but that was what everyone called him.)
‘I don’t know how I’m going to get Spike home,’ sighed Harriet, fussing her pet-sized sibling into his greasy duffle-coat, ‘without him getting totally soaked.’
Harriet lived in a shabby caravan park on the edge of the village with her alcoholic mother and a stepfather who could get spare parts for cars if necessary. There were rumours of sexual abuse, and a social services file running into dozens of pages.
‘I have an umbrella,’ said Frances. ‘A super-duper giant umbrella. I can walk with you as far as the petrol station.’ She watched the flicker of calculation cross the girl’s face: yes, the petrol station was not in view of the wretched caravans: yes, the answer was yes.
Together they walked through the streets of Rotherey, the pelting rain screening the shops and houses as if through frosted glass. Everything was an indistinct and luminous grey,a vast sea with a mirage of a village shimmering on the waves, through which car headlights cruised slowly like distant ships. To get the best cover from the umbrella, Spike and Harriet walked on either side of Frances, and after ten minutes or so Frances was surprised and delighted to feel Harriet fumbling to hold hands with her.
Near the edge of the village, a red light pulsed luridly through the gloom: a police car parked outside the MacShane house. The police were there every day, apparently, though what they hoped to achieve at this late stage was hard to imagine. Perhaps they thought David MacShane would come back to pick up his mail or feed the dog.
The rain was thrashing down absurdly now, as if in fury, almost deafeningly noisy against the fabric of the umbrella. Luckily there was no wind, so Frances was able to hold their protecting canopy still as spouts of water clattered off the edges all around them.
‘This is awful!’ shouted Harriet.
‘No it’s not!’ Frances called back. ‘We’re safe under here, and the rain won’t last!’
They passed the petrol station; Frances said nothing. She understood she was crossing a Rubicon of trust and would soon glimpse the farther shore of caravan-land.
‘This is where we live,’ said Harriet when the park was in view. The rain, softening now, shimmered like television static all over the dismal junkyard of permanently stalled mobile homes. Frances knew that to accompany the children any farther would be to push her luck.
Yet, as Harriet and her brother were leaving the canopy of their new teacher’s umbrella, Harriet made a little speech, spoken at a gabble as if escaping under pressure.
‘Mrs MacShane used to come here sometimes after school. To see a man who’s moved away now. They made loud noises together inside his caravan for hours, then she’d go home tothe village. It was sex – everybody knows that. That’s why Mr MacShane got so angry. He must of found out.’
The secret relayed at last, Harriet grabbed her brother by the hand and hopped gingerly into the marshy filth of her home territory.
In Frances’s home – or rather, the house she would live in for the duration of this assignment – all was not well.
The wild weather (highest volume of rainfall in a single day since 1937, the radio would have told her if she’d known how to find the local station) had battered through the roof’s defences, and there was water dripping in everywhere.
Frances walked through the upstairs rooms, squinting up at the clammy ceilings. They seemed to be perspiring in terror or exertion. In the bedroom especially, the carpet sighed under her feet and the bed was drenched: Nick had brought the buckets in too late. Returning downstairs. Frances almost broke her neck on the slick fur of the carpeted steps; perversely, this somehow knocked the edge off the contempt she felt for the house – as well as shaking her up badly.
‘I did check all the windows were closed when the downpour started,’ Nick told her a little defensively. ‘I just didn’t