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didn’t like that thought.
    It was starting to get light now. Perhaps he should just stay awake until morning. Perhaps...
    ~
    In the morning, Matt went with his mother to visit Gran’s grave.
    They went out to Crooked Elms in the back of a taxi, a rare extravagance on his mother’s part – she was so careful with money, these days. She’d never been like that back in Norwich.
    “If Dad was here we could have gone in the Volvo,” said Matt, sullenly.
    His mother pushed a strand of hair away from her eyes and opened her mouth to speak, then stopped herself. His words had clearly hurt her and he wasn’t sure if it was satisfaction he felt, or guilt.
    She started again. “Dad’s working,” she said. “We can’t always rely on your father.”
    When they left the taxi they followed a gravel path through the crowded graveyard and around the side of the church. The grass between the haphazard rows of headstones had been mown recently, and its sweet smell was heavy in the air.
    The grounds to the rear of the church were less crowded, the stones cleaner, sharper-edged, more recent.
    Gran didn’t have a headstone. Instead, she had a small plaque set at the foot of a high stone wall. It carried her name and the dates of her birth and death, nothing else.
    His mother was kneeling before the plaque, her pale, blue eyes unfocused, distant. Matt stayed at her side for a minute or two, then turned away. Let her be alone, he thought. Give her some peace.
    The small path wound around the back of the church and then joined another wider track. To his right, the track led through a kissing gate toward the dark shade of Copperas Wood. He turned left, heading back towards the front of the church.
    As soon as he saw the low wrought iron fence he remembered it from Gran’s funeral: the mass grave from some time late in the nineteenth century.
    He went closer and saw the year 1898 engraved on the tall stone cross at the back of the small enclosure. He peered through the brambles and tall grass to read the stone slabs that covered each of the six family graves.
    Four members of the Sapsford family. Three members of the Johnsons. Four Todd-Martins.
    “Twenty-one dead, from six families.”
    Matt jumped at the sudden voice from behind. He turned and squinted in the harsh sunlight. A young man, blond, glasses, patchy beard. It was the vicar who had conducted Gran’s funeral.
    Matt relaxed a little. “I noticed it before,” he said, feeling a need to justify his curiosity. “Were they all from the village?”
    The vicar nodded. “A tragic loss,” he said. “It’s hard to put yourself in the position of those who had to endure such a catastrophe.”
    “What happened?”
    The vicar spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “There was a madness in this place,” he said mysteriously. “A single night of quite horrific violence and six families were destroyed and an entire village left in shock. Accounts from the time are confused and unclear.
    “I asked the same questions when I came to this parish six years ago. My predecessor was somewhat old-fashioned: he blamed the Devil.”
    Matt suppressed a shiver. “Is that why nobody looks after this part of the churchyard?” he asked, waving a hand at the tangle of brambles that covered the enclosure.
    “People are scared,” said the vicar. “Scared of the madness, scared of what happened on that night. Each of us has something of the Devil within us: no-one will work here because it reminds them of this fact.”
    All the way back to Bathside, sitting on the top deck of the bus, those words kept coming back to Matt: each of us has something of the Devil within us . It sounded like something out of the Dark Ages.
    Vicars these days were supposed to be modern, to wear jeans and play tambourines. What must it have taken to make the young vicar of Crooked Elms talk so readily of the Devil like that?

4 The Outsider
    They were talking about the possibility of selling the family house