“Yes, they were here,” said Swinebank dismissively. “It’s not important.”

He had, she realized, a story to tell, a story which had been bursting to come out for decades. At last its time was close and he was impatient for the moment of release.

“OK,” said Sam. “Shoot.”

He closed his eyes. Was he saying a prayer? And if he were, what for?

His eyes opened and fixed themselves on her face and he began speaking.

Let’s start with Pam Galley coming over to Skaddale from Eskdale. That was in the autumn of 1960, not long after Sam Flood started here as curate. She came to the village school with the twins. She fitted in all right, didn’t talk a lot. We watched the way the twins treated her. That was the touchstone of survival for us lads. So long as you didn’t cross the Gowders, you’d be all right. They weren’t cruel to her or anything. They just treated her like she was some kind of animated doll. She did more or less exactly what they told her. Sometimes they’d play silly tricks on her, like telling her to stand out in the rain during playtime while the rest of us were sheltering. But it was too easy to be fun for long. Generally they just ignored her.

Not long after she came to Illthwaite, she started menstruating. The twins knew, living in the same house, and they told us. They were our sexual mentors. Living in the country, you pick up on the animal basics pretty early, but when it came to translating the facts of life from the byre to the bedroom, it was the Gowders who spelled things out. Sometimes their spelling was pretty terrible. If you did it standing up, the girl couldn’t get pregnant, and if you did it in the churchyard, your willy would fall off, that sort of thing. But no one ever argued.

They stated pretty authoritatively that once a girl started bleeding, she was ready for tupping. Their word. Not that little Pam offered any incentive to tupping compared with some of the other more developed girls. And not that any of us boys had much real notion of the mechanics of human tupping, apart from some very confused and overheated fantasies. This was 1960. In rural Cumberland, it might as well have been 1930.

The Gowders I should say have never seemed very personally involved with sex, either as adolescents or grown men. Maybe it’s because they’ve always formed a sort of self-contained unit. They were only interested in sex because they saw how much most of the rest of us were fascinated by it, so being the acknowledged experts gave them yet another form of dominance.

Midway through December Madge Gowder, the twins’ mother, who’d been poorly for a long time, took really ill. It was cancer. They said reassuring things to the kids, of course, but all the adults must have known she was dying. It was a bright hard spell, lots of sun but very cold. We used to go up on Mecklin Moor to play. It’s a wild place, there’s lots of old stone circles up there, and lots of wild legends about what went on in them. And of course there’s the Moss, where on a dark and misty night they say the ghosts of every creature that’s drowned there come out to taste the air again.

Not far above the Foulgate track before you reach the Moss itself there’s a place where two rock slabs have rolled together to form a sort of cave, and this was the spot us lads thought of as our den.

That day in January 1961 – it must have been the first week, we still weren’t back at school – there were five of us up there. Me, the Gowders, Pam Galley, and Gerry Woollass.

Here in Illthwaite the squire’s children had always gone to the village school till they were eleven or twelve and then moved on to boarding school. There was no distinction made in lessons, but in the playground, maybe because I was the vicar’s son, Gerry and I often kept pretty close together. The twins could easily have persecuted us for being different. Instead, maybe because it demonstrated their supremacy even more, they made us subordinates in their gang. It was an invitation you didn’t refuse. In fact I felt quite excited and privileged as I swore a rather bloodthirsty oath of fealty and secrecy about all the gang’s activities.

We brought some bits of wood for a fire, knowing we’d not find much up on the moor, and soon we had a decent blaze going. We pooled what scraps of food we had to make a picnic – some biscuits, a bit of cheese, a bar of chocolate – and the twins had brought a bottle of beer and a bottle of cider and some cigarettes. With Foulgate being a house of sickness, they’d been able to raid their father’s drink store without being noticed. They’d also got a magazine which I presume belonged to him too. By contemporary standards, it was pretty innocuous, but the photos it contained of nude women posing with beach balls, that sort of thing, set our young minds swooning.

Then one of the Gowders asked if we’d ever seen the real thing. We had to admit we hadn’t. And he said, would we like a look? Not knowing quite what he meant, me and Gerry said, yes, we wouldn’t mind. And the twin turned his head and called to Pam.

We’d almost forgotten she was there. I think she’d been given some squares of chocolate and she just sat a little way behind us, dead quiet, waiting till the twins would take her home.

When the twin told her to take her clothes off, she looked at him blankly.

Then he said something like, it’s all right, you won’t get cold, here make room for her by the fire. And it was as if that was a kind of reassurance, as if the only thing to worry about was being cold. So she took her clothes off.

For me there was little or no connection between the women in the pictures and this skinny little scrap of white flesh shivering by the fire. I don’t think the Gowders were particularly aroused either. Like I said, they never showed much direct personal interest in girls. They were more like farmers showing off a prize yow at a show. But Gerry Woollass was different. Maybe he was more developed than the rest of us, or maybe he’d had more than his share of the cider and beer and tobacco. But it was clear that he was excited.

When they saw this, one of the twins said, “Would you like to touch her? You can if you like. You can touch her with your thing if you like.”

Again, I think it just amused them to get the squire’s boy so completely out of his own control and into theirs. The girl was just a means to an end.

After that things moved very quickly. Little Pam didn’t struggle, she just did what the twins told her. Gerry was so excited it didn’t last long. The mere act of pushing into her set him off. She screamed but not too loud, choking it back as if she didn’t want to anger the twins. Gerry made more noise than she did. In the space of less than a minute it was all over, Gerry was buttoning himself up, Pam lay there quiet, but there were tears on her cheeks. And drops of blood on her legs.

I just sat and watched. I had a sense that something terrible was happening, but I wasn’t a brave child. I’m not making excuses. I was what they call nowadays a bit of a wimp. I suppose that was what made me willing to put up with any indignities the Gowders heaped upon me. Being one of their gang meant the other boys treated me with respect.

So I was very willing to let myself be reassured by the way the Gowders acted afterward. They told Pam to get dressed, even helped her. And they gave her the rest of the chocolate and borrowed Gerry’s handkerchief so she could dry her eyes and wipe her legs, and they threw the rest of our little store of fuel on the fire, and talked about our plans for the rest of the day as if nothing had happened.

Gerry suddenly stood up and said it was getting late, he had to go home.

He didn’t look well. I think that maybe with him being brought up a strict Catholic, some notion of having committed a dreadful sin was already eating away at his mind. I could understand this. There was plenty of hellfire preaching in my upbringing, and behind all that reassurance I was letting myself feel, I think I too was already feeling the heat of those diabolical flames. I heard myself saying I was expected back at the vicarage too.