Because of the risk of raids, Mrs Darling had apparently been in the habit of starting her circles early. ‘Oh blimey, we’re just about to go in now!’ she said as she hustled me impatiently into her house. ‘I thought you was coming earlier to speak to Esme.’ ‘I was,’ I said. ‘But I got caught up at work . . .’ An old girl on Haig Road had finally given in to the cancer that had caused her to scream her way from this world and into the next. I’d had to deal with the exhausted family left behind. Not any doctor. They hadn’t been able to pay for one of those. Me. ‘Well, Esme’s gone in now,’ Mrs Darling said as she waved a hand towards her blacked-out parlour. ‘I can’t break the ambience. You can talk to her afterwards. Now you can either join the circle or you can sit out here in the hall.’ I said I’d take the hall if it was all the same to her. As I sat down on one of the hardback chairs I looked into the room just before Mrs Darling disappeared. There wasn’t enough light to be able to see any details of who was in there, but in number there were probably five plus the medium, who made six.
