Free A Restless Evil by Ann Granger Page A

school run. But chiefly the vicar (more than his wife who knew the village rather better than he did) believed that Ruth would learn from mixing with the village children and they from association with her. Moreover, the parents of
the children would see that the vicar and his family were approachable, human, one of them.
    Which they weren’t and couldn’t ever be, thought Ruth crossly. Her four years at Lower Stovey Church Primary had been wretched. Good intentions don’t always result in good outcomes. From the start she’d been an outsider and an oddity, held by the other children in contempt. She talked posh. Her father didn’t work with his hands at a proper job. He was a Holy Joe who sat in his study among books. In Ruth’s hearing at school, the children, quoting their parents and finding the words hilarious, referred to their spiritual leader as a bit of an old woman.
    But his wife, now, that had been a different matter. Ruth’s mother, prior to her marriage, had been Miss Fitzroy, last of that line. She’d grown up at the Manor, (nowadays a retirement home for the well-heeled elderly). Older villagers, ignoring her marriage, had continued to address her as ‘Miss Mary’. The vicar’s wife drove a car, which none of the village women did fifty years ago. She drove it once a week to Bamford to have her hair washed and set at a proper hairdresser’s, and twice a year made an expedition by train to London where, villagers whispered in awe, she had her hair cut in Harrods’ hairdressing department. The village women gave each other home perms which, in damp weather, frizzed and made the wearer look as if she’d had an electric shock.
    On her first day at school Ruth had been confused at midday by being told it was now dinner-time and if she wasn’t having her dinner at school, she could go home, returning by two o’clock. At the vicarage they ate dinner in the evening. She caused hilarity by saying, ‘Oh, you mean lunch.’ Only she’d
probably said ‘luncheon’ because the vicar was fussy about details like that. It was one of many faux pas Ruth was never allowed to forget.
    On that first day she’d been seated next to Dilys Twelvetrees and been distressed by the strange odour emanating from the other child. Later she was able to identify this odour as being compounded of rancid chip fat and cabbage water, the smells of which clung to Dilys’s clothes which were seldom washed. As was Dilys, come to that. To be fair, the majority of village parents wouldn’t have dreamed of sending their offspring to school other than clean and tidy, the boys with hair cut to military shortness and girls with tightly-braided pigtails. But the Twelvetrees family, Ruth had soon discovered, was not as other families. They were regarded by other villagers with mistrust and unease. They, too, were outsiders of a kind and Ruth sometimes wondered if the class teacher had seated the two little girls together for that reason, calculating that individual isolation might cause them to strike up a friendship. If so, it hadn’t worked. Dilys might be one of ‘them Twelvetrees lot’ but she joined in the general contempt of Ruth.
    Also at the school, but older and in senior grades, were Sandra and Young Billy (already so-called) Twelvetrees. Ruth had little to do with Young Billy who was an amiable, unteachable ten-year-old, given to ‘skiving off’. Sandra and Dilys were poorly nourished and badly dressed. Dilys was the worse dressed because she had to wear Sandra’s cast-offs and they’d already been cast off by someone else. On one terrible day, Dilys had appeared in a last year’s cotton dress of Ruth’s, bought for a few pence at a church jumble sale. It was too tight in the bodice and where the hem had been let down it was a different colour.
Ruth had been embarrassed by this, but Dilys had hated her for it and