Serialized by Patrick George Callaghan Part One The easterly wind that hurried in on that spring morning of 1921 still had the taste of winter on its breath. It was a further reminder that Mill Hill had yet to be woken by the warm golden hues of an English summer. Single shafts of faint cool sunlight daggered pointlessly across the grey-green landscape as the three girls walked cautiously, and with some purpose, in the direction of the old convent that rested majestically between the tall rows of elderly Beech trees. They had kept a watchful eye for anyone who might know them. There seemed little point in circling the fields. Those meadows of long winter grasses curtained high and dark woods, thick and frightening, and somehow were quite beyond the line of perfect reason, and anyway the road was quiet enough, aside from a trundling omnibus, empty of its passengers, and an unobservant bike-straddled butcher’s boy. When s