The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

But most books are agreed on one thing: banshees are very sorrowful and sad and what they do, if they possibly can, is wail – the proper kind of wailing which involves howling and weeping and the wringing of hands.

Banshees need to wail like footballers need to kick balls and opera singers need to sing and acrobats need to turn somersaults. If they don’t get a chance to wail they seize up. But though they are strange and gloomy, and like dark places, banshees do not cheat. If they wail it is because there is something to wail about – and usually this means that somebody has died.

But what sort of somebody? A banshee who is serious about her work isn’t going to wail for some thugs who have hit each other on the head with broken bottles and landed in the local cemetery, or for a car thief who has smashed himself up going joyriding in a stolen car.

And as people became more and more unpleasant and slaughtered each other in stupid wars, banshees these days quite often found themselves wailing for animals.

The Johnston sisters were elderly and lived together in a small house in a quiet street in a London suburb and at first you might have thought they were exactly like so many old ladies who live together, bothering no one.

But if you looked carefully, you could see … signs. The sisters’ eyes were slightly swollen and their noses were reddened at the tips from years of weeping, and there were bald patches on their scalps where they had pulled out tufts of grey hair in their grief.

There were other signs too: the collars of their black dresses often seemed to be damp and they drank enormous quantities of tea. To make tears, the body needs a lot of liquid – and there is nothing better for making tears than tea.

They were drinking tea now, sitting round the blue teapot with its knitted cosy, and dunking ginger biscuits, when they heard the newspapers dropping in through the letter box. There was the Evening Herald, the Radio Times – and the Banshee Bulletin.

And it was in the Banshee Bulletin that they saw an extraordinary piece of news.

‘My goodness, how amazing!’ said the eldest of the sisters. ‘Who would have thought it?’

‘Yes indeed,’ said the middle sister. ‘Quite extraordinary. And so sudden.’

‘It’s the last thing I would have expected,’ said the youngest sister. She was delicate and took things hard.

There was a pause while they poured themselves another cup of tea. Then:

‘You don’t think … we ought to ...?’ said the eldest sister.

‘It makes one wonder, certainly,’ said the middle sister.

The youngest sister swallowed the last of her biscuit. ‘I haven’t had a good wail for a long time. I feel quite bunged up. But it’s a long way.’

‘Yes, it’s certainly a long way.’

‘And we’re not young any more.’

‘No, we’re definitely not young any more,’ agreed the others.

There was another pause, during which more tea was drunk and ginger biscuits were dunked. Then:

‘I do feel perhaps it’s our duty to go,’ said the eldest sister. ‘Goodness knows what kind of banshees they have up in the north. They probably live in caves and wear skins.’

So the next morning the three ladies set off in their small black motor car. They had been careful not to clean the car because they wanted to merge into the background (banshees are very fond of merging) and they had packed it with food for the journey and rugs and a change of underclothes.

But the most important thing they took was an enormous cardboard box crammed full of clean and freshly ironed handkerchiefs, and this was sensible. A working banshee cannot have too many handkerchiefs – and the job they were going to do in the distant north was one of the biggest they had ever taken on.

Rollo went on behaving well. Seeing Madlyn in such despair and anger had shaken him badly.

But he was not the same as he had been before. He was very quiet; no one heard him laugh; and he spent a lot of time with Sir George in his study, listening to stories of what it had been like to be a soldier in the war.

‘You obeyed orders,’ said Sir George. ‘Sometimes it was very difficult and you thought the orders were wrong, but you obeyed them because you knew that the men who gave them were doing their duty. And it’s the same now. The men who took the cattle were obeying orders from the government. They were doing their duty. When they killed the animals in the big foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001, people screamed and threatened to shoot themselves, but making a fuss doesn’t help. We have to obey orders and we have to do it quietly,’ said the old man.

But when he was alone he would stand by the window, not moving, wondering if there was any point in going on.