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‘ S o the thing is,’ said Andrew, ‘I’ve got the results of all your tests, Simon, and I need to talk to you about them.’

‘You said you weren’t the only one researching this,’ interrupted Simon. ‘How do my results compare with the others’?’

‘Simon,’ Andrew’s voice was soft. He cradled his coffee cup and looked out across the fields. ‘Simon, you are the only one anyone has managed to observe from the moment of attack. All the others…’

‘It would be good to meet them,’ Simon interrupted again. ‘I’d like to hear about what their experiences.’

‘It’s not some kind of gentleman’s club,’ snapped Andrew.

‘You can’t just meet up and discuss transformations over a cold beer and a bag of pork scratchings.

There’s no retreat where you can confess your urge to attack complete strangers and eat raw flesh a few hours after returning to normal.

I’ll say it again, you are the only one we’ve ever documented since the moment of attack. ’

‘The only one in captivity,’ Simon said with bitterness.

‘If you’re going to be melodramatic, then you’re the only one of two in captivity. If you’re going to pay attention, you ought to be glad. The number of live, I repeat live werewolves under observation are six around the world.’

‘Where?’ asked Rose.

‘Here, that is Simon, two in the Americas, two in Asia and one on mainland Europe. All the evidence suggests that in the normal course of events, after a few months, the person who’s been attacked becomes disconnected socially.

He or she retreats into reclusiveness, often into woodland or at any rate, wild spaces.

There they can only do harm if they come across humans.

There is no evidence they can harm wolves.

The fact that they tend to retreat is a mystery.

We’ve established that it is a virus that causes the werewolfism and it can only pass on by attacking people.

Whether the urge to attack in the transformed state is tempered by the urge not to in the normal state, is something we’d hoped you could explain.

Or possibly, if the virus isn’t passed on in a specified time, it destroys the host and therefore itself. ’

‘Well maybe I can’t be normal because I’m constantly sedated,’ snapped Simon. ‘Perhaps if you let me ride it out, somewhere secure of course, I could tell you. Why don’t you ask the others?’

‘Because all of them are too far gone. Every single one.’

‘What do you mean too far gone?’

Andrew ran his hand through his hair and took another swig of coffee. It was very quiet.

Rose could hear the birds and the breeze in the pines. Rob’s car had pulled off a long time ago. ‘Go on,’ she told Andrew.

‘As far as we can establish, the most recent one apart from Simon was attacked about three and a half years ago.’

‘How?’

‘She is still recognisable from a missing person’s poster and her DNA still has markers for her family.

She’s the only one “in captivity” as you call it.

She can understand and she appears to be able to read, but she can no longer talk nor write.

Of the others, two are presumed to have been attacked a year or so before that and the last two are in a very poor way.

No one can observe them from any proximity.

As soon as they know they’re observed, they hide.

Even in human form, they behave like sick animals.

We have no way of communicating properly with any of them but the woman.

What she seems to indicate is immense distress and fear of hurting us when she is human and a vicious and desperate urge to attack us when wolf.

Well before the full moon is due she starts to alter in personality.

While she can, she begs to be locked up.

Then she tracks our movements from behind the bars. ’

Simon looked down at his hands. Perhaps he was thinking of the film and that figure under the sea-green trees, limping, deranged.

‘I thought that by sedating you Simon, we had a good chance to slow down the process of deterioration while we tried to find a practical cure or antidote. It’s hard to know if it’s worked, but…’

‘I am still deteriorating.’

‘Yes. But only in so far as there are signs of premature ageing. I’m still hopeful. But you have to do what I say. You cannot be unsedated. ’

‘Are there really only six werewolves in the whole world?’ said Rose.

‘We’ve found six lives ones. That’s all. The others reported werewolves turned out to be shapeshifters like Sky.’

‘She’s not the only one?’ said Rose.

‘They’re a dying breed,’ said Andrew, ‘but the point is that their make-up and trigger is wholly different. It’s genetic, a kind of physiological choice.

Werewolfism is a disease. It is like a parasite, destroying its host. We have tried to take blood and bone marrow from the shapeshifters to see if this holds any kind of key.

Unsurprisingly they’re not very keen. The ones who were born human are afraid of stigma and the ones who were born animal, like Sky, don’t really understand but have a fundamental mistrust of losing part of themselves.

The things is that werewolves don’t survive very well.

In the wrong climate, they die of exposure pretty quickly.

Wild animals fear and distrust them and will attack without mercy.

I’m sorry,’ Andrew sighed. ‘There is no easy way to tell you this. It’s taking longer than we’d hoped, given that you were… ’

‘A fresh specimen?’ snapped Simon.

‘I am doing all I can,’ said Andrew. ‘The team is doing all they can. We have the corpses, in varying stages of decomposition of several other werewolves: some in a transformed state, others in a human state. How do we know they were werewolves? Because the DNA is skewed, the limbs and spine are malformed, all have prematurely aged, all have significant brain damage. What do you want me to say? I’ve been trying to help you lead as close to a normal life as possible for twelve months.

Sky let me have some of her blood. It’s just possible something will come of it.

In the meantime, you have to be careful.

And you have to report everything odd that happens. ’

‘Everything is bloody odd if you ask me. I wish…’ Simon stared up into the sky.

Don’t say it , thought Rose. Don’t say you wish you’d died.

She wondered what to put into the silence. Words formed and vanished on her lips. On the patio, the three of them sat under the warm sun, lost and uncertain.

‘Coo-ee!’ called a voice into the emptiness. ‘I hope you don’t mind a wee visit, seeing as we were passing.’

It was Emmeline coming round the corner of the bungalow.

‘Good morning gentlemen,’ she said. ‘Now Miss Henderson, I expect you’ve got coffee and milk by now. A nice cup wouldn’t go amiss, would it Hester?’

Hester, the same colour as the pebble-dash, emerged from the shadows and blinked at Rose with amber eyes.

For the first time, Rose looked at Hester properly. She castigated herself for the disregard with which she’d thought of her. Mousy, indistinct, side-lined, unimportant, colourless, under the thumb. Was that how people thought of her too?

Hester’s clothes were those which someone of an older generation might choose as sensible wear for a respectable woman.

But they were camouflage just as much as high fashion would have been.

Hester was obscured by the image she portrayed.

In sharp focus in the noon sun, Rose saw nothing indeterminate about her face or her stance.

She was not so much beige as sandy, her hair a soft reddish brown, her eyes tawny.

She stood still as one who listens unobserved. It chilled her.

Emmeline with her grey hair and long limbs, piercing into them with her cold blue eyes wore a smile which was a curse.

What had they heard?

Glancing at the men, Rose saw that even Simon, for all his determination to tell the world, had paled. Andrew was openly staring.

What had they heard?

‘Two sugars for Hester,’ instructed Emmeline and sat down on the edge of one of the dusty patio chairs.

Rose excused herself, went down to the bathroom and was violently sick.

‘I didn’t hear your car,’ Andrew was saying when she reappeared. He indicated to Rose to seat herself and that Simon had gone to make drinks.

‘Och, we walked,’ said Emmeline blasé as before. ’It’s such a nice day. We did so hope to be able to speak to Rob Baillie as well as Miss Henderson. But it seems he’s away from home?’

It was a question rather than statement. Rose bit her tongue and shrugged.

‘In this part of the world, my dear,’ Emmeline continued. ‘We take an interest in our neighbours. That is,’ she added with a slight wink and raised eyebrow, ‘we care about them.’

Blinking and still nauseous, Rose missed the innuendo at first but the urge to be sick was stronger than the need to blush.

Andrew noticed her face and the strands of damp hair sticking to her face.

‘Rose isn’t very well,’ he said. ‘I’m the family doctor. Now let me drive you back to town so we can leave her in peace. I’m sorry ladies, but she needs to rest.’

This time Emmeline’s eyebrows raised even further. There was no mistaking the implication. Ridiculous …

‘I’m not so surprised really,’ Emmeline said.

‘The performance last night was thoroughly inappropriate. I presume alcohol or drugs drove them to it. I can think of no other reason why they should have gone so explicitly beyond their instructions. Miss Henderson,’ she added, rising with dignity, still straight and angular, ‘I did warn you that this is a place which wants to retain its uniqueness. We do not hold with outside ways and new fashions unless approved by the Guild. We abhor mutation of any kind, or deviance. It has never been tolerated here. This place will always reject it. I have warned Patrick Ross and Craig McClean and I will be back to warn Robert Baillie on his return. And I am now warning you.’