No one would ever have described Manningtree Grove as fashionable. Few would have found it especially interesting. But it was not an unpleasant place to live: the old railway line lay in a valley, and the gardens looked down onto it through an almost rural scene of grass and trees. It was the kind of place where nothing ever happened. And yet it was here that Peter Yearman first sold his soul to the devil. Here that his sister first thought of the doll and the uses to which magic might be put. And here, in the Mistley tunnel, that Diarmit Bawne first barricaded himself behind the old broken mattress and thought of using the knives.