Want to know about evil? Don't ask a vicar.

If the Bible is too long, read The Third Beast instead. All your answers about what is moral, what is immoral, and what is evil, in 158 short violent angry pages.

Wait a minute. This gritty British crime novel is blurbed as 'the ultimate novel of bloody revenge'. Revenge Biblical? Hardly. But then, maybe.

She was only a little girl, really. When she was done up in her school uniform, with her white ankle socks and all, she looked about ten years of age.

The first-person unnamed narrator is the girl's uncle. He runs a breaker's yard in grimy 1970s unemployed pre-Thatcher Britain. He breaks cars and sells the bits to poverty-stricken Triumph Dolomite, Morris Minor or Ford Escort drivers. Occasionally he might get a Jag.

When she was a little girl, she was always down at the scrapyard in the nice weather. There was an old Riley I kept for her, as a playhouse. She'd line all her dolls upon the back seat, you know the way little children do, sitting them up straight and telling them all how to behave. And then she'd get behind the wheel and 'drive' them down to the seaside. ... I'd have battled a starving lion then, to stop her being hurt ...

And now she's thirteen. And they - four of them - have taken her into 'a freezing muddy field' and thrown her onto the ground.

Stop right there.

If you do stop right there, that is already grounds for exacting revenge on four thugs who have assaulted a thirteen-year-old girl.

But the thugs don't stop. But this book is not salacious or prurient.

I can't even bear to think of the rest. ... there might be some little pervert somewhere might get a thrill out of it, hearing about a young girl being gang-raped.

So the author, Peter Loughran, jump-cuts to the courtroom where the thugs get off on technicality, slick lawyers and sharp suits. On the way out, the mother of one of the thugs spits in Laura's mother's face. Evil runs in the family.

Slowly Laura recovers, 'recover' being a hopelessly inadequate word. Rather, she continues to live. Her uncle fixes a camper van that some Australian tourists have dumped at his scrapyard, and he takes his wife, sister and Laura to the Isle of Wight for a seaside holiday.

She started behaving like a little kid again, you know, making sand castles and digging trenches in the beach so the sea could fill them up, that sort of thing.

These descriptions of the lonely minutiae of a child's life counterpoint the cold naked anger that seeps through the novel, over the injustice of a young life having its future ripped away by four semi-humans.

Anger is the moral bedrock of the book. How could a sane person forgive the barbarity of a fellow adult who has defiled a child? The concept of forgiveness withers like a pop-psychologist's explanation of the peace to be found in 'letting go'. There's no letting go here. The narrator knows it's not about him, it's about Laura. Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life, the forgotten Biblical quote; the prodigal brother of the lazy cliched 'forgiveness' meme spouted by tea-ed-up vicars the world over.

I'd sit and watch her playing and I'd think, 'I'm glad I topped those bastards – I'd do the same thing again if I had to' ...

So he's laid down his life and killed three of the four so far, against the odds and at immense risk of detection.

Where does this place him in the moral universe? And anyway, who's to decide? Rather than kill the guilty, some 'cultures' kill or abandon their defiled victim female relatives instead. That's barbarity: turbo-charged with savagery.

The Third Beast
Peter Loughran
Grafton, 1987