Thorne turned and hurried for the stairs.

He could not really explain why he felt the need to get down and out into the back garden as quickly as possible. After all, a darkness as profound as this one meant that anyone out and about would need to use a torch.

It was hardly suspicious.

He told himself that circumstances were making him unnecessarily jumpy, that it was probably just that birdwatcher out in search of the bird whose name he could never remember. The one that came back to its burrow at night, with the spooky call Nicklin had mentioned.

But hadn’t Burnham said it was the wrong time of year?

Maybe it was the warden himself, come to see how Thorne was settling in. Perhaps it was Caroline or Patrick Black.

By the time Thorne had forced the stiff, heavy bolts on the kitchen door and burst through into the back garden, there was no sign of anyone.

He stood still and listened.

There was only the softest kiss of the wind through the long grass, the distant wail of a grey seal and the hiss of the drizzle against the corrugated iron roof of the outside toilet. Thorne shone his torch across the lean-to, the moss on the stone wall, the cracked wooden door.

He pushed the door open with his foot and stepped inside. It smelled musty, that was all; probably a damn sight better than it did when there were holidaymakers in residence. A plastic seat had been fixed on to a simple wooden platform. There was a large metal jug and a row of damp and crinkled toilet rolls on one side.

Thorne positioned his torch so that it shone in roughly the right direction and unzipped. He pissed quickly, his shoulders tense, and when he had finished, he picked up the jug to flush, but it was empty.

He took out his radio as he walked back out into the garden.

‘Dave?’

Holland took a few seconds to answer. ‘Yeah, I’m here.’

‘Have you been out of the chapel?’

‘No. What’s the matter?’

‘I thought I saw someone outside the cottage, that’s all.’

‘Not me.’

‘OK, not to worry…’

Thorne turned at a noise from the other side of the cottage and ran around the side of the building. The grass was even more overgrown here and whipped around his calves as he emerged at the front in time to see a torch beam playing across the gate.

He pointed his own torch and shouted, ‘Who’s that?’

His voice was a little higher than normal.

He watched as the stranger’s beam moved, then intensified, pooling beneath a chin and lighting up a pale face; the eyes in shadow and the inside of the mouth black when it opened.

Wendy Markham said, ‘It’s me…’

FORTY-SEVEN

Earlier, from the window of the sitting room in Chapel House, Batchelor had watched the last of the day slip from view and it had felt like the darkness was being hammered into place; nailed down.

As if the light had gone for good, out there and inside him.

Now, he sat on a hard sofa next to Alan Jenks, listening to Fletcher and Nicklin talking on the other side of the room. They seemed to have been talking for hours already, an incessant jabbering. Every word, each bark of laughter, another nail…

The others were still eating next door. The archaeologist and her team, their conversation bleeding through the stone wall. More laughter, more ordinariness, and Jenks next to him with his nose in some magazine or other, like this was just a waiting room or something.

Like there was nothing terrible out there in the dark.

I just wanted to say goodnight, best girl …

The stupid thing is that I think you’d have quite liked this place. It’s certainly not like anywhere else I’ve ever been, or even heard of. There’s such a lot of history here and you know how much I love the fact that you inherited a passion for all that from me. Well, that’s what I tell myself, anyway. All the bad stuff you got from your mum, obviously. The inability to be anywhere on time or to file things or to keep your room tidy. Your strange affection for chaos.

It’s so ironic, really. Considering what I did, the journey I’ve been on to get here. It breaks my heart that we never got a chance to come here together. To do so many things.

He glanced to his left, saw Jenks lick the end of a finger and slowly turn a page. Fletcher was talking to Nicklin about football and Nicklin was pretending to be interested. The rise and fall of chit-chat was still drifting in from the next room.

This place would actually make the perfect prison, you know that? Like Alcatraz or somewhere. Like Robben Island, where they kept Mandela, where you talked about going, remember? I was thinking how awful it must have been, being a prisoner somewhere like that. Somewhere like this. So much space around you, such a big sky. That’s so much crueller in a way than how things are now. Don’t you think? I mean, I reckon I’ve had it fairly easy compared to that, all things considered.

Bearing in mind what I did. How wrong I got it all.

It’s weird how easy I find it now, talking to you like this and yet I still haven’t got a clue what I’m going to say to your mum later on. I keep going over it, trying to come up with a few lines, but everything just sounds corny and rubbish. I can be like that with you though, because I just imagine you rolling your eyes and telling me how ‘sad’ I am. The way you and your sister did if you saw me dancing or if I didn’t know what some piece of slang meant or something.

It’s what dads do, isn’t it? What they’ve always done. We’re hard-wired to embarrass you and to grumble about you coming home late and using the place like a hotel. We’re on safe ground with all that stuff, aren’t we? We know how we should behave.

It’s the other things.

The things nobody should ever have to deal with.

When we don’t know what to do because your heart is broken, and when the pain you’re in is so real and so raw and we can’t do anything to make it better. When we walk into your bedroom and find you … you know? And afterwards, when your mum’s making a noise that’s not like anything we’ve ever heard before, like something’s being torn out of her.

Finding out the truth about what actually happened was terrible, I can’t pretend that it wasn’t. Like tumbling into the pit. But there’s some consolation in knowing that because I got it so wrong, you’re loved up there as much as you ever were here. As cherished.

Right now, I’m cold and I’m scared, but that’s a real comfort.

He looked up at a noise from across the room and understood that Nicklin was talking to him.

Sorry, Jode, I’ve got to go.

He nodded, hating him. Hating being dragged so roughly up and away from her. From a perfect, waking dream of death to a nightmare of shadows and shit and something terrible in the dark.

‘You never been a football fan then, Jeff?’

Love you, baby.

‘Jeff?’

Love you, love you, love you …

FORTY-EIGHT

‘I just came to see how you were getting on,’ Markham said.

Thorne nodded, but hadn’t really listened. ‘Were you in the back garden a few minutes ago?’

‘No.’ She looked confused. ‘Are you…?’

Thorne had already turned and was on his way back round to the rear of the property.

‘Is everything OK?’

‘There was someone out there,’ Thorne said. ‘I saw a torch.’

Markham followed a pace or two behind, pushing through the long grass at the side of the cottage. ‘Maybe it was my torch reflecting off something,’ she said. She emerged into the garden and noticed the generator. ‘Off that, for a start.’ She turned round and nodded back towards the front of the cottage. ‘Could it have been the lighthouse, maybe?’