'What on earth were you dreaming about?' Dr Johnson wanted to know. Her palm was pressed against his brow. 'Do you remember?' Will shook his head. 'Well, you've got quite a fever, my lad. It's no wonder you're having strange dreams. But you'll mend.' She pulled a prescription pad from her bag and scrawled on it. 'He'll need to stay in bed,' she said as she got up to leave. 'Three days at least.'

ii

This time Will had no trouble obeying: he felt so weak he couldn't have escaped the house even if he'd wanted to, which he didn't. He had no reason to go anywhere now, not with Jacob gone. All he wanted to do was put a pillow over his head and shut out the world. And if he smothered himself in the process, so what? There was nothing left to live for, except pills, recriminations and dreams of Lord Fox.

If things looked grim when he woke, they looked worse a couple of hours later, when two policemen arrived to ask him questions. One was in uniform, and sat in the corner of his bedroom, slurping from a mug of tea supplied by Adele. The other - a droopy man who smelled of stale sweat - sat on the edge of Will's bed, introduced himself as Detective Faraday, and then proceeded to ply Will with questions.

'I want you to think very carefully before you answer me, son. I don't want lies and I don't want fabrications. I want the truth, in plain words. This isn't a game, son. Five men are dead.'

This was news to Will. 'You mean ... they were killed?'

'I mean they were murdered, by the woman who was with this man who abducted you.' Will wanted to say: he didn't abduct me; I went because I wanted to go. But he held his tongue, and let Faraday babble on. 'I want you to tell me everything he said to you, everything he did, even if he told you to keep it a secret. Even if ... even if some of the things he said or did are hard to talk about.' Faraday lowered his voice here, as though to reassure Will that this would be secret stuff, justbetween the two of them. Will wasn't convinced for a moment; but he told Faraday he'd answer any questions he was asked.

That's what he did, for the next hour and a quarter, with both Faraday and the constable taking notes on what he was telling them. He knew some of what he recounted sounded strange, to say the least, and some of it, especially the part about burning the moths, made him seem cruel. But he told it all anyway, knowing in his heart nothing he told these dull men would ever allow them to find Jacob and Rosa. He had no information about where Steep and McGee lived or where they were going. All he knew for certain, all he cared about, was that he wasn't with them.

There was another interview two days later, this time from a man who wanted to talk to Will about some of the stories he'd told Faraday, especially the part about seeing Thomas, alive and dead. The interviewer's name was Parsons, but he invited Will to please call him Tim, which Will pointedly refused to do, and he kept circling around the business of how Jacob had touched him. Will was as plain as he could be: said that when they were climbing the hill and Jacob laid a hand on him, he felt strong. Later, he explained, in the copse, it had been him who'd done the touching.

'And that's when you felt as if you were in Jacob's skin, is that right?'

'I knew it wasn't real,' Will said. 'I was having this dream, only I wasn't asleep.'

'A vision ...' Parsons said, half to himself.

Will liked the sound of it. 'Yes,' he said, 'it was a vision.' Parsons jotted something down. 'You should go up there and look,' Will said to him.

'Do you think I might have a vision, too?'

'No,' Will said. 'But you'd find the birds, if they haven't been eaten by ... foxes or whatever...'

He caught a fearful look on the man's face. He wouldn't go up the hill to look for the birds, today or any time. For all his understanding looks and his gentle persuasions, he didn't want to see the truth, much less know it. And why? Because he was afraid. Faraday was the same; and the constable. All of them afraid.

The next day, the doctor pronounced that he was well enough to get up and move around the house. Seated in front of the television, he watched an update on the murders at Burnt Yarley, with the reporter standing in the street outside Donnelly's the Butchers. Sightseers had come from all over the country, apparently, despite the inclement weather, to see the site of the atrocities.

'This little hamlet,' the reporter said, 'has had more visitors in its icy streets the last four days than in half a century of summers.'

'And the sooner they go home again-'said Adele, emerging from the kitchen with a tray of vegetable soup and cheese and chutney sandwiches for Will '-the sooner we can all go back to normal.' She set the tray on Will's lap, warning him that the soup was very hot. 'It's so morbid,' she said, as the reporter interviewed one of the visitors. 'Coming to see a thing like this. Have people no decency?' With that, she retreated to her steak-and-kidney-pie making in the kitchen. Will kept watching, hoping there'd be some mention of him, but the live coverage from the village now ceased, and the newscaster returned to report on how the search for Jacob and Rosa had spread to Europe. There was evidence that two people fitting their description had been linked to crimes in Rotterdam and Milan within the last five years, the most recent report from northern France, where Rosa McGee had been involved in the deaths of three people, one of them an adolescent girl.Will knew it was shameful to feel the pleasure he did, hearing this catalogue of deeds. But he felt it nevertheless, and he'd learned from Jacob to speak his feelings truthfully, though in this case the only person he was telling was himself. And what was the truth? That even if Jacob and Rosa turned out to be the most bloodthirsty pair in history, he couldn't regret having crossed their paths. They were his connection to something bigger than the life he'd been leading, and he would hold onto their memory like a gift.Of all the people who talked to him during this period of recuperation, it was, surprisingly, his mother who knew most intimately the way he was thinking. He had no verbal proof of this; she kept her exchanges with him brief and functional. But the expression in her eyes, which had been until now a vague fatigue, was now sharpened into wariness. She no longer looked through him as she'd been wont to do. She scrutinized him (he several times caught her doing so when she thought he wasn't watching) with something strange in her eyes. He knew what it was. Faraday and Parsons were afraid of the mysteries he'd talked about. His mother was afraid of him.'It's brought up all the bad memories, I'm afraid,' his father explained to him. 'We were doing so well and now this.' He had called Will into his study to have this little talk. It was, of course, a monologue. 'It's all perfectly irrational, of course, but your mother has this very Mediterranean streak in her.' He had not looked at Will more than once so far, but gazed out of the window at the sleet, lost in his own ruminations. Like Lord Fox, Will thought, and smiled to himself. 'But she feels as though somehow ... oh, I don't know ... somehow death's followed us here.' He had been twirling a pencil in his fingers, but now he tossed it down on his well-ordered desk. 'It's such nonsense,' he snorted, 'but she looks at you and-'She blames me.'

'No, no,' said Hugo. 'Not blames. Connects. That's it, you see. She makes these ... connections.' He shook his head, mouth drawn down in disgruntlement. 'She'll snap out of it eventually,' he said. 'But until then we just have to live with it. God knows.' Finally, he swung his leather writing chair around and looked at Will between the piles of papers. 'In the meanwhile, please do your best not to get her stirred up.'