Napoleon beat his heavy tail on the floor and grumbled to himself. ‘Well, no, I’ve never actually known you to eat bedspreads, but there’s always a first time.’

She fumbled for her eye shadow and applied it carefully, blending the two shades, and smudging the lighter one away into nothing. A tiny piece of masking tape stuck to the compact reminding her which was the darker of the two green-grey shades. She had given up wearing make-up for quite some time after the accident, but her sister had insisted she learn how, sitting with her in front of the mirror because that was the way she had always done it before the accident, and coaxing and coercing her into trying out new shades and methods. Naomi was truly grateful for all the fond bullying her sister and her friends had done, though at the time it had seemed so terribly hard and so unfair. Now she applied her ‘face’, as her sister called it, with almost as much confidence as she had in her sighted days and, with a bit of practise, she had even mastered lipstick, and recently had begun to trust herself to apply the richer, deeper shades that went so well with her dark hair.

Alec opened the door and announced himself. ‘It’s me. You ready, love?’

She nodded and stood up, turning to face him. ‘I look OK?’

‘You look great.’ He inspected her as he always did. She was still slightly paranoid about going out in badly matched clothes. ‘I like the new eye stuff.’

‘Thanks. Thought I’d try something new. I’m starving.’ She called Napoleon and allowed herself to be escorted downstairs. ‘We should tell Marcus what happened,’ she said.

‘I tried to phone him, but just got some woman who said she was looking after the shop today and he’d be back this evening.’

‘Right, he’s going to be upset by all of this.’

‘Hmm, and Reg Fine, the DS you met at the house,’ Alec continued, ‘he’s going to arrange for us to be taken to where they found Rupert.’

‘When?’

‘Hopefully tomorrow. All we are going to do today is eat and rest. Doctor’s orders.’

‘What doctor?’

‘Doctor Friedman.’

Naomi laughed. Alec seated her at their table and settled Napoleon. ‘Seriously love, you had a really bad fright. I want you to be all right.’

‘I’m fine. What I’d really like is to have lunch then go for a walk and just have some unwinding time. We’ve not had a proper chance to look around yet. Let’s make like tourists for a while?’

‘Whatever you want to do. We can do the John Wesley trail, if you like. That would be a good way of finding out about the town.’

She nodded. ‘I’d forgotten about the whole Methodist thing. Nonconformist territory, isn’t it, around here? I vaguely remember Mum insisting we did all that one holiday. Looking at Wesley’s tomb and an old rectory, I think.’ She shook her head. ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Funny how we both spent our holidays round here,’ Alec commented. ‘OK, we’ll do all of that and see what the shops have to offer. The girl on reception told me there’s a ghost walk tonight, if you feel up to it.’

‘Um, maybe.’ She was aware that she was not responding with the enthusiasm Alec would have liked and aware that would worry him even more than he was already, but she couldn’t seem to do anything about it. Though she was trying to seem outwardly calm and her heart rate had long ago returned to normal, there was a little piece of her brain still switched into panic mode and when someone close by dropped a glass it was all she could do not to leap to her feet and run away.

Her response made her angry, irritated with herself. She’d been in worse situations, she reminded herself. Under greater threat, or equal threat at least. Hadn’t she?

To be truthful, she was no longer certain that was the case. Something about the way the man had responded to her. The rage she had sensed, and which had been barely contained, unsettled her. No, more than unsettled; it shook her to the very core. It wasn’t normal, Naomi decided. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t sane.

Naomi attended to the starter which had just arrived and tried to divert her thoughts. The statement had taken a while to make. First off she had presented what had happened in bald facts, trying to keep events in the right order and tell her story as clearly as possible. Gently, Alec had coaxed the finer details from her. Naomi was surprised at how much she could in fact remember. The scent of aftershave. The taste of tobacco on the man’s skin when she had bitten him. The rough skin at the side of his fingers. The lighter footsteps of the other man.

‘What are you thinking?’ Alec asked her.

‘Nothing much.’

‘Nomi?’ Alec chided gently.

She took a deep and slightly quavering breath. ‘I was going over the statement in my head,’ she said. ‘In case I’d forgotten anything.’ It was, she thought, only a small lie. Just a little omission.

He reached across the table and took her hand. ‘Forget it now,’ he said gently. ‘Let’s enjoy ourselves for the rest of the day. Tomorrow when we see DS Fine again, we may have more information to add to the puzzle. Nothing you can do about it now.’

She knew he was right and she wanted so much to be able to put this from her mind and allow herself to be distracted. She wasn’t fooled for one moment that Alec was any less preoccupied and in part she wanted to tell him to stop pretending and just give in and talk this thing to death. The more sensible, thinking part said there was no point and that Alec was right. Let Reg Fine do his job and tomorrow may well bring further revelation.

Most of all she wanted to tell Alec what she felt about the man who had come to the door at Fallowfields and she shuddered inwardly at the knowledge, pure and simple, that he would be back.

Ten

‘How far away are we from Fallowfields?’ Naomi asked as DS Fine stopped the car.

‘It’ll be … let me see. Fallowfields is on the other side of Epworth, actually a bit closer to Owston Ferry, and we’re now about a mile outside of Crowle, not far from the river Don and up at the top end of the Isle of Axholme, proper. All in all, it’ll be about eleven, twelve miles. We’re now in part of the Peatlands nature reserve. Much of a nature lover was he, your uncle?’ he asked Alec.

‘Only in a general sort of way. I don’t recall that he went bird watching or anything like that.’

‘Pity,’ Fine said. ‘This is the place for it. I saw a hen harrier here a week or so ago, brought my lad up with me.’

‘You have children?’ Naomi asked.

‘Oh aye. Two of them. Boy’s ten and the little lass is nearly eight.’

The burr, Naomi noticed, seem to have thickened as they drove further out into the country.

Alec got out, then opened the rear passenger door for Naomi and Napoleon.

‘So, what’s it like?’ she asked, turning her head and catching the sound of birds and the rustle of wind blowing through grass. There was another sound too, one she had previously associated with the Somerset Levels, an almost subliminal hiss of saturated ground. ‘Marshland,’ she said. ‘Of course. Was this area not drained then?’

‘Not completely. No, the Dutch engineer Vermuyden and his men managed to suck the water from the sponge most everywhere back there in the sixteen hundreds but there’s the odd spot wouldn’t give in.’

Naomi heard the satisfaction in his voice and smiled in sympathy.

‘There are old peat diggings all over here and on the Thorn and Hatfield moors. Anyone coming here should stick to the paths until they know their way around. They can literally end up in deep water, and that before they know it.’

‘And Rupert, did he keep to the path?’

‘It doesn’t look that way. The hikers that found him said he were lying face up about thirty yards off the track. Pure fluke that they spotted him at all. He was part hidden behind some thorn bushes and when they first spotted him they thought he might be twitching, bird watching, you know.’