There flickered across Rhona’s face an expression that Jane found all too easy to read. When she left, the house would be empty. Rhona busied herself as she could but Joseph was out a lot and it was clear that she was lonely.

“I won’t start trying to persuade you to change your mind, my dear. Only if you aren’t happy down there after that business, promise you’ll come back. Even in the middle of the night. We shan’t mind a bit.”

“I promise. Thank you.”

“Well, at the very least let me pack you up some things c you’ll need bread and milk and—”

“No, I’ll drive over to the supermarket. Honestly. I must get back to normal, Rhona.”

Rhona Dow sighed and broke off another square of chocolate.

The all-night supermarket on the Bevham Road was not a place Jane would ever have thought of as a haven but when she pulled into the car park, and saw the multicoloured blaze of lights and bright hoardings, she felt a lifting of her spirits. Inside it was warm and cheerful. She pushed a trolley round, exchanging words with other shoppers, picking out foods she would not normally buy as well as the dull essentials, eking out her time there. As long as she was surrounded by the cheerful hum everything else receded into the background and did not trouble her.

After the checkout she went to the café. She was hungry, she realised, queuing for her coffee, and added a plate of bacon, eggs and toast to her tray. She also bought a newspaper.

Supermarkets were good refuges, good for the lonely, those with empty lives, those needing a break and some company of the sort which committed you to nothing more than a few words and the price of a cup of tea. People who said they were soulless and that small shops were always best had not felt as she had, and been restored, even temporarily, by the wide aisles and bright clatter and activity. You couldn’t linger in a small shop, taking advantage of warmth and company, for as long as you liked, and she had known plenty in London with brusque and unwelcoming staff.

God, she thought, the God I know, the God I believe in, the God of love and comfort, the God who sustains, is here as palpably tonight as in the Cathedral of St Michael.

The bacon and eggs were hot and surprisingly delicious, the local newspaper a carousel of gossip and titbits of information and the sort of photographs of amateur dramatic society productions, school sports and wedding pictures that delighted her.

As she was leaving the café a couple came up to talk, recognising her from the cathedral and wanting to ask about having all four of their children baptised together.

The streets were quiet as she drove back. The moon was a paring from a silver sixpence, over the Hill.

She slid her car up to the space on the cobbles beside the Precentor’s house, which was in darkness. Joseph’s car was back. She wondered how Rhona had got on with her dressmaking and how she managed to keep chocolate stains from the fabric. Now she had only to lug three carrier bags down through the garden to the bungalow, let herself in and put on all the lights to send any dark shadows and memories shrinking back into the walls.

The torch she kept on her keyring and which normally sent a thin, piercing beam some distance ahead was not working when she clicked the end, but she knew her way down the path by now. The bushes whispered as she caught against them, and out beyond the fruit trees she heard some creature scuttle away. In one of the gardens further along, a cat yowled, startling her. She edged her way up to the porch, touching a hand against the wall to help her get her bearings. Above her, the constellations of stars prickled against the sky. Key. It slid sweetly into the new lock. She pushed open the door. The house smelled of fear, her fear, the last time she had been inside it, trapped, held, caught claustrophobically inside with Max Jameson. She felt his arm round her throat and the chill edge of the knife blade and began to shiver. Her hand shook as she felt along the wall for the light switch and when the light came, for a second the place looked utterly strange, so that she was disorientated, half wondering if she had mistaken the house.

She went quickly round, turning on every light in kitchen, sitting room, study, bedroom, every lamp. She pulled her carrier bags of shopping inside, shut, locked and bolted the door, drew the kitchen blind and the curtains in each room. Only when she had done all of that did she take deep breaths to still herself. It was a while before her heart stopped thumping.

She made herself look about slowly. Everything was as it had been. Chairs, table, desk, pictures, television, books, all in their places, all familiar. There was the faintest smell of must. The garden house was damp in spite of the maintenance team’s best efforts.

She went to the window in the sitting room. Stopped dead, hearing something. Some scrape or scratch outside, a stone kicked, a brick dislodged?

Of course she could not sleep with the windows open.

It was after midnight. She unpacked her shopping and put it away, switched on the kettle, took out a mug and tin of chocolate powder, milk, a spoon. Set them on the table. The slightest noise, of tin on table, plug into socket, sounded uncanny, loud and hollow, and when it was over, the silence was total, a nervous, taut, unfriendly silence.

She took her hot drink resolutely into the study, and picked up her prayer book from the desk.

“O Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life, Until the shades lengthen and the evening comes.”

She spent some time over prayer, the reading of the office and then of her Bible, so that it was well after one before she went to bed. But the silence had taken on a different quality, become a quietness, pleasing and soothing rather than an anxious silence. She read A.S. Byatt’s Possessionfor half an hour and then switched off the lamp. She felt a deep exhaustion that muffled her brain and made her limbs heavy. Sleep would come as a blessing.

She woke from a nightmare of slimy darkness, in which she was choking on some foul substance and her lungs were being pierced with blades, to sit up in a terror of sweat. In reaching for the lamp she sent it crashing to the floor. Jane cried out but then shook herself, got out of bed on the side away from the broken base and felt her way to the light switch beside the door. As she did so, she heard a sound in the garden.

No, she told herself, there is nothing in the garden, apart from cats and foxes, possibly an owl. Nothing. No one.

She fetched a dustpan and brush, cleared up the mess and put it in the kitchen bin. There was a spare lamp in her study, which she brought and set up, switched on and read by for another twenty minutes.

“O Lord, illuminate the darkness of this night with your celestial brightness, And from the children of light banish the deeds of darkness. Through Jesus Christ, Our Lord.”

The noise outside was a muffled bump as if someone had fallen.

There were several things she might do: ring the police; ring the Dows; look through the window; go outside c And she could do none of them, she was paralysed with fear, her mouth puckered and dry.

Through her head ran a film which she could not stop, of Max Jameson pushing her down, holding her by the arms, staring into her face, holding the knife, laughing, crying in triumph, sitting opposite her, tormenting her with fear, and talking, talking, in a slow, peculiar whisper which susurrated in her ears.

She forced herself to climb out of bed, put on her slippers and dressing gown, and then to pull back the curtain. She had her hand on the latch, ready to open the window when she looked out into the night garden.

Max Jameson’s face leered back at her. His body was in shadow, even his neck seemed wrapped so that his face, with its wild hair and mess of beard, was floating alone a few yards away. Jane would have shouted, banged the window, gestured to him to get away but she did nothing, only froze in terror at the window, looking out as he looked in.