For a moment in my disorientated state, I wonder if I have imagined it. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all. But then they are there again, close enough that I can almost smell their breath. Taking a slow step forward, a twig quietly crunching beneath my foot, I hear a man’s voice again, this time followed by a name: Eva. Amidst a distorted mush of syllables, a language I cannot understand, I hear the girl speak; I don’t know the words but the meaning is clear. Stop, she is saying. Please stop!

The man’s presence hangs in the air like an omen. Willing my body not to move, I feel my weight shift involuntarily below me as the air struggles for space in my chest. Any second now one of the twigs beneath my feet will crack under the pressure.

I am like an animal under attack, each of my senses amplified so that every smell, every sound, every taste rushes through my body all at once. And then I hear it, the snap as a tiny shard of wood gives way beneath the heel of my bare foot.

I feel the girl’s face before I see it, turning slowly towards me. Time seems to slow down as the image is scored onto my memory: the dark unblinking brown eyes, pupils frozen in horror. For just a second our gazes lock, a bolt running down my spine, and then, without another thought, I feel my body rise.

No longer aware of the blood gathered in clots at my toes, I lunge towards my escape route, a tunnel of light spilling through the clearing; I manage two giant steps, my feet guiding me through a rotten knot of roots and bark. And then it comes, the scream, chasing me down the hill. I know it instantly: the sound of a life being torn out by the roots.

Chapter 4

Gabriela

That first summer with Tom passed by in a haze of picnics on the Heath, and evenings spent with her dad at the house watching TV in easy silence while Tom attended rehearsals with his band – an anachronistic jazz four-piece that at least explained the terrible dress sense. The nights he was around, and she wasn’t working at the pub on Arlington Road where she did four shifts a week behind the bar, they spent at his place, her skimming through textbooks for the final year of her degree. He cooked and washed up, helping her sort through the endless paperwork relating to her mother’s estate, finding ways to care for her when she was incapable of caring for herself.