‘No, Sabine, please, no. Let’s just shout. Henri will come.’

‘And then what? We’ve still got to get out and we’ll do it by ourselves.’

‘You go down. If there’s a problem I’m here to help you up again.’

Sabine’s command over her was such that, crying and begging, Suzie was forced further into the hole. She was entering a rock tomb and would never come out alive. She braced her back against the wall of the chimney and lowered herself away from Sabine, crouching above her.

‘What’s happening?’ Sabine called out. ‘Tell me what you find.’

Suzie refused to speak. She was so far down now that there was no more vegetation for her hands. She was held in place by the narrow bore of the hole and descended by pushing her body down, scraping her back on the rock, until her knees were bent and then, extending one leg after the other, she found a new foothold. The pressure on the muscles of her thighs increased. Her descent was for ever and for good; she would never, never be able to climb up again.

The pipe opened out. As she put out one foot to find somewhere to wedge it, the rock wall below her vanished. She kicked wildly and lost her purchase. Her fall was a matter of feet. She landed, miraculously, on a soft bed. She lay on her back and her hands discovered hay. It was not wholly dark; rolling over, she could see cracks of light below her and could make out shapes in the darkness, masses, which resolved themselves into structures. She was in a loft in one of the cave storerooms on the path down to the lake. She could distinguish a ladder leading down to the rocky floor and she quickly scrambled down. Wooden doors closed the entrance. Nowhere on the farm was ever locked and the double doors swung open to the push of her shoulder. She found herself on the cliff path, the water shining darkly in the late afternoon light. Returning to the cave, she shouted up to Sabine in the rock chimney, ‘It’s all right, you can come down.’

She stood outside in the sunshine, gratefully breathing in the fresh air.

Sabine wants to kill me, she thought. She’ll go on and on until she does.

Walking back into the barn, her eyes full of the radiance of the sun, she was forced to duck in terror. A powerful projectile had swung just over her head and back again.

‘Watch out,’ she cried in alarm.

Sabine was standing in the loft, watching the swing of the free end of a rope, weighted with an iron hook, suspended from a pulley. She caught it on its return, and once more sent it in a sweeping arc across the empty space of the barn. When its diminishing swing brought it at last to a swivelling halt, Suzie saw that it hung well above her head. It could not have hit her.