Her blood thudding in her ears and her own breathing sounding loud as a steam engine to her heightened senses, Lindsay pounded the asphalt, aiming for the light. So obsessed was she with reaching the relative safety of a street with traffic and other human beings that she completely failed to register the low wall that bordered Watergaw’s unit until it was too late. Like a badly prepared showjumper, she tried to adjust her stride to take the wall, but mistimed it completely.

The sandal on her trailing leg caught the top of the foot-high wall, catapulting Lindsay into a scrappy somersault. She flew over the pavement, landing in an awkward sprawl a yard into the road. White light bathed her as a taxi’s brakes screeched in a screaming swerve, bringing it to a juddering halt in a stutter of diesel engine mere inches from where she lay groaning in the road.

The taxi driver jumped out and ran round to the front of the cab, his “What the fuck?” strangled at birth when Lindsay lifted a face that was a Janus mask half blood, half green-tinged flesh. “Jesus Christ,” he gasped instead.

Lindsay pushed herself on to her knees, then, using the cab’s radiator as a prop, to her feet. Casting a desperate glance behind her that seemed surprisingly agonizing, she stuttered, “A bloke. With a baseball bat. Chasing me.”

“I can’t see nobody, love,” the cabbie said. “Whoever he was, he must have legged it when he saw you flying through the air with the greatest of ease. He’s gone, love. You’re all right.” He reached out a hand. “Well, when I say all right . . . maybe we should get you to hospital.”

Lindsay shook her head. Again pain shot along her jaw. But she couldn’t work out why. She must have scraped her face on the asphalt when she hit the ground. Bruises and a nasty graze, that’s what it would be. “I’m just a bit bruised. Nothing broken. I’ll be fine,” she said, her voice clear with the disengaged calm of deep shock.

The cabbie put a firm arm round her shoulder. “Hospital, love. You can’t see what I can see. You must have hit a bit of broken glass in the road. Look, you can see it shining there. A broken milk bottle, it looks like. Whatever, that face of yours is gonna need more than an Elastoplast, believe me.”