‘What happened?’ he asked, shoving several mewling cats out of the way when they ran in from the other room and started trampling over her to get to him.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I came to get a drink, and next thing I knew, I was lying here with a sore head.’

Frank dipped down to take a look, and winced when he saw dried blood on her hair and the tiles beneath.

‘Who did this to you?’ he asked, sliding his phone out of his pocket. ‘Did you see their faces?’

‘I’ll have tripped over something,’ she said. ‘My daft old legs aren’t as strong as they used to be, so it wouldn’t be the first time.’

Frank suspected she had disturbed a burglar and been whacked before they’d made their escape. But she obviously hadn’t seen them, and he didn’t want to frighten her, so he decided not to tell her about the door.

‘How long have you been lying here?’ he asked instead.

‘I don’t know?’ she said, her brow creasing deeply as she tried to remember. ‘It was the night I came to your place, I think.’

‘Christ, that was a couple of days ago,’ Frank said, thinking she was lucky she hadn’t frozen to death. ‘Are you hurt anywhere else?’

‘My back doesn’t feel too good,’ she said, closing her eyes and swallowing loudly. ‘And I can’t really feel my leg.’

Shocked by how old and frail she looked without the garish make-up she’d been wearing the last few times he’d seen her, Frank said, ‘OK, let me find something to cover you with while I call an ambulance.’

‘There’s a blanket on the sofa,’ she told him.

Nodding, he got up and dialled 999 as he walked through to the living room.

‘Ambulance, please,’he said, tugging a cat-hair-matted crocheted blanket off the sofa. ‘And I think we might need the police as well,’ he added quietly. ‘I came round to check on my neighbour, and it looks like someone’s broken in and attacked her. I found her on the floor with a nasty cut on the back of her head, and she says her back’s hurting and she can’t feel her leg . . . Yes, it’s Yvonne Caldwell, and she lives at Rose Cottage on Marsh House Lane . . . In her sixties, I think. Give me a sec while I ask her.’

‘Seventy-six,’ Yvonne told him when he went back to the kitchen.

Surprised, because he hadn’t realized she was that old, Frank relayed it to the operator and thanked her when she told him that help would be with them soon.

‘She reckons they’ll have trouble getting an ambulance up here in this weather, so they might have to send a helicopter,’ he told Yvonne.