‘And a less savoury bunch,’ Betsy whispered.

Hawkins frowned. ‘OK, I get the picture. But why here?’

Alice again. ‘The main interest comes from the fact that the church was built in the wrong alignment; facing North–South instead of East–West. Evidently that wasn’t a problem in the eleventh century, but by the mid-eighteen hundreds, it was seen as a slight to Christianity.’

She leaned closer, speaking softly. ‘They say it’s a sign of the Devil.’

22

He stopped dead, eyes locked on the distance, already alert senses heightening.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

He’d been so careful, put so much time and effort into finding this location.

Thought he was safe.

So how the fuck had he missed it?

He slid away from the doorless opening and stood a few feet back from the cracked, smeared window above the sink, staring out at the anomaly, so clearly visible now that daylight had gone.

The yellow rectangle was tiny, but it stood out in the darkness like a beacon, and it meant only one thing.

There was a house over there.

Someone lived on the far side of the field.

His heart rate kicked up again as he glanced behind him, towards the front room. There was no way to know how long it would be until someone found the corpse. Even if it took weeks, he still couldn’t afford to have been seen in the area.

And the other house massively increased the chances of that.

Automatically, his mind rewound to the first time he’d come here, in daylight, to assess its viability. The cottage itself had seemed perfect – isolated, abandoned; the kind of place casual visitors wouldn’t investigate, and that locals complained about but came to ignore. He’d taken a slow sweep of the horizon that day, detecting nothing but nature in every direction for at least a quarter of a mile. He pictured the area near the lit window, vaguely recalling what had appeared to be a natural copse.

He had dismissed it.

Only now, in the negative relief of late dusk was it obvious that the trees obscured some kind of property, with at least one window facing the cottage in which he now stood.

Giving the occupants clear line of sight.

He had killed already. And, if the first three bodies hadn’t made him a priority for the police, a fourth certainly would. He needed to be even more careful from now on, take greater care in identifying his targets; greater care not to give himself away.

Routine interaction became harder by the day, the outward appearance of normality demanding ever greater focus. And doing that, while maintaining the detachment necessary to facilitate the later stages of his plan, left him with few opportunities to enlist help from outside. But there was no option to stop, no other way.

He had to keep going.