Bex looked up. ‘I should have realised. Ever since Tim died, he’s been obsessed with protecting everyone. He’s been doing it for years. Protecting piglets from their mothers, protecting the children in the village, protecting me from my sister. It’s what he does.’

52

‘We’ve got to find a way out of here,’ I said. ‘How can we get out?’ I was feeling better. Whatever he’d drugged me with was wearing off.

‘We can’t,’ Nina said.

‘He has to come some time. I’m going to kill him.’ I jumped up and walked over to the kitchen area. Pulled open drawers. ‘There are knives here. He’s left knives. Between all of us we can overpower him easily.’

‘We have knives now because he knows we can’t escape,’ Nina said. ‘He’s made it so we can’t escape. Because we managed to get Ivan out. Twice. The first time, Kirsty found him and brought him back.’

Despite everything I knew about Kirsty, this made me cold to the core. ‘Kirsty knows about this?’

Nina nodded. ‘Tony told me she found out when Ivan escaped the first time. He wanted to upset me that my own daughter would know, but not save me. Because he was angry I made Ivan escape through the old lead mining passages under the barn. We would have all escaped but Sofia was too scared of the dark tunnels.’ She sighed. ‘It was when Ivan and Sofia were nine and Kirsty was fifteen. She is my daughter, but Kirsty is not right. She is the reason I wanted to take you away.’

And that must have been when Daniel’s brother, Charlie, saw the Pale Child. Ivan. In a white dress to keep him safe. And then Charlie fell into the reservoir spillway. How convenient.

‘After that, Tony closed the tunnels, but Ivan managed to escape a second time. He pushed past his father, and Tony couldn’t catch him. But he never came back and I worry what happened because he didn’t save us.’ Nina wrinkled her brow. ‘I pray he escaped but could not find his way back to us. I pray he is alive.’

I couldn’t tell Nina and Bex that he was dead. That his bones were buried in the woods. That he’d raped Bex, his own sister, and fathered her child. Fathered Violet.

‘How can we get out?’ I said. ‘There must be a way.’

‘There isn’t,’ Nina said. ‘He has codes and the locks work with his fingerprints. And he microchips us.’ She lifted her T-shirt and pointed to a scar on her upper arm.

Bex slammed her hand against her own arm. Lifted her T-shirt. A patch of blood. ‘Oh my God. He’s done me.’

I touched my own upper arms but there was nothing.

‘Maybe he’s not planning to keep you,’ Bex said.