‘Do you realize they haven’t told us anything about themselves, or where they come from?’

‘Yes.’

He pulled her towards himself, kissed her. Her lips were warm and soft. Gently he inserted his cupped hand between her legs and held her for a long moment.

‘Go to sleep,’ he said. ‘The sooner you’re asleep the sooner it’ll be morning.’

In response, she touched him.

‘Why,’ she said, softly and sleepily, ‘I do believe someone will be fully recuperated by tomorrow.’

‘That you can depend on,’ he whispered.

She sighed happily and turned round so that her back fitted snugly against his front. Almost immediately his consciousness began to dissolve, hypnagogic imagery drifting before him until sleep came.

3

3 The Night Walker

He awoke suddenly, not in the gradual manner he was accustomed to, but instantly alert as if consciousness had reintegrated as quickly as a stretched rubber band snaps together when released. He was lying flat on his back, his body cocooned in warmth, his face cold in the icy air of the room. Moisture from his exhaled breath had dampened the blanket round his mouth.

Carol’s warm back touched his left arm. He lay without moving, watching the ceiling. The faint light from the dimmed oil-lamp still rendered the room visible. He had no idea how long he had slept or what had wakened him. He stretched out his right hand to the top of the small bedside cabinet and retrieved his watch and a torch. Shielding the beam with the fingers of one hand, he contrived to read the time. Twenty past two.

And then he heard the noise. It came from the ceiling. The sound of footsteps. A heavy, measured tread back and forth, from the area of the bay window to the centre of the room. Back and forth. The sound of a heavy man’s regular pacing. Paul could almost visualize him, hands clasped behind his back, striding in deep thought across the floor of the room above. The room above? Was there another floor to the house?

Who was it? And at nearly half past two. Which of the nine people they had met was up there? But if he remembered correctly they were all allocated to bedrooms on this floor. Was it someone he and Carol had not yet met, someone hidden away from them? Half-formulated speculations he had not dared to voice to Carol surfaced in his mind again. That this group of people had no permission to be in this dilapidated house at all – that they had some illegal purpose – that the army-type men were bogus – that he and Carol were in some kind of deadly danger. Before, those thoughts had seemed melodramatic; now in the low-confidence hours of the night he was not so quick to dismiss them.