It’ll only take a minute, part of him said. He switched on the torch and sent its beam along the corridor. It lit up the black, opaque panes of a window in the far wall at the end of the corridor. He moved it to the left and it revealed a dark rectangular opening and the first treads of an ascending flight of stairs.

Paul realized he was apprehensive, that the chill in his bones was as much due to fear as to the low temperature of the surrounding air. And then quite suddenly he capitulated to his self-respect. Quickly he approached the narrow stairway, the light from his torch slanting up a drab dark-green wall holding a wooden rail angled upwards.

Ten steps upwards the flight turned left. Grimly he went upwards, the beam searching before him.

At the top of the flight he halted. Directly in front of him, a long, low, narrow corridor ran away, parallel to the front of the house. The light from his torch seemed powerless to penetrate fully the deep palpable blackness filling the tunnel-like passage beyond. In any case, he knew it was the other corridor leading off to the right that must take him to the door of the room above their bedroom.

His stomach a knot of tension, he padded along the ten feet of corridor to the closed door on his right. No light came from under it. And no sound from behind it. Around the oval of his torch beam, the darkness pressed in with claustrophobic intensity, combining with the chill of the air to produce in him an impression of being shut in an ice house.

What do I want, what do I want? he found himself gabbling inwardly. If I open that door and they’re behind it – doing what? – what happens then? But maybe it’s locked. Maybe they’ve gone now, gone while I stood at the bedroom door. They could have departed along that other corridor.

He tried the handle. It turned, slowly, reluctantly. And the door gave inwards when he applied pressure to it. And a black, totally black gap appeared.

He pushed the door wider, sent the torch beam around the high ceilinged seven-sided room, five of whose sides held windows. Light splashed from dusty bare floorboards, several cupboards, a central octagonal table and four chairs. But nothing else. If boxes and trunks had been stored there, they had been taken away. Trembling with a sense of outrage at the way he had been put through an emotional wringer, Paul turned to go. And froze, as two facts about the room grabbed at him, shredding his anger-built ego.

There were no curtains, not even a curtain-rail. And though his footprint was plain in the layer of dust on the floorboards by the door, there were no other marks.