Pollard leaped to the lounge door, threw it open and stopped. They crowded behind him. Outside, the hall floor and the staircase were almost hidden under heaps of snow, broken wood, jagged pieces of glass, twisted lead sheets. Freezing air bit at their lungs. And where the large domed skylight had been, a gap as wide as the hall lay open revealing a darkish opaque sky from which snow fell heavily and silently into the house.

To Paul’s horror he saw an arm sticking up above the largest heap of snow and debris. Even as he watched, a red patch began to spread over the snow. A few treads above, another mound of debris covered a second body lying sprawled down the stairs.

The men clambered over the snow and fragments of the dome, began to work frantically. They got Fletcher uncovered first. He bled to death even as Bourne worked, his jugular severed by a razor-sharp shard of glass. Afterwards Bourne conjectured that he must have heard the preliminary creaking and splintering, tilted back his head and received the knife-like fragment in his throat.

Swanson was dead when they got him out. His neck was broken, his skull crushed. With ashen faces, the men carried the bodies upstairs to the bedroom the dead men had occupied. Placing them on their beds, they drew sheets over them before leaving the room. They had crunched down the stairs again and were crossing the filthy, littered, slaughterhouse-like hall when they halted. All around them, softly but insistently, the air vibrated with a low murmuring, like a whispered conversation just audible but not decipherable. Sibilant, sighing, it exuded triumph and hate. And then, suddenly, as if someone had closed a soundproof door on it, it was gone.

They scanned each other’s faces, read that their companions too had heard it. Meredith drew in a deep breath.

‘Let’s get into the lounge.’

They rejoined Carol, Ann and Joyce. Ann, in tears, was being comforted by Joyce. Carol seized Paul’s hand as he crossed to sit beside her. Her own cheeks were wet with recent tears, her hand was icy.

A bitter and acrimonious debate developed, polarized about Meredith and Bourne. Stubbornly, Bourne resisted Meredith’s suggestion that the deaths were anything other than accidental.

‘The wooden frame of the dome was obviously rotten with age. The weight of snow, lead and glass was too much for it. It was a tragic coincidence that Swanson and Fletcher were carrying the camera equipment down the stairs when it occurred.’

‘And the sounds?’

‘Who knows what sounds may not be set up by a wind in such circumstances? Meredith, I will not be stampeded into acceptance of a supernatural origin or of some preposterous plot from the Other Side’ – his scathing tones seared – ‘to kill or injure us. I am a scientist. I go by the facts. I subscribe to Occam’s Razor.’