Nikki looked less excited about the journey, repeatedly fiddling with her phone in its holder on the dashboard, which was serving as a satnav. Factoring in breaks, it was a good five-hour drive to Lancashire and they had set off in the late morning, shunting and winding around the usual treacle-traffic of London, and now they were out beyond the M25, free of the city’s shackles. Hours passed, and anonymous fields and stretches of vegetation zipped by on both sides of the motorway, the sky overhead grey and nondescript.

They got to the borders of Lancashire just as the last of the sun was bleeding from the sky. Heather had been dozing in the passenger seat, but something woke her as they turned down a country road. She sat up, blinking and trying to recapture the specific sensation. A voice saying her name? Had she been dreaming?

‘Oh, good, you’re awake.’ Nikki sounded distracted. ‘Can you keep an eye on the map for me? These roads are all really twisty, and this place is in the middle of bloody nowhere.’

Heather nodded and peered at the electronic map. They drove for another hour or so, trundling up and down roads boxed in with trees and low stone walls, until it was completely dark. There were very few lights out here, and more than once Heather found herself staring out into the night, at the yawning blackness of the fields.

‘When I was a kid,’ she said, ‘I used to imagine how scary it would be to suddenly be transported somewhere like this. If you were just at home, watching telly in your pyjamas, and then suddenly you were in the middle of a field at night, no idea where you were, no way to contact home. Cold and alone, no idea what might be in the woods. I used to imagine that a lot.’

‘Do we take the next left? No wait, I’ve got it …’ Nikki nodded towards the windscreen. ‘There it is, look. There’s the entrance.’

Their headlights caught it – a flash of white in the night. It was a big shiny board, advertising the Fiddler’s Mill Spa Complex in an ostentatious green font. Underneath it was a big stylized acorn with the words ‘Oak Leaf’ written through it, and beyond the sign they could make out a long, smooth road, helpfully lit with discreet lamps. Somewhere out in the dark, up a gradually sloping hill, Fiddler’s Mill House lurked. Heather squinted at the windscreen, thinking it would be possible to see lights in its windows perhaps, but the glow from the car cast everything beyond the road into a blank kind of darkness.

‘Our cottage should be left of here.’ Heather leaned back. ‘It’s a little way from the big house.’