She curled her hand around the handle of the knife. Fear still felt like a very distant thing. Instead, the dry kindling feeling of rage that had nestled in her chest when she’d slammed the pen through her colleague’s hand was back. It didn’t matter what happened next, because she was right. This person she was chasing, the person she intended to hurt, was a monster, and she couldn’t be feeling guilty for wanting to hurt him. And perhaps she would find the woman who looked like Lillian and hurt her too. The sensation was incredibly liberating.

As she drew closer to the folly and the house, she got a better idea of the layout of the place. The folly didn’t sit directly on the sand – she supposed that would have been a very unstable foundation – but on a spur of rock spiking out from the forested area towards the sea. There was a rough sort of road leading away from it, curling away into the dark somewhere out of sight, and the house crouched within its shadow, a strange sort of afterthought.

She had just stepped onto the rock when the thin line of light under the window blind vanished. Stopping where she was, Heather waited, expecting to see another light come on elsewhere in the house, but several long minutes passed and the darkness remained complete. She listened too, desperate to get some sense of where this person was, or where Nikki was, but no voices were carried to her on the wind, no slamming doors or footsteps. Everything was eerily quiet. With the knife now held at her hip, Heather circled the place until she found a back door, a short flight of steps leading up to it. In the dark, everything was colourless.

Wait. Wait, wait, wait. She screwed her eyes up tight, trying to concentrate on the small voice of reason. Try your phone again. You have to. You could be about to get both yourself and Nikki killed, idiot.

Half a bar of signal. It might be enough, but then again, she might get a few words out before she lost the connection, and then what? She quickly texted Ben: Fiddler’s Folly. Red Wolf found. He has Nikki. Help.

She didn’t wait to see if it had gone through or try to call him. The monster inside this place would get a good early warning that she was here, and that could doom Nikki. Better to go in quietly now, Heather told herself. Better to take the chance.