They searched the stairs, inspected the stonework, went down to the kitchen at the bottom of the tower, where their barricade was still mostly intact.

‘He can’t have come this way,’ said Dalip, rattling a big chair hard enough to make the table resting on it fall to one side. Once it had all finished moving, he added: ‘See?’

‘You climbed in the window,’ said Luiza. ‘He must have climbed out.’

‘I don’t know if he could. He doesn’t seem the climbing sort.’

‘He doesn’t seem the kind of bloke who’d rip someone’s head off, either,’ said Mary. ‘But here we are.’

Dalip leaned back against the wall. Stanislav had saved his life, more than once. And now this. He’d been brought up to be loyal, and deferential to his elders. This … this was difficult for him.

‘Luiza. The two women we found in the room above. Where did they go?’

She blinked. ‘They came upstairs with us.’

‘But they’re not there now.’

‘No.’ She tutted. ‘I suppose we must look for them too.’

‘This is getting stupid, right?’ Mary stared into the darkness up the stairs, and Dalip couldn’t help but see how her scars shifted.

‘We should go back to the top floor,’ said Luiza, ‘and wait until morning. We cannot see what we are doing.’

‘At this rate, there may be no one left by morning.’ Dalip pulled out the knife. ‘We brought him here. We have to deal with this. One way or another.’

‘Well, he’s your mate,’ said Mary.

‘In which case, I might get a chance where no one else will. I’m not saying we have to do anything, you know, permanent, but who else is going to stop him? There’s no one but us.’

‘Every room, then. Every door. If he’s not in the tower, then that’s something.’

When they got back to the store room, Dalip made to go in again. Mary was about to stop him, and tell him they’d already looked there. Then she caught his expression and said nothing.

He opened the door, pushing it with his foot. It was exactly as he’d left it, except that the bars that should have been sealing the way to the bridge were lying on the floor, and the door chattering and rattling in the rising wind. The draught stole around his ankles on its way through the tower.

Luiza, in charge of the lantern, held it high over Dalip’s head. ‘He was in there all the time,’ she said.

Dalip moved back on to the stairs and pulled the door firmly closed behind him.

‘Mary, when you turn into a bird, how do you do it?’

‘How? I just … I don’t know. I just can. I want to be it, and there I am. Some big-arse bird.’

‘And the first time, what happened?’