When we had both written, we swapped them over. Hers was the same as mine. Word for word. I stared at her, then at the sentence she’d written down.

‘Trust in your memory, Charlie, trust in yourself. Now, here’s the deal: I can tell you how Mrs Nesbit got to be in those dreams. But information has a price.’

I was still staring at her note. I felt hot and sweaty, and once more the image of the blue Buick started to bleed into the space around me. Soft and indistinct to begin with and then with the pile of rocks, more solid, more defined. The oak tree started to appear, too, as the dappled light began to play on the tables in the dining room. As the illusion unfolded I had the bewildering fear that the encroaching vision wouldn’t stop, that it would wash over me and I would stay locked in the Dreamstate for ever. I gazed at what few scraps of reality remained – the table, the coffee pot, Zsazsa – and concentrated on them lest I lose them, too.

But to no avail.

Within a few seconds they had vanished and Mrs Nesbit had arrived, wanting to know where the cylinder was. She was shouting now, demanding, coercing. Louder and louder until I was about to draw my Bambi and attack her, when someone else appeared.

‘Birgitta?’

She was right there in front of me, eternally unchanged, dressed in her dungarees and the man’s shirt, holding the brushes, hair carelessly tied up. She smiled, told me she loved me, and I, in return, told her I loved her too. There was a pause, the waves crashed on the beach, and there was a gurgle of a child’s laugh as the beach ball bounced past.

‘Charlie? Are you okay?’

I looked at Birgitta and she suddenly appeared older, more careworn, and in an instant she wasn’t Birgitta at all but Zsazsa, and I was back in the dining room with the Dormiselle staring at me. My hand was still gripped around the butt of the Bambi, my thumb on the safety but thankfully I hadn’t drawn the weapon – or worse. I had been seconds away from attacking an entirely imaginary foe. I carefully released my hold on the Bambi, palms damp with sweat.

‘Shit,’ I said, now knowing precisely what had taken Moody and Suzy. The blue Buick dream had swept over them, too, in a suffocating alternative reality, and they’d tried to kill the hectoring Mrs Nesbit, and been killed themselves. But I had a secret weapon: Birgitta. She’d just saved my life, and quite possibly Zsazsa’s as well.

‘Are you okay?’ asked Zsazsa again.

‘I’m fine,’ I said, the return from the event almost as rapid as the descent.

I took a drink of water and stared at Zsazsa.

‘So how did you know about Mrs Buckley and the remote farm in Lincolnshire?’