“I saw Grace yesterday.”

His smirk becomes a full smile. “You thought you saw Grace yesterday.” His voice is a guttural rumble, his vowels round and soft, Cornish.

“You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t her. How did you know about this place?”

I hear the same plumpness in my own accent. He shrugs his thin shoulders.

“You’ve been pretty upset recently, haven’t you, Cara? You might not tell people what you’re feeling but I know you’re upset. Who’s to say you didn’t just see someone who looked a bit like Grace and got overexcited?”

His eyes are slits, as though even the bleached colors of early morning are too bright for him. I shake my head.

“So why drag me all the way out here then? Why not just ignore me? I know you know something. And I know what I saw. I saw Grace.”

“Yeah, but you know how it sounds, don’t you? A local disabled girl is missing and you see her able-bodied and well, running around in a graveyard?” His voice is only just about a whisper. “You think anyone’s going to believe that? C’mon, Cara, where’s your evidence?”

He looks as though he’s trying not to laugh. How does he know so much? Grace must have told him everything—my name, the day she saw me . . . but did she tell him willingly or did he force it out of her?

“I have evidence.”

I want the lie to be small but powerful, but he doesn’t even flinch.

“Don’t bullshit me. We both know you don’t.”

“How do you know? The only way you could know is if you’ve got Grace. She’s telling you everything.”

Without taking his hands out of his pockets he steps towards me. I feel suffocated by his height. I take two steps back.

“You need to stop, Cara. Grace wouldn’t want you to be in any danger, would she?”

He’s so close I can see his Adam’s apple moving below the zipper of his jacket. I take two more steps back, the barbed-wire fence getting closer. He presses on again, close to me, trying to trap me.

I take another step back and the barbed wire presses against my back through my thin coat. I hear the sea, boiling and messy below. GoodSam looks at it over my shoulder.

“You know, I remember there were a bunch of teenage kids who used to dick around up here, cliff-jumping. Then one day one of them landed on a rock, smashed both his legs and his spine into little pieces.”

He moves towards me again, so close I can see myself reflected in miniature in his eyes. I strain back, I can’t bear to touch him, I cry out, but he ignores me as the barbed wire bites into the skin on my back.

“The lesson being that you need to be careful of what you can’t see, because what’s just below the surface can be worse, far worse, than you ever imagined.”