She didn’t suppose it’d got any better in her absence.

As she took the right turn at the old tollhouse, the road narrowed. Anna tugged the steering wheel, pulling the car over abruptly. The light was fading more quickly now, the sun dipping behind the dark granite rock of Haytor on nearby Dartmoor. It was still warm, or maybe it was Anna’s anxiety heating her blood. She wound the window down, breathing in slowly and deeply. It even smelled the same. That couldn’t be possible, she knew – but it transported her back to her childhood. Back to the memories Mapledon held; the ghosts she’d left behind. With a deep sigh, Anna shook off the feeling and tried to gain control. She should get to her mother’s house before dark – before the ghosts came.

Shifting the gear into first, she set off again, heeding the twenty-mile-an-hour speed limit through the village. That was something new, at least. Second right, next left … She swallowed hard as she reached the turning to her mother’s road. Slowly, she drove in. Her heart banged. There it was. The 1960s magnolia-coloured, end terraced house she’d grown up in. She hadn’t visited the house since she’d left twenty years ago. She hadn’t even stepped foot in the village since she escaped its clutches. All contact with her mother had been through telephone calls and in person with her mother’s biannual trips to Anna’s house in Bristol.

Her mother had never argued when Anna had politely declined each of her invitations over the years. Never questioned why. She guessed Muriel knew without having to ask. Anna’s strained relationship with her mum had begun the day her father had walked out on them for another woman. Anna had always considered herself a daddy’s girl, so she was devastated when he left. She’d blamed everyone over the years: her mother, him, and even herself. But the full weight of her anger and bitterness had often been aimed at her mother – after all, she was the only one present and Anna believed Muriel had been the one to drive the poor man into someone else’s arms in the first place.

But he’d left Anna, too. For that she’d blamed him. He’d moved to the other end of the UK – Scotland, the farthest he could get – and had broken off all contact: not a phone call, not a letter. He’d abandoned his only daughter because of something her mother had done. That was unforgivable.

Anna pulled the key from the ignition and, with a dragging sensation in her stomach, got out of the car.

‘Bloody hell.’ Anna sucked in a lungful of air. Why hadn’t her mother removed the thing from the front door? It set a chill in motion, starting deep inside her belly and radiating outwards. And something else too – just outside her grasp. She imagined the attention Muriel would’ve got from the neighbours – she’d have revelled in that, no doubt. Approaching the front step, Anna couldn’t peel her eyes away from the gruesome head pinned like a horror-film prop on the door. Her mother would’ve left it there so that Anna could get the full effect.