I lay back down on the cold wet rock. I was shivering and sick and frightened. If I stayed completely still, the pain from my leg was only a dull throb. But the tiniest movement was agony. And now I was so alone.

How long would it be? If Kenny could find a way back up onto the rough path by the stream and then get to the road … Well, twenty minutes? Half an hour? But then he had to stop a car. What if there weren’t any? Who would be driving on the moors at night? No, someone would. This wasn’t Outer Mongolia, it was bloody Yorkshire. People everywhere. There hadn’t been a single day of my life that I hadn’t seen people. That was the world. It was full of people. You couldn’t hide from them if you wanted. You’d go into Leeds and there’d be thousands, millions, billions of them, more than you could count. All swarming around, all different but all the same, and none of them knowing who you are. Even the village was getting like that. New houses, new people – people whose stories you’d never find out.

Cold.

And it was snowing again. The wind didn’t reach down in the gorge, and the overhanging trees kept some of the snow off. But now it was snowing so hard that big wet flakes still reached me. One landed on my lips and I licked it off. It was nice. I hadn’t realised how thirsty I was. I opened my mouth and hoped more flakes would drop in. But it’s one of those things you learn as a kid: you can’t drink rain or snow, no matter how hard it falls – even when it seems that the sky has more water in it than air.

I took a glove off and ran my hand over my wet hair, trying to scoop the snow off it. Then I licked my fingers. It was useless.

I tried to scrunch myself up, hiding from the snow. I needed to keep whatever warmth I had left wrapped up inside me. But my leg hurt too much to bend it. It was about then that I first thought I might really die there, freezing to death in the wet snow before Kenny found someone and brought them back to me.