I didn’t see Summer again for nearly two hours. To be honest, there were times she might have been nearby, but with my eyes firmly fixed on the treacherous ground right in front of me, I’d have missed anything smaller than a woolly mammoth.

I made it to three more clues in that time, all written on card and stuffed inside the kitchen-roll tube containers, the first two were straightforward to anyone who knew anything about meteorology, however the third had me stumped until I realised it was an anagram.

The weather hunt might have felt like an adventure had I been working with someone else. Stumbling through the snow, searching behind a cluster of compost heaps and in amongst soggy tree roots by myself was more like a bad dream. The edge of the storm had begun to whip through the estate, shaking the trees and tossing about stray twigs and other debris.

I started to imagine that the other candidates had finished ages ago, and were laughing and joking over hot drinks and crumpets in the library wondering whether to send out a search party for me. That was, until I rounded the corner of a decrepit outbuilding and came across Ben, huddled on a rusty bench.

‘Bea, hi!’ He tried to smile but it turned out more like a sob.

‘Are you okay? Where’s Jordan?’

‘Jordan?’

‘Your partner in the hunt.’

‘Oh, yes… Jordan. He gave up hours ago.’

‘We’ve only been out here for a couple of hours.’

‘Really?’ Ben grimaced. ‘My phone died back at the third clue.’

‘Have you found the fifth one yet? I thought it must be somewhere by this building.’

He shook his head. ‘I forgot what it said, and with no phone I couldn’t take a picture or even work out where I was. I’ve been wandering around for ages, and then thought I’d wait here and hope someone found me.’

‘It’s a nightmare, isn’t it?’ I went to sit next to him. His lips were tinged an alarming blue, fingers curled into stiff claws.

‘Yes. This is a literal nightmare. It’s my first time in Scotland and my second time seeing snow. I did not know that any place on earth could be this cold.’

‘The best way to warm up is to start moving. Give me a minute to find the clue and we can get your blood pumping.’

In the end it was two minutes before I found the shiny container under an upturned flowerpot. To my amazement, all the tokens were still inside, meaning that I’d somehow overtaken the others. I guessed the anagram had stumped Lincoln and Calvin, too.

‘Can you work it out?’ Ben asked, flapping his arms against his sides.

‘It’s not cryptic, just says to head straight to the library and use the password, the other term for “pyrocumulus”.’