“… Lauren Tranter.” She remembered then, her first fleeting thought about the hissing threats, that it sounded like someone putting on a voice. It was Lauren’s voice, hissing the threats, to herself.

“Are you still there?” said Gideon.

She thanked him and ended the call.

For a while her mind wouldn’t focus and she concentrated on the road. The car climbed the next hill, into the woods, and then slowed as she rounded a bend and the valley was revealed. Scorched by the sun, the late-summer landscape seemed prematurely autumnal. Burnt yellow and brown heather across the flats, huge majestic rocks of grey. The land fell away behind a wall made of newly cut stone, car-sized patches of different colours along its length, evidence that it had been rebuilt one too many times. Harper thought, imagine if I hadn’t slowed down enough. Imagine driving the car off the edge. The way the road swerved, it would be all too easy on a dark night, to lose concentration, to tip over here, into oblivion.

At once it was like someone flipping tarot cards in a row, revealing the truth:

The wounds on Lauren’s arms, that the doctor had said she’d done to herself.

The sightings of the woman, whom no one but Lauren could see.

The missing babies, found by Natasha in the mill wheel tower in the woods, and no one else seen with them except the mother.

Even the glitch trails on the CCTV: the bare foot. Of course the nurse wouldn’t have flinched, if it was a patient who had wandered by in the middle of the night. And now, the analysis of the 999 call had revealed that Lauren had been alone on the ward all along.

Finally Harper forced herself to consider that what everyone else was saying might be true: that Lauren had done it all herself. Whether she knew it or not.

When Harper had spoken to Lauren about the woman who took the babies, she’d talked about her being from the water. She’d said that the woman had taken them into the water, and changed them. Harper realised that Lauren didn’t mean that they’d been altered, or baptised in some way. She meant it literally: she thought the boys were changelings.

She’s from the water, that woman. Where the two rivers meet. Just like these two.

What if Lauren also thought she knew what Victoria did, about the solution.

She’ll have to put them in the water, if she wants her own back. Right under the water.

Harper pulled the car to the side of the road and dialled Thrupp. There was still time. There had to be.

“Sir, I’ve had a rethink. I don’t think we’re going to find her at the unit.”

“No?”