Automatically, I stepped back, behind the edge of the main doors, and looked across the barn. It was torchlight, a pipe-shaped beam coming from the opposite side. In between were gates and runs for the cattle, as well as the cows themselves, so it was hard to see much else, let alone who was holding the torch. And then, whoever it was had gone again, a thin shape passing out through a door in the far corner of the building.

I backed up and hurried around the barn, walking parallel to it, my hand out at my side, my fingers brushing the corrugated skin of the structure in order to keep me in a straight line. When I got to the corner, I leaned around: at this end, the barn opened out into more pasture, hemmed in by wooden gates. On the far side, maybe four hundred feet from me, I could see an ivory column of torchlight.

Whoever it was, was heading away from me.

I moved quickly across the field, stumbling slightly, and then again as I got to the fence. Just down from me, six feet away, a cow emerged from the darkness as I scaled the barrier, and once I landed on the other side it made a long, low sound like an air-raid siren.

Ahead of me, I saw the torch swing back in my direction.

Whoever was out here was trying to find me – or, at least, the reason why the cow had made a noise – but it was much harder now because, I realized, we were in a different part of the farm: not a field any more, but a series of smaller, open-sided barns, linked together by concrete paths. Inside the barns were the skeletons of old machinery: tractors without wheels, ploughs, a field sprayer, rust-eaten vehicles and equipment whose shapes I couldn’t identify, all of them sitting dormant in a sea of blackness, like the torso of some sleeping giant. As the torch came back in my direction again, trying to seek me out, I moved behind cover and watched the beam continually vanish and reappear as it passed countless openings and doorways.

They couldn’t find me.

There were too many hiding places.

I stayed behind one of the barns, moving along its flank, using the torch like a point on a map. The owner of the torch was moving slowly now, back in the direction they’d come, either drawn towards the noise the cows had been making, or aware that they’d hit a dead end. Beyond the barns, from what I could see, circling them like castle walls, were huge laurel hedges, and I realized that, though we were at the edge of the farm, there was no way out from here.

It was a dead end.

Whoever was here would have to come back.