She jerks awake, unsure if she has been lost in dream or memory. Takes a quick glance at her surroundings. Pictures clamour for attention; scraps of recent recollection forming a tatty collage; feelings, fears, things half glimpsed, faces unseen. She thinks of Eva-Jayne. Of the wound in her chest – the blood at her mouth. Concentrates on the blurry features of the man who had visited such horrors upon her flesh. She can’t make herself see. He’s just a shape; a hazy blob of darkness. He came after her, she remembers that. Managed to get a hand upon her handbag and yank it from her shoulder. She remembers a moment of impact, of spinning around and driving her knee into some fleshy part of his anatomy, and then they had both been fumbling, fighting, falling, bouncing down the stairs at the end of the corridor. She’d hurt something; heard something inside her break. She’d bit through her tongue. She found her feet before her mind could process what had just occurred, and she’d scrabbled, painfully, towards the glass doors. Had there been another figure? A man, waiting by a red door? She can’t picture it. Just ran, and stumbled, and didn’t stop until she was halfway up the dual carriageway and there was no strength left in her body.

It’s been more than twenty-four hours since she fled the scene. Twenty-four hours of grief and fear. She found some brief shelter beneath the base of a truck-stop café, in a little layby at the top of the busy road. In the damp earth, surrounded by the stink of fried food and spilled diesel, she had heard the police cars scream by; saw their blue lights flickering in the dirty mirrors that gathered in the cracked road. She didn’t let herself cry. Hasn’t cried since she was a girl, and the bad men took her childhood away in an abandoned farm building.

It’s now a little after ten p.m., and Roisin is four miles from the scene of Eva-Jayne’s murder. She’s taken refuge in an abandoned, timber-framed wood-store, well off the main pathway that leads through this damp, overgrown woodland. She’s heard few voices, these past hours. A couple of dog walkers; a middle-aged couple having an angry row; two clandestine lovers coupling wetly against the bark of a maple. None have seemed the right people to ask for help. Not that she’d accept it if it were offered. She was raised to be wary of do-gooders, of outsiders, of countryfolk and Gorjas. The idea of going to the police is horrific. She has no doubt they’ll be seeking her. Knows that she might even be a suspect. There was probably CCTV in the lobby of the flats, and she left enough personal items to set them on her trail. Were she able, she might do the one thing that she has sought opportunity to do since reaching something close to adulthood. She would contact Aector. Would tell him she needs help. She doesn’t doubt he would come to her, she just doesn’t know where to find him. Last time she’d checked he was still with Cumbria Police, but she can’t imagine how she could track him down, or even how the conversation would start. He might even think she was holding something over him, blackmailing him with the secret she holds in her heart. The thought disgusts her. The thing he did for her was an act of goodness; of mercy. God himself would have struck down those men for what they did.