She squashed the stupid maternal panic that made the stable bedroom floor feel suddenly more like quicksand. So her boy hadn’t come home. Perhaps he’d met up with friends and gone for a drink, or had a better offer from a pretty girl. Only normally he’d have called her, however late. Let her know to put the chain on the door. Tell her not to worry. Bart was thoughtful like that. His father had taught him well. Maggie took the stairs carefully, and checked the answerphone on the landline. No message. She didn’t have a mobile. It was just one more bill that she didn’t need. Plastering an optimistic smile on her face, she popped her head through the door of the lounge, all ready to have a good laugh in case he’d had a few too many and slept on the couch. She was fooling no one with the false jollity, least of all herself. Bart wasn’t an excessive drinker. He’d never reached a point where the couch looked like a better option that his own bed. Her mind began conjuring the ghosts of accidents before she could stop it. Somewhere in there, a misadventure with a meatball loomed large. Like father like son. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate irony? Both of them gone, cause of death Italian cuisine.

‘Stop it, you silly woman,’ she scolded herself, wandering into the kitchen to make her own cup of breakfast tea. ‘Your boy’ll be back any minute.’

But the truth that Maggie had felt in that secret, vile part of the brain no parent ever wanted to hear pipe up, was that he wouldn’t be back in a minute. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Because by then, Bartholomew McBride was 100 miles away.

It was the stench that woke him. Something acrid with a heavy undertone of sulphur had filled his sinuses and was threatening to make him gag.

‘Mum?’ His first thought was that she must be ill. That she’d gone down with food poisoning or a virus overnight and been too embarrassed or too thoughtful to have disturbed him. Only he couldn’t remember getting home. And now that he registered the pain in his body, he realized he wasn’t in his bed. Or any bed at all.

He sat bolt upright, head swimming, before collapsing back down to the floor. Everything was dark. Not the dark of Scottish nights away from the city camping by a loch. Not even the dark of the private rooms at the back of the night club he occasionally attended with his friends. True dark. Not one star. No bloom of pollution. No crack or spill from beneath a door or at the edge of a blind.

‘Hello?’ he shouted, braving movement again, sitting up more slowly. That was when he felt the tugging on his leg.