The rain had stopped, but the wind was gathering momentum. It was early October, and autumn was already settling in. Steven Golding stood up quickly, and glanced around him, pleased that the kitchen looked so clean and tidy. He looked at his watch – it was after eight, and he made his way down into the cellar, locking the heavy door behind him carefully. No one was ever getting past that door, it was like Fort Knox. The smell assailed his nostrils, and he smiled at the discomfort he knew it must be causing Jessie Flynn. He stepped carefully down the stairs, and walked to where she was still lying on her bed.

She looked terrible. Her legs were swollen and they looked so painful. Her face was porcelain white, the skin tight on her skull, and her eyes had sunk back into their sockets. She was dying, and she knew that as well as he did. Her breathing was laboured – every breath she took was a long and drawn out wheeze, loud in the quiet of the basement.

‘Jessie, Jessie, wake up, lovely.’ He was shaking her roughly and, as she opened her eyes, he bent over her. ‘I need to talk to you, Jessie. You’re dying, but I think you’ve worked that out for yourself, haven’t you? Your dad should have been here by now. I really thought he would have found you a lot quicker than this.’

She didn’t say anything; she was still trying to focus on him, trying to pull herself into the real world.

Steven Golding could see that Jessie Flynn was too far gone for him to have any kind of meaningful conversation with her; she had deteriorated rapidly in the last twelve hours. Her condition shocked him – he had thought she was a much stronger person, and thought she would have fought much harder than she had done. In the beginning she had been so cocky, so arrogant, threatening him with her dad. She had been convinced that he would help her. She had assumed this was about money – money was all people like the Flynns understood. When she had finally realised that it wasn’t about him getting a ransom, that she was never going to be rescued, never going to leave this basement, she seemed to have succumbed to the inevitable. It was not what he had expected – he was not pleased about this turn of events.