She tried to imagine what the neighbours would say about her when they were asked. No doubt they’d all agree that Rose Shepherd was a very private person, who never called round to say ‘hello’ and didn’t mix much in the village. They knew she’d lived alone for the past ten months at Bain House in Foxlow, deep among the Derbyshire Dales. Some would put her age at nearly seventy; others would frown and say she could only be in her fifties, surely? But they hadn’t really got a close look at her. The postman might recall she had an accent that wasn’t local, but she’d never spoken more than a few words to him.

And that was pretty much all anyone would know of her. The details of her life were shrouded by trees and protected by electronic gates. And that was the way it had to be. It was what had kept her alive until now.

Rose smoothed out her sheets, turned over her pillows and went back to bed. Ten minutes later, she was hovering fearfully on the edge of consciousness when a black Mitsubishi Shogun with tinted windows drove into Foxlow and stopped outside her gate.

Leaving through the back door of a cottage on the corner of Pinfold Lane, Darren Turnbull saw the black car as it drew away from Bain House. He stepped back into the shadows, wishing that Stella wouldn’t insist on having that security light. He had to walk right through its glare to reach the lane by the church, and it didn’t do much for his anonymity. In this place, he felt sure that some nosy neighbour would see him and find out all about him before he got his car keys out of his pocket. Stella sometimes talked about him leaving her house like a thief in the night. With that bloody security light, he was more like an actor stepping out on to a stage. He prayed there was no audience tonight.

Darren watched the vehicle coming back towards him from the corner. He was slightly puzzled by its speed. There was no other traffic anywhere on the road at this time, and most drivers would whizz through a place like Foxlow in seconds. But maybe this was some old fogey who thought you had to obey speed limits, even when there was no one around.

He wasn’t as good at recognizing makes of car as some of his mates were, but Darren could see this was some kind of four-wheel-drive job. A big one, probably Japanese. He liked black cars – there were too many grey and silver models around these days, and they all looked the same. Tinted windows, too. That was cool. He could barely distinguish the outline of a driver as the car passed under a streetlamp near the phone box.