An aperture passed on her left; presumably the doorway to the living room. Another aperture followed; maybe the foot of the staircase. Either way, there was nothing for her there: cul-de-sacs, blind alleys in which he’d easily corner her. She cursed herself for having lost her phone. If nothing else, she’d have used it to light her way. The passage suddenly gave out into a broader space. Lucy sensed greater dampness in here, greater rot, and saw weak yellow light filtered through diagonal planks nailed across a glassless window. Just beneath that, it glinted on the rusting relics of a sink and draining board.

Boots now came clumping into the hall behind her; the heavy rasp of breath through wool.

She whimpered, hurling herself across the derelict kitchen – and colliding with a metal-framed table, which the darkness had obscured. She tangled with it, tumbling down onto a tacky, threadbare carpet.

The booted feet thudded up the hallway.

Lucy leapt back up, grabbed the table by two of its aluminium legs and swung it around three-sixty degrees before releasing it, flinging it at the blacker-than-black oblong of the doorway to the hall – just as the outline of a man appeared there.

Who knew what he saw of the object twirling towards him. But he opened fire all the same, the stroboscopic flash blowing the table every which way, turning it to splinters, to flesh-rending shards. Lucy, meanwhile, had vaulted onto the sink. The unit beneath cracked under her weight, but she ignored it, bullocking her way towards the boarded aperture fists bunched in front of her face in case there was glass she hadn’t noticed. The diagonal planks erupted from their moorings as she fell out head-first, taking the stinging blow from the paving stones on the flats of her hands.

Again, adrenaline fogged the pain as she leapt back to her feet, finding herself in a typical terraced house backyard – though there was no easy route to its gate, it was so crammed with rubbish: bricks and masonry, stacks of furniture, mounds of festering household waste.

Hearing movement behind, she threw herself backward, flattening her body against the strip of wall alongside the kitchen window, sucking in two lungfuls of air and trapping it inside her. Sweat streamed down her face as she heard his harsh breathing, sensing him on the other side of the window frame, only inches away as he peered out into the dim yard.

It was anyone’s guess how much of it he could see with his restricted vision. His solution was to riddle the entire yard with another strobe-like burst, kicking up multiple divots of filth, hammering ruined furniture into heaps of pulverised scrap.