It had never happened to Thea before and it all happened so quickly her brain didn’t have a chance to tell the rest of her body what to do. One minute Len was reaching behind him and Ethan was standing next to her, then suddenly Ethan had thrown himself at Len, knocking the older man to the ground, where the two of them grappled for control of what was now, very definitely, a gun.

‘Run!’ Ethan yelled as the other men closed in.

Fight or flight, it was called. Thea had hoped that, in such a situation, she would fight, that she wouldn’t just stand there and gawp, feeling as if her body were a very long way away. She wouldn’t freeze up, or roll over. She would instead, for example – try and grab the gun.

Fight or flight. The world moved very slowly. She may have hoped for fight but there, in the moment, she found out her first instinct. Ethan yelled at her again. ‘Run!’

So she did. She scrambled back onto the path and then barrelled straight across it into woodland, moving without really thinking, knowing she couldn’t outrun any of those men, if they came after her.

But she could hide.

Chapter 23

It was her mother Thea thought about as she hid in the wood.

What she thought about most was her living room.

The other women all called it “HQ”. It was the hub of everything they did: their marches, protests, talks, meetings, charity plans. They ate there, sloppy bowls of pasta or noodles, whatever the choice of the person whose turn it was to cook. And tea, so much tea was made, endless cups of it, weird concoctions of bark and roots that made the room smell as earthy as a burrow.

One whole wall had been shelved out years ago and was filled with books and whatever else her mother didn’t know what to do with: the odd pebble, a corn dolly, some photos of Thea in school uniform, a piece of stained glass shaped like a peacock feather, a kaleidoscope. There were books on shamanism, philosophy, talking to the dead and making a living from selling on eBay. Trashy horror novels in Seventies’ binding with yellowing pages were jammed up next to a row of pristine Harry Potters, a The Joy of Sex and a copy of The Tiger Who Came to Tea. There was no arrangement in any of it, no alphabetizing, no grouping by genre, or topic. As a child, Thea used to close her eyes and jab her finger randomly at the shelves. Mostly her mother had let her read whatever she found that way. It had made for some interesting conversations with teachers at parents’ evening.