Were they signalling to him?

It didn’t seem likely, but then Nathan wondered if it might be the girl.

He couldn’t understand why she’d be trying to attract his attention, unless … perhaps her leg was giving her real problems. There was supposed to be someone else with her, but if they’d had no physio training, they’d likely be no use. And hadn’t the girl called whoever it was an idiot, anyway?

Picturing some gormless younger brother sitting behind the steering wheel, or maybe a doddery old parent, he started along the path. As before, his vision tilted slightly, and he felt dizzy. Definitely fluid in the ears, he decided. He’d been doing lots of underwater lengths recently. But then why was he feeling sluggish too, and even sleepy?

Someone on his left gave what sounded like a choked scream.

Nathan turned sharply, and almost toppled over.

More than water in the ears, maybe. Now, he was really feeling tired, unnaturally so, his eyelids drooping … but first things first. Was someone in trouble?

He was maybe thirty yards along the path. The wall behind him had a dense rank of rhododendrons on the other side, but beyond the wall in front stood the church, a vast, gothic silhouette on the starlit fields. Just to the left of it, cluttered together somewhat, many of them old and leaning, stood the cruciform outlines of gravestones. Nathan tried to focus on these, because suddenly he thought he’d spied movement over there, as if someone had just flitted out of sight around the back of the main building.

As though in a dream, the edges of his vision blurring, he spied the lychgate in front of him, pushed it open and stepped through into the churchyard.

‘Everything all right over there?’ he shouted, trying to get his vision straight, wondering why his voice sounded hoarse and weak.

Not water … flu. It could only be flu.

He dropped his bag before blundering forward, following the gravel path along the side of the church, the jumbled headstones drifting foggily past. When he reached the far corner, he wasn’t sure what he expected to see. The girl from the gym maybe, whatever her name was – Janice? – being dragged through the long, straggling grass by some masked assailant. That he could have handled, rough and exhausted though he now felt.

But all he saw was a few more graves, a dry-stone wall and, behind that, open fields.

Nathan was bewildered. He knew what he’d seen. He tottered forward a few steps, his feet stumbling off the gravel and into the lengthy grass.

A reverberating clunk sounded behind him.