She tried to make sense of the controls in front of her. Could she even drive this car? She hadn’t driven for years, and it looked very different from the vehicle she’d learned in.

She placed her hands on the wheel and depressed the clutch, pushing it into gear.

What had Lucy done when driving?

Sister Cassie threw her mind back, and she remembered. She’d seen everything.

But what would Lucy do now?

One thing was sure, the ex-nun knew. She wouldn’t run away.

Chapter 46

There was a door at the top of the stairs, but it was locked. Only by a single bolt, but this was stiff. Lucy struggled with it frantically as feet clattered up the penultimate flight behind her. The bolt came free, she yanked the door open and hurled herself out – and with a thunderous bang, another round was discharged, the top left corner of the door exploding.

She ran forward, panting, a fresh breeze relieving her nose and throat and her stinging eyes. The sky, a blaze of moon and stars after the red-tinged darkness below, dizzied her, but she tottered on, feet drumming on what felt like tarmac laid over wooden boards. She realised that a tall, tapering structure standing fifty yards to her left was the steeple. That was a shock, but it only really struck her that she was on the care home’s roof when she half-tripped over a curved aluminium hood capping the top of a ventilation shaft.

How safe it was to be up here, she didn’t know. It felt flimsy, the pitch-covered boards cracking and groaning under her feet – and then suddenly ending in three rows of bricks rendered greasy with moss, and beyond those a sheer drop. Lucy only just stopped in time, teetering on the edge, the vast moonlit spread of the ornamental lake lying in front of her. Directly below, some eighty feet down, was the driveway. About ten yards to her left, a couple of feet beneath the parapet, a stone gryphon-like creature, with a curved back and beaked head, jutted menacingly out, its upper portions caked in bird droppings. Some ten yards further on, there was a Tolkienesque goblin, and beyond that, maybe thirty feet down, she saw the top of the stone pediment on which the care home clock was displayed.

‘You bitch!’ came a voice strained with exhaustion.

Lucy turned and found Alyssa Torgau limping towards her from the shattered door.