‘Hello.’

‘George, I don’t know what to do, I can’t breathe, I’m in police custody, they won’t let me go, I’ve been arrested!’

It was Nellie.

‘Nellie, slow down, breathe. Jesus Christ. Slowly.’

‘I’ve only got a minute, I can’t… I can’t…’

‘Nellie, don’t tell anyone who you called, do you hear me?’

‘What do I do?’

‘Hold your nerve, calm down. I will sort it,’ he said, lying to her. How the hell he’d unpick her from this particular predicament, given her lack of resolve and what she might give away, he had no clue. She hung up, out of time.

The dragline of the web had just got that much tighter and stickier, with similar properties to high grade alloy steel wrapping its long thin strands around his neck. He loosened his collar. He imagined a disgusting flash vision of a spider spinning dense protein out of its swollen abdomen.

The line went dead and he destroyed the phone, walking to the supermarket three streets away, to dispose of it in a wastebin.

He had to get out of the Lake District. The prospect of ever holding his daughter in his arms again was slipping away like the fluttering snowflakes that were freezing everything, stuck in time, like his brain.

He went inside the shop and purchased another pay-as-you-go mobile and inserted a SIM into it as he went to a bench near the recycling area, and called Vivienne.

‘Why have you sent Fabian up here?’ he asked. George figured that attack was the best form of defence at this stage.

‘I haven’t,’ she replied, somewhat irritably. ‘Anyway, how do you know?’

‘He called me.’

‘He’s letting his new position go to his head and making stupid decisions,’ she said.

‘What does he hope to gain from being up here?’ George asked.

‘Well, ostensibly, he’s collecting the body of his late father. Of course, you know as well as I do that Fabian has his own agenda.’

George was tempted to come clean there and then about how unilaterally Fabian had acted, and how she should perhaps keep a closer eye on him, but he held off, sensing that it might be wise to hold on to that information for now, and play mother against son. He had to save some leverage, should he need it, for when the time came, and he was stuck in between these two toxic partners who pretended to love each other. Fabian fawned over his mother, and Vivienne loved to play the doting matriarch, but George knew them both too well.

Neither would take a moment to choose to save their kin when the time came, and George would be stuck in the middle. And he’d still never see his girl.

‘Tidy up.’

He sighed and they ended their call.