A different voice. “Mrs. Shackleton, you have to get out of the car.

I had to get out of the car because the car was going nowhere. It had let me down. I had let it down. If I sat still, they would go away, they would leave me alone.

The sky slowly righted itself, but it was too bright.

“Alec can’t open this. We’ll get you out the other side.”

They dragged me and pulled me, one on either side. “Hurry!”

“No!”

But they would not slow down. I knew them now, Milly and Alec. Alec was saying, “I think someone did it on purpose.”

And whether he was right or wrong, the fear in his voice touched something inside me. We were in the wood, dizzily moving through the trees. Blasts of light and shade, sun and shadow, patterns of leaves and flowers danced around us, snowdrops and daffodils. A voice that sounded like mine said, “Keep off the flowers.”

“Never mind the flowers,” Alec said.

We veered, onto a path, and another. Milly was breathing heavily. And then I had to stop. They kept running so that I was pulled along, my toes scraping the ground. Suddenly they paused, and it was because I was being sick.

Milly said, “She’ll choke.”

He said, “Keep going.”

I could see the sky revolving, and the tops of the trees and we were hurrying and I knew this must be the end.

They were walking quickly now. I wanted to sit down, to rest, even to just lean against a tree.

“We have to keep going,” Milly said.

It was the urgency in her voice as much as the words. It came back to me now. We knew too much. I knew too much.

Just me and Milly now. From a long way off the echo of what Alec said. Words were slow to go from my ear to my brain.

Milly kept talking to me, catching her breath in between. “We heard the crash. Alec saw it was going to happen.”

He would. Alec. Benjie’s son. Had he led us into the wood deliberately? What the car crash didn’t achieve, an “accident” might.

“We ran,” Milly said. “We were faster than the others.”

The others. The others would come for me.

The wood was so beautiful. Might this be the last thing I see? Now I felt steadier. My head hurt, I was dizzy, but my legs did as I wanted, one before the other.

Milly still held my arm. “I thought you’d had it.”

“Where are we going?”

“Away from the house. We’ve come through the clearing with the chair the old gardener made. We’re looking for his hut.”

The clearing with the chair was where I had taken Raynor’s photograph. It was he. He would be waiting, with a gun? Alec had led us into a trap. “How do we get out of the wood?”