‘We can’t do this,’ she said. ‘Can we? I mean, we just can’t.’

‘Hannah, I’m sorry. I didn’t—’

‘We should go back to reception. There’s nothing here, is there? I mean, it smells of lavender but that’s because we’re in a spa.’ Her laugh sounded strange. ‘The bang was probably just the wind, echoing around the hotel. I don’t know why Audrey thought it would be a good idea to hunt for ghosts during a storm, anyway.’

She slipped past him and walked out of the room, back to the spa’s reception, and found her place on the bench again, putting her hands under her knees as she sat down. ‘Was that you, Anna?’ she muttered. ‘Are you messing with our minds, making Noah act out of character? He’s not a fisherman, you know – that’s his dad. And my name’s Hannah, not Anna. We’re not destined to repeat your tragic love triangle.’

She stopped her whispered tirade when Noah appeared in the doorway. She wondered what he’d been doing in that thirty-second delay: berating himself? Sending Beth a guilty text? Clearing his head after a bout of ghostly possession? She rolled her eyes at that one. The whole thing was ridiculous.

‘Hannah, I’m sorry,’ he whispered as he joined her on the bench. ‘I shouldn’t have done that. I didn’t mean to overstep.’

‘It’s fine. It’s forgotten. We should …’ she pointed at the recording device, not wanting the others to hear them picking over something that shouldn’t have happened, but which had set her senses on fire. Ghostly intervention or not, that briefest of touches had shown Hannah that kissing Noah properly would be every bit as wonderful as she’d been imagining. She felt singed by it, dizzy, as if her body wouldn’t be happy until she’d gone back to that moment and hit replay.

They sat in relative quiet, occasionally repeating their questions, but Hannah felt nothing else: nothing that could match the tension between her and Noah, anyway. Her thoughts were spinning. He didn’t seem like a cheater: from what she’d seen, he had too much integrity for that. And yet she couldn’t dismiss the evidence of her own eyes and ears. She wondered if the ghosts were laughing at them, delighted at having tied them up in knots.

After what seemed like a thousand awkward minutes, her phone vibrated in her pocket. She took it out and read the message from Charlie: Audrey’s calling it. Come back to the snug. Xx

‘We’re done.’ She let out a sigh of relief. ‘Time to meet everyone back in the snug.’

‘OK,’ Noah said evenly. As she reached the door and flipped the light on, he put his hand on her arm. ‘Are we all right?’

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘It’s been a strange night, that’s all.’

He nodded, and together they walked down the corridor.

The foyer was softly lit, the Christmas tree winking in the corner, reminding her that not everything was dead people and darkness and gorgeous men she wasn’t supposed to kiss. She took a step towards the snug and a white streak shot past her. She pivoted, expecting the automatic doors to be locked for the night, but when Spirit approached they slid open and he raced through, just as a blast of wind howled inside, its chilling tendrils wrapping around her.