‘I’m going to burn every trace of Alec Sparling and Tír Mallacht,’ he replied. ‘And we’re going to celebrate, okay? On Monday we’re rich. Have you anything to drink? I should have stopped by an off-licence.’

‘I always have something to drink,’ she said, her smile fragile as a rose in a storm. ‘There are briquettes inside, and wood from a cabinet that we broke up. Just don’t tell the landlady. There’s so much shitty furniture in this house that I reckon we’ve enough firewood to last us until Christmas.’

Ben couldn’t have been prouder of her. She was no more intrepid than a child who had sat through a marathon of horror movies. But she was forcing all those senseless fears to the back of her thoughts.

The sitting room felt somehow colder than the street outside. Ben stood by the coffee table for a moment, blowing air into his cupped hands, eyeballing the sealed curtains like forbidden fruit, chewing over that same seed of doubt. What if it was real? What if just one of those superstitions were true?

The curtains were suddenly illumed by the headlights of a car turning at the end of the cul-de-sac, like a lighthouse beacon warning distant ships to steer their course to safer shores.

‘That’d be the creeper now,’ he whispered to no one, ‘running late as usual.’

The uplighter was too dim to dispel the room of darkness. It served only to draw attention to the black spots of mould that sagged down in the corner of the ceiling. These weren’t isolated lumps. This cancer ran deep. Ben laid down the briquettes and went about assembling the shattered memories of Chloe’s bedside cabinet into a pyramid.

He regretted calling Jess earlier. Jesus, what if she thought I’d been drinking? Any impoliteness on his part would be construed by Aoife’s mother as an act of war. And she was more formidable than any creeper.

Ben had wanted to tell Jess about the job and the money, but he couldn’t exactly do that with Sparling sitting across the room. When eventually they spoke again, the reality would be carefully dressed up to best impress. He had been headhunted for a research position. Not too far removed from the truth. The pay should be false proof enough. It had certainly duped Ben into believing it. Everything would be better with a few more digits in his bank account.

And Aoife was fine. She was perfectly safe. Then why, whenever Ben thought of his daughter, did he imagine her standing within the creeper’s gangly shadow, unaware of those long fingers reaching for her neck?

*