Alec walked over to the large door leading from the study to the main entrance. His legs were stiff from sitting too long. It was as though they cracked in complaint whenever carried away from the fire’s warmth. Lara stood patiently as he opened the inner door and gestured her to step through. This was how they bid each other goodnight. She would stand in that room, between two doors, and only when Alec closed the one adjoining the study would she open the main door, leading outside. This she would lock behind her.

‘Goodnight, Doctor,’ Lara said, pulling her hat down over her head.

‘Goodnight, Lara,’ he said, before closing the door behind her. ‘Do pass my wishes on to your mother when you see her.’

Alec waited a moment, allowing the silence to resettle around him.

He had sat for quite long enough and his thoughts were too harried to return to his reading. A nightcap might best calm his nerves. Just the one. First, however, he would lock the master bedroom as Lara had suggested. Alec had inherited so much from his father, but not the old man’s carelessness.

9

The rain came during the night. A gentle pitter-patter at first before it fell in torrents, thundering on their tent, causing its dome to bulge inwards like a fat belly. Chloe was entombed in her sleeping bag, crystalline pale, covered in any layers that Ben could spare, and still she trembled. The cold seemed to have filled her bones. From the marrow it plotted its campaign of conquest, colonising every part of her from her fingers to her toes.

He had stayed awake for as long as he could, massaging the short hairs on Chloe’s head as she slept, watching over her the same way teddy bears guard children when they sleep. His two glassy eyes were fixed on the zip hanging from the door, as though it were the only weak point in a nylon tent.

Searching the surrounding fields had proven futile. Ben’s torchlight was but a fissure in the black, leaving too little seen and too much uncertain. Everywhere, he imagined glimpses of the one that had followed them, as a memory haunts the mind – intangible, inescapable, and somehow worse than its reality.

At one point Chloe roused and a soporose twitch slapped Ben’s hand away from her head. She turned over and plunged deeper into her bed. He hadn’t really given a thought to what he was doing. It was how he helped Aoife relax whenever she was restless.

Eventually he faded. Exhaustion engulfed him like a slow drug and he slept, arms folded tight against the cold, with no sound but the rain.

*