‘Slow down. You’re not making sense.’

Ruth shivered convulsively in her crumpled white shirt. Charlie had her coat in the boot of her Audi. ‘Leave your car,’ she said. ‘I’ll drive you home and we can talk there.’ She would get inside that bloody lodge house one way or another. She’d been irritated all day by the thought of Malcolm Goat-man Fenton trying to keep her out.

‘A man’s been following me,’ said Ruth, as they walked down Demesne Avenue to Charlie’s car. ‘No, that’s wrong. Not following—he doesn’t stalk me when I go out or anything, but he walks past my house. With a black Labrador.’ Having started to talk, she seemed unable to stop—the words flowed out, devoid of tone, as if all she wanted was to get it over with. ‘I first noticed him last June. He was there every day for a while. Then he disappeared, for months. I thought he’d stopped but . . . he came back on Sunday, yesterday. I can show you—I’ve got him on tape. I saw him this morning too. Aidan says he’s just walking his dog in the park. He gets impatient when I mention it, calls me paranoid, but he’s never seen him, the way he looks at the house.’

Charlie had stopped. In order not to miss anything, she’d had to hang back. Ruth was barely moving and had stopped shivering. She no longer seemed aware of the cold. ‘Has he ever threatened you? Approached you, or the house?’

‘No.’

‘Isn’t it normal for people walking in the park to look at your house? It’s an unusual building. I’ve looked at it in the past and wondered who lived there.’

‘You sound like Aidan. He says everyone who walks in or out through the gates looks at the lodge on their way past. He’s right—nearly all of them do. But this man looks in a different way.’

Aidan Seed, the voice of reason, thought Charlie. Apart from the small matter of his belief that he murdered a living woman.

‘He wears a red woolly hat, the man, with a bobble on the top. Even in summer. That’s not normal.’

‘I’m not sure normal exists,’ said Charlie. Certainly not in your vicinity, she might have added.

Ruth stared into the distance, eyes wide. ‘He wears it because it looks stupid, comical. No one who wears a hat like that could be dangerous—that’s what he wants me to think.’