Hardly daring to touch it, I force myself to turn the canvas round. A chill spreads through me. It’s unfinished, but Mary has done enough work on it to make it instantly familiar. An outline of a person—again, one that could be male or female. Head and shoulders only this time, and nothing inside the black line, not yet. Behind the figure, part of the background has been painted in: a bedroom. This one, the one I’m standing in—Mary’s picture room. The curtains and wallpaper are the same, though there are no piles of pictures in the painted version. Instead, there’s a double bed with a chair next to it. On the chair, there’s a glass ashtray with a hand holding a cigarette over it, the ash waiting to drop.

. . . Heathcote, Margerison, Rodwell, Winduss.

Aidan was right. Abberton was the first of a series. Blandford , though incomplete, is the second. I heave things out of the way, looking for other similar pictures, perhaps one that Mary’s only just started, but I find nothing. So far she’s got no further than the second of nine.

My breaths come too quickly, making me feel dizzy. I tell myself there’s nothing to be afraid of: a mystery is only a mystery until you know the answer. I’ll ask Mary—I’ll make her tell me. There must be a reason why Aidan knew all the names. Who are they, these nine people?

I’m about to leave the room when I notice an iron handle next to the edge of a painting of a large stone building with a pointed roof and a square tower on one side. Without the windows, it might be a dark rocket, waiting for lift-off.

I move the painting to one side and see a small wooden door with a sloping top set into the wall. I pull it open, find myself staring into a little cupboard, nowhere near big enough to hide a man of Aidan’s size. I’m about to close the door when I spot something on the floor. A framed picture, face-down, with a printed label on the back.

I pull it out and nearly laugh with relief when I see that the name on the back isn’t Darville. It’s a woman’s name: Martha Wyers. I’m on the point of shoving the picture back in the cupboard when something stops me.

I turn it over, then drop it a second later, as if it’s burned my skin. It falls at my feet, picture-side up and I stare, horrified. A noise escapes from my lips. I feel as if I’ve lost all control over my life, as if I’ve been set down at the centre of somebody else’s carefully orchestrated nightmare, and am being pushed further in, a little bit at a time.

I’m looking at a painting of a woman with a rope knotted round her neck. It’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. It isn’t a dead body, only the image of one, but it makes no difference. Mary is too good a painter. I am in the presence of Martha Wyers, whoever she is. Was.