I’m about to smash the glass when the music stops. I hesitate, listening to the intense silence all around me. Less than five seconds later, the noise starts up again: the same song, endlessly repeating. ‘Help!’ I scream into the empty, muffling air around me. ‘Somebody help me!’ Nothing.

I drive the bicycle pump into the windowpane, putting all my weight behind it. The glass smashes. Most of it falls into the room. I use the pump to scrape away the jagged pieces still sticking out of the frame. Then I climb in through the window and push the heavy floor-length curtains aside. The air in the room is full of what I think at first are small, coloured feathers, floating, but they’re not. They’re pieces of canvas, lifted from the top of the pile by the gust of wind that’s blown in through the smashed window. There it is in front of me, an enormous, flaking, shedding growth that looks as if it’s sprouted from the floor: the mountain of destroyed paintings. And the paint that’s been thrown over it, pooled on the floor . . . I bend, touch a puddle of blue with my fingers: it’s still wet. More paint, even since I left. I bring my fingers to my nose and sniff.

This isn’t the sort of paint anyone would use for pictures; the smell’s too strong, too chemical. I look over at the dining table. The tins of paint, the same ones I saw last time I was in here, with Mary, are round and wide. Dulux. For painting walls, not pictures. For disguising a worse smell underneath. It didn’t occur to me before. None of the walls in Garstead Cottage are this shade of blue. Or yellow, or green. Or red.

My heart pounding, I bend to touch a pool of red. The texture is different. I smell my fingers and cry out. Blood.

I dive into the pile and start to tear at it, pushing its mass to one side, shovelling fragments aside with my arms, tunnelling my way in. I burrow down, spitting pieces of canvas out of my mouth as I go. Every few seconds I lift my face to breathe. I keep delving and pushing until I hit something hard and cold, something I know can’t be a painting, or part of a frame.

I close my hand around it and pull it out: a hammer. On its silver-coloured head, I can see where the blood has dried in smears. I throw it across the room, hating the feel of it against my skin, and carry on digging, combing with my fingers. I’ve got to be right. I’ve got to be . . .

I’m touching a hand.

A painted smile, a fingernail, a patch of grey-blue sky.