If this was what Liz Harper had threatened – and whatever the evidence the certainty was in Ellie like a stone in her gut – the priority now was to get back to the village and alert them. Whatever his faults, Tom had been a police officer: he’d have understood that.

Ellie crawled into the Land Rover; there was police equipment she’d have to salvage. Her first thought was the radio set, however little use it may be, but it was resting on the inverted ceiling; the casing had been battered until it buckled and cracked, the electronics removed and smashed with the same vicious, methodical thoroughness she’d seen in the Becks’ kitchen.

There was equipment in the back: road signs and traffic cones, a fire-extinguisher, a life-ring. An unopened box of emergency supplies: foil blankets, energy bars, a box of road flares. Ellie dragged it free of the car and then spun round, suddenly convinced she’d find someone behind her.

No one. Just snow-covered ground lit by her headlamps, and falling flakes dancing in their glow.

Again, the question intruded – what if Tom was lying yards away, just out of sight? It was a judgement call; if she was wrong, and they found his frozen corpse tomorrow, she’d face the consequences, live with the guilt.

Ellie took a step towards the X5, and stopped.

There was something in the snow.

It was thin and narrow, a blurred grey shadow, just past the edge of the headlights’ glare. It was motionless, and seemed to go in and out of focus, the white flurries alternately revealing and concealing it. Ellie had an impression of some sort of fabric flapping around it, and of long, drawn-up limbs; she remembered the shape she’d glimpsed minutes before. She shone the flashlight towards it, and it fell back into the darkness, out of sight.

Ellie’s skin prickled. The flashlight shook, the beam wavering. When she turned, she saw more of the thin shapes. A line of them stretched across the picnic area and disappeared behind the wrecked Land Rover. A second line extended from the opposite side of the wreck, back towards the X5 and beyond it. Again, they recoiled and disappeared when she shone the torch directly at them, but when it passed she’d see the pale bonelike limbs and blurred thin bodies crawl back to their former positions, cutting her off from the road.

If she could just get to the car. The engine was running – so shut the doors, shift gears, hit the accelerator. The watchers, the thin things – people, they had to be people of some kind, didn’t they? – surely they’d get out of the way of an oncoming vehicle.

The shotgun was in the car too. In the car and not with her.