Anna held out her arm in a sweeping gesture. ‘He went into the sea,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Do you realise how easy it is to dismantle the railings on our balconies? I just rolled him straight into the water.’

Paula felt her body begin to quake with shock as finally, belatedly, she realised that she was in mortal danger. This woman would kill her, had killed before, two people that she had mentioned in as many minutes. She would not be telling Paula all this if she was planning to let her walk away. Paula had known people like this existed, but never, ever had she thought that in her adult life she would encounter such barbaric evil herself.

Run, she told herself again, and miraculously this time her body responded. She spun around to face away from Anna, her feet wheeling comically on the ice, and skidded away, running in a crouch, one hand trailing on the ice to stop herself from falling. Between the snowflakes that had thickened into a snowstorm, she saw tracks in the ice. Half of her brain wondered what they were, before realising they were not tracks; rather they were cracks. Spider webs of danger that even now were growing and multiplying. She changed direction, flashes of Anna in her peripheral vision to her right, and put her head down and urged her body along, sending up silent prayers that the ice would hold, that she could get back to the shore.

But what then? She chanced a look over her shoulder. Anna was moving fast, gaining on her, gliding along, and the sight made Paula slow down as she observed the other woman properly.

What could Anna do? Unless she had a gun concealed on her person, or a knife or some other weapon, what harm could this tiny, emaciated child-woman really do her?

She’s killed men, a voice hissed in her ear. The man in the newspaper had been old, slightly infirm, but the other one, Mark, what about him? Paula looked down at herself. She was bigger than Anna, but she wasn’t a fighter. She had never had a physical altercation in her life.

And then all her thoughts were shoved aside at the sight that suddenly appeared in front of her.

Through the snow that was coming down like tiny blades, she saw a dark hole open up in the ice a few metres ahead.

The shore!

The gravel, the sand and the sludgy ice – she had made it back to land!

She skidded to a stop just in time, and screamed, the sound ringing out, bouncing off the rocks that surrounded the lake, flinging her cry back at her in an echo.

It wasn’t the shore at all; it was a hole. A great gaping breach in the ice. From here she could see the sides of it, the ice inches thick, and the jet-black water inside.