Toby looked away, but she didn’t need him to answer anyway. Rachel knew what stuck and what didn’t. She thought about her old camper van and wished she had it here, now. She could drive away, leave this place, start over somewhere else. Just leave it all behind and escape.

‘Why is someone out to make trouble for you?’ Toby said. ‘Who benefits from you being talked about like this?’

Rachel rubbed a hand over her face. ‘I don’t know. I don’t have any power,’ she said, feeling hollow as the keen truth of the words hit home. ‘I’m no threat to anyone.’

Toby snatched up the paper and shook it. ‘And this is to make sure that’s true. We have to fight back, Rachel.’

We? Rachel thought.

‘Toby,’ she said. ‘It’s late. Thank you, but – I’m going to go to bed now.’

A look of concern passed a shadow across his face. ‘Have you eaten? Why don’t you let me make you something? You can come back to the cottage. Or I’ll make you something here.’

‘No. I just want to be alone.’

For a second he looked as if he might argue, but then he nodded. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow?’

Rachel rubbed a hand across her eyes. ‘I don’t have anywhere else to go, so…’

He went to the door and she followed to lock it behind him. She didn’t watch him walk away down the hill, and it wasn’t until Rachel had turned off the lights and was heading for the stairs that she realized he had taken the paper with him.

Eustace was waiting at the door to the apartment. His eyes shone yellow in the dim glow from the night light on the mezzanine. He climbed the stairs in front of her and disappeared into the kitchen, but she didn’t follow. Rachel went straight up to the bedroom and then climbed the steps to the camera obscura. She pulled on the lens handle and looked down at the white disc of the viewing plinth, but there was nothing to see. The light had gone out of the world, and so Eveline MacDonald’s device could not paint a moving image inside her private space. Rachel stared at the blank circle of darkness and hunched her shoulders, wondering if the woman who had built this place had ever done the same. I was here and not here.

For a moment it seemed to Rachel as if Eveline were standing beside her in that little domed room.

Thirty-Three

‘It’s absolutely disgusting,’ Edie said, fury written in every line of her face. ‘I’ve already written a letter to the paper, and I’ve complained to the PCC and to our MP.’

It was the following day. Edie had appeared with Gilly before the bookshop had even opened, and Rachel was preparing to hand over to Gilly so that she could spend another day sorting out the gatehouse. Ron would be waiting for her there already.

‘Thank you,’ Rachel told her, ‘I don’t know what to do, to be honest. Toby wants me to sue, but—’