Matt looked at his watch and saw that it was just after nine. They’d been walking for around an hour and a half now, and although their pace had been slow Matt thought it wouldn’t be long before they reached Creek Lane. He had a Nokia 33/10 tucked in his inside coat pocket which he meant to use when he got there. His mum had made him take it. To use in case there’s an emergency, she’d said, but it hadn’t registered any bars of signal since they were back at the campsite on Thursday. The thought of the phone and Creek Lane made a question pop into Matt’s head, one which filled him with a tired, weary dread.

‘What am I going to tell them?’ he said. ‘What am I going to say when I phone up for help?’

‘Tell them the truth.’ Tim’s voice was soft, but firm.

Matt thought about it for a while, then shook his head.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘What adult in the world is going to believe me if I tell them what happened just now, with that– with that thing?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said James. ‘We’ll back you up. They won’t be able to ignore all three of us.’

Matt shook his head. ‘No, they’ll think I’m prank calling them. They won’t believe a fucking word of it.’ He paused. ‘I’m not even sure if I believe it yet.’

James started to protest, but Tim cut him off.

‘He’s right,’ he said. ‘I tried to tell someone about Dad when I was younger, back when we were living in Yeovil. It was just after he’d come back from being away, and he was trying to get me to… well, he was being really horrible to Mum and we were both scared of him, so I tried to tell a teacher at my school.’

‘What happened?’ asked James.

‘I stayed behind after class and said I wanted to talk to her about my dad, and at first she looked really worried and she was being extra nice to me, but then when I started to tell her the truth – how he’d tell me these horrible stories before bed and how sometimes his eyes would turn yellow and I’d get really scared – she just burst out laughing.’

‘She did what?’

‘It’s not so weird, when you think about.’ Tim sounded impossibly tired. ‘I was an eight-year-old boy who’d just told my teacher I was afraid of my dad’s scary stories and that his eyes sometimes turned yellow at night. She thought my imagination had got the better of me, that was all. I couldn’t make her understand what he was like, not really.’

Tim paused, and Matt heard him pull in a deep breath.