As I put my hand up to Nora’s door, I heard a noise nearby, further down the lane near the ruins of Holly Cottage. A growl or a howl, some kind of animal maybe. Very conscious of the darkness closing around me, I knocked. Nothing. A shiver ran through me, and I felt madness rise inside me. This was crazy. I had to speak to another human, and it couldn’t be Nick. Where was she? I’d never known her to go out, except on our walks. Terrible doubts spiralled in my head. Eleanor. No, no, it couldn’t be.

I remembered our discussion one day before setting out on a walk. Nora slipping her key under a plant pot, querying why I always set the alarm. People didn’t lock their doors here, that was what Gavin the estate agent had said when we first saw the place. But Nick hadn’t subscribed to that; instead he’d installed the most expensive lock system money could buy. I hadn’t wondered why at the time. To keep people out, or to keep me in? Telling myself I was just checking something, I felt around under the pot, my fingers scrabbling in soil until I found the solid shape of the key. Then I turned it in the lock and I was inside Nora’s house. Once in there in the quiet, I could hear my own breath panting, the beat of my heart.

‘Nora?’

No answer, and all her lights were off. I should have left right then, I knew. But something made me stay. Maybe it was because I knew so little about my friend, when my life was an open book to her. She’d never shown me a picture of her husband, or told me anything about her own family, where she’d grown up. What if she came home and found me? I’d make up some excuse about thinking I’d seen a light in the house, I’d been worried about burglars. It was dark, and I realised what a musty smell this cottage had. Not like ours, which had been gutted to a shell. Maybe there was something indecent about that, buying up what had been a damp labourer’s cottage, full of TB and mould, and making it into a gleaming middle-class palace. What had we done? Why had we ever come here?