Moisture seeped down my cheek from my hairline and soaked the back of my neck. Finally, Jaxon said, ‘No effect.’ Almost lazily, he drew up a spool of his own and added its strength to our labours. ‘Are we quite sure that this poltergeist is Sarah Metyard? It would hardly surprise me if Didion had misidentified it.’

‘It must be.’ Nick’s voice was straining. ‘Who else would want to confront Anne?’

It had to be Sarah. The woman who had starved and neglected the girl to death. The woman who had carried her body in pieces to the gully-hole. Who else could it be?

Suddenly I found myself thinking back to the paperwork, remembering what the frightened children had cried when they found Anne senseless in her bindings.

Miss Sally! Miss Sally! Nanny does not move.

It hadn’t been the old woman they had called for. It had been Sarah Metyard the younger. The daughter. If she does not move, she had answered, I will make her move.

Sally.

Sally, who had been brutalised by her mother – who had beaten the girls in the shop, and been beaten herself. Sally, who had eventually run from the house Anne had died in.

Sally, who had condemned them both when she confessed their crime.

As the pieces slotted together, it began to add up.

I will make her move, Sally had said. But even though she had struck Anne’s corpse, even though they had shaken and screamed at her, Anne had not moved. That stillness continued to mock Sally.

I will make her move. I will make her move.

Now she was here again, to make Anne move. To keep her moving, so she would never have peace.

‘There were t-two Metyards,’ I said. My lips were trembling. ‘This is the daughter.’

Realisation dawned on Nick’s face. ‘But she was called Sarah Metyard, too,’ Eliza said, her voice cracking with frustration. ‘Sally was just a nickname.’

‘I seem to remember a middle name,’ Jaxon said. ‘From the record of the hanging.’

‘Oh! Yes, yes – she did have a middle name. Wait.’ Sounding frantic, Eliza released her spool and pelted past us, back into the den. ‘I need to see the death record. Just hold on for a few more seconds—’

‘Hurry, Eliza,’ Nick said. Sweat was streaming off him, and he was deathly pale.

All I could taste was metal. I thought I would die of the pain in my temples, but I had crossed a line somewhere. I could hold on. I could survive this.

It must have been seconds, but it felt like hours before the shout came from the window above us:

‘Morgan. Sarah Morgan Metyard!’

Jaxon set to work at once. In the final moments of the binding, I fell to my knees again, almost retching at the pain. Another soundless scream went through the æther.

And then, just like that, the poltergeist was calm. She hung between us – passive and still.