The previous evening she’d been on autopilot: escape from the water, get dry, find some spare clothes, treat the cuts, get some calories inside, try to rest. She realised her reaction had been a way of coping, the result of her army training. Push the emotion down and you survive, allow your feelings and fears to rise to the top and you end up making the wrong decisions. Now though, lying in the dark, the shock kicked in. Someone wanted her dead. If not that then at the very least they wanted to hurt her and scare her. But who? Fairchild’s ‘dark forces’? Whoever was in the black BMW?

Sometime in the predawn a car passed in the lane, the noise waking Silva from a fitful sleep. She jumped out of bed and went to the window. Headlights painted the hedgerows as the car drove away. The car was the final straw and she gave up trying to sleep and went downstairs.

She opened the back door and slipped outside into the pale light that preceded sunrise. The weir rumbled, the water churning in the pool below. She walked across to the sluice gate at the top of the weir and gripped the railings with both hands. The cold metal sent a sharp pain into the cuts on her palms. She flinched but continued to hold on, as if she needed to cling to some form of reality. She breathed in the sharp morning air, felt a mist on her face as spray rose from the frothing water, heard the sounds of birds starting their dawn chorus. All that was real. The other stuff, like Karen Hope, Fairchild’s dark forces, the break-in and the mysterious assailant who’d pushed her into the water, was just the opposite. The realm of fiction. Things she didn’t want to believe. Things she was frightened of.

Except it wasn’t fiction. Somebody had attacked her.

She relaxed her grip on the railings and turned, almost expecting to see someone lunging for her, hands outstretched, intent on violence. She shivered, aware of how vulnerable she was, and hurried back into the cottage and locked the door.

Inside, she fished out a tin of rice pudding from a cupboard for breakfast and changed back into her own clothes. She spent another hour clearing up the mess the burglar had left behind and then fired up her bike and headed for north London and Third Eye News, the agency her mother had worked for.