‘Maybe you took it out by mistake.’

‘And they pushed the van here? Wouldn’t the steering lock have been on?’

‘Yup, well, the police have tools for getting into cars, I imagine.’

She pressed the key fob to unlock the doors. Just like with the BMW, nothing happened. She unlocked it manually, got in and tried to start the engine.

The battery in this vehicle was dead, too.

‘What’s going on?’ she said.

Jason, standing in the street, was looking around warily.

‘Both cars can’t have flat batteries, Jason.’ Her voice was on a knife edge. ‘How can that happen?’

‘Maybe there was some kind of electrical surge that’s knocked them both out?’ he reasoned.

‘And this surge somehow plugged back in our command box? And fried your brain in the process?’

He pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket. ‘I’ll find a taxi company.’

But as he brought the screen alive and tapped on the Google app, he frowned. The screen went black.

‘Em, can you try yours, I’m out of power.’

She took her phone out of her bag and tapped the screen. Then tapped it again. ‘Dead,’ she said. ‘It’s dead. How’s that possible? Bloody battery life on this thing – I charged it this afternoon.’

‘Let’s try the landline.’

They went back inside and through to the kitchen, where the cordless phone sat in its base station.

It was dead, too.

81

Thursday 27 December

Jason plugged his phone into the mains charger. After a short while, a red line appeared on the screen. Seconds later it vanished, to be replaced by two digits.

60

They were static.

‘What the fuck?’ he said.

‘Who are you talking to?’ she asked, jumpily.

He stared at the screen. 60.

Sixty what?

He felt clammy, a sick feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. The sense that someone – or something – intensely malign was watching him. The hairs on the back of his neck rose.

There was a distinct click. The sound of the front door opening. Someone walking in.

‘Hello? Who’s that?’ Emily called.

Jason followed her out of the kitchen. The front door was wide open and a bitterly cold wind tore through the hall. He hurried over and slammed the door shut. ‘Must have not closed it properly when we came…’

He stopped, realizing the wind wasn’t coming from outside. It was inside. A howling gale, as if every door and window in the house was wide open. It rippled their clothes, tore at the roots of their hair. Panic-stricken, Emily’s eyes darted in every direction.

Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the wind died, completely.

They stood still, staring at each other in bewilderment.

‘What was that?’ she asked.

He shook his head. He didn’t know, he really did not know. He went through into the living room to check the windows, but they were all shut. They were shut in all the other rooms he looked in. How much more, he wondered, silently, could either of them take?