He walked up a couple of steps, the air even colder still, like entering a walk-in freezer.

Then, as if invisible hands were pushing him, trying to prevent him from climbing further, he found he couldn’t climb any more.

He stood still for a moment. Cold air riffled his hair.

I am not going to be scared in my own home!

He was about to climb on when he stopped again, staring in utter astonishment at what looked at first like a swarm of translucent bees coming down the stairs towards him. Dozens of tiny, bright lights, bending and swirling down the stairs in sync, as one shape.

Like the lights that had remained, fleetingly, as the apparition of the woman had dissolved.

His throat constricted as they moved rapidly down towards him, giving him no time to turn and run.

A split second later, taken by total surprise, he was barged into by a strong, invisible force. He made a desperate grab for the handrail to prevent himself from tumbling backwards as the lights swirled on down, his mug tumbling after them, spattering black coffee over the carpet and wall.

‘You might fucking say excuse me!’ he shouted in both anger and shock.

From below, he heard Emily call out. ‘Darling – are you OK?’

Then she screamed.

31

Sunday 16 December

On the television, one of the Antiques Roadshow experts, a silver-haired man in a striped blazer, was admiring a porcelain racehorse with a round, analogue clock set into its midriff. The expert was extolling its virtues as a fine, rare, example of Art Deco.

Claudette Penze-Weedell, feeling decidedly sloshed, watched with sudden interest. She held a glass of prosecco in her hand from one of the bottles Maurice had bought for Christmas, which she had insisted he open tonight.

He’d been reluctant at first, telling her she had really drunk quite enough at the pub at lunchtime, and that they needed to watch the pennies, but she had played the card that always worked, telling him to open a bottle if he wanted any hope of action in the bedroom tonight.

She unwrapped and scoffed a Green Triangle, her least favourite of the chocolates, which were all that now remained of the Quality Street collection. She would need to pay a visit to the supermarket tomorrow to buy another tub, or realistically two, to last her through the holidays – so long as she hid them on Christmas Day when all their greedy relatives would be with them, most of them Maurice’s. She’d married a man who came from a family of gannets.

‘And now to put a value on this,’ the expert said. ‘Well, if I were to put this to auction, I would place a reserve on it of at least twenty thousand pounds.’

The woman on the screen, in tight close-up, gasped.

Claudette gasped, too. Her eyes shot to the glass cabinet. To the porcelain donkey with the sombrero on its head and the square quartz clock in its belly, which she had picked up in the Martlets charity shop in Brighton for ten pounds.