I stayed put. To guard the door, I told myself. In case anyone made a break for it; the state those girls were in, one of them could do something stupid, down the stairwell before you know it and then we’d be in trouble—

Load of shite. I was afraid. Cold Cases takes you to bad motherfuckers, these were just little girls, but these were the ones that stopped me dead. These were the ones that would smell me stepping over their threshold and turn, hands rising, come for me in a rush of streaming hair and silence and rip me into a thousand bloody gobbets, one for each reason they had.

Oh God oh God oh—

The overhead bulb exploded. Sudden rush of dimness and slips of glass firing like golden arrows through the light of the standing lamps, a fresh burst of screams; a girl clapping her hand to her face, blood black in the shadows. The window burned pale, lit their upturned faces like worshippers’.

Alison was on her feet on the seat of a sofa, spindly and rocking. One skinny arm stretched out, finger pointing. Not at the window. At Holly’s four: Rebecca head back and white-eyed, Holly and Julia grabbing at her arms, Selena glazed and swaying. Alison was screaming on and on, screams huge enough to rise up over all the rest: ‘Her it was her I saw her I saw her I saw her—’

Conway’s head came round. She clocked Alison, scanned frantically for me. Caught my eye and gestured over the whirl of heads, yelled something I couldn’t hear, but I saw it: Fucking come on!

I took a breath and I dived in.

Hair slicing across my cheek, an elbow ramming my ribs, a hand clawing at my sleeve and I wrenched away. My skin leaped at every touch, nails or for a second I thought teeth raked the back of my neck, but I was moving fast and nothing dug in. Then Conway’s shoulder was against mine like protection.

We got Alison under the arms, lifted her off the sofa – her arms were rigid, brittle, sticks of chalk, she didn’t struggle – had her back through the boiling mess and out of the door before McKenna could do anything but see us go. Conway slammed the door behind us with her foot.

The sudden quiet and brightness almost turned me light-headed. We got Alison down the corridor so fast her feet barely touched the ground, dumped her on the landing at the far end. She collapsed, heap of arms and legs, still screaming.