Lying down across the top of the opening they’d already made, lengthways with her trainers fastened, she wiggled her right leg to get her foot and ankle beneath the floorboard at the far end.

‘There’s enough space for me to bend my knee. Come up by my head and hold on to me.’

Elspeth gave her some support to lean back against, and Meggy began to kick. No point after that in pretending they wouldn’t be overheard if Fergus was in the house. In the room below it must have sounded as if the ceiling was about to fall in. The board protested, fought, took its time, then flew into the air, flipped and landed the other side of the room. Meggy and Elspeth hugged one another then stared at the chaos before them.

‘Wasn’t much point fixing the light,’ Meggy said.

‘It’ll be okay. All we’d have to do is hide the floorboards, roll the carpet back over and hope he doesn’t tread in the gap. How near can we get the lamp?’

The answer was not very. The removed boards were mid-room, and the tiny lamp’s cord extended no more than two feet from the power points at the edge.

‘Have you seen an extension cable anywhere?’ Meggy asked.

‘No. He’d be too worried about us wrapping it around his neck. And now we’ve got floorboards as a weapon too, not that these are good for much more than a single hit. They must be decades old.’

‘He must be a coward if he’s scared of a woman and a girl beating him up. It’s been nearly twenty-four hours. Maybe he’s left us. Or perhaps he got caught by the police, but they don’t know where to look for us.’

‘Or it could just be part of whatever sick game he’s playing. I don’t know. Do you ever think you end up with what you deserve in life? That there really is such a thing as just deserts? I don’t know what scares me more – the thought that him taking me was completely random and that nothing I did contributed to his choosing me, or the idea that maybe this happened to me because of something I did wrong. That there’s some giant invisible scale in the sky for each of us and that when you screw up enough you tip it over, and that’s when bad things happen.’