‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. You were right. I shouldn’t have looked.’

Elspeth pushed Meggy away from the hole and took a deep breath. Genie, bottle, too late were the phrases that occurred to her as she bent forward. The scrap of material that was catching the light came as no surprise. Pale pink cotton. The end of a pink ribbon a little further into the cavity. She didn’t want to look but did anyway.

The last person to have worn the dress had auburn hair. It was matted, looked infested in the half-light. The face, or whatever remained of it – small mercies – was turned away from the light. One arm was clearly visible, though. Not that you could really call it an arm any more. Whatever fleshy padding it had once possessed had dried out, leaving only leathery skin clinging to the outline of bone. There was no way of knowing how old the woman had been, nor how she’d died. But the fabric of the dress was more than just dirty. Patches of it were filthy with mud.

Elspeth sat up again, contemplating the death of the woman below the floorboards. Multiple bones of different sizes, and a fresh body. Fergus had killed before, definitely more than once, possibly many times. No doubt he’d kill again. Another woman, same dress, she thought. It wasn’t her previous life that flashed before her eyes as she’d expected, but the life she’d carelessly assumed she had left to live. Her children’s graduations. Weddings. Grandchildren. Holidays, Christmases, birthdays …

‘Did he do this?’ Meggy asked, weeping. ‘Hurt these people and hide their bones down here? You think he did. You think he’s going to do the same to us.’

‘Put the bones back under the floor,’ Elspeth instructed her softly. ‘We should never have seen any of this.’

‘No,’ Meggy said. ‘Whoever ended up down there, we should get them out. I don’t want to die here and be put under the floor. Why should they stay there, in the dark?’

‘Meggy, be sensible. If he comes back now and finds all this, we’re going to end up under that floor much sooner than we need to. Now put it back!’

‘I won’t, and you can’t tell me what to do. When I came in you were under the bed covered in shit, and I had to look after you, so you don’t get to be the grown-up now.’

Meggy thrust her hand back into the cavity again, circling her arm wildly, reaching in every direction. When she finally surfaced, it was with a handful of tiny bones clutched in her hand.

‘Is that … is that fingers, do you think?’

Elspeth sat looking away, shaking her head.

‘It’s bones from a hand, I reckon. Only they’re tiny, really tiny. Like …’ Meggy said.

‘Don’t say it,’ Elspeth whispered.