‘I’ve been gone that long? My children will think I’m dead, they’ll stop looking for me. My God … what did the papers say? Does anyone know what happened to me? Please tell me they don’t just think I ran off.’

‘At first they thought it was a ransom situation. There was some copycat attempt asking for money. The police caught them and realised it was a scam. There was a lot of coverage about your disappearance at first. It’s quieter now,’ he explained.

‘And Meggy? Was she in the papers, too?’

‘Yes. There was a police raid, something to do with her mother, and after that there were general appeals for information. But they’ll find Danny’s body and they’ll be looking for me. He left my wheelchair in the middle of a car park. They’ll be looking for us all now. If we can just stay alive …’

‘You haven’t told him what we found under the floorboards, then,’ Meggy said from the doorway, sounding petulant.

Elspeth wanted to hug her and tell her everything would be all right, but the girl was too old for lies, and she was too tired to tell them.

‘He already knows what Fergus is capable of. I think we need to focus on keeping each other safe. There are three of us now, and that’ll make it much harder …’

‘A kid, a woman who’s never been in a fight in her life, and a man who can’t walk. That’s just fucking great,’ Meggy said.

‘Meggy!’ Elspeth cried, stung by the honesty.

‘She’s right,’ Xavier said. ‘He had a knife on him when he took me. If he feels threatened, we won’t be able to defend ourselves against him.’

‘We’ll barricade the door. You said yourself the police will be looking for you now. It’s just a matter of time until they track him down. All we have to do is wait it out.’ Elspeth stood up, wringing her hands in spite of the attempted injection of conviction in her voice.

‘He controls this whole place, right? He can turn off the heating, the electricity, even the water. We’ll have no food. Nothing. We’ll all be dead within a week, and that’s if he doesn’t decide to smoke us out or take the door off its hinges and finish us even faster,’ Xavier said. ‘We need to create an escape route, not block them up.’

‘He’s going to kill us all anyway,’ Meggy said. ‘There are bones under the floor. And …’ she pressed a hand against her stomach, ‘… and a body. I mean, there’s not much, you know, left on it, but it’s not just bones.’

‘A body?’ Xavier looked at Elspeth.

‘Tell him about the clothes,’ Meggy persisted.