‘I’m sorry. You’re right. I spend a lot of time soaking up the details of other lives, and I counter that by burying mine.’ She shoved her hands deep in her pockets. ‘For nearly a year of my life, I couldn’t talk. Couldn’t communicate at all, in fact. So now it’s all I do. I find ways to enable people to communicate with me. Even when they’re dead, I guess.’

‘Okay,’ he said softly.

‘Goodnight, then.’ She shrugged and took a step backwards.

‘Goodnight.’

He walked away, Edinburgh’s streets taking a welcome rain washing after the unusual spell of hot weather. The city lights reflecting on the wet streets reminded her of Boston. Connie went back into the bar. There was at least one more measure of Grey Goose with her name on. There were memories best left alone and questions she didn’t have the answer to yet. Neither was going to allow her to sleep for at least another hour. She could just as well spend her insomnia at the bar as staring at the ceiling from her bed.

Chapter Sixteen

The lights hadn’t come on all day; nor had Fergus appeared. Meggy and Elspeth had huddled in bed, sleeping only fitfully, that first night. In the morning – they knew it was morning only courtesy of Elspeth’s watch – they both finally fell fast asleep, waking in sweaty panic, imagining themselves somewhere terrible and unknown, only for the nightmare to continue.

Meggy was the first to force herself out of bed.

‘We have to pick the lock on the door,’ she said. ‘It’s no good waiting here then trying to fight him. If we can get out into the main house, we stand a much better chance. There’ll be things we can use to hurt him there, hit him with or spray in his eyes or something.’

Elspeth sat up in bed. The dim lamplight did nothing to reduce the appearance of the overloaded bags beneath her eyes and was unflattering to the sickly white of her skin. Still Meggy thought Elspeth was beautiful. Sweet and kind, and beautiful. It would have been better, of course, to have landed in this situation with a female survival expert like Megan Hine, an Olympic martial arts gold medallist like Kayla Harrison, or world champion powerlifter Manon Bradley. Meggy liked reading about powerful women. There weren’t enough of them in her own life.