As she sinks down deeper into the cold blackness of the lake, Tilda thinks about how people say you see your whole life flash before you when you die. But no images of her childhood appear, no snatches of teenage romances, or family moments, or first foreign holidays. Nothing. It is more, she decides, as if she is watching her own death from a distance. As if she is a detached witness to the event, rather than the main player. She is not aware of any fear, nor pain. Just the seductive power of the cold, and the light-headedness a lack of oxygen is currently bringing about. She knows time must be passing at the usual rate, and that all she is experiencing is happening in seconds, and yet it feels as if these particular seconds have been stretched. As if down here, in the quiet darkness, everything moves to a different rhythm. Even her own heartbeat, which echoes softly against her eardrums, seems to have slowed effortlessly.

Her mind is able to drift back to the moment in the boathouse when she knew she could not wait for rescue. She had sat and shivered on the wet, slippery boards of the small building, trying to see why the ghost had not killed her. Without the torc, without poor Thistle, Tilda was defenseless. She was easy prey. And yet the apparition from the grave had chosen to leave her trapped, rather than deliver a fatal blow. It made no sense, after all the other attacks, after what had happened when Lucas had lifted the grave stone, the way the creature had menaced and hounded her, why had it pulled back this time? She had made herself find possible explanations.

It only wanted to scare me. But why? And it certainly felt like it was going to kill me when it swung the pickax at me. But perhaps I could have still reached the torc. Is that what it wants? The words it shouted at me, Life for a life, the professor said. But is it likely Seren killed the woman in that grave? If Lucas’s theory is right, and she was being punished, I don’t see how Seren can have been responsible for putting her there, so why would she come after her descendants?

The more she had turned the matter over and over in her mind, the more she had heard those words. A life for a life.

She wants someone dead, but not me. Wants someone’s life, but not mine. Who, then? Who else can have a connection? Professor Williams says his family came from north Wales, not around here. And his wife, Greta, she and her brother, Dylan’s dad, they came from Winchester. Not Wales at all, but Hampshire.