I kept driving; an ache across my shoulders and up my neck into my skull. There were no other cars on the road. It felt like my pursuer and I were the only people in the world. The windscreen was all streaky rain and dead flies and the headlights barely managed to cast light further than a couple of car-lengths. I glimpsed a couple of rabbits in the road, scurrying into the little hedgerows; saw a great oak at a bend in the road, turning left towards the slope beneath the railway bridge. For a moment I thought about slowing down and exiting the car, throwing myself onto the grass verge and permitting the vehicle to continue without me for a few hundred yards, but once the ruse was discovered I’d be no better off. I had no weapon, no way of contacting anyone, and would have done nothing but slowed myself down. I thought upon the airbase, two miles above Gilsland, out past the great empty vastness of the peat bogs. There would be airmen there. A phone. People who could be counted upon to ask the right questions and not spot the wrong answers. I was an MP’s wife. A senior intelligence officer. I could bluster my way in – use the upper-crust voice and give off the air of innate superiority – insist upon the despatching of military police to the house under instructions to pick up whoever they found. It would be reckless, riddled with potential disasters, but I couldn’t think what else to do. All I had to do was lose the tail, and I knew the roads well enough to fancy my chances once I got past the railway bridge and into the stygian black of the farmlands beyond.

My pursuer made the decision for me. I heard the unmistakable rumble of a big engine brought to life. I glanced in the mirror and saw that the vehicle was surging towards me, the headlights suddenly flicking to full beam and dazzling me with their sheer brilliant whiteness.

The big car didn’t crunch into me. It was more of a caress: a perfectly placed little shunt that pushed me sideways as if we were moving on ice.