I touched something soft with my outstretched hand. Snatched it back and then probed again at the black air in front of my face. I could feel a length of metal piping, ice-cold to the touch. Beyond it was the damp roughness of bare brick. I kept patting at the air. Felt a slight warmth upon my palm and fingertips and reached out, putting my other hand in my mouth in case I made a sound. There was an emptiness – a space between the edge of the boards and whatever lay beyond. I wriggled forward, trying to get my bearings. I’d moved perhaps fifteen feet from the edge of the room where John and Sera waited. That must have taken me out across the hallway and over the room that backed on to Cordelia’s study. I pushed myself forward again, hands above my head now, inching forward over the little biting teeth of the wood and the nail-heads. And at last I saw light. Beneath me, the distance impossible to judge, I could just make out a line of soft yellow light. I moved towards it, feeling like a creature underground: a little blind mole nosing its way through roots and bones.

Then I heard them. Heard the voices off to my left. The light changed. Shadows seemed to flicker and dance as if somebody had opened the grate on an open fire. I angled my head forward and saw another line of light. Then another, moving away, regular as railway sleepers. Somehow I’d found my way into the space above the study. I was directly on top of the high-ceilinged room where the men were assembled, and where a voice I didn’t recognize was talking softly.

I stayed perfectly still, barely daring to breathe. I wriggled forward again. I needed to see. Needed to hear. I pulled myself forward with my fingertips and hauled myself up to the line of light, pressing my face to the gap.

It took a while for the blurry picture to make sense to me. Took a while before I could decide whether I wanted to put my ear or my eye to the gap. But a picture formed and I can describe it for you as clear as I can close my eyes and tell you what every inch of my own bedroom looks like.