I emerged onto the edge of the gravel, pumps muddy, clothes wet. My eyes strayed from window to window and round the pillars of the porch, and I noticed that all the blinds were lowered, as they had been at the wedding, except for one on the first floor that was half raised. The pale smudge of someone’s face was visible for a moment, pressed up against the glass, and I swore under my breath.

There was no doorbell, as far as I could see. The rope with the STRICTLY PRIVATE sign had gone, but the double doors were firmly shut. I knocked, but the sound didn’t resonate.

“Hello?” The doors changed the timbre of my voice, making me sound faint and frightened.

I pushed the wet hair out of my eyes and looked back across the lawn. The wedding canopy was stark white against the black sky, its ropes and canvas panels flapping in the wind. Some of the fairy lights had come unhooked from the trees and swung in drunken loops a few inches from the ground.

I knocked again, but nobody came.

The rain stung my head as I made my way round the side of the house. Unlike the snow-white frontage, these walls hadn’t been painted in a long, long time. Blocked drainpipes dripped rust-coloured water, and there were green stains on the flaky plaster. Many of the windows were cracked and a few were smashed, though only one was patched with a half-hearted square of cardboard. There were dandelions and chickweeds in the gutters, and roof tiles half buried in the jungly grass.

I ploughed on and managed to make a circuit of the house. It wasn’t easy, what with the broken plant pots underfoot, and elbow-high nettles, and a trailing bramble that ripped a line all the way along my knuckles—and I didn’t even find another entrance. There was a kitchen door, but the hinges were thick with cobwebs and ivy, and there didn’t seem much point in knocking.

By the time I’d fought my way round to the third side of the house, my clothes were plastered to my skin and my hand was bleeding. I could hear the wind buffeting the trees and I wanted to hide. I was six years old again, and the storm was a bounding, flashing-fanged monster with a taste for human flesh.

“Idiot,” I muttered, stooping to unpick a bramble from the hem of my jeans, and a voice answered me from the front of the house. I froze. There it was again: a voice that rang and dwindled and spun in the wind, fragile as a feather.

“Who’s there?” it called. “Who is it? Who’s there?”

Diana stands at a first-floor window awaiting the return of her son. It might ease her mind if she could hobble from room to room, window to window, but it hurts too much to walk. The illness she suffers is a greedy one, eating her up from the inside, and she is confident it will kill her before the year is out.