‘If you leave, will you take me with you?’ and my heart squeezed as tight as a fist inside my chest.

‘Listen, Mary – William and Hettie were bad. They did bad things. They are still bad. I believe that they make you do bad things now. There is one answer only. If Hettie talks to you – you must not engage and you must stop talking to William. You do talk to him, don’t you?’

She nodded. The fear was back.

‘It must cease today. Promise me, Mary, promise me.’

At church, although I knelt and clasped my hands together and joined in the song, my head was empty but for the fear of the coming night. Mary stayed close beside me as if she longed for the touch of another living soul.

Robert Argylle read out his passage but its words had no meaning. Instead I studied the dark corners and the hovering spaces in the apex of the roof. Not even the coughs and creaks that emanated from the congregation made a mark on my discomfort.

And then it was a supper of overcooked meat and undercooked potato. Greer reappeared from her sick bed and watched me maliciously, a pearl of pleasure in her iris. And I thought then, that however odious had been the idea that it was she who had stopped by my door each night as she hummed, how much worse it was that it was not her at all.

The lamps behind Miss Gillies dropped light on to the table and across her face. I had ceased to notice the scar by then – it was as if my brain had readjusted her features, making a whole from the undamaged cheek. But that night, the opposite was true, and more than once, as I answered a question or made a comment it seemed to me that her whole face was twisted.

I was not aware of my fork as it lifted food from the plate or my hand on the knife. Miss Gillies smiled and I watched the way she drank her wine and how every now and then, her gaze slid to Mary and displeasure come down upon her expression like a veil. Iskar is mine, she had said. Time dragged and yet passed too quickly, and with each turning of the hour fear became a little brighter on my skin like a burn. Finally, Miss Gillies rang the bell and announced that she was retiring for the night.