“Yes.” Lucy wondered whether it could, in fact, be no more than a horrible coincidence. Yet the similarity in the two cases, the same stretch of road, the fact that she could easily have been thrown from the car, all looked very suspicious. Plus she had seen someone, someone who had deliberately stepped out into the road. And despite the black cloak and the crows, she didn’t think it had been Odin.

Bright blue lights along the road indicated the arrival of the police.

“Oh God,” Lucy said suddenly, “I forgot I was supposed to be meeting Persis! She’ll be sitting in the pub wondering what’s happened to me.”

“I saw Persis closing up the shop when I came through the village on the way back from the motorway,” Finn interrupted. “That was about five minutes before I called you. She certainly wasn’t in Hinton. I thought it was weird because you mentioned in your message you were going to meet her.”

“Are you sure?” Lucy stared at him, feeling suddenly a little cold. “I got the message quite late on in the evening. I assumed she was already there from the way it was worded. Look...” She reached for her phone and showed him.

Finn keyed in the number and called it. “It’s blocked,” he said.

There was silence whilst they looked at each other. “Well, that’s weird,” Lucy said. Her tired mind tried to grapple with the implications but came up blank. “There must be some mistake,” she said, and saw that Finn was frowning.

“Tell the police anyway,” he counseled, “and we can talk it through tomorrow when you’re feeling a bit better.”

The police arrived then and shortly after, a pickup truck came and took the car away. Once the police had ascertained that she didn’t need to go to hospital, they agreed to call to interview her the following day and Finn was allowed to take her home. The whole thing felt like a horror film running through Lucy’s mind; explanations, arrangements, insurance... She was exhausted, feeling every bruise and scratch, wanting nothing more than to sleep.

“Thank you for the lift home,” she said to Finn with a yawn. “I’d rather not have walked.”

Finn took her hand for a second, his grip conveying that he understood everything she wasn’t saying, and she closed her eyes and rested her aching head against the seat back. It seemed extraordinary to her that it was still only ten o’clock.

“Do you want to call Cleo to come over and keep you company?” Finn asked. “Or...” He stopped. Lucy wondered what the “or” had been. It seemed very early in their relationship to ask him to stay but it also felt as though they had somehow bypassed several stages during the drama of the evening.

“No, it’s fine,” she said. “Cleo deserves an evening off from fussing about me. I’ll ring her in the morning. Besides, she’d only make me drink very sweet tea, which is her solution for any sort of trauma. But—” She stopped.