‘Thass the Canon,’ said Ethel jubilantly. ‘We’re all right now. He never had nothing to do with them .’

‘Wait,’ Miss Mayfield said, fighting against the wave of dizziness, the near dementia of pain, and smoke and noise, and the necessity to choose beween two evils. She looked up and saw that near the head of the stairs there was a licking flame, a beam end that sagged.

‘Wait,’ she said again. ‘Just one more minute. Someone else may. And, oh . . .’

She tottered across to the hiding place under the stairs, leaned down, let the wave of vertigo wash over her, and retrieved the camera.

They might kill her, but they wouldn’t kill Ethel; she was too valuable.

‘Hide this, Ethel, in your cardigan. There are pictures in it of everything that happened here this evening. Proof. If anything happens to me, take it to the police. They’ll look after you. Don’t let anybody else have it, whatever you do. And don’t give in. Go on being the brave good girl you have always been. Now, open the door.’

And so, in the end, we walk out of the trap into the arms of our enemies. Well, better people than I have been defeated, too. The Christians walked into the arena singing, but the lions ate them just the same.

She tried to walk out proudly, but it took Ethel’s arm, slipped under her sound one, to keep her upright and to get her to move. The opening of the door made a fresh draught which set the fire overhead roaring like a furnace; as they stepped out, the first timber fell, bringing with it a great firework display of sparks and volumes of stinking smoke. She and Ethel might have been spewed up from the very mouth of Hell.

Then several things happened at once. Granny Rigby ran forward, crying ‘Ethel!’ just as though she were an ordinary old woman greeting a beloved granddaughter after a long separation. And Ethel, letting go of Miss Mayfield’s arm, shifted the torch into her right hand and said:

‘Keep right away from me or I’ll let you hev it.’

And there was a clatter of hobnailed boots in the porch. Tom Hayward had arrived. Miss Mayfield recognized him.

The first of the honest men. For whom the bell had rung. I must speak to him, appeal for protection.

She took a step forward into thick, sucking mud. She fought against it, as she had fought all those hours ago, but this was deeper, more clinging. She went down and down. . . .

Sinking in it, drowning, no longer able to see or move, she could still hear. It was like the time when she had had a tooth out under gas; completely anaesthetized, she had heard everything, even the noise of the tooth root being ripped from the jaw.

She heard Canon Thorby say: