Jasmine checked her stride, walking a little faster in response to the sound of an approaching car, a silver Vectra. It would have to slow down anyway, she was aware, as it was a no-through-road, but drivers could be complete dicks, like when they wouldn’t slow to let you out even as they approached a red light. He’d be heading back again tout de suite too, as there were no spaces to be had.

‘It gets worse,’ Fallan told her. ‘Some of those cemeteries had been closed for decades when that survey was done, yet they were only glowing a wee bit dimmer than the rest. It seems your light really does shine longer after death than it does while you’re alive – but you can only see it in infrared, and it helps if you’re flying in an aero—’

He stopped mid-word, something about him instantly altered to a heightened condition of alertness, like an animal that had sniffed something on the breeze.

Jasmine was aware of his head turning, then a microsecond later of being gripped around her waist and thrust forward between two of the angularly parked cars. She tumbled to the ground, clattering her elbow against the side of a Peugeot and her knee on the tarmac. As she fell, she heard something crack in the air above her head, and the simultaneous sound of an object embedding itself in the stone of the tenement alongside, dust puffing out in a wispy breath from the resultant hole.

She was being shot at, again, and unlike most things in life, it didn’t get any easier from experience. The fear, in fact, was cumulative, as though everything she had felt in Northumberland was instantly recalled and everything she felt now was supplementary to it. She felt frozen on her hands and knees, terrified to move, terrified not to.

Another crack followed, accompanied by a shattering of glass and a second impact in the stone of the building, then another, and another.

Why was this happening to her? She hadn’t done anything wrong. Where were the police? Where was her mummy? Where was Uncle Jim? Where was Fallan?

He was gone, no longer alongside her, but she could hear him scrambling close by, and from her perspective, sprawled on the deck, she saw that he was one car away.

Daring to look behind her, she could see the wheels and skirts of the Vectra that had been heading towards the bollards, now sitting stationary, engine idling.

The shooting stopped, but Jasmine’s relief lasted only a second and a half before she recognised the sound of the Vectra’s door being thrust open. The gunman was about to get out and come looking for them.