What was I supposed to do? something inside her screams. I couldn’t stay in the car, not with the ferry service cancelled. Someone would have recognised Karen’s Ford eventually and they might have decided to come over to say hi. And they would have seen it wasn’t her behind the wheel.

You could have gone back, another voice inside her replies. William’s voice. You could have just turned the car right around and driven back home. I told you to call me straight away if anything went wrong. Why can’t you ever do what you’re told?

Because I’m at my breaking point. You should have known that.

Maybe she says that last part out loud, maybe she shouts it into the wind, she doesn’t know. I don’t know anything, she thinks to herself and feels her mind racing faster and faster until she can’t hold onto her thoughts anymore. It makes no difference now. All she can do is keep walking.

She slips on the packed snow and staggers into the road. A car honks loudly as it narrowly misses her. She has time to feel frightened before the realisation sinks in, before a single irrefutable truth cuts through the chaos.

Somehow, William is going to come out on top. He always does. It’s who he is.

Chapter 77

77

She is greeted by a solid wall of darkness. Complete and utter blackness and the smell of stagnant damp. And something fusty. She hesitates for a second. Surely there must be another exit somewhere? Maybe more than one? She had come across tunnel entrances in the woods all the time as a child when her aunt took her mushroom picking. Sometimes hastily boarded up, sometimes meticulously sealed with bricks. She can still hear Ingeborg’s warning. No one who goes in ever comes out again.

Karen looks back over her shoulder at the wine cellar, at the devastation of smashed wine bottles and the steel door at the far end. She might be safer staying there than aimlessly wandering around an abandoned mine. Not a mine, she corrects herself, a tunnel that leads to the mine; the mine proper is several hundred feet further down.