What happened to the dead? They would bury her body, of course. You can’t leave corpses lying around. People would ask questions. And they would rot and smell awful. But what would happen to her? Who was she inside? Would she go on into another world, like sleep? Were the ministers of the Church right, or was it just darkness, like this? No sound, no sight, no movement? An endless silence, alone. And getting colder. She could not feel her feet any more.

  Was she dead now? She didn’t feel real pain, just an aching – and a slowly growing knowledge of being utterly alone! That had been Radnor’s terror, hadn’t it? Ceasing to exist?

  She had no idea how long it was before she was aware of something touching her arm, something warm. She drew in her breath in horror, and heard her own voice crying out.

  She tried to wrench her arm away. The hand let go of its grip on her, and she moved. The restraints had gone.

  There was light beyond her eyelids, and warmth. She opened her eyes very slowly, dreading what she would see.

  ‘Hester!’ It was Monk’s voice, urgent, edged with fear.

  She looked up at him. He was close to her, his hand near her arm as if he had just let go of her. She was in her own bedroom, in her own bed.

  Very slowly she sat up, moving her feet, her legs. There was nothing holding her, no restraints at all, except where she had tangled herself in the sheets.

  She looked at Monk again. He was fully dressed.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked huskily.

  ‘You were so tired I let you sleep,’ he replied. ‘But you cried out. You must have been dreaming . . . something pretty bad, from the fear in your voice.’ He touched her gently, brushing the tangled hair off her forehead. He did not ask what she had dreamed. Perhaps he thought that like most nightmares, it disappeared a moment or two after you were awake. But this one didn’t. It was still very real, there in her body, in the smell of blood in her nose and throat.

  She lay back on the pillow. ‘I dreamed someone was bleeding me,’ she said quietly, then told him exactly what it had felt like.

  ‘Hester!’ He took hold of her firmly, almost tightly enough to hurt. ‘Stop it! It was a dream. I won’t leave you alone again. Not when you’re asleep. Sit up.’ He pulled her forward a little and up. His hands were warm. ‘I’ll put the kettle back on and Scuff can bring you a cup of tea.’

  ‘No!’ she said, reaching out to hold on to him. ‘Don’t go . . . not just yet.’

  He did not argue, just moved her gently across further to her own side of the bed. Then he lay down and put his arms around her.

  ‘I understand why Radnor was so afraid of dying,’ she said quietly, trying to explore the jungle of thoughts in her mind. ‘Maybe most of us are. We just don’t think about it because it would cripple us. I felt . . .’ the horror came back to her vividly so her whole body clenched, ‘. . . I felt as if I were tied up so I couldn’t move. And I was getting weaker all the time. Do you think Rand has any idea what he’s doing to people? Maybe he only sees the ones he’s helping?’

  ‘That isn’t an excuse,’ Monk said grimly. ‘It’s a child’s answer. I would take that from Worm. From Scuff I’d tell him he must do better.’

  ‘I know.’ She was silent for a few moments. She was warm now, comfortable. She remembered the room with the contraption that held the bottle of blood and very carefully fed it, a drop at a time to Radnor. Rand’s machine was cleverly designed and made. ‘It was exactly balanced, William,’ she said aloud.

  ‘Being a good engineer doesn’t excuse anything,’ he replied.

  ‘That wasn’t what I was thinking. How long do you suppose it took him to make it?’

  ‘Why? What does it matter?’

  ‘Months? Years, to get the design exactly right? All the weights and balances?’

  He sat up slowly to look at her, his face filled with the darkness of his thoughts. ‘Hester?’

  ‘A long time,’ she whispered. ‘How many other people’s blood did he try with? And what happened to them? Obviously he wasn’t caught for it, or he’d not still be free.’

  He stared at her. ‘What are you saying, Hester? That he took other people to the cottage to experiment on them?’

  She met his eyes. ‘Yes, I think so. The place was all prepared and set up when we got there. I think he took us on the spur of the moment, when he realised you were looking into it all too closely. He bolted. It wasn’t planned. He decided it right then when I was in his office. He put ether over my face. It was a sudden decision. The children said they were taken in a hurry, after I was already there. They couldn’t remember much, but all of it was hurry, and secrecy. He didn’t have time to plan.’ She took a break and rushed on. ‘It wasn’t the same machine in the cottage as the one he used in the hospital. It was already there, set up and ready to use. William, he’d used it before! How many times? How long? And what happened to those people?’

  For several seconds Monk did not answer.

  Hester said nothing more, lapsing into thought herself. She allowed her mind to go back to the time in the cottage. Now, instead of fighting it, she was actively trying to remember.

  ‘The room was ready for the children,’ she said aloud. ‘There were four beds there, not three, all made up with sheets and blankets. You can’t do that in a short time. Either Rand was planning to go there anyway, but was pushed into it before he had intended, or . . . or it was a place he had used before.’

  ‘You said the machine, the contraption, was complicated. Could they have made that quickly?’

  ‘No. And the screws were tight, jammed, as if they’d been there for a long time. I know because I tried to undo one with a spanner, so I could adjust the arm. I couldn’t budge it.’

  ‘Then I think I have no alternative but to go out there again, maybe take Hooper, and see what we can find.’

  Monk sat up again, moving his arm away from her. ‘And before Patterson recalls the court and tries to get some order back into the trial. God knows how he’ll do it. And I’ll take Worm back to Claudine at the clinic. I think he’s safe enough now.’

  ‘Are you . . .?’ Then she stopped. She had been going to ask if he were sure Worm would be all right at the clinic, but then she remembered how frantic Claudine would be without him. To her he was unique. Every child should be special to someone: needed, not just accepted.

  ‘Good idea,’ she agreed. ‘I must get up. What would you like for breakfast? There’s—’

  He pushed the hair back off her brow again, smiling. ‘How about lunch?’ he asked.

  ‘Is it that time?’

  ‘Almost. By the time you’re dressed it will be.’

  When Scuff heard what Monk was going to do, he immediately volunteered to come along as well. ‘We’ll find twice as much if there are two of us,’ he pointed out reasonably.

  ‘You are quite right,’ Monk agreed. ‘Which is why I will take Hooper.’

  ‘Hooper’s still hurt,’ Scuff argued.

  ‘Have you thought about how Hester feels?’ Monk said gently. ‘She was locked up there for days. She saw pretty well everything he did.’

  Scuff felt a hurt tighten inside him. He wished he were bigger and stronger, so he could personally hit Hamilton Rand, beat him till he bled, and make him really sorry for what he had done.

  ‘Then we’ve got to see that they put him in prison,’ he said with intense feeling. ‘We must! However long we have to look. Why aren’t we going straight away? What are we waiting for?’

  ‘Lunch,’ Monk answered.

  ‘What does lunch matter?’ Scuff said incredulously.

  Monk stared at him. It was the first time since he had known him that Scuff had been uninterested in any kind of food.

  Scuff blushed, but he was still annoyed.

  ‘Actually,’ Monk said gently. ‘I want you to stay here and look after Hester. She’s having some pretty bad nightmares about being captive in that house, about being tied down and bleeding to death herself. I don’t want to leave her alone – in fact I can’t. I could ask someone from the clinic, perhaps—’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Scuff interrupted. It made him almost sick, the thought of using a stranger for this, compared with him. ‘You shouldn’t get someone else. That’d be bad. She’d think we didn’t care. What’s wrong with you?’

  Monk tried to hide his smile but Scuff saw it. ‘You did that on purpose!’ he accused Monk, feeling the colour burn up his face. It was a mixture of anger, fear, awareness of terrible responsibility, and also of at last being almost grown up . . . and still belonging.

  ‘Be gentle with her,’ Monk continued. ‘She saw some pretty bad things. She knew he’d kill her and the children if Radnor died, and it looked once or twice as if he would. But make her eat. Don’t listen to her if she says she’s not hungry. Cups of tea, bread and butter, but cut it thin. Have you ever watched her butter the cut end of the loaf, and then slice it afterwards, so the butter holds it together and you can do it really thin?’

  Scuff nodded. ‘Yes. Is that what I should do?’

  ‘Yes, if you can. If you can’t, then get her to do it herself, even if you pretend it’s for you. Just get her to eat, and talk to her. Don’t leave her alone. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Depends on what we find. It could take all night, even the next day. Don’t worry, just sit up with her, if I’m not back. Don’t let her have nightmares and wake up in the dark alone.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Scuff promised. ‘I’ll sit in the chair all night, I promise.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Scuff took his new responsibility very seriously. The more he thought about it, the more he realised that Monk not only trusted him, but he had offered him an opportunity to repay a small part of all that Hester had done for him.

  Even now he occasionally dreamed again of being locked into the bulges of Jericho Phillips’ boat.

  Did Hester feel like that? She was so strong and so clever it was hard to believe she could ever have felt as small and vulnerable as he had, or so easily beaten. Maybe he could even be more help to her than Monk himself? He knew what it felt like. He would always know, whatever else happened to him. Even if he grew to be as tall as Monk, learned how to fight, how to get a proper job and earn money, that memory would always be there somewhere inside him, behind a door he wouldn’t open, unless he had to.

  As soon as Monk was gone he stoked up the fire and put the kettle on. Hester was folding laundry in the back of the laundry room and where the deep tubs were that you could wash sheets in. He knew there was cake in the pantry. He fetched it out and put it on the table, then went to find her.

  As soon as he opened the laundry room door he saw her. She was standing with a clean sheet in one hand, thinking, as if she were miles away, or had forgotten how to fold it.

  He took it from her and gave her back one end. She smiled and took it. Together they folded all of them and put them in a pile. He loved the smell of clean cotton. It was warm and safe. It was sweet – not like sugar, but like the wind in the country that blows in off fields. He had only smelled that recently, just the other day, but it wasn’t something you forgot.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said with a slight smile. She still looked very pale.

  ‘I made some tea,’ he told her. ‘And I got the cake out. Maybe if we eat all that then we could make some more.’

  ‘We?’ She smiled, shaking her head, following him into the kitchen. She saw the cake and the teapot and cups on the table. Suddenly she blinked very hard and looked away, as if there were something interesting beyond the window.

  He pretended not to have noticed. But that told him Hester was in a bad way. Other women cried quite often, but not Hester. Whatever happened, she dealt with it. She never cried.

  He sat down at the table and poured the tea, one cup for her, one for himself. Then he cut the cake in half and put a piece on each of the plates. She would argue about eating so much, but Monk had said she needed to eat.

  Scuff took a deep breath. He did not know what he should do, and he tried to remember what she had done when he had nightmares about Phillips’ boat. She had made him talk about it, little by little, not keep it all locked up inside him, too dreadful for words.

  ‘Your tea’s getting cold,’ he said. Then he thought that was silly. He had only just poured it.

  She turned away from the window and sat down opposite him. He knew from her face that she was just being polite, but she started to eat the cake, just in small pieces, one at a time. She looked tired and, if such a thing were possible, afraid.

  He must say something. That was what Monk had left him here for, not just to sit and watch. It was very strange. It was always she who had made him talk when he was scared and miserable, remembering bad things and frightened they would happen again. It had been as if he even just closed his eyes, maybe he would open them and find he was back there, and the reality was in fact the dream.

  ‘I still dream about Jericho Phillips,’ he said quietly.

  She looked up at him, letting the cake fall. ‘I know. I can’t promise it will go away. I wish I could. But it will get less.’

  ‘It’s less now,’ he answered. ‘But you said it was all right to talk about it sometimes, and I wasn’t a coward because it still scared me.’

  ‘It is all right,’ she said quickly. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘No. But is it true, what you said, that it’s not silly to talk about it sometimes, and not being a baby if it still feels real, and bad?’

  ‘Of course it’s not silly. Why would you ask that? Have the dreams got worse?’ Now she looked so worried he was afraid he had gone too far.

  ‘No, they haven’t,’ he said quickly. ‘Hardly ever happens any more. But I know what it’s like. I was thinking about them little kids. Are they going to have dreams too, d’yer reckon? Or did you stop that ’cos yer were there so they weren’t never alone?’

  Hester smiled a little hazily. ‘I’d like to think so. At least most of the time. They’ll be back with their mother and father soon. When they’re stronger.’

  ‘But was their mother really pleased to see them?’ he pressed.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Now her voice was definitely husky, as if she were fighting back intense emotion. ‘Yes, she was. It was as if someone had turned on all the lights inside her.’

  Scuff was quiet for a moment, tasting the happiness of it. Then he took a breath. ‘You could talk about it, too. I can listen. You taught me how to do that. I wouldn’t think you were silly. Sometimes it’s silly not to be scared.’

  She smiled properly this time, and the tears came to her eyes again. ‘Thank you,’ she said huskily.

  ‘So tell me about it.’ He kept his voice firm. ‘I’m not going to leave you alone, not till Monk comes back. I’m going to sleep in the armchair in your room, so if you wake up in the night I’ll be there.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that!’ she protested.

  ‘Yeah, I do. I remember how scared I was, and when I woke up in the night you were always there, until I was all right again.’ He stared at her, meeting her eyes, and she did not look away. He saw that she had been badly hurt, because of the children she couldn’t save, and because she thought she would die and not see Monk again, or him, or anyone she loved. He knew that was what he saw because it was what he would have felt.

  ‘It’ll get better,’ he promised. ‘Even if they don’t hang Mr Rand, something’ll happen to stop him, or we’ll make it happen.’ He had no idea if that was true, but he reckoned that was what she needed to believe. ‘I promise,’ he added.

  She reached across and kissed him very gently on the cheek. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I would like it if you slept in the chair. That way I don’t think the bad dreams will dare to come.’

  He felt a rush of pleasure like a warmth inside him. This must be what belonging was, not here because people were sorry for you, but because you were worth something too.

  That night Hester still dreamed, and it was of reunion, of families together. It was not Charlie, Maggie and Mike seeing their mother again and knowing they could go home, it was of Adrienne and the restored and vigorous Bryson Radnor.

  Had Adrienne known he would make that dramatic entrance in the trial? That was what had saved her, and incidentally also Hamilton Rand. Had she known he would do that? The terror in her face suggested not. Was that so no one would suspect, or had Radnor not even thought of it until the moment when he acted?

  She would rather have assumed that he had, but glimpses kept coming back to her of Adrienne and Radnor together both in the hospital, and later in the cottage. He was impatient with her, condescending, sometimes even dismissive. Had that been his illness speaking, his fear? Or his nature?

  Did Adrienne understand him, and it did not matter?

  Or did she depend on him too deeply even to fight back?

  Hester slipped deeper into dreamless sleep without an answer.

  Monk and Hooper took a far smaller cart to Redditch this time, and a horse that could keep up a pretty good pace. They called in very briefly at the local police station, to let them know they would be at the cottage, looking for further evidence to do with the case. It was not only a courtesy, but a necessary precaution in the circumstances. Another necessary precaution was to take a pistol each, just in case the gardener with the shotgun, and now with a very real cause for vengeance, might still be on the property, or in the woods nearby.

  ‘If he decides to shoot at me, he could say he thought I was a rabbit,’ Hooper said drily.

  Monk looked Hooper up and down. ‘And expect to be believed?’ he said incredulously.

  Hooper grinned. ‘Maybe not, but it would be a bit late for me then,’ he pointed out.

  They arrived in the golden autumn morning. Many of the fields were already harvested and the stooks stood sharp in a bucolic kind of beauty. After rubbing the horse down and giving it shelter and water, which was plentiful in the old stables, Hooper gave it a small portion of the oats they had brought for it, and then they turned their attention to the house.