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lounge room, but she found no radiator. She looked behind curtains and armchairs, then realised that the room had a fireplace –
    no need for a radiator as well. Her problem now was that she had no clue how to light a fire. A stack of newspapers and a wire rack with a few logs on it sat next to the hearth, but she was too tired and homesick –
    yes, that was the other feeling no matter how much she resisted it – to work it out. She just wanted to call Adrian, hear his voice and make contact with something resembling normality.
    No dial tone. How irritating. She checked the connection and everything looked okay. Perry Daniels had lied to her. Perhaps it wasn’t his fault, perhaps it was British Telecom’s. In any case, she hoped Adrian wouldn’t worry that he hadn’t heard from her yet. She replaced the receiver and picked up a photograph in a frame that sat next to the phone, examined the people in the picture.
    A white-haired lady in a red dress – too bright a red for a woman that age, really – smiled out of the photo. Maisie guessed this was Sybill. She had a nice face, perhaps looked like she didn’t take herself too seriously. She had her arm around a youngish man. Maisie wondered if he might be a long-lost cousin or something, as his hair was the same black as hers, his eyes the same dark, dark brown. But there was some kind of Eastern European aspect around his eyes and cheekbones, something a little exotic about his eyebrows. So her grandmother had friends. That was good.
    Maisie stood and yawned. Was she tired enough to sleep again? She had a horrible feeling that if she did she would be awake at around three a.m. It hardly mattered really. So what if she was up at odd hours for a few nights? All she had to do here was sort out her grandmother’s clutter. This time she would turn out all the lights to discourage the visits of local Reverends. She was in the kitchen, her hand just falling away from the light switch, when she heard . . . what was it?
    Footsteps? But light, gliding footsteps. Perhaps not footsteps at all. She froze where she was, her body tense as she listened. She had almost managed to convince herself that she had heard nothing when the sound came again. This time she could pinpoint it as being somewhere beyond the grotty laundry window.
    “Now, Maisie,” she said, under her breath. “This is a new place – you don’t know what’s a normal noise and what isn’t.” It could be the wind. Or a cat. Or a . . . Suddenly, a scratch on the glass. Despite herself, she let out a little yelp of fright. She ran away from the noise, towards her grandmother’s bedroom, burrowed under the covers and tried to compose herself. So it was a spooky noise. It didn’t necessarily follow that it had a spooky cause. She remembered as a teenager a Danish exchange student had stayed with them for a month. On the first night he had freaked out and woken the whole household after hearing strange, light footsteps on the roof and a sinister growling. What he had imagined as a dark, diabolic figure running lithely from rooftop to rooftop in search of . . . souls?
    children’s eyes? . . . was, in fact, the humble possum which had lived in their roof forever. This was just the Solgreve equivalent of a possum in the roof. And anyway, she found that with the covers over her ears, she could hear nothing but her breath and the beating of her own heart.
CHAPTER THREE
    Though he was loath to admit it, Reverend Fowler was afraid of Lester Baines. The big man sat across from him, all meaty forearms and ill-fitting clothes, looking like a criminal. Which was exactly what he was.
    “Rev, don’t worry. I have sources all over the place
    – something will turn up soon.”
    “But you mustn’t take unnecessary risks. Nobody must know.”
    Lester twisted his lips into a kind of smile. “Hey, give me some credit. Haven’t I been doing this for you for ten years?”
    That was true, taking away the short stretches