‘There. He was there. I woke, and looked out, and I saw him.’ She turned to look into their faces, her own drawn, desperate. ‘I’m telling you the truth. I’m not mad! He was there.’...

They turned to head back in the direction of the chalet, and the east wind was bitterly cold on her exposed face. Pyjamas, she thought, and bare feet. He could not still be alive out...

Hamilton stared at him, with what might be the beginning of anger. His nerves had been frayed, Jane thought, as all their nerves had, and she suspected that underneath the bonhomie there could be sensitivity...

They covered the other rooms in the basement first, looking behind rows of tins, sacks of potatoes and big sugar and flour canisters in the food store. The room that Hamilton had mentioned was a...

‘Doesn’t make sense,’ he said, ‘does it? A body doesn’t just disappear like that. It has to be somewhere.’ Douglas said: ‘He couldn’t have been dead, in that case. Catalepsy. Haven’t there been cases where...

Sight … Another stage required, the finding of the small muscles that would open the eyes, and then the directing. A strangeness here. Question and answer again. A heaviness, unknown before. Then, touch? Something that...

‘My father was a butcher.’ He looked at the makeshift coffin, his face expressionless. ‘Mustn’t develop delusions of grandeur. A butcher’s assistant. Though he was given a shop to manage in the end. He died...

It was surprising how often submissiveness in women concealed a potential domination, particularly with unpleasantly cocky men like Deeping. Domination, and that same indifference she had charged him with showing to the children. Even before...

‘What happened after the sledge tipped over? How did Andy look?’ ‘All right. He was laughing about it. And then …’ ‘Then?’ ‘He called to me that he’d found something in the snow.’ ‘What had...