It was ten past ten when she pulled into a layby in front of a multi-armed signpost and, flicking on the light, consulted her road map again. It showed Redall as a small dot on the shore. Leading to it was a broken line which denoted a track of some sort. To reach the track she had to negotiate about four miles of intricate lanes. She scowled. The snow was harder now and though the little car had bowled gamely through the worst it could throw at her so far, there were signs of it drifting now she was on a deserted road. There were no car tracks visible; and at the foot of hedges a deceptively soft bank was building up on both sides of the road.

‘Oh, well, plough on.’ She muttered to herself. She had already pinpointed a pub on the mainish road which looked as though it was only half a mile or so from Redall. Perhaps she should make for that first.

The tyres slithered uncomfortably as she engaged first gear and pulled out into the middle of the carriageway, but once she got going the car held the road. Left. Left. Right. She repeated the turnings to herself out loud as she negotiated each increasingly narrow lane with more and more care. She should be nearly there now. There should be a pub on the next bend.

There wasn’t. She drove on. The turning she knew should appear within a couple of hundred yards did not materialise. The lane turned inland again and wound infuriatingly back on its tracks, climbing up and down steep hills which had no right to be there at all. She must have missed a turning somewhere. ‘Damnation!’ She pulled up and consulted the map again. It looked so straightforward on paper. Left, left, right. A straight bit, a bend, the pub and then a few more bends until the top of the track. She wound down the window and stared out. The wind was ice cold, clean, cutting. Ice crystals seared her skin. All she could hear was silence and then, almost subliminally, in her bones, the distant moan of the wind. Hastily she wound her window up again. She preferred the steamy, incestuous fug of the little car with its canned music – Schumann had now given way to a Beethoven Sonata.

She had begun to ponder the possibility of having to spend the night in the car – not a pleasant prospect without rugs or thermos – when she saw the lights of a house loom out of the snow ahead. It was no pub, but at least the occupants might be presumed to know where they were.

They did, and it was a good five miles from Redall. ‘You turned the wrong way back there, my dear.’ The elderly man who opened the door in his dressing gown had invited her into his hallway to consult her map with her. ‘What you had better do is go on down here,’ he stabbed at it with a nicotine-stained finger, ‘and then turn back along the estuary road.’

‘Are you on your own?’ A pale wispy woman in a worn eau-de- Nil bathrobe, her straggly hair in rollers, appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘You shouldn’t drive around on your own on a night like this.’

‘I know.’ Anne managed a bright smile. ‘I didn’t realise the weather was going to be so bad.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea before you go on?’ The woman was descending the stairs now, one step at a time, painfully.

Anne was sorely tempted but she shook her head. ‘It’s kind of you, but I think I had better go on. It’s settling quite deep and I don’t want to get stuck.’

‘Well, you go carefully,’ the old lady nodded. ‘And you watch out for the Black Dog on the marsh.’ She chuckled as she watched Anne pull up her collar and run out to the car.

‘Black Dog!’ Anne muttered to herself as she restarted the engine. She had heard of the phantom Black Dog of East Anglia; she gave a wry grin. She had not expected to run into the supernatural quite so soon.

As the car slithered down the lane and turned at last onto a slightly broader road which showed signs of having been recently sanded, the snow lessened and a patch of clear sky revealed a high, cold moon, only a fraction off the full, sailing amongst a trail of huge, bulbous clouds. Cautiously Anne accelerated a little, following the winding road with care. The woman had described this as the estuary road, and suddenly Anne saw why. A steep incline, where the car tyres spun wildly for a moment gave way to a flat straight stretch and she found she was looking down on a broad river estuary, glinting like silver in the moonlight. She brought the car to a standstill and stared. It was breathtaking. A landscape of white and silver and polished steel. And completely deserted. She had not, she realised, seen another car for over half an hour now. Turning her back with regret on the view, she set off again, more slowly this time, determined not to miss the turnings which would take her across the arm of land which led behind Redall Bay.

The track was in the right place. There was no doubt she had reached it at last, but it was obvious that that was as far as the little car was going. The wind had piled the snow across the turning in heaps four feet deep. She climbed out and looked round in despair. The moonlight was so bright now that the road was clearly visible in both directions for several hundred yards. She had passed a farmhouse some half a mile back. Perhaps she should drive back there and ask their advice? She glanced at her watch. It was after eleven. Not too late, surely, to knock on the door.

But the farmhouse, when she reached it, was in darkness and her repeated knocking brought no answer.

She shivered. The moon was half veiled now and the clouds were building once more. In another few minutes it would have gone. Climbing back into the car, glad of its lingering warmth, she sat back for a moment and thought. There were only two alternatives. Either she could drive on to the next village and beg a room at the pub or she could leave the car on the road and walk down the track to Redall.

Pulling back onto the road she drove slowly back to the top of the track and stopped. It was clearly visible, in spite of the snowdrifts, winding into the trees. She put on the light again and stared down at her map. The track could not be more than half a mile long, less probably. She measured it with her thumbnail. It was crazy to go away now she had got here. She glanced up at the sky again, peering through the windscreen. The moon was clearly visible now, lighting the whole place like day. The banks of snow cloud she had seen over the estuary did not seem to have advanced at all. It would be easy to see her way down the track.

She made up her mind. Climbing out of the car she pulled her bag out with her. There was a bottle of Laphroaig in there, produce of Scotland. She had not forgotten her sister’s fondness for malt whisky and if she fell in a snowdrift, to hell with all the received wisdom about cold and alcohol, she would drink it herself. Turning off the lights she locked the car and, shouldering the bag, with a rueful glance down at her far-from-waterproof Princes Street boots, she turned towards the trees.

For the first twenty-five yards the moonlight lit the path with brilliant clarity and it was easy to put the thought of Kate’s poltergeist out of her mind. The snow was soft but not very thick and she found the going easy, though it was strange how quickly her bag grew heavy. Then abruptly the track turned at right angles into a densely growing copse and the moonlight, deflected by the trees, shone elsewhere. The path at her feet was black. In spite of herself she glanced over her shoulder into the deeper shadows. It was very quiet. The wind had died and she could hear nothing but the steady crunch of the snow beneath her boots.

She stopped to swing her holdall onto the opposite shoulder. Without the steady sound of her own footsteps the night was eerily quiet. No wind; no patter of leaves; then, in the distance she heard the manic tu-wit, tu-wit of an owl, followed by a long wavering hoot. It was a primitive sound which brought a shiver to the back of her neck. She walked on, unaware how tightly her knuckles were knotted into the straps of the bag on her shoulder.

Her eyes were used to the darkness now and she could make out more detail. The gnarled oaks, their solid profiles clearly recognisable, the tangled mass of less easily identifiable copse which crowded to the edge of the track, the dense curtain of some creeper or other – traveller’s joy, perhaps – which hung in clusters over the path. The track turned again and she found the snow at her feet bathed in moonlight once more. With a sigh of relief she quickened her pace, slithering out of control as the track steepened, staggering to keep her feet.

It was then she saw the upturned car. Cautiously she approached it, her heart thumping uneasily, pushing her way through the broken branches. The skid marks were still visible beneath the snow, and the dark stains which in daylight would probably be blood. Her mouth had gone dry as she peered round the upturned bonnet. There was no one there. Relieved, she touched the cold metal and saw the drift of snow which had settled on the inside console. The crash must have happened a while ago and whoever had been in the car had gone.

The loud crack of a breaking twig stopped her in her tracks. She looked round. She could hear her heart thundering in her ears. She glanced up at the sky. The moon was almost gone. In another few seconds it would be swallowed by the thick, snow-heavy band of cloud which was drifting steadily in from the sea. It was nearly midnight and she had never felt so lonely in her life.

The skin on the nape of her neck began to prickle as she walked on. She tried to view the feeling objectively. It was a primitive reaction to fear of the unseen; or was she sensing something out there in the dark? Something watching her. Swallowing hard, she made herself go on. Surely it could not be far now to the farmhouse? A flicker in the strength of the moonlight made her glance up again. Only a few seconds more and the moon would be gone. She held on to her bag more tightly, refusing to quicken her pace. A fear of the dark was an irrational primitive throwback; this was the twentieth century. There were no wild beasts out there, queuing up to eat her, no enemy tribes, no evil spirits, no ghosts. She was a rational, liberated modern woman; a scientist.