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very important. Roman highway engineers swept all before them - forests, houses, whole villages if necessary. For them the straight line was divinity itself. At least when it came to roads.’
    ‘Then whatever was built here, on the site of the house, must have mattered to them a lot.’ Eden suspected this sudden talk of the road had been to change the subject. But her aunt must have been nagged by the notion of unfinished business.
    ‘The Via Britannicus was one of the most important roads in Romano Britain.’ She nodded to her left. ‘That way, York.’ Then right. ‘That way... Rome. Heart of Empire. Favoured city of the gods.’ She let the curtain slip back to keep the night at bay. ‘I don’t know if your mother told you, but when I inherited this place I sent her a cheque. I didn’t have to.’
    ‘That’s entirely her business.’
    ‘In any case, it will have bought a lot of cider and exciting times at music festivals.’
    ‘She won’t have wasted the money.’
    ‘I don’t suppose she thought she was wasting it. Daisy’s happy-go-lucky. She will be until the day she dies.’
    ‘Heather. I’m very tired.’
    She took the hint. ‘We tend to rise early, but you get up when you want. Don’t think there are any pressures on you here. We’ll keep you safe.’

5. Monday: Midnight
     
     
    It may have been the chimes of the clock downstairs, striking twelve, that first woke Eden. However, even as the echoing notes died other noises came to the fore.
    ‘Not again... not fire... ’
    She flew from the bed to stand in the darkness, not knowing where to find the light switch in the unfamiliar room. Cold air touched her bare legs. She tried to catch the smell of smoke. The strange whooshing sound took her back to the angry roar of flames as they reduced her kitchen to ash. Don’t shout - listen. Eden held her nerve. Now she focused her attention on the sound to identify it. Fire? Unlikely: not so much as a whiff of smoke. Water gushing? No. It’s not continuous. The whooshing’s broken... a rush-rush sound followed by silence.
    Breathing?
    No - snorting! That is someone - no, more likely an animal - breathing hard. Trying to catch a scent. What came to mind was a horse picking up a compelling aroma on the air. But why was it so loud in the house?
    She pulled back the curtain to look outside. The rain clouds had dispersed. A crescent moon, like a curving steel blade, hung poised overhead. Its brittle light turned a garden bush into a mass of silver speckles. As her eyes adjusted she could make out the relentless black band of the road slicing through fields. At the house it formed a hook shape around the garden before flying toward distant York. No traffic used it at this time of night. Then that had always been the case when Eden visited as a child. Sunset might as well have been a red stop sign for this particular highway. A local man, who was considered to be ‘a bit slow’, would immediately run back to his parents’ home in the village if he was caught out alone on the road at dusk. Eden could still remember vividly how he bellowed in fear as he ran, his arms rotating in a fantastic windmill motion. ‘Mam! Dad! I’m frit... I’m frit!’ Her grandmother explained that ‘frit’ was a local word for ‘frightened.’
    Then she glimpsed a figure. It sped across the front lawn. For a moment, she thought it was the man who was scared of the road at night. She half-expected to hear the terrified yell of ‘I’m frit!’ But the shape darted to the base of the house. Then she heard the sound again.
    ‘My God, he’s smelling the door.’ But the force of that intake of breath? This was the peculiar thing: he must be snorting great lung-fulls of air from the building’s interior. In astonishment, she murmured, ‘He wants to know what the inside of the house smells like. Why on Earth would anyone do that?’
    The figure, little more than a shadow, flitted lightly toward the hedge, so it could look