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like a set of robes sweeping about her little feet. Her spine curved like a sickle, as if it suffered from a deformity.
    Kyle uncapped his bottle of water. She gulped at it with her withered mouth, then gasped and offered the bottle back to him. The rim was smeared with red lipstick and he knew he wouldn’t be drinking from it again. ‘You’re very kind.
    Thank you,’ Susan said, which snapped Kyle out of his unpleasant thoughts with a pang of guilt; she was old and frightened. ‘You have to understand . . . But how could you?
    How foolish of me.’
    ‘Just get your wind back. Get yourself settled. And then—’
    She clutched the back of his hand. Looked up; her eyes so bright with genuine fear, he thought her seriously disturbed.
    ‘What happened here. What began here. It was terrible. There are so few of us . . .’ She actually trembled inside her collapsed garments.
    ‘Are you all right? A doctor?’ Kyle felt his scalp tingle with panic at the suggestion of a medical emergency, though her insinuation about the ‘evil’ house left him totally unaffected.
    He tried to remember C.P.R. Nothing came to him besides something vague about tilting the head back, and forming a seal over the mouth. Now it was his turn to shudder.
    ‘I thought I’d be all right. I told Max I would be all right.
    I don’t want to let him down. He sent train tickets to me and everything.’
    Kyle looked at Dan, who had raised two impossibly thick eyebrows.
    ‘If this upsets you too much,’ Kyle said, ‘we can talk somewhere else.’
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    ADAM NEVILL
    Susan shook her head. ‘No. No. What’s the point of me being upset now!’ Then more quietly, she said, ‘Bit late for that.’
    A woman in tight jeans and high heels paused beside Dan.
    Kyle heard Dan say, ‘OK, I think. Just a funny turn.’ The woman nodded, her smooth face creased by a frown. She carried on, the tips of her heels ringing out in the damp air.
    ‘Susan.’ Kyle held her hand. ‘You OK now?’
    ‘I feel foolish,’ she whispered.
    ‘Don’t. We’re really grateful you made the effort to come up. You sure you can do this?’
    She nodded. ‘People need to know. They need to. Max is right.’ She screwed her face up and tried to stand. Kyle helped her back to her feet. ‘So much of me is still stuck inside there.
    And I wanted to see if I could get it back. By coming here.’
    ‘Flats now. But we had the whole place. Right to the roof.’
    Susan White miraculously regained her strength on the inside.
    As they did the walk-through, she flapped about the ground-floor rooms like a flightless tropical bird trying to escape its captors.
    All three of the luxury flats the building had been subdiv -
    ided into were now vacant after a recent renovation. Steely light shone through the large sash windows and warmed the empty spaces, gilded laminate floors and silvered the bare walls in three unfurnished ground-floor rooms and the kit -
    chen. A scent of fresh paint lingered about the white walls, the skirting boards, and the wainscoting around the high ceilings; all vast and spotless save for the decorative moulds framing the light sockets, from which bare bulbs hung on cables.
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    LAST DAYS
    ‘In here they printed the magazine, Gospel . We sold it all over London! In there was the office, where we brought the donations. Every day at six!’
    Once she burned off the initial excitement, Kyle would need to step in and slow her down, then partition her narrative between the rooms to vary the footage; take it room by room as Susan imparted stories about the purpose of each space. He’d cut her narration with B-roll slides from the London period. They’d take light readings and line up the sound in each room as they moved through the building; do every segment from two cameras. In all of his films he edited mentally as they shot.
    Downside: there was little variety to form backdrops to Susan’s dialogue. The rooms would have been better furnished, so they’d have to do