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awake by my daughter’s piercing scream. Before I could get to the back bedroom, Millie came rushing at me. She threw her arms around me, her tiny body clinging on fiercely.
    “It’s okay, love. You’re safe now. Just a nasty dream.”
    “Mum, there’s a man outside my window. A huge man all in black, with a massive head and great big fangs.”
    I tried not to smile (it was the fangs that did it) for it was serious to Millie and nightmares can be terrifying things that feel vividly real.
    “He’s gone now.”
    ‘How’d you know?’ she asked, her eyes massive globes.
    “You’ve woken up. Nightmares disappear when you wake up.”
    “But he was real.”
    How could I explain to my daughter that people in nightmares are only our fears taking on human form? I didn’t think she’d go for that - and it might make her feel worse.
    “Well?” She put her hands on her hips in a feisty stance that I can only assume she’d copied from some soap opera.
    “What?”
    “Aren’t you even coming to look?” she demanded.
    I suppose I had to. She wouldn’t go back to sleep until I’d declared her bedroom a vampire-free zone.
    “ See ,” I said, with the confidence of someone who hasn’t been woken from a deep sleep by some huge, fang-ridden man dressed in black. “Nobody’s here, Mills.”
    She pulled her hand from mine. She hated that pet name, said it made her sound like a kid. (Duh!)
    “And there was somebody here,” she said, grudgingly allowing me to tuck the Peppa Pig duvet tightly around her. She’d complained she was now much too old and sophisticated to be clinging onto anything with a trace of Peppa Pig about it. But when I’d put it in the charity bag she pulled it out again when she thought no one was looking. Neither of us mentioned it, but the old duvet cover still did the odd turn, and hadn’t been totally ousted by the Disney Princesses.
    I kissed her goodnight and smiled, sat on her bed till she fell asleep. The sleep of the innocent. A tear made its way down my face. It surprised me, for I hadn’t felt sad, but happy, looking at my daughter.
    Then I realised what it meant. You want to protect your kids from bad things in life, but bad things happened no matter how much you tried to plan. And that was my problem. There was no plan. I was rolling from disaster to disaster in a way that felt as if someone else was in charge, someone above me pulling strings like some jeering puppet master who specialised in black humour.
    I laughed out loud. Get a grip. I had two beautiful children. A roof over my head. The promise of a new job. Extra money to tackle the backlog of bills.
    There’d be lots of people happy to swap places with me. And as for some demon, puppet master controlling my fate . . . That was the easy way out, to blame someone else for the results that came from your own decisions.
    I gave the sleeping figure a final pat, moved across to Millie’s window to pull the curtains and a face appeared in the bottom pane. A large head with long, black, straggly hair. He opened his mouth wide in a smile and his teeth glared white in the surrounding darkness. But what I remember most were his large incisors. They looked like fangs.

Chapter 6
     
     
    “I’ll be right over.”
    It was almost twelve o’clock at night, a time when it’s hard to drag up enthusiasm or positive thoughts. Especially after a bizarre day when you think you’ve been followed, one of your kids believes his father hates him, and a disembodied head appears at your window.
    Maybe I shouldn’t have called James McDonald, just gone straight to the police. But would they even have come? And if they did, what could I tell them that didn’t make me look like some paranoid idiot.
    James had been very reasonable and even-tempered. Especially for someone just woken out of bed. And he didn’t sound that sleepy which sent my confidence in him up another notch. I mean, hands-up, I can be a real cranky bitch when I’m kicked out