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took them from your bag when I was looking for an inhaler. It was close to where you dropped your mobile.”
    “I’m not asthmatic.”
    “I guessed.” She curled her fingers round the keys. “I’m going to hang on to them to stop you driving. You can’t leave yet…not behind a wheel, anyway. If you want them back, you’ll have to come into the house and get them.”
    Her assumption that I would tamely do as she said annoyed me. I still thought of her as younger than she was, but there was a rigidity about her slight frame that suggested a strength of purpose I didn’t have. “Are you a policeman?”
    “No. Just playing safe. You’ll damage yourself as well as other people if I let you go now.” She searched my face again. “Was it the dogs?”
    I recalled how long it had taken me to drive through the entrance. “No.”
    She gave a satisfied nod before tucking the keys back into her pocket. “The doctor who’s coming—Peter Coleman—knows nothing about panic attacks,” she said bluntly. “He’ll probably tell you to take tranquillizers and write out a shopping list of anti-depressants to lift your mood. I only phoned him to cover my arse in case you tried to sue. You’d do better to put your faith in paper bags and break the cycle.”
    A small laugh floated round my head. “Are you a psychiatrist?”
    “No, but I had a few panic attacks when I was twenty.”
    “What were you afraid of?”
    She thought for a moment. “Not being able to cope, I suppose. I was left with a farm to run, and I didn’t know how to do it. What are you afraid of?”
    Suffocation…drowning…dying…
    “Not being able to cope,” I echoed flatly.
    It was a truth of sorts but she didn’t believe it. Either my tone was wrong or my face was telling her something else. I wondered if she was offended that I hadn’t confided in her, because she pushed herself to her feet and disappeared back into the house again. Some while afterwards, the doctor arrived.
    He drew up alongside Jess’s Land Rover and I watched him ease himself out of the driver’s door. He was a tall, dark-haired man, dressed in a linen jacket and cavalry twills, and I could see a golf bag propped on the front seat of his BMW. He stooped to check his tie in the driver’s window before walking past me and into Barton House. I heard him call, “Where the hell are you, Jess? What’s this all about?” before his voice was swallowed by the walls.
    If anything was guaranteed to set me panicking again it was the thought of all the fuss that was going to follow. Ambulances…psychiatrists…hospitals…the press. I could predict the tabloid headlines: “Distressed Connie Has Breakdown.” It was the stimulus I needed to get out of the car because I knew I couldn’t face the shame of disclosure again. I should have been as brave as Adelina.
    Did you try to resist? No.
    Did you ask the men who they were? No.
    Did you ask them why they were doing it? No.
    Did you talk to them at all? No.
    Can you tell us anything, Ms. Burns? No.
    I eased my fingers out of a fist to reach for the door handle, and found I’d been gripping the paper bag so hard that it had begun to disintegrate in the sweat of my palm. It’s the little things that frighten. I had a sudden, terrible fear that this was my last bag.
    It wasn’t. My stash was still in the pocket to my right, a heap of folded brown paper that represented a lifeline. It’s a trick I discovered on the Internet. If you inhale your own carbon dioxide, the symptoms of panic begin to lessen. The brain understands that the body isn’t going to die of asphyxiation, and the vicious cycle of terror is temporarily broken. As I learnt later, the means of managing her attacks had been Jess’s key to stopping them, but, for me, paper bags were merely a last resort before I died of suffocation.
    I wiped my hands fiercely against each other to rid myself of the shreds. It was Lady Macbeth stuff. “Out, damned spot! Out, I say! Hell