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whether she should get rid of her T-shirt next, or one of her socks.
    The barking was still coming towards her, and it was getting closer.
    She accelerated, going as fast as she could. The forest was beginning to open out now with more space between the trees and fewer bushes to hide behind. The treetops had thinned out too, making it lighter and easier for Ash to bespotted. She looked up, silently cursing the moon, then looked back down, watching out for traps.
    One of the dogs howled, no more than fifty metres behind her. Fifty metres and closing.
    Ash was flying now. She didn’t think she’d ever run this fast, not even when she was a thirteen-year-old girl and the champion sprinter in her year at school, capable of doing a hundred metres in just over twelve and a half seconds. Her long, gangly legs used to ‘eat up the track like spaghetti’, as her mum would say. But that didn’t matter now because she was never going to be able to go fast enough. The dogs were going to catch her. In a few minutes’ time it was all going to be over. Every experience she had ever had, every emotion she’d ever felt, was going to disappear for ever, wiped clean. It would be like she’d never existed.
    The hole appeared without warning, and her foot went straight into it. She tripped and landed painfully on the hard ground.
    Suddenly she was rolling down an incline, hitting stones and exposed tree roots before landing with an icy splash in water.
    She was in a fast-moving stream about ten metres across. Rolling further into it, sheallowed herself to be taken by the current, keeping all but the top half of her head underwater as she half-crawled and half-swam downstream. The water was freezing but she didn’t care. This was her chance of escape.
    Behind her, Ash heard the dogs stop, barking wildly. She dipped her head below the surface, holding her breath, pushing herself into the middle where the water was three or four feet deep and she could swim properly. A minute passed and she came up, gasping for air.
    The stream was running faster now, and she could hear a roaring, growing steadily louder, coming from further ahead. That was when she realised with a jolt of panic that she’d read in a brochure at the lodge that close by was a waterfall more than twenty metres high.
    She must be heading straight for it.
    Cursing, she fought her way across to the opposite side of the stream from the dogs, but she was soon out of her depth, and fully clothed and wearing shoes. It was suddenly a terrible struggle. The roar was getting louder, and she was being swept along faster. Currents of water were whirling and flowing around her, and the cold was beginning to have a real effect.
    For a moment she thought about giving up. Just letting the water take her to where it would.If that meant death, then so be it. At least that way the effort was over.
    But Ash was a fighter. She always had been. When she put her mind to something she didn’t give up.
    An exposed rock appeared in front of her, and she grabbed hold of it. She took a couple of desperate, panting breaths before using the rock as a lever to push herself over to another rock closer to the bank. A huge sense of relief filled her as she felt solid ground beneath her feet. She waded out, glancing backwards. She could still hear the dogs but they sounded quite a long way back now, and because they were on the other side of the stream, she hoped they’d no longer have her scent.
    Close to exhaustion now, and shivering with the cold, Ash crawled under a thick holly bush a few yards from the water’s edge, trying to get as far under it as possible. Finally, she lay still and let her breathing slow.
    In those moments, she once again thought about death, about how a person’s world could change in the blink of an eye, or the deep slash of a knife. One minute she was a happily married woman living a problem-free life. The next her husband was lying dead in their holiday home, and she was alone