Holly used the flashlight of her phone to make her way tentatively towards the bank, the beam illuminating the snowfall in front of her. She tested each pace forward before putting pressure on her boot. Sticking to the ridge she was soon at the water. The entrance of the mill faced the river.

She found a small flight of steps that were buried in snow and used the toe of her boot to feel the edge of each one and ascend to a recessed wooden door. The lock was a modern one, and she fumbled out the keys she’d taken from the kitchen and tried each one.

Three of the eleven keys slid into the lock. But they wouldn’t turn. She was wasting time and would probably have to slip by police to get back to the car. Was there really something inside that Babysitter wanted them to find? Or had he called Connor to warn him of their arrival?

But now she was here Holly had to try and gain entry, otherwise she wouldn’t know if she’d missed something vital. She decided to insert the three keys again, and twist them harder. Maybe the lock was frozen.

The second one made a snap sound, and Holly thought she’d broken it, but the door suddenly relaxed from the frame.

Holly pushed on the heavy panel, and it swung into a dim stone passage. She tensed and stepped inside. The door gently glided shut behind her. It felt colder than outside.

The beam picked up three doorless rooms, one to her left, right and straight ahead. Over the musty aroma of aged and rotten wood there was another, more artificial, scent. A cloying air freshener that smelt of sickly, synthetic lemon.

She stopped at the aperture to her left. Inside she could see the remnants of the mill workings, its mechanics rusted and its flat, circular grinding stones shrouded by leaves and cobwebs.

She cautiously moved to the next empty chamber. The floor was covered by a square of grubby fawn carpet, and there were dark stains near the rear wall below the slit window. She played the beam over them. It appeared to be blood but there was something else scattered there.

She entered to get a closer look, and they glinted in the flashlight. Fragments of teeth.

Holly backed from the room. There was no way of imprisoning somebody inside it but that made the discovery even more repellent. Once the front door of the mill was locked there was no escape.

She shone the flashlight to the end doorway but the light couldn’t reach far enough to penetrate its dark interior. That was where the potent air freshener smell emanated from. Another wave of it rolled out at her. Every particle of her wanted to turn and flee.

Holly tried to swallow, once, twice but it felt as if her dread was a solid lump in her throat. She couldn’t walk out without glimpsing what was inside the room, however, and advanced, her beam extending into its blackness.

A rustle halted her in her tracks.

Sounded like a plastic bag. She waited. ‘Hello?’ Her voice was dampened by the low ceiling.

Nothing.

The air freshener was overpowering, and she could taste its acrid sweetness at the back of her tongue. ‘Hello?’ She swung the phone rapidly around the granite bricks of the inner walls, and it shifted the shadows of something that was piled on the floor. Holly padded forward and directed the flashlight downwards.

There were a number of garbage bags there. She reached the doorway and played it along the nearest until she caught a man’s face staring back at her.

The whites of his eyes glinted behind thin orange polythene, and Holly recoiled. But the spotlight remained on his moustachioed face and half-open mouth.

Holly’s hand was over her own.

The rustle came again, and she froze.

But she could see the man hadn’t moved. His skin was mottled, his collapsed expression unblinking. Was there somebody else alive in there?

There was motion beyond the dead man. Polythene shifting.

‘Answer me if you need help.’

The man’s face was silent but now Holly could distinguish the blue torso of the corpse behind him. How many bodies? Five, six?

The disturbance intensified, and the source of the noise sprang up. A rat scuttled over the cadavers from the rear of the room and was quickly followed by a stream of others.

Holly turned and ran, her beam swivelling from the silver flashes in their eyes.