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John Hopkinson turned and caught sight of me. Our eyes met. I placed a firm hand on whatever instinct had raised its head from my subconscious and shoved down hard. Then I turned.

It was the Doctor. His fine hair was disarrayed and he seemed to be wearing a different jacket from the one I had previously seen him in – a darker, more sombre colour – but he was undeniably the same Doctor whom I had seen, dead, lying at the bottom of the hill. His skin was pale, suiting his Bohemian raffishness, but not as pale as death, and his limbs were straight, unbroken.

‘Doctor!’ Kreiner cried. ‘You’re alive!’

‘I was never anything else,’ the Doctor said grimly, ‘although someone in this house had other ideas. There is something terribly, terribly –’

He stopped as a hand emerged from the darkness behind him and rested on his shoulder. It looked companionable, reassuring even, until I noted the discoloration of the skin and the way the talon-like fingernails were digging into the Doctor’s velvet coat. The Doctor raised his head slightly, and sniffed.

‘The mistake I made’, he said quietly, ‘was in assuming that there was only one mystery in Banquo Manor.’

At that point the owner of the hand decided to follow it out of the shadows.

And I screamed.

Richard Harries’s one intact eye glistened in the light of the lamp as it stared with amusement from the wrecked and pitted lunar surface of his face. His body, smaller and more apelike than it had appeared on his bed, lurched towards us from out of the shadows. His clothes were stained with the fluids of death and the exposed portions of his skull, burned to the bone by the explosion and surrounded by petals of flesh, resembled a peach half eaten through to the stone and left for a week.

You see, even as he lumbered towards us, even as my brain gibbered like a monkey within the cage of my head, police training took control. If I had remembered which pocket my notebook was in, I think I might automatically have started filling in details.

Harries was breathing, a ragged parody of human breath that tore into my guts. Hopkinson and I started to back away together, not taking our eyes from Harries. He came closer, step by dragging step, and the light fell more fully upon his face.

It was like wakening suddenly from a nightmare into daylight. The mask was convincing, perfect in every detail. As a delaying tactic it was beautiful. Someone more impressionable, less hardheaded and cynical than myself, it might even have driven over the edge into full-scale panic. Hopkinson was a romantic: I could tell from his grip on my right arm that he had not penetrated the disguise. It was very clever. Very clever indeed. I began to feel a grudging respect for whoever the murderer was, hiding behind the mask.

Then the smell hit me. The stench of charred and rotting flesh. And the hands raised up towards us. And the mouth twitched into a ghastly smile. And the eye moved its gaze from Hopkinson and fixed on to me.

And I woke up to the reality that this really was Richard Harries returned to us to extract vengeance for his murder. But from whom?

* * *

THE ACCOUNT OF JOHN HOPKINSON (19)

Stratford beat me to the stairs – just. The Doctor and Kreiner were breathing, metaphorically, down my neck as I ran. We had backed away from the grotesque, flesh-torn apparition in the corridor for only a few steps before our nerves snapped simultaneously and we all turned to run. Stratford beat me to the stairs because he did not look back; I did. And saw the fractured body of Richard Harries lumbering towards us, the shadows breaking into shards of light and dark on his pitted face, and one eye gleaming disproportionately after us. I passed Stratford several steps down.

We could sense Harries’s presence behind us, at the top of the stairs, as we flung ourselves forward – not worried about falling so long as we got to the bottom. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled and I hoped it was my imagination that Harries was starting down the staircase after