At the end of the corridor she turned around.

“She’ll leave, you know,” she said.

“In nine years she’ll be gone and you’ll be fifty-one and alone in that house with a woman who’s been dead for fifteen years, and you’ll think about today.”

I have thought about that quite a lot, actually, because it is the only genuinely frightening thing anybody said to me that day, and because it may well be true.

“She doesn’t have to stay forever to be worth protecting this afternoon,” I said.

And that was the last thing I ever said to Pamela Gable.