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Calum turned his head towards her, looking at her as if he was just noticing her for the first time. Then he turned his head back to look at the ceiling.

“An interesting story,” he said before stopping. Steph waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, she began to ask why, butshe had no sooner uttered the first syllable when he cut her off saying, “Martina is not best pleased with me about it all, truth be told. She said that if it wasn’t for me, this wouldn’t have happened. A bit rich if you ask me.”

Roger came over from the kitchen area with a bag of frozen peas and some ibuprofen which he handed over. Calum gingerly placed the peas on the puffy knee and swallowed the tablets without water, making Steph wince.

“I thought I’d be safe inside,” Calum began again – Steph noted how he flicked his eyes guiltily towards her for a moment. “I cannot say I’m proud, but I panicked and shut the door on the others.”

“Calum!” Roger gasped.

“I said I’m not proud!” Calum retorted, reddening. “If I could go back, I wouldn’t have shut the door so quickly.”

“Quickly? At all! Until you knew that you had done all you could have done!”

“That’s what I was insinuating! Besides, it isn’t you who should be annoyed, it should be her!”

Calum jerked his head towards Steph. The other two looked at her. To her surprise she was not annoyed. The looks of the others suggested she should be, but she wasn’t. Maybe the anger would come later. She suspected not though.

“And are you going to apologise?” Davey asked quietly.

“I will!” Calum snapped, testily. “But properly. Not some forced thing now in front of you all otherwise it won’t mean anything.”

In a strange way there was a logic to what he said. However, Steph felt it was also the type of answer a politician might give; difficult to say it was definitely wrong even though it certainly felt that way.

“So what happened when you shut the door?” Steph asked. “Inside the house. Obviously, I know what went on outside thehouse.”

Calum gave her a sideways look before turning to the ceiling once more. “I wasn’t especially sure what to do, to be honest. I can’t claim to know the house very well, so I sort of stood by the door for a moment… I wish I hadn’t.”

Steph grimaced, remembering the sound of Thomas’s scream slowly choked off by blood and teeth.

“Anyway, I knew there was meant to be some underground bit somewhere (not that Kelvin ever showed me), so that sounded safest. I had half thought to lock myself in a toilet somewhere but then I would never have known when to come out – strange how your mind thinks in a panic. So I looked for the underground bit.”

“You mean the labs and things?” Davey asked.

“If you say so. But I couldn’t find them. You would have thought it would be obvious for signs or something to have been erected, but instead, the house just looks like… well… a house!”

“There’s a lift though,” Roger pointed out. “We had literally been in it the day before! It doesn’t just go to the top floor you know.”

“But what if it had got stuck? All these images were going through my head of getting trapped halfway down and then some giant lion thing jumping on the top and gnawing its way in. Like opening a can of tuna!”

“But the lion was outside, not in the house?” Steph said.

“Yes, itwasoutside, but at that point, Calum’s stupid brain had at least been partly right to panic!”

Everyone turned their heads. Martina had opened Roger’s bedroom door without anyone noticing.

“I had seen on the monitor what was happening. I had planned to go and get a tranquillizer – the right dosage – but then I saw this idiot milling about whilst the lion leapt in through an open window. I assumed Kelvin had had one of his moments againabout ventilation.”

Steph turned to Davey who mouthed the wordlater.

“Anyway, I didn’t have long to get Calum from what I saw, so I parked the tranquillizer idea for a moment and went up in the lift to get him.”

“Yes, but when the lift opened and you had beckoned me towards it, the lion was already behind me and there would have been no time for the lift door to shut before we were turned into cat food,” Calum said, folding his arms where he lay.

“True,” Martina said, walking over and sitting on an arm of the sofa and looking at the others. “So we ran through the house, slamming doors behind us and then locking ourselves in a bathroom.” Calum turned his head a moment to give everyone a look of satisfaction at the wordbathroom. “Goodness knows how long we were in there for. You could hear the thing outside the door. It knew we were in there but never tried to break the door down. At one point we thought it had gone as it was so quiet. I chanced opening the door and the fucker came leaping round a corner as if it had been waiting the whole time. Eventually it really did go but we waited a long time. Not knowing where it was, we didn’t risk going through the house with all its hidden corners. We jumped out the nearest window instead. Then we went to get a buggy, saw they were both gone, went to get a quad bike and that is basically when Davey met us.”

Steph could see that Davey was about to pick up the thread of the story, but she had a question first.

“One thing I don’t quite get is why would the lion bother getting into the house if it had already made a kill?”