Synopsis:

When the bizarrely mutilated and long-dead body of a young woman is found in a ditch in Manham, an isolated and insular village in the Norfolk marshlands, it isn't just the fact that she had been a friend that disturbs Dr David Hunter. He was once a high-profile forensic anthropologist and all too familiar with the different faces of death, until a devastating personal tragedy made him turn his back on his former life and career. Now hidden away as a country doctor, Hunter's past is a secret he hopes will remain buried. So when he's asked by the police to use his arcane skills to help track down the killer, he's reluctant to become involved, knowing this will only stir up the painful memories he's been trying so hard to forget. Then another young woman disappears, and Manham is plunged into a fog of fear and paranoia that threatens to tear it apart. And no one seems exempt from suspicion as the twisted killings continue. And as the once peaceful community is riven by fear and mistrust, David Hunter realises it will take all his knowledge and expertise if the killer is to be stopped. But not even he is prepared for the terrible cost that will exact — or the awful price that failure threatens to bring...

THE CHEMISTRY OF DEATH

By

Simon Beckett

Copyright © Simon Beckett 2006

For Hilary

1

A human body starts to decompose four minutes after death. Once the encapsulation of life, it now undergoes its final metamorphoses. It begins to digest itself. Cells dissolve from the inside out. Tissue turns to liquid, then to gas. No longer animate, the body becomes an immovable feast for other organisms. Bacteria first, then insects. Flies. Eggs are laid, then hatch. The larvae feed on the nutrient-rich broth, and then migrate. They leave the body in orderly fashion, following each other in a neat procession that always heads south. South-east or south-west sometimes, but never north. No-one knows why.

By now the body's muscle protein has broken down, producing a potent chemical brew. Lethal to vegetation, it kills the grass as the larvae crawl through it, forming an umbilical of death that extends back the way they came. In the right conditions — dry and hot, say, without rain — it can extend for yards, a wavering brown conga-line of fat yellow grubs. It's a curious sight, and for the curious what could be more natural than to follow this phenomenon back to its source? Which was how the Yates boys found what was left of Sally Palmer.

Neil and Sam came across the maggot trail on the edge of Farnham Wood, where it borders the marsh. It was the second week of July, and already the unnatural summer seemed to have been going on for ever. The heat seemed eternal, leaching the colour from the trees and baking the ground to the hardness of bone. The boys were on their way to Willow Hole, a reed pond that passed as the local swimming pool. They were meeting friends there, and would spend the Sunday afternoon bombing into the tepid green water from an overhanging tree. At least, so they thought.

I see them as bored and listless, drugged by the heat and impatient with each other. Neil, at eleven three years older than his brother, would be walking slightly ahead of Sam to demonstrate his impatience. There's a stick in his hand, with which he whips the stalks and branches he passes. Sam trudges along behind, sniffing from time to time. Not from a summer cold, but from the hay fever that also reddens his eyes. A mild antihistamine would help him, but at this stage he doesn't know that. He always sniffs during summer. Always the shadow to his bigger brother, he walks with his head down, which is why he and not his brother notices the maggot trail.

He stops and examines it before shouting Neil back. Neil is reluctant, but Sam has obviously found something. He tries to act unimpressed, but the undulating line of maggots intrigues him just as much as it does his brother. The two of them crouch over the grubs, pushing dark hair out of similar faces and wrinkling their noses at the ammoniac smell. And though neither could later remember whose idea it was to see where they were coming from, I imagine it to be Neil's. Having walked past the maggots himself, he would be keen to assert his authority once more. So it's Neil who sets off first, heading towards the yellowed tufts of marsh grass from which the larvae are flowing, and leaving Sam to follow.

Did they notice the smell as they approached? Probably. It would be strong enough to cut through even Sam's blocked sinuses. And they probably knew what it was. No city boys, these, they would be familiar with the cycle of life and death. The flies, too, would have alerted them, a somnolent buzzing that seemed to fill the heat. But the body they discovered was not the sheep or deer, or even dog, they might have expected. Naked but unrecognizable in the sun, Sally Palmer was full of movement, a rippling infestation that boiled under her skin and erupted from mouth and nose, as well as the other less natural openings in her body. The maggots that spilled from her pooled on the ground before crawling away in the line that now stretched beyond the Yates boys.

I don't suppose it matters which one broke first, but I think it would be Neil. As ever, Sam would have taken his cue from his big brother, trying to keep up in a race that led them first home, then to the police station.

And then, finally, to me.

As well as a mild sedative, I also gave Sam antihistamine to help his hay fever. By this time, though, he wasn't the only one to have red eyes. Neil too was still shaken by their discovery, although now he was beginning to recover his juvenile poise. So it was he rather than Sam who told me what had happened, already starting to reduce the raw memory to a more acceptable form, a story to be told and retold. And later, when the tragic events of that preternaturally hot summer had run their course, years later Neil would be telling it still, forever identified as the one whose discovery had started it all.

But it hadn't. It was just that, until then, we had never realized what was living among us.

2

I came to Manham in the late afternoon of a wet March, three years earlier. I arrived in the train station — little more than a small platform in the middle of nowhere — to find a rainswept landscape that seemed as empty of human life as it was of contour. I stood with my suitcase and took in the surrounding scenery, barely noticing the rain that dripped down the back of my collar. Flat marshland and fens spread out around me, a linear topography broken only by patches of bare woodland as it stretched to the horizon.

It was my first time in the Broads, my first time in Norfolk. It was spectacularly unfamiliar. I took in the sweeping openness, breathed in the damp, cold air, and felt something, minimally, begin to unwind. Unwelcoming as it might have been, it wasn't London, and that was enough.

There was no-one to meet me. I hadn't arranged any transport from the station. I hadn't planned that far ahead. I'd sold my car, along with everything else, and not given a thought to how I would get to the village. I still wasn't thinking too clearly, back then. If I'd thought about it at all, with the arrogance of a city-dweller I'd assumed there would be taxis, a shop, something. But there was no taxi rank, not even a phone box. I briefly regretted giving away my mobile, then picked up my suitcase and headed for the road. When I reached it there were just two options, left or right. Without hesitating I took the left. No reason. After a few hundred yards I came across a junction with a faded wooden road sign. It leaned to one side, so that it seemed to be pointing into the wet earth to some point underground. But at least it told me I was heading in the right direction.

The light was fading when I finally reached the village. One or two cars had passed as I'd walked, but none had stopped. Other than those, the first signs of life were a few farms set well back from the road, each isolated from the other. Then ahead of me in the half-light I saw the tower of a church, apparently half-buried in a field. There was a pavement now, narrow and slick with rain but better than the verge and hedgerows I'd been using since leaving the train station. Another bend in the road revealed the village itself, virtually hidden until you stumbled across it.

It wasn't quite a picture postcard. It was too lived in, too sprawling to fit the image of a rural English village. On the outskirts was a band of pre-war houses, but these soon gave way to stone cottages, their walls pebbled with chunks of flint. They grew progressively older as I drew nearer to the heart of the village, each step taking me further back in history. Varnished with drizzle, they huddled against each other, their lifeless windows reflecting back at me with blank suspicion.

After a while the road became lined with closed shops, behind which more houses ran off into the wet dusk. I passed a school, a pub, and then came to a village green. It was ablaze with daffodils, their yellow trumpets shockingly colourful in the sepia world as they nodded in the rain. Towering over the green, a gigantic old horse chestnut spread its bare black branches. Behind it, surrounded by a graveyard of canted, moss-covered stones, was the Norman church whose tower I'd seen from the road. Like the older cottages, its walls were encrusted with flint; hard, fist-sized stones that defied the elements. But the softer mortar surrounding them was weathered and worn by age, and the church windows and door had subtly warped as the ground it stood on had shifted over the centuries.

I stopped. Further on I could see that the road gave way to more houses. It was obvious that this was pretty much all there was to Manham. Lights were on in some of the windows, but there was no other sign of life. I stood in the rain, unsure which way to go. Then I heard a noise and saw two gardeners at work in the graveyard. Oblivious to the rain and dying light, they were raking and tidying the grass around the old stones. They carried on without looking up as I approached.

'Can you tell me where the doctor's surgery is?' I asked, water dripping down my face.

They both stopped and regarded me, so alike despite the disparity in their ages that they had to be grandfather and grandson. Both faces held the same placid, incurious expression, from which stared calm, cornflower-blue eyes. The older one motioned towards a narrow, tree-lined lane at the far side of the green.

'Straigh' up there.'

The accent was another confirmation I was no longer in London, a coiling of vowels that sounded alien to my city ears. I thanked them, but they'd already turned back to their work. I went up the lane, the sound of the rain amplified as it dripped through the overhanging branches. After a while I came to a wide gate barring the entrance to a narrow drive. Fixed to one of the gateposts was a sign saying 'Bank House'. Beneath it was a brass plaque that said 'Dr H. Maitland'. Flanked by yews, the drive ran gently uphill through well-kept gardens, then dropped down to the courtyard of an imposing Georgian house. I scraped the mud from my shoes on the worn cast-iron bar set to one side of the front door, then raised the heavy knocker and rapped loudly. I was about to knock again when the door was opened.

A plump, middle-aged woman with immaculate iron-grey hair looked out at me.

'Yes?'

'I'm here to see Dr Maitland.'

She frowned. 'The surgery's closed. And I'm afraid the doctor isn't making home visits at the moment.'

'No… I mean, he's expecting me.' That brought no response. I became aware of how bedraggled I must look after an hour's walk in the rain. 'I'm here about the post. David Hunter?'

Her face lit up. 'Oh, I'm so sorry! I didn't realize. I thought… Come in, please.' She stood back to let me in. 'Goodness, you're soaked. Have you walked far?'

'From the station.'

'The train station? But that's miles!' She was already helping me off with my coat. 'Why didn't you call to tell us when your train was in? We could have had someone pick you up.'

I didn't answer. The truth was it hadn't occurred to me.

'Come through into the lounge. The fire's lit in there. No, leave your case,' she said, turning from hanging up my coat. She smiled. For the first time I noticed the strain evident in her face. What I'd taken earlier for terseness was just fatigue. 'No-one'll steal it here.'

She led me into a large, wood-panelled room. An age-worn leather chesterfield faced a fire on which a pile of logs were glowing. The carpet was Persian, old but still beautiful. Surrounding it were bare floorboards burnished to a deep umber. The room smelled appealingly of pine and wood smoke.

'Please sit down. I'll tell Dr Maitland you're here. Would you like a cup of tea?'

It was another sign I was no longer in the city. There it would have been coffee. I thanked her and stared into the fire when she had gone out. After the cold, the heat made me drowsy. Outside the French window it was now completely dark. Rain pattered against the glass. The chesterfield was soft and comfortable. I felt my eyelids begin to droop. I stood up quickly, almost panicking as my head began to nod. All at once I felt exhausted, physically and mentally drained. But the fear of sleep was even greater.

I was still standing in front of the fire when the woman came back. 'Do you want to come through? Dr Maitland's in his study.'

I followed her down the hall, shoes creaking on the floorboards. She tapped lightly on a door at the far end, opening it with an easy familiarity without waiting for an answer. She smiled again as she stood back for me to enter.

'I'll bring the teas in a few minutes,' she said, closing the door as she went out.

Inside, a man was sitting at a desk. We regarded each other for a moment. Even sitting down I could see he was tall, with a strong-boned, deeply lined face and a thick head of hair that was not so much grey as cream. But the black eyebrows contradicted any suggestion of weakness, and the eyes beneath them were sharp and alert. They flicked over me, receiving what sort of impression I was unable to say. For the first time I felt faintly disturbed that I wasn't exactly at my best.

'Good God, man, you look drenched!' His voice was a gruff but friendly bark.

'I walked from the station. There weren't any taxis.'

He gave a snort. 'Welcome to wonderful Manham. You should have let me know you were coming a day early. I'd have arranged a lift from the station.'

'A day early?' I echoed.

'That's right. I wasn't expecting you till tomorrow.'

For the first time the significance of the closed shops dawned on me. This was a Sunday. I'd not realized how badly skewed my sense of time had become. He pretended not to notice how thrown I was by my gaffe.

'Never mind, you're here now. It'll give you more time to settle in. I'm Henry Maitland. Pleased to meet you.'

He extended his hand without getting up. And it was only then I noticed his chair had wheels on it. I went forward to shake his hand, but not before he'd noticed my hesitation. He smiled, wryly.

'Now you see why I advertised.'

It had been in the appointments section of The Times, a small notice that was easy to overlook. But for some reason my eyes had fallen on it straight away. A rural medical practice was looking for a GP on a temporary contract. Six months, accommodation provided. It was the location that attracted me as much as anything. Not that I particularly wanted to work in Norfolk, but it would take me away from London. I'd applied without much hope or excitement, so when I'd opened the letter a week later I'd been expecting a polite rejection. Instead I found I'd been offered the job. I had to read the letter twice to take in what it was saying. At another time I might have wondered what the catch was. But at another time I would never have applied for it in the first place.

I wrote back to accept by return of post.

Now I looked at my new employer and belatedly wondered what I'd committed myself to. As if reading my mind, he clapped his hands on his legs.

'Car accident.' There was no embarrassment or self-pity. 'There's a chance I'll recover some use in time, but until then I can't manage by myself. I've been using locums for the past year or so, but I've had enough of that. A different face from one week to the next; that's no good for anyone. You'll learn soon enough they don't like change around here.' He reached for a pipe and tobacco on his desk. 'Mind if I smoke?'

'Not if you don't.'

He gave a laugh. 'Good answer. I'm not one of your patients. Remember that.'

He paused while he held a match to the pipe bowl. 'So,' he said, puffing on it. 'Going to be quite a departure for you after working in a university, isn't it? And this certainly isn't London.' He looked at me over the top of the pipe. I waited for him to ask me to enlarge on my previous career. But he didn't. 'Any last-minute doubts, now's the time to speak up.'

'No,' I told him.

He nodded, satisfied. 'Fair enough. You'll be staying here for the time being. I'll get Janice to show you to your room. We can talk more over dinner. Then you can make a start tomorrow. Surgery kicks off at nine.'

'Can I ask something?' He raised his eyebrows, waiting. 'Why did you hire me?'

It had been bothering me. Not enough to make me turn it down, but in a vague way nevertheless.

'You looked suitable. Good qualifications, excellent references, and ready to come and work out in the middle of nowhere for the pittance I'm offering.'

'I would have expected an interview first.'

He brushed aside the comment with his pipe, wreathing himself in smoke. 'Interviews take time. I wanted someone who could start as soon as possible. And I trust my judgement.'

There was a certainty about him I found reassuring. It wasn't until long afterwards, when there was no longer any doubt that I'd be staying, that he laughingly confided over malt whiskies that I'd been the only applicant.

But right then such an obvious answer never occurred to me. 'I told you I don't have much experience in general practice. How can you be sure I'm up to it?'

'Do you think you are?'

I took a moment to answer, actually considering the question for the first time. I'd come here so far without thinking very much at all. It had been an escape from a place and people it was now too painful to be around any longer. I thought again about how I must look. A day early and soaking wet. Not even sense enough to come in out of the rain.

'Yes,' I said.

'There you are then.' His expression was sharp, but there was an element of amusement. 'Besides, it's only a temporary post. And I'll be keeping an eye on you.'

He pressed a button on his desk. A buzzer rang distantly somewhere in the house. 'Dinner's usually around eight, patients permitting. You can relax till then. Did you bring your luggage or is it being sent on?'

'I brought it with me. I left it with your wife.'

He looked startled, then gave an oddly embarrassed smile. 'Janice is my housekeeper,' he said. 'I'm a widower.'

The warmth of the room seemed to close in on me. I nodded.

'So am I.'

That was how I came to be the doctor at Manham. And how, three years later, I came to be one of the first to hear what the Yates boys had discovered in Farnham Wood. Of course, no-one knew who it was, not straight away. Given its evident condition the boys couldn't even say if the body was that of a man or a woman. Once back in the familiarity of their home, they weren't even sure if it had been naked or not. At one point Sam had even said it had wings, before lapsing into uncertainty and silence, but Neil just looked blank. Whatever they had seen had overwhelmed any terms of reference they were familiar with, and now memory was baulking at recalling it. All they could agree on was that it was human, and dead. And while their description of the abundant sea of maggots implied wounds, I knew only too well the tricks the dead can play. There was no reason to think the worst.

Not then.

So their mother's conviction was all the stranger. Linda Yates sat with her arm around her subdued youngest son, huddled against her while he halfheartedly watched the garishly coloured TV in their small lounge. Their father, a farm worker, was still at work. She'd called me after the boys had run home, breathless and hysterical. Even though it was a Sunday afternoon, there was no such thing as off-duty in a place as small and isolated as Manham.

We were still waiting for the police to arrive. They clearly saw no reason to rush, but I felt obliged to stay. I'd given Sam the sedative, so mild as to be almost a placebo, and reluctantly heard the story recounted by his brother. I'd tried not to listen. I knew well enough what they would have seen.

It wasn't anything I needed reminding of.

The lounge window was wide open, but no breeze came through to cool the room. Outside was dazzlingly bright, bleached to whiteness by the afternoon sun.

'It's Sally Palmer,' Linda Yates said, out of the blue.

I looked at her in surprise. Sally Palmer lived alone on a small farm just outside the village. An attractive woman in her thirties, she'd moved to Manham a few years before me after inheriting the farm from her uncle. She still kept a few goats, and the blood-tie made her less of an outsider than she might otherwise have been; certainly less than I was, even now. But the fact she made her living as a writer set her apart, and made most of her neighbours regard her with a mixture of awe and suspicion.

I hadn't heard any talk of her being missing. 'What makes you say that?'

'Because I had a dream about her.'

It wasn't the answer I expected. I looked at the boys. Sam, calmer now, didn't seem to be listening. But Neil was looking at his mother, and I knew whatever was said here would be spread around the village the moment he got out of the house. She took my silence as scepticism.

'She was standing at a bus stop, crying. I asked her what was wrong, but she didn't say anything. Then I looked down the road, and when I turned back she was gone.'

I didn't know what to say.

'You have dreams for a reason,' she went on. 'That's what this was.'

'Come on, Linda, we don't know who it is yet. It could be anyone.'

She gave me a look that said I was wrong, but she wasn't going to argue. I was glad when the knock came on the door, announcing the arrival of the police.

There were two of them, both solid examples of rural constabulary. The older man was florid-faced, and periodically punctuated his conversation with a jovial wink. It seemed out of place under the circumstances.

'So, you think you've found a body, do you?' he announced cheerily, shooting me a look, as if to include me in an adult joke that was over the boys' heads. While Sam huddled against his mother, Neil mumbled responses to his questions, cowed by the uniformed authority in their home.

It didn't take long. The older police officer flipped his book closed. 'Right, we'd better go and take a look. Which one of you boys is going to show us where it was?'

Sam burrowed his head into his mother. Neil said nothing, but his face paled. Talking was one thing. Going back there was another. Their mother turned to me, worried.

'I don't think that's a good idea,' I said. In fact, I thought it was a lousy one. But I'd dealt with the police enough to know diplomacy was usually better than confrontation.

'So how are we supposed to find it when neither of us know the area?' he demanded.

'I've got a map in the car. I can show you where to go.'

The policeman didn't try to hide his displeasure. We went outside, squinting in the sudden brightness. The house was the end one of a row of small stone cottages. Our cars were parked in the lane. I took the map out of my Land Rover and opened it on the bonnet. The sun glanced off the battered metal, making it hot to the touch.

'It's about three miles away. You'll have to park up and cut across the marsh to the woods. From what they said the body should be somewhere round here.'

I pointed to an area on the map. The policeman grunted.

'I've got a better idea. If you don't want one of the boys to take us, why don't you?' He gave me a tight smile. 'You seem to know your way around.'

I could see by his face that I wasn't going to have any choice. I told them to follow me and set off. The inside of the old Land Rover smelled of hot plastic. I wound both windows down as far as they would go. The steering wheel burned my hands as I gripped it. When I saw how white my knuckles were, I made myself relax.

The roads were narrow and meandering, but it wasn't far. I parked in a rutted semicircle of baked earth, the passenger door brushing against the yellowed hedge. The police car bumped to a halt behind me. The two officers climbed out, the older one hitching up his trousers over his gut. The younger, sunburned and with a shaving rash, hung back a little.

'There's a track across the marsh,' I told them. 'It'll take you to the woods. Just keep following it. It can't be more than a few hundred yards.'

The older policeman wiped the sweat from his head. The armpits of his white shirt were dark and wet. An acrid waft came from him. He squinted at the distant wood, shaking his head.

'It's too hot for this. Don't suppose you want to show us where you think it is?'

He sounded half-hopeful, half-mocking.

'Once you reach the woods your guess is as good as mine,' I told him. 'Just keep an eye out for maggots.'

The younger one laughed, but stopped when the other looked at him balefully.

'Shouldn't you let a scene of crime team do this?' I said.

He snorted. 'They'll not thank us for calling them out for a rotting deer. That's all it usually is.'

'The boys didn't think so.'

'Well, I think I'd rather see it for myself, if you don't mind.' He motioned to the younger man. 'Come on, let's get this over with.'

I watched the two of them clamber through a gap in the hedge and make their way towards the woods. He hadn't asked me to wait, and I couldn't see any point in staying. I'd brought them as far as I could; the rest was up to them.

But I didn't move. I went back to the Land Rover and took a bottle of water from under my seat. Tepid, but my mouth was dry. I put my sunglasses on and leaned against the dusty green wing, facing towards the woods where the police officers were heading. The flatness of the marsh had already swallowed them from sight. The heat gave the air a steamy, metallic taint, full of the hum and chirrup of insects. A pair of dragonflies danced past. I took another drink of water and looked at my watch. There was no surgery today, but I had better things to do than stand around on a roadside waiting to see what two rural policemen found. They were probably right. It could have just been a dead animal the boys had seen. Imagination and panic had done the rest.

I still didn't move.

A while later I saw the two figures heading back. Their white shirts bobbed against the bleached grass stalks. Even before they'd reached me I could see the pallor of their faces. The younger one had a wet stain of vomit on his front that he seemed unaware of. Wordlessly, I handed him the bottle of water. He took it gratefully.

The older one wouldn't meet my eye. 'Can't get a bloody signal out here,' he muttered as he went to their car. He was trying for his earlier gruffness, but not quite making it.

'It wasn't a deer then,' I said.

He gave me a bleak look. 'I don't think we need keep you any longer.'

He waited until I was in the Land Rover before he made his call. As I drove away he was still on the radio. The younger police officer was staring at his feet, the bottle of water dangling from his hand.

I headed back to the surgery. Thoughts were buzzing away in my head, but I'd erected a screen, keeping them out like flies behind mesh. I kept my mind blank by an effort of will, but the flies were still whispering their message to my subconscious. The road leading back into the village and the surgery came up. My hand went to the indicator and then stopped. Without thinking about it, I made a decision that would echo down the weeks to come, one that would change my own life as well as that of others.

I went straight on. Heading for Sally Palmer's farm.

3

The farm was bordered by trees on one side and marshland on the others. The Land Rover threw up dust as it jolted along the rutted track that led to it. I parked on the uneven cobblestones that were all that was left of the courtyard and got out. A tall corrugated-metal barn shimmered in the heat. The farmhouse itself was painted white, peeling and fading now, but still blindingly bright in the sun. Bright green window boxes were fixed either side of the front door, the only shot of colour in a bleached-out world.

Usually, if Sally was in, her Border collie Bess would set off barking before you had chance to knock. Not today, though. There was no sign of life through the windows, either, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. I went to the door and knocked. Now I was here my reason for coming seemed pretty stupid. I stared out towards the horizon as I waited, trying to think of what I should say if she answered. I supposed I could always tell her the truth, but that would make me look as irrational as Linda Yates. And she might misconstrue it, take the reason for my visit as something more than a nagging disquiet I couldn't explain.

Sally and I had, if not exactly a history, then at least something more than a casual acquaintance. There had been a time when we'd seen quite a lot of each other. Not too surprising, really: as outsiders who'd both moved to the village from London, we had our past metropolitan lives in common. Plus she was around my age, and the outgoing sort who made friends easily. And attractive. I'd enjoyed the few times we'd met in the pub for drinks.

But that was as far as it had gone. When I began to sense she might want more I backed off. She'd seemed puzzled at first, but as things had never really had a chance to develop between us there had been no ill feeling or embarrassment. When we bumped into each other we still chatted easily enough, but that was all.

I'd made sure of that.

I knocked on her door again. I remember I actually felt relieved when she didn't open it. She was obviously out, which meant I wouldn't have to explain why I was there. Come to that, I didn't even know myself. I wasn't superstitious, and unlike Linda Yates I didn't believe in premonitions. Except she hadn't said it had been a premonition, not exactly. Just a dream. And I knew all about how seductive dreams can be. Seductive and treacherous.

I turned away from the door, and the direction in which my thoughts had started to travel. It was just as well she wasn't here, I thought, annoyed with myself. What the hell had I been thinking of? Just because some hiker or birdwatcher had died was no reason to let my imagination run away with me.

I was halfway back to the Land Rover when I stopped. There was something bothering me, but until I turned around again I didn't know what it was. It still took me a few moments before I realized. It was the window boxes. The plants in them were brown and dead.

Sally would never let them get that way.

I went back. The soil in the boxes was baked hard. No-one had watered them for days. Perhaps longer. I knocked on the door, called her name. When there was no answer I tried the handle.

It wasn't locked. It was possible she'd got out of the habit of locking her door since she'd lived here. But she was from a city, like me, and old habits died hard. The door stuck as I opened it, caught on the mound of envelopes that lay behind. They slithered in a mini-avalanche as I pushed my way in and stepped over them into the kitchen. It was as I remembered: cheerful lemon walls, solid rustic furniture and a few touches that showed she hadn't been able to leave behind all traces of the city — an electric juicer, stainless-steel espresso maker and large, well-stocked wine-rack.

Other than the build-up of post, at first glance there was nothing wrong. But the house had a musty, unaired smell, overlaid with the sweet scent of decaying fruit. It came from an earthenware bowl on the old pine dresser, a still-life memento mori of blackened bananas, apples and oranges furred white with mould. Dead flowers, now unrecognizable, hung limply over a vase on the table. A drawer by the sink was half-open, as if she'd been disturbed as she was about to take something from it. I automatically went to close it, but left it as it was.

She could be on holiday, I told myself. Or been too busy to bother throwing out old fruit and flowers. There were any number of possible explanations. But I think at that point, like Linda Yates, I knew.

I considered checking the rest of the house, but decided against it. Already I was starting to think of it as a potential crime scene, and I knew better than to risk contaminating any evidence. Instead I went back outside. Sally's goats were in a paddock around the back. One glance confirmed that something was badly wrong. A few were still standing, emaciated and feeble, but most were lying prone, either unconscious or dead. They'd almost stripped the paddock of grass, and when I went to the water trough it was bone dry. A hose was lying nearby, obviously used to fill it. I hung it over the edge of the trough and followed the other end back to a stand-pipe. As water spluttered into the metal trough one or two of the goats tottered over and began to drink.

I would get the vet over here, just as soon as I'd called the police. I took out my phone but there was no signal. Reception around Manham was notoriously patchy, which made mobile phones unpredictable at the best of times. I moved further from the paddock and saw the signal bars stutter into life. I was about to dial when I noticed a small, dark shape half-hidden behind a rusting plough. With a tense, oddly certain feeling of what it would be, I went over.

The body of Bess, Sally's Border collie, lay in the dry grass. It looked tiny, its fur dusty and matted. I batted away the flies that left it to inspect my fresher meat and turned away. But not before I'd seen how the dog's head had been almost severed.

The heat seemed suddenly to have intensified. My legs automatically took me back to the Land Rover. I resisted the urge to get in and drive away. Instead, putting it between me and the house, I continued with my call. As I waited for the police to answer I stared at the far green smudge of the woods I'd just come from.

Not again. Not here.

I realized a tinny voice was coming from the phone. I turned away from both the distant wood and the house.

'I want to report a missing person,' I said.

The police inspector was a squat, pugnacious man called Mackenzie. Perhaps a year or two older than me, the first thing I noticed about him were his abnormally large shoulders. The lower part of his body seemed out of proportion in comparison; short legs tapered to absurdly dainty feet. It would have given him the appearance of a cartoon bodybuilder if not for the blurring line of his gut, and a threatening aura of impatience that made it impossible to take him anything less than seriously. I'd waited by the car while Mackenzie and a plain-clothed sergeant had gone to look at the dog. They'd seemed unhurried, almost unconcerned as they strolled over. But the fact that a chief inspector from the Major Investigation Team was here instead of uniformed officers was a sign this was being taken seriously.

He'd come back over to me while the sergeant had gone inside the house to check the rooms. 'So tell me again why you came.'

He smelled of aftershave and sweat, and, faintly, of mint. His sunburned scalp flamed through his thinning red hair, but if he felt any discomfort at standing out in the sun he didn't show it.

'I was near by. I thought I'd call round.'

'Social call, was it?'

'I just wanted to make sure she was all right.'

I wasn't going to bring Linda Yates into it unless I had to. As her doctor I had to suppose she'd told me what she had in confidence, and I didn't think a policeman would put much stock in a dream anyway. I should have known better myself. Except that, irrational or not, Sally wasn't here.

'When was the last time you saw Miss Palmer?' Mackenzie asked.

I thought back. 'Not for a couple of weeks.'

'Can you narrow it down more than that?'

'I remember seeing her in the pub for the summer barbecue about two weeks ago. She was there then.'

'With you?'

'No. But we spoke.' Briefly. Hi, how are you? Fine, see you later. Hardly meaningful, as last words go. If that's what they were, I reminded myself. But I no longer had any doubt.

'And after not seeing her since then you suddenly decided to come round today.'

'I'd just heard a body had been found. I wanted to check that she was all right.'

'What makes you so sure the body is a woman's?'

'I'm not. But I didn't think it would hurt to make sure Sally was OK.'

'What's your relationship?'

'Friends, I suppose.'

'Close?'

'Not really.'

'You sleeping with her?'

'No.'

'Been sleeping with her?'

I wanted to tell him to mind his own business. But that's what he was doing. Privacy didn't count for much in these situations, I knew that well enough.

'No.'

He stared at me without saying anything. I looked back at him. After a moment he took a packet of mints from his pocket. As he unhurriedly put one in his mouth I noticed the odd-shaped mole on his neck.

He put the mints back without offering me one. 'So you weren't in a relationship with her? Just good friends, is that it?'

'We knew each other, that's all.'

'But you still felt compelled to come out to see if she was all right. No-one else.'

'She lives out here by herself. It's pretty isolated even by our standards.'

'Why didn't you phone her?'

That stopped me. 'It didn't occur to me.'

'Does she have a mobile?' I told him she did. 'Do you have her number?'

It was in my phone memory. I scrolled to it, knowing what he was going to ask and feeling stupid for not having thought of it myself.

'Shall I ring it?' I offered, before he could say anything.

'Why don't you?'

I could feel him watching me as I waited for the connection to be made. I wondered what I would say if she answered. But I didn't really think she would.

The bedroom window opened in the house. The police sergeant leaned out.

'Sir, there's a phone ringing in a handbag.'

We could hear it faintly from behind him, a tinkling electronic tune. I rang off. In the house the notes stopped. Mackenzie nodded to him. 'All right, it was just us. Carry on.'

The sergeant disappeared. Mackenzie rubbed his chin. 'Doesn't prove anything,' he said.

I didn't answer.

He sighed. 'Christ, this bloody heat.' It was the first sign he'd given that it bothered him. 'Come on, let's get out of the sun.'

We went to stand in the shadow of the house.

'Do you know of any family?' he asked. 'Anyone who might know where Miss Palmer is?'

'Not really. She inherited this place, but as far as I know she doesn't have any more family in the area.'

'How about friends? Apart from yourself.'

There might have been a barb there, but it was difficult to tell. 'She knew people in the village. But I don't know of anyone in particular.'

'Boyfriends?' he asked, watching for my reaction.

'I wouldn't know. Sorry.'

He grunted, looking at his watch.

'So what happens next?' I asked. 'Will you check if the DNA from the body matches a sample from the house?'

He regarded me. 'You seem to know a lot about it.'

I could feel my face reddening. 'Not really.'

I was glad when he didn't pursue it. 'We don't know this is a crime scene yet anyway. We've got a woman who may or may not be missing, that's all. There's nothing to link her to the body that's been found.'

'What about the dog?'

'Could have been killed by another animal.'

'From what I could see the wound in its throat looks like a cut, not a tear. It was made by a sharp edge.'

Again he gave me that appraising look, and I kicked myself for saying too much. I was a doctor now. Nothing else. 'I'll see what the forensic boys say,' he told me. 'But even if it was, she could have killed it herself.'

'You don't really think that.'

He seemed about to retort, then thought better of it. 'No. No, I don't. But I'm not going to jump to conclusions, either.'

The house door opened. The sergeant emerged, giving a shake of his head. 'Nothing. But the lights had been left on in the hallway and lounge.'

Mackenzie nodded, as if that were what he'd expected. He turned to me. 'We'll not keep you any longer, Dr Hunter. Someone'll be around to get your statement. And I'd appreciate it if you didn't talk about this to anyone.'

'Of course not.' I tried not to feel annoyed that he'd even asked. He was turning away, speaking with the sergeant. I started to go, then hesitated.

'Just one thing,' I said. He glanced at me, irritably. 'That mole on your neck. It's probably nothing, but it might not hurt to get it checked out.'

I left them staring after me as I went back to the car.

I drove back to the village feeling numbed. The road cut past Manham Water, the shallow lake or 'broad' that each year lost a little more of itself to the encroaching reedbeds. Its surface was mirror still, fragmented only by a flight of geese that descended onto it. Neither the lake nor the choked creeks and dykes that cut through the marshes to it were navigable, and with no river close to the village Manham was bypassed by the boat and tourist traffic that descended on the rest of the Broads during summer. Although only a few miles separated it from its neighbours, it seemed to belong to a different part of Norfolk, older and less hospitable. Surrounded by woodland, bog-like fens and poorly drained marshland, it was a literal as well as figurative backwater. Apart from the occasional birdwatcher the village was left to itself, sinking further into its isolation like an antisocial old man.

Perversely, this evening Manham looked almost cheery in the sunshine. The flowerbeds in the church and village green were like punches of colour, so bright they hurt. They were one of Manham's few sources of pride, scrupulously maintained by old George Mason and his grandson Tom, the two gardeners I'd met when I'd first arrived. On the edge of the green, even the Martyr's Stone had been garlanded with flowers by the local schoolchildren. It was an annual event, decorating the old millstone where in the sixteenth century a woman had supposedly been stoned to death by her neighbours. The story went that she'd cured an infant of some palsy, only to be accused of witchcraft. Henry joked that only Manham could martyr someone for doing a good turn, and claimed there was a lesson there for both of us.

I didn't feel like going home, so I headed for the surgery. I often went there, even when I didn't have to. At times my cottage could feel lonely, whereas at the big house there was always at least the illusion of work, if nothing else. I let myself into the back door that led into the self-contained clinic. An old conservatory, dense and humid with plants that Janice lovingly tended, served as a reception and waiting room. Part of the ground floor had been converted into Henry's private living quarters. But that was at the other end of the house, which was more than big enough to accommodate all of us. I'd taken over his old consulting room, and as I closed the door behind me the scent of old wood and beeswax was calming. Even though I'd been using it almost every day since I'd arrived it was still more a distillation of Henry's personality than mine, with its old hunting oil, roll-top desk and leather-seated captain's chair. The bookshelves were filled with his old medical books and journals, as well as less obvious subjects for a village GP. There were texts by Kant and Nietzsche, and an entire shelf given over to psychology — one of Henry's hobby-horses. My only contribution to the room was the computer monitor that hummed quietly on the desk, an innovation Henry had disgruntledly acquiesced to after months of persuasion.

He never had recovered enough to return to work full-time. Like his wheelchair, my temporary contract had developed into something more permanent. It had been first extended, then changed into a partnership when it became apparent that he would no longer be able to run the practice solo. Even the old Land Rover Defender I now drove had once been his. It was a battered old automatic, bought after the car crash that had left him a paraplegic and killed his wife Diana. Buying it had been a statement of intent, when he still clung to the hope of being able to drive — and walk — again. But he never had. Or ever would, the doctors had assured him.

'Idiots. Put someone in a white coat and they think they're God,' he'd scoffed.

Eventually, though, even Henry had to accept that they were right. And so I'd inherited not just the Land Rover, but bit by bit most of the practice as well. We'd split the workload more or less equally to begin with, but increasingly more and more of it had been left to me. That didn't stop him remaining 'the proper doctor' in most people's eyes, but I'd given up minding long ago. I was still a newcomer as far as Manham was concerned, and probably always would be.

Now, in the late-afternoon heat, I tried visiting a few medical websites, but my heart wasn't in it. I stood up and went to open the French windows. The fan on my desk whirred, noisily stirring the turgid air without cooling it. Even with the windows open, the difference was purely psychological. I stared out across the neatly tended garden. Like everything else it was parched; shrubs and grass almost visibly withering in the heat. The lake ran right up to the garden's border, with only a low embankment as protection from the inevitable winter flooding. Moored to a small jetty was Henry's old dinghy. It was little more than a glorified rowing boat, but Manham Water wasn't deep enough for anything else. It was hardly the Solent, and there were still areas that were too shallow or clogged with reeds to venture into, but both of us enjoyed going out on it even so.

There was no chance of raising a sail today, though. The lake was so still there was no movement at all. From this angle there was only a scribble of distant reeds separating it from the sky. All was flatness and water, an emptiness that, depending on your mood, could be either restful or desolate.

I didn't find it restful now.

'Thought I heard you.'

I turned as Henry wheeled himself into the room. 'Just sorting out a few things,' I said, pulling my thoughts back from where they'd wandered.

'Like a bloody oven in here,' he muttered, stopping in front of the fan. Except for the non-use of his legs he looked the picture of health; creamy-white hair over a tanned face and keen dark eyes.

'So what's this about the Yates boys finding a body? Janice was full of it when she brought my lunch.'

Most Sundays Janice would deliver a covered plate with whatever she'd cooked for herself. Henry insisted he was capable of cooking Sunday lunch himself, but I noticed he rarely put up much of a struggle. Janice was a good cook, and I suspected her feelings for Henry went beyond those of housekeeper. Unmarried herself, I guessed her disapproval of his late wife stemmed mainly from jealousy, although she'd hinted more than once at some old scandal. I'd made it clear I didn't want to know. Even if Henry's marriage hadn't been the idyllic affair he now seemed to recall, I'd no interest in raking over the bones of gossip.

But I wasn't surprised that Janice knew about the body. Half the village would be buzzing with the news by now.

'Over by Farnham Wood,' I told him.

'Some birdwatcher, probably. Yomping around with a backpack in this heat.'

'Probably.'

His dark eyebrows went up at my tone. 'What, then? Don't tell me we might have a murder? That'd liven things up a bit!' His smile faded when I didn't join in. 'Something tells me I shouldn't joke about it.'

I told him about my visit to Sally Palmer's house, hoping talking about it might make it seem less of a possibility. It didn't.

'Good Christ,' Henry said heavily, when I'd finished. 'And the police think it might be her?'

'They didn't say one way or the other. I don't suppose they can, yet.'

'God, what a bloody thing to happen.'

'It might not be her.'

'No, of course not,' he agreed. But I could see he didn't believe it any more than I did. 'Well, I don't know about you, but I could do with a drink.'

'Thanks, but I'll give it a miss.'

'Saving yourself for the Lamb later?'

The Black Lamb was the village's only pub. I often went there, but I knew that this evening the main topic of conversation wouldn't be one I wanted to join in.

'No, I think I'll just stay at home tonight,' I told him.

My house was an old stone cottage on the outskirts of the village. I'd bought it when it became obvious I'd be staying longer than six months after all. Henry had told me I was welcome to stay with him, and God knows Bank House was certainly big enough. Its wine cellar alone could have swallowed my cottage. But I'd been ready to move into my own place, to feel I was putting down permanent roots rather than continue as a lodger. And as much as I enjoyed my new work, I didn't want to live with it. There were times when it was still good to be able to close the door and walk away, and hope the phone didn't ring for a few hours at least.

This was one of them. A few people were drifting up the churchyard path for the evening service as I drove by on my way home. Scarsdale, the vicar, was in the church doorway. He was an elderly, dour man I couldn't pretend to like very much. But he'd been here for years and had a loyal, if small, congregation. I raised my hand to acknowledge Judith Sutton, a widow who lived with her adult son Rupert, an overweight hulk who always trudged along two paces behind his overbearing mother. She was talking to Lee and Marjory Goodchild, a prim couple of hypochondriacs who were regulars at the surgery. They regarded me as on-call twenty-four hours a day, and I hoped I wouldn't be flagged down now for an impromptu consultation.

But this evening neither they nor anyone else stopped me. I parked on the baked earth at the side of the cottage and let myself in. It was stuffy inside. I opened the windows as wide as they'd go and helped myself to a beer from the fridge. I might not have wanted to go to the Lamb, but I still needed a drink. In fact, realizing just how badly I needed one, I put the beer back and poured myself a gin and tonic instead.

I broke some ice into the glass, added a wedge of lemon and drank it at the small wooden table in the back garden. It looked out across a field onto woods, but if the view wasn't as spectacular as from the surgery, neither was it quite such a daunting landscape. I took my time over the gin, then cooked myself an omelette and ate it outside. The heat was finally ebbing from the day. I sat at the table as the sky slowly deepened and the stars began making their first hesitant appearance. I thought about what was going on a few miles away. The activity there would now be around the once peaceful stretch of country where the Yates boys had made their discovery. I tried to visualize Sally Palmer safe and laughing somewhere, as if thinking about it would make it so. But for some reason I couldn't hold a picture of her in my mind.

Putting off the moment when I would have to go to bed and face sleep, I stayed there until the sky had darkened to velvet indigo, pierced by the brilliant flickering of stars, a random semaphore of long-dead flecks of light.

I jerked awake, sweat-drenched and gasping. I stared around, with no idea where I was. Then awareness draped itself on me again. I was naked, standing by the open bedroom window, its lower edge pressing into my thighs as I leaned out into space. I backed away, unsteadily, and sat on the bed. Its crumpled white sheets were almost luminous in the moonlight. The tears dried slowly on my face as I waited for my heart to slow back to normal.

I'd had the dream again.

It had been a bad one. As always, it had been so vivid that waking seemed like the illusion, my dream the reality. That was the cruellest part. Because in the dreams Kara and Alice, my wife and six-year-old daughter, were still alive. I could still see them, speak to them. Touch them. In the dreams I could believe we still had a future, not just a past.

I dreaded them. Not in the sense that you would fear a nightmare, because there was nothing fearful about them in themselves. No, it was exactly the opposite.

I dreaded them because I had to wake up.

Then the shock of grief, of loss, would be just as fresh as when it first happened. Often I would wake to find myself somewhere else, my somnambulent body having operated without any awareness on my part. Standing, like now, by the open window, or at the top of the steep and unforgiving stairs, with no memory of getting there or what subconscious urge might have steered me.

I shivered, despite the cloying warmth of the night air. From outside came the lonely barking of a fox. After a while I lay down and stared at the ceiling until the shadows faded and the dark ebbed away.

4

The mist was still rolling off the marshes when the young woman closed the door behind her and set off on her morning run. Lyn Metcalf ran with an easy athleticism. The pull in her calf muscle was healing nicely, but she still took it easy at first, falling into relaxed, loping strides as she ran along the narrow lane from her house. Partway down she cut off onto an overgrown track that led across marshland to the lake.

Long grass stalks whipped at her legs as she ran, still wet and cold with dew. She took a deep breath, savouring the feeling. Monday morning or not, she couldn't think of a better start to a new week. This was her favourite time of day, before she had to worry about balancing the accounts of farmers and small businesses who resented her advice, before the day developed a less optimistic shape, before other people had a chance to sully it. All was fresh and sharp, reduced to the rhythmic thump of her feet on the track and the even rasp of her breathing.

At thirty-one Lyn was proud of her condition. Proud of the discipline that kept her in shape, and meant she still looked good in the tight shorts and cropped top. Not that she would be smug enough to admit that to anybody. Besides, she enjoyed it, and that made it easier. Enjoyed pushing herself, seeing how far she could go, and then trying for that extra bit further. If there was a better start to the day than pulling on a pair of running shoes and putting in the miles while the world came alive around her she'd yet to find it.

Well, OK, except sex, of course. And the edge had gone from that lately. Not that it wasn't still good — just the sight of Marcus showering off the day's plaster dust, the water flattening the dark hair on his body to an otter's pelt, could still produce a coiling in her belly. But when there was a point behind it besides pleasure it tended to blunt the enjoyment for both of them. Especially when it had come to nothing.

So far.

She leapt over a deep rut in the track without breaking stride, careful not to lose her rhythm. Lose my rhythm, she thought, sourly. I wish. When it came to rhythms her body was as regular as clockwork. Every month without fail, almost to the day, the hated flow of blood would begin, signalling the end of another cycle and a fresh disappointment. The doctors had said there was nothing wrong with either of them. For some people it just took longer than others; no-one knew why. Keep trying, they said. And they had, eagerly at first, laughing at being given medical approval for doing something they both enjoyed anyway. Almost like getting it on prescription, Marcus had joked. But the jokes had gradually petered out, replaced by something that wasn't quite desperation, not yet. But the embryonic beginnings of that, if nothing else, were forming. And it was starting to colour everything else, to taint every aspect of their relationship.

Not that either of them admitted it. It was there, though. She knew Marcus found it hard enough that she earned more from her small accountancy practice than he did as a builder. The recriminations hadn't started yet, but she was frightened they might. And she knew she was as capable of hitting out as Marcus. Outwardly, they'd reassured each other that there was nothing to worry about, that there was no rush. But they'd been trying for years, and in another four she'd be thirty-five, the age she'd always claimed would be her cut-off point. She did a quick sum. That's forty-eight more menstruations. It seemed frighteningly close. Forty-eight more potential disappointments. Except that this month was different. This month the disappointment was three days late.

She quickly closed down the burst of hope she felt. It was too soon for that. She'd not even told Marcus that her period hadn't started. No point raising his hopes for nothing. She would give it a few more days, then take a test. That thought alone was enough to send a flutter of nerves through her stomach. Run, don't think, she told herself, firmly.

The sun was coming up now, burnishing the sky directly ahead. The track ran along an embankment by the lake, cutting through reedbeds as it headed for a dark expanse of woods. Mist curled slowly on the water, as if it were about to combust. The sound of a fish jumping broke the silence with an invisible slap. She loved this. Loved summer, loved the landscape. Even though she'd been born here, she'd still been away to university, travelled abroad. But she'd always come back. God's own country, her dad always said. She didn't believe in God, not really, but she knew what he meant.

She was coming to her favourite part of the run now. A path forked off into the woods, and Lyn followed it. She slowed her pace as the trees closed in overhead, closeting her in shadows. It was all too easy to trip over a root in the dim light. It had been a stumble over one of them that had made her pull the muscle in her leg, and she'd gone almost two months before she could run again.

But the low sun was already starting to pierce the gloom, turning the canopy of leaves into a glowing latticework. The woodland here was ancient, a wilderness of creeper-strangled trunks and swampy, treacherous ground. Cutting through it was a warren of meandering paths that could lure the unwary into its depths. When they'd first moved into the house Lyn had made the mistake of exploring it during one of her morning runs. It had been hours before she'd emerged onto a familiar stretch by pure luck. Marcus had been frantic — and furious — when she'd finally made it back home. Since then she'd kept to the same path going both in and out.

The halfway point for her six-mile route was a small clearing, in the centre of which was an old standing stone. It might have been part of a stone circle once, or just a gatepost. No-one knew any more. Overgrown with lichen and grass, its history and secrets were long forgotten. But it was a convenient marker, and Lyn had fallen into the habit of patting its rough surface before setting off back. The clearing wasn't far now, a few minutes at most. Breathing deeply but steadily, Lyn thought about breakfast to goad herself to run faster.

She wasn't sure when the unease started. It was more a growing awareness, a subliminal itch that finally tipped into conscious thought. Suddenly, the woods seemed unnaturally quiet. Oppressive. The thud of her feet on the path sounded too loud in the stillness. She tried to ignore the feeling, but it persisted. Grew stronger. She fought the temptation to look around. What the hell was the matter with her? It wasn't as if she hadn't done this run most mornings for the past two years. She'd never been bothered before.

But she was now. The back of her neck prickled, as though something was watching her. Don't be stupid, she told herself. But the urge to look back was growing. She kept her eyes on the path. The only other living thing she'd ever seen here was a deer. This didn't feel like a deer, though. That's because it isn't. It's nothing. Just your imagination. Your period's three days late and you're letting it get to you.

The thought distracted her, but only briefly. She risked a quick glance, had time to see only dark branches and the path twisting out of sight before her foot stubbed against something. She stumbled, windmilling her arms for balance, heart thumping as she just managed to keep upright. Idiot! The clearing was just ahead of her now, an oasis of dappled sunbeams in the choked woodland. She put on an extra spurt of speed, slapped her hand onto the rough surface of the standing stone and quickly turned around.

Nothing. Just the trees, shadowed and brooding.

What did you expect? Pixies? But she didn't leave the clearing. There was no birdsong, no whisper of insects. The wood seemed to hold its breath in pensive silence. Lyn was suddenly afraid to break it, loath to leave the clearing's sanctuary and feel the trees close in around her again. So what are you going to do? Stay here all day?

Without giving herself time to think, she pushed off from the stone again. Five minutes and she'd be back out in the open. Open fields, open water, open sky. She pictured it in her mind. The unease was still there, but less urgent. And the shadowy woods were growing lighter, the sun throwing its light ahead of her now. She began to relax, and that was when she saw something on the ground ahead of her.

She stopped a few feet away. Splayed out on the centre of the path like an offering was a dead rabbit. No, not a rabbit. A hare, its soft fur matted with blood.

It hadn't been there before.

Lyn quickly looked around. But the trees offered no clue as to where it had come from. She stepped around it, then broke into a run again. A fox, she told herself, as she settled back into her rhythm. She must have disturbed it. But a fox wouldn't have left its prey behind, disturbed or not. And the hare didn't look as if it had been just dropped. The way it was laid out looked…

Looked deliberate.

That was stupid, though. She pushed the thought from her mind as she pounded down the path. And then she was out of the wood and back in the open, with the lake spread out before her. The anxiety she'd felt a few minutes before sloughed away, fading with every step. In the sunlight it seemed absurd. Embarrassing, even.

Later, her husband Marcus would remember that the local news was on the radio as she came in. As he put bread in the toaster and chopped a banana he told Lyn that a body had been found only a few miles away. It must have sparked a connection, even then, because she told him about finding the dead hare. But she'd laughed about it, making a joke of how it had spooked her. As the bread popped out of the toaster the incident already seemed insignificant to both of them.

When she came back from the shower, it wasn't mentioned again.

5

I was halfway through the morning surgery when Mackenzie arrived. Janice brought the news along with the next patient's notes. Her eyes were wide with intrigue.

'There's a policeman here to see you. A Chief Inspector Mackenzie.'

For some reason I wasn't surprised. I looked down at the patient's notes. Ann Benchley, an eighty-year-old woman with chronic arthritis. A regular.

'How many more are there to see?' I asked, stalling.

'Another three after this.'

'Tell him I won't be long. And tell Mrs Benchley to come through.'

She looked surprised, but said nothing. By now I doubted there was anyone in the village who didn't know that a body had been found the day before. But so far no-one seemed to have made the connection with Sally Palmer. I wondered how long it would stay that way.

I pretended to study the notes until Janice had gone. I knew Mackenzie wouldn't have come unless it was important, and I doubted any of that morning's patients were urgent cases. I wasn't sure why I was keeping him waiting, other than a deep reluctance to hear whatever he had to say.

I tried not to think what it might be as I saw my next patient. I looked sympathetic as Mrs Benchley displayed her gnarled hands, made the soothing and ultimately useless noises expected of me as I wrote her another prescription, and smiled vaguely as she hobbled out, satisfied. After that, though, I couldn't put it off any longer.

'Send him in,' I told Janice.

'He doesn't look very happy,' she warned me.

No, Mackenzie didn't look very happy. There was an angry flush to his face, and his jaw jutted truculently.

'Good of you to see me, Dr Hunter,' he said, his sarcasm barely concealed. He carried a leather folder. He held it on his lap as he sat down opposite me, uninvited.

'What can I do for you, Inspector?'

'Just a couple of points I'd like to clarify.'

'Have you identified the body?'

'Not yet.'

He took out the packet of mints and popped one in his mouth. I waited. I'd known enough policemen not to be discomforted by the games they played.

'I didn't think places like this were around any more. You know, small, family doctor, home visits, all that sort of thing,' he said, looking around. His eyes settled on the bookshelves. 'Lot of stuff on psychology, I see. That an interest of yours?'

'They're not mine, they're my partner's.'

'Ah. So how many patients do the two of you have?'

I wondered where this was going. 'Five, six hundred altogether, perhaps.'

'As many as that?'

'It's a small village but a big area.'

He nodded, as if this were just a normal conversation. 'Bit different to being a GP in a city.'

'I suppose so.'

'Miss London, do you?'

I knew then what was coming. Again, no real surprise. Just a sense of a weight settling onto my shoulders. 'Perhaps you'd better tell me what you want.'

'I did some research after we spoke yesterday. My being a policeman and all.' He gave me a cool stare. 'You've an impressive CV, Dr Hunter. Not the sort of thing you'd imagine for a village GP.'

Unzipping the folder, he made a show of leafing through the papers in it. 'Took your medical certificate then switched to a PhD in anthropological science. Quite a high-flier, according to this. Followed that with a stint in the States at the University of Tennessee before coming back to the UK as a specialist in forensic anthropology.'

He cocked his head. 'You know, I wasn't even sure what forensic anthropology was, and I've been a policeman for nearly twenty years. I could manage the "forensic" bit, of course. But anthropology? I always thought that was studying old bones. Bit like archaeology. Shows how things can slip by you.'

'I don't like to rush you, but I've got patients waiting.'

'Oh, I won't take any longer than I have to. But while I was on the internet I also found some papers you'd written. Interesting titles.' He picked up a sheet of paper. ' "The Role of Entomology in Time-Since-Death Analysis". "The Chemistry of Human Decomposition".'

He lowered the paper. 'Pretty specialist stuff. So I phoned a friend of mine in London. He's an inspector with the Met. Turned out he'd heard of you. Surprise, surprise, it looks like you've worked as a consultant for various police forces on quite a few murder investigations. England, Scotland, even Northern Ireland. My contact said you were one of the few registered forensic anthropologists in the country. Worked on mass graves in Iraq, Bosnia, the Congo. You name it. According to him you were pretty much the expert when it came to human remains. Not just identifying them, but how long they'd been dead, what they'd died of. He said you picked up where pathologists left off.'

'Is there a point to this?'

'The point is I can't help but wonder why you didn't mention any of this yesterday. When you knew we'd found a body, when you found evidence it could be a local woman, when you knew we would want to identify who it was as soon as bloody possible.' He kept his voice level, though his face had grown redder than ever. 'My friend at the Met thought it was highly amusing. Here am I, the senior investigating officer of a murder inquiry, with one of the country's leading forensic experts in front of me pretending to be a GP'

I didn't let the fact he'd finally called it a murder distract me. 'I am a GP.'

'But that's not all you are, is it? So why the big secret?'

'Because what I used to do doesn't matter. I'm a doctor now.'

Mackenzie was studying me as if trying to decide if I was joking or not. 'I made some other phone calls after that one. I know that you've only been practising as a GP for three years. Packed in forensic anthropology and came out here after your wife and daughter died in a car crash. Drink-driver in the other car survived unhurt.'

I sat very still. Mackenzie had the grace to look uncomfortable. 'I don't want to open old wounds. Perhaps if you'd been straight with me yesterday I wouldn't have had to. But the bottom line is we need your help.'

I knew he wanted me to ask how, but I didn't. He went on anyway.

'The condition of the body's making it difficult to identify. We know it's female, but that's all. And until we've got an ID we're pretty much hamstrung. We can't start a proper murder investigation unless we know for certain who the victim is.'

I found myself speaking. 'You said "for certain". You're already pretty sure, aren't you?'

'We still haven't been able to trace Sally Palmer.'

It was only what I'd been expecting, but it still shook me to hear it confirmed.

'Several people remember seeing her at the pub barbecue, but so far we haven't found anyone who can recall seeing her since,' Mackenzie continued. 'That's nearly a fortnight ago. We've taken DNA samples from the body and the house, but it'll be a week before we get any results.'

'What about fingerprints?'

'Not a chance. We can't say yet if that's down to decomposition or if they've been deliberately removed.'

'Dental records, then.'

He shook his head. 'There aren't enough teeth left to get a match.'

'Someone broke them?'

'You could say that. Could have been done deliberately to prevent us identifying the body, or just a by-product of the injuries. We don't know yet.'

I rubbed my eyes. 'So it's definitely murder?'

'Oh, she was murdered, right enough,' he said, grimly. 'The body's too badly decomposed to know if she was sexually abused as well, but the assumption is that she probably was. And then somebody killed her.'

'How?'

Without answering, he took a large envelope from the folder and dropped it on the desk. The shiny edges of photographs peeped out. My hand was reaching for them before I realized what I was doing.

I pushed the envelope away. 'No thanks.'

'I thought you might want to see for yourself.'

'I've already told you I can't help.'

'Can't or won't?'

I shook my head. 'I'm sorry.'

He regarded me for a moment longer, then abruptly stood up. 'Thank you for your time, Dr Hunter.' His voice was cold.

'You've forgotten this.' I held out the envelope.

'Keep it. You might want to look at them later.'

He went out. I still had the envelope in my hand. All I had to do was slide out the photographs. Instead I opened a drawer and dropped it inside. I closed the drawer and told Janice to send in the next patient.

But the envelope's presence stayed with me for the rest of the morning. I could feel its tug throughout every conversation, each examination. After the last patient had closed the door I tried to distract myself by writing up his notes. Those finished, I went and stared out of the French doors. Two home visits, and then I had the afternoon to myself. If there had been a breath of wind I could have taken the dinghy out on the lake. But as it was I'd only be as becalmed on the water as I felt now, on dry land.

I'd felt curiously numb as Mackenzie had dredged up my past. He might have been talking about someone else. And in a way he was. It was a different David Hunter who had immersed himself in the arcane chemistry of death, seen the end product of countless incidents of violence, accident and nature combined. I'd looked on the skull beneath the skin as a matter of course, priding myself on knowledge that few other people were even aware existed. What happened to the human body when life had left it held little mystery for me. I was intimate with decay in all its forms, could chart its progress depending on the weather, the soil, the time of year. Grim, yes, but necessary. And I took a magician's satisfaction in identifying when, how, who. That these were individuals I was dealing with I never forgot. But only in an abstract sense; I knew these strangers only in death, not in life.

And then the two people I cherished more than anything else in this world had been snatched from me. My wife and daughter, snuffed out in an instant by a drunk who had walked away from the crash unscathed. Kara and Alice, both transformed in a moment from living, vital individuals to dead organic matter. And I knew — I knew — exactly what physical metamorphosis they would be undergoing, almost to the hour. But that failed to answer the single question that had come to obsess me, and to which all my knowledge couldn't even begin to find an answer. Where were they? What had happened to the life that had been within them? How could all that animation, that spirit, simply cease to exist?

I didn't know. And that not knowing was more than I could bear. My colleagues and friends were understanding, but I hardly noticed. I would have gladly plunged myself into my work, except that was a constant reminder of what I'd lost, and the questions I couldn't answer.

And so I ran. Turned my back on everything I'd known, relearned my old medical training and hid away out here, miles from anywhere. Given myself, if not a life, exactly, then a new career. One that dealt with the living rather than the dead, where I could at least try to delay that final transformation, even if I was no closer to understanding it. And it had worked.

Until now.

I went to my desk and opened the drawer. I took out the photographs, keeping them face down. I would look, then give them back to Mackenzie. I still wasn't committing to anything, I rationalized, and turned them over.

I hadn't known how I'd feel, but what I hadn't banked on was the familiarity of it all. Not so much because of what the images showed — God knows that was shocking enough. But the fact of looking at them was like taking a step back in time. Without even realizing it, I began studying them for what they might tell me.

There were six photographs, taken from different angles and viewpoints. I leafed through them quickly, then went back to the start and looked at each one again in more detail. The body was naked and lying face down, arms stretched out above it as though it were in the act of taking a dive into the long stalks of marsh grass. It was impossible to tell its sex from the photographs. The darkened skin hung off the body like badly fitting leather, but that wasn't what caught the eye. Sam had been right. He'd said that the body had wings, and so it had. Two deep cuts had been sliced into the flesh either side of the spine.

Thrust into them, giving the body the look of a fallen, decaying angel, were white swan wings.

Set against the decaying skin, the effect was shockingly obscene. I looked at them for a while longer, then studied the body itself. Maggots spilled like rice from the wounds. Not just the two large ones on the shoulder blades but from numerous smaller gashes on the back, arms and legs. The decomposition was well advanced. Heat and humidity would have accelerated the process, and animals and insects speed it further. But each factor would have its own story to tell, each one helping to provide a timetable of how long it had lain there.

The last three photographs were of the body after it had been turned over. There were the same small cuts on the body and limbs, and the face was a shapeless mess of splintered bone. Below it the exposed cartilage of the throat, harder and slower to decompose than the softer tissue that had covered it, gaped wide where it had been slashed open. I thought about Bess, Sally's Border collie. The dog's throat had also been cut. I went through the photographs one more time. When I found myself looking for anything recognizable about the body, I put the photographs down. I was still sitting there when a rap sounded on the door.

It was Henry. 'Janice told me the police had been. Locals been buggering the livestock again?'

'It was just about yesterday.'

'Ah.' He sobered. 'Any problem?'

'Not really.'

Which wasn't really the truth. I felt uncomfortable keeping anything from Henry, but I hadn't gone into all the details about my background. While he knew I'd been an anthropologist, it was a broad enough field to cover any number of sins. The forensic aspect of my work, and my involvement in police investigations, I'd kept to myself. It hadn't been something I'd wanted to talk about.

It still wasn't.

His eyes went to the photographs lying on the desk. He was too far away to make out any detail, but I felt as though I'd been caught out, all the same. He raised his eyebrows as I put them back in the envelope.

'Can we talk about it later?' I said.

'Of course. I didn't mean to pry.'

'You weren't. It's just… there are a few things I need to think about right now.'

'Are you OK? You seem a little… preoccupied.'

'No, I'm fine.'

He nodded, but the look of concern didn't fade. 'How about taking the dinghy out some time? Bit of exercise will do us both good.'

Although he needed help getting in and out of the boat, Henry's disability didn't prevent him from rowing or sailing once he was on board. 'You're on. But give me a few days.'

I could tell he wanted to ask more, but thought better of it. He wheeled himself back to the door. 'Just say the word. You know where I am.'

When he'd gone I sat back in the chair and closed my eyes. I didn't want this. But then, nobody did. Least of all the dead woman. I thought about the pictures I'd just seen, and realized that, like her, I didn't have a choice.

Mackenzie had left his card with the photographs. But I couldn't reach him on either his office number or mobile. I left messages to call me on both and hung up. I couldn't say I felt better for reaching a decision, but some of the weight seemed to lift from me.

After that, there were the morning's visits to do. Only two, and neither was serious; a child with mumps, and a bedridden elderly man who was refusing to eat. By the time I'd finished it was lunchtime. I was on my way back, debating whether to go home or to the pub, when my phone rang.

I grabbed it, but it was only Janice to tell me that the school had called. They were worried about Sam Yates, and could I go to see him? I said I would. I was glad to do something constructive while I waited for Mackenzie to call.

Back in Manham, the presence of police officers on the streets was a sobering reminder of what had happened. Their uniforms were a stark contrast to the gaiety of the flowers brightening the churchyard and green, and there was a sense of muted but unmistakable excitement about the village. But the school, at least, seemed normal. Although the older children had to travel five miles to the nearest comprehensive, Manham still had its own small primary school. A former chapel, its playground was colour-fully noisy in the bright sunshine. This was the last week of term before the long summer holiday, and the knowledge seemed to give an extra edge to the usual lunchtime hysteria. A little girl bounced off my legs as she dodged another who was chasing her. Giggling, they ran off, so preoccupied in their game that they barely noticed my presence.

I felt the familiar hollowness as I went into the school office. Betty, the secretary, gave me a bright smile as I knocked on the open door.

'Hello, there. You here to see Sam?'

She was a tiny, warm-faced woman who'd lived in the village all her life. Never married, she lived with her brother and treated the schoolchildren as her extended family.

'How is he?' I asked. She wrinkled her nose.

'Bit upset. He's next door in the sick bay. Just go straight in.'

'Sick bay' was a rather grand title for what was in effect a small room with a sink, a couch and a first-aid cabinet. Sam was sitting on the couch, head down and feet dangling. He looked peaky and close to tears.

A young woman was sitting next to him, talking in soothing tones as she showed him a book. She broke off, looking relieved when I walked in.

'Hi, I'm Dr Hunter,' I said to her, then gave the boy a smile. 'How you doing, Sam?'

'He's a bit tired,' the young woman answered for him. 'Apparently he had bad dreams last night. Didn't you, Sam?'

She sounded matter-of-fact, calm without seeming condescending. I guessed she was his teacher, but I hadn't seen her before and her accent was too slight for her to be local. Sam had dropped his chin onto his chest. I squatted down so I was on his eye level.

'That right, Sam? What sort of nightmares?' After seeing the photographs, I could guess. He kept his head down, saying nothing. 'OK, let's take a look at you.'

I didn't expect there to be anything physically wrong with him, and there wasn't. Temperature a little high, perhaps, but that was all. I ruffled his hair as I stood up.

'Strong as an ox. Will you be OK while I have a word with your teacher?'

'No!' he said, panicked.

She gave him a reassuring smile. 'It's all right, we'll be right outside. I'll even leave the door open, and then I'll come right back. OK?'

She gave him the book. After a second he took it, sullenly. I followed her into the corridor. She left the door ajar, as promised, but stood far enough away so we were out of earshot.

'Sorry you had to come out. I didn't know what else to do,' she said in a low voice. 'He got completely hysterical earlier. Not like him at all.'

I thought again about the photographs. 'I suppose you've heard about what happened yesterday?'

She grimaced. 'Everybody's heard. That's the trouble. All the other kids wanted to hear about it. It just got too much for him.'

'Have you sent for his parents?'

'Tried to. Can't get hold of them at any of the contact numbers we have.' She shrugged, apologetically. 'That's why I thought we'd better send for you. I was really worried about him.'

I could see she meant it. I'd have put her in her late twenties or early thirties. Her short-cropped blond hair looked natural, but it was several shades lighter than the dark eyebrows that, at the moment, held an anxious crease. Her face was lightly dusted with freckles, brought out by a faint tan.

'He's had a bad shock. It might take him a while to get over it,' I said.

'Poor Sam. Just when he's got the school holidays coming up as well.' She glanced towards the open door. 'Do you think he's going to need counselling?'

I'd been wondering that myself. If he was no better in a day or two then I'd have to refer him. But I'd been down that route myself, and knew that sometimes picking at a wound only made it bleed all the more. Not a fashionable view, perhaps, but I'd rather give Sam a chance to recover by himself.

'Let's see how he goes. By the end of the week he might be up and running again.'

'I hope so.'

'I think the best thing for now is to get him home,' I told her. 'Have you tried his brother's school? They might know how to get in touch with their parents.'

'No. No-one thought of that.' She looked annoyed with herself.

'Can someone stay with him till they get here?'

'I will. I'll get someone to cover my class.' Her eyes widened. 'Oh, sorry, I should have said! I'm his teacher!'

I smiled. 'I sort of guessed that.'

'God, I've not introduced myself at all, have I?' A blush made her freckles more prominent. 'Jenny. Jenny Hammond.'

She held out her hand, self-consciously. It was warm and dry. I remembered hearing that a new teacher had started earlier that year, but this was the first I'd seen of her. Or so I thought.

'I've seen you in the Lamb once or twice, I think,' she said.

'That's more than possible. The night-life's a bit limited around here.'

She grinned. 'I noticed. Still, that's why you come somewhere like this, isn't it? Get away from it all.' My face must have registered something. 'Sorry, you don't sound local, so I thought…'

'It's all right, I'm not.'

She looked only slightly relieved. 'I'd better get back to Sam, anyway.'

I went back in with her to say goodbye to him and make sure he didn't need a sedative. I would check on him that evening, tell his mother to keep him off school for a few more days, until the raw memory of what he'd seen had sufficiently scabbed over to resist the pokings of his schoolmates.

I was back at the Land Rover when my phone rang. This time it was Mackenzie.

'You left a message,' he said, bluntly.

I spoke in a rush, in a hurry to get rid of the words. 'I'll help you identify the body. But that's all. I'm not going to get involved beyond that, OK?'

'Whatever you like.' He didn't sound exactly gracious, but then neither was my offer. 'So how do you want to play it?'

'I need to see where they found the body.'

'It's already been taken to the mortuary, but I can meet you there in an hour—'

'No, I don't want to see the body itself. Just where it was found.'

I could feel his exasperation down the line. 'Why? What good's that going to do?'

My mouth was dry. 'I'm going to look for leaves.'

6

The heron drifted lazily above the marsh, sliding across the gelid air. It looked too big to be able to stay aloft, a giant compared to the smaller waterfowl its shadow passed over. Angling its wings, it banked down towards the lake, giving two breaking flaps as it landed. With an arrogant shake of its head it picked its way deliberately across the shallows before standing immobile, a fossilized statue on its reed-thin legs.

I turned reluctantly away from it as I heard Mackenzie approach. 'Here,' he said, holding out a sealed plastic bag. 'Put these on.'

I took the white paper overalls from the bag and stepped into them, careful not to rip the flimsy fabric as I tugged them over shoes and trousers. As soon as I zipped them up I could feel myself beginning to sweat. The humid discomfort was disturbingly familiar.

It was like stepping back in time.

I'd been unable to shake a sense of déjà vu ever since I'd met Mackenzie at the same stretch of road where I'd brought the two policemen the day before. Now it was lined with police cars and the big trailers that functioned as mobile incident rooms. After I'd put on the overalls and paper shoes, we walked in silence on the track across the marsh, our route marked by parallel ribbons of police tape. I knew he wanted to ask what I was planning to do, knew also that he thought it was a sign of weakness to let me see his curiosity. But I wasn't holding back out of any misplaced desire to play power games. I was just putting off the moment when I'd have to face up to why I was here.

The area where the body had been found was cordoned off with more tape. Inside it crime scene investigators swarmed over the grass, anonymous and identical in their white overalls. The sight brought another unwelcome jolt of memory.

'Where's the bloody Vicks?' Mackenzie asked no-one in particular.

A woman held out a jar of vapour rub. He put a smear under his nose and offered it to me.

'It's still a bit ripe in there even though the body's gone.'

There had been a time when I was so used to the smells inherent in my work I no longer worried about them. But that was then. I daubed the menthol-smelling Vicks on my top lip and wriggled my hands into a pair of surgical rubber gloves.

'There's a mask if you want it,' Mackenzie said. I shook my head automatically. I'd never liked wearing masks unless I had to. 'Come on then.'

He ducked under the tape. I followed him. The officers on the crime scene team were combing the ground inside. A few small markers stuck into the earth indicated where potential trace evidence had been found. I knew most would turn out to be irrelevant — sweet wrappers, cigarette ends and fragments of animal bone that would have nothing to do with what they were looking for. But at this stage they had no idea what was important and what wasn't. Everything would be bagged and taken away for examination.

We received one or two curious glances, but my attention was on the patch of ground in the centre. The grass here was blackened and dead, almost as if there had been a fire. But it wasn't heat that had killed it. And now something else was noticeable: an unmistakable smell that cut through even the concealing smear of menthol.

Mackenzie flipped a mint into his mouth, put the packet away without offering it. 'This is Dr Hunter,' he told the other officers, teeth cracking the sweet. 'He's a forensic anthropologist. He's going to help us try to identify the body.'

'Well, he's going to have to try harder than this,' one of them said. 'It isn't here.'

There was laughter. This was their job, and they resented anyone else encroaching on it. Especially a civilian. It was an attitude I'd encountered before.

'Dr Hunter's here at the request of Detective Superintendent Ryan. You'll obviously give him any assistance he needs.' There was an edge to Mackenzie's voice. I could see from the suddenly closed faces that it hadn't been well received. It didn't bother me. I was already crouching down by the patch of dead grass.

It held the vague shape of the body that had been lying on it, a silhouette of rot. A few maggots still squirmed, and white feathers were scattered like snowfall on the black and flattened stalks.

I examined one of the feathers. 'Were the wings definitely from a swan?'

'We think so,' one of the crime scene officers said. 'We've sent them to an ornithologist to find out.'

'How about soil samples?'

'Already at the lab.'

The iron content of the soil could be checked to see how much blood it had absorbed. If the victim's throat had been cut where the body was found, the iron content would be high; if not, then either the wound had been made after she was dead, or she'd been killed somewhere else and her body dumped here later.

'What about insects?' I asked.

'We have done this before, you know.'

'I know. I'm just trying to find out how far you've got.'

He gave an exaggerated sigh. 'Yes, we've taken insect samples.'

'What did you find?'

'They're called maggots.'

It raised a few snorts. I looked at him.

'What about pupae?'

'What about them?'

'What colour were they? Pale? Dark? Were there empty shells?'

He just blinked at me, sullenly. There was no laughter now.

'How about beetles? Were there many on the body?'

He stared at me as though I were mad. 'This is a murder inquiry, not a school biology project!'

He was one of the old school. The new breed of crime scene investigators were keen to learn new techniques, open to any knowledge that might help them. But there were still a few who were resistant to anything that didn't fit into their proscribed experience. I'd come across them every now and again. It seemed there were still some around.

I turned to Mackenzie. 'Different insects have different life-cycles. The larvae here are mainly blowfly. Bluebottles and greenbottles. With the open wounds on the body we can expect insects to have been attracted straight away. They'll have started laying eggs within an hour if it was daylight.'

I poked about in the soil and picked up an unmoving maggot. I held it out on my palm. 'This is about to pupate. The older they are the darker they get. By the look of this I'd say it was seven or eight days old. I can't see any husk fragments lying about, which mean no pupae have hatched yet. The blowfly's full life-cycle takes fourteen days, so that suggests the body hasn't been here that long.'

I dropped the pupa back into the grass. The other officers had stopped work to listen now.

'OK, so from basic insect activity you're looking at a preliminary time-since-death interval of between one and two weeks. I take it you know what this stuff here is?' I asked, indicating the traces of yellow-white substance clinging to some of the grass.

'It's a by-product of decomposition,' the crime scene officer said, stiffly.

'That's right,' I said. 'It's called adipocere. Grave wax, as it used to be known. It's basically soap formed from the body's fatty acids as the muscle proteins break down. That makes the soil highly alkaline, which is what kills the grass. And if you look at this white stuff you'll see it's brittle and crumbly. That suggests a fairly rapid decomposition, because if it's slow the adipocere tends to be softer. Which fits in with what you'd expect for a body lying outdoors in hot weather, and with a lot of open wounds for bacteria to invade. Even so, there isn't much of it yet, which again fits with a time-since-death of less than two weeks.'

There was silence. 'How much less?' Mackenzie asked, breaking it.

'Impossible to say without knowing more.' I looked at the decaying vegetation and shrugged. 'Best guess, even allowing for a rapid rate of decomposition, I'd say perhaps nine, ten days. Much longer than that in this heat and the body would have been fully skeletonized by now.'

As I was talking I'd been scanning the dead grass, trying to see what I hoped would be there. 'Which way was the body orientated?' I asked the crime scene officer.

'Which way what?'

'Which end was the head?'

He pointed, sullenly. I visualized the photographs I'd seen, how the arms had been outstretched above the head, and moved to examine the ground around that area. I couldn't find what I wanted on the area of dead grass, so I began to extend my search beyond, carefully parting the grass stalks to see what lay at their base.

I was beginning to think nothing was there, that some scavenging animal had discovered it, when I saw what I'd been looking for.

'Can I have an evidence bag?'

I waited till one was produced, then reached into the grass and gently lifted out a wizened brown scrap. I put it into the bag and sealed it.

'What's that?' Mackenzie asked, craning his head to look.

'When a body's been dead for a week or so you start getting skin slippage. That's why it looks so wrinkled on a corpse, like it doesn't fit properly. Particularly the hands. Eventually the skin will slough completely off, like a glove. It's often overlooked because people don't know what it is and mistake it for leaves.'

I held up the see-through plastic bag containing the parchment-like scrap of tissue.

'You said you wanted fingerprints.'

Mackenzie drew his head sharply back. 'You're joking!'

'No. I don't know if this is from the right or left hand, but the other should be around here as well, unless an animal's had it. I'll leave you to find it.'

The crime scene officer snorted. 'And how are we supposed to get prints off that?' he demanded. 'Look at it! It's like a bloody crisp!'

'Oh, it's easy enough,' I told him, beginning to enjoy it. 'Like it says on the packet, just add water.' He looked blank. 'Soak it overnight. It'll rehydrate and you can slip it onto your hand like a glove. Should give you a decent enough set of prints to get a match from.'

I held the bag out to him. 'I'd get someone with small hands, if I were you. And put rubber gloves on first.'

I left him staring at the bag and ducked under the tape. Reaction was beginning to set in. I stripped off the overalls and protective shoes, glad to be rid of them.

Mackenzie came over as I was wadding them up. He was shaking his head. 'Well, you live and learn. Where the hell did you pick that up from?'

'Over in the States. I spent a couple of years at the anthropology research facility in Tennessee. The Body Farm, as it's called unofficially. It's the only place in the world that uses human cadavers to research decomposition. How long it takes under different conditions, what factors can affect it. The FBI use it to train in body recovery.' I nodded over at the crime scene officer, who was bad-temperedly snapping instructions to the rest of the team. 'We could use something like it over here.'

'Fat chance.' Mackenzie struggled out of his own overalls. 'I hate these bloody things,' he muttered, brushing himself down. 'So you reckon the body's been dead for about ten days?'

I peeled off my gloves. The smell of latex and damp skin brought back more memories than I cared for. 'Nine or ten. But that doesn't mean it's been here all that time. It could have been moved from somewhere else. But I'm sure your forensic boys will be able to tell you that.'

'You could help them.'

'Sorry. I said I'd help you identify the body. This time tomorrow you should have a better idea who it is.' Or isn't, I thought, but kept that to myself.

Mackenzie obviously saw through me. 'We've started serious inquiries now to try and find Sally Palmer,' he said. 'No-one we've spoken to so far has seen her since the pub barbecue. She'd got a grocery order she was supposed to be picking up the next day that she never appeared for. And she usually called into the newsagent's every morning for her papers. Avid Guardian reader, apparently. But she stopped collecting that as well.'

A dark, ugly feeling was beginning to grow in me. 'Nobody reported this till now?'

'Apparently not. Seems like nobody missed her. Everyone thought she must have gone off somewhere, or be busy writing. The newsagent told me it wasn't like she was a local. So much for living in a close-knit community, eh?'

I couldn't say anything. I'd not noticed her absence either. 'It doesn't mean it's her. The barbecue was almost two weeks ago. Whoever you found here hasn't been dead for that long. And what about Sally's mobile phone?'

'What about it?'

'It was still working when I called it. If she'd been missing for all that time, the battery would be dead.'

'Not necessarily. It's a new model, with a standby time of four hundred hours. That's about sixteen days. Probably exaggerated, but just sitting in her bag without being used, it could have lasted.'

'This could still be somebody else,' I persisted, not believing it myself.

'Perhaps.' His tone implied there was something he wasn't going to share with me. 'But whoever it is we need to find who killed her.'

There was no arguing with that. 'Do you think it's somebody local? From the village?'

'I don't think anything yet. Victim could be a hitch-hiker; killer could have just dumped her here as he was passing through. Too soon to say one way or the other.' He drew in a breath. 'Look—'

'The answer's still no.'

'You don't know what I'm going to ask yet.'

'Yes, I do. Just one more favour to help you out. Then it'll be another, and another.' I shook my head. 'I don't do this any more. There are other people in the country who do.'

'Not many. And you were the best.'

'Not any more. I've done what I can.'

His expression was cold. 'Have you?'

Turning, he walked away, leaving me to make my own way back to the Land Rover. I drove away, but only until I was out of sight. My hands were shaking uncontrollably as I pulled into the side of the road. All at once I felt I couldn't breathe. I rested my head on the wheel, trying not to gulp air, knowing if I hyperventilated that would only make it worse.

Finally, the panic attack subsided. My shirt was sticking to me with sweat, but I didn't move until there was a blare of horn from behind me. A tractor was chugging up towards where I was blocking the road. As I looked the driver gestured angrily for me to get out of the way. I held up my hand in apology and set off again.

By the time I reached the village I was beginning to feel calmer. I wasn't hungry but I knew I should eat something. I stopped outside the store that was the closest thing the village had to a supermarket. I was planning to buy a sandwich and take it back home, snatch an hour or two trying to put my thoughts in order before evening surgery started. As I passed the chemist's a young woman came out and almost bumped into me. I recognized her as one of Henry's patients, one of the loyal number who still preferred to wait until they could see him. I'd treated her once, when Henry hadn't been working, but still had to search for her name.

Lyn, I thought. Lyn Metcalf.

'Oh, sorry,' she said, clutching a parcel to her.

'That's all right. How are you, anyway?'

She gave me a huge grin. 'I'm great, thanks.'

As she went off up the street I can remember thinking it was good to see someone so obviously happy. And then I didn't give her another thought.

7

It was later than usual when Lyn reached the embankment that ran through the reedbeds, but the morning was even mistier than the day before. A white smudge overlaid everything, swirling into aimless shapes that remained just out of sight. It would burn off later, and by lunchtime it would have become one of the hottest days of the year. But right now all was cool and damp, and the idea of sun and heat seemed far away.

She felt stiff and out of sorts. She and Marcus had stayed up late the night before to watch a film, and her body was still protesting about it. She'd found it uncharacteristically hard to force herself out of bed that morning, grumbling to Marcus who merely grunted unsympathetically as he locked himself in the shower. Now she was out her muscles felt stiff and grudging. Run it off. You'll feel better for it afterwards. She grimaced. Yeah, right.

To take her mind off how hard the run was proving, she thought about the parcel she'd hidden in the chest of drawers under her bras and pants, where it was a safe bet Marcus wouldn't find it. The only interest he took in her underwear was when she was wearing it.

She hadn't intended to buy the pregnancy testing kit when she went into the chemist's. But when she'd seen them on the shelves, impulse had made her put one into her basket along with the extra box of tampons she hoped she wouldn't be needing. Even then she might have had second thoughts. It was hard enough keeping anything secret in this place, and buying something like that could well mean the entire village would be giving her knowing looks before the day was out.

But the shop was empty, and there had only been a bored young girl on the checkout. She was new, indifferent to anyone over the age of eighteen, and unlikely to even notice what Lyn was buying, let alone care enough to gossip. Face burning, Lyn had stepped forward and busied herself rummaging in her bag for the money as the teenager listlessly rang the testing kit through on the till.

She'd been grinning like a kid when she hurried out, only to bump straight into one of the doctors. The younger one, not Dr Henry. Dr Hunter. Quiet, but not bad-looking. Caused quite a stir among the younger women when he arrived, though he didn't seem to notice it. God, she'd felt so embarrassed; it had been all she could do not to laugh. He must have thought she was mad, beaming at him like an idiot. Or thought she fancied him. The thought of it made her smile again now.

The run was doing its work. She was finally starting to loosen up, kinks and aches easing as the blood began to pump. The woods were just ahead now, and as she looked at them some dark association stirred in her subconscious. At first, still distracted by the memory of what had happened at the chemist, she couldn't place it. Then it came to her. She'd forgotten about the dead hare she'd found on the path the day before until now. And the sense of being watched she'd felt when she'd entered the woods.

Suddenly the prospect of going into them again — especially in this mist — was strangely unappealing. Stupid, she thought, doing her best to dismiss it. Still, she slowed a little as she approached them. When she realized what she was doing she clicked her tongue in irritation and picked up her speed. Only when she had almost reached the treeline did she think about the woman's body that had been found. But that hadn't been near here, she told herself. Besides, the killer would have to be some sort of masochist to be out this early, she thought wryly. And then the first of the trees closed around her.

It was a relief when the foreboding she'd felt the day before failed to materialize. The woods were just woods again. The path was empty, the dead hare no doubt part of the food chain by now. Just nature, that was all. She glanced at the stopwatch on her wrist, saw she'd lost a minute or two on her usual time, and picked up her pace as she approached the clearing. The standing stone was in sight now, a dark shape ahead of her in the mist. She was almost on top of it before it registered that something about it was wrong. Then light and shadow resolved themselves, and all thoughts of running went out of her mind.

A dead bird had been tied to the stone. It was a mallard, bound with wire around its neck and feet. Recovering, Lyn quickly looked around. But there was nothing to see. Only trees, and the dead mallard. She wiped sweat from her eyes and looked at it again. Blood darkened its feathers where the thin strand bit into it. Uncertain whether or not to untie it, she leaned forward to examine the wire more closely.

The bird opened its eyes.

Lyn cried out and stumbled backwards as it began to thrash about, head jerking against the wire pinning its neck. It was damaging itself even more, but she couldn't bring herself to go near the wildly beating wings. Her mind was beginning to function again, making the connection between this and the dead hare, laid on the path as though for her to find. And then that was swept away by a more urgent realization.

If the bird was still alive it couldn't have been here long. Someone had done this recently.

Someone who knew she'd find it.

Part of her insisted that was just fantasy, but she was already sprinting back down the path. Branches whipped her as she pounded past, no thought of pacing herself now, just get out get out get out yelling again and again in her head. She didn't care if she was being stupid or not, wanted only to escape from the woods to the open landscape beyond. Only one more twist in the path and she'd be able to see it. Her breath rasped as she ran, eyes flitting to the trees at either side, expecting someone to appear out of them at any second. But no-one did. She gave a half-moan, half-sob as she neared the final bend. Not far, she thought, and as she felt the first stirrings of relief something snatched her foot out from under her.

There was no time to react. She pitched forward onto the ground, the impact forcing the air from her lungs. She couldn't breathe, couldn't move. Stunned, she managed one breath, then another, sucking the damp scent of loam into her throat. Still dazed, she looked back at what had tripped her. At first what she saw made no sense. One leg was stretched out awkwardly, the foot twisted at an odd angle. There was a thin gleam of fishing line snagged around it. No, she realized, not fishing line.

Wire.

Understanding came too late. As she tried to scramble to her feet a shadow fell across her. Something pressed into her face, smothering her. She tried to rear back from the cloying, chemical stink, fighting with all the strength in her legs and arms. It wasn't enough. And now even that was ebbing. Her struggles grew weak as the morning swam away from her, light bleeding to black. No! She tried to resist, but she was already sinking further into darkness, like a pebble dropped into a well.

Was there a last sense of disbelief before consciousness winked out? Possibly, though it wouldn't have lasted long.

Not long at all.

For the rest of the village, the day broke as any other. Perhaps a little more breathless, excited by the continued presence of the police and speculation about the identity of the dead woman. It was a soap opera come to life, Manham's very own melodrama. Someone had died, yes, but for most people it was still a tragedy at arm's length, and therefore not really a tragedy at all. The unspoken assumption was that it was some stranger. If it had been one of the village's own, wouldn't it have been known? Wouldn't the victim have been missed, the perpetrator recognized? No, far more likely that it was an outsider, some human flotsam from a town or city who had climbed into the wrong car, only to wash up here. And so it was regarded almost as an entertainment, a rare treat that could be savoured without shock or grief.

Not even the fact that the police were asking about Sally Palmer was enough to change that. Everyone knew she was a writer, often travelled to London. Her face was too fresh in people's minds to associate with what had been found on the marsh. So Manham was unable to take any of it seriously, slow to accept the fact that, far from being an onlooker, its role was far more central.

That would change before the day was out.

It changed for me at eleven o'clock that morning, with the phone call from Mackenzie. I'd slept badly, gone into the surgery early to try and shake the vestiges of another night's ghosts from my mind. When the phone on my desk rang and Janice told me who was on the line I felt a renewed tension in my gut.

'Put him through.'

The hiatus of connection seemed endless, yet not long enough.

'We've got a fingerprint match,' Mackenzie said as soon as he came on. 'It's Sally Palmer.'

'Are you sure?' Stupid question, I thought.

'No doubt about it. The prints match samples from her house. And we've got hers on record as well. She was arrested during a protest when she was a student.'

She hadn't struck me as the militant type, but then I hadn't really got to know her. And never would now.

Mackenzie hadn't finished. 'Now we've got a firm ID we can get things moving. But I thought you might be interested to know we still haven't found anyone who can remember seeing her after the pub barbecue.'

He waited, as if I should find some significance in that. It took me a moment to drag my thoughts back. 'You mean the maths don't add up,' I said.

'Not if she's only been dead for nine or ten days. It's looking likely now that she went missing almost a fortnight ago. That leaves several days unaccounted for.'

'That was only an estimate,' I told him. 'I could be wrong. What does the pathologist say?'

'He's still looking into it,' he said, dryly. 'But so far he isn't disagreeing.'

I wasn't surprised. I'd once come across a murder victim who'd been stored in a freezer for several weeks before the killer finally dumped the body, but usually the physical processes of decay worked to an ordered timetable. It might vary depending on the environment, be slowed down or speeded up by temperature and humidity. But once they were taken into account then the process was readable. And what I'd seen at the marsh the day before — I still hadn't made the emotional jump to connecting it with the woman I'd known — had been as irrefutable as the hands on a stopwatch. It was just a matter of understanding it.

That was something few pathologists were comfortable with. There was a degree of overlap between forensic anthropology and pathology, but once serious decomposition started most pathologists tended to throw up their hands. Their area of expertise was cause of death, and that became increasingly difficult to determine once the body's biology started to break down. Which was where my work started.

Not any more, I reminded myself.

'You still there, Dr Hunter?' Mackenzie asked.

'Yes.'

'Good, because this is going to leave us with a predicament. One way or another we need to account for those extra days.'

'She might have been holed up writing. Or just have gone off somewhere. Been called away without having time to tell anyone.'

'And been killed as soon as she got back, without anyone in the village seeing her?'

'It's possible,' I said stubbornly. 'She could have surprised a burglar.'

'She could,' Mackenzie conceded. 'In which case we need to know one way or the other.'

'I don't see where I come into it.'

'What about the dog?'

'The dog?' I repeated, but I could already see what he was getting at.

'It makes sense to assume that whoever killed Sally Palmer killed her dog as well. So the question is, how long has the dog been dead?'

I was torn between being impressed at Mackenzie's sharpness, and irritation that I hadn't seen it myself. Of course, I'd been trying hard not to think about it at all. But there was a time when I wouldn't have needed it pointing out.

'If the dog's been dead roughly the same length of time,' Mackenzie went on, 'then that gives more credence to your burglar. She's either here all the time writing or arrives back from wherever, her dog disturbs an intruder, he kills them both and then dumps her body on the marsh. Or whatever. But if the dog's been dead longer that puts a different complexion on it. Because that means whoever murdered her didn't do it straight away. He kept her prisoner for a few days before getting bored and carving her up with a knife.'

Mackenzie paused to let the impact of his words hit home. 'Now, I'd say that was something we'd need to know, wouldn't you, Dr Hunter?'

Sally Palmer's house had been transformed since the last time I'd seen it. Then it had been silent and empty; now it was host to grim-faced and uninvited visitors. The courtyard had filled with police vehicles, while uniformed and white-boiler-suited forensics officers went about their business. But the activity only seemed to underline the atmosphere of abandonment, transforming what had once been a home into a pathetic time capsule of the recent past, to be picked apart and pored over.

There seemed nothing left of Sally's presence as I walked across the courtyard with Mackenzie.

'The vet came for the goats,' he told me. 'Half of them were already dead, and he had to destroy a couple of others, but he says it's amazing any survived at all. Another day or two would have finished them. Goats are tough buggers, but he reckoned they must have been a couple of weeks without being fed or watered to get to that state.'

The area at the back of the house where I'd found the dog had been taped off, but other than that it was as I'd found it. No-one was in as much of a hurry to move a dog, and either the forensics team had already finished or felt there were other priorities to examine first. Mackenzie stood back and popped a mint into his mouth as I crouched down beside the body. It looked noticeably smaller than I remembered — not necessarily a trick of memory as by this time the decay would be waging an almost visible war of attrition on what was left.

The fur was misleading, disguising the fact that the dog had largely been reduced to bone. Tendons and cartilage remained, like the open tube revealed by the wound in its throat. But there was hardly any soft tissue left. I used a stick to lightly poke in the earth around it, took in the empty eye sockets, and then stood up.

'Well?' Mackenzie asked.

'It's difficult to say. You've got to take into account the smaller body mass. And its fur will have some effect on the rate of decay. I'm not sure what, exactly. The only comparative work I've done on animals was with pigs, and they have a hide, not a pelt. But I'd guess it'd make it harder for insects to lay their eggs, except in open wounds. So that'll probably slow things down.'

I was talking to myself more than him, rapidly brushing through cobwebs of memory, sifting through the knowledge that had been lying dormant.

'What soft tissue was exposed has had animals picking at it. See this here, around the eye sockets? The bone's been gnawed. Too small for foxes, so it's probably rodents and birds. That probably happened quite early on, because once it gets too ripe they'll leave it alone. But that means less soft tissue, and so less insect activity. And the ground here is much drier than the marsh where you found the woman.' I couldn't quite bring myself to say Sally Palmer. 'That's why it looks dried up. In this heat, without moisture it'll mummify. It changes the way the body decays.'

'So you don't know how long it's been dead?' Mackenzie prompted.

'I don't know anything. I'm just pointing out that there are a lot of variables here. I can tell you what I think, but bear in mind it's only a preliminary estimate. You're not going to get any hard and fast answers just from a quick look.'

'But…?'

'Well, there still aren't any empty pupae husks, but some of these look about ready to hatch. They're darker than those we found around the body, obviously older.' I pointed at the open wound in the dog's throat. On the ground around it, a few shiny black carapaces could be seen crawling in the grass. 'There are a few beetles here as well. Not many, but they tend to come later. Flies and maggots are the first wave, if you like. But as the decay progresses the balance changes. Less maggots, more beetles.'

Mackenzie was frowning. 'Were there beetles where Sally Palmer was found?'

'Not that I saw. But beetles aren't as reliable an indicator as maggots. And, like I say, there are all the other variables to take into account.'

'Look, I'm not asking you to swear under oath. I just want some idea of how long the damn thing's been dead.'

'Rough guess.' I looked at the scrap of fur and bone. 'Twelve to fourteen days.'

He chewed his lip, scowling. 'So it was killed before the woman.'

'That's how it looks to me. Comparing this with what I saw yesterday, the decomposition is perhaps three, four days more advanced. Take off the extra day and night this has been lying outside and you're still looking at around three days. But like I say, it's only guesswork at this stage.'

He eyed me, thoughtfully. 'Do you think you're wrong?'

I hesitated. But he wanted advice, not false modesty. 'No.'

He sighed. 'Shit.'

His mobile rang. He unclipped it from his belt and moved away to answer it. I stayed by the dog's body, scrutinizing it for anything that might cause me to revise my opinion. Nothing did. I bent down to take a closer look at its throat. Cartilage lasted longer than soft tissue, but animals had been here too, chewing the edges. Even so, it was still evident that it was a cut, not a bite. I took a pencil light from my pocket, reminding myself to disinfect it before I examined anyone's tonsils again, and shone it inside. The cut extended all the way to the cervical vertebrae. I played the light on a pale line gouged across the bone. No animal had caused that. The blade had gone so deep it had cut into the spine as well.

That made it a big knife. And a sharp one.

'Seen something?'

I'd been too engrossed to hear Mackenzie return. I told him what I'd found. 'If the bone's marked clearly enough you might be able to tell if the blade was serrated or not. In any event, it would have taken strength to cut that deeply. You're looking for a powerful man.'

Mackenzie nodded, but he seemed distracted. 'Look, I've got to go. Take as long as you like here. I'll tell forensics not to disturb you.'

'No need. I'm done.'

'You won't change your mind?'

'I've told you as much as I can.'

'You could tell us more if you wanted to.'

I was beginning to feel angry at the way he was trying to manipulate me. 'We've already been through this. I've done what you asked.'

Mackenzie seemed to be weighing something up. He squinted into the sun. 'The situation's changed,' he said, reaching a decision. 'Someone else has gone missing. You might know her. Lyn Metcalf.'

The name hit me hard. I remembered seeing her outside the chemist's the evening before. Thinking how happy she'd looked.

'Went running this morning and didn't come back,' Mackenzie went on, relentlessly. 'Could be a false alarm, but right now it doesn't look like it. And if it isn't, if this is the same man, then the shit's really going to hit the fan. Because either Lyn Metcalf's already dead, or she's being held somewhere. And given what was done to Sally Palmer, I wouldn't wish that on anybody.'

I almost asked why he was telling me all this, but even as the question formed I knew the answer. On the one hand he was putting more pressure on me to co-operate; on the other, Mackenzie was simply being a policeman. The fact that I'd reported Sally Palmer as missing had put me low on the list of potential suspects, but if there was now a second victim then everything was up in the air again. No-one could be discounted.

Including me.

Mackenzie had been watching to see how I would react. His expression was unreadable. 'I'll be in touch. And I'm sure I needn't ask you to keep this to yourself, Dr Hunter. I know you're good at keeping secrets.'

With that he turned and walked away, his shadow chasing him across the grass like a black dog at his heels.

If Mackenzie had been serious about my keeping Lyn Metcalf's disappearance to myself he needn't have bothered. Manham was too small a place for something like that to remain secret for long. Word had already spread by the time I'd got back from the farm. It came at roughly the same time as news broke that the murdered woman was Sally Palmer, a double blow that was almost too much to take in. Within hours the mood of the entire village had changed from febrile excitement to one of shock. Most people clung to the hope that the two events would prove unconnected, and that the supposed second 'victim' might yet turn up safe and sound.

But it was a hope that faded every hour.

When Lyn didn't return from her run, her husband Marcus had set out to look for her. He admitted later he wasn't unduly worried to start with. At that point, before Sally Palmer's name had been released, his main concern was that his wife might have decided to try a different route and become lost. It had happened before, and as he followed the track towards the lake, it was with a degree of irritation that he called her name. Lyn knew he had a busy day, and now her stupid insistence on an early-morning run was making him late.

He still wasn't too anxious as he crossed the reedbeds and cut into the woods. When he found a dead mallard tied to the standing stone, his first reaction was anger at the senseless cruelty. He'd lived all his life in the country and had no time for sentiment where animals were concerned, but neither did he like casual sadism. Only as he thought of it in those terms did the first chill of fear begin to enter his mind. He told himself that the dead bird couldn't possibly have any connection with Lyn being late. But once there, the fear was impossible to dislodge.

It continued to grow, fed by his echoing shouts that rang unanswered in the trees. By the time he began making his way out of the woods he was fighting to remain calm. Hurrying back towards the lake, he told himself she would probably be waiting for him back at home. And then he saw something that blew away his false hopes like so much dust.

Half-hidden by a tree root was Lyn's stopwatch.

He picked it up, took in the broken strap and cracked face. Fear now giving way to panic, he looked around for some other sign of her. There was nothing. Or, at least, nothing he recognized as such. He saw the thick wooden stake hammered into the ground nearby without realizing its significance. It would be several hours before the police forensic team confirmed it as the remains of a snare, and several more before splashes of Lyn's blood were identified on the path.

But of Lyn herself, there was no trace.

8

It seemed like most of the village turned out to help with the search. At another time, or in different circumstances, it might have been thought that Lyn Metcalf could have left of her own accord. Oh, she and Marcus seemed happy enough, it was generally agreed. But you could never tell. Coming when it did, though, on the heels of the murder of another woman, her disappearance immediately took on a far more sinister aspect. And while the police concentrated their efforts on the woods and area where she'd gone running, virtually everyone who was fit and able wanted to help find her.

It was a beautiful summer evening. As the sun lowered in the sky and swallows dipped and swooped, the atmosphere could almost have been festive, a rare sense of communal unity and resolve. But no-one could forget for long the reason for them being there. And with that came another unpalatable fact.

Whoever had done this was one of Manham's own.

It was no longer possible to blame an outsider. Not any more. It could hardly be an accident, and certainly no coincidence, that the two women came from the same village. No-one could believe that an outsider would have either stayed around after killing Sally Palmer, or come back to claim a second victim. Which meant that whoever had hacked one woman to death and strung wire across a path to snare another had to be local. There was a chance it was someone from a neighbouring village, but that begged the question of why Manham had been the site for both attacks. The other possibility was both more likely and more frightening: that not only did we know the two women, we also knew the animal responsible.

That realization was still taking root as people set out to look for Lyn Metcalf. And although it hadn't yet begun to flower, it was already beginning to put up shoots. It revealed itself as a slight distance in the way people responded to each other. Everyone knew of murders where the killer had taken part in the search. Where they had publicly expressed revulsion and sympathy, even shed reptilian tears, when all the while the victim's blood was barely dry on their hands, the final screams and entreaties locked away to fester in their heart. And even as Manham showed its solidarity as a community, kicking aside long grass and peering under bushes, suspicion was already undermining it from within.

I'd joined the search myself as soon as I finished evening surgery. Its epicentre was the police trailer set up as near to the woods where Marcus Metcalf had found his wife's stopwatch as the road allowed. It was on the outskirts of the village, and cars were pulled into the hedgerows for quarter of a mile either side of it. Some people had just struck off by themselves, but the majority had come here, drawn by the glut of activity. There were a few journalists, but only from the local press. At that point the nationals still hadn't picked up on the story, or perhaps felt that one woman murdered and another abducted wasn't particularly newsworthy. That would soon change, but for the moment Manham was still able to go about its business with relative anonymity.

The police had set up a table to help co-ordinate the public search. It was as much a PR exercise as anything; giving the community a sense that it was doing something and making sure the volunteers didn't get in the way of the professional teams. But the countryside around Manham was so wild that it would be impossible to cover all of it anyway. It could soak up searchers like a sponge without ever giving up its secrets.

I saw Marcus Metcalf standing with a group of men, yet slightly apart from them. He had the undefined muscle bulk of a manual worker, and a face that, under normal circumstances, was pleasant and cheerful under a shock of blond hair. Now he looked haggard, a pallor yellowing his tanned features. With him was Scarsdale, the reverend finally finding a situation that suited the severity of his features. I'd considered going over to express ... what? Sympathy? Condolences? But the hollowness of anything I could say, and memory of how little I'd appreciated the awkward utterances of near strangers myself, prevented me. Instead, leaving him to the reverend's ministrations, I went straight to the table to be told where to go.

It was a decision I would come to regret.

I spent an unproductive few hours trudging across a boggy field as part of a group that included Rupert Sutton, who seemed glad of the excuse to be out without his domineering mother. His bulk made it hard work for him to keep up with the rest of us, but he persevered, breathing heavily through his mouth as we slowly made our way across the uneven landscape, trying to skirt the wetter patches of ground. Once he slipped and stumbled to his knees. His perspiring body gave off an animal whiff of exertion as I helped him up.

'Bugger,' he panted, his face colouring with embarrassment as he stared at the mud coating his hands like black gloves. His voice was surprisingly light, almost girlish. 'Bugger,' he kept repeating, blinking furiously.

Other than that, few people spoke. When the growing dusk made it impractical to search any longer we abandoned the attempt and made our way back. The general mood was as sombre as the darkening landscape. I knew many of the searchers would stop off at the Black Lamb, seeking company more than alcohol. I almost went straight home. But I didn't feel like being alone any more than anyone else did that night. I parked outside the pub and went in.

Apart from the church, the Lamb was the oldest building in the village, and one of the few in Manham that had a traditional thatched roof. Anywhere else in the Broads it would have been smartened into twee respectability, but with only the locals to please no real attempt had been made to halt its slow decay. The reeds on its thatch were slowly mouldering, while the unpainted plaster of its walls was cracked and stained.

Tonight, though, it was doing good business, but it was far from a party atmosphere. The nods I received were solemn, the conversation low and subdued. The landlord lifted his chin in silent enquiry as I reached the bar. He was blind in one eye, the milky cast emphasizing the resemblance to an ageing Labrador.

Tint, please, Jack.'

'You been out on the search?' he asked as he set the glass in front of me. When I nodded he waved away my money. 'On the house.'

I barely had time to take a drink before a hand fell on my shoulder. 'Thought you might come in tonight.'

I looked up at the giant who'd materialized beside me. 'Hi, Ben.'

Ben Anders topped six feet four, and seemed half as broad again. A warden at Hickling Broad nature reserve, he'd lived in the village all his life. We rarely saw much of each other, but I liked him. He was easy company, someone I felt as comfortable maintaining a silence with as talking to. He had a pleasant, almost dreamy smile in a heavy-boned face that looked as though it had been screwed up and only partially smoothed out again. Set in its tanned leather, his eyes seemed incongruously bright and green.

Normally they held a twinkle of good humour, but there was no humour in them now. He propped an elbow on the bar. 'Bad business.'

'Lousy.'

'I saw Lyn a couple of days ago. Not a care in the world. And then Sally Palmer, as well. It's like being struck by lightning twice.'

'I know.'

'I hope to Christ she's just buggered off somewhere. But it's not looking good, is it?'

'Not very, no.'

'God, poor Marcus. Doesn't bear thinking about what the poor bastard must be going through.' He pitched his voice lower so it wouldn't carry. 'There's a rumour going around that Sally Palmer was cut up pretty bad. If it's the same man who took Lyn… Jesus, makes you want to break the fucker's neck, doesn't it?'

I looked down into my glass. Obviously word hadn't got out that I'd helped the police. I was glad, but it made me feel awkward now, as if keeping quiet about my involvement were making me a liar.

Ben slowly shook his massive head. 'You think there's any chance for her?'

'I don't know.'

It was as honest an answer as I could give. I remembered what Mackenzie had said earlier. If I was right, then Sally Palmer hadn't been killed until around three days after she'd disappeared. I wasn't a psychological profiler but I knew that serial killers followed a pattern. Which meant, if this was the same man, there was a chance that Lyn might still be alive.

Still alive. God, could she be? And if she was, for how long? I told myself I'd done what I could, given the police as much as could reasonably be expected of me. But it felt like a cheap rationalization.

I realized Ben was looking at me. 'Sorry?'

'I said are you OK? You look pretty bushed.'

'It's just been a long day.'

'You can say that again.' His expression soured as he looked towards the doorway. 'And just when you think it can't get any worse…'

I turned to see the dark figure of Reverend Scarsdale blocking out the light as he entered. Conversations died away as he advanced stern-faced to the bar.

'Don't suppose he'll be getting them in,' Ben muttered.

Scarsdale cleared his throat. 'Gentlemen.' His eyes drifted disapprovingly over the few women in the pub, but he didn't bother to acknowledge them. 'I thought you should know that I will be holding a prayer service tomorrow evening for Lyn Metcalf and Sally Palmer.'

His voice was a dry baritone that carried effortlessly.

'I'm sure all of you' — he let his gaze run around the pub — 'all of you will be there tomorrow evening to show your respect for the dead and support for the living.' He paused before stiffly inclining his head. 'Thank you.'

As he headed for the door he stopped in front of me. Even in summer there seemed an odour of mildew about him. I could see the white dusting of dandruff on the black wool of his jacket, smell the mothball taint of his breath.

'I trust I'll see you as well, Dr Hunter.'

'Patients allowing.'

'I'm sure no-one will be selfish enough to keep you from your duty.' I wasn't quite sure what he meant by that. He favoured me with a humourless smile. 'Besides, I think you'll find most of them will be at the church. Tragedies draw communities like this together. Coming from the city you'll probably find that strange. But we know where our priorities lie here.'

With a final terse nod, he left. 'There goes a real Christian,' Ben said. He raised his empty glass, more like a half-pint in his big hand. 'Ah, well, you ready for another?'

I declined. Scarsdale's appearance hadn't improved my mood. I was about to finish my drink and go home when someone spoke behind me.

'Dr Hunter?'

It was the young teacher I'd met at the school the day before. Her smile faltered at my expression. 'Sorry, I didn't mean to intrude ...'

'No, that's OK. I mean, no, you aren't.'

'I'm Sam's teacher. We met yesterday?' she said, uncertainly.

Normally I'm bad at remembering names, but I recalled hers straight away. Jenny. Jenny Hammond.

'Sure. How is he?'

'OK, I think. I mean, he didn't come to school today. But he seemed better by the time his mother collected him yesterday afternoon.'

I'd meant to check on him, but other things had intervened. 'I'm sure he'll be fine. There's no problem with him being off, is there?'

'Oh, no, not at all. I just thought I'd… you know, say hello, that's all.'

She looked embarrassed. I'd assumed she'd come over to ask something about Sam. Belatedly, it occurred to me she might just be being friendly.

'So, are you with some of the other teachers?' I asked.

'No, I'm by myself. I went on the search and then … well, my housemate's out, and it just didn't feel like a night for sitting in alone, you know?'

I knew. There was a silence for a while.

'Can I get you a drink?' I asked, just as she said, 'Well, I'll see you later.' We laughed, self-consciously. 'What would you like?'

'No, it's all right, really.'

'I was just going to get myself another.' I realized as I said it that my glass was still half-full. I hoped she wouldn't notice.

'A bottle of Becks, then. Thanks.'

Ben had just finished getting served as I leaned on the bar. 'Changed your mind? Here, let me.' He started putting his hand in his pocket.

'No, it's all right. I'm getting someone else's.'

He glanced behind me. His mouth twisted in a smile. 'Fair enough. See you later.'

I nodded, conscious of my face burning. By the time I was served I'd finished the rest of my beer. I ordered myself another and took the drinks over to where Jenny was standing.

'Cheers.' She raised the bottle in a little toast and took a drink. 'I know the landlord doesn't like you doing it, but it just doesn't taste the same from a glass.'

'And it's less to wash up, so you're actually doing him a favour.'

'I'll remember that next time he tells me off.' She grew more serious. 'I just can't believe what's happened. It's so awful, isn't it? I mean, two of them, from here? I thought places like this were supposed to be safe.'

'Was that why you came?'

I didn't mean it to sound as intrusive as it did. She looked down at the bottle she was holding. 'Let's just say I was tired of living in a city.'

'Where was that?'

'Norwich.'

She had started to peel the label from the bottle. As if realizing what she was doing she suddenly stopped. Her expression cleared as she smiled at me.

'Anyway, how about you? We've already established you're not a local either.'

'Nope. London, originally.'

'So what made you come to Manham? The bright lights and scintillating night-life?'

'Something like that.' I saw that she was expecting more. 'Same as you, I suppose. I wanted a change.'

'Yeah, well, it's that all right.' She smiled. 'Still, I quite like it. I'm getting used to living out in the middle of nowhere. You know, the quiet and everything. No crowds or cars.'

'Or cinema.'

'Or bars.'

'Or shops.'

We grinned at each other. 'So how long have you been here?' she asked.

'Three years.'

'And how long did it take you to be accepted?'

'I'm still working on it. Another decade and I might be thought of as a permanent visitor. By the more progressive elements, obviously.'

'Don't say that. I've only been here six months.'

'Still a tourist, then.'

She laughed, but before she could say anything there was a commotion in the doorway.

'Where's the doctor?' a voice demanded. 'Is he here?'

I pushed my way forward as a man was half-supported, half-carried into the pub. His face was contorted in pain. I recognized him as Scott Brenner, one of a large family who lived in a ramshackle house just outside Manham. A boot and the bottom of one trouser leg were soaked in blood.

'Sit him down. Gently,' I said, as he was lowered into a seat. 'What happened?'

'He stepped in a snare. We were going up to the surgery but we saw your Land Rover outside.'

It was his brother Carl who'd spoken. The Brenners were a clannish lot, ostensibly farm workers but not averse to poaching as well. Carl was the eldest, a wiry, truculent individual, and as I eased back the blood-soaked denim from Scott's leg I entertained the uncharitable thought that this had happened to the wrong brother. Then I saw the damage that had been done.

'Do you have a car?' I asked his brother.

'Don't think we walked here, do you?'

'Good, because he needs to go to hospital.'

Carl swore. 'Can't you just patch him up?'

'I can put a temporary dressing on, but that's all. This needs more than I can do.'

'Am I going to lose my foot?' Scott gasped.

'No, but you're not going to be doing much running for a while.' I wasn't as confident as I sounded. I considered taking him up to the surgery, but by the look of him he'd been manhandled enough. 'There's a first-aid kit under a blanket in the back of my Land Rover. Can somebody fetch it?'

'I will,' Ben said. I gave him the car keys. As he went out I asked for water and clean towels and began mopping the blood from around the wound.

'What type of snare was it?'

'Wire noose,' Carl said. 'Tightens once anything's got its foot in it. Cut through to the bone, it will.'

It had done that all right.

'Whereabouts were you?'

Scott answered, face averted from what I was doing. 'Over on the far side of the marsh, near the old windmill—'

'We were looking for Lyn,' Carl cut in, giving him a look.

I doubted that. I knew where they meant. Like most windmills in the Broads, the one outside Manham was actually a wind-powered pump, built to drain the marshes. Abandoned decades before, it was now an empty shell that lacked sails or life. The area was desolate even by Manham's standards, but it was ideal for anyone wanting to hunt or trap animals away from prying eyes. Given the Brenners' reputation, I thought that was a more likely reason for them to be out there at this time of night than any sense of public duty. As I wiped the blood from the wound I wondered if they'd managed to blunder into one of their own snares.

'Wasn't one of ours,' said Scott, as though he'd read my mind.

'Scott!' his brother snapped.

'It wasn't! It was hidden under grass on the path. And it was too big for rabbit or deer.'

The announcement was met by a silence. Although the police hadn't yet confirmed it, everyone had heard about the remains of the tripwire that had been found in the woods where Lyn had disappeared.

Ben returned with the first-aid box. I cleaned and dressed the wound as best I could. 'Keep the foot elevated and get him to casualty as soon as you can,' I told Carl.

Roughly, he hauled his brother to his feet and half-supported, half-hauled him out. I washed my hands and then went back to where Jenny stood with my drink.

'Will he be all right?' she asked.

'Depends how much damage has been done to the tendon. If he's lucky, he'll just end up with a limp.'

She shook her head. 'God, what a day!'

Ben came over and handed me my car keys. 'You'll be needing these.'

'Thanks.'

'So what do you think? Reckon that's anything to do with what's happened to Lyn?'

'I don't know.' But, like everyone else, I had a bad feeling about it.

'Why should it have?' Jenny asked.

He seemed unsure how to answer. I realized they didn't know each other.

'Ben, this is Jenny. She teaches at the school,' I told him.

He took it as approval to continue. 'Because it seems like too much of a coincidence. Not that I've any sympathy with any of the Brenners, bunch of poaching bast—' He broke off with a glance at Jenny. 'Anyway, I hope to God that's all it is. A coincidence.'

'I don't follow.'

Ben looked at me, but I wasn't going to say it. 'Because if not it means it's somebody from around here. From the village.'

'You don't know that for sure,' Jenny objected.

His face said otherwise, but he was too polite to argue. 'Well, we'll see. And on that note, I think I'll say good night.'

He drained his glass and started for the door. As if as an afterthought, he turned to Jenny. 'I know it's none of my business, but did you come in a car?'

'No, why?'

'Just that it might be a good idea not to walk home alone, that's all.'

With a last look at me to make sure I'd got the message, he went out. Jenny gave an uncertain smile. 'Do you think it's that bad?'

'I hope not. But I suppose he's right.'

She shook her head, incredulously. 'I don't believe this. Two days ago this was the quietest place on the planet!'

Two days ago Sally Palmer had still been dead, and the animal responsible was probably already turning his gaze towards Lyn Metcalf. But I didn't say that.

'Is there anyone here you can go with?' I asked.

'Not really. But I'll be fine. I can look after myself.'

I didn't doubt it. But beneath the defiance I could see she'd been unnerved.

'I'll give you a lift,' I said.

When I got home I sat outside at the table in the back garden. The night was warm, without a breath of wind. I put my head back and stared up at the stars. The moon was approaching full, an asymmetrical, haloed white disc. I tried to appreciate its dappled contours, but my eyes were drawn lower until I was looking at the shadowed wood across the field. Normally it was a view I enjoyed, even at night. But now I felt uneasy as I looked at the impenetrable mass of trees.

I went into the house, poured myself a small whisky, and took it back outside. It was after midnight and I knew I'd be up early. But I grasped any excuse to put off sleep. Besides, for once I had too much to think about to be tired. I'd walked with Jenny to the small cottage she rented with another young woman. We hadn't bothered with my car after all. It was a warm, clear night, and she only lived a few hundred yards away. As we walked she'd told me a little about her job, and the children she taught. Only once had she spoken about her past life, mentioning working at a school in Norwich. But she'd quickly brushed past it, burying the lapse in a flurry of words. I'd pretended not to notice. Whatever it was she was avoiding, it was none of my business.

As we walked up the narrow lane towards her house a fox suddenly cried out nearby. Jenny grabbed my arm.

'Sorry,' she said, quickly letting go as if burned. She gave an embarrassed laugh. 'You'd think I'd be used to living out here by now.'

There'd been an awkwardness between us after that. When we reached her house she stopped by the gate.

'Well. Thanks.'

'No problem.'

With a last smile she'd hurried inside. I'd waited until I heard the snick of the lock before turning away. All the way back through the dark village I could feel the pressure of her hand on my bare arm.

I could still feel it now. I sipped my drink, wincing at the memory of how flustered I'd become just because a young woman had accidentally touched me. No wonder she'd gone quiet.

I finished the whisky and went inside. There was something else pricking my subconscious, a nagging sense of something I had to do. I thought for a moment before I remembered. Scott Brenner. I wasn't confident his brother would let him tell the police about the wire snare. It might be nothing, but Mackenzie needed to know about it. I found his card and dialled his mobile. It was almost one o'clock, but I could leave a voicemail message for him to get first thing.

He answered straight away. 'Yeah?'

'It's David Hunter,' I said, caught off-guard. 'Sorry, I know it's late. I just wanted to make sure Scott Brenner had got in touch.'

I could hear his irritation and fatigue in the pause. 'Scott who?'

I told him what had happened. When he spoke, the tiredness had gone. 'Where was this?'

'Near an old windmill a mile or so south of the village. You think it might be connected?'

There was a sound it took me a moment to identify — the rasp of his whiskers as he rubbed his face.

'Ah, what the hell. We're going to have to go public with this tomorrow anyway,' he said. 'Two of my officers were injured tonight. One got caught by a wire snare, the other stepped in a hole someone had stuck a sharpened stick in.'

There was no mistaking the anger in his voice.

'So I think we've got to assume that whoever took Lyn Metcalf expected us to come looking for him.'

There was no shock of transition from the dream that night. I simply found myself awake, eyes open and staring at the spill of moonlight falling through the window. For once I was still in bed, my nocturnal wandering this time confined to the dream. But the memory of it remained with me, as vivid as if I'd just walked from one room into another.

It was always in the same setting. A house I'd never seen in my waking life, a place I knew didn't exist but that nevertheless felt like home. Kara and Alice were there, vibrant and real. We would talk about my day, about nothing in particular, just as we had when they were alive.

And then I would wake, and confront again the stark fact that they were dead.

I thought again about what Linda Yates had said. You have dreams for a reason. I wondered what she would make of mine. I could imagine what a psychiatrist would say, or even an amateur psychologist like Henry. But the dreams defied any neat rationalization. There was a logic and reality to them that was far from dreamlike. And, although I could barely acknowledge it even to myself, a part of me didn't want to believe that's all they were.

If I let myself believe that, though, it would be the first step on a road I was scared to take. Because there was only one way I could ever be with my family again, and I knew taking it would be an act of despair, not love.

What scared me even more was that sometimes I didn't care.

9

Next morning two more people were injured in traps. They were separate incidents, neither of them anywhere near those of the previous night. I knew because our surgery lacked a permanent nurse, so I treated them both. One, a policewoman, had impaled her calf on a stick embedded point up in a concealed hole. As with Scott Brenner, I did what I could and sent her to hospital for stitches. The other injury, to Dan Marsden, a local farmhand, was more superficial, the wire noose having only partially cut through his tough leather boot.

'Christ, I'd like to get my hands on the bastard who put it there,' he said through gritted teeth as I dressed the wound.

'Was it well hidden?'

'Bloody invisible. And the size of it! God knows what they were hoping to catch with something that big.'

I didn't say anything. But I thought it was likely the traps had caught exactly what had been intended.

So did Mackenzie. He called a temporary halt to the search for Lyn Metcalf and had a first-aid station set up outside the mobile incident room. He also issued a statement warning everyone else to stay out of the woods and fields around the village. The result was predictable. If the mood before had been largely one of numb shock, news that the countryside around Manham was no longer safe brought the first touch of real fear.

Of course, there were those who refused to believe it, or stubbornly insisted they weren't going to be scared away from land they'd known all their lives. That lasted until one of the loudest objecters, fuelled by an afternoon's drinking in the Lamb, put his foot into a hole that had been covered with dried grass and snapped his ankle. His yells drove home the point far more effectively than any police warning.

As more police were drafted in and the national press finally woke up to what was going on, descending on the village with their microphones and cameras, Manham began to feel like a place under siege.

'There's just the two different kinds of trap so far,' Mackenzie told me. 'The wire one is pretty much a basic snare, same sort of thing any poacher might know how to make. Except these are big enough to take an adult's foot. The stakes are even worse. Could be ex-military or one of these survivalist buffs. Or just someone with a nasty imagination.'

'You said "so far"?'

'Whoever laid them knows what he's doing. There's real thought been put into this. We can't assume he hasn't planted some more surprises.'

'Couldn't that be what he wanted? To disrupt the search?'

'I daresay. But we can't afford to take the chance. The ones we've found have only caused injuries. We carry on blundering through the woods and next time someone might get killed.'

He broke off as we came to a junction, drumming the steering wheel impatiently as he waited for the car in front to pull out. I looked out of the window, my anxiety returning in the silence.

I'd called Mackenzie first thing that morning to tell him I would examine Sally Palmer's remains if he still wanted me to. The knowledge had been with me from the moment I'd woken, as if the decision had been made while I was asleep. Which, in a way, I suppose it had.

Realistically, I didn't know how much use I would be. At best I might be able to give a more precise idea of the time-since-death interval, assuming my rusty knowledge hadn't deserted me. But I was under no illusions that it would do much to help Lyn Metcalf. It was just that doing nothing was no longer an option.

That didn't mean I was happy about it.

Mackenzie had sounded neither surprised nor greatly impressed when I'd told him. Just said he'd check with his superintendent and get back to me. I hung up feeling left in limbo, wondering if I'd made a misjudgement.

But he'd rung back within half an hour to ask if I could make a start that afternoon. Mouth dry, I'd said I could.

'The body's still with the pathologist. I'll pick you up at one and take you over,' he'd told me.

'I can make my own way.'

'I've got to go back to the station anyway. And there's one or two things I'd like to talk about.'

I'd wondered what they might be as I went to ask Henry if he would cover for me during that evening's surgery.

'Of course. Something come up?'

He'd looked at me expectantly. I still hadn't got round to telling him why Mackenzie had been to see me in the first place. I felt bad about that, but it would have meant more explanations than I'd been ready to go into. I knew I couldn't put it off much longer, though. I owed him that much, at least.

'Give me till the weekend,' I'd said. By then I should have finished what I had to do, and there wouldn't be a surgery to worry about. 'I'll tell you everything then.'