‘And why do we only know about it now?’ Her voice was deceptively calm, her eyes fiery.
‘The guy only found the body because his van broke down and he was wandering around trying to get a phone signal. He ended up walking to the road and flagging down a car.’
‘Where is he now?’ Vera was already on the way to her office to fetch her coat.
‘At the Forestry Commission office in Kirkhill waiting for you.’ The PC ventured a little further into the room and handed over a slip of paper with an address.
Vera took it, stopped at the door and looked into the room. ‘Joe, you take over here. Let the CSI and Doc Keating know. I’ll give an accurate GPS location when I have one. Continue with the briefing. I want a full report of everything discussed on my desk before you leave tonight.’ A pause. ‘Hol, you’re with me.’
The forestry officer was Les Robson. He was wiry, one of those outdoor, weather-beaten men it’s impossible to age, still in his uniform green trousers and jersey, a fleece. The commission office was in a wooden building close to Kirkhill community hall. He was sitting at his desk, his hands cupped round a mug of coffee. Holly thought it would take a lot to throw him, but he’d been thrown by this. He looked as if he was planted in his chair and hadn’t moved since he’d got there.
Vera was uncharacteristically patient. ‘Will you find the place again,’ she asked, ‘in the dark? I wouldn’t blame you if it was a struggle. These commercial plantations all look the same to me.’
‘We carry coloured plastic ribbons,’ Robson said, ‘to mark the edge of the clear fell. I tied those to trees as I made my way back to the van. Even in the light I wasn’t sure I’d find my way back.’
Vera nodded. ‘We’ll need you to come with us. This is your patch. We couldn’t do it without you. Wouldn’t know where to start.’
He got to his feet and picked up keys from his desk. ‘We can take one of the other vans. Mine’s still out there. It won’t get fixed until tomorrow.’
‘No need,’ Vera said. ‘We’ll go in my Land Rover. You can direct me.’
‘Thanks.’ He seemed grateful that he didn’t have to drive.
The three of them squeezed into the bench seat at the front, Holly squashed in the middle. There were still street lights until the edge of the village and then it was perfectly dark. No traffic. No houses. Holly thought she recognized the road and the long wall that marked the entrance to Brockburn, then they took a turn into unknown territory, a lane surrounded by trees, which blocked out even the stars and the moonlight. They came to a barrier and Vera stopped.
‘Is this us?’
Robson didn’t answer. He was out of the vehicle and raising the metal pole that blocked the way. Vera drove through and they waited for the man to join them.
‘It’s not locked?’
‘No need. Nobody drives here.’ A pause. ‘Walkers come sometimes. It’s a public bridleway and locals grew up playing in the forest. You get riders occasionally.’ There was a steep, sandy track only separated from the trees by boggy ditches, covered in ice, which glittered when the headlights swept over them. A sharp turn, another narrower track and then a small clearing where the green Forestry Commission van still stood.
‘It’s a walk from here.’ Robson jumped down first. ‘There’s an area we cleared years ago and seems to have been forgotten. I thought I might get better phone signal away from the trees. The path’s overgrown now. I couldn’t have got my van through and I wouldn’t risk your Land Rover.’
The air felt sharp and thin, turning their breath white in the torchlight. The only colour was on pink plastic ribbons, strangely celebratory, which marked the route through the forest. The path was rutted and pitted, churned by heavy machinery, the forest already encroaching on either side. Patches of snow lay under the trees. Holly walked easily, only missing her footing occasionally on the uneven ground, but Vera was already wheezing. She stopped for a moment and bent double to catch her breath.
‘Is this the only way in?’
‘Aye.’ He stood. Holly could tell he was impatient, eager to get this over. ‘As far as I know.’
‘You could get a tractor down here, a quad bike?’
‘I guess so.’
Vera shone her torch to the ground, looking for recent tyre tracks, but everything was covered by a new sheen of frost. Holly thought the boss wanted an excuse to rest a while longer before they continued. As they walked on, following the trail of the ribbons at junctions and splits in the track, Holly again ran through the women she’d been considering, earlier in the evening, as potential suspects. Would Juliet and Harriet find their way here? Even if they had access to an off-road vehicle? Yet they’d both grown up in the valley. Harriet would have seen the trees planted, watched them grow. She’d know the land beneath the forest. The same was true of the farmers, Rosemary Heslop and Jill Falstone. And of the next generation, the Heslop girls and Josh. This landscape was strange to Holly, but it was probably their playground, a place to explore.
Holly was wondering how well Dorothy would know it, when they came to a gap in the trees. She stopped in her tracks, stunned by the scene laid out before her. When Robson had spoken of a clearing, she’d imagined a green space, light and grassy, a place for summer picnics.
This looked more like a war zone, a graveyard, not like the neat and ordered cemetery she saw from the window of her apartment, but a place of twisted limbs, everything dead and dry. The foresters had cut the pines, and stripped
