Ahead of her were the line of trees that cupped the field, the two huge horse chestnuts and a cluster of oak, birch, and elm. Under the sunshine the leaves were as bright as stained-glass, green and yellow, red and gold, and yes, there were the thorny green casings scattered on the grass, spilling open their milky pale insides. Beverly began stuffing her pockets with fallen conkers, picking up only those that had survived the fall unscathed, and keeping an extra eye out for cheese cutters—conkers with a flat side, which were especially good for destroying your opponent. Once or twice, she found casings that had only partially split open. These she pressed on one side with her boot, smiling with satisfaction as the conkers popped free, all smooth and newly born. One of these produced a particularly fine cheese cutter.

“I’ll keep that one for myself, I think.” Beverly slipped the conker into an inside pocket. Conkers was no fun at all if she couldn’t beat at least one of her grandkids. It was the conker immediately after this, plucked from the grass close to the roots of the big old tree, that felt wrong in her hand. Grimacing, she held it up to the light, not quite registering the crimson smear on her fingers until she caught the smell of it: the back step of the butcher’s shop on a hot day.

Beverly yelped and dropped the conker. The grass by her feet was dark: saturated, she belatedly realized, with blood.

“It’ll be that bloody dog,” she said hotly, holding out the dirty hand as though she had burned it. “Bloody dog got hold of something again.”

But there was no eviscerated rabbit that she could see, or even a big bird—both of which she had seen on the fields in the past. Instead, as she drew closer to the trunk of the old conker tree, she saw that the blood was flowing from the roots, as though the tree itself were bleeding. The big hollow at its base, normally clogged with old leaves and mud, had been filled up with something else.

“Oh God. Oh God no, oh God …”

Beverly’s arms fell to her sides, her fingers numb. There was a face in the hollow, a woman’s face with her eyes closed and mouth open as if in prayer. Her cheeks were waxy and flecked with dark matter, and there were flowers poking out from between her teeth. Pink ones, noted Beverly, who would never allow pink flowers in her house again. Dog roses, by the looks of it.

Crushed beneath the woman’s head were a pair of feet, bare, save for a silver toe ring and pale pink nail polish, and there was an arm, too, the hand laying palm up on the grass as though she were reaching for help, or, beckoning for someone to join her. Incongruously, she could also see the sleeve of a red jacket, the wide buttons on the cuff dotted with beads of moisture. It was all crammed in so tight that Beverly couldn’t see the color of the woman’s hair or anything of her torso, if indeed that was in there with her, but she could see a soft wall of purplish rope-like things, falling softly to either side of the arm. In the bark above the hollow, a heart had been scratched; some pining lover’s romantic gesture, no doubt.