Nikki swirled the wine in her glass, frowning into its depths.

“And, okay, mostly I am just curious to see the place. Pamela Whittaker said it was evil.” Heather smiled as Nikki rolled her eyes. “I want to see this miserable patch of grass my mum apparently thought was so amazing. Where this all started. I’m sure that … I’m sure that if I want to know more about her, I have to go to this place and see it for myself.”

“This place is in Lancashire, isn’t it?”

“Yup.”

“Lancashire, where they recently found bits of a woman’s body shoved inside a tree.”

“Come on, it’s the same county. It’s not like the murderer is on the welcoming committee as you drive up the M6.” For a moment, an image of the petals and the dead bird floated across her mind. She could still smell the blood. Guiltily, she pushed it away.

“Hmm.” Nikki, who had been nursing the wine rather than drinking it, took a long swallow of her drink, then shrugged. “All right. I have some time off owing. And apparently, I have nothing better to do.”

Heather had always liked long car journeys. They put her in mind of her earliest childhood, when her dad was still alive and he would get a sudden urge to drive to the coast. Her mother would give her a big bag of barley sugars to settle her stomach—never forgetting the incident where she had vomited noisily out the window while they were on the motorway—and she would spend hours sucking sweets and looking out the window at stretches of green and brown, smears and smudges of places she would never know. Sometimes she would play games with her dad, iterations of I-spy or word games based on number plates, and when they got to their destination, she would always be faintly disappointed. There was something precious and strange about having both her parents’ undivided attention for so long.

Nikki looked less excited about the journey, repeatedly fiddling with her phone in its holder on the dashboard, which was serving as a sat-nav. Factoring in breaks, it was a good five hour drive to Lancashire and they had set off in the late morning, shunting and winding around the slow-moving traffic of London, and now they were out beyond the M25, free of the city’s shackles. Hours passed, and anonymous fields and stretches of vegetation zipped by on both sides of the motorway, the sky overhead gray and nondescript.

They got to the borders of Lancashire just as the last of the sun was bleeding from the sky. Heather had been dozing in the passenger seat, but something woke her as they turned down a country road. She sat up, blinking and trying to recapture the specific sensation. A voice saying her name? Had she been dreaming?

“Oh good, you’re awake,” Nikki sounded distracted. “Can you keep an eye on the map for me? These roads are all really twisty, and this place is in the middle of bloody nowhere.”