When they’d finished their tea, Bert walked them to the front door. The sunshine had gone, to be replaced with a blanket of thick clouds, dark with potential rain.

The old man peered up at the sky, smiling faintly. “Well, it looks like the sun is over for you.” He turned back to look at Heather. “Take care, won’t you?”

CHAPTER

36

THEY MADE IT through the first stretch of woods and then it began to rain heavily, in the steady sort of way that suggests it is planning to hang around all day. Deciding to try a short cut, umbrellas brandished above them, they walked through another, sparser set of trees, and came across an ancient looking caravan. Once it had been white with a red and a brown stripe along the side, but now it was camouflaged with patches of rust and a thick covering of dead leaves and forest debris. At some point someone had attempted to fence the thing off with wire panels, but those had mostly fallen down, and thick tangled bushes had grown up around its wheels.

“Hey, that’s got to be from the commune. Do you want to have a look inside?”

Nikki grimaced. The rain was getting stronger all the time, the ground under their boots rapidly turning into mud. “Can we come back later? We should go and get the car.”

“You go. I’ll join you in a bit.”

“Are you sure?”

Heather nodded. “Go on. I just want to have a quick poke around, and then I’ll head back to the cottage. I think our exploring is done for the day.”

When Nikki had trudged away toward the clearing, Heather picked her way across the wild undergrowth until she reached the flimsy looking door. It came open with one fairly solid kick, and, collapsing her umbrella, she stepped inside.

It was dark, the only light filtered through a series of small, dirty windows, and it smelt powerfully of damp and moldy clothes. Heather took out her phone and turned on the torch function, slowly turning around to take in the whole scene. There was a kind of sitting room, seats with padding that could be flipped to turn into beds, storage units and a fold down table. Further back was a tiny sink, with more cupboards lining the available wall space, and then at the far end, a closed door leading into another room. Here and there she could see more evidence that the place was more than forty years old—orange and brown wallpaper with a familiar ornate flower pattern; stickers on the cupboard doors that demanded the government “ban the bomb,” several on the fridge that were of the Smurfs, their blue faces mottled with damp. More interestingly, there were signs that the owners had been interested in an alternative lifestyle of sorts. Heather spotted what could only have been a very old bong lying sideways in the sink, and an ancient poster on the wall detailed the months and signs of the zodiac, as well as phases of the moon and other esoteric advice.