She turned away as she took her coat off, so that Nikki wouldn’t see her face. What has followed me here? And how could it?

“Did you look in all the rooms? For the bird, I mean?”

“Yup, no sign. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” Heather joined her friend in the kitchen, retrieving a bottle of wine from the side and pouring herself a glass. It’s probably nothing, she told herself, although the sick feeling in her stomach only seemed to increase. If you tell her, you’ll be scaring her for no reason. “Listen, I am a bit tired though. How about we call it a day and have a rest? I want to drink a glass of wine, have a hot bath or something.” She took out her phone from her pocket and glanced at the screen, but still no messages from Ben. The idea of calling to complain that someone was leaving feathers in her holiday home only made her feel worse.

“Sure.” Nikki smiled, although Heather could see the little crease between her eyebrows that meant she was worrying about something. “It’s raining too hard to go for a walk now anyway. We’ll pick up where we left off tomorrow.”

CHAPTER

37

BEFORE

BONES, WHITE AGAINST the black earth.

Michael knelt, curious, pushing away clods of mud and pieces of mulch until a shape emerged: empty eye sockets, long toothy snout. It was the skull of a fox, he was fairly certain, and it had been here a good long time. Long enough to lose all its flesh, to simmer away its fur under the forest floor and then emerge this morning, clean and somehow alert, fitting so neatly into his hands.

There were bones all over his piece of Fiddler’s Woods, and he knew the location of most of them, but of the women he brought back only their hearts nestled in the mud—that was the rule. This skull felt like a message of some sort, but he couldn’t have said what it was. A warning? A blessing? Were the woods trying to speak to him directly?

He had just placed it back into the dark earth, turning it so that its eyes looked up to the trees, when an alien noise made him sit up. It took him a moment to place it—a baby, not crying yet, but whinging in that pitiful way that babies do when something isn’t quite to their liking.

“Hello?”

He stood up and moved away from the skull, wiping his hands on his trousers. It was a warm day, and the midges were thick in the air. The closer he got to the sound of the baby, the more he picked up other, more reassuring noises: there was Colleen, her voice pitched higher than usual as she tried to settle the child, and there was the voice of someone else, talking to her. A moment after he recognized her voice he saw her, walking an old woodland path with one of the Bickerstaff sisters. She was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with tiny purple roses on it, and the baby was wrapped in a yellow blanket. Every now and then she rocked it in her arms, trying to get it to quieten down, but the whinging was edging close to crying now.