I dash through birches and around pine trees, their dead lower branches scratching at my neck, drawing blood on my wrist.

She’s whispering now.

I can barely hear her.

‘I’m nearly there,’ I yell, but I have no idea where ‘there’ is, just as I have no notion of where ‘here’ is either. Drop me in a forest and I’m likely to fall down and give up, but throw in thick fog and I may as well…

An arm catches round my neck.

I fall.

Wet moss and pine needles.

A body on top of me. Heavy. Smells of waxed jacket. A forearm to my face.

‘Get off me!’

‘Please,’ she says.

I roll away and she is staring at me, her eyes bulging and red, her fingers bloody.

‘Please.’

‘Who are you?’ I ask, the fog managing to drift between us, her face breaking up behind the static.

She gets to her knees and stands and I see her jeans are red. Stained. Splattered.

I pull my knife from my bag and she says, ‘No,’ and puts her palms to her face, and she says, ‘No, no, no.’

I take a deep breath of forest air, dense with spores and rotten leaves. It’s thick autumn air laced with the tang of rot and decay.

‘Over there,’ she says, pointing into the mists.

I swallow hard and stand up and move to where she’s pointing.

A fallen pine, its root system flat and sprawling like a metro map. A dash of colour behind. A coat?

I clamber over the pine, its rough bark scratching at my trousers like the nails of a grasping hand.

Two boots.

And two legs.

‘Dead,’ she says.

I look back and see the woman properly for the first time. She’s shaking her head. No coat. Just a haunted expression.

‘What happened here?’ I ask. But she just points harder, her blood-tipped index finger stabbing into the fog.

She doesn’t come to where I am. She stays back.

My foot plunges into a deep pile of leaves and brown, acidic water fills my boot.

‘Call the police,’ I say.

‘No phone.’

I take out my phone and dial Gavrik police. ‘It’s me, Tuva Moodyson. Halfway up Visberg hill. You’ll see my truck. Fifteen minutes into the forest on the north side. Near a house with no ground-floor windows. A body.’ I end the call because what more is there to say.

The woman keeps back and I don’t trust her yet. I don’t like the look of her scarlet hands.

The body is resting on granite, not earth.

Covering the rock is a thin layer of saturated, bright-green moss. A blanket.

The head is hidden by a coat, probably the screaming woman’s coat, but I can tell this is a man’s body. From his boots, his hands, his shape.

I turn back to her. ‘The police are on their way.’