The road opens out into an area the size of four or five football pitches. They pass several large buildings and tall metal towers which she assumes are crushing plants, along with a row of heavy machinery and trucks parked up for the night. Floodlights heighten the sense of a lunar landscape.

The security vehicle veers off to the right between two huge piles of gravel, ploughs through a pool of water, then turns left. Anna realises that the quarry is not a gigantic rectangle, as she’d imagined. It is more like a wheel; the section they’ve just left is presumably the hub, with various ravines running off it like spokes in all directions. However, when the ravine they’re following keeps splitting into several new branches, she can see that that comparison doesn’t work either. At the fifth division she understands that she would never have found her own way, and is very glad that all she has to do is follow the rear lights of the Jeep.

She is almost completely disorientated by the time they reach another flat, open area, with the ridge forming a high, steep cliff on the far side. Three vehicles are parked in a semi-circle, their headlights focused on a solitary birch tree. Rain hangs in the air, the odd drop already slicing through the beams.

She parks a short distance away and walks over. One of the vehicles is the patrol car whose driver called her, the second is a large digger. The third is Henry Morell’s car. He is talking to the uniformed officer and a man who, judging by his high-vis jacket, is the Glarea team leader who made the original call.

‘Hi, Anna,’ Morell says. ‘I’m afraid he’s not a pretty sight.’

He switches on a torch and shines it high up into the tree, where the headlights don’t quite reach. The scene is horrific, yet bordering on the absurd. A long wound of broken branches reaches all the way from the top of the tree down to about four metres from the ground, where something that looks like a rag doll has got stuck in a V-shaped cleft. The dead man’s limbs are contorted at unnatural angles, and his clothes are ripped. One branch has gone straight through his chest and is sticking out between his shoulder blades. The leaves, the trunk and the ground below are dark with blood.

‘We had another suicide here about ten years ago,’ Morell informs her. ‘A business owner from the city who’d ruined both family and friends, but he actually landed on the ground. This poor bastard has made things a little more difficult for us.’

He directs the beam of his torch at the cliff behind the tree. It is at least fifty to sixty metres high.