The nightmare of Fiddler’s Mill retreated for Colleen, but only so far. The creatures she had left behind in the woods didn’t forget about her, after all – and all her life, she felt them watching.

There was the summer fête, where she had seen the Oak Leaf symbol on an awning, where small children were queuing to pick up their prizes. It was his company, his way of keeping track, and although he wasn’t there, it was as though she could smell his fetid old-man breath on the back of her neck. In a blind panic, she had scooped Heather up into her arms and turned towards the car park.

There was the card, left outside their front door. When she thought how close they had come then to finding out the truth, it had knocked all the strength from her.

And then, eventually, there came the Bickerstaff sisters, creeping around her door and pushing their way inside. All of Colleen’s careful defences, built up over so many years, were tattered into pieces over that long, horrific afternoon. She learned the fate of her long-lost child, of the harvest that was coming, and still they kept her pinned in place with the worst threat of all: tell anyone, and we’ll come for your daughter, too.

When they finally left her – after they’d extracted every painful secret she’d ever held close to her heart – Colleen went and fetched her nicest notepad, the one she had never used to write to Michael. She sat down at her own kitchen table and, just like her daughter, she tried to find the words.

47

The forest did not seem darker with him in it. The birds still sang, the sunlight still filtered down through the branches, a dappled blessing on the earth and grass. Michael Reave walked with his face turned up, trying to take it all in, and Heather watched him closely. It seemed wrong that Fiddler’s Wood did not recoil from him, that the skies didn’t turn black and the trees die, but then, she reminded herself, he was their creature. He had fed the roots and nourished the ground, in his own way.

‘Heather?’ He turned to face her, smiling. ‘Look, do you see that there?’ He nodded towards a hole next to a small mound of fresh earth. ‘That’s the entrance to a badger sett. I used to see them sometimes, but they’re shy animals. They can have big families living inside them, the larger setts. A clever little network of tunnels.’

‘This isn’t a nature walk.’

‘No, lass.’ He put his smile away, and his eyes drifted up to look over her shoulder. ‘No, you’re right there.’

Behind her, she knew he could see the police gathered, DI Ben Parker among them. They were never far behind.