‘It was an evil place.’ Pamela looked down at her hands, an expression of hate twisting her features. ‘Evil. Like I said, you have to be there to feel it, I think. If there’s one thing I still believe from those days, it’s that the landscape remembers – deep down in its stone roots, the landscape remembers all the terrible things, all the blood shed on it. Fiddler’s Mill is a place like that. You couldn’t pay me to go back there now.’

‘Ms Whittaker, would you be prepared to tell me exactly what you saw? If there were crimes, then we should get justice for them. I could help you do that. Can you describe what was going on out there?’

All the anger and certainty seemed to bleed out of the older woman, the line of her mouth becoming wet and infirm.

‘It was so long ago … Even with the best will in the world, things get clouded. I painted some of it, and some of it I couldn’t. Babies crying, blood in the earth …’

‘I’m sorry? Blood in the earth?’

Pamela Whittaker shook her head but didn’t say anything.

‘Pamela, are you aware that Michael Reave was there, at the commune?’

The older woman went very still, like a rabbit in the grass when there’s a dog in the woods.

‘Do you know who I mean by Michael Reave? The Red Wolf?’

‘I thought you said you wanted to talk about my art.’ Pamela Whittaker’s voice was a small thing now, and vaguely petulant. ‘I feel I’ve let you in here under, under false pretences. You’re a journalist, I know that, or you used to be. I can use Google, you know.’

Heather shrugged a little, feeling all her previous admiration for Pamela Whittaker dissipating. She didn’t want to think about her old job, or how she had lost it.

‘Don’t you think it’s interesting though? Here you are telling me that Fiddler’s Mill is evil, that you saw some terrible things – and all the while there was a serial killer there. I reckon that makes your story even more believable, but you don’t seem very willing to actually talk about it. Why is that?’

Pamela Whittaker pressed her thin lips together. ‘He was there. There were others, too. I told the police later, when all that came out … I can’t talk about it now.’

‘What happened? Did they threaten you? Who else was part of this circle?’

The old woman shook her head slowly, her face creased with distaste. ‘There were always rumours flying about. Rumours about sex parties in the woods, what those led to, the aftermath. I got to know a young woman called Anna. She was very fragile, very vulnerable, and she should not have been in a place like that … I didn’t realize until it was too late, of course.’

‘What happened to her there?’