‘No. Not for many years. Twenty at least.’ Stanislav stared at the ruin as if it had been his own once.

‘How can you tell that?’

‘The trees,’ he said, circling his finger. ‘They are all younger here. This land was cleared, farmed, and then abandoned.’

‘Do you want to take a look?’ asked Dalip.

His fleeting expression told her that no, he didn’t. Really didn’t. But he looked away, then back, and he wore a different face. ‘Yes.’

The three of them converged on the house from different angles. It wasn’t big, but big enough for a few people who really didn’t mind seeing each other every waking moment. The roof had collapsed completely, and a single sapling poked out above the tottering walls.

The rude wooden door was still in place, but only for as long as it took Dalip to rest his hand on it. It fell, neatly and cleanly, backwards to join the ferns and fungi that were growing out of the scattered shingles and beams.

The walls were rough timber, overlapping split logs on a frame with the bark facing outwards. For all that, it was carefully and skilfully made, and it would have been dry inside.

‘I wonder what happened?’ said Mary. She ducked under Dalip’s arm and stood on the fallen door. There wasn’t any evidence of furniture, or anything on the walls.

‘The wolfman said—’ started Dalip, but Stanislav interrupted.

‘We know what the wolfman said. It is very convenient that he told us about the possibility of empty houses before we found any. As he knew we would, because he also told us the direction to go to find this geomancer.’

Mary walked in further, and began kicking through the debris with the toe of her boot. ‘You think he’s lying?’

‘I think it is convenient, that is all. If we accept his explanation, all we think when we see these falling-down walls is that the people who lived there have moved somewhere else.’ He looked up at the sky, at the trees reaching out over the ruin. ‘There are other reasons for houses to be abandoned, not all of them good.’

‘You’re very suspicious,’ said Dalip. ‘Sometimes an abandoned house is just an abandoned house. We see them all the time on London streets: you know, with those steel shutters over the doors and windows.’

‘How often were the occupants forced to leave?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose that happens sometimes.’

‘It happens a lot,’ said Mary. She’d made a hole in debris, and had dug as far as a layer of thick bark sheets. ‘In squats, or you can’t pay your rent. Bailiffs come round and give you the evils, throw your stuff out on to the street, and it’s fuck you very much.’

Dalip conceded the point with a shrug. ‘Okay. But it’s not like anyone owns this bit of the forest, do they?’