‘I would. It’s like he’s seen all this before. Where did you say he was from?’ She bent down again, and started pulling up plants. They came away easily, and she threw them to one side, creating a shower of soil that made Dalip step back.

‘I didn’t say he was from anywhere, and I don’t know. Eastern Europe somewhere, I suppose.’ He shook the dirt from the uppers of his boots. ‘What if he’s right? What if we’re trespassing on someone else’s land?’

‘We’ve walked for half a day and we’ve seen no one. We’ve been here two days and there’s only been the wolfman. There’s no one here. This place is empty.’ In London, everywhere was someone’s; the council’s, developers, some rich Russian bloke, it didn’t really matter – there were rules wherever she went, even in places that seemed to have fallen down the cracks of the city. Here? No.

She uncovered a few more pieces of detritus. Shards of a small stone bottle. A wooden handle, worn smooth with use, but no clue as to what it was attached to. Something that may have been once string, but fell apart on being picked up.

There was nothing to indicate one way or the other whether the farmer had simply upped and left for pastures new, or been forced out by some crooked landlord.

By the time the rest of the group arrived, Mary was already out in the forest. She could see, now that it had been pointed out to her, where the former fields had been: thinner trees this side of the line, fat trees, the other. In places, she could even see the remains of a fence, now only a series of rotten posts in the ground.

She couldn’t see any chickens, or pigs, or cows, or sheep. That exhausted her knowledge of nursery rhyme animals, but there didn’t seem to be anything moving except the occasional flash of orange boilersuit on the ground, and glossy feathers in the air.

She followed the old fence around. It wasn’t far, enough to encompass the land that someone could reasonably work and live off. It went in a strip from the river to beyond the house, roughly square. And as she walked the boundary, she saw another structure in the distance, between the straight trunks and slanting branches of the trees.

Looking around, Mama was closest to her, but she didn’t say anything. It wasn’t like it was important. She stepped over the fence line and through the mature wood until she came to it. The house was also a ruin, roof gone, walls sagging, but there was no evidence of fields around it. Instead, there were jumbled piles of logs, slowly returning to the soil.