Another couple of kilometres further down the road we came to another crossroad, this one marked with a tall Celtic cross in grey stone – a war memorial, at a guess – where Dominic turned right into a narrow tree-lined lane that climbed towards the top of the ridge. I wondered if this was the same ridge as the Bee House had sat on, but the cell coverage was too intermittent for me to check the location on my phone.

‘School Wood,’ Dominic said when I asked where we were going. The school in question being a posh independent school we’d actually passed on the drive over. Not that they owned it anymore – it was National Trust property now, part of the Croft Castle Estate.

In places the lane was so narrow that leaves and twigs brushed the sides of the Nissan and Dominic was careful to slow down whenever we approached a blind corner.

‘Tractors?’ I asked.

‘Tractors,’ he said. ‘Minicabs, horses, Tesco vans, cows – you never know what you’re going to meet around a corner here.’

The entrance to the woods was marked by a wooden five-bar gate with a green National Trust sign on it. Dominic stayed in the Nissan while I got out to open it and let him through. I closed the gate behind him and, because I remembered my Country Code lessons from school trips, I made sure the latch was secure. Once I’d climbed back inside Dominic set off again up a rough track that curved into a forest of dark conifers. The Nissan made easy work of the flinty track bed, which explained why Dominic had chosen it for today’s trip. My new Asbo would have been scraping its axles – some of the ruts were that deep.

The track forked and Dominic took the right-hand turn for another hundred metres or so until we reached a place where the greyish brown trunks of felled trees had been stacked in a pyramid by the track. A pale face peered suspiciously around the end of the stack as we drew up.

‘That’s Stan,’ said Dominic as his friend emerged from hiding.

‘Stan?’ I asked.

‘Short for Samantha.’

Stan was about average height, but an habitual stoop made her look shorter. She had brown hair, deep-set eyes, a snub nose, thin lips and a receding chin. As well as the stoop there was a noticeable slackness to the right side of her face. Result of an accident when she was a teenager, Dominic told me later. ‘Jumped off the back of a quad bike when she was seventeen,’ he said. When I asked why she’d jumped, Dominic just said that they’d all been very drunk at the time.