The front door isn’t. I do another quick walk-around. No back door. None of the windows will budge.

Step two: look for the spare key. Everyone has one.

The front porch is bare except for a rocking chair and a doormat. Nothing under either one. I run my fingers across the top of the doorframe. Just dust. No potted plants around the cabin. Everyone has a spare key, but you can’t always find it.

At this point a burglar would take the hinges off the door, or kick it in. But a squatter will go to step three.

I stand on the rail that surrounds the porch so I can reach the rain gutter, and then I scramble up onto the roof itself. There’s a chimney, too narrow to climb down. But the roof is tiled, not sheet metal. Some luck, at last. It’s pretty easy to lift one tile just enough to unhook the one next to it, making a square hole of blackness. After removing four more tiles, the hole is just wide enough to worm through.

The flashlight in my phone illuminates a crawlspace stuffed with fluffy yellow insulation panels. This would be a great place to squat in. I wriggle through the insulation, the fibres sticking to my clothes. I’m going to be itchy as hell tomorrow.

Eventually I find a trapdoor. I open it and drop down into the cabin.

When I dust myself off and stand up, someone is watching me.

I leap backwards, survival instinct taking over. The eyes watching me from the shadows are big and far apart, like something out of a nightmare, gleaming almost too brightly to be real.

I raise the phone, hoping to dazzle the demon with the flashlight. The beam falls on dark fur and long teeth. A wolf!

Or, more precisely, a wolf’s head. It’s a hunting trophy, mounted on the wall.

The wolf is not alone. I look around, taking in all the animal heads as they stare at me through glass eyes. They’re everywhere—above the fireplace, between the cluttered bookshelves, watching over the leather armchair. There’s a rug which used to be a deer, its head still whole, mouth agape.

Even my house isn’t this creepy—and it contains two human corpses.

A hunting rifle hangs by its strap from a hook beside the door, next to a candle lantern and a flashlight. The wood stock shines, recently polished.

A new image forms in my mind. Biggs, stripped naked on the deer rug, while the owner of this place points the rifle at him.

In my head, the owner has no face. But he’s big, and dressed like a hunter, in boots, khakis and a wool-lined cap.

‘I’ll give you a twenty-second head start,’ he says, as Biggs trembles. ‘Now run, rabbit!’

I don’t have much evidence for this scenario. So it’s time to find some more.