‘There’s a body?’ I blinked my eyes wide. Good. That was what a normal person would say. An innocent person.

No confirmation. ‘She’d have smelled something like that, yes?’ PC Chevening. I kept forgetting their names and having to look at their badges. I realised my hands were clasped tight together, and tried to relax them.

‘Maybe. She does run after smells a lot, all beagles do, but I kept her on the lead.’

‘So you saw nothing?’

I pretended to think. ‘Not that I can recall.’

‘Very short walk, was it? Witnesses said you came right out again, almost running.’

Witnesses? Bloody Audrey, I bet.

‘I – needed the loo. Forgot to go before we left.’ No one could disprove that either. ‘Why are you here – just because I was in the woods? Lots of people go in the woods.’

I heard a nervy shake in my voice as I said it. I saw them exchange another look, and various scenarios flared across my mind. Someone had seen me in the clearing. Maybe there was even a picture of me approaching it and running, stumbling out – or worse, video footage. People could film things on their phones nowadays. Maybe I had touched it in my shock and not remembered, left my fingerprints or hairs or some other trace. Either way, I could tell from the way they were looking at me: somehow, they knew I had found the body. And that I had lied about it.

PC Chevening put her notebook away. ‘OK, Rachel. We may well want to talk to you again, OK?’

I didn’t understand for a moment, lost in my worst imaginings. ‘That’s it?’

‘For now. Thank you.’

They were going. They had suspicions, perhaps, but clearly they couldn’t prove anything yet. Anyway, it wasn’t a crime to find a body and not report it – was it?

As I watched them walk to their car, I saw that a large and muddy jeep was drawing up nearby. Marilyn. She got out, came towards me, and I was so pleased to see her ruddy cheeks, her untidy greying hair, brown cords held up with a safety pin and covered in dog hair, that I almost stumbled into her arms, hairs notwithstanding. Her eyes looked red and swollen. She was five years my senior, at most, but she took care of me as if it was more.

‘Rachel! What on earth happened? I know you go through the woods on your walk, so I thought I’d see if you were all right. Did you get arrested?’ Was that what people would think? I could see Audrey peering between her expensive slatted blinds, and she abruptly withdrew as I caught her eye.

‘No, I wasn’t arrested. Just . . . they were asking if I saw something in the woods today. There was . . . there was a body, apparently.’ I said the last in a whisper.

‘I know. You didn’t . . . find it, did you?’