Mr Richards would have found it if he’d known where to look. The secateurs were a decoy as it turns out, intentional or not. This is the danger. She unwraps it with trembling fingers. A knife lies in her hands; a thing of beauty with a smooth, indigo-blue handle and a long, shining blade. She turns on the light in the car. A line of red lies along the edge of the blade, separated into minute granules, thicker at the edge where it makes an uneven reddish stripe thinning to pale orange. If she looks hard enough she can convince herself there are little pieces of matter caught along the edge, dehydrated fragments, translucent like skin. She puts it down on the pile of sweet papers, her head thumping to the rhythm of three questions: whose blood, whose skin, who exactly has her son hurt?

Eve

‘Sorrel!’

A crow rises from the ground, black wings flapping. Empty branches scrape the sky; the day is ticking fast towards its end. The police and their dogs have searched the wood again; Eve is still looking. There may be clues left on the ground, under the fallen leaves, or caught on a branch, something small the police might have missed.

‘Sorrel, answer me, baby.’

Her foot strikes unexpected softness. She moves the covering leaves with care and leans close to the ground, her heart tipping forward in her mouth. She sees a rounded shape, brown-grey fur, soft ears. A dead rabbit. She turns it with a foot and the guts spill out, mauve and grey against the amber leaves. She straightens, feeling sick, and walks away, halting at a leafless horse chestnut tree at the back of the wood by the fence. The children had been sitting in the dappled shade of a chestnut tree when she found them with Martin that afternoon in May, maybe the very same one. Babes in the wood, he had said; she should have taken that as a warning.

‘Tell me where you are, my darling. Tell me you’re alive.’

She looks up at the birds in the sky above the wood, but the tilt of her head makes her giddy and she puts a steadying hand on the wire. A certainty comes, as if from nowhere, that Sorrel is alive, she is waiting, she isn’t far. It’s as though she has left a trace in the air, touched the trees, or leant against the fence. Eve closes her eyes; minutes go by, lost in prayer.