‘It began somewhere like this,’ he said, his voice muted, as if it were coming from miles away. ‘That’s why I always liked it here. It’s the silence.’ He shifted on his knees, flinching, and looked up at me; it was hard to know what to make of him now – the threat was gone, the rage, the animal in him. ‘Big Bear Lake. That’s what it reminds me of.’

‘In California?’

He nodded. ‘I took a girl up there once, right back at the beginning. Martina. I liked her, I suppose. We had so little in common but I found her fascinating.’

‘Is she dead too?’

‘Yes,’ he said, but there was a sadness to him. ‘She overdosed.’

I watched him.

‘Tell me where the bodies are, Adrian.’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘You don’t remember where you left nine bodies?’

‘Do you know how long you’ve been here?’ he said by way of a response.

I looked out at the trees, a part of me scared to know the answer.

‘Do you know how long?’ He grimaced.

‘How long?’

‘Forty-six days.’

The news hit me hard.

Forty-six days. It had been the middle of March when I’d last seen daylight; now it was almost the end of April. I looked around me, at the trees, the frosted grass; felt the chill of the air against my skin. This had to be somewhere up north: it would explain why the weather was still so cool, the remoteness of the place, and it made sense of the vague memory I had of being enclosed inside a boot for hours – heavily sedated and tied up – and driven somewhere.

‘G76984Z.’

It took me a couple of seconds to find my feet again.

‘G76984Z,’ Vale repeated. ‘You recognize that?’

The sequence Mills had written on the Dictaphone.

The sequence I’d seen in an email at the house in Highgate.

‘Do you know what that means?’ he asked.

His fingers fell away from the wound.

‘You don’t, do you?’

He laughed, caustic, broken.

‘So what’s it mean, Adrian?’

He turned to the forest again and it was like I could instantly see his concentration wane, a light malfunctioning at the end of its existence, its power almost gone.

‘Adrian? Is it some kind of map reference?’