He was motionless now.

‘Adrian?’

But there was no answer.

Just the quiet of the forest.

And, somewhere among its trees, nine people from Black Gale.

Circle

2018

London | Two Weeks Ago

The flight landed at Heathrow almost twenty minutes late.

She followed a family out, into the corridors of the terminal, watching as the son and daughter – neither more than four or five – discussed the films they’d been watching when they should have been sleeping. The flight had been turbulent, the eastern seaboard like a rollercoaster, so Jo hadn’t managed to sleep much either, and now her eyes felt dry and her throat scratchy. She grabbed a bottle of water from her backpack and hurried past the family, trying to get ahead of the crowds spilling out of flights all the way down the walkway.

The lines in immigration were still huge, a snaking queue that went across the hall and back again. She got out her phone and waited for it to connect, then texted Ethan to let him know she’d arrived safely. She told him to give Claire and Maisie a big hug from her. After that, she went to her Dropbox and accessed everything that she’d collated on the village of Black Gale.

She moved forward in the queue, inch by inch, footstep by footstep. It had taken her a long time to get here.

Almost two and a half years.

She remembered the call she’d got the day after she retired from UCI. If the British guy hadn’t mentioned Adrian Vale, maybe she would have forgotten about it entirely, despite the things that bothered her. She was sixty-five at the time, exhausted, actively looking to leave the reminders of her working life behind. She’d been worried about whether she’d find a similar sense of purpose in retirement, the same drive to get up every day, but not worried enough not to do it. Soon after the call, she’d flown up to San Francisco to see Ethan and his family, spent four weeks with them, and, when she’d come back, allowed her retirement to take over in earnest and the ghosts of her working life to wither. She’d actively gone out to meet friends, she’d invited old LAPD colleagues around for dinner, she’d taken up Pilates and tried her hand at golf. At weekends, she’d gone on walks with other retirees she knew at Seal Beach, along the coast into Sunset and Huntingdon, into the rolling hills of Crystal Cove, sometimes on the ferry across to Santa Catalina Island. She’d been out on some dates too, although none of them ever felt quite right, even after so many years. They were perfectly nice men, polite and interesting, but they weren’t Ira and, eventually, she stopped.