Around us, the trees moved again and, for the first time, I could see the sun, winking through the canopy at a low angle off to my left. I’d wondered earlier if it was dawn or dusk, but now I could see the answer: the sky was lightening and the light improving.

‘But, in the end, she went ahead with it?’

Mills nodded again. He was propped up against the tree now, weakening every second we spent out here – not bleeding profusely, but bleeding enough for it to make a difference. He blinked, as if struggling to focus, and said, ‘Vale was paying some kid to sit and listen to these people, all day, every day, and not to ask questions why, and when I called in to check on him about a week in, the kid mentioned a dinner party. So he reads back what he’s heard. At this point, it was already 5 p.m. …’

He stopped, guilt embedded like shrapnel in his face.

‘I called Vale.’ He closed his eyes, winced. ‘I picked up the phone and I called him to let him know, thinking he’d just want to sit on it and hear the recording from the dinner party first, get a sense of what they all discussed. We’d only been listening in for a week or so by then. It was no time at all, really. But he didn’t. As soon as I told him Patrick was getting suspicious about who Zaid was, he went totally fucking nuts. The idea of even more people looking into Beatrix, and then looking into Adrian Vale, and then asking questions about Robert Zaid, it just blinded him. He told me we were going to go to the village straight away. I said, “This is a bad idea. We’re not prepared for this. You’d be better off biding your time,” and he said he didn’t give a single shit what I thought, and that he already had a plan in place. It was too late to stop the dinner party from happening, too late to stop Patrick and Freda discussing it there, but it wasn’t too late for Vale to stem the bleeding.’

At the mention of blood, he looked down at himself again, and then off at the trees behind me again, deeper into the forest. It took him a moment to rediscover the thread of the conversation, his eyes distant, his expression fixed and difficult to fathom.