I looked from the shack to Mills, and watched as he stopped at the edge of the clearing, pale against the trunks of the pine trees that flanked him. He followed my eyes, to the plastic, to the tools, and then he pointed beyond the shack, to where the forest continued on the opposite side of the stream, and said, ‘They’re all in there.’ He blinked, as if he were struggling to focus. ‘All nine of them are in there.’

I looked beyond the stream, into the trees.

This is the end for you now.

He’d meant the case, not my life.

‘Vale didn’t give a shit about them once they were dead,’ Mills said, his voice so low now it was barely even a whisper. ‘He would have happily left them where they dropped. No one would have found them. No one comes out this far. But I couldn’t.’

It took him a moment to find his words again and for the first time he dropped the gun to his side, as if he didn’t have the strength or the energy to hold it any more.

‘I couldn’t leave them like that.’

‘You buried them all yourself?’

He nodded: a single, painful jerk of the head.

‘He kept them in the same hole you were in, and then, once I arrived here, we took them out and walked them down to this spot. He’d done all the prep himself – travelled here with them, one by one – but he wanted to kill them all at the same time, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to handle nine people alone, even armed. There was too much risk. So that was what he brought me for. When I had doubts, he told me he would kill me. When I tried to beg him not to do it, he put a gun in my mouth and told me he would pull the trigger. I think a part of him liked the idea of me being here too: it gave him something else to use. I’d be complicit, even if I never fired a bullet. I’d be so deep into the swamp there would be no way out.’

‘So you went along with it.’