Mills fell to his knees, the gun resting against one of his thighs. He looked across at me, the two of us on either side of the stream: he was like a man who’d run a marathon, his breath coming in harsh, ragged movements that seemed to send convulsions through his body. He wiped an eye, and then again, blood mixing with tears, then said, barely audibly, ‘I picked her up from the airport.’ He sucked in another breath. ‘An old source of mine in North Yorkshire Police called me to say she’d started asking around about Beatrix and Black Gale, so I started digging into her phone calls. I could see she’d called Quinn.’ Another breath, so frayed and so broken, it was nothing but pain. ‘I pretended to be him. I got her to trust me.’

He knelt there and sobbed.

‘Vale decided it would be too dangerous to meet her himself,’ he said eventually, the blood in his mouth now, smeared across his teeth. ‘He suspected that she already knew who he was. He was supposed to come back to London for a couple of days midway through that five-week trip he made to see shareholders, but he cancelled it and stayed out of the country instead.’ He made a small sound, like a grunt; maybe a snort of disbelief. ‘All the shit he’d pulled over the years and you know something?’ He glanced at me. ‘He was scared of that woman. I think she was the only person he’d ever met who was as obsessive as him.’

Gabriel Wilzon and Donald Klein.

Thirty-three years, and she’d never let it go.

‘So he asked me to take care of it, to bring her here, and said he would finish the job when he was done with that work trip.’ He sniffed, using his wrist to wipe his nose, mouth, cheeks. ‘Any sounds you heard down in the hole, that was probably her.’

I remember the clunks, the hums.

I thought it had been a generator.

It meant Kader hadn’t been dead for long.

Maybe only days.

‘There’s a pipe in the hatch we kept her in,’ Mills said. ‘She would try to climb it.’ He looked past me, to Joline Kader’s grave. ‘She was a fighter, right until the end.’

To the end.

The wind rose and then settled again.

The trees moved.