We covered Mills’s body with the groundsheet, took his notebook and went back to the house, following the vague path through the frozen trees. Neither of us said much about how we’d got here, but Kader – Jo, as she told me to call her – knew as much about me as I did her. It was enough for us to see clearly: we’d both gone looking for answers – we’d just been at opposite ends of Adrian Vale’s life.

At the house, we patched ourselves up using a first-aid kit in the living room, and then I found some food in the kitchen and we ate out of cans in front of the fire.

‘Do you know where we are?’ Jo asked.

I shook my head. ‘No. Do you?’

‘No.’

I’d searched the house properly and had found a small, open lockbox in one of the wardrobes, but all it had in it was a car key for a Ford, and an old Nokia mobile phone, pre-touchscreen, with a black-and-white display. It was working, the battery charged, but there was no reception. Neither Vale nor Mills had brought anything else with them. Any wallets, IDs or bank cards they might have had must have been back at the car, which suggested they’d walked out here to the house, not expecting to be long. The question was in what direction they’d come. In her search, Jo had found a wrinkled, yellowing piece of paper with a hand-drawn map on it. It looked like it was Isaac Mills’s writing and it appeared to show a path through the forest in a northerly direction, skirting the clearing and the shack next to the grave site. Yet I could tell, even without knowing her at all, that Jo was just as concerned about how we found our way out of the forest as I was: the map was a start, perhaps better than nothing, but it was still lacking in detail.

She moved in her seat, wincing.

Her wrist was sprained and she’d broken a finger.