I was pretty much the same build as Vale, so physically I wouldn’t instantly be overwhelmed, and if Mills released me from the hatch early, I’d have another advantage, because Vale wouldn’t see me coming. And if it all went to plan and I got the drop on Vale, Mills could immediately get back to London and begin the process of insulating himself from whatever Vale had on him before anyone even got a sniff that Vale – or Robert Zaid – was dead. It wasn’t foolproof. It was, in fact, treacherous and difficult, but it was better than the life he was having to lead.

A life of lying, and of hurting people.

A life of burying bodies in a forest.

It was, though, a plan with one unanswered question: what had Mills intended to do with Jo and me? He hadn’t wanted to kill us, that much was clear, but if we were still alive, we could tell the world what he’d done and been a part of, regardless of how much of it he managed to erase from history in the time it took us to find our way home again.

Maybe, in the end, he didn’t know.

The man I’d followed to the mill that day, the man he’d been around Melia and her children, the man who didn’t want to hurt Jo, who apologized to her even as she blacked out in his car, wasn’t a murderer. But he was a survivor. He wanted to break free. He wanted a different life. He wanted to love someone. He wanted to be normal. When he’d made a run for it into the forest, even after he’d been stabbed by Vale, he was still thinking about the plan. The blood, the pain, it skewered his perspective entirely, his sense of what was possible from that point on. But then, when I’d caught up to him, reality had finally kicked in. He had a knife in his gut. He was dying in the middle of nowhere. He wasn’t going to make it home to Keighley, to Melia, to her kids. The plan had failed.

All he could do was make his side of the story clear.

That was what the notebook was for.

‘He dug a grave next to the others,’ Jo said quietly, bringing me back into the half-light of the house, ‘and then he went out and shot a deer. I had no idea what he was doing, but he dragged the deer back, skinned it, and then dumped it into the grave, before filling it all in again.’

I thought of the deer I’d hit with my car right back at the start of the case. If I hadn’t done that, I might never have met Mills at all.