‘After that,’ Jo went on, ‘he bound and gagged me and left me in this hollow. It was about forty feet from the clearing, behind that shack there, and it was full of fallen branches and sticks; leaves, mud. He told me that if I wanted us both to live, I had to stay quiet, whatever I heard.’ She stopped, putting the can down, the glow from the fire like pigment on her skin. ‘I heard him bring Vale down. They stood somewhere close to the graves and Mills told him that I’d pretended to be sick, and that was why he’d got me out of the hatch; then, once I was out, I’d made a break for it into the forest, and – after a long chase – he’d ended up having to shoot me. And that was when I felt the change. I’m not even kidding. I was forty feet away and it was just like static; you could feel Vale’s rage like moisture in the air.’

She was silent for a moment, the fire crackling.

‘Mills kicked some of the earth away, to show Vale the corpse, and that was when I realized what the deer was for. It was still bloody, fresh, and mixed with mud, I guess its belly would have looked enough like a human’s.’ She glanced at me, as if she were still struggling to understand her feelings towards Isaac Mills. ‘Vale went insane. It was scary just listening to it. But that’s what I did. I lay there under all the shit that Mills had covered me with, and I listened to that beast ranting and screaming, telling Mills he’d screwed up, that I was his, not Mills’s. “That bitch was mine”: that’s all he kept saying – “That bitch was mine” – like I was some part of his destiny. Maybe I was, I don’t know. Maybe, if you believe in that stuff, he and I were always meant to meet each other, and – when we did – one of us wasn’t leaving again, but all I kept thinking as I lay there was, “I could have stopped this. I could have stopped this fucking monster thirty-three years ago.”’

She was quiet for a while.

I put some more wood on the fire, stoked it a little, and thought about what to do next. It was five thirty in the afternoon now, and there was no way we could head out into a forest this massive and this dense with night only a few hours away.

We’d have to go at first light.