The morning that Jo and I left Adrian Vale’s house in the forest, the sky was clear, pale as milk, the trees silhouetted against it. We moved across the grass in front of the veranda, heading in the same direction that Mills had taken me the day before, to the graves of the Black Gale villagers. As we did, we passed the body of Vale, still in the same place he’d died, but now covered in a tarpaulin we’d weighted to the ground with rocks to stop the animals getting at him. Once we hit the trees, the light began to dwindle and everything seemed to pull in towards us, huge trunks in vast lines in all directions. It was freezing cold, the forest floor like iron.

I grabbed a torch from my pack and switched it on.

Light scattered ahead of me, shadows lurching and changing direction, and we picked up the vague hint of the trail we’d come back to the house on after I’d found Jo in the shack. She was close behind me, her shoes making a heavy thump every time they landed: her build was small, her frame slender, but the only boots we could find in the house for her were men’s, a size eight, so she’d had to make do. Both of us worried about blisters, about the discomfort of walking miles in footwear that didn’t fit, but we had little choice. The clothes she was wearing were too big for her as well – but they were warm, and they were preferable to what Vale had put her in.

‘Any reception on the phone?’ I asked her.

She checked the Nokia. ‘No, nothing.’

We’d divided up what we’d needed: I was carrying food and water, some spare clothes and a couple of blankets, as well as Isaac Mills’s notebook, and she had more spare clothes, another blanket, a first-aid kit, and then the car key and mobile phone.

‘How are the shoes feeling?’ I asked.

‘Like I should be in a circus.’

I smiled, and we chatted some more, Jo discussing her husband, me talking about Derryn, and then we fell into a comfortable silence until we reached the clearing. Mills’s body was still under the plastic, exactly where we’d left it, the sheet weighted down with rocks for exactly the same reason as Vale’s. After we got out of the forest and alerted the authorities, they’d want to examine the bodies, and we needed to preserve the evidence as best we could.