She knew what I knew: there was no way Vale and Mills had carried one person this far, let alone the nine from Black Gale – not through growth this dense. So had they headed south from the house, not north? Was that where their car was? The way out?

Were we headed in completely the wrong direction?

‘Do you want to turn around?’ Jo asked.

I looked at her. ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

She looked into the trees again.

‘It’ll mean we’ve just walked two hours for nothing.’

‘I should have asked Mills how to get out of here,’ I said, annoyed with myself, ‘not relied on this.’

‘He had a gun to your head, then he had a gun to his, then he blew his brains out.’ She turned in the direction we’d come. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’

I took a mouthful of water.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any reception on the phone?’

She got it out of her pocket and checked it.

‘Nothing.’ She looked at me. ‘Let’s just keep going for a while.’

We started walking again.

Jo went ahead of me this time, but if I was hoping for a change of luck, we didn’t get one. The trees didn’t get smaller, they didn’t thin out or break up. There was marginally more of a path now, and the sun was arcing through the branches, arrows of soft light spearing the mud, the twigs, the needles, but otherwise we could have been back where we’d started, only minutes from the house.

Another hour passed.

And then another.

After the fifth hour, I noticed something: the ground was beginning to change, the flatness of the earth leaning away from us, in a slant. Jo noticed it too, but her reaction was more muted. She’d long since started to flag, the boots hurting her, her gait uneven; she was holding her sprained wrist across her chest like a broken wing, and her damaged finger had bruised the colour of ink. She glanced over her shoulder at me, to check that I was seeing what she was, and then told me to go ahead of her, to see how far the slope went, and to where. Very quickly, I realized I wouldn’t have to.

Through the trees, I could see a lake.

A road.

We both stopped, looking at the tarmac drifting in and out of view through the wall of branches and trunks. I glanced at Jo and could see tears in her eyes, and when I looked again, at the grey ribbon cutting around the lake, I began to get emotional too.

I’d started to think we were lost.

I’d started to fear we might never escape the forest.

‘You ready?’ I asked.

She wiped her eyes.

‘I was ready five hours ago,’ she said. ‘Let’s do this.’