He stands with his hands in his pockets, looking around. Big plant pots, packed with nothing but dirt. Wind chimes, knotted around one another in the shelter of a low, mortar-free wall where the dead stalks of flowers and plants stick out from grey earth. The grass is overgrown, sticking up in irregular peaks where the wind has whipped in off the water. He angles his head, examining the jumble of rotten wood and chicken wire bundled up at the very end of the garden. An animal run? Chicken coop? It certainly hasn’t been used for a long time. It shields a little of the sagging fence from view: the concrete post leaning up against it, loose twists of rusty wire sticking up like the teeth of a snare.

McAvoy moves through the long, damp grass, wincing into the damp gale. Peers past the clump of tumbledown wood and wire. If their killer came from the water, this would be where they had scaled the fragile fence; putting their feet down on the pile of rotting planks, hopping down onto the bed-spring coils of chicken wire. He changes position. Peers low at the impressions in the long grass. Makes out the faintest of indentations. Stands straight, arching his back, looking back towards the windows of the house, then left, to the home of Mr and Mrs Dash. A larger, sturdier-looking wall encircles their property, made more formidable by the screen of tall, rain-blackened trees. The other direction offers nothing save for a swathe of farmland, which disappears into a sharp-edged ditch. He imagines the scene from above and gets his bearings. Cautiously, hitching up trousers and coat, he sidesteps over the wire of the fence. Feels his boot sink into damp soil. Awkwardly, trying not to step on anything that might later prove useful, he walks lightly away from the house, heading up to where the drainage ditch slashes through the earth like a perfect wound.

To his left, the rising sun gives off a weak, watery light. He squints as he places his feet, trying to keep to rocks, to patches of hogweed and twisted grass.

There’s a little smudge of privet, off to his right: an ancient boundary marker picking out the edge of one field and the beginning of another. He stops, peering past the hedgerow towards the footpath that leads in from the water’s edge and circles back towards the main road. He feels dizzy, as though the landscape is turning and twisting around him. He ducks under the spindly edges of the privet, eyes still fixed on the drainage ditch, pushing his hand out to stop the spiky, spindly branches slapping at his face.

Sees a glint of silver: a flash of something metal glinting among the spindly twigs and curled-in leaves.

He peers at it, easing the other twigs aside to better examine the curious little flash of silver. A memory rises: crickets and butterflies, skewered onto sharp sticks; a larder of twitching near-cadavers; a feast for the bird who impaled them with sick accuracy that their suffering would endure long after it had begun to feed.