‘No.’ She remembers them stuck to the rubber mat on the pickup’s floor. She tries to shake the woman in the dressing gown out of her head; perhaps it is better that she left. People in Strath Horne love to talk about her and her dad, she knows that. And the incident feels too strange a thing to say out loud.

‘I don’t have any more, I ate them all,’ Lauren says.

‘Ya pie.’

‘Billy!’ She tries to hit him but he dodges her arm and, like this, they weave up the stony track. They stop bickering when they reach the mouth of the forest where the fields disappear and the mottled trees turn to miles of pine.

The sprawling forest is the same size as their hamlet, fields, farms and small town put together; the wild inverse to their man-made space. They take the path known by locals as the Loop, which cuts into a section of forest for a couple of miles and back again. The only people to do this now are children and the occasional dog-walker. The children know this path by heart, making it easy to forget that they are surrounded by large swathes of parts unknown.

‘I’m only at school tomorrow then I’m away to Disneyland Paris,’ Billy says, trying to sound casual. ‘My mum got permission.’

Lauren looks at him. Her ideas of ‘Disneyland’ and ‘Paris’ are a fuzzy mixture of the photos Billy brings back every year and the film Ratatouille. ‘I’ve never been on an aeroplane before,’ she says.

‘I canna believe that. Seriously?’

Lauren ignores him.

‘Anyway, we’re only flying from Inverness to London, then we’re taking the Eurostar.’ He stops and looks at Lauren. ‘It’s this train that goes under the sea.’

‘You’ve told me before.’ She rolls her eyes.

‘What’s that?’ He grabs her arm and points to where someone is walking in the trees to the left of the path. There are flashes of white material among dark-green branches. She looks straight into his sky-blue eyes and then back. The person is walking away from them, deeper into the forest.

Billy has already started walking further up the path, but Lauren stays standing and lets out her breath. ‘She’s gone.’ She’s sure the figure was the young woman from the road.

‘Who?’ Billy says as he continues to trudge on up the path.

‘That person. The one we just saw there.’

‘Didn’t see anyone.’

‘Yeah, you did. You grabbed my arm. Two seconds ago. And now they’ve gone.’ He has to be winding her up.

‘Did I? I didn’t mean to … I’ve got a bit of a sore head.’

‘We both saw them. Her.’

‘Her?’