They hear Jameson growling, his head inside a rabbit hole.

‘Lauren, you’re in a mood today.’

‘You’re the one who’s acting weird.’ Lauren imagines the woman walking back through the trees. Her shoulders tighten, but the forest stays still.

‘How am I?’

‘You keep forgetting stuff.’

‘Like what?’

‘That person, the girl.’

‘Lauren, I swear, I didna see anything. Sorry.’

‘You don’t get it.’ She wishes she could move through the world like Billy, the way a duck crosses a pond, without thinking what’s beneath it.

‘Good thing I brought these too.’ He pulls out a pair of walkie-talkies like giant black insects from his rucksack. Lauren begged her father for a pair two months ago, but he said there was no point when she could use Billy’s. Niall has bought her a mobile phone instead. When she points out that the phone rarely works in the village and never in the woods, he just shakes his head and mutters about batteries.

Lauren clutches a heavy radio and runs further out into the trees. When she switches it on, static crackles through the air. She sneaks towards a large tree and crouches, her back against the bark. ‘I feel like someone is watching us,’ she says.

‘I have an idea.’ Billy’s voice scrapes through the radio grill. She’s not sure at this point whether he is in character. ‘I need you for reconnaissance.’

‘What?’

‘Go and do a recce – try and find Stuart and Maisie.’

‘Nah, I’m OK.’ Lauren looks through the trunks between her and the hut, but she can’t see Billy. Jameson’s ginger tail waggles out of the bushes on her left.

She runs deeper into the woods, skidding sideways down a mossy slope and into a patch of crackling bracken, then denser trees. The only paths here are narrow cuts into the undergrowth, made by deer. She wants large sticks, which can only be found a little way off, where bigger birches and oaks grow, nearer the edge. She feels the silky bark of a birch tree. Birches, she understands, are protective, the same as rowans, which cleanse the air in their own fiercer way. She edges her thumb under some of the peeling bark and pulls it off gently; she takes a couple of small birch branches that have fallen on the floor and breaks them up into little pieces. She picks the leaves of twinflower and primrose.

Billy’s voice crackles over the radio again: ‘See anything?’

‘No. I’m finding more sticks.’

She follows grey stones sunk deep in a line, the remains of a cottage or outhouse at some point in history. The forest used to belong to the local estate and in the Victorian era it was used for shooting game. But the trees grew too quickly and spread out in the intervening years, making the land unmanageable.