Soon I’ve reached the point where I have to ditch the car. I’d stopped off at a petrol station and bought a pre-pay phone, then used the last of my cash to buy food and drink and a cheap rucksack. It’s bright orange so before loading it I find a ditch and rub it in the soft mud at the water’s edge. The moon ripples on the water’s surface as I work. Once it’s covered I take the four cans of Red Bull, a packet of sliced Gouda and three chocolate bars out of the car and stuff them all into the rucksack. I check the phone. I’ve got two bars. I can see the place I’m heading to on the phone’s map app, but I just hope that when I’m in the woods I’ll still be able to use it to navigate.

And the forest ahead, now that I’m here, seems several times darker and larger than I’d thought it would be. I raise my nose and sniff the air a couple of times before setting off. It smells like rain.

Off on the hunt.

The trunk had probably come down in a storm. Or maybe its roots had been damaged by insects or fungus, or perhaps it had just reached an age and, tired of this world, had decided to keel over, taking as many of its neighbours as possible. In any case, it’s right across the path I’m on. I sit down by it, the huge girth partly sheltering me from the rain which has begun to fall. A cluster of mushrooms sprout from the wood like little umbrellas. I check the phone and see I’ve been going for just over two hours. Rucksack, Red Bull. The can hisses loudly into the night. It’s almost flat by the time it’s finished fizzing over. But I’m grateful for the energy it gives me.

I think back to all the crimes I’ve been witness to, how all of them were really nothing more than the almost inevitable conclusion of some earlier action, some chain of events whose outcome would have, despite their inevitability, been hard to predict. Invisible strings play us like puppets.