Yes, you can see it for yourself. You can witness the last moments. Follow the signs at the gibbet and the rock, and you can meet my flesh eater.

It’s perfectly simple. All you have to do is find the dead place.

Chapter Four

There was a motorbike parked outside the Jarvis house, and several lumps of metal rusting in the paddock. The rain that had been falling all morning made sporadic rattling sounds in the long grass, as if hitting something metallic and hollow, like a car roof.

Ben Cooper stopped halfway up the path to take a closer look. Yes, the largest lump had been a car once – maybe an old Datsun Sunny, judging from the chocolate brown paintwork. Nearby were the remains of a chest freezer and a pig trailer with a broken chassis. None of them had served any useful purpose for a long time, except as homes for insects and rodents. Tongues of pale bracken were breaking through the floor of the Datsun, and nettles had folded themselves into its wheel arches, clutching the deflated tyres in tangles of spiky leaves. Now that summer was nearly over, the nettles, like everything else, were starting to die.

Cooper could feel the dampness penetrating the hems of his trousers as he brushed through the grass. Even when it wasn’t raining, it would be permanently wet down here on the low-lying ground at Litton Foot. White bracket fungus flourished wherever it could find an inch of surface soft enough to plant its spores. Layers of it grew from the rubber seal on the lid of the abandoned freezer, and from the crumbling foam insulation behind the dashboard of the car.

He saw that there were other rusted hulks lying in the paddock, and more of them hidden in brambles growing around a gate that led down to the woods. But it was too wet, and Cooper didn’t feel interested enough to explore.

A man in jeans and a thick sweater stood watching him from a wooden porch built on to the back of the house. Cooper hoped he hadn’t looked too interested in the wrecked Datsun. The man had the expression of a used car salesman spotting an approaching customer. Predatory, yet ready to turn on the charm. Cooper could feel himself being assessed.

‘Mr Jarvis?’ he called.

‘Aye. What can I do for you?’

Before he answered, Cooper moved a bit closer. He had to watch where he was putting his feet to avoid stepping on shards of rusted metal lying in the grass.

As he got closer, he saw that the porch itself seemed to have been made out of old timber salvaged from a converted chapel or schoolroom. The boards Mr Jarvis was standing on were massive planks of weathered oak, full of knotholes and the heads of six-inch nails embedded in the wood and painted over. Here and there, patches of black paint still showed through a layer of varnish. The whole structure must weigh a ton – no modern pine decking from Homebase for Tom Jarvis.