Dark shadows crossed the few remaining leaves from the previous autumn’s leaf fall in a confusion of oscillating stripes. He squinted, straining to focus. All around him, swinging from the limbs of the trees that fringed the clearing, were an assortment of crudely carved wooden figures. As his vision grew accustomed to the light he could see that they’d been smeared with a viscous brown liquid. And, hanging between them, he could now make out other figures too. Figures that had until recently lived, and walked, and breathed just as he did now. And whose time had been deliberately cut short. He was surrounded by a macabre menagerie of creatures: crows, magpies, rabbits, even a fox. All dangling from lengths of orange baler twine, congealed blood matting their fur and covering their feathers.

He felt suddenly light-headed. He closed his eyes and hungrily gulped in air. All at once the memory of the sweet, floral aroma of the mead that had filled his nostrils was replaced by the overpowering stench of death. In front of him, in the centre of the clearing, lay the body of a hare, head tipped back. Its throat ripped open. Its blood splattered across the centre of the glade.

A sudden gust of wind caused the grotesque statuary hanging round the fringes of the clearing to jerk violently from side to side like dancing marionettes. One shadow longer than the rest swung pendulum-like, its inky presence casting a shiver-inducing chill across him.

He moved forward, blinking, struggling to cope with the fluctuating light. He was close enough now to see a bluebottle crawl across the head of the figure, moving from the corner of the lipstick-covered cherry-red of her mouth, across the bridge of her aquiline ash-grey nose and finally alighting on her open eyeball. He took in the dark hair falling almost to her waist, and the familiar form of her tall, slim figure. From somewhere a memory surfaced of those lips moulded seductively around a cigarette. He turned aside, retched and threw up.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I think I’ve solved our little problem.’ Despite herself Clare couldn’t prevent a smile spreading across her lips as she put the phone down.

David looked up from his seat on the other side of Clare’s desk and snorted. ‘I’d hardly call being forced to close the unit a little problem.’

‘Do you want to know what the solution is or not?’

He gestured towards her impatiently.

‘I asked Margaret to put some feelers out. See if she had any contacts who knew if there was any work going.’