He changed into his wellies and tugged on his raincoat before getting out of the van, then took the plunge. Moments later, he’d undone the padlock holding the side gate and let himself through the fence, closing it behind him before setting off at a trudge towards the trees.

The forest was very dense and hard to walk through, and Ross was certainly no hardened outdoorsman. He tripped and stumbled his way for nearly quarter of a mile using a GPS navigation device to orient him towards the western boundary. Without the GPS he’d soon have been hopelessly lost, probably doomed to wander for ever. Overhead the tall trees swayed in the wind and their branches clacked and clashed like the antlers of fighting stags in the rutting season. Deep, deep in the forest he swore out loud – who the hell could hear him, anyway – as he had to clamber over a slippery, moss-covered fallen trunk that blocked his path with no other way around except through a mass of brambles that would have stopped a tank. He cursed even more vehemently a few metres further on, when he was forced to negotiate a steep downward slope where part of the ground had been washed away by floods of rain, exposing tree roots and a great deal of rotted and richly odorous vegetable matter.

Damn and blast. Why’d this have to happen to me? At least, if it was any consolation, the rain had stopped.

He was halfway down the slippery incline when he lost his footing. He windmilled his arms to try to regain his balance, to no avail. Next thing he was tumbling and slithering through the gloopy mud, desperately grasping at roots in an attempt to halt his descent but unable to stop himself until he’d rolled and somersaulted all the way to the claggy, squelchy bottom.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ he yelled as he managed to sit upright, caked from head to toe in wet, cloying, dripping, freezing cold filth that dripped from his fingers and matted his hair. ‘I don’t bloody believe it!’ Followed by a stream of much more profane invective.

But then his words abruptly died in his mouth as a very strange and unexpected sight caught his eye.

He reached out and raked in the dirt to uncover the rest of the shiny, glinting object whose corner was peeking up at him from the ground next to him. Something hard and small and thin and round, which he picked up and held up to look at more closely. As he wiped dirt off it, a stray beam of sunlight penetrated through the pine canopy above. It reflected off the object in his fingers, and it was as though someone had shone a golden light in his face. He gasped in astonishment.