Date: 2025-10-09 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Adult; Thriller; Mystery
Description: Something moves on the forest floor... Josie is at rock bottom. Burned out, heartbroken and recovering from an abusive relationship, she lives a haunted existence after returning to her isolated hometown on the edge of the Forest of Dean. But the tall, dense pine trees are not the only things casting shadows across her skin. Josie's hopes of a fresh start are horribly derailed when she stumbles across a dead woman's decaying, ant-infested body in the woods. The grim discovery sends her into a downward spiral, forcing her to face uncomfortable truths about the victim and her own past - all whil
Publisher: Hachette Mobius

Gemma Amor is a Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Award-nominated horror author, editor, illustrator and podcaster based in Bristol, UK. She was named one of Esquire’s Writers Shaping Horror’s Next Golden Age, and recently featured in Ellen Datlow’s prestigious Best Horror of the Year anthology, Vol. 15.

Gemma loves to write about misunderstood monsters, both human and supernatural, as well as feminist horror. Itch! is her first novel with Hodder & Stoughton.

gemmaamorauthor.com

@manylittlewords on Instagram and X

Itch!

Gemma Amor

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2025 by Hodder & Stoughton Limited

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Gemma Maroney  2025

The right of Gemma Amor to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover by Saffron Stocker

All illustrations by Gemma Amor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ebook ISBN 978 1 399 74538 3

Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

For those who are infested, like me.

Contents

Author’s note

Part One

2001

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part Two

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Part Three

2005

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Part Four

2005

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Part Five

2005

Chapter 58

Acknowledgements

Support for all and any victims of abuse

Author’s note

As with all my novels, I would like to give any survivors some more information on the potential triggers they may face in this book, so that they can choose how to engage with it. These triggers might include sexual assault, rape, suicidal thoughts, mental health issues, self-harm and both physical and emotional abuse.

Part One

2001

Josie’s father was chopping meat with a large and very sharp butcher’s knife, humming along to music, when his daughter came downstairs.

‘Dad?’

At first he didn’t hear her. The music was too loud.

Josie tried again, heart in her mouth.

‘Dad?’

The knife halted, mid-slice. Her father looked over to where Josie hovered in the kitchen doorway.

The girl wrung her hands together.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

Her father reached out, turned down the CD player, just enough to be heard over.

‘Are you a good girl, Josie?’ he asked, then.

Josie didn’t know how to answer that. The question, delivered so abruptly and without any context, felt like a trick.

She wrinkled her nose, fiddling with a strand of hair that had come loose from her braid as she worked through the best possible response.

If she said yes, her father would no doubt disagree. Worse, he’d be disappointed with her for lying. Josie knew she wasn’t a good girl. She had a hard time paying attention, was clumsy, frequently lost or broke things, and was often getting into trouble. A truly good girl would do none of those things.

If she answered no, however, her dad would be equally as disappointed in her. He would say she should try harder, then, to be good. He was alone now, he would remind her sternly. She should behave better.

Teamwork, he was fond of muttering, brows low with disappointment. It’s supposed to make the dream work, Josie.

And she tried, she really did, but sometimes she made mistakes.

Didn’t most people make mistakes?

Her father didn’t like mistakes very much.

Josie didn’t hold this against him. He had a lot on his mind lately. People (other adults) went out of their way to tell her that, wherever possible. Your dad’s got a lot on his mind, love. Don’t take it to heart. He still loves you.

It was best not to upset him, they said.

And yet here she was, interrupting his evening.

Her father stood waiting, head cocked to one side, face highlighted in a peculiar fashion by the harsh kitchen lighting overhead.

Josie scrunched her toes against the freezing tile floor. Rain assaulted the windowpanes of their cottage. It sounded like thousands of fingernails tapping the rattling glass. Wind whistled and moaned down the chimney in the living room.

Autumn is trying to get in, Josie. Can you hear her?

When Josie’s mother used to say that, Josie would imagine a long, earthy woman wrapped around their house like a strangling root, her tangled auburn hair draped across the roof, skin made of crinkly leaves, fingers that were spindly twigs, tap-tap-tapping on the panes.

Let me in.

It’s cold and wet out here.

Let me in!

‘Um,’ Josie said, stalling for time.

Thunder pealed in the distance, added percussion for the orchestral efforts leaking out of the CD player. Josie didn’t know what tonight’s music was called, but it had lots of violins in it, all hacking away together in a frenzied manner. It didn’t sound very nice, not to her ears. It sounded how she imagined a headache would sound. Her dad loved music like this. He liked cooking to it. Violin concertos were his favourite, he said. At first, she’d misheard him. She thought he had been saying violent concertos. She still secretly called them that. Josie didn’t know what a concerto was, exactly, but she did know they were very loud. Sometimes so loud, the music filtered into Josie’s dreams.

Perhaps that was why she was awake, now. Dad was cooking later than usual tonight. Josie knew better than to ask why. Dad had a way of turning questions into conversations she didn’t want to have, like have you done your French homework, or why are you bothering me, or did you take the money from the jar on the mantelpiece or when will you learn to fucking behave, Josie?

Her father hated questions almost as much as he hated mistakes.

Yet Josie had woken up, and now she could not get back to sleep.

And Dad was being weird, for some reason.

‘Well?’ he persisted. ‘Are you?’

Thunder rumbled again, closer.

Josie plumped for honesty. Being honest was good, wasn’t it?

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, looking down at her blue pyjamas with gold stars on them. A gift from her mother. She was getting too big for them but refused to wear anything else to bed. Her pale ankles stuck out well below the hemline, making her feet look twice as big.

An ant ran suddenly across her left big toe, a large black ant with a huge head capped with giant pincers. Josie gasped and twitched, jerked her foot. The ant scrambled off towards the kitchen cabinets.

Her father narrowed his eyes, murmured something, turned the volume dial back up on the CD player and went back to chopping meat, ignoring her entirely.

Minutes passed. The music swelled, rising to a crescendo that Dad seemed to get lost in. Eyes half-closed, head tilted back, his carpenter hands kept going at the meat. Josie marvelled at how skilled he was, how he never managed to cut himself. Like the meat was wood to be worked.

Thunder grumbled again, closer still.

Another ant emerged from under the fridge, ran after its companion.

Josie waited for the most dramatic part of the concerto to die down. In the brief gap between tracks, she worked up enough courage to ask the question she had come into the kitchen for in the first place.

‘Daddy,’ she said, trying to feel brave and failing. ‘I can’t sleep.’

A snort.

‘What’s new,’ came the reply. The knife moved up and down.

Josie was undeterred. In for a penny, in for a pound, as her mother would have said.

‘Will you tell me a story?’

This request, she knew, would go one of two ways. If he was in the right sort of mood, her father would be kind, funny and accommodating – he would willingly follow her upstairs and tuck her back into bed, read to her patiently, using all the funny voices, and let her snuggle into his chest while he spoke, all the while gently re-braiding her hair into the usual, long neat plait he preferred. Or – and this was the more likely outcome – he would be in the wrong sort of mood, and shout at her, tell Josie to grow the fuck up and stop being such a fucking baby, before sending her back to bed. If she was lucky, she would escape without being spanked on the behind, soundly. If she wasn’t . . .

He’d go back to normal soon enough, her teacher reassured her when she caught Josie crying in the playground one breaktime. It would just take a while. He was grieving.

Be patient, she was told. Be a good girl, for his sake.

Josie knew she should go back to bed, leave Daddy be.

But Josie didn’t want to go back to bed, not alone. Something made her uneasy, frightened, something worth risking the threat of a smacked bottom. Whether it was the storm, or some other noise she heard, or maybe a bad dream, she didn’t know.

She just wanted someone to sit with her for a little bit.

And seeing as how her mother wasn’t around anymore, her father would have to do.

Josie held her breath, counting to ten in her head. A flash of lightning lit up the sky outside the kitchen windows on the count of seven. Josie briefly glimpsed the tall larch trees in her garden whipping around in the fierce wind, rain hammering the roof of her dad’s shed, where she wasn’t allowed to go, on pain of severe punishment. Then the dark returned, filling the windowpanes. No stars – the storm was right on top of them.

The black was punctuated instead by the pale reflection of her dad’s face in the rain-spattered glass. The counter lights shone in such a way it seemed as if the man had no shoulders, no body. He was just a head, his eyes shadowy holes. Like he was wearing a mask, Josie thought.

Uneasy with this image, Josie’s eyes darted around the kitchen, seeking comfort.

She noticed her mum’s favourite fern, wilted, browning at the ends. She saw cobwebs gathering in the spaces above the kitchen cupboards. She saw her cat, Max, asleep on a pile of laundry dumped next to the washing machine. A bowl of half-eaten cat food spilled on to the tiles nearby. The litter tray was just beyond, several fly-specked deposits noticeable under a dusting of pellets. She could smell it, a faint, foul under-odour. The house had never been untidier than it was right now. Josie didn’t like it.

Then she spotted Dad’s jacket, hanging on its peg by the back door, dripping. His bike helmet was dumped on the hall stand, right where Josie’s mother had always asked him not to leave it. Rainwater had run down the visor, was probably staining the wood underneath. By the back door – her father’s biker boots, caked in fresh mud, brown stuff splattered over the floor tiles. The boots should have been upside down on their pegs in the porch outside, where the mud wouldn’t get tracked into the house.

It was beginning to feel like Mummy had never existed at all.

‘Daddy?’

The knife ceased chopping and slicing once again. Josie’s father sighed and set the utensil to one side while he registered the request, flexing his knife hand, working the kinks out. Freshly cubed meat lay in a large mound on the chopping board before him.

His hands, Josie saw, were wet and red, almost all the way up to the wrists.

‘Josie,’ he said, eventually. Irritation carried his voice above the concerto. ‘I have to make these pies. It’s the Devil’s March tomorrow, and I promised three of them. And now your mother isn’t here to do it . . .’

He used the poppy tea towel to wipe his fingers clean. Different shades of red bled together on the fabric.

Josie frowned. The towel was Mummy’s favourite.

That was one step too far.

‘Mummy says you should wash your hands with soap before wiping them on the towels,’ Josie blurted, her mother’s exact tone and intonation still strong in memory.

Then, because her father didn’t like talking about Mummy very much, she plugged her thumb into her mouth.

She started counting to ten again, feeling panicked.

On the count of five, another sheet of lightning flared, followed by a gigantic clap of thunder that rattled the windows and set a dog barking somewhere down the lane. Max stirred, stretched one leg out straight as a rod in front of him, let it fold lazily and fell back asleep.

Josie cringed, waiting for her father’s response.

Another ant scuttled out from beneath the fridge.

Josie’s father smiled, a wistful gleam in his eye that could have been a tear, but that was unlikely. Daddy didn’t cry – at least, Josie had never seen him cry. Maybe he did it in private, in his shed.

Or maybe he just didn’t get as sad about things as she did.

The music shifted to something slower, more mournful, as if reading Josie’s mind. An adagio, her father had tried to tell her, multiple times. He didn’t like those movements as much. Too soppy, he said. Too sentimental.

Dad crumpled the tea towel and threw it at the laundry pile festering on the floor near the washing machine. Max the cat looked up in surprise, sniffed the towel, closed his eyes in disdain.

‘Mummy won’t mind,’ he told Josie, gently. ‘She’s dead, remember?’

Two more ants scrambled across the kitchen tiles, then three. Then four, five. A column formed. It moved quickly, climbing the cabinets, headed for the countertop where the meat sat, ready to be made into festival pies.

Her dad did not seem to notice.

Josie sucked her thumb harder, hurt by his words. She did remember that her mother was dead. Of course she did. Sometimes she forgot, but usually only right after she’d woken up from a sleep, and only for a short while.

Sadness flooded in, heightened by the music. There had been a funeral. All the grown-ups had been crying. Josie’s father had given a speech, his voice cracked and funny. There had been flowers and cards and, strangely, a cake, like they were having a birthday party, only everyone wept openly at this party and there were no candles – at least on the cake – and no games, no pass-the-parcel, no musical statues. Everyone had been dressed in black and grey. Relatives she had never met had pinched her cheek and patted her hair, eyes bright from crying. Josie had not liked being touched by any of them.

She missed being touched by her mother.

Josie’s lip wobbled. Suddenly her face was hot and wet.

Six more ants joined the column.

Her father sighed, again.

‘Come on now,’ he said, finally crossing the kitchen and scooping Josie up with his meaty hands. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. None of that.’

Josie tensed, hoping the leftover red on her father’s hands and arms wouldn’t stain her pyjamas. Then, as the sadness jabbed at her heart, she wrapped her legs around his waist, taking some reluctant comfort from his familiar bulk. He smelled like no one else she knew: a combination of wood shavings, motorbike oil, raw meat, smoke. Sweat, too, a sour tang that made Josie wrinkle her nose.

He carried her out of the kitchen, towards the staircase.

‘You have to be braver than this,’ he muttered, as she sniffled into his neck, exhausted. ‘You have to be strong, we both do. No choice. Can’t cry forever.’

Josie wasn’t so sure. She sometimes felt like there was an endless supply of tears in her body, but she let her father carry her away, back up to bed. Tonight, he was Good Daddy, and she would have to make the most of that. Josie never knew when Bad Dad, or Sad Dad, was going to take over, so she exploited the moment, snuffling and snuggling into him as he hit the stairs.

‘Can I have some milk?’

Her mother used to make her warm milk before bedtime. Her dad only made it when Josie asked, and sometimes not even then. Not my forte, he said, meaning domestic things, chores, anything to do with cleaning or tidying. Pies were different, pies were for the festival. Pastry and chopped onions and diced meat.

Warm milk was another thing altogether.

He made the milk differently to Josie’s mother, burning it in the pan, sometimes, she thought, on purpose, then adding honey, he said, to sweeten it, to correct the mistake.

‘Daddy? Milk?’

‘Will you leave me alone if I do?’

Josie nodded. She didn’t mind the burned taste, or the skin of milk that always grew on the top of the mug as it cooled. She just liked that her dad made it every now and then. It made her feel special, like she mattered more than his grief, and she always slept after, soundly, waking groggy and gritty-eyed the following morning.

‘Fine. Story first, then milk.’

Satisfied, Josie cast one last look into the kitchen over Dad’s shoulder before they ascended. Another sheet of lightning flared outside. Thunder boomed. The red beef sat lurid under the strong counter bulbs.

A large line of black dots now traipsed across the wooden countertop, coalescing into a dark, crawling mesh as the insects swarmed over the meat. From the way they moved, they resembled a strange, living sort of net, a net that moved with purpose, the individual strands tightening over the cubed beef with perfect intention, lifting and turning it, like a baker turning dough.

Josie wriggled against her dad as her skin started to feel itchy.

She hoped none of the ants ended up in the finished pies.

Seeing them made something in the back of Josie’s mind itch, too. Some memory of crawling things and bugs and meat and the colour red, or maybe all those things together, but then Josie was beyond sight of the kitchen, up the stairs, being carried towards her bedroom. There her dad would tell her a story while the rain splattered hard against the windows. There she would drink sweet burned milk and fall asleep, and get one more night, one more bad dream, away from the day her mother died.

Chapter 1

2024

When she found the corpse twenty-three years later, Josie thought it was a mannequin, dragged into the Knoll by bored teens on the back of a mountain bike, unceremoniously dumped under a cluster of pine trees to one side of the path.

She never once entertained the idea that it was a real, human dead body.

Decomposing flesh and blood.

A woman, who, like Josie, had once harboured hopes and dreams and desires as wide as the sky, with a mother who loved her, missed her, was crying at that very moment in time, wondering where she was, why she had left, and if she was ever coming back.

The path through the Knoll, sometimes called the Devil’s Knoll, was well-trodden: a long track through a gloomy stretch of moss-splattered firs, pines, larches and rhododendron bushes that separated the small hamlet of Ellwood from the town of Sling and led directly to Josie’s apartment. Not the fastest way home, but the most direct. The shortcut was popular with dog walkers, schoolkids and drug users, as evidenced by the sporadic deposits Josie glimpsed in the undergrowth: soft drink cans. Chocolate wrappers. Discarded baggies. Crumpled tinfoil. Small, shiny gas cylinders. Even syringes. They had a problem in these parts, but nobody seemed to want to talk about it much. Signs nailed to trees warned people to keep their pets on a lead, and to clean up after them. Beneath the signs, snagged on branches where they’d been tossed: tied-up bags of dog faeces abandoned by lazy owners.

Beyond being a cut-through, the Knoll had another purpose. Every winter, it was part of the eight-mile ceremonial route that formed the Devil’s March, Ellwood’s annual festival. The March, which ran across the Forest of Dean and culminated at a highpoint called the Devil’s Pulpit, overlooking the Wye Valley, had come through only the night before, just as it had done for hundreds of years, if not longer. Brightly coloured paper streamers, chunks of straw, feathers, glitter and drifts of dried rose petal confetti lay trampled along the trail. Josie hadn’t bothered attending, despite her father asking several times that she go with him. It’ll be just like old times, he’d said, but Josie didn’t want to remember old times. She’d had enough of that when she was a kid. Maypole dancing, Guy Fawkes, Jack o’ the Green, wassailing . . . growing up in rural England was inherently strange. Pockets of tradition and superstition stubbornly coexisting alongside huge mobile phone towers erected in the woods, drone deliveries from retail companies dropping from the sky, cars with exhaust boosters, online dating, e-cigarettes. The local kids still sat around on their doorsteps in the afternoons after school weaving corn dollies while scrolling on their phones. The contrast sometimes gave Josie whiplash.

Which was why she stuck to the green spaces where possible. Josie liked walking through the Knoll every day, despite the mess and litter. It had become something of a ritual, this wandering back to the apartment through the trees after her shift at the King’s Arms. It loosened her up after hours bent over, scrubbing toilets and making beds, vacuuming and dusting and plumping pillows and sorting cutlery and polishing glasses. There was something about the shadowy calm of the place, the pine-scented air, so much fresher than fake-pine-scented laundry detergent and bleach. Birds chittered. Rustling sounds in the undergrowth signalled rabbits coming in and out of their burrows. A woodpecker tapped furiously at a tree trunk in the distance, taking breaks to let fly its raucous, rasping call.

So lulled was she, into some brief semblance of peace, that when Josie eventually spotted the bloated, stiff-limbed figure lying in a strange position atop a thick blanket of dropped pine needles a little way ahead, she thought:

Oh. A dummy.

And kept on walking towards it, small puffs of breath hanging white in the November air before her.

The smell of the coming winter was oddly distracting. Exciting, almost. It was mid-afternoon, the sun past its highest point, and bitterly cold. The ground felt hard and unyielding under Josie’s feet, her skin tight from the chill. Amber light struggled through needle-laden branches and twitching leaves preparing to drop. Josie felt as if she were walking through a stained-glass-window-lit cathedral, the high, vaulted ceilings latticed with swaying branch-shadows.

There hadn’t been many quiet or natural places like this back in London. Not much birdsong. There were plenty of parks, pockets of green in the urban sprawl, but they never felt very safe, or very peaceful, or very wild. Not to her.

Her life there had been loud. Relentlessly, overwhelmingly so.

Part of that had been Lena. She’d always dominated whatever space she was in, both physically and by way of projecting, filling up a room with her voice, with large hand gestures, with exaggerated expressions.

Especially when she was angry, which was often.

‘You’re nothing without me!’ Josie’s ex had screamed, right before throwing the half-brick they used as a stop for the fire escape door at Josie’s head. It had been a crack shot. Not killing Josie as Lena had perhaps intended, but killing the relationship with remarkable efficiency.

Josie hated that this was her last, defining memory of the years they’d spent together: Lena’s face, twisted in rage, the brick, held expertly at shoulder height, like she was throwing a shot-put at an athletics competition. Josie’s feet scuffed along the frozen forest path as she once again relived the moment in high definition with added surround sound, her brain singularly occupied with endlessly cycling memories of that last, horrible argument, which played like an ugly movie on permanent loop in the front of her mind.

You’re nothing!

You’re—

She shook her head hard, exasperated, trying to dislodge the memories.

In hindsight, Josie supposed, it was not surprising things had ended the way they had. She’d left Ellwood to get away from her past, and crashed full tilt into Lena within days of moving to London. Now, she was back home, running from a different set of bad memories. Country girl moves to the big city, becomes city girl, she thought, wiping her dripping nose with the back of her hand.

City girl moves back to the country, becomes . . .

It felt like failing twice over.

Chapter 2

Josie stepped over a discarded paper face mask painted with harlequin features. The straps had broken, having been trampled by dozens of moving feet. The features were scrunched inwards. Josie looked at it and realised how the Devil’s March must seem to the outside world. Like a lucid dream. It had all been so normal to her, as a child, this ritual procession, the costumes, dancing, singing, chanting. As normal as posting a letter or combing one’s hair or riding on a bus. Just a part of daily life: appeasing the Devil.

Lena had made endless fun of Josie’s parochial upbringing, calling her a yokel every time she dared to bring up any sort of childhood memory. She had screeched in catty delight over old photographs of the March, carefully arranged and kept in faded hard-backed albums, particularly at those where a young Josie posed in ceremonial gear, dancing along in a voluminous white dress, corn circlet on her head, woodpecker mask covering her features, feathers stuck all over. Lena had pinned one such photo to the fridge in their apartment so she could ‘cheer herself up’ whenever she wanted to. Making fun of others was always Lena’s quickest route to joy. Josie had begun to feel deeply ashamed of Ellwood, its quirks and traditions, and of her strange, insular little life back there. She stopped talking about it. She didn’t bring any more photos out of storage, either.

That’s all behind you, now, Josie tried to remind herself, rubbing her hands together briskly as she moved deeper into the Knoll and closer to the discarded dummy. Let it go.

But the mind-loop played through, then reset.

You always play the fucking victim, Josie, Lena would say, a favourite accusation of hers.

It had turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. A near-miss masquerading as a bull’s eye. Josie remembered, for the millionth time, the last few seconds before she lost consciousness, the sensation of something coming towards her at speed, the disbelief, the flowering pain. She’d had time to think, before she blacked out, one sad thing:

Lena doesn’t love me at all, does she.

And then she’d woken up, in every sense. First, in a hospital bed – and afterwards, to the reality of her situation.

Josie touched the scar on her forehead, fingering the ridge of puckered skin there and wondering if, despite all the work she had tried to do on herself since leaving, Lena was, in fact, right. Perhaps Josie was nothing without her. She felt like nothing. She felt invisible and ashamed and thin and tired, all the time.

Lena was gone, now, a restraining order legally keeping her at a safe distance. Physically, at least.

But Josie, to her shame, still missed her ex. Missed her horribly and in a way she could never have anticipated. It pulled at her, like grief. She found she was not only mourning the person she’d met before it had all gone wrong, but the other version of Lena, too. The woman who had tried to kill her.

A familiar headache started to creep in, just around the temples. Josie got a lot of those now, even though it had been almost a year since the accident.

Accident.

The mind-movie was about to reset, she could feel it. Rumination was a lingering side-effect of abuse, Josie had discovered. Once she started, it was impossible to stop.

She had to focus on something else, before she went mad.

Josie dragged herself into the present moment, sucking in a large gulp of icy air, transporting herself back to the path through the Knoll, grounding herself in her surroundings.

The Knoll skirted behind a small cul-de-sac of nineties new builds called the Tower Street estate. Estate being a generous description, for it was one looping road around which nine houses were crammed, uncomfortably close to each other. Some of the houses could be glimpsed through breaks in the trees as Josie walked, a few winking windowpanes reflecting the sun that came out in brief bursts between racing clouds and swaying branches.

The residents of the Tower Street cul-de-sac were the closest thing Josie had to neighbours, even if there was a half-mile of thick woodland between her and them. The estate had been clumsily dropped on to what was once a small farm butting up alongside the Knoll, sold to developers when the farmer got too old to care for his livestock. The buildings never encroached upon the Knoll itself because the stretch of woodland shielded a scheduled monument and was therefore protected land – ancient earthworks lay buried under the brambles and nettles. There was an old fort and trackway hidden in the undergrowth too, of which only the mossy tips of a few misshapen lumps of stone remained visible. The earthworks were a large part of why the route was included in the Devil’s March. There were markings on the stones, if one could be bothered to find them in the undergrowth. Arrows, and three long scrapes, the Devil’s claw marks, according to some, anchoring the Knoll to tradition.

Keep to the Old Ways, the locals liked to say to each other, often. The Old Ways keep the devil at bay.

Tradition seemed to be the only thing Ellwood shared freely with outsiders. Otherwise, people kept themselves to themselves, while also somehow knowing everyone else’s business. Josie had assumed it might be a friendlier existence, returning home, for Londoners were taciturn to say the least, but she had forgotten that folk were just as insular around here, just as brusque. She’d hoped for some sense of homecoming, some feeling of return, of comfort, but had been left wanting. Hardly a familiar face from Josie’s childhood remembered her unless she was with her father, and even then, nobody seemed that interested.

Why would they be?

It was not like she’d had many friends here as a child. Her dad had seen to that, and her mother’s death had put paid to the rest. Nobody wanted to be friends with the weird, dishevelled, lonely kid who cried all the time.

Lena had been the first real new friend she’d made after leaving home.

Josie wondered about that, now. How desperate she’d been to find acceptance. She ignored signs that would have been obvious to others, out of loneliness.

That, and Lena had been a master of disguise, wearing a beautiful mask of her own.

The mind-loop started whirring, pressing against her aching brain. Josie could hear the memory mechanism resetting, the brick-throwing incident gearing up to replay.

Her eyes darted back to the dummy lying by the path ahead.

She sped up a little, curiosity piqued. Something about the discarded bundle nagged at her, but she wasn’t close enough to take the feeling seriously. Assumptions were easier and safer, so she once again told herself that she saw a collection of limbs, waxen, plasticky, man-made.

Waste, garbage.

Denial, she understood later, was a powerful protector.

Josie’s feet suddenly hit a dip in the path. She missed a step. Her ankle rolled, and she almost tumbled forward, recovered at the last moment by flapping her arms frantically. She was a lot clumsier since the head injury, more prone to falling into things and over her own feet. She always scared herself, when she fell.

Her pulse raced now in a way it hadn’t before. Wincing, she gingerly rolled her foot around, stretching out her ankle, which throbbed.

At the same time, she began to recite the alphabet quietly under her breath. Another grounding exercise she’d learned after her first big row with Lena. As a kid, she used to count to ten, especially when talking to her dad, but ten didn’t work with Lena. Too short. The alphabet was longer, more comforting. Later, the exercise was a way of confirming she wasn’t brain damaged.

Can you recite the alphabet for me? the doctor asked when she woke up.

A, B, C . . .

Pines towered above Josie, rustling as consonants and vowels slipped from her lips. She felt suddenly dizzy. She wished, not for the first time, that her mother was still alive to talk to. About Lena, about life in general. Dad would do his best, if he was in the mood. He would half-listen as well as he was able, he might even nod and perhaps briefly pat her shoulder as she tried to articulate some of the strange thoughts that dominated her day, but he wouldn’t be able to offer any clarity. He considered his duty more than amply fulfilled by letting Josie live in his holiday apartment rent-free, or at least, he said, rent-free until she got back on her feet. Her father was losing a considerable amount of money by letting her stay, he told her, every day. He’d also set her up with the cleaning job at the King’s Arms, the local pub. Called in several favours, he was fond of reminding her.

Asking him to extend his parenting skills to existential wisdom and advice was a hiding to nothing. Her father wasn’t like that. He was a closed book, an open hand. Had been since Josie’s mother died.

But having nobody to talk to left Josie almost as alone as she’d felt with Lena, who had done a remarkably efficient job of cutting her off from her few former connections, although there hadn’t been many. Without the adrenaline that characterised and drove her through her old day-to-day existence, Josie felt numb, directionless, sealed off from the world, unable to fully take advantage of her senses.

Maybe that’s why it took her so long to figure out what the thing on the side of the path actually was. The grisly truth of it.

Shaking her head firmly once more to stop the movie from looping back over – You’re nothing! Nothing! – Josie limped forward on her rolled ankle.

That’s when the smell hit her.

Chapter 3

Josie still couldn’t fully accept it, even when the stench grew so pungent she gagged, covering her cold nose and mouth with her jacket sleeve.

Confused, she drew closer. Her headache worsened, pulling at her scalp and making her feel heavy, disconnected. Her feet didn’t land precisely where she wanted them to. It was like one of those dreams she used to have as a kid when she would forget how to walk entirely while classical music blared out in the background. Still, she limped on. She was exhausted after her shift. She wanted to get home, collapse on the couch, stare at the television until sleep claimed her.

She wanted the obsessive thought-loops to stop, so she could rest, truly rest.

The mannequin grew closer.

The smell got stronger.

Josie saw, on nearing it, that the dummy was partially clothed. A red Converse shoe lay on the path a little distance away. The other was presumably attached to the figure’s foot.

I wonder what size those are, Josie thought. I like Converse.

I like red, too.

The mannequin had hair, masses of it, dark chestnut curls that were sodden and matted with dead leaves, needles, twigs, grass and what looked like large clumps of mud. Clearly, it had been out in the elements for a while. There was a greenish tinge to the exposed limbs that Josie took for mildew, or moss.

It wasn’t until Josie was directly beneath the small cluster of pines that she saw the mud around the figure was teeming with maggots.

A lurching feeling surged in the pit of Josie’s stomach. Blood whooshed in her ears as her feet nudged the dummy, gently.

It didn’t move.

Josie looked around, grabbed a stick from the brush nearby. She chose the longest one she could find, partly for protection against the visceral fear that had unexpectedly descended on her, partly because she wanted to investigate the bundle of hair and waxy limbs at the bottom of the small cluster of pine trees without touching it. She wasn’t fond of dirt, never had been. Her hands were testament to that: dry and red and cracked across the knuckles from repeated washing.

She leaned forward, swatting away a persistent cloud of flies that zoomed around her face. Then, reaching out with the stick, Josie poked the dummy vigorously in a pale, exposed region just below the head.

She expected, on doing so, to feel the solid resistance of plastic. She expected the head to roll under the force of the stick, settle rigidly back in place.

Instead, there was a gentle yielding sensation, then a squelching sound.

The tip of the stick sank into soft neck.

The feeling that travelled up her arm was that she was poking something fleshy. Rotting.

Josie gasped and yanked the stick back. A torrent of ants poured out of the fresh hole she’d made in the dead woman’s body.

And Josie, finally understanding what she was looking at, screamed.

Chapter 4

A succession of realisations ploughed through the denial that had kept Josie safe up until this moment.

Dead.

A dead body.

Bloated, stinking. The flesh, weird colours: greys, greens, blues, blacks. Even yellow and purple, in places. Not mildew, or moss.

Putrescence.

The woman was lying chest down on the forest floor, head twisted violently to one side so half her ruined features were exposed. The tangled mass of maggoty hair spread away from her delicate throat, now mauled by Josie’s stick. In the socket where her eye should have been, more wriggling things, white and disgusting. In her ear, too. In the little well between shoulder blades.

And ants.

So many ants. A scrambling blanket of them.

They’d made a colony inside the body, Josie saw. The insects had been industrious. They’d eaten away the softer parts of the dead woman’s face completely: eyes, eyelids, the skin around the nostrils, lips. The exposed teeth left behind made it look like the woman was snarling in anger, or fear.

Josie screamed again, louder this time. Jackdaws roosting in the pine-tops erupted up into the air overhead in a burst of black feathers, squawking in annoyance.

The scream died in her throat. The dead woman remained.

Josie, trembling all over with shock, dropped the stick and covered her mouth with her hand, clamping down hard to prevent the stench from infiltrating every part of her.

The corpse was partly clothed, but the garments were in disarray. The woman’s shirt, once yellow, now brown, with tiny patches of the original colour showing through the filth and grime, was hitched up to show the back bra strap, frayed, elasticity gone, held in place just barely by one eye-clasp, the other bent out of shape. Josie could see movement underneath the fabric: more bugs. Her own skin started to itch fiercely as she slowly took in the rest of the scene: dried, rust-coloured blood all over the woman’s head, which was a strange shape, like it had caved in on one side. Other, grey, gelatinous patches Josie later realised were brains. A single, thin braid had flopped off to one side of the hair and brain matter mass, incongruous for how neatly woven it was.

Josie yanked her own braid, hard. The pain kept her from collapsing.

The woman was wearing a pair of jean shorts, also stained rusty brown. An odd choice for November. They were unbuttoned, lying slightly below her hips, and Josie could see the top of the corpse’s knickers, a lacy hem. Below the shorts, two skinny legs, covered in slugs, ants, beetles, worms, bits of straw, mud, blood and bruises and . . . were those animal bites? Something had been gnawing at her, a fox, maybe, or a rat. The woman’s exposed ankles were blackened and swollen, and one was demonstrably broken, a sharp piece of bone jutting out through discoloured skin. The broken ankle topped the remaining Converse shoe, the sole of which was half-ripped away, flapping like a lolling tongue. The foot inside the shoe was bent to an odd, unnatural angle, as if the woman had landed on it sharply from a great height. A collapsed puppet, strings cut.

Josie gagged repeatedly.

She caught sight of several strange marks on one of the tree trunks above the lifeless, lopsided head. Three marks, deep gouges in the bark, made with sharp claws, or a tool. She felt cemented in place with disbelief and fear, her entire body stiff with panic, rigor-gripped, as if she herself were a fresh corpse. Her headache pounded against the walls of her skull, bringing fresh tears to eyes already watering with fright.

What should I do? What the fuck do I do?

The dead woman’s empty eye sockets offered no answers.

Chapter 5

Josie remembered her phone. She pulled it from her pocket with shaking hands. It took several attempts to unlock the screen, her numb fingers refusing to cooperate.

She tried to call her father first. She wondered about that, after.

Why Dad, and not the police?

She rang him six times, to no avail. She left a voicemail after each attempt, the messages getting more frantic and unintelligible with each call.

Then, when it finally sank in that he was busy, that he was not going to answer, Josie rang the police.

The initial relief she felt on reaching an operator was short-lived. The woman at the end of the line asked Josie to check that the body was, in fact, a dead body, and not a live one.

‘Can you feel a pulse at all?’ the operator asked, cool and collected, as if she were asking after the weather. ‘Can you see her chest rise and fall, feel any breath if you put your hand above her mouth?’

Josie stared at the ragged hole she’d made in the woman’s neck, teeming with frantic little ant-blobs. The exposed teeth, the blackened gums. The missing lips, gnawed away to the bone.

‘She’s definitely dead,’ Josie whispered, feeling sick. ‘She’s . . . I think she’s been this way for some time.’

‘How can you tell? I know this is difficult, but it’s really important we—’

‘She’s got no fucking eyes left, OK?!’

A pause.

‘I’m sorry, can you repeat that?’

Josie started to cry, shivering from cold and shock. The trees around her leaned in, threatening. The ants continued their busy work, deconstructing flesh, making a home out of death. ‘Her eyes are missing. They’ve . . . I think they’ve been eaten away. And she . . . Oh, God.’

The operator was typing furiously. Josie could hear her fingernails clacking on the keys.

A woodpecker’s leitmotif started up again, in the distance.

‘It’s all right, love, you’re doing so well. Just stay calm.’

‘I’m trying, OK? I’m fucking trying.’

The operator ignored her expletive, remaining steady and placid.

‘So the woman is definitely deceased. Are you one hundred per cent—’

Josie snapped.

‘Can you just fucking send someone? I don’t want to stand here answering a hundred and one questions!’

‘I’m putting out a call right now.’

‘I can’t be alone with her like this any longer. I’m scared. Just send someone out to the Knoll, and I’ll go home. My address is—’

‘I’m sorry, love,’ the operator said, ‘but I’m going to have to ask you to stay where you are until we’re able to get to you.’

A small breeze swept through the tree boughs above Josie’s head, rustling the pine needles. It sounded like soft laughter.

‘What?’ Josie was unable to believe what she was being told. ‘Wait here? By myself?’

‘I know this is tough, but I need you to stay with the body, please, madam, until our officers can get over there. We will have to take a statement, and—’

‘No!’ Josie shouted, ‘I’ve told you where she is. I’ve given you the details, I – I—’

The operator was apologetic but firm. ‘If I could ask you to remain calm, take a few deep breaths . . .’

The ants grew busier, moving in frenzied patterns across the dead woman’s face, as if encouraged by Josie’s hysteria.

‘. . . I know this is hard, but I have someone coming as a matter of urgency. Now. Josie, was it? If you can try to focus, I need a few more bits of information.’

The trees closed in tighter. Josie’s headache was now so bad she could barely see, barely think. Her brow was slick with sweat. She fought back recurring waves of nausea. The operator’s voice started to warp, slurring as if the unseen woman were drugged.

‘Just . . . remain calm . . . Josie . . . please . . . Now, can you . . . descri—’

Josie’s phone slipped out of her fingers as another ice-cold wave of dizziness crashed into her, almost knocking her off her feet. Staggering, she bent double, trying to get her head between her knees so she didn’t faint.

The ants seemed to follow her movements, swirling around her shoes, circling each foot as if waiting for her to fall.

Kicking out in panic, her breath shallow and fast, she found she couldn’t draw anything in through her lips except for tiny flies, a cloud of which whined persistently in her ears. She felt them go into her mouth, hit the back of her throat. She felt invaded, like the woman on the ground. They had similar hair, similar taste in clothes, similar height, from what she could tell.

Josie’s thoughts swirled like fog.

Is it really a dead body? Or is that me lying over there in a heap?

Frantically checking to see if her eyes were still where they should be, hands crawling urgently like spiders over her own features, trying to ground herself, persuade herself she was still alive, still breathing, still intact, Josie swayed and stumbled again, her weakened ankle rolling, and she lost balance, and started to topple forward, unable to catch herself this time.

The operator’s voice, tinny and small, leaked out of her fallen phone.

‘Hello? Madam? Josie? Hello, are you there?’

But Josie wasn’t there anymore. She’d hit the floor, face-first, and didn’t even flinch when the ants, who had long been looking for warmer skin to conquer, continued to empty out of the corpse, swarming together to form a long, thin, living bridge of tiny bodies stretching from one woman to the next, a crawling span of insectile traffic, masses of inquisitive, industrious little things acting as one interlocked structure, a collective arc from the past to the present, the living to the dead, marching all over her body.

Nothing.

You are nothing.

A . . . B . . . see?

I told you.

Chapter 6

In the beginning, it hadn’t been bad with Lena.

In the beginning, it was passionate, and romantic. Lena pursued her with dozens of texts, calls, videos of herself singing in the car, FaceTimes, gifts, tagging Josie constantly on affectionate social media posts, fancy dates, flowers and cards. Josie, unused to such attention and public displays of romance, had been swept off her feet, floored by the sheer force of Lena’s alleged feelings for her. This beautiful woman was interested in her? This fierce, intelligent, successful creature with eyes like blue pools and legs as long as the day? Lena had a penthouse apartment near Canary Wharf, a brand-new Porsche and a whole wardrobe just for shoes. She was sleek and sophisticated and unfazed in that city-born way, had hundreds of friends, thousands of followers online across various channels.

On their first date, she’d taken Josie to a Michelin-starred restaurant, eating barely anything at all, watching in amusement as Josie worked through the entire tasting menu with gusto.

I think you’re my soulmate, she’d said, as they clinked champagne glasses.

I know you’ll be in my life forever, no matter what.

I didn’t really know myself, until I met you.

You make me want to be a better person.

But Lena hadn’t become a better person with Josie.

Lena had only become bitter, and possessive, and hypercritical. Moody, depressed. Never satisfied with anything. Obsessed with money. Status. Other people’s opinions of her. She stopped texting, stopped tagging Josie in soppy posts on her Instagram or Facebook. Stopped recording silly singing videos. The dates slowed down, too, until they rarely went out together at all. Other girls began popping up on Lena’s phone, girls that looked like Josie, only younger, more athletic, with better clothes, better posture. When Josie questioned her about this, Lena would get angry, tell her she was being controlling. Then she would stomp out in a righteous mood, only to return three days later with a smirk on her face and love bites on her hips. She liked being bitten. Eat me like I’m a snack, she would say, and Josie would oblige, thrilled at first, wearied by the end.

Josie’s early confidence wilted under the force of Lena’s voracious ego – her whole day dominated by the other woman’s frustrations and insecurities, wants and needs. Josie found herself growing smaller and weaker in the face of Lena’s extreme moods, her aloof and often cruel demeanour that swung, without warning, into obsessive vulnerability, and an exhausting desire to be in control, all the time, even when it came to the tiniest, most inconsequential of things. What Josie wore. Who Josie spoke to. What Josie ate, or didn’t, depending on Lena’s mood. The television shows she consumed. The books she read, or wasn’t able to. The brand of shampoo she used. Her list of instructions grew longer as Josie’s happiness diminished, fading away almost completely until she looked in the mirror one day and was unable to recognise the husk that stared back.

But there had been moments of magic, and those breadcrumbs had kept Josie captive, perhaps because they were so infrequent, and therefore felt even more special. On the rare occasions Lena was able to let her guard down, relax, exist for the now, instead of for the maybes, think about someone else, instead of herself, they would lie in bed facing each other, a peculiar tenderness pinning them to the sheets. Josie would look into Lena’s eyes, and Lena would look right back into hers, and they would trace the lines and soft angles of their features with their index fingers, or they’d stroke each other between the legs as if writing messages in wet sand, only the messages were not love letters, but cries for peace. For connection. For something to change. For the lies to stop.

The peace never lasted.

The memory of Lena’s eyes did.

When Josie woke, head throbbing, body pressed into the hard forest floor, she found herself face to face with the eyeless dead.

She realised, with a groggy, mounting awareness, that she was tracing the outline of the cold woman’s lipless mouth with her index finger, fingernail circling the ragged orifice as if she were still in bed with Lena, back in London, before it all went to shit.

Only this was not Lena.

This was a dead body, and Josie’s fingers were playing across her decaying gums, sliding over necrotic tissue.

Her other hand was inching under the dead woman’s waistband.

Josie yanked both arms back as if burned.

I’m sorry! she thought, silently hysterical with revulsion. I didn’t mean to!

A sound worked its way through the loud tinnitus buzz that rang in Josie’s ears. For a moment, the sound felt like a scream of rage, coming from the lipless mouth of the body before her.

Can the dead scream?

But Josie could see inside the woman’s mouth from where she was lying, face to face, just two lovers on a pine-needle quilt. She could see past the teeth, yellow and furry with plaque and blackened with rot in a few places. There was no tongue, she saw, with which to cry out.

It, too, had been devoured by the wildlife.

And then, Josie felt them.

Ants.

Thousands of insects, a mass moving all over her body. Biting. They’d left the cold home of the dead and taken up residence in her clothes.

Josie shrieked and jerked, hands slapping herself frantically. Pain raced across her skin, pinballing around her body as the ants bit down harder, angry at being disturbed.

She tried to get to her feet but was so dizzy attempting to stand that she buckled at the knees and sank back to the ground.

The ants burrowed deeper under her clothes, trying to escape her erratic slaps. Josie felt the insects in her bra, her knickers, tasted several in her mouth.

‘Hello? Is anyone there?’

Tormented, Josie reared backwards, crab-scuttling away across the path, spitting and gagging, throwing her body around, limbs flailing, trying to get as far as she could from the rotting woman and the ant’s nest inside of her, until her spine hit a tree trunk with a hard thump.

‘Hello? Police, hello, is there anyone there?’

A dog barked, excited.

Another voice called out, different to the first.

‘Josie Jackson? Miss? Hello?’

But Josie couldn’t answer. She sat with her back to the tree, sobbing, clawing up her T-shirt and looking down at herself in distress. Her skin was on fire, itching and burning. The pain was tremendous. She found she was covered in bites, hundreds of them, thousands, small, bright red dots and lumps making strange star-constellation rashes all over her body.

She lost control then, completely. Her howls rang around the forest like those of an animal in a trap: pain and fear, and anger, too. And that was how the police found her: sitting across from a dead body in the woods, scratching and shrieking, pulling at her skin and face and braid, eyes wide as saucers, gibbering about ants and the alphabet and someone called Lena.

Chapter 7

Another hospital. This time, for a sedative, for monitoring, for antihistamines to treat the bites and stings. The sedatives made her drowsy, which was a relief, for Josie actually slept, a dreamless, heavy sleep with no memories, thought-loops, nightmares or recollections.

Better than Dad’s milk, she thought, when she woke. A nurse frowned at the scar on Josie’s head when he came in to check up on her later.

‘That looks like it was nasty,’ he said, not unkindly.

Josie didn’t answer, instead turned her head to the wall. She’d had sympathy and concern from medical staff before. The nurse didn’t press the issue, aware of how exhausted she was.

She wondered if she would ever feel energetic or happy again. Or like she belonged anywhere. Her prospects, she realised, as the nurse fussed around her, were grim. Coming home to Ellwood was supposed to have helped Josie. She hadn’t finished her university degree. She hadn’t saved any money. She had lost all her friends, her relationship with Lena had been the only real, tangible thing she could claim, and that was over.

Returning to her roots, going back to a quieter, more manageable way of life, was supposed to be the fix. Walks in the countryside, visiting places she’d been to with her mother, places like the Knoll, which they’d cut through so many times, hand in hand, or Nagshead Nature Reserve, or Puzzlewood, or other places littered with old stones, deep woods, still quarries, ancient trails. Things she had missed in the big city. Fresh milk on the doorstep. Clean air she could gulp down by the lungful. Talking to her father, finding time to think, space to breathe, opportunities to heal. Blackberry picking and crackling fires, mud on her boots. Birds in the air.

Freedom.

Instead, she’d fallen face-first into a dead body.

The nurse left and came back again an hour or so later. He brought a cup of tea and had a woman with him, who wore plain clothes, but screamed police, in the way she held herself, and the officious tone of voice she used when talking.

Josie realised the plainclothes had arrived before her own father.

‘She’s groggy, but that’s the diazepam,’ the nurse said, propping Josie up more comfortably and passing her the cup of tea. ‘For the panic attacks. Are you sure this can’t wait a day or two longer?’

A shake of the head. ‘Time is of the essence.’ The reply came in a tone that brooked no refusal.

The nurse looked at Josie. ‘This lady is from the police,’ he explained, a disapproving frown on his face. ‘You don’t have to speak to her now if you don’t want to. You have rights. Whatever she wants can wait until you feel stronger.’

‘It’s OK,’ she croaked, gesturing to the chair by her bed. Josie didn’t want to drag this out any more than she had to. Better to get it over and done with now, then try to move on. Just like her dad had taught her.

The nurse was not happy. He shot the policewoman a dirty look.

‘Just be patient with her,’ he cautioned, before he left.

‘Of course.’ The older woman drew up the chair so it was closer to Josie’s bedside. She was tall and struggled to find a place for her legs. She had cropped grey hair swept back into a quiff, and wore a severely starched shirt tucked into black jeans, buttoned up to the top, the collar so tight it pinched her neck.

‘Hello, Josie. I’m Detective Constable Wilkes. You’ve been through an ordeal, haven’t you?’

The sympathy felt false. Josie knew the detective didn’t particularly care whether she was traumatised or not, otherwise she wouldn’t have shown up here like this, at her hospital bed. She would have waited a few days, done things more formally, in a more comfortable setting, perhaps visiting Josie at home, as per protocol.

Josie knew this because she’d been through the whole rigmarole before, with Lena. Her statement had been filmed, then, in a special suite in the police station. Before that, she’d been visited in her hotel room, paid for by her dad. She hadn’t wanted to go back to the apartment she shared with Lena, ever again.

She sipped her tea. It was overly sweet, but Josie didn’t mind.

‘Have you come to take my statement?’

The other woman nodded, device at the ready. It looked part phone, part tablet, loaded with a notebook function for typing her statement into.

‘I know the timing isn’t ideal, but under the circumstances, I thought this would be better than forcing you to come in,’ Wilkes lied. ‘Normally, we would ask you to write this down yourself, but I’m not sure you’re up for that, just yet.’

Josie flexed her writing hand. ‘Probably not,’ she said, unsure. Her head felt woozy, and her hands shook sporadically; she gripped her braid in an effort to calm them. ‘Will I have to go to court?’

The policewoman tapped her screen a few times. ‘We don’t know if a crime has been committed yet, so it’s hard for me to say.’

No crime? Josie thought, remembering the dead woman’s head, caved in on one side, spilling brain matter all over the forest floor. The broken ankles, the foot, bent back so far it had almost detached.

Then why was Wilkes here?

‘You don’t think it was an accident, her ending up like that?’

Of course she didn’t. Josie could sense excitement in Wilkes, an undercurrent of urgency. Probably the most interesting thing that had happened to her career-wise, this dead body. More interesting than pensioners driving on the wrong side of the road and disputes over hedgerows.

Detective Constable Wilkes kept her expression carefully neutral.

‘I’m afraid I can’t give you any more information at the moment. But your statement will help us understand more, perhaps. If it turns out there is some reason for a trial, then you might be called upon to testify. Apparently, it won’t be your first time.’ She slipped it into the conversation like a knife under one of Josie’s ribs.

Josie blinked. Bringing up her past felt clumsy at best, vindictive at worst. Did she expect Josie to cooperate, after that? Perhaps, she mused, the detective was simply bad at her job. She decided not to react.

‘Domestic assault, wasn’t it?’ Wilkes continued. ‘Got a nasty scar out of it, looks like.’

Josie said nothing. She owed the detective none of her past.

Wilkes scanned Josie’s face with curious eyes, then sighed. Her tone softened. ‘People don’t talk much about abuse in same-sex relationships, do they? A lot of victims never report it, for fear of being laughed at. You were brave, standing up to your ex like that.’

Josie swallowed back sudden tears. She didn’t feel brave. She felt like a shell. Wilkes was only being nice to her now to secure her cooperation, she understood that. Unsettle, then soothe. A horrible tactic, and wholly unnecessary in the circumstances.

‘I don’t like talking about it,’ she managed.

Wilkes nodded. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘It’s not the nicest topic, but then neither is the reason I’m here. I am sorry, for what it’s worth. Sorry for what you’ve been through.’

Josie sighed. Wilkes was just doing her job, albeit terribly. There was a mangled body in the woods, and somebody needed to figure out who she was, and why she’d been dumped there.

Josie was not about to stand in the way of that.

She gave her statement, laboriously going over the details. As she spoke, recounting the horrors of her discovery in the Knoll, her skin started to itch. It began as a mild sort of tingle, radiating out from the bites smothering her body, then seemed to go deeper, under the skin, like her insides were aggravated, too. She ignored the sensation as best she could, focusing on the minutiae the detective needed. Wilkes nodded along, stopping her occasionally to clarify some small detail, and then read the entire thing back to her at the end, holding the device steady while Josie clumsily tapped a button that automatically signed the form.

‘Thank you,’ Wilkes said, tucking the device back into her bag. ‘I know that can’t have been easy for you.’

‘No problem,’ Josie replied, for she was nothing if not cooperative.

And Lena’s voice, never fully silenced, chuckled vindictively in the back of her mind.

The detective slipped Josie a small square of card. ‘This has my mobile number on it,’ she said gently. ‘If you remember anything else at all, any other detail you think might help us, just give me a call, any time, day or night. And this’ – she fumbled around in her bag for a leaflet, handed that over too; it showed two women talking, one distressed, one kindly resting a hand on the other’s back in sympathy as she listened to the first – ‘is the number for victim support. I think it might be helpful to ring them, they’re very good.’

‘Victim?’ Josie looked up in confusion. ‘I don’t think I’m the victim here, do you?’

Detective Constable Wilkes nodded, just once, then made to leave.

‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘I rather think I do.’

Chapter 8

The first few days following her discharge from the hospital were rough. Josie’s dad moved out of his cottage and into the apartment with her, sleeping on the hard, viciously sprung fold-out couch in the lounge. To keep her company, he said. He did so without prompt or complaint, which made Josie realise how serious things were. Dad usually complained about everything. His silence now was frightening and peculiar.

Or maybe he was just trying to make up for not coming to get her from the hospital. Josie had taken a taxi home in the end. The nurse had given her a twenty so she could pay for it.

It had been a lonely, expensive ride. Josie stared out through a small gap she had wiped on the fogged window at the Forest of Dean passing by. Thousands of trees, that was all there ever was to see around here. Trees, and bracken. Occasionally, the ivy-wreathed humps of old stone wells, or a fly-tipped couch, or a stream. A deer, once, bounding through a rare break in the pines. Further back from the side of the road, dotted amongst the undergrowth every few miles or so, the distinctive, unsightly orange tops of large lumber storage boxes, for foresters to deposit coppiced tree limbs and other timber harvested each year. They had numbers spray painted on the sides in messy black. Her dad used these boxes often. Wood was difficult to keep dry, and his garden shed only had so much space.

Josie wondered if that was where he had been, collecting timber instead of answering her calls from the hospital. She didn’t bother asking him when he did eventually show up at the apartment. Questions were only useful when the querent had some hope of getting an answer that meant something. That wasn’t a jumble of hastily thought-up excuses: I wasn’t near my phone much. I was working. I had no signal. I didn’t see your missed calls. My voicemail isn’t working properly. I left my phone at home.

All excuses Lena had used as well.

The apartment was a holiday let, although business had dropped off significantly after the pandemic. The upstairs portion of an old, narrow coach house huddled behind a row of oversized, ugly conifers that abruptly gave way to the forest, it was decidedly gloomy inside. The tiny windows and sentinel-like trees blocked the sun’s rays for most of the day. It consisted of one bedroom, a tiny lounge that opened straight into an even tinier galley kitchen, a poky bathroom with a quarter-size bath and a staircase cutting the apartment in half right down the middle. Minimally furnished, with pale grey walls and brand-new grey laminate flooring, it was utterly devoid of any charm or personality. The exact opposite of the colourful cottage Josie had grown up in a few narrow roads over, in the heart of Ellwood, a cottage her mother had bought and decorated, where her dad still lived.

Josie soon discovered that the apartment was far too small for the both of them. Dad’s snoring echoed through the bedroom walls each night, rhythmic and intrusive, like an additional punishment for some unknown crime she’d committed. Sleep eluded Josie entirely until she managed to get an emergency prescription over the phone for sleeping pills. Then, she took too many and was knocked out for a whole day, which made her dad angry. He threw the pills away the next morning. It reminded him too much of her coma, he said. Of those early hours when he’d sat by her bed in the hospital after Lena threw a brick at Josie’s head, hoping she’d wake up.

‘You’re better off with warm milk,’ he muttered.

They continued to grate on each other while Josie did her best to recover. Once, when he’d had a little too much to drink at the King’s Arms, and stumbled home, red-cheeked, mumbling, Josie’s father confessed that he’d wanted his daughter to wake up after her attack only if she could do so as herself, not as a vegetable, which made Josie feel a number of different ways she had no desire to explore in any real depth.

What was the point? He’d said what he’d said. Words couldn’t be put back in the jar once the lid popped off.

‘I never understood what happened between you two,’ he went on, slumping on to the couch heavily. ‘Couples fight, that’s normal. Your mother smashed more than a few plates in her time . . .’

There’s a big difference between a smashed plate and a brick to the head, Josie thought about saying, but she couldn’t summon the energy. It hardly mattered, anyway, what he thought about the past. Not when a dead body had taken up residence in Josie’s brain.

Her own, living body did not cope well with the memories, or the ant bites. It swelled, her skin becoming shiny and red and hot to the touch as the bites triggered a series of strong allergic reactions, like aftershocks rolling out across her frame. The prescribed antihistamines stopped working. Josie smothered herself in hydrocortisone and calamine to try and quell the burning itch, swallowed handfuls of hay fever pills and buckthorn capsules, covered her food in cinnamon and took regular cold baths to cool her inflamed body. But she always felt as if she were still covered in ants – as if the bugs were somehow still there underneath the surface of her skin, marching along her veins and arteries, hollowing out her insides as they built a new palace for their queen. Josie imagined that queen, the xenomorphic, fecund head of the colony sitting regally upon her liver, or taking up residency in her aorta, or perhaps using Josie’s pancreas as a pillow, reclining while her worker ants cleaned the eggs she laid, carried the larvae and pupae away to nurseries built between the loops of her intestines and in the hollow of her pelvis, where eventually they would grow and turn into more mature ants that would spill out of her softest parts, flooding down her legs like period blood. Josie herself would erupt not long after, her purpose as host fulfilled, her insides spilling out, wet oats from a rotten sack, and the ants would dig into that mealy substance, burrow down, make tunnels in her remains.

She scratched herself violently, all the time, even in her sleep. Eventually her dad had to clip her fingernails and tape soft woollen gloves to her hands at bedtime, so she didn’t wake up covered in deep gouges and cuts from her attempts to relieve the itching.

‘Like you’re a baby again,’ he said, with an odd look on his face. ‘You used to scratch yourself in your sleep then, too.’

Later on, Josie looked it up. Formication; the feeling of insects crawling across, or underneath your skin. A tactile hallucination, the internet told her. Caused by anxiety. Or skin cancer. Or Lyme disease or Parkinson’s disease or drug use or head injury, amongst other terrifying conditions. Psychogenic itching was a thing, too. Stress, anxiety, manifesting on her skin. Josie didn’t feel better after learning any of this. If anything, her skin buzzed and burned more ferociously, as if the more attention she paid to the ants, the more gleefully they inhabited her.

Sometimes, she sat in her small, sparsely decorated bedroom and watched herself intently in the floor-length mirror on her wall, looking for signs of invasion, especially as regarded the flesh on her arms, thighs, and belly. She watched until her eyes burned, desperate for movement underneath, evidence that she was not being tortured by hallucinations alone.

She never thought to visit a doctor again, beyond her sleep prescription. She realised she no longer trusted doctors. Lena had been a private doctor for a fancy clinic that served the wealthy and well-to-do in Chelsea. She would come home and make fun of each patient over dinner, while Josie sat, obediently listening and nodding along.

Josie wondered, not for the first time, how Lena would feel if she could see her now, red, lumpy, sore, half-crazy from irritation. Triumphant, probably.

See? she would say. You can’t manage without me, look at the state of you.

It didn’t take long for Josie’s dad to get exasperated with his daughter going on about the incessant itching and discomfort she was experiencing. Soon, when her father shouted at her for scratching and told her to get a grip, or he’d send her back to London, she stopped talking about the pain she was in, the things happening to her body.

Stopped talking altogether, for a while.

But she was always thinking.

About the dead woman, mostly. When not looking for ants, Josie was thinking about the corpse. A new movie played on loop in her mind-cinema: a thirty-second clip of herself, poking a hole through rotting skin with a stick. The torrent of dark, crawling things emerging from the wound. The noise of her own scream, the memory of how unlike herself it sounded. This nasty, pervasive sequence of images replaced Lena’s film. Corpse season at the movies. Josie was almost relieved, for no other reason than at least her obsessive ruminations had a new subject matter, grim as it was.

After a week had passed – a week in which she said no more than ten words in total out loud – she realised that the thing that bothered her the most about finding the corpse was not that she had stumbled on a decaying, battered body. It was not the memory of the woman’s lopsided, sinking skull, or missing eyes or bared teeth or shattered bone poking obscenely out of her leg at such a rude angle. It was not even the bugs, although she had frequent nightmares about those.

It was that the woman resembled Josie herself far too closely for comfort.

In death, certainly, but even more so when she’d been alive, as she discovered one evening seven days on, after turning on the TV.

Chapter 9

Her picture had made Josie gasp when it flashed up on the television. Even her dad sat up straighter than usual when he saw it. Trays in laps, they had developed a habit of slumping side by side on the narrow, hard couch and eating a microwave dinner while catching up with the six o’clock news.

Josie almost choked on a mouthful of piping hot potato when the woman’s likeness popped up.

Her name was Laurel Howell, the news reporter said. Twenty-six years old, medium build, long chestnut hair, curling down past the shoulders, even the parting worn the same way Josie liked to wear hers. Same eye colour, which Josie, for obvious reasons, had not been able to ascertain from the corpse: a deep brown. Freckles. A mole, on the same cheek Josie had a mole: the left one, down near the mouth.

‘She looks just like me,’ Josie whispered. Five of her ten words of the week.

Her father shifted on the couch, fluffed up his own pile of mashed potatoes with his fork.

Laurel had been missing since mid-September, which explained the shorts, Josie realised. She’d been dressed for a different season. At the time of death, she had no profession. Josie read between the lines: the woman had been having a difficult time. She had lived locally, in Sling, but was originally from Ellwood.

In the photograph, Laurel was staring dead into the camera with a calm, somewhat serious expression on her face. No posing, no artifice. Josie realised all Laurel’s other photos must be like that, because usually, when the media used pictures of dead girls for news reports, they found the most joyful, jovial shots they could. Doing so created higher sympathy levels in viewers, she was sure. She lit up the room, a friend or relative would inevitably say when interviewed. Josie had always thought that lighting up the room only served to increase a woman’s chances of dying by nefarious means. Try not to light up the room, she’d often thought, at parties, in pubs. There was not much risk of that. She’d never enjoyed bringing attention to herself. Neither did she smile for the camera.

Lena used to complain about this, frequently. I’m spending all this fucking money on you, she’d grouse. At least pretend you’re enjoying yourself, for God’s sake.

The news report said nothing about how or why Laurel Howell had died, only that she had been found by a local resident, and there was now an inquest. The photo was replaced with a shot of fluttering police tape. Then the segment switched abruptly to another shot of the Knoll, only this time, it was dark. The news commentator stated, somewhat salaciously, that the site of the discovery was also a pivotal location for a strange and ancient local custom, the Devil’s March. A column of laughing, excited people pranced across the screen, dressed in colourful costumes, wearing face masks of all descriptions, wreaths of holly and berries perched on various heads. They held burning torches high to ward off the night gloom, sticks with streamers attached to the tips whipping and tapping at tree trunks as they marched in a long line through the Knoll, drummers and pipers dancing along with them. The camera panned out. Glimpsed briefly, held high on a wooden throne that rested on the shoulders of four men at the head of the procession, was a large figure, made of straw.

The Queen of the March.

Josie had forgotten how big the effigy was. How oddly sinister it looked, like a scarecrow, less humanoid, yet somehow recognisably female. Crude humps of straw for breasts, long sheaves of wheat for hair. A crown of plaited grass, stabbed through with more holly, ivy, and oak.

Josie’s dad changed the channel, bored.

Josie sat next to her father on the couch and felt like she was sinking down through the cheap laminate floor, back into the earth beneath the very foundations of the coach house. She could hear the sound of her own blood, pounding in her ears. She knew, from this noise, that she must be alive, but doubted it. Looking down at herself, at her fork still half-laden with cooling potato, she suddenly imagined her limbs to be that of the Laurel-mannequin, discoloured, waxen, jointed clumsily. She saw her skin darken, turn yellow, purple, then a deep greenish grey. It started to melt off her bones, sagging, tearing. She could see things moving beneath, white maggots and black spots, organisms intent on disassembling her, like Lena had, only more efficiently, less spitefully, just nature, this time, performing its duty.

No malice. A return to the earth.

She blinked. Her skin regained its usual, living tone and texture, albeit red and sore from all the scratching.

A single black ant wandered across her plate of food, staggering as it tried to find purchase on the sticky mash.

Disgusted, Josie put down her fork, placed her tray to one side. Went to her room. Closed the door. Lay on the bed.

Her dad turned up the TV as she left, filling the apartment with excited, jabbering commentary that sounded like the chittering of thousands of insects.

Chapter 10

Seeing Laurel’s photo sent Josie down a deep, slippery spiral. She became newly convinced the dead body she found that afternoon in the forest did not belong to a woman called Laurel Howell at all. Instead, she had, in fact, stumbled across her own dead form.

It would explain the ants running around under her skin, wouldn’t it?

Knowing, however, that this could not possibly be true, because dead bodies didn’t get up in the morning, didn’t make their bed, didn’t take the bins out, didn’t shampoo their hair or stare at themselves in the mirror or scroll on the internet for hours at a time, Josie accepted that she was simply on the receiving end of a horrible trick her brain was playing on her. It was some form of trauma response, some mental knee-jerk reaction to the shock of the grisly discovery. Even so, she began to spend even more time scrutinising her reflection, just to be absolutely sure.

Instead of calling the number on the victim support leaflet, she performed a number of small experiments, desperate to prove to herself, once and for all, that she was still alive. Pinching herself. Pulling at her skin, picking at it, too, until she bled. The blood was red and warm, providing Josie with moments of temporary relief. Blood was proof of life. The relief would fade the longer she sat there dripping red on to her bedroom laminate, so she would try pulling strands of hair out of her braid instead, slapping both cheeks, hard, over and over, lifting her eyelids up to check for maggots underneath. She trimmed her fingernails down to the quicks, partly so the sore nail beds could act as further proof of life, partly because she was paranoid about insects having laid eggs under her nails when she’d blacked out on the forest floor. She would take a needle and poke and scrape at each nail bed until it was raw. Then she would dip the fingertips into a weak solution of disinfectant and bleach. Only then was she happy her hands were egg-free.

Once, she sat on the bedroom floor, naked, and opened her legs, lifting them up past her shoulders, and stretched her labia as wide as possible, with both hands, to dispel the pernicious idea that the colony of ants was waiting just inside of her, ready to pour out. Staring at her reflection, her body open like a wound, she realised she’d recreated the image of a figure she’d seen a lot as a child: Sheela-na-gig, a stone carving found on some of the older houses and on the parish church over in Sling. The figure was showing her true self for all to see, unashamed, defiant. Josie’s mother had told her that statues of Sheela-na-gig helped scare the devil away, for the devil could not bear the sight of a woman’s parts. Josie had always thought the little figurines funny with their huge round eyes and large, pronounced slit. Now, she didn’t know if she was scaring off the devil or death, or perhaps both. Either way, she never saw ants in the warm folds of herself. This didn’t stop her from checking down there each day.

She spent hours performing these strange acts of confirmation until her eyes were sore from looking at herself, until her backside grew numb and her legs got pins and needles from the uncomfortable positions she put herself in.

Is this my face, or hers? she would ask herself, tracing her fingertips along veins and around moles and imperfections, following the path of the crawling sensations travelling up and down her limbs. She witnessed new weals and scratches develop on her body. Wounds, doubled, she would think, scratching a particularly itchy spot with fervour. Her reflection would scratch right along with her. Sometimes that felt comforting, like she wasn’t suffering alone.

Sometimes, it angered Josie, for it felt as if the reflection was mocking her.

Despite her series of experiments, she was unable to shake the mounting conviction that she had died and somehow ended up in the Knoll. Downloading the image of Laurel released by the police and printing it out to scale, Josie taped the photograph to her mirror. She got very familiar with the contours of Laurel’s cheekbones, chin, nose, eyebrows and hairline, performing an odd sort of spot-the-difference puzzle with herself. She kept a list of differences on a piece of paper, even used a ruler to measure the length, in millimetres, of certain aspects: the cupid’s bow curving across the top of her mouth. The position of her ears on her head. Her forehead, length and width. She didn’t see anything wrong in taking these measurements. The differences, as she observed them – Laurel’s nose was two millimetres narrower, nostril to nostril, and her eyes were three millimetres wider apart, tear duct to tear duct – kept Josie anchored in reality. They couldn’t be the same person, for Laurel was missing several teeth, and the mole on her face, a distinctive mark, was exactly one inch higher up than Josie’s was.

Josie’s dad never questioned why she was spending so much time closeted away. He was out for a large part of each day, beetling around the area on his bike, doing jobs. Someone had to earn a living, he said. Josie suspected he was relieved to get away from her. She couldn’t blame him, she supposed. On the rare occasions she did come out of her room, in the evenings, she would always ask her dad the same question: if she was still real, if she was still alive.

‘Of course you are,’ her father would snap, in an increasingly frustrated tone. ‘Nobody dead would be such a colossal pain in the arse, would they?’

And Josie would retreat into her room, temporarily relieved. Until the itching would start up again.

Eventually, her father’s patience ran out completely. He ordered Josie back to work, so she could ‘take her mind off things’.

‘Besides,’ he said, that night over his tray-dinner, ‘the building society called. My mortgage is going up. I’m going to need you to start paying rent, soon. I can’t afford to keep this place much longer if I’m losing income through holiday lets.’

Josie frowned, taken aback. ‘But you said—’

He cut her off. ‘I know what I said, but I didn’t plan for . . .’ He waved a fork in the air, vaguely motioning a gesture meant to imply either financial or emotional turbulence. ‘Point is, things are worse than I thought. So if you need to stay, you have to pay your way. It’s only fair, Josie. I’ll charge you a lot less than most landlords round these parts, trust me.’

‘Can’t I just move back into the cottage, with you?’

Josie’s father shook his head, vehemently. ‘No,’ he said, offering no further explanation.

Josie felt as if she’d been kicked in the ribs, but she knew once her father had made his mind up, there was little chance of persuading him otherwise.

Besides, she reasoned, after the initial sting of his announcement died down, times were hard. She supposed it wasn’t unfair of her father to ask her to contribute. He wasn’t wealthy, by any means. He was a carpenter, an odd-job man. He lived, cash in hand, from job to job, like a lot of people around here did.

And Josie was an adult, when all was said and done. So perhaps it was time she behaved like one.

But it was something that Lena had never let Josie do: work, contribute, own her own finances. Lena had correctly assumed that removing Josie’s fiscal independence would put her in a more malleable state.

‘Besides, what skills do you have, really?’ Lena would say. ‘You’ll have a hard time finding anyone to take you on. Save yourself the grief. I earn enough for both of us.’

And Josie had always thought, skills can be learned, right? But she’d kept that thought to herself. Still, the question remained.

What skills do you have, really?

Josie realised, as she lay wide awake in bed later that night, thinking over everything in tortuous, miserable circles of rumination, that this question haunted her.

It haunted her because it felt like a valid question. Josie had never, throughout her life, been encouraged to think about things she liked doing, or was good at. She had only ever been encouraged to behave, as a child, and then as a girlfriend. To be as inoffensive and unproblematic as possible, so her dad or Lena could get on with things, get on with being the adults in the situation. Nurturing any innate talents, interests or abilities had not been high up on her father’s list of parenting duties, or Lena’s list of relationship priorities.

But it’s not my fault, Josie thought, scratching at herself with her mittens. The fabric caught on the scabbed tops of her bites. The sensation was unbearable. She stopped scratching, only to start up again on a different part of her body moments later. It’s not my fault. My mother died. My relationship was abusive. My ex put me in a coma. And then I found a dead body.

One thing after another, after another.

Josie knew that wasn’t enough of an excuse. Her mother would have told her, Life is not always something that happens to you. It’s something you can make happen for yourself. But then she’d died at thirty-seven years of age, and those words had felt empty to Josie.

Still, she would have wanted a different outcome for her daughter. Josie realised giving into despair and paranoia and inertia so completely wasn’t honouring her memory very well.

It was past time, she told herself, hands jabbing and pawing at her tender skin, that she started acting like a grown-up. She couldn’t hide in her room forever, scratching and picking at herself and doing gymnastics in front of the mirror, wondering if she was real or not. Going back to work might do her some good. It was so gloomy and claustrophobic in the coach house, she was sure it wasn’t helping her recover.

So Josie woke early the next morning and slipped on her tunic. She put her hair into a long, stern braid, the way her dad always did it when she was a kid, found her headphones, grabbed her bag and coat, attached her bunch of keys to her waist, stuffed her special cleaning gloves (the brand her mum had always sworn by) and kneeling pad in her backpack, and headed out, back to the King’s Arms.

The first step in a return to some sort of normality, she hoped. Perhaps it would be the start of things getting better, becoming more manageable. To get there, she would have to first walk back through the Knoll.

So walk she did, her heart up in her mouth, towards the looming stretch of trees where she’d found the decaying form of Laurel Howell, lying in a pile, discarded, unwanted, infested, not unlike Josie herself.

Part Two

Chapter 11

Josie’s return to the Knoll was inevitable, she knew that. It was the main path to everywhere that mattered in her small, insular world, so she thought of it the same way she’d thought about giving the statement while still in hospital: like ripping off a sticking plaster. Quick, and confronting, rather than prolonging the discomfort.

The hamlet of Ellwood was laid out like a pair of lopsided spectacles dropped deep in the Forest of Dean, two loops at each end connected by the bridge of Bromley Road, ending with a junction leading to Milkwall, Sling, or Broadwell, depending on which branch you took. The Knoll cut behind this intersection in a way that avoided roads entirely, safely depositing those who traversed it at one end of Ellwood’s high street.

The Knoll was quiet, for it was early. A few birds hopped around in the pines above her, but there were no crows, no magpies or jays, no scolding squirrels. No dog walkers, or schoolkids. She was alone.

It was even colder than before, a biting chill that sank in deep. Josie could detect a distinct hint of snow in the air, taste it, too. Change had flavour, she always thought, and autumn’s end tasted sad, rich, and heavy. She felt a stirring in her belly. Her skin tingled, only now, it wasn’t itching but alive with anticipation, a sensation akin to someone blowing gently on the nape of her neck or running their fingers lightly down her spine.

The spot where Josie had found the corpse was still cordoned off with police tape. As she approached it, lingering thick coils of early-morning fog crept across the path in front of her, as if to shield her from the sight of the disturbed earth, of police markers left behind on the frosted ground. The fog broke apart, and Josie was suddenly standing right before Laurel’s last resting place. She studied the ground around her carefully, searching for ants, but saw none.

Because they’re all inside you, now, she thought.

A dark patch of cleared pine needles was all that remained of Laurel Howell, looped by the flickering tape and multiple sets of boot prints in the turned soil. Someone had placed a small jar with a candle in it at the base of one of the trees, the trunk that bore the three deep gouges. Sap leaked from those cuts, like sticky blood. A bunch of cellophane-wrapped roses, already wilting, lay next to the candle, which still guttered. More offerings would come, Josie supposed, as the story spread. Perhaps she should leave her own flowers. She was suddenly ashamed she’d not thought of this earlier.

Who had left these? She could see no note, no card. A friend? A family member? A sympathetic local, moved by the story?

The police had taken a large chunk of the soil with them after moving the corpse, scooping away a deep depression the same shape and size as Laurel’s body. That suggested the earth was needed for something: testing, perhaps.

Josie thought back to Wilkes, furiously typing her statement by her bed in the hospital. That whole thing had been so hasty, so unlike her previous experience with the police. As if Wilkes was doing something underhand, coming out to Josie like that, instead of waiting for her to recover more completely.

She thought about this, thought about the condition of the body. The advanced decomposition. The removed soil. Her mind took her back to the moment of discovery. She found she could recall every tiny detail, despite her panic at the time. Perhaps because of it.

Josie had assumed, at first, that Laurel had been left out in the woods for a long while, due to her colouring, the state of decay, the debris on her skin, the intense insect activity, but that didn’t make sense. Practically, Laurel couldn’t have been there at the base of the pines for very long at all. This was a busy path, a common commute between Sling and Ellwood. It was rare for Josie not to come across another person using the cut-through, unless it was early, like now. It backed on to the housing estate, which had three heavily used wooden access gates set into the perimeter fence that led directly on to the Knoll.

If the body had been here any length of time, other people would have seen it, that was certain. There was the smell, too. The dogs alone, and there were many that came this way, would have alerted their owners to the true nature of what had been dumped beside the path.

Besides, Josie reminded herself, the whole damn village had been through the Knoll only the night before, for the Devil’s March. Crowds of villagers and curious tourists, traipsing along under the trees with torches. The Knoll would have been lit up. Not to mention the local news crew, filming the whole thing. It would not have been possible to miss a dead body, sprawled out as Laurel was, in such an obvious location.

Which meant two things: Laurel’s body must have been kept somewhere else before it was brought here, for it to have reached such a decayed state. Beyond that, her body, dumped sometime after the Devil’s March, which had come through around six in the evening, could not have been lying directly beside the path all night and all morning before Josie found it, in broad daylight, mid-afternoon of the next day.

So, Laurel had died, some time ago, lain elsewhere, then . . .

Josie began to feel very strange. She felt the cold air pinching her cheeks, fingers and nose, and struggled to ground herself, to concentrate. She was close to some sort of critical realisation, but it skittered out of reach like a pebble skidding over ice.

She frowned, scratching at the skin on the back of her hands furiously. If the body hadn’t been dumped last night, and hadn’t been discovered prior to Josie coming upon it, that meant, logically . . .

Her brain clicked. A tiny thrill of electricity raced along her veins.

It meant the dead woman had probably only been lying under the trees in the Knoll for a very short window of time before Josie had the misfortune to stumble upon her. Perhaps an hour, even less.

Perhaps only minutes.

Josie felt deeply, horribly afraid. The itching flared up in a blaze of discomfort across her entire body, spreading like wildfire fanned by fear, intensifying the moment she connected the dots: someone had deliberately dumped the body here, close to the path, only a very short time before Josie walked alone, through the trees, on her way home.

Had they watched, peering through the tree trunks with bated breath, as Josie discovered the corpse? Had they watched as she cried and gagged and yelled and fainted? As the ants and other crawling things decamped from Laurel and eagerly invaded Josie, seeking live flesh?

Ants in your pants, the kids at school would chant at Josie when she was little, for Dad often forgot to wash her clothes, especially in the early days after her mother’s death.

Ants in your pants, ants in your—

But what if she wasn’t dumped? What if Laurel ran or dragged herself here to die under that tree?

But Laurel’s head was half caved in. Her ankles were broken. Her foot was nearly falling off. Her skin was green. Her brain lay in little grey lumps on the forest floor. She had not run anywhere.

No. Laurel had been left, deliberately, for Josie to find.

Josie, trembling with this new knowledge, swallowed, and looked over her shoulder, scanning the trees all around with wide, frightened eyes. The fog bank still swirled through the Knoll, hovering just above ground level, obscuring the bottoms of the trunks so the pines looked like they were floating in mid-air. She could only see the first few rows of trees. After that, the Knoll dissolved into a milky white expanse, impenetrable to her gaze.

A loud crack echoed out of the fog, somewhere to her left. A twig, snapping underfoot.

Convinced she was being surveilled, feeling sick and disoriented and deeply, deeply afraid, Josie bolted from the scene. She raced along the path until she was clear of the Knoll, bursting out of the treeline with a sob, and then, because she didn’t know what else to do, she simply kept on running.

Chapter 12

Josie managed to calm herself a little by the time she reached the King’s Arms. She stood on the kerb outside the ancient, low-eaved building trying to catch her breath. Her lungs burned from running in the cold, and her skin tingled all over from pins and needles. Beneath the tiny, stabbing hurts: crawly things, busier than ever under her skin.

The King’s Arms Hotel was the only pub standing on the tiny high street of Ellwood. High street was an exaggeration – the hamlet’s core spread itself out along Bromley Road, a heavily potholed artery connecting the primary school, a tiny nursery next to which a rusty red phone box rubbed shoulders with a Royal Mail post-box and a wonky cast-iron waymark, an old Primitive Methodist chapel recently converted into a tastefully appointed house, gravestones still proud in the ground beside it, and, nestled alongside the pocket cemetery, the King’s Arms. Beyond, a smattering of cottages and bungalows, waterlogged playing fields, a tall bank of bracken and heather, the ramshackle football clubhouse, and then the sprawling woods and gorse-thick heathland that characterised the Forest of Dean. Left at the end of the high street, down Marsh Lane, a person could reach the larger village of Sling within ten minutes’ walk, via the Knoll.

The Devil’s Knoll, Josie reminded herself, massaging her chest and waiting for her heart rate to subside. The main street was as deserted as the Knoll had been, much to her relief. She didn’t want anyone to see her running along in a mad, blind panic. It didn’t take much to set people tittle-tattling around here. Luckily for Josie, there were none of the usual early-morning dog walkers about, nor the paperboy, the milkman, not even the postman. The hamlet was silent.

She kept staring back down the road anyway, expecting a sinister shadow to be trailing her through the fog. Maybe the Devil himself, she mused. Then, she shivered.

The weeks after the March in Ellwood always felt particularly eerie to Josie. It was like the aftermath of Christmas: now the excitement had gone, there was a whole year to wait for the next March. The high street was still in disarray, one week later. The discovery of a dead body the morning after had thrown everyone off. Decorations still hung stiff and frost-hardened from old-fashioned iron streetlamps standing to attention either side of the pub. Straw and paper confetti had gathered in damp piles on the ground. Trestle tables set up with tarpaulin-smothered food warmers, stacks of plastic cups and empty steel cider and ale barrels still waited patiently to be tidied away. Her dad usually did that, did most of the heavy lifting for the festival, but he’d been preoccupied, with Josie. Metal barriers remained, blocking either end of the street to keep the traffic at bay. A hat garnished with long pheasant feathers gently rolled along a gutter as a faint breeze picked up. Poking out of an overflowing bin nearby: dozens of handmade paper flags, the words ‘DEVIL’S MARCH 2024’ just visible in red lettering. Multicoloured cloth bunting zigzagged from building to building, anchored by telegraph poles along the street, each triangular piece of fabric painstakingly embroidered with three jagged lines: the Devil’s claw marks, according to tradition.

Josie was reminded of the marks on the trunk of the tree near Laurel’s body. Three deep, jagged gouges, oozing life. A sign of the Devil?

Perhaps she should tell Detective Constable Wilkes.

Tell her what, though? That someone had left the Devil’s claw marks in a tree next to Laurel’s body? It was probably just someone from the March paying tribute to the Old Ways.

It was strange, the fixation with the Devil, for the people of Ellwood were not overtly religious. The nearest functioning church, just beyond Sling, was poorly attended, even on a Sunday. Weddings, funerals and Christmas services still occasionally filled the pews, but the medieval structure was mostly empty on a weekday. Josie knew, because she liked to go there sometimes to think. It was quiet and cool and smelled a bit like a cave – damp, mildewed, earthy. She liked the way the light came in through the windows. She liked that nobody bothered her there. When she was a kid, she’d cycle over and sing to herself in the main chancel. The acoustics had always been generous. She sang a lot, before her mother died.

Not so much after.

No, Ellwood was not a religious place.

But the locals all believed in the Devil. Hence, the March. It wasn’t a fun, seasonal tradition, or an odd, quirky idiosyncrasy, no matter how often Lena had mocked it as such. The Devil’s March was a sacred thing, an almost frenzied procession of deadly import, in as much as the people who took part in the ritual firmly believed the fate and fortune of their town was tied to it. This belief sprang, according to some, from the winter of 1895, when the March had been cancelled, on pain of imprisonment, by a zealous archbishop who took a keen interest in Ellwood and its customs. One month later, scarlet fever ripped through the local population, killing fifty townspeople. The month after that, smallpox took fifteen more and blinded ten. Then a fire burned down twelve houses, a barn full of livestock, and a year’s supply of grain. A pig fell into the town well, still the main source of water at the time, and polluted it. Then the coldest winter on record hit, dumping tons of snow across the valley, snow that was tinged an odd pink in colour and took an unprecedented amount of time to thaw.

The Devil was displeased, the town said, furious with the archbishop who died himself, not long after, of typhus.

After that, the stories went, the March returned, and the people of Ellwood regained their health and fortune, although never their numbers. The town became a village, and the village aged, dwindling until it was no more than a hamlet.

When her mother told her these tales, Josie used to think that it all sounded like superstition, bad luck, but now she stood outside the pub, trembling and panting, having experienced so much bad luck herself, she wondered if calling these things the work of the Devil might not have been justified, in the circumstances.

Was it the Devil who left Laurel’s body for Josie to find?

Go inside, idiot! Josie told herself. You’re driving yourself insane.

She squared her shoulders, turned to enter the pub. A gnarled, knotted garland of straw, hops, barley, oak leaves, holly and rowan berries framed the ancient front door of the King’s Arms, which was iron-studded oak, as thick as Josie’s handspan and incredibly heavy. The door could break fingers easily if a person wasn’t quick to move once it was open.

Josie found her large iron spare key. It weighed a ton and had probably been cut sometime in the eighteen hundreds. The door’s massive lock was kept well-oiled by the landlord, Angela. The key always needed a little jiggle to release the mechanism fully, but Josie had learned the knack. She struggled for a few seconds, then pushed her way inside, closing the door carefully behind her, keeping her fingers well clear of the edge.

Then she stood, drinking in the total silence that enveloped her, letting her eyes adjust to the low light inside. Once a sixteenth-century coach house, the buttercup-yellow-painted King’s Arms pub had a unique atmosphere; Josie often felt as if she’d wandered back in time a few hundred years when she entered the building. She took in a deep breath, feeling the quiet stillness of the place settle on her skin like a blanket. Angela would be up soon. Josie didn’t quite have the energy to speak to her boss, who could, as she cheerfully told anyone and everyone, talk the hind leg off a donkey.

But for this brief moment before anyone was about, there was wonderful peace, and safety. The pub’s thick stone walls, skimmed with rippling plaster, low ceilings, polished flagstone floors . . . they were an odd type of embrace, a protective shelter from the outside world. Tasteful clutter was arranged all around. Angela, who lived in a small annex to the rear of the pub, had many interests and pursuits, most of them to do with nature, dogs, witchcraft and the outdoors, and this was reflected in the pub’s decor. The King’s Arms had become an extension of her personality, which was probably why Josie felt so safe there. Comfort, within and without.

It reminded her a lot of her mother.

Old etchings hung on the walls, depicting various sacred standing stone circles: Avebury, Stanton Drew, the Hurlers, Castlerigg, Stoney Littleton Long Barrow, and Stonehenge, of course. Josie knew each site well, for her mother had been fascinated by local history and archaeology. They had spent many Sundays together traipsing around various locations in the Southwest, picking buttercups and walking in a clockwise direction around each stone circle while her mum muttered some old poem or historical fact to herself. Her dad had shown no interest in these excursions, choosing to lock himself in his shed with his tools every weekend for, he said, a little peace and quiet.

Garlanded above each etching were corn dollies; looped, twisted strands of corn interwoven in geometric patterns, with the ears arranged in artful shapes, some depicting people, some depicting triangles or horns or horseshoes or love hearts. An endangered art, according to Angela, but not in this town. Josie had made plenty when she’d gone to school locally, mostly fairies, with twisted skirts and looped wings. Her mother had always kept them on the kitchen dresser until her father threw them out.

Above the dollies and framed art, large swoops of dried hops intertwined with strings of twinkling fairy lights hung from iron hooks embedded in the roof beams. These were a pain to dust, as Josie well knew, but they added a wholesome cosiness that was Angela’s signature style. She replaced them every September with fresh hops, so these still smelled reasonably pungent. It was a fantastic scent, at once both citrusy and spicy, like sweet grass, or smoked wood chippings. Perfume as old and reliable as the pub itself.

The pub’s windows were Josie’s favourite feature. Antique, bubbled, brightly coloured stained-glass panes sat like dozens of jewels within their lead-beaded casements, each pane depicting a Celtic knot motif carefully hand-painted by some master craftsman back in the sixteen hundreds, except for one circular pane in the middle of each window, which bore the Devil’s three jagged claw marks. Angela had installed Perspex screens on either side of the window casements to preserve the glass. ‘I’ve not lost a single pane yet,’ she would say, proudly, ‘and I don’t intend to while this place is mine.’

The windows, which were punctuated with giant stone sills upon which Angela had collected an assortment of bottles, jars and vials, all filled with mysterious substances she liked to mix or ferment, let in a kaleidoscopic type of light. Though pretty, it was nowhere near bright enough to illuminate the pub, so Angela compensated with candles of all sizes, placed on every table, shelf and in every nook, and two huge, low-hanging, medieval-style iron chandeliers. One of Josie’s jobs as cleaner was to scrape the candle wax off the flagstone floor every morning before the pub opened. She also had to dust the chandeliers and trim each wick, to ‘keep the candle healthy’. Josie had strict instructions to collect the scraped wax in a special bucket so that Angela could melt it down into tallow and make fresh candles. This waste-not, want-not mentality was something Josie was very familiar with. Most of her childhood had been like that: don’t waste a thing, on pain of censure. Waste was for people with money to spare, her mother would say.

Cold now after her frantic run, Josie looked to the two huge fireplaces that bookended the main bar. One was an old-fashioned open hearth, which burned coal. The other was an enormous cast-iron log burner, in front of which Angela’s dog, Finn, a massive and affectionate Irish wolfhound, usually slept. Finn was absent at the moment. With both fires out, he would be somewhere warmer. Probably at the foot of Angela’s bed. The hound would surface with his mistress, nails click-clacking across the flagstones in that measured, slow way he had, loping along to his favourite spot, marked by an old, flattened cushion that had a large hairy dent in the middle.

It was too early to light either fire, so Josie moved to stand in a small patch of light instead, while she gathered herself in preparation for the work ahead. Angela was particular about cleanliness and hygiene; there was a reputation to uphold, after all. During the summer months, the King’s Arms was popular with holidaymakers and travelling couples, hikers and the odd businessman out this way. The English breakfast, hand-cooked by Angela herself, was legendary, as was the spotlessness of the place. During the winter months, the landlord’s standards remained every bit as high.

If Josie had been asked as a young girl where she hoped to end up after she left school, down on her hands and knees scrubbing other people’s shit stains off toilet bowls might not have been her first response, but her life had taken a huge swerve thanks to Lena, and now this was where she found herself.

Besides, there was pride in cleaning things. It was simple but satisfying, wiping dust, scrubbing away limescale stains, polishing fixtures, smoothing down sheets, vacuuming up crumbs and hairs and flakes of mud. It was like fixing something that was broken, fixing the world in small increments.

Fixing her heart in increments too – or at least she’d been trying to.

Josie went to the broom cupboard behind the bar to gather the rest of her cleaning supplies, the surface of her skin still crawling, but less acutely. Below the surface was a different matter. She felt herself teeming inside, as though she was liable to rupture at any moment and spill ants all over the place, ants she would then have to vacuum up or sweep away, knowing full well they’d return.

Josie hauled her bucket, sponges, cleaning creams and air fresheners, brushes and microfibre cloths for polishing up the narrow staircase leading from the main pub to the upper levels, which were just as tastefully appointed. Oak beams and freshly repointed stone presided over classy bedding, designer paint hues, roll-top, claw-footed baths, espresso machines, flat-screen TVs and lightning fast Wi-Fi (the only building in the entire town to be blessed with such connectivity). In the honeymoon suite, a large antique oak four-poster bed sat regally waiting for newlyweds to tumble around in it.

Each step creaked with age as Josie ascended, so she went carefully, always mindful of the uneven floors that characterised a sixteenth-century building. At the top of the stairs, she ducked to avoid a low, thick oak beam. Pausing to check the housekeeping planner (laminated and slipped into her bucket at the start of every week by Angela), she found the first empty room on the left, unlocked the door, went in, set down her bucket, then sank down onto the end of the bed, knees weak suddenly. It was as if the entire weight of everything she’d experienced in the last few weeks, months, years, hit her all at once like a ton of falling bricks, and she surprised herself by bursting, once again, into tears.

And once she started crying, Josie found she couldn’t stop. She cried so hard she nearly vomited – although that might have come as a relief, she thought. At least it would rid her insides of the ants before they found other means of escape.

So deep in the weeds was she, Josie didn’t notice a tall, broad shadow filling the open bedroom doorway until it came to a halt in front her. By the time she did notice someone else in the room, they were toe to toe with each other, practically touching.

Josie bit off a sob mid-way through, startled. She looked up, snot dribbling down her chin, eyes swollen, face slick with tears.

Her boss, Angela, looked down on her with a shocked expression.

‘What,’ the older woman said, eyes wide, ‘and I mean this in the nicest possible way, the fuck are you doing here, Josie?’

Josie didn’t know what to say. ‘I . . . I . . .’ she stuttered.

Suddenly, she was enfolded in Angela’s arms, sobbing into the older woman’s shoulder, which was draped with a thick, hand-knitted cardigan that smelled like cinnamon, lavender laundry detergent and a lingering undertone of Chanel. And as Josie collapsed into the landlord, it struck her that it had been years since she’d been comforted like this. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a proper hug, a sincere embrace. Probably not since her mother died.

The thought only made Josie cry harder.

Chapter 13

Angela let her cry, then led Josie back down the stairs to the bar, where she had a large coffee machine plumbed in. She slammed the portafilter empty of old coffee, loaded the head with freshly ground beans, jammed it into place sternly and steamed up some milk, pouring Josie a flat white and sprinkling it with cinnamon and nutmeg. She did this without talking, allowing Josie enough time to gather herself before the coffee was pushed across the highly polished brass countertop.

‘Drink that,’ Angela said in a bossy, yet kind way. ‘I can’t function without my three morning cups, and I bet you haven’t had even one.’

Finn emerged from a dark corner of the pub, coming over to Josie and sniffing at her legs. She scratched the brindled hair between his ears, marvelling at how much comfort a simple act of contact could bring. His tail wagged slowly, as if to reassure her that everything was going to be OK.

‘My ex told me coffee was poison.’ Josie dipped a teaspoon listlessly into the thick froth capping her cup. ‘I tried to quit, had terrible headaches for months.’

Angela made a rude noise. ‘Your ex sounds like an idiot.’

Josie fingered the scar on her forehead, said nothing. Angela’s eyes narrowed. She probably knew all about Lena, and the restraining order, because there were no secrets in a place as small as Ellwood, but she changed the subject, back to the more pressing issue at hand.

‘I didn’t expect to see you back yet,’ she said, folding her arms. ‘I told Petra to come in and cover for you until next week. What on earth were you thinking, coming back so soon?’

Josie sipped her coffee. It tasted wonderful, the added spices lingering on her tongue.

‘Dad told me to get out of the house, for my own good.’

‘Mmm-hmm.’ Angela made it clear this was not a good enough explanation.

‘. . . Actually, he says I owe him rent,’ Josie clarified.

Angela snorted. ‘Oh did he, now?’ The disgust was open and plain on her face. ‘Isn’t that just delightful of him. How many dead bodies has he stumbled across, I wonder?’ She shook her head, sighing. ‘These men and their stoic bullshit will be the end of us, I swear.’

Josie laughed. ‘I think it’s a country thing, not a man thing. My mum was the same. I broke my arm once and she didn’t believe me, sent me off to school anyway. It was only when the teacher saw my bone trying to poke its way out through my skin that I was allowed to go to the hospital.’

Josie looked down at her left forearm where the break had been and tensed. She thought, but couldn’t be sure, that she saw a tiny ripple under the skin, right near the inside crease of the elbow, where a blue vein stood proud. The rippled dispersed before she could fix on it.

Formication.

‘Oh, I remember that,’ Angela said, tutting. Her eyes took on a faraway look. ‘To give her credit, your ma felt terrible about it after. She thought you were having her on, because you didn’t like school very much. She came in here and cried like a baby when your arm was set in a cast, just a couple of stools over from where you’re sitting right now, in fact. Face all covered in snot, just like yours. You wore your hair exactly the same, that big, long braid of yours. I didn’t have a coffee machine back then, so I poured your mother a stiff gin. It was ten thirty in the morning.’

Angela reached for a roll of kitchen paper, ripped off a few sheets, handed them to Josie.

Josie wiped her face obediently, sipped more coffee.

‘I still miss her. It’s weird, it’s been so long, but I do.’

Angela nodded. ‘Of course. Me too. Your dad hasn’t been the same since.’

‘You’re telling me.’ Josie snorted.

‘I thought he’d move on, find a new wife . . .’ The older woman sighed. ‘Soften him up a bit, tough old boot. He never seemed to want to.’

Josie bit her lip. Dad, with another woman? The thought made her uneasy.

‘Anyway,’ Angela continued, tone stern again. ‘Point is, you should be at home, resting. You’ve had a horrible experience. You should be in counselling at the very least.’

Josie looked at her coffee. The foam heart Angela had artfully poured had distorted into a whirling, lopsided vortex of bubbles. An ant wobbled across the surface of the milk, scrambling from bubble to bubble, but when she blinked, it was just a speck of nutmeg, caught on the foam.

Get a grip, Josie.

She started to scratch at a patch of reddened skin behind her left elbow. The ants had gathered there, in a ball. She could feel them. If she poked at the area with a finger, they dispersed, then regrouped.

‘Josie?’

Josie tried to snatch the conversational thread back.

‘The detective gave me a number when she took my statement. Victim support, she said it was. I told her I didn’t feel like a victim . . .’

Angela leaned over the counter and slapped Josie’s wrist, hard.

‘Oh, you’re as stupid as your father, then!’ she said, crossly. ‘Of course you’re a victim, what else do you call it when you come across a woman’s corpse in the woods? Your dad said you took a funny turn, right after, fainted. You’d better ring that sodding number they gave you, Josie, I swear I won’t let you leave here until you do.’

Josie chewed her bottom lip. Scratched her elbow harder, trying to dig deep with brutalised nails stripped back to the quick. The ant ball dispersed again, reformed. The bugs were resilient. Her skin buzzed under her fingertips. She forced back a wave of revulsion.

What were they trying to do to her?

‘I think that’s the thing I can’t get over, Angela. The state of her. She was so beaten up, and her skin was all . . . and her head . . . her legs were broken at the ankle, and . . . and . . .’ Josie gulped. ‘You know she had no eyes left?’

Angela tutted again, in sympathy. ‘Horrendous. A horrendous thing to see. You poor lamb.’

Then, the older woman got a look at Josie’s hands.

‘What on earth happened here?’ She grabbed the hand that was itching, examined the ripped-down nail beds, raw from Josie’s obsessive scraping and cleaning. ‘What did you do to yourself?’ Angela gasped as she looked closer, saw the remnants of bites on Josie’s arms, took in the red patches, welts, scars from scratching. ‘Josie, you’re a mess, my love.’

‘Don’t be nice to me,’ Josie swallowed. ‘I’ll cry all over again.’

‘Oh fuck off, you need a bit of nice. I have some lotion that will help with this mess. Wait a moment.’

She extricated herself from behind the bar, crossed the pub, went to the windowsill where her bottles and jars sat glowing in the weak light of the winter sun. Humming, she chinked and clinked her way around until she found what she was looking for.

‘Aha!’ she said, triumphantly. ‘Got it.’

Angela came back to the counter with a tall blue jar labelled Angie’s Magic Balm. A recipe was scrawled across a grease-soaked sticker on the side.

Angie’s Magic Balm

For stings, bites, scrapes and itches.

1 tbsp plantain oil w Vit E

1 tbsp self-heal oil w Vit E

1 tbsp yarrow oil

1 tbsp beeswax pellets

1 tbsp lemongrass, tea tree and eucalyptus

Melt oils and wax in a double boiler,
then add essential oils and pour into pots.

Angela unscrewed the lid and set about smearing some of the waxy balm inside on Josie’s fingernails, bites and sore spots.

‘Keep talking,’ she said, working on Josie like she was a piece of furniture that needed repair. ‘It’ll do you good.’

‘She looked like she’d been outside somewhere for days. She was so . . . so . . .’

‘Decomposed?’

Josie shuddered. The balm stung, but in a pleasant way. The ants scurried away from the areas Angela rubbed it on.

‘Yeah. But she can’t have been lying there that long. Not long enough to get like that, at least. The Knoll is so busy, and . . . I just don’t understand.’

‘Well . . .’ Angela blew gently through her teeth, thinking. She didn’t seem at all perturbed by the grisly details. Angela had always been like that, though. A woman of action, practical to a fault.

Perhaps that was why Josie had really come back to work, rather than stay at home with her father.

The woman continued thinking out loud while pushing up both of Josie’s sleeves, high as they would go, and smearing more balm on her.

‘There are boars in the woods now, maybe one of them got to her.’

‘What?’

‘You know, those bristly old wild pigs. There’s ever so many of them now in the Forest, especially since people started feeding them. They eat anything. There was one over in Cinderford who started digging up the local cemetery. Turned over dozens of graves. The vicar was fuming.’

Josie didn’t think boars were the answer.

‘I bet they could make short work of a . . .’ Angela cleared her throat.

Josie shook her head. ‘It’s not just the condition of the body. I mean, that’s a big part of it. It’s . . . I can’t explain it very well, my brain is . . .’

‘Take your time.’

‘It looked like she fell. But not where I found her. Does that make sense? That’s the best way I can describe it. She was broken, but . . . she had been broken somewhere else, left to rot for a while, then moved. Deliberately. Like . . . someone wanted her to be found.’

Angela stilled.

‘Murdered?’

‘A body doesn’t move itself, or get like that, in that state, without help, right?’

Angela sucked in her cheeks, started biting the insides of them, alternating from side to side like she was tasting something new and exotic.

‘I don’t know, love. I saw a man who got hit by a car once, knocked off his bike. He was in a terrible mess by the time they scraped him off the road. Maybe she was in a hit-and-run – that happens out here, sometimes. There was that young lad, five years back. Country lanes at night can be deadly. Joyriders, and such. Maybe someone hit her by accident and then threw the body in the Knoll after.’

‘But that doesn’t make sense. The road is too far from where I found her. She wasn’t . . . fresh, Angela. Her skin was all . . . She’d lain somewhere else, somewhere outside, for a good while before ending up on the path. Long enough to get eaten at. I can’t make sense of it.’

Warm liquid suddenly trickled down Josie’s arm from the patch of skin she’d been picking and scratching at. Angela, catching sight of the blood, grabbed a sheet of kitchen roll and pressed it to the open sore.

Josie shrugged apologetically.

‘Stress habit,’ she said, by way of explanation. ‘I can’t seem to leave myself alone. Some anxiety thing, I think. Been worse since . . .’

Angela waved it off, left a penny-sized circle of kitchen paper stuck on the wound to dry it out, and finished applying the balm.

‘You can keep this,’ she said, screwing the lid back on and pushing the jar at Josie.

‘Thank you. I feel better already.’

Angela snorted, making it clear that there was no need to thank her, and never would be. She went to make herself a coffee, leaving Josie to think more.

Josie sat quietly until the other woman was done banging, tamping and making noise with the steamer. She was starting to feel better, a lot less itchy. Whether it was the balm, or the relief of just being able to talk things out, she didn’t know. She did know that everything was always easy with Angela. There were no expectations from either side. Just two people trying to puzzle something out. She could see why her mother and the landlord had been such firm friends.

‘I knew the girl, a little,’ Angela said from behind the bar.

This took Josie by surprise. ‘What? You mean—’

‘I mean, I saw her once, at a wedding we had here. For your mum’s cousin, I think. Laurel, isn’t it? She was about your age. Went to school with my nephew over in Sling.’

‘Everyone has been to school with everyone, around here,’ Josie replied, thinking back to her own education. Many of the kids from her class still lived within a mile or two of their old primary school, a fact that baffled and depressed Josie in equal measure.

Except you’re one of them now, aren’t you?

Ants in your pants, ants . . .

‘You don’t, um . . . you don’t know where her family live, do you?’ Josie asked then, trying to sound as casual as she could. ‘Boyfriend, parents?’

‘Oh, she had dozens of boyfriends, from what I gather,’ Angela replied, shaking cinnamon on to her latte. ‘A new one every week. She was a restless sort. Never seemed happy. Very different to what she was like as a girl. She was a sweet thing when she was little. Like you. Ever so well behaved. Her mum was always so proud of her. Mrs Howell – is it Janet? I think it’s Janet – still lives over in Sling, not far from Clearwell Caves. Lambsquay Road, just off. Not Sling, really, more like Lower Cross, but you know how all the villages bleed into each other. I think your dad was friendly with the Howells, for a while.’

Josie blinked, trying to keep up with Angela’s patter. ‘He was?’

Angela nodded. ‘Yes, I think he did their kitchen cabinets when they had the house redone – years ago it was. Before they got divorced. He’d probably know more.’

Josie looked into her cup. Dozens of dead ants now floated on the brown meniscus of crema, struggling through the remnants of foam. She swirled the cup viciously, hoping to drown them with the final dregs of her drink, which had turned bitter.

‘He never said anything,’ she said, as coffee slopped over the side and pooled, ant-free, on to the counter.

Chapter 14

Old Jacob came in through the back of the pub as the women were finishing their coffees.

‘Morning, both,’ he grunted, holding up a hand in perfunctory greeting.

‘Look who the Devil brought in,’ Angela said, trotting out a well-worn phrase the locals often used to greet each other.

Old Jacob claimed his usual seat, tucked into the stone alcove originally used for bread warming next to the log burner. This spot had been known as Jacob’s seat for upwards of thirty years. Woe betide the unsuspecting stranger who tried to rest there; Old Jacob had been known to sit merrily in the laps of those who didn’t move out of the way quick enough, cackling to himself with a breed of glee only found in a man who had grown so old he no longer cared what anyone else thought of him. He just wanted his chair, and the fire to be lit, and his usual half-pint of bitter on a Friday night.

Finn, happy to see Jacob, trotted over, tail wagging, snuffling at the old man’s pockets where he usually kept a biscuit for him.

‘Here you go, greedy mutt,’ the old man said, pulling out a small bone-shaped treat. Finn snaffled it, licking Jacob’s hand by way of gratitude.

‘It’s not lit yet, Jacob,’ Angela admonished from behind the bar. She meant the log burner. ‘It’s a bit early.’

Josie knew full well that Angela had given Jacob a spare key to let himself in precisely so he could make a fire and sit by it whenever he wanted. His house, an old heap of slipping tiles and soft, wet stone out on the very end of Fern Road on the edge of Ellwood, was freezing and damp, a ramshackle prospect in need of significant repair. Old Jacob could barely afford to feed himself, let alone fix up and heat his decrepit four-bedroom home for six months of the year, but he refused to move, so the King’s Arms had become his daily haunt, a place he could get warm, get fed, and find company. In return, he did odd jobs around the place when his hands weren’t hurting too much from arthritis. The winters were particularly rough on his aching joints. His social life, too. Angela knew the difference a little company could make, for an elderly man. She put up with him cheerfully, telling the other pub patrons that having him around made the King’s Arms feel ‘lived in’. She was right. Old Jacob was as much a part of the furniture as the polished bar, the stools, the flagstones, the thick, low, beer-stained tables.

He rubbed his crabbed hands together, blew on them. His face was pinched and bluish with cold.

‘Not early for me,’ he said in his thin, reedy voice. ‘I’ve been up for hours. I’ll sort it, don’t you worry.’

He leaned his walking stick, a large, hand-carved cane with a polished oak knob at the top, against the pub wall, where a two-pronged peg had been knocked into the plaster just for this purpose, and slowly crouched in front of the log burner. Josie had seen him do this dozens of times, always worried he would not be able to get back up again, once he was down there on the flagstones. She never offered to help, despite the cracking and creaking of his bones as he bent over. Jacob didn’t like being interfered with. He was a prideful old soul.

Jacob scraped ash from last night’s fire out of the bottom grate, then reloaded the burner with logs from a nearby basket, arranging them in a pyramid. After stuffing tinder and kindling into the base of the pile, he fiddled with the vent sliders up top and bottom so the burner would draw properly. Then he struck a long match from a box that lived on a tiny shelf in the alcove, cupped it carefully with shaking, fat-knuckled fingers, and lit the kindling.

The burner did nothing significant for a moment, then woosh! The logs took. Soon, a roaring fire was crackling merrily.

Old Jacob waited a second to see if it had taken properly, then shut the glass doors, turning the handle to seal them. He pulled his usual chair up as close as he could, and collapsed into it, sighing in pleasure.

‘Cheeky bastard,’ Angela said indulgently. ‘You’ll have me out of fuel entirely by Christmas. Logs don’t grow on trees, you know!’

Josie had heard the joke dozens of times in her childhood, and plenty more since she’d returned to work at the King’s Arms.

One of the most elderly residents of Ellwood, if not the most, Old Jacob was coy about how old he actually was. Josie’s father thought he must be pushing ninety, perhaps more. Old Jacob, however, didn’t like Josie’s father very much, so it was unlikely he would ever have told the other man his true age. They’d fallen out some time ago. Josie’s father never explained why.

‘What were you two gossiping about?’ Old Jacob asked now, relaxing as warmth sank into his bones. At Jacob’s feet, Finn flopped down on to his hairy cushion in front of the burner.

Josie looked at this scene and thought how much of a pastiche it seemed, a real-life oil painting of the simple country life, Old Man and Dog by the Fire.

Yet, the more she studied this idyllic scene, the less Josie felt she could trust it. An undercurrent of unease had pervaded her every waking moment. Man and dog looked too peaceful, too comfortable. Life wasn’t either of those things.

The ants stirred, readying to rise to her skin for fresh explorations.

‘We weren’t gossiping,’ Angela said tartly. ‘Josie’s been having a hard time, is all.’

Old Jacob grunted. ‘I sen’ that on the news. Nasty business. A shame you had to find her like that, Josie. Nice girl like you.’

‘Thank you, Jacob. I’ll be all right.’

He nodded. ‘Course you will. Not the first time it’s happened, though.’

Josie frowned. The ants stilled.

‘What do you mean?’

Angela shot Jacob a warning look. ‘Now don’t be going and making it worse with your nonsense tales, Jacob. She’s got enough on her plate as it is.’

‘Not the first time what happened?’

Jacob folded his hands comfortably across his lap.

‘Not the first body of a young girl to be found in the woods round here.’

Josie stared at him. Jacob smiled back.

Angela sighed and rolled her eyes.

The ants surged back with a vengeance, turning Josie’s skull into a buzzing rattle. She blinked, fought against shaking her head to dispel the fizzing sensation behind her eyes.

‘You’re a menace, Jacob.’ Angela turned her back on them both and started to polish pint glasses fresh from the dishwasher.

‘Is he right?’

Angela’s head waggled from side to side, irritated. ‘People die, Josie. It doesn’t have to mean anything other than that. People die, and sometimes, yes, they end up in the Forest. Like that hit-and-run I told you about earlier. Just an accident, that’s all.’

‘The others were different, and you know it.’ Jacob’s voice had become gravelly, sharp.

‘Different?’

‘Pah!’

Angela was growing increasingly agitated with the turn of conversation. She flapped the tea towel she was holding dismissively.

‘What he’s talking about . . . the girls they found . . . the last one was all over and done with a decade ago. I don’t know why you’re dragging it all up now, Jacob, I really don’t,’ Angela scolded. ‘It’s fiendish of you. Our Josie has had a hell of a time.’

Jacob remained impervious to her tone, chin tilted defiantly, like a small boy being told off for misbehaving.

‘I should smother that fire, right now,’ the landlord continued. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, using her shock as an excuse to wag on about your old folk tales.’

‘They aren’t tales, and you know it!’ Old Jacob banged one arm of his chair, wincing as the impact jarred his sore joints. ‘Women died. More than one. An old man like me remembers these things, that’s all. I sen’ what it did to the community. The girls’ mothers. The rest of you clean forgot.’

‘How many?’ Josie got up from the bar, dragged a stool over to the fire and sat opposite Jacob.

‘Josie, don’t, I’m telling you, it’s a crock of nonsense.’

‘How many?’

Jacob sucked on his false teeth. The pointed tip of something pink poked out of his left nostril, segmented, shiny, questing. It moved like a worm.

Josie knew this was a distraction, her brain trying to protect her from the conversation, so she ignored it.

‘Well, it’s been a while since the last, like Angie says. Perhaps ten years. Six, I think, in total.’

Josie blinked, aghast. ‘Six bodies? Of women? What, just . . . just lying around in the Forest of Dean?’

The worm slid a little further out of Jacob’s nose.

‘Perhaps there were others, never found. The Wye Valley is big. The Forest is bigger. Acres of space to hide a body. Could be dozens more out there.’

Another inch of pink. The worm was lively, curling the free part of its body up into a loop, releasing, curling up again.

‘But it’s always the same, when they are found. The ones that get discovered are put somewhere on purpose, for anyone to stumble across. Like a calling card, or a come-get-me. The last one was in Tintern Abbey. Covered in muck. Half-rotting, right there in the cloister. Did yours have a braid in her hair?’

Josie went cold with shock. Laurel’s braid came back to her: incongruously neat, lying off at an angle from her head, separate to the matted mess of the rest of her hair.

Maggots squirming up and down the plaited tail like it was a ladder.

‘Yes,’ she managed, voice suddenly hoarse. ‘But what does that mean?’

Josie searched Jacob’s lined, mottled face for an answer. The earthworm living in his nostril evicted itself almost entirely, dangling down over Jacob’s mouth like a long, squirming strand of pink mucus.

‘It means,’ the old man said, yanking the worm completely free and throwing it to Finn, who caught it mid-air and wolfed it down with one quick snap, ‘that Emmet is back.’

Chapter 15

Josie passed a hand over her eyes, doubting she would ever trust anything they showed her again. In the brief moment her eyelids were shut, she glimpsed the bright white outline of squiggly, squirming shapes, thrashing around in the gel of her sclera. It seemed no part of her was free of infestation. She was a vessel now, for parasites.

When she looked again, Jacob appeared as usual: an old man in his cosy spot, impish, brimming with barely contained vigour that filled his entire frame as he gossiped, happy to have a receptive ear for once.

No more worms.

Small mercies.

Josie cleared her throat, wiped a trickle of sweat from her forehead. The fire kicked out a fierce heat. A small stove fan on top of the burner whirred, distributing the warmth outwards. Finn stretched in his bed, groaning, resettling, falling back into a deep, comfortable sleep.

Lucky dog, Josie thought.

‘Emmet? Who is that?’ she asked out loud, humouring Jacob.

Angela slammed a newly polished glass down on the counter.

‘Don’t let him fill your head with this stuff, Josie,’ she warned. ‘The man’s been too full of lore for years. I don’t think he knows what’s real and what isn’t, anymore.’

She seemed on the verge of giving Josie her marching orders, if only to end the conversation.

Jacob was undeterred. He wasn’t about to pass up a chance to air out his knowledge.

‘It’s an old English word, emmet. You write it like this.’

He slid a beer mat off a nearby table, pulled a chewed, leaking biro from his jacket pocket, and scrawled something shakily across the cardboard disc, handing it over.

Josie took the coaster, frowned at the word.

Æmete

‘Yes, but what does it mean?’

The old man tucked the pen back in his pocket.

‘Ach, I can’t remember the exact translation . . .’ He tapped the side of his head, mischievous. ‘The details are the first to go, when you get to my age,’ he said.

Josie felt like shaking him. Jacob’s eyes were too bright. He was deliberately holding something back.

Josie’s fingers twitched. The soothing effect of the balm was already wearing off.

‘I know what Emmet looks like, though,’ Old Jacob continued, smiling.

‘Emmet is a person?’

‘Emmet wears a mask when killing, see.’

Josie had not been expecting that.

‘Sometimes with deer horns attached, sometimes with antennae on top. Like an insect, you know.’ He mimicked the antennae with his crooked index fingers. ‘Feathers, too, arranged in a circlet, like a crown. Red and black, or just black, depending on the seasons, or the mood.’

‘OK.’ Josie’s skin prickled. She pinched a patch of skin behind one elbow, squeezing tight, hard enough to produce a nugget of pain that eased her frustration.

‘Some say Emmet is old witch stock. Others say it’s Jack Frost, because it only kills in the winter. Others think it’s malevolent wood spirits, sacrificing virgins to the Old Ones. I say, evil is a lonely pursuit, no matter how you dress it up. Sometimes a mask is not a mask at all. The face underneath is the true mask.’

Silence followed his little rant. Angela stared at Jacob, lips slightly parted. This was particularly obscure, even for him. Josie slumped back, disappointed. Folklore, fairy tales. Just like Angela said. She shot the landlord a look.

I told you, Angela mouthed back.

Still, other bodies meant something, if that part was true. Josie’s fingers released their grip on her elbow as she fought the urge to pull out her phone and look up deaths in the area. Cold cases. Other corpses found in the Forest of Dean. Young women, like Laurel.

Six.

There can’t have been that many, or she would have heard about them. Wouldn’t she?

Perhaps not. Josie’s dad enforced a sheltered upbringing after her mother’s death. There was no TV in the house because he refused to pay the television licence. The only technological source of entertainment had been the CD player, which was strictly reserved for her father’s concertos. Violent concertos. There had been no internet. Dad had owned a mobile phone for emergencies, a brick-like Motorola, but rarely used it. Josie wasn’t even sure the landline was connected, back then. She couldn’t remember hearing the house phone. People came round if they wanted something fixed or made. The sound of the doorbell with its sonorous bell-chimes was firmly ingrained in her memory. If it was past seven in the evening, anyone who didn’t get an answer at the door would have found her father in the King’s Arms, where he’d spent most nights ever since she could remember, for he was a creature of habit.

Otherwise, Josie and her father had been largely cut off from the rest of Ellwood; just the way he liked it.

A hundred women could have died, and Josie might not have heard about it.

Jacob sat like a gnarled sprite in his cubby, waiting for the women present to acknowledge his information.

‘But everyone has a mask like that, round here,’ Josie managed, eventually. ‘For the Devil’s March.’

It was true. Most folks in Ellwood made, embellished or repaired their processional masks on the first day after the autumn equinox, working with papier mâché and glue, paint, feathers, leaves, antlers, felt, fur, and any other natural detritus they could get their hands on. Sometimes Angela hosted mask-crafting sessions in the pub, lubricated with mulled cider or fragrant, spiced hot wine. She kept wicker baskets stuffed with moss, twigs, fabric and leather offcuts year-round on a dedicated shelf near the bar, and often had simmer pots bubbling in the pub kitchen while the locals drank and cut and glued things together and breathed in the heady scents of cinnamon, clove, orange and lemon slices and bay leaves that wafted throughout the entire building. For protection, the landlord said.

From what was always implied, never explicitly said out loud.

The Devil.

Once crafted, the masks would be worn until they fell apart or got trampled on during the March’s more frenzied moments, at which point the owner would be forced to make a new mask, or risk local ridicule. They came in all shapes and sizes, depicting a kaleidoscopic range of characters and animals: owls, beetles, foxes, cats, wolves, bears, the green man, or Jack o’ the Green, butterflies, badgers, strange bearded men with red varnished skin, impish faces created entirely from autumn leaves, sprites, black pigs, green dragons, the sun, the moon, stars, clouds . . . Josie’s own mask was a lesser spotted woodpecker, red cap, white cheeks, black stripes, probably still sitting around somewhere on its custom-made stand, empty-eyed, back at her dad’s cottage. Assuming she had a bedroom there anymore. She wouldn’t have put it past her father to have turned her cramped bolthole into a tool depository, or somewhere to store old bike parts or wood offcuts. She wondered where his own Devil’s March mask was, the black dog with bright-red gums and yellow teeth that had always frightened her when she was little. In the shed, she supposed, where all his important things were kept, under lock and key.

Josie sighed. This conversation was getting her nowhere. Thinking about her childhood made her sad. Uneasy. There were large parts of it lost to poor memory, to the fog of grief she’d wandered into after her mother’s death. When she did remember details – like the masks, her bedroom, occasional interactions with her dad as they tried to go on living after mum’s funeral – it was in small, grainy flashbacks that were out of sequence.

Finn woke, rolled on to his back, belly exposed, legs straight in the air, blowing out his lips dramatically.

‘But Emmet is different,’ Jacob said, cracking his knuckles and grimacing in pain.

‘How?’

‘The Devil’s March wasn’t always about the Devil, for starters,’ he said.

This statement made little sense to Josie, but then not much of what came out of Jacob’s mouth made sense.

‘I don’t follow.’

Old Jacob coughed into his fist, clearing a wad of phlegm lodged in his throat. Josie winced at the crackling, wet sounds he made as he hacked it up.

At least it wasn’t another worm.

‘There’s been a processional tradition around here for centuries, maybe longer, before Christianity even came to this country. We don’t know when it started, or what it was about, back in the earliest days. Probably some way of giving thanks to the gods, to keep them appeased, or a fertility rite, or to keep the crops growing.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Old Jacob used to be the town historian,’ Angela called out, raising her voice over the clattering of glasses being unloaded from the dishwasher.

‘I prefer resident folklorist,’ Jacob retorted. ‘Anyway, what we do know is, in the early medieval days, before the March became about the Devil, they called it charivari.’ He pronounced the start of the word with a spittle-drenched shhh-ing noise.

‘Charivari. Sounds Italian.’

‘French. My old granddad called it a “skimmington”. It was either a march of joy, or of shame, see.’

‘I don’t see.’ More sweat trickled down the back of Josie’s neck. Was it sweat, or a tiny, six-legged creature running along her spine?

Hard to tell, these days.

‘If someone in the town was deemed to have behaved badly – got pregnant out of wedlock, say, or married too fast after losing a spouse, or married someone far too young for them – they’d hold a parade. A communal serenade, if you prefer. To celebrate, but mostly to mock the guilty party. Usually a woman. Ever heard of a scold?’

Josie shook her head.

‘A scold was a woman who nagged her husband too much. Or spoke too loudly or answered back.’

Angela made a rude noise from behind the bar. Old Jacob winked.

‘The townspeople didn’t much like scolds. Their outspokenness implied the menfolk couldn’t control their women, their households. They dealt with this in their own way, gathering in a crowd and wearing terrifying masks and making a hell of a racket beating pots and pans and whatnot. Called it “rough music”. They’d drag the poor scold out of their house and force them to take part.’

‘Sounds awful.’

‘Sometimes the scold rode backwards on a donkey, through town. Her neighbours threw things at her while she rode. Sometimes they got dunked in the river, or a well. They had cucking-stools for that. On occasion, scolds were forced to wear an iron bridle: a head cage with a thick metal bar that pressed the tongue down, to stop it wagging.’

Josie swallowed, inadvertently. Where was this going?

‘And sometimes’ – Old Jacob rummaged in his pocket for a dog treat, throwing it at Finn, who deftly caught it upside down, jaws snapping with a loud click! – ‘the locals made an effigy of the person, and burned it at the end.’

Josie found herself growing begrudgingly interested.

‘An effigy? Like the Queen of the March?’

She thought about the straw queen, mounted on the shoulders of the head of the procession. Over the years, it had gotten bigger and more ornate and lifelike. At the procession’s culmination, the straw sculpture would be thrown off the Devil’s Pulpit as an offering. The Pulpit was a natural outcrop of rocks overlooking Tintern Abbey and the Wye Valley; it was said that the Devil used to shout at the monks below from this limestone platform to tempt them into wickedness. He only stopped when the locals began offering him virgins – a tithe, of sorts. First in flesh, then in straw.

Josie found herself not liking that idea at all, as she listened to Jacob. Even though she’d accepted the custom for years, she began to see it in a new light. Yes, we carry the effigy of a virginal woman on our shoulders for eight miles across the county, singing, and dancing and waving torches, and then, when we get to the highest point of the Forest, we throw her off a cliff.

As an offering to Satan.

No wonder Lena made fun of me, Josie thought.

‘So you’re saying that, originally, the procession . . . the effigy . . . was to shame women?’

Jacob wagged his finger puckishly. ‘You’re catching on. Over time, these customs get twisted, sucked into other traditions, and then religion muddies it.’

‘Jacob, please.’ Angela pleaded with the old man again. ‘You’ll wear her out with all this stuff.’

Too late, Josie thought.

Jacob ignored her. ‘These days, the March is all about keeping the Devil at bay. The queen symbolises purity – a virginal offering that can’t talk back.’

Josie found the notion depressing.

‘But consider this,’ Old Jacob continued, leaning forward and staring intently into Josie’s eyes. ‘What if it didn’t work?’

His features rippled. Josie thought she saw the skin stretched over his skull turn momentarily translucent.

‘What if the Devil were already among us, under a different name?’

Josie felt something stirring inside of her like a coiled woodlouse about to spring open. Excitement? Fear? Unified, her inhabitants let out a prolonged, nervous chittering sound only she could hear.

Jacob’s face re-solidified, settled.

‘You believe in all that?’ Josie licked her lips. She wanted to know. Because Jacob was different to everyone else in town. He was educated, he had been to places far beyond the county lines, seen things. She had never thought him superstitious, only eccentric, his interests human, not theological.

‘I didn’t say that, now, did I? The Devil comes in many forms. Is many things, to many people – much like any other icon. Just because I don’t call it by the same name, doesn’t mean I don’t believe in it. Or something like it.’

‘Emmet.’

Jacob said nothing.

A fresh wave of heat from the burner rolled over Josie. Her desire to scratch herself intensified to an unbearable degree. She wanted this conversation to be done, so she could leave.

‘Come on, Jacob. A malevolent masked spirit who kills girls and leaves them in the Forest for others to find? The Devil, stalking the village?’

Jacob’s smile melted as rapidly as it had formed.

‘Only fools question the unknown,’ he huffed, leaning back in his chair, disappointed.

Angela tutted. ‘Give the girl a break, Jacob. I told you, she’s had an ordeal.’

‘Think what you like,’ the old man snapped. ‘I know Emmet’s work when I see it. There’s something going in in these woods, and it’s been going on for a long, long time. Way before you tripped over that Howell girl. Did you find the Devil’s mark near her body?’

Josie relived her stumble on the Knoll path, the smell, the stick, the heap of rotting clothes and broken limbs. The leaking gouges in the bark of the pine tree above Laurel’s head.

‘How did you know that?’

Old Jacob scowled.

Angela folded her arms. ‘Enough!’ she barked, slapping the tea towel down on to the bar. ‘Don’t get your hair off at her, Jacob. This is a police matter, now. They’ll have to figure it out, not you.’

Old Jacob made as if to spit, but changed his mind, wary of Angela’s wrath.

‘Pah,’ he said derisively. ‘The police are next to useless, you know that. They didn’t do anything about it ten years back, so why should things be any different now?’

Josie had heard enough. She rose, gathering her things. Her heart was thumping heavily in her chest. She could still smell Laurel’s corpse, rich and pungent in her nostrils. She could recall every white, wriggling maggot squirming in her eye sockets, between her teeth, across the gruesome mess where a tongue once lay.

The ants were busier than ever inside Josie, particularly as the fire was now so hot she could feel her knees burning through her jeans. Her hands crabbed with the desire to attack herself, pull off all her layers, dig out the bugs and find relief, no matter how brief, how temporary.

‘I think I need some fresh air,’ Josie said, excusing herself.

Angela nodded, coming around the bar to give her a big hug. ‘You go rest, love. Get away from this old coot and his crazy notions. Take that balm with you.’

Jacob made a belligerent noise in the back of his throat, flapping a disappointed hand at the women.

Josie pocketed the proffered jar of balm. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ she promised. Angela started to protest, but Josie held up a hand to stay the argument. ‘The work will do me good. I’ll take one more day to get my head right. But I want to work. I need to. It’s a distraction.’

The older woman narrowed her eyes.

‘Are you going to call that victim support line?’

Josie smiled. ‘Sure,’ she said, ducking out of the pub quickly so Angela couldn’t see the lie on her face.

Chapter 16

Once outside, Josie pulled out her phone and googled the word ‘emmet’.

. . . The use of emmet, to mean ants, derived from the Old English word æmete, from which the modern English word ant is also . . .

Her insides screamed.

Ants.

That old bastard. How did Jacob know? About her? About the scratches on the tree? She considered going back to confront him, but the thought of his inscrutable smile, of having to listen to more superstitious nonsense, stopped her.

Josie was suddenly aware that something was happening far outside the scope of her control, something interconnected, something inevitable and bleak and uninterruptible, like a tidal bore surging along a river once a year, or a storm, furious and famished, bearing down on an unsuspecting hamlet built of ramshackle cottages with potholed roads and ancient cut-throughs connecting them in the barest sense. There were too many pieces on the table, a jumbled half-puzzle that Josie couldn’t complete. A dead woman in the woods. Bleeding scars on the bark of a tree. Other bodies, supposedly, left for the unsuspecting to find. A masked being, thirsty for death. Its name, an archaic term for—

Ants.

The buzz of them roared and rushed through the space between her ears, and then moved lower, racing down her body and pooling just below her belly button. She squirmed, plucking at the waistband of her jeans, resisting the urge to plunge her hand into her underwear right there on the street to check for any crawling leakages. How many were living inside her now? Thousands? Millions? A megalopolis of intruders underneath her skin. Did she have any hollow spaces left, or had she been cemented up from the inside out by her larvae’s moulting fluid, by living eusocial structures, self-organised, replacing her softness, her humanity, with a colony in thrall to a queen of their own? How many tiny life cycles were playing themselves out in her body at that precise moment, only to fall dead by the wayside of her bones?

Josie swallowed, residue from the coffee she’d drunk earlier clagging in the back of her dry mouth. She could hear Old Jacob hawking up phlegm inside the King’s Arms, loud enough that the sound carried through the thick stone walls.

Revulsion chased the anxiety crawling around inside her head. Trembling, she googled ‘body of woman found in Forest of Dean’.

The first page of results brought up a surprising number of hits. There was a body in a quarry in Cannop, another on the side of the road up by Ruspidge, another hacked into pieces and placed in a sports holdall buried deep in some blackberry bushes near a popular mountain bike trail. But these weren’t what Josie was looking for. These bodies had been identified, cause of death attributed, a guilty party found responsible, tried and convicted. One was a suicide, one was drug-related and the sports holdall victim had been caught up in a domestic violence situation. Josie flinched as she read the report, remembering the brick she’d taken to the head.

Could have been worse.

The second page of results featured more obscure cases, which, as far as Josie could tell, remained unsolved. It was a sad series of articles. She scrolled and tapped, skim-read, scrolled, tapped some more, all while shivering on the pavement outside the King’s Arms. She was developing a very firm sense of the disposable nature of a woman’s life.

Josie counted six bodies of interest, just like Old Jacob said. All dumped in busy locations around the Forest, all discovered in a time frame spanning the late nineties to the mid-noughties. Details were sparse; the articles were old and didn’t display well on a modern phone browser, but Josie ascertained that two were Jane Does, one was a young supermarket cashier from Steam Mills called Jane Bowl, reported missing a year prior to the discovery of her remains, and the other three were girls who lived in the immediate area: Sling, Trow Green, and Parkend, respectively.

Josie googled the names, and the dates of the articles about the discovery of their bodies, and found a series of other, more granular news reports.

One of these displayed a slightly pixelated photo of Jane Bowl, taken shortly before she went missing. Poor girl. Josie used her finger and thumb to enlarge Jane Bowl’s photo, feeling short of breath as she did so. The ants vibrated along her veins, scrambling to confirm her suspicions: Jane Bowl was chosen for the same reason that Laurel Howell had been chosen, namely, their resemblance to each other. Same serious expression. Same long, dark hair. Same build, rough height, appearance, age.

They could have been sisters, if they’d been seen out together.

They looked like Josie herself.

Josie shuddered, feeling strangely violated.

As Jane Bowl’s likeness fully settled into Josie’s brain, her mind-movie whirred on, projecting its inevitable replay. Only now, instead of poking a hole into Laurel’s neck, it was Jane who lay beneath the pines, and Josie was stabbing holes in her with a long, sharp stick, the tip of which was coated in furious black ants.

The itching renewed with such savage intensity as this imagery played out that Josie felt her spine suddenly wrenching into a solid, fused line, her head snapping back painfully. Her entire body then convulsed with a rolling succession of micro seizures. All she could do was wait them out, breathing in short, ragged bursts, convinced she was about to rupture like rotten fruit dropping from a tree and hitting the floor.

Gradually the seizures abated and, one by one, her muscles unclenched, her spine loosened, leaving her limp and floppy. Sagging forward at the waist, she hugged her knees as she waited for her heartbeat to slow down and the itching to subside. The prickling, tickling irritants living in her didn’t disappear entirely as her pulse slowed; they simply quietened down, flaring every now and then to remind her that standing on the pavement, dribbling, shaking, phone clutched tightly in hand, wasn’t helping the situation.

Josie, finally released from the grip of what she was no longer convinced were hallucinations, visions brought on by trauma, but rather some wild, different, unexplainable neuropathic, tortuous energy that had decided to take up residence in her frail and unfit body, sucked in a huge breath of freezing air, as if she could burn herself clean with the cold from the inside out.

As she tried to make sense of it all, a clanging noise startled her.

Looking up, she saw her father rolling empty beer kegs across the high street, stacking them in a small pile, ready for collection. Josie straightened quickly. Waited for him to notice her. Put up a hand, acknowledged him.

‘Thought you would be inside, working,’ he called, cheeks flushed from the cold and exertion. From a distance, Josie saw her father had aged more than she’d appreciated in close quarters. He no longer moved as confidently as he used to. He was more careful with his back, exertion had him struggling for breath. His nose was bright red, veins standing proud, a testament to the amount he drank in the King’s Arms of an evening, sinking pint after pint of ale while he ran up an enormous tab he could never pay off.

Josie felt a needle of concern stab through her heart.

It was oddly painful, seeing him age. Dad had always been there. Not, perhaps, the kindest, most understanding, nor the most reliable father, but a constant in her life nonetheless. Someone she cared about, despite their differences.

If he got old, sick, died, she would be alone, really alone. The thought almost made her wish Lena hadn’t gone. Almost.

‘Angela didn’t need me,’ Josie called back. ‘Petra has my shift today. I’ll start tomorrow.’

Her father shook his head, went back to the barrels. Josie started walking away from him, heading down the road.

‘You back in time for dinner?’ he shouted.

Josie rolled her eyes. Dad was pernickety about when he ate, about routine. He liked his dinner with the news, finishing his meal in time to walk to the pub and be propping up the bar by seven.

‘I’ll make it for six, like usual! Don’t worry yourself!’

‘Actually, I thought I’d give it a go,’ her father retorted.

Josie stopped in her tracks, threw a shocked look over her shoulder. ‘You what?’ she yelled, cupping a hand around her mouth to project her voice better, unsure she’d heard him correctly.

Her father shrugged. ‘What?’ His face was as innocent as a child’s. ‘It’s my turn.’

Josie blinked and gave him an uncertain thumbs up. Her dad hadn’t cooked a meal for her since she was twelve years old, by her reckoning. What was he up to?

She knew better than to start questioning his motivation. If Dad wanted to cook, he could cook, save her the trouble. Cooking when you had no desire to eat was tedious, and she’d lost her appetite of late.

‘All right,’ she shouted, unconvinced. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

He went back to the barrels, conversation over.

Josie carried on walking, shaking her head. Her father was nothing if not unpredictable, whether he was getting on in years or not.

Chapter 17

Thanks to Angela, Josie knew where Laurel’s house was. No secrets in the countryside, after all. A quick google confirmed the exact address: 11 Lambsquay Road. A forty-minute hike, left on Holly Lane, via Milestone Walk, until she hit Lambsquay.

Forty minutes there, forty back.

A good hour and twenty where she would be occupied, in motion, with an objective.

Doing something useful, she told herself. She didn’t stop to dwell on whether Laurel’s mother would be happy to see her turn up on her doorstep. Josie knew the answer to that already: she wouldn’t. But then Mrs Howell wouldn’t be happy about anything, for a long time, not if she had truly loved her daughter. And Josie was trying to help, that was all.

Playing detective, Lena’s voice sneered. Sticking your nose in where it isn’t wanted.

But what skills do you have, Josie?

What are you actually good at?

Perhaps, Josie told herself, this was just how people processed the bad stuff. Endless replays, until one day, the mind was suddenly free. Maybe the ants would just up and leave without warning, too, if she was patient enough. Trauma had a timeline. At least that was what she’d been told when her ex had thrown a brick at her head.

Josie walked. She felt weak and shaky, more unsure of her footing than ever. Her headache threatened at the edges of her temples, adding to the sensory discomfort that seemed to be her constant companion. The exercise would do her some good, she told herself. It might offer some peace.

Although now that Jacob had put the idea of Emmet in her head . . .

Even before that, though, she’d felt watched. Sized up, by unseen eyes.

Josie pictured a masked being, lurking behind a tree. Long, clawed fingers, clutching the trunk, the force of the grip leaving jagged furrows. Empty eye-hollows in a feathered mask, following her every move. She could feel the ants, settling towards the front of her abdomen as if she had an unruly baby inside of her, pushing at the skin of her belly so it distended outwards, nudging her in the direction of Lambsquay Road. Steering her towards more answers. Her guts boiled with the potency of everything she’d learned so far. Her insides cramped as if trying to expel that information like rotten food.

‘Don’t think,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Just walk.’

Clouds had gathered, sitting low in the sky, almost close enough to reach up and touch. The temperature had dropped further, the frost-hardened ground crunching under her Converse-clad feet. The smell of coming snow in the bitter air was stronger than ever. Earlier, the promise of a change in the weather had excited her, but now it filled Josie with a sense of foreboding. The world would be bleak and leafless, soundless too as the snow dampened everything. Her isolation would be compounded: the pub would shut if it was a heavy fall, and she would be stuck in the apartment, either alone with herself, or alone with her father. Neither of those prospects was appealing.

Lambsquay Road, when she eventually turned down it, was muddy along the middle. Traffic, farm machinery and horses had churned up the overgrown verge and splattered earth across the potholed tarmac. Josie’s thin canvas Chucks were ill-equipped for such a mess; now dark brown with mud, her toes stung from the cold and damp that seeped in. She had not had time yet to get herself any boots, a countryside staple. Show me you’re a townie without saying so.

The ants scrambled down to her feet, as if to compensate for this. Josie tingled with every step and felt as if, whenever she slowed, the bugs kept her moving at an even pace. Soon, her cheeks were flushed with exertion. Her breath came fast, vapour clouding the air before her.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d moved her body like this.

Lena used to run, had London mapped out on her expensive smartwatch. Josie had only joined her once. Lena had made it very clear, less than half a mile in, that she would not wait for Josie, who could not match the fitter, taller woman’s pace. The run ended when Lena disappeared off along the Thames Embankment, weaving expertly through crowds, barely breaking a sweat as Josie collapsed against a bollard, red-faced and near to puking. After that disastrous effort, she never tried to join Lena again.

The road drew Josie along as she struggled with residual feelings of inadequacy, feelings Lena had nurtured with great diligence. High hedgerows on either side made her feel doubly oppressed: they had been trimmed so the sides were neatly clipped, but the tops, beyond the reach of the trimmer blades, extended out over the lane like a low, dark ceiling, growing across at a peculiar right-angle, creating the illusion of a flat-topped tunnel along which she walked. Josie kept to the middle of the road, beneath the glowering brow of hedge, and allowed herself to breathe deeply, in, out, in, out. She could smell old manure spread on the fields through which the road cut. She could smell ice, and mud, and—

A sound echoed down the lane behind her.

Josie glanced back, startled.

A tiny figure moved along the muddy central strip, some distance away. Josie could hear feet squelching gently through the mess.

Dog walker?

Josie’s eyes, watering from the cold, blurred as she tried to get a better look at the figure without making it obvious that she’d seen it. Fixing on the distant shape was difficult. She found it hard to focus properly. She blinked furiously. Thought, for the brief moment she could settle her gaze, the figure looked peculiar. There was something off about the proportions, the head appeared elongated and seemed to be adorned with two short, stubby protuberances, like horns, or antlers.

Or, she thought, remembering Old Jacob’s words and his two index fingers raised at either side of his head, antennae.

Josie came to a halt. Peered intently at the figure, no longer caring if it saw her doing so. The time for subtlety had passed.

Emmet?

The figure moved closer, then vanished. Josie found her vision clouded with a mass of tiny, wriggling floaters. She couldn’t see beyond them to the person in the road, to the road itself, or the hedge, or the fields, or the sky.

She could see nothing but writhing shapes, floundering across her eyeballs.

Panicking, she dug her fingers into her sockets, rubbed her lids so hard she was in danger of popping the infested orbs out entirely, or so it felt.

The ants buzzed, irritated at her lack of progress. They tugged at her feet.

She stopped rubbing. Blinked away the hot tears.

Tried to look again.

The squiggling things multiplied, so her entire world was now balletic floaters dancing crazily across her retinas. Josie couldn’t see anything but those unwanted creatures, couldn’t see if the figure on the road was still moving closer, or whether it was a man, a woman, a kid, a dog walker, a horned eldritch being intent on sacrificing her, or a murderer, wearing a mask of feathers, painted half black, half red.

Josie wished she had fingernails instead of blunt, stubby beds filed down to the quick. Desperate, thinking she was about to go inexplicably blind – punishment for some crime she’d committed in her past, a crime she had no memory of – she struggled to clear her sight by holding open the eyelids on the left side, first, then pressing firmly into the rubbery ball, dragging her index fingertip directly over the surface of her cornea, trying to scrape, as best she could, the squirming things off.

It worked, partially. When she brought her finger away from that eye, she could half see again, albeit blurrily. She brought her finger up as close as she could, found the tip coated with tiny, thrashing, sharp-tipped white worms, thread-like and disgusting.

Revolted, she squashed the worms between her thumb and fingertip, glancing down the road to see the figure, indistinct apart from the lumps on its head, still approaching.

Panting in fear, she scraped the worms from her other eye, smashing them between her fingertips. She wished she had water to rinse herself with, or bleach. She felt so dirty, so unclean, so parasitically overwhelmed that she forgot momentarily how to move, how to breathe. She froze, fighting off another seizure, wishing she could pull her hands free of her wrists and discard them, feeling the weight of the worm residue on her skin, in the grooves of her fingerprints.

The sound of squelching footsteps grew closer, close enough that the figure could be no more than a few feet away. How had it covered the distance so quickly?

In terror, Josie stumbled back, vision still infuriatingly blurry, eyes stinging from the clumsy assault of her fingers.

The light changed. The figure loomed directly over her, within touching distance if she had so dared. Josie cried out, trying to ward the stranger off with raised arms, batting at the air like she was swatting a wasp away.

‘What are you doing? Why are you following me?’

There was an intake of breath, sharp, disbelieving.

Then a laugh, hard, scornful.

‘Calm down, love,’ a man’s voice said, irritated. ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’

With his words, Josie’s vision fully cleared. In an instant, the residual blurriness was gone, as if it had never afflicted her in the first place.

Her sight renewed, Josie found herself standing in front of a middle-aged man in a wax jacket, a scathing look on his face. He had a dog on a lead by his side, a muddy cocker spaniel carrying a stick.

The ants rattled around Josie’s feet, impatient, hurrying her.

The man was wearing a woollen hat, Josie saw, an ill-fitting beanie that stood up in two long, soft peaks on his head because it was too big for him.

No horns, no antlers, no antennae.

‘Oh God,’ Josie said, the heat of embarrassment flooding her face and turning it scarlet. ‘I’m so sorry, I—’

‘You women think every fucking thing is about you, don’t you?’ the man spat, tugging on the dog’s lead. ‘Not every poor sod out walking and minding his own business is a rapist or murderer, you know.’

He stomped around her in disdain and continued up the road, muttering to himself angrily. Adrenaline roared through Josie’s body with such force it almost flushed the ants out.

‘I’m sorry!’ she called out, though she didn’t really mean it.

‘Get a life, bitch!’ the man shouted back, hunching his shoulders and leaning forward, keen to be rid of her.

Then he rounded the corner and was gone.

Josie stood there, letting her breathing return to something like normal, trying to get a grip on herself. Her chest felt tight, her lungs too full to let any of the cold air in.

Just a dog walker.

She debated turning around, going home. Laurel’s face, taped to her bedroom mirror, stopped her. So did the thought of the apartment: tiny, stuffy, gloomy. The grey and beige decor. The cold linoleum floor. Her dad’s disappointment on seeing her there, in jogging bottoms and a giant, saggy hoodie, the uniform of the depressed.

But at least you’ll be no trouble to anyone there, Lena’s voice whispered.

The ants had heard enough from Lena. They started their ceaseless activity again, working the tendons in Josie’s feet so she found herself moving on, first one step, then the next, until she was striding along the lane, back on target, back on mission, tears leaking down her cheeks. Already thoroughly exhausted, though it was not yet midday, she wondered what else might happen to her in the minutes, hours ahead, what new dread she would encounter before she could finally call it a day, lay her head on a pillow and dream of dead things, without interruption or judgement.

Chapter 18

‘Mrs Howell?’

Laurel’s mother answered the door on the second knock, as if waiting for company. She looked like a mess pretending to be a well-put together woman. Josie recognised the signs of a person who used neatness and routine as a coping mechanism. Her clothes were clean, pressed, orderly. Her hair was styled in a low bun, and she wore a light covering of make-up, tasteful silver stud earrings, and a matching necklace. Her nails were polished, neatly manicured.

But Josie could see past all that. This woman was haunted. Hurting.

‘What?’ the older woman asked suspiciously.

‘Hey,’ Josie replied, feeling sure now that she’d made a terrible mistake. She considered turning away, but that might be more unsettling for the other woman than simply explaining herself. ‘Um. My name is Josie.’

‘You’re not a reporter.’ Mrs Howell’s voice was bitter, cold, with a faint Welsh lilt. Josie was not the first unsolicited visitor this week.

Josie took a polite step back off the doorstep, shook her head. ‘No, not a reporter. I live over in Ellwood.’

‘What do you want, then?’

Josie swallowed. ‘I know this is . . . listen, I don’t know how to say this.’

The woman in the doorway stared, eyes rimmed with a thin, bright red outline, waiting.

‘I was . . . I’m so sorry. My name is Josie.’

‘You said that already.’

‘I was the one who found your daughter’s body,’ Josie finished quietly.

Laurel’s mother assessed Josie, trying to establish if this was a prank, or if she was genuine. Josie stood miserably before her, bearing the scrutiny with a weariness only the sincere could muster up, legs clamped together to ward off the cold, skin crawling, eyes stinging and sore, nose dripping from the chill air.

‘And what do you want?’

‘Just to talk. I . . . I just wanted to pay my respects.’

Mrs Howell thought about it. Her face softened.

‘You’d better come in, then,’ she said, turning and disappearing into the house, leaving the front door open for Josie to follow.

Josie breathed a sigh of relief. She followed, slipping off her muddy shoes, leaving them on the doorstep and shutting the door gently behind her.

The house was like the woman who ran it: immaculate, tasteful. Clean. Everything had a place. There was not a spot of dust anywhere, as far as Josie could tell. The couch looked brand new. The carpet freshly vacuumed.

‘It’s nice in here,’ Josie said softly, sitting down where Mrs Howell indicated.

‘Tidy home, tidy mind,’ Mrs Howell replied, matter of fact. ‘Tea, or coffee?’

Josie spread her hands. ‘Coffee, if you have it. I’m not really a tea sort of person.’

Mrs Howell snorted. ‘Nor was Laurel. Young people today don’t drink it the same way the rest of us do. It’s all coffee this, coffee that.’

She pointed to a framed portrait standing on the mantelpiece over a log burner. Laurel. Josie struggled to quiet the small beasts jumping inside her.

‘That’s not the photo I gave the police,’ Mrs Howell went on. Josie realised the importance in letting the woman talk. ‘I can’t look at that again, not since . . . Well, I prefer this one, honestly. More natural. She was a serious girl, you know. Didn’t smile much. But you could always see it in her eyes, what she was thinking. Like . . . like she always had some sort of private joke going on, you know? At least when she was younger. That all went away.’

Mrs Howell drifted off, lost in some private recollection she didn’t want to share, but managed to bring herself back with a deep inhale.

‘Anyway, I won’t be long,’ she said brightly. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

The dead woman’s mother went into the kitchen, where she could be heard firing up the kettle, bustling about with cups and cupboard doors. Josie wondered if those cupboard doors were still the same ones carved and fitted by her dad, according to Angela. She’d be able to tell if she could get a glimpse, later. She could spot his handiwork a mile off.

For now, Josie stared at Laurel’s photograph. She preferred this picture, too. Laurel seemed more relaxed, more natural, as her mother said. She was sitting on a chair with a cat on her lap, gazing up with that solemn expression Josie had come to know well. She caught herself imitating the same face from time to time: solemn, with a hint of something warmer around the eyes, corners of the mouth ever so slightly tightened, as if a smile was coming, but hadn’t quite made up its mind to show itself yet. One of Laurel’s hands was caressing the cat’s ears, the other casually held a wine glass, half filled with what looked like water. Her legs were crossed, and Josie recognised the red Converse shoes, one of which had been flung across the Knoll.

Josie looked down at her own feet in embarrassment, socks worn through with holes over each big toe. Her own pair of dirty red Converse felt like a tacky, crass choice of attire. She’d been unable to resist, digging around in a bag of old clothes for them in the first week after finding Laurel’s body. She hoped suddenly that Mrs Howell wouldn’t notice the shoes, realise she was mimicking the dead girl’s fashion sense.

Mrs Howell returned, tray in hand, two coffee cups and a plate of biscuits balanced on top. A hospitable woman, even in grief. Josie thought how nice it must have been for Laurel to have a mother like this. Neat, dependable, considerate. It made her miss her own even more.

‘I didn’t know how you like it,’ the woman said, setting the tray down on a low table and passing Josie a cup. ‘I put a splash of milk in, just in case.’

‘Milk is fine,’ Josie said, gently. ‘Thank you.’

The women sipped their drinks. It struck Josie that it had been a day for sitting, sipping, thinking. Making conversation. She could feel the toll it was taking, all this talking. She felt bone-heavy, skin-dense, shoulders aching with all the words.

‘So,’ Mrs Howell said eventually, as Josie frantically tried to find the courage to ask all the things she wanted to ask. ‘What can I do for you, Josie? You didn’t just come to pay your respects, I can tell.’

Josie set her cup down carefully, taking care not to spill.

‘I’m sorry to come here like this. I would have called first if I’d known where to look for a number.’

Mrs Howell waved a hand. ‘It’s all right. You know, I stupidly thought it was only me that would be affected by all this, but I forget about the others. You, the police officers, the detective, the poor people who picked her up off that floor, the funeral folks who will eventually have to try to make her look decent – if I can ever get Laurel’s body back, that is . . .’

She trailed off, uncomfortably.

Josie licked her lips.

‘Mrs Howell, I know it’s strange, me coming here like this, but . . . ever since I found her, found your daughter, I can’t . . . I can’t quite get her out of my head.’

Mrs Howell waited patiently for Josie to articulate whatever it was that had brought her here.

‘She’s there, all the time, in my thoughts, you see. It’s tearing me up, Mrs Howell—’

‘Janet. You can call me Janet.’

‘Janet. I thought, maybe, if I came here . . . maybe I could learn a bit more about her, what she was like, and perhaps . . . perhaps it would help a bit, I don’t know. Maybe I’d sleep better.’

Mrs Howell sat thinking. Josie babbled on, losing confidence with each word, feeling increasingly awful and selfish at her intrusion, her invasion of this woman’s grief for her own gain. ‘I know it’s a lot to ask, talking to a complete stranger like me, I don’t expect you want to talk about it in the slightest, but . . . I need to know, is all. What she was like. What kind of person Laurel was.’

Still nothing. The wheels were turning in Mrs Howell’s mind, but Josie could not tell in which direction. She lost confidence. Half-rose, as if to stand.

‘This was a mistake, I apologise.’

‘Josie—’

‘I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m an idiot. I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs Howell, I really am. You can’t imagine how sorry.’

Laurel’s mother sighed heavily, set her own cup down.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, smiling, putting out a hand to get Josie to stop. ‘Sit back down, love.’

Josie did as she was told, lowering herself slowly back into the chair.

Mrs Howell sniffled, dabbed at her nose with a folded handkerchief she kept in a pocket.

‘It’s nice to be asked about her, actually,’ she said eventually, to Josie’s relief. ‘No one else seems terribly interested. She . . . Laurel was troubled, you know. I think that’s why the police have been so keen to play this all down as much as they have. I still don’t have an official cause of death, can you believe that? They have to cut her open first. Autopsy. Toxicology. All sorts. That’s why I can’t have a funeral yet. Inquest, they said, but they only tell you bits and pieces. The rest, you have to imagine, as you lie awake at night going slowly mad. God knows what they’ll find in her. Laurel had her issues, you see.’

‘Issues?’

And, then, Mrs Howell told her all about it. She told her all about her baby girl.

Chapter 19

‘She was a kind girl, that’s the most important thing I wish people knew. Serious, but unfailingly kind, and gentle. She cared about things, deeply. She tried to help others whenever she could. She was also very naive. Maybe that made her an easy target.’

Josie patted her knee. ‘You can’t think like that. None of this is her fault.’

‘She was a hopeless romantic, too. Her favourite movie was Sleepless in Seattle. She always cried at the part where Tom Hanks describes his dead wife, how she could peel an apple in one long strip.’

‘I haven’t seen that movie in years.’

‘She used to watch it every weekend. Right where you’re sitting, actually.’

Josie felt a small current of electricity run through her. She glanced down at the chair she was perched on, wondering if there were any skin cells left, any moulted hair she could collect. She knew she needed something of Laurel’s to keep. The ants told her so. They liked to gather things for the colony. Crumbs. Food. leaves. Sap.

The microscopic, long-shed remains of a dead woman.

Laurel read a lot of classic novels, Austen, Brontë, Du Maurier. Her favourite songs were love ballads, her favourite artists Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell. Her nickname at school had been ‘Retro’, for this reason.

She grew out of nicknames when she was sixteen.

After her sixteenth birthday, Mrs Howell said, Laurel never smiled at all. It was as if the date served as a cut-off point for joy.

To Josie, that made sense. She’d had her own cut-off point, the day her mother died, and then the day Lena threw a brick at her head, and then the day she found Laurel’s body. What had happened to Laurel on her sixteenth birthday, she wondered. Something that altered everything, made it impossible to smile. Josie felt her connection to the dead girl growing stronger with every passing moment. Laurel had been through something and come out the other side, alive, but changed.

Mrs Howell had recognised something was wrong with her daughter, but she chalked it up to the teenage years, to hormones.

‘I thought she’d grow out of it,’ she said sadly. ‘People told me teenagers were just like that. She was an only child, see. I had no idea what to expect, what was normal.’

‘Teenagers are. Like that, I mean.’

Josie herself had been well behaved as a teen. Josie’s dad would never have allowed it otherwise.

Despite the frequent bouts of moodiness, depression and apathy, Laurel remained, for a little while, what everyone still deemed a nice young woman. She studied hard, got good grades, did her chores, earned her own money as a part-time assistant cashier in the local post office, and kept herself to herself.

Until the nightmares started up.

It all started to go really wrong after that, Janet said, around her tears, which she could no longer hold back. The fights. Throwing things. Staying out until all hours. The bottles of vodka hidden under the bed. The boys. Soon, the nice girl had a not-so-nice reputation. People gossiped about her behind their hands.

By the time of Laurel’s disappearance, the nice young woman was no longer nice. She was troubled. She quit her job. She drank heavily and stopped taking care of herself. She would behave strangely in public. She was extremely hostile and at the same time wildly promiscuous. Unsubstantiated, nasty rumours circulated that she was addicted to crack, that she’d had abortions, that she had AIDS, that she was a whore, she just hadn’t admitted it to her mother yet.

Nobody seemed to care much that, before the young woman’s life had gone downhill so drastically, she’d had dreams. That she liked to make friendship bracelets out of scarlet embroidery thread for the people closest to her, take long autumnal walks in the Wye Valley with her mum, collecting conkers and acorns and orange leaves that she would later arrange in a decorative basket to celebrate the changing seasons. That she wrote poems and painted and sang and played guitar, but only when she thought nobody was listening. That she had been, to all intents and purposes, a good girl. Nobody seemed to care at all, aside from her mother.

Until Josie came along, and found her dead body.

Chapter 20

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Anything.’ Josie meant it.

‘Have you ever . . . ever seen death up close before? Like you did with my girl?’

Josie hesitated. ‘Once. My mother . . .’

Something inside her, some voice, was trying to make itself heard. Not Lena, and not, as far as she could tell, the ants, for they had gone suspiciously quiet since she arrived at the Howell residence. This voice felt different, more indistinct, more difficult to understand. She couldn’t tell if it was a fresh memory she was reliving, or an odd glitch trying to distract her from the seriousness of the conversation.

Josie suppressed the whisperings, keen to give Mrs Howell the full attention she deserved.

‘Your mother?’

‘Mum died when I was little. She was sick a long while. It started like flu but got progressively worse. She threw up a lot. The end was slow. Like she was slightly less there every time I went into her room. And then one day I went to school, and when I came home, she’d been taken away. The next time I saw her she was in the coffin.’

Janet struggled to maintain her composure.

‘It was very different to Laurel.’

‘The thing I think about the most . . .’ Mrs Howell said eventually, ‘is that you were one who found her, in the forest. My girl, I mean. It wasn’t me. It should have been me. I would have held her. Told her it was all going to be OK. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. She’d been missing for days before anyone informed me. I thought she was just off doing her usual thing, that she’d be back around before long. If I’d known the last time I saw her would be . . . well. It should have been me.’

Josie knew better. She remembered waking on the forest floor, tracing the outline of the decaying girl’s rotting lips with her fingertips. She remembered the maggots thrashing around in cavities and under Laurel’s clothes. She remembered the ants, everywhere, busy, busy, taking what they needed for their queen, wherever she was hiding.

‘Death shouldn’t be like that, you know. A body, thrown away, like garbage. Death shouldn’t be like that.’

‘I don’t know,’ Josie said, after a long pause. She could feel the ants curiously exploring her ear canal. She resisted the urge to smack herself on the side of her head to dislodge them.

‘My mother was laid to rest the proper way, you could say. A church, flowers, organ playing, hymns, a nice grave under a sycamore tree. But to me, it didn’t feel right. Her death never felt right. I don’t think it matters how you go; maybe death is never the way we want it. Because nobody wants it, do they?’

Mrs Howell stared at Josie, jaw working.

‘I have a question for you,’ Josie asked. ‘I know this might be a liberty, but . . . Can I . . . can I see her room?’

‘Of course.’ Mrs Howell didn’t hesitate. She stood up. ‘It’s this way.’

Josie was surprised.

‘You don’t mind? I know it’s a lot to ask, I . . .’

‘I’d like you to see it,’ Mrs Howell said bluntly. ‘It makes her seem more alive to me when people take an interest. Besides, it might help rid you of some of the memories of how you found her. I’d prefer you remember Laurel differently. Like she was before.’

Josie nodded, following, nearly slamming into the back of Mrs Howell when the older woman stopped suddenly, turning to look Josie dead in the eyes.

‘Was she in a very bad way, when you found her?’

Janet’s face appeared suddenly much older, tired beyond description. Josie could see her make-up gathering in the creases around her nostrils, lips, the gentle folds of her neck. Little blobs of wet mascara had stuck to the bags under her lower lash line, from crying.

Josie thought the blobs looked like ants. She wanted to reach out, swat them away.

‘I know she must have been bad because I wanted to go along to identify her, but they wouldn’t let me. They showed me a photo – not of her whole body, just some of her tattoos – and then they used her dental records, some of my DNA, too, just to be on the safe side. They wouldn’t let me see. How bad was she?’

Josie swallowed, feeling suddenly like a child, put on the spot.

Truth, or a comfortable lie? Honesty was always best. Even if it was hard to hear.

‘She was bad,’ Josie said, bowing her head. ‘I’m glad you didn’t see her.’

Janet let a few more tears fall, then brushed them away.

‘Come on, then.’

Following Mrs Howell to the staircase, Josie passed the kitchen door. It didn’t take more than one quick glance inside to see that the cupboard doors were indeed her father’s handiwork. He had a distinctive style, carving everything from sawn oak. Expensive, but durable, he always said. He left a signature mark on the things he made: a tiny acorn, carved into a corner somewhere that wasn’t prominent.

‘I think my dad fitted your cabinets,’ Josie remarked, not wanting there to be any secrets between them. They’d shared too much information in the short time they’d known each other.

Janet paused on the bottom step, head whipping around in surprise.

‘What was your surname again? You said you were from Ellwood?’

‘Jackson,’ Josie replied. ‘Ellwood born and bred.’

‘Jackson.’ Janet’s eyes reassessed her. ‘Oh, well, then yes, my husband used to be good friends with your dad, back in the day. They would play pool together at the King’s Arms. Is Angela still the landlord there? I remember her.’

‘Yes, she’s still going strong. I work there now.’ Josie shrugged.

Janet shook her head, as if dislodging a memory. ‘I should have put two and two together when you said your mum had died. We lost touch with him after she passed – you know how it is. And then I got divorced. My ex-husband moved away. But you’re right, those are your dad’s.’ She pointed at the cabinets. ‘He didn’t fit them, though. He made them on commission, but my ex-husband collected and fitted them himself. To save on costs, you know. I don’t think your dad ever set foot in this house, come to think of it. He was a hard one to drag out of the pub. So was my husband.’

Josie felt oddly relieved. Her dad probably didn’t even remember he’d done some work for Laurel’s family. He had made something for just about every house within a twenty-mile radius of Ellwood. He was known for quality, and people liked that he used durable oak or ash, beech, walnut, all sourced from the Forest of Dean.

‘Now that I think about it . . .’ Mrs Howell continued, digging deep into her memories. ‘Your braid. You still wear it like you did when you were a kid.’

Josie shrugged, flopping her plait over her shoulder. ‘My mum always liked it like this. It’s practical.’

‘You know, you and Laurel met, as kids.’

Josie felt the air go very still around her, almost solidified, as if she was suddenly encased in ice. All exterior sound vanished. Inside, it was a different story. Her viscera thrummed with this new information, and the ants in her body screeched, shaking their little bodies like thousands of vibrating ball bearings rattling along her arteries, until she was sure Mrs Howell would be able to hear her blood humming.

‘We did?’ she managed, throat raw.

‘You had the exact same hairstyles, I remember now. We thought you looked like twins. We went to that festival you lot have over in Ellwood. You know, the one with all the costumes and music and masks and whatnot.’

‘The Devil’s March.’

‘That’s it. Your dad pestered us to come along one year.’ Janet shook her head. ‘I remember now. Never seen so much pagan nonsense, I tell you. Torches and silly hats and that big straw doll you carry up front of the procession. We had fun though. There might even be a photo of you girls together in costume, if I look. The albums are up in the attic.’

Mrs Howell turned and headed up the stairs, while Josie tried to get a hold of herself.

A real-world connection. A moment in time, together. A moment where they were both alive, with years ahead of them, instead of varying degrees of ruined life and death colliding on the filthy forest floor.

‘You coming?’ Mrs Howell called.

Josie ascended, the ants growing more frantic and excited with every step.

Chapter 21

‘I haven’t changed much in here. I dust, move a few things around. I’ve added a few photos of her. But everything else is pretty much as she left it when she moved out.’

The room was small, but cosy. It reminded Josie a lot of her own childhood bedroom. The walls were a deep burgundy colour, with green skirting boards, curtains, and a picture rail. The colour combination had a medieval feel, heightened with an outdated fleur-de-lys duvet cover and tapestry cushions with bright yellow suns picked out against sapphire blue backgrounds. Josie could see that young Laurel had taken an interest in many of the same things she herself had: crystals, tarot, star signs. Movies, books. There were ornaments everywhere, fairies, dragons, skulls, a tiny Ganesha, a miniature Baphomet, a rustic carved crucifix.

‘I kept her room for her after she moved out, in case she ever needed to come back. Sometimes she did, in a right state. I would have to bathe her, like a baby, to get the filth off. Sometimes she was too ashamed to come back. I never knew what way she was going to be, after a while. She just blew in and out, like the wind.’

On the desk, Josie saw a series of exercise books stacked in a pile, A4 sized, the type used to write notes in at school.

‘Those were her sketchbooks,’ Mrs Howell said, fondly. ‘She was always scrawling away in them. She said it helped calm her down, when she felt particularly bad with all the nightmares, hallucinations.’

Josie frowned, catching on the last word.

She turned, slowly.

‘Hallucinations?’

Mrs Howell nodded. ‘Oh yes. She had terrible visions, like waking nightmares. They started at the same time as the bad dreams. Shadows and monsters, flying things, creeping things . . . She often used to think she had bugs all over her, crawling across her body. She would scratch and pick at her skin, too, you know? And pull her own hair out, sometimes in huge clumps. I put it down to the drugs she was on, messing with her head, and . . . Christ, now what?’

The doorbell rang downstairs. Janet’s tongue clicked with annoyance.

Josie felt a powerful need to sit down before her knees gave out.

Laurel had things living under her skin, too.

‘It’s OK,’ Josie started to say, as Janet dithered over the doorbell. ‘I don’t have to—’

‘You’re fine.’ Mrs Howell glanced at Josie, sympathy in her eyes. ‘You can stay here. Take as long as you need. Just be careful with her things, that’s all. Please. This is all I have left of her, see.’

Josie nodded. ‘I’ll be careful,’ she said, quietly. ‘Of course I will be.’

The doorbell rang again.

‘I’m coming!’ Mrs Howell snapped, exasperated.

The woman retreated downstairs to answer the door, as the bell sounded out once again.

Josie was relieved to be alone for a while. Her own skin had started rippling in response to the clear and familiar description of Laurel’s sensory discomfort, and she didn’t know how to hide that from the dead girl’s mother. Scratching at herself so publicly might make it seem as if Josie was somehow mocking Laurel.

She stood now in the silent room, feeling the heaviness of a personality no longer present. Stuffed toys waited on the bed for the return of an old friend who would never come back. Posters rippled with age on the walls. Knick-knacks and trinkets stared at Josie with dozens of small, ceramic eyes. It was sad that Laurel would never lie down on her bed again, flick through her books and magazines, rearrange her ornaments, sleep soundly, knowing she was safe. It was sad knowing that something bad had happened to her, something that had dragged her off the path during her teenage years and set her on a course through danger, through drugs, through loneliness.

Josie wondered what it was, the turning point. The event. What had happened to Laurel at sixteen? Her eyes went to the desk, to the notebooks. She crossed the room and flipped open the first of the exercise books, hesitant.

The itch shot through her fingertips. The first page was blank. She turned it.

Josie gasped, frozen. She was confronted with a mass of scrawled lines in black biro, a furious cloud of scribbled marks and cross-hatching, and sitting there, xenomorphic and lifelike in the middle of the page, was a large, perfectly proportioned ant.

Josie’s hands started to shake. She wanted to tear herself open. Instead, she flipped the page again. Another ant, close up, the anatomy labelled. Leg. Coxa. Femur. Pronotum. Mesonotum. Petiole . . .

Josie flipped to the next page, urgently.

Dozens of ants.

Flip.

Hundreds.

Flip, flip, flip.

The further into the book she got, the more pronounced Laurel’s obsession with the insects became, until, abruptly, the subject matter changed.

Flip.

Angry hatch marks now outlined a shadowy figure, tall, broad, long-limbed, drawn sideways, stretching across two pages, so Josie had to turn the book to see properly. The figure was split across the waist by the seam of the spine. Old Jacob’s description came back to haunt her as she stared at the drawing.

Red and black biro depicted stubby antlers, a crown of pheasant feathers, small, cut-out eyes, and a crude slit for a mouth. Below the horrifying visage, thrusting grotesquely out of the darkened realm of the cloak, a protuberance, held firmly in one clawed hand. Little blobs of ants dripped from the end, drawn in minuscule detail with a very fine pen. Josie was reminded of Sheela-na-gig, the stone female holding open her parts for the world to see. This felt similar. A proclamation of form, of self. Power, not desire.

Beneath the figure, Josie saw two initials, intertwined, an odd pairing of vowels smashed together in an ancient, peculiar way.

Æ

Æmete

Chapter 22

Josie carefully closed the sketchbook and slid it into the back of her jeans, untucking her shirt and pulling down her jumper to cover the item up. She backed out of Laurel’s bedroom and bolted down the stairs, only to barge straight into Detective Constable Wilkes, who looked less than pleased to see her.

‘Well, look what the Devil blew in,’ the detective said, shaking her head. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

‘She came to pay her respects.’ Mrs Howell defended Josie, forcefully. ‘I’m glad someone took the time, at least.’

The detective let out a sigh.

‘I’ve got some news about Laurel I’d like to share with you, Janet, if that’s OK.’

Wilkes shot Josie a pointed look.

‘In private,’ she finished sternly.

Mrs Howell shook her head. ‘I think she has just as much right to know what’s going on as any of us,’ the woman retorted, a firm look in her eye. ‘She found her, after all. She found my girl, in the state that she was. Can you imagine? You wouldn’t let me see her, but Josie saw. All of it. All the damage. She’s a victim, too. She can stay.’

Wilkes rolled her head around on her shoulders, rubbing the back of her neck in a brief gesture of frustration. Laurel’s notebook jabbed gently into Josie’s lower back, as if to remind her it was still there.

‘Her involvement in this situation is yet to be clarified, Mrs Howell, I must stress that. I would prefer to speak to you alone.’

Josie blinked in shock. What did that mean, exactly? Was there any doubt that her involvement was anything other than accidental?

‘Really, she shouldn’t be here at all,’ the detective continued. ‘But you know that, don’t you?’

This last was aimed at Josie herself.

‘I had to come,’ Josie replied quietly. ‘I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her. I just . . . I wanted to know what she was like. Laurel. And to say sorry. I thought . . .’ She tailed off, not knowing how to finish the sentence.

‘What information?’ Mrs Howell wanted the conversation back on track. Information, at this point, was all she had left to look forward to. Her voice wobbled a little before she controlled it.

‘Janet, I simply cannot talk to you about this in front of—’

‘Why did you insist on taking my statement when I was still in the hospital, barely able to sit up, let alone think straight?’ Josie interrupted.

Wilkes stilled.

‘I was traumatised,’ Josie continued, and the ants seemed revitalised by her anger. Bitter nectar, energy rich. ‘You could have waited. Visited me at home. You blindsided me, and you know it. How do I even know if you typed the right thing in my statement?’

There was silence in the room as Josie and Wilkes stared at each other.

Mrs Howell eventually cleared her throat.

‘My daughter?’ she asked quietly, patiently. She took a seat on the sofa, gesturing for the others to do the same.

‘Fine,’ the detective said, a murderous glint in her eye. ‘She can stay.’

Wilkes sat, opened a folder, pulled out some printed sheets of information.

‘The first thing to share,’ she continued, ‘is that the coroner has finished his post-mortem examination of Laurel’s body.’

Janet Howell sat up straighter.

‘Does that mean I can have her back? I would like a funeral. I want to put her somewhere nice. Somewhere with a view.’

Wilkes put up a hand.

‘We can’t get ahead of ourselves just yet. You see, there were several findings we need to explore further.’

‘Findings?’ The wobble returned to Mrs Howell’s voice.

‘The time of death, for one. According to the condition of the remains and insect activity, we estimate that Laurel died some seven or eight weeks before Josie found her body. That is significant.’

‘What do you mean?’

Wilkes proceeded more tactfully.

‘Well, for one thing, we had a late summer heatwave, which sped things up, in terms of decomposition.’

‘Oh,’ Janet whispered. Josie could see the woman’s imagination working overtime. ‘You mean she died shortly after she went missing?’

Wilkes nodded, just once, to confirm. ‘Which leads me to the next point. As you know, we had to determine whether Laurel died by misadventure.’

Janet stared at the detective, confused. ‘Misadventure, what does that mean?’

‘Unexpected accidents, usually. An unnatural death, but not necessarily because of foul play.’

Mrs Howell made a noise, incredulous. Josie did the same.

Wilkes motioned for patience. ‘I know. It doesn’t make sense, especially given the condition of the body. The autopsy showed that Laurel’s injuries were substantial, and beyond this, that her wounds were consistent with a fall.’

Josie licked her lips. The ants sang from behind her teeth. She remembered the snapped ankles. The dented skull. The rubbery brain matter.

Wilkes kept her gaze trained on Josie, trying to gauge her reaction.

‘The damage sustained to your daughter’s joints, her ribs, her skull, and some of her internal organs, the bruising on her skin and other factors . . . taken together, these injuries indicate that she fell from a great height. She landed head first, and struck something hard on impact, which is why her head had so much trauma. Understand?’

Mrs Howell stared. ‘You mean like . . . she jumped from something? But how would she end up in the woods?’

Josie nodded. To her, the big mystery was not how Laurel died. It was how her dead body had been moved afterwards.

Wilkes signalled for patience.

‘The injuries were likely sustained after Laurel died.’

Silence, as Mrs Howell struggled to absorb everything Wilkes was telling her.

‘So . . . she died, and then . . . fell from something?’

Wilkes continued. ‘There was soil under her nails and on her person, soil that was different to the dirt typically found in the Knoll, which is sandy, grey, alkaline. From limestone. The residue we collected however, was richer, more like clay. That type of soil is more commonly found in the middle of the Forest of Dean area, in the natural coal basin there.’

Wilkes pulled a different piece of paper from the folder. This one was headed Soil Analysis. She handed it to Mrs Howell. The older woman held it loosely between her fingers, unstudied, focusing instead on what the detective was saying.

‘The results,’ Wilkes continued, ‘prove that Laurel’s remains had been resting for various periods in several different locations across the Forest of Dean, Mrs Howell. Before she was found by Josie, here.’

‘What do you mean? Different locations. What does that mean?’

‘This indicates, we think, that after Laurel died there was substantial tampering with her body.’

Josie thought suddenly about ants moving the bodies of their dead to the ant graveyards they kept. The notion made her feel oddly desolate. Even ants had roles. Ant caretakers. They had structure, a place in the grand scheme of things. They all worked together for some higher purpose, a purpose that eluded Josie.

But ants did this for sanitary purposes – to keep rotting matter away from their queen. Moving a broken girl all over the Forest . . . hiding her in different places, leaving her out to be found when the time was right . . .

That felt more like a game.

Mrs Howell’s tears started to drip down her nose.

Wilkes handed her a tissue from a packet she had brought.

‘There’s more,’ Laurel’s mother whispered. ‘There’s more you’re not telling me.’

‘There is.’

Wilkes showed her first signs of discomfort, a flash of empathy that gave Josie hope: the detective wasn’t a complete cold fish.

‘The coroner ran the full range of tests, including a thorough toxicology report. More thorough than the tests we usually perform.’

‘Don’t tell me she was using again,’ Mrs Howell said, shoulders now shaking with repressed tears. ‘I don’t want to hear it. She told me she quit. I don’t want to know if she was using again!’

‘She wasn’t using again, Janet. Whatever she said about getting clean, she meant it. There was nothing like that in her system. No trace of anything you could class as recreational, I promise you.’

‘But . . . ?’ Janet Howell was sensitive to the things Wilkes wasn’t saying. The detective, like most people who had difficult jobs, was a master of expressing the quiet parts out loud, which Josie suspected was part training, part intuition. Letting someone come to terrible news in such a way made the blows softer when they eventually landed.

Perhaps she wasn’t so bad at her job after all.

What she said next left Josie reeling.

‘But . . . Laurel was drugged. We found paralysing agents in her blood. Several, in fact.’

Josie coughed loudly at this revelation, a sudden convulsion of her diaphragm that sent the ants scrambling for cover.

‘Paralysing agent?’

‘Toxicology found a variety of substances in her blood and they’re still running a few final tests to nail all the elements down specifically. But what they’ve found is . . . well, peculiar,’ Wilkes said, and gave Josie a long, hard appraising look.

Chapter 23

‘Have you ever heard of hemlock, Mrs Howell?’

Josie blinked. Hemlock was the domain of people like Angela, with her dried herbs and potions and balms all lined up on the windowsill of the King’s Arms. Josie thought about the lotion the landlord had rubbed on her own skin, how effectively it had soothed her bites. The jar was still in her coat pocket, a comforting weight.

‘That’s a herb, isn’t it? Grows wild?’

Wilkes nodded. ‘Hemlock is found naturally throughout the UK, yes.’ She referred to her notes. ‘Conium maculatum. It’s quite a powerful substance, if abused. If someone ingests enough of it, it can attack the nervous system, going after the respiratory muscles, and the heart. In some cases, it can bring on a heart attack. It can, in the highest doses, also induce a coma, as everything in the body shuts down.’

Mrs Howell kept silent, eyes darting from side to side as she absorbed this news. The unread soil report shook in her hand.

Wilkes carefully removed it, slid it back into the paper folder.

Mrs Howell didn’t even notice it had gone.

‘We also found a small quantity of Tetrodotoxin. Tetrodotoxin is a neurotoxin found in several animals, including pufferfish, porcupinefish, sunfish, triggerfish. It’s the sort of thing you could possibly buy on the black market, if you knew where to look, or at some exotic market overseas, but you’d have to search pretty hard for it.’

‘OK,’ said Laurel’s mother, but she didn’t sound OK. She sounded like someone on the verge of a breakdown.

Josie could sympathise.

‘Additionally, there was a trace amount of a naturally occurring curare, in alkaloid form. Curare is a poison derived from tree or plant sap; it’s sometimes used by indigenous peoples in’ – Wilkes checked her notes – ‘South America. They put it on arrows to paralyse prey,’ she clarified, as Mrs Howell’s eyes grew blanker and her gaze fixed on a spot somewhere in the distance.

‘Again, I have no idea how anyone over here could get hold of stuff like that. It would have to be bought overseas, I think. Or possibly on the internet. It also has muscle relaxant properties.’

‘OK,’ Laurel’s mother repeated.

‘It’s a highly unusual blend of ingredients, Mrs Howell,’ Wilkes reiterated. ‘Probably mixed by someone specifically for the purpose of disabling or paralysing whoever it was administered to. In this case, your daughter. The coroner theorised that perhaps too much was administered, leading to her death. We don’t know how it was given, exactly, but the coroner presumes orally. An unprecedented combination, certainly like nothing I’ve ever seen before in my time on the force. Laurel died by poisoning, Mrs Howell. The fall came after.’

Another tissue was offered and ignored. Mrs Howell was beyond accepting anything, information or otherwise. Josie could see she had shut down, all the parts of her brain not occupied with grief now completely overrun with questions she might never find the answers to. She started to brush at her knees, over and over, wiping away imaginary crumbs, an attempted soothing mechanism that brought her no comfort.

‘So she wasn’t alive, is what you’re saying. When she fell.’

‘No.’

‘Poisoned. And then a big fall. Like Humpty Dumpty!’

Mrs Howell let out a wild, unsteady laugh.

Then she started to sob.

Wilkes bowed her head. ‘The poison does explain why we found no defensive wounds on her body. And no signs of a physical struggle.’

Mrs Howell’s shoulders shook violently.

Wilkes licked her lower lip. Josie swallowed back her own tears as she watched Laurel’s mother slowly piece things together.

‘Some bastard drugged her, poisoned her, kept her body, and threw her off something when he was done with it! And then, what, he didn’t think that was enough? He thought he’d drag her into the woods for anyone to find? What did my girl ever do to deserve that kind of treatment?’

Silence.

Janet’s chest heaved with repressed grief and anger.

Wilkes leaned forward. Josie silently begged the detective to stay quiet.

‘Janet, we are now treating this as a murder inquiry,’ the detective continued. ‘That means we have to hold Laurel’s remains a little longer, I’m so sorry.’

A thought occurred to Mrs Howell. Her sobs subsided.

‘Was there any . . . any . . . sexual stuff?’ she asked flatly.

Josie’s stomach sank.

Wilkes cleared her throat again.

‘There is some indication that sex took place not long before she died, yes.’

Mrs Howell let out a long, ragged breath.

Josie’s insides crawled.

‘Some vaginal tearing. But it’s possible the sexual activity was unrelated to her death. We’re still trying to get a handle on a solid timeline, based on sightings, CCTV footage, witness reports . . . your daughter was very active, in that regard. According to . . .’

Wilkes trailed off. Josie stared at her. Any respect she’d had for the detective vanished with that last, unfinished sentence.

‘Get out,’ Mrs Howell snapped, with venom. ‘Get out. Let me alone.’

Josie didn’t blame her. She surreptitiously felt for the sketchbook tucked in the back of her jeans. Still there.

Janet collapsed into the couch and started crying again.

Josie rose and left without a further word, glaring hard at Wilkes, and squeezing Mrs Howell’s shoulder gently as she left.

Chapter 24

Wilkes, chagrined, discreetly left the packet of tissues behind on the coffee table and followed Josie out the front door and into the bitter air.

Josie picked up her shoes, teetering on the front step as she dragged the sodden, muddy Chucks back on awkwardly.

‘Want a lift?’ Wilkes asked, her voice unfriendly.

‘No thank you,’ Josie declined, preparing to head back the way she’d come.

‘It wasn’t a question,’ Wilkes clarified, gesturing to her car, which was parked at an angle in the driveway.

Josie sighed.

Today was proving to be a very long day indeed.

She climbed in, reluctantly. Wilkes wasted no time in interrogating her.

‘What were you doing there? At the Howells?’ the detective asked, jamming the car into reverse and three-point-turning her way out of the narrow driveway, back on to Lambsquay Road.

Josie stared moodily out of the window at the trees that shot by as the vehicle picked up speed. ‘I told you. I couldn’t stop thinking about Laurel. I had to . . . I can’t sleep. My skin is alive. I needed to know more about her.’

‘What you did, going there, bothering Mrs Howell like that. It was wildly inappropriate.’

‘So was taking my statement in the hospital, while I was still dosed up on painkillers. Yet neither thing seems to be illegal.’

Wilkes put her foot down, taking a corner fast, too fast for comfort. She was angry, Josie realised. She bit the bullet.

‘What’s really going on here? Why are you so hostile towards me? I’ve done nothing wrong, but you’re treating me like a suspect. What is it you’re not telling me?’

‘Just the wrong place at the wrong time, right?’ the detective said, changing gear aggressively.

Josie decided to take a gamble.

‘Someone told me there were others, found in the woods. Bodies.’

Silence.

‘Other women. About ten years ago. I looked it up. They all looked a lot alike. They all looked like Laurel. Uncanny, really.’

Wilkes remained very, very quiet. The speedometer dropped.

Josie pressed on.

‘Are they connected?’

More silence. Wilkes kept her eyes trained on the road. Had Josie just stumbled upon something that the police didn’t want to publicise? Or was this the first Wilkes herself had heard of the other deaths? Josie couldn’t imagine how that could be possible. This wasn’t a big city like London. It was the back of beyond, the sticks. Things like this were a big deal, out here. Not forgotten easily, as Old Jacob had proved.

Plus, Wilkes was smart. She didn’t miss much. Josie could not imagine her having no knowledge of something as significant as six cold cases with similar victim types lying around the Forest of Dean, deaths unsolved.

They drove in silence for ten more minutes, each mile passed proving to Josie that she was right. The quiet was all the confirmation she needed.

‘Want me to drop you at yours?’ Wilkes said eventually. The car pulled towards the edge of Ellwood, approaching the corner of Fern Road. As they neared, Josie caught sight of Old Jacob hobbling, unbothered, along the middle of the road towards them, directly in the path of oncoming traffic, his stick striking out in front of him with each slow step.

‘No,’ Josie said, making a quick decision. ‘Drop me here. I’m going to pay a visit to a friend.’

Wilkes braked sharply, as if keen to be rid of her.

‘If you need anything at all, feel free to call me,’ the detective said, as the car stopped. ‘I am sorry for all you’ve had to go through, for what it’s worth. But it might be better to come to me, first, if there’s anything you’re struggling with, rather than bother Mrs Howell any more. Deal?’

Josie nodded. She’d troubled Janet enough, for a while.

‘Deal,’ she said. Wilkes revved her engine and sped off.

Good riddance, Josie thought, turning to greet Old Jacob as he made his steady way towards her.

‘Hello, again,’ she called, touching the sketchbook down the back of her jeans to check it was still safely in place. ‘I don’t suppose I could trouble you for a cup of tea?’

‘You don’t drink tea,’ Jacob said, huffing as he stopped before her, his breath hanging in the air in small white puffs. ‘You want information. Everyone wants to be Old Jacob’s friend when they need information. The Devil is never idle, eh?’

Josie didn’t answer, simply waited.

Old Jacob cackled. ‘Come on then,’ he called, starting up again, turning down Fern Road, at the end of which his house sat waiting, ramshackle, damp. Full of secrets.

And answers, she hoped.

Chapter 25

Old Jacob’s house was concealed from the road by a giant weeping willow tree, easily hundreds of years old, judging by the size and spread of the branches, which met the ground in a large, circular curtain. Josie would have liked playing in the leafy, green cave beneath that curtain during the summer months, as a kid. She looked at the tree and wondered what Old Jacob had been like when he was a small boy. Did he play under the willow fronds, too, or had the tree been too small, then? Was the willow as old as he? As resolute, hardy?

Jacob walked as if he had no intention of dying any time soon, despite the obvious pain he was in as he hobbled along. For a man in his nineties, he was fiercely independent, arthritis bedamned, as he often said.

His house, however, was a ramshackle prospect at first glance. The roof was a mess of slipping tiles, and the exterior paintwork not much better, peeling off the walls in great, flaky chunks, but the foundations were solid, Josie knew. These old houses were built to last. The windows didn’t lean in their casements, the chimney stacks weren’t falling. The house, which was large, far too large for an old man living alone, was damp, but then all the old houses around here were. The Forest of Dean was a damp place to live, especially of late, when the area had received double the amount of rainfall it usually got. Josie could see clumps of moss growing in Jacob’s gutters, and green staining the lower portion of the cracked render. The ground around his front door was boggy, too, underfoot. Josie felt her feet sink into waterlogged turf that was on the point of refreezing after a brief thaw, leaving wet footprints in her wake.

Old Jacob let Josie in through his unlocked front door.

‘Jacob,’ Josie admonished, entering the gloom of the house to find it somehow, unbelievably, colder than the outside. ‘You shouldn’t leave the house unlocked like that. Anyone could come in.’

Old Jacob chuckled. ‘They’re welcome to,’ he said, leaning his walking stick up against a dirty wall and shrugging out of his ancient jacket. He slung it on to a heap of clothes mouldering on the floor of his entrance hall, which was so cluttered with debris, soggy magazines, stacks of newspapers, piles of tinfoil trays, bottles with layers of curdled milk festering inside, bin bags, plastic coat hangers, a cracked television and a broken typewriter, amongst other things, that Josie could barely squeeze past.

‘I doubt they’d find anything worth stealing in here. All the things I own . . . they’re sentimental. Historical. Nothing of any worth.’

They made their way to the next room, Josie’s nose twitching as the smell of mould crept up her nostrils. She sneezed. Her eyes started to feel gritty around the lids. She doubted Old Jacob had dusted much in the last ninety years, judging by the state of the place. And the dust had a lot of things to cling to.

She saw shelves everywhere. On them, a vast display of items, collectibles, artefacts, all of them ritualistic, or of the occult, or relating to folklore, witchcraft and local history. Curiosities and objects of such strange and specific peculiarity that she realised she was staring at something carefully curated, a collection assembled for a purpose, with a deliberate and particular care.

‘Why do you have all this stuff, Jacob?’ Josie asked, gazing around, taking her time. Her eyes struggled to see everything through the gloom of the house’s interior.

Jacob waved a hand dismissively, wandering over to a heavily laden coffee table with one wonky leg that threatened to dump its burden on the floor at any moment. He started rifling through an enormous stack of old farming almanacks piled on top.

‘Years ago, before you were born, there used to be a village museum up the road, in an old tollbooth near the football club. A roundhouse, it was. Looked like a miniature tower. Lovely thing, that building.’

Josie’s eyes scanned chalices of iron and stone, ritual knives, wands of twisted willow and hazel, a heavily bound black notebook with metal clasps on the front, belts, garters, a whip with soft leather tails. Pentacles on necklaces, amulets of teeth and bone, crystals strewn across every surface. Straw dolls, and a collection of rough, cloth-stitched dolls with no faces. Those were called poppets, Josie knew – her mother had had one. A doll made to cast spells on a person; either to help them, or for the other, less pleasant reason.

‘Perfectly round, with these little turrets up top,’ Jacob continued. ‘We kept a lot of this stuff in there. I would charge 50p entrance for anyone passing through. It was surprisingly popular in the summer. I consider myself a folklorist, in many respects. Well, you knew that.’

‘I had no idea you were this dedicated.’

Old Jacob huffed out his sallow cheeks. ‘This land . . . its traditions . . . nobody seems to want to remember the Old Ways anymore. The younger generations care about their phones and their gadgets but not for the customs and habits of their ancestors. I did my best to keep some of that alive. Now it all sits here, and nobody looks at it.’

Josie peered into a dusty glass display case leaning against a wall to see what it contained. She could vaguely make out legs, hairy, spider-like, hooks at the end.

Several of the almanacks slid off the table, landing on the floor in a thick cloud of dust. Josie sneezed, three times in a row.

‘What happened to the museum?’

‘An HGV lorry driver came through one winter and drove head-on into it. Flattened it completely. I salvaged what I could. A lot was damaged beyond saving.’

Josie could hear anguish in the old man’s voice. The thing in the display case, however, was bothering Josie too much to pay him heed. She wiped the glass with her sleeve, lifting off a layer of grime.

‘Oh, shit!’ Josie reared back, sneezing again, this time more in shock than from dust. The thing inside the case was not a spider.

It was a human hand, hairy, desiccated, mummified, remnants of nail polish left on the curling, brittle fingernails.

Her mind went back immediately to the Knoll, to a bruised, swollen hand lying stiff on the forest floor, dirt under the fingernails, only this dirt was not from the Knoll. It was from a variety of places, elsewhere in the Forest. Josie felt a prickling spread through all her extremities, triggering the most intense itching sensation she had felt yet, exacerbated by dust and mould. It took every ounce of control she had not to rip her skin off with her bare hands in great, peeling strips, right there in front of Jacob.

Calm down, she told herself, over and over. Calm.

She did not want to have a breakdown here, in the old man’s house of curiosities.

‘Jacob,’ she said, voice hoarse as she dragged herself away from the brink of panic. Laurel’s eyeless sockets stared back at Josie from the recesses of her memory, deep and dark, and full of secrets.

‘Yes, dear?’

‘Why the fuck do you have a severed human hand in a glass case?’

Chapter 26

Old Jacob was surprisingly unperturbed.

‘Oh, you found her, did you?’

‘Found who?’

Josie couldn’t rid herself of the memory of Laurel’s bloated fingers. The dead woman’s fingernails had borne traces of black and red polish on the thumbs and middle fingers. Josie’s ants wanted her to remember everything, every small horror. They swarmed and chittered and screeched, and Josie wished, fervently, that she was not the only one who could hear them. It made her feel terribly lonely, this particular infestation of the soul. Lonely, and useless.

She longed to run a cheese grater over the length of her body. Her fingers closed around the jar of Angela’s balm in her pocket, but she’d have to wait until she got home. If she could last that long.

‘That’s Helen,’ Jacob said, sucking at his false teeth and shuffling over. ‘Say hello to the old girl.’

Josie found the affection with which he said the name perturbing. She stared in disgust at the appendage. Jacob’s leer slipped.

‘Ah, you probably don’t want to see that sort of thing, do you? Not after . . .’

He looked around for something to cover the case with, found an old tea towel, and clumsily draped it over the dirty glass box.

‘Why do you have that?’

Old Jacob tutted. ‘She’s a museum exhibit, Josie. A witch’s talisman. Nothing more. An oddity. What else would you have me do with her?’

‘Can’t you bury it?’

‘And bury the history along with her? No, it wouldn’t be right. This hand belonged to a wise woman who lived over in Milkwall. A powerful healer. After she died, her body was divided up into pieces, and the pieces were scattered across the neighbouring villages and towns, to bring luck, good health. People were fond of keeping body parts, in those days. They thought a dead body had great power.’

It does, Josie thought to herself. It does have power. The power to destroy, the power to ruin everything.

When I die, I want my body burned, so it can’t upset anyone, spoil anyone’s day.

‘It was a different time, I guess.’

Jacob chuckled. ‘That it was. See this?’ He rummaged around on a nearby desk, bringing out an old black notebook bound in leather then holding it out to Josie.

She took it reluctantly.

‘What’s this?’

The notebook was very old and very smooth, with odd little pockmarks on the leather cover that looked a lot like . . .

‘What is this made of?’

Old Jacob grinned, his false teeth coming loose for a moment until he tongued them back in place.

‘It’s human skin.’

Josie almost threw the book at him.

‘You old ghoul!’ she said, disgusted. ‘What is wrong with you? What part of “I found a dead body and I’m having a hard time” is so difficult to understand?’

Her headache threatened; Lena’s legacy.

Old Jacob wheezed again, that impish look on his face.

‘Well, that’s the point, dear. We’ve all gotten too precious about death,’ he said. ‘I tell you, it was different in the old days. A body was a statement. When a man was hanged for a crime, they’d use his corpse as a dissection model. Criminals’ skin would be used to cover pocketbooks – to disrespect them in the afterlife, see. Really drive the punishment home.’

Josie shuddered. ‘I don’t want to see any more body parts, please,’ she said. ‘I can’t stress that enough.’

Old Jacob put the notebook back in place, scowling. ‘All right, keep your hair on. What is it that you want to see, then?’ he groused. ‘I know this isn’t a social call. I don’t get any of those. That’s what the pub is for.’

Josie allowed herself one long, deep scratch across her forearms, a single scrape of the fingernail up each limb, groaning at the second of relief the motion afforded. The itching flooded back, renewed, fiercer than ever, immediately after the last stroke of her fingernail.

‘Oh,’ Jacob said, watching Josie’s face closely as she scratched. ‘Oh, I see. You want to know more about Emmet, don’t you?’

Josie nodded, just once.

‘Bothering you, is it? And here you were, thinking it was just an old man’s folk tales.’

Josie shrugged. ‘I spoke to the detective again. Asked her about the other bodies. She was . . . less than forthcoming. But I figured, from her face, that you were on to something.’

She decided not to tell the old man about Laurel’s sketchbook. About the double-page drawing of the masked figure.

About the ants.

‘Is that right.’

‘And it’s more than that. I can’t . . . I can’t rest, Jacob. This whole thing, it’s got me turned all inside and out. I need some answers. Seems like maybe, you had some. Like there was more, more you weren’t telling me.’

Old Jacob’s lopsided, toothy grin sobered.

‘It’s not often people take me seriously,’ he said, waving a hand, motioning for her to follow. ‘Let’s go into my study, shall we? I’ve got all my books in there.’

Josie shadowed the old man as he hobbled around the piles of junk and assorted items of furniture, out of one room, into the next.

Jacob’s study was as crammed with oddities as the rest of the house; mostly books, charts, posters, calendars, prints, and framed paintings, tapestries and strange documents written in languages Josie didn’t understand. One particularly large, circular painting was labelled ‘Wheel of the Year’. It was a golden calendar disc with a sun painted in the middle, other prominent dates marked in ornate hand around the diameter: Beltane, Summer Solstice, Lammas, Autumn Equinox, Samhain, Yule, Imbolc, Vernal Equinox. In between Samhain and Yule someone had scribbled three jagged marks: the Devil’s claw marks, meant to indicate the Devil’s March, Josie realised.

And then she saw the wall of masks. They were all old, all grotesque, not like the masks locals made for the March. The crude features of these masks were twisted, rudimentary, angry, eyes buggy and staring, brows furrowed, lips twisted in wide, nasty smiles.

‘You really are a collector,’ Josie murmured, gazing at the wall. Dozens of pairs of empty eye sockets stared back at her, as if trying to see behind her skin.

‘Masks are an important part of human history.’ Jacob settled down in an old bucket chair behind a vast desk, almost completely hidden under stacks of paper and books and ornaments. ‘Those are from all over the world, from multiple periods in time.’

‘This one?’ Josie asked, pointing to a wooden mask with round pinhole eyes, a large nose, a grinning mouth cut with harsh angles, and two antenna-like protuberances on top. It looked so similar to the image of Emmet she had formed in her mind, and to the drawing in Laurel’s book, that Josie started to sweat in earnest, despite the deep chill permeating through Jacob’s house.

Old Jacob was dismissive. ‘That one is from Switzerland – Sarganserland, to be precise. It’s meant to be a demon. Turn of the nineteenth century. The Swiss had a tradition of mask-making similar to ours, and like us they would wear them at a festival to mark the coming of winter. In fact, the winter festival tradition is found throughout Europe. See that one, next to it? To the left, I mean.’

Josie pointed to a hollow yellow bear’s head, a complete helmet with pointed ears, a cap of real fur on top and glued around the neck, and small eyes cut out of the wood, which was scored with marks – meant to represent the bear’s coat, she supposed. The nose was long, mouth open, displaying a carved, protruding tongue.

Old Jacob nodded. ‘Another winter festival mask. The jaw can be moved with a string, see?’ Josie noticed a small string with a bobble at the end, hanging down. ‘It’s from Slovakia. They have a festival called Fašiangy. That mask would be worn on top of a full costume, fur coat, chains or bells attached. All to make noise. A racket. Charivari style, skimmington like, but different. Bears were meant to protect from demons. They’re symbols of rebirth, too.’

Once again, Josie had a sense of herself, tiny and inconsequential, scratching at the surface of a vast, ancient enigma, huge and widespread, the significance of which she would never be able to fully appreciate. Masks. Festivals. Rituals. Ceremony, performance. All this dissemblance, to connect the living with something beyond the human realm. Spirits. Nature. The supernatural. The dead.

The Devil.

‘And this?’ she asked, pointing to a headdress made from a long, tapering sheaf of straw. It loosely resembled the head of the straw queen they hoisted through the Devil’s March each year.

‘That one is a straw bear from Whittlesey, over the other side of the country, but the tradition is widespread throughout Germany, too. And Poland. And Nigeria. The person playing the bear wears a whole costume made of wheat, or oats, or rye. A personification of winter, a ritualistic way of bringing in the new season, or seeing it out, depending on which festival you’re looking at. The Whittlesea bear goes door to door on Plough Monday, the traditional start of the English farming year, asking for food. But it’s all mixed in with Christianity, too. The ploughshare, and all that. People bringing goods into church. No mention of the devil there, but these local festivities, they’re all connected. This island of ours is nothing more than a patchwork quilt stitched with legend and myth, Josie. Every county, every town, every village, we all have our ways.’

Josie was starting to understand how Mrs Howell had felt when the detective was discussing Laurel’s toxicology report. Flattened, somewhat, with an abundance of unwanted information.

‘It looks a lot like the straw queen,’ she said, feeling exhausted.

‘It does that. I used to make the straw queen every year, you know.’

Josie shook her head. She didn’t know that.

‘Oh, yes. I took great pride in it. I have nothing but the greatest respect for our customs. Our traditions. It’s human nature to form habits and idiosyncrasies specific to where you lay your head. It’s how you root yourself to the land, to your home. It’s what home is, for a lot of people.’

‘I never really felt at home anywhere, after Mum died.’

‘Home is not just who you live with. It’s a way of life, a sequence of habits. Ah, I talk too much. You’ve got me rambling. What was I saying?’

‘You used to make the queen.’

‘My hands gave out.’ He sounded bitter about it. ‘They gave the job to someone else.’ Old Jacob shot Josie a strange look. ‘Of course he doesn’t care about it like I did. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

‘Who?’

But Jacob refused to elaborate. He leaned over a desk drawer, searching for something.

Josie looked at the other items piled on his desk amongst the books and papers. A divination mirror, several porcelain statues of a lady with a hare’s head atop a graceful, long neck, breasts bared and covered in vines, leaves and fern motifs. A statuette of Baphomet, a scattering of clay models that were phallic symbols. Mandrake roots in labelled jars. More poppets, these seemingly made of wax. One of the dolls caught her eye. Josie picked it up.

Although it was faceless, she could see who it was meant to represent. The miniature biker helmet in the poppet’s hand, the black jacket, the tiny carpenter’s chisel in the other. Two small coils of wood shavings, glued to his front.

That’s my dad, she realised, shocked.

The poppet was bound tightly with layers of black sheep’s wool, wrapped round and around the doll as if it were a spindle.

Why did Old Jacob have this?

Was it to help, or hinder? The two men had never gotten along, their dislike of each other the stuff of local lore.

Josie held the poppet up to Old Jacob for an explanation.

‘What did you argue with my father about?’ she asked, as casually as she could, as if the answer didn’t matter much to her either way. ‘I never could get it out of Dad.’

Jacob continued to rummage, avoiding her gaze.

‘Hang on,’ he said, distracted. ‘One thing at a time, would you? I’ve got something here you’ll find useful, I just need to . . .’

Josie put the poppet down. She was growing tired of all the mysteries piling on top of each other. Her skin was so agitated that she felt faint. The dust Old Jacob was stirring up during his search swirled visibly in the air, attacking the back of Josie’s throat.

‘Can I use your bathroom?’ she asked politely.

Old Jacob chuckled. ‘I can’t promise it’s very clean. Upstairs and on the left.’

Josie left him to search, desperate to be alone for a moment so she could recalibrate.

Tiptoeing over and around yet more teetering piles of newspapers, journals and pamphlets – papery death traps waiting to wrong-foot intruders – she mounted the stairs. The first door on the landing was open and she glanced in. The bed inside was a big old four-poster with twisted mahogany columns holding aloft an ornate wooden tester panel, from which desiccated velvet drapes hung, moth-eaten and ragged. The mattress and coverlet were lost beneath mountains of junk, like most parts of Jacob’s house. Josie wondered where the old man slept. She doubted it was in anything as conventional as a bed.

Then something beyond the bed caught her attention.

Although she knew she shouldn’t snoop, the ants made her bold. They nudged her into the bedroom and over to the far wall, where she found a large wooden cabinet standing on spindly legs. It struck her as ominous, yet important. Josie felt her body calm momentarily as she stood before it. It looked like an old apothecary cabinet. Victorian, or perhaps older. Two beautiful panelled oak doors opened wide to reveal dozens of tiny drawers inside, each one meticulously labelled with ivory plaques, the names of each substance, herb, chemical and solution singed into the yellowing bone with enormous care and precision. Above the drawers were filigree alcoves. Rows of old glass bottles were lined up within, contents visible inside through the clear glass, tops sealed with wax cloth and string, others plugged with glass or cut crystal stoppers. The labels were easy enough to read, for they’d been written in a neat, old-fashioned hand.

Josie read through the ingredients. Powdered rhubarb. Camphorated spirit. Oil of almonds. Opodeldoc. Cinnamon. Willow bark. Nettle herb. She felt like she was back in the King’s Arms, sorting through Angela’s bottles on the windowsill. Why were people in the countryside so obsessed with herbal remedies? The potions in this cabinet must have been bottled hundreds of years ago, given the age of the labels, the staining of the glass. Josie wondered how much the antique collection was worth. Thousands, probably. Jacob had stuff like this lying all over his house, valuables he could make a fortune off, if he sent them to auction. He could easily make enough to fix his roof, just by selling this cabinet.

Josie kept reading, fascinated by the contents. Medicine in the old days was as dangerous as the malady, by sounds of it. Liquorice. Turpentine. Cream of tartar. Bicarbonate of soda. Epsom salts. Linseed oil. Tartaric acid. Laudanum. Stomachic powder. Paregoric elixir. Juniper berries. Saltpetre. Carbolic oil. Borax. How anyone survived getting sick back then was beyond her. Magnesium sulphate. Enemas. Senna. Arrowroot.

Pufferfish toxin.

Hemlock.

Curare.

Josie went ice-cold, from head to toe.

She gazed at the three small bottles, the glass of which was a deep blue, different to the rest. Blue, for poison. Unsure, she reached out, expecting the itch to start up again as she brushed one of the bottles lightly with her fingers. Nothing. They looked empty, on closer inspection.

She shook her head, unused to the silence in her skull. The quiet was unnerving, after the constant activity she’d been incubating since finding Laurel’s body.

Should she take the bottles? Give them to Wilkes?

No. It would only cause more trouble. Jacob was a good man, everyone knew that.

Josie remembered Mrs Howell, sobbing into a sodden tissue.

Unsure of herself, she turned to survey the rest of the room.

And saw a terrarium.

On the opposite side of the bedroom to where she stood, the giant glass case stretched wall to wall, floor to ceiling, built around the doorframe. Josie could see, in cross-section, layers of dirt, tunnels, cavities and pits, and, scrambling about within: a massive ant colony, encased.

A tiny snickering ripple ran through her guts. At the same time, the thin, buzzing whine returned to her ears, the sibilant noise akin to a movement of tiny bows scraping across wire strings.

There you are, she thought.

She took a step towards the terrarium. There were thousands of tiny, amber-coloured insects behind the glass. Millions, maybe. A huge colony, a demented mass, all of them working in kinetic, manic unison, trying to match her movements, she saw. They were desperate to get to her.

‘What the fuck,’ she breathed, aghast.

She took a step to the left. The ants surged together, following her. She took a step to the right, feeling hysteria tickle at the edges of her headache. The ants swerved, rushing in the opposite direction, again, to copy her motion.

She jumped up and down, once, on the spot.

The ants leapt with her, in a frenetic, bizarre imitation, landing in a pooled mess, whereupon they dispersed, reorganised, and threw themselves at the glass again.

Josie felt herself take a step towards them. They called to her.

Inside, the whine intensified as her own private colony began screaming. She found herself in agony, being pulled from both outside and in, dragged towards a communion she didn’t want.

And then she was suddenly sprawled against the terrarium, arms stretched wide, cheek pressed against the casing, and her fist was pounding the glass, over and over, as a million tiny, twitching, screeching, uncontrollable urges collided inside of her to form a great outpouring of fear, and anger, and frustration. Josie pounded and pounded until the glass of the terrarium cracked. She kept beating at the splintering case until she punched through the glass entirely, with a great, wild roar, and the contents of it burst outwards, showering her in an explosion of red ants, gravel, larvae, sand, and soil that knocked her to the floor.

Panting, gagging, she thrashed and flipped herself over. On her knees, now, coated in well-tilled earth, cramming handfuls of ants into her mouth, fist after fist after fist, feeling their tiny, biting bodies smash under her teeth, feeling their juices squirt into her mouth, swallowing them down, even though it burned, Josie ate like a starving woman, and kept eating, because there was room inside of her still, despite everything. There was room for more. Intrusive thoughts rose, wild, frightening, tightly knitted together like living ant structures themselves, insectile pincers stabbing directly at her brain, so she began to wish she’d never questioned the silence, because what followed in its wake was so, so much worse.

Kill, the thoughts screeched, insistently.

Kill.

Kill.

‘Who?’ Josie sobbed, as she continued mashing handfuls of ants into her mouth. Her headache was so intense she could no longer see. There was only blackness, punctuated with the indelible white outlines of tiny wriggling worms, as if she’d not scraped them away on her walk to Laurel’s house.

Kill, the thoughts replied, unhelpfully.

Kill him.

Chapter 27

When she returned to some semblance of reality, Josie was still on her knees in Old Jacob’s bedroom. The terrarium was whole again, the glass unbroken, the contents firmly layered behind the casing. The red ants in the terrarium bumbled along busily, just ants in a colony, going about their business. Utterly disinterested in her.

Josie looked at her hands. They were empty.

But I can still taste them, she thought, confused, lost.

‘I found it,’ a voice said, from the doorway. ‘What are you doing down there?’

Desolate, Josie blinked the last of the worm shadows from her vision, spat the last of the phantom ants out from behind her teeth.

‘I think there’s something wrong with me,’ she whispered miserably.

‘Oh, no doubt,’ Old Jacob said, limping into the room and holding out a hand to help Josie up. ‘But then, there’s something wrong with most of us, don’t you think?’

He handed her a rolled-up cylinder of paper, held in place with a piece of straw binding. ‘Take this,’ he said, hauling on Josie’s arm until she was on her feet, wobbly, but able to stand again. Her headache had subsided to a dull thudding sensation that circled around her scar.

‘What is it?’

‘You’ll see,’ the old man said, steering her out of the bedroom and back towards the staircase. ‘Take it home with you. Time is getting along. It’ll be dark, soon enough. Best be off.’

Josie nodded. Her dad was making dinner. Being late for such a rare event was not an option, no matter how shaken she was.

Josie paused before stumbling back down the stairs. It seemed impossible that Jacob managed to get himself up and down them every day without breaking his neck. She found herself suddenly concerned for the old man, living alone in a house that could have easily been a museum. If he fell, nobody would notice, not for days.

‘I used to be afraid of you, when I was a kid,’ she said, unsure why she felt the need to share this piece of information.

‘You wouldn’t be the first.’

‘I’m seeing things, Jacob.’ Josie felt the acute pain of repressed tears adding to the soreness around Lena’s scar. ‘I see things that shouldn’t be there.’

Old Jacob tapped the side of his nose thoughtfully.

‘Or perhaps,’ he said, cryptic as ever, ‘you’re finally seeing what is actually there.’

When Josie made her way outside, leaving Jacob behind in his house of curiosities, gazing at her through a gap in his lopsided French blinds to make sure she was really on her way, she found it was snowing.

Chapter 28

Josie knew something was wrong the second she reached her front door, cold, weary, and sore all over. On the step outside, a pair of trainers rested on pegs, upside down to keep the rain off.

They were not her dad’s size. They also looked expensive. The treads were hardly worn down at all.

Josie’s heart sank like a stone.

She pushed open the door as quietly as she could, feeling her pulse pound loudly in her ears. The pain around her scar gathered and resettled in the space between her eyes, a tight, horrible tension, a preamble to more tears. Josie was sick of crying, or feeling as if she needed to.

The ants stirred angrily, a call and response to the sudden sense that she was under threat. Was that perfume she could smell?

Yes. She knew it well.

Voices travelled softly down the small staircase leading from the apartment entry door up to the kitchen. Two people, deep in amicable conversation.

Cutlery scraped on plates, glasses chinked.

Josie climbed up towards the unseen pair as if in a dream, still clutching the rolled cylinder Old Jacob had given her, snowflakes melting on her shoulders and sleeves. Hard to tell if she was floating or walking; she only felt herself rising up towards danger, while everything inside her screamed, No! Not safe! She doesn’t love you, remember?

You’re nothing without me. Are you a good girl, Josie?

Josie entered the split-level apartment and came face to face with her father, who was pouring wine into a couple of tumblers with an affability afforded to very few individuals, including Josie herself.

‘Hello, sweetheart,’ he said, pouring Beaujolais.

A place, Josie saw, had been laid at the tiny dining table for her, next to two placemats that Josie didn’t even know they had. No television lap dinners tonight. Her father had gone all out, for the first time in . . . well, ever.

‘We’ve got company.’

Standing next to her father – as comfortably as if nothing bad had ever happened and there was not, in fact, a restraining order requiring her to keep a minimum of fifty metres away at all times – looking more gorgeous than ever and wearing a wide, predatory smile on her face, was Lena.

‘Hello, Josie,’ she said softly.

Josie couldn’t reply. She stood, dumb, unresponsive, her entire body rigid with fear.

The past year had been kinder to Lena than it had to Josie, that much was obvious. She was startlingly beautiful – devastatingly so. Her large eyes seemed to hold all the light in the apartment, her skin glowed, her hair was thick and smooth. Josie could smell her perfume, stronger now. She’d always loved that smell, until they broke up. It had lingered on her possessions for months, long after she’d moved out, no matter how many times she ran her clothes through the wash. Lena was clever like that; she’d probably sprayed Josie’s belongings deliberately, soaking them in Dior, knowing it would haunt her when her physical presence no longer could.

She looked more robust than the last time they’d met, as if she’d been hitting the gym a lot. It suited her. There was a hint of sadness in her smile, sadness that Josie could immediately tell was of the manufactured variety. Of course, Lena could weaponise any emotion, always had been able to. For a split second, memories of all the good times came flooding back to her in a hot, perfumed wave: all the sex and the intimacy and the exploration, all the nights spent rolling around in bed and on the couch and on the floor and sometimes on the kitchen counters; the intoxication of having Lena, the thrill of having been had by her; the late nights in the city, the walks along the Thames, holding hands in the back of taxi cabs, the long looks at each other over the tops of steaming coffee cups; the private jokes, the weekends away, the mundane shit like folding laundry together, cleaning the apartment, ordering takeaways, the TV shows they’d loved, the books they’d discussed . . .

Josie shook her head, deliberately breaking the thought spiral.

‘No,’ she said, quietly and firmly, more firmly than she felt.

The ants rattled in her throat, lending her voice strength, so she repeated herself.

‘No.’

‘But your dad invited me,’ Lena said, in an imitation of a wounded voice.

‘You can’t be here.’ Josie took a step back.

Josie’s father set the wine bottle on the table.

‘I thought you two should talk,’ he said, and Josie could not believe the words coming out of his mouth. ‘I was never happy with how it all played out. I always assumed there had been a big mix-up.’

Josie stared at him, feeling as if the floor were falling away beneath her feet. How could he think that, when he’d seen her in the hospital? When he’d waited for her to wake up from a coma? When he’d supported her through the restraining order process, giving her statement to the police, helping her move out of London and back to the Forest?

What had he done?

Lena opened her arms. ‘Come here,’ she said, and a terrified Josie almost did, but she caught herself at the last moment, or maybe the colony caught her, reminding her that her body belonged to them, not Lena, even with the memory of her lover’s tongue slipping between her legs.

‘I’ve missed you so much,’ Lena said. ‘I know how it ended between us. I know I shouldn’t be here. There’s so much I want to say, so many misunderstandings to clear up . . .’

‘Lena’s been telling me all about it,’ Josie’s father added, leaning back against the wall and sipping on his wine. He seemed oblivious to the pain he was putting his daughter through. He seemed, if anything, proud of himself. Like he was making a difference, intervening between the children, sorting out a minor disagreement. ‘How it was all a big mistake, how everything got misinterpreted. She’s really sorry, Josie. When she showed up earlier, begging to be let in so she could tell her side of the story . . . I didn’t know how to say no. And there’s lots you never told me.’

Josie stared from one to the other, back and forth, dumbfounded.

Just when she thought her dad was really making an effort, too.

She was certain that Lena had not simply turned up in Ellwood out of the blue. Dad’s offer to make dinner, so unexpected, so strange yet welcome, could now be seen for what it was: a ploy, a prearranged tactic cooked up between her ex and her father.

And for what?

So the pair of them could rewrite history?

‘If you didn’t want me living here anymore,’ Josie said bitterly, no longer bothering to fight the tears, ‘you should have just said.’

‘Now, come on,’ her father responded, but Josie didn’t need to hear any more. She had never felt so betrayed.

She turned smartly on her heel, clattered back down the stairs, and left the apartment. It was fully dark now, but the snow added a reflective glow that meant she could find her way more easily than she otherwise might.

Josie had only one place left to go. She jogged the whole way, convinced the pair would be chasing her. She only stopped when her stomach cramped violently on the other side of the cut-through.

Moaning, Josie clutched her belly and bent over double. She heaved, retched, and vomited up a writhing mass of maggots. Staring down at the thrashing, steaming mess on the earth between her feet, she noticed other things amongst the half-digested vegetables and rice that had been last night’s dinner – thin, white, squirming insects that resembled worms but were much longer, with dozens of legs attached to the segmented bodies. There were ants, too, of course, and a spider, legs braced tightly about itself. As she watched, snowflakes drifting down gently around her, chest heaving, spit dribbling freely from her lower lip, the spider unfurled each leg and staggered out of the stinking puddle, crawling off across the melted snow and into the woods. One of the white centipedes uncoiled itself and followed suit.

Josie couldn’t take anymore. She went back to the one place, the one person she felt she could rely on.

She ran back to Angela.

Chapter 29

‘He did what?’

Angela’s outrage was validating. Josie had begun to doubt herself as she’d neared the pub. By the time she’d pushed through the throng of locals leaning against the bar and fallen, snot and tears plastered all over her face, into the landlord’s arms, she assumed she’d be accused of overreacting. She had begun to question whether the incident with the brick had happened the way she’d remembered. Head injuries were tricky, she’d been told, her memory might not be the most reliable. It had been unreliable even before the brick had made a dent in her forehead. Since her mother died, recollections of her youth were patchy, lacking in colour or detail. She was always getting into trouble for misplacing things, or getting lost, or not paying full attention, or forgetting people’s names. Lena had deemed her flighty, or, on unkinder days, a dimwit. You’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on was a favourite gripe.

Was it possible that Josie had gotten it wrong? That perhaps the brick had been accidental, or . . . or . . .

But Angela’s face told her quite the opposite.

‘The fucking gall!’ the older woman said, using a thumb to wipe tears off Josie’s cheeks. This simple act of kindness almost sent Josie into a fresh weeping fit.

She let Angela pat her face completely dry with the sleeve of her cardigan, staring up into her eyes the whole time. Their proximity and the tenderness passing between them suddenly felt charged. Josie shuddered.

‘He knew about the restraining order. The attack. He was with me in the hospital. I can’t understand why he did it. He said . . . he said it was all a misunderstanding.’

Angela’s face was red with anger. She rolled up her cardigan sleeves, one of them now soggy, exposing tattoos on both her forearms – Celtic knots, with a green man motif nestled among the looping lines on the left arm.

‘I swear, that man gets worse with each passing year! That’s what happens when you spend too long on your own, you get bitter, and—’

The pub door swung open. A tall shadow filled the doorway.

The locals turned, peering over their shoulder at the stranger letting all the cold in.

‘Shut the bloody door then!’ someone cried.

‘In or out, make your mind up!’

‘Yeah, piss or get off the pot!’

The figure moved through, letting the heavy oak door swing shut behind her. Josie glimpsed snow briefly flurrying around the single working streetlamp outside.

Lena.

She’d followed Josie to the pub.

That, or Josie’s dad had told her where his daughter would be.

Angela took one look at Josie’s terrified face and bristled.

‘Out!’ the landlord roared at the stranger, one finger pointing the way like a signpost. ‘There’s an order out against you! You’re not allowed within miles of her, and you know it!’

Fifty metres, Josie thought, but said nothing. She was just happy there was a bar and a wall of human bodies between her and her ex.

Lena didn’t comply. She stood facing the bar, that odd, wounded expression back on her face.

‘Look,’ she said, holding up both hands in a gesture of surrender. No weapons, see? I’m unarmed.

Except Lena was always armed. She might look innocent, and Josie could see the effect she was having on the assembled locals, who all sat a little straighter on their barstools, assessing this stranger with model looks from out of town with great interest, but they didn’t know that Lena had an uncanny ability to turn any object, statement or happenstance, no matter how ordinary, into a weapon.

Josie had never had much interest in living that way.

Or in winning at life.

She just craved peace.

It was becoming apparent that this request was not realistic, so long as she stayed in Ellwood.

‘I just want to talk to her, that’s all.’

It wasn’t in Lena’s nature to back down, even when confronted with the force of nature in a cardigan that was Angela. Seeing this, the landlord moved to put Josie firmly behind her, out of the firing line. Finn the dog, hearing the anger in his mistress’s voice, heaved himself up from his fireside cushion, growling, and adopted a defensive stance – hackles up, legs straight, head down low.

Lena looked at the animal with a slight curl in her lip.

The landlord of the King’s Arms pub folded her arms and stared Lena down.

‘You had your chance,’ Angela said, matter of fact. ‘You threw a brick at her head and put her in a coma, remember?’

‘She threw a brick at our Josie?’ one of the locals exclaimed, snorting over his ale. ‘What’s the matter, couldn’t you find a man good enough to throw a brick at?’

The man in the neighbouring barstool slapped him upside the head. ‘Don’t be a prick,’ he said, sipping his beer. ‘You can’t say stuff like that, not in this day and age. You’re being . . . What’s the word? . . . Homophobic.’

‘Can you be homophobic towards women?’ the first man slurred.

Angela shot the pair a filthy look. ‘Of course you fucking can, you ignorant pigs,’ she snapped, and the men instantly bowed their heads over their pint glasses, mouths pressing shut. Nobody liked being told off by the only landlord in town. The threat of a ban was too serious, especially as the next pub was a good thirty-minute walk away. ‘Now shut up before I put you both out in the cold too.’

The men did as commanded.

‘As for you . . .’ Angela’s attention returned to Josie’s ex. ‘Out. You’re banned.’

‘Please,’ Lena persisted, calm, patient, as if she had every right to be there. ‘I just want to talk, that’s all. I never got a chance to explain, Josie. Everything happened so fast, and . . . you have no idea how hard things have been, since you left. How my life has changed. It’s hardly been a party. The things people say about me . . . I lost my job, I—’

Angela snatched a phone handset from where it was mounted on the wall behind the bar. ‘You’ve got thirty seconds before I call the police.’

‘I just want to say—’

‘How about you start with “I’m sorry”? Seems Josie is owed an apology or two.’

Hate glittered in Lena’s eyes. ‘I mean, of course I’m sorry, I never meant to—’

‘Twenty seconds.’

‘Listen, this has all been blown massively out of proportion, I—’

‘Fifteen.’

Lena was getting rattled, Josie could tell. It was not often people refused to fall for her charms.

‘There’s really no need for so much hostility, I—’

‘Ten.’

‘Can you stop fucking counting, please?’

‘Five.’

‘For fuck’s sake! Josie, listen, I—’

Angela whistled one short, sharp tone.

Finn’s growl intensified, in both pitch and force.

The massive hound took another step across the pub floor, hackles up, teeth bared.

‘Out,’ Angela said, implacable. The pub grew deathly silent.

Lena stared at the dog and backed up. Lowered her hands.

‘Fine,’ she said, lifting her chin high, as if leaving was her own idea. ‘But you’re making a big mistake. Both of you.’ Her voice was laden with threat.

There it is. There’s the real Lena.

Josie knew that tone far too well. It meant unfinished business. It meant Lena doubling down on her intentions. She had things to say, and she was going to make sure Josie heard them whether she liked it or not, restraining order be damned.

Finn kept coming. His growls got louder.

Lena shot one last, long look at Josie, then exited the pub silently.

‘Good boy,’ Angela crooned, as the door slammed shut. She threw Finn a biscuit.

Josie let out a shaky breath. Lena was gone.

For now.

The next day, Lena sent flowers to the pub, where Josie had spent the night on Angela’s insistence.

Josie threw them in the bin.

Chapter 30

A deep sadness followed. Josie had thought she was over her heartbreak, but seeing Lena in the flesh reopened old wounds that never healed. This, with all the other things she’d seen – masks, ants, corpses, cabinets filled with poison, biro sketches, slashed tree bark – had Josie sinking into a pit of chaotic rumination, where obsessive thoughts and feelings warred for attention in her head every passing moment, but nothing coherent ever really made it through.

Angela tried to distract Josie from her unhappiness by roping her into decorating the King’s Arms in preparation for Christmas.

‘A bit early,’ she said, dumping a basket full of tinsel and baubles on the bar one morning while Josie sipped her usual flat white. ‘The locals will probably crucify me, but let them. It’s still snowing, and I think we could use a bit of festive cheer around here, don’t you?’

The women worked for hours, making garlands from holly, ivy, and spruce, threading strings of dried fruit slices and cinnamon sticks, folding and hanging dozens of paper stars from the ceiling, arranging boughs of larch and pine and fir along each wooden beam, untangling yards of fairy lights, making space for the Christmas tree, sorting baubles, snaking tinsel around the beer pump handles, hanging bunches of mistletoe, and arranging poinsettias in pots on every table in the pub. When it was done, they lit the log burner and had a quiet drink before opening up for the evening, savouring the quietness and the simple beauty of twinkling lights, glittering baubles, bright berries and deep green foliage. It was like bringing the forest inside, without the mud and the mess.

Or the dead bodies, Josie thought, unable to help herself.

Itch, itch.

‘Feeling better?’ Angela asked kindly.

Though unused to displays of affection and generosity, Josie forced herself to reply.

‘I am,’ she said, and in a way, she was. It felt good to be taking part in an activity that was homely and mundane for a change. Something with no great consequence attached to it beyond promoting seasonal cheer. There was something about the way Angela sang to herself while they hooked baubles on to sprigs of fir arranged above the log burner that reminded Josie of her mother. Mum had always gone all out for Christmas. Her father had not been anywhere near as bothered after she died.

There was that one Christmas, though, remember?

Josie did. It made her better disposed towards Dad than when he did heinous things like inviting a woman who had tried to kill his daughter for a cosy sit-down dinner in her apartment.

‘You’re a bad liar, Josie,’ Angela replied, winking and patting her on the knee. The landlord’s fingers lingered a moment longer than they’d ever done before, but Josie didn’t mind.

The snow, which had come early that year, melted during a warmer snap where it rained for several days, non-stop. Josie used that time to sequester herself in one of the guest bedrooms, which Angela said was hers for as long as she needed it.

She didn’t move much from her bed during those days, wrapping herself in a thick duvet and poring over Laurel’s sketchbook and the cylinder Old Jacob had given her, which turned out to be a map. When Josie finally had time to unfurl it, holding down the edges with books so it didn’t spring back into place, she gasped. It wasn’t just a map. It was a history of six unsolved crimes, meticulously plotted.

Clearly, Old Jacob had been working on this macabre puzzle for years. The large and very detailed Ordnance Survey map of the Forest of Dean featured dozens of annotations in his neat handwriting, marking each site of interest with details pertaining to the dead girls.

First, Jacob had noted via a series of bright red triangles the precise locations where the bodies had been found over the years. Six in total. And he’d named them all, so Josie had a list, which she copied down into a separate notebook to keep them better organised in her head: Jane Doe One, Jane Doe Two, Alison Wright, Jane Bowl, Lucy McRobert, Daniella Penney. Laurel Howell made seven. Josie added that name to the map herself.

Old Jacob had written the ages of each woman too, next to their names. The oldest victim, Daniella Penney, was twenty-seven when she died. Josie had an uneasy feeling she’d probably been to school with one, if not several of these girls, but she would have to go and dig out her old class photographs to be sure. There were a few primary schools in the surrounding villages, but some events – like carol services at the church in Sling – drew together every school-age child in the area to boost the size of the choir. Josie was still trying to get her head around the fact that she’d met Laurel at a Devil’s March. Played with her. Been photographed with her, maybe. It was all too weird, too close. Josie didn’t want to be another piece in that particular puzzle, tessellated with the others. She could all too easily imagine an eighth triangle on the map with her name above it.

Next, Jacob had circled several locations where tourists tended to congregate. Puzzlewood. Clearwell Caves. Symonds Yat Rock. Point Quarry viewpoint. Coppett Hill. Mallards Pike. Eagle’s Nest viewpoint. Nagshead Nature Reserve. The Devil’s Pulpit. She didn’t know why the old man had highlighted them, but they were all places Josie had visited as a kid, either on rare family days out, or, more commonly, alone with her mother when she’d been alive. Nagshead Nature Reserve in particular had a lot of good memories attached to it. In the spring, the woodland there was carpeted with bluebells. Her mother had made that an annual pilgrimage.

From the last location, the Devil’s Pulpit, Old Jacob had highlighted the route of the Devil’s March. The Pulpit was the end point, from whence the queen was flung in a symbolic gesture meant to appease the Devil. In order to reach that point, the villagers of Ellwood followed an ancient, unvarying route that took three to four hours, depending how fast or slow a person walked. Their starting point was the King’s Arms, where they would gather to consume pies, beer and hot chocolate to traditional music. After the opening ceremony, the marchers would proceed through the Knoll, then follow the main roads from Sling, through Trow Green, skirting around the edge of St Briavels, then across Hewelsfield Common to rejoin the road on the other side. The march route then circled around the back of Beeches Farm Campsite, threaded through Lippets Grove Nature Reserve, and continued along a portion of the Offa’s Dyke path to its final destination, the natural stone pulpit overlooking the Wye Valley and the winding River Wye, with the ruins of Tintern Abbey directly below.

Josie looked at the route, marked in green, and then studied the locations of the bodies. They were arranged, she realised, in a pattern that resembled a large wave spreading from the original disturbance of the route of the March. Like a snake gliding across a pond, spreading ripples. It also roughly resembled the shape made by Sheela-na-gig when she was holding herself open.

Or maybe Josie was reading too much into it.

But Laurel had been found the day after the March – left in a spot the procession actually passed through. Was that significant?

And what about Emmet? And the ants?

Josie didn’t know if she was joining dots or making a mess.

The fact that Old Jacob was so interested in the deaths put Josie in a terrible quandary, too, one she needed time and space to work through before she went to DC Wilkes. If she went to Wilkes.

On the one hand, the old man had this map, and had taken an unusual level of care in documenting the murder victims – for that, Josie reminded herself, was what they all were. Murdered and dumped. Left like calling cards– but only when the killer deemed the time was right. Until then, the bodies were stored. And, assuming the others had been treated the same way as Laurel, moved to a number of locations within the Forest before their eventual discovery, although Jacob couldn’t have known that.

Regardless, it signalled a deep interest in the deaths on Old Jacob’s part that a suspicious person like Wilkes might think unnatural.

Then there was the fact that the old man had an antique medicine cabinet stocked with the very poisons identified in Laurel Howell’s toxicology report.

Bringing Jacob’s apothecary cabinet and map to the attention of Wilkes, however, came with risks. Old Jacob could be innocent of nothing more than curiosity and coincidence. He was ninety-something years old, arthritic, thin, and could only walk with the aid of a stick. And then there was the fact Laurel had had sex with someone shortly before she died. Forensic tests had found soil from a number of locations on her remains; Josie doubted Old Jacob had the strength to hump a body around, much less throw it off something. Not that his obvious frailty would cut any ice with Wilkes. Nor would it matter that he wasn’t trying to hide anything. He had given Josie the map, and his knowledge, freely. He didn’t deserve to be dragged through the fire.

Still undecided what to do about Old Jacob, Josie set aside the map and went back to Laurel’s notebooks. It was clear that the hallucinations she’d suffered followed the same theme as Josie’s: ants and worms and other crawling things. The deranged sketches turned her stomach, but she ploughed on, forcing herself to pore over every page, scrutinising the minutest detail in the hope of finding some clue to the mysterious event that had befallen Laurel around the time of her sixteenth birthday. But as she pondered what could have made Laurel fall apart, blow up her life so completely, Josie was aware that she too was withdrawing, hiding from the outside world, hiding from the pain of seeing Lena again, and the feelings her arrival in Ellwood had stirred up.

She’d half-expected her dad to call or text her, to apologise, to check in on her, but her phone remained silent on the bed next to her. After a while, she couldn’t bear glancing over at the black screen, waiting for a notification to come in, so she put it in Airplane Mode and hid it in a drawer. Her dad knew she was here. If he wanted to talk, he could come find her.

He wouldn’t though; her father had never been one for apologies. Angela said he was stubborn, but Josie wasn’t so sure. She thought it was easier for him to believe his own innocence than to admit to any wrongdoing. She wasn’t sure he even understood that what he’d done was in any way wrong.

At some point, she would have to have it out with her father. At some point, she might have to face her ex, too, might have to stand up for herself, might have to assert some boundaries, maybe even call the police on her. But right now, she didn’t have the energy. While playing detective from the safety of a well-made bed wasn’t a long-term solution to her unhappiness, it at least made her feel as if she was doing something to make a difference. To right some wrongs.

What she found in the dead girl’s sketchbook were endless repetitions of the same things. Insects. Worms. And the masked figure, depicted in a progressively bizarre series of poses. In one sketch he was leaning towards the base of a tree, ants flowing from beneath his cloak, watering the roots like water from a spout. In another, he was running after a naked woman, who ran screaming into the mouth of a cave. On the next page he was embracing a sculpture that resembled the straw queen.

The final sketches were hastily scrawled, lacking the meticulous detail Laurel had previously favoured; the paper was splattered with coffee stains and ink blots. These sketches featured a hooded figure floating in mid-air above a path that wound through trees. Its head was thrown back, the peculiar red-black mask still covering the face, both arms raised as if to summon something momentous into being.

Behind the figure, its form scrappily depicted in a blur of red and black biro, a woodpecker beat its head against the trunk of an oak.

The path seemed oddly familiar, the way the narrow trail went through the trees, the bench scrawled off to one side, the bank of bracken leaning in on the left. There could be a dozen places like that in the Forest of Dean, but Laurel had added a waymark post to this drawing, sticking out of the pen-hatched ground not far from the oak tree. It had words on it, words that looked as if they had come from memory, if only because they were too plain and prosaic to have come from anywhere else:

Short trail

←

Long trail

→

Car park 680m

↑

Underneath those three lines, a small acorn, carved into the wooden sign.

Seeing the carpenter’s mark made Josie reach for her phone again. She turned off Airplane Mode. Nothing.

Sometimes her father was hired by the Forestry Commission to make waymarks like the one in Laurel’s sketch, for placing alongside popular footpaths. He was always happy when these jobs came in, because they paid decently enough, and kept him busy for several weeks. He charged extra for installation, which the Commission let him do. Nobody knew the Forest better than Dad, aside, perhaps, from Josie’s mother.

Where was this particular sign? Josie tried desperately to remember if her father had ever mentioned a specific location she could tie the sketch to, but the harder she concentrated, the more her brain skidded away from the topic, as if something inside her memory didn’t want to cooperate. This frustrated Josie, who felt, finally, as if she was on to something tangible and significant, a trail she could follow.

But try as she might, she couldn’t dredge any place names from her memory.

Her phone buzzing on the bed beside her eventually snagged her attention.

It was an unknown number. Not her dad.

Of course it isn’t him, she thought bitterly.

Josie answered it and found herself on a call with Mrs Howell.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Laurel’s mother said. ‘I got your number from Detective Wilkes.’

‘I don’t mind, Janet,’ Josie replied, knowing why the woman was calling.

‘Did you take the notebook?’ Mrs Howell didn’t bother with any further pleasantries. ‘Laurel’s notebook. There’s one missing from her desk.’

Josie sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll bring it back.’

‘See that you do,’ Janet Howell replied coldly. ‘You can push it through the letterbox. I won’t say anything more about it. But don’t come here again, ever. Understand?’

‘Yes.’

The call clicked off, leaving Josie sick and disheartened.

When she looked down at the sketch again, the little acorn she thought she’d seen on the bottom of the waymark had gone. She brought the book up close to her face, double checking. Her vision wasn’t the most reliable thing, these days, especially when worm-thickened.

No acorn.

She’d imagined it.

Christ, Josie, way to project.

The location of the sketch still looked familiar to her, though. Like a place she’d walked past, or through. In a region as insular as the Forest of Dean, where the many beauty spots were regular haunts of locals, the fact that Laurel and Josie had walked the same trail, passed the same waymark post at some point, was only to be expected. Especially given the number of walks Josie had taken with her mother.

A rising tide of movement in Josie’s belly signalled the unwelcome awakening of the colony. It was almost a relief. They’d been quieter, of late.

Too quiet.

Why now? she wondered, flipping the notebook shut. What strange compulsion did they need to fulfil all of a sudden?

The ants calmed, as if listening to her thoughts. Josie, exhausted, rolled up the map. Threw her phone across the room.

Lay back on the bed, listening to raindrops drumming on the windowpane.

When sleep came, it was not restful. Josie dreamed of flowers with long purple stems, delicate leaves threaded with veins, clusters of white blooms opening slowly, as if answering the call of spring, or awakening to sun . . .

But instead of basking in the glow, each blossom, as it unfurled, was screaming.

The flowers then disintegrated, collapsing into a whirlpool of ants and other tiny creatures. They swirled on the spot for a long, long time before forming a trail, a living column, the head of which was shaped like a spear, or an arrow, pointing in one direction only.

Josie was powerless to stop herself from following it.

And when she woke from the dream, blue-lipped, shivering, wrapped only in a coat over her T-shirt and knickers, she was no longer at the King’s Arms.

She was outside, in the freezing cold.

It was morning. The rain had stopped, a weak sun was making its way over the horizon. She was kneeling on a freshly re-frozen path, slick with hardened puddles, lined with large oak trees, a long stand of them. The path itself was stone-littered and sandy, the sand grey and fine and glittering with mineral deposits. Further along, two goldfinches sat on a frozen log, pecking a hole through the thin layer of ice that had collected in a hollow.

There was a bench nearby, and a waymark directly before her.

The waymark, Josie saw, blinking, had three lines chiselled into the wood.

Short trail

←

But after the first line, the lettering was unreadable, marred by three, deep jagged scratch marks splintering the wood beneath.

The Devil’s claw marks.

Josie looked at her own hands. They were caked with filth, and raw from tugging at something. She saw she had been scrabbling at an object secured to the base of the waymark, in a patch of ferns and bracken, where the soil was darker, and glossy ropes of ivy tried their best to get between her and the thing she was trying to grab hold of. The ivy stems looked like pronounced veins running up the trunk of the sign.

High above, a woodpecker tapped its beak against a knot in one of the oak trees.

And Josie’s fingers eventually closed around the tied neck of a sodden, bulky hessian sack.

She managed to untie it, though not yet fully awake.

Inside, she saw bones.

Chapter 31

The temperature plummeted further as the morning wore on, falling unusually low for the time of year. A bitter hoar frost covered every part of the Forest, so thick it could have been snow, except this was crunchy, with thorn-like icicles clustered around every twig, branch, blade of grass, leaf. Cold swirls of milky air danced as the sun crept reluctantly higher, staining the upper part of the horizon a deep amber, which paled to gold, then primrose yellow.

Josie leaned against a squad car in the Nagshead Nature Reserve car park and watched the sun with blankets draped around her shoulders, breath curling in the air around her head, nose and lips numb, insides even more numb.

She couldn’t believe it had happened again.

A white tent was being erected in the distance, on the edge of the path through Nagshead, where she’d woken. How, she couldn’t even begin to fathom, which terrified her. Nagshead was over an hour’s walk from the King’s Arms, along Coleford Road, and she must have navigated the route in complete darkness, in the middle of the night, with no memory of having done so.

This wouldn’t go down too well with Wilkes, she was well aware. Any minute now she expected the detective to appear, neck pinched by her signature starched collar, an equally pinched expression on her face as she took in Josie’s presence at yet another crime scene.

What was she going to say in her defence? The truth?

Josie didn’t think the truth would suffice, not when it came to human remains.

The ants stirred in her chest, pressing in on her lungs. Josie drew in a painful breath, to remind herself that she was still alive.

Men in Tyvek suits carefully measured the ground around the base of the waymark where the sack containing human bones had been left. A cordon ran around a large swathe of the oak tree stand, across the public footpath, and into the bracken beyond. Josie gazed at the white tent, at the Tyvek suits beetling around it, and wished she could remember a time before the discovery of not one, but two dead bodies, fly-tipped like rubbish in the woods. How she had felt as a well-meaning woman going about her business without the invasive memories of dead flesh, of greened bone and empty eye sockets penetrating her existence.

A policeman handed Josie a steaming flask cup of coffee. She took it mutely, unable to summon the strength to thank him.

Two more officers gossiped quietly behind her.

‘She’s either psychic or she’s the unluckiest woman alive,’ one of the officers grunted, not appearing to care if Josie heard him or not.

No, she thought, in response. No.

Once is unlucky.

Twice?

Twice felt like something else.

She gripped the warm plastic cup in her hands and felt the deadly cold of winter scold every other exposed part of her. It would be nothing in comparison to the scolding Wilkes would give her when she finally made an appearance.

Josie looked down at her cup. A tiny ant crawled out of her tear duct, dropped from her eye and plopped into her coffee.

She didn’t bother to remove it. Josie drank it down in one large, burning gulp, for that, she assumed, was her lot now.

Part Three

2005

Josie could smell woodsmoke. Rich and appealing, the smell of safety in the winter, of comfort, of warm foods and warm toes after a cold, dreary walk. In the cottage, when her mother had been alive, the fire had always been lit on returning from any winter rambles she and her mum took together. Wet socks would get hung in front of the fire to dry out. Josie would watch them steam while her mother made hot chocolate in the immaculately tidy kitchen, adding cinnamon and nutmeg and marshmallows. The fire was rarely lit these days. Josie’s father said they couldn’t afford the logs, even though that was his trade, his currency. He had enough chunks of oak and pine and beech in his shed to light a thousand fires, but that would be burning money, he always said. Only a fool would burn their livelihood like that.

The smell tickling Josie’s nostrils now came from a thin column of white smoke that rose above the trees just beyond the path she trod. She walked cautiously towards it, reluctant to turn back, hoping she wouldn’t be spotted through the trees in her school uniform, pushing her bike.

The path wound around the edges of Darkhill Ironworks, a collection of nineteenth-century stone and brick structures deep in the forest where men used to experiment with metals, with the making of steel and alloy. Josie knew this because her mother had told her all about it, on one of their many excursions together. Not that you could tell from what remained of the ironworks. Right now, pushing two wheels along the narrow, bumpy path, Josie saw a stepped rise, covered in blackberry bushes, honeysuckle and masses of ivy, through which an old, tumble-down wall would occasionally be glimpsed. Rubble, ruin. Nothing more exciting than that. Not a place where men played with the elements.

Her mother had brought Josie here several times when she was very small, and tried to teach her about the terraced structures, the secret experiments carried out behind the walls, in the bowels of the forest, while the Industrial Revolution raced along elsewhere, changing the course of history, of nature, and of the people caught between the two.

Tungsten steel, her mother had said, as if that should have meant something to her, but Josie had been more enchanted by how the green had grown back over the ruined ironworks.

It looks like a castle, Mummy! Her mother, unimpressed with her contribution, had merely snorted in response.

Do you think fairies live here?

The expression had softened.

Yes, darling, came the reply. I rather think they do.

Not long after, Josie’s mother stopped bringing her. She’d been too sick to take Josie anywhere. Her eyes sank into her face, her soft, pink cheeks hollowed out and turned white. She vomited repeatedly. The local doctor, when he was finally called, was baffled. He talked of blood tests and scans, but nothing ever came of it. No cancer, no medical reason for the decline.

Josie loved her mother but had found the smell of sickness difficult to be around. The illness was confusing to a child who didn’t understand how it could change a person so completely in such a short space of time.

And then, one day, her mum was gone entirely. No lingering presence in the bedroom. No smell, no vomit sounds, no groans of pain or people coming in and speaking in hushed voices. There was a complete lack of anything associated with Josie’s mother.

She still found that absence difficult to cope with. It was like leaving a conversation partway through, expecting to return to it, pick up right where she’d left off, only to find she couldn’t – unless it was in her own imagination, and that was too painful.

Still, coming to these places made her feel closer to her mother, somehow.

The ruins were even more crowded by foliage now, overgrown despite a valiant attempt to mow the grass along the pathway, to erect fences to keep the trees and bracken back. The forest was not interested in staying away; it wanted to reclaim land lost to it hundreds of years before. Saplings sprouted all over the site, much to Josie’s joy; red cedars, oak, plums, willows, even a rare redwood. Black beetles crawled across the path in their dozens before her, too many to completely avoid. The slow ones popped beneath her bike tyres, a noise both satisfying and mildly disgusting.

Sound carried in this strange little pocket of the forest, echoes of Josie’s own footsteps, birds singing a morning song, high up in the branches of the trees, the rattle of dying leaves falling. It was winter, the early days of it. Soon the Devil’s March would wind its way across the land, off to the Devil’s Pulpit.

But first, Josie had feathers to collect. The woods next to the ironworks were famous for woodpeckers and Josie wanted to replenish several balding patches on her mask before the next procession.

And, she wanted to spend some time alone. Not alone like she was in her classroom, alienated from her classmates by grief. Not alone as she so often was in the cottage, listening to the ticking walls and creaky pipes.

Alone in the forest, with trees, with birds.

Josie was disgruntled to find that someone else apparently had the same idea.

She kept pushing towards the narrow plume of smoke, feeling nervous. She should be at school. Her dad would be furious if he found she’d taken her bike and bunked off to collect feathers and leaves.

But what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, she reasoned.

Unless she was seen.

Besides, what did her dad do all day? He never told her. She knew it involved tools and making furniture out of wood or fixing things that were broken, but she didn’t see how that could occupy as many hours in a week as it did. When he wasn’t at the pub, her dad was always off on his motorbike on some job or other, and yet the money wasn’t coming in. Not enough, at any rate, to match the amount of labour he professed to.

This mattered to Josie. It mattered because her father kept badgering her to get a paper round, to bring in some small sums of cash, to ‘pay her way’, as he put it, which hardly seemed a fair thing to ask when he was not upholding his end of the deal.

It also mattered because Josie was painfully aware that she only had one parent now, and she wanted that to actually mean something. Loneliness was not a new state of being, for she’d never found it easy to socialise with other kids even before her mother’s death, but it was worse now than it had ever been. Before, her mother had plugged the gaps in Josie’s solitude, overcompensating for her father’s aloofness and lack of interest in his child.

Now Mum was gone, her father’s discomfort in parenting meant he was finding excuses to be absent for even longer periods of time. He would slam the front door behind him at the crack of dawn, leaving Josie to get herself ready for school, make her own breakfast, walk herself across Ellwood, and he would return just in time for her to fix dinner, which was always something basic, like a ready meal, or baked beans on toast, or an omelette, which Josie would eat by herself while her father took his elsewhere, pottering around in his shed in the cottage garden, before heading out to the pub. Sometimes he didn’t come home until after last orders; other nights, he’d be back by nine, red-faced, eyes unfocused, and then he would collapse on the couch and open a can of beer, having loaded a concerto on the kitchen CD player first.

At first, being avoided by her own father made Josie sad and confused. After a few years, sadness turned to anger and defiance. She didn’t think it was right for a dad to be gone as much as he was.

So Josie bunked off school, feeling too miserable, too aggravated to go in. The pain of rejection sat like a ball of biting, scratching things in her chest. She missed her mother, the other kids in her class were mean to her, and she had little to no interest in learning French or maths or English or anything much at all, not when the sky was so blue, when the leaves burned so bright against it.

Not when her mask needed attention.

That morning, Dad had set off on foot instead of taking his motorbike, which was not like him. Curious, Josie followed him at a distance, pushing her bike through the shadowed parts of the road so the neon colours wouldn’t catch his attention. She’d stalked him along the main street, off down Fern Road to Old Jacob’s house, past the dilapidated Range Rover with its two flat tyres, moss-covered windscreen and mildewed seats.

She watched her dad duck around the giant willow tree in front of Old Jacob’s house and knock on the front door. After a moment, the old man opened it. Tense words were exchanged. Both men looked angry, gesticulating, but whatever the argument was about carried on behind closed doors as Jacob disappeared into the gloom of his house and Josie’s father followed.

Perhaps her dad was there to fix something for the old man, Josie thought. The house looked like it needed a whole lot of fixing.

It didn’t matter. She took the opportunity to scoot past the house as quickly as possible on her bike, into the woods beyond Old Jacob’s driveway, along a left-hand path that skirted past Smith’s Hill, across Marsh Lane, where cars always drove too fast, and back into the woods until they opened out around Darkhill. Around the edge of the ironworks, and then off to the right, into a dense rise of oak and beech trees, some of which had hung on to their leaves but were preparing to drop them.

Josie had never come this far on her own. The nerves started to die down. In their place, she felt the exhilaration of freedom.

She found a tree to rest her bike against, the smell of smoke stronger, but not close enough to be threatening. If someone had made a campfire, it was none of her business, she told herself. The woods were big enough for all of them.

Josie lost herself in foraging, searching the forest floor for woodpecker feathers, pinecones, particularly crispy leaves of yellow and orange and burnt umber. She put everything she gathered into a large paper bag, which slotted into her school rucksack. It felt like a much better use for it than a heavy load of textbooks and things she had no interest in.

Before long, she found herself on a small track that looked like a rabbit trail, barely wide enough to walk along, but enough of a break in the dead leaves and brambles that she could follow it. She walked deeper into the woods, then, suddenly found herself out of the trees again, in a clearing where the forest curved around a natural rise, skirting the edge of a road. Josie could hear the faint sound of cars in the distance. She saw fencing ahead, marking the boundary of someone’s garden: it was so overgrown with blackberry brambles that the fence wasn’t really necessary.

The path narrowed even further here, and Josie’s clothes snagged on the brambles as she fought her way through. She hesitated, wondering if she should turn back to check on her bike before someone came along and stole it, but curiosity made her continue.

The trail widened out again after a while, swooping back into the thick of the forest, away from the road. It was here, after ten minutes of wandering, that Josie found the source of the woodsmoke; suddenly, with no time to react, she emerged into a clearing occupied by a compact wooden shed, its steepled roof covered in wooden shingles and topped with a small iron chimney from which smoke puffed steadily.

The shed was weathered but sturdy, well built, and, it seemed, well maintained. No windows, but a small porch. Along one side of it were storage racks that held tools, chopped wood, and a rusted bicycle that hadn’t been used for many years, judging by the honeysuckle vines covering the bike’s frame, winding in and out of the bent wheel spokes.

Her stomach growled; Josie had skipped breakfast to carry out her act of truancy. Now, smelling the woodsmoke, her brain made a link between fires and marshmallows, baked things, jacket potatoes wrapped in foil and left in a bed of embers to bake, bacon frying over an open flame, eggs sizzling in a cast-iron pan. The hunger was enough to make her realise she should head for cover before someone found her wandering where she shouldn’t be.

The shed was intriguing, however. It looked like something from a fairytale about lost children following trails of breadcrumbs. A gingerbread house, with a hungry witch inside who wanted to suck on her bones. A fire meant someone was probably in there, working on whatever people did in sheds. She couldn’t hear any noises coming from it, but it didn’t make sense to heat the structure unless someone was using it.

Josie tiptoed closer. An insistent voice in her head was urging her on, and it made her bold, it made her want to feel something again, even if it was only the kind of anxiety that came with trespassing where she didn’t belong, so she went right up to the wooden shed door. Above it, Josie saw hand-painted lettering that spelled out Jacob’s Shed.

Josie frowned. Why did the old man have a shed way out here, in the thickets? Then she saw the door was padlocked, with a heavy iron lock. The lock looked familiar. Josie instantly recognised it as a twin to a lock she’d seen many times before: the lock on her dad’s shed, behind the cottage.

She grasped the padlock, rattled it once.

Heard movement on the trail behind her.

‘Josie?’

Josie froze.

Shit! she thought, frantically whipping round.

Her dad stood on the edge of the path, staring at her with a face like thunder. In his hand, a small key dangled. It was clearly intended for the lock on the shed.

‘Why aren’t you in school?’ Josie’s father spat, taking a step forward.

Josie considered her options. Usually, when caught doing something forbidden, she held her hands up, apologised meekly, promised never to do it again.

But something about being outside, in the woods, with her bike within running distance, something about the anger and the frustration and the grief she’d never been able to talk about, something about her loneliness, made her unusually bold. Against her better judgement, she didn’t apologise.

She just shrugged.

‘What do you care?’ she muttered, turning back to the shed and rattling the lock.

‘Get away from there, right now.’ Rustling warned her of her father’s swift approach.

‘What do you keep in here, anyway?’

‘I said, get away!’

Josie continued to ignore him, rattling the door again.

Hands grabbed her shoulders, yanked her back.

‘I know you heard me, girl!’

Josie spun, staring up into a furious pair of bloodshot eyes in a stone-cold mask of wrath that appeared barely human.

And then, whether it was from fear, or contempt, or both, Josie spat, full into her father’s face.

He reared back, exclaiming in disgust. Josie seized the opportunity and ran.

She bolted past the shed, veering in a wide arc that would throw off her father, not the most agile of men, in the hope it would lead her back to the narrow trail that would return her to her bike. After that, she didn’t know what she would do, where she would go.

But it sure as hell wouldn’t be back to the cottage, to wait for her father.

It would take him days to calm down, she knew that from bitter experience.

‘Come here, you little shit!’ she heard him roar as he crashed through the woods behind her.

She glanced back over her shoulder. He was running too, faster than she would have thought possible for a man of his size.

Josie fled before him, in a blind panic now. She followed a rabbit trail that ended, all of a sudden, in a tangle of a honeysuckle. After fighting her way through, she found herself skirting the fence once more.

Almost there, she told herself, pounding as fast as she could along the narrow path. Then, the trail widened out, the trees beckoning. Scared, for she could still hear crashing and swearing echoing through the beech trunks behind her, she looked for her bike. Saw it, bright yellow, pink and neon orange, leaning against the tree where she’d left it. Almost crying with relief, Josie threw herself at the bike, unlocked the front wheel as quickly as she could, fumbling with the combination code on the cable lock, yanked the cable out from between the front spokes, wheeled the bike slightly downhill and leapt on it, only to experience, after a few seconds of frantic pedalling, a blinding, searing pain that exploded across the back of her skull. The force of something hard and sharp knocked her clean off her saddle. Josie tumbled down, face-first, into leaf mulch, her bike crunching beneath her, the sharp edge of the pedals scraping the skin off her shins and ankles. She rolled, tried to stand, found her vision swimming with black spots that looked like a thousand tiny beetles scrambling across her vision. Behind the spots: a large shadow, clutching something lumpish and rock-shaped in its fist. Her tongue felt swollen in her mouth, and she tasted blood. Josie’s knees wobbled and then her legs folded, depositing her face down on the forest floor again.

The last thing she remembered was the sound of feet stepping steadily through the fallen beech leaves, crunch, crunch, cr—

What a fucking mess.

I suppose I’d better clean up.

Do you want to help?

Now you’re here.

I told you to go to fucking school.

I told you not to come in here.

Why must you always disobey me?

Just like your mother.

Chapter 32

2024

Josie didn’t do so well, after the second body was found. A new mind-movie opened in her head. Bones, stripped of flesh, in the twine and straw sack. They had been kept outside, somewhere cool and damp, judging by the greening and clumps of moss on several curved splinters that could have been ribs, or perhaps some other part Josie was not familiar with. Peeking out from the very bottom of the sack, a fragment of a leering skull, only a few teeth remaining on the top row. The bottom jaw was missing altogether.

The sack did not contain a whole body, but enough human remains to determine biological basics that Josie already guessed, before she later learned all the details: a woman, aged between nineteen and twenty-six, Caucasian.

Another triangle for Old Jacob’s map.

Now that she’d found a second corpse, Wilkes wasted no time bringing Josie in for questioning, under the guise of taking her statement ‘properly this time’, as the detective put it.

Those first twenty-four hours after the body was found were hellish. Josie was kept in an interview suite and harassed, gently at first, patiently, then with more and more intent as the clock ticked, until Wilkes reluctantly determined she did not have enough evidence to hold her suspect any longer. Josie, on the brink of collapse, was told not to leave Ellwood, for she remained a person of interest while the remains waited for identification – if such a thing was possible. A forensic anthropologist had been summoned. If they could find some distinguishing feature that could give the bones in the bag an identity, so she would become a woman once again, the next logical step would be to see how Josie was linked to her. They would keep trying until they found a connection, be it relationally, via mutual acquaintance . . . any connection whatsoever, no matter how tenuous. Wilkes made it plain she had Josie in her sights and was not letting go.

She was not subtle about this, either.

When Josie was released, and picked up by Angela in her ancient, barely legal Nissan Altima, Wilkes followed, from an obvious distance, in her own unmarked car. She remained parked up on the kerb outside the King’s Arms for days on end after that, waiting for Josie to leave the pub – which never happened. Josie was too terrified she might stumble across another dead body she never asked for.

Wilkes, it turned out, was not the only one stalking Josie.

Lena had her eyes on the broken target, too.

She had evidently moved in where Josie had moved out – the holiday apartment. Josie was informed that Lena had been spotted coming and going as if everything was perfectly normal. Incredibly, Josie’s father seemed to be fine with that arrangement. He turned up unannounced before opening time more than once, knocking at the front door of the King’s Arms, Lena in tow, trying to force a mediated encounter with Josie during which he would act as referee, forcing them to ‘forget all the nonsense’.

The third time the unwelcome pair arrived at the pub, Angela was ready at the door with Finn and a cricket bat, which she thwacked menacingly into the palm of her open hand – no mean feat, given the size and heft of the thing. This was during a rare window of time in which Wilkes was not parked outside, eating her way through a packet of salted peanuts, seat half-reclined, heating cranked up in the car.

The cricket bat was brandished. Angela let fly a loud torrent of choice words, most of them explicit and downright profane. Lena stood, arms folded, hips tilted so her long legs were accentuated, with an amused expression on her face, while Josie’s father lost his temper entirely. It was like shouting at a large boulder: Angela was not to be moved. Finally Josie’s father gave up yelling and waving his arms and stomped away in defeat, with Lena following calmly behind.

Josie observed the altercation from the safety of the pub’s top floor with a hollow heart, wondering what the fuck sort of pantomime her life had turned into.

And all the while that restless colony within her bred, expanded. Soon, Josie would have no space left to house the ants. She leaked insects constantly, through her tear ducts, from her ears, into her knickers, which would flood constantly when her period started. She had to wear extra thick pads, and found the experience of going to the bathroom traumatising, for the large clots she passed were thick not only with ants but other things: maggots, bright pink slugs – even, once, a drenched moth, wings stuck together with her menstrual blood.

The expulsions also came via long streaks of ant-encrusted mucus, which would pour from her nose at the most inconvenient of moments, usually when she was asleep. Most distressingly, she evicted insects through her pores. Although the latter were very, very tiny ants, so small they were like mites, they were the worst, because they stung viciously on the way out, wriggling through minute holes in her skin not designed for such a purpose. Josie worried about herself. No hallucinations could be quite as vivid, nightmarish and all-encompassing as these. Could they?

Josie saw ants and worms and slugs everywhere. Not just saw but felt them, heard them, without respite, in both her waking and sleeping moments, fitful though the second state was. She craved relief with such desperation that she fantasised about pulling off her own head, or plugging up her ears with melted candle wax. She settled instead for digging at her skin with a broken ring, a cheap plastic piece of costume jewellery she’d found lying in one of the guest rooms when she was vacuuming. She snapped it in two, bending the remaining half into the perfect shape and size to poke holes in herself. When she did so, by the light of her bedside table lamp, the ants would come pouring out in thick streams, like blood spurting, only it wasn’t spurting, it was scrambling. Though painful, it left her feeling momentarily in control. That false sense of control was intoxicating, addictive. Before the month of December was halfway through, Josie was covered with ragged release-wounds, holes that Angela diligently applied balm to, shaking her head and tutting to herself with increasing levels of concern.

After Lena’s third attempt to get into the pub, Josie’s excavations grew so severe that several of the holes got infected, despite the ministrations of magic balm. Angela insisted that Josie see a doctor, or talk to someone, the implication being a psychiatrist. Josie refused.

‘I’ll be OK,’ she would whisper, avoiding eye contact. ‘I’m just having a funny week, is all.’

One funny week turned into two, then three. Josie started sneaking alcohol from the pub’s reserves, tiptoeing downstairs when Angela was sleeping. At first, this form of self-medication worked, if only a little, to calm her body down. The itching subsided after a shot or two of something neat, and strong. Josie had never been a big drinker, her dad’s habits had put her off, but the temporary relief the alcohol bought was, like the hole-poking, extraordinarily addictive. Soon, Josie was drinking considerably more than the odd nip of gin or whisky to calm her nerves, and Angela started to notice when doing inventory. Instead of confronting Josie about it, the landlord quietly removed all open bottles from the bar at the end of each night, taking armfuls of stock into the cellar beneath the pub, and locking it up so Josie couldn’t access anything stronger than non-alcoholic beer or orange juice.

Which worked fine for a night or two, until the itching and chittering got so bad that Josie broke into the cellar with a screwdriver and a hammer, determined to do one, if not two things: silence the voices scratching at her mind, and find oblivion in the bottom of a bottle.

She achieved neither goal. Angela discovered Josie on her knees in the dusty, damp cellar, blind drunk on vodka, ripping up floorboards with a demented brute strength in the belief that there was a colony of red termites, millions of them, excavating the dirt beneath the ancient building. She told Angela they were whispering to her, something about paying the queen her dues, about doing as she was told, about being a good girl, because if not, the whole pub would sink into the earth and be swallowed up by the crawling shadows that lived down there, and it would all be Josie’s fault.

Angela immediately called an ambulance. The paramedics arrived just as Josie, having decided ripping up the floorboards was futile, inserted the screwdriver into her ear, intent on hitting the end of it with the hammer so she could pierce the crackling ball of limbs and carapaces that had become her brain.

Josie was sedated and taken to hospital where her wounds were treated. The doctor on duty wanted to section her under the Mental Health Act. He told Angela he had real concerns for her safety, and the safety of those around her, if she were to leave the hospital.

Angela, who knew detainment came with its own horrors, fought hard against this. She explained to the doctor that Josie was having a horrible reaction to finding two dead bodies, to the pressure the police had put her under. She told him that the wounds on Josie’s skin were ant bites that had become infected. Then she assured him, in ever more strident tones, that the worst was behind Josie now, that there was nothing to justify bludgeoning the poor girl with the Mental Health Act and detaining her against her wishes, whether in a hospital or elsewhere.

The doctor hummed and hawed. He was harassed, overworked and understaffed. It was winter. The hospital wards were as full as they could get. Josie was occupying valuable bed space, and the section forms were long, complicated and time-consuming to fill out. Angela piled on the pressure. ‘I’ll look after her,’ she said. ‘I’ll make sure she’s OK. I dropped the ball once: I won’t let it happen again. I’m her support network, see.’

Her insistence paid off. After further deliberation and a change of shift, which meant a change of duty staff, Josie was prescribed medication and given a handful of pamphlets with helpline telephone numbers and website addresses printed on them, then discharged. Her hallucinations were attributed to shock. She agreed to speak to a therapist (a promise she had no intention of keeping) and a victim support counsellor (ditto), to stop drinking, and to take the anxiety medication she had been prescribed, along with the sleeping pills, so she could actually rest.

Then she was discharged. It felt more like a jail break: Angela hustled her out of the ward at eight in the morning, in the middle of a shift change and before visiting hours and the breakfast rounds began. On exiting the ward, they made their way through hallways lined with patients on trolleys, the sounds of coughing and wheezing and groaning and laboured breathing echoing around them.

When Josie hobbled through the sliding front doors with Angela by her side, Wilkes’s car was parked opposite the exit. The window of the detective’s vehicle was rolled down a crack, just enough to see the top of the woman’s face, a strip where two piercing eyes studied them through the gap in the glass.

Angela stuck her middle finger up at Wilkes as they passed.

‘Go and get a proper job,’ she spat in disgust.

The detective shook her head, rueful. She rolled the window further down.

‘Are you OK, Josie?’

Angela spun, marched right up to the car. ‘No she’s not OK! You pushed her too hard, and you know it.’

Josie tugged at Angela’s sleeve. ‘It’s fine,’ she said meekly. ‘She was only doing her job. Can we go?’

Wilkes watched them leave, a troubled look on her face. She seemed less cocksure than usual. Perhaps she, like Josie, didn’t like the feeling of being swept up in something bigger than the two of them.

When the women returned to the King’s Arms, Josie headed straight to bed. She hadn’t slept properly for days, but she had a paper bag filled with the new prescription and this time her father wasn’t around to throw away the pills. She undressed and swallowed twice the recommended dose, eager for oblivion. The sheets when she slid between them felt cool, freshly laundered.

Angela came in to check on her. ‘Did you—’

‘Yes, yes, I took them.’

Josie slumped back into her pillows groggily as the landlord looked down on her, face creased with worry.

‘I’m sorry I’m putting you through all this,’ Josie said softly. ‘I’ve added such a huge burden to your life.’

Angela snorted, plumped Josie’s pillow behind her head.

‘You’re not a burden, Josie. You’re a friend. Your mum was one of my dearest friends, too. And friends support each other, right?’

Josie nodded, slipping into sleep already.

‘Right,’ she murmured, and for the first time in perhaps her whole life, she began to understand what friendship was really about.

Chapter 33

Christmas came and went. Things improved a little. The cocktail of medications Josie ingested on Angela’s insistence seemed to be helping, to the point where the walls didn’t seethe with living things as Josie passed them. She could run a hand along the rippled plaster and it would come away clean, rather than globbed with ants or beetles or worms. The eaves of the King’s Arms no longer echoed with a million tiny, insistent voices calling for this or that. She could walk barefoot across the carpeted guest-room floor again without worrying about the crunch and squish of broken exoskeletons underfoot.

Josie worked every night she could in the King’s Arms, glad for the distraction, glad for the company and the bustle and the fires roaring, the glasses clinking, Finn wandering around wagging his tail as patrons idly scratched his head. All normal, good, pleasant things. Lena stopped coming to the pub, which meant Josie’s father was allowed back in, his temporary ban lifted. Josie eyed him from behind the safety of the bar as she served, making light conversation with him, just enough effort to ensure there was no unpleasant atmosphere, not enough to create the impression she’d forgiven him. Because, she hadn’t. Not at all.

During the day, Josie went back to her cleaning duties. She was a good deal more rigorous about it than she needed to be, but she found the bleaches and cleaning creams and sprays and the scrubbing, rubbing, polishing, wiping, was necessary to help keep the ant infestation at bay.

Angela never once questioned her new live-in companion about the sack of bones. Whenever Wilkes came to the pub, which was often, she remained adamant that Josie knew nothing. It was all a horrible coincidence. That Josie was unlucky. A victim. The Forest was big, but not big enough, evidently. Josie was grateful for her support but wondered if the landlord was secretly suspicious of her, despite her protestations. She had unearthed two dead bodies within weeks of each other, after all.

But nobody in the village seemed to mind that much. Josie had expected gossip, but there was none. The locals relied on Angela as a judge of character and acted accordingly. It was the most accepted Josie had ever felt, bodies or no bodies.

Wilkes, who seemed to have softened towards Josie a little, continued to observe her. She would perch herself at the end of the bar, sipping on a half-pint of bitter shandy, taking everything in with calculating eyes. Josie ignored her as best she could. She got the impression the detective was lonely and passing time, rather than actively working any hot leads.

That made her no better than anyone else who came to the King’s Arms after night fell, Josie’s father included.

The first fingers of spring stretched down into Ellwood halfway through March, later than it should have come, but the winter had been bitterly cold and drawn out. Angela kept the fires lit until well after February but then pulled back on both wood and patience. Old Jacob’s daily visits to the King’s Arms shortened, as a result, which was something of a relief for everyone else, because the old man had grown crankier than ever. Angela tried to keep her temper. They were friends, after all, but she smiled more in Jacob’s absence. Josie also preferred it when the folklorist wasn’t sitting on his chair in the cubby, staring daggers at her father, or catching Josie’s eye and winking at her knowingly. All she could think when she saw him was that he had a cabinet full of poisonous toxins in his house and a map covered in murder trivia, which still sat rolled up on a shelf upstairs, alongside Laurel’s notebook, which Josie had not returned. She still did not feel comfortable sharing this information with Wilkes, although she could not explain why. It was something about the way Wilkes was, perhaps, how she was intent on inserting herself into their community where she didn’t quite belong. It made Josie deeply uncomfortable.

Days grew longer, the evenings drew out, and gradually, Josie, who was getting used to being quiet inside of herself, felt more comfortable going outside. There was something about bright yellow daffodils and beautiful purple crocuses and trees budding lime green that brought confidence to her posture and gait. She started to take long walks with Angela and Finn, shadowed by Wilkes, usually, until they got to somewhere particularly muddy or steep or difficult to navigate in pressed trousers and smart shoes.

Eventually, Angela persuaded Josie to venture out for a walk alone.

‘Take Finn with you, though,’ she commanded gently. ‘He’ll get all fat and past his prime, otherwise, like me.’

Josie looked Angela dead in the eyes. ‘You’re beautiful,’ she replied, simply.

Angela blushed, unhooked Finn’s lead from its hook behind the bar.

‘I’m too old for you, is what I am.’

Josie shook her head. ‘I said what I said.’

‘Go on with you,’ Angela giggled, making a shooing motion with her hands. ‘Give me a bit of peace and quiet for a change, why don’t you.’

She delivered the statement with a wrinkle of the nose, and a wink.

Josie wrinkled her nose in return, grabbed the lead, attached it to Finn’s collar, and went out into the windy day for her first walk alone in many, many weeks. The first, in fact, since the night she’d walked, fast asleep, through the countryside, only to wake, freezing and confused, kneeling at the base of a waymark and fumbling at a sack of bones.

She had not gone more than a mile along the road, turning on to a small track that ran through a field that was half-heathland, half cattle grazing, before she was confronted with a familiar silhouette. Tall, leggy, slim, broad-shouldered, athletic, long hair swept back neatly, immaculate clothes, fashionable wellington boots. Josie took it all in before she was fully conscious of even doing so. Sometimes, a person is so ingrained in another person’s psyche that they would know them from a hundred miles distant, if they were no more than a tiny speck on the horizon.

Lena had lived inside Josie’s mind for so long she was indelibly imprinted on to every sense.

And of course this had been the plan all along, Josie realised. She had naively thought her ex a thing of the past once again, for Lena had not been seen locally for some time. But Lena had never been one to give up or walk away. Lena, who had nearly murdered her and yet expected a reconciliation, was determined to tell her side of the story.

She waited for Josie on the track, head artfully tilted to one side so her thick, gorgeous hair could whip around in the breeze. There was a smile on her face; she had more lines around her mouth than Josie remembered.

‘Hello, lover,’ she said, voice carrying seductively on the wind.

And Josie, sick to her stomach, ambushed, unprepared, felt the faint stirrings of infestation in her guts once again.

The quiet had been nice while it lasted.

Chapter 34

Finn growled. He was well versed in unwelcome smells, and Lena’s was the most unwelcome of all.

‘Oh shut up,’ Lena snapped, curling her lip right back at the dog, who had his teeth bared. She held a riding crop loosely in one hand. Where she’d gotten it from, Josie could not fathom. There were no stables nearby. Had she brought it with her? For what purpose? Did she think this was what people in the countryside did, wander around in riding gear when there wasn’t a horse to be seen for five miles in any direction?

It didn’t matter. A ripple of discontent bulged under Josie’s skin.

Unless you dug weeds up by the roots, Josie knew, they always came back, eventually.

Josie flexed her shoulders, feeling heavier than she had before encountering Lena. Her clothing felt tighter. If she were to take off her jacket, and roll up her sleeves, she knew her veins would be prominent, bulked out with the fast-moving traffic that characterised the colony. Her skin would be bubbling with activity. The sky darkened as her vision clouded with the familiar threadworms of displeasure. She no longer felt the urge to scrape them away, mash them between her fingers. The worms shielded her from Lena’s ugliness.

Her body tensed, a tightening of muscle and sinew.

‘Long time, no see,’ Lena said mockingly. ‘I’d like to say the year has been kind to you, but I’d be lying. Obviously country air isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

Lena’s voice was an odd thing to deal with, Josie found. She had lived for so long with just the memory of that voice, the real-world version of it rocked her. It was far crueller than she remembered. More irritating, nasal. She had always thought Lena so sophisticated, so laid back, so cool. Now, she found her tone and intonation unpleasant. Disgusting, even.

Querulous, unable to speak, Josie held up a hand to ward Lena off. She felt rather than saw the world around her change. Overhead, clouds raced, as if excited by the sudden conflict unfolding below. Grass bowed, letting the air punch it down into glossy patches, like ruffled hair, like beaten water. She witnessed none of these things with her eyes – her vision was filtered by a dark, wriggling lens – but she could sense them through the colony, she understood. It made her more connected to the earth, to the natural heartbeat and mood and movements of it.

Josie felt the ant swarm flex outwards as she acknowledged the colony’s gifts. Her skin creaked. Her clouded eyes pushed ever so slightly out of their sockets, sank back in.

The colony hissed. Kill. Kill.

Her stomach rolled as Lena continued.

‘You didn’t really think a stupid piece of paper would keep me away, did you?’

Josie stayed quiet, pulling a straining Finn back on his lead.

Inside, she thought, No, I guess I didn’t.

‘You didn’t think I was done, either, did you?’

Done?

‘With you, I mean.’

The riding crop smacked against Lena’s thigh.

‘I remember when you used to like it a bit rough,’ she said then, laughing brusquely. ‘I would pull your hair, yank that stupid braid of yours, and God, how you’d squirm.’

Josie tugged on Finn’s lead, turning to go back the way she’d come. She was not too far out from Ellwood, a quick walk would get her back to the pub, back to safety. Finn would lead. All she’d have to do was follow. She was not ready for this confrontation, she was not prepared for Lena’s force of will, for her poisonous words.

But Lena is faster. And stronger, remember?

And she could easily outrun Josie, as she had proven.

Josie might not be ready for this confrontation, but whether she liked it or not, this confrontation was ready for her. So, after a few steps, she turned back.

Or rather, her body was turned for her, by the internal, unseen engine. Kill, it insisted. Kill!

Josie felt angry suddenly. Angry at Lena, angry at everything. She flexed her hands. Her fingernails had been allowed to grow into thin, flaky crescents that couldn’t really harm her too seriously when she scratched herself. She felt mites moving around under each nail tip, minuscule, but not to her sensitive skin.

‘What is it that you want, Lena?’ she asked, more calmly than she felt. ‘You already ruined my life, what more could there be?’

‘I ruined your life?!’

Josie’s vision cleared momentarily to show Lena’s face, twisted with incredulity. Her mouth was open in a surprised O shape that was so contrived Josie almost laughed.

There it is, she thought. Lena had reclaimed victim status within seconds.

‘I lost my job, you stupid bitch!’ Josie’s ex ranted. ‘I throw one small thing in your vague direction in a fit of spite, and you get the police involved! The courts! A fucking restraining order, for a stupid pebble!’

Brick, Josie corrected, silently. She could feel something scratchy and hot and busy rising up her throat. It wasn’t bile. It moved too purposefully for that. She felt thousands of tiny feet grappling the walls of her trachea. A torrent was coming, and there was nothing Josie could do to stop it. The colony was on the move. She lacked the energy to warn Lena, who was still furiously wailing on about the injustice of it all.

Instead, Josie took a step forward.

She meant to take one back, but the colony had other ideas. Finn, who had been facing into Lena’s scent, turned his head, got a sudden whiff of Josie.

His growls turned to high-pitched, troubled whines.

‘Down, boy,’ Josie whispered, with difficulty, around a mouthful of squirming ants. Some of them dripped from her lips as she spoke.

‘I lost my job, I lost my apartment, I had to move! I had to sell my Mercedes! Have you any idea how fucking humiliating it is for a person like me to have any sort of criminal record at all? Let alone common or garden assault. Absolutely pathetic. I’d rather have been done for murder!’

Josie didn’t doubt it. She took another step forward, closing the gap between herself and her ex, something she hadn’t done for a long, long time. Finn cowered with fear, belly low to the ground, digging in his heels and refusing to go any further. Josie dropped his lead.

She motioned with her hand: Stay.

Finn lay down on the path, head on his paws, tail thumping worriedly against the earth as he made himself as small as possible.

Lena, too absorbed in herself to notice anything amiss, was not done.

‘The thing that really boils my piss, Josie, the thing that hurts me more than anything, is that I did so much for you.’

Another step. Lena’s perfume was stronger than ever.

‘I paid rent, I bought the food, I took us out, I gave you new clothes and everything you could ever have wanted. I paid your gym membership – not that you ever went. I worked so hard for us, Josie. I worked my fingers to the damn bone. And you? You brought nothing to the table, nothing at all. You didn’t cook, you barely cleaned, you didn’t take care of yourself, you didn’t work, or bring in any income . . . you just took, took, took. And now you’re the victim, and somehow I’m the fucking bad girl!’

These words were variations of complaints Josie had heard before. Why can’t you be a good girl, Josie. You don’t contribute to this family. I have to work my fingers to the bone, and you can’t even go to school and hand your homework in on time.

When are you going to start listening, Josie.

Teamwork makes the dream work, Josie.

Are you a good girl?

Was this really why Lena had come? To bring it all up again? Josie was not stupid. She knew she hadn’t meant that much to Lena, who moved straight into another relationship within weeks of the brick-throwing incident. She knew, because Lena had plastered the new girlfriend over every single one of her social media profiles, her messaging app icons, everything. Josie, in the early days of their separation, had developed an unhealthy obsession with blocking and unblocking her ex, across every possible platform. When she’d seen Lena with the new flame, she’d felt, despite everything, like someone had punched a hole clean through her ribcage and yanked out her barely beating heart.

Which, she supposed, in hindsight, had been the desired effect.

Lena had won, on so many different levels.

So why go to all this effort to track Josie down now, remind her of what a useless creature she was?

It didn’t make sense. Unless . . .

Two more steps, and Josie was close enough to smell not just Lena’s perfume but the sweat that hid beneath it. Beyond that, there was a faint musk Josie had never detected before. It was sour and biscuity, a mix of unwashed flesh and fear.

Josie breathed it in. The colony responded furiously. Her cheeks bulged with them.

‘And I loved you, Josie.’

The sudden change in tactics – a speciality of Lena’s. Switch up the tone, change the mood lightning fast, keep Josie guessing at every turn.

Josie reached out a hand and gently grasped Lena’s left wrist. This stopped the flow of malice instantly. She could feel Lena’s pulse, racing. Her own beat steadily, now.

She had moved past fear.

The two women faced each other as the wind picked up further, great gusts of it hassling the gorse bushes and straggling turf in repeated bouts around them. Josie was reminded of being cuffed around the side of her head by her father if she didn’t do something quickly enough, or if she ever dared talk back. Unexpected violence, the potential for which was always there, a sinister undercurrent. Josie just hadn’t recognised that at the time.

She recognised it now.

‘I loved you, and you betrayed me in return.’

Lena’s voice was heavy with feigned loss and heartbreak. Still trying to manipulate, still trying to save face. Rank desperation, foul and sour on the wind.

Was it feigned, though? It was impossible to tell.

Josie couldn’t swallow it down anymore. Her disgust. Her anger. Her heartbreak.

Betrayal? she thought, tightening her grip on Lena’s arm until the other woman cried out in pain. Her vision cleared, became ultra sharp, ultra-focused. Josie fancied she could see every individual atom stitching the other woman together, every particle, cell. Once she saw all this, once she realised Lena was nothing more than skin and bone and hair, not the terrifying spectre she had become over the years, her spell over Josie was finally broken.

In its place, Josie found a horrifying desire for revenge.

She pulled Lena hard into her. Shut up, she tried to say, but as she opened her mouth, as wide as it would go, tilting her head back slightly to give the words enough space to exit her body, a great branch of crawling ants thrust outwards from her mouth instead. Josie, gagging and heaving, could feel her lips splitting, dozens of tiny cracks leaking blood down her chin.

The living structure that emerged stretched forward like a tree root, questing for Lena’s throat. It was accompanied by a terrible susurrating chorus of tiny voices, chanting in anger.

Kill.

In horror, eyes wide, Lena tried to fall back, but Josie held her tight.

‘What the fuck?’ the other woman cried, raising the riding crop and beating at the weird growth to keep it from touching her. The ants exploded under the crop’s impact, reformed mid-air, using each other’s bodies as platforms and bridges, grappling with their neighbour to rebuild the limb intent on wrapping around and squeezing Lena’s neck until it snapped.

That’s strange, Josie thought, curiously detached from her own body and what was coming out of it. She can see them, too.

Lena shrieked and struggled, still unable to free herself from Josie’s grasp.

‘Listen, stop, please!’

It was no good. The colony had made their decision.

Lena was a threat.

The queen had spoken.

The crawling limb once again inched towards Lena’s throat, circling it, until she wore a whirling, scrambling torc of insects. Gradually and inexorably they began to exert pressure, to move faster, tightening their formation, squeezing the flesh of Lena’s neck until her veins started to pop.

Struggling, her toes now only brushing the earth below as the limb raised her body up off the floor, Lena fought for her life. The ants were stronger. As her eyes started to go bloodshot and leak tears, real tears this time, the first Josie had ever seen from her, she managed to whisper: ‘I . . . your dad made me come!’

Josie froze. The grip on Lena’s neck relaxed, ever so slightly. Josie could not speak, for her mouth was stuffed full of busy little bodies, but she didn’t need to ask the question out loud.

What?

Gasping for air, plucking frantically at the insects with her free hand, Lena gabbled on.

‘It’s true, he called me, he said you were desperate to reconcile, to apologise, that it was all a huge misunderstanding, that you still loved me . . .’

Confusion cut through the chorus of intrusive voices in her mind. Until, once again, Josie realised, her father didn’t want her here. She was an inconvenience to him, still, all these years later. Perhaps he thought that, by bringing Lena back, Josie would forgive, as she so often did, and shoulder responsibility for the incident, which she so often did, and reconcile, as she so often had in the past, and her father would have his freedom from her again.

Or perhaps he just did it to be cruel.

The ants suddenly withdrew from Lena and climbed back into Josie’s mouth, sinking down along her gullet. She swallowed them, choking on the thronging mass as it retreated.

Lena slumped to the floor, gasping, clutching her neck, which was red, bruises flowering already. Even like this, as she looked up in fear at Josie, real fear, this time, nothing feigned, her hair plastered to the sweat on her forehead, tears streaking her carefully applied make-up, eyes bloodshot and horrified, she was impossibly beautiful.

But Josie understood that Lena would forever be miserable, no matter who she ended up with, or what iteration of the truth she clung to.

Josie realised, in that moment, that she didn’t need vengeance. She just needed Lena to go away.

The wind died down. A small break in the clouds let a beam of weak spring sunshine out in the distance. It highlighted the fresh buds sprouting in the horse chestnut trees on a nearby hill.

‘What happened to you?’ Lena gasped, eventually. She looked at Josie with new-found fright, tinged with something horribly akin to respect. Josie had finally retaliated; in a language Lena knew well.

‘You happened,’ Josie said. She turned to leave.

‘I thought you still loved me,’ Lena blurted, then, and Josie felt a great sadness moving through her, for she had thought so too, and worse, she had wanted to be loved by Lena, by her father, by anyone, really, so desperately, more than anything she’d ever wanted before and since her mother died. The lack of love had been a huge load to bear, over the years, and seeing it play out like this, the desecration of tender things, of heady nights, of hands held in the back of a taxi, of swaying in time to music, of opening oneself up, and then the fights, the comments, the tears, the uncertainty, the sheer difficulty of existing alongside another human in close proximity when one of them did not want to be there at all, the anxiety and sleepless nights, the volatility, all of it, it rent open a chasm inside of her through which the ants fell, shrieking. They were swallowed by the enormity of Josie’s grief, and something of how she was feeling must have been a shared experience, for Lena started to cry.

‘I really thought you loved me,’ she said, again. ‘And I just didn’t know what to do with that, Josie. I . . . I panicked. Nobody ever loved me like that before.’

‘And they never will again,’ Josie replied, bending and scooping up Finn’s lead.

She left Lena sitting in a heap on the path, walking away with her head as high as she could hold it.

Chapter 35

When Josie got to the flat, Lena’s trainers were still on their pegs by the front door. Her father was waiting for her upstairs.

By what magic he knew she was coming for him, Josie could not fathom. But somehow, her dad anticipated the visit. Anticipated, and prepared.

‘Don’t get comfortable,’ he said, handing her his spare motorbike helmet before Josie could say a single word on emerging from the top of the staircase. ‘We’re going on an adventure.’

‘Where?’ Josie didn’t want to go anywhere with him. She wanted to lie down. She was exhausted. Her head buzzed with all the million insectile voices clamouring to be heard above her own thoughts, which were few and far between. But this unexpected display of proactivity was rare from her father. Even rarer, his desire to spend time with her. It had the same feel to it as his offer to cook dinner for the first time in over a decade. Josie saw immediately that this was a tactic. Clever, but if she knew one thing about him, it was this: it was better to let Dad think he was in control, that he had one over on her, than it was to stand her ground. At least initially.

Josie’s father smiled, sensing fragility. The confrontation with Lena had taken a lot out of Josie, physically and otherwise. She had begun to scratch at herself again after dropping Finn at the pub, opening scabs that had healed. The fabric of her sleeves caught on the re-exposed, gummy wounds and stuck to the cotton.

‘You’ll see,’ he said, checking his watch. His demeanour was an insult, one of a long succession Josie had suffered over the years. The dismissal of her pain, of the seriousness of what she had faced. He had always been that way. His gaze focused inwardly, like Lena’s did. Both were unable to live from any other perspective at all.

Peas in a pod.

‘If we hurry, we’ll get there just before closing,’ he said.

Josie agreed, but only because she was under strict instructions to do so.

On the back of his bike, she resisted the urge to wrap her arms around her father as they whipped along the spring-bright country lanes. Fast-moving air slapped her cheeks. She gripped on to the passenger backrest instead, regretting not bringing gloves. It had been a long time since she’d ridden pillion like this.

The bike zipped along Lambsquay Road, and for a moment Josie thought her father was taking her to Mrs Howell’s house, perhaps so the woman could shout at Josie for not returning her daughter’s sketchbook, but he sped past her driveway, joining Perrygrove Road and pulling into a large car park, at the entrance of which a sign said:

Puzzlewood

A magical day out in the Forest of Dean!

The bike puttered along to the end of the car park, then stopped. Josie’s father kicked down the stand and waited for her to climb off.

‘Are you serious?’ Josie was completely confused, which, she suspected, was half the point.

Her father sat there, helmet visor closed so she couldn’t see his face. Josie realised, with a horrible jolt, that the helmet’s colouring, blacked out, shiny visor, glossy black and brown leathers, ribbed at the knees and elbows, leather gloves, and biker boots coated in mud and bristling with wet leaves and twigs, made him resemble, in that moment, a large, four-legged ant, standing upright. All the man needed to complete the effect were two antennae on the top of the helmet.

Antennae.

Josie thought about Emmet. About a red-and-black mask scribbled into a school notebook. About a body bundled into a bag, dumped near a sign made of oak, about another body thrown from something high, dragged off into the woods. All the other bodies, now triangles on an old Ordnance Survey map. She thought about Devil’s claw marks, she thought about strange toxins. She thought about ants, everywhere she went. Ants, ants, ants, crawling around every single part of her life.

Josie’s father took off his helmet, revealing himself as just a man underneath. Josie was somewhat disappointed. It would have been neater, tidier, to have realised he was the bad spirit all along.

But her father wasn’t an evil entity, an eldritch thing. He was just a man. Selfish, yes. Cold, unaffectionate, abrupt, unempathetic. Hot-tempered. Rude.

But not bad.

The colony rolled, subsided. Josie’s stomach cramped as they settled.

Her father wore an uncomfortable, almost bashful expression now.

‘Your mum used to bring you here when you were little,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘I came too, once or twice. It wasn’t such a touristy thing back then. There was this honesty box on the gate that led straight into the wood, but . . . I know you’ve been through a lot lately, Josie. I’m not so good at showing I care, I understand that.’

Josie did not want to be disarmed by his vulnerability, not after all he’d done, but it was hard. He was very charming, she realised. Had he always been this likeable, when he wanted?

‘And Lena?’ she said. She knew she deserved an explanation she wouldn’t get.

He had the sense to pretend to look ashamed.

‘Lena was a mistake,’ he admitted. Josie didn’t think he meant it, not for a second.

He took Josie’s helmet from her, chained it, and his, to the bike.

‘I never understood your relationship, truth be told,’ he went on. ‘I just . . . your mother and I used to fight all the time. She always had too much to say for herself. It made things . . . difficult. We always made up afterwards, though. Everyone fights, that’s how it goes. I thought it was all a bit ridiculous, to be honest. You in the hospital, the police and all that. Women aren’t violent like men are. Seemed like a lot of fuss over a misunderstanding, was all. I thought I could help.’

Josie passed a hand over her eyes.

‘We didn’t fight, Dad. It wasn’t a misunderstanding. She threw a brick at me and knocked me unconscious. She was violent. I have a scar, or is that hard for you to see?’

She pointed to the dent in her forehead.

He shrugged. ‘We all get a bit het up, sometimes. Heat of the moment, and all that. People make mistakes.’

Doggedly siding with anyone other than his daughter.

Josie no longer understood what she was doing here. Why she was listening to him. Why she found it so hard to walk away. Her dislike of the man in front of her intensified. She felt her insides solidify in a quick, cold rush. The colony rolled and skidded across the slick, hard surfaces, scrabbling for purchase.

It was clever of him to bring her here, Josie considered, to a relatively remote location. Out on the main road, no bus stops. No real path, not on this stretch of land. Arguing in the apartment was a whole different proposition to arguing in the middle of a forest. The power dynamic tipped in his favour, simply by means of transport.

He had not accounted, Josie realised, for her walking legs.

She would walk a thousand miles through oncoming traffic happily if it meant getting away from him. And yet, even on the cusp of her departure, the ants were curious.

‘The restraining order was there for a reason,’ she managed, eventually. She didn’t say this to win the argument, for there was never any arguing with this man. He was a conversational one-way street.

She said it to move them on.

Josie’s father sensed her shifting resolve. He doubled down on his pretence of affection, proving to Josie that everything he was doing was a tactic. A strategy.

But to what end?

‘I just thought . . . you might like to come back here,’ he said, spreading his hands wide. ‘Remember how it was with your mum and me, before she got sick.’

Josie didn’t trust herself to speak. Her father sighed.

‘They close in ten minutes, though. Shall we?’

Josie thought about it. A swarm raced down her legs, raring to go. There was more, she realised, to discover.

She nodded.

Her father sweet-talked the young girl on the ticket desk to let them in, despite the late hour, and then the woman behind the counter in the coffee shop, which was in the act of closing down for the day. He charmed two hot chocolates out of her, handed one to Josie, and they set off together down the muddy access path, past farm animals in small petting pens, towards the wood itself.

Josie made sure to keep distance between them as they walked.

Chapter 36

Puzzlewood was a private patch of woodland notable for one thing: the ancient moss-covered scowles, or rocky outcrops, that appeared to grow there, like green, spongy, living organisms. A distinctive feature of the Forest of Dean. The information board near the entrance to the wood refreshed Josie’s memory as she passed: millions of years ago, caves formed deep underground, infiltrated by the coal-rich water of the forest, which left strains of iron ore in the crevices. The caves then lifted up to the surface, eroding and leaving behind weird and wonderful rocky shapes, hollows, tall columns and fingers of stone, and shallow pits. Later, humans mined these pits for iron, adding extra lumps and cavities to the landscape with mounds of waste and more, hand-dug pits. After that, the mines were abandoned, and the forest took over. It coated everything with a thick layer of moss, fungi and plant life, so the strange, undulating rock formations took on a furry, organic appearance.

A mile-long footpath now weaved in and out of the scowles, part of a tourist trail that snaked through a magical, otherworldly, overgrown landscape that was sometimes used as a filming location in science fiction and fantasy movies. Josie remembered regularly visiting the wood as a kid, now her dad had reminded her, and she recalled from those visits one lasting thing: Green. So many different shades of it. It was as if other colours, shades, did not exist. The trees were green, the rocks and scowles were green, the path was green, it felt like the very air was tinged green. The thick moss growing on every branch, scowle, rock and root damped all sound, like emerald snow, heightening the effect of walking through a giant, sealed terrarium. Not even the wind reached them down here. Josie was glad for this. She didn’t want to catch Lena’s perfume on the air anymore.

As Josie and her father embarked on the path, following carved wooden signs so they didn’t lose track of which way they’d come, they were swallowed by a heavy sage gloom. Wooden steps and rustic wooden handrails fashioned from tree roots and fallen limbs had been erected all along the trail, which was circular. Barely any daylight made it down to the scowles. Water dripped from saturated mosses and fern tips. Their footsteps were swallowed by a layer of winter leaf mulch sitting atop mud, slippery in places, hence the handrails.

Ferns sprouted in bursts of bright green from every nook and crevice, loving the moisture of the hollows and clefts in and around the scowles: bird’s nest ferns, soft shield ferns, hart’s tongue ferns, fiddleheads. Some of these were still only budding, croziers coiled tightly like brown hairy snakes waiting to strike. They just needed a few more days of warmth, of sunshine, to spring the loops.

Josie knew how they felt. She was eternally coiled, waiting for spring, but the sun never seemed to hit her in the right way, for long enough. She remained tightly wound, unable to flourish.

Soon, the colony hissed, but Josie didn’t know what that meant.

Now they were on the trail, Josie’s father didn’t seem to want to talk much. He simply wandered up and down steps, along walkways, around stones and into gulleys, looking for all the world like a man on a simple outing with his daughter, until Josie had had enough.

She stopped following him when she saw a bench on a raised part of the walkway, cobbled together from dead branches and logs. Josie plonked herself on it, refusing to go any further.

‘What do you want, Dad?’ she said flatly, addressing his back. The burning sensation had returned in her gullet. She swallowed a few times, fighting the colony.

He returned, sat gingerly on the end of the bench next to her. Took his time. The beetles and bugs and ants thrummed inside her.

‘I know I’m a grumpy old git, Josie,’ he said, eventually. ‘Words never were my strong suit. Emotions, feelings, all that stuff . . . that was always your mother’s skill set. I’ll be honest . . . all those big feelings you have, all bloody women seem to have . . . they scare me. I don’t know what to do with any of them.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Josie meant it sarcastically. He did not take it this way.

‘This is not a “sorry” sort of thing. I just . . . I just didn’t want you to think I don’t care. Because I do. Care.’

Josie nodded, disbelieving. He had brought her here to defuse her anger, that was all. To distract and deflect. Not to confess anything deep, or meaningful.

The selfishness was doubly depressing for its predictability.

‘Thank you for bringing me here,’ she said, eventually, to break the silence more than anything. It was better than I hate you, Dad.

‘Your mum used to tell you the fairies lived here. She used to say the bloody fairies lived everywhere. She was a hippy, through and through.’ He snorted. ‘They’re all like that, out here. Mystical and magical, obsessed with all the folklore and shit. You can’t go ten feet without stumbling into a crystal shop or a fucking tarot reader. Bunch of weirdos, if you ask me.’

Josie shifted. She could feel wriggling things down in her underwear, questing for freedom around tired knicker elastic.

‘You’re too pragmatic for all that, hm?’

He shook his head. ‘I just don’t understand why a whole bunch of grown adults indulge in it all as much as they do. Angela, with her potions and shit. Old Jacob. His whole house is like something out of a seventies folk movie.’

‘You still help out at the Devil’s March every year though, don’t you?’ Josie said, shifting again. She was growing increasingly uncomfortable in her father’s company. Her entire body rejected him. Lena had made her feel like that too, often. The crawling skin wasn’t the ants, not this time.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Making pies and putting up all the decorations and everything. Cleaning up after the festival, hoisting barrels about. You do it every single year, without complaint. Anyone would think you like the Devil’s March.’

Josie’s father snorted. ‘Of course I do. It’s a laugh, but that’s all. I don’t believe in any of it. Besides, these people, weird or not, are my livelihood. I have to stay on good terms with everyone, or else I can’t pay the bills.’

‘You can’t pay the bills anyway. And yet you manage to keep your tab running at the King’s Arms.’

‘You’ve been around Angela too much. You’re starting to sound like her.’

Josie thought, Well, that’s not a bad thing.

‘So, what. You don’t like living out here?’ she wanted to know.

Her father shook his head. ‘It was always your mother’s home, not mine.’

He got up, wandered off. Josie had no choice but to follow, using the opportunity to shuffle a hand around in her underwear. She evicted several long earthworms from herself, and threw them into the scowles before her father noticed.

‘It isn’t easy uprooting your life when you’re a man heading for retirement age,’ he puffed, lowering himself down a narrow set of steps. He clung on to the handrail for dear life, and Josie was once again struck by how much older he suddenly seemed. When she was small, he had been like an ox: strong, brawny, huge hands.

Now, he was slow and clumsy and toddler-like as he struggled to maintain his balance on the slippery path.

You could push him, the voices whispered, as the man approached a narrow set of stairs leading down into a damp chasm.

But that would be too easy, Josie thought. Besides, there wasn’t a steep enough drop here to do much damage. She needed something much higher, like a cliff.

Like the Devil’s Pulpit. That would do it.

The image of a sharp, steep edge, of her father’s body tumbling off it, only to crash heavily into the earth below, stirred in her brain.

‘Where would you go, if you could?’ she asked, instead of pushing him down the stairs. In her imagination, his brains leaked out across a frozen puddle.

Josie shook her head, and the woodlands returned. Green. Soft. Damp. Gentle.

‘Somewhere warm,’ Josie’s father said, without hesitation. ‘And dry, where it doesn’t rain for six months of every fucking year. With no damp, no heating bills. Decent pubs. And a good Chinese takeaway that doesn’t cost an arm and a fucking leg.’

‘Benidorm? Ibiza?’

‘It’s not going to happen,’ he said bitterly. ‘I’m as stuck here as you are.’

After an hour in his company, Josie had run out of patience with traipsing around after her father through the fairy forest of her childhood. She started to move faster, hustling him around the walkway, eager to be gone, to get back to the King’s Arms, back to Angela and Finn and the stone floors and thick walls and soft beds. Her dad didn’t seem to mind being rushed. His whole purpose in bringing her here had been to head off the argument he’d sensed coming. Now that had been done, he’d lost interest in the rock formations, the plants, the wildlife. He looked as bored as he ever did, which angered Josie, but she let none of how she felt show on her face.

What would be the point?

The way out took them along one last shadowy stretch of path that suddenly dipped into a series of stone steps, earthy red and rich in colour, which made a welcome streak through the seemingly impenetrable green on either side. Moss still thickly coated the scowles and tree trunks all around, and then gave out to a small clearing, into which weak light filtered. The path widened at the bottom of this clearing, and the scowles burst up higher on the far side beyond it, coming together to form a sort of miniature gorge through which the trail then led.

On one side of this gorge, a low decorative wooden door had been set into a wall running beneath a stone overhang. Josie remembered this door from childhood. Her mother loved it. She’d made up some story about it being the entrance to a secret underworld, a fabulous place of magic and mystery, of trickery and joy, where the fae danced under the waxing worm moonlight and seduced humans, luring them to their doom. Josie had eaten those stories all up, fascinated with the idea that such an existence lay waiting just beyond their own. Sometimes she’d felt like her mother came from a place like that, a place of shimmering beauty and ancient power.

Until she got sick. Then Josie’s mother looked very human indeed.

The door had been given a rudimentary slumping roof, complete with tiles, and two tree-trunk pillars on either side, holding the tiles up into a porch-like structure, which loosely resembled a hobbit hole, or a goblin’s house, or a witch hut from a book of children’s tales. The door was ornamental only, for it must have opened on to a wall of mud and moss and stone, but it was chained shut anyway, the padlock new and shiny in contrast to the rusted loops it was attached to.

Josie’s father stopped at the bottom of the steps and stared at the doorway, over which fern fronds and beech tree branches dangled.

‘I always like this bit,’ he said, unexpectedly. ‘I always used to wonder where that door led.’

Josie frowned at him. She doubted he’d thought anything of the sort. Her dad was not given to whimsy. He’d always hated his wife’s stories.

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah.’ Josie’s father lingered, staring at the wooden portal, features clouded.

The colony went silent, waiting.

Josie went to the door, tried the rustic handle.

‘Locked,’ she said, rattling the chain that secured it.

‘I fixed your bike too,’ her father said, then.

Josie blinked.

‘Thanks.’

‘No problem.’ He took one last look at the door, then at Josie. Perhaps he wanted to say something, wanted something to be said and understood.

But Josie had nothing. Even the colony had gone quiet now, as if second-guessing itself.

On their way back to the car park, empty now apart from one solitary car (Wilkes’s), Josie took the spare helmet offered and pushed it down over her ears.

‘This is the best day we’ve had together in a really long time, Dad,’ she lied, mounting the bike behind him. ‘Thank you. I feel better.’

‘Forgive me?’ he asked, kicking back the stand.

No, Josie thought, with violence. No, no, I don’t.

When he pulled up back at the apartment, where Josie asked to be dropped so she could check that Lena and her things had really gone this time, he didn’t dismount or kill the engine. He wasn’t staying, she realised. He would probably head back to the cottage, back to his shed, and whatever it was that he did there each night, until it was time to walk to the pub.

Josie climbed off, handed back his helmet.

‘Leave it inside,’ he said brusquely. His visor remained closed.

‘All right.’

‘I suppose you’ll be off back to the King’s Arms, then?’

Josie nodded.

‘Well.’ Her dad paused. Josie wondered what the hell he was thinking behind the blacked-out glass of the visor. The impression of him as a shiny, segmented bug was stronger than ever. If she removed his helmet, she felt sure she’d find another one beneath, mandibles working furiously.

‘I guess this is goodbye, then,’ he said, voice odd.

Josie frowned. ‘I’m only at the pub,’ she replied coldly. ‘It’s not a million miles away, Dad.’

He revved the bike’s engine.

‘Take care of yourself, Josie.’ The words were so muffled she almost didn’t catch them. ‘Good luck out there.’

Then her father drove off, leaving Josie to stare after him, wondering if that had been the point of the excursion, after all. Did he just say goodbye to her, for good? Where was he going?

She wished she had it in her to care. Wherever he was headed, he’d be back, she knew. The man was one more weed that she hadn’t dug out at the root.

Chapter 37

She cycled from the apartment to the pub. Her dad had indeed fixed her old mountain bike, fitted new tyres, and a headlamp, and left it in the lower level of the apartment for her.

A parting gift, Josie mused. Had his talk of moving to Spain been bluster, or intent? Either way, she appreciated not having to cut through the Knoll anymore.

She wobbled a bit on the bike at first, for it had been a while since she’d last cycled. As the wheels turned, micro-memories flashed through her mind: cycling through woods, along country roads, down knolls, across tree-lined ridges. A brief memory of the back of her head hurting, a sharp, unexpected pain she attributed to perhaps having her helmet strapped on too tight. Wind whipped her braid around, and the pain moved on.

Josie cycled, legs pumping the pedals, happy in the knowledge that Lena had also moved on. She had come back during Josie’s trip to Puzzlewood and collected her things, including the trainers by the front door, leaving the key in its pot by the stairs. Josie was relieved. This was the end of it now, she felt sure. The ants were celebrating inside her, busily rebuilding the collapsed colony and making it bigger, stronger, more elaborate than before.

Josie wondered again where the queen was chambered. Was it her heart, all along?

That would explain a lot.

By the time she arrived at the pub, cheeks red from pedalling, it was early evening, and Wilkes, who had overtaken Josie and her dad on the drive back from Puzzlewood, was now slumped over a glass of white wine at the end of the bar.

‘Nice trip to the forest?’ she asked, as Josie let herself in behind the bar by raising a wooden flap and ducking beneath it. Finn thumped his tail at her from his cushion by the burner, now unlit. Old Jacob was nowhere to be seen.

Josie shrugged out of her coat, wincing as the fabric pulled off fresh scabs. Angela was further along the bar, sorting through till receipts and jotting things down in a ledger.

‘Not that it’s any of your business, but no.’

‘Sure looked cosy, from where I was sitting. A regular Daddy–Daughter Day.’ Wilkes was drunk, Josie realised. There was no malice in her voice. She sounded resigned, more than anything.

Josie wondered what was wrong. She’d never seen the detective drunk, before.

‘Don’t you have anything better to do than harass me?’ she asked lightly. ‘I’m sure those dead girls won’t solve their own murders.’

Josie made herself a coffee from the machine.

‘That they won’t,’ Wilkes replied, depressed.

Angela flicked a look over to the detective constable, then hissed at Josie from behind her hand.

‘I didn’t have the heart to turn her away. She looked so dejected.’

Josie reassessed Wilkes. She was far more dishevelled than usual. The hair was not as neat, the shirt not ironed as sharply. The top button usually pinching her neck was unbuttoned.

She took her coffee and went over. She felt bolder after facing Lena. Less meek, less concerned about things like the law, and the police, and what they did and didn’t think she had done.

‘Why the long face, Detective?’

Wilkes grimaced into her glass.

‘It’s Allie,’ the woman grunted. ‘Just Allie, now. Not detective constable.’

Josie stared at her, questioning.

Wilkes sighed.

‘I got fired, you’ll be pleased to know. Gross misconduct for, amongst other things, how I handled taking statements. It’s a fucking joke, if you ask me. Do you know how many revolting, fucked up WhatsApp messages I’ve seen in group chats? They forgot I was in them, half the time. How many of that lot abused the badge so they could sexually harass women? Steal? Bully people? Go on power trips? Cut in line? That’s real misconduct. And yet here I am, without a job because I didn’t follow fucking procedure once or twice.’

‘Oh,’ said Josie, processing. ‘I’m sorry.’

Wilkes pinged her glass with a finger. ‘No you’re not. Your witness statement was the final nail in my coffin.’

Josie chose restraint over telling Wilkes she deserved it. ‘I suppose that means the case will go to someone else?’

Wilkes visibly flinched. She had worked hard on this, Josie realised. She was invested, emotionally. Letting go of all that work was going to be difficult.

Which was why she was here, licking her wounds in the King’s Arms, instead of at home, wherever that was.

‘Thanks for dobbing me in,’ Wilkes continued, subdued. ‘Just when I was starting to get somewhere, too. I suppose I can’t blame you. I did lean on you pretty fucking hard.’

Josie carefully set her cup down.

‘I never told anyone,’ she said simply.

Wilkes seemed surprised. ‘You didn’t lodge a complaint?’

Josie shook her head. ‘To who? I’ve been out of my fucking mind these past few months. I didn’t exactly have the energy to make a fuss. I can’t have been the only witness you messed about. Don’t blame your incompetence on me.’

The woman’s eyes considered her. Josie pressed the point home.

‘Why were you so fixed on me as a suspect?’

‘Person of interest,’ Wilkes corrected.

‘Whatever. What possible reason could you have had?’

‘You mean beyond the fact you stumbled over two bodies connected to the same inquiry?’

Angela drifted over to them, away from the till, drawn by the intensity of their conversation. ‘It’s a good question,’ the landlord said, folding her arms under her bosom. ‘Josie is a good girl, everyone knows that.’

Josie’s skin prickled.

Are you a good girl, Josie?

‘Let’s pretend I didn’t find the second body,’ she retorted. ‘You were fixated on me from the get-go. Why?’

Wilkes said nothing. Angela saw her glass was empty. She subtly collected it, poured a refill, replaced it.

The ex-detective glanced at her out of the corner of her eye, shrugged, gulped down two huge mouthfuls of fresh, cold wine.

‘Come on,’ Josie urged. ‘You follow me around everywhere. You coerced a statement out of me when I was unfit to give one. You’re always sizing me up with those shrewd eyes. Why? It’s all so strange and hostile. I think I have a right to know why. I don’t exactly fit the mould for a serial killer. I’m not that interesting.’

‘You’re right,’ Wilkes answered, taking a large gulp of booze. The glass would be empty again before too long. ‘You are not that interesting, no offence.’

‘But . . . ?’ Josie could sense the word coming.

‘But it wasn’t you I was interested in.’

Angela and Josie both looked at each other, confused.

‘What?’ they asked in unison.

Wilkes finished her glass, tapped it for a refill.

‘No,’ said Angela. ‘Explain.’

‘It was the sawdust,’ Wilkes replied, sighing. ‘The sawdust was the interesting thing, Josie.’

Chapter 38

‘I don’t—’ Josie was going to say ‘follow’, but then the words started to sink in. Sawdust.

Take care of yourself, Josie.

Good luck out there.

‘Go on,’ Angela said, worriedly.

Wilkes tapped the glass again. Angela ignored her.

‘We found sawdust on Laurel’s body. Trace amounts, in her hair, in her ears, under her fingernails, mixed with the different soil types. In her mouth.’

Josie remembered the girl’s mouth, remembered the eaten-away tongue. She felt the air leaking out of her lungs in a long, despairing expulsion.

‘Just hers?’

Wilkes shook her head. ‘On the bagged-up bones, too.’

Josie’s shoulders sagged.

The colony remained still, silent. They were listening.

‘Smaller amounts, practically undetectable. But there were traces of it between the remaining teeth and stuck in the weave of the sack fabric.’

‘And the older bodies? The girls from the past? Was there ever any trace found back then?’ Josie felt once more like she was jamming jigsaw pieces together clumsily.

‘That was the next step. Go back over old reports, track down any bagged evidence. I didn’t get that far before . . . well.’ Wilkes snorted into her glass.

Angela waved her hands, impatient. ‘I’m sorry but . . . what is so special about sawdust?’

Wilkes nodded. ‘Good question. The residue, all the tiny shavings . . . it was from a variety of wood types. But there was one distinct type of sawdust that kept recurring.’

Josie bent forward and rested her head on the bar. She felt sick and dizzy.

‘So that’s a link? It proves, what, a connection? Between the bodies.’ Angela was way, way behind the other two women on this.

‘Correct. It’s a link of a forensic nature, which is important when it comes to any court proceedings. Everything else so far has been frustratingly . . . circumstantial.’

‘But what does that have to do with our Josie?’

Josie chuckled in despair.

Not a bad man, she’d thought. Just a man.

‘What?’ Angela’s voice, usually deep and calm, climbed up an octave. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It means I am an idiot,’ Josie said into the bar top. It was difficult to fully process her thoughts any further, because the ants chose that moment to start screaming in her head.

Her body, however, knew exactly what she was being told. Josie began to shake.

Angela still hadn’t caught up. ‘What?’

Wilkes, her voice slurring, patiently explained:

‘The sawdust came from a variety of trees commonly found in this area. Beech, fir, pine. Sweet chestnut. Ash. But the most predominant species here is oak. And there are different types of oak, apparently. Pedunculate and sessile.’ She stumbled over the pronunciation. ‘It’s the sessile oak we’re really interested in, because that type of oak is only processed by one sawmill in these parts.’

‘Goodgate Sawmills, over near Mile End,’ Josie whispered.

She thought about acorns, artisan marks, carved into doors and on signs and in the corners of fitted shelves and probably, if she were to look closely, on some of the cabinets and cupboards around the bar she currently lay her head upon.

And on the cabinets at Laurel Howell’s childhood home. The waymark next to the bag of bones.

Wilkes leaned back on her stool, folded her hands behind her head.

‘Yep. I learned a lot about trees, working this case. Anyway, Goodgate Sawmill, as Josie correctly stated, processes sessile oak. They have a logging agreement with a landowner who only has that type of oak tree on his patch of woodland. They have to be logged very strategically, because it takes those types of trees a long time to grow. It’s also not as versatile as other kinds of oak, but for the right carpenter—’

Angela blanched.

‘Wait, are you saying—’

Finally, it started to sink in.

Wilkes continued, oblivious to the ants foaming at Josie’s mouth. ‘Wherever those bodies were stored, you see, was somewhere wood was also stored, then cut, planed, worked at. Producing the sawdust.’

Josie thought about bright orange storage timber boxes all around the forest, boxes her dad had access to for lumber. Numbers sprayed on the lids. You could hide something in one of those for months, years.

‘This, with the different soil types found under Laurel’s nails . . . we figured a workshop somewhere, or a wood store. Or perhaps multiple locations, where each body was rotated, to avoid discovery. Until he gets bored of keeping them. Then, they get dumped. Ostentatiously. In locations that only Josie here seems to stumble across.’

But only recently, Josie thought. There were others, before. Why?

‘We had a list of employees, sawmill workers, tree surgeons, local carpenters. Would have been easier if we’d had suspect DNA to work with, but our killer was always clever about that.’

Angela laid a trembling hand on Josie’s back, patting her nervously between the shoulder blades.

‘Oh, love,’ she said quietly. ‘Oh, my love.’

Wilkes licked her finger, rubbed it around the rim of the glass to make a high-pitched whining sound.

‘Imagine my surprise,’ she continued grimly, ‘when I learned that the daughter of one of those carpenters on our list was the very same girl who stumbled upon Laurel’s body.’

Angela kept patting and rubbing Josie, as if she could soothe the truth away somehow.

‘And then, when you found the second set of remains . . .’

The colony started to hiss.

You should have killed him!

Kill!

We told you to kill!

Pushing her father down the steps at Puzzlewood, Josie realised, might not have been such a bad idea after all.

Chapter 39

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ Josie mumbled. ‘I could have helped.’

‘I didn’t want you to warn him off. You and your dad seemed tight.’

Angela snorted. ‘Clearly, you don’t know her father.’

‘Last thing I wanted was our only viable suspect doing a runner. Sawdust, it turns out, might have been enough to convict him. That, and the connection with you. Forensic and circumstantial evidence together, enough to sway a jury. But I wanted it to be locked in tight. I need more forensic evidence. After the second body, I was going to go back over the other women, the cold cases. I was going to find grounds for a warrant to search his cottage, but then . . . well, then some prick made a complaint about me, and I got fired.’

‘I knew Laurel,’ Josie said, without context. Wilkes blinked.

Josie chewed her bottom lip. ‘I played with her as a kid. Our parents were friends. Mrs Howell told me when I went to see her. My dad knew Laurel.’

Wilkes nodded, slowly. ‘That makes sense. When someone is killed like that, we work in circles. The closest family members first, then outwards to friends, acquaintances. It’s usually someone they know.’

Josie wrung her hands together, remembering the tortured sketches in Laurel’s notebook.

‘I think he did something to her when she was sixteen. I think he . . .’

She didn’t know how to finish the sentence. It was all too much.

Angela wiped a hand across her face. ‘He always had an eye for other women; it used to drive your mum mad, but . . . sixteen?’ She shook her head, staring into space.

‘It had an effect on her,’ Josie said. ‘And then he went back for her, a decade later. I don’t know why.’

Wilkes looked up to the ceiling, thinking. ‘Unfinished business, maybe,’ she said, eventually. ‘Perhaps the fact that Laurel survived whatever he did to her at sixteen sealed her fate all those years later. Like a job he had to complete.’

The women let that sink in.

‘So,’ Angela asked, eventually. She bore the expression of a woman who was sick to her stomach. ‘What happens now?’

‘I’ve got no idea what’ll happen now. There will be a handover, which will take time. Someone else will have to work through all my reports and paperwork and get back into the swing of things. Meanwhile, the leads go cold. People get away with murder. He might do it again. He’s most certainly done it before, multiple times.’

‘Old Jacob knew,’ Angela realised. ‘This is . . . this is . . .’

‘A lot?’ Wilkes stared up at the ceiling, defeated. ‘It would have been a career case, this one. Case of a lifetime. A serial killer, dumping bodies in the forest for nearly twenty years, finally caught. I could have retired early on that.’

Josie’s mind scrambled back over the afternoon: her dad’s odd expressions, his parting words. Him, driving off on his bike.

He knew he was about to get caught.

He left Laurel’s body there for me to find. And the bones.

How? How does a man drag a body around the forest, through public spaces, and not get caught?

A little present for you, Josie.

Something ugly stirred in her memory.

Can you be a good girl, and keep a secret?

Suddenly she knew why he had taken her to Puzzlewood. A place she’d been to with her mother and loved. Like the path at Nagshead Nature Reserve, and the Knoll. Suddenly, she knew why he had lingered by the strange decorative wooden door.

The ants chose that moment to pour out of her mouth and on to the bar top. Josie yanked her head back, staring as the tiny crawling bodies swirled, formed into patterns, dispersed, and reformed, spelling out a simple, scrambling word.

GO.

Josie laughed out loud, a crazy, unstable chortle.

‘What’s so funny?’ Wilkes barked.

Angela was still in shock. ‘I don’t . . . I can’t . . .’ she stammered.

‘You’re fired, though,’ Josie stated, in an odd voice.

‘Thanks for reminding me.’

‘Shut up,’ Josie snapped. ‘Is it effective immediately?’

‘Dismissal without notice. I’m out. Why?’

‘What if I told you . . .’

Josie trailed off, still trying to slot it all together. The ants reformed, spelling out a new word.

NOW.

‘What? Told me what?’ Wilkes’s voice was sharp.

‘Angela, can you drive?’

‘Why?’

Josie swallowed.

‘Because I think I know where the next body is,’ she said, a lot more calmly than she felt.

Chapter 40

The car sped through the dark. Finn stuck his snout out of a small gap in the window, tonguing the air. Josie told Wilkes about the other puzzle pieces she’d unearthed as Angela drove. The map. Old Jacob’s cabinet. Laurel’s sketches. The acorns. Emmet.

She left the ants out of it. Wilkes’s credibility would only go so far.

As she negotiated the pitch-black roads, the ubiquitous trees flashing past, Angela shook her head.

‘There’s too many moving parts to this,’ she said, flicking the headlights to high beam so she could see better. ‘Fact and fiction, all rubbing up against each other. I could strangle Old Jacob for putting all his nonsense in your head on top of everything else.’

‘But what if it isn’t nonsense?’ Josie replied. She’d been thinking about this, a lot: the ‘how’ of it all. ‘Every year the entire town dresses up in masks and costumes and dances around behind a sacrificial straw effigy. We throw the damn thing off a cliff at the end of the procession. Why is it so hard to accept something like Emmet could be real, too? Real in the sense that maybe it was a character my dad borrowed from folklore. He probably heard about it from Old Jacob and just . . . recycled the idea, for his own purposes. Made up his own sick customs.’

‘Rape. Murder. Poison.’ Angela spat the words out with contempt.

Josie knew she was on the right path. ‘It’s like we said: tales of a masked man hiding in the forest . . . not so far-fetched in these parts. And the mask would mean that, even if anyone did encounter him, identifying him after would have been almost impossible.’

She thought about her father, lurking in the shadows, a mask covering his face, waiting for a young girl to pass, waiting for the right moment.

A young girl like Laurel, recently turned sixteen. But he hadn’t killed Laurel until years later. Why? Was it really a simple case of unfinished business?

‘Let’s just get to where we’re going,’ Wilkes said. She was chugging water from a bottle, desperately trying to sober up.

The sign for Puzzlewood loomed suddenly out of the dark. They couldn’t access the car park, for the barriers had gone down now it was after hours. Angela parked up on the narrow roadside verge instead.

‘I’m not coming with you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll stay here with Finn. I’ll be here, whatever happens, but I don’t want to see . . . I just don’t. If you’re right.’ She let out a shaky breath.

‘That’s OK.’ Josie looked at Angela’s profile under the overhead light. ‘You’re a good person, Angela,’ she said then, kissing the other woman lightly on the corner of her mouth.

Angela, overcome with feelings, couldn’t reply.

Wilkes glugged down the last of her water and exited the car. She and Josie ducked under the barrier, hopped over a gate, crept past the shuttered ticket office and around the edge of the petting paddocks, hoping to avoid setting off any security lights. They made it to the entrance of the woodland undetected, but Josie grabbed Wilkes’s sleeve before they could go further.

‘What happens,’ she asked, ‘if I’m right, if we do find something. What happens to him?’

Wilkes’s face was a dark smudge in the night. Her silence was all Josie needed to hear.

‘What if I’m wrong? What if I’m putting all the pieces together wrong?’

Wilkes shook her head. ‘What if you’re not?’

‘I need to be sure,’ Josie said. ‘I need to be absolutely sure it’s my dad.’ Her voice broke. ‘Let me be sure, first. Please.’

‘Can we hurry the fuck up and find out, then?’ Wilkes said, heading off into the dark.

They snuck into the woods, hearts racing, using the torch light from Josie’s phone to navigate the tricky paths. She kept a finger over half of it, so the glare wouldn’t be as noticeable.

In the dark, the scowles looked like hunched beasts, waiting to pounce. Ferns and fronds of bracken clutched at their legs as they hastened along the path. The women slipped and fell several times, helping each other up, getting lost, doubling back on themselves without realising, until they eventually found the door.

Josie had come prepared with Angela’s screwdriver and hammer. She used the tools to break the iron chain and padlock holding the door shut. Then she put her shoulder to the warped wood and shoved, hard.

The door partially opened, hitting a wall of mud directly behind. But then, Josie saw a small gap between the earthen wall and an embankment of ferns, through which a narrow path tapered off, following the curve of a rocky ledge.

Josie followed it without hesitation, squeezing through the narrow space between door and earth. Wilkes, cursing, struggled through behind her.

A tangle of stinging nettles, brambles, ferns of all description, moss and roots grabbed at Josie’s skin and clothing as she pushed on.

Why are you in such a hurry to find another corpse? Josie asked herself, panting and sliding all over the place. Her torch illuminated a torrent of insects moving like liquid alongside her. They flowed in a single column along the tiny rabbit path barely wide enough to fit her feet, all headed in the same direction. Josie followed the beetles, maggots, worms, moths, ants, crickets, ladybirds, spiders, slow worms and centipedes, taking as much care as she could not to put her foot on any of them as they surged past and ahead, tumbling over her boots like water over rocks.

Why?

Because I need to know.

She pushed through a final, thick barrier of bird’s nest ferns and fallen logs and sprouting bracken and found herself at last in a secret dell, off the main tourist trail, surrounded on all sides by densely packed green stone scowles, and mounds of dead, brown leaves, collected over the years and rotted into a number of deciduous midden heaps.

Josie took a moment to catch her breath, letting her phone torch scan the area slowly. The dell was away from the main tourist trail, secluded, overlooked only by plants, trees and birds. There were so many places like this in the forest, Josie knew. Invisible places, where a whole person could disappear, as if they’d fallen through a tear in reality. Out of sight, out of mind. Faerie realms, just like her mother had told her.

A perfect spot to hide something terrible.

Her phone picked out a strange feature to the rear of the dell. She could hear Wilkes tramping along the path, swearing, a short distance off. Josie held her phone steady, squinting.

In one dark recess of the dell, where the stones narrowed in like a closed fist, she saw a black mouth, almost invisible behind dangling leaves and fern fronds that looked like green teeth. Josie saw all the insects flooding into this mouth, which was the entrance of a small cave, and then they disappeared inside, and she knew, without question, that she was going to find something inside that cave.

Wilkes burst into the dell behind her, panting.

‘Fucking hell,’ she gasped, resting her hands on her knees. ‘Don’t wait for me, or anything.’

Josie kept her light trained on the cave entrance.

‘In there,’ she said.

‘You’ve been here before, I assume,’ Wilkes wheezed.

Josie nodded. ‘I must have. I mean, I’ve been to the woodland, the tourist path, but this specific spot . . . I must have been here, too. Perhaps with my mother. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have chosen this place.’

‘Explain.’

Josie swallowed. How to explain an enigma like her father?

‘He never liked my mum that much, I don’t think. He pretended to. She was . . . she was a force of nature. She had her own ways. He always felt trapped by her, I see that now. And he hated how close we were. The other places he left the other two bodies . . . they’re spots I went to with Mum. I think he’s trying to taint them for me.’

‘Oh,’ said Wilkes.

Josie stepped towards the inevitable. The insects still flowed in a river towards the cave, the noise of them all moving together triggering a headache, which started pulsing back around Josie’s scar.

‘Right,’ Wilkes said, rolling up her sleeves. ‘Better take a look.’

Josie shook her head. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said.

‘It could be a crime scene; we don’t want to—’

‘I’ll do it.’ Josie passed her phone to Wilkes. ‘Hold this.’ She wound her braid into a knot at the base of her neck, so it wouldn’t dangle down and get in her way.

‘Just don’t . . . touch anything, for God’s sake,’ Wilkes huffed. ‘Stick your head in, and the second you spot anything that looks strange, come straight back out. Promise?’

Josie nodded, took her phone back. Turned the torch brightness up, then clamped the device between her teeth.

On her hands and knees, pushing her way into the wet, freezing cave interior, water dripping down the back of her neck, hands crunching through layers of tiny wings and thoraxes and legs, antenna, shell casings, segmented abdomens, Josie thought suddenly about the queen inside of her, spawning, laying thousands, maybe millions of eggs within her body. Maybe she’d already laid her own replacement, a new queen, a queen that would sprout wings and fly off and start her own colony. Maybe not. The colony was dependent on her to survive, Josie knew that much. If she died . . .

Her torch caught something pale in the blackness.

Josie kept crawling.

The insects tumbled around her, chittering.

And then, at the back of the cave, she found it.

Half-mummified, the damp and the cold and the mud and dead leaf matter had formed a shroud around the body, but Josie could just about make out skin, the dull glint of a tiny stud earring, and the matted ball of dark hair on a scalp that had only half disintegrated. There was a set of yellowed teeth, bared as if in fear, and running down one side of the corpse’s face, a perfect, neat braid, just like Josie’s, held at the bottom with a plastic clip with a tortoiseshell pattern on it.

There were maggots in the corpse’s eye sockets, and in her mouth. And ants, obviously, flowing through and around her, busy as ever with the industry of death.

Behind her, gouged into the thick moss coating on the wall of the cave, three jagged, deep gashes in the stone. The Devil’s claw marks.

This time, Josie didn’t even bother to scream. She simply rested her forehead to the cold, unforgiving earth, and wept.

Chapter 41

‘Once is unlucky, Josie. Twice might be really, really, unlucky, a coincidence perhaps. Three times . . . three times is proof.’

Wilkes couldn’t keep the victory out of her voice. She had been right, all along. A killer of women. A sick predator. Responsible for three dead girls, if not more, if he could be linked to the other dead bodies marked on Jacob’s map.

A lot of triangles, a lot of mothers without answers, Josie thought.

Wilkes jiggled her knees anxiously in the back of Angela’s car, thinking at a hundred miles an hour. ‘It might not be enough though. Another body. We need more evidence tying him to them. He’s been smart with DNA: no sperm, no hair, nothing. Not even any skin under their fingernails, just dirt and sawdust.’

‘Because he drugs them,’ Josie whispered, thinking back to Laurel’s toxicology report. ‘They don’t fight him off because they can’t move.’

Angela shifted in the driver’s seat. Tears slid down her cheeks, but she cried quietly, not wanting to draw attention to herself.

Wilkes, by contrast, was elated. She was sitting on a goldmine of a case, if she could somehow bring it home. One for the books. Josie could see television shows and book deals in her eyes. If she could find a way back in, after her excommunication, maybe even a promotion to detective sergeant.

‘I need more. Something definitive.’

Josie sat in the passenger seat, staring at a tiny patch of dusty dashboard, poorly illuminated by the weak overhead light. Inside, she was a scrabbling, chittering, struggling mass of rage.

We told you, the colony whispered. Kill.

‘So . . .’ Angela cleared her throat, aggressively. ‘We’re not . . . we’re not calling the police?’

Wilkes was still deep in thought, trying to determine the best course of action.

‘God knows how long that body has been there,’ she said, chewing on her lower lip. ‘A few more hours won’t hurt it.’

It? Josie thought.

Her.

The rage intensified. Ants were pouring down her cheeks like tears, filling the gaps in the footwells, blocking out the windows, covering the roof, the steering wheel, the seat coverings, but only she could see them.

‘You really think they’ll let you back on the case?’ she asked, monotone.

‘I think they’ll have to,’ Wilkes concluded, nodding as if to reassure herself. ‘Misconduct or not. I can . . . I can consult for them! The pay would be better, I guarantee.’

Angela made a small noise of disgust.

Wilkes, startled, looked at her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said then, hanging her head. ‘I’m nervous. How are you holding up, Josie?’

Josie wasn’t holding up. Her insides were roaring at her. She could feel movement in every pore, across every inch of her body. Her father was a killer of women.

He drugged them and did things to them and hid their bodies around the Forest before dumping them, like waste, in heaps for his daughter to find. Before she had come of age, and she was fairly certain that was the deciding factor, he left them for others to find, only nobody had made the connection between them, and their memories had faded, so the other women existed mostly in a series of outdated articles waiting for the occasional google. He could have gotten away with it, if he’d quit while he was ahead, if he’d left off while Josie was a child.

Why make his daughter a part of this at all?

Josie remembered her old cat, Max. How he would bring the soggy bodies of dead mice to lay at her feet, proud of himself.

Not the same.

Wilkes cleared her throat.

‘Josie, what’s happening here . . . I don’t think this is new behaviour. Not given your dad’s age, the other bodies found in the woods over the years. You were a child, when they first started appearing. Have you considered . . .’

Angela placed her hand comfortingly on Josie’s thigh. She knew what Wilkes was about to say.

‘Have you considered that you might be repressing things you saw, maybe? As a kid?’

Josie began to rock back and forth slowly in her seat, swayed by the rhythm and pulse of the colony. Had she considered it?

The blanks in her memory.

The nights she woke up, over and over, to the sound of a violin concerto blaring? She thought it was because he liked to work while listening to his music, cook along to an orchestra while she slept. Perhaps he wasn’t as cultured as he’d made out.

Perhaps he just wanted something loud enough to cover a scream.

Violent concerto.

I can’t sleep, Daddy. Can I have some warm milk?

The milk always worked like a charm. The morning after, Josie woke feeling groggy, like her sleep had been unnaturally deep.

He drugs the women so they can’t fight back.

‘Josie,’ Wilkes said.

But as the words came out of her mouth, the ants in the car exploded in number, pouring out of every one of Josie’s orifices, expanding like black, crackling foam, multiplying, swelling, filling the car until she thought it would squeeze them all into a pulp, until she was sure the car would buckle outwards and then pop like a balloon under the pressure of all those tiny, angry bodies.

‘Has anyone ever asked you about the death of your mother?’

Part Four

2005

Josie drifted awake as if washed up on a shore: in small, propulsive bursts of consciousness that stuck long enough for her to realise she was inside her father’s shed.

It looked a lot bigger from the inside. A small wood burner crackled at one end. The source of the smoke. There were tools, an axe, heaps of wood shavings and chippings, sawdust in little mounds all over the floor. Josie saw a long, polished bench, a stool, and an offcut of carpet, for insulation against the cold. Two big bundles of freshly cut hay and a bale of straw were squashed beneath the bench. A small polished plank of oak hung on one wall nearby, a series of wooden hooks mounted across it, from which hung carving tools, bunches of dried rosemary, and four long plaits of human hair, tied at the ends with straw.

Its cosy in here, Josie thought, groggily. The back of her head felt horrible, sticky, incredibly sore. Josie remembered the rock, but only just. She shook her head, trying to wake up properly. It was difficult: the shed was hot, stiflingly so, and her vision clouded with bright spots that looked like worms when she moved her head.

Dad has two sheds, she realised, slowly. The one at the cottage, and this one, Jacob’s old shed. A real retreat, a place where a man could spend hours, comfortably, by himself. Uninterrupted.

Except Josie had interrupted him.

She was not alone in the shed, either.

Star-worms exploded again as she tried to sit upright, get a better sense of what she was looking at. A strange noise filled her ears, which buzzed with a ringing sound that also felt crackly, insectile, like she had water in her eardrums or ants crawling around in her ear canals, chattering directly into her brain.

Beyond that noise: grunting, panting. Repeating sounds, like waves beating against a wall.

The bright obscurations settled.

Josie saw a woman on the woodworking bench before her. The woman was naked, and bound, limbs splayed, so she looked like a pale star against the dark stained oak beneath her body. Her skin was mottled with cold, her nipples bright pink. Her head lolled gently in a repetitive motion.

Her father, Josie saw, eventually, when her vision cleared fully, was on top of this woman. She knew it was her father from the tattoo he had on his right shoulder. A small acorn, with an oak leaf. Otherwise, it would have been hard to tell.

He grunted from behind a mask that was painted half red, half black, crowned with pheasant feathers and tiny, stubby muntjac antlers.

‘Dad?’ Josie slurred. Her body felt soft and boneless, floppy. ‘What are you doing?’

It was so hot, so stuffy, and everything smelled strange.

Her father didn’t answer.

The muscles in his neck were pulled tight.

Josie felt as if she wasn’t in her own body at all. There was something in her blood making her feel very heavy, very sleepy. The shed spun around her, then paused as her father let out one long, horrible groan, before spinning again.

When the shed stopped spinning, the woman lay still, no longer rocking. Josie thought she might be sleeping, only with her glassy wide eyes open. That could happen sometimes, she knew, when people sleepwalked. Josie had heard her mother talking about it, once. Sleepwalkers, led by demons and devils to do odd things, like walk over high rooftops in the middle of night. If the sleepwalker was called by their Christian name, they would suddenly wake up, tumble off the roof.

You had to be careful to catch them, or wake them slowly, else they’d fall to their deaths.

But Josie didn’t think this was like that. The girl’s eyes looked awake, somehow.

Aware.

A bitter taste in Josie’s mouth made her tongue tingle. A wave of heat from the log burner billowed out, forcing her to close her eyes. Her head pounded.

Sleep, a collection of small voices in her head commanded.

You don’t need to see this.

Sleep.

She found she couldn’t fight anymore. Eyelids leaden, impossibly heavy, she drifted off towards the thick, black unawareness, unable to help herself from being sucked back out to sea by the tide.

The eyes of the woman on the table faded from view as Josie retreated into the black. Before she lost all sense of time and place, she thought those eyes, big, and brown, with long, beautiful lashes, looked to her desperately, registering her presence, widening just a fraction, as if to ask her, mutely, for help. She thought, on locking eyes with her, that she could see ants crawling around the whites, making themselves busy, as ants could not help but do. They formed balls, mimicking the irises, then dispersed, pushing their way out from beneath eyelids, dropping to the floor like strange tears beneath the woman’s dangling braid.

The final thing Josie heard before the picture died altogether was the voice of her father, ragged, breath coming hard and fast.

‘That’s a good girl,’ he whispered, from somewhere she couldn’t see.

Chapter 42

2025

‘Take your time.’ Wilkes was gentler than she’d ever been with Josie.

‘He won’t be in there,’ Josie replied. ‘He’s not that stupid.’

‘He’d better not be in there,’ Angela muttered.

Josie hadn’t seen her childhood cottage for many years. On her return to Ellwood, she’d gone straight to the holiday apartment, and then she’d moved to the King’s Arms. Her father had always discouraged her from showing up at her old home, and now that she stood in the front garden, she could see why.

The place, for want of a better word, was a shithole.

Oh, Mum, Josie thought, sadly. What did he do to your house?

‘He won’t,’ Wilkes said, getting out of Angela’s car. ‘He knows it’ll take a while for a search warrant to go through, but he also knows I don’t need one. I have you. He wouldn’t hang around.’

Angela got out herself and threw Wilkes a dirty look. The ex-detective shrugged.

‘You can glare at me all you like,’ she continued, ‘but imagine being able to lock this man up, after all he’s done. Imagine providing enough evidence that a jury has no doubt whatsoever that he did all those terrible things. You might think I’m using Josie for my own glory, but I promise you . . . it’s more complicated than that.’

Angela rolled her eyes. ‘You talk too much, for a detective,’ she said unkindly. ‘I prefer the ones in the books, the taciturn sort that keep their mouths shut for half the story.’

Wilkes shrugged. ‘I got the alcoholic part right, at least.’

Josie found it hard to engage in the nervous banter.

The cottage, which had been Josie’s mother’s home before she met Josie’s father, had never had a name, just a number. This number was now almost invisible, having worn off the sign on the side of the gate that led into the front garden. That garden was horribly overgrown and piled with junk of all sorts: motorbike parts, rusted tools, empty bottles, a broken saw blade, a cane chair with the bottom out of it, smashed and cracked flowerpots, an overturned wheelie bin nobody had bothered to pick up. Moving through the garden, Josie spotted something neon pink and yellow and orange sticking out of a pile of weeds.

‘The bike I had as a kid,’ she said, with hate. ‘Dad gave me that one Christmas. Only nice thing he ever bought me.’

‘If he did buy it,’ Wilkes commented.

Josie had never considered that.

She looked for the spare front door key, found it under a fake pebble near the doorstep, plastic, with a hollow in it. Poorly concealed, but then, who would want to break into this dump?

Josie unlocked the door.

‘Dad?’ she called out, hesitant. ‘Are you here?’

The three women waited on the doorstep, breath held.

Silence.

Wilkes pushed her way inside, flicking on the hall light. The other two women followed, reluctantly. Josie closed the front door behind her and started to take off her shoes. Force of habit, from when her mother was still alive.

‘I wouldn’t bother,’ Angela said sadly. ‘Filthy bugger.’

Her father had retired the no-shoes-or-boots-inside rule as soon as Josie had moved out, she supposed, as evidenced by the carpet in the hallway. The entire stretch of corridor was black with filth, oil, mud, wood shavings, and straw, all trodden into the carpet weave so that the original colour, a warm, clean, biscuity shade, could only be seen along the very edges of the carpet, butting up against the wall. The strip down the middle was so dark it looked like tarmac, and Josie realised her father been tracking filth through her house like this, in his work boots or wellies or biker boots, depending on the day of the week, for years.

Wilkes crouched down, pulled out a small plastic baggie, picked up a pinch of sawdust from the filthy carpet and deposited it in the bag.

‘Dad?’ Josie called out again, angrier now. The anger came in waves, rising and falling, washing the colony up and down and around her nervous system along with it.

There was no sign of anyone inside. No noise, no lights. It was chilly, too. The heating was off, but that was probably a cost-saving thing, knowing Josie’s dad.

Wilkes’s straightened up, pocketing the baggie. The mess intimidated her. ‘You’d better go first,’ she said, lip curled.

‘I don’t know what we’re looking for,’ Josie replied.

‘More evidence. Anything linking him to the dead women. Trophies. The drugs he uses, maybe, to sedate them.’

Trophies. Think hard, Josie.

There’s more.

There’s always more.

The bike, neon, multicoloured. A gift from him to her, at Christmas. She thought he’d got it for her because he loved her.

It’ll be a bit big for you to start with, but you’ll grow into it. I put the seat down as far as I could.

Who did it belong to, before?

There’s more.

Think harder.

There’s . . .

An ant, scrambling out from a gap in the floorboards, making its way over to her bike, climbing the wheel spokes.

A gap in the floorboards.

Josie scanned the hallway, found a single column of ants marching across the wall, towards the kitchen.

‘This way,’ Josie said, swallowing. Her head throbbed. Usually, the pain centred around the dent in the front of her head, Lena’s gift, but this time it clustered around a spot on the back of her skull. She massaged the area with cold fingers. Could she feel something there? Some small ridge, some imperfection she’d never really paid much mind to before, hiding at the roots of her hair?

Josie thought, as she squeezed around piled-up furniture and cardboard boxes and more bike parts and wood offcuts, that the interior of her once beautiful and tidy family home now looked like the inside of Old Jacob’s house. They were both hoarders: Jacob, of history and folklore; her father, of broken things, of rubbish and parts, and rotting, mouldy junk.

Why had those two fallen out?

Josie knew it had something to do with all this.

When they reached the kitchen, only one of the overhead counter lights worked. All the other bulbs were dead. It was enough light to see the dead mouse lying on the pan-stacked kitchen countertop. It had been there some time, judging by how stiff it was.

The smell in this room was particularly revolting. All three women covered their noses with their sleeves, eyes watering with disgust.

Josie felt like burning the entire place down, razing it to ash. It was not just the junk, the filth, the dead mouse. It was all of it together. The cottage was a stark reminder that her mother was dead, the wonderful home she’d created was dead, Josie’s innocence was dead.

And her dad had killed them all, most probably. It was what he was good at.

Scanning the kitchen, which was a muckheap of food scraps, dirty plates, filthy cutlery, cups with mould growing on the bottoms of them, microwave dinner trays, foil oven trays with baked-on food still crusted all over, tins, packets, smeared and smudged glasses, one disgusting tea towel with poppies faintly visible on it, stacks of porn magazines, old-fashioned, glossy, explicit, rippled with dried fluid, Josie had a sudden memory of her father preparing pies for the Devil’s March down here, when it was still in a fit state to cook in. She had been unable to sleep, and his concertos had been going, as usual. A storm had been pounding the windows from the outside. Josie remembered her father carrying her up to bed, how he smelled as she pressed her face into his neck. She had been afraid of him then, she remembered. Always afraid, while still loving him.

How much of my childhood have I lost?

Josie looked for the ants. They moved in a snaking line through the kitchen to the back door, which led into the garden proper, at the bottom of which the shed sat.

‘Out here, I think,’ she said, moving on.

‘I had no idea he lived like this,’ Angela said, dismayed. ‘I mean, he was always rude and a bit offhand with people, but . . . I had no idea.’

‘He doesn’t live like this because he likes it,’ Josie replied, stepping into the garden. ‘He lives like this as a fuck-you to my mother. To desecrate what was hers. I told you, he didn’t like her very much.’

The other women said nothing, simply shook their heads, followed Josie down the slimy, slick garden path. The shed waited for them in the gloom, its hulking shadow smaller, more slumped than Josie remembered.

When she reached the structure, she saw the padlock on the shed door. It matched the one on the decorative door in Puzzlewood, in both size, and make. There was another lock lodged in her memory too, that also matched.

Some of the woodbins he used around the Forest, as well, she’d wager. Wherever her father bought them from, he was obviously a repeat customer.

She pointed to the lock. ‘You’ll want this,’ Josie told Wilkes, who nodded to show she understood.

Josie rattled the shed door handle; futile, considering the padlock was tightly closed over a solid, brand-new clasp. Doing so felt like breaking the law. She remembered this feeling very well – touching what was forbidden. A different shed, though. Surrounded by the woods. Not this shed.

Again, the back of her head throbbed, as if trying to tell her something.

Don’t snoop, Josie. Don’t stick your nose in where it doesn’t belong.

She backed up.

‘Give me some space,’ she commanded. Angela and Wilkes did as they were told.

Josie balled her fists. Threw herself into the shed door, with all her might, hip first.

The latch popped off the door, first attempt. Wilkes retrieved the lock, slid it into another baggie. Josie went into the shed, without hesitation. She half-expected to find a woman inside, dark-haired, dark-eyed, serious expression on her face, wearing red shoes, probably. She would be in a sack, or tied at the hands and feet to a bench.

There was none of that. There was nothing of anything.

The shed was empty. No tools, no bench, no wood scraps.

Look harder, the colony hissed.

Josie thought hard, concentrating as best she could despite the pounding in her skull. She was a child once again, staring at a prize, staring at a multicoloured mountain bike wrapped in a blanket. It was two days before Christmas, and snowing. Violins scraped across the cold night air. Josie had a duvet bundled around her shoulders. An array of woodworking tools hung on the walls of the shed over Dad’s workbench, sorted by size and function. In this area, at least, he was tidy. Josie saw, with a remote, miserable type of interest, dozens of trays of screws, labelled, and pots, also labelled, and a clock, a metal vice, bundled cables, cans of WD40, white spirit, other bottles and jars filled with indistinguishable liquids and pastes, and various metal bins crammed with offcuts of oak, ash, beech, and pine.

And the bike, glorious, glowing, exactly what she’d always wanted.

‘I love you, Daddy,’ Josie had said, and as the words left her mouth, she noticed an ant, scrambling out from a crack in the floorboards beneath the bike. He didn’t reply. The ant was joined by a friend. As her dad ushered Josie back outside into the snow, she saw the insects form a marching line, leading from the crack in the floor, along the tyre spokes, and soon, they ran the length of the bike entire.

Don’t worry, Josie had thought to herself as her father closed the door to the shed, slamming it hard, for the wooden frame had swollen. A muffled thump from inside indicated something falling from a hook, on to the floor perhaps. It was closely followed by a second thump, then another.

They won’t survive the cold for long.

Thump.

Josie scanned the floor. Saw a thin, rectangular outline across one area of the floorboards, half-covered by a scrap of old carpet. A hasp lay against the edge of the outline, which was about four feet wide by six feet long. Josie knew this because she’d had a lot of practice at measuring things, helping Dad to hold a tape measure when marking and cutting large blocks of wood.

Josie flipped the edge of the carpet with her toe. Beneath, a small trapdoor. Josie looked around for something to break it. There was nothing, so she settled for kicking the hasp furiously until it bent.

Wilkes ducked outside, returned with a rusty garden fork, the tines bent but strong enough to work the lock. The ex-detective inserted the fork into the small gap beneath the hasp, then leveraged the tool like she was digging up tree roots. The hasp and lock held, then popped.

Together, the three women opened the trapdoor.

Lined with old hessian sacks, foam, wood shavings and straw, the pit was just the right length for a body, if it was a certain height and weight.

Are you a good girl, Josie?

Inside the pit now, there lay only one thing. Not a body, not a live woman.

A mask.

Half black, half red. Crowned with antlers, and pheasant feathers. Eyes small, diamond-shape holes, crudely cut. The mask was shiny, as if varnished. This was not her father’s March mask.

This was Emmet. It matched the description Old Jacob had given her just as closely as it matched the biro sketch in Laurel’s notebook. Not a malevolent wood spirit, or Jack Frost, or even the Devil himself.

It was just a mask worn by a man, and that man, her father, had turned out to be the bad man after all.

‘You’ll want that too,’ Josie said, and Wilkes chewed on her lip, staring down at it with uncertainty.

Chapter 43

The next day, Old Jacob fell down his stairs while trying to get up them to use the bathroom. A stack of magazines tipped over at exactly the wrong time. His foot hit the slippery paper, shooting out behind him and sending him face-first into the steps, down which he then tumbled, hitting every single one on the way. Just like Josie had feared he would.

He lay at the bottom of his staircase, bruised, broken and barely breathing for hours before Josie, Wilkes and Angela came looking for him, or more precisely, for answers. By the time the three women arrived, however, Old Jacob was past questioning. In the hospital, he contracted pneumonia and sepsis and battled with a collapsed lung. He had sustained two broken ribs, a broken collarbone and popped his left hip out of joint, for good measure. Old Jacob drifted in and out of consciousness for many weeks, fighting for his life in a sealed ward, which nobody was allowed to visit for fear of bringing flu or Covid in and finishing the job his lethal obstacle course of a house had started.

The dead girl’s remains were carefully extracted from the cave in Puzzlewood after Wilkes directed the police there. She left Josie’s name out of things, and the investigation rolled on, without Wilkes, who was crushed to discover that fired meant fired. She could not even offer her services as a consultant. Worse, the ex-detective was threatened with repercussions if she kept interfering in an ongoing police investigation. Now she was a member of the public, she was told, she had no authority to go about questioning suspects and trying to gather evidence or apprehend interested parties. She might be called upon to testify, if things ever got that far, but other than that, Wilkes was out on her ear.

The local media got hold of the unfolding story shortly after, thanks to an anonymous, disgruntled email sent by someone who wrote in a very similar style to Wilkes. The regional news went into a brief frenzy of speculation, dramatic headlines and wild claims. When that died down, another anonymous email pinged into various inboxes. It didn’t take long for the cold cases to surface, then, and the furore exploded for real. Wilkes, bitter and disenfranchised, got involved in every interview she could, going on the record with any journalist who would have her, until she was once again threatened with legal action.

Meanwhile, business at the King’s Arms boomed. People came looking for answers, for gossip, and went away disappointed. Angela refused to talk about the case and banned anyone she caught gossiping with immediate effect.

Josie was endlessly grateful for that, and for her.

The landlord’s generosity and strength of character did nothing to quell the anger that hardened in Josie like solid sap, however.

Life felt impossible to navigate, now Josie knew the truth about her father. She barely slept or ate. She sank into endless replays of herself crawling into the cave, seeing bone and braid in the torchlight. She expected a knock at the door every second of each day. Come with us, please, madam. We want to talk to you about your father. It never happened.

Wilkes griped that this was down to her old team’s reluctance to support her hard work or advocate for it to the DCI heading up the investigation. The Detective Chief Inspector wanted to carve his own path, away from the disgraced Wilkes and her findings, especially now the glory was up for grabs, but that path eventually petered out into nothing. Josie’s dad stayed missing, seemingly vanished into thin air. The body of the third girl remained unidentified. Forensics did their best, but the corpse persisted as one more Jane Doe (Three), on record, and on Old Jacob’s map, where Josie added her details.

Where did he find these women? she wondered, late at night as she sat staring at the spread of triangles and contour lines and footpaths and forest boundaries. Did nobody miss them?

Tired of waiting to be called upon, Josie eventually took herself to the nearest police station and presented her theories. The bodies were all found in locations that were significant. The victims all shared a similar appearance, height and build to Josie. She knew where the ingredients for the toxins found in Laurel’s body were kept. She brought with her the baggie of wood shavings and sawdust gathered from the shed floor, so they could match it with the oak dust found on all the other bodies. She handed over the broken padlock too. She told the officer taking notes that she had known Laurel as a child. So had her father.

The new officer was very polite, affable. He listened intently, nodding along as he made notes, took everything she offered, and then . . . nothing happened. A murder suicide in a small farm outside of Coleford sealed the case’s fate. It was a gruesome family massacre, a father with massive debts and a shotgun, ripping his way through the lives of his three children, his wife, his dogs, and even his horses. With all eyes diverted, Josie found it impossible to get through to anyone. The officer stopped answering her calls.

After that, it all went very, very quiet. The media moved on. The pub’s popularity waned. Wilkes, Angela and Josie had no choice but to sit passing theories back and forth over a glass of wine. They would pore over Old Jacob’s map and Laurel’s notebook and all the other things they knew, and didn’t know, and drive themselves mad with it as days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months.

Meanwhile, Josie’s father remained a ghost.

Summer came, bringing an unexpectedly fierce heatwave that burned green to yellow, where even the air under the forest canopy was too thick, too soupy, too mosquito-infested to enjoy. Josie would walk for hours under the pines and oaks and beeches, thinking about dead bodies and decomposition and looking for Emmet, looking for her father – for she knew he was out here somewhere. And as she wandered, checking the neon orange timber boxes she came across for corpses, with Finn by her side for company, she held her mouth wide open, trying to catch as many bugs as she could, until her tongue was coated with them. And then she would swallow, and the colony, never quiet, never still, took the crushed bodies and stowed them away in their special midden heap, away from the queen. Necrophoresis, it was called; she had looked it up. The carrying away of the dead. Josie kept feeding the habit, and the ants complied, scurrying with the insectile remains to some dark part of her the queen would not care much about, and all the while plotting revenge. Josie knew, as she fed them, that the colony was unfinished business, pure and simple.

Knowing that helped, in those long hot days. Josie understood that, no matter how long her father hid, how well he kept himself burrowed away, it wouldn’t matter. The colony was patient, the queen, even more so, and soon, winter would be on its way again.

And winter, she knew, would flush Emmet out of the woods like smoke flushing wasps from a paper nest.

Chapter 44

The summer heat cooled to a bearable haze. Fresher breezes swept in, bringing the first hints of season’s change on the air. The sun took on a full, fat, golden aspect, like ripe fruit ready for plucking. At night, the Milky Way stood out clear and sharp in a dark sky unsullied by city lights. Josie liked to look up and think about all the things she could see that she hadn’t been able to from Lena’s penthouse apartment in London.

The cluster headaches on the front and back of Josie’s head did not go away. Her braid pulled at her scalp, worsening the discomfort. Josie decided to shave her head. She asked Angela to help.

‘Where do you keep the scissors?’ she asked, without preamble, sticking her head into the bar where Angela was doing a crossword puzzle and throwing biscuits absent-mindedly at Finn. It was another one of those scenes that looked like an oil painting: Tavern Wench and Hound in Sunbeam. The sun lingered on Angela’s curly black hair, glinting as it picked up the crystal pendants she wore in a cluster around her neck. She was a very lovely-looking woman, Josie appreciated, not for the first time. Statuesque. There was something eminently peaceful about Angela, something she emitted, like she was her own light source.

The landlord looked up. Smiled. ‘I wondered when you’d get round to asking me that.’

Josie yanked on her braid, sharply. ‘It’s long overdue, I think,’ she said.

‘I agree.’

They used the en suite next to Josie’s room. Angela found a pair of dressmaking scissors, large-bladed, lethally sharp, to snip the braid off at the root.

Instantly, Josie felt lighter. Freer. She rolled her head around, feeling the muscles in her neck click and loosen.

Angela handed her the braid.

Josie stared at it like it was a live snake in the palm of her hand.

Hang it from its hook, her father’s voice suddenly muttered in her memory.

Josie frowned. ‘He always told me to keep my hair like this because Mum liked it that way,’ she said, slowly. ‘Maybe she did, I don’t know.’

‘She had short hair herself, the whole time I knew her.’

‘Then he said it was the easiest way of keeping me tidy, after she died. He said he didn’t know how to style a girl’s hair and didn’t have time to learn. I always believed him. Even when he was being . . . vile.’

Angela went away, came back with a pair of clippers she sometimes used to trim Finn’s coat down to manageable levels when it got particularly straggly, or he rolled in a patch of burrs or stickyweed that needed cutting out.

‘Star treatment,’ she said, plugging the device into the shaver socket above the en-suite sink.

‘Always,’ Josie smiled, and the two women looked at each other in the mirror hanging over the sink.

Angela’s face drooped.

‘The thing I can’t get my head around . . .’ She trailed off, shaking her head. ‘He did all those things to all those women while you were tucked up in your bed not twenty feet away. A child. Innocent. Just sleeping while he did God knows what. That’s what I can’t fathom. You were there, close by, the entire time.’

Josie took the plait, wrapped it around her fist until it formed a hairy knuckle-wrap. Inside, the ants were boiling. Josie was so full, she knew they would spew out if she let them. She fought for control. The eruption wouldn’t serve, not yet.

Head bent over the sink, Josie held still while Angela dutifully ran the pair of electric clippers over her scalp. Her remaining hair came off in chunks, tickling her nose so she found it hard not to sneeze.

When Angela got to the back of Josie’s head, specifically the occipital lump that stuck out at the base of her skull, the landlord murmured out loud, shutting off the clippers.

‘What did you do here?’ she asked, running her finger delicately over a patch of ridged skin, barely discernible to Josie’s fingertips. Hidden in the thick mass of her hair for all this time, it was only detectable now as a tiny difference in texture and depth, like a crease, a shallow ridge, not the large and messy scar on her forehead.

‘I don’t know,’ Josie said, into the sink bowl. ‘I didn’t even know I had that.’

‘You must have fallen off something, cracked your head maybe.’

‘Maybe,’ Josie said, but she knew that wasn’t it.

Sometimes, when she replayed the mind-movie of Lena throwing the brick, Lena’s face flickered, replaced with the face of her father. Sometimes he was wearing Emmet’s mask, sometimes he was not. The brick was sometimes a brick, other times it was a large rock. Josie had secrets still buried inside her, secrets that the colony were unearthing slowly, one by one. She might not get to the bottom of them all, as some of the memories had been placed in a box and sealed shut. But the colony demanded retribution for every last one.

Chapter 45

Old Jacob finally found his way out of hospital care and back to Ellwood, the forest, and, of course, the King’s Arms. The staff, he told everyone, proudly, all thought he was a medical miracle. Old Jacob had fought off the pneumonia, the sepsis. It took a long time to stabilise, but his lung healed, out of pure spite, the nurses said, amazed. His broken bones took much longer to set, and gave him a great deal of discomfort, but he forced himself up and out of his bed whenever he could, slowly rebuilding his strength to a point where he could shuffle up and down the ward again until someone found him and, scolding, herded him back to bed. His mobility improved, as did his stamina. Before long, he was uncontainable. The staff let him wander at will, clattering along the hallways doggedly with his walking frame, until they finally admitted he could be let go.

When he was discharged, Angela brought him back to the pub. It was the end of October, and she lit the first fires in his honour.

Old Jacob’s face when he came into the warm, spice-scented space and saw his seat waiting for him, in the nook by the burner, was a thing to behold.

‘Ah,’ he smiled, as Finn came to greet him, tail wagging happily. ‘I missed this old place. And you.’

He took his throne as if he’d never left it, propping one foot up on a stool Angela found so he could keep his leg out straight before him.

‘So,’ he said then, as the landlord went to pour him a half-pint of bitter shandy. ‘What did I miss?’

Chapter 46

Angela, Josie and Old Jacob huddled around the log burner in the King’s Arms while Finn lay stretched out on the floor, basking in the heat. Flames burnished the pub’s interior, casting a deep, flickering orange glow across every surface. Angela had turned all the other lights off and locked the door so nobody would bother them, but several disgruntled locals bashed on it anyway, until she lost her temper.

‘Sod off!’ she shouted, loudly enough to make Finn jump. ‘We’re fucking closed!’ The hound woofed, annoyed at the interruption to his sleep, then flopped his head back on the cushion, tucking his snout under one paw for comfort.

Jacob and Josie chuckled.

Half an hour later, there was another knock on the door. More polite, no less insistent.

‘I said, fuck off!’ Angela yelled. ‘Honestly, what’s so hard to understand about the word “closed”?’

‘It’s me,’ came the muffled reply.

Angela sighed.

‘Josie, go let Sherlock in, would you?’

And three became four, plus a dog. Gathering of local yokels around a fire, Josie thought, amused. Oil on canvas. Wilkes counted as a local, now. She’d rented out the converted chapel on Ellwood’s main street.

Before long, talk turned to the case of the dead girls, just like it did most nights. To Josie’s father. To Emmet. These conversations were useful, to Josie. She found the more she talked, the more parts of her childhood started to make sense. Things that had never quite added up, now, knowing everything else she knew, did.

‘Like the music,’ she said to the room, staring into the fire.

‘Music?’ Wilkes was on her second glass of Chablis. She was softer when she drank, less bullish.

‘Dad used to play this music all the time, sometimes so loud I would hear it when I was asleep. It would come into my dreams, only . . . only the music was horrible. There was something about it that scared me. It would wake me up.’ Josie dug around in her pocket and pulled out her severed braid. She’d taken to using it as a worry tool, but she was not sure how healthy that was. ‘I think they were screams. The other sounds. I think he played the music so loud he would cover the screaming. While I slept. Upstairs.’

Finn woofed gently in his sleep, tail slapping against the floor, paws twitching as he dreamed of chasing rabbits or foxes or rats.

Wilkes broke the silence.

‘All I keep thinking is, how does a man like that move a body around without being noticed? Not just one, but three, eight, however many it is. There’s probably more we haven’t found.’

‘Undoubtedly.’ Old Jacob wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘I could never stand that man, not since he first came to Ellwood. I knew he was running around behind your mother’s back,’ he said, looking at Josie. ‘I had firm words with him about it, several times. He told me to mind my own fucking business. Never did know how to speak to his elders.’

Wilkes drained her glass.

‘I gave him a job here once, behind the bar.’ Angela shuddered, thinking about it. ‘He lasted a week. Couldn’t stand being told what to do.’

‘Your father didn’t work well with others.’

Old Jacob made to spit. Angela skewered him with a dirty look. He swallowed it.

‘I think he used a distraction of some sort,’ Wilkes went on, holding her now empty glass up to the firelight. Her fingerprints glowed yellow on the bowl. ‘Conceal, divert. Discard.’

The colony suddenly awoke, racing around Josie’s body. She sneezed, more out of shock than anything else, and a messy deposit of snot-covered insects flew across the room, landing on the flagstones where they struggled to extricate themselves from Josie’s mucus.

Old Jacob leaned forward ever so slightly in his chair, peering at the floor.

Josie felt the excitement of the queen inside, stirring up the rest of the colony.

‘Josie? You all right?’ Angela got up to refill everyone’s glasses.

‘She’s got a funny look on her face,’ Wilkes remarked.

‘Josie?’

‘Leave her,’ Old Jacob cautioned. ‘She’s remembering something. Can’t you tell? Let her sit with it.’

‘Remembering what?’

‘Let the bread rise, Angela. Don’t interfere.’

Josie’s limbs felt strange, like her muscles were contracting. She was moments away, she knew, from stiffening up entirely, and then her body would whip about in odd, contorted motions as the colony tried to puppet her into some action she didn’t know she needed to perform yet.

She stood up abruptly, started pacing the pub, trying to walk off the encroaching takeover. She stamped her feet as she went, and ants flew out of the bottoms of her jeans, scattering as soon as they hit the floor.

Conceal, divert. Discard.

‘It wasn’t just sawdust you found with the bodies, was it?’ she asked Wilkes, thinking hard.

‘What do you mean?’

Josie stopped pacing.

‘When the bodies were analysed. There was soil. Sawdust, we know about. Dirt, from all over the forest. But there was straw, too.’

Wilkes nodded. Angela handed Josie a fresh alcohol-free beer.

‘Laurel was found the morning after the Devil’s March,’ she reminded her, softly. ‘The Knoll had straw all over it, from the queen. You know how it is, that damn thing sheds all over the village.’

Josie stared at her.

‘There was straw in the sack with bones, too,’ she said, right on the cusp of something. ‘The neck of it was tied with a long, straw bind. I remember.’

Wilkes licked her lips, sitting up straighter. ‘She’s right.’

‘What about on the Puzzlewood body?’

Josie shook her head. ‘I can’t remember. It was too dark, too close in there.’

Jacob sucked on his false teeth noisily.

‘When did you stop making the queens, Jacob?’ Josie asked.

‘Fifteen year back. Maybe more. You were a kid, I remember that. Or perhaps a teenager. I thought I was doing him a favour.’

‘Doing who a favour?’

But Josie knew the answer already. So did Angela, who looked at her, white-faced.

‘Your dad,’ she said, finally fitting it altogether.

‘Your dad,’ Old Jacob confirmed. ‘Your father took over making the queens. I thought you knew that?’

‘No,’ Josie said dreamily. ‘No, I didn’t.’

Chapter 47

‘It wasn’t really my decision,’ Old Jacob continued bitterly. ‘My hands started to go, and he seemed to be so keen for it. He said he wanted to contribute more to the community.’

Josie was still trying to figure out the practicalities of this new information.

‘Where would he have made them? It wasn’t at our place, his shed there. He certainly never did it in the house. Not that I saw. He made pies, but that was it.’

‘Of course he didn’t make them in his shed, lazy pig. He wouldn’t have wanted the bother of hauling the straw out to yours. I sold him mine.’

‘Your what?’

‘My shed! My workshop, out on the edge of Darkhill Ironworks. It’s all Forestry England land now, I suppose they pulled it down. The straw for the queen came from land close by. Hardly any distance at all. Those bales are heavy, see.’

Josie’s mouth was very, very dry.

‘A tiled shed in the woods? With a porch out to one side and a tin chimney sticking out the top?’ The back of her head throbbed. The other women leaned in, gripped.

Old Jacob sounded exasperated, as if the things he was telling Josie were common knowledge.

‘Yes, that was my shed, where I used to make all sorts. Belonged to my father before me, he built it for poaching. Trapped a few hares and pheasants out there myself, I’m not shy to admit. The shed was where I’d skin them, kept all my fishing gear, as well as my tools. Buried deep in the trees, it was. Only a rabbit track leading to it. I kept the path overgrown on purpose. The things I made in there, Josie, when I had the hands to. Not just the Queen of the March. Your dad wasn’t the only carpenter and handyman around these parts, back then. I used to be nimble enough, before my . . .’

He held up his hands. The joints of his fingers looked more swollen than ever.

Josie felt a sinking sensation pull her downwards.

‘Another shed.’

Old Jacob scowled. ‘Aren’t you listening? I told you, I sold it to him twelve, thirteen year back, when he took over the making of the queens. Threw in all my tools, too. My lathe, my chisels. My vice. I couldn’t use them anymore. I thought I was giving them to a good cause. He said he’d follow the Old Ways, just like I had. Your father was always a liar, but I was the only one who ever thought so, in those days. I gave him the benefit of the doubt anyway, because of your mother. She said I should try to see the good in people. And all the while he was fumbling around behind her back.’

Angela’s head came up.

‘Is that why you two fell out?’

Old Jacob stared into the fire.

‘Because of the way he made the queens. It wasn’t proper. It wasn’t tradition. He broke his promise.’

Silence.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He lacked respect for Ellwood’s customs. The March and everything that goes into it . . . he never had regard for any of it. Think of all the bad things that have happened here since he started his “duties”. The deaths, the sickness, the accidents. The damn plague. The elections. The bodies. Ellwood gets smaller every year. There’s hardly any of us left now. The Devil doesn’t like false gifts.’

Angela sighed. ‘That’s just how it is in small towns, Jacob. The Devil has nothing to do with it. Luck comes and goes, things happen. It wasn’t just us, it was the world entire. You can’t blame one man for that, not even him. He has enough to feel ashamed about. Those poor women are the real crimes. The real shame.’

Jacob would not be moved.

‘He never cared,’ the old man insisted. ‘The queen should have been made by someone who cared. My queens were delicately crafted, from balsa wood, from hay, from barley, from wheat. I used the techniques my father taught me, and his father before him. If I had a son, I would have taught him the same, but I didn’t. It would take me weeks to fashion the body, make it lightweight, weave all the straw and grass, make her hair, make her beautiful . . . they were worthy offerings! The Devil is only appeased with worthy offerings. I thought I could trust him, but the queens your father made . . . pah.’

Josie felt the floor softening beneath her. She fell through the quicksand of millions of collapsing ants, hastened by her fresh comprehension of what her father did, and how.

Old Jacob carried on his rant. ‘The ones he made . . . they were these huge, ugly things. Heavy, too. Messy. Straw bundled all over with no real skill or design. He had no respect for the Old Ways, and I told him that . . .’

Josie sank further into memory, the feel of it warm and thick like mud, thrashing through subcutaneous parts of her history she had buried, deep down, deep, deep, down, but buried things, like bones, don’t stay buried forever. Sooner or later, evil rises to the surface, weeds push back through the soil, and unless they are dealt with properly, via poison, or force, it would ever be thus.

And Josie didn’t have patience for an eternity of bad feeling.

There was another shed, she thought. Then, out loud:

‘Dad used your shed to make living queens,’ before the pub floor sealed over the top of her head, entombing her completely.

Chapter 48

Midnight came. Old Jacob had dropped off in his throne. His snores mingled with Finn’s.

‘Explain it to me like I’m an idiot, one more time,’ Wilkes slurred.

‘Me too,’ Angela pleaded from her bar stool. ‘Help me understand.’

Josie heard herself speak but could not connect the voice to her own self.

‘He abducts them,’ she said, matter of fact. ‘He drugs them, does unspeakable things to them, then he puts them inside the straw queen. Still paralysed. Still alive, you understand?’

She shifted on her own stool, body sore and aching from fatigue.

‘It’s so fucking simple,’ Wilkes said, eyes wide. ‘So fucking devious.’

‘They get carried along on the back of the Devil’s March. The queen is carried on her podium at the head of the March and we all skip along, dancing and singing, behind, for miles. Nobody is any the wiser that we’re actually prancing behind a live body, under all the straw.’

Angela rested her head in her hands. ‘I’m so very tired,’ she lamented.

‘Then,’ Josie continued, voice cold, ‘we throw them off the Devil’s Pulpit. The whole village helps. That only adds to his enjoyment of it. That’s your diversion, your distraction. The queen. It’s all a massive game, to him. A way of . . . controlling everyone, in secret. He likes making us a part of it. He likes us to be complicit. Like I was, as a kid.’

Angela wiped her face with her sleeve, as if cleaning away imaginary grime. Finn heaved himself up and sat as close to his mistress as he could, head resting on her knee. He whined softly, tail slapping on the floor as if to try and reassure everyone.

‘They’re alive when they’re thrown,’ Josie whispered. ‘Alive. Maybe conscious, hopefully not. It depends. They’re thrown off, to land in the valley below.’

‘Except for Laurel,’ Wilkes corrected. ‘He gave her too much of the toxin. She died before he could carry out his little ritual. She was in a poor state of health anyway. He overdosed her, then kept her. She was dead when she was thrown, months later. Like . . .’

‘Like he was punishing her for something?’

Josie thought about Old Jacob’s skimmingtons. The parades of shame. Scolds, flung from cliffs for being too loud.

‘Maybe she stuck up for herself too loudly,’ she said, grimly. ‘She survived him at sixteen, after all. She was a fighter.’

‘He used us. Abused our traditions. Made a mockery of all of us.’ Old Jacob had woken up. He glared at them all with bleary eyes.

‘Worse,’ Josie said. ‘He made us all accomplices.’

‘And after . . . after they’re thrown, what . . . ?’ Wilkes was still trying to work through it.

Josie sighed.

‘He goes back for them later, collects the queen. Loads them back into his trailer. It’s this custom-made thing that fits on to the back of his bike. He uses it to lug timber about. Except he doesn’t just use it for that. He also uses it to take the bodies home. To move them around. Nobody sees anything out of the ordinary, because they just see a straw queen. A bundle of hay in the back of a trailer. An effigy. Festival detritus. Not a girl. He takes what is left of them to one of the many wood bins he has, scattered around the Forest. Stores them there for as long as he wants. Sometimes years. Then he remembers them, unboxes them . . . And leaves them in prominent places.’

‘The last three, he left for you to find. Why not the ones before? The other six bodies?’

‘I don’t know.’ Josie frowned. ‘I’ve been trying to understand. I think it was because I was a kid back then. I think all this is about women, not girls. Or maybe . . . maybe he just got tired. Maybe he wanted me to figure it all out. Maybe, eventually, he wanted to get caught.’

Wilkes disagreed. ‘Usually, they think the opposite, they think they’ve gotten away with it so often that they will never get caught. They get sloppy, make mistakes. Very few of them get tired of the hunt.’

Josie didn’t know. ‘He used to make warm milk for me when I was little. I had problems sleeping. I woke up all the time and never knew why. People said it was because I was grieving Mum, but it wasn’t that. It was because I could hear him doing things.’

Grief, anger, shame. The feelings antagonised the ants, who coalesced around her lungs.

‘The milk always tasted too sweet. He said he put honey in it, but I thought it tasted more like caramel. It was hard to tell, exactly, because he’d always burn it in the pan.’

Angela looked unsteadily to the windows. To where her rows of jarred herbs, tinctures, potions and balms sat, on their sills.

Easily accessible, just like Old Jacob’s apothecary cabinet.

‘It wasn’t honey,’ the landlord said. ‘I don’t think he used on you what he used on them. He just wanted to keep you asleep, not paralyse you. He was more interested in making sure you didn’t interrupt him.’

‘I did, several times,’ Josie remembered.

Angela went over to one of the low casement windows, spent some time peering at the collection, then pulled a slim bottle from the sill. Brought it back to the fire.

‘I used to make this for my sister, when she couldn’t drop off,’ she said, holding the bottle out. Josie could see a label on the glass, one word scrawled in biro: SLEEP.

‘Chamomile, lavender, Valerian. Lion’s mane mushrooms. There’s a secret place they grow, up in the forest, that nobody knows about but me. The recipe is hundreds of years old, probably older, passed down through my family for generations. I had to sweeten it with birch sap, to take the bitterness out. It tastes a bit like . . .’

‘Caramel,’ Josie finished. ‘Too sweet for honey.’

‘I made a batch for your mum, when she was sick. To help her sleep through the pain. He must have kept it. Used it on you.’

More silence. The fire continued to pop and spit behind the glass doors.

‘But why?’ Angela said, eventually. She sounded lost. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. Why?’

Josie thought about Lena. About the joy that would flare within her whenever she was in control, exerting power over someone else. She was always happiest when she was at the centre of things, when she could influence or destroy. Her father had a similar aspect to him, only he went to greater lengths than Lena ever had to hide his true nature. He had made himself indispensable to the locals of Ellwood. He was foul to his family, but polite enough when it came to everyone else.

He was an expert wearer of masks, Josie understood, both physical and otherwise. Only Old Jacob had seen past the facade.

‘Because he could,’ Wilkes replied. ‘What other reason is there?’

‘Where do you suppose he is?’

Angela put the bottle back on its sill, running her hand across the jars. Her finger rings tapped against the glass, eliciting different tones from each container, depending on the contents and how full they were.

‘In the forest somewhere. Hiding.’ Old Jacob’s nose dripped again. He dabbed at it with a handkerchief.

‘In your old shed?’

Jacob shook his head.

‘No, he won’t go back there. If it’s even still standing. Too obvious. He knows we’d come looking eventually. That’s why he emptied out the shed at the cottage, too. He’s been preparing for this for some time.’

‘He left behind Emmet’s mask. Why?’

‘Maybe he wanted to leave you an heirloom.’

Josie didn’t think so.

Old Jacob shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. He could be anywhere. He knows the Forest better than all of us.’

‘The police won’t find him, is what you’re saying.’ Wilkes, exasperated, slid off her chair entirely and lay flat on her back on the flagstone floor, while Finn sniffed around her body, curiously.

Old Jacob snorted.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ the man said, something canny and cunning in his voice. ‘Justice will find him if the police don’t, never doubt it.’

‘What do you mean?’ Josie stared at Old Jacob.

‘Only that justice will find him swift enough. I know, because I can see her sitting on your shoulder.’ The old man grinned.

The skin of her left earlobe tingled.

‘Who?’

‘Who do you think? There’s only one true authority, around here. Only one person we pay dues to.’

‘The Devil? But you said “her”.’

Old Jacob’s eyes were huge with reflected flames and shadow.

‘What,’ he said soberly, ‘makes you think the Devil is a he?’

Chapter 49

Angela laid her head next to Josie’s in bed that night, holding her tight as she fell into a sleep marred by the weirdness of repressed memories, unearthed by the crawling, busy bodies intent on pushing all the bad out, to the surface, and away.

Josie drank in the landlord’s softness, and warmth, and let her mind take her where it wanted.

Another shed. The one that belonged to Old Jacob.

I sold it to him twelve year back, when he took over the making of the queens.

Threw in all my tools, too. My lathe, my chisels. My vice.

He said he’d use it for storage.

A shed in the woods. Chimney, smoking. Padlock on the door.

A bike, propped against a tree. Multicoloured, pannier on the back, basket on the front. Neon bright. A woman on a bench, braid dangling down. More braids on a rack on the shed wall. Woodsmoke and heat, and a pounding headache at the back of her skull. Bales of hay under the bench.

Josie’s skin itched so much she needed to get rid of it.

In the dream she bolted away from the shed, left her father grunting and straining as he ejaculated messily, and went outside, into the cool forest. Under the largest beech canopy, she found a long stone, made jagged by three deep claw marks. Josie ripped off her coat, her sweater, her shirt, her jeans. Down to her bralet and knickers, she rubbed herself, dragging her body across the rock, pumicing away the shame and the anger and the guilt and the realisation that she had been, even if unwillingly, a witness to a crime so terrible she could not bear it.

Under her skin, she found tightly packed wheat, hay, and yellow straw blades all bundled together in a messy approximation of limbs, torso, breasts. The straw was infested with insects and critters of all kinds: harvest mice, nibbling at her grassy innards, ladybirds, thousands of them. Beetles, grasshoppers, crickets. Big, colourful butterflies. Flying ants crawled out from a darkness behind the straw blades and took flight, off to found their own, new colonies.

The forest flickered, shifted. Josie was rubbing herself across a milestone marker on Ellwood’s main street, just outside the King’s Arms. Her insides were no longer straw. They were rotting meat, maggoty and green.

‘Cor, she’s fucking heavy this time, mate, what did you put in her?’

Josie looked up.

Her father and several other men were unloading the queen from the small steel trailer he fixed to his bike, preparing to take her to her ceremonial platform outside the King’s Arms, where the Devil’s March always started from.

The whole town had assembled, Josie saw, in full regalia. Burning torches flickered in the night. A band played, dancers clacked ceremonial sticks together. People ate pies and drank mead and cider and ale from laden tables set up along the street.

Josie’s father, dressed in his bike leathers, helmet still on, visor up, smirked.

‘Well, yeah. I weighed her down with rocks. Last year her bindings broke, the wind took her and she got snagged on the treetops, remember? Nearly lost her before the end.’

One of the men chuckled. ‘Oh, God, I forgot that. We had a right rigmarole poking her down with poles and all sorts. Didn’t someone have to climb up and dislodge her?’

‘Me!’ a small voice piped up. It was a local kid, skinny, a strong climber. The kid looked a lot like Josie had, at that age. She had the same hair braid. She wore red Converse chucks.

‘Didn’t think you’d want it to happen again,’ Josie’s father shrugged. ‘So she’s put a bit of weight on this year.’

He slapped the straw effigy hard, on the thigh, then himself on the belly.

‘She’s not the only one.’

More laughter, raucous, with an edge to it. Dad had a way of getting people to laugh with him, even when they didn’t like him that much. He tapped into the fervour of the night. People were always excited for the Devil’s March. It was an occasion where a person could let off steam, drink, laugh, dance, eat, walk, exact pantomime violence on the body of a straw virgin. The festival brought out the raw in people, the primeval. A strange, mob-like energy fizzed in the air. The gathered crowds sucked it in and breathed it back out, recycled zeal.

The queen, silent, immobile, lumpish, was heaved into her throne. Heavy straps were buckled across her legs. Josie saw fluid leaking from the bottom of the effigy. No one else seemed to notice.

The smell, however, was harder to disguise.

‘Lord, she stinks a bit, this one, did you use manure straw?’

Josie’s father shrugged sheepishly. ‘Needs must,’ he said. Only it wasn’t manure, this smell. It was too sweet, too sour at the same time. A bad-meat smell, smothered with hay.

A crown of holly and ivy was placed on the queen’s head.

Four men, including Josie’s father, then lifted her palanquin up on to their shoulders, gripping the handles and jiggling them around to try and get a more comfortable purchase.

‘There’s a happy medium, John,’ one of the queen bearers complained. ‘She weighs a bloody ton! We’ve got miles to walk with this.’

‘Yes,’ Josie’s father said, turning and staring right at his daughter. His head was no longer his own, but that of an ant. ‘Miles and miles and miles.’

Josie woke up with a start, crying out. She found herself drenched in sweat and trembling, ants streaming across the sheets, every bit as distressed as she was.

‘What is it?’ Angela roused slowly, still drunk. ‘What?’

‘I think he’ll be back for the March,’ Josie gabbled. ‘I think he’s tied to it, to the performance aspect. The pageantry. I think he’ll be back. In a different mask. He’ll get a kick out of that. He’s going to come back, to join in. He’s coming back for the Devil’s March.’

Angela reached out in the dark, gripped Josie’s hand tightly in her own.

‘Then we’ll be waiting for him,’ she said quietly. ‘Come back to sleep, love.’

Chapter 50

Days passed. Torrential bursts of rain came and went, lashing the land and drenching it so thoroughly that all the fields, heathland and farmland around Ellwood became a spongy, waterlogged bog. Even the forested parts were nigh unwalkable, as mud and leaf mulch combined into a sticky, slippery mire that sent dog walkers and stubborn hikers tumbling to their knees and falling into puddles wherever they dared to tread. Angela quickly got fed up with sweeping tracked mud from the floor of the pub every day, so she installed old-fashioned boot brushes on the pavement outside for patrons to wipe their feet on, before entry.

She put up a small cardboard sign above it, at eye level, to be extra sure: Muddy Feet = No Service.

The locals who felt like braving the weather knew better than to argue. The ones that didn’t stayed home.

The pub fell quiet, apart from a few hardened regulars.

The King’s Arms stood warm and steady as storm after storm rolled in, battering the region, ripping thatched roofs to pieces, felling trees, blowing over chimney stacks and telegraph poles, smashing windows and loosening tiles. It was the worst succession of storms in recent history, according to the news, which Josie still watched each evening, only now she watched it on a small portable TV in the corner of the bar with Angela and Finn, background noise while they prepared the pub for service. Every evening she hoped to hear news about the dead girls, or her father, or something that would give her hope that justice would be served, but every evening it was the same succession of local interest pieces: disaster weather. Sports fixtures. Small disputes. A good-news tidbit thrown in for balance.

Josie knew, when it came down to it, that justice wouldn’t be served, not by the Devil like Old Jacob had said. No. It would be left to her.

That was why the colony had made a home in her. Josie found she had come to more peaceable terms with the infestation, perhaps because she had finally found a home of her own, with Angela, with Finn, with her cleaning duties and the locals who became an important feature of her daily existence at the pub.

But to Josie, the responsibility for righting decades of wrongs now resting firmly on her shoulders was intimidating, albeit inevitable. Her father had made her responsible for a lot, over the years. He had made her a homemaker, a surrogate wife, cook, parent to herself, and then, when he got bolder with his habits, he made her an accomplice. Josie would never get over the guilt of soundly sleeping while innocent women suffered within a stone’s throw of her childhood bed. Guilt was like a stain, and it leached into her very soul, but the thought of catching him, of somehow bringing him to account, kept her sane.

As did the thought of revenge.

It certainly kept the colony happy, knowing there was a plan.

A plan that the weather, which bore down relentlessly, was doing its best to sabotage.

‘The March will be a washout this year,’ Wilkes said one evening, thumbing through her phone and sipping her usual white wine. She wore her hair in a less severe style, and had done away with the starchy buttoned collars, opting for heavy knitwear instead. Josie thought the change suited her.

‘If the weather continues like this, we can say goodbye to any family reunions with your dad,’ Wilkes continued bleakly.

‘I don’t think a bit of weather will stop him,’ Josie remarked. ‘He might be many things, but he isn’t a fair-weather type of man.’

Josie remembered muddy boots on her mother’s clean floors. She should go back to the cottage, she knew, and clean up after him. That was, after all, her main skillset. Cleaning things. Tidying things. Putting things away. Setting the world to rights one mess at a time.

But it didn’t feel right to, not yet.

Not when he might come back and sully all her efforts.

Josie felt him out there, always, watching. Whether he was or not was immaterial. She felt his presence, as she had since she was little. Looming, overbearing, angry. Unpredictable. It was like a horrible itch between her shoulder blades, one she couldn’t quite reach.

‘I don’t think there is going to be a Devil’s March this year,’ Angela said, coming in from the back with a stack of firewood. She took it over to the burner and dumped it in the empty wood basket next to it.

Old Jacob, who was seated in his spot as usual, took that as his cue, and started rebuilding the fire that had burned low.

‘What? Why?’

‘With your father gone . . . like it or not, but he did a good deal of the heavy lifting, the setting up, the organising . . . not to mention, he . . .’

‘He fashioned the queens.’

Angela shrugged. ‘I didn’t want to have to say it out loud, given everything we suspect now but . . . no queen, no march. Nobody else has got the skills, see. A dying practice. Apart from Old Jacob, and his hands have gone.’

Old Jacob bowed his head.

‘He doesn’t need his hands,’ Josie said, flatly. ‘I’ve got hands, and mine work perfectly well.’

Old Jacob’s head came back up.

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying, the Devil’s March has taken place every year for thousands of years except once, right? If we’ve got any hope of catching my father, we can’t let it die off. I’ve got hands. Old Jacob has the knowledge. He can teach me how to make the queens. The rest of it, we’ll all muck in. Offer up free pints in exchange for shifting stuff about, decorating, all that. We don’t need my father.’

Old Jacob liked this idea. He liked it a lot.

‘You’ll do exactly as I instruct?’ he said, gazing at Josie from where he knelt awkwardly.

Josie tilted her head to one side. ‘Depends how bossy you are.’

Angela chuckled. She liked it when Josie tapped into her cheekier side. She was no longer using humour to deflect and mask her pain, but to enjoy being part of a conversation, part of a community, something bigger than herself, at last.

Old Jacob wagged a crooked finger at the women.

‘We’ll do it properly, this time. You’ll follow my instructions, to the letter. We’ll make amends with the Devil.’

And make amends, Josie did. She put herself completely at Jacob’s disposal.

She set herself to the task of fashioning the Queen of the March.

Chapter 51

The straw was bunched, then stitched on to a leather lining ribbed with balsa wood struts that Old Jacob could still whittle, given the soft sponginess of the wood. Having a practical task brought new cheer to the old man, who seemed drawn and tired as winter marched on. His house had sprung several new leaks from the roof, and an upstairs window had smashed during a storm, only days before his ancient boiler ground to a halt, leaving the house with no heating.

When Angela discovered this, she moved Jacob immediately into one of the King’s Arms guest rooms, ignoring his protestations with the steely determination of a well-meaning bulldozer.

‘I’m not having it,’ she simply said, over and over. ‘Not this winter. Not alone, in that shit heap of a house. I’m just not having it.’

And Jacob found that this year, he was too cold and old to be stubborn. His pride was forced to take a seat by the fire. He showed his gratitude to Angela by not complaining about her fussiness as loudly as usual. Angela returned the favour by not losing her temper when the pub became a workshop for the straw queen.

The legs were assembled first, then the torso, with breasts moulded from soft balls of dried grass, then the head. Old Jacob had a very particular order he needed Josie to stick to, for reasons he kept to himself. The edifice was put together in parts and sewn into a complete effigy like a weird stuffed doll. Josie had a hard time with this part of the assembly: every time she stabbed her needle through the leather lining, pulling limbs towards the torso, tightening seams, arranging legs, making sure the head sat straight, she thought of Laurel Howell’s body, splayed out across the floor of the Knoll, ankles broken, knees bent, arms flung out awkwardly, like a dropped toy.

Once assembled, the effigy was packed with cotton, linen and hay. This part was the most strenuous, and took Josie hours of labour. She cut herself on the straw dozens of times, and pulled sharp, hair-thin splinters of the stuff from under each one of her nails, which had grown long again.

‘We used to use oat straw,’ Jacob said helpfully, as Josie grunted with exertion, down on her knees on the pub flagstones. Finn sniffed at her excitedly, yipping every now and then and tugging on the queen’s leg or arm, thinking it all a game, until Angela hooked him out of the bar and banished him into the back, where he howled dolefully, miserable at his exclusion.

‘Oh?’ Josie didn’t have the breath for a pithier response.

‘Softer. More fragrant. It was grown on an allotment that I handed over to your father, for just that purpose. Near the shed, like I said. Special seed, land hand-tilled by generations. He was supposed to tend to it, never did. The crop has gone almost completely wild. The mess that is left . . . well, it failed, these past few years. As if angry with us. We have to use wheat straw now. There’s a farm over the other side of Coleford that lets us have it.’

‘Fascinating.’ Josie pummelled a sharp, stiff handful of the stuffing into the queen’s torso. Every time she did, she thought of her father stuffing the straw costume shell with a warm body, instead. Limp, unresisting. Pressing soft flesh into place, tightening the leather lining up around the chest, the neck, and finally, the face. The image, which became a mind-movie, played on a loop until Josie felt sick to her very stomach. She sat back on her heels, stifling a rancid belch.

‘I know you probably think that makes no difference,’ Old Jacob continued, leaning on his stick. ‘The type of straw. But it does. The Devil sees all.’

‘I hope so,’ Josie replied grimly. ‘I hope it sees me coming.’

A small stirring in her chest felt like a warning.

Once the straw shell was stuffed, the limbs and other parts packed tight enough to look lifelike, Josie stitched up the large gash running the length of the body so that the leather lining was tightly sealed. Then she arranged the straw to hide the seams.

All that remained was to give the queen her face.

Josie took her time over this part, bending wire into the shapes of eyes, brows, lips, a nose, high cheekbones, a pair of ears. She wrapped each wire sculpture with grass, more pliable and less likely to break than straw, then pinned each feature to the head, carefully rearranging until she saw the face of a woman who looked not that dissimilar to herself. To Laurel. To Jane Bowl. To the other women. Serious expression. Large eyes. A mouth that could smile but chose not to.

When she was done, she sat back on her heels. Angela peered over the bar, curious. Old Jacob sat silently, his posture suggesting approval.

Josie felt only dread as she looked at the queen. For her fate was that of sacrifice, to be thrown to the Wye Valley floor from the highest point.

I’m sorry, Josie said silently. I’m so very sorry for what is to come.

She didn’t know if she was talking to the queen, to the murdered women, or to her father.

‘Your father,’ Jacob said, echoing her thoughts, ‘never bothered with much of a face.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘He made an effort over the eyes, some years. But never a mouth. I always thought that was a travesty. A queen should have eyes, ears, and a mouth with which to speak.’

Josie didn’t need to answer. She thought of the scolds again, how her father had chosen to honour the parts of town history that suited him best. Women, silenced. Punished. Shamed.

Outside, the rain had finally let up. Josie could hear ladders being placed against the pub walls as strands of bunting were hung. She could hear tables clattering, beer barrels rolling. Her hands started to sweat with nerves.

Ellwood was in the final throes of festival preparation.

Chapter 52

The day came; the sky was dull, clouds loaded with menace, lurking, but never quite unleashing the rain they threatened. Mizzle made everything damp, but not enough to saturate local spirits.

The Devil’s March got underway.

By four in the afternoon, just as the day was falling to dark, Ellwood’s main road crowded with locals, visitors from surrounding villages and towns, and strangers who heard about the festivities and wanted to join in. It was the busiest day of the whole year in Ellwood. Josie stood behind a trestle table serving mulled cider and plastic pints of ale with a tight chest, fear bundled around her heart. She wondered if the high street had looked like this all the time, back in the old days. Ellwood used to have a market on this street once a week, used to be a thoroughfare with a butcher shop, tailor, a bakery, post office. Now only the school and pub remained, and the little cemetery. Josie felt sad for the hamlet, which had been steadily dying for years.

Dying, but not quite dead, not today.

The crowds were both a blessing, and a hindrance. It would be hard to spot her father in all the chaos. Especially as most of the people assembled were in festival regalia, which included masks, of which there was a dizzying, almost nightmarish array on show. Like the giant papier mâché and cardboard rooster head, brightly painted, red rubber wattle flapping about as the wearer bobbed and clucked, theatrically pecking at passers-by. Some laughed, some didn’t. The head was intimidating, the hard resin eyes too realistic. Dozens of ‘feathers’ sewn to the rest of the costume were, in fact, scraps of fabric, like a rag-rug, pinks and yellows and lurid reds, all of which made a soft rushing noise as the rooster moved through the crowds, occasionally letting out a loud gobbling noise for effect.

Is it him? Josie thought, watching the rooster peck a tourist.

No. Not his style.

Other masks leered out of the throng, depending on where Josie looked. A wolf’s head. A brown hare with pheasant tail feathers for ears. A joke rubber horse’s head. A barn owl mask, two actually, the wearers holding hands as a couple, coordinated with long brown cloaks lined with white velvet. Deer, and stags sporting large antler crowns. A fox. Dozens of cats. Crows. A bull. Green oak leaves, painted on to faces, willow leaves across the tops of eyebrows so grown men wandered about with wildly quizzical expressions. Other faces were not masked, but smeared entirely red, green, black or blue. A woman dressed in black-and-white patches, like Dalmatian spots, wandered up, walking a puppet dog on strings. As she reached Josie’s table, she made the marionette dog cock its furry leg against the trestle, making a psssss noise to imitate dog piss.

Finn, who was curled up at Josie’s feet, lifted his head and growled.

Josie smiled uncertainly behind her mask and handed over a glass of mulled cider. The woman accepted it, did a double take when she saw what Josie was wearing on her head, then hurried away, dragging the marionette along, charade forgotten.

Good, Josie thought to herself. At last, someone is scared of me.

Josie had first retrieved her woodpecker mask from her childhood bedroom in the cottage, clambering over piles of junk and waste and, as she’d suspected, wood offcuts and tools, to get to the shelf where it sat. On taking it back to the King’s Arms, however, and trying it on in front of a mirror, she found she couldn’t place the bird’s likeness to her own face without a deluge of emotions accompanying it: the loss of her mother, fresh as if it had happened only yesterday. The excitement of the March, seen through a child’s eyes. The knowledge that she had played with Laurel, right outside this very pub, and then forgotten the encounter, just like she had forgotten so much else about her earlier years, because her father had stolen those memories with drugged milk, with injury, with dismissal. His gaze always on her, watching, disapproving. The constant, crushing pain of needing his approval while also fearing him, fearing him right down to her bones, for he may have presented in a friendly way to the rest of the world, but to Josie he was hot one minute, cold the next, affectionate or angry, with no in-between.

The woodpecker mask made Josie feel like a child again, vulnerable, lost, hurt. So she put it to one side, then remembered she had a different mask at her disposal. One that would fit.

And so, for the purposes of the March, she was Josie no more.

She was Emmet, and she found, to her surprise, that the mask, with its crown of feathers and antlers, to which she added a wreath of corn, holly and ivy, felt right to wear. It felt powerful. Like she’d taken off her real mask, her own face, and revealed the truth of what lay beneath, deep down, where the colony dwelled. The truth of herself, varnished, half black, half red. Josie could be a predator, too.

She had no doubt her father wore this mask while he did things to those women. He would have worn it to frighten them, to make himself feel more manly, virile, to take on a different persona, so he could distance himself from what he was doing. It wasn’t him, it was Emmet. He would have worn it to stick a middle finger up at all the rural superstitions and folklore he’d grown to hate as passionately as he hated Ellwood, but lacked the means, financial and otherwise, to leave. He had spent years, probably, listening to Old Jacob’s stories in the pub. Then, when he needed a disguise, he had taken one of those stories and corrupted it.

And in Emmet’s mask, he had created his own legend. A grisly, grimy, grubby legend, of sex, of power, of broken, pretty bones. Josie was not disgusted by the visage tied to her head. She wore it like armour. She wore it to piss her father off. She wore it to remind herself of why she was here: for Laurel Howell, for the bones in the bag, for the girl in the cave at Puzzlewood. For the others: Jane Doe One, Jane Doe Two, Alison Wright, Jane Bowl, Lucy McRobert, Daniella Penney. The names swirled around in Josie’s head as she watched the March crowd swell in anticipation.

The ants, by contrast, were quiet and patient inside her.

Wilkes stood nearby with Angela and Old Jacob, making up their usual four. The ex-detective was not masked but made a token effort to dress up with some face paint, a rainbow that started over the corner of her eye and ended on the outer edge, like a fat, curved, multicoloured brow.

‘This is the most countryside shit I’ve ever seen,’ she said in disbelief as she chewed on a hot sausage roll. ‘I keep expecting Lord fucking Summerisle to jump out at me, any moment.’

Old Jacob scowled. He had his weasel mask up on the top of his head, so he could blow his nose, which dripped from the cold. ‘This, whether you like it or not, is our identity. The whole damn country is losing contact with the Old Ways. But not here. Not in Ellwood.’

Wilkes snorted. ‘It’s not my fucking identity. This is really good, by the way.’

‘I’m surprised you can eat, at a time like this,’ Angela said, hoisting an empty barrel out of the way and tapping into a new one. ‘My stomach is in knots.’

Wilkes smiled around flaky pastry. ‘Thrill of the chase. Makes me hungry.’ Her eyes darted about the crowd, seeking Josie’s father.

I know what you mean, Josie thought, doing the same.

The festivities ramped up with dancing from different troupes of performers, some Morris dancers, others, more regional. Like the men in top hats who did odd little jigs as they marched along the street, taking long, exaggerated strides, then spinning around on the spot, before continuing on. And the performers in hats stuck all over with straw, feathers, ears of corn, giant crowns of holly, who tumbled and did flips. Or the staid men and women sidestepping in long black jackets with felt jagged stripes embroidered on, the Devil’s claw marks. Their leader had a felt cut-out in the shape of the Queen of the March covering most of her back and played the accordion. Or the group with bells on their shoes and in hands, long yellow stockings, garters, braces crossed across their chests and backs, rag bundles and pom poms, brandishing long pale wooden batons that clicked and clacked against each other as pipes whistled in accompaniment. After that, purple shirts, green leggings, scarlet faces, leather strokers, dancers spinning each other around, arm in arm. Then, a group of long, black-skirted, red-shirted women, kicking legs out to the front and side, bobbing up and down in perfect synchronicity.

Old Jacob continued to scowl from beneath his upturned mask. ‘Appalachian step dancing. Pah. It used to be just local performers. The queen’s molly, people who knew the proper steps, the real songs. Molly dancers were ploughboys, back then. Nowadays, anyone dances.’

‘It’s still tradition,’ Angela soothed. She was getting increasingly nervous, mouth drawn tight, deep creases between her eyebrows.

‘Not ours. The Devil notices things like this. It’s disrespect.’

Wilkes stuffed the remainder of the sausage roll into her mouth in one go. ‘Traditions are meant to be fun, I always thought,’ she managed, her mouth full. ‘Not a millstone around your neck.’

A group of men in green cummerbunds leapt past the table with long wooden-handled swords above their heads. They formed a circle, closing the lethal blades in and around each other’s heads in intricate, geometric patterns of interlocked warped metal. One wrong move, one quick flex, and a man could lose his head between those blades.

‘Rapper sword dancing,’ Old Jacob muttered, furiously. He pulled his mask back down, to hide the sour look on his face. Behind him, groups of children skipped and ducked beneath large triangles of patterned cloth, going around and around in circles, never seeming to tire of the routine. Josie found the repetition and glee nightmarish.

Above all this, on her customary platform, waiting, sat the queen. Josie’s queen. Regal, beautifully crafted from straw. People posed beside her for photos, smiling. One woman wrapped her arms around the base of the statue, slapping the icon hard on the thigh.

‘We’ve missed you, old bitch!’ she cried happily.

The queen didn’t deign to reply.

Chapter 53

At six in the evening, the March started in earnest. The dancing stopped, the beer kegs sat drained, the mullers switched off. The gathered crowds milled about, chattering, laughing, singing to themselves, passing lit torches around, as the queen was hoisted on to the shoulders of the four queen bearers, all of whom wore special red velvet jackets and breeches for the occasion. Beneath the breeches, long socks, tucked into sturdy boots. They had a good distance to walk. The right footwear made all the difference.

‘It’s going to rain,’ Old Jacob said, crabbily eyeing up the sky.

‘It’s not going to rain,’ Angela replied. ‘It’s not as cold as last year’s March, but it’s not going to rain. You know you can’t walk the whole distance, right? Not with all those broken bones still floating about your body.’

‘I know, I know. Just to the end of the street.’

‘Not even the end of the street. You must save your energy. We’ll meet them at the Pulpit, that’s a long enough walk for you, from Tidenham Chase car park. I can probably wheel you most of the way.’

Angela was referring to the wheelchair the hospital had given him. Jacob shook with anger at the suggestion.

‘You’ll do no such thing,’ he said indignantly.

‘So, we’ll drive to the car park and get going right away. We can take our time, then. Plus, we’ve got Finn for moral support.’

Finn woofed, wagged his tail. He wanted to get going, just like everyone else.

Angela was not done. ‘Josie, stick with Wilkes. No solo heroics. You lay eyes on him, then you call it in. Let the police do the rest.’ The landlord gripped Josie’s masked face in her hands. ‘Take this thing off for a second, it’s awful.’

Josie did as she was told. Angela stared into her eyes. The landlord was scared.

‘Promise me,’ she said firmly. ‘You don’t go after him. You don’t confront him. You spot him, you keep your distance, you call it in. OK?’

Wilkes examined the backs of her brittle fingernails closely, struggling to keep a neutral expression. Josie nodded. ‘OK.’

‘Promise me. You don’t go near him.’

‘I promise.’

They both knew she didn’t mean it.

Josie put the mask back on, tying the straps tight around her head, which felt odd and cold and stubbly without her usual thick mass of hair to keep it warm.

‘They’re leaving,’ Old Jacob said as a great cheer went up.

The March moved off, away from the front of the pub. Music started up, abrasive, jarring. Tambourines and symbols, horns and accordions. Josie remembered Old Jacob talking about ‘rough music’, skimmingtons, Charivari. Processions built to shame women, scolds. Was this any different? The woman in question was straw, but no less harangued.

Josie and Wilkes joined the surge, moving along Ellwood’s main street, leaving Angela and Old Jacob behind, with Finn, who barked in confusion at being left when he thought he was about to have a good, long walk.

‘Be safe!’ Angela called, but Josie had no time to wave back. She settled her mask more comfortably while she followed the crowd, adjusting the straps, all the time keeping an eye out for her father.

The March usually took three to four hours to complete, depending on the speed of the participants. Some years it was slow, some fast, but everyone found their own pace and stuck to it, meaning the procession often spread out for a good mile along the route. Not everyone went the whole distance, some only walked part of the way, others drove to the car park nearest the end point, Tidenham Chase, and walked the final section, along Offa’s Dyke way, to the Devil’s Pulpit.

Her father, Josie knew, would be in it for the long haul. He would derive the most pleasure from that. Pretending to be a loyal participant while secretly seething with contempt, with anger.

‘See him yet?’ Wilkes muttered as they walked.

Josie shook her head. ‘He’s here though,’ she replied calmly. ‘I can feel it.’

At the end of the main street, the March turned left on to Parkend Walk, which eventually became Mile End Walk, but before that, it passed through the Knoll. Wilkes blew out her cheeks as the trees loomed ahead.

‘Been a year since I was last here,’ she said. ‘Looking down at a dead girl.’

‘Almost exactly one year ago to the day,’ Josie replied, as they reached the edge of the ancient, wooded dell. ‘The day after the March is when I found her. And not long after, I met you.’

‘I’m sorry for how I treated you,’ the ex-detective said. She seemed less sure of herself than ever. Josie wondered if Wilkes had suddenly realised she wouldn’t have the luxury of backup, of a police mandate, of weaponry and extra bodies on call if she needed them. In her mind, up until now, she had still been a detective constable with the full weight of the Force, and the law, behind her, not an ousted, unemployed woman with pastry crumbs around her lips and a rainbow daubed across one side of her face.

Josie, on the other hand, felt stronger than she ever had. Perhaps it was the colony, who had formed taut ropes inside her limbs, powering them along quickly, lending her a preternatural strength she had never felt before. Or perhaps it was that she had finally found purpose, and found something worth coming back to, after.

Or perhaps it was the thought of finally giving the man she hated calling her father some taste of his own violence.

‘It’s in the past,’ Josie said, eyes continuously scanning the crowds.

They passed by Laurel’s spot, where the devil’s marks had started to heal over with a gummy residue. Josie still could not fathom why her dad had made those marks, and with what. His woodworking tools all had sharp edges, nothing ragged, claw-like, like this. A dismal scrap of police tape remained tied just beneath, knotted around the pine trunk under which Josie had collapsed, and come nose to nose with a corpse.

It felt like a lifetime ago, now. Josie was an entirely different woman to the person who had snivelled down the phone that cold November afternoon, crying and fainting and making a scene for the police, when they did arrive.

‘Still,’ Wilkes said, staring at the tape. The two women had paused, momentarily, to pay their respects.

‘It doesn’t matter. Not now.’

‘It does to me. I just wanted to know if you knew. Anything at all. I was sure he was a good fit for it, your father. I should have gone about proving it differently.’

But Josie had stopped listening.

Because while the rest of the procession moved along behind them, dancing, clapping, singing, ringing bells, bashing tambourines, and chatting merrily, one participant had stopped, on the opposite side of the path to the two women. Josie felt his gaze on the back of her shaved head.

She turned, slowly, thankful for Emmet’s mask to hide behind.

And saw him.

The figure held a burning torch in one hand, around which dozens of gnats danced. The trees of the Knoll stretched high over the top of his head, and Josie knew right away that she was looking at her father, because he was wearing a mask that was shiny, varnished dark brown, with two huge, round eyes up top, weird, serrated mandibles on the chin, and two thin antennae sticking out the hairline.

Her father, Josie saw, had come to the March dressed as an ant. The colony inside her screeched in fury.

Kill!

Josie remained rooted to the spot as father and daughter stared at each other across the flow of marching people. Wilkes, frowning, turned, followed Josie’s gaze, letting out a small gasp when she saw him.

‘Back to the scene of the crime,’ she muttered angrily. ‘How very fucking textbook of him.’

That was the whole point, Josie knew. To come back and relive his kills, relive the processional theatre of it all, the macabre pageantry. To revel in the memories, especially now the straw queens were off limits to him.

Josie took a step forwards, fists clenched, but in the same instant, a cackling knot of processionals hustled past, skipping and cheering. The ant-headed man lingered a moment, then ducked and vanished into the crowd, letting himself be swept along like a twig down a river. Wilkes hissed between her teeth.

‘Gone again,’ she said.

A few cold spots of rain spattered on to the back of Josie’s neck, just like Old Jacob had predicted.

‘Not for long. We know he’s here now. That’s all that matters.’

‘Shall we call it in?’

‘No.’

Josie started walking again, eyes ahead. She knew he would march the whole distance, until he reached the Pulpit, for he would want to look down one last time and reminisce about all the women he’d thrown from it. He would peer over the edge and feel proud of himself for getting the better of these countryside folk, but pride, Josie knew, always came before a fall.

Her father should know that better than anyone.

Chapter 54

The March thinned out as the rain grew heavier. Fair-weather walkers, Old Jacob would have said. The procession headed through Sling, along a dark country road that was bordered by fields edging on to Trow Green.

The March lost more people at St Briavels and Coldharbour, where kind folk waited for them with hot chocolates, plastic disposable rain macs, umbrellas and hot dogs, handing these things out to people passing as if doling out water and energy pouches at a marathon. The mood remained high, despite the worsening weather.

Josie worried about the straw queen, even though she had a cloth canopy over her head. She knew it was silly to worry for something that was about to be lobbed off a cliff, but ever since she’d found Laurel’s remains, and the other two women, discarded like trash, like unwanted junk, she’d gotten peculiar about throwing things away. She understood Old Jacob’s house a little better, the clutter and why he hung on to it, because even the smallest item could have significance, sentimental value, some emotional permanence beyond it being a simple inanimate object.

The March proceeded down a narrow, walled single track that passed the odd farmhouse or gated-off barn conversion. Huge banks of bracken leaned in here, forcing the procession to cluster tighter together. This made it even more difficult to know where Josie’s father was, which affected Wilkes, who jumped at every loud noise, looked over her shoulder constantly, and walked with her hands stuffed under her armpits as the rain got heavier and more insistent. Still, the singing, dancing, clapping and cheering did not stop. If anything, it got louder, more purposeful in the face of the downpour. Tambourines drummed incessantly, pipes wailed, the accordion kept going, despite the rain.

Wilkes made it clear she hated every moment of the proceedings.

‘You do this every year for fun?’ she muttered, as rainwater trickled down the back of her neck. The ex-detective shrugged her shoulders repeatedly, only making herself wetter.

‘It’s tradition,’ Josie replied from behind her mask. She kept her eyes on the crowd ahead, and although she couldn’t see him, she knew whereabouts her dad would be. He would be as close to the queen as he could get.

The now very bedraggled March left the road eventually and joined the Offa’s Dyke path at the six-mile mark, just before Mill Hill. The trail deviated along a dark tunnel through low oak boughs, bordered by a stone wall on one side, and a small stream on the other. It was marked with a small waymark, acorn carved into the tip. Her dad had been everywhere, Josie realised. She would be finding his marks for years to come, in the most unexpected of places.

Moths crawled out of her ears and flew into the night.

This part of the trail felt different to the road route. It felt older, more mystical, more rooted to a different reality as it followed the line of an ancient earthwork, built by an ambitious king from the eighth century, as Old Jacob had informed her. The night grew darker and more volatile. The colony responded in kind, making their own processional way, a shivering landslide of small beasts, of creeping, crawling, flitting, jumping things, snaking around the unsuspecting boots of the merrymakers on their way to throw a queen to her doom. The queen inside of Josie kept quiet, waiting, waiting.

A few miles more, and the Dyke path met the dense forest canopy of Lippets Grove Nature Reserve. Another favourite spot that Josie had come to with her mother. Were there more mouldering bones out here, waiting to be found? More claw marks in bark, more acorns on posts?

The March grew louder still, more raucous. The crowd could sense the end approaching and got a second wind. They were grateful, tired, wet-through, jubilant. The trees dripped and swayed with the weather, making their own rowdy noise that contributed to an atmosphere almost feral. The animal masks in the flickering, guttering torchlight looked horrifying, nightmarish, like something witnessed when drugged, or hallucinating, or dreaming. The songs being sung sounded more like grunts, shrieks, braying and baying, in the small gaps of awareness Josie was afforded between moths crawling out of her head. There seemed to be an endless supply of them, fluttering away like memories, like childish hopes.

And then, suddenly, they were on the final hundred-metre stretch. The rain stopped. The singing hushed. People walked single file under the dripping trees. Wilkes limped along, for her boots were new, unproven, rubbing against her ankles. She looked exhausted and, somehow, ashamed of herself, as if she couldn’t believe she was going along with this charade.

Josie had no sympathy for her. She had no feelings left inside at all.

She simply had an end in sight, and a means to freedom. Just one swift push, and it would all be done. Justice would be served. And Josie could finally lay the colony to rest.

The Pulpit appeared as a dark gap in the thick beech treeline, lit for the occasion by a large copper brazier someone had placed earlier. Flames from this brazier cast wildly flickering shadows among the leaves overhead, creating an impression of leaping, juddering creatures running amok in the beech boughs.

Angela waited there, along with a crowd of people, Old Jacob by her side. They sheltered under a ledge of rock opposite the Devil’s Pulpit, a ceremonial rock out of which a yew tree grew, wonderfully contorted, its roots snaking in and out of the clefts of the limestone in a zigzag formation that looked unnatural but was purely by the tree’s design, yet the shapes were so fluid and strange it appeared as if the yew were made of melting clay, or soft dough, rather than hard, old bark seeking a path of least resistance.

The queen bearers finally laid down their burden, groaning and rubbing each other’s shoulders in relief, slapping each other on the back. Another March successfully navigated. No slips, no falls, no accidents.

The queen sat in her palanquin, waiting to be sacrificed.

Josie saw her father, standing just before the rocky outcrop. Mask up, so she would know it was him.

He grinned as he laid one hand idly on the queen’s grass breast and gave it a quick, cruel squeeze.

And Josie, unable to hold herself back, felt something burst deep inside of her. Some pressure point, some hardened bubble, tested to its final limit. It burst, and a rancid rage pulsed through her.

Josie pushed violently through the crowd, towards her father. Wilkes yelled at her to stop, but Josie ignored her, ran forward, as fast as she could. She would throw herself at him, rugby-tackle him if need be, grapple him to her and heave them both gleefully off the Pulpit. But as confused revellers parted, realising that something was happening, something not part of the usual ritual, something odd and violent and unexpected, Josie saw, with horror, that her father had anticipated this. Anticipated, and was already running, turn-tail, away from the Pulpit, and back into the darkness of the forest, where no torches burned, only shadows, for those were the best disguise of all, better than any mask.

He was fast, faster than she’d expected. His shape became a blur, and then a black smudge in the night. He ran more rapidly than Josie would ever have given him credit for.

It didn’t matter. She followed, feet skidding across a torrent of insects. Josie had the colony, and they gave her speed.

Chapter 55

Josie ran for her life. For Laurel’s life, for the other women. For her mother.

She ran towards her life, not away from it. Or rather, the promise of the life that lay beyond her father’s lies. A life, Josie realised, that she deserved. If only so she could live it in a way the others had not been able to. Those young women, cut off from age, from joy, from tragedy, from birth, from weddings, from travels and studies and triumphs and sex and love and all the things a person was entitled to. All the things he had stolen. A murderer, and a thief. A liar, and a coward.

It didn’t take long to catch up to him. He may have been faster than expected, but the forest was dark. He couldn’t see through the shadows like she could. His momentum faltered. He was clumsy, tripping and stumbling over himself in the gloom. Josie heard him crash and fall on the forest floor.

She sent the swarm ahead of herself.

A million pairs of legs and wings surged forward, thronging, biting, hissing, scratching, sucking, screeching, a plague of nasty bodies.

Josie’s father screamed.

When she came upon him, a frantic crown of moths fluttering about her head, her fingers threaded with centipedes and slow worms, her eyes preternaturally widened by adrenaline, by white worms, by a type of fury that had its own radiance, she saw her dad covered in a thick, dark, moving blanket of insects, crushing him hard into the ground. They left his eyes and mouth clear but gleefully smothered every other part.

‘Josie!’ he cried, thrashing about. ‘Josie!’

Josie lifted up one arm, beckoned. To what, she didn’t quite understand, but she knew it had been there all along, hiding inside the infestation. A presence, watching, waiting for this moment.

It answered.

A small, scrabbling tornado rose up in the space between her and her father. As she watched, the colony inside Josie screamed, mindless, unified, bonded by the queen’s resolve, by pain, by hurt, excreting this trauma so forcibly Josie felt every part of her heat up, until she was so hot inside she felt she might melt inwards at any point.

The whirlwind of bodies and organic litter from the forest floor began to coalesce, rising, assembling a structure that was elongated, weirdly humanoid. The sound accompanying this terrible birth was incredible: chittering, shrieking, whining, rasping, buzzing. It reminded Josie of her father’s violent concertos, a thousand tiny violins sawing away in orchestrated chaos. The sounds rose and fell intermittently as the mass writhed, combining to form a single high-pitched screech that harmonised with the shrieking ants within her brain and coaxed a trickle of blood out of Josie’s left nostril, first, and then the right.

She wiped the blood away, flung the excess to the floor. Saw the small dark splatters crawling with maggots.

Josie’s father lay pinned to the Dyke path with fear, panting, eyes huge.

‘What’s happening?’ he whimpered, a pathetic, cowardly man, in thrall to whatever his daughter was birthing from the night. ‘What the fuck is happening?’

Josie shook her head. She didn’t know, and she didn’t care. She was here for one thing, and one thing only.

Her father.

She stepped through the teeming mass. She was still wearing Emmet’s mask. She stood over her father as he stared up at her. The foul, seething presence now loomed over her left shoulder.

‘You’re pathetic,’ she said, out loud. ‘You always have been.’

Acrid breath billowed from behind her, faintly coloured, a sulphurous, sickly yellow. Something resembling a hand laid upon Josie’s flesh. Sharp, hot claws raked across her collar bones then dug into her skin, on both shoulders. They left jagged marks behind, like she was soft bark on a tree, marks she had grown up seeing stitched to banners and carved into doorposts and stamped on flyers.

Marks she had found on tree trunks and rocks and signs, near dead bodies.

Blood bubbled out of each wound, boiling and sizzling.

‘My little Josie,’ her father rasped with sudden hatred, a trapped rat, chewing on his words as if gnawing off his own leg. His mind, she saw, had finally untethered, as he lay amongst the debris and insects. ‘Only you weren’t such a good girl, after all, were you?’

‘Open up,’ she commanded, by way of reply, leaning down and jamming one hand into his mouth so he had no choice but to comply. The hand held her severed braid, a talisman of sorts. She made him swallow it down.

He gagged, biting her hard, his defiance turned to terror, to blind survival, his gaze filled with the red glow of whatever ancient, furious thing hovered just behind Josie. The sour tang of piss tickled her nostrils. She remembered a time, just after her mother’s death, when she had wet the bed. Her father had beaten her with a wooden spoon until her behind was black and blue. She had gone to school with welts on her skin after laundering her own sheets. Nobody had said anything. Nobody had even noticed.

The presence behind Josie snorted in approval. The claws dug deeper into the skin around her collarbone. Josie knew she should fear it, but she was not able to. She was a vessel, a simple chambered structure, filled only with seething ants.

‘You deserve this,’ she told the dying man below. ‘You deserve all of this.’

The colony roared. Josie’s ears started to bleed. Her stomach cramped. She could feel them rising up her gullet, feel a tremendous pain building in her belly, her chest. A warm flood filled her knickers: a period had started, spontaneously.

She opened her mouth, retched. A small gobbet of spit dribbled out of her mouth, landed on her father’s chin. An ant struggled in the phlegm. She watched it drown in fine detail, her vision heightened in the dark by the primal, dreadful power that flowed into her through the insectile cries pulverising her eardrums.

Josie retched again. More drool, a clump of wriggling ants scrambling for safety across her father’s features.

And again. A ball of ants this time. They splatted across her father’s eyes. He thrashed and moaned. She kept her braid jammed in his throat, wondering if she could reach all the way down, grab his black heart, yank it out through his mouth.

No time. Josie doubled forward, screaming in pain, violently clutching her father’s face with her spare hand. It was coming. There was no stopping it, no holding back.

The colony wanted out.

She withdrew the fist and the plait stuffed into her father’s mouth, sealed her lips quickly over his, and vomited a boiling hot jet of furious, biting, frantic ants, mucus, bile and creamy, acidic phlegm directly into the back of his throat.

Josie’s father could not even scream.

A glass of milk for you, she thought, expelling the curdled contents of her body into his in an endless, deadly stream. It kept coming, hot, and steaming, and choked with ants, thousands and thousands of dead ants, a colony evicted. For a moment, it felt like Josie was watching a mind-movie. A movie showing the grainy, leaping image of a woman on her knees, wearing a terrifying red and black mask with horns on top, thighs pinning the face of an older man firmly in place while he kicked and thrashed under her. She saw herself stuffing great handfuls of earth and leaves and rocks down his throat, scooping up mud and shoving it into his mouth.

As soon as the movie started, it stopped, and Josie was brought back to the stream of poisoned bile still gushing from her mouth. Her father gargled, spluttering and choking as the potion went down, until Josie’s body was empty. She strained as claws savaged her shoulders, digging deeper and deeper into her muscles, coaxing a final, thin stream of bile from her aching mouth, until she burped, spent, her body shuddering to a halt.

It didn’t take long for the Devil’s concoction to work. Her father’s body went soft, and slack. His arms, clutching at her in defence, flopped to the floor. His head rolled back, eyelids sliding down until Josie propped each one open with a small stick, snapped in two. Just enough of an aperture for him to see her dark silhouette, she hoped.

‘How does it feel?’ she asked, leaning back, wiping a hand across the drool hanging from her lower lip, still kneeling so her legs were either side of his shoulders. The foul, sulphurous stink lingered in her nostrils, but she found she didn’t mind it.

Her father’s eyes rolled under the propped lids. Tears slid down the sides of his face. He peered at her in horror, unable to move, the paralysing agents in her ejecta making him spasm and shake like a leaf about to drop.

Josie looked down at him. He had been such a poor father, even in the rare moments when he remembered his dues, when he had read stories to her in bed, but only, she reminded herself, to get her to go to sleep, so she wouldn’t bother him, so she wouldn’t interfere with the things he did in the shed.

So she would be a good girl.

A final question made its way out into the night. She didn’t need to ask it. But she needed him to know she knew.

‘Did you kill my mother, too?’ Josie asked, already convinced of the answer.

Josie’s father could not reply.

A blast of hot air billowed out from behind. The hair on Josie’s arms curled as the heat singed her. Claws dug deeper still. Her head turned, brushed against something rough and dry and hard, tipped with a nipple that felt like an acorn. A leathery cheek pressed against hers. Lips, putrid and dry, skimmed her ear. A voice whispered to her, in a tongue too old and too evil to understand.

Maggots and beetles and cockroaches fell as the voice spoke, dropping down her neck, into her cleavage, wriggling up against her breasts and worming around inside her bra.

Josie knew an instruction when she heard one, even if she could not translate the language. She deliberately and savagely pushed her thumbs deep into her father’s eye sockets, pressing down, hard, hard, hard, until she heard something pop, until she felt things give way.

She blinked, and her thumbs were nowhere near his eyes.

But her hands were holding a huge wad of clay and mud into his mouth. The furry tip of the braid poked out once more between his bleeding lips. Josie’s father twitched one last time, and then went still, every limb relaxing. Josie revelled in the knowledge that the last thing he saw was Emmet’s mask, half red, half black, its wearer leering down through two small, savage eyeholes, a crown of living things circling the horns poking up from the hairline, mouth frozen in a pitiless grimace before the world went black, and quiet, and still, for the last time.

And then, the deed was done.

Josie ripped Emmet’s mask off her head, threw it to one side. She turned to see what waited behind her. She found the Devil, naked as a babe, steaming, teeming, clawed, and formed like a woman.

Chapter 56

Her friends found her, staring at Emmet’s discarded mask, her dead father limp on the ground near to where she knelt, his hands crabbed, mouth wide open and packed with wet, deadly earth and hair.

Not a single ant to be seen, anywhere.

‘What did you do?’ Angela cried, in a panic, the flashlight she’d brought from her car bobbing around erratically in the dark. ‘What did you do, Josie?’

‘The Devil came,’ Josie croaked, numb to the core, as Old Jacob stopped beside her. Angela and Wilkes scrambled over to the body. Wilkes checked for a pulse, tilting the dead man’s head back before realising the airways were blocked entirely and rearing back in disgust.

‘I told you she would,’ Old Jacob said.

‘The Devil filled me up.’ Josie could not stop shaking. She understood her part in things better, now. The Devil had engineered all of it: Josie’s discovery of the bodies. The claw marks nearby, left as grisly testament. Look what he did, the Devil had been telling her, in bark and in stone. Perhaps a different vessel had been chosen before Josie came home, one who failed the Devil. Perhaps it had been Laurel herself, her hallucinations, scribbled so vividly in her notebooks, actually secret, coded instructions. She had been overcome by Josie’s father, who, spurred on by some different evil, had met her with his own darkness. Until parent and child clashed, one last time, in the forest, by design. The oldest of designs. Evil unstoppable force met foul, immovable object.

The Devil, Josie saw, had tasked her, and she had accepted.

‘We have our customs for a reason, Josie.’ Old Jacob bent down to help her stand, using his walking stick to brace them both. He seemed haler and healthier than he had in months. ‘We do all we do to keep the Devil at bay, until we no longer can. It has been that way for centuries. All she asks is that we observe the Old Ways. Until your father, we did well enough. Her eye was turned from us.’

Josie stood. Old Jacob clutched her arm, held her steady.

‘He’s dead,’ Angela said, softly. Her voice was filled with pain and disappointment. Josie nodded, knowing that eventually, she would understand. It was self-defence. It was necessary. Angela would forgive her, in time. She was like that.

The night whirled around her. The claw marks on her shoulders burned fiercely.

‘And now?’ she croaked, staring into Old Jacob’s face.

The old man wisely shook his head. ‘Tis not for me to say.’

Chapter 57

They made sure her father would never be found. They followed the old methods, the old traditions, according to Old Jacob, who kept records of all the traditional punishments and repercussions.

The body was taken apart, in all the ways a body could be. The bones were buried, deep in the forest. The skin was cured, stretched. Old Jacob made a book, the pages blank, the cover porous, shiny, with a few tiny hairs remaining. He gave it to Josie. He made the paper within himself, hand pressed, he said, from the bark from the willow tree in front of his house.

‘Write yourself a new life, Josie,’ he said. ‘You can, now. Remember, the bodies of the dead hold great power.’

Josie knew this already.

Part Five

2005

When Josie opened her eyes again, she was still on her chair, in her father’s secret shed. She’d been tied to it, this time, loosely, with a scarf. Just tight enough so she could sleep without sliding off. Not tight enough to really hold her there, or hurt her.

Her father was still at his workbench, preparing the straw queen. It was raining outside, now. Josie felt like it was always raining, in her childhood.

There was a radio on, a small wind-up radio with a crooked antennae, because her father was incapable of working without music. The signal wasn’t good at all, so the radio kept hissing with static at random intervals. Josie thought it sounded like an angry snake. Her head hurt worse than it had before, the throbbing lump on the back of her skull larger, more pronounced.

‘You want a closer look?’ her father asked, seeing she was awake. ‘I assume that’s why you followed me here. To see what I do.’

He came over, untied her arms from the chair, half carried her over to the workbench.

Josie was so groggy she couldn’t fight back.

The queen was far bigger than she remembered from previous Marches. She’d always been this iconic thing, the Queen of the March, a symbol so ingrained in Josie’s childhood psyche that she doodled it often through class, and later on, in adulthood. Sometimes she wondered if the queen could come to life, hop down from her perch on the shoulders of others, lead the people of Ellwood under her own steam, up to the Devil’s Pulpit, where she would throw herself down into the valley below, without help.

But up close, Josie was disappointed to find the queen was, in fact, just a large bundle of straw. Incapable of movement, or motion. Just a dummy, an effigy.

Except . . .

Not quite.

Peeking out from behind a straw fringe, Josie locked gaze with a human eye, leaking tears. The eyelid, she saw, was pinned back with a safety pin, piercing the lid and the brow above, so it couldn’t close.

‘Do you see now, Josie?’ her father said, sounding proud. It wasn’t often he used that tone with his daughter. Josie watched the eyeball, breath held.

She wasn’t sure but . . . Did the eyeball move? Roll, just a fraction, to one side?

Josie squeaked in fright. An ant suddenly appeared from behind a blade of straw, ran across the exposed surface of the eye, burrowed itself into the pink fold of the pinned eyelid.

Josie began to understand, in that slow, delayed manner in which people sometimes process bad and terrible things, shock, she thought they called it, that something was terribly, terribly wrong.

‘I think I have seen enough, Daddy,’ she said, quietly. ‘Can I go home now?’

Josie’s father smiled at her indulgently.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But first, it’s time for a drink.’

Her father gripped her face with vice-strong fingers. A bottle was raised to Josie’s lips. It was glass, with a long, thin neck. There was liquid in the bottle.

The liquid tasted sweet. Her father said he put honey in it to help Josie sleep. When she woke, back in her own bed, it was dark outside. There was no moon, but her clock said it was 3 a.m.

She thought it strange that she had no memory of her day, strange, but she was so tired, and felt so groggy and sick, and her head hurt so much, that she fell back asleep within minutes.

And then, on waking, Josie forgot all about the eye in the queen. She remembered vague things about the night before, at odd moments when she was daydreaming, bored, in class, strange, fuzzy details like rain, like straw. Ants.

Beyond that, everything was blurry, a chaotic series of shapes and sounds in her memory. Her father told her she’d had nightmares. He gave her magic milk to make her sleep better.

Josie forgot all about that night in the shed. But her subconscious never forgot.

It took many, many years for her to quietly, sadly, forgive herself.

Chapter 58

2025

September. The River Wye looped around an island jewelled with trees and fringed with green, sheep-cropped grass in a pronounced oxbow on the floor of the valley below. From where Josie stood, at Symonds Yat Rock viewpoint, once the site of an iron age hillfort, now a tourist attraction, she could see for miles. A canoe lazily paddled along the river, tiny and toy-like from this vantage point. It shored up on to a small sandbank in the middle of the bend so the occupants could take a quick selfie. A stone hut on the island beyond glowed honey yellow in early fingers of morning light that pushed through the trees. Josie had seen a sign on her walk up here, a Forestry Commission notice that aimed to lift walker’s spirits. Komorebi, it had informed her, a Japanese word for dappled light through leaves, also for hope, tiny glimmers of it, found only when looked for, in the most unexpected of places.

Josie didn’t know about that. Hope seemed an ambitious treasure to seek. Like fair weather, if found, it would not last long. As she thought this, a cold wind picked up. She looked to the horizon. A weather front was moving in from the east; heavy clouds so dark they appeared black, creeping steadily closer. Soon the komorebi would be gone, the building on the island would return to dreary grey stone.

The sun came, the sun went: Josie had never felt more aware of the repetitious history of the land than she did at that moment. Two thousand five hundred years ago, according to another information board nearby, settlers lived here in tiny dwellings, mud and straw and sticks and stones protecting them from the keen winds that flew up the gorge, pigs and dogs snuffling around their feet, red kites wheeling high up in the sky above. A defensible location, near water, with the forest all around from which to forage. Habits were formed here, traditions. Humans were incapable of living in any other way. They liked familiarity. They liked repetition. They liked to connect with each other through small, personal rituals, like handing the same bread recipe down from generation to generation, or bigger traditions, like a processional march across the land along an ancient pathway with a straw queen at the head.

Or other types of ritual, like the killing of young women, the preparing of tonics, the braiding of hair, the crafting of a sacrificial straw vessel in which a woman, still alive, still breathing, unable to move, could be flung from a rock, a rock famous for being the pulpit where the Devil once whispered to monks in a monastery far below, tempting them to sin.

Josie shivered then, thinking about her father. About the most difficult of all habits to break: that of still hating him. She had overturned every single memory, from childhood until this moment. Those rare times where his affection, so hard won, had sustained her. The moments when he had read to her in bed, prepared her warm milk, held her hand on the occasional walk to school, taught her to ride a bike. Sat with her in the hospital when she was unconscious, a new scar seeping through the bandages wrapped around her forehead.

She had taken each of those moments, and inverted them, reprogrammed her mind into accepting these encounters for what they were. Tactics. While Josie slept, she reminded herself, daily, her father was in his shed, torturing women, enjoying their screams. While Josie woke in the morning, groggy, reluctantly getting herself ready for a new day at school, he was admiring his handiwork, grinding more herbs. While Josie was in her lessons, struggling with trigonometry or physics or maths, he was wandering the nearby forests and natural beauty spots treasured by so many, scouting locations to hide a dead body.

There was nothing about him, either dead, or alive, that Josie could find redeeming, or trust. Including his role, still presumed, in her mother’s death.

Josie had considerable time to think about this in the aftermath of the Devil’s March. Mum’s quick fade. Her dramatic weight loss. Her being bedridden, anxious, paranoid. The smell of sickness, heavy in the air. The emptiness of the house when her mother’s body was taken away. Her father’s swift move to reclaim their cottage as his own, by dint of making a mess.

Whether or not he killed her felt unimportant, now. Confirming this suspicion wouldn’t bring her mother back. Both parents were gone. Josie had no choice but to look to the future instead of dwelling in the past.

Josie thought about rituals, and habit, and custom, and she thought about tradition, and breaking with it.

‘Drink your hot chocolate, love, it’ll get cold.’ Angela’s arm came around Josie’s shoulders, her cardigan a barrier against the wind. She nudged Josie to drink.

Josie hesitated, then lifted the paper cup to her lips, let the sweet liquid coat her tongue. There was a small cafe near the viewpoint, a log cabin that served hot drinks, freshly baked walnut slices heavy as stones. Josie buzzed with the sugar.

‘You’re going to be all right,’ Angela went on, matter-of-fact. She sounded as if she was trying to convince herself of this fact, too. She curled her arm tighter around Josie’s shoulders.

‘I am?’ Josie stared out across the valley. ‘I don’t know how, exactly.’

‘You will, trust me. I’ll make sure of it. You’re a good person, Josie. It’ll all come right in the end.’

Josie froze, mid-sip.

Good girl, her father used to say. Good girls kept secrets that weren’t theirs to keep, for years and years, until the secrets turned into crawling black things that swarmed through every available nook and cranny in the human body and turned a person inside out, hunting for the truth.

Jane Doe One. Jane Doe Two. Alison Wright. Jane Bowl. Lucy McRobert. Daniella Penney. Laurel Howell. The bones in the bag. The girl in the cave.

The wind tugged at Josie’s hair insistently as the names cycled through her head. The clouds crept closer. Josie could see rain sheeting down hard at the end of the valley. They’d be caught in it, if they didn’t move soon.

Finn jumped up next to the pair, put his paws on the low stone wall surrounding the viewpoint. Scented the wind, lips back, tail wagging. Barked once, as some fresh exciting smell hit him. Perhaps it was the sheep down below. Perhaps it was a treat, dropped by a dog walker.

Perhaps it was a dead body, lying undiscovered deep in the woods nearby.

Josie lifted her head. Felt her spine stiffen. Felt something new bloom in her chest. Not a crawling sensation, not the antsy, itchy, nasty, grainy feel of millions of tiny hurts scrambling around inside.

No. This sensation was more like searing hot liquid, spreading, scalding, cleansing. Josie remembered reading somewhere that the quickest way to clear out an ant’s nest was to pour boiling water over it. This wouldn’t kill the entire colony, but the ant hill on top would collapse, and the nest would be disrupted enough that the ants would have no choice but to leave, making their own processional march, hunting for a new home.

The foragers would go ahead first, scouting new ground. Nurse ants would pack up the brood, preparing to vacate their nursery. The colony would cluster together as they left, unsure as to which way to go, until worker ants broke through into the mass, prodding them to move along, which they would, in strange, erratic, jerky bursts of movement. Other workers would carry the queen on their backs as the colony marched in procession, not to dispose of her, to hurl her from anything high, but to find her a new palace, worthy of her.

The abandoned nest would eventually collapse in on itself, the hollow spaces filling with fresh dirt. After that, things would grow, put down roots. Thrive.

‘You know what, Angie?’ Josie said, turning from the view, brushing the first few rainspits off her jacket and preparing to head back to the car park. They needed to get back to the King’s Arms, anyway. Janet Howell had promised to stop by, and Old Jacob and Wilkes were holding the fort, in their absence.

‘What, pickle?’

‘I think I’m done with being a good girl, for now.’

Josie left, heading back down the path, Finn at her heels. Angela waited for a moment, watching Josie’s long, determined strides that spoke of impatience and determination, before following.

And further down the valley, near the steep footpath that climbed up from the village of Symonds Yat to the viewpoint, half-buried under a heap of old leaf mulch, the bones of a young woman lay undiscovered. Crammed into a small trench, flesh long since rotted away, she was still wearing a braid, one of two. Its twin had been severed near the hairline. She was not the only one, not by any means, for the Devil’s bluff had been called, years ago, by a man in a red and black mask, and the Devil herself was nothing, as time had shown, if not vindictive.

THE END

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my enormous and unending thanks to the following people, all of whom were instrumental in the making of this novel in some manner:

My editor Kate Norman, for bringing me into the Hodder fold, fulfilling a literal lifelong dream. Thank you!

David Sodergren, for making introductions, with an extra big up for Boris, the best pug there ever was.

My agent Becky LeJeune, for being so encouraging and supportive always.

Karmen Wells, for the hugs, tears, martinis, walks (up and down so many damn stairs), advice, travels, cons, hand slaps when I spent too much time on my phone, and music. A perfect human.

V. Castro, for most of the same, with added prosecco and fires.

My family for, as ever, putting up with me while I was deep in the weeds of this book and ignoring everyone and everything else. Sorry about all the burned dinners.

The Team Cream groupchat consisting of John Crinan, Ally Wilkes, Neil McRobert, CC Adams and Dan Willcocks, because you’re all my lifeblood in this up and down thing I call a career.

To Chris Panatier for being just the most ridiculous, smart, crazy talented person whom I love very much.

To Shit Thom Yorke.

To Richard Meek, my oldest friend, who used to bunk off maths to go sing Mariah Carey songs in the loo and has somehow made an amazing career out of that. Proud of you, you brilliant thing.

Support for all and any victims of abuse
ashianasheffield.org
bisurvivorsnetwork.org
galop.org.uk
haloproject.org.uk
hubofhope.co.uk
mensadviceline.org.uk
mensaid.co.uk
nationalaidhelpline.org.uk
oneinfour.co.uk
rapecrisis.org.uk
refuge.org
roshnibirmingham.co.uk
safeline.org.uk
safeplaces.co.uk
samaritans.org
southallblacksisters.org.uk
supportforsurvivors.org
thedashcharity.org.uk
thesurvivorstrust.org
victimsupport.org.uk
womanstrust.org.uk
womensaid.org.uk

Stay in touch...

Visit Gemma’s website here

@manylittlewords

/littlescarystories

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