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hesitantly forward, standing now and then to look for signs of earlier passage, while dead leaves from a hundred autumn falls lay sodden underfoot, mouldering and dirty, the stench of decay filling the air.
    ‘How often d’you reckon people come down here?’ Jack asked him. He shrugged, and ploughed on without a word, down a steep incline towards the river, its slimy banks littered with outcrops of pale marbled rock. Wellingtons skidding, Jack almost tumbled in, and Dewi caught his arm, hauling him upright.
    ‘You could hide a hundred bodies down here and nobody’d ever find them,’ Dewi observed. He turned to John Jones. ‘Funny how you managed, isn’t it?’
    By the river, waters creaming in spate over rock debris and glittering gravel on the river-bed, the light was magnificent, filled with steely-blue and grey-white tones, the sun long obscured behind thick winter cloud driven hard and fast by winds off the sea. Branches creaked in the heavy silence, yet the air remained so still it was like, Jack fancied, being submerged. Wherever he looked, he saw trees: sombre, dark trees, some frosted with the sharp livid green of budding foliage, others dying, life choked out by dark tendrils of ivy. Along the riverbanks, lichen-covered rocks tumbled, wrapped in fronds of dead bracken. No birdcall broke the stillness, no small animals scuttered in the undergrowth; nothing relieved the grandeur and symmetry of nature reclaiming its own. His eye caught the drift of a shadow within the phalanx of trees directly ahead, and he stared, trying to make sense of the mass of grey and mouldy green splashed in his line of sight like drab colour running from a painter’s careless brush strokes.
    John Jones moved forward, boots squelching. ‘It’s there. I can see it.’ Slowly, almost reluctantly, they followed the crabbed figure. On a mound within the woods, amid a convolution of dead trees throttled with ivy, the body, barely more substantial than the shadow of a shadow, swung on the end of frayed rope, clothes which had once been black hanging in grey tatters about its limbs. Little fillets of dried flesh still clung here and there; a few tufts of matted hair sprouted from its head. The eyes were long gone, a feast for the crows and magpies. Jack looked upon their find, and his scalp crawled. How many days and nights had she hung there, drenched by rain, scalded by the summer sun, scoured by the winds, and made brittle by deep mid-winter frost?
    The corpse dangled close to the ground, rope and neck and spine and legs stretched by gravity and damp: elongated into some surrealistic form, feet pointing like those of a dancer, motion frozen in mid jump. A ragged skirt swung with a life of its own, giving off heady puffs of some strange scent. Touching nothing, in fear of damaging the frail remains, Jack examined the body. As he moved around, it seemed to swing after him, attracted by a strange magnetism, the head leaning forward to watch his progress. He felt its hip brush his shoulder, and almost screamed with terror.
    A suicide, he decided, and a typical way for a woman to kill herself.He stood behind her, that strange scent drying the back of his throat, and looked at what remained of her hands, crippled and clawed below the thick leather strap which bound her wrists tight together like those of the convict ready for execution.

Chapter 2
    ‘Have you told McKenna yet?’ Emma Tuttle asked her husband.
    ‘Couldn’t raise him. Been trying all afternoon and evening.’ Jack yawned.
    ‘D’you want me to call Denise?’
    ‘No, love. I’ll ring again before we go to bed. Nothing to be done tonight, anyway.’
    Emma threw another log on the fire. ‘Is anyone still down in that awful place? On a night like this?’ she asked. ‘You haven’t left anyone there on his own, have you?’
    ‘No point. We don’t know how long the body’s been there until Eifion Roberts does the post-mortem … if then. From the looks of it, she died at