An hour into the search and Will was leaning, forehead to a tree, muscles in spasm. He was pushing hard, bark digging into his skin to meet the bone, the search-whistle out of his pocket but dropped somewhere, images of fox-torn remnants of clothing and flesh so putrid it was black littering the ground around him, so real he’d had to step round it, sweet offal colonising the mucous of his nostrils.

But it couldn’t have, because it wasn’t there.

But it had. Because it was.