Soon they were in the forest, their trousers soaked by tall heather and brambles. There was no path. Wendy Wrigley had her phone out. Edward was trying to unfold the paper map as he walked.
‘Would my phone help?’ she asked, a little impatiently. ‘With this I can tell north, south, east, et cetera. I have signal. Good old Chittlehamholt.’
‘I guess airfields have masts. I don’t need a mast for this.’ He spread the map across his knee and marked the point at which they had entered the forest and then, after looking over his shoulder, the location of the ATC shed. There was a cross on it already – he had marked the location of the X in the TV report.
‘You never came here?’ he asked as they picked their way among the debris on the forest floor.
‘No, never. Not before, not much of a walker, you know. And after …’ She trailed off.
‘Did he used to walk here on his own?’
‘Yes. Especially if he felt unwell.’
‘Unwell?’
‘I thought I’d told you. He just had bad fatigue, a sense that he was stumbling a bit, messing things up. Middle age, I thought.’
‘He wasn’t much older than me.’ Edward stopped walking. ‘We are now right at the middle of the cross they showed on the TV report. It’s where we’re standing.’
They were beside a stream fifteen feet wide. The water flowed at speed, jumping and bubbling at their feet. Set back from the stream, twenty yards to their right and in a state of disrepair so total its original function was barely recognizable, were the remains of a bandstand.
The pair looked around miserably. They were both in waterproof coats. The spit had turned to drizzle, so thin you almost could not feel it, but gradually making their clothes damper. In places where the trees parted, the sky was a miserable grey and the canopy offered virtually no light. Occasionally one of them had been hit by what felt like a cupful of rainwater dislodged from the thick leaves and branches above them.
He looked at the screenshot on his phone again, shook his head and pushed it deep into the pocket of his raincoat. ‘Someone doing the graphics just found a map with an existing cross on it. Probably an intern at the TV station. They had no more clue where it happened than us. The cross was probably for the bandstand over there.’
They trudged on. Now he was dependent on the Ordnance Survey map alone, criss-crossed with erratic lines drawn with a biro (thank God he had a pen on him, just sheer good fortune), while it rested on his thigh or a fallen tree. Eventually they came to the stump of an oak, cleanly cut. ‘Wendy, I’m going to struggle finding the place.’ He unfolded the map and spread it across the smooth surface. ‘Could you—’
She knew instinctively what he wanted, and produced her brolly as she stood above him. Edward sank to his knees, immediately feeling damp seep through his jeans. He was conscious of her silence as the rain pattered on the surface of the small umbrella.
He spoke to the map. ‘The first black line is the direction we were pointed by the chap with that yellow croissant on his head.’
‘My husband struggled with his own hair loss; quite sudden it was too.’
‘Apologies. That is the sightline from the shed he works in.’ Edward put his thumb on a second line, finding the paper damp. ‘Although he didn’t realize it, the angle changes the end point.’
‘A clearing?’ she suggested. ‘They all said a clearing.’
‘That doesn’t help, does it?’
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘His body was found below a tree in a clearing.’
Now Edward stood, leaving the map spread across the tree stump. ‘I don’t see what you mean.’
‘A clearing is a place without trees.’ She looked at the canopy, thick with leaves and branches. ‘But this was a clearingwitha tree. It had a tree. He was underneath the tree, and they could see him. How do you see a guy from the air if he’s underneath a tree?’ She looked at the ground, tugged at the knot in her scarf and shook her head, as if the thought had taken off and left her behind.
He said: ‘I work in a garden centre once or twice a week. I have friends there who helped me when my son died. A clearing,’ he repeated. He was back on his knees, staring at the map, spreading his hands across it until the damp from the tree stump threatened to tear the thick paper. ‘When did your husband die?’
‘October the twelfth, the year before last,’ she said bitterly.
He produced his phone again. A fleck of rainwater hit the screen. He checked the exact location of the cross on the screenshot against the Ordnance Survey map. Then he stood and looked around them, chose a tree with large, low branches and started to climb it. When he was fifteen feet up, he spent five minutes looking in all directions. By the time he descended she was walking in circles, staring at her feet.
‘You’ve had an idea?’ she asked.
‘I know where it happened. I’m certain actually. This way.’ And he led her through the forest.
He had worked it out. She had not understood the clue she had given him. But he knew. The doctor was found beneath a tree which had shed by October.
He explained as they walked. ‘I don’t know that I’m right.’ Yet he felt some pride. He had brutally applied logic. ‘A clearing. Tree leaves not in the way. An ash. We’re heading for the tallest ash, because it needs to have stopped competitor trees from growing near it. This time of year it won’t look like a clearing at all.’
