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that revolting growth over the course of the night. Their feathers fluttered as they lay skewered there, sparrows and thrushes and finches hung like bloodied trophies.
    For some reason he remembered then Freemantle’s joke of two mornings earlier about being up with the larks. A lot had changed since that phone conversation, but one thing hadn’t: he still wouldn’t know what a lark looked like. Maybe there was an example present in the gory tableau in front of him. But he didn’t really feel like further studying the bush.
    He decided he would visit Loxley’s Cross. He calculated that it lay about four miles to the north-east of where he stood. He had seen Raven Dip and he had visited Gibbet Mourning and he wondered whether the third ancient location mapped on this wilderness would have the same sinister character of the other two. It didn’t matter, really. In a few weeks these places would be obliterated forever as the forest returned to claim its place and restore the character of the land to how it had originally been.
    There was a signpost when he got there. It was so stark and solitary an object in the surrounding grassy expanse that it possessed the character, to him, of some sort of man-made anomaly. It was made of cast iron and looked as though it dated from the early nineteenth century. It was painted black and its surface was pitted by time and weather. The places it pointed to were picked out on vanes placed at right angles to one another.
    The first of the vanes pointed him back towards Gibbet Mourning. The second pointed coastward, towards some forgotten destination that had once been named Puller’s Reach. Who or what a puller was, Curtis had no idea. He was a bit mystified by Loxley’s Cross. It was enigmatic and so solitary and redundant it seemed almost surreal. It pointed to nowhere anyone might ever wish to go. But it was not sinister, which was something.
    Looking at it, still and black and staunch, he wondered whether the function of the signpost at Loxley’s Cross might actually be the opposite of what would generally be assumed. It might exist to warn the wary traveller against places they should not visit. He smiled to himself at that contrapuntal bit of reasoning. Then he looked at his watch. He was due back at the house for lunch at one o’clock. He had ample time. He would head for Puller’s Reach and check personally on whatever it was the sign was warning people to avoid.
    He was almost at the edge of the sea and had practically given up, was on the very brink of the land before he saw what he supposed must be the Reach. It was a construction. It was modest, but it was unarguably man-made.
    Only a small cairn of stones marked the spot, at a place indistinguishable otherwise from anywhere else on the cliff top. It was very still, the sea was calm and it was almost noon when he got there. He dismounted and switched off the quad bike’s engine, listening to the somnolent rhythm of the waves lapping eighty feet below on the beach as he studied the conical pile.
    The cairn had been assembled from large pebbles. This careful work had been completed a long time ago. The quantity and age of the moss and lichen suggested decades. The stones were stained a deep, enduring green with what had grown over them in their enduring stillness there through the years. The whole construction was about a yard across at its base and reached to a flat pinnacle only a little higher than his waist.
    The wind had got up, unless it was just that bit fresher anyway in the exposure of the cliff top, so close to the expanse of the open sea. It whistled through the cairn. Curtis listened. The sound crooned and insinuated, like some sly and secretive melody half reluctant to let you hear it. It was as though some spirit inhabited the stones and he was hearing it at play, making music partly to entertain itself, partly to signal the fact of its presence, invisible there.
    Curtis tried to enjoy the boundless view out