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feet, two squirrels scampered, chattering angrily. They were spoiling with one another over a tidbit of food, each determined to be victor in the fray. They raced round the side of an elaborate marble tomb at the graveyard’s edge and scrambled onto the waist-high flintstone wall that separated the church property from the back field of a local farm, screened off by several heavy-limbed conifers. Back and forth they flew along the top of the wall, first one then the other surging into the attack. Paws, teeth, tiny legs all embroiled in a fight as the cherished food dropped onto the ground below.
    It was the diversion Deborah needed. “Here, no!” she said. “Don’t fight. Stop it! Now!”
    She approached the two animals and, seeing her coming, they fled over the side of the wall and up into the trees.
    “Well, at least that’s better than fighting, isn’t it?” she said, looking up into the branches that overhung the graveyard. “Behave yourselves now. It’s not polite to quarrel. It’s not even the place.”
    One of the squirrels was tucked into the joint of a branch and the tree trunk. The other had disappeared. But the one that remained watched her with bright eyes from his position of safety. After a moment, feeling secure, he began to groom himself, rubbing paws sleepily over his face as if he intended to nap.
    “I wouldn’t be so sure of myself if I were you,” Deborah warned. “That little bully is probably waiting for just this sort of opportunity to pounce again. Where do you suppose he’s gone?”
    She started to look for the other squirrel, moving her eyes along the branches fruitlessly and then dropping them after a time to the ground.
    “You don’t think he’s clever enough to—”
    Her voice died. Her mouth was instantly dry. Words fled. Thoughts dissolved.
    A child’s naked body was lying beneath the tree.

 
     
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    Horror immobilised her. It was a shaft of ice driven down the length of her spine, rooting her to the spot. Details intensified, impelled into her brain by the force of shock.
    Deborah felt her lips part, felt the rush of air distend her lungs with an unnatural force. Only a terrified shriek could dispel the air fast enough, before her lungs burst and left her helpless.
    Yet she couldn’t cry out and even if she did so, there was no one nearby to hear her. So she only whispered, “Oh God.” Then uselessly, “Simon.” And then, although she didn’t want to do so, she stared, hands drawn into fists and muscles coiled, ready to run if she had to, when she could.
    The child was lying partially on its stomach just beyond the flintstone wall in a bed of bloomless creeping jenny. By the length and the cut of hair it appeared to be a boy. He was very dead.
    Even if Deborah had been silly enough or hysterical enough to convince herself that he was merely asleep, explaining why he would be sleeping completely naked in a late afternoon growing colder by the minute was an impossibility. And why under a tree in a copse of pines where the temperature was even lower than it would be had he sought out the last rays of the afternoon sun? And why would he sleep in that unusual position, with his right hip taking the burden of his weight and his legs splayed out, and his right arm twisted awkwardly so that it was doubled up beneath itself, and his head turned to the left with three quarters of it pressed into the ground, into the creeping jenny? Yet his skin was quite flushed—very nearly red—and surely that indicated warmth, life, the pulse and flow of blood….
    The squirrels resumed their bickering, racing down the tree that had sheltered them, scampering over the inert form near the trunk. The tiny claw of the lead squirrel caught at the flesh of the child’s left thigh, held, and made the animal a prisoner. Wild chattering erupted, companion to a frantic scramble for freedom. The proximity of his pursuer gave fire to the squirrel’s need to escape. The child’s flesh