The Wilds

PENNY PILSON ISN’T answering her phone. Caffery leaves a message – ‘When you have time I want to ask you something. Wonder what you meant when you said Handel would be “off into the wilds”. Give me a call.’ Then he checks his watch. The super is in a meeting at HQ and he’s going to be there until lunchtime. AJ LeGrande has Caffery’s mobile number. There’s nothing keeping him here. He finds his keys, and at the last minute gets his North Face Triclimate jacket from the cupboard and his walking boots.

Wotton-under-Edge is named because it sits under the edge of the Cotswolds. An old market town, it retains that atmosphere of a place people gather. But at this time on a chilly late-October day it is peopled only by a few shoppers, ducking in and out of the brightly lit shops. Caffery drives through, watches the town dwindle in his rear-view mirror. Upton Farm is only two miles from here. Wotton would have been the place the Handel family shopped. He wonders if Isaac has been here more recently. Whether he’s sat in that bus shelter or on that bench and watched people coming and going.

Wire and pliers. Something left unfinished?

The road winds up the escarpment until he’s cresting along the summit, passing Westridge and North Nibley. Using his phone and his memory of the map, he locates a small farm track that leads through an abandoned orchard. A rusting skip lies on its side under the gnarled trees, as if some giant has got fed up apple picking and cast it aside. The grass hasn’t been cut – it lies flat and bedraggled under the sodden heaps of rotting apples.

Where the track stops, Caffery parks. He pulls on the boots and jacket, and from under the driver’s seat takes a torch. It is weighty and solid and feels good in his hand. He locks the car, turns up his collar, and heads off down the footpath that leads into the trees.

It takes him fifteen minutes to pick his way to the place named The Wilds. Several times his phone drops its GPS connection and finds it again. As he comes down a path and sees daylight ahead where it opens into a glade, the signal flashes to SOS, and then, in the next moment: No Service. He tucks it inside his jacket and continues.

The moment he gets to the clearing the shape leaps out at him. A mountain – a white-boned giant. It’s a tree, he recognizes that immediately, but like no other tree he’s ever seen: it is huge and dead in the thin light. The collapsed skeleton of an ogre.

He scans the surrounding woods, then, drawn to the tree, moves forward a few steps, approaching it slowly, his feet crunching the dead leaves. As he circles it he finds, half hidden, an arch leading to an empty chasm where its heart must have once been. One hand on the nearest root arch, he bends and shines the light inside. He sees beer cans, a soaking wet sleeping bag on an unfolded cardboard box.

‘Hello?’ The torch picks up the gnarled interior of the tree, pocked with sealed knots and bumps – like polished rock walls. ‘Anyone home?’

Silence. He flicks the torch on from side to side – as if the movement will shake anything hiding in the tree out into the open. He switches it off and waits, his breath held. There is no noise at all. Nothing.

He sniffs. There’s a strong smell of wet earth and leaf mould – and something else. A lower keynote under the damp that touches a deep nerve and makes him hold his mouth open slightly like a cat testing a scent. He’s smelled it recently – it’s too familiar. The uncared for, urinated-on funk of Handel’s dolls.

He stoops and, bent almost double, enters. It’s impossible to stand up inside. The smell is so strong it makes him cover his mouth. He finds a broken stick on the ground and uses it to poke through the items on the floor. It’s like going through a recycling bin. Beer cans are squashed into bumpy discs. There are flattened plastic bottles and a few empty crisp bags. He uses the stick to lift the corner of the sleeping bag. Sees that lying on top of the cardboard, serving as a half-hearted waterproof layer, is a Wickes carrier bag.

‘Hello, mate,’ he murmurs under his breath. ‘Nice to find you at last.’