Nush pulled down the sun visor and hunched over the steering wheel. With the soft-top down, the wind tousled her black hair, and for the longest while after leaving London it had been fun. Sunglasses on, silk scarf from Selfridges around her neck, she could have been Audrey Hepburn, Meg Ryan, or maybe more Deepika Padukone, flying out of London chasing freedom and pushed by fate to find romance.

  Things had been fine on the M1 heading north. She even stopped for a passable coffee on the cusp of what she considered ‘The North’, though in reality it was barely the Midlands of England. After a coffee and a wee (of which the service’s toilet paper was like rubbing one’s fanny with sandpaper), even the back-arse A-roads weren’t so bad. A bit boring but not bad. She knew where she was, or rather the little blue arrow on the sat nav regularly corresponded to identifiable things in her reality as her two-seater BMW Z4 whizzed along.

  Radio Two bounced between a surprisingly glorious trip down the iPod playlist of her youth, news about as skin deep as Botox injections, and phone-ins with the great unwashed British public. God love their skill of communicating almost entirely in banal idioms. At the end of the day, Jeremy, it just isn’t right that fuel prices keep going up. What you’ve got to understand, Jeremy, is some people use the morning after pill as contraception. Fair play to single mothers, Jeremy, I wouldn’t work if you gave me all those benefits either. No offense, but the bottom line is there ain’t enough room for all the immigrants, is there Jeremy? I ain’t racist or noffing, one of my best mates is black, but taking the knee before a football game is... and so on.

  Things started to go wrong after coming off the A14 at Wodanthorpe. The sat nav got a little muddled but would find itself again. The radio would drop out. Nush would fiddle with the settings and pick up a local station with even worse grammar and greater banality.

  Just as she was about to turn the car around, she spotted a sign for Hernshore and hung a right. The road had two lanes at that point, and the coast couldn’t be that far away. With blue skies and sunshine, this was the point at which she decided to pop the soft-top down and flirt with the possible romance of this trip. The wind brushed her face. The engine shifted up and down as she wound through the kind of quintessential countryside foreigners informed by Downton Abbey and period dramas think England is all about. The fields rolled gently. Crops waved genially, and cattle chewed the cud like old men in ye olde pubs. She could definitely sell the arse out of this to the right buyer. Thank you, Michael Lorimer – and if this deal helped finagle Nush back into his good graces, well, who was she to protest? A little money to fan the flames of the spark between them. She wasn’t imagining it. There had been that night in the booth at Tres Beaux, with the bottle of Pino Grigio and a drunken kiss before her Uber. Right? That wasn’t a dream. Though they hadn’t spoken about it since, so it had started to feel like something she’d imagined.

  The road narrowed further. A white line still divided it down the middle, but her tyres had no choice but to encroach on the other side. If anything bigger than a car came the other way, she’d end up in a hedge. However, no traffic came, not a single car, van, or yokel on a tractor. It was pure isolation. With no signal, she’d turned the radio off, and the silence and lack of navigation while momentarily unsettling also felt liberating. But then the hedges grew thicker and the trees taller and more unruly, blocking her line of sight over the fields and casting shade like camouflage.

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  Bugs splattered the windscreen. She turned on the wipers and spray. Dead insects smeared across the glass before disappearing, only to be replaced by more of their brethren in an endless entomological slaughter. Of course, the water ran out from Nush constantly cleaning the windscreen. After which, the glass soon turned brown and grimy.

  Stray brambles intermittently lashed the car’s flank. Nush clung onto the wheel, craning forward to see. Stress crept up. A clammy sweat moistened her armpits and the back of her neck as she sped under noiseless drumming fingers of sunlight and shadow from overhanging bows. The road was almost down to a single track. If this carried on, the road would disappear altogether, swallowed by the unruly countryside.

  Nush strained to see through the patina of carnage matting the glass. ‘I hate the fucking country.’

  Suddenly, the road opened either side of the Beemer and yet came to an end. Nush slammed on the brakes. The wheels locked. There was the grinding scratch of rubber over loose gravel. She was pinned back into her seat. The car jolted to a stop with its bumper inches from a sign, throwing Nush forward into the biting seatbelt which then hauled her back.

  The engine idled. Birds tweeted unseen from hedgerows and the canopy of the wood she seemed to have found. Nush unbuckled and tapped the sat nav. The blue arrow remained lost in a featureless patch of green.

  ‘Bollocks!’

  She fished her phone out of the central console. No bars, no connection to the outside world. With a huff, she flung open the car door and climbed out. It wasn’t her most graceful dismount ever. Her right ankle wobbled and almost went over at an unnatural angle, but she managed to save it, righting herself. That was one for circuits class at the gym.

  Out of the car, it was oppressively hot. The junction created a small clearing. Her heels beat out a dull clip on the cracked hardtop. They really needed to improve the infrastructure here. Rustic, her estate agent’s brain translated, as she carefully navigated the cracks. The childish memory of hopping between paving slabs to avoid bad luck floated up briefly, popping like a bubble when she made it to the front of the car.

  That errant lock of hair worried her right eye. She blew it away again, and when it fell back into the same place, Nush tucked it behind her ear while she put her other hand on her hip, cocked her head to one side, considering what was before her.

  The sign was old, weather worn, hardly legible. She was at a fork in the road. As crappy and overgrown as the one that had just spat her out, two lanes diverged.

  ‘What does that twatting well mean?’ she asked the indecipherable hieroglyphs upon the road sign.

  There was no one around to hear her exasperation.

  Each fork meandered through a great wood, which must have been the one the gorgeous Lord Lorimer had told her about. That meant she was close. Things might be looking up. She’d get a feel for the asset. But back to the sign. She was already ridiculously late.

  Pointing, or rather slouching to the left, the sign might have read ‘Wyr something, something de something, something.’ The other half of the sign, listing upward, half-heartedly pointing to the right and to the canopy of the wood, Nush read as, ‘Hern something, then probably an e,’ but after that it was illegible.

  That must be it. How many places could start with Hern around here? To the right it is. She faced the road. Where it tapered off ahead, probably curving like bloody country roads seemed unable not to do. Beyond that, the woodland darkened into twilight.

  ‘Better get a wriggle on.’ Nush turned heel and remounted the two-seater sports car. A little reverse, an adjustment of the wheel, and with a bit of welly on the accelerator, Nush was away again, throwing up a cloud of dust. As it settled and the birds resumed their gossiping, the sound of Nush’s engine was smothered by the woods. When the road meandered and the car followed its path, it was as if she’d been swallowed by the trees.