Nush officially hated Michael Lorimer. Okay, that wasn’t strictly true, but she was royally pissed at him, that was for sure. The forest had grown denser and darker, and despite that gloom it was hotter too. The path, it seemed, went on forever.

  Nush angrily unscrewed her bottle of water, muttering: ‘Like a fucking tropical rainforest sprouting out of the arse of England.’

  She threw back the bottle and the last of its warm contents trickled into her mouth. It wasn’t enough. Would it be too dramatic to stick her tongue in the hole for any last drops? Yes, it bloody well would, Nush decided, but only just, and stuffed the bottle back in her handbag.

  She attempted to blow away the lock of black hair draped across her forehead, but it was plastered there with sweat, so she wiped it away with her equally sweaty arm, rubbed her sweaty face with her clammy hand, and looked down at her sweaty chest. She had to undo the top three buttons, and quite frankly didn’t give a shit that her bra was showing. Beads of perspiration glistened and rolled down her body. The heat reminded Nush of a trip “home” to Mumbai when she was fourteen and her parents dragged her there to meet about four-million members of her extended family. The holiday confirmed to Nush that she was very much a British girl. Mumbai wasn’t even her parents’ home; it was her grandparents’. She was second generation British born and bred. Even the rain was hot over there. Whoever heard of hot rain? It was supposed to be grey and chilly and persistent, the same as the moaning about it. This forest held the same oppressive heat.

  Nush staggered on a few more paces, her heels wobbling on the uneven track, while she moaned. Bluff and bluster covered the noises coming from the foliage all around. ‘The Lorimer seat has the only fucking rainforest in the whole of sodding Europe. This unique micro-climate and habitat comes along with the twatting beach house, bollocking castle ruin on the hill, and much of the shitty surrounding farmland and pissing dunes. Privacy is guaranteed...’

  Her heel broke. She tripped and fell to her knees with an indignant squawk. Birds took flight, their wings battering against leaves in the canopy, and she shouted at the top of her lungs: ‘Because you’ll never cunting-well find the fucking place.’

  That was it! She’d followed this yellow brick road long enough. Time to head back to the car and out the other side of the woods and back to fucking Kansas, where they served cappuccinos and chilled ping grigio and flaky croissants and sushi and where the roads were, well, goddamnmotherfucking roads.

  Normally, swearing made Nush feel better. Some people said it wasn’t ladylike. But they were patriarchal tossers equally as stupid as those who thought swearing indicated a lack of vocabulary. As far as Nush was concerned she had all the other wonderous words of the English language, plus a pocket dictionary’s worth of profanity. Smash them together and one could be more creative than Jackson Pollock in his bucket of cow semen phase. However, it wasn’t making her feel better with her backside planted in a soft mattress of moss.

  When the phone started ringing, Nush snatched open her handbag. She riffled through the contents, pushing aside her purse, keys, the empty bottle of water, a couple of just-in-case sanitary towels, lipstick, various make-up essentials, and a mini tester sized bottle of perfume. Finally, she found her phone. But even as she laid her hand on it and the phone rang for a third time, she couldn't quite comprehend what was happening. She pulled her arm free, phone in hand, triumphant and ready to embrace a call from civilisation, when she froze before the blank screen.

  The phone rang again, and the screen remained black. It wasn’t her phone that was ringing. In fact, her ring tone didn’t even sound like the old-fashioned bell she could hear. The sound was coming from off to her left. Stuffing the phone away, Nush got to her feet, peering through the trees. There it was again. She followed it, coming to the side of the path that was barely even a path anymore, and placed a hand on the trunk of the tree, listening. It wasn’t her phone, but this meant civilisation had come to her. Someone must be in the woods on a different network, and they were getting coverage. Or maybe it was a cottage with a landline. But why weren’t they answering it?

  Nush stepped away from the path and between the trees. ‘Hello!’

  A twig cracked under her shoe. The ground was pliant, and she had to watch where she was putting her feet. Ferns brushed against her legs, and she moved thin tendrils of low hanging branches out of her way. The phone kept ringing.

  ‘Is anyone there? Your phone is ringing.’ State the fucking obvious, Nush thought, but she craved someone to answer.

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  There was a small gully, sloping down then up and covered with brown leaf-litter. It brought her to a brief halt. There was another ring and she descended, picking up speed and unbalancing so that she fell on her hands against the far side of the gully.

  ‘Bollocks!’ she said, dusting off her hands.

  The ringing stopped. A wave of panic washed over her. A fat tree root looped out of the gully walls. Nush grabbed it and used it to ascend to the other side. When she reached the top, ignoring the smudges of dirt on her hands and knees, she expected to see a house, a rundown woodcutter’s dwelling, or a picture book gingerbread cottage. What she got was a red double decker bus, sitting in a small clearing. Tentatively, she picked her way over the lumpy ground.

  ‘Hello!’

  No one answered.

  ‘Is anyone there?’

  A little closer and Nush could see the bus had flat tyres. Deflated, they looked as though they had melted. Green mould and lichen freckled its flanks and roof. Ivy had grown up and over the bus’s rump, creeping inside the open door at the back, where passengers used to be able to hop on and off while it was still moving, in the days before health and safety.

  It must have been here for years, decades even, Nush thought. It couldn’t have been in service since before she was born.

  Something else caught her eye. Up in one of the trees, a horse chestnut maybe, strange fruit dangled down. Dozens of pairs of old shoes, everything from cherry Dr Martin’s, ladies’ calf-high boots with buttons up the sides, trainers of all different sizes and colours, and even two-tone dress shoes, the kind worn in gin houses to do the Charlston to some Ragtime jazz between the wars. There was even a pair of leather sandals, not with buckles but tied together with their long laces and slung over a bough, like all the other footwear.

  Nush stopped by a shrub and stubbed her toe. She tugged back some of the leaves to see what the hard metal object was and found a mangle. It’s two thick rollers were pitted with woodworm and chunks of them had rotted and fallen way. The iron frame stood rusting beneath the foliage. What was this place, a junkyard or a beauty spot used by the locals for illegal fly-tipping?

  Both intrigued and somewhat trepidatious, Nush moved away from the mangle-cum-shrub symbiosis. The clearing had many humps, green with moss that was spongy underfoot. Nush trod carefully between them and found herself thinking she was walking through a graveyard that had been forgotten and reclaimed by the wood. In her mind, each tiny hillock could have been a tiny grave, a child’s grave. Her flesh prickled with a cold flush, despite the heat. It was a silly idea, of course. A B-movie horror set in the back woods in which some unsuspecting real-estate agent looking for love and wondering off comes across a family of cannibals living in the woods. She froze. A cold tidal undertow flushed through her. Right in front of her, lying at her feet, was one of those small moss-covered mounds, and sticking out of it was a small, puggy arm, white as death, and riven with minute blue veins. It pointed across the clearing towards the darker heart of the wood. A baby’s arm. A dead baby’s arm. Nush’s heart wanted to scrabble out of her chest. Her back went stiff just as her knees lost their strength. A scream was building from some primal part of her brain. The baby’s arm came into sharp focus, filling her world with dreadful possibilities. The whole clearing was covered in these mounds, these graves, these babies’ graves.

  But finally, the rational part of Nush managed to make itself heard.

  Instead of screaming, Nush laughed, a sound of relieving tension, coloured with nervous energy.

  ‘You silly moo!’

  Squatting down, Nush placed fingers in the moss on the grave’s top and delicately began to pull back the turf, fingering through it like thick, damp fur. A solid clump the turf tore back easily, revealing a white face, with bright blue eyes staring up at Nush. It was an old-fashioned porcelain doll. She ripped away moss to uncover more of it. What she initially had taken for blue veins were in fact the tessellation of capillary-fine cracks in the milky-white glaze. It had what might once have been auburn hair, darkened further by the grave, and its dress, a Victorian affair, with frills at the shoulders, collar and hem was rotten peach. Two rose bud lips had been painted on her face. Nush held her up, body soft and wet. The heavier clay head and limbs lolled back, threatening to tear away from the torso, so she placed the doll back down.

  Nush had stopped laughing and, from her haunches, looked around, smiling at her ridiculousness. But the smile sloughed away when she thought each of the mounds in the clearing might contain another ancient doll, and a chilling question formed. Why would someone bury so many dolls in the middle of a forest? Serial killing cannibal could be on that list, however unlikely, along with lesser varieties of the unhinged.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! Pull yourself together. A little alone time and you’re shitting yourself at imaginary monsters.’

  The phone began to ring again. Its sudden shattering of the wood’s hush, on top of everything else, caused Nush to yelp. She stood, searching for the source of the ringing. She was closer than before. No longer dampened by the trees, the sound rang clear. Picking her way between the possible graveyard of antique dolls, Nush followed the ringing towards the dilapidated London bus.

  Twenty yards off, she thought she spotted the source. It made no sense, but then nothing in this clearing made sense, and if that really was a telephone, she wanted to answer it. She stopped in front of the gnarled truck of a tree at the edge of the clearing. The telephone’s two old-fashioned brass bells trilled. She hesitated. The phone was from another century. It didn’t have a single handset, but rather a mouthpiece fixed to a wooden box below the bells, like two bug eyes above a comic Martian nose. A separate earpiece nestled in a brass-fork hung on the side, connected with an archaic cable. The trees had grown around the telephone. Petrified folds of rough bark had begun to envelop it.

  It was all so odd: the phone, the bus, the doll, the whole clearing. Why was an antique telephone ringing in the middle of a forest? The question sounded like a twisted Zen kwon, one which Nush didn’t have time to ponder. But then again, if this place was weird, who was likely to be at the end of the call? A cannibal wondering how many to expect for dinner? On the other hand, she really wanted out of this place.

  ‘Fuck it!’ she said and answered the phone.