Wildwood by Janine Ashbless Read Free Book Online Page A

ferns, their former places now clear patches where saplings had sprung up and were engaged in a furious race for the light. Others of the fallen trees were still alive even with half their roots jutting into the air and from a recumbent position were reaching up branches of their own. There was dead wood everywhere, underfoot and hanging overhead and poking up from banks of bracken. There wasn’t a tree in sight with a straight trunk. From a forester’s point of view it was a horrible, mismanaged mess. I couldn’t help think it was beautiful.
    There were some faint paths, tracks made by rabbits perhaps. I followed one winding between the boulders and the tree trunks , hoping it would take me to the crown of the hill, but it soon peeled away and began to circle the flank. There were birds singing all around, though I couldn’t see many, only little flickers of movement at the periphery of my vision. A grey squirrel hung head down on the bole of a tree and stared at me until I pointed a warning finger and mouthed a silent gunshot, at which it fled and I grinned. The smell of damp wood and moss was intoxicating, overlaid with the very faint sweet smell of the bluebells. I didn’t write anything on my paper after ‘acid oak–birch woodland’. I just let it all sink in, in a daze. It wasn’t as if there were any of the noteworthy features Michael Deverick had been looking for, not even any very tall trees. From a timber point of view this place was a dud, and in fact anyone trying a paintball game here was likely to break a leg.
    ‘Wow,’ I said to myself.
    Something shiny hanging from a branch caught my eye. I left the path and crossed down towards it. To my surprise, I found it was a glass ball, crimson coloured and as big as my two fists, strung up and spinning slowly on a length of fishing line that was almost invisible. I frowned and tapped it. A strange thing to find in a wood, I thought. Like a giant Christmas bauble.
    It wasn’t the last. As I switched to another path and resumed my same general drift northwards I caught sight of others glinting in the sunlight, some red but others blue or yellow or green. And there were other decorations too: little bundles of twigs tied with red wool. The more I looked, the more of them there were.
    ‘Someone’s been watching
Blair Witch
,’ I muttered. Those signs of human presence made me feel less comfortable, though not because they were sinister in themselves. There shouldn’t have been anyone in these woods, that was all. Nobody had lived in Kester Grange in years. When Michael Deverick bought it the house had been near-derelict and the estate gone halfway to wilderness.
    I crossed the rocky bed of a stream. There was a big boulder in the centre of the course, and straddling that a hawthorn bush. Multicoloured rags had been tied to its twigs and hung, some faded and some still fresh, among the last of its white blossom. I gnawed my lip, hands on hips. Then I turned to follow the clearest path, down beside the water, away from the hill. I marked the stream tentatively on my sketch map, but I had no idea where it was flowing from, or to, and was beginning to think I’d have to buy a compass. I made an attempt to scramble up the bank but a branch of sallow I was pushing back slipped from my hand to smack me hard across the top of the thighs and I slid back down and decided to continue downstream to a clearer patch. If I’d not been wearing padded leggings, or if I’d been a bloke, the blow would have been really painful.
    I remembered the slap of the plastic ruler on Scott’s skin as I rubbed my stinging legs.
    God, it was long time since I’d given my ex much thought, at least by daylight. I didn’t miss him and our break-up hadn’t been particularly painful as these things go – or at least not for me. I grinned at the thought.
    I’d driven down to the house he shared in Norwich as usual that Friday, except that after three weeks of serious overtime clearing