The Wood by Rachel McLean and Joel Hames, book 6 in the Cumbria Crime series - Chapter 1

“Where’s the little shit gone now?” Hettie Bradshaw muttered. “Persephone! Where are you, my darling?”

Two years, she’d had the dog. Two years of puppy training and all the care a special little girl could ask for, and she still didn’t understand her own damn name.

Maybe it was too complicated for a spaniel. But Hettie had had eight King Charles Cavaliers, all named after overlooked figures from Greek mythology, and Persephone was the first to struggle with recall.

Mind you, Polyhymnia had been a handful.

“Perseph—” she began, then stopped. It was raining again, but over its patter, there was another sound. Paws on the soggy remains of leaves.

The sound stopped. Hettie peered between the trunks of the bare oaks, spotting a gap in the slate wall to her right. Baysbrown Wood was full of little walls like this. Difficult for a dog to get too far when it was hemmed in.

The sound had come from that direction.

“Persephone!” she called again.

Nothing. She shook her head and approached the wall. Hundreds of years old, but now a chunk of it had fallen in, and there was nothing between her dog and the tunnel entrances to the old slate mines.

Maybe naming her after the Queen of the Underworld hadn’t been one of Hettie’s brightest ideas.

But if the stupid thing had gone in there, she could bloody well get herself out again.

Hettie stepped through the gap, angling her feet to avoid slipping on the wet rock, and bent to catch her breath.

She was too old for this. Too old to go running around after stupid spaniels who didn’t know their own names. Light-headed, she closed her eyes, reaching out for support and finding the cold but reassuring wall beside her.

She breathed. In for two, out for four. In for two, out for four. Six times.

When she opened her eyes, Persephone was standing there, looking up at her like she was waiting for something. Hettie narrowed her eyes and frowned, but she couldn’t keep it up for long. And it wasn’t like the dog even noticed.

“Who’s a beautiful girl, then?”

The dog seemed to grin at her, tongue lolling long, yellow, and green from her mouth. Hettie reached for a stick and began to straighten, then stopped.

Yellow and green?

She bent again and checked the dog’s mouth.

Not a tongue. A strip of fabric.

“What have you got there, girl?” She could have sworn the dog nodded at her. Hettie reached for it, but the dog turned and trotted away.

“Where are you—” What was the point? Sighing, she walked after the dog, gently downhill and along the wall. That was good. They weren’t heading towards the slate tunnels, and she could grab the wall if she felt she was about to fall.

The dog kept going, stopping every few seconds, and looking back to make sure she was following. Behind her, mounds of slate from the old quarry poked above the bare branches. Beyond, the hills rose red-brown behind Chapel Stile and the Church of the Holy Trinity, dressed in that same dark slate.

And the dog pressed on.

“Bloody thing,” Hettie muttered. If this continued much longer, she’d need her more serious arsenal of curses. But for all her faults, Persephone was a gorgeous girl.

Hettie paused. The ground ahead was disturbed. Churned up. For weeks, it had been either snowing or raining, but this looked like the work of something different.

“Bloody animals,” she muttered, and continued.

After another minute the dog stopped, a few yards ahead, still close to the wall. They were deep into the heart of the wood now, a fair distance from the paths. Even the quarry was out of sight.

The dog was looking down at something on the ground, then back up at Hettie.

“I’m coming,” Hettie grumbled, and walked over. There was something there. Something long and blue, and then – was that snow? Surely the snow had all disappeared by now? Whatever it was, there was a gap in it, a patch of darkness, and on that those same shades of yellow and green she’d seen in Persephone’s mouth. Yellow and green, and red and blue, as well.

A rainbow. It was a rainbow.

“What is it, then?” she asked, stepping closer, the words almost sticking in her mouth.

She knew what it was.

She took another step, to be sure, and stopped.

Long and blue. That was a leg. A pair of them, in jeans. What she had thought was snow was an expensive-looking coat. The black thing was a t-shirt, with a design she thought she’d seen before. All of it was torn and muddy.

And all of it around the body of a man lying on his back, her dog’s tongue slurping at his equally torn and muddy face.

Backing away, one arm on the wall, Hettie reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her phone.