Just Before I Died: The gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Ice Twins

Our secret.

The dogs run ahead, leaping over boulders. They know the route well, it looks as if they are keenly following the scent of a badger or a fox. I pat my pockets, wishing I had brought a torch. The daylight will be gone in twenty minutes. Anxiety rises, very slightly. I want to get home, to a nice roaring wood-fire. Whatever timid warmth the day possessed has now gone for good.

It’s going to be a very bitter winter night on the high moorland.

The trees surround us, their cold branches scratching my anorak. It must be below freezing now: the perpetual Dartmoor dampness has turned, here at Hobajob’s, into a hard-core frost. The twigs and leaves underfoot make brittle, snapping sounds as we pace. Lyla is eagerly pursuing the dogs towards the gloom, towards the little clearing in the middle of the wood, where she always finds her treasures. The clearing was probably a Stone Age hut, many thousands of years ago, or some Neolithic shrine, no one quite knows.

We have to cross a stile, an ancient wall, it could be two hundred years old, it could be two thousand, after that we climb a hill and the woodland deepens again, surrounding the clearing. Cages within cages, no birds sing.

The dogs are already there. I can see them in the frosty gloom, circling shapes, like loping wolves in a Victorian picture book. They are barking wildly, oddly. Making a noise I have never heard from them before. What have they found?

Lyla turns to me, her face worried.

‘What’s wrong with Felix and Randal? Mum? Something is wrong!’

I have a fierce and overwhelming urge to turn and run back along the deepening shadows of the path to the car. It’s freezing cold. It’s nearly dark. I am scared, of what I do not know.

But I don’t want to show Lyla my fear. Get the dogs, and go home. Now.

Lyla runs towards the dogs as their howling gets even louder. I can barely see a thing; the winter evening is falling fast, dark grey and black, and the mossed and gathered trees make it darker still. ‘Mummy!’

Lyla’s yell cuts right through me.

She is yards ahead, in the clearing; I push icy brambles aside and run into the sombre glade. The dogs are circling and yowling. Fiendish. Perhaps they are simply scared of the weather, and the whiteness: here in the dark cold core of the forest, there’s been an ammil, that strange Dartmoor phenomenon when an initial thaw in cold weather is turned to ice, once again, as deep winter suddenly returns, devouring and glaciating.

In the slantwise evening light, this ammil, as always, looks beautiful. The special moorland ice storm that makes silent glasswork of the world.

My mother always loved the ammils.

As the dogs raise their eerie lamentations I look around, in something like wonder, an infant on a dark Christmas Day: every twig on every branch on every wizened little tree looks like the finger of a candied skeleton, a slender see-through bone of sugar. All the holly leaves are turned to immobile flames of white frost; through the trees I can see the distant shaggy cattle walking on grass made of tiny crystal spears.

But the dogs won’t stop their yowling. What is frightening them?

‘Look, Mummy, look!’

Lyla is pointing to the centre of the clearing. I can see a couple of dead birds and a few dead mice, three or four, lying, claws in the air, no doubt killed by the vicious returning cold. They’re in a kind of line, but that means nothing. Next to them is a trail of household rubbish. Daily waste. Casually dumped. It makes me so angry when people do this to Dartmoor, it makes Lyla even angrier.

It sometimes makes her cry.

Yet something snags. I look again at the scattered line of trash in the frost. I can see a hairbrush. Incongruously pink, and now rimed with a varnish of frost.

It is mine. I am sure it is mine. I lost it a while ago. And now I step a little closer I can see my own fine brown hairs are still meshed in the prongs, though stiffened to wire by the cold, and there are scrunched-up, mouldering tissues trailing from the brush, red and stained, either kissed with lipstick, or dabbed with blood. I shudder in the freeze. Is this my blood? And there, at the end, under the tree, is that a tampon? One of my used tampons? I have to throw away tampons carefully, in bags: our sewage system out in the wilds cannot cope with these things, but why would my tampon be scattered out here?

Revulsion shudders through me. I feel invaded, or poisoned. Violated. It must be the scent of all this, the blood, the hair, the waste, that is freaking out the dogs, who are now backing away from the clearing, hackles up, growling.

Lyla calls after them. I stare at the tissues daubed obscenely with my blood. Who is doing this? Who has taken my trash, my hair, my brush, and laid them out here in the wood, next to these sad little birds, stiffened and killed by the cold? I look at my daughter, could she have done this, as a joke, or some ritual, making a pattern? Why? This is not her style, she is not sly or conniving, and she looks as shocked and alarmed as me.

‘Mummy, what’s wrong with the dogs?’ Lyla’s face is even paler than usual. ‘Where are they going?’

My blood thumps. I wonder if it was me that dumped this here, or lost this here, and I have simply forgotten. Part of my amnesia. Yet why such intimate waste? Blood, tissues, hair.

Abruptly, Lyla grabs at my hand, her fingers freezing, and lets out a piercing scream.

‘Mummy! I can hear someone coming!’

Hobajob’s Wood (#ulink_ea392f49-c6f1-56cd-b3e7-d090d1ff166a)

Wednesday evening

‘What? Where?’

I clutch my daughter’s hand, very tight. It is so dark now I can hardly see the bare frozen twigs of the dead trees on the other side of the clearing.

‘Lyla, what can you hear?’

She shakes her head and tilts her face, listening intently. My words are clouds of mist. The twigs tinkle in a subtle breeze, like sentimental chimes. It could be minus five. We need to get away, get far away from this wood and this sickening trail of trash.

‘Lyla, come on.’

Lyla shakes her head at me, almost angrily. ‘Listen!’

I strain but can’t hear anything unusual. ‘There’s nothing, no one. Come on, Lyla—’

‘No! That’s him!’

She’s almost screaming. Her hearing is ten times better than mine. Needles of fear prickle my fingers.

‘Who? Lyla, who can you see?’

‘No one!’ she says, whispering now. Hard and low. ‘But I can hear him, he’s out there, I know it! Mummy, he’s watching us, it’s him, the man on the moor, in the freeze.’

‘Stop this. Let’s go! When we get home we can call the police.’ I pat my raincoat pockets for my phone. I have no phone, of course, and anyway it wouldn’t get a signal out here, but it does have a little torch. But I left it charging in the car. So we don’t have any light. We have to leave right now.

‘Lyla, come on, we have to go.’

‘But what if he sees, Mummy, what if he catches us on the way? He’ll do it again … He’ll take you to the lake.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Mummy, Mummy, look!’

She is chattering with cold, or terror. Helpless, I stare around at the quiet wood. In the gloom, the leafless, frosted, moss-hung trees seem to edge towards us, their dark, frost-rimed fingers lifted to the twilit sky as if they were once a crowd of trapped, imploring people, burned to blackness by an awful fire.

Is that someone, or something, in the trees?

‘Mummy, he’s so close! That way, over there!’

I look and think, for a second, I see movement. But no, there is nothing here, is there? Just us and the dogs and the dead birds, and my hairbrush, and a hideous used tampon.