It is not how he imagined.

He’d buried bodies before. Too many. Shallow graves torn from the hard earth. Then there had been no shovels - sticks, jagged stones, and his own bare hands had sufficed. And always driven by urgency. Hiding remains in the earth before the rot set in. The stench. Wild dogs and wolves. The creatures that scurry across the white clay of the Basque country. Creatures seeking whatever flesh it might lay teeth and claws upon.

If it is possible to get used to such things, then he’s an expert. An old hand.

But here, it is not how he imagined.

Excerpt from Hollow

Not daring to look back, not daring to look up, he plunges forward, changing direction, legs suddenly windmilling beneath him. Lifted. Turned sideways, head over heels. A blast of solid air catches him, punches him, flicking him across the open ground. He spins once, twice, a third time and hits the dry earth, breath torn from his body.

Excerpt from Hollow

Porter stares into the hollow.

‘Anything?’ Webster shouts up.

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing? Are you certain?’

‘Absolutely. Were you expecting something?’

Webster looks at the recovered skeleton. ‘A hand. The right one to be precise. It’s missing. It looks as if it was amputated.’

Porter stares across the hollow. ‘I don’t understand.’

Webster pauses. ‘Detective, whoever put her in here cut off her hand. And apparently, they took it with them.’

Excerpt from Hollow

She looks into his eyes, tears forming in her own. ‘I’m scared for him because of what he said they’d do to stop anyone finding them. He told me they’d killed a woman. I believed him then and I still do. And I’m certain that men who could do a thing like that won’t hesitate to kill again.’

Excerpt from Hollow

She was slim, ‘boyish’ his mother would have said. Slender where Rachel was full-figured. Even with the heavy material of the uniform, it’s clear her body is firm, athletic. Quick to suggest ideas of her own, her manner tells him she’s Home Counties, grammar school educated. A woman disconcertingly sure of herself.

Excerpt from Hollow

He fixes his mind on the road that is speeding him ever closer to the answers he feels lie ahead. It felt good to find purpose, a focus for action. When he speaks, it’s a declaration. She’d thrown a snowball and an avalanche came back. ‘I’m going to find him,’ he states. ‘And, if he’s not the one I want, then I’ll find the rest of them. I’ll keep going, one after the other, until I find Bella’s murderers. All of them. Wherever they are.’

Excerpt from Hollow

Moving out of the room, Porter glances back at the group around the table. For the first time he catches sight of the drawing clasped tight in the patient’s hand. The drawing he’d been working on throughout the interview.

Scrawled in blackest charcoal, etched hard into the paper, is a tree.

A blackened tree; a devil’s tree, a wych elm.

Excerpt from Hollow

He reaches a hand under his jacket, feeling the cold hard reassurance of the Colt pistol and holster tucked in the rear waistband of his trousers. He’d taken it some days ago from the station armoury where it had lain unused, unthought-of since the early scares of invasion. Tonight more than ever, it feels more of a necessity than a precaution.

Excerpt from Hollow

In the darkness of the blackout he feels rather than sees the movement. Feels the sensation of warm liquid seeping across his throat. Senses rather than sees the blade that slides across once more, this time from left to right.

Excerpt from Hollow

He stares once more at the folder that lies across the blotting pad.  The designation TOP SECRET is stamped in red and angled across one corner of it. The letters lie in a beam of sunlight that burnishes their ink a deeper, darker hue. Blood red.

Winnie was a great leader, but there is blood on his hands. Tarpeia had seen to that. He, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck is charged with washing it away.

Excerpt from Hollow