A quick glance at Hunnyton’s estate map that he’d tucked into his pocket gave him his orientation and he set out across the open ground to his right, heading for an intriguing incursion into the landscape of what looked like several acres of ancient woodland which had been left untroubled to serve as an element of the framework of the Hall and as a screen for the stable block. A group of three tall elms, outliers of the wood, stood on guard. To welcome or repel? Joe made straight for them across the close-cropped grass, using them as a marker.

As he approached, he picked out oak, ash, hazel, much tangled hawthorn and a concentration of lower-growing shrubbery. Tantalisingly, Hunnyton had marked in the centre of this wilderness a tiny building he’d labelled TEMPLE OF DIANA. On a sporting and sociable estate like Truelove’s there was bound to be a temple to a classical god and Diana was most suitable. Diana the Huntress, eternally young and lovely. An appealing challenge to the sporting male ego since she had dedicated herself eternally to a state of virginity. Joe had always thought it odd that her other attribute was a mismatched concern for fertility. Denying it in herself, she loved and encouraged it in women. Those who wanted to become pregnant sought her intercession and when the moment came, this goddess would even help them through a painful childbirth.

Follies, hermitages (occasionally still with hermit in residence), marble temples, they were thick on the ground in English country seats, usually put up at the whim of eighteenth-century young English gentlemen recently returned from their Grand Tour. They came back from the continent, travelling boxes stuffed with architectural designs of a classical style or Italianate nature. Some, more adventurous, brought along the architect himself if he were of cool classical style or hot Italianate nature.

Joe enjoyed harmless whimsy. He approved of follies—they made useful trysting places or a refuge from boring company. A place to retire to with a good book minutes before someone’s aunt called for a fourth at bridge. He had fond memories of kisses snatched, surprising intimacies allowed, in his youth; he had less fond memories of a corpse he’d been called in to attend to, hideous flesh and blood polluting the white marble beauty. He reckoned he had time to take in Diana on his way to the stables. He hoped there’d be a statue of some sort, for choice a scantily clad Grecian lady on whose lips he could plant a chaste kiss. Sculptors quite often went into flights of erotic fantasy when chiselling out a Diana. He’d make off to the house before she could turn him into a wild animal or a bush of some sort. He remembered Diana had a quick temper and a short way of dealing with unwanted romantic overtures; her admirer, Actaeon, even her male priests had all come, one after the other, to a sticky end. Better treat her with respect when he found her. Still—a guest who took the trouble to stop off and make a votive offering to the goddess of the place on his way up to lunch might just soften the heart of the Dowager. It would certainly get the conversation going.

The heat of the open parkland changed within a few strides to cool shadow as he entered the wood. He paused for a moment to let his eyes grow accustomed to the gloom and he breathed in deep forest scents laced with the intoxicating sharp top note of the elderflower that frothed in abundance, creamy-white amongst the dark foliage. He wished he could spend the afternoon here, alone with his thoughts.

Some yards to his right, a twig snapped. A small animal? Joe moved on briskly into the heart of the wood, seeking for a rise in the ground for that would be where a temple would be sited. The trees now crowded overhead, blotting out any external pointers like the tall bell tower of the distant chapel he’d lined up his sights on. If he kept his back to the sun he couldn’t go far astray—the whole grove couldn’t be much more than a couple of hundred yards wide. He stopped as, again, a twig snapped, to his left this time, and slightly behind him. Could be a poacher? Joe thought not. Those fellers didn’t go about snapping twigs so carelessly. Joe was used to tracking—and being tracked. Even allowing for the still air and the smothering effect of the thick tree canopy, that snap had been too loud. Not accidental. He could have sworn someone had picked up a stick and broken it with gusto. To attract his attention? Warn him off? Frighten him?

All senses alert, he continued on his way more slowly. A rustling in the undergrowth kept pace with him. A low growl raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Not an animal, he thought. But what human would be making hostile noises at an innocent visitor in broad daylight? He’d try to lure it into view. Joe took his notebook from his pocket and, humming a snatch from The Mikado, went to stand in the shade of a particularly gnarled oak tree and affected to be drawing a sketch of the writhing outline. A very ancient specimen he decided and tentatively reached up and tugged at one of the lower branches, testing its resilience.

He leapt to one side a split second before a log of wood crashed down, grazing his cheek, and thumping to the ground at his feet. He turned and caught a flash of green and brown behind a thick hazel only feet away. With a hideous cackle some being began to crash its way through the undergrowth, running away from him.

Joe set off in pursuit, anger and outrage and a stinging face urging him on. In ten strides he had caught up. He launched his weight at it in a high tackle learned on the rugby pitch, automatically reaching for a human right arm and, to his relief, finding one. He hauled it up behind the creature’s back, shouting a dire caution in a police voice. When he sensed that resistance had stopped, he flipped his victim over onto his back and immediately recoiled in disgust. A stench of sweat and fear wafted up from the leather-clad body of a man. A wiry man, smaller than Joe but well muscled. His face was obliterated by a green mask, his head hidden under a cap of knitted wool woven through with oak and ivy leaves to produce an extravagant mass of greenery. Joe stared in astonishment. The mask was no amateur, papier maché, village-hall-drama-club attempt at stage costume. It was Venetian in quality, dark green silk, a full face mask, with embroidered slanting holes for eyes and a red-lined slit for the mouth. The eyes were dark and venomous, the teeth bared in a growl were grey and rotting.

A Woodwose! He was holding down, but barely holding down, a bloody Woodwose! Joe had seen hundreds of effigies and carvings of the Wild Green Man in wood and stone on bench ends, on architraves, hidden up in the ceiling, keeping sinister watch on the congregation in country churches. No one had any real idea where the image came from but two things were certain: they were ancient and they were malevolent. Joe was disturbed to be faced with a flesh-and-blood relic of this paganism. He resisted the urge to tear off the mask and look into the face of the coughing, winded creature wearing it. Instead he pulled him to his feet, forcing him under his arm in a neck lock, and marched him back to the pathway.

Joe stopped at the spot where his abandoned notebook told him he’d been standing, right by the considerable chunk of oak that had so nearly dropped him in his tracks. With time now to assess the weight of the object, he knew for a certainty that it could have split his skull. If he’d stood still, he calculated he would now be lying bleeding or dead—and from a wound that could have been caused by a falling branch. It would have been very simple, the work of a few moments, to arrange the scene. Remove the killer log, lose it in the undergrowth and replace it with a freshly torn down branch from the ancient tree overhead, ensuring that it bore signs of his blood. “Poor chap!” they’d say. “Killed by the very tree he was sketching! So sad … Still, it was a very old tree, rotten, quite rotten … Mentioned in the Domesday Book I shouldn’t wonder …” There you had it: a death by misadventure. Another death by misadventure on Truelove land.