The Cold, Cold Ground

and a flat cap.
    “Everybody out!” I said to Crabbie in the front and Matty in the back.
    “I’m De Sloot,” the ranger said with a Dutch accent. We did the handshakes and I helped Matty unpack his gear.
    De Sloot was all business. “This way, if you please,” he said.
    We followed him through a cutting in the wood up a steep hill and into one of the older sections of the pine forest.
    The trees were tall and densely packed together. So dense in fact that the forest floor was a dark, inert wasteland of pine needles and little else. As we went deeper we had to turn on our flashlights. The hill was north-facing and it was a good five or six degrees colder than the temperature outside the wood. Inhollows and against rock faces there were even patches of snow that had survived the spring rains.
    “Who found the body?” I asked De Sloot.
    “I did. Or rather my dogs did. A fox had been reported attacking sheep and I thought they had found him or a badger, but of course I was mistaken.”
    “You saw the fox?”
    “No, it was a report.”
    “Who reported it?” I asked.
    “A man,” De Sloot said.
    “What man?” I insisted.
    “I don’t know. I got a phone call this morning that a fox had been attacking sheep and it had gone into Woodburn Forest.”
    “Describe the man’s voice.”
    “Northern Irish? I think. Male.”
    “What else? How old?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What exactly did he say?”
    De Sloot thought for a moment.
    “He asked me if I was the ranger for Woodburn Forest. I said that I was. He said ‘A fox has been worrying sheep. I saw him go into Woodburn Forest.’ That was all. Then he hung up.”
    “What time was this at?” Crabbie asked.
    “Around ten o’clock, perhaps ten thirty.”
    “And what time did you find the body?”
    “Some time after two. It’s quite deep into the forest, as you can see.”
    “Yes.”
    “Aye, how much bloody further?” Matty asked, struggling with his lights and sample kit.
    “Gimme something,” I said, taking one of his bags.
    “Quite a bit yet,” De Sloot said cheerfully.
    The trees were even more tightly packed here and it was so dark that we’d have been hard pressed to find our way withoutthe flashlights.
    The incline increased.
    I wondered how high we were up now.
    A thousand feet? Twelve hundred?
    I was glad that I was in plain clothes today. The polyester cop uniforms were murder in any kind of extreme temperature. I took off my jacket and draped it over my shoulder.
    We stopped for a breather and De Sloot offered us water from his canteen. We took a drink, thanked him, soldiered on. On, through the dark, lifeless carpet of rotting pine needles before De Sloot finally called a halt. “Here,” he said, pointing to a snow-filled hollow in the lee of a particularly massive tree.
    “Where?” I asked.
    I couldn’t see anything.
    “Near that grey rock,” De Sloot said.
    I shone my flashlight and then I saw her.
    She was fully clothed, hanging under the limb of an oak tree. She had set up the noose, put her head in it, stepped off a tree stump and then regretted it.
    Almost every person who hanged themselves did it wrong.
    The noose is supposed to break your neck not choke you to death.
    Lucy had tried desperately to claw through the rope, had even managed to get a finger between the rope and her throat. It hadn’t done any good.
    She was blue. Her left eye was bulging out of its socket, her right eyeball had popped onto her cheek.
    Apart from that and the lifeless way the breeze played with her brown hair she did not look dead. The birds hadn’t found her yet.
    She was early twenties, five two or three, pale and once, not too long ago, she had been beautiful.
    “She left her driver’s licence on the tree stump over there,” De Sloot said.
    “Any note?” Crabbie asked.
    “No.”
    In a situation like this what saves you is the routine. There is something about process and procedure that distances you from the reality. We were professionals with a job to do. That’s also why you’re supposed to look under your car every morning – it isn’t just the possibility of finding a bomb, it’s the heightened sense of awareness that that routine is supposed to give you for the rest of the day.
    Process, procedure and professionalism.
    “Everybody stay here. Matty, get your camera and start snapping. Mr De Sloot, have you moved anything at all?”
    “No,” De Sloot said. “I read the driver’s licence and then I went back home