Watered-down ink. This guy was doing his best to stretch out an emptying inkpot.

There was a lot in this leather book, he sensed: perhaps the complete story of what had happened here. But he’d need to scan the pages and digitally clean them up to make them easily legible, particularly the latter ones.

‘Grace, with your permission, I’m going to take just this book with me, okay? Nothing else.’

She looked unhappy with that. ‘Ain’t yours to take.’

‘We’re going to need to photograph each page. Get a digital record of this immediately. The paper’s fragile, and there’s very faint ink here, towards the back.’ Julian turned a few pages. ‘Very faint. The writing’s almost like a watermark. This should come out of the ground right now, and be kept somewhere dark and dry.’

She considered that for a moment.

He closed the notebook gently. ‘If I leave it out here, it’ll deteriorate. It needs to be taken out and digitised, Grace. As soon as possible.’

The woman considered that for a moment, and then nodded. ‘Okay.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘you know… for trusting us.’ Julian looked up at the cold grey sky. ‘You think it’ll snow today?’

Grace shrugged. ‘Snow’s due, I guess. Usually as regular as clockwork.’ She looked up at the pale featureless clouds. ‘I reckon, though, we’ll need to head back soon. We got us about six hours of daylight for hiking back to the camp site this afternoon.’

Julian stood up. ‘Where’s Rose? I’ll get her to pack up her stuff.’ He climbed out of the ditch and called out for her. He could see the bright red flash of her anorak amongst the trees on the far side of the clearing; she was stepping slowly through the tangled briar and roots with the camera braced firmly on her shoulder.