He reached out and grabbed the body's legs, trying to ignore the feel of cold leathery flesh beneath his hands, clammy with moisture. He pulled. The body shifted a few inches toward him then stopped, held fast by something he could not see.

The skull had remained exactly where it was.

"Fuck!" Tom moved sideways to another skeleton, dragging it up the small slope to the expanding pile laid out on the heather above. He checked the dog tag, discarded it—another stranger—and went back for more.

Jo grabbed his hand again. She squeezed tighter and Tom cried out, a wretched exhalation of despair. He looked up at the sky and it was pure, clean, unsullied by death. But though he saw blue, and heard Jo whispering her love for him, he could still feel the slickness of the grave between his fingers.

Have I changed? he thought. Have I changed so much?

He rubbed his fingers together and let Jo go.

"It's all for you," Tom said, and he looked down again. The strange skull stared at him with its shrunken eyes. The unnatural distance between it and its departed body gave the whole tableau a surreal aspect, and Tom almost pushed the body back close to the head … but its limbs were too long, the ribs too narrow, and why was he doing this? Why was he playing games with himself?

"Steven!" he shouted, and as he dug down again …

He's not here.

Tom wondered when that sensation of being watched had amplified without him really noticing. The buzzards were gone, but the skin of his neck was tingling, set in motion by a gaze he could not pin down.

The weird skull grinned at him through lips shrunken back from the jaws.

"You're dead," he said, pulling at another skeleton, not Steven, then another, also not Steven.

And that was it. Eleven bodies excavated and spread across the heather, eleven sets of dog tags, and none of them were his son. There had supposedly been fifteen killed; perhaps Steven and the other three missing had been buried elsewhere, or incinerated, or …

Why leave the dog tags? Too dangerous? Too much risk of infection?

Down in the pit, though, there were more. Behind the body he could not move he saw the glint of more bones. He reached underneath and his hands touched something cold, heavy. He tugged the corpse again and heard the chink of metal on metal. He pulled harder and another body slipped from the mud, this one also headless and as deformed as the first. Its skull—left behind—also had a bullet hole behind one ear.

I'm not seeing this, he thought, I've been digging up fucking corpses and now it's getting to me, it's hot, Jo is worried, I'm crying and my tears are distorting everything, I'm just not seeing this!

The dead thing slithered toward him as he pulled, connected to the first headless body by the thick metal chain, and then another, smaller corpse followed it up. Tom stood and backed away, only partially realising that he still had a hold of the first body's mummified legs. He brought the dead things with him, two headless adults and what could only have been a child, also headless, its skull lost somewhere in that rank pit.

He was about to drop the legs, back away, run away, when he saw that the chain was wrapped around another bundle, another corpse. This one still seemed to have its head attached. He pulled again and it popped free of the ground, wet and filthy and yet obviously whole. It was chained to the three headless corpses, the metal wrapped around its chest, under its armpits and between its legs, thoroughly entangled, and Tom wondered why anyone would need to bury a dead person like this.

He faltered only for a second before moving slowly down into the pit again. These bodies were more whole than any of the others he had brought out, mummified rather than rotted, perhaps because they had been buried deeper in the peaty ground. The first skull stared at him as he reached over the two adult bodies, grabbed the headless child's skeleton and pulled it across to himself. He was crying, and moaning, and there was a strange keening sound that took him many seconds to realise actually came from him. The child was as light as a pillow, its body seemingly whole and yet dried out, desiccated. The only thing that gave it weight was the chain. Tom placed the corpse gently between the headless adults, clasped the chain and pulled. He lifted, grunting with the effort, tears and sweat blurring his vision as he tried to make out what was wrong with this thing's head, why it was shaped like that, why it was turning…

And then the tiny corpse reached out and grabbed Tom's arm.

Chapter Three

"What did you tell him?"

"I've already told!"

"I don't believe you."

"Then why bother asking me again, Cole?"

Cole stared down at Nathan King, tied into a chair with his own Tom-up clothes. The idiot was still trying to play with him, string him along, and Cole did not have time for that. Not now. His purpose, stalled for a decade, was moving again. The last thing he wanted to be doing was beating information out of his friend, this useless ex-grunt. "You're wasting my time," he said.

King shook his head. "For God's sake, I told—" Cole's fist connected with his chin and flipped his head back and to the side.

King gasped, spat blood, and Cole stepped back so that he did not get splashed. "Think about what you're going to say to me next," Cole said. "Daz told me you went back to the pub to meet Tom Roberts. There's only one reason you'd have done that, and we both know what that is. So, for the last time … what did you tell him?" He massaged his knuckles and turned away.

King's flat was small and untidy. There were grubby hand marks around the light switches, cobwebs in the ceiling corners, and used fast food containers piled up beside the only armchair. Food was trodden into the carpet. Beer cans were crushed and thrown into one corner of the kitchen. He lived like an animal. Cole did not want to be here—he felt dirtied just breathing the air—but he needed more from King. More than just, "I told him it wasn't like the army said." In one way he was glad that King had spilled the beans at last, but he needed to know which beans and what flavour. It would do Cole no good at all storming blindly into the countryside in search of phantoms he had lost a decade ago.

"Cole …" King spat several times and a tooth tumbled from his mouth. "Fuck's sake, Cole, you knocked my tooth out! I don't see you for ten years, then you turn up and knock out my tooth? What's the point of that, eh?" He stared at the bloodied molar stuck on his thigh, shaking his head, and his whole body shivered.

Cole looked at the pathetic man strapped into the timber kitchen chair, and shame bled into his anger. "Sorry, Nath," he said. "Really mate, I'm sorry. But more than being sorry, I need to know exactly what you said to the old guy about his son. Exactly. Everything. He's left his house with his wife and I need to know why he's suddenly gone. I can guess where he's gone, that's no problem, because it's ten years ago this weekend. But Nath … I don't want to go down there blind and deaf, mate. I need to know how much you told him. I need to know everything he knows. And I'll hit you again if you continue to piss me around."

King hung his head, blood dripping into his lap. Tears followed, and the big man sucked back a sob. "Cole, it just came out," he said. "Steven Roberts was his son—remember Steve?—and the guy looked so sad, you know? So desperate for the truth. I thought it might help him to know. And I told him where to look."

"The grave?" Cole went cold. We left her chained up, wanting her to suffer, wanting her to be alive down there forever … "I'll meet you again" she said… "Holy shit, Nath."

"I didn't tell him anything about—"