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scuffed up a drift of dry leaves with her foot.
    She’d been walking for twenty minutes or so when something caught her eye: a flash of white, screened by the trunks of a stand of closely planted sweet chestnut. She stopped and frowned. White isn’t a woodland colour. She had a bad feeling about that. Only a few weeks ago, she’d found herself being filmed by a remote drone belonging to the Hello channel. She’d called the air force and had it shot down over the Bering Strait, and she’d hoped that would’ve discouraged any further intrusions on her privacy, but maybe not. She took her Warthog XL from her shoulder bag and set it to scan for electromagnetic activity, but the readout said there wasn’t any.
    There it was again, a brief flash of white about twenty metres off the path. It didn’t seem to be moving like a drone. There was an organic quality to its movement that no machine could replicate. If it hadn’t been white, she’d have sworn it was a deer.
    Well, she thought, there are white deer, aren’t there? She realised she didn’t know. Out came the Warthog again. A quick check through PaySearch told her that yes, white deer were known to have existed; albino forms of several species had been authenticated at various times in the past, the most recent recorded sighting having been in 1957 in Thuringia, Germany.
    She called Forest Management.
    “Dieter,” she said (they liked it when she remembered their names). “Have we got any white deer in the woods right now?”
    “White deer,” Dieter repeated. “You mean, white as in colour?”
    She turned her head away, so Dieter wouldn’t hear her sigh. “That’s right, yes.”
    “Checking. No, no white deer.” Pause. “Are there white deer?”
    “Yes, apparently. Well, a long time ago. They’re pretty rare.”
    “Ah. Would you like me to get some?”
    “No, that’s fine. Thanks, Dieter. Out.”
    That was that, then. It couldn’t have been a white deer, so it must’ve been something else. Something white that wasn’t a deer, or a deer that wasn’t white. Problem solved.
    She walked on another hundred metres, and there it was again. Quite definitely white, almost certainly a deer; at any rate, a deer-sized quadruped, running with a sort of spring-heeled bounce. She tried to call Dieter again, but she couldn’t get a signal. Not unusual. Reception wasn’t guaranteed, because of the trees. She’d thought about having them grown with superconductive filaments running up through the bark.
    Dead ahead of her, it stepped out on to the path, no more than thirty metres away. Not a deer after all. A horse. A white horse, with a single silver horn growing out of its forehead.
    Without taking her eyes off it, she lifted the phone and whispered, “Dieter.” But nothing; just a very faint crackle.
    Besides, what could she possibly have said? Dieter, there’s a unicorn in my wood. To which, if he’d had any sense of humour at all, he’d have had to reply, Don’t talk so loud or they’ll all want one. He would not, of course, have believed her. No such thing as unicorns. No such thing as white deer, either, not in these parts, but at least there had been white deer once.
    The unicorn looked at her, shook its head, lifted its tail and dumped a steaming brown pile on the leaf-mould.
    “Dieter?” she whimpered, but this time the phone didn’t even crackle.
    In a way, she thought, that’s reassuring. If I was hallucinating, I wouldn’t hallucinate a great big pile of unicorn poo, because my mind simply doesn’t work that way. So I’m not seeing things, so there is a unicorn in the forest, so— There are times when a good, honest hallucination is preferable to the alternative. She made herself stand quite still, until she got pins and needles in her left foot. That made her wobble, the movement startled the unicorn and it set off with a great bounding leap into the trees. She started to follow it, but as soon as her left foot touched the ground she