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experience had left us all feeling raw and edgy, especially Tina who still had a bad case of the shakes.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, rubbing her shoulders. ‘It was a one off, a fluke. It won’t happen again.’
    Tina started sobbing again and I realized that she urgently needed something mundane to grip her mind and harness her imagination before it brought on another bout of hysterics.
    ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I said. ‘Clear our heads and try to put this intoperspective. After all, we’re OK. That’s the important thing. We can unpack later.’
    The suggestion was well received. I think everyone was keen to get out of the house for a spell, if only to flush the adrenaline out of our bodies. As I closed the front door behind us I felt an easing of the tension that had seized me. The air was fresh and the sun was still shining. I put my arm around Tina and noticed with relief that she had stopped shaking. Nicole smiled at me and those familiar dimples appeared in her cheeks. But it was a half-hearted smile that required a degree of effort. And that made me feel guilty. OK, it wasn’t my fault that the first day of our holiday had been ruined, but I couldn’t help feeling responsible. I just had to hope that once the shock wore off we would all feel better.
    As we started walking down the track we’d driven up, Michael suddenly began shouting excitedly and pointing up at the sky. He’d spotted a low-flying helicopter roaring towards us across the valley. Within seconds it was soaring above our heads and it was so close we could clearly see the word
Police
stencilled across the underside in large, black letters. It proved to be a welcome distraction because as it disappeared over a hill we were all left wondering if something awful had happened in another part of the forest.
    And for a time we forgot about the snake.

7
    D CI Temple watched the police helicopter swerve in low over Cranes Moor. The crew would be looking for anything unusual, an abandoned car, perhaps, or maybe someone observing the scene from a distance through binoculars.
    The roar of the rotor blades shattered the plaintive silence of the forest. Most of the forensic technicians and police searchers stopped what they were doing to follow its progress.
    Temple returned his attention to the dead girl. The team were in the process of erecting a small white tent over her to prevent further contamination of the area around the body. This was the most crucial phase of any investigation. Get lucky now and you could save yourself an awful lot of time and effort later on. Most killers were careless, even the ones who thought they were forensically astute because they had watched every episode of
CSI
. But criminals always leave something behind, be it DNA, fibres or fingerprints. And thanks to the latest technology it usually leads the police directly to them.
    Despite the statistics, Temple was not confident that today’s search would bear much fruit. Crime scenes that are out in the open, especially those on fields and in woodland, are notoriously unproductive. Weather, wildlife and body decomposition usually conspire to hinder the work of the forensic team. And today their job would be even more difficult. The girl hadn’t died here, according to Matherson. And it hadn’t rained lately so the ground was dry, which made it difficult to find useful tyre tracks and shoeprints. Nevertheless they would use their scientific wizardry to try to recreate the path that the killer took to reach this spot.
    Temple already knew that the tattoo on the girl’s ankle was going to be their best and possibly only lead at this early stage.
    Genna. Who was she? What could she possibly have done to deserve such a fate? Was the killer her boyfriend or husband or perhaps someone she had rejected? Most times there’s a connection between the victim and the offender. That’s one reason the murder detection rate is so impressive. Quite often it’s obvious who the