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By Root 807 0

shop. He used the shop’s changing room to get out of his suit and into the shorts and trainers and track top he’d brought with him in his grip. He crammed his work clothes into the grip and the grip into a cheap rucksack the more easily to carry it, pedalling, on his back. And he bought the detailed island map he needed and, after riding a mile to get used to the bike, sat at the side of the road in the shade of a hedge in the heat and plotted his route. And when he’d done that, he paused. It was now just after five o’clock. There were scalloped clouds remote in the sky and the earth was warm under him. The island sky was enormous after the limited vistas of London. He could smell wildflowers entwined in the hedgerow allowing his shade. In the time he’d sat there, two cars had passed him. A 2CV had rocked by on thin tyres, its rear compartment kaleidoscopic with buckets and spades and balls and rolled beach towels, Joni Mitchell shrill on its radio through the open driver’s window, singing something tremulous and folky from the album Blue. And a Morris Traveller, resplendent in its timber trim, had happened by towing a caravan. Island life was a lot different from Hackney, he thought, smiling as he climbed on to the saddle of the bike.

It occurred to him that it was a week to the day since he had first heard the name Pandora Gibson-Hoare. He’d been on the roof at St Martin’s with the boys, Stuart Lockyear dressed like Franchot Tone in Five Graves To Cairo, sipping cheap Lambrusco in the indolent London heat. Every silver lining has a cloud, Stuart had said. The scene on the roof had been played out to a soundtrack, the broken-backed songs of Hank Williams on Foyle’s paint-spattered beatbox. Over the course of just seven days he had become obsessed by Pandora, by her short life and disquieting work and tantalising mysteries. It was odd, really. He didn’t feel he knew or understood her very well. Yet something in his heart and brain and even in his memory suggested that he had known something of this woman always.

Direct, he judged the distance southwest across the island to the forest to be about nine miles. But he chose to skirt around Newport, rather than navigate his way through the island’s busiest town. His route was narrow and hilly and he missed a couple of crucial signposts, forcing him to double back twice. He’d been pedalling hard for over an hour when the ferns and saplings and second growth of the forest outskirts told him he had arrived there. He stopped and took a long drink from the bike’s water bottle, glad the fellow in the adventure shop had thought to fill it for him.

Because he’d skirted Newport, he was approaching the forest from the north, across what the map told him was Newbarn Down. He could see the forest proper rising in front of him to a horizon where dense trees capped a high slope. He reckoned the Fischer house had to be at the bottom of the downward slope on the south side of the hill. The house was on land near a stream or river and Pandora had made no mention of a gorge, so he was assuming the house had been built on the same elevation as the stream, close to sea level. And the other side of the wooded crest in front of him would be more accessible by car from where she and Fischer had landed in the boat piloted by Wheatley. So he knew roughly where he was going. The only problem was that he couldn’t get the bike over the hill. The adventure-shop man had proudly demonstrated the fact that the bike had fifteen gears. It had a tough grippy tread on its thick tyres. But so dense was the wood already that Seaton was wheeling it now rather than riding it. There were not sufficient gaps between trees to steer the thing through.

He looked at his watch. It was seven o’clock. He could double back and find a road and go around the perimeter of the forest and approach it from the seaward side. But he had doubled back enough. He could cut his losses, ride off to the guest house in Ventnor, dump his bag and find a nice seafront bar. The guest-house owner had told him a free house called the Spyglass