Into the Woods
Praise for David Mark
‘Dark, compelling crime writing of the highest order’ DAILY MAIL
‘Brilliant’ THE SUN
‘Exceptional… Mark is writing at the top of his game.’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
‘A wonderfully descriptive writer’ PETER JAMES
‘A class act. Utterly original and spine chillingly good, when it comes to crime fiction, David Mark is in the premier league.’ ABIR MUKHERJEE, AUTHOR OF A RISING MAN
‘One of the most imaginative crime writers in the business, David Mark knows how to tell a good story – usually one that will invoke feelings of extreme horror and awe… in a good way, of course!’ S J I HOLLIDAY, AUTHOR OF THE LINGERING
‘Aector McAvoy, Mark’s gentle giant, is one of the most fascinating, layered characters in British crime fiction. Mark is an outstanding writer.’ M W CRAVEN
‘Masterful’ MICHAEL RIDPATH
‘A true original’ MICK HERRON
‘To call Mark’s novels police procedurals is like calling the Mona Lisa a pretty painting.’ KIRKUS REVIEWS
‘Mark writes bad beautifully’ PETER MAY
Also by David Mark
Novels
The Burying Ground
A Rush of Blood
Borrowed Time
Suspicious Minds
Into the Woods
The Guest House
The DS McAvoy series
Dark Winter
Original Skin
Sorrow Bound
Cruel Mercy
A Bad Death
Dead Pretty
Fire of Lies
Scorched Earth
Cold Bones
As D M Mark
The Zealot’s Bones
INTO THE WOODS
David Mark
An Aries book
www.headofzeus.com
This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Aries, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © David Mark, 2021
The moral right of David Mark to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781800244016
ISBN (PB) 9781800246362
Cover design © Lisa Brewster
Aries
c/o Head of Zeus
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
www.headofzeus.com
For Snowdrop, with love
Contents
Welcome Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Two
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Part Three
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Epilogue
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
‘The greatest blessings granted to mankind come by way of madness, which is a divine gift.’
Socrates
‘The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls. All the creatures that we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, souls that do not perish with the body and which must therefore be pacified lest they revenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies.’
Knud Rasmussen, polar explorer and anthropologist
Prologue
Now,
And Then…
The girl is beginning to return. She takes possession of her own unconscious skin as if wriggling into a wetsuit. Graceless, she slithers her way into fleshy cul-de-sacs and dead ends. She comes to life as if somebody were blowing air into a deflated rubber doll.
She can’t work out where her arms and legs should go.
Can’t decipher up from down.
Can’t remember how to breathe.
Gradually, she realises she cannot see. Her senses are all jumbled; smells and sights and sounds all swirled around like wet paint. She fancies she can touch colour; can taste crimson and iron. Can reach out with her hands and grope at great liquid handfuls of darkness.
She considers herself. She feels somehow waxy. Oddly soft. A pig-fat candle. Drowned flesh.
At length, she becomes aware of the high, ringing sensation in the centre of her skull. She thinks of piano wire, pulled tight and then plucked with a coin.
My name, she thinks. I don’t know my name…
The fear is coming, now. Fear, and pain. Adrenaline is flooding her. Sensations and feelings start to log-jam at the knot of muscle and bone and nerve endings at the top of her neck.
Suddenly she is gagging on scent. Scorched feathers and yesterday’s rain. Sandalwood and oil. Mushrooms past their use-by date. Meat: all sweaty leather and mildew.
She realises she can taste a little. Herbs and tobacco. Her tongue is swollen, too big for her mouth. Her lips tingle. There had been a drink. A cold, brown soup slopped from an earthen bowl. It had plants in. Some wormy tuber had touched her lip as she lapped at the brew like a cat with a saucer.
Memory again. Music. A guitar on a strap. Bare feet and the shimmering puddles within the underpass. The honey-drink. She can taste its sweetness. Can remember the touch of the green-gold bottle upon her lip – the reckless way they had passed it between them, brim unwiped, giddy on their new friend.
She tries to move. Blood rushes into her fingers, her toes. It cuts through the numbness. It’s as if hundreds of pins are pushing out through her flesh. She squirms again. Her face is constricted. It feels like she’s being squeezed. There’s pressure behind her eyes and across her sinuses, as if she were hanging forward.
She’s on her belly, on the table, looking down, staring at…
…and now she realises she can see a little. Darkness. Shapes. Soft edges and hard edges and something just out of sight.
The floor is moving. Snakes and eels wriggle beneath the thin carpet of leaves and paper and dirt. She blinks again, hard: eyelids pressed together like lips refusing the spoon. A fast, feathery panic flutters at her chest as she forces herself to see through the hallucinations and to fo
cus on what is really there.
A memory, sudden and vicious. The girls. Her friends.
Following the stranger. Smoking his cigarettes. Drinking his honeyed wine. Tripping after him like ducklings after their mother, heads swimming with the sweet golden wine…
There had been a fire. Branches blackening around a small, red-gold flame. They had danced, and smoked, and drank. And then he had begun to tell them what he believed. He had begun to talk about his great undertaking. About the journeys. His gift. And he had made them drink. They’d gagged on it, scared and shivering and each wanting the other to do something, to say something…
She croaks, pitifully, and from somewhere nearby she hears a small, snickering laugh.
She smells sweat. Smells the high, keening song of earthy skin buffed with moss and wild garlic.
She gasps as she feels the first of the small, cold objects being placed upon her back. She tries to buck backwards but cannot seem to get her body to obey her commands. She feels insubstantial, floating like a kite above herself, the thread gossamer thin.
She pictures them again. Her friends. Her best and only friends…
There is an electrical charge within her – a copper wire inside her bones. For a moment she is a mosaic; a whole made up of a billion parts. Inside her skull, an orange glow, like watching a bright sun through closed eyes.
Again, the sound of drums. Wood and leather, rhythmic and swift: split wood beating a thunderous pulse on a perfect circle of taut skin.
She opens her eyes. They bulge like fish straining at the trawl. Through the haze she sees the earth below her begin to shift. Opens her mouth and feels her tongue flop forward as the leaves and the stones and the broken twigs rise up as if something is tunnelling upwards out of the earth. She tries to rise. There is a sudden weight upon her back; a bare, sweaty knee in the well of her spine, a warm flat hand pushing her head, stuffing her deeper into the face-hole.
A face appears from the darkness beneath her: a full moon emerging from black cloud.
She blinks: tears and ash. Tries to make sense of the thing that leers up at her from the ground.
Teeth. Eyes like gobstoppers. Bristles and hair and crusted spit.
A mask?
A face.
It’s all leather and pig flesh – a mess of tusks and furrowed snout: the whole stained a dark tobacco-brown. She thinks of bog bodies.
Beneath, the ground bulges, rises; stones tumbling down; the stench of turned earth and bad meat rushing up to fill her nose, her mouth…
She stares into the eyes of the thing beneath the table; the thing that has lain in wait, submerged in the warm, wet earth. She glimpses dark, wrinkled skin.
She opens her mouth and sees the grotesque, porcine face extend its tusks in mimicry.
She sees the face beneath – the one that peers out through the open mouth of the boar.
Sees eyes she recognises, in a face she has smiled into a thousand times.
It lunges up from the earth.
And darkness falls.
Rowan Blake @Ro_Blakewriter
Just took a call from a Neo-Nazi with zero sense of irony. Threatened to burn my hands off if I didn’t apologise for last week’s Guardian column. Here’s my response, mate. Just try it, you prick.
6:11PM August 23
19 Retweets 42 Likes
Antony Lukaku @h8crimez 8m
Replying to @Ro_Blakewriter
You’re going to burn.
6:19 PM August 23
2 Retweets 19 Likes
PART ONE
1
The Eskdale Valley, Lake District, Northern England
Monday, November 19, this year
9.47am
The morning mist gives this landscape a blurry quality, as if the watcher’s eye were still muzzy with sleep. It transforms the panorama into something oddly fabric in texture: the fells gathered into ruches and pleats; all mismatched swatches of tweed and hessian – felted twists and wisps of downy green wool.
A little cottage stands at the foot of the slumbering fell, half lost in the damp, grey air. It has a red chimney and a new roof of green slate. The two sash windows are big inquisitive eyes above the astonished mouth of the black lacquered door. It has been built of the same grey stone as the low wall that encircles it.
A sign hangs above the doorframe: white letters on black wood.
Bilberry Byre
A thinnish, darkish man stands in the doorway, squinting up at the grey clouds. He is barefoot, his mud-grimed feet turning slowly white from contact with the cold grey stone of the front step. He wears dirty jeans, the knees stained. He is wrapped, toga-like, in a tartan blanket, its folds lying across his shoulders and gathered around his waist. His skin is a gallery: a turmoil of intricate words and pictures.
Rowan Blake, fortyish, is glaring at the world as if he would like to punch it in the throat. He flicks his head back and forth: a deranged horse swatting at a wasp. He lowers himself into a crouch. Squats. Moves cautiously forward, braced… then swings: his head a wrecking ball. Something red and brown flutters up elegantly from the overhanging branches, and Rowan leans on the wall for support. He’s sure he just heard his brain strike his skull: a damp splat, as if a squid has been hurled at a wall.
Rowan sags, beaten and sore.
‘Give it a rest,’ he growls, feebly. He squints in the general direction of the bird that has been driving him to distraction with its song. He can’t see the little bastard.
Probably laughing at you, Rowan, says the voice in his head. Gonna take shit from a tit? You gonna stand for that, son?
Temper breaks like a flung glass. ‘You’re shit! You’re a shit fucking singer. Your parents are embarrassed; your kids won’t admit they know you! You’re a shit bird in a shit nest. And that’s a shit fucking tree!’
He stops, out of breath. Listens as the echo disappears into the damp swaddling clothes of mist and mountain and autumn air. He permits himself a small, half-mad laugh. ‘Come to this, has it?’ he mutters to himself. ‘You’re a joke, mate. An embarrassment. If they could see you now…’
Rowan forces himself to stop. Unchecked, he could well berate himself for ever.
He closes his eyes. Slumps back against the brickwork. Feels gloom settle upon him like ash. The unfairness of it all! Three great steps up the career ladder and each has taken him closer to the bottom. From journalist to writer. Tick! From writer to TV presenter. Tick! And from TV presenter back to square bloody one. Dick! A reporter without a story; a journalist without a journal. Self-employed bordering on full-time unemployed.
He feels his disappointment, his resentment, like a physical pain; some herniated lump of gristle right behind his heart. He’d served his time, hadn’t he? Twenty years in newspapers, man and boy. He’d been right to take the money from the posh publishers down by the Thames. A two-book deal: two true-crime books, the first to be delivered inside twelve months. That wasn’t a problem, considering he’d already written it. He got most of his money in one go. The agreed fee was supposed to be paid out in different stages – the signature of contracts, the acceptance of the manuscript, the hardback publication and finally the paperback. Rowan was struggling with some old debts and having outright fistfights with some new ones. He agreed to a slightly lower fee, if he could have the bulk of the cash up front. He’d quit his staff job at The Mirror before the transferred cash hit his account.
This is it, lad, he’d told himself, full of pride. You’re going to be a writer. You’ve made it!
The book was a critical success and a commercial failure. His series of interviews with serial killer Gary King were found to be illuminating and repulsive in equal measure. Critics said he had an uncanny skill for letting people believe they were speaking to a confidant. Rowan gave his all to the marketing campaign, writing endless blogs about his poor-but-honest childhood and his sense of journalistic responsibility to the truth. Writers whom he’d admired gave admiring quotes for the front cover and
three serial killers wrote to him asking if he would like to poke around inside their heads.
Trouble was, not enough people bought it. That’s what it came down to, in the end. There were posters and promos and appearances at every bookshop and library he was willing to attend. It just didn’t do very well. King wasn’t a proper household name and his victims were all middle-aged white men, which meant little public sympathy. If he’d favoured young blonde girls or vulnerable women, King would have made Rowan a fortune. Rowan had come to the conclusion that there is almost nothing more expendable than a bland, white male. If he ever fancied becoming a serial killer himself, he would definitely make them his targets. After teenage runaways and long-term addicts, there is little in society as replaceable as a man.
The publishers expect something more commercially appealing for book two. The brief has been maddeningly broad. Perhaps something from a victim’s perspective, they’d said. A confession, perhaps. Or an unsolved mystery, like those ones on Netflix. Rowan recalls one tall, blonde, frightfully Oxbridge twenty-something looking at him over her chai latte and asking, quite seriously, if he knew of any unsolved cases that he might be able to solve. Preferably one with a personal angle…
Rowan raises his hands as if to push back a loop of hair, looking afresh at the things on the ends of his wrists – the things that now pass for hands. His palms and fingers are entirely mummified in bandages and polythene. They hide the grisly mass of peeling skin and yellow pus beneath. Last time he was permitted to look, some of the skin grafts were starting to look a little healthier. In other places he was still just blood and bone. He feels as though he has been wrung out like a damp cloth. Something inside him feels fractured; broken. He looks as if he has been drained; juiced – as if the right gust of wind could carry him away.
Maybe those bastard producers were right after all, he thinks, looking at the mess of cloth and plastic and skin. He sinks in on himself. You couldn’t appear on camera anyway now. Not like that.