They found her bag first,
It was caught in the undergrowth about forty meters from the main path into Ashford Forest, half hidden under a sprawl of dead leaves like it had been dropped in a hurry or thrown, and the investigator who found it crouched down and looked at it for a long time before he touched it, taking in the way it was sitting, the angle, what it suggested about direction and speed,
Her phone was still inside,
Cracked screen, dead battery, but inside,
They found the shoe twenty minutes later, further in, just one, a flat black one that had clearly come off a foot mid movement rather than being removed deliberately, and that detail was the one that sat heaviest because shoes that came off in forests did not come off because someone stopped to take them off,
The investigat
