As far as days to die were concerned, the longest day of the year was as good a day as any.

Naomi Bennett lay with her eyes open at the bottom of a ditch while the blood that had kept her alive for all of her twenty-four years pulsed away into the grit and rubble beneath her.

As she drifted in and out of awareness, she contemplated the irony of it all: how she was going to die now – having survived so much, and thinking that freedom was so close – at the hands of the only man who had ever really loved her and shown her kindness. He stood at the edge of the ditch above her, his face in shadow as the sun shone through the bright green leaves and cast dappled light over him, his hair halo-bright. Waiting.

The blood filled her lungs and she coughed, blowing scarlet bubbles that foamed over her chin.

He stood motionless, one hand on the shovel, watching the blood flow out of her and marvelling at its glorious colour, a liquid jewel, and at how even at the moment of death she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

Once the flow slowed to a mere trickle he turned away, casting a glance across the derelict no-man’s-land between the back of the industrial estate and the beginnings of farmland. Nobody came here, not even dog-walkers; the ground was rough and scarred with manufacturing rubbish accumulated over decades, weeds growing through empty cable reels, brown fluid leaking out of rusted oil drums, and at the edge, beneath a long row of lime trees, a six-foot ditch that brought dirty water when it rained, draining a mile away into the river.

Several minutes passed.

She was dead.

The wind had started to pick up and he looked up through the canopy of leaves to the clouds chasing each other across the sky.

He scrambled carefully down the rough slope into the bottom of the ditch, using the shovel for support, and then without hesitation drove it into her skull, bouncing roughly off the first time, then with a dull crack breaking the bone and splintering it into her flesh. Again and again, gasping with the effort, smashing her face away, breaking teeth, bone and flesh into one ghastly mixture.

After that, she wasn’t his Naomi any more.

He used the knife again to slice away at each of her fingers in turn, her palms, until nothing identifiable was left.

Finally, he used the bloody shovel to cover her over with the rubble, sand and rubbish that had collected in the ditch. It wasn’t a very good job. The blood was everywhere.

But as he finished – wiping away the tears that he’d been shedding from the moment she’d said his name in surprise, just as he’d sliced her throat – the first spots of rain fell from the darkening sky.