The three men trudged through the trail which led to the spot where Lisa had been found, brushing against the bristly arms of the evergreens. Scott had the uncanny feeling that the trees were trying to pull them into their leafy mysterious world, from whence there would be no return.

"Over here," Scott pointed in the direction of the azara bush, his breath freezing in the frigid air. In the near distance, he could make out the sinister contours of the Humpback Bridge.

A profound, almost holy hush descended eerily on the snow-enshrouded world around them. As if it were holding its icy breath in anticipation of what was to come.

"Oh God no..." Ben discovered her first. She lay sprawled on the frozen ground; flaming curls fanned round her face, the voluminous green cloak spread out like a sacrament around her.

For several long minutes that stretched on like an eternity, nobody either spoke or moved. The three men just stood there in a state of stunned immobility as the oppressive, unnatural stillness of that awful place held them fast in its grip. They were like spectators at a sacrificial altar of old, frozen into a state of horrified silence.

A ghastly sense of deja vu invaded their bones along with the numbing cold. This was the same place exactly where another murdered girl had lain twenty years ago to the hour. But it was the gnawing sense of guilt that they, no matter how unintentionally, were responsible for this young woman's violent and lonely end.

"Oh my God," Ben muttered at last, and wondered how something that started out as a harmless, although foolish re-enactment of a crime, could end up by duplicating it in such a terrible way?