Charlie woke to the sound of her phone ringing.

Peeling herself from sleep, she scrabbled for the phone on her nightstand. She managed to coordinate her fingers enough to swipe to answer. “Ramsden speaking.”

“There’s been another one.”

It was Stephen, and she rubbed her hand over her face before pushing herself to sitting. From the lack of light beyond her curtains, it was still night time outside, and she glanced at the LED clock. 4:45 a.m. Far too early to be awake. Especially for a dead sheep.

“Another sheep attack?” she confirmed.

“Another attack, but not a sheep this time. Looks like whatever is doing this has progressed to human prey.”

Instantly, she was wide awake, and she reached out to flick on her nightstand lamp. “Human? You mean someone’s been murdered?”

He seemed confused by her choice of words. “It’s not exactly murder if it’s an animal attack, is it?”

She frowned at herself. Why had she jumped to that conclusion?

“Yes, of course. Sorry.”

She swung her legs out of bed and got to her feet, stretching out her shoulders and arms. “Where’s the scene of the crime?”

“Near Hameldown Tor.”

“Okay. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Charlie didn’t waste any more time. She quickly dressed in uniform and used the bathroom to freshen up. She pulled her long blonde hair into a ponytail and then twisted it around to create a bun. One thing she’d learnt over her years in the force was that people tended to pay more attention to her and take her more seriously if she was able to hide her hair. For some reason, long blonde hair immediately meant she was an airhead, when in fact she was anything but.

In less than ten minutes from receiving the phone call, she was in her car and heading down the A38 towards the moors. She didn’t use her siren. The roads were practically clear at this time in the morning, and it wasn’t as though the body would be going anywhere.

Twenty minutes later, she was navigating the narrow roads of moorland, slowing her speed, careful to avoid any wild ponies or sheep that were grazing. Last night’s clouds had cleared, and the moon was close to full, sending an eerie white glow across the moorland. In the distance, the stacked rocks of the tors towered into the sky. The moors were beautiful during the daytime, but they definitely had a creepy atmosphere at night. Of course, that she was about to visit the scene of a death wasn’t helping to ease her creeped-out feeling. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t seen a dead body before—she’d seen plenty in her six years on the force—but that didn’t make it any easier. It always reminded her of her own mortality and how fragile life was. Most people walked around thinking ‘it couldn’t happen to me’, but then they ended up being one of the bodies pulled from a car wreck or out of a river.

The swirling blue light of Stephen’s car caught her eye before anything else. He didn’t have any sirens on, but she guessed he’d left the blue light on to pinpoint the location for her. It was a little way off the road, but the four-by-four he drove had allowed him to drive across the moorland without fears of getting stuck in the boggy peat, which could suck people under.

She wasn’t driving a four-by-four, however, and so pulled the car over. She’d been expecting to see a makeshift campsite, with other campers around, frightened and worried, or even grieving if the dead man was someone they knew well, but instead there was only Stephen cordoning off the area. A sheet covered a lump in the middle of the cordoned-off space, which she assumed hid the body from prying eyes.

He’d seen her approach, but only now stopped what he was doing to straighten and look in her direction, his lips a thin line of concern. Stephen was in his forties, with a wife and two children at home. She knew he hadn’t been best pleased about getting a twenty-six-year-old woman as a partner, but they’d bumped along together initially and quickly found they worked well as a team. She didn’t need to worry about any juvenility from him, and she’d met his wife a number of times now and they’d got on great, so there was no tension on that front either. Stephen was dedicated to his job and his family. He didn’t have time for messing around.

“The victim is twenty-six-year-old Richard Hutton from Plymouth. He was out here on a hiking break with two others. His friends have already identified him and have been taken down to the station to be interviewed. They’ll need to do a formal identification back at the station, too.”

“How’s it looking?” she asked, removing her torch from her belt and shining the beam in the direction of the covered body.

“Hate to say it, but it’s the same M.O. as in the deaths of the sheep we’ve been seeing.”

“I thought you said this guy was a camper? There’s no sign of a campsite here?”

“No. Seems whatever took the man dragged him out here. The campsite is almost half a mile away.”

Charlie frowned. What kind of thing were they dealing with that could drag a fully grown man half a mile?

“Did the people he was camping with hear anything?”

“No,” Stephen said, “but we need to interview them further. I’m struggling to believe a grown man can be snatched like that without anyone hearing so much as a yell.”

Unease threaded its way through her veins, and the hairs on her arms stood to attention. Subconsciously, she found herself rubbing at her forearms. “They didn’t hear a thing?”

“They’re all in the single-man tents—you know, the pop-up kind. The two others he was with say they heard the front of the tent unzip but assumed he was just stepping out to take a piss. One of them got worried when they didn’t hear him coming back in, so they set out in search of him. They thought he might have got disorientated and not been able to find his way back to the tent. Then they stumbled across his body.”

“Jesus.” She pushed her hand over the top of her head. “Any defensive wounds?”

He gestured to the body. “See for yourself.”

Charlie crouched beside the covered body and took a deep breath, then pulled the sheet back. At the sight of the body, she closed her eyes briefly, composing herself, and then looked back. The man appeared to have been killed in exactly the same way as the sheep they’d seen over the last couple of weeks. His throat was missing, blood smeared across the lower half of his face and drenching the front of his t-shirt. The ground beneath was also sodden in blood, which made her think the man had been dragged here and then killed, rather than killed at the campsite.

She snapped on a pair of gloves and got to work. She checked the man’s hands and under his nails. There were no scratch marks on his hands or arms, and she couldn’t see any sign of skin or blood under his nails. In short, nothing to show the man fought back. Had he been knocked unconscious back at the campsite? She couldn’t see any other explanation as to why he’d not fought back while he’d been dragged all this distance before being killed.

“We’re going to need to interview everyone who was in the area last night, see if anyone saw or heard anything unusual.”

Stephen nodded his agreement. “Yes, though that’s going to take a while. This is a big area.”

“But sparsely populated. We’ll need to try to interview anyone who might have been passing through as well.”

He heaved out a sigh. “Going to be a long day.”

She gave a wry smile. “All part of the job.”