At the gable end they stopped at the body of a suited man dead on his belly between an Audi and the shooting box.

‘Looks like he got the furthest,’ Lynch said.

‘Apart from her and the baby.’ Carlin pointed his thumb over his shoulder.

Lynch turned and looked across the moor to where the other crime scene, smaller yet no less grim, had been cordoned off. The mother and daughter hikers who’d found the bodies and made the call were talking to uniformed officers among a fleet of ambulances and cruisers, lights strobing vibrantly in the pale light.

The woman lay sprawled in a peat bog, pink hair flecked with blood flowing across the sedge. Ligature bruises clouded under the skin of her wrists and ankles. Scarfed about her throat hung a spit-soaked gag and a blindfold. A gutter dredged through her cheek as if by a chasing bullet. In her back, her latissimus, gaped a ragged black hole. This bullet had perforated her torso and entered what she’d been carrying. Mute in her track-marked arms lay a dead newborn. Both had been branded.

‘Fucking men.’ Lynch spat in the grass.11

Carlin looked at him. ‘Bury that shit now. You hear me?’

Lynch grunted and looked away.

‘I mean it. Bury it now or it’ll eat you alive.’

Clouds massed into mountains and their immense shadows crossed the moor and the temperature, already low, dropped another couple of degrees.

‘One thing that doesn’t make sense,’ Carlin said.

‘Just one?’

‘There doesn’t appear to be any money involved. I mean, if this is some trafficking deal gone wrong, where’s the money?’

Lynch thought about this. ‘Maybe the money side of the deal was made over the phone or online. The laptop.’

The helicopter came back and swooped in low, the grass careening in the blades’ backwash, and then it was rising again and moving off, leaving behind a thrumming silence.

Lynch’s phone sounded. He took it out and looked at the caller ID. Kat. He pocketed the phone without reading the text and cleared his throat.

‘Just one of the lads.’

‘I didn’t ask.’ Carlin was examining the dead man’s outstretched hand. The wrist and digits bent in abnormal articulation. ‘What do you think?’

Lynch put on nitrile gloves and sat on his heels in the blood-spattered gravel and inspected the splayed hand. ‘Looks like his fingers were prised apart. Couple feel broke. Like someone was trying to take something from him.’ He stood up. ‘A gun?’

‘Maybe.’

‘So what we have here is potentially missing money and a missing gun.’

‘Which means?’

‘We’re missing a man. Or men.’12

‘And maybe a couple of other vehicles.’ Carlin nodded at the ground.

Lynch stepped back and looked at the marked-off tyre tracks intersecting gravel and grass. ‘More off-roaders. Big. Probably a Land Rover. The others, not sure.’