Did you find the missing girl from the stone circle? I doubt it. One can’t find something that burrows away from the light. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you happened upon her by chance; it was all planned. She’ll appear again soon, but blink and you might miss her. But hurry, because time is running out. When the day meets the night, and darkness descends across the land, and the Moon Goddess returns to slumber, then only the spirits rule until balance returns.

Sloppy slaying in Braithwaite. Amateur. I love animals. That part really made me sick.

Namaste x

Kelly stared at the letter. Her hands began to shake, and she couldn’t stop them. Mary’s body had been discovered late Friday afternoon, the news hadn’t hit until the ten o’clock bulletin. How the hell could anyone get a letter here to Cumbria about it so soon? It was feasible that it had been posted first thing Saturday.

The content was wrong on so many levels – morally, personally, intellectually – and Kelly’s initial instinct was to crumple the piece of paper between her hands and throw it into the waste paper bin, but she couldn’t. Too many questions remained unanswered. It wasn’t why a killer had decided to follow her two most recent cases that bothered her so much – any psychopath has to have an obsession, and Kelly had reluctantly accepted a long time ago that she had become The Teacher’s fixation. So, it wasn’t the personal nature of the letter that bothered her. It was more the tone of the narrative about the crimes themselves. The girl at Castlerigg… Sloppy slaying at Braithwaite… She was being taunted, and it angered her. She read over the letter again, this time without emotion: she was looking for what had triggered the uncomfortable feeling in her gut that Amy Richmond might have something more to say about her current cases. One can’t find something that burrows away from the light…

And who the hell is the Moon Goddess?

Kelly had dabbled in the supernatural at university, as many young people did. Some bright spark bought a Ouija board, and they’d tried to contact somebody’s dead grandmother or cat. One joker always pulled the glass around, making the girls scream, and somebody else freaked out, smashed the lights and blew out candles. It was all rite-of-passage stuff.

But to be taken seriously in an investigation, it was a tall order, and one that Kelly was having a hard time processing. She left her desk and went to find Rob. After all, it was he who’d spotted the tables in the homes of Fred and Mary, and likened them to altars. He’d actually used that word, ‘altar’. Kelly had done a double take.