For a moment, she was able to push the small village of Braithwaite to the back of her mind. The small community was in shock. It had emerged, though, that perhaps Mary wasn’t as accepted a member of the village as was once intimated. Fear had begun to set in, especially with the older residents of nearby streets who also lived alone. Gossip spread fast and the word on the street was that a mob had robbed Mary’s house and turned angry: youths likely. Another theory was that it was somebody who was sick and tired of her animals.

It had emerged that the local sentiment was that the dead woman kept too many pets: the property had a distinct whiff of the four-legged lodgers, and neighbours often complained about the noise of the cats worrying the birds. For the most part, this seemed to be exaggerated, but the uniformed police performing house calls had to log every detail, and as a result, had recorded a dozen or so incidents where neighbours were upset with the growing menagerie. According to the way their statements read Mary Hales was in fact more unpopular than had at first been reported.

During initial inquiries on such a sensitive and brutal case, conjecture always crept in to witness accounts. The police presence provided by head office was large, and it reflected the local panic resonant in the pubs and streets of the surrounding areas. The height of the summer season was virtually over, but tourism still brought in wages during the glorious autumn months when people flocked to the Lakes to enjoy the majesty of the autumn colours: bronzes, golds and oranges tinged every corner of the hills and framed award winning photography. The press was also out in sizeable force. Reporters from Manchester and London had been seen outside the victim’s house, and had been asking questions in the surrounding villages. Some wacky stories had circulated, including reports from one local journalist, Carry Tomlin, about the case being linked to witchcraft.

The news had caught Kelly’s attention.

Carry Tomlin was a young reporter, fresh out of university, trying to make her mark, and she’d already recently published an inflammatory article about the practice of worshipping sun and moon deities in the Lake District going back thousands of years. It was DC Emma Hide who’d marked the journalist as one to watch. Anything with cruelty to animals as a background canvas always raised a flicker of a concern about ritual, and gossip had to be contained. Kelly had asked Emma to look into any possibilities, and had also given her the file on the Birkett Mire cruelty case: it was a line of inquiry, nothing more at this stage. After Johnny’s revelation, she’d also found the file on the High Rigg case from 2013 and, without looking at it herself, passed that to DC Hide also.