James knelt down next to the body and flicked the flakes from the face with a gloved hand.

As the grey, swollen features were revealed, he saw that he was indeed looking down at a male. It was clear that he was dead and that he must have been lying here for hours.

It took James several seconds longer to realise that he recognised the face. It belonged to Charlie Jenkins, landlord of The White Hart pub.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

James felt his breath stall as he stared down at the body of Charlie Jenkins. At the same time his heart started racing, punching at his chest like a steam hammer.

Before touching the body again, he called it in and told control that backup and a SOCO team, plus a pathologist, needed to be dispatched right away.

He then took great care to brush the snow from the torso. Jenkins was wearing a thick coat that was soaked through. Most of the blood had formed on the chest and stomach, and that was where James spotted the holes in the material.

He had seen enough knife wounds in his career to know that the man had been stabbed at least twice and with brute force. He would leave it to the scene of crime technicians to delve beneath the layers of clothing. The last thing he wanted to do was damage or destroy vital pieces of evidence.

But there was no doubting the fact that Jenkins had been murdered, and it had happened at some time during the night or early hours of this morning.

James stood and started to frantically process the scene, not an easy task given that the whole area was under a layer of snow. He then remembered what the woman who had stumbled upon the body had said about a dog.

It didn’t take him long to spot the small mound a few yards away. He stepped over to it and crouched down for a closer look. It wasn’t covered by as much snow due to the overhanging branches of the beech tree, so James could tell that it was a small, brown Yorkshire Terrier. There didn’t appear to be any blood on or around it so he suspected it must have frozen to death while remaining at its owner’s side.

James gritted his teeth and tried to think, and the first thing that popped into his mind was the chilling message written on the card he’d received.

Twelve days. Twelve murders. Twelve victims. And they all deserve what’s coming to them.

So was Charlie Jenkins the first victim? Was his murder proof that it wasn’t a hoax after all? Or did this have nothing to do with the Twelve Days of Christmas warning? Was it simply a hideous coincidence?

More questions came thick and fast. Where was Charlie’s wife, Sonia? If he had been here for most of the night, why hadn’t she come looking for him or raised the alarm? Was it conceivable that she was the person who had killed him, perhaps in a jealous rage over his affair with Janet Dyer?