They did find footprints. And they weren’t human.

Lee still had the photos on a datastick somewhere. They weren’t exactly a smoking gun though. None of the footprints were complete, and they overlapped one another—but if someone had made them with a fake wading-bird foot, they’d really gone to town. The prints had two long toes and one short one, as though the inner toe had broken off halfway. Mal and Lee exchanged looks, and there was something between elation and terror in the air. Even messy and infinitely interpretable, this was new. This would get them in the Fortean Times. This would get them a speaker’s spot at Weird Weekend or even air fare to a big symposium in the States. This would make their names in the field—they knew it.

Mal picked up a bad smell beyond the general farmyard odour and followed it round the side of the barn. Lee’s subconscious was busy comparing reality with her memories of the video, feeling something was missing.

When Mal let out a horrified noise, Lee dashed over, already feeling sick in her stomach. The scent of dead meat was overpowering even through her hay-fever, sweet with rot. Most definitely she could hear the legion of busy flies. She was horribly certain it was Roberts.

It was sheep, though. A little flock had been penned in here, in what looked like decidedly makeshift accommodation, and something had got in amongst them. They were very dead, and for a moment that was all Lee could think about, because there was blood everywhere, painting the walls even, and some of the bodies seemed to have just about exploded. Mal lost what was left of her lunch right then, staggering out of the barn and retching, but Lee just stared. She’d seen roadkill before, and her neighbour’s hamster, when it did that hamster trick of dying for no reason. Now she was looking at the brutally torn-up carcasses of at least seven sheep. She felt almost clinical about it, like she was Sherlock Holmes ready to make gnostic pronouncements about the murderer. And the more she stared, the more she really did think like that, because she was noticing things, even as Mal called for her to come away. Horrible as the sight was, this wasn’t just death for death’s sake. There were far too many visible bones, and they were hacked about, not torn by the teeth of animals…

“Flensed,” she said, and Mal gave her a baffled look. Then Lee lost her nerve and didn’t explain the thought sitting in her head like a toad: this is what you get when you butcher bones, not when you gnaw on them.