It was colder. They stood there in shorts and T-shirts and shivered, dickering over whether to get more clothes out of their rucksacks. Lee looked up at the early afternoon sun, seeing it bright and fierce in a clear blue sky. The cold seemed something other, as though it was leaching in from elsewhere. Or so Lee remembered later, with the benefit of hindsight.

Mal approached the nearest stone, which wasn’t much taller than she was, flat and irregular, nothing like the decent workmanship of Stonehenge. “Six brothers,” she said derisively. On the inner faces of all three were lichen-clogged scratches that might have been local graffiti or Stone Age ritual magic.

The Range Rover’s door was open. Lee slowed her approach, sniffing frantically through her allergy-clogged nose in case it was another murder scene. There was no body slumped half out of the driver’s seat. There was no sign of Cador Roberts at all. She even got down on her knees to look underneath, finding only that the ground was somehow freezing cold and soaking wet.

“Lee,” Mal said. She was standing by the stone, not quite touching it, and she was very still. “You can see forever.”

“Hmm?” Later, Lee would try to reinterpret that pronouncement into something profound and prophetic, but probably Mal just meant the view. The stones marked out a rise in the moorland, and they could see for miles. What they could not see, however, was any sign of Roberts. The thought was almost as frightening as the sheep slaughter. Why would someone dump their car here and walk off into the tawny forever of the moors?

“I think we’re out of our depth here,” Lee decided, and then a rolling line of shadow raced over, as if clouds were obscuring the sun. That sky had been entirely clear a moment before, but weather could turn suddenly on the moors, Lee told herself.

Then it began to snow.

There was a moment where the summer sky above Lee was mostly blue, and yet snowflakes were spiralling down—and she was such a city girl that alarm bells were still failing to ring. Then Mal shouted. Lee turned towards her and got a face full of blizzard.

Abruptly the wind was tearing around her, out of nowhere. It brought great skirls of snow, like the waves of the sea, raking her skin and flurrying at her clothes with a thousand sharp fingers. She staggered forwards, leaning into the wind to make progress. Mal was in the midst of the storm, hunched between two of the stones. She had her phone out, trying to take a picture of the weather. Why not? It was a prime Fortean phenomenon: unseasonal snow from an almost clear sky. Perhaps it would start raining frogs and fish next.