YouTube was not, of course, undiscovered country. Discovery was entirely the point of YouTube. And if you looked hard enough, you could discover just about anything on it, although sometimes you had to wade through a lot of porn to find what you were looking for. One thing YouTube had, if you entered the right search terms, was a plethora of the Unexplained.

Mal and Lee were no longer wide-eyed naifs when it came to that sort of thing. They’d spent a dozen hysterical evenings over the last couple of years trawling the net to find cryptid videos, mysterious sightings of unknown species. Lee’s firm impression was that nine-tenths of the “unknown animal” videos on YouTube boiled down to (a) gross jellyfish, (b) bad special effects and (c) actual readily identifiable animals with the bad luck to be encountered by someone who’d apparently never seen a nature documentary. One of them, under the heading of MISTERY ANIMALS!!, had been just a regular heron. And the look in that heron’s eye had said, “Don’t you be pulling that internet shit on me,” or that’s what Mal had claimed.

So when they were huddled together on Mal’s bed, blinds drawn and her laptop balancing precariously across their knees, Lee hadn’t exactly been holding her breath.

The video Mal had found was titled Birdman of Bodmin?, and at least all three words were spelled correctly. The alliteration was a nice extra.

“This is going to be dumb,” Lee decided, leaning into Mal.

“Just watch.” And there had been a jag of excitement in the other girl’s voice that said that however dumb this dumb video was, they would be heading to Bodmin Moor that summer.

It purported to be footage from a security camera. Black-and-white nocturnal video of a suitably grainy quality, so that the viewer didn’t have to try very hard to start seeing things in the static-laden gloom. The viewpoint was immobile, angled to look down the stone wall of a two-storey building: there were suggestions of rectangular windows, and across from them, a corrugated wall, perhaps a barn. There was a gap of about ten feet between the buildings, cluttered with what might be farm implements and tarpaulined crates, a kennel on its side, a bicycle missing its front wheel. At the far extent of the view, after a security light was triggered, Lee could just make out the looming hulk of a Range Rover, crusty with mud. Or that was how she remembered it in retrospect. She could never quite square the precision of her recollection with the grainy quality of the video. Memory screwed you over like that.