The Becks had replaced their old oak front door with a brand-new uPVC one – tradition was all very well, Grant had told Ellie, but you wanted to keep the cold out in winter and the gas bills weren’t coming down any time soon. It had five lever mortice locks that made it next to immovable, but move it had: the frame was empty, and the door, torn off its hinges, lay inside the dim hallway.

Ellie popped two paracetamol from a blister pack and swallowed them dry.

“See what I mean?” Bert Annable climbed down from his tractor cab. He was a big, grey-bearded man of sixty-odd in waxed jacket, wellies and cords, a woollen cap over his bald patch. He ran a smallholding on the far side of Barsall – his family had lived there for centuries, and had allegedly been among the few survivors of the ‘Bad Winter’ that had almost wiped the village out – and used his tractor to clear the smaller local roads after heavy snow, which was why he’d been driving along Spear Bank at eight a.m. He’d seen the state of the place, and come banging on Ellie’s door.

Ellie nodded. “Grant?” she shouted. “Sally?” What had the daughter’s name been, again? “Kate?”

No answer. There was no wind; the morning was silent, without even a birdcall. If anything had moved or made a noise inside the house, it would have been audible.

“See the state of the door?”

“Yes, Bert, I can.” If Bert Annable had a fault, it was a tendency to state the obvious.

“And that thing over it?”

“Yes, Bert.” The charcoal symbol was stark against the whitewash: a long black vertical line with a shorter diagonal one pointing down and to the left from the top. Different to the one by Tony Harper’s body, but made the same way and equally incomprehensible.

“Not an animal, then,” said Bert.

“Well, obviously,” said Ellie, then remembered – every winter, almost like clockwork, Bert would lose sheep from his flock and mutter darkly about animals roaming the moors – escaped dogs, big cats or whatever. Only a matter of time, he’d always scowl, when in that mood, before they attacked a person. “How are your sheep?” she said. “Missing many of them?”

“Strangest bloody thing is, I’m not. Lost two or three, no more than that – and a couple of those I found later. One had tumbled down a gorge and the other one’d drowned in a stream. Usually a sight worse than that by this time of year. That’s why I thought it might’ve been the dogs or cats or whatever the hell they are here to begin with – buggers deciding to go after bigger game. But animals can’t draw.”