It was nearly two hours before they reached their destination, and Rutledge was never quite sure how the constable had found his way across the featureless expanse. Tracks there were, but they seemed to go where they willed rather than in any discernible direction, to any discernible destination.

A great pile of rocks loomed up, ruins of a colliery, Rutledge thought, peering at it through the darkness. And then the sputtering fire that the men had lit to keep warm if not dry. The rains had stopped, but there was a drizzle in the wind that clung to everything. It was easy to understand why a small boy might die out here of exposure, even in summer.

In the lea of a boulder, where erosion had widened the crevice over the years, there was a pile of bones, pitiful in their smallness. Rutledge could see the whiteness of a longer one behind the others. He dismounted, leaving the bike in the charge of a roughly dressed man who appeared out of nowhere to take it.

“There’s no skull,” Dawlish was saying to Hawkins. “And no pelvis, as I told you. Only the little bones, and that leg bone yonder. Can you tell anything about it, sir?” Someone was bringing a lantern over to them, its light spilling across their feet, and then their faces.

Hawkins knelt. “You’ve looked for the skull? Or ribs?”

“Aye, sir, all through the rocks. Nothing.”

“Carried off then, by wild dogs,” he said, running his fingers over the smaller fragments. Lifting the leg bone, he brought it closer to his face, then adjusted the lantern in the holder’s hand so that it fell the way he wished it to. “This was broken. Here.” He pointed to a jagged fracture line in the bone. “Died before it began to heal. Caught a foot in the hole by the rock, I’d say, and couldn’t get out again.” He got up and went to the fire, using that and the lantern to better judge the bone.

After a few minutes he said, “Just as I thought. Sheep carcass. That’s what you dragged me out here for!”

“There was no knowing for certain, sir. With nothing larger than that one bone to go by,” Dawlish said apologetically.

“Next time, bring the damned things in to me.”

“No,” Rutledge said, countermanding that instruction. “I want to see them in place. Not on a laboratory table. And as soon as they’re found.”

Hawkins glared at him, went to fetch his bicycle, and Rut-ledge had to hurry to catch up with him—or stay on the moors with the searchers, as Dawlish was doing.

Halfway back to the village, Rutledge heard Hawkins say, “You’re a damned fool. You know that, don’t you?”

“I’m a policeman. I do what I have to do. No more, no less.”