He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. Almost five o'clock. An hour and a half more sleep if he was lucky, then Monday morning and back to work. Bollocks, he thought, letting out a sigh. The case he was working on seemed to be a total dead-ender. A few elderly homosexuals had been assaulted at night in car parks dotted around Manchester. No one wanted to talk about it, especially not the victims once the ambulance drivers had patched up the minor cuts and bruises to their heads. Normally the Major Incident Team wouldn't be dragged into a case of this nature, but the latest attack had moved the case up several notches in the serious crime scorecard.
The recording of the emergency call was clear in his head. A man's voice, panic making it waver and dip.
'Police? That's the police? You need to get out here, someone's being killed!'
The operator's voice, calm and steady. 'Where are you, Sir?'
'What? It's the car park. The one by the recreation ground. Silburn Grove, Middleton.'
'The public car park on Silburn Grove. Thank you, Sir. Who is being attacked?'
'Listen, I don't know! This lad jumped out on us by the shed. He's got an iron bar. Oh Jesus, I can hear screaming.'
The recording had captured it too, muffled and faint in the background. Someone in terror for their life.
'Good God, hurry. He's killing him.'
'Please stay calm, Sir. Who is being attacked?'
'Oh! I can see him now, he's come back round. He's going towards his car.'
'Who, Sir? The attacker?'
'There's so much blood!'
'Can you see the make or registration?'
'MA03 H something. It's a big estate. Jesus, I don't know where the other guy is.' Movement against the earpiece as the man must have looked desperately around. Just before he rang off an engine surged as the accelerator was pressed down.
By the time the patrol car arrived the car park was deserted. As one of Manchester's more popular sites for gay rendezvous, that was very unusual — especially since it was late evening. The attending officers had swept the area around the shed with their torches and soon found blood spatters arcing in dotted lines up a side wall. Someone had taken a serious beating.
Clusters of drops had then led them across the asphalt towards an area of undergrowth that screened a shallow, dirty stream. The water was clogged with old tyres, bags of dumped rubbish and the odd shopping trolley. No corpse was in the vicinity.
The decision was made to refer the assault on to MIT and Jon arrived at the crime scene two hours later. The powers that be saw it as an escalation of violence that could — if it hadn't already — lead to murder.
The problem was the lack of witnesses. Jon was familiar with cases where victim and witnesses were unwilling to come forward. He was left trying to investigate a case that was doomed to failure. Only when an actual body showed up would the resources needed for a breakthrough be released. Still, at least he was getting home on time each night.
Gurgling noises returned him to the present. He looked down as Holly pushed the teat from her mouth. Her arms slowly lowered then fell slackly to her sides. He held the bottle to the nightlight and saw it was almost empty. Jesus, she could bolt milk like there was no tomorrow. His mum had seen this and, unable to resist in a bit of misty-eyed reminiscing, proudly told Alice that, as a baby, Jon could sink nine ounces in a few minutes. But, Jon thought, he'd weighed almost eleven pounds when he was born. The little thing in his lap had been almost half that. Obviously making up for it.
He lifted her to a sitting position, formed a V shape with the thumb and fingers of his spare hand and then gently wedged her chin into it. Her arms hung down and he began rubbing her back, feeling the minute bumps of her spine against the palm of his hand. So tiny. So fragile. Eventually a couple of surprisingly large burps escaped her. 'Good ones, my piglet,' he whispered, planting a kiss on her soft cheek. He lifted her up and gently placed her back in the cot. He was just straightening up when a noise outside caused him to freeze.
The sound, at first low and guttural, suddenly erupted into a hideous yowl. Something deep in Jon reacted to its animal ferocity and his heart started to beat more quickly. The noise came again, dying away into a fearsome hiss.
He stepped over to the window, lifted the blind and peered out into the blackness. A crack had opened in the unseen cloud layer above and moonlight shone down. Balanced on their rear wall was a large tabby cat, back arched upward, fur jutting out in a series of spikes. Its attention was riveted on something on the other side of the wall.
Jon felt like a wildlife photographer observing the secret interplays that take place between the creatures of the night. Sightings of foxes were becoming more and more common in the neighbourhood and he felt a slight thrill that a wild animal could be just metres away, roaming the streets and alleys, using the darkness to claim an urban territory as its own.
Suddenly a tingle worked its way down his spine as he thought about what had taken place up on Saddleworth Moor not three weeks ago. A farmer's wife had been savaged to death by some creature and a frenzy of 'mystery beast' fever had gripped the nation ever since.
Jon knew from recent newspaper articles that the loss of sheep was a fairly commonplace occurrence for many farms in and around Britain's national parks. The problem had got so bad around Bodmin during the mid-nineties that the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food had commissioned a scientific investigation to determine once and for all if a wild panther was stalking the bleak expanses of Dartmoor. The study was inconclusive and the issue had lapsed back to occasional sightings of large black cats. But ripped open and disembowelled carcasses of sheep continued to be found in the more remote parts of the countryside.
The Suttons' farm on Saddleworth was suffering particularly badly and the wife, a few years younger than her more elderly husband, had taken to going out at night and patrolling the perimeters of their land on a quad bike. On the fateful night, the husband had been away from home, staying overnight at a big sheep market in Keswick up in the Lake District. According to numerous witnesses, he'd got mightily drunk before staggering off to his hotel room at gone two in the morning. When he returned home the next day his wife was nowhere to be found. Eventually he'd gone out on to the moor, spotted the abandoned quad bike and then discovered her corpse alongside the remains of a partially eaten ewe in a nearby ravine. Both of their throats had been torn out and short strands of wiry black hair were found under the wife's nails. Laboratory analysis revealed that the hair belonged to a panther.
The cat on their yard wall was now backing away, a horrible low noise emerging from deep within its throat. Deciding there was enough distance between it and the unseen adversary below, it turned and leaped onto the adjoining wall before disappearing up and over the neighbour's garage with a frantic scrabble of claws. The gap in the cloud closed up, the scene vanished and silence returned.
From beyond the curve of the earth came a faint glow, just strong enough to separate black horizon from dark sky. Night was coming to an end.
The creature remained motionless, body pressed into the tundra-like grass of the moor. Before it the ground dropped away, clumps of gorse quickly dissolving into the gloom. Further down the slope two sheep sheltered at the base of a particularly dense bush.
The wind shifted and the long hairs that emerged from the tips of the creature's ears bent ever so slightly. This new current of air carried up from the plains of Cheshire stretched out below. Contained in it were some interesting sounds and scents. The noise of engines, the sharpness of exhaust fumes, the presence of Man.