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Steph Patel licked the end of her thumb as she continued to read through the articles she’d collated. There was a one-day-old cut on the end of her it caused by a tuna can lid. The wound had closed but was irritatingly placed.

This was the fifth article she had found on the subject, and it was enough to pique her interest. Like much of the material she researched, it was put together by a small-town paper, local to the area. They were always like that; large papers wouldn’t have touched the subjects with a twelve-foot barge pole.

Steph squinted as she read. She was tired. She’d been at it for a couple of hours. This would be the last one and then she would decide what to do in the morning.

The article spoke about an eight-year-old boy in Scotland. He’d been out exploring but never came back. A search party was sent out, and they were fortunate enough to find him. Unfortunately, what they found was not in one piece. The boy had been ripped apart by something. A local ‘wildlife expert’ had exclaimed how the wounds and lacerations to the boy’s body were not from any creature native to that part of the world. Police had written off murder as there were bite marks all over the body with no use of a weapon evident. The family of the boy were devastated, of course. Et cetera, et cetera.

The idea of a monster causing such harm was clearly thought of as preposterous, but people rarely seemed to consider an animal that had been released somewhere it shouldn’t. This always baffled Steph. Moreover, people didn’t fully understand the damage wild animals could inflict, so they struggled to get their heads around incidents when they occurred. Steph understood well enough. She’d seen things. The worst was seeing a fully grown gorilla tearing a man’s arm off.

Steph’s business covered the sensational as opposed to the easily explained (although she would try to rationalise the sensational), but that was more due to what people wanted rather than her own opinion. To her it was just as interesting to find an unlikely but perfectly reasonable and digestible explanation for something rather than something so out of the ordinary that it would shatter people’s belief in what was real. Steph had never actually found something so extraordinary. She had alluded to the possibility of it as that was her job. She was good at her job. It was why she was going places with a six-part documentary series in the pipeline. Certainly, that was what her agent would have her believe.

Steph ran her index finger along her teeth. It was probably a large cat of some sort. The type that had been kept as a pet by some criminal or other that had either escaped or been released when the owner was bored of it. Pablo Escobar had inadvertently been the creator of a hippo population in South America. They’d had a big impact on their surroundings. However, even less dangerous creatures could have an effect.

Some genius had introduced an American grey squirrel into a London park. The result was that the red squirrel had been pushed almost completely out of England just a hundred years later.

Steph shut her laptop and yawned. Was there enough there to justify paying for a flight to Scotland? There was an article in it for sure, but was there a book? She would have to do a lot of digging when she was out there and pad things out with all sorts of interviews. It could be tricky to make it stretch. Then again, she had an audience; her last book’s sales said as much. Besides, she could always knock something up on the Loch Ness monster if needs be. That was a subject where all the work had basically been done for her but seemed – for whatever reason – to still spark people’s interest.

Screw it. She’d do it. She’d told her agent that she was working on something, so she should probably get on and change the lie into a truth. A half-truth.

She opened her laptop again and looked up the cheapest tickets to Scotland she could find. One day, she was sure, someone would pay for her to fly places. They’d probably fly her out in comfort too. If they wanted her there so badly, they would at least book her into business class. After all, she imagined, it would be based on a business deal so it would be fitting.

Steph shook herself out of her head and paid for the tickets. She wondered whether her parents would be annoyed knowing she would have been relatively close and not called in. She could do that on the way back. They wouldn’t know. She could hire a car and drive down to Sheffield as a surprise. That would win her points.

Steph yawned again and looked at the black travel case she kept under her bed. Then she looked at her wardrobe with its door hanging open and a couple of shirts tumbling down from one of the shelves. She rubbed her eye with the palm of her hand. She’d pack tomorrow; it wouldn’t take long.

Steph arrived at San Francisco International Airport earlier than she needed to. Although she was a messy person, she at least knew she was punctual. Punctuality was what most people noticed. That was the impression she liked to give. It helped that she didn’t work in a job that required a desk or anything static, where her shadier habits would be noticeable to others. Not that she’d ever wanted a desk job. It was why she had trained to be a field biologist rather than the dentist her mother had suggested so strongly she become.

As usual, Steph breezed through the check-in, flew through security, grabbed a McDonald’s breakfast despite promising herself she would not this time, and sat and read her book. It had been nine months since she started it, but she was determined to finish it even if it killed her. She should have just picked up something trashy that she would enjoy. Now she was stuck with a classic she thought would make her seem more intellectually insighted. She thought it might make her more attractive to any single men potentially looking for something more than a one-night-fling. Not that Steph would have turned down a fling. But at what cost would this fling come? The book was painful!

Steph put down the book and picked up the magazine she’d bought. It was a waste of time but less of a slog.

It was to Steph’s displeasure that she found herself sitting next to one of those social types when she got on the plane. The seatbelt sign had hardly been turned off when the man seated next to her turned to engage her in conversation. The man was smiling as if a long-haul flight was something to be happy about. His hair was turning white, but wrinkles seemed to have mostly missed crevassing his face apart from where they marked out his happy nature.

“What takes you to Scotland?”

the man asked.

“Work,”

Steph replied, fiddling with her bag.

Through her peripheral vision, she could see the man nodding.

“Oh, and what’s your line of work?”

“Biology.”

That was half true.

Steph pulled a notebook from her bag along with a Parker ballpoint. Her grandmother had always insisted one should have something good to write with. She’d always written with a fountain pen. Steph could understand why as they wrote much smoother, but they lacked the practicality of a ballpoint, especially when traipsing around the wilderness.

“What kind of biology?”

“Field biology.”

Steph started making notes on her pad. There wasn’t much aim to their content, but she hoped that the action would be enough to dissuade the man from further attempts at conversation. She was wrong. The man was apparently irrepressible.

“Gosh, field biology sounds exciting,”

the man said, leaning back.

“I suppose it is, not that what I do is perhaps as academically smiled upon as that of colleagues I know,”

Steph replied before grimacing. She’d said more than two words. She’d flung the door open; she knew it.

“Why do you say that?”

Stuff it. In for a penny, in for a pound. She put her pen down.

“I don’t go to study normal phenomena exactly. I could do; I have the qualifications to do so. However, I suppose I go where the money is. I do what is popular.”

“What do you mean?”

the man asked, frowning.

“Well, let’s put it like this: there are a large number of people who go into the study of plants and animals, but could you really tell me any you know or what they do? No. Unless you are in that line of work, you just know they study animals. That is to be respected. I respect it, I do. But and here is the thing, where do they get their money from?”

The man opened his mouth slightly before deciding there was nothing to come out of it except a stumped exhale. He shrugged.

“That’s my point,”

Steph continued.

“If you’re really lucky you might be picked up by a television company. You might fall into studying a species of animal that has some sort of commercial value to some private company – I’d rather not get into the details – but the chances are you will end up studying a species of plant or animal that, although it furthers human knowledge, is not massively interesting to the wider society. Someone must pay you for your work. The idea of driving around the savannah following big animals sounds cool, but who is going to pay you to do it? Why you? Why not someone else as there are enough people about? And what are they getting out of it that is of value to them?”

“I don’t know,”

the man replied slowly, clearly unsure whether Steph was inviting him to talk or not. She was becoming more fervent in the way she spoke.

“Precisely. So like I said, I go where the money is. I find niches where there is a hunger for information that people are willing to pay for?”

“Like studying monkeys in a lab or something to help cure brain tumours or…?”

Steph, for the first time, turned to look at the man who shrank slightly.

“I am a field biologist, not some sort of Dr Frankenstein of animals.”

“Right… sorry.”

“No, I go and study unsolved mysteries of the animal kingdom,”

Steph continued.

“I go out and try to come up with a plausible explanation by studying the natural environment including both the flora and fauna. Sometimes I do not find an exact answer but that doesn’t seem to matter exactly.”

“And who… who pays you for that?”

“The public does, I suppose,”

Steph said.

“People love a mystery – if you excuse me for stating the obvious – so I give them real-life ones that involve animals. Obviously, I include relevant information to educate the reader…”

“Reader?”

“I write books. I found an agent who was able to sell my particular idea to a publisher who has since discovered my niche to be lucrative enough. Nothing massive, but it pays a lot better than if I went to simply study wolverines or something similar for whatever reason. Actually, there is the potential for a documentary series for me on one of the animal channels which would really get things going.”

“Which one?”

“I am not at liberty to say.”

There was silence for a minute. Steph contemplated picking up her notebook again. The man noticed.

“So what’s the mystery you are investigating in Scotland?” he asked.

“The death of a boy,”

Steph replied, a little too matter-of-factly for the man’s liking.

“He has been attacked by something that shouldn’t have been there or by someone who found a way to make it look like that. Supposedly, it was near a large fenced-off area. I am not sure exactly why the area is fenced off, only that it belongs to a private company working on some sort of environmental project… potentially. I’ll be honest; I haven’t managed to find much about it. Again, this is part of the reason I’m going. Sort of like an animal murder mystery if you like.”