Even in that stifling bungalow, with the sun coming through the picture windows, lying in great squares on the dingy patterned carpet, and Lexie a few yards away in the kitchen, I got this crawl of discomfort across my skin. I leaned nearer to the TV and stared at the wavery brown line of empty beach, the camera holding steady on the island in case the beast reappeared. A full three minutes elapsed until the tourist gave up waiting and turned the camera back to the other men on the boat. They stood at the gunwales, all four of them in their Bolton Wanderers shirts, holding the stanchion line and staring in silence at the spot on the beach where the creature had been.

The people at the BBC reckoned it was an actor, someone in a costume. Their AV unit had worked on the Bluff Creek Bigfoot film, and they thought this video had some of the same hallmarks: Sasquatch, as we all knew, was just some guy in a Hollywood gorilla suit — and the technicians decided that was probably what was happening in the Pig Island film. The problem was, because the video was taken from a boat about two hundred yards offshore, because the 'creature' emerged from the trees at frame 1,800 and had disappeared into the foliage by frame 1,865 (at a rate of thirty frames per second that meant a shade over two seconds), and because the movement of the boat had the picture jumping all over the place, the Beeb couldn't get a good enough image to analyse it any closer. They could only say what it appeared to be.

Half beast. Half human.

'I'll put your lighter in the rucksack,' said Lexie, suddenly, from the kitchen. 'I'm putting it in the front pocket.'