Foxglove Summer

9 Post Incident Management

Rule of policing number one – when something good falls into your lap, pass it up the chain of command as quickly as possible before something else bad can happen. Me and Dominic picked up a girl each and let Beverley lead us to the main road. This involved crossing the Lugg again, or more precisely a second stream of the same river because we’d actually been standing on an island.

‘Of course we were on an island,’ said Beverley. ‘You think I’d have risked being that stroppy if we hadn’t?’

We stumbled over another barbed-wire fence in the dark, but once we were over that we found ourselves on the lane that ran past Aymestrey church to the main road. We were level with the blunt comforting rectangle of the church spire when we heard the sirens. A traffic duty BMW reached us first, followed quickly by an ambulance and an unmarked Mercedes containing Inspector Edmondson that must have torn up the Highway Code to get to us that fast.

The girls were prised out of our grip and hustled off by the paramedics. Their parents, Edmondson informed us, were already en route to Hereford where they would be reunited at the hospital.

Then we walked back the route we’d come, only this time gloriously mob handed with a couple of dozen officers, two of them armed. We showed Edmondson both river crossings and where, to the best of our recollection, we’d found the girls.

He asked me whether I suspected that there had been Falcon involvement in the kidnapping and I had to tell him that, while there was definitely some weird shit going on in the general vicinity, I didn’t have any evidence that it was related to Hannah and Nicole’s disappearance.

‘We’ll have to wait to see what they have to say for themselves,’ said Edmondson.

There was no point having officers thrashing around in the darkness, so the decision was made to start search operations, for evidence this time, at first light. And we were whisked off to Leominster nick to be statemented and debriefed. Well, me and Dominic were whisked off. Beverley said she’d much rather go back to her hotel if they didn’t mind. Strangely, they didn’t mind and even allocated the snazzy traffic BMW to take her back.

I called Nightingale once we were on our way.

‘Good work,’ he said. ‘Do you think you’ll be returning soon?’

I thought about the unicorns and Hugh the bee man and his memories of Ettersberg. I thought about coincidences and moon paths and the fact that at that moment nothing which had happened made any sense whatsoever.

‘I think there are some loose ends I want to tie up first,’ I said.

‘Jolly good,’ said Nightingale. ‘Try not to take more than a week.’

An investigation like Operation Manticore doesn’t end when you find the missing kids – but it does get a lot less fraught. Afterwards, you’re looking to discover what happened to the poor little mites and feel the collar of whatever despicable scrote turned out to have been responsible. Then you’ve got to get enough evidence to send them up the steps to court and, if you’re lucky, perhaps arrange to have them fall down a few steps on the way there. In fact, from the point of view of DCI Windrow and the MIU, finding the girls was just the start. So it wasn’t unusual that me and Dominic had to give statements immediately. What was unusual was that we had to first meet up and discuss exactly what we were going to leave out of the statement. We had that meeting out on the terrace, because then it could be explained away as a cigarette break.

‘We normally do two statements,’ Windrow, who looked horrified. ‘One with all the difficult bits left out and one that goes into our files so we have a complete record – just in case.’

‘Just in case of what?’ asked Dominic.

‘In case it becomes relevant later,’ I said.

Windrow took a drag off his cigarette and nodded.

‘So, what the hell do we say you were doing up there in the middle of the night?’ he asked.

‘Witness trawl,’ I said and nodded at Dominic. ‘After Dom’s success finding Russell Banks we decided it was worth running a quick outreach operation to find any witnesses amongst people who visit the area by night.’

‘Such as?’ asked Windrow.

‘Doggers,’ said Dominic. ‘Birdwatchers.’

‘Amateur astronomers,’ I said.

‘Fox watchers,’ said Dominic.

‘Druids,’ I said.

‘UFO spotters.’

‘Satanists,’ I said.

DCI Windrow gave me a look.

‘Just joking,’ I said quickly. ‘Sir.’

‘It’s flimsy,’ said Windrow.

‘We found Hannah and Nicole,’ said Dominic. ‘Nobody’s going to be interested in why we were up there.’

Windrow put his cigarette out in the flower pot that had become the unofficial senior officer’s fag disposal unit and sighed – he obviously would have liked to light up another one.

‘If that’s the way it’s done,’ he said, ‘that’s what we’ll do.’

I looked over the parapet – the civilian car park was almost completely empty except for one satellite van and a ten-year-old Ford Mondeo that belonged to one of the reporters from the Herefordshire News. The pack had migrated en masse to the hospital. I asked Windrow if there’d been any news.

‘They’re both sleeping now,’ said Windrow. ‘And their parents are with them.’

They weren’t suffering from exposure, and while they were wearing the same clothes they went missing in, both the girls and their clothes were relatively clean. They had definitely been held somewhere with amenities and had been fed and watered. There were no outward signs of physical or sexual abuse but Nicole, so far, had presented as withdrawn and uncommunicative. Hannah, on the other hand, had talked pretty much continuously from the moment she was reunited with her mother until she fell asleep in her arms three hours later.

‘What did she say?’ I asked.

‘Hold up, Peter,’ said Windrow. ‘I’m not prejudicing either of you before you’ve given a statement. And, besides, I haven’t seen the transcripts myself yet.’

Then we went inside and got ourselves statemented which, this being a serious investigation, meant that it was first light by the time we’d finished. Victor was waiting for us downstairs – well, waiting for Dominic. But he was nice enough to give me a lift back to Rushpool as well.

I had a mad urge to stop off at the hotel and see if Beverley was awake. But between the hiking, the magic, and the strenuous unicorn avoidance tactics I was so knackered that bed seemed more attractive. And I can tell you that doesn’t happen very often.

That morning the press went totally bonkers, but fortunately I managed to sleep through most of it.

I woke to birdsong, something with a call like a very high-pitched pneumatic drill. I wondered if Beverley would know what the name was. I patted the other side of the bed on the off chance Beverley might have mysteriously materialised there while I was asleep, but no such luck.

I checked my watch. It was mid-afternoon. I hadn’t actually slept that long, but I felt fully rested . . . just not inclined to get up.

Objectively speaking, my whole operation the night before had been a mess from start to finish. I’d gone out to attract unspecified supernatural entities with no real idea what the hell I was going to do if I succeeded. Worse, I’d put Dominic and Beverley at risk through a basic lack of common sense. Nightingale was going to be quietly critical when I explained the thinking behind my actions. If we hadn’t found Hannah and Nicole it would have looked even worse – we’d been lucky.

Or had we?

Had it really been a coincidence that two, count them two, invisible unicorns had chased us straight to their location?

My dad would have told me to take the breaks as you get them and not worry about where they come from. But my mum never saw a gift horse that she wouldn’t take down to the vet to have its mouth X-rayed – if only so she could establish its resale value.

I decided that I was going to go with my mum on this one.

Eventually I got up, showered and dressed in the one pair of jeans Molly thought worth packing, and a green cotton shirt with a button-down collar that both my parents would have approved of. Having learnt never to trust the countryside, I bypassed my good shoes and stuck my PSU boots back on.

When I stepped outside I found Beverley waiting for me on the lawn.

She was sitting in a folding canvas chair by a rickety outdoor table with a chipped pink Formica top. She was wearing an orange and red gypsy skirt with matching halter top and enough beady jewellery to keep a Camden Market stall in merchandise for a year. A floppy wide-brimmed straw hat had been jammed on top of her dreads, a pair of round smoked-glass sunglasses were perched on her nose and she was reading a battered paperback book with a distinctive cover of black and white diagonal stripes.

‘What’re you reading?’ I asked.

She waved the book at me, and as she lifted her hand a cascade of enamelled blue and silver bracelets slipped down her forearm.

‘Val McDermid,’ she said. She kicked a blue and white plastic beer cooler that was sitting in the shade under the table. ‘I brought you something to drink.’

I sat down in the second folding chair by the table and watched the curve of her bare back as she bent down to fish a couple of bottles out the cooler. They were squat little things made of thick brown glass and sealed with stoppers. There was no label, but when I opened mine I caught a sharp whiff of fermented apple.

‘Cider?’ I asked.

‘Scrumpy,’ said Beverley.

‘What’s the difference?’

Beverley thought about it for a moment or two.

‘It’s not made in a factory,’ she said.

‘So, no quality control then?’

‘Are you going to talk about it or drink it?’

I took a swig – it was tart, alcoholic and tasted of apples. About what I look for in a cider, really.

‘Like it?’

‘Let’s talk about last night,’ I said.

‘Which bit?’ Beverley folded over the corner of her page and put the book down on the table.

‘The “Oh my god I shouldn’t be here, we’re in violation of treaty, Captain” etcetera,’ I said.

‘Violation of treaty?’ asked Beverley demonstrating why, when you’re asking questions, it pays to be literal. ‘What treaty is that?’

‘You know what I’m talking about,’ I said, and took another swig of the scrumpy.

‘Okay,’ said Beverley. ‘If you really want to know.’ She leaned over the table towards me and beckoned me to do the same and we didn’t stop until I could feel her breath against my cheek, could smell the clean warmth of her skin and see the verdigris discolouring the frame of her sunglasses.

‘You see us now?’ she murmured. ‘Close enough to whisper, close enough for me to smell the magic clinging to your skin, close enough that – if you had the bottle – you could kiss me?’

So I kissed her – just a brush pass, by way of polite inquiry.

‘Let’s see if we can keep this all metaphorical just for the moment,’ said Beverley, which is the story of my life, really. ‘The fact that we’re close together means that we’re undergoing an immediate and involuntary set of interactions – right?’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Immediate and involuntary.’

‘Now imagine you’ve got your face this close to a total stranger,’ she said. ‘What happens next?’

‘I pull back,’ I said.

‘What if you can’t? What if they literally won’t get out of your face?’ she asked.

‘Then I’d have to take steps, wouldn’t I?’

‘Exactly,’ said Beverley and kissed me.

I kissed her back – an immediate and voluntary action. It didn’t last quite as long as I would have liked because Beverley pulled back to stare at me over the rim of her sunglasses, her lips twitching into a smile.

‘But if you were stuck on the tube you might have to put up with being that close to a total stranger, right?’ she said. ‘Because all these things are contingent, aren’t they?’

Her dark brown irises, I noticed, were tinged with amber and gold around the pupils.

‘So it’s like personal space?’ I asked.

‘Only more sort of geographical,’ said Beverley.

Because on any other night she might have skipped merrily along the trail with no cares at all. Running into that kind of hostility had been a bit of a shock since Beverley, according to Beverley, generally gets to go where she likes.

I pointed out that I’d had to rescue her from the goddess of the River Teme and her daughters because she’d unwittingly trespassed on their territory, but Beverley waved that away with another cascade of bracelets.

‘That was a minor misunderstanding,’ she said. ‘And anyway, we came to a mutually beneficial arrangement.’

‘Which was?’

She leaned back in her chair and reached out to tap my bottle with her fingernail. ‘Drink your scrumpy,’ she said. ‘We’re going to a party.

I did as I was told and drained the bottle. Then I followed Beverley over the fence and along the boundary of the old orchard towards the parish hall. Ahead, I heard what sounded like a big pub crowd. Wood smoke rose lazily in the warm air and I realised I was going to get a close up look at what happens when the good people of Rushpool push the boat out.

Or at least how the Marstowe family half of it did.

As it was explained to me, later, by Dominic’s mum, it hadn’t been planned exactly. The Marstowe family being as widespread and persistent as fungus it had already turned out to volunteer for the search teams. When they got news that Hannah and Nicole had been found, the volunteers had congregated at the village hall to wait for further developments. Naturally, given the good news, a celebratory drink was in order.

By midday, wives, parents, husbands and partners had started driving up from homes in Leominster, Hereford, Ludlow and Kidderminster. Depriving the county, Dominic estimated, of about a third of its taxi drivers and about half its hairdressers. Many of them brought food, and the trestle tables were taken out of the community hall and into the field at the back so that everyone could share. Since there were a lot of people, including a mass of children, it seemed sensible to have a bit of a whip-round and do a couple of runs to the supermarket. At some point someone decided it would be a good idea to build a bonfire – and if you’re going to do that you might as well have a barbecue.

Dominic’s dad, being Andy Marstowe’s second cousin, qualified as one of the family and so was obliged to persuade one of the available PCSOs to keep the media out.

There were a couple of hundred people in the field by the time we climbed over the makeshift stile. I looked over the crowd, the trestle tables covered in bowls and trays and tinfoil, the ranks of bottles, the kids running around the legs of the grown-ups and, oh yes, the granny corner – Dominic’s mum plus half a dozen cronies ensconced on a couple of garden loveseats that had been transported in from who knew where.

‘This is strangely familiar,’ I said, because you could have dropped my mum smack in the middle and she would have felt right at home – although the blandness of the food would have been a bit of a shock.

‘Isn’t it just?’ said Beverley. ‘All it’s missing is a decent sound system.’

‘There he is,’ shouted a woman, ‘there’s my fucking hero.’

Joanne, pale-blonde hair spiky with sweat and dressed in a loose denim sundress, bore down on me and threw her arms around my neck. The open bottle of cider she’d been carrying thumped into my back and I had to throw my arms around her to stop her from falling over.

‘God, you’re beautiful,’ she said, and gave me a boozy kiss – on the lips thankfully, with no tongue. ‘I’d kiss Dominic as well,’ she said without slackening her grip. ‘But I don’t know how he’d take it.’

I felt a shudder run through her back and she buried her face in my shoulder. I held her tight for a minute while she shook and then abruptly she pushed me gently back and held me at arm’s length. There were tear tracks down her cheeks, but she was smiling.

‘We need to get you properly drunk,’ she said.

‘Where’s Hannah?’ I asked.

‘Over there somewhere,’ she said. ‘With her cousins.’

‘What about Nicole?’

‘Still at the hospital, poor thing – running a fever,’ said Joanne, and there was definitely a touch of smugness when she told me that Hannah had come out of the experience much better than her friend. She then dragged me off by the arm in search of some alcohol – a manoeuvre that degenerated into a rough spiral movement which probably would have ended in us tripping over a table if Beverley hadn’t interrupted and presented us with a couple of bottles of her bootlegged scrumpy.

Beverley casually put her hand on my shoulder and left it there.

Joanne looked her up and down and gave me a grin.

‘Oh, you’re a lucky boy,’ she said. ‘You want to make sure you enjoy it while you can – and whatever you do, don’t let anyone, ever, tell you who you can fuck.’ And with that she lurched off back into the crowd.

‘Hail the conquering hero,’ said Beverley and held up her bottle to clink.

‘Sic transit Gloria mundi,’ I said, because it was the first thing that came into my head – we clinked and drank. It could have been worse. I could have said Valar Morghulis instead.

Beverley took my hand. ‘Let’s see what the local food is like,’ she said.

It turned out to involve a surprisingly large amount of pasta salad. While we were heaping our paper plates I saw a bunch of kids loitering under a canvas sunscreen by the parish hall and recognised one as Hannah. I did a quick scan and swiftly located Andy Marstowe, who wasn’t hovering but was definitely maintaining line of sight.

I would have liked to have a quick word. But interviewing a key witness, never mind a child, without going through the SIO would have been a disciplinary offence – not to mention a serious breach of etiquette.

Beverley decided, once we’d eaten, that we needed something to sit on. So we slipped into the dark resin-scented interior of the hall to see what we could scrounge up. The overlapping OS maps were still pinned to the cork notice board, with the last set of search areas still drawn in with chinagraph pencils on the plastic covering. I traced the route we’d taken from the Whiteway Head down to the River Lugg where Beverley had done her Arwen impression. Pokehouse Wood had been searched, so had School Wood – especially near where Stan’s stash had gone missing. And so had the ancient Iron Age fort of Croft Ambrey. The big question was, where had the girls been hidden for seven days? Looking at the map, I reckoned that Edmondson and DCI Windrow would be looking north of the ridge. I tapped the spot where, despite not being marked, I knew the Bee House was – they’d pretty much overlooked the whole area.

Another visit might be in order. And if I could prise a little bit more history out of Hugh, so much the better.

Beverley called my name, and I turned to find her trying to pull a stack of folding chairs out from underneath a shelf. She’d had to bend over to get a grip and I watched the play of muscle under the skin of her bare back until she snarled at me to stop mucking about and give her a hand.

We carried the chairs outside where all but two were cheerfully taken off our hands and distributed amongst the needy, the infirm, and the somewhat sloshed.

Just after five, Dominic and Victor turned up with a freshly dead sheep in the back of the Nissan Technical. I thought for a mad second that this was part of the case, but Andy and a couple of other men grabbed hold of it and manhandled it up the far end of the party field. After twenty minutes of discussion, the knives and skewers came out and I made sure I was about as far from the butchery as I could get. Dominic joined me.

‘It’s a country thing,’ he said. ‘They’re all desperate to prove that they’re not a bunch of soft townies.’

‘You’re not going to help Victor, then?’

‘I worked six months on a pig farm,’ said Dominic. ‘I have nothing to prove – trust me.’

It can take a surprisingly long time to roast a sheep, especially when you have too many cooks. But, by seven thirty, authentically greasy chunks of mutton were being distributed along with a choice between stone ground wholemeal bread or Morrisons’ best buy plastic white. I took the wholemeal and the last dollop of English mustard scraped from its jar.

By that time someone had turned up an amp and a deck from somewhere and we were treated to ten repetitions of Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’, because it was Hannah’s current fave, before she was bundled off to bed by her father, her mother having gone to sleep in a folding chair with a bottle of beer in one hand and a contented smile on her face.

As it grew darker and the air began to cool, the focus of the party tightened around the bonfire, bottles of spirits made their appearance and I was handed a plastic cup with a quadruple measure of Bacardi which Beverley confiscated and handed on to someone else.

‘Oh, no,’ she said, and drew me away from the fire. ‘I’ve got other plans for you.’

When she steered me out the front and down the lane towards the cowshed I reckoned my luck was in – which just goes to show that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle affects everything, including my love life. Instead of bed we ended up in the Asbo, Beverley driving, and heading into the evening.

Maybe she doesn’t like the cowshed, I thought.

Less than fifteen minutes later we turned into the car park at the Riverside Inn, which would have suited me fine. Only, instead of going inside, Beverley dragged me down to the edge of the river. There she threw her arms around my neck and kissed me – hard. I felt her breasts push against my chest and behind them her heart beating with a frightening urgency.

She let go with one arm long enough to untie her halter and then guide my hand into the waistband of her skirt. I pushed it down slowly, letting my palm slide inside her knickers and down the smooth skin of her thighs. Her fingers fought with the belt and the buttons on my jeans and I nearly lost my balance when she grabbed hold of me and gave me a couple of experimental tugs.

I was acutely aware that we were less than five metres from a busy gastro-pub but unless the patrons came out with searchlights and dogs there was no way I was stopping on their account.

We reached the inevitable stage where at least one of you has to do something undignified to get all the way undressed. Beverley let go of me and stepped out of her skirt – laughing as I scraped off my shoes and hopped around getting my jeans off over my feet. My socks stayed on – they always bloody do. At least I got my shirt off without losing any buttons.

It was while I was bending over to pull my socks off that I realised what was coming next. I looked at the river and noticed then that the water was climbing up the wooden slats that lined the embankment, half drowning the bushes that had been planted along the river’s edge.

Beverley slipped her arms around my waist and buried her face in my shoulder, the whole exquisite length of her pressed against me.

‘It’s going to be freezing,’ I said.

‘Not while you’re with me,’ she said.

I thought of the three sisters of the Teme.

‘Aren’t we sort of trespassing?’ I asked.

‘Nah. There’s nobody home,’ she said. ‘At least nobody who’s got an opinion about it.’

It was about then that I probably should have become really suspicious. But, looking back, had you told me then what I found out later I would have carried on regardless.

Letting go of me, Beverley stepped down into the water without hesitation or even worrying about her footing. The river foamed around her ankles, visibly rising as I watched, to cover her calves and then her knees. When she reached the middle of the river she turned back to face me. She was black and silver in the moonlight, a woman made of shadows and curves. Her eyes were hidden but her smile was a pale crescent.

‘Aren’t you going to join me?’ she asked.

‘What are you planning to do?’

She put her hands on her hips.

‘What do you think we’re going to do?’

Still I hesitated.

‘You know you can pose on the beach all you like, Peter,’ she said. ‘But sooner or later you’re going to have to get wet.’

So, because one of us had to be practical, I scooped up our clothes and dumped them in the back of the Asbo. Then hid the keys under the leg of one of the picnic tables. By the time I was ready, the water was roiling around her thighs.

‘Get a move on,’ she called. ‘Or we’ll miss the surge.’

Oh, the surge, I thought, the rainstorm over the Brecon Beacons that was nothing to do with her.

Sometimes it’s you . . . Sometimes it’s exceptionally heavy rainfall in your catchment area, she’d said. It can be tricky telling the two apart.

I cautiously stepped into the water – it was freezing and the footing was uncertain. I carefully felt my way towards the middle where Beverley waited, one hand outstretched towards me. She was still wearing her bracelets.

By the time I reached her, my legs were so numb with the cold that when she touched me her hands felt hot and feverish against my skin. She kissed me again and this time I kissed her back.

Then she leaned back, drawing me down onto the water that was supporting us in such an unnatural way that Archimedes would have given up natural philosophy and retired to the country to become an olive farmer.

I felt it suddenly – the storm surge at my back – there was nothing of people about it, nothing human, it was the smell of morning rain and the gritty touch and scrape of red sandstone. It was the laughing roar of water as it cuts its way through the bones of the earth.

Beverley locked her legs around mine in the darkness.

‘Trust me,’ she whispered, and drew me down into the water.

10 Intelligence Led

I ended up floating in the sunlight. Beverley was asleep with her head on my shoulder and one leg cocked possessively over my groin. I yawned and wondered where we were – we’d definitely gone with the flow the night before – but I was careful not to wake Beverley, not least because we were still doing that weird buoyancy thing and I wasn’t in a hurry to start sinking.

Straight up was blue sky and the dark leafy ends of overhanging branches. If I twisted my head I could see the arches and piers of a bridge that we must have just passed under. Occasionally a vehicle crossed in a flash of metallic reflection and engine noise.

My memories of the night before were already coming apart in my mind. I definitely remembered grabbing some serious air while going over a weir, Beverley’s legs locked around my waist, her hips grinding into mine, whooping as her dreadlocks whipped around our heads and we twisted like a dolphin in the moonlight before crashing back down into the drainage basin and slowly sank beneath the surface.

I was sure that that had really happened, but it faded even as I grabbed at it.

I tightened my grip on Beverley – who was definitely real – and basked in the warm afterglow of someone who’s just had their brains banged out by the partner of their choice.

It couldn’t last. And soon I felt my shoulders scrape along a gravel bank. We pivoted around in the current and beached where the bank had eroded into an alcove. Beverley sighed and rolled herself on top of me, arching her back to look around.

‘Where are we?’ she asked.

‘Somewhere downstream,’ I said, and took the opportunity to cop a feel.

Beverley twisted around until she could see the bridge.

‘Oh,’ she said in a surprised tone. ‘I thought we’d go further.’

‘Where are we, then?’

‘Just past Leominster,’ she said, and twisted back to look down at me, her dreadlocks hanging down and dripping water on my face and chest. ‘Eight or nine miles,’ she said and kissed me. I was firming up nicely again and I would have been happy to see if we couldn’t add a couple of kilometres to the total – or maybe just shag where we were, I was easy – but Beverley broke off with a sigh.

‘I think we’d better get our clothes back,’ she said, and stood up.

As soon as we lost skin contact the water around me turned cold as ice. I leapt to my feet screaming, and stared at Beverley who stood glistening, naked and unconcerned on the bank.

‘Bloody hell,’ I said. ‘Give me some warning next time.’

‘Woke you up, though, didn’t it?’ she said.

‘How are we going to get back to the car?’ I asked.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Beverley as she climbed up the bank ahead of me. ‘I know where we can get some help.’

For a moment I was too lost in admiration to speak, but by the time I’d joined her at the top I’d recovered enough to ask her how far the help was. All I could see was clumps of trees and the metalled track that led up to the main road.

‘That’s the A44,’ said Beverley, pointing to the road. ‘Down there and to the left.’

‘Just a quick stroll down the road,’ I said.

‘Ten minutes tops,’ said Beverley.

‘Stark bollock naked?’ I asked.

‘If you like, you can stay here while I fetch our stuff,’ said Beverley.

Across the road there was a rather tasty regency cottage with cream walls and a red tiled roof.

‘Should we just ask them?’

‘Come on, come on,’ said Beverley and pointed. ‘Civilisation is that way.’

Despite the fact that it couldn’t have been much more than six o’clock in the morning, the sun was hot enough to quickly dry the water off our skin. Fortunately, out in the countryside pavements hadn’t been invented yet. So at least we were walking on grass.

‘After you,’ I said.

‘No, no,’ said Beverley. ‘It’s only proper that the woman walks two paces behind her man.’

I set out down the verge, gingerly watching where I stepped.

Beverley said something I couldn’t make out.

‘What was that?’

‘Nothing,’ said Beverley. Then, ‘Have you been doing a bit of training recently?’

I squared my shoulders – I couldn’t help myself.

As we walked away from the bridge a middle-aged white man came out of the cottage and was climbing into his car when he stopped and did an actual double-take when he saw us.

‘Morning,’ called Beverley.

‘Morning,’ said the man and then, noticing me, nodded. ‘Nice day for a walk.’

‘Splendid,’ said Beverley.

Unlike Beverley, you can see when I’m blushing, although the worst bit for me was when we reached the roundabout and the morning traffic picked up.

I tried to remember which offences you got prosecuted under. I was pretty safe from the Sexual Offences Act (2003), because the test for that is whether your intention is to provoke distress, alarm or outrage. Same with the Public Order Act (1986), because I was not intentionally looking to distress, harm or harass anyone – quite the contrary. Now, if I was a total bastard of a police officer I could probably get me on ‘outraging public decency’ and, judging by the erratic behaviour of some of the oncoming traffic, causing a breach of the peace.

‘There it is,’ said Beverley from behind me. ‘To your left.’

I looked and saw, through the trees that marked the start of the next field along, a scatter of angular shapes and bright colours. It was Travellers of some kind, and when I spotted the signpost to the Leominster Enterprise Park I finally got myself orientated and realised that this was the fairground I’d seen from the terrace of Leominster nick.

I picked up the pace – I wanted a pair of trousers before some passing motorist put us both on YouTube.

There’s no such thing as a single fun fair. The different rides are owned and operated by different families, each of who chooses which pitch they’re heading for next. Each of the families decorate their rides and vehicles with a different livery, each has its own reputation and own history – some dating back centuries, some who drifted into the life during the last recession and never left. They say that if you’re in the know you can walk into a fair and work out who’s there by checking the colours. Unfortunately, I’m not in the know. But Nightingale had told me that a few of the families are part of the great informal mesh of agreements that link horse fair to showground to winter camp to the old ways and byways of medieval Europe.

This looked more like a staging area than an operating fair. I made mental note of the names, Wilson, Carter, Spangoli, Reginald. There were a lot of late Victorian steam rides aimed at the nostalgia market and a couple of genuine steam road locomotives. The nearest was a huge beast of black iron painted crimson and forest green – the name Faerie Queen emblazoned on the side of its canopy.

A middle-aged white woman in an Afghan coat jumped down from the Faerie Queen’s footplate and looked me up and down.

‘Cor,’ she said. ‘I bet you don’t get many of those for a fiver.’

Beverley stepped up to my side and smiled at the woman, who responded with a look of wary recognition.

‘Good morning,’ said Beverley. ‘We’re looking for a bit of assistance.’

The woman nodded. ‘We were told you might turn up,’ she said.

Who by? I wondered.

And assistance we got – in abundance. Beverley was ushered off to one caravan while I was taken off to a modern Sterling Eccles by a guy called Ken, who for all he was wearing his hair in a ponytail might as well have had ex-Para written across his forehead. Inside he found some cast-offs that would fit me and made tea while I put them on. Ken worked the steam yachts in the summer but migrated to Ibiza in the winter where he had a job as a bouncer.

‘It’s mostly Spaniards off-season,’ he said. ‘So it’s nothing like as rowdy.’

He had a Spanish wife on the island and attributed the success of his marriage to his prolonged absences every year.

‘I leave just as she’s getting sick of me,’ he said, ‘and I come back when she’s ready for some company.’

A cup of tea later I met up with Beverley outside. I got a pair of khaki shorts and a slightly too small Status Quo T-shirt. She got a leather biker vest and a pair of navy cargo pants. All she was missing was a couple of katanas and we could have gone zombie hunting together.

Although, for the record, in the event of the zombie apocalypse I’ll be looking to liberate a Warthog PPV from Regent’s Park Barracks just for that little bit of extra confidence while dealing with the walking dead.

Transport for us had been arranged in the form of a Series II Land Rover which, despite the marine blue paintjob and a painfully bodged repair to the right fender, was in amazingly good nick.

Leaning against the Land Rover was Lilly, daughter of the Teme, looking pale, pierced and pouty. She wore skinny black jeans and a matching Keep Calm and Listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt with the neckline cut open so that it hung loosely off one shoulder.

She held up her hand in greeting as we approached and asked Beverley how it had gone.

‘Later,’ said Beverley and called shotgun, which meant I ended up in the back, where I’m fairly certain a sheep had ridden not long before. A very unwell sheep at that.

For a car that was older than my mother, it had a pretty decent stereo on which Lilly played Queen’s Greatest Hits but only, she explained, because her sister had borrowed her iPod and hadn’t given it back and Queen’s Greatest Hits was the only CD in the stereo. Maybe the sheep liked it.

We were just into the questionable first verse of ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ when we pulled into the car park at the Riverside Inn. After recovering the keys I was sent in to wangle drinks out of the landlord who, because it was out of hours, let me have the ciders on the house. As I fetched them out I spotted Beverley and Lilly by the riverbank with their backs to me as they stared down into the water.

Now, I’m not saying I sneaked up on them. But I certainly took care not to draw myself to their attention.

‘You guys shouldn’t have anything to complain about,’ said Beverley.

‘It’s not me,’ said Lilly. ‘It’s Mum and Corve – they’ve got a lot invested in this, haven’t they?’

‘I was a bit too busy to update Twitter at the time,’ said Beverley. ‘But I can give you the bullet points if you want.’

Lilly sighed.

‘You know, actually, that’s a bit tempting,’ she said.

‘I was being facetious,’ said Beverley.

‘No, seriously,’ said Lilly. ‘It’s been that long that I could do with a reminder.’

‘Well, not from me,’ said Beverley.

‘But you’re sure it went all right?’

‘Trust me,’ said Beverley. ‘The earth moved – that’s all you need to know.’

‘Your word?’

‘My word,’ said Beverley.

‘Your word on what?’ I asked.

Lilly started, but Beverley just turned and took her drink.

‘That no fish were harmed,’ she said, and challenged me with a smile to make something of it.

Not when I’m outnumbered, I thought.

I nodded at the river, which was back down to its pre-flood levels.

‘What happened to all the water?’ I asked.

‘It was just a surge,’ said Lilly quickly. ‘Unprecedented heavy rainfall in the Brecon Beacons.’

‘Was that your mum making it rain then?’ I asked.

Beverley kicked me in the shins and gave me exactly the same look my mum once gave me when I asked Uncle Tito why he had two families. I was seven at the time and it did seem a bit unfair, what with my dad essentially not being there even when he was, technically, there.

I made a point of mouthing a big ‘ow’ and acting like I was in pain. You have to do this – if you don’t, they kick you again to make sure you got the point.

So I asked Lilly about the Land Rover instead and she said that it still had its original two-litre petrol engine, which I’d thought was only installed in the Series I. As Lilly explained that some early versions of the Series II had been fitted with the smaller engine rather than the 2.25 litre that became standard for the next couple of decades I grinned at Beverley, who was obviously suffering. Served her right.

After a bit more car talk Lilly, having finished her cider, hopped back in her Land Rover and sped off. No doubt to inform her family that Beverley and her chump boyfriend had satisfactorily done whatever it was they were supposed to have done.

I decided that it was time for the chump boyfriend to find out exactly what that was – especially since we were still at the scene of the crime.

At the far end of the car park was the start of a footpath that led along the river bank. Overlooked by a wooded hillside, it struck me as a nice shady place to have a chat about shady business. We walked in silence until we’d gone far enough for the Riverside Inn to be hidden behind the curve in the path.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Just what were we doing last night?’

‘I’m hurt you don’t remember.’

‘What else were we doing?’

Beverley bobbed her head from side to side.

‘We were helping out,’ she said. ‘As well as the other thing.’

‘Helping out who?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ she said.

‘I think I have a right to know the truth,’ I said.

She sighed.

‘You see this lovely river here? Got lots of potential but no one to look after it – to care about it,’ she said.

‘Apart from the National Rivers Authority,’ I said.

‘Not that kind of care,’ she said. ‘And do you want to know or not?’

There was a sensation then of disgruntled suburban driver, of car wax and loud stereo, of someone shouting in what I learnt later was probably Korean. I realised that I hadn’t felt any flashes of Beverley’s true nature all morning. With it came a rush of excitement and desire that I was almost totally sure originated with me – almost totally sure.

‘Do your worst,’ I said

‘It just needed a little spark, a little passion to, you know, get it going,’ she said.

I had to think about that for a bit.

‘Are you saying we inseminated a river?’ I asked.

‘Not exactly,’ said Beverley. ‘It was a bit more . . . diffuse than that.’

I remembered frog reproduction from school, the female lays a huge pile of eggs and the male turns up later and basically hoses them down. It did seem to me that the species had been hard done by in the sex department.

‘Are you saying I did it like a frog?’

It was Beverley’s turn to pause and work something out. She wasn’t happy when she did.

‘Ah, fuck no,’ said Beverley. ‘What kind of fucked-up mind do you have, Peter? Yuck.’

‘So it’s not like that then?’

Beverley stuck out her tongue and made a face.

‘How could you even go there?’ she asked. ‘Now I’ve got that image stuck in my mind. Frogs, please.’

‘That’s what you made it sound like.’

‘Did not.’

‘Then what is it like?’

Beverley took my hand and led to me along until she found a place where we could sit down on the edge and dangle our feet, minus shoes obviously, in the water. It was midmorning and the sun had come into its full heat so we stayed in the shade of what Beverley identified as a stand of silver birch but which looked more red-brown to me.

‘You see this river,’ said Beverley. ‘Like I said, lots of potential but nobody’s home. What it needs is something to stir it up – sometimes this can be perfectly natural, and sometimes you can give it a helping hand.’

I thought of Mama Thames, who claimed to have gone into the river as a suicidal nursing student and walked out a goddess. And with a personality like that, was it any wonder that she sparked the process in her tributaries, or that they so took after her?

‘We were making a donation?’ I asked.

‘I know you want to be a father,’ said Beverley, ‘but there were no genes involved whatsoever, no transfer of information, we were strictly catalytic in the process.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘If we come back in ten years and he’s watching Doctor Who, you can call me a liar.’

‘He?’

‘I think this is going to be a boy river,’ said Beverley, kicking up spray with her feet. ‘But you never know – it might have its own view on the subject.’

‘You know, I’m pretty certain I’m not supposed to do shit like this,’ I said.

Beverley put an arm around my shoulder and leaned in to talk softly in my ear.

‘How about this then, Peter,’ she said. ‘You’ve been part of something that no wizard has ever been part of before. You know something that’s not in their books.’

I wanted to say that lots of things weren’t in the libraries of the wise, including plate tectonics, molecular biology and the complete works of J.K. Rowling, but she’d probably say that I was missing the point. I must have hesitated long enough for Beverley to think she’d won the argument.

‘You should feel privileged,’ she said. And rested her head on my shoulder.

‘I shall write it up as a paper, as soon as I get home,’ I said.

‘You do that,’ she said. ‘I dare you.’

‘My milkshake brings all the gods to the yard,’ I said.

‘Damn right, it’s better than yours,’ said Beverley. ‘I could teach you but I’d have to charge.’

The next line that came into my head was Flat bottomed barges you make the river world go round! But I decided to keep that one to myself.

Back at the cowshed I had just enough time to change into some respectable clothes before DCI Windrow summoned me back to the nick for ‘a discussion’. Beverley, who seemed to be in no hurry to leave the cowshed while I dressed, waved me off and climbed under my duvet for a nap while I drove all the way back to Leominster.

DCI Windrow was worried, but it was a whole order of magnitude less worried than he’d been before we found the girls. He was also chewing gum, something I’d never seen a senior officer do before in my life. Nicotine gum, I suspected.

‘Nicole remains withdrawn,’ he said.

I asked what that meant – exactly.

‘Withdrawn,’ he said. ‘She’s not talking to anyone, she’s off her feed – unresponsive is what they call it. Indicative of a severe psychological trauma, they say.’

‘Like being kidnapped?’ I asked.

‘You know what modern doctors are like,’ said Windrow. ‘They’re never definite about anything anymore. It’s all “maybe, could be, let’s see what happens”.’

‘I saw Hannah running around last night,’ I said. ‘She didn’t seem particularly traumatised.’

‘She could be exhibiting a different set of symptoms,’ said Windrow. ‘The doctors think she may be repressing the trauma by creating an alternative narrative.’

‘What makes them think that?’

‘There are some fantastical elements in her statement.’

‘Like unicorns?’

He handed me a wodge of hardcopy. ‘I think it would be better if you read it yourself and then gave me your assessment.’

So back I went into Edmondson’s office – where I wasn’t going to contaminate Windrow’s nice rational kidnapping inquiry with any of my sorcerous ways. Someone, probably Edmondson himself because you don’t ever mess with an Inspector’s stuff, had jimmied the office window so that it opened all the way, which at least meant the room was warm but not stuffy. It also meant that the drifts of paperwork had to be held down with makeshift paperweights.

I moved a stack of incident reports that were anchored by a spare Airwave handset and started on – Statement: Hannah Marstowe at Hereford Hospital, 22nd of June.

Taking a statement from anyone can be a long process on account of the fact that your average member of the public wouldn’t know the truth if it donned a pink tutu and danced in front of them singing the Chicken Song. This means you have to ask a lot of confirmation questions and then do some intensive cross-referencing to wring out the facts.

Taking a statement from kids is even worse, because not only do they like to make stuff up, but if they get scared, hungry, tired or just fed up with your questions they can, especially if they’re badly brought-up kids, tell you to fuck off. With impunity. Now add in the suspicion that in a magic-related case it’s just possible that the truth really is wearing a pink tutu, and you can end up with six hours of video and a couple of hundred pages of transcript.

You start with the transcript, a highlighter pen and your notebook.

Why had Hannah got out of bed?

Because she’d arranged with Nicole to go for a night-walk.

What was a night-walk?

When you go and walk around at night – duh!

Had they gone on night-walks before?

Only when it was hot.

How long had they been doing this?

Hannah couldn’t remember. ‘Ages,’ she’d said.

What did they do on night-walks?

Go for a walk, silly. Look at the moon. Sometimes they would do naughty dancing.

And what was naughty dancing?

That was when you took off all your clothes and danced around in the buff.

There then followed at least thirty pages where the child psychologist attempted to establish when and where this naughty dancing took place, who instigated the idea and were there any adults involved?

Hannah was cheerfully open that they danced about in the churchyard, sometimes in the field behind Hannah’s house and, if they felt particularly daring, at the road junction by the Rushpool. Generally speaking they weren’t totally naked because they left their sandals or flip-flops on. She was amused by the notion that an adult might be involved and asked why an adult would want to watch them dancing.

‘They might want to know what you were doing out at night,’ said the child psychologist and gently steered Hannah back to the night, as we like to say, in question. On that particular night, whose idea had it been to go for a night-walk?

Hannah said that Nicky, which is what she liked to call Nicole, had suggested it that night.

Was she sure?

She was sure that she would like to stop for a drink and something to eat and could she watch telly because that’s what she really wanted to do, and she’d quite like to do all that back at her own home if that wasn’t too much trouble.

There followed what is generally known as a multi-agency conference in which the police, social services, the paediatrics registrar and the child psychologist discussed their options for an hour before agreeing that yes, Hannah should go home.

I logged onto HOLMES and had a quick rummage – and there it was. An action for someone to go through all the witness statements and see if there was a reference to the girls going out at night and dancing – with or without clothing. There wasn’t any result.

The child psychologist rode back with Hannah and Joanne to their house and noted that Hannah had explained that they had different kinds of dances for different occasions – when Joanne exploded. The child psychologist actually wrote that in their notes – at that point the mother exploded! That would have been a fearsome sight even in the spacious back seat of a traffic BMW. The child psychologist felt that the outburst might have been a good thing, because Hannah knew her mother was upset and would have been tense and inhibited in the expectation of parental disfavour.

But she was shocked by the swearing, some of which she had to look up on the internet.

Hannah, now presumably disinhibited, got her dinner, then some telly and then magnanimously agreed to talk to the child psychologist again. Albeit on the condition that she be allowed to watch the Disney Channel at the same time.

When asked what had happened after she and Nicole had sneaked out of their houses and met up, Hannah explained, in a distracted fashion, that they’d taken secret paths up to the moor where they’d met a beautiful woman riding a unicorn. The child psychologist worried at the last statement – did Hannah mean a woman on a horse?

No she meant a lady riding a unicorn – side saddle!

Was this ‘unicorn’ perhaps Nicole’s invisible friend Princess Luna?

Hannah was not impressed – Princess Luna is a completely different unicorn.

Did this unicorn have a name?

The lady never said.

Did the lady have a name?

Yes, the lady’s name was Lady.

The child psychologist then sits through an episode of Phineas and Ferb before, quite spontaneously, Hannah explains that they walked for miles and miles and miles, then they went downhill and through a cave by a river and then up a hill where they had a sleep.

In the open?

No, Hannah thought there had been tents, old-fashioned tents made of skins or possibly rainbows. And there had been kebabs but she didn’t think they were good kebabs because she’d felt sick afterwards. Then they’d woken up and hadn’t had to have a wash or clean their teeth or anything.

I made a note to check the medical report and see whether their teeth had been neglected or not.

The next morning they had walked down a hill for a very long way and she’d been really tired and it was getting dark when they went up a hill and into a castle.

What kind of castle?

A castle castle.

Could she remember what colour it was?

Pink and blue and orange.

Had there been any other houses, or roads or signposts?

It had all been trees.

What kind of trees? I asked myself, and a few lines down the transcript the child psychologist also asked, but it was clear by that point Hannah had lost patience with the whole operation and wanted to go out and play with her cousins.

She didn’t ask after Nicole – I wondered if that was significant.

She did remember a sort of road in the forest, it was all overgrown but the lady had made them run across it very quickly. There hadn’t been any signposts or houses, apart from the castle of course.

I found Windrow in his office reading statements and approving actions which, along with going to meetings with other senior officers, is what senior officers spend most of their time doing. Rather them than me.

I asked if there were any word on Nicole but Windrow said no – the inter-agency care team would send word as soon as there was any change.

‘What did you think of the statement?’ he asked.

‘Don’t know, sir,’ I said. ‘Any chance I can talk to her?’

‘Let’s see if she sticks to the same story for the next couple of days,’ he said. ‘Is there any chance it’s true?’

‘It would be nice to have some physical evidence,’ I said. ‘She mentioned a cave – any sign of that?’

‘From the description it sounded like it might be along the river bank at Aymestrey. There are old quarry workings down there – so it’s possible.’

And close to where we found them, I thought, and the scrap of cloth from Nicole’s clothes, too. That every vaguely castle-like structure within thirty kilometres of Rushpool was going to get a thorough going-over went without saying. My guess was that the National Trust was going to be seeing a heavy police presence in the next couple of days.

‘Any trouble with the media?’ asked Windrow.

‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘Is there likely to be?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Windrow. ‘I don’t trust them when they go all quiet.’

I promised to keep my head down, my nose wiped and to wear a clean pair of underpants at all times.

‘What do you plan to do next?’ he asked.

‘I’m going to do what I didn’t do when I got here,’ I said. ‘I’m going to hit the books.’

Thankfully, he didn’t ask me what books. Perhaps he assumed that back at the Folly we had great big tomes full of esoteric lore within which the true history of the world was illuminated. It’s true about the esoteric lore, but the illumination has always been on the scarce side. Fortunately, I knew a bloke with a lot of the books I was looking for. All conveniently located in the same place.

I pulled out my phone, found the number I wanted and pressed call – it rang twice.

‘Oswald Honey,’ said Mellissa. ‘Best honey there is.’

‘Hi, Mellissa,’ I said using my non-policing voice. ‘I wonder if I could come up and use your library.’

‘Granddad’s asleep,’ she said.

‘I’ll be quiet,’ I said. ‘You won’t even know I’m there.’

‘Are you going to bring your friend?’

‘Who, Beverley?’

‘Of course Bev.’

‘If you want,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ said Mellissa. ‘Come over whenever you like.’

11 Service Delivery Option

In some households you only have to turn up three times before you’re expected to make your own tea, draw up a chair in front of the telly and call the cat a bastard. The Oswalds’ wasn’t that kind of household, not least because they don’t have a telly, but at least Mellissa seemed almost pleased to see me – or more likely Beverley.

‘She’s a bit short of female company round here,’ Beverley had said as we drove up the steep lane to the Bee House. ‘There are certain topics she can’t discuss with her granddad.’

I’d asked her to see if she could find out who Mellissa’s parents were, but she made no promises – not even to tell me if she did find out. ‘Some things are private,’ she’d said. ‘Even from the police.’

Which explained why, when we arrived, I was peremptorily waved up the stairs to the study while Beverley and Mellissa hustled into the kitchen with cries of glee and a vague promise that refreshments might arrive at some point in the future. Up in the study, I carefully cleared space on the gateleg table and removed a stack of old Bee Craft magazines from the wood and leather desk chair. The cover of the topmost magazine was dark pink and showed a line drawing of a hive and almost abstract pictures of flowers in the bulbous ink style that I associate with Gerry Mulligan covers of the mid-sixties. I remember staring at the cover of Feelin’ Good for hours when I was twelve but that was not necessarily down to the Art Nouveau stylings of the design.

The trick, when rifling through the library of a practitioner, is to find the books with the notes written in the margins. I don’t know why – perhaps it was something they encouraged at Casterbrook – but I’ve never met a wizard yet who could resist jotting his thoughts down on somebody else’s work. The History of Ludlow by Thomas Wright Esq., MA, FRS, Hon. MRSL, 1850 had been extensively scribbled on as well as having obviously, judging by the stamp, been lifted from the Bodleian Library. There was quite a lot about wolves and their rampages in the tenth century alongside which Hugh, I recognised his handwriting, had written alas no more. One book caught my eye because it had a distinctive plain burgundy cover that I’d learnt to associate with the limited editions published in Oxford for use by the Folly. I opened it to the frontispiece to find the title – A Survey of Significant Locations in England and Wales by Henry Boatright. Published in 1907, it was a vestigium survey of Earthworks and Ancient Monuments with, where possible, a compendium of any information gathered by reputable practitioners about said sites. I checked the entry for Northern Herefordshire and found listings for Croft Ambrey, Brandon Hill, Pyon Wood Camp and the battlefield at Mortimer’s Cross.

Boatright had diligently noted his impressions of possible vestigia as he examined the locations. But, being from the last century, he had yet to take up the ultramodern Yap scale of magical influence.

Should have got yourself a ghost-hunting dog, I thought. That’s the way us go-ahead twenty-first-century practitioners calibrate our science experiments.

Boatright was an unspeakably dull writer but, hopefully, conscientious – he certainly went on at length about his sense impressions in a manner that would have made Henry James proud. I did The Turn of the Screw for GCSE English, in case you wondered. And I’ve got to say, I preferred the metaphysical poets – so there.

But Boatright certainly loved Pyon Wood Camp, which was situated the other side of the road from Croft Ambrey – talking about its numinous quality and air of ancient solemnity. He also rated Croft Ambrey because of its lofty aspect, but was disappointed because he found nothing that would verify his theory that this was where Caratacus made his last stand against the Romans. Brandon Hill gave him a weak feeling in his bowels which he later attributed to some dodgy boiled beef he’d eaten the night before. I skipped Mortimer’s Cross because it was on the other side of the Lugg and, judging by Beverley’s face-off with the unicorn, whatever was running around on the ridge didn’t like to cross the river. Why that might be was something I planned to get Beverley to find out.

Caratacus suffered the double indignity of being taken to Rome in chains and having an opera written about him by Elgar. Apart from the need to deal with stroppy British chieftains, the Romans didn’t have much interest in northern Herefordshire except as a route up to Wroxeter and places North. They did this by constructing Watling Street, which runs diagonally across England like the zip on a Mary Quant dress, from Dover to Wroxeter. This is the road that crossed the Lugg by the Riverside Inn and that I had admired from up on the ridge – imposing itself on the landscape for certain. I made a note to check and see whether it was possible that either Pyon Wood or Croft Ambrey might be the castle Hannah had talked about. Perhaps the castle had been as immaterial as the unicorns – a product of magic. Or possibly even more insubstantial – a ghost of a castle like the incorporeal apple trees I’d seen in the moonlight. If that were true I’d have pegged the Roman Road to be the one she’d described crossing. Only she’d said it was partially overgrown. According to the OS map the nearest disused section of the Roman road started over a kilometre north of Aymestrey and continued on to skirt the eastern side of Wigmore.

Hugh’s annotations were extensive but cryptic, being mainly memos to himself. Things like BA disagrees and See IB07, BA confirms IB06. Most promising to me was a note on the Croft Ambrey page which read Activity stops in 1911 BA has no explan. It took me another half an hour of systematic searching before I located a row of old battered notebooks with dun-coloured cardboard covers on which was handwritten Incident Book, County of Hereford and then a year from 1899 to 1912. If I had any doubts about what kind of incidents they recorded then these were dispelled by the words ipsa scientia potestas est – knowledge itself is power – written in a ponderous cursive hand on the inside cover of every single notebook. And under that, a name. Barnaby Atkins Esq., MA (Oxon) CP (Herefordshire). CP stood for County Practitioner, a term that I’d heard Nightingale use. But I’d never taken it very seriously. It made me think of pith helmets and tea on the veranda with the District Commissioner. But there he was – Barnaby Atkins, aka BA – and his incident books, or IB, listed by year 99 to 12.

These were working notebooks full of abbreviations and words that I don’t think meant what I thought they did. I was particularly suspicious of the number of women Barnaby had a ‘brush’ with during the course of his activities. Most of his cases were referred to him by the Chief Constable of the Herefordshire Constabulary, local magistrates or, and this surprised me, the Bishop of Hereford. It all seemed very informal, relaxed and entirely lacking in concern for the rights of anyone on less than £160 a year. I knew there was a section of the mundane library at the Folly which consisted of loose pages bound into ledgers – each one had been embossed with the name of a county. That must be where Barnaby Atkins Esquire’s formal reports had gone – Nightingale would have to have a look for me – but I suspected a great deal was fixed on the down low and never got reported. Especially things like, Wednesday Morning a happy bit with Mary who is maid to Mrs Packnar – most satisfactory.

Barnaby’s sexual exploitation aside, it took a while to skim through the material. I started in 1912 and worked backwards to see what activity BA had no explanation for, and which stopped in 1911. TH complains that there have been no more visitations of the ghostly horses to Croft Ambrey and that he is £5 out of pocket through loss of custom. He claims that the visitations were common enough in the summer months but that he has seen nothing of them since the year before last. I told him that it was in the nature of spirits to be mercurial and that such matters were only my concern when they caused a breach of the peace. TH remonstrated that a loss of £5 was very much a breach of the peace but I repeated that I could not assist him and bade him farewell.

Ghost horses, Croft Ambrey, the summer months – any of this ringing a bell?

Barnaby, to give him his due, did investigate further and found that a number of other magical phenomena at Aymestrey, Mortimer’s Cross and Yatton – two ghosts and, ironically, an unearthly ringing bell – had also ceased.

I was wondering why Barnaby hadn’t asked any of the local rivers if they knew anything, when I found this in IB05 – Came upon one of the river nymphs in a pool by the bridge at Little Hereford today and overcome by her beauty foolishly sought to grapple with her. At which point she landed me such a blow upon the side of the head that I had to take myself straightway to a Doctor and thereafter to my bed for a fortnight.

I took a photo of that to show Beverley later.

1911, I thought, what happened in 1911?

More to the point, did it have anything to do with my case? The ghost horses said yes, but back in those days horses were as common as people so . . . coincidence?

I heard a scraping noise from the staircase and, thinking that maybe tea had arrived, I stuck my head around the corner to see if I could help. To my amazement, Hugh Oswald was making his way up the stairs to see me – one step at a time. When he saw me he raised a shaking hand in greeting, but was obviously too breathless to speak. I moved to help him, but he waved me away, shaking his head. It took him at least ten minutes to reach the study, and at the end he accepted my arm over to a hastily cleared spot on the sofa.

He sat down gratefully and wheezed at me while making apologetic little gestures. It was painful to watch. I offered him a drink from the bottle of water I had in my bag and he took it gratefully, making sips between gasps.

‘I don’t think you should have come up those stairs,’ I said.

The wheezing became suddenly ragged, which worried me until I realised he was laughing.

‘I had a chance at a bungalow in the Palladian style,’ he said. ‘But I wanted the tower.’ He paused for breath again. ‘You can’t even fit a chairlift, either – Mellissa spent almost a year trying to find a way. Perils of living in a listed building.’

I offered to go fetch Mellissa, but he was having none of that.

‘She’ll come looking for me soon enough,’ he said. ‘I wanted a bit of time alone with you. And she does fuss.’

‘If you’re sure,’ I said.

His face lost some of its livid mottling and his breathing its rasping edge.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said and directed me over to a chest that had been hidden under a dusty red floral cushion and two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I opened it up and smelt camphor and the warm smell of old cloth. Inside was a long cylindrical khaki bag with a rough webbing shoulder strap. I’ve spent enough time rooting around in the Folly’s basement to know army surplus when I see it. Stencilled along the side of the bag was Oswald, H. 262041 and it was held closed with three buckles. The contents were heavy – at least two or three kilos, I reckoned, when I lifted it out of the chest. Under Hugh’s direction I placed it on the floor in front of his feet and crouched down to unbuckle it.

When I got it open a thick booklet with a dull red cover fell out – written on the front was Soldier’s Service and Pay Book. When I picked it up a photograph fluttered out from between the pages – sepia toned and faded, of a young man. Younger than me, I realised with a shock, stiffly posing in his uniform – unmistakably Hugh Oswald. I retrieved the photograph and handed it and the booklet to Hugh, who took them without looking at them. He nodded down at the bag.

‘What do you think?’ he asked.

Inside the bag were two staves the size and shape of pickaxe handles. At one end they sported grips made of wrapped canvas and leather and at the other an iron cap. Branded neatly into one side was the same number sequence as on the bag, at a guess Hugh’s service number, and the hammer and anvil sigil of the Sons of Weyland – British wizardry’s legendary smiths.

Makers of staffs.

‘Don’t be shy,’ said Hugh. ‘They won’t bite you.’

A couple of bad experiences has taught me a certain amount of caution when handling unfamiliar arcane objects, so at first I just let my fingertips brush the surface of the wood. I felt it at once, the rasping, dancing, wriggling honey-soaked warm intimacy of the hive.

‘Have you been keeping this in your attic?’ I asked.

‘As a matter of fact, yes. Well spotted,’ said Hugh. ‘Take a good grip. It won’t hurt you.’

I closed my hand around one staff and lifted it like a club. It was heavy and comfortable and could, if I was any judge, serve usefully as a hand-to-hand weapon in a pinch. Had it ever come to that pinch? Had this frail old man, who had to muster up his strength to eat toast, smacked some poor unsuspecting German with it? Take that Fritz! Eat English Oak. I felt the heart of it then, the beating of the hammers and the hot breath of the forge and behind that the rivers of steel and oceans of coal and the clang clang clang of Empire.

I don’t know about the enemy, but it scared the hell out of me.

‘I want you to have them,’ said Hugh

‘I’m not sure I should take these,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t Mellissa want them?’

‘Now you listen to me, lad,’ said Hugh. ‘In 1939 we had no inkling of what was to come – the end of the world can arrive with no warning at all and a wise man makes sure he has a big stick tucked away, just in case.’

I nodded.

‘Thank you,’ I said. I replaced the staff in its bag and buckled it up.

A more practical weapon, I thought, from a less civilised age.

‘What did happen at Ettersberg?’ I said. The question I’d been aching to ask.

‘Operation Spatchcock,’ said Hugh.

‘What went wrong?’ I said.

‘What went right? We got greedy, we thought the war was all but over and started thinking about after, what would be our role, what would be the Folly’s, the order’s, England’s, the Empire’s.’

He looked at the bottle of water he held, as if trying to remember what it was for. ‘Hubris is what it was.’ He took another sip and when he spoke again his voice was stronger.

‘Nightingale was against it from the start, said we should send in the RAF and bomb the camp from altitude. He said it was the only way to be sure.’ He gave me a puzzled look. ‘Did I say something funny?’

‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘You mentioned being greedy. Greedy for what?’

‘There were some bright young sparks before the war,’ said Hugh. ‘On both sides. People like David Mellenby, who said they thought it might be possible to formulate a theory that would unite magic with relativity.’ Hugh paused again, eyes unfocused. ‘Or was it quantum theory? Which one is the one with the cat?’

‘Schrödinger’s cat?’

‘That’s the bugger,’ said Hugh.

‘Quantum theory,’ I said.

‘Closing the gap, he called it,’ said Hugh. ‘Had lots of foreign friends, particularly in Germany – all practitioners or boffins – which was damned unusual, you understand. He took the start of the war very badly, saw it as a personal betrayal. You see, the Nazis took his work and . . . I’m not sure what the word is.’

‘Perverted it?’

‘No,’ said Hugh. ‘We thought they might have closed the gap, but the methods they used . . .’ Hugh was trembling and I considered calling his daughter, but then I saw the look in his eyes and realised it was anger. Not just anger, but rage – even seventy years later. ‘They did terrible things to live prisoners, to men and women and the fae and . . .’

He stopped, his chest heaving, and looked around his study, blinking his eyes.

‘And, being German,’ he said finally, ‘they wrote it all down, typed it up in triplicate, cross-referenced it and filed it neatly in a hundred filing cabinets in a central bunker in a camp near a town called Ettersberg.’

‘Oh shit,’ I said. I realised the implications. Hugh gave me a reproachful look. ‘They wanted the research data,’ I said. ‘That’s what the operation was all about.’

‘We couldn’t let the Russians have it, or the Americans, or the French for that matter,’ he said. ‘It was obvious to everyone by ’45 that this was the Empire’s last hurrah. The Russians were gearing up to win the Great Game and the Yanks couldn’t wait to get us out of the Far East. I think some believed, including David, that this could put us back in the game.’

‘What game?’

‘Precisely,’ said Hugh and looked so pleased with me that I didn’t explain that I meant the question literally. ‘And we secured the library, the Black Library we called it after that, for all the good that it did us. Nightingale’s job was to cover the extraction, and by god that’s just what he did. But even he couldn’t save the men who were cut off at the camp.’

And so Operation Spatchcock had fallen apart and the raiding force, over eight hundred men in all, was broken up and destroyed in detail while the remnants fled west in squads or as individuals – werewolves on their tail.

‘Were they real werewolves?’ I asked. ‘Or just special forces?’

‘Nobody knows for sure,’ said Hugh.

Nightingale being among the last of the few stragglers that made it across the Allied front line.

‘He made sure the wounded were on the gliders with the Library, me amongst them, and he gave up his own place so that David could escape,’ said Hugh.

‘David Mellenby got out?’ I said. ‘I thought he was killed in action.’

‘No,’ said Hugh. ‘Took his own life, sadly. Locked himself in his lab and shot himself in the head. Wasn’t the only one, certainly not the only one, come to think of it.

‘You have to understand, Peter,’ said Hugh. His voice was shaking and I saw there were tears in his eyes. ‘I regret nothing, and if I could go back in time to my young self I would tell him to stop being a weak sister and get the job done. Sometimes you have to make a choice and sometimes you have to act on blind faith and trust that your mates won’t let you down.’

I heard his granddaughter call his name from below.

‘But when you do that, Peter,’ he said, ‘make sure you know who your mates are.’

Mellissa bounced into the room and made her displeasure known to both of us. I let myself be chivvied downstairs. Hugh looked done in and I didn’t want him to hurt himself. I grabbed the staves along with my other stuff, the heavy wood clonking against my hip as I swung the strap over my shoulder.

In the kitchen I found Beverley seated behind a stack of cardboard pallets containing squat green glass jars with home-printed labels on them.

‘I hope you made her pay for those,’ I said to Mellissa.

‘Got my money’s worth,’ she said and winked at Beverley, who laughed.

‘You can help get them into the car,’ she said.

If I couldn’t speak to Hannah, I figured I could talk to the next best thing. Her mum. So I called up DS Cole and asked if I could interview Joanne. She said in fact Joanne had been asking after me, so I could visit straight away? Providing I agreed to keep it informal. Which is police speak for waiting until the subject can’t see you before taking down your notes. I was getting good enough at navigating the lanes around Rushpool that I could swing around to drop Beverley off at the Swan and then go on to the Marstowe’s without having to do any reversing or tricky three-point turns. I did notice that some of the press pack were back in the Swan’s car park and, when I turned into the Marstowe’s cul-de-sac, I spotted a photographer staking it out. He fired off a couple of shots as I passed, but it was an automatic gesture. Routine.

I also noticed that Andy Marstowe’s Toyota wasn’t parked outside the house, so imagine my state of unsurprise when I found Derek Lacey with his feet firmly ensconced under the kitchen table. I followed Joanne inside and he jumped up when he saw me and shook my hand.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

And then, surprised to find he was still holding my hand, he let go and offered me a seat opposite him and Joanne.

‘Thanks,’ he said again. ‘It seems such an inadequate word.’

There were two open bottles of wine on the kitchen table and two glasses. As I sat down, Derek, obviously familiar with the kitchen, located another wine glass and plonked it down in front of me.

‘Red or white?’ he asked.

I went with white. After all, I was under instructions to keep it informal. The beauty about the whole ‘coppers don’t drink on duty’ rule is that people think that if you’re drinking you’re not on duty. They’re wrong, of course. We’re always on duty. It’s just that sometimes we’re a little bit unsteady as well. Although, strictly speaking, I should have sought pre-authorisation by a senior officer of Superintendent rank or above before I emptied my glass.

I tasted the wine. A year sitting at Nightingale’s table meant I could at least tell good from bad – and this was not bad.

‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ said Derek. ‘South African.’

‘So how’s Nicole?’ I asked.

‘Don’t they keep you informed?’ asked Joanne.

‘I’m just a constable,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty much the last person that anybody tells anything to.’

‘She’s coming home tomorrow morning,’ said Derek. ‘That’s why I’ve been sent ahead to make sure everything is shipshape and Bristol fashion.’

‘So she’s over the shock?’ I said.

‘Not entirely,’ said Derek and drained his glass. ‘But the doctors think that familiar surroundings might help.’

Help what? I wondered, but sometimes it’s better just to look interested and hope for the best.

‘She’s having trouble talking,’ said Derek. ‘She keeps forgetting words – aphasia, the doctors call it. She was completely non compos mentis when we first saw her, but much better now.’ He paused to fetch another bottle – a Sauvignon blanc this time. ‘I’m just relieved to have them back.’

‘Peter,’ said Joanne, and then stopped and looked at Derek, who took a breath.

‘If something had happened to the girls . . .’ he said. ‘The police wouldn’t keep it from us – to spare our feelings?’

‘No,’ I said.

Not unless you were suspects, I thought, and even then . . .

‘Definitely not,’ I said.

‘You’re sure?’ asked Joanne.

‘Do you think something happened?’ I asked.

Derek filled his glass and topped up mine.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘They’ve always been such happy girls – ask anyone. It’s worrying to see Nicky so withdrawn and uncommunicative.’

‘And we were worried the last time,’ said Joanne.

‘The last time?’ I asked.

Derek sighed.

‘It’s not the first time one of mine has run away,’ said Derek.

This was not in any case summary I’d read and, believe me, in missing kid cases ‘has run away before’ tends to be pretty prominent in the initial assessment.

‘Nicole ran away before?’ I asked. ‘When?’

‘God, no,’ said Joanne. Her glass was empty so I topped it up – it was only polite.

‘This was a long time ago,’ said Derek. ‘And it wasn’t Nicole. It was my eldest – Zoe.’

‘I didn’t know you had an eldest,’ I said and thought – if it’s in the files Lesley would be so pissed off with me for missing that.

‘By Susan, my first wife. She’s all grown up now,’ he said. ‘Lives over in Bromyard.’

I filled my glass and took a sip – the second bottle wasn’t as good. Not that Derek seemed to notice. I filled his glass as well.

Given the amount of wine we’d necked, I decided to just come out and ask them what happened.

‘Zoe was always a difficult child,’ said Derek.

‘She was a perfectly good girl,’ said Joanne.

‘Well, she loved you, didn’t she?’ said Derek to Joanne.

Joanne turned to me and said in mock confidence, ‘I used to babysit her when she was small.’

‘And spoil her,’ said Derek. ‘And listen to her stories.’

‘She had a wonderful imagination. Loved Harry Potter and all those fairy books,’ said Joanne.

‘Did she say why she ran away?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Derek. But he said it way too quickly, and his eyes shifted unconsciously to look at Joanne, who was pretending to be taking a long sip of her wine while she thought of something convincing to say. I gave her as long as she needed.

‘It was just a silly argument,’ she said, and then uttered the phrase you should never utter in front of the police. ‘It wasn’t anything important.’

‘And we found her quickly enough,’ said Derek.

‘Just in time,’ said Joanne. ‘We were just about to call you lot.’

‘Where was she when you found her?’ I asked.

‘By the lay-by on the main road,’ said Derek. ‘The one you reach if you go left towards Lucton when you come out of the village.’

I pulled out my phone and got them to pinpoint the location on Google Maps. I think they wanted to avoid the subject, but they couldn’t do that without drawing attention to the fact that that was what they wanted to do.

The location was east of Rushpool, the opposite direction from where Hannah and Nicole were reckoned to have crossed the same road while heading up to Bircher Common.

‘Why do you want to know?’ asked Joanne.

‘Habit,’ I said and took a gulp of wine. ‘It’s the way I’m trained – ask questions first, worry about what the information is for later.’

I didn’t stay much longer after that, and I left the pair of them polishing off a third bottle. I wondered what was going to happen the moment I stepped out the front door and was tempted to double back and peer in through the windows. I decided not to – even the police have to have some standards. And anyway, they might see me and that would end their use as sources of information.

I arrived home at the cowshed to find Beverley rifling through my stuff.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

She was kneeling by my trunks, dressed only in a pair of blue silk knickers and a matching camisole, and systematically laying out the contents on the floor around her.

‘I was languorously awaiting your return,’ she said, ‘but after ten minutes I got bored.’

‘That explains the underwear,’ I said. ‘Which is very nice by the way.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Beverley.

‘But what are you doing in my stuff?’

‘We need a present to give to Hugh,’ she said. ‘In return for what he gave you.’

‘I don’t think he wants anything in return,’ I said.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Beverley. ‘He’s given you the most important thing he owns – that’s an imbalance – you can’t have that. He’s an old man – what if he dies?’

She pulled out the Purdey lightweight two-inch self-opening sidelock shotguns, cracked the breeches and gave them a disturbingly professional once-over.

‘Do you think he’d like these?’ she asked.

I sat down on the bed and started taking off my clothes.

‘I think he’s done with weapons,’ I said. ‘Don’t you?’

I decided to leave my boxers on – a man should maintain a certain amount of mystery after all.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘And Mellissa would only give them to her harem.’

Beverley closed the trunk and looked at me.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘I’m waiting languorously,’ I said. ‘For you to get into the bed.’

‘What make you think I’m still in the mood?’

‘Unlike some people,’ I said, ‘I’m committed to this state of languor. I’ve been putting in the hours. If necessary I can maintain it for an extended period.’

‘I could go back to my room at the Swan,’ she said.

I slowly put my hand behind my head and cocked my left leg provocatively.

‘But then,’ I said, ‘you’d be all alone and I’d still be here being irresistibly languid.’

She made me wait at least a minute, and then she climbed onto the bed with me. There followed some kissing and some grabbing of parts – the details I will not bother to bore you with, except to say that just as we were getting down to business I paused long enough to ask – ‘We’re not going to be, like, fertilising this garden or something are we?’

‘Peter!’ snarled Beverley. ‘Focus!’

Afterwards we lay sweating on top of the duvet, spread-eagled to catch the faint breeze coming in through the door, not touching except where her hand rested on my thigh and my hand covered hers.

‘When you were eleven,’ I said, ‘did you ever sneak out of your house?’

‘All the time,’ said Beverley.

‘Where did you go?’

‘Into the river of course,’ she said. ‘Where else?’

‘You didn’t dance about?’

‘On dry land?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Might have done – don’t know.’

‘Naked?’

‘When I was eleven?’

‘I just wondered if it was a fae thing,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen you swimming around without your kit on.’

‘I know,’ she said and rolled over to face me, propping her head up with her hand. ‘I’ve seen you watching me.’

‘Couldn’t take my eyes off you,’ I said.

She reached out and twirled her finger tips around my belly, making me laugh and gasp at the same time.

‘Children do strange things,’ she said. ‘They don’t have to be different to want to dance around as free as a chimpanzee.’

She swept her hand up to my chest, pushing ahead a little wave of water, my sweat I realised, coalescing in a way that could not be explained by momentum and surface tension.

‘I was naked the first time I saw you – do you remember?’ she asked. Her palm swept across my shoulders like a child gathering material for a sand castle.

‘That was you in the river at Richmond,’ I said. ‘What happened to your wetsuit?’

‘I was at mum’s house and my wetsuit was at my place – when we got the alarm I had to go as I was. We went up the river like crazies – me, Fleet, Chelsea and Effra – if you’d seen us then you’d have freaked big time.’

With a twist of her wrist she held out her hand out palm up, and above it floated a globe of water.

‘We’d chased Father Thames’s little boys back to their boat, and we’re just giving them some lip when down swoops the Jag and the Nightingale comes storming out. I was totally stealthy because, you know, Nightingale . . . Mum’s got views about us getting into too much trouble. The next thing I know I’m seeing this gormless looking boy standing on the shore.’

The globe started to rotate and flatten out slightly.

‘You swore at me,’ I said.

‘I cut myself on a wire cage,’ she said. ‘Some stupid environmental anti-erosion measure or something.’

I extended my hand and concentrated, which wasn’t easy with one of Beverley’s breasts brushing against the side of my chest. Aqua was a forma I’d only learnt quite recently, but I managed to get a respectable globe of water hovering over my own hand.

‘Why, thank you,’ said Beverley and without any fuss my globe jumped over and merged with hers. She saw my startled look and grinned.

‘How did you do that?’ I asked.

‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ said Beverley, and with an elegant flick of her hand the globe shot up towards the ceiling and exploded in a puff of vapour. A cool mist floated down around us, beading her shoulders and hip and making me shiver.

I could tell she knew I was going to ask again, because she leaned over and kissed me until I’d forgotten what I was going to say. After that one thing led to another, but fortunately Beverley paused long enough to do the vapour thing again so we didn’t collapse from heat exhaustion.

Alas all good things must end – even if only to avoid back strain.

‘And what’s your plan for tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘I’m going high tech.’

12 Passive Data Strategy

‘I knew it was something to do with aliens,’ said the man from the electronics shop whose name turned out to be Albert but apparently I could call him Al.

‘No comment,’ I said, which of course merely confirmed Call Me Al’s most cherished suspicions. He’d done a good job quickly lashing up a batch of Peter Grant’s patented wide-area magic detectors. These consisted of a disposable pay-as-you-go phone, modified to my specifications and mounted inside a brightly coloured plastic box with rounded corners. One third were yellow, another third blue and the rest letter-box red.

I flicked one with my finger – it was heavy duty PVC.

‘Where did you get these?’ I asked.

‘Sports warehouse,’ said Al. ‘They’re children’s floats for swimming pools.’

He’d picked them up on his way back from Birmingham where he’d bought the phones. Reputable shops won’t sell you more than three disposables at a go, but fortunately everyone else will – especially for cash. One of the advantages of being the police is that when you want to buy something slightly dodgy, you generally know where to shop.

There were thirty of the buggers, and they filled up the back of the Asbo. I also kept four phones still in their plastic packaging for use later.

‘Did you see it?’ asked Al, as he helped me carry the magic detectors to the car.

‘See what?’

‘There was a sighting two nights ago up near Croft Ambrey,’ said Al.

We went back into the shop and opened up my laptop and loaded up the tracking software.

‘Multiple witnesses, classic Type V, light source, no visible body,’ said Al as we waited for the diagnostic test to run. He was surprised that it hadn’t made the national papers. ‘But your lot did find those kids that day,’ he said, and implied that he thought the two were related – which of course they were.

The laptop ran through each of the detectors in turn before putting them into passive mode. Being cheap disposables they didn’t have GPS, so I’d have to log each location as I planted them.

‘Aymestrey’s always been a hotspot for close encounters,’ said Al. ‘Some of them very difficult to explain away.’

I asked him if he had a list, and he directed me to a website called UKUFOindex.com where all UFO sightings were indexed and cross-referenced for any member of the UFO community to access. I made a point of noting down the address in my notebook.

We ran one last test to ensure that the detectors were registering on my laptop.

‘Any abductions?’ I asked.

‘Loads,’ he said. ‘But none verified.’

Al, while being a firm believer that extraterrestrial life had visited Herefordshire, was a firm agnostic on the whole abduction and cattle mutilation thing. Although he lived in hope.

‘Just think what would happen if we had irrefutable proof that we weren’t alone,’ he said. ‘Think what a difference that would make.’

It was about then that I got the idea for the investigation technique that I call, for reasons too geeky to mention, the reverse Nigel Kneale. I paid Al in cash, got his personal mobile number in case I needed a technical consult in the middle of the night, and headed for Leominster nick.

The crowd there had thinned out a bit now that the search was no longer being staged from it. MIU was still stuffed into their overheated office space. Luckily somebody had sprung for an industrial-sized cooling fan with a face the same diameter as a dustbin lid and an unfortunate tendency to blow any unsecured paperwork out the nearest window. If we’d had a green screen we could have shot the live elements to a low budget disaster movie. Edmondson had quite adamantly reasserted control of his own office, but the MIU office manager found me some desk space next door in the territorial policing office.

I was just logging into UKUFOindex.com when Lesley texted me. Have U gone native yet?

I hadn’t been expecting a call until at least that evening, which meant I spent the next ten minutes trying to open the tough plastic clamshell packaging around one of the spare burner mobiles until finally a PCSO on her lunch break took pity on me and lent me a pair of scissors. Fortunately, disposable phones nearly always come with some charge – enough at least to make my initial response.

No, I texted back, using the disposable. But I have been eating sheep.

I had no doubt Lesley would notice that I was using a different phone but the question was, would she figure out why?

While I waited for a response, I dug into UKUFOindex.com and found that in some quarters UFOs were now known as UAPs – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – although adoption of this term had proved contentious. The index was just that, a long catalogue of incidents listed by date without any search function, going back as far the 1940s. A guy believed he’d been abducted in Northumbria and Winston Churchill suppressed reports of UFOs sighted by RAF reconnaissance flights. Herefordshire had its own sighting in the summer of 1942 when there was a report of an aircraft crash near Aymestrey, only once the authorities arrived there was no sign of any wreckage.

The disposable phone pinged.

Does this mean we can talk?

‘We need to push her,’ Inspector Pollock had said when we discussed the last text exchange. ‘She may be reaching out to you because she’s uncomfortable with her current situation. We need to make it easier for her to engage but at the same time you need to push her emotionally. I’m sorry, but that’s just what needs to be done.’

What needs to be done, I thought, and texted How’s your face?

The 1950s saw UFOs popping up from Southend-on-Sea to the USAF base at Lakenheath, but nothing that I could find in Herefordshire or the surrounds. The 1960s proved to be a time of cosmic significance, at least in the number of UFO sightings all over the country. But it was not until August 1970 that I had my first close encounter. A couple travelling towards Wigmore on the A4110 experienced their car mysteriously stopping and then refusing to restart. Although there were no lights available, the couple claim that a tall humanoid, with big eyes, dressed in long dark robes, held up its hand – just like a lollipop lady, you know, holding up traffic while the kids cross the road. They were just about to leave their car to have a closer look when the figure vanished and, miraculously, when they tried the ignition the car restarted.

Herefordshire remained blessedly free of alien intrusion until 1977, when there was a sighting in Hereford itself and then nothing until 2002 when a young girl claimed to have met aliens near Mortimer’s Cross, just south of Aymestrey. I clicked on the hyperlink and was taken to the relevant page and read the account. Unfortunately, the report was obviously a summary, not an original statement. It described a young girl running away from her home in a nearby village and being ‘drawn’ up the footpath north of Mortimer’s Mill.

I checked the OS map – there was no footpath marked from the water mill, but if you did walk north from there you’d find yourself following the east bank of the River Lugg right into Pokehouse Wood.

The anonymous girl is reported to have encountered a tall alien with big eyes and scaly silver skin/clothes like a fish who talked to her for a while and gave her something to drink. The girl believes that what she drank may have been drugged because she went to sleep and woke up later that night on a road near her village.

Three guesses as to who the little girl might be.

Now, what with DCI Windrow and his team being more than just competent, one of the first things they would have done would have been to TIE any spare relatives. So it took just a five second word search to find a nominal devoted to ZOE THOMAS, daughter of Derek Lacey’s estranged first wife Susan Thomas and Nicole Lacey’s half-sister. They’d done a complete Integrated Intelligence Platform check so I had her, somewhat pathetic, criminal record, as well as a current address, employment and the sad fact that apart from work she used her mobile to talk to precisely three other people. One of whom was her mother.

The disposable mobile pinged. Still better than yours.

I called Inspector Pollock and informed him that Lesley had taken the bait.

‘Assuming this is Lesley,’ said Pollock, ‘and not a fake to lead us away.’

‘Lead us away from what?’ I asked. ‘This is definitely her.’

‘We’ll see. Anyway, I’ll brief Nightingale,’ he said.

‘Do you want me to come back in?’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Pollock quickly. ‘We all like you where you are right now – a long, long way away. We’ll let you know how the operation pans out.’

After I’d hung up, I went and splashed cold water on my face in the bathroom before seeing what could be safely scarfed up in the coffee area. One whole shelf of the fridge was rammed with Morrisons’ filled doughnuts that were apparently free for the taking. Dominic told me later that Inspector Edmondson believed that a squad stuffed with saturated fat and sugar was a happy squad. I ate a custard doughnut while I finished up my UFO research, but I think I should have let it defrost a bit because it tasted funny.

Al the electronics geezer had been right about Aymestrey becoming a hotspot for sightings – lots of night-time lights, suspicious movement in the trees, an encounter with an invisible ‘entity’ and an inhuman screaming like a pig being tortured. I made a note to ask Dominic whether pig torturing was a common nocturnal pastime in these parts.

All of this activity had taken place after the summer of 2002 when Zoe Thomas had met her tall alien in fish scales – it was time to have a chat. I let the MIU office manager know what action I was taking so it could be properly actioned, jumped into the Asbo and headed east along the A44 for the mighty metropolis of Bromyard.

With towns like Bromyard you can tell when you reach the historic section because suddenly the houses are all crowding onto narrow pavements and they assume the squeezed frontage that is typical of a planned medieval town. Apart from that, and some startlingly well preserved sixteenth-and seventeenth-century buildings, it looked like a large suburb with all the exciting connotations that implies.

Zoe Thomas lived in a bedsit above a Chinese takeaway on the Old Road near the town centre. It smelt faintly of sweet and sour pork and had that precarious scruffiness that you get when someone is fighting to maintain basic standards, but losing. There were no fast food containers serving a second career as combination ashtray and biological experiment, but the washing up in the sink was at least two days old and I could see dust and cobwebs building up in the corners.

‘I’ve already talked to the police,’ said Zoe. She was sitting on the bed because as the guest I got use of the only chair, a wooden upright kitchen chair that had obviously come from an expensive set about fifty years previously and then been repainted in gloss white by someone with no taste.

I smiled reassuringly and posed with my pen over my notebook.

‘This is just a follow-up,’ I said.

‘They found them, didn’t they?’ she asked. ‘It was on the news.’

She had a ruddy white complexion, a square forehead and a beaky nose that must have come from her dad, and a big toothy mouth that must have come from somewhere completely different. When she smiled, which was rarely, she had dimples.

She was wearing slacks and a navy blue uniform shirt with Countrywide embroidered on the breast. Countrywide were a chain store I’d never heard of that provided all the things country folk needed: wellies – I presumed – organic pig feed, bear traps. The IIP check had revealed that Zoe worked full time as a sales assistant down the road at the local branch.

‘This is a related matter,’ I said, and she immediately tensed.

She hadn’t offered me a tea when she let me inside, which is always a bad sign. According to the PNC, she’d been sectioned under the Mental Health Act two years ago but released after the twenty-eight day psychiatric assessment. There were also a string of arrests and cautions for shoplifting and minor public order offences. Generally, people who’ve had to deal with the criminal justice system more than three times stop offering random police officers tea. But you can but hope.

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Zoe.

Sweat was starting to plaster her hair to her forehead, but she made no move to open the windows and let a breeze in. My neck began to prickle in sympathy. There was a smell like microwaved rice.

‘I’d like to talk about 2002,’ I said. ‘When you were eleven and ran away from home.’

‘Which time are you talking about?’ she asked.

‘The time in August,’ I said. ‘Did you run away a lot when you were a kid?’

‘Not before Mum ran off first,’ she said. ‘That was when I was nine.’

‘Were you trying to follow her?’ I asked.

She started and looked straight at me for the first time – her eyes were a beautiful hazel colour. Not only was I sure she didn’t get that from her dad, I was also pretty certain I’d seen them listed as blue in one of the reports.

‘Did you used to run away?’ she asked.

‘Everyone runs away at least once in their lives,’ I said.

‘Why did you?’ she asked intently, and as she did I felt a strange little flutter like the batting of moth’s wings on a window. A faint echo of the sensation I felt when somebody supernatural tried to influence me – and trust me, every single one I’ve met so far has tried it on at least once.

‘Why did I what?’ I asked, to buy time.

‘Run away,’ she said, and the flutter came again.

A practitioner can emulate the effect, but it’s a ridiculously high-order spell so I was guessing that this was an unconscious phenomenon. The fae are often lavish in their glamour and I surmise that they deploy it in the same unthinking manner as do young ladies their charms – so sayeth Victor Bartholomew who despite being a dullard and a wanker has yet to steer me wrong.

‘My father was a heroin addict,’ I said. ‘Sometimes it was like living with the walking dead – so I had to get out.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ asked Zoe.

‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘You make the tea and I’ll wash up.’

I’d got there just in time – another twenty-four hours and the Environment Agency would have declared the sink a Site of Special Scientific Interest and refused us access. I did briefly consider taking a broom to the spider webs in the corners, but you don’t get the full Studio Ghibli from me without a sizable cash advance.

The disposable phone pinged while I was drying up. Food is terrible here.

That had to be a hospital reference. Was she trying to tell me where she was? Why was she texting me? Was she reaching out or trying to misdirect?

‘Girlfriend?’ asked Zoe when she saw me staring at the phone.

‘Colleague,’ I said without thinking, and texted back. U only have yourself to blame.

Zoe Thomas did have a photograph of herself from before the incident, a head and shoulders portrait in school uniform. In it she’s smiling lopsided at the camera with her head tilted ever so slightly to one side, as if questioning the whole purpose of the exercise. The picture was big enough for me to see that her eyes were blue. I looked up from the photograph to find Zoe staring at me.

‘Your eyes . . .’ I said. ‘When did that happen?’

‘The night I ran away,’ she said. ‘And do you know something – my parents never even noticed.’

‘I think you’d better tell me what happened,’ I said, and she did. Over tea and biscuits.

Even when she was small she liked to go out at night – especially when the moon was up.

‘That’s the best bit about living in the country, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘All the stars.’

I asked her if she used to dance around in the nude and she gave me a funny look.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I’ll tell you afterwards,’ I said.

After Mummy had left, she’d started going further away from home.

‘And this is going to sound weird,’ she said. ‘But I felt like I was being called.’

I asked if she’d ever actually heard any voices, but she said no – it was much more like a feeling. ‘I wish I’d heard voices,’ she said. ‘It would have made the whole thing easier to explain. Of course now I realise it was a telepathic compulsion.’

I was afraid to ask from who – but I had to know.

‘From aliens,’ she told me.

‘Aliens?’

‘I’m not mad, you know,’ she said. ‘I’ve been sectioned. They kept me in for four weeks’ “evaluation” and at the end the top shrink calls me into her office and looks me in the eye and says, “You’re saner than I am – go away”.’

‘Did you tell them about the aliens?’ I asked.

‘I may have glossed over some of the details,’ she said, and dunked a biscuit.

Definitely sane, I thought.

‘So would it be fair to say that you were summoned out that night?’

I didn’t ask whether the summoner had been an invisible unicorn – that would have been leading the witness. You learn about this stuff when you do your PEACE (Planning, Engage and explain, Account & clarify, Closure, Evaluate) training – the not leading the witness bit, not the unicorn. They’re one of the things you have to pick up on the job.

‘Not exactly,’ she said and gave me a rueful smile. ‘I walked in on my dad shagging my babysitter.’

‘No shit,’ I said, and then realised who that must have been. ‘Joanne Marstowe?’

‘The very bitch,’ said Zoe. ‘They didn’t see me, of course – too busy – so I went upstairs, packed my things and went out the front door. I slammed it hard, too, but they must have been too busy to even hear that.’

‘Wait,’ I said, doing the maths in my head. ‘She must have had Hannah by then – where was she?’

Zoe shrugged.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Not at our house.’

And I’d seen enough of the Derek and Joanne Show to know that they were probably still at it eleven years later. It was outrageous, but I wasn’t sure it was relevant – I was certainly not going to write it up this time. To change the subject, I pulled up a picture on my phone of the knapsack they’d found near the B4362 during the search and showed it to Zoe.

‘Was this yours?’

‘Oh my god,’ Zoe grabbed my phone and brought it right up to her face. ‘That’s my bag. I got it free with a magazine – I loved that bag.’

I explained where and when it had been found.

‘I’m amazed it lasted that long.’

‘So you had it with you when you left the house?’

‘Definitely,’ she said. But she didn’t know when, precisely, she’d lost it. She certainly didn’t have it when she reached Mortimer’s Mill. I asked her what had brought her there and she said that it had been a light, only like a light in her brain.

‘More telepathy?’ I asked.

‘I guess so,’ said Zoe. ‘I think of it being like the guide beam like they use at airports to bring in aircraft in poor visibility.’

I bet Call Me Al would have liked that explanation.

There was a path from the Mill that followed the bank of the Lugg all the way up to Pokehouse Wood, which wasn’t much of a wood back in the summer of 2002, being a bit deficient in the tree department.

‘It had just been cleared,’ said Zoe. ‘There were stacks of trunks by the logging track – it looked really strange in the moonlight – like it was all made of ghosts.’

She’d walked up the logging track, the same one which me, Beverley and Dominic had run down pursued by unicorns, and it was there that she encountered her alien. Pretty much where we’d found Hannah and Nicole.

There was a bright light, like really intense moonlight.

‘Only now I think about it,’ said Zoe, ‘I think that was in my mind as well.’

She was certain that the alien was real, though.

‘It was like when you meet someone famous,’ said Zoe. ‘And I don’t mean like Big Brother famous. I mean Marilyn Manson famous, proper famous, and it’s like a shock when you see them and you think, “Oh my god”. And no matter how cool you want to play it, you just talk rubbish. You know?’

I said I did, even though the only time I’d met a celebrity of any stature I’d almost arrested him, and Lesley had to pin his minder to the pavement. It’s amazing how fast the famous become just another customer when there’s constabulary duty to be done. The joke amongst police being, Do you know who I am? Yes, sir – you’re nicked.

Zoe described her alien as tall, human-looking, only with eyes that slanted downwards and had purple irises. She wore a cloak and carried a long staff almost as tall as she was.

‘How did you know it was a she?’ I asked.

‘She had tits all right,’ said Zoe. ‘Or at least she stuck out in the chest department. And there was the way she moved . . . but you’re right – why should aliens even have the same sexes as us? They could have a hundred different sexes, couldn’t they?’

‘What was she wearing?’ I asked.

‘A sort of spacesuit,’ said Zoe.

‘Describe it to me?’

‘Like a spacesuit,’ she said. ‘You know.’

‘What colour was it?’ I asked.

Zoe had to think about that. ‘Silver,’ she said. ‘Definitely silver.’

It took a lot of questions, but by the end I thought I’d managed to filter out any of Zoe’s embellishments. Dressed in silver definitely. There was also almost certainly two other individuals present, but they ‘weren’t in the light’, so Zoe didn’t get a good look at them. Zoe said that they had communicated telepathically, for which I could find no evidence either way, and in any case she couldn’t remember what they’d talked about.

Nor could she be sure how long they’d talked for, but she did distinctly remember being given a drink which, disappointingly, tasted a lot like water. The next thing she remembered clearly was walking down the road near the top of Rush Lane and meeting her dad coming the other way in his car.

‘They went mental,’ she said. ‘Dad was yelling, and bloody Victoria had to be held back – that’s what I heard, anyway. The very next day my mum came and picked me up and took me away. I hadn’t seen her for months and suddenly she was there.’

Zoe sighed and shook her head.

‘Wasn’t like I hadn’t run away before,’ she said.

‘Why do you think the reaction was different that time?’

‘See,’ said Zoe and gave me a shy smile, ‘that time I took the baby with me.’

‘You took the baby?’

‘Now you sound just like them,’ she said. ‘It’s not like Dad or my “babysitter” were paying any attention.’

‘What about your close encounter?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t know there were going to be aliens now, did I?’ she said. ‘How could I have known that was going to happen?’

As attention-grabbing behaviour it was hard to beat. I had a horrible thought.

‘Did anything happen to the baby?’ I asked.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘I never let go of her.’

I thought about the gaps in Zoe’s memory.

‘Her eyes didn’t change colour, did they?’

‘You think lady Victoria muckety-muck would have missed that?’ said Zoe. She got up and started piling the tea things in the sink where presumably they would stay until the next Good Samaritan arrived. I’d pretty much got everything I was going to get from that interview, but I thought a follow-up might be in order – perhaps I’d bring Beverley along to see if that would loosen her up.

I thought about Mellissa the bee woman, and how Zoe’s eyes had changed. Back in the nineteenth century Charles Kingsley had written of fae and demi-fae and also of people that had been ‘touched’ by the fae – so that they themselves seem strange even to themselves. He seemed to think such people lurked under every hedgerow and I’d wondered whether back then there had been way more activity than in my time. Or it could have just been Kingsley’s overactive imagination. Dr Walid often complains that, despite the order being founded by Isaac Newton, for most of the early wizards the Baconian method was something that happened to other people.

‘You believe me?’ asked Zoe. ‘You believe I met aliens?’

‘I believe you met something,’ I said, and gave her one of Dr Walid’s cards. He makes me carry them around for just this purpose.

‘I’m going to ask a friend of mine to contact you,’ I said, as Zoe gave the card a dubious look. ‘He’ll be interested in why your eyes changed colour. He’ll want you to come down to London for a chat.’

And an MRI, I thought, and blood tests, DNA swabs and anything else he can think of. Although, judging by Zoe’s expression, she was thinking a lot worse.

‘I can come with you, if you’ll feel more comfortable,’ I said.

‘Why me?’ she asked.

Does she want to be a special snowflake or an ordinary person? I wondered. And compromised.

‘You’ve come across some weird shit,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to lie to you and say it’s an everyday thing. But it has happened to a few others – we can help.’

‘Okay,’ she said. And then almost eagerly asked, ‘When do you think he’ll be in touch?’

‘You need to call him,’ I said, and tapped the card in her fingers. ‘This is about you, not us.’

Pokehouse Wood, I thought as I walked back to the Asbo. It all keeps coming back to Pokehouse Wood. I paused by the car to check my notebook. I’d been right, 2002 was listed as the last time before this year that the wood had been clear-felled. The time before that, 1970, had been the same year as the ghostly lollipop lady on the Roman Road nearby. I knew where the first set of detectors was getting planted early tomorrow morning.

I called Beverley, who answered with her mouth full.

‘I’m having supper with Dominic’s mum,’ she said.

I could hear cutlery clinking in the background and the sound of the TV being ignored.

I told her I was on my way back, but she said that Joanne Marstowe had popped round and asked if I could come see them. I asked why Joanne hadn’t rung me directly.

‘She said she didn’t trust her phone,’ said Beverley.

‘Did she say why?’

‘Just that she needed to talk to you,’ said Beverley.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Why she didn’t trust her phone?’

‘Sorry, I didn’t ask,’ said Beverley. ‘I told them you’d pop in as soon as you got back.’

Bromyard to Rushpool is half an hour by car, and I knew the route well enough to do that automatic thing when you start preparing for turn offs before your conscious mind has registered where you are. Third exit at the roundabout where me and Beverly had paraded past the locals, left at the next roundabout to cut through Leominster past the Dale factory where the half of Dominic’s family who didn’t work as cab drivers were gainfully employed bashing metal into structural members. My interview with Zoe had taken long enough that, by the time I reached the turn-off into Rushwater Lane just past Lucton, the sun was starting to flirt with the horizon. I drove up past the village pond and the Swan Inn, past the church, and then left into the Marstowes’ cul-de-sac.

Andy opened the door – which surprised me.

‘Yeah,’ he said when he saw it was me. ‘You’d better come in.’

He led me back to the kitchen where Joanne was staring out the back window to where Hannah was playing with her brothers. Ethan was sitting primly in his high chair, his little pink fists waving in cheerful anticipation. He gave me a hopeful look, no doubt believing that my presence signalled the imminent arrival of dinner – or at least the start of the floor show.

‘If I told you something crazy,’ Joanne said without looking round, ‘would you believe me?’

‘It depends on how crazy,’ I said.

Andy stepped up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder, and she put her hand over his.

Does he know? I wondered. That his wife’s been banging Derek Lacey for over a decade and – if I’m any judge of body language – still is? Or maybe he does know, and this is one of those weird unspoken arrangements that nobody ever speaks about.

Joanne turned and let Andy put his arm around her shoulder. Behind her, through the window, I saw Hannah scramble to catch a ball thrown by one of her brothers.

‘What if somebody thought that somebody was not the person you thought they were?’ she asked.

I glanced back out the window at Hannah.

‘Not Hannah,’ said Andy.

‘Nicole?’ I asked, not liking where this was going at all.

Joanne nodded.

Ethan started yelling – the floor show having been a bit of a disappointment.

Career criminals and Old Etonians aside, people generally like their police to take control of whatever situation they find themselves in. You don’t call the police unless things have already gone pear-shaped, and it’s nice to have a group of people you can shunt all the responsibility onto. As police, how you assert control ranges from hitting people with an extendable baton through making everyone speak slowly and clearly, to asking them to make you a cup of tea in their own kitchen.

The last being what I did that evening and soon Ethan had his dinner, Hannah was fetched in from the garden, I got a cup of tea, and we all sat around the kitchen table in a calm and productive manner.

‘Tell Peter what you told me,’ said Joanne.

Hannah screwed up her face.

‘Do I have to?’ she asked.

‘Yes, you do,’ said her mum.

‘But I want to watch TV.’ She slumped in her chair and started sliding off it by inches.

‘Hannah,’ said Andy gently. ‘Just you tell Peter here what you know and then you can be off.’

At her dad’s words, Hannah reluctantly straightened up and, after a great sigh, looked straight at me.

‘Nicky isn’t Nicky,’ she said. ‘She’s somebody else.’

The drama of the moment was somewhat undercut by Ethan, who demonstrated a new mastery of the mysteries of angular momentum by banging his hand down hard on the edge of his bowl, causing it to cartwheel off his tray and create a, no doubt interesting to him, Catherine-wheel effect with his dinner.

The resulting scolding, cleaning and fussing at least gave me a chance to try and think of something more sensible to say than, Are you sure? Of course she was sure, I could see that in the set of her face. But what did she mean? I was willing to believe that families ran a bit different in the countryside, but I doubt it went as far as Victoria accepting a strange child as her own. Presumably, the Nicole currently recuperating at the Lacey house looked and sounded like the one who had gone missing ten days before.

‘How can you tell?’ I asked Hannah while her parents were distracted.

‘Just can,’ said Hannah.

‘But she looks the same?’

‘Looks the same, yeah,’ she said. ‘But she isn’t the same.’

I asked about clothes, dress, speech, smell – which made Hannah giggle – but she couldn’t give me a single bit of verifiable evidence that Nicole Lacey was anyone other than Nicole Lacey. Not that Hannah knew who the imposter could be.

‘Just isn’t Nicky,’ she said stubbornly.

When the brothers came in from the darkening garden it seemed prudent to release Hannah to watch TV. She shot off, and I found myself sharing a table alone with Andy as Joanne put Ethan to bed.

‘Is it a good job, policing?’ he asked.

‘It’s varied,’ I said. ‘You never know what you’re going to be doing when you go on shift.’

‘I was thinking of joining the army,’ he said. ‘But then Hannah came along and I couldn’t do that to the girl.’

‘I can see that,’ I said.

‘Plus I wasn’t keen on the whole notion of killing people,’ he said.

‘He’s such a softy,’ said Joanne as she sat down next to her husband.

‘Do you believe Hannah?’ asked Andy.

‘There’s something going on, but I’m buggered if I know what it is,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ said Joanne. ‘But do you believe her?’

‘It’s not about what I believe,’ I said. ‘Let’s just say that it’s going to form part of an ongoing investigation.’

They gave me the look I’ve seen from Brightlingsea to Bermondsey, in council flats and interview rooms, from people who remember the Blitz and from kids that are below the age of criminal responsibility. Yeah, the look says, we’ll believe it when we see it.

‘The important thing is that everyone stays calm while we get to the bottom of this,’ I said and, because the universe likes a bit of irony, it was just then that the wheels came off.

‘Mummy,’ called Hannah from the front room. ‘There’s people outside.’

There’s no other sound on earth like coppers turning up mob-handed outside your door, two to three vehicles drawing up but leaving their engines running, multiple car doors creaking open in quick succession and then not being closed, the sound of heavy people in big boots piling up with muffled efficiency outside your front door.

‘Peter,’ said Joanne. ‘What’s going on?’

Through the kitchen windows I saw flickers of light in the back garden as officers with torches quickly made their way up the side passage to block the rear entrance.

‘Peter?’ asked Joanne again – rising panic in her voice.

The doorbell rang, twice, three times – insistent.

‘Stay here,’ I told Joanne and Andy and walked up the hallway to answer the door. I opened it to find DCI Windrow and DS Cole on the doorstep. Behind them waited a line of uniforms.

Windrow was surprised to see me.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘Joanne said she had information,’ I said.

Windrow nodded quickly to himself.

‘Who’s inside?’ he asked.

‘Joanne and Andy in the kitchen. Hannah is in the living room with Ryan and Mathew,’ I said. ‘Ethan is upstairs in his cot in the master bedroom.’

‘Any sign of firearms?’

What the fuck?

‘No, sir,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Windrow.

I thought very carefully about everything I’d seen that evening and made damn sure.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

‘Good boy,’ said Windrow. ‘Go out the front and stay with Dominic until I have a chance to come and see you.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said and got out of their way.

DS Cole led the mob in, calling out Joanne and Andy’s names in her best reassuring we’re-just-here-to-have-tea voice. I headed down the garden path and out of the immediate operational area as fast I could go. I did notice that none of the cars had their light bars on and that the entrance to the cul-de-sac had been closed off with tape.

Someone called my name – Dominic standing by an unmarked pool car. I joined him and when I asked him what was going on he handed me a copy of the Daily Mail.

NICOLE & HANNAH KIDNAP AN INSIDE JOB?

13 Operational Compartmentalisation

I think I must have been awake for some time already, because I distinctly heard the ping from the disposable phone, despite it being muffled under the pile of yesterday’s clothes. With a bit of careful wriggling I managed to loosen Beverley’s embrace enough to get an arm free to grab the phone and get it in front of my face. The text read, WTF have U done now?

I thought for a moment and ended up sending back. WASNT ME, because the disposable had crappy predictive text and Beverley’s spare hand had grabbed my attention at a crucial moment.

I looked at my watch and wondered why Lesley was awake at five thirty in the morning. Thankfully, Beverley let go of my dick and rolled over, dragging the sheet with her until she became a white lump in the middle of the bed. I took this as my cue to get up and, as quietly as possible, have a shower and get dressed.

‘Where are you going?’ asked the lump in the bed while I was pulling my boots on.

‘I’m off to conduct science experiments,’ I said. ‘Want to come?’

Beverley lifted her head and looked at me suspiciously.

‘What kind of science?’

‘Thaumatological,’ I said.

‘You’re taking the piss,’ she said.

‘Straight up,’ I said.

Beverley unwound from the bed, stood up and arched her back – palms pressing against the low ceiling of the cowshed. Then she shook out her dreads before looking at me, head tilted to one side.

‘Is it important?’ she asked.

I was so tempted to say no, but you can’t keep putting shit off.

‘A bit,’ I said.

‘Give me ten minutes for a shower,’ she said.

While I waited I pulled up the day’s headlines. The Daily Mail had the scoop but the media had caught the smell of blood in the water and twenty-four-hour news outlets were running the bulletin every half an hour, with a teaser on the quarter in case your attention span was that short.

According to the Mail, who seemed to be the only outlet with any actual facts, Nicole Lacey had accused Hannah’s parents of luring them out of their homes with the promise of free gifts. Then they and persons unknown were supposed to have kidnapped them, or at least Nicole, and made them walk all the way to Wales where they had to sleep in a tent until they were made to walk all the way back again. Sharon Pike speculated in a separate column that making the children walk was a cunning ploy to avoid CCTV and automatic number plate recognition systems. She wrote of the existence of a network of temporary camps frequented by new age travellers, migrant labourers, gypsies, asylum seekers and Romanians who were, allegedly, responsible for the shocking increase in rural crime, unemployment and, some said, spreading foot and mouth.

‘That’s just stupid,’ Dominic told me later. ‘Nobody believes that Romanians spread foot and mouth – everybody knows that was down to Tony Blair in an attempt to destroy the rural way of life.’

The rolling news networks loved the idea of a shadowy network of camps. It gave them hours of talking heads and a chance to stick a body from Migration Watch or UKIP up against a government spokesman or, even better, someone from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants in the hope they would both kill and eat each other live on air.

Beverley stepped out of the shower and asked whether there were going to be brambles. I said it was likely. She sniffed yesterday’s clothes, kept the jeans, produced an emergency pair of knickers from god knows where, and replaced last night’s crop top with a buff linen waistcoat she’d retrieved from the trunk. I winced as she tossed her dirty clothes back on the bed. There was a delay while I found an empty carrier bag and made her put them in there. She seemed to find this inordinately funny, but that’s because her mum hadn’t been making her iron her own shirts from the age of six onwards.

I watched her tie up her dreads into a ponytail, unconsciously biting her lower lip as she concentrated on getting the elastic tie exactly the way she wanted it. She caught me watching, her eyes narrowing as she smiled at me.

‘Why are you hanging about?’ she asked. ‘I thought we were in a hurry.’

So we climbed into the Asbo with its cargo of magic detectors in the back and headed for School Wood. Beverley asked what had happened the night before.

‘Nicole has alleged that Joanne and Andy, or rather some of their relatives, abducted her and Hannah,’ I said.

‘Fuck!’ said Beverley.

‘Not only that, but Nicole came out with her story in front of Sharon Pike, freelance journalist and newspaper columnist,’ I said. ‘With predictable results.’

Which were DCI Windrow turning up mob-handed to ‘interview’ Andy and Joanne while forensics went over their house with a set of tweezers and a UV light source. Which was a waste of time, because searching that house had happened day one of Operation Manticore – even Beverley spotted that.

‘It’s in the papers now,’ I said. ‘Windrow’s got to dot his I’s and cross his T’s etcetera etcetera.’

He’d also told me to stay out of sight.

‘It’s all got complicated enough,’ he’d said, ‘without dragging any “additional” elements into the case.’ He was too professional to say it out loud, but it was clear he expected the Marstowes to be eliminated from inquiries pretty damn fast – at which point he was hoping the media, and with them the politics, would go away. ‘I hear you’ve got something lined up with Dominic tomorrow,’ he’d said. ‘Good. You two can keep each other out of trouble.’

I thought I heard, as if from somewhere far away, Lesley giving a hollow laugh. But I’m pretty sure it was my imagination.

‘Are you okay coming back up here?’ I asked as the Asbo climbed the hill to the top of the ridge. ‘You’re not going to be stepping on anyone’s territorial imperative, are you?’

‘You worry about your job,’ said Beverley. ‘I’ll worry about mine.’

Dominic was waiting for us at the top of the lane. He held the gate open so I could drive in and park by the skeleton of an ancient barn preserved by the National Trust. Stan was waiting with him, both of them sweating even in the shade of the western hemlocks – I think it must have been even hotter than that second day when Dominic had brought me up here to see about his ‘mate’s’ stash.

Stan was wearing the same grubby boiler suit I’d seen her in when we first met, still with the arms tied around her waist. But, in deference to the heat, she was wearing a 1950s blue and white striped bikini top that would have suited a saucy seaside postcard. Her skin was the colour of skimmed milk and I was worried she was going to burn.

Stan was with us because she had a quad bike and trailer which promised to take the slog out of transporting the detectors. The plan was that we would split up, me and Beverley going downhill to Pokehouse Wood while Dominic and Stan deployed the detectors further along the ridge, on the logging track we’d met Princess Luna on, and on Croft Ambrey and the footpaths that converged on it.

‘That’s a big area,’ he said as we piled the detectors into the trailer. ‘What’s the range of these things?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s not exactly an exact science. Put them at crossroads and places that look like,’ I hate making stuff up as I go along, ‘gateways,’ I said. ‘Transitional points between one place and another.’

‘Boundary points,’ said Stan. ‘Got you.’

Dominic had brought two rolls of blue and white police tape to wrap around the detectors – the better to deter tampering.

‘You star,’ I said, after he’d explained. ‘Do you think it will work?’

‘With the walkers and tourists,’ he said. ‘But the local buggers will have it away with anything.’ He glared at Stan, who gave him a bland look.

We divided up the detectors, the bulk going in the trailer, and me and Beverly watched Stan rattle off on the quad with Dominic riding pillion behind her.

‘I notice we have to carry ours,’ said Beverley. We each had a courier bag for our share of the detectors. With the strap across our shoulders the weight was even but they banged against our hips when we walked.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But it’s downhill, isn’t it?’

This time, instead of blowing the shit out of various fences, we followed the official right of way, making sure to stay on the path, close gates behind us and prevent our hypothetical dog from chasing the livestock.

We crossed over into a meadow where the long grass was overrun with clusters of yellow flowers.

‘Buttercup,’ said Beverley. ‘It’s poisonous, so cows and sheep won’t graze here – they must be keeping this field for hay.’

Further on we reached the wire fence that marked the edge of the woods and the drop down to Pokehouse Wood and the River Lugg. We found the stile that I’d last seen from the other side when I’d spotted the blood-stained strip of cloth the week before. There was still police tape marking the forensic search around where the cloth had hung on the barbed-wire fence.

Beverley clonked her bag pointedly at my feet and so I took the first detector from hers. Then it was a simple matter to wire it to the base of one of the stile’s posts and wrap some police tape around it a few times. I unshipped my tablet and checked that the detector had some bars and, satisfied it could get a signal out, I noted its position using the GPS co-ordinates app on my good phone.

‘Done,’ I said.

‘You just brought me along to help carry these,’ said Beverley and shook her bag at me.

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I was hoping you’d tell me about the landscape – you being a proper expert and everything.’

Beverley looked around. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Stuff.’

‘Stuff,’ said Beverley. And then she put her arm around my neck and kissed me. It went on for a while too – there was some tongue in there and everything. Things might possibly have got a bit impromptu, if not alfresco, except she let go of me and laughed.

‘What we’re standing on is a limestone ridge,’ she said. ‘Silurian limestone, as a point of fact. Very permeable, the rain goes right through it and down to the river valley where it belongs, leaving up here nice and well drained – hence the buttercups and the harebell along the hedges.’ She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side. ‘Helpful?’

‘Interesting,’ I said.

We followed the path down the heavily wooded slope, past trees that Beverley identified as yew, elder and some oak. I set up another detector where the footpath reached the cleared area which marked the start of the Pokehouse Wood. While I did that, Beverley wandered out into the stands of foxglove that stood between the newly planted saplings. When I’d finished inputting the location I turned to find her gone.

I called her name and she rose out of the nodding purple flowers, the hot sunlight making amber highlights on the strong curve of her upper arms and her neck. I felt a mad rush of desire, not just sex but something wilder and stronger and almost like worship. I wanted to carve statues of her and paint her image on the walls of my cave, where the firelight would make them flicker and jump. I wanted to wrap myself in an animal skin and dance around the campfire wearing a necklace of bear teeth. Had she just asked, I’d gladly have gone mammoth hunting in her honour – although I’d only do that armed with a suitably high-powered rifle. There are limits, you know.

There was definitely power in that place, wild and weird and fae.

‘Did you feel that?’ I asked Beverley.

‘Feel what?’ she asked.

I took a deep breath. It’s observable but not reliably observable. It can have a quantifiable effects, but resists any attempt to apply mathematical principles to it – no wonder Newton kept magic under wraps. It must have driven him mental.

Or maybe not – the guy had spent almost as much time on calculating the mystical dimensions of the Temple of Solomon as he had developing the theory of gravity. Maybe Newton liked his life compartmentalised, too.

Hugh Oswald had claimed that Nightingale’s old friend David Mellenby had found a way to close the gap between Newtonian magic and quantum theory. What might have happened if that had been true, what kind of future had died during that terrible rout from Ettersberg?

‘You want to know something strange?’ asked Beverley.

‘I don’t think mammoth goes well with palm oil,’ I said.

She hesitated, and then took that as a ‘yes’.

‘These flowers are weird,’ she said, looking at the foxglove.

‘They’re poisonous, you know,’ I said.

‘They also like an acidic soil,’ said Beverley. ‘Which this shouldn’t be – not when it’s built up on limestone like this.’

‘Because calcium carbonate is alkaline?’ I asked.

‘Exactly,’ said Beverley. ‘Judging by the trees on the slope, it’s pretty alkaline until we get to this cleared area.’

‘Can you get local patches of acidity?’

‘You can get local patches of anything,’ said Beverley. ‘Heavy rainfall can leach out the calcium and the potassium, but,’ she gestured at the slope with its white support tubes poking out amongst a sea of purple foxglove, ‘I don’t think so. And this is proper land management we’re looking at here, so I can’t see the National Trust smothering the land in fertiliser. And even if they did, the run off would have gone into the Lugg and I would have noticed it.’

I put talking to the land management team at Croft Castle on my list of things to do.

‘And everything goes well with palm oil,’ said Beverley. ‘Providing you use enough palm oil.’

I secured another detector at the place where the footpath crossed the logging track. Then we walked down the track to where I judged we’d found the two girls and placed a detector there. The bulk of the detectors were laid out at various strategic points around the wood – anywhere that looked like it was, or might have been, a path at some point in the past. I had planned to walk as far as the Roman Road and place at least four detectors at intervals along that, but looking out across the field where we found the dead sheep I realised I was down to just the spares I wanted to keep against contingencies. I’d have to get Stan and Dominic to swing down and place the ones on the road. So we walked back up through the wood to where we’d left the Asbo.

Strangely, it was while crossing the buttercup meadow that I remembered the way foxglove was used to make a tea to drive away babies that were suspected of being changelings – possibly a form of sanctioned infanticide.

Changelings, I thought, and remembered Hannah’s absolute certainty that the returned Nicole was not the girl she grew up with.

Changelings – the babies that fairies left with human parents when they nicked a human child. In these enlightened times we didn’t have to rely on poisoned tea to determine the ancestry of a child. Although it has to be said that while the science was relatively straightforward, it was the legal issues that were going to be complicated.

‘A changeling?’ said Windrow, and I could I tell from his tone of voice that I’d used the wrong term.

‘A substitution of one child for another,’ I said. ‘Could be classified as an abduction.’

Windrow’s mouth worked, and I suspected he was wondering whether it was medically advisable for him to have another piece of nicotine gum.

You may have chosen the wrong moment to quit smoking, I thought, but I didn’t say, because you don’t – not to chief inspectors.

‘I’m assuming,’ he said at last, ‘that you have a line of inquiry you’d like to follow.’

‘We take DNA samples from both girls and their parents and then we test to see if they are who we think they are,’ I said.

‘And what do we tell them we’re doing it for?’

‘For elimination purposes,’ I said.

‘I know the Met has a reputation for being a bit free and easy with the facts,’ said Windrow. ‘But you do realise that we’re talking about the victims and the victims’ families here, and that we’re operating with the full sodding media pack camped outside our door. They may not know what the story is, but they can smell there’s a story. Not to mention that Sharon bloody Pike has an inside line to the Lacey family. Do you really think that, given all this, it would be a good idea to obtain DNA samples under false pretences?’

‘Sir . . .’ I said as neutrally as possible in the time honoured tradition of interrupting your senior officer when he’s being rhetorical.

‘If she is a . . . “substitute”,’ said Windrow, ‘what’s the worst case scenario?’

‘If she’s been swapped, then Nicole Lacey is still being held by whoever made the change,’ I said. ‘In which case, this is still a live kidnapping inquiry.’

And if there’s a case review and it turns up that we didn’t do our due diligence, then it wasn’t going to be me answering the tricky questions, was it?

Windrow nodded.

‘I want you to get the necessary authorisation from your governor and run this as an official Falcon line of inquiry,’ he said. That covered him from any case review, and it also gave him plausible deniability should it blow up in the press. ‘I also want you to be the one to approach the families and get the samples.’

I said I was fully prepared to do that.

‘And don’t discuss this with anyone but me and your boss – understood?’

I understood. He didn’t want any leaks to the press – or at least, in the event of there being a leak, he wanted to make sure it wasn’t traced back to the MIU or, bonus, the West Mercia Police. Mind you, this sort of compartmentalisation suited Nightingale down to the ground – someone had once told him in 1939 that loose lips sink ships and he obviously hadn’t seen any reason to change just because the war was over.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said and rushed off to obey.

Nightingale has his own attitude to the modern world. If he deems something necessary or useful – modern police communications, for example – he is perfectly willing to learn how to use it. This he does with frightening speed and efficiency, although anyone who’s spent a couple of months mastering a forma will find even the deeper mysteries of the Airwave handset a piece of piss. Still, I wasn’t looking forward to explaining to him the finer points of DNA fingerprinting, not least because I’d forgotten quite a lot of it myself. I was just about to start looking things up on the internet when I realised that it didn’t have to be me that explained it to Nightingale – I just needed to convince Walid, and then let him do all the heavy lifting.

‘Changeling, eh,’ said Dr Walid.

‘A possible substitution,’ I said. I was out on the canteen terrace, which was in full sunlight and no breeze at all, but got the best phone bars in the nick.

‘But not as a child?’

‘As an eleven-year-old,’ I said.

‘That would be a rare thing indeed,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk to Thomas. Once he says yes, I’ll email you instructions as to how I want you to handle the samples.’

Once he says yes, I thought. Walid really wants that changeling DNA.

I heard a mechanical organ playing in the distance and looking over, across the railway tracks and the bypass, I could just see a swirl of movement amongst the trees. I realised it was a Sunday and the Steam Fair was open for business – not just a staging post after all. Very faintly, over the mechanical organ, the traffic noise from the bypass and the thrum of the generators, I could hear the sound of excited children.

How many of those kids would have been kept indoors until now?

Once I was done with Dr Walid it was time to check in with Inspector Pollock, who seemed to think it was time I took the initiative. I pulled out the disposable phone and texted, Talk to me!

‘She’s not going to fall for this, you know,’ I’d told Pollock.

‘You never know,’ he’d said. ‘And it costs us nothing.’

I really hoped so.

While I was waiting to see which train would wreck first, I drove into Leominster proper and put in an order for another twenty detectors on the basis that I could always take them back to the Folly if I didn’t use them. Call Me Al was delighted. I was probably doubling his turnover that month. I thanked him for pointing out the UKUFOindex site and he asked whether I wanted to meet up with him and his mates at the pub later. I said I’d see if I was free.

I found a café off the main square which was decorated like a tea shop and served as fine a medley of greasy comestibles as any transport café in the country. Although they did share the regional obsession with providing a lineage for not just your pig but your eggs and potatoes as well. Criminally, I couldn’t tell you what it tasted like on account of the fact that I was practically drumming the table by that point. I was just about to distract myself by calling Beverley when Nightingale called and gave me the go-ahead to collect samples.

‘I know circumstances are fraught,’ said Nightingale. ‘But do try to be discreet.’

I checked my tablet and found I had an email with Walid’s instructions on how he wanted the samples collected, labelled and transported. I don’t need to tell you how important getting a DNA sample from a changeling might be, he wrote. We’d discussed setting up a database of ‘interesting’ DNA samples, but apparently there were legal issues. Patient confidentiality and human rights and all that.

Dominic’s mum had a fully equipped office.

‘From when she thought she was going to run this place as a B&B,’ said Dominic, as he helped me print off the consent forms I was required to get the parties to sign. ‘Do you want me to help?’

‘Your governor doesn’t want you involved,’ I said. ‘Besides, you must have actions piling up back at the nick.’

‘They’ve got me reviewing statements during the initial investigation,’ he said. ‘Occasionally I punch myself in the face to keep awake.’

‘If anything exciting happens, I’ll let you know,’ I said.

To avoid just that, I started with the Marstowes. And, to avoid the posse of photographers at the end of their cu-de-sac, I cut through the adjacent woods, hopped over their back fence and knocked on their kitchen door. Andy answered. He gave me a puzzled look as if trying to work out who the hell I was.

‘You’d better come in,’ he said.

He sat me down in the kitchen and offered me a beer which I declined in favour of a cup of tea. Despite the open window the kitchen was stuffy and there was the starchy overheated smell of baby food. Andy said that Ethan was poorly and that Joanne was upstairs dosing him with Calpol and would be down in a minute.

I asked him for samples and showed him the forms. He asked why and I decided to tell him the truth.

‘If Nicole is not really Nicole, then we should be able to tell by comparing her DNA to her parents,’ I said.

‘I get that,’ he said. ‘Why do you need ours?’

‘In case Hannah was the one that was swapped,’ I said. ‘This saves us having to make two trips to the lab.’

I watched his face as he parsed that and then he chuckled grimly.

‘Belt and braces,’ he said and signed the forms.

I took the swab using the collection kit that I’d borrowed from Dominic who, I realised, had left the Boy Scout scale behind and was now verging on Batman levels of crazy preparedness.

When Joanne came down, Andy persuaded her to sign and swab and then she persuaded Hannah – who wouldn’t stop giggling. Then I mounted a detector at the front and back doors, or rather I watched as Andy neatly screwed them into position himself.

‘Just a precaution,’ I said.

‘I don’t like the idea of being watched,’ said Joanne.

‘This doesn’t detect you,’ I said. ‘It’s not a motion sensor.’

‘What does it do?’ asked Andy.

‘Hopefully,’ I said, ‘if certain conditions are met, it will stop working.’

I slipped out over the back fence and made my way down the backs of the village gardens to the Old Vicarage and the Laceys. On the basis that what the eyes don’t see the mouth can’t complain about, I planted a detector in their huge back garden before banging on their back door.

They met me in what estate agents call a reception room, what I would have called a living room and no doubt Nightingale called a parlour – unless it was a drawing room. In a country home this is not a sign of favour.

They didn’t offer me tea.

Derek made a big production of checking the consent forms while Victoria sat beside him on the sofa with her lips compressed down to a line and her hands jammed between her knees.

‘I really don’t see why this is necessary,’ he said.

‘A big case like this,’ I said, ‘even forensic evidence can get challenged. You know, as to collection and that sort of thing. Better to have two sets of samples – that’s why they’ve got me collecting it because I’m not from West Mercia Police and I’m going to send my samples to a lab in London. Separate force, separate samples, separate lab, separate chain of custody.’

Derek was nodding his understanding but Victoria was just staring at me, not angry or hostile, just impatient with one more aggravation she didn’t need right now – thank you very much. Still, like the Marstowes, they signed the consents and opened their mouths for the cheek swab.

Victoria insisted on accompanying me when I took the sample from Nicole. I didn’t tell her that I was pretty much legally required to have an adult present – it’s easier to manage people if they maintain a sense of agency. She led me to the den where Nicole sat amongst a pile of discarded sweet wrappers and empty 600ml plastic Pepsi bottles. She had one in her hand when I walked in and was banging it idly against the floor – fascinated by the boing noise it made when it hit. The flat screen TV was showing Hotel Transylvania with the mute on – I judged it had got about halfway – and one of the Wii controllers nestled in an empty box of Milk Tray chocolates.

‘Nicky, love,’ said Victoria. ‘There’s someone here to see you.’

Nicole stopped banging the Pepsi bottle and turned to look at us.

I’d made a point to study pictures of Nicole Lacey taken just prior to her disappearance. In them she’d looked pretty but slightly odd, the combination of the straight blonde hair and the dark brown eyes meant that even with her photograph face on she stared out of the pictures with a peculiar intensity. She looked exactly the same in the flesh and if the eyes were different or changed then I couldn’t see it.

For a moment I was sure that my changeling theory had been totally wrong, but then Nicole smiled at me. It was a wonderful it’s my birthday and I’ve got a pony smile. As sincere as a cash donation and equally as suspect.

‘Who are you?’ she asked, springing to her feet.

‘My name is Peter Grant,’ I said.

‘Peter wants to take a—’ started Victoria, but Nicole didn’t seem to hear.

‘Mummy,’ she said. ‘There’s no more chocolate. Can I have some more chocolate?’

I felt the glamour underneath, and it was strangely harsh and commanding. A play-princess type of glamour, pink and sparkly and hard as plastic. Still, it had its effect. Victoria bobbed her head.

‘Of course, Princess,’ she said. ‘Anything for you.’

The little girl kept her eyes on Victoria’s back until she was safely out of the room, before turning her smile on me again.

‘You’ve got a funny face,’ she said.

‘I’m here to take a sample,’ I said, mainly just to buy time while I tried to work out what I was dealing with.

Was she a changeling? Nicole and Hannah had only been missing seven days. How would they, whoever they were, produce a duplicate in that time? Mind you, there was a spell, dissimulo, that could warp flesh and bone to fit a certain image. Could a substitute have been sculptured to look like Nicole? That would be very bad – when dissimulo let go the warped tissue fell apart. It was how Lesley had lost her face. I felt a twist of fear in my stomach that must have shown on my face because the little girl, who may or may not have been Nicole, frowned at me.

And the frown was like a slap in the face – or would have been, had I not built up a resistance to this sort of thing. Still, the girl didn’t have to know that. I made a point of looking stricken.

‘Do you like chocolate?’ she said. ‘I like chocolate – I don’t know why anybody eats anything else.’

‘Chocolate’s nice,’ I said. ‘So your name is Nicky, is it?’

There was a smear of chocolate in the corner of her mouth and a sticky sweet wrapper caught in the hair behind her ear.

‘I’m Nicole,’ she said primly. ‘But you can call me Princess.’

‘Well, Princess,’ I said, and pulled up out my sample kit and showed her the cotton bud. ‘I need to swab the inside of your cheek.’

‘What if I don’t want you to?’ she asked.

‘That wouldn’t be very nice,’ I said. ‘A proper princess would want to be helpful.’

She gave that comment the consideration it deserved.

‘I think no,’ she said, and I got the full changeling Princess Barbie effect complete with Ken’s house pool and the train-to-trot homicidal unicorn collectible set with realistic neighing. ‘But I don’t mind if you think that you did.’

You’re so busted, I thought.

I was just dithering about what to do next when I was saved by the return of Victoria with another woman in tow.

I recognised her at once.

‘Aunty Sharon’s here to see you again,’ said Victoria.

The journalist cooed hello to the fake Nicole before turning her beady eyes on me.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘I’m just on the way out,’ I said, and with that I beat a hasty retreat. But not before half-inching a couple of empty Pepsi bottles. The consent forms merely specified collected biological sample – it didn’t specify how I had to collect it.

14 Media Compliant

Now, I was pretty sure that the girl currently living with Victoria and Derek Lacey was a changeling, swapped out by a unicorn-employing supernatural person or persons unknown some eleven days previously. But I didn’t have any proof. Yes, she was alarmingly weird. But then so were a lot of children – including, it has to be said, some of my relatives. And, yes, she displayed an ability – the glamour – that I’d assumed resided only with practitioners, Genius Loci like Beverley Brook and the fae. On the other hand, her appearance was unchanged and her own parents fully accepted her as their child. Worse, the media in the form of Sharon Pike, weekend cottage owner and newspaper columnist, had decided that the child was truly Nicole Lacey.

After a careful risk assessment, I determined that rushing in mob-handed and seizing the child would be hazardous, if not actually illegal. In the meantime, I suspected that the girl currently known as Nicole wasn’t facing a substantial risk of anything other than hyperglycaemia.

We were going to have to wait for the DNA tests which, according to Dr Walid, would be ready by the next afternoon at the earliest. I spoke to Nightingale, who said he would ask DCI Windrow to maintain a close watch on ‘Nicole’ and make sure she didn’t wander off anywhere.

‘Any chance of you getting up here?’ I’d asked.

‘That rather depends on how Lesley responds to your last text,’ he’d said. ‘Whatever Inspector Pollock thinks, we are ultimately responsible for Constable May. And it would be risky in the extreme if he tried for an arrest without me present.’

I told Nightingale I couldn’t see Lesley falling for such an obvious trap, but he disagreed.

‘Not consciously,’ he’d said. ‘But nobody changes their allegiance so absolutely overnight – she may be looking for a way back.’

I thought of the Lesley May I knew, who was more decisive than a bag full of judges. I still thought it was unlikely, but what did I know?

Nightingale did agree that if Lesley hadn’t responded within another twenty-four hours, he’d move on site and review my risk assessment in situ – he didn’t say it exactly like that of course.

‘Give it a day,’ he’d actually said. ‘If we still haven’t heard anything, I’ll pop up in the Jag and see what’s what. Abdul assures me that all the blood tests will be completed by then.’

So, once I’d ensured the samples were couriered off, I met up with Beverley, Dominic and Victor two villages over in the back garden of the Boot Inn where I had lightly battered Scottish cod fillet, hand cut chips and garden peas.

It was late enough for the sunlight to be slanting into the garden from the west and be cut into shadows by the shades over the tables and splash on the potted trees arranged along the fence.

‘Are there no just-pub pubs around here?’ I asked.

Dominic blamed Ludlow which, having become a major foodie centre, had raised the pretentions of all the eateries within a fifty miles radius.

‘Even the places in Wales,’ he said.

‘Good for business, if you can get plugged into the supply network,’ said Victor who, bizarrely, turned out to be a vegetarian. ‘I don’t mind raising and slaughtering them,’ he’d said when I asked him about it. ‘I just draw the line at eating them.’ He had the roasted shallot tarte Tatin, roasted pepper, goat’s cheese, artichoke and roasted pepper salad.

‘That’s one too many roasteds in the menu,’ said Dominic.

I checked my mobiles at regular intervals – both of them – the disposable and my second-best Android which Call Me Al had rigged to alert me if anything tripped a detector.

Neither made a sound for the rest of the evening, until me and Beverley were back at the cowshed putting the flagrant back into in flagrante when, in accordance with the iron principles of Sod’s Law, my Android rang. Since Beverley was the only one with at least one hand free at the time, she got to the phone first, glared at it, and stopped bouncing long enough to read it.

‘It’s just three numbers – 659,’ she said, over her shoulder.

‘It’s one of the detectors,’ I said, and extricated my right hand from under her bum and held it out. Instead of handing the phone over, she lifted her hips a fraction and pivoted around to face me – a sensation that managed to be both hugely erotic and uncomfortably weird at the same time. When she finally let me have the phone, I confirmed the numbers.

‘I’ve got to check this out,’ I said.

Beverley sighed and flopped forward onto my chest.

It took me ten minutes to get out of the cowshed, and it probably would have been longer if Beverley hadn’t decided that she wanted to come with, and so obligingly dismounted without an argument.

The detector that had gone offline was the northernmost, planted on the Roman road where the lane from Yatton crossed and became a public footpath. Dominic had attached it amongst the bushes by the stile, so there was a good chance it might have just been vandalised.

In the darkness I could only make out the surrounding hills by the way they blotted out the stars, but according to the map on my tablet the shadow to the west was Pyon Wood and to the east Croft Ambrey, with a waning moon hung above like a banner. The Roman road was a straight grey strip between the black hedgerows. I parked the Asbo on the grass verge and left the hazard lights on. Beverley held the torch while I detached the detector from its mount and carried it back to the car. I cracked open the PVC case to expose the bare innards of the device.

‘That’s a mobile phone,’ said Beverley, leaning over my shoulder to look.

I explained that it was, and that the detector worked on the simple principle that a powerful enough source of magic would break the phone and cause it to stop pinging the network, which would then alert the custom program on my tablet.

‘So basically it only works once,’ she said.

I used a jeweller’s glass to scan the electronics, but I couldn’t see any visible pitting.

‘That’s the trouble with magic,’ I said. ‘It’s slippery stuff.’ I shrugged. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘You could bundle four or five phones together and automatically rotate through them,’ said Beverley, as I bagged and tagged the phone for shipping back to Dr Walid. ‘That would extend the life a bit.’

I installed one of my spare detectors by the stile and packed up.

‘But the switching mechanism can’t be a microprocessor,’ I said. ‘And I haven’t had time to test the effect of magic on transistors yet – you might have to use valves or electromechanical switches.’

‘Do you know why it happens?’ asked Beverley as we drove back to the cowshed.

I admitted that I did not have the faintest idea how magic did anything – let alone why it reduced microprocessors to sand and brains to Swiss cheese.

‘When you do magic . . .’ I said.

‘I don’t do magic,’ said Beverley quickly. ‘You get me? It’s not the same thing.’

‘When you do . . . things that other people can’t do . . .’ I said, ‘it doesn’t damage your phone.’

‘Not unless the waterproofing fails,’ she said.

‘I wonder why that is?’

‘That’s easy,’ said Beverley. ‘I am a natural phenomenon. So I do less damage than you.’

‘Have you visited Covent Garden recently?’ I asked. ‘They’ve almost finished the rebuilding.’

‘That was collateral,’ she said. ‘And entirely your fault.’

The next morning I decided to check out Pyon Wood Camp – I took Miss Natural Phenomenon along with me, so she could tell me what all the plants meant.

‘They mean,’ said Beverley when she saw them, ‘that in lowland Britain if you don’t chop the trees down you get a forest.’

Pyon Wood Camp is a scheduled monument described in the catalogue as a small multivallate Iron Age hill fort. What it looked like was a round hill covered in trees. When I looked up the meaning of the word multivallate I found it meant a hill fort with three or more rings of concentric defences. Since the easiest way to start an argument amongst archaeologists is to ask them what purpose hill forts actually served – as defended villages, refuges of last resorts, ritual centres, palaces of tribal chiefs, cattle herding stations – none of that information was particularly useful.

Neither was Beverley Brook.

‘More Silurian limestone,’ she said. ‘Topped by the usual suspects – oak and ash, some beech, a couple of birch.’

It was particularly hot that morning. Victor had complained that the recent hot weather was buggering up his harvesting schedule, but he hoped that some of the rain they’d had in Wales would shift over his way.

‘Not that I want a thunderstorm,’ he’d said. ‘But a shower or two to take the edge off would be nice.’

It was too hot to walk up the shimmering track from the Roman road, so I risked the low slung underside of the Asbo and drove uphill until we reached the spot, plus or minus twenty metres or so, where the Antiquarian map said that the trail into the monument should start. It wasn’t exactly well signposted, and if there was a stile or other public access, me and Beverley must have missed it. In the end we climbed over a fence and slogged through some dense bracken until we reached a close approximation of a path that wound around the hill.

It was close under the shade of the trees and not notably cooler. The air was heavy with a sickly sweet smell that Beverley said was probably the rhododendrons, and the scent of scorched bark and resin that I’d started to think of as overheated forest. Something hooted further up the hill.

‘Wood pigeon,’ said Beverley.

‘I’ve heard that in London,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Beverley slowly, ‘we have birds in London. Many of them of the same species.’

Amongst the trees and undergrowth, the ditches and ramparts were hard to distinguish from the steep slope of the hill. It was only when the trail rounded the north-east corner and we found the entrance that I realised the ramparts, despite obvious damage, were twice my height. We laboured up onto what I supposed must have been the central enclosure, although I couldn’t see it for the trees. And, despite the heat, we decided to follow the path to its bitter end. Drifts of foxglove started to appear amongst the bracken and bramble, growing more frequent until we stepped out into a glade awash with purple. The clearing was almost too circular to be natural, and certainly large enough that it ought to have shown up on Google Earth.

Beverley kicked at something down amongst the foxglove stems. It cracked and splintered – rotten wood.

‘Stump,’ she said. ‘Somebody cleared this area.’

‘The latest imagery on Google Earth was four years ago,’ I said. ‘It must have happened since then. Is it possible that it might be natural?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Beverley. ‘Probably not.’

We worked our way to the centre of the clearing, pushing through the stands of foxglove which seemed taller here than elsewhere, the bells of the flowers larger and more mouth-like as they shivered in the hot, still air. When we stopped I realised that the glade was very quiet. Even the wood pigeon we’d heard earlier seemed muffled and far away.

‘There’s no bees,’ said Beverley. ‘And bees love foxglove.’

Mellissa’s bees had been avoiding the south-west section of the ridge, from the edge of Bircher Common to where the river is. They weren’t coming here or to Pokehouse Wood.

‘Feel anything?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘How about you?’

I smelt green stuff, hot and dusty, and sneezed.

‘There’s no castle,’ I said. ‘Hannah was very sure about the castle.’ The child psychologist had continued her gentle interrogation of Hannah. Heroically enduring countless episodes of Jessie and more Yonder Over Yonder than was probably medically advisable, the psychologist chipped gently away at Hannah’s story, particularly the pink and blue and orange castle which she probably figured for a defence mechanism or a mental block or whatever the psychological term is. Hannah, while growing increasingly fuzzy on every other detail, had stayed firm on the castle.

I thought there had to be a castle somewhere, or at least something vaguely castle-like. But if there was, it certainly wasn’t at Pyon Wood Camp.

I had one spare detector left, so I placed it in the centre of the glade and activated it.

‘Just on the off chance,’ I said.

‘Is your work always this vague?’ asked Beverley.

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Sometimes we really don’t know what we’re doing.’

Beverley had to make what she called a ‘pastoral visit’ to the Steam Fair, so I dropped her off there before heading back towards the industrial park and the redbrick ship shape of Leominster nick. The media were thick around the public side and there was even a knot of photographers at the entrance to the police car park. I made sure I was wearing a suitably solemn face to avoid ‘Police Laugh At Kidnapped Children’ headlines from the Independent.

‘There’s going to be a press conference later,’ said Dominic when I asked him about the scrum outside. The broadsheets led with the war in Syria, but the tabloids were having way too much fun with the idea of child-stealing gypsies to let the mere lack of facts get in the way.

‘Copper pipe I’d believe,’ said Dominic. ‘Children, no.’

I asked him what the MIU had come up with, but he told me to watch the press conference like everybody else.

I settled into my assigned space in the territorial policing office and picked up the phone. I called up Croft Castle and asked to talk to whoever it was who managed the forest. They told me his name was Patrick Blackmoor and they gave me his mobile number.

‘The western hemlock was doing really badly,’ Blackmoor said when I asked why they’d clear-felled Pokehouse Wood out of schedule. ‘So we decided to fell early.’

When I asked what the problem had been, Blackmoor told me that it was a variety of factors. ‘The soil remained very poor and acidic, but not enough to explain the losses amongst the plantation,’ he said. ‘It’s a vigorous tree, your western hemlock. That’s why it gets planted.’ It took more than some abnormal soil chemistry to stunt their growth, but there had been damage to the young trees as well.

‘What kind of damage?’ I asked.

‘In the initial planting phase some of the saplings were dug out during the night. Others had bark damage,’ said Blackmoor. But he didn’t have an explanation as to what was doing it.

‘We called in your lot at one point,’ he said. ‘In case it was vandals.’ Although nobody could think of a reason why, with over 200,000 hectares of Forestry Commission woodlands in England to play with, they’d want to pick on the Pokehouse Wood. I asked whether they might have been protesting the planting of foreign conifers on an ancient woodland site.

Blackmoor found that idea hilarious.

‘This was going to be the last commercial crop,’ he said. ‘Once it was harvested we would have replanted with broadleaf – basically what we’re doing now.’

‘Maybe someone didn’t want to wait?’ I asked, which was the bit Blackmoor found most funny.

‘Forests are a long-term thing,’ he said. ‘And the people who care enough about the management of ancient woodlands to vandalise a tree think in the same time frames as us. Besides, there are plenty of ancient woodlands under threat from motorways and infrastructure projects – that’s what gets protestors excited.’

‘Then who?’ I asked, but he didn’t have the faintest idea. And the damage had continued. Once the trees began to mature they started to suffer from what looked like an unknown disease, or possibly poisoning.

‘At first we were sure it was poisoning,’ said Blackmoor. Because most of the affected trees were found to have been drilled. ‘Up to a depth of thirty centimetres – in some cases all the way through the trunk.’

I tried to remember my night out with Princess Luna, and to estimate at what height that horn would have been when deployed in skewer-the-policeman mode.

‘How high up the trunk did the drilling take place?’ I asked.

Blackmoor couldn’t say for certain without looking at his notes, but he remembered the holes being mostly chest high. ‘Five to six feet off the ground,’ he said.

I remembered that night, the glass unicorn refracting the werelight, the crunch as something invisible and sharp skewered a tree at the same height my head would have been – had I not been sensible enough to get out of the way.

‘We didn’t find any evidence of poisoning, though,’ said Blackmoor.

Some trees just mysteriously fell over. Many others showed suboptimal growth or other deformities. So they set up a hide in the woods above and trained a time-lapse camera on the area.

‘It stopped working after the second night,’ he said.

I’ll bet it did, I thought.

They’d got so desperate that they granted permission for a pair ‘of those UFO nutters’ to camp out in the woods for a fortnight. But they never spotted anything strange and they were really looking.

I asked if there were temporal patterns to the damage.

‘It happened mostly during the summer,’ said Blackmoor. ‘That’s all I can give you off the top of my head.’

‘Did you keep records?’ I asked. And they did, as it happens – vandalism being an important issue to the National Trust. Blackmoor said he’d send them to me as long as I promised, should I figure out what the cause was, to feed that information back to him.

And if it turns out to be a sacred grove, I thought, or a faerie place of power or some such mystical bollocks, would he still want to know? Probably yes. And he’d just add it to the long list of issues that makes modern heritage land management such a complex and challenging career.

Inspector Edmondson found the tree vandalism case for me, and when the records from Croft Castle arrived in the form of a great big spreadsheet I started correlating both with my UFO sightings and the timeline of Zoe Lacey’s encounter. I was still doing that when the press conference started. Me and Dominic got cold drinks and joined pretty much the rest of the nick to watch it on the internal monitor. These days, sensible police officers make sure they have an independent record of any encounter with a journalist. This meant that we got to see the whole thing – something that very few members of the public did.

For the hard-working lower ranks of the police force there is no entertainment quite as thrilling as watching your senior officer conducting a press conference. Not only is there the possibility that it might be humorously embarrassing, but also if it goes very badly it’s useful to have advance warning so one can make oneself scarce. Officers of Inspector rank and above are a power in the land, and they don’t like to be mildly contradicted let alone thwarted or shown up in public. I’m sure I wasn’t the only officer in the incident room watching the TV and coming up with a convenient list of actions which would keep me far away from Leominster nick – just in case.

It started out normally enough, with Inspector Edmondson and DCI Windrow sitting at a table elevated on a podium and doing their best gruff, matter of fact, nothing to see here, just doing our job with understated professionalism, manner. We are the police and we have brought order out of chaos – believe it, bruv!

It took them about ten minutes to run down the list of allegations, and why they were bollocks. No evidence that any member of the Marstowe family was involved in the kidnap, no evidence that any member of the local traveller community had been involved, and no evidence of an informal network of child-smuggling camps. Once Windrow had finished, a couple of journalists asked him whether he was one hundred per cent sure that the Marstowe family was not involved and that there weren’t gypsies roaming the land stealing children and illegally living off incapacity benefit – cross his heart and hope to die.

Windrow repeated himself in the manner of a man who was perfectly happy to sit there and repeat himself until everybody got bored and went home. Unaccountably, he failed to raise the working theory that the children had been abducted by faeries.

It’s just that sort of deception, I thought, that breeds distrust of the police.

Sharon Pike certainly distrusted the police, because she stood up and demanded to know what about Harry Plimpton.

‘Who Nicole identified by name as one of the men that held her,’ she said.

I looked at Dominic to see if the name meant anything to him – his face screwed up in concentration.

‘Andy’s aunt’s daughter’s son,’ he said after a moment. ‘Second cousin. You met him at the sheep roast.’

I was impressed. In my family once you got past niece or uncle it was all cousins, and even that tended to include any random former stranger who’d managed to get his feet under the table.

I heard a flurry of activity from the incident room as someone looked up the relevant nominal on HOLMES. Meanwhile, Windrow stalled by asking where and when the identification had taken place.

‘Surely that’s not the point,’ said Sharon Pike. ‘Surely the question is why the police have failed to conduct a thorough investigation.’

I saw Windrow glance down at where he must have had a tablet tucked out of sight.

‘Harry Plimpton,’ he said, ‘has been comprehensively eliminated from the inquiry. Not only did he spend most of the period in question helping as a volunteer with the search, but he can also account for his whereabouts for the rest of the time.’

I looked at Dominic, who nodded at the incident room – the MIU had been busy while some of us were out gallivanting in the woods.

‘Has he been put in a line-up?’ asked Sharon Pike. ‘Has any effort been taken at all to try and identify the men that kidnapped Nicole?’

‘Because of the gravity of the offences this inquiry has been meticulous,’ said Windrow. He was too professional to let any of his irritation show. ‘We have followed every line of inquiry as they came to our attention.’

‘Then why haven’t you made an arrest?’ asked Sharon Pike.

The police had a two-camera set-up in the press room and, after a while switching randomly backwards and forwards, whoever was running the mixing board decided that Sharon Pike was more interesting than Windrow and settled on her.

I noticed that the journalists either side of her seemed alarmed by her behaviour, but I couldn’t tell whether it was her manner or her questions.

‘And whom should we have arrested?’ asked Windrow.

Sharon Pike blinked theatrically, as if the question astonished her.

‘Well, Andrew and Joanne Marstowe would do for a start,’ she said. ‘Since it was their plan from the beginning.’

Windrow fell back on police speak and reiterated that there were no plans to arrest Andrew and Joanne Marstowe, nor were they helping the police with their inquiries or considered persons of interest.

‘Of course not,’ said Sharon Pike. ‘Because the whole hideous plot was facilitated by an officer of the West Mercia Police!’ She almost shouted this. The journalists around her were beginning to edge away as if wary of sharing the same frame.

‘Sharon,’ said Windrow. ‘If you have any evidence—’

‘Detective Constable Dominic Croft,’ she said.

‘Well, that explains a great deal,’ I said. ‘You always were suspiciously one step ahead of the rest of us.’

‘That’s not funny,’ said Dominic, his face pale.

He was right to be worried. A public accusation like that was going to hang around his neck.

Windrow’s mouth literally dropped open in shock, but fortunately Inspector Edmondson stepped in.

‘That’s a very serious allegation,’ he said. ‘If you have any proof . . .’

‘Of course I have proof,’ said Sharon Pike and, after rummaging in her bag, held up what looked like an oblong of black plastic and marched towards the podium shouting that ‘here was her proof’ before slapping it down in front of Windrow.

‘This is something you can’t sweep under the carpet,’ said Sharon Pike. and slammed her hand down on what looked to me like – and on further forensic analysis proved to be – the plastic tray from inside a box of Milk Tray chocolates.

Windrow looked down at the plastic tray, back up at Sharon Pike, and then put his hand over the microphone in front of him and said something.

‘Of course I’m all right,’ said Sharon, loudly enough to be picked up by an adjacent microphone. ‘What are you afraid of? Look at it!’

Windrow spoke again, too low to be picked up.

Sharon Pike glared at him and then looked down at the sad crumpled piece of plastic in front of her. Her head snapped back up and she opened her mouth, but didn’t speak. The camera angle was all wrong to see her expression clearly, but you could read the confusion in the set of her shoulders as she looked back down at her ‘evidence’.

Then, without a word, she turned and walked away. The police camera swung madly to keep her in frame as she marched up the central aisle between the ranks of silent journalists and camera operators.

I had one of those ‘somebody do something’ moments when you suddenly have the realisation that the person supposed to be doing something is you. I scrambled up from my desk and ran down the front staircase without a care for health and safety or the two uniforms coming up towards me. They sensibly flattened themselves against the railing and I shouted a thank you as I jumped past.

I missed her in the car park, so I ran around to the police zone and hopped into the Asbo. By the time I was on the main road I’d already done a PNC check to find out what she was driving – a BMW X5 Diesel, which seemed like quite a serious car for someone who lived alone in a small village. Perhaps she had a lot of relatives?

I decided that her most likely destination would be her house in Rushpool, second most likely would be her main house in London. Beyond that, it was anyone’s guess. I managed to get Dominic on the Airwave and asked him to ask, politely, if they could keep an eye out for the BMW and Sharon Pike.

‘She’s going to be acting a bit weird,’ I said. ‘So she may have to be sectioned.’

I heard Dominic spluttering. Sectioning a prominent journalist would be, as they say, problematic. But both Bartholomew and Kingsley had left detailed case notes about people who had been put under the influence, seducere as Bartholomew called it, and had become maddened to the point where they rent their garments and would be like to injure themselves if not restrained.

I considered going blues and twos, but I didn’t really want to exceed my authority – and I wasn’t sure it would be much help if I ran into the back of a trailer full of hay. I had a worst case scenario growing at the back of my mind, so I went straight to the half-timbered pile that was the Laceys’ home. And, sure enough, outside was parked a white BMW X5 Diesel with the right index. I drew up alongside and found Sharon Pike banging on the PVC door and screaming at the top of her lungs.

Before I could reach her, the door opened and Sharon Pike recoiled violently as a small pale figure stepped out to face her. Whatever she’d been planning to say choked off. And in the sudden quiet I heard the little girl say:

‘Why’re you hitting yourself?’

Sharon Pike smacked herself and the girl giggled and told her to do it again.

I reached them just in time to see Sharon Pike punch her own face hard enough to draw blood.

Some policing situations are the same wherever or whatever you’re dealing with. I put myself between Sharon Pike and the girl and spoke in my command voice.

‘Stop that!’

Probably-not-Nicole sneered at me.

‘I don’t like you. Go away.’

‘Stop it!’

‘Go away,’ she yelled.

‘Look me in the eye,’ I said, and waited until she reluctantly lifted her head to do so. ‘That doesn’t work on me.’

Not-Nicole squinted at me.

‘Why not?’ she asked.

‘Because I’m police and it’s my job to beat small children if they misbehave.’

‘You won’t,’ she said.

‘I can and I will if you don’t behave yourself,’ I said.

‘You wouldn’t!’

You think that because you are small I will not beat you. But I am your mother and I know what is best for you. And if I have to beat you, then that is what I will have to do – it’s true, I thought. As you grow up you turn into your parents.

‘Go inside and behave,’ I said. ‘We will talk about this later.’

She gave me a sullen look before turning and walking back into the house. She wanted to slam the door but she didn’t dare.

Sharon Pike was standing with the dazed look of someone who’s been hit by a bus. I decided to take her to the parish hall, which would be suitably neutral ground. As I took her by the arm, she gave me one of those vaguely thankful looks that you get from members of the public when they realise you’re taking them away from whatever mess they’ve got themselves into.

The place had been cleared out since the celebratory sheep roast, but there were still a couple of Evians in the fridge behind the serving counter. Sharon Pike took hers gratefully and once I had her sat down on a folding chair she took a dainty sip. I unfolded a second chair and sat down to face her, close enough to be intimate but far enough away to be non-threatening.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘You’ve been put under a form of suggestion,’ I said. ‘A bit like hypnotism.’

Sharon took another sip of water and then shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not possible.’

‘Normally, no,’ I said. ‘This is a special case.’

‘By whom? Who did it to me?’

‘I can’t say,’ I said.

‘Can’t or won’t?’ she asked, the confusion wearing off. I didn’t think I had to worry about her rending her clothes, but my window for getting useful information was shrinking as she segued from victim to journalist.

‘It’s part of an ongoing case,’ I said. ‘But you just stood up and accused the West Mercia Police of conspiring to cover up the kidnap of two children and you did it in front of the whole press corp.’

Sharon held up a hand to make me stop. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ she said. ‘I was there. Oh god – it’s all on tape.’

‘Ms Pike,’ I said. ‘This is important. Can you remember where the ideas come from?’

‘You’re PC Peter Grant,’ she said. ‘I looked into you, you work for the Special Assessment Unit – the Met’s very own X-Files. I heard you investigate ghosts and aliens and psychics . . .’ She trailed off. ‘Psychics,’ she pinched her forehead. ‘Jesus Christ.’ She looked at me, eyes narrowed.

‘Psychics?’ she asked.

‘It’s an ongoing investigation,’ I said.

‘You know I’d love to say that little monster made me do it. But I think she just pushed me in the right direction, and I went off and did it to myself.’ She sighed. ‘It would have been such a good story, too – pretty little girl, chav family, police incompetence – you’ve got to admit it had everything.’

‘You’re sure it was the girl?’ I said. ‘Not Victoria or Derek?’

‘Oh it was little Nicky all right,’ said Sharon. ‘Victoria, I’m sure you may have noticed, has no backbone. And Derek is no better than he should be.’

‘Derek?’ I asked, wondering what that meant.

‘Anything with a pulse,’ she said. ‘Even me once or twice.’ She sighed again and drank more of the water. The good thing about the glamour is that it’s all in the mind – she was going to be okay. ‘Best lay I ever had.’

‘All the names and details you listed in the press conference—’

‘You’re determined to keep bringing that up,’ said Sharon.

‘Did you provide the details?’ I asked. ‘Or did Nicole?’ I thought it better not to raise the possibility that the girl was a changeling. Not when Sharon was so obligingly thinking herself down a cul-de-sac.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I provided all the details – so much for professionalism.’ She straightened her shoulders. ‘Is Nicole psychic?’

‘We don’t use that term,’ I said.

‘Really? What term do you use?’

‘We just refer to them as people who are unusually good at getting other people to do what they want,’ I said. ‘It’s disconcerting, but luckily it’s a bit on the rare side.’ As was my ability to talk bollocks, I thought.

‘And Nicole is one of these unusual people?’

‘Inquiries are ongoing,’ I said.

Except they weren’t. Because I was stuck waiting for the DNA tests to come back.

First step was to get some bodies out in the field behind the Old Rectory to ensure fake Nicole didn’t do a runner out the back. Fortunately, I was in Windrow’s good books for so promptly dealing with Sharon Pike.

‘Who is where?’ he asked when I called him up.

‘In her cottage having a lie down,’ I said.

‘Any sign of the media?’ he asked.

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘What was the reaction after Ms Pike left?’

‘Confused,’ he said. ‘I think they may just pretend it didn’t happen.’

‘Seriously?’

‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ he said.

So I got some bodies in the fields and on the main lane with instructions to watch out for any comings and goings, but not to intervene unless asked to. I was just trying to figure out what to do next when Dr Walid called.

‘In the first instance,’ he said, ‘Hannah and Nicole are half-sisters, they both share Derek Lacey as their father.’

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Sharon Pike wasn’t kidding about Derek.’ And then the implications hit me. ‘Wait. If you could tell that, then the sample I gave you must have come from Nicole Lacey.’

‘Correct,’ said Dr Walid. ‘The samples taken from the drink bottles were definitely of the child of Derek and Victoria Lacey – assuming you didn’t get the samples mixed up.’

I didn’t bother asking him if he was sure. When Dr Walid gives a DNA result you can take it into court – literally.

He obviously correctly interpreted my silence as proof that I was floundering, because he went on to tell me that he’d contacted the labs which had processed the DNA samples for the investigation.

‘The bottle samples match the blood sample from the strip of cloth you found, but not the baseline samples that were taken from the Lacey house at the start of the investigation,’ said Walid. ‘Hair follicles, I believe they were. Although they have a parent in common.’

‘Derek Lacey?’

‘Very good,’ said Dr Walid.

Boy, I thought, he really does get about.

Eleven years ago Zoe Lacey ran away with her baby half-sister, met the fae and came back with a different half-sister. And the Laceys had spent eleven years raising a changeling, until a week ago. When the fae, for whatever reason, had swapped them back.

What was I going to tell DCI Windrow? I’d only just managed to sell him on the idea of a changeling. And what was I going to tell Victoria Lacey – actually, genetically, the monster in your den is your biological daughter.

And why were they physically identical?

‘What do you plan to do next?’ asked Dr Walid.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to think of something.’

15 Window of Opportunity

If you ask any copper why they stick at a job which exposes them to abuse from everyone from petty criminals all the way down to government ministers, they’ll say it’s the variety. It’s the not knowing when you go on shift what the rest of the day is going to be like. Accordingly, your training and experience emphasise a loose set of principles which can be applied to a wide variety of situations.

They are: make sure it doesn’t spread, make sure no one’s dead, make sure no one’s going to be dead soon – and make sure you call for back-up before you need it.

I had the Lacey place surrounded, now the next step was to ensure Victoria and Derek weren’t dead or injured. So I went back in, but not before I got Dominic to round up some beefy uniforms and wait outside with instructions to come get me if I wasn’t out within ten minutes.

I found Derek and Victoria in the kitchen, apparently unharmed except for the valiant attempt both were making to incur alcohol poisoning. They sat facing each other at either end of the vast oak kitchen table. Derek had two half bottles of Bell’s in front of him – one empty, the other mostly gone – while Victoria had two bottles of red wine and a dodgy-looking bottle of Bailey’s that I suspected dated back several Christmases.

‘How are you two doing?’ I asked.

‘Fine,’ said Victoria flatly. ‘Thank you for asking.’

Derek rolled his eyes and gave me a look-at-what-us-boys-have-to-put-up-with look which I ignored.

‘Where’s Nicole?’ I said, keeping my voice as bright and businesslike as I could.

‘In the den,’ said Victoria.

Before I went to look, I paused at the entrance to the kitchen and asked if either of them would like to leave the house.

‘Now would be a good time to do that,’ I said.

Victoria kept her back to me.

‘Why would we want to leave?’ she said. ‘Everything we want is here.’

They know something, I thought, as I cautiously made my way to the den. But what is it they know? It was hard to imagine that Derek had a tryst with the fae and hadn’t noticed anything odd – or maybe the mother of his child had just looked like a tourist or, possibly, a particularly attractive sheep. I really wanted to ask, but I doubted he was going to tell me right that instant. I mentally stuck it on the follow-up to-do list.

I heard her before I reached the door, a very pig-like snoring, and indeed I found her lying on her back asleep surrounded by sweet wrappers. She looked exactly like every annoying eleven-year-old I’d ever been forced to babysit for.

Again I considered just scooping her up there and then and making a run for it. But a run for it where? And to what purpose? I didn’t think that Herefordshire Social Services would be best pleased about me dumping a poorly socialised pre-teen with mind control powers on them. And, assuming we recovered the real fake Nicole, the one that had actually grown up in Rushpool, we’d end up one child surplus to requirements. In which case, we’d need to find someone to take care of her.

I let sleeping changelings lie and retreated out of the house before Dominic and the brute squad came charging in.

Dominic was outside leaning against the tailgate of the Nissan, which he’d obviously backed into the Lacey’s drive to serve as a formidable road block. The brute squad, in actuality a couple of PSCOs from the safer neighbourhood team, sloped off as soon as they saw I was okay.

It was getting into late afternoon, but there was no let-up in the heat and no sign of a breeze. I joined Dominic at the tailgate, which at least was in the shade of the trees that screened the rectory from the lane. He handed me an Evian that was, if not cold, noticeably cooler than I was. I turned my phone back on and checked for messages. Then I turned the disposable back on and checked that – the same.

I told Dominic I didn’t think anyone was going to go anywhere – at least not until it was dark.

‘You seem very sure something’s going to kick off tonight,’ he said. Which translated as You know something and you’d better tell me what it is.

‘It’s the phases of the moon,’ I said. ‘Hannah and Nicole went missing a fortnight ago when the moon was in the first quarter.’

‘That’s half and half, right?’

‘And when I trawled through all the databases it was clear that all the confirmed events, and most of the suspect events, happened between the first and third quarter. In other words the moon has to be at least half full for any of this shit to happen. And tonight . . .?’

‘Is the last night?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe?’

‘Why would the moon have any effect on any of this?’ I said. ‘What possible mechanism is in place?’

‘Well . . .’ started Dominic.

‘You’re going to ask about the tides, aren’t you?’

‘Um, no,’ he said. ‘I was going to say that the mechanism is irrelevant at the moment.’

‘Tonight’s the night,’ I said.

‘So what about the tides, then?’ asked Dominic.

‘Gravity,’ I said. ‘That’s the mechanism with tides.’

‘All living things have water in them,’ said Dominic.

‘Gravity affects the oceans because they slosh about,’ I said. ‘Not because they’re made of water.’

‘That’s me told, then,’ he said.

‘Damn right,’ I said.

‘So the moon affects magic, why?’

‘I’m working on several theories,’ I said. ‘But I’m currently favouring the hypothesis that the moon has a seemingly arbitrary effect on magic because it likes to piss me off.’

‘That’s a theory with a high degree of applicability to other spheres of life,’ he said.

‘Yes it is,’ I said, and we spontaneously fist bumped.

The thing about back-up is that when you want it, you want it now, not two to three hours away in London. So, as I schlepped back to the cowshed for a shower and a change of gear, I was rehearsing what I was going to say. I was just trying to find a form of words that would imply that none of what had happened was my fault when the disposable phone rang.

Has to be a wrong number, I thought as I answered. But it wasn’t. It was Lesley.

‘Hello, Peter,’ she said.

‘Where are you?’ I asked.

‘Like I’m going to tell you,’ said Lesley, her tone the same as if we were still proceeding down Charing Cross Road with our thumbs hooked in our Metvests. I stopped walking and sat down on a low garden wall. It took me a moment to catch my breath.

‘You’ve got to come in, Lesley,’ I said. ‘This is not going to end well.’

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Listen, I called to make sure you were all right.’

‘Whether I’m all right?’ My voice actually went up an octave. It was embarrassing. ‘You’re the one who’s up to their neck in shit.’

‘Yeah, but at least I know what I’m doing,’ she said.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m not wasting the little time we’ve got talking bollocks,’ she said. ‘Are you banging Beverley yet?’

‘Why do you care?’

‘Because I want you to be happy, you pillock,’ she said. ‘Because you spend too much time worrying about shit that’s not important. And you never know . . .’ She hesitated, and this time I heard a catch in her voice. ‘You never know when it’s all going to get taken away.’

‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘You come in and I’ll let you run my love life.’

I heard something that might have been a laugh, might have been a cough.

‘Yeah, that’s tempting,’ she said.

‘You want to make me happy, Lesley?’ I said. ‘Meet me somewhere – so at least I know you’re safe.’

A real laugh for sure – a bitter one.

‘I crossed a line, Peter,’ she said. ‘I’m never going to be safe again.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘And I did it with my eyes open,’ she said. ‘You always said that people need to accept the consequences for their actions – this is me doing that.’

‘You know I was talking bollocks. And anyway, coming in would be a way of accepting the consequences.’ I said.

‘You’ve got about a year, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘Then it’s going to kick off for certain – if you keep your head down I might just be able to keep you out of it.’

‘Keep me out of what?’ I asked.

‘Time’s up,’ said Lesley. ‘Take care.’

The phone cut off.

The evening sunlight sliced across the tops of the trees, a car slowed as it passed me and then accelerated up towards the parish hall. Something tweeted insanely in a bush a couple of metres from my head.

What the hell was that supposed to be – a friendly warning? Something to assuage her guilt? Or second thoughts? Was it part of a plan, and if it was – whose plan was it? A year? Fuck, fuck, fuck. Why a year?

Too late I reached for my own phone to call Nightingale, but there already was a text from Inspector Pollock. No contact until auth. Meaning I wasn’t to contact Nightingale, or anyone related to Operation Carthorse – the operation to apprehend Lesley May. I’d like to think that Pollock was worried that I was being monitored. But it was more likely that he still hadn’t yet ruled out to his satisfaction that me and Lesley had been working together.

So, no back-up until further notice.

I got up and jogged up the lane to the cowshed. I needed a shower to calm down, a change of clothes and a plan.

Containment, then. Stop the little monster currently residing at the rectory from happening to other members of the public. Prevent any further breaches of the peace by Princess Luna and friends. Which left Nicole, our reverse changeling, stuck with the faeries until Nightingale could get up here and lend a hand.

Stuck where? Hannah’s pink and orange and blue castle.

I kept the shower cool in the hope it would kick-start my brain.

Get through the night and then ask permission to interview Hannah. Maybe do a little bit of magic to show her I was on her side. Longer term, extend the detector grid out to possible faerie sites. Restatement Zoe Lacey re: aliens and interview Derek Lacey re: his random sexual encounters with the supernatural.

I got out of the shower to find my tablet bleeping at me. The detectors at Pyon Wood Camp and at the crossroads on the Roman road had stopped broadcasting. Coincidence? Don’t make me laugh.

I had a pair of khaki combat trousers which were strictly for cleaning jobs and definitely not street wear, unstylish but reinforced at the knees and with lots of pockets. I pulled them on plus my PSU boots.

We could also drag in folklorists and vicars and start working up lists of likely castle sites, plus Professor Postmartin could dig out the County Practitioner records for Herefordshire and the surrounding counties – somebody was bound to have noticed a faerie castle.

East of the Roman Road the detector at Yatton went out.

Next, I put on my utility belt with extendable baton, pepper spray, handcuffs and then my Metvest over what I realised had to be one of Beverley’s Tshirts because it was tight on me and had STOP STARING AND GET OUT OF MY WAY written across the chest. As I pulled it on I smelt Beverley, not her vestigia but a human smell of sweat and clean skin.

I considered the shotguns – but I’d probably only shoot my foot off. The same probably applied to Hugh Oswald’s staffs, but when I pulled one out of their bag it felt solid and comforting in my grip.

The night may be dark and full of terrors, I thought, but I’ve got a big stick.

‘Is there something I should know?’ asked Dominic when I re-joined him outside the Old Rectory. I showed him the detector track on my tablet and told him that back-up was on hold. He sighed.

‘You were right,’ he said. ‘Tonight’s the night.’

‘Looks like it,’ I said.

‘Have I got time to get changed?’ he asked.

‘Yeah – I don’t think anything’s going to happen until the moon gets up.’ I checked my notebook. ‘Which isn’t until about half past ten.’

So, while Dominic was off girding his loins, I called Beverley who seemed to be attending a party in a steam organ.

‘I’m negotiating,’ she shouted over a background of hurdy-gurdy and screaming children.

‘Negotiating what?’ I shouted back.

‘River stuff,’ she shouted. ‘I’ll tell you all about it when I get back – don’t wait up.’

Dominic returned half an hour later wearing cargo pants and real authentic farmer’s Wellington boots. Apparently you can tell they’re authentic when the muck has permanently discoloured the rubber up to the ankle level. He’d brought his own extendable baton and his stab vest in the beige ‘undercover’ sleeve.

He’d also brought a folding table, a pair of folding chairs and a picnic hamper. We set them up at the back of the Nissan, sat down and had a drink.

‘Outstanding,’ I said. ‘Now all we need is a deck of cards.’

As the sun set, the detector at Croft Ambrey went offline and we called Stan, who lived close by in Yatton Marsh, to see whether she’d noticed anything. Dominic shouted into the phone for Stan to turn the music off but to no obvious success. He grimaced and turned the phone in my direction so that I could hear a burst of a raw sounding cover of Children of the Revolution before Dominic cut the line in disgust.

‘She’s been sniffing aggro diesel and listening to 9XDead again,’ he said. ‘There won’t be nothing coherent from her until Wednesday.’ He put the phone away. ‘Do we actually have an operational plan for dealing with the unicorns?’ he asked, and then laughed. ‘I can’t believe I just said that.’

‘Priority one, protect members of the public,’ I said. ‘Priority two, if we can, follow them back to wherever it is they come from in the hope that we can recover the real Nicole.’

Dominic decided to risk a dash for some drinks. While he was away I amused myself by piggybacking onto the Laceys’ wifi and looking at the online newspaper front pages. The Express went with a new Diana conspiracy theory, the broadsheets went with Syria and a side order of fracking, the tabloids with cricket and the Royals. Windrow had been right. Sharon Pike’s little meltdown was being quietly forgotten. It made sense. No profession likes to wash its dirty laundry in public.

Nightingale called at last.

They’d triangulated the signal from Lesley’s phone to a flat in the Dog Kennel Hill estate in Dulwich, and after the requisite amount of time charging about shouting ‘police’ and ‘clear’ Nightingale had walked into the kitchen to find an envelope on the table with his name on it.

‘It was one of those white envelopes you get with greeting cards and inside was one such, with a cat on the front licking its paw and the inscription With Sympathy in pink letters. Inside were written the words NICE TRY.’

‘I told you,’ I said.

‘She could have left us a demon trap,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or something mundane and equally unpleasant. It’s quite maddening, really. I’m certain she’s trying to communicate something to us, but I’m damned if I know what. Did she say anything significant to you on the phone?’

‘I’d rather tell you about that call in person,’ I said.

‘Quite,’ said Nightingale. ‘How are things your end?’

I gave him a quick briefing.

‘I think things may be kicking off soon,’ I said. ‘I could use some help.’

‘I’ll set off as soon as I’m sure that Lesley has really left the area,’ he said. ‘That should put me in your vicinity in four to five hours. Can you last until then?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

‘Remember, Peter, the fae are like peacocks. They strut and they boast and they will expect you to do the same,’ he said. ‘Put on a good show and you may be able to avoid an actual physical confrontation.’

‘And if I can’t avoid a physical confrontation?’

‘I’d really rather that you did,’ said Nightingale.

‘And if I can’t?’

‘Fight like a policeman,’ he said. ‘That should take them by surprise.’

But what kind of policeman? I wondered.

Nightingale said he had to go, and hung up. I sat staring into the growing dark while a robin made a valiant attempt to trill its guts out. But at least the bloody wood pigeon had shut up by then.

Dominic came back with a flask of coffee and we sat in silence for a while, as something in the distance imitated the music from the shower scene in Psycho.

‘Song thrush,’ said Dominic.

The tablet chimed and all the detectors in Pokehouse Wood dropped out – all of them.

‘It always comes back to Pokehouse Wood,’ I said. ‘It’s like that’s the hinge around which everyone travels.’

‘The hinge?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Axis, roundabout, entrepôt, gateway?’

‘Do you think we should check it out?’ asked Dominic.

‘No need,’ I said. ‘I think they’re coming here.’

We drank our coffee and listened to the birds and waited.

‘Victor wants to get married,’ said Dominic.

‘Congratulations,’ I said.

‘I’m not that keen,’ said Dominic.

‘Really?’

‘Christ, no,’ said Dominic. ‘I don’t want to spoil what we’ve got.’

‘Why would it spoil it?’

‘For one thing, I’d have to go live on his bloody farm,’ he said. ‘It’s not like he’s going to move into my flat. This is David Cameron’s fault, you know – he had to have his trendy bloody Same Sex Couples Act.’

‘Tell him you want a long engagement,’ I said.

Dominic sighed.

‘Would you marry him?’ he asked.

‘Who, Victor?’

‘Of course Victor.’

I gave it some thought.

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Not with the hours he works – it’s bad enough on the Job when you’re doing shifts. But farming, dawn to dusk – no thanks.’

‘That’s my point,’ said Dominic.

‘I bet he’s going to stay fit, though,’ I said. ‘All that hard work.’

‘There is that,’ said Dominic. ‘Even if he does smell of cow shit. What about Beverley?’

‘What, marriage?’

‘Why not?’

I remembered Isis, wife of the River Oxley, telling me that I shouldn’t be in a hurry to go into the water. ‘It’s not a decision you want to rush into,’ she’d said. But I had, that night on the banks of the Lugg. Rushed in like the fool I am.

‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,’ I said.

‘Peter,’ said Dominic.

‘Yeah?’

‘All the birds have stopped singing,’ he said.

We both slowly got to our feet and listened.

I could just hear the sound of a TV coming from a house up the road and a low rumble of voices that was probably the crowd outside the Swan in the Rushes. Far away a car with a diesel engine was labouring up a steep slope.

Dominic used his Airwave to call the spotters we’d stationed in the field to the west of the village, sitting in a Toyota that had a good view of the off-road approaches to both the Old Rectory and the Marstowes’ house. They were under instructions to report any movement, strange lights and/or other general weirdness, and to not get out of the Toyota unless told to. So far they hadn’t seen anything. Dominic advised them to stay sharp.

‘You don’t actually have to do this with me,’ I said, as I tested the grip on Hugh Oswald’s staff and hefted it about a bit.

Dominic laughed.

‘My patch, my village,’ he said. ‘Probably my folklore. So, yeah – actually I think I do.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘If something weird gets behind me, watch my back and smack anything that’s not a small child. As hard as you can – you want to put them down as fast as possible.’

‘Put what down?’

‘I wish I knew.’

‘So, to summarise,’ said Dominic, ‘we guard the Laceys, prevent anything supernatural happening, follow any . . . thing back to where it came from.’

‘Which will probably be Pokehouse Wood.’

‘And rescue any missing children we might find lying around. Is that about it?’

‘That’s the plan,’ I said.

Which, right that moment, fell completely apart.

My tablet played the red alert sound from Star Trek, which indicated that one of the detectors in the village had dropped offline. I turned, naturally, to look at the Old Rectory – walking to the side a bit to see if I could get a look around the back – but there was nothing. Same deal from our spotters in the Toyota – nothing.

I checked the tablet and saw that the other village detector had dropped off – the one at the Marstowe house.

It was at least four hundred metres from the Old Rectory to the cul-de-sac and me and Dominic did it in less than a minute and a half, which is pretty impressive considering all the kit we were carrying and the fact that it was fricking uphill.

There were crashing sounds from inside the house and high-pitched screams, which meant we may even have picked up the pace before a flash lit up the ground floor windows. Followed by the distinctive boom of a shotgun, which caused us to clatter to a halt at the front door.

We stood clear either side of the doorway and I nudged the door open with my foot. It was unlocked and swung inwards.

These country people, I thought, don’t half neglect the basics of home security.

We heard Andy cursing, saw another flash and heard another boom.

‘Andy, mate,’ called Dominic, ‘is that you with the shotgun?’

‘Yeah,’ called Andy from inside. ‘The bastards are trying to get in the back.’

Double flash, two blasts close together, the sound of plate window glass shattering.

‘We’re coming in the front,’ yelled Dominic. ‘Don’t you dare fucking shoot us.’

‘Right-oh,’ called Andy, almost casually.

Dominic went in first. It was his idea, after all.

We found Andy flattened against the wall by his kitchen door, shotgun at the ready.

‘I tried to call you lot,’ he said when we joined him. ‘But all the phones were buggered.’

‘Where’re the kids?’ asked Dominic.

‘Upstairs with Joanne,’ said Andy.

I peered around the doorframe. The kitchen light was off and half the windows blown out. The upstairs lights spilled down into the garden, illuminating the swing set, the rotary clothes dryer and a gleaming shape – like a horse spun out of glass. It snorted and its great head swung back and forth – looking for an opening.

Andy meekly handed over the shotgun when Dominic asked for it.

‘Out of shells anyway,’ he said. Nonetheless Dominic cracked it open and checked. I wondered if Andy had a shotgun licence, but decided now was not the time to ask. Dominic laid it carefully down and kicked it into the living room.

‘Andy,’ I said. ‘I want you to go upstairs, pick the most secure room and barricade yourself, Joanne and the kids inside.’

I expected him to argue, but he seemed to have a touching faith in the police and did as he was told.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Dominic once Andy was safely upstairs.

‘We go forth,’ I said. ‘And we de-escalate the situation.’

Dominic nodded. ‘De-escalation,’ he said. ‘One of my favourites.’

Peacocks, Nightingale had said.

I squared my shoulders, hefted Hugh’s staff and walked into the kitchen, fixed the beast outside with my eyes and said, ‘Oi, sunshine! Cut it out.’

The unicorn turned in my direction, the moonlight flashing on the ridges of its spiral horn, and for a moment we stared at each other through the smashed window of the kitchen door. Then, faster than I would have believed possible, it lowered its head and surged towards me.

Its head fit through the broken window, but its shoulders smashed into the frame, ripping it out of the brick work with a noise like a JCB ram-raiding a DIY store. Between the kitchen units and the table I had no room to dodge, and turning my back on half a metre of spike did not strike me as a good idea.

But I wasn’t some terrified peasant, I was an apprentice and I had been trained by the man who led the rearguard at Ettersberg. And we were about to find out how good that training was.

Anticipate, Nightingale had drilled into me, formulate, release . . . and for god’s sake, Peter, you have to have the follow-up ready the moment you release the first spell.

I had anticipated the charge and I was speaking the spell even as splinters of wood clattered off the ceiling. It was my shield, famously capable of stopping seven out of ten pistol calibre rounds – on a good day. Had the beast hit it face-on, that horn would have gone right through it. But I didn’t have it held face-on – I had it deflected at an angle so that the point slid off to my right, because the surface of the shield is well slippery.

And I knew that not from some ancient text but because I’d logged hours on the range, conjuring the thing at different angles while Molly poked at me with a stick.

The thing bellowed with rage as its horn slid uncontrollably to its left. And where the horn went, head, neck and shoulders were sure to follow. It hit the kitchen table at just over knee height and went down on its side amidst splinters of laminated chipboard. Its great hooves scrabbled on the lino as it tried to get them back under itself. But I had my follow-up ready – I twisted and swung Hugh’s staff as hard as I could. I would have liked to have landed one on its head, but my reach wasn’t good enough and instead the staff’s iron cap scored its way down the unicorn’s shoulder.

It bellowed with pain and frustration.

Cold iron, I thought. The stories are true.

I hit it again and it screamed.

I kept the shield aimed downwards to keep it pinned and raised my staff once more.

The unicorn stopped struggling to rise and lay there quivering, staring at me with a mad brown eye – in the darkness it seemed real and solid and all there.

‘Are you going to be a good boy?’ I asked.

The mad eye rolled in its socket, but the head slumped down amongst the splintered wood of a kitchen unit, stainless steel cutlery and the remains of Joanne’s best china.

‘Dominic,’ I said. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That was interesting.’

‘We’re going to be stepping back into the hallway,’ I said. ‘Give Princess Luna here a chance to get up.’

Dominic put his hand on my shoulder and guided me backwards – as I went, I lifted the shield away from the unicorn, although I made a point of keeping it between me and the beast.

It hesitated at first, but then in a crackle of broken glass it got to its feet. I thought it might have another go, but it started turning immediately, incidentally smashing the sink off the wall and bringing down the last intact wall unit. Water hit the ceiling as the cold tap sailed through the air and out one of the broken windows. Even as it sauntered out through the ruins of the kitchen door it had begun to fade, until it was nothing but the sound of hooves vanishing into the night.

‘Aren’t we going to follow it?’ asked Dominic.

‘I know where it’s going,’ I said.

‘You know,’ said Dominic, ‘I think I’m going to marry Victor after all. An experience like this puts your life in perspective.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Mine is still passing in front of my eyes.’

‘Okay,’ said Dominic as we retreated to avoid the widening pool caused by the water fountaining out of the broken sink. ‘But are you sure what you’re seeing is not just the rest of your life?’

The next step was to get the Marstowes safely out of the house. We played rock, paper, scissors to determine which one of us would explain to Joanne why she was going to need to wrangle a new kitchen out of Herefordshire County Council – I won. We were waiting downstairs for them to grab some overnight clothes and Dominic had just unshipped his Airwave to get some support in when we heard the siren.

It had the slower tone change that marked it as an ambulance. We heard it come up the slope and then stop further down – about where the Old Rectory was.

‘Oh shit,’ said Dominic.

By the time we got there Derek was being wheeled out of the house on a trolley. He was wearing a neck brace and an oxygen mask – there was a pressure bandage covering the side of his head. Inspector Edmondson had taken over the scene. We gave him the sanitised version of what had happened to us, and he explained that his people had searched the house and that Victoria and not-really-Nicole were missing.

16 Going Forward

The house of Puck, the Pokehouse, where will-o-wisps were wont to lead travellers astray – and cause police officers to break traffic regulations with extreme prejudice. I’d told Dominic to floor it, and that’s just what he’d done.

Whoever had smacked Derek Lacey on the side of the head, and my money was on Victoria Lacey in the kitchen with the bottle of Baileys, had a good twenty minute head-start. But, since they hadn’t taken a car, we might have a chance to cut them off – literally at the pass, as it happened.

The big Nissan roared as we did a ton down the B4632 towards Mortimer’s Cross. And, trust me, that is not something you want to do without an ejector seat. Behind us I saw lights and sirens as assets started piling in from Leominster – fuck knew what DCI Windrow was going to make of this.

‘I think we’re going to be asked some questions,’ I said.

‘What’s with the “we”, kemosabe?’ said Dominic. ‘I’m planning to blame you for everything.’

He made a sudden right into a turn I couldn’t even see, and we went bouncing up a slope. I caught a quick flash of an English Heritage sign and then we slipped about on a rough track until Dominic told me to get ready to open a five-bar gate. So I leaned out the window and knocked it off its hinges with an impello. The Nissan bounced noticeably as we ran over the flattened gate.

‘That,’ said Dominic, ‘was not compliant with the countryside code.’

As far as I could tell, we were bouncing across an open field – ahead of us something dull and metallic reflected in the headlights.

‘Another gate,’ yelled Dominic, and I leaned out and knocked that one down as well. The staff seemed to ripple under my hand as I used it, purring as the metal five-bar gate fell down flat with no fuss whatsoever.

Then we were jolting down a tunnel of trees, with flashes of light grey to our left. I realised we were on the same path that Zoe had followed with baby Nicole over a decade ago. One that really wasn’t designed to be driven down at speed.

I saw pale faces suddenly caught in the headlights – so did Dominic, and he hit the brakes. The Nissan skidded, fishtailed sideways towards the riverbank before recovering, and slowed to a halt a couple of metres short of the figures.

It was substitute-Nicole and Victoria. The woman had bound the girl’s hands with what looked like duct tape and wound a piece around her lower face to gag her.

We climbed out of the Nissan and approached carefully.

‘You can’t stop me,’ she screamed and started dragging the girl up the path.

When faced with a low-level hostage situation your first task is to calm the hostage taker down long enough to find out what they want. Then you can lie to them convincingly until you negotiate the hostage back, or are in a position to dog pile the perpetrator. Dominic got his torch out and kept it on Victoria’s legs to avoid intimidating her – that could come later.

‘What can’t we stop you doing?’ I asked.

Victoria gave me a puzzled look.

‘You can’t stop me getting Nicole back,’ she said.

I looked at the girl who was not-Nicole but probably her half-sister. She glared back over the duct tape as if it was my fault. Which technically, I suppose, it probably was.

So it was a hostage swap – which meant if we were clever we might be able to get Nicole back and keep not-Nicole as well.

‘Who are you making the swap with?’ I asked.

We were emerging from the tunnel of trees. To our right the treeless slope of Pokehouse Wood swept up the ridge. The white poles that protected the new saplings thrust up amongst brambles and the stands of foxglove stood grey and trembling in the moonlight. I smelt horse sweat and malevolence – I didn’t think we were alone.

‘The lady who owns Princess Luna . . .’ she said. ‘She came to see me last night. I thought it was a dream. But it couldn’t have been a dream, could it? Because you never remember your dreams, do you?’

Victoria started to drag the girl up the diagonal forestry track – it was slow going, not least because not-Nicole had gone limp in an effort to stop her.

‘This one is your biological daughter,’ I said.

Victoria stopped dead.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Remember when Zoe ran off with the baby?’ I asked. ‘This is where she came.’

‘For god’s sake, why?’

‘For the attention I suppose—’

Victoria cut me off with a disgusted sound.

‘Of course for the attention,’ she snapped. ‘I mean, why did she think it was a good idea to swap Nicky?’

‘That was an accident,’ I said. ‘She didn’t even notice it go down.’

‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘That makes everything okay.’ She shook not-Nicole roughly by the arm. ‘This isn’t mine,’ she said. ‘Blood isn’t everything – I want my daughter back.’

‘So do I,’ I said. ‘And when the other half of this swap-meet turns up, maybe we can do some bargaining.’

‘Um,’ said Dominic urgently. ‘That would be about now.’

I can’t say they materialised out of thin air, but it was as if when I turned my head they arrived in my blind spot, so that when I looked back in that direction they were there. It was creepy, and it was definitely showing off.

And they were real, there in Pokehouse Wood, on the last of the quarter moon. They were flesh and blood. Human shaped but tall and thin, with long delicate faces and hands and black eyes. A woman stood ahead of us dressed in armour made not of metal, but of overlapping stone scales, slate possibly, polished to a bright blue-grey sheen.

Like the scales of a fish, Zoe had said.

Victoria might have called her a lady but I know a Queen when I’m within genuflection distance.

She wore a silver circlet upon her head with a single large sapphire at her brow. In her hand she held a straight spear of white wood tipped with a leaf-shaped flint blade. I’ve seen enough Time Team to know how sharp a blade like that could be. From her shoulders hung a cloak of white wool, and sheltered under one hem I could see a small figure with a pale worried face. The real Nicole, I presumed.

For a mad moment I considered just stepping up and arresting the lot of them – as a plan it at least had the virtue of simplicity. Its principal drawback being that the Queen was flanked on either side by her beasts, real and stinking. I could see the sheen of sweat on their dappled flanks, and the one on the left had a nasty cut on its shoulder – a streak of dark blood down its side. That one had a particularly mad look in its eye, just for me.

‘There’s a pair of good looking IC7 boys behind us,’ said Dominic softly. ‘Carrying bows and arrows. And another two upslope.’

‘Good fields of fire,’ I said.

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘We’re okay as long as we don’t do anything stupid.’

‘You’re giving me this advice now?’ said Dominic.

Victoria grabbed not-Nicole by the shoulders and held her out at arm’s length towards the Queen.

‘I’ve brought this one,’ she said. ‘Now give me back my daughter.’

The Queen narrowed her eyes and suddenly I knew I’d seen that expression on someone else’s face. She twitched back her cloak and gently laid a long-fingered hand on Nicole’s shoulder.

Victoria shoved not-Nicole, who was having none of it and refused to budge.

‘Move,’ hissed Victoria, and the Queen’s lips twisted into a thin smile. She shook her spear and not-Nicole’s shoulders slumped and her head drooped – she took a step forward.

What does it profit a copper, I thought, if he should gaineth one hostage but loseth another?

I put a werelight into the air above our heads, the biggest I’d ever attempted. The staff hummed like a beehive and the light came out the size of a weather balloon and bright enough to get three paragraphs in UKUFOindex.com and a special feature in the Fortean Times.

I’d been going for sunlight, and it rolled over us like a sudden summer, painting the unicorns in pinks and whites, rippling like an oil slick across the scales of the Queen’s armour and flashing off the sapphire at her brow.

‘This is the police,’ I said. ‘Everybody needs to keep calm and stay where they are.’

‘You moron,’ shouted Victoria.

The Queen turned her eyes on me and I felt the power of her regard push and pull and shove at me as if it were a festival crowd.

‘You wouldn’t believe the number of people who’ve tried that on me,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid you’re just going to have to talk instead.’

The pale flawless skin of her brow ruffled, and fuck me if I didn’t recognise that expression – every single time I failed to finish what was put in front of me for supper at the Folly. So far the Queen had kept her gob shut, but I was willing to bet she had a mouth full of sharp teeth and, behind them, a long and prehensile tongue.

I laughed for sheer delight at having that question answered.

Now I knew what to look for, the similarities to Molly were obvious. Not so much the physical, but the way they held themselves, the way they moved as if they were standing still and the world was obligingly rearranging itself around them.

So Molly was fae or, even better, this particular kind of fae – whatever this kind of fae was. And so we progress in our knowledge of the universe step by step, pebble by pebble.

‘Give me my child,’ shouted Victoria. The Queen glanced at her, and Victoria fell suddenly silent and slumped to her knees.

‘Stop that,’ I said.

The Queen looked back at me and inclined her head.

‘I can’t let you have either of the children,’ I said. And, because I was raised to be polite, ‘Sorry.’

The Queen’s expression went from annoyance to contempt, and on either side her beasts stirred, stamped their hooves and lowered their heads.

I fixed my eyes on my unicorn, the one with the bleeding wound on its shoulder, and feinted with my staff. It flinched and then backed away a couple of steps before rearing up on its hind legs with a frightened whinny.

The Queen shot it a poisonous look and I thought, Just wait till she gets you alone. You’re in so much trouble. The unicorn came down at her unvoiced command, but it stayed noticeably nervous.

Then the Queen turned back to me and smiled – this time showing her teeth.

And suddenly there were at least a dozen more armoured fae standing amongst the foxgloves and between the trees that grew down by the riverbank. They wore the same armour of blue-grey slate and in their hands they held half-drawn metre-long bows.

I took a deep breath.

‘Peter,’ said Dominic. ‘Can you even spell de-escalate?’

And I exhaled slowly.

‘Let’s not do anything hasty,’ I said, and lowered my staff.

I heard Dominic mutter something weird about a throne of blood. I looked at the girl half-wrapped in the Queen’s cloak, at her half-sister bound and fuming, and her mother on her knees and weeping silently. My mind was suddenly clear and free of doubt and, given what I was about to do, possibly devoid of thought.

‘My name is Peter Grant, I am a sworn constable of the crown and an heir to the forms and wisdoms of Sir Isaac Newton,’ I said. ‘I offer myself in exchange for the children, the mother and my friend. Take me – let everyone else go.’

She made me wait, didn’t she? Of course she did.

Then her smile grew wider and she inclined her head in gracious acceptance.

‘Dominic,’ I said.

‘You idiot,’ said Dominic.

‘Take the girls and Mrs Lacey and get out of here as fast as you can and go to the nearest place indoors where there’s lots of people – a pub will do,’ I said.

The Queen banged the butt of her spear against the ground.

‘I’ll be right with you,’ I said, and then to Dominic, ‘You’ve got to get a message to my governor, DCI Nightingale. Tell him that wherever they’re taking me it will be via Pyon Wood Camp, okay? The castle must be somewhere beyond that, in Wales I think.’

Two sharp raps with the haft of the spear – no more time.

‘They don’t like the Roman road,’ I said quickly, and handed Dominic my staff. ‘That would be a good place to intercept.’

Before Dominic could say anything I stepped forward until I was between Victoria and not-Nicole and the Queen. The unicorn I’d injured snorted and pawed the ground – I gave it the eye.

‘Now the girl,’ I said.

The Queen nodded cheerfully and set Nicole in motion towards her mother. She passed me, a small figure dressed in what looked like a woollen shift. I heard her mum sob with relief.

‘Dom?’ I called without looking round. ‘Have they cleared out of your way?’

‘Yes, they have,’ said Dominic.

‘Then off you go,’ I said and stepped forward.

You swear an oath when you become a police officer – you promise to serve the Queen in the office of constable with fairness, integrity and impartiality, and that you will cause the peace to be kept and preserved and prevent all offences against people and property. The very next day you start making the first of the many minor and messy compromises required to get the Job done. But sooner or later the Job walks up to you, pins you against the wall, looks you in the eye and asks you how far you’re willing to go to prevent all offences. Asks just what did your oath, your attestation, really mean to you?

I could have bottled it and not offered the swap. No disciplinary inquiry would have found me lacking in my duty had I merely sought to contain the situation and wait for back-up – in fact that would have been proper procedure.

And it’s not like my colleagues wouldn’t have understood. We’re not soldiers or fanatics, although I think I would have heard the whispering behind my back in the canteen whether it was really there or not.

But sometimes the right thing to do is the right thing to do, especially when a child is involved. And I reckon there wasn’t a copper I’ve worked with who wouldn’t have made the choice I did. I’m not saying they would have been pushing their way to the front of the queue, and they certainly wouldn’t have done it with a glad song on their lips, but when push comes to shove . . .?

So I did it. Because I’m a sworn constable and it was the right thing to do.

Plus I fully expected Nightingale to come rescue me.

Eventually.

I hoped.

They followed the Queen as she turned and walked up the logging track. The unicorns wheeled and cantered ahead. Her heralds, I decided, and the manifestation of her desires. Around me the rest of the party moved in a loose formation, some on the track, some drifting silently amongst the saplings. It was hard to pin down how many there were.

I heard the Nissan start up and, after what sounded like a slightly desperate three-point turn, roar away. The engine sounded weirdly muffled, but at the time I just put that down to distance and the intervening trees.

Either we turned off the logging track or it petered out, because soon we were walking a narrow trail that threaded between mature trees. There was some moonlight to see by, but I found it hard to keep up and the Queen had to stop a number of times to wait for me. Whenever she did, I heard a familiar rhythmic hissing sound from her retainers – I recognised it from Molly. Laughter.

After a long time we emerged onto the bare crown of a hill. One of the unicorns crowded me then, pushing its shoulder against me and guiding me roughly into a hollow between two grassy banks. There the Queen and her retainers made camp, sitting down and wrapping their grey cloaks around themselves. There was a chill in the air, so when one of the retainers offered me a cloak I took it gratefully, although it did smell suspiciously of horse.

The unicorns took station at either end of the hollow and, under their watchful eyes, I slept.

I dreamt that I’d pulled over a flying saucer and was trying to determine whether to charge the occupant with driving while unfit under section 4 of the Road Traffic Act (1988). Which was stupid really because it was a flying saucer and they’d have to be charged as being unfit for duty under part 5 of the Railways and Transport Safety Act 2003. Not to mention breaches of various CAA regulations, and of course Illegal Entry into the UK under the 1971 Act.

I woke to grey skies and damp grass.

Croft Ambrey, that’s where I reckoned I was, in one of the ditches that put the ‘multi’ into multivallate Iron Age hill fort. I smelt wood smoke and, looking over, saw a group of grey-cloaked figures crouched around a campfire.

Never mind Nightingale, I thought, the National Trust are going to have conniptions about that. Quietly, I got up. And angling away from the campfire, I made my way up the side of the lower of the banks. If I was at Croft Ambrey it might be possible to make a dash down the slope towards Yatton. Despite the low cloud it was humid and I was sweating by the time I reached the top.

Stretching away below me was an unbroken sea of trees. Not the ordered ranks of pine and western hemlock, but the spreading multi-coloured tops of oak and ash and elder and all the traditional species of the ancient woodland. I recognised the outline of the hills and valleys from Google Maps and from when I’d stood at the Whiteway Head further up the ridge.

But there was no farmland in sight, no white gouge of quarry works at Leinthall Earls, no village of Yatton – so no Stan sniffing her chemicals and listening to death metal. This was the Wyldewood, spelt with a Y, that once covered the Island of Britain and would again, once the pesky tool-using primates had done the decent thing and exterminated themselves.

I didn’t think it was time travel because faintly, like an old scar, I could see the line of the Roman road running north up the valley from Aymestrey towards Wigmore. And, beyond the road, the solitary mound where Pyon Wood Camp had stood – only here was Hannah’s castle, blue and orange and, well, I personally would have said salmon rather than pink. A grouping of slender bulbous-topped turrets with rounded roof caps. It looked like a cross between something on the album cover of a progressive rock band and a termite tower.

I realised then that the fae didn’t coexist with us within the material world. This was a parallel dimension of some kind. The sort that mathematicians and cosmologists get all excited about and smugly inform you that your tiny maths-deficient brain couldn’t get a grip on. But I had a grip on it all right. A terrifying, sick-making grasp of my predicament. Because I didn’t think Nightingale was going to be able to get me out of this.

‘Fuck me,’ I said out loud, ‘I’m in fairyland.’

I heard a hissing sound behind me and turned to find the Queen having a good laugh.

They were realer in their own world, particularly the retainers, whose faces showed acne scars and blemishes. Their fingernails were dirty and their armour sported the occasional cracked scale or sign of obvious field maintenance. The unicorns were still beasts the size of carthorses, with the temperament of a Doberman Pinscher and a great big offensive weapon in the middle of their foreheads.

The Queen scared me most of all now that her cloak smelt of damp wool and had a splatter of mud along its hem. As she turned to organise her retainers breaking camp she seemed far too solid for comfort.

It’s amazing what irrelevancies you find yourself thinking when it’s too late. Because as I looked over the Wyldewood at the disturbingly organic towers of the castle on Pyon Mount, I realised what gift it was that I could give to Hugh Oswald in exchange for his staffs.

We should open up the school, I thought, if only for a day. Bring down Hugh and all his mates and show them the names that Nightingale carved onto the walls. Let them know that they are remembered, now, while some of them are still alive, before it’s too late.

And bring their children and their grandchildren – even if, like Mellissa, some of them were definitely a bit odd. In fact, especially the ones that were odd. That way they would know that they were not alone and me, Dr Walid and Nightingale could get a good look at them and take notes for future reference.

And why stop there – let’s bring the lot of them. Beverley, the rivers, Zach the goblin, the Quiet People, all the strange and illusive members of the demi-monde and show them the wall and have an alfresco buffet.

Get all of us in the same place so we could all get a good look at each other and come to some kind of proper arrangement. One that we could all live with.

The day was warming up by the time we headed downslope and into the valley where Yatton definitely no longer existed. Being really real hadn’t put a crimp in the way the fae moved, though, gliding amongst the trees even as I stumbled down the path and used both hands to steady myself. It got easier once the slope levelled, but the trail stayed narrow and twisty and the canopy of the trees blocked out the sky.

After fifteen minutes of crossing the valley floor, the Queen held up her hand and the band stopped. She made a quick gesture at two of her retainers, one of whom pulled a rope from his pack while the other mimed holding his hands out in front of him, wrists pressed together. I glanced at the Queen who gave me a weary Just don’t get any ideas look and so I held out my hands as directed. The other retainer wrapped the rope around my wrists, tied it with some care to keep the circulation going but without giving me any leeway, and looped the other end around his own wrist.

I felt a moment of excitement. They hadn’t been concerned to restrict my movements before, but the fact that they felt they had to now indicated that they feared I might to try to escape. Which implied that there might be a way to escape nearby.

It was the road. The Roman road. Those imperial fuckers had put their mark on the landscape, all right. Even to the point where it impinged onto fairyland. Had that been their intention, to break up the native fae and ease their conquest of the material world? Or had they just liked straight lines and not cared about the effect?

Maybe the road coexisted in both the mundane and the faerie worlds. Perhaps a bright young man who was quick on his feet might have it away down that road to safety. The Queen must think so, otherwise why bind my wrists? She took the other end of the rope in her own hand – I took that as a mark of respect.

Roman engineers like a nice wide bed, and a cross-country road was often eight metres across with the undergrowth cleared back for another five or six metres either side. I saw it first as a lightening in the wooded gloom and then as a long straight clearing. The Wyldewood had done its best – saplings and undergrowth had claimed the road almost to the middle. But none of the mature trees intruded further than a metre.

The band paused in the shadows at the edge. The Queen cocked her head as if listening to something far away. Beside her the unicorns stamped uneasily. Then she whipped around to face me – a question in her eyes.

‘I can’t hear anything,’ I said.

But then I did.

A buzzing sound that dopplered past my ear. A bee and not a fat bumblebee, I saw, but a slender working girl from a hive. She swerved past one of the unicorns which flicked its mane angrily at her, then back to me where she circled once around my head and then buzzed off back down the line of the Roman road.

I thought I heard the sound of tiny trumpets.

I glanced at the Queen who waited, still as a statue, for at least a minute before raising her hand to gesture us forward. But before we could move there was a crashing in the undergrowth and a huge white deer as tall as me at the shoulder thundered past the spot where we waited. And, as if he had been a pathfinder, a wave of animals followed. I spotted wild pig, more deer, rabbits, red coats and white, brown fur and russet red. Birds whirred overhead, screaming and crying.

By the pricking of my thumbs, I thought, something wicked this way comes.

The Queen let out a low snarl. And then I heard it.

It sounded like a train, like a steam train – huffing and blowing. The flood of animals reduced down to a trickle. I watched a cat the size of a Labrador zigzagging in panic before scuttling around us and vanishing into the undergrowth. I looked down the clear path towards where the noise came from, and saw the forest changing. Trees were falling backwards away from the road, their trunks splintering and fragmenting as they crashed down, so that by the time they hit the ground they had gone to dust. Grey stones the size of my fist were pushing themselves up through the forest floor like stop-motion mushrooms.

The Queen screamed in anguish as her unicorns jittered and skipped back.

I heard marching feet and smelt wet iron and rotting fish as the old Roman road ripped through the forest like a new wound.

The Queen pulled me closer and then, with a savage yank on the rope, drove me to my knees. She shoved her face in mine, lips bared over sharp teeth and her restless tongue snapping like a whip around her lips.

‘Make her stop,’ she hissed.

‘Make who stop?’ I asked.

‘Make her stop,’ she hissed and grabbed my head and jerked it round until I could see the engine bearing down on us. I recognised then the black iron painted with crimson and forest green livery and saw the name written on the canopy – Faerie Queen. The driver was still hidden behind the pistons, spinning bits and pipes and struts. But I knew, suddenly, who had come to rescue me.

‘Oh boy,’ I said. ‘You’s in trouble now!’

I’ll say this for the Queen. She was brave – or possibly stupid. It’s easy to mistake the two. She stood her ground while all her retainers fled alongside the other animals of the forest. She kept me on my knees by her side as the huge iron machine huffed and hissed and clanked and lurched to an uncertain stop beside us.

We waited for what seemed like a long time as the engine ticked and whirred and let off occasional mysterious bursts of steam. There was a clang from inside the driver’s compartment and a familiar voice said, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.’

Then silence.

Then Beverley Brook stepped onto the footplate and pointed a shotgun straight at the Queen’s head – I recognised the Purdey from my trunk. It was nice to see it getting an airing.

Beverley herself was wearing an oversized leather jerkin and jeans. Her dreads had been tied into a plait down her back and a pair of antique leather and brass goggles were pushed up onto her brow.

‘Put your hands on your head,’ she said, ‘and step away from the boyfriend.’

The Queen hissed and gripped the rope harder.

‘I don’t care,’ said Beverley slowly. ‘He is not free to make such a bargain.’

‘Nonetheless,’ hissed the Queen, ‘he made a bargain and he must keep it.’

‘Ladies,’ I said.

‘Peter,’ said Beverley, ‘you stay the fuck out of this.’

She reshouldered the shotgun.

‘I’ve loaded this particular gun with scrap iron,’ she said. ‘Now, I don’t know if a shot to the head will kill you or not. But just consider how much fun we can have finding out.’

While they were chatting, I created a little shield and, very carefully, sliced off the ropes around my wrist. The Queen felt when they went slack and turned to grab me but Beverley shouted, ‘No!’ And she thought better of it. She watched sullenly as I picked my way to the traction engine and climbed aboard – managing to burn myself just the once on hot metal.

‘The railings,’ said Beverley. ‘Keep your hands on the railings.’

When I was onboard Beverley ducked back into the cab, pulled what she called the reversing lever, checked the single brassbound gauge and pulled a second lever. The Faerie Queen lurched into reverse.

As we backed away, I heard the Queen, the real Queen, shriek with frustration. But even as she did so, the sound began to grow fainter. As it faded, the sun came out and the trees that had crowded the road melted away like dew until we were reversing up the good old A4410 and overlooking the hedgerows to the calm and civilised fields beyond.

The clouds had gone and so had the termite castle.

I sighed with relief.

Beverley stopped the traction engine and spent what seemed to me a very complicated ten minutes, getting it turned round to face in the other direction. Beverley shushed me when I tried to talk.

‘This is not easy,’ she said. ‘In fact, if I wasn’t cheating I’m not even sure I could do it.’

I wanted to know how she was cheating, but she glared at me until I shut up.

Once we were safely lurching in the right direction I got her to explain how she came to be the one who rescued me. She’d returned to Rushpool about the same time as Dominic. Beverley had insinuated herself into the conversation – ‘I felt it was my duty to offer my expertise,’ she said – and, having assessed the situation, made her own plans.

‘Your boss approved of it, of course,’ she said. ‘He’s waiting for us at Aymestrey.’

I doubted that Nightingale had been quite that relaxed about Beverley’s role and boy was he going to freak when I tried to explain the whole parallel universe thing to him. Not to mention the all-too-human loose ends which were flapping around this case.

I asked whether Nightingale had any idea what to do with not-Nicole.

‘Are you saying that you did that whole stupid hostage swap when you didn’t even know what you were going to do with the evil little strop afterwards?’

‘It was a high-pressure situation,’ I said. ‘Do you think Molly would like a friend?’

‘Not that kind of friend,’ said Beverley. ‘Besides, Molly has her own friends.’

‘Like who?’ I asked and thought – like how?

Beverley hesitated. ‘That’s not for me to say, is it? You’ll have to ask her yourself.’

‘The girl has to go to social services,’ I said.

‘Like that won’t be a total disaster,’ said Beverley.

‘I’m open to suggestions.’

‘Give her to Fleet,’ said Beverley. ‘She’s already got like a gazillion foster kids, and she’s married to a fae. So little Miss Psycho’s not going to worry her.’

‘Married to a fae?’

‘Yeah,’ said Beverley. ‘Scandalous, isn’t it?’

Ahead I could see the bridge across the River Lugg next to which I’d allowed myself to be taken into the water. There were stands of alder on the river’s banks and dogwood, hazel and hawthorn in the hedgerows. Robins and thrushes sounded across the fields and a couple of wood pigeon still refused to bloody shut up.

I put my arms around Beverley’s waist and buried my face in her hair. Beneath the oil and metal she smelt of peppermint and shea butter.

I was ready to go home to London.