Foxglove Summer

1 Due Diligence

I was just passing the Hoover Centre when I heard Mr Punch scream his rage behind me. Or it might have been someone’s brakes or a distant siren or an Airbus on final approach to Heathrow.

I’d been hearing him off and on since stepping from the top of a tower block in Elephant and Castle. Not a real sound, you understand – an impression, an expression through the city itself – what we might call a super-vestigia if Nightingale wasn’t so dead set against me making up my own terminology.

Sometimes he’s in a threatening mood, sometimes I hear him as a thin wail of despair in amongst the wind moaning around a tube train. Or else he’s pleading and wheedling in the growl of late-night traffic beyond my bedroom window. He’s a mercurial figure, our Mr Punch. As changeable and as dangerous as an away crowd on a Saturday night.

This time it was rage and petulance and resentment. I couldn’t understand why, though – it wasn’t him who was driving out of London.

As an institution, the BBC is just over ninety years old. Which means that Nightingale feels comfortable enough around the wireless to have a digital radio in his bathroom. On this he listens to Radio Four while he’s shaving. Presumably he assumes that the presenters are still safely attired in evening dress while they tear strips off whatever politician has been offered up as early morning sacrifice on the Today programme. Which is why he heard about the kids going missing before I did – this surprised him.

‘I was under the impression you quite enjoyed the wireless first thing in the morning,’ he said over breakfast after I’d told him it was news to me.

‘I was doing my practice,’ I said. In the weeks following the demolition of Skygarden Tower – with me on top of it – I’d been a key witness in three separate investigations, in addition to one by the Department of Professional Standards. I’d spent a great deal of each working day in interview rooms in various nicks around London including the notorious twenty-third floor of the Empress State Building where the serious investigations branch of the DPS keeps its racks and thumbscrews.

This meant that I’d gotten into the habit of getting up early to do my practice and get in some time in the gym before heading off to answer the same bloody question five different ways. It was just as well, since I hadn’t exactly been sleeping well since Lesley had tasered me in the back. By the start of August the interviews had dried up, but the habit – and the insomnia – had stuck.

‘Has there been a request for assistance?’ I asked.

‘With regard to the formal investigation, no,’ said Nightingale. ‘But where children are concerned we have certain responsibilities.’

There were two of them, both girls, both aged eleven, both missing from two separate family homes in the same village in North Herefordshire. The first 999 call had been at just after nine o’clock the previous morning and it first hit media attention in the evening when the girls’ mobile phones were found at a local war memorial over a thousand metres from their homes. Overnight it went from local to national and, according to the Today programme, large-scale searches were due to commence that morning.

I knew the Folly had national responsibilities in a sort of de facto under-the-table way that nobody liked to talk about. But I couldn’t see how that related to missing kids.

‘Regrettably, in the past,’ said Nightingale, ‘children were occasionally used in the practice of . . .’ he groped around for the right term, ‘unethical types of magic. It’s always been our policy to keep an eye on missing child cases and, where necessary, check to make sure that certain individuals in the proximity are not involved.’

‘Certain individuals?’ I asked.

‘Hedge wizards and the like,’ he said.

In Folly parlance a ‘hedge wizard’ was any magical practitioner who had either picked up their skills ad hoc from outside the Folly or who had retired to seclusion in the countryside – what Nightingale called ‘rusticated’. We both looked over to where Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina, formerly of the 365th Special Regiment of the Red Army, was sitting at her table on the other side of the breakfast room, drinking black coffee and reading Cosmopolitan. Varvara Sidorovna, trained by the Red Army, definitely fell into the ‘and the like’ category. But since she’d been lodging with us while awaiting trial for the last two months she, at least, was unlikely to be involved.

Amazingly, Varvara had appeared for breakfast before me, looking bright eyed for a woman I’d seen put away the best part of two bottles of Stoli the night before. Me and Nightingale had been trying to get her drunk in the hope of prising more information on the Faceless Man out of her, but we got nothing except some really disgusting jokes – many of which didn’t translate very well. Still, the vodka had knocked me out handily and I’d got most of a night’s sleep.

‘So, like ViSOR,’ I said.

‘Is that the list of sex offenders?’ asked Nightingale, who wisely never bothered to memorise an acronym until it had lasted at least ten years. I told him that it was, and he considered the question while pouring another cup of tea.

‘Better to think of ours as a register of vulnerable people,’ he said. ‘Our task in this instance is to ensure they haven’t become entangled in something they may later regret.’

‘Do you think it’s likely in this case?’ I asked.

‘Not terribly likely, no,’ said Nightingale. ‘But it’s always better to err on the side of caution in these matters. And besides,’ he smiled, ‘it will do you good to get out of the city for a couple of days.’

‘Because nothing cheers me up like a good child abduction,’ I said.

‘Quite,’ said Nightingale.

So, after breakfast I spent an hour in the tech cave pulling background off the network and making sure my laptop was properly charged up. I’d just re-qualified for my level 1 public order certificate and I threw my PSU bag into the back of the Asbo Mark 2 along with an overnight bag. I didn’t think my flame-retardant overall would be necessary, but my chunky PSU boots were a better bet than my street shoes. I’ve been to the countryside before, and I learn from my mistakes.

I popped back to the Folly proper and met Nightingale in the main library where he handed me a manila folder tied up with faded red ribbons. Inside were about thirty pages of tissue-thin paper covered in densely typed text and what was obviously a photostat of an identity document of some sort.

‘Hugh Oswald,’ said Nightingale. ‘Fought at Antwerp and Ettersberg.’

‘He survived Ettersberg?’

Nightingale looked away. ‘He made it back to England,’ he said. ‘But he suffered from what I’m told is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still lives on a medical pension – took up beekeeping.’

‘How strong is he?’

‘Well, you wouldn’t want to test him,’ said Nightingale. ‘But I suspect he’s out of practice.’

‘And if I suspect something?’

‘Keep it to yourself, make a discreet withdrawal and telephone me at the first opportunity,’ he said.

Before I could make it out the back door Molly came gliding out of her kitchen domain and intercepted me. She gave me a thin smile and tilted her head to one side in inquiry.

‘I thought I’d stop on the way up,’ I said.

The pale skin between her thin black eyebrows furrowed.

‘I didn’t want to put you to any trouble,’ I said.

Molly held up an orange Sainsbury’s bag in one long-fingered hand. I took it. It was surprisingly heavy.

‘What’s in it?’ I asked but Molly merely smiled, showing too many teeth, turned and drifted away.

I hefted the bag gingerly – there’d been less offal of late, but Molly could still be pretty eccentric in her culinary combinations. I made a point of stowing the bag in the shaded footwell of the back seat. Whatever was in the sandwiches, you didn’t want them getting too warm and going off, or starting to smell, or spontaneously mutating into a new life form.

It was a brilliant London day as I set out – the sky was blue, the tourists were blocking the pavements along the Euston Road, and the commuters panted out of their open windows and stared longingly as the fit young people strolled past in shorts and summer dresses. Pausing to tank up at a garage I know near Warwick Avenue, I tangled with the temporary one-way system around Paddington, climbed aboard the A40, bid farewell to the Art Deco magnificence of the Hoover Building and set course for what Londoners like to think of as ‘everywhere else’.

Once Mr Punch and the M25 were behind me, I tuned the car radio to Five Live, which was doing its best to build a twenty-four-hour news cycle out of about half an hour of news. The children were still missing, the parents had made an ‘emotional’ appeal and police and volunteers were searching the area.

We were barely into day two and already the radio presenters were beginning to get the desperate tone of people who were running out of questions to ask the reporters on the spot. They hadn’t reached the What do you think is going through their minds right now? stage yet, but it was only a matter of time.

They were making comparisons with Soham, although nobody had been tactless enough to point out that both girls in that case had been dead even before the parents had dialled 999. Time was said to be running out, and the police and volunteers were conducting intensive search operations in the surrounding countryside. There was speculation as to whether the families would make a media appeal that evening or whether they would wait until the next day. Because this was the one area they knew anything about, they got a whole ten minutes out of discussing the family’s media strategy before being interrupted with the news that their journalist on the spot had actually managed to interview a local. This proved to be a woman with an old-fashioned BBC accent who said naturally everyone was very shocked and that you don’t expect that sort of thing to happen in a place like Rushpool.

The news cycle reset at the top of the hour and I learnt that the tiny village of Rushpool in sleepy rural Herefordshire was the centre of a massive police search operation for two eleven-year-old girls, best friends, Nicole Lacey and Hannah Marstowe, who had been missing for over forty-eight hours. Neighbours were said to be shocked and time was running out.

I turned the radio off.

Nightingale had suggested getting off at Oxford Services and going via Chipping Norton and Worcester, but I had the satnav switched to fastest route and that meant hooking round via Bromsgrove on the M42 and M5 and only bailing at Droitwich. Suddenly I was driving on a series of narrow A-roads that twisted through valleys and over grey-stone humpbacked bridges before expiring west of the River Teme. From then on it was even twistier B-roads through a country so photogenically rural that I half expected to meet Bilbo Baggins around the next corner – providing he’d taken to driving a Nissan Micra.

A lot of the roads had hedgerows taller than I was and thick enough to occasionally brush the side of the car. You could probably pass within half a metre of a missing child and never know she was there – especially if she were lying still and quiet.

My satnav led me gently as a lamb through a switchback turn up onto a wooded ridge and then up a steep climb called Kill Horse Lane. At the top of the hill it guided me off the tarmac and onto an unpaved lane that took me further up while taking dainty little bites out of the underside of my car. I turned around a bend to find that the lane ran past a cottage and, beyond that, a round tower – three storeys high with an oval dome roof that gave it a weirdly baroque profile. The satnav informed me that I’d arrived at my destination, so I stopped the car and got out for a look.

The air was warm and still and smelt of chalk. The late morning sun was hot enough to create heat ripples along the dusty white track. I could hear birds squawking away in the nearby trees and a steady, rhythmic thwacking sound from just over the fence. I rolled up my sleeves and went to see what it was.

Beyond the fence the ground sloped away into a hollow where a two-storey brick cottage sat amongst a garden laid out in an untidy patchwork of vegetable plots, miniature polytunnels, and what I took to be chicken coops, roofed over with wire mesh to keep out predators. Despite being quite a recent build there was something wonky about the line of the cottage’s roof and the way the windows were aligned. A side door was open, revealing a hallway cluttered with muddy black Wellington boots, coats and other bits of outdoor stuff. It was messy, but it wasn’t neglected.

In front of the cottage was open space where two white guys were watching a third split logs into firewood. All three were dressed in khaki shorts and naked from the waist up. One of them, an older man than the others and wearing an army green bush hat, spotted me and said something. The others turned to look, shading their eyes. The older one waved and set off up the slope of the garden towards me.

‘Good morning,’ he said. He had an Australian accent and was much older than I’d first thought, in his sixties or possibly even older, with a lean body that appeared to be covered with wrinkled leather. I wondered if this was my guy.

‘I’m looking for Hugh Oswald,’ I said.

‘You’ve got the wrong house,’ said the man and nodded at the strange tower. ‘He lives in that bloody thing.’

One of the younger men strolled up to join us. Tattoos boiled from under his shorts and ran up over his shoulders and down his arms. I’d never seen a design like it before, interlaced vines, plants and flowers but drawn with an absolute precision – like the nineteenth-century botanical texts I’d seen in the Folly’s library. They were recent enough for the red, blues and greens to still be vivid and sharp. He nodded when he reached us.

‘All right?’ he asked – not an Aussie. His accent was English, regional, but not one I recognised.

Down by the cottage the third man hefted his axe and started whacking away again.

‘He’s here to see Oswald,’ said the older man.

‘Oh,’ said the younger. ‘Right.’

They both had the same eyes, a pale washed-out blue like faded denim, and there were similarities in the line of the jaw and the cheekbones. Close relatives for certain – father and son at a guess.

‘You look hot,’ said the older man. ‘Do you want a glass of water or something?’

I thanked them politely but refused.

‘Do you know if he’s in?’ I asked.

The older and younger men exchanged a look. Downslope the third man brought down his axe and – crack – split another log.

‘I expect so,’ said the older man. ‘This time of the year.’

‘I’d better get on then,’ I said.

‘Feel free to pop in on your way back,’ he said. ‘We don’t get that many people up here.’

I smiled and nodded and moved on. There was even a viewing platform enclosed by railings on top of the dome. It was the house of an eccentric professor from an Edwardian children’s book – C.S. Lewis would have loved it.

A copper awning over what I took to be the front door provided a nice bit of shade and I was just about to ring the disappointingly mundane electric doorbell, complete with unfilled-in nametag, when I heard the swarm. I looked back across the track and saw it, a cloud of yellow bees under the branches of one of the trees that lined the track. Their buzzing was insistent, but I noticed that they kept to a very particular volume of space – as if marking it out.

‘Can I help you?’ asked a voice from behind me.

I turned to find that a white woman in her early thirties had opened the door – she must have seen me through the window. She was short, wearing black cycling shorts and a matching yellow and black Lycra tank top. Her hair was a peroxide yellow fuzz, her eyes were dark, almost black, and her mouth extraordinarily small and shaped like a rosebud. She smiled to reveal tiny white teeth.

I identified myself and flashed my warrant card.

‘I’m looking for Hugh Oswald,’ I said.

‘You’re not the local police,’ she said. ‘You’re up from London.’

I was impressed. Most people don’t even register whether the photo on your warrant card matches your face – let alone notice the difference in the crest.

‘And who are you?’ I asked.

‘I’m his granddaughter,’ she said, and squared her stance in the doorway.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

If you’re a professional criminal this is where you lie smoothly and give a false name. If you’re just an amateur then you either hesitate before lying or tell me that I have no right to ask. If you’re just a bog-standard member of the public then you’ll probably tell me your name unless you’re feeling guilty, stroppy or terminally posh. I saw her thinking seriously about telling me to piss off, but in the end common sense prevailed.

‘Mellissa,’ she said. ‘Mellissa Oswald.’

‘Is Mr Oswald here?’ I asked

‘He’s resting,’ she said, and made no move to let me in.

‘I’d still better come in and see him,’ I said.

‘Have you got a warrant?’ she asked.

‘I don’t need one,’ I said. ‘Your granddad swore an oath.’

She stared at me in amazement and then her tiny mouth spread into a wide smile.

‘Oh my god,’ she said. ‘You’re one of them – aren’t you?’

‘May I come in?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said. ‘Fuck me – the Folly.’

She was still shaking her head as she ushered me into a stone-paved entrance hall – dim and cool after the summer sun – then into a half-oval sitting room smelling of potpourri and warm dust and back out via the middle of three French windows.

The window opened onto a series of landscaped terraces that descended down towards more woods. The garden was informal to the point of being chaotic, with no organised beds. Instead, clumps of flowers and flowering bushes were scattered in random patches of purple and yellow across the terraces.

Mellissa led me down a flight of steps to a lower terrace where a white enamelled wrought-iron garden table supported a bedraggled mint-green parasol shading matching white chairs, one of which was occupied by a thin grey-haired man. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, staring out over the garden.

Anyone can do magic, just like anyone can play the violin. All it takes is patience, hard graft and somebody to teach you. The reason more people don’t practise the forms and wisdoms, as Nightingale calls them, these days is because there are damn few teachers left in the country. The reason you need a teacher, beyond helping you identify vestigium – which is a whole different thing – is because if you’re not taught well you can easily give yourself a stroke or a fatal aneurism. Dr Walid, our crypto-pathologist and unofficial chief medical officer has a couple of brains in a jar he can whip out and show you if you’re sceptical.

So, like the violin, it is possible to learn magic by trial and error. Only unlike potential fiddlers, who merely risk alienating their neighbours, potential wizards tend to drop dead before they get very far. Knowing your limits is not an aspiration in magic – it’s a survival strategy.

As Mellissa called her granddad’s name I realised that this was the first officially sanctioned wizard, apart from Nightingale, I’d ever met.

‘The police are here to see you,’ Mellissa told him.

‘The police?’ asked Hugh Oswald without taking his eyes off the view. ‘Whatever for?’

‘He’s up from London,’ she said. ‘Especially to see you.’ Stressing the especially.

‘London?’ said Hugh, twisting in his chair to look at us. ‘From the Folly?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

He climbed to his feet. He’d never been a big man, I guessed, but age had pared him down so that even his modern check shirt and slacks couldn’t disguise how thin his arms and legs were. His face was narrow, pinched around the mouth, and his eyes were sunken and a dark blue.

‘Hugh Oswald,’ he said holding out his hand.

‘PC Peter Grant.’ I shook his hand but although his grip was firm, his hand trembled. When I sat down he sank gratefully into his own chair, his breathing short. Mellissa hovered nearby, obviously concerned.

‘Nightingale’s starling,’ he said. ‘Flown all the way up from London.’

‘Starling?’ I asked.

‘You are his new apprentice?’ he asked. ‘The first in . . .’ He glanced around the garden as if looking for clues. ‘Forty, fifty years.’

‘Over seventy years,’ I said, and I was the first official apprentice since World War Two. There had been other unofficial apprentices since then – one of whom had tried to kill me quite recently.

‘Well, god help you then,’ he said and turned to his granddaughter. ‘Let’s have tea and some of those . . .’ he paused, frowning, ‘bread things with the spongy tops, you know what I mean.’ He waved her off.

I watched her heading back towards the tower – her waist was disturbingly narrow and the flare of her hips almost cartoonishly erotic.

‘Pikelets,’ said Hugh suddenly. ‘That’s what they’re called. Or are they crumpets? Never mind. I’m sure Mellissa will be able to enlighten us.’

I nodded sagely and waited.

‘How is Thomas?’ asked Hugh. ‘I heard he managed to get himself shot again.’

I wasn’t sure how much Nightingale wanted Hugh to know about what we police call ‘operational matters’, a.k.a. stuff we don’t want people to know, but I was curious about how Hugh had found out. Nothing concerning that particular incident had made it into the media – of that I was certain.

‘How did you hear about that?’ I asked. That’s the beauty of being police – you’re not getting paid for tact. Hugh gave me a thin smile.

‘Oh, there’s enough of us left to still form a workable grapevine,’ he said. ‘Even if the fruit is beginning to wither. And since Thomas is the only one of us who actually does anything of note, he’s become our principal source of gossip.’

I made a mental note to wheedle the list of old codgers out of Nightingale and get it properly sorted into a database. Hugh’s ‘grapevine’ might be a useful source of information. If I’d been about four ranks higher up the hierarchy I’d have regarded it as an opportunity to realise additional intelligence assets through enhanced stakeholder engagement. But I’m just a constable so I didn’t.

Mellissa returned with tea and things that I would certainly call crumpets. She poured from a squat round teapot that was hidden underneath a red and green crocheted tea cosy in the shape of a rooster. Her father and I got the delicate willow pattern china cups while she used an ‘I’m Proud of the BBC’ mug.

‘Help yourself to sugar,’ she said, then perched herself on one of the chairs and started spreading honey on the crumpets. The honey came from a round little pot with ‘Hunny’ written on the side.

‘Do have some,’ she said as she placed a crumpet in front of her granddad. ‘It’s from our own bees.’

I hesitated with my cup of tea halfway to my lips. I lowered the cup back into its saucer and glanced at Hugh, who looked puzzled for a moment and then smiled.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Where are my manners? Please eat and drink freely with no obligation etcetera etcetera.’

‘Thank you,’ I said and picked up my teacup again.

‘You guys really do that?’ Mellissa asked her granddad. ‘I thought you made all that stuff up.’ She turned to me. ‘What exactly are you worried would happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I’m not in a hurry to find out.’

I sipped the tea. It was proper builder’s tea, thank god. I’m all for delicate flavour, but after a stint on the motorway you want something with a bit more bite then Earl Grey.

‘So, tell me, Peter,’ said Hugh. ‘What brings the starling so far from the Smoke?’

I wondered just when I’d become ‘the starling’ and why everyone who was anyone in the supernatural community had such a problem with proper nouns.

‘Do you listen to the news?’ I asked.

‘Ah,’ said Hugh and nodded. ‘The missing children.’

‘What’s that got to do with us?’ asked Mellissa.

I sighed – policing would be so much easier if people didn’t have concerned relatives. The murder rate would be much lower, for one thing.

‘It’s just a routine check,’ I said.

‘On granddad?’ asked Mellissa. I could see her beginning to get angry. ‘What are you saying?’

Hugh smiled at her. ‘It’s quite flattering really – they obviously regard me as strong enough to be a public menace.’

‘But children?’ said Mellissa, and glared at me.

I shrugged. ‘It really is just routine,’ I said. Just the same way we routinely put a victim’s nearest and dearest on the suspects list or grow suspicious of relatives who get all defensive when we make our legitimate inquiries. Is it fair? No. Is it warranted? Who knows. Is it policing? Ask a stupid question.

Lesley always said that I wasn’t suspicious enough to do the job properly, and tasered me in the back to drive the point home. So, yeah, I stay suspicious these days – even when I’m having tea with likable old buffers.

I did have a crumpet, though, because you can take professional paranoia too far.

‘You didn’t notice anything unusual in the last week or so?’ I asked.

‘I can’t say I have, but I’m not as perceptive as I once was,’ said Hugh. ‘Or rather, I should say, I am not as reliably perceptive as I was in my prime.’ He looked at his granddaughter. ‘How about you, my dear?’

‘It’s been unusually hot,’ she said. ‘But that could just be global warming.’

Hugh smiled weakly.

‘There you have it, I’m afraid,’ he said, and asked Mellissa if he might be permitted to have a second crumpet.

‘Of course,’ she said and placed one in front of him. Hugh reached out with a trembling hand and, after a few false starts, seized the crumpet with a triumphant wheeze. Mellissa watched with concern as he lifted it to his mouth, took a large bite and chewed with obvious satisfaction.

I realised I was staring, so I drank my tea – concentrating on the cup.

‘Ha,’ said Hugh once he’d finished chewing. ‘That wasn’t so difficult.’

And then he fell asleep – his eyes closing and his chin dropping onto his chest. It was so fast I started out of my chair, but Mellissa waved me back down.

‘Now you’ve worn him out,’ she said and despite the heat she retrieved a tartan blanket from the back of her granddad’s chair and covered him up to his chin.

‘I think it must be obvious even to you that he didn’t have anything to do with those kids going missing,’ she said.

I stood up.

‘Do you have something to do with it?’ I asked.

She gave me a poisonous look and I got a flash of it then, sharp and incontrovertible, the click-click of legs and mandibles, the flicker of wings and the hot communal breath of the hive.

‘What would I want with children?’ she asked.

‘How should I know?’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re planning to sacrifice them at the next full moon.’

Mellissa cocked her head to one side.

‘Are you trying to be funny?’ she asked.

Anyone can do magic, I thought, but not everyone is magical. There are people who have been touched by, let’s call it for the sake of argument, magic to the point where they’re no longer entirely people even under human rights legislation. Nightingale calls them the fae but that’s a catch-all term like the way the Greeks used the word ‘barbarian’ or the Daily Mail uses ‘Europe’. I’d found at least three different classification systems in the Folly’s library, all with elaborate Latin tags and, I figured, all the scientific rigour of phrenology. You’ve got to be careful when applying concepts like speciation to human beings, or before you know what’s happening you end up with forced sterilisations, Belsen and the Middle Passage.

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘I’ve given up funny.’

‘Why don’t you search our house, just to be on the safe side?’ she said.

‘Thank you very much – I will,’ I said, proving once again that a little sarcasm is a dangerous thing.

‘What?’ Mellissa took a step backwards and stared at me. ‘I was joking.’

But I wasn’t. The first rule of policing is that you never take anyone’s word for anything – you always check for yourself. Missing children have been found hiding under beds or in garden sheds on properties where the parents have sworn they’ve searched everywhere and why are you wasting time when you should be out there looking? For god’s sake it’s a disgrace the way ordinary decent people are treated as criminals, we’re the victims here and, no, there’s nothing in there. Just the freezer, there’s no point looking in there, why would they be in the freezer, you have no right . . . oh god look I’m sorry, she just slipped, I didn’t mean to hurt her, she just slipped and I panicked.

‘Always best to be thorough,’ I said.

‘I’m fairly certain you’re violating our human rights here,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said with the absolute certainty of a man who’d taken a moment to look up the relevant legislation before leaving home. ‘Your granddad took an oath and signed a contract that allows accredited individuals, i.e. me, access on demand.’

‘But I thought he was retired?’

‘Not from this contract,’ I said. It had actually said until death release you from this oath. The Folly – putting the old-fashioned back into good policing.

‘Why don’t you show me round?’ I said. And then I’ll know you’re not off somewhere stuffing body parts into the wood-chipper.

Number one Moomin House may have looked like a Victorian folly, but was in fact that rarest of all architectural beasts – a modern building in the classical style. Designed by the famous Raymond Erith, who didn’t so much invoke the spirit of the enlightenment as nick its floor plans. Apparently he’d built it in 1968 as a favour to Hugh Oswald who was a family friend, and it was beautiful and sad at the same time.

We started with the two little wings, one of which had been extended to house an additional bedroom and a properly-sized kitchen. As an architect Erith might have been a progressive classicist, but he shared with his contemporaries the same failure to understand that you need to be able to open the oven door without having to leave the kitchen first. An additional bedroom had been added, the no-nonsense brass bedstead augmented with a handrail, the floor covered in a thick soft carpet and any sharp corners on the antique oak dresser and wardrobe fitted with rounded plastic guards. It smelt of clean linen, potpourri and Dettol.

‘Granddad moved down to this room a couple of years ago,’ said Mellissa and showed me the brand new en suite bathroom with an adapted hip bath, lever taps and hand rails. She snorted when I popped back into the bedroom to check under the bed, but her humour evaporated when she realised I really was going to check the broom cupboards and the wood store.

A circular staircase with bare timber treads twisted up to the first floor, leading me to what had obviously been Hugh’s study before he shifted to downstairs. I’d expected oak bookshelves but instead half the circumference of the room was filled with pine shelves mounted on bare metal brackets. I recognised many of the books from the Folly’s own non-magical library, including an incredibly tatty volume of Histoire Insolite et Secrète des Ponts de Paris by Barbey d’Aurevilly. There were too many books to be contained by the shelves and they had spilled out into piles on the gateleg table that had obviously served as a desk, on the worn stuffed leather sofa, and any spare space on the floor. Many of these looked like local history, beekeeping guides and modern fiction. There were no magic books. In fact, nothing in Latin but the very old hardback editions of Virgil, Tacitus and Pliny. I recognised the Tacitus. It was the same edition Nightingale had given me.

It was all a bit short on missing children, so I had Mellissa show me up the stairs to her bedroom, which took up the whole of the top floor. There was a Victorian vanity and a Habitat bed and wardrobes and chests of drawers that were made from compressed and laminated chipboard. It was quite amazingly messy; every single drawer was open and from every single open drawer hung at least two items of clothing. Just the loose knickers would have caused my mum to do her nut, although she would have had some sympathy for the drifts of shoes piling up at the end of the bed.

‘If I’d known the police were coming,’ said Mellissa, ‘I’d have had a bit of a tidy.’

Even with all the windows open it was warm enough to pop beads of sweat on my back and forehead. There was also a sickly sweet smell, not horrible, not decay, but all-pervading. I saw that there was a ladder built into the wall and a hatch above it. Mellissa saw me looking and smiled.

‘Want to have a poke in the attic?’ she asked.

I was just about to say ‘of course’ when I became aware that the deep thrumming sound that hovered on the edge of audibility throughout the rest of the house was louder here and, predictably, coming from the attic.

I told her that, yes, I would like a quick look if it was all the same to her, and she handed me a wide-brimmed hat with a veil – a beekeeper’s hat.

‘You’re kidding me,’ I said, but she shook her head so I put it on and let her secure the ribbons under my chin. After a bit of rummaging in the drawers of the vanity Mellissa found a heavy torch with a vulcanised rubber sheath – she tested it, although in the sunlight it was hard to tell whether the old-fashioned incandescent bulb came on or not.

When I climbed up, a wave of sticky heat rolled out. I waited a moment, listening to the now much louder thrumming noise, but there was no threatening roar or sinister increase in pitch – it stayed as steady as before. I asked Mellissa what was causing it.

‘Drones,’ she said. ‘They basically have two jobs – banging the queen and keeping the hive at a constant temperature. Just move slowly and you’ll be fine.’

I climbed up into the warm gloom. The occasional bee flashed through the beam of my torch, but not the swarms that I’d feared. I turned my torch on the far end of the attic and saw the hive for the first time. It was huge, a mass of fluted columns and sculpted ridges that filled half the space. It was a wonder of nature – and as creepy as shit. And I personally stuck around just long enough to ensure there weren’t any colonists cemented into the walls – or children – and ducked out of there.

Mellissa trailed after me down the spiral stairs with a smug look on her face and followed me outside, more to make sure I was going than out of politeness. When I reached my car I realised that the cloud of bees had contracted down to a solid mass under one of the main branches. To my surprise, it was an ovoid shape that appeared to hang from the tree by a single narrow thread – just like the cartoon beehives that regularly got dropped on characters’ heads.

I asked Mellissa if it would stay on the tree.

‘It’s the queen,’ said Mellissa, and sniffed. ‘She’s just showing off. She’ll be back – if she knows what’s good for her.’

‘Do you know anything about these girls?’ I asked.

I thought I heard a pulse of noise from the house behind her – a deep thrumming sound that swelled and then faded into the background.

‘Not unless they bought some honey,’ she said.

‘You don’t keep the honey for yourself?’ I asked.

The afternoon sunlight caught the downy blond hair on her arms and shoulders.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘What would I do with that much honey?’

I didn’t leave immediately. Instead I leant against the back of the Asbo, where there was some shade, and wrote up my notes. It’s always a good idea to do this immediately after an interview because your memory is fresh and also because panicked suspects have been known to assume that the police have long gone and exit their front door carrying all sorts of incriminating stuff. Including, in one famous case, parts of a body. Before I started, though, I looked up the West Mercia channels and switched my Airwave handset over so I could listen in to the operation while I finished up.

A lot of journalists have access to an Airwave, or access to someone who has one, so in a high profile case the cop-speak and jargon can get very dense. Nobody wants to see their ‘inappropriate’ humour decorating the front page on a slow news day – that sort of thing can be a career killer. I could hear the operation going critical even as I finished up my notes. ACPO don’t chat over the Airwave, but it was clear that requests for assistance were now being routed through the Police National Information Coordination Centre (PNICC), commonly pronounced ‘panic’ – particularly if you’ve reached the stage of having to call it.

It wasn’t my operation, and if I was to travel any further off my manor they’d be speaking a different language, probably Welsh. And if West Mercia Police wanted my help then it would be co-ordinated through the PNICC and I wasn’t even sure what kind of mutual aid I’d be providing.

But you can’t walk away, can you? Not when it’s kids.

I called Nightingale and explained what I wanted to do. He thought it was a ‘capital idea’ and agreed to make the necessary arrangements.

Then I climbed into my boiling hot car and set my satnav to Leominster Police Station.

For a moment I thought I heard an angry cry come floating over the hills towards me, but it was probably something rural – a bird of some kind.

Yeah, definitely a bird, I told myself.

2 Mutual Aid

Big cities thin out at the edges. Detached houses give way to semis, then to terraces which then grow a couple of storeys before you either reach the historic old town or, more usually, what’s left of it after the one-two blow of aerial bombardment and post-war planning. In the countryside the towns start so suddenly that one second you’re amongst open fields, the next you’re looking at a collection of renovated early-modern townhouses. And then, before you even get a chance to discover whether that was really a genuine Tudor half-timbered building or a bit of late Victorian whimsy, you’re out the other side with an ugly red brick hypermarket filling your rear-view mirror.

Leominster, pronounced ‘Lemster’ in case you wondered, was a bit more interesting than that. And I probably would have taken a moment to enjoy its market square if the satnav hadn’t plonked me straight onto the bypass which did exactly what it said on the tin. The town was already behind me when I crossed a bridge back over the railway and spun off a roundabout into the sleepy-looking industrial park where the local nick was kept.

You put your green-field police stations on the outskirts of town for the same reason you built your supermarkets there – floor space and parking. My first proper nick was Charing Cross, smack in the heart of one of the busiest BOCUs in the Met – there we could just about cram all the IRVs, vans, Clubs and Vice covert units and sundry other pool cars into the garage and nobody under the rank of superintendent got a parking space.

But Leominster nick had two car parks, one for the public and one for police. And, I learnt later, its own helicopter landing pad. The building itself was a three-storey redbrick affair with an exuberant curve that made the far end look like a prow, so that from one side it looked like a jolly storybook boat that had grounded itself kilometres from the sea. The visitors’ car park was rammed solid with mid-range hatchbacks, satellite vans and a crowd of white people milling around aimlessly – the famous press pack, I realised. I took one look at them and drove around the block to the entrance to the police car park. To my eye this had a ludicrously low fence around it, easily scalable by any miscreant intent on committing mischief on constabulary property – I was not impressed, helicopter pad or not.

I turned into the automatic gate, leaned out of my window and pressed the button on the intercom mounted on a pole. I told the scratchy voice at the other end who I was, and waved my warrant card at the beady eye of the camera. There was an affirmative squawk and the gate rattled open. For a police car park it was suspiciously devoid of police vehicles, leaving just a couple of unmarked Vauxhalls and a slightly worse for wear Rover 800. It must have been all hands on deck for the search.

I parked up in a space away from the entrance where I reckoned I wasn’t going to get sideswiped by a returning carrier or prisoner transfer vehicle. Never underestimate the ability of a police driver to misjudge a corner when finally coming home from a twelve-hour shift.

A young white man was waiting for me by the back door. He was blond, with a broad open face and blue eyes. His suit, I noticed, looked tailored. But it was hard to tell since he’d obviously been wearing it for the last twenty-four hours straight. He was swigging from an Evian bottle which he lowered when he saw me, stuck out a friendly hand and introduced himself as DC Dominic Croft.

‘They’re expecting you,’ he said, but he didn’t say what for.

It was the cleanest nick I’d ever been in – it didn’t even have the distinctive smell of a lot of bodies working long shifts in heavy clothing that you expected in a working station. Eau de stab-vest, Lesley had used to call it. The place was painted exactly the same colour scheme as Belgravia and half-a-dozen other London nicks I’d been in – whoever was selling that particular shade of light blue must have been coining it.

‘This place is usually pretty empty,’ he said. ‘Normally it’s just the neighbourhood policing team.’

Dominic led me upstairs to the main offices where the air conditioning, such as it was, was failing to deal with the sheer mass of police. A couple of detectives looked up as we walked into the incident room, nodding at Dominic then pausing to give me a suspicious once-over before turning back to their work. They were all white and, between them and the press pack out the front, I suspected that on this case my diversity training had been wholly in vain.

Incident rooms during a major inquiry are rarely a barrel of laughs, but the atmosphere that day was grim, the faces of the detectives sweaty and intent. Missing kids are tough cases. I mean, murder is bad but at least the worst has already happened to the victim – they’re not going to get any deader. Missing kids come with a literal deadline, made worse by the fact that you don’t get to learn the timing until it’s too late.

Dominic knocked on a door with a rectangular metal plate marked LEARNING ZONE, opened it without waiting for a response, and went inside. I followed him into the sort of long, narrow room that exists primarily because the architect had a couple of metres left over when dividing up the floor space and didn’t know what else to do with it. A small window was open to its meagre health and safety-mandated maximum extent and a desk fan was pushing the warm air around. A desk ran along one wall and an athletic white man in an inspector’s uniform leant against it with his arms folded across his chest. Dominic introduced him as Inspector Charles, definitely not Charlie, Edmondson, who was geographic commander for northern Herefordshire, which meant that this was his patch and he didn’t seem that delighted to have me on it. Occupying the better of the two seats available was a short squared-off white man with an incongruously long face and pointed chin that looked as if he’d borrowed his features from someone taller and thinner and then refused to give them back. This was DCI David Windrow, senior investigating officer of Operation Manticore – the search for Hannah Marstowe and Nicole Lacey. He waved me to the other seat and I sat and adopted the appropriately earnest but slightly vacant look that is expected of lowly constables in these circumstances.

‘Apparently,’ said Windrow, ‘you’ve been up here on official business.’

‘Due diligence, sir.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I spoke to your Inspector. He said it was just a routine check.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And that you were volunteering to stay up here and lend a hand.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But you’re certain that there’s no . . .’ Windrow hesitated. ‘No Falcon aspect to this case.’

The police have a habit of taking a call sign and using it indiscriminately as a noun, a verb and, on special occasions, a burst of profanity. Trojan is firearms, Ranger is Diplomatic and Protection, and Falcon is what a certain DCI of my acquaintance likes to call ‘weird bollocks’. The call sign has been in use since the seventies, but it’s been getting more of an airing in the last year or two. This portends, depending on the canteen you sit down in, the dawning of the age of Aquarius, the End of Days or, just possibly, that the Folly now has at least one officer that knows how to use his Airwave properly.

Inspector Edmondson unfolded his arms and sighed.

‘So you’re not planning to continue a Falcon inquiry?’ he asked.

‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘I just want to help in any way I can.’

‘Apart from the obvious,’ said Windrow, ‘you got any experience in anything else?’

‘Just general policing, PSU, a bit of interrogation, and I’m qualified to use a taser.’

‘What about Family Liaison?’ asked Windrow.

‘I’ve seen it done,’ I said.

‘Do you think you could support an experienced FLO?’

I said I thought I could and Windrow and Edmondson exchanged looks. Edmondson didn’t look pleased, but then he nodded and they both looked back at me.

‘Okay, Peter,’ said Windrow. ‘If you want to help then we’d like you take over as second FLO to one of the families – the Marstowes. That way we can reassign Richard, the officer taking that role now, to the search.’

‘He’s POLSA,’ said Edmondson by way of explanation. A search specialist.

‘If it’ll help,’ I said.

‘We tend to double up roles out here,’ said Windrow. ‘We’re spread a bit thin.’

It’s a good thing that the sheep are all so law abiding, I thought but did not say, proving that my diversity training hadn’t been wasted after all.

‘We probably don’t need to tell you this,’ said Edmondson. ‘But keep clear of the media. Everything is being routed through the press officer.’

‘Any of those bastards asks you a question,’ said Windrow, ‘you direct them there – got it?’

I nodded keenly to show that my egg sucking was indeed proficient and up to date. We tied up a couple of bureaucratic loose ends and then I was dismissed into the care of DS Dominic Croft who was now charged with getting me to Rushpool.

Dominic, being a human being not a satnav, guided me through the town proper – the centre of which boasted one of those completely unnecessary one-way systems that were so beloved of a certain generation of town planners. Most of it was Victorian or Regency terraces crowded close onto narrow pavements with the occasional half-timbered chunk of the seventeenth century plonked down amongst them.

Dominic managed to restrain himself from asking the obvious question until we were safely back in the countryside.

‘So ghosts and magic are real?’ he said.

I’d had that question enough times to have an answer ready. ‘There are things that fall outside the parameters of normal policing,’ I said. I find you get two types of police, those that don’t want to know and those that do. Unfortunately, dealing with things you don’t want to know about is practically a definition of policing.

‘So “yes”,’ said Dominic.

‘There’s weird shit,’ I said. ‘And we deal with the weird shit, but normally it turns out that there’s a perfectly rational explanation.’ Which is often that a wizard did it.

‘What about aliens?’ asked Dominic.

Thank god for aliens, I thought, muddying the water since 1947. I’d once asked Nightingale the same question and he’d answered ‘Not yet’. So I suppose if they were to suddenly turn up they’d be part of our remit. But I hoped they didn’t turn up anytime soon. It’s not like we don’t have enough work to do already.

‘Not that I know about,’ I said.

‘So you don’t rule them out?’ he said.

We both had the windows down as far as they would go to try and pick up whatever breeze we could.

‘Do you believe in aliens?’ I asked.

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’

‘It’s a big universe,’ I said. ‘It’s not going to be totally empty, is it?’

‘So you do believe in aliens,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But not that they’re visiting us.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why would they want to travel all that way?’ I asked.

We passed through an elongated village that Dominic identified as Luston. Beyond that, the road narrowed and the dense green hedgerows blocked out the view on either side.

‘Do you think someone snatched them?’ I said, before Dominic could ask any more awkward questions.

‘From two separate households?’ he said. ‘Unlikely. Lured them out, maybe.’

‘Internet grooming?’

‘Nothing on their computers. At least nothing I’ve been told about.’

‘Someone they knew? Or met locally?’

‘Let’s hope it’s a local,’ said Dominic.

Because if it was a local then there’d be a connection. And if there was a connection then sooner or later it could be dug out by the investigation. In the case of Soham the police had their eye on Ian Huntley, the main suspect, from the moment he opened his gob and admitted to being the last person to see the victims alive. Without a connection it came down to hoping they were spotted by the public or came home of their own accord. Or they might be found by the ever-widening search programme – but we didn’t want to think of that.

Dominic asked where I was staying and I asked him what was available.

‘Today?’ he asked. ‘Bugger all. It’s all full of media.’

‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Do you know anywhere?’

‘You can stay in my mum’s cowshed,’ he said.

‘Her cowshed?’

‘Don’t worry. There’s no cows in it.’

I’d have looked for a bit more clarification, but I turned a corner and had to brake suddenly to avoid a white TV satellite van which was trying to park in a gap between a Range Rover and a sleazy-looking maroon Polo. I edged past into the Y-junction that formed the heart of the village, but there were so many media vehicles it was hard to see the houses.

‘Lock up your sheep,’ muttered Dominic. ‘The circus is in town.’

He directed me left again, up a lane that ran up a slope.

‘Church is that side,’ said Dominic. ‘Rectory on your left, pub is back down the way we came.’

What I could see of the village was free of rubbish but untidy, long yellow grass obscuring the fences, bushes thrusting out into the lane, and green banks overgrown with white flowers. Trees overhung the road by the church and the air beneath them was hot and still and smelled of overheated car. We threaded our way between another satellite van and a faded blue Transit with a vehicle hire logo on the side. I asked where the actual press might be.

‘Going by past form, the senior reporters are in the pub, the photographers are outside the houses and the junior reporters are running around trying to get the locals to talk to them.’

‘Is there anywhere for us to park?’

‘We’ll tuck into my mum’s and walk from there,’ he said.

Dominic’s mum lived in the last of a row of red brick council houses, none of which were still owned by the council, at the north edge of the village. Hers was the only bungalow, set back from the lane with a gravel drive and a front lawn that needed mowing. I followed Dominic’s directions and parked in a space by the kitchen door. He told me to grab my stuff.

‘We’ll dump it in the cowshed and head over to the hall,’ he said.

The cowshed was a sturdy one-storey, flat-roofed rectangle built from sandy coloured brick. It stood at the far end of large and unkempt back garden that ended in a barbed-wire fence beyond which stretched a strangely lumpy pasture bounded by an old stone wall. It looked more like a garage extension then a cowshed but when we walked around the back I saw that it had a wide patio window giving a view over the field. Dominic slid open the door to reveal a furnished room with a bed, desk, a flatscreen TV and a walled-off corner that probably held a shower and toilet.

‘You guys must really love your cows,’ I said.

‘Famous for it,’ said Dominic.

The inside was as hot as a locked car, so I quickly dumped my stuff by the bed and closed the door. Dominic locked up and handed me the key but, instead of going back out by way of the drive, we headed for the fence where a couple of grey plastic crates and a tractor tire formed a makeshift stile.

‘My mum got it into her head that you didn’t need planning permission for agricultural buildings,’ said Dominic, climbing over the stile with practised ease. ‘She wanted to rent it out as a B&B.’

I went over carefully. I didn’t want to turn up to my first briefing with a hole in my jeans.

‘Is it true about the planning permission?’ I asked.

‘I think you’re supposed to be a farmer as well,’ said Dominic. ‘You’ll be the first guest.’

I followed Dominic along the verge of the field which, as far as I could tell, ran the other side of the thick hedgerow that lined the lane leading out of the village. You could hear vehicles passing on the other side but you couldn’t see them at all. I’d been right. Searching for missing kids in this landscape must be a nightmare. Judging from the compacted soil this was a popular back route for the villagers. On those rare times I’d ventured out into the British countryside as a kid I’m pretty sure I was told not to walk across people’s fields.

‘This isn’t a public right of way, is it?’ I asked.

‘Nah,’ said Dominic, ‘but this is an old orchard.’

Which explained the stone perimeter wall, I thought.

‘The council bought it up to build houses,’ he said, of which his mum’s had been the last. They had also allocated a section to a new parish hall stroke community centre and financed that by selling off the rest to a developer.

‘He land-banked it in the hope he could change the terms of the planning permission,’ said Dominic. Apparently the new plan was to build luxury houses aimed at incomers – it all sounded depressingly familiar – but the villagers had managed to block his application.

‘They found a loophole,’ he said.

I asked what the loophole was, but Dominic said he made a point of not asking.

‘I get enough environmental distress from the boyfriend without wanting to get it from my mum as well,’ he said.

The parish hall was about a hundred metres up from the cowshed. It was an odd building with wooden shingle walls and a gambrel roof that looked like it had been shipped over from the Midwest of America and then, presumably, assembled by the Amish synchronised barn-building team. There was an asphalt parking space out the front which was empty except for a shiny new Vauxhall Vivaro in West Mercia Battenberg livery. A lone female PSCO stood guard by the road to make sure nobody else parked there and kept an eye on the scattering of press clustered outside the front entrance. Them being out front was the reason that Dominic had taken us in the back way.

The hall was just that, a big room that was open to the rafters with a stage at one end and doors off to a kitchen area and toilets. According to Dominic it was where you had birthday parties, amateur dramatics and the dreaded young farmers’ disco. ‘Feared for miles around,’ he told me. It was currently being used as a staging area for the search for Nicole and Hannah, which was why the media was outside. And since every available body was out searching it meant it was deserted. Sausage bags and rucksacks were piled in the corners, shrink-wrapped pallets of bottled water were piled under trestle tables on which Styrofoam cups and jars of instant coffee were stacked. Two Ordnance Survey maps had been pinned to a cork notice board, overlapping so that the areas matched up, and covered in plastic. Arrows, loops and whorls had been drawn on in marker pen – the search so far. The air was warm and still and smelt of creosote.

‘Hello,’ called Dominic. ‘Anyone here?’

‘Just a second,’ called a woman from behind the door to the toilets.

I had a look at the map while we waited. A modern search isn’t just a matter of marking off a grid and working through it one by one. These days you section it off by probability – where your subject could have got to under their own power in the time available. So the search area grows like frost on a spider web, shooting down roads and tracks, spreading out in sheets over fields and gardens.

The door to the toilets opened and a fat woman in a beige cardigan stepped out. She had a round face with a milky complexion and dark brown hair pulled into a no-nonsense pony tail. To go with the cardigan she had a pair of glasses dangling around her neck on a pink strap, knee-length brown skirt and sensible court shoes. She was aiming for dependable parish busybody but it was undermined by sharp blue eyes which were constantly darting back and forth – taking everything in. Proper copper eyes, those.

Still, she did a good professional bustle when she saw me and shook my hand and introduced herself as DS Allison Cole.

‘You must be Peter Grant,’ she said. ‘Thank you for volunteering. Although god knows what the family are going to make of you.’

We sat down by one of the trestle tables. DS Cole yanked a bottle of Evian out of a pallet and offered it to me – I shook my head. She opened it and drank gratefully.

‘We’re lucky with the weather,’ she said. ‘If they’re out there in the open they’re not going to die of exposure.’

‘Hottest summer in living memory,’ said Dominic. ‘You should be right at home.’

I didn’t even bother to give him the look – it’s not like he’d have understood what it meant anyway.

‘Where are you staying?’ asked Cole.

‘I’m putting him in me mum’s cowshed,’ said Dominic.

‘I thought the council wanted that knocked down?’ said Cole.

‘They haven’t got round to it yet,’ he said.

‘At least it will be a short commute,’ said Cole. ‘And it’ll be good to have somebody near at hand overnight. Means I can get back to my kids.’

‘You think this is going to drag out?’ I asked.

‘Who can tell?’ she said, which meant yes.

‘Do you think we’re going to get them back?’

‘I hope so,’ she said, which meant no.

She took another swig of water and wiped her forehead with the back of her arm.

‘We’d better get you briefed and introduced,’ she said.

The Marstowes lived in one half of a semi built in the watered-down neo-Georgian style that was de rigueur for post-war rural housing developments. Situated at the end of a cul-de-sac, it was, Dominic told me, the last actual council-owned council house in the village. All the rest having been bought up by their tenants in the 1980s and 1990s and then sold on to wealthy incomers.

‘Except for your mum,’ I said.

‘She didn’t want to sell,’ he said. ‘Now of course she looks like a bloody genius – prices being what they are.’

Judging from the decomposing grey VW Rabbit and the empty Calor Gas bottles amongst the long unmown grass of the front garden, the Marstowes were either hoping for a spot on the next Channel 4 deprivation documentary or a two-page spread in the Daily Mail. Although to clinch the Mail story they’d probably have to adopt a Romanian asylum seeker or something. On the other side of a box hedge the front garden of the other half of the semi was a neat lawn without flower beds. The windows on that side were closed up and doors were shut tight, and it had a blank empty aspect. The owner-occupier, a senior lecturer at Birmingham University had been amongst the first locals to be TIEed after the girls went missing. That’s Traced, Identified and Eliminated, in case you were wondering.

‘At his holiday villa in Tuscany,’ Dominic had told me. He’d been there since the end of the July.

‘A Tuscan villa and a weekend house in the country?’ I’d asked. ‘How much does he get paid?’

Apparently he’d planned to move his family out to Rushpool, but his wife had divorced him when she found him with an undergraduate discussing Borges’ pivotal role in the development of post-colonial literature with the aid of a feather duster, a latex vest and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Brownie-flavoured ice cream.

I asked whether the wife or the undergraduate had joined him in Tuscany.

‘Wife and kids,’ Dominic said. ‘And the undergraduate.’

The semi stood at the far end of a cul-de-sac which branched off the village lane. The media, I noticed, observed a sort of unofficial line of control – never pushing their way beyond the junction. Dominic said that they’d been good about respecting the family’s privacy – so far. I wondered how long that would last.

The front door on the Marstowes’ side was propped open with a brick and from inside I heard children screaming. Dominic knocked a couple of times on the door, tried the bell which didn’t work, and knocked again. He looked at me and shrugged. The screaming got louder. At least one toddler, I thought, and a couple of older kids. One was definitely seriously aggravated about not being allowed out of the house.

Dominic gave up and was about to step inside when a white boy of about nine came charging up the hall and skidded to a halt at the sight of us. He was dressed in a green T-shirt with a cartoon picture of Psy on the front and clutching a pink plastic cricket bat. He stared at Dominic, then at me, bit his lip in consternation and then ran back the way he’d come.

‘Ryan,’ said Dominic. ‘The eldest boy.’

We followed Ryan into the house.

Given the hillbilly front garden, the inside of the house was surprisingly tidy, or at least as tidy as a house with four kids under the age of twelve is likely to get without a full-time professional cleaning staff. I followed Dominic down the short hall and into the kitchen at the back and was introduced to Joanne Marstowe.

She was a small woman with a narrow upturned nose, blue eyes and Midwich Cuckoo-coloured hair. She was slender for someone with four kids. The youngest, Ethan, aged one, was balanced in the crook of one arm. He had the same white-blond hair as his mother and appeared at some point in the recent past to have submerged his face in a bowl of Heinz mashed apple and pork casserole. I could see the open pot on the kitchen table and the high chair with an upturned blue and pink flowered bowl on the eating tray. Ryan had taken up a position behind his mum and now peered cautiously around her body to check we weren’t after him. A third child, who by a process of elimination had to be Mathew, aged seven, whose sandy hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat, sat quietly at the table with the air of a child who had been subjected to more than reasonable punishment as specified by section 58 of the Children’s Act 2004.

‘Hello, Joanne,’ said Dominic.

Joanne glared at him, noticed me and turned back to Dominic.

‘Who the fuck is this?’ she asked.

‘This is Peter,’ said Dominic. ‘He’s going to be working with Allison Cole and you.’

‘Where’re you from?’ she asked me.

‘London,’ I said, which seemed to please her.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘It’s about time they took this seriously. Have a seat.’

Mathew watched me sit down with wide suspicious eyes. Joanne asked Dominic if he was staying but he made his excuses and left, though not before giving me a surreptitious thumbs up from the door.

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

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll make it, if you like?’

‘God, no,’ she said and thrust Ethan into my arms. ‘But if you can deal with the monster I’d appreciate it.’

I may be an only child, but I’ve got a lot of cousins. And their parents shared my mum’s conviction that once you’re big enough to pick up a toddler unaided, you’re big enough to babysit while the adults drink tea and discuss the important issues of the day. Ethan gave a startled yelp as I plonked him on my lap, his overheated pink face unclenching as curiosity got the better of his upset. There was kitchen roll on the table. I grabbed a couple of sheets and wiped most of the food off his face. He was a sturdy little boy and a bit heavy to be hanging off his mum’s hip. I wondered if he was catching the vibe from the adults around him.

‘Have you got anyone who can help out?’ I asked. ‘Family?’

Joanne looked up from the sink where she was triaging the washing up.

‘Lots of family,’ she said. ‘If you’d been here earlier you’d have been tripping over them. They were very keen to help, so keen that I had to get rid of them – at least for a bit.’

I watched as she paused in front of the kitchen cupboard and nervously tapped her finger on the counter.

‘Mummy,’ said Ryan, tugging at her leg.

‘Shut up,’ she told him. ‘I’m trying to remember what the fuck I’m supposed to be doing. Tea, right?’

‘Or coffee, if that’s easier.’

‘Which one?’ asked Joanne testily.

‘Coffee,’ I said.

‘Can I have coffee too?’ asked Mathew.

Which meant that Ryan wanted coffee as well, but in the end they both settled for a can of Coke each and a couple of mini Swiss rolls – the nation’s parental bribe of choice. I did my part by bouncing Ethan up and down and making weird noises until he was too confused to be upset. By the time my cup of own-brand instant was plonked down in front of me, Ryan and Mathew had wandered off into the adjacent living room to watch cartoons. Joanne slumped down in the chair across the table from me and put her face in her hands.

‘Jesus,’ she said.

Ethan burped ominously and I stopped jiggling him, just in case. There are limits to the sacrifices I’m willing to make in the name of community policing.

‘When’s your husband getting back?’ I asked.

Joanne raised her head and sighed.

‘He won’t be back until it’s dark,’ she said. ‘They’ll probably have to drag him back – he can’t sit around waiting, he’d go mad.’

‘What about you?’

‘I don’t have any choice there, do I?’ she said. ‘Vicky asked if I wanted to wait it out at her house. I mean it wasn’t like she was going to come down and “wait it out” here, was it? Have you seen her house? Can you imagine this lot . . .’ She made a gesture that encompassed her children and the state of her kitchen. ‘No, if she wants company . . . It’s not like she’s short of friends.’ She gave me an odd look. ‘Are you lot trained to keep your mouth shut? Because I seem to be doing most of the entertaining here.’

’We’re supposed to unobtrusive,’ I said.

‘Oh, yeah? All the better to let us incriminate ourselves?’

As it happened, exactly that – amongst all the other roles an FLO is supposed to perform.

‘Trained that way,’ I said. ‘The idea is not to make your life any more difficult than it has to be.’

She laughed at that, a short mirthless bark. Then she made eye contact and held it.

‘Do you think I’m going to get my daughter back?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Why?’

Because you’ve got to have hope and no news is good news. And because the best you can do is sound like you’re being forthright and sincere. If they get their kids back they won’t even remember what you said and if they don’t – then nothing else will be important.

I was trying to come up with a convincing lie when I was saved by a voice from the hallway.

‘Jo? Are you in?’ Male, adult, public school.

‘In the kitchen,’ called Joanne.

We heard him pause at the living room door and ask the boys if they were bearing up.

‘Chin up,’ he told them, and then he came into the kitchen.

He was taller than me, mid-forties, dressed in cargo pants and green wellies, and a blue and gold rugby shirt that wasn’t loose enough to disguise a little pot belly. He had broad shoulders that were going to fat, brown eyes, a narrow nose and a big forehead. He was about to say something to Joanne when he copped sight of me.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

Joanne introduced us. He was Derek Lacey – father of the other missing child. He’d been out with the searchers, but they were losing the light.

‘I just wanted to be sure you were okay,’ he said.

‘I’m about what you’d expect,’ she said.

Derek pulled a seat out and placed it at the end of the table before sitting down. About as close as he could to interposing himself between me and Joanne without actually sitting cross-legged on the table. I wondered if he was even aware he’d done it. Joanne asked if he wanted a coffee – he asked for something stronger.

‘Vicky doesn’t approve,’ he told me as Joanne snagged a half-bottle of Bell’s off a suitably child-inaccessible shelf at the top of the cupboard. ‘But by god I need a drink right now.’

He got it in an orange drinking glass with a picture of a happy octopus on it. The Bell’s went firmly and decisively back on the shelf. Derek finished his in two gulps. Inspired, Ethan screwed up his face and started to cry until he was pacified with orange squash.

‘Where’s Andy?’ asked Joanne.

‘He was with a different party,’ said Derek. ‘I think they were down towards Bircher.’ His eyes flicked up to the cupboard where the Bell’s was tucked safely away, towards Joanne, and then back to me.

‘I don’t wish to sound rude,’ he said. ‘But I’d like a word in private with Joanne.’

I glanced at Joanne for confirmation – she gave a slight nod.

‘Of course,’ I said and offered him Ethan just to see what the reaction would be. Derek scooped up the toddler with practised ease and Ethan didn’t seem to have any objections – although he could have been distracted by the orange squash.

I could feel them waiting for me to be gone all the way down the hall and out the front door. I considered doubling back and seeing if I could listen in, but I figured that would have been a little bit too Enid Blyton – even for me.

Rushpool was situated in a side valley that ran roughly northwest to south-east following, I learnt later from an impeccable source, the line of the Rushy Brook – one of the many streams that converged further down the valley with the Ridgemoor Brook before meeting the Lugg at Leominster. Hydraulically speaking, it’s actually more complicated than that. But since I fell asleep during that part of the explanation I can’t inflict it on you. Although it was still early evening the sun had already fallen below the ridge behind the Marstowes’ house in a glare of smoky orange and the village was thrown into cooling shadow. I could hear the pub crowd murmur of the media scrum – still waiting at the entrance to the cul-de-sac – and see the glowing tips of their e-cigarettes and occasional camera flashes. I doubted Nightingale was that keen on me getting my face on the news, so I ducked sideways to guarantee that I was hidden by another box hedge. Then I called DS Cole to let her know I was out of the house.

She told me to stay close in case they called me back in. ‘Or a major domestic kicks off.’ I didn’t get a chance to ask her whether she thought that was likely. The search teams were going to be out until nightfall, but DCI Windrow would be holding a briefing for the investigation team for the next hour or so. Until then I was the man on the spot.

‘I’ll be back after the briefing to talk to the family,’ Cole said. ‘There’s likely to be a press conference tomorrow morning. If there is, I’ll deal with the family. Windrow wants you available in case some actions come up – Dominic will let you know.’

After she hung up I checked through the hedge to see if the media had eased off yet. As I watched, a shudder seemed to run through the pack, then those on the left hand edge broke away and headed up the lane – they were quickly followed by more and more of their peers until the whole herd had thundered after them. A few stragglers armed with telephoto lenses were left to guard the cul-de-sac. I slouched over in my best nothing-but-us-cockney, or at least in their case probably mockney, geezers-together manner and asked where everyone had gone.

‘Leominster,’ said a photographer with ginger dreadlocks and freckles. ‘In case the local plod make an announcement afterwards.’

They see me and they know I’m police, I thought. But it just doesn’t register with them – not really. Which I admit can be handy at times.

‘What’s the local like?’ I asked.

‘The Swan?’ he said and bobbed his head from side to side. ‘A bit foodie but a good range of beers.’

The Swan in the Rushes was not what I expected from a country pub, although it has to be said that my expectations were largely drawn from my mum’s prolonged addiction to Emmerdale in the 1990s. Situated at the bottom of the village, beside the pond that presumably gave the place its name – not that I could see any rushes – it was a squat late-Victorian building that had originally been built to replace the old water mill just in time for electrification to render it obsolete. It had quickly been converted to a pub misleadingly named the Old Mill before being bought and renamed by the current owner. He introduced himself to me as Marcus Bonneville and told me that he was originally from Shropshire but had made his pile doing something unspecified in London before deciding to return to the country.

People shouldn’t be non-specific about where they made their money, not in front of police. The only reason I didn’t make a note of his name to do an IIP check later was because I was fairly certain that Windrow’s mob had done that on day one – probably before breakfast. When dealing with the law, having a mysterious past is contra-indicated.

He had taste, though, and instead of decking the pub out with the usual olde worlde accoutrements he’d gone for a rather classy Art Deco styling with blond walnut dining tables with matching chairs and circular Perspex light fittings hanging from the ceiling. The mahogany bar had rounded corners and brass detailing and there were framed vintage travel posters on the walls advertising impossibly sun-kissed destinations – Llandudno, Bridlington and Bexhill-on-Sea. All it needed was a murdered heiress and Hercule Poirot would have felt right at home. The cooking was a bit fancy, and while I’m all for transparency in the food chain I’m really not that bothered about precisely which breed of cattle from what particular herd had given its life to make a six-ounce fillet steak served with peppercorn sauce, grilled field mushroom, tomato and chunky chips plus a half a cider for a twenty and change.

I was contemplating an Italian style bread and butter pudding with mocha ice cream when the press pack started rolling in the front door, so I ducked out the back with my glass of Bulmer’s in hand. This led me out into a scruffy gravel parking area with a charming view of the wheelie bins and the kitchen doors, which had been left open to let the cool air in. As I finished my cider I watched the staff, in full chef’s whites, gearing up for the post-briefing rush. Marcus would be doing well out of the crisis – it’s an ill wind, and all that.

The sun was behind the ridge by then and it was almost full dark. Over the top of the kitchen clatter and the voices in the bar I made out the thump of a helicopter travelling low and fast to the south. The search was winding up for the night.

I called Nightingale and told him where I’d be staying – he asked how long I thought I’d be there.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But West Mercia is digging in for the long haul – I don’t think they think this is going to end well.’

‘I see,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’ll arrange to have some essentials sent up.’

‘There’s a couple of bags in my room,’ I said. ‘One under the bed. The other should be in the wardrobe.’

‘I’ll get Molly to see to it tonight,’ said Nightingale, which should have set off alarm bells then and there.

We were interrupted by a call from DS Cole who said that I could consider myself off duty but on-call until dawn the next morning, when search operations would resume. Once I’d signed off with Cole I asked Nightingale if he had any advice.

‘Keep your eyes open,’ said Nightingale. ‘And do your best.’

The village had no street lamps but enough light spilt out from the houses to light my way up the hill. I slipped past the photographers still on guard at the entrance to the cul-de-sac and up to Dominic’s mum’s bungalow. The lights were on behind net curtains and I could hear the TV inside. I stumbled over something painfully solid left on the path around the side of the building and sensed rather than saw the cowshed as a block of lighter shadow in the darkness. I carefully worked my way to the front. I was fumbling for the key when I looked up and saw the sky for the first time.

When I was very young my mum headed back to Sierra Leone with suitcases full of presents and trunks filled with enough ‘as new’ clothing to keep a branch of Oxfam in stock for a year and a half. As an afterthought, and probably to secure the additional baggage allowance, she took me with her. I don’t remember much of that trip but Mum has several albums filled exclusively with pictures of me looking in turn solemn and terrified as I am manhandled by a succession of relatives. One thing I do remember is looking up at the night sky and seeing that it was crossed by a river of stars.

I saw the same thing that night, a braided stream of light arching over my head while a quarter moon cruised the horizon. For a moment I thought I smelt a sweet slightly fermented scent and the moonlight tricked me into thinking that the empty field behind Dominic’s mum’s garden was filled with trees. But as soon as I got the lights on in the cowshed they were gone.

3 Operational Flexibility

The sun came up before six the next morning. I lay on top of the duvet and watched blades of light pierce the gaps where the curtains met the walls. I’d left my Airwave on the pillow beside me all night and had heard the search teams up and chattering along with the dawn chorus. It was day three and the girls were still missing. I wondered what the fuck I was doing.

In the absence of coffee, I had a shower, and, by the time I was dressed, Dominic had texted me to say that he was on his way. The air was still fresh but the sun was already sucking up the moisture from the fields and you didn’t need to be chewing on a straw to know it was going to be another hot day.

Dominic tooled up five minutes later in a ten-year-old Nissan pickup truck that had been painted a non-standard khaki, dipped in dried mud up to the wheel arches and then randomly smacked with a sledgehammer to give it that Somali Technical look. I found myself checking to see if there was a mount for a fifty-calibre machine gun in the back.

‘It’s the boyfriend’s,’ said Dominic. ‘He got it second-hand.’

‘Who from?’ I asked. ‘Al Shabaab?’

Dominic gave me a blank look and then asked if I understood about ‘mates’.

I nodded. I knew about mates, people from before your attestation as a constable was even a thought in the mind of your career adviser. Some of them are going to break the law and some of those are going to expect you to look the other way. Unless you’re a total hard-hearted bastard there’ll be at least one who you think you’ve got an obligation to. Someone you’re willing to let slide, or at the very least stand them a pint when they finish a stretch inside. Every copper I know has a mate like that. They’re an embarrassment, a pain – and, if you’re really unlucky, a sackable offence.

Inside the cab the seats were patched and smelt of overheated dog.

‘Well, you see, I’ve got this mate who’s found something that might be relevant to the search,’ said Dominic as he deftly steered the massive four by four up past the village hall and onto what laughingly passes as a main road in Herefordshire. ‘Only I can’t go through the normal channels because she’s a bit of an addict.’

And a mate.

‘So if we find something?’ I said.

‘You can say it was your idea.’

‘My idea?’

‘Something suitably weird.’

‘That’s a bit presumptuous, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘Presumptuous is my middle name,’ said Dominic.

A kilometre further along we reached a crossroad where a crowd of people were assembled. Most of them were dressed in shorts or army trousers, had knapsacks slung over their shoulders and were wearing hats. I noticed that a few of them had Airwave sets clipped to their belts. Dominic slowed down and exchanged greetings with a couple before heading off again. I spotted Derek Lacey on the fringes of the group – looking grim.

‘Volunteers,’ said Dominic.

Volunteers are good news and bad news in a search. Good because they allow you to cover more ground and have local knowledge. Bad because no copper likes to take a civilian’s word that somewhere has been searched properly – we’re superstitious that way.

Another couple of kilometres further down the road we came to another crossroad, this one marked with a tall Celtic cross in grey stone – a war memorial, at a guess – where Dominic turned right into a narrow tree-lined lane that climbed towards the top of the ridge. I wondered if this was the same ridge as the Bee House had sat on, but the cell coverage was too intermittent for me to check the location on my phone.

‘School Wood,’ Dominic said when I asked where we were going. The school in question being a posh independent school we’d actually passed on the drive over. Not that they owned it anymore – it was National Trust property now, part of the Croft Castle Estate.

In places the lane was so narrow that leaves and twigs brushed the sides of the Nissan and Dominic was careful to slow down whenever we approached a blind corner.

‘Tractors?’ I asked.

‘Tractors,’ he said. ‘Minicabs, horses, Tesco vans, cows – you never know what you’re going to meet around a corner here.’

The entrance to the woods was marked by a wooden five-bar gate with a green National Trust sign on it. Dominic stayed in the Nissan while I got out to open it and let him through. I closed the gate behind him and, because I remembered my Country Code lessons from school trips, I made sure the latch was secure. Once I’d climbed back inside Dominic set off again up a rough track that curved into a forest of dark conifers. The Nissan made easy work of the flinty track bed, which explained why Dominic had chosen it for today’s trip. My new Asbo would have been scraping its axles – some of the ruts were that deep.

The track forked and Dominic took the right-hand turn for another hundred metres or so until we reached a place where the greyish brown trunks of felled trees had been stacked in a pyramid by the track. A pale face peered suspiciously around the end of the stack as we drew up.

‘That’s Stan,’ said Dominic as his friend emerged from hiding.

‘Stan?’ I asked.

‘Short for Samantha.’

Stan was about average height, but an habitual stoop made her look shorter. She had brown hair, deep-set eyes, a snub nose, thin lips and a receding chin. As well as the stoop there was a noticeable slackness to the right side of her face. Result of an accident when she was a teenager, Dominic told me later. ‘Jumped off the back of a quad bike when she was seventeen,’ he said. When I asked why she’d jumped, Dominic just said that they’d all been very drunk at the time.

‘Who’s this?’ asked Stan. She was dressed in a blue boiler suit with the top half undone and tied around her waist by the arms, and a grubby purple T-shirt with the OCP logo on it. If I’d met her while on patrol in London I’d have tagged her on general principles, but she wouldn’t have stood out. I realised that out here in the sticks I didn’t know what was normal. Maybe everybody dressed like that.

‘This is Peter,’ said Dominic. ‘He’s up from London.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ The words came out slowly, as if Stan was pissed and having to concentrate to speak clearly. I wondered just how badly she’d come off that bike.

‘Are you going to show us what you found, or what?’ asked Dominic.

Stan stared at me for a moment – her eyes were a pale grey and her right eyelid had a noticeable droop.

‘What about him?’ asked Stan.

‘Peter’s from the Met,’ said Dominic. ‘When he’s finished up here he’s going straight home. He’s not interested in any of your little crimes and misdemeanours.’

Stan’s head flopped forward as if it had suddenly got too heavy for her neck.

‘Okay,’ she said.

After about ten seconds of us all standing there like Muppets I looked at Dominic, who shrugged and indicated that we should wait. Half a minute later Stan’s head came up and, as if someone had wound her key a couple of times, she told us to follow her into the woods.

We trooped off behind her into waist-high bracken, down something that was not so much a path as a statistical variation in the density of the undergrowth. Despite the shade from the trees the air was warm and humid, and I was just thinking about taking my jacket off when Stan halted in front of a great wall of rhododendron bushes.

‘It’s in here,’ she said, before crouching down and crawling into a narrow gap. Reluctantly, I followed her into a short leafy tunnel that smelt like cheap air freshener, which opened up into a small clearing surrounded on three sides by more rhododendron bushes and on the fourth by a stumpy deciduous tree with shaggy leaves and branches that were so bent and twisted that its canopy brushed the ground. The clearing itself was an unusually regular rectangular shape as a result of being, I recognised, the foundation of a small building. At one end was a blackened fireplace defined by a circle of half bricks and large stones, and at the other a raised concrete plinth – a coal bunker or cesspit or something utilitarian like that. The cement floor had been exposed long enough for a couple of centimetres of powdery grey soil to build up on top.

‘Nobody can find this place,’ said Stan proudly.

Only someone obviously had, because Stan showed us the cast-iron metal door mounted in the side of the plinth – it looked like the rubbish chute at my parents’ flats. Streamers of plastic, green, white and transparent, drooped from the edges of the door – the remains of carrier bags. Stan pulled on the door, which opened with a creak to reveal more strips of plastic and an evil smell – old meat and rotting paper. There looked to be quite a large void behind the door, but I wasn’t that keen to investigate.

‘What did you keep in there?’ I asked.

‘My stash,’ said Stan.

‘Yeah, but what was in your stash?’ I asked.

‘Bennies, some blues, some billy whizz, a bit of deer, a couple of coneys and some red.’

Bennies, blues and billy whizz I knew – Benzedrine, diazepam and amphetamines. I asked Dominic what the rest was.

‘You know,’ said Dominic. ‘Deer as in Bambi, coneys is rabbits and red is agricultural diesel. Stan’s been siphoning it out of her dad’s tractor, haven’t you, Stan?’

She bobbed her head. I wondered what agricultural diesel was, but didn’t want to look stupid so I didn’t ask.

‘When do you think the stuff was nicked?’ I asked.

‘I found it like this on Thursday,’ said Stan. ‘Afternoon.’ She twirled a curl of hair around her finger. ‘About five.’

The morning the kids were discovered missing – Day One.

‘And when was the last time you came up here before that?’ asked Dominic, who’d obviously been thinking the same thing as me.

‘Wednesday,’ said Stan and stopped when she saw I’d taken out my notebook and was writing things down. For the police, if it isn’t written down it didn’t happen. And, if the inquiry went pear shaped, questions would be asked. I wasn’t going to risk any confusion about who said what to whom – mate or no mate.

‘Morning or afternoon?’ I asked.

Dominic made encouraging noises and Stan admitted that she’d checked the stash at around seven that evening. A really horrible thought occurred to me then.

‘Have you checked to see if,’ I hesitated, ‘anybody is in there?’

Stan shook her head.

I looked at Dominic and nodded at the yawning hatch. He groaned.

‘She’s your mate,’ I said.

Dominic sighed, pulled a neat little pencil torch from his jacket pocket and dutifully stuck his head inside. I heard a muffled ‘Fuck!’ followed by coughing and then he whipped his head back out again.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Thank god. And, Stan, do not be storing food down there in future. It’s disgusting and probably really unhealthy.’

‘We’re going to have to report this,’ I said and Dominic nodded.

Stan stuck out her lower lip.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘So the search teams don’t waste their time on it when they get here,’ said Dominic.

‘You think they’ll come up here, then?’ asked Stan.

‘The teams will be here by tomorrow,’ said Dominic.

‘Oh,’ said Stan. ‘You’re still going to help. Right?’

‘Help with what?’ I asked.

Stan made a little helpless gesture at the gaping hatch.

‘They stole my stash,’ she said.

‘What?’ I said. ‘All the illegal stuff you had hidden away so that the law didn’t catch you?’

‘Rabbits isn’t illegal,’ mumbled Stan.

‘Who do you think took your stuff?’ asked Dominic.

‘Thought it might have been a pony,’ said Stan.

‘Why would a pony get into your stash?’ I asked.

‘They’re a bugger for food,’ she said.

I asked Dominic if there were any ponies nearby.

‘There are some a couple of fields over,’ he said. ‘More down the hill towards Aymestrey. But I’ve never heard of them drinking diesel before.’

‘What about the drugs?’ I said. ‘What would diazepam even do to a horse?’

We both looked at Stan, who shrugged.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve never given it to a horse.’

‘Maybe we should notify local vets,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t a horse,’ said Stan. ‘I had the door wired shut.’

She showed us the black iron loops on the door and the frame – remnants of a deadbolt, I thought. Stan said that she always pushed a double loop of heavy gauge steel wire through the loops and then twisted it to keep it shut. I asked where the wire was and she showed me where the unwound strands had been dumped. I picked them up and had a look – they hadn’t been cut or melted through or, as far as I could tell, been exposed to magic. In fact there was bugger all in the way of vestigia around the stash at all. Vestigia being the trace that gets left behind when magic happens.

Flora, your actual growing things, retain vestigia really badly and this makes the countryside, leaving aside poetry, not a very magical place. This caused a great deal of consternation to the more Romantic practitioners of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Particularly Polidori, who spent a great deal of time trying to prove that natural things in their wild and untamed state were inherently magical. He went bonkers in the end, although that could have been a result of spending too much time with Byron and the Shelleys. His big claim to fame, beyond writing the first ever vampire novel, is his work attempting to classify where whatever it is that powers magic comes from. He called it potentia because there’s nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact that you’re making it up as you go along.

He was amongst the first to postulate that things other than animals must generate potentia. Forests, for example, would produce potentia silvestris and rivers potentia fluvialis. And it is from these sources that the gods and goddesses and spirits of a locality gain their strength.

I’ve stood in the presence of Father Thames and felt his influence wash over me like an incoming tide. I’ve seen a lesser river goddess send a wall of water from one end of Covent Garden market to the other. That’s sixty tonnes of water over a distance of thirty metres – that’s a lot of power, at least 70 megawatts – about what you get from a jet engine at full throttle. And I nearly kissed her just after she’d done it too – makes you think, doesn’t it?

We know that power has to come from somewhere, and Polidori’s theories were as good as anyone else’s. But sticking a Latin tag on a theory doesn’t make it true. Not true in a way that matters.

If there had been some kind of supernatural activity, I would at least have expected to get something off the door, or the concrete of the foundations, both of which stayed stubbornly neutral. Absence of evidence, as any good archaeologist will tell you, is not the same as evidence of absence – I made a note to ask Nightingale about how things went in the countryside.

‘What’re you looking for?’ asked Stan.

‘I was looking to see if there are any tracks,’ I said.

‘There aren’t any tracks,’ said Stan. ‘If there’d been any tracks I’d have seen them.’

‘Stan’s good with tracks,’ said Dominic.

The sun had got high enough to shine directly onto the back of my neck.

‘So, no tracks?’

‘Nothing,’ said Stan.

‘So why did you think a pony did it?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Stan. ‘That was just the first thing that came into my head when I found it open.’

We were all silent for a moment – something high-pitched yodelled out amongst the trees. The heat seemed to grow around us. I realised that my bottle of water was still in the Nissan.

‘To recap,’ I said. ‘Your stash is gone but the kids are not stuck down there. It must have been people not animals. But they didn’t leave any tracks.’

‘I thought it might be aliens,’ said Stan. ‘Because there’s no tracks.’ She made a motion with her arm – like a claw dangling down.

‘Let’s hope their saucer runs on diesel, then,’ said Dominic. ‘Otherwise I think they’re going to be a bit disappointed.’

I used an app on my phone to get a GPS fix on our location and then I suggested that we head back to the Nissan before calling it in.

‘How are we going to explain what we were doing here?’ asked Dominic as he crawled back out of the rhododendrons. I said he could blame it on me doing my due diligence. ‘I thought that was the plan.’

Dominic admitted that this was true, but still wanted to know what I was going to say.

‘Tell them that I wanted to check on a World War Two military installation,’ I said. It wasn’t that much of a stretch. The foundations had been the right dimensions for a standard hut and had been made from the poor quality ‘economy concrete’ used for throwing up pillboxes and air raid shelters in a hurry. In the scramble that followed the fall of France in 1940 a lot of sites had just fallen off the bureaucratic radar.

‘Is that part of your brief, then?’ asked Dominic.

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘There are all sorts of secrets from back then.’

We pushed our way out of the bracken and back onto the path. It was getting hotter and I could smell the warm resin scent of the trees around me. Potentia silvestris, Polidori called the power derived from a forest, the power from whence sprang the antlered gods of Celtic myth, Lemus, Cernunnos and Herne the Hunted – although probably not the last one.

‘Who uses this path?’ I asked.

‘Dog walkers,’ said Dominic.

‘Ramblers,’ said Stan.

‘Tourists,’ said Dominic, and explained that it was part of the Mortimer Trail, which stretched from Ludlow in the North East, along the ridge that overlooked Rushpool, down into Aymestrey where it crossed the River Lugg and then up to Wigmore, famed in song and story as the ancestral seat of the Mortimer Family. Dominic was a bit hazy about who the Mortimers were, beyond them being powerful Marcher Lords during the middle ages and getting seriously involved in the War of the Roses.

‘We did do them in school,’ he said. ‘But I’ve forgotten most of it.’

The trail was popular with casual ramblers because of its relative ease and the number of excellent pubs along the route.

‘And ufologists,’ said Stan.

‘Bit of a hotspot,’ said Dominic.

‘Window area,’ said Stan.

There having been a spate of sightings ten years previously, including lights in the sky, cars mysteriously breaking down and a cattle molestation, although Dominic admitted that there might have been an alternative explanation for the last.

‘We used to have UFO parties,’ said Dominic, in which apparently there was the traditional drinking of the cheap cider, bouts of vomiting and occasional snogging – hopefully not in that order.

‘Ever had a close encounter?’ I asked Stan before I could stop myself.

‘Yeah,’ said Stan. ‘But I don’t like to talk about it.’

We reached where we’d parked the Nissan Technical. Dominic offered Stan a lift but she said she was fine walking home. She lived with her family on the other side of the ridge near somewhere called Yatton. I watched as she lurched off down the track, making the occasional zigzag and halting every so often to get her bearings.

‘She went headfirst into a tree,’ said Dominic. ‘Spent six months in hospital. The doctors were amazed she walked out on her own feet – everything after that is a bonus.’

Yeah, I thought, that’s a mate you’re going to go to the wall for.

Despite Dominic having parked it partially in the shade, a gust of hot foetid air struck us in the face when we opened the Nissan’s doors. Underneath the aroma of dried shit I could smell rotting vegetables and half-melted plastic.

‘Christ, Dominic, what does your boyfriend do for a living?’

‘He’s a farmer,’ said Dominic, as if that explained everything.

We decided to leave the Nissan with the doors open to air out while Dominic called in with his Airwave which got, much to my surprise, better reception than either of our phones. I was that thirsty that I’d just started psyching myself up to brave a rummage in the Nissan when Dominic lowered his handset and beckoned me over.

‘Were you expecting a delivery?’ he asked.

Dominic’s mum was a round woman who barely came up to my chest. Her chestnut hair was streaked with grey and tied up into a rough bun at the back of her head. She’d obviously caught the sun that summer, because her skin was brown and she wore streaks of sunblock across her cheekbones. She came hurrying out of the bungalow as soon as Dominic had parked outside and thrust out her hand for me to shake. Her skin was warm and as soft as chamois leather and the bones underneath felt delicate like those of a small bird.

‘It’s nice to meet you at last.’ She was breathing hard as if the short dash from her front door had left her out of breath. ‘Is the room all right?’

‘Perfect,’ I said.

She nodded and withdrew her hand. I gave her a moment to catch her breath before asking about the delivery. She pointed to the paved area by her front door where two old-fashioned oxblood leather-bound trunks had been left side by side.

I sighed and asked Dominic to give me a hand.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said when he tried to lift his end. ‘How long were you planning to stay?’

‘It’s the housekeeper,’ I said. ‘She gets carried away.’

Dominic gave me an odd look.

‘Housekeeper?’

‘Not my housekeeper,’ I said as I tried to avoid knocking over a garden gnome. ‘Our nick has a housekeeper.’ Which I decided sounded even weirder.

‘Okay,’ said Dominic. ‘Well, Leominster nick’s got vibrating chairs in the rec room.’

‘Vibrating chairs?’

‘You know. You sit in them and they vibrate,’ he said. ‘It’s very relaxing.’

The inside of my room, a.k.a. the cowshed, was boiling, so once we’d dumped the trunks we retreated back outside with a jug of homemade lemonade provided by Dominic’s mum. When the air had a chance to cool inside, me and Dominic had a rummage in the first of the trunks. The top layer, thank god, consisted of about half the contents of my wardrobe, freshly laundered and the creases ironed to a knife edge – which just looks weird on a sweatshirt. The trunk was equipped with a number of convenient drawers and compartments which yielded a miniature brass camp stove with matching pot and kettle and a leather case which contained a cut-throat razor, a shaving brush and a stick of dehydrated soap that smelt of almonds and rum. I wondered if this was all Nightingale’s stuff or whether Molly scavenged it from elsewhere in the Folly. A lot of men must have left their belongings behind in 1944 believing that they were coming back.

I put the shaving kit back where I’d found it.

The second trunk contained a tweed shooting jacket, matching yellow waistcoat, a vintage Burberry trench coat, riding boots, a green canvas camp stool and a shooting stick. It was therefore less of a surprise when at the bottom, disassembled in their own oak and leather case, I found a pair of two-inch self-opening shotguns. Judging from the chasing on the mechanism they were Nightingale’s two Purdey guns that he kept in a locked case in the billiard room.

I looked at Dominic, whose eyes were bugging out.

‘You didn’t see that, okay?’

‘Absolutely not,’ he said.

‘Right.’

‘The Glorious Twelfth was Monday,’ he said. ‘So grouse is in season.’

I suddenly wondered if Nightingale’s contemporaries had bothered with shotguns, or whether they’d trooped out to the countryside and banged away with fireballs. I say, good shot there, Thomas! Winged the blighter, by god. It occurred to me that I was currently less than a half hour’s drive from a man who might be able to tell me – if the bees didn’t sting me to death on the doorstep.

‘What the fuck?’ said Dominic and, straightening up, looked back towards the front of the bungalow. I joined him just in time to see a column of vehicles roar past the front drive – I recognised a blue Peugeot from the public car park at Leominster nick, likewise a battered green hatchback. A pair of motorbikes with photographers riding pillion raced past, followed by more cars and a satellite van. It was the pack in motion and it was actually quite impressive – like a posh version of Mad Max.

‘Shit,’ said Dominic. ‘They must have got wind of something.’

We exchanged looks – neither of us liked the implications. Dominic pulled out his phone and called the outside inquiry office. After talking for a minute his face relaxed – not bodies, then. He glanced over at me and then told whoever he was talking to that indeed I was here and ready to spring into action – as soon as instructed as to which direction.

‘They want you over at the Marstowes’ house right away,’ he told me. ‘Before the thundering herd come rushing back.’

‘Have they found something?’ I asked.

‘Not really,’ said Dominic. ‘That’s the problem.’

Even with all the windows open, the Marstowes’ kitchen was stuffy and smelt of hot laminated chipboard. DS Cole had Joanne and her husband sitting on one side of the table and us on the other. Ethan was asleep upstairs and Ryan and Mathew had been packed off to an aunt in Leominster for the afternoon.

‘What’s happened?’ asked Andy Marstowe as soon as we had our legs under the table. He was a short man, just a bit taller than his wife and built with that kind of solidity you get from doing manual labour all your life. He had a pointed chin and deep-set hazel eyes. His light brown hair was receding sharply and he’d obviously decided to bite the bullet and cut the rest of it short. He looked like the classic sawn-off psychopath I used to dread meeting doing the evening shift in Soho, except there was none of the angry violence in his eyes – only fear.

‘First,’ said Cole, ‘let me assure you that we have not found any indication that either Hannah or Nicole have been harmed in any way.’ Andy and Joanne didn’t look particularly reassured. ‘Normally we wouldn’t bring something like this to your attention, but unfortunately the media got hold of it and we wanted you to have all the facts before getting a garbled version from them.’

The pack had swept back into the village less than ten minutes after they’d left, and come boiling up the cul-de-sac like the return of a tide, licking at my heels as I ran up the path and only stopping at the hedge line because it was held by a special constable called Sally Donnahyde who was a primary school teacher in her other job and so wasn’t going to take any lip from a bunch of journalists. The kitchen was at the back of the house, but I could still hear them as a restless murmur, like surf on a pebble beach.

I watched the parents shift in their seats and brace themselves.

‘We found a child’s knapsack just off the B4362, four hundred yards from the assembly point. But it was immediately apparent that the item had been lying there for at least ten years, so we don’t think it’s connected to the case.’

Andy’s fists unclenched and Joanne let go her breath. DS Cole opened the case on her tablet and showed them a picture of the knapsack. It had been laid out on plastic sheeting and had a ruler placed next to it for scale. It was made of see-through plastic and although it was fogged by age and neglect it was obvious that any contents had been removed. Cole asked, she said purely as a matter of routine, whether either of them recognised it.

They said they didn’t, but I thought Joanne hesitated just a little bit too long before speaking. Then she sprang up and asked if anyone wanted tea. Cole took the opportunity to fill them both in on the current state of the search. Andy fidgeted throughout, and in the first pause said if that was all he’d like to get back to the search now, thank you very much. Then, either not noticing or ignoring his wife’s angry look, he got up and left.

I’d have liked a chance to talk with Cole about Joanne’s hesitation, but Cole obviously didn’t want to leave her alone. I wondered if I should press Joanne on the subject myself, but I figured it would be a mistake to pre-empt a senior officer. It was probably nothing . . . but that sounded a little bit too much like famous last words.

‘He’s not dealing with it,’ said Joanne when her husband was safely gone. ‘He’s just keeping himself busy.’

‘I’m not sure there is actually a way to “deal” with it, Jo,’ said Cole.

‘Peter,’ Joanne said suddenly, and turned to me. ‘Truthfully – what are the chances?’

Now Cole was staring at me, too – no pressure there.

‘I think the chances are good,’ I said.

‘Why?’ Joanne’s eyes were wide, desperate.

‘Because they went out together,’ I said. ‘If someone had harmed them locally we’d have a lead by now. And if it was someone from outside we’d have sightings of them coming in.’

Joanne subsided. It was all bollocks, of course. Not even very plausible bollocks at that. But I didn’t think Joanne wanted facts – just an excuse to hold it together.

It left a bad taste in my mouth, though.

A phone rang, the fake old-fashioned telephone ringtone that comes as standard on most phones. It rang three times before I remembered that I’d switched it over from my usual tone – the Empire Strikes Back theme, because you didn’t want that going off in front of a distressed family member – and I had to scramble to answer the call before the voicemail cut in.

When I answered, a cheerful woman asked me to confirm that I was Peter Grant. When I did, she informed me that she was DCI Windrow’s Personal Assistant and could I come in, because the chief inspector would like to have a word.

‘When?’ I asked.

‘Just as soon as you can get here,’ she said.

4 The Falcon Assessment

The first thing I noticed was that somebody, contrary to Health and Safety regulations, had jimmied the windows in Leominster nick so that they opened all the way out. Given the inquiry offices were all on the first floor, they got a surprising amount of breeze – I figured that, and a truly stupendous amount of caffeinated beverages, was all that was holding the MIU together. I seriously doubted the vibrating chairs were making much of a contribution.

Edmondson and Windrow were waiting for me in the Learning Zone again. They asked me to sit down and offered me some cold water – which I took gratefully. I resisted the urge to rub the bottle against my forehead.

‘How are you finding it?’ asked Windrow.

‘Sir?’ I asked.

‘The operation,’ he said. ‘How do you think it’s going?’

Nothing unnerves a junior officer quite as much as having a much senior officer stare over a desk and ask your opinion on something. It’s always tempting to fall back on that strangled mixture of cop-speak and management-ese that has proved the modern police officer’s friend when he wants to talk a great deal and say nothing. Still, from the look in Windrow’s eyes, blurting out that I thought that West Mercia Police were taking an aggressively proactive approach in line with best practice as laid down in national guidelines was not the way to go.

‘As well as can be expected,’ I said, which was almost as bad.

Windrow nodded benignly – a gesture I’ve seen interviewing officers use on suspects dozens of times.

‘What’s your impression of the Marstowes?’ he asked.

‘They’re hanging in there,’ I said.

‘There’s no possibility that they might have orchestrated the disappearance?’ asked Windrow.

God, I thought. But as a theory it certainly had its attractions.

‘Is there some evidence that they might have?’ I asked.

Windrow shook his head.

‘Oh, congratulations by the way,’ said Edmondson. ‘You’ve made the papers.’

He passed me a copy of the Sun which had pushed the page three girl all the way back to page eleven in order to devote more space to MISSING GIRLS. Since they didn’t know anything we didn’t, and we didn’t know anything, they had a lot of pictures to cover up the lack of text. In the upper right-hand corner of page five was a good one of me and Dominic standing by the village hall. We were obviously talking and, fortunately, both of us were looking suitably grim and intense. The caption read ‘ALL HANDS ON DECK: Police from all over the country are involved in the search for Hannah and Nicole.’

‘Sorry about that, sir. They must have used a telephoto lens.’

‘Not a problem,’ said Edmondson. ‘The ACC thought it reflected well on the force – diversity wise.’ He gave me a humourless smile. ‘Everyone pulling together and all that.’

That’s me, I thought. Poster boy for diversity.

Windrow steepled his fingers.

‘You’ve been with the SAU for over a year,’ he said. ‘Correct?’

‘Since February last year,’ I said, wondering where the hell this was going.

‘So you’ve had experience of unusual cases?’ he asked. ‘Cases involving the—’ He stalled. Behind him Edmondson shifted his weight uneasily and spoke.

‘The supernatural,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, and there was a pause while we all tried to think of what to say next.

The two men glanced at each other.

‘Do you see any of that in this case?’ he asked.

‘Sir?’ I said. Because if I’ve learnt one thing, it is to let the senior officers make their position clear before you risk opening your gob.

‘You came up to interview . . .’ Windrow checked a yellow sticky note attached to his policy book. ‘A Mr Hugh Oswald over by Wylde?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘It was a standard TIE.’ A Trace, Implicate or Eliminate is the backbone job of any major inquiry, find someone and either make them a suspect or eliminate them from the inquiry.

‘And you’re satisfied that he’s not involved?’ asked Windrow.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘On account of him being ninety-three and pretty much confined to a wheelchair.’

‘And there’s no possibility of an accomplice?’ asked Windrow.

There was his daughter, who I hadn’t thought to check. But then I’d assumed that the main purpose of the trip had been get to my moping self out from under Nightingale’s feet. I should have at least statemented her – Lesley would have killed me for being that sloppy.

‘I did a standard assessment,’ I said, and wondered just how desperate West Mercia Police were, to be talking to me about this.

Edmondson folded his arms and then unfolded them again.

‘I know you haven’t been attending briefings,’ said Windrow after a pause. ‘But you must be aware that we are not making any progress. All we know is that the most likely scenario is that the girls got up in the middle of the night and left their homes voluntarily. After that they just vanish.’ He tapped his finger on his desk a couple of times. ‘We believe it would be remiss of us not to consider all possible angles. And, since you’re here and available, we’d like you to do a Falcon assessment on the whole case.’

They were that fucking desperate.

I nearly froze up, staring at the pair of them in disbelief. But fortunately my highly tuned bureaucratic arse-saving instincts kicked in and I managed to say that I’d have to clear it with Nightingale first.

They agreed and even let me make the call outside their earshot.

Nightingale thought it was an eminently sensible idea, notwithstanding the fact that neither of us had ever done a formal Falcon assessment before, me because I was too junior and him because in his day such things as assessments and regular case reviews hadn’t been invented. At least, not at the Folly they hadn’t.

‘I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking for,’ I said.

Nightingale replied that he would immediately repair to the library and see what he could dig up in the way of rural supernatural crime.

‘And I shall call Harold,’ he said. ‘This is just the sort of thing he lives for.’

Professor Harold Postmartin being the Folly’s archivist, amateur historian and Oxford don voted least likely to get a four-part documentary series on Channel Four, six years in a row.

‘And now that I think of it,’ said Nightingale, ‘it might be worth reaching out to some of our other friends in the demi-monde. Just on the off-chance.’

So I glumly reported back to Edmondson and Windrow that not only would the SAU be happy to do a full Falcon assessment, but we would be tasking our senior civilian analyst and drawing on our covert human intelligence sources – even if some of them weren’t entirely human.

They were so delighted they put me in Edmondson’s office down the hall which, quite apart from having its own dedicated HOLMES II socket, was out of sight of the main inquiry office. There was a brief delay while Windrow got my access enabled and rustled up a HOLMES-enabled laptop I could use before they closed the door and let me get on with it.

But get on with what?

Part of the problem with doing a Falcon assessment is that it’s hard to apply professional best practice to a field of law enforcement that most police wouldn’t touch with a one metre extendable baton. Not to mention that the closest the Folly had come to a formal assessment were the times we’d had to tell a senior officer that having occult graffiti sprayed across the crime scene did not make it a Falcon case. Especially if the symbols had been cribbed from Aleister Crowley, The Lord of the Rings or Adventure Time. The only case like that we ever hesitated over was the kanji characters sprayed onto the front of a private school in Highgate, but according to one of Postmartin’s friends at the School of Oriental and African Studies they were from a JRPG called Sakura Wars – very popular in the 1990s.

The problem was that once the government pushed through its major cuts in policing, a lot of officers had got the notion that they might be able to unload anything even vaguely weird onto us.

‘Although it is noticeable,’ Nightingale had pointed out, ‘that this never happens if the officer concerned has worked with us before.’

All your cases, I thought, do not belong to us.

So I did what I always did in these situations, and asked myself what Lesley would do – apart from taser me in the back and betray me to the Faceless Man, that is. And what she would do is say – Start with the action list – duh!

A modern major investigation runs off HOLMES II, which is a great big computerised mincing machine into which your investigating officers shovel information and turn the handle in the hope that something edible, or at least admissible in court, will emerge from the other end. In order to keep the machine fed, senior officers assign their junior officers ‘actions’ – interviewing Hannah’s and Nicole’s teachers is an ‘action’, as is checking the family phone records against the numbers of known sex offenders. The police never saw a noun they didn’t want to turn into a verb, so it quickly became ‘to action’, as in you action me to undertake a Falcon assessment, I action a Falcon assessment, a Falcon assessment has been actioned and we all action in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine.

Thus, to review a major inquiry is to review the list of ‘actions’, and their consequences, in the hope that you’ll spot something that thirty-odd highly trained and experienced detectives didn’t. I sat down and made a note in my notebook – Commence Falcon assessment with review of action list – and dated it.

It was lunchtime on day three, Hannah and Nicole had been missing for over fifty hours.

Day One – 09:22 – first and only 999 call – caller identified himself as Derek Lacey.

I didn’t listen to the sound file, but even from the transcript you can sense him struggling to maintain control. He’d obviously taken a moment to marshal his arguments in the fear that the police wouldn’t take him seriously, because he listed off Nicole’s and Hannah’s ages, the fact that they had left their bedrooms some time during the night, and that none of their friends or relatives had seen them. And he’d clearly impressed the Force Duty Inspector at the Worcester control centre, because he in turn had sent all of available D-shift directly to Rushpool, headed by PS Robert Collington.

Team D had a TOA (time of arrival) of 09:37 at which point Edmondson, as geographic commander, had been informed and had chosen to take ownership of the operation.

Statistically speaking, in cases involving missing children, abduction by a stranger comes at the bottom of a long list that starts with having simply run off, continues down through staying overnight at a mate’s without telling their parents and, often, hiding somewhere in the house. In fact, a child is much more likely to be murdered by their parents than be abducted by a stranger. So the first set of actions after arrival involved searching the parents’ houses and gathering names and addresses of friends and family.

But Dominic had been right, and the fact that two girls had gone missing from two separate households on the same night must have caught everyone’s eye. Because by quarter past ten, less than an hour after the initial 999 call, the girls had been designated as HIGH RISK MISPERS and the on-call POLSA had been notified. Standby PSU officers were called out in Hereford, Worcester, Kidderminster and Shrewsbury. By lunchtime, a sizable chunk of West Mercia Police’s available manpower had found itself deployed into the area around Rushpool.

By that time the girls’ computers were on their way to High-Tech to be checked for signs of online grooming, and the requisite applications to track their phones in real time had been made. Had this been London, teams of officers would have been poring through hours of CCTV footage. But out in the wilds the surveillance state was unaccountably thin on the ground.

When you deploy for missing children, if you do so at all, the rule is to deploy fast and in numbers. Even if probability and common sense tells you that they’re going to skip back into their front door later that day. Had they been older, fourteen or over, then West Mercia might have waited another twenty-four hours before literally calling out the dogs. Still, up until six o’clock in the evening, Edmondson probably thought it likely that the girls would return under their own steam.

Then they found the phones. Both immediately identified as belonging to Nicole and Hannah, both with dead batteries. Since an eleven-year-old girl is more likely to relinquish a kidney than her mobile phone, the working hypothesis changed from runaway to abduction and that’s when the fun really started.

Hereford CID was immediately contacted, and the Major Investigation Unit attached to what was now designated OPERATION MANTICORE. Just when most of the detectives had been heading home – they must have loved that. I discovered during a quick trip to the coffee area that despite its fully equipped custody and interview suite, HOLMES-capable offices, canteen, helicopter pad, and not forgetting the famous vibrating chairs, Leominster nick normally only housed the safer neighbourhood team. It was essentially mothballed against future need – presumably an upsurge in cross-border raids by the Welsh. DCI Windrow, Dominic, and all his mates had decamped there from their base in Hereford – which explained why the place was so clean.

The Press Liaison officer contacted the local media only to find that they’d been pre-empted. Somebody had already been in touch with the Leominster News and Hereford Times, providing details of the two girls’ names and a suitably heart-wrenching photograph of both of them in sun hats. I recognised the background – it was definitely the Marstowes’ back garden. I spotted a red swing set I’d seen out the kitchen window. Somebody else had recognised it, too, because the assumption in the report was that Joanne Marstowe had contacted the press directly. It was too late for either of the newspapers to change their headlines, but local radio and BBC regional TV news sent journalists and agreed to run an appeal for information. The local news managers must have taken one look at the photograph of two pretty smiling eleven-year-old white girls in matching sun hats and wept tears of joy. The story went national in about the time it took the editors in London to open the jpeg attached to the email. By the time Inspector Edmondson was briefing all the new hands on deck at ten o’clock, the media was already assembling in the foyer.

I tried to remember what I’d been doing that night, but nothing came to mind.

Searches resumed at first light and there was a flurry of actions from the newly installed MIU, two hundred plus of which were TIEs on RSOs. Impressively, the MIU had completed over a hundred Trace Implicate or Eliminate on Registered Sex Offenders in Herefordshire alone and had farmed out a bunch more to adjacent police forces. As of when I was checking the list there were only three RSOs within two hundred kilometres of Rushpool that hadn’t been checked, and there was a strong suspicion that two of the remaining might be dead.

You can do a keyword search on HOLMES, the utility of which depends on what words you use. I tried, just for the hell of it, magic, wizard, witch, invisible, three different spelling variations of fairy and spent fifteen minutes weeding out a surprisingly large number of references to books, TV and a fancy dress party many of the kids had attended a week before the disappearance. One statement taken from a school friend of Nicole and Hannah’s caught my eye.

R175 H TST GABRIELLA DARRELL MISC

PC TASKER: So Nicole had an invisible friend.

GABRIELLA: Yes.

PC TASKER: Like an imaginary friend?

GABRIELLA: Not really.

MRS DARRELL: Nicole always was a very imaginative child. Not like Gaby here who’s very sensible. Aren’t you Gaby? No imaginary friends for you.

I added a restatementing to my action request list on the basis that if you don’t know where you’re going, try as many directions as possible.

By five I’d finished a fast sweep of the action list and took a break. Someone gave me directions to the nearest supermarket, but I got lost and ended up at a huge Morrisons instead. I took the opportunity to stock up on the sort of essentials that Molly wouldn’t think of – bottled water, snacks, fruit and shaving gear that had been manufactured this side of the millennium. Inside the store, the air conditioning was fierce. So I parked myself at the in-store café and called Nightingale to discuss my next move. This had the added advantage of keeping Folly business away from the prying ears of other police officers.

‘Nothing jumped out, then?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Not off the action list,’ I said. ‘The working hypothesis is that they both decided to sneak out of their houses and meet up. And that either they ran away, which is unlikely, or something bad happened to them.’

Nightingale asked why running away was unlikely.

‘They didn’t take anything except their phones,’ I said. ‘Runaway kids nearly always take something.’ I had, both times, although the first time it had been limited to a peanut butter and jam sandwich and a copy of 2000AD.

‘For the moment we should leave the more run of the mill nastiness to our country cousins,’ said Nightingale. ‘You should first establish whether the two girls could have come into contact with something uncanny.’

‘Like what?’

‘A rogue practitioner,’ said Nightingale. ‘A hedge wizard or witch we don’t know about it, or a fae, or demi-fae, or revenant of some sort. Did either of them change their routine behaviour or exhibit strange cravings?’

‘The child abuse unit will be looking for the same things,’ I said.

‘Then I suggest you might confer with them,’ said Nightingale. ‘You might also want to have a chat with their teachers and the leaders of the Girl Guides or whatever the equivalent body is these days. Assuming they were Guides. Is there a parish priest?’

‘I can find out,’ I said, and noticed that a couple of white boys at a nearby table were giving me the side eye.

‘A good parish priest often knows the more esoteric aspects of his local history,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or at least they used to.’

They were both dark haired, pasty faced despite the summer. The shorter one had blue eyes and the taller was wearing sunglasses indoors – which told you everything you needed to know, really. The sleeves of their grey and green check shirts were rolled up to reveal the beefy arms of people who actually work for a living. In London I would have pegged them as builders, but out here in the sticks they could have been lumberjacks or sheep shearers for all I knew.

‘You might want to talk to Hugh Oswald again,’ said Nightingale. ‘See if he’s noticed anything odd.’

Apart from his creepy granddaughter, I thought. Although she might be worth talking to, as well.

‘It’s a pity we can’t sniff people out like the rivers can,’ I said.

‘I for one am quite glad that that particular ability appears limited to them,’ said Nightingale. ‘I feel our work has become quite complicated enough as it is. Still, as you say . . .’

The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated – that’s the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don’t get a lot of practical experience. I gave them a quizzical look, just to fuck with them a bit.

They broke eye contact first. The tall one in the sunglasses turned to his friend and said something, then they both looked at me and sniggered.

What are we, I thought, twelve? So I laughed. It wasn’t a genuine laugh but they weren’t to know that. They both stared at me and then turned away when I didn’t break eye contact. I wanted to provoke them. I wanted to give them a smacking they wouldn’t forget.

‘Peter?’ asked Nightingale and I realised I hadn’t been listening.

At the very least I wanted to show them my warrant card and mess with their preconceptions. But you can’t do that sort of thing, because there’s always a chance you’ll end up in a fight. And then you’ll have to arrest them. Which, never mind the ethical issues surrounding the abuse of power, results in a ton of paperwork. Not to mention I was way off my manor, so it would piss off West Mercia Police who probably felt they had better things to waste their time on right now, thank you very much. So I took a deep breath and looked away.

That’s me – Peter Grant, a credit to his territorial policing agency.

‘Sorry sir,’ I said. ‘I was distracted.’

‘I asked how you were feeling,’ said Nightingale.

‘Fine, sir,’ I said.

‘Glad to hear that,’ he said.

I tensed, hearing the chairs scrape as the boys got to their feet, but they passed on the other side of the table and headed towards the main entrance.

‘I’d better get back,’ I said. ‘I need to get some actions actioned.’

Outside, the sun was frying the car park and my two friends from the café were attempting to lean nonchalantly against the side of a blue Nissan Micra without burning themselves. I wondered whether they were waiting for me, or just didn’t have anywhere else to go – it’s possible they didn’t know either.

The tall one with the sunglasses lit up a Silk Cut and took an aggressive drag.

Magic has what Dr Walid, who would be the Folly’s resident man of science if he wasn’t actually resident in a nice Victorian villa in Finchley, would call a deleterious effect on microprocessors. We don’t know why doing a spell can reduce the chip set of your laptop to a fine sand, but since everything useful from your phone to your food mixer is controlled by chips these days it means you have to be careful. But just because you don’t know why something happens doesn’t mean you can’t attempt to quantify its effects.

And once you’ve quantified an effect, it becomes that much easier to weaponize it. All you need to do is modify your werelight a bit with a couple of formae inflectentes and, after about three weeks of trial and error, you have a projectable spell that will burn out every microprocessor within a conveniently small radius.

I’d got some stick from Nightingale, who has this strange idea that his apprentice should know what he’s doing before sticking his finger in the electric socket of the universe. But even he changed his mind when I pointed out that a) it was really just a beefed up werelight and b) you could use it to disable any car fitted with a microprocessor-controlled engine management system – which was pretty much all of them now.

Standing in the baking car park outside Morrisons I came this close to lobbing one into the white boys’ Micra, but even as I rehearsed the forma in my head I remembered the girls’ phones. According to the results summary from forensics, no data had been recoverable from either the phone memories or the SIM cards. But it hadn’t given a cause. There are plenty of things that can ruin your phone, but fewer things that are so thorough that a decent forensics team can’t extract anything useful. And one of those fewer things, I knew from bitter experience, was a burst of magic.

I gave the two boys a happy smile which almost caused the tall one to swallow his cigarette. Then I moved swiftly back to the Asbo, but not so swiftly as to give them the wrong idea.

Back at Leominster nick I called up the exhibit list and found the reports related to both the girls’ mobile phones. They were found at the foot of yet another war memorial, this one a skinny cross set in a raised grassy dais by the B4362 where the lane that runs up parallel to Rushpool to the east switches over to become the lane that runs up the hill to somewhere called Bircher Common. Which appeared to be both the name of a hamlet and your actual piece of open land for public use. I printed the sketch map and photographs of the site which recorded the exact position of the phones. Then I checked the POLSA notes which hypothesised that Hannah and Nicole had taken the footpath west across the fields until they reached Pound Lane, and walked north up the lane until it reached the B4362 where they had become separated from their phones. The crossroad quickly became the loci of two types of searches, one based on the assumption that the girls had travelled on by foot and the second on the assumption that they had voluntarily or involuntarily climbed into a vehicle driven by person or persons unknown.

The POLSA and their search teams were covering option one, MIU were covering option two – which was a horrible job. With no CCTV and limited ANPR – that’s automatic number plate recognition to you, Winston – MIU had to rely on canvassing local witnesses for information about car movements in and out of the area. And even in the countryside nobody’s that nosy at five o’clock in the morning. Still, they had managed to amass a staggering number of car sightings around both Rushpool and the crossroads where the phones were found. These ranged from Some kind of van that might have been white to I saw that Citroën belonging to Will Whitton what lives over the hill in Orelton and was up to no good and no mistake.

Five officers had been assigned to grind their way through these reports. You could tell who they were by the pitiful groans and low moans of despair that floated up from their corner of the incident room.

I noticed from the action list that they were prioritising the period from four to six in the morning – which puzzled me until I found a cross link to the statement by Nicole’s mother that she had first noticed her daughter missing at five in the morning. When asked why she hadn’t raised the alarm then, she said that Nicole often got up at first light in the summer.

‘She likes to watch the sun come up,’ she said.

The evidence entry for the girls’ mobiles had contact details for a Kimberly Cidre at the High Tech Crime Unit in Worcester, and I gave her a ring on the basis that if you want something done fast it’s better to talk than to email.

‘Can I help you?’ Kimberley Cidre had a strong Belfast accent. I suspected Cidre was not her maiden name.

I identified myself and asked about the phones.

‘They’re a total loss,’ she said. ‘At first we thought the batteries had been completely drained, but when we changed them they still didn’t work. That’s when we took them apart. We tested all the ICs independently and they were all inoperable.’

‘Was there any visible damage?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No obvious sign of physical damage at all.’

‘Have you looked at them under a microscope?’

There was a pause.

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘What would I be looking for?’

The trouble with scientists is that you can’t blind them with science, unless you know more than they do – which, by definition, I didn’t.

‘I don’t want to prejudice the results,’ I said, which is always a good standby. ‘But if you spot something, I’d like to send pictures to a specialist in London to have a look.’

‘What kind of specialist?’

Explaining that Dr Walid was a world renowned enterologist would probably just raise more questions than it answered.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m just the police, but if we find what we looking for I’ll have him call you and explain. How about that?’

There was quite a long pause.

‘Is this something to do with UFOs?’ asked Cidre.

‘No,’ I said with complete honesty, for a change. ‘Do you get a lot of UFOs up here?’

‘We get a lot of UFO spotters and a lot of sightings,’ she said. ‘These two facts may be related.’

‘As far as I know there are no UFOs involved,’ I said. ‘But if we find one, I’ll let you know.’

Cidre agreed to check the microprocessors and email me images of anything she found.

Looking back, I could have possibly been a little bit firmer about the non-involvement of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Even when you’re part of the investigation you don’t just turn up on the doorstep of a victim’s parents, start asking questions and poking around their bookshelves. First I had to clear the action with DCI Windrow, who told me to clear it with DC Henry Carter who was the lead FLO attached to the Laceys. There was a delay while DC Carter checked with DS Cole as to whether I could be trusted or not – obviously I could, because Windrow gave his blessing. But only if either DS Cole or Carter was with me to hold Victoria Lacey’s hand.

It was getting dark as I drove back to Rushpool and I realised I was finally beginning to understand how the landscape worked. Leominster sits on a plain where two valleys converge. Travelling northwest, the valley of the River Lugg snakes off towards Aymestrey. And, to the north, another valley drains the land around Orelton and the wonderfully named Wooferton. Between them they make a Y-shape just like a cartoon character’s slingshot, with the ridge of high land occupied by Croft Castle and Bircher Common forming the elastic band. Rushpool was one of a string of villages that occupied the slopes below the ridge, nestling in the small valleys cut by streams draining into the flat lands.

In late evening the ridge became a shadow looming ahead as you reached the village, with just a couple of lights visible from isolated houses on the slopes. I drove carefully up the main street, the better to avoid any stray journalists.

The Laceys lived in what was, at its core, an honest to god sixteenth-century half-timbered building. It was the sort of place that had been so heavily modified by each succeeding generation that grown conservationists are reduced to weeping because the whole ill-fitting hodgepodge of styles and periods are equally historical and worth preserving. Except for maybe the ugly PVC frame door which filled the Restoration-era hooded doorway like a cheap set of plastic dentures. The door was opened by Derek Lacey who didn’t seem pleased to see me and, judging from his breath, had acquired a bottle of whisky since we’d last met.

‘You’d better come in,’ he said.

Victoria Lacey was sitting at the huge oak kitchen table and idly rotating a half-drunk glass of red wine. The remains of a snack – bread, posh cheese and a supermarket salad still half in its plastic container – was spread out between her and the seat that her husband returned to. DC Henry Carter was there to watch over them and reassure the pair that I wasn’t about to pop them in a cauldron and have them for supper.

Victoria had a thin pale face and chestnut brown hair cut into a bob. She was wearing a man’s sized sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal painfully thin wrists and long delicate hands. Her eyes, I saw when she looked up at me, were a very pale blue.

I paid my respects and told them I’d try to be as unobtrusive as possible, but they just nodded vaguely. There was half a bottle of red on the table and they were both reaching for it when I left the kitchen.

Much as I’m a fan of Georgian formalism, I do like a house where you can walk down a flight of three stairs on the ground floor and find yourself in what I supposed I’d have to call a ‘den’. It certainly wasn’t a library, because it only had a couple of Ikea bookshelves. And if Derek Lacey used it as an office, then he wasn’t in the habit of leaving his work out. There was a Wii attached to an average-sized flatscreen TV with two sets of controllers strewn at its base – Hannah and Nicole. I found traces of the girls elsewhere in the room, a stack of board games in dog-eared boxes with sun-bleached covers, a collection of teen magazines plonked on a bookshelf, and a battered copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire wedged into a gap between a pristine edition of Wolf Hall and the film tie-in of Life of Pi.

One corner of the room had a chill that had nothing to do with a physical draft. I felt a waft of dank air and the rattle of some kind of hand-powered machine – a milk churn, if I had to guess. As vestigia went, it was about par for a house of this age and nothing to get excited about.

There had been a half-hearted attempt to impose a uniform design on the ground floor of the house, with matt-finished oatmeal walls in a conscious echo of the original wattle and daub, but it fell apart on the first floor. I could tell from the texture that if you scraped the top layer of white, with a hint of peach, off the walls you’d find the history of the families that lived here written in the layers of wallpaper underneath.

More vestigia in the hallway, the click and whirr of a cuckoo clock, the smell of Vicks VapoRub and hot steam – sensations that cut off abruptly inside the master bedroom. A modern king-size bed, sturdy antique wardrobe and a nice mahogany Victorian vanity. The scatter of shoes in the corners told me that Derek and Victoria were still sharing the marital bed.

Further down, there was a musty smelling spare room containing a brass bed with a pink coverlet and a double stack of moving boxes in the corner. Next to that, a bathroom that had been refurbished within the last six months, judging by the absence of scale build-up in the shower and the lack of discoloration on the back of the imitation brass taps.

Nicole’s own room was bigger than the master bedroom, but an awkward long shape that hinted of two rooms that had been knocked together. It was pleasingly not-pink, but instead wallpapered with subtle lemon yellow and light blue stripes. The furniture was expensive but modern and had taken some punishment around the legs and corners. Again not much in the way of books, just the rest of the Harry Potter set and what looked like textbooks on the fold-down desk. Much less in the way of furry mascots, but stray bits of Lego had worked their way into gaps between the chest of drawers and the skirting board. An obvious gap where the High-Tech Crime unit had had it away with her laptop. A poster of Hunger Games over the bed – Jennifer Lawrence taking aim down the length of an arrow.

I pulled out one of the Harry Potters. It was practically mint, probably unread. I put it back and decided that there wasn’t anything useful here.

‘I understand why you have to do these things,’ said Victoria Lacey from behind me – I turned to find her in the doorway. ‘I really wish you didn’t have to.’

‘So do I, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Did Nicole have a Kindle or any other kind of eReader?’

‘Why?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

‘They can get emails and other social media,’ I said. ‘A lot of people don’t realise that. We need to ensure we haven’t overlooked any avenues of communication that might have existed between Nicole and other people.’

‘When you say “other people” you mean paedophiles, don’t you?’

Her lips clamped shut on the end of the sentence. I could see she was trying to say the unthinkable in the hope it wouldn’t be true – it’s a sort of magic thinking, but unfortunately not the kind that works.

‘Not just paedophiles,’ I said. ‘Undesirable contacts, estranged parents, dealers, gang members, that sort of thing.’ Christ, I thought. Talk about scant comfort.

‘That’s your speciality in London, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Gang violence, that sort of thing.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I check for things that other officers overlook.’

‘Because there aren’t any gangs out here,’ she said. ‘I mean, apart from the Travellers and I suppose some of the Poles, but then they don’t live around here as such.’ She stopped and stared at me for a moment. ‘This is a good place to bring up kids, you know. Not like London. I mean, anything can happen in London.’

I asked her if she’d grown up in London herself, but she said she came from Guildford.

‘But I lived in London for a couple of years. Before I met Derek,’ she said. ‘He’s from here. I’m from off. That matters up here. But I suppose in London everyone’s from off.’

Except those of us who are from Kentish Town, I thought.

‘Derek whisked me up here almost as soon as he heard I was pregnant,’ she said. ‘He already had the house by then, bought it off the church when the village lost its vicar. I’m glad he did, because there’s room for kids out here.’ She looked around the room. ‘Do you think they have missed something?’

I glanced around the room – there were still traces of fingerprint powder around the window frames, the door, and anywhere else an intruder might have touched. I estimated that more forensic time had been spent in that one room than in the last fifty local burglary investigations.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they have.’

She started to cry then. I’m not even sure she was aware it was happening until she felt the tears trickling down her cheeks. I took a step towards her, but she whirled quickly around and fled.

I went downstairs and let myself out.

The next morning my phone pinged while I was in the shower. It was an email from Kimberly Cidre at the High Tech unit. There was an attached image which even my dinky phone display could expand enough for me to see a familiar pattern of microscopic pits and lesions. I forwarded them on to Dr Walid but I didn’t need his confirmation.

I know hyperthaumaturgical degradation when I see it.

The phones had been done in by magic.

5 Customer Facing

‘Now you’re beginning to freak me out,’ said Dominic as I squatted down to get my face close to the old stone of the war memorial. ‘I still don’t see what you need me for.’

‘Local guide,’ I said.

It was late enough for the search teams to be out, but early enough for the air to still be cool and fresh. Stone retains vestigia longer than anything except certain types of plastic, but I’d wanted to check first thing and not waste any time. Magic powerful enough to damage a phone would have left a trace on the monument had it happened here. I know this because I’ve done experiments in a controlled setting to determine accurately the persistence of vestigia following a magical event. Or at least as accurately as you can using your own perception and that of a short-haired terrier called Toby.

‘Whatever happened to the phones,’ I said, ‘didn’t happen here.’

It hadn’t happened at the Lacey house either. Or, and I’d double checked that morning, at the Marstowe house. I was facing the possibility that I might just have to knock on every door in the village and have a sniff around. This is where it would have been useful to have another practitioner to split the work with.

‘So you think this is a Falcon case?’ asked Dominic.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But there’s no point me going to your governor until I’ve got something worth telling him.’

‘He’s going to want to know either way,’ said Dominic.

Just then a helicopter clattered right over our heads, the lowest I’d ever seen an aircraft not coming into land. It was a militarised Eurocopter Dauphin in army camouflage. When it banked to head up the ridge we caught the edge of its rotor wash – it was that low.

‘Eight Flight,’ said Dominic smugly. ‘Special Air Service.’ He grinned at the expression on my face. ‘Finally,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if anything out here was going to impress you.’

‘Are they joining the search?’ I asked.

‘They’ve been in it from the start,’ said Dominic. ‘One of the perks of operating in Herefordshire – the SAS tend to pitch in on these sort of cases.’

Magic only damages microprocessors when they’re powered, which meant that whatever happened to the girls’ phones happened when they were switched on. But practically the first thing you do with a high priority MISPER is call their service provider and get the snail trail – the track the phone leaves when it’s on. That data is kept for three days, but on the night the girls vanished both phones went off the air within five minutes of each other at around ten o’clock. The girls’ bedtime.

That was worrying. Because if person or persons unknown had told the girls to turn off their phones, then it displayed a disturbing level of forensic awareness.

‘If you were an eleven-year-old girl, what would you turn your phone on for?’ I asked.

‘Send a text?’

I thought about it. ‘Both at the same time?’

‘Tweet maybe,’ said Dominic. ‘Because OMG you’ll never believe what just happened.’

Records showed that there hadn’t been a text or a tweet, but perhaps whatever made them turn on their phones destroyed them almost immediately.

Accidentally or deliberately? It just went round and round.

Right, I thought. If you can’t be clever, then at least you can be thorough.

So I called DCI Windrow and provided exactly enough information to complicate his investigation and not enough to help in a material way. I told him that I was working on the hypothesis that whatever had happened to their phones happened on their way to the crossroad where they were abandoned. I said I needed to do a survey of the whole village so he lent me Dominic, since he was a local boy who people would talk to, and off we went.

There are one hundred and seven separate dwellings in Rushpool, and we quickly fell into a pattern where Dominic distracted the homeowner/resident/dog while I slipped off to do what Dominic started calling my voodoo shit. At least until I told him to stop calling it that, and he switched to calling it psychic stuff, which wasn’t much better.

About a quarter of the houses were empty, with their occupants on holiday abroad. Many of the rest had middle-aged or older couples, some on early retirement, others who commuted into a town for work. One of the things that struck me was the lack of young children. Go house to house in a street or estate block in London and you’d have been neck deep in rug rats. But in the village there were a lot of spare rooms, a lot of trim gardens, and no abandoned Tonka toys or Lego punji sticks hidden in the grass.

We paused for a cup of tea in the shade of big tree with a reddish-brown trunk whose canopy spread out like something from a Chinese illustration. The man who made us the tea was called Alec and worked from home as a software engineer. His wife taught in a private school outside Hereford. Both their kids were grown up and moved to London. Their garden was on a terrace that overlooked the churchyard and, beyond that, the twist of the valley as it dropped down towards Leominster. Big trees in a dozen shades of green and brown created a patchwork of light and shade down the lane. It was as quiet as London only gets at dawn on a summer Sunday or in post-apocalyptic movies.

Me and Dominic drank our tea in silence and got on with the job.

During the whole pointless process not one resident refused to let us in or objected to us looking around, which I found creepy because there’s always one. But Dominic said no.

‘Not in the countryside,’ he said.

‘Community spirit?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That and everyone would know that they hadn’t co-operated, which people would find suspicious. In a village that sort of thing sticks for, like, generations.’

Do something frequently enough and you quickly learn to streamline. I worked out early how to identify good vestigia-retaining stone items, and how to snatch a few moments of quiet to get a read. I considered teaching Dominic – anyone can do it as long as you have someone to start you off. But I figured Nightingale would have views about it. Even so, I got it down to about ten minutes a house, with just half an hour for the two farms that lay adjacent to the main village.

There was a ton of vestigia at the farms. The smell of new-mown grass in a barn conversion, the snort and snuffle of horses by a stone wall halfway down the main lane. Somebody had been really miserable about two hundred years ago in the kitchen of a bungalow – a neat trick, since I judged the place to have been built in the mid-70s. Nothing striking, nothing recent. It was all background. Less activity than I would get from a street in Haringey.

At midday we stopped off for refs at Dominic’s mum’s bungalow. She was out serving refreshments of her own to the search teams, so we raided her stupendously large American fridge, which was the size of a cryogenic pod and had an ice maker and everything. It was also ridiculously full for one old lady overseeing a totally theoretical B&B business.

‘Half my family stops in here of an evening,’ said Dominic when I asked about it. ‘I think she sees more of us now than when we were all living in the same house.’

I put together a German salami sandwich with sliced tomatoes and lettuce that had Produce of Spain on its packaging. The stoneground wholemeal bread, Dominic said, was from a bakery in Hereford. ‘I bought it the day before yesterday.’

While we ate, Dominic pulled up the Ordnance Survey map of the area on his tablet.

‘You’re pretty sure the . . .’ He looked at me for a clue but I was too busy chewing. ‘. . . the “magical event” didn’t happen in the village – right?’

I nodded.

‘What if the phones were dumped after the event by somebody other than the kids?’

I swallowed. ‘Like a kidnapper?’

‘That, or a third party who found the phones and dropped them off at the crossroads to be found.’

‘To throw us off?’

‘Or because they didn’t want anyone to know they were in the area,’ said Dominic.

‘But this has been on TV for two days,’ I said. ‘If they weren’t the kidnapper, wouldn’t they have come forward by now?’

‘You know it doesn’t work like that,’ said Dominic.

He was right. Members of the public were famously crap at volunteering information if they thought it might drop them in the shit – even in a serious case like missing children. They could vacillate for days, and often they tried to pass on the information in some devious roundabout way.

‘You’re thinking they might have called the hotline already?’ I said.

‘Yep,’ said Dominic.

In a case like this there had to have been a thousand calls by now. But the good news was that some other poor sod would have already done the basic follow-up work.

My phone rang and when I checked it was Beverley’s number.

I answered and said, ‘Hi, Bev.’

‘Would this be Constable Grant?’ asked a woman with a Welsh accent.

I said it was.

‘My name is Miss Teveyddyadd,’ she said. ‘I believe we have a friend of yours here that needs to be picked up.’

‘Picked up from where?’ I asked.

Miss Teveyddyadd told me. And while it wasn’t either a hospital or a police station, I wasn’t sure it might not be worse. I told her that I’d be right there.

‘I have to run an errand,’ I told Dominic.

‘Do you want me to come?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I think I’d better do this one myself. You start going through the callins and I’ll join you as soon as I get this sorted.’

Little Hereford is a collection of houses and a couple of pubs that lies fifteen minutes’ drive east of Rushpool in the valley of the River Teme. My GPS turned me off the main road just before I reached the stone bridge and past an orchard to the Westbury Caravan Park. It was a touring park, which meant that it catered for the kind of caravans that people use to clog up the roads in the summer and not the aluminium house substitutes with the suspiciously vestigial wheels. The nice white lady in the camp office looked up from her paperwork and asked if she could help me.

I told her that I was there to meet a Miss Teveyddyadd.

She gave me a broad grin that was slightly worrying in its fervour.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘You’re here to see the blessed sisters.’

I said that I was rather afraid I was, and she gave me directions.

The plots were laid out on neat rectangles of lawn between shaggy olive-green hedges. As I crunched down the gravel access drive I could see heat haze wavering over the white aluminium tops of the caravans. A huge half-naked white man, his belly an alarming lobster colour, dozed in a black and white striped deckchair under a porch awning. In front of the next caravan an elderly couple in matching yellow sun hats sat side by side, drinking tea and listening to The Archers on a digital radio.

A fat bumblebee meandered humming past my ear – I gave it a suspicious look, but it ignored me and headed off towards the fat man. Maybe it thought he was an aubergine.

Ahead I could hear high pitched yells and screams – the sound of children playing. Beyond a five-bar gate was what Nightingale insists on calling a sward, an area of naturally short grass, dotted with trees and picnic tables, edged with a steep bank that led to the river. There was a scatter of adults sat at the picnic tables or in the shade of the trees, but the children were all down in the water. Here the river was over ten metres across but shallow enough that I could see the smooth green stones of its bed. I watched from the bank as the kids thrashed around in the water – a froth of bright tropical blue, purples and yellows and distressingly pale limbs. Although I did notice at least one mixed-race boy amongst the others.

I had a sudden urge to pull off my boots and socks, roll up my trousers and go for a paddle.

‘Stop that,’ I said out loud.

The water stayed cool and inviting but I took a step back. And, because being police is something that never goes away, I did a quick safety assessment to ensure that sufficient adults were supervising.

Satisfied that nobody was about to get themselves drowned in fifteen centimetres of water, I turned left and walked along the bank until I reached the gate which marked the entrance to the orchard. A pale little boy with bleached-white blond hair was standing on the bottom rail and staring inside. When he heard me coming, he hopped off and turned to give me a suspicious look.

‘You can’t go in there,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because there’s poo everywhere,’ he said. ‘It’s disgusting.’

He was right, I could smell it. Only it was definitely animal – sheep shit, at a guess.

‘I’ll watch my step,’ I said.

‘And there’s witches,’ he said. He had a Black Country accent, so witches came out with a long e – weetches.

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

The boy hopped from one foot to the other. ‘Everybody says so,’ he said. ‘You can hear them singing at night.’

I moved to open the gate and the boy scurried away to take up position at what I assumed he thought was a safe distance. I gave him a wave and stepped through the gate and straight into some sheep shit. The culprits, or possibly their relatives, came scampering over to see if I’d been stupid enough to leave the gate open. At first I thought they were goats, but then I realised that the pale shorn look was due to them having been recently sheared. They looked like a herd of stereotypical English tourists – all they were missing were the knotted hankies on their heads.

Despite the shade it was hot and still under the branches of the apple trees and the air was thick with the shit odour, green wood and a sweet smell like rotting fruit. On this side of the hedge, the slope of the riverbank was less steep and held in place by clumps of mature trees. Right on the edge, sitting amongst the trees and so grown about with long grass and climbing flowers that I almost didn’t spot it, was a campervan.

Sighing, I headed towards it – scattering sheep as I went.

It was a genuine VW Type 2 Camper van with a split windscreen and ‘A’ registration number plate just visible through the long grass and wild flowers, which dated it back to 1963. It was painted RAF blue with white trim and all the windows I could see, including the windscreen, had paisley pattern curtains drawn across.

When I paused to check the tyres – it’s a police thing – I saw that they’d all but rotted away and that the van had been there long enough for the roots of a young tree to tangle itself in the wheel arch. From the other side of the van I could hear a woman humming to herself. And I could smell, appropriately given the vehicle, that someone was smoking a spliff. I smiled. Because it’s always a comfort when you’re the police to walk into a situation knowing that if all else fails you can still make a legitimate arrest.

The humming stopped.

‘We don’t drive it around much these days,’ said a woman from the other side of the van. ‘You can’t get the wheels anymore, or so I’m told.’ I recognised the voice from the phone call – it was Miss Teveyddyadd. Or more properly, as five seconds on Google had revealed, Miss Tefeidiad. Or even more precisely, since we were on the English side of the border, the goddess of the River Teme. Nightingale calls them Genius Loci, spirits of a locality, and says that the first rule of dealing with them in person is to remember that every single one of them is different.

‘They are, after all,’ he’d said, and smiled, ‘spirits of a specific locality. It’s only logical that they will be somewhat variable.’

Miss Tefeidiad was as tall as I was, with a shaggy head of blonde hair with a grey streak over her temple, a long straight nose, thin lips and black eyes. It was the sort of face that had become attractively interesting around puberty and was going to stay that way until the owner was carried out of their nursing home feet first. She appeared to be in her well-preserved mid-sixties, but I’d learnt not to trust appearances.

She stood waiting for me on the far side of the VW, where a heavy red and gold awning was attached above the open side doors and stretched out on a pair of poles. In its shade was an old wooden kitchen table covered in a red and white check vinyl table cloth.

‘You must be the famous Peter Grant,’ she said, and ushered me into one of four grey metal folding chairs set around the table. Another of the chairs was occupied by a handsome middle-aged white woman with long brown hair, hazel eyes and the same long straight nose as her – sister? mother? Relative, certainly. She wore an orange sun dress and broad-brimmed straw hat.

‘This is my daughter Corve,’ said Miss Tefeidiad.

Corve reached out and shook my hand. Her grip was firm and the skin rough from hard work.

‘Delighted to meet you, Peter.’ Her Welsh accent was less pronounced than her mother’s. I noticed that there was no visible sign of the spliff.

I nodded and said likewise. The Corve was a tributary of the Teme – I’d looked up the whole watershed before coming over.

‘Lilly, love,’ called Miss Tefeidiad. ‘Why don’t you be a dear and put the kettle on.’

Something groaned and stirred inside the VW, which rocked alarmingly. I realised then that the back end of the van was dangling over the edge of the bank, as if the ground had eroded away after it had parked.

Beyond where I was sitting a path dropped down to the river, tree roots entangling to form a disturbingly regular flight of steps. At the bottom, the action of the river had carved a pool, deeper and darker than the shallow water immediately downstream. I wondered if the kids playing less than ten metres downstream ever ventured into it for a swim – or what would happen if they did.

A white face appeared in the shadowed doorway of the VW, stared blearily at us from eyes heavily outlined in black, grunted and then swivelled to address the compact cooker that was Germany’s contribution to family holidays in the 1950s.

‘My youngest,’ said Miss Tefeidiad, and got an answering snarl.

‘Don’t mind her,’ said Corve. ‘She’s been like that since Ralph de Mortimer married Gladys the Dark.’

‘So Scotland Yard is back in business,’ said Miss Tefeidiad. ‘Gaily rushing in where even the saints fear to tread.’

I wanted to ask where Beverley was, and how the Teme family just happened to have her phone. But if there’s one thing Nightingale has taught me, it’s to let other people talk themselves out before giving anything away. It’s something he has in common with Seawoll and Stephanopoulos, and all the top cops that I know.

‘I’m just lending a hand with the search,’ I said.

‘For the missing girls?’ asked Corve.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, we haven’t seen them,’ said Miss Tefeidiad. ‘I can tell you that for nothing.’

Lilly’s pale face emerged from the gloom of the camper van and looked around before fixing on me. ‘Do you want sugar?’ she asked. Her left eyebrow was practically hidden behind a row of studs, and loops of silver pierced her left ear from lobe to tip.

‘No tea for me,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

‘You could have said,’ she snorted, and withdrew.

‘Don’t you go back to sleep now, Lilly,’ said Corve. ‘We still want a cup.’

‘Let me tell you something, Constable Grant,’ said Miss Tefeidiad. ‘Where you are now is not London – it’s not even England.’

‘Yes it is, Ma,’ said Corve.

‘Only in a political sense,’ snapped Miss Tefeidiad over her shoulder, before turning a slightly less than reassuring smile on me. ‘We remember your lot when they first started, and a more arrogant collection of . . . gentlemen . . . you will never meet. But we have long memories that go all the way back, you see, back to when your beloved Thames was still scuttling around with his tongue jammed up a Roman backside.’

‘We used to get heads,’ said Corve. ‘The druids used to throw them in along with the other offerings.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Miss Tefeidiad. ‘You got some respect in those days.’

‘Not that we’re looking for heads these days,’ said Corve. ‘We’ll take cash or goods in kind.’

‘So when your lot got themselves all massacred or whatever,’ said Miss Tefeidiad, ‘we weren’t exactly crying into our tea. And I have to say that we’ve got a little bit used to managing our own business in recent years. So, it’s not that we don’t like visitors . . .’

‘We love visitors, really we do,’ said Corve. ‘Liven the place up.’

‘But I think we’re going to have to insist on certain minimum standards of navigational etiquette in future.’ Miss Tefeidiad gave me an expectant look.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Stakeholder engagement is a vital part of our modernisation plans going forward.’

‘Look,’ she said, ‘do you want your girlfriend back or not?’

I wanted to tell them that she wasn’t actually my girlfriend and that they better release her before her mother, goddess of the important bit of the Thames, found out they were detaining her and came over to have words. But my life is complicated enough these days and I try not to make things more difficult for myself.

‘Yes, please,’ I said.

Miss Tefeidiad nodded and then looked over at Corve who got to her feet and went to the top of the tree-root stairs. I got up and followed to look over her shoulder.

‘Bev, love,’ called Corve. ‘Your ride’s here.’

She walked out of the pool stark naked – except for the lavender full-body neoprene wetsuit and a Tesco bag wrapped around her hair to keep it dry. She glared at Corve, and then turned her black eyes on me, her full lips twisting into a half smile.

‘You took your time,’ she said.

‘I’ve been busy,’ I said.

Beverley turned to Miss Tefeidiad. ‘Can I have my bag back?’

A purple sausage bag came flying out of the dark interior of the VW. Beverley grabbed it out of the air and slung it over her shoulder.

‘And I believe this is yours,’ said Corve and handed Beverley her phone. ‘Bit of a revelation, that,’ she said. ‘We didn’t know they made them waterproof – very handy.’

‘I can’t be doing with those things,’ said Miss Tefeidiad and sniffed.

Behind her, Corve made a face.

‘Laters, ladies,’ said Beverley and, grabbing my arm, urged me away.

‘So, you won’t be staying for tea then?’ asked Miss Tefeidiad.

Beverley urgently squeezed my arm, so I told them we couldn’t.

‘I have to get back to the investigation,’ I said.

‘That’s a shame then,’ said Miss Tefeidiad.

And me and Beverley got while the going was good.

‘Not a word,’ said Beverley, who was so keen to get away we were halfway back to the car before she realised that she was walking barefoot on gravel. We paused long enough for her to extract a pair of flip flops from her sausage bag and then walked briskly the rest of the way. She didn’t relax until we were in the car and the River Teme was a kilometre behind us.

‘That was close,’ she said.

‘What was all that about?’ I asked.

She pulled off the Tesco bag and shook out her locks, flicking me with water and filling the Asbo with the smell of clean damp hair.

‘I thought it would be quicker to get here by water,’ she said, rummaging in her carryall and bringing out a yellow and blue beach towel. ‘Should have used an M&S bag,’ said Beverly and started squeezing out her locks in bunches. ‘That bitch Sabrina failed to mention the weird sisters were still in residence and I ran right into them at Burford.’

‘They didn’t like you trespassing?’

‘I’m lucky to be alive,’ said Beverley. ‘You don’t mess with someone’s river without getting permission first.’

‘You should have driven up,’ I said.

‘I’d still have had to cross the Severn, and if you do that you’ve got to stop and give some respect to Sabrina or she throws a right strop,’ said Beverley. ‘I thought that if I was getting my hair wet I might as well take a short cut.’

‘What are you doing out here, anyway?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been deputised,’ she said. ‘And sent out to assist in your investigation.’

‘Who by?’

‘Who do you think?’ she said. ‘Your boss wanted someone out here who knew one end of a cow from the other.’

‘And that’s you, is it?’

‘One of us spent a year rusticating with their country cousins,’ she said. ‘And do you remember whose bright idea that was?’ She bunched her fist and punched me in the shoulder – hard enough that I almost put us in the hedgerow. ‘And did I get one visit?’

‘It was a difficult time,’ I said.

‘It was the Thames Valley,’ she said. ‘Not the moon.’

My phone rang – it was Dominic.

‘Guess who I’ve found,’ he said.

The interview room at Leominster’s cell block was as clean and as unused as the rest of the station. It was also missing the table that we in the Met have long come to see as an indispensable prop to bang papers on, push cigarettes across, make coffee rings on and, in extremis, put our head down on for a quick kip while no one was looking. Instead, there were two rows of three chairs bolted so that one row faced the other – just over an easy punching distance apart. There was nowhere to put papers or support one of those yellow legal pads while making notes. The briefs must hate it – which, speaking as police, I definitely saw as a feature not a bug.

Dominic who, unlike me, had done a couple of PIP courses (Professionalising Investigation Process) in interviewing, said that the open set-up allowed you to see the suspect’s – sorry, the interview subject’s – whole body language. You’d be surprised how many people nervously tap their foot when being questioned and how often the frequency of the tapping depends on how close to the truth you are.

Our ‘interview subject’ had brown hair, small narrow-set blue eyes and an unfortunate nose – he also had a foot tap that just wouldn’t quit. He looked like someone who knew he’d been a naughty boy.

Which was how Dominic had tracked him down, by asking himself what kind of no-good would someone have to be up to not to want to help the police with their inquiries. Given the quiet rural nature of the area, the list was distressingly long, ranging from sheep rustling, poaching, agricultural vehicle theft – a top of the line tractor being more expensive than a Lamborghini and much easier to sell in Eastern Europe – to fly-tipping and public indecency. Even hardened criminals, especially those that consider themselves the salt of the earth trying to get by, will come forward on cases involving missing kids. But none had. And, besides, a quick check revealed that nothing majorly criminal had occurred that night. Dominic figured that if it wasn’t fear of prosecution it might be sexual shame. And since Bircher Common, just up the lane from where the phones were found, was the local dogging site he concentrated his initial efforts on cars sighted accessing the common late that night. Fortunately, some of the locals, fed up with having their beauty sleep disrupted by the nocturnal revelries, had taken to noting down number plates. Fifteen minutes on the computer had got him a list of names and addresses and, by the time I was fetching Beverley out of captivity, he was knocking at the front door of the first on the list. One Russell Banks of Green Lane, Leominster.

Mr Banks had taken one look at Dominic’s warrant card and blurted out that it was in fact him who had left the phones at the crossroad, but he didn’t have anything to do with those missing kids, he’d never do anything to harm a kid for god’s sake, and please don’t tell the wife where he was that night.

‘Obviously,’ said Dominic, ‘the missus wasn’t a participant in our Russ’s escapades.’

The interview room was part of the custody suite downstairs and so had thick walls, making it remarkably cool compared to the rest of the nick. Even so, Russell Banks’s grey and blue check button-down shirt showed dark sweat patches under the armpits.

Dominic explained to Russell that he wasn’t under arrest but, for his own protection, the interview was being recorded on audio and video. And that any time he could just ask to leave. He said he was fine but could he have some water? I passed him a bottle of Highland Spring that we had in a picnic cooler. His hand was trembling.

‘We just want to know about the phones,’ said Dominic.

Russell nodded. ‘I found them,’ he said.

‘Where did you find them?’ asked Dominic.

‘Just short of the Mill,’ said Russell, which seemed to mean something to Dominic, if not to me.

‘Where were they?’ he asked. ‘Exactly?’

‘By the side of the road,’ he said. ‘On the verge like, just lying there and I thought it was strange but didn’t know it had anything to do with those missing girls, you know. Didn’t even know there were missing girls, until the next day when I heard it on the radio, like.’ His leg was practically a blur.

‘Why did you get out of the car?’ I asked.

His head snapped round to look at me.

‘What?’

‘You said you found the phones on the verge – correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’d have to have got out of your car – yes?’

I personally would have gone with stopping for a slash, but I don’t think Russ was really thinking that clearly. We were pretty certain we knew roughly where he’d been, but members of the public have an unnerving tendency to switch straight from lying to your face to telling you what they think you want to hear – with no intervening period of veracity at all. That’s fine when you’re looking for them to put their hand up to some crimes and boost your clear-up statistics. But when the lives of two kids depends on the accuracy of the statement, you tend to be a bit more thorough.

He started to say something, but then closed his mouth suddenly and looked at Dominic in mute appeal.

‘So,’ said Dominic cheerily. ‘Where did you really find them?’

He told us the truth, although it took ages to pry all the sordid details out. Which just goes to show that if you want a confession, use a telephone book – but if you want the truth, you’ve got to put in the hours.

Our Russell had been out enjoying the pleasures of alfresco voyeurism and public sex on Bircher Common with likeminded individuals. Having satiated his carnal desires, he’d made his way back to where he’d parked his car and spotted, when he turned on his headlights, the phones by a gate into the woods. Thinking that one of his fellow swingers had lost them during the throes of passion, he left them at the war memorial in the hope that their owners would find them there – this being the accepted practice, apparently.

‘Does you good to see such neighbourliness at work,’ I said.

‘I bet you don’t get that kind of community spirit in the big city,’ said Dominic.

It took us another couple of hours to winkle out the names of the participants he’d recognised, and descriptions of others – ‘fabulous blonde’, ‘short hairy guy’ and ‘let’s just say he was lucky we were all doing it in the dark.’ Plus makes and models of their cars. This was all going to generate a ton of actions that would be dumped on a bevy of constables who would set forth to TIE every single one. I suspected the dogging scene in North Herefordshire was about to suffer a serious blow. People would just have to go back to having sex indoors for a change.

Fortunately for me and Dominic, what with me being a specialist officer, we could leave that to others.

‘We need you to take us to the exact spot where you found the phones,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ said Russell. ‘When do you want to do that?’

‘How much daylight do we have left?’ I asked Dominic.

‘A couple of hours.’

‘How about right now?’ I said.

I hadn’t thought the West Mercia Police were quite ready for Beverley, so just before my little tête-à-tête with Russell Banks I’d dropped her off at the Swan in the Rushes in Rushpool, and suggested that once we’d finished for the day Dominic might be able to help her with accommodation.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said. ‘I can take care of myself.’

I would have offered to put her up in the cowshed, but that sort of thing can be misconstrued. Or to be honest, accurately construed. And I didn’t think I wanted to go there.

Dominic put Russell in his boyfriend’s truck and I followed on in the Asbo as we drove back to Rushpool, up through the village, across the main road and up yet another narrow lane which twisted onto the ridge. We passed a rather fine cottage with a neat thatched roof, rattled across a cattle grid and parked in the open space beyond, just long enough for me to transfer into the truck. Then we proceeded up a flinty track that was rough enough to eat the bottom chassis of any family hatchback.

‘And you drove up here in your car?’ I asked Russell.

He said everyone did, which meant to my mind you could track all these doggers by their frequent trips to the garage. Dominic’s boyfriend’s Nissan made short work of the rough track, as it probably did of wild animals and anti-personnel mines. We climbed towards the ridge with woods on our left and a wide stretch of short grass to our right. After five hundred metres or so we ran out of car-destroying track and set out directly over the grass.

‘And you came all the way up here?’ I asked as the Nissan bumped and squeaked on its suspension.

‘Yes,’ said Russell.

‘In the dark?’

‘Yes.’

‘Boy, you really must have been desperate,’ I said.

‘You get a better class of people at the top of the common,’ he said. ‘There’s too many weirdos at the bottom.’

Russell directed us to a point just short of the ridge line where the fence that separated the common from the woodland was pierced by a five-bar gate, a wooden side gate and a wooden sign bearing the National Trust crest and a trail marker.

‘This is part of the Mortimer Trail,’ said Dominic.

We got out of the truck and Russell showed me where he’d found the phones – just on the bare patch that ramblers’ feet had worn in the grass in front of the wooden gate. I wasn’t going to get anything off that, but the metal was everything an investigatory wizard might hope for. I placed my palms on the top rail, trying not to make it look too theatrical, and attempted to sort through the random sense impressions, stray thoughts, sounds and fantasies that are definitely not vestigia. And for a moment I thought the gate was clean, until I realised what it was I was sensing. Nightingale once described vestigia as being like the after-image you get in your eyes after looking at a bright light, but what I felt at the gate was different. It was more like stepping out of a cool house on a bright sunny day – for a moment everything is a confusion of light and warmth, and then your senses adjust. Something powerful had happened around that gate and blotted out any other traces with the magical equivalent of white noise.

I didn’t like to commit without corroboration, but I was willing to bet that whatever had happened to the phones had happened right where I was standing.

‘This is the place,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Dominic.

‘Edmondson’s going to want a POLSA up here,’ I said. ‘Before it gets dark.’

Dominic pulled out his phone and called in to the nick while I did a slow turn on the spot to see whether anything jumped out. Up on the ridge there was a cool breeze that lazily stirred the grass and the odd clump of bracken. I could hear bird song and far in the distance the lawn-mower hum of a power tool. The sky was powder blue and cloudless – not even a contrail.

I heard Dominic explaining to Windrow that I was certain that the phones had been abandoned at this particular spot. I noticed he didn’t mention the M word or call it Falcon. Nightingale says that conspiracies of silence are the only kind of conspiracies that stand the test of time.

‘Is this place important?’ I asked Russell.

‘It’s the Whiteway Head,’ said Russell. ‘This is where all the ancient track-ways cross.’

If I squinted at the dry yellow grass I could sort of see what he meant. The Mortimer Trail came out of its gate and ran west to east, and there was definitely another track crossing it north to south. I went to where I judged the centre of the crossroads was, got on my hands and knees and lowered my face towards the grass.

I was briefly distracted by Russell asking Dominic whether I was praying to Mecca, but I’ve done this procedure at Piccadilly Circus so it was only for a moment. The short grass was prickly under my palms and filled my nostrils with its vaguely sick-making smell. I idly chased Beverley across the meadows of my mind before letting that go and for a moment I thought there was nothing to sense.

Then suddenly I felt it. Very quiet but very deep, the crack-crack of chisels in stone and the heavy slap of men carrying weight on their shoulders, grunting and sweating and the thirsty smell of salt. You do get vestigia in the countryside, I thought, only it seeps in deep and lies there like water under a dry riverbed.

And there was something else, a greasy tension that I remembered from when the Stadtkrone broke open at the top of Skygarden Tower and filled the air with magic. The Romantics had been right. There was power out here amongst all the green stuff – Polidori’s potentia naturalis.

I broke out Dominic’s map. Stan’s raided stash was down the Mortimer Trail to the west, Rushpool was along the track to the south, and across a valley to the north at the top of the next ridge was Hugh Oswald’s house – less than fifteen hundred metres as the bee flies.

6 Stakeholder Engagement

The next morning I called Beverley as soon as the sun touched the front of the cowshed – she wasn’t best pleased.

‘If you’re going to stay,’ I said, ‘you’re going to work.’

She was waiting for me in the gravel car park behind the Swan in the Rushes, wearing a pair of high-waisted khaki army trousers and a purple T-shirt with the words I’M FROM HERE STUPID written across the chest. In one hand she had what I learnt later was a genuine army surplus gas mask case, and in the other a mug of coffee.

I opened the passenger door and gestured her in.

‘Just a sec,’ she said, and drained her mug. Then, holding it straight out towards the inn, she called out a name.

A young blonde photographer in skinny jeans and a red sweatshirt trotted out of the inn, smiled, took the mug and trotted back in. I gave Beverley the stare when she got in the car, but she just ignored me.

‘You’re not supposed to do that,’ I said.

‘If you’re going to get me up this early in the morning, then you don’t get to complain when I smooth off some of the rough edges.’

I started up the Asbo and pulled out of the car park.

‘How did you get a room there, anyway?’ I asked. ‘I heard it was rammed.’

‘Oh,’ said Beverley, ‘the nice lady from Sky News let me have her room.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Not just like that, actually,’ said Beverley. ‘I had to ask twice! I hate being this far from the Thames Valley.’

After a moment she said, ‘Where are we going?’

‘I want your professional opinion about someone.’

‘My profession in this instance being what?’

‘Goddess of small suburban river in South London.’

She nodded and then reached over to brush the side of my face, which was beginning to swell nicely.

‘When did you do this?’ she asked.

‘Yesterday evening,’ I said. ‘I walked into a tree.’

After finding the phones we still had a couple of hours of daylight, and it wasn’t like the POLSA was going to need us looking over his shoulder. So we’d split up. Dominic went east onto the common with our favourite sexual pervert as guide and I went west into the woods.

‘And you thought that was clever,’ said Beverley.

‘It’s a National Trust property,’ I said. ‘It’s not like there were going to be giant spiders. The locals call it Fairy Wood. So I had to check it, didn’t I?’

‘You think they were abducted by fairies?’

‘I don’t even know if that’s a thing,’ I said.

I’d asked Nightingale once I’d got back to the cowshed, and he’d said that while he’d never had a case in his lifetime, there were always rumours that it had happened. He promised to look through books and see what he could find.

‘Is it a thing?’ I asked Beverley.

‘Not that I know about,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Mum doesn’t hold with it, so someone would have to be pretty stupid to tell me about it.’

‘And fairies?’

Beverley hesitated and then – ‘Peter,’ she said, ‘some things you don’t talk about.’

‘Not even to me?’

‘Especially to the feds,’ she said. ‘Double so the magic feds.’

I cordially hate the use of the word feds – I’d rather be called the filth, at least that would be English English. It’s the lack of imagination that pisses me off.

Just short of a crossroad hamlet called Mortimer’s Cross we rumbled over a stone bridge and Beverley jolted in her seat and asked whether the river we’d crossed was the Lugg.

‘I think so,’ I said, trying to remember the map on the GPS. ‘Is that important?’

‘Nah,’ said Beverley. ‘Just professional curiosity.’

I turned right onto the A410 which went north with suspiciously Roman straightness towards Aymestrey, which is less a village than a diorama of the last six hundred years of English vernacular architecture stretched along either side of the road. Then another stone bridge across the Lugg where it curved west towards Wales and then a tricky little turn-off that took us through Yatton and the weirdly named Leinthall Earls, where Stan the strange lived. To our right a steep escarpment reared up, topped by the ancient hill fort of Croft Ambrey and Whiteway Head – although our view would have been better if the hedgerows hadn’t been higher than our car.

‘I’m not totally comfortable with the tops of hills,’ said Beverley as we climbed up a steep wooded incline.

‘Why’s that?’

‘You know water,’ she said. ‘Tends to flow downhill, tends to accumulate at the bottom.’

‘That make sense,’ I said. ‘How do you feel about bees?’

‘Why do you ask?’

I told her about Mellissa Oswald’s unusual affinity for anthophila.

‘And you think she’s a bee?’ she asked.

‘Let’s just say I think there’s more going on there than an interest in grow your own honey,’ I said.

‘And that helps us how?’

‘Bees cover a wide area. Maybe they spotted something.’

‘And told your bee girl?’

‘Possibly.’

Beverley kissed her teeth.

‘Not unless the missing girls were covered in sugar they wouldn’t,’ she said.

‘They might have seen something and not known what it is.’ It was beginning to sound pretty thin even to me.

‘Have you ever dissected a bee?’ asked Beverley. ‘One look inside its head and you’d know that not knowing what stuff is is practically the definition of how a bee operates.’

‘When have you ever dissected a bee?’

‘I did biology at A-level,’ said Beverley. ‘Mum insisted. She’s still hoping that one of us will qualify as a doctor.’

‘And?’

‘I’d rather eat a frog than dissect one,’ she said. ‘And I’m certainly not going to start putting my hands on any sick people.’ She shuddered. ‘But since I was stuck in the country,’ she raised her fist and I dutifully flinched, ‘I did pick up a bit of ecology, if only because that’s what all the Thames boys go on about.’ She punched me in the arm, but gently this time, leaving hardly any bruising at all.

‘And let me tell you that I wouldn’t be reading too much into the eusocial behaviour of bees if I was you – they’re little honey-making machines, that’s all.’

‘Why don’t you wait until you meet Mellissa?’ I said. ‘And we’ll see what you say then.’

It was breathless, bright and hot on the flint road outside the Bee House. I left the windows on the Asbo wound all the way down, because it would be better for it to get stolen than to have the dashboard melt off its frame.

Beverley paused to look at the tower.

‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Nightingale should live here – it’s a proper wizard’s tower.’

The front door opened before we could reach it and Mellissa stepped out to greet us. She was dressed in orange Capri pants with a fake tie-dye pattern and a matching sleeveless T-shirt that revealed the soft blond down on her upper arms and shoulders.

‘Hello, Ms Oswald,’ I said. ‘I wonder if I could have another word with you and your granddad.’

Mellissa crossed her arms. ‘And what do you want this time?’

‘First off,’ I said and indicated Beverley, who gave Mellissa her best friendly smile, ‘let me introduce my friend Beverley Brook.’

‘Hi, Mellissa,’ said Beverley and took a step forward.

Mellissa’s eyes narrowed and then she relaxed and smiled in a sort of delighted way that I was sure she wasn’t aware she was doing.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said, and they shook hands.

Interesting, I thought. There’s instant recognition, but only if they look for it – they could slip past each other in a crowd.

Mellissa remembered that she was supposed to be hostile and glared at me.

‘What is it you want?’ she asked.

‘We need your help.’

‘And why should we help you?’

‘Two eleven-year-old girls are missing,’ I said. ‘Their names are Hannah—’

‘I know their names,’ said Mellissa sharply, and then softened. ‘What is it you think we can do?’

‘Provide local knowledge,’ I said. ‘Of a particular kind.’

Mellissa nodded.

‘You’re not to over-tire him,’ she said and turned to lead us inside.

As Beverley crossed the threshold, I swear I heard a deep rumble from upstairs in the tower. Mellissa sighed and rolled her eyes.

‘Just a second,’ she said to Beverley, and then slammed the bottom of her fist into the wall. ‘Stop that,’ she said and the rumble cut off. ‘Some of us are not used to visitors here.’

‘Family?’ asked Beverley.

‘You might say that,’ said Mellissa and gestured for Beverley to follow her in.

‘I know all about that,’ said Beverley.

I followed them both in and tried not to look too obviously smug.

‘He’s upstairs in his study,’ said Mellissa. ‘If you go up, I’ll bring some tea.’

I made my way up the cool dimness of the spiral staircase to the first floor where I found Hugh Oswald behind his desk, reclining comfortably in a cracked brown leather chair. He looked better than he had the last time I’d seen him, his face more animated and less drawn.

‘Ah, if it isn’t the starling,’ he said. ‘Are you going to introduce me to your friend?’

‘I’m sure she’ll appear,’ I said and, remembering this was a man prone to falling asleep at random intervals, I got on with it. ‘I was hoping you could help me,’ I said.

‘Of course, dear boy,’ said Hugh. ‘Pull yourself up a pew.’

I cleared half a metre’s worth of Bee Improvement Magazine off a wooden swivel chair and sat down.

‘Nightingale suggested that I talk to the local vicar because they often take an interest in local folklore,’ I said.

‘I believe that many did,’ said Hugh. ‘But once upon a time being a pastor was a great deal more leisurely occupation than it is now.’

‘But then I thought, why chase down the poor hard-working vicar when I have a fully qualified practitioner living in the area?’ I said. ‘Taking an interest.’

‘That’s assuming I took an interest,’ said Hugh. ‘I have broken my staff, after all – lignum fregit.’

I nodded at the nearest bookshelf. ‘You kept all your books.’

Hugh smiled.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Hugh. ‘Nightingale’s starling. Tough and clever, that’s what he always said he was looking for – had he been looking for an apprentice at all.’

I didn’t get a chance to ask who Nightingale had said this to, or when, because we were interrupted by Mellissa and Beverley arriving with tea and toast. While Mellissa set down a tray on top of a precarious pile of books I introduced Beverley – by her full name.

Hugh looked a bit wild eyed as the implications sank in, but recovered enough to be passably charming. Beverley was charming back and, after giving me the side-eye for no justifiable reason that I could see, accompanied Mellissa back downstairs again.

‘Good Lord,’ said Hugh. ‘Where did she spring from?’

‘Nightingale sent her,’ I said, watching as he buttered his toast with painful slowness. I was tempted to do it for him, but I didn’t think he’d like that.

‘Things must have changed back at the Folly,’ he said and, toast finally buttered, he lifted the lid on a little white china pot and scooped out some orange marmalade. ‘Still, the Nightingale was always a little bit unorthodox in his friends. There used to be this creature, slip of a thing, worked below stairs – never spoke.’ He paused looking for the name.

‘Molly?’

‘Yes, that was her name,’ said Hugh. ‘Molly. Used to terrify all us New Bugs, but not the Nightingale.’ Hugh smiled. ‘There were rumours, of course,’ he said. ‘It was scandalous.’

He bit decisively into his toast.

‘Why does everyone call him the Nightingale?’ I asked.

Hugh chewed industriously for a moment, swallowed and caught his breath.

‘Because he was so singular, so extraordinary – or so the seniors said. Of course most of us didn’t believe a word of it, but we used it as a nickname – irony, or so we thought.’

He was looking in my direction, but his gaze was somewhere back in time to his young self. My dad does the same thing when he talks about seeing Freddie Hubbard with Tubby Hayes at the Bull’s Head in 1965 or being at Ronnie Scott’s and hearing Sonny Rollins solo live for the first time.

There were so many questions I wanted answered, but I began to fear that he was drifting off – or worse.

‘You should have seen him at Ettersberg,’ he said softly. ‘It was like standing before the walls of Troy. Aías d’amphì Menoitiádei sákos eurù kalúpsas hestékei hós tís te léon perì hoîsi tékessin, but Ajax covered the son of Menoitios with his broad shield and stood fast, like a lion over its children.’

He grew quiet again, and I saw that I’d worn him out and utterly failed to get the information I’d wanted. Lesley would have been well pissed off with me for that.

Children are missing, she would have said, and you’re sitting around talking ancient history.

‘I was going to ask you about local magic and folklore,’ I said.

Hugh was obviously relieved to change the subject, because he brightened right up.

‘I may have just the thing,’ he said.

It turned out to be large shabby hardback book with Folklore of Herefordshire picked out in gilt on a burgundy cloth cover. It was Ella Mary Leather’s classic 1912 work and I had a copy of it on my tablet – after a recommendation by Nightingale. I was about to politely refuse on the basis that it was obviously a valuable antique, when I opened it up to find that the inside pages were covered in handwritten annotations, some in pencil, many in a spiky cursive hand. There was also a stamp that indicated that the volume had been nicked from Gloucester City Library.

‘When I first moved up here my doctor encouraged me to go for long walks,’ said Hugh. ‘But I’ve always been a bit of an explorer rather than a traveller.’

I wanted to ask more, but I could tell that I’d worn him out. I gathered up the tea things and took them downstairs leaving Hugh alone to ‘rest his eyes for a moment’.

There was no sign of either Beverley or Mellissa in the kitchen or in the garden, so I texted Beverley that it was time for us to go. I let myself out the front door just in case she’d gone back the car, and heard her voice from the other side of the hedge.

I looked over to see Beverley and Mellissa emerge from the cottage next door. The older man with the Australian accent and his sons followed them out to say goodbye. As they did so I got a sense of intimacy between Mellissa and the men – nothing overtly sexual, but a lingering touch on the arm of one of the younger ones, the brush of her shoulder against the older man’s chest. Beverley saw me and waved, then she turned back to Mellissa and they had a quick exchange. One of the men was sent back inside for a pen and Beverley wrote a number on the palm of her own hand. Then there was another round of goodbyes and Beverley joined me by the Asbo. We paused for a bit with the doors open to let the inside temperature fall below the boiling point of lead.

‘Is she . . .?’ I nodded back towards the cottage.

‘None of your business,’ said Beverley.

‘What, all three?’

‘Like I said,’ said Beverley, ‘none of your business.’

‘Damn,’ I said.

‘You should be so lucky,’ said Beverley.

I realised that Dr Walid was going to want a full report on Mellissa Oswald when I got home. He’d probably like me to get a tissue sample or lure her down to the UCH in London so he could get one himself. I wondered what possible conversational gambit I could slip that into – Are you certain you’re completely human? Would you like to find out for sure? Then come on down to Dr Walid’s crypto-pathology lab where we put the ‘frank’ back into Frankenstein!

‘I’m sure she could fit you in,’ said Beverley.

‘Did she say if her bees had spotted anything unusual?’

‘Unlike some people, I’m not tactless,’ said Beverley. ‘You just don’t go asking people about their business like that, making assumptions about what they do and how they do it.’ Beverley tapped her finger on her chest. ‘I merely inquired as to whether Mellissa may, or may not have, noticed anything out of the ordinary.’

‘And had she?’

‘She said she couldn’t be sure, but she thinks her boys . . .’

‘Her boys?’ I asked. ‘Are we talking them next door or the buzzy ones?’

‘Her buzzing boys,’ said Beverley. ‘They’ve been avoiding the south-west section of the ridge, from the edge of Bircher Common to where the river is.’

Whatever had killed the mobile phones had been on the edge of that area, and I didn’t need to check my map to know that Stan’s missing stash had been right in the middle.

‘Could she relate it to the missing kids?’

‘If she had, she says she would have told you when you first came.’

‘I can’t go to Windrow or Edmondson with this,’ I said. ‘Even if I persuaded them to change the search area, I don’t think it would be a good idea.’

‘I’m sure she’ll keep her antenna tuned,’ said Beverley. ‘Got any other leads?’

‘Just something I picked up from one of the statements – I’m waiting for Windrow to okay a fresh interview.’

‘In that case, can we—’

My phone rang – it was Dominic.

‘Are you still up at Wyldes?’ he asked.

I told him we were just finishing.

‘One of the search teams found something you might want to look at,’ he said. ‘Just down the road from where you are now.’

‘Is it related to the search?’

‘Honestly,’ said Dominic, ‘I don’t know. I thought you might be able to tell me.’

I may be a city boy, but I’m fairly certain that the greasy purple and red squishy bits are supposed to stay inside the sheep and not be sprayed across a surprisingly large area.

‘Animal attack?’ I asked.

Both Beverley and Dominic gave me pitying looks. Stan, who’d been the one to discover the dead sheep and call in Dominic, actually snorted.

‘Not unless that puma’s come up from Newtown Cross again,’ she said.

We were standing in a large field just off the Roman road near where it crossed the Lugg. The wooded slopes of the ridge rose up to the east and hidden on the reverse side was School Wood and Stan’s late lamented stash. It was even hotter down here in the valley and missing the breeze we’d had up around the Bee House. Nothing really to dispel the smell of rotting sheep.

‘Mind you,’ said Dominic, ‘when it comes to finding new ways to get themselves killed, sheep are bloody geniuses.’

The sheep lay on its side. It had been sheared recently, giving it a forlorn naked look and making it all too easy to spot the bloody gash in its stomach through which most of its innards seemed to have been pulled out. I’m not very fond of animals, even when they’re on their way to the dinner table. But you don’t do policing by holding your nose and looking the other way. I put on my surgical gloves and squatted down to have a look and do my due diligence.

The edges of the wound were ragged, suggesting tearing rather than cutting, and the glistening viscera looked like they’d been dragged out, widening the hole. Had she been caught on a hook of some sort? Agricultural machinery looked pretty fearsome to me. Plenty of dangerously sharp bits of metal attached to ridiculously over-torqued diesel engines – an accident waiting to happen. But I couldn’t see any tyre tracks in the short grass around the body. I got my face as close to the wound as I could, closed my eyes and held my breath.

There was a kind of vestigia associated with the body. Very faint, nothing that Toby would get out of his basket for.

‘Do you see any horse tracks around here?’ I asked.

‘Do you mean hoof prints?’ asked Dominic as I stood up.

I told him that, yes, I did in fact mean hoof prints and we all spent five minutes looking around the scene to see if we could find any – with no luck.

‘Why did you think a horse had got into your stash?’ I asked Stan. ‘Were there tracks? A smell?’

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s just what came into my head when I found it.’

Vestigia for certain. Which meant what? Something unnatural was buggering about in the countryside, but I hadn’t seen any indication, beyond the dead phones, that it had anything to do with Hannah and Nicole. For all I knew, this was everyday life for country folk. What I needed was some of your actual evidence. Or, failing that, a couple of hours with Hugh’s folklore book.

‘It’s Falcon,’ I said. ‘But it’s not necessarily anything to do with the kids.’

‘Should I call Windrow?’ asked Dominic.

I considered just how much fast talking it would take to explain exactly why I wanted West Mercia Police to put some of their forensic resources into autopsying a sheep, and then phoned Dr Walid.

He said he’d be delighted, and if I could protect the corpse and maybe pick up some samples, he’d send some people over to collect it.

‘What kind of people?’ I asked.

‘There’s a couple of firms that specialise in biohazard removal and forensic preservation,’ said Dr Walid. ‘I consult for them occasionally, and in return they send me anything I might find interesting.’

I got the GPS co-ordinates and texted them to him and he indicated what he wanted in the way of samples. I relayed this to Dominic, who said we should file a report just to be on the safe side.

Beverley said that, although messing with a mutilated sheep seemed like a pile of fun, she was going to take herself down to the pub by the bridge. ‘I’m going to have a quick word with the river,’ she said. ‘Come pick me up when you’re finished.’

‘A quick word with the river?’ asked Dominic once Beverley was gone.

‘I’d tell you, but then you’d have to section me,’ I said. ‘Have you got anything for samples?’

Dominic had a proper Early Evidence Kit in the back of the Nissan, complete with a fingerprint kit, sketchpad and clear plastic evidence bags – the proper ones with individual serialised numbers and a tear-off strip to maintain chain of custody. We took photographs using a high-end digital camera that Stan fetched from her parents’ house.

‘For UFO hunting,’ Dominic told me when Stan was out of earshot.

‘Do we put the entrails back in the sheep?’ I asked. ‘Or put them in a separate bag?’

Nobody had a clue, so I phoned Walid again and he told us to wrap the intestines in plastic sheeting and then place them by the corpse. I’ve done some nasty things in my time, but that was genuinely one of the worst. I never did get the smell of dead sheep out of my clothes.

Once our sheep was bagged and tagged we paid Stan to stay with it until Dr Walid’s people turned up. Well, I was the one that had to cough up the cash because, as Dominic pointed out, I’d declared this a Falcon operation. I made a point of noting it down with the rest of my expenses. Dominic said he’d talk to the farmer while I picked up Beverley.

‘Won’t the farmer mind us taking stuff off his land?’ I asked.

‘You’re joking,’ said Dominic. ‘The farmer has to pay for the safe disposal of animal carcasses – we’re doing him a favour.’

The Riverside Inn was a sprawl of a building that had accreted around a solid sixteenth-century half-timbered core. Its restaurant was well known and it was best, I was informed, to book in advance to avoid disappointment. Fortunately you could get snack type food for eating in the pub garden, although their idea of cheese on toast was mature cheddar melted onto a slab of brioche and topped with mustard seeds and cress. As well as a garden terrace, the inn kept a strip of lawn hard on the riverbank just by the stone bridge and it was there I found Beverley relaxing at a wooden picnic table with the aforementioned posh cheese on toast and an open bottle of Bordeaux. She offered me a glass as I sat down.

‘Try it,’ she said. ‘It’s on the house.’

‘Can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m on duty.’

‘So you are,’ she said, and poured herself another glass.

A smart-looking white girl in a black skirt emerged and on Beverley’s recommendation I had the steak baguette which practically came with a genealogy of the cow and a half-page essay on fresh bread making in Northern Herefordshire. After all that, it was probably just as well that it was delicious if a bit under-seasoned by my standards. Beverley waited till I had a mouthful before asking me to keep an eye out, and without another word she lay down on the bank and stuck her face and head in the water. I swear she stayed in that position for over a minute, her locks waving like seaweed in the current.

I was just about to tap her on the shoulder when she straightened suddenly, an arc of water from her hair spraying back into the car park and landing on the bonnet of an overheated Mondeo where it sizzled.

‘Social call?’ I said.

‘Nobody home,’ said Beverley, flicking out her locks. Water made a sheen on her neck and shoulders and soaked the top of her T-shirt so that the zip of her sports bra poked through the material.

‘Sad really,’ she said.

‘What is?’ I asked, standing clear as Beverley flicked her locks again and tied them back with a waterproof scrunchie.

‘The terrible Teme trio told me about it,’ she said. ‘The spirit of the river was done in by Methodists in Victorian times. That really pissed them off – Miss Tefeidiad said you expect that kind of behaviour from the English, but Welsh boys should have known better.’

My phone pinged and let me know that my restatementing of Nicole and Hannah’s friend had been actioned. I told Beverley, and asked if she wanted to be dropped off somewhere.

‘Can I come to the interview?’ she said.

‘How would I introduce you – “Hello, my name’s Peter Grant. I’m with the police and this is my colleague Beverley Brook who is a small river in South London?” ’

‘You used to introduce me like that,’ said Beverley.

‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know what I know now – did I?’

A2457 H TST GABRIELLA DARRELL RE: INVISIBLE FRIEND MISC

Gabriella – just call her Gaby, she won’t answer to anything else – Darrell was a stolid little girl who was either preternaturally dull, on Ritalin, or biding her time to wreak an appalling revenge on her mother for being clingy and overbearing. Her mother Clarissa was short and unhealthily thin with a narrow intense face and, as far as I could tell, no sense of humour whatsoever.

The barn conversion where they lived just beyond the village of Orelton was seriously nice, its spacious rooms laid out in an uncluttered linear sequence with big windows framed in hardwood and lots of earth tones. It was a Channel Four sort of house with a Channel Four vibe. Mr Darrell was CEO of a mid-sized building services company based in Birmingham.

I didn’t need to inquire into their lives since there was already twenty-plus pages worth of information on him and his family, because Gaby claimed to be BFFs with Nicole Lacey and so they had been thoroughly TIEd, IIPed and statemented. West Mercia Police had even gone so far to as check Gaby’s claims about her relationship with the missing girls – and had concluded that they’d been BFs maybe, but BFFs? No way!

‘I’d like to ask you about Nicole’s invisible friend,’ I said.

Gaby opened her mouth, but before she could answer her mum spoke instead.

‘Why do you want to know about that?’

Gaby rolled her eyes and sighed – see what I have to put up with? I winked back and pretty much from that point on we were allies.

‘We’re following up any possible point of contact,’ I said. ‘We like to make sure we haven’t missed anything first time round.’

‘I see,’ she said.

‘Gaby,’ I said. ‘When you talked to my colleague he asked you to make a list of everyone that Hannah and Nicole might know – do you remember that.’

Gaby nodded.

‘And you said that Nicole had an invisible friend – is that right?’

Gaby nodded again. Her mother opened her mouth to speak, but I held up a finger to stop her. She gave me a poisonous look, but she kept her mouth shut.

‘But an invisible friend is not the same as an imaginary friend, is it?’

Gaby nodded – she obviously planned to make me work for this.

‘Did Nicole’s friend have a name?’

Gaby screwed up her face realising, reluctantly, that she was going to have to communicate. ‘Princess Luna,’ she said.

I looked at her mother to see if this meant anything to her, but she shook her head. I turned back to Gaby, but before I could ask another question she asked me why I was brown.

‘Gaby,’ said her mother in a shocked voice.

‘Because my mum’s from Sierra Leone,’ I said.

‘Where’s that?’ asked Gaby.

‘West Africa,’ I said. ‘Did you ever meet Princess Luna?’

Gaby nodded.

‘When was this?’

‘At Hannah’s birthday party,’ she said. ‘Mummy didn’t want me to go.’

‘I thought it started rather late and they had a bonfire,’ said Gaby’s mother. ‘But Little Miss here put up such a stink . . .’ She shrugged.

‘When was this?’ I asked.

‘Mid-March,’ said Gaby’s mother. ‘I could look up the date if you like.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and she fished out her iPhone and started flicking through the calendar.

‘We had sparklers,’ said Gaby.

‘April the 26th,’ said her mother.

I asked where the party had taken place.

‘Rushpool,’ said Gaby’s mum. ‘In that field behind the parish hall.’

‘And they roasted a whole sheep on a spit,’ said Gaby. ‘And I got grease all over my fingers.’

Gaby’s mum gave a little humourless chuckle. ‘We didn’t inquire too closely as to where the sheep had come from.’

‘Nice,’ I said. I turned to Gaby. ‘Did you see Princess Luna?’

‘Don’t be silly. You can’t see Princess Luna – she’s invisible.’

‘Of course she is.’

‘Nicole and Hannah were feeding her sheep,’ said Gaby, and for a second I thought I’d misheard her.

‘They were feeding Princess Luna some of the cooked sheep?’

‘Yep,’ said Gaby. ‘I would have given her some of mine, but I’d eaten it all. I let her lick my fingers, though.’

I felt her mother practically start out of her chair, and then subside again.

‘What did it feel like?’ I asked.

‘Like a big tongue,’ said Gaby.

‘And was it low down or high up?’

Gaby jumped off her chair and demonstrated by sticking her arm straight out in front of her with her palm turned up. About a metre twenty above floor level, but the way she held her hand suggested an animal of some kind.

‘What kind of animal is Princess Luna?’ I asked.

‘She’s a pony, silly,’ said Gaby brightly.

A little klaxon went off in my head.

Aruga aruga, I thought. Set condition one throughout the ship.

When you’re police sometimes you’ve just got to stop and think about what you’re doing – even when you’re on Day 5 and fears, as the media always say, are growing. I needed somewhere to work, I needed peace and quiet, and I needed a secure internet connection. So I headed back to Leominster nick, because two out of three ain’t bad.

A quick chat with Beverley would have been useful, only her phone went to voicemail. She’d said she was going to have a quick look up and down the River Lugg, so it was possible that she was either in a dead area or currently underwater. I didn’t have any luck with Nightingale, either, and calling the Folly just got me the long ominous silence that indicated Molly was the only one answering the phone. I left a message anyway – Nightingale always gets them. I don’t know how. Perhaps she writes them down.

I sneaked past the incident room, hid myself in Edmondson office and fired up HOLMES II. First I wrote up Gabriella Darrell’s new statement from my notes and sent it off to be processed and then I checked my emails to see if anyone had bothered to solve any of my problems for me – fat chance. Then I opened the annotated copy of Folklore of Herefordshire that Hugh Oswald had given me, skipping to the index and looked for abductions, of which there were none. Nor was there anything under changelings, children but there was something under The Fairy Changeling. Ella Mary Leather reported an account of a baby that never grew up and was strangely hairy, who turned out to be a changeling and was tricked into revealing the location of the true baby by an older brother. Leather suggested that such changeling stories might be the result of hypothyroidism or other conditions to which Hugh had noted in the margin Likely, but what if no gross phys. changes found? What if grows to adult? Oth, rec. foxglove tea (digitalis) to drive baby away – justified infanticide? No evd. Fae this case.

I was about to move on to horses, supernatural or otherwise, but Hugh’s annotations led over to the next page where the name Aymestrey popped out at me. This was in the section on Hobgoblins, which Ella Mary Leather associated with brownies, which she claimed was the Herefordshire name for Robin Goodfellow, the Puck of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A name associated with Pokehouse Wood which was located, according to Google Earth, half a kilometre from where Beverley stuck her head in the river and my unfortunate sheep said goodbye to its entrails. It was also on the Mortimer Trail, the same right of way that ran past Stan’s stash, and, I found when I checked Inspector Edmondson’s Ordnance Survey map, close to the gate where the girl’s phones were damaged.

There a traveller was once so tormented by Puck in the woods that he left a bequest the remuneration from which paid a local to ring the church bell at a certain time of night – to guide future travellers home. By this Hugh had written: No ev. of ac. rcntly. wood now F.C. replanted with cons.

I took a brain break and googled Princess Luna – who turned out to be a character from My Little Pony, and a unicorn, and not noticeably invisible.

My phone pinged and I picked it up expecting it to be Beverley or Dr Walid. Instead I read – WTF R U doing in sticks? <3 LESLEY

7 Enhanced Interrogation

I woke in the hour before dawn, stuck in that strange state where the memory of your dreams is still powerful enough to motivate your actions. Believing that I’d heard someone outside the cowshed doors I’d stumbled to my feet and slid them open. In the moonlight I thought I saw serried ranks of what I now recognised as apple trees filling the pasture out to the old wall, an orchard of silver and shadow. Above their topmost branches was a white point of light, too bright to be a star. A planet – probably Jupiter. There were a couple of bright stars and there, just visible through a gap in the trees, an orange spark that even I could identify – Mars. In that half-dreaming state I was certain that there was a path running through the orchard and beyond the walls was a darker and thicker forest full of secret places and hidden people.

Then I blinked and it was just a pasture, an old wall and fields of grain beyond.

Back in the cowshed I dug around in the trunks which Molly had sent from London and extracted the antique brass primus stove. It sloshed heavily when I shook it, so there was plenty of paraffin inside.

As soon as I’d got the text from Lesley I’d called Inspector Pollock at the Department of Professional Standards, who was my designated point of contact with the team that was investigating Lesley’s criminal misconduct. I informed him that Lesley had made contact and gave him the details. He told me not to make any response until he’d had a chance to make an assessment. I told him to assess away.

The primus came in a handsome wooden carrying case complete with a brassbound saucepan and lid and a reservoir of white spirit for getting it started. I’ve practised lighting one of these using lux to vaporise the paraffin, but I didn’t want to turn my phone off in case Lesley texted again. It took less than five minutes to fetch water from the bathroom, pump up the pressure, light the white spirit, watch the main burner catch and give a merry flame under the saucepan. Nightingale said that Amundsen had used one of these on his way to the South Pole and that Hilary and Tensing had hoiked one up the slopes of Everest.

Further down in the trunk I found a battered biscuit tin containing half a packet of digestives, loose teabags, some teacakes wrapped in rice paper and a bottle of Paterson’s Camp Coffee that was so old that on the label the Sikh was still on his feet proffering a tray to the seated Highland major-general. I decided not to risk it – not least because Camp Coffee is famous for not having any caffeine in it.

After briefing the DPS, I had called Nightingale and told him about Lesley. He seemed rather impressed with it as a tactic.

‘Rather neatly pins us, doesn’t it?’ he’d said. ‘I was considering following you up to Herefordshire.’

‘What about the comrade major?’ I’d asked.

‘Oh, I think I’d have brought her too. And Toby,’ he’d said. ‘Might have made quite a jolly outing. But if Lesley knows you’re out of town I can’t get further than a quick rush from the Folly.’ And whatever it was that was hidden behind the door in the basement. Whatever it was that Nightingale, I was beginning to suspect, had stayed in his position at the Folly to protect. He wasn’t going to leave that exposed.

So no back-up. Apart from Beverley, who seemed more interested in the River Lugg than in the case. I wanted to ask Nightingale about Ettersberg and what, precisely, was behind the black door in the basement of the Folly – but I bottled out and asked him to check the literature on unicorns and brownies.

He said he’d see what he could find, although he was almost certain that brownies were considered entirely mythical.

Inspector Pollock called back and said that I was to engage Lesley in conversation. ‘Stretch it out,’ he said. ‘And if you can entice her to talk directly on the phone, so much the better.’

He didn’t have to say that all communication is the policeman’s friend, that even if we can’t trace your call the mere fact that you’re talking tells us something and every cryptic clue, every denial, every weird utterance tells us something. Even if it’s just that you’re in a desperate need to talk to someone.

He didn’t have to say that they were monitoring my phone.

So I texted back: I’m working where R U?

And then I did my paperwork and, after that, to bed to dream of apple trees in the moonlight.

Mercifully I didn’t have to do the briefing in Windrow’s narrow little office, but instead on the first-floor terrace that stuck out in front of the canteen like the flying bridge on a landlocked boat. It may have been an unconscious desire to avoid conferring too much legitimacy on the Falcon assessment, but it was most likely so that Windrow could have a crafty fag. We stood there in the cool morning shade enjoying the chill air as the eastern horizon turned gold under a powder blue sky.

It was Day 6 and things were getting a little bit desperate. Edmondson handed me a newspaper with the headline. POLICE FAILING HANNAH AND NICOLE SAY VILLAGERS.

‘If you don’t feed the dogs,’ said Windrow, ‘you’re going to get bitten.’

I checked the by-line, because it always pays to know who not to talk to next time you’ve got something juicy to trade. But I didn’t recognise the name – Sharon Pike.

‘Writes columns in a couple of the nationals,’ said Edmondson.

‘What’s she doing on the front page?’ I asked.

‘She considers herself a local,’ said Windrow.

‘She has a cottage in Rushpool,’ said Edmondson. ‘I hear she spends most of her time in London, though.’

I suddenly remembered her from me and Dominic’s fruitless search for village vestigia. She’d been a slight white woman with black hair, dressed in skinny jeans and a salmon-coloured cardigan. I remembered that she’d asked a lot of questions and I hurriedly reviewed my memory to see how much trouble I might have talked myself into.

Windrow must have seen my expression. ‘Hasn’t mentioned you yet,’ he said.

I didn’t like the sound of that ‘yet’ one bit.

Windrow lit a second cigarette off the first and took a deep drag as if trying to fill every cubic centimetre of his lungs.

‘I’m stocking up for when I have to go back inside,’ he said.

Edmondson checked his watch and glanced at where the sun was springing up above the distant hills.

‘So what’s your assessment?’ he asked.

‘Before I start, sir, I need to ask you how much actual Falcon information you want to hear.’

Edmondson blinked and Windrow scratched his chin.

‘How much do you normally give out?’ asked Windrow.

‘As much as people are comfortable with,’ I said. ‘Some people don’t like to use the M-word. Some don’t mind that, but want explanations for things we can’t explain.’

‘Lad,’ said Windrow, ‘we’re so desperate we’ll take whatever we can get.’

I started with what I’d already told them – that the phones had been fried by magic up on Whiteway Head where the Mortimer Trail crosses onto Bircher Common. That there was something supernatural moving around in the woods to the south-east along the trail which might, if it was the same thing as Nicole’s invisible My Little Pony, be related to her and Hannah’s disappearance.

‘If the invisible pony really turned up at the birthday party,’ I said, ‘then we have a clear path from Rushpool, up to Whiteway Head and then west down the Mortimer Trail to where we found yesterday’s dead sheep.’

‘We were going to have to go into those woods sooner or later,’ Edmondson said to Windrow.

‘I do have indications that something weird is localised to that area. And there are historical leads to run down, and I’d like to deploy some specialist help,’ I said.

‘This would be Beverley Brook, aged twenty, resident of Beverley Avenue, London SW20?’ asked Windrow.

Well, of course they’d done an IIP check – they’d probably had Dominic do it.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And who is she?’ he asked. ‘Exactly?’

‘Best to think of her as a consultant,’ I said.

‘Good god,’ said Edmondson. ‘Are you saying she’s a . . .’ He hesitated as his mandated diversity training caused him to trip over the word voodoo or possibly witchdoctor – I couldn’t tell which. ‘A traditional spiritualist?’ Which impressed the hell out of me, and I was tempted to agree just to reward such a valiant effort. But it’s one thing to withhold information from a senior officer and quite another to feed them false data.

‘Not really, sir,’ I said. ‘It’s just that there are some people who’ll talk to her who wouldn’t talk to us.’

‘People?’ asked Windrow dryly.

‘Special people, sir,’ I said. ‘Bees are avoiding the area in question. That’s why we think something is going on there.’

I waited for one of them to ask whether the bees were ‘special people’, but luckily both of them had more important things on their minds.

‘What’s your next step?’ asked Windrow.

‘I’d like to re-interview both sets of parents,’ I said. ‘See what they know about the invisible Princess Luna. And then I’d like to have a look at Pokehouse Wood and a couple of other places that have come up in the literature.’

‘You’re going to have a hard time getting Derek or Andy to interrupt their search,’ said Edmondson. ‘So I’d talk to them as soon as possible – before we restart operations.’

‘I’ll ask Cole to facilitate a second interview with the mothers,’ said Windrow.

There was the sound of voices from inside the canteen – members of MIU arriving and looking for coffee.

‘It’s about time we got in there,’ said Edmondson. ‘Are you ready?’

‘One more cigarette,’ said Windrow.

Andy had reached the point where he was going to keep going until someone told him he could stop. Even in the bright morning sunshine he looked grey and tired. The next search was staging at Bircher Common, where there was enough room for police and volunteers to park. I took Andy Marstowe aside behind a Peugeot Van with battenberg visibility strips and a West Midlands Police crest, and asked him whether he knew anything about Nicole Lacey’s invisible friend. He just stared at me blankly and said he didn’t know what I was talking about. I’d have preferred it if he’d demanded to know why I was wasting his time. Which just shows, you should never wish for things you don’t really want to get.

‘What the fuck is this bullshit?’

Derek Lacey stared at me after I asked him the same thing. He was red-faced and erratic and, if I was any judge, about a day away from coming apart at the seams. His voice was angry but his eyes were sad, pleading, wanting to know why I was tormenting him with these stupid questions. I got him calmed down using the patented reasonable police voice while making sure I stayed out of reach. Fortunately, it’s easier to settle people in plain clothes, the uniform has a tendency to set people off, but either way the important thing is to remain calm but firm. This is where doing your two-year probation in the West End comes in really handy.

I explained that we, and it’s always ‘we’ when dealing with aggravated members of the public, were double checking every possible point of contact between Hannah and Nicole and the outside world.

‘When kids talk about imaginary friends,’ I said, ‘sometimes they’re talking about a real person. You see, say you don’t want a child’s parents to know you’re talking to them . . . so you tell the child not to tell anyone, tell them that bad things will happen if they do. But kids like to talk, they especially like to talk about their friends. Especially if they’re interesting or naughty. I mean, what is the point of interesting or naughty if you can’t talk about it to someone else?’

A strange look came into Derek’s eyes and I wondered whether maybe I should have avoided the whole ‘stranger danger’ aspect of my little speech. Served me right for making this stuff up as I went along. Then he pushed his hand through his thinning hair and took a deep breath.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see now – apologies. What was the question?’

I repeated the question and he shrugged.

‘Oh, yeah, I remember Princess Luna,’ he said. ‘I thought that had sort of stopped. Nicky used to demand extra sweets for Princess Luna and then scoff the lot herself. Vicky got very uptight about it – all those childhood obesity articles in the women’s section of the Sundays.’

Apparently, there was one of those mother-daughter power struggles – like those that so enliven the lives of my mum’s relatives – which Derek had made a point of staying out of. Finally, Nicole stopped talking about her imaginary friend, and Derek just assumed it had been a phase.

‘Unless it was real,’ he said. ‘And just wandered off one day.’

And how many invisible friends are not imaginary, I asked myself as he walked off to join the search team. What if this stuff is way more common than even the Folly thinks it is? What if it wasn’t just children – what if it was schizophrenics as well?

I carry a notebook with a list of these kinds of questions, and it gets longer every month – especially since Nightingale made answering them conditional on my advancement through the forms and wisdoms.

According to DS Cole, Victoria Lacey and Joanne Marstowe were spending the morning together at the Marstowe house while kind relatives, of which Joanne had almost as many as my mum, were taking the two older boys out for a day in Hereford. When I arrived in the suddenly – and suspiciously – neat and tidy kitchen I found the two mothers seated on either side of the table while DS Cole sat at the end and acted as de facto referee. You could have fried an egg in the space between the two women, and I almost turned on my heel and walked back out again.

‘Peter,’ said Joanne. ‘Would you like some tea?’ She was already up and bustling before I could answer, so I said I would and deliberately took her seat to break up the confrontation.

Victoria stared at me as I sat down, her face a mask. ‘Is it true you’ve been asking about Nicky’s silly imaginary friends?’

I gave her the same flannel I’d given her husband and I think she bought it, or at least was willing to convince herself that the police hadn’t suddenly gone completely bonkers.

‘Who wants tea?’ asked Joanne.

I said yes again, Victoria said no and DS Cole gazed longingly at the kitchen door.

‘You know what it’s like with children,’ said Victoria. ‘Once they get an idea in their head they won’t let go – the more you try to stop them the harder they cling on to it. But you can’t just appease them forever – can you?’

Joanne plonked a mug of tea in front of me and I asked her if Hannah had ever claimed to have met Princess Luna.

‘Hannah said you could only see her when it was a full moon,’ said Joanne as she sat down with her own tea. ‘I remember because she insisted we have her bloody birthday party on that particular night.’

‘I wondered why you’d done that, and it went on so late,’ said Victoria.

‘The moon wasn’t up until past nine o’clock now, was it?’ said Joanne. ‘I thought they’d got that nonsense from that Hobbit film.’

‘I don’t remember a unicorn in The Hobbit,’ said Victoria.

‘No, it was the writing in that,’ said Joanne. ‘On the map.’

Victoria picked a thread off the shoulder of her blouse.

‘I don’t think I was paying that much attention,’ she said. ‘It all seemed rather daft.’

‘They made us take them to the film twice,’ said Joanne. ‘They were looking forward to the next one.’

Joanne sipped her tea and looked out of the window.

I took the opportunity to surreptitiously check the phases of the moon on my phone – April 26th had been a full moon.

‘I remember when they first went missing we thought they might have sneaked out to look at the moon,’ said Joanne. ‘Didn’t we, Vicky?’

That hadn’t been in their initial statements – I saw DS Cole blink.

Victoria nodded her head reluctantly.

‘Following the moon,’ said Joanne. ‘Just like last time.’

‘I think I will have a cup of tea now,’ said Victoria. ‘If that’s all right with you.’

‘Of course,’ said Joanne and got up.

‘They’d run away before?’ asked DS Cole about two seconds before I could wrap my head around the implications.

‘No,’ said Victoria. ‘Not Nicky and Hannah, they hadn’t, but they used to talk about it. As a game – following the moon.’

‘They had a song,’ said Joanne, extracting a teabag and flicking it into the sink – ‘In a minute soon we’ll run away to follow the moon.’

‘It doesn’t really scan, does it?’ said Victoria.

I asked some follow-up questions, but Victoria had been trying hard to ignore the whole ‘imaginary friend situation’ as she put it and Joanne had three boys under the age of ten and could rarely hear herself speak, let alone Hannah.

Because the media pack were camped outside the front door, I went out the back and hopped over the garden fence and onto the unofficial – definitely not a right of way – footpath that ran behind the houses. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see that nearly all the late-twentieth-century build in the village had gone up on decommissioned orchards. In some places the old fence line had become the edge of people’s back gardens. One remnant of the original orchards remained behind the Old Vicarage and I saw a dip in its back wall where a pair of eleven-year-old girls could have easily climbed over. This must have been their semi-secret path. No wonder they’d been inseparable since they were old enough to express a preference – it must have been like having their own secret garden.

The pair would have had to split in September – Nicole would be going up the road to Lucton School, fee paying, while Hannah would be commuting into Leominster to attend a state school. Fear of this separation was put forward as one of the narratives that might lead to them running away together. I wondered what being split up might be like – I didn’t have any friends that had gone to posh schools, unless you counted Nightingale.

The path led me out onto a lane by Spring Farm and after a short cut down the back of the graveyard – Rushpool was an old enough village to have two – and I came out by the car park of the Swan in the Rushes where Beverley was waiting with the Asbo. All without attracting the attention of the media.

Me and Beverley parked the Asbo at the Riverside Inn, crossed the bridge and found the official Mortimer Trail footpath a hundred metres further on. We followed it to another gate and stile and through another field munched down to a green fuzz by sheep and then over a barbed-wire fence into a lumpy field of long grass. The path was barely visible as a slightly trampled diagonal, but luckily we could see the next stile at the far corner. A solitary goat watched us go past – we were probably the most interesting thing that had happened all summer.

I paused mid-field to orientate myself using my phone. We were less than three hundred metres from where we’d found the dead sheep. I looked for it and I could spot where it had lain in the next field.

Pokehouse Wood was not what I expected. For a start, it was missing a lot of trees. It was easy to see where it had been, a rough rectangle of cleared land on a steep slope that ran down to the footpath by the River Lugg. Freshly planted saplings stood in white protective cylinders like ranks of war graves, and between them the scrub and grass were shot through with purple stands of foxglove. I recognised these because I’d googled the plants after seeing Hugh’s notes – a famous source of digitalis, which in small doses can save your life and in larger doses kill you.

The missing trees were explained by a sign on the kissing gate which, on behalf of the National Trust, welcomed us to Pokehouse Wood and told us that the area had been cleared and planted with conifers in 2002, but had now been cleared again and planted with native broadleaved trees to restore the beauty and nature conservation of this important local woodland. There was a contact number for Croft Castle which I made a note of.

According to the map on my phone, the footpath ran along the river all the way to a historic mill at Mortimer’s Cross. Stairs cut into the slope and reinforced with planking marked where the footpath led up to the ridge. We weren’t supposed to be searching exactly, a full POLSA-directed team was an hour behind us. But I’d wanted to have a look before all those size tens stirred up the ground.

At the top of the steps was another track, this one cut level into the hillside and sloping down towards an intersection with the footpath by the river.

‘Logging track,’ said Beverley. ‘That’s why it has to be graded flat. You know, this is a bit weird.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Weird is what we’re looking for.’

‘I don’t think it’s that kind of weird,’ she said. ‘You see, this bit of land we’re standing on belongs to the National Trust but it’s been managed by the Forestry Commission.’

The role of which was to deal with the fact the UK was in danger of losing its forests which were, back then, a strategic national resource on account of the fact you needed it to make stuff. This being before Ikea turned up backed by the limitless expanse of the Swedish forests, fabled home to fascist biker gangs, depressed detectives and werewolves.

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Werewolves?’

‘That’s what I heard,’ said Beverley.

No wonder the detectives were depressed, I thought. And just about managed to stop myself asking for more information – priorities and all that.

‘They would have cut down the ancient woodland and planted western hemlock or Douglas fir, probably,’ said Beverley. Because back then you wanted a tree with a nice straight trunk that grew fast and was easy to manage. Then, in the late sixties, it began to occur to people that perhaps there was a bit more to reforestation than just planting a ton of trees. By the early 1980s someone had invented the word biodiversity and rural landowners, who up until then had cheerfully been industrialising the landscape, were told to start putting it back the way they’d found it – in fact, better than the way they’d found it, if you don’t mind.

‘When the National Trust took this place over they probably designated it a PAWS,’ said Beverley. Which meant Plantation on Ancient Woodland Site, which led to the next question – what the fuck is an ancient woodland?

‘They call it the wildwood,’ said Beverley and, according to the men and women with serious beards and slightly windswept hair who make it their business to know this stuff, it used to cover pretty much most of the island of Great Britain. Then, 6,000 years ago, farmers turned up with their fancy genetically modified crops and started clearing the forest out. And what they didn’t clear got eaten away by their artificially mutated cattle, sheep and goats. By the Middle Ages most of it was gone, and Britain entered the Napoleonic War desperate for timber.

‘Why do you know all this stuff?’ I asked.

‘It’s all anyone involved in working the countryside ever talks about,’ she said. ‘That and the vagaries of the EU subsidy regime and how evil the supermarkets are. Anyway, ground cover has a critical impact on water tables and flow rates, so you can bet we all take an interest in that – even Tyburn, who’s pretty much a storm drain from one end to the other.’

Beverley pointed out the trees that had been left standing when the area was cleared. A long strip of them went along the river bank and beside the footpaths. ‘That’s deliberate. Those are remnants of the ancient woodlands,’ she said.

‘And the weird bit?

‘It’s the timing,’ she said. ‘You don’t just charge in and clear ten hectares of commercial forest – which apart from anything else is worth a ton of money.’ So normally you wait for the current crop of western hemlock or Douglas fir or whatever to mature and then you cut them down and replant with historically appropriate broadleaf trees. Forest management not being an industry for people with a short attention span.

But according to the dates we’d seen on the sign, the trees had only been halfway to maturity before they were felled. ‘That would have been a serious loss of revenue, and I doubt the Forestry Commission would have liked it.’

‘And that’s what’s weird, is it?’ I asked.

‘I told you it wasn’t the kind of weird you wanted,’ said Beverley. ‘What do you want to do now?’

I looked back the way we’d come. The squared-off tower of Aymestrey’s church was visible on the other side of the river, and up the road by the bridge I could see the half-timbered jumble that was the Riverside Inn. It was hot and exposed out amongst the seedlings and the air was still and close. It was tempting just to walk back down, step into the bar and a have a beer or nine. I turned to find Beverley looking at me with concern.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘Let’s go up a bit,’ I said.

So we followed the trail as it climbed diagonally across the upper slope of what would be, in another twenty years or so, the ancient Pokehouse Wood. We got a taste of what it might look like when the path turned left into a mature belt of deciduous trees. Near the far edge of the trees the path got steep enough that you ended up using your hands to navigate the last bit, and that meant my eyes were just at the right level to spot the little strip of pink hanging from a strand of the barbed-wire fence, just to the right of the stile.

It was a centimetre wide and about six long. Thick pink cotton, the same shade as that of the Capri pants that Nicole Lacey was thought to have been wearing when she left her house. I froze and told Beverley to stop moving. We’d have to be careful backtracking down the path to avoid contaminating the scene any further.

I leaned forward, put my hand over my mouth, and got as close as I dared. When I was sure there wasn’t any detectable vestigia I leant back and swore.

‘What is it?’ asked Beverley.

I nodded at the strip of cloth. Along one side there was a distinctive reddish-brown stain.

We’re the police. We’re accustomed to disappointment. But I’ve never been in a room full of so many dispirited coppers as we had at the evening briefing on Day 6.

Windrow and Edmondson were good, but there was no disguising the litany of non-results. There had been sightings everywhere across the UK, Europe and beyond. Police were turning out from Aberdeen to Marseilles, which was heartening while at the same time being totally futile. In a case involving missing children the good news/bad news routine is always, the bad news is – we haven’t found them yet, and the good news is – we haven’t found them yet . . .

But we had found a strip of pink cloth. Less than two minutes after I’d called it in, a helicopter had gone overhead and less than ten minutes after that the lead elements of the search team in Aymestrey had arrived, red-faced, sweating and proving that they were much fitter than I was. They helped secure the site, but as the numbers started to pile up me and Beverley made a tactical retreat.

Windrow and Edmondson invited me down to the nick where we had a two-hour discussion about what led me up that particular path at that particular time. The problem being that a search team had done the whole length of the Mortimer Trail on Day 2 and that strip of pink fabric had not been there when they did it.

When this was reported at the briefing a ripple went through the ranks. I knew what they were thinking – a kidnapping, a plucky but futile escape attempt, recapture by the kidnapper, followed by panic. Followed, with remorseless logic, by death and disposal.

When it was over I slipped out onto the terrace to clear my head.

It was still close enough to sunset for the sky to be dark blue rather than black, but it was already cooler. There was a distinct breeze coming from the west and with it snatches of James Brown and the hum of generators – the drone of a funfair as unmistakable as a bagpipe warming up. Much closer below me I could hear the restless murmur of the media pack as they lapped at the walls of the station.

My phone pinged. The caller ID showed ‘withheld’ but I knew who it was.

Y haven’t you found girls yet?

Beverley was waiting for me outside the cowshed – which would have been encouraging on just about any other night. The door was open and the light was on, casting a yellow rectangle across the bottom of the garden and into the empty orchard beyond.

Either I’d left the door open or Beverley had broken in.

‘Dominic’s mum gave me the spare keys,’ she said.

‘Did you have a good rummage?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’m going to bed. You can do what you like.’

‘You’re fucking unnatural, you are,’ she said,

‘Oh, don’t start.’

She stepped over into my line of sight.

‘I understand you’ve got self-control and all that,’ she said. ‘I get it. But you’re just . . . fucking unnatural, Peter.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You can come to bed too, but I’m still going to go to sleep.’

‘Is that what you think I’m talking about?’ Beverley folded her arms across her chest.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you just tell me?’

‘You had your hands on the Faceless Man,’ she said. ‘And your best friend stabbed you in the back and you’re just like “Oh well, you win some, you lose some – ho ho ho.” Which is fucking unnatural.’

‘And you think this is helping?’

‘I think it would be useful if you got just a little bit angry,’ she said. ‘I’m not asking you to turn green and go on a rampage but, you know, expressing a little bit of displeasure would not be inappropriate given the circumstances.’

‘Like what you’d have done, yeah?’ I said, because I’m terminally stupid. ‘Throw a strop – flood out a few homes?’

‘That’s different,’ said Beverley matter of factly. ‘And, anyway, sometimes it’s you getting angry and sometimes it’s exceptionally heavy rainfall in your catchment area. To be honest, it can be tricky telling the two apart. But that’s me, isn’t it? I’m a goddess, Peter, a creature of temperament and whimsy. I’m supposed to be arbitrary and mercurial – it’s practically my job description. And this isn’t about me.’

‘What do you want me to do, Bev? Anything for a quiet life.’

Beverley turned and pointed down at a solitary tree that stood by the garden fence. It was squat and a bit twisty; something deciduous is the best I can do.

‘Why don’t you blow up the tree?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Give it a lightning bolt, rip it up by its roots, knock it down – set it on fire?’ She trailed off.

‘What’s it ever done to me?’ I asked.

‘It’s a tree,’ said Beverley.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

‘They’re not short of trees round here,’ she said. ‘They’re not going to miss it. And in case you’re worried, nobody’s living in it or mystically attached to it. Take some of that anger and let it rip – you’ll feel better.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Yeah, you can,’ she said.

‘I can’t.’

‘What is wrong with you?’

‘I can’t,’ I said slowly. ‘It doesn’t fucking work that way, okay? It’s not about anger, or love or the power of fricking friendship. It’s about concentration, about control.’ It’s hard enough to make a forma when you’re hungry, let alone when you’re angry. ‘So you can see that as a form of cathartic release it’s a little bit shit.’

Beverley tipped her head to one side and gave me a long look.

‘Okay,’ she said and cast around at the base of the tree and came up with a section of branch a shade longer than a baseball bat – she held it out to me. ‘Hit it with a stick instead.’

‘If I hit the tree,’ I said, ‘will you get off my back?’

‘Maybe.’

She smiled as I took the branch. The full moon hovered over the roof of the bungalow and I remembered half dreaming the empty orchard full of trees. I strode up to the tree, swung one handed and the impact jarred the branch loose from my fingers.

‘That’s pathetic,’ called Beverley.

I scooped up the branch and brandished it at the tree.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I know you trees are up to something.’

And then I smacked it hard with the branch, keeping my grip loose so that I wouldn’t let go this time – it did make a satisfying thwack.

‘Now, I thought I was dreaming last night,’ I said. ‘But I wasn’t, was I?’

Thwack.

‘They were ghost trees . . .’

Thwack.

‘Weren’t they? Because people leave a trace behind them. So why shouldn’t trees?’

Smack – a fragment of bark flew off the trunk.

‘It doesn’t have to be a big trace, because you’re there for bloody years – aren’t you?’

Smack.

‘But you can’t talk because you’re a fucking tree, so really this whole fucking enhanced interrogation shit is a waste of time.’ I lowered my branch. ‘As if it wasn’t always a waste of time.’

I hit the bloody thing as hard as I could, hard enough to numb the palms of my hands, hard enough that the crack echoed off the old wall. Because it’s always a waste of time, all those rushed, angry stupid things you do. They never solve the problems. Because in real life that rush of adrenaline and rage just makes you dumb and seeing red just leads you up the steps to court for something aggravated – assault, battery, stupidity.

I hit the tree again and it hurt my hands even worse.

Because getting angry doesn’t help, or weeping or pleading or just fucking trying to be reasonable. Because she lost her face, man. Because that had to be like having your identity ripped away. Because you’re looking in the mirror and a hideous stranger is staring back. And what would I do if I was her, if I was given that choice? – like there would even be a decision. And getting angry doesn’t bring back her face or unmake the choice that she made. Any more than it made a difference when Dad wouldn’t get out of bed or when Mum just flat out told you that your stuff was needed by somebody else. When the people you need stuff from are more interested in something else.

At some point the stick broke.

There were probably manly tears.

Beverley Brook may have put me to bed, or it’s possible I might have done it myself, just as I’ve always done.

I woke up to find the curtains open and my bed bathed in sunshine.

I got into the shower and the hot water stung my palms. There were scrapes and cuts across both my hands.

‘You think this is bad,’ I told the reflection in the bathroom mirror. ‘You should see the other guy.’

When I got out of the shower I rolled my shoulders and stretched my neck. I felt better, but there was still a stone in my chest when I thought of Lesley. Some things aren’t fixed by a couple of hours of primal screaming – or whatever that was I’d been doing the night before.

It was Day 7 – Hannah and Nicole were still missing.

Me-time was over. There was work to be done.

8 Proactive Measures

First question to ask yourself is – what are you good for? West Mercia Police didn’t need me to beat the bushes because they had everyone from Grampian Search and Rescue to the SAS doing that. They didn’t need me holding the hands of the parents, even though I bet DS Cole would have paid me quite a lot of money to do so, and they really didn’t need me handling the media. What I was was the only Falcon-qualified officer in the area and, along with my specialist civilian support, i.e. Beverley, I was best deployed concentrating on my area of expertise.

The second question to ask yourself is – what the fuck do I do next? Since weird shit was what I was there for, I decided I should work on the assumption that weird shit was what had happened.

We knew that the girls had got up, dressed themselves, and left their separate homes under their own steam. There was no sign of forced entry, and I hadn’t detected vestigia in their rooms. Assume they were lured out, or possibly one was lured out and then lured the other one out. Assume the luring was done by something supernatural and in trots suspect number one – Princess Luna. Invisible horse-shaped friend, possibly a unicorn, possibly only visible in moonlight – the physics of which I didn’t even want to think about.

Closest Princess Luna sighting to the village was at Hannah’s birthday party, so stick a virtual pin in the field behind the village hall. Assume the girls go gambolling after My Invisible Pony – following the moon, which had been in its first quarter that night. They wouldn’t have walked on the roads, not least because of the danger of being run over by alfresco sex maniacs and, besides, Dominic said that village kids went across the fields – and their paths were not necessarily the ones that were marked on the OS map.

So, up by paths unseen to Whiteway Head – although it must have been a reasonably direct route if the timings were going to make any sense – where something definitely magical happened, and blew both their phones.

Now, I reckoned that they’d met a third party there, perhaps a friend of Princess Luna or maybe an owner, and that would be the point where the girls’ fun-filled frolic went sour.

I called up Leominster nick and they confirmed that while they’d had trouble getting a precise DNA match between the blood stain on the pink cotton with hair samples recovered from Nicole’s room, a second round of tests using swabs taken from Victoria and Derek Lacey had confirmed a definite parental match. The high probability, the lab had said, was that the blood had belonged to Nicole Lacey.

Which meant that they had gone west down either the Mortimer Trail or the logging road that ran parallel to it, and had probably stayed in that area for at least three days before Nicole had caught her leg on the barbed-wire fence above Pokehouse Wood. A place famous as the abode of fairies – and a mere hop, skip and a jump from where we’d found the dead sheep.

I called Dr Walid and asked whether he’d finished his autopsy.

‘Hello, Peter,’ he said. ‘How’re you bearing up?’

I told him I was fine.

‘Wonderful bit of mutton you sent me,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Finished it up this morning. Thought you might like the results.’

‘Anything interesting?’

‘The sheep itself is your bog standard North Country Mule, a cross between Swaledale and a Border Leicester – a breed known for its meat and for being even more gleckit than ordinary sheep. I’ve sent some tissue samples to the lab just to be sure.’

‘Any sign of magical contact?’

‘Nothing in gross physical terms. I sectioned the brain, such as it was, but there was no sign of hyperthaumaturgical degradation. It was a remarkably healthy sheep – apart from the great big hole in its belly, of course. That was cause of death, by the way. In case you were wondering.’

‘Could you reconstruct the injury?’

‘Well, it’s never easy just going by the crime scene photographs. But at a guess I’d say it was struck in the belly, impaled, then lifted bodily and thrown some distance. That’s how its guts got spread over such large area.’

‘Are you saying it was gored?’ I asked. ‘By a bull or a goat?’

‘I’ve met some tough goats, but nothing big enough to fling a full grown sheep three metres or so,’ said Dr Walid. ‘And there’s only one piercing wound, so I doubt it was a bull or even a cow – they can get quite territorial, you know.’

I asked what the weapon had been like.

‘At least sixty centimetres long, circular cross section and tapering to a sharp point,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Possibly a spiral configuration.’

‘Like a narwhale’s horn?’

‘Aye,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Just like that.’

‘So you think it’s a unicorn?’

‘I wouldn’t like to jump to conclusions,’ he said. ‘Not without more evidence.’

‘But?’

‘If you achieve nothing else,’ he said, ‘get me a tissue sample.’

Assuming Princess Luna was real, and not a physical manifestation of something incorporeal. There hadn’t been hoof prints at Stan’s stash and none around the stabbed sheep. And why would a unicorn stab a sheep, anyway?

The girls had let Princess Luna lick the mutton juice from their fingers.

Carnivorous unicorns, I thought. And if it did raid Stan’s stash, a meat-eating unicorn that was blissed out on Benzedrine and diazepam and agricultural diesel oil. There were certain ‘things’ I knew that navigated the exciting boundary between corporeal and incorporeal existence. Ghosts, revenants like my friend Mr Punch, and certain types of Genius Loci. They all had one thing in common in that whatever work-around for the law of thermodynamics they thought they had, sooner or later they had to get their power from somewhere. Vestigium was a source. But even better was a bit of raw magic.

And that’s when I came up with a cunning plan – one of my better ones, if I do say so myself.

‘Got to go, Abdul,’ I said. ‘I’ve just had a bright idea.’

Just before I hung up I think he might have said ‘god be merciful’, but I couldn’t be sure.

I called Windrow and cleared my plan with him and Edmondson, who clearly thought I was bonkers, but by that point were getting used to my little ways. Dominic was once again volunteered as liaison, under the condition I explain the plan to him myself.

‘Do you have any confidence this will work?’ asked Windrow.

‘Honestly, sir,’ I said, ‘I don’t know – but if something supernatural is actively working against us, then I suggest it’s about time we took a more aggressively proactive approach.’

Windrow gave that last sentence the mirthless chuckle it deserved and wished me luck.

Then I called Beverley.

‘Want to come out tonight?’ I asked.

‘What are we doing?’

‘Unicorn hunting,’ I said.

‘Aren’t they an endangered species?’

‘That depends on whether they’ve been helping abduct kids,’ I said. ‘Don’t it?’

It took about thirty seconds on the internet to find a shop in Leominster that sold what they called ‘second user computers’, five minutes to specify what I wanted, and at least another fifteen minutes to come up with a plausible explanation for what I wanted it for. Then I drove into town, found a café that steadfastly refused to provide a genealogy for its sausages and had a proper fry-up. While I was doing that, I wrote down the specifications for the next job I wanted to do – that would have taken much longer to detail verbally, and even longer to bullshit away.

‘So what kind of science experiment is it?’ asked the man in the shop as I inspected the devices. They’d done a good job and had gone so far as to add a tiny red LED on the end of each one to show when the power was on.

‘I’m looking to see whether high-tension electrical cables really disrupt microprocessors,’ I said. ‘What did you use for the casing?’

The man was a bit taller than me, with an elegantly clipped black beard that was at odds with his polyester-mix beige T-shirt that had the shop’s logo on the front.

‘Plastic cricket bats,’ he said. ‘Kid’s size.’

I tested each one carefully and then paid for them.

‘You’re really out looking for UFOs, aren’t you?’ said the man.

‘You got me,’ I said.

‘Those kids,’ said the man. ‘You don’t think they were abducted, do you? By aliens?’

‘God, I hope not,’ I said. ‘My life’s complicated enough already.’

I handed him handwritten specifications and waited while he read them so that I could clarify a few points and help with the niceties of cursive script.

‘Is this supposed to be a detection grid?’ he asked.

I told him it was, and he asked me what I was hoping to detect.

‘Things that aren’t normally there,’ I said, and he nodded as if this made sense.

‘I’ll have to go to Birmingham to get the gear,’ he said. ‘I can have them ready in two days.’

I paid the guy, packed my stuff, and drove on to the nick to inform Dominic of his role in the festivities.

Strangely, he was less than enthusiastic about me involving his boyfriend.

‘We need his Nissan to get us up the rough bits on Bircher Common,’ I said. ‘And we need someone to drive it.’

‘And that’s not me, because . . .’

‘Because you and me are going to be proceeding down the Mortimer Trail and seeing if we can’t attract something supernatural,’ I said.

‘Have you cleared this with the bosses?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘Submitted an operational plan, objectives analysis, risk assessment. The whole thing.’

‘And what did they say?’ asked Dominic.

‘They wanted me to take someone from the MIU to keep an eye on things.’

‘And that would be me?’

‘Yep.’

‘We’re going to be walking through the woods at night?’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘It’s just I’m not that fond of the great outdoors,’ said Dominic.

‘But I thought you were a country boy,’ I said. ‘You grew up in a small village.’

‘Yeah, and as soon as I was old enough I moved to the city.’

‘You moved to Hereford,’ I said. ‘That’s not quite the same thing.’

‘Yes it is. We’ve got a cathedral and an Anne Summers,’ said Dominic. ‘That makes us a city.’

‘Anne Summers?’

‘It’s right on the square and everything,’ said Dominic.

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t your boyfriend have a farm to live on?’

‘Sore point,’ said Dominic. ‘And, anyway, what makes you think we’ll attract anything supernatural?’

‘For one thing, tonight it’s going to be a full moon,’ I said. ‘Also because I will be doing magical things.’

‘Your name is Baldrick,’ said Dominic. ‘And I claim my ten pounds.’

One thing old jazzmen and old police officers both agree on is that it’s important to get your rest in when and where you can. Which is why I drove back to the cowshed, had another shower to cool off, lay down on the bed in my underwear and tried not to think for a bit.

It was hot, even with the doors open. But a little bit of a breeze touched the curtains and brought in the smell of grass and a sweeter smell that I thought I now recognised as cowslip in bloom, although it could have been silage for all I knew.

There were a couple of strands of dusty spider web hanging from one edge of the ceiling. Dominic’s mum needed to invest in a proper extension duster or at least learn how to put a J-cloth on a stick.

I lay on my back and let the ceiling go in and out of focus.

My phone pinged – number withheld.

Do you think they were abducted by fairies?

I sat up and took a deep breath to calm my nerves. Then I logged the call, contacted the DPS team on a separate phone to give them a heads up, and then texted back.

Why do you think fairies?

Who else?

Y not people?

No other leads.

This made me pause. It was the sort of sloppy thinking that Lesley, had she caught me doing it, would have pointed out – just because you don’t know something is there doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

And how would she know that we didn’t have any leads?

I called Inspector Pollock at the DPS.

‘She’s got a line into the secure net,’ I said. ‘Or access to someone with access privileges.’

‘Is it you?’ asked Pollock.

‘Nope,’ I said.

‘Of course not,’ said Pollock. ‘Because that would make my life easier.’

But not mine, I thought. I so hated being on the wrong side of the interview table.

‘If she’s following the same pattern as last time,’ said Pollock, ‘she’ll make one more response before changing SIMs – try to make the next question count.’

I thought about it for a bit, and then I thought about the tree outside in the garden and the futility of anger.

I miss you, I texted.

I waited, but she didn’t respond before it was time to go out that evening.

Dominic’s boyfriend was named Victor Lowell and was one of the new breed of farmers who got their market price updates via Twitter and drove their tractors listening to 50 Cent. He had floppy blond hair and the posh accent of someone who was privately educated but never got the memo about having to pretend to be just one of the blokes. He also owned the land he farmed which made him, notionally, the richest person I’d ever met.

‘Not that I could sell it,’ he shouted over the Nissan Technical’s engine as he gunned it up the flinty trail to Whiteway Head. ‘It’s been in the family for, oh . . . months.’

Dominic groaned – this was obviously an old joke.

‘You’re not a farming family then?’ said Beverley.

‘Oh, it’s a long sad history of farmers. It’s just that I’m the first one to own the land I farm,’ he said. ‘My uncle was a tenant, but my father ran off to London where he made a pile in property. Then I came back and bought the land.’

‘He lied to me when we met,’ said Dominic. ‘Said he was a stockbroker.’

‘People have such extraordinary prejudices,’ said Victor airily.

We’d come up the slope before sunset to give Victor a bit of daylight to drive back down in. Whiteway Head, I saw, was a saddle between the high points of the ridge to east and west. It was the logical place to cross if you didn’t want to schlepp around either end. There was also a clear route of descent on the escarpment side, although I personally wouldn’t want to carry a sack of salt down that slope.

We’d brought sandwiches from Dominic’s mum’s and bottles of water, so we had an impromptu picnic, picking a site at the top of the ridge that gave us a good view across the valley.

The sky overhead was the same hot blue it had been since I arrived in Herefordshire, but to the west the sun was hidden behind a huge bank of grey and blue clouds that were piling up on the horizon.

‘The Brecon Beacons,’ said Victor. ‘The Met Office are issuing a severe weather warning. Could cause some flooding downstream of the Lugg.’

I looked at Beverley, who shrugged.

‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘It’s not my part of the world.’

The last of the sunlight seemed to leak out from under the clouds to wash over the valley below. I could just see the A4110 as it crossed the Lugg – a typical Roman straight line aimed at what Dominic identified as Wigmore. Imposing themselves on the landscape – they’d always called it that on Time Team. Especially the beardy Iron and Bronze Age specialists – The Romans imposed themselves on the landscape. Or, I thought, they wanted to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

Dominic pointed out Leinthall Earls and the white angular scar of the limestone quarry that spread up the hillside behind it. Fields covered the bottom of the valley with silvery stands of conifers on the higher slopes. To the north-east I saw the last red of the sun flash off the copper dome at the top of Hugh Oswald’s tower. I wondered if the bees were still out and about, or whether they’d retreated to that vast hive under the dome.

Did Mellissa listen to them, or watch over them? Did she sleep up there? There was a thought. Did she dance in front of them, shaking her honey-maker back and forth to tell them where the best flowers were?

We ate chicken tikka masala sandwiches and drank coffee from the big military flasks I’d found in the trunks. Dominic kissed Victor goodbye and we watched the big Nissan rumble and lurch its way down the hill.

The moon rose in the east, swollen and full, but I made everyone wait until it was dark before we approached the gate into the forest.

‘Do you think it will make a difference?’ asked Beverley as I held the gate open for her and Dominic.

‘I just don’t want to have to come back and do this again,’ I said.

In the moonlight the logging track was a straight milky line between the dark ranks of conifers on either side. I warned Beverley and Dominic to turn off their phones and pulled out the first of my mini cricket bats and turned it on. The LED glowed red in the darkness.

‘What does that do?’ asked Dominic.

I considered telling him that it saved my brain by providing a power source external to my precious grey matter, but then I’d have to explain everything else.

‘Helps me cast spells,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ said Dominic. ‘Wait – magic spells?’

I cast a simple lux impello combo which put a yellowish werelight about two metres over my head where, hopefully, it would bob about after me like a balloon, only brightly lit. The LED on the cricket bat started to flicker.

Dominic stared at the werelight.

‘What the hell is that?’ he asked.

‘It’s a magic spell,’ I said, and Beverley snorted.

‘Show off,’ she said.

‘I said I was going to do magic,’ I said.

‘But . . .’ Dominic floundered around for a bit before pointing at me accusingly. ‘You said that there’s weird shit, but it normally turns out to have a rational explanation.’

‘It does,’ said Beverley. ‘The explanation is a wizard did it.’

‘That’s my line,’ I said, and Beverley shrugged.

‘You didn’t say anything about spells!’ said Dominic.

‘It’s just a werelight,’ I said.

It was like having our own personal streetlight, but beyond that bright circle the woods were a jumble of angular shadows – shifting uneasily as the yellow werelight bobbed and wavered in the breeze.

‘Can we at least start moving in the right direction?’ I said.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Dominic, who was still having trouble. ‘Is there anything else I should know?’

‘We’re looking for an invisible unicorn and Bev here is the goddess of a small river in South London.’

‘It’s quite a big river, actually,’ said Beverley.

‘How do people normally react to this?’ asked Dominic.

‘And most of it’s above ground,’ said Beverley.

‘Usually a bit stunned to start with,’ I said. ‘Then they either get angry, go into denial or just deal with it.’

‘Sounds familiar,’ said Dominic.

‘Unlike some rivers I could mention,’ said Beverley.

‘What else can you do?’ asked Dominic.

‘More importantly,’ said Beverley, ‘what makes you think this is going to work?’

‘Because incorporeal entities need power to interact with the real world. And this,’ I pointed at the werelight above me, ‘is the all-you-can-eat-buffet sign.’

‘You know that sounded completely mad, don’t you?’ asked Dominic.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Professional hazard.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Beverley. ‘Enough distractions. Let’s do it.’

So into the woods we went – it was surprisingly noisy. Especially one loud bird whose chirping sounded far too cheerful for the middle of the night.

‘That’s just a robin,’ said Beverley.

I said I thought they were diurnal.

‘All day, all night,’ she said. ‘They don’t shut up.’

Somewhere deeper into the gloom, amongst the straight trunks of the western hemlocks, something else made a sound like a ZX Spectrum loading a game off a cassette – Beverley said it was a nightjar.

Even without the sun, the air was warm and spiced with resin and the smell of dusty bark.

About fifty metres up the track it separated and we took the right-hand path which, according to my map, led us parallel to the top of the ridge. Because we were supposed to be looking out for anything weird we didn’t talk and in that strange stumbling silence I felt as if my senses had contracted down to the small flickering circle of the werelight.

After a quarter of an hour or so we reached a T-junction where the Mortimer Trail separated from the logging road.

‘I think this might have been a mistake,’ I said.

‘Definitely is,’ said Beverley, pointing to the left which was noticeably darker than the right. ‘Because we are not going up that way.’

‘No,’ I said, blinking to try and get my night vision back. ‘I mean the light – I should have used a darker point source.’ If only lux hadn’t been so reliable as a ghost attractor. I checked the cricket bat and saw that the LED had gone out. When I shook it next to my ear I could hear sand sloshing around inside. I swapped it for the next bat – the LED flickering as soon as I turned it on.

‘Left or right?’ asked Dominic.

I considered it. If the point was to attract things to us, then taking the easier road made sense. I’d have liked to take the right-hand trail to Croft Ambrey, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be stumbling around an Iron Age fort, what with ditches and ramparts and other convenient limb-breaking opportunities, until I’d had a chance to suss it out in daylight.

This, by the way, is what we call in the trade a risk assessment.

‘Allons y,’ I said, and led off down the left-hand track.

We’d gone on another couple of hundred metres, around a turn and past a turn-off that Dominic identified as heading down to Croft Castle, when we heard the hoof beats.

Beverley heard them first, but as soon as she’d pointed them out I heard them as well. Hooves hitting the ground in a fast jaunty rhythm. A slow trot, I learnt later – sometimes known as a jog.

It took a couple of rounds of shushing and craning to establish that it was coming from behind us. I put down the cricket bat to anchor the werelight in place and ‘jogged’ back five metres to see if I could re-establish my night vision. With the light behind me the track became a milky strip, snaking between the vertical shadows of the trees, whose pointed tops marched off like fence spikes. The moon hung full and round and almost perfectly aligned with the track.

If this wasn’t your actual moon path, I thought, it would certainly do for the postcard.

I couldn’t see a horse, but I could hear the hoof beats getting closer – and picking up the pace.

‘Let’s get off the road,’ I said.

Neither Beverley nor Dominic argued, even when we found ourselves pushing through the chest-high bracken that had lain invisible in the darkness until we blundered straight into it. If anything, we were grateful for the additional cover as we crouched down and waited for the hoof beats to get closer.

I glanced up at the werelight obediently hanging directly over the track where I’d left it. The colour was definitely beginning to edge into the red as whatever approached sucked up the magic and lowered the frequency of the emitted light.

The hoof beats slowed to a walk and then a cautious amble. They sounded large, the hoof beats, great big dinner-plate-sized hooves that thumped down onto the dust of the track with authority.

I watched through the gaps in the bracken as the werelight dimmed down to a sullen red and Princess Luna made her appearance. It was transparent but refractive, a statue of living glass, the dying light from the werelight tingeing its shoulders and haunches with red and outlining the long spiralled horn that rose from between its eyes.

Then the werelight popped out and suddenly it was there, huge and real and sweaty and pale in the moonlight, its horn bobbing left and right as it swung its head and sniffed the air.

I resisted the urge to push further back into the bracken.

Then the head snapped back to point down the track, the big muscles in its haunches bunched, flexed and the beast sprang forward, its vast hooves kicking up dust and splinters of rock.

We scrambled out of our hiding place and stumbled out to stare after the unicorn as it vanished around a curve in the track.

‘Okay,’ said Beverley. ‘I really hope one of you is a virgin.’

‘What now?’ asked Dominic.

‘We follow it,’ I said.

Which we did, but incredibly cautiously, all the way down to what Dominic assured me was School Wood – not far from where Stan had had her stash snaffled. I considered launching another werelight, but after a brief discussion with the others we decided to delay that until we were within a comfortable mad panicked rush of where Victor was parked in the Technical.

In fact, I had Dominic turn his phone back on so he could call to make sure that Victor was indeed waiting. You know – just in case.

The track had curved south so that the tall trees cast their moon shadows across the path, making it much harder to continue without lights. The warmth of the day was leaching out of the air and I shivered at a breeze that blew in from the north and riffled the tree tops.

When I figured we’d reached the point where the track started to descend sharply, I decided to give the big werelight another go.

‘And what’s your plan if Princess Luna turns up again?’ asked Beverley.

‘I want you two to hang back,’ I said. ‘While I go and try to make friends with it.’

‘And when it inevitably tries to kill you?’ asked Dominic.

‘You rush in and rescue me,’ I said.

Beverley kissed her teeth.

‘We have to at least narrow down where it’s coming from,’ I said. ‘So if it runs, we follow it again. And if it attacks, we see how far it follows us.’

‘Just for the record,’ asked Dominic, ‘what were you expecting to happen when we first met it?’

I told them I had thought our invisible friend would be a bit more insubstantial and a bit less like a carthorse with a lethal spike stuck on its head.

‘The girls are still missing,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to make another attempt.’

‘Fine,’ said Beverley. ‘Just stay out of the way of the horn, right?’

I promised I would.

Then I turned on the last of the cricket bats and put a werelight over our heads, a slightly bigger one than I meant to, one that I learnt later was visible as far away as Wigmore and Mortimer’s Cross.

As soon as it went up I felt Beverley clutch my arm.

There was a chill in the air and a sudden coppery taste in my mouth. A smell like smashed flint and a screech like a blade on a whetstone.

At the far edge of the werelight the shadows amongst the trees began to quiver.

‘I have to get off this ridge,’ said Beverley.

‘Why?’

‘There are some things you don’t do, some places you don’t go, unless you are seriously looking for trouble.’

‘Are we talking postcodes here?’

‘Fuck postcodes,’ said Beverley. ‘This is a no-fly zone, UN resolution-breaking, war-starting stuff. You know my mum and the Old Man of the River, remember all that aggravation? That’s nothing compared to what’ll happen if we don’t get off this ridge right now.’

‘I get that,’ I said. ‘But who?’

‘I don’t know, Peter,’ said Beverley. ‘And I don’t think it’s a good idea to stick around to find out.’

I heard hoof beats to the north-east, behind us. The fucker must have circled around or just stood invisible in the wings and watched us walk past.

‘Which way?’ I asked.

Beverley hesitated and then thrust out an arm in a vaguely south-westerly direction.

‘That way,’ she said. ‘Towards the river.’

Away from the unicorn – it seemed like a sensible idea.

‘I thought you were going to make friends,’ said Dominic as he headed off at a brisk pace.

I would have explained that operational flexibility is the key to successful policing, but I decided to save my breath. I also left the cricket bat and the werelight behind me in the hope that it might slow down whatever was following us.

‘How far is it to the car?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know,’ said Dominic. ‘Half a mile?’

I stopped and looked back.

A hundred metres behind me the unicorn had stopped beneath my werelight to bask in its glow. As I watched, it reared up on its hind legs, the reddening light gleaming along its horn, and gave a deep rumbling bellow.

Nothing that ate grass, I decided, would make a noise like that and legged it after the others.

Suddenly the forest on our left gave way to a single line of trees reinforced with a barbed-wire fence and, on the other side, open pasture silver in the moonlight. Beverley stopped so fast that I nearly ran into her back.

‘That way,’ she said, pointing at the pasture.

I was about to ask why we couldn’t just keep going when I saw something blocking the track ahead. In the darkness it was an indistinct pattern of shadow, but when it moved my brain had no trouble filling in its outline – another unicorn.

‘Oh, great,’ said Dominic.

I looked back to where the werelight was flickering and our prancing friend came whumping down on its front hooves, head lowered like a bull. I swung back to the fence looking for a stile or a gate, or even a gap that wouldn’t involve ripping myself to bits on the barbed wire.

‘Peter,’ said Beverley – I heard hoof beats from both directions.

‘I know,’ I said trying to clear my mind.

‘Hurry,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I said, summoning up the impello forma in my mind and trying to remember the formae inflectentes that would make it do what I want.

‘I mean it,’ she said, and I let the spell go.

It wasn’t pretty but it got the job done, ripping out a section of the barbed-wire fence and shoving it to the side so that me, Beverley and Dominic could run through the gap.

‘The farmer’s not going to like this,’ yelled Dominic as we ran past the twisted remains of the fence.

‘He can bill me,’ I said.

Even in my PSU boots, running at night over uneven ground was difficult and Beverley soon pulled ahead of me and Dominic. Out in the open pasture I was suddenly aware of the blue-black vastness of the sky and the river of stars arching over my head. At the far side of the field I could see a smudged line of shadow against the midnight blue of the sky – I hoped it was another fence line because if it was a cliff or something we were in deep shit.

I heard the bellow of a unicorn behind me and, without looking back, I put on a spurt of speed, the long grass whipping around my ankles.

‘There’s a fence,’ yelled Beverley from in front of me.

Doing magic on the fly, even something as basic as an impello variant, is incredibly difficult. Nightingale said that when he was training only half his peers could perform while under physical stress. Which is why, in the Folly, boxing practice goes, jab, jab, right, duck, roundhouse, uppercut, lux, jab, jab, impello.

I stripped away the sound of my own breathing and the impact of my feet on the grass so that in my head there was only the pounding of my heart and the right formae – and then I twisted that shape in the Yale lock of the universe.

Ahead of me I saw bits of shadow splinter and fly away to either side. It wasn’t perfect, but I reckoned that even the Russian Olympic judge was going to give me at least eight points for interpretation.

Then I realised that beyond the fence the land fell away in a sixty degree slope, fortunately a wooded one, and I saved myself by deliberately running into a tree and throwing my arms around it.

Beverley screamed my name suddenly and I heard an angry snort from right behind my head and threw myself to the side. There was a horrible crunching sound and a hole the size of a fifty pence bit appeared in the trunk of the tree I’d been holding. Another snort, frantic this time. Bark spooled off from around the hole in the tree and, with a splintering sound, a crack a metre long appeared above.

I smelt it, horse sweat and rough hair, and felt the weight and power of the muscles underneath its invisible skin. And then as if the moon had come out from behind a cloud I saw it, outlined in silver, as big as a carthorse, as shaggy as a pony and as pissed off as a bull in the household goods section of Marks and Spencer. Its mad black eye was fixed on me as it twisted and pulled, trying to get its narwhale horn free of the tree.

‘Peter,’ Beverley’s voice came from a surprisingly long way down the hill. ‘Don’t play with it – run!’

I know good advice when I hear it, and half scrambled and half slid on my bum down the slope, using the trees to keep myself from spilling over and breaking my neck. Above and behind me the unicorn snorted its frustration and stamped the ground. I was fairly certain it wasn’t going to attempt such a steep slope.

This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly. Sucks to be you, quadruped. Opposable thumbs – don’t leave home without them.

The trees ended suddenly and I joined Beverley and Dominic staring down a steep slope planted with white protective tubes and covered with nodding foxglove. I recognised it at once.

‘Pokehouse Wood,’ I said.

Had the girls been chased down here? Was that why Nicole had left a bloodied strip of her Capri pants on the barbed-wire fence – no handy fence-clearing magic for her. I wondered if there had been a moment when the unicorn had gone from invisible friend to terrifying predator – the point where the mask came off.

‘The river’s down there,’ said Beverley. ‘We need to get across it.’

What with the thigh-high grass, the nettles, the springy hummocks and inconveniently foot-sized hollows, it was harder work getting down through newly planted saplings than it had been amongst the full-grown trees. We were seriously grateful to reach the logging track that cut diagonally across the slope of the hill. At least, we were until my mental map of the area reminded me that further up the valley the logging track merged with the one in School Wood. A round trip of about a kilometre – or less than ten minutes as the pissed-off unicorn canters.

I pointed this out, and it was when we turned to flee down the track that we saw them ahead of us.

Two figures, child sized, white faces pale ovals in the moonlight, one of them in a green T-shirt, the other in a pink top,

‘Okay,’ said Beverley. ‘That’s strangely convenient.’

I heard hoof beats from up the track, two sets, in what I was to learn later was an aggressive canter – at the time it sounded like a gallop.

‘Not that convenient,’ I said.

Normally, I would have approached a pair of missing kids with tact and care, taking it slow so as not to exacerbate any distress. Then, slowly, I would have established who they were while trying to find out, circumspectly, whether their abductors were still in the vicinity.

However, with a couple of tons of enraged fairy tale on our arses, me and Dominic bore down on the girls and unceremoniously picked them up and threw them over our shoulders – practically without missing a step.

Beverley stayed behind us, a hand on my back in encouragement.

‘Faster,’ she said.

I’m young and I’m fit, but an eleven-year-old is still a weight and even down the slope the best I could manage was a lumbering trot. Dominic was keeping level but I could tell by his gasping breath that it was costing him.

We were getting close to the bottom of the slope, but there the replanted area ran out and plunged into the darkness, cliff face to the left.

‘Go right, go right,’ yelled Beverley behind us. ‘Across the river.’

I went right and stumbled forward as the ground fell away, managed to drop the girl before I landed on her, and came down hard on my shoulder in five centimetres of freezing water. I heard one of the girls give a shrill little scream at the cold.

A hand grabbed my collar and pulled me upright – one handed – it was Beverley. She had her other arm around the waist of a girl and once I was safely up she bounded across the river with her as if the girl weighed nothing.

I scrambled after them, my feet slipping on the pebbled bottom of the stream bed, and threw myself onto the opposite bank.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Dominic, but he wasn’t talking to me. He was crouched down in front of the two little girls and checking them for injuries. ‘Can you make a light?’ he asked me as I joined him.

There was a stamping and bellowing from the other side of the river.

‘Not a good idea,’ I said.

Both unicorns were amongst the long grass of the far riverbank, visible as horse-shaped refractions of light and shadow.

Beverley put her hand on my shoulder and stepped forward to face them across what looked, to me, like quite a narrow stretch of shallow water.

‘Yeah,’ she shouted. ‘You want them – you come get them.’

A sapling crackled and split as a horn the length of my arm smashed into it. Hooves smashed down in frustration. But I noticed neither unicorn advanced into the river.

‘Come on then,’ yelled Beverley, for whom de-escalation was something that happened to other people. ‘Get one hoof wet – I dare you.’

Then, with a final snort, they whirled and vanished.

‘Thought so,’ said Beverley. ‘And stay that side.’

Dominic was swearing at his phone which, given how much magic I’d flung around that night, wasn’t working. I pulled my Airwave set, turned it on and handed it over. He called Leominster nick while I squatted down and tried to determine whether either of the girls were injured.

‘You’d better go get him, then,’ said Dominic to someone at the other end. ‘Because we’ve found them.’