There were thirty of the buggers, and they filled up the back of the Asbo. I also kept four phones still in their plastic packaging for use later.
‘Did you see it?’ asked Al, as he helped me carry the magic detectors to the car.
‘See what?’
‘There was a sighting two nights ago up near Croft Ambrey,’ said Al.
We went back into the shop and opened up my laptop and loaded up the tracking software.
‘Multiple witnesses, classic Type V, light source, no visible body,’ said Al as we waited for the diagnostic test to run. He was surprised that it hadn’t made the national papers. ‘But your lot did find those kids that day,’ he said, and implied that he thought the two were related – which of course they were.
The laptop ran through each of the detectors in turn before putting them into passive mode. Being cheap disposables they didn’t have GPS, so I’d have to log each location as I planted them.
‘Aymestrey’s always been a hotspot for close encounters,’ said Al. ‘Some of them very difficult to explain away.’
I asked him if he had a list, and he directed me to a website called UKUFOindex.com where all UFO sightings were indexed and cross-referenced for any member of the UFO community to access. I made a point of noting down the address in my notebook.
We ran one last test to ensure that the detectors were registering on my laptop.
‘Any abductions?’ I asked.
‘Loads,’ he said. ‘But none verified.’
Al, while being a firm believer that extra-terrestrial life had visited Herefordshire, was a firm agnostic on the whole abduction and cattle mutilation thing. Although he lived in hope.
‘Just think what would happen if we had irrefutable proof that we weren’t alone,’ he said. ‘Think what a difference that would make.’
It was about then that I got the idea for the investigation technique that I call, for reasons too geeky to mention, the reverse Nigel Kneale. I paid Al in cash, got his personal mobile number in case I needed a technical consult in the middle of the night, and headed for Leominster nick.
The crowd there had thinned out a bit now that the search was no longer being staged from it. MIU was still stuffed into their overheated office space. Luckily somebody had sprung for an industrial-sized cooling fan with a face the same diameter as a dustbin lid and an unfortunate tendency to blow any unsecured paperwork out the nearest window. If we’d had a green screen we could have shot the live elements to a low budget disaster movie. Edmondson had quite adamantly reasserted control of his own office, but the MIU office manager found me some desk space next door in the territorial policing office.
I was just logging into UKUFOindex.com when Lesley texted me. Have U gone native yet?
I hadn’t been expecting a call until at least that evening, which meant I spent the next ten minutes trying to open the tough plastic clamshell packaging around one of the spare burner mobiles until finally a PCSO on her lunch break took pity on me and lent me a pair of scissors. Fortunately, disposable phones nearly always come with some charge – enough at least to make my initial response.
No, I texted back, using the disposable. But I have been eating sheep.
I had no doubt Lesley would notice that I was using a different phone but the question was, would she figure out why?
While I waited for a response, I dug into UKUFOindex.com and found that in some quarters UFOs were now known as UAPs – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – although adoption of this term had proved contentious. The index was just that, a long catalogue of incidents listed by date without any search function, going back as far the 1940s. A guy believed he’d been abducted in Northumbria and Winston Churchill suppressed reports of UFOs sighted by RAF reconnaissance flights. Herefordshire had its own sighting in the summer of 1942 when there was a report of an aircraft crash near Aymestrey, only once the authorities arrived there was no sign of any wreckage.
The disposable phone pinged.
Does this mean we can talk?
‘We need to push her,’ Inspector Pollock had said when we discussed the last text exchange. ‘She may be reaching out to you because she’s uncomfortable with her current situation. We need to make it easier for her to engage but at the same time you need to push her emotionally. I’m sorry, but that’s just what needs to be done.’
What needs to be done, I thought, and texted How’s your face?
The 1950s saw UFOs popping up from Southend-on-Sea to the USAF base at Lakenheath, but nothing that I could find in Herefordshire or the surrounds. The 1960s proved to be a time of cosmic significance, at least in the number of UFO sightings all over the country. But it was not until August 1970 that I had my first close encounter. A couple travelling towards Wigmore on the A4110 experienced their car mysteriously stopping and then refusing to restart. Although there were no lights available, the couple claim that a tall humanoid, with big eyes, dressed in long dark robes, held up its hand – just like a lollipop lady, you know, holding up traffic while the kids cross the road. They were just about to leave their car to have a closer look when the figure vanished and, miraculously, when they tried the ignition the car restarted.
Herefordshire remained blessedly free of alien intrusion until 1977, when there was a sighting in Hereford itself and then nothing until 2002 when a young girl claimed to have met aliens near Mortimer’s Cross, just south of Aymestrey. I clicked on the hyperlink and was taken to the relevant page and read the account. Unfortunately, the report was obviously a summary, not an original statement. It described a young girl running away from her home in a nearby village and being ‘drawn’ up the footpath north of Mortimer’s Mill.
I checked the OS map – there was no footpath marked from the water mill, but if you did walk north from there you’d find yourself following the east bank of the River Lugg right into Pokehouse Wood.
The anonymous girl is reported to have encountered a tall alien with big eyes and scaly silver skin/clothes like a fish who talked to her for a while and gave her something to drink. The girl believes that what she drank may have been drugged because she went to sleep and woke up later that night on a road near her village.
Three guesses as to who the little girl might be.
Now, what with DCI Windrow and his team being more than just competent, one of the first things they would have done would have been to TIE any spare relatives. So it took just a five second word search to find a nominal devoted to ZOE THOMAS, daughter of Derek Lacey’s estranged first wife Susan Thomas and Nicole Lacey’s half-sister. They’d done a complete Integrated Intelligence Platform check so I had her, somewhat pathetic, criminal record, as well as a current address, employment and the sad fact that apart from work she used her mobile to talk to precisely three other people. One of whom was her mother.
The disposable mobile pinged. Still better than yours.
I called Inspector Pollock and informed him that Lesley had taken the bait.
‘Assuming this is Lesley,’ said Pollock, ‘and not a fake to lead us away.’
‘Lead us away from what?’ I asked. ‘This is definitely her.’
‘We’ll see. Anyway, I’ll brief Nightingale,’ he said.
‘Do you want me to come back in?’
‘Absolutely not,’ said Pollock quickly. ‘We all like you where you are right now – a long, long way away. We’ll let you know how the operation pans out.’
After I’d hung up, I went and splashed cold water on my face in the bathroom before seeing what could be safely scarfed up in the coffee area. One whole shelf of the fridge was rammed with Morrisons’ filled doughnuts that were apparently free for the taking. Dominic told me later that Inspector Edmondson believed that a squad stuffed with saturated fat and sugar was a happy squad. I ate a custard doughnut while I finished up my UFO research, but I think I should have let it defrost a bit because it tasted funny.
Al the electronics geezer had been right about Aymestrey becoming a hotspot for sightings – l
ots of night-time lights, suspicious movement in the trees, an encounter with an invisible ‘entity’ and an inhuman screaming like a pig being tortured. I made a note to ask Dominic whether pig torturing was a common nocturnal pastime in these parts.
All of this activity had taken place after the summer of 2002 when Zoe Thomas had met her tall alien in fish scales – it was time to have a chat. I let the MIU office manager know what action I was taking so it could be properly actioned, jumped into the Asbo and headed east along the A44 for the mighty metropolis of Bromyard.
With towns like Bromyard you can tell when you reach the historic section because suddenly the houses are all crowding onto narrow pavements and they assume the squeezed frontage that is typical of a planned medieval town. Apart from that, and some startlingly well preserved sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings, it looked like a large suburb with all the exciting connotations that implies.
Zoe Thomas lived in a bedsit above a Chinese takeaway on the Old Road near the town centre. It smelt faintly of sweet and sour pork and had that precarious scruffiness that you get when someone is fighting to maintain basic standards, but losing. There were no fast food containers serving a second career as combination ashtray and biological experiment, but the washing up in the sink was at least two days old and I could see dust and cobwebs building up in the corners.
‘I’ve already talked to the police,’ said Zoe. She was sitting on the bed because as the guest I got use of the only chair, a wooden upright kitchen chair that had obviously come from an expensive set about fifty years previously and then been repainted in gloss white by someone with no taste.
I smiled reassuringly and posed with my pen over my notebook.
‘This is just a follow-up,’ I said.
‘They found them, didn’t they?’ she asked. ‘It was on the news.’
She had a ruddy white complexion, a square forehead and a beaky nose that must have come from her dad, and a big toothy mouth that must have come from somewhere completely different. When she smiled, which was rarely, she had dimples.
She was wearing slacks and a navy blue uniform shirt with Countrywide embroidered on the breast. Countrywide were a chain store I’d never heard of that provided all the things country folk needed: wellies – I presumed – organic pig feed, bear traps. The IIP check had revealed that Zoe worked full time as a sales assistant down the road at the local branch.
‘This is a related matter,’ I said, and she immediately tensed.
She hadn’t offered me a tea when she let me inside, which is always a bad sign. According to the PNC, she’d been sectioned under the Mental Health Act two years ago but released after the twenty-eight day psychiatric assessment. There were also a string of arrests and cautions for shoplifting and minor public order offences. Generally, people who’ve had to deal with the criminal justice system more than three times stop offering random police officers tea. But you can but hope.
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Zoe.
Sweat was starting to plaster her hair to her forehead, but she made no move to open the windows and let a breeze in. My neck began to prickle in sympathy. There was a smell like microwaved rice.
‘I’d like to talk about 2002,’ I said. ‘When you were eleven and ran away from home.’
‘Which time are you talking about?’ she asked.
‘The time in August,’ I said. ‘Did you run away a lot when you were a kid?’
‘Not before Mum ran off first,’ she said. ‘That was when I was nine.’
‘Were you trying to follow her?’ I asked.
She started and looked straight at me for the first time – her eyes were a beautiful hazel colour. Not only was I sure she didn’t get that from her dad, I was also pretty certain I’d seen them listed as blue in one of the reports.
‘Did you used to run away?’ she asked.
‘Everyone runs away at least once in their lives,’ I said.
‘Why did you?’ she asked intently, and as she did I felt a strange little flutter like the batting of moth’s wings on a window. A faint echo of the sensation I felt when somebody supernatural tried to influence me – and trust me, every single one I’ve met so far has tried it on at least once.
‘Why did I what?’ I asked, to buy time.
‘Run away,’ she said, and the flutter came again.
A practitioner can emulate the effect, but it’s a ridiculously high-order spell so I was guessing that this was an unconscious phenomenon. The fae are often lavish in their glamour and I surmise that they deploy it in the same unthinking manner as do young ladies their charms – so sayeth Victor Bartholomew who despite being a dullard and a wanker has yet to steer me wrong.
‘My father was a heroin addict,’ I said. ‘Sometimes it was like living with the walking dead – so I had to get out.’
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ asked Zoe.
‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘You make the tea and I’ll wash up.’
I’d got there just in time – another twenty-four hours and the Environment Agency would have declared the sink a Site of Special Scientific Interest and refused us access. I did briefly consider taking a broom to the spider webs in the corners, but you don’t get the full Studio Ghibli from me without a sizable cash advance.
The disposable phone pinged while I was drying up. Food is terrible here.
That had to be a hospital reference. Was she trying to tell me where she was? Why was she texting me? Was she reaching out or trying to misdirect?
‘Girlfriend?’ asked Zoe when she saw me staring at the phone.
‘Colleague,’ I said without thinking, and texted back. U only have yourself to blame.
Zoe Thomas did have a photograph of herself from before the incident, a head and shoulders portrait in school uniform. In it she’s smiling lopsided at the camera with her head tilted ever so slightly to one side, as if questioning the whole purpose of the exercise. The picture was big enough for me to see that her eyes were blue. I looked up from the photograph to find Zoe staring at me.
‘Your eyes . . .’ I said. ‘When did that happen?’
‘The night I ran away,’ she said. ‘And do you know something – my parents never even noticed.’
‘I think you’d better tell me what happened,’ I said, and she did. Over tea and biscuits.
Even when she was small she liked to go out at night – especially when the moon was up.
‘That’s the best bit about living in the country, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘All the stars.’
I asked her if she used to dance around in the nude and she gave me a funny look.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I’ll tell you afterwards,’ I said.
After Mummy had left, she’d started going further away from home.
‘And this is going to sound weird,’ she said. ‘But I felt like I was being called.’
I asked if she’d ever actually heard any voices, but she said no – it was much more like a feeling. ‘I wish I’d heard voices,’ she said. ‘It would have made the whole thing easier to explain. Of course now I realise it was a telepathic compulsion.’
I was afraid to ask from who – but I had to know.
‘From aliens,’ she told me.
‘Aliens?’
‘I’m not mad, you know,’ she said. ‘I’ve been sectioned. They kept me in for four weeks’ “evaluation” and at the end the top shrink calls me into her office and looks me in the eye and says, “You’re saner than I am – go away”.’
‘Did you tell them about the aliens?’ I asked.
‘I may have glossed over some of the details,’ she said, and dunked a biscuit.
Definitely sane, I thought.
‘So would it be fair to say that you were summoned out that night?’
I didn’t ask whether the summoner had been an invisible unicorn – that would have been leading the witness. You learn about this stuff when you do your PEACE (Planning, Engage and explain, Account & c
larify, Closure, Evaluate) training – the not leading the witness bit, not the unicorn. They’re one of the things you have to pick up on the job.
‘Not exactly,’ she said and gave me a rueful smile. ‘I walked in on my dad shagging my babysitter.’
‘No shit,’ I said, and then realised who that must have been. ‘Joanne Marstowe?’
‘The very bitch,’ said Zoe. ‘They didn’t see me, of course – too busy – so I went upstairs, packed my things and went out the front door. I slammed it hard, too, but they must have been too busy to even hear that.’
‘Wait,’ I said, doing the maths in my head. ‘She must have had Hannah by then – where was she?’
Zoe shrugged.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Not at our house.’
And I’d seen enough of the Derek and Joanne Show to know that they were probably still at it eleven years later. It was outrageous, but I wasn’t sure it was relevant – I was certainly not going to write it up this time. To change the subject, I pulled up a picture on my phone of the knapsack they’d found near the B4362 during the search and showed it to Zoe.
‘Was this yours?’
‘Oh my god,’ Zoe grabbed my phone and brought it right up to her face. ‘That’s my bag. I got it free with a magazine – I loved that bag.’
I explained where and when it had been found.
‘I’m amazed it lasted that long.’
‘So you had it with you when you left the house?’
‘Definitely,’ she said. But she didn’t know when, precisely, she’d lost it. She certainly didn’t have it when she reached Mortimer’s Mill. I asked her what had brought her there and she said that it had been a light, only like a light in her brain.
‘More telepathy?’ I asked.
‘I guess so,’ said Zoe. ‘I think of it being like the guide beam like they use at airports to bring in aircraft in poor visibility.’
I bet Call Me Al would have liked that explanation.
There was a path from the Mill that followed the bank of the Lugg all the way up to Pokehouse Wood, which wasn’t much of a wood back in the summer of 2002, being a bit deficient in the tree department.