‘Not that I want a thunderstorm,’ he’d said. ‘But a shower or two to take the edge off would be nice.’
It was too hot to walk up the shimmering track from the Roman road, so I risked the low slung underside of the Asbo and drove uphill until we reached the spot, plus or minus twenty metres or so, where the Antiquarian map said that the trail into the monument should start. It wasn’t exactly well signposted, and if there was a stile or other public access, me and Beverley must have missed it. In the end we climbed over a fence and slogged through some dense bracken until we reached a close approximation of a path that wound around the hill.
It was close under the shade of the trees and not notably cooler. The air was heavy with a sickly sweet smell that Beverley said was probably the rhododendrons, and the scent of scorched bark and resin that I’d started to think of as overheated forest. Something hooted further up the hill.
‘Wood pigeon,’ said Beverley.
‘I’ve heard that in London,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Beverley slowly, ‘we have birds in London. Many of them of the same species.’
Amongst the trees and undergrowth, the ditches and ramparts were hard to distinguish from the steep slope of the hill. It was only when the trail rounded the north-east corner and we found the entrance that I realised the ramparts, despite obvious damage, were twice my height. We laboured up onto what I supposed must have been the central enclosure, although I couldn’t see it for the trees. And, despite the heat, we decided to follow the path to its bitter end. Drifts of foxglove started to appear amongst the bracken and bramble, growing more frequent until we stepped out into a glade awash with purple. The clearing was almost too circular to be natural, and certainly large enough that it ought to have shown up on Google Earth.
Beverley kicked at something down amongst the foxglove stems. It cracked and splintered – rotten wood.
‘Stump,’ she said. ‘Somebody cleared this area.’
‘The latest imagery on Google Earth was four years ago,’ I said. ‘It must have happened since then. Is it possible that it might be natural?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Beverley. ‘Probably not.’
We worked our way to the centre of the clearing, pushing through the stands of foxglove which seemed taller here than elsewhere, the bells of the flowers larger and more mouth-like as they shivered in the hot, still air. When we stopped I realised that the glade was very quiet. Even the wood pigeon we’d heard earlier seemed muffled and far away.
‘There’s no bees,’ said Beverley. ‘And bees love foxglove.’
Mellissa’s bees had been avoiding the south-west section of the ridge, from the edge of Bircher Common to where the river is. They weren’t coming here or to Pokehouse Wood.
‘Feel anything?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘How about you?’
I smelt green stuff, hot and dusty, and sneezed.
‘There’s no castle,’ I said. ‘Hannah was very sure about the castle.’ The child psychologist had continued her gentle interrogation of Hannah. Heroically enduring countless episodes of Jessie and more Yonder Over Yonder than was probably medically advisable, the psychologist chipped gently away at Hannah’s story, particularly the pink and blue and orange castle which she probably figured for a defence mechanism or a mental block or whatever the psychological term is. Hannah, while growing increasingly fuzzy on every other detail, had stayed firm on the castle.
I thought there had to be a castle somewhere, or at least something vaguely castle-like. But if there was, it certainly wasn’t at Pyon Wood Camp.
I had one spare detector left, so I placed it in the centre of the glade and activated it.
‘Just on the off chance,’ I said.
‘Is your work always this vague?’ asked Beverley.
‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Sometimes we really don’t know what we’re doing.’
Beverley had to make what she called a ‘pastoral visit’ to the Steam Fair, so I dropped her off there before heading back towards the industrial park and the redbrick ship shape of Leominster nick. The media were thick around the public side and there was even a knot of photographers at the entrance to the police car park. I made sure I was wearing a suitably solemn face to avoid ‘Police Laugh At Kidnapped Children’ headlines from the Independent.
‘There’s going to be a press conference later,’ said Dominic when I asked him about the scrum outside. The broadsheets led with the war in Syria, but the tabloids were having way too much fun with the idea of child-stealing gypsies to let the mere lack of facts get in the way.
‘Copper pipe I’d believe,’ said Dominic. ‘Children, no.’
I asked him what the MIU had come up with, but he told me to watch the press conference like everybody else.
I settled into my assigned space in the territorial policing office and picked up the phone. I called up Croft Castle and asked to talk to whoever it was who managed the forest. They told me his name was Patrick Blackmoor and they gave me his mobile number.
‘The western hemlock was doing really badly,’ Blackmoor said when I asked why they’d clear-felled Pokehouse Wood out of schedule. ‘So we decided to fell early.’
When I asked what the problem had been, Blackmoor told me that it was a variety of factors. ‘The soil remained very poor and acidic, but not enough to explain the losses amongst the plantation,’ he said. ‘It’s a vigorous tree, your western hemlock. That’s why it gets planted.’ It took more than some abnormal soil chemistry to stunt their growth, but there had been damage to the young trees as well.
‘What kind of damage?’ I asked.
‘In the initial planting phase some of the saplings were dug out during the night. Others had bark damage,’ said Blackmoor. But he didn’t have an explanation as to what was doing it.
‘We called in your lot at one point,’ he said. ‘In case it was vandals.’ Although nobody could think of a reason why, with over 200,000 hectares of Forestry Commission woodlands in England to play with, they’d want to pick on the Pokehouse Wood. I asked whether they might have been protesting the planting of foreign conifers on an ancient woodland site.
Blackmoor found that idea hilarious.
‘This was going to be the last commercial crop,’ he said. ‘Once it was harvested we would have replanted with broadleaf – basically what we’re doing now.’
‘Maybe someone didn’t want to wait?’ I asked, which was the bit Blackmoor found most funny.
‘Forests are a long-term thing,’ he said. ‘And the people who care enough about the management of ancient woodlands to vandalise a tree think in the same time frames as us. Besides, there are plenty of ancient woodlands under threat from motorways and infrastructure projects – that’s what gets protestors excited.’
‘Then who?’ I asked, but he didn’t have the faintest idea. And the damage had continued. Once the trees began to mature they started to suffer from what looked like an unknown disease, or possibly poisoning.
‘At first we were sure it was poisoning,’ said Blackmoor. Because most of the affected trees were found to have been drilled. ‘Up to a depth of thirty centimetres – in some cases all the way through the trunk.’
I tried to remember my night out with Princess Luna, and to estimate at what height that horn would have been when deployed in skewer-the-policeman mode.
‘How high up the trunk did the drilling take place?’ I asked.
Blackmoor couldn’t say for certain without looking at his notes, but he remembered the holes being mostly chest high. ‘Five to six feet off the ground,’ he said.
I remembered that night, the glass unicorn refracting the werelight, the crunch as something invisible and sharp skewered a tree at the same height my head would have been – had I not been sensible enough to get out of the way.
‘We didn’t find any evidence of poisoning, though,’ said Blackmoor.
Some trees just mysteriously fell over. Many others showed suboptimal growth or other defor
mities. So they set up a hide in the woods above and trained a time-lapse camera on the area.
‘It stopped working after the second night,’ he said.
I’ll bet it did, I thought.
They’d got so desperate that they granted permission for a pair ‘of those UFO nutters’ to camp out in the woods for a fortnight. But they never spotted anything strange and they were really looking.
I asked if there were temporal patterns to the damage.
‘It happened mostly during the summer,’ said Blackmoor. ‘That’s all I can give you off the top of my head.’
‘Did you keep records?’ I asked. And they did, as it happens – vandalism being an important issue to the National Trust. Blackmoor said he’d send them to me as long as I promised, should I figure out what the cause was, to feed that information back to him.
And if it turns out to be a sacred grove, I thought, or a faerie place of power or some such mystical bollocks, would he still want to know? Probably yes. And he’d just add it to the long list of issues that makes modern heritage land management such a complex and challenging career.
Inspector Edmondson found the tree vandalism case for me, and when the records from Croft Castle arrived in the form of a great big spreadsheet I started correlating both with my UFO sightings and the timeline of Zoe Lacey’s encounter. I was still doing that when the press conference started. Me and Dominic got cold drinks and joined pretty much the rest of the nick to watch it on the internal monitor. These days, sensible police officers make sure they have an independent record of any encounter with a journalist. This meant that we got to see the whole thing – something that very few members of the public did.
For the hard-working lower ranks of the police force there is no entertainment quite as thrilling as watching your senior officer conducting a press conference. Not only is there the possibility that it might be humorously embarrassing, but also if it goes very badly it’s useful to have advance warning so one can make oneself scarce. Officers of Inspector rank and above are a power in the land, and they don’t like to be mildly contradicted let alone thwarted or shown up in public. I’m sure I wasn’t the only officer in the incident room watching the TV and coming up with a convenient list of actions which would keep me far away from Leominster nick – just in case.
It started out normally enough, with Inspector Edmondson and DCI Windrow sitting at a table elevated on a podium and doing their best gruff, matter of fact, nothing to see here, just doing our job with understated professionalism, manner. We are the police and we have brought order out of chaos – believe it, bruv!
It took them about ten minutes to run down the list of allegations, and why they were bollocks. No evidence that any member of the Marstowe family was involved in the kidnap, no evidence that any member of the local traveller community had been involved, and no evidence of an informal network of child-smuggling camps. Once Windrow had finished, a couple of journalists asked him whether he was one hundred per cent sure that the Marstowe family was not involved and that there weren’t gypsies roaming the land stealing children and illegally living off incapacity benefit – cross his heart and hope to die.
Windrow repeated himself in the manner of a man who was perfectly happy to sit there and repeat himself until everybody got bored and went home. Unaccountably, he failed to raise the working theory that the children had been abducted by faeries.
It’s just that sort of deception, I thought, that breeds distrust of the police.
Sharon Pike certainly distrusted the police, because she stood up and demanded to know what about Harry Plimpton.
‘Who Nicole identified by name as one of the men that held her,’ she said.
I looked at Dominic to see if the name meant anything to him – his face screwed up in concentration.
‘Andy’s aunt’s daughter’s son,’ he said after a moment. ‘Second cousin. You met him at the sheep roast.’
I was impressed. In my family once you got past niece or uncle it was all cousins, and even that tended to include any random former stranger who’d managed to get his feet under the table.
I heard a flurry of activity from the incident room as someone looked up the relevant nominal on HOLMES. Meanwhile, Windrow stalled by asking where and when the identification had taken place.
‘Surely that’s not the point,’ said Sharon Pike. ‘Surely the question is why the police have failed to conduct a thorough investigation.’
I saw Windrow glance down at where he must have had a tablet tucked out of sight.
‘Harry Plimpton,’ he said, ‘has been comprehensively eliminated from the inquiry. Not only did he spend most of the period in question helping as a volunteer with the search, but he can also account for his whereabouts for the rest of the time.’
I looked at Dominic, who nodded at the incident room – the MIU had been busy while some of us were out gallivanting in the woods.
‘Has he been put in a line-up?’ asked Sharon Pike. ‘Has any effort been taken at all to try and identify the men that kidnapped Nicole?’
‘Because of the gravity of the offences this inquiry has been meticulous,’ said Windrow. He was too professional to let any of his irritation show. ‘We have followed every line of inquiry as they came to our attention.’
‘Then why haven’t you made an arrest?’ asked Sharon Pike.
The police had a two-camera set-up in the press room and, after a while switching randomly backwards and forwards, whoever was running the mixing board decided that Sharon Pike was more interesting than Windrow and settled on her.
I noticed that the journalists either side of her seemed alarmed by her behaviour, but I couldn’t tell whether it was her manner or her questions.
‘And whom should we have arrested?’ asked Windrow.
Sharon Pike blinked theatrically, as if the question astonished her.
‘Well, Andrew and Joanne Marstowe would do for a start,’ she said. ‘Since it was their plan from the beginning.’
Windrow fell back on police speak and reiterated that there were no plans to arrest Andrew and Joanne Marstowe, nor were they helping the police with their inquiries or considered persons of interest.
‘Of course not,’ said Sharon Pike. ‘Because the whole hideous plot was facilitated by an officer of the West Mercia Police!’ She almost shouted this. The journalists around her were beginning to edge away as if wary of sharing the same frame.
‘Sharon,’ said Windrow. ‘If you have any evidence—’
‘Detective Constable Dominic Croft,’ she said.
‘Well, that explains a great deal,’ I said. ‘You always were suspiciously one step ahead of the rest of us.’
‘That’s not funny,’ said Dominic, his face pale.
He was right to be worried. A public accusation like that was going to hang around his neck.
Windrow’s mouth literally dropped open in shock, but fortunately Inspector Edmondson stepped in.
‘That’s a very serious allegation,’ he said. ‘If you have any proof . . .’
‘Of course I have proof,’ said Sharon Pike and, after rummaging in her bag, held up what looked like an oblong of black plastic and marched towards the podium shouting that ‘here was her proof’ before slapping it down in front of Windrow.
‘This is something you can’t sweep under the carpet,’ said Sharon Pike. and slammed her hand down on what looked to me like – and on further forensic analysis proved to be – the plastic tray from inside a box of Milk Tray chocolates.
Windrow looked down at the plastic tray, back up at Sharon Pike, and then put his hand over the microphone in front of him and said something.
‘Of course I’m all right,’ said Sharon, loudly enough to be picked up by an adjacent microphone. ‘What are you afraid of? Look at it!’
Windrow spoke again, too low to be picked up.
Sharon Pike glared at him and then looked down at the sad crumpled piece of plastic in front of her. Her head snapped back up and s
he opened her mouth, but didn’t speak. The camera angle was all wrong to see her expression clearly, but you could read the confusion in the set of her shoulders as she looked back down at her ‘evidence’.
Then, without a word, she turned and walked away. The police camera swung madly to keep her in frame as she marched up the central aisle between the ranks of silent journalists and camera operators.
I had one of those ‘somebody do something’ moments when you suddenly have the realisation that the person supposed to be doing something is you. I scrambled up from my desk and ran down the front staircase without a care for health and safety or the two uniforms coming up towards me. They sensibly flattened themselves against the railing and I shouted a thank you as I jumped past.
I missed her in the car park, so I ran around to the police zone and hopped into the Asbo. By the time I was on the main road I’d already done a PNC check to find out what she was driving – a BMW X5 Diesel, which seemed like quite a serious car for someone who lived alone in a small village. Perhaps she had a lot of relatives?
I decided that her most likely destination would be her house in Rushpool, second most likely would be her main house in London. Beyond that, it was anyone’s guess. I managed to get Dominic on the Airwave and asked him to ask, politely, if they could keep an eye out for the BMW and Sharon Pike.
‘She’s going to be acting a bit weird,’ I said. ‘So she may have to be sectioned.’
I heard Dominic spluttering. Sectioning a prominent journalist would be, as they say, problematic. But both Bartholomew and Kingsley had left detailed case notes about people who had been put under the influence, seducere as Bartholomew called it, and had become maddened to the point where they rent their garments and would be like to injure themselves if not restrained.
I considered going blues and twos, but I didn’t really want to exceed my authority – and I wasn’t sure it would be much help if I ran into the back of a trailer full of hay. I had a worst case scenario growing at the back of my mind, so I went straight to the half-timbered pile that was the Laceys’ home. And, sure enough, outside was parked a white BMW X5 Diesel with the right index. I drew up alongside and found Sharon Pike banging on the PVC door and screaming at the top of her lungs.