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 red-brick 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 primaril
y 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.
&nbs
p; ‘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.