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 tha
t 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 disappe
arance. 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.’