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 f
or 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 call-ins 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 th
e 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.