‘Like what?’
‘A rogue practitioner,’ said Nightingale. ‘A hedge wizard or witch we don’t know about it, or a fae, or demi-fae, or revenant of some sort. Did either of them change their routine behaviour or exhibit strange cravings?’
‘The child abuse unit will be looking for the same things,’ I said.
‘Then I suggest you might confer with them,’ said Nightingale. ‘You might also want to have a chat with their teachers and the leaders of the Girl Guides or whatever the equivalent body is these days. Assuming they were Guides. Is there a parish priest?’
‘I can find out,’ I said, and noticed that a couple of white boys at a nearby table were giving me the side eye.
‘A good parish priest often knows the more esoteric aspects of his local history,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or at least they used to.’
They were both dark haired, pasty faced despite the summer. The shorter one had blue eyes and the taller was wearing sunglasses indoors – which told you everything you needed to know, really. The sleeves of their grey and green check shirts were rolled up to reveal the beefy arms of people who actually work for a living. In London I would have pegged them as builders, but out here in the sticks they could have been lumberjacks or sheep shearers for all I knew.
‘You might want to talk to Hugh Oswald again,’ said Nightingale. ‘See if he’s noticed anything odd.’
Apart from his creepy granddaughter, I thought. Although she might be worth talking to, as well.
‘It’s a pity we can’t sniff people out like the rivers can,’ I said.
‘I for one am quite glad that that particular ability appears limited to them,’ said Nightingale. ‘I feel our work has become quite complicated enough as it is. Still, as you say . . .’
The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated – that’s the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don’t get a lot of practical experience. I gave them a quizzical look, just to fuck with them a bit.
They broke eye contact first. The tall one in the sunglasses turned to his friend and said something, then they both looked at me and sniggered.
What are we, I thought, twelve? So I laughed. It wasn’t a genuine laugh but they weren’t to know that. They both stared at me and then turned away when I didn’t break eye contact. I wanted to provoke them. I wanted to give them a smacking they wouldn’t forget.
‘Peter?’ asked Nightingale and I realised I hadn’t been listening.
At the very least I wanted to show them my warrant card and mess with their preconceptions. But you can’t do that sort of thing, because there’s always a chance you’ll end up in a fight. And then you’ll have to arrest them. Which, never mind the ethical issues surrounding the abuse of power, results in a ton of paperwork. Not to mention I was way off my manor, so it would piss off West Mercia Police who probably felt they had better things to waste their time on right now, thank you very much. So I took a deep breath and looked away.
That’s me – Peter Grant, a credit to his territorial policing agency.
‘Sorry sir,’ I said. ‘I was distracted.’
‘I asked how you were feeling,’ said Nightingale.
‘Fine, sir,’ I said.
‘Glad to hear that,’ he said.
I tensed, hearing the chairs scrape as the boys got to their feet, but they passed on the other side of the table and headed towards the main entrance.
‘I’d better get back,’ I said. ‘I need to get some actions actioned.’
Outside, the sun was frying the car park and my two friends from the café were attempting to lean nonchalantly against the side of a blue Nissan Micra without burning themselves. I wondered whether they were waiting for me, or just didn’t have anywhere else to go – it’s possible they didn’t know either.
The tall one with the sunglasses lit up a Silk Cut and took an aggressive drag.
Magic has what Dr Walid, who would be the Folly’s resident man of science if he wasn’t actually resident in a nice Victorian villa in Finchley, would call a deleterious effect on microprocessors. We don’t know why doing a spell can reduce the chip set of your laptop to a fine sand, but since everything useful from your phone to your food mixer is controlled by chips these days it means you have to be careful. But just because you don’t know why something happens doesn’t mean you can’t attempt to quantify its effects.
And once you’ve quantified an effect, it becomes that much easier to weaponize it. All you need to do is modify your werelight a bit with a couple of formae inflectentes and, after about three weeks of trial and error, you have a projectable spell that will burn out every microprocessor within a conveniently small radius.
I’d got some stick from Nightingale, who has this strange idea that his apprentice should know what he’s doing before sticking his finger in the electric socket of the universe. But even he changed his mind when I pointed out that a) it was really just a beefed up werelight and b) you could use it to disable any car fitted with a microprocessor-controlled engine management system – which was pretty much all of them now.
Standing in the baking car park outside Morrisons I came this close to lobbing one into the white boys’ Micra, but even as I rehearsed the forma in my head I remembered the girls’ phones. According to the results summary from forensics, no data had been recoverable from either the phone memories or the SIM cards. But it hadn’t given a cause. There are plenty of things that can ruin your phone, but fewer things that are so thorough that a decent forensics team can’t extract anything useful. And one of those fewer things, I knew from bitter experience, was a burst of magic.
I gave the two boys a happy smile which almost caused the tall one to swallow his cigarette. Then I moved swiftly back to the Asbo, but not so swiftly as to give them the wrong idea.
Back at Leominster nick I called up the exhibit list and found the reports related to both the girls’ mobile phones. They were found at the foot of yet another war memorial, this one a skinny cross set in a raised grassy dais by the B4362 where the lane that runs up parallel to Rushpool to the east switches over to become the lane that runs up the hill to somewhere called Bircher Common. Which appeared to be both the name of a hamlet and your actual piece of open land for public use. I printed the sketch map and photographs of the site which recorded the exact position of the phones. Then I checked the POLSA notes which hypothesised that Hannah and Nicole had taken the footpath west across the fields until they reached Pound Lane, and walked north up the lane until it reached the B4362 where they had become separated from their phones. The crossroad quickly became the loci of two types of searches, one based on the assumption that the girls had travelled on by foot and the second on the assumption that they had voluntarily or involuntarily climbed into a vehicle driven by person or persons unknown.
The POLSA and their search teams were covering option one, MIU were covering option two – which was a horrible job. With no CCTV and limited ANPR – that’s automatic number plate recognition to you, Winston – MIU had to rely on canvassing local witnesses for information about car movements in and out of the area. And even in the countryside nobody’s that nosy at five o’clock in the morning. Still, they had managed to amass a staggering number of car sightings around both Rushpool and the crossroads where the phones were found. These ranged from Some kind of van that might have been white to I saw that Citroën belonging to Will Whitton what lives over the hill in Orelton and was up to no good and no mistake.
Five officers had been assigned to grind their way through these reports. You could tell who they were by the pitiful groans and low moans of despair that floated up from their corner of the incident room.
I noticed from the action list that they were prioritising the period from four to six in the morning – which puzzled me until I found a cross link to the statement by Nicole’s mother that she had first noticed her daughter missing at five in the morning. When asked why she hadn’t raised the alarm then, she said th
at Nicole often got up at first light in the summer.
‘She likes to watch the sun come up,’ she said.
The evidence entry for the girls’ mobiles had contact details for a Kimberly Cidre at the High Tech Crime Unit in Worcester, and I gave her a ring on the basis that if you want something done fast it’s better to talk than to email.
‘Can I help you?’ Kimberley Cidre had a strong Belfast accent. I suspected Cidre was not her maiden name.
I identified myself and asked about the phones.
‘They’re a total loss,’ she said. ‘At first we thought the batteries had been completely drained, but when we changed them they still didn’t work. That’s when we took them apart. We tested all the ICs independently and they were all inoperable.’
‘Was there any visible damage?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No obvious sign of physical damage at all.’
‘Have you looked at them under a microscope?’
There was a pause.
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘What would I be looking for?’
The trouble with scientists is that you can’t blind them with science, unless you know more than they do – which, by definition, I didn’t.
‘I don’t want to prejudice the results,’ I said, which is always a good standby. ‘But if you spot something, I’d like to send pictures to a specialist in London to have a look.’
‘What kind of specialist?’
Explaining that Dr Walid was a world renowned enterologist would probably just raise more questions than it answered.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m just the police, but if we find what we looking for I’ll have him call you and explain. How about that?’
There was quite a long pause.
‘Is this something to do with UFOs?’ asked Cidre.
‘No,’ I said with complete honesty, for a change. ‘Do you get a lot of UFOs up here?’
‘We get a lot of UFO spotters and a lot of sightings,’ she said. ‘These two facts may be related.’
‘As far as I know there are no UFOs involved,’ I said. ‘But if we find one, I’ll let you know.’
Cidre agreed to check the microprocessors and email me images of anything she found.
Looking back, I could have possibly been a little bit firmer about the non-involvement of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Even when you’re part of the investigation you don’t just turn up on the doorstep of a victim’s parents, start asking questions and poking around their bookshelves. First I had to clear the action with DCI Windrow, who told me to clear it with DC Henry Carter who was the lead FLO attached to the Laceys. There was a delay while DC Carter checked with DS Cole as to whether I could be trusted or not – obviously I could, because Windrow gave his blessing. But only if either DS Cole or Carter was with me to hold Victoria Lacey’s hand.
It was getting dark as I drove back to Rushpool and I realised I was finally beginning to understand how the landscape worked. Leominster sits on a plain where two valleys converge. Travelling northwest, the valley of the River Lugg snakes off towards Aymestrey. And, to the north, another valley drains the land around Orelton and the wonderfully named Wooferton. Between them they make a Y-shape just like a cartoon character’s slingshot, with the ridge of high land occupied by Croft Castle and Bircher Common forming the elastic band. Rushpool was one of a string of villages that occupied the slopes below the ridge, nestling in the small valleys cut by streams draining into the flat lands.
In late evening the ridge became a shadow looming ahead as you reached the village, with just a couple of lights visible from isolated houses on the slopes. I drove carefully up the main street, the better to avoid any stray journalists.
The Laceys lived in what was, at its core, an honest to god sixteenth-century half-timbered building. It was the sort of place that had been so heavily modified by each succeeding generation that grown conservationists are reduced to weeping because the whole ill-fitting hodgepodge of styles and periods are equally historical and worth preserving. Except for maybe the ugly PVC frame door which filled the Restoration-era hooded doorway like a cheap set of plastic dentures. The door was opened by Derek Lacey who didn’t seem pleased to see me and, judging from his breath, had acquired a bottle of whisky since we’d last met.
‘You’d better come in,’ he said.
Victoria Lacey was sitting at the huge oak kitchen table and idly rotating a half-drunk glass of red wine. The remains of a snack – bread, posh cheese and a supermarket salad still half in its plastic container – was spread out between her and the seat that her husband returned to. DC Henry Carter was there to watch over them and reassure the pair that I wasn’t about to pop them in a cauldron and have them for supper.
Victoria had a thin pale face and chestnut brown hair cut into a bob. She was wearing a man’s sized sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal painfully thin wrists and long delicate hands. Her eyes, I saw when she looked up at me, were a very pale blue.
I paid my respects and told them I’d try to be as unobtrusive as possible, but they just nodded vaguely. There was half a bottle of red on the table and they were both reaching for it when I left the kitchen.
Much as I’m a fan of Georgian formalism, I do like a house where you can walk down a flight of three stairs on the ground floor and find yourself in what I supposed I’d have to call a ‘den’. It certainly wasn’t a library, because it only had a couple of Ikea bookshelves. And if Derek Lacey used it as an office, then he wasn’t in the habit of leaving his work out. There was a Wii attached to an average-sized flatscreen TV with two sets of controllers strewn at its base – Hannah and Nicole. I found traces of the girls elsewhere in the room, a stack of board games in dog-eared boxes with sun-bleached covers, a collection of teen magazines plonked on a bookshelf, and a battered copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire wedged into a gap between a pristine edition of Wolf Hall and the film tie-in of Life of Pi.
One corner of the room had a chill that had nothing to do with a physical draft. I felt a waft of dank air and the rattle of some kind of hand-powered machine – a milk churn, if I had to guess. As vestigia went, it was about par for a house of this age and nothing to get excited about.
There had been a half-hearted attempt to impose a uniform design on the ground floor of the house, with matt-finished oatmeal walls in a conscious echo of the original wattle and daub, but it fell apart on the first floor. I could tell from the texture that if you scraped the top layer of white, with a hint of peach, off the walls you’d find the history of the families that lived here written in the layers of wallpaper underneath.
More vestigia in the hallway, the click and whirr of a cuckoo clock, the smell of Vicks VapoRub and hot steam – sensations that cut off abruptly inside the master bedroom. A modern king-size bed, sturdy antique wardrobe and a nice mahogany Victorian vanity. The scatter of shoes in the corners told me that Derek and Victoria were still sharing the marital bed.
Further down, there was a musty smelling spare room containing a brass bed with a pink coverlet and a double stack of moving boxes in the corner. Next to that, a bathroom that had been refurbished within the last six months, judging by the absence of scale build-up in the shower and the lack of discoloration on the back of the imitation brass taps.
Nicole’s own room was bigger than the master bedroom, but an awkward long shape that hinted of two rooms that had been knocked together. It was pleasingly not-pink, but instead wallpapered with subtle lemon yellow and light blue stripes. The furniture was expensive but modern and had taken some punishment around the legs and corners. Again not much in the way of books, just the rest of the Harry Potter set and what looked like textbooks on the fold-down desk. Much less in the way of furry mascots, but stray bits of Lego had worked their way into gaps between the chest of drawers and the skirting board. An obvious gap where the High-Tech Crime unit had had it away with her laptop. A poster of Hunger Games over the bed – Jennifer Lawrence tak
ing aim down the length of an arrow.
I pulled out one of the Harry Potters. It was practically mint, probably unread. I put it back and decided that there wasn’t anything useful here.
‘I understand why you have to do these things,’ said Victoria Lacey from behind me – I turned to find her in the doorway. ‘I really wish you didn’t have to.’
‘So do I, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Did Nicole have a Kindle or any other kind of eReader?’
‘Why?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
‘They can get emails and other social media,’ I said. ‘A lot of people don’t realise that. We need to ensure we haven’t overlooked any avenues of communication that might have existed between Nicole and other people.’
‘When you say “other people” you mean paedophiles, don’t you?’
Her lips clamped shut on the end of the sentence. I could see she was trying to say the unthinkable in the hope it wouldn’t be true – it’s a sort of magic thinking, but unfortunately not the kind that works.
‘Not just paedophiles,’ I said. ‘Undesirable contacts, estranged parents, dealers, gang members, that sort of thing.’ Christ, I thought. Talk about scant comfort.
‘That’s your speciality in London, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Gang violence, that sort of thing.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I check for things that other officers overlook.’
‘Because there aren’t any gangs out here,’ she said. ‘I mean, apart from the Travellers and I suppose some of the Poles, but then they don’t live around here as such.’ She stopped and stared at me for a moment. ‘This is a good place to bring up kids, you know. Not like London. I mean, anything can happen in London.’
I asked her if she’d grown up in London herself, but she said she came from Guildford.
‘But I lived in London for a couple of years. Before I met Derek,’ she said. ‘He’s from here. I’m from off. That matters up here. But I suppose in London everyone’s from off.’