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 militarized 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 a 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 toward 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 cooperated, 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 for 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 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 aluminum 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 fervor.
“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 aluminum tops of the caravans. A huge half-naked white man, his belly an alarming lobster color, 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 toward 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 meters 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 among 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 centimeters 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 white-bleached 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 realized that the pale shorn look was due to them having been recently sheared. They looked like a herd of stereotyped 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 odor, 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 among 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 toward 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 tires—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 the 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 recognized 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 blond hair with a gray 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 learned 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 gray 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.
“Delighted to meet you Peter.” Her Welsh accent was less pronounced than her mother’s. I noticed that there was no visible sign of the spliff.
I nodded and said likewise. The Corve was a tributary of the Teme—I’d looked up the whole watershed before coming over.
“Lilly, love,” called Miss Tefeidiad. “Why don’t you be a dear and put the kettle on.”
Something groaned and stirred inside the VW, which rocked alarmingly. I realized then that the back end of the van was dangling over the edge of the bank, as if the ground had eroded away after it had parked.
Beyond where I was sitting a path dropped down to the river, tree roots entangling to form a disturbingly regular flight of steps. At the bottom, the action of the river had carved a pool, deeper and darker than the shallow water immediately downstream. I wondered if the kids playing less than ten meters downstream ever ventured into it for a swim—or what would happen if they did.
A white face appeared in the shadowed doorway of the VW, stared blearily at us from eyes heavily outlined in black, grunted and then swiveled to address the compact cooker that was Germany’s contribution to family holidays in the 1950s.
“My youngest,” said Miss Tefeidiad, and got an answering snarl.
“Don’t mind her,” said Corve. “She’s been like that since Ralph de Mortimer married Gladys the Dark.”
“So Scotland Yard is back in business,” said Miss Tefeidiad. “Gaily rushing in where even the saints fear to tread.”
I wanted to ask where Beverley was, and how the Teme family just happened to have her phone. But if there’s one thing Nightingale has taught me, it’s to let other people talk themselves out before giving anything away. It’s something he has in common with Seawoll and Stephanopoulos, and all the top cops that I know.
“I’m just lending a hand with the search,” I said.
“For the missing girls?” asked Corve.
“Yes.”
“Well, we haven’t seen them,” said Miss Tefeidiad. “I can tell you that for nothing.”
Lilly’s pale face emerged from the gloom of the camper van and looked around before fixing on me. “Do you want sugar?” she asked. Her left eyebrow was practically hidden behind a row of studs, and loops of silver pierced her left ear from lobe to tip.
“No tea for me,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You could have said,” she snorted, and withdrew.
“Don’t you go back to sleep now, Lilly,” said Corve. “We still want a cup.”
“Let me tell you something, Constable Grant,” said Miss Tefeidiad. “Where you are now is not London—it’s not even England.”
“Yes it is, Ma,” said Corve.
“Only in a political sense,” snapped Miss Tefeidiad over her shoulder, before turning a slightly less than reassuring smile on me. “We remember your lot when they first started, and a more arrogant collection of . . . gentlemen . . . you will never meet. But we have long memories that go all the way back, you see, back to when your beloved Thames was still scuttling around with his tongue jammed up a Roman backside.”
“We used to get heads,” said Corve. “The druids used to throw them in along with the other offerings.”
“Oh yes,” said Miss Tefeidiad. “You got some respect in those days.”
“Not that we’re looking for heads these days,” said Corve. “We’ll take cash or goods in kind.”
“So when your lot got themselves all massacred or whatever,” said Miss Tefeidiad, “we weren’t exactly crying into our tea. And I have to say that we’ve got a little bit used to managing our own business in recent years. So, it’s not that we don’t like visitors . . .”
“We love visitors, really we do,” said Corve. “Liven the place up.”
“But I think we’re going to have to insist on certain minimum standards of navigational etiquette in future.” Miss Tefeidiad gave me an expectant look.
“Sure,” I said. “Stakeholder engagement is a vital part of our modernization plans going forward.”
“Look,” she said, “do you want your girlfriend back or not?”
I wanted to tell them that she wasn’t actually my girlfriend and that they better release her before her mother, goddess of the important bit of the Thames, found out they were detaining her and came over to have words. But my life is complicated enough these days and I try not to makes things more difficult for myself.
“Yes, please,” I said.
Miss Tefeidiad nodded and then looked over at Corve who got to her feet and went to the top of the tree-root stairs. I got up and followed to look over her shoulder.
“Bev, love,” called Corve. “Your ride’s here.”
She walked out of the pool stark naked—except for the lavender full body neoprene wetsuit and a Tesco bag wrapped around her hair to keep it dry. She glared at Corve, and then turned her black eyes on me, her full lips twisting into a half smile.
“You took your time,” she said.
“I’ve been busy,” I said.
Beverley turned to Miss Tefeidiad. “Can I have my bag back?”
A purple sausage bag came flying out of the dark interior of the VW. Beverley grabbed it out of the air and slung it over her shoulder.
“And I believe this is yours,” said Corve and handed Beverley her phone. “Bit of a revelation, that,” she said. “We didn’t know they made them waterproof—very handy.”
“I can’t be doing with those things,” said Miss Tefeidiad and sniffed.
Behind her, Corve made a face.
“Laters, ladies,” said Beverley and, grabbing my arm, urged me away.
“So, you won’t be staying for tea then?” asked Miss Tefeidiad.
Beverley urgently squeezed my arm, so I told them we couldn’t.
“I have to get back to the investigation,” I said.
“That’s a shame then,” said Miss Tefeidiad.
And me and Beverley got while the going was good.
“Not a word,” said Beverley, who was so keen to get away we were halfway back to the car before she realized that she was walking barefoot on gravel. We paused long enough for her to extract a pair of flip flops from her sausage bag and then walked briskly the rest of the way. She didn’t relax until we were in the car and the River Teme was a kilometer behind us.
“That was close,” she said.
“What was all that about?” I asked.
She pulled off the Tesco bag and shook out her locks, flicking me with water and filling the Asbo with the smell of clean damp hair.
“I thought it would be quicker to get here by water,” she said, rummaging in her carryall and bringing out a yellow and blue beach towel. “Should have used an M&S bag,” said Beverly and started squeezing out her locks in bunches. “That bitch Sabrina failed to mention the weird sisters were still in residence and I ran right into them at Burford.”
“They didn’t like you trespassing?”
“I’m lucky to be alive,” said Beverley. “You don’t mess with someone’s river without getting permission first.”
“You should have driven up,” I said.
“I’d still have had to cross the Severn, and if you do that you’ve got to stop and give some respect to Sabrina or she throws a right strop,” said Beverley. “I thought that if I was getting my hair wet I might as well take a short cut.”
“What are you doing out here, anyway?” I asked.
“I’ve been deputized,” she said. “And sent out to assist in your investigation.”
“Who by?”
“Who do you think?” she said. “Your boss wanted someone out here who knew one end of a cow from the other.”
“And that’s you, is it?”
“One of us spent a year rusticating with their country cousins,” she said. “And do you remember whose bright idea that was?” She bunched her fist and punched me in the shoulder—hard enough that I almost put us in the hedgerow. “And did I get one visit?”
“It was a difficult time,” I said.
“It was the Thames Valley,” she said. “Not the moon.”
My phone rang—it was Dominic.
“Guess who I’ve found,” he said.
The interview room at Leominster’s cell block was as clean and as unused as the rest of the station. It was also missing the table that we in the Met have long come to see as an indispensable prop to bang papers on, push cigarettes across, make coffee rings on and, in extremis, put our head down on for a quick kip while no one was looking. Instead, there were two rows of three chairs bolted so that one row faced the other—just over an easy punching distance apart. There was nowhere to put papers or support one of those yellow legal pads while making notes. The briefs must hate it—which, speaking as police, I definitely saw as a feature not a bug.
Dominic who, unlike me, had done a couple of PIP courses (Professionalizing Investigation Process) in interviewing, said that the open set-up allowed you to see the suspect’s—sorry, the interview subject’s—whole body language. You’d be surprised how many people nervously tap their foot when being questioned and how often the frequency of the tapping depends on how close to the truth you are.
Our “interview subject” had brown hair, small narrow-set blue eyes and an unfortunate nose—he also had a foot tap that just wouldn’t quit. He looked like someone who knew he’d been a naughty boy.
Which was how Dominic had tracked him down, by asking himself what kind of no-good would someone have to be up to not to want to help the police with their inquiries. Given the quiet rural nature of the area, the list was distressingly long, ranging from sheep rustling, poaching, agricultural vehicle theft—a top of the line tractor being more expensive than a Lamborghini and much easier to sell in Eastern Europe—to fly-tipping and public indecency. Even hardened criminals, especially those that consider themselves the salt of the earth trying to get by, will come forward on cases involving missing kids. But none had. And, besides, a quick check revealed that nothing majorly criminal had occurred that night. Dominic figured that if it wasn’t fear of prosecution it might be sexual shame. And since Bircher Common, just up the lane from where the phones were found, was the local dogging site he concentrated his initial efforts on cars sighted accessing the common late that night. Fortunately, some of the locals, fed up with having their beauty sleep disrupted by the nocturnal revelries, had taken to noting down number plates. Fifteen minutes on the computer had got him a list of names and addresses and, by the time I was fetching Beverley out of captivity, he was knocking at the front door of the first on the list. One Russell Banks of Green Lane, Leominster.
Mr. Banks had taken one look at Dominic’s warrant card and blurted out that it was in fact him who had left the phones at the crossroad, but he didn’t have anything to do with those missing kids, he’d never do anything to harm a kid for god’s sake, and please don’t tell the wife where he was that night.
“Obviously,” said Dominic, “the missus wasn’t a participant in our Russ’s escapades.”
The interview room was part of the custody suite downstairs and so had thick walls, making it remarkably cool compared to the rest of the nick. Even so, Russell Banks’s gray and blue check button down shirt showed dark sweat patches under the armpits.
Dominic explained to Russell that he wasn’t under arrest but, for his own protection, the interview was being recorded on audio and video. And that any time he could just ask to leave. He said he was fine but could we have some water? I passed him a bottle of Highland Spring that we had in a picnic cooler. His hand was trembling.
“We just want to know about the phones,” said Dominic.
Russell nodded. “I found them,” he said.
“Where did you find them?” asked Dominic.
“Just short of the Mill,” said Russell, which seemed to mean something to Dominic, if not to me.
“Where were they?” he asked. “Exactly?”
“By the side of the road,” he said. “On the verge like, just lying there and I thought it was strange but didn’t know it had anything to do with those missing girls, you know. Didn’t even know there were missing girls, until the next day when I heard it on the radio, like.” His leg was practically a blur.
“Why did you get out of the car?” I asked.
His head snapped round to look at me.
“What?”
“You said you found the phones on the verge—correct?”
“Yes.”
“So you’d have to have got out of your car—yes?”
I personally would have gone with stopping for a slash, but I don’t think Russ was really thinking that clearly. We were pretty certain we knew roughly where he’d been, but members of the public have an unnerving tendency to switch straight from lying to your face to telling you what they think you want to hear—with no intervening period of veracity at all. That’s fine when you’re looking for them to put their hand up to some crimes and boost your clear-up statistics. But when the lives of two kids depends on the accuracy of the statement, you tend to be a bit more thorough.
He started to say something, but then closed his mouth suddenly and looked at Dominic in mute appeal.
“So,” said Dominic cheerily. “Where did you really find it?”
He told us the truth, although it took ages to pry all the sordid details out. Which just goes to show that if you want a confession, use a telephone book—but if you want the truth, you’ve got to put in the hours.
Our Russell had been out enjoying the pleasures of alfresco voyeurism and public sex on Bircher Common with likeminded individuals. Having satiated his carnal desires, he’d made his way back to where he’d parked his car and spotted, when he turned on his headlights, the phones by a gate into the woods. Thinking that one of his fellow swingers had lost them during the throes of passion, he left them at the war memorial in the hope that their owners would find them there—this being the accepted practice, apparently.
“Does you good to see such neighborliness at work,” I said.
“I bet you don’t get that kind of community spirit in the big city,” said Dominic.
It took us another couple of hours to winkle out the names of the participants he’d recognized, and descriptions of others—“fabulous blonde,” “short hairy guy,” and “let’s just say he was lucky we were all doing it in the dark.” Plus makes and models of their cars. This was all going to generate a ton of actions that would be dumped on a bevy of constables who would set forth to TIE every single one. I suspected the dogging scene in North Herefordshire was about to suffer a serious blow. People would just have to go back to having sex indoors for a change.
Fortunately for me and Dominic, what with me being a specialist officer, we could leave that to others.
“We need you to take us to the exact spot where you found the phones,” I said.
“Okay,” said Russell. “When do you want to do that?”
“How much daylight do we have left?” I asked Dominic.
“A couple of hours.”
“How about right now?” I said.
I hadn’t thought the West Mercia Police were quite ready for Beverley, so just before my little tête-à-tête with Russell Banks I’d dropped her off at the Swan in the Rushes in Rushpool, and suggested that once we’d finished for the day Dominic might be able to help her with accommodation.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”
I would have offered to put her up in the cowshed, but that sort of thing can be misconstrued. Or to be honest, accurately construed. And I didn’t think I wanted to go there.
Dominic put Russell in his boyfriend’s truck and I followed on in the Asbo as we drove back to Rushpool, up through the village, across the main road and up yet another narrow lane which twisted up onto the ridge. We passed a rather fine cottage with a neat thatched roof, rattled across a cattle grid and parked in the open space beyond, just long enough for me to transfer into the truck. Then we proceeded up a flinty track that was rough enough to eat the bottom chassis of any family hatchback.
“And you drove up here in your car?” I asked Russell.
He said everyone did, which meant to my mind you track all these doggers by their frequent trips to the garage. Dominic’s boyfriend’s Nissan made short work of the rough track, as it probably did of wild animals and anti-personnel mines. We climbed toward the ridge with woods on our left and a wide stretch of short grass to our right. After five hundred meters or so we ran out of car-destroying track and set out directly over the grass.
“And you came all the way up here?” I asked as the Nissan bumped and squeaked on its suspension.
“Yes,” said Russell.
“In the dark?”
“Yes.”
“Boy, you really must have been desperate,” I said.
“You get a better class of people at the top of the common,” he said. “There’s too many weirdoes at the bottom.”
Russell directed us to a point just short of the ridge line where the fence that separated the common from the woodland was pierced by a five-bar gate, a wooden side gate and a wooden sign bearing the National Trust crest and a trail marker.
“This is part of the Mortimer Trail,” said Dominic.
We got out of the truck and Russell showed me where he’d found the phones—just on the bare patch that ramblers’ feet had worn in the grass in front of the wooden gate. I wasn’t going to get anything off that, but the metal was everything an investigatory wizard might hope for. I placed my palms on the top rail, trying not to make it look too theatrical, and attempted to sort through the random sense impressions, stray thoughts, sounds and fantasies that are definitely not vestigia. And for a moment I thought the gate was clean, until I realized what it was I was sensing. Nightingale once described vestigia as being like the after-image you get in your eyes after looking at a bright light, but what I felt at the gate was different. It was more like stepping out of a cool house on a bright sunny day—for a moment everything is a confusion of light and warmth, and then your senses adjust. Something powerful had happened around that gate and blotted out any other traces with the magical equivalent of white noise.
I didn’t like to commit without corroboration, but I was willing to bet that whatever had happened to the phones had happened right where I was standing.
“This is the place,” I said.
“Are you sure?” asked Dominic.
“Edmondson’s going to want a POLSA up here,” I said. “Before it gets dark.”
Dominic pulled out his phone and called in to the nick while I did a slow turn on the spot to see whether anything jumped out. Up on the ridge there was a cool breeze that lazily stirred the grass and the odd clump of bracken. I could hear bird song and far in the distance the lawn-mower hum of a power tool. The sky was powder blue and cloudless—not even a contrail.
I heard Dominic explaining to Windrow that I was certain that the phones had been abandoned at this particular spot. I noticed he didn’t mention the M word or call it Falcon. Nightingale says that conspiracies of silence are the only kind of conspiracies that stand the test of time.
“Is this place important?” I asked Russell.
“It’s the Whiteway Head,” said Russell. “This is where all the ancient track-ways cross.”
If I squinted at the dry yellow grass I could sort of see what he meant. The Mortimer Trail came out of its gate and ran west to east, and there was definitely another track crossing it north to south. I went to where I judged the center of the crossroads was, got on my hands and knees and lowered my face toward the grass.
I was briefly distracted by Russell asking Dominic whether I was praying to Mecca, but I’ve done this procedure at Piccadilly Circus so it was only for a moment. The short grass was prickly under my palms and filled my nostrils with its vaguely sick-making smell. I idly chased Beverley across the meadows of my mind before letting that go and for a moment I thought there was nothing to sense.
Then suddenly I felt it. Very quiet but very deep, the crack-crack of chisels in stone and the heavy slap of men carrying weight on their shoulders, grunting and sweating and the thirsty smell of salt. You do get vestigia in the countryside, I thought, only it seeps in deep and lies there like water under a dry riverbed.
And there was something else, a greasy tension that I remembered from when the Stadtkrone broke open at the top of Skygarden Tower and filled the air with magic. The Romantics had been right. There was power out here among all the green stuff—Polidori’s potentia naturalis.
I broke out Dominic’s map. Stan’s raided stash was down the Mortimer Trail to the west, Rushpool was along the track to the south, and across a valley to the north at the top of the next ridge was Hugh Oswald’s house—less than fifteen hundred meters as the bee flies.