Intelligence Led
I ENDED UP floating in the sunlight. Beverley was asleep with her head on my shoulder and one leg cocked possessively over my groin. I yawned and wondered where we were—we’d definitely gone with the flow the night before—but I was careful not to wake Beverley, not least because we were still doing that weird buoyancy thing and I wasn’t in a hurry to start sinking.
Straight up was blue sky and the dark leafy ends of overhanging branches. If I twisted my head I could see the arches and piers of a bridge that we must have just passed under. Occasionally a vehicle crossed in a flash of metallic reflection and engine noise.
My memories of the night before were already coming apart in my mind. I definitely remembered grabbing some serious air while going over a weir, Beverley’s legs locked around my waist, her hips grinding into mine, whooping as her dreadlocks whipped around our heads and we twisted like a dolphin in the moonlight before crashing back down into the drainage basin and slowly sank beneath the surface.
I was sure that that had really happened, but it faded even as I grabbed at it.
I tightened my grip on Beverley—who was definitely real—and basked in the warm afterglow of someone who’s just had their brains banged out by the partner of their choice.
It couldn’t last. And soon I felt my shoulders scrape along a gravel bank. We pivoted around in the current and beached where the bank had eroded into an alcove. Beverley sighed and rolled herself on top of me, arching her back to look around.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Somewhere downstream,” I said, and took the opportunity to cop a feel.
Beverley twisted around until she could see the bridge.
“Oh,” she said in a surprised tone. “I thought we’d go further.”
“Where are we, then?”
“Just past Leominster,” she said, and twisted back to look down at me, her dreadlocks hanging down and dripping water on my face and chest. “Eight or nine miles,” she said and kissed me. I was firming up nicely again and I would have been happy to see if we couldn’t add a couple of kilometers to the total—or maybe just shag where we were, I was easy—but Beverley broke off with a sigh.
“I think we’d better get our clothes back,” she said, and stood up.
As soon as we lost skin contact the water around me turned cold as ice. I leaped to my feet screaming, and stared at Beverley who stood glistening, naked and unconcerned on the bank.
“Bloody hell,” I said. “Give me some warning next time.”
“Woke you up, though, didn’t it?” she said.
“How are we going to get back to the car?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” said Beverley as she climbed up the bank ahead of me. “I know where we can get some help.”
For a moment I was too lost in admiration to speak, but by the time I’d joined her at the top I’d recovered enough to ask her how far the help was. All I could see was clumps of trees and the metaled track that led up to the main road.
“That’s the A44,” said Beverley, pointing to the road. “Down there and to the left.”
“Just a quick stroll down the road,” I said.
“Ten minutes tops,” said Beverley.
“Stark bollock naked?” I asked.
“If you like, you can stay here while I fetch our stuff,” said Beverley.
Across the road there was a rather tasty regency cottage with cream walls and red tiled roof.
“Should we just ask them?”
“Come on, come on,” said Beverley and pointed. “Civilization is that way.”
Despite the fact that it couldn’t have been much more than six o’clock in the morning, the sun was hot enough to quickly dry the water off our skin. Fortunately, out in the countryside pavements hadn’t been invented yet. So at least we were walking on grass.
“After you,” I said.
“No, no,” said Beverley. “It’s only proper that the woman walks two paces behind her man.”
I set out down the verge, gingerly watching where I stepped.
Beverley said something I couldn’t make out.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” said Beverley. Then, “Have you been doing a bit of training recently?”
I squared my shoulders—I couldn’t help myself.
As we walked away from the bridge a middle-aged white man came out of the cottage and was climbing into his car when he stopped and did an actual double-take when he saw us.
“Morning,” called Beverley.
“Morning,” said the man and then, noticing me, nodded. “Nice day for a walk.”
“Splendid,” said Beverley.
Unlike Beverley, you can see when I’m blushing, although the worst bit for me was when we reached the roundabout and the morning traffic picked up.
I tried to remember which offenses you got prosecuted under. I was pretty safe from the Sexual Offenses Act (2003), because the test for that is whether your intention is to provoke distress, alarm or outrage. Same with the Public Order Act (1986), because I was not intentionally looking to distress, harm or harass anyone—quite the contrary. Now, if I was a total bastard of a police officer I could probably get me on “outraging public decency” and, judging by the erratic behavior of some of the oncoming traffic, causing a breach of the peace.
“There it is,” said Beverley from behind me. “To your left.”
I looked and saw, through the trees that marked the start of the next field along, a scatter of angular shapes and bright colors. It was Travelers of some kind, and when I spotted the signpost to the Leominster Enterprise Park I finally got myself orientated and realized that this was the fairground I’d seen from the terrace of Leominster nick.
I picked up the pace—I wanted a pair of trousers before some passing motorist put us both on YouTube.
There’s no such thing as a single fun fair. The different rides are owned and operated by different families, each of who chooses which pitch they’re heading for next. Each of the families decorate their rides and vehicles with a different livery, each has its own reputation and own history—some dating back centuries, some who drifted into the life during the last recession and never left. They say that if you’re in the know you can walk into a fair and work out who’s there by checking the colors. Unfortunately, I’m not in the know. But Nightingale had told me that a few of the families are part of the great informal mesh of agreements that link horse fair to showground to winter camp to the old ways and byways of medieval Europe.
This looked more like a staging area than an operating fair. I made mental note of the names, Wilson, Carter, Spangoli, Reginald. There were a lot of late Victorian steam rides aimed at the nostalgia market and a couple of genuine steam road locomotives. The nearest was a huge beast of black iron painted crimson and forest green—the name Faerie Queen emblazoned on the side of its canopy.
A middle-aged white woman in an Afghan coat jumped down from the Faerie Queen’s footplate and looked me up and down.
“Cor,” she said. “I bet you don’t get many of those for a fiver.”
Beverley stepped up to my side and smiled at the woman, who responded with a look of wary recognition.
“Good morning,” said Beverley. “We’re looking for a bit of assistance.”
The woman nodded. “We were told you might turn up,” she said.
Who by? I wondered.
And assistance we got—in abundance. Beverley was ushered off to one caravan while I was taken off to a modern Sterling Eccles by a guy called Ken, who for all he was wearing his hair in a ponytail might as well have had ex-Para written across his forehead. Inside he found some cast-offs that would fit me and made tea while I put them on. Ken worked the steam yachts in the summer but migrated to Ibiza in the winter where he had a job as a bouncer.
“It’s mostly Spaniards off season,” he said. “So it’s nothing like as rowdy.”
He had a Spanish wife on the island and attributed the success of his marriage to his prolonged absences every year.
“I leave just as she’s getting sick of me,” he said, “and I come back when she’s ready for some company.”
A cup of tea later I met up with Beverley outside. I got a pair of khaki shorts and a slightly too small Status Quo T-shirt. She got a leather biker vest and a pair of navy cargo pants. All she was missing was a couple of katanas and we could have gone zombie hunting together.
Although, for the record, in the event of the zombie apocalypse I’ll be looking to liberate a Warthog PPV from Regent’s Park Barracks just for that little bit of extra confidence while dealing with the walking dead.
Transport for us had been arranged in the form of a Series II Land Rover which despite the marine blue paintjob and a painfully bodged repair to the right fender was in amazingly good nick.
Leaning against the Land Rover was Lilly, daughter of the Teme, looking pale, pierced and pouty. She wore skinny black jeans and a matching Keep Calm and Listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt with the neckline cut open so that it hung loosely off one shoulder.
She held up her hand in greeting as we approached and asked Beverley how it had gone.
“Later,” said Beverley and called shotgun, which meant I ended up in the back, where I’m fairly certain a sheep had ridden not long before. A very unwell sheep at that.
For a car that was older than my mother, it had a pretty decent stereo on which Lilly played Queen’s Greatest Hits but only, she explained, because her sister had borrowed her iPod and hadn’t given it back and Queen’s Greatest Hits was the only CD in the stereo. Maybe the sheep liked it.
We were just into the questionable first verse of “Fat Bottomed Girls” when we pulled into the car park at the Riverside Inn. After recovering the keys I was sent in to wangle drinks out of the landlord who, because it was out of hours, let me have the ciders on the house. As I fetched them out I spotted Beverley and Lilly by the riverbank with their backs to me as they stared down into the water.
Now, I’m not saying I sneaked up on them. But I certainly took care not to draw myself to their attention.
“You guys shouldn’t have anything to complain about,” said Beverley.
“It’s not me,” said Lilly. “It’s Mum and Corve—they’ve got a lot invested in this, haven’t they?”
“I was a bit too busy to update Twitter at the time,” said Beverley. “But I can give you the bullet points if you want.”
Lilly sighed.
“You know, actually, that’s a bit tempting,” she said.
“I was being facetious,” said Beverley.
“No, seriously,” said Lilly. “It’s been that long that I could do with a reminder.”
“Well, not from me,” said Beverley.
“But you’re sure it went all right?”
“Trust me,” said Beverley. “The earth moved—that’s all you need to know.”
“Your word?”
“My word,” said Beverley.
“Your word on what?” I asked.
Lilly started, but Beverley just turned and took her drink.
“That no fish were harmed,” she said, and challenged me with a smile to make something of it.
Not when I’m outnumbered, I thought.
I nodded at the river, which was back down to its pre-flood levels.
“What happened to all the water?” I asked.
“It was just a surge,” said Lilly quickly. “Unprecedented heavy rainfall in the Brecon Beacons.”
“Was that your mum making it rain then?” I asked.
Beverley kicked me in the shins and gave me exactly the same look my mum once gave me when I asked Uncle Tito why he had two families. I was seven at the time and it did seem a bit unfair, what with my dad essentially not being there even when he was, technically, there.
I made a point of mouthing a big “ow” and acting like I was in pain. You have to do this—if you don’t, they kick you again to make sure you got the point.
So I asked Lilly about the Land Rover instead and she said that it still had its original two-liter petrol engine, which I’d thought was only installed in the Series I. As Lilly explained that some early versions of the Series II had been fitted with the smaller engine rather than the 2.25 liter that became standard for the next couple of decades I grinned at Beverley, who was obviously suffering. Serves her right.
After a bit more car talk, Lilly, having finished her cider, hopped back in her Land Rover and sped off. No doubt to inform her family that Beverley and her chump boyfriend had satisfactorily done whatever it was they were supposed to have done.
I decided that it was time for the chump boyfriend to find out exactly what that was—especially since we were still at the scene of the crime.
At the far end of the car park was the start of a footpath that led along the river bank. Overlooked by a wooded hillside, it struck me as a nice shady place to have a chat about shady business. We walked in silence until we’d gone far enough for the Riverside Inn to be hidden behind the curve in the path.
“Okay,” I said. “Just what were we doing last night?”
“I’m hurt you don’t remember.”
“What else were we doing?”
Beverley bobbed her head from side to side.
“We were helping out,” she said. “As well as the other thing.”
“Helping out who?”
“You don’t want to know,” she said.
“I think I have a right to know the truth,” I said.
She sighed.
“You see this lovely river here? Got lots of potential but no one to look after it—to care about it,” she said.
“Apart from the National Rivers Authority,” I said.
“Not that kind of care,” she said. “And do you want to know or not?”
There was a sensation then of disgruntled suburban driver, of car wax and loud stereo, of someone shouting in what I learned later was probably Korean. I realized that I hadn’t felt any flashes of Beverley’s true nature all morning. With it came a rush of excitement and desire that I was almost totally sure originated with me—almost totally sure.
“Do your worst,” I said.
“It just needed a little spark, a little passion to, you know, get it going,” she said.
I had to think about that for a bit.
“Are you saying we inseminated a river?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” said Beverley. “It was a bit more . . . diffuse than that.”
I remembered frog reproduction from school, the female lays a huge pile of eggs and the male turns up later and basically hoses them down. It did seem to me that the species had been hard done by in the sex department.
“Are you saying I did it like a frog?”
It was Beverley’s turn to pause and work something out. She wasn’t happy when she did.
“Ah, fuck no,” said Beverley. “What kind of fucked-up mind do you have, Peter? Yuck.”
“So it’s not like that then?”
Beverley stuck out her tongue and made a face.
“How could you even go there?” she asked. “Now I’ve got that image stuck in my mind. Frogs, please.”
“That’s what you made it sound like.”
“Did not.”
“Then what is it like?”
Beverley took my hand and led me along until she found a place where we could sit down on the edge and dangle our feet, minus shoes obviously, in the water. It was midmorning and the sun had come into its full heat so we stayed in the shade of what Beverley identified as a stand of silver birch but which looked more red-brown to me.
“You see this river,” said Beverley. “Like I said, lots of potential but nobody’s home. What it needs is something to stir it up—sometimes this can be perfectly natural, and sometimes you can give it a helping hand.”
I thought of Mama Thames who claimed to have gone into the river as a suicidal nursing student and walked out a goddess. And with a personality like that, was it any wonder that she sparked the process in her tributaries, or that they so took after her?
“We were making a donation?” I asked.
“I know you want to be a father,” said Beverley, “but there were no genes involved whatsoever, no transfer of information, we were strictly catalytic in the process.”
“You’re sure?”
“Tell you what,” she said. “If we come back in ten years and he’s watching Doctor Who you can call me a liar.”
“He?”
“I think this id going to be a boy river,” said Beverley, kicking up spray with her feet. “But you never know—it might have its own view on the subject.”
“You know, I’m pretty certain I’m not supposed to do shit like this,” I said.
Beverley put an arm around my shoulder and leaned in to talk softly in my ear.
“How about this then, Peter,” she said. “You’ve been part of something that no wizard has ever been part of before. You know something that’s not in their books.”
I wanted to say that lots of things weren’t in the libraries of the wise, including plate tectonics, molecular biology and the complete works of J.K. Rowling, but she’d probably say that I was missing the point. I must have hesitated long enough for Beverley to think she’d won the argument.
“You should feel privileged,” she said. And rested her head on my shoulder.
“I shall write it up as a paper, as soon as I get home,” I said.
“You do that,” she said. “I dare you.”
“My milkshake brings all the gods to the yard,” I said.
“Damn right, it’s better than yours,” said Beverley. “I could teach you but I’d have to charge.”
The next line that came into my head was Flat bottomed barges you make the river world go round! But I decided to keep that one to myself.
Back at the cowshed I had just enough time to change into some respectable clothes before DCI Windrow summoned me back to the nick for “a discussion.” Beverley, who seemed to be in no hurry to leave the cowshed while I dressed waved me off and climbed under my duvet for a nap while I drove all the way back to Leominster.
DCI Windrow was worried, but it was a whole order of magnitude less worried than he’d been before we found the girls. He was also chewing gum, something I’d never seen a senior officer do before in my life. Nicotine gum, I suspected.
“Nicole remains withdrawn,” he said.
I asked what that meant—exactly.
“Withdrawn,” he said. “She’s not talking to anyone, she’s off her feed—unresponsive is what they call it. Indicative of a severe psychological trauma, they say.”
“Like being kidnapped?” I asked.
“You know what modern doctors are like,” said Windrow. “They’re never definite about anything anymore. It’s all ‘maybe, could be, let’s see what happens.’”
“I saw Hannah running around last night,” I said. “She didn’t seem particularly traumatized.”
“She could be exhibiting a different set of symptoms,” said Windrow. “The doctors think she may be repressing the trauma by creating an alternative narrative.”
“What makes them think that?”
“There are some fantastical elements in her statement.”
“Like unicorns?”
He handed me a wodge of hardcopy. “I think it would be better if you read it yourself and then gave me your assessment.”
So back I went into Edmondson’s office—where I wasn’t going to contaminate Windrow’s nice rational kidnapping inquiry with any of my sorcerous ways. Someone, probably Edmondson himself because you don’t ever mess with an Inspector’s stuff, had jimmied the office window so that it opened all the way, which at least meant the room was warm but not stuffy. It also meant that the drifts of paperwork had to be held down with makeshift paperweights.
I moved a stack of incident reports that were anchored by a spare Airwave handset and started on—Statement: Hannah Marstowe at Hereford Hospital 22nd of June.
Taking a statement from anyone can be a long process on account of the fact that your average member of the public wouldn’t know the truth if it donned a pink tutu and danced in front of them singing the Chicken Song. This means you have to ask a lot of confirmation questions and then do some intensive cross-referencing to wring out the facts.
Taking a statement from kids is even worse, because not only do they like to make stuff up, but if they get scared, hungry, tired or just fed up with your questions they can, especially if they’re badly brought up kids, tell you to fuck off. With impunity. Now add in the suspicion that in a magic-related case it’s just possible that the truth really is wearing a pink tutu, and you can end up with six hours of video and a couple of hundred pages of transcript.
You start with the transcript, a highlighter pen and your notebook.
Why had Hannah got out of bed?
Because she’d arranged with Nicole to go for a night-walk.
What was a night-walk?
When you go and walk around at night—duh!
Had they gone on night-walks before?
Only when it was hot.
How long had they been doing this?
Hannah couldn’t remember. “Ages,” she’d said.
What did they do on night-walks?
Go for a walk, silly. Look at the moon. Sometimes they would do naughty dancing.
And what was naughty dancing?
That was when you took off all your clothes and danced around in the buff.
There then followed at least thirty pages where the child psychologist attempted to establish when and where this naughty dancing took place, who instigated the idea and were there any adults involved?
Hannah was cheerfully open that they danced about in the churchyard, sometimes in the field behind Hannah’s house and, if they felt particularly daring, at the road junction by the Rushpool. Generally speaking they weren’t totally naked because they left their sandals or flip-flops on. She was amused by the notion that an adult might be involved and asked why an adult would want to watch them dancing.
“They might want to know what you were doing out at night,” said the child psychologist and gently steered Hannah back to the night, as we like to say, in question. On that particular night, whose idea had it been to go for a night-walk?
Hannah said that Nicky, which is what she liked to call Nicole, had suggested it that night.
Was she sure?
She was sure that she would like to stop for a drink and something to eat and could she watch telly because that’s what she really wanted to do, and she’d quite like to do all that back at her own home if that wasn’t too much trouble.
There followed what is generally known as a multi-agency conference in which the police, social services, the pediatrics registrar and the child psychologist discussed their options for an hour before agreeing that yes Hannah should go home.
I logged onto HOLMES and had a quick rummage—and there it was. An action for someone to go through all the witness statements and see if there was a reference to the girls going out at night and dancing—with or without clothing. There wasn’t any result.
The child psychologist rode back with Hannah and Joanne to their house and noted that Hannah had explained that they had different kinds of dances for different occasions—when Joanne exploded. The child psychologist actually wrote that in their notes—“at that point the mother exploded!” That would have been a fearsome sight even in the spacious backseat of a traffic BMW. The child psychologist felt that the outburst might have been a good thing, because Hannah knew her mother was upset and would have been tense and inhibited in the expectation of parental disfavor.
But she was shocked by the swearing, some of which she had to look up on the internet.
Hannah, now presumably disinhibited, got her dinner, then some telly and then magnanimously agreed to talk to the child psychologist again. Albeit on the condition that she be allowed to watch the Disney Channel at the same time.
When asked what had happened after she and Nicole had sneaked out of their houses and met up, Hannah explained, in a distracted fashion, that they’d taken secret paths up to the moor where they’d met a beautiful woman riding a unicorn. The child psychologist worried at the last statement—did Hannah mean a woman on a horse?
No she meant a lady riding a unicorn—side saddle!
Was this “unicorn” perhaps Nicole’s invisible friend Princess Luna?
Hannah was not impressed—Princess Luna is a completely different unicorn.
Did this unicorn have a name?
The lady never said.
Did the lady have a name?
Yes the lady’s name was Lady.
The child psychologist then sits through an episode of Phineas and Ferb before, quite spontaneously, Hannah explains that they walked for miles and miles and miles, then they went downhill and through a cave by a river and then up a hill where they had a sleep.
In the open?
No, Hannah thought there had been tents, old-fashioned tents made of skins or possibly rainbows. And there had been kebabs but she didn’t think they were good kebabs because she’d felt sick afterward. Then they’d woken up and hadn’t had to have a wash or clean their teeth or anything.
I made a note to check the medical report and see whether their teeth had been neglected or not.
The next morning they had walked down a hill for a very long way and she’d been really tired and it was getting dark when they went up a hill and into a castle.
What kind of castle?
A castle castle.
Could she remember what color it was?
Pink and blue and orange.
Had there been any other houses, or roads or signposts?
It had all been trees.
What kind of trees? I asked myself, and a few lines down the transcript the child psychologist also asked, but it was clear by that point Hannah had lost patience with the whole operation and wanted to go out and play with her cousins.
She didn’t ask after Nicole—I wondered if that was significant.
She did remember a sort of road in the forest, it was all overgrown but the lady had made them run across it very quickly. There hadn’t been any signposts or houses, apart from the castle of course.
I found Windrow in his office reading statements and approving actions which, along with going to meeting with other senior officers, is what senior officers spend most of their time doing. Rather them than me.
I asked if there were any word on Nicole but Windrow said no—the inter-agency care team would send word as soon as there was any change.
“What did you think of the statement?” he asked.
“Don’t know, sir,” I said. “Any chance I can talk to her?”
“Let’s see if she sticks to the same story for the next couple of days,” he said. “Is there any chance it’s true?”
“It would be nice to have some physical evidence,” I said. “She mentioned a cave—any sign of that?”
“From the description it sounded like it might be along the river bank at Aymestrey. There are old quarry workings down there—so it’s possible.”
And close to where we found them, I thought, and the scrap of cloth from Nicole’s clothes, too. That every vaguely castle-like structure within thirty kilometers of Rushpool was going to get a thorough going-over went without saying. My guess was that the National Trust was going to be seeing a heavy police presence in the next couple of days.
“Any trouble with the media?” asked Windrow.
“No, sir,” I said. “Is there likely to be?”
“I don’t know,” said Windrow. “I don’t trust them when they go all quiet.”
I promised to keep my head down, my nose wiped and to wear a clean pair of underpants at all times.
“What do you plan to do next?” he asked.
“I’m going to do what I didn’t do when I got here,” I said. “I’m going to hit the books.”
Thankfully, he didn’t ask me what books. Perhaps he assumed that back at the Folly we had great big tomes full of esoteric lore within which the true history of the world was illuminated. It’s true about the esoteric lore, but the illumination has always been on the scarce side. Fortunately, I knew a bloke with a lot of the books I was looking for. All conveniently located in the same place.
I pulled out my phone, found the number I wanted and pressed call—it rang twice.
“Oswald Honey,” said Mellissa. “Best honey there is.”
“Hi, Mellissa,” I said using my non-policing voice. “I wonder if I could come up and use your library.”
“Granddad’s asleep,” she said.
“I’ll be quiet,” I said. “You won’t even know I’m there.”
“Are you going to bring your friend?”
“Who, Beverley?”
“Of course Bev.”
“If you want,” I said.
“Okay,” said Mellissa. “Come over whenever you like.”