Passive Data Strategy
“I KNEW IT was something to do with aliens,” said the man from the electronics shop whose name turned out to be Albert but apparently I could call him Al.
“No comment,” I said, which of course merely confirmed Call Me Al’s most cherished suspicions. He’d done a good job quickly lashing up a batch of Peter Grant’s patented wide-area magic detectors. These consisted of a disposable pay-as-you-go phone, modified to my specifications and mounted inside a brightly colored plastic box with rounded corners. One third were yellow, another third blue and the rest letter-box red.
I flicked one with my finger—it was heavy duty PVC.
“Where did you get these?” I asked.
“Sports warehouse,” said Al. “They’re children’s floats for swimming pools.”
He’d picked them up on his way back from Birmingham where he’d bought the phones. Reputable shops won’t sell you more than three disposables at a go, but fortunately everyone else will—especially for cash. One of the advantages of being the police is that when you want to buy something slightly dodgy, you generally know where to shop.
There were thirty of the buggers, and they filled up the back of the Asbo. I also kept four phones still in their plastic packaging for use later.
“Did you see it?” asked Al, as he helped me carry the magic detectors to the car.
“See what?”
“There was a sighting two nights ago up near Croft Ambrey,” said Al.
We went back into the shop and opened up my laptop and loaded up the tracking software.
“Multiple witnesses, classic Type V, light source, no visible body,” said Al as we waited for the diagnostic test to run. He was surprised that it hadn’t made the national papers. “But your lot did find those kids that day,” he said, and implied that he thought the two were related—which of course they were.
The laptop ran through each of the detectors in turn before putting them into passive mode. Being cheap disposables they didn’t have GPS, so I’d have to log each location as I planted them.
“Aymestrey’s always been a hotspot for close encounters,” said Al. “Some of them very difficult to explain away.”
I asked him if he had a list, and he directed me to a website called UKUFOindex.com where all UFO sightings were indexed and cross-referenced for any member of the UFO community to access. I made a point of noting down the address in my notebook.
We ran one last test to ensure that the detectors were registering on my laptop.
“Any abductions?” I asked.
“Loads,” he said. “But none verified.”
Al, while being a firm believer that extra-terrestrial life had visited Herefordshire, was a firm agnostic on the whole abduction and cattle mutilation thing. Although he lived in hope.
“Just think what would happen if we had irrefutable proof that we weren’t alone,” he said. “Think what a difference that would make.”
It was about then that I got the idea for the investigation technique that I call, for reasons too geeky to mention, the reverse Nigel Kneale. I paid Al in cash, got his personal mobile number in case I needed a technical consult in the middle of the night, and headed for Leominster nick.
The crowd there had thinned out a bit now that the search was no longer being staged out of it. MIU was still stuffed into their overheated office space. Luckily somebody had sprung for an industrial-sized cooling fan with a face the same diameter as a dustbin lid and an unfortunate tendency to blow any unsecured paperwork out the nearest window. If we’d had a green screen we could have shot the live elements to a low budget disaster movie. Edmondson had quite adamantly reasserted control of his own office, but the MIU office manager found me some desk space next door in the territorial policing office.
I was just logging into UKUFOindex.com when Lesley texted me. Have U gone native yet?
I hadn’t been expected a call until at least that evening, which meant I spent the next ten minutes trying to open the tough plastic clamshell packaging around one of the spare burner mobiles until finally a PCSO on her lunch break took pity on me and lent me a pair of scissors. Fortunately, disposable phones nearly always come with some charge—enough at least to make my initial response.
No, I texted back, using the disposable. But I have been eating sheep.
I had no doubt Lesley would notice that I was using a different phone but the question was, would she figure out why?
While I waited for a response, I dug into UKUFO- index.com and found that in some quarters UFOs were now known as UAPs—Unidentified Aerial Phenomena—although adoption of this term had proved contentious. The index was just that, a long catalog of incidents listed by date without any search function, going back as far the 1940s. A guy believed he’d been abducted in Northumbria and Winston Churchill suppressed reports of UFOs sighted by RAF reconnaissance flights. Herefordshire had its own sighting in the summer of 1942 when there was a report of an aircraft crash near Aymestrey, only once the authorities arrived there was no sign of any wreckage.
The disposable phone pinged.
Does this mean we can talk?
“We need to push her,” Inspector Pollock had said when we discussed the last text exchange. “She may be reaching out to you because she’s uncomfortable with her current situation. We need to make it easier for her to engage but at the same time you need to push her emotionally. I’m sorry, but that’s just what needs to be done.”
What needs to be done, I thought, and texted How’s your face?
The 1950s saw UFOs popping up from Southend-on-Sea to the USAF base at Lakenheath, but nothing that I could find in Herefordshire or the surrounds. The 1960s proved to be a time of cosmic significance, at least in the number of UFO sightings all over the country. But it was not until August 1970 that I had my first close encounter. A couple traveling toward Wigmore on the A4110 experienced their car mysteriously stopping and then refusing to restart. Although there were no lights available, the couple claim that a tall humanoid, with big eyes, dressed in long dark robes, held up its hand—“just like a lollipop lady, you know, holding up traffic while the kids the cross the road.” They were just about to leave their car to have a closer look when the figure vanished and, miraculously, when they tried the ignition the car restarted.
Herefordshire remained blessedly free of alien intrusion until 1977, when there was a sighting in Hereford itself and then nothing until 2002 when a young girl claimed to have met aliens near Mortimer’s Cross, just south of Aymestrey. I clicked on the hyperlink and was taken to the relevant page and read the account. Unfortunately, the report was obviously a summary, not an original statement. It described a young girl running away from her home in a nearby village and being “drawn” up the “footpath north of Mortimer’s Mill.”
I checked the OS map—there was no footpath marked from the water mill, but if you did walk north from there you’d find yourself following the east bank of the River Lugg right into Pokehouse Wood.
The anonymous girl is reported to have encountered a tall alien with big eyes and scaly silver skin/clothes like a fish who talked to her for a while and gave her something to drink. The girl believes that what she drank may have been drugged because she went to sleep and woke up later that night on a road near her village.
Three guesses as to who the little girl might be.
Now, what with DCI Windrow and his team being more than just competent, one of the first things they would have done would have been to TIE any spare relatives. So it took just a five second word search to find a nominal devoted to ZOE THOMAS, daughter of Derek Lacey’s estranged first wife Susan Thomas and Nicole Lacey’s half-sister. They’d done a complete Integrated Intelligence Platform check so I had her, somewhat pathetic, criminal record, as well as a current address, employment and the sad fact that apart from work she used her mobile to talk to precisely three other people. One of whom was her mother.
The disposable mobile pinged. Still better than yours.
I called Inspector Pollock and informed him that Lesley had taken the bait.
“Assuming this is Lesley,” said Pollock, “and not a fake to lead us away.”
“Lead us away from what?” I asked. “This is definitely her.”
“We’ll see. Anyway, I’ll brief Nightingale,” he said.
“Do you want me to come back in?”
“Absolutely not,” said Pollock quickly. “We all like you where you are right now—a long, long way away. We’ll let you know how the operation pans out.”
After I’d hung up, I went and splashed cold water on my face in the bathroom before seeing what could be safely scarfed up in the coffee area. One whole shelf of the fridge was rammed with Morrisons’ filled doughnuts that were apparently free for the taking. Dominic told me later that Inspector Edmondson believed that a squad stuffed with saturated fat and sugar was a happy squad. I ate a custard doughnut while I finished up my UFO research, but I think I should have let it defrost a bit because it tasted funny.
Al the electronics geezer had been right about Aymestrey becoming a hotspot for sightings—lots of night-time lights, suspicious movement in the trees, an encounter with an invisible “entity” and an “inhuman screaming like a pig being tortured.” I made a note to ask Dominic whether pig torturing was a common nocturnal pastime in these parts.
All of this activity had taken place after the summer of 2002 when Zoe Thomas had met her tall alien in fish scales—it was time to have a chat. I let the MIU office manager know what action I was taking so it could be properly actioned, jumped into the Asbo and headed east along the A44 for the mighty metropolis of Bromyard.
With towns like Bromyard you can tell when you reach the historic section because suddenly the houses are all crowding onto narrow pavements and they assume the squeezed frontage that is typical of a planned medieval town. Apart from that, and some startlingly well preserved sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings, it looked like a large suburb with all the exciting connotations that implies.
Zoe Thomas lived in a bedsit above a Chinese takeaway on the Old Road near the town center. It smelled faintly of sweet and sour pork and had that precarious scruffiness that you get when someone is fighting to maintain basic standards, but losing. There were no fast food containers serving a second career as combination ashtray and biological experiment, but the washing up in the sink was at least two days old and I could see dust and cobwebs building up in the corners.
“I’ve already talked to the police,” said Zoe. She was sitting on the bed because as the guest I got use of the only chair, a wooden upright kitchen chair that had obviously come from an expensive set about fifty years previously and then been repainted in gloss white by someone with no taste.
I smiled reassuringly and posed with my pen over my notebook.
“This is just a follow-up,” I said.
“They found them, didn’t they?” she asked. “It was on the news.”
She had a ruddy white complexion, a square forehead and a beaky nose that must have come from her dad, and a big toothy mouth that must have come from somewhere completely different. When she smiled, which was rarely, she had dimples.
She was wearing slacks and a navy blue uniform shirt with Countrywide embroidered on the breast. Countrywide were a chain store I’d never heard of that provided all the things country folk needed: wellies—I presumed—organic pig feed, bear traps. The IIP check had revealed that Zoe worked full time as a sales assistant down the road at the local branch.
“This is a related matter,” I said, and she immediately tensed.
She hadn’t offered me a tea when she let me inside, which is always a bad sign. According to the PNC, she’d been sectioned under the Mental Health Act two years ago but released after the twenty-eight day psychiatric assessment. There were also a string of arrests and cautions for shoplifting and minor public order offenses. Generally, people who’ve had to deal with the criminal justice system more than three times stop offering random police officers tea. But you can but hope.
“Oh, yeah,” said Zoe.
Sweat was starting to plaster her hair to her forehead, but she made no move to open the windows and let a breeze in. My neck began to prickle in sympathy. There was a smell like microwaved rice.
“I’d like to talk about 2002,” I said. “When you were eleven and ran away from home.”
“Which time are you talking about?” she asked.
“The time in August,” I said. “Did you run away a lot when you were a kid?”
“Not before Mum ran off first,” she said. “That was when I was nine.”
“Were you trying to follow her?” I asked.
She started and looked straight at me for the first time—her eyes were a beautiful hazel color—not only was I sure she didn’t get that from her dad, I was also pretty certain I’d seen them listed as blue in one of the reports.
“Did you used to run away?” she asked.
“Everyone runs away at least once in their lives,” I said.
“Why did you?” she asked intently, and as she did I felt a strange little flutter like the batting of moth’s wings on a window. A faint echo of the sensation I felt when somebody supernatural tried to influence me—and trust me, every single one I’ve met so far has tried it on at least once.
“Why did I what?” I asked, to buy time.
“Run away,” she said, and the flutter came again.
A practitioner can emulate the effect, but it’s a ridiculously high-order spell so I was guessing that this was an unconscious phenomenon. The fae are often lavish in their glamor and I surmise that they deploy it in the same unthinking manner as do young ladies their charms—so sayeth Victor Bartholomew who despite being a dullard and a wanker has yet to steer me wrong.
“My father was a heroin addict,” I said. “Sometimes it was like living with the walking dead—so I had to get out.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?” asked Zoe.
“I tell you what,” I said. “You make the tea and I’ll wash up.”
I’d got there just in time—another twenty-four hours and the Environment Agency would have declared the sink a Site of Special Scientific Interest and refused us access. I did briefly consider taking a broom to the spider webs in the corners, but you don’t get the full Studio Ghibli from me without a sizable cash advance.
The disposable phone pinged while I was drying up. Food is terrible here.
That had to be a hospital reference. Was she trying to tell me where she was? Why was she texting me? Was she reaching out or trying to misdirect?
“Girlfriend?” asked Zoe when she saw me staring at the phone.
“Colleague,” I said without thinking, and texted back. U only have yourself to blame.
Zoe Thomas did have a photograph of herself from before the incident, a head and shoulders portrait in school uniform. In it she’s smiling lopsided at the camera with her head tilted ever so slightly to one side, as if questioning the whole purpose of the exercise. The picture was big enough for me to see that her eyes were blue. I looked up from the photograph to find Zoe staring at me.
“Your eyes . . .” I said. “When did that happen?”
“The night I ran away,” she said. “And do you know something—my parents never even noticed.”
“I think you’d better tell me what happened,” I said, and she did. Over tea and biscuits.
Even when she was small she liked to go out at night—especially when the moon was up.
“That’s the best bit about living in the country, isn’t it?” she said. “All the stars.”
I asked her if she used to dance around in the nude and she gave me a funny look.
“No,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
“I’ll tell you afterward,” I said.
After Mummy had left, she’d started going further away from home.
“And this is going to sound weird,” she said. “But I felt like I was being called.”
I asked if she’d ever actually heard any voices, but she said no—it was much more like a feeling. “I wish I’d heard voices,” she said. “It would have made the whole thing easier to explain. Of course now I realize it was a telepathic compulsion.”
I was afraid to ask from who—but I had to know.
“From aliens,” she told me.
“Aliens?”
“I’m not mad, you know,” she said. “I’ve been sectioned. They kept me in for four weeks’ ‘evaluation’ and at the end the top shrink calls me into her office and looks me in the eye and says, ‘You’re saner than I am—go away.’”
“Did you tell them about the aliens?” I asked.
“I may have glossed over some of the details,” she said, and dunked a biscuit.
Definitely sane, I thought.
“So would it be fair to say that you were summoned out that night?”
I didn’t ask whether the summoner had been an invisible unicorn—that would have been leading the witness. You learn about this stuff when you do your PEACE (Planning, Engage and explain, Account & clarify, Closure, Evaluate) training—the not leading the witness bit, not the unicorn. They’re one of the things you have to pick up on the job.
“Not exactly,” she said and gave me a rueful smile. “I walked in on my dad shagging my babysitter.”
“No shit,” I said, and then realized who that must have been. “Joanne Marstowe?”
“The very bitch,” said Zoe. “They didn’t see me, of course—too busy—so I went upstairs, packed my things and went out the front door. I slammed it hard, too, but they must have been too busy to even hear that.”
“Wait,” I said, doing the maths in my head. “She must have had Hannah by then—where was she?”
Zoe shrugged.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Not at our house.”
And I’d seen enough of the Derek and Joanne Show to know that they were probably still at it eleven years later. It was outrageous, but I wasn’t sure it was relevant—I was certainly not going to write it up this time. To change the subject, I pulled up a picture on my phone of the knapsack they’d found near the B4362 during the search and showed it to Zoe.
“Was this yours?”
“Oh my god,” Zoe grabbed my phone and brought it right up to her face. “That’s my bag. I got it free with a magazine—I loved that bag.”
I explained where and when it had been found.
“I’m amazed it lasted that long.”
“So you had it with you when you left the house?”
“Definitely,” she said. But she didn’t know when, precisely, she’d lost it. She certainly didn’t have it when she reached Mortimer’s Mill. I asked her what had brought her there and she said that it had been a light, only like a light in her brain.
“More telepathy?” I asked.
“I guess so,” said Zoe. “I think of it being like the guide beam like they use at airports to bring in aircraft in poor visibility.”
I bet Call Me Al would have liked that explanation.
There was a path from the Mill that followed the bank of the Lugg all the way up to Pokehouse Wood, which wasn’t much of a wood back in the summer of 2002, being a bit deficient in the tree department.
“It had just been cleared,” said Zoe. “There were stacks of trunks by the logging track—it looked really strange in the moonlight—like it was all made of ghosts.”
She’d walked up the logging track, the same one which me, Beverley and Dominic had run down pursued by unicorns, and it was there that she encountered her alien. Pretty much where we’d found Hannah and Nicole.
There was a bright light, like really intense moonlight.
“Only now I think about it,” said Zoe, “I think that was in my mind as well.”
She was certain that the alien was real, though.
“It was like when you meet someone famous,” said Zoe. “And I don’t mean like Big Brother famous. I mean Marilyn Manson famous, proper famous, and it’s like a shock when you see them and you think, “Oh my god.” And no matter how cool you want to play it, you just talk rubbish. You know?”
I said I did, even though the only time I’d met a celebrity of any stature I’d almost arrested him, and Lesley had to pin his minder to the pavement. It’s amazing how fast the famous become just another customer when there’s constabulary duty to be done. The joke among police being, Do you know who I am? Yes sir—you’re nicked.
Zoe described her alien as tall, human-looking, only with eyes that slanted downward and had purple irises. She wore a cloak and carried a long staff almost as tall as she was.
“How did you know it was a she?” I asked.
“She had tits all right,” said Zoe. “Or at least she stuck out in the chest department. And there was the way she moved . . . but you’re right—why should aliens even have the same sexes as us? They could have a hundred different sexes, couldn’t they?”
“What was she wearing?” I asked.
“A sort of spacesuit,” said Zoe.
“Describe it to me?”
“Like a spacesuit,” she said. “You know.”
“What color was it?” I asked.
Zoe had to think about that. “Silver,” she said. “Definitely silver.”
It took a lot of questions, but by the end I thought I’d managed to filter out any of Zoe’s embellishments. Dressed in silver definitely. There was also almost certainly two other individuals present, but they “weren’t in the light,” so Zoe didn’t get a good look at them. Zoe said that they had communicated telepathically, for which I could find no evidence either way, and in any case she couldn’t remember what they’d talked about.
Nor could she be sure how long they’d talked for, but she did distinctly remember being given a drink which, disappointingly, tasted a lot like water. The next thing she remembered clearly was walking down the road near the top of Rush Lane and meeting her dad coming the other way in his car.
“They went mental,” she said. “Dad was yelling, and bloody Victoria had to be held back—that’s what I heard, anyway. The very next day my mum came and picked me up and took me away. I hadn’t seen her for months and suddenly she was there.”
Zoe sighed and shook her head.
“Wasn’t like I hadn’t run away before,” she said.
“Why do you think the reaction was different that time?”
“See,” said Zoe and gave me a shy smile, “that time I took the baby with me.”
“You took the baby?”
“Now you sound just like them,” she said. “It’s not like Dad or my ‘babysitter’ were paying any attention.”
“What about your close encounter?” I asked.
“I didn’t know there were going to be aliens now, did I?” she said. “How could I have known that was going to happen?”
As attention-grabbing behavior it was hard to beat. I had a horrible thought.
“Did anything happen to the baby?” I asked.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I never let go of her.”
I thought about the gaps in Zoe’s memory.
“Her eyes didn’t change color, did they?”
“You think lady Victoria muckety-muck would have missed that?” said Zoe. She got up and started piling the tea things in the sink where presumably they would stay until the next Good Samaritan arrived. I’d pretty much got everything I was going to get from that interview, but I thought a follow-up might be in order—perhaps I’d bring Beverley along to see if that would loosen her up.
I thought about Mellissa the bee woman, and how Zoe’s eyes had changed. Back in the nineteenth century Charles Kingsley had written of fae and demi-fae and also of people that had been “touched” by the fae—“so that they themselves seem strange even to themselves.” He seemed to think such people lurked under every hedgerow and I’d wondered whether back then there had been way more activity than in my time. Or it could have just been Kingsley’s overactive imagination. Dr. Walid often complains that, despite the order being founded by Isaac Newton, for most of the early wizards the Baconian method was something that happened to other people.
“You believe me?” asked Zoe. “You believe I met aliens?”
“I believe you met something,” I said, and gave her one of Dr. Walid’s cards. He makes me carry them around for just this purpose.
“I’m going to ask a friend of mine to contact you,” I said, as Zoe gave the card a dubious look. “He’ll be interested in why your eyes changed color. He’ll want you to come down to London for a chat.”
And an MRI, I thought, and blood tests, DNA swabs and anything else he can think of. Although, judging by Zoe’s expression, she was thinking a lot worse.
“I can come with you, if you’ll feel more comfortable,” I said.
“Why me?” she asked.
Does she want to be a special snowflake or an ordinary person? I wondered. And compromised.
“You’ve come across some weird shit,” I said. “I’m not going to lie to you and say it’s an everyday thing. But it has happened to a few others—we can help.”
“Okay,” she said. And then almost eagerly asked, “When do you think he’ll be in touch?”
“You need to call him,” I said, and tapped the card in her fingers. “This is about you, not us.”
Pokehouse Wood, I thought as I walked back to the Asbo. It all keeps coming back to Pokehouse Wood. I paused by the car to check my notebook. I’d been right, 2002 was listed as the last time before this year that the wood had been clear-felled. The time before that, 1970, had been the same year as the ghostly lollipop lady on the Roman Road nearby. I knew where the first set of detectors was getting planted early tomorrow morning.
I called Beverley, who answered with her mouth full.
“I’m having supper with Dominic’s mum,” she said.
I could hear cutlery clinking in the background and the sound of the TV being ignored.
I told her I was on my way back, but she said that Joanne Marstowe had popped round and asked if I could come see them. I asked why Joanne hadn’t rung me directly.
“She said she didn’t trust her phone,” said Beverley.
“Did she say why?”
“Just that she needed to talk to you,” said Beverley.
“No,” I said. “Why she didn’t trust her phone.”
“Sorry, I didn’t ask,” said Beverley. “I told them you’d pop in as soon as you got back.”
Bromyard to Rushpool is half an hour by car, and I knew the route well enough to do that automatic thing when you start preparing for turn offs before your conscious mind has registered where you are. Third exit at the roundabout where me and Beverly had paraded past the locals, left at the next roundabout to cut through Leominster past the Dale factory where the half of Dominic’s family who didn’t work as cab drivers were gainfully employed bashing metal into structural members. My interview with Zoe had taken long enough that, by the time I reached the turn-off into Rushwater Lane just past Lucton, the sun was starting to flirt with the horizon. I drove up past the village pond and the Swan Inn, past the church, and then left into the Marstowe’s cul-de-sac.
Andy opened the door—which surprised me.
“Yeah,” he said when he saw it was me. “You’d better come in.”
He led me back to the kitchen where Joanne was staring out the back window to where Hannah was playing with her brothers. Ethan was sitting primly in his high chair, his little pink fists waving in cheerful anticipation. He gave me a hopeful look, no doubt believing that my presence signaled the imminent arrival of dinner—or at least the start of the floor show.
“If I told you something crazy,” Joanne said without looking round, “would you believe me?”
“It depends on how crazy,” I said.
Andy stepped up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder, and she put her hand over his.
Does he know? I wondered. That his wife’s been banging Derek Lacey for over a decade and—if I’m any judge of body language—still is? Or maybe he does know, and this is one of those weird unspoken arrangements that nobody ever speaks about.
Joanne turned and let Andy put his arm around her shoulder. Behind her, through the window, I saw Hannah scramble to catch a ball thrown by one of her brothers.
“What if somebody thought that somebody was not the person you thought they were?” she asked.
I glanced back out the window at Hannah.
“Not Hannah,” said Andy.
“Nicole?” I asked, not liking where this was going at all.
Joanne nodded.
Ethan started yelling—the floor show having been a bit of a disappointment.
Career criminals and Old Etonians aside, people generally like their police to take control of whatever situation they find themselves in. You don’t call the police unless things have already gone pear-shaped, and it’s nice to have a group of people you can shunt all the responsibility onto. As police, how you assert control ranges from hitting people with an extendable baton through making everyone speak slowly and clearly, to asking them to make you a cup of tea in their own kitchen.
The last being what I did that evening and soon Ethan had his dinner, Hannah was fetched in from the garden, I got a cup of tea, and we all sat around the kitchen table in a calm and productive manner.
“Tell Peter what you told me,” said Joanne.
Hannah screwed up her face.
“Do I have to?” she asked.
“Yes, you do,” said her mum.
“But I want to watch TV.” She slumped in her chair and started sliding off it by inches.
“Hannah,” said Andy gently. “Just you tell Peter here what you know and then you can be off.”
At her dad’s words, Hannah reluctantly straightened up and, after a great sigh, looked straight at me.
“Nicky isn’t Nicky,” she said. “She’s somebody else.”
The drama of the moment was somewhat undercut by Ethan, who demonstrated a new mastery of the mysteries of angular momentum by banging his hand down hard on the edge of his bowl, causing it to cartwheel off his tray and create a, no doubt interesting to him, Catherine-wheel effect with his dinner.
The resulting scolding, cleaning and fussing at least gave me a chance to try and think of something more sensible to say than, Are you sure? Of course she was sure, I could see that in the set of her face. But what did she mean? I was willing to believe that families ran a bit different in the countryside, but I doubt it went as far as Victoria accepting a strange child as her own. Presumably, the Nicole currently recuperating at the Lacey house looked and sounded like the one who had gone missing ten days before.
“How can you tell?” I asked Hannah while her parents were distracted.
“Just can,” said Hannah.
“But she looks the same?”
“Looks the same, yeah,” she said. “But she isn’t the same.”
I asked about clothes, dress, speech, smell—which made Hannah giggle—but she couldn’t give me a single bit of verifiable evidence that Nicole Lacey was anyone other than Nicole Lacey. Not that Hannah knew who the imposter could be.
“Just isn’t Nicky,” she said stubbornly.
When the brothers came in from the darkening garden it seemed prudent to release Hannah to watch TV. She shot off, and I found myself sharing a table alone with Andy as Joanne put Ethan to bed.
“Is it a good job policing?” he asked.
“It’s varied,” I said. “You never know what you’re going to be doing when you go on shift.”
“I was thinking of joining the army,” he said. “But then Hannah came along and I couldn’t do that to the girl.”
“I can see that,” I said.
“Plus I wasn’t keen on the whole notion of killing people,” he said.
“He’s such a softy,” said Joanne as she sat down next to her husband.
“Do you believe Hannah?” asked Andy.
“There’s something going on, but I’m buggered if I know what it is,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Joanne. “But do you believe her?”
“It’s not about what I believe,” I said. “Let’s just say that it’s going to form part of an ongoing investigation.”
They gave me the look I’ve seen from Brightlingsea to Bermondsey, in council flats and interview rooms, from people who remember the Blitz and from kids that are below the age of criminal responsibility. Yeah, the look says, we’ll believe it when we see it.
“The important thing is that everyone stays calm while we get to the bottom of this,” I said and, because the universe likes a bit of irony, it was just then that the wheels came off.
“Mummy,” called Hannah from the front room. “There’s people outside.”
There’s no other sound on earth like coppers turning up mob handed outside your door, two to three vehicles drawing up but leaving their engines running, multiple car doors creaking open in quick succession and then not being closed, the sound of heavy people in big boots piling up with muffled efficiency outside your front door.
“Peter,” said Joanne. “What’s going on?”
Through the kitchen windows I saw flickers of light in the back garden as officers with torches quickly made their way up the side passage to block the rear entrance.
“Peter?” asked Joanne again—rising panic in her voice.
The doorbell rang, twice, three times—insistent.
“Stay here,” I told Joanne and Andy and walked up the hallway to answer the door. I opened it to find DCI Windrow and DS Cole on the doorstep. Behind them waited a line of uniforms.
Windrow was surprised to see me.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.
“Joanne said she had information,” I said.
Windrow nodded quickly to himself.
“Who’s inside?” he asked.
“Joanne and Andy in the kitchen. Hannah is in the living room with Ryan and Mathew,” I said. “Ethan is upstairs in his cot in the master bedroom.”
“Any sign of firearms?”
What the fuck?
“No, sir,” I said.
“Are you sure?” asked Windrow.
I thought very carefully about everything I’d seen that evening and made damn sure.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Good boy,” said Windrow. “Go out the front and stay with Dominic until I have a chance to come and see you.”
“Yes, sir,” I said and got out of their way.
DS Cole led the mob in, calling out Joanne and Andy’s names in her best reassuring we’re-just-here-to-have-tea voice. I headed down the garden path and out of the immediate operational area as fast I could go. I did notice that none of the cars had their light bars on and that the entrance to the cul-de-sac had been closed off with tape.
Someone called my name—Dominic standing by an unmarked pool car. I joined him and when I asked him what was going on he handed me a copy of the Daily Mail.
NICOLE & HANNAH KIDNAP AN INSIDE JOB?