Operational Compartmentalization
I THINK I must have been awake for some time already, because I distinctly heard the ping from the disposable phone, despite it being muffled under the pile of yesterday’s clothes. With a bit of careful wriggling I managed to loosen Beverley’s embrace enough to get an arm free to grab the phone and get it in front of my face. The text read WTF have U done now?
I thought for a moment and ended up sending back. WASNT ME, because the disposable had crappy predictive text and Beverley’s spare hand had grabbed my attention at a crucial moment.
I looked at my watch and wondered why Lesley was awake at five thirty in the morning. Thankfully, Beverley let go of my dick and rolled over, dragging the sheet with her until she became a white lump in the middle of the bed. I took this as my cue to get up and, as quietly as possible, have a shower and get dressed.
“Where are you going?” asked the lump in the bed while I was pulling my boots on.
“I’m off to conduct science experiments,” I said. “Want to come?”
Beverley lifted her head and looked at me suspiciously.
“What kind of science?”
“Thaumatological,” I said.
“You’re taking the piss,” she said.
“Straight up,” I said.
Beverley unwound from the bed, stood up and arched her back—palms pressing against the low ceiling of the cowshed. Then she shook out her dreads before looking at me, head tilted to one side.
“Is it important?” she asked.
I was so tempted to say no, but you can’t keep putting shit off.
“A bit,” I said.
“Give me ten minutes for a shower,” she said.
While I waited I pulled up the day’s headlines. The Daily Mail had the scoop but the media had caught the smell of blood in the water and twenty-four-hour news outlets were running the bulletin every half an hour, with a teaser on the quarter in case your attention span was that short.
According to the Mail, who seemed to be the only outlet with any actual facts, Nicole Lacey had accused Hannah’s parents of luring them out of their homes with the promise of free gifts. Then they and person unknown are supposed to have kidnapped them, or at least Nicole, and made them walk all the way to Wales where they had to sleep in a tent until they were made to walk all the way back again. Sharon Pike speculated in a separate column that making the children walk was a cunning ploy to avoid CCTV and automatic number plate recognition systems. She wrote of the existence of a network of temporary camps frequented by new age travelers, migrant laborers, gypsies, asylum seekers and Romanians who were, allegedly, responsible for the shocking increase in rural crime, unemployment and, some said, spreading foot and mouth.
“That’s just stupid,” Dominic told me later. “Nobody believes that Romanians spread foot and mouth—everybody knows that was down to Tony Blair in an attempt to destroy the rural way of life.”
The rolling news networks loved the idea of a shadowy network of camps. It gave them hours of talking heads and a chance to stick a body from Migration Watch or UKIP up against a government spokesman or, even better, someone from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants in the hope they would both kill and eat each other live on air.
Beverley stepped out of the shower and asked whether there were going to be brambles. I said it was likely. She sniffed yesterday’s clothes, kept the jeans, produced an emergency pair of knickers from god knows where, and replaced last night’s crop top with a buff linen waistcoat she’d retrieved from the trunk. I winced as she tossed her dirty clothes back on the bed. There was a delay while I found an empty carrier bag and made her put them in there. She seemed to find this inordinately funny, but that’s because her mum hadn’t been making her iron her own shirts from the age of six onward.
I watched her tie up her dreads into a ponytail, unconsciously biting her lower lip as she concentrated on getting the elastic tie exactly the way she wanted it. She caught me watching, her eyes narrowing as she smiled at me.
“Why are you hanging about?” she asked. “I thought we were in a hurry.”
So we climbed into the Asbo with its cargo of magic detectors in the back and headed for School Wood. Beverley asked what had happened the night before.
“Nicole has alleged that Joanne and Andy, or rather some of their relatives, abducted her and Hannah,” I said.
“Fuck!” said Beverley.
“Not only that, but Nicole came out with her story in front of Sharon Pike, freelance journalist and newspaper columnist,” I said. “With predictable results.”
Which were DCI Windrow turning up mob handed to “interview” Andy and Joanne while forensics went over their house with a set of tweezers and a UV light source. Which was a waste of time, because searching that house had happened day one of Operation Manticore—even Beverley spotted that.
“It’s in the papers now,” I said. “Windrow’s got to dot his I’s and cross his T’s etcetera etcetera.”
He’d also told me to stay out of sight.
“It’s all got complicated enough,” he’d said, “without dragging any ‘additional’ elements into the case.” He was too professional to say it out loud, but it was clear he expected the Marstowes to be eliminated from inquiries pretty damn fast—at which point he was hoping the media, and with them the politics, would go away. “I hear you’ve got something lined up with Dominic tomorrow,” he’d said. “Good. You two can keep each other out of trouble.”
I thought I heard, as if from somewhere far away, Lesley giving a hollow laugh. But I’m pretty sure it was my imagination.
“Are you okay coming back up here?” I asked as the Asbo climbed the hill to the top of ridge. “You’re not going to be stepping on anyone’s territorial imperative, are you?”
“You worry about your job,” said Beverley. “I’ll worry about mine.”
Dominic was waiting for us at the top of the lane. He held the gate open so I could drive in and park by the skeleton of an ancient barn preserved by the National Trust. Stan was waiting with him, both of them sweating even in the shade of the western hemlocks—I think it must have been even hotter than that second day when Dominic had brought me up here to see about his “mate’s stash.”
Stan was wearing the same grubby boiler suit I’d seen her in when we first met, still with the arms tied around her waist. But, in deference to the heat, she was wearing a 1950s blue and white striped bikini top that would have suited a saucy seaside postcard. Her skin was the color of skimmed milk and I was worried she was going to burn.
Stan was with us because she had a quad bike and trailer which promised to take the slog out of transporting the detectors. The plan was that we would split up, me and Beverley going downhill to Pokehouse Wood while Dominic and Stan deployed the detectors further along the ridge, on the logging track we’d met Princess Luna on, and on Croft Ambrey and the footpaths that converged on it.
“That’s a big area,” he said as we piled the detectors into the trailer. “What’s the range of these things?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not exactly an exact science. Put them at crossroads and places that look like,” I hate making stuff up as I go along, “gateways,” I said. “Transitional points between one place and another.”
“Boundary points,” said Stan. “Got you.”
Dominic had brought two rolls of blue and white police tape to wrap around the detectors—the better to deter tampering.
“You star,” I said, after he’d explained. “Do you think it will work?”
“With the walkers and tourists,” he said. “But the local buggers will have it away with anything.” He glared at Stan, who gave him a bland look.
We divided up the detectors, the bulk going in the trailer, and me and Beverly watched Stan rattle off on the quad with Dominic riding pillion behind her.
“I notice we have to carry ours,” said Beverley. We each had a courier bag for our share of the detectors. With the strap across our shoulders the weight was even but they banged against our hips when we walked.
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s downhill, isn’t it?”
This time, instead of blowing the shit out of various fences, we followed the official right of way, making sure to stay on the path, close gates behind us and prevent our hypothetical dog from chasing the livestock.
We crossed over into a meadow where the long grass was overrun with clusters of yellow flowers.
“Buttercup,” said Beverley. “It’s poisonous so cows and sheep won’t graze here—they must be keeping this field for hay.”
Further on we reached the wire fence that marked the edge of the woods and the drop down to Pokehouse Wood and the River Lugg. We found the stile that I’d last seen from the other side when I’d spotted the blood-stained strip of cloth the week before. There was still police tape marking the forensic search around where the cloth had hung on the barbed-wire fence.
Beverley clonked her bag pointedly at my feet and so I took the first detector from hers. Then it was a simple matter to wire it to the base of one of the stile’s posts and wrap some police tape around it a few times. I unshipped my tablet and checked that the detector had some bars and, satisfied it could get a signal out, I noted its position using the GPS coordinates app on my good phone.
“Done,” I said.
“You just brought me along to help carry these,” said Beverley and shook her bag at me.
“Actually,” I said, “I was hoping you’d tell me about the landscape—you being a proper expert and everything.”
Beverley looked around. “What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Stuff.”
“Stuff,” said Beverley. And then she put her arm around my neck and kissed me. It went on for a while too—there was some tongue in there and everything. Things might possibly have got a bit impromptu, if not alfresco, except she let go of me and laughed.
“What we’re standing on is a limestone ridge,” she said. “Silurian limestone as a point of fact. Very permeable, the rain goes right through it and down to the river valley where it belongs, leaving up here nice and well drained—hence the buttercups and the harebell along the hedges.” She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side. “Helpful?”
“Interesting,” I said.
We followed the path down the heavily wooded slope, past trees that Beverley identified as yew, elder and some oak. I set up another detector where the footpath reached the cleared area which marked the start of the Pokehouse Wood. While I did that, Beverley wandered out into the stands of foxglove that stood between the newly planted saplings. When I’d finished inputting the location I turned to find her gone.
I called her name and she rose out of the nodding purple flowers, the hot sunlight making amber highlights on the strong curve of her upper arms and her neck. I felt a mad rush of desire, not just sex but something wilder and stronger and almost like worship. I wanted to carve statues of her and paint her image on the walls of my cave, where the firelight would make them flicker and jump. I wanted to wrap myself in an animal skin and dance around the campfire wearing a necklace of bear teeth. Had she just asked, I’d gladly have gone mammoth hunting in her honor—although I’d only do that armed with a suitably high-powered rifle. There are limits, you know.
There was definitely power in that place, wild and weird and fae.
“Did you feel that?” I asked Beverley.
“Feel what?” she asked.
I took a deep breath. It’s observable but not reliably observable. It can have a quantifiable effect, but resists any attempt to apply mathematical principles to it—no wonder Newton kept magic under wraps. It must have driven him mental.
Or maybe not—the guy had spent almost as much time on calculating the mystical dimensions of the Temple of Solomon as he had developing the theory of gravity. Maybe Newton liked his life compartmentalized, too.
Hugh Oswald had claimed that Nightingale’s old friend David Mellenby had found a way to close the gap between Newtonian magic and quantum theory. What might have happened if that had been true, what kind of future had died during that terrible rout from Ettersberg?
“You want to know something strange?” asked Beverley.
“I don’t think mammoth goes well with palm oil,” I said.
She hesitated, and then took that as a “yes.”
“These flowers are weird,” she said, looking at the foxglove.
“They’re poisonous, you know,” I said.
“They also like an acidic soil,” said Beverley. “Which this shouldn’t be—not when it’s built up on limestone like this.”
“Because calcium carbonate is alkaline?” I asked.
“Exactly,” said Beverley. “Judging by the trees on the slope, it’s pretty alkaline until we get to this cleared area.”
“Can you get local patches of acidity?”
“You can get local patches of anything,” said Beverley. “Heavy rainfall can leach out the calcium and the potassium, but,” she gestured at the slope with its white support tubes poking out among a sea of purple foxglove, “I don’t think so. And this is proper land management we’re looking at here, so I can’t see the National Trust smothering the land in fertilizer. And even if they did, the runoff would have gone into the Lugg and I would have noticed it.”
I put talking to the land management team at Croft Castle on my list of things to do.
“And everything goes well with palm oil,” said Beverley. “Providing you use enough palm oil.”
I secured another detector at the place where the footpath crossed the logging track. Then we walked down the track to where I judged we’d found the two girls and placed a detector there. The bulk of the detectors were laid out at various strategic points around the wood—anywhere that looked like it was, or might have been, a path at some point in the past. I had planned to walk as far as the Roman Road and place at least four detectors at intervals along that, but looking out across the field where we found the dead sheep I realized I was down to just the spares I wanted to keep against contingencies. I’d have to get Stan and Dominic to swing down and place the ones on the road. So we walked back up through the wood to where we’d left the Asbo.
Strangely, it was while crossing the buttercup meadow that I remembered the way foxglove was used to make a tea to drive away babies that were suspected of being changelings—possibly a form of sanctioned infanticide.
Changelings, I thought, and remembered Hannah’s absolute certainty that the returned Nicole was not the girl she grew up with.
Changelings—the babies that fairies left with human parents when they nicked a human child. In these enlightened times we didn’t have to rely on poisoned tea to determine the ancestry of a child. Although it has to be said that while the science was relatively straightforward, it was the legal issues that were going to be complicated.
“A changeling?” said Windrow, and I could tell from his tone of voice that I’d used the wrong term.
“A substitution of one child for another,” I said. “Could be classified as an abduction.”
Windrow’s mouth worked, and I suspected he was wondering whether it was medically advisable for him to have another piece of nicotine gum.
You may have chosen the wrong moment to quit smoking, I thought, but I didn’t say, because you don’t—not to chief inspectors.
“I’m assuming,” he said at last, “that you have a line of inquiry you’d like to follow.”
“We take DNA samples from both girls and their parents and then we test to see if they are who we think they are,” I said.
“And what do we tell them we’re doing it for?”
“For elimination purposes,” I said.
“I know the Met has a reputation for being a bit free and easy with the facts,” said Windrow. “But you do realize that we’re talking about the victims and the victims’ families here, and that we’re operating with the full sodding media pack camped outside our door. They may not know what the story is, but they can smell there’s a story. Not to mention that Sharon bloody Pike has an inside line to the Lacey family. Do you really think that, given all this, it would be a good idea to obtain DNA samples under false pretenses?”
“Sir . . .” I said neutrally as possible in the time honored tradition of interrupting your senior officer when he’s being rhetorical.
“If she is a . . . ‘substitute,’” said Windrow, “what’s the worst case scenario?”
“If she’s been swapped, then Nicole Lacey is still being held by whoever made the change,” I said. “In which case, this is still a live kidnapping inquiry.”
And if there’s a case review and it turns up that we didn’t do our due diligence, then it wasn’t going to be me answering the tricky questions, was it?
Windrow nodded.
“I want you to get the necessary authorization from your governor and run this as an official Falcon line of inquiry,” he said. That covered him from any case review, and it also gave him plausible deniability should it blow up in the press. “I also want you to be the one to approach the families and get the samples.”
I said I was fully prepared to do that.
“And don’t discuss this with anyone but me and your boss—understood?”
I understood. He didn’t want any leaks to the press—or at least, in the event of there being a leak, he wanted to make sure it wasn’t traced back to the MIU or, bonus, the West Mercia Police. Mind you, this sort of compartmentalization suited Nightingale down to the ground—someone had once told him in 1939 that loose lips sink ships and he obviously hadn’t seen any reason to change just because the war was over.
“Yes, sir,” I said and rushed off to obey.
Nightingale has his own attitude to the modern world. If he deems something necessary or useful—modern police communications for example—he is perfectly willing to learn how to use it. This he does with frightening speed and efficiency, although anyone who’s spent a couple of months mastering a forma will find even the deeper mysteries of the Airwave handset a piece of piss. Still, I wasn’t looking forward to explaining to him the finer points of DNA fingerprinting, not least because I’d forgotten quite a lot of it myself. I was just about to start looking things up on the internet when I realized that it didn’t have to be me that explained it to Nightingale—I just needed to convince Walid, and then let him do all the heavy lifting.
“Changeling, eh,” said Dr. Walid.
“A possible substitution,” I said. I was out on the canteen terrace, which was in full sunlight and no breeze at all, but got the best phone bars in the nick.
“But not as a child?”
“As an eleven-year-old,” I said.
“That would be a rare thing indeed,” he said. “I’ll talk to Thomas. Once he says yes, I’ll e-mail you instructions as to how I want you to handle the samples.”
Once he says yes, I thought. Walid really wants that changeling DNA.
I heard a mechanical organ playing in the distance and looking over, across the railway tracks and the bypass, I could just see a swirl of movement among the trees. I realized it was a Sunday and the Steam Fair was open for business—not just a staging post after all. Very faintly, over the mechanical organ, the traffic noise from the bypass and the thrum of the generators, I could hear the sound of excited children.
How many of those kids would have been kept indoors until now?
Once I was done with Dr. Walid it was time to check in with Inspector Pollock, who seemed to think it was time I took the initiative. I pulled out the disposable phone and texted, Talk to me!
“She’s not going to fall for this, you know,” I’d told Pollock.
“You never know,” he’d said. “And it costs us nothing.”
I really hoped so.
While I was waiting to see which train would wreck first, I drove into Leominster proper and put in an order for another twenty detectors on the basis that I could always take them back to the Folly if I didn’t use them. Call Me Al was delighted. I was probably doubling his turnover that month. I thanked him for pointing out the UKUFOindex site and he asked whether I wanted to meet up with him and his mates at the pub later. I said I’d see if I was free.
I found a café off the main square which was decorated like a tea shop and served as fine a medley of greasy comestibles as any transport café in the country. Although they did share the regional obsession with providing a lineage for not just your pig but your eggs and potatoes as well. Criminally, I couldn’t tell you what it tasted like on account of the fact that I was practically drumming the table by that point. I was just about to distract myself by calling Beverley when Nightingale called and gave me the go-ahead to collect samples.
“I know circumstances are fraught,” said Nightingale. “But do try to be discreet.”
I checked my tablet and found I had an e-mail with Walid’s instructions on how he wanted the samples collected, labeled and transported. I don’t need to tell you how important getting a DNA sample from a changeling might be, he wrote. We’d discussed setting up a database of “interesting” DNA samples, but apparently there were legal issues. Patient confidentiality and human rights and all that.
Dominic’s mum had a fully equipped office.
“From when she thought she was going to run this place as a B&B,” said Dominic, as he helped me print off the consent forms I was required to get the parties to sign. “Do you want me to help?”
“Your governor doesn’t want you involved,” I said. “Besides, you must have actions piling up back at the nick.”
“They’ve got me reviewing statements during the initial investigation,” he said. “Occasionally I punch myself in the face to keep awake.”
“If anything exciting happens, I’ll let you know,” I said.
To avoid just that, I started with the Marstowes. And, to avoid the posse of photographers at the end of their cu-de-sac, I cut through the adjacent woods, hopped over their back fence and knocked on their kitchen door. Andy answered. He gave me a puzzled look as if trying to work out who the hell I was.
“You’d better come in,” he said.
He sat me down in the kitchen and offered me a beer which I declined in favor of a cup of tea. Despite the open window the kitchen was stuffy and there was the starchy overheated smell of baby food. Andy said that Ethan was poorly and that Joanne was upstairs dosing him with Calpol and would be down in a minute.
I asked him for samples and showed him the forms. He asked why and I decided to tell him the truth.
“If Nicole is not really Nicole, then we should be able to tell by comparing her DNA to her parents,” I said.
“I get that,” he said. “Why do you need ours?”
“In case Hannah was the one that was swapped,” I said. “This saves us having to make two trips to the lab.”
I watched his face as he parsed that and then he chuckled grimly.
“Belt and braces,” he said and signed the forms.
I took the swab using the collection kit that I’d borrowed from Dominic who, I realized, had left the Boy Scout scale behind and was now verging on Batman levels of crazy preparedness.
When Joanne came down, Andy persuaded her to sign and swab and then she persuaded Hannah—who wouldn’t stop giggling. Then I mounted a detector at the front and back doors, or rather I watched as Andy neatly screwed them into position himself.
“Just a precaution,” I said.
“I don’t like the idea of being watched,” said Joanne.
“This doesn’t detect you,” I said. “It’s not a motion sensor.”
“What does it do?” asked Andy.
“Hopefully,” I said, “if certain conditions are met, it will stop working.”
I slipped out over the back fence and made my way down the backs of the village gardens to the Old Vicarage and the Laceys. On the basis that what the eyes don’t see the mouth can’t complain about, I planted a detector in their huge back garden before banging on their back door.
They met me in what estate agents call a reception room, what I would have called a living room and no doubt Nightingale called a parlor—unless it was a drawing room. In a country home this is not a sign of favor.
They didn’t offer me tea.
Derek made a big production of checking the consent forms while Victoria sat beside him on the sofa with her lips compressed down to a line and her hands jammed between her knees.
“I really don’t see why this is necessary,” he said.
“A big case like this,” I said, “even forensic evidence can get challenged. You know, as to collection and that sort of thing. Better to have two sets of samples—that’s why they’ve got me collecting it because I’m not from West Mercia Police and I’m going to send my samples to a lab in London. Separate force, separate samples, separate lab, separate chain of custody.”
Derek was nodding his understanding but Victoria was just staring at me, not angry or hostile, just impatient with one more aggravation she didn’t need right now—thank you very much. Still, like the Marstowes, they signed the consents and opened their mouths for the cheek swab.
Victoria insisted on accompanying me when I took the sample from Nicole. I didn’t tell her that I was pretty much legally required to have an adult present—it’s easier to manage people if they maintain a sense of agency. She led me to the den where Nicole sat among a pile of discarded sweet wrappers and empty 600ml plastic Pepsi bottles. She had one in her hand when I walked in and was banging it idly against the floor—fascinated by the boing noise it made when it hit. The flat screen TV was showing Hotel Transylvania with the mute on—I judged it had got about halfway—and one of the Wii controllers nestled in an empty box of Milk Tray chocolates.
“Nicky, love,” said Victoria. “There’s someone here to see you.”
Nicole stopped banging the Pepsi bottle and turned to look at us.
I’d made a point to study pictures of Nicole Lacey taken just prior to her disappearance. In them she’d looked pretty but slightly odd, the combination of the straight blond hair and the dark brown eyes meant that even with her photograph face on she stared out of the pictures with a peculiar intensity. She looked exactly the same in the flesh and if the eyes were different or changed then I couldn’t see it.
For a moment I was sure that my changeling theory had been totally wrong, but then Nicole smiled at me. It was a wonderful it’s my birthday and I’ve got a pony smile. As sincere as a cash donation and equally as suspect.
“Who are you?” she asked springing to her feet.
“My name is Peter Grant,” I said.
“Peter wants to take a—” started Victoria, but Nicole didn’t seem to hear.
“Mummy,” she said. “There’s no more chocolate. Can I have some more chocolate?”
I felt the glamor underneath, and it was strangely harsh and commanding. A play princess type of glamor, pink and sparkly and hard as plastic. Still, it had its effect. Victoria bobbed her head.
“Of course, Princess,” she said. “Anything for you.”
The little girl kept her eyes on Victoria’s back until she was safely out of the room, before turning her smile on me again.
“You’ve got a funny face,” she said.
“I’m here to take a sample,” I said, mainly just to buy time while I tried to work out what I was dealing with.
Was she a changeling? Nicole and Hannah had only been missing seven days. How would they, whoever they were, produce a duplicate in that time? Mind you, there was a spell, dissimulo, that could warp flesh and bone to fit a certain image. Could a substitute have been sculptured to look like Nicole? That would be very bad—when dissimulo let go the warped tissue fell apart. It was how Lesley had lost her face. I felt a twist of fear in my stomach that must have shown on my face because the little girl, who may or may not have been Nicole, frowned at me.
And the frown was like a slap in the face—or would have been, had I not built up a resistance to this sort of thing. Still, the girl didn’t have to know that. I made a point of looking stricken.
“Do you like chocolate?” she said. “I like chocolate—I don’t know why anybody eats anything else.”
“Chocolate’s nice,” I said. “So your name is Nicky, is it?”
There was a smear of chocolate in the corner of her mouth and a sticky sweet wrapper caught in the hair behind her ear.
“I’m Nicole,” she said primly. “But you can call me Princess.”
“Well, Princess,” I said, and pulled up out my sample kit and showed her the cotton bud. “I need to swab the inside of your cheek.”
“What if I don’t want you to?” she asked.
“That wouldn’t be very nice,” I said. “A proper princess would want to be helpful.”
She gave that comment the consideration it deserved.
“I think no,” she said, and I got the full changeling Princess Barbie effect complete with Ken’s house pool and the train-to-trot homicidal unicorn collectible set with realistic neighing. “But I don’t mind if you think that you did.”
You’re so busted, I thought.
I was just dithering about what to do next when I was saved by the return of Victoria with another woman in tow.
I recognized her at once.
“Aunty Sharon’s here to see you again,” said Victoria.
The journalist cooed hello to the fake Nicole before turning her beady eyes on me.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I’m just on the way out,” I said, and with that I beat a hasty retreat. But not before half-inching a couple of empty Pepsi bottles—the consent forms merely specified collected biological sample—it didn’t specify how I had to collect it.