The Falcon Assessment
THE FIRST THING I noticed was that somebody, contrary to Health and Safety regulations, had jimmied the windows in Leominster nick so that they opened all the way out. Given the inquiry offices were all on the first floor, they got a surprising amount of breeze—I figured that, and a truly stupendous amount of caffeinated beverages, was all that was holding the MIU together. I seriously doubted the vibrating chairs were making much of a contribution.
Edmondson and Windrow were waiting for me in the Learning Zone again. They asked me to sit down and offered me some cold water—which I took gratefully. I resisted the urge to rub the bottle against my forehead.
“How are you finding it?” asked Windrow.
“Sir?” I asked.
“The operation,” he said. “How do you think it’s going?”
Nothing unnerves a junior officer quite as much as having a much senior officer stare over a desk and ask your opinion on something. It’s always tempting to fall back on that strangled mixture of cop-speak and management-ese that has proved the modern police officer’s friend when he wants to talk a great deal and say nothing. Still, from the look in Windrow’s eyes, blurting out that I thought that West Mercia Police were taking “an aggressively proactive approach in line with best practice as laid down in national guidelines” was not the way to go.
“As well as can be expected,” I said, which was almost as bad.
Windrow nodded benignly—a gesture I’ve seen interviewing officers use on suspects dozens of times.
“What’s your impression of the Marstowes?” he asked.
“They’re hanging in there,” I said.
“There’s no possibility that they might have orchestrated the disappearance?” asked Windrow.
God, I thought. But as a theory it certainly had its attractions.
“Is there some evidence that they might have?” I asked.
Windrow shook his head.
“Oh, congratulations by the way,” said Edmondson. “You’ve made the papers.”
He passed me a copy of the Sun which had pushed the page three girl all the way back to page eleven in order to devote more space to MISSING GIRLS. Since they didn’t know anything we didn’t, and we didn’t know anything, they had a lot of pictures to cover up the lack of text. In the upper right-hand corner of page five was a good one of me and Dominic standing by the village hall. We were obviously talking and, fortunately, both of us were looking suitably grim and intense. The caption read “ALL HANDS ON DECK: Police from all over the country are involved in the search for Hannah and Nicole.”
“Sorry about that, sir. They must have used a telephoto lens.”
“Not a problem,” said Edmondson. “The ACC thought it reflected well on the force—diversitywise.” He gave me a humorless smile. “Everyone pulling together and all that.”
That’s me, I thought. Poster boy for diversity.
Windrow steepled his fingers.
“You’ve been with the SAU for over a year,” he said. “Correct?”
“Since February last year,” I said, wondering where the hell this was going.
“So you’ve had experience of unusual cases?” he asked. “Cases involving the—” He stalled. Behind him Edmondson shifted his weight uneasily and spoke.
“The supernatural,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and there was a pause while we all tried to think of what to say next.
The two men glanced at each other.
“Do you see any of that in this case?” he asked.
“Sir?” I said. Because if I’ve learned one thing, it is to let the senior officers make their position clear before you risk opening your gob.
“You came up to interview . . .” Windrow checked a yellow sticky note attached to his policy book. “A Mr. Hugh Oswald over by Wylde?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “It was a standard TIE.” A Trace, Implicate or Eliminate is the backbone job of any major inquiry, find someone and either make them a suspect or eliminate them from the inquiry.
“And you’re satisfied that he’s not involved?” asked Windrow.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “On account of him being ninety-three and pretty much confined to a wheelchair.”
“And there’s no possibility of an accomplice?” asked Windrow.
There was his granddaughter, who I hadn’t thought to check. But then I’d assumed that the main purpose of the trip had been get to my moping self out from under Nightingale’s feet. I should have at least statemented her—Lesley would have killed me for being that sloppy.
“I did a standard assessment,” I said, and wondered just how desperate West Mercia Police were, to be talking to me about this.
Edmondson folded his arms and then unfolded them again.
“I know you haven’t been attending briefings,” said Windrow after a pause. “But you must be aware that we are not making any progress. All we know is that the most likely scenario is that the girls got up in the middle of the night and left their homes voluntarily. After that they just vanish.” He tapped his finger on his desk a couple of times. “We believe it would be remiss of us not to consider all possible angles. And, since you’re here and available, we’d like you to do a Falcon assessment on the whole case.”
They were that fucking desperate.
I nearly froze up, staring at the pair of them in disbelief. But fortunately my highly tuned bureaucratic arse-saving instincts kicked in and I managed to say that I’d have to clear it with Nightingale first.
They agreed and even let me make the call outside their earshot.
Nightingale thought it was an eminently sensible idea, notwithstanding the fact that neither of us had ever done a formal Falcon assessment before, me because I was too junior and him because in his day such things as assessments and regular case reviews hadn’t been invented. At least, not at the Folly they hadn’t.
“I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking for,” I said.
Nightingale replied that he would immediately repair to the library and see what he could dig up in the way of rural supernatural crime.
“And I shall call Harold,” he said. “This is just the sort of thing he lives for.”
Professor Harold Postmartin being the Folly’s archivist, amateur historian and Oxford don voted least likely to get a four-part documentary series on Channel Four, six years in a row.
“And now that I think of it,” said Nightingale, “it might be worth reaching out to some of our other friends in the demi-monde. Just on the off-chance.”
So I glumly reported back to Edmondson and Windrow that not only would the SAU be happy to do a full Falcon assessment, but we would be tasking our senior civilian analyst and drawing on our covert human intelligence sources—even if some of them weren’t entirely human.
They were so delighted they put me in Edmondson’s office down the hall which, quite apart from having its own dedicated HOLMES II socket, was out of sight of the main inquiry office. There was a brief delay while Windrow got my access enabled and rustled up a HOLMES enabled laptop I could use before they closed the door and let me get on with it.
But get on with what?
Part of the problem with doing a Falcon assessment is that it’s hard to apply professional best practice to a field of law enforcement that most police wouldn’t touch with a one meter extendable baton. Not to mention that the closest the Folly had come to a formal assessment were the times we’d had to tell a senior officer that having occult graffiti sprayed across the crime scene did not make it a Falcon case. Especially if the symbols had been cribbed from Aleister Crowley, The Lord of the Rings or Adventure Time. The only case like that we ever hesitated over was the kanji characters sprayed onto the front of a private school in Highgate, but according to one of Postmartin’s friends at the School of Oriental and African Studies they were from a JRPG called Sakura Wars—very popular in the 1990s.
The problem was that once the government pushed through its major cuts in policing, a lot of officers had got the notion that they might be able to unload anything even vaguely weird onto us.
“Although it is noticeable,” Nightingale had pointed out, “that this never happens if the officer concerned has worked with us before.”
All your cases, I thought, do not belong to us.
So I did what I always did in these situations, and asked myself what Lesley would do—apart from taser me in the back and betray me to the Faceless Man, that is. And what she would do is say—Start with the action list—duh!
A modern major investigation runs off HOLMES II, which is a great big computerized mincing machine into which your investigating officers shovel information and turn the handle in the hope that something edible, or at least admissible in court, will emerge from the other end. In order to keep the machine fed, senior officers assign their junior officers “actions”—interviewing Hannah’s and Nicole’s teachers is an “action,” as is checking the family phone records against the numbers of known sex offenders. The police never saw a noun they didn’t want to turn into a verb, so it quickly became “to action,” as in you action me to undertake a Falcon assessment, I action a Falcon assessment, a Falcon assessment has been actioned and we all action in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine.
Thus, to review a major inquiry is to review the list of “actions,” and their consequences, in the hope that you’ll spot something that thirty-odd highly trained and experienced detectives didn’t. I sat down and made a note in my notebook—Commence Falcon assessment with review of action list—and dated it.
It was lunchtime on day three, Hannah and Nicole had been missing for over fifty hours.
Day One—09:22—first and only 999 call—caller identified himself as Derek Lacey.
I didn’t listen to the sound file, but even from the transcript you can sense him struggling to maintain control. He’d obviously taken a moment to marshal his arguments in the fear that the police wouldn’t take him seriously, because he listed off Nicole’s and Hannah’s ages, the fact that they had left their bedrooms some time during the night, and that none of their friends or relatives had seen them. And he’d clearly impressed the Force Duty Inspector at the Worcester control center, because he in turn had sent all of available D shift directly to Rushpool, headed by PS Robert Collington.
Team D had a TOA (time of arrival) of 09:37 at which point Edmondson, as geographic commander, had been informed and had chosen to take ownership of the operation.
Statistically speaking, in cases involving missing children, abduction by a stranger comes at the bottom of a long list that starts with having simply run off, continues down through staying overnight at a mate’s without telling their parents and, often, hiding somewhere in the house. In fact, a child is much more likely to be murdered by their parents than be abducted by a stranger. So the first set of actions after arrival involved searching the parents’ houses and gathering names and addresses of friends and family.
But Dominic had been right, and the fact that two girls had gone missing from two separate households on the same night must have caught everyone’s eye. Because by quarter past ten, less than an hour after the initial 999 call, the girls had been designated as HIGH RISK MISPERS and the on-call POLSA had been notified. Standby PSU officers were called out in Hereford, Worcester, Kidderminster and Shrewsbury. By lunchtime, a sizable chunk of West Mercia Police’s available manpower had found itself deployed into the area around Rushpool.
By that time the girls’ computers were on their way to High-Tech to be checked for signs of online grooming, and the requisite applications to track their phones in real time had been made. Had this been London, teams of officers would have been poring through hours of CCTV footage. But out in the wilds the surveillance state was unaccountably thin on the ground.
When you deploy for missing children, if you deploy at all, the rule is to deploy fast and in numbers. Even if probability and common sense tells you that they’re going to skip back into their front door later that day. Had they been older, fourteen or over, then West Mercia might have waited another twenty-four hours before literally calling out the dogs. Still, up until six o’clock in the evening, Edmondson probably thought it likely that the girls would return under their own steam.
Then they found the phones. Both immediately identified as belonging to Nicole and Hannah, both with dead batteries. Since an eleven-year-old girl is more likely to relinquish a kidney than her mobile phone, the working hypothesis changed from runaway to abduction and that’s when the fun really started.
Hereford CID was immediately contacted, and the Major Investigation Unit attached to what was now designated OPERATION MANTICORE. Just when most of the detectives had been heading home—they must have loved that. I discovered during a quick trip to the coffee area that despite its fully equipped custody and interview suite, HOLMES capable offices, canteen, helicopter pad, and not forgetting the famous vibrating chairs, Leominster nick normally only housed the safer neighborhood team. It was essentially mothballed against future need—presumably an upsurge in cross border raids by the Welsh. DCI Windrow, Dominic, and all his mates had decamped there from their base in Hereford—which explained why the place was so clean.
The Press Liaison officer contacted the local media only to find that they’d been preempted. Somebody had already been in touch with the Leominster News and Hereford Times, providing details of the two girls’ names and a suitably heart-wrenching photograph of both them in sun hats. I recognized the background—it was definitely the Marstowes’ back garden. I spotted a red swing set I’d seen out the kitchen window. Somebody else had recognized it, too, because the assumption in the report was that Joanne Marstowe had contacted the press directly. It was too late for either of the newspapers to change their headlines, but local radio and BBC regional TV news sent journalists and agreed to run an appeal for information. The local news managers must have taken one look at the photograph of two pretty smiling eleven-year-old white girls in matching sun hats and wept tears of joy. The story went national in about the time it took the editors in London to open the jpeg attached to the e-mail. By the time Inspector Edmondson was briefing all the new hands on deck at ten o’clock, the media was already assembling in the foyer.
I tried to remember what I’d been doing that night, but nothing came to mind.
Searches resumed at first light and there was a flurry of actions from the newly installed MIU, two hundred plus of which were TIEs on RSOs. Impressively, the MIU had completed over a hundred Trace Implicate or Eliminate on Registered Sex Offenders in Herefordshire alone and had farmed out a bunch more to adjacent police forces. As of when I was checking the list there were only three RSOs within two hundred kilometers of Rushpool that hadn’t been checked, and there was a strong suspicion that two of the remaining might be dead.
You can do a keyword search on HOLMES, the utility of which depends on what words you use. I tried, just for the hell of it, magic, wizard, witch, invisible, three different spelling variations of fairy and spent fifteen minutes weeding out a surprisingly large number of references to books, TV and a fancy dress party many of the kids had attended a week before the disappearance. One statement taken from a school friend of Nicole and Hannah’s caught my eye.
R175 H TST GABRIELLA DARRELL MISC
PC TASKER: So Nicole had an invisible friend.
GABRIELLA: Yes.
PC TASKER: Like an imaginary friend?
GABRIELLA: Not really.
MRS. DARRELL: Nicole always was a very imaginative child. Not like Gaby here who’s very sensible. Aren’t you, Gaby? No imaginary friends for you.
I added a restatementing to my action request list on the basis that if you don’t know where you’re going, try as many directions as possible.
By five I’d finished a fast sweep of the action list and took a break. Someone gave me directions to the nearest supermarket, but I got lost and ended up at a huge Morrisons instead. I took the opportunity to stock up on the sort of essentials that Molly wouldn’t think of—bottled water, snacks, fruit and shaving gear that had been manufactured this side of the millennium. Inside the store, the air conditioning was fierce. So I parked myself at the in-store café and called Nightingale to discuss my next move. This had the added advantage of keeping Folly business away from the prying ears of other police officers.
“Nothing jumped out, then?” asked Nightingale.
“Not off the action list,” I said. “The working hypothesis is that they both decided to sneak out of their houses and meet up. And that either they ran away, which is unlikely, or something bad happened to them.”
Nightingale asked why running away was unlikely.
“They didn’t take anything except their phones,” I said. “Runaway kids nearly always take something.” I had, both times, although the first time it had been limited to a peanut butter and jam sandwich and a copy of 2000AD.
“For the moment we should leave the more run of the mill nastiness to our country cousins,” said Nightingale. “You should first establish whether the two girls could have come into contact with something uncanny.”
“Like what?”
“A rogue practitioner,” said Nightingale. “A hedge wizard or witch we don’t know about, or a fae, or demi-fae, or revenant of some sort. Did either of them change their routine behavior or exhibit strange cravings?”
“The child abuse unit will be looking for the same things,” I said.
“Then I suggest you might confer with them,” said Nightingale. “You might also want to have a chat with their teachers and the leaders of the Girl Guides or whatever the equivalent body is these days. Assuming they were Guides. Is there a parish priest?”
“I can find out,” I said, and noticed that a couple of white boys at a nearby table were giving me the side eye.
“A good parish priest often knows the more esoteric aspects of his local history,” said Nightingale. “Or at least they used to.”
They were both dark haired, pasty faced despite the summer. The shorter one had blue eyes and the taller was wearing sunglasses indoors—which told you everything you needed to know, really. The sleeves of their gray and green check shirts were rolled up to reveal the beefy arms of people who actually work for a living. In London I would have pegged them as builders, but out here in the sticks they could have been lumberjacks or sheep shearers for all I knew.
“You might want to talk to Hugh Oswald again,” said Nightingale. “See if he’s noticed anything odd.”
Apart from his creepy daughter, I thought. Although she might be worth talking to, as well.
“It’s a pity we can’t sniff people out like the rivers can,” I said.
“I for one am quite glad that that particular ability appears limited to them,” said Nightingale. “I feel our work has become quite complicated enough as it is. Still, as you say . . .”
The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated—that’s the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don’t get a lot of practical experience. I gave them a quizzical look, just to fuck with them a bit.
They broke eye contact first. The tall one in the sunglasses turned to his friend and said something, then they both looked at me and sniggered.
What are we, I thought, twelve? So I laughed. It wasn’t a genuine laugh but they weren’t to know that. They both stared at me and then turned away when I didn’t break eye contact. I wanted to provoke them. I wanted to give them a smacking they wouldn’t forget.
“Peter?” asked Nightingale and I realized I hadn’t been listening.
At the very least I wanted to show them my warrant card and mess with their preconceptions. But you can’t do that sort of thing, because there’s always a chance you’ll end up in a fight. And then you’ll have to arrest them. Which, never mind the ethical issues surrounding the abuse of power, results in a ton of paperwork. Not to mention I was way off my manor, so it would piss off West Mercia Police who probably felt they had better things to waste their time on right now, thank you very much. So I took a deep breath and looked away.
That’s me—Peter Grant, a credit to his territorial policing agency.
“Sorry sir,” I said. “I was distracted.”
“I asked how you were feeling,” said Nightingale.
“Fine, sir,” I said.
“Glad to hear that,” he said.
I tensed, hearing the chairs scrape as the boys got to their feet, but they passed on the other side of the table and headed toward the main entrance.
“I’d better get back,” I said. “I need to get some actions actioned.”
Outside, the sun was frying the car park and my two friends from the café were attempting to lean nonchalantly against the side of a blue Nissan Micra without burning themselves. I wondered whether they were waiting for me, or just didn’t have anywhere else to go—it’s possible they didn’t know either.
The tall one with the sunglasses lit up a Silk Cut and took an aggressive drag.
Magic has what Dr. Walid, who would be the Folly’s resident man of science if he wasn’t actually resident in a nice Victorian villa in Finchley, would call a deleterious effect on microprocessors. We don’t know why doing a spell can reduce the chip set of your laptop to a fine sand, but since everything useful from your phone to your food mixer is controlled by chips these days it means you have to be careful. But just because you don’t know why something happens doesn’t mean you can’t attempt to quantify its effects.
And once you’ve quantified an effect, it becomes that much easier to weaponize it. All you need to do is modify your werelight a bit with a couple of formae inflectentes and, after about three weeks of trial and error, you have a projectable spell that will burn out every microprocessor within a conveniently small radius.
I’d got some stick from Nightingale, who has this strange idea that his apprentice should know what he’s doing before sticking his finger in the electric socket of the universe. But even he changed his mind when I pointed out that a) it was really just a beefed up werelight and b) you could use it to disable any car fitted with a microprocessor-controlled engine management system—which was pretty much all of them now.
Standing in the baking car park outside Morrisons I came this close to lobbing one into the white boys’ Micra, but even as I rehearsed the forma in my head I remembered the girls’ phones. According to the results summary from forensics, no data had been recoverable from either the phone memories or the SIM cards. But it hadn’t given a cause. There are plenty of things that can ruin your phone, but fewer things that are so thorough that a decent forensics team can’t extract anything useful. And one of those fewer things, I knew from bitter experience, was a burst of magic.
I gave the two boys a happy smile which almost caused the tall one to swallow his cigarette. Then I moved swiftly back to the Asbo, but not so swiftly as to give them the wrong idea.
Back at Leominster nick I called up the exhibit list and found the reports related to both the girls’ mobile phones. They were found at the foot of yet another war memorial, this one a skinny cross set in a raised grassy dais by the B4362 where the lane that runs up parallel to Rushpool to the east switches over to become the lane that runs up the hill to somewhere called Bircher Common. Which appeared to be both the name of a hamlet and your actual piece of open land for public use. I printed the sketch map and photographs of the site which recorded the exact position of the phones. Then I checked the POLSA notes which hypothesized that Hannah and Nicole had taken the footpath west across the fields until they reached Pound Lane, and walked north up the lane until it reached the B4362 where they had become separated from their phones. The crossroad quickly became the loci of two types of searches, one based on the assumption that the girls had traveled on by foot and the second on the assumption that they had voluntarily or involuntarily climbed into a vehicle driven by person or persons unknown.
The POLSA and their search teams were covering option one, MIU were covering option two—which was a horrible job. With no CCTV and limited ANPR—that’s automatic number plate recognition to you, Winston—MIU had to rely on canvassing local witnesses for information about car movements in and out of the area. And even in the countryside nobody’s that nosy at five o’clock in the morning. Still, they had managed to amass a staggering number of car sightings around both Rushpool and the crossroads where the phones were found. These ranged from “some kind of van that might have been white” to “I saw that Citroën belonging to Will Whitton what lives over the hill in Orelton and was up to no good and no mistake.”
Five officers had been assigned to grind their way through these reports. You could tell who they were by the pitiful groans and low moans of despair that floated up from their corner of the incident room.
I noticed from the action list that they were prioritizing the period from four to six in the morning—which puzzled me until I found a cross link to the statement by Nicole’s mother that she had first noticed her daughter missing at five in the morning. When asked why she hadn’t raised the alarm then, she said that Nicole often got up at first light in the summer.
“She likes to watch the sun come up,” she said.
The evidence entry for the girls’ mobiles had contact details for a Kimberly Cidre at the High Tech Crime Unit in Worcester, and I gave her a ring on the basis that if you want something done fast it’s better to talk than to e-mail.
“Can I help you?” Kimberley Cidre had a strong Belfast accent. I suspected Cidre was not her maiden name.
I identified myself and asked about the phones.
“They’re a total loss,” she said. “At first we thought the batteries had been completely drained, but when we changed them they still didn’t work. That’s when we took them apart. We tested all the ICs independently and they were all inoperable.”
“Was there any visible damage?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “No obvious sign of physical damage at all.”
“Have you looked at them under a microscope?”
There was a pause.
“Not yet,” she said. “What would I be looking for?”
The trouble with scientists is that you can’t blind them with science, unless you know more than they do—which, by definition, I didn’t.
“I don’t want to prejudice the results,” I said, which is always a good standby. “But if you spot something, I’d like to send pictures to a specialist in London to have a look.”
“What kind of specialist?”
Explaining that Dr. Walid was a world renowned enterologist would probably just raise more questions than it answered.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just the police, but if we find what we’re looking for I’ll have him call you and explain. How about that?”
There was quite a long pause.
“Is this something to do with UFOs?” asked Cidre.
“No,” I said with complete honesty, for a change. “Do you get a lot of UFOs up here?”
“We get a lot of UFO spotters and a lot of sightings,” she said. “These two facts may be related.”
“As far as I know there are no UFOs involved,” I said. “But if we find one, I’ll let you know.”
Cidre agreed to check the microprocessors and e-mail me images of anything she found.
Looking back, I could have possibly been a little bit firmer about the non-involvement of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Even when you’re part of the investigation you don’t just turn up on the doorstep of a victim’s parents, start asking questions and poking around their bookshelves. First I had to clear the action with DCI Windrow, who told me to clear it with DC Henry Carter who was the lead FLO attached to the Laceys. There was a delay while DC Carter checked with DS Cole as to whether I could be trusted or not—obviously I could, because Windrow gave his blessing. But only if either DS Cole or Carter was with me to hold Victoria Lacey’s hand.
It was getting dark as I drove back to Rushpool and I realized I was finally beginning to understand how the landscape worked. Leominster sits on a plain where two valleys converge. Traveling northwest, the valley of the River Lugg snakes off toward Aymestrey. And, to the north, another valley drains the land around Orelton and the wonderfully named Wooferton. Between them they make a Y shape just like a cartoon character’s slingshot, with the ridge of high land occupied by Croft Castle and Bircher Common forming the elastic band. Rushpool was one of a string of villages that occupied the slopes below the ridge, nestling in the small valleys cut by streams draining into the flat lands.
In late evening the ridge became a shadow looming ahead as you reached the village, with just a couple of lights visible from isolated houses on the slopes. I drove carefully up the main street, the better to avoid any stray journalists.
The Laceys lived in what was, at its core, an honest to god sixteenth-century half-timbered building. It was the sort of place that had been so heavily modified by each succeeding generation that grown conservationists are reduced to weeping because the whole ill-fitting hodgepodge of styles and periods are equally historical and worth preserving. Except for maybe the ugly PVC frame door which filled the Restoration era hooded doorway like a cheap set of plastic dentures. The door was opened by Derek Lacey who didn’t seem pleased to see me and, judging from his breath, had acquired a bottle of whisky since we’d last met.
“You’d better come in,” he said.
Victoria Lacey was sitting at the huge oak kitchen table and idly rotating a half drunk glass of red wine. The remains of a snack—bread, posh cheese and a supermarket salad still half in its plastic container, was spread out between her and the seat that her husband returned to. DC Henry Carter was there to watch over them and reassure the pair that I wasn’t about to pop them in a cauldron and have them for supper.
Victoria had a thin pale face and chestnut brown hair cut into a bob. She was wearing a man’s sized sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal painfully thin wrists and long delicate hands. Her eyes, I saw when she looked up at me, were a very pale blue.
I paid my respects and told them I’d try to be as unobtrusive as possible, but they just nodded vaguely. There was half a bottle of red on the table and they were both reaching for it when I left the kitchen.
Much as I’m a fan of Georgian formalism, I do like a house where you can walk down a flight of three stairs on the ground floor and find yourself in what I supposed I’d have to call a “den.” It certainly wasn’t a library, because it only had a couple of Ikea bookshelves. And if Derek Lacey used it as an office, then he wasn’t in the habit of leaving his work out. There was a Wii attached to an average-sized flat screen TV with two sets of controllers strewn at its base—Hannah and Nicole. I found traces of the girls elsewhere in the room, a stack of board games in dog-eared boxes with sun-bleached covers, a collection of teen magazines plonked on a bookshelf, and a battered copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire wedged into a gap between a pristine edition of Wolf Hall and the film tie-in of Life of Pi.
One corner of the room had a chill that had nothing to do with a physical draft. I felt a waft of dank air and the rattle of some kind of hand-powered machine—a milk churn if I had to guess. As vestigia went, it was about par for a house of this age and nothing to get excited about.
There had been a half-hearted attempt to impose a uniform design on the ground floor of the house, with matt-finished oatmeal walls in a conscious echo of the original wattle and daub, but it fell apart on the first floor. I could tell from the texture that if you scraped the top layer of white, with a hint of peach, off the walls you’d find the history of the families that lived here written in the layers of wallpaper underneath.
More vestigia in the hallway, the click and whirr of a cuckoo clock, the smell of Vicks VapoRub and hot steam—sensations that cut off abruptly inside the master bedroom. A modern king-size bed, sturdy antique wardrobe and a nice mahogany Victorian vanity. The scatter of shoes in the corners told me that Derek and Victoria were still sharing the marital bed.
Further down, there was a musty smelling spare room containing a brass bed with a pink coverlet and a double stack of moving boxes in the corner. Next to that, a bathroom that had been refurbished within the last six months, judging by absence of scale build up in the shower and the lack of discoloration on the back of the imitation brass taps.
Nicole’s own room was bigger than the master bedroom, but an awkward long shape that hinted of two rooms that had been knocked together. It was pleasingly not-pink, but instead wallpapered with subtle lemon yellow and light blue stripes. The furniture was expensive but modern and had taken some punishment around the legs and corners. Again not much in the way of books, just the rest of the Harry Potter set and what looked like textbooks on the fold-down desk. Much less in the way of furry mascots, but stray bits of Lego had worked their way into gaps between the chest of drawers and the skirting board. An obvious gap where the High-Tech Crime unit had had it away with her laptop. A poster of Hunger Games over the bed—Jennifer Lawrence taking aim down the length of an arrow.
I pulled out one of the Harry Potters. It was practically mint, probably unread. I put it back and decided that there wasn’t anything useful here.
“I understand why you have to do these things,” said Victoria Lacey from behind me—I turned to find her in the doorway. “I really wish you didn’t have to.”
“So do I, ma’am,” I said. “Did Nicole have a Kindle or any other kind of eReader?”
“Why?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Why do you want to know?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
“They can get emails and other social media,” I said. “A lot of people don’t realize that. We need to ensure we haven’t overlooked any avenues of communication that might have existed between Nicole and other people.”
“When you say ‘other people,’ you mean pedophiles, don’t you?”
Her lips clamped shut on the end of the sentence. I could see she was trying to say the unthinkable in the hope it wouldn’t be true—it’s a sort of magic thinking, but unfortunately not the kind that works.
“Not just pedophiles,” I said. “Undesirable contacts, estranged parents, dealers, gang members, that sort of thing.” Christ, I thought. Talk about scant comfort.
“That’s your specialty in London, isn’t it?” she said. “Gang violence, that sort of thing.”
“No,” I said. “I check for things that other officers overlook.”
“Because there aren’t any gangs out here,” she said. “I mean, apart from the Travelers and I suppose some of the Poles, but then they don’t live around here as such.” She stopped and stared at me for a moment. “This is a good place to bring up kids, you know. Not like London. I mean, anything can happen in London.”
I asked her if she’d grown up in London herself, but she said she came from Guildford.
“But I lived in London for a couple of years. Before I met Derek,” she said. “He’s from here. I’m from off. That matters up here. But I suppose in London everyone’s from off.”
Except those of us who are from Kentish Town, I thought.
“Derek whisked me up here almost as soon as he heard I was pregnant,” she said. “He already had the house by then, bought it off the church when the village lost its vicar. I’m glad he did, because there’s room for kids out here.” She looked around the room. “Do you think they have missed something?”
I glanced around the room—there were still traces of fingerprint powder around the window frames, the door, and anywhere else an intruder might have touched. I estimated that more forensic time had been spent in that one room than in the last fifty local burglary investigations.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think they have.”
She started to cry then. I’m not even sure she was aware it was happening until she felt the tears trickling down her cheeks. I took a step toward her, but she whirled quickly around and fled.
I went downstairs and let myself out.
The next morning my phone pinged while I was in the shower. It was an e-mail from Kimberly Cidre at the High Tech unit. There was an attached image which even my dinky phone display could expand enough for me to see a familiar pattern of microscopic pits and lesions. I forwarded them on to Dr. Walid but I didn’t need his confirmation.
I know hyperthaumaturgical degradation when I see it.
The phones had been done in by magic.