Foxglove Summer (13 page)

‘It was a difficult time,’ I said.

‘It was the Thames Valley,’ she said. ‘Not the moon.’

My phone rang – it was Dominic.

‘Guess who I’ve found,’ he said.

The interview room at Leominster’s cell block was as clean and as unused as the rest of the station. It was also missing the table that we in the Met have long come to see as an indispensable prop to bang papers on, push cigarettes across, make coffee rings on and, in extremis, put our head down on for a quick kip while no one was looking. Instead, there were two rows of three chairs bolted so that one row faced the other – just over an easy punching distance apart. There was nowhere to put papers or support one of those yellow legal pads while making notes. The briefs must hate it – which, speaking as police, I definitely saw as a feature not a bug.

Dominic who, unlike me, had done a couple of PIP courses (Professionalising Investigation Process) in interviewing, said that the open set-up allowed you to see the suspect’s – sorry, the interview subject’s – whole body language. You’d be surprised how many people nervously tap their foot when being questioned and how often the frequency of the tapping depends on how close to the truth you are.

Our ‘interview subject’ had brown hair, small narrow-set blue eyes and an unfortunate nose – he also had a foot tap that just wouldn’t quit. He looked like someone who knew he’d been a naughty boy.

Which was how Dominic had tracked him down, by asking himself what kind of no-good would someone have to be up to not to want to help the police with their inquiries. Given the quiet rural nature of the area, the list was distressingly long, ranging from sheep rustling, poaching, agricultural vehicle theft – a top of the line tractor being more expensive than a Lamborghini and much easier to sell in Eastern Europe – to fly-tipping and public indecency. Even hardened criminals, especially those that consider themselves the salt of the earth trying to get by, will come forward on cases involving missing kids. But none had. And, besides, a quick check revealed that nothing majorly criminal had occurred that night. Dominic figured that if it wasn’t fear of prosecution it might be sexual shame. And since Bircher Common, just up the lane from where the phones were found, was the local dogging site he concentrated his initial efforts on cars sighted accessing the common late that night. Fortunately, some of the locals, fed up with having their beauty sleep disrupted by the nocturnal revelries, had taken to noting down number plates. Fifteen minutes on the computer had got him a list of names and addresses and, by the time I was fetching Beverley out of captivity, he was knocking at the front door of the first on the list. One Russell Banks of Green Lane, Leominster.

Mr Banks had taken one look at Dominic’s warrant card and blurted out that it was in fact him who had left the phones at the crossroad, but he didn’t have anything to do with those missing kids, he’d never do anything to harm a kid for god’s sake, and please don’t tell the wife where he was that night.

‘Obviously,’ said Dominic, ‘the missus wasn’t a participant in our Russ’s escapades.’

The interview room was part of the custody suite downstairs and so had thick walls, making it remarkably cool compared to the rest of the nick. Even so, Russell Banks’s grey and blue check button-down shirt showed dark sweat patches under the armpits.

Dominic explained to Russell that he wasn’t under arrest but, for his own protection, the interview was being recorded on audio and video. And that any time he could just ask to leave. He said he was fine but could he have some water? I passed him a bottle of Highland Spring that we had in a picnic cooler. His hand was trembling.

‘We just want to know about the phones,’ said Dominic.

Russell nodded. ‘I found them,’ he said.

‘Where did you find them?’ asked Dominic.

‘Just short of the Mill,’ said Russell, which seemed to mean something to Dominic, if not to me.

‘Where were they?’ he asked. ‘Exactly?’

‘By the side of the road,’ he said. ‘On the verge like, just lying there and I thought it was strange but didn’t know it had anything to do with those missing girls, you know. Didn’t even know there
were
missing girls, until the next day when I heard it on the radio, like.’ His leg was practically a blur.

‘Why did you get out of the car?’ I asked.

His head snapped round to look at me.

‘What?’

‘You said you found the phones on the verge – correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’d have to have got out of your car – yes?’

I personally would have gone with stopping for a slash, but I don’t think Russ was really thinking that clearly. We were pretty certain we knew roughly where he’d been, but members of the public have an unnerving tendency to switch straight from lying to your face to telling you what they think you want to hear – with no intervening period of veracity at all. That’s fine when you’re looking for them to put their hand up to some crimes and boost your clear-up statistics. But when the lives of two kids depends on the accuracy of the statement, you tend to be a bit more thorough.

He started to say something, but then closed his mouth suddenly and looked at Dominic in mute appeal.

‘So,’ said Dominic cheerily. ‘Where did you really find them?’

He told us the truth, although it took ages to pry all the sordid details out. Which just goes to show that if you want a confession, use a telephone book – but if you want the truth, you’ve got to put in the hours.

Our Russell had been out enjoying the pleasures of alfresco voyeurism and public sex on Bircher Common with likeminded individuals. Having satiated his carnal desires, he’d made his way back to where he’d parked his car and spotted, when he turned on his headlights, the phones by a gate into the woods. Thinking that one of his fellow swingers had lost them during the throes of passion, he left them at the war memorial in the hope that their owners would find them there – this being the accepted practice, apparently.

‘Does you good to see such neighbourliness at work,’ I said.

‘I bet you don’t get that kind of community spirit in the big city,’ said Dominic.

It took us another couple of hours to winkle out the names of the participants he’d recognised, and descriptions of others – ‘fabulous blonde’, ‘short hairy guy’ and ‘let’s just say he was lucky we were all doing it in the dark.’ Plus makes and models of their cars. This was all going to generate a ton of actions that would be dumped on a bevy of constables who would set forth to TIE every single one. I suspected the dogging scene in North Herefordshire was about to suffer a serious blow. People would just have to go back to having sex indoors for a change.

Fortunately for me and Dominic, what with me being a specialist officer, we could leave that to others.

‘We need you to take us to the exact spot where you found the phones,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ said Russell. ‘When do you want to do that?’

‘How much daylight do we have left?’ I asked Dominic.

‘A couple of hours.’

‘How about right now?’ I said.

I hadn’t thought the West Mercia Police were quite ready for Beverley, so just before my little tête-à-tête with Russell Banks I’d dropped her off at the Swan in the Rushes in Rushpool, and suggested that once we’d finished for the day Dominic might be able to help her with accommodation.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said. ‘I can take care of myself.’

I would have offered to put her up in the cowshed, but that sort of thing can be misconstrued. Or to be honest, accurately construed. And I didn’t think I wanted to go there.

Dominic put Russell in his boyfriend’s truck and I followed on in the Asbo as we drove back to Rushpool, up through the village, across the main road and up yet another narrow lane which twisted onto the ridge. We passed a rather fine cottage with a neat thatched roof, rattled across a cattle grid and parked in the open space beyond, just long enough for me to transfer into the truck. Then we proceeded up a flinty track that was rough enough to eat the bottom chassis of any family hatchback.

‘And you drove up here in your car?’ I asked Russell.

He said everyone did, which meant to my mind you could track all these doggers by their frequent trips to the garage. Dominic’s boyfriend’s Nissan made short work of the rough track, as it probably did of wild animals and anti-personnel mines. We climbed towards the ridge with woods on our left and a wide stretch of short grass to our right. After five hundred metres or so we ran out of car-destroying track and set out directly over the grass.

‘And you came all the way up here?’ I asked as the Nissan bumped and squeaked on its suspension.

‘Yes,’ said Russell.

‘In the dark?’

‘Yes.’

‘Boy, you really must have been desperate,’ I said.

‘You get a better class of people at the top of the common,’ he said. ‘There’s too many weirdos at the bottom.’

Russell directed us to a point just short of the ridge line where the fence that separated the common from the woodland was pierced by a five-bar gate, a wooden side gate and a wooden sign bearing the National Trust crest and a trail marker.

‘This is part of the Mortimer Trail,’ said Dominic.

We got out of the truck and Russell showed me where he’d found the phones – just on the bare patch that ramblers’ feet had worn in the grass in front of the wooden gate. I wasn’t going to get anything off that, but the metal was everything an investigatory wizard might hope for. I placed my palms on the top rail, trying not to make it look too theatrical, and attempted to sort through the random sense impressions, stray thoughts, sounds and fantasies that are definitely not
vestigia
. And for a moment I thought the gate was clean, until I realised what it was I was sensing. Nightingale once described
vestigia
as being like the after-image you get in your eyes after looking at a bright light, but what I felt at the gate was different. It was more like stepping out of a cool house on a bright sunny day – for a moment everything is a confusion of light and warmth, and then your senses adjust. Something powerful had happened around that gate and blotted out any other traces with the magical equivalent of white noise.

I didn’t like to commit without corroboration, but I was willing to bet that whatever had happened to the phones had happened right where I was standing.

‘This is the place,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Dominic.

‘Edmondson’s going to want a POLSA up here,’ I said. ‘Before it gets dark.’

Dominic pulled out his phone and called in to the nick while I did a slow turn on the spot to see whether anything jumped out. Up on the ridge there was a cool breeze that lazily stirred the grass and the odd clump of bracken. I could hear bird song and far in the distance the lawn-mower hum of a power tool. The sky was powder blue and cloudless – not even a contrail.

I heard Dominic explaining to Windrow that I was certain that the phones had been abandoned at this particular spot. I noticed he didn’t mention the M word or call it Falcon. Nightingale says that conspiracies of silence are the only kind of conspiracies that stand the test of time.

‘Is this place important?’ I asked Russell.

‘It’s the Whiteway Head,’ said Russell. ‘This is where all the ancient track-ways cross.’

If I squinted at the dry yellow grass I could sort of see what he meant. The Mortimer Trail came out of its gate and ran west to east, and there was definitely another track crossing it north to south. I went to where I judged the centre of the crossroads was, got on my hands and knees and lowered my face towards the grass.

I was briefly distracted by Russell asking Dominic whether I was praying to Mecca, but I’ve done this procedure at Piccadilly Circus so it was only for a moment. The short grass was prickly under my palms and filled my nostrils with its vaguely sick-making smell. I idly chased Beverley across the meadows of my mind before letting that go and for a moment I thought there was nothing to sense.

Then suddenly I felt it. Very quiet but very deep, the crack-crack of chisels in stone and the heavy slap of men carrying weight on their shoulders, grunting and sweating and the thirsty smell of salt. You do get
vestigia
in the countryside, I thought, only it seeps in deep and lies there like water under a dry riverbed.

And there was something else, a greasy tension that I remembered from when the Stadtkrone broke open at the top of Skygarden Tower and filled the air with magic. The Romantics had been right. There was power out here amongst all the green stuff – Polidori’s
potentia naturalis
.

I broke out Dominic’s map. Stan’s raided stash was down the Mortimer Trail to the west, Rushpool was along the track to the south, and across a valley to the north at the top of the next ridge was Hugh Oswald’s house – less than fifteen hundred metres as the bee flies.

6

Stakeholder Engagement

The next morning I called Beverley as soon as the sun touched the front of the cowshed – she wasn’t best pleased.

‘If you’re going to stay,’ I said, ‘you’re going to work.’

She was waiting for me in the gravel car park behind the Swan in the Rushes, wearing a pair of high-waisted khaki army trousers and a purple T-shirt with the words I’M FROM HERE STUPID written across the chest. In one hand she had what I learnt later was a genuine army surplus gas mask case, and in the other a mug of coffee.

I opened the passenger door and gestured her in.

‘Just a sec,’ she said, and drained her mug. Then, holding it straight out towards the inn, she called out a name.

A young blonde photographer in skinny jeans and a red sweatshirt trotted out of the inn, smiled, took the mug and trotted back in. I gave Beverley the stare when she got in the car, but she just ignored me.

‘You’re not supposed to do that,’ I said.

‘If you’re going to get me up this early in the morning, then you don’t get to complain when I smooth off some of the rough edges.’