Foxglove Summer (18 page)

But according to the dates we’d seen on the sign, the trees had only been halfway to maturity before they were felled. ‘That would have been a serious loss of revenue, and I doubt the Forestry Commission would have liked it.’

‘And that’s what’s weird, is it?’ I asked.

‘I told you it wasn’t the kind of weird you wanted,’ said Beverley. ‘What do you want to do now?’

I looked back the way we’d come. The squared-off tower of Aymestrey’s church was visible on the other side of the river, and up the road by the bridge I could see the half-timbered jumble that was the Riverside Inn. It was hot and exposed out amongst the seedlings and the air was still and close. It was tempting just to walk back down, step into the bar and a have a beer or nine. I turned to find Beverley looking at me with concern.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘Let’s go up a bit,’ I said.

So we followed the trail as it climbed diagonally across the upper slope of what would be, in another twenty years or so, the ancient Pokehouse Wood. We got a taste of what it might look like when the path turned left into a mature belt of deciduous trees. Near the far edge of the trees the path got steep enough that you ended up using your hands to navigate the last bit, and that meant my eyes were just at the right level to spot the little strip of pink hanging from a strand of the barbed-wire fence, just to the right of the stile.

It was a centimetre wide and about six long. Thick pink cotton, the same shade as that of the Capri pants that Nicole Lacey was thought to have been wearing when she left her house. I froze and told Beverley to stop moving. We’d have to be careful backtracking down the path to avoid contaminating the scene any further.

I leaned forward, put my hand over my mouth, and got as close as I dared. When I was sure there wasn’t any detectable
vestigia
I leant back and swore.

‘What is it?’ asked Beverley.

I nodded at the strip of cloth. Along one side there was a distinctive reddish-brown stain.

We’re the police. We’re accustomed to disappointment. But I’ve never been in a room full of so many dispirited coppers as we had at the evening briefing on Day 6.

Windrow and Edmondson were good, but there was no disguising the litany of non-results. There had been sightings everywhere across the UK, Europe and beyond. Police were turning out from Aberdeen to Marseilles, which was heartening while at the same time being totally futile. In a case involving missing children the good news/bad news routine is always, the bad news is – we haven’t found them yet, and the good news is – we haven’t found them yet . . .

But we
had
found a strip of pink cloth. Less than two minutes after I’d called it in, a helicopter had gone overhead and less than ten minutes after that the lead elements of the search team in Aymestrey had arrived, red-faced, sweating and proving that they were much fitter than I was. They helped secure the site, but as the numbers started to pile up me and Beverley made a tactical retreat.

Windrow and Edmondson invited me down to the nick where we had a two-hour discussion about what led me up that particular path at that particular time. The problem being that a search team had done the whole length of the Mortimer Trail on Day 2 and that strip of pink fabric had not been there when they did it.

When this was reported at the briefing a ripple went through the ranks. I knew what they were thinking – a kidnapping, a plucky but futile escape attempt, recapture by the kidnapper, followed by panic. Followed, with remorseless logic, by death and disposal.

When it was over I slipped out onto the terrace to clear my head.

It was still close enough to sunset for the sky to be dark blue rather than black, but it was already cooler. There was a distinct breeze coming from the west and with it snatches of James Brown and the hum of generators – the drone of a funfair as unmistakable as a bagpipe warming up. Much closer below me I could hear the restless murmur of the media pack as they lapped at the walls of the station.

My phone pinged. The caller ID showed ‘withheld’ but I knew who it was.

Y haven’t you found girls yet?

Beverley was waiting for me outside the cowshed – which would have been encouraging on just about any other night. The door was open and the light was on, casting a yellow rectangle across the bottom of the garden and into the empty orchard beyond.

Either I’d left the door open or Beverley had broken in.

‘Dominic’s mum gave me the spare keys,’ she said.

‘Did you have a good rummage?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’m going to bed. You can do what you like.’

‘You’re fucking unnatural, you are,’ she said,

‘Oh, don’t start.’

She stepped over into my line of sight.

‘I understand you’ve got self-control and all that,’ she said. ‘I get it. But you’re just . . . fucking unnatural, Peter.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You can come to bed too, but I’m still going to go to sleep.’

‘Is that what you think I’m talking about?’ Beverley folded her arms across her chest.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you just tell me?’

‘You had your hands on the Faceless Man,’ she said. ‘And your best friend stabbed you in the back and you’re just like “Oh well, you win some, you lose some – ho ho ho.” Which is fucking unnatural.’

‘And you think this is helping?’

‘I think it would be useful if you got just a little bit angry,’ she said. ‘I’m not asking you to turn green and go on a rampage but, you know, expressing a little bit of displeasure would not be inappropriate given the circumstances.’

‘Like what you’d have done, yeah?’ I said, because I’m terminally stupid. ‘Throw a strop – flood out a few homes?’

‘That’s different,’ said Beverley matter of factly. ‘And, anyway, sometimes it’s you getting angry and sometimes it’s exceptionally heavy rainfall in your catchment area. To be honest, it can be tricky telling the two apart. But that’s me, isn’t it? I’m a goddess, Peter, a creature of temperament and whimsy. I’m supposed to be arbitrary and mercurial – it’s practically my job description. And this isn’t about me.’

‘What do you want me to do, Bev? Anything for a quiet life.’

Beverley turned and pointed down at a solitary tree that stood by the garden fence. It was squat and a bit twisty; something deciduous is the best I can do.

‘Why don’t you blow up the tree?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Give it a lightning bolt, rip it up by its roots, knock it down – set it on fire?’ She trailed off.

‘What’s it ever done to me?’ I asked.

‘It’s a tree,’ said Beverley.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

‘They’re not short of trees round here,’ she said. ‘They’re not going to miss it. And in case you’re worried, nobody’s living in it or mystically attached to it. Take some of that anger and let it rip – you’ll feel better.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Yeah, you can,’ she said.

‘I can’t.’

‘What is wrong with you?’

‘I can’t,’ I said slowly. ‘It doesn’t fucking work that way, okay? It’s not about anger, or love or the power of fricking friendship. It’s about concentration, about control.’ It’s hard enough to make a
forma
when you’re hungry, let alone when you’re angry. ‘So you can see that as a form of cathartic release it’s a little bit shit.’

Beverley tipped her head to one side and gave me a long look.

‘Okay,’ she said and cast around at the base of the tree and came up with a section of branch a shade longer than a baseball bat – she held it out to me. ‘Hit it with a stick instead.’

‘If I hit the tree,’ I said, ‘will you get off my back?’

‘Maybe.’

She smiled as I took the branch. The full moon hovered over the roof of the bungalow and I remembered half dreaming the empty orchard full of trees. I strode up to the tree, swung one handed and the impact jarred the branch loose from my fingers.

‘That’s pathetic,’ called Beverley.

I scooped up the branch and brandished it at the tree.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I know you trees are up to something.’

And then I smacked it hard with the branch, keeping my grip loose so that I wouldn’t let go this time – it did make a satisfying thwack.

‘Now, I thought I was dreaming last night,’ I said. ‘But I wasn’t, was I?’

Thwack.

‘They were ghost trees . . .’

Thwack.

‘Weren’t they? Because people leave a trace behind them. So why shouldn’t trees?’

Smack – a fragment of bark flew off the trunk.

‘It doesn’t have to be a big trace, because you’re there for bloody years – aren’t you?’

Smack.

‘But you can’t talk because you’re a fucking tree, so really this whole fucking enhanced interrogation shit is a waste of time.’ I lowered my branch. ‘As if it wasn’t always a waste of time.’

I hit the bloody thing as hard as I could, hard enough to numb the palms of my hands, hard enough that the crack echoed off the old wall. Because it’s always a waste of time, all those rushed, angry stupid things you do. They never solve the problems. Because in real life that rush of adrenaline and rage just makes you dumb and seeing red just leads you up the steps to court for something aggravated – assault, battery, stupidity.

I hit the tree again and it hurt my hands even worse.

Because getting angry doesn’t help, or weeping or pleading or just fucking trying to be reasonable. Because she lost her face, man. Because that had to be like having your identity ripped away. Because you’re looking in the mirror and a hideous stranger is staring back. And what would I do if I was her, if I was given that choice? – like there would even be a decision. And getting angry doesn’t bring back her face or unmake the choice that she made. Any more than it made a difference when Dad wouldn’t get out of bed or when Mum just flat out told you that your stuff was needed by somebody else. When the people you need stuff from are more interested in something else.

At some point the stick broke.

There were probably manly tears.

Beverley Brook may have put me to bed, or it’s possible I might have done it myself, just as I’ve always done.

I woke up to find the curtains open and my bed bathed in sunshine.

I got into the shower and the hot water stung my palms. There were scrapes and cuts across both my hands.

‘You think this is bad,’ I told the reflection in the bathroom mirror. ‘You should see the other guy.’

When I got out of the shower I rolled my shoulders and stretched my neck. I felt better, but there was still a stone in my chest when I thought of Lesley. Some things aren’t fixed by a couple of hours of primal screaming – or whatever that was I’d been doing the night before.

It was Day 7 – Hannah and Nicole were still missing.

Me-time was over. There was work to be done.

8

Proactive Measures

First question to ask yourself is – what are you good for? West Mercia Police didn’t need me to beat the bushes because they had everyone from Grampian Search and Rescue to the SAS doing that. They didn’t need me holding the hands of the parents, even though I bet DS Cole would have paid me quite a lot of money to do so, and they really didn’t need me handling the media. What I was was the only Falcon-qualified officer in the area and, along with my specialist civilian support, i.e. Beverley, I was best deployed concentrating on my area of expertise.

The second question to ask yourself is – what the fuck do I do next? Since weird shit was what I was there for, I decided I should work on the assumption that weird shit was what had happened.

We knew that the girls had got up, dressed themselves, and left their separate homes under their own steam. There was no sign of forced entry, and I hadn’t detected
vestigia
in their rooms. Assume they were lured out, or possibly one was lured out and then lured the other one out. Assume the luring was done by something supernatural and in trots suspect number one – Princess Luna. Invisible horse-shaped friend, possibly a unicorn, possibly only visible in moonlight – the physics of which I didn’t even want to think about.

Closest Princess Luna sighting to the village was at Hannah’s birthday party, so stick a virtual pin in the field behind the village hall. Assume the girls go gambolling after My Invisible Pony – following the moon, which had been in its first quarter that night. They wouldn’t have walked on the roads, not least because of the danger of being run over by alfresco sex maniacs and, besides, Dominic said that village kids went across the fields – and their paths were not necessarily the ones that were marked on the OS map.

So, up by paths unseen to Whiteway Head – although it must have been a reasonably direct route if the timings were going to make any sense – where something definitely magical happened, and blew both their phones.

Now, I reckoned that they’d met a third party there, perhaps a friend of Princess Luna or maybe an owner, and that would be the point where the girls’ fun-filled frolic went sour.

I called up Leominster nick and they confirmed that while they’d had trouble getting a precise DNA match between the blood stain on the pink cotton with hair samples recovered from Nicole’s room, a second round of tests using swabs taken from Victoria and Derek Lacey had confirmed a definite parental match. The high probability, the lab had said, was that the blood had belonged to Nicole Lacey.

Which meant that they had gone west down either the Mortimer Trail or the logging road that ran parallel to it, and had probably stayed in that area for at least three days before Nicole had caught her leg on the barbed-wire fence above Pokehouse Wood. A place famous as the abode of fairies – and a mere hop, skip and a jump from where we’d found the dead sheep.

I called Dr Walid and asked whether he’d finished his autopsy.

‘Hello, Peter,’ he said. ‘How’re you bearing up?’

I told him I was fine.

‘Wonderful bit of mutton you sent me,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Finished it up this morning. Thought you might like the results.’