Foxglove Summer (7 page)

‘Who’s this?’ asked Stan. She was dressed in a blue boiler suit with the top half undone and tied around her waist by the arms, and a grubby purple T-shirt with the OCP logo on it. If I’d met her while on patrol in London I’d have tagged her on general principles, but she wouldn’t have stood out. I realised that out here in the sticks I didn’t know what was normal. Maybe everybody dressed like that.

‘This is Peter,’ said Dominic. ‘He’s up from London.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ The words came out slowly, as if Stan was pissed and having to concentrate to speak clearly. I wondered just how badly she’d come off that bike.

‘Are you going to show us what you found, or what?’ asked Dominic.

Stan stared at me for a moment – her eyes were a pale grey and her right eyelid had a noticeable droop.

‘What about him?’ asked Stan.

‘Peter’s from the Met,’ said Dominic. ‘When he’s finished up here he’s going straight home. He’s not interested in any of your little crimes and misdemeanours.’

Stan’s head flopped forward as if it had suddenly got too heavy for her neck.

‘Okay,’ she said.

After about ten seconds of us all standing there like Muppets I looked at Dominic, who shrugged and indicated that we should wait. Half a minute later Stan’s head came up and, as if someone had wound her key a couple of times, she told us to follow her into the woods.

We trooped off behind her into waist-high bracken, down something that was not so much a path as a statistical variation in the density of the undergrowth. Despite the shade from the trees the air was warm and humid, and I was just thinking about taking my jacket off when Stan halted in front of a great wall of rhododendron bushes.

‘It’s in here,’ she said, before crouching down and crawling into a narrow gap. Reluctantly, I followed her into a short leafy tunnel that smelt like cheap air freshener, which opened up into a small clearing surrounded on three sides by more rhododendron bushes and on the fourth by a stumpy deciduous tree with shaggy leaves and branches that were so bent and twisted that its canopy brushed the ground. The clearing itself was an unusually regular rectangular shape as a result of being, I recognised, the foundation of a small building. At one end was a blackened fireplace defined by a circle of half bricks and large stones, and at the other a raised concrete plinth – a coal bunker or cesspit or something utilitarian like that. The cement floor had been exposed long enough for a couple of centimetres of powdery grey soil to build up on top.

‘Nobody can find this place,’ said Stan proudly.

Only someone obviously had, because Stan showed us the cast-iron metal door mounted in the side of the plinth – it looked like the rubbish chute at my parents’ flats. Streamers of plastic, green, white and transparent, drooped from the edges of the door – the remains of carrier bags. Stan pulled on the door, which opened with a creak to reveal more strips of plastic and an evil smell – old meat and rotting paper. There looked to be quite a large void behind the door, but I wasn’t that keen to investigate.

‘What did you keep in there?’ I asked.

‘My stash,’ said Stan.

‘Yeah, but what was in your stash?’ I asked.

‘Bennies, some blues, some billy whizz, a bit of deer, a couple of coneys and some red.’

Bennies, blues and billy whizz I knew – Benzedrine, diazepam and amphetamines. I asked Dominic what the rest was.

‘You know,’ said Dominic. ‘Deer as in Bambi, coneys is rabbits and red is agricultural diesel. Stan’s been siphoning it out of her dad’s tractor, haven’t you, Stan?’

She bobbed her head. I wondered what agricultural diesel was, but didn’t want to look stupid so I didn’t ask.

‘When do you think the stuff was nicked?’ I asked.

‘I found it like this on Thursday,’ said Stan. ‘Afternoon.’ She twirled a curl of hair around her finger. ‘About five.’

The morning the kids were discovered missing – Day One.

‘And when was the last time you came up here before that?’ asked Dominic, who’d obviously been thinking the same thing as me.

‘Wednesday,’ said Stan and stopped when she saw I’d taken out my notebook and was writing things down. For the police, if it isn’t written down it didn’t happen. And, if the inquiry went pear shaped, questions would be asked. I wasn’t going to risk any confusion about who said what to whom – mate or no mate.

‘Morning or afternoon?’ I asked.

Dominic made encouraging noises and Stan admitted that she’d checked the stash at around seven that evening. A really horrible thought occurred to me then.

‘Have you checked to see if,’ I hesitated, ‘anybody is in there?’

Stan shook her head.

I looked at Dominic and nodded at the yawning hatch. He groaned.

‘She’s your mate,’ I said.

Dominic sighed, pulled a neat little pencil torch from his jacket pocket and dutifully stuck his head inside. I heard a muffled ‘Fuck!’ followed by coughing and then he whipped his head back out again.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Thank god. And, Stan, do not be storing food down there in future. It’s disgusting and probably really unhealthy.’

‘We’re going to have to report this,’ I said and Dominic nodded.

Stan stuck out her lower lip.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘So the search teams don’t waste their time on it when they get here,’ said Dominic.

‘You think they’ll come up here, then?’ asked Stan.

‘The teams will be here by tomorrow’ said Dominic.

‘Oh,’ said Stan. ‘You’re still going to help. Right?’

‘Help with what?’ I asked.

Stan made a little helpless gesture at the gaping hatch.

‘They stole my stash,’ she said.

‘What?’ I said. ‘All the illegal stuff you had hidden away so that the law didn’t catch you?’

‘Rabbits isn’t illegal,’ mumbled Stan.

‘Who do you think took your stuff?’ asked Dominic.

‘Thought it might have been a pony,’ said Stan.

‘Why would a pony get into your stash?’ I asked.

‘They’re a bugger for food,’ she said.

I asked Dominic if there were any ponies nearby.

‘There are some a couple of fields over,’ he said. ‘More down the hill towards Aymestrey. But I’ve never heard of them drinking diesel before.’

‘What about the drugs?’ I said. ‘What would diazepam even do to a horse?’

We both looked at Stan, who shrugged.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve never given it to a horse.’

‘Maybe we should notify local vets,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t a horse,’ said Stan. ‘I had the door wired shut.’

She showed us the black iron loops on the door and the frame – remnants of a deadbolt, I thought. Stan said that she always pushed a double loop of heavy gauge steel wire through the loops and then twisted it to keep it shut. I asked where the wire was and she showed me where the unwound strands had been dumped. I picked them up and had a look – they hadn’t been cut or melted through or, as far as I could tell, been exposed to magic. In fact there was bugger all in the way of
vestigia
around the stash at all.
Vestigia
being the trace that gets left behind when magic happens.

Flora, your actual growing things, retain
vestigia
really badly and this makes the countryside, leaving aside poetry, not a very magical place. This caused a great deal of consternation to the more Romantic practitioners of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Particularly Polidori, who spent a great deal of time trying to prove that natural things in their wild and untamed state were inherently magical. He went bonkers in the end, although that could have been a result of spending too much time with Byron and the Shelleys. His big claim to fame, beyond writing the first ever vampire novel, is his work attempting to classify where whatever it is that powers magic comes from. He called it
potentia
because there’s nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact that you’re making it up as you go along.

He was amongst the first to postulate that things other than animals must generate
potentia
. Forests, for example, would produce
potentia silvestris
and rivers
potentia fluvialis
. And it is from these sources that the gods and goddesses and spirits of a locality gain their strength.

I’ve stood in the presence of Father Thames and felt his influence wash over me like an incoming tide. I’ve seen a lesser river goddess send a wall of water from one end of Covent Garden market to the other. That’s sixty tonnes of water over a distance of thirty metres – that’s a lot of power, at least 70 megawatts – about what you get from a jet engine at full throttle. And I nearly kissed her just after she’d done it too – makes you think, doesn’t it?

We know that power has to come from somewhere, and Polidori’s theories were as good as anyone else’s. But sticking a Latin tag on a theory doesn’t make it true. Not true in a way that matters.

If there had been some kind of supernatural activity, I would at least have expected to get something off the door, or the concrete of the foundations, both of which stayed stubbornly neutral. Absence of evidence, as any good archaeologist will tell you, is not the same as evidence of absence – I made a note to ask Nightingale about how things went in the countryside.

‘What’re you looking for?’ asked Stan.

‘I was looking to see if there are any tracks,’ I said.

‘There aren’t any tracks,’ said Stan. ‘If there’d been any tracks I’d have seen them.’

‘Stan’s good with tracks,’ said Dominic.

The sun had got high enough to shine directly onto the back of my neck.

‘So, no tracks?’

‘Nothing,’ said Stan.

‘So why did you think a pony did it?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Stan. ‘That was just the first thing that came into my head when I found it open.’

We were all silent for a moment – something high- pitched yodelled out amongst the trees. The heat seemed to grow around us. I realised that my bottle of water was still in the Nissan.

‘To recap,’ I said. ‘Your stash is gone but the kids are not stuck down there. It must have been people not animals. But they didn’t leave any tracks.’

‘I thought it might be aliens,’ said Stan. ‘Because there’s no tracks.’ She made a motion with her arm – like a claw dangling down.

‘Let’s hope their saucer runs on diesel, then,’ said Dominic. ‘Otherwise I think they’re going to be a bit disappointed.’

I used an app on my phone to get a GPS fix on our location and then I suggested that we head back to the Nissan before calling it in.

‘How are we going to explain what we were doing here?’ asked Dominic as he crawled back out of the rhododendrons. I said he could blame it on me doing my due diligence. ‘I thought that was the plan.’

Dominic admitted that this was true, but still wanted to know what I was going to say.

‘Tell them that I wanted to check on a World War Two military installation,’ I said. It wasn’t that much of a stretch. The foundations had been the right dimensions for a standard hut and had been made from the poor quality ‘economy concrete’ used for throwing up pillboxes and air raid shelters in a hurry. In the scramble that followed the fall of France in 1940 a lot of sites had just fallen off the bureaucratic radar.

‘Is that part of your brief, then?’ asked Dominic.

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘There are all sorts of secrets from back then.’

We pushed our way out of the bracken and back onto the path. It was getting hotter and I could smell the warm resin scent of the trees around me.
Potentia silvestris
, Polidori called the power derived from a forest, the power from whence sprang the antlered gods of Celtic myth, Lemus, Cernunnos and Herne the Hunted – although probably not the last one.

‘Who uses this path?’ I asked.

‘Dog walkers,’ said Dominic.

‘Ramblers,’ said Stan.

‘Tourists,’ said Dominic, and explained that it was part of the Mortimer Trail, which stretched from Ludlow in the North East, along the ridge that overlooked Rushpool, down into Aymestrey where it crossed the River Lugg and then up to Wigmore, famed in song and story as the ancestral seat of the Mortimer Family. Dominic was a bit hazy about who the Mortimers were, beyond them being powerful Marcher Lords during the middle ages and getting seriously involved in the War of the Roses.

‘We did do them in school,’ he said. ‘But I’ve forgotten most of it.’

The trail was popular with casual ramblers because of its relative ease and the number of excellent pubs along the route.

‘And ufologists,’ said Stan.

‘Bit of a hotspot,’ said Dominic.

‘Window area,’ said Stan.

There having been a spate of sightings ten years previously, including lights in the sky, cars mysteriously breaking down and a cattle molestation, although Dominic admitted that there might have been an alternative explanation for the last.

‘We used to have UFO parties,’ said Dominic, in which apparently there was the traditional drinking of the cheap cider, bouts of vomiting and occasional snogging – hopefully not in that order.

‘Ever had a close encounter?’ I asked Stan before I could stop myself.

‘Yeah,’ said Stan. ‘But I don’t like to talk about it.’

We reached where we’d parked the Nissan Technical. Dominic offered Stan a lift but she said she was fine walking home. She lived with her family on the other side of the ridge near somewhere called Yatton. I watched as she lurched off down the track, making the occasional zigzag and halting every so often to get her bearings.

‘She went headfirst into a tree,’ said Dominic. ‘Spent six months in hospital. The doctors were amazed she walked out on her own feet – everything after that is a bonus.’

Yeah, I thought, that’s a mate you’re going to go to the wall for.

Despite Dominic having parked it partially in the shade, a gust of hot foetid air struck us in the face when we opened the Nissan’s doors. Underneath the aroma of dried shit I could smell rotting vegetables and half- melted plastic.

‘Christ, Dominic, what does your boyfriend do for a living?’

‘He’s a farmer,’ said Dominic, as if that explained everything.