Foxglove Summer (19 page)

‘Anything interesting?’

‘The sheep itself is your bog standard North Country Mule, a cross between Swaledale and a Border Leicester – a breed known for its meat and for being even more gleckit than ordinary sheep. I’ve sent some tissue samples to the lab just to be sure.’

‘Any sign of magical contact?’

‘Nothing in gross physical terms. I sectioned the brain, such as it was, but there was no sign of hyperthaumaturgical degradation. It was a remarkably healthy sheep – apart from the great big hole in its belly, of course. That was cause of death, by the way. In case you were wondering.’

‘Could you reconstruct the injury?’

‘Well, it’s never easy just going by the crime scene photographs. But at a guess I’d say it was struck in the belly, impaled, then lifted bodily and thrown some distance. That’s how its guts got spread over such large area.’

‘Are you saying it was gored?’ I asked. ‘By a bull or a goat?’

‘I’ve met some tough goats, but nothing big enough to fling a full grown sheep three metres or so,’ said Dr Walid. ‘And there’s only one piercing wound, so I doubt it was a bull or even a cow – they can get quite territorial, you know.’

I asked what the weapon had been like.

‘At least sixty centimetres long, circular cross section and tapering to a sharp point,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Possibly a spiral configuration.’

‘Like a narwhale’s horn?’

‘Aye,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Just like that.’

‘So you think it’s a unicorn?’

‘I wouldn’t like to jump to conclusions,’ he said. ‘Not without more evidence.’

‘But?’

‘If you achieve nothing else,’ he said, ‘get me a tissue sample.’

Assuming Princess Luna was real, and not a physical manifestation of something incorporeal. There hadn’t been hoof prints at Stan’s stash and none around the stabbed sheep. And why would a unicorn stab a sheep, anyway?

The girls had let Princess Luna lick the mutton juice from their fingers.

Carnivorous unicorns, I thought. And if it did raid Stan’s stash, a meat-eating unicorn that was blissed out on Benzedrine and diazepam and agricultural diesel oil. There were certain ‘things’ I knew that navigated the exciting boundary between corporeal and incorporeal existence. Ghosts, revenants like my friend Mr Punch, and certain types of Genius Loci. They all had one thing in common in that whatever work-around for the law of thermodynamics they thought they had, sooner or later they had to get their power from somewhere.
Vestigium
was a source. But even better was a bit of raw magic.

And that’s when I came up with a cunning plan – one of my better ones, if I do say so myself.

‘Got to go, Abdul,’ I said. ‘I’ve just had a bright idea.’

Just before I hung up I think he might have said ‘god be merciful’, but I couldn’t be sure.

I called Windrow and cleared my plan with him and Edmondson, who clearly thought I was bonkers, but by that point were getting used to my little ways. Dominic was once again volunteered as liaison, under the condition I explain the plan to him myself.

‘Do you have any confidence this will work?’ asked Windrow.

‘Honestly, sir,’ I said, ‘I don’t know – but if something supernatural is actively working against us, then I suggest it’s about time we took a more aggressively proactive approach.’

Windrow gave that last sentence the mirthless chuckle it deserved and wished me luck.

Then I called Beverley.

‘Want to come out tonight?’ I asked.

‘What are we doing?’

‘Unicorn hunting,’ I said.

‘Aren’t they an endangered species?’

‘That depends on whether they’ve been helping abduct kids,’ I said. ‘Don’t it?’

*

It took about thirty seconds on the internet to find a shop in Leominster that sold what they called ‘second user computers’, five minutes to specify what I wanted, and at least another fifteen minutes to come up with a plausible explanation for what I wanted it for. Then I drove into town, found a café that steadfastly refused to provide a genealogy for its sausages and had a proper fry-up. While I was doing that, I wrote down the specifications for the next job I wanted to do – that would have taken much longer to detail verbally, and even longer to bullshit away.

‘So what kind of science experiment is it?’ asked the man in the shop as I inspected the devices. They’d done a good job and had gone so far as to add a tiny red LED on the end of each one to show when the power was on.

‘I’m looking to see whether high-tension electrical cables really disrupt microprocessors,’ I said. ‘What did you use for the casing?’

The man was a bit taller than me, with an elegantly clipped black beard that was at odds with his polyester-mix beige T-shirt that had the shop’s logo on the front.

‘Plastic cricket bats,’ he said. ‘Kid’s size.’

I tested each one carefully and then paid for them.

‘You’re really out looking for UFOs, aren’t you?’ said the man.

‘You got me,’ I said.

‘Those kids,’ said the man. ‘You don’t think they were abducted, do you? By aliens?’

‘God, I hope not,’ I said. ‘My life’s complicated enough already.’

I handed him handwritten specifications and waited while he read them so that I could clarify a few points and help with the niceties of cursive script.

‘Is this supposed to be a detection grid?’ he asked.

I told him it was, and he asked me what I was hoping to detect.

‘Things that aren’t normally there,’ I said, and he nodded as if this made sense.

‘I’ll have to go to Birmingham to get the gear,’ he said. ‘I can have them ready in two days.’

I paid the guy, packed my stuff, and drove on to the nick to inform Dominic of his role in the festivities.

Strangely, he was less than enthusiastic about me involving his boyfriend.

‘We need his Nissan to get us up the rough bits on Bircher Common,’ I said. ‘And we need someone to drive it.’

‘And that’s not me, because . . .’

‘Because you and me are going to be proceeding down the Mortimer Trail and seeing if we can’t attract something supernatural,’ I said.

‘Have you cleared this with the bosses?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘Submitted an operational plan, objectives analysis, risk assessment. The whole thing.’

‘And what did they say?’ asked Dominic.

‘They wanted me to take someone from the MIU to keep an eye on things.’

‘And that would be me?’

‘Yep.’

‘We’re going to be walking through the woods at night?’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘It’s just I’m not that fond of the great outdoors,’ said Dominic.

‘But I thought you were a country boy,’ I said. ‘You grew up in a small village.’

‘Yeah, and as soon as I was old enough I moved to the city.’

‘You moved to Hereford,’ I said. ‘That’s not quite the same thing.’

‘Yes it is. We’ve got a cathedral
and
an Anne Summers,’ said Dominic. ‘That makes us a city.’

‘Anne Summers?’

‘It’s right on the square and everything,’ said Dominic.

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t your boyfriend have a farm to live on?’

‘Sore point,’ said Dominic. ‘And, anyway, what makes you think we’ll attract anything supernatural?’

‘For one thing, tonight it’s going to be a full moon,’ I said. ‘Also because I will be doing magical things.’

‘Your name is Baldrick,’ said Dominic. ‘And I claim my ten pounds.’

One thing old jazzmen and old police officers both agree on is that it’s important to get your rest in when and where you can. Which is why I drove back to the cowshed, had another shower to cool off, lay down on the bed in my underwear and tried not to think for a bit.

It was hot, even with the doors open. But a little bit of a breeze touched the curtains and brought in the smell of grass and a sweeter smell that I thought I now recognised as cowslip in bloom, although it could have been silage for all I knew.

There were a couple of strands of dusty spider web hanging from one edge of the ceiling. Dominic’s mum needed to invest in a proper extension duster or at least learn how to put a J-cloth on a stick.

I lay on my back and let the ceiling go in and out of focus.

My phone pinged – number withheld.

Do you think they were abducted by fairies?

I sat up and took a deep breath to calm my nerves. Then I logged the call, contacted the DPS team on a separate phone to give them a heads up, and then texted back.

Why do you think fairies?

Who else?

Y not people?

No other leads.

This made me pause. It was the sort of sloppy thinking that Lesley, had she caught me doing it, would have pointed out – just because you don’t know something is there doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

And how would she know that we didn’t have any leads?

I called Inspector Pollock at the DPS.

‘She’s got a line into the secure net,’ I said. ‘Or access to someone with access privileges.’

‘Is it you?’ asked Pollock.

‘Nope,’ I said.

‘Of course not,’ said Pollock. ‘Because that would make my life easier.’

But not mine, I thought. I so hated being on the wrong side of the interview table.

‘If she’s following the same pattern as last time,’ said Pollock, ‘she’ll make one more response before changing SIMs – try to make the next question count.’

I thought about it for a bit, and then I thought about the tree outside in the garden and the futility of anger.

I miss you
, I texted.

I waited, but she didn’t respond before it was time to go out that evening.

Dominic’s boyfriend was named Victor Lowell and was one of the new breed of farmers who got their market price updates via Twitter and drove their tractors listening to 50 Cent. He had floppy blond hair and the posh accent of someone who was privately educated but never got the memo about having to pretend to be just one of the blokes. He also owned the land he farmed which made him, notionally, the richest person I’d ever met.

‘Not that I could sell it,’ he shouted over the Nissan Technical’s engine as he gunned it up the flinty trail to Whiteway Head. ‘It’s been in the family for, oh . . . months.’

Dominic groaned – this was obviously an old joke.

‘You’re not a farming family then?’ said Beverley.

‘Oh, it’s a long sad history of farmers. It’s just that I’m the first one to own the land I farm,’ he said. ‘My uncle was a tenant, but my father ran off to London where he made a pile in property. Then I came back and bought the land.’

‘He lied to me when we met,’ said Dominic. ‘Said he was a stockbroker.’

‘People have such extraordinary prejudices,’ said Victor airily.

We’d come up the slope before sunset to give Victor a bit of daylight to drive back down in. Whiteway Head, I saw, was a saddle between the high points of the ridge to east and west. It was the logical place to cross if you didn’t want to schlepp around either end. There was also a clear route of descent on the escarpment side, although I personally wouldn’t want to carry a sack of salt down that slope.

We’d brought sandwiches from Dominic’s mum’s and bottles of water, so we had an impromptu picnic, picking a site at the top of the ridge that gave us a good view across the valley.

The sky overhead was the same hot blue it had been since I arrived in Herefordshire, but to the west the sun was hidden behind a huge bank of grey and blue clouds that were piling up on the horizon.

‘The Brecon Beacons,’ said Victor. ‘The Met Office are issuing a severe weather warning. Could cause some flooding downstream of the Lugg.’

I looked at Beverley, who shrugged.

‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘It’s not my part of the world.’

The last of the sunlight seemed to leak out from under the clouds to wash over the valley below. I could just see the A4110 as it crossed the Lugg – a typical Roman straight line aimed at what Dominic identified as Wigmore.
Imposing themselves on the landscape
– they’d always called it that on
Time Team
. Especially the beardy Iron and Bronze Age specialists –
The Romans imposed themselves on the landscape.
Or, I thought, they wanted to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

Dominic pointed out Leinthall Earls and the white angular scar of the limestone quarry that spread up the hillside behind it. Fields covered the bottom of the valley with silvery stands of conifers on the higher slopes. To the north-east I saw the last red of the sun flash off the copper dome at the top of Hugh Oswald’s tower. I wondered if the bees were still out and about, or whether they’d retreated to that vast hive under the dome.

Did Mellissa listen to them, or watch over them? Did she sleep up there? There was a thought. Did she dance in front of them, shaking her honey-maker back and forth to tell them where the best flowers were?

We ate chicken tikka masala sandwiches and drank coffee from the big military flasks I’d found in the trunks. Dominic kissed Victor goodbye and we watched the big Nissan rumble and lurch its way down the hill.

The moon rose in the east, swollen and full, but I made everyone wait until it was dark before we approached the gate into the forest.

‘Do you think it will make a difference?’ asked Beverley as I held the gate open for her and Dominic.

‘I just don’t want to have to come back and do this again,’ I said.

In the moonlight the logging track was a straight milky line between the dark ranks of conifers on either side. I warned Beverley and Dominic to turn off their phones and pulled out the first of my mini cricket bats and turned it on. The LED glowed red in the darkness.

‘What does that do?’ asked Dominic.

I considered telling him that it saved my brain by providing a power source external to my precious grey matter, but then I’d have to explain everything else.

‘Helps me cast spells,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ said Dominic. ‘Wait – magic spells?’

I cast a simple
lux
impello
combo which put a yellowish werelight about two metres over my head where, hopefully, it would bob about after me like a balloon, only brightly lit. The LED on the cricket bat started to flicker.