Foxglove Summer (27 page)

‘Where was she when you found her?’ I asked.

‘By the lay-by on the main road,’ said Derek. ‘The one you reach if you go left towards Lucton when you come out of the village.’

I pulled out my phone and got them to pinpoint the location on Google Maps. I think they wanted to avoid the subject, but they couldn’t do that without drawing attention to the fact that that was what they wanted to do.

The location was east of Rushpool, the opposite direction from where Hannah and Nicole were reckoned to have crossed the same road while heading up to Bircher Common.

‘Why do you want to know?’ asked Joanne.

‘Habit,’ I said and took a gulp of wine. ‘It’s the way I’m trained – ask questions first, worry about what the information is for later.’

I didn’t stay much longer after that, and I left the pair of them polishing off a third bottle. I wondered what was going to happen the moment I stepped out the front door and was tempted to double back and peer in through the windows. I decided not to – even the police have to have some standards. And anyway, they might see me and that would end their use as sources of information.

I arrived home at the cowshed to find Beverley rifling through my stuff.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

She was kneeling by my trunks, dressed only in a pair of blue silk knickers and a matching camisole, and systematically laying out the contents on the floor around her.

‘I was languorously awaiting your return,’ she said, ‘but after ten minutes I got bored.’

‘That explains the underwear,’ I said. ‘Which is very nice by the way.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Beverley.

‘But what are you doing in my stuff?’

‘We need a present to give to Hugh,’ she said. ‘In return for what he gave you.’

‘I don’t think he wants anything in return,’ I said.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Beverley. ‘He’s given you the most important thing he owns – that’s an imbalance – you can’t have that. He’s an old man – what if he dies?’

She pulled out the Purdey lightweight two-inch self-opening sidelock shotguns, cracked the breeches and gave them a disturbingly professional once-over.

‘Do you think he’d like these?’ she asked.

I sat down on the bed and started taking off my clothes.

‘I think he’s done with weapons,’ I said. ‘Don’t you?’

I decided to leave my boxers on – a man should maintain a certain amount of mystery after all.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘And Mellissa would only give them to her harem.’

Beverley closed the trunk and looked at me.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘I’m waiting languorously,’ I said. ‘For you to get into the bed.’

‘What make you think I’m still in the mood?’

‘Unlike some people,’ I said, ‘I’m committed to this state of languor. I’ve been putting in the hours. If necessary I can maintain it for an extended period.’

‘I could go back to my room at the Swan,’ she said.

I slowly put my hand behind my head and cocked my left leg provocatively.

‘But then,’ I said, ‘you’d be all alone and I’d still be here being irresistibly languid.’

She made me wait at least a minute, and then she climbed onto the bed with me. There followed some kissing and some grabbing of parts – the details I will not bother to bore you with, except to say that just as we were getting down to business I paused long enough to ask – ‘We’re not going to be, like, fertilising this garden or something are we?’

‘Peter!’ snarled Beverley. ‘Focus!’

Afterwards we lay sweating on top of the duvet, spread-eagled to catch the faint breeze coming in through the door, not touching except where her hand rested on my thigh and my hand covered hers.

‘When you were eleven,’ I said, ‘did you ever sneak out of your house?’

‘All the time,’ said Beverley.

‘Where did you go?’

‘Into the river of course,’ she said. ‘Where else?’

‘You didn’t dance about?’

‘On dry land?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Might have done – don’t know.’

‘Naked?’

‘When I was eleven?’

‘I just wondered if it was a fae thing,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen you swimming around without your kit on.’

‘I know,’ she said and rolled over to face me, propping her head up with her hand. ‘I’ve seen you watching me.’

‘Couldn’t take my eyes off you,’ I said.

She reached out and twirled her finger tips around my belly, making me laugh and gasp at the same time.

‘Children do strange things,’ she said. ‘They don’t have to be different to want to dance around as free as a chimpanzee.’

She swept her hand up to my chest, pushing ahead a little wave of water, my sweat I realised, coalescing in a way that could not be explained by momentum and surface tension.

‘I was naked the first time I saw you – do you remember?’ she asked. Her palm swept across my shoulders like a child gathering material for a sand castle.

‘That was you in the river at Richmond,’ I said. ‘What happened to your wetsuit?’

‘I was at mum’s house and my wetsuit was at my place – when we got the alarm I had to go as I was. We went up the river like crazies – me, Fleet, Chelsea and Effra – if you’d seen us then you’d have freaked big time.’

With a twist of her wrist she held out her hand out palm up, and above it floated a globe of water.

‘We’d chased Father Thames’s little boys back to their boat, and we’re just giving them some lip when down swoops the Jag and the Nightingale comes storming out. I was totally stealthy because, you know, Nightingale . . . Mum’s got views about us getting into too much trouble. The next thing I know I’m seeing this gormless looking boy standing on the shore.’

The globe started to rotate and flatten out slightly.

‘You swore at me,’ I said.

‘I cut myself on a wire cage,’ she said. ‘Some stupid environmental anti-erosion measure or something.’

I extended my hand and concentrated, which wasn’t easy with one of Beverley’s breasts brushing against the side of my chest.
Aqua
was a
forma
I’d only learnt quite recently, but I managed to get a respectable globe of water hovering over my own hand.

‘Why, thank you,’ said Beverley and without any fuss my globe jumped over and merged with hers. She saw my startled look and grinned.

‘How did you do that?’ I asked.

‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ said Beverley, and with an elegant flick of her hand the globe shot up towards the ceiling and exploded in a puff of vapour. A cool mist floated down around us, beading her shoulders and hip and making me shiver.

I could tell she knew I was going to ask again, because she leaned over and kissed me until I’d forgotten what I was going to say. After that one thing led to another, but fortunately Beverley paused long enough to do the vapour thing again so we didn’t collapse from heat exhaustion.

Alas all good things must end – even if only to avoid back strain.

‘And what’s your plan for tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘I’m going high tech.’

12

Passive Data Strategy

‘I knew it was something to do with aliens,’ said the man from the electronics shop whose name turned out to be Albert but apparently I could call him Al.

‘No comment,’ I said, which of course merely confirmed Call Me Al’s most cherished suspicions. He’d done a good job quickly lashing up a batch of Peter Grant’s patented wide-area magic detectors. These consisted of a disposable pay-as-you-go phone, modified to my specifications and mounted inside a brightly coloured plastic box with rounded corners. One third were yellow, another third blue and the rest letter-box red.

I flicked one with my finger – it was heavy duty PVC.

‘Where did you get these?’ I asked.

‘Sports warehouse,’ said Al. ‘They’re children’s floats for swimming pools.’

He’d picked them up on his way back from Birmingham where he’d bought the phones. Reputable shops won’t sell you more than three disposables at a go, but fortunately everyone else will – especially for cash. One of the advantages of being the police is that when you want to buy something slightly dodgy, you generally know where to shop.

There were thirty of the buggers, and they filled up the back of the Asbo. I also kept four phones still in their plastic packaging for use later.

‘Did you see it?’ asked Al, as he helped me carry the magic detectors to the car.

‘See what?’

‘There was a sighting two nights ago up near Croft Ambrey,’ said Al.

We went back into the shop and opened up my laptop and loaded up the tracking software.

‘Multiple witnesses, classic Type V, light source, no visible body,’ said Al as we waited for the diagnostic test to run. He was surprised that it hadn’t made the national papers. ‘But your lot did find those kids that day,’ he said, and implied that he thought the two were related – which of course they were.

The laptop ran through each of the detectors in turn before putting them into passive mode. Being cheap disposables they didn’t have GPS, so I’d have to log each location as I planted them.

‘Aymestrey’s always been a hotspot for close encounters,’ said Al. ‘Some of them very difficult to explain away.’

I asked him if he had a list, and he directed me to a website called UKUFOindex.com where all UFO sightings were indexed and cross-referenced for any member of the UFO community to access. I made a point of noting down the address in my notebook.

We ran one last test to ensure that the detectors were registering on my laptop.

‘Any abductions?’ I asked.

‘Loads,’ he said. ‘But none verified.’

Al, while being a firm believer that extra-terrestrial life had visited Herefordshire, was a firm agnostic on the whole abduction and cattle mutilation thing. Although he lived in hope.

‘Just think what would happen if we had irrefutable proof that we weren’t alone,’ he said. ‘Think what a difference that would make.’

It was about then that I got the idea for the investigation technique that I call, for reasons too geeky to mention, the reverse Nigel Kneale. I paid Al in cash, got his personal mobile number in case I needed a technical consult in the middle of the night, and headed for Leominster nick.

The crowd there had thinned out a bit now that the search was no longer being staged from it. MIU was still stuffed into their overheated office space. Luckily somebody had sprung for an industrial-sized cooling fan with a face the same diameter as a dustbin lid and an unfortunate tendency to blow any unsecured paperwork out the nearest window. If we’d had a green screen we could have shot the live elements to a low budget disaster movie. Edmondson had quite adamantly reasserted control of his own office, but the MIU office manager found me some desk space next door in the territorial policing office.

I was just logging into UKUFOindex.com when Lesley texted me.
Have U gone native yet?

I hadn’t been expecting a call until at least that evening, which meant I spent the next ten minutes trying to open the tough plastic clamshell packaging around one of the spare burner mobiles until finally a PCSO on her lunch break took pity on me and lent me a pair of scissors. Fortunately, disposable phones nearly always come with some charge – enough at least to make my initial response.

No
, I texted back, using the disposable.
But I have been eating sheep.

I had no doubt Lesley would notice that I was using a different phone but the question was, would she figure out why?

While I waited for a response, I dug into UKUFOindex.com and found that in some quarters UFOs were now known as UAPs – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – although adoption of this term had proved contentious. The index was just that, a long catalogue of incidents listed by date without any search function, going back as far the 1940s. A guy believed he’d been abducted in Northumbria and Winston Churchill suppressed reports of UFOs sighted by RAF reconnaissance flights. Herefordshire had its own sighting in the summer of 1942 when there was a report of an aircraft crash near Aymestrey, only once the authorities arrived there was no sign of any wreckage.

The disposable phone pinged.

Does this mean we can talk?

‘We need to push her,’ Inspector Pollock had said when we discussed the last text exchange. ‘She may be reaching out to you because she’s uncomfortable with her current situation. We need to make it easier for her to engage but at the same time you need to push her emotionally. I’m sorry, but that’s just what needs to be done.’

What needs to be done, I thought, and texted
How’s your face?

The 1950s saw UFOs popping up from Southend-on-Sea to the USAF base at Lakenheath, but nothing that I could find in Herefordshire or the surrounds. The 1960s proved to be a time of cosmic significance, at least in the number of UFO sightings all over the country. But it was not until August 1970 that I had my first close encounter. A couple travelling towards Wigmore on the A4110 experienced their car mysteriously stopping and then refusing to restart. Although there were no lights available, the couple claim that a tall humanoid, with big eyes, dressed in long dark robes, held up its hand –
just like a lollipop lady, you know, holding up traffic while the kids cross the road.
They were just about to leave their car to have a closer look when the figure vanished and, miraculously, when they tried the ignition the car restarted.

Herefordshire remained blessedly free of alien intrusion until 1977, when there was a sighting in Hereford itself and then nothing until 2002 when a young girl claimed to have met aliens near Mortimer’s Cross, just south of Aymestrey. I clicked on the hyperlink and was taken to the relevant page and read the account. Unfortunately, the report was obviously a summary, not an original statement. It described a young girl running away from her home in a nearby village and being ‘drawn’ up the
footpath north of Mortimer’s Mill.

I checked the OS map – there was no footpath marked from the water mill, but if you did walk north from there you’d find yourself following the east bank of the River Lugg right into Pokehouse Wood.