Foxglove Summer (32 page)

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘I’m just on the way out,’ I said, and with that I beat a hasty retreat. But not before half-inching a couple of empty Pepsi bottles. The consent forms merely specified collected biological sample – it didn’t specify how I had to collect it.

14

Media Compliant

Now, I was pretty sure that the girl currently living with Victoria and Derek Lacey was a changeling, swapped out by a unicorn-employing supernatural person or persons unknown some eleven days previously. But I didn’t have any proof. Yes, she was alarmingly weird. But then so were a lot of children – including, it has to be said, some of my relatives. And, yes, she displayed an ability – the glamour – that I’d assumed resided only with practitioners, Genius Loci like Beverley Brook and the fae. On the other hand, her appearance was unchanged and her own parents fully accepted her as their child. Worse, the media in the form of Sharon Pike, weekend cottage owner and newspaper columnist, had decided that the child was truly Nicole Lacey.

After a careful risk assessment, I determined that rushing in mob-handed and seizing the child would be hazardous, if not actually illegal. In the meantime, I suspected that the girl currently known as Nicole wasn’t facing a substantial risk of anything other than hyperglycaemia.

We were going to have to wait for the DNA tests which, according to Dr Walid, would be ready by the next afternoon at the earliest. I spoke to Nightingale, who said he would ask DCI Windrow to maintain a close watch on ‘Nicole’ and make sure she didn’t wander off anywhere.

‘Any chance of you getting up here?’ I’d asked.

‘That rather depends on how Lesley responds to your last text,’ he’d said. ‘Whatever Inspector Pollock thinks, we are ultimately responsible for Constable May. And it would be risky in the extreme if he tried for an arrest without me present.’

I told Nightingale I couldn’t see Lesley falling for such an obvious trap, but he disagreed.

‘Not consciously,’ he’d said. ‘But nobody changes their allegiance so absolutely overnight – she may be looking for a way back.’

I thought of the Lesley May I knew, who was more decisive than a bag full of judges. I still thought it was unlikely, but what did I know?

Nightingale did agree that if Lesley hadn’t responded within another twenty-four hours, he’d move on site and review my risk assessment in situ – he didn’t say it exactly like that of course.

‘Give it a day,’ he’d actually said. ‘If we still haven’t heard anything, I’ll pop up in the Jag and see what’s what. Abdul assures me that all the blood tests will be completed by then.’

So, once I’d ensured the samples were couriered off, I met up with Beverley, Dominic and Victor two villages over in the back garden of the Boot Inn where I had lightly battered Scottish cod fillet, hand cut chips and garden peas.

It was late enough for the sunlight to be slanting into the garden from the west and be cut into shadows by the shades over the tables and splash on the potted trees arranged along the fence.

‘Are there no just-pub pubs around here?’ I asked.

Dominic blamed Ludlow which, having become a major foodie centre, had raised the pretentions of all the eateries within a fifty miles radius.

‘Even the places in Wales,’ he said.

‘Good for business, if you can get plugged into the supply network,’ said Victor who, bizarrely, turned out to be a vegetarian. ‘I don’t mind raising and slaughtering them,’ he’d said when I asked him about it. ‘I just draw the line at eating them.’ He had the roasted shallot tarte Tatin, roasted pepper, goat’s cheese, artichoke and roasted pepper salad.

‘That’s one too many roasteds in the menu,’ said Dominic.

I checked my mobiles at regular intervals – both of them – the disposable and my second-best Android which Call Me Al had rigged to alert me if anything tripped a detector.

Neither made a sound for the rest of the evening, until me and Beverley were back at the cowshed putting the flagrant back into
in flagrante
when, in accordance with the iron principles of Sod’s Law, my Android rang. Since Beverley was the only one with at least one hand free at the time, she got to the phone first, glared at it, and stopped bouncing long enough to read it.

‘It’s just three numbers – 659,’ she said, over her shoulder.

‘It’s one of the detectors,’ I said, and extricated my right hand from under her bum and held it out. Instead of handing the phone over, she lifted her hips a fraction and pivoted around to face me – a sensation that managed to be both hugely erotic and uncomfortably weird at the same time. When she finally let me have the phone, I confirmed the numbers.

‘I’ve got to check this out,’ I said.

Beverley sighed and flopped forward onto my chest.

It took me ten minutes to get out of the cowshed, and it probably would have been longer if Beverley hadn’t decided that she wanted to come with, and so obligingly dismounted without an argument.

The detector that had gone off-line was the northernmost, planted on the Roman road where the lane from Yatton crossed and became a public footpath. Dominic had attached it amongst the bushes by the stile, so there was a good chance it might have just been vandalised.

In the darkness I could only make out the surrounding hills by the way they blotted out the stars, but according to the map on my tablet the shadow to the west was Pyon Wood and to the east Croft Ambrey, with a waning moon hung above like a banner. The Roman road was a straight grey strip between the black hedgerows. I parked the Asbo on the grass verge and left the hazard lights on. Beverley held the torch while I detached the detector from its mount and carried it back to the car. I cracked open the PVC case to expose the bare innards of the device.

‘That’s a mobile phone,’ said Beverley, leaning over my shoulder to look.

I explained that it was, and that the detector worked on the simple principle that a powerful enough source of magic would break the phone and cause it to stop pinging the network, which would then alert the custom program on my tablet.

‘So basically it only works once,’ she said.

I used a jeweller’s glass to scan the electronics, but I couldn’t see any visible pitting.

‘That’s the trouble with magic,’ I said. ‘It’s slippery stuff.’ I shrugged. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘You could bundle four or five phones together and automatically rotate through them,’ said Beverley, as I bagged and tagged the phone for shipping back to Dr Walid. ‘That would extend the life a bit.’

I installed one of my spare detectors by the stile and packed up.

‘But the switching mechanism can’t be a microprocessor,’ I said. ‘And I haven’t had time to test the effect of magic on transistors yet – you might have to use valves or electromechanical switches.’

‘Do you know why it happens?’ asked Beverley as we drove back to the cowshed.

I admitted that I did not have the faintest idea how magic did anything – let alone why it reduced microprocessors to sand and brains to Swiss cheese.

‘When you do magic . . .’ I said.

‘I don’t do magic,’ said Beverley quickly. ‘You get me? It’s not the same thing.’

‘When you do . . . things that other people can’t do . . .’ I said, ‘it doesn’t damage your phone.’

‘Not unless the waterproofing fails,’ she said.

‘I wonder why that is?’

‘That’s easy,’ said Beverley. ‘I am a natural phenomenon. So I do less damage than you.’

‘Have you visited Covent Garden recently?’ I asked. ‘They’ve almost finished the rebuilding.’

‘That was collateral,’ she said. ‘And entirely your fault.’

The next morning I decided to check out Pyon Wood Camp – I took Miss Natural Phenomenon along with me, so she could tell me what all the plants meant.

‘They mean,’ said Beverley when she saw them, ‘that in lowland Britain if you don’t chop the trees down you get a forest.’

Pyon Wood Camp is a scheduled monument described in the catalogue as a small multivallate Iron Age hill fort. What it looked like was a round hill covered in trees. When I looked up the meaning of the word
multivallate
I found it meant a hill fort with three or more rings of concentric defences. Since the easiest way to start an argument amongst archaeologists is to ask them what purpose hill forts actually served – as defended villages, refuges of last resorts, ritual centres, palaces of tribal chiefs, cattle herding stations – none of that information was particularly useful.

Neither was Beverley Brook.

‘More Silurian limestone,’ she said. ‘Topped by the usual suspects – oak and ash, some beech, a couple of birch.’

It was particularly hot that morning. Victor had complained that the recent hot weather was buggering up his harvesting schedule, but he hoped that some of the rain they’d had in Wales would shift over his way.

‘Not that I want a thunderstorm,’ he’d said. ‘But a shower or two to take the edge off would be nice.’

It was too hot to walk up the shimmering track from the Roman road, so I risked the low slung underside of the Asbo and drove uphill until we reached the spot, plus or minus twenty metres or so, where the Antiquarian map said that the trail into the monument should start. It wasn’t exactly well signposted, and if there was a stile or other public access, me and Beverley must have missed it. In the end we climbed over a fence and slogged through some dense bracken until we reached a close approximation of a path that wound around the hill.

It was close under the shade of the trees and not notably cooler. The air was heavy with a sickly sweet smell that Beverley said was probably the rhododendrons, and the scent of scorched bark and resin that I’d started to think of as overheated forest. Something hooted further up the hill.

‘Wood pigeon,’ said Beverley.

‘I’ve heard that in London,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Beverley slowly, ‘we have birds in London. Many of them of the same species.’

Amongst the trees and undergrowth, the ditches and ramparts were hard to distinguish from the steep slope of the hill. It was only when the trail rounded the north-east corner and we found the entrance that I realised the ramparts, despite obvious damage, were twice my height. We laboured up onto what I supposed must have been the central enclosure, although I couldn’t see it for the trees. And, despite the heat, we decided to follow the path to its bitter end. Drifts of foxglove started to appear amongst the bracken and bramble, growing more frequent until we stepped out into a glade awash with purple. The clearing was almost too circular to be natural, and certainly large enough that it ought to have shown up on Google Earth.

Beverley kicked at something down amongst the foxglove stems. It cracked and splintered – rotten wood.

‘Stump,’ she said. ‘Somebody cleared this area.’

‘The latest imagery on Google Earth was four years ago,’ I said. ‘It must have happened since then. Is it possible that it might be natural?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Beverley. ‘Probably not.’

We worked our way to the centre of the clearing, pushing through the stands of foxglove which seemed taller here than elsewhere, the bells of the flowers larger and more mouth-like as they shivered in the hot, still air. When we stopped I realised that the glade was very quiet. Even the wood pigeon we’d heard earlier seemed muffled and far away.

‘There’s no bees,’ said Beverley. ‘And bees love foxglove.’

Mellissa’s bees had been
avoiding the south-west section of the ridge, from the edge of Bircher Common to where the river is.
They weren’t coming here or to Pokehouse Wood.

‘Feel anything?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘How about you?’

I smelt green stuff, hot and dusty, and sneezed.

‘There’s no castle,’ I said. ‘Hannah was very sure about the castle.’ The child psychologist had continued her gentle interrogation of Hannah. Heroically enduring countless episodes of
Jessie
and more
Yonder Over Yonder
than was probably medically advisable, the psychologist chipped gently away at Hannah’s story, particularly the pink and blue and orange castle which she probably figured for a defence mechanism or a mental block or whatever the psychological term is. Hannah, while growing increasingly fuzzy on every other detail, had stayed firm on the castle.

I thought there had to be a castle somewhere, or at least something vaguely castle-like. But if there was, it certainly wasn’t at Pyon Wood Camp.

I had one spare detector left, so I placed it in the centre of the glade and activated it.

‘Just on the off chance,’ I said.

‘Is your work always this vague?’ asked Beverley.

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Sometimes we really don’t know what we’re doing.’

Beverley had to make what she called a ‘pastoral visit’ to the Steam Fair, so I dropped her off there before heading back towards the industrial park and the redbrick ship shape of Leominster nick. The media were thick around the public side and there was even a knot of photographers at the entrance to the police car park. I made sure I was wearing a suitably solemn face to avoid ‘Police Laugh At Kidnapped Children’ headlines from the
Independent
.

‘There’s going to be a press conference later,’ said Dominic when I asked him about the scrum outside. The broadsheets led with the war in Syria, but the tabloids were having way too much fun with the idea of child-stealing gypsies to let the mere lack of facts get in the way.

‘Copper pipe I’d believe,’ said Dominic. ‘Children, no.’

I asked him what the MIU had come up with, but he told me to watch the press conference like everybody else.

I settled into my assigned space in the territorial policing office and picked up the phone. I called up Croft Castle and asked to talk to whoever it was who managed the forest. They told me his name was Patrick Blackmoor and they gave me his mobile number.

‘The western hemlock was doing really badly,’ Blackmoor said when I asked why they’d clear-felled Pokehouse Wood out of schedule. ‘So we decided to fell early.’