Nicole’s own room was bigger than the master bedroom, but an awkward long shape that hinted of two rooms that had been knocked together. It was pleasingly not-pink, but instead wallpapered with subtle lemon yellow and light blue stripes. The furniture was expensive but modern and had taken some punishment around the legs and corners. Again not much in the way of books, just the rest of the Harry Potter set and what looked like textbooks on the fold-down desk. Much less in the way of furry mascots, but stray bits of Lego had worked their way into gaps between the chest of drawers and the skirting board. An obvious gap where the High-Tech Crime unit had had it away with her laptop. A poster of
Hunger Games
over the bed – Jennifer Lawrence taking aim down the length of an arrow.
I pulled out one of the Harry Potters. It was practically mint, probably unread. I put it back and decided that there wasn’t anything useful here.
‘I understand why you have to do these things,’ said Victoria Lacey from behind me – I turned to find her in the doorway. ‘I really wish you didn’t have to.’
‘So do I, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Did Nicole have a Kindle or any other kind of eReader?’
‘Why?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
‘They can get emails and other social media,’ I said. ‘A lot of people don’t realise that. We need to ensure we haven’t overlooked any avenues of communication that might have existed between Nicole and other people.’
‘When you say “other people” you mean paedophiles, don’t you?’
Her lips clamped shut on the end of the sentence. I could see she was trying to say the unthinkable in the hope it wouldn’t be true – it’s a sort of magic thinking, but unfortunately not the kind that works.
‘Not just paedophiles,’ I said. ‘Undesirable contacts, estranged parents, dealers, gang members, that sort of thing.’ Christ, I thought. Talk about scant comfort.
‘That’s your speciality in London, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Gang violence, that sort of thing.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I check for things that other officers overlook.’
‘Because there aren’t any gangs out here,’ she said. ‘I mean, apart from the Travellers and I suppose some of the Poles, but then they don’t live around here as such.’ She stopped and stared at me for a moment. ‘This is a good place to bring up kids, you know. Not like London. I mean, anything can happen in London.’
I asked her if she’d grown up in London herself, but she said she came from Guildford.
‘But I lived in London for a couple of years. Before I met Derek,’ she said. ‘He’s from here. I’m from
off
. That matters up here. But I suppose in London everyone’s from
off
.’
Except those of us who are from Kentish Town, I thought.
‘Derek whisked me up here almost as soon as he heard I was pregnant,’ she said. ‘He already had the house by then, bought it off the church when the village lost its vicar. I’m glad he did, because there’s room for kids out here.’ She looked around the room. ‘Do you think they have missed something?’
I glanced around the room – there were still traces of fingerprint powder around the window frames, the door, and anywhere else an intruder might have touched. I estimated that more forensic time had been spent in that one room than in the last fifty local burglary investigations.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they have.’
She started to cry then. I’m not even sure she was aware it was happening until she felt the tears trickling down her cheeks. I took a step towards her, but she whirled quickly around and fled.
I went downstairs and let myself out.
The next morning my phone pinged while I was in the shower. It was an email from Kimberly Cidre at the High Tech unit. There was an attached image which even my dinky phone display could expand enough for me to see a familiar pattern of microscopic pits and lesions. I forwarded them on to Dr Walid but I didn’t need his confirmation.
I know hyperthaumaturgical degradation when I see it.
The phones had been done in by magic.
Customer Facing
‘Now you’re beginning to freak me out,’ said Dominic as I squatted down to get my face close to the old stone of the war memorial. ‘I still don’t see what you need me for.’
‘Local guide,’ I said.
It was late enough for the search teams to be out, but early enough for the air to still be cool and fresh. Stone retains
vestigia
longer than anything except certain types of plastic, but I’d wanted to check first thing and not waste any time. Magic powerful enough to damage a phone would have left a trace on the monument had it happened here. I know this because I’ve done experiments in a controlled setting to determine accurately the persistence of
vestigia
following a magical event. Or at least as accurately as you can using your own perception and that of a short-haired terrier called Toby.
‘Whatever happened to the phones,’ I said, ‘didn’t happen here.’
It hadn’t happened at the Lacey house either. Or, and I’d double checked that morning, at the Marstowe house. I was facing the possibility that I might just have to knock on every door in the village and have a sniff around. This is where it would have been useful to have another practitioner to split the work with.
‘So you think this is a Falcon case?’ asked Dominic.
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But there’s no point me going to your governor until I’ve got something worth telling him.’
‘He’s going to want to know either way,’ said Dominic.
Just then a helicopter clattered right over our heads, the lowest I’d ever seen an aircraft not coming into land. It was a militarised Eurocopter Dauphin in army camouflage. When it banked to head up the ridge we caught the edge of its rotor wash – it was that low.
‘Eight Flight,’ said Dominic smugly. ‘Special Air Service.’ He grinned at the expression on my face. ‘Finally,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if anything out here was going to impress you.’
‘Are they joining the search?’ I asked.
‘They’ve been in it from the start,’ said Dominic. ‘One of the perks of operating in Herefordshire – the SAS tend to pitch in on these sort of cases.’
Magic only damages microprocessors when they’re powered, which meant that whatever happened to the girls’ phones happened when they were switched on. But practically the first thing you do with a high priority MISPER is call their service provider and get the snail trail – the track the phone leaves when it’s on. That data is kept for three days, but on the night the girls vanished both phones went off the air within five minutes of each other at around ten o’clock. The girls’ bedtime.
That was worrying. Because if person or persons unknown had told the girls to turn off their phones, then it displayed a disturbing level of forensic awareness.
‘If you were an eleven-year-old girl, what would you turn your phone on for?’ I asked.
‘Send a text?’
I thought about it. ‘Both at the same time?’
‘Tweet maybe,’ said Dominic. ‘Because OMG you’ll never believe what just happened.’
Records showed that there hadn’t been a text or a tweet, but perhaps whatever made them turn on their phones destroyed them almost immediately.
Accidentally or deliberately? It just went round and round.
Right, I thought. If you can’t be clever, then at least you can be thorough.
So I called DCI Windrow and provided exactly enough information to complicate his investigation and not enough to help in a material way. I told him that I was working on the hypothesis that whatever had happened to their phones happened on their way to the crossroad where they were abandoned. I said I needed to do a survey of the whole village so he lent me Dominic, since he was a local boy who people would talk to, and off we went.
There are one hundred and seven separate dwellings in Rushpool, and we quickly fell into a pattern where Dominic distracted the homeowner/resident/dog while I slipped off to do what Dominic started calling my voodoo shit. At least until I told him to stop calling it that, and he switched to calling it psychic stuff, which wasn’t much better.
About a quarter of the houses were empty, with their occupants on holiday abroad. Many of the rest had middle-aged or older couples, some on early retirement, others who commuted into a town for work. One of the things that struck me was the lack of young children. Go house to house in a street or estate block in London and you’d have been neck deep in rug rats. But in the village there were a lot of spare rooms, a lot of trim gardens, and no abandoned Tonka toys or Lego punji sticks hidden in the grass.
We paused for a cup of tea in the shade of big tree with a reddish-brown trunk whose canopy spread out like something from a Chinese illustration. The man who made us the tea was called Alec and worked from home as a software engineer. His wife taught in a private school outside Hereford. Both their kids were grown up and moved to London. Their garden was on a terrace that overlooked the churchyard and, beyond that, the twist of the valley as it dropped down towards Leominster. Big trees in a dozen shades of green and brown created a patchwork of light and shade down the lane. It was as quiet as London only gets at dawn on a summer Sunday or in post-apocalyptic movies.
Me and Dominic drank our tea in silence and got on with the job.
During the whole pointless process not one resident refused to let us in or objected to us looking around, which I found creepy because there’s always one. But Dominic said no.
‘Not in the countryside,’ he said.
‘Community spirit?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That and everyone would know that they hadn’t co-operated, which people would find suspicious. In a village that sort of thing sticks for, like, generations.’
Do something frequently enough and you quickly learn to streamline. I worked out early how to identify good
vestigia
-retaining stone items, and how to snatch a few moments of quiet to get a read. I considered teaching Dominic – anyone can do it as long as you have someone to start you off. But I figured Nightingale would have views about it. Even so, I got it down to about ten minutes a house, with just half an hour for the two farms that lay adjacent to the main village.
There was a ton of
vestigia
at the farms. The smell of new-mown grass in a barn conversion, the snort and snuffle of horses by a stone wall halfway down the main lane. Somebody had been really miserable about two hundred years ago in the kitchen of a bungalow – a neat trick, since I judged the place to have been built in the mid-70s. Nothing striking, nothing recent. It was all background. Less activity than I would get from a street in Haringey.
At midday we stopped off for refs at Dominic’s mum’s bungalow. She was out serving refreshments of her own to the search teams, so we raided her stupendously large American fridge, which was the size of a cryogenic pod and had an ice maker and everything. It was also ridiculously full for one old lady overseeing a totally theoretical B&B business.
‘Half my family stops in here of an evening,’ said Dominic when I asked about it. ‘I think she sees more of us now than when we were all living in the same house.’
I put together a German salami sandwich with sliced tomatoes and lettuce that had
Produce of Spain
on its packaging. The stoneground wholemeal bread, Dominic said, was from a bakery in Hereford. ‘I bought it the day before yesterday.’
While we ate, Dominic pulled up the Ordnance Survey map of the area on his tablet.
‘You’re pretty sure the . . .’ He looked at me for a clue but I was too busy chewing. ‘. . . the “magical event” didn’t happen in the village – right?’
I nodded.
‘What if the phones were dumped after the event by somebody other than the kids?’
I swallowed. ‘Like a kidnapper?’
‘That, or a third party who found the phones and dropped them off at the crossroads to be found.’
‘To throw us off?’
‘Or because they didn’t want anyone to know they were in the area,’ said Dominic.
‘But this has been on TV for two days,’ I said. ‘If they weren’t the kidnapper, wouldn’t they have come forward by now?’
‘You know it doesn’t work like that,’ said Dominic.
He was right. Members of the public were famously crap at volunteering information if they thought it might drop them in the shit – even in a serious case like missing children. They could vacillate for days, and often they tried to pass on the information in some devious roundabout way.
‘You’re thinking they might have called the hotline already?’ I said.
‘Yep,’ said Dominic.
In a case like this there had to have been a thousand calls by now. But the good news was that some other poor sod would have already done the basic follow-up work.
My phone rang and when I checked it was Beverley’s number.
I answered and said, ‘Hi, Bev.’
‘Would this be Constable Grant?’ asked a woman with a Welsh accent.
I said it was.
‘My name is Miss Teveyddyadd,’ she said. ‘I believe we have a friend of yours here that needs to be picked up.’
‘Picked up from where?’ I asked.
Miss Teveyddyadd told me. And while it wasn’t either a hospital or a police station, I wasn’t sure it might not be worse. I told her that I’d be right there.
‘I have to run an errand,’ I told Dominic.
‘Do you want me to come?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think I’d better do this one myself. You start going through the call-ins and I’ll join you as soon as I get this sorted.’
Little Hereford is a collection of houses and a couple of pubs that lies fifteen minutes’ drive east of Rushpool in the valley of the River Teme. My GPS turned me off the main road just before I reached the stone bridge and past an orchard to the Westbury Caravan Park. It was a touring park, which meant that it catered for the kind of caravans that people use to clog up the roads in the summer and not the aluminium house substitutes with the suspiciously vestigial wheels. The nice white lady in the camp office looked up from her paperwork and asked if she could help me.