I realised that Dr Walid was going to want a full report on Mellissa Oswald when I got home. He’d probably like me to get a tissue sample or lure her down to the UCH in London so he could get one himself. I wondered what possible conversational gambit I could slip that into – Are you certain you’re completely human? Would you like to find out for sure? Then come on down to Dr Walid’s crypto-pathology lab where we put the ‘frank’ back into Frankenstein!
‘I’m sure she could fit you in,’ said Beverley.
‘Did she say if her bees had spotted anything unusual?’
‘Unlike some people, I’m not tactless,’ said Beverley. ‘You just don’t go asking people about their business like that, making assumptions about what they do and how they do it.’ Beverley tapped her finger on her chest. ‘I merely inquired as to whether Mellissa may, or may not have, noticed anything out of the ordinary.’
‘And had she?’
‘She said she couldn’t be sure, but she thinks her boys . . .’
‘Her boys?’ I asked. ‘Are we talking them next door or the buzzy ones?’
‘Her buzzing boys,’ said Beverley. ‘They’ve been avoiding the south-west section of the ridge, from the edge of Bircher Common to where the river is.’
Whatever had killed the mobile phones had been on the edge of that area, and I didn’t need to check my map to know that Stan’s missing stash had been right in the middle.
‘Could she relate it to the missing kids?’
‘If she had, she says she would have told you when you first came.’
‘I can’t go to Windrow or Edmondson with this,’ I said. ‘Even if I persuaded them to change the search area, I don’t think it would be a good idea.’
‘I’m sure she’ll keep her antenna tuned,’ said Beverley. ‘Got any other leads?’
‘Just something I picked up from one of the statements – I’m waiting for Windrow to okay a fresh interview.’
‘In that case, can we—’
My phone rang – it was Dominic.
‘Are you still up at Wyldes?’ he asked.
I told him we were just finishing.
‘One of the search teams found something you might want to look at,’ he said. ‘Just down the road from where you are now.’
‘Is it related to the search?’
‘Honestly,’ said Dominic, ‘I don’t know. I thought you might be able to tell me.’
I may be a city boy, but I’m fairly certain that the greasy purple and red squishy bits are supposed to stay inside the sheep and not be sprayed across a surprisingly large area.
‘Animal attack?’ I asked.
Both Beverley and Dominic gave me pitying looks. Stan, who’d been the one to discover the dead sheep and call in Dominic, actually snorted.
‘Not unless that puma’s come up from Newtown Cross again,’ she said.
We were standing in a large field just off the Roman road near where it crossed the Lugg. The wooded slopes of the ridge rose up to the east and hidden on the reverse side was School Wood and Stan’s late lamented stash. It was even hotter down here in the valley and missing the breeze we’d had up around the Bee House. Nothing really to dispel the smell of rotting sheep.
‘Mind you,’ said Dominic, ‘when it comes to finding new ways to get themselves killed, sheep are bloody geniuses.’
The sheep lay on its side. It had been sheared recently, giving it a forlorn naked look and making it all too easy to spot the bloody gash in its stomach through which most of its innards seemed to have been pulled out. I’m not very fond of animals, even when they’re on their way to the dinner table. But you don’t do policing by holding your nose and looking the other way. I put on my surgical gloves and squatted down to have a look and do my due diligence.
The edges of the wound were ragged, suggesting tearing rather than cutting, and the glistening viscera looked like they’d been dragged out, widening the hole. Had she been caught on a hook of some sort? Agricultural machinery looked pretty fearsome to me. Plenty of dangerously sharp bits of metal attached to ridiculously over-torqued diesel engines – an accident waiting to happen. But I couldn’t see any tyre tracks in the short grass around the body. I got my face as close to the wound as I could, closed my eyes and held my breath.
There was a kind of
vestigia
associated with the body. Very faint, nothing that Toby would get out of his basket for.
‘Do you see any horse tracks around here?’ I asked.
‘Do you mean hoof prints?’ asked Dominic as I stood up.
I told him that, yes, I did in fact mean hoof prints and we all spent five minutes looking around the scene to see if we could find any – with no luck.
‘Why did you think a horse had got into your stash?’ I asked Stan. ‘Were there tracks? A smell?’
‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s just what came into my head when I found it.’
Vestigia
for certain. Which meant what? Something unnatural was buggering about in the countryside, but I hadn’t seen any indication, beyond the dead phones, that it had anything to do with Hannah and Nicole. For all I knew, this was everyday life for country folk. What I needed was some of your actual evidence. Or, failing that, a couple of hours with Hugh’s folklore book.
‘It’s Falcon,’ I said. ‘But it’s not necessarily anything to do with the kids.’
‘Should I call Windrow?’ asked Dominic.
I considered just how much fast talking it would take to explain exactly why I wanted West Mercia Police to put some of their forensic resources into autopsying a sheep, and then phoned Dr Walid.
He said he’d be delighted, and if I could protect the corpse and maybe pick up some samples, he’d send some people over to collect it.
‘What kind of people?’ I asked.
‘There’s a couple of firms that specialise in biohazard removal and forensic preservation,’ said Dr Walid. ‘I consult for them occasionally, and in return they send me anything I might find interesting.’
I got the GPS co-ordinates and texted them to him and he indicated what he wanted in the way of samples. I relayed this to Dominic, who said we should file a report just to be on the safe side.
Beverley said that, although messing with a mutilated sheep seemed like a pile of fun, she was going to take herself down to the pub by the bridge. ‘I’m going to have a quick word with the river,’ she said. ‘Come pick me up when you’re finished.’
‘A quick word with the river?’ asked Dominic once Beverley was gone.
‘I’d tell you, but then you’d have to section me,’ I said. ‘Have you got anything for samples?’
Dominic had a proper Early Evidence Kit in the back of the Nissan, complete with a fingerprint kit, sketchpad and clear plastic evidence bags – the proper ones with individual serialised numbers and a tear-off strip to maintain chain of custody. We took photographs using a high-end digital camera that Stan fetched from her parents’ house.
‘For UFO hunting,’ Dominic told me when Stan was out of earshot.
‘Do we put the entrails back in the sheep?’ I asked. ‘Or put them in a separate bag?’
Nobody had a clue, so I phoned Walid again and he told us to wrap the intestines in plastic sheeting and then place them by the corpse. I’ve done some nasty things in my time, but that was genuinely one of the worst. I never did get the smell of dead sheep out of my clothes.
Once our sheep was bagged and tagged we paid Stan to stay with it until Dr Walid’s people turned up. Well, I was the one that had to cough up the cash because, as Dominic pointed out, I’d declared this a Falcon operation. I made a point of noting it down with the rest of my expenses. Dominic said he’d talk to the farmer while I picked up Beverley.
‘Won’t the farmer mind us taking stuff off his land?’ I asked.
‘You’re joking,’ said Dominic. ‘The farmer has to pay for the safe disposal of animal carcasses – we’re doing him a favour.’
The Riverside Inn was a sprawl of a building that had accreted around a solid sixteenth-century half-timbered core. Its restaurant was well known and it was best, I was informed, to book in advance to avoid disappointment. Fortunately you could get snack type food for eating in the pub garden, although their idea of cheese on toast was mature cheddar melted onto a slab of brioche and topped with mustard seeds and cress. As well as a garden terrace, the inn kept a strip of lawn hard on the riverbank just by the stone bridge and it was there I found Beverley relaxing at a wooden picnic table with the aforementioned posh cheese on toast and an open bottle of Bordeaux. She offered me a glass as I sat down.
‘Try it,’ she said. ‘It’s on the house.’
‘Can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m on duty.’
‘So you are,’ she said, and poured herself another glass.
A smart-looking white girl in a black skirt emerged and on Beverley’s recommendation I had the steak baguette which practically came with a genealogy of the cow and a half-page essay on fresh bread making in Northern Herefordshire. After all that, it was probably just as well that it was delicious if a bit under-seasoned by my standards. Beverley waited till I had a mouthful before asking me to keep an eye out, and without another word she lay down on the bank and stuck her face and head in the water. I swear she stayed in that position for over a minute, her locks waving like seaweed in the current.
I was just about to tap her on the shoulder when she straightened suddenly, an arc of water from her hair spraying back into the car park and landing on the bonnet of an overheated Mondeo where it sizzled.
‘Social call?’ I said.
‘Nobody home,’ said Beverley, flicking out her locks. Water made a sheen on her neck and shoulders and soaked the top of her T-shirt so that the zip of her sports bra poked through the material.
‘Sad really,’ she said.
‘What is?’ I asked, standing clear as Beverley flicked her locks again and tied them back with a waterproof scrunchie.
‘The terrible Teme trio told me about it,’ she said. ‘The spirit of the river was done in by Methodists in Victorian times. That really pissed them off – Miss Tefeidiad said you expect that kind of behaviour from the English, but Welsh boys should have known better.’
My phone pinged and let me know that my restatementing of Nicole and Hannah’s friend had been actioned. I told Beverley, and asked if she wanted to be dropped off somewhere.
‘Can I come to the interview?’ she said.
‘How would I introduce you – “Hello, my name’s Peter Grant. I’m with the police and this is my colleague Beverley Brook who is a small river in South London?” ’
‘You used to introduce me like that,’ said Beverley.
‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know what I know now – did I?’
A2457 H TST GABRIELLA DARRELL RE: INVISIBLE FRIEND MISC
Gabriella –
just call her Gaby, she won’t answer to anything else
– Darrell was a stolid little girl who was either preternaturally dull, on Ritalin, or biding her time to wreak an appalling revenge on her mother for being clingy and overbearing. Her mother Clarissa was short and unhealthily thin with a narrow intense face and, as far as I could tell, no sense of humour whatsoever.
The barn conversion where they lived just beyond the village of Orelton was seriously nice, its spacious rooms laid out in an uncluttered linear sequence with big windows framed in hardwood and lots of earth tones. It was a Channel Four sort of house with a Channel Four vibe. Mr Darrell was CEO of a mid-sized building services company based in Birmingham.
I didn’t need to inquire into their lives since there was already twenty-plus pages worth of information on him and his family, because Gaby claimed to be BFFs with Nicole Lacey and so they had been thoroughly TIEd, IIPed and statemented. West Mercia Police had even gone so far to as check Gaby’s claims about her relationship with the missing girls – and had concluded that they’d been BFs maybe, but BFFs? No way!
‘I’d like to ask you about Nicole’s invisible friend,’ I said.
Gaby opened her mouth, but before she could answer her mum spoke instead.
‘Why do you want to know about that?’
Gaby rolled her eyes and sighed – see what I have to put up with? I winked back and pretty much from that point on we were allies.
‘We’re following up any possible point of contact,’ I said. ‘We like to make sure we haven’t missed anything first time round.’
‘I see,’ she said.
‘Gaby,’ I said. ‘When you talked to my colleague he asked you to make a list of everyone that Hannah and Nicole might know – do you remember that.’
Gaby nodded.
‘And you said that Nicole had an invisible friend – is that right?’
Gaby nodded again. Her mother opened her mouth to speak, but I held up a finger to stop her. She gave me a poisonous look, but she kept her mouth shut.
‘But an invisible friend is not the same as an imaginary friend, is it?’
Gaby nodded – she obviously planned to make me work for this.
‘Did Nicole’s friend have a name?’
Gaby screwed up her face realising, reluctantly, that she was going to have to communicate. ‘Princess Luna,’ she said.
I looked at her mother to see if this meant anything to her, but she shook her head. I turned back to Gaby, but before I could ask another question she asked me why I was brown.
‘Gaby,’ said her mother in a shocked voice.
‘Because my mum’s from Sierra Leone,’ I said.
‘Where’s that?’ asked Gaby.
‘West Africa,’ I said. ‘Did you ever meet Princess Luna?’
Gaby nodded.
‘When was this?’
‘At Hannah’s birthday party,’ she said. ‘Mummy didn’t want me to go.’
‘I thought it started rather late and they had a bonfire,’ said Gaby’s mother. ‘But Little Miss here put up such a stink . . .’ She shrugged.
‘When was this?’ I asked.
‘Mid-March,’ said Gaby’s mother. ‘I could look up the date if you like.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and she fished out her iPhone and started flicking through the calendar.
‘We had sparklers,’ said Gaby.
‘April the 26th,’ said her mother.
I asked where the party had taken place.
‘Rushpool,’ said Gaby’s mum. ‘In that field behind the parish hall.’
‘And they roasted a whole sheep on a spit,’ said Gaby. ‘And I got grease all over my fingers.’