‘It’s about time we got in there,’ said Edmondson. ‘Are you ready?’
‘One more cigarette,’ said Windrow.
Andy had reached the point where he was going to keep going until someone told him he could stop. Even in the bright morning sunshine he looked grey and tired. The next search was staging at Bircher Common, where there was enough room for police and volunteers to park. I took Andy Marstowe aside behind a Peugeot Van with battenberg visibility strips and a West Midlands Police crest, and asked him whether he knew anything about Nicole Lacey’s invisible friend. He just stared at me blankly and said he didn’t know what I was talking about. I’d have preferred it if he’d demanded to know why I was wasting his time. Which just shows, you should never wish for things you don’t really want to get.
‘What the fuck is this bullshit?’
Derek Lacey stared at me after I asked him the same thing. He was red-faced and erratic and, if I was any judge, about a day away from coming apart at the seams. His voice was angry but his eyes were sad, pleading, wanting to know why I was tormenting him with these stupid questions. I got him calmed down using the patented reasonable police voice while making sure I stayed out of reach. Fortunately, it’s easier to settle people in plain clothes, the uniform has a tendency to set people off, but either way the important thing is to remain calm but firm. This is where doing your two-year probation in the West End comes in really handy.
I explained that we, and it’s always ‘we’ when dealing with aggravated members of the public, were double checking every possible point of contact between Hannah and Nicole and the outside world.
‘When kids talk about imaginary friends,’ I said, ‘sometimes they’re talking about a real person. You see, say you don’t want a child’s parents to know you’re talking to them . . . so you tell the child not to tell anyone, tell them that bad things will happen if they do. But kids like to talk, they especially like to talk about their friends. Especially if they’re interesting or naughty. I mean, what is the point of interesting or naughty if you can’t talk about it to someone else?’
A strange look came into Derek’s eyes and I wondered whether maybe I should have avoided the whole ‘stranger danger’ aspect of my little speech. Served me right for making this stuff up as I went along. Then he pushed his hand through his thinning hair and took a deep breath.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see now – apologies. What was the question?’
I repeated the question and he shrugged.
‘Oh, yeah, I remember Princess Luna,’ he said. ‘I thought that had sort of stopped. Nicky used to demand extra sweets for Princess Luna and then scoff the lot herself. Vicky got very uptight about it – all those childhood obesity articles in the women’s section of the Sundays.’
Apparently, there was one of those mother-daughter power struggles – like those that so enliven the lives of my mum’s relatives – which Derek had made a point of staying out of. Finally, Nicole stopped talking about her imaginary friend, and Derek just assumed it had been a phase.
‘Unless it was real,’ he said. ‘And just wandered off one day.’
And how many invisible friends are not imaginary
, I asked myself as he walked off to join the search team.
What if this stuff is way more common than even the Folly thinks it is?
What if it wasn’t just children – what if it was schizophrenics as well?
I carry a notebook with a list of these kinds of questions, and it gets longer every month – especially since Nightingale made answering them conditional on my advancement through the forms and wisdoms.
According to DS Cole, Victoria Lacey and Joanne Marstowe were spending the morning together at the Marstowe house while kind relatives, of which Joanne had almost as many as my mum, were taking the two older boys out for a day in Hereford. When I arrived in the suddenly – and suspiciously – neat and tidy kitchen I found the two mothers seated on either side of the table while DS Cole sat at the end and acted as de facto referee. You could have fried an egg in the space between the two women, and I almost turned on my heel and walked back out again.
‘Peter,’ said Joanne. ‘Would you like some tea?’ She was already up and bustling before I could answer, so I said I would and deliberately took her seat to break up the confrontation.
Victoria stared at me as I sat down, her face a mask. ‘Is it true you’ve been asking about Nicky’s silly imaginary friends?’
I gave her the same flannel I’d given her husband and I think she bought it, or at least was willing to convince herself that the police hadn’t suddenly gone completely bonkers.
‘Who wants tea?’ asked Joanne.
I said yes again, Victoria said no and DS Cole gazed longingly at the kitchen door.
‘You know what it’s like with children,’ said Victoria. ‘Once they get an idea in their head they won’t let go – the more you try to stop them the harder they cling on to it. But you can’t just appease them forever – can you?’
Joanne plonked a mug of tea in front of me and I asked her if Hannah had ever claimed to have met Princess Luna.
‘Hannah said you could only see her when it was a full moon,’ said Joanne as she sat down with her own tea. ‘I remember because she insisted we have her bloody birthday party on that particular night.’
‘I wondered why you’d done that, and it went on so late,’ said Victoria.
‘The moon wasn’t up until past nine o’clock now, was it?’ said Joanne. ‘I thought they’d got that nonsense from that Hobbit film.’
‘I don’t remember a unicorn in
The Hobbit
,’ said Victoria.
‘No, it was the writing in that,’ said Joanne. ‘On the map.’
Victoria picked a thread off the shoulder of her blouse.
‘I don’t think I was paying that much attention,’ she said. ‘It all seemed rather daft.’
‘They made us take them to the film twice,’ said Joanne. ‘They were looking forward to the next one.’
Joanne sipped her tea and looked out of the window.
I took the opportunity to surreptitiously check the phases of the moon on my phone – April 26th had been a full moon.
‘I remember when they first went missing we thought they might have sneaked out to look at the moon,’ said Joanne. ‘Didn’t we, Vicky?’
That hadn’t been in their initial statements – I saw DS Cole blink.
Victoria nodded her head reluctantly.
‘Following the moon,’ said Joanne. ‘Just like last time.’
‘I think I will have a cup of tea now,’ said Victoria. ‘If that’s all right with you.’
‘Of course,’ said Joanne and got up.
‘They’d run away before?’ asked DS Cole about two seconds before I could wrap my head around the implications.
‘No,’ said Victoria. ‘Not Nicky and Hannah, they hadn’t, but they used to talk about it. As a game – following the moon.’
‘They had a song,’ said Joanne, extracting a teabag and flicking it into the sink – ‘
In a minute soon we’ll run away to follow the moon
.’
‘It doesn’t really scan, does it?’ said Victoria.
I asked some follow-up questions, but Victoria had been trying hard to ignore the whole ‘imaginary friend situation’ as she put it and Joanne had three boys under the age of ten and could rarely hear herself speak, let alone Hannah.
Because the media pack were camped outside the front door, I went out the back and hopped over the garden fence and onto the unofficial – definitely not a right of way – footpath that ran behind the houses. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see that nearly all the late-twentieth-century build in the village had gone up on decommissioned orchards. In some places the old fence line had become the edge of people’s back gardens. One remnant of the original orchards remained behind the Old Vicarage and I saw a dip in its back wall where a pair of eleven-year-old girls could have easily climbed over. This must have been their semi-secret path. No wonder they’d been inseparable since they were old enough to express a preference – it must have been like having their own secret garden.
The pair would have had to split in September – Nicole would be going up the road to Lucton School, fee paying, while Hannah would be commuting into Leominster to attend a state school. Fear of this separation was put forward as one of the narratives that might lead to them running away together. I wondered what being split up might be like – I didn’t have any friends that had gone to posh schools, unless you counted Nightingale.
The path led me out onto a lane by Spring Farm and after a short cut down the back of the graveyard – Rushpool was an old enough village to have two – and I came out by the car park of the Swan in the Rushes where Beverley was waiting with the Asbo. All without attracting the attention of the media.
Me and Beverley parked the Asbo at the Riverside Inn, crossed the bridge and found the official Mortimer Trail footpath a hundred metres further on. We followed it to another gate and stile and through another field munched down to a green fuzz by sheep and then over a barbed-wire fence into a lumpy field of long grass. The path was barely visible as a slightly trampled diagonal, but luckily we could see the next stile at the far corner. A solitary goat watched us go past – we were probably the most interesting thing that had happened all summer.
I paused mid-field to orientate myself using my phone. We were less than three hundred metres from where we’d found the dead sheep. I looked for it and I could spot where it had lain in the next field.
Pokehouse Wood was not what I expected. For a start, it was missing a lot of trees. It was easy to see where it had been, a rough rectangle of cleared land on a steep slope that ran down to the footpath by the River Lugg. Freshly planted saplings stood in white protective cylinders like ranks of war graves, and between them the scrub and grass were shot through with purple stands of foxglove. I recognised these because I’d googled the plants after seeing Hugh’s notes – a famous source of digitalis, which in small doses can save your life and in larger doses kill you.
The missing trees were explained by a sign on the kissing gate which, on behalf of the National Trust, welcomed us to Pokehouse Wood and told us that the area had been cleared and planted with conifers in 2002, but had now been cleared again and planted with native broadleaved trees
to restore the beauty and nature conservation of this important local woodland.
There was a contact number for Croft Castle which I made a note of.
According to the map on my phone, the footpath ran along the river all the way to a historic mill at Mortimer’s Cross. Stairs cut into the slope and reinforced with planking marked where the footpath led up to the ridge. We weren’t supposed to be searching exactly, a full POLSA-directed team was an hour behind us. But I’d wanted to have a look before all those size tens stirred up the ground.
At the top of the steps was another track, this one cut level into the hillside and sloping down towards an intersection with the footpath by the river.
‘Logging track,’ said Beverley. ‘That’s why it has to be graded flat. You know, this is a bit weird.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Weird is what we’re looking for.’
‘I don’t think it’s that kind of weird,’ she said. ‘You see, this bit of land we’re standing on belongs to the National Trust but it’s been managed by the Forestry Commission.’
The role of which was to deal with the fact the UK was in danger of losing its forests which were, back then, a strategic national resource on account of the fact you needed it to make stuff. This being before Ikea turned up backed by the limitless expanse of the Swedish forests, fabled home to fascist biker gangs, depressed detectives and werewolves.
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Werewolves?’
‘That’s what I heard,’ said Beverley.
No wonder the detectives were depressed, I thought. And just about managed to stop myself asking for more information – priorities and all that.
‘They would have cut down the ancient woodland and planted western hemlock or Douglas fir, probably,’ said Beverley. Because back then you wanted a tree with a nice straight trunk that grew fast and was easy to manage. Then, in the late sixties, it began to occur to people that perhaps there was a bit more to reforestation than just planting a ton of trees. By the early 1980s someone had invented the word biodiversity and rural landowners, who up until then had cheerfully been industrialising the landscape, were told to start putting it back the way they’d found it – in fact, better than the way they’d found it, if you don’t mind.
‘When the National Trust took this place over they probably designated it a PAWS,’ said Beverley. Which meant Plantation on Ancient Woodland Site, which led to the next question – what the fuck is an ancient woodland?
‘They call it the wildwood,’ said Beverley and, according to the men and women with serious beards and slightly windswept hair who make it their business to know this stuff, it used to cover pretty much most of the island of Great Britain. Then, 6,000 years ago, farmers turned up with their fancy genetically modified crops and started clearing the forest out. And what they didn’t clear got eaten away by their artificially mutated cattle, sheep and goats. By the Middle Ages most of it was gone, and Britain entered the Napoleonic War desperate for timber.
‘Why do you know all this stuff?’ I asked.
‘It’s all anyone involved in working the countryside ever talks about,’ she said. ‘That and the vagaries of the EU subsidy regime and how evil the supermarkets are. Anyway, ground cover has a critical impact on water tables and flow rates. so you can bet we all take an interest in that – even Tyburn, who’s pretty much a storm drain from one end to the other.’
Beverley pointed out the trees that had been left standing when the area was cleared. A long strip of them went along the river bank and beside the footpaths. ‘That’s deliberate. Those are remnants of the ancient woodlands,’ she said.
‘And the weird bit?
‘It’s the timing,’ she said. ‘You don’t just charge in and clear ten hectares of commercial forest – which apart from anything else is worth a ton of money.’ So normally you wait for the current crop of western hemlock or Douglas fir or whatever to mature and then you cut them down and replant with historically appropriate broadleaf trees. Forest management not being an industry for people with a short attention span.