Beverley screamed my name suddenly and I heard an angry snort from right behind my head and threw myself to the side. There was a horrible crunching sound and a hole the size of a fifty pence bit appeared in the trunk of the tree I’d been holding. Another snort, frantic this time. Bark spooled off from around the hole in the tree and, with a splintering sound, a crack a metre long appeared above.
I smelt it, horse sweat and rough hair, and felt the weight and power of the muscles underneath its invisible skin. And then as if the moon had come out from behind a cloud I saw it, outlined in silver, as big as a carthorse, as shaggy as a pony and as pissed off as a bull in the household goods section of Marks and Spencer. Its mad black eye was fixed on me as it twisted and pulled, trying to get its narwhale horn free of the tree.
‘Peter,’ Beverley’s voice came from a surprisingly long way down the hill. ‘Don’t play with it – run!’
I know good advice when I hear it, and half scrambled and half slid on my bum down the slope, using the trees to keep myself from spilling over and breaking my neck. Above and behind me the unicorn snorted its frustration and stamped the ground. I was fairly certain it wasn’t going to attempt such a steep slope.
This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly. Sucks to be you, quadruped. Opposable thumbs – don’t leave home without them.
The trees ended suddenly and I joined Beverley and Dominic staring down a steep slope planted with white protective tubes and covered with nodding foxglove. I recognised it at once.
‘Pokehouse Wood,’ I said.
Had the girls been chased down here? Was that why Nicole had left a bloodied strip of her Capri pants on the barbed-wire fence – no handy fence-clearing magic for her. I wondered if there had been a moment when the unicorn had gone from invisible friend to terrifying predator – the point where the mask came off.
‘The river’s down there,’ said Beverley. ‘We need to get across it.’
What with the thigh-high grass, the nettles, the springy hummocks and inconveniently foot-sized hollows, it was harder work getting down through newly planted saplings than it had been amongst the full-grown trees. We were seriously grateful to reach the logging track that cut diagonally across the slope of the hill. At least, we were until my mental map of the area reminded me that further up the valley the logging track merged with the one in School Wood. A round trip of about a kilometre – or less than ten minutes as the pissed-off unicorn canters.
I pointed this out, and it was when we turned to flee down the track that we saw them ahead of us.
Two figures, child sized, white faces pale ovals in the moonlight, one of them in a green T-shirt, the other in a pink top,
‘Okay,’ said Beverley. ‘That’s strangely convenient.’
I heard hoof beats from up the track, two sets, in what I was to learn later was an aggressive canter – at the time it sounded like a gallop.
‘Not that convenient,’ I said.
Normally, I would have approached a pair of missing kids with tact and care, taking it slow so as not to exacerbate any distress. Then, slowly, I would have established who they were while trying to find out, circumspectly, whether their abductors were still in the vicinity.
However, with a couple of tons of enraged fairy tale on our arses, me and Dominic bore down on the girls and unceremoniously picked them up and threw them over our shoulders – practically without missing a step.
Beverley stayed behind us, a hand on my back in encouragement.
‘Faster,’ she said.
I’m young and I’m fit, but an eleven-year-old is still a weight and even down the slope the best I could manage was a lumbering trot. Dominic was keeping level but I could tell by his gasping breath that it was costing him.
We were getting close to the bottom of the slope, but there the replanted area ran out and plunged into the darkness, cliff face to the left.
‘Go right, go right,’ yelled Beverley behind us. ‘Across the river.’
I went right and stumbled forward as the ground fell away, managed to drop the girl before I landed on her, and came down hard on my shoulder in five centimetres of freezing water. I heard one of the girls give a shrill little scream at the cold.
A hand grabbed my collar and pulled me upright – one handed – it was Beverley. She had her other arm around the waist of a girl and once I was safely up she bounded across the river with her as if the girl weighed nothing.
I scrambled after them, my feet slipping on the pebbled bottom of the stream bed, and threw myself onto the opposite bank.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Dominic, but he wasn’t talking to me. He was crouched down in front of the two little girls and checking them for injuries. ‘Can you make a light?’ he asked me as I joined him.
There was a stamping and bellowing from the other side of the river.
‘Not a good idea,’ I said.
Both unicorns were amongst the long grass of the far riverbank, visible as horse-shaped refractions of light and shadow.
Beverley put her hand on my shoulder and stepped forward to face them across what looked, to me, like quite a narrow stretch of shallow water.
‘Yeah,’ she shouted. ‘You want them – you come get them.’
A sapling crackled and split as a horn the length of my arm smashed into it. Hooves smashed down in frustration. But I noticed neither unicorn advanced into the river.
‘Come on then,’ yelled Beverley, for whom de-escalation was something that happened to other people. ‘Get one hoof wet – I dare you.’
Then, with a final snort, they whirled and vanished.
‘Thought so,’ said Beverley. ‘And stay that side.’
Dominic was swearing at his phone which, given how much magic I’d flung around that night, wasn’t working. I pulled my Airwave set, turned it on and handed it over. He called Leominster nick while I squatted down and tried to determine whether either of the girls were injured.
‘You’d better go get him, then,’ said Dominic to someone at the other end. ‘Because we’ve found them.’
The Other Country
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts ‘A Shadow Passes’ (1919)
Post Incident Management
Rule of policing number one – when something good falls into your lap, pass it up the chain of command as quickly as possible before something else bad can happen. Me and Dominic picked up a girl each and let Beverley lead us to the main road. This involved crossing the Lugg again, or more precisely a second stream of the same river because we’d actually been standing on an island.
‘Of course we were on an island,’ said Beverley. ‘You think I’d have risked being that stroppy if we hadn’t?’
We stumbled over another barbed-wire fence in the dark, but once we were over that we found ourselves on the lane that ran past Aymestrey church to the main road. We were level with the blunt comforting rectangle of the church spire when we heard the sirens. A traffic duty BMW reached us first, followed quickly by an ambulance and an unmarked Mercedes containing Inspector Edmondson that must have torn up the Highway Code to get to us that fast.
The girls were prised out of our grip and hustled off by the paramedics. Their parents, Edmondson informed us, were already en route to Hereford where they would be reunited at the hospital.
Then we walked back the route we’d come, only this time gloriously mob handed with a couple of dozen officers, two of them armed. We showed Edmondson both river crossings and where, to the best of our recollection, we’d found the girls.
He asked me whether I suspected that there had been Falcon involvement in the kidnapping and I had to tell him that, while there was definitely some weird shit going on in the general vicinity, I didn’t have any evidence that it was related to Hannah and Nicole’s disappearance.
‘We’ll have to wait to see what they have to say for themselves,’ said Edmondson.
There was no point having officers thrashing around in the darkness, so the decision was made to start search operations, for evidence this time, at first light. And we were whisked off to Leominster nick to be statemented and debriefed. Well, me and Dominic were whisked off. Beverley said she’d much rather go back to her hotel if they didn’t mind. Strangely, they didn’t mind and even allocated the snazzy traffic BMW to take her back.
I called Nightingale once we were on our way.
‘Good work,’ he said. ‘Do you think you’ll be returning soon?’
I thought about the unicorns and Hugh the bee man and his memories of Ettersberg. I thought about coincidences and moon paths and the fact that at that moment nothing which had happened made any sense whatsoever.
‘I think there are some loose ends I want to tie up first,’ I said.
‘Jolly good,’ said Nightingale. ‘Try not to take more than a week.’
An investigation like Operation Manticore doesn’t end when you find the missing kids – but it does get a lot less fraught. Afterwards, you’re looking to discover what happened to the poor little mites and feel the collar of whatever despicable scrote turned out to have been responsible. Then you’ve got to get enough evidence to send them up the steps to court and, if you’re lucky, perhaps arrange to have them fall down a few steps on the way there. In fact, from the point of view of DCI Windrow and the MIU, finding the girls was just the start. So it wasn’t unusual that me and Dominic had to give statements immediately. What was unusual was that we had to first meet up and discuss exactly what we were going to leave out of the statement. We had that meeting out on the terrace, because then it could be explained away as a cigarette break.
‘We normally do two statements,’ Windrow, who looked horrified. ‘One with all the difficult bits left out and one that goes into our files so we have a complete record – just in case.’
‘Just in case of what?’ asked Dominic.
‘In case it becomes relevant later,’ I said.
Windrow took a drag off his cigarette and nodded.
‘So, what the hell do we say you were doing up there in the middle of the night?’ he asked.
‘Witness trawl,’ I said and nodded at Dominic. ‘After Dom’s success finding Russell Banks we decided it was worth running a quick outreach operation to find any witnesses amongst people who visit the area by night.’
‘Such as?’ asked Windrow.
‘Doggers,’ said Dominic. ‘Birdwatchers.’
‘Amateur astronomers,’ I said.
‘Fox watchers,’ said Dominic.
‘Druids,’ I said.
‘UFO spotters.’
‘Satanists,’ I said.
DCI Windrow gave me a look.
‘Just joking,’ I said quickly. ‘Sir.’
‘It’s flimsy,’ said Windrow.
‘We found Hannah and Nicole,’ said Dominic. ‘Nobody’s going to be interested in why we were up there.’
Windrow put his cigarette out in the flower pot that had become the unofficial senior officer’s fag disposal unit and sighed – he obviously would have liked to light up another one.
‘If that’s the way it’s done,’ he said, ‘that’s what we’ll do.’
I looked over the parapet – the civilian car park was almost completely empty except for one satellite van and a ten-year-old Ford Mondeo that belonged to one of the reporters from the
Herefordshire News
. The pack had migrated en masse to the hospital. I asked Windrow if there’d been any news.
‘They’re both sleeping now,’ said Windrow. ‘And their parents are with them.’
They weren’t suffering from exposure, and while they were wearing the same clothes they went missing in, both the girls and their clothes were relatively clean. They had definitely been held somewhere with amenities and had been fed and watered. There were no outward signs of physical or sexual abuse but Nicole, so far, had presented as withdrawn and uncommunicative. Hannah, on the other hand, had talked pretty much continuously from the moment she was reunited with her mother until she fell asleep in her arms three hours later.
‘What did she say?’ I asked.
‘Hold up, Peter,’ said Windrow. ‘I’m not prejudicing either of you before you’ve given a statement. And, besides, I haven’t seen the transcripts myself yet.’
Then we went inside and got ourselves statemented which, this being a serious investigation, meant that it was first light by the time we’d finished. Victor was waiting for us downstairs – well, waiting for Dominic. But he was nice enough to give me a lift back to Rushpool as well.
I had a mad urge to stop off at the hotel and see if Beverley was awake. But between the hiking, the magic, and the strenuous unicorn avoidance tactics I was so knackered that bed seemed more attractive. And I can tell you that doesn’t happen very often.
That morning the press went totally bonkers, but fortunately I managed to sleep through most of it.
I woke to birdsong, something with a call like a very high-pitched pneumatic drill. I wondered if Beverley would know what the name was. I patted the other side of the bed on the off chance Beverley might have mysteriously materialised there while I was asleep, but no such luck.
I checked my watch. It was mid-afternoon. I hadn’t actually slept that long, but I felt fully rested . . . just not inclined to get up.
Objectively speaking, my whole operation the night before had been a mess from start to finish. I’d gone out to attract unspecified supernatural entities with no real idea what the hell I was going to do if I succeeded. Worse, I’d put Dominic and Beverley at risk through a basic lack of common sense. Nightingale was going to be quietly critical when I explained the thinking behind my actions. If we hadn’t found Hannah and Nicole it would have looked even worse – we’d been lucky.
Or had we?
Had it really been a coincidence that two, count them two, invisible unicorns had chased us straight to their location?
My dad would have told me to take the breaks as you get them and not worry about where they come from. But my mum never saw a gift horse that she wouldn’t take down to the vet to have its mouth X-rayed – if only so she could establish its resale value.