‘No, seriously,’ said Lilly. ‘It’s been that long that I could do with a reminder.’
‘Well, not from me,’ said Beverley.
‘But you’re sure it went all right?’
‘Trust me,’ said Beverley. ‘The earth moved – that’s all you need to know.’
‘Your word?’
‘My word,’ said Beverley.
‘Your word on what?’ I asked.
Lilly started, but Beverley just turned and took her drink.
‘That no fish were harmed,’ she said, and challenged me with a smile to make something of it.
Not when I’m outnumbered, I thought.
I nodded at the river, which was back down to its pre-flood levels.
‘What happened to all the water?’ I asked.
‘It was just a surge,’ said Lilly quickly. ‘Unprecedented heavy rainfall in the Brecon Beacons.’
‘Was that your mum making it rain then?’ I asked.
Beverley kicked me in the shins and gave me exactly the same look my mum once gave me when I asked Uncle Tito why he had two families. I was seven at the time and it did seem a bit unfair, what with my dad essentially not being there even when he was, technically, there.
I made a point of mouthing a big ‘ow’ and acting like I was in pain. You have to do this – if you don’t, they kick you again to make sure you got the point.
So I asked Lilly about the Land Rover instead and she said that it still had its original two-litre petrol engine, which I’d thought was only installed in the Series I. As Lilly explained that some early versions of the Series II had been fitted with the smaller engine rather than the 2.25 litre that became standard for the next couple of decades I grinned at Beverley, who was obviously suffering. Served her right.
After a bit more car talk Lilly, having finished her cider, hopped back in her Land Rover and sped off. No doubt to inform her family that Beverley and her chump boyfriend had satisfactorily done whatever it was they were supposed to have done.
I decided that it was time for the chump boyfriend to find out exactly what that was – especially since we were still at the scene of the crime.
At the far end of the car park was the start of a footpath that led along the river bank. Overlooked by a wooded hillside, it struck me as a nice shady place to have a chat about shady business. We walked in silence until we’d gone far enough for the Riverside Inn to be hidden behind the curve in the path.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Just what were we doing last night?’
‘I’m hurt you don’t remember.’
‘What else were we doing?’
Beverley bobbed her head from side to side.
‘We were helping out,’ she said. ‘As well as the other thing.’
‘Helping out who?’
‘You don’t want to know,’ she said.
‘I think I have a right to know the truth,’ I said.
She sighed.
‘You see this lovely river here? Got lots of potential but no one to look after it – to care about it,’ she said.
‘Apart from the National Rivers Authority,’ I said.
‘Not that kind of care,’ she said. ‘And do you want to know or not?’
There was a sensation then of disgruntled suburban driver, of car wax and loud stereo, of someone shouting in what I learnt later was probably Korean. I realised that I hadn’t felt any flashes of Beverley’s true nature all morning. With it came a rush of excitement and desire that I was almost totally sure originated with me – almost totally sure.
‘Do your worst,’ I said
‘It just needed a little spark, a little passion to, you know, get it going,’ she said.
I had to think about that for a bit.
‘Are you saying we inseminated a river?’ I asked.
‘Not exactly,’ said Beverley. ‘It was a bit more . . . diffuse than that.’
I remembered frog reproduction from school, the female lays a huge pile of eggs and the male turns up later and basically hoses them down. It did seem to me that the species had been hard done by in the sex department.
‘Are you saying I did it like a frog?’
It was Beverley’s turn to pause and work something out. She wasn’t happy when she did.
‘Ah, fuck no,’ said Beverley. ‘What kind of fucked-up mind do you have, Peter? Yuck.’
‘So it’s not like that then?’
Beverley stuck out her tongue and made a face.
‘How could you even go there?’ she asked. ‘Now I’ve got that image stuck in my mind. Frogs, please.’
‘That’s what you made it sound like.’
‘Did not.’
‘Then what is it like?’
Beverley took my hand and led to me along until she found a place where we could sit down on the edge and dangle our feet, minus shoes obviously, in the water. It was midmorning and the sun had come into its full heat so we stayed in the shade of what Beverley identified as a stand of silver birch but which looked more red-brown to me.
‘You see this river,’ said Beverley. ‘Like I said, lots of potential but nobody’s home. What it needs is something to stir it up – sometimes this can be perfectly natural, and sometimes you can give it a helping hand.’
I thought of Mama Thames, who claimed to have gone into the river as a suicidal nursing student and walked out a goddess. And with a personality like that, was it any wonder that she sparked the process in her tributaries, or that they so took after her?
‘We were making a donation?’ I asked.
‘I know you want to be a father,’ said Beverley, ‘but there were no genes involved whatsoever, no transfer of information, we were strictly catalytic in the process.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘If we come back in ten years and he’s watching
Doctor Who
, you can call me a liar.’
‘He?’
‘I think this is going to be a boy river,’ said Beverley, kicking up spray with her feet. ‘But you never know – it might have its own view on the subject.’
‘You know, I’m pretty certain I’m not supposed to do shit like this,’ I said.
Beverley put an arm around my shoulder and leaned in to talk softly in my ear.
‘How about this then, Peter,’ she said. ‘You’ve been part of something that no wizard has ever been part of before. You know something that’s not in their books.’
I wanted to say that lots of things weren’t in the libraries of the wise, including plate tectonics, molecular biology and the complete works of J.K. Rowling, but she’d probably say that I was missing the point. I must have hesitated long enough for Beverley to think she’d won the argument.
‘You should feel privileged,’ she said. And rested her head on my shoulder.
‘I shall write it up as a paper, as soon as I get home,’ I said.
‘You do that,’ she said. ‘I dare you.’
‘My milkshake brings all the gods to the yard,’ I said.
‘Damn right, it’s better than yours,’ said Beverley. ‘I could teach you but I’d have to charge.’
The next line that came into my head was
Flat bottomed barges you make the river world go round!
But I decided to keep that one to myself.
Back at the cowshed I had just enough time to change into some respectable clothes before DCI Windrow summoned me back to the nick for ‘a discussion’. Beverley, who seemed to be in no hurry to leave the cowshed while I dressed, waved me off and climbed under my duvet for a nap while I drove all the way back to Leominster.
DCI Windrow was worried, but it was a whole order of magnitude less worried than he’d been before we found the girls. He was also chewing gum, something I’d never seen a senior officer do before in my life. Nicotine gum, I suspected.
‘Nicole remains withdrawn,’ he said.
I asked what that meant – exactly.
‘Withdrawn,’ he said. ‘She’s not talking to anyone, she’s off her feed – unresponsive is what they call it. Indicative of a severe psychological trauma, they say.’
‘Like being kidnapped?’ I asked.
‘You know what modern doctors are like,’ said Windrow. ‘They’re never definite about anything anymore. It’s all “maybe, could be, let’s see what happens”.’
‘I saw Hannah running around last night,’ I said. ‘She didn’t seem particularly traumatised.’
‘She could be exhibiting a different set of symptoms,’ said Windrow. ‘The doctors think she may be repressing the trauma by creating an alternative narrative.’
‘What makes them think that?’
‘There are some fantastical elements in her statement.’
‘Like unicorns?’
He handed me a wodge of hardcopy. ‘I think it would be better if you read it yourself and then gave me your assessment.’
So back I went into Edmondson’s office – where I wasn’t going to contaminate Windrow’s nice rational kidnapping inquiry with any of my sorcerous ways. Someone, probably Edmondson himself because you don’t ever mess with an Inspector’s stuff, had jimmied the office window so that it opened all the way, which at least meant the room was warm but not stuffy. It also meant that the drifts of paperwork had to be held down with makeshift paperweights.
I moved a stack of incident reports that were anchored by a spare Airwave handset and started on –
Statement: Hannah Marstowe at Hereford Hospital, 22nd of June.
Taking a statement from anyone can be a long process on account of the fact that your average member of the public wouldn’t know the truth if it donned a pink tutu and danced in front of them singing the Chicken Song. This means you have to ask a lot of confirmation questions and then do some intensive cross-referencing to wring out the facts.
Taking a statement from kids is even worse, because not only do they like to make stuff up, but if they get scared, hungry, tired or just fed up with your questions they can, especially if they’re badly brought-up kids, tell you to fuck off. With impunity. Now add in the suspicion that in a magic-related case it’s just possible that the truth really is wearing a pink tutu, and you can end up with six hours of video and a couple of hundred pages of transcript.
You start with the transcript, a highlighter pen and your notebook.
Why had Hannah got out of bed?
Because she’d arranged with Nicole to go for a night-walk.
What was a night-walk?
When you go and walk around at night – duh!
Had they gone on night-walks before?
Only when it was hot.
How long had they been doing this?
Hannah couldn’t remember. ‘Ages,’ she’d said.
What did they do on night-walks?
Go for a walk, silly. Look at the moon. Sometimes they would do naughty dancing.
And what was naughty dancing?
That was when you took off all your clothes and danced around in the buff.
There then followed at least thirty pages where the child psychologist attempted to establish when and where this naughty dancing took place, who instigated the idea and were there any adults involved?
Hannah was cheerfully open that they danced about in the churchyard, sometimes in the field behind Hannah’s house and, if they felt particularly daring, at the road junction by the Rushpool. Generally speaking they weren’t totally naked because they left their sandals or flip-flops on. She was amused by the notion that an adult might be involved and asked why an adult would want to watch them dancing.
‘They might want to know what you were doing out at night,’ said the child psychologist and gently steered Hannah back to the night, as we like to say, in question. On that particular night, whose idea had it been to go for a night-walk?
Hannah said that Nicky, which is what she liked to call Nicole, had suggested it that night.
Was she sure?
She was sure that she would like to stop for a drink and something to eat and could she watch telly because that’s what she really wanted to do, and she’d quite like to do all that back at her own home if that wasn’t too much trouble.
There followed what is generally known as a multi-agency conference in which the police, social services, the paediatrics registrar and the child psychologist discussed their options for an hour before agreeing that yes, Hannah should go home.
I logged onto HOLMES and had a quick rummage – and there it was. An action for someone to go through all the witness statements and see if there was a reference to the girls going out at night and dancing – with or without clothing. There wasn’t any result.
The child psychologist rode back with Hannah and Joanne to their house and noted that Hannah had explained that they had different kinds of dances for different occasions – when Joanne exploded. The child psychologist actually wrote that in their notes –
at that point the mother exploded!
That would have been a fearsome sight even in the spacious back seat of a traffic BMW. The child psychologist felt that the outburst might have been a good thing, because Hannah knew her mother was upset and would have been tense and inhibited in the expectation of parental disfavour.
But she was shocked by the swearing, some of which she had to look up on the internet.
Hannah, now presumably disinhibited, got her dinner, then some telly and then magnanimously agreed to talk to the child psychologist again. Albeit on the condition that she be allowed to watch the Disney Channel at the same time.
When asked what had happened after she and Nicole had sneaked out of their houses and met up, Hannah explained, in a distracted fashion, that they’d taken secret paths up to the moor where they’d met a beautiful woman riding a unicorn. The child psychologist worried at the last statement – did Hannah mean a woman on a horse?
No she meant a lady riding a unicorn – side saddle!
Was this ‘unicorn’ perhaps Nicole’s invisible friend Princess Luna?
Hannah was not impressed – Princess Luna is a completely different unicorn.
Did this unicorn have a name?
The lady never said.
Did the lady have a name?
Yes, the lady’s name was Lady.
The child psychologist then sits through an episode of
Phineas and Ferb
before, quite spontaneously, Hannah explains that they walked for miles and miles and miles, then they went downhill and through a cave by a river and then up a hill where they had a sleep.
In the open?
No, Hannah thought there had been tents, old-fashioned tents made of skins or possibly rainbows. And there had been kebabs but she didn’t think they were good kebabs because she’d felt sick afterwards. Then they’d woken up and hadn’t had to have a wash or clean their teeth or anything.