8

Proactive Measures

FIRST QUESTION TO ask yourself is—what are you good for? West Mercia Police didn’t need me to beat the bushes because they had everyone from Grampian Search and Rescue to the SAS doing that. They didn’t need me holding the hands of the parents, even though I bet DS Cole would have paid me quite a lot of money to do so, and they really didn’t need me handling the media. What I was was the only Falcon qualified officer in the area and, along with my specialist civilian support, i.e. Beverley, I was best deployed concentrating on my area of expertise.

The second question to ask yourself is—what the fuck do I do next? Since weird shit was what I was there for, I decided I should work on the assumption that weird shit was what had happened.

We knew that the girls had got up, dressed themselves, and left their separate homes under their own steam. There was no sign of forced entry, and I hadn’t detected vestigia in their rooms. Assume they were lured out, or possibly one was lured out and then lured the other one out. Assume the luring was done by something supernatural and in trots suspect number one—Princess Luna. Invisible horse-shaped friend, possibly a unicorn, possibly only visible in moonlight—the physics of which I didn’t even want to think about.

Closest Princess Luna sighting to the village was at Hannah’s birthday party, so stick a virtual pin in the field behind the village hall. Assume the girls go gamboling after My Invisible Pony following the moon, which had been in its first quarter that night. They wouldn’t have walked on the roads, not least because of the danger of being run over by alfresco sex maniacs and, besides, Dominic said that village kids went across the fields—and their paths were not necessarily the ones that were marked on the OS map.

So, up by paths unseen to Whiteway Head—although it must have been a reasonably direct route if the timings were going to make any sense—where something definitely magical happened, and blew both their phones.

Now, I reckoned that they’d met a third party there, perhaps a friend of Princess Luna or maybe an owner, and that would be the point where the girls’ fun-filled frolic went sour.

I called up Leominster nick and they confirmed that while they’d had trouble getting a precise DNA match between the blood stain on the pink cotton with hair samples recovered from Nicole’s room, a second round of tests using swabs taken from Victoria and Derek Lacey had confirmed a definite parental match. The high probability, the lab had said, was that the blood had belonged to Nicole Lacey.

Which meant that they had gone west down either the Mortimer Trail or the logging road that ran parallel to it, and had probably stayed in that area for at least three days before Nicole had caught her leg on the barbed-wire fence above Pokehouse Wood. A place famous as the abode of fairies—and a mere hop, skip and a jump from where we’d found the dead sheep.

I called Dr. Walid and asked whether he’d finished his autopsy.

“Hello Peter,” he said. “How’re you bearing up?”

I told him I was fine.

“Wonderful bit of mutton you sent me,” said Dr. Walid. “Finished it up this morning. Thought you might like the results.”

“Anything interesting?”

“The sheep itself is your bog standard North Country Mule, a cross between Swaledale and a Border Leicester—a breed known for its meat and for being even more glaikit than ordinary sheep. I’ve sent some tissue samples to the lab just to be sure.”

“Any sign of magical contact?”

“Nothing in gross physical terms. I sectioned the brain, such as it was, but there was no sign of hyperthaumaturgical degradation. It was a remarkably healthy sheep—apart from the great big hole in its belly, of course. That was cause of death, by the way. In case you were wondering.”

“Could you reconstruct the injury?”

“Well, it’s never easy just going by the crime scene photographs. But at a guess I’d say it was struck in the belly, impaled, then lifted bodily and thrown some distance. That’s how its guts got spread over such large area.”

“Are you saying it was gored?” I asked. “By a bull or a goat?”

“I’ve met some tough goats, but nothing big enough to fling a full grown sheep three meters or so,” said Dr. Walid. “And there’s only one piercing wound, so I doubt it was a bull or even a cow—they can get quite territorial, you know.”

I asked what the weapon had been like.

“At least sixty centimeters long, circular cross section and tapering to a sharp point,” said Dr. Walid. “Possibly a spiral configuration.”

“Like a narwhale’s horn?”

“Aye,” said Dr. Walid. “Just like that.”

“So you think it’s a unicorn?”

“I wouldn’t like to jump to conclusions,” he said. “Not without more evidence.”

“But?”

“If you achieve nothing else,” he said, “get me a tissue sample.”

Assuming Princess Luna was real, and not a physical manifestation of something incorporeal. There hadn’t been hoof prints at Stan’s stash and none around the stabbed sheep. And why would a unicorn stab a sheep, anyway?

The girls had let Princess Luna lick the mutton juice from their fingers.

Carnivorous unicorns, I thought. And if it did raid Stan’s stash, a meat-eating unicorn that was blissed out on Benzedrine and diazepam and agricultural diesel oil. There were certain “things” I knew that navigated the exciting boundary between corporeal and incorporeal existence. Ghosts, revenants like my friend Mr. Punch, and certain types of Genius Loci. They all had one thing in common in that whatever work-around for the law of thermodynamics they thought they had, sooner or later they had to get their power from somewhere. Vestigium was a source. But even better was a bit of raw magic.

And that’s when I came up with a cunning plan—one of my better ones, if I do say so myself.

“Got to go, Abdul,” I said. “I’ve just had a bright idea.”

Just before I hung up I think he might have said “god be merciful,” but I couldn’t be sure.

I called Windrow and cleared my plan with him and Edmondson, who clearly thought I was bonkers, but by that point were getting used to my little ways. Dominic was once again volunteered as liaison, under the condition I explain the plan to him myself.

“Do you have any confidence this will work?” asked Windrow.

“Honestly, sir,” I said, “I don’t know—but if something supernatural is actively working against us, then I suggest it’s about time we took a more aggressively proactive approach.”

Windrow gave that last sentence the mirthless chuckle it deserved and wished me luck.

Then I called Beverley.

“Want to come out tonight?” I asked.

“What are we doing?”

“Unicorn hunting,” I said.

“Aren’t they an endangered species?”

“That depends on whether they’ve been helping abduct kids,” I said. “Don’t it?”

*   *   *

It took about thirty seconds on the internet to find a shop in Leominster that sold what they called “second user computers,” five minutes to specify what I wanted, and at least another fifteen minutes to come up with a plausible explanation for what I wanted it for. Then I drove into town, found a café that steadfastly refused to provide a genealogy for its sausages and had a proper fry-up. While I was doing that, I wrote down the specifications for the next job I wanted to do—that would have taken much longer to detail verbally, and even longer to bullshit away.

“So what kind of science experiment is it?” asked the man in the shop as I inspected the devices. They’d done a good job and had gone so far as to add a tiny red LED on the end of each one to show when the power was on.

“I’m looking to see whether high-tension electrical cables really disrupt microprocessors,” I said. “What did you use for the casing?”

The man was a bit taller than me, with an elegantly clipped black beard that was at odds with his polyester-mix beige T-shirt that had the shop’s logo on the front.

“Plastic cricket bats,” he said. “Kid’s size.”

I tested each one carefully and then paid for them.

“You’re really out looking for UFOs, aren’t you?” said the man.

“You got me,” I said.

“Those kids,” said the man. “You don’t think they were abducted, do you? By aliens?”

“God, I hope not,” I said. “My life’s complicated enough already.”

I handed him handwritten specifications and waited while he read them so that I could clarify a few points and help with the niceties of cursive script.

“Is this supposed to be a detection grid?” he asked.

I told him it was, and he asked me what I was hoping to detect.

“Things that aren’t normally there,” I said, and he nodded as if this made sense.

“I’ll have to go to Birmingham to get the gear,” he said. “I can have them ready in two days.”

I paid the guy, packed my stuff, and drove on to the nick to inform Dominic of his role in the festivities.

Strangely, he was less than enthusiastic about me involving his boyfriend.

“We need his Nissan to get us up the rough bits on Bircher Common,” I said. “And we need someone to drive it.”

“And that’s not me, because . . .”

“Because you and me are going to be proceeding down the Mortimer Trail and seeing if we can’t attract something supernatural,” I said.

“Have you cleared this with the bosses?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Submitted an operational plan, objectives analysis, risk assessment. The whole thing.”

“And what did they say?” asked Dominic.

“They wanted me to take someone from the MIU to keep an eye on things.”

“And that would be me?”

“Yep.”

“We’re going to be walking through the woods at night?”

“Is that a problem?”

“It’s just I’m not that fond of the great outdoors,” said Dominic.

“But I thought you were a country boy,” I said. “You grew up in a small village.”

“Yeah, and as soon as I was old enough I moved to the city.”

“You moved to Hereford,” I said. “That’s not quite the same thing.”

“Yes it is. We’ve got a cathedral and an Anne Summers,” said Dominic. “That makes us a city.”

“Anne Summers?”

“It’s right on the square and everything,” said Dominic.

“Hold on,” I said. “Doesn’t your boyfriend have a farm to live on?”

“Sore point,” said Dominic. “And, anyway, what makes you think we’ll attract anything supernatural?”

“For one thing, tonight it’s going to be a full moon,” I said. “Also because I will be doing magical things.”

“Your name is Baldrick,” said Dominic. “And I claim my ten pounds.”

*   *   *

One thing old jazzmen and old police officers both agree on is that it’s important to get your rest in when and where you can. Which is why I drove back to the cowshed, had another shower to cool off, lay down on the bed in my underwear and tried not to think for a bit.

It was hot, even with the doors open. But a little bit of a breeze touched the curtains and brought in the smell of grass and a sweeter smell that I thought I now recognized as cowslip in bloom, although it could have been silage for all I knew.

There were a couple of strands of dusty spider web hanging from one edge of the ceiling. Dominic’s mum needed to invest in a proper extension duster or at least learn how to put a J-cloth on a stick.

I lay on my back and let the ceiling go in and out of focus.

My phone pinged—number withheld.

Do you think they were abducted by fairies?

I sat up and took a deep breath to calm my nerves. Then I logged the call, contacted the DPS team on a separate phone to give them a heads up, and then texted back.

Why do you think fairies?

Who else?

Y not people?

No other leads.

This made me pause. It was the sort of sloppy thinking that Lesley, had she caught me doing it, would have pointed out—just because you don’t know something is there doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

And how would she know that we didn’t have any leads?

I called Inspector Pollock at the DPS.

“She’s got a line into the secure net,” I said. “Or access to someone with access privileges.”

“Is it you?” asked Pollock.

“Nope,” I said.

“Of course not,” said Pollock. “Because that would make my life easier.”

But not mine, I thought. I so hated being on the wrong side of the interview table.

“If she’s following the same pattern as last time,” said Pollock, “she’ll make one more response before changing SIMs—try to make the next question count.”

I thought about it for a bit, and then I thought about the tree outside in the garden and the futility of anger.

I miss you, I texted.

I waited, but she didn’t respond before it was time to go out that evening.

*   *   *

Dominic’s boyfriend was named Victor Lowell and was one of the new breed of farmers who got their market price updates via Twitter and drove their tractors listening to 50 Cent. He had floppy blond hair and the posh accent of someone who was privately educated but never got the memo about having to pretend to be just one of the blokes. He also owned the land he farmed which made him, notionally, the richest person I’d ever met.

“Not that I could sell it,” he shouted over the Nissan Technical’s engine as he gunned it up the flinty trail to Whiteway Head. “It’s been in the family for oh . . . months.”

Dominic groaned—this was obviously an old joke.

“You’re not a farming family then?” said Beverley.

“Oh, it’s a long sad history of farmers. It’s just that I’m the first one to own the land I farm,” he said. “My uncle was a tenant, but my father ran off to London where he made a pile in property. Then I came back and bought the land.”

“He lied to me when we met,” said Dominic. “Said he was a stockbroker.”

“People have such extraordinary prejudices,” said Victor airily.

We’d come up the slope before sunset to give Victor a bit of daylight to drive back down in. Whiteway Head, I saw, was a saddle between the high points of the ridge to east and west. It was the logical place to cross if you didn’t want to schlepp around either end. There was also a clear route of descent on the escarpment side, although I personally wouldn’t want to carry a sack of salt down that slope.

We’d brought sandwiches from Dominic’s mum’s and bottles of water, so we had an impromptu picnic, picking a site at the top of the ridge that gave us a good view across the valley.

The sky overhead was the same hot blue it had been since I arrived in Herefordshire, but to the west the sun was hidden behind a huge bank of gray and blue clouds that were piling up on the horizon.

“The Brecon Beacons,” said Victor. “The Met Office are issuing a severe weather warning. Could cause some flooding downstream of the Lugg.”

I looked at Beverley, who shrugged.

“Who knows?” she said. “It’s not my part of the world.”

The last of the sunlight seemed to leak out from under the clouds to wash over the valley below. I could just see the A4110 as it crossed the Lugg—a typical Roman straight line aimed at what Dominic identified as Wigmore. “Imposing themselves on the landscape”—they’d always called it that on Time Team. Especially the beardy Iron and Bronze Age specialists—“The Romans imposed themselves on the landscape.” Or, I thought, they wanted to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

Dominic pointed out Leinthall Earls and the white angular scar of the limestone quarry that spread up the hillside behind it. Fields covered the bottom of the valley with silvery stands of conifers on the higher slopes. To the north-east I saw the last red of the sun flash off the copper dome at the top of Hugh Oswald’s tower. I wondered if the bees were still out and about, or whether they’d retreated to that vast hive under the dome.

Did Mellissa listen to them, or watch over them? Did she sleep up there? There was a thought. Did she dance in front of them, shaking her honey-maker back and forth to tell them where the best flowers were?

We ate chicken tikka masala sandwiches and drank coffee from the big military flasks I’d found in the trunks. Dominic kissed Victor good-bye and we watched the big Nissan rumble and lurch its way down the hill.

The moon rose in the east, swollen and full, but I made everyone wait until it was dark before we approached the gate into the forest.

“Do you think it will make a difference?” asked Beverley as I held the gate open for her and Dominic.

“I just don’t want to have to come back and do this again,” I said.

In the moonlight the logging track was a straight milky line between the dark ranks of conifers on either side. I warned Beverley and Dominic to turn off their phones and pulled out the first of my mini cricket bats and turned it on. The LED glowed red in the darkness.

“What does that do?” asked Dominic.

I considered telling him that it saved my brain by providing a power source external to my precious gray matter, but then I’d have to explain everything else.

“Helps me cast spells,” I said.

“Okay,” said Dominic. “Wait—magic spells?”

I cast a simple lux impello combo which put a yellowish werelight about two meters over my head where, hopefully, it would bob about after me like a balloon, only brightly lit—the LED on the cricket bat started to flicker.

Dominic stared at the werelight.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“It’s a magic spell,” I said, and Beverley snorted.

“Show off,” she said.

“I said I was going to do magic,” I said.

“But . . .” Dominic floundered around for a bit before pointing at me accusingly. “You said that there’s weird shit, but it normally turns out to have a rational explanation.”

“It does,” said Beverley. “The explanation is a wizard did it.”

“That’s my line,” I said, and Beverley shrugged.

“You didn’t say anything about spells!” said Dominic.

“It’s just a werelight,” I said.

It was like having our own personal streetlight, but beyond that bright circle the woods were a jumble of angular shadows—shifting uneasily as the yellow werelight bobbed and wavered in the breeze.

“Can we at least start moving in the right direction?” I said.

“Jesus Christ,” said Dominic, who was still having trouble. “Is there anything else I should know?”

“We’re looking for an invisible unicorn and Bev here is the goddess of a small river in South London.”

“It’s quite a big river, actually,” said Beverley.

“How do people normally react to this?” asked Dominic.

“And most of it’s above ground,” said Beverley.

“Usually a bit stunned to start with,” I said. “Then they either get angry, go into denial or just deal with it.”

“Sounds familiar,” said Dominic.

“Unlike some rivers I could mention,” said Beverley.

“What else can you do?” asked Dominic.

“More importantly,” said Beverley, “what makes you think this is going to work?”

“Because incorporeal entities need power to interact with the real world. And this,” I pointed at the werelight above me, “is the all-you-can-eat-buffet sign.”

“You know that sounded completely mad, don’t you?” asked Dominic.

“Sorry,” I said. “Professional hazard.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Beverley. “Enough distractions. Let’s do it.”

So into the woods we went—it was surprisingly noisy. Especially one loud bird whose chirping sounded far too cheerful for the middle of the night.

“That’s just a robin,” said Beverley.

I said I thought they were diurnal.

“All day, all night,” she said. “They don’t shut up.”

Somewhere deeper into the gloom, among the straight trunks of the western hemlocks, something else made a sound like a ZX Spectrum loading a game off a cassette—Beverley said it was a nightjar.

Even without the sun, the air was warm and spiced with resin and the smell of dusty bark.

About fifty meters up the track it separated and we took the right-hand path which, according to my map, led us parallel to the top of the ridge. Because we were supposed to be looking out for anything weird we didn’t talk and in that strange stumbling silence I felt as if my senses had contracted down to the small flickering circle of the werelight.

After a quarter of an hour or so we reached a T-junction where the Mortimer Trail separated from the logging road.

“I think this might have been a mistake,” I said.

“Definitely is,” said Beverley pointing to the left which was noticeably darker than the right. “Because we are not going up that way.”

“No,” I said, blinking to try and get my night vision back. “I mean the light—I should have used a darker point source.” If only lux hadn’t been so reliable as a ghost attractor. I checked the cricket bat and saw that the LED had gone out. When I shook it next to my ear I could hear sand sloshing around inside. I swapped it for the next bat—the LED flickering as soon as I turned it on.

“Left or right?” asked Dominic.

I considered it. If the point was to attract things to us, then taking the easier road made sense. I’d have liked to take the right-hand trail to Croft Ambrey, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be stumbling around an Iron Age fort, what with ditches and ramparts and other convenient limb-breaking opportunities, until I’d had a chance to suss it out in daylight.

This, by the way, is what we call in the trade a risk assessment.

“Allons y,” I said, and led off down the left-hand track.

We’d gone on another couple of hundred meters, around a turn and past a turn off that Dominic identified as heading down to Croft Castle, when we heard the hoof beats.

Beverley heard them first, but as soon as she’d pointed them out I heard them as well. Hooves hitting the ground in a fast jaunty rhythm. A slow trot, I learned later—sometimes known as a jog.

It took a couple of rounds of shushing and craning to establish that it was coming from behind us. I put down the cricket bat to anchor the werelight in place and “jogged” back five meters to see if I could reestablish my night vision. With the light behind me the track became a milky strip, snaking between the vertical shadows of the trees, whose pointed tops marched off like fence spikes. The moon hung full and round and almost perfectly aligned with the track.

If this wasn’t your actual moon path, I thought, it would certainly do for the postcard.

I couldn’t see a horse, but I could hear the hoof beats getting closer—and picking up the pace.

“Let’s get off the road,” I said.

Neither Beverley nor Dominic argued, even when we found ourselves pushing through the chest-high bracken that had lain invisible in the darkness until we blundered straight into it. If anything, we were grateful for the additional cover as we crouched down and waited for the hoof beats to get closer.

I glanced up at the werelight obediently hanging directly over the track where I’d left it. The color was definitely beginning to edge into the red as whatever approached sucked up the magic and lowered the frequency of the emitted light.

The hoof beats slowed to a walk and then a cautious amble. They sounded large, the hoof beats, great big dinner-plate-sized hooves that thumped down onto the dust of the track with authority.

I watched through the gaps in the bracken as the werelight dimmed down to a sullen red and Princess Luna made her appearance. It was transparent but refractive, a statue of living glass, the dying light from the werelight tingeing its shoulders and haunches with red and outlining the long spiraled horn that rose from between its eyes.

Then the werelight popped out and suddenly it was there, huge and real and sweaty and pale in the moonlight, its horn bobbing left and right as it swung its head and sniffed the air.

I resisted the urge to push further back into the bracken.

Then the head snapped back to point down the track, the big muscles in its haunches bunched, flexed and the beast sprang forward, its vast hooves kicking up dust and splinters of rock.

We scrambled out of our hiding place and stumbled out to stare after the unicorn as it vanished around a curve in the track.

“Okay,” said Beverley. “I really hope one of you is a virgin.”

“What now?” asked Dominic.

“We follow it,” I said.

Which we did, but amazingly cautiously, all the way down to what Dominic assured me was School Wood—not far from where Stan had had her stash snaffled. I considered launching another werelight, but after a brief discussion with the others we decided to delay that until we were within a comfortable mad panicked rush of where Victor was parked in the Technical.

In fact, I had Dominic turn his phone back on so he could call to make sure that Victor was indeed waiting. You know—just in case.

The track had curved south so that the tall trees cast their moon shadows across the path, making it much harder to continue without lights. The warmth of the day was leaching out of the air and I shivered at a breeze that blew in from the north and riffled the tree tops.

When I figured we’d reached the point where the track started to descend sharply, I decided to give the big werelight another go.

“And what’s your plan if Princess Luna turns up again?” asked Beverley.

“I want you two to hang back,” I said. “While I go and try to make friends with it.”

“And when it inevitably tries to kill you?” asked Dominic.

“You rush in and rescue me,” I said.

Beverley kissed her teeth.

“We have to at least narrow down where it’s coming from,” I said. “So if it runs, we follow it again. And if it attacks, we see how far it follows us.”

“Just for the record,” asked Dominic, “what were you expecting to happen when we first met it?”

I told them I had thought our invisible friend would be a bit more insubstantial and a bit less like a carthorse with a lethal spike stuck on its head.

“The girls are still missing,” I said. “We’ve got to at least make another attempt.”

“Fine,” said Beverley. “Just stay out of the way of the horn, right?”

I promised I would.

Then I turned on the last of the cricket bats and put a werelight over our heads, a slightly bigger one than I meant to, one that I learned later was visible as far away as Wigmore and Mortimer’s Cross.

As soon as it went up I felt Beverley clutch my arm.

There was a chill in the air and a sudden coppery taste in my mouth. A smell like smashed flint and a screech like a blade on a whetstone.

At the far edge of the werelight the shadows among the trees began to quiver.

“I have to get off this ridge,” said Beverley.

“Why?”

“There are some things you don’t do, some places you don’t go, unless you are seriously looking for trouble.”

“Are we talking postcodes here?”

“Fuck postcodes,” said Beverley. “This is a no-fly zone, UN resolution-breaking, war-starting stuff. You know my mum and the Old Man of the River, remember all that aggravation? That’s nothing compared to what’ll happen if we don’t get off this ridge right now.”

“I get that,” I said. “But who?”

“I don’t know, Peter,” said Beverley. “And I don’t think it’s a good idea to stick around to find out.”

I heard hoof beats to the north-east, behind us. The fucker must have circled around or just stood invisible in the wings and watched us walk past.

“Which way?” I asked.

Beverley hesitated and then thrust out an arm in a vaguely south-westerly direction.

“That way,” she said. “Toward the river.”

Away from the unicorn—it seemed like a sensible idea.

“I thought you were going to make friends,” said Dominic as he headed off at a brisk pace.

I would have explained that operational flexibility is the key to successful policing, but I decided to save my breath. I also left the cricket bat and the werelight behind me in the hope that it might slow down whatever was following us.

“How far is it to the car?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” said Dominic. “Half a mile?”

I stopped and looked back.

A hundred meters behind me the unicorn had stopped beneath my werelight to bask in its glow. As I watched, it reared up on its hind legs, the reddening light gleaming along its horn, and gave a deep rumbling bellow.

Nothing that ate grass, I decided, would make a noise like that and legged it after the others.

Suddenly the forest on our left gave way to a single line of trees reinforced with a barbed-wire fence and, on the other side, open pasture silver in the moonlight. Beverley stopped so fast that I nearly ran into her back.

“That way,” she said, pointing at the pasture.

I was about to ask why we couldn’t just keep going when I saw something blocking the track ahead. In the darkness it was an indistinct pattern of shadow but when it moved my brain had no trouble filling in its outline—another unicorn.

“Oh, great,” said Dominic.

I looked back to where the werelight was flickering and our prancing friend came whumping down on its front hooves, head lowered like a bull. I swung back to the fence looking for a stile or a gate, or even a gap that wouldn’t involve ripping myself to bits on the barbed wire.

“Peter,” said Beverley—I heard hoof beats from both directions.

“I know,” I said trying to clear my mind.

“Hurry,” she said.

“I know,” I said summoning up the impello forma in my mind and trying to remember the formae inflectentes that would make it do what I want.

“I mean it,” she said, and I let the spell go.

It wasn’t pretty but it got the job done, ripping out a section of the barbed-wire fence and shoving it to the side so that me, Beverley and Dominic could run through the gap.

“The farmer’s not going to like this,” yelled Dominic as we ran past the twisted remains of the fence.

“He can bill me,” I said.

Even in my PSU boots, running at night over uneven ground was difficult and Beverley soon pulled ahead of me and Dominic. Out in the open pasture I was suddenly aware of the blue-black vastness of the sky and the river of stars arching over my head. At the far side of the field I could see a smudged line of shadow against the midnight blue of the sky—I hoped it was another fence line because if it was a cliff or something we were in deep shit.

I heard the bellow of a unicorn behind me and, without looking back, I put on a spurt of speed, the long grass whipping around my ankles.

“There’s a fence,” yelled Beverley from in front of me.

Doing magic on the fly, even something as basic as an impello variant is incredibly difficult. Nightingale said that when he was training only half his peers could perform while under physical stress. Which is why, in the Folly, boxing practice goes, jab, jab, right, duck, roundhouse, uppercut, lux, jab, jab, impello.

I stripped away the sound of my own breathing and the impact of my feet on the grass so that in my head there was only the pounding of my heart and the right formae—and then I twisted that shape in the Yale lock of the universe.

Ahead of me I saw bits of shadow splinter and fly away to either side. It wasn’t perfect, but I reckoned that even the Russian Olympic judge was going to give me at least eight points for interpretation.

Then I realized that beyond the fence the land fell away in a sixty degree slope, fortunately a wooded one and I saved myself by deliberately running into a tree and throwing my arms around it.

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 meter long appeared above.

I smelled 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 recognized 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 among 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 kilometer—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 centimeters 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 among 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.”