14
Media Compliant
NOW, I WAS pretty sure that the girl currently living with Victoria and Derek Lacey was a changeling, swapped out by a unicorn-employing supernatural person or persons unknown some eleven days previously. But I didn’t have any proof. Yes, she was alarmingly weird. But then so were a lot of children—including, it has to be said, some of my relatives. And, yes, she displayed an ability—the glamor—that I’d assumed resided only with practitioners, Genius Loci like Beverley Brook and the fae. On the other hand, her appearance was unchanged and her own parents fully accepted her as their child. Worse, the media in the form of Sharon Pike, weekend cottage owner and newspaper columnist, had decided that the child was truly Nicole Lacey.
After a careful risk assessment, I determined that rushing in mob handed and seizing the child would be hazardous if not actually illegal. In the meantime, I suspected that the girl currently known as Nicole wasn’t facing a substantial risk of anything other than hyperglycemia.
We were going to have to wait for the DNA tests which, according to Dr. Walid, would be ready by the next afternoon at the earliest. I spoke to Nightingale, who said he would ask DCI Windrow to maintain a close watch on “Nicole” and make sure she didn’t wander off anywhere.
“Any chance of you getting up here?” I’d asked.
“That rather depends on how Lesley responds to your last text,” he’d said. “Whatever Inspector Pollock thinks, we are ultimately responsible for Constable May. And it would be risky in the extreme if he tried for an arrest without me present.”
I told Nightingale I couldn’t see Lesley falling for such an obvious trap, but he disagreed.
“Not consciously,” he’d said. “But nobody changes their allegiance so absolutely overnight—she may be looking for a way back.”
I thought of the Lesley May I knew, who was more decisive than a bag full of judges. I still thought it was unlikely, but what did I know?
Nightingale did agree that if Lesley hadn’t responded within another twenty-four hours, he’d move on site and review my risk assessment in situ—he didn’t say it exactly like that of course.
“Give it a day,” he’d actually said. “If we still haven’t heard anything, I’ll pop up in the Jag and see what’s what. Abdul assures me that all the blood tests will be completed by then.”
So, once I’d ensured the samples were couriered off, I met up with Beverley, Dominic and Victor two villages over in the back garden of the Boot Inn where I had lightly battered Scottish cod filet, hand cut chips and garden peas.
It was late enough for the sunlight to be slanting into the garden from the west and be cut into shadows by the shades over the tables and splash on the potted trees arranged along the fence.
“Are there no just-pub pubs around here?” I asked.
Dominic blamed Ludlow which, having become a major foodie center, had raised the pretentions of all the eateries within a fifty miles radius.
“Even the places in Wales,” he said.
“Good for business, if you can get plugged into the supply network,” said Victor who, bizarrely, turned out to be a vegetarian. “I don’t mind raising and slaughtering them,” he’d said when I asked him about it. “I just draw the line at eating them.” He had the roasted shallot tarte Tatin, roasted pepper, goat’s cheese, artichoke and roasted pepper salad.
“That’s one too many roasteds in the menu,” said Dominic.
I checked my mobiles at regular intervals—both of them—the disposable and my second-best Android which Call Me Al had rigged to alert me if anything tripped a detector.
Neither made a sound for the rest of the evening, until me and Beverley were back at the cowshed putting the flagrant back into in flagrante when, in accordance with the iron principles of Sod’s Law, my Android rang. Since Beverley was the only one with at least one hand free at the time, she got to the phone first, glared at it, and stopped bouncing long enough to read it.
“It’s just three numbers—659,” she said, over her shoulder.
“It’s one of the detectors,” I said, and extricated my right hand from under her bum and held it out. Instead of handing the phone over, she lifted her hips a fraction and pivoted around to face me—a sensation that managed to be both hugely erotic and uncomfortably weird at the same time. When she finally let me have the phone, I confirmed the numbers.
“I’ve got to check this out,” I said.
Beverley sighed and flopped forward onto my chest.
It took me ten minutes to get out of the cowshed, and it probably would have been longer if Beverley hadn’t decided that she wanted to come with, and so obligingly dismounted without an argument.
The detector that had gone off-line was the northernmost, planted on the Roman road where the lane from Yatton crossed and became a public footpath. Dominic had attached it among the bushes by the stile, so there was a good chance it might have just been vandalized.
In the darkness I could only make out the surrounding hills by the way they blotted out the stars, but according to the map on my tablet the shadow to the west was Pyon Wood and to the east Croft Ambrey, with a waning moon hung above like a banner. The Roman road was a straight gray strip between the black hedgerows. I parked the Asbo on the grass verge and left the hazard lights on. Beverley held the torch while I detached the detector from its mount and carried it back to the car. I cracked open the PVC case to expose the bare innards of the device.
“That’s a mobile phone,” said Beverley, leaning over my shoulder to look.
I explained that it was, and that the detector worked on the simple principle that a powerful enough source of magic would break the phone and cause it to stop pinging the network, which would then alert the custom program on my tablet.
“So basically it only works once,” she said.
I used a jeweler’s glass to scan the electronics, but I couldn’t see any visible pitting.
“That’s the trouble with magic,” I said. “It’s slippery stuff.” I shrugged. “What are you going to do?”
“You could bundle four or five phones together and automatically rotate through them,” said Beverley, as I bagged and tagged the phone for shipping back to Dr. Walid. “That would extend the life a bit.”
I installed the last of my spare detectors by the stile and packed up.
“But the switching mechanism can’t be a microprocessor,” I said. “And I haven’t had time to test the effect of magic on transistors yet—you might have to use valves or electromechanical switches.”
“Do you know why it happens?” asked Beverley as we drove back to the cowshed.
I admitted that I did not have the faintest idea how magic did anything—let alone why it reduced microprocessors to sand and brains to Swiss cheese.
“When you do magic . . .” I said.
“I don’t do magic,” said Beverley quickly. “You get me? It’s not the same thing.”
“When you do . . . things that other people can’t do . . .” I said, “it doesn’t damage your phone.”
“Not unless the waterproofing fails,” she said.
“I wonder why that is?”
“That’s easy,” said Beverley. “I am a natural phenomenon. So I do less damage than you.”
“Have you visited Covent Garden recently?” I asked. “They’ve almost finished the rebuilding.”
“That was collateral,” she said. “And entirely your fault.”
* * *
The next morning I decided to check out Pyon Wood Camp—I took Miss Natural Phenomenon along with me, so she could tell me what all the plants meant.
“They mean,” said Beverley when she saw them, “that in lowland Britain if you don’t chop the trees down you get a forest.”
Pyon Wood Camp is a scheduled monument described in the catalog as a small multivallate Iron Age hill fort. What it looked like was a round hill covered in trees. When I looked up the meaning of the word multivallate I found it meant a hill fort with three or more rings of concentric defenses. Since the easiest way to start an argument among archeologists is to ask them what purpose hill forts actually served—as defended villages, refuges of last resorts, ritual centers, palaces of tribal chiefs, cattle herding stations—none of that information was particularly useful.
Neither was Beverley Brook.
“More Silurian limestone,” she said. “Topped by the usual suspects—oak and ash, some beech, a couple of birch.”
It was particularly hot that morning. Victor had complained that the recent hot weather was buggering up his harvesting schedule, but he hoped that some of the rain they’d had in Wales would shift over his way.
“Not that I want a thunderstorm,” he’d said. “But a shower or two to take the edge off would be nice.”
It was too hot to walk up the shimmering track from the Roman road, so I risked the low slung underside of the Asbo and drove uphill until we reached the spot, plus or minus twenty meters or so, where the Antiquarian map said that the trail into the monument should start. It wasn’t exactly well signposted, and if there was a stile or other public access, me and Beverley must have missed it. In the end we climbed over a fence and slogged through some dense bracken until we reached a close approximation of a path that wound around the hill.
It was close under the shade of the trees and not notably cooler. The air was heavy with a sickly sweet smell that Beverley said was probably the rhododendrons, and the scent of scorched bark and resin that I’d started to think of as overheated forest. Something hooted further up the hill.
“Wood pigeon,” said Beverley.
“I’ve heard that in London,” I said.
“Yes,” said Beverley slowly, “we have birds in London. Many of them of the same species.”
Among the trees and undergrowth, the ditches and ramparts were hard to distinguish from the steep slope of the hill. It was only when the trail rounded the north-east corner and we found the entrance that I realized the ramparts, despite obvious damage, were twice my height. We labored up onto what I supposed must have been the central enclosure, although I couldn’t see it for the trees. And, despite the heat, we decided to follow the path to its bitter end. Drifts of foxglove started to appear among the bracken and bramble, growing more frequent until we stepped out into a glade awash with purple. The clearing was almost too circular to be natural, and certainly large enough that it ought to have shown up on Google Earth.
Beverley kicked at something down among the foxglove stems. It cracked and splintered—rotten wood.
“Stump,” she said. “Somebody cleared this area.”
“The latest imagery on Google Earth was four years ago,” I said. “It must have happened since then. Is it possible that it might be natural?”
“I don’t know,” said Beverley. “Probably not.”
We worked our way to the center of the clearing, pushing through the stands of foxglove which seemed taller here than elsewhere, the bells of the flowers larger and more mouth-like as they shivered in the hot, still air. When we stopped I realized that the glade was very quiet. Even the wood pigeon we’d heard earlier seemed muffled and far away.
“There’re no bees,” said Beverley. “And bees love foxglove.”
Mellissa’s bees had been “avoiding the south-west section of the ridge, from the edge of Bircher Common to where the river is.” They weren’t coming here or to Pokehouse Wood.
“Feel anything?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “How about you?”
I smelled green stuff, hot and dusty, and sneezed.
“There’s no castle,” I said. “Hannah was very sure about the castle.” The child psychologist had continued her gentle interrogation of Hannah. Heroically enduring countless episodes of Jessie and more Yonder Over Yonder than was probably medically advisable, the psychologist chipped gently away at Hannah’s story, particularly the pink and blue and orange castle which she probably figured for a defense mechanism or a mental block or whatever the psychological term is. Hannah, while growing increasingly fuzzy on every other detail, had stayed firm on the castle.
I thought there had to be a castle somewhere, or at least something vaguely castle-like. But if there was, it certainly wasn’t at Pyon Wood Camp.
I had one spare detector left, so I placed it in the center of the glade and activated it.
“Just on the off chance,” I said.
“Is your work always this vague?” asked Beverley.
“Nah,” I said. “Sometimes we really don’t know what we’re doing.”
Beverley had to make what she called a “pastoral visit” to the Steam Fair, so I dropped her off there before heading back toward the industrial park and the redbrick ship shape of Leominster nick. The media were thick around the public side and there was even a knot of photographers at the entrance to the police car park. I made sure I was wearing a suitably solemn face to avoid “Police Laugh At Kidnapped Children” headlines from the Independent.
“There’s going to be a press conference later,” said Dominic when I asked him about the scrum outside. The broadsheets led with the war in Syria, but the tabloids were having way too much fun with the idea of child-stealing gypsies to let the mere lack of facts get in the way.
“Copper pipe I’d believe,” said Dominic. “Children, no.”
I asked him what the MIU had come up with, but he told me to watch the press conference like everybody else.
I settled into my assigned space in the territorial policing office and picked up the phone. I called up Croft Castle and asked to talk to whoever it was who managed the forest. They told me his name was Patrick Blackmoor and they gave me his mobile number.
“The western hemlock was doing really badly,” Blackmoor said when I asked why they’d clear-felled Pokehouse Wood out of schedule. “So we decided to fell early.”
When I asked what the problem had been, Blackmoor told me that it was a variety of factors. “The soil remained very poor and acidic, but not enough to explain the losses among the plantation,” he said. “It’s a vigorous tree, your western hemlock. That’s why it gets planted.” It took more than some abnormal soil chemistry to stunt their growth, but there had been damage to the young trees as well.
“What kind of damage?” I asked.
“In the initial planting phase some of the saplings were dug out during the night. Others had bark damage,” said Blackmoor. But he didn’t have an explanation as to what was doing it.
“We called in your lot at one point,” he said. “In case it was vandals.” Although nobody could think of a reason why, with over 200,000 hectares of Forestry Commission woodlands in England to play with, they’d want to pick on the Pokehouse Wood. I asked whether they might have been protesting the planting of foreign conifers on an ancient woodland site.
Blackmoor found that idea hilarious.
“This was going to be the last commercial crop,” he said. “Once it was harvested we would have replanted with broadleaf—basically what we’re doing now.”
“Maybe someone didn’t want to wait?” I asked, which was the bit Blackmoor found most funny.
“Forests are a long-term thing,” he said. “And the people who care enough about the management of ancient woodlands to vandalize a tree think in the same time frames as us. Besides, there are plenty of ancient woodlands under threat from motorways and infrastructure projects—that’s what gets protestors excited.”
“Then who?” I asked, but he didn’t have the faintest idea. And the damage had continued. Once the trees began to mature they started to suffer from what looked like an unknown disease, or possibly poisoning.
“At first we were sure it was poisoning,” said Blackmoor. Because most of the affected trees were found to have been drilled. “Up to a depth of thirty centimeters—in some cases all the way through the trunk.”
I tried to remember my night out with Princess Luna, and to estimate at what height that horn would have been when deployed in skewer-the-policeman mode.
“How high up the trunk did the drilling take place?” I asked.
Blackmoor couldn’t say for certain without looking at his notes, but he remembered the holes being mostly chest high. “Five to six feet off the ground,” he said.
I remembered that night, the glass unicorn refracting the werelight, the crunch as something invisible and sharp skewered a tree at the same height my head would have been—had I not been sensible enough to get out of the way.
“We didn’t find any evidence of poisoning, though,” said Blackmoor.
Some trees just mysteriously fell over. Many others showed suboptimal growth or other deformities. So they set up a hide in the woods above and trained a time-lapse camera on the area.
“It stopped working after the second night,” he said.
I’ll bet it did, I thought.
They’d got so desperate that they granted permission for “a pair of those UFO nutters” to camp out in the woods for a fortnight. But they never spotted anything strange and they were really looking.
I asked if there were temporal patterns to the damage.
“It happened mostly during the summer,” said Blackmoor. “That’s all I can give you off the top of my head.”
“Did you keep records?” I asked. And they did, as it happens—vandalism being an important issue to the National Trust. Blackmoor said he’d send them to me as long as I promised, should I figure out what the cause was, to feed that information back to him.
And if it turns out to be a sacred grove, I thought, or a faerie place of power or some such mystical bollocks, would he still want to know? Probably yes. And he’d just add it to the long list of issues that makes modern heritage land management such a complex and challenging career.
Inspector Edmondson found the tree vandalism case for me, and when the records from Croft Castle arrived in the form of a great big spreadsheet I started correlating both with my UFO sightings and the timeline of Zoe Lacey’s encounter. I was still doing that when the press conference started. Me and Dominic got cold drinks and joined pretty much the rest of the nick to watch it on the internal monitor. These days, sensible police officers make sure they have an independent record of any encounter with a journalist. This meant that we got to see the whole thing—something that very few members of the public did.
For the hard-working lower ranks of the police force there is no entertainment quite as thrilling as watching your senior officer conducting a press conference. Not only is there the possibility that it might be humorously embarrassing, but also if it goes very badly it’s useful to have advance warning so one can make oneself scarce. Officers of Inspector rank and above are a power in the land, and they don’t like to be mildly contradicted let alone thwarted or shown up in public. I’m sure I wasn’t the only officer in the incident room watching the TV and coming up with a convenient list of actions which would keep me far away from Leominster nick—just in case.
It started out normally enough, with Inspector Edmondson and DCI Windrow sitting at a table elevated on a podium and doing their best gruff, matter of fact, nothing to see here, just doing our job with understated professionalism, manner. We are the police and we have brought order out of chaos—believe it, bruv!
It took them about ten minutes to run down the list of allegations, and why they were bollocks. No evidence that any member of the Marstowe family was involved in the kidnap, no evidence that any member of the local traveler community had been involved, and no evidence of an informal network of child-smuggling camps. Once Windrow had finished, a couple of journalists asked him whether he was one hundred percent sure that the Marstowe family was not involved and that there weren’t gypsies roaming the land stealing children and illegally living off incapacity benefit—cross his heart and hope to die.
Windrow repeated himself in the manner of a man who was perfectly happy to sit there and repeat himself until everybody got bored and went home. Unaccountably, he failed to raise the working theory that the children had been abducted by faeries.
It’s just that sort of deception, I thought, that breeds distrust of the police.
Sharon Pike certainly distrusted the police, because she stood up and demanded to know what about Harry Plimpton.
“Who Nicole identified by name as one of the men that held her,” she said.
I looked at Dominic to see if the name meant anything to him—his face screwed up in concentration.
“Andy’s aunt’s daughter’s son,” he said after a moment. “Second cousin. You met him at the sheep roast.”
I was impressed. In my family once you got past niece or uncle it was all cousins, and even that tended to include any random former stranger who’d managed to get his feet under the table.
I heard a flurry of activity from the incident room as someone looked up the relevant nominal on HOLMES. Meanwhile, Windrow stalled by asking where and when the identification had taken place.
“Surely that’s not the point,” said Sharon Pike. “Surely the question is why the police have failed to conduct a thorough investigation.”
I saw Windrow glance down at where he must have had a tablet tucked out of sight.
“Harry Plimpton,” he said, “has been comprehensively eliminated from the inquiry. Not only did he spend most of the period in question helping as a volunteer with the search, but can also account for his whereabouts for the rest of the time.”
I looked at Dominic, who nodded at the incident room—the MIU had been busy while some of us were out gallivanting in the woods.
“Has he been put in a line-up?” asked Sharon Pike. “Has any effort been taken at all to try and identify the men that kidnapped Nicole?”
“Because of the gravity of the offenses this inquiry has been meticulous,” said Windrow. He was too professional to let any of his irritation show. “We have followed every line of inquiry as they came to our attention.”
“Then why haven’t you made an arrest?” asked Sharon Pike.
The police had a two camera set up in the press room and, after a while switching randomly backward and forward, whoever was running the mixing board decided that Sharon Pike was more interesting than Windrow and settled on her.
I noticed that the journalists either side of her seemed alarmed by her behavior, but I couldn’t tell whether it was her manner or her questions.
“And whom should we have arrested?” asked Windrow.
Sharon Pike blinked theatrically as if the question astonished her.
“Well, Andrew and Joanne Marstowe would do for a start,” she said. “Since it was their plan from the beginning.”
Windrow fell back on police speak and reiterated that there were no plans to arrest Andrew and Joanne Marstowe, nor were they helping the police with their inquiries or considered persons of interest.
“Of course not,” said Sharon Pike. “Because the whole hideous plot was facilitated by an officer of the West Mercia Police,” she almost shouted this. The journalists around her were beginning to edge away as if wary of sharing the same frame.
“Sharon,” said Windrow. “If you have any evidence—”
“Detective Constable Dominic Croft,” she said.
“Well, that explains a great deal,” I said. “You always were suspiciously one step ahead of the rest of us.”
“That’s not funny,” said Dominic, his face pale.
He was right to be worried. A public accusation like that was going to hang around his neck.
Windrow’s mouth literally dropped open in shock, but fortunately Inspector Edmondson stepped in.
“That’s a very serious allegation,” he said. “If you have any proof . . .”
“Of course I have proof,” said Sharon Pike and, after rummaging in her bag, held up what looked like an oblong of black plastic and marched toward the podium shouting that here was her proof before slapping it down in front of Windrow.
“This is something you can’t sweep under the carpet,” said Sharon Pike, and slammed her hand down on what looked to me like—and on further forensic analysis proved to be—the plastic tray from inside a box of Milk Tray chocolates.
Windrow looked down at the plastic tray, back up at Sharon Pike, and then put his hand over the microphone in front of him and said something.
“Of course I’m all right,” said Sharon, loudly enough to be picked up by an adjacent microphone. “What are you afraid of? Look at it!”
Windrow spoke again, too low to be picked up.
Sharon Pike glared at him and then looked down at the sad crumpled piece of plastic in front of her. Her head snapped back up and she opened her mouth, but didn’t speak. The camera angle was all wrong to see her expression clearly, but you could read the confusion in the set of her shoulders as she looked back down at her “evidence.”
Then, without a word, she turned and walked away. The police camera swung madly to keep her in frame as she marched up the central aisle between the ranks of silent journalists and camera operators.
I had one of those “somebody do something” moments when you suddenly have the realization that the person supposed to be doing something is you. I scrambled up from my desk and ran down the front staircase without a care for health and safety or the two uniforms coming up toward me. They sensibly flattened themselves against the railing and I shouted a thank you as I jumped past.
I missed her in the car park, so I ran around to the police zone and hopped into the Asbo. By the time I was on the main road I’d already done a PNC check to find out what she was driving—a BMW X5 Diesel, which seemed like quite a serious car for someone who lived alone in a small village. Perhaps she had a lot of relatives?
I decided that her most likely destination would be her house in Rushpool, second most likely would be her main house in London. Beyond that, it was anyone’s guess. I managed to get Dominic on the Airwave and asked him to ask, politely, if they could keep an eye out for the BMW and Sharon Pike.
“She’s going to be acting a bit weird,” I said. “So she may have to be sectioned.”
I heard Dominic spluttering. Sectioning a prominent journalist would be, as they say, problematic. But both Bartholomew and Kingsley had left detailed case notes about people who had been put under the influence, “seducere” as Bartholomew called it, and had become “maddened to the point where they rent their garments and would be like to injure themselves if not restrained.”
I considered going blues and twos, but I didn’t really want to exceed my authority—and I wasn’t sure it would be much help if I ran into the back of a trailer full of hay. I had a worst case scenario growing at the back of my mind, so I went straight to the half-timbered pile that was the Laceys’ home. And, sure enough, outside was parked a white BMW X5 Diesel with the right index. I drew up alongside and found Sharon Pike banging on the PVC door and screaming at the top of her lungs.
Before I could reach her, the door opened and Sharon Pike recoiled violently as a small pale figure stepped out to face her. Whatever she’d been planning to say choked off. And in the sudden quiet I heard the little girl say:
“Why’re you hitting yourself?”
Sharon Pike smacked herself and the girl giggled and told her to do it again.
I reached them just in time to see Sharon Pike punch her own face hard enough to draw blood.
Some policing situations are the same wherever or whatever you’re dealing with. I put myself between Sharon Pike and the girl and spoke in my command voice.
“Stop that!”
Probably-not-Nicole sneered at me.
“I don’t like you. Go away.”
“Stop it!”
“Go away,” she yelled.
“Look me in the eye,” I said, and waited until she reluctantly lifted her head to do so. “That doesn’t work on me.”
Not-Nicole squinted at me.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because I’m police and it’s my job to beat small children if they misbehave.”
“You won’t,” she said.
“I can and I will if you don’t behave yourself,” I said.
“You wouldn’t!”
You think that because you are small I will not beat you. But I am your mother and I know what is best for you. And if I have to beat you, then that is what I will have to do—it’s true, I thought. As you grow up you turn into your parents.
“Go inside and behave,” I said. “We will talk about this later.”
She gave me a sullen look before turning and walking back into the house. She wanted to slam the door but she didn’t dare.
Sharon Pike was standing with the dazed look of someone who’s been hit by a bus. I decided to take her to the parish hall, which would be suitably neutral ground. As I took her by the arm, she gave me one of those vaguely thankful looks that you get from members of the public when they realize you’re taking them away from whatever mess they’ve got themselves into.
The place had been cleared out since the celebratory sheep roast, but there was still a couple of Evians in the fridge behind the serving counter. Sharon Pike took hers gratefully and once I had her sat down on a folding chair she took a dainty sip. I unfolded a second chair and sat down to face her, close enough to be intimate but far enough away to be non-threatening.
“What happened?” she asked.
“You’ve been put under a form of suggestion,” I said. “A bit like hypnotism.”
Sharon took another sip of water and then shook her head.
“No,” she said. “That’s not possible.”
“Normally, no,” I said. “This is a special case.”
“By whom? Who did it to me?”
“I can’t say,” I said.
“Can’t or won’t?” she asked, the confusion wearing off. I didn’t think I had to worry about her rending her clothes, but my window for getting useful information was shrinking as she segued from victim to journalist.
“It’s part of an ongoing case,” I said. “But you just stood up and accused the West Mercia Police of conspiring to cover up the kidnap of two children and you did it in front of the whole press corp.”
Sharon held up a hand to make me stop. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. “I was there. Oh god—it’s all on tape.”
“Ms. Pike,” I said. “This is important. Can you remember where the ideas come from?”
“You’re PC Peter Grant,” she said. “I looked into you, you work for the Special Assessment Unit—the Met’s very own X-Files. I heard you investigate ghosts and aliens and psychics . . .” She trailed off. “Psychics,” she pinched her forehead. “Jesus Christ.” She looked at me, eyes narrowed.
“Psychics?” she asked.
“It’s an ongoing investigation,” I said.
“You know I’d love to say that little monster made me do it. But I think she just pushed me in the right direction, and I went off and did it to myself.” She sighed. “It would have been such a good story, too—pretty little girl, chav family, police incompetence—you’ve got to admit it had everything.”
“You’re sure it was the girl?” I said. “Not Victoria or Derek?”
“Oh it was little Nicky all right,” said Sharon. “Victoria, I’m sure you may have noticed, has no backbone. And Derek is no better than he should be.”
“Derek?” I asked, wondering what that meant.
“Anything with a pulse,” she said. “Even me once or twice.” She sighed again and drank more of the water. The good thing about the glamor is that it’s all in the mind—she was going to be okay. “Best lay I ever had.”
“All the names and details you listed in the press conference—”
“You’re determined to keep bringing that up,” said Sharon.
“Did you provide the details?” I asked. “Or did Nicole?” I thought it better not to raise the possibility that the girl was a changeling. Not when Sharon was so obligingly thinking herself down a cul-de-sac.
“No,” she said. “I provided all the details—so much for professionalism.” She straightened her shoulders. “Is Nicole psychic?”
“We don’t use that term,” I said.
“Really? What term do you use?”
“We just refer to them as people who are unusually good at getting other people to do what they want,” I said. “It’s disconcerting, but luckily it’s a bit on the rare side.” As was my ability to talk bollocks, I thought.
“And Nicole is one of these unusual people?”
“Inquiries are ongoing,” I said.
Except they weren’t. Because I was stuck waiting for the DNA tests to come back.
First step was to get some bodies out in the field behind the Old Rectory to ensure fake Nicole didn’t do a runner out the back. Fortunately, I was in Windrow’s good books for so promptly dealing with Sharon Pike.
“Who is where?” he asked when I called him up.
“In her cottage having a lie down,” I said.
“Any sign of the media?” he asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “What was the reaction after Ms. Pike left?”
“Confused,” he said. “I think they may just pretend it didn’t happen.”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” he said.
So I got some bodies in the fields and on the main lane with instructions to watch out for any comings and goings, but not to intervene unless asked to. I was just trying to figure out what to do next when Dr. Walid called.
“In the first instance,” he said, “Hannah and Nicole are half-sisters, they both share Derek Lacey as their father.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Sharon Pike wasn’t kidding about Derek.” And then the implications hit me. “Wait. If you could tell that, then the sample I gave you must have come from Nicole Lacey.”
“Correct,” said Dr. Walid. “The samples taken from the drink bottles were definitely of the child of Derek and Victoria Lacey—assuming you didn’t get the samples mixed up.”
I didn’t bother asking him if he was sure. When Dr. Walid gives a DNA result you can take it into court—literally.
He obviously correctly interpreted my silence as proof that I was floundering, because he went on to tell me that he’d contacted the labs which had processed the DNA samples for the investigation.
“The bottle samples match the blood sample from the strip of cloth you found, but not the baseline samples that were taken from the Lacey house at the start of the investigation,” said Walid. “Hair follicles I believe they were. Although they have a parent in common.”
“Derek Lacey?”
“Very good,” said Dr. Walid.
Boy, I thought, he really does get about.
Eleven years ago Zoe Lacey ran away with her baby half-sister, met the fae and came back with a different half-sister. And the Laceys had spent eleven years raising a changeling, until a week ago. When the fae, for whatever reason, had swapped them back.
What was I going to tell DCI Windrow? I’d only just managed to sell him on the idea of a changeling. And what was I going to tell Victoria Lacey—actually, genetically, the monster in your den is your biological daughter.
And why were they physically identical?
“What do you plan to do next?” asked Dr. Walid.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to think of something.”