2

Mutual Aid

BIG CITIES THIN out at the edges. Detached houses give way to semis, then to terraces which then grow a couple of stories before you either the reach the historic old town or, more usually, what’s left of it after the one-two blow of aerial bombardment and post-war planning. In the countryside the towns start so suddenly that one second you’re among open fields, the next you’re looking at a collection of renovated early modern townhouses. And then, before you even get a chance to discover whether that was really a genuine Tudor half-timbered building or a bit of late Victorian whimsy, you’re out the other side with an ugly red brick hypermarket filling your rear-view mirror.

Leominster, pronounced “Lemster” in case you wondered, was a bit more interesting than that. And I probably would have taken a moment to enjoy its market square if the satnav hadn’t plonked me straight onto the bypass which did exactly what it said on the tin. The town was already behind me when I crossed a bridge back over the railway and spun off a roundabout into the sleepy-looking industrial park where the local nick was kept.

You put your greenfield police stations on the outskirts of town for the same reason you build your supermarkets there—floor space and parking. My first proper nick was Charing Cross, smack in the heart of one of the busiest BOCUs in the Met—there we could just about cram all the IRVs, vans, Clubs and Vice covert units and sundry other pool cars into the garage and nobody under the rank of superintendent got a parking space.

But Leominster nick had two car parks, one for the public and one for police. And, I learned later, its own helicopter landing pad. The building itself was a three-story red-brick affair with an exuberant curve that made the far end look like a prow, so that from one side it looked like a jolly storybook boat that had grounded itself kilometers from the sea. The visitors’ car park was rammed solid with mid-range hatchbacks, satellite vans and a crowd of white people milling around aimlessly—the famous press pack, I realized. I took one look at them and drove around the block to the entrance to the police car park. To my eye this had a ludicrously low fence around it, easily scalable by any miscreant intent on committing mischief on constabulary property—I was not impressed, helicopter pad or not.

I turned into the automatic gate, leaned out of my window and pressed the button on the intercom mounted on a pole. I told the scratchy voice at the other end who I was, and waved my warrant card at the beady eye of the camera. There was an affirmative squawk and the gate rattled open. For a police car park it was suspiciously devoid of police vehicles, leaving just a couple of unmarked Vauxhalls and a slightly worse for wear Rover 800. It must have been all hands on deck for the search.

I parked up in a space away from the entrance where I reckoned I wasn’t going to get sideswiped by a returning carrier or prisoner transfer vehicle. Never underestimate the ability of a police driver to misjudge a corner when finally coming home from a twelve-hour shift.

A young white man was waiting for me by the back door. He was blond, with a broad open face and blue eyes. His suit, I noticed, looked tailored. But it was hard to tell since he’d obviously been wearing it for the last twenty-four hours straight. He was swigging from an Evian bottle which he lowered when he saw me, stuck out a friendly hand and introduced himself as DC Dominic Croft.

“They’re expecting you,” he said, but he didn’t say what for.

It was the cleanest nick I’d ever been in—it didn’t even have the distinctive smell from a lot of bodies working long shifts in heavy clothing that you expected in a working station. Eau de stab-vest Lesley had used to call it. The place was painted exactly the same color scheme as Belgravia and half a dozen other London nicks I’d been in—whoever was selling that particular shade of light blue must have been coining it.

“This place is usually pretty empty,” he said. “Normally it’s just the neighborhood policing team.”

Dominic led me upstairs to the main offices where the air conditioning, such as it was, was failing to deal with the sheer mass of police. A couple of detectives looked up as we walked into the incident room, nodding at Dominic then pausing to give me a suspicious once-over before turning back to their work. They were all white and, between them and the press pack out the front, I suspected that on this case my diversity training had been wholly in vain.

Incident rooms during a major inquiry are rarely a barrel of laughs, but the atmosphere that day was grim, the faces of the detectives sweaty and intent. Missing kids are tough cases. I mean, murder is bad but at least the worst has already happened to the victim—they’re not going to get any deader. Missing kids come with a literal deadline, made worse by the fact that you don’t get to learn the timing until it’s too late.

Dominic knocked on a door with a rectangular metal plate marked LEARNING ZONE, opened it without waiting for a response, and went inside. I followed him into the sort of long, narrow room that exists primarily because the architect had a couple of meters left over when dividing up the floor space and didn’t know what else to do with it. A small window was open to its meager health and safety mandated maximum extent and a desk fan was pushing the warm air around. A desk ran along one wall and an athletic white man in an inspector’s uniform leaned against it with his arms folded across his chest. Dominic introduced him as Inspector Charles, definitely not Charlie, Edmondson who was geographic commander for northern Herefordshire, which meant that this was his patch and he didn’t seem that delighted to have me on it. Occupying the better of the two seats available was a short squared-off white man with an incongruously long face and pointed chin that looked as if he’d borrowed his features from someone taller and thinner and then refused to give them back. This was DCI David Windrow, senior investigating officer of Operation Manticore—the search for Hannah Marstowe and Nicole Lacey. He waved me to the seat and I sat and adopted the appropriately earnest but slightly vacant look that is expected of lowly constables in these circumstances.

“Apparently,” said Windrow, “you’ve been up here on official business.”

“Due diligence, sir.”

“Yes,” he said. “I spoke to your Inspector. He said it was just a routine check.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And that you were volunteering to stay up here and lend a hand.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But you’re certain that there’s no . . .” Windrow hesitated. “No Falcon aspect to this case.”

The police have a habit of taking a call sign and using it indiscriminately as a noun, a verb and, on special occasions, a burst of profanity. Trojan is firearms, Ranger is Diplomatic and Protection, and Falcon is what a certain DCI of my acquaintance likes to call weird bollocks. The call sign has been in use since the seventies, but it’s been getting more of an airing in the last year or two. This portends, depending on the canteen you sit down in, the dawning of the age of Aquarius, the End of Days or, just possibly, that the Folly now has at least one officer that knows how to use his Airwave properly.

Inspector Edmondson unfolded his arms and sighed.

“So you’re not planning to continue a Falcon inquiry?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said. “I just want to help in any way I can.”

“Apart from the obvious,” said Windrow, “you got any experience in anything else?”

“Just general policing, PSU, a bit of interrogation, and I’m qualified to use a taser.”

“What about Family Liaison?” asked Windrow.

“I’ve seen it done,” I said.

“Do you think you could support an experienced FLO?”

I said I thought I could and Windrow and Edmondson exchanged looks. Edmondson didn’t look pleased, but then he nodded and they both looked back at me.

“Okay, Peter,” said Windrow. “If you want to help then we’d like you take over as second FLO to one of the families—the Marstowes. That way we can reassign Richard, the officer taking that role now, to the search.”

“He’s POLSA,” said Edmondson by way of explanation. A search specialist.

“If it’ll help,” I said.

“We tend to double up roles out here,” said Windrow. “We’re spread a bit thin.”

It’s a good thing that the sheep are all so law abiding, I thought but did not say, proving that my diversity training hadn’t been wasted after all.

“We probably don’t need to tell you this,” said Edmondson. “But keep clear of the media. Everything is being routed through the press officer.”

“Any of those bastards asks you a question,” said Windrow, “you direct them there—got it?”

I nodded keenly to show that my egg sucking was indeed proficient and up to date. We tied up a couple of bureaucratic loose ends and then I was dismissed into the care of DS Dominic Croft who was now charged with getting me to Rushpool.

*   *   *

Dominic, being a human being not a satnav, guided me through the town proper—the center of which boasted one of those completely unnecessary one-way systems that were so beloved of a certain generation of town planners. Most of it was Victorian or Regency terraces crowded close onto narrow pavements with the occasional half-timbered chunk of the seventeenth century plonked down among them.

Dominic managed to restrain himself from asking the obvious question until we were safely back in the countryside.

“So ghosts and magic are real?” he said.

I’d had that question enough times to have an answer ready. “There are things that fall outside the parameters of normal policing,” I said. I find you get two types of police, those that don’t want to know and those that do. Unfortunately, dealing with things you don’t want to know about is practically a definition of policing.

“So ‘yes,’” said Dominic.

“There’s weird shit,” I said. “And we deal with the weird shit, but normally it turns out that there’s a perfectly rational explanation.” Which is often that a wizard did it.

“What about aliens?” asked Dominic.

Thank god for aliens, I thought, muddying the water since 1947. I’d once asked Nightingale the same question and he’d answered, “Not yet.” So I suppose if they were to suddenly turn up they’d be part of our remit. But I hoped they didn’t turn up anytime soon. It’s not like we don’t have enough work to do already.

“Not that I know about,” I said.

“So you don’t rule them out?” he said.

We both had the windows down as far as they would go to try and pick up whatever breeze we could.

“Do you believe in aliens?” I asked.

“Why not?” he said. “Don’t you?”

“It’s a big universe,” I said. “It’s not going to be totally empty, is it?”

“So you do believe in aliens,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “But not that they’re visiting us.”

“Why not?”

“Why would they want to travel all that way?” I asked.

We passed through an elongated village that Dominic identified as Luston. Beyond that, the road narrowed and the dense green hedgerows blocked out the view on either side.

“Do you think someone snatched them?” I said, before Dominic could ask any more awkward questions.

“From two separate households?” he said. “Unlikely. Lured them out maybe.”

“Internet grooming?”

“Nothing on their computers. At least nothing I’ve been told about.”

“Someone they knew? Or met locally?”

“Let’s hope it’s a local,” said Dominic.

Because if it was a local then there’d be a connection. And if there was a connection then sooner or later it could be dug out by the investigation. In the case of Soham the police had their eye on Ian Huntley, the main suspect, from the moment he opened his gob and admitted to being the last person to see the victims alive. Without a connection it came down to hoping they were spotted by the public or came home of their own accord. Or they might be found by the ever-widening search program—but we didn’t want to think of that.

Dominic asked where I was staying and I asked him what was available.

“Today?” he asked. “Bugger all. It’s all full of media.”

“Shit,” I said. “Do you know anywhere?”

“You can stay in my mum’s cowshed,” he said.

“Her cowshed?”

“Don’t worry. There’s no cows in it.”

I’d have looked for a bit more clarification, but I turned a corner and had to brake suddenly to avoid a white TV satellite van which was trying to park in a gap between a Range Rover and a sleazy-looking maroon Polo. I edged past into the Y junction that formed the heart of the village, but there were so many media vehicles it was hard to see the houses.

“Lock up your sheep,” muttered Dominic. “The circus is in town.”

He directed me left again, up a lane that ran up a slope.

“Church is that side,” said Dominic. “Rectory on your left, pub is back down the way we came.”

What I could see of the village was free of rubbish but untidy, long yellow grass obscuring the fences, bushes thrusting out into the lane, and green banks overgrown with white flowers. Trees overhung the road by the church and the air beneath them was hot and still and smelled of overheated car. We threaded our way between another satellite van and a faded blue Transit with a vehicle hire logo on the side. I asked where the actual press might be.

“Going by past form, the senior reporters are in the pub, the photographers are outside the houses and the junior reporters are running around trying to get the locals to talk to them.”

“Is there anywhere for us to park?”

“We’ll tuck into my mum’s and walk from there,” he said.

Dominic’s mum lived in the last of a row of red brick council houses, none of which were still owned by the council, at the north edge of the village. Hers was the only bungalow, set back from the lane with a gravel drive and a front lawn that needed mowing. I followed Dominic’s directions and parked in a space by the kitchen door. He told me to grab my stuff.

“We’ll dump it in the cowshed and head over to the hall,” he said.

The cowshed was a sturdy one-story, flat-roofed rectangle built from sandy colored brick. It stood at the far end of large and unkempt back garden that ended in a barbed-wire fence beyond which stretched a strangely lumpy pasture bounded by an old stone wall. It looked more like a garage extension then a cowshed but when we walked around the back I saw that it had a wide patio window giving a view over the field. Dominic slid open the door to reveal a furnished room with a bed, desk, a flat screen TV and a walled-off corner that probably held a shower and toilet.

“You guys must really love your cows,” I said.

“Famous for it,” said Dominic.

The inside was as hot as a locked car, so I quickly dumped my stuff by the bed and closed the door. Dominic locked up and handed me the key but, instead of going back out by way of the drive, we headed for the fence where a couple of gray plastic crates and a tractor tire formed a makeshift stile.

“My mum got it into her head that you didn’t need planning permission for agricultural buildings,” said Dominic, climbing over the stile with practiced ease. “She wanted to rent it out as a B&B.”

I went over carefully. I didn’t want to turn up to my first briefing with a hole in my jeans.

“Is it true about the planning permission?” I asked.

“I think you’re supposed to be a farmer as well,” said Dominic. “You’ll be the first guest.”

I followed Dominic along the verge of the field which, as far as I could tell, ran the other side of the thick hedgerow that lined the lane leading out of the village. You could hear vehicles passing on the other side but you couldn’t see them at all. I’d been right. Searching for missing kids in this landscape must be a nightmare. Judging from the compacted soil this was a popular back route for the villagers. On those rare times I’d ventured out into the British countryside as a kid I’m pretty sure I was told not to walk across people’s fields.

“This isn’t a public right of way, is it?” I asked.

“Nah,” said Dominic, “but this is old orchard.”

Which explained the stone perimeter wall, I thought.

“The council bought it up to build houses,” he said, of which his mum’s had been the last. They also allocated a section to a new parish hall stroke community center and financed that by selling off the rest to a developer.

“He land-banked it in the hope he could change the terms of the planning permission,” said Dominic. Apparently the new plan was to build luxury houses aimed at incomers—it all sounded depressingly familiar—but the villagers had managed to block his application.

“They found a loophole,” he said.

I asked what the loophole was, but Dominic said he made a point of not asking.

“I get enough environmental distress from the boyfriend without wanting to get it from my mum as well,” he said.

The parish hall was about a hundred meters up from the cowshed. It was an odd building with wooden shingle walls and a gambrel roof that looked like it had been shipped over from the Midwest of America and then, presumably, assembled by the Amish synchronized barn-building team. There was an asphalt parking space out the front which was empty except for a shiny new Vauxhall Vivaro in West Mercia Battenberg livery. A lone female PSCO stood guard by the road to make sure nobody else parked there and kept an eye on the scattering of press clustered outside the front entrance. Them being out front was the reason that Dominic had taken us in the back way.

The hall was just that, a big room that was open to the rafters with a stage at one end and doors off to a kitchen area and toilets. According to Dominic it was where you had birthday parties, amateur dramatics and the dreaded young farmers’ disco. “Feared for miles around,” he told me. It was currently being used as a staging area for the search for Nicole and Hannah, which was why the media was outside. And since every available body was out searching it meant it was deserted. Sausage bags and rucksacks were piled in the corners, shrink-wrapped pallets of bottled water were stacked under trestle tables on which Styrofoam cups and jars of instant coffee were stacked. Two Ordnance Survey maps had been pinned to a cork notice board, overlapping so that the areas matched up, and covered in plastic. Arrows, loops and whorls had been drawn on in marker pen—the search so far. The air was warm and still and smelled of creosote.

“Hello,” called Dominic. “Anyone here?”

“Just a second,” called a woman from behind the door to the toilets.

I had a look at the map while we waited. A modern search isn’t just a matter of marking off a grid and working through it one by one. These days you section it off by probability—where your subject could have got to under their own power in the time available. So the search area grows like frost on a spider web, shooting down roads and tracks, spreading out in sheets over fields and gardens.

The door to the toilets opened and a fat woman in a beige cardigan stepped out. She had a round face with a milky complexion and dark brown hair pulled into a no-nonsense pony tail. To go with the cardigan she had a pair of glasses dangling around her neck on a pink strap, knee-length brown skirt and sensible court shoes. She was aiming for dependable parish busybody but it was undermined by sharp blue eyes which were constantly darting back and forth—taking everything in. Proper copper eyes, those.

Still, she did a good professional bustle when she saw me and shook my hand and introduced herself as DS Allison Cole.

“You must be Peter Grant,” she said. “Thank you for volunteering. Although god knows what the family are going to make of you.”

We sat down by one of the trestle tables. DS Cole yanked a bottle of Evian out of a pallet and offered it to me—I shook my head. She opened it and drank gratefully.

“We’re lucky with the weather,” she said. “If they’re out there in the open they’re not going to die of exposure.”

“Hottest summer in living memory,” said Dominic. “You should be right at home.”

I didn’t even bother to give him the look—it’s not like he’d have understood what it meant anyway.

“Where are you staying?” asked Cole.

“I’m putting him in me mum’s cowshed,” said Dominic.

“I thought the council wanted that knocked down,” said Cole.

“They haven’t got round to it yet,” he said.

“At least it will be a short commute,” said Cole. “And it’ll be good to have somebody near at hand overnight. Means I can get back to my kids.”

“You think this is going to drag out?” I asked.

“Who can tell?” she said, which meant yes.

“Do you think we’re going to get them back?”

“I hope so,” she said, which meant no.

She took another swig of water and wiped her forehead with the back of her arm.

“We’d better get you briefed and introduced,” she said.

*   *   *

The Marstowes lived in one half of a semi built in the watered-down neo-Georgian style that was de rigueur for post-war rural housing developments. Situated at the end of a cul-de-sac, it was, Dominic told me, the last actual council-owned council house in the village. All the rest having been bought up by their tenants in the 1980s and 1990s and then sold on to wealthy incomers.

“Except for your mum,” I said.

“She didn’t want to sell,” he said. “Now of course she looks like a bloody genius—prices being what they are.”

Judging from the decomposing gray VW Rabbit and the empty Calor Gas bottles among the long unmown grass of the front garden, the Marstowes were either hoping for a spot on the next Channel 4 deprivation documentary or a two-page spread in the Daily Mail. Although to clinch the Mail story they’d probably have to adopt a Romanian asylum seeker or something. On the other side of a box hedge the front garden of the other half of the semi was a neat lawn without flower beds. The windows on that side were closed up and doors were shut tight, and it had a blank empty aspect. The owner-occupier, a senior lecturer at Birmingham University had been among the first locals to be TIEed after the girls went missing. That’s Traced, Identified and Eliminated, in case you were wondering.

“At his holiday villa in Tuscany,” Dominic had told me. He’d been there since the end of the July.

“A Tuscan villa and a weekend house in the country?” I’d asked. “How much does he get paid?”

Apparently he’d planned to move his family out to Rushpool, but his wife had divorced him when she found him with an undergraduate discussing Borges’s pivotal role in the development of post-colonial literature with the aid of a feather duster, a latex vest and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Brownie flavored ice cream.

I asked whether the wife or the undergraduate had joined him in Tuscany.

“Wife and kids,” Dominic said. “And the undergraduate.”

The semi stood at the far end of a cul-de-sac which branched off the village lane. The media, I noticed, observed a sort unofficial line of control—never pushing their way beyond the junction. Dominic said that they’d been good about respecting the family’s privacy—so far. I wondered how long that would last.

The front door on the Marstowes’ side was propped open with a brick and from inside I heard children screaming. Dominic knocked a couple of times on the door, tried the bell which didn’t work, and knocked again. He looked at me and shrugged. The screaming got louder. At least one toddler, I thought, and a couple of older kids. One was definitely seriously aggravated about not being allowed out of the house.

Dominic gave up and was about to step inside when a white boy of about nine came charging up the hall and skidded to a halt at the sight of us. He was dressed in a green T-shirt with a cartoon picture of Psy on the front and clutching a pink plastic cricket bat. He stared at Dominic, then at me, bit his lip in consternation and then ran back the way he’d come.

“Ryan,” said Dominic. “The eldest.”

We followed Ryan into the house.

Given the hillbilly front garden, the inside of the house was surprisingly tidy or at least as tidy as a house with four kids under the age of eleven is likely to get without a full-time professional cleaning staff. I followed Dominic down the short hall and into the kitchen at the back and was introduced to Joanne Marstowe.

She was a small woman with a narrow upturned nose, blue eyes and Midwich Cuckoo colored hair. She was slender for someone with four kids. The youngest, Ethan aged one, was balanced in the crook of one arm. He had the same white-blond hair as his mother and appeared at some point in the recent past to have submerged his face in a bowl of Heinz mashed apple and pork casserole. I could see the open pot on the kitchen table and the high chair with an upturned blue and pink flowered bowl on the eating tray. Ryan had taken up a position behind his mum and now peered cautiously around her body to check we weren’t after him. A third child, who by a process of elimination had to be Mathew, aged seven, whose sandy hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat, sat quietly at the table with the air of a child who had been subjected to more than reasonable punishment as specified by section 58 of the Children’s Act 2004.

“Hello, Joanne,” said Dominic.

Joanne glared at him, noticed me and turned back to Dominic.

“Who the fuck is this?” she asked.

“This is Peter,” said Dominic. “He’s going to be working with Allison Cole and you.”

“Where’re you from?” she asked me.

“London,” I said, which seemed to please her.

“Good,” she said. “It’s about time they took this seriously. Have a seat.”

Mathew watched me sit down with wide suspicious eyes. Joanne asked Dominic if he was staying but he made his excuses and left, but not before giving me a surreptitious thumbs up from the door.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” asked Joanne.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll make it, if you like?”

“God, no,” she said and thrust Ethan into my arms. “But if you can deal with the monster I’d appreciate it.”

I may be an only child, but I’ve got a lot of cousins. And their parents shared my mum’s conviction that once you’re big enough to pick up a toddler unaided you’re big enough to babysit while the adults drink tea and discuss the important issues of the day. Ethan gave a startled yelp as I plonked him on my lap, his overheated pink face unclenching as curiosity got the better of his upset. There was kitchen roll on the table. I grabbed a couple of sheets and wiped most of the food off his face. He was a sturdy little boy and a bit heavy to be hanging off his mum’s hip. I wondered if he was catching the vibe from the adults around him.

“Have you got anyone who can help out?” I asked. “Family?”

Joanne looked up from the sink where she was triaging the washing up.

“Lots of family,” she said. “If you’d been here earlier you’d have been tripping over them. They were very keen to help, so keen that I had to get rid of them—at least for a bit.”

I watched as she paused in front of the kitchen cupboard and nervously tapped her finger on the counter.

“Mummy,” said Ryan, tugging at her leg.

“Shut up,” she told him. “I’m trying to remember what the fuck I’m supposed to be doing. Tea right?”

“Or coffee, if that’s easier.”

“Which one?” asked Joanne testily.

“Coffee,” I said.

“Can I have coffee too?” asked Mathew.

Which meant that Ryan wanted coffee as well, but in the end they both settled for a can of Coke each and a couple of mini Swiss rolls—the nation’s parental bribe of choice. I did my part by bouncing Ethan up and down and making weird noises until he was too confused to be upset. By the time my cup of own-brand instant was plonked down in front of me, Ryan and Mathew had wandered off into the adjacent living room to watch cartoons. Joanne slumped down in the chair across the table from me and put her face in her hands.

“Jesus,” she said.

Ethan burped ominously and I stopped jiggling him, just in case. There are limits to the sacrifices I’m willing to make in the name of community policing.

“When’s your husband getting back?” I asked.

Joanne raised her head and sighed.

“He won’t be back until it’s dark,” she said. “They’ll probably have to drag him back—he can’t sit around waiting, he’d go mad.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t have any choice there, do I?” she said. “Vicky asked if I wanted to wait it out at her house. I mean it wasn’t like she was going to come down and ‘wait it out’ here, was it? Have you seen her house? Can you imagine this lot . . .” She made a gesture that encompassed her children and the state of her kitchen. “No, if she wants company . . . It’s not like she’s short of friends.” She gave me an odd look. “Are you lot trained to keep your mouth shut? Because I seem to be doing most of the entertaining here.”

“We’re supposed to unobtrusive,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? All the better to let us incriminate ourselves?”

As it happened, exactly that—among all the other roles an FLO is supposed to perform.

“Trained that way,” I said. “The idea is not to make your life any more difficult than it has to be.”

She laughed at that, a short mirthless bark. Then she made eye contact and held it.

“Do you think I’m going to get my daughter back?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Why?”

Because you’ve got to have hope and no news is good news. And because the best you can do is sound like you’re being forthright and sincere. If they get their kids back they won’t even remember what you said and if they don’t—then nothing else will be important.

I was trying to come up with a convincing lie when I was saved by a voice from the hallway.

“Jo? Are you in?” Male, adult, public school.

“In the kitchen,” called Joanne.

We heard him pause at the living room door and ask the boys if they were bearing up.

“Chin up,” he told them, and then he came into the kitchen.

He was taller than me, mid-forties, dressed in cargo pants and green wellies, and a blue and gold rugby shirt that wasn’t loose enough to disguise a little pot belly. He had broad shoulders that were going to fat, brown eyes, a narrow nose and a big forehead. He was about to say something to Joanne when he copped sight of me.

“Hello,” he said. “Who are you?”

Joanne introduced us. He was Derek Lacey—father of the other missing child. He’d been out with the searchers, but they were losing the light.

“I just wanted to be sure you were okay,” he said.

“I’m about what you’d expect,” she said.

Derek pulled a seat out and placed it at the end of the table before sitting down. About as close as he could to interposing himself between me and Joanne without actually sitting cross-legged on the table. I wondered if he was even aware he’d done it. Joanne asked if he wanted a coffee—he asked for something stronger.

“Vicky doesn’t approve,” he told me as Joanne snagged a half bottle of Bell’s off a suitably child-inaccessible shelf at the top of the cupboard. “But by god I need a drink right now.”

He got it in an orange drinking glass with a picture of a happy octopus on it. The Bell’s went firmly and decisively back on the shelf. Derek finished his in two gulps. Inspired, Ethan screwed up his face and started to cry until he was pacified with orange squash.

“Where’s Andy?” asked Joanne.

“He was with a different party,” said Derek. “I think they were down toward Bircher.” His eyes flicked up to the cupboard where the Bell’s was tucked safely away, toward Joanne, and then back to me.

“I don’t wish to sound rude,” he said. “But I’d like a word in private with Joanne.”

I glanced at Joanne for confirmation—she gave a slight nod.

“Of course,” I said and offered him Ethan just to see what the reaction would be. Derek scooped up the toddler with practiced ease and Ethan didn’t seem to have any objections—although he could have been distracted by the orange squash.

I could feel them waiting for me to be gone all the way down the hall and out the front door. I considered doubling back and seeing if I could listen in, but I figured that would have been a little bit too Enid Blyton—even for me.

Rushpool was situated in a side valley that ran roughly northwest to southeast following, I learned later from an impeccable source, the line of the Rushy Brook—one of the many streams that converged further down the valley with the Ridgemoor Brook before meeting the Lugg at Leominster. Hydraulically speaking, it’s actually more complicated than that. But since I fell asleep during that part of the explanation I can’t inflict it on you. Although it was still early evening the sun had already fallen below the ridge behind the Marstowes’ house in a glare of smoky orange and the village was thrown into cooling shadow. I could hear the pub crowd murmur of the media scrum—still waiting at the entrance to the cul-de-sac—and see the glowing tips of their e-cigarettes and occasional camera flashes. I doubted Nightingale was that keen on me getting my face on the news, so I ducked sideways to guarantee that I was hidden by another box hedge. Then I called DS Cole to let her know I was out of the house.

She told me to stay close in case they called me back in. “Or a major domestic kicks off.” I didn’t get a chance to ask her whether she thought that was likely. The search teams were going to be out until nightfall, but DCI Windrow would be holding a briefing for the investigation team for the next hour or so. Until then I was the man on the spot.

“I’ll be back after the briefing to talk to the family,” Cole said. “There’s likely to be a press conference tomorrow morning. If there is, I’ll deal with the family. Windrow wants you available in case some actions come up—Dominic will let you know.”

After she hung up I checked through the hedge to see if the media had eased off yet. As I watched, a shudder seemed to run through the pack, then those on the left hand edge broke away and headed up the lane—they were quickly followed by more and more of their peers until the whole herd had thundered after them. A few stragglers armed with telephoto lenses were left to guard the cul-de-sac. I slouched over in my best nothing-but-us-cockney, or at least in their case probably mockney, geezers-together manner and asked where everyone had gone.

“Leominster,” said a photographer with ginger dreadlocks and freckles. “In case the local plod make an announcement afterward.”

They see me and they know I’m police, I thought. But it just doesn’t register with them—not really. Which I admit can be handy at times.

“What’s the local like?” I asked.

“The Swan?” he said and bobbed his head from side to side. “A bit foodie but a good range of beers.”

The Swan in the Rushes was not what I expected from a country pub, although it has to be said that my expectations were largely drawn from my mum’s prolonged addiction to Emmerdale in the 1990s. Situated at the bottom of the village, beside the pond that presumably gave the place its name—not that I could see any rushes—it was a squat late-Victorian building that had originally been built to replace the old water mill just in time for electrification to render it obsolete. It had quickly been converted to a pub misleadingly named the Old Mill before being bought and renamed by the current owner. He introduced himself to me as Marcus Bonneville and told me that he was originally from Shropshire but had made his pile doing something unspecified in London before deciding to return to the country.

People shouldn’t be non-specific about where they made their money, not in front of police. The only reason I didn’t make a note of his name to do an IIP check later was because I was fairly certain that Windrow’s mob had done that on day one—probably before breakfast. When dealing with the law, having a mysterious past is contraindicated.

He had taste, though, and instead of decking the pub out the usual olde worlde accouterments he’d gone with a rather classy Art Deco styling with blond walnut dining tables with matching chairs and circular Perspex light fittings hanging from the ceiling. The mahogany bar had rounded corners and brass detailing and there were framed vintage travel posters on the walls advertising impossibly sun-kissed destinations—Llandudno, Bridlington and Bexhill-on-Sea. All it needed was a murdered heiress and Hercule Poirot would have felt right at home. The cooking was a bit fancy, and while I’m all for transparency in the food chain I’m really not that bothered about precisely which breed of cattle from what particular herd had given its life to make a six-ounce filet steak served with peppercorn sauce, grilled field mushroom, tomato and chunky chips plus a half a cider for a twenty and change.

I was contemplating an Italian style bread and butter pudding with mocha ice cream when the press pack started rolling in the front door, so I ducked out the back with my bottle of Bulmer’s in hand. This led me out into a scruffy gravel parking area with a charming view of the wheelie bins and the kitchen doors which had been left open to let the cool air in. As I finished my cider, I watched the staff, in full chef’s whites, gearing up for the post-briefing rush. Marcus would be doing well out of the crisis—it’s an ill wind, and all that.

The sun was behind the ridge by then and it was almost full dark. Over the top of the kitchen clatter and the voices in the bar I made out the thump of a helicopter traveling low and fast to the south. The search was winding up for the night.

I called Nightingale and told him where I’d be staying—he asked how long I thought I’d be there.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But West Mercia is digging in for the long haul—I don’t think they think this is going to end well.”

“I see,” said Nightingale. “I’ll arrange to have some essentials sent up.”

“There’s a couple of bags in my room,” I said. “One under the bed. The other should be in the wardrobe.”

“I’ll get Molly to see to it tonight,” said Nightingale, which should have set off alarm bells then and there.

We were interrupted by a call from DS Cole who said that I could consider myself off duty but on-call until dawn the next morning when search operations would resume. Once I’d signed off with Cole I asked Nightingale if he had any advice.

“Keep your eyes open,” said Nightingale. “And do your best.”

The village had no street lamps but enough light spilled out from the houses to light my way up the hill. I slipped past the photographers still on guard at the entrance to the cul-de-sac and up to Dominic’s mum’s bungalow. The lights were on behind net curtains and I could hear the TV inside. I stumbled over something painfully solid left on the path around the side of the building and sensed rather than saw the cowshed as a block of lighter shadow in the darkness. I carefully worked my way to the front. I was fumbling for the key when I looked up and saw the sky for the first time.

When I was very young my mum headed back to Sierra Leone with suitcases full of presents and trunks filled with enough “as new” clothing to keep a branch of Oxfam in stock for a year and a half. As an afterthought, and probably to secure the additional baggage allowance, she took me with her. I don’t remember much of that trip but Mum has several albums filled exclusively with pictures of me looking in turn solemn and terrified as I am manhandled by a succession of relatives. One thing I do remember is looking up at the night sky and seeing that it was crossed by a river of stars.

I saw the same thing that night, a braided stream of light arching over my head while a quarter moon cruised the horizon. For a moment I thought I smelled a sweet slightly fermented scent and the moonlight tricked me into thinking that the empty field behind Dominic’s mum’s garden was filled with trees. But as soon as I got the lights on in the cowshed they were gone.