Foxglove Summer (30 page)

Beverley lifted her head and looked at me suspiciously.

‘What kind of science?’

‘Thaumatological,’ I said.

‘You’re taking the piss,’ she said.

‘Straight up,’ I said.

Beverley unwound from the bed, stood up and arched her back – palms pressing against the low ceiling of the cowshed. Then she shook out her dreads before looking at me, head tilted to one side.

‘Is it important?’ she asked.

I was so tempted to say no, but you can’t keep putting shit off.

‘A bit,’ I said.

‘Give me ten minutes for a shower,’ she said.

While I waited I pulled up the day’s headlines. The
Daily Mail
had the scoop but the media had caught the smell of blood in the water and twenty-four-hour news outlets were running the bulletin every half an hour, with a teaser on the quarter in case your attention span was that short.

According to the
Mail
, who seemed to be the only outlet with any actual facts, Nicole Lacey had accused Hannah’s parents of luring them out of their homes with the promise of free gifts. Then they and persons unknown were supposed to have kidnapped them, or at least Nicole, and made them walk all the way to Wales where they had to sleep in a tent until they were made to walk all the way back again. Sharon Pike speculated in a separate column that making the children walk was a cunning ploy to avoid CCTV and automatic number plate recognition systems. She wrote of the existence of a network of temporary camps frequented by new age travellers, migrant labourers, gypsies, asylum seekers and Romanians who were, allegedly, responsible for the shocking increase in rural crime, unemployment and, some said, spreading foot and mouth.

‘That’s just stupid,’ Dominic told me later. ‘Nobody believes that Romanians spread foot and mouth – everybody knows that was down to Tony Blair in an attempt to destroy the rural way of life.’

The rolling news networks loved the idea of a shadowy network of camps. It gave them hours of talking heads and a chance to stick a body from Migration Watch or UKIP up against a government spokesman or, even better, someone from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants in the hope they would both kill and eat each other live on air.

Beverley stepped out of the shower and asked whether there were going to be brambles. I said it was likely. She sniffed yesterday’s clothes, kept the jeans, produced an emergency pair of knickers from god knows where, and replaced last night’s crop top with a buff linen waistcoat she’d retrieved from the trunk. I winced as she tossed her dirty clothes back on the bed. There was a delay while I found an empty carrier bag and made her put them in there. She seemed to find this inordinately funny, but that’s because her mum hadn’t been making her iron her own shirts from the age of six onwards.

I watched her tie up her dreads into a ponytail, unconsciously biting her lower lip as she concentrated on getting the elastic tie exactly the way she wanted it. She caught me watching, her eyes narrowing as she smiled at me.

‘Why are you hanging about?’ she asked. ‘I thought we were in a hurry.’

So we climbed into the Asbo with its cargo of magic detectors in the back and headed for School Wood. Beverley asked what had happened the night before.

‘Nicole has alleged that Joanne and Andy, or rather some of their relatives, abducted her and Hannah,’ I said.

‘Fuck!’ said Beverley.

‘Not only that, but Nicole came out with her story in front of Sharon Pike, freelance journalist and newspaper columnist,’ I said. ‘With predictable results.’

Which were DCI Windrow turning up mob-handed to ‘interview’ Andy and Joanne while forensics went over their house with a set of tweezers and a UV light source. Which was a waste of time, because searching that house had happened day one of Operation Manticore – even Beverley spotted that.

‘It’s in the papers now,’ I said. ‘Windrow’s got to dot his I’s and cross his T’s etcetera etcetera.’

He’d also told me to stay out of sight.

‘It’s all got complicated enough,’ he’d said, ‘without dragging any “additional” elements into the case.’ He was too professional to say it out loud, but it was clear he expected the Marstowes to be eliminated from inquiries pretty damn fast – at which point he was hoping the media, and with them the politics, would go away. ‘I hear you’ve got something lined up with Dominic tomorrow,’ he’d said. ‘Good. You two can keep each other out of trouble.’

I thought I heard, as if from somewhere far away, Lesley giving a hollow laugh. But I’m pretty sure it was my imagination.

‘Are you okay coming back up here?’ I asked as the Asbo climbed the hill to the top of the ridge. ‘You’re not going to be stepping on anyone’s territorial imperative, are you?’

‘You worry about your job,’ said Beverley. ‘I’ll worry about mine.’

Dominic was waiting for us at the top of the lane. He held the gate open so I could drive in and park by the skeleton of an ancient barn preserved by the National Trust. Stan was waiting with him, both of them sweating even in the shade of the western hemlocks – I think it must have been even hotter than that second day when Dominic had brought me up here to see about his ‘mate’s’ stash.

Stan was wearing the same grubby boiler suit I’d seen her in when we first met, still with the arms tied around her waist. But, in deference to the heat, she was wearing a 1950s blue and white striped bikini top that would have suited a saucy seaside postcard. Her skin was the colour of skimmed milk and I was worried she was going to burn.

Stan was with us because she had a quad bike and trailer which promised to take the slog out of transporting the detectors. The plan was that we would split up, me and Beverley going downhill to Pokehouse Wood while Dominic and Stan deployed the detectors further along the ridge, on the logging track we’d met Princess Luna on, and on Croft Ambrey and the footpaths that converged on it.

‘That’s a big area,’ he said as we piled the detectors into the trailer. ‘What’s the range of these things?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s not exactly an exact science. Put them at crossroads and places that look like,’ I hate making stuff up as I go along, ‘gateways,’ I said. ‘Transitional points between one place and another.’

‘Boundary points,’ said Stan. ‘Got you.’

Dominic had brought two rolls of blue and white police tape to wrap around the detectors – the better to deter tampering.

‘You star,’ I said, after he’d explained. ‘Do you think it will work?’

‘With the walkers and tourists,’ he said. ‘But the local buggers will have it away with anything.’ He glared at Stan, who gave him a bland look.

We divided up the detectors, the bulk going in the trailer, and me and Beverly watched Stan rattle off on the quad with Dominic riding pillion behind her.

‘I notice we have to carry ours,’ said Beverley. We each had a courier bag for our share of the detectors. With the strap across our shoulders the weight was even but they banged against our hips when we walked.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But it’s downhill, isn’t it?’

This time, instead of blowing the shit out of various fences, we followed the official right of way, making sure to stay on the path, close gates behind us and prevent our hypothetical dog from chasing the livestock.

We crossed over into a meadow where the long grass was overrun with clusters of yellow flowers.

‘Buttercup,’ said Beverley. ‘It’s poisonous, so cows and sheep won’t graze here – they must be keeping this field for hay.’

Further on we reached the wire fence that marked the edge of the woods and the drop down to Pokehouse Wood and the River Lugg. We found the stile that I’d last seen from the other side when I’d spotted the blood-stained strip of cloth the week before. There was still police tape marking the forensic search around where the cloth had hung on the barbed-wire fence.

Beverley clonked her bag pointedly at my feet and so I took the first detector from hers. Then it was a simple matter to wire it to the base of one of the stile’s posts and wrap some police tape around it a few times. I unshipped my tablet and checked that the detector had some bars and, satisfied it could get a signal out, I noted its position using the GPS co-ordinates app on my good phone.

‘Done,’ I said.

‘You just brought me along to help carry these,’ said Beverley and shook her bag at me.

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I was hoping you’d tell me about the landscape – you being a proper expert and everything.’

Beverley looked around. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Stuff.’

‘Stuff,’ said Beverley. And then she put her arm around my neck and kissed me. It went on for a while too – there was some tongue in there and everything. Things might possibly have got a bit impromptu, if not alfresco, except she let go of me and laughed.

‘What we’re standing on is a limestone ridge,’ she said. ‘Silurian limestone, as a point of fact. Very permeable, the rain goes right through it and down to the river valley where it belongs, leaving up here nice and well drained – hence the buttercups and the harebell along the hedges.’ She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side. ‘Helpful?’

‘Interesting,’ I said.

We followed the path down the heavily wooded slope, past trees that Beverley identified as yew, elder and some oak. I set up another detector where the footpath reached the cleared area which marked the start of the Pokehouse Wood. While I did that, Beverley wandered out into the stands of foxglove that stood between the newly planted saplings. When I’d finished inputting the location I turned to find her gone.

I called her name and she rose out of the nodding purple flowers, the hot sunlight making amber highlights on the strong curve of her upper arms and her neck. I felt a mad rush of desire, not just sex but something wilder and stronger and almost like worship. I wanted to carve statues of her and paint her image on the walls of my cave, where the firelight would make them flicker and jump. I wanted to wrap myself in an animal skin and dance around the campfire wearing a necklace of bear teeth. Had she just asked, I’d gladly have gone mammoth hunting in her honour – although I’d only do that armed with a suitably high-powered rifle. There are limits, you know.

There was definitely power in that place, wild and weird and fae.

‘Did you feel that?’ I asked Beverley.

‘Feel what?’ she asked.

I took a deep breath. It’s observable but not reliably observable. It can have a quantifiable effects, but resists any attempt to apply mathematical principles to it – no wonder Newton kept magic under wraps. It must have driven him mental.

Or maybe not – the guy had spent almost as much time on calculating the mystical dimensions of the Temple of Solomon as he had developing the theory of gravity. Maybe Newton liked his life compartmentalised, too.

Hugh Oswald had claimed that Nightingale’s old friend David Mellenby had found a way to close the gap between Newtonian magic and quantum theory. What might have happened if that had been true, what kind of future had died during that terrible rout from Ettersberg?

‘You want to know something strange?’ asked Beverley.

‘I don’t think mammoth goes well with palm oil,’ I said.

She hesitated, and then took that as a ‘yes’.

‘These flowers are weird,’ she said, looking at the foxglove.

‘They’re poisonous, you know,’ I said.

‘They also like an acidic soil,’ said Beverley. ‘Which this shouldn’t be – not when it’s built up on limestone like this.’

‘Because calcium carbonate is alkaline?’ I asked.

‘Exactly,’ said Beverley. ‘Judging by the trees on the slope, it’s pretty alkaline until we get to this cleared area.’

‘Can you get local patches of acidity?’

‘You can get local patches of anything,’ said Beverley. ‘Heavy rainfall can leach out the calcium and the potassium, but,’ she gestured at the slope with its white support tubes poking out amongst a sea of purple foxglove, ‘I don’t think so. And this is proper land management we’re looking at here, so I can’t see the National Trust smothering the land in fertiliser. And even if they did, the run off would have gone into the Lugg and I would have noticed it.’

I put talking to the land management team at Croft Castle on my list of things to do.

‘And everything goes well with palm oil,’ said Beverley. ‘Providing you use enough palm oil.’

I secured another detector at the place where the footpath crossed the logging track. Then we walked down the track to where I judged we’d found the two girls and placed a detector there. The bulk of the detectors were laid out at various strategic points around the wood – anywhere that looked like it was, or might have been, a path at some point in the past. I had planned to walk as far as the Roman Road and place at least four detectors at intervals along that, but looking out across the field where we found the dead sheep I realised I was down to just the spares I wanted to keep against contingencies. I’d have to get Stan and Dominic to swing down and place the ones on the road. So we walked back up through the wood to where we’d left the Asbo.

Strangely, it was while crossing the buttercup meadow that I remembered the way foxglove was used to make a tea to drive away babies that were suspected of being changelings – possibly a form of sanctioned infanticide.

Changelings
, I thought, and remembered Hannah’s absolute certainty that the returned Nicole was not the girl she grew up with.

Changelings – the babies that fairies left with human parents when they nicked a human child. In these enlightened times we didn’t have to rely on poisoned tea to determine the ancestry of a child. Although it has to be said that while the science was relatively straightforward, it was the legal issues that were going to be complicated.

‘A changeling?’ said Windrow, and I could I tell from his tone of voice that I’d used the wrong term.

‘A substitution of one child for another,’ I said. ‘Could be classified as an abduction.’

Windrow’s mouth worked, and I suspected he was wondering whether it was medically advisable for him to have another piece of nicotine gum.