Foxglove Summer (3 page)
‘It’s been unusually hot,’ she said. ‘But that could just be global warming.’
Hugh smiled weakly.
‘There you have it, I’m afraid,’ he said, and asked Mellissa if he might be permitted to have a second crumpet.
‘Of course,’ she said and placed one in front of him. Hugh reached out with a trembling hand and, after a few false starts, seized the crumpet with a triumphant wheeze. Mellissa watched with concern as he lifted it to his mouth, took a large bite and chewed with obvious satisfaction.
I realised I was staring, so I drank my tea – concentrating on the cup.
‘Ha,’ said Hugh once he’d finished chewing. ‘That wasn’t so difficult.’
And then he fell asleep – his eyes closing and his chin dropping onto his chest. It was so fast I started out of my chair, but Mellissa waved me back down.
‘Now you’ve worn him out,’ she said and despite the heat she retrieved a tartan blanket from the back of her granddad’s chair and covered him up to his chin.
‘I think it must be obvious even to you that he didn’t have anything to do with those kids going missing,’ she said.
I stood up.
‘Do
you
have something to do with it?’ I asked.
She gave me a poisonous look and I got a flash of it then, sharp and incontrovertible, the click-click of legs and mandibles, the flicker of wings and the hot communal breath of the hive.
‘What would I want with children?’ she asked.
‘How should I know?’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re planning to sacrifice them at the next full moon.’
Mellissa cocked her head to one side.
‘Are you trying to be funny?’ she asked.
Anyone can do magic
, I thought,
but not everyone is magical.
There are people who have been touched by, let’s call it for the sake of argument, magic to the point where they’re no longer entirely people even under human rights legislation. Nightingale calls them the fae but that’s a catch-all term like the way the Greeks used the word ‘barbarian’ or the
Daily Mail
uses ‘Europe’. I’d found at least three different classification systems in the Folly’s library, all with elaborate Latin tags and, I figured, all the scientific rigour of phrenology. You’ve got to be careful when applying concepts like speciation to human beings, or before you know what’s happening you end up with forced sterilisations, Belsen and the Middle Passage.
‘Nah,’ I said. ‘I’ve given up funny.’
‘Why don’t you search our house, just to be on the safe side?’ she said.
‘Thank you very much – I will,’ I said, proving once again that a little sarcasm is a dangerous thing.
‘What?’ Mellissa took a step backwards and stared at me. ‘I was joking.’
But I wasn’t. The first rule of policing is that you never take anyone’s word for anything – you always check for yourself. Missing children have been found hiding under beds or in garden sheds on properties where the parents have sworn they’ve searched everywhere and why are you wasting time when you should be out there looking? For god’s sake it’s a disgrace the way ordinary decent people are treated as criminals, we’re the victims here and, no, there’s nothing in there. Just the freezer, there’s no point looking in there, why would they be in the freezer, you have no right . . . oh god look I’m sorry, she just slipped, I didn’t mean to hurt her, she just slipped and I panicked.
‘Always best to be thorough,’ I said.
‘I’m fairly certain you’re violating our human rights here,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said with the absolute certainty of a man who’d taken a moment to look up the relevant legislation before leaving home. ‘Your granddad took an oath and signed a contract that allows accredited individuals, i.e. me, access on demand.’
‘But I thought he was retired?’
‘Not from this contract,’ I said. It had actually said
until death release you from this oath.
The Folly – putting the old-fashioned back into good policing.
‘Why don’t you show me round?’ I said. And then I’ll know you’re not off somewhere stuffing body parts into the wood-chipper.
Number one Moomin House may have looked like a Victorian folly, but was in fact that rarest of all architectural beasts – a modern building in the classical style. Designed by the famous Raymond Erith, who didn’t so much invoke the spirit of the enlightenment as nick its floor plans. Apparently he’d built it in 1968 as a favour to Hugh Oswald who was a family friend, and it was beautiful and sad at the same time.
We started with the two little wings, one of which had been extended to house an additional bedroom and a properly-sized kitchen. As an architect Erith might have been a progressive classicist, but he shared with his contemporaries the same failure to understand that you need to be able to open the oven door without having to leave the kitchen first. An additional bedroom had been added, the no-nonsense brass bedstead augmented with a handrail, the floor covered in a thick soft carpet and any sharp corners on the antique oak dresser and wardrobe fitted with rounded plastic guards. It smelt of clean linen, potpourri and Dettol.
‘Granddad moved down to this room a couple of years ago,’ said Mellissa and showed me the brand new en suite bathroom with an adapted hip bath, lever taps and hand rails. She snorted when I popped back into the bedroom to check under the bed, but her humour evaporated when she realised I really was going to check the broom cupboards and the wood store.
A circular staircase with bare timber treads twisted up to the first floor, leading me to what had obviously been Hugh’s study before he shifted to downstairs. I’d expected oak bookshelves but instead half the circumference of the room was filled with pine shelves mounted on bare metal brackets. I recognised many of the books from the Folly’s own non-magical library, including an incredibly tatty volume of
Histoire Insolite et Secrète des Ponts de Paris
by Barbey d’Aurevilly. There were too many books to be contained by the shelves and they had spilled out into piles on the gate-leg table that had obviously served as a desk, on the worn stuffed leather sofa, and any spare space on the floor. Many of these looked like local history, beekeeping guides and modern fiction. There were no magic books. In fact, nothing in Latin but the very old hardback editions of Virgil, Tacitus and Pliny. I recognised the Tacitus. It was the same edition Nightingale had given me.
It was all a bit short on missing children, so I had Mellissa show me up the stairs to her bedroom, which took up the whole of the top floor. There was a Victorian vanity and a Habitat bed and wardrobes and chests of drawers that were made from compressed and laminated chipboard. It was quite amazingly messy; every single drawer was open and from every single open drawer hung at least two items of clothing. Just the loose knickers would have caused my mum to do her nut, although she would have had some sympathy for the drifts of shoes piling up at the end of the bed.
‘If I’d known the police were coming,’ said Mellissa, ‘I’d have had a bit of a tidy.’
Even with all the windows open it was warm enough to pop beads of sweat on my back and forehead. There was also a sickly sweet smell, not horrible, not decay, but all-pervading. I saw that there was a ladder built into the wall and a hatch above it. Mellissa saw me looking and smiled.
‘Want to have a poke in the attic?’ she asked.
I was just about to say ‘of course’ when I became aware that the deep thrumming sound that hovered on the edge of audibility throughout the rest of the house was louder here and, predictably, coming from the attic.
I told her that, yes, I would like a quick look if it was all the same to her, and she handed me a wide-brimmed hat with a veil – a beekeeper’s hat.
‘You’re kidding me,’ I said, but she shook her head so I put it on and let her secure the ribbons under my chin. After a bit of rummaging in the drawers of the vanity Mellissa found a heavy torch with a vulcanised rubber sheath – she tested it, although in the sunlight it was hard to tell whether the old-fashioned incandescent bulb came on or not.
When I climbed up, a wave of sticky heat rolled out. I waited a moment, listening to the now much louder thrumming noise, but there was no threatening roar or sinister increase in pitch – it stayed as steady as before. I asked Mellissa what was causing it.
‘Drones,’ she said. ‘They basically have two jobs – banging the queen and keeping the hive at a constant temperature. Just move slowly and you’ll be fine.’
I climbed up into the warm gloom. The occasional bee flashed through the beam of my torch, but not the swarms that I’d feared. I turned my torch on the far end of the attic and saw the hive for the first time. It was huge, a mass of fluted columns and sculpted ridges that filled half the space. It was a wonder of nature – and as creepy as shit. And I personally stuck around just long enough to ensure there weren’t any colonists cemented into the walls – or children – and ducked out of there.
Mellissa trailed after me down the spiral stairs with a smug look on her face and followed me outside, more to make sure I was going than out of politeness. When I reached my car I realised that the cloud of bees had contracted down to a solid mass under one of the main branches. To my surprise, it was an ovoid shape that appeared to hang from the tree by a single narrow thread – just like the cartoon beehives that regularly got dropped on characters’ heads.
I asked Mellissa if it would stay on the tree.
‘It’s the queen,’ said Mellissa, and sniffed. ‘She’s just showing off. She’ll be back – if she knows what’s good for her.’
‘Do you know anything about these girls?’ I asked.
I thought I heard a pulse of noise from the house behind her – a deep thrumming sound that swelled and then faded into the background.
‘Not unless they bought some honey,’ she said.
‘You don’t keep the honey for yourself?’ I asked.
The afternoon sunlight caught the downy blond hair on her arms and shoulders.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘What would I do with that much honey?’
I didn’t leave immediately. Instead I leant against the back of the Asbo, where there was some shade, and wrote up my notes. It’s always a good idea to do this immediately after an interview because your memory is fresh and also because panicked suspects have been known to assume that the police have long gone and exit their front door carrying all sorts of incriminating stuff. Including, in one famous case, parts of a body. Before I started, though, I looked up the West Mercia channels and switched my Airwave handset over so I could listen in to the operation while I finished up.
A lot of journalists have access to an Airwave, or access to someone who has one, so in a high profile case the cop-speak and jargon can get very dense. Nobody wants to see their ‘inappropriate’ humour decorating the front page on a slow news day – that sort of thing can be a career killer. I could hear the operation going critical even as I finished up my notes. ACPO don’t chat over the Airwave, but it was clear that requests for assistance were now being routed through the Police National Information Coordination Centre (PNICC), commonly pronounced ‘panic’ – particularly if you’ve reached the stage of having to call it.
It wasn’t my operation, and if I was to travel any further off my manor they’d be speaking a different language, probably Welsh. And if West Mercia Police wanted my help then it would be co-ordinated through the PNICC and I wasn’t even sure what kind of mutual aid I’d be providing.
But you can’t walk away, can you? Not when it’s kids.
I called Nightingale and explained what I wanted to do. He thought it was a ‘capital idea’ and agreed to make the necessary arrangements.
Then I climbed into my boiling hot car and set my satnav to Leominster Police Station.
For a moment I thought I heard an angry cry come floating over the hills towards me, but it was probably something rural – a bird of some kind.
Yeah, definitely a bird, I told myself.
Mutual Aid
Big cities thin out at the edges. Detached houses give way to semis, then to terraces which then grow a couple of storeys before you either 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 amongst 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 green-field police stations on the outskirts of town for the same reason you built 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 learnt later, its own helicopter landing pad. The building itself was a three-storey 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 kilometres 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 realised. 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.