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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do you have any confidence this will work?’ asked Windrow.

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

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

Then I called Beverley.

‘Want to come out tonight?’ I asked.

‘What are we doing?’

‘Unicorn hunting,’ I said.

‘Aren’t they an endangered species?’

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

*

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

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