Dominic was swearing at his phone which, given how much magic I’d flung around that night, wasn’t working. I pulled my Airwave set, turned it on and handed it over. He called Leominster nick while I squatted down and tried to determine whether either of the girls were injured.

‘You’d better go get him, then,’ said Dominic to someone at the other end. ‘Because we’ve found them.’

PART TWO

PART TWO

The Other Country

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Eden Phillpotts ‘A Shadow Passes’ (1919)

Post Incident Management

9

Post Incident Management

Rule of policing number one – when something good falls into your lap, pass it up the chain of command as quickly as possible before something else bad can happen. Me and Dominic picked up a girl each and let Beverley lead us to the main road. This involved crossing the Lugg again, or more precisely a second stream of the same river because we’d actually been standing on an island.

‘Of course we were on an island,’ said Beverley. ‘You think I’d have risked being that stroppy if we hadn’t?’

We stumbled over another barbed-wire fence in the dark, but once we were over that we found ourselves on the lane that ran past Aymestrey church to the main road. We were level with the blunt comforting rectangle of the church spire when we heard the sirens. A traffic duty BMW reached us first, followed quickly by an ambulance and an unmarked Mercedes containing Inspector Edmondson that must have torn up the Highway Code to get to us that fast.

The girls were prised out of our grip and hustled off by the paramedics. Their parents, Edmondson informed us, were already en route to Hereford where they would be reunited at the hospital.

Then we walked back the route we’d come, only this time gloriously mob handed with a couple of dozen officers, two of them armed. We showed Edmondson both river crossings and where, to the best of our recollection, we’d found the girls.

He asked me whether I suspected that there had been Falcon involvement in the kidnapping and I had to tell him that, while there was definitely some weird shit going on in the general vicinity, I didn’t have any evidence that it was related to Hannah and Nicole’s disappearance.

‘We’ll have to wait to see what they have to say for themselves,’ said Edmondson.

There was no point having officers thrashing around in the darkness, so the decision was made to start search operations, for evidence this time, at first light. And we were whisked off to Leominster nick to be statemented and debriefed. Well, me and Dominic were whisked off. Beverley said she’d much rather go back to her hotel if they didn’t mind. Strangely, they didn’t mind and even allocated the snazzy traffic BMW to take her back.