The crowd there had thinned out a bit now that the search was no longer being staged from it. MIU was still stuffed into their overheated office space. Luckily somebody had sprung for an industrial-sized cooling fan with a face the same diameter as a dustbin lid and an unfortunate tendency to blow any unsecured paperwork out the nearest window. If we’d had a green screen we could have shot the live elements to a low budget disaster movie. Edmondson had quite adamantly reasserted control of his own office, but the MIU office manager found me some desk space next door in the territorial policing office.

I was just logging into UKUFOindex.com when Lesley texted me. Have U gone native yet?

I hadn’t been expecting a call until at least that evening, which meant I spent the next ten minutes trying to open the tough plastic clamshell packaging around one of the spare burner mobiles until finally a PCSO on her lunch break took pity on me and lent me a pair of scissors. Fortunately, disposable phones nearly always come with some charge – enough at least to make my initial response.

No, I texted back, using the disposable. But I have been eating sheep.

I had no doubt Lesley would notice that I was using a different phone but the question was, would she figure out why?

While I waited for a response, I dug into UKUFOindex.com and found that in some quarters UFOs were now known as UAPs – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – although adoption of this term had proved contentious. The index was just that, a long catalogue of incidents listed by date without any search function, going back as far the 1940s. A guy believed he’d been abducted in Northumbria and Winston Churchill suppressed reports of UFOs sighted by RAF reconnaissance flights. Herefordshire had its own sighting in the summer of 1942 when there was a report of an aircraft crash near Aymestrey, only once the authorities arrived there was no sign of any wreckage.

The disposable phone pinged.

Does this mean we can talk?

‘We need to push her,’ Inspector Pollock had said when we discussed the last text exchange. ‘She may be reaching out to you because she’s uncomfortable with her current situation. We need to make it easier for her to engage but at the same time you need to push her emotionally. I’m sorry, but that’s just what needs to be done.’

What needs to be done, I thought, and texted How’s your face?