‘Lead us away from what?’ I asked. ‘This is definitely her.’

‘We’ll see. Anyway, I’ll brief Nightingale,’ he said.

‘Do you want me to come back in?’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Pollock quickly. ‘We all like you where you are right now – a long, long way away. We’ll let you know how the operation pans out.’

After I’d hung up, I went and splashed cold water on my face in the bathroom before seeing what could be safely scarfed up in the coffee area. One whole shelf of the fridge was rammed with Morrisons’ filled doughnuts that were apparently free for the taking. Dominic told me later that Inspector Edmondson believed that a squad stuffed with saturated fat and sugar was a happy squad. I ate a custard doughnut while I finished up my UFO research, but I think I should have let it defrost a bit because it tasted funny.

Al the electronics geezer had been right about Aymestrey becoming a hotspot for sightings – lots of night-time lights, suspicious movement in the trees, an encounter with an invisible ‘entity’ and an inhuman screaming like a pig being tortured. I made a note to ask Dominic whether pig torturing was a common nocturnal pastime in these parts.

All of this activity had taken place after the summer of 2002 when Zoe Thomas had met her tall alien in fish scales – it was time to have a chat. I let the MIU office manager know what action I was taking so it could be properly actioned, jumped into the Asbo and headed east along the A44 for the mighty metropolis of Bromyard.

With towns like Bromyard you can tell when you reach the historic section because suddenly the houses are all crowding onto narrow pavements and they assume the squeezed frontage that is typical of a planned medieval town. Apart from that, and some startlingly well preserved sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings, it looked like a large suburb with all the exciting connotations that implies.

Zoe Thomas lived in a bedsit above a Chinese takeaway on the Old Road near the town centre. It smelt faintly of sweet and sour pork and had that precarious scruffiness that you get when someone is fighting to maintain basic standards, but losing. There were no fast food containers serving a second career as combination ashtray and biological experiment, but the washing up in the sink was at least two days old and I could see dust and cobwebs building up in the corners.

‘I’ve already talked to the police,’ said Zoe. She was sitting on the bed because as the guest I got use of the only chair, a wooden upright kitchen chair that had obviously come from an expensive set about fifty years previously and then been repainted in gloss white by someone with no taste.

I smiled reassuringly and posed with my pen over my notebook.

‘This is just a follow-up,’ I said.