Beverley kicked at something down amongst the foxglove stems. It cracked and splintered – rotten wood.

‘Stump,’ she said. ‘Somebody cleared this area.’

‘The latest imagery on Google Earth was four years ago,’ I said. ‘It must have happened since then. Is it possible that it might be natural?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Beverley. ‘Probably not.’

We worked our way to the centre of the clearing, pushing through the stands of foxglove which seemed taller here than elsewhere, the bells of the flowers larger and more mouth-like as they shivered in the hot, still air. When we stopped I realised that the glade was very quiet. Even the wood pigeon we’d heard earlier seemed muffled and far away.

‘There’s no bees,’ said Beverley. ‘And bees love foxglove.’

Mellissa’s bees had been avoiding the south-west section of the ridge, from the edge of Bircher Common to where the river is. They weren’t coming here or to Pokehouse Wood.

‘Feel anything?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘How about you?’

I smelt green stuff, hot and dusty, and sneezed.

‘There’s no castle,’ I said. ‘Hannah was very sure about the castle.’ The child psychologist had continued her gentle interrogation of Hannah. Heroically enduring countless episodes of Jessie and more Yonder Over Yonder than was probably medically advisable, the psychologist chipped gently away at Hannah’s story, particularly the pink and blue and orange castle which she probably figured for a defence mechanism or a mental block or whatever the psychological term is. Hannah, while growing increasingly fuzzy on every other detail, had stayed firm on the castle.

I thought there had to be a castle somewhere, or at least something vaguely castle-like. But if there was, it certainly wasn’t at Pyon Wood Camp.

I had one spare detector left, so I placed it in the centre of the glade and activated it.

‘Just on the off chance,’ I said.

‘Is your work always this vague?’ asked Beverley.

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Sometimes we really don’t know what we’re doing.’

Beverley had to make what she called a ‘pastoral visit’ to the Steam Fair, so I dropped her off there before heading back towards the industrial park and the redbrick ship shape of Leominster nick. The media were thick around the public side and there was even a knot of photographers at the entrance to the police car park. I made sure I was wearing a suitably solemn face to avoid ‘Police Laugh At Kidnapped Children’ headlines from the Independent.

‘There’s going to be a press conference later,’ said Dominic when I asked him about the scrum outside. The broadsheets led with the war in Syria, but the tabloids were having way too much fun with the idea of child-stealing gypsies to let the mere lack of facts get in the way.

‘Copper pipe I’d believe,’ said Dominic. ‘Children, no.’