I asked him what the MIU had come up with, but he told me to watch the press conference like everybody else.

I settled into my assigned space in the territorial policing office and picked up the phone. I called up Croft Castle and asked to talk to whoever it was who managed the forest. They told me his name was Patrick Blackmoor and they gave me his mobile number.

‘The western hemlock was doing really badly,’ Blackmoor said when I asked why they’d clear-felled Pokehouse Wood out of schedule. ‘So we decided to fell early.’

When I asked what the problem had been, Blackmoor told me that it was a variety of factors. ‘The soil remained very poor and acidic, but not enough to explain the losses amongst the plantation,’ he said. ‘It’s a vigorous tree, your western hemlock. That’s why it gets planted.’ It took more than some abnormal soil chemistry to stunt their growth, but there had been damage to the young trees as well.

‘What kind of damage?’ I asked.

‘In the initial planting phase some of the saplings were dug out during the night. Others had bark damage,’ said Blackmoor. But he didn’t have an explanation as to what was doing it.

‘We called in your lot at one point,’ he said. ‘In case it was vandals.’ Although nobody could think of a reason why, with over 200,000 hectares of Forestry Commission woodlands in England to play with, they’d want to pick on the Pokehouse Wood. I asked whether they might have been protesting the planting of foreign conifers on an ancient woodland site.

Blackmoor found that idea hilarious.

‘This was going to be the last commercial crop,’ he said. ‘Once it was harvested we would have replanted with broadleaf – basically what we’re doing now.’

‘Maybe someone didn’t want to wait?’ I asked, which was the bit Blackmoor found most funny.

‘Forests are a long-term thing,’ he said. ‘And the people who care enough about the management of ancient woodlands to vandalise a tree think in the same time frames as us. Besides, there are plenty of ancient woodlands under threat from motorways and infrastructure projects – that’s what gets protestors excited.’

‘Then who?’ I asked, but he didn’t have the faintest idea. And the damage had continued. Once the trees began to mature they started to suffer from what looked like an unknown disease, or possibly poisoning.

‘At first we were sure it was poisoning,’ said Blackmoor. Because most of the affected trees were found to have been drilled. ‘Up to a depth of thirty centimetres – in some cases all the way through the trunk.’

I tried to remember my night out with Princess Luna, and to estimate at what height that horn would have been when deployed in skewer-the-policeman mode.

‘How high up the trunk did the drilling take place?’ I asked.