Blackmoor couldn’t say for certain without looking at his notes, but he remembered the holes being mostly chest high. ‘Five to six feet off the ground,’ he said.

I remembered that night, the glass unicorn refracting the werelight, the crunch as something invisible and sharp skewered a tree at the same height my head would have been – had I not been sensible enough to get out of the way.

‘We didn’t find any evidence of poisoning, though,’ said Blackmoor.

Some trees just mysteriously fell over. Many others showed suboptimal growth or other deformities. So they set up a hide in the woods above and trained a time-lapse camera on the area.

‘It stopped working after the second night,’ he said.

I’ll bet it did, I thought.

They’d got so desperate that they granted permission for a pair ‘of those UFO nutters’ to camp out in the woods for a fortnight. But they never spotted anything strange and they were really looking.

I asked if there were temporal patterns to the damage.

‘It happened mostly during the summer,’ said Blackmoor. ‘That’s all I can give you off the top of my head.’

‘Did you keep records?’ I asked. And they did, as it happens – vandalism being an important issue to the National Trust. Blackmoor said he’d send them to me as long as I promised, should I figure out what the cause was, to feed that information back to him.

And if it turns out to be a sacred grove, I thought, or a faerie place of power or some such mystical bollocks, would he still want to know? Probably yes. And he’d just add it to the long list of issues that makes modern heritage land management such a complex and challenging career.

Inspector Edmondson found the tree vandalism case for me, and when the records from Croft Castle arrived in the form of a great big spreadsheet I started correlating both with my UFO sightings and the timeline of Zoe Lacey’s encounter. I was still doing that when the press conference started. Me and Dominic got cold drinks and joined pretty much the rest of the nick to watch it on the internal monitor. These days, sensible police officers make sure they have an independent record of any encounter with a journalist. This meant that we got to see the whole thing – something that very few members of the public did.