I said I thought I could and Windrow and Edmondson exchanged looks. Edmondson didn’t look pleased, but then he nodded and they both looked back at me.

‘Okay, Peter,’ said Windrow. ‘If you want to help then we’d like you take over as second FLO to one of the families – the Marstowes. That way we can reassign Richard, the officer taking that role now, to the search.’

‘He’s POLSA,’ said Edmondson by way of explanation. A search specialist.

‘If it’ll help,’ I said.

‘We tend to double up roles out here,’ said Windrow. ‘We’re spread a bit thin.’

It’s a good thing that the sheep are all so law abiding, I thought but did not say, proving that my diversity training hadn’t been wasted after all.

‘We probably don’t need to tell you this,’ said Edmondson. ‘But keep clear of the media. Everything is being routed through the press officer.’

‘Any of those bastards asks you a question,’ said Windrow, ‘you direct them there – got it?’

I nodded keenly to show that my egg sucking was indeed proficient and up to date. We tied up a couple of bureaucratic loose ends and then I was dismissed into the care of DS Dominic Croft who was now charged with getting me to Rushpool.

Dominic, being a human being not a satnav, guided me through the town proper – the centre of which boasted one of those completely unnecessary one-way systems that were so beloved of a certain generation of town planners. Most of it was Victorian or Regency terraces crowded close onto narrow pavements with the occasional half-timbered chunk of the seventeenth century plonked down amongst them.

Dominic managed to restrain himself from asking the obvious question until we were safely back in the countryside.

‘So ghosts and magic are real?’ he said.

I’d had that question enough times to have an answer ready. ‘There are things that fall outside the parameters of normal policing,’ I said. I find you get two types of police, those that don’t want to know and those that do. Unfortunately, dealing with things you don’t want to know about is practically a definition of policing.

‘So “yes”,’ said Dominic.

‘There’s weird shit,’ I said. ‘And we deal with the weird shit, but normally it turns out that there’s a perfectly rational explanation.’ Which is often that a wizard did it.

‘What about aliens?’ asked Dominic.

Thank god for aliens, I thought, muddying the water since 1947. I’d once asked Nightingale the same question and he’d answered ‘Not yet’. So I suppose if they were to suddenly turn up they’d be part of our remit. But I hoped they didn’t turn up anytime soon. It’s not like we don’t have enough work to do already.

‘Not that I know about,’ I said.

‘So you don’t rule them out?’ he said.