By five I’d finished a fast sweep of the action list and took a break. Someone gave me directions to the nearest supermarket, but I got lost and ended up at a huge Morrisons instead. I took the opportunity to stock up on the sort of essentials that Molly wouldn’t think of – bottled water, snacks, fruit and shaving gear that had been manufactured this side of the millennium. Inside the store, the air conditioning was fierce. So I parked myself at the in-store café and called Nightingale to discuss my next move. This had the added advantage of keeping Folly business away from the prying ears of other police officers.

‘Nothing jumped out, then?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Not off the action list,’ I said. ‘The working hypothesis is that they both decided to sneak out of their houses and meet up. And that either they ran away, which is unlikely, or something bad happened to them.’

Nightingale asked why running away was unlikely.

‘They didn’t take anything except their phones,’ I said. ‘Runaway kids nearly always take something.’ I had, both times, although the first time it had been limited to a peanut butter and jam sandwich and a copy of 2000AD.

‘For the moment we should leave the more run of the mill nastiness to our country cousins,’ said Nightingale. ‘You should first establish whether the two girls could have come into contact with something uncanny.’

‘Like what?’

‘A rogue practitioner,’ said Nightingale. ‘A hedge wizard or witch we don’t know about it, or a fae, or demi-fae, or revenant of some sort. Did either of them change their routine behaviour or exhibit strange cravings?’

‘The child abuse unit will be looking for the same things,’ I said.

‘Then I suggest you might confer with them,’ said Nightingale. ‘You might also want to have a chat with their teachers and the leaders of the Girl Guides or whatever the equivalent body is these days. Assuming they were Guides. Is there a parish priest?’

‘I can find out,’ I said, and noticed that a couple of white boys at a nearby table were giving me the side eye.

‘A good parish priest often knows the more esoteric aspects of his local history,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or at least they used to.’

They were both dark haired, pasty faced despite the summer. The shorter one had blue eyes and the taller was wearing sunglasses indoors – which told you everything you needed to know, really. The sleeves of their grey and green check shirts were rolled up to reveal the beefy arms of people who actually work for a living. In London I would have pegged them as builders, but out here in the sticks they could have been lumberjacks or sheep shearers for all I knew.

‘You might want to talk to Hugh Oswald again,’ said Nightingale. ‘See if he’s noticed anything odd.’