‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But there’s no point me going to your governor until I’ve got something worth telling him.’

‘He’s going to want to know either way,’ said Dominic.

Just then a helicopter clattered right over our heads, the lowest I’d ever seen an aircraft not coming into land. It was a militarised Eurocopter Dauphin in army camouflage. When it banked to head up the ridge we caught the edge of its rotor wash – it was that low.

‘Eight Flight,’ said Dominic smugly. ‘Special Air Service.’ He grinned at the expression on my face. ‘Finally,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if anything out here was going to impress you.’

‘Are they joining the search?’ I asked.

‘They’ve been in it from the start,’ said Dominic. ‘One of the perks of operating in Herefordshire – the SAS tend to pitch in on these sort of cases.’

Magic only damages microprocessors when they’re powered, which meant that whatever happened to the girls’ phones happened when they were switched on. But practically the first thing you do with a high priority MISPER is call their service provider and get the snail trail – the track the phone leaves when it’s on. That data is kept for three days, but on the night the girls vanished both phones went off the air within five minutes of each other at around ten o’clock. The girls’ bedtime.

That was worrying. Because if person or persons unknown had told the girls to turn off their phones, then it displayed a disturbing level of forensic awareness.

‘If you were an eleven-year-old girl, what would you turn your phone on for?’ I asked.

‘Send a text?’

I thought about it. ‘Both at the same time?’

‘Tweet maybe,’ said Dominic. ‘Because OMG you’ll never believe what just happened.’

Records showed that there hadn’t been a text or a tweet, but perhaps whatever made them turn on their phones destroyed them almost immediately.

Accidentally or deliberately? It just went round and round.

Right, I thought. If you can’t be clever, then at least you can be thorough.

So I called DCI Windrow and provided exactly enough information to complicate his investigation and not enough to help in a material way. I told him that I was working on the hypothesis that whatever had happened to their phones happened on their way to the crossroad where they were abandoned. I said I needed to do a survey of the whole village so he lent me Dominic, since he was a local boy who people would talk to, and off we went.

There are one hundred and seven separate dwellings in Rushpool, and we quickly fell into a pattern where Dominic distracted the homeowner/resident/dog while I slipped off to do what Dominic started calling my voodoo shit. At least until I told him to stop calling it that, and he switched to calling it psychic stuff, which wasn’t much better.