At midday we stopped off for refs at Dominic’s mum’s bungalow. She was out serving refreshments of her own to the search teams, so we raided her stupendously large American fridge, which was the size of a cryogenic pod and had an ice maker and everything. It was also ridiculously full for one old lady overseeing a totally theoretical B&B business.

‘Half my family stops in here of an evening,’ said Dominic when I asked about it. ‘I think she sees more of us now than when we were all living in the same house.’

I put together a German salami sandwich with sliced tomatoes and lettuce that had Produce of Spain on its packaging. The stoneground wholemeal bread, Dominic said, was from a bakery in Hereford. ‘I bought it the day before yesterday.’

While we ate, Dominic pulled up the Ordnance Survey map of the area on his tablet.

‘You’re pretty sure the . . .’ He looked at me for a clue but I was too busy chewing. ‘. . . the “magical event” didn’t happen in the village – right?’

I nodded.

‘What if the phones were dumped after the event by somebody other than the kids?’

I swallowed. ‘Like a kidnapper?’

‘That, or a third party who found the phones and dropped them off at the crossroads to be found.’

‘To throw us off?’

‘Or because they didn’t want anyone to know they were in the area,’ said Dominic.

‘But this has been on TV for two days,’ I said. ‘If they weren’t the kidnapper, wouldn’t they have come forward by now?’

‘You know it doesn’t work like that,’ said Dominic.

He was right. Members of the public were famously crap at volunteering information if they thought it might drop them in the shit – even in a serious case like missing children. They could vacillate for days, and often they tried to pass on the information in some devious roundabout way.

‘You’re thinking they might have called the hotline already?’ I said.

‘Yep,’ said Dominic.

In a case like this there had to have been a thousand calls by now. But the good news was that some other poor sod would have already done the basic follow-up work.

My phone rang and when I checked it was Beverley’s number.

I answered and said, ‘Hi, Bev.’

‘Would this be Constable Grant?’ asked a woman with a Welsh accent.

I said it was.

‘My name is Miss Teveyddyadd,’ she said. ‘I believe we have a friend of yours here that needs to be picked up.’

‘Picked up from where?’ I asked.

Miss Teveyddyadd told me. And while it wasn’t either a hospital or a police station, I wasn’t sure it might not be worse. I told her that I’d be right there.

‘I have to run an errand,’ I told Dominic.

‘Do you want me to come?’ he asked.