Dominic put Russell in his boyfriend’s truck and I followed on in the Asbo as we drove back to Rushpool, up through the village, across the main road and up yet another narrow lane which twisted onto the ridge. We passed a rather fine cottage with a neat thatched roof, rattled across a cattle grid and parked in the open space beyond, just long enough for me to transfer into the truck. Then we proceeded up a flinty track that was rough enough to eat the bottom chassis of any family hatchback.

‘And you drove up here in your car?’ I asked Russell.

He said everyone did, which meant to my mind you could track all these doggers by their frequent trips to the garage. Dominic’s boyfriend’s Nissan made short work of the rough track, as it probably did of wild animals and anti-personnel mines. We climbed towards the ridge with woods on our left and a wide stretch of short grass to our right. After five hundred metres or so we ran out of car-destroying track and set out directly over the grass.

‘And you came all the way up here?’ I asked as the Nissan bumped and squeaked on its suspension.

‘Yes,’ said Russell.

‘In the dark?’

‘Yes.’

‘Boy, you really must have been desperate,’ I said.

‘You get a better class of people at the top of the common,’ he said. ‘There’s too many weirdos at the bottom.’

Russell directed us to a point just short of the ridge line where the fence that separated the common from the woodland was pierced by a five-bar gate, a wooden side gate and a wooden sign bearing the National Trust crest and a trail marker.

‘This is part of the Mortimer Trail,’ said Dominic.

We got out of the truck and Russell showed me where he’d found the phones – just on the bare patch that ramblers’ feet had worn in the grass in front of the wooden gate. I wasn’t going to get anything off that, but the metal was everything an investigatory wizard might hope for. I placed my palms on the top rail, trying not to make it look too theatrical, and attempted to sort through the random sense impressions, stray thoughts, sounds and fantasies that are definitely not vestigia. And for a moment I thought the gate was clean, until I realised what it was I was sensing. Nightingale once described vestigia as being like the after-image you get in your eyes after looking at a bright light, but what I felt at the gate was different. It was more like stepping out of a cool house on a bright sunny day – for a moment everything is a confusion of light and warmth, and then your senses adjust. Something powerful had happened around that gate and blotted out any other traces with the magical equivalent of white noise.