I’d asked Nightingale once I’d got back to the cowshed, and he’d said that while he’d never had a case in his lifetime, there were always rumours that it had happened. He promised to look through books and see what he could find.

‘Is it a thing?’ I asked Beverley.

‘Not that I know about,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Mum doesn’t hold with it, so someone would have to be pretty stupid to tell me about it.’

‘And fairies?’

Beverley hesitated and then – ‘Peter,’ she said, ‘some things you don’t talk about.’

‘Not even to me?’

‘Especially to the feds,’ she said. ‘Double so the magic feds.’

I cordially hate the use of the word feds – I’d rather be called the filth, at least that would be English English. It’s the lack of imagination that pisses me off.

Just short of a crossroad hamlet called Mortimer’s Cross we rumbled over a stone bridge and Beverley jolted in her seat and asked whether the river we’d crossed was the Lugg.

‘I think so,’ I said, trying to remember the map on the GPS. ‘Is that important?’

‘Nah,’ said Beverley. ‘Just professional curiosity.’

I turned right onto the A410 which went north with suspiciously Roman straightness towards Aymestrey, which is less a village than a diorama of the last six hundred years of English vernacular architecture stretched along either side of the road. Then another stone bridge across the Lugg where it curved west towards Wales and then a tricky little turn-off that took us through Yatton and the weirdly named Leinthall Earls, where Stan the strange lived. To our right a steep escarpment reared up, topped by the ancient hill fort of Croft Ambrey and Whiteway Head – although our view would have been better if the hedgerows hadn’t been higher than our car.

‘I’m not totally comfortable with the tops of hills,’ said Beverley as we climbed up a steep wooded incline.

‘Why’s that?’

‘You know water,’ she said. ‘Tends to flow downhill, tends to accumulate at the bottom.’

‘That make sense,’ I said. ‘How do you feel about bees?’

‘Why do you ask?’

I told her about Mellissa Oswald’s unusual affinity for anthophila.

‘And you think she’s a bee?’ she asked.

‘Let’s just say I think there’s more going on there than an interest in grow your own honey,’ I said.

‘And that helps us how?’

‘Bees cover a wide area. Maybe they spotted something.’

‘And told your bee girl?’

‘Possibly.’

Beverley kissed her teeth.

‘Not unless the missing girls were covered in sugar they wouldn’t,’ she said.

‘They might have seen something and not known what it is.’ It was beginning to sound pretty thin even to me.