A quick chat with Beverley would have been useful, only her phone went to voicemail. She’d said she was going to have a quick look up and down the River Lugg, so it was possible that she was either in a dead area or currently underwater. I didn’t have any luck with Nightingale, either, and calling the Folly just got me the long ominous silence that indicated Molly was the only one answering the phone. I left a message anyway – Nightingale always gets them. I don’t know how. Perhaps she writes them down.

I sneaked past the incident room, hid myself in Edmondson office and fired up HOLMES II. First I wrote up Gabriella Darrell’s new statement from my notes and sent it off to be processed and then I checked my emails to see if anyone had bothered to solve any of my problems for me – fat chance. Then I opened the annotated copy of Folklore of Herefordshire that Hugh Oswald had given me, skipping to the index and looked for abductions, of which there were none. Nor was there anything under changelings, children but there was something under The Fairy Changeling. Ella Mary Leather reported an account of a baby that never grew up and was strangely hairy, who turned out to be a changeling and was tricked into revealing the location of the true baby by an older brother. Leather suggested that such changeling stories might be the result of hypothyroidism or other conditions to which Hugh had noted in the margin Likely, but what if no gross phys. changes found? What if grows to adult? Oth, rec. foxglove tea (digitalis) to drive baby away – justified infanticide? No evd. Fae this case.

I was about to move on to horses, supernatural or otherwise, but Hugh’s annotations led over to the next page where the name Aymestrey popped out at me. This was in the section on Hobgoblins, which Ella Mary Leather associated with brownies, which she claimed was the Herefordshire name for Robin Goodfellow, the Puck of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A name associated with Pokehouse Wood which was located, according to Google Earth, half a kilometre from where Beverley stuck her head in the river and my unfortunate sheep said goodbye to its entrails. It was also on the Mortimer Trail, the same right of way that ran past Stan’s stash, and, I found when I checked Inspector Edmondson’s Ordnance Survey map, close to the gate where the girl’s phones were damaged.

There a traveller was once so tormented by Puck in the woods that he left a bequest the remuneration from which paid a local to ring the church bell at a certain time of night – to guide future travellers home. By this Hugh had written: No ev. of ac. rcntly. wood now F.C. replanted with cons.