Foxglove Summer

The Daily Mail had the scoop but the media had caught the smell of blood in the water and twenty-four-hour news outlets were running the bulletin every half an hour, with a teaser on the quarter in case your attention span was that short.

I’ll say this for the Queen. She was brave—or possibly stupid. It’s easy to mistake the two.

I am a goddess, Peter, a creature of temperament and whimsy. I’m supposed to be arbitrary and mercurial—it’s practically my job description.

His big claim to fame, beyond writing the first ever vampire novel, is his work attempting to classify where whatever it is that powers magic comes from. He called it potentia because there’s nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you’re making it up as you go along.

“Of course now I realize it was a telepathic compulsion.”

I was afraid to ask from who—but I had to know.

“From aliens,” she told me.

“Aliens?”

“I’m not mad, you know,” she said. “I’ve been sectioned. They put me in for four weeks’ ‘evaluation’ and at the end the top shrink calls me into her office and looks me in the eye and says, ‘you’re saner than I am—go away.’”

“Did you tell them about the aliens?” I asked.

“I may have glossed over some of the details,” she said.

One of the advantages of being the police is that when you want to buy something slightly dodgy, you generally know where to shop.

Taking a statement from anyone can be a long process on account of the fact that your average member of the public wouldn’t know the truth if it donned a pink tutu and danced in front of them singing the Chicken Song.

“So the moon effects magic, why?”

“I’m working on several theories,” I said. “But I’m currently favoring the hypothesis that the moon has a seemingly arbitrary effect on magic because it likes to piss me off.”

“That’s a theory with a high degree of applicability to other spheres of life,” he said.

“I’ve loaded this particular gun with scrap iron,” she said. “Now, I don’t know if a shot to the head will kill you or not. But just consider how much fun we can have finding out.”

This was the Wyldewood, spelt with a Y, that once covered the Island of Britain and would again, once the pesky tool-using primates had done the decent thing and exterminated themselves.

“How about this then, Peter,” she said. “You’ve been part of something that no wizard has ever been part of before. You know something that’s not in their books.”

I wanted to say that lots of things weren’t in the libraries of the wise, including plate tectonics, molecular biology and the complete works of J. K. Rowling. But she’d probably say that I was missing the point.

“They’ve got me reviewing statements during the initial investigation,” he said. “Occasionally I punch myself in the face to keep awake.”

Nightingale says that conspiracies of silence are the only kind of conspiracies that stand the test of time.

I find you get two types of police, those that don’t want to know and those that do. Unfortunately, dealing with things you don’t want to know about is practically a definition of policing.

“Come on then,” yelled Beverley, for whom de-escalation was something that happened to other people.

We were pretty certain we knew roughly where he’d been, but members of the public have an unnerving tendency to switch straight from lying to your face to telling you what they think you want to hear—with no intervening period of veracity at all.

“Any abductions?” I asked.

“Loads,” he said. “But none verified.”