‘Yes,’ he said, rearranging the pieces of his face into a smile. ‘It’s quite the miracle.’
‘Alice has an amazing future ahead of her, I can tell.’
Alice was posting fragments of cake into her mouth. ‘Daddy,’ she said around her fingers, ‘Everett says that we can go to his farm to see their new chickens. Please can we?’
‘Assuming that you’ve already asked your mother,’ he replied, ‘what has she said?’
Becky handed him a mug of tea. ‘Her mother has said that she’s not sure because it’s still early days, the doctors still have lots of tests to do, and it might be best for Alice to avoid germs for a little while yet just to be on the safe side.’
David offered a silent prayer of thanks to his wife.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Everett, ‘but I simply cannot accept no for an answer. The fresh air will be good for her, you don’t have to touch anything, and I can guarantee that there will be no contact with chicken poop.’
Alice giggled and said, ‘Chicken poop.’
‘Or indeed poop of any kind.’
‘Poop!’
Becky took Alice’s plate away before she could start licking it. ‘Stop saying poop, honey. David, what do you think?’
‘Well…’
‘What I can guarantee is more of Ardwyn’s famous walnut cake. I’m not a doctor but I do know the countryside and I can tell you that a visit to Farrow Farm would be one of the best things she could possibly do for her health right now.’ He ruffled Alice’s hair and smiled straight at David, but there was ice in his eyes. ‘Your daughter is such a lamb.’
Images of Turner’s lambs hanging on the fence – eviscerated, their intestines puddled and flyblown in the dirt beneath their mutilated bodies – sprang vivid in his memory. The threat couldn’t have been clearer if Everett had taken the knife out of that cake and held it to Alice’s throat.
‘I can hardly refuse, can I?’
‘Wonderful! We’ll expect to see you very soon, then. Let’s say next weekend?’
‘It’s a date,’ said Becky.
After Everett had gathered his things together and left, Becky put it on the kitchen calendar. To Alice’s column of reminders about tests, there was now added Chickens!
* * *
Although Burton was technically the main police station for the Needwood area it was closed on the weekends – because nothing exciting ever happened on a weekend, did it – and his shift was based at the police station at Rugeley. He changed into his kit and paired up with his regular for the evening, Sergeant Praveen Kaur, a veteran of some fifteen years whom he enjoyed riding with because she took him seriously and didn’t treat him like some gung-ho amateur who was only in it for the nee-naw and the flashing lights. The early part of the evening was spent mostly attending to calls about gangs of kids hanging around parks and making nuisances of themselves, an argument between hikers and cyclists who had run afoul of each other on Cannock Chase – the broad swathe of heathland and forest that backed onto the town and was always busy with families on the weekends but especially so at the height of summer – and a callout to a pair of cars in a lay-by that the dispatcher had said were suspected to be full of people dogging. It turned out to be two families of neo-pagan crusties heading home from the solstice festival at Stonehenge who had stopped for a rest. The driver opened the window on an interior full of dreadlocks and facial piercings and reeking with patchouli, and asked if everything was okay, officer. Prav thought there was a good chance that they had some weed, but, after asking them to turn out their pockets and having a quick look around the vehicle, couldn’t find any and wished them a safe homeward journey. They were resigned and polite about it, as if that sort of thing happened to them all the time.
‘Bit of a stereotype, isn’t it?’ he asked as they drove off. ‘Assuming that they were in possession because they’re into sun worship and facial tatts?’
‘David,’ she replied. ‘When some idiot comes at you with a knife do you want him to see your uniform and think “Oops, better not make assumptions here, let’s just see if I can stab him first” or do you want him to take one look and back off because the way you’re dressed sends a clear message about the kicking he can expect from you if he tries it? Everybody wears uniforms, whether they mean to or not, and those uniforms communicate messages about the kind of behaviour you can expect from the people wearing them – again, whether they mean to or not. They’re stereotypes because they’re sometimes true.’
He thought about the fact that the pagan cultists he knew wouldn’t have looked out of place on the average village allotment, but didn’t say anything; she’d have just thought he was being sarcastic.
Then around eight in the evening they got a call to say that Lauren Jeffries’ co-worker, Pauline Marsh, was worried that she’d gone missing. Apparently Jeffries hadn’t shown up for work at the travel agency that day and wasn’t answering her phone, so Marsh had gone to her flat and found it locked up and her cat unfed.
‘Chances are she’s bunked off and spent the day at the beach,’ said Prav. ‘Weather like today? I would.’ She drove them to Dodbury to hear from Marsh first-hand, have look at the flat and a chat with the neighbours, who predictably hadn’t seen anything and knew nothing, and in the meantime the Police Search Advisor at Stafford got back to them with a GPS result from the location app on Lauren’s phone. It wasn’t pin-point, and the data was two
