And, also alas, Blair didn’t say which previous CP’s notes he’d consulted. So, short of ploughing through two hundred years of paperwork, I was stuffed. Blair found no direct sign of fairy involvement but did report a strong vestigia of the country type which I took to mean possibly fairy. He did discover bare footprints and some empty gin bottles—freshly emptied by the smell—and concluded that the dancers were probably women from the local mill out for a drunken lark. There followed a paragraph or three lamenting the decline of modern female morality which he blamed on allowing women to do factory work during the Great War. I bet that went down well with the typing pool.
It wasn’t much, but then all I’d had in Herefordshire were imaginary friends and UFO sightings. So I did a quick Google and found the area around Waterside had had its share of sightings—lights in the sky in 2009 and a purported YouTube video of a spacecraft a couple of years later.
More importantly, Waterside was within a brisk cycle ride or short car journey from two stations on the Metropolitan Line—Chesham, and Chalfont and Latimer. So I hopped in the Blue Asbo and set forth to brave the wilds of Buckinghamshire.
Once you’re past the M25 and driving up the Latimer Road there’s no disguising that you’re in a river valley and that Jaget’s fabled good Tamil restaurants are a long way behind you. It didn’t help that the woods and hedgerows were giving me flashbacks to Herefordshire, although thankfully it wasn’t so hot and, hopefully, was lacking in psychopathic unicorns.
After a long stretch of mixed woods and farming, the valley narrows, you pass a sewage treatment plant, some heavy farming and some light engineering and you’ve arrived in Waterside. Beyond the recreation centre and swimming pool was the Moor—note capital letters.
Which, if you were looking for a wild and romantic place, was a bit of a disappointment in that it wasn’t really a moor. It was in fact a marshy artificial island created in the tenth century by Lady Elgiva. Whoever she was, she presumably liked marshy islands for the waterfowl hunting and peasant drowning opportunities. It was used as a recreation area and had a car park, which was handy. So I parked up and had a sniff around. It was a triangular piece of land, hemmed in by the River Chess on one side and the Metropolitan Line on the other. The high fae, aka the fair folk aka elves or whatever you want to call them, do not live amongst us in the same way other fae do, but appear to exist parallel to our world. I’d use the phrase other dimension but I’m not ready to think about the implications of that just yet—thank you very much.
The vestigia they leave behind during an incursion is subtle but powerful and if they’d been abducting princesses in the vicinity I was pretty certain I’d spot it. I checked around to make sure nobody was watching me and lay down in the long grass and pressed my ear to the ground.
For a long time there was nothing but the sweetish smell of grass, the swish of passing cars and the vague worry that I hadn’t remembered to back up my current set of case notes. I’ve learnt to allow myself to let go of these things and exist in the now—which is exactly as easy as it sounds.
Very faintly I caught the distant regular thumping of old machinery, the crackle of paper and an acrid, caustic stink. There’d been mills all along this stretch of the river. The girls the prim and proper Wallace Blair had suspected of drunkenly dancing through the night had worked in those mills and lived in the mean terraces on the opposite bank.
But there was none of the deep vibrato sense of change that you got from an incursion. I suspected it had been gin-drinking working girls back in 1924 and nothing magical before or after. I raised my head to look over at the river.
At least nothing fae.
There was a well-maintained and tree-shaded path running alongside the water. I cast an experienced eye over the suspiciously new-looking reed beds and anti-erosion fixtures. They call this sort of scheme “rewilding.” I can’t prove that a sudden rush to improve your local river indicates the emergence of young and active genius loci. But when Mama Thames went into the river at London Bridge it was so toxic that drowning was the least of your worries. And now—cleanest industrial river in Europe. Just saying.
Right on cue a sturdy little white boy came running down the path towards me waving his arms and yelling. He didn’t look more than four or five, with amazingly pink cheeks, fair hair and blue eyes. He was dressed in red shorts, a stripy blue and green T-shirt and blue trainers. As soon as I saw him I automatically starting scanning for nearby traffic in case he ran into the road, potential child abductors and/or responsible adults.
I soon spotted an elderly white couple, a man and a woman, twenty metres behind him and trying to muster the speed to catch up. The man, grey haired, tweed jacketed and carrying a walking stick, looked dangerously out of breath and I resolved to gently corral the boy to a stop and return him to—what? Grandparents, at a guess.
I bent down and opened my arms to block the pavement, which the boy took as a cue to throw himself at me and wrap his arms around my neck. It was like plunging my face into an icy stream, shocking and exciting and with that the grinding of metal teeth and the fluttering sound of paper wings. I stood up and hoisted him onto my hip.
“What’s your name?” he cried.
“Peter,” I said. “What’s yours?”
“I’m Chess,” he said. “Which is supposed to be short for Chester.”
The grandfather had been forced to stop for a bit of a breather, but the gran was made of sterner stuff.
“Chester,” she said as she approached. “Put that poor man down.” And then to me, “I’m so sorry. He seems to have got away from us.” She glanced back at the man who stopped coughing long enough to raise a reassuring hand.
I assured her that it was fine and that I was skilled in the ways of wrangling children, having a ton of nieces, nephews and assorted cousins.
“You smell funny,” said Chester.
A look of total mortification crossed the woman’s face.
“Chester!” she said, and looked at me with a pleading expression. “I’m so very very sorry.”
I told her not to worry, even as Chester asked me if I ate funny food.
“Here, let me take him,” said the woman. She sagged as I handed him back. He was a heavy little boy and slid down her front until he was standing on the pavement holding her hand.
“I’m so very sorry,” said the woman.
The old man arrived in time to catch the fag end of the conversation. He eyed me belligerently and said, “He’s just a boy.”