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Meadowvale as a “three-hander.” You didn’t even try to arrest him until there were at least three of you to do it.
    Hazel Best was new to Norbold. She didn’t know this.
    After seeing Gabriel Ash and his dog settled in the Meadowvale cells, she and Constable Budgen had gone back on patrol. They’d overseen chucking-out time at the local hostelries, hushing the noisier revelers and steering others away from the car parks and toward the taxi rank. By one in the morning the town was quiet, but there remained hours of their shift still to serve. Wayne Budgen suggested checking the all-night café for criminal masterminds. When none was immediately apparent, they took a corner table and—as cover—ordered a pot of coffee and some sticky buns.
    They were still waiting for the criminal masterminds to show up when the call came in. Another disturbance at the park, this time involving vandalism at the war memorial. As they hurried out to the car, Hazel mumbled around the last of her bun, “It’ll be those same yobbos again, bet you anything. The ones who kicked nine bells out of … um…”
    “Rambles,” Budgen reminded her. “Let’s hope so.”
    Hazel looked at him in surprise. “You can think of someone you’d be less happy to meet on a dark night in an empty park than half a dozen young thugs who six hours ago were trying to beat a man to death?”
    “Oh yeah,” said Wayne fervently. “Barking Mad Barclay.”
    In primitive societies, you never speak of fairies for fear they might appear. Primitive societies know a thing or two.
    Norbold’s war memorial was a simple, dignified affair—a four-step plinth topped by a stone obelisk engraved with the names of the fallen, in two world wars and all the campaigns since. There were a lot of them.
    Barking Mad Barclay was head-butting the obelisk.
    If that had been all, they might have taken the view that twelve tons of granite could stand up to anything the human head could throw it, and waited until either boredom or brain damage intervened. Unfortunately, before he started on the obelisk, he’d overturned three of the four stone urns located around the plinth and rolled them into the Garden of Remembrance, scattering the faded remnants of wreaths. This is the kind of thing that upsets people, and it left them with no option but to make an arrest. Or at least try to.
    “Gonna need backup,” predicted Wayne Budgen.
    Hazel elevated an eyebrow. “Really?” They were both young, fit, robust, and well trained, and the suspect—which hardly seems an appropriate term when actually you’ve seen him head-butting a war memorial—had blood pouring down his face and a glazed expression in his eyes. “We can take him. Can’t we?”
    “That’s…” But before he’d got more than one word into the explanation, something unexpected happened to Constable Budgen. He blushed. She was a woman—all right, a couple of years older than he was, and maybe a shade more substantial and capable-looking than the girls he usually went for, but still an attractive young woman with green eyes and a lot of wavy fair hair that she tied back for work but which tended not to stay tied back—and she was looking to him, expecting him, to help her subdue Barking Mad Barclay. And Wayne Budgen was too embarrassed to tell her he was afraid. Of course they should have waited for backup. Budgen knew that; every police officer in Norbold should have known that. It was just Budgen’s luck to be patrolling with the one exception when it became an issue.
    He’d been thumped before. What was going through his mind now was that it would be better to be thumped again than let Hazel Best raise that eyebrow any higher at him. He amended what he’d been about to say. “If he flattens me, call for backup.”
    But Hazel hadn’t joined the police in order to watch other people do the difficult bits. “He probably would flatten you,” she admitted, adding with hasty tact, “if he could. He might not