Sentence The Sevenhundredandseventeenth

 

At the look on both of the girls' faces, DI Isa Urquhart asks: "I don't know if you were here twenty years ago?" and Rose says "I was still in Oz, in Secondary, I would have been 12," and Pollyanna confirms: "I was, but I was still in Primary," and enquires: "what happened?" Isa takes a deep breath and Milly puts away her notebook – she knows all about it, only too well; then Isa says: "there were a lot of weird goings on, people disappearing into the past and others appearing from the past, something to do with Worm-Holes and Ley Lines; it was difficult for the Police – we were just constables at the time, WPCs – to get to grips with; one of the strangest was a bunch of American GIs who'd disappeared in Vietnam in the 70s, believed killed in action, who emerged from the Eildons, from a huge cave system that no-one had known existed, and there was a historian, Professor Sir Clement Dane, who apparently got off a train at Tweedbank – that was the terminus for the newly restored Borders Railway, before it was extended to Hawick and then Carlisle; before Scotland won it's Independence and then later Cumbria and Northumberland voted to become part of Scotland." and Poll nods: "oh, yeah, I remember my mum and dad getting all excited when Newcastle and Carlisle became Scottish cities!" and Rose said: "wow! you know I always thought they had been? I didn't

know they used to be part of England?" and Isa laughs: "there was even talk of London holding a 

referendum to become Scottish too, and maybe if there had still been Scottish MPs at Westminster that might have happened, but the English Government vetoed it! they'd already lost Scotland and Northern Ireland when it became united with the Republic, and Wales was on the brink of leaving England – though that actually happened a couple of years later – and they couldn't risk their Capital City leaving England! though King Charles was interested in the idea of Cornwall gaining it's Independence and if he hadn't died it might, but once King Billy was on the throne – he used to be thought of as a nice guy – that all changed; he showed his true colours and wanted to scrap Parliament and become an absolute ruler, but Prince Harry, his younger brother, led the revolt which forced Billy to abdicate and scuttle off to Gibraltar, so King Harry became the People's King and did away with lots of the restriction his brother had enforced; but enough history! the point is, it looks as if the same sort of thing happened to Dod Broon, and led to him appearing here; Maisie died about ten years ago but we haven't told him yet; he's under sedation but in a day or two we'll be able to interview him," and Poll said: "will you tell him we want to help him in any way we can?" and Isa promised that she would pass on their wishes to him; "his old house was sold after his wife died, he had been declared legally dead seven years after he disappeared, so at the moment he doesn’t exist, legally, and I'll have to institute proceedings to change that; we had to do the same for Thomas Learmonth – no, not the Paramedic – his ancestor, who restored his old Tower in Earlston and became quite a local celebrity, but then he disappeared just as suddenly as he'd appeared – probably went back to his own time, and was able to make predictions of what he knew would come to pass: three bridges over the Tweed at Leaderfoot, all that sort of stuff – he claimed to have spent the intervening years in Fairyland, never divulging that he had travelled into the distant Future and

clearly Fairyland was much more believable in his time! and the same with Sir Walter Scott's believed-drowned daughter, Patience: she was twelve when she was lost crossing the Tweed in a passenger ferry, and she is still alive, as far as I know, and living in a flat in her old home, Abbotsford, did you know her at school?" she asked Poll, who started, blushed, and said: "of course! we were both at Earlston High, I'd forgotten that story – how she'd fallen in the Tweed, woken up in a cave in the Eildons, living among some kind of Neolithic people, and then was struck by lightning and came to in 2016; it was one of a myriad of Fortean anomalies she talked about, but we didn't know which were true or just made up, like her father's novels," which was when DI Urquhart's phone rang – she answered it and listened, then put it back in her pocket and, looking at Sergeant Millican, said: "they've turned up!" and turning to face the two girls, explained: "now it really is getting quite minatory – Dod Broon's three drinking chums also disappeared, within a day or so of him, and that's them all been discovered today, here in Melrose; so I think we have to refurbish our Cold Case Files, they are no longer Missing Persons, all three were murdered!"