9th May
A search of the house of Bishop Anthony Forrester, on the previous evening, had yielded no further clues.
Duck and Jenny sat in a bar in the nearby city of Leicester and reviewed the situation.
‘OK,’ said Jenny, ‘we know that the Masters of ARK were Hunter, Rycroft, Summerland, Forrester and Holland. Summerland is still in Turkey. Rycroft and Holland are dead, and only Leadbetter knows what happened to Hunter. That leaves Forrester as the only accessible Master of ARK and, indeed, the only other member of ARK that we know about.’
‘What do you think ought to be done?’ asked Duck.
‘I think that MI5 should pick up and interrogate Forrester,’ Jenny replied.
‘What would Joan think of that idea?’
‘The Archbishop of Canterbury has been briefed, and he was worried that if a third bishop were to vanish, it would be impossible to sustain the cover stories for their absences. Fortunately, no one has yet linked Holland to all this.’
‘I guess all that UFO hysteria in Norfolk is diverting attention from the disappearance of one local vicar,’ Duck suggested.
Duck glanced out of the pub window. They were near a station, and the stall of a street newspaper vendor stood just across the street. ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Duck before quickly standing up and leaving the pub.
Jenny watched him cross the street to the newspaper stall and buy a paper. He had obscured the news placard from her view until he moved away for the stall. She could now read the words: Bishop Abducted by UFO!
Duck returned to his seat with a copy of the Evening News. He placed it on the table between then so that they could both read the front page article:
Bishop Anthony Forrester Abducted By UFO
In a dramatic turn of events surrounding recent UFO sightings in London and East Anglia, there have been reports that the Bishop of Northchester, the Right Reverend Anthony Forrester, has been abducted by a UFO from his home near Leicester.
Eyewitnesses report a craft landing in the garden of his property and two humanoid figures then bundling someone, thought to be the bishop, into it.
The craft was then said to have silently risen into the air and vanished at high speed. …