Before Gosie heads to Romney Marsh, she wants to go slightly north towards East Anglia, maybe Norfolk but precision doesn't matter. @EdithStourton can be found there. It was Edith who first noticed that Gosie was in the south of France, way back when Gosie was in the south of France.
Aside from being friends, Edith sees a lot of tractors. So Gosie wants to check if the patterns she saw with Magpie are also true with Edith.
What's going on is much bigger than Gosie first thought.
That’s what’s going on.
The tractor pattern wasn’t local to Magpie’s area. Edith confirms it within about ten minutes of Gosie arriving.
Not through maps.
Through annoyance.
Edith Stourton lives in that broad East Anglian landscape where:
- machinery is constant
- everyone notices weather
- and vehicles stand out only when they behave wrongly
And we know she has two gorgeous dogs.
Brains immediately likes Gosie, obviously. Calm, alert, faintly intellectual German Pointer energy.
Batshit crashes into a wheelbarrow, gets stuck under a chair for six seconds, then proudly retrieves a boot no one asked for.
Gosie likes them both instantly.
Edith listens to the Romney Marsh theory while making tea.
Then says:
“Oh. That explains Lola.”
Pause.
“Sorry—Lola explains your theory.”
Lola should not, under any reasonable agricultural framework, be operating a combine harvester.
Yet she is.
And not badly.
That’s the unsettling bit.
Edith explains:
- Lola appears at odd farms at odd times
- always during busy movement windows
- always “helping out” when equipment or drivers are unexpectedly unavailable
- never stays long enough for questions
People remember:
- the tiny Jack Russell driving a combine
- not the support vehicles moving alongside it
Classic distraction technique.
Gosie realises the adversary network has layers:
Layer 1 — attention
The absurdity:
- Jack Russell in a combine
- odd machinery movements
- harmless local eccentricity
Layer 2 — concealed logistics
While everyone watches Lola:
- containers move
- trailers swap
- loads transfer
Layer 3 — assembly
Romney Marsh.
That’s still the convergence point.
Then Brains does something useful.
Batshit does something catastrophic.
Brains retrieves a discarded tarp from near Edith’s sheds because she noticed it was out of place.
Batshit has the energy of a creature who has never once completed the task she started but has nevertheless altered the course of events repeatedly.
She charges after a pheasant, crashes through stacked equipment, and accidentally reveals a concealed crate hidden behind diesel drums.
Inside:
- packing straw
- fragments of sealing wax
- and a scrap of cloth marked with the same multilingual annotation style Gosie saw in Oxford
The network has already been here.
Very recently.
Edith goes quiet.
Not frightened.
Offended.
Someone used her land as a transfer point.
And now Gosie knows:
- the logistics web is much wider than expected
- East Anglia is an active corridor
- Lola the combine-driving Jack Russell is part distraction, part courier support
Also:
Batshit may accidentally be one of the most effective counter-intelligence assets in Britain.
Honestly, Gosie probably trusts Batshit more at this point because no adversary can reliably predict what Batshit will do next. Including Batshit.