by Phil Rickman
‘Smith?’
‘Oh, it’s a big tribe, Lol, the Smiths. None bigger. Doesn’t mean she was related to the boys who killed Stewart.’
‘It does give them a reason for not killing Stewart, though, doesn’t it?’
‘I suppose you could say that.’
‘And did Stewart claim to know what happened to this Rebekah Smith?’
‘I don’t know. The thing is, Lol, you can’t libel the dead, and if Stewart wanted to suggest that Conrad Lake was in some way connected with the so-called disappearance of Rebekah Smith, there was nothing much to get in his way…’
‘Except Adam Lake, maybe. How much does Stock know?’
Isabel spread her hands. ‘Who can say? Especially now.’
‘Is there a manuscript?’
‘I’ve no idea. I don’t even know if he’d started writing it before he was murdered. But, yes, you’re right, of course, it wouldn’t make young Adam feel any more at home to have some book on sale for ever and ever in Bromyard and Ledbury and Hereford, linking his late father with some nasty old scandal. Especially,’ Isabel smiled gently, ‘as the local people have always said – and Sally Boswell will confirm this for you – that the terrible collapse of the Lake family hop-empire is down to what you might call a very traditional Romany curse.’
‘Of course.’ The aphids, the red spiders, the white mould… and the Verticillium Wilt. The four plagues of the Frome Valley.
And the Lady of the Bines – where did she fit in?
Lol stood up. ‘So that was where Stock was coming from.’
‘Bit clearer now, is it?’
‘That’s a joke, right?’ Lol said.
‘You asked God,’ said Isabel, ‘and God, in His mysterious way, asked me to fill you in on a few basics. Can we go back now? I need a wee, I do, and I can’t just nip behind a bush any more. Not till I’ve been to Lourdes.’
Lol pushed the wheelchair back into the lane. He wondered when God might think it appropriate to ask her exactly why she’d been so afraid of Simon going into Stock’s kiln?
30
Element of Surprise
EIRION TOOK THE big roundabout at Carmarthen on two wheels, it felt like, throwing Jane into the passenger door. ‘There’s a station here, right?’ she demanded, but he didn’t react. He drove on, until, quite soon, there was only open countryside in front of them.
‘I did not ask for this,’ Jane said. ‘I did not want this.’
Eirion was heading north towards Llandeilo. He was, like, serious. He was even wearing his baseball cap the right way round.
‘I’d really hoped,’ Jane said, ‘that you were not going to turn out to be one of those guys who think women can’t transport themselves from A to B on their own.’
He still didn’t respond. Well, stuff it, Jane was thinking now, why should I complain if he wants to drive me to Hereford and then turn the car around and drive all the way back to the bosom of his incredible family? Except…
‘This is Gwennan’s car, isn’t it?’
‘She lets me use it,’ Eirion said through his teeth, eyes fixed on the road. ‘And anyway, they’ve still got Dad’s car.’
‘As I understand it, she only lets you use it because you’ve got some heavy dirt on her. Like that she’s really English or something?’
‘If you’re just trying to make me dump you at the roadside,’ Eirion said, ‘it won’t work.’
‘I was merely trying to envisage the scenario when little Sioned and little Lowri returned from y siop, maybe half an hour ago, to find out that we’d pissed off without them, and their mummy discovered she was obliged to take care of them for the entire day. I would have gone on to make the point that whatever dirt you have on her – and I would be the last one ever to ask – would then count for like… not a great deal. I just make the point.’
Eirion slowed the BMW. She saw that, despite the air-conditioning, he was sweating.
‘I just don’t want you to get disinherited in favour of those spooky kids, is all,’ Jane said. ‘It would like distress me if you were to be taken away from the Cathedral School and forced to work as a rent boy in Abergavenny.’
‘What makes you think I don’t already?’
‘You’re not pretty enough.’
‘Why don’t you call your mum?’ Eirion said.
‘It’s not your problem.’
‘Then why did you tell me about it?’
‘We’ve been through this. I just didn’t want you to think it was a racial thing when I went over the wall.’
Eirion pulled into the side of the road. Though it was a main road, it was still fairly quiet. The hills were low and green and there were broadleaf woods. Apart from the colour of the soil, it didn’t look dramatically different from Herefordshire.
Eirion turned to face her and took off his baseball cap. His eyes were solemn, his famously amazing smile now in cold storage.
‘I’ll be straight with you, Jane, I’m going to be in deep shit over this. Gwennan and Dad have a big lunch today in Tenby with some Arts Council people and National Assembly delegates and a cultural delegation of Irish-speakers from Ireland. It’s informal, but there could be a significant PR contract in it for Gwennan, in connection with this pan-Celtic cultural festival.’
‘Turn the car round now,’ Jane said with this, like, dark menace.
‘No. They’ll deal with it. They’ll find someone to look after the kids. Things will be a little tense for a while. I may have minor transportation problems – nothing I can’t handle.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Brownie points, that’s all,’ Eirion said. ‘I mean I’d really hate you to think I was in love with you or anything like that.’
He turned on the engine and pulled back into the traffic without looking at her.
Jane sank back into the leather. ‘Holy shit,’ she whispered, almost to herself.
They stopped for lunch at a roadside diner, where they were served chips only slightly broader than matches, then made it through Llandovery and Brecon without once being stopped by the Welsh National Assembly Cultural Police looking for a stolen BMW, and reached the outskirts of Hereford by early afternoon.
It was like Eirion had crossed over some barrier, and nothing emotive was touched on again. His mood was lighter, but Jane also sensed an underlying determination, and by the time he pulled into a side road off Kings Acre it was clear it had never been his intention to drop her off at the bus station.
‘Where exactly do we find this suicide kid?’
‘It wasn’t my intention even to try,’ Jane said. ‘It would mean getting past her old lady. That could take time. She sounded like a very difficult woman.’
‘Then let’s be sensible about this and go and see your mother.’
‘You’re missing the point. My mother is in an invidious position. And if she gets involved with Riddock it will like rise off the scale of invidiousness.’
‘So you want to go and face up this Riddock?’
‘Christ, no. She’d chew us up. Especially you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You’re a guy. Guys she eats for an aperitif.’
‘An aperitif is a drink, Jane. Try hors d’oeuvre.’
‘I thought children of your ethnic persuasion had to do Welsh instead of French.’
‘I didn’t need to do Welsh, Jane. It was my first language – well, almost.’
‘Sometimes you scare me, you’re so alien.’
‘Bollocks,’ Eirion said. ‘Neither, somehow, do I believe this Riddock scares you.’
‘Doesn’t scare me, exactly. I just don’t want to go near her until I’ve got the means to, like, bend her to my will. No, listen…’ Jane hammered both fists on her knees. ‘Listen, listen, listen, I can work this out. You were right, of course. There was no way I could go to the media with half a story. We have to know first what the complete score is with this slag. Like, are we talking extortion? Because when I first sat down at t
hat table in Steve’s shed, the first thing Kirsty Ryan asked me was had I got the ten quid. I mean, was that a joke? Or have they actually been taking money off little kids for letting them talk to their dear departeds?’
‘Little kids tend not to have dear departeds,’ Eirion said. ‘Death doesn’t mean that much to them.’
‘Jesus,’ Jane said, ‘when did you have your mid-life crisis?’
‘Besides which, I thought you said she had this rich stepfather who bought her a yellow Porsche.’
‘Mazda. Look, we don’t know enough, OK? Therefore, we need to talk to someone who does. Turn the nice German wheels around, and I shall endeavour to direct you. And…’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m very grateful to you for sacrificing your cultural heritage on the altar of, um…’
‘Don’t embarrass us both,’ Eirion said. ‘We have all the time in the world for that crap.’
‘Wasn’t that in an ancient James Bond film?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Bond’s like, “We have all the time in the world.” Then his woman gets shot.’
‘You have to turn everything into wide-screen, don’t you, Jane?’
‘It’s a cultural thing,’ Jane said. ‘It’s about seeing the big picture – being outward-looking, rather than… all right, forget it.’
She had a vague idea where the farm was because Kirsty and her sister had thrown this barn-rave for Kirsty’s sixteenth, about a year ago, and these little maps had been given out. Despite her old friend Dr Samedi doing the music, Jane hadn’t gone along in the end because… well, because of a nobody-to-go-with kind of short-term situation, if you wanted the truth. But she remembered the name of the farm.
‘The Bluff?’ Eirion said. ‘Is this an omen?’
He was taking it very slowly because this was, after all, Gwennan’s car, and they were into rough tracks now. He’d left a terse but nervous message on his dad’s answering machine, explaining about the car. All Jane knew was that it was terse and nervous, because it was also in Welsh.
‘I could’ve sworn this was right.’ She was sitting up, peering from side to side: fields full of hay like big rolls of butter, a distant church steeple that could be Weobley. The Bluff implied high ground, but this was all fairly flat.
It was getting very hot; she wished she’d worn shorts.
‘You didn’t say you’d never actually been here,’ Eirion said crossly, the BMW lurching on a baked rut. ‘And you don’t know she’s going to be there when we find it. In fact, you haven’t really thought this out, have you?’
‘I’m an emotional, volatile, charged kind of person, Irene. When I see what has to be done, I just go for it. I thought that was one of the things you—’
‘Don’t push it,’ Eirion growled.
‘All right,’ Jane said. ‘I’d have rung her, if I’d thought about it. But anyway, I always think the element of surprise works best, don’t you?’ She looked over the back of the seat, through the rear window. ‘You know this… this has got to be right, Eirion. If Weobley’s over there and Sarnesfield’s back there—’ She pointed across the field. ‘OK, look, there’s a guy on a tractor. Why don’t we just ask him? Just like drive across, you’re OK.’
‘I can’t just drive across his field!’
‘Course you can, he’s already done this bit.’
Eirion changed down; the BMW chugged across the spiky surface of the mown meadow. When they got to within about ten yards of the tractor, the big machine stopped and the driver was jumping down, walking slowly towards them. The driver wore a red shirt and jeans and a dark blue baseball cap with Ford across the front.
The car couldn’t go any further; they were into this rolling sea of cut hay. There was another guy messing about with whatever you called the piece of machinery the tractor was pulling. He looked up. Both of them looked sweaty and knackered. Eirion wound down the window and hot, urban music came in, along with the industrial juddering of the tractor.
‘Sorry to bother you—’
The driver whipped off the cap, uncovering short red spiky hair and unshadowing a face that was, despite its deepening tan, not a happy face.
‘Right, mate – deal. You show me the sign that says “picnic site” and I won’t ram you into the bloody ditch.’
‘Oh.’ Jane leaned across Eirion to the open window.
The tractor driver peered past Eirion at Jane.
‘Er… hi,’ Jane said. ‘Hi, Kirsty. You got a couple of minutes?’
Kirsty Ryan wiped the sweat from her nose with the back of a hand, and a clinking of the outsize nose-rings not allowed in school. She looked butch and she looked sullen. She also looked like she knew exactly what this was going to be about.
‘Piss off, Watkins,’ Kirsty said. ‘We got nothing to say to each other.’
‘Element of surprise,’ Eirion murmured. ‘Yes, that always works best.’
31
Little Taps
DAVID SHELBONE DIDN’T look well. There was something static about one side of his long face, as though he’d had a stroke.
‘No, I’m all right, quite all right,’ he’d kept saying to Sophie, as she offered him more tea, a paracetamol. ‘I’ve always suffered from migraines; this is nothing.’
Merrily didn’t like to stare, but she wondered if perhaps he had only one eye. He was not what she’d imagined. Charlie Howe had led her to expect some stern prophet type, wielding the banner of Christ and the Law of Listed Buildings. But David Shelbone had a diffident, faraway look, like some ageing poet weary of words.
Sophie had read something in his manner. Announcing that she had some papers to collect from the Bishop’s Palace, she left them alone. Merrily led Mr Shelbone into the little Deliverance office. A few weeks ago, she’d turned the desk around, so she now had her back to the Palace yard and was facing the door – a feng shui arrangement, recommended by Jane. She had to admit it did feel better-oriented; she felt more in control. Even this morning.
‘I owe you an apology.’ David Shelbone didn’t have a local accent like his wife; there was something vaguely northern about it, and his voice was flat but thin, like card. ‘When Amy came home from hospital, we had a talk. She told us your daughter was not one of the organizers of this spiritualist circle, that she in fact only attended once and was virtually dragged into it.’
Merrily nodded. ‘That’s my understanding, too.’
‘Amy said it had been on her conscience. She felt pressured – not so much by you as… Anyway, I’m very sorry. There was, I’m afraid, some overreaction.’
‘That was understandable.’
‘We were going to write to you, to apologize.’
‘No need. How is she? It must’ve been—’
‘It could have been a lot worse. We thought there’d have to be a stomach pump, but fortunately she was very sick in the ambulance. Anyway, I rang Canon Beckett last night, and he said I should talk to you, although he wasn’t sure whether or not you’d gone on holiday yet. Failing that, he thought I should go to the police. But we’d rather keep the authorities out of this. She’s our only child, you see, the only child we’ll ever have now.’
Police? ‘Erm… Sophie said your wife and Amy had gone away somewhere, because you were afraid Social Services might—I mean, can they do that? Can they take her away, if she’s been formally adopted?’
‘It’s complicated, I’m afraid, Mrs Watkins, but broadly, yes, they can take away any child they might consider to be in danger.’
Merrily thought of all the battered wives, abused children in unstable homes. She didn’t understand.
Mr Shelbone coughed nervously. ‘Also, you see, I’m… This is going to sound ridiculous.’ There was a patch of white stubble on his neck, a grease spot on the collar of his faded grey shirt.
‘Which is what most people say when they come here,’ Merrily told him.
‘Normally, I abhor talk of victimization… vendettas.’
She said carefully, �
��We are talking about Amy here? We’re talking about school?’
‘Er… not entirely.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Or at least, we… we’re probably also talking about me.’
‘I see. I think I see.’
‘Do you?’
‘Possibly. I happened to be talking to one of the councillors.’
His eyes flickered: a hunted look. ‘Which one?’
‘Well, I don’t think I’d better…’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’ His breathing had quickened.
‘But someone who I think you could say is neutral on the issue of the Barnchurch development,’ Merrily said.
He blinked hard then looked almost relieved, closed his eyes for a moment. The wall clock clicked on 11.55, and Merrily remembered, with an inner shudder, precisely where she’d been standing this time yesterday.
‘I have to be careful what I say here, Mrs Watkins,’ Mr Shelbone said. ‘As you may have heard, I’m not a very popular person in some quarters. Though I try to do what is right and Christian.’
Merrily nodded. Tell me about it.
‘The problem with councils,’ he said, ‘is that, although different departments – let’s say planning and social services – have very different functions, and officials rarely encounter one another in the course of their work, they’re all closely linked, through the elected members.’
‘In that a councillor who serves on – shall we say, planning…’
‘May also serve on social services.’ He nodded. ‘You’re being very perceptive, I think.’
‘No, I’m just putting two and two together from what I’ve been told. You’ve a history of getting in the way of certain people’s plans. They’d like you out. Your wife indicated you’d been offered some sort of early-retirement deal, but you wanted to go on.’
‘We all feel we’re here for a purpose, and protecting the past is mine,’ he said simply. ‘How could I relax at home, knowing wrong decisions were being made and important buildings were in danger of disappearing for ever?’