by Phil Rickman
‘Mrs Watkins?’
His voice was loud, more landowner than workman. He beamed through white stubble, opening the gates for her, extending a big hand.
Merrily pushed her right hand out of a once-waxed sleeve.
‘Mr Kellow.’
Was it? She’d Google-imaged Dennis Kellow, the heritage builder, and in all five pictures he’d been big and bronze. This man didn’t look that big and his face was stretched and battered-looking.
‘We don’t’ – he pulled the gates to behind her – ‘invite traffic. Not since some bloody urbanite claimed he’d ruined his suspension on the track and sent us a solicitor’s letter. The compensation culture. Try anything these days.’
‘How did that end?’
‘On the fire. Now.’ He stood looking down at her, rubbing his leathery hands together. ‘We haven’t met before, have we?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘It’s just that people I haven’t seen for years often don’t recognize me. Lost a lot of weight. Quite deliberate. Not, you know, a side-effect of anything.’
He pulled off his well-worn hat to show he still had hair and quite a lot of it, off-white and brushed back, manelike. He put the hat back and they shook hands.
‘Sorry about Adam, m’dear. He’s normally very reliable. Bloody hospital exploits his enthusiasm.’
‘Right.’
When she’d rung from home, just before nine, to make sure she was expected, Adam Malik had said that unfortunately he was on his way out. Quite rare to be called into the hospital on a Saturday morning, but there’d been a bad crash on a notorious hill on the Leominster road, several badly broken bones. He was so sorry. Would she mind awfully talking to his father-in-law, who actually knew more than he did about this… issue? Merrily thinking, as she left, that Adam Malik hadn’t sounded all that sorry that he wouldn’t be there.
‘Now,’ his father-in-law said. ‘Would you like some tea or coffee, or should I show you around first and let things just come out in their own way? Don’t know how much time you have. Afraid I don’t really know the formula for this sort of thing.’
‘Oh… well… there isn’t one, really. It starts with you explaining what the problem is. Then I see if I can help, and how, and then you decide if that’s the way you want to go. Tea, yes, that would be good, thank you, Mr Kellow.’
‘Dennis. I’m Dennis. Mellowed, you see.’ A short laugh, and then he set off up the dirt drive, where you could see a stone chimney stack above the trees. ‘Forced to bloody well mellow by my own—’ He stopped. ‘Sorry, m’dear, with you not wearing a dog collar, one tends to—’
‘If you’d heard what I said the day I dropped a bottle of communion wine on the chancel step…’
He smiled.
‘Which church?’
‘Ledwardine.’
‘Rood screen with apples?’
‘Gosh.’
‘Merrily, I know them all. Used to drop in unsummoned occasionally and spot problems with the fabric. Make a note of the worst on the back of one of my business cards and drop it in the offertory box. They’d call back, eventually. “That bad?” Aghast, invariably. “And where the hell are we expected to find that much money?” I was regarded as the Angel of Death.’
‘Don’t think I’ve ever found a card in my box. Plenty of big cracks in the walls, mind.’
‘Who, as you know, I almost ran into.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Angel of Death.’ He carried on walking, a bit slower this time, through the remains of an orchard, misshapen apple-trees with wizened fruit and blackened cages of mistletoe in their upper branches. ‘No time for that bastard. Hence the weight loss. Prescribed pills and some dreadful marge that’s supposed to lower one’s cholesterol – couldn’t stand the stuff, so just stopped eating almost everything. Seemed to work.’
‘You’re over it now?’
‘Never been better.’
He didn’t look it. A stubborn man, Raji Khan had said. Promised to take it slowly from now on.
‘Another fifteen years should see it right.’
She looked up at him.
‘The house,’ he said. ‘Got to finish the bloody house. To a level. Before I die.’
Dennis Kellow was breathing heavily. He glanced at Merrily and she looked away. The track had stopped rising and outbuildings of wood and stone were shambling out of the undergrowth on either side, some semi-ruined. There was a metal barn with one side missing and an elder tree growing out of it, and a roofless granary supported by steel girders. The buildings were like crippled old retainers, kept on unworked.
‘How much land, Dennis?’
‘One hundred and two acres. Most of the valley. We let most of it for grazing. There are other farms not far away, just can’t see them from here. There was once a village. Down there, you can still find the remains of homes, overgrown, some with only foundations, buried in woodland.’
He looked all around, as if searching for signs in the valley’s tangle.
‘Maybe not a village the way we think of them now, but certainly more than a hamlet.’
The track had opened out into a yard, part cobbled, part tarmac, part baked mud. A dented old Defender and a Mercedes four by four were parked outside a house that didn’t look like the kind of house that would ever get finished.
‘Kellow’s folly.’
He stood staring at it, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d acquired: a long, crouching house built of rubble-stone the colours of a muddy fox. Irregular windows, some mullioned, two with oaken vertical bars, a roof of stone tiles all the shades of an autumnal paint chart.
‘Most of what you see is fifteenth and sixteenth century. Some of what you can’t see is thirteenth, possibly earlier. Much of the stone would’ve come from…’ Dennis Kellow half turned, extending an arm. ‘… that.’
She turned, too.
‘Blimey.’
The landscape had locked them in; there was only one view left, intimate and yet awesome, directed to an obvious focal point across the wooded valley. Under a sky like tallow, the remains of Cwmarrow Castle poked like a bony fist out of the trees. Weak sun gleamed like sweat on the distant sawn-off tower. Crows were circling it like specks of soot.
‘Already falling into ruins when medieval England became Tudor England,’ Dennis Kellow said. ‘Old castles became stone quarries for farms like this.’
‘How much left?’
‘Not much beyond half a tower and a receding wall. That’s it now. One of the few things English Heritage gets right is to leave these places alone. Don’t let them fall down, but never build them back up. What’s done’s done.’
‘Respect.’
‘Yes.’ He looked down at her, smiling. ‘And hope you get some back.’ The smile vanished. ‘This is what you buy. Cwmarrow. All of it. The whole place, intact. A medieval microcosm. Something magical.’
‘Yes.’
‘Can’t leave now, m’dear. It’s as if my whole life was leading up to this. Still. In spite of everything. Actually, because of everything. Can’t let it win.’
‘It’s a contest?’
She looked up at him with concern.
‘I think it’s more of a war, now,’ he said.
‘Between you and… what?’
He didn’t reply.
19
Hicksville
NEIL COOPER WAS a man in transition. Boxes everywhere in his big old flat, a few of them wooden. Bliss upturned one and sat down on it so as to appear unthreatening.
‘So how close were you to Tristram Greenaway, Neil?’
‘Close?’ Cooper seemed to flinch, which was interesting. ‘I work— worked with him. I didn’t, you know, socialize with him.’
‘Know anybody who did?’
‘Well, no, he… he didn’t talk much about his… his private life. Not to me, anyway.’
Neil Cooper’s flat was over a shop in a Victorian building in St Owen’s Street, close to the city centre.
Though not for long; he’d told Bliss he and his growing family were moving next week to a new house, a few miles away at Hampton Bishop. The wife and kids were staying with the in-laws till most of the furniture was installed. Cooper said he’d spent most of last night at the new place, only came back this morning to collect more stuff, which was when he’d picked up the messages the police had left on his machine. He’d phoned Gaol Street without delay but learned nothing until Bliss had arrived with Vaynor.
Two sash windows were halfway up, street noise blowing in. On a Saturday morning, it was like they were sharing a bus shelter.
‘See, right now, Neil,’ Bliss said, ‘we can’t actually find anybody else who was in contact with Mr Greenaway. His parents live out towards Evesham but they seem to be away on some weekend break and none of the neighbours know where. And we don’t know who his girlfriend was, although they don’t seem to be together any more.’
Cooper looked, for the first time, close to smiling.
‘Also, Neil, he didn’t seem to have any particular friends in his block of flats or on the Plascarreg.’
Not that this was surprising. Some of Greenaway’s closest neighbours on the Plas, most of their friends were their old cellmates. The door-to-doors had found a few people claiming they’d just seen him around. Two neighbours had also seen the woman who’d lived with Greenaway for a while.
‘Funny,’ Cooper said. ‘I thought it was going to be about the skull.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Why you were trying to get hold of me.’
‘Neil,’ Bliss said, ‘this is a mairder inquiry.’
Laying on the accent because, just occasionally, it intimidated people who’d only heard Scousers on TV where they were often bastards. Cooper wasn’t actually looking threatened, just as if there were some things he could tell them but wasn’t sure if he needed to.
‘OK.’ He sat down on a box opposite Bliss. ‘Let me just say I’m not, you know…’
Bliss put his head on one side.
‘Gay,’ Cooper said. ‘I’m not gay.’
Bliss flicked a glance at Vaynor as he prepared to skip a question so Cooper wouldn’t think there was something obvious he hadn’t known about.
Which he hadn’t.
‘Neil, was it widely known that Tristram Greenaway was gay?’
‘Well… Oh God, I mean that’s the point. No, it wasn’t. Tris was quite… well, he was, you know, he was very reticent about it.’
‘And why would that be, Neil? Being gay, that’s like extra points these days. Even gays in Liverpool come out now.’
Cooper’s smile was strained,
‘He was born and grew up in Hereford, but he didn’t come back after university. He’d worked in the London area for several years, and that’s where he came out.’
‘He told you this?’
‘We had mutual friends in London. I was instrumental in him getting this job. He was nervous about coming back. He thought Herefordshire was, you know, Hicksville? He thought gays simply weren’t as acceptable in places like this.’
‘Because he hadn’t been one, as it were, when he was growing up here?’
‘It was nonsense, and I told him so. Times change and most people here are pretty tolerant about most things. Whatever you are, they just let you get on with your life, don’t they?’
‘Not necessarily on the Plascarreg, Neil.’
‘You think this was—?’
‘We don’t know, that’s why we’re talking to fellers like you who spent time with him. What about the woman who was living at his flat? Why did you start to smile when I mentioned her?’
‘Oh. Well. Her name was Rosemary… something. He’d been at university with her. She’d moved to the city to take up a relief teaching job and needed somewhere to stay. When the job expired, she left.’
‘When was this?’
‘Not sure. Two or three weeks ago? You see, the thing is, he liked that arrangement. He liked to be seen around with women. If there was a pretty woman around he’d make for her at once. There was a girl here looking for me yesterday, he offered to walk her across town to Castle Green. Just to be seen with her, I imagine.’
Bliss glanced at Vaynor.
‘Let’s have her name, then, Neil. And anybody else you know who had contact with Tris in the hours before his death.’
‘It was Jane Watkins. You’ll know her mother.’
‘Merrily? That Jane Watkins?’
‘Looking for gap-year work.’
‘And the lad was flirting with young Jane so he’d look straight?’
‘Look, he… he was hoping for a permanent job with us. A strong possibility if Des retired and I got his job… well, Tris was hoping to get my job. He realized the competition for it was likely to be fierce and he… you know, if there were any councillors involved in the interviewing process, knowing what some of the older councillors can be like, he didn’t want anything to queer his— Oh Christ.’
Cooper closed his eyes.
They went back to Gaol Street on foot.
‘Well,’ Bliss said, crossing St Peter’s Square between the church and the raised flower beds, ‘that simplifies everything doesn’t it, Darth? We can now include every friggin homophobe on the Plas.’
‘Is homophobe a big enough word for someone who could do that to a man’s face?’
‘It suggests history. I mean, I realize it’s probably homophobic of us to link every gay murder either to the victim’s sex life or other folks’ attitude towards it, but…’
‘Experience.’
‘Yeh.’
Entering the Gaol Street car park, Bliss spotted Annie’s car. She’d need to decide soonish whether to put a mobile incident room into the Plas for the locals to spray fuck off pigs on it under cover of darkness. Waste of money, really. As if your regular Plas people would ever be seen strolling in to see if they could assist. Meanwhile, extra vehicles suggested they were setting up the major incident room upstairs.
‘I shouldn’t really have left the premises at this stage of the game. I just wanted to see Cooper’s reactions.’
‘Odd, I thought,’ Vaynor said, holding the door for Bliss, ‘him thinking it might be about his skull.’
‘He was in a hell of a state over it on the night.’
‘My initial thought, boss, was it was probably the first major discovery since he’d been in charge.’
‘And he’s fluffed it.’ Bliss nodded, and they went up the stairs. ‘Yeah. Could just’ve been that.’
Air of expectancy in the CID room as Bliss went in. Like it might all be over before it had started. He shook his head, making calm-down, as-you-were motions, noticing that Karen Dowell was wearing this kind of birthday-girl look.
‘Found it, boss.’
It was in the centre of her desk. Bliss looked down at its silver shell.
‘Greenaway’s lappie?’
‘Wasn’t stolen after all. He’d locked it in his car boot. Maybe just taken it to work with him and forgot to bring it out.’
‘Frisked it yet, have we, Karen?’
Like he needed to ask. Nobody had actually appointed DS Dowell as official Gaol Street techie, but nobody ever challenged it. Karen and computers, it was almost unhealthy.
‘More or less,’ Karen said.
‘And?’
‘He’s an archaeologist.’
‘We know.’
‘That’s it. That’s all there is. It’s all work. He emails other archaeologists, his favourites bar is full of archaeological websites. And he swaps Tweets with archaeologists, or similar.’
‘So you’re saying no emails with rows of kisses?’
Karen shrugged.
‘It appears to be his whole life. Archaeology, history and allied interests. His bookshelves were full of mainly non-fiction, ancient and medieval history. And architecture and a few historical-type novels. It’s like if you weren’t an archaeologist he didn’t talk to you.’
‘Pictures?’
‘Lots. Mostly open trenches and bits of bone. Archaeological porn.’
‘Let’s have a look.’
Bliss went through to his office, followed by Karen, carrying the laptop, and Vaynor. He sat down behind his desk, the sun washing in over his shoulder. Annie had discreetly fixed it for him to get this office because it had a window; his old one was bigger but relied on the kind of artificial lighting that still did his head in due to the brain-stem injury he’d never admit to still struggling with.
‘Anything been wiped, do you think, Karen?’
‘Not that I can see.’ Karen set down the laptop in front of him and came round beside his chair and opened it up. ‘If you want to see his last email, it was a couple of days ago. One he sent out to…’ Prodding the screen. ‘… whoever that is.’
[email protected]
‘I’ll find out,’ Karen said. ‘Anyway, this is his message.’
Please do not share
You may be interested to know that someone we all hoped to meet one day has turned up. You might not recognize him but you all doubtless remember who he is. If you want to know where he was found I can Draw you a Map. Let me know.
‘That’s it,’ Karen said. ‘It’s slightly different, as most of his emails are full of references to academic papers and—’
‘And he doesn’t sign it.’
‘No, he doesn’t. And he doesn’t address anybody in particular. That’s also unusual. It’s still archaeological, mind. As you can see from the attached picture.’
She scrolled up until the picture filled half the screen. Bliss drew a breath.
‘Any reply to this?’
‘No, I’d’ve told you.’
Bliss pulled the laptop round, away from the sunlight. The screen brightened and there was this buggered up human skull with its eye sockets full of soil and shit and stuff, and you could see where the cranium had come apart down the middle and been pushed back together. And its gob was open like it was chewing on a mint. You could even see the mint, the remaining teeth grinning round it.
Bliss tried not to grin back. Karen looked at him, curious.