by Phil Rickman
‘A read,’ Bliss said disgusted, switching off the set. ‘A friggin’ read. Murder in Birmingham, two minutes plus. Murder in Hereford, fifteen friggin’ seconds over a clip of the Plas.’
‘When Charlie’s Police and Crime Commissioner,’ Annie said quietly, ‘the Hereford profile will rise accordingly. Sorry. Remind me, how does that phone call from Greenaway senior change things?’
‘Well, he’s mad at Cooper. Who he now sees as having led him along, maybe deterring him from applying for other jobs he might even have got. And then shafting him.’
‘Cooper didn’t shaft him.’
‘All right then, he’s blaming the messenger. Either way, we now know Greenaway was seriously pissed off, and that gives us a reason for him lifting Cooper’s skull. If only out of pique. He gets the elbow and Cooper gets his name in the annals for discovering the first deviant burial in the county.’
‘Deviant burial,’ Annie said. ‘You really like that phrase, don’t you?’
‘Actually, I do. It sounds like an offence against common decency. “You stand accused of deviant burial”.’
‘It’s not a terrific claim to fame, though, is it? Finding an ancient corpse with its head between its legs.’
‘I don’t know. And how rational was Greenaway at the time? Was he actually pissed when Cooper rang him up and asked him to come and help out on Castle Green?’
Annie stood up and went to switch off the standard lamp he’d bought in a junk shop to replace the one Kirsty had come back for within a week of leaving him. Now the room was reduced to soft orange from the small table lamp Annie had brought over from Malvern. She came back to the sofa, the light softening her skin.
‘So – OK – what’s your premise?’
‘OK, here’s the case for Cooper as the killer. He puts two and two together as regards the skull. He’s furious. Goes round to Greenaway’s place, says “gimme…” And one thing leads to another. Possible. Both of them are angry now, and no easy way it’s going to be resolved. Most murders are not premeditated. Lots of them are over something that appears completely trivial.’
‘But when you see the pictures of Greenaway’s face… That’s extreme rage, Francis.’
‘Yeh. That doesn’t fit Cooper at all. How about the weapon? Can we afford to dip into the Wye?’
‘Where? It’s a very long river. OK if he just walked across the road and tossed it in, but…’
‘And a lorra silt down there.’
‘What about the skull itself? I presume we’ve been looking for that?’
‘Could be in the river too, for all we know.’
Annie was nodding at the phone.
‘You realize you’ve disappointed her again.’
‘Karen?’
‘She still fancies you, doesn’t she?’
‘Gerroff.’
‘Ringing at night, thinking you might like to go round to her place and discuss the case. Or invite her here.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Bliss shook his head. ‘Despite being younger, I’ve always thought Karen’s feelings for me were verging on the maternal.’
‘Francis, you don’t understand the first thing about women.’
‘And don’t women love to say that.’
Bliss looked at Annie and she looked back at him. She wasn’t wearing the stripy sweater and it wasn’t Christmas.
Never mind. He pushed her gently down on the sofa, his right hand sliding under her skirt. Annie shuddered.
Police work. Always underrated as an aphrodisiac.
27
Cunning
JANE HAD LIT a fire, was sitting on the edge of the inglenook in the parlour, listening to music through headphones. Taking them off as Merrily came in.
‘Don’t let me—’
‘No, no, I like interrupting her.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Laura Marling. Bit smug. Like she knows how good she is. I mean, knowing it is one thing, but showing you know it… Lol doesn’t. Ever.’
‘Maybe that’s where he’s been going wrong all these years.’ Merrily flopped into the sofa, hadn’t realized how bone-tired she was. ‘I thought… that you’d be seeing Eirion.’
Shouldn’t have said that, though she still wasn’t sure why. Jane’s glance was like broken glass.
‘You been talking to Lol?’
‘Not since last night. Why?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
Oh, hell…
‘I may have asked you this before, Jane but did something go wrong in Pembrokeshire? Something you haven’t told me about.’
‘Look.’ Jane leaned over and ejected Laura Marling. ‘I’m just a bit uncertain about some things. Like digging up the past only to bury it again. What’s the point?’
‘Unless it’s bodies, flower. Bodies should be reburied.’
This wasn’t the problem. This was a familiar Jane diversion – not turning off, just slipping into a parallel lane and you ended up following.
‘I can probably think of a full counter-argument,’ Merrily said, ‘but right now I’m too tired.’
‘It just gives experts another opening to dream up another unprovable theory about the way people lived or worshipped or whatever. Which always gets discredited within a couple of years by somebody else looking for a book or an academic paper or a bloody grant. We’re knee-deep in discarded theories.’
‘All adds to the sum of human knowledge. From which we can draw… occasional threads of sense.’
Merrily leaned back into a corner of the sofa, eyes closing. Do not be tempted to tell Jane about being offered the post of Rural Dean. Jane would remember how many times her mother had rubbished the race for promotion within the Church. If this is about money, Jane would say, then I’ll just forget about university. No problem. So don’t mention it, just quietly turn it down.
And yet… if she turned it down it was unlikely she’d be offered anything again, just awarded more parishes with churches frequented only by sporadic tourists. And would still lose deliverance. If Innes had already decided to dump her this was hardly going to change his mind.
‘Neil Cooper’s not rung,’ Jane said. ‘His assistant was murdered, did you know about that?’
Merrily opened her eyes.
‘This is the guy who was found at his home, down near the Plascarreg? He worked with Neil Cooper?’
‘You knew about that?’
‘Heard it on the car radio. They didn’t say who he was or what he did.’
‘I met him. The day he was killed.’
‘You did?’
Merrily sat up. Jane told her about the guy who’d insisted on escorting her to Cooper. And about Bliss and Lol in the Black Swan.
‘Bliss came here in the middle of a murder inquiry just to talk to you? Why don’t I like the sound of that?’
‘Lol thinks he came out because he wanted to talk to you. He thought you’d be here. I was just the excuse.’
‘Then why didn’t he just ring?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
Merrily thinking back to when she was Jane’s age. When she thought she wanted to be a lawyer, to get justice for people. Instead, she’d got pregnant and wound up marrying a man whose idea of the law didn’t have a lot to do with justice. Would she ever have ended up in the Church if she hadn’t felt irredeemably soiled by Sean and his clients? The truth was: probably not. And the awful mixed emotions when Sean’s car had piled into a motorway bridge, Sean and girlfriend dead. She’d felt worse about the girlfriend.
‘What are you going to do if Neil Cooper doesn’t find you anything?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I mean, not that you have to do anything. You haven’t had a holiday, and if Eirion—’
She stopped. Jane was avoiding her eyes.
‘We haven’t split up, OK? We both just have a lot to think about. He’s also working. Weekends, he goes into the South Wales Echo. Probably something his dad wangled.’
‘I see.’
What she said next came out without much forethought.
‘Flower, look, how would you— I don’t want this to sound patronizing or anything because it isn’t, but how would you feel about helping me?’
Jane switched off the stereo.
‘Do a couple of funerals? I could probably handle that.’
‘Even more exciting… bit of research? In relation to Cwmarrow Castle. Cwmarrow Court.’
It was the only time since she’d come back home that Jane had seemed animated. Looking across the valley at a medieval castle she hadn’t known existed. What is… that?
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Who lived there over the years? What happened to the village that used to be there? Anything you can find out, really. Anything that looks, you know, anomalous. You know the kind of thing, by now.’
Jane was looking mildly diverted, which meant she was very interested.
‘Why? Can you tell me? In confidence?’
‘It’s a possibly aggressive poltergeist situation. And there are other problems. The guy there is recovering from a stroke, his wife’s clearly very worried about him having another. He loves the house, she’s afraid it could kill him, however irrational that might seem. And I know from experience that it’s not irrational at all when you’re in the middle of it.’
‘These are the Muslims?’
‘No, these are the in-laws. I haven’t met the Muslims yet.’
‘You still haven’t told the Bishop?’
‘I suspect if I did, he’d tell me not to get involved and have someone contact the imam to discuss the politics of the situation. And nothing would get done, and—’
‘So you’re carrying on with this… doing a foreigner. Extra mural. Clandestine.’
‘If you like.’
‘Good,’ Jane said. ‘Excellent.’
‘I’m pretty sure there are things I don’t know, because you never get told everything – that is, there are things they’re probably not telling me – personal things. And other things they don’t know, which we might be able to uncover.’
Jane leaned back.
‘I’m guessing this won’t involve remuneration.’
‘Your guess is inspired, flower.’
‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘If I’m not getting paid, it won’t exactly be patronizing, will it? All right, why not? Makes me feel kind of employed. Anything else?’
‘There’s a man called Selwyn Kindley-Pryce.’
‘The folklorist?’
‘You’ve heard of him? I hadn’t.’
‘You read the wrong books, vicar. He was more of a historian, really. I think he was a history professor somewhere, but he also collected folklore and he wrote books. One was just called The Cunning.’
Merrily shook her head. Never heard of it.
‘I haven’t got a copy,’ Jane said. ‘Too expensive, even if I’d wanted one. It’s like huge and scholarly. By which I mean tedious. They have one in Hereford Library and only the title looked readable. You’re saying he had some connection with Cwmarrow?’
‘He lived there.’
‘Wow. I didn’t know that. I didn’t even know he was from this area. Wouldn’t’ve shoved it back on the shelf so fast. It’s a study of folk magic and healing in Britain. Which makes it sound more interesting than it looks. I mean, academically, it was probably the definitive work on the subject, but you wouldn’t want to plough through it and get bogged down in all the footnotes and references and appendices and glossaries and stuff.’
‘So the title, The Cunning, that’s cunning folk?’
‘Community wizards, hedge witches. Local healers and clairvoyants. I didn’t realize there were so many. Up to last century, even. Hundreds of them. The book just looked like a mass of contemporary accounts. Academic, very dull.’
‘Except I don’t think he was. He was described to me as a storyteller. Loved to tell stories. Toured schools, that kind of thing. And, in later years, wrote children’s books with a partner, girlfriend… Caroline…? Can’t remember, but the books were written under the name Foxy… something.’
Jane sat up in the sofa.
‘Rowlestone?’
‘You’ve come across them? See, I didn’t think you had.’
‘Because you always monitored what I was reading, which was quite annoying.’
‘I thought of it as taking an interest.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Jane said. ‘Foxy Rowlestone. No I never read any. Not even as an impressionable child. Some of the other kids at school did. Before we came down here. It was a bit of a cult thing. Not for very long, because I think it finished after a couple of books. Imagine if Harry Potter had packed in after two books. Might’ve been forgotten now. But, yeah, very cool for a while.’
‘But you were above all that?’
Jane smiled, shaking her head.
‘I was about twelve. They’d probably been around a while by then. You know why I didn’t go near them? Because I’d found those old pictures of you in your black-lipstick years.’
‘It was actually my black-lipstick six months. I was about fifteen.’
‘Don’t try and squirm out of it, you were a horrible little post-punk with a vampire fetish.’
‘Fetish is entirely the wrong word.’
‘Anyway, that’s why I avoided the Foxy Rowlestone books. There was a girl on the front of one actually looked a bit like you, in a black dress and a cloak. They were like Anne Rice for pubescent kids. Sexy vampires.’
‘And set in this area?’
‘Not that I recall from the odd copy I flipped through, though we were still up north so I wouldn’t’ve noticed. Actually, I think they were set in one of those mythical places. I know the series ended suddenly, and some of my mates – Michelle, you remember Michelle? – she was quite hacked off to find there weren’t any more. I mean, I’d guess they sold pretty well. But then there were the Twilight books and all that stuff to help them get over it. We never run out of vampires, do we?’
‘We?’
‘Well, not me, as you know. Too sophisticated. Vampires are just literary creations from the nineteenth century. I could see that, even then. Interesting, though, all this bollocks coming out of the Golden Valley.’
Merrily told her what she knew about Cwmarrow Court, the village that disappeared, the clink of the blacksmith’s hammer in the morning.
‘I like that,’ Jane said. ‘You get these tales of villages in Wales that vanished under the sea and you still hear the church bells ringing when there’s a storm. Actually, lost villages in Herefordshire, that’s not so unusual either. Just like humps in the ground where there used to be buildings. When are you going again?’
‘Tomorrow afternoon.’
‘I come along?’
‘Well, I’m not sure they’d—’
‘No, I mean drop me off before you get to the house, and I’ll wander round the valley, maybe check out the castle. I’d like that. They don’t have to know I’m even there.’
‘I’ll think about it. Oh, and there’s something else you could look into if you get a chance.’
‘You haven’t eaten, have you?’ Jane said. ‘Should I make something? Or if you want to go and spend the night with Lol – I mean all night – that’s no problem.’
‘No, I—’
‘Don’t go all embarrassed on me, Mum. It was me who wanted it to happen, long before either of you…’
‘I know. I’m sorry. Anyway, it’s Sunday tomorrow. Early shift.’
Perhaps this was stupid but it felt wrong leaving Lol’s bed before first light, creeping back to the vicarage and then off to church for Holy Communion. At the same time, she felt guilty about neglecting Lol, back home for the winter, only to become the r
ecipient of her angst. Putting on her glitter for him, for dinner, and they’d wound up sharing a sandwich. Last night she’d probably looked old. Too old for him, now he’d beaten his past and could face an audience. Oh God.
‘Tell you what, flower, if we eat healthy all next week as penance, why don’t you go to the chippy?’
‘What was the other thing? The thing you wanted me to check out.’
‘Strokes.’
‘Strokes? You mean like…?’
‘High blood pressure. Paralysis. Something Casey Kellow said. I can explain later.’
‘They do beanburgers now,’ Jane said. ‘At the chippy.’
Sunday tomorrow, and she didn’t have a sermon. Some parish priests, it was an organized chore; they kept sermon files on their computers, would recycle them, making subtle alterations, preserving the central theme inside a different framework. Others beat their heads on the laptop: what can I talk about that I haven’t mentioned yet this year? Going through the newspapers like a desperate columnist, searching for something to be reassuring about.
They’d eaten the beanburgers and chips in front of the fire and Jane had gone up to her apartment in the attic to trawl the Net and her library of weird, second-hand books. Merrily had gone into the scullery where it was too cold to fall asleep, to put together a sermon and wait for Huw. Don’t talk to anybugger till I come back to you tonight.
She was remembering what Huw had said about Innes and his precocious skills as a preacher. She hated preaching. The Holy Spirit channelled through the minister. How dangerous was it for a priest to assume that what was coming out was God-given wisdom?
The words Cunning People were on the screen. From the days when cunning was more about native skills than slyness. The parish priests would have known about the cunning people. Perhaps some of them had been the parish priests. On either side of Offa’s Dyke, Christianity and paganism had lain side by side for centuries. Which, she saw now, was no bad thing. Compared with places like East Anglia, there seemed to have been remarkably few witch trials along the Welsh border.
There probably was a reasonable sermon here, about the tradition, in this area, of tolerance, a virtue of increasing importance in an age of polarized fanaticism.