by Phil Rickman
‘That’s interesting.’
‘I will tell you one thing, though, boss,’ Mumford said. ‘Charlie en’t a killer.’
‘That’s a firm statement, Andy.’
‘He’s a cover-upper, is what Charlie is.’
Bliss flicked the wipers again. Still no sign of life in Steve’s house. He switched off the engine.
‘And a bully,’ Mumford said. ‘Whatever he done, always he done it for the best of reasons and anyone who suggests otherwise he’s right in their face and they better watch their step, else they might not have a job for very long. If you see where I’m coming from.’
‘‘I hate that,’ Bliss said.
‘Power thing, see.’
‘Hate it, Andy.’
‘What I’m saying, unless you got something real solid, not an easy man to lean on.’
‘I realise that.’
‘On the other hand,’ Mumford said, ‘young Mebus, he thinks he’s smart but he en’t. So if you want somebody to talk to Mebus, on the quiet, like, civilian rules, I’m up for that. Don’t take this the wrong way, boss, but you was always good to me. Especially in the last days. And the business over Robbie. I appreciate that.’
‘That’s very civil of you, Andy.’
‘I expect you’d return the favour, any openings come up where you could put in a word.’
‘If there’s anybody left who listens to me.’
‘Bear it in mind, anyway, boss,’ Mumford said.
Bliss smiled into the darkness. Mumford’s subtext: anything . . . just get me away from the mixed corn.
‘I’ve gorra few problems, Andy.’
‘Aye,’ Mumford said. ‘I know.’
Bliss was finishing off the last Thai Prawn sarnie when his mobile went.
‘Not convenient to explain further,’ Eileen Cullen said. ‘But it’s as you said. All right? Have to go now.’
‘Thanks, Sister. I owe you one.’
‘You certainly do.’
So . . . the old bastard.
And it would go on, the eternal triangle of Annie Howe, Charlie Howe and Frannie Bliss, until one of the corners dropped off.
He thought about Mumford, a good detective lumbering through most of his career as a DC, kicked out with the digital camera and the inscribed tankard, facing the rest of his mobile years as a part-time PI, part-time corn salesman.
He thought of himself, young Frannie making a fresh start still in his twenties: nice country town, not many streets where you couldn’t see a hill. Nice, laid-back country people, not as sharp as Scousers, most of them, but not as bitter either. Thinking he’d have a fair chance of promotion and getting it, too, in the early years.
And then it stopped, and he was looking at a bunch of unexceptional DCIs five years younger than him, then seven years younger. Looking particularly at Annie Howe, acting superintendent. A crap detective. A frigging shite detective, with a dad who’d been a bent detective.
And a bully. All bullies were cowards. His dad was always telling him that when he was a kid. You didn’t give in to a bully.
The rain was heavier now, and he switched on the engine and the demister. In the old days, someone on the occupied part of the estate would’ve noticed a car parked without lights and come over to check it out. Not any more. Not with new knife-crime stats on the box every other night. They wouldn’t ring the police either, because they knew the police wouldn’t come, or maybe they’d drop by next day, if they were passing.
After about two minutes, Karen Dowell called and, for a while, Bliss brightened up.
‘It’s ridiculous, boss.’
‘Where are you, Karen?’
‘I’m at home. You see it on the box?’
‘I haven’t gorra box in the car.’
‘Man helping with inquiries?’
Bliss lurched in his seat.
‘They’ve pulled?’
‘Nah, it’s Wilford Hawkes.’
‘Karen.’ Bliss slumped back. ‘You’re kidding me.’
‘Couldn’t believe it either. I actually rang the school to confirm, talked to Terry. What happened, they turned over Hawkes’s place and found he’d just put a brand new chain on his twenty-year-old chainsaw. Cleaned it all up himself, like new. So now they’ve stripped his workshop, sent a vanload to forensic, and they’re asking him the same questions, over and over again, in the hope he’ll slip up, give some different answers. Which he does, of course, everybody does in the end. Poor little bugger doesn’t know what day it is.’
‘This is Howe?’
‘She’s had Brent at him now. Both of them, in fact.’
‘Ms Nasty and Dr Nasty. I suppose it’s occurred to them that Hawkes is half Ayling’s size and nearly as old?’
‘It was a single stab wound,’ Karen said. ‘Not much of a wound, not much blood. In fact, they were still a bit iffy about it till the PM showed what it did to the aorta. Ayling would probably’ve been dead within minutes.’
‘And Willy would’ve known exactly where to stick it, would he?’
‘Could’ve been luck. On the other hand, he was in the Army, way back. Paras. Commando training?’
‘But look at him now, Karen!’
‘Yeah, well, they think he may’ve had a partner. They’re going through Jane Watkins’s database, name by name. Paying visits.’
‘Witch-hunt?’
‘Yeah, funny you should say that. One situation – listen to this – Terry was telling me these witches up towards Ross, friends of Willy’s, they thought it was carol singers from the church and wouldn’t open the door? And Brent . . . he had it smashed in? Smashed in. All right, maybe there was a bit more to it, and they found some cannabis, but it’s still bloody madness, Frannie.’
Bliss thought about his own dawn raid on Gyles.
‘Just be glad you’re not part of it,’ Karen said.
‘Yeh.’
Not part of anything. Not even part of a family any more.
‘Mind you,’ Karen said, ‘don’t forget it was you who first pointed them at Dinedor.’
‘Yeh, but that—’
‘Goodnight, boss.’
Bliss sat there, shaking his head.
Well, sure, Dinedor needed checking out. But only in tandem with the possibility that somebody wanted them to think it was all about Dinedor. An investigation this size was more like snooker than frigging rugby – a lot of balls on the table and you didn’t just pick one up and run with it.
Unless, of course, you thought your old man might get potted along the way.
Bliss laughed, starting to despise himself. He could stay here all night waiting for Furneaux, and wake up at first light, wheels firmly embedded in the shite, and have to ask Gyles to give him a push, and look like a dick.
When what he was really avoiding . . .
He leaned back, took a long breath. Well, why not?
Why the fuck not?
He wrenched the car out of the mud at the fourth attempt and put on his lights. He didn’t know if this was going to be right, but knew he wouldn’t sleep now if he didn’t go for it, and the thought of dragging himself back to the empty house at Marden, back to the pile of Chrissie cards on the mat, the spread of white envelopes with a few red ones, like blood in the snow . . .
On the way to Leominster, he crawled through five pools of flash-flood in the road. He passed twenty-seven houses and bungalows with Christmas lights all over their walls and wrapped around trees and chimneys. Didn’t know why he counted them.
Once, disgracefully, he pulled in to the side of the road and wept and almost turned back.
In Leominster, there was no flooding, and no lights at all in or outside the Victorian three-storey terraced house where Charlie Howe lived.
43
Lute of the Frome
THERE WAS, INEVITABLY, an element of ceremonial. Merrily had slipped out of her wet shoes in the stone and panelled hall, and that seemed symbolic now, as Al Boswell laid the wooden case on the long oak table below a big copper lant
ern.
Al must know there was no time to waste. Although the River Frome seemed to be staying within its banks, the duck pond in front of the Hop Museum was brimming, the green and gold gypsy caravan up to its axles in water darker than beer.
‘We didn’t think you’d come,’ Sally Boswell said. ‘Nobody should be out on a night like this.’
Sally’s long white hair was down. Al was spindly and ageless, like some woodland sprite, Sally the lovely mortal he’d abducted by means of Romani magic.
‘The drukerimaskri?’ Al said. ‘Of course we knew she would come.’
He’d had the guitar ready for her. She’d expected him to take her down to his workshop, through the exhibition of hop-growing memorabilia, old pictures of the Romani who had travelled to the Frome Valley for the annual hop harvest. But Al had known there wasn’t time.
When he opened the case, the strings of the lute-shaped dark-wood guitar shivered in a draught from somewhere.
‘God, Al, it’s so . . .’
Merrily leaned over the case but didn’t touch. The air felt fresh after the stifling Cole Barn, and the night felt unreal, as if she’d become part of some mythic saga involving the lost lyre of Orpheus or something.
‘It’s too dim in here,’ Al said, ‘but if you look into the soundhole when you get it home, you will see, in the wood below it, a quite perfectly proportioned cross.’
‘You did that?’
‘No, no.’ Al laughed lightly. ‘The cross was naturally in the grain, and I placed it under the soundhole. In your honour. Would you like to bless the instrument before you take it away? Drukerimaskri?’
Romani for a woman priest.
Al bowed and straightened up, spreading his arms, revealing the golden lettering on his black sweatshirt:
Boswell Guitars. The Lute of the Frome.
‘I think,’ Sally said briskly, ‘that we can consider the instrument to be blessed already and not delay Merrily any longer. It’s a terribly cruel night. I heard on the radio that all the bed-and-breakfast places in Hereford were full because of people trapped in the city. How will they get home for Christmas? How will you get home, Merrily?’
‘I don’t need to go through Hereford.’
‘You should have waited until tomorrow.’
‘Couldn’t. I’ve too much on and, besides . . . he’s doing a concert at the Swan in Ledwardine tomorrow night. His first. He’s a bit worried about it, playing on his own doorstep and I thought . . . Well, I was going to give this to him on Christmas Day, but . . .’
‘You’ve driven across the hell that is Herefordshire on the worst night of the year.’ Al’s eyes lit up and his face split like a polished wooden puppet’s into a crooked but radiant smile. ‘This is love, I think.’
‘Yes. I—’
‘But you’re worried.’
‘This and that.’
She’d put Cole Barn on hold to concentrate on the road, getting the guitar back home.
Al studied her.
‘Tell me . . . where does Nick Drake come into this?’
‘I don’t know.’ Merrily felt a small seepage of alarm in her stomach. ‘I mean, apart from him being Lol’s original inspiration. But you knew that, didn’t you?’
‘Of course he knew that,’ Sally said. ‘Al’s anything but psychic.’
‘Alas, she’s right. Disregard my whimsy.’ Al closed the guitar case, held it out to her like a sheaf of flowers. ‘Take her home.’
‘Al, you’ll have to hold on to her while I get my chequebook out.’
‘Pay me after Christmas,’ Al said. ‘As the sofa retailers say.’
‘Absolutely not. Just tell me how much. It’s not a problem. I’ve some money put by—’
‘I haven’t yet decided on a suitable price,’ Al said.
‘Please. Let’s not quarrel about this. I want to pay the proper price and Lol would want that, too. Especially Lol, because of . . . what happened to the other one.’
‘Ah, yes. The man who had it smashed, as a warning. Leave a hundred pounds in cash on the table. Do you have a hundred pounds? If not, fifty will do. Don’t cross me, drukerimaskri, or the curse will come down, and you know how good we are at this.’
‘I do have a hundred pounds, but . . . it’s just a deposit, Al.’
‘There we are, then.’ Al thrust the guitar case at her and then sprang back, laughing, all limbs, like a grasshopper. ‘Tell me . . . does Laurence feel guilt, because the young man died unfulfilled, unrecognised, and now Laurence is . . . almost halfway famous?’
‘Nick Drake?’ Merrily said. ‘You’re talking about Nick Drake again?’
She wasn’t about to say that Lol had seen the destruction of the Boswell, the finest handmade acoustic guitar in the country, as a sign of his unworthiness. A confirmation that he’d never be as good as Nick Drake.
‘Leave it, Al,’ Sally said, and Merrily was grateful.
Before she left the Hop Museum, she put down all the notes in her wallet without counting them.
‘A deposit, Al.’
Before she drove away into the cold, liquid night, she sat in the back seat with the guitar case across her knees and, without thinking too hard about whether this was right or reasonable, she asked God to bless the Boswell.
In Lol’s house, Jane sat with Eirion next to the wood stove in the mouth of the inglenook, sipping hot chocolate, listening to Lol’s new music.
Can melting sugar sweeten wine?
Can light communicated keep its name?
Can jewels solid be, though they do shine?
From fire rise a flame?
Her back almost touching the stove, Jane felt this odd, warm shimmer as Lol’s voice rose to meet a high guitar note. Lol sat on the edge of the sofa, looking apprehensive, the guitar on its stand under the window.
The room was lit by a fat candle on the low table, the music crisp and real, from the stereo. Lol had made demos on mini-disc of most of the new songs. He could do concerts now, even fairly intimate folk-club-type gigs, but he was still too shy to play live in front of friends. Like he felt that people who knew him would see through the songs to all the flaws in his character, his weaknesses.
Crazy?
Not when you knew the Lol Robinson story. Barely twenty and convicted of sexually assaulting a fourteen-year-old girl while on tour with Hazey Jane. An offence actually committed, while Lol was asleep, by the band’s bass-player, who’d walked away, leaving Lol on probation, unjustly disgraced, disowned by his creepy Pentecostalist parents, swallowed by the psychiatric system. His career wrecked, his spirit smashed.
It was Jane’s mum who’d finally brought him out of the past. But before he even knew Mum, Lucy Devenish had begun to reassemble him. Lucy and the poems of Thomas Traherne, who’d seen the essence of paradise in this border landscape. Found happiness. Felicity.
Before dying at thirty-seven.
Which meant that Lol was older than Traherne now. Oh God, nothing was ever perfect, nothing was easy.
Thus honey flows from rocks of stone
Thus oil from wood, thus cider, milk and wine
From trees and flesh . . . thus corn from earth . . .
He’d turned three of Traherne’s 17th-century poems into songs, and it couldn’t have been easy at all; they all had strange, archaic rhythms.
‘We can illustrate this no problem,’ Eirion said. ‘I’ve got dozens of pictures from last summer that we shot along the ley. All very lush and pastoral. It’s the Elgar stuff I’m not sure about. Maybe I could download some pictures from the Net. Could I hear that again, Lol?’
Lol located it on the disc. The song was just called ‘Elgar’, dealing with the composer’s thoughts as he lay dying, but it wasn’t morbid; it was, in the end, uplifting.
When it was over, Lol said, ‘People misunderstood Elgar for years, thought he was too grand. Just an ordinary guy, lower middle-class. Insecure . . .’
‘Right.’
Jane was getting a real feel for th
is now, how it all tied in. Elgar had been a friend of Alfred Watkins and had actually had his picture taken with Watkins in what was almost certainly Coleman’s Meadow. Lol had written a new song about Alfred Watkins, using lines from the seminal Old Straight Track set to this kind of chugging, pulsing rhythm, like you were following a ley on foot, the music speeding up as you reached what Jane was certain had to be Cole Hill at sunrise, midsummer.
Whether some of the crass bastards who drank and dined at the Black Swan would get any of this was anybody’s guess and, for a moment, Jane could hear it all being drowned out by whoops and laughter and inane chat.
And then realised she was actually hearing voices. Raised. Outside the window. Raised voices, excitement. Or panic.
Lol stood up, turned the music down and went over to the window, wiping off condensation with his sleeve.
‘Something seems to have happened.’
Merrily had taken what seemed to be the safe route, through Bromyard, but who could tell? The entrances to several side roads were blocked by portable signs, some of them semi-submerged.
FLOOD
ROAD CLOSED
She flicked the wipers to double speed, driving like a learner first time out, hands on the wheel at ten to two, unblinking, the radio on low. Halfway to Leominster, the Radio Hereford and Worcester all-night flood special said,
‘. . . And if you’ve just tuned in and you’re heading into Hereford from the south on the Abergavenny or Ross roads, police advise turning back because the Belmont roundabout has now been closed. Belmont roundabout is closed.’
Not good. Halfway to becoming the Isle of Hereford.
The wipers strained and the surface water tugged at the wheels, but she made it around Tenbury Wells, its town-centre streets turned into canals, according to the radio.
‘They knew this was coming, look,’ a caller to the station said, ‘and they’ve never spent a penny on flood prevention. When was this river last cleaned out? Tell me that.’
Merrily switched off the radio. Getting repetitive, the litany of recrimination. She followed a silver container lorry at 25 m.p.h. all the way to Leominster. The town centre was clear, its lights dulled, its swilled streets empty. She drove up the hill towards the roundabout beyond Morrisons supermarket. There was little traffic. She thought she saw Frannie Bliss’s yellow Honda Civic, same blue sticker in the rear window, parked at the side of the road, but it couldn’t have been.