by Phil Rickman
Amber turned to Jane. ‘I think she means that’s something for your mother.’
‘Oh.’
It was Ben Foley who sprang from the bottom step. ‘Amber, I’m sorry if I’m interrupting anything, but we’ll need another room.’
The man with Ben bestowed on Jane a gracious smile.
‘Jesus, I wouldnae like to do that journey again. Thank you, hen, you’ve got a hell of a nose for a developing situation.’
Nothing was ever simple, nothing ever painless.
Danny had been aware of diamond-bright blue-white vehicle lights behind them on the bypass, sticking with them after they turned off at Walton, using their tracks. But with snow fuzzed all over his wing mirror he couldn’t be sure what it was, and by the time they pulled up at his place the lights had vanished.
It was when Jeremy got down to open the farm gate for him that the little black Daihatsu appeared, coming the other way, down from Kinnerton. Danny had the idea it had been waiting in the lay-by, about a hundred yards back, to see who was in the tractor. Now it stopped, hugging the hedge, wedges of snow collapsing onto its roof as someone got out, a woman in a blue waterproof. Then Jeremy was springing back from the gates, and he was locked together with the woman in the tractor’s headlight beams.
And Danny was down from the cab, real fast, and in through the farm gate.
Greta had the door open before he reached it, standing there in a wash of yellow, and just for a moment it was like the first time he’d ever seen her, in a long floaty frock with little golden stars, like a dusty sunbeam.
‘You all right?’ Danny almost sobbing in relief.
Gret said, ‘I couldn’t do nothing, Danny. Had to let them in. Wasn’t nothing I could—’
‘What?’ And then Danny heard another engine up on the road and turned and saw the blue-white lights hard behind the tractor at the gate, heard the jolt of vehicle doors opening.
‘When they told me,’ Greta said, ‘about Sebbie Dacre...’
And then behind her, inside the house, a girl’s voice was screaming out, in real distress, ‘No! Mum, go away! Don’t come in!’ And there were sounds of pulling and scuffling, and this long, rending wail of despair.
Greta said, ‘You better—’
A copper came past her then, out of the front door, and Danny recognized his grey moustache: Cliff Morgan, sergeant.
‘Don’t get involved, Danny, eh?’ Cliff said.
But Danny ran back with the coppers to the open gate, where meshing headlights had turned the snow magnolia, and Jeremy and Natalie Craven were boxed in between the tractor and Jeremy’s old black Daihatsu, in the centre of all these beams of hard light, snow coming down on them, cops gathering in a wider circle, blocking the lane.
But they were separated from it. World of their own. Jeremy with his scarf wound around his neck, so she wouldn’t see what he’d done to hisself, holding her hand real tight. ‘Where you been?’ he kept saying. ‘Where you been?’
Natalie Craven pulled his head into the crease of her shoulder.
‘It’s all over,’ Natalie said, long hands in his fluffy hair. ‘All done now.’
42
Alleluia
HE DIDN’T EXPECT them to find her. That was clear. Dexter wasn’t subtle, and he didn’t expect them to find Alice.
They went up to the top of Old Barn Lane, back into Church Street and down to the Ox with its frosted front windows, a dim yellow glow visible from somewhere back in the pub.
‘They used to drink yere, when Jim was alive,’ Dexter said, as if they might see Alice peering in, thinking it was still 1979.
Dexter was going through the motions.
Lol wiped snow from his glasses with a forefinger. ‘How did she find out about your cousin?’
‘Eh?’
‘You said you thought it was the shock that might’ve made her wander off.’
‘I said that?’ Dexter sniffed and slumped off round the corner, where an alley led to public lavatories. Lol followed him. A tin-hatted lamp on a wrought-iron bracket turned snowflakes into falling sparks.
‘Check out the Women’s, you reckon?’ Dexter said.
‘It’s all locked up.’ Lol could see an iron gate, a chunky padlock.
‘Pity.’ Dexter finished off his lager, tossed the can to the end of the alley. He came over, leaned down into Lol’s face, his arms folded. ‘You really poking that little vicar?’
‘Not right now,’ Lol said.
‘Her go like Alleluia! when her comes?’ Dexter burst out laughing. ‘Just thought o’ that.’
‘Must remember to tell her,’ Lol said.
‘Alleluia when her comes.’ Dexter laughed up at the sky.
‘What do you reckon happened to him?’ Lol followed Dexter round to the front of the pub, where they stood under its open porch. ‘Just seems odd, a bloke falling in the road.’
‘Pissed, most likely,’ Dexter said.
‘He hadn’t given it up, then?’
‘Uh?’
‘Turning Christian?’
‘Christian.’ Dexter coughed and spat into the snow. ‘He never. He just said what he wanted ’em to think – Alice, and fuckin’ daft Dionne. I’ll tell you, he was a weak bastard, always gonner go wrong. Too weak to hold a job down. Not like me, Alice knew that. I was all she got, look. Me as looked out for her. Sisters got their own lives and their families up in Hereford. Laughing their tits off at Alice, all this ole church stuff. I was all she got, daft ole bitch. Couldn’t have no kids, look.’
‘How long you been helping at the chip shop?’
‘Helping? Cheeky cunt. When I’m in there, I’m running that place, look, reorganizin’. All these idle assistants, all this chitchat, we don’t need that. Get ’em served and on to the next one, don’t give ’em too many chips neither. Where them customers gonner go, they don’t like it? En’t like there’s competition. I says to ’em, these women, you do what I say, don’t gimme no stress, look, and we’ll get on. Where’s your beer?’
‘Must’ve left it on the table.’
‘No fuckin’ use there, is it, boy? Where you wanner go now?’
‘Ring the police?’
‘Waste o’ time. Cops is shit round yere. They en’t gonner look for an ole woman in this. What we’ll do, we’ll go round the ole bowling green and back up the square, see how it looks then. What’s your name, I ask you that?’
‘Lol.’
‘Kind o’ name’s that?’
‘A short one.’
‘Got a job, Lol?’
‘Bit of singing. Write songs.’
‘That a proper job?’
‘It is, actually.’
‘All right, what we’ll do, we’ll go round the bowling green, but we’ll come out by the Swan. That’s what we’ll do.’
Somebody who expected never to be contradicted or refused, due to being asthmatic and not looking for stress.
Lol remembered how, when he was working with Dick Lydon, the Hereford psychotherapist, Dick had this disabled client with the same attitude. You had to humour them to begin with, Dick used to say, and then, after a while, make it obvious that you were humouring them so they’d see a reflection of themselves.
That could take all night with Dexter. It could take all night, and it still wouldn’t work. Whatever Dexter had done tonight, he was proud of himself. He kicked a lump of snow, hands punching out the pockets of his leather jacket, killing time looking for someone he knew they wouldn’t find.
‘What you waitin’ for?’
‘I’m just thinking,’ Lol said. ‘Where is Alice likely to have gone?’
‘Coulder gone back home by now, for all I knows.’
‘We’d have seen her. Unless she... We haven’t checked out the orchards at the back of the bungalow, have we? There’s a path through the orchards. Where people walk their dogs?’
‘Alice didn’t have no dog, never went for no walks.’
Past tense. Always past tense.
�
��No,’ Lol said, ‘but—’
‘I said her never went for no fuckin’ walks.’
Lol tightened up inside. Dexter didn’t want him checking out that footpath.
‘It’s, er... also a short cut to the church, isn’t it? And she was a church cleaner. The head cleaner. Be the quickest way for her to go.’
‘Not at bloody night.’
‘As head cleaner, she’d probably have keys. If she was very cut up about what happened, she might’ve got it into her head to go and... offer up a prayer?’
‘At night?’
‘Like you said, they do strange things, old people, don’t they?’
The squeak of fists clenching in leather gloves.
Lol turned into the tracks they’d made, back up towards the square. ‘Tell you what, if you go and check round the old bowling green, like you said, and I’ll have a walk up to the church... Then I’ll follow the footpath back the other way. You won’t need the torch, will you?’
He wiped the new snow off his glasses and walked off.
After a few seconds, he was aware of Dexter following him. Not altogether a pleasant sensation.
‘Mrs Watkins.’ Merrily had been looking for Jane and he’d come down the main stairs, a man with a laptop and black-framed glasses. ‘Matthew Hawksley. I suspect we may have exchanged e-mails.’
‘Yes. I believe we did. Sorry about that. I just wanted to know what my daughter was getting into.’
‘She isn’t getting into anything. We try not to involve anybody under the age of twenty-one.’
‘Well, that’s... good.’
‘Anyway, we’re glad to have you with us,’ Matthew said.
‘Now that sounds ominous.’
‘This place is ominous,’ Matthew said. ‘What’s been happening tonight only underlines it.’
‘A murder can make a children’s playground seem ominous.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘do they know it’s murder?’
‘It’s a lot of manpower for a suicide, Matthew.’
‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘Look, I know how the clergy, in general, feel about spiritism, so I won’t bend your ear on that, but – have you got a couple of minutes?’
‘Maybe hours. I don’t think I’m going to get home tonight.’
‘You’re probably right. Poor you. Look, I’d hate to say this in front of Ben Foley, but my feeling is that this place – this house, this hotel – should never have been built.’
‘No, best not to say that in front of Ben.’
‘Not built here, is what I mean. Not as if it was erected on the site of a former dwelling; there never was a house here.’
‘On Stanner Rocks?’
‘I’d probably argue that this site has a degree of psychic instability.’
‘Jane would say pagan magic, and she’d put it down to the Border. Would that be in line with your thinking?’
Matthew grimaced. ‘What you had was an obscenely rich family moving to a generally poor area. Perhaps they were warned, perhaps not. They were, after all, bringing wealth and employment.’
‘And modern science to an area riddled with primitive superstition?’
‘Spiritism.’ Matthew smiled ruefully. ‘I wish we had a better word for it. I’d be the first to agree that very few of the claims made by people like Conan Doyle have been substantiated. In fact we’re no further forward now than we were then – except that we’re less susceptible to frauds.’
‘Wouldn’t say that necessarily.’
‘All right’ – he put up his hands – ‘let’s not go down that road. Let’s get back to geophysics. I mean, look around... Even on a simple structural level, it doesn’t feel right – damp coming through everywhere, woodwork rotting. I suspect the heating will never be adequate. Standing here, now, it’s almost as if we’re standing on the bare rock. Am I telling you things you already know?’
‘You mean people didn’t live here until we had an urban, industrialized society that believed man was destined to have full dominion over the natural world – i.e. the Victorians?’
‘Bottom line is, Conan Doyle notwithstanding, Foley’s going to go bankrupt here in no time at all, and he knows it. When I first heard that somebody had taken a dive off Stanner Rocks, I half thought it was going to be him. Hello—’
Merrily turned to follow his gaze. DS Mumford had come in from the car park and was standing just inside the entrance, bulky as a lagged cistern in one of those long, dark overcoats on which snow appeared to evaporate. Bliss appeared in the doorway of his incident room. Mumford nodded.
Matthew said, ‘I don’t know much about your side of things, but Beth Pollen tells me there’s something you can do called an Exorcism of Place. Cleanses a place of bad vibes, the residue of unfortunate acts. Makes it a more amenable place to live and work.’
‘It’s not feng shui, Matthew.’
‘I didn’t—’
‘Has anyone asked you to mention this?’
‘I’m... just sounding you out, Reverend. But I think my colleagues – Beth, anyway – are getting a little nervous. The TV producer’s arrived and he and Foley are intent on filming something tonight, as originally planned.’
‘With all this?’
‘With the police action as background. Sexy telly.’
Two uniformed police were opening up both swing doors to the porch and the tall detective who’d connected Merrily with Annie Howe moved to a vantage point near the unlit Christmas tree.
‘Are they bringing something in?’ Matthew asked.
‘Someone, I’d guess.’
She heard doors opening behind her, sensed more people standing there. The electric current passing through the lobby could have relit the tree and doubled the candlepower of the chandelier. Everyone tensed for that first glimpse of Brigid Parsons. Even, presumably, the people who already knew her as Natalie Craven.
‘Given what’s happening, Beth now feels apprehensive about what we’d originally planned,’ Matthew said. ‘I think she’d be happier if there was a spiritual dimension to it.’
‘Making it even sexier telly, right?’
Headlamps speared through the porch and then veered away – a vehicle stopping directly outside the doors. The two policemen moved to either side of the entrance. Mumford and a stocky policewoman in a dark blue jersey waited by the reception desk.
Presently, five people came in through the porch: two uniforms, two detectives, one woman.
‘We appreciate you can’t just exorcise a place willy-nilly. You’d need a focus,’ Matthew said.
For just a moment, from about ten feet away, the gaze of the killer, Brigid Parsons, met Merrily’s. The eyes were brown and candid. What had she expected – cold, bleak, washed clean of humanity? Brigid was wearing a fleece-lined light-blue waterproof jacket hanging open over a dark shirt and jeans. Her head was held high, the dense dark brown hair falling back. As if she was finally ready to shed the years of dyes and deception.
Matthew said, ‘We were thinking that the late Hattie Chancery might fit the agenda.’
43
Tough Ole Bat
MERRILY FOUND GOMER in his truck, parked on the edge of the forecourt where the snow was churned up like cold custard. She’d climbed in next to him just as he finished talking to Danny on his old car-phone.
‘How’s Jeremy taking it?’
Gomer got out his ciggy tin, squinted at it, then put it back in a pocket of his scarred old bomber jacket.
‘When things is bad, Jeremy just closes down, like he’s been unplugged.’
‘Where are they now, Gomer?’
‘Back at The Nant.’
Through the windscreen, Merrily watched a policeman come out of the porch and look up at the flaking sky. The snow had become sporadic again, as if the weather was playing with them. One of the witch’s-hat towers was wreathed in a pinkish vapour.
‘And Clancy?’
‘Still at Greta’s, with a woman cop. Cliff Morgan, he reckoned they’d likely br
ing her yere tomorrow, give ’em some time together, ’fore her mam’s taken to Hereford. Don’t look like that’s gonner happen till it gets light and they clears the roads. Any chance her’ll walk away from this, vicar? Light sentence? If her had good reason? Not a nice feller, Sebbie.’
Merrily shivered inside Jane’s worn duffel coat, tightened her scarf. Clearly Gomer didn’t yet know that this was Brigid Parsons and the chances of her getting out of prison ever this time were remote.
‘Cops know her’s Hattie’s granddaughter, vicar?’
‘I think they’d regard that as a closed case.’
The curtains in the hotel lounge had been drawn now, for the interrogation of the prime suspect. A shadow rose against them: Bliss throwing up his arms in probable frustration, but it looked like he was dancing.
‘Nothin’ happens round yere’s ever closed. You knows that,’ Gomer said.
The church’s main door was locked, and there was nothing in the stone porch apart from the side benches, the parish notice-board and a rack of leaflets.
‘Satisfied?’ Dexter said.
Lol couldn’t see Dexter, but the density of him made the stone porch feel claustrophobic. He bounced the torch beam around one last time.
‘You’re a funny bugger, Lol. What’s she to you?’
‘Alice?’
‘Less it gets you brownie points with the vicar. Gets you into her, whatsit, cassock.’
‘That must be it, then,’ Lol said tightly.
He wanted to smash the torch into Dexter’s face. Instead, he switched it off so that Dexter couldn’t see him thinking. When Dexter had appeared at the scullery window, he’d come across the lawn from the orchard, and then gone back the same way, which would have brought him into the churchyard. Dexter had been this way before.
Lol looked out, down the churchyard path and found that he couldn’t see the lychgate. Normally it would be outlined in gold, from the lantern on the perimeter wall.
The lantern had gone out. Lol bent and peered through where the gate would be. Usually, you would see the lamps on the square and the partly floodlit profile of the Black Swan.