by Phil Rickman
‘And when she says we…’ Martin waved the card ‘… I presume she means the two of them.’
‘She’s either… well, there are several possibilities. She’s deluded… she’s pretending, she wants me to think Ms Nott might still be around, or…’
‘Or Ms Nott is around,’ Martin said.
‘Yes.’
‘Or the other possibility, Merrily, is that she wants Ms Nott with her, and by visualizing her there…’
‘There’s a word for that. I think it’s the N-word.’
‘I believe it is, yes.’
‘But… even if we’re prepared to believe that a retired businesswoman is ready to give in to what she may not realize are necromantic urges to keep a dead person on a lead…’
‘She’s a regular churchgoer, you say?’
‘A cathedral-goer.’
‘Yes.’ Martin nodded. ‘I suppose the worst this reveals is a lamentable ignorance of the rules of exorcism and deliverance.’
‘I think…’ Merrily put a finger over her lips then took it away ‘… a deliberate misinterpretation.’
‘Which prayers did you use?’
‘Well… nothing that might sound ritualistic. I busked it. As cosy as I could make it, without insulting her intelligence. Ms Merchant is not a particularly cosy person.’
Martin lowered himself to a corner of the bed.
‘I don’t know what to say. I mean, are you consulting me as a recently bereaved person… or as a homosexual?’
‘As a priest, of course, with a knowledge of exorcism.’
Martin smiled. He’d done the course with Huw, even if he’d probably never been called on to do the business.
‘There’s always been gay clergy,’ Merrily said. ‘Did anybody make a thing of it? It’s a point Huw Owen makes. As soon as you turn something into an Issue, everyone starts to overreact. The Church never handles Issues very well.’
‘Men like me,’ Martin said, ‘we don’t help. I’m a stupid, emotional person, Merrily, which I hope is nothing to do with being gay. Rendered temporarily insane by grief and rage, I… got drunk.’
Merrily nodded, resigned to it now.
‘On wine. On communion wine – quite deliberately – in the vestry. Helplessly, mindlessly, angrily drunk.’
‘I didn’t know that bit.’
‘Only the next bit, eh? In the chancel.’
‘Only, as you say, the, er… next bit. Some of it. Possibly.’ She looked beyond him out of the window, down the street in search of inspiration. ‘What can I say? We’ve all screamed at God, in the night. And I think… I suspect… I know… priests scream louder.’
‘Bit more than a scream, Merrily.’
Could be the hardest shrug she’d ever forced. She heard the phone ringing, the extension in her bedroom two doors away.
‘Get that… please,’ Martin said.
She shook her head. Let the machine pick it up. No more excuses for avoiding this.
‘A priest having a breakdown,’ she said, ‘losing his faith, it’s never pretty, is it? You didn’t make a secret of it. You confessed all to Canon Jeffrey Alexander, the diocesan school-sneak. I’m tempted to think that was entirely deliberate. You sought him out, the way, erm, Christ sought out, erm, Judas Iscariot. Not that I’m…’
‘No more lives left, Merrily. That’s the bottom line.’
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘The other reason I’m telling you about Ms Merchant and Ms Nott is that, as that card warns, she’s planning to come back.’
‘And not, I imagine, on her own.’
‘And you’ll be here.’
‘Well,’ Martin said. ‘There’s challenging, isn’t it? You want to be involved?’
‘If I happen to be around.’
‘Take them on together, is it?’
‘Won’t feel outnumbered, will she?’
Both of them giggling creepily, like maladjusted kids in front of a juvenile panel.
‘I’ll bring my cases up, then.’ Martin Longbeach opened the bedroom door, then stopped. ‘You know that feeling of being on the brink of madness you get sometimes in this job?’
‘All too well.’
‘I used almost to like that,’ Martin said. ‘Once. Now go and check your answering machine. It’s not going to be for me.’
It was Huw Owen, who’d tried to reach her at Lol’s, left a message on both machines.
‘Two of the trainees had to leave early, so we wound up the course last night. Don’t suppose you can do Capel this morning, by any chance? Around eleven at the little church? Feller I’d like you to meet. All a bit heavier than I’d figured, lass. Let me know, anyroad.’
Couldn’t see why not. She called him back. He wasn’t there. She left a confirming message on his machine.
So. That was it, then. She’d be out of here sooner than she’d figured. By the time she was back from Capel-y-ffin, Martin Longbeach would be the Vicar of Ledwardine.
Loose ends? She switched on the computer to check if there were any files she needed to email to the laptop, noting that the latest bookmarked reference was the most recent website for OSIS – the Order of the Sun in Shadow.
The site was called Dark Orb. She’d scanned it once and found it all so lurid and extreme – a new aeon dawns in a sky of glistening blood – that she’d wondered if it wasn’t all an elaborate joke.
Anyway… not the best night-time reading for a paranoid priest.
She wiped it.
34
Niceties
ACTING-DCI BRENT said, ‘You don’t look well, Francis.’
The Renault Clio was at the bottom end of the car park where the spaces were marked out for coaches. The Clio was old and scratched and forlorn. Bliss felt as close to tears as when his Irish gran died.
‘Long night,’ he said.
He coughed, turning away, looking blankly across the car park to the recycling bins. The sky was mercilessly white. He’d snatched just two hours’ sleep in his car and by the time he was back, this had happened, changing everything.
Hardening it up. No longer the possibility of a night with a boyfriend nobody had known about.
‘Her phone was in the side pocket,’ Brent said. ‘Dowell’s got it. Not revealing much, last I heard. When she’s finished, she can go to Cusop with you. As you seem to know your way around.’
Bliss said nothing.
Iain Brent, PhD. Ph frigging D. Smooth-skinned, light-haired, gym-toned. Five or six years younger than Bliss, probably younger than Annie Howe. Brent thought he was clever, on account of all the certificates saying he was. Pretty soon it would be like the army, highly educated twenty-two-year-olds from some cop-Sandhurst starting out with the rank of inspector. That would be the day he quit.
‘Some issues we’ll need to discuss, Francis,’ Brent said. ‘But not now. We still need to find out exactly where Winterson’s been, who she’s spoken to in the last couple of days. Can’t afford to skimp on the basics.’
The basics. Yeh, you could probably trust Bliss with the basics.
‘If you think it’ll help attending the briefing, you can do that first,’ Brent said.
Twat.
Hay police station was small and grey and stuffed down a back street, no more than a couple of minutes’ walk from England. Too small and not enough parking space for an operation on this scale, so Dyfed-Powys had fixed it for them to use the Hay Community Centre, also grey and even closer to England. Bigger, though, with chairs and tables for the incident room and a field alongside.
DCI Brent would be based here. Just in case this turned into a murder inquiry. Just in case, with the car being found in Hay, the Dyfed-Powys cops from Brecon tried to muscle in, grab too much of the action.
‘We need to talk to all known friends and relatives of Tamsin,’ Brent said to the assembly. ‘In this case, unusually, we don’t have far to look. Who were her best friends in the police? And, before that, at college. I’m sure some of you will have ideas. The situation may chang
e but, for the present, Inspector Ford’s our office manager. So let’s keep him, and his assistant, Alison, very busy.’
Extra computers were being carried in. The bar was opened for coffee. Outside, the troops were gathering. No smiles, no black humour.
‘Next briefing at twelve,’ Brent said. ‘Unless there’s a development that alters things.’
Bliss was hovering outside, waiting for Karen Dowell, when the first TV people arrived, the reporter and cameraman in separate cars. The reporter came over.
‘Excuse me, are you with…?’
‘Liverpool Daily Post,’ Bliss said.
Brent came out of the community centre with DI Watts, from Dyfed-Powys, who were being friendly, under the terms of the cross-border crime initiative. Happy to let them use Hay as an operational base, but Brent wouldn’t be happy until it was clear that he’d be SIO, no matter how far into Wales this went.
Watts was older and balder and heavier than Brent. The TV cameraman shot them, as Karen Dowell wandered over to Bliss.
‘DCI’s on unfamiliar ground, boss. I was convinced he was going to ask about a translator.’
‘Into what?’
‘If there was the slightest possibility that some Welsh people, even though they all speak English, might prefer to communicate in their own language…’
‘In Hay?’
‘He likes to observe the political niceties,’ Karen said, ‘as you know.’
‘Yeh, I could almost believe that. Nothing from Tamsin’s phone?’
‘Nothing obvious. They’re ringing all the stored numbers now, but, essentially, no business on that phone since she talked to Kelly James. The phone was in the car, and the car could have been here all night.’ Karen took in a long breath. ‘Doesn’t look good, does it?’
‘That car needs a good going-over. Did she drive into Hay and park it, or did somebody else?’
‘Couple of locals say there was an old blue Nissan truck parked a couple of spaces away. May have been there for most of last night, but gone by the time we got here.’
‘Basically,’ Bliss said, ‘there’s no evidence that Tamsin even left Dorstone. Last people to actually see her were her own family at about two p.m., after lunch. She hadn’t said where she was going or what she planned to do. But apparently it wouldn’t be the first time she’d taken work home, if you see what I mean.’
‘Would that necessarily be your drowning? Could she have been working on something else?’
‘Worth considering. I think we can take it she didn’t cross paths with Claudia Cornwell, so it could be that she didn’t even go to Cusop. Still, let’s do it thoroughly, like the man says. If I’ve missed anything, I don’t want anybody else finding it.’
At least he could still talk like this in front of Karen. A mate. Either Brent didn’t know this or he did know it and didn’t want any mate of Bliss’s too close to him, reporting back.
They walked up the hill towards the car park, a long traffic queue forming because the cops were restricting access to the car park and also questioning people, in search of anybody who might have parked there yesterday.
Karen pulled out her car keys.
‘Go in mine?’
‘I look that bad?’
‘We all know you’re not out of the woods yet, boss.’
‘All?’
He was still wearing the baseball sweater with the big numbers, was unshaven, and his left eye kept half closing. Not comfortable, but not life-threatening.
‘No,’ Karen said, ‘not all, just a few of us. I can see why you decided it was better to get back in the saddle, I’d probably be the same, especially with him around. Just don’t tire yourself out too much, is all I’m saying, because he’ll pounce on anything.’
‘Yeh.’
‘And I don’t care what anybody says, we’d be better off if Annie Howe hadn’t gone to Worcester. Could be a cold bitch, but you knew where you were with her.’
Bliss said nothing. The big car park was just round the corner and up the hill from the community centre. Karen was parked near the top, the little Renault Clio cordoned off at the bottom. Karen pointed beyond it towards the foothills of the Black Mountains.
‘That’s Cusop, just there, see. Those big houses in the trees? Easy walking distance through the fields.’
Shielding his eyes, Bliss saw movement across there. Bunch of uniforms already doing the walk, like soldier ants. Dogs and sticks. And after that, it was big country time, chopper terrain. In case she’d been injured or collapsed on a run up there. The last hope had been that Tamsin would arrive for work as normal this morning, having spent the night with some bloke.
‘Karen, what’s she done? Farm girl. Knows her way around. What can she possibly have done?’
He kept getting images of her in her perfectly pressed, spotless uniform, the thin red hair, the freckles, the solemn expression. Call me boss, he’d said, as if she already had a foot inside the CID room.
Didn’t usually get emotionally involved. It didn’t help.
Maybe he wasn’t out of the woods.
35
Cold history
THEY SAID THAT if you drove west from London, the Black Mountains would be the first actual wilderness you encountered. Probably true. Living in Hereford, in the river valleys, you were unaware of them for much of the time. Unless you were a hiker or a fell runner or a member of the SAS, you really didn’t know your way around the high ridges and exposed summits with arcane names that weren’t on the road maps. Didn’t know your Black Hill from your Cat’s Back.
A secret wilderness, Merrily was thinking, and destined to stay secret because no road crossed the mountains from England. Capel-y-ffin wasn’t much more than a mile over the Welsh Border, but it still took over half an hour to get there from the Hereford side.
Along the Gospel Pass. The best road, not to say the only road, twisting roughly north–south through the mountains. So called because legend said St Paul had been this way, maybe St Peter, too.
How remotely likely was it that Middle-Eastern Biblical icons would have travelled this route? Seemed more likely the stories had been invented by the monks at Craswall Priory in the north or remote Llanthony Priory to the south, in the days when monks knew all there was to know about everything, and needed money.
Still, if St Peter and St Paul had been this way, chances were they’d still recognize it. You forgot what kind of road this was, how many times you had to pull into the hedge, as it climbed and climbed, like a vein up an arm, to let oncoming all-terrain vehicles through and a few ambitious tourists.
She was late. There’d been a hold-up in Hay, some problem on the car park. Already late getting away from the vicarage with having to show Martin how the kitchen worked while resisting, one more time, his determination to explain – oh God – the circumstances of his sacrilege.
But he was OK, really, was Martin. Nothing wrong with being vulnerable, insecure, paranoid. If it came to it, he was likely to get more out of Sylvia Merchant than George Curtiss had.
She held the Freelander on the handbrake at an awkward junction. Craswall? No, couldn’t be. She followed the twist to the right and came out on the road to Hay Bluff, a sheep-shorn plateau with vast views. Popular with walkers, a meeting place for hang-gliders and probably the last place offering safe, level parking before Capel-y-ffin.
Two empty cars and a Land Rover, lined up alongside the stone circle by the roadside. A pagan statement on the Gospel Pass, if not much of one; it was ragged and irregular, only one stone of any size, bent over like a lonely gravestone beside a pool of brown water. From here, the road was only going to get worse.
Unlikely this was going to be worthwhile, now. Any obsession of Huw’s would be interesting, but Bliss… she was feeling, with hindsight, a bit annoyed with Bliss.
That’s not how we work, the police. Not many points for preventing the hypothetical.
But then, quite suddenly, hypothetical was no longer the word.
&nb
sp; The CD player in the Freelander was playing up, kept cutting out, so she’d had the radio on, and the ten o’clock news had it as second lead.
‘Police on the Welsh Border have begun a major operation to find a twenty-two-year-old policewoman missing from her home in Herefordshire. More than a hundred officers from two forces are involved in the search for PC Tamsin Winterson, who…’
What?
Merrily braked, reversed back to the stone circle, while a policeman, not Bliss, was saying Tamsin Winterson was a capable officer with a good knowledge of the area, but…
She sat and stared out over God knew how many counties and then pulled the phone from the dash and called Bliss.
‘Let me call you back,’ Bliss said.
‘I can’t wait for—’
‘Five minutes.’
She couldn’t go anywhere because you couldn’t rely on a parking place or a signal after leaving the Bluff.
Tamsin? Was this some appalling coincidence? How often did police officers just disappear? Why this one? Why now? The dizzying views before her were across the lower hills of Radnorshire, Herefordshire, Shropshire. She looked over her shoulder, to where the soiled sky lay like a gloved hand on a long thigh of naked mountain. A helicopter in the distance.
The phone chimed.
‘Where are you?’ Bliss said.
Meaning was she on her own?
‘Hay Bluff. I said last night that I’m supposed to be meeting Huw Owen. Have you—?
‘No,’ Bliss said. ‘Nothing. I was gonna call you… at some point.’
‘You think this…?’
‘Merrily, I don’t know, do I? It might be totally unconnected. We… they found her car a couple of hours ago, on the car park at Hay.’
‘Oh, hell… I passed it, wondered what was happening. Nobody saw—?’
‘Nobody saw anything. Nobody saw her getting out of the car, but it could’ve been in the middle of the night. And there’s a little gate at the bottom of the car park accessing an endless network of footpaths. Miles of them. Up into the mountains to where you are. Lorra ground to search.’