by Phil Rickman
‘As you do.’
‘Anyway, he wasn’t our guy, as it turned out. We got someone else within a couple of days, DNA and all. But what Buckland’s sister had to say was fairly alarming. Things like he’d ask for books on anatomy for his birthday?’
‘Don’t tell me — the parents thought he wanted to be a hospital consultant when he grew up.’
‘You know more about parenting than I do.’ Howe coughed. ‘Sorry.’
‘You kept an eye on him, then.’
‘Oh, sure, we had a round-the-clock obbo on his flat.’
‘Yeh, yeh, insufficient manpower and no brownie points for prevention. How you can be mates with that frigging dim—’
‘Leave it out, Francis. We’ll talk about the Home Secretary when we’ve nothing more urgent — Oh shit…’
Some kid had backed into their table. Howe mopped up spilled coffee with a paper napkin.
‘Where’s Buckland now?’ Bliss said.
‘We don’t know.’
‘Yeh, that’s helpful.’
‘He’s entirely respectable. Twenty-seven years old, probably looks younger. No form.’
‘At all?’
‘No record except as a victim. He was badly beaten up in a pub when he was seventeen.’ Annie released a brittle laugh. ‘Main guy responsible was found stabbed to death in a car park. Killer never found.’
‘Presumably CID talked to him about that?’
‘It was four and a half years after the pub incident. And several years before we learned about Glyn’s lifelong fascination with blades. And no DNA traces, no basis for reopening the inquiry.’
‘Dish best served cold?’
‘Cold’s the word. In the current moral climate, you no longer have to be a psycho to kill without remorse. When did you last encounter a knifeboy with a conscience?’
‘Or even one who could spell it.’
‘Conscience?’
‘I was thinking knife.’
Howe laughed.
‘Actually, Buckland’s intelligent enough. And in full-time employment. Self-employment. Moves around, which is why he’s difficult to track. Also been known to use different names — for security reasons, allegedly. He’s in the security business.’
‘What kind?’
‘Any kind. Driving factory wages to advising on burglar alarms. My guess is that’s how he meets people who are feeling threatened enough to want to take extreme measures. Just… another kind of security.’
‘How sure are you that he did the Lasky job?’
‘Circumstantial, but good circumstantial. He worked for Lasky fairly regularly. Lasky recommended him to his clients. Just not quite enough to bring him in for a chat. But I’d be reluctant to, anyway.’
‘Because he doesn’t know about the sister coming to you. He has no reason to think you’re onto him.’
‘That’s the situation. Leave him alone until we’re sure of him.’
‘All right,’ Bliss said. ‘If we’re looking at a Hereforward subcommittee, does that include Bill Blore, maybe Lyndon Pierce in a consultative capacity?’
‘Anyone else?’
‘You’re wondering about Charlie?’
‘If I have to, I have to.’
Her narrow face was flushed, her hair flung over to one side of it in white waves. There was a little coffee stain, like a birthmark, on the side of her mouth. She didn’t look like Charlie.
Bliss said, ‘I think Charlie was fixed up with totty to keep him sweet, and maybe that’s where it ends. I think we’re looking at Ledwardine here, but I’m buggered if I know why.’
‘It’s not a big place.’
‘Not yet, no. But unless Traffic knows otherwise, it’s not a place you can get a car into tonight. It’s got a moat round it.’
‘Blore’s there?’
‘I’m sure Pierce is. How do we play it?’
Howe tapped the table slowly with a sugar spoon.
‘This feller…’ Bliss said. ‘You’ve gorra have a fairly low moral threshold to whack a bloke to get a bunch of paedos off the hook.’
‘He’s a child of the new void,’ Annie Howe said.
Still tapping.
61
See You Shine
Merrily watched Stooke throw open the front door of the Swan and walk out into the rain. She stood for a moment, undecided, looking behind her. Nobody had followed her out of the lounge bar.
Lol was beginning a song she hadn’t heard before, Lucy rearing over him like a guardian bird of prey.
Guardian?
Oh God, it was late. It had been a long, long day. The church had been desecrated. She was full of the jitters of nicotine-deprivation. She stood looking down at her hands. It was pixels. Pixels right?
Behind her, behind two oak doors, Lol sang softly,
‘… and then you feel your heart can’t let it go
Miss Devenish would ever wish it so…’
Sod it.
She straightened up and walked out into the night.
Jane sat hunched for a long time, elbows on her knees, head in her hands. Was this it? Was this the final severance? Could she even bear to go on living here? Perhaps she’d form a mild attachment to whichever college town she ended up in. Maybe Cardiff, to be near Eirion, if he still wanted a manic-depressive. Somewhere too big and chaotic to feel a responsibility for.
Mum would be left on her own, of course. No good. She should marry Lol and move away. A perfect time now Lol was on a roll. Only she’d feel she had to stay out of some misplaced, masochistic sense of mission. Nothing left here, though, nobody worth saving… well, except Gomer, Jim at the shop, a few other people.
And Lucy. Lucy would always be here, a forlorn, broken ghost around her besmirched grave.
God, God, God. Jane stood up, furious. No justice, anywhere. Scum rises, bastards rule. She unlocked the cubicle door and walked out to the wash basins. Didn’t look in the mirror; perhaps people would think she’d been moved to tears by Lol’s songs. Only hoped that Blore had gone back to his caravan to bed one of his students, because if she saw him again tonight, doing his booming laugh, she’d smash his beer glass into his…
At the door of the Ladies, she stopped, the water gargling in the pipes, and someone…
… someone sobbing in one of the cubicles?
Merrily found Mathew Elliot Stooke alone between the two oak pillars at the end of the market hall, looking down Church Street to the end of the world.
‘You’re not wearing a coat,’ he said.
The rain was slower now, but the water was deep enough on the cobbles to reflect the inner globes of the fake gaslamps. You were walking on light.
‘I’m guessing this isn’t the first time,’ Merrily said. ‘Merrily…’ Stooke didn’t look at her ‘… while you’re not quite the last person I’d want to talk to at the moment…’
‘It’s actually not that uncommon — I mean denial. Even religious people often go that way because they don’t think it’s—’
‘No.’
‘No what?’
‘No basis for discussion here.’
‘You were keen enough to question me the other day.’
‘Because I’m a journalist, and you’re… someone with an axe to grind.’
Merrily peered down Church Street. Couldn’t see the water at the bottom, not from here at night, but you could sense it somehow, and you knew it would be higher again tonight. She tried again.
‘Not Lenni, you said. You didn’t think Lenni had seen it, just you.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Go back and listen to your boyfriend.’
‘You do, though, Elliot. You do know what I’m talking about.’
‘Look.’ He turned at last to face her, the Devil’s spin doctor haloed in amber. ‘I made it up. My wife wanted you to get that woman off our backs. Didn’t bother me, personally. And you… you have to keep on fooling yourself to justify the absurdity of your job.’
‘The other
night, you described a warrior-figure with a short cloak that you’d seen in the field, near the orchard. As if it was somebody from Shirley’s church, but I don’t think anybody from Shirley’s church has been here, ever. I think she’s keeping you for herself. Whether she’s been in contact with Ellis in America and he’s manipulating her, the way he always could with women…’
She thought about it. It was the way Ellis would work, grooming Shirley by email, making her feel important, chosen. Getting inside her mind, the way he used to use a crucifix… and she must keep it to herself.
‘Lucy Devenish,’ Merrily said. ‘When the picture of Lucy faded up on the screen… Lucy, in her poncho, always reminded me of an old Red Indian warrior.’
‘You’re mad, Merrily. You’re as mad as any of them. I find that very disappointing.’
‘Lucy’s face, whether or not it moved, as some people seemed to think… Well, the important thing for me was your face. That look of shocked recognition followed by this… not quite hunted, more something… catching up with you. Again.’
He hissed in contempt and half turned away, a stocky, irritated man in a black fleece. Merrily closed her eyes for a moment.
‘I don’t think that was the first time. Dreams, premonitions, figures in the bedroom when you were a kid? Unpleasant? Scary? And always the fear of madness. Then, when you’re grown up and it’s still happening, you think, sod this, I’m going to turn and fight it, I’m going to kill it. Stamp it into the ground.’
He said nothing, didn’t move.
‘And then, just when you think you’ve kicked it to death, there it is again, right in front of you and you’re out of there. Out… here.’
‘I walked out,’ Stooke said, ‘because I’d had a row with my wife, who’d dragged me here knowing I’m not a particular lover of this kind of music. I walked out because I couldn’t bear to spend any more time in the middle of all those wispy New Age clowns with their oh-so-serious drivel about the female principle in nature. I told my wife I’d walk home and she could come back when she liked. Now go back into the pub, you’ll catch cold.’
‘If you’d come out with the intention of walking over half a mile home, you’d have brought a coat, an umbrella…’
‘I was going back to get them.’
‘Your wife… as good as told me you were a hack, in it for the money. I think it’s much more complex than that. Sure, you were in a business full of cynics, which must’ve helped, not as if you were sailing against a tide…’
‘How can I get rid of you, Merrily?’
‘You can tell me the truth.’
From somewhere came ribbons of laughter. There were lights in most of the houses, a splash of fluorescent white from the glass door of the Eight Till Late.
‘These things,’ Stooke said. ‘Anomalous phenomena. All down to brain-chemicals.’
‘Sure. To an extent.’
‘Let’s say a glimpse of an old woman did cause some aberration. False memory, déjà vu. Where part of your brain thinks you’ve seen something before but in fact you haven’t.’
Merrily laughed.
‘But above all…’ Stooke spun at her, throwing out a sudden white smile. ‘Above all, it in no way suggests a god. Above all, it does not imply that’.
Merrily caught a squeal from the bottom of the street.
‘You know that,’ Stooke said. ‘You spend time — waste your life, some of us might say — ministering to people who… their bulbs blow, ornaments fall off their shelves. It doesn’t mean anything. What does that say about divine purpose? It’s random. It’s anomalies… blips. Pointless. It means nothing, Merrily.’
‘You’re right.’ She watched the amber lights bobbing in the waterlogged cobbles below the steps of the market hall. ‘In the end, we all still face the chasm. No matter what we’ve seen or think we’ve seen, that leap of faith is still required. The admission of helplessness which, in the end, makes us all equal… you and me and Einstein and Dawkins. Charles Darwin, Lucy Devenish…’
‘Bullshit.’
Stooke was shaking his head as another cry came echoing up Church Street. A cry conveying outrage, disgust. More lights were coming on in houses on both sides of the street, upstairs and downstairs, outshining the sprinkling of coloured Christmas lights, like they were sending signals to each other. Signals of distress.
‘I think someone’s in trouble, Elliot.’
‘Not me,’ Stooke said.
‘No, I mean—’
‘The flood.’ He sighed. ‘I’m tired of the very word.’
‘Could be into the houses. We’d better get help.’
‘All right,’ Stooke said. ‘You go back to the pub and fetch some people. I’ll go down there and see what I can do.’
‘Be careful, it’s going to be very deep now.’
‘I won’t do anything stupid.’ He walked out of the market hall, turning to face her with another glowing smile. ‘Doesn’t mean we’re selfish, you know. Doesn’t mean we don’t care. All this talk of Christian charity, as if you’ve cornered the market. That really makes me sick.’
‘I’ll catch up with you,’ Merrily said.
Jane burst back into the lounge in the slipstream of her fury. Had to get this out, now: the hypocrisy, the treachery.
She stood in the doorway, laughter blossoming around her in an atmosphere mellow with lamplight and the haze of beer and spirits.
Needed Mum, and there was no sign of her. Lol would know what to do, but Lol was busy. Busy winning. No space any more between him and his audience. No divide either between the locals and the Serpent people who’d come in the coach from Hereford.
Ken Williams, the farmer who’d let Gomer build the new riverbank on his land, stood up in the middle of the floor, pint glass in one hand.
‘Tell you what, boy,’ he said seriously to Lol, ‘you’re wasted on plant hire.’
Even Jane smiled for a moment. Somebody was asking Lol why he hadn’t written a song about the Dinedor Serpent. Jane spotted Eirion, with his sound mixer and his remote control for the video and began to squeeze through the crowd. She saw Lol pausing to think for a moment before pulling the new Boswell on to his knee and hitting a couple of chords.
‘Actually, I can only remember the chorus, which… Anyway, you can sing along just as soon as you pick it up.’
Lol looked around, eyes glittering between his little brassrimmed glasses, high on the energy. Singing lightly.
‘Dinedor Serpent
‘I’d do anything
To see you shine’.
Jane stopped, recognising the tune: ‘Sidewalk Surfer’ by Super Furry Animals. Perfect fit.
‘That’s it?’ a guy said.
‘That’s it,’ Lol said.
He did it again. He smiled.
‘Altogether now, Dinedor Serpent…’
If this had been a summer festival, they’d all have lit matches, held them up. River of light. Jane spotted Eirion rocking back in glee.
‘Eirion!’
His grin fading as she stepped over wires and collapsed next to him at his card-table under the deepset window. She hadn’t called him Irene.
‘Listen…’
He couldn’t hear her, with the whole audience going, ‘We’d do anything… to see you shine.’
Everybody loving it. Everybody loving it so much they wouldn’t notice Mum come in with her hair all soaked and her make-up running. Jane leapt up, but the crowd had closed between them.
62
En’t Good
You could smell him now. Smelled foul. It was almost sexual, Jane thought. Swollen, invasive, obscene, the river engorged.
Bastard hadn’t listened to a word she’d said. Rapists never did.
Jane, in her rain-darkened parka — she lived in the thing now — skipping back in disgust as he licked at her wellies. Eirion steadying her as she backed up against someone’s wall, clutching her mini Maglite torch like a votive candle.
Too late for prayers. You coul
d tell why flood was such a powerful biblical device: fire consumed, flood just degraded everything, turned it into sludge.
God’s verdict on the vanity of the New Cotswolds.
Somebody had driven a car, a Mercedes four by four, halfway down the street and left it in the middle of the road with the engine running and the headlights on full, turning the churning water caramel, finding the roof and blind windows of another car, this one drowned. Parked on what used to be the street.
Jane and Eirion were standing just above the Ox. It had been evacuated; you could see tables piled on top of tables under the sallow bulbs of the public bar, its pool-table covered with heavy plastic, its gaming machines unplugged. The water, knee deep on the floor, looked like bad, gassy beer and smelled worse, and the road outside was full of people, like extras discarded by Hieronymus Bosch. Glistening like slugs as they struggled into waterproofs, joining the trickle down Church Street to the banks of the new lake.
The river was already a quarter way up the walls of the lowest two houses either side of the street, swirling like dark oil here, out of the headlights, and rising, rising, rising; if you tried to reach one of the door-knockers, the water would be to your chest.
‘Oh God,’ Jane said. ‘Poor Miss Huws.’
The last evacuee. You could see bits of her life washed into the street, a wooden stool, the floating lid of a breadbin, a loaf of sliced bread.
‘I can’t,’ she was sobbing. ‘Not in that!’
Gomer’s Matbro, this yellow hydraulic lift. The extended metal platform closing in on an opened upstairs window, its frame banging back against the wall. Someone was standing up in the platform, holding on to the metal guard rail, leaning across to the window.
‘Coming in, Miss Huws.’
James Bull-Davies.
‘Probably the first time a man’s ever been inside that bedroom,’ Jane murmured to Eirion.
It wasn’t funny, though. Edna Huws, a frail moth in her parchment-coloured clothes, shrilling at James in front of a crowd of sympathetic voyeurs.