by Phil Rickman
‘Village is set to grow. Maybe he’s on a promise. All too friendly with Councillor Pierce these days.’ Barry leaned his chair back against an oak pillar where a wall had once divided the bar into two rooms. ‘End of the day, we’re just the little people. These things don’t happen on our level, do they? I mean, the word is he’ll ask me to stay on, but that’s… not for me.’
‘I’m so sorry, Barry.’
‘Nah, I’ll be all right. Not sure about Ledwardine, though.’ Barry settled into his chair, evidently more relaxed now it was out. ‘So what’s the problem with Syd Spicer, then, Merrily?’
‘Didn’t think you wanted to talk about him.’
‘I didn’t. Now, suddenly, it seems like light relief. One of your lot now, last I heard.’
‘Actually, one of your lot again. Been made chaplain at Credenhill.’
‘Has he now?’
‘You didn’t know?’
‘They don’t put out a newsletter. Chaplain, eh? Padre. Well, well.’
‘Barry, could I ask you something in general? About the Regiment?’
Barry shrugged, his jacket tightening, a sleeve rising to expose a purplish scar snaking up his wrist from the palm of his left hand.
‘I’m sorry if it-’
‘Nah, nah, just it’s usually teenage boys. How many men you killed? How many times you been tortured? It can get wearing.’
‘Just that Syd once told me… he said there was a kind of mysticism in the Regiment. His word.’
‘Oh, I see. This is about the things you do on the side.’
Much of the time, Barry’s broad face was smooth and bland, but his eyes were the eyes of a far thinner, warier man. Maybe a colder man. He sucked some froth from his Guinness.
‘Not quite sure what you mean by mysticism. There’s a lot of myths .’
Merrily waited. The old apple log was well alight and it felt warmer in here now, almost like old times. But this was the last good log.
‘What can I tell you?’ Barry said. ‘There’ve been geezers I knew, up against a wall, who’ve prayed their hearts out and the wall never moved, know what I mean? And there’s a bloke I know survived against all the odds, and he’s seen it as a miracle and gone hallelujah, praise the Lord, born-again.’
‘What about superstition?’
‘Rabbits’ feet? Not treading on the cracks in the minefield?’ Barry shook his head minimally. ‘Small obsessions can get you hurt.’
‘Fear of the unknown?’
‘You don’t give in to it. If you’re in a tight situation, personal fears take a back seat because you’re concentrating on how to deal with it.’
‘What if it’s something a man knows he can’t get at? I’m wondering at what stage he would think he was going mad.’
‘Blimey,’ Barry said. ‘What’s this about? Only, generally speaking, we don’t do mad. All right. What I’d say is you might start by eliminating the possibility of there being, say, something in the water – practical stuff.’
‘And when you’ve eliminated the rational, the hallucin- atory…?’
‘We talking about Syd here? Only he’s a bleedin’ vicar.’
‘Not all vicars feel able to take the funny stuff on board. Don’t all take God on board any more. At what stage do you think he might seek help?’
‘On a mission, you rely on your mates, your gang. The circumstances would have to be very special for you to venture outside. You read Frank’s book? Frank Collins?’
‘Should have, shouldn’t I?’
Frank Collins: former curate at St Peter’s, Hereford. Ex-SAS. Occasionally spoken of among Hereford clergy, warily.
‘Wish I’d known him,’ Merrily said. ‘But he was dead before I came here.’
By his own hand. Gassed himself in his car. She’d heard it said that he’d become depressed after writing the book about his time in the SAS and his conversion to Christianity. It hadn’t been well received – by the Regiment, not the clergy.
‘Some weird stuff in that book,’ Barry said. ‘How God spoke to him through the radio. There’s one tale in there of a guy who knows his best mate’s bought the farm in the Falklands on account of he’s appeared to him in his house, thousands of miles away, all dripping wet. Made me shiver a bit, that. I served with them both. Frank, too. Blondie, we called him.’
‘I’ll read it. Did start it once, but life intervened. Did, erm… did Frank Collins find the same level of support in the Church as he had in the SAS?’
‘Evidently not,’ Barry said.
‘I see.’
‘In the Regiment, you rely on your mates not only because they’re your mates but because each of you’s got special skills. Abilities the others respect.’ He looked at Lol. ‘Like in a band. Only a band where, if you forget your chords, you might get the drummer killed.’
‘Good analogy,’ Lol said. ‘I’m guessing.’
‘We don’t like to rely on guesswork,’ Barry said.
Some nights, Lol would just go back to the vicarage with Merrily for coffee or hot chocolate.
This wasn’t going to be one of them. They both knew that, as they walked out onto cobbles already slick with black ice. Almost touching, not quite. They never publicly held hands in Ledwardine, not even after dark.
A few icy stars were out over Cole Hill, a wreath of them above the church steeple. Merrily shivered with cold and unease, watching Lol beside her, head down, the lyrics pad under an arm, a hole in an elbow of his Gomer Parry sweatshirt. The Ledwardine village musician, one day playing music, the next following a JCB down to the riverbank with a hand shovel. She could almost hear his thoughts echoing across the cobbles: what kind of fantasy is this?
Lol had never really been much of a pub guy. Didn’t drink much, didn’t play darts or pool, didn’t have mates. It was only after his Christmas concert at the Swan that he’d achieved a degree of openness in Ledwardine. After he’d been lured out to play his music in front of his neighbours. And now…
I’ve agreed with Barry to do a few more gigs. Here at the Swan. And maybe something outside in the summer.
‘If Savitch can’t get it cheap enough, he might not bother,’ Merrily said at the entrance to Church Street. ‘I mean, what’s he going to do with it anyway, to make it show a decent profit… on his scale?’
Wishing, as soon as it was out – like with a lot of things she’d said tonight – that she’d kept quiet.
‘You know exactly what he’ll do,’ Lol said. ‘He’ll make it into some kind of apres-shoot retreat for his corporate clients… and for all the wives and girlfriends who don’t want to stay in a chalet, however luxurious, on a muddy farm. He’ll build up the restaurant and double the prices. It’ll just… regularize things.’
They stood and contemplated the clutch of lights down Church Street, where the holiday homes – sixteen at the last count – would be in darkness until Easter weekend. One of the For Sale notices had acquired a cross-strip saying sold. Had Savitch bought that, too?
Merrily saw Lol bent over his guitar in a corner, his music drowned out by the laughter of loud-voiced, faux -rural thugs.
‘They look out from their penthouses across all the lights,’ Lol said. ‘And they can’t see it but they know it’s there… all those thousands of square miles of it, all dark and empty. It just… it starts to irritate them. They’re thinking, what’s it doing? We’re the masters of the universe, why isn’t it giving us anything?’
Merrily was nodding gloomily. Had it ever been otherwise, since Norman kings designated thousands of acres as hunting ground? Great slabs of it going to the barons, who settled and grew, in their brutal way, to love it and eventually became the old squirearchy.
The Bulls and the Bull-Davieses.
Until they, in turn, started to lose it under the weight of inheritance taxes, leaving it prey to the new money. Savitch.
Cycles of exploitation.
The last fake gas lamp on the square was behind them now. A merciful mesh of shadows
claiming them for its own. Lol brought out the keys to the terraced cottage where Lucy Devenish used to live. The folklorist. The guardian of the soul of the village. Jane’s first mentor.
‘I suppose what gets me,’ Lol said, ‘is that most people don’t seem to mind. The first time somebody off the TV comes to stay at the Swan, bit of glamour, they’re all in favour of it. It’s brought the village alive… but not in the right way.’
‘A bit of glamour,’ Merrily said. ‘Maybe we all need that.’
Her eyes felt damp.
Lol held open the front door for her. Inside, the wood stove was burning a surprising terracotta red.
Merrily’s black woollen top was off before they reached the sofa.
18
An Island in the Night
‘Actually, I do think he did it,’ Bliss said. ‘What’s wrong with that? It’s me job to suspect people.’
Staring up at the plaster moulding around the bedroom ceiling. The curtains were undrawn; you could see blurry lights in the big houses on the hillside across the road.
Cosy. An upstairs flat in a classy Victorian villa set back from the main road out of Great Malvern. Bliss liked it here – at the moment, more than anywhere, especially his crappy semi on the flat side of Hereford. OK, if he was called out in the night it’d take him maybe forty minutes to get back, and he’d need to leave at seven a.m., anyway. But it was worth it. Wasn’t it?
‘Francis, you…’
Annie Howe peering at him, her eyes all soft and woolly and useless without her contacts. It was worth it just for that.
‘… you can’t simply accuse a man of murder because he doesn’t like you. Sometimes I don’t like you. You can be an intensely annoying person.’
‘Part of me appeal, Annie.’
Bliss watched a light go out across the road, and then the hillside was as blank as those years of mutual blind distrust. Fast-track Annie, man-hating bitch, daughter of Councillor Charlie Howe, ex-copper, bent. All the poison darts Bliss had aimed at her back. Why should she like him?
He felt, unexpectedly, flimsy. What was she supposed to see in a twat who couldn’t hold anything together, not his job, not his family? Like Kirsty said, You never did put yourself out much, did you, Frank?
True, in a way. He and Annie had fallen into bed within days of Kirsty leaving, both coasting on the euphoria of a crucial result, a key arrest. A cop thing. How much staying power was there in that?
‘What’s the matter?’ Annie said.
Chris says you consistently neglected your wife, Inspector.
‘Francis…?’
She moved away from him. She’d put her nightdress back on, all creased. She was his superior. Better-educated, better-connected, better-looking. Coat hanger with tits? Was Stagg blind?
‘We said when this began that there’d be no analysis,’ Annie said softly. ‘One day at a time. We also said that.’
But there were no days, only nights. Cover of darkness. Cover of Christmas. It should have been his emptiest Christmas ever. Instead, he’d spent the days in work, the nights with Annie. In January they were spending two nights a week together, one at her place, one at his – Annie parking around the corner, walking, all muffled up, to the back door. We’re all right, she’d said, as long as nobody finds out. As long as we’re never seen together. As long as we don’t go out together. As long as we don’t ever do that thing where you drive a hundred miles into Wales or somewhere and have lunch and walk by the river, because there’s always some bloody copper, who used to be in this division, on holiday.
Bliss cleared his throat. Badly wanting to tell Annie about Kirsty, get her input, see if she had any idea at all who might’ve rumbled them. But Annie’s job was as important to her as his was to him. If he told her, she’d restrict their meetings, and he couldn’t stand that, because this was the only thing preventing him exploding into gases and shrapnel.
‘Right, then, Francis…’
In the glacial light from the street lamps he saw that she’d arranged two pillows against the bedhead, sitting back into them, a nipple’s areola vanishing back into the white cotton. Reaching to the bedside table and finding her glasses and putting them on to watch him across the post-midnight greyness. Return of the Ice Maiden.
‘Tell me about Sollers Bull,’ she said.
Gut feelings were no longer encouraged. No place for them in teamwork. Even Bliss was suspicious of gut feelings. Other people’s, anyway.
‘See, even when I was talking to him, I could feel it. I could see him in a pair of them green nylon overalls that farmers wear for mucky jobs.’
‘Pulling them off, I suppose, as he ran through the fields into the headlights of our correspondent and his girlfriend.’
‘I wanted to go back with a warrant to search his house. I wanted to talk to his hidden wife. Maybe she knows, maybe she doesn’t or maybe she just suspects.’
‘Stay away from her, Francis. Until you have something stronger, anyway. The bottom line is… he has an alibi. Several.’
‘The staff at his caff? It’s still borderline. Time of death’s not that certain, and it’s not that far away. You didn’t see the rage in him. Something about it that was wrong for the situation… skewed.’
Anger was always useful for concealing a hole where grief ought to be, but it was also a good outlet for the hyper excitement that lived in you for hours after you’d done something enormous.
‘I was thinking at first that if there was no real pain there it was because half of him’d be well chuffed at getting the farm.’
‘Perhaps that’s all it was,’ Annie said. ‘We don’t even know he didn’t get on with his brother. OK, different kinds of men – the traditionalist and the young progressive. University education, big ideas.’
‘Enough to cause a rift, when he starts shaking off the steadying hand.’
‘Even if they did hate one another, who’s going to tell you? Not the family, and not the wider community.’
‘Somebody will,’ Bliss said. ‘Always somebody with a grudge, a chip.’
‘We get his DNA, for purposes of elimination?’
‘Yeh.’
‘You feel threatened, Francis?’
‘Me?’
‘He’s put you very much in the firing line. A symbol of what’s gone wrong with the police in this area. Urban cop.’
‘Strange as it may seem, Annie, it wasn’t that urban where I grew up. Not then, anyway. There are fields up there.’ Bliss lay back. ‘Countryside frigging Defiance. Where did that come from?’
‘I Googled them. Much of it’s hunting-based. Aimed mainly, I’d guess, at attracting younger people to the cause. The trad- itional fox-hunting image of a retired colonel and Camilla Parker-Bowles as was… is not terribly evident on their Web site.’
‘Who’s behind it?’
‘Don’t know. They’re also using Facebook and Twitter. Sollers Bull in hunting pink is a gift. Good-looking and a little bit dark and edgy. He was always like that.’
‘Oh?’
‘I didn’t know him well, but I did know him. From his days in the YFC.’
‘ You were in the Young Farmers?’
‘I was a young farmer’s girlfriend for a while. He was a friend of Sollers. This was when I was about sixteen. We were at the same parties, occasionally. He was popular with girls who… had more going for them in the looks department than I ever did.’
‘Don’t sell yourself short.’
‘I’m a realist. Anyway, I didn’t know him well enough to get behind the image.’
‘He’s a liar,’ Bliss said. ‘He was acting. On TV. Just like all those husbands who break down in front of the cameras: Please find the monster who killed my lovely wife. And all the time you’re looking at him.’
The lights were all out in the houses on the hillside, traffic was sparse. Bliss had that feeling he used to get as a kid, of being on an island in the night. It was not unpleasant.
‘He did it, Annie.’
‘I’d be very careful, at this stage, who you share your suspicions with. It’s a small county and Bull has friends all over it.’
‘Including my soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law.’
‘Did you know that your in-laws knew Sollers Bull?’
‘Be surprising if they didn’t. The farm’s only ten minutes away and Chris Symonds has social ambitions. Always asking me if I was up for promotion.’
Annie slid down in the bed, a long thigh against his.
‘You’re obviously up for something,’ Annie said.
Overslept.
It was six-thirty and fully light when the mobile trilled by his side of the bed. Bliss awoke spooned into Annie’s back, experiencing the usual half-shock at whose back this was. His hand had barely found his phone before Annie’s phone made its Nokia noise on the other side.
‘Karen, yeh?’ Bliss said.
Watching Annie fumbling for her glasses, peering at her screen. In Bliss’s phone, Karen Dowell didn’t dress it up.
‘Shit,’ Bliss was clawing the sleep out of his eyes. ‘Where?’
‘City centre, more or less. East Street?’
‘A woman. You did say a woman?’
‘No, boss, I said two.’
Part Three
When I was still young, I thought it a great pity to die. Not that there was anything on earth I wanted to live for…
Julian of Norwich
Revelations of Divine Love
19
Icon
Just gone eight, and the city was stirring irritably under a blotchy brown sky, East Street sealed off, end to end.
A barrier was moved to one side, the tape dropped, letting Bliss through to where Terry Stagg was waiting with a blurry excitement on his brick-dust face.
‘Briefly, Tez.’
‘Two females. Mid-twenties? We’re thinking East European.’
Bliss stood in the middle of the street, looking down to a private parking area for office workers, lawyers, hairdressers. You could see the screens projecting from behind a blank yellow end wall. East Street ran narrowly between the city centre and the Cathedral Close. A few discreet shops, refurbished terraced housing, offices, the rear of the Shirehall and a lone bijou black and white property used by chiropractors.