by Phil Rickman
‘He isn’t doing anything. Just learning stuff, most of which he isn’t going to need. His fifteenth year of learning. Weird, when you think about it, the whole university thing. Like, your mental energy levels are about as high as they’re ever going to be, and it just gets poured down the system.’
Was that what the rage was about? Some acrimony with Eirion?
‘And then you come out in serious financial debt,’ Jane said. ‘To them. With no guarantee of meaningful work. It’s a scam. Eirion reckons if they can get a stack of foreign students paying an arm and a leg they’re more than happy.’
On the box, a beautiful pathologist with uncovered glossy hair and perfect make-up wielded an electric handsaw, and a dead man’s brainpan was eased away like the top of a soft-boiled egg. Without appearing to notice what was on the screen, Jane switched it off.
‘I might get an early night.’
Merrily sat up in bed. The rain had stopped. No vehicles on the streets, only the occasional flattened notes of footfalls on the cobbles, the claw-patter of a dog on a lead. Townies talked about escaping to the country, but there was no escape out here. Everybody knew where to find you.
Too much had happened today, none of it good, but there was still work to do. Under the bedside lamp, she read Mother Julian’s account of changing skin colours on the dead Christ, half his face coated in dried blood.
Merrily marked the place with a Post-It sticker. There had to be a logical sequence for this meditation and it should be stored in her head. No sitting at the top of the nave with a clipboard. Just a low and steady voice, minimal inflection, not a preacher’s voice. Julian’s voice.
She worked with the book for an hour, until around midnight, applying more Post-Its. Syd hadn’t used them. Pages of his Deliverance handbook had been folded seemingly at random, as if simply to mark his place. The book was uncared-for, as though he’d carried it around in his pockets.
And then thrown it at the wall because he couldn’t find what he needed. You picked it up and you could almost feel the frustration. She’d left it downstairs. With Julian of Norwich, she’d been thinking, there would at least be distance.
Of course, there wasn’t. After six centuries, Mother Julian was up-close and breathing, resisting impulses to look away from the horror because she knew that while she gazed on the cross her soul was safe. Apart from the cross she had no assurance. Interesting.
Merrily stopped work, went to the window and prayed for the capacity to interpret and to understand what had driven Syd Spicer on that final exercise. Then the bedside phone rang.
‘Merrily. Me.’
‘Barry.’
‘You ain’t gone to bed or nothing? Only, I phoned Big Liz. She’ll be happy to talk to you on the understanding it’s off the record.’
‘Wasn’t planning to use it in a sermon, Barry. You, er… haven’t spoken to James Bull-Davies, by any chance?’
‘No. Not for a couple of days, anyway. Look, you’ll need to make it earlyish tomorrow. Liz’s got her first Easter guests arriving after lunch. Start of the season. Can you do nine prompt? And wear the vicar kit – that’ll impress her.’
Merrily dreamed of having to watch a post-mortem on Jesus Christ. Several of them in a gallery overlooking the table: James Bull-Davies, stooped and solemn, William Lockley behind his Lord Kitchener moustache and, in the darkest corner, Syd Spicer with his steady, soft-toy’s gaze.
She kept walking away from the metal table and out of the door, then finding herself walking back into the morgue through a different door. Watching and worrying because the wounds of Jesus Christ, as listed in the New Testament, did not include a circle of black stitches between the eyes and the halo, where the top of his skull had been sewn back on.
31
Blue Sparks
When the mobile whined, Bliss was camped in front of the massed ranks of CCTV monitors in the Big Telly room.
‘You talk?’
‘Yeh, give me five minutes.’
Annie Howe said, ‘If it’s not a good time…’
‘Good as any tonight.’
Looked like Rich Ford’s reasoning had been well off-beam. In the aftermath of the carnage, it was unnaturally quiet on the night streets of Hereford. They’d spotted a handful of blokes who roughly fitted the inexact descriptions given by Carly Horne and Joss Singleton but nobody worth more than a mild tug. Bliss signalled to Vaynor to keep tabs and went downstairs and out to the car park and called Annie back.
‘I was gonna give it another half-hour and then stagger off home. What’s your day been like?’
‘We’ve set up a phone line specifically for reporting rural crime – anything suspicious – anything. Which we may live to regret, as we pursue fly-tippers and kids stealing apples. On the positive side, we may actually have a response to the coded appeal for the guy who saw the man covered with blood. And I had to let Stagg go for a while, when this SAS chaplain was found.’
‘Anything in that?’
‘Looked borderline suspicious at first, but it doesn’t seem to be. Nothing much for us to do. They look after their own.’
It was spitting again. Bliss moved under the awning by the door.
‘Where are you?’
‘Home. Thought about staying with Dad, decided that wasn’t a good idea. Ah… the TV I saw, you handled it well.’
Bliss had done six TV interviews, including satellite. Only one reporter had slipped in a rogue question: You feeling more comfortable on an urban case, Inspector?
‘They didn’t use it, far as I know. Maybe they’ll save it for if the rural-cops issue comes up again.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Annie said. ‘Which it well might, I’m afraid.’
Here it comes. Bliss moved out into the rain.
Annie said, ‘The Chief Constable’s had an e-mail document, copied to both MPs, from Countryside Defiance. Containing what purports to be a list of over two hundred unsolved rural crimes in this division over the past year.’
‘Like what?’
‘Theft of equipment and vehicles. Arson. Damage to property – a rural bus company having seats repeatedly slashed…’
‘Yeh, by a rival bus firm, if it’s the one I’m thinking of. Point of honour for some of these redneck bastards to settle their own scores. Half your rural crimes, it’s stuff they keep to themselves. Feud-linked, neighbours with a grudge. Leaving each other’s gates open, cutting fences…’
‘According to Countryside Defiance,’ Annie said, ‘some farmers apparently have given up reporting crimes because they’re tired of wasting hours of the working day-’
‘Balls!’
‘-on worthless interviews and statements when in the end no one is ever arrested and they never get their property back.’
‘Most thefts from farms are twats in vans, cruising the lanes, seeing what’s unlocked. Chancers from the West Midlands, South Wales. It’s not organized. What are we supposed to do about that? Put all the dozens of friggin’ patrol cars we haven’t got into hundreds of miles of twisty little lanes? Stop and search? You imagine how well that’d go down?’
‘And there’s something else,’ Annie said.
***
At some point, Bliss forgot where he was. Finding himself the other side of the main road, by the steps to the magistrates’ court, some drunk staring at him from under a street lamp. It was pissing down now, reminding him of the night during the floods when he’d doorstepped Annie’s dad, and come off worst.
Go home boy. Charlie’s finest sneer. Go back to Liverpool or wherever it was you crawled from. Long outstayed your welcome down yere.
Ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Charlie Howe, former head of Hereford CID. It was all different now, the organization, more remote. Bliss had met the Chief Constable just the once. He recalled a mild-mannered bloke, not a big sense of humour, but that had never been a qualification.
‘The fucker wants me out?’
‘Essentially… yes.’
‘He told you on the Bluetooth
this morning, didn’t he? On your way to East Street.’
‘I didn’t say anything then because I didn’t really think he was serious. And it… didn’t seem a good time to discuss it.’
‘The cowardly twat.’
‘Francis, they’re all the same. It’s a difficult job at a difficult time.’
‘“Difficult time”-’
The drunk was still staring at him. Bliss lowered the phone, advanced on him.
‘Will you piss off!’
A sardonic, rubbery grin and a finger, and the drunk moon-walked away.
‘I’m sorry,’ Annie said. ‘It’s knee-jerk and it’s probably unjust. And it’s…’
‘A small county?’
‘Not quite set in stone. Not yet.’
‘If he’s told you, Annie, it’s as friggin’ good as.’
‘He’s told me because he’s heard there’s a long-standing hostility between us. He’s told me, because he’s hoping I’ll expedite it. I imagine he thinks I’ll quite enjoy expediting it.’
‘He say how he expects it done?’
‘The usual. It’s to be made clear to you, quietly, that DI is very much as far as you’re going if you stay here. Other opportunities will be aimed in your direction.’
Bliss stood with his face tilted into the rain, letting it come.
‘Francis…?’
‘I’m going home. I’m switching off.’
‘No, listen, that…’ Annie sounded tired and distressed. ‘That’s… not the half of it.’
Bliss sat in his kitchen until getting on three a.m. Under the naked bulb, from which Kirsty had taken the lampshade. One of the clutch of low-energy bulbs that came free from the lecky company, coiled white tubes like frozen intestine.
He’d been picturing Annie’s incident room. Her little outpost at Mansel’s yard. A message to the farmers: we’re here for you. And we’re local people. Maybe you remember my father. Maybe you were in his Lodge.
Bliss stood up, took his mug to the sink and held it under the tap with both hands for too long, numbingly cold water cascading over his wrists. Remembering something else Charlie had said that night in the rain.
You never deserved Kirsty. Nice girl. Good sensible head on her shoulders. Well rid of you, boy. Well rid.
Small county.
He turned away from the sink, hands dripping, staring at the bright, new brass lock on the back door. The locks had been changed now, front and back. Kirsty would never again get in to sniff the sheets, check the bathroom cabinet for cosmetic anomalies, the kitchen cabinet where the Brazilian decaff was, the only bit of exotica that Annie had ever introduced.
It was now entirely possible that Annie would never come here again, with her overnight bag and her expensive Brazilian decaff.
Bliss dried his hands, switched off the coiled bulb and went and sat down at the table in the dark. In his head, he was joining the wires. They ran from his father-in-law, Chris Symonds, would-be gentleman farmer, to Sollers Bull, who knew the family. To Charlie Howe, who knew the family.
And what about Lord Walford, Sollers’s father-in-law and former member of the police authority? Former? Made no odds, he’d still have the contacts.
Chris Symonds says you consistently neglected your wife, Mr Bliss .
Had it actually come from Kirsty? No stranger to False Memory Syndrome, his wife. Of course I won’t be doing anything about it. He’s not worth it. I’ll just be glad never to have to see him again.
Bliss could still hear Annie’s voice in the mobile as he was standing in the rain outside the mags’ court. The words still tight in his head like a migraine.
Abuse. Physical.
Confused at first. I’m not getting this, Annie. Hadn’t realized who she was talking about.
They’re saying… that your abuse of your wife also had a physical dimension.
And then, Who? Who, who, who…? he’d been screaming into the phone, until he realized that might make him sound like someone who easily lost it and…
… lashed out at his wife.
‘ There was no abuse. Do you understand, Annie? Making his voice very calm. Physical or otherwise. Or, if there was, it was one-sided. She knows that all too well.
Well, of course she knew it, but that didn’t matter. Didn’t matter whether he had or he hadn’t. Didn’t matter. In a small county.
Bliss sat there in the dark, head in his hands, remembering, as he often did, the first time he’d seen the DCI as a woman. Opening her front door to him on a December night, wearing the jeans and the loose stripy top. Hair down, glasses on the end of her nose. Those little blue sparks of static electricity. Maybe he should’ve seen the way this would go.
Sometimes I don’t like you.
Just last night. And then this morning, in her car, after her Bluetooth discussion with the Chief: I’m adapting to instructions, Francis. It’s what I do. Adapt. Known for it.
Thing was, he had seen the way it might go. His eyes had been open the whole way. He knew what Annie was and what he wasn’t. After that unexpected, glorious compatibility on the night they’d nailed Steve Furneaux, together, he’d been fully prepared for a slow descent into the old brittle, viper-tongued, day-to-day disparaging. A relationship as workable as a frozen toilet.
And – here was the really sad bit – had even been willing to endure it for those brief moments of defrosting, the hair-down, glasses-on-the-end-of-the-nose moments, the blue sparks.
Bliss parted his hands and let his forehead come down on the tabletop, again and again and again.
Part Four
Yet in all this I wanted (as far as I dared) to get a real sight of hell and purgatory…
Julian of Norwich
Revelations of Divine Love
32
A Soul in Camouflage
Abruptly, Big Liz rose, went over to a sprawling oak sideboard and came back with a green cardboard folder which she handed to Merrily.
‘Just in case you thought we were never happy.’
Liz had wide grey eyes and copious white hair pulled back into more of a cob than a bun. And she was big. Tall, wide-shouldered, wearing a long sheepskin waistcoat.
In the wedding picture, she looked bashful in a complicated white veiled headdress, and the man she’d married was all smouldering hero in his morning suit and winged collar, with his thick dark hair.
‘He could be very charming,’ Liz said. ‘Always good with my parents. That was half the battle, then.’
They were sitting near a bay window in a high-ceilinged, mauvey, chintzy sitting room with a wide stone fireplace and a view across the Golden Valley to the Black Mountains.
‘My father – before I got married, he said, Elizabeth, you’re going to have to be very strong – stronger than an ordinary wife – and very discreet, for the rest of your life. And you’ll have to make allowances, because these are not ordinary men.’
‘Your father was in the army?’
‘No, just very patriotic, and Colin, being a career soldier in an elite regiment, he could do no wrong. I’m not very good at people. I just go along with things.’
Colin Jones. Right.
‘How long have you lived here?’
The stone farmhouse, at Allensmore, south of Hereford, was Victorian and lofty. Big bones, like Liz. There was a small crenellated tower in the roof, aligned to the front porch with its double doors.
‘It was my parents’ house. My mother started the bed-and-breakfast side. I grew up here, and they always said that when Colin came out of the Regiment they’d sell the grounds, retire and move into a cottage and let us take over the house. At the time, Colin seemed delighted but…’ Liz gave a small, helpless shrug ‘… I didn’t realize then that was only because it would give me something to do. Keep me occupied while he did other work.’
‘What kind of other work?’
‘He took a job with one of the private-security companies in Hereford. Went abroad for weeks at a time, as a bodyguard to various bus
inessmen. It was a bit on and off, and then it stopped. That was when he started to write his books. Non-stop, once he’d started one, early morning till late at night. He had a lot of energy. Too much for ordinary things.’
‘He didn’t get involved with your business here?’
‘Wanted nothing to do with it. We had separate lives, almost. Well, except for sex, and that was…’ Liz looked away, out of the bay window ‘… never very loving, but I made allowances. Anyway.’ She placed her hands primly in her lap. ‘There we are. I suppose I thought they were all like that. Oh dear.’
She blew out a short, startled breath, then sat back, looking a little surprised, as if she’d let herself be tricked into saying too much. Merrily looked around at the nests of chairs and coffee tables and saw why Byron Jones might have found it hard to settle here. Even the bookshelves had ornaments on them – little wooden boxes and china figurines and what might have been golf trophies, widely spaced. Liz’s second husband was out playing golf, apparently. It seemed likely she’d arranged this meeting for early in the day not, as Barry had said, because she was expecting guests after lunch but because she knew that this morning they’d be alone.
Big Liz owed Barry. She’d met him on a tourism course. When Byron left, Barry had helped her keep the business afloat, attract some grants. Leading you to think that Barry had been sorry for her and maybe knew more about Byron than he’d revealed last night.
As for Liz… she was oddly incurious, hadn’t once asked why a vicar might want to know about her first marriage. It seemed enough that Merrily had been sent by Barry.
‘I’d begun to think it was all history. Then Barry rang and told me about Syd.’ Liz’s face became glum. ‘Oh dear. You never know what you should or shouldn’t say. I’m still a bit of a patriot, like my dad.’
‘Where did you meet Colin?’
‘Disco. In Hereford. I didn’t go very often, but my cousin was staying with us and she was all for that kind of thing. It wasn’t very long after the Iranian Embassy siege in London, when the Regiment rescued the hostages, and they were national heroes, and all the girls in Hereford… do you remember that? Perhaps you’d be too young.’