by Phil Rickman
And it takes all of a winter’s night
To change the chords and put things right
And it takes all of a winter’s night
To dance the darkness down
God, he loved that. To dance the darkness down. His legs were aching in anticipation of song and dance for the darkest night. Sticks clacking in the frantic air. Dancing on the old solstice, dancing on the cusp. The time when you felt the hollow earth under your feet, and the earth and the sky were all one, joined by snow, and you were in a different space from where you’d be if you weren’t in movement. In flow with the drum and the squeeze box and the fiddle.
He bit on the wood, stood poised, feeling the strange weight of snow, and ran into the dance.
Weaving between the lines, narrowly dodging the clashing sticks, then bouncing up and instinctively intercepting with his own stick. Then around the musicians – an accordion belch, a rip of fiddle – and dancing back up, out the other end and then, one hop, two hops, back into the dance, clack, clack, the sounds softened by the snow on the sticks, the music thickened by the sound of an engine, a big throaty engine, like the engine grinding underground.
And then, with angry cries, the morris men turned on him, the way they’d said they would, sticks cracking over his head, then the dance broke apart in the darkness, all torches doused, the dancers barely silhouettes, rag jackets alive like crow-wings, and Lol, with no glasses, struggling to follow the lines when a stick smashed into his shoulder.
He went down. Becoming aware that the air all around him was vibrating with a sudden feral joy and the song had darkened in his head.
The wind is prowling in the east
To raise the devil, scorn the priest…
Like being inside a street fight, except this was orchestrated, purposeful, a pitiless, rhythmic rage, and there was no stopping a rhythm, and when he found his feet his limbs were moving in response and the night was inside him.
He rose. He swung the willow stick and felt it connect as a bright crack opened up in his head and, amidst the rag jackets he saw an alley of light and, with a joyful yell, ran for it, and a third line blossomed around him.
Let’s light the lamps for Lucy’s feast
And…
Running across the snow to the yew tree and the path up the mound to the south door, just as it came fully open
And dance the darkness down!
A fidgety hush in the church. He looked for Merrily with her candle but saw only Darvill in his wheelchair, coming at him very fast, too fast.
‘… the fuck’s going on out there, Robinson?’
Darvill snarling into the blizzard, Lol leaping to one side, spinning round short of the doorway, to engine-roar and yellow lights and great, shining, rigid arms outstretched, and then the snow was choked with a coarse industrial fog in which screams were smothered, and as Lol ran out towards it, there was a vicious, spitting mist in his foliate face.
69
What we are
IN THE END, Bliss just had to call Annie.
They’d have gone through the ridiculous, but necessary procedure of checking her alibi and concluding that whoever had shot Charlie Howe, it wasn’t his daughter. They’d have finished with her mobile by now but, if it still wasn’t safe to call her, Bliss didn’t care. He was tired; he wanted a long, warm back to stretch out against until it was light.
So when his car wouldn’t start outside the country pub he’d gone to for an evening meal simply because he’d never been there before, didn’t know anyone, he didn’t call the AA, he called Annie on her mobile. Finding she was staying at the motel near the Plascarreg, in case she was needed in Hereford. Double room, he was hoping, but he didn’t care.
She came out into the Hereford tundra and picked him up in her little Yeti, and he told her about Darth Vaynor’s meeting with one of Jack Kenny’s bagmen. Vaynor following Bliss’s script because of Bliss’s need to keep his head below the counter.
‘Seems Kenny didn’t actually throw it out,’ he said as they abandoned his Honda, in the pub car park. ‘In fact he put it into the system. For the morning.’
‘Only you would think the morning might be too late, Francis.’
‘The sooner somebody goes down for Charlie, case closed, the more likely it is that we walk out from under this. The longer it takes to get a result, the more likely it is that they come back to you. And Friday night at Charlie’s place. When somebody will have seen us.’
She started back towards town, very slowly, on some very nasty roads.
‘I keep wondering,’ she said after a while, ‘if it’s best to simply tell them about Friday. Let them take us apart, find there’s nothing there. Come to an arrangement, leave Hereford. Maybe one of us keeps a job. I don’t mind if it’s you.’
‘That what you want, Annie? It’s part of us, being coppers. I mean us as an item. Part of what we are.’
‘It’s a pretty sorry reason to stay together. Sounds like convenience.’
It was friggin’ inconvenience. And not only because the police wouldn’t have senior officers in the same bed, even though they knew it happened. If it could be turned into a good reason for killing Charlie, even if they couldn’t make it stand up they wouldn’t let it simply fade into Gaol Street folklore.
‘If it does turn out to be Hurst,’ Annie said, ‘you’d need to stay well out of it and let Jack Kenny walk away with all the credit. If your ego can stand that.’
There was, he had to admit, sense in this. He leaned back. They’d passed a couple of abandoned cars and even the Yeti, good for its size, was struggling.
‘I cried,’ Annie said after a silence, pushing on towards the main road at Belmont. ‘I actually cried. For a long time. Don’t know what I was crying for. Maybe for the dad I used to have a long time ago. On which basis, perhaps it was the kind of crying I should’ve done years ago. Doesn’t matter. It’s done now.’
‘I’ve never seen you cry,’ Bliss said.
‘It’s not pretty. I was battering the headboard and telling him what a bastard he was, and if he thought I was going to his state funeral he could fuck off.’
Suspecting she was crying now, he answered his mobile.
‘Bliss,’ she heard.
Over the wheezing and the sobbing, the rumble of the engine, the poisonous hiss, and the sound of stumbling feet around a snowbed already unmade, brown and slushy and soured.
He won’t come, you know, Darvill had said.
Iestyn? He might.
Oh, he came. He was there. You couldn’t see the driver, but Gomer Parry had recognized the machine.
‘That’s Iestyn Lloyd’s fancy American sprayer!’
‘Frannie…’ Merrily panting into the phone, weaving between the gravestones, looking frantically all around. ‘Please… get us some help. You need to get some people here. I mean fast. All kinds of people.’
In the ill-lit night, through the falling sky, it looked like one of those busy Bruegel snow scenes. But Bruegel, to her knowledge, had never done panic and pain, confusion. His people did not have hands over their faces, moaning and sobbing and calling out for one another, asking why.
‘You’re still at Kilpeck, right?’ Bliss said.
‘Yes. Still at Kilpeck.’
Where the smell was sweet. Like caramel. The smell that was part of the falling snow.
‘Let me stop you there, Merrily. Have other people called the police? If not, get them to do it.’
‘They’re doing it now. Phones everywhere.’
What people did now; they reached for their phones.
To video it. Some of them, amongst the ones who weren’t burned or fighting for breath, were bloody filming it.
‘Right then,’ Bliss said. ‘Calm down. Tell me.’
‘It’s pesticide.’ She’d reached the edge of the wall, looking down. Where were they? Jane, Lol, Eirion. Please. Any of them. ‘It’s a pesticide sprayer, like…’ When she’d first seen its extending arms splayed out, she’d
thought of the Kilpeck pylon, split down the middle and collapsed. ‘… like a big tractor with wings and nozzles. It’s got Iestyn Lloyd inside it, and he’s spraying this filth everywhere.’
‘Then where’s—’
Her face was stinging with snow.
Hands gripping her arms, now, pulling her back from the edge of the wall round the church’s mound.
‘Come back, Merrily,’ Rachel Peel insisted. ‘Now.’
Snow didn’t sting. She knew that. Snow didn’t hurt your eyes.
‘I can’t see them.’ Her eyes filling with tears, or something. ‘I can’t see them anywhere.’
‘Let’s just get you back,’ Rachel said.
Outside Clehonger village, normally just a few minutes away from the main road into Hereford, a breakdown crew was disentangling a people carrier from a bus shelter. And there was Big Patti Calder from Traffic, old mate of Bliss, running the show. Annie spotted her too and was already reversing, sliding all over the road, and pulling in under some trees out of sight, to wait this out, wait until anybody who might know them had cleared off.
They might get back to Hereford by dawn. They wouldn’t have made it to Kilpeck.
He had Vaynor back on the phone. Vaynor said the incident was known about, but nobody was there yet.
‘I’m looking at a sprayer now on the computer, boss. Half-tractor, half-microlight. They’re bad enough in a field, slaughtering wildlife. But this doesn’t bear thinking about. You’re sure he’s spraying people?’
‘That’s what I’ve been told.’
‘Do we know what with?’
Annie had been on her own phone, examining the possibilities. Most of them were long words you didn’t want to read twice.
‘Probably something that deals very efficiently with wild flowers in potato fields,’ Bliss said, ‘and evidently also causes skin burns and respiratory problems to human beings. Let me know when you find something out. My contact’s vanished.’
‘Listen, boss, what I wanted to tell you, they brought me in on an interview as local knowledge man. Guy called Adrian Ripley, who is Lyndon Pierce’s partner in accountancy. He was very, very scared.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘I won’t say all of it came out, but it’s certainly enough to keep the Charlie team going for most of tomorrow.’
‘This is Pierce’s link with Charlie?’
‘That was taken for granted. This is better. This is Pierce and Liam Hurst. Yes, Pierce does indeed handle Iestyn Lloyd’s accounts, which is one big earner to start with, but they’re never satisfied, are they? It’s fact that Iestyn’s been losing it up top for a while. Hurst’s been… helping him out, shall we say?’
‘Fingers in the pie.’
‘More like a whole arm. There’s a deal on the table, involving Pierce, Hurst and a building firm whose name you’ll know immediately, to make available all the land needed for what would amount to something like Ledwardine New Town.’
‘That’d be big.’
‘Massive, boss. The fly in the ointment was Aidan Lloyd, who was pushing him towards a different kind of farming. They last thing he’d go for would be selling lovely farmland for Ledwardine New Town. Hurst’s saying to Pierce, Well, let’s not worry about Aidan at this stage, shall we? He’ll come round. Few weeks later, bang. And then Hurst’s saying Let’s not worry about Iestyn, he’ll come round.’
‘He was gonna do Iestyn too?’
‘Maybe just let him vanish into the sunset. Why rush things? But they do, don’t they, once they’ve started. For Pierce, there was very big money in this, but even he was thinking, Oh shit, what have I got myself into? Pierce was greedy, ruthless, all of that, as Ripley’s only too glad to confirm, but removing human obstacles is a different league, isn’t it? Pierce realizes he might be in bed with a monster, but what can he do? Shares his fears with Ripley – after all, nothing illegal’s happened yet involving Pierce. Should he go to the police and risk them looking into his previous iffy deals? And then it comes to him – why not talk to his respected colleague, Councillor Howe, a man who’d know the best way to take it to the police, by the front door or the back.’
‘And Charlie, of course,’ Bliss said, ‘sees a much more satisfying way of using this information and launches his private investigation with a trip to Hewell. This is nice, Darth. We may never find out how Hurst gorra hint that Pierce was presenting Charlie with his scalp, but let’s try and harden this up. Go and talk to Kenny’s bagman again, claim all the deductive credit and gerrit over to them that they need to get a warrant to raid his place. Tonight.’
‘What are they looking for?’
‘You need to go in with them. You’ll know.’
From the road ahead, there was this sickening, rending screech as the people carrier was parted from the bus-shelter under the white spotlights and the blues and twos.
In the grey snowlight, phone off, Bliss looked at Annie.
‘You gorra charger for the mobile? Could be on this all night.’
He watched her fumbling around in a side pocket. There was a funny side to this: directing a major inquiry, secretly, from the sidelines, through a third party, over a mobile phone. So funny he was close to tears.
He thought about Hurst. Wasn’t the big thing it used to be, killing. He thought about the famous Joanna Dennehy, who’d knifed three men to death on the other side of England then, just for the fun of it, went on a stabbing spree in Hereford where she was caught. The whole world now knew that picture of Joanna brandishing a huge, serrated blade like an executioner.
Hurst wasn’t like that.
‘Some fellers live for it,’ Bliss said. ‘A hell of a lorra fellers live for it. Bang – something flying up out of the grass, the bigger the better. Foxes, badgers, they can justify it – stock gerrin slaughtered, lambs, chickens, cattle contracting TB. They still gerra lorra fun out of it, but…’
‘The justification almost makes a virtue out of it,’ Annie said.
‘Exactly. Some of these fellers – never admit to it in a million years – dream of killing a human being. Even good old Slim Fiddler came close to it. They’d like to be in the SAS. Obviously not the bit where you’ve gorra jog twenty-five miles with a fifty-pound pack on your back, but the endgame, where it’s kill or be killed. Preferably without the being-killed bit.’
‘Why didn’t we have Hurst in the frame earlier?’
‘Because we’re not looking for fellers like him right now. We never have. We’re all looking for Islamic terrorists and creepy blokes with computers full of kiddie-porn. And because killers are invisible in the countryside. And because—’ Bliss choked back the dark laughter. ‘Because he’s a civil sairvant.’
‘Linked to a bureaucracy geared to making more and more farmland available for development,’ Annie said. ‘Run by politicians financed by builders. He’s killing for the economy. Or this could all be madness. No clear explanation.’ She sank back behind the wheel. ‘What the hell am I saying? This is not how I talk.’
70
Out of it
A MAN HAD died, a retired university lecturer and a Kilpeck Church fan of many years. He’d been brought up from Abergavenny by his daughter and son-in-law. Heart attack, Rachel had decided, brought on by the effects of inhaling whatever it was that smelled of creamy fudge. His daughter had said he’d had a heart attack earlier in the year and was on medication. They took him into the church and covered him up with the altar cloth.
‘That’s not him,’ Iestyn Lloyd said, watching from the nave. ‘Where is he? Did I get him?’
Merrily heard this from the nave, his voice querulous, with the sense of something justified, something owed. But his head was in a different place. This would all be drifting past him like a dream.
the past, for him, is a noxious place, full of an old hatred. He thinks I’m my father. He thinks Henry Darvill’s still here and out to destroy him.
Iestyn, this blank-eyed man in a long coat, had been helped down from the
sprayer by Gareth Brewer, perhaps the only person here, apart from Gomer Parry and Sarah Baxter, who knew him. It was about keeping him well away from friends and relatives of the people with burned skin, temporary blindness and problems with their breathing.
‘He’ll be no trouble,’ Gareth said sadly. ‘He’s had his moment.’
Merrily saw Sarah Baxter watching for a while with her husband, big man in a flat cap, and then Sarah shuddered, turned her back and pulled him away.
* * *
There must be sixty people out there now, perhaps a dozen of them in need of treatment of some kind. She’d watched some stumbling blindly around, groping for untainted snow to rub into eyes and skin, the rest having fled, perhaps shocked into a primeval fear by the surreal malevolence of a shiny crablike entity spitting chemical venom.
Among the damaged, oh dear God, was Eirion. He’d swallowed some of the chemical. If you were in the wrong place, all you had to do was breathe through your mouth. In between coughing fits, he kept saying he was OK, but what did he know? What did any of them know? Yes, flower, he’ll be fine, it’s just a precaution, Merrily had said to a white-faced Jane. Just a precaution. What did she know, except that this had become an almost mythic horror?
Rachel thought the stuff might be… something complicated ending in acid. Said she’d dealt with just one case involving pesticide, a farmer attending to a blocked nozzle on a sprayer with a canister he’d been wearing on his back, and the nozzle had suddenly become unblocked.
‘Only I thought the really noxious pesticides had been banned,’ Rachel said.
Gomer Parry sniffed and drew Merrily away. He’d been up into the sprayer almost before Iestyn was out of it, making sure it was disabled. He brought out his vape stick.
‘Don’t like to say this, vicar, but it could be any ole muck in that bloody tank. Some farmers, they don’t get rid of it. Allus got stuff in their sheds as is years old. All gets mixed in. Waste not, want not, see.’