by Phil Rickman
Mentioning the Royal Oak to Frannie Bliss … this had been like opening the door of the CID room and rolling a grenade through the gap.
They were in the café in the Cathedral cloisters, with a Gothic-framed view of the Bishop’s garden. Bliss was doing his eager-fox smile, raspberry jam from his doughnut oozing between his fingers.
‘Clever little bastard, though, Merrily. His old feller’s some kind of professor of Islamic Studies in Wolver-hampton. Also, a consultant to the Home Office.’
He evidently thought she knew more than she actually did.
‘The lad’s been doing his bit, too, advising the council on community relations in Worcester. Oh, and he also runs an ethnic art gallery in Malvern, where the Prince of Wales once attended a reception.’
‘Yes,’ Merrily said, ‘I’m sure the Prince of Wales would have enjoyed that, but—’
‘In fact, so snugly has Raji fitted himself into the system that the little shit was actually one of the speakers at a symposium last year on new directions in community policing. Having earlier – this may surprise you, or not – had lunch with my esteemed ruler.’
‘Annie Howe? Why would that surprise me? Frannie, just give me the building blocks … How does this guy come to be the owner of a country pub in the Malverns?’
‘Oh, and then, following the symposium – attended by civic leaders and other useless suits – I get meself formally introduced to young Mr Khan. Merrily, he patronized me.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘“From Liverpool, then, sergeant.”’ Bliss putting on this poncy public school accent and a twisted smirk. ‘“That’s quite a cultural quantum leap, isn’t it?”’
‘He called you sergeant?’
Bliss leaned back. His red hair was receding slightly, and something throbbed in his temple.
‘Full name Rajab Ali Khan. Twenty-seven years old, and already the owner of – as well as the nice gallery – nightclubs in Worcester and Kidderminster. And now, yeh, the Royal Oak Inn, as was, in the heart of the glorious Malverns. I think he even had grant-aid. He’s good at that.’
He put down the remaining half of his jammy doughnut. On the side plate, it looked like debris from a post-mortem.
‘And at this point I’ve gorra say, Merrily, that I believe Raji to be a main player in the supply of a substantial percentage of Class A drugs entering the Border counties.’
Merrily stirred her coffee. ‘You know that?’
‘No, I said I believe it.’
‘I believe in God, Frannie, but—’
‘And I also believe there’s a firewall around him, for reasons I’m either not sufficiently elevated to have been told about or because…’ Bliss picked up his doughnut. ‘Ah, what’s the point? The service is in flux again, and the best we can do is keep our noses down until it’s over.’
Merrily said nothing. He meant the proposed merger of West Mercia Police with two other regions, creating a superforce supposedly more capable of tackling terrorism and major crime but probably in the process also saving the Home Office milllions of pounds by raising the bar and reducing aggravated burglary to a misdemeanour.
He held up a hand, a raspberry globule like a stigmata in the centre of the palm. He was a Roman Catholic, fond of symbolism.
‘A warning, Merrily. We’re becoming hopelessly politicized. It’s no longer about nailing villains to the wall.’
Merrily poured more coffee.
‘Can I take it Mr Khan is a practising Muslim?’
‘Practising? Bastard’s got it off to a fine art. See, these days, if there’s a Muslim who speaks out publicly against terrorism, as Raji’s been known to do – I’m a Brit, don’t I sound like a Brit? – some clowns tend to be less concerned about what else he’s into.’
‘And you think drugs are passing through the Royal Oak in significant quantities? I mean, what are we talking about – crack, speed, heroin … ?’
‘And acid,’ Bliss said. ‘Acid is back. Turn off your mind, relax and float off a sixth-floor balcony.’
‘Is all this widely known?’
‘What is widely known, but not widely highlighted, is that there are suddenly more drugs – by far – on the streets of these old market towns than we can hope to control. Coke and cannabis – recreational stuff for the middle classes – and cheap nasties for the kids. I expect Jane—’
‘I’d know.’
‘What they all say, Merrily. Moorfield … a famously liberal headteacher.’
‘School director.’
‘Eh?’
‘What he prefers to be called.’
‘God help us.’ Bliss took an angry bite out of his doughnut. ‘I mean, look at Pershore. You imagine anything like that happening in Pershore?’
‘Remind me.’
‘Lad called Chris Smith found shot through the head in his van in a car park near the river. Signs of torture. Mouth taped, cigarette burns. Other things I won’t describe with food around. Local CID didn’t know him – no form – but subsequently identified as quite a prominent local dealer, operating in the area for over a year.’
‘Linked to this Raji Khan, you think?’
‘We don’t know. Less than half an hour from the Oak. If you were to twist my arm … Aaah.’ Bliss made a frustrated hissing noise. ‘Lot of us coming round to thinking it should all be decriminalized, everything you can smoke, swallow or inject. We’re pouring billions down the pan, in man-hours and paperwork, and we’re losing the battle. And we’re bored with it and all the ancillary villainy by brain-dead street-trash supporting a thousand-a-week habit. Some point, we’re gonna back away, wash our hands, say fuck it.’
Bliss put up both hands, pushing it all away.
‘And I have told you nothing, Merrily. In fact, we haven’t even had this little meeting in the lovely old cloisters that your lot pinched off my lot in fifteen-whenever-it-was.’
‘Like that, huh?’
‘You’re a mate.’ Bliss beamed bleakly. ‘And I like to be there for me mates. And I hope you feel the same way.’
‘So what you’re saying … if I happen to come across anything in Wychehill that might be pertinent to the inquiries you’re not allowed to make…’
‘Not actively encouraged to make. Yes, that would be helpful. You priests, so intuitive. Even the Prods.’ Bliss tucked the remains of his doughnut into his mouth. ‘Just one thing – if you do happen to learn anything—’
‘Call you at home.’
‘Exactly. Or on the mobile, if urgent.’ He fingered up a bead of jam left on his plate and licked it off. ‘So … the good people of Wychehill are claiming that all the extra traffic and the nasty music has disturbed something a bit…’
Bliss waggled his fingers and made spooky woo, woo noises.
‘Sometimes, Merrily, I don’t know how you keep this up.’
It was very warm now, and the Cathedral green was smudged with people in T-shirts and summer frocks, some of them camped around the recently installed life-size bronze sculpture of a pensive Sir Edward Elgar gazing up at the tower.
A teenage girl sitting by the plinth was wearing cans and had an iPod in her lap. Walking back towards the gatehouse, Merrily thought it unlikely that the kid was listening to The Enigma Variations. If it had been Jane, not in a million years; to Jane, unless attitudes had changed, Elgar was just some pompous, imperialist old fart.
I’m not keeping up any more, that’s the trouble.
Merrily stopped in dismay, looking back at the Cathedral tower, under major repair again – scaffolding around it like a thousand interlinked Zimmer frames. And she was not yet forty, but she’d reached the age when ‘keeping up’ required consistent effort. Jane never bothered about staying ahead of the game, because Jane knew she was the game.
Scary. Everything was scary. Like the thought of a centralized police service directed by nervous politics. Merrily went across to the Hereford tourist information centre and picked up what she could on the Malverns before climbing the stone steps to the De
liverance office, where Sophie was putting the phone down.
‘Just came in to say that if there’s nobody I need to see, I think it might be best to go back to Wychehill. Get this over. Is that all right?’
‘Did Mr Bliss clarify things?’
‘Mr Bliss muddled things further, as Mr Bliss so loves to do.’
‘Merrily, three things … I resorted to the telephone, from which I learned that the Royal Oak used to be a favoured meeting place for rambling clubs because of its capacious car park and access to several footpaths. The Ramblers’ Association, needless to say, has lodged a complaint with the tourist authorities.’
‘It’s what they do. I don’t think I’m going to worry too much about the Royal Oak.’
‘I also checked with Worcester Deliverance. It appears that mysterious balls of light are not unknown in the Malverns. Usually connected with UFOs rather than anything psychic. Unexplained cyclists with lamps, however … that’s a new one.’
‘Oh, well. Thanks, Soph—’
‘And, thirdly, the Reverend Spicer rang. The public meeting in Wychehill planned for Wednesday … I’m sorry about this, Merrily.’
‘Called off? No, you wouldn’t be sorry about that, would you?’
‘Brought forward. To tomorrow evening.’
‘What?’
‘For reasons of discretion, according to Mr Spicer. They want to be sure there are no press people there. Or, indeed, employees of the local authorities or the tourist associations, who’ve been known to attend such meetings. He says it’s something that should be settled by local people … and you, of course.’
‘But I’ve got a christening in the afternoon!’
‘The part of the meeting relevant to you won’t start until eight-thirty.’
‘No, I mean, I still have people in Wychehill to see.’
Sophie sighed. ‘Sometimes I think you try too hard.’
‘You either do the job or you don’t. I’ll just have to go back tonight.’
‘Merrily…’ Sophie rocked back. ‘That’s ridiculous. You’ve been there twice already, you’ve been up since dawn … Have you even eaten?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Right,’ Sophie stood up. ‘I’ll take you.’
‘No, it’s—’
‘If you fall asleep at the wheel on the way back…’
‘I’ll ask Lol, OK? Give me a chance to see Jane before we go – I’m starting to feel like a part-time parent.’
Maybe it was what Bliss had suggested, about Jane and drugs. She rang Lol, and there was no answer.
11
Idyll Chipped
When Lol called back, Merrily was already in the car in the Bishop’s Palace courtyard. She switched off the engine. Lol was asking if she knew about Jane’s project.
Merrily sank back in her seat, twisting the rear-view mirror, smoothing out what could be a new line under her left eye.
Jane and project. Curious how sinister those words sounded together.
‘She said she was going to explain it all to you this morning,’ Lol said, ‘if you hadn’t had to dash off so early.’
‘If I hadn’t had to dash off so early, she’d have been at school, and she knows it.’ Merrily closed her eyes. ‘She’s never done that before. I don’t think.’
‘The exams are over…’
‘I don’t care, it’s a school day.’
‘Do you want to call in, if you get home earlyish?’
‘Thing is, I’m only coming home to change. I’ve got a job out near Malvern. For which I think I need to look like a minister of God.’
‘Oh. Well, she knows I’ll tell you. She just uses me as a filter. It’ll wait.’
‘No, it won’t,’ Merrily said. ‘I can tell it won’t.’ Bloody Jane. ‘Lol, I was wondering if you could come with me. Sophie wanted to drive … thinks I might fall asleep at the wheel. Actually, it’s a situation that might benefit from a second opinion, and I’m not sure Sophie’s would be the right one.’
‘I’m just a humble songwriter. Sure. Whatever.’
‘You undersell yourself. A humble songwriter who once did half a psychotherapy course. If you come over to the vicarage in, say, fifty-five minutes, I should be changed and ready to leave.’
Small silence. Through one of the Bishpal windows, she could see Gary, the Bishop’s West Highland terrier, standing on the back of a sofa waiting for the boss to come back from the cricket.
‘If I come round in, say, forty-five minutes,’ Lol said, ‘will you still be undressed?’
No time, of course, for that. Jane was home, anyway – quiet, obliging, and therefore suspicious. Sure, she’d get her own meal. No problem, you two get off to … wherever. Exhibiting no particular curiosity about what might be going down. Which meant that something was printed on her own agenda, in heavy type.
But worrying about Jane could eat up your life. And now, for the first time in many years, she was a problem shared … kind of. At least, Lol … well, at least they were officially an item at last, nothing clandestine any more.
On the road, Merrily driving the Volvo, he told her about Jane and Coleman’s Meadow. The ley line and the luxury executive homes. Something about all this seemed to bother him but, for once, Merrily couldn’t see a major problem.
‘Kid’s been involved in far worse things. I mean, I don’t like the idea of an ancient trackway to the top of Cole Hill being obliterated to accommodate luxury executive homes. We’ve had two new estates in eighteen months.’
‘Small starter homes would be OK?’ Lol said.
‘We need a few starter homes. I’m just not sure we need any more…’
‘Sedate, comfortable middle-class people?’
‘Let’s back away from that one for the moment. Whatever we need, there have to be better places to put them. OK, so Jane gets up a petition to the council. Fair enough. She’s seventeen. Next year she gets the vote.’
Lol polished the lenses of his brass-rimmed glasses on the bottom of his T-shirt.
‘Far be it from me, as a failed psychotherapist, to try to tell you about your daughter, but, like … do you think maybe it goes deeper? Bored with A levels, not lit-up by the idea of university, because everybody does that.’
‘You think she doesn’t want to leave home?’
‘Maybe she’s afraid to. Afraid that she’ll come back to find everything destroyed. Lost a lot, over the years. Her dad. Lucy…’
‘Mmm.’
Jane’s dad, her mother’s unfaithful husband. Dead in a car crash, but Jane had still been little then. When the formidable Lucy Devenish, the kid’s first real friend in Ledwardine, had been knocked off her moped and killed on the outskirts of the village, that was worse, an idyll badly chipped. Jane, town-raised, had bonded with the countryside very quickly, thanks to Lucy and her rural folklore and her – OK – possible paganism.
And it was in Lucy’s old shop, Ledwardine Lore, that Jane had been the first of them to encounter a damaged musician, trying to reassemble his life after a criminally unjust court conviction, a family breakdown, a bad time in a psychiatric hospital. So many daughters could barely tolerate their mothers’ boyfriends, but Jane had virtually engineered this relationship. Lol putting down a deposit on Lucy’s cottage in Church Street, just across from the vicarage … that was the final piece in Jane’s mosaic.
And Lucy Devenish was still a presence for all three of them.
Lucy’s primary raison d’être had been the defence of old Ledwardine against misguided incomers and the slashing scythe of crass development.
Uh-oh.
Merrily glanced at Lol, trying to look like a respectable companion for a vicar in a dark jacket over a dark T-shirt with no motif. Jane and Lol were, in their own way, also an item. Jane knew how to work him.
‘So the imminent destruction of Coleman’s Meadow and the ley line … you think she sees that as something that would’ve sent Lucy ballistic. What’s she going to do, do you think?’
‘She wanted to know who to complain to.’
‘Councillor Pierce?’
‘What else could I say? She’d only find out somewhere else.’
‘Well. I instinctively don’t like Lyndon Pierce much…’
‘But at this moment you could almost feel sorry for him, right?’
‘It’s going to be an experience for him, certainly.’
Merrily drove into Ledbury, with its oak-framed market hall, its clock and its sunny old bricks. Last town before the Malvern Hills, the eastern ramparts of Here-fordshire reflecting the Black Mountains of Wales in the west. Between these purple-shadowed walls, the county was a twilit, peripheral place.
Normally, she liked that. The out-of-timeness of it.
Bloody Jane.
* * *
The Malverns were so familiar, an eleven-mile ripple on the horizon, that it was easy to miss how strange they were. They were sudden hills, a surprise happening in an otherwise eventless landscape
Driving in from a different side tonight, Merrily watched the scenery acquiring scaled-down Alpine dimensions: sunlit, serrated ridge, inky valley. Eleven roller-coaster miles with a long history of recreation, ever since they’d been reserved as a hunting ground by the conquering Normans.
Never more famous, however, than in Victorian days when the healing waters of one-time holy wells had briefly been more sought-after than champagne and Great Malvern had become a fashionable resort.
The guidebook she’d bought in Hereford and checked out over tea explained how these hills had been given special protection, for one reason or another, throughout recorded history.
But it hadn’t stopped the quarrying.
‘Apparently, George Bernard Shaw remarked that so much stone was being taken away that the Malvern Hills were in danger of becoming the Malvern Flats.’
‘But they’ve stopped it now?’ Lol said.
‘Not that long ago.’ Merrily slowed, approaching a green-bearded cliff face. ‘But at least quarrying’s good for concealed car parks.’
A segment like a slice of layered cake had been cut out of the hillside, and someone had built a shambling stone house on raised ground at the apex. A house which, at some stage, had grown into a country pub. Lol inspected it with no discernible awe.