by Phil Rickman
Maybe the sight of Lol through the window had been a disappointment. If he’d seen Merrily here, alone, would he have come to the door? It was a disturbing thought, and something even more disturbing occurred to Lol when he was back behind the computer.
How sure was he that it had, in fact, been Dexter? Hadn’t got a very good look at him in the kitchen earlier. Suppose, this had been the other one, Darrin? The bad guy. How alike the cousins were in appearance he had no idea, but he knew they were about the same age. The lower lip might have been exaggerated by being pressed against a wet window.
What must it be like here for Merrily now that Jane was away at weekends? For a house right at the heart of the village, it was surprising how isolated the vicarage seemed in conditions like these.
Something must be done.
Nothing, however, he could do tonight.
Lol sat down and rang Canon Jeavons back.
The lounge door was half-open and she could hear Bliss on the phone. He sounded irritated. ‘Yes, I will. I already had. I’ll ask her now.’
When he brought Merrily in, they sat this time at the table near the window, either side of the unlit Victorian oil lamp.
‘The Ice Maiden’s been called in,’ Bliss said. ‘Perfect night, eh?’
‘Annie Howe? Is she coming here?’
‘God forbid. No, she’s on another one. This, er… this is something and nothing, Merrily, but you might be able to help us.’
‘I heard you were looking quite seriously for Natalie Craven,’ Merrily said.
‘And where did you hear that?’
‘She works here, Frannie, where else would I hear it? And she seems to be missing.’
‘Yes, she is.’
‘And you’re looking for her.’
‘Yes, we are.’
‘And her daughter?’ Would he know about Clancy being at Danny Thomas’s?
‘Her, too,’ Bliss said.
‘And the van that was set on fire was originally Natalie’s, I believe.’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘You don’t want to talk about this, do you?’
‘No, I don’t. Unless you can tell me where she is.’
‘No, I can’t. However, I do get the feeling that you know a lot more about her than you’re saying.’
He leaned back. ‘Oh?’
‘Like that her real name’s not Natalie Craven.’
‘And what would her name be, Merrily?’
‘Brigid?’
She could tell by the absence of reaction that Bliss was very surprised.
‘You want to tell me about it?’ she said.
‘You little bugger,’ Bliss said. ‘Who else knows?’
‘Who else knows what?’
‘Right, Merrily,’ Bliss said, ‘we’ll deal with this. But first let’s get the other matter out of the way. Before Annie Howe arose from her coffin, I’d already heard from Melvyn at headquarters. The custody sergeant? Feller I consulted about your friend… forgotten the bugger’s name, now…?’
‘Dexter Harris.’
‘Dexter. And his cousin, Darrin. Not Harris, Hook. Darrin Hook.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Dead,’ Bliss said.
‘What?’ Full-beam headlights blasted the window. An engine was revving on the car park.
‘First snow casualty of the night. Run over by a van.’
‘Where?’
‘Ah,’ Bliss said, as Mumford came in.
‘Dr Grace, boss. Would like to see you.’
‘Send him in. Excuse me a minute, would you, Merrily, been waiting for this.’
Merrily was half out of her chair when Mumford said, ‘On site, boss.’
‘Bugger.’ Bliss stood up. ‘All right, tell him I’ll be there in five mins.’ He nodded at the lights outside the window. ‘For me?’
‘When you’re ready.’
Merrily put herself between Bliss and the door. ‘What is this, Frannie? What happened to Darrin Hook?’
‘Look, Merrily, I’ve just gorra— Can you—? All right, do you want to come with me? We can talk on the way.’
‘Well… OK.’ She stepped back and, pulling on her coat, followed him out into the lobby, where he was stopped by a lanky detective in red Gore-Tex.
‘This bloke Berrows, boss.’
‘You’ve talked to him?’
‘Not happy about him at all. Let us go through the house, no problem, but he’d got another guy there with him — Thomas — old hippy type, said he was on all-night snow-clearing. Said he’d been clearing Berrows’s track. Tractor outside, fair enough, but something didn’t feel right. Would’ve liked to bring him in, really…’
‘Not yet. Not while there’s a chance she might come home. You sure you checked all the buildings?’
‘I’m satisfied she’s not there, boss, but Mal and Ewan are watching the entrance, in case.’
‘As long as the bastards don’t fall asleep.’
‘They fall asleep in this, boss, they’ll never wake up.’
‘They’ll certainly wish they hadn’t,’ Bliss said. ‘Come along, Merrily.’
Outside, new snow was falling in a careless, disdainful way, like the contents of God’s shredder. The back door of a police Range Rover was hanging open. ‘After you,’ Bliss said.
She didn’t move, both boots in a cake of brown slush. ‘What happened to Darrin Hook?’
‘All right.’ He sighed. ‘What’s more interesting is where it happened. He was found on the A465 Hereford to Abergavenny road, halfway down the hill towards Allensmore.’ He glanced at her. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m sorry—?’
‘The proximity of a bus shelter leads Melvyn to think we may be looking at the exact spot where Darrin’s little brother died. You coming?’
37
The Schizoid Border
The lights flickered again, the third time, and there was a crackle on the phone. In this area it was always the same with sudden heavy snow or any kind of extreme weather, including heat. The power lines and the phone lines were badly maintained, compared with the cities, and at some point they would go down and the centuries would drop away.
‘Black shuck, skriker, barguest, trash,’ Canon Jeavons said. It was like an incantation.
‘Regional names for the phantom black dog,’ Lol guessed.
‘You dealing with archetypes. Heavy tribal stuff. The twelve priests, the snuff-box… and, of course, the black dog… The black dog is known all over these islands, and he’s linked strongly to the landscape. He’s out there.’
The lights dipped again, the reduced wattage reducing colours, giving the scullery the appearance of an engraving. Static cackled in the phone. Lol looked across at the window, convinced that he could still see the smeary impression of a man’s face on the glass.
He was recalling Nick Drake’s song ‘Black-Eyed Dog’, about the personalized depression at the door that had haunted him to death.
‘Let’s talk about the black dog,’ Jeavons said. ‘What is he? The shadow of fate? And why a dog?’
‘Because a dog follows you?’
‘Haw! Correct. The black dog that follows a family through the generations. And is always out there.’
Nick Drake had sung of the black-eyed dog that knew his name. ‘Only, this one’s described as demonic,’ Lol said.
‘A word open to many interpretations. I would say they are… representative of a layer of existence that it would be unwise to trust. I believe these images exist, I believe we should accept that but never attempt to relate to them. For there can be no productive relationship.’
‘Unless you’re interested in knowing about the imminence of death,’ Lol said.
Bliss said to Merrily, ‘You don’t have to look.’
Sebbie Dacre’s body was in a canvas shelter isolated on an island of white in a choppy sea of slush. There was industrial noise, industrial light and exhaust fumes coming from three sides. Nothing was silent, except for Sebbie Dacre in his s
helter and the ruched and fissured rock face behind it, feathered and tufted with fresh snow.
And she did have to look. Because Jane had. Because Jane had been the first, after the foxes and the badgers, to discover this. She had to know what Jane had seen.
Two arc lights lit the area, powered by a small, chattering generator. Bliss lifted the canvas flap.
‘Don’t throw up here.’
The dead man’s head sat on the corded collar of a withered old Barbour. His face, upturned to the ceiling of the shelter, was like the inside of a sliced tomato. The canvas also covered an ugly archipelago of blotchy things in the snow.
Enough. She turned away. Bliss let the flap fall.
‘From the second ring of tape up to the hedge, it’s all but useless,’ one of the Durex suits said. ‘Obviously, the fire brigade didn’t help, trampling all over the perimeter, dragging bloody hoses. That whole area, up to the hedge, that’s a complete write-off.’
‘You’ll get there, Jacko.’ Bliss turned to Merrily. ‘This is Jacko the Soco.’
‘He just likes saying that,’ Jacko said. ‘Francis, I’ve sent the first set of stills and the video down to the hotel. You have got a laptop over there? Hey up, here he is.’
A man with a beard came over, scraping back the hood of his coverall. ‘Francis, you little turd! Had a glorious long weekend planned, starting with me and my nursie tucked up by the fire with balloon glasses of Remy and a DVD of The Blair Witch Project.’
‘It’s a let-down, Billy,’ Bliss said. ‘You were spared a lot of disappointment. Go on, surprise me — give me a time of death to within two weeks.’
The pathologist unzipped his coverall and pulled out a Mars Bar. ‘Blood sugar comes first this time of night, matey.’
Merrily slid into the shadows. It was how they handled it — almost everything that didn’t involve young children. Like wartime, she supposed. Frannie Bliss and Dr Grace lived in a permanent war zone, littered with hard jokes and Mars wrappers.
There would be a similar scene at Allensmore, if more subdued.
It was a big van carrying carpets, Bliss had said, that ran over Darrin Hook. The driver said he hadn’t seen him. Which was understandable, as Darrin was already lying in the road amidst a lot of snow, his head two feet from the central white lines. In these conditions, with all the warnings and diversions, traffic was sparse, even on a main road.
Darrin had been sharing a rented flat with another bloke in a big former hotel near Wormelow, a few miles from where he was found dead. He might have been walking home or attempting to hitch-hike. There had been a half-empty bottle of Scotch in Darrin’s jacket pocket, and the body smelled strongly of alcohol.
‘Merrily, he was a scrote,’ Bliss had said in the Range Rover. ‘A toe-rag. A hopeless case. He got pissed, and disorientated. He fell into the road. Fellers like that, it happens to them all too frequently.’
‘At exactly the same spot his brother died?’
‘Life, Merrily, is full of accidental irony.’
‘He killed himself, didn’t he? He drank a lot of whisky and then he lay down in the road and waited for a lorry at exactly the same spot—’
‘As he doesn’t seem to have left a note, we may never know. But he’d been known to us for many years and appeared to have had connections with what we grandly refer to as the Hereford drug trade. So the Ice Maiden’s looking at this more closely and wondering if you might know of any reason why Darrin might have been the victim of an intentional hit-and-run — on the basis that the carpet-van driver was not the first to squash his innards. That’s the trouble with Melvyn — on a long night in the custody suite, he’ll talk to strange women.’
‘She’s ruling out suicide?’
‘Your theory’s unlikely to have occurred to her. Perhaps you should talk to her. Sorry about that.’
On the edge of the disused quarry, Merrily turned her face up to the spattering sky. Darrin Hook was dead, and the location of his death linked it firmly to another death, seventeen years ago. And the chances were that Darrin, whatever kind of human detritus he’d been, would still be alive if some meddling priest had not suggested digging the whole thing up again by holding a Requiem Eucharist for Roland Hook in a — get this — an attempt to cure his cousin Dexter’s asthma.
Healing and Deliverance: a creeping neo-medieval madness inside the collapsing ruins of the Church of England. She was feeling almost sick with self-disgust.
She wondered if Alice knew yet.
‘Give me that again,’ Bliss said to the pathologist.
‘I’m not saying it’s a fact,’ Dr Grace told him, ‘I’m saying it’s worth looking at. Won’t know a thing for certain till I get this chap back to the slab.’
‘But it’s probable, right?’
‘It’s possible.’ Grace looked up at the face of Stanner Rocks. ‘It’s a substantial drop, but it’s not exactly Beachy Head, is it? And he did fall into thickish snow. Now — and I believe one of your more athletic people has some of this on video from the top of the rocks — there were signs of disturbance. As if our friend tried desperately to clutch at outcrops and projections on his way down. Which would have slowed his descent considerably. Therefore — bottom line — broken bones likely, death far from inevitable. Could be he was awfully unlucky and his bonce bounced off a sharp rock at the bottom — you’ll have a better idea of that when we move him and they can have a good sift around. But it very well may not be. Extensive facial injuries, even allowing for scavengers. That’s as far I’m prepared to go.’
‘The alternative being that he was clobbered before he fell. That’s what you’re saying?’
‘I’m not saying. But bear it in mind.’
‘Oh, I will, I will.’ Bliss was already heading for the Range Rover, lifting a hand to the pathologist. ‘Nighty-night, Billy. Do a good one.’
Merrily was ringing Alice Meek on her mobile and not getting an answer.
It seemed to be some kind of guilt trip. Jeavons seemed to think that, having given Merrily some hasty and unreliable advice on the Harris/Hook issue, he had ground to make up.
He’d been researching intensively in his library and on the Internet, like it had become his responsibility to dispense wisdom on the Stanner case, details of which he’d gathered greedily from Lol. Family history, tribal traditions, race memories, curses — Jeavons’s primary area of operation. Now he was retired, he said, it gave him a buzz to work all night.
‘Does the black dog ever kill sheep?’ Lol asked. ‘Conan Doyle had his Hound ripping a man’s throat out.’
‘Seems unlikely, doesn’t it, if the black dog is just a walking portent? And yet livestock are often known to have been attacked in areas supposed to be haunted by them. We may wonder if living canines, from foxes to domestic dogs, might in some way be influenced by the proximity of such entities.’
‘Animals becoming possessed?’
‘Another difficult word. Perhaps. In a way. I like you, Lol, you don’t make light of such things, nor give the impression that you consider me to be mad and dangerous.’
‘Oh, you’re dangerous,’ Lol said. ‘But then, so are psychiatrists and psychotherapists.’
Jeavons did his haw haw laugh. ‘And we share jargon with these professions — no coincidence. They are the new shamans, the smoke-and-mirror profession. The necklace of skulls under the suits and the white coats.’
‘The twelve priests and the snuff-box,’ Lol said. ‘What’s your take on that?’
‘Archetypes, too, though less common than the black dog. The twelve priests represent the twelve apostles, and occasionally there may be mention of a thirteenth, the Man himself. This is widespread in folk-lore. And in fact the Vaughan exorcism itself is replicated further up the Welsh Border. At Hyssington, near Montgomery, we have a wicked squire who terrorized the area after his death. Like Vaughan, he appears in the local church as a bull. In this same church, the ubiquitous posse of parsons is waiting, with lighted candles. Like Vaugh
an, the squire gets reduced to something that can be accommodated in a snuffbox.’
‘So what’s that saying about the Welsh Border?’
‘Borders are psychic pipelines,’ Jeavons said. ‘What you have here is a river into which streams of belief flow, from both England and Wales. This is a particularly interesting part because of the way Wales and England seem to intermingle. The original boundary was the Dark Age earthwork, Offa’s Dyke, so how come we have an English town — Kington — which, according to my map, is on the Welsh side and a few miles away, a Welsh town — Presteigne — on the English side?’
‘Schizophrenic,’ Lol said.
‘You have it! The Schizoid Border. Hey, we cookin’ here, son. Consider the symptoms of the condition: delusion, hallucination… loss of identity, the withdrawal into a fantasy world.’
‘The landscape of the mind is more important than the outside world and it becomes impossible to distinguish between them.’
Lol thought about isolated communities caught between two cultures, emotionally, politically and linguistically. Never sure where they stood in big national conflicts — like the Wars of the Roses, in which Thomas Vaughan was involved on both sides at different times.
The Schizoid Border.
‘It’s all bollocks, of course,’ Lol said. ‘You can make anything fit into psychology. It’s why I packed it in and went back to writing little songs.’
But Jeavons wasn’t letting go.
‘Let’s take this a little further. Localization of archetypes, OK? The appearance of the spectral bull up at Hyssington is immediately put into a local context — Oh, it must be the ghost of old so-and-so, he was a bad-tempered guy, he must have turned into a bull when he died. But — hold on here — as recently as the 1980s, a ghostly bull is seen in Kington Church by a woman visiting the area… whose name happens to be Vaughan. An indication that such phenomena can actually become personalized.’
‘Yeah, but Thomas Vaughan doesn’t seem to have been evil or tyrannical. So what’s the evil that needs to be dealt with by this apostolic assembly of priests?’
‘Can’t tell you. The obvious target might be paganism, which I would guess survived in this area well beyond medieval times. The Christian Church lures the spirit of paganism into a holy place and relentlessly reads the scriptures at it until it becomes exhausted and shrivels into insignificance. It may simply be the spirit of paganism, or something more sinister…’