by Phil Rickman
‘Sod off,’ Terry Stagg said, going not quite red.
‘Boss.’ Bliss relaxed. As best he could these days.
***
He stood fingering the loose change and the car keys in his pockets, unhappy about the way Annie Howe’s uncharacteristic professional restraint had been spotted. Had they also noticed how readily she’d trusted him to handle a major inquiry of national interest?
‘Karen?’
On their own now in his office, Terry Stagg heading back to the crime scene.
‘Mmm?’
‘Karen, look, I’m gonna come over all pathetic now. Is there any kind of rumour going round? About me.’
‘What? About being gay?’ Karen grinned, then saw his face. ‘Sorry, boss, I’m not sure what you’re asking me. If you mean Kirsty… a wonky marriage’s hardly got novelty value in this place.’
‘Nothing else? I apologize for sounding girlie.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Well?’
‘Unless I’ve failed to pick up on something, I’d say the pressure of a high-profile murder investigation, combined with your domestic issues, is making you just a bit paranoid.’
‘So nothing?’
‘Nothing. Frannie, I’d know. And if I knew, I’d tell you.’
Should’ve kept his gob shut. She’d be curious now. And Kirsty… Kirsty still knew something. But from whom? Who’d found out about him and Annie and passed it on?
‘Things’ll get better, boss,’ Karen said.
‘Yeh,’ Bliss said, as Gwyn Adamson, office manager on the Mansel inquiry, came over with an envelope.
‘Couple of things, Francis. One’s an eyewitness report from a petrol station at Leominster. Bloke apparently was dropped from a car and then escorted by two men into a four-by-four. As he was getting in, someone pulled a bag over his head.’
‘When was this?’
‘Last Wednesday night. Two nights before Mansel was killed. No indication of duress. Witness thought it was a joke. However this…’ Gwyn handed Bliss the envelope ‘… is more interesting. Came in the lunchtime post, just addressed to Police, Hereford. Could be a crank job, but…’
Bliss accepted a folded sheet of A4. Computer printout.
The word BLOOD all over it.
12
Act of Sacrifice
THESE WERE TWO pains that shewed in the blessed head: the first wrought to the drying while his body was moist, and that other slow, with blowing of wind from without, that dryed him more…
The sky, through the scullery window, was scored with raw pink cloud. Easter was coming, and Easter Week at the end of March would sometimes mean snow. Nobody here would be surprised after what last winter had hurled at them.
…and pained with cold, more than my heart could hold… and The shewing of Christ’s pains filled me full of pains.
Merrily folded down the corner of the page, shut the paperback. It was still scary. It had the feel of reportage. Informed, forensic, almost dispassionate reportage. Nothing quite like it before or since.
There’d been a few blank faces when she’d brought it out in church yesterday, Palm Sunday.
This had been after the evening meditation, attended by the more thoughtful, committed parishioners, all ten of them.
‘Julian of Norwich.’ Holding up the paperback. ‘A woman. Mother Julian. A nun. An anchoress, or recluse, and a mystic. In 1373, when she was just thirty, she became very ill and nearly died, and that was when she experienced the series of visions she discusses here.’
Or fever dreams, hallucinations, whatever.
‘Leaving us with this profoundly, harrowing, gritty account of what crucifixion must really have been like. Which, erm… I was thinking we could use as a basis for the Good Friday meditation.’
A suitably sombre prelude to the proposed vigil in the church through Saturday night to Easter Day. Amanda Rubens, the bookseller – looking a little nunlike herself in a long black dress – had probably spoken for most of them.
‘And you really want us to dwell on wounds and killing… exactly a week after what happened at Oldcastle Farm?’
It had been all over Ledwardine by the time she’d arrived home from Brecon. Ten miles was nothing in the country. Ten miles was somewhere you could see, across the fields, between the trees.
Although she’d never met or heard of Mansel Bull, she knew a relative, James Bull-Davies, last remnant of the Ledwardine squirearchy. And Gomer Parry had once dug a pond for Mansel. And Jim Prosser in the Eight Till Late, his brother-in-law had had a sheepdog pup off Mansel less than a year ago. Merrily’s own grandad had farmed at Mansel Lacy after which the dead man, apparently, had been named. Connections everywhere: an act of sudden, blinding violence ricocheting like a pinball around the countryside, setting off vibrating lights, jarring the whole table.
The Sunday papers had pictures of a red-brick farmhouse on the edge of an orchard above the Wye and a smiling thickset man leaning on a gate.
This morning, a new For Sale sign had appeared in Church Street to join the existing four. All of them reactions to the winter and the fatal flooding which had turned the church into a no-go area on Christmas Day. The mopping and the mourning into New Year, when the snow came.
And then the bitter winds, driving the sleet, heralding the murder of Mansel Bull at Oldcastle, whose high chimneys you could see from Cole Hill in the lifting of the morning mist.
Some weeks, during the frozen months, there had been no actual meditation in church. Too cold in here, even with all the heat on. They’d just sat around, in their coats, and talked. Ledwardine shivering in chill fatalism, and the village still looked raw and flaking. Not much energy here, except around The Court, where Ward Savitch hosted upmarket action weekends and shooting parties to reawaken hunter-gatherer instincts in men from Off.
‘Obviously we should do it,’ Gus Staines had said.
Gus was a plump little woman with a semi-permanent goblin smile. She’d come up from London in January to join Amanda, her long-time partner, who had been making an adequate and decorous living here in the New Cotswolds… until the weekend visitors began to be repelled by the snow and the electricity kept failing, and the shops didn’t get supplied so often.
‘We’ve all gone soft,’ Gus said stoutly. ‘We should throw ourselves into the full horror of the Crucifixion. The violence and the misery. Because that’s the reality of what people do to each other still. This is not the time to turn away.’
Merrily had glanced over to where Jane was sitting on the edge of the circle. Jane had been to the meditation most weeks since Christmas. Not saying much, which was probably just as well. She didn’t say anything now, but she looked mildly interested. And then…
‘It’s a magical ritual,’ she’d said last night. ‘You’re playing with the Big Forces here. Community shaman.’
‘Dear God.’
‘Resurrection of Christ, resurrection of Ledwardine. Correct?’
The kid was sitting, as she often did, on a cushion at the edge of the hearth with the reddening log fire behind her, Ethel the black cat on her knees, the eyes of both glittering like LEDs.
‘The role of the shaman being to lead the tribe out of the dark. Like, out of the tunnel of winter onto the sunlit hillside of spring. Pain and death, a vigil through midnight and then, boom… catharsis… Easter!’
‘Sod off, Jane.’
‘You’re going into denial already?’
‘Not exactly denial…’
‘Easter was the most profound of all seasonal festivals way before Christianity. Even the Last Supper has pagan origins. And, like… I think you said Julian of Norwich actually wished for her illness… invoking mortality in the hope of rebirth? Experiencing those visions in like the delirium of near-death?’
Merrily sighed.
‘It’s all totally valid,’ Jane said. ‘The village has lost its mojo. You need to kick-start the ancient engines. And some asses.’
Jane looking down, slowly massaging Ethe
l under the chin. Ancient engines. They’d been here before. The creaking and stirring of old Ledwardine, spiritual sap seeping eerily into centuries-dead oak timbers. Jane’s favourite picture of herself was the one taken by Eirion, her boyfriend, in Coleman’s Meadow, bare arms raised to the sun. Handmaiden of the Goddess.
‘Needs to be seriously harrowing, Mum. Like, when a place gets into disaster mode, expecting the worst all the time, the worst just seems to go on happening. Unless you step in with an act of sacrifice.’
‘Jane, how can I put this? We don’t actually want to scare people?’
Although we do, obviously, Huw Owen said now in Merrily’s head, watching a bulb swing like some sinister censer.
Merrily had spent an hour underlining passages in Revelations of Divine Love. Normally on a Monday afternoon, she’d have driven into Hereford to go through the deliverance diary with Sophie, but the Monday before Easter was for planning and organizing the weekend ahead.
There was also a parish council meeting on Wednesday. Uncle Ted, senior churchwarden, had a proposal to create a permanent café in the church. Turn it into the heart of the village again, he said. Also make some money. So what would happen to the silence? Where would you go when you needed to be alone with something that didn’t judge, didn’t question, didn’t ask you if you wanted to buy a raffle ticket?
Merrily looked up, out of the scullery window at the lesions in the sky. The sky was momentarily blurred. Maybe she needed glasses. A middle-age thing. It would come, sooner rather than later. Now she had an adult daughter. God…
The phone rang. She shut her eyes for a second before picking up.
‘All right, lass?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
Hadn’t spoken to him since Saturday morning. A sparse breakfast, just the two of them, Syd Spicer having left silently before first light, as they’d both known he would.
‘Just had a call.’
‘What did he want?’
Merrily watched the daffodils still huddled in their buds. You didn’t have to be psychic.
‘He’s laughing. “Huwie,” he says, “just a slight problem here, mate, a mere technicality…”’
‘A mere technicality. He said that?’
‘And laughed.’
She could hear the laughter. It would be artificial. She felt for a cigarette, still staring out of the window. Under the winter-bleached church wall, banks of snowdrops were only now beginning to droop next to the emerging daffs.
‘And what was the technicality?’
‘If a man feels… let’s say oppressed by the perceived proximity of someone who’s passed on, someone who, in life, was known to him but who was, shall we say, a flawed person, how is it best to get this presence off the premises?’
‘Requiem eucharist? You might expect him to know that.’
‘He said there could be complications. Here comes the technicality. He suspects there could be what he describes as strongly negative energy behind the manifestations.’
‘Plural?’
‘Plural, aye. Suggests a chronic case.’
‘Is this one of his, erm, flock?’
‘Declines to be specific. But why else the secrecy? I reminded him I wasn’t his spiritual director. I said Hereford Diocese wasn’t my patch, I said he needed to talk to somebody else.’
‘And he said…?’
‘He said he thought that when you were describing the case of Mr Joy you hadn’t finished the story. He wanted to know what nobody else had the nous to ask about. What you did afterwards to keep Mr Joy out of your life.’
‘I see. That negative.’
‘Cry for help, Merrily.’
‘If that’s a cry for help, it’s pitched too high for my hearing. Look…’ She pulled the last cigarette out of the packet. ‘I was new to it then. I was very scared. I’d listened to an old wives’ tale from an old woman who’d dabbled in areas I was supposed to abhor, and…’
‘And it worked.’
‘Something worked. Well… so far.’
‘It worked because you did it in the right spirit.’
‘You could argue…’ Merrily stared at the church wall, with all its lichens and life forms ‘… that the right spirit would be not to have done it at all. The purer soul does it with considered prayer. This was… something else.’
The cold finger was on Merrily’s spine. Up sprang the spidery figure of a creepy old woman in a care home whose name was Anthea but who only answered to Athena.
‘And you told him, did you?’
‘What I knew of it. Threw in a couple of defensive penta-grams, point up. See what reaction I got to that. He said nowt, seemed to be writing it down.’
Merrily remembered discussing Athena’s advice with Huw afterwards. How it bordered on what Jane would call magical ritual, and Huw had asked her if she realized how many so-called magical rituals had come out of the medieval Catholic Church.
She wondered if Syd had noted what she’d told Huw’s students about not necessarily analysing everything in depth.
That’s why we have the rituals and the liturgy… just do it.
Still not sure how true that was.
‘How does this feel to you?’ Merrily asked.
‘Feels wobbly. Temporary. I don’t like it, but if the bugger won’t come clean…’
‘It’s personal, isn’t it? It’s him.’
‘Or connected to him.’
‘Is he going to come back to you afterwards? Tell you – man to man – if it worked? Because he isn’t going to come to me, is he?’
‘Happen you should smother your pride and give him a call.’
‘I haven’t got his new number.’
‘I have it here,’ Huw said. ‘Give him a day or so, then call him. I think it were bloody hard for him to give away much as he did. I reckon he’s in a bad way.’
‘Thanks,’ Merrily said.
13
Killing Fields
THE CORE SQUAD, in the CID room in front of the box. All the blinds up on a heavyweight early-evening sky. A gathering dismay in the room. Bliss howling.
‘What are these bastards trying to do? It’s like it’s been orchestrated.’
He’d come in halfway through the replay of the national news. He sat down, shaken.
‘How far it was planned is of no great importance at the present time,’ Annie Howe said. ‘It’s happening, and we need to respond to it.’
Annie had returned in a rare sparkling mood, the Worcester jury having come back unexpectedly with a nice result: two out of three guilty on the stabbing. The DCI’s fizz had survived the national TV news, but the extended version on Midlands Today was something else.
‘… poisoned our towns.’
On the screen, some fat bastard bulging out of his tweeds. ‘… and now it’s overflowing into rural areas. All the time, we see strangers in old vans, clearly up to no good, but we know we’re wasting our time reporting it, because it’ll be ignored… simply ignored.’
Cut to camel-coat-and-headscarf woman by a five-barred gate.
‘Obvious why they don’t care. Coming out here’s jolly time-consuming, and everybody knows they can meet their arrest and conviction targets far quicker and more cheaply in the towns.’
‘Trouble is, she’s not far wrong there, is she?’ Bliss said.
‘Though we won’t be expressing those sentiments outside of this room, will we, Francis?’ Annie Howe said quietly, not looking at him. ‘Karen, run the item again from the beginning, would you, please? We need to know who they all are.’
Karen Dowell played about with the remote, brought up the current Midlands Today Barbie-and-Ken presentation team.
Man: ‘With the hunt for the brutal killer of a Herefordshire farmer in its third day, a rural pressure group has been accusing police of failing the countryside.’
Woman: ‘And, as Mandy Patel reports, the attack’s been spear-headed by the brother of the murdered man, who says West Mercia Police repeatedly ignore
d reports of intruders on their land.’
Familiar shots of the middle Wye Valley looking bare and wind-scoured. Patel’s voice describing how the mood in Herefordshire had swung from horror to rage, as the vision cut to an obvious protest meeting. Bunch of people at a raised table, draped in banners. Apart from Sollers Bull, Bliss recognized nobody.
Annie said to Karen, ‘Who’s the man in the red waistcoat?’
‘Can’t remember his name, ma’am, but I’m pretty sure he’s the county chairman-elect of the NFU. And the guy next to him…’
‘Is Lord Walford?’
Karen nodded.
Bliss said, ‘Who the fuck’s Lord Walford?’
‘Old Tory peer, boss. And Sollers Bull’s father-in-law.’
‘Also a former member of the police authority,’ Annie said, ‘Where’s this happening, exactly?’
Walls of light wood, spotlights from exposed rafters. Pine tables.
‘The restaurant at Sollers Bull’s farm shop,’ Karen said. ‘Out on the Leominster Road. My mum works there, part-time. Got to say I’ve been around here all my life, ma’am, but there’s quite a few people I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.’
‘Yes, well, me neither,’ Annie Howe said. ‘Which possibly lends credence to their claim that it’s a national movement.’
‘Freeze it,’ Bliss said. ‘There – isn’t that one of those ageing boy racers from The Octane Show?’
‘Smiffy Gill,’ Terry Stagg said. ‘Lives just over in Wales.’
‘Just the kind of flash twat who’d throw his driving gloves into the ring for this shite,’ Bliss said.
Above the panel of nobs at the raised table, a sign, green on white, covered half the wall.
COUNTRYSIDE DEFIANCE
The camera pulling back from the sign, the reporter saying, in voice-over, ‘The organizers insist this is not a spin-off from the Countryside Alliance but a new response to what they say is an urgent situation.’
‘Hold it there,’ Annie Howe said. ‘Man at the back, black hair, receding jawline. Tim… Tim somebody. Member of the police committee.’
‘Who’s he supporting?’ Bliss said.