by Phil Rickman
‘What’s the matter?’ Annie said.
Chris says you consistently neglected your wife, Inspector.
‘Francis…?’
She moved away from him. She’d put her nightdress back on, all creased. She was his superior. Better-educated, better-connected, better-looking. Coat hanger with tits? Was Stagg blind?
‘We said when this began that there’d be no analysis,’ Annie said softly. ‘One day at a time. We also said that.’
But there were no days, only nights. Cover of darkness. Cover of Christmas. It should have been his emptiest Christmas ever. Instead, he’d spent the days in work, the nights with Annie. In January they were spending two nights a week together, one at her place, one at his – Annie parking around the corner, walking, all muffled up, to the back door. We’re all right, she’d said, as long as nobody finds out. As long as we’re never seen together. As long as we don’t go out together. As long as we don’t ever do that thing where you drive a hundred miles into Wales or somewhere and have lunch and walk by the river, because there’s always some bloody copper, who used to be in this division, on holiday.
Bliss cleared his throat. Badly wanting to tell Annie about Kirsty, get her input, see if she had any idea at all who might’ve rumbled them. But Annie’s job was as important to her as his was to him. If he told her, she’d restrict their meetings, and he couldn’t stand that, because this was the only thing preventing him exploding into gases and shrapnel.
‘Right, then, Francis…’
In the glacial light from the street lamps he saw that she’d arranged two pillows against the bedhead, sitting back into them, a nipple’s areola vanishing back into the white cotton. Reaching to the bedside table and finding her glasses and putting them on to watch him across the post-midnight greyness. Return of the Ice Maiden.
‘Tell me about Sollers Bull,’ she said.
Gut feelings were no longer encouraged. No place for them in teamwork. Even Bliss was suspicious of gut feelings. Other people’s, anyway.
‘See, even when I was talking to him, I could feel it. I could see him in a pair of them green nylon overalls that farmers wear for mucky jobs.’
‘Pulling them off, I suppose, as he ran through the fields into the headlights of our correspondent and his girlfriend.’
‘I wanted to go back with a warrant to search his house. I wanted to talk to his hidden wife. Maybe she knows, maybe she doesn’t or maybe she just suspects.’
‘Stay away from her, Francis. Until you have something stronger, anyway. The bottom line is… he has an alibi. Several.’
‘The staff at his caff? It’s still borderline. Time of death’s not that certain, and it’s not that far away. You didn’t see the rage in him. Something about it that was wrong for the situation… skewed.’
Anger was always useful for concealing a hole where grief ought to be, but it was also a good outlet for the hyper excitement that lived in you for hours after you’d done something enormous.
‘I was thinking at first that if there was no real pain there it was because half of him’d be well chuffed at getting the farm.’
‘Perhaps that’s all it was,’ Annie said. ‘We don’t even know he didn’t get on with his brother. OK, different kinds of men – the traditionalist and the young progressive. University education, big ideas.’
‘Enough to cause a rift, when he starts shaking off the steady- ing hand.’
‘Even if they did hate one another, who’s going to tell you? Not the family, and not the wider community.’
‘Somebody will,’ Bliss said. ‘Always somebody with a grudge, a chip.’
‘We get his DNA, for purposes of elimination?’
‘Yeh.’
‘You feel threatened, Francis?’
‘Me?’
‘He’s put you very much in the firing line. A symbol of what’s gone wrong with the police in this area. Urban cop.’
‘Strange as it may seem, Annie, it wasn’t that urban where I grew up. Not then, anyway. There are fields up there.’ Bliss lay back. ‘Countryside frigging Defiance. Where did that come from?’
‘I Googled them. Much of it’s hunting-based. Aimed mainly, I’d guess, at attracting younger people to the cause. The trad- itional fox-hunting image of a retired colonel and Camilla Parker-Bowles as was… is not terribly evident on their Web site.’
‘Who’s behind it?’
‘Don’t know. They’re also using Facebook and Twitter. Sollers Bull in hunting pink is a gift. Good-looking and a little bit dark and edgy. He was always like that.’
‘Oh?’
‘I didn’t know him well, but I did know him. From his days in the YFC.’
‘You were in the Young Farmers?’
‘I was a young farmer’s girlfriend for a while. He was a friend of Sollers. This was when I was about sixteen. We were at the same parties, occasionally. He was popular with girls who… had more going for them in the looks department than I ever did.’
‘Don’t sell yourself short.’
‘I’m a realist. Anyway, I didn’t know him well enough to get behind the image.’
‘He’s a liar,’ Bliss said. ‘He was acting. On TV. Just like all those husbands who break down in front of the cameras: Please find the monster who killed my lovely wife. And all the time you’re looking at him.’
The lights were all out in the houses on the hillside, traffic was sparse. Bliss had that feeling he used to get as a kid, of being on an island in the night. It was not unpleasant.
‘He did it, Annie.’
‘I’d be very careful, at this stage, who you share your suspicions with. It’s a small county and Bull has friends all over it.’
‘Including my soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law.’
‘Did you know that your in-laws knew Sollers Bull?’
‘Be surprising if they didn’t. The farm’s only ten minutes away and Chris Symonds has social ambitions. Always asking me if I was up for promotion.’
Annie slid down in the bed, a long thigh against his.
‘You’re obviously up for something,’ Annie said.
Overslept.
It was six-thirty and fully light when the mobile trilled by his side of the bed. Bliss awoke spooned into Annie’s back, experiencing the usual half-shock at whose back this was. His hand had barely found his phone before Annie’s phone made its Nokia noise on the other side.
‘Karen, yeh?’ Bliss said.
Watching Annie fumbling for her glasses, peering at her screen. In Bliss’s phone, Karen Dowell didn’t dress it up.
‘Shit,’ Bliss was clawing the sleep out of his eyes. ‘Where?’
‘City centre, more or less. East Street?’
‘A woman. You did say a woman?’
‘No, boss, I said two.’
Part Three
When I was still young, I thought it
a great pity to die. Not that there
was anything on earth I wanted
to live for…
Julian of Norwich
Revelations of Divine Love
19
Icon
JUST GONE EIGHT, and the city was stirring irritably under a blotchy brown sky, East Street sealed off, end to end.
A barrier was moved to one side, the tape dropped, letting Bliss through to where Terry Stagg was waiting with a blurry excitement on his brick-dust face.
‘Briefly, Tez.’
‘Two females. Mid-twenties? We’re thinking East European.’
Bliss stood in the middle of the street, looking down to a private parking area for office workers, lawyers, hairdressers. You could see the screens projecting from behind a blank yellow end wall. East Street ran narrowly between the city centre and the Cathedral Close. A few discreet shops, refurbished terraced housing, offices, the rear of the Shirehall and a lone bijou black and white property used by chiropractors.
‘And why are we thinking that?’
‘Apart from general appearance,’ Stagg said, ‘one�
�s wearing this kind of a locket thing, silver, with a little religious-looking picture inside and some foreign words.’
‘Foreign words.’
‘I was off sick when they ran the course on migrant crime.’
Bliss wrinkled his nose. Thousands of East Europeans around the county now: mainly honest, decent migrant workers, a percentage of migrant layabouts and a handful of migrant heavy-duty wrongdoers. There’d been a short course for cops on the kind of societies they came from, their favourite crimes – the more violent ones usually practised against other migrants who were usually reluctant to give evidence.
‘How long’s he been here?’
A silver Beemer was parked up by the little black and white place. The Havana cigar box on the dash identifying Billy Grace’s urban transport.
‘Quite a while,’ Terry Stagg said. ‘He likes the ones where he gets noticed.’
The private parking area was almost a little square. Uneven levels, low brick walls and the arse-ends of buildings in need of repair. A weeping birch tree grew incongruously at its centre and its horizons were tarted up by the tower and steeple of St Peter’s and the Shirehall’s little cupola with its flagpole and Union Jack.
‘This where it happened – or were they dumped?’
‘Unlikely,’ Terry Stagg said. ‘Blood and gunge over a fairly wide area.’
‘Who found them?’
‘Elderly bloke from over there.’ Terry nodding at a modernized brick terrace. ‘Woke up to screams and yells not long after midnight.’
‘You mean… we actually came out here last night?’
‘No, he didn’t report it. Thought it was kids, pissed. Seems he’s complained twice in recent weeks and, um, no action was taken. And you don’t go out to remonstrate any more, do you?’
‘I presume the DCI’s en route?’ Bliss said.
A practised insouciance – getting good at this. Annie’d given him ten minutes’ start so they wouldn’t be seen arriving together.
‘And presumably we’re knocking on doors. Those windows overlooking the car park? Pubs, clubs, night workers, minicab firms.’
‘And CCTV,’ Stagg said. ‘The whole city centre.’
‘Good,’ Bliss said. ‘Right, then. Let’s go and put me off me breakfast.’
Turned towards the tape and the canvas, and Terry handed him the Durex suit, and they walked down past the offices of the Hereford Herd Book Society, whatever that meant.
Sollers frigging Bull would know.
Most of the video had been shot, but they were still taking stills from different angles. Images to wither your soul. Breathing in all the degrading smells of violent death, Bliss heard a man distantly protesting, ‘No, I work here, of course. Come in early because I have clients. How long am I supposed to hang around? Can’t you at least…?’
‘Twat,’ Bliss said.
It came out a bit choked up, surprising him. It wasn’t the horror as much as the sad banality: the two red shoes shed in different places, the blue vinyl handbag sprung open, letting out lipsticks and tissues and photos, left where they’d fallen. He saw a picture of a middle-aged couple, hand in hand on the edge of a field, with a white dog.
‘Only one handbag, Slim?’
‘Nothing else here.’ Slim Fiddler, head SOCO, came up like a hippo from a swamp. ‘And I can’t imagine they shared.’
The first body… it was as if she’d been thrown like discarded clothing over a low wall, maybe the foundation of a demolished outbuilding. She was wearing jeans and a black fleece, half off. A thin arm was draped over the bricks, the hand already bagged. You could only see one of her eyes; it was like sun-dried tomato.
‘Looks like the head was banged repeatedly into the sharp edges of the bricks,’ Billy Grace said. ‘The other one… is less of a big-production number.’
Beaming the way only Billy Grace ever beamed.
The other one lay a few paces away in a patch of scrubby grass. The pink fleece and the way she was half-curled made her look like a prawn, Bliss thought, a giant prawn, for God’s sake. One hand down between her legs.
‘Sexual assault?’
‘Probably.’ Billy bent down. ‘Dress ripped here. Didn’t do that herself. But the rest of it, as you can see, is far less… frenzied… than the other one.’
Her face was unmarked. It was a doll’s face – not a baby’s doll, more like one of those Russian dolls where one was inside another and so on. The hair was brown with gold highlights.
‘Probably died quite quickly,’ Billy Grace said. ‘I’d guess she fell back on the corner of that brick – see the blood there? Then perhaps somebody pulled her away, let her fall again.’
‘But the other one… fought harder.’
‘To the end, I’d imagine.’
Billy straightened up. Under his unzipped Durex suit, he wore a blazer with a badge, old-fashioned rugby-club type.
‘Not a lone assailant, is it?’ Bliss said.
‘Unlikely.’
Bliss returned to the first and bloodiest body, took a breath and bent to the poor kid, examining her neck. A few scratches there, that was all.
‘Where’s the locket?’
‘Came off, Frannie.’ Slim Fiddler led him to a patch of weeds. ‘Try not to touch.’
Bliss squatted to where the leaves had been parted, making eye contact with the Virgin Mary in light blue and gold. The locket was silver, tarnished.
‘Very possibly Romanian,’ he said.
An unusual silence. Bliss half turned. Billy Grace was peering at him over his half-glasses, eyebrows raised. Bliss scowled.
‘Piss off, Billy, I’m norra complete friggin’ moron. It’s from an icon, Russian Orthodox kind of thing. The Romanians are big on icons of Our… of the Virgin.’
Could have told him how once, aged seventeen, just, he’d had to take his ma and his most devoutly Catholic auntie to this exhibition of icons in Liverpool – was it the Walker Gallery? Not long after he’d passed his driving test, anyway, so he’d been quite happy to relieve the old man of the chore just to get his mitts on the car keys for an afternoon.
Bliss stood up and backed off to view both victims in the context of the location. The violence was… careless. Almost impersonal, like storm damage.
‘They’ve been left like rubbish, Billy. Like fly-tipping. No attempt at concealment. Not what rapists do. Rapists, if they’ve killed, they make some effort to cover up.’
‘That include gang-rapists? Drunk.’
‘I dunno. Something’s not quite right.’
‘Be able to give you a more formal verdict on the sexual aspect later today.’
‘Won’t be me, Billy. I’ll be off back to Oldcastle. Where I might even get left alone for a bit. DCI’ll be here soon. This is the big one.’
‘You think so? Mansel Bull’s a pillar of the rural community, whereas these pitiful young things…’
‘Careful, Billy.’
‘I’m too old to care, Francis. This your mistress now?’
What?
Bliss tensed, but didn’t look at him. Up in the street, Annie Howe, in her light grey trenchcoat, was getting out of her Audi, bringing her mobile to her ear.
Just a figure of speech, that was all. Not a chance in a million that Billy Grace knew or even suspected. Just a frigging stupid, flip remark.
Bliss turned his back on the crime scene to walk slowly, as if reluctantly, towards Annie.
‘No!’ he said. ‘No, listen, that’s not what’s gonna happen…’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
Back in the Audi. Bliss in the passenger seat, all the windows up. Annie behind the wheel, no make-up. Bliss hunched himself up against the passenger door, explicit body language for anybody watching: he didn’t want to be here with this woman.
‘Apart from anything, you know exactly what it’s gonna look like.’
‘Actually, I don’t think it will,’ Annie said. ‘That’s the point. This is a double murder. By any criteria, the biggest c
ase. It’s also going to be immensely high-profile, controversial and politically sensitive.’
‘And urban.’
‘Nobody’s going to make that distinction, Francis. And, anyway, it’s what God wants, so we have to live with it.’
She’d been talking to the Chief on the Bluetooth, driving here. Fait accompli. Fit-up. The church clock at St Peter’s began to chime the hour. Annie passed a folded paper across to Bliss, under dash-level.
He stared at her.
‘I don’t like the friggin’ Guardian. It’s all opera and foreign stuff.’
‘It’s the Daily Mail. I had to pick it up on the way here. Just read it, will you?’
Sourly, Bliss opened the paper out to a double-page spread. A panorama of Oldcastle Farm on its bank above the Wye, photographed across the fields between bands of police tape.
RURAL IDYLL OR KILLING FIELDS?
Police ‘don’t want to know’
In another picture, the Countryside Defiance banner. In the middle of the page, a shot of a man sitting with his head in his hands. The caption,
Sollers Bull: shattered.
‘If it’s painful, you can skip to the end,’ Annie said.
‘Not sure I can move me reading finger that fast.’
Annie turned away, tapping the steering wheel slowly with her nails. Bliss sighed. Near the bottom of the story, it said:
West Mercia police confirmed last night that the detective leading the inquiry, DI Francis Bliss, is an incomer from Merseyside.
‘DI Bliss has been with us for several years now,’ a spokeswoman said, ‘and we’re fully confident both of his ability and the extent of his local knowledge.
‘We consider the claims made by Countryside Defiance to be ill-founded and obstructive.’
‘So just get on with it,’ Annie said. ‘And be nice to the television people. Look, it’s the best solution. Except, possibly, for me, but I’ll cope.’
‘Two incident rooms?’
‘You get Gaol Street. I’ll be taking a caravan over to Oldcastle.’
‘Will there be a generator and a primus stove?’