Friends of the Dusk

by Phil Rickman

  That was true enough. Born-again Christians could be hard going. She drew slowly on the e-cig. Health issues were a minefield. Faith issues a wasps’ nest.

  ‘I’m assuming,’ Khan said, ‘that the disturbances have resumed. To what extent I don’t know. I had another call this morning, and this time it was from Dennis Kellow. I do know him, he did some work for me at Wychehill. He asked me if I was still in touch with the priest. Used to be a jolly, exuberant man. A man who loved his job. Hardly recognized his voice.’

  Oh God.

  ‘I can’t— I mean, it would be difficult tomorrow. Meeting with the new Bishop in the afternoon, and I don’t really like going at night, in the first instance.’

  ‘The following day would be fine,’ Mr Khan said. ‘That will be Saturday. I’ll provide you with the address and directions.’

  She saw he was eyeing the vial between her fingers, the light brown fluid in it.

  ‘I see nicotine remains your drug of choice,’ he said. ‘Splendid.’

  8

  Lawful and justified

  AT LUNCHTIME, ANNIE HOWE was waiting for Bliss in the Gaol Street car park, wearing her buttermilk trench coat, a red woollen scarf and a scowl.

  ‘Francis, I really don’t have too much time…’

  ‘I’m coming now,’ Bliss said. ‘Ma-am.’

  Making a show of muttering as he pulled on his beanie in the CID doorway, aware of plump, smirking Terry Stagg watching him. Holding the smirk on his way into CID. Giving the DI a hard time again. Poor bastard can’t put a foot right with Howe. Taken him off for another private policy-briefing – translate as bollocking.

  Staggie playing his usual double-game. He’d slag off Howe in front of Bliss, who knew he was secretly on her side, for obvious reasons – principally the question of succession if Bliss were to crack and leave town. What was funniest, if he ever told Terry Stagg the absolute truth about him and Annie, Stagg would think he was taking the piss.

  This had been amusing Bliss for months, but not today.

  Outside, he pulled out his car fob.

  ‘Mine?’

  Annie nodding, tightening her scarf. Colder this morning, the sky sepia over Hereford, as if it had sucked all the autumn colours out of the leaves. They climbed into Bliss’s Honda, didn’t say much until they were out of the city on the Brecon road, coming up to White Cross, Bliss slowing for the zebra.

  ‘What did you tell Stagg, about why you were looking for me?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Annie said. ‘Just made sure I didn’t appear happy.’

  ‘Yeh, that usually works.’

  ‘Wasn’t hard,’ Annie said. ‘Today.’

  Bliss put on a sigh.

  ‘Tell me.’

  He drove slowly along suburban Kingsacre, many of its trees prematurely stripped by the gales, fields exposed behind the houses. Pretty obvious what was coming.

  ‘Charlie rang me about an hour ago.’

  ‘So it’s official, is it?’ Bliss kept an even speed. No surprise to him, but still a gut-punch to hear it confirmed. ‘Tossed his name into the hat.’

  ‘Not yet, but he’s decided to. Just wanted to sound me out the other night. See how I felt about it.’

  ‘And you really think that would influence him one way or another?’

  ‘Look,’ Annie said wearily. ‘Do you think I like this?’

  Bliss said nothing. Annie was back in Hereford full-time, heading up CID, Iain Twatface Brent having returned to Worcester to stab a few backs at headquarters. And get promoted for it. Unbelievable.

  ‘I checked the regulations again last night,’ Annie said. ‘Thinking there might just be a chance Charlie would be too old.’

  ‘I’d guess not.’

  ‘Far as I can make out, the only rule is that a candidate needs to be over eighteen. No seniority limit. He’s eminently qualified. Ex senior police officer, county councillor, served for years on the police authority. He’s also fairly fit, after his hip replacement. And he doesn’t, of course, look his age.’

  ‘One of the benefits of having no conscience,’ Bliss said.

  He didn’t think Annie smiled. Well, who would? The thought of this man returning to policing, in his dotage, to become their ultimate boss because the blindingly stupid fucking government had altered a system that didn’t need altering…

  ‘He has to obtain supportive signatures from a hundred citizens registered to vote,’ Annie said. ‘I didn’t ask him if he’d done that yet.’

  ‘Bastard could collect them in one morning, Annie, door to door. “How’re you, my dear. You remember me. Local boy?”’

  He’d perfected the accent long ago, Charlie’s oily, popular-market-trader jollity riff. Once rang Annie as Charlie and it worked for nearly a minute.

  On election day, the bastard would pick up votes because he was local and he had a friendly smile on a recognizable face. That was one of the big jokes in replacing the old local police committees with a single, elected Police and Crime Commissioner. People – the few who bothered – would vote local and they’d vote friendly smile: all it took to replace a wonky kind of democracy with a dangerous autocracy. At least the old police committees, made up mainly of councillors, generally recognized they weren’t much more than a formality and had very little impact on actual policing.

  ‘How long’s he there for, if he gets elected?’

  ‘Four years.’

  ‘Mother of God, you imagine the damage Charlie could do in four years?’

  ‘To you, you mean?’

  ‘That, too.’

  The housing thinned, and Bliss turned right into the Wyevale Garden Centre, driving straight through to the field behind that was used for overflow parking. It wasn’t summer and it wasn’t Christmas, so they were alone here, behind the hedge, looking out to the hills. He stopped the car, brought out his phone, scrolled down to the oath that the Police and Crime Commissioner would have to swear, which included…

  I will not seek to influence or prevent any lawful and reasonable investigation or arrest, nor encourage any police action save that which is lawful and justified within the bounds of this office.

  Handed it to Annie and watched her face tighten, registering for the first time that, in the couple of days since he’d seen her last, she’d had her pale hair cut shorter. Her make-up was minimal, her skin almost translucent. She looked five years younger and innocent, as if she’d been scrubbing away at an ancestral skin rash.

  ‘Strictly speaking,’ Annie said, ‘this is less about what he might have done in the past than what he agrees not to do in the future.’

  ‘Annie, he took bribes to suppress evidence. When he was a young DC, he covered up a major landowner’s… involvement in a murder. By the time he was running CID, it was second friggin’ nature. The way things were done. Cheaper, more expedient. He was saving the country time and money.’

  ‘But none of it was proved,’ Annie said very quietly. ‘He’s never even been publicly—’

  ‘Because he’s clever. And he’s local. And he’s been in the Masons and every other friggin’—’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I’m not disagreeing with you, Francis, I’m telling you that yes, I think he did these things … of which he hasn’t been accused.’

  ‘I’ve accused him.’

  Tried to, anyway. Bliss couldn’t even think about Charlie without feeling again the pissing rain on the night in Christmas week when he’d confronted the bastard on his doorstep in Leominster, Charlie entirely unintimidated. You en’t going no higher and you know it. Bliss reduced to screaming through the downpour as the door slammed in his face. Forced to accept he really didn’t have what it took to bring down somebody as practised in bare-faced deceit as Charlie Howe.

  But then… the unimaginable happened. A night of sublime irony just before Christmas, which had ended with the woman they called the Ice Maiden defrosting in Bliss’s bed.

  Till that night, it had
never occurred to him that he might actually fancy her. Metal coat-hanger with tits, Terry Stagg would say, knowing he was on safe ground with Bliss, who, everybody agreed, was never going to be Annie Howe’s kind of copper, not in any sense.

  The strangest, most gratifying part had been how it had happened. The catalyst: working together, out of hours, at the sharp end for the first time, to craft an exceptional result. Feeding the mutual craving for a collar. Finding one another professionally.

  They’d still lie in bed talking Job, and all this had made him so insanely happy. And he understood, now, why she played everything by the book, by a whole fusty library. Why she was so tight and proper, so politically correct, cold and humourless in the workplace, diligent to a fault. Why she was such a pain in the arse.

  You couldn’t hope to understand Annie, or even like her a bit, until you knew where she’d come from, and where she’d come from was Charlie Howe, a man so bent for so long that the sinister kinks in his history were invisible to him now.

  Bliss had sometimes wondered what it would do to Charlie, if he ever discovered who his daughter was spending quality time with. Sometimes he thought of how good it would be to arrange for Charlie to find out accidentally. Then he’d start wondering what Charlie might do to smash them apart, and it really hadn’t been worth the risk.

  Only now… now it looked like Charlie was about to achieve that anyway without even knowing. Charlie who hated Bliss because he’d been developing an interest in history. Bitter, twisted, sick little man. I know about you, Brother Bliss.

  Bliss picked up Annie’s right hand, and it felt cold and rigid.

  9

  Overpowering

  BISHOPS CAME AND bishops went; Sophie Hill, like the Cathedral, remained. Same pearls, same crisp white hair, same silver chain on the half-glasses. Same watchful expression, an emotional temperature control set to frost.

  ‘So how long have you been doing that?’

  Nodding at the black leatherette case Jane had brought back from Pembrokeshire. Merrily had boldly placed it in the centre of her desk by the window overlooking Broad Street. Start out how you meant to go on.

  ‘Just over a day.’ She lifted the little glass tube up to the light. ‘Still looks slightly sinister to me, compared to tobacco and paper. Every time I bring it out, it reminds me I’m feeding an addiction.’

  ‘And does it?’

  ‘Does, actually. Surprisingly. Didn’t think it was going to work. And I can do it in here and it causes no more pollution than the kettle. That is OK, isn’t it Sophie?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Sophie looked unconvinced. Merrily expelled vapour, very close to telling her about Raji Khan and his cousin. All deliverance cases had been filed by Sophie from the start: each visit, the measures taken, the aftercare. Keeping this one to herself felt like a step into the worst kind of dark.

  But she’d given her word. As a Christian. To a Muslim. She’d actually wound up doing that, with a certain formality, after Khan confided that Dennis Kellow’s wife had been reluctant to approach their local parish priest because the woman was too helpful and effusive. Which meant nosy, Raji Khan had said, not having met her. Helpful to the point of intrusive.

  As distinct from me, Merrily had thought. Cautious to the point of timidity.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’

  Sophie observing her, over the half-glasses.

  ‘Was I? Sorry. Nerves, perhaps. I’ve only met two new bishops of Hereford, and one of them—’

  ‘Let’s not talk about Michael Hunter.’ Sophie frowned and then lightened. ‘It won’t be an ordeal, Merrily. He might seem a little overpowering at first, but that probably conceals his own insecurity. Most new bishops go through a short period of—’

  ‘How do you mean “overpowering”?’

  ‘Wrong word, perhaps. He’s… emphatic. He knows what he wants. A phase, probably. It’ll pass.’

  ‘It’s just that Huw Owen appeared to be… slightly uncertain about him.’

  ‘Doesn’t surprise me greatly,’ Sophie said. ‘He’s rather like Huw Owen in reverse – in that Huw was born in Wales and brought up in England, whereas Bishop Craig was born in England into a military family. His father having been an army officer in Brecon, so that was where he went to school: Christ College.’

  Private school.

  ‘So, where Huw Owen has a Yorkshire accent,’ Sophie said, ‘Bishop Craig sounds rather Welsh.’

  According to the Hereford Times, Craig Innes had been at Oxford, where he’d stayed on as an academic for a couple of years before becoming a curate in Banbury. Then he was a vicar somewhere in the Thames Valley, returning to Brecon as a junior canon at the Cathedral and then, for a short time, a rector and rural dean in the Usk Valley. A suggestion of fast-track?

  ‘What’s he like, really?’

  You had to accept the possibility of split loyalties here. The deliverance side of Sophie’s work had expanded probably four fold since Merrily had taken over from the granite-faced traditionalist, Canon Dobbs. Sophie had never complained and would even, if pushed, admit to finding it fascinating. But her principal role was still as the Bishop’s lay secretary.

  ‘What do you want me to say? He’s quite large, rather imposing…’

  ‘I know what he looks like.’

  ‘Ebullient. Tends to fill a room.’ Sophie walked across to the second window, overlooking Gwynne Street, where Dobbs had lived. ‘I’m not yet sure how he works. He’s still setting out his stall. I don’t know how much he delegates.’

  Merrily leaned her chair back against the wall and drew on her e-cig. This wasn’t a hard room to fill. It always felt intimate but active, like a hayloft or a granary. It was her second home. Through the vapour, she noticed for the first time that it had been very subtly tidied. No visible personal items – scarves, gloves, library books, packets of mints. Even the florid calendar from Sophie’s sister in Tuscany had gone. Was the new Bishop some kind of minimalist?

  ‘Sense of humour?’ Merrily said.

  ‘Good-humoured, certainly.’

  Not always the same thing.

  ‘And played rugby, of course,’ Sophie said. ‘But you knew that.’

  Merrily put down the e-cig.

  ‘Sophie, do you happen to know what dealings he had with Huw? Both were in the Brecon diocese, but is there any obvious history between them?’

  ‘What has Huw said?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Parish priests and bishops…’ Had Sophie’s eyes become guarded? ‘We both know that parish clergy and bishops… it’s a different career path, and they rarely see eye to—’

  ‘A parish isn’t usually a career path at all,’ Merrily said.

  Bishops were admin. Bishops were chosen for their managerial and social skills. Spirituality rarely came into it. Or that was how vicars tended to see it.

  ‘It’s inevitable,’ Sophie said carefully, ‘that all bishops will have encountered some animosity on their way to the top.’

  You had to smile. The higher clergy could fight like rats in a sack.

  ‘But to answer your question,’ Sophie continued, ‘I imagine Bishop Craig first encountered Huw Owen the same way you did. He completed one of Huw’s deliverance courses.’

  Merrily sat up slowly.

  ‘When?’

  ‘During his time in the Usk Valley, I assume.’ Sophie’s eyes flickered. ‘Huw didn’t mention that?’

  ‘No. No, he bloody didn’t.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Sophie said.

  ‘So – let me get this right – that means Innes was actually in the deliverance ministry? For how long?’

  ‘I don’t know how long. But you don’t do it unless you have some interest, do you?’

  You didn’t just have some interest. It became part of you, altered your awareness of everything. And then, before you knew it, it had become your touchstone.

  On one level, having a bishop with exorcism experience could be helpful. Might
save a lot of explanation and justification. But a bishop sometimes could be too close to it. The rules decreed that anyone in purple could no longer do hands-on deliverance, but that didn’t stop a Bishop from adopting a director’s role.

  ‘Anyway, we have all that to find out.’ Sophie uncapped her fountain pen, made a small note on her pad, looked up. ‘And is Laurence back?’

  ‘Oh yes. I feel awful. We were supposed to have a small celebration dinner last night, at the Black Swan, but… something came up. As usual. So we ended up just having a sandwich. As usual.’

  In the end, Jane had stayed with them in the Swan, but neither she nor Lol had asked, in this too-public place, about Raji Khan. And then they’d gone back to their separate houses, separate beds, with too much unsaid, a sense of too much in the air. Jane had come with her to Hereford this morning with the intention of pestering Neil Cooper, of the county archaeologist’s department, for some gap-year work. They’d had lunch at All Saints, another too-public place, again not much said. Why did she have the feeling that something had occurred during the foreshortened Pembrokeshire dig to take the edge off Jane’s enthusiasm for a future in archaeology?

  Sophie said, ‘Do you never think about a holiday?’

  ‘Never been able to afford one. Not much of one anyway. And no time, really.’

  ‘I meant you and Laurence. You had a chance when Jane was away.’

  ‘Not much of one. With Lol away as well, much of the summer.’

  ‘If you don’t,’ Sophie said, ‘you might regret it. One day. Maybe sooner than you think.’

  She blinked, as if slightly appalled at what she might have said.

  Merrily heard the door opening at the bottom of the stairs.

  Footsteps. Big footsteps.

  10

  Trashy world

  THERE WAS NO sign of a grave or excavation, just the Green.

  Castle Green. All green, no castle. The norm in Herefordshire. If it hadn’t been for the widespread destruction during the Glyndwr warfare of the fifteenth century, you wouldn’t be able to stand anywhere in this county without seeing a stone tower. Today, the term castle usually referred to nothing more than a green mound in a field that you wouldn’t even notice unless, like Jane, you were obsessed with bulges in the landscape.