Friends of the Dusk

by Phil Rickman

  They were in Dyfed-Powys Police country, north of Hay. A scruffy darts and pool pub, Bliss in jeans and his baseball sweater with the big numbers on the front, Annie with the stripy top under her jacket.

  Very occasionally, they allowed themselves to go out together like this, for a drink or a meal in some obscure pub outside the West Mercia boundary. Yeh, there was always a remote possibility of some off-duty cop lurking in one of them, but they could explain it. Sometimes senior plod met out of hours to iron out some admin issue; if they were spotted, Annie would be able to handle it. Annie scared policemen.

  ‘Is it possible to like him as a man,’ she said, ‘and hate him as a police officer?’

  ‘He isn’t a police officer, Annie, he’s something worse. Or could be very soon.’

  They’d tried talking about other things, but everything kept coming back to Charlie. It was like he was watching them from the bar, giving his daughter the occasional friendly wink over his pint, pretending he hadn’t seen Bliss. As he would.

  ‘I wish he’d been something else in the first place,’ Annie said. ‘Dentist or something.’

  ‘He’d still be bent. Pull out a few healthy teeth and then offer you bridgework for five grand.’

  Annie said nothing. Bliss was already sorry he’d said that. Charlie was her dad. She worried a lot about bent genes. There was silence for what seemed to Bliss like a long time. His head was feeling numb. Another reason for frequenting dark pubs was that bright lights could still push a spike into his brain stem. Made him think that maybe he should’ve owned up to this problem, taken a lump sum and got the hell out. Joined his old bagman Andy Mumford in the private inquiry business.

  Nah, that’d be like an ante-room to old age.

  ‘It means, of course, that I have to go,’ Annie said. ‘Probably sooner rather than later.’

  Bliss looked down into his grapefruit juice – teetotal now; one pint and he couldn’t walk a straight line. She was right. He heard her swallow.

  ‘He rang just before I left.’

  ‘Did he?’

  Taken a while for this to come out.

  ‘He said there was no reason at all for me to seek a transfer if he’s elected.’

  ‘And he brought that up, did he?’

  Annie faded back into a wonky old settle with initials carved into the varnish. Her voice came back tired.

  ‘He’s planting the idea, isn’t he? Giving me time to find something, elsewhere. That’s the real reason he rang, isn’t it? A little reminder.’

  ‘That would be like him,’ Bliss said.

  He’d been online again, hoping there was some small-print clause indicating that a candidate for the still comparatively new position of Crime Commissioner for West Mercia should not be related to a serving police officer in that force.

  There wasn’t.

  ‘He sees it as the summit of his achievements,’ Annie said dully. ‘The natural high point of his career.’

  ‘And a last chance of real power in his sunset years. He’ll be like some redneck sheriff. He can probably see the good old days reforming around him, only better. And I mean, Christ, he might be right. All this talk of regional devolution, so we wind up run by a West Midlands parliament made up of every dirty councillor who ever collected a brown envelope. Twats in Westminster like to talk about real local democracy, but it’s…’

  Something throbbed over Bliss’s left eye.

  ‘Like selling the country into organized crime?’ Annie said. ‘Possibly. Central government might be considered remote, but at least it’s always under press scrutiny. The regional media, what’s left of it, doesn’t have the resources.’

  ‘Or the balls in most cases, if there’s advertising at stake. Yeh, Charlie’s the tip of a black iceberg.’

  On the face of it, this was not particularly his problem. He was hardly the only cop in town who knew Charlie Howe’s history, or some of it, anyway.

  But then, if Annie transferred to South Wales or Thames Valley or somewhere, it wouldn’t be her problem either.

  ‘And what about us?’ he said.

  His feelings for Annie continued to surprise him. They’d been coppers first and he suspected they always would be. It was a key part of what made them work – he kept telling himself this – but it wasn’t everything, not any more, not for him.

  You’re a sick little man, Brother Bliss. Charlie’s voice like static through the crashing rain, the night of the big confrontation. Come down yere thinking you were God’s gift to West Mercia. Smart young city copper… show the country boys how it’s done… you en’t going no higher and you know it.

  Not now, certainly. Not here.

  ‘He’ll have me at some stage, Annie. There’ll be so many snares out that one day I’ll step into one, and that’ll be that.’

  But if Annie was gone, how much would he care? He noticed she hadn’t answered his question. What about us? Meaning, was there any chance of them ever becoming more important than the sum of their careers?

  His phone went ding-dong in his jacket pocket. He didn’t touch it. He’d always had this little fantasy of one day sending to Charlie’s mobile a selfie of him and Annie in bed.

  He felt long, cool, slightly bony fingers on his right hand.

  ‘Francis, the whole Crime Commissioner thing’s so flawed they could scrap it anytime.’

  ‘When did flaws ever get anything dumped?’

  Thing was, he probably knew enough to hang Charlie out to dry. He’d need to work on it a bit more, get all his ducks in a row, and then take it to… who? Who did he know who was both powerful and clean, out of reach of Charlie’s tentacles? If Charlie didn’t go down, he would.

  And what would it mean for Annie, either way?

  Her phone was playing something by Vivaldi. The two phones going off at once only ever meant one thing. Annie already had hers out.

  ‘What’s the problem, Terry?’

  Bliss sighed and slid his answer bar across.

  ‘Darth,’ he said heavily.

  ‘Boss, we have a suspicious death. In town.’

  ‘How suspicious?’

  ‘Well… he might’ve fallen over and cracked his head on a coffee table.’

  ‘Yeh?’

  ‘And then picked himself up and fallen on it again from the other side. And then done terrible things to his face.’

  Does the DCI know?’

  ‘DS Stagg seems to be telling her as we speak.’

  ‘You’re not there now?’

  ‘DS Dowell’s there. Meadow Grove – that’s the left turning before the Plascarreg, coming out of town.’

  ‘All right, I’m about half an hour away. I’ll come now. Perhaps you can get Terry to point this out to the DCI in case she’s washing her hair?’

  ‘I’ll pass him a note,’ Vaynor said.

  15

  A sense of betrayal

  HUW SAID CRAIG INNES had been working deliverance for no more than a couple of months when he was consulted by one of his own deacons, a hesitant, unmarried middle-aged woman. Huw called her Ann Evans, Merrily guessing he’d changed the name.

  Ann was the only daughter of the Rev. Alwyn Evans, a low-church minister of the old school. Not exactly a hellfire preacher, Huw said, possibly due to lacking the necessary warmth, but a man who thought he was most certainly not in the business of offering comfort.

  ‘Made R.S. Thomas look a bit cosy,’ Huw said.

  Merrily recalled once spotting the Rev. Thomas’s The Echoes Return Slow, at the end of a shelf above Huw’s fireside chair. Poems of a uniquely Welsh starkness, a sense of drab resignation. Beauty beyond despair. It made a certain sense. She asked when Ann Evans had become a deacon. You didn’t have to think too hard for an answer.

  ‘She were thirty before he allowed her to teach Sunday school. Course, by then, there were only about four kids going, and happen he were blaming her for that, for not dragging them off the streets by their collars.’

  ‘No mother arou
nd?’

  ‘Alwyn’s wife? More like a live-in housekeeper. Never allowed to spend a penny on the house, in all its Victorian drabness. Worked set hours as rector’s wife and given a week’s holiday a year, when she’d go away with her sister to a boarding house in Porthcawl.’

  The Rev. Alwyn Evans never moved away from his church in the Usk Valley and was perhaps unaware of the wider Church moving inexorably away from him. Huw said Evans had thought that the very idea of women priests was so risible that it would never happen in his time, nor even his daughter’s.

  ‘Not in Wales, anyroad,’ Huw said. ‘Not till the End of Days were in view.’

  The End of Days came, appropriately enough, in the 1990s. When the worst happened, Evans said nothing to anybody, would never discuss it or rail against it from his pulpit. In his world, nothing had changed.

  Except that Evans had begun to fade away. No other words for it. Literally faded into the grey fabric of the village, walking its streets before the milkmen were up, rarely speaking to anybody, resistant to approaches, oblivious.

  ‘Like there were a dark, resentful mist around him,’ Huw said. ‘He’d stand in the pulpit when there were no service on, sometimes at night. Fully robed, staring out down the nave in complete silence. The very air were toxic wi’ his sense of betrayal. Got so the parishioners didn’t like to enter in the hours of darkness, not even the cleaners, in case he were there.’

  ‘Like a ghost?’ Merrily said.

  ‘Not yet.’

  The dust had built up on the pew ends and the book rests.

  And then the rector died.

  ‘Whatever it said on the medical certificate di’n’t matter. You might’ve said it were a broken heart if the bugger’d had one to break. If you were looking for a cause of death, you’d have to say he died of malcontentedness, if that’s the right word. Silent, suppressed outrage poisoning his system.’

  ‘Not in the church?’

  ‘Most likely in his own bed. Don’t matter. Wherever he were found, nobody could tell the difference, his face had been in rigor that long.’

  His wife had gone to live with her sister. His daughter, Ann, stayed in the village.

  ‘Living in a little terraced cottage and making a living doing accounts for farmers as couldn’t be mithered wi’ calculators, let alone computers. And meanwhile, owd Alwyn’s church had became part of a cluster of parishes run by a young lad based five miles away.’

  It had taken the new rector six years to persuade Ann Evans to become a deacon, by which time the rector wasn’t a young lad any more and she was in her forties. It was a role at which he knew that Ann, in her quiet way, would excel: a sympathetic ear, a caring nature. Without the old man to stifle her spirit, her personality had flowered. She could talk to people and she did.

  Deacon – that was just the start, Huw said. She’d taken services in the smaller churches and was a natural for the priesthood, everybody said that. Everybody but Ann who, mindful of her father’s unequivocal if undeclared opinion on the ordination of women, had kept very quiet. Which everybody thought was respect, though in fact, it was fear.

  For the new rector, Ann had become a special project. He’d told the story to Huw a couple of years later. Telling him how it had ended. About the churchwarden who’d found Ann Evans in the graveyard. The warden, a widower, had been drawn to Ann, looking out for her, thinking there might be a chance for him.

  Huw’s voice had slowed, his descriptions becoming more deliberate. He was on firmer ground now, having actually been to the village and its church, making a point of sitting on his own at the bottom of the nave, observing the pulpit, eighteenth century with nineteenth-century additions, too much dark varnish, a heavy overhead sounding board.

  He said he still didn’t know what Ann Evans looked like, could only see her in his mind, from behind as she entered the nave at twilight, padded towards the chancel, the big, dark pulpit like a cliff face on her left.

  It was the third evening in a row that Ann had done this. Coming to pray for an answer, a sign. One more time. Should she put her name forward? Should she?

  Huw said he could imagine her walking away from him towards the chancel, almost trembling but finding, from somewhere, the determination. Looking directly ahead of her towards the unlit altar where, it was said, no candles ever burned lest it cause offence to the spirit of the Rev. Alwyn Evans.

  ‘And at that moment,’ Huw said, ‘by God, I felt it. The pressure. The pressure to turn your head and look up. Did she think that were meant? That if she gave into it and turned her head to the left, she’d get the sign she was looking for?’

  Both Merrily’s hands were clammy around the phone.

  ‘The instant she turns,’ Huw said, ‘the cold’s settling around her like cement.’

  Anyone else, you might’ve thought he was making this up, sitting there beside his open fire, his imagination following Ann’s turning head to the pulpit.

  Where he stood.

  Dear God.

  Merrily could see the old rector. Arms raised high in the winged sleeves of his surplice, and his face like a cracked memorial, giving off stone dust, radiating malice.

  ‘When the warden found her in the churchyard, she weren’t dead. That would have been too easy, too pat. She’d kept going back, after she saw him. Still went back. Can you imagine that? Going in, along the dark nave, knowing he were there but not looking. Eyes focused on the altar ahead of her, refusing to turn her head. Managing, finally, to kneel on the chancel steps. But she couldn’t pray.’

  This happened. Merrily knew that. The ability to pray would desert you when you needed it most.

  ‘Couldn’t get the words out,’ Huw said. ‘Couldn’t get the words into her head.’

  ‘I know that feeling. Terrifying. Deadening pressure. The only way out of it is to relax. But in some situations that’s next to impossible.’

  ‘In the end she were running out into the churchyard, thinking he were coming after her. Outside, she trips over a grave-kerb. Scrapes her head on the edge of a headstone. Happen slightly concussed when the churchwarden finds her. Takes her home, makes her some tea, wi’ brandy. Story comes out. Next day he goes to the rector. Rector doesn’t bugger about. He consults his local deliverance minister, one Craig Innes—’

  ‘Just… slow down, Huw. Was there something in the church?’

  ‘Don’t matter, lass. Pretty much the same either way. Imagination, if you want to call it that, can be just as damaging. But if you apply the same balm…’

  ‘A Requiem Eucharist.’

  ‘Exactly. Either way, Requiem’s likely to work. The rector had the right idea. Best way to get shut of the ole bugger. Send him to his rest, whether it’s the image in the church or Ann’s head. Or both. Give him the full Requiem.’

  Merrily nodding.

  ‘It involves clergy, and a church. What else would you do?’

  ‘The lad could’ve done it himself. His church, his responsibility. But he wanted a second opinion, and that were the right thing, too. He had the right idea, just went to the wrong man. Innes told the rector he’d deal with it himself. Which he did. He didn’t go to see Ann Evans, he simply phoned her. He phoned her that same night. He gave her his considered advice.’

  Merrily sighed, her mental landscape falling into shadow.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Advised her to go and see her GP,’ Huw said. ‘Wi’ a view to referral to a psychiatrist.’

  16

  Claw

  THE FACT THAT the ground-floor flat was in a small block only a short walk from the Plascarreg Estate took away a whole level of mystery. From the ill-lit road outside, Bliss could point to the steel-reinforced doors of at least two dope-dealers’ dwellings.

  But this was not what dope dealers did.

  He got out of there as soon as he could, standing outside the doorway breathing harder than a man of his experience should ever be seen to breathe.

  There’d been a small hallway,
but one of its walls had been taken out so the front door opened directly into the living room, where there was enough blood for a multiple stabbing. But it wasn’t a stabbing.

  Billy Grace, the Home Office Dr Death, had been and gone. Karen Dowell had been here a while with the crime-scene crew, watching everything, inspecting everybody. Karen could get possessive about crime scenes. She joined Bliss outside, pushing back the hood of her Durex suit.

  ‘OK, boss?’

  ‘Course I’m OK. We know him?’

  ‘We do now. But not in the way you mean. I don’t think we’re looking at what you might call a Plascarreg neighbour dispute.’

  ‘We’re not actually on the Plas, are we?’

  ‘These flats were here before all that was even thought of. I remember them as a kid. Quite bijou at one time but, when something like the Plas goes up next door, your property value goes into a steep slide and it all gets a bit scruffy.’

  ‘Robbery?’

  ‘Don’t think so. But look…’

  Bliss pulled in a quick breath and turned to the room. The body was face down next to a small Shaker-style table. There was a wall-mounted TV and a packed bookcase. All quite tidy in here, in fact, if you ignored the spatter, some of it so liberal that it looked like the furniture itself had been bleeding.

  An investigation was assembling around the body with no sadness, only the excitement that cops had become so good at hiding from the public. An excitement, Bliss was thinking, that was only heightened by the horror. Despicable, really. He was forcing himself to look, if only so as not to come over as a wuss in front of Karen, who was famous for taking a bag of chips and a kebab into a post-mortem.

  ‘While I wouldn’t think robbery as a motive,’ Karen said, ‘I reckon something’s been taken. There’s a printer on the desk, see? But no computer. Where’s the computer?’

  ‘Somebody killed him and walked out of here with their arms full of computer?’

  ‘Maybe a laptop. I don’t know, I’m just speculating.’

  Bliss tweaked a smile. Speculation? Was that still allowed?

  ‘So who is he, Karen?’