by Phil Rickman
Bliss thumped the top of the seat. Down the field, two seagulls took off like a storm warning.
‘Funny thing,’ Mumford said. ‘I’ve only realised since I retired how much quicker the process is when you don’t have to make out reports.’
‘Tell me about it.’ Bliss pulled off his beanie, ran a hand through the wasteland of his hair. ‘Doesn’t help that after I spoke to you last night I went to see Charlie Howe.’
He saw Mumford briefly shut his eyes.
‘Boss, you dick.’
‘It was indeed a bad, bad move, Andy.’
‘What did you think, he was getting old? Lost his teeth?’
‘I figured we could have a private chat, agree to keep off each other’s backs. Andy, what’s the matter with me?’
‘I figured you wasn’t yourself on the phone.’
‘Annie’ll’ve heard all about it by now.’ Bliss sank his chin into the pillow of his arms on the back of the passenger seat. ‘Amazing how fast you can go down. Seen it happen to other fellers but usually it gets a bit of a push from the booze or gambling. Never gonna happen to me.’
‘All right,’ Mumford said. ‘You wanner have a think about what you got? Lay it all out?’
Bliss was grateful. Never had a sounding board like Mumford before or since.
‘Half of what’s left of me brain’s turning it over and over as we speak, Andy. How much of Jason can we rely on? I still think the butchering was possibly part of his contract. The killer did a lovely neat job on Ayling – one judicious thrust, one accurate little wound that closed up so fast there wouldn’t be much blood.’
‘Meaning why would he want to do the messy stuff himself if he could pay an ex-slaughterman?’
‘Exactly. I’m guessing there was only one parcel to begin with in the back of that van, and the Mebuses had to haul Ayling down the forest and whizz the head off.’
‘Bone could ruin your chain,’ Mumford said.
Bliss rolled his eyes.
‘Lot of rain to wash the blood away, mind.’
‘Now that is a good point.’
‘Also,’ Mumford said, ‘if anybody found the signs, they’d think it was just evidence of some poacher having a go at one of these wild boar you keep hearing about in the Forest.’
Bliss nodded.
‘And Jason’s keeping quiet about that bit,’ Mumford said, ‘on account of it’s got a smell of violence about it. It’s a bit more than waste disposal. Leaves you asking the question, did he do the whole thing?’
‘What do you think?’
‘En’t got the balls. En’t got the brains.’
‘So we’re looking for a pro, aren’t we?’ Bliss hunched himself higher up the greasy passenger seat. ‘And a contract killer puts the crime into a whole different arena. It’s hard to imagine the Friends of the Serpent having a quick whip round and dispatching their hardest member into the underworld with a bag of unmarked twenties. I think we’re firmly back in Jason’s world.’
‘Drugs?’
‘Fact – Jason and various members of Jason’s family and friends obtain wholesale coke from Birmingham, Bristol, Gloucester, Newport. Comes into the Plascarreg, as we’ve all known for years, for distribution to the usual suspects, plus the new breed of middle-class party animal supplied by the likes of Gyles Banks-Jones. Which is where I came in.’
‘There don’t have to be a connection,’ Mumford said.
‘Yeh, but there is a connection, Andy. And it’s through a man called Steve Furneaux. Steve is Gyles’s next-door neighbour. He was the last person, or – assuming he didn’t do it – the last but one person to see Clement Ayling alive. And, unless all my instincts are playing me wrong, he’s a cokehead. Quite long-term, I’d guess. For a long time, Steve was on the fringe. Suddenly he’s looking like a main player.’
‘Form?’
‘No way. All right, let’s approach it from the other side. Mebus gets a call from Birmingham. I think we have to assume Birmingham is Jason’s euphemism for the people he doesn’t talk about . . . whether they’re Birmingham or Gloucester or Newport. Whatever, Birmingham calls and discloses to Mebus that a man is going to be topped and an example has to be made of him. Now . . . if we assume Dinedor is just being used to lay a false trail, who wants Ayling dead? And why?’
‘Not a clue, boss.’
‘OK . . . Let’s think out of the box, as Steve would say. Ayling, Furneaux and Charlie Howe – all members of the same quango. One of these outfits nobody knows what the hell it does but it’s obviously above the rules of democracy and public scrutiny.’
‘Sounds like Charlie’s kind of thing.’
‘Yeh. Who’s gonna tell us more about Hereforward?’
‘Journalists?’
‘That’s a thought. You know anybody?’
‘Bloke at Three Counties News Service? Freelances are always a better bet, my experience.’
‘Could you give him a call?’
‘I’ll try and find him.’
‘Thanks, pal.’
Silence. Bliss heard a preliminary patter of rain on the wind-screen; probably bring Jumbo back in a minute. It occurred to him he needed to go into Hereford this afternoon, buy some presents for the kids, try and get Karen to wrap them properly ready for the ordeal of taking them over to the in-laws’ farm tomorrow. What a bloody desert his life was. He closed his eyes for a moment, shuffled the cards in his head.
‘All right,’ he said to Mumford. ‘Let’s cut to the heart of it. What do we know about the killer?’
‘Good with a knife?’
‘Either good or lucky. Let’s assume good. And that in itself . . . if we assume he’s an outsider, brought in to do a quick job, how common is that? Your hit man, almost by definition, uses a firearm. But . . . there’s no basic reason why not a knife. Knife crime’s breaking records all over the country.’
‘And it’s as old as them fellers in skins who built the ole fort on top of Dinedor,’ Mumford said.
‘Yeh, but the method of dispatch was clearly more scientific than your average slasher, which is why Annie and Brent got a bit excited when they discovered poor old Willy Hawkes might’ve had commando training.’
‘Contract killing en’t what it used to be. Any hard kid in need of a few quid . . . frightening, really.’
‘It’s what I said to—Shit.’
‘Wassat, boss?’
Bliss thought, Sharpest knife in the drawer.
‘It was Annie I said it to. I was trying to wind her up about leaving this Worcester paedophile witness-killing to take command of the Ayling murder, and I made that same point about kids going into the homicide business.’
‘That’s contract?’
‘And a stabbing. This feller who was gonna give evidence against his brother-in-law, knifed to death in his garage.’
‘Two contract knife-jobs? How often’s that happen? You got the PM report on that one? Where the blade went in?’
‘Well, I haven’t, obviously, but it shouldn’t be difficult to get me hands on it.’
‘Karen?’
Bliss nodded.
‘A good girl. And at least she won’t have to talk to Howe, who—bugger me, Andy!’ Bliss threw his beanie at the roof and caught it on the return. ‘Listen to this . . . I said to Annie something like, must be a bit of a problem, you know who ordered the hit but you don’t know who actually did it, and she—frigging hell . . .’
The voice like an ice pick in his head: Actually, it’s the other way round, we’re fairly sure we know who did it, but we don’t know who ordered it.
‘They know him, Andy. They’ve gorra name for this bastard.’
50
The Heart
AS THE COMMUNITY was splitting up, there was a feeling of its coming together. The people, locals and incomers, relying on one another and knowing that they could.
In the chilly, damp air on Christmas Eve.
Merrily and Jane had spent the morning with James Bull-Davies’s party
of volunteers, helping people on the riverside estate to move furniture upstairs: chairs and TV sets and stereos and computers and phones. Carpets and rugs were rolled up, some of them left on the stairs or on the tops of tables. Items that were too heavy to move or plumbed-in – cookers, washing machines – were covered with plastic sheets or polythene feed sacks cut open.
At the split-level home of one retired couple, thousands of books were packed into boxes to be stored on the upper floor. People who lived on the higher ground were accommodating lawnmowers and bikes and, in one case, tropical fish.
Like the Blitz, someone said, and Merrily supposed comparisons weren’t all that misplaced. There had been a sense of that old British wartime spirit, which was heartening.
Some families who’d believed it could never happen had been shaken by breakfast-TV pictures of flooded homes in villages no more than a few miles away, like Eardisland and Pembridge. Even though levels in Ledwardine were conspicuously higher than last night, some people only ever believed what they saw on TV.
And on TV they also saw the bridge. Pictures from last night, all blue and orange lights and the floodlit, whitened river blasting between the exploded arches.
Calls were made, families arranging to be picked up by friends and relatives on the other side of Ward Savitch’s footbridge. Some of the weekenders, fighting to save Christmas, had grabbed what rooms were available in hotels around Hereford and Leominster.
Merrily borrowed Gomer’s jeep to drive over to Savitch’s farm in the late morning, following a family of five, off to spend Christmas at the grandparents’ farm near Hay, the jeep packed with presents the parents didn’t want the kids to see. Helping to carry the stuff across the footbridge to where the grandad was waiting with his 4×4 and a small galvanised livestock trailer.
This strange parade of refugees tramping across the field with their cases. There must’ve been sixty cars behind council and police barriers on the Ledwardine side of the footbridge and several coaches and vans in the free world across the river. And a burger van and a fish-and-chip van, naturally. Lyndon Pierce was there, getting hassled by a guy called Derry Bateman, self-employed electrical contractor.
‘You and your bloody bypass. When was that bridge last examined, eh?’
‘These en’t normal conditions, Derry.’
‘And you en’t gonner give me a proper answer, are you? You know how many jobs this is gonner cost me? How’m I supposed to get my fucking gear out, Lyndon?’
‘Couldn’t you hire a van the other side? Carry it across?’
‘And leave it overnight in some bloody field to get broke into?’
‘We’re doing all we can,’ Pierce said, Derry Bateman turning away in disgust.
‘Tosser.’
Peace on earth: always too good to last. Back on the village square, the Christmas tree was lit up; around it, a cobbled-together choir sang carols from the Christmas service books Merrily had brought from the church and handed round. People making wartime-style jokes as they clustered behind their synthesised smiles.
‘Only difference, in wartime, folks was evacuated to the countryside,’ Jim Prosser said in the shop. ‘Have to impose bloody rationing soon.’
Merrily said. ‘You’re absolutely sure you’ve got no cigarettes?’
Sounding, she was afraid, almost shrill. Jim leaned across the counter, lowering his voice, confidential.
‘I’d put sixty Silk Cut away for you, see. Only somebody found them, din’t they? And sold them.’
The post office hadn’t opened, wouldn’t be opening, and Shirley West had gone.
‘Many you got left, Merrily?’
‘Three.’
‘Packs?’
‘No, Jim, three cigarettes.’
‘Oh hell. Best we all keeps away from you, then.’
Jim laughing, but nervously. It was two and half cigs, actually. She’d lit one automatically after breakfast and put it out when she’d realised.
By lunchtime, for any number of reasons, she wanted to kill Shirley West.
By two p.m., there were no more people in obvious need of help. It looked like a vacant film set: no cars, no kids playing, no dogs barking. Jane and Mum went back to the vicarage, where Mum went upstairs to make two bedrooms habitable and Jane threw cheese and pickle sandwiches together, putting some into a basket with some fruit and taking it down to the river to find the guys.
Easier to find Gwyneth, the big yellow JCB. All three of them behind her, having a breather. A few metres in front of them, this wall of hard-packed soil, rock and red clay.
‘En’t much more we can do, Janey.’ Gomer, in dark green overalls, leaning up against Gwyneth, rolling a ciggy. ‘All down to if it rains again tonight and how hard.’
‘And will it?’
Jane looked up into a sky like frogspawn. A holiday caravan was being towed across the field towards higher ground, somebody’s emergency home in waiting.
‘Count on it,’ Gomer said. ‘Trouble is – and you don’t like to tell ’em – but this could be the best part.’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’
Gomer mouthed his ciggy, lit up.
‘I done some flood relief once, down South Wales, fifteen, twenny year ago. We come back afterwards, help them clear up. Terrible mess. Get deep water in your house, sometimes it’s buggered for a year or more. Folks comes back to find this thick slime on the floor, whole place stinking to hell. Plaster on the walls all ruined. I seen places had to be stripped back to the breeze-blocks.’
‘Gomer, what about—?’
‘They talks about fire gutting a home, water does it just as well. Sorry, Janey?’
‘I was just going to say, what about your bungalow?’
‘He’ll be all right.’
‘Like you can’t exactly move stuff upstairs, can you? What I was thinking, why don’t we clear out some of your furniture and stuff, store it at the vicarage? We’ve got masses of—’
‘Don’t you get fussed, Janey. I got the important stuff out – Minnie’s things. Put ’em up the roof space.’
‘Yeah, but—’
Minnie had been dead nearly two years.
‘You ask me,’ Gomer said, ‘only place we could have a real problem with – Church Street. En’t no earth we can move there. Only sandbags, and sandbags is a poor substitute for a real barrier.’
‘It’s true,’ Lol said. ‘You’ve already got a lake at the bottom. All it needs is for the water to rise another ten feet up the street and it’ll be into the first black and whites. Maybe for the first time in history.’
‘What about your house, Lol?’
Lol shrugged. There was mud in glistening streaks like snail-trails down the front of his sweatshirt. The square, along with the church, the vicarage, the Black Swan and most of the shops, was at the highest point of the village and therefore considered to be safe, and Lol’s house wasn’t too far down from the square.
‘You’re ready for tonight?’
‘May not be an audience left, way things are going.’
‘You don’t get out of it that easily, Lol. All the people who count are going to be there. You’re coming, aren’t you, Gomer?’
‘Less there’s an emergency, I’ll be there, sure to.’
‘Aw, Gomer, if there’s an emergency, can’t you for once let somebody else—? I mean, you’ve already worked too hard for a—’ Jane broke off, Gomer giving her a hard look ‘—a man who isn’t getting paid.’
That was close. Nearly called him an old guy to his face. Jane felt herself blushing, looked away quickly at the new bank Gomer and Lol and Eirion had made, the way the earth was impacted, the way the structure curved, following the line of the swollen river under the bubblewrap sky. Not exactly like the Dinedor Serpent, more like . . .
‘Oh my God.’
Eirion lifted himself away from the JCB, watching Jane through narrowing eyes.
‘I’ve got to talk to Coops.’
‘Jane, let the poor
guy have a Christmas, huh?’
‘It’s . . . it’s just so obvious, Irene. It has been staring us in the face.’
Eirion looked doubtful. She knew he believed in her, maybe more than anybody, but he didn’t see the pentagram at the heart of the apple.
‘It’s why it’s special. It’s the whole key to this place. I’m sorry . . .’ For a moment Jane couldn’t breathe, couldn’t find the breath to say it, totally choked up with emotion. ‘It’s what’s behind the whole thing. The Village in the Orchard.’
51
Manic
‘YOU DON’T ASK much, do you, boss?’ Karen Dowell said.
The cusp of lighting-up time. Bliss was back on the fringe of Phase Two. Still no signs of life in Furneaux’s house, but the Christmas tree was twinkling in Gyles Banks-Jones’s front window, shadows moving behind it.
Fearful shadows, with any luck.
‘And what if he checks me out?’ Karen said. ‘How do I explain my interest? And, more to the point, how do I explain why I haven’t just asked Howe?’
Bliss thought about it. Problem was, the DCI babysitting the Lasky case for Howe . . . he didn’t know this feller at all. Came in from Droitwich a month or two ago. Bliss wasn’t sure he’d even been to Droitwich, and a new DCI with Howe to answer to would be wearing belt, braces and two pairs of underpants.
‘All right, tell him the truth.’
‘Which version of the truth is that?’
‘Tell him it’s a long shot. Tell him that although we’ve gorra man well in the frame for Ayling we’re covering our arses and we’d like to compare wounds just in case. Tell him you’ve been trying to get hold of Annie for the last hour, without success. Come on, Karen, you know what to say. Charm him. And if there’s anything approaching a match on the wounds, take it from there.’
‘What if Howe—?’
‘She won’t. It’s Christmas. The worst she’ll do is make a note to nail you about it when school’s back. Trust me, where Howe’s concerned you have one big thing going for you here, Karen: you are not me.’
