by Phil Rickman
‘Specially as you was wearin’ a Gomer Parry sweatshirt when you done it,’ Danny said.
Then he noticed the way that Lol’s hand was shaking, on the edge of the candlelight, as he tried to stroke the cat.
‘Bastard of a situation to be in, mind,’ Danny said. ‘Real bastard havin’ to wait here for the cops, with... him in the next room.’
‘Reckon I’d’ve covered his face up, too,’ Gomer admitted. ‘Must have a dent in his head you could prop your bike in.’
Lol Robinson laughed a lot at that, leaning back against the desk.
Wasn’t normal laughter, though, even accounting for the physical pain, and Danny didn’t reckon somehow that the dent in the head was the reason Lol had covered up the feller’s face.
It was the right thing. The primary rule, always hammered home with a couple of tragic case histories by Huw Owen in the Brecon Beacons, was this: never leave without doing something. This was more than something.
After half an hour, the lamp was sputtering, its oil level running low, the colour of even the nearest walls changing from magnolia to a dingy nicotine yellow.
And the confirmed congregation for Hattie’s Requiem stood at: Beth Pollen, Jeremy Berrows, Jane – pagan Jane, for heaven’s sake – Amber and Ben Foley and possibly Francis Bliss.
She needed one more, maybe two, specific communicants to make this work.
Bliss was initially helpful. He agreed to put a Range Rover and driver at the disposal of Beth Pollen, who’d offered to go down to St Mary’s Church to borrow the Sacrament. Just when you needed another priest, the vicar of Kington, it seemed, was away; to obtain the sacrament they’d need to disturb the verger.
But there was a limit to Bliss’s cooperation.
‘Merrily, are you like totally three sheets?’
‘No, I’m serious. It’s important.’
‘God knows, I’ve stuck me neck out a lorra times for you and, God knows, I’d do it again. And you’ve been good to me. But there are places I will not go. Not with the legendary atheism of the Ice Maiden and that bastard around with his little Handycam.’
‘He won’t be there, Frannie. Neither will Annie Howe. And if the lure of money wins out, and Ben Foley shows us the door, I’m ready to hold this service in a clearing in the woods.’
‘So I can tie her to a tree?’
‘Bloody hell, Frannie, I think she’d even be allowed out of prison to attend her granny’s funeral. Don’t you?’
‘Merrily.’ Bliss stood in front of the door to the lounge, as if she might suddenly charge it. ‘No.’
This was when Mumford came in to say there was a call for her, at the reception desk.
It was coming up to five-fifteen a.m. when Jane found Mum sitting by candlelight in Ben’s office under the etching of Sherlock Holmes’s most despicable moment. She looked – face it – shattered. The crow’s-feet seriously in evidence, her fingers dancing unevenly on the desktop.
‘Mum, why don’t you like go upstairs and get some rest?’
‘It’s OK, I need to... meditate.’
‘It’s not going to be easy, even I can see that. She still thinks she owns this place. She isn’t going to want to leave.’
‘Sorry, who?’
‘Jeez. Hattie Chancery?’
‘Oh.’ Mum smiled strangely. Fatigue. Halfway out of it.
‘Who was the call?’
‘Lol.’
‘He’s waited up for you? You don’t realize the kind of guy you’ve got there, do you?’
‘The picture’s forming, flower.’
‘What did he want? Is he all right?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘You’re not going to tell me about this, are you?’
‘Not now. But I will tell you. I will tell you everything. Bear with me, flower.’
Jane felt excluded, apprehensive, insecure. ‘There’s nothing wrong between you and Lol, is there?’
‘Absolutely not,’ Mum said. ‘Can you give me a few minutes to sort something out?’
Jane wandered away and came back quietly a couple of minutes later and didn’t go in, just stood outside the door. Expecting to overhear a phone call. Instead, listening in utter dismay to the sobbing and unable to work out whether this was relief or total despair.
The phone at reception called her away.
‘Jane?’
‘Irene! Haven’t you gone?’
‘I’m not going. I was on the Net for a couple of hours. Anyway, I decided not to go to Switzerland. It’s no problem. It means Lowri can take her mate from school and I can have pizzas instead of bloody turkey.’
‘Irene, this is—’
‘Shut up, Jane. You know who this Brigid is, don’t you?’
‘I...’
‘It’s bloody Brigid Parsons. That stuff’s from a nasty little site called veryverybadgirls.com, on which sick bastards all over the English-speaking world discuss their masochistic obsession with women who like to damage men or boys. Or kill them, in most cases. You know who Brigid Parsons is, don’t you?’
‘Er... yeah.’
‘And that’s not all,’ Eirion said. ‘That’s really not all. I do not like this, Jane.’
51
Of the Midnight
MERRILY HAD NEVER felt more grateful at being permitted to cry, let out this great vomit of emotion. Because there really was no way you could sit down and reason it all out, analyse your own reactions, from the initial blinding love and relief, through the horror and the pity, all the way down to the guilt and remorse and the residual dread that settled in your stomach like sour wine.
After attempting to repair her face with wipes from her shoulder bag, she’d come out of Ben’s office to find Jane waiting with a candle on a tin tray and the laptop she’d borrowed from Matthew Hawksley.
Jane had been on the phone to Eirion whom Merrily kind of thought had gone away for Christmas. And what was he doing up at this hour, anyway?
Nothing was normal.
Jane placed the laptop on the counter at reception and plugged it into the phone socket. Merrily stood and watched the savage colours rise on the flat screen.
www.veryverybadgirls.com
‘This isn’t the important one,’ Jane said, ‘but you need to see it first.’
Ben Foley looked as if he’d been holding his head under a cold tap to revive himself.
‘We should’ve talked.’ His swept-back hair was damp and lank, his long, thin face still glowing with towel friction in the haze of the Tilley lamp. ‘We should’ve talked ages ago. Now you think I’m some kind of conman and Jane hates me.’
‘My emotions change with the wind,’ Jane said.
They went into Ben’s office. He shut the door.
‘Before you say anything, Amber’s told me about... Brigid Parsons.’
‘You really didn’t know before?’ Merrily said.
‘I swear to you I didn’t. And I’ll tell you something else – if I had known I’d still have offered her the job.’
‘Of course you would. Probably for the same reasons she’d have turned it down if she thought there was any chance you knew. What I’m more interested in, however... How long have you known Antony Largo?’
‘Ha.’ He pulled out a chair. ‘You’d better sit down.’
Jane opened the laptop on the desk, brought up the first downloaded file: www.veryverybadgirls. He looked at it with distaste. ‘Is there a name for men like this?’
‘I’m sure we can think of one,’ Merrily said.
‘A name... or a man like this?’
‘Both?’ Jane brought up the second site. ‘OK,’ Merrily said. ‘This, as it happens, was a cross-reference or whatever they call it, from veryverybadgirls. Which was how Jane’s boyfriend found it – although I think it was the other way round. He’d already checked out Antony Largo when he found out Jane was working with him. Finding this.’
the official women of the midnight website
‘Ah,’ Ben sai
d, with no great surprise.
‘You’ve seen it before?’
‘No, I’m not much of an Internet person, but I’d have been surprised if there hadn’t been one.’
‘Seems to have become quite a cult, doesn’t it? Video editions with extra footage, all the unpleasant details you weren’t given in the original.’
‘Never liked that sort of thing myself – director’s cuts. When a production’s finished, it’s finished.’
‘I think we’re looking at prurient rather than artistic interest. What emerges from this – and from the badgirls site – is this particular producer’s... would obsession be too strong a word?... with bad girls generally and Brigid Parsons in particular.’
Ben Foley sighed. ‘Yes. I knew about that. Antony’s, ah, had a thing about her for quite a long time. Since he was a junior researcher at the BBC – Panorama or some such. Around the time we first met, as it happened. They were going to make a film about Brigid, when she was not long out of prison with a young baby. Idea was they’d follow her progress back into the world – all back views and silhouettes, of course. Antony was part of the team – very minor role, so there was no way she’d remember him, but he... fell for her in a big way.’
‘Fell for her... or what he thought she was? I mean, when you say he had a thing about her...’
‘She’s a rather beautiful woman. A beautiful dangerous woman. I’d like to think he was a little more sophisticated about it than the poor pervs on that Web site.’
‘I don’t remember the Panorama programme.’
‘Because it never happened. She pulled out in the end. Probably realized there was absolutely no way they could do it without identifying locations, at least. Current Affairs were furious – these were the early Birt years, when the pennies had to be accounted for.’ Ben shuddered. ‘Antony never forgot her, however, which I never found entirely healthy, or indeed his apparent obsession with women who’d killed men and boys. When he was making Women of the Midnight he did his damnedest to get Brigid. She wouldn’t meet him or any of his team, and she made sure they never found out where she was. So all they could do in Midnight, in the end, was tell the story – as they had to do with Myra Hindley – without an interview with the subject. Still made compulsive viewing, though.’
‘So when you invited him here—’
‘I’ve told you, I had no idea Natalie was... anything other than another woman on the run from a bad relationship. I thought my secret weapon in persuading Antony was going to be the story of Hattie Chancery. Antony saw Natalie, looked at her the way he looked at all attractive women, and I warned him off. He must’ve recognized her at once, didn’t say a word to me, but then he wouldn’t. From that moment on, he was evidently following his own agenda.’
‘Does he know you know... now?’
‘No. And I’m going to choose my... my moment. The little bastard.’ Ben struck the desk with his fist; the laptop vibrated. ‘The minute Amber told me, the truth of everything blew up in my face. That shit. He did it so well, continuing to resist my arguments, letting me woo him, finally relenting, oh so reluctantly. And now he’s going to shaft me and walk away. I want to kill him, Merrily. When Amber told me how he treated you like dirt in there... He wants to be thrown out. He doesn’t need me or Stanner any more. He’s got what he wants.’
‘Has he? I’m sorry...’
Ben stood for a few moments staring at a picture of the young Mary Bell on the laptop. ‘You’d better have a look at this,’ he said.
He pulled a dust cover away from a TV monitor with a nine-inch screen. ‘Hope there’s enough juice in this battery.’
From a cupboard under the desk, he produced a video camera like the one Jane had been using. He connected it to the TV, switched on, turning the sound down low. Video channel, cool blue screen.
‘I was rather surprised when Antony turned up tonight, having apparently driven from London after talking to Jane on the phone. I did a check with the AA – the route he was claiming to have taken was blocked in several places, even to a Mitsubishi Shogun.’
Jane looked up. ‘You mean he was... here all the time?’
‘Not here, but somewhere close. For at least a couple of days. When he came in tonight, he had his usual bag of cameras, but no room to go to. Took out what he needed, asked me – in view, as he put it, of all the thieving police around – if I’d put the bag in the safe. Naturally, when I found out what I found out, I had a poke around in his case. Found this.’
Brigid Parsons was on the screen, in close-up, unsmiling, no make-up, hair untidy. She seemed to be in a vehicle; there was a metal-framed window behind her. She was talking about her father.
‘... When he married again, I was fine with that, yeah. I mean, the poor guy deserved some kind of life. With my mother, he was husband, nurse, minder. I think he did love her at first... or maybe not, maybe it was just infatuation – and some kind of need. She was undoubtedly a beauty, and she needed him, and it was his job, what he did. I suppose there was a buzz in that, being needed... for a while.
‘When she was pregnant, it was, undoubtedly – he’d tell me this, time and time again – the happiest time of his marriage to Paula. So full of the happy hormones. But after I was born – whether it was like with her sister I don’t know... whether she was jealous, but... I do think that if she hadn’t killed herself she’d have killed me.’
Ben snapped off the sound. Brigid mouthed silently on the screen, her hands weaving about, her face contorted, those lush lips writhing in distaste, actual tears in her eyes. She wiped a hand across her eyes, and there was a streak of what looked like drying blood on one wrist, and livid, open lacerations.
Merrily turned away, to Ben. ‘He’s been here recording, with Brigid?’
‘Duplicitous little bastard.’ Ben switched off the set. ‘How did he persuade her? I don’t know. But he’s got an interview there maybe fifty minutes long, nearly all of it usable and worth a small bloody fortune. While my piffling Conan Doyle doco... well, that will never be made, will it? Now you know why I want to kill him. Amber said restrain yourself, think things out, and that’s what I’ve done so far.’
‘Have you told the police?’
He looked puzzled. ‘Why should I? Hasn’t broken the law, has he? I must say it did occur to me that if the police were building a case against poor Natalie, this was something they might like to impound – which would screw his exclusive, let the whole thing out of the bag. But that seemed rather unsubtle. I’ve told you because you raised the issue with me, and I want to be honest with you. But I’d be glad if you’d keep it to yourself for the moment. I am, I regret to say, unashamedly looking for a way to shaft him back.’
‘I’d like to ask Brigid about it.’
‘So would I, if I had the chance,’ Ben said. ‘But I don’t see it, do you? I don’t see any of us having a chance to talk to her again for about twenty-five years.’ He put the dust cover back over the TV monitor. ‘Look, this... Vaughan thing. I don’t know what to think. Is that woman...?’
‘I don’t know, Ben.’
‘We don’t even know if any of it’s true, do we?’
‘It makes a lot of sense, though.’
‘Inherited evil?’
‘Most of what I do, I can’t prove...’ Merrily suddenly felt so tired that she had to stand up to stop her head falling forward on to the desk ‘... anything.’
When she went alone in search of Bliss, Mumford pointed her to a door that she hadn’t noticed before, near the foot of the stairs. Mumford put a finger to his lips as she went quietly in to find a small room furnished as a study, with bookshelves. And Bliss slumped over a desk, with his head laid on an arm.
He sprang up instantly.
‘It’s allowed, Frannie,’ Merrily said.
‘Must be getting old. Used to be able to do all night and all the next day on black coffee and cheese-and-onion crisps.’
‘The adrenalin of crazed ambition. Listen, when Danny Thom
as gets back, I’m hoping to get Clancy brought over. You could at least give me Brigid for half an hour.’
‘You were trying to nobble me before I was properly awake, weren’t you? Listen, I’ve been to me share of Requiem Masses. I know the kind of emotion all that can generate. Blood on the altar I do not want.’
‘Blood on the altar?’
‘Gwent police have been talking to Nathan – Bowker, Bowdler? Anyway, the cowboy with the big gun and the small brain who was savaged by Ms Parsons for the crime of trespassing with intent.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’m assuming this is news to you, naturally. But he’s only just back on his feet and the first thing he did, when he was able to talk without pain, was to telephone Mr Sebastian Dacre with a view to obtaining compensation for his injuries in return for his silence. The way you do.’
‘When was this?’
‘Last night, shortly before seven. Nathan said that when they were first let loose, Sebbie had talked about the woman living with Berrows. Nathan was a little coy on this, according to Gwent, but they had the feeling that it had been suggested that Nathan and his mates needn’t be overly polite to her. No suggestion from Sebbie, of course, that she might retaliate, so the lad was gobsmacked in every sense of the word.’
‘And you think this was what sent Dacre up Stanner Rocks in a snowstorm? Confirmation that this was Brigid Parsons and she hadn’t changed?’
‘We’ll be looking at Sebbie’s mobile, to see who he rang last night, who he might’ve made an appointment with. Unfortunately, the thing was smashed on the rocks, so it’ll have to go to the boffins. But, yeh, you’re right, I reckon. Puts paid to any doubts he might’ve had that the lovely Natalie was indeed his little cousin Brigid. And it gives him more leverage. Being arrested for GBH, if you happen to be Brigid Parsons, it’s not gonna be a smack on the wrist, is it? Also, think of the publicity. Sebbie gives her an ultimatum, re sale of farm... she sends him on his last journey.’
