by Phil Rickman
Of which there were quite a lot. Could be as many as a hundred pictures? Merrily wondered. They were soft-porn poses, mostly, colour and black and white. A scattered few were harder core, a couple featuring women using vibrators. The weakness of the lights and the clouding shadows added the illusion of movement – that was disturbing, in an eerie way. The rest, Merrily decided, was just sad for a man twenty years out of his middle teens.
‘Like some repressed schoolboy’s fantasy den, isn’t it?’ Frannie Bliss stood in the bedroom doorway.
Merrily turned to glance at the bed, keeping her hands in her coat pockets. The bed was king-size, unmade. Black shiny sheets – well, of course. There was a thick smell.
‘Makes you wonder how he ever got a woman to spend a night in here, doesn’t it?’ Bliss said.
‘I don’t think he’d get one for a second night.’
‘Ah, well…’ He came a little way into the room. ‘The answer, of course, is that he’s got another bedroom, along the passage. Red lights, pictures of Spanish dancers – nothing to offend, other than aesthetically, and I don’t imagine there’ve been too many cultural exchanges in there. So if we assume that’s where he takes the, er, young ladies, then this’ll be where he… enjoys his own company.’
Merrily shuddered. She recalled the shadow of Roddy Lodge standing immediately over her in front of the Pawson house, the birthday-boy look on his trowel-shaped face. A woman? he’d said.
Like: any woman. Another one for the wall.
Bliss stood there, hands in his pockets. They both had their hands in their pockets. Bliss was watching her, waiting.
Merrily met his eyes.
‘Er…’ He cleared his throat. ‘You’re not getting it, are you?’
‘Sorry… ?’
‘Take a closer look, would you, Merrily?’
She didn’t move. ‘I don’t see that—’
‘There’ll probably be some ladies you might not recognize – don’t know them all meself. But the one just to the left of the door, for instance, is Kelly Emerson, who was found raped and murdered in Swindon last year. That was the picture the family gave the police for the crime posters. It was widely used in the papers at the time.’
‘What?’
She followed his forefinger to a blurred black and white face, dark synthetic curls, big smile, naked body in shadow. She didn’t understand; the newspapers had used a nude photograph of a missing woman? She moved in closer, realizing that there was something wrong here, something skewed. Saw that the face of Kelly Emerson was in grainy black and white, but the naked body was studio quality and, on closer inspection, was slightly too big for the face.
Merrily backed rapidly away, aware of breathing harder.
‘Thing is, of course,’ Bliss said, ‘that he couldn’t’ve done that one. There’s a bloke doing life for Kelly. Feller from Bournemouth – they got him on DNA and then he pleaded guilty, no messing. It’s beyond any question.’
‘But…’
Lodge had pasted the cut-out face of a murdered woman onto the body of some anonymous pin-up from the Sun? Just another model… just another dead woman.
She made herself go back and examine both walls more closely. There were several faces she recognized now: celebrity murder victims, celebrity suicides. Also the most famous car- crash casualty of all time. All of them women, all of them now dead, their faces pasted onto cut-out nude bodies – tragic victims twisted, with scissors and paste and lighting, into profane pin-ups.
Merrily turned away from the wall. All the sensations of last night were coming back, from the feeling of grease and smoke in her hair at Gomer’s burned-out depot, to the waves of aftershave, to the cloying perfume of decay under the tarpaulin.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘I think you do, Merrily,’ Bliss said softly. ‘You’re looking at his inspiration. These are the ones he wishes he’d done. The ones he wishes he’d got to first.’
She stood in the dimness, staring no longer at the illuminated wall but into the very thin lines of grey and white between the blades of the Venetian blinds.
‘They’re all paste-ups?’
‘Not all of them. I think some were just piccies he got off on. Part of the mix-’n’-match. I expected to find one of Lynsey, but she’s not there. Maybe because she’s not had her picture in the papers, yet. There’ll be a reason. He…’ Bliss paused. ‘He might tell you what it is.’
It was as though he’d opened the door of a deep-freeze.
‘I can’t do it,’ she said.
‘That’s your decision, Merrily. I can’t force you to see him.’
‘He doesn’t want to talk to me. You know that. He just wants a woman in the room with him. Any woman. You know that.’
She remembered Roddy Lodge passing her his card, scrutinizing her as if taking a mental photograph, offering to tell her all the scary things he’d told the local vicar about what he’d seen in the night. She didn’t like to think now about what he might have seen in the night, inside or outside his own head.
Thanks, she’d said. I’d like that.
Yeah. You would indeed, my darlin’.
Merrily pushed her fists hard into the pockets of Jane’s duffel coat, determined not to shiver. ‘You’d better tell me what you know,’ she said to Bliss. ‘How did he kill Lynsey Davies?’
He shrugged. ‘Strangled her. The PM should confirm it. Roddy told the lads in the car he’d “throttled” her. He just hasn’t said it for the tape yet. Probably not bare hands, we think something was used – possibly a belt.’ He paused. ‘You can probably understand now why I want to dig up a few more Efflapures.’
‘Yes.’ Bliss was probably right to want to dig up every Efflapure that Roddy Lodge had ever planted.
‘I didn’t want to say too much in advance. Open the blinds now, if you’re feeling a bit oppressed.’
She tugged on the cord and grey daylight made the room look merely tawdry. The view, sliced horizontally by the blinds, was further slashed and diced by the great steel legs of the pylon at the edge of Roddy’s garden.
‘Would it offend the crime-scene people overmuch if I had a cigarette?’ Merrily said.
12
Dark Lady
EIRION SUBJECTED JANE to this sideways perusal she didn’t care for. They were heading out of Hereford on the darkening Ledbury road, bound for Knight’s Frome.
‘Like what?’ Jane demanded. ‘Go on, say it!’
They’d been dissecting her mother’s love life to discover precisely why it was going nowhere. From the lofty plateau of a relationship that was actually working – OK, within the restrictive parameters of herself and Eirion being still at school and stuff like that – Jane figured this was legit, her duty even. After all, it had taken her over a year to engineer the Mum/Lol thing.
‘Jane’ – Eirion did this exaggerated sigh – ‘you didn’t, though, did you?’
‘What?’
‘Engineer it. It was nothing to do with you. In fact, if you’d kept your nose out completely, it would probably actually have happened before it did.’
‘Thanks!’
‘Well, it’s true. You can’t leave anything alone.’
‘You totally smug fat git!’
She glared out of the window at the newly stripped hopframes around Perton. When Eirion had picked her up at five p.m., she’d noticed he’d put on a bit of weight, a big Welsh problem.
‘It’s because of all this driving to pick you up,’ Eirion said. ‘Maybe I should stay in and do sit-ups and weight training.’
I’m sorry,’ she said gruffly, not looking at him. ‘I didn’t mean fat… exactly.’
He didn’t respond. They drove in silence for a mile or so. They were in Eirion’s new old car, a little grey Peugeot with one of those CYM stickers identifying the driver as a resident of Wales who’d taken the vehicle abroad, if only to England. In fact, usually only to England.
And everything – like everything – was ir
ritating Jane tonight. Obviously, she loved to talk and theorize about Mum and Lol, but right now – she realized this, she wasn’t stupid – it was also an escape from the aura of manic desperation surrounding Gomer. She wished there was something she could do for him, but even Eirion didn’t have an HGV licence, probably wasn’t old enough. Besides, it would take more than dealing with a backlog of digging contracts to put Gomer back together this time. The big pendulum had taken him down once too often this year. Anxiety began to inflate in her chest; she folded her arms over it.
‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter who engineered it if it was meant to happen, if it’s the right thing for her – and for Lol, obviously – and it quite clearly is. But because of what she does she’s got to be sure it’s the right thing by… Him. Like He deserves that kind of deference. If He exists.’
‘It’s a big responsibility, being a priest,’ Eirion said lamely.
‘The truth is,’ Jane said, ‘they’re both basically wimps. Neither of them had the confidence to commit. They were just kind of moving warily around one another, like cats.’
‘That’s not being wimpish, it’s what you do when you’re an adult,’ Eirion said, the trite bastard. ‘You’ve made a few mistakes before, and you don’t want to jump into anything without being sure of the territory… especially when there’s additional baggage.’
‘You mean me?’
‘No, you egomaniac – emotional baggage! History.’
‘Well,’ Jane said, ‘it’s not like they’re still not making a complete bollocks of it – all this about everything having to be kept under wraps… which is like totally ridiculous.’
‘It’s not, totally, when you think about it.’
Jane leaned back against the passenger door. ‘What’s to think about? If you look at the Anglican Church as a whole, about half the priests are gay, right? And they’re not hiding their private life any more, are they? They’re practically announcing it from the pulpit.’
‘Dearly beloved brethren…’ Eirion did this reedy voice. ‘This morning, I have to impart to you all that the big black guy living with me at the vicarage is not really a Nigerian theological student, as originally announced in the parish magazine. In fact, he’s my special friend.’
Jane fought back the grin. ‘But I mean, with a gay vicar you’ve got an ordained minister who’s having sex with one or more partners with no possibility of any of them ever becoming the vicar’s wife, in the traditional sense, so why can’t two heterosexuals—?’
‘Because, right now,’ Eirion said in his explaining-to-the- child tone, ‘neither of them needs the shit. She’s had more publicity than she ever wanted just lately. Plus, Lol’s got a lot to work out, with this album and the chance of a comeback after, well, a very long time. Be bad enough for someone who hadn’t had… the kind of problems he’s had.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing, Irene, if Mum had walked away, he wouldn’t’ve been able to finish that album. If you listen to the new songs, most of them are actually about her. Which has got to be just the most incredible turn-on, hasn’t it? Like being the Dark Lady of the Sonnets.’
‘Jane, with all respect and everything—’
‘OK, hyper. But if I was his Muse…’
Eirion stopped for the traffic lights at Trumpet. ‘You still fancy him, don’t you?’
She stared at him, resentful again. He’d refused to let her drive, claiming the car wasn’t insured for a learner. Which was bollocks, probably. The truth was he was afraid.
‘But what this is really… Jane… ?’
‘What?’ she said sulkily.
What this is really about is Moira Cairns, isn’t it?’
‘That’s crap. Moira Cairns is really old.’
‘And really beautiful and charismatic.’
‘Moderately attractive, I believe. If you like that kind of thing and you can put up with the grating accent.’
‘And – what – possibly five years older than your Mum?’ His patronizing lilt was back. ‘That’s not very old, really, is it? And Moira and Lol have the same musical background. And Lol’s going to be playing on her album. And she’s doing one of his songs? And they’re under the same roof, miles from anywhere, recording well into the night.’
‘That is total, absolute, complete bollocks,’ Jane said, furious.
It was getting dark now, and some of them were carrying torches or lamps. About a dozen people, men and women, with a few teenagers lurking on the fringes. From a distance, it looked like a group of very early carol-singers but, close up, Merrily could tell they weren’t going to be bought off with mince pies.
A man came forward, his voice preceding him across the cindered forecourt of Roddy Lodge’s garage.
‘We’d like, if we may, to speak to the Senior Investigating Officer?’
Frannie Bliss turned to Merrily, raised an eyebrow and then walked out to them – a poised and dapper figure despite the loss of sleep and all the coffee. A pro, an operator.
‘That would be me. DI Francis Bliss. How can I assist?’
‘Well, I hope that, for a start, you can tell us exactly what’s going on.’ The man was half a head taller than Bliss. He wore jogging gear, luminous orange. He put out a hand. ‘Fergus Young. Chair of the Underhowle Development Committee. Also head teacher at the school.’
He and Bliss shook hands, while Merrily stayed in the shadow of the concrete building, hoping on one level that all this wasn’t going to take too long and on another – because of what lay ahead for her – that it would take half the night.
‘Mr Young,’ Bliss said. ‘I’m happy to tell you what I can, but I’m afraid it’s not going to be much.’
‘Well, to begin with, if I may ask this, where is Mr Lodge?’
‘Ah.’ Bliss put his head on one side. ‘Mr Lodge – to use a phrase which I only wish we’d been able to improve on over the years, but we somehow never have – is helping us with our inquiries.’
A woman shouted, ‘Please don’t patronize us. We know the kind of questions you people have been asking in the village.’
‘Yeh, I’m sure you do.’ Bliss peered cautiously into the assembly. ‘The press aren’t here, are they?’
‘Of course not,’ Fergus Young said. ‘We’re all local people, and we’re here because we’re quite naturally concerned about what appears to be intensive police activity around the community in which we’ve chosen to invest our lives. And if that sounds pompous I’m very sorry.’
It certainly didn’t sound local. He was about Merrily’s age, and had a bony, equine head with tough and springy dull gold hair. He looked like the kind of evangelical head teacher who did an hour’s fell-running before morning assembly.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I can assure you that anything you say to us will be treated with sensitivity and discretion.’
Bliss looked pointedly at the teenagers.
‘Or,’ Fergus Young said, ‘if you’d prefer to talk to just a few of us, in a less public place, I’m sure—’
‘That might be a better idea, sir, yes.’
Young turned to the group to discuss it. Frannie Bliss moved away, hands in his trouser pockets. Merrily murmured, ‘Shall I wait in the car?’
‘Not unless you really want to. I might need back-up, with some of these plummy bastards.’
And so they all wound up walking, almost single file, into the village of Underhowle in the blustery dusk. The lane was slick with wet leaves. Nobody spoke much. Merrily knew that Bliss was working out how to turn this around, milk the villagers while telling them nothing they didn’t already know and making it sound like he was taking them into his confidence. Walking a couple of yards behind the delegation, she had the feeling of being towed into something she was going to regret.
Underhowle: she didn’t know what to expect. The village, though still in Herefordshire and close to the most expensive curves of the Wye Valley, was also on the fringe of the Forest of Dean, the less affluent part of rural Gloucestershire –
former mining area, high unemployment, a fair bit of dereliction. It wasn’t only the River Severn that separated the Forest from the Cotswolds, and it probably wasn’t only the Wye separating Underhowle from the posher parts of South Herefordshire.
Bliss dropped back to take a call on his mobile. ‘Yeh.’ Then he listened for a while. ‘So that bears out? Good, good…’
The trees dwindled, lights appeared.
‘Lovely job. Ta very much, George.’
Bliss snapped his phone shut, dropped it into his jacket pocket and quietly punched his left palm with his right fist. Fergus Young glanced back at him sharply. Merrily wondered if Bliss had been given the post-mortem result, but he didn’t enlighten her. She caught up with the others.
‘Never seems to stop raining these days, does it?’ she said to nobody in particular, reaching for her hood.
‘Aspect of global warming,’ a white-bearded man growled. ‘We only have ourselves to blame.’
‘I suppose so.’
There was a solitary street lamp at a staggered crossroads, a signpost pointing through the rain to Ross in the west, Lydbrook in the east. Ahead of them, Merrily saw sporadic cottages and modern houses edging warily up a stubbly hillside with the pylons marching behind. In the dusk, with few lights, it looked stark, like a big, sloping cemetery.
‘We’ll use the village hall, I think,’ Fergus Young said.
Not what Merrily was expecting, given the bleakness of the village. Nor, after the abattoir ambience of Ledwardine parish hall, what she was used to.
It had evidently been a barn, left over from the days when the village centre had formed around old farms. Now it was the classiest kind of barn conversion: chairs with tapestry seats, tables of antique pine. Wall lights shone softly on unplastered rubblestone, open beams and rafters.
A sandstone lintel, above a window in the end wall, had one word carved into it: ARICONIUM.
There was also a coffee bar. A dark, wiry guy with a shaven head went behind it, flicking switches. ‘Gotta be espresso, I’m afraid. That all right for everyone? Inspector?’ London accent.
