by Phil Rickman
‘Years and years. I was brought up not far from here, and he was a friend of my parents.’
‘You don’t sound local.’
‘Went away to various schools and then Oxford. I can sound alarmingly local when I want to.’
‘Why were you standing on the castle mound at Cusop late this afternoon?’
‘It’s… Look, it’s somewhere we used to walk, Peter and I. I obviously couldn’t get into his house, so it’s where I went to say goodbye. I’ve what looks like a longish case coming off towards the latter part of next week, so may not be able to attend his funeral.’
Bliss nodded. He wondered what form her goodbye had taken.
‘Actually, I didn’t stay long,’ she said. ‘To be quite honest, it didn’t feel comfortable.’
‘In what way?’
Claudia sat up, easing her jacket off.
‘Do you really want to go into all this?’
She tossed the jacket on to the sofa between Bliss and the teddy. She was wearing a white silk shirt, two or three buttons undone, revealing a pendant, a gold disc with some kind of symbol on it. Might be something like a St Christopher medal. Or might not.
Bliss looked at his watch. He had half an hour before Annie might start getting restive.
‘You know what, Claudia?’ he said. ‘I think I need to.’
32
Plea of insanity
BLISS CALLED Robert Winterson from Annie’s car, parked on a double-yellow in the centre of Talgarth.
‘The police are here,’ Winterson said. ‘We’re going over it all again. Nothing you got to tell me?’
‘Afraid not, Robert. I’ve spoken to the woman Tamsin told Kelly she was looking for. Drew a blank. She didn’t do anything to check the car registration number she had from Kelly. I’m sorry. And listen, Robert, if they want to search the farmhouse and your house, don’t be offended. It’s a formality they’ve gorra observe.’
‘They done that already. They wanted to know everywhere she went. Well we din’t know – she used to go running on her days off, to keep fit, up in the hills, everywhere. To keep fit for her job.’
Something choked off in the background suggested Tamsin’s mother had clocked the expression on Robert’s face. Bliss bent his head, his right hand wrapped tightly in the unfastened seat belt. No worse side of the job than this.
‘And I’ll stay very much in touch,’ he said. ‘Anything you think of, please come back to me at any time.’
‘Mr Bliss, my mother would like a word.’
‘Well, I do need to… Of course.’
Bliss squeezed his eyes shut.
‘Inspector Bliss…’
‘Mrs Winterson, can I just assure you—’
Mrs Winterson said, ‘I just wanted… I just need to ask you if you can tell me if she’s… do you know of any actual danger she might be in?’
‘No, I don’t. Not at all. And I… I know it’s daft to say this, but I don’t want you to worry, ’cos we’re gonna find her.’
‘She was very excited to be working with you,’ Mrs Winterson said.
Bliss’s head was hammering.
He said to Annie, ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry for gerrin’ you involved in this.’
‘You’ll need to go in and make a report.’
‘I know. But how much is gonna be in it?’
He pulled down the sun visor against the sodium street-lights and told her everything this time, all the details. It took about twenty minutes. Annie sat back, letting down the side window.
‘Not exactly what I wanted to hear,’ Annie said. ‘And there’s hardly time for a considered opinion. But my feeling is that if you went babbling on about an old woman from Hardwicke and… satanic neo-Nazis… well, I know how I’d react.’
‘Yeh. What I thought.’
‘Francis, I’m trying to help. People like Mrs Watkins get paid – albeit a pittance – to listen sympathetically to this kind of drivel. We get paid to lend half an ear on the occasions when someone’s trying to enter a plea of insanity.’
Bliss nodded. Annie started the engine.
‘My feeling is that it would only complicate the search for Winterson by diverting attention and manpower from where they need to be focused.’
‘I’m forced to agree.’
‘There’s no evidence that Winterson’s disappearance is in any way linked to the non-suspicious drowning of a man in his nineties. You should have walked away from that before you did, but I understand why you didn’t. And you obviously shouldn’t be back at work, but that’s a side issue. Right now, someone needs to find Winterson’s car, her phone, her friends, boyfriends. Search her parents’ farm outside and in, and… well, you don’t need me to tell you.’
Bliss nodded. Rich Ford, the uniform inspector, rang.
‘Jesus, Francis, she’s a relation. Well… her dad’s the wife’s cousin, kind of. She couldn’t be hiding something from the family, I suppose? Personal problems?’
‘She could, but I don’t see it, Rich. She’d promised to babysit for her brother, and she struck me as a conscientious kid.’
‘All right,’ Rich said. ‘Let’s not bugger about. You can leave these situations too long. We need to put the troops in. I’m going to have to wake somebody up, talk to headquarters.’
‘I only wish I could think of something more expedient.’
‘This bloody drowning, Francis…’
Bliss took a breath.
‘What that comes down to is that when she was a kid, her and her mates used to make up stories about Rector. He was eccentric, he was known to have an interest in the occult and he knew about herbs and fixing dislocated bones. Tamsin thought the circumstances of his death might be worth a second look. It was her own backyard. Talk to Kelly James, she’ll tell you what she told me. She took down the registration of a car belonging to a woman Tamsin thought might be the last person to see Rector alive. Tamsin said she’d look into it, and that seems to be the last anybody heard from her. I’ve talked to the woman. The woman says she’s never seen her.’
‘And this is a barrister? Has she prosecuted for us?’
‘Works Wales, but she was gonna defend Buckland.’
‘Must be good. Or desperate.’
‘There you go.’
‘Looked at from another angle,’ Rich said, ‘what we have is a missing girl in the countryside. Day off, out of uniform, all kinds of bloody animals out there these days. And she’s a copper. She’ll know how we’re likely to react if she goes off the map, and how much that costs.’
‘Yeh.’
‘You’d better come in, Francis. We’re going to need some paperwork from you.’
Annie flicked him a glance.
‘Good. I wouldn’t risk embroidering it any further.’
She was driving back through Hay, all quiet lights, empty streets. Midnightish.
‘We think we know what’s going on out there,’ Bliss said. ‘Could be we don’t know the half of it. You ever think that?’
‘No, I don’t. Things we used to consider bizarre, not much of it gets concealed any more. There’s even some kind of grouping of pagan police, for heaven’s sake. No Witchcraft Act any more. Less contentious than being in the Freemasons.’
‘Like your dad?’
Charlie Howe, one-time head of Hereford CID. Disgraced. Annie didn’t even reply.
‘As it happens, Claudia said she could tell me the names of two senior police officers who were into it,’ Bliss said, ‘and at least four who’re witches. Though she talked about witches in slightly superior tones, like coppers talk about traffic wardens. Norra lorra mental training required, just turn up, light a fire and get your kit off.’
‘And she believes it actually works? A famously intelligent woman. QC-material?’
‘She said it works on its own terms, whatever that means. She says it’s a wonderful discipline. If you’re the type of person for whom the physical world is, as she puts it, insufficient for a rounded life.
’
‘You could say that of the average churchgoer.’
Which Annie wasn’t. Calling her a sceptical agnostic would be coming down on the liberal side.
‘Difference is,’ Bliss said, ‘that your average churchgoer is told to put his faith in God and stay out of the boiler room. People like Peter Rector and Claudia… if there are other spiritual levels, they want to know how it all works. The hidden mechanics. Where they can fit their spanners.’
He could still hear Claudia’s voice, very reasonable, explanatory, like she was addressing the jury as equals. Saying she was quite sure there were lots of things she didn’t know about Peter Rector but she could assure Bliss that all her dealings with him had shown him to be, essentially, a lovely man who’d harm none, as the witches said.
Annie drove past the big car park, down and over the bridge into England.
‘Strange,’ she said. ‘I’d taken against that woman from the first time I met her.’
‘Claudia? I thought—’
‘Mrs Watkins. Women priests – that whole thing made me angry. Women who wanted to be priests, I thought we were bigger than that crap. But the night when you were taken to hospital she was unexpectedly helpful, and I realized she was getting her head around aspects of human behaviour that were a complete mystery to me.’
‘Different side of the brain, Annie.’
He let his head fall back, under the engine hum. A long night with too many bright lights. They were right. He shouldn’t be back. Should’ve stayed at home with a bunch of dvds. If something had happened to Tamsin Winterson because of something he’d failed to process, how would he live with that when they put him out to grass at barely forty?
‘Coming to say goodbye to Rector,’ Annie said. ‘That doesn’t sound convincing to me. What was she really doing there?’
‘She wasn’t exactly being surreptitious about it. Driving openly to Cusop in a bright red car, putting herself very visibly on top of an earthmound.’
‘Do we know she was actually alone there? How many students did Rector have?’
‘Five or six she knows of.’
‘So he was running courses at Cusop for fee-paying acolytes. She provide you with a list?’
‘Didn’t ask for one. No real reason to. But, like she said, she only knew what Rector wanted her to know, so there could be more of them. Which would explain what Tamsin picked up about what locals were calling the coven. And also why there’s no temple. He wasn’t performing rituals, he was conducting tutorials.’
Annie turned right again, for the Golden Valley and Hereford.
‘Francis, I really can’t take a chance on being seen taking you into Gaol Street. We’ll have to go via Marden and you can pick up your car. Will you be all right with that?’
‘Sure. I just want Tamsin found and all this over with.’
‘Try and sleep,’ Annie said.
‘You’re going back to Malvern?’
‘I can stay at your place, if you like.’
‘You’re better going back to Malvern. Keep your head down. Sorry about the weekend.’
‘You’re not talking to Kirsty here, Francis.’
Bliss smiled, eyes closed, reminded of why, even if it was strongly discouraged, a relationship with another serving officer could work well. Whenever he’d buggered up a weekend for Kirsty she wouldn’t speak to him till the next one was looming.
Another twenty minutes to the house at Marden, to pick up his car. The BMW growled quietly.
The countryside around them was dark and loaded. Nobody phoned to say Tamsin Winterson was OK.
Part Four
… artists, poets and visionaries
have found this place a place
where ‘Prayer is valid’… where
the veil between the visible
world and the invisible has worn
diaphanously thin.
Fr. RICHARD WILLIAMS,
Parish priest, Hay-on-Wye
on Capel-y-ffin
33
The N-word
MERRILY WAS THINKING that if she hadn’t been expecting Martin Longbeach, she wouldn’t have recognized him, when he arrived around eight a.m.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I’m fine, I really am.’ He handed her an oil bill and a subscription copy of Private Eye. ‘Postwoman gave me your mail at the gate. Saw the dog collar, I suppose. Safe pair of hands.’
His laugh was like a knife scraping a plate.
‘Of course they are,’ Merrily said at the vicarage door.
Hoping the unease didn’t show. Even his hands looked pale. She remembered when he was tubby and camp in an innocent comedy-vicar way, screening shrewdness. He must have lost two stones, maybe more. His monkish face had acquired lines, his eyes looked like bruises as she led him into the vicarage kitchen, Ethel watching from her spare basket.
‘Not allergic to cats are you, Martin? She’ll be wandering over here when I’m out. Likes to hang out with people.’
Martin Longbeach shook his head, bent to scratch Ethel under the jaw. Ethel craned her neck into his finger.
‘If you think this is not going to work,’ Martin said to the cat, not looking up, ‘I’ll go quietly. I really don’t deserve friends like you.’
‘Now don’t start that,’ Merrily said. ‘Please.’
Well, they weren’t exactly friends. Met him perhaps four times, knew more about what he’d done since his breakdown than anything from his earlier life.
‘Took a holiday last week,’ Martin said. ‘Except it wasn’t.’
‘I know quite a bit about holidays that aren’t. Still, not been great weather, has it?’
‘Perfect for my needs. I took a cottage for a week, in Mid Wales. A mile from Pennant Melangell, the shrine of St Melangell. Every day, I walked to the church.’
‘Always useful, remote churches,’ Merrily said, remembering. ‘That primitive, Celtic… thing.’
‘Barefoot.’
‘Oh.’
‘Every day.’ The scrapy laugh again. ‘Fasted for five of them. Nothing except spring water.’
God…
‘Do you think that was, erm, a good thing, Martin, on your own? That is, presumably…’
‘Oh, quite alone, yes. That was the idea. Giving Him an opportunity to make away with me. See? In the end, I was forced to realize it was all self-pity, Merrily.’
‘Were you?’
‘The great revelation, by the grace of God and a dozen big bottles of Aqua Pura. You can’t die of self-pity, I don’t think. Rage is something different, but equally despicable.’
Don’t. Just don’t, Martin.
‘Why don’t I show you your room?’ Merrily said.
She’d prepared one on the western side, from which the church was not visible, only the bottom end of Church Street where it sloped to the river bridge. A small room. Jane had painted the walls pale blue, the ceiling midnight blue. A copper oil lamp, electrified, stood on an upturned painted chest by the bedside, and the wardrobe was light pine.
‘Calms the fevered brow just to be here, Merrily.’
‘Bathroom next door. I’ll show you how things work in the kitchen later. And there’s an iMac in the scullery. You’re OK with that?’
‘Perfectly.’ He looked down at the duvet cover, an old one, much-washed, but the only alternative was pink. ‘We didn’t even live together, you know.’
‘Look, Martin, you don’t—’
‘It was a celibate relationship. Technically celibate. Not so much because Daniel had HIV, but because the spiritual side of it had become more important for both of us. Or so I told myself. We prayed together every day. And because it’s no longer an automatic death sentence, his death was… it knocked me bloody sideways, Merrily. I felt we’d been unjustly punished… for trying. You know? Trying to be good Christians – in everyone’s eyes. This is quite a conservative area in some ways. Well… most ways, really.’
‘Where are you from originally, Martin?’
/> ‘Me? Cardiff.’ Pronouncing it like a native, Cairdiff. ‘So, thinking you’re doing your best to be virtuous, trying to be a good Christian – sin of pride, do you think?’
‘Not necessarily, no.’
‘When Daniel died… I just gave in to an all-consuming rage. You’ll’ve heard some of it, anyway. I think you need to hear it all from me, really, before you—’
‘No!’
Didn’t need to, didn’t want to. Was that wrong, unfeeling?
‘Martin,’ she said desperately, ‘can I ask your advice? Not being patronizing or anything, I do actually need help. This…’ She took from her jeans the postcard of Hereford Cathedral from Sylvia Merchant. ‘This is something that also relates to bereavement. In, perhaps, a potentially… quite negative way.’
She read the message on the card, explained its background. Standing in the window, from which you could see Lol’s cottage.
‘These women,’ he said. ‘I’m assuming a long-term relationship?’
‘Though I don’t think they lived together until she retired. And there’s no certainty that it was anything more than companionship. But… that’s not my business.’
‘Boss and secretary,’ Martin said.
‘A long, working relationship. I was thinking two desks in the same office, twin beds. Continuity.’
‘In Victorian times,’ Martin said, ‘some wealthy women – and some not so wealthy – would have a personal maid. To cater for all their needs.’
‘So I gather.’
‘But what did she want from you?’
‘I don’t know. Thought I did. She went directly to Sophie, saying that she’d been seeing her companion after death. I thought she wanted some reassurance there was nothing unhealthy or worrying about that. And that Ms Nott, having provided evidence of an element of survival, could now go on to find… you know, eternal rest? Not quite the case. Apparently.’
‘Did she ask you to try and stop it happening?’
‘Thinking back, she didn’t ask me anything. She just reported it. She apparently wanted advice. I played it by ear. As you do.’
