by Phil Rickman
‘And why are we thinking that?’
‘Apart from general appearance,’ Stagg said, ‘one’s wearing this kind of a locket thing, silver, with a little religious-looking picture inside and some foreign words.’
‘Foreign words.’
‘I was off sick when they ran the course on migrant crime.’
Bliss wrinkled his nose. Thousands of East Europeans around the county now: mainly honest, decent migrant workers, a percentage of migrant layabouts and a handful of migrant heavy-duty wrongdoers. There’d been a short course for cops on the kind of societies they came from, their favourite crimes – the more violent ones usually practised against other migrants who were usually reluctant to give evidence.
‘How long’s he been here?’
A silver Beemer was parked up by the little black and white place. The Havana cigar box on the dash identifying Billy Grace’s urban transport.
‘Quite a while,’ Terry Stagg said. ‘He likes the ones where he gets noticed.’
The private parking area was almost a little square. Uneven levels, low brick walls and the arse-ends of buildings in need of repair. A weeping birch tree grew incongruously at its centre and its horizons were tarted up by the tower and steeple of St Peter’s and the Shirehall’s little cupola with its flagpole and Union Jack.
‘This where it happened – or were they dumped?’
‘Unlikely,’ Terry Stagg said. ‘Blood and gunge over a fairly wide area.’
‘Who found them?’
‘Elderly bloke from over there.’ Terry nodding at a modernized brick terrace. ‘Woke up to screams and yells not long after midnight.’
‘You mean… we actually came out here last night?’
‘No, he didn’t report it. Thought it was kids, pissed. Seems he’s complained twice in recent weeks and, um, no action was taken. And you don’t go out to remonstrate any more, do you?’
‘I presume the DCI’s en route?’ Bliss said.
A practised insouciance – getting good at this. Annie’d given him ten minutes’ start so they wouldn’t be seen arriving together.
‘And presumably we’re knocking on doors. Those windows overlooking the car park? Pubs, clubs, night workers, minicab firms.’
‘And CCTV,’ Stagg said. ‘The whole city centre.’
‘Good,’ Bliss said. ‘Right, then. Let’s go and put me off me breakfast.’
Turned towards the tape and the canvas, and Terry handed him the Durex suit, and they walked down past the offices of the Hereford Herd Book Society, whatever that meant.
Sollers frigging Bull would know.
Most of the video had been shot, but they were still taking stills from different angles. Images to wither your soul. Breathing in all the degrading smells of violent death, Bliss heard a man distantly protesting, ‘No, I work here, of course. Come in early because I have clients. How long am I supposed to hang around? Can’t you at least…?’
‘Twat,’ Bliss said.
It came out a bit choked up, surprising him. It wasn’t the horror as much as the sad banality: the two red shoes shed in different places, the blue vinyl handbag sprung open, letting out lipsticks and tissues and photos, left where they’d fallen. He saw a picture of a middle-aged couple, hand in hand on the edge of a field, with a white dog.
‘Only one handbag, Slim?’
‘Nothing else here.’ Slim Fiddler, head SOCO, came up like a hippo from a swamp. ‘And I can’t imagine they shared.’
The first body… it was as if she’d been thrown like discarded clothing over a low wall, maybe the foundation of a demolished outbuilding. She was wearing jeans and a black fleece, half off. A thin arm was draped over the bricks, the hand already bagged. You could only see one of her eyes; it was like sun-dried tomato.
‘Looks like the head was banged repeatedly into the sharp edges of the bricks,’ Billy Grace said. ‘The other one… is less of a big-production number.’
Beaming the way only Billy Grace ever beamed.
The other one lay a few paces away in a patch of scrubby grass. The pink fleece and the way she was half-curled made her look like a prawn, Bliss thought, a giant prawn, for God’s sake. One hand down between her legs.
‘Sexual assault?’
‘Probably.’ Billy bent down. ‘Dress ripped here. Didn’t do that herself. But the rest of it, as you can see, is far less… frenzied… than the other one.’
Her face was unmarked. It was a doll’s face – not a baby’s doll, more like one of those Russian dolls where one was inside another and so on. The hair was brown with gold highlights.
‘Probably died quite quickly,’ Billy Grace said. ‘I’d guess she fell back on the corner of that brick – see the blood there? Then perhaps somebody pulled her away, let her fall again.’
‘But the other one… fought harder.’
‘To the end, I’d imagine.’
Billy straightened up. Under his unzipped Durex suit, he wore a blazer with a badge, old-fashioned rugby-club type.
‘Not a lone assailant, is it?’ Bliss said.
‘Unlikely.’
Bliss returned to the first and bloodiest body, took a breath and bent to the poor kid, examining her neck. A few scratches there, that was all.
‘Where’s the locket?’
‘Came off, Frannie.’ Slim Fiddler led him to a patch of weeds. ‘Try not to touch.’
Bliss squatted to where the leaves had been parted, making eye contact with the Virgin Mary in light blue and gold. The locket was silver, tarnished.
‘Very possibly Romanian,’ he said.
An unusual silence. Bliss half turned. Billy Grace was peering at him over his half-glasses, eyebrows raised. Bliss scowled.
‘Piss off, Billy, I’m norra complete friggin’ moron. It’s from an icon, Russian Orthodox kind of thing. The Romanians are big on icons of Our… of the Virgin.’
Could have told him how once, aged seventeen, just, he’d had to take his ma and his most devoutly Catholic auntie to this exhibition of icons in Liverpool – was it the Walker Gallery? Not long after he’d passed his driving test, anyway, so he’d been quite happy to relieve the old man of the chore just to get his mitts on the car keys for an afternoon.
Bliss stood up and backed off to view both victims in the context of the location. The violence was… careless. Almost impersonal, like storm damage.
‘They’ve been left like rubbish, Billy. Like fly-tipping. No attempt at concealment. Not what rapists do. Rapists, if they’ve killed, they make some effort to cover up.’
‘That include gang-rapists? Drunk.’
‘I dunno. Something’s not quite right.’
‘Be able to give you a more formal verdict on the sexual aspect later today.’
‘Won’t be me, Billy. I’ll be off back to Oldcastle. Where I might even get left alone for a bit. DCI’ll be here soon. This is the big one.’
‘You think so? Mansel Bull’s a pillar of the rural community, whereas these pitiful young things…’
‘Careful, Billy.’
‘I’m too old to care, Francis. This your mistress now?’
What?
Bliss tensed, but didn’t look at him. Up in the street, Annie Howe, in her light grey trenchcoat, was getting out of her Audi, bringing her mobile to her ear.
Just a figure of speech, that was all. Not a chance in a million that Billy Grace knew or even suspected. Just a frigging stupid, flip remark.
Bliss turned his back on the crime scene to walk slowly, as if reluctantly, towards Annie.
‘No!’ he said. ‘No, listen, that’s not what’s gonna happen…’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
Back in the Audi. Bliss in the passenger seat, all the windows up. Annie behind the wheel, no make-up. Bliss hunched himself up against the passenger door, explicit body language for anybody watching: he didn’t want to be here with this woman.
‘Apart from anything, you know exactly what it’s gonna look like.’
‘Actually, I don’t think it will,’ Annie said. ‘That’s the point. This is a double murder. By any criteria, the biggest case. It’s also going to be immensely high-profile, controversial and politically sensitive.’
‘And urban.’
‘Nobody’s going to make that distinction, Francis. And, anyway, it’s what God wants, so we have to live with it.’
She’d been talking to the Chief on the Bluetooth, driving here. Fait accompli. Fit-up. The church clock at St Peter’s began to chime the hour. Annie passed a folded paper across to Bliss, under dash-level.
He stared at her.
‘I don’t like the friggin’ Guardian. It’s all opera and foreign stuff.’
‘It’s the Daily Mail. I had to pick it up on the way here. Just read it, will you?’
Sourly, Bliss opened the paper out to a double-page spread. A panorama of Oldcastle Farm on its bank above the Wye, photographed across the fields between bands of police tape.
RURAL IDYLL OR KILLING FIELDS?
Police ‘don’t want to know’
In another picture, the Countryside Defiance banner. In the middle of the page, a shot of a man sitting with his head in his hands. The caption,
Sollers Bull: shattered.
‘If it’s painful, you can skip to the end,’ Annie said.
‘Not sure I can move me reading finger that fast.’
Annie turned away, tapping the steering wheel slowly with her nails. Bliss sighed. Near the bottom of the story, it said:
West Mercia police confirmed last night that the detective leading the inquiry, DI Francis Bliss, is an incomer from Merseyside.
‘DI Bliss has been with us for several years now,’ a spokeswoman said, ‘and we’re fully confident both of his ability and the extent of his local knowledge.
‘We consider the claims made by Countryside Defiance to be ill-founded and obstructive.’
‘So just get on with it,’ Annie said. ‘And be nice to the television people. Look, it’s the best solution. Except, possibly, for me, but I’ll cope.’
‘Two incident rooms?’
‘You get Gaol Street. I’ll be taking a caravan over to Oldcastle.’
‘Will there be a generator and a primus stove?’
‘You’ll also get some extra bodies from Worcester and two translators, that’s been agreed.’
Translators. Wonderful. Bliss could foresee long hours of watching people’s eyes for traces of guilt while listening to the soundtrack of a foreign film without the subtitles.
‘And you can have Karen Dowell.’ Annie Howe went on looking out of the windscreen down the length of East Street. ‘Look, I’m adapting to instructions, Francis. It’s what I do. Adapt. Known for it. Off you go. Get the bastards before they can leave the country. Oh-There are two Lithuanian nationals in the cells, apparently, brought in pre-dawn, drunk and incapable. That’ll be a start for you.’
‘Thanks, I’ll eat them later.’ Bliss shouldered open the passenger door. ‘Just remember what I said, Annie.’
‘About what?’
‘You know what.’
Bliss stepped out, looked up into the sheeny sky, scraped with brown clouds like the chickenshit on a new-laid egg.
‘Annie… check him out, yeh? Just… check him out.’
20
Who We Are
Despite the Metropolitan fantasies of a few power-crazed councillors, Hereford was still a big village. When a very bad thing happened, Merrily was thinking, ordinary life didn’t yet accelerate around it. Something lurched, shifted down a gear.
With East Street sealed off, traffic concertinaed, it had taken her ten minutes to get from the top of Broad Street to the Cathedral Gatehouse. You could walk it in two. She’d left the old Volvo in the Bishop’s Palace yard, meeting one of the canons, Jim Waite, who explained what had happened.
Slaughter was the word he’d used.
He hadn’t said, Where the hell is God in this?
Up in the gatehouse office, Sophie was at the window, gazing down into Broad Street, then across the Cathedral Green towards Church Street. Both of them linked into the – hitherto more obscure East Street.
The killings must have happened close to the centre of Hereford’s medieval triangle of big churches: All Saints, St Peter’s, the Cathedral. An alleyway linked East Street directly to the Cathedral Close, winding past the house once occupied by Alfred Watkins, the antiquarian.
And where the hell was God? A question that the previous owner had pencilled into the margin of her second-hand copy of Frank Collins’s Baptism of Fire, the book she’d been reading till after one a.m.
‘It’ll become commonplace here sooner than we know, Merrily.’ Sophie turned sharply away from the window, her glasses swinging on their chain. ‘Like Birmingham and Manchester. Society’s losing all cohesion.’
She went to sit down at her desk. She’d had her hair cut shorter for spring – too soon, as it had turned out. She was still wearing the winter cardie long after its time. She looked – unusual for Sophie – lost.
‘One only has to look into the hopeless faces of the drunks in Bishop’s Meadow. Lost souls in a purgatory of disillusion and charity shops.’ Both Sophie’s hands were placed flat on the desk, as if for stability. ‘I have no doubt that the vast majority are decent people, trying to earn an honest living. But they’re not the ones who create the need for a policeman almost full-time on the door at Tesco.’ She looked down at herself. ‘Dear God, stop me, Merrily.’
‘Questioning the impact of social change isn’t quite the same as joining the British National Party,’ Merrily said.
Sophie winced.
‘And we don’t know what’s happened, yet, do we?’ Merrily said. ‘We don’t know if it’s a sexual thing or a robbery or a… private matter.’
‘A private matter. That’s just it, isn’t it?’ Sophie said. ‘We don’t know what they’ve brought with them. We don’t understand what kind of demons drive them. And we do need to, because we’re not London, we’re a country town. We know who we are. Or we always used to. Now, one can feel a… a weight of silent resentment. And an apprehension.’
‘But that…’
Merrily had been about to say that it wasn’t exactly new. In the Middle Ages there’d been resentment in the city about the increasing Jewish community, even the revered bishop Thomas Cantilupe railing against them.
No, forget it. She wandered over to the window, looked down at the Cathedral Green. Seasons slowly shifting out there, winter retiring into the mist, spring blinking warily in the tepid sunshine. Then the clouds took it away, and she saw a lone daffodil, still in bud, flattened by someone’s shoe.
‘The Bishop’s been quiet lately.’
‘He’s increasingly tired. I think he’ll probably hang on until the autumn, then we’ll hear something.’ Sophie stood up. ‘I’ll make some tea. I’ve itemized your calls, in terms of apparent priority. Three inquiries in the past week, none of which I felt you needed to be alerted about. One’s that rather querulous person who seems to think you can get her grandson off heroin by… exorcizing his inner junkie. I’ve taken the precaution of quietly alerting her parish priest and suggesting she talks it over with him.’
‘Thank you.’ Merrily sat down. ‘Nothing from the Holmer?’
A fortnight ago she’d been called out to a single space in a factory parking area where a manager, newly divorced, had – like poor Frank Collins – asphyxiated himself in his car. Several workers had claimed that they’d felt him sitting next to them in their own cars if they parked there. The local vicar had dismissed it as hysteria.
‘Nothing.’ Sophie shook her head, filling the kettle. ‘In fact, you really didn’t need to come in.’
‘Well, I came in because… I need to make a possibly tricky phone call.’
For some reason, it was easier from here. Like you had the weight of the Cathedral around you. And Sophie to consult. Pretty much the same thing.
‘It’s Syd Spicer.
Now at Credenhill?’
‘Ah, yes,’ Sophie said.
‘How long have you known?’
‘Since the Bishop approved it. It’s been announced now, has it?’
You were inclined to forget that her principal role was as the Bishop’s lay secretary, guardian of episcopal secrets.
‘I’ve been a bit naive about all this, Sophie. Until a few days ago, it didn’t strike me that to become a chaplain you had to actually join the army. Or rejoin.’
‘Yes, that’s a requirement.’
‘Problem?’
‘Well… I suppose I can tell you. We were in two minds about his suitability. Since leaving the city for Credenhill, the Regiment does seem to have become more remote from us. Not even in the same parliamentary constituency. So Hereford, technically, is no longer a garrison town.’
‘Appointing one of their own as chaplain makes them more remote?’
Sophie said nothing. Merrily looked at the phone. Much of the incentive had gone. She looked up at Sophie.
‘OK, can I tell you about this?’
Lol had had to force himself to go back to work this morning. Couldn’t bear to finish the one about the village musician who found recovery in the back of a JCB. When the knock came on the front door, he was messing with the lyrics for ‘The Simple Trackway Man’, one he was trying to persuade Danny to sing. A homage to Alfred Watkins, the Hereford man who discovered ley lines.
I am a simple trackway man Who walks the lanes by ancient plan
Leading the people from beacon to steeple
And steeple to stone
And all the way home.
Back in the 1920s, Mr Watkins, controversially, had traced possible cross-country tracks connecting prehistoric ritual sites – stones and circles and burial mounds – and the medieval churches built on ancient sacred enclosures. Most of his research had been done in his home county and Danny’s native Radnorshire. Unlocking the British countryside for future generations who wanted to connect again with the land. Jane’s hero.
Lol’s song had been written carefully in the vernacular, borrowing material from Watkins’s classic work, The Old Straight Track. He was quite proud of it. A song that should’ve been written decades ago, to be sung in folk clubs and on village greens at Whitsuntide. Or by chains of walkers stepping out to refresh themselves and the countryside at Easter. Mr Watkins as some unassuming, low-key pied piper of the border hills.
