by Phil Rickman
Sitting on his sofa, with the Boswell across his knees, Lol sang ‘Trackway Man’ to the wood stove glowing ashy pink against the morning sunlight.
Across the fields where gates align
Ole scarecrow gives us all a sign
Where stand of pine marks sacred shrine
And secret dell hides holy well.
He saw the man in the cap walk past the front window, didn’t take much notice, and it was about half a minute before the knock came, as if the man had walked past the door towards the village square and then either had remembered something or had second thoughts and turned back.
Answering the front door, Lol didn’t recognize him at first. He wore a rust-coloured gilet and a leather cap. Incomer wear, nothing unusual. He had his chin up and his hands behind his back. He had a quick, efficient smile.
‘Lol Robinson?’
‘Yes.’
‘My partner introduced me t’your music.’
‘Oh… right…’
The hand came out, a leather glove removed.
‘Ward Savitch. Is this convenient?’
‘Too much reticence can be counterproductive,’ Sophie said. ‘You deserve at least an explanation.’
They were looking at the SAS base on Google Earth. Half surprised to find it there, this unexpectedly large network of utility buildings, parked vehicles. A community probably bigger, if more compact, than the village of Credenhill. You pulled back, and the wide view was all open countryside, apart from the wooded slopes of the hill itself, close enough to overlook the base.
‘You feel like you’re breaking the Official Secrets Act just doing this, Sophie. Like they’re going to know, and the door will fly open and men will be there with automatic rifles.’
Sophie looked severe.
‘When they were at the old Stirling Lines, they were part of the city. Part of the community. Mrs Thatcher liked to call them her boys . But, essentially, they were our boys. Part of Hereford since the Regiment was formed in 1941. That’s a long time.’
‘But the glamour years only began in the 1980s.’
After the SAS had travelled from Hereford to rescue hostages in the Iranian Embassy in London, abseiling down the walls from the roof live on TV.
‘And we were always discreet, Merrily. When a new recruit came off the train and asked for directions to the army base, he wasn’t told.’
‘I’ve heard that.’
‘We all knew where it was, but we didn’t tell just anyone. The Regiment was inside the city itself, but it was anonymous. And yet a presence.’
‘Like the Cathedral?’
‘Call Spicer,’ Sophie said abruptly. ‘He used you. I’m tired of seeing people used.’
Merrily looked at her, curious. Was she thinking that nobody had been murdered on the streets of Hereford when the SAS was still in town?
She picked up the phone, put in the number Huw had given her. And was almost grateful when there was no answer, no machine, no voice-mail.
Last night, she’d told Lol about Syd at the chapel. Lol had met him once, at the end of a very dark night in the Malverns, when Syd had been very much in denial. Merrily had said, You really don’t see anything bordering on the paranormal? and Syd had said, You mean you do? ’
She let his phone ring for half a minute before hanging up. Tried twice more before lunch and also called home to see if there were any messages on the machine. Sometimes, if she’d had to leave early, Jane would leave one for her. Jane, whose mood last night, when Merrily had got in from the Swan, had been changing like traffic lights, flickering erratically, red-amber-red-amber. Like she’d wanted to talk about something, but couldn’t. Said nothing this morning, either, and you wondered if it would be better or worse when she went to university.
Not that Merrily had wanted to talk last night. Better not to mention Savitch’s bid to buy the Swan until it actually happened. With the vague hope that it wouldn’t.
‘Sophie… in Canon Dobbs’s day – was there ever any involvement with the SAS, back then?’
‘In what way?’
‘I don’t know. I’m just wondering if there’s any precedent.’
‘I can check the records.’
‘Perhaps it wouldn’t be there. If there was anybody less forthcoming than the SAS, it was Dobbs, so the combination of the two…’
Sophie’s smile was transient, and it probably wasn’t nostalgia.
At twelve, they switched on the radio for the national news headlines and, for the first time since New Year, Merrily heard the nasal tones of Frannie Bliss.
‘… horrific crime, and we wanna talk to anybody who was in or near the centre of the city last night between the hours of eleven and one a.m. Doesn’t matter whether or not they think they’ve seen anything significant, they may still have information that could be useful to us.’
Frannie – how was he doing? Merrily had invited him round for a meal a couple of times since his marriage had finally collapsed. Both times he’d said he was busy.
The phone rang and Sophie turned the radio off.
‘Gatehouse.’ A pause. ‘The Cathedral Gatehouse. In Hereford. Who is this?’ Sophie listened. An eyebrow rose fractionally.
‘Ah… one moment.’
She put the call on hold.
Merrily said, ‘Me?’
‘Picked you up on 1471. From Credenhill.’
‘Syd?’
‘His wife,’ Sophie said. ‘Mrs Spicer, I’m putting you through to Mrs Watkins.’
What did she know about Fiona Spicer? Very little. Except that SAS wives who survived the course were rarely insubstantial women.
‘I think we almost met once in the Malverns. My name’s-’
‘Yes, I realize who you are now.’
Voice low and steady and not exactly friendly. Neutral southern-English accent. Merrily pulled the Silk Cut packet from her bag, stood it on the desk in front of her. Sophie frowned.
‘I ran into Syd a few days ago. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were… back with him.’
Christ, what did this sound like? Merrily stared at the packet, extracting a spiritual cigarette.
‘I’m not back with him, Mrs Watkins. This is a visit.’
‘Is, erm… is Syd there?’
‘No.’
Merrily waited. After a couple of seconds, the silence suggested that Mrs Spicer had gone.
No – a mobile. She’d picked up the number from the house phone, but she was calling back on a mobile. Merrily looked at Sophie, back behind her desk, making no pretence of doing anything but listening.
‘Mrs Spicer, it’s the first time I’ve used the Credenhill number. I got it from Huw Owen, my spiritual director. Syd consulted him and – indirectly – me, about something, and I just wanted to follow up on it.’
‘Did you?’
Something wrong here. Merrily lit the spiritual cigarette. Sometimes it worked.
‘Do you, erm, know where he is, Mrs Spicer?’
‘He can’t be far away. His car’s here.’
‘You are at the house?’
‘I’m at the house, yes. The army house. He’ll be across the road. Attending to his flock. Fortunately, he’s not very SAS when it comes to hiding spare keys, so I was able to go in and take a look around.’
‘First time you’ve been?’
‘To this house, yes. I’m in the garage now.’
‘Syd said you’d be moving in soon.’
No response.
‘Mrs Spicer-’
‘My husband worked with you once before,’ Mrs Spicer said. ‘Your name and number are written inside a book entitled Deliverance. A book much thumbed. Pages folded over.’
‘That would make sense.’
‘But you haven’t spoken to him today.’
‘No.’
A silence, then…
‘Mrs Watkins, something’s disturbing me. Would it be possible for us to meet?’
‘Of course. Should I come over?’
&
nbsp; ‘Perhaps I should come to you. I’m staying in Hereford, at a B and B. You’re at the Cathedral, are you?’
‘In the gatehouse. Above the entrance to the Bishop’s Palace.’
‘I’d rather come to the Cathedral itself. Where’s quiet?’
‘Do you know the Lady Chapel?’
‘I can be there in about half an hour.’
The dead line was for real this time. Sophie was sitting on the edge of the desk, pale and watchful as a barn owl on a branch. Merrily handed her the phone to hang up.
21
Liberal of the Old School
When Dc David Vaynor came in, all seven feet of him if you included the big hair, Bliss was waiting for the pictures of the dead to come up on his laptop. Cleaned-up pictures of the cleaned-up dead, done before the PM, before the craniums came off. Pictures you could show to people with no loss of breakfast.
‘We might’ve got them, boss,’ DC Vaynor said.
‘Shut the door, son.’
Bliss closed his lappie, Vaynor ducking into the office. Despite being a Cambridge honours graduate, or some such, and wearing a tweedy sports jacket, he wasn’t a bad lad. Locally born, working class, good contacts – where they counted. Maybe these sloppy old sports jackets were all he could get to fit him.
‘Right, then. Go on.’
‘Goldie Andrews, boss? On the Plascarreg?’
‘Couldn’t be that easy, Darth. Could it?’
‘Goldie’s been scuttling around the estate asking if anyone’s seen her lodgers.’
‘Female lodgers.’
‘Sisters.’
‘Where’d this come from?’
‘The new launderette at the front of the Plas? My cousin’s wife, it is, runs that.’
‘Good boy. Names?’
‘Marinescu. Maria and Ileana.’
‘Jesus, that sounds right, the escu bit.’ Bliss began tapping lightly on the lid of his lappie. ‘How long they been missing?’
‘Just the one night. Not normally a cause for upset, except they don’t do things like that. Also… it’s rent day and apparently they owe Goldie for two weeks. I just rang her up to confirm, took it straight to Sergeant Wilton, and he said to come in and tell you right away.’
‘Goldie’s lodgers… yes…’ Bliss came to his feet. ‘The bottom line here being that it’s not exactly unusual for Goldie’s lodgers to be on the game, is it?’
‘Unusual for them not to be on the game.’
‘She know they might be dead?’
‘She will by now, it’s all over the radio, TV, Internet…’
‘Right, then.’ Bliss pulled his jacket from the chair. ‘Let’s go and have a chat. They can send the piccies to me phone.’ He beamed. ‘Nice one, Darth. Write yourself out a commen- dation.’
‘Cheers, boss. Do you, um… want me to…?’
‘Yeh, yeh, come along. But I might just go in on me own at first, to chat to Goldie.’ Walking out, almost bumping into Karen Dowell. ‘Thing is, that woman owes me… quite a bit. Karen.’
‘Boss, we have a reliable sighting in the Grapes in Church Street, from half-nine, and then the Monk’s Head, ten-nish.’
‘Lovely. Get Elly to put out an appeal for anybody who saw them in either. Karen, me and Darth’s off to Goldie’s on the Plas. If you could tell Brian Wilton, it looks like we’ll need forensics. And when the pictures come in from the morgue, could you get them sent to me phone?’
Known, inevitably, as the Plascarreg Hilton.
It had once been a row of 1930s brick-built terraced houses, here before there was an estate. Goldie had got the first for peanuts, renting out the bedrooms to working girls, buying out the neighbours one by one as the new estate got developed at the bottom of their backyards and the value of the houses sank. The sign outside said Abbey View, possibly referring to Belmont Abbey, which you were unlikely to see from anywhere on the Plascarreg without a platform crane, although on a clear day you could spot the Tesco tower.
Bliss let Goldie weep for a while. Two weeks’ rent she’d never see, that wasn’t funny. Eventually she looked up, over her lace hanky with the border of red flowers like little blood spots.
‘Shoulda knowed. Soon’s I seen it was you at the door.’
‘Nothing’s set in stone yet, Goldie.’
‘You’s the angel of death, you are, boy.’
Couple of years now since two teenage boys in a stolen Transit had booked in for the night, paying in advance with hot cash from an armed robbery at a petrol station in the Forest of Dean. Two boys, one seventeen, one fifteen, and a bottle of Gordon’s. Oh, and an old. 38 revolver with which they’d played Russian roulette and, at just after three in the morning, one had lost.
‘I never said you wasn’t understanding, mind,’ Goldie said.
‘How long the girls been with you, Goldie?’
‘Four, five months.’ Goldie set light to a roll-up. ‘We connected straight off, see… The Roma?’
‘What? Oh, yeh…’
Romany, Romania? Who knew? Goldie’s origins were obscure. She’d come down from a caravan in the Black Mountains. Before that, it was a caravan somewhere in the South Wales valleys. Some element of gypsy back there – you could see it all over the living room, the brass ornaments and the illustrated plates and the gilt pendulum clocks.
‘We had a…’ Goldie mouthed the ciggy, touched forefingers in the air. ‘Like that, we was.’ The cig waggling. ‘Movin’ in yere, it was like comin’ home. Her kept sayin’ that, her did.’
‘Who?’
‘Maria, was it?’ Goldie pulled out the ciggy, ruby and emerald rings winking. Breathed out some suspiciously herbal smoke. ‘She’ve got the best English. She do’s the talking.’
‘So they were here for the winter, yeh?’
In summer Goldie did B amp; B. Difficult to imagine anybody wanting to spend a holiday on the Plascarreg. But then, there were holidays and holidays. In winter, it was long-stay guests, cheap deals, all meals out.
Bliss watched the skin around Goldie’s eyes crinkling like bits of old bath sponge.
‘Lord above, Mr Francis, this can’t be right. They’s good girls.’
‘Of course.’
A liberal of the old school. All Goldie’s girls were good girls. Bliss’s iPhone was buzzing.
‘Gissa sec, Goldie.’
No message, just the pictures which somehow, when viewed on his phone, made him feel like a sick voyeur. Snuff-porn.
‘Goldie, I’m gonna have to ask you to take a look at a couple of photos.’
‘I en’t their ma.’
‘You’re all right, we’ve had them, you know, prettied up a bit.’
‘Oh, dear Lord.’
Goldie breathed in, slow and phlegmy, then pulled her glasses from their electric-blue plastic case. Bliss flicked from one pic to the other a couple of times and chose the least horrible. Goldie pushed her unlikely blonde ringlets behind her ears, and he handed her the iPhone.
‘Take your time.’
Sitting next to her on the old studio couch, slabs of polished wood, somehow coffin-coloured, set into the armrests. Waiting for her nod and then flicking to the other picture, which was not so nice because of the eye. Given time, they’d’ve found a glass eye.
Bliss counted five clocks ticking before Goldie leaned back and crossed herself.
‘Which is which, Goldie?’
‘The one with the eye… that’s Maria. The one with the English. Lord above, what’s happenin’ to this town?’
‘When d’you last see them?’
‘I’m not sure. Yesterday morning? They left… I dunno, about ten?’
‘To go where? Where’d they go when they left here?’
‘Town. Where’s anybody go?’
‘They say where in town?’
‘Just town. Was they interfered with?’
‘Where would they go at night?’
‘Pubs? Clubs? I don’t know. They only goes out one night a week. Safer yere. We al
l knows each other on the Plas.’
‘They got any family… anywhere in this country?’
Goldie shook her head.
‘None?’
‘Come over to work on the strawberries, ennit?’
Figured. Thousands of them came across from Eastern Europe to work in the polytunnels.
‘Last year?’
Goldie nodded.
‘And didn’t go back?’
‘A lot don’t.’
‘What did they do after that? Did they get more work?’
‘This and that.’
‘They work for you, Goldie?’
‘Bit of housework.’
‘I mean outside work.’
Goldie’s eyes were narrowing.
‘I’ve always tried to help you, Mr Francis.’
‘And I think it’s been mutual. If not more than mutual. And, in case you forget, this is a mairder investigation.’ Bliss leaning on his accent. ‘We’re nor’all that interested in lifting anybody for minor stuff.’
‘They never done no outside work for me.’
‘Never? Not even when they ran out of cash and couldn’t pay the rent? You never suggested how they might pick up a few quick twenties apiece?’
‘I’m tellin’ you they done cleaning work, an’ that was it.’
‘Where?’
‘Used to be at one of the stores, on the Barnchurch. The factory-outlet place, you know? Wasn’t full-time, and then they got let go.’
‘When was that?’
‘When it closed down.’
‘Yeh, that would figure. When? ’
‘’Bout a month ago?’
‘All right, I’ll ask yer again. Any reason to think they might’ve been doing night work, freelance?’
‘They wouldn’t. I’m tellin’ you. They was religious girls.’
‘What about friends? They have friends among other East Europeans?’
‘Not many, far’s I know.’
