by Phil Rickman
‘I’ve never heard you use so many big words before, Barry.’
‘Funny how despair can inflate your command of English. Of course, if you do turn down his offer, that would look a bit…’
‘Perverse.’
‘But, equally, if you say yes…’
‘I’d be in his pocket. So I’m not going to, am I?’
‘Idea’s planted now. He could go on to hold a bigger event, with big names. Yours not among them.’
Barry’s hands were efficiently twisting the napkin into another lily. Lol watched, fascinated.
‘They teach you that in the SAS?’
‘Yeah, but with necks,’ Barry said.
In the end, they went in separate cars, Fiona’s blue Honda Jazz leading Merrily north-west along those pale, seemingly pointless new roads which hinted at clandestine development plans. Then familiar wooded hills with an early-spring greening like fresh mould, an occasional long view across the hidden Wye to the notched belt of the Black Mountains.
The side-window down, but the breeze couldn’t blow away the voices
Huwie, he says, just a slight problem. A mere technicality.
A circle of salt. Had Syd also forced himself to visualize the golden rings around and above his body, mentally enclosing himself in an orb of light?
Received wisdom. Received madness from a spidery old woman named Anthea White who called herself Athena and lived in an old folks’ home with her occult library. Supplemented with suggestions from the handbook of the Christian Delivery Study Group. Much thumbed, pages folded over.
Open all the cupboard doors, take out all the drawers, cover the mirrors.
… a chance to step back and rationalize it.
Huw again, with chapel echo.
‘It can’t be rationalized,’ Merrily hissed, as if he were sitting in the car with her. ‘It isn’t rational.’
Carly Horne, the skinny one with black hair slanting down over one eye, thought Bliss talked like that comedian.
‘Yeh, I know,’ Bliss said. ‘Lily Savage.’
Carly said, ‘Who?’
Karen Dowell smiled. Bliss didn’t ask. They were in the least grotty interview room. He sat down next to Karen.
‘So you heard it on the radio news.’
‘Stations I listen to don’t do news, to be honest,’ Carly said. ‘Taylor Magson told me – this bloke at college? He knows which pubs we do and when I said I remembered these Russian girls, he was like, hey, you better go tell the cops?’
‘Romanian,’ Karen said. ‘The girls were Romanian.’
‘Got us an afternoon off college, anyway.’
‘What courses are you on?’
‘I’m doing secretarial, she’s beauty therapy, jammy cow.’
The other one was heavy and sullen-looking. Her hair was cut short and the acid colour of lemon cheese. Her name was Josceline Singleton. She had on a high-necked top and pink leggings.
‘You know those pictures you showed us,’ Carly said. ‘Was that them dead?’
Bliss gave her a rueful smile.
‘That’s really sick,’ Carly said.
Karen said, ‘How long you been going in the pubs, Carly?’
‘Years, but I don’t drink much, to be honest, when I got college next day.’
‘So this is the Monk’s Head,’ Bliss said. ‘Lounge bar. Ten o’clockish?’
‘Bit later, when these women come in. There’s only one bar now, since they started doing live music, weekends.’
‘You ever see these girls before?’
Carly shook her head.
‘Were they on their own?’
‘Yeah. They looked kind of, you know, isolated? I used to feel pissed off about them coming over here taking our jobs and stuff, but I feel sorry for them now, I do. When you read about them having to live like seven of them in one room? That’s why I went over and talked to them, really. Well, I was on my way to the lav, to be honest, and I like bumped their table?’
‘Oh.’ Bliss sat up. ‘So you actually talked to them.’
‘Talk to anybody, me. I mean, we didn’t discuss the government and stuff, it was just like, so where you from, kind of thing? And then she comes out with this place I en’t never heard of, so that was a bit useless. I don’t think they wanted to talk, to be honest. Same with a lot of these ethnics, they don’t really wanner mix with us, do they?’
‘It’s the language,’ Josceline Singleton said. ‘They don’t know a word of English.’
‘Except benefits,’ Carly said. ‘That’s my dad. He’s a bigot, he is.’
Bliss said, ‘You told the sergeant some men followed them out.’
‘Yeah. A few blokes in the pub was looking them over?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Like, you know, grinning at each other, making fists and stuff? Kind of, give her one. You know?’
‘And then followed them out? What time was this?’
‘Not sure. Maybe about quarter past eleven?’
‘How many of them?’
‘How many, Joss? I wasn’t counting, to be honest. Wasn’t like they was good-looking or anything. And quite old. Three? I think there was three. They was ethnics, too.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘You can just tell, can’t you?’
‘Would you recognize them again?’
‘You don’t really take them in, do you, ’less they’re a bit fit.’
‘All right,’ Bliss said. ‘I’m gonna leave you with DS Dowell. I’d like you to try very hard to describe these men – how old, how tall, what they were wearing…’
‘Yeah,’ Carly said. ‘All right. I mean, when you think about it… could’ve been any of us, couldn’t it? Like, murdered?’
It was Jane, with her growing feel for the landscape, who’d pointed out that Credenhill existed on three different levels.
The village itself was strung out aimlessly – modern housing, a line of convenience stores set back from the main road. It was looking already like the suburbia of a much-extended Hereford which it might one day become.
An ignominious future, in the shadow, literally, of its impressive ancient history.
Merrily and Jane had once walked up the huge afforested hill to the east, which carried the remaining earthen ramparts of the biggest Iron Age hill fort in the county. Not much to see now, but some historians said Credenhill had once been the Celtic capital of what became Herefordshire, an elevated fortified community with a population of more than three thousand.
It had once looked down on the later Roman military town of Magnis, long gone. Now, as you followed the winding track, you could see down below, when the trees were bare, a spread of low buildings, vaster than it looked from the road. A quiet, self- contained community, with intersecting roads and parked trucks.
The third and most modern Credenhill, to which the elite warriors of the British Army returned, some of them seared and scorched and riven by demons. Applauded from afar, but not allowed to talk about it.
Except to people like Syd Spicer.
Merrily slowed when the gates of the camp appeared on her left. Two police cars were parked alongside one of the buildings, armed guards at the entrance. None of this, to Merrily’s knowledge, outside of routine. The army housing was across the road. She followed Fiona’s Jazz into the estate, which was like any other housing estate except somehow quieter. Parking behind the Jazz outside an end house next to a wooded field, she guessed their arrival would already have been clocked by somebody, somewhere.
All the hundreds of times she’d driven past. Never actually stopped here before. You didn’t. You just didn’t.
Memories of the Frank Collins book were with her now. Frank, a Christian in the SAS, bothered by the old question of God and warfare. In the end, he’d justified it simply to himself: soldiers killed to prevent innocent people dying. The Regiment as knights, trained to deal with evil. Frank had been raised among tough kids in working-class Newcastle, breaking the la
w like the others. She guessed he’d been a good priest.
Merrily came out of the old Volvo with a ridiculous caution, as if she might be in someone’s cross hairs. For no obvious reason, she pulled the collar of her woollen coat across her dog collar and buttoned it.
It was all very quiet. She looked around and saw nothing moving on the estate, no curtains twitching. No wind. A sky like tarnished brass.
Further along the main road was the turning to Credenhill Church, raised up on the right. Strange connection, coming here direct from the chantry where Thomas Traherne’s vision burned in stained glass. This was a tiny parish in his day, averaging about two baptisms a year, but it would be wrong to think he wouldn’t recognize the place now. He’d know the fortified hill at once and the vista across the Wye Valley to the Black Mountains. On the Welsh border, the big things didn’t change.
He might wonder, though, about the metal frames for poly-tunnels which she could see in the distance to the south, might even find a kind of beauty in their skeletal caterpillar symmetry. Traherne could find beauty in most things.
Did Syd ever go to Traherne’s church?
She felt uneasy. She was on army ground. Had no doubts where Syd’s loyalties would lie. While Merrily was locking the Volvo, Fiona was already walking towards the front door, between bare brown bushes, and then she stopped. Glanced over her shoulder towards Merrily, who moved towards her.
Fiona nodded at the white door. It was half open.
‘Oh,’ Merrily said. ‘He’s back, then.’
No sooner were the words out than she knew how wrong she was.
Fiona didn’t move as they were surrounded. It happened very quickly, as if this was a surprise party, but all the guests were men, and none of them expressed a greeting. After what seemed a long time, one of them turned to Merrily.
‘Mrs Spicer?’
She saw an older man, standing between the brown bushes, shaking his head.
‘I’m sorry,’ the first man said, and the older man approached Fiona, quite slowly.
‘Mrs Spicer, we met once before, briefly. My name’s William.’
He wasn’t in uniform. None of them were. Fiona nodded.
‘Yes, I remember.’
William was solidly built and had a full grey moustache. He wore walking boots.
He said, ‘Should we go inside?’
‘No,’ Fiona said. ‘I’d rather not.’
Her face had gone grey, like fresh plaster. Merrily took in three other men, one of whom she recognized: stubble and broken veins. Not military. It was Terry Stagg, detective sergeant.
William said, ‘Who is this woman, please?’
Fiona half-turned, as if she’d forgotten Merrily was there.
‘She’s a friend of Sam’s. In the Church. A priest.’ She stood before William, her head tilted up to stare him in the eyes. ‘You’d better tell me.’
‘Mrs Spicer, I think-’
‘Where’s my husband?’
‘Mrs Spicer,’ William said, ‘I’m afraid I have some… distressing news. I… very bad news.’
It was Merrily who nearly cried out. Fiona’s lips were tight. She still hadn’t moved, yet she seemed far away from here, as if replaying a scene which had occurred in her midnight thoughts so many times that emotions could be dispensed with.
25
A Lovely Thing
Jane used to know kids who loved messing with dead things, but she’d never been one of them, so she’d been dreading this all day.
At this stage of your school career, if you didn’t have any particular classes, you had the choice of coming home, to work on revision. Yeah, right.
When she got off the bus, there was no sign of the Volvo outside the vicarage, so she went directly round the back to the garden shed. At least there’d been no blood on the path this morning.
Not yet four p.m., the sun still high, but weak. The shed was just a lean-to against the highest part of the wall. Wasn’t kept locked and it had been the only place she could think of last night.
Needed some help with this, really. Even Mum who, as a kid, had wanted to be a vet and knew a bit about injured pets and livestock. Mum would have an idea how the bird had died.
Could hardly take it to Mum, though, who knew nothing about the earlier incident with Cornel and the beer. Tangled web. Jane began to part the garden tools, remembering pushing the sack behind them. She threw the door wide, pulled out the spade and the hoe and the rake and the hedge loppers, tossing them onto the lawn behind her, but…
Oh, God, no…
This could only be Mum. Now she’d have to explain everything, which would lead to a chain of explanations, and that would get Lol in bother, too, for not disclosing what had happened on the night of the storm. She was in deep trouble and hadn’t even dealt with the no-university situation yet.
Jane closed the shed door, walked away to the end of the garden, leaned against the churchyard wall, staring over at the old graves. Considering the worst options: could Cornel have pinched it back? Would he have gone to that kind of trouble?
He couldn’t have seen her last night, could he? Couldn’t, surely, have been in a fit state after the kicking he’d had and throwing up in Barry’s yard. Last night, Jane had awoken twice, with the gritty ghosts of dead flies in her mouth and shuddery memories of the quick, efficient way in which Cornel had been damaged, that almost feminine cry of pain. Big, tall Cornel, breast-fed for months and months. Cornel, the winner who could do anything he wanted because the bank was paying. Cornel had been very afraid, had done as he’d been told, had taken the sack away. Except he’d been told to bury it and he’d only buried it in the bin on the square.
But what about the other guy? Who had just disappeared. Who hadn’t seemed like the kind of guy who would just disappear.
Oh Christ. The very worst option: what if he ’d seen her?
Jane began to sweat. Went over the whole garden, frantic now, looking behind all the apple trees, into the long grass under the church wall, leaning over the wall to see into the churchyard. Why the hell had she taken it? What was it supposed to prove?
She ran back around the vicarage, out of the front gate and down Church Street towards the river, pulling out her phone. She’d call Eirion. Hadn’t called him back last night, just dropped him a quick text promising to explain tomorrow. She’d tell Eirion everything.
But his damn phone was switched off. Jane leaned over the bridge, watching the slow water making dark, languid circles around the pillars and buttresses. After the psychotic nights around Christmas, the river was back to its old torpid self, and there was no sign of a bin sack down there.
‘’Ow’re you, Janey?’
‘Oh!’
He was leaning over the bridge next to her, teeth clamped on an unlit ciggy, pale sunlight swimming in his specs. Hadn’t even heard him approaching. Jane looked down at his feet.
‘Gomer… you’re wearing trainers.’
‘Hay ’n’ Brecon Farmers. Two for the price o’ one.’
‘That’s, erm… normal in footwear, isn’t it?’
‘Two pair, girl. Don’t worry, you en’t gonner see me doing no joggying.’
‘You don’t fool me, Gomer.’ Jane found a smile. ‘I bet you’ve got a hoodie and a baseball cap in the back of the JCB.’
‘En’t even seen the bloody ole thing for nigh on two days. Danny’s got him, workin’ over by Walton, makin’ a pond. Been fillin’ my time with a bit o’ spring maintenance in the churchyard. Found some bloody ole briars muster got missed last autumn, so…’ Gomer eyeing Jane, head on one side ‘… took up the vicar’s offer of borrowin’ the ole loppers.’
He put the ciggy back in his mouth, stood with his hands behind his back, rocking slightly.
‘Oh,’ Jane said. ‘Erm… from the shed.’
‘Exackly. From the ole shed, back o’ the vicarage.’
‘Right. Wooh. So, you, erm…’ Jane looked into Gomer’s glasses: opaque white discs, relief enfo
lding her like an old bath robe. ‘You probably found a black bin sack.’
‘Sure t’be.’ Gomer extracted his ciggy. ‘Bit of a story to this, is there, Janey?’
Jane felt her shoulders slump.
‘Got him back at my place. You wanner…?’
She nodded and followed him, down from the bridge. They walked up to the bungalow with the fading buttermilk walls, where Gomer had lived alone since Minnie’s death.
Gomer. Sometimes, crap situations just rearranged themselves for the best. With divorce and death and stuff, Jane had never really had a grandad. Her worst recurrent nightmare was probably the one in which Gomer had died.
Gomer didn’t judge. Well, not Jane, anyway, so she told him virtually everything, in the sure knowledge that it would go no further.
He leaned against his wall, listening, chewing on his unlit ciggy. When she’d finished, he opened his garden gate.
‘Dull buggers, some o’ these fellers,’ he said. ‘For all their college papers.’
‘He was really scared, Gomer. And probably shocked. That the guy could, you know, do whatever he did. He obviously knew who it was.’
‘You sure it wasn’t Barry?’
‘I heard his voice.’
‘Only Barry, see, he’s had his times.’
‘Oh, I know Barry could have done it, but he didn’t. Definitely not him.’
Signs of springtime action in Gomer’s garden – a rake and a hoe leaning against the wall, with a stainless steel spade, its blade worn thin and sharp.
‘En’t much into gardenin’, see, Janey, ’cept for the ole veg, but Minnie… her always liked her daffs. These is in memory, kind o’ thing.’
‘They’re nice, Gomer. Erm…?’
Gomer nodded towards the garden table. The black bag was underneath it, tied up with orange baler twine. He went over and dragged it out, placed it on the table, undid the twine.
Jane looked around nervously. The bungalow was raised up behind substantial hedging, tightly cut, obviously. You could see over it back to the river bridge and, in the other direction, the Church Street pitch, all the way up to the market square. But nobody could see into Gomer’s garden.
