by Phil Rickman
‘Jan,’ the woman said.
Bliss sat down the other side of Jan.
‘And when will your friend be joining us?’
‘She won’t,’ Jan said.
Bliss looked at Annie, who smiled colourlessly.
‘Jan is our witness, Francis.’
It took a moment.
‘Ah,’ Bliss said.
Jan told them she was taking up an appointment after Easter, as head teacher at a local primary school.
Bliss said, ‘You mean, out there, in the sticks?’
‘Out there, yes.’
Jan said the person she’d been with in the car on the night of Mansel Bull’s murder was married, but wouldn’t be for long. They’d been at college together, found one another again after fifteen years. She was the reason Jan had come looking for work in the Hereford area.
‘There might not be complications with either parents or governors, but there just might. It’s necessary to be discreet and take things slowly. This is, after all, a rural area.’
‘You’re quite right there, Jan,’ Bliss said. ‘It very much is.’
He wondered if her girlfriend was fairly well known in the area. And if the husband had any inkling. Jan still looked nervous.
‘You won’t get me to give evidence in court. You do accept that?’
Annie said, ‘We can talk about that later.’
‘There won’t be a later if I don’t get an assurance.’
Annie Howe nodded.
At least they got an accurate location, a good half-mile from where they’d stopped searching for blood traces in the fields. Covered some ground, this guy. The access involved several unmarked single-track lanes. There was a derelict barn you couldn’t miss, Jan said, and the ungated field entrance was about fifty yards after that.
Bliss made notes. Asked her if she’d seen any other vehicles on the way there, and Jan shook her head, said nobody lived up there any more.
‘I’ve walked that whole area. I’m staying in a guest house at Tillington, about three miles away, looking for a cottage, so I’ve done a lot of exploring around. Essential preparation for taking over a local school. Kids can be evil wee sods if they think you’re an innocent abroad.’
‘And your friend? She’s local?’
‘Do we have to go into that?’
Bliss shrugged.
‘Credenhill,’ Jan said. ‘Though not originally.’
Bliss didn’t react. Was it possible that Jan was snuggling up to some SAS man’s missus while he was in foreign parts? That’d make anybody nervous.
‘In your letter,’ Annie said, ‘you called Mansel “Farmer Bull”. Was that how your girlfriend knew him?’
‘It’s what they called him in the local shop.’
Bliss said, ‘When you saw this man in the field, did you also see any sign of a vehicle? Off-road, perhaps? Or any other people?’
‘We didn’t hang around, if I’m honest. Out there in the middle of nowhere, it was pretty frightening. We’d only just arrived, so we still had the engine running and the headlights on when he came rushing out of the dark. As if he’d been blown out by the wind.’
‘You say you couldn’t see his face – what about his hair?’
‘I think he had hair… I mean, I don’t recall him as bald or anything, but… it could’ve been slicked back with the… with the blood. I don’t know.’
‘Tall, short, thin, fat?’
‘He certainly seemed tall. And well-built, I suppose. And quite fit, I’d imagine, the way he was moving. I go to the gym twice a week, but you wouldn’t get me out running in those conditions.’
‘Let me play devil’s advocate here,’ Annie said. ‘How do you know it was blood? How do you know he wasn’t simply plastered with mud? Red Herefordshire mud.’
‘And then I heard about the murder afterwards, you mean, and put two and two together and made eleven?’
‘You wouldn’t be the first to make that kind of mistake in a situation like that.’
‘Chief Inspector, I spent many hours agonizing over whether to send you that letter, knowing that if it got out that a respectable married woman was having a relationship with a gay woman who was about to become head teacher at the school attended by her children…’
‘Yeh, OK,’ Bliss said. ‘What did he do, this feller, when he saw you?’
‘Stopped. I mean, he had to, or he’d’ve run into the front of the car. Then he turned away and ran off. Almost casually. As if he was an athlete running for pleasure, and he was full of endorphins, you know?’
‘What was his… you know, his mood? You gerra sense of that?’
‘It was – this is going to sound crazy – but it was as if he was loving it. Despite all the blood. Obviously, we thought it must be his own blood, and you think… even as you’re backing the car away, you’re thinking, does he need help? And yet that really wasn’t…’
‘Like he was relishing the blood?’ Bliss said. ‘I’m thinking the way a new huntsman – a fox-hunter – when it’s his first time, they splatter him with the fox’s blood?’
Bliss’s eyes met Annie’s, saw a flickering warning there. He smiled.
‘I’m afraid I’ve had nothing to do with blood sports,’ Jan said.
Annie asked her, ‘Do you think he saw you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He must’ve seen what kind of a car you had.’
‘And if you backed up and accelerated out of there, he must have known you’d seen him,’ Bliss said.
He watched Jan playing nervously with a stray blonde curl. Women of a Sapphic persuasion, it wasn’t as easy to identify them any more. In a few ways, she was more girlie than Annie.
‘I did think of that, yes,’ Jan said. ‘Another very good reason not to want to be identified, wouldn’t you say?’
Bliss said, ‘If we were to show you some piccies…?’
Felt Annie Howe’s head coming round on him with the weight of a gun turret.
‘It would be very unlikely that I’d recognize anybody from a photograph,’ Jan said. ‘As I say, it was all terribly fast and rather blurred.’
Bliss saw the waitress leaving the doorway of the bar with their coffee and cups on a tray.
‘What about your friend?’
‘She saw less than I did. Screaming her poor wee head off by then.’
***
‘I firmly trust you weren’t actually going to do that,’ Annie said. ‘That you were saying it just to annoy me.’
Jan had left. They knew where to find her. Bliss licked his spoon.
‘Why not? It’d be with a selection of other photos.’
‘Planting the idea that West Mercia Police suspect Sollers Bull of killing his brother?’
‘Got that twat’s prints all over it.’
Telling her about his and Karen’s visit to Magnis Berries last night and the reason. Annie scowled. Bliss shrugged.
‘Don’t tell me you wouldn’t’ve done the same.’
‘As it happens, I did know about Mansel selling the land to Magnis.’
‘Done behind Sollers’s back?’
‘According to Sollers, it was a decision made without much forethought. Mansel was using those top fields for training his sheepdogs. And then simply decided he’d had enough. The offer came, and he took it. Shortly before he was killed, he’d arranged to sell all his dogs to Berrows, from Kington, who you’ll know.’
‘Jeremy?’
‘He’s taken them all. Five dogs.’
‘That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’
‘What’s so odd about it, apart from the timing? Mansel presumably didn’t know he was going to be murdered. He’d lost the patience for it, according to Sollers. Not winning trophies any more. That’s all it is.’
Bliss said nothing. Sat and looked at Annie, sitting with her jacket open, her long woollen scarf hanging loose. The slender neck, the carelessly brushed pale hair.
‘Right,’ Annie said. ‘We’d better get
back. I’ll send Slim Fiddler to find that field, and I’ll make sure he goes over every last blade of grass.’
‘Good luck.’
Bliss contemplated the oval miniature of his own face wizened into the sugar spoon. Spent a couple of cliff-edge seconds reconsidering his decision not to tell Annie about Kirsty’s first little bombshell:
…when it all comes out, won’t one of you have to move to another division? Isn’t that how it works?
Annie said, ‘Presumably you didn’t get anything useful from Magnis Berries?’
‘Nothing of immediate significance, no.’
Annie stood up, buttoning her jacket, the tower and steeple of St Peter’s in the wedge of white sky behind her. For a moment Bliss thought she was smiling as she looked down at him.
Then she said, ‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t assure me again that you never hit your wife. I believe you. However, for the foreseeable future…’ she tucked a two-pound coin under the coffee pot ‘… I think we need to be colleagues.’
‘What?’
‘Colleagues,’ Annie said. ‘People who work together.’
34
Burned
Halfway along the Golden Valley, a green hill bounced up on the right, its summit shaped by the earthen ramparts of another British camp. Tiny compared with Credenhill, but they were everywhere, a whole layer of landscape sculpted by ancient Britons. Still here, still dominant.
Merrily was driving slowly, under clouds like the rolling smoke from a grass fire. She’d brought a flask of holy water up from the car and done the blessing, with Liz. An appeal for calm and light in an oppressed place. Most times you were uncertain: an unaccountable man-stench in the tower-room – wishful thinking, Miss Pleston?
And yet a faint sensation of something resistant had come back at her, and she’d walked downstairs feeling unexpectedly drained. Maybe she was just overtired and underfed, or affected by the mind-altering properties of Jeyes Fluid.
No, Barry had been right. Byron Jones was not funny.
It would’ve been interesting to see the books he’d kept in the tower. Old pagan religions and the occult. Merrily thought about the people of the hilltop camps, whose priests had been Druids. Talk to Jane, and they were kindly nature-worshippers and all they ever used a sickle for was cutting down mistletoe. Read the Roman accounts, and you got blood-drenched savages, well into human sacrifice. They probably didn’t smell too good, either.
In the straggling village of Peterchurch, she pulled into the parking area opposite the Norman church, called home to check the machine and found just the one message:
‘ Merrily, this is Fiona Spicer. I think we have loose ends.’
A voice still perfectly contained, wholly together. A widow of one day. Merrily sat staring across the parking area at a children’s playground which looked like a small power station. Lit a cigarette and called Fiona.
Lol had been in Danny Thomas’s barn since eight. Danny was walking up and down in the straw, rehearsing a verse of ‘Trackway Man’, talking it into the mic.
‘“Among the hills where shepherds watch, we’ll march towards the skyline notch. From tump to twt we’ll mark the route…” What the hell’s a twt, Lol?’
‘I thought you were Welsh.’
‘I’m from Radnorshire, it en’t quite the same.’
‘I thought it was a Radnorshire word. I dunno, maybe a burial mound, a small tump. Rhymes with route, anyway, that’s all that matters.’
‘This don’t seem like your kind o’ song, somehow,’ Danny said. ‘Them Biblical quotes at the start. “Set me up waymarks, writes Jeremiah”?’
Lol explained how Alfred Watkins had collected bits from the Bible which seemed to support the idea of ley lines. He was thinking it would be quite good to use them with a kind of monastic echo. Resonant.
‘Just trying to connect, Danny. You were born here, I’m just… don’t know.’
Passing through?
‘Just ’cause you lives yere, it don’t necessarily mean you connects.’ Danny squatted down in the straw between a vintage Marshall amp and Jimi the sheepdog. ‘Did once, mind. Had what you might call a spiritual experience where I seen the poetic truth of ley lines. Looked at the veins in my wrist and seen the arteries of the countryside. Magic, that was.’
‘I thought it was acid.’
‘Well, aye, it was, but a vision’s a vision, ennit? Bloody hell, what a long time ago that was. I was only a kid. Thirteen, fourteen?’
‘You were dropping acid at thirteen?’
‘Very progressive area, Radnorshire, in the ole days, boy. ’Sides, nobody knowed, back then, what it could do to your brain.’
‘Radnorshire?’
Danny grinned. Then, abruptly, his face was solemn.
‘Seen much of young Jane, past day or so?’
‘Uh… not really.’
‘That business in the Swan, where she poured that feller’s beer… Got a bit overshadowed, that did, when the word come in about Mansel Bull.’
‘An ill wind.’
‘Never seen her like that before. Serious. The changes round yere – gettin’ to her. Savitch.’
‘Getting to all of us, one way or another.’
‘Only, Gomer and me, we got a problem,’ Danny said.
Fiona said, ‘No commiserations. Sympathy cards, I won’t even open. Don’t want to be treated like an invalid. When you’ve lived with a vicar, you know all the bereavement rituals. ’
Merrily thought naked grief was easier to handle.
‘You’re not still on your own, are you?’
‘Emily’s on the way up to Hereford, with her boyfriend. And I have things to organize. Better than thinking. I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk last night, and I’m grateful for what you did. And what you might have done if we… if we’d been in time. You will take the funeral?’
‘Well, if you… I don’t do quickies, Fiona.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Well, it doesn’t mean endless eulogies. But there are things I need to understand. Whatever he wouldn’t tell me, it’s not going to rebound on him now. Which… is one reason I’ve just been over to Allensmore. To talk to Byron Jones’s ex-wife.’
‘That was quick.’
‘When you were talking about the books that Syd was reading, back in the Cathedral, I don’t recall you mentioned Byron Jones. So when I found that book, with the others…’
‘I was certainly surprised to see a copy of that book on the desk.’ A pause. ‘OK, the last time I saw one was when we were at Wychehill. A parcel arrived one day with a copy of Caradog inside. Newly published.’
‘This was when they were still friends?’
‘I thought they were. A short time afterwards, I opened the wood stove, because it seemed to be nearly out and… you know how you can tell something used to be a book, for just a second, before the ashes collapse?’
‘Syd burned the book? Without even reading it?’
‘He never explained. Though he now seems to have acquired another copy. They were good friends, once. Byron was a bit older than Sam. He came out of the army first, but they stayed in touch.’
‘Was Syd in Byron’s local-history group?’
‘His what?’
‘Liz says Byron was in – or might even have set up – a society to study the history around Stirling Lines. Romano-British history. The inference being that this was where he got much of the background for his fiction.’
‘I know nothing about that. Though it’s hardly something you’d need to keep secret.’
‘Liz said Byron despised Christianity.’
‘Not sure if he despised it quite so much before Sam got into it. Sam was hyper at that time. His ground-to-air missile period.’
Merrily shifted in her seat, looked over towards Peterchurch’s Norman church with its fibreglass steeple. It was called The St. Peter’s Centre now, and it had a cafe and a library. Was this wha
t Uncle Ted had in mind for Ledwardine? Which reminded her there was a parish council meeting tonight to discuss it. Bugger.
She said, ‘You do know about Syd going to visit Byron at Liz’s place?’
‘When was this?’
‘Liz said two or three years after Byron left the Regiment. Possibly around the time Caradog was published. Would that have been after the burning of the book?’
‘I didn’t know that Sam had ever visited Byron,’ Fiona said. ‘Or imagined he’d want to. What did Liz say about it?’
Merrily told her. Everything, including the shotgun, which provoked a short, sour laugh.
‘Perhaps he felt he needed it as protection. Turning the other cheek was the one Christian premise I always felt Sam could never quite swallow.’
‘You’ve met Liz?’
‘One or twice. At funerals. Walking – metaphorically – half a pace behind Byron. They’re often the ones who get hurt in the end. Wholesale philandering goes with the territory. Like Vikings.’
‘But not Sam.’
‘Sam was a misfit who didn’t know what he wanted or where he wanted to be. The army straightened him out for a while, religion messed him up again.’
‘Did he ever mention Brinsop?’
‘Who?’
‘It’s a hamlet near Credenhill. Where Byron lives. Where, according to Liz, he seems to think it’s very important for him to live. Syd ever mention it?’
‘No. And if you were thinking of going to visit him I’d urge you not to. Some of these guys, there’s another side to them which is great in warfare but, in ordinary life, relatively… antisocial.’
‘Fiona… do you have any idea what all this is about? You must’ve given me those books for a reason.’
‘Knee-jerk reaction. Probably a mistake. I don’t know anything about deliverance, and Wordsworth – no idea what that’s about either. Merrily, I have to go. Have people to see… solicitors… and whoever you see to register a death. I’m sorry.’
***
Danny pulled down a squared bale of straw and sat on it.
‘Likely you don’t know much about cockfighting. Well, me neither. Us ole hippies, we never done that stuff. Foreign to our nature. But it went on.’
