by Phil Rickman
Bax shuffled around, prodded a tyre on his bike.
‘I live in hope.’
Lol said, ‘Ever come across a bloke called Byron Jones?’
‘Round here? Should I have?’
‘I think he lives in a caravan. Or he did.’
‘Oh…’ Bax blew out smoke. ‘You mean Colin Jones?’
‘Probably do.’
‘He don’t live in the caravan no more. Got permission for a bungalow on the edge of his land. The Compound. Nice, too. Swimming pool.’
‘Compound?’
‘That’s what it looks like. All that high barbed-wire fencing. Don’t know him, exactly. We are acquainted. He does intensive fitness training. Got a gym in there and an assault course where you swing over a pond on a rope, that kinda caper. You know him?’
‘Know of him.’
‘Ex-Sass. And then he was a minder. Quite well fought of, in these parts.’ Bax sniffed. ‘As they are, the Sass.’
‘People like you… ever go on these courses?’
‘Me? Nah. Wouldn’t be able to afford it. Though occasionally Mr Jones offers a one-day crash-course sort of thing to local boys, for nothing. Excellent for local relations.’ Bax took a long, noisy pull on his spliff, now down to a fragment. ‘Blimey, that din’t last long, did it?’
Lol smiled.
‘I was wondering if that wasn’t the dragon you came here to meet.’
‘The Magic Dragon. Poor ole thing, he ain’t too welcome at home no more, not since the missus joined the WI. When we first come here and she wore cheesecloth, we grew it in the dingle. Gotta pay for it now, in town. But, tell you one thing, Mr Lol… it ain’t slowed my brain enough that I can’t tell you’re fishing for som’ink? Nah, nah…’ Bax held up his hands like saucers. ‘I don’t wanna know, mate. You wanted me to know, you’d tell me, wou’n’cha?’
Lol didn’t know what to say. It was an odd, dreamlike encounter, Brinsop Church snuggling into its shadows behind them, only its bell tower showing like a periscope.
‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for. But a new verse for the song would make it worthwhile.’
Bax said, ‘What about the fings what reappear?’
‘I thought you hadn’t seen them.’
‘I know a bloke who has,’ Bax said. ‘You interested?’
41
Pain
It was still fully light when Bliss reached the entrance to Chris Symonds’s farm, so he drove past, crawled around the lanes for a while. Needed to be sure the kids were in bed.
He drove out towards Moreton-on-Lugg, through the flat-lands, towards the western horizon.
Saw no way round this any more but to take her on. How the hell she’d found out about Annie he still had no idea, but if she knew, then she knew, and he was tired of playing games. He’d let her know that, yes, he was prepared to leave the division. He’d go on the transfer list directly after Easter. With the single proviso that the shit-stirring stopped.
As from now, as from tonight, any more lies about physical abuse, any whispers about him and Annie Howe… anything… and he’d flog his car and give his last penny to the flashest lawyer he could find to trash her through the courts and anywhere else she showed her devious little face.
Tell her now. On the doorstep. No discussion, no explanations, no attempts at self-justification. Then piss off back home, get the best night’s sleep he could manage and throw himself into nailing the killers of the poor bloody Marinescu Sisters before he left Hereford.
Credenhill, rising like a crusty loaf across the shadowed fields, told him he was only a few miles from Magnis Berries, and he felt a pang of guilt about his behaviour there, the way he’d leaned on Vasile Bocean.
And yet…
Why did they leave, Vasile?
I told you. They always seeing dead men, ghostmen.
They were fired? Dismissed… for that?
They was causing upset. Bad vibes. Praying out loud. Lighting candles. Is fire risk! Health and Safety!
Vasile had said he thought they were, in the end, happy to take some money to go. Maybe they took the ghosts with them. Or maybe they didn’t, all the murmurings that went on afterwards.
Bliss could hear Jeremy Berrows telling him about places where the air was loaded and Mansel’s sheepdogs had become uncontrollable. He’d thought of going back, alone, to talk to Vasile again, man to man. But the problem was that when people’s testimony bordered on the unlikely it negated everything else they’d told you, making them useless as witnesses. Guaranteed to get you laughed out of court.
He turned the car at the next junction and headed back to his father-in-law’s farm.
Jane lit a candle on the altar and sat down in the choirmaster’s chair.
She was alone, hadn’t seen much of Mum tonight – parish meeting at the village hall, Uncle Ted, usual trivial crap, but at least it kept her out of the church.
The full preparation now, systematic relaxation.
Sitting upright, hands on knees, slowly sensing the body from the toes to the top of the head. It was getting a lot easier. Practice. Jane was finding she could almost slide into a relaxed state these days, without the tedious preliminaries.
Meditation: probably the only procedure which actually transcended all the halfway-workable religions. Of course, Jane only did this in here when she was sure she wouldn’t be disturbed by Uncle Ted or some other tosser. Didn’t want anyone to think she’d found Mum’s God.
The Easter holiday had begun tonight. Tomorrow would be the first day of what was, in effect, the last school holiday she’d ever have. When the big summer holiday began, it wouldn’t count because she’d have left school. Not a break, but a springboard into adult life. Whatever that was about.
Jane listened to her breathing. She’d brought along the copy of Revelations of Divine Love from Mum’s desk. Mum had marked a section where Mother Julian was welcoming the sickness she’d contracted at the age of thirty, wanting it to bring her as close as possible to death. To know the reality of dying, in the hope this would cleanse her and bring about a spiritual rebirth. OK, a touch masochistic but this was not a woman who messed around. Maybe knowing there were some secrets you could only learn through pain. Jane went into some chakra breathing, a kind of energy conveyor belt, but soon lost the cycle. The body was still, but the mind wouldn’t switch off.
She’d seen Cornel again tonight. He’d parked his Porsche on the square but, instead of going into the Swan, he’d followed his jutting chin down Church Street, like some zombie on the prowl, and she’d watched him enter the Ox, where the serious drinkers went. She’d almost gone after him – Mum would be in the village hall for at least two hours – but wasn’t sure she was ready to handle it.
Had to be done right.
Getting off the school bus, she’d run into Gomer outside the Eight Till Late. He’d looked embarrassed. Admitting, as they walked down Church Street together, that he was getting nowhere. Talked to everybody he could think of, either side of the border, and, while some could remember when there were illegal cockfights, nobody knew of any happening hereabouts at present. Gamecocks were still being bred, but for collectors, poultry buffs, not for fights.
En’t gived up, mind, Gomer had said. Jane didn’t think he was optimistic. But, look, that was OK. That was actually good. It meant local people weren’t involved. Now the finger of suspicion could only be pointing one way.
She knew a lot about cockfighting, now. Not something she’d ever wanted to study, but this was not a responsibility she could walk away from. She’d sat down in her apartment and spent nearly two hours on the Internet, downloading everything except the cockfight videos. Fights had been staged for over two thousand years and were still happening, mainly in the Far East, South America. Less publicly in the UK, where they’d first been introduced by Roman invaders.
Bastards. She couldn’t stop thinking about the bird with the lion’s mane.
But main
ly she couldn’t stop replaying what she’d heard last night, outside the kitchen door.
James Bull-Davies.
Complicated times, Mrs Watkins… what, with Savitch bidding to buy the Swan…
Dear God, the final insult. The oak-panelled Jacobean core of the community. How many people knew? Mum had obviously known already and taken a decision not to tell the kid. Hey, let’s not have Jane doing something stupid. But she wasn’t a bloody kid any more and whatever she did wouldn’t be stupid.
Jane concentrated on her breathing, taking the air down to the solar-plexus chakra.
Preparation.
Curved bars of blackening cloud made the western sky look like an old ribcage as Bliss turned, like he had hundreds of times, along Chris Symonds’s farm track.
In a glow of excitement, once upon a time, at the thought of seeing Kirsty, in tight black jeans and a straining top, waiting for him where the track forked by an ancient oak tree with a trunk wider than his car.
A dirt track in those days. Now it was tarmac. The real thing, not one of your itinerant-gang jobs that cracked up in weeks; this one was in better nick than the county roads. Possibly even quietly laid by a few of the same fellers, Bliss had heard. The word was that Chris was putting himself up for the council next time.
He turned left at the fork, driving slowly without lights, following the track leading to the stone outbuildings converted into classy stone holiday cottages, one of them currently occupied by Kirsty and the kids. Bliss slowed, did a tight three-point turn and parked on the grass verge a good distance away. Didn’t want her looking out and recognizing his Honda and not answering the door.
Just as well. When he got out of the car, not fully closing the door to avoid the noise, he saw another vehicle, a light-coloured Discovery, half hidden on the edge of the pair of fat leylandii which separated the holiday cottages from the farmhouse and threw their front doors into evening shade.
No sign of Kirsty’s Ka. Chris Symonds drove a Discovery; maybe she’d borrowed it to cart stuff around. Worst scenario would be that Chris and Pat were in there, in which case a mere exchange of bitter words would be the least he’d get away with.
Bliss was about four paces from the door when there was muffled click and then he was standing like a social-club compere in overlapping circles of garish lemon light.
He backed off sharpish. Who the hell had installed security spots?
A shadow crossed the upstairs window and he heard a muffled biffing – the heel of a hand repeatedly hitting a jammed window frame. And then, as it gave way, a voice from up there.
‘… bloody thing. See, told you it was nobody. Not even the paparazzi.’
…trailed by a sound he hadn’t heard in a good long while: Kirsty’s little shocked-but-thrilled, plumped-out giggle.
Bliss crouched in the damp grass at the edge of the track until the security lights reached the end of their cycle and went out, and he could see the figure in the window, out of shadow up there.
The shock and the pain came sudden and vicious, like a knife-thrust in some clammy alleyway, as the setting sun showed him that the parts of Sollers Bull visible above the window frame were unclothed.
42
Don’t Go There
It took a while to come out – it always did around here. The two brothers had been introduced by Bax as Percy and Walter. They lived in a small red-brick cottage, nineteenth-century, at the end of a row of modern houses and bungalows near Kenchester. They travelled in the slow lane. The silent Walter, who was probably over ninety, wore an apron and made the tea. Percy had never heard of anybody called Lol before.
‘Short for Laurence,’ Lol said.
He’d crawled up from Brinsop in the truck, behind a man on a bike.
‘Well, well,’ Percy said.
Walter handed Lol tea in a china cup. A low-wattage bulb, its brown flex hanging over a blackened beam, had probably been on all day. Coal was burning in an iron range. There was a TV set that had to be fifty years old and probably didn’t work any more. The room smelled of… well, it smelled of old blokes.
‘Lol writes songs,’ Bax told Percy.
‘Too many bloody songs, now. All sounds the same.’
Percy was a few years younger than Walter. His hair was white and curly.
‘No, proper songs,’ Bax said. ‘Folk songs. Songs about life. And songs about things what goes on…’ he winked at Lol ‘… that people don’t talk about much no more.’
‘Talk? They wanted me to give a talk, look,’ Percy said. ‘Women’s Institute. Some woman comes round, asks me to give a talk.’
‘That was my missus, Percy.’
‘Wasn’t gonner talk to a load o’ women. They spreads stuff all over, women does. And they gets it wrong.’
‘Always a problem with women,’ Bax admitted.
‘En’t I don’t like to talk.’ Percy nodded at Walter. ‘ He don’t like to talk much, never has, look. I likes to talk, long as folks gets it right, what I tells ’em. Half the buggers, they don’t listen proper, n’more.’
Bax nodded.
‘Talks back, don’t listen,’ Percy said.
After a while he seemed to notice Lol, sitting on a stool by the door. Lol was listening. Percy nodded approvingly.
‘Tell Lol what you seen in the long field that night,’ Bax said.
In the feeble light, the already muted colours in the room had died back into a sombre sepia. Percy did some thinking.
‘Wouldn’t ’appen to ’ave any more o’ that scenty baccy, would you, boy?’ he said eventually.
Halfway down Church Street, Jane began to feel cold and a little stupid in the sawn-off white hoodie that she’d worn in the Swan the night she’d met Cornel. But he’d been pissed then and she needed him to recognize her.
Ready for this now. Knew exactly how she’d handle him. Sure he’d come out of the Ox at some point. Maybe he was here with his cockfighting mates. Eventually she went in and had a glance around.
Mistake.
‘Watkins!’
Slobby Dean Wall at one of the gaming machines.
‘Don’t get excited, Wall,’ Jane said calmly. ‘I’m only looking for somebody.’
‘Yeah.’ Wall looked at her bare bits, sucking in his breath. ‘It looks like you bloody are, too.’
Jane took a couple of steps inside. Stink of stale beer. Only the Ox could sell beer that smelled stale when it was fresh out of the pump. Men’s eyes were flickering her way from all corners of the cramped bar with its tobacco beams and stained flags. A barmaid was clearing glasses from a table. Six pint glasses in two hands, fingers down in the dregs, clinking. She looked up, and it was Lori Jenkin, who worked part-time in the Eight Till Late. Jane leaned over, lowered her voice.
‘I’m looking for Cornel.’
‘Your mum know about this, Jane?’
‘Got a message for him, that’s all. Somebody said he was in here.’
This was going all wrong. She needed to just, like, bump into him.
‘I think he’s in his room,’ Lori said. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘He’s staying here?’
The Ox had two spare bedrooms, which Jane understood were used mainly by sad downmarket commercial travellers too pissed to go back on the road. A guy with a Porsche staying here… that did not sound right.
Lori said, ‘I’ll get somebody to give him a knock, if you like.’
‘ No… No, it’s OK. It’s not urgent, I’ll catch him again.’
Jane got out of the Ox under Dean Wall’s soiled, beery gaze and stood there feeling like a prostitute, shivering. They always underdressed, apparently. This wasn’t working. Give up for tonight, go home.
Rapid footsteps across the street and, oh jeez, it was Mum walking up from the village hall. Jane hung back, keeping close to the shadowed cottages. But, after a few paces, inevitably tonight, Mum looked back and saw her.
Jane walked up, hands jammed in her pockets to pull the hoodie down over the bar
e bits. How was she going to explain this?
‘Meeting’s over already?’
‘Uncle Ted couldn’t make it, so we had a fairly restricted agenda, thank God. Apparently, he, erm… tried to ring me earlier.’ Mum glancing sideways at Jane, as they walked up to the empty square, taking in the skimpy apparel and then glancing away. ‘Jane, look, I know it’s none of my-’
‘I needed to walk and think and stuff. Didn’t realize how cold it was.’
They reached the square, with its tumble of black and white buildings, the weary lanterns coming on outside the Swan, soon to be owned by…
Jane’s fists tightened.
‘So,’ Mum said, ‘you were thinking. And stuff.’
‘Last day of term. Last school holiday. The future.’
Everybody had been demob happy at school. Those facing A levels probably less so, but nobody quite as messed-up as she was.
Mum said, ‘I’m not so old I don’t remember what that’s like. You’ve made a decision that could determine the rest of your life and you’re thinking, God, have I done the right thing?’
‘Oh.’ Jane went to stand with her back to the open-sided, oak-pillared market hall. ‘Like… most of the guys at school, they just can’t wait to get the hell out of here and go to London. Or Paris or New York?’
‘Sure.’
‘Me, I don’t even want to go to university.’
There. It was out.
‘Ah,’ Mum said. ‘So that’s it.’
‘Three years? That’s like…’
‘Flower, compared with the rest of-’
‘The rest of my life, yeah. It is actually about more than that, though, isn’t it? And, like, for what? A degree means nothing any more. There’s guys out there with PhDs who can’t spell. Coops is Dr Cooper, and he just works for the council. And the… the forces of darkness are gathering. Hereford’s already as good as gone. All crap superstores and charity shops and women getting murdered in the back streets…’
‘Jane-’
‘And if I leave… if I go… I’ll come back and it’ll all be shit here, too.’ Jane felt the pressure of tears; hadn’t intended to go this far. ‘That sounds bonkers, doesn’t it? So why do I keep waking up depressed and frightened?’
