by Phil Rickman
‘They were in for dinner last night and we got talking. Amazing how many intelligent people swallow all that crap about Herefordshire being the New Cotswolds. They see a lovely old black and white village in summer and it entirely escapes them that the old Cotswolds are an hour from London while we’re not within commuting distance of anywhere halfway affluent. Most people round here, if they want a picture on their wall they frame a page of last year’s calendar.’
‘So they couldn’t sell paintings and now they can’t sell the gallery?’
‘Not as business premises, and it’s too small to be any good for much else.’
‘Not really been much of a business since it was Lucy’s shop.’
‘The Devenish curse, you think?’
‘Just never seemed quite right, did it? Rural knick-knacks and apple mementoes, then she dies and it’s posh, minimalist art at non-Hereford prices.’
‘Anyway,’ Barry said, ‘they don’t like to say they’re strapped for cash, but they’ve been putting it around, quietly, that it’s available for rent. Cheap enough for me to think I might just go for it as a retail outlet for specialist ciders. Then I had a better idea.’
‘Tanning salon?’
Barry adjusted his eye patch.
‘You all right, Laurence? You seem a bit out of it.’
‘I’m fine.’
He could probably tell Barry everything that had happened last night, without risk. Digging up a corpse would get barely a blink from a former SAS man. But perhaps not.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’
‘What I was thinking, we’re gonna need a festival office.’
‘Are we?’
‘To take bookings and that. It was gonna be here, at the Swan, but then I’d have to lose a room. Whereas if we rented that shop… nice little mews off the high street that nobody can resist peering into. Music playing softly.’
‘We could afford it?’
‘We could sell related stuff, as well. I’m thinking albums by the artists on the bill. Books. CDs and DVDs. Your albums, even. Festival-linked tourist tat. And specialist cider.’
‘Well, that…’
‘I’ve talked to Savitch, looks like he might chuck some money in. Get it up and running early next year. What’s to lose? Whaddaya think?’
Lol was remembering his own early days in the village, when he used to mind the shop for Lucy Devenish. It had been well overcrowded, full of apple pottery, books of apple recipes and apple folklore and a sign that said something like, Lovely to look at, delightful to hold, but if you break it… don’t worry it’s my own bloody fault for running a business in such a grotty little hovel.
Lucy. What a loss.
‘It’s not a bad idea, Barry. Of course you’d need staff.’
‘We would. Might get volunteers for a while, but that’s not really satisfactory.’ Barry leaned back into a pale sunbeam, hands behind his head. ‘What about young Jane?’
‘To run it?’
‘Gap year’s not going as well as expected, what I heard. Girl seems at a bit of a loose end. I may be wrong here, but she doesn’t look too happy.’
‘It’s, uh, that time of transition. Between two worlds. The one where your future’s always decided for you so you can rebel against it. And the other one, where you’ll only have yourself to blame.’
Remembering Jane coming into Ledwardine Lore when he was looking after the shop for Lucy one spring afternoon. Back when he and Jane had never seen one another before and he’d never met her mother. Lol at his most neurotic, trying to avoid Karl Windling, the old Hazey Jane bass player who’d nearly destroyed him and then had the nerve to come back, years later, with plans to reform the band. Jane taking over from Lol in the shop so that he could creep upstairs and hide, like a mouse.
His time of transition. One of several. Sometimes he felt he was stuck in transition, never getting anything quite right. Like last night, when he should’ve come down from that earthmound, grabbed the lamp from her, guided her away. He’d replayed that scene so many times in the past few hours: how a thinking Lol Robinson might have prevented Jane from seeing what she’d seen and was unlikely ever to forget.
‘You really all right, Lol?’
‘Yeah, it’s just…’
He should have gone back to the churchyard at first light, if only to check they hadn’t left any evidence of what they’d done. He didn’t think they had. His last memory of the churchyard was Gomer gathering together the tools holding down the groundsheet and then taking it to the stile before shaking off the flakes of soil and clay.
‘You don’t think it’s a good idea?’ Barry said. ‘She’d get paid, naturally. Not hugely.’
‘I think it’s a brilliant idea.’
‘But…?’
‘No, it’s brilliant, Barry. Really. Magic.’
Jane crossed the street, having to wait for a break in the traffic. That didn’t happen often on a Sunday in winter. The sunshine had brought visitors into Ledwardine, a few early Christmas shoppers, even. The antique-stroke-junk shop and the bookshop, Ledwardine Livres, had started opening on Sundays and the Swan did good lunches, not too expensive. It was even rumoured that a few seasonal visitors actually went to church.
Weird.
What was also slightly weird was that you could go for weeks without encountering Dean Wall, and then he was suddenly in your face all the time. She was barely halfway across Church Street, heading towards Lucy’s Cottage to see if Lol was back, when he was hailing her from the corner. He was wearing a felt hat with a band around it, like a fedora.
‘Your lucky day, Jane.’
‘Well, it might’ve been.’
‘You don’t appreciate me. Listen. The gay-boys stayed at the Ox? You still interested?’
‘Who said they were gay?’
‘Little bells round their legs? You kiddin’?’
She jerked back the shudder.
‘You have a very simplistic mind, Wall.’
‘S’pose I could tell you name of the feller booked the rooms.’
‘Yeah?’ Jane trying not to look too interested. ‘How’d you get that out of him?’
‘Bing? Done him a few favours. And now I can do you one, Jane.’
‘But then I’d owe you, right?’
‘Then you’d owe me big time, girlie.’
Jane sighed.
‘And what do you reckon would make us even?’
He thought about it for a few seconds, puffing out his big lips, his breath steaming.
‘No chance of a shag, I s’pose?’
Jane instinctively tightened her scarf, letting the silence drift for a while before coming down to his level.
‘Dean, if I said I’d rather bite off my own nipples…’
The worst of it was he actually looked disappointed. You could swear the light went out of his eyes.
‘You don’t help yourself, Jane.’
‘What?’
He turned and began to walk away, but slowly. For the first time, Jane felt soiled enough to threaten him. She let him get fifteen or twenty paces away before calling after him.
‘How about I try and put a word in for you with Raji Khan?’
A couple of shoppers turned round. Wall came shuffling to a stop. She walked slowly up behind him.
‘I mean a good word. As opposed to a bad word.’
He stood there with his head sunk between his shoulders.
‘I still don’t get your connection with him.’
He didn’t turn round. He’d asked her about this before and evidently hadn’t believed the answer, involving, as it did, Mum.
‘Being an alleged drug dealer doesn’t prevent someone having a spiritual side. It’s often quite compatible, I’m told.’
‘Oh, you think you’re smart, Jane, but you’re so full of shit.’
‘Anyway, he might be looking for, I dunno, a doorman for one of his clubs sometime? You’d have to wear a tie, of course. You got a tie?’
&nbs
p; ‘Fuck off,’ Dean Wall said. Then, ‘His name’s Gareth Brewer. From Kilpeck.’
‘How’s that spelt? The guy’s name, not Kilpeck.’
He swung round.
‘How much you want?’
‘It’s OK, I’ll work it out.’
She saw Lol coming across the square, past Big Jim Prosser’s Eight Till Late, looking casually from side to side. A guy in search of a home. Sometimes, in Ledwardine, he looked like he’d found it. Not today, though. She thought if she could see auras his would be deep mauve flecked with black.
Wall said, ‘What are you into, Jane?’
She coughed; her throat was parched.
‘For the first time, Dean, I can say with confidence that even you really don’t want to know. OK?’
She’d seen that Lol was wearing suede boots and wondered if he’d burned last night’s trainers.
19
Wild West
EXCEPT LATER, IN the photos, Bliss never saw his face. By the time he was pulling the Honda onto the forecourt, they had the lad all bagged up and ready to go. But probably a nice-looking feller, Karen Dowell said, before he was shot twice in the head from close up.
Karen had briefed him on the phone with her customary attention to unnecessary detail. Before he was out of the car he could almost smell it in his head, the engine grease and the blood.
The garage was where he’d thought it might be, at the rural end of the industrial estate, not far from Rotherwas Chapel and the council tip. Half the forecourt had already been taped off in front of a gaping entrance framed in stained concrete. Police screens across it now. Seven or eight second-hand cars parked outside, none of them priced over five K. But the purple and white sign over the entrance was new.
JAG’S MOTORS.
DC Vaynor came round one of the screens, clambering between the police vehicles like some kind of stick insect.
‘Inspector Ford sends his regards, boss. He dropped by, before his Sunday morning pint.’
‘How very thoughtful of him.’ And how bloody prescient. Bliss leaning on his arms over his driver’s door, peering up at Vaynor, who was close to seven feet tall and young enough to be still growing. ‘First off… handgun – that confirmed?’
‘Definitely. When did that last happen in Hereford?’
‘Before my time, anyway. In fact it probably involved a retired colonel and a service revolver.’
‘Far as we can tell…’ Vaynor bent his back and lowered his voice. ‘… it’s two headshots, fairly close range, one from behind. One probably done after he was down, just to make sure.’
‘Which also kind of rules out suicide. And we know it’s him, yeh? Wictor Justyn Jaglowski.’
Vaynor nodded.
‘His girlfriend found him. She’s English, so we didn’t have to wait for a terp. She’d gone out looking for Jag when he didn’t come back from mass. Ended up here. Doors unlocked but no lights on.’
‘The garage wasn’t open?’
‘It’s Sunday. Good Catholic.’
‘Like me ma,’ Bliss said. ‘Mr Jag. Worra shame we didn’t have a chance to run an obbo on him. Due to start tomorrow, as it happened. Terry Stagg was organizing it. He’d be miffed. ‘Where’s the girlfriend?’
‘Her dad picked her up. Wasn’t in any state to drive. We know where to find her, anyway.’
Bliss could see some action inside, more lights going on. Saw no reason to interrupt Karen. A good look round, an itemizing of everything, could prove productive, and it didn’t need an audience. Best to keep it all low-key. It would blow up big time tomorrow.
‘He was fencing stuff?’ Vaynor said.
‘As I’m sure Inspector Ford confirmed for you. Could’ve been obtaining items to order. Mainly of an agricultural nature. But was he treading on someone else’s ground, that’s the point? Doesn’t take them long, these fellers, to mark out their territory. City’s divided up in no time. Still… at least we’ve gorra good idea of time of death without pestering the doc.’
‘His girlfriend have any idea why he might’ve come to the garage?’
‘She says they didn’t talk much about his business.’
‘So we can take it he had a special reason to come in,’ Bliss said. ‘To meet somebody, maybe.’
‘Who then shot him?’
‘Anybody actually hear any shots?’
‘It’s Sunday. Not many people around to hear anything. As you see, we haven’t drawn much of a crowd.’
Bliss turned and saw a couple of teenage lads across the road, one of them taking pictures on his phone. Nothing you could do about that. Vaynor pointed into the middle distance, where the estate crumbled away into scrub.
‘Open fields, there. I expect there’s some rough shooting on a Sunday, legit or otherwise. Couple of bangs wouldn’t cause much of a stir. There’s a petrol station a few hundred metres down the road, we’re talking to them. That’s the nearest CCTV, I’m afraid.’
Bliss sighed.
‘The new gangland. Organized theft, people-smuggling, slavery – he was linked to the lot.’
He wrinkled his nose. It didn’t scare him, but it didn’t give him a buzz either. Migrant crime could be a drag, too reliant on the National Register of Public Service Interpreters. Dial-a-Terp. You could wait hours for the buggers to arrive, taking a big chunk out of your allotted twenty-four.
‘Thing about gangland,’ Vaynor said, ‘is after a while, in the big cities, it gets sort of tolerated, doesn’t it? On account of most of the time they’re just taking out each other.’
‘So many vacancies for gang bosses they’re taking on kids with no proper qualifications,’ Bliss said. ‘It’s a disgrace.’
Remembering the last time he went up north to see his mam, having a pint with an old mate, now a super with the major incident posse. Telling Bliss the Merseyside gangs were all little kids now. He’d said he felt like a headteacher who’d had his cane swapped by the Home Office for a handbook on child psychology.
At least these were grown-ups. Jaglowski was about twenty-eight. A veteran.
They watched him being brought out, all packed up like a futon from Furniture Village, Karen Dowell in a Durex suit following. Always been good with bodies, Karen, possibly down to an impaired sense of smell.
The meat-wagon doors clunked.
‘You know what, Darth?’ Bliss said. ‘I realize the council’s doing its best, but the way I see it, Hereford’s not big enough yet for gang warfare. We don’t stamp on it, we’re gonna look stupid and ineffectual very quickly.’
‘I suppose.’
‘Besides,’ Bliss said, ‘it offends me, these scallies and their handguns. I realize this is England’s Wild friggin’ West, but Mother of God…’
‘Charlie Howe as sheriff?’
‘Sorry, son?’
‘They elected sheriffs. In the Wild West.’
Bliss considered this.
‘You’re a big lad, Darth,’ he said eventually, ‘but not too big to get bounced back into friggin’ uniform.’
Vaynor grinned. They waited for Karen to come over, unzipping her Durex suit, looking almost dismayed.
‘Could be more complicated than we thought, boss. We’ve made a discovery in the inspection pit that puts a whole new slant on it. Four of them.’
‘Four what?’
‘Lovely little automatic pistols. All shiny and well greased. The business.’
20
Grave goods
JANE WAS DRAPING her parka over the back of Lol’s sofa, pulling her phone out of one of the pockets, as if she was here for the long haul. Then flinging herself into the sofa and looking at him like he was crazy.
‘Let things settle? Are you serious?’
Lucy’s parlour was bathed in blue light, always stronger and brighter in winter with no leaves on the trees. Jane’s anger was vivid.
‘All I meant,’ Lol said, ‘was now we know what happened—’
‘We do? Really?’
‘What happene
d,’ Lol said softly, ‘is that we committed a serious crime. The kind of distasteful crime for which people usually get the book thrown at them. Maybe several books.’
Vaguely remembering some travellers stealing a child’s body some years ago. Also members of an animal rights group jailed after unearthing the remains of a woman connected with a farm supplying guinea pigs for medical research. Custodial sentences in both cases.
‘Gomer and me, anyway,’ he said.
‘And me.’ Jane sat up hard. ‘Come on! Accessory, at least. Worse – I told you to do it and, to compound it, I’ve just hidden Gomer’s spade. So like… me, too.’
Defiant, glassy tears in her eyes.
‘You just got into bad company,’ Lol said. ‘They’ll understand.’
He sat down on the rug in front of the inglenook, realizing she was hyper, watching her coming down, pushing fingers through her hair then shaking her head.
‘Can we… can we go back to what happened? I mean before the… what we did. Exhumation. Is that the right word?’
‘I don’t think it is,’ Lol said. ‘An exhumation’s legal.’
He hadn’t slept well. No surprise there. Nor were the dreams. He’d been up early, doing some nervous checking. Once a body or even ashes had been buried in consecrated ground, you couldn’t touch them without permission from the Church. And the Church rarely gave permission without a struggle, Christian burial still regarded as final.
‘If relatives want to move a body to another grave or another cemetery, for some quite legitimate reason, they have to make a formal application to the diocese. Which, as far as I can see, means the Bishop. A very good reason to sit tight and say nothing to your mum. Much as I hate that.’
‘She’d feel responsible. For the churchyard. And for us.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘What about Gomer?’
‘Gomer won’t breathe a word. He’s satisfied. He’s proved his suspicions were not misguided. That he hasn’t lost it and Aidan Lloyd’s now properly buried.’
It had taken another half-hour digging out the grave to its original depth, lowering the coffin on ropes. A further hour replacing the earth, refitting the turf like carpet tiles.
