by Phil Rickman
The church door opened again. Not sure who this was, but too heavy-footed to be Jane. Hoping to God she had this right, she invited the unseen assembly in the nave to inhale the darkness.
Breathing in the bitter aroma of burnt wick and cooling wax. The real challenge would come next Sunday when she’d have to approach the spiritual power of love without sounding trite.
She didn’t think that Rachel would be here. Dr Rachel Peel, who had declined any of the uncertain, counselling-based help usually offered to recipients of a bereavement visitation. If she was anywhere tonight, perhaps she’d be at Kilpeck Church, if it was Kilpeck’s turn to have a Sunday evening service.
It ended, as usual, in five minutes of silent meditation. When it was over, she didn’t relight any candles, found her way instead to the switches beside the rood screen and activated the highest ambient lights.
And thus – jolted hard back into the wooden screen, a hand to her mouth – was able to identify the person who had been last in and was now first out.
Outside, it was so cold now that you could almost see the frost crystals forming in the air, but they walked back slowly along the edge of the cobbles, Lol telling her about Jane bringing him the name of Gareth Brewer, finding his phone number. And why, in the end, he’d called it.
‘Oh God, they’re going to make the connection,’ Merrily said. ‘You do realize that?’
‘I think Brewer’s wife already has.’
He’d hesitantly taken her hand, something he still did outside in Ledwardine only in the hours of darkness.
‘Lol, even if she doesn’t know exactly why they came to Ledwardine, when she tells her husband she’s had a call from someone here, he will know. And then what?’
‘She knows something,’ Lol said. ‘Would’ve been better if I could’ve talked to him directly.’
‘And put it to him that he was dancing on a grave?’
His hand tightened around hers, as if in spasm.
‘This is Jane, isn’t it?’ Merrily said. ‘She got the number, I don’t like to think how, and she said that if you didn’t call him, she would?’
Always a dilemma for Lol, how to handle Jane. Whether he realized this or not, his central discomfort had always related to coming across in any way paternal.
‘It was my decision,’ he said. ‘But you’re right, they’re going to be wondering what we know. I need to get hold of this Lionel Darvill. Sir Lionel. When we find out who he is.’
‘Maybe I’ll sound out the local priest. Kilpeck’s part of a cluster run from Ewyas Harold, where the rector’s newish so might not know too much. I’m going in to see Sophie tomorrow, I’ll check her out.’
‘It’s best,’ Lol said, ‘if you aren’t involved.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m getting tired of hiding.’
Screwing up her eyes to examine a small group of people crossing the square towards the entrance of the Swan. None of them looked like Paul Crowden, the wrestler. Merrily felt numb. It had been Crowden in church, hadn’t it?
Lol said, ‘Come back with me. Things I have to tell you.’
‘I’d love to, but I’ve hardly seen Jane today, and she… doesn’t seem too happy.’
‘She isn’t. But she agrees it’s best you hear it from me.’
‘Hear—?’
‘Just come back. Please.’
The wobbly lights of the Black Swan, those warm leaded squares, glimmered from across the cobbles, and applewood fires perfumed the air. She thought suddenly, irrationally, or maybe not, I’m going to lose all this.
24
Big farming
JANE FOUND THAT Lol had been right. There was nothing online about the Kilpeck Morris and very little about Sir Lionel Darvill.
However…
What he should have done was followed the family name. Jane – grimly driven tonight – did some serious following on the laptop up in her apartment with Ethel sleeping on her bed and the old blow-heater death-rattling behind her. Whoever these guys were, she was coming for them.
The Darvills of Kilpeck.
You didn’t have to be particularly famous to get a Wikipedia entry and there was quite a lot on the Darvills. The name had been spelled a few different ways over the centuries, notably De Ville, as in Cruella, for quite a while until it found its current form in the nineteenth century.
Well, of course, Jane knew that the British aristocracy had grown out of thieving and backhanders, favours to the Crown getting repaid. What changed?
The Darvills claimed their ancestors had come over with William the Conqueror or maybe a little later. These posh bastards were always lying about their roots. Whether this particular branch was descended from the original Norman family was open to conjecture, but they were certainly baronets, which gave them a title they could pass on but no seat in the House of Lords. Seemed like win-win to Jane.
She had to wade through two world wars and a lot of politics before finding something shining dully out of the dirt.
It was the word mysticism.
The key period began with Peter Darvill, who had inherited the title in the late 1960s along with a big farmhouse, rather than a mansion, called Maryfields, in the middle of a substantial estate just outside Kilpeck. Peter had become an active farmer, running the expanding estate for nearly ten years, very profitably, until he died, suddenly, the way a lot of active farmers died.
You didn’t have to live in the sticks for very long to learn that, even today, a high proportion of accidental deaths on farms were down to tractor accidents. Peter Darvill had had this huge, expensive beast, a pedigree shirehorse of a tractor, a power symbol. He’d climbed down from the cab when it was on a hillside and gone round the back, apparently to check on something, somehow failing to immobilize it, and the great tractor had come rolling inexorably back, on its enormous tyres, over Sir Peter.
He was divorced, no kids, so the title went to his younger brother, Henry, which was where it got interesting. This was because Henry had no particular interest in agriculture, according to Wikipedia, while being fascinated by stuff that Jane could well understand people getting into: basically, human potential. Not how much money he could make but what he could be. What any of us could be.
Henry Darvill was a mystic with intent.
Jane – and his destiny, as it turned out – found him at an establishment called the College for Perpetual Learning, which he’d helped finance with much of his inheritance as second son when Peter had landed the farm.
The college had been founded in a small mansion near Pershore in neighbouring Worcestershire, to continue the work of the late George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.
OK, she was sure she’d heard the name, but nobody could be expected to know every eastern-European-bordering-on-Russian spiritual teacher.
Back to Google.
She liked the look of him at once: bald head, big black curly moustache and eyes that nailed you to the wall even in old black and white photos. Gurdjieff, dead since 1949, had spent years guru-chasing in North Africa and the East, before coming west between the world wars, settling in France, collecting a bunch of wealthy and cultured followers whom he’d tasked with menial work like toilet cleaning in the cause of attaining higher consciousness. He called it the Fourth Way because it was achievable in the course of an ordinary life. Gurdjieff’s premise: you’re all asleep, you need to learn how to awaken fully or you’re stuffed in the afterlife. But don’t think it’s going to be easy.
Whether Henry Darvill ever fully awoke was debatable because he had to give up his studies at the College for Perpetual Learning to become Sir Henry.
After which the Maryfields estate would never be the same again.
Merrily was huddled into a corner of Lol’s sofa, one sleeve of the cashmere sweater pushed up, he guessed, to hide a new hole, one hand gripping the other as if it might come away. Her shoes were off, her hair was loose. She looked younger, but not necessarily in a good way. As if she was throwing off all resemblance to an adult in
control.
He’d turned the hard chair away from the desk to face her. The stove was burning low.
‘I’m not going all self-pitying and using words like betrayed,’ Merrily said, not looking at him, ‘but I did think I could trust you. Of all people.’
‘What could I do?’ Lol’s eyes shutting in anguish. ‘He’d already started. I tried to talk him out of it. If I hadn’t helped him he might’ve been there all night. I like Gomer.’
‘We all like Gomer. Jesus Christ, we love Gomer…’
‘He just had to know he was right. At his time of life, these things are important.’
‘Lol, it’s not what you did, abhorrent though it was. It’s the fact that you conspired—’
‘Conspired? Fucking hell…’
‘Decided to hide it from me. You dug up the grave of a man in my churchyard and you thought it would not be good to tell me in case it offended my… Christian sensibilities?’
‘What would you have done… if you’d known?’
‘I don’t know. Something. I don’t know. It changes everything, doesn’t it? This really is a crime. And you…’
‘Yeah, I’m guilty, too. Just as guilty as whoever did it the first time.’
‘And Jane—’
‘Jane had no part in it.’
‘Except to incite you to go ahead. While I… slept.’
Lol sat staring between his knees to the stone flags.
‘We were wrong. I was wrong. I should’ve told you this morning. Should’ve been waiting for you outside the church door…’
‘We can’t go to the police now, can we? We can’t even go to the police we know. We’re in the middle of it now. We’re part of it.’
‘You aren’t—’
‘Don’t you— You promise me now that you will never again—’
‘Merrily, please—’
She looked about to cry. Put both hands over her face, and stifled it. Sat upright on the edge of the sofa.
‘I’m sorry. You were there only because of us. Because of something Jane said. If you hadn’t been there, Jane would still have turned up. Then God knows what would’ve happened. Jane and Gomer. A lethal cocktail. I’m sorry. It’s time for me to do something. And don’t… don’t ask me what.’
The first thing Henry Darvill did when he took over Maryfields was get rid of the big tractor that killed his older brother.
Probably not realizing at the time how symbolic this would be. It would, according to Wikipedia, condition his whole future approach to farming.
Big tractor: big agriculture.
Bad.
Well, yeah, big agriculture was bad. Jane thought of old woodland getting chainsawed into oblivion, hedgerows ripped up, ancient field-systems lost for ever, wildlife habitats destroyed. She’d read that over a hundred species of wildlife were facing extinction in the UK because of pesticides sterilizing the countryside. Manure replaced by chemicals. You saw these massive crop-spraying machines too wide for the border lanes, all shiny metal discs and poisonous tubes coiled together. Meeting one was like facing some horror-comic alien invasion. Even before it had pushed you into the ditch, you hated it.
So the death of his brother had brought about this Damascene conversion in Henry Darvill. OK, maybe not Damascene – Wikipedia said it had happened over a period of two or three years; you couldn’t immediately become an organic farmer, you had to ease the land back into the old ways. And you had to be prepared to lose money.
So, at first, profits sank, and Sir Henry didn’t seem get along with some of his neighbours for reasons that were not clear but probably included stuff like reopening the old footpath between Maryfields and Kilpeck Church.
But Henry, in comparative penury, was on a high. At last he could live with himself as a big landowner with a title.
Though not with his farm manager. Jane read that the second big thing Henry did, which took much longer than getting rid of the tractor, was to dispense with the services of the very efficient, very professional guy who had made a lot of money for his brother Peter on the basis that Big Farming was the only kind that worked.
There were no details of this on Wikipedia, and it probably didn’t matter, but Jane never liked to give up until she had everything the Net had to reveal. Besides, she hadn’t yet found anything about Sir Lionel who, presumably, was Sir Henry’s successor.
She found the crunch line eventually on a dense site dealing with industrial tribunals involving farm workers. It seemed the Maryfields farm manager’s unfair dismissal case had been abandoned after he was bought off, at considerable expense.
Enough, it was suggested, to enable the farm manager to acquire a farm of his own on the edge of a village about twenty miles away.
Holy shit.
Jane stood up, images of oilseed rape soaking into her thoughts like yellow vomit.
Part Four
Above all, the performers must be infected with the true spirit of the dance. The Morris is something more than a severe, cold, unemotional dance, even if it cannot justly be called a merry, exuberant one…
The dancer must have complete control over his limbs and attain a balance and supple poise of body… after prolonged practice, the coordinated movements of arms, body and feet have become automatic. In the early stages the beginner is advised not to be afraid of erring on the side of force and strength.
Sharpe and MacIlwaine
The Morris Book (1912)
25
Looking at dead police
GAOL STREET, MONDAY morning. Bliss turning away from his office window, sitting down behind his laptop on the desk, bringing up another piccy of the garage man’s upper half, lying in black grease and showing off the hole in the shaven side of his head.
‘And now we know exactly what did that,’ he said to Annie. ‘It’s this.’
He brought up another pic of a little automatic pistol with a brown handle, and turned the lappie to face her across the desk.
‘Makarov 9-mil. Apparently a Russian old faithful from Soviet days.’
Annie studied it. She was in her dark blue business suit, white shirt, her white-blonde hair tied back. In half an hour she’d be chairing morning assembly in the Major Incident Room. There was already a buzz around Gaol Street, excitement not shared by Bliss. If he’d been sentimental about gun crime he’d be back Up North by now.
Annie looked up.
‘Many of these getting imported? Do we know?’
‘Of late, yeh. Less fashionable in Russia since the last cold war ended, so bargains to be had. Doesn’t mean the Russian mafia, they’re all over Eastern Europe. There’s a Russian video on YouTube of some fat twat loading one and firing it. I say fat twat, because his gut’s all you ever see.’
YouTube and Google. It had come to this. Not too long ago, you’d have to wait for some boffin in ballistics to serve up the background and it might take an hour or so; now it was a couple of clicks away. They were still waiting for the PM.
Annie opened her primeval spiral-bound notebook.
‘Let me get this absolutely right, Francis, before we go in there. Jaglowski was shot with one of his own guns.’
‘Not necessarily, but it’s a working theory.’
Karen’s team had found them wrapped in oily cloth in a strongbox at the bottom of the inspection pit under the ramp in Jag’s garage. Also five boxes of bullets that looked like little Duracell batteries with rounded ends.
‘The bullets that did for Jag were not your ordinary nine mil. Makarov ammo was made significantly bigger so they’d be incompatible with Western pistols in case there was a war and some got nicked by the enemy. Paranoid bastards, the Soviets.’
‘But he wasn’t killed by one of the pistols found in the garage.’
‘None of them had been fired.’
Slim Fiddler, the chief SOCO, had told him all this. Bit of a ballistics expert, Slim. Been a hobby of his for years. Surprising what you didn’t know about your colleagues.
‘Fiddler
was in a gun club, Annie. Used to go target shooting at an army range. Gorra Walther PPK of his own. Like James Bond?’
‘Not at home, I hope.’
‘Kept at the club, under lock and key. Obviously, we don’t know where Jaglowski got these, but I expect they’re all over Birmingham.’
‘The point is he was dealing guns from Hereford.’
She looked faintly outraged. Annie had been born here. Now Hereford – on her watch – was becoming a city housing heavy-duty villains. As if a virulent infection had got in under cover of the fog and soon there’d be kids shooting kids in alleyways and across the spare land beyond the Plascarreg.
‘Until his death,’ Bliss said, ‘all we knew about this man was that he was a small-time criminal fencing stolen farm machinery. If we’d known about that two or three weeks ago, had him under obbo – assuming we could afford that – we could be looking at a serious result by now.’
‘We could also be looking at dead police,’ Annie said soberly.
He didn’t say anything. He’d never liked guns, never even wanted an airgun when he was growing up in a part of Merseyside that still had fields. Never done firearms training, felt nervous standing next to some bugger with body armour and a stubby machine gun, even if they were on the same side. Still…
‘Don’t like to talk about poetic justice, Annie, but if the only man trading in Russian handguns in Hereford is the first victim of one of them… No evidence of these weapons circulating in the city. Norra whisper. You wouldn’t hold up a Tesco Express with one, would you? Chances are he picked them up for peanuts, couldn’t bring himself to say no.’
‘Do we know how many Makarovs were originally in that strongbox? Was it open?’
‘No, all locked up. They found the key on his keyring – not very professional of him. Annie, listen… it’s one feller. Not like there’s been an eruption of gun crime. Jag was a general dealer operating behind a second-hand car business. Maybe this was a first time for him, and the fact that he let himself get shot is an indication of his inexperience.’
