All of a Winter's Night

by Phil Rickman

  ‘I gather he went on to make more liberal use of cannabis. Which they say might account for his subsequent mental imbalance.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Some people, it comes without herbal assistance. You’d certainly know about that.’

  Lol felt a prickle of sweat on his forehead; Darvill went breezing on.

  ‘Brewer tells me you were asking his wife about the Kilpeck Morris. For some local fete.’

  ‘Folk festival.’

  ‘And she told you the Kilpeck Morris didn’t do other people’s events.’

  ‘I hadn’t realized that.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t let it go.’

  ‘I just… I have to report back to the festival committee.’

  There was no festival committee, only Barry.

  ‘Don’t know what you’ve heard, Robinson, but you probably need to forget it, don’t you think?’

  Lol didn’t reply. You might forget what you’d heard, you never forgot what you’d seen. On a cold night. In a grave.

  ‘Forget you ever heard of the Kilpeck Morris, hey? That’d be a start. Message getting through to you? The KM… en’t public property.’

  Lol gripped the edge of the desk; in his mind it was a coffin lid, slick with cold clay.

  ‘The morris side I was once with… briefly… that was all about being public.’

  ‘Which morris side?’

  ‘It was Cotswold. You wouldn’t know it. But I kind of interpreted it as being about spreading energy. About life, as distinct from—’

  ‘Robinson. Listen to me.’

  It went quiet. The oil tanker had moved on.

  ‘You don’t really want to get on the wrong fucking side of me,’ Darvill said. ‘Do you?’

  Clunk.

  He found Merrily alone in the vicarage kitchen, wearing an apron and an oven glove to push the emptied ash-tray back into the woodstove.

  ‘It was actually a threat?’

  ‘They don’t usually stoop to threats, these guys, do they? However—’

  ‘These guys?’ She tossed the block into the stove and spun round. ‘Lol, he’s just… another bloke.’

  Her apron rising like a tutu in a shower of wood ash.

  ‘He said his dad was at school with Nick Drake,’ Lol said. ‘Marlborough College.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He also seemed to know I’d done a stretch in a loony bin.’

  ‘He Googled you.’

  ‘Plus, he’s from here – like his ancestors for eight or nine centuries – and I’m from Off. Therefore, it would be very much in my interests to let this go. It was a threat. Trust me, I’m a failed psychotherapist.’

  ‘Like we agreed, it was a mistake to ring Mrs Brewer. Because Jane was pushing you to do something, and you find it hard to say no to Jane – I’m not blaming you for that, she was always a manipulative kid.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Food shopping at Jim Prosser’s. We have the special privilege of filling a trolley and wheeling it across the road, on the basis that a vicar will always bring it back. How little he knows about the clergy. Listen… Darvill… he’s in a wheelchair. Disabled people feel vulnerable. In a showdown they tend to fire first. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘It wasn’t a showdown. Didn’t get that far. I’m not the showdown type. You know that.’

  Merrily closed the stove door, brushed ash from her oven glove.

  ‘I’m going to see Julie Duxbury this afternoon.’

  ‘Perhaps you could ask her why they have a private morris side.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense, does it?’

  ‘It’s always had its secretive aspects. Black faces, all that. But no, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.’ He felt suddenly helpless. ‘What would happen if we just let it lie? It’s the Sticks, weird things happen.’

  Merrily frowned.

  ‘Jane isn’t going to let it lie. She’s feeling displaced. No control over her own life. People doing things under her nose for their own reasons in a place she thinks she knows. If not owns. No, look, suddenly, I’m in a safer position than either of you. I haven’t actually committed an imprisonable offence.’

  ‘You vicars are so smug.’

  She gave him the sardonic smile.

  ‘I told Julie I was looking for Aidan Lloyd. Chasing a ghost, I said, in my mysterious exorcist voice. She came back about twenty minutes ago. Mrs Watkins, she said, I think I’ve found your ghost. And I said, What does that mean, exactly? And she said, I’m not going to dress this up, I think we need your advice. Some very peculiar things have been happening.’

  Merrily let the smile go, but there was a change in her, a bit of electricity, an indication to Lol of just how much she needed what she called the Night Job. How reduced, as a person, she’d be if it were taken away.

  30

  Shopped

  LATE MORNING, THEY brought Danni James back into the interview room. No coffee this time, no bickies. This time Bliss sent Vaynor in with Karen Dowell. The break had come through Darth’s visit to Danni’s dad’s dental surgery.

  Karen had a clipboard with printouts that were nothing to do with the case. She sat leafing through them for a minute or so before nodding to herself and then looking across the table, not smiling.

  ‘Lech Jaglowski, Danni. Jag’s brother. You met him… how many times would you say?’

  Danni moistened her lips.

  ‘Dunno. Few times.’

  ‘Lech and Wictor – Jag. You suggested they were mates. You actually said they were close.’

  Danni didn’t reply. Bliss sat alone in front of the monitor, watching Darth Vaynor putting on his nasty face.

  Vaynor said, ‘Only our information suggests otherwise. Or at least that Lech and Jag’s relationship was going through a rough patch.’

  ‘They didn’t always see eye to eye,’ Danni said. ‘Brothers… you know?’

  ‘They had arguments?’

  ‘Well, yeah. Sometimes.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I don’t know. When they got going at each other, ranting, they’d go off into Polish.’

  Vaynor looked up. Bliss had heard he was taking Polish lessons. Probably have it cracked in a couple of months.

  Karen Dowell said, ‘Did you get any sense at all of what they might’ve been arguing about?’

  ‘I kept out of it.’

  ‘When was the last row?’ Karen said. ‘How close, would you say, to when Lech was arrested?’

  ‘I dunno, few days?’

  ‘How many days?’

  ‘I can’t… one, two… I’m not sure.’

  ‘The last time they met, when you were there… was there a row?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘How would you describe their relationship around the time Lech was arrested?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘I think you do, Danni,’ Karen said.

  Danni’s dad, the dentist, had told Vaynor he remembered her coming home to get away from the endless rows between Wictor and his brother. Lech arriving drunk, banging on the door in the middle of the night, disturbing Danni’s beauty sleep. Two days after Danni had gone back home, Jag himself had turned up at their house with flowers and perfume and touching apologies that Danni’s mother had found disarming in an old-fashioned way. How many of her English boyfriends would’ve done that?

  Karen smiled at last.

  ‘How did you get on with Lech?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Ever meet him when Jag wasn’t there?’

  ‘Who’s been telling you this stuff?’

  ‘He ever come round to the apartment when Jag was at work?’

  Danni was messing with a ring on her left hand, turning it round and round.

  ‘Nothing happened, all right?’

  ‘It’s not an offence. Danni.’

  ‘Nothing happened.’

  ‘But did Jag think something might have happened?’ Vaynor said. ‘This could be important, Danni, so you
might want to think before you answer.’

  ‘Why? Why’s it important? Lech didn’t shoot Jag, did he? He was in prison.’

  Vaynor steepled his fingers.

  ‘And what did Jag have to say about that? About Lech being in prison.’

  There was none of the excitement of when you’d physically pulled somebody for a killing. Wasn’t the same when the suspect was already doing nine months.

  ‘What Danni says Jag said was this,’ Bliss told Annie later, in her office. ‘He said he felt quite relieved that Lech was off the streets as, back in Krakow, a rape charge against him had been dropped through lack of evidence. Jag said Lech had always been attracted to girls who said no.’

  ‘That true?’

  ‘We’re trying to check, but probably not. It does start to look as if Jag arranged for his brother to be grassed up for the cigs. Terry Stagg’s going back to the original sources, see if we can establish a link with Jag.’

  ‘And this is because he thought Lech and Danni were…?’

  ‘Danni claimed he’d told her to lock the doors when he was at work and if Lech showed up pretend she wasn’t in. She also says Lech wanted to give up his shop and join Jag in the garage business, but Jag didn’t want that.’

  ‘If Jag got Lech nicked, did Lech know that?’

  Annie tapping her teeth with the end of a pen.

  ‘Well, this is it,’ Bliss said. ‘Jag would’ve done it through a third party, but, yeh, it’s very likely Lech would know. And had a lorra time to dwell on it.’

  What was going to take some work – and a few costly interpreters – was proving that it was Lech who’d arranged to have Jag killed. Was it through a contact in Hereford? Was it somebody he encountered in prison?

  ‘Does Lech inherit the garage now?’

  Bliss smiled.

  ‘Apparently not. The garage was rented, as was the apartment. Jag’s estate, whatever that amounts to, goes to his mam and dad in Krakow.’

  ‘What about the pistols?’

  ‘Yeh. What about the pistols?’

  ‘If Jaglowski was shot with one of his own guns, we might assume Lech knew he was dealing in firearms.’

  Bliss shook his head, wearied by the weight of implications. They were still waiting for the intelligent fellers at FIB to come up with Jag’s historic form, if any.

  ‘I’m not saying this won’t take for ever, Annie, or that we can do it on our own. There’s still a killer out there, but it might well be a professional and he might be in Brum, or London or anywhere in Europe.’

  ‘Who’s going to talk to Lech?’

  He thought he’d send Darth. Lad had been on a roll lately. Annie nodded, went across to the window to look at the dull lights of Hereford. No high-rise, no neon. Maybe it seemed a bit more like home now that the Jag killing was looking closer to a domestic.

  ‘At least it gets Charlie off our backs,’ Bliss said. ‘Didn’t tell you, did I? He’s been passing tips to the media. Told Mandy Patel about Jag owning the van driven by the Lithuanian lad who knocked that farmer off his quaddie.’

  ‘Where did Charlie get that?’

  ‘Wondered that meself. Talked to Rich Ford about it and, like he says, we never actually sat on that information but we didn’t put it out either. Charlie, however…’

  ‘Still has friends in Gaol Street,’ Annie said. ‘Probably more than we know. But why would he talk to the media about that? Unless it’s simply to show he’s still in the loop.’

  ‘Gorra be part of his campaign. No suggestion he told anybody about our suspicion that Jag was involved in farm thefts, though. Mandy thought he was just scaremongering about foreign drivers with no proper insurance bombing round the lanes in white vans.’

  Annie sat down at her desk.

  ‘Anything I don’t understand about Charlie makes me feel insecure.’

  ‘You mean there were things you did understand about Charlie?’

  ‘Saw his girlfriend in town this lunchtime,’ Annie said.

  ‘Sasha?’

  ‘She used to be all over me at one time, if I bumped into her. Like we’d grown up together.’

  ‘Not now?’

  ‘Cut me dead. Stared right through me.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Bliss said. ‘That’s at least one positive development.’

  Annie didn’t laugh. She was Charlie’s daughter – though only nominally now, Charlie had said. Cruel feller, behind all that compassion.

  31

  An oven

  THE SENSE OF border was pervasive here, hard country stalking soft under the darkening frown of the Black Mountains. Merrily drove down from Hereford on the Abergavenny road – long, straight runs beloved of boy-racers – before turning left into the little, sunken lanes in already-fading daylight.

  Open fields, then sporadic housing, mainly modern, bungalows with cars in drives but nobody about.

  Habitation but not an obvious community. A place, rather than a village, a loose knot of lanes, porch doors closed against the teeth of winter, a few chimneys pumping smoke from newly lit stoves and open fires. No landmarks, no obvious guardian hills before the threatening heights in the west. Kilpeck was haphazard, featureless, and the church wasn’t in the centre. There was no obvious centre, and the tallest structure was a stocky electrical pylon enclosed by housing.

  The sun’s red eye, half shut, was squinting through a tangle of bare trees. She switched on the car lights. The Freelander crawled around a corner by a pub, and there was a village green with an oak tree. Then a parking area, a farmhouse, and Kilpeck ended with the famous church, as if it had been kicked out, put aside.

  Hadn’t always been like this, Julie Duxbury said.

  She was pointing to the field to the right of the rounded apse.

  ‘That was the village, once. All round there and back across the lane where that barn is and also behind the church.’

  Nothing but fields now, and the occasional farmhouse, all the way to the low hills to the east and the north. They were quite alone under the amber sky.

  ‘The Black Death,’ Julie said. ‘That’s what they say. The old village never came back after the plague. But they seem to say that about so many places in this area.’

  Her thick white hair was brushed back and tucked into the collar of her outsize bomber jacket. She was in her fifties, big-boned, brisk and fit-looking. Her red Renault Clio was the only other vehicle on the parking area which faded into greenery, and then there were meaningful mounds.

  ‘So the slightly… disorganized community behind me,’ Merrily said, ‘that was…’

  ‘Farmland, I suppose, when this was Kilpeck and the church was in the middle and the castle’ – Julie followed an arm towards the mounds to the west – ‘was its defence. And the reason for everything.’

  Merrily saw a summit of jagged stone, partly concealed by the green ramparts.

  ‘It’s odd,’ Julie said. ‘There aren’t many medieval castles in this area, so you’d expect even a sparse ruin to be a tourist attraction, but it just isn’t. It used to overshadow the church, but now the church – metaphorically speaking – overshadows everything.’

  ‘It’s so small. I’m sure I’ve been before, but I just don’t remember it as quite so small.’

  It sat on a low mound like a half-bun. It had no steeple, no proper tower, nothing to take on heaven. It rose in three sandstone stages from the rounded apse to a little bell-mount merging into the blackening trees behind.

  ‘We’ll come back to it, if you don’t mind. I see you’re wearing boots – good.’ Julie smiled – generous mouth – and strode off across the parking area. She wore tight black leggings. ‘Before it goes dark, I want to show you where something happened. I don’t imagine, having lived here for years and your job and everything, that it’ll surprise you, but it scared the hell out of me.’

  Merrily followed her up into the churchyard past an ancient yew, woody entrails exposed. Approaching the bell-tower side of the church, she glimpsed an a
rched doorway, voluptuously sculpted.

  ‘Later,’ Julie said. ‘It gets dark very quickly now.’ This was a different woman to the one she’d spoken to on the phone, hesitant and guarded no more. ‘I probably wasn’t particularly forthcoming yesterday. Have to admit I’ve always been a little wary of deliverance.’

  ‘Never much liked that word either,’ Merrily said. ‘Makes me think of rednecks in the Everglades. Was it the Everglades? Long time since I saw the film.’

  ‘There were banjos, I think. A man on a cliff or something exchanging plink-plonk notes with someone else, somewhere, and then it got faster and faster.’

  ‘That was the bit I liked.’

  Past a few graves and into a footpath pointing to the setting sun, a wooden gate appeared. Beyond it, the hint of a path rapidly became steep, the grass slick underfoot. Julie warning her to take care as the gutted shell of a stone tower rose before them, sooty-black against the fading winter sun, and Merrily realized she’d been climbing up earthen ramparts.

  ‘That’s the castle keep – what’s left of it. Well battered in conflicts with the Welsh, but still in use in the sixteenth century, during the Civil War. Not much after that. Still, we’re lucky to have a ruin.’

  ‘It’s on Darvill land?’

  ‘No, this is the Whitfield estate, though I’m sure Sir Lionel feels a sort of spiritual possession.’

  Beyond the castle mound, there was a vast view west, across fields that shone like tarnished brass, towards the Black Mountains and Wales. This was England, but Wales was everywhere. Not many centuries ago, all these fields would have been in Wales, the village as well.

  ‘Right, then…’ Julie stood on a shelf of ground below the tower. ‘There comes a point, Merrily, where one feels out of one’s depth. Situations escalate.’

  ‘Oh, they do.’

  ‘Thought it was fog at first, we’ve had so much of that lately. But fog doesn’t stink of petrol. Not here, anyway. It was actually quite a fine night for the time of year. Rather cold but reasonably clear, although no visible moon.’

  ‘This was…?’

  ‘Last Thursday. No, actually Friday, it would’ve been after midnight. I should’ve been in bed, but I had some letters to write – still do that, for friends, rather than emails – so when I had the phone call I was able to react quite quickly. One of those calls you don’t forget in a hurry. The sound was smothered, as if something had been put over the phone to disguise the voice. “Is that the priest? Something you want to know about. Man on fire near your church.” If I’d heard chinking glasses and general merriment, I might’ve thought twice about coming out here, but nothing like that. I didn’t know who it was, probably never will… Ah, here we are, just here…’