by Phil Rickman
‘It’s big enough for them to send their own. They generally put someone in who doesn’t know anything about this area – and that’s just the Brummies when I’m on holiday. The Londoners spell it Hertfordshire.’
‘How long you been doing this now, Mandy?’
‘Eleven years next March. You can swing retirement at fifty, if you time it right, then come back after a couple of years as a freelance on the radio. BBC’s answer to the cold-case squad.’ She leaned out of the window to scrape a flake of red soil from his tie. ‘How’s it going, anyway, Frannie? Anything you could very quietly slip me, in return for favours past? Not that I want to score points or anything.’
Bliss shrugged.
‘I’m off the case. Insubordination.’
Mandy smiled.
‘I met Julie Duxbury once – not on a story. She married a friend of mine at Abbeydore in the summer. A fairly distant friend, and we only got invited because I was on the telly. So today – guess what? – I had to ring her up, this distant friend, to ask if we could borrow the wedding video for pictures of Julie in happier times.’
‘She tell you to piss off?’
‘Sadly not. They’ll still do anything to be seen on telly. And the minister’s a murder victim? Wow. Cool. Aren’t people shits?’
‘You liked her? Julie?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I did, actually. Women clergy, in general they’re either ultra-feminist or a bit too cosy. She was quite earthy and she drank beer. I don’t often say this, Frannie, because murders are easy to cover after Day One, but I really hope you get this bastard.’
‘We will. Mandy, did I see you with Charlie Howe earlier?’
Mandy Patel looked away, sucked air through her teeth.
‘Briefly.’
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘He didn’t tell you?’
‘What do you think?’
‘This is between us, right?’
‘As always.’
‘It doesn’t involve me. One of our elder statesmen wanted some shots of Charlie at a crime scene. No chat, just wallpaper.’
‘What – for his obit? Haven’t you got footage in the files or is all that in black and white?’
‘I doubt it’s his obit. I’ll be dead before him. Might be for when he’s elected Commissioner. Or a promotional video on YouTube. The truth is I don’t know. Which is annoying, but I don’t. It was fixed up between this elder statesman, whose face you’d probably recognize, and the cameraman, who’s freelance.’
‘Doesn’t suppose it’s conceivable they’re planning an exposé? Charlie Howe, the sordid facts.’
‘Quite the reverse. This guy’s been there a long, long time. Him and Charlie Howe…’
She held up two fingers, crossed below the varnished nails.
‘Even at the BBC?’ Bliss took a step back. ‘What’s going on, Mand?’
‘I really don’t know. He seems to have old friends everywhere. Mainly veterans who got taken under his wing as very young reporters, and now they’re elder statesmen. Could be something quite innocent.’
‘Charlie doesn’t understand the word innocent,’ Bliss said. ‘He thinks it means the same as gullible and naive.’
Or the fit-up failed. Bliss blew Mandy a kiss and got into his Honda.
44
Hatched
THEY WERE LOOKING out for a private sign in a dip in the hills outside Kilpeck. No more than knee-high from the ground, according to Nora. Discreet, easily missed. Not, Jane thought, like Iestyn Lloyd’s loud Churchwood Farm placards, promoting local meat at the roadsides.
‘There.’
Jane pointing between two sturdy saplings. Apple. In the late summer, passers-by would get to help themselves. Generous. The sign said,
Maryfields
‘I’ve just thought,’ Jane said. ‘That’s the church’s dedication. St Mary and St David.’
‘Only two saints, a church that special?’
‘Nobody ever calls it that. It’s just Kilpeck Church. Built by a Norman baron called Hugh de Kilpeck, who threw untold wealth at it. His fast-track to paradise. See, I’m being useful already.’
‘I didn’t need to know any of that, so it doesn’t count,’ Lol said wearily.
Evidently still unhappy that she was here, but there’d been no way she wasn’t coming. She’d stay in the Animal while he went to suss out the situation, but she wasn’t missing an opportunity to check out this place, not after all that research. Felt she knew it already, could probably point out the very field where Peter Darvill had vanished under the last big tractor.
Lol turned the truck in, and the drive dipped suddenly, hedges rising steeply on both sides. Single-track, but there were escape routes leading off it to slip away into old woodland, some of it caging the smudgy shapes of buildings.
‘You could easily find someone else,’ Jane said.
He slowed right down and turned to look at her.
‘For what?’
‘The festival shop. Cool job, for Ledwardine. Be a queue of applicants.’
‘I doubt it. We’d run up against the national minimum wage. Barry’s thinking whoever does it would have to be part of the enterprise.’
‘What, like self-employed?’
‘To an extent. I’m not sure. He deals with all that.’
‘Right.’
Jane went quiet again, absorbing the place. The drive went uphill again, past lines of young trees, hedged fields – no fencing, no barbed wire – with strong wooden gates, crude signs on them with names, hand-painted: Haresfield, Quarryfield, Job’s Meadow.
‘How it used to be, I suppose,’ Lol said. ‘All the fields known by individual names.’
‘Still are in most places round here. You just don’t often see them inscribed on the gates.’ Jane lowered her side window, breathing deeply into the cold air. ‘If this is all Darvill’s organic farm it must look amazing in summer, all the wild flowers you get when you’re not spraying death everywhere.’
A kind of fairyland. Even in winter, it sang of an older country, the Herefordshire that Thomas Traherne had gazed on. So lovely did the distant green that fringed the field appear.
She liked what Darvill was doing. Pity he was such a twat.
The wind had died and the afternoon had brightened, the sun battling to break through before it had to set, making the grey sky shine like foil and turning a row of bare poplars into a barred window on the green hills. Directly ahead, more woodland and then an orchard with some very old apple trees shouldering planets of mistletoe. Squat, massive oaks were hanging out along the drive like overweight but muscular bouncers. Jane imagined Darvill strolling between them in designer green wellies, then she remembered. Also about the men who’d delved in darkness for a dead dancing partner.
Suddenly, she didn’t want to think about any of that. She turned from the window.
‘So it would be like… my business?’
Lol braked and turned to her.
‘Sorry?’
‘Ledwardine Lore. I’d be like the proprietor? This what Barry wants? Someone with flair and commitment who won’t make demands on his time? Who’ll make it pay for itself.’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Like Lucy coming back,’ Jane said. ‘To oversee things.’
‘Now you’re scaring me.’
Jane laughed. And then went quiet. The truck moved slowly into an avenue of vast and ancient yew trees, a living temple of winter greenery.
She sat up hard.
‘Holy shit…’
‘Quite.’
‘This is the real thing, Lol.’
‘It’s only a house,’ Lol said.
‘I don’t think so.’
The struggling sun had found it first. It was sprawled, sinuous and relaxed, over a rise or a mound. It was long and low with one gable end. Its oak-framed walls were the colour of red Herefordshire mud, age-bleached timbers worming through the fabric, some projecting like old bones from the earth. A private p
lace, some windows so densely paned that their leading looked like twig-mesh.
Except it wasn’t leading, it was actually wood. It was like the house had hatched from the mound many centuries ago. An organic house.
‘We don’t actually go there.’ Jane was disappointed but Lol sounded relieved. ‘It’s the next right.’
‘What are we looking for?’
‘A stable. With a small sign on the door.’
A curving dirt track led to an assembly of big outbuildings, probably cowsheds. There was an open barn, loaded with hay in traditional small bales; Lol stopped the truck in its shadow. He hesitated, Jane sensing his discomfort, knowing he wasn’t good with strangers unless there was an orchestra pit between them.
‘Lol, just turn the engine off and go and look for your stable. Leave the key. If the truck’s in the way, I’ll move it. Find a door and knock. Go on.’
He nodded and leaned on the door handle.
‘Uh-oh,’ Jane said. ‘Too late.’
A woman was walking round the side of one of the barns, heading directly for the truck. She was tall, taller than Lol anyway, wore a sheepskin jacket over a mauve roll-neck sweater and tight jeans. Her brown hair was tied back.
She was carrying a double-barrelled shotgun under an arm. It wasn’t broken. Lol brought his window down.
‘Just leave it here, Mr Robinson.’
The woman was… handsome. OK, more than that. In that serenely unconcerned, aristocratic way that fitted in so well with places like this. If not with her accent. Lol raised his eyebrows at Jane, switched off, opened his door and slid down from the cab.
‘Not a bad day,’ the woman said. ‘They keep forecasting snow, but it doesn’t happen.’ She put out a long, slim hand to Lol. ‘Nora.’
‘Lol.’
‘Arguably the most popular name on social media.’ Nora had the kind of accent that would sound, to an American, like cut-glass East-coast-plus. She glanced back at the truck. ‘You gonna bring your friend in?’
‘That’s… Jane.’
‘I know who she is. We have you all sussed – Mrs Watkins and what she does, you and your songs. Jane and her interests.’ Nora smiled at the windscreen. ‘Social media? All those pagan groups?’
Jane sank into the seat. Shit…
‘None of us has a private life any more,’ Nora said. ‘Anyhow, it’s not getting any warmer out here. Also…’ She hefted the twelve-bore. ‘… there’s a killer on the loose. Never thought I’d be saying that here.’
45
Talking to the help
IT WAS PART of what once might have been a full stable block. The door was pine, with a caged lamp over it, and the sign said:
Nora Mills
CLINIC
Inside, a small waiting room with deep pink walls, uplit. Two wooden chairs, a low table with magazines and catalogues. Nora opened another pine door at the far end, and there was a bigger room, beamed with a single square window. There was a sink, a treatment couch, rubber mats. Two exercise benches, one high, one low, and a grey curtain, floor to ceiling, across what looked like a changing area.
Nora put the shotgun down on the couch, Jane eyeing it warily.
‘What do you shoot with that thing?’
‘Skeet. Clay pigeons. We have a range here. It’s about, uh, diversification?’ Nora shed her sheepskin coat and sat astride the taller exercise bench. ‘You wanna grab some chairs?’
Lol brought in the two seats from the waiting room, and they sat down. In the clinic.
‘Consider this neutral ground,’ Nora said. ‘You can say what you like in here. Ask questions.’
‘Here’s one,’ Lol said. ‘Who exactly are you?’
Nora peered at Lol’s chest.
‘I like your sweatshirt. Alien. Area fifty-one? I went there once as a kid. A birthday treat. This was your first album?’
‘First solo album. Tells you everything you need to know about me.’
‘Well, me too,’ Nora said. ‘No matter how many years I get to spend here I’m never gonna be a native.’ She shrugged. ‘But that’s OK.’
As if this was a cue, she gave them her CV. It was all pretty glib, like she’d said all this before, many, many times: how she’d come over as a teenager, with her family when her dad was with the US Army. Now a trained nurse, qualified physiotherapist. She treated clients here. Another Maryfields business like Gareth Brewer’s farriery and the cheesemaker and the cider-maker whose ciderhouse was just around the block.
‘So you don’t actually work for Sir Lionel,’ Lol said.
‘I work with him. The reason I live here. I hold him together. Part therapist, part housekeeper. Lifekeeper, he likes to say. Absurd flattery. Balanced by occasional abuse, when he’s in pain.’
‘And that…’
‘Is an ongoing situation. He has complex injuries. Essentially, nothing happening below the waist.’
‘Um… an old injury?’
‘Since he was a young man. He likes to call it a morris injury. Although that’s not strictly accurate except he’d been out drinking with other guys in the morris side the night it happened. At the inn here. Walking back in the dark, there was this scaffolding left by guys repairing the church roof? So he climbs it. For no particular reason other than he’s young and smashed and it’s there. Like you do.’
Lol said nothing. Not what he would have done, Jane guessed, even as a kid.
‘Not so high, that roof,’ Nora said, ‘but it wasn’t a clean fall. He came down on a tomb, a headstone and this little cart – a wheelbarrow? Full of builders’ stuff, jagged masonry. He didn’t walk again.’
Lol winced.
‘Or dance?’ Jane said.
Not looking at Lol, knowing he was tossing her a hard look. Nora turned to face her, swivelling her hips on the bench. She probably rode horses.
‘From then on, he needed guys to dance for him. That’s how it’s been, ever since. You see, I’m answering all your questions in full.’
‘Except,’ Lol said, ‘you know… the one that goes, Why are we here?’
‘Ah yeah. That question.’
‘You said we needed to talk.’
‘We need to talk. That old cliché.’
‘And also…’
‘Why are you talking to the help?’ Nora flashed him a brilliant smile. ‘Because, Lol, I am good at it. I deal with people day to day. And usually they feel they can get along with me. Even when I’m carrying a twelve-gauge. Now Lionel, it usually starts with people feeling sympathetic towards him, and he hates that, so he’s rude to them. Sometimes he’s rude before they even say a word, to repel any sympathy. Sometimes they take great care not to appear to insult him with sympathy…’
‘And he hates that worst of all?’ Lol said.
‘Oh, yeah. Lionel Darvill, in a word, is an asshole. But you knew that. He called you. Nice to hear your opinions confirmed?’
‘Still doesn’t explain why we’re here.’
‘No. OK.’ Nora came down from the bench, sat on a high stool. ‘Things’ve been happening. Not good things. One of the first was you calling Lara Brewer on some pretext, but it was clear you wanted to know what the Kilpeck Morris had been doing in your village. Which came directly back to Lionel.’
‘People asking questions about his morris side,’ Lol said. ‘People trying to book them for their festivals and fetes. I’m guessing he hates that, too.’
‘Yep. The Kilpeck Morris isn’t for hire. It’s not about entertaining an audience, it’s part of the mechanism that runs this place. The motor— No, don’t ask that question. If it’s the right thing, you’ll find out. So Lionel makes a friendly call to you.’
‘That was his friendly side?’
‘And then who should show up in Kilpeck but your partner – would partner be the right term?’
‘I wish.’
‘And she’s with the minister in charge of the church here. The minister who, just a few hours later, is found killed. In a truly barbaric way w
hich more than justifies a crazy colonial like me walking around with a shotgun. For which, yeah, I do hold a permit. And meantime… meantime your lady is persuading the leader of the Kilpeck Morris that the dance he loves is not a good thing for him to be involved in. Now does this—?’
‘No—’ Jane was out of her chair before she knew it. ‘It wasn’t like that.’
Nora didn’t move.
‘Take it easy, Jane. Because that’s certainly how it seemed to Lionel when Gareth Brewer showed up this morning, maybe a half-hour after we learned about Julie, and said he was gonna have to quit dancing. Does this sound like a reason for us to be talking yet?’
Lol exchanged glances with Jane. He was thinking that he rather liked Nora Mills but didn’t trust her, suspicious of the way she was bad-mouthing Darvill. He felt they were in trouble. They’d come over here without a thought. Knee-jerk. He was never going to learn.
Nora curved a trainer up and over the spindle between the legs of the stool.
‘She somehow got along with Lionel. Julie. Took a while. They talked last night about a service we plan to hold at Kilpeck Church. She was to have… what would you say, presided?’
‘Something like that.’
‘A midwinter service. A solstice service. The solstice is important to the Border morris. The morris is important to Li. The service we were planning – I get to do the organizational stuff – involves the KP. The minister prays for a good year to come. The Man of Leaves leads the dance to the south doorway, where his image is set in stone?’
Nora arose from the stool, walked over to the window. It was going dark.
‘The Man of Leaves… he comes knocking on the door. And the minister, the rector, is waiting with a candle to welcome him in.’
Lol saw the slow smile animating a corner of Jane’s mouth.
Mention of the Man of Leaves. That old atavistic buzz.
‘The Man of Leaves would have been Aidan Lloyd,’ Nora said. ‘And now Aidan’s dead. That was, uh, a big death here.’
‘Not a good omen,’ Jane said. ‘And now another one. Only worse?’
Nora turned to her.
‘How old are you, Jane?’
‘Nineteen.’
‘How’s your mom view your pagan inclinations?’
