by Phil Rickman
A burst of light made Merrily turn in time to catch the second contained flash from a crime-scene camera, bringing the horror luridly alive: the obscene hole in the victim’s throat like parted lips with a protruding tongue. She thought of hostages in Iraq dying on video, heard the keening of the knife in the air, saw the blade shining red-golden in the sunset. A slash, a spurting, a choked-off scream. She shivered.
‘You’re doing well,’ Bliss said. ‘This is what I wanted to hear.’
‘Huh?’
‘Look, if you need a cig, go ahead, just don’t drop the stub.’
‘I’m OK.’
‘You don’t look it. I’m sorry, Merrily, I didn’t think. I do tend to use people, me.’
‘Really? I’ve never noticed that side of you.’
Bliss grinned. Headlights washed across the sloping trees below them. The turf under Merrily’s feet felt as springy as an exercise mat. With the smoky hills snaking away before her, it was like standing on some kind of natural escalator. Power of place.
‘It’s an execution, isn’t it?’
‘Possibly,’ Bliss said. ‘Of sorts.’
‘And you’re thinking the victim’s connected with the Royal Oak.’
‘A good detective is open to all possibilities.’
‘Only…’ She hesitated. ‘… A guy in the parish meeting just now was insisting that the licensing authority had been tolerating what was happening at the Royal Oak because you got better tourism grants if you could show the government you were encouraging black and Asian visitors.’
‘Must send the council a picture. This could be worth thousands.’
‘So I was wondering…’
‘A racist execution?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You know what I think, Merrily? I think if this lad had been found with the same injuries behind one of the garages on the Plascarreg Estate we wouldn’t be asking ourselves any of these questions.’
‘Power of place,’ Merrily said.
It was another ninety minutes or so before they went back to the British Camp car park. Bliss had offered to get Henry to take Merrily back to her car at Wychehill, but she’d hung on, watching the police tape going up, lights bobbing around the hillside.
Bliss had wandered off to consult with his team and Merrily had phoned Lol, asking him to get a message to Jane: don’t wait up.
‘Henry says people come up here for the Midsummer sunrise,’ Bliss said as they climbed down from the 4×4. ‘In which case they’ll be disappointed tomorr—’ He looked at his watch. ‘Dear me, it is tomorrow. Anyway, I don’t want any bugger on that hill until we’ve been over it in daylight.’
‘How long are you staying?’
‘I’ll drive you to your car and then I’ll come back for an hour or two. See if I can make enough progress to stake a claim.’
‘On the case?’
‘Soon as Howe gets in tomorrow, she’ll be working out how to remove me from the investigation. Being so close to the Worcester border doesn’t help.’ Bliss unlocked his car. ‘Don’t want to be too tired to put up a decent resistance.’
He drove past the side of the Malvern Hills Hotel and into the road that led back to Wychehill.
‘However,’ he said, ‘if I did want to keep going until sunrise, and probably the sunrise after that, the answer would be in the knapsack that one of the lads has found among the rocks. Up by the Giant’s Cave, as it’s known.’
‘A knapsack … full of … ?’
‘In very saleable quantities. We’ll know for certain in the morning if it belonged to our friend.’
‘He was a dealer?’
‘Not for me to defame the dead without forensic evidence, but … yeh.’
‘He was dealing on Herefordshire Beacon?’
‘Oh heavens! A purveyor of narcotic substances on a national monument. Merrily, imagine for a moment, if you’re a Malvern professional person throwing a dinner party, how much more civilized it would be to stock up on the After Eights on a balmy summer evening with all-round views.’
‘Luckily I’m a vicar who can’t afford to throw dinner parties. Bloody hell, Frannie.’
‘But what puzzles me is who would brutally unthroat a drug dealer … and then not even nick his flamin’ stash?’ Bliss cruised down the hill past the darkened Royal Oak in its tree-lined quarry. ‘I’m norra great believer in coincidence, Merrily.’
‘Look … what can I tell you? I’ve been to a public meeting where the community had to decide what it wanted me to do about the ghost of … of a cyclist. If anything in that connects with an appallingly nasty murder of a drug dealer on the lower slopes of Hereford-shire Beacon it isn’t obvious to me. But then, it is late.’
‘But you’ll be coming back, I take it.’
‘I suppose.’
‘And I might not be. So keep me informed.’
‘And you keep me informed.’
In the north-eastern sky, she could see amber strips. Probably a false dawn. Midsummer morning in Elgar’s England.
‘Not only did they not take his drugs,’ Bliss said, ‘they didn’t even nick his mobile. Work that out.’
PART TWO
‘Both in prehistory and in the medieval period, the Malverns were in effect a ritual landscape against which various religious rites were played out.’
Mark Bowden, with contributions by David Field and Helen Winton, The Malvern Hills: An Ancient Landscape (2005)
23
Freelancing
Jane, at breakfast, said, ‘I haven’t been trying to avoid you.’
‘Did I say you had?’
‘Lol said you had. Which means the same thing.’
‘Actually,’ Merrily said, ‘I was feeling bad that I hadn’t been, as they say, here for you. Maybe you could take me to see this Coleman’s Meadow? When you get home from school.’
After some sweaty, befuddled dreams that she couldn’t remember but knew were unpleasant, Merrily just wanted to do something normal. She sat and looked at Jane across the refectory table. Wished they could stay here like this all day.
Jane said, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Difficult night.’ Merrily put an extra spoonful of sugar in her tea. ‘After the meeting, Frannie Bliss took me to look at a murder scene.’
‘Scousers really know how to show a woman a good time. Like … why, exactly?’
‘Because the dead man was found with his throat cut on something called the Sacrificial Stone at Herefordshire Beacon and Bliss wanted to eliminate the possibility of it being a ritual midsummer slaughter by pagans.’
‘Wow. For a vicar, you really—’
Merrily watched her daughter, translating every facial twitch: Jane trying not to be impressed while remembering she had guilty secrets and couldn’t afford to be too abrasive over…
‘Pagans doing ritual murder? That is so insulting.’
‘As Bliss pointed out, there are pagans and pagans. Anyway, it was bloody horrible, and I didn’t get back until nearly two a.m. So if you’ve been trying to avoid me, I’ve not been aware of it.’
‘Who was the vic?’
Kid watched too many American crime shows on Channel Five.
‘When I left, he was still unidentified. Jane … do you know anything about a dance venue called Inn Ya Face?’
‘Best thing about that place –’ Jane spread a slab of honey, obscenely, on a crumpet ‘– is its name.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve been, obviously.’
‘When? You never mentioned that.’
‘We didn’t stop long. I mean, it’s a good place to go because there’s masses of parking space, supervised by these hard-looking guys so you don’t get your car nicked, and it’s free. We thought we might go again some time, if there was anybody particularly cool appearing, but we somehow never have.’
‘You and Eirion?’
‘Dr Samedi was supposed to be on – you remember Jeff, from Kidderminster?’
‘Oddly, I was
only thinking about Dr Samedi last night. He’s still in business?’
‘Yeah, but we got the wrong night. There was this really poxy band on, thought they were the new Chemical Brothers. Really bad. Not bad as in wicked, bad as in … crap.’
‘Talking of chemicals—’
‘Whoever told you I’m doing drugs is—’
‘I meant the Royal Oak. Inn Ya Face. Could you – if you wanted to – get much there?’
‘Mum, how naive are you? You can get it anywhere. There are like ten-year-old dealers outside playgroups? I mean, all that meet-me-on-the-corner-when-the-lights-are-going-on stuff … that’s costume drama.’
‘That’s an exaggeration, right?’
‘Not much of one. Prices have never been lower in Hereford. So I’m told. Look, Mum … erm…’ Jane’s eyes flickered. ‘You heard from anyone? About … me?’
‘Like who?’
‘I don’t know … Morrell?’
‘The head?’ Merrily drank some hot tea. What was this? ‘Why Morrell, Jane? Does he know about your serial truancy?’
‘Serial—? Mum, that is absolute sh—’
‘How many times?’
Jane picked up a piece of crumpet, put it down again, stared at it and sighed.
‘Two.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I swear. Look, if I’d asked for time off the premises to work on my project I’d’ve got it. I just didn’t want to…’
‘Tell them exactly what the project involved.’
‘Because … All right, because I went round to Councillor Pierce’s place to ask him about this housing plan, and there were all these county council guys there, and one was a woman from the education authority.’
‘Why don’t I like the sound of this?’
‘I mean I wasn’t, you know, rude to them or anything. Just tried to get my point over about Coleman’s Meadow being, essentially, an important ancient monument, and they said that was all crap, and Alfred Watkins was a misguided old man. They called it “acceptable infill”. And Lyndon Pierce said he wanted to build Ledwardine up into a thriving little town with like restaurants and massage parlours?’
‘He said that?’
‘Well, he said restaurants. And a new village hall – leisure centre – that’s already going ahead, apparently.’
‘That’s rubbish. I’d have heard. Been consulted, even.’
‘No, really. They’re getting a Lottery grant.’
‘Seems very unlikely to me. I was at a christening tea in the village hall yesterday. It’s going to be redecorated next month.’
‘It sounded like a seriously done deal to me,’ Jane said.
‘I’ll check it out. What did you say to them?’
‘Nothing. Not really. When this woman started banging on about Morrell, I just got out of there.’ Jane stood up, brushing cat hairs from her skirt. ‘You do look knackered, Mum.’
‘I am knackered – let’s not get sidetracked.’
Merrily inspected Jane in her school uniform, hoping it wasn’t only familiarity that made her daughter look innocent rather than sultry and faintly menacing like some of the other girls you saw waiting for the school bus. Jane going, on her own, to see Pierce … that was kind of admirable, but whether Pierce would regard it as mature and socially aware was a different matter.
‘You haven’t done anything else I should know about, have you?’
Call it intuition.
‘He used to shoot blue tits off nut dispensers,’ Jane said.
‘What?’
‘Lyndon Pierce. When he was a kid. Lucy Devenish tried to stop him and he pointed his airgun at her, and then Gomer—’
‘Gomer told you this?’
‘Gomer took the gun off him and flattened it under his JCB. I bet the bastard didn’t put that in his election leaflets.’
‘Jane—’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to try and blackmail him or anything.’ Jane shouldered her airline bag. ‘I’m probably not even going to say anything about his old man, Percy Pierce, doing a dirty deal with the disgusting Rod Powell to get this, like, agricultural restriction lifted.’
‘What?’
‘So he could build Lyndon’s revolting Las Vegas-style villa. I’m not going to hang that on him … yet.’
‘Good,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m delighted you’re probably not going to attempt to blackmail the local councillor, because it is, as you know, a serious crime.’
‘Building on Coleman’s Meadow is also a crime,’ Jane said. ‘Well … better get off, I suppose.’
The phone started ringing. Merrily rose.
‘There is something I don’t know, isn’t there?’
‘Well, obviously, there must be lots of things, Mum,’ Jane said. ‘But I can’t imagine anything that would cause you a particular problem.’
‘When did you ever?’
As soon as Merrily heard Spicer’s voice on the phone, flat and neutral as underlay, it came to her how much she didn’t want to go back there.
‘You had a good night, then,’ he said.
‘I had a bloody awful night. But how would you know?’
The time for civility was long gone. It was clear that Wychehill – whatever Wychehill was – needed help, the element of nervous dysfunction quiveringly obvious. And, as Lol had said when she’d rung to tell him about last night, it was surely time that Spicer did something about it, rather than some outsider. Of course, that could just have been Lol not wanting her to go back either.
‘I’m glad you went,’ Spicer said.
‘You were told to call me off, weren’t you?’
‘Yeah, but I couldn’t reach you, could I?’
‘Of course you could.’
‘Sure.’
‘Who told you to call me off?’
‘Preston.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s just a funny bloke. Proprietorial. His family goes back. I mean, really goes back – Norman times. I’m not saying he doesn’t like outsiders, exactly – the guy’s running upmarket holiday accommodation on his farm – but he likes to be in control. And people in Wychehill like him to be in control. They’re all outsiders and they like to buy into the history. Even Holliday.’
‘So Holliday was firing Devereaux’s bullets?’
‘Holliday would’ve run with Elgar’s ghost, all the way to the News of the World, even if he doesn’t believe a word of it. Maybe because he doesn’t believe a word. I can understand Devereaux not wanting that – I wouldn’t want it.’
‘But you weren’t there last night.’
‘No point. It was a stitch-up. But like I say, I’m glad you went. It worked out. A requiem will be spot-on. Everybody happy.’
‘Why do I feel I’ve been stitched up?’
‘Trust me, it’s the best thing. Devereaux respects you now. That counts.’
‘What about Stella Cobham?’
‘Oh, he isn’t gonna forget that, is he? She came close to making a fool of him.’
‘And what’s your feeling now about … what we’re dealing with?’
‘Don’t matter what my feelings are. What are yours?’
‘It’s impressive. But if there’s going to be a requiem, maybe you should do it.’
‘No.’
Startled by the force of Spicer’s response, Merrily said nothing.
‘It’s not my thing. All right? I can get you the names and addresses of the dead kids’ parents. Been in touch with the priest handling the joint funeral in Cookman’s parish. I can make the arrangements – all you have to do is show up.’
‘This coming Sunday? Evening?’
‘Why not? Thank you, Merrily.’ A long expulsion of breath; he was smoking. ‘I hear you were up on the hill last night.’
She was getting used to how long it took him to get around to crucial issues.
‘All it was … a CID man I know was in charge up there. He thought I might be able to help. He was wrong.’
‘Why�
�d he think that, Merrily?’
‘Because it looked as if there was a ritual element to it.’
‘Nah,’ Spicer said. ‘It’s urban business, innit?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘He was a bouncer. At the Oak.’
‘I didn’t know that. Syd…’
‘Yeah?’
‘Are there still serious drugs coming out of there, in quantity?’
‘That what your pal thinks?’
‘Not my place. But I did hear something about Preston Devereaux’s boy. Not Hugo, the other one.’
‘Louis. He’s about twenty-three now. What did you hear?’
‘That he’d gone off the rails after the hunt ban.’
‘Yeah, that’s true. Youngest-ever master of the East Malvern hunt. Lived for it, totally. Ban came in, he had a breakdown, of sorts. Like his life had been cut off at the roots.’
‘But his father … moved on?’
‘As he likes to say. Yeah, he sold the horses. All the other hunts, with the tacit approval of the gutless wankers in the Cabinet, are doing pretend drag hunts where foxes just accidentally get killed. Preston’s too proud.’
‘So when he says, you move on…’
‘He means, you move on, disguising your rage and loathing. Don’t give them the satisfaction.’
‘And does that also explain his attitude to the Royal Oak?’
‘You’re doing very well, Merrily,’ Spicer said. ‘It usually takes outsiders years to acquire that level of local understanding.’
‘I live in a village.’
‘He’s right,’ Bliss said. ‘Roman Wicklow. A hard-boy.’
He wouldn’t talk on the phone, so it was back to that same table in the Cathedral cloisters. Outside, it was an all-too-typical midsummer morning: small, white sun crowded by sour clouds, not very warm.
‘His form includes ABH, malicious wounding and possession of Class A. Bromsgrove’s his old playground, so they’ll be looking there.’
‘They? Not you?’
‘Mr One-night-stand, me.’ No doughnut this time, Bliss was drinking black coffee. ‘Left to meself, I’d be roasting Raji on a slow spit. But when you’re off the case, you’re off the case.’
‘Annie Howe’s taken over?’
‘Since first light. Legitimately. It’s a Worcester thing now, from all angles.’
