by Phil Rickman
Merrily followed Jane into the lounge.
‘I do like this room,’ Bliss said. ‘Don’t you? It’s like, “I’ve called you all together here in the drawing room…” Who’s that old bugger over the fireplace?’
‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,’ Jane said tonelessly. ‘Ben uses this room for his mystery weekends, pretty much like you just said.’
‘Perceptive of me, Jane.’
A single fat log smouldered on a bed of ash in the grate below the blue-tinted blow-up of the great man’s face. Maybe it was the same picture as the one on the White Company’s Web site: Doyle in middle age, his eyes fixed on something the photographer couldn’t see.
‘Mr Foley kindly agreed to us having this as our incident room — for tonight, anyway. We’ll see he’s recompensed, we’re very good about things like that. It’s bloody cold, mind.’ Bliss went to peer at the fire. He was wearing an old blue fleece jacket over jeans.
‘The central heating will have gone off by now,’ Jane said. ‘They weren’t expecting so many late guests.’ She nodded at the fire. ‘All Ben’s logs are still green. He doesn’t know anything about wood-burning. It’s softwood, nicked out of the forestry.’
Bliss glanced back at Jane in curiosity. The kid’s face was expressionless-to-sullen. The boss no longer a hero, then. Bliss grabbed a poker, battering the solitary log in search of heat under there, and Merrily took the opportunity to whisper in Jane’s ear, ‘I came directly from home, OK?’
The kid nodded briefly, maybe brightening a little, possibly even grateful at being gathered into her mum’s confidence. Lol had briefly explained about the video camera, the proposed documentary. Go easy on her, eh? What would you have done at that age?
‘You know, Merrily…’ Bliss stood with his hands on his hips. ‘I realize you’re peripheral to all this — that this is Jane’s show — but when you’re present I always know that other angles I might’ve found a trifle, shall we say, puzzling… will be covered. Mrs Elizabeth Pollen, for instance. Now what on earth would that be about?’
‘Mrs Pollen’s a member of the White Company,’ Jane said.
Merrily said, ‘I don’t know Mrs Pollen personally, but the White Company seems to be a spiritualist group set up to continue the efforts of Arthur Conan Doyle to prove there’s life after death.’
‘Thank you. Do we need proof, Merrily, you and me?’ Bliss rubbed his hands together, kindling energy, and moved over to a mahogany writing table set up in the bay window. It had an unlit repro-Victorian oil lamp on it, with a green shade. There was a hard chair either side of the table. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we’re mates, let’s go and sit by the fire. Statement later, Jane. Just a cosy chat for now. You know me.’
They sat down, mother and daughter, on a sofa. And Merrily, who did know Bliss, too well, became wary, because Bliss didn’t do cosy. All she knew was that there’d been a fire up on the rocks and then a body found below. Found by Jane, this was the problem.
Merrily felt a draught on her ankles; she was still wearing Jane’s duffel coat, her fingers enfolded in the white woolly hat on her knees. Through the window, she could see someone trudging across the sludgy car park towards the porch: Gomer, back from learning what he could from some cop or a fireman; there was always somebody around who Gomer had known for years.
‘So,’ Bliss said. ‘What were you doing at the bottom of Stanner Rocks on a night like this, Jane?’
Jane shrugged. ‘We saw a fire on the rocks. I saw a fire. From the kitchen. Ben and Mrs Pollen went to check it out.’
‘Why you?’
‘Because…’ Jane sighed. ‘Because I was helping them to shoot a video, about Stanner Hall and… stuff. It looked kind of dramatic. And I had the camera with me.’
Merrily watched Jane. The kid had the camera on her lap. She was more subdued than Merrily had ever seen her in the presence of Bliss who, on other occasions, had brought out the worst in her. Merrily sensed a weight of suppressed evidence.
Bliss put his head on one side. ‘And did you get some nice piccies, Jane?’
‘Not really. The fire was more or less out by the time we got there. Because of the snow, I suppose.’
‘Right, then… tell me how you found what you found.’
‘Well, like I… got kind of separated from Ben and Mrs Pollen. Like, you stop to get a good shot of the skyline and stuff, and when you’ve finished they’ve gone. And then I saw a torch beam, and that turned out to be Mrs Pollen. Well, she found me. I like… I hadn’t got a torch and I fell. In the snow. And I suppose she heard me and…’
‘Nobody else about?’
‘Er… no. Not as far as I know.’
‘How long were you separated?’
‘Only a few minutes.’
‘And where was Mr Foley?’
‘He’d like… Mrs Pollen said he’d gone part-way up the path towards the van and saw it was burning out and nobody seemed to be in there. So he just went down to the road to wait for the fire brigade. Would’ve been easy for them to miss the turning, especially with all the snow.’
‘So just you and Mrs Pollen.’
‘She must’ve told you all this.’
‘Just you and Mrs Pollen. You saw nobody else.’
‘No.’
‘OK…’ Bliss leaned back. ‘I realize this is distressing, Jane, but what exactly did you see?’
Jane swallowed. ‘It was like… half-buried in the snow. There was a lot of blood. And it was…’ She looked up towards the cracked cornice around the ceiling. ‘Bits seemed to have been torn away. Bits of…’ Jane shuddered ‘… face. And… like, tissue. Strewn about.’
Merrily put a hand on Jane’s arm. ‘How long had it been there, Frannie?’
‘Foxes,’ Bliss said. ‘We figured foxes had been at it. Or badgers. Doesn’t take them long sometimes. ’Specially on a night like this, if there’s fresh blood.’
‘Do you know who it was yet?’
Bliss stretched his arms. ‘Well, as it happened, I could’ve identified him meself. Except even I wasn’t entirely sure, because, as Jane says, it was all a bit messy.’ He leaned forward, hands on his knees, looked at Jane and then at Merrily. ‘Reason I knew him is I’d had to give evidence a couple of times when he was on the bench.’
‘Oh?’ Jesus.
Bliss paused. He’d be wanting to see if either of them knew the name. Merrily said nothing.
Jane blew it, of course. ‘Dacre?’
‘Sebbie Three Farms, as he’s known,’ Bliss said. He leaned back again, beaming at Jane. ‘So where have you come across him? Not in court, obviously.’
‘Gomer,’ Merrily said quickly.
‘Gomer.’ Bliss beamed. ‘What a useful little feller he is.’
‘However, I don’t suppose Mr Dacre was actually killed by foxes avenging all their relatives,’ Merrily said, wanting a cigarette. ‘Did he fall from the rocks, or what?’
‘He almost certainly did… but whether it was accidental is open to debate. Would a local man, aware of the dangers, go for a stroll along Stanner Rocks in these conditions? If he was contemplating suicide, death would be far from a foregone conclusion — it’s not all that high, is it?’
‘Maybe he went up to see what the fire was?’ Jane said.
‘It’s a thought, Jane. Or did he start the fire? Or did he catch someone else starting the fire?’ Bliss stretched his arms luxuriously above his head, yawning pleasurably. ‘It’s a complete mystery, isn’t it, girls? I do love a mystery.’
Except that he didn’t. There was nothing, in Merrily’s experience, that real detectives hated more than a complete mystery.
Which meant that Bliss knew what he was looking for and that it was only a matter of time.
On the village square, the Christmas tree lights had gone out, and the security lamps outside the Black Swan were fogged and feeble, like the hopeless eyes of someone bound up tight in white bandage.
Standing by the landing window, Lol felt helpless. He was stran
ded.
Canon Jeavons had been most disturbed to hear Jane’s theory about Merrily and the Vaughan exorcism. A dangerously unpredictable situation. Give him some time to investigate this, think things out, and he’d be back.
In the meantime, Jane had called again.
The police are here now. Blue lights, I can see the blue lights out of the window. Or maybe more firemen. I’m up in my room. I’ve been sick again. I just ran straight up here to be sick in the toilet. Plus I didn’t want to talk to any of them. I don’t trust any of them. I want out of here. When you talk to Mum, just tell her… tell her I want to go home.
The phones went off in stereo, from upstairs and downstairs — bleeps and bells all over the vicarage, like the phones were crying out to each other. Lol ran down the stairs, through the hall, plucking the cordless from the kitchen wall.
‘Hope I’m in time, son,’ Lew Jeavons said. ‘You wanna make some notes?’
‘Hold on.’ Lol moved to the scullery door, shouldered it open. ‘I’ll go in the office.’
The scullery was lit solely by the orange bars of the electric fire. He moved to the desk. The lemon sleep-light on the computer was swelling like something medical. He found a pen, sat down.
Sprang up again. ‘Oh!’
‘You OK, Lol?’
‘Yes, I… Could I call you back?’
‘Sure.’
‘Right.’ Through the window, Lol could see the snow-slumped apple trees and the flattened face of Dexter Harris, his jug-spout lower lip squashed up against the glass. ‘Give me ten minutes.’
36
First Snow Casualty
When Jane realized how close she was to losing it, she backed away into the corner of the bedroom farthest from the window.
‘Mum, he couldn’t. He’s gentle, he’s entirely harmless. He’s the only farmer round here doesn’t even have a shotgun.’
‘Look, I don’t want it to be the truth either—’
Mum was sitting on the side of the bed, her face as grey as death. The two of them up here, with the lights out, exchanging information. Like spies, Jane thought, inside an enemy fortress. What she’d learned had, at first, just blown her away: the revelation that Natalie was the daughter of Hattie Chancery’s child. Natalie Craven was Hattie Chancery’s granddaughter.
That she was Sebbie Dacre’s cousin. Jeremy’s landlord.
And that she was in fact called… Brigid?
So it looks like she’s still doing it. They can’t stop. It’s a physical need. HOWARD. I have been dreaming about her for about 20 years. she still makes me swet. GAVIN
The implications would connect, at intervals, in a disjointed kind of way, and Jane would hug herself, the nylon parka crackling electrically.
‘We should go home. We know too much.’
Meaning she didn’t want to learn any more, not tonight, couldn’t handle it. But Mum didn’t want to go home. You could sense it in the way she was sitting — the duffel coat untoggled, hands on her thighs, resisting cigarettes only because it was such a small room and Jane was in it, too, and this was no night for opening the window. In some ways, Mum in the middle of something was no better than Bliss.
Avoiding the Foleys, Jane had brought her up two flights of stairs, along underlit passages, to this poky fridge, not imagining that things were going to get worse.
‘You’re a priest. You don’t have to tell Bliss anything. It’s like the sanctity of the Confessional. They can’t make you. Not even in a court of law.’
‘I don’t actually think that applies in this situation. Anyway, that’s not the point. God, it’s freezing in here, Jane. Has it always been like this?’
‘They can’t afford luxury accommodation for the servants.’
They’d been talking about the camper van. The one that Nat and Clancy had arrived in, like gypsies. The van in which, according to Mum, Nat was said to have been seen, with a man. At first, Jane had refused to believe it. Stood to reason that when someone as good-looking as Nat arrived in a place like this, women would resent her on sight. When she had the brass nerve to hook up with an unmarried local farmer, the gossip machine would be white-hot, and all gossip machines manufactured disinformation.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mum said irritably, ‘I wish I didn’t even have to think about any of this. He’s been in love with her for most of his life, even I could see that. Be nice to think love never had any negative side effects.’
‘He wouldn’t.’ Jane pressed herself into the corner in despair. ‘I don’t know him well but I know he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Clancy says he won’t even send stock to market, because they have to suffer in pens, so they go direct to the slaughterhouse. He’s an honourable farmer. He actually cares about living things.’
‘He tried to hang himself.’
‘That doesn’t prove anything.’
‘It poses questions.’ Mum stood up and went to the window. A row of white-capped conifers stood like a primitive rood-screen between the hotel grounds and the long, pale altar of Hergest Ridge. ‘And the other one is, where’s your friend Natalie?’
Jane said, ‘The last time I saw her, she was telling Ben she had to take Clancy to a neighbour’s because the track to The Nant was blocked. Which it obviously isn’t, so…’ Jane felt sick. Somebody was lying.
‘We know she took her to Danny Thomas’s, but where did she go then?’
‘All I know is she didn’t come back here.’
‘If she went to meet someone at the van—’
‘Dacre? You’re saying she was having sex with her cousin, right?’
‘I’m not saying anything, flower, except that Jeremy and Dacre are not exactly mates, and if Jeremy happened to catch Dacre at the van with Natalie, then you don’t know what might happen.’
‘But she knows, right, and that’s why she’s keeping out of the way?’ Jane felt her brain flailing around. ‘A lot of people hated Dacre.’
‘So it seems.’
‘OK, listen — suppose she’s having a thing with Ben? Don’t look like that, Amber thinks it could be happening. She was like… she said to me the other night, kind of throwaway, that Ben would… that he’d be better off married to Natalie. Maybe seeing if she got a reaction, seeing if I knew.’
‘Jane—’
‘If Ben and Nat did have something on the go, they couldn’t very well do it in the hotel, could they? And Ben was so anxious to be first on the scene of the fire. Without me there. Without video. Suppose he’d started it?’
‘Why would—?’
‘If I hadn’t been in the kitchen at the right time, nobody would’ve spotted that fire, so like no wonder he was mad at me. No wonder he wanted to get up there to make sure it was fully destroyed. Because… DNA? Whoever was with Nat, they’d have left DNA all over the van, wouldn’t they? Doesn’t fire destroy DNA? Like at Gomer’s depot?’
‘And Ben killed Dacre as well, did he?’
‘He nearly killed Dacre’s shooter!’ There was suddenly a hard sensation in the pit of Jane’s stomach. It felt like certainty.
Mum’s fingers were squeezing her knees. ‘We should… stop speculating.’
‘How do we do that, take sedatives? Like, Nat was even telling me she wouldn’t be surprised if Amber walked out on Ben.’
‘When?’
‘Earlier tonight. She wanted Amber to walk out, didn’t she? It’s blindingly obvious. And also when Antony — Antony Largo, the TV guy? — was eyeing up Nat, Ben was very quick to warn him off. He’s like, Keep your filthy paws off my house-manager, she’s in a relationship. Well, yeah: Smoothie Ben and Foxy Nat? You gonna tell Bliss or shall I?’
‘I don’t think either of us needs to tell Bliss anything. I think he knows something already. He’s too confident.’
‘He’s always like that.’
‘In front of you, maybe. I think we should wait to see what happens before interfering.’ Mum sat for a while on the edge of the bed, rocking backwards and forwards. ‘Wouldn’t mind anothe
r chat with Jeremy, though.’
‘That’s your way of not interfering?’
‘He talked to me before. He was still talking to me when Lol rang. Gomer and I said we’d come back and tell him what had happened.’ She stood up. ‘At least you’ll be safe here with half of Hereford CID on the premises. Just don’t… don’t be alone with Ben Foley. Or anyone else, for that matter.’
‘Am I stupid?’
‘Don’t tempt me.’ Mum wrapped her scarf around her neck.
‘Mum—’
‘Mmm?’
‘You’d better see this.’ Jane dug the Brigid Document from her jeans, opened it out and tossed it on the bed.
They found Gomer in his truck on the edge of the car park. He jumped down, a half-inch of glowing ciggy slotted into his front teeth like a red jewel. He extracted it.
‘Cops brought out the base of a paraffin lamp, vicar. Likely the oil was used to start the fire, somebody emptied it over some bedding, whatever’d burn easy. Made a pile of it, set it alight, buggered off.’
Somebody opened both doors of the hotel porch and yellow light splashed out into the slush. ‘Nothing left?’ Merrily said.
A man in white leggings came out of the porch, carrying a bulky leather holdall, and got into a police Range Rover with orange traffic markings.
‘Not much at all, vicar. Only Sebbie, and he en’t sayin’ a lot.’
‘Who did you get this from?’
‘Les Thomas, Danny’s cousin — one o’ the part-time fire boys. Les also says…’ Gomer lowered his voice. ‘Says the cops is runnin’ this big search for Natalie Craven.’
‘On what basis?’ Merrily asked.
‘Mrs Watkins…’ None of them had noticed Sergeant Mumford coming over; he moved quietly for a fat slob. ‘Boss can see you now.’ Mumford glanced at Jane. ‘On your own.’
Lol had found deep footprints across the snowy lawn: two sets of them. One coming, one going.
Dexter Harris had come in through the old gate from the orchard, walked across to the lighted scullery window, peered in and then returned the same way before Lol could get round there.
