by Phil Rickman
‘Tonight, you could get the feeling of something more sinister.’
Lol told Jeavons about the discovery of a man’s body at the foot of Stanner Rocks, torn about by some creature.
‘Who is this man?’ Jeavons said.
‘Unlikely to be a Vaughan. The family died out in that area.’
The lights dimmed again, with a clicking from somewhere in the hollows of the house, and there was another dragged-out crackling in the phone.
38
Big White Bird
‘I do, Jeremy,’ Danny said. ‘I remember.’
They had mugs of tea, another fat ash log on the fire. Danny was sweating, inside and out.
Yes, he remembered that summer. Because it was the Oldfield summer, the summer after Hergest Ridge, the album, came out, and the Ridge was world-famous as the tourists arrived to see where the celebrated composer had flown his model gliders. Only by then, Mike Oldfield was either leaving Kington or had already left.
Bitter-sweet memories. Danny never did get to hang out with Mike in his studio; however, that same year he had managed to persuade the gorgeous Greta Morris to go out with him.
He sat now, in front of the range, watching Jeremy Berrows fizzing into some kind of paranoid life in the wake of that visit from the police. The bloody hugeness of this. It was gonner light up this valley like SAS flares. Sebbie Dacre. Sebbie Dacre. Dead. Killed.
Danny had taken the call when the bloke rang for the vicar, to say that her daughter had found a body at the rocks. The idea of it being Sebbie had never even occurred to him, and Danny thought about him and Jeremy trying to look normal when the police had told them. Cops hadn’t been fooled, he could tell.
And yet they’d gone. They’d looked around The Nant and they’d gone. They were looking for Natalie Craven and the child. He could’ve told them where the child was, but he’d held off. Didn’t want to tell nobody nothing right now.
Had it occurred to the cops that Jeremy might have killed Sebbie and Natalie, too? Had they thought of that? Because Danny sure bloody had.
The lie about the track being blocked so the kid couldn’t come home? The hurried note? The hanging, for God’s sake…
Danny hung on to his mug, letting solid old riffs plash and bang in his head to hold him halfway steady. Let him talk, let it come out.
‘We was only little kids that first holiday,’ Jeremy said.
‘I remember. Little blonde girl.’
‘Playing around the farm, walking down to Kington for ice lollies. We never had a fridge back then, the seventies.’
Danny looked over at the dresser. ‘That’s you and her, ennit, in that photo? Don’t recall seein’ it before.’
‘Always kept it in my bedroom. Kept it in a dark corner, so I couldn’t hardly see it proper, most of the time, but I didn’t want it to fade, see.’
Danny rubbed his beard. ‘Jeremy, I just never imagined. Mabbe because she was real blonde then, and now her’s dark.’
‘Blonde as ever was, underneath. Nobody expects a blonde to dye her hair dark, do they?’
‘Funny Greta don’t know ’bout that. Bloody hairdresser’s, that’s the intelligence centre of the whole valley.’
‘Does it herself. It was… the second time, see. The second holiday they had yere — that was when it really happened.’ Jeremy was fondling the dog’s ears, remembering. There was almost a smile on his face, over the ravages of the rope. ‘Brigid’s ole man, he was a nice enough feller. Quiet sorter bloke, but friendly. Wanting to know all about the farm, what this did, what that did. Tried to help with the shearing, made a bugger of it, but we told him he was doing well for a first-timer. Never talked about Paula. Brigid—’
Jeremy had to stop, tears in his eyes like broken glass. Danny remembered this time well: a damp, forlorn period, heralding the soulless eighties. Mike Oldfield had left the area for ever, and the world had already forgotten about Hergest Ridge.
‘We was only about twelve. Too young for — too young to do much about it, anyway, although…’ Jeremy flicked a sideways look at Danny, like, What am I doing, talking like this to a bloke? ‘We was in the ole barn this day, sheltering from the rain. Brigid was… you know how they get sometimes, girls, women: moody. En’t nothin’ in the world that’s right. No pleasin’ ’em, no talkin’ ’em out of it. So I suppose we kind of quarrelled, the way kids do.’
‘You… quarrel with somebody?’
‘Quarrel was with herself. Me as got hit, mind.’
‘Where?’
‘In the old barn.’
‘No, you fool—’
‘Oh. In the eye.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing. What could I do? What would I want to do?’
Danny nodded. Please, God, don’t let him have done this.
‘Next thing, her arms is round me and her’s sobbin’ away, up against me, all soft. And then we kissed, real gentle. First kiss, Danny.’ Jeremy looked up, flushed. ‘Her fell asleep in my arms. And then I suppose, eventually, I fell asleep, too. Woke up with a black eye. And in love. You know?’
Danny smiled.
‘Puppy love, my mam said. Be over it in no time at all.’
‘They don’t know, do they?’
‘When she left, I didn’t wanner live for a good while — you know how that is?’
Danny nodded. ’Course he knew.
‘Couldn’t sleep much, not for months. Used to creep out and spend whole nights, till dawn, out in the meadow with the ewes, then stagger off to school and fall asleep over the desk. Used to go up the church, times when there wasn’t nobody else there, and I’d pray to God to send her back. Pray to God, Danny. Had a special prayer I’d wrote down. Figured if I kept repeating it, every day, real sincere, he’d bring her back.’
‘God listen?’
‘Not till last summer.’
‘Bloody hell, Jeremy, poor ole Mary Morson never had a hope with you, did she?’
‘Nice girl, mind.’
‘Mary Morson?’
‘They all got their ways.’
‘Bugger me,’ Danny said faintly.
‘I wrote to Brigid, regular, she wrote back. Every week, more or less. The next summer I was thinking, they’ll be back. Lookin’ out for the caravan, you know?’ Jeremy shivered over the fire. ‘I remember, tried to phone her once. Got through to her dad. He said I couldn’t talk to her. Her sounded different — harsh, wound-up. Said never to ring again.’
‘And so you didn’t.’
‘How’d you know that?’
Danny sighed. Jeremy sank down in his chair, all the breath whispering out of him. The dog whimpered.
‘Some’ing yere I en’t getting,’ Danny said. ‘Why couldn’t you talk to her?’
‘Danny…’ Jeremy turned to him, full face, and Danny wasn’t sure which caused the boy the most agony, the twisting of his neck or the thought of what he was saying. ‘Some’ing happened…’
Danny had the feeling he ought to know, but he didn’t.
‘She was Brigid Parsons,’ Jeremy said. ‘That’s what happened.’
Back at Stanner, the cold air dropping around them like a shroud, Bliss said, ‘So how well do you know Natalie Craven?’
When Merrily had tried to raise the issue in the Range Rover, he’d nodded towards the driver and shaken his head, so she’d gone back to thinking about Alice, wondering if she ought to ring Lol, see if Alice had phoned. However Darrin Hook had died, it was going to damage Alice.
She followed Bliss into the porch. ‘Don’t know her at all. Jane’s at school with her daughter. Which is how Jane got the job here — Clancy invited her over one weekend, and the Foleys were looking for cheap Saturday labour.’
‘But you know who she is,’ Bliss said.
‘I know who she is… and I know…’ She cleared her throat, swallowed. ‘This is one of the things I was going to tell you in the Range Rover. We think — Jane and I think — that Natalie Craven may have taken the girl to D
anny Thomas’s house for the night, because they thought the track to The Nant could be difficult. Danny’s the guy who was with Jeremy Berrows. He’s… Gomer’s partner.’
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry, Frannie. There was no reason to think—’
‘Where?’
‘It’s a farm. Back off the Kinnerton road from Walton. Not sure what it’s called, I—’
Bliss had surged into the lobby, leaving the door swinging back on her. Hell.
When she went in, the tall detective who’d been to The Nant to talk to Jeremy padded across the worn carpet.
‘Mrs Watkins, could you phone the chief, please, in Hereford?’
‘Annie Howe?’
‘Not a happy bunny tonight, the chief.’
‘Has she ever been a happy bunny?’
He grinned. ‘Use my mobile.’ He keyed in the number for her, and she sat down in a chintzy chair near the reception desk.
Annie Howe answered on the second ring.
‘Ms Watkins. The fourth emergency service.’
Howe was an atheist, younger than Bliss, seriously educated, promoted over his head and on course for the stratosphere. She wore crisp, white shirts and pencil skirts and rimless glasses and smelled, Jane would insist, of Dettol No. 5.
‘You wanted to, erm, talk about Darrin Hook?’
Merrily recalled the last time she and Howe had been together, in a derelict hopyard in the Frome Valley last summer, in circumstances that Howe was likely to have erased like a virus from the hard disk of her consciousness.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to tell me everything you know about the late Darrin Hook.’
‘Well, I… I only found out about him in a roundabout way — through his aunt, who lives in the village.’ No harm in going into this; whatever you thought about Annie Howe, she didn’t gossip. ‘She was worried about a rift in the family, stemming from the incident you obviously know about, seventeen years ago, when Darrin Hook’s young brother was killed. The other person in the stolen car, the cousin, Dexter, has suffered health problems ever since. Their aunt wanted me to… pray for him.’
‘Pray for him.’
‘I don’t expect you to identify with this, Annie, but it’s what we do.’
‘After you’ve made a few inquiries, to make sure that God has all the relevant background information necessary to deliberate the possibility of intercession. Even though, as I understand it, omniscience is one of his—’
‘Yeah, all right, you think my whole career has been founded on a tissue of myths. Fine. Strangely, I can live with that.’
‘It is strange,’ Howe said. ‘But then the most unexpected people can fall prey to superstition. Like Hook himself.’
‘I’m not following.’
‘Darrin Hook was released from Brompton Heath Prison just under three weeks ago, having served less than half his latest eighteen-month sentence for burglary. The decision was made on the recommendation of, among others, the prison chaplain.’
‘Oh?’
‘Because Hook appeared to have undergone a conversion to your… faith.’
‘Darrin Hook became a… Christian?’
‘You didn’t know that? Somehow, I’d expected that was how you came to be acquainted with him.’
‘I’m not acquainted with him. I’ve never met him. And I certainly didn’t know he’d been… When you say a conversion, what do you mean?’
‘The usual absurd fanaticism. Bibles appearing in his cell…’
‘Sent down from heaven?’
‘Brought in by a prison visitor. A relative. Hook began to attend the Sunday services, throwing up his arms and yelling that he’d been saved and praise the Lord and all this tosh. I think even the prison chaplain became bored with him after a while — perhaps why he recommended an early release.’
Merrily was shaking her head. ‘This is all news to me.’
The implications were startling. For a start, if this was true, Alice would have no reason to worry about Darrin’s reaction to the idea of a Requiem Eucharist for his brother.
‘You got this from the prison?’
‘We haven’t been in touch with the prison. The information came from a woman called Dionne Grindle, a cousin of Hook’s living in Solihull. We found her phone number in his wallet. She turned out to be the relative instrumental in his seeing the… light.’
My niece, the one in Solihull, she did one of them Alpha courses at her church, did I tell you?… Reckoned it d’creep up on you somehow… felt the Holy Spirit was in her heart like a big white bird…
‘She obviously didn’t tell the rest of the family,’ Merrily said.
‘Apparently, Hook specifically asked her to say nothing to the Hereford side of the family. He said that he wanted to tell them in his own time and in his own way. He also, according to Ms Grindle, had plans to — and this is what interests us, of course — make an entirely new beginning by setting the record straight on a number of dark areas in his past. Now I assumed that, by this, he meant coming clean about previous offences for which he was never caught. And we’d have been, naturally, delighted to help him with the paperwork.’
‘Wouldn’t you have had to charge him?’
‘Depends how serious they were. We can be fairly discreet, especially if it leads us to other offenders. And this, of course, is the point. If Hook had talked about his conversion and its implications, it might have been viewed as a rather worrying development by some of his former associates in this city’s criminal underclass. Especially if he was indicating to all and sundry that he might be ready to put the record straight on certain matters — come clean, as it were.’
‘You think he’d be a marked man?’
‘It does rather sound as if he was bent on martyrdom.’
‘Have you talked to his other relatives?’
‘Only his mother, who lives in the city and knew nothing of any conversion. She thought the most likely person for him to tell would be the aunt, who—’
‘So you did know about Alice.’
Howe didn’t reply.
‘Have you talked to her?’
‘No answer when we rang. She’s probably asleep by now. And we haven’t been out there simply because most of the roads in that area are now closed. Anyway, I thought I’d talk to you first, somehow imagining you’d be able to tell me rather more than you have.’
‘He really was killed?’
‘He was certainly killed. But if you’re asking if he was murdered, let me put it this way: there are some not-terribly-subtle textural differences between snow which has fallen naturally on to a body lying in the road and snow which has been kicked over it in order to conceal it from approaching vehicles.’
‘Somebody… dumped him in a main road? To be run over?’
‘Whether he was already dead, or unconscious, when he was placed in the road, only a PM can establish, so we won’t know until tomorrow.’
Merrily discovered that she was pacing the lobby, loose shadows meshing in her path.
‘Of course, the macabre aspect to this,’ Annie Howe said, ‘as one of our officers pointed out, is that Hook was placed in the road at the spot — or somewhere very close to the spot — where his brother died. Hook lived in a flat at Wormelow. A neighbour who was walking to the Tump Inn saw him leaving the building sometime around mid-evening, on foot. He may have been going to meet his killer and, unless this was a remarkable coincidence, we could assume the killer was someone who not only knew about the accident but also precisely where it took place.’
‘I…’ Merrily went back to the chintz-covered chair and sat down again. ‘His cousin Dexter was driving. Which you know, of course.’
‘Was Harris still close to his cousin?’
‘Apparently not. There’s been a rift in the family since the accident. We… I suggested the situation might be improved by holding a service — a Requiem Eucharist — for Roland, who was killed. Dexter said that Darrin would be dead against it.
He suggested several times that Darrin was unstable… violent. He said, more or less, that he’d been scared of Darrin when they were kids. That Darrin liked to hurt people, cause trouble, had a cruel streak. I assumed, because Darrin had a prison record and Dexter didn’t, that this was at least close to the truth.’
There was a silence. The door of the lounge opened and Bliss looked out, saw that Merrily was still on the phone, scowled and went back in.
‘I’ll tell you about Darrin Hook, shall I?’ Annie Howe said. ‘Because I arrested him once, you see, a number of years ago. He’d got into a factory on the Holmer estate, with some mates, lifting some computers that they didn’t, of course, know how to get rid of — these particular models being part of a network system. So, when they tried to flog them to a nice chap who assembles PCs in his garage, we had the whole bunch in no time. Hook, it turned out, was the one who had got them into the factory, past quite an efficient security system. He’s not bright, but he’s remarkably good with his hands. And he does what he’s told. You might say, I want to get into a chemist’s shop, or I want a BMW Series 7, and Darrin will do the technical bits. You could call him an instinctive thief, a natural.’
‘He was the one who broke into the car that night. When he was about twelve.’
‘It’s what he does. What he did. It made him popular with certain people. Won him acceptance.’
‘Dexter indicated he was… you know… hard.’
‘Mrs Watkins, all his convictions relate to basic thieving, never involving violence — not on his part, anyway. It doesn’t surprise me at all that he was converted, in a very short time, to your religion. If he was exposed to someone with sufficient evangelical fervour, in a situation where he couldn’t get away, he’d be a pushover.’
‘Especially if he had something on his conscience?’
‘I don’t doubt that. You people are quite good at targeting someone’s weak points.’
