by Phil Rickman
‘Don’t question it.’ Bliss zipped the Durex suit from groin to throat. ‘Give thanks.’
He plucked the elasticated sleeve away from his watch: just gone nine. Taken him the best part of half an hour to get here from home. Blown-off branches all over the roads, one lacerating the flank of his car as he squirmed past on the grass verge.
‘So this is…?’
‘Mr Mansel Bull, boss. Fifty-seven. Farmer, as you know. Old family.’
‘Double-page spread in the Hereford Times kind of old?’
‘Maybe special supplement,’ Terry Stagg said.
‘Not short of a few quid, Tez. Lorra leckie going to waste, or is that you?’
The yard was ablaze with lights on sensors, like a factory, and alive with bellowing creaks, the smashing of blown-open doors, the restive moaning of the cattle in the sheds – Bliss thinking all this was like the sounds of his own nerves amplified.
‘Billy Grace?’
‘On his way,’ Terry said. ‘Allegedly. But we do have time-of-death to within half an hour or so. Mr Bull’d gone to a parish-council meeting arranged for seven, but called off due to the conditions. Sounds like he came directly back. Walking into… something.’
A council meeting explained the suit and tie, what you could see of it under a glistening beard of blood. Hard to say if his head was still even attached. Was that bone? Was that an actual split skull? Bliss stepped back. You never quite got used to this.
‘Who found him?’
‘Brother. Heard the cattle moaning in the shed, so he had a walk up. With his shotgun.’
‘Oh aye?’
‘Not loaded, he claims. Lives in the big bungalow down towards the river. Mr Bull lived here, on his own.’
‘On his own – in that?’
Security lights on the barn opposite flushed out mellow old brick and about fifteen dark windows on three storeys. Oldcastle Farm. The house and buildings wedged into a jagged promontory above the Wye, embedded like a fort. Georgian or Queen Anne or whatever, had to be big enough for a family of twelve, plus servants.
‘Divorced. For the second time, apparently.’
Terry looking sideways at Bliss. Mr Bull was face-up to the lights, eyes wide open in his big, bald, dented head, like he couldn’t believe the way death had come racing at him out of the wind and the night.
‘Where’s the brother?’
‘In the house. Waiting for you.’
‘He see anything?’
Terry Stagg shook his head.
‘All right.’ Bliss hunched his shoulders against the wind. ‘So where we up to, Tezza?’
‘Covering the lanes, pubs, for what that’s worth now. They’ll be well away.’
‘They?’
‘Mr Sollers Bull thinks a gang. He’ll explain.’
‘Where’s Karen?’
‘House-to-house. Well… farm-to-farm. In the four-by-four. With a couple of uniforms, just in case.’
‘Good, good.’
Karen was connected: farming family. Where Bliss came from, a farmer was a bloke with a shared allotment and a chicken.
‘Obviously you’ve searched the buildings.’
‘With Mr Sollers Bull. And the house. Did I…?’ Terry Stagg coughed. ‘Did I say Mr Sollers Bull was not very happy?’
‘No. You amaze me, Terence.’
Terry said, ‘In the sense that… he reckons he and his brother both reported intruders.’
‘When?’
‘Two occasions in the past month. He says we laughed.’
‘We laughed?’
‘The police.’
‘The police laughed. Fuck me. Excellent.’
‘I mean, that’s what he says.’
‘Might this explain the DCI’s generosity in letting the underling take charge, d’you think?’
Thinking, nice one, well-timed, Francis, as a vehicle came coughing and grumbling up the tarmac drive. Dr Grace’s Land Rover Defender.
‘Also,’ Terry Stagg said, ‘when I told him you’d be in to talk to him later on, Mr Sollers Bull said… He seems to know who you are.’
The vehicle’s engine had been switched off but was clinging to life. In the instant of its last shudder, the wind died and it was like they were standing in the vacuum of quiet at the eye of the storm.
‘Fame at last. I’m made up.’ Bliss’s own voice came bouncing back at him from across the yard. He lowered it. ‘What are you saying?’
‘He knows your father-in-law.’
‘Oh.’
Billy Grace was hauling his kit up the drive. Bliss went to meet him.
Shit. The downside of having a complicated private life in a small county.
Every other Saturday, work permitting, he’d collect his kids from the in-laws’ farm. Trying to time it so he’d be bringing them back just before Kirsty got in from shopping or wherever. In the hope that he could leave them with his mother-in-law, a woman he could handle, more or less.
Unfortunately, he’d pulled this one too many times. Last Saturday, the door had been ajar at the farm holiday cottage where Kirsty was living, and the kids had gone running inside. He’d considered just buggering off, but in the end he’d gone in to find the stove lit, all very cosy, smell of quality coffee – sour reminders of his own kitchen with all its comforts now plundered.
And here was the plunderer in person: Mrs Bliss. Only, this was the Mrs Bliss of ten years ago – the future Mrs Bliss reborn. All made up, short black skirt well up the thigh. See what you threw away.
‘You had another hour, at least,’ Kirsty said, when the kids were out of the room. ‘But then you always did get bored with them quite rapidly… what with an eight-year-old’s lack of interest in the vagaries of the Crown Prosecution Service.’
Vagaries? She’d been rehearsing, evidently.
‘Kairs—’
‘Or do you have a date tonight?’
Date. Not a word they’d ever used between themselves. That little tweak of petty triumph on Kirsty’s lovely pulpy lips.
She knew something. She bloody knew something.
‘Gorra be off, Kairsty,’ Bliss said. ‘Be the Easter holidays next time I come, so we can make it a different day if you want. I could maybe take them over to Aberystwyth or somewhere.’
‘You never did put yourself out much, did you, Frank?’
Finding his arms folded – classic defence stance – Bliss let them drop.
‘It’s not that frigging convenient. Couple of hours each way, and with Easter traffic—’
‘I think,’ Kirsty said, ‘that you know what I’m talking about.’
‘I’ve gorra go.’
‘The thing is…’ she stood up slowly ‘… isn’t it against the rules? I mean, when it all comes out, won’t one of you have to move to another division? Isn’t that how it works?’
Bliss had felt the blood draining out of his face so fast that his cheeks actually felt cold.
‘Now, look… I don’t where you think you’re going with this, but—’
‘Oh, you do, Frank.’
Bliss’s mind was going like a washing machine: oh shit. Shit, shit, shit. Where had she got this from? Which one of his beloved colleagues had sniffed it out? How was this even possible?
‘You’re mental, Kairsty, you know that?’
Safest to go on the offensive. An advantage of being separated was the way you could bring a row directly to the boil, knowing you could slip away, with nothing lost, before the first plate hit the wall.
‘I don’t think so.’ Her eyes cold as quartz. ‘I mean, I could almost feel insulted if that cow’s as far as your ambition goes, but being I know what a sad little sod you’ve become, it doesn’t surprise me a great deal, Frank, to be honest.’
‘I’m going.’
Bliss’s palms starting to sweat.
‘Calling the shots now, is she, on your private life?’
‘Think whatever you want.’
‘As I understand it, with a male officer
and a woman, it’s always the man has to move, isn’t it? Or have I got that wrong?’
‘What exactly do you want off me?’
And she’d smiled. Generously.
‘Just want you to own up to it, Frank, that’s all.’ Oh, the satisfaction in her eyes. ‘Dad’s solicitor says that makes it a lot easier. Play your cards right, it might not come out in public’
Oh sure.
‘Just makes it easier, that’s all,’ Kirsty said.
‘And costlier. For me, anyway.’
Kirsty had shrugged, Bliss feeling like his insides had been flushed out with cold water. Kirsty blamed the police for everything that had gone wrong between them. She was wrong about that, and she probably knew she was wrong, but this was convenient, and she’d use it.
‘Close friend, Billy?’
Dr Grace, who was very well-connected, glanced over his shoulder at Bliss. ‘Not particularly a friend at all, Francis, but everybody’s at least acquainted in this county. Except, possibly, for uncouth incoming Scousers like yourself.’
‘You mean a Masonic thing?’ Bliss said.
Dr Grace declined to reply, turning back to his work, lifting a distended flap of skin like he was opening a Jiffy bag full of blood, and Bliss turned away.
‘Big family, mind, Billy. Branches everywhere. The Bulls, Bull-Morrises, Bull-Davieses…’
‘Small county.’
‘And a big house for one man.’
‘Two marriages, Francis. Both childless. Not what a farmer wants. Well, now, I’d say that was pointing at him as culprit, but not the kind of man to have his sperm tested. Almost certainly would’ve been a third wife. Never a man to look back, Mansel.’
‘He didn’t see this coming,’ Bliss said.
‘Ah now…’ Billy Grace turned, beaming, a loose, shambling man with big white teeth, a wild, neon smile. ‘Actually, he did. He must’ve been facing directly into it.’
‘What you offering?’
‘Not a penknife, Francis. Machete, more like.’
‘That’s urban, Billy.’ Bliss took a step back. ‘That’s frigging gangland.’ Mr Sollers Bull thinks a gang. ‘Go on then, doc. Give me the guesswork.’
Billy Grace lurched to his feet. Thimbles of blood on the fingers of his surgical gloves.
‘The neck – one blow, looks like. A single slash. I’m guessing that came first, while he was still on his feet. The blows to the top of the head would’ve put him straight down.’
Billy took a couple of long strides into the middle of the farmyard, all the uniforms and techies moving away as his right arm went back for role-play.
‘If you imagine he’s standing here when the blade makes contact, slamming into the windpipe. Not exactly what you’d call a butcher’s strike, but the sheer impact of it would leave the poor bastard reeling, spouting blood and tissue everywhere. A great dollop… as you see.’
Billy gestured at the separate puddle. Bliss felt queasy.
‘Poor old Mansel tottering away, couple of metres and then…’ He began to back off unsteadily. ‘Bang, on the skull, and Mansel comes down like a block of flats.’
Bliss said, ‘And the killer…?’
‘Just watches.’
‘Watches?’
‘Well, obviously, I don’t know that, but… I’ll be able to give you a full list of injuries and possibly confirm the sequence tomorrow, but if you want to take a closer look…’
‘For now, I’ll take your word. So the killer knew he’d killed. There was serious intent…’
‘Hardly trying to fend the poor chap off.’
‘And then slinks away. With his big knife.’ Bliss turned to Terry Stagg, the wind in his face like barbed wire. ‘First light, we go over the whole frigging farm, inch by inch. I also think we’re gonna have to drag Howe away from her dinner party, or wherever. Gorra mad bastard here.’
‘Or someone pumped up with drugs.’ Billy’s teeth shining with carnivorous glee. ‘Whoever he is, Francis, I wouldn’t like to face him in an alley.’
Terry Stagg said, ‘Mr Sollers Bull… you need to know…’
‘Where is he?’
‘I suggested he went home. You go down to the fork in the drive, turn right—’
‘Where’ve I heard that name before, Terence? Sollers Bull…’
‘TV?’ Stagg said. ‘Pictures in the papers? I’ve been trying to tell you.’
Bliss turned. Billy Grace was grinning.
‘Oh shit,’ Bliss said. ‘He’s got form.’
‘That might be how you see it, Francis,’ Billy said. ‘But to quite a few people hereabouts, he’s a bloody hero.’
6
Exhaust
EVEN NOW, EVEN in a room full of priests, it was hard to relive. Years later, it would still start burning in her memory like acid. If it caught her in the night, she’d have to get out of bed and pray. Recite St Patrick’s Breastplate, the way she had the night Denzil Joy died.
‘Let me set the scene for you,’ Huw Owen said to the students. ‘When Merrily were appointed as deliverance consultant, the man she replaced was the last Diocesan Exorcist. His name were Canon Dobbs and he couldn’t be doing wi’ namby-pamby terminology like deliverance.’
He paused, looking down to the darkest part of the chapel again.
‘An austere owd bugger, Dobbs. Former academic. Not a supporter of the ordination of women. Merrily’s a university dropout who received her calling in the last days of a wonky marriage – he got killed in a car crash. Was there an element of guilt after that? I wouldn’t like to spec—’
‘Huw—’
‘Always an element of summat, in’t there? We’re all on the threshold of imbalance. As this job keeps reminding us.’
She saw his left hand quiver. And again he looked out towards the shadows in the left-hand corner, where Merrily could see a man now, leaning back, an arm thrown across the back of the empty chair next to his.
‘Anyroad, Canon Dobbs felt it were his duty to expose the upstart bint to the kind of evil the very existence of which would be denied by the progressive bishop who’d appointed her. And – happen – by some of you. Lass?’
Huw extended an arm. Merrily stood up.
‘Erm… I don’t know whether anybody here’s ever been a nurse. Or knows one. But I’ve found it’s always useful to listen to nurses.’
A rush of wind hit the chapel and there was a distant splintering, all heads turning except for Huw’s.
‘Not least because they’ve seen most things relating to death. This, erm, this is about a death. It was my first deliverance job and probably should’ve been Canon Dobbs’s last before he retired, but he was… unavailable.’
Merrily was already uncomfortable. All she had to do was lift the cellar hatch of memory, just a crack, and out it sprang again, and she could almost feel it on the underside of her wrist.
Scritch-scratch.
The smell coming back at once: cat-shit and gangrene, one of the nurses had said.
‘Mr Joy was a hospital patient in Hereford, and he didn’t have long. I was called out in the night because the nurses said he was asking for a priest and the hospital chaplain wasn’t available. The truth was that it was the nurses who needed the priest.’
The nurses who didn’t like to touch Mr Joy. The nurses who had seen the way he used his wife when she came to visit.
The nurses who never could forget the sensation of his fingers when they bent over him to take his temperature or change one of the tubes.
Scritch-scratch. On the soft skin on the underside of the wrist.
‘But I was new at this,’ Merrily said. ‘I told them it wasn’t my job to judge him, only to try and bring him peace. Something was still insisting, back then, that there was no such thing as an evil presence.’
A hand went up. Shona, the woman who’d been a prison governor, hair like a light brown balaclava.
‘You mean your own life-experience or your training?’
‘Look,’ Merrily said. �
��Here you are at the bedside of a dying man.He’s dying, you’re a priest, there to bring comfort. How can you do that if you accept that he’s infested with evil? So you go with the rational view. No such thing as an abstract, incorporeal evil. You need to relax.’
He can enter you without moving, that man, one of the nurses had said.
Merrily’s hand instinctively moving to the pectoral cross. Don’t shudder. Do not shudder now.
‘Cut to the car chase, lass,’ Huw said. ‘And don’t omit the exhaust.’
She told them the rest. Well, most of it.
Trying to convey that sense of all the light in the room being sucked sourly into a man on the very rim of extinction, whose touch was like an enema.
‘Looking back, it leaves me asking a number of questions. Fierce sexual energy coming from an old, dying man – can that be explained medically? Possibly it can, I’m not qualified to say, but the nurses didn’t think so, and nurses, no matter how compassionate, can be very cynical people.’
It was quieter now, the wind in remission.
‘The psychological explanation,’ Merrily said, ‘might be that here was a man who’d enjoyed exploiting women sexually, degrading them. A man in search of increasingly perverse pleasures – to what extent you want to demonize this is up to you.’
Huw was looking at her, head on one side. OK, I’m coming to it.
‘You can usually find a rational explanation, but there has to be a cut-off point. You need to recognize when you’re trying too hard to explain something away, because that can be when you’re most vulnerable. And if it reaches you, there’s not much hope for whoever you’re trying to protect.’
Shona said, ‘When you say “if it reaches you”…?’
‘What do I mean by it? Not sure. But I think if you’re unable to accept the premise of an external evil, you may not be able to deal with some problems. I think… looking back, I don’t think I handled it forcefully enough. I let the psychology make too many decisions. And afterwards I failed to draw a line under it, as a result of which… something… seemed to be hanging around, for some time.’
Looking at Shona, hoping she’d ask another question, move the thread.
