by Phil Rickman
‘Did he know you were coming here?’ Merrily said. ‘To Credenhill?’
‘I rang last weekend, suggesting I might come over, get things organized… and there was immediate resistance. Oh, there were things he needed to do to it, it was still in a mess. Well, I like a mess, gives me a sense of purpose. Hell, I’m supposed to be living there in a few weeks. No… he didn’t know I was coming. Compliance is an essential virtue for a Regiment wife, but I’m fifty-one, for Christ’s sake. I’ve been through that phase.’
‘So you went to see Syd, without giving any indication that you were coming.’
‘It was easier in the old days, when they were in Hereford. All that high fencing, like a prison, but it was still in the city. Credenhill, you feel more exposed. Still, I found the house easily enough, end of the row, near a little wood.’
Fiona had parked the car, gone up and knocked on the door. Ready for Syd saying this really wasn’t convenient and maybe she could come back in a couple of hours. But there was no answer.
Fiona had her hands in the pockets of her jacket. Like Sophie, she was overdressed for the weather – even a scarf, as if she’d learned from experience that you couldn’t trust signs of warmth.
‘So you let yourself in,’ Merrily said.
‘I know where he hides things like spare keys. Not under the step. And I didn’t do anything furtive, which always gets noticed.’
The two couples came out of the Audley chantry and Canon Jim Waite appeared, said ‘Hi, Merrily,’ and then guided the visitors into the Lady Chapel. Merrily nodded at the chantry door.
‘Why don’t we go in there? I’ll tell you what I know.’
She talked about Syd at the Brecon chapel, sitting in the shadows, asking no questions. And afterwards at Huw’s rectory, that unconvincing airy optimism. It’s going to be all right. It’s working out. How they’d decided, she and Huw, that there was probably a security aspect to whatever was troubling Syd.
‘Always a good get-out,’ Fiona said. ‘And that’s it, is it?’
‘There’s a bit more. He phoned Huw yesterday to inquire about certain deliverance procedures.’
They were on separate wooden benches, Merrily by the windows, Fiona by the door, staring bleakly into a stained-glass starburst Godface of blinding white.
‘Let me get this right. Deliverance is exorcism?’
‘Yes.’
‘To get rid of spiritual evil.’
‘Sometimes. Syd suggested to Huw that an old evil had come back to haunt him. Would you have any idea what that might be?’
‘There was a book dealing with it. Deliverance. It was with two other books on the back seat of his car, in the garage. The car wasn’t locked, which is how I got your number.’
Fiona hadn’t answered the question; Merrily didn’t push it. Fiona said Syd had told her the Credenhill house was a mess, but it had actually been very tidy. Everything in its place. Not the places Fiona would have put things, but all very neat.
He’d lied, to keep her away. Why?
‘Not another woman. He’d’ve told me.’
Her face was flushed, but only by the sun through the firework blaze of extreme stained glass. The new Thomas Traherne windows, four of them, were small and ferocious, with individual dominant colours: the almighty white, the crucifixion red, the pagan green. You never enjoy the world aright, Traherne had written …till you are clothed in the heavens and crowned with the stars.
You had the impression that it had been a long time since Fiona had found anything in the world to enjoy.
‘I made myself some tea,’ she said. ‘Sat down in the living room for a while, thinking he’d be back. When he didn’t come back, I started to look around. Some of it… You could come back to the house and take a look if you wanted to. If you have the time.’
‘If he’s back, he won’t be overjoyed to see me there.’
‘If he’s back, he can bloody well live with it.’
No raising of the voice, just a hoarse, fur-tongued undertow, thick with history. Fiona was looking into the second window, which had an ephemeral Christ figure in a shaft of light, arms wide, head bowed, crucified without a cross.
‘Do you know anything about the house?’ Merrily asked. ‘Who lived there before? I mean, they’re not old houses, are they?’
‘It’s army housing, end of a row, detached. You think there’s something wrong with the house?’
‘It might be one explanation. If it was a house where… perhaps people couldn’t settle, where successive occupants felt unhappy, had marital problems, sickness… then new people living there might well get a sense of that.’
‘You’re so matter-of-fact about all this, aren’t you?’
Fiona shook her head slowly, as if her senses were adjusting to the atmosphere of another planet.
‘I’m familiar with it, that’s all,’ Merrily said. ‘But Syd didn’t have much patience with any of it. Out of his comfort zone.’
‘They don’t do comfort,’ Fiona said. ‘Neither do I. But – I’m sorry – this is beyond reason. This is mad.’
‘What did you find?’
Fiona unwound her scarf as if it was choking her. The green glow of the end window lit the side of her face, making her look faintly sick.
‘I went upstairs. If it was going to be my home, I had every right. Have to work out where to put the furniture, much of which is still in store.’
‘Sure.’
‘The house has three bedrooms. Two were full of boxes of stuff, waiting to be unpacked. The master bedroom… well, it was empty. As if it had been burgled or something. No clothes in the wardrobe. And the dressing table… all the drawers had been pulled out, as far as they’d go. All empty.’
‘I see.’
In the green window, a figure – possibly the poet, Traherne himself – was running along a path towards a conical wooded hill. Fiona was slowly winding the ends of her scarf around her hands, pulling it tight.
‘That means something to you?’
‘It might. Go on.’
‘The mirror had a dust cloth draped over it, although there was no visible dust. The whole room was extremely clean and bare. The bed had been pulled away from the wall, almost into the middle of the floor, the bedclothes pulled back but not removed. Oh—and there was no carpet. It had been rolled up and put into one of the other bedrooms. And… there was a trail of white, making a circle around the bed.’
‘Salt.’
‘A lot of salt. How did you know?’
‘Salt’s part of the mix for holy water, sprinkled during a clearance. An exorcism, if you like. But it can also be used on its own.’
‘Christ.’
‘Anything else?’
‘And on the wall, opposite the window, there was a large wooden cross I’d never seen before.’
Probably to catch the first rays of the morning sun.
‘Sam’s never done much of that – crosses and pictures. Nothing ostentatious. He says you should hold whatever you have in your… your heart. The only thing he used to keep in the bedroom was his Bible. Not a Gideon-type Bible in the bedside cabinet, this was a massive old family Bible, half the size of a paving slab.’
‘An heirloom?’
‘No. He bought it. Just before he was ordained. Symbolic, I suppose. Something big and heavy that you couldn’t just slip into your pocket. A necessary burden. I…’ Fiona spread her hands. ‘I don’t know. With Sam, there were always things you didn’t ask. It had brass bindings and a lock, and he used to keep it on top of the wardrobe and get it down to dust it every Sunday. The odd thing is that it wasn’t there. There was nothing on top of the wardrobe. Not even dust.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I got out of there. I felt… quite cold.’
Fiona took both her hands out of her scarf and laid them on top of it. Her wedding ring was iridescent in the blazing stained-glass light. Merrily stood up, turned to watch the figure that might be Thomas Traherne moving away a
long the path up the wooded hill which might be Credenhill. Traherne had been the vicar at the church below the hill. She had a strong feeling there was history here that Fiona wasn’t yet prepared to disclose.
‘Those things you didn’t ask…’
‘I don’t have the knowledge. Do I?’
‘How about if I ask them?’
‘That might be helpful. If you don’t mind.’
‘OK.’ Merrily picked up her bag. ‘Your car or mine?’
23
Swab City
BILLY GRACE HAD found bruising around the pubic area in both cases but no traces of semen, and no internal damage. Neither Maria nor Ileana Marinescu had been raped. Or, it seemed, had recent sex of any kind.
‘So… was there an attack with intent to rape?’ Bliss said to the class. ‘Or was it something random? Group of lads coming back from the pub, spot these two on their own, maybe wander over, see what’s on offer.’
‘Maybe simply thinking they were prostitutes?’ Darth Vaynor said.
They had decent CCTV now, of the girls entering and leaving the Grapes in Church Street at 9.45 p.m. On their own, both times. Nobody following them.
‘Very drunk, presumably, the attackers,’ Rich Ford said, the veteran uniform inspector. ‘And then it gets progressively out of hand.’
About fifteen of them in the incident room, including seven uniforms and Slim Fiddler and Joanna Priddy from crime-scene.
Rich Ford, months off retirement, glanced over his shoulder, cleared his throat.
‘Perhaps I should mention that while the two Lithuanian gentlemen helped into the hospitality lounge in the early hours were completely pissed – one vomiting profusely all over the reception desk – neither had any blood on him. We did manage to talk to them this morning before they were checked out, and it was fairly clear that neither of them had seen – or at least remembered seeing – anything untoward.’
Statistics showed overwhelmingly that most crimes against economic migrants in Hereford were committed by other migrants. Maybe retribution for non-payment of business protection or the required percentage for procurement of employment. Neither of which seemed to apply to the Marinescu sisters.
‘However, if this is to do with some existing conflict we know nothing about,’ Rich said, ‘there’s likely to be retaliation, isn’t there? Could be trouble on the streets tonight – and that could give us an in.’
‘If the girls had been on the game,’ Bliss said, ‘we’d have to consider the possibility that they’d intruded on someone else’s street corner or pub of choice… or failed to cough up the agreed percentage of their earnings to the pimp.’
‘Which in this case would be Goldie,’ Darth Vaynor said. ‘And we don’t have any reason to think Goldie’s lying about them not being involved in prostitution.’
Slim Fiddler grunted.
‘Less they was doing a foreigner?’
‘Can’t be ruled out,’ Bliss said. ‘Or, as Darth said, that somebody thought they were on the game. We’ll come back to that. Let’s just deal with the second possible motive – robbery.’
Turning to Brian Wilton, the office manager, who brought up on the monitor a picture of the pale blue handbag found in Bishop’s Meadow down by the river. A twin to the one Bliss had seen in East Street.
‘Contents emptied out,’ Brian said. ‘Wallet-type purse found in the Cathedral Close, empty. Bits of make-up kit also picked up between the Cathedral and the river.’
‘Likely to be DNA,’ Slim Fiddler said. ‘We’re still waiting.’
‘Also, that lays a bit of a trail.’ Bliss went over to the blown-up street map, tapped it with his pen. ‘Quickest way from East Street to the Cathedral Close is through this little alleyway, almost directly across the street from the car park. Curves round past the old Alfred Watkins house into the Cathedral grounds. We might assume that, after killing the Marinescu sisters, the attackers ran across East Street, into the alley, going through the bag as they went.’
‘Why take only one bag?’ Karen Dowell said. ‘If the other was left in East Street and there was a few quid left in the purse…’
‘I don’t think we ever really considered this was about robbery, Karen, I’m just gerrin it out the way. What else? Any ideas?’
‘Personal?’ Rich Ford said. ‘They’ve committed some offence against their family?’
‘According to Goldie Andrews, they have no known family over here, and they didn’t mix much with other migrants.’
‘What about non-compliance?’ Darth Vaynor said. ‘They were invited to work for somebody but, being religious, they declined, and…’
‘Maybe.’ Bliss wrinkled his nose. ‘Have to be more complicated, though. Like that they were threatening to come to us. And how often does that happen?’
He waited for more, got blank faces. They were talking to the Romanian authorities, but the suggestion so far was, as Goldie had thought, that the Marinescu girls were from a fairly rural area and maybe not exactly sophisticated.
Bliss was still pretty sure, mind, that there was a lot of stuff Goldie hadn’t told him, maybe in connection with the fruit farm. Time to float this one.
‘It’ll surprise none of you to learn that these girls came over to work in the tunnels. In the last instance, Magnis Berries, off the Brecon Road. So… what do we know about Magnis Berries? All shut when me and Terry called in the other day, and no particular reason to take it further at that stage.’
Silence.
‘Aw, come on, children, what’ve we heard?’
‘No suicides,’ Brian Wilton said. ‘Unlike some similar establishments.’
‘Rumours of intimidation? Threats, bribery? Think back to the van driver who demanded his weekly blow job for getting a woman to work on time. Pretty scary for a couple of young lasses from a village in rural Romania.’
‘It’s a newish establishment,’ Karen Dowell said. ‘They seem to have started up with full knowledge of the kind of reputations that some fruit farms had got themselves for bullying and poor working conditions. Brought in local people as supervisors. I don’t suppose they pay any more than the others, but we’re not getting rumours.’
‘Then why did the girls leave? We need to find out.’
Karen said, ‘If we’re descending on Magnis Berries, that’d be rubbing shoulders with the Mansel Bull inquiry. I believe the farm’s being extended onto what used to be Mr Bull’s land.’
‘It is?’
‘I learned last night that he sold it a month or so ago. Causing a bit of controversy locally, as you’d expect.’
‘Absolutely.’ Bliss was blinking hard. ‘Right. Well, not too much is clear at the minute, but I still don’t expect this to take long. We’ve gorra lorra DNA to play with. So – need I say – any excuse to snatch a sample from any bugger, we grab it. Welcome to Swab City.’
‘OK, Karen.’ Assembly over, Bliss shut the door of his office, waved her to the spare chair, sat down behind his desk. ‘Give.’
‘The bit of controversy?’
‘Indeedy.’
‘You’re going to get overexcited now. This is only from my mum, right, so it might need some more looking into.’
‘I see Mrs Dowell as an impeccable source, Karen.’
Karen sighed.
‘Magnis Berries, the parent company, is in the Vale of Evesham. Well established, fairly responsible. So what you hear – or what you don’t hear – is pretty reliable. It’s still a shit job, but nobody at Magnis gets a bucket of muddy water thrown over them when they pass out from the heat.’
‘But just because it’s not too bad for the wairkers…’
‘Once it gets out that a few hundred migrant workers are going to be housed in huts and caravans, creating a new community twice the size of any of the local villages, and all the fields spread with plastic… you’ve got trouble. And as it’s now about to almost double in size again…’
‘Double? Sollers Bull agreed to this deal?’
‘
Nobody locally knew that ground was even for sale until the deal was done. Which is not exactly normal procedure, if you want to get the best price…’
‘Yeh, yeh.’
‘Point is, Sollers didn’t get a chance to disagree. The deal was done by Mansel Bull. On the quiet.’
Bliss leaned his chair back on two legs, his elbows against the wall.
‘Mansel Bull… very quietly, behind his brother’s back, sells a chunk of his farm to Magnis Berries?’
‘I think it was no more than about twelve acres, but he also brokered a deal for three other neighbouring farmers to sell pieces of their land… probably for well above the going rate. Which, in a time of deep recession, would overcome any resistance they might have. The few enemies he’d make would just be incomers from Off, the roses-round-the-door types.’
‘And Sollers.’
‘Sollers… came round,’ Karen said.
‘It was me, I’d be nursing a grudge the size of Wales.’
‘Boss, bear with me. He, like, physically came round? To Magnis Berries? I mean, quite often. Oh hell, look, this is from my mum, right? And if it ever got out she was the source she’d lose her job so fast—’
‘Yeh, yeh.’
‘I mean, it’s not a major secret that Sollers puts it about, and although he—’
‘Hang on…’ Bliss was sitting up. ‘Sollers puts it…’
‘Bit of a celeb?’ Karen said. ‘Plus, the number of women turned on by hunting pink and riding boots is still considerable. He’s discreet, naturally, with a useful marriage to protect.’
‘Lord Walford’s daughter.’
‘In hunting circles, that means a lot.’
Bliss was breathing hard.
‘Karen, could you possibly… spell this out? Whereabouts has Sollers been putting it?’
‘This is only—’
‘Hearsay, yeh. I love hearsay. Just spit it out.’
