by Phil Rickman
‘Some of the migrant girls… always hoping it’ll end in a fairy-tale marriage and a lovely home in England?’
Bliss shot forward, the front legs of his chair clacking to the floor.
‘You’re telling me Sollers Bull was shagging the wairkers?’
‘It only once got dicey, when a certain Polish girl… I understand he went back a few times too many, and she got the wrong idea. Shows up at his restaurant one day, demanding to see him. Which was how my mum first got a glimpse of the situation. I think she must’ve collected a good pay-off, this girl, ’cause she apparently went home to Warsaw or wherever soon after that. Anyway, it was dealt with.’
Bliss was tapping his desk, rhythmically, quite fast.
‘He was practically accusing migrants of killing his brother.’
‘That would be male migrants, boss.’ Karen’s eyes were opaque. ‘I expect you’ll have to pass this on to Ma’am, though, it being not your case any more.’
‘Sure. Although, naturally, I’ll need to visit Magnis Berries first, ask some questions about their two murdered employees.’
‘That restaurant…’ Karen looked unhappy ‘… there’s a lot of irresponsible gossip. I don’t know if he goes to the farm any more. It probably gave him a scare, the Polish girl. I think maybe you should pass this directly on to Ma’am, don’t you? It’s the way things are done?’
‘The Marinescu sisters,’ Bliss said. ‘Very attractive girls. But also religious. Maybe a little naive.’
Karen stood up and opened the door and then shut it again.
‘Just be careful, Frannie. You know? Let the DCI run with it?’
‘Your ma’s job is safe in my hands, Karen.’
Bliss’s fingers still going tappy-tap-tap on the side of the desk, like a little dynamo.
Alone in his office, Bliss Googled Magnis Berries, found a discreet Web site with the head of some Roman-looking god wearing a wreath of strawberries, blueberries and blackcurrants. There was only one number, in Evesham. Bliss tapped it in, got a chirpy lad’s voice.
‘Magnis Berries. My name’s Robin, how can I help you today?’
‘My name’s Detective Inspector Bliss from West Mercia Police, Robin, and you can help me by putting me through to Batman.’
‘It’s Batwoman, sir,’ Robin said.
Bliss waited on hold, listening to the inquiries unrolling on the other side of the door, Darth Vaynor talking intelligently to someone in London connected with the Romanian embassy. In his left ear, some half-familiar classical music from Magnis Berries, then a crisp, educated female voice.
‘Alex Goddard.’
‘DI Francis Bliss, Ms Goddard, West Mercia CID, Hereford. You’re the MD?’
‘Inspector Bliss…’ A bit snappy, not intimidated by cops. ‘I’ve already told one of your officers that we have very few people working in the Wye Valley at this time of the year, and my manager has assured me he knows nothing that would help with your investigation.’
‘Cross purposes, Ms Goddard. This is not the Mansel Bull inquiry, this is two of your former employees. The Marinescu sisters?’
‘If they’re former employees, I don’t see how… What have they done?’
‘Got themselves beaten to death in Hereford.’
‘Oh, good God.’
‘As you were their last formal employer, I’m interested in the circumstances under which they left.’
‘Inspector, these people come and go in great numbers, and while they’re the first at one of our farms to become victims of violence…’
‘As far as you know.’
‘My instructions to all the managers is that anyone found fighting or attempting to intimidate other workers should be summarily dismissed.’
‘Is Wye Valley your biggest farm? I was thinking, with the whole firm being called Magnis Berries…’
‘We adopted the name last year. Magnis was the name of the Roman town discovered not too far away, and it gave us an identifiable corporate image. In fact, several of our other farms are two or three times as big.’
She gave Bliss the manager’s name, Roger Hitchin, and the unlisted number. Not that he planned to ring first; he and Karen could be there in ten minutes.
But then Brian Wilton came in to tell him that a couple of young women had arrived in response to their appeal for anyone who’d seen the Marinescus in the pubs around East Street. Then Elly Clatter rang through about the inevitable press conference, a necessary chore, timed for two p.m. Magnis would have to wait.
Of course, it might all come to nothing.
Bliss was tingling to his fingertips.
24
Demons
LOL FOUND BARRY in the Swan dining room, putting out menus. Just had to talk to somebody about this.
‘It’s like you’ve gone to hell and here’s Satan in a cardigan, offering you tea and scones.’
‘It’s the way he is,’ Barry said. ‘Taps into what he sees as the prevailing mood. Now, what you accusing me of?’
Five tables were laid out with traditional stiff white cloths and napkins furled like water lilies. Lol counted another six tables, bare wood, redundant now, pushed against the oak panelling.
‘All I’m saying is only four of us knew about it. Danny Thomas, Merrily… and I didn’t even tell her until last night.’
‘Making me the most likely one to’ve blabbed to Savitch.’ Barry pulled a dining chair away from a table, waved Lol to another. ‘What exactly did he say?’
‘Tells me his partner likes my… fine music.’
‘Brigid? That woman keeps a flat in the Smoke because she can’t go a week without a night at the opera. With all due respect, Laurence, I doubt she regards what you do as music at all.’
‘Good at this, though, isn’t he? Knows his folk festivals, too… Super idea, actually, Mr Robinson. Obviously, never be a Glastonbury here, but perhaps a smaller-scale Cropredy, or a Green Man? Real ale… good Herefordshire cider. Marvellous.’
‘Google is a wonderful thing,’ Barry said. ‘What’s he offering you?’
‘A site. He’s thinking one of his larger meadows, up near the bridge. Lots of parking.’
‘How much?’
‘I may have misunderstood, but I think it was free.’
‘Tribute to your status here, Laurence, though he’ll want a percentage.’
‘Barry, I don’t have any status here.’
‘Nah, the gig during the flood won you a bunch of new friends. Always been great public affection for the dance band on the Titanic.’
‘They all drowned,’ Lol said. ‘The dance band.’
‘Well, that’s true, yeah.’ Barry opened out a napkin. ‘You got a problem here, no getting round that.’
Lol recalled Savitch’s face exploding into a wide, disarming smile. He’d expected arrogant, distant, and had got ordinary, reasonable. Very scary.
‘He said people had him all wrong. As if he was trying to distance himself from the blood-sport side. How keen he was to revive the whole tradition. More about Merrie England than hunting and shooting.’
‘Merrie England? Like when the countryside was a recreation area for the aristocracy?’
Barry’s smile was like the coal-chip smile on a snowman. Lol understood he’d been brought up in South London foster homes. His dad had died in Wandsworth Prison.
‘So what was your response, Laurence?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Savitch, your ethos is not in the spirit of the music we’re trying to promote. In fact we hate everything you stand for.’
‘And you actually said…?’
‘I said it was a very generous offer, but it was early days yet. And he invited me to visit his establishment on Thursday. Media launch for the family open day he’s having on Easter Monday. He gave me two tickets.’
‘You and Merrily?’
‘Me and my partner.’
‘He wants the vicar, trust me. Two birds with one. Sooner or later he’ll make a donation to Merrily’s church. He’ll wait for
an opportunity. Urgent repairs needed in the belfry, something like that. Something that gets him noticed, yet doesn’t look like profligate largesse.’
‘I’ve never heard you use so many big words before, Barry.’
‘Funny how despair can inflate your command of English. Of course, if you do turn down his offer, that would look a bit…’
‘Perverse.’
‘But, equally, if you say yes…’
‘I’d be in his pocket. So I’m not going to, am I?’
‘Idea’s planted now. He could go on to hold a bigger event, with big names. Yours not among them.’
Barry’s hands were efficiently twisting the napkin into another lily. Lol watched, fascinated.
‘They teach you that in the SAS?’
‘Yeah, but with necks,’ Barry said.
In the end, they went in separate cars, Fiona’s blue Honda Jazz leading Merrily north-west along those pale, seemingly pointless new roads which hinted at clandestine development plans. Then familiar wooded hills with an early-spring greening like fresh mould, an occasional long view across the hidden Wye to the notched belt of the Black Mountains.
The side-window down, but the breeze couldn’t blow away the voices
Huwie, he says, just a slight problem. A mere technicality.
A circle of salt. Had Syd also forced himself to visualize the golden rings around and above his body, mentally enclosing himself in an orb of light?
Received wisdom. Received madness from a spidery old woman named Anthea White who called herself Athena and lived in an old folks’ home with her occult library. Supplemented with suggestions from the handbook of the Christian Delivery Study Group. Much thumbed, pages folded over.
Open all the cupboard doors, take out all the drawers, cover the mirrors.
…a chance to step back and rationalize it.
Huw again, with chapel echo.
‘It can’t be rationalized,’ Merrily hissed, as if he were sitting in the car with her. ‘It isn’t rational.’
Carly Horne, the skinny one with black hair slanting down over one eye, thought Bliss talked like that comedian.
‘Yeh, I know,’ Bliss said. ‘Lily Savage.’
Carly said, ‘Who?’
Karen Dowell smiled. Bliss didn’t ask. They were in the least grotty interview room. He sat down next to Karen.
‘So you heard it on the radio news.’
‘Stations I listen to don’t do news, to be honest,’ Carly said. ‘Taylor Magson told me – this bloke at college? He knows which pubs we do and when I said I remembered these Russian girls, he was like, hey, you better go tell the cops?’
‘Romanian,’ Karen said. ‘The girls were Romanian.’
‘Got us an afternoon off college, anyway.’
‘What courses are you on?’
‘I’m doing secretarial, she’s beauty therapy, jammy cow.’
The other one was heavy and sullen-looking. Her hair was cut short and the acid colour of lemon cheese. Her name was Josceline Singleton. She had on a high-necked top and pink leggings.
‘You know those pictures you showed us,’ Carly said. ‘Was that them dead?’
Bliss gave her a rueful smile.
‘That’s really sick,’ Carly said.
Karen said, ‘How long you been going in the pubs, Carly?’
‘Years, but I don’t drink much, to be honest, when I got college next day.’
‘So this is the Monk’s Head,’ Bliss said. ‘Lounge bar. Ten o’clockish?’
‘Bit later, when these women come in. There’s only one bar now, since they started doing live music, weekends.’
‘You ever see these girls before?’
Carly shook her head.
‘Were they on their own?’
‘Yeah. They looked kind of, you know, isolated? I used to feel pissed off about them coming over here taking our jobs and stuff, but I feel sorry for them now, I do. When you read about them having to live like seven of them in one room? That’s why I went over and talked to them, really. Well, I was on my way to the lav, to be honest, and I like bumped their table?’
‘Oh.’ Bliss sat up. ‘So you actually talked to them.’
‘Talk to anybody, me. I mean, we didn’t discuss the government and stuff, it was just like, so where you from, kind of thing? And then she comes out with this place I en’t never heard of, so that was a bit useless. I don’t think they wanted to talk, to be honest. Same with a lot of these ethnics, they don’t really wanner mix with us, do they?’
‘It’s the language,’ Josceline Singleton said. ‘They don’t know a word of English.’
‘Except benefits,’ Carly said. ‘That’s my dad. He’s a bigot, he is.’
Bliss said, ‘You told the sergeant some men followed them out.’
‘Yeah. A few blokes in the pub was looking them over?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Like, you know, grinning at each other, making fists and stuff? Kind of, give her one. You know?’
‘And then followed them out? What time was this?’
‘Not sure. Maybe about quarter past eleven?’
‘How many of them?’
‘How many, Joss? I wasn’t counting, to be honest. Wasn’t like they was good-looking or anything. And quite old. Three? I think there was three. They was ethnics, too.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘You can just tell, can’t you?’
‘Would you recognize them again?’
‘You don’t really take them in, do you, ’less they’re a bit fit.’
‘All right,’ Bliss said. ‘I’m gonna leave you with DS Dowell. I’d like you to try very hard to describe these men – how old, how tall, what they were wearing…’
‘Yeah,’ Carly said. ‘All right. I mean, when you think about it… could’ve been any of us, couldn’t it? Like, murdered?’
It was Jane, with her growing feel for the landscape, who’d pointed out that Credenhill existed on three different levels.
The village itself was strung out aimlessly – modern housing, a line of convenience stores set back from the main road. It was looking already like the suburbia of a much-extended Hereford which it might one day become.
An ignominious future, in the shadow, literally, of its impressive ancient history.
Merrily and Jane had once walked up the huge afforested hill to the east, which carried the remaining earthen ramparts of the biggest Iron Age hill fort in the county. Not much to see now, but some historians said Credenhill had once been the Celtic capital of what became Herefordshire, an elevated fortified community with a population of more than three thousand.
It had once looked down on the later Roman military town of Magnis, long gone. Now, as you followed the winding track, you could see down below, when the trees were bare, a spread of low buildings, vaster than it looked from the road. A quiet, self- contained community, with intersecting roads and parked trucks.
The third and most modern Credenhill, to which the elite warriors of the British Army returned, some of them seared and scorched and riven by demons. Applauded from afar, but not allowed to talk about it.
Except to people like Syd Spicer.
Merrily slowed when the gates of the camp appeared on her left. Two police cars were parked alongside one of the buildings, armed guards at the entrance. None of this, to Merrily’s knowledge, outside of routine. The army housing was across the road. She followed Fiona’s Jazz into the estate, which was like any other housing estate except somehow quieter. Parking behind the Jazz outside an end house next to a wooded field, she guessed their arrival would already have been clocked by somebody, somewhere.
All the hundreds of times she’d driven past. Never actually stopped here before. You didn’t. You just didn’t.
Memories of the Frank Collins book were with her now. Frank, a Christian in the SAS, bothered by the old question of God and warfare. In the end, he’d justified it simply to himself: soldiers killed to prevent inn
ocent people dying. The Regiment as knights, trained to deal with evil. Frank had been raised among tough kids in working-class Newcastle, breaking the law like the others. She guessed he’d been a good priest.
Merrily came out of the old Volvo with a ridiculous caution, as if she might be in someone’s cross hairs. For no obvious reason, she pulled the collar of her woollen coat across her dog collar and buttoned it.
It was all very quiet. She looked around and saw nothing moving on the estate, no curtains twitching. No wind. A sky like tarnished brass.
Further along the main road was the turning to Credenhill Church, raised up on the right. Strange connection, coming here direct from the chantry where Thomas Traherne’s vision burned in stained glass. This was a tiny parish in his day, averaging about two baptisms a year, but it would be wrong to think he wouldn’t recognize the place now. He’d know the fortified hill at once and the vista across the Wye Valley to the Black Mountains. On the Welsh border, the big things didn’t change.
He might wonder, though, about the metal frames for poly-tunnels which she could see in the distance to the south, might even find a kind of beauty in their skeletal caterpillar symmetry. Traherne could find beauty in most things.
Did Syd ever go to Traherne’s church?
She felt uneasy. She was on army ground. Had no doubts where Syd’s loyalties would lie. While Merrily was locking the Volvo, Fiona was already walking towards the front door, between bare brown bushes, and then she stopped. Glanced over her shoulder towards Merrily, who moved towards her.
Fiona nodded at the white door. It was half open.
‘Oh,’ Merrily said. ‘He’s back, then.’
No sooner were the words out than she knew how wrong she was.
Fiona didn’t move as they were surrounded. It happened very quickly, as if this was a surprise party, but all the guests were men, and none of them expressed a greeting. After what seemed a long time, one of them turned to Merrily.
‘Mrs Spicer?’
She saw an older man, standing between the brown bushes, shaking his head.
‘I’m sorry,’ the first man said, and the older man approached Fiona, quite slowly.
‘Mrs Spicer, we met once before, briefly. My name’s William.’
