by Phil Rickman
Ethel was slaloming between Merrily’s ankles, and she got up to put out some Felix. She could hear the sound of the TV from the parlour. A chance here of discovering what was on Jane’s mind. Take some hot chocolate in. Meanwhile, she rang Lol to explain the situation. It was important to keep him in the loop. Start sharing more. Guard against slippage.
‘It was on the news,’ Lol said. ‘About the body on Credenhill. No name. God… Syd Spicer?’ A silence, then he said, ‘Don’t even think of shouldering any—’
‘It’s not about blame,’ Merrily said quickly. ‘It’s about finding out what was damaging him and making sure nobody else is affected. This is supposed to be my manor. If he was keeping something from us because it involved national so-called security… well, that’s not my problem, either.’
‘You need to be careful with those guys.’
‘Me? A harmless lunatic? A medieval throwback? Oh… I’ve been asked to do his funeral.’
‘Oh, no,’ Lol said. ‘Not that.’
And then there was someone at the door. An efficient tapping, as if with the tip of a walking stick or an umbrella. Or an army officer’s baton.
Merrily watched James Bull-Davies shaking out his umbrella, shuffling on the doormat, angled like a tower crane.
‘Not, ah, keeping you up, am I?’
‘It’s not yet nine o’clock, James. Coffee?’
‘Bit late for caffeine.’ James stood his umbrella under the Light of the World print. ‘No, hell, might as well. Thank you.’
Merrily led him into the stone-flagged kitchen. Chilly in here in these days of post-Aga economic restraint.
‘I’m sorry, I was meaning to call in, after…’
‘Mansel? Second cousin, twice removed, something like that. Hadn’t spoken to him in years. Nothing wrong, just never that close.’
‘Still a hell of a shock, though.’
‘Rather admired him for his refusal to give up the family home, the way we did ours. Otherwise, lived within his means. Which both his wives seem to have seen as being tight with money, but… shocking, as you say. Shouldn’t happen. Country going down the lavatory.’
James pulled out a chair at the refectory table and spread himself over it in his ungainly way. He was wearing an old tweed jacket, grey woollen tie.
‘Reason for disturbance… you met a friend of mine earlier. Lockley. William. Never Bill. Despises Bill, don’t know why.’
‘He said you were friends.’
‘Shipped orf to the same school, for our sins. Christ Col, Brecon. Also served Her Maj together as young chaps, briefly, before he… took a slightly different path. Now. This man Spicer…’
‘What does William do? With the Regiment?’
‘Nothing too active now. Had his time in the sandpit. They keep him on. Chaps like him have their uses, if it’s only a long memory.’ James coughed. ‘This is me talking to you, by the way. Not him. Not them. Fairly clear, that, I suppose?’
‘You know I’d never suspect you of making covert inquiries on behalf of the Ministry of Defence.’
Army county, this. Someone’s fingers snapped and men who were never quite retired came out of civilian limbo. James cleared his throat.
‘Here – far as I’m aware – purely on behalf of my old friend Lockley.’
‘As far as you’re aware.’
‘Or could ever expect to be aware.’
‘James, my head’s starting to ache.’
James shifted in his chair, like a minor rockfall.
‘Didn’t just drop out of the cot, Merrily. Fully aware of the degree of suspect politics which may appear to be lurking behind anything involving the military. Fully aware of that.’
‘Good. Go on.’
‘Having him as stand-in chaplain… not universally applauded.’ James sighed irritably. ‘Hate this kind of thing. Poor chap’s gorn, that should be an end to it. However, one or two things still leave cause for concern.’
The atmosphere had altered, the banter was over. The coffee pot began to burble. Merrily went to it. James cleared his throat again.
‘Probably know what they found in Spicer’s bedroom?’
‘I didn’t go in. Wasn’t invited.’
James was silent.
‘All right,’ Merrily said. ‘I may have an idea what was in there.’
‘I, ah… made it clear to Lockley that I had considerable respect for you, as a person. Wouldn’t like you to be buggered about. However, they… that is, we… I… were wondering how far you’d be prepared to share.’
She turned to face James, a mug in each hand.
‘Share?’
‘Things are sensitive. We’re in wars, could be for some time. Not made easier by the nation being in two minds about the need for it. Though, with all the loss of life, there’s a lot of sympathy, at present, for the chaps who have to fight. Anything which might affect that sympathy or the morale of the fighting man, which, between ourselves, is getting bloody close to rock bottom… PTSD, combat-stress… obviously needs to be watched.’
Rain skittered like moths on the high window. Merrily frowned.
‘I know how hard this is for you, James, but you’re going to have to spell this out.’
‘Merrily, this… hell’s bells, they don’t understand this stuff. Not their field of combat. Lockley’s job’s to ensure that whatever was bothering Spicer could not, if it ever emerged, be damaging to the reputation of the Regiment. Might’ve been the onset of mental illness. Might’ve been something personal or foolish. Or…’
‘What do they think it might be?’
James didn’t reply.
‘Share means share, James. Two-way street?’
Merrily waited. James sat there for some moments, concrete-jawed. She guessed he often wondered where he’d be now if he hadn’t been dragged out of the army after the sudden death of his father, to pull what remained of the estate together. Not too successfully, as it had turned out. Savitch was the squire now.
She began to lose patience.
‘Maybe I need to consult my boss. Before this goes any further.’
James looked up sharply.
‘Who are we talking about?’
‘The Bishop?’
‘Oh.’ He looked relieved. ‘Dunmore. Well, yes, of course. Absolutely fine. Apparently.’
You could only take that one way. Small county with a long history of cooperation between Church and Military. It felt like the walls were closing in on her with a sinister splintering of old, brittle wattle.
‘Though we’d rather you said nothing to the other chap,’ James said. ‘Owen.’
Merrily let the mugs come down, clunk, on the table. James smiled ruefully, chin sinking into his tie.
‘Complicated times, Mrs Watkins. Even in our own little world. Savitch bidding to buy the Swan, heart of the community?’ He coughed. ‘Apart from the church of course.’
‘No, you were right the first time.’
‘Should talk again.’ James stood up, looking sorrowfully down at the spillage on the table. ‘But I think you understand where we’re coming from, broadly speaking. And, ah, perhaps it is a little late for coffee.’
After James had gone, Jane was still in the parlour, sitting on the sofa. But the TV sound was off, and she was talking into her mobile.
‘Yeah,’ she was saying, ‘I’ll consider it.’
When she came off the phone and didn’t ask who’d been here… well, absence of curiosity was often a sign that Jane had something of her own to conceal. And when it was weighted with a muted fury which couldn’t have been more apparent if the kid had been slashing the sofa…
‘That was Eirion,’ Jane said.
Tossing the phone onto a cushion, as CSI Miami played silently on the TV: shiny, flawless techno-puppets moving in digitized choreography against glass walls and orange skies.
‘How is he?’ Merrily said.
‘Bit bored.’
‘With university?’
‘He is
n’t doing anything. Just learning stuff, most of which he isn’t going to need. His fifteenth year of learning. Weird, when you think about it, the whole university thing. Like, your mental energy levels are about as high as they’re ever going to be, and it just gets poured down the system.’
Was that what the rage was about? Some acrimony with Eirion?
‘And then you come out in serious financial debt,’ Jane said. ‘To them. With no guarantee of meaningful work. It’s a scam. Eirion reckons if they can get a stack of foreign students paying an arm and a leg they’re more than happy.’
On the box, a beautiful pathologist with uncovered glossy hair and perfect make-up wielded an electric handsaw, and a dead man’s brainpan was eased away like the top of a soft-boiled egg. Without appearing to notice what was on the screen, Jane switched it off.
‘I might get an early night.’
Merrily sat up in bed. The rain had stopped. No vehicles on the streets, only the occasional flattened notes of footfalls on the cobbles, the claw-patter of a dog on a lead. Townies talked about escaping to the country, but there was no escape out here. Everybody knew where to find you.
Too much had happened today, none of it good, but there was still work to do. Under the bedside lamp, she read Mother Julian’s account of changing skin colours on the dead Christ, half his face coated in dried blood.
Merrily marked the place with a Post-It sticker. There had to be a logical sequence for this meditation and it should be stored in her head. No sitting at the top of the nave with a clipboard. Just a low and steady voice, minimal inflection, not a preacher’s voice. Julian’s voice.
She worked with the book for an hour, until around midnight, applying more Post-Its. Syd hadn’t used them. Pages of his Deliverance handbook had been folded seemingly at random, as if simply to mark his place. The book was uncared-for, as though he’d carried it around in his pockets.
And then thrown it at the wall because he couldn’t find what he needed. You picked it up and you could almost feel the frustration. She’d left it downstairs. With Julian of Norwich, she’d been thinking, there would at least be distance.
Of course, there wasn’t. After six centuries, Mother Julian was up-close and breathing, resisting impulses to look away from the horror because she knew that while she gazed on the cross her soul was safe. Apart from the cross she had no assurance. Interesting.
Merrily stopped work, went to the window and prayed for the capacity to interpret and to understand what had driven Syd Spicer on that final exercise. Then the bedside phone rang.
‘Merrily. Me.’
‘Barry.’
‘You ain’t gone to bed or nothing? Only, I phoned Big Liz. She’ll be happy to talk to you on the understanding it’s off the record.’
‘Wasn’t planning to use it in a sermon, Barry. You, er… haven’t spoken to James Bull-Davies, by any chance?’
‘No. Not for a couple of days, anyway. Look, you’ll need to make it earlyish tomorrow. Liz’s got her first Easter guests arriving after lunch. Start of the season. Can you do nine prompt? And wear the vicar kit – that’ll impress her.’
Merrily dreamed of having to watch a post-mortem on Jesus Christ. Several of them in a gallery overlooking the table: James Bull-Davies, stooped and solemn, William Lockley behind his Lord Kitchener moustache and, in the darkest corner, Syd Spicer with his steady, soft-toy’s gaze.
She kept walking away from the metal table and out of the door, then finding herself walking back into the morgue through a different door. Watching and worrying because the wounds of Jesus Christ, as listed in the New Testament, did not include a circle of black stitches between the eyes and the halo, where the top of his skull had been sewn back on.
31
Blue Sparks
WHEN THE MOBILE whined, Bliss was camped in front of the massed ranks of CCTV monitors in the Big Telly room.
‘You talk?’
‘Yeh, give me five minutes.’
Annie Howe said, ‘If it’s not a good time…’
‘Good as any tonight.’
Looked like Rich Ford’s reasoning had been well off-beam. In the aftermath of the carnage, it was unnaturally quiet on the night streets of Hereford. They’d spotted a handful of blokes who roughly fitted the inexact descriptions given by Carly Horne and Joss Singleton but nobody worth more than a mild tug. Bliss signalled to Vaynor to keep tabs and went downstairs and out to the car park and called Annie back.
‘I was gonna give it another half-hour and then stagger off home. What’s your day been like?’
‘We’ve set up a phone line specifically for reporting rural crime – anything suspicious – anything. Which we may live to regret, as we pursue fly-tippers and kids stealing apples. On the positive side, we may actually have a response to the coded appeal for the guy who saw the man covered with blood. And I had to let Stagg go for a while, when this SAS chaplain was found.’
‘Anything in that?’
‘Looked borderline suspicious at first, but it doesn’t seem to be. Nothing much for us to do. They look after their own.’
It was spitting again. Bliss moved under the awning by the door.
‘Where are you?’
‘Home. Thought about staying with Dad, decided that wasn’t a good idea. Ah… the TV I saw, you handled it well.’
Bliss had done six TV interviews, including satellite. Only one reporter had slipped in a rogue question: You feeling more comfortable on an urban case, Inspector?
‘They didn’t use it, far as I know. Maybe they’ll save it for if the rural-cops issue comes up again.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Annie said. ‘Which it well might, I’m afraid.’
Here it comes. Bliss moved out into the rain.
Annie said, ‘The Chief Constable’s had an e-mail document, copied to both MPs, from Countryside Defiance. Containing what purports to be a list of over two hundred unsolved rural crimes in this division over the past year.’
‘Like what?’
‘Theft of equipment and vehicles. Arson. Damage to property – a rural bus company having seats repeatedly slashed…’
‘Yeh, by a rival bus firm, if it’s the one I’m thinking of. Point of honour for some of these redneck bastards to settle their own scores. Half your rural crimes, it’s stuff they keep to themselves. Feud-linked, neighbours with a grudge. Leaving each other’s gates open, cutting fences…’
‘According to Countryside Defiance,’ Annie said, ‘some farmers apparently have given up reporting crimes because they’re tired of wasting hours of the working day—’
‘Balls!’
‘—on worthless interviews and statements when in the end no one is ever arrested and they never get their property back.’
‘Most thefts from farms are twats in vans, cruising the lanes, seeing what’s unlocked. Chancers from the West Midlands, South Wales. It’s not organized. What are we supposed to do about that? Put all the dozens of friggin’ patrol cars we haven’t got into hundreds of miles of twisty little lanes? Stop and search? You imagine how well that’d go down?’
‘And there’s something else,’ Annie said.
***
At some point, Bliss forgot where he was. Finding himself the other side of the main road, by the steps to the magistrates’ court, some drunk staring at him from under a street lamp. It was pissing down now, reminding him of the night during the floods when he’d doorstepped Annie’s dad, and come off worst.
Go home boy. Charlie’s finest sneer. Go back to Liverpool or wherever it was you crawled from. Long outstayed your welcome down yere.
Ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Charlie Howe, former head of Hereford CID. It was all different now, the organization, more remote. Bliss had met the Chief Constable just the once. He recalled a mild-mannered bloke, not a big sense of humour, but that had never been a qualification.
‘The fucker wants me out?’
‘Essentially… yes.’
‘He told you on the Bluetooth this
morning, didn’t he? On your way to East Street.’
‘I didn’t say anything then because I didn’t really think he was serious. And it… didn’t seem a good time to discuss it.’
‘The cowardly twat.’
‘Francis, they’re all the same. It’s a difficult job at a difficult time.’
‘“Difficult time”—’
The drunk was still staring at him. Bliss lowered the phone, advanced on him.
‘Will you piss off!’
A sardonic, rubbery grin and a finger, and the drunk moon-walked away.
‘I’m sorry,’ Annie said. ‘It’s knee-jerk and it’s probably unjust. And it’s…’
‘A small county?’
‘Not quite set in stone. Not yet.’
‘If he’s told you, Annie, it’s as friggin’ good as.’
‘He’s told me because he’s heard there’s a long-standing hostility between us. He’s told me, because he’s hoping I’ll expedite it. I imagine he thinks I’ll quite enjoy expediting it.’
‘He say how he expects it done?’
‘The usual. It’s to be made clear to you, quietly, that DI is very much as far as you’re going if you stay here. Other opportunities will be aimed in your direction.’
Bliss stood with his face tilted into the rain, letting it come.
‘Francis…?’
‘I’m going home. I’m switching off.’
‘No, listen, that…’ Annie sounded tired and distressed. ‘That’s… not the half of it.’
Bliss sat in his kitchen until getting on three a.m. Under the naked bulb, from which Kirsty had taken the lampshade. One of the clutch of low-energy bulbs that came free from the lecky company, coiled white tubes like frozen intestine.
He’d been picturing Annie’s incident room. Her little outpost at Mansel’s yard. A message to the farmers: we’re here for you. And we’re local people. Maybe you remember my father. Maybe you were in his Lodge.
Bliss stood up, took his mug to the sink and held it under the tap with both hands for too long, numbingly cold water cascading over his wrists. Remembering something else Charlie had said that night in the rain.
