by Phil Rickman
You never deserved Kirsty. Nice girl. Good sensible head on her shoulders. Well rid of you, boy. Well rid.
Small county.
He turned away from the sink, hands dripping, staring at the bright, new brass lock on the back door. The locks had been changed now, front and back. Kirsty would never again get in to sniff the sheets, check the bathroom cabinet for cosmetic anomalies, the kitchen cabinet where the Brazilian decaff was, the only bit of exotica that Annie had ever introduced.
It was now entirely possible that Annie would never come here again, with her overnight bag and her expensive Brazilian decaff.
Bliss dried his hands, switched off the coiled bulb and went and sat down at the table in the dark. In his head, he was joining the wires. They ran from his father-in-law, Chris Symonds, would-be gentleman farmer, to Sollers Bull, who knew the family. To Charlie Howe, who knew the family.
And what about Lord Walford, Sollers’s father-in-law and former member of the police authority? Former? Made no odds, he’d still have the contacts.
Chris Symonds says you consistently neglected your wife, Mr Bliss.
Had it actually come from Kirsty? No stranger to False Memory Syndrome, his wife. Of course I won’t be doing anything about it. He’s not worth it. I’ll just be glad never to have to see him again.
Bliss could still hear Annie’s voice in the mobile as he was standing in the rain outside the mags’ court. The words still tight in his head like a migraine.
Abuse. Physical.
Confused at first. I’m not getting this, Annie. Hadn’t realized who she was talking about.
They’re saying… that your abuse of your wife also had a physical dimension.
And then, Who? Who, who, who…? he’d been screaming into the phone, until he realized that might make him sound like someone who easily lost it and…
… lashed out at his wife.
‘There was no abuse. Do you understand, Annie? Making his voice very calm. Physical or otherwise. Or, if there was, it was one-sided. She knows that all too well.
Well, of course she knew it, but that didn’t matter. Didn’t matter whether he had or he hadn’t. Didn’t matter. In a small county.
Bliss sat there in the dark, head in his hands, remembering, as he often did, the first time he’d seen the DCI as a woman. Opening her front door to him on a December night, wearing the jeans and the loose stripy top. Hair down, glasses on the end of her nose. Those little blue sparks of static electricity. Maybe he should’ve seen the way this would go.
Sometimes I don’t like you.
Just last night. And then this morning, in her car, after her Bluetooth discussion with the Chief: I’m adapting to instructions, Francis. It’s what I do. Adapt. Known for it.
Thing was, he had seen the way it might go. His eyes had been open the whole way. He knew what Annie was and what he wasn’t. After that unexpected, glorious compatibility on the night they’d nailed Steve Furneaux, together, he’d been fully prepared for a slow descent into the old brittle, viper-tongued, day-to-day disparaging. A relationship as workable as a frozen toilet.
And – here was the really sad bit – had even been willing to endure it for those brief moments of defrosting, the hair-down, glasses-on-the-end-of-the-nose moments, the blue sparks.
Bliss parted his hands and let his forehead come down on the tabletop, again and again and again.
Part Four
Yet in all this I wanted (as far as I dared)
to get a real sight of hell and purgatory…
Julian of Norwich
Revelations of Divine Love
32
A Soul in Camouflage
ABRUPTLY, BIG LIZ rose, went over to a sprawling oak sideboard and came back with a green cardboard folder which she handed to Merrily.
‘Just in case you thought we were never happy.’
Liz had wide grey eyes and copious white hair pulled back into more of a cob than a bun. And she was big. Tall, wide-shouldered, wearing a long sheepskin waistcoat.
In the wedding picture, she looked bashful in a complicated white veiled headdress, and the man she’d married was all smouldering hero in his morning suit and winged collar, with his thick dark hair.
‘He could be very charming,’ Liz said. ‘Always good with my parents. That was half the battle, then.’
They were sitting near a bay window in a high-ceilinged, mauvey, chintzy sitting room with a wide stone fireplace and a view across the Golden Valley to the Black Mountains.
‘My father – before I got married, he said, Elizabeth, you’re going to have to be very strong – stronger than an ordinary wife – and very discreet, for the rest of your life. And you’ll have to make allowances, because these are not ordinary men.’
‘Your father was in the army?’
‘No, just very patriotic, and Colin, being a career soldier in an elite regiment, he could do no wrong. I’m not very good at people. I just go along with things.’
Colin Jones. Right.
‘How long have you lived here?’
The stone farmhouse, at Allensmore, south of Hereford, was Victorian and lofty. Big bones, like Liz. There was a small crenellated tower in the roof, aligned to the front porch with its double doors.
‘It was my parents’ house. My mother started the bed-and-breakfast side. I grew up here, and they always said that when Colin came out of the Regiment they’d sell the grounds, retire and move into a cottage and let us take over the house. At the time, Colin seemed delighted but…’ Liz gave a small, helpless shrug ‘… I didn’t realize then that was only because it would give me something to do. Keep me occupied while he did other work.’
‘What kind of other work?’
‘He took a job with one of the private-security companies in Hereford. Went abroad for weeks at a time, as a bodyguard to various businessmen. It was a bit on and off, and then it stopped. That was when he started to write his books. Non-stop, once he’d started one, early morning till late at night. He had a lot of energy. Too much for ordinary things.’
‘He didn’t get involved with your business here?’
‘Wanted nothing to do with it. We had separate lives, almost. Well, except for sex, and that was…’ Liz looked away, out of the bay window ‘… never very loving, but I made allowances. Anyway.’ She placed her hands primly in her lap. ‘There we are. I suppose I thought they were all like that. Oh dear.’
She blew out a short, startled breath, then sat back, looking a little surprised, as if she’d let herself be tricked into saying too much. Merrily looked around at the nests of chairs and coffee tables and saw why Byron Jones might have found it hard to settle here. Even the bookshelves had ornaments on them – little wooden boxes and china figurines and what might have been golf trophies, widely spaced. Liz’s second husband was out playing golf, apparently. It seemed likely she’d arranged this meeting for early in the day not, as Barry had said, because she was expecting guests after lunch but because she knew that this morning they’d be alone.
Big Liz owed Barry. She’d met him on a tourism course. When Byron left, Barry had helped her keep the business afloat, attract some grants. Leading you to think that Barry had been sorry for her and maybe knew more about Byron than he’d revealed last night.
As for Liz… she was oddly incurious, hadn’t once asked why a vicar might want to know about her first marriage. It seemed enough that Merrily had been sent by Barry.
‘I’d begun to think it was all history. Then Barry rang and told me about Syd.’ Liz’s face became glum. ‘Oh dear. You never know what you should or shouldn’t say. I’m still a bit of a patriot, like my dad.’
‘Where did you meet Colin?’
‘Disco. In Hereford. I didn’t go very often, but my cousin was staying with us and she was all for that kind of thing. It wasn’t very long after the Iranian Embassy siege in London, when the Regiment rescued the hostages, and they were national heroes, and all the girls in Hereford… do you remember tha
t? Perhaps you’d be too young.’
‘Well, I wasn’t living here then, but I can imagine what it was like.’
‘Madness. They were like pop stars. It was when young men started pretending they were in the Regiment just to get the girls. Colin, though… I didn’t even find out that he was one of them, not for a while.’
‘He was actually one of the team who got into the embassy?’
‘No, no. Just in the Regiment. Though he never made a thing out of it, never. In fact, not long after we got engaged he said he was thinking of leaving, he’d had enough. But… he didn’t go until he had to. And by then he didn’t want to.’
‘You mentioned something being history. What was that?’
Clouds were lowering like a big gloved hand over the southern Black Mountains and the air was occasionally ripped by the screams of duelling chainsaws from middle-distant woodland.
‘Yes,’ Liz said eventually. ‘The trouble between Colin and Syd. I may have mentioned it to Barry, once.’
‘I’m trying to clear up a few things. Syd and I worked together… in the…’
Merrily lifted a hand to her dog collar. Liz nodded as if she understood, said she thought Colin and Syd had been quite close friends in the Regiment. So she was pleased – at first – when Syd had turned up one afternoon, not long after the publication of the first book.
Just passing through, Syd had said. Colin had been out when he arrived, and he said he’d wait and they had a pot of tea, Syd and Liz, and quite a long chat. Syd had not long been ordained as a minister, and Liz remembered he’d said it was as if his innocence had been restored.
‘I think it was something he’d been building up to. Coming to see Colin. Not just passing at all.’
‘Did they meet in the end?’
‘It was a Sunday. Colin had been out shooting. As soon as he walked in, I sensed… It was like an encounter between two hostile wild animals. Colin still had his shotgun and a bag with what he’d shot – wood pigeons, I think. Standing there with his gun under his arm. I said, Well, I’m sure you two have a lot to catch up on. I was uncomfortable. The whole atmosphere had changed, and I realized there was something badly wrong between them. I don’t think they even noticed me go out.’
‘So you didn’t hear what they talked about.’
‘I didn’t want to.’ Liz looked agitated. ‘I shut myself in the kitchen and put the radio on, loud. Classic FM. If there’d been guests in, I don’t know what I’d’ve done, but it was out of season. I heard Syd shout, in quite an anguished voice, “They’re dead! They’re all dead now!” Didn’t see him leave.’
‘Who might he have meant? All dead.’
Liz looked out of the window. There was a long view over pastureland, channelled by woodland, to the foothills of the Black Mountains and then the smoky shelf of the mountains themselves.
‘I don’t know, my dear. Colin never mentioned it afterwards. I do know that resolving a dispute with Colin was never easy. He didn’t forgive anyone quickly, if at all. And, of course, he always seemed to despise the Church, even though we were married in one. I didn’t like to mention that before, with you being… He once said Christianity was… not a man’s religion. Certainly not a soldier’s religion.’
‘So could the antagonism between Colin and Syd have been anything to do with the fact that Syd had taken up a religion that Colin had no time for?’
Merrily shifted in the squashy chair. For a moment there, she’d felt something of Syd Spicer in the place. The quietness of him, almost an absence, a soul in camouflage.
‘Possibly… I don’t know,’ Liz said. ‘I thought… this sounds silly, but I kept thinking it was something to do with the books.’
The books had started not long before Byron had left the private-security company in Hereford. When the foreign jobs had become fewer. He’d begun talking about all the money that guys like the man known as Andy McNab were making from SAS memoirs and spin-off novels.
Liz took Merrily upstairs, where there were five bedrooms off the landing, the doors of all of them hanging open. A scent of fresh linen and a light musk from a dish of pot-pourri on a window sill.
Five doors open, one closed: narrow, Gothic-shaped, midway along the landing. The tower room, where Byron had written his books.
‘A lot of controversy at the time about SAS memoirs. The Ministry of Defence didn’t like it and Colin thought they were right. When some new regulations were imposed to make it harder for them, he thought that was good. He always said that what he was doing wouldn’t affect national security in the least. Because his books weren’t about the SAS. Well, not directly.’
‘This is the ancient Britons, the Celts against the Romans?’
‘He said all he was doing was using his experience of close combat to show what it was really like. He was going to be the first writer to really get inside the heads of the old warriors. He used to go running up the hill, where there’s a Celtic fort.’
‘Credenhill? But I thought—’
‘No, the other one. Dinedor. The old Stirling Lines was close to it.’
That was interesting. The SAS had moved its headquarters from the shadow of one Iron Age fortified hill to a site directly below another.
‘I think some Roman remains were also found around the camp itself, and he was very interested in that. He joined a local history group. In fact…’ Liz’s forehead furrowed ‘… I’m not sure they didn’t actually form it themselves.’
‘While still in the Regiment?’
‘He’d read a lot of books. By the time he left, he knew all about the Celts and the Romans. And he had this idea about Caractacus, who he called Caradog, the Welsh name. Colin’s family was from Wales, although he was born in London. The later books were written in the first person – as if he was Caradog, you know?’
‘I’ve only seen the first one.’
‘He was furious when publishers kept turning him down. One of them said it had all been done before, and Colin rang the man up and raged at him – no, this has never been done before, you… effing idiot.’
‘Was it always going to be for children?’
‘Oh, no. No, it wasn’t. It made him furious when the only publisher who was interested said it should be written for children. He said he was going to forget the whole thing. Then the publisher came to see him. A woman. I think she’d persuaded him it was going to make a lot of money.’
‘How many has he written?’
‘Five. He’d stopped by the time we parted. He was quite bitter. Used to say they’d led him on with lies about selling the books all over the world. But they only ever sold one – to America, and the Americans demanded all kinds of changes which made him angry. His publishers kept saying it would build a readership when it became a series, but it never really happened. It was always going to be the next one.’
Liz unlocked the door of the tower room, and the pot-pourri scent followed them up four steps from the landing. The room was west-facing, white-painted walls, one small window. No furniture, only cleaning utensils, bathroom sprays and bumper packs of toilet tissue.
‘He’d shut himself in here for whole days… He could go a long time without meals. I was glad at first when the publishers wanted him to go to schools and talk to children, to promote the books. But he hated that. He didn’t particularly like children. Or pets. An encumbrance. He didn’t like encumbrances.’
Liz looked down at the boarded floor. Had she wanted children and Byron hadn’t?
‘Wouldn’t make any concessions in the books, to young people. I tried to read them, but I had to skip some of it. Scenes where people are garrotted and… worse. There was a lot of bad feeling with the publishers, in the end. His editor… she rang one day, when he was out, very upset. He didn’t like having a woman edit his books. She sounded quite frightened, actually. Very shrill. He didn’t write another one after that. Broke his contract, but they didn’t try to stop him or get any money back. I think they were worried about antagoni
zing him any more.’
‘Were you frightened, Liz?’
‘I’d learned to keep out of his way when he was angry. I kept thinking of what my father said. The pressure he must’ve been under, the things he’d had to do. He certainly never touched me… in anger. When things became too much, he’d go out walking a lot. And shooting. Sometimes he’d stay out all night. I got used to it. Well, you have to, don’t you?’
Liz had left the door of the tower room wide open, pushed back against the wall. She was standing against the frame, her hair coming loose.
‘Some nights he wouldn’t come home, and there’d be no explanation. I never once thought about other women. He didn’t like women enough. I knew he went to Hereford, drinking with his mates, and I just assumed he was unfit to drive and sleeping on someone’s sofa. Seems everyone knew except me. But then, I’m not very bright. He used to say that.’
Merrily sighed. Liz tried vainly to pile her hair back.
‘Stella, who helps here, told me in the end. I think she was embarrassed on my behalf. Not like it was just one woman. He was playing the field. As if he was in his twenties again. In the pubs and the clubs. He was… you know, walking out with them. Stella’s brother’s a minicab driver in town, and he picked Colin up twice with different women. Drunk and all over one another in the back. I was sick to my stomach, and it took me a long time to ask him about it. When I did, he admitted it at once. Apologized and offered to find me a good lawyer. All very businesslike.’
‘How long ago was this?’
‘We’ve been divorced exactly two and a half years. Married Paul last year – known each other since we were kids. It’s fine. It’s all right. Quieter now. I was glad when Colin took his books away – all the second-hand books he’d bought for research. Not the kind of books you wanted guests to see. Pagan religions and the occult. I was always worried he’d leave this door unlocked and someone would come in and… Don’t like this room.’
You could see the marks where bookshelves had been taken out. Liz’s hair had come free now, like a cloud of white steam. She swivelled her head, looking from wall to wall, as if there might be blood oozing out of the plaster.
