by Phil Rickman
The lights were unhealthily bright, halogen hell. Sollers dragged out a chair and sat down directly opposite them.
‘Bliss?’ he said. ‘Or Sergeant Dowell?’
Annie Howe was motionless.
‘Pot… kettle… black,’ Sollers said.
‘You have any proof of this, Mr Bull?’
‘Mrs Bliss has been aware of it for quite some time. And she should know, don’t you think?’
Annie was silent for a couple of seconds.
‘Yes,’ she said quite slowly. ‘She should know.’
‘And all this,’ Sollers said, ‘relates to the murder of my brother how?’
‘Did your brother know?’
No hesitation from Annie. In the pink light, Sollers Bull’s face froze for just an instant.
‘Your brother,’ Annie said. ‘Did he know about the resumption of your friendship with Mrs Bliss?’
‘My brother and I didn’t discuss social life. We moved in different circles. And you know what, Annie? I’m not putting up with this any longer. I’m going to ask you to leave.’
‘Did your brother know?’
‘Get out,’ Sollers said.
Annie Howe drove the Audi back up the track with the headlights on full beam, took the left at a fork, let the car crawl up to the stone gateposts and a cracked sandstone sign.
OLDCASTLE
The metal gate to the drive was closed, no lights. Rearing beyond it, the house looked to Merrily like a derelict nursing home: three storeys, a flat sheen of moonlight like tin plate on its highest windows.
Annie Howe flashed the Audi’s headlights at the gates and waited, lowering her window as a uniformed policeman emerged from a smaller gate to the side of the main entrance.
‘Don’t bother with the big gates, George, I’ll leave the car out here.’
‘Ma’am, you do know they’re looking for you?’
‘I can imagine. I’m not here.’
‘Bad night, Ma’am.’
‘Yes.’
‘I never trust a full moon,’ George said.
‘Nonsense.’ Howe turned to Merrily. ‘You spare me another hour?’
‘You had a phone call. Before you started talking to Sollers Bull.’
Annie Howe pushed her hair back.
‘Yes. I had a phone call.’ She parked to the left of the gates, leaving the engine running. ‘The woman Bliss was looking for, the prime suspect in the Marinescu case… he found her.’
‘Oh.’
‘She was attending – if not running – an illegal cockfight in the cellar of a well-known flophouse and brothel on the Plascarreg. The woman is a large, violent sociopath, and the cellar was also full of men who have no reason to love the police. For reasons known only to himself, Bliss went down there. On his own.’
‘Oh God…’
‘At 19.20, a 999 call was made by the elderly woman who owns the place. Uniform turned out in force, blocked all the entrances to the Plascarreg, caught the suspect trying to smash someone else’s car through a security fence. Five other arrests. Males.’
‘And…?’
‘Bliss was found in the ring. He was taken to Hereford and then transferred to the ICU.’ Annie Howe’s face was tinted in the bitter-orange haze of the dashboard lights as the engine died. ‘They say he’s in what, in a few hours, will probably qualify as a coma.’
Shouldering open the car door, ejecting herself into the night.
71
Something Insane
IT WAS COLD now; there might even have been a frost. A stray cloud was draped like a washed-out rag over the bowl of the moon, the only lamp was in the farmyard at Oldcastle.
‘You haven’t got a coat?’ Annie Howe said.
‘It was actually quite springlike earlier on. I just jumped in the car.’
‘I’ve got a spare one in the boot, if you…’
‘Listen,’ Merrily said, ‘shouldn’t you be back in Hereford?’
‘I’m not a doctor.’
Annie Howe walked away into the centre of the yard. She had a flashlight but hadn’t switched it on. The mobile incident room was parked at the top of the drive, the bulk of it concealed by an extended barn.
The yard was far too quiet for a farm.
‘We had to get the livestock moved,’ Annie Howe said, ‘so forensic could spend some time in the sheds and barns. Not that they turned up anything useful.’
The flagstones were slick underfoot as if the blood was still here, still wet. Merrily thought about those apocryphal stories where the blood from a murder never dried.
‘Are they going to call you, if… if there’s any change?’
‘Dowell’s at the hospital.’
‘You do know there’s no truth in what he said about Bliss and Karen Dowell?’
Yet was it so unlikely that Frannie Bliss, in the long nights of the coldest winter for many years, would seek refuge with someone who spoke his language? Maybe why he’d been so remote lately?
‘Dowell has more sense,’ Annie Howe said. ‘Either Bull’s lying, or Kirsty’s got the wrong end of the stick. Not that… there necessarily is a stick.’
The edge had gone from her voice. Drained of attitude, she looked waiflike in the moonlight. The long coat was buttoned around her throat; she sank both hands into its pockets, staring at the ground.
‘Jesus Christ, I thought he knew Sollers was sleeping with his wife.’
‘How could you know and he didn’t?’
‘It emerged during routine inquiries. Stagg found out. Couldn’t wait to tell me. I couldn’t imagine how Francis could fail to know about his wife’s former relationship, but you forget how secretive rural families can be. I realise now that if he had known he would’ve been very polite and distant with Sollers and unloaded the investigation on someone else long before he was ordered to.’
‘To give himself some space to stitch Sollers up from behind?’
‘You really do know him, don’t you?
‘I’d probably have been more help in there if I’d known what you were looking for,’ Merrily said.
‘I’ve never known anyone break down and confess to a serious crime. You know you’re actually getting somewhere when they start to say no comment, meaning yes, I did it, now prove it.’
‘Did he say no comment?’
‘He told us to get out. If he was entirely innocent he’d be determined to carry on talking until he’d convinced us of it. “Get out” means “I need time to think.”’
Annie Howe gazed at the moon’s bevelled reflection in one of Oldcastle’s attic windows. Merrily was thinking that if this was anyone else she’d be asking if they could pray together for Frannie. Most of them would humour her.
‘Nobody’s allowed in to see him,’ Annie said. ‘When they are, I’ll be there.’
‘Good.’
Merrily looked up at the cold-haloed moon, recalling the first time she’d met Bliss. The spiritual cleansing of a country church which had been desecrated: a crow’s entrails spread over the altar, a stench of urine. Early days for her, then, in deliverance; she’d asked if they could send a cop who might believe that what she was doing wasn’t a joke. Bliss had been a detective sergeant then, with a fullish head of ginger hair. I’m a Catholic. That all right for you?
Merrily prayed silently, alone, eyes wide open, head still fogged with shock.
Annie Howe said, ‘I need to get a feeling for what might have happened on the night Mansel Bull died. I think I actually need to get yours.’
She walked away, across the flags, to a taped-off area halfway between the biggest barn and the house.
‘You can waste a lot of time looking for a motive. Forensics have overtaken psychology. You no longer need to show why someone did it, just that they did. Most convicted murderers come out of court in the back of the van and we still don’t know why.’
‘You still seemed to be presenting Sollers Bull with a selection of motives.’
‘Oh yes. Did Mansel know a
bout the affair with Bliss’s wife, and how did he feel about that? He and Kirsty’s father were the biggest farmers in the area – were they friends or was there rivalry? Did Sollers want Mansel out of the way because the growing divergence of their ideas on the future of farming was threatening his plans? Was he afraid that Mansel was going to marry again, maybe this time producing offspring? And then there’s the sale of the land to Magnis Berries. Did Mansel really do it without consulting Sollers? Now – why did you ask Sollers if his brother was superstitious?’
‘You won’t like this.’
‘I didn’t even like you asking the question.’
‘It was when Sollers said Mansel didn’t feel it was part of his farm. An old-fashioned farmer. Instinctive. Meaning he followed his feelings. The implication was that he didn’t like that ground, even though he’d bought it himself. Was it just not productive… or what?’
Annie Howe said, ‘You’ll need to explain, as if to an idiot.’
‘Everything here is built on or around the Roman town Magnis. There are superstitions connected with parts of the area. It’s unlikely that Mansel hadn’t heard the stories. A particular field gets a reputation for being unlucky. Crops failing, stock dying, tractor accidents…’
Merrily sensed a dampening of the air between them.
‘It’s what I do, Annie. The alternative path. You get tired of being defensive in the face of the secular society. Even your copper down there…’
‘Didn’t trust the full moon.’
‘You get the same with paramedics and nurses in A and E. Night of the full moon, increased violence. Surveys prove it. Apparently. So tell me, where does irrational superstition begin? There’s an old farmer out at Bishopstone or somewhere who’s seen misty figures in the river mist, and some appear real and some don’t. He talks of one with a bird’s head. Followers of Mithras would wear masks to signify whichever grade they’d attained. One of the grades is the raven.’
Men who had been reappearing.
‘So who was the hallucination drenched in blood?’ Annie said.
When they reached the barn doors, two spotlights blazed into life high up on the house wall. As though a play was about to begin on the stage of weathered stone flags. Annie Howe fingered the police tape.
‘Around six forty-five p.m., on the night of the storm, Mansel Bull sets out for his parish council meeting, then receives a call on his mobile from the council clerk to say it’s been called off because of the weather. Mansel turns his Range Rover round and heads home. Who knew he’d be attending a council meeting? The other councillors and the clerk. And his brother, Sollers.’
She moved to the double doors opposite the farmhouse.
‘In both these barns there were cattle. Herefords. Including, in a separate stall, one bull.’
‘You know that?’
‘From Sollers himself who initially was pointing us at rustlers. Now if – for the sake of argument – there was a plan to take some of Mansel’s cattle, the night of the parish council, which Mansel never missed, might be seen as the most appropriate time.’
‘Wouldn’t Sollers know if something on that scale was happening? It would take several people.’
‘The coach house is lower down the hill, screened by trees and reached by a different turn-off from the main drive. They could easily get up here without being seen. And, on a night like that, without being heard. Perfect conditions, in fact, for crow-barring a barn door.’
‘Was the barn door forced?’
‘No. Perhaps because it didn’t get that far. Because Mansel returned in the middle of it.’
‘And they killed him?’
‘Could easily be that simple. If Jones and his Mithraism are irrelevant. Now give me your take on it.’
‘Me?’
‘Tell me something insane.’
From the top of the farmyard you could make out, in the moonlight, the silver eel that was the River Wye. Always venerated, sometimes claiming sacrifices. Part of the landscape that the Romans knew.
Oldcastle was part of it, too, a vantage point, perhaps built inside the long-flattened ramparts of a minor Iron Age hill fort. Or a Roman site, with Roman masonry now built into the foundations of this house. Sollers hadn’t been specific. Perhaps he didn’t know. Perhaps he did.
Back at the edge of the police tape, Merrily bent and lit a cigarette. She was wearing Annie Howe’s checked woollen coat. The sleeves were too long, but it was a cold night.
‘In weather like that, most of us prefer to go home and bar the doors against the wind, but when you’re encouraged to go out and use its energy…’
‘Paganism again.’
‘Most kinds of paganism work with natural energy. If you’re in what might be considered a haunted landscape, or one that you believe to be conditioned by over a thousand years of military endeavour… I’m just giving you the received wisdom. Tell me to stop whenever you like. I was interested in Byron’s description of sacrificial ritual that doesn’t end in blood.’
‘This is the man who makes his own way here, camps in a field, goes on a fast… Is it necessary for the sacrifice to be done in the temple?’
‘I don’t know. If this was a Roman site, part of the extended Magnis… then they might find some justification for doing it right here. Leave quite a mess though, wouldn’t it?’
‘Rustlers have been known to butcher animals in the fields,’ Annie said. ‘That’s what it would look like – butchery. For the meat. All right. So, developing the idea that there was a plan to take Mansel’s bull and have it slaughtered…’
‘The candidate arrives at the height of the storm. Maybe accompanied, maybe not. Part of the challenge? You have to imagine someone who’s been through all the grades – the heat and the cold and the near-death, whatever – has now reached the point where he’s ready to take on, for a short time, the role of the god himself. He’s on fire.’
‘But these are…’ Tension creases in Annie Howe’s spotlit face illustrating the hard time she was having with all this. ‘These are educated men?’
‘Annie, high-level Freemasons, ritual magicians… they’re all educated men. Businessmen, financiers, guys in massively competitive industries, powered by testosterone, not known for their sensitivity… And right now they’re angry and disillusioned, reeling under accusations of collapsing the Western economy and walking away with their massive unde-served bonuses.’
‘Fallen masters of the universe. OK, I’ll buy it for the moment. How might this escalate to the murder of a man? Anybody can be a killer if there’s enough anger, greed, ambition, repressed sexuality. How about the candidate?’
‘You get drawn into something and if it’s changing your life for what seems like the better, you’re not going to jump off when it starts to get… extreme. Artificial stimulants might also be involved. The Romans seem to have used something called, I think, haoma.’
Miss White’s drug of war. Combined with dogma and ritual and a physical regime built around commitment to a deity, real or symbolic. Could it be recreated? Bull’s blood and magic mushrooms.
‘Nothing like a brew.’ Merrily smiled wearily. ‘As they say in the Regiment.’
Chemically-enhanced excitement in the middle of a raging wind where you could hardly hear yourself think.
Annie said, ‘Suppose Sollers knew about this. Told them what night his brother’s going to be out, what time he leaves, what time he usually comes back from the council. Or was actually there, when his brother was killed? There’s time. All we know is that he was at his restaurant at seven-thirty and he wasn’t covered with blood. What if Sollers was here to see it? Extreme blood sport.’
Male model in hunting pink, Merrily thought. Ridiculously vain. A figurehead for Countryside Defiance, which he both supported and despised.
‘And then Mansel’s back unexpectedly,’ Annie said, ‘and here’s his beloved little brother and a man with a large knife.’
Merrily closed her eyes, watched Mansel
Bull’s headlights blasting between the bars of the gate, Mansel barrelling towards them through the wind-whipped night.
Who’s this?
It’s Mansel. Mansel Bull.
The Bull. The Bull in his citadel.
The symbolism was both insane and inescapable.
Annie Howe was standing at the high point of the farmyard, looking down between the bare trees at the moonlit Wye. Her face latticed with white light and shifting shadows.
‘He has to come through this.’ Barely a whisper. ‘Bliss.’
‘Yes.’
72
Sham
THE SMELL REACHED Jane first. Didn’t smell like any church or temple she’d ever been in or imagined. Not herbs, not incense. More like a meat store. The smell of raw meat always made her feel slightly sick now, and she thought about the beautiful dead cockerel with his golden mane.
Cornel shone his torch around for her. It was smaller than it had looked in the picture on his phone. Half the size of a chapel, one of those cold Welsh Nonconformist chapels. Jane could hear echoes of her own hyped-up breathing.
‘Go on,’ Cornel said. ‘Go down.’
‘Hold on.’
The torch opened up a panel of light in front of her. She was in the wide trench down the middle.
‘This is it?’ Carefully, Jane stood up. ‘This is where they hold the cockfights?’
It was like a car workshop, with a pit where the car was ramped up. There was a long rectangular gulley down the middle of the floor. On either side of it, rough ledges or benches like seating areas. Much of this below ground level, sunk into the foundations of the hut. So it was a Nissen hut built over a rectangular pit or a trench, as dug by archaeologists.
Cornel was jumping down the steps, pushing past her and strolling along the trench like he owned the place. Pretty clear now that he’d been snorting coke. Talking faster, moving weirdly. Eirion had done coke, just the once – well, as far as Jane knew. Eirion had said it was like ten minutes of cloud nine and then an hour or so all pumped up before you needed some more.
