To Dream of the Dead

Her face looked thinner, with hollows. They were alone in what had been the medieval heart of Hereford. No shops here, no obvious public buildings, only timber-gabled cottages and three-storey Georgian town houses. Quiet, except for the beating rain and the murmur of old money, what was left of it.

Never mind Baghdad, think how many heads must’ve rolled routinely down here, below the walls of Hereford Castle.

Merrily had found a parking space near the footpath to the Castle Green. Not a stone left of the castle now, unless some remained in the foundations of these steep, solid, private dwellings, one owned by Sophie and her husband, another by…

‘What’s her name?’

‘Helen,’ Sophie said. ‘Ayling. We’ve… known one another for some years.’

‘I’ve heard that name… Ayling… have I?’

‘Well, of course you have.’

But the connection wouldn’t come. Merrily felt damp and uncomfortable in her funeral clothes.

‘She hadn’t reported him missing,’ Sophie said. ‘Hadn’t seen him for more than twenty-four hours, but it wasn’t the first time.’

‘Oh my God, she had to identify…?’

‘No, they spared her that.’ Sophie nodded down the street towards a three-storey terrace of old red brick. ‘It’s the middle one, with the cream door.’

She pointed the umbrella, began to follow it into the road. Merrily stayed at the kerb, getting very wet very quickly.

‘Sophie… why me?’

‘Because you’re…’ Sophie came back, held the umbrella over them both ‘… because you’re a widow and… and a priest. And you mix with these people.’

‘People? You mean the police?’

‘And because you’re here. Helen doesn’t have any relatives.’

Didn’t sound right. A touch nervous now, Merrily let herself be steered into a narrow alley at the end of the terrace, Sophie deciding they wouldn’t use the front door.

‘They’ll see us.’

‘Who?’

‘You didn’t notice the car parked on a double yellow line?’

‘The police?’

‘Watching the house. They wanted a woman to come in and stay with her, a… what do you call them?’

‘Family liaison officer?’

‘Well, even I know what that’s really for. Someone following her around, being solicitous, making tea, hoping she’ll let something slip.’

‘What?’

‘Here.’

Sophie pushed at a mossy, Gothic-pointed door in a high brick wall.

They were in a substantial walled garden. A dead fountain in an overflowing stone pool, rain bouncing angrily from a small conservatory backing on to the house.

‘We were in the Cathedral choir together,’ Sophie said.

As if this explained something.

‘How come no relatives?’

‘Well, not in Hereford, anyway. She met Clement in London when she was a secretary with the Association of County Councils, and he—’

‘Clement?’

‘Clement Ayling.’

‘Christ,’ Merrily said.

A high-ceilinged drawing room. The grandfather clock doing its hollow thock thock in the shadows. Tall windows silvered by the rain, a pastel green glow from a small reading lamp on a coffee table and a crimson glimmer from the fireplace. Pictures on the walls of the same man shaking hands with various notables: Princess Anne, Margaret Thatcher.

‘Merrily lost—’ Sophie coughed. ‘Lost her husband some years ago. In a car crash.’

Helen Ayling looked up, confused, from a brown leather wing chair. ‘And had he stormed out after a row?’ She steadied the white china cup and saucer on her knees. ‘I’m sorry, I—’

‘After several rows, actually,’ Merrily said. ‘Sometimes he walked out, sometimes I walked out. But it’s… hardly the same.’

The atmosphere was different from the dimmed death houses she often had to visit. Unstable here, still slippery with congealing shock. She and Sophie were sharing a creaky leather chesterfield. On the wall behind his widow’s head, Councillor Clem Ayling stood shoulder to shoulder with Bill Clinton — but only, Merrily guessed, for the photo.

‘It was rather stupid of me,’ Helen Ayling said, ‘even to mention the row. But you don’t think, do you? You can’t think. It’s as though everything around you is collapsing.’

No make-up, and her eyes were dry. She was slim and tidy and her short brown hair, though tangled, looked freshly washed. Merrily had imagined she’d be around the same age — who knew? — as Sophie, but she was younger, maybe late forties. So about twenty years younger than Clem Ayling.

‘They said to me, what was it about? What were you arguing about? I said, it’s none of your business, it’s a private matter — we had a row, like couples do, he walked out and he didn’t…’ her voice gave out and she swallowed ‘… come back.’

Merrily looked up at Clement Ayling in the Thatcher photo. A bulky, beaming man with grey hair, crisp and wavy, and an almost-Edwardian moustache. She’d never met him, knew him only by reputation: an old-school Tory, a dinosaur, a throwback.

Merrily’s mouth was dry. Someone had killed a former leader of the city council and cut off his head. All hell would break loose.

‘He’d done it before,’ Helen Ayling said. ‘Last time he booked into the Castle House, just up the street. He has an office, with a change of clothes, and he’d go directly there the following day. After he retired, the council became… most of who he was.’

Merrily nodded.

‘The police said, why didn’t you report him missing? I tried to explain, but they didn’t seem convinced.’ Both hands gripping the cup. ‘Oh, dear God.’

‘When you say the police…?’

‘Man with some sort of Northern accent.’

‘Liverpool?’

‘Perhaps.’

The strategic hypocrisy of the cops. As if they’d have reacted at all, the same night, to a report of a man walking out on his wife. Even if it was a face from the Hereford Times.

Helen Ayling sat up, placing the cup and saucer on the table, shaking her head.

‘I still can’t take it in. The sheer horror of it. When did they do it? He was on foot. Were they waiting somewhere here? Did they take him somewhere to—?’

‘Don’t.’

Sophie reaching over, taking Helen’s hands. Sophie’s eyes suddenly blazing with outrage. That it could happen here. In this most protected, select part of town. This conservation area. Under the Cathedral that Sophie served.

‘The police were all over the house,’ Helen said. ‘And the garden. Putting all the lights on. The tool-shed…’

Yes, they would have to look in the tool shed.

‘You’ll stay with us tonight, Helen?’

‘Sophie, thank you, but… I have to stay here, don’t I? For as long as… Have to get used to it.’