To Dream of the Dead

‘Electrical goods, small chain of discount shops. Lucrative in their time. Gone before you arrived here, I think. His daughters weren’t interested in taking it on.’

‘You don’t think Helen will stay?’

‘I think she’ll be off as soon as he’s buried.’ Sophie came to sit down. ‘It was a dream gone sour. A rather naive dream. I don’t know what he promised her, but she had this vision of an elegant, graceful life in the Cathedral Close. Civilised dinner parties, receptions, nights at the theatre. This is just… just a market town with a cathedral.’

Sophie looked up at the soiled ceiling, wrinkled her nose. ‘All the changes she was going to make to the house and wasn’t allowed to. What’s wrong with it? he used to say, and I think he really didn’t know. Self-made man, you see, his father was a manual worker. Mrs Thatcher — you saw the photo?’

‘Mmm.’

‘His idol. The small-businessman’s daughter. Waste not, want not. He loved it when she was advising us to stock up on tinned food. He’d go to Tesco and come back with nine tins of stewed steak. Also thought — like Mrs T — that the worst thing to happen to the twentieth century was the 1960s.’

Merrily said nothing. If there was a margin between this and Sophie’s own philosophy, it was slender.

‘And she actually didn’t realise any of this before she married him?’

‘He was — I’ve heard this from quite a few people — a very different man when he was away from home. He was always dynamic, in a heavy sort of way, full of a sometimes alarming energy. And away from Hereford he became… expansive. Generous, charming. As if he saw himself as an ambassador. Helen was exposed to the full force of it, at a particularly vulnerable time in her life.’

Sophie got up and went to the door to check if the police were still in the house.

‘Familiar story. Still living at home, caring for her disabled father. And then he died, leaving a void she had no idea how to fill. Clement Ayling was rather good at filling voids.’ She came back and sat down. ‘I’d guess it barely survived the wedding. Within two years she was almost suicidal. But wouldn’t leave, you see — couldn’t. She’d made her bed.’

‘So this row they had — what do you think that was about?’

‘She’s not going to tell anyone now, Merrily. To be quite honest, I’d’ve thought a row would have been almost a positive step. Most of the time they hardly communicated any more. Helen said the council was most of what he’d become… I’d go further. Since he sold the business, the council was all of him.’

‘So…’ No way of edging around this. ‘Frannie Bliss suspects that Helen might have had something to do with Ayling’s death? Is that what you’re thinking?’

Sophie stared at the closed door, her hands around the small brown teapot. A tea-for-two, waste-not-want- not kind of teapot.

Merrily said, ‘That why I’m here, Sophie? Second opinion?’

‘Given—’ Anxiety bloomed in Sophie’s eyes. ‘Given the nature of his death, that seems… barely conceivable.’

‘We don’t know the nature of his death. Only what was done to him, presumably afterwards. His whole body could be in… portable fragments.’

Sophie was rigid now, palms flat on the table.

‘Oh, look,’ Merrily said, ‘Bliss would just be going through the motions. When there’s a murder, the first person who needs to be eliminated is the partner. Because… in most cases, the partner did it. And you just said yourself that she was desperate. Suicidal.’

‘I said almost suicidal. She got used to it, Merrily, as people usually do. As women of my generation almost always did.’

‘No, you’re right,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

Dismissing the image of a wretched, half-demented Helen Ayling carrying her husband’s head through the Christmas crowds in a shopping bag. But it was no surprise that they’d checked out the tool shed.

Merrily sat back. Her stomach felt like an empty fridge. She wanted to pray, preferably over a cigarette.

Sophie said, ‘If Inspector Bliss thinks—’

‘Sophie… whatever Bliss thinks doesn’t matter any more. It’s what…’ Merrily nodded at the door. ‘It’s what she thinks.’

‘We should go.’

Sophie was on her feet, carrying the crockery to the sink, numbly turning on taps. Merrily found a tea towel, and they performed, in silence, a domestic ritual which might never seem as comfortingly familiar again.

They left by the back door, not speaking until they were in the alley. The rain had thinned; the sun was a voyeur behind dirty curtains of cloud.

Merrily was thinking that Howe and whoever was carrying her bag might be closeted with Helen until dark.

‘I’ll come back later,’ Sophie said. ‘When they’ve gone.’

‘Be slightly careful, Sophie.’

‘I shall sit and listen. Without questioning.’ Sophie had put up the golf umbrella, a garish blossom in the drizzle on Castle Street. ‘Do you want to come back for something to eat, Merrily? It really won’t take me—’

‘No… thank you. Really, I need to get back. Get out of these clothes.’

Merrily saw that there was still a car across the street, parked on the double yellow lines. Sophie turned to walk home, looking back over her shoulder.

‘I’ll call you tonight. After I’ve talked to Helen.’

‘I’d be glad if you would.’

Walking back to the Volvo, Merrily felt choked up with doubt and uncertainty about something that was not her business. And apprehension about Sophie, about whom she harboured no doubts, no uncertainties.

As she reached the unmarked police car, another car pulled in behind it, a window gliding down.

‘You got time for a coffee, Reverend?’ Frannie Bliss said.

14 Joy to the World

In a Chromium cafe on Broad Street, Bliss was taking his filter coffee black, to match his mood. His face was sallow with freckles, his hair had been eroded beyond comb-over to the shaven stage, never totally convincing in December.

Not yet forty, looked older.

‘She wants me out,’ he said.

At barely four p.m., the day was signing off. The winter-holiday lights over the street were ice blue and sea green. No angels, no Santas, no reindeer.

‘Hang on in there, Frannie,’ Merrily said. ‘She might be up for a transfer to the Met or something.’

Bliss looked up over his bitter coffee with a bitter little smile. ‘Merrily, I meant Kirsty.’

‘Oh God.’ Merrily lowering her mug. ‘I thought you’d managed to… deal with things.’

‘You can only paper over the cracks so many times before the paste stops sticking and the frigging paper falls off.’

‘What about the kids? It’s… Christmas.’

‘Oh, Christmas helps. We always went to the in-laws’ farm for Christmas. Gorra lot more going for it, for kids, than a semi in Marden.’

‘That’s where they’ve gone?’

‘The farm, yeh. Only this time they won’t be coming back on Boxing Day. The house… the house we can flog, for less than we paid last year, or I can buy Kirsty’s half — the options were efficiently outlined for me in an email waiting on me lappie. By wanting me out, I meant out of her life, not necessarily off the premises, if I can buy her out. Lucky me.’

‘God, I’m so sorry, Frannie. Look, if there’s any—’

‘Got in, in good time for breakfast, she’s already buggered off. Even turned the heating off. Shut the frigging