To Dream of the Dead

moved to.’

‘It hasn’t happened yet, Jim, we can still ob—’

‘I meant the whole county. Nobody’s ever gonner forget it was Ayling who stuck to it as half the secondary schools would be gone within five years because of the council getting squeezed. But that en’t how I see it. If they can afford new shopping centres, they can afford to keep the schools open. We got more bloody supermarkets in Hereford than any city of its size in the country — did you know that? All the time, they’re expanding on what we don’t need and cutting back on what we do, and it… it’s bloody wrong.’

Merrily nodded. What could you say?

‘No,’ Jim said, ‘I never thought anything like this would ever happen yere, but then I never thought to see so many strangers in the city — criminals, a lot of’em — only gotter read the court cases in the Hereford Times. It’s out of control, it is. We’re all rushing to the edge of the bloody cliff. I dunno how you do your job — trying to find the good in people.’

‘Jim, if we—’

‘Brenda wants to sell up,’ Jim said.

‘The shop?’ Merrily looked up at him, one hand in her wallet. ‘Leave the shop?’

‘Gonner be sixty-six next time. Old enough to remember how, when you caught a youngster nicking sweets, you clipped him round the yearole and told his dad, and his dad’d give him a good hiding on top. Nowadays you just gotter raise your voice, bloody dad’s in threatening to take you apart.’

Merrily sighed.

‘You know what done it for Brenda? That armed robbery up in Shropshire — you see that on the local news? Country village, shop just like this, with a post office at the back. Brenda says, that’s it, time to get rid.’

Merrily glanced up to the top of the store, where Shirley West hunched behind reinforced glass. It was widely known that Brenda Prosser had never wanted to take on the post office, for this very reason: all that money on the premises. But with the Post Office flogging off most of its premises, it was the back of the Eight Till Late or nothing.

Neither Jim nor Brenda was qualified to run a post office, but if they’d refused it wouldn’t have gone down at all well in Ledwardine. Fortunately, Shirley West, having left the bank in Leominster for reasons undisclosed, had been looking for a job. And Shirley had once worked in a post office.

‘I don’t know what to say, Jim. It just wouldn’t be the same.’

‘It already isn’t the same,’ Jim said. ‘Anything else I can get you?’

‘No, I don’t — Yes. Well, just information. The people at Cole Barn…?’

‘The Wintersons? If you’re thinking of trying to get them into church I wouldn’t bother, they’re only renting. Nobody was gonner buy at the kind of price that French outfit were asking. Not now.’

‘No.’

Cole Barn had been acquired, derelict, for conversion by a subsidiary of the company which now owned the Black Swan. Speculators, in other words, and nobody was too upset when it backfired. Executive homes or standing stones, neither would be good news for the privacy of Cole Barn, still on the market after over a year.

‘Yere today, gone tomorrow, these folks,’ Jim said. ‘Not worth the bother.’

‘I’m not allowed to say that. What are they like?’

‘They’re… from the Home Counties somewhere. Woman’s friendly enough in an eyes-everywhere kind of way — I’ll have one of these, some of that… Bit hyper. The husband I’ve never seen. Something you’ve heard, Merrily?’

‘Me? When do I ever hear anything?’ Merrily picked up her cigarettes. ‘You’re not really thinking of going, are you?’

‘Likely next spring. Look at it this way… what’s this shop gonner be worth with a Tesco or a Co-op down the bottom of Church Street? Bugger-all.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Say nothing yet, eh?’ Jim said. ‘We don’t want talk.’

Merrily nodded, zipping up her coat. It had held off raining for all of half an hour but as she left the Eight Till Late it was starting again, like some automated cyclical sprinkler. She moved along the side of the square and under the market hall, walking to the end where, between the oak pillars, you could see into the window of the new bijou bookshop called — God forbid — Ledwardine Livres. Nine thirty, and it was opening a good hour earlier than usual — Christmas market. The blind went up to reveal a narrow window with a display including, she noticed, Richard Dawkins, Ian McEwan and Philip Pullman. Healthy balance towards atheism, then. Or was this paranoia? Maybe not. Above Dawkins’s The God Delusion was a book with a silver-blue cover. The Hole in the Sky.

The O in Hole actually had a hole in it. Merrily went in, collecting a wry smile from the proprietor, Amanda Rubens, late of Stoke Newington, when she laid a copy on the counter.

‘Know thine enemy, vicar?’

‘Something like that,’ Merrily said.

She hadn’t noticed any books in here about local folklore, mysticism, earth mysteries. How things had changed since the shop had been Ledwardine Lore, run by the late Lucy Devenish.

The car was still stinking of last night’s chips. Bliss sat in the parking lot, behind Gaol Street, the session with Annie Howe replaying itself in his head like one of those sick-making seasonal supermarket tape loops of Slade and Roy Wood wishing it could be frigging Christmas every frigging day. Bliss wanting to beat his head on the dash to dislodge Howe’s final ringing dismissal.

‘Go!’

Turning away, like she couldn’t bear to look at him. Like he was some kind of old shit the police service needed to scrape off its new boots. Unbelievable. The Senior Investigating Officer in the crucial early stages of the biggest murder case in Hereford since Roddy Lodge, making time in her schedule to tell him—

Bliss let the window down.

— about one of the consultant orthopaedic surgeons at the County Hospital preparing to file a complaint regarding the treatment of his son by a plain-clothes officer of this division in an incident which had occurred—

Bliss turned his face into the rain.

— two nights ago, during the extended opening period for Christmas shopping in High Town.

‘Mr Shah…’ Howe fingering a report on her desk ‘… alleges that the boy and two friends were being harassed by an over-zealous community support officer who had wrongly accused them of dropping litter.’

‘Wrongly accused them?’

‘When they began to protest their innocence, a man identifying himself as a police officer intervened, threatening to throw Mr Shah’s child into a cell and, I quote, beat the shit out of him.’

Bliss sitting there, staring at Howe. The other side of the glass door, the hall was filling up with cops.

‘The officer did not give his name but, when he began to scream obscenities at the boys—’

‘Scream ob—?’

‘—They noticed he had what was described as a distinctive northern accent. Similar, according to one of the boys, to the comedian Paul O’Grady.’

‘How much flattery can a man take?’

‘You’re not denying you were the officer concerned.’

‘Annie, what I am denying—’

‘Even though, for some reason, DI Bliss, we can’t seem to put our hands on your report of the incident.’

‘That is ridiculous. It wasn’t an incident, by any stretch of the— How old d’you say the kid was?’

‘Thirteen. And why do we have incident reports? Remind me?’

‘This thirteen-year-old was drinking Stella. Not exactly the weakest of lagers.’

‘Orange squash—’

‘Balls.’