To Dream of the Dead

‘—According to Mr Shah.’

‘Mr Shah. Right. OK. Let’s deal with that aspect first, in case you’re about to — It was night and half the shops were shut. I did not even notice what colour the kid was. I assure you — and community support will corroborate it — that this kid was chugging full-strength lager and appeared intoxicated. And he did throw it down in the street, after spraying lager at this long-suffering anti- drink campaigner in a monkey suit. As for the obscene language… I told them to piss off. That was it.’

‘You told a thirteen-year-old boy to piss off.’

‘You should’ve heard him!’

‘And did you also call him a twat?’

‘Aw, Jesus, I call everybody a twat! It’s hardly…’ Bliss shut his eyes. After all his efforts to tone down his language, successfully reducing fucking to frigging, for the sake of his kids, he just wasn’t having this. ‘And — you can confirm this with the plastic plods — I never laid a hand on any of those kids, nor did I threaten to. I most certainly did not threaten to beat the shit out of him. Come on… in the centre of town? In public?’

‘It seems you expressed a preference for somewhere less public. Like a cell stinking of vomit?’

‘Jesus, it’s what you do, isn’t it? You give the little — You give them a bit of a scare and send them on their way. It saves a lorra…’ Paperwork. Bliss shut up. Howe’s entire career had been fabricated out of paper.

Silence. Even the frigging rain holding off.

‘No.’ Annie Howe’s voice like ice splitting on a January pond. ‘It isn’t what you do. It’s what some stupid, crass policemen used to do. In the bad old days.’

And then she’d filled in the background for him — why this was not something he could just walk away from, with two fingers in the air. Seemed that most of what happened had been witnessed by a neighbour of Shah’s from Lyde, north of the city. Thought next day that he ought to tell Shah that his son had been involved in what appeared to be a binge-drinking incident in the centre of Hereford. The little twat had obviously lied through his teeth about what had happened to avoid a backlash at home.

A public incident; now this Mr Shah wanted a public apology.

‘In that case,’ Bliss had told Howe, ‘I will personally pay a visit to Mr Shah and put him fully in the pic—’

‘You will not go near Mr Shah.’

‘Jes—’ Bliss gripping his knees. ‘All right, what about the plastic plods? You’ve presumably got their statements?’

‘We have.’

‘And?’

‘The community support officers say that while the accusation of littering was legitimate—’

‘Exactly.’

‘—Both agree that what happened was an entirely manageable situation and they had not — nor would have — requested any assistance.’

‘Aw, come on, there was no way—’

‘They say, in fact, that the situation was undoubtedly inflamed by your uncalled-for and unnecessary—’

‘The lying shites!’

‘Bliss…’ Howe finally rising up. ‘I don’t care which of you is lying. What I do care about is having a senior officer implicated in a trivial but potentially damaging and highly public incident while the rest of us are working flat-out on what’s turning out to be the most—’ Howe waving the Daily Press in Bliss’s face ‘—high-profile homicide investigation in the history of this city. Now, I don’t know what your problem is… my information is that it’s personal and domestic. But you’d better either keep it under control or seek counselling… and meanwhile give some serious thought to drafting a suitably arse-licking apology to this bloody man before he takes it any further.’

‘Ma’am, I think you ought to—’

‘Don’t say anything else. Get out of here. Talk to the people we discussed and give me a report. You know what I’m looking for.’ And, as he was leaving, she’d told him explicitly where he stood, looking down at the papers on her desk, making the odd note, delivering the message as a partly absent afterthought.

‘If anybody can get you out of this,’ Annie Howe had said, ‘it will probably have to be me.’

She hadn’t looked up. No need to.

Bliss laid his head on the steering wheel, forehead against the fuzzy tiger-striped cover the kids had bought him last Father’s Day. Remembering the hollow quiet in the incident room, half-full by then, when he went back that way, looking for Karen Dowell.

Aware also that, having been briefed by Howe and sent out on his own by nine a.m., he’d effectively been excluded from Morning Assembly and was in no position to complain.

Lol ran downstairs and flung open the front door. The rain washed Merrily inside. Lol was exasperated.

‘You’ve got a key…’

Why did she never seem to use her key, like she might be some kind of intrusion into his space?

‘Yeah, I know.’ Slipping out of her coat, hanging it over the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, where Lucy Devenish used to hang her poncho. ‘I forgot it. I just… walked out. Needed to talk to somebody.’

‘Somebody?’

‘Sorry.’ She put her arms around him. ‘This is ridiculous.’

‘What is?’

‘This.’

Merrily went back to her coat, pulled a brown paper bag from a pocket, handed it to him. Lol shook out the paperback book, recognised it at once, from hoardings in London and the sides of bus shelters.

It was the hole that did it. It wasn’t a black hole, just grey. A grey hole in a shiny, silver-blue sky, and when you opened the cover it exposed not a title page but a blank page, all grey, at the bottom of which it said:

nothing… what did you expect?

‘I don’t get it,’ Lol said. ‘You bought this?’

‘Just now.’

‘You bought Mathew Stooke’s best-selling guide to living—’ he read from the back cover ‘—a balanced, guiltless life without the pointless tedium of God…?’

‘Begrudging every penny,’ Merrily said. ‘But I suppose we ought to support our neighbours.’

20 Government Health Warning

The wood-burning stove wasn’t very big, but was more than enough for this room. One of the newer ones with glass that didn’t fog, two reddening logs melting into one another, the whole chamber flushed pink and orange, a beacon in the greyness of the day.

Sinking into the sofa under the giant Mars Bar beam, legs extended into the heat, Merrily almost fell asleep. Damn it, so much cosier here than the big, draughty vicarage.

Marry me, Lol. Take me away.

She blinked, shocked at herself, sat up. Lol was coming in from the kitchen with mugs of tea. She put out a hand, looked up into the eyes behind his round brass-rimmed glasses.