To Dream of the Dead

before they got to sink the first trowel.

‘You going to the parish meeting, Gomer?’

‘Mabbe look in, mabbe not. Nobody gonner listen to an ole gravedigger. You still banned, is it, Janey?’

‘Well, not banned exactly. Mum’s just…’

… politely requested that she stay away.

It’s not going to help, flower. It’s reached the stage where we need a degree of subtlety, or they’re going to win.

Mum thinking the mad kid wouldn’t be able to hold back, would make a scene, heckling Pierce, making the good guys look like loonies.

The brown water flung itself at the old sandstone bridge, and Jane, officially adult now and able to vote against the bastard, bit her lip and felt helpless. Even the riverman was on the point of betraying her.

‘Dreamed about my Min last night,’ Gomer said.

Jane looked at him. His ciggy drooped and his glasses were as grey as stone.

‘Dreamed her was still alive. Us sittin’ together, by the light o’ the fire. Pot of tea on the hob.’

‘But you—’

‘En’t got no hob n’ more. True enough. That was how I knowed it was a dream.’ Gomer steadied his roll-up. ‘Was a good dream, mind. En’t often you gets a good dream, is it?’

Nearly a couple of years now since Minnie’s death. Close to the actual anniversary. Gomer had put new batteries in both their watches and buried them in the churchyard with Minnie. Maybe — Jane shivered lightly — one of the watches had finally stopped and something inside him had felt that sudden empty stillness, the final parting.

‘You know what they says, Janey.’

‘Who?’

‘Sign of rain,’ Gomer said.

‘Sorry?’

‘What they used to say. My ole mam and her sisters. To dream of the dead…’

‘What?’

‘To dream of the dead is a sign of rain.’

‘That’s…’ She stared hard at him. ‘What kind of sense does that make?’

‘Don’t gotter make no partic’lar sense,’ Gomer said. ‘Not direc’ly, like, do it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘These ole sayings, they comes at the truth sideways, kind of thing.’

‘Right,’ Jane said.

It seemed to have gone darker. The clouds had closed down the moon, and the village lights shone brighter as if in a kind of panic. New rain slanted into Jane’s cheeks, sudden, sharp and arrogant, and she thought about her own troubled nights, worrying about the dig, the future, her own future, Eirion…

‘So, like, what’s supposed to happen,’ she said, ‘if you dream about the rain?’

3 See the Rabbit

One of Hereford’s little secrets, this ruin. In daylight, at the bottom of a secret garden surrounded by depots, offices and a school, you could easily miss it; most people, tourists and locals, didn’t even know it existed.

But with night screening the surroundings, Bliss thought, it was a sawn-off Castle Dracula.

‘So where is it?’

Looking around in case he’d been scammed; wouldn’t be the first time these bastards had done it to him, especially around Christmas, but he wouldn’t have expected it of Karen Dowell.

‘The body, Karen?’

Bending his head on the edge of the blurry lamplight to peer into her fresh, farmer’s-wife face.

‘The body… we don’t exactly know, boss,’ Karen said.

‘What?’

Had to be eight of them in the rose garden in front of the monastery. Bliss had registered DC Terry Stagg, several uniforms and two techies, clammy ghosts in their Durex suits.

On balance, too many for a scam. And there was this little trickle of unholy excitement, which would often accompany shared knowledge of something exquisitely repellent.

Bliss looked around, recalling being here once before. One of the kids had been involved in some choir thing at the Coningsby Hospital which fronted the site on lower Widemarsh Street. Coningsby was only a hospital in some old-time sense of the word, more of a medieval chapel with almshouses and an alleyway leading to the rose garden, where there was also a stone cross set into a little tower with steps up to it.

‘’Scuse, please, Francis. Let the dog see the rabbit.’

Crime-scene veteran Slim Fiddler, seventeen stone plus, squelching across the grass, messing with his Nikon. A strong wire-mesh fence separated the ruins from the St Thomas Cantilupe primary school next door. Slim Fiddler stopped a bit short of it, turned round, and the other techie, Joanna Priddy, moved aside as his flash went off.

Which was when Bliss also saw, momentarily, the rabbit.

Saw why Karen had chucked her supper.

The body… we don’t exactly know, boss.

The cross… its base seemed to be hexagonal. About four steps went up to the next tier, which was like a squat church tower with Gothic window holes, stone balcony rails above them, and the actual cross sprouting from a spire rising out of the centre.

Thought it was a gargoyle, at first. When the flash faded, it had this stone look, the channels of blood like black mould.

‘Fuck me,’ Bliss said quietly.

The face was looking out from one of the Gothic windows.

‘If you’re going up there, best to get kitted up, Mr Bliss.’

Joanna Priddy handed him a Durex suit and Bliss clutched it numbly, as the rain blew in from Wales.

‘Who found it?’

‘Bloke came in for a smoke,’ Karen said. ‘Nobody knows where it’s legal to light up, any more, do they?’

‘Like we’re supposed to care.’

‘Comes round the back of the cross to get out of the wind, flicks his lighter and…’

‘Swallows his cig?’ Bliss said. ‘We looking at gangland here, Karen, or what?’

‘I’d like to think we could rule out a domestic, boss.’

Bliss thought for a moment about two baddish faces he’d eyeballed walking over from High Town. After dark, away from the city centre, the people you passed became predominantly male and increasingly iffy. The whole atmosphere of this Division had changed a good deal in the past few years.

‘Just the head, Karen? No other bits?’

‘Not that we’ve found. There’s a brick behind it, stood on end to prop it up. And a piece of tinsel — you can’t see it now from the ground. It was round the neck, but it’s slipped down.’

‘Like people put round the turkey on the dish?’

‘Probably.’

‘Very festive,’ Bliss said. ‘I presume someone’s checked it’s, you know, real?’

‘Why do you think I threw up? Not much, mind, but it was the shock, you know? Not like anything I’ve…’

Bliss nodded. In no great hurry, frankly, to put on the Durex suit and take a closer look. He clapped his hands together.

‘Right, then. Let us summon foot soldiers. If the rest of this feller’s bits are anywhere in the vicinity, I want them found before morning. I want this whole compound sealed and that school closed tomorrow. Where’s Billy