To Dream of the Dead

all that, about him being basically a hack with no great evangelical need to convert society to non-belief.’

‘Happen lull you into a sense of false security. You wouldn’t’ve gone near that place otherwise, would you?’

‘Maybe not. And yet… I’ll tell you one thing. There was a look Stooke gave me just before I left — this is Stooke, not Lensi. It was full of almost a kind of pain. Like he’s saying, Denial? Of course I’m in denial. What the hell would you expect?’

‘All right,’ Huw said. ‘Let’s talk about the figure in the field. On the edge of the orchard?’

‘It was too dark to get him to show me the exact spot. Apart from it bucketing down.’

‘Assuming it’s not a scam,’ Huw said. ‘Nightwatchman, you reckon?’

Charlie didn’t even look at the blonde woman. He didn’t stop looking at Bliss. He held the keys out over his shoulder.

‘Make us some coffee, Sasha.’

Accepting the umbrella, keeping it well away from Bliss as the blonde went into the house and lights came on.

‘You know where my daughter is tonight, brother?’

Still at her desk, popping pills to stay awake? Having Willy Hawkes woken up with a halogen spotlight in the eyes, every hour on the hour till he coughed to Ayling’s murder?

‘No,’ Bliss said.

The water was sluicing over his ears, down the back of his neck until he could feel it cold on his spine.

‘Private party in the Home Secretary’s constituency,’ Charlie said. ‘They been good friends for some years.’

‘Of course, yeh. Keep forgetting how relatively local the Home Seckie is. Think Annie’ll be offered a Home Office consultancy? House of Lords next? Baroness Howe. Has a ring of… I dunno… destiny.’

‘In your dreams, boy. Anne’s a copper through and through. In the genes, it is. She en’t going nowhere she won’t be able to pick up the likes of you and drop you where you belong. And neither am I.’

Bliss had started to shiver. You could go through a car-wash on full cycle and not get this wet. And Charlie in the dry, not a droplet on him.

Story of Charlie’s life.

‘Well, for her sake you can only hope…’ Bliss wiped a hand across his face ‘… that Annie’s DNA managed to bypass the bent gene.’

The rain was suddenly lit up in colours. Bliss turned to see one of those charity Christmas floats rolling past, probably on its way home but the lights still blazing, Bliss thinking, Jesus, did I really just say that?

And turning back round to find the rubber foot of Charlie’s metal crutch up against his throat.

‘Didn’t catch that, Francis? Hard to make out what you’re saying in this rain.’

Well, he could snatch the crutch away, and then maybe Charlie would lose his footing on the wet, slimy driveway. And the woman would, of course, be watching, from an upstairs window, a witness to this unprovoked assault on an elderly man recovering from hip surgery. Yes, that was one option.

Bliss backed off.

‘Why don’t we go inside, then? Where it’s quiet. Lot to talk about, Councillor. Talk about Hereforward?’

The presence of the woman complicated everything. The woman and the rain. The noise of the rain meant there was no way neighbours or passers-by could overhear anything that might embarrass Councillor Howe and make it sensible to get Bliss inside.

A quiet one-to-one. Even half an hour would do it. Mumford was probably right, Charlie wasn’t a killer. Just a cover-upper. Official cover-upper for Hereforward. All quangos had secrets, and this one…

‘Why don’t you just go home, Brother Bliss?’ Charlie lowering the crutch. ‘Modern policing got no use for a one-man band.’

‘Yeh, well, that’s because no fucker wants to take individual responsibility any more. The new ethos of arse-shielding, Char—’

He was spluttering. The rain was in his mouth. Even the weather was on Charlie’s side. This was a waste of time. Nothing for him here. Nothing but more grief, another chance to test his self-destruct button.

‘Go home, boy,’ Charlie said amiably. ‘Go back to Liverpool or wherever it was you crawled from. Long outstayed your welcome down yere, you must see that. You got no friends, you got no—’

‘Shah told you the lies his son fed him.’ Bliss had started to shout, just needing to get it out. ‘You told Shah you’d get it dealt with.’

‘—got no wife, now, either. No wife… no kids?’

How the…? Bliss clawed rain out of his eyes.

‘You’re a sick little man, Brother Bliss. Come down yere thinking you were God’s gift to West Mercia. Smart young city copper full of the ole Northern grit, show the country boys how it’s done. Make a swift rise to the top.’

‘That’s bollock—’

‘Only it never happened. You weren’t good enough. Fooled ’em for a while and then they saw what you were. And now you en’t going no higher and you know it and my, that’s made you bitter, ennit? Bitter, twisted, sick little man. I know about you, Brother Bliss, known for a long time.’

‘You don’t know shit!’

‘But I do know your father-in-law.’ Charlie raising the umbrella so Bliss could see him grinning. ‘Didn’t know that, did you?’

Shit, shit, shit.

‘Same lodge?’ Bliss tried.

‘Same county, Brother Bliss, that’s all it takes. Very small county and you got a big, big mouth. You never deserved Kirsty. Nice girl, good, sensible head on her shoulders. Well rid of you, boy. Well rid.’

‘You know the truth, Charlie?’ Bliss in free fall now. ‘I used to love being in this city when I first came. It was small, and it had… this freshness. Wherever you looked you could see a green field or a hill or a wood. You could breathe.’

‘Stand there much longer, boy, your breathing days gonner be limited. Get pneumonia and die, and what a mercy that’d be, for all of us.’

‘I used to like the way you could breathe. And now…’ Bliss took a step forward, soaking socks fused to his frozen feet. ‘Now all I can see is frigging greed and opportunism, and I don’t enjoy breathing any more because whenever I breathe in I can smell somebody like you. I can fucking smell you, Charlie.’

Jesus, how pathetic was this?

Charlie stepped back, and his front door opened behind him. He let down his umbrella, gave it a good shake in Bliss’s direction and went into the warm and shut the door very quietly behind him.

Through the windscreen, Merrily saw small smears of light, like glowing tadpoles.

Nightwatchman.

Huw had always preferred his own euphemisms: visitors, volatiles, insomniacs, hitch- hikers. Flavouring the unknowable with a measure of comforting familiarity.

‘That’s your word for a guardian, is it?’

‘An entity or thought-form attached to the site to deter intruders who might want to damage or corrupt it,’ Huw said. ‘We could talk about cases where thunder and lightning resulted from somebody sticking a spade into a burial mound. And horrific phantasms, obviously. But you probably know all them. How close is the barn to the buried stones, lass?’

‘Next field. Tell me about nightwatchmen, Huw.’

‘Happen less harmful than they look, in most cases.’

‘Less harmful? How?’

‘Sometimes the images people receive may appear demonic. But that might be more a result of their own conditioning. If we operate on the basis that true demonic is, by definition, satanic and therefore something explicable only in terms of Christian theology, well… Neolithic’s a long time pre-Christian. Unless it’s been