To Dream of the Dead

‘I, um…’ Bliss coughed. ‘I don’t know where the other bloody carol singers’ve got to, Annie, but I’ve gorra tell you I sound terrible on me own. Would it be all right if I just talked?’

The lounge bar was the Black Swan at its most Jacobean. Those deep, leaded mullion windows. Half an oak wood on the walls and ceiling. Beautifully ill-lit.

Lol had never seen it so empty.

‘It’s early,’ Barry said.

He was also, as usual, in black and white. Essex boy, way back, but he’d spent all his adult years in Hereford. An old-style manager. He said people liked that, and they probably did.

‘Not going to be quite what I expected, mate, but nothing I can do about that. Act of God. We’ve been getting calls all day from people who were going to come over for it — one as far away as Chester, ready to book a double room. Asking if there was any way into the village. I said it’d be a two-mile walk across flooded fields, but possible with the right kit.’ Barry shrugged. ‘Couldn’t figure why they lost interest.’

‘Probably because, unlike you, they’d never been in the SAS,’ Lol said.

Barry nodded, sage-like. Lol saw James Bull-Davies walking through from the public bar with Alison Kinnersley. Alison smiled and waved. It seemed half a lifetime since he’d lived with Alison and written a bitter- sweet song for her including most of the place names in the Golden Valley. He wouldn’t play it tonight.

‘You’ll still get the same fee, of course,’ Barry said.

‘Barry, forget the fee. Why don’t we just call it off?’

‘Good God, bunch of local people been really looking forward to it. It’s Christmas Eve, mate. The water’s rising. There’s nothing else to look forward to.’ Barry wiped his brow with a paper napkin. ‘I’m not putting this very well, am I? What I mean is, I think we’ll get a few locals who would normally give it a miss. A percentage would’ve been going into Hereford tonight, or to parties outside. I think the situation makes people want to get together. Kind of security in numbers. Take their mind off it.’

‘Social service.’

‘Exactly.’ Barry patted Lol on the shoulder. ‘We’ll make bugger-all money out of it, but we’ll feel better about ourselves in the morning.’

Lol sat down next to his Guild acoustic amplifier and opened the Boswell’s case. It shone up at him, like there was a halo around it. Although it had a sophisticated adjustable bridge and an internal pick-up based on the Takamine, something about it seemed older than the Black Swan.

He didn’t know what to do. He knew how much Merrily earned, and there was no way she could afford this. He hadn’t been able to say half of what he’d wanted to say because she’d almost pushed him out of the door, saying she had an urgent phone call to make.

When he’d gone running home to change into clean jeans and dry socks, he’d found a message on his machine

This is about love, Laurence, Al Boswell said. The guitar… well, at least you deserve the guitar.

Light laughter.

Click.

‘Actually,’ Annie Howe said, ‘I do know why I came to the door. I doubt I’d get to sleep tonight if I didn’t find out why Karen Dowell had rung Mark Connelly to ask for the name of the man we think did the knifing for Lasky’s merry band of kiddy-fiddlers.’

‘Ah.’

‘And then, when I saw you drowning on the step, something just kind of clicked.’

‘Right.’

‘My God, Bliss, you really do have to be in some kind of shit to turn up here.’

‘Yeh,’ Bliss said. ‘I think that would more or less encompass the situation. However, Karen… it’s not her fault. She was obeying an instruction I should never’ve given her. It was an abuse of power. Mea culpa.’

He sipped his coffee and looked around. What had surprised him most about Annie Howe’s apartment was not its spartan aspects — went without saying — but all the books. Could be a couple of thousand, and not just to fill tastefully fitted shelves, because the shelves weren’t tasteful or fitted, some of them no more than planks of new pine separated by bricks — clean bricks, but still… Bliss could see a lot of law up there — she had a law- degree, he knew that much — and criminology, but also history and geology and a few dozen paperback crime novels. Normal stuff. Human-being stuff.

Maybe she was storing them for a friend.

‘I thought you’d be out,’ he said. ‘It’s Christmas. I think.’

‘Where?’ Howe said. ‘On the town? Clubbing? Binge-drinking with my mates?’

She was sitting under a blue-shaded brass standard lamp in a rocking chair that was clearly second-hand, a threadbare powder-blue rug underneath it. Bliss was high up on an overstuffed settee, feeling stupid on account of his feet barely touched the stained floorboards.

Also a trifle gobsmacked at discovering a woman who didn’t care about decor. Kirsty’s lip would be curled double in disgust.

‘After the past week,’ Howe said, ‘I’m more than happy to lock the door, take off my shoes and open a bottle of wine. Perhaps a scented bath with one of my lesbian lovers.’

Bliss tried for the right kind of smile, suspecting there wasn’t one.

‘Or maybe both of them at once,’ Howe said. ‘It’s quite a generous bath.’

A tiny fibre-optic Christmas tree on the mantelpiece over the blocked-in fireplace changed from mauve to silver.

‘Actually,’ Howe said, ‘if the only men out there were the kind of crass bastards generally found in the police service, I think I might well have gone gratefully down that road.’

‘For what it’s worth,’ Bliss said, ‘I didn’t actually place a bet.’

‘You parsimonious bastard, Francis.’

‘Shit,’ Bliss said. ‘It wasn’t for charity, was it?’

Jesus, did Annie nearly laugh then?

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I won’t waste your time. I’ll just lay this out on the floor and if you don’t like it you can kick it down the lift shaft. Essentially, the suburban coke affiliate that was supposed to keep me out of the way until Twelfth Night has turned out to link directly into Ayling.’

Howe was rocking gently. Near-white hair fluffed over her eyes. Glasses — the rimless Gestapo-issue — on the end of her nose. What had happened to the contacts?

‘Connection comes through a council planning officer called Steve Furneaux,’ Bliss said quickly, ‘who turns out to be the main player, while Gyles Banks-Jones…’

‘Frontman.’ Howe stopped the movement of the chair with the tip of a trainer. ‘Well recompensed, I’d guess, to take all the risks. Idiot, basically.’

‘Well… yeh.’

‘Furneaux’s a reptile.’

Bliss grew cautious, tilted himself forward so both feet were firmly on the floor.

‘Worked in local government and public relations in Birmingham,’ Annie Howe said, ‘and the Black Country. West Midlands have a slim but meaningful file on him.’

‘What’s he done?’

‘Well, nothing we know about, obviously, or they’d have had him years ago. That house in Hereford, though, he paid cash. He also has a very nice flat in Solihull, which he rents out, and a time-share in Menton. And in case you’re wondering about private income, his parents are still alive, both low-grade schoolteachers, so nothing from that end.’

Bliss shuffled uncomfortably to the edge of the sofa.

‘And you know all this… how?’

‘Mainly from my dad. They serve together on a quango called…’

‘Hereforward.’

‘I believe that’s the name. Whenever someone mentions it, I plead ignorance because — you’ve probably noticed this yourself — no two people ever give the same explanation of what it actually does.’