now we’re taking the shit for militant Islam and a handful of kiddie-fiddling Catholic priests. We’re either naive and laughable or we’re part of a sinister old conspiracy to control people’s minds and have sex with their children. And all the time there’s Dawkins standing on his citadel of science, pissing on us over the railings.’
Merrily let the smile show.
‘Did I just hear a snatch of your fantasy final sermon?’
Huw’s eyes lit up for just a moment, like in the old days, and he laughed.
‘Bugger off to bed, you cheeky cow, or you’ll be fit for nowt in the morning.’
She nodded and stood up.
‘Keep an eye on him,’ Huw said.
‘Syd? He’s a grown man.’
‘Credenhill’s no more than… what? Eight miles from you?’
‘You think this could actually be something at the SAS camp? Not going to get in there, am I?’
‘I never saw you as a defeatist,’ Huw said.
The room Merrily’d been given… she figured it wasn’t supposed to be a guest room. Syd would have the guest room. This was… a woman’s room? Nothing you could quite put your finger on. No frilly pink shade on the bedside lamp, no extra mirrors, no fleecy rugs.
The lamp had a parchment shade, making a pale sepia circle around two books: a hardback New Testament and an Oxford paperback edition of Aquinas’s Selected Philosophical Writings. The bed was a double bed. Merrily guessed this was the room where Huw had slept with Julia – a room that he didn’t use any more.
Wearing a sweater over bra and pants, Merrily switched off the lamp and walked over to the sash window. The view was down the valley towards the few remaining lights of the village of Sennybridge. The landscape looked disarranged, like rumpled bedclothes after a restless night.
The way the weather got inside the landscape. The way it got inside people. Even Huw.
New deliverance guidelines. Another generation of dull buggers appointed by careful bishops. She couldn’t lose that grainy mental video of Huw in the passage at the chapel heading the old stained light bulb, and she had a disturbing sense of disintegration: Jane leaving home for some university next autumn, Lol’s career reviving after the years of oblivion. Even though he only lived across the street, Merrily wasn’t seeing as much of him this year, now that Danny Thomas’s barn, over the border, had become his rehearsal room.
Well, that was wonderful, obviously. Life was good for Lol, good for Jane… if she could let go of Ledwardine.
Merrily stood at the window, arms wrapped around herself, watching the lights in the valley going out.
Part Two
…then my sight began to fail and the room became dark about me, as if it were night…
Julian of Norwich
Revelations of Divine Love
11
Mid-morning, Day Three of the Mansel Bull investigation, and the police press officer was on the phone to Bliss. Elly Clatter, this was, ex-local journalist from the Black Country and a nice enough woman if you didn’t mind being treated like a maladjusted kid at play school.
‘Normal way of it, Francis, my duck, I’d be suggesting you maintain a dignified silence. Only it looks to me like this is starting to become a bit of an issue.’
An issue. This year, everything was a frigging issue.
‘And he’s saying what, exactly?’
Sollers Bull. The first formal interviews since his brother’s murder. Hunt hero Sollers Bull, in the Tory tabs. Twat in Bliss’s book.
‘He hasn’t said anything yet. He’s doing TV and radio in about an hour. But if he says what we think he might say, we’re going to need to be ready with some answers.’
‘Not me again, Elly, I’ve done enough.’
Couple of pressers over the past two days. This was a particularly savage and pointless crime. We know the killer left the scene with a considerable amount of blood on his clothing and on his person. Somebody out there knows who this is. This is an individual nobody should be hiding.
Trite crap. Hated the telly, particularly.
‘You can relax,’ Elly said. ‘It’ll just be a quote from a police spokesperson at this stage. All we need from you, Frannie, or your colleagues, is some background, so we can formally say, no, we’re not turning a blind eye to petty crime in the countryside, and yes, we do investigate all reports of suspicious behaviour.’
‘Shit, Elly, I’ve gorra-’
Bliss broke off. Eyes were raised all over the CID room. Must’ve been shouting. Normally he’d be in his own office, but that wasn’t the best place to find out if people were dissecting your private life.
‘If you cobble something together,’ Elly said, ‘I’ll mess around with it, read it back to you, then take it upstairs for clearance. How’s that sound?’
‘Or you could just tell the media that DI Bliss has told Mr Bull to go and-’
‘Now, Francis…’
‘Sorry.’ Bliss lowered his head into Billy Grace’s report: divided trachea, several blood vessels… ‘I’m not gerrin a lorra sleep, Elly. I’ll talk to the DCI, get back to you, all right?’
‘He seems to be an impulsive sort of man, this Mr Bull,’ Elly said.
‘Yeh.’
Bliss had a few of the back-stories on his laptop. THE BLOODING OF PREZZA – Daily Express on the red- paint incident. A Telegraph feature on the saintly Sollers’s battle to defend a thousand-year tradition. Pictures of Sollers in his fox-hunting kit and his ear stud. Bliss looked up and saw that Elly Clatter hadn’t gone away.
‘What?’
‘I’d be a bit a careful, Frannie. You just see him as a man with form, but in hunting circles it’s a medal. Him and that Otis Ferry?’
‘Both members of the Jumped-up Twats Club.’
A moment’s silence. From opposite corners of the CID room, Terry Stagg and Karen Dowell were staring at him.
‘You ever think you might be working in the wrong part of the country, Francis?’ Elly Clatter said.
About half an hour later, Bliss rang Annie Howe at headquarters in Worcester. From his office this time. Door shut, voice lowered. Annie was still only half-available, required to be on hand in case she was recalled to the Crown Court. She’d been quite helpful meanwhile, which was still a whole new experience for Bliss.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘We tried. Either they know nothing or they’re not playing.’
‘Or the translator’s crap,’ Bliss said.
‘She’s actually a very good translator, I’m told.’
It had been Annie’s idea – and not a bad one – to approach the two men facing rustling charges in Evesham, offer them a deal in return for information on who might be lifting stock in Herefordshire. A network couldn’t be ruled out.
‘Both came over as seasonal workers,’ Annie said, ‘but don’t seem to have been at any of the Hereford fruit farms.’
Bliss and Stagg had been over to the Magnis Berries farm first thing. Still a pre-season skeleton staff: local manager, six workers. Everybody living off-site, the whole place locked up all night.
‘Stuffed, then,’ Bliss said. ‘They could’ve come from anywhere… Birmingham… Newport… Gloucester…’
‘Widen the net, then. Talk to West Midlands, Gwent. What about general crime? No pointers there?’
‘Farm thefts are up. Stolen quad bikes, chainsaws. Diesel drained from tanks. Widespread metal-theft. Some organized poaching, but no recent rustling of farm animals, no violence. We’ll keep trying.’
