‘We don’t like to rely on guesswork,’ Barry said.
Some nights, Lol would just go back to the vicarage with Merrily for coffee or hot chocolate.
This wasn’t going to be one of them. They both knew that, as they walked out onto cobbles already slick with black ice. Almost touching, not quite. They never publicly held hands in Ledwardine, not even after dark.
A few icy stars were out over Cole Hill, a wreath of them above the church steeple. Merrily shivered with cold and unease, watching Lol beside her, head down, the lyrics pad under an arm, a hole in an elbow of his Gomer Parry sweatshirt. The Ledwardine village musician, one day playing music, the next following a JCB down to the riverbank with a hand shovel. She could almost hear his thoughts echoing across the cobbles: what kind of fantasy is this?
Lol had never really been much of a pub guy. Didn’t drink much, didn’t play darts or pool, didn’t have mates. It was only after his Christmas concert at the Swan that he’d achieved a degree of openness in Ledwardine. After he’d been lured out to play his music in front of his neighbours. And now…
I’ve agreed with Barry to do a few more gigs. Here at the Swan. And maybe something outside in the summer.
‘If Savitch can’t get it cheap enough, he might not bother,’ Merrily said at the entrance to Church Street. ‘I mean, what’s he going to do with it anyway, to make it show a decent profit… on his scale?’
Wishing, as soon as it was out – like with a lot of things she’d said tonight – that she’d kept quiet.
‘You know exactly what he’ll do,’ Lol said. ‘He’ll make it into some kind of apres-shoot retreat for his corporate clients… and for all the wives and girlfriends who don’t want to stay in a chalet, however luxurious, on a muddy farm. He’ll build up the restaurant and double the prices. It’ll just… regularize things.’
They stood and contemplated the clutch of lights down Church Street, where the holiday homes – sixteen at the last count – would be in darkness until Easter weekend. One of the For Sale notices had acquired a cross-strip saying sold. Had Savitch bought that, too?
Merrily saw Lol bent over his guitar in a corner, his music drowned out by the laughter of loud-voiced, faux - rural thugs.
‘They look out from their penthouses across all the lights,’ Lol said. ‘And they can’t see it but they know it’s there… all those thousands of square miles of it, all dark and empty. It just… it starts to irritate them. They’re thinking, what’s it doing? We’re the masters of the universe, why isn’t it giving us anything?’
Merrily was nodding gloomily. Had it ever been otherwise, since Norman kings designated thousands of acres as hunting ground? Great slabs of it going to the barons, who settled and grew, in their brutal way, to love it and eventually became the old squirearchy.
The Bulls and the Bull-Davieses.
Until they, in turn, started to lose it under the weight of inheritance taxes, leaving it prey to the new money. Savitch.
Cycles of exploitation.
The last fake gas lamp on the square was behind them now. A merciful mesh of shadows claiming them for its own. Lol brought out the keys to the terraced cottage where Lucy Devenish used to live. The folklorist. The guardian of the soul of the village. Jane’s first mentor.
‘I suppose what gets me,’ Lol said, ‘is that most people don’t seem to mind. The first time somebody off the TV comes to stay at the Swan, bit of glamour, they’re all in favour of it. It’s brought the village alive… but not in the right way.’
‘A bit of glamour,’ Merrily said. ‘Maybe we all need that.’
Her eyes felt damp.
Lol held open the front door for her. Inside, the wood stove was burning a surprising terracotta red.
Merrily’s black woollen top was off before they reached the sofa.
18
‘Actually, I do think he did it,’ Bliss said. ‘What’s wrong with that? It’s me job to suspect people.’
Staring up at the plaster moulding around the bedroom ceiling. The curtains were undrawn; you could see blurry lights in the big houses on the hillside across the road.
Cosy. An upstairs flat in a classy Victorian villa set back from the main road out of Great Malvern. Bliss liked it here – at the moment, more than anywhere, especially his crappy semi on the flat side of Hereford. OK, if he was called out in the night it’d take him maybe forty minutes to get back, and he’d need to leave at seven a.m., anyway. But it was worth it. Wasn’t it?
‘Francis, you…’
Annie Howe peering at him, her eyes all soft and woolly and useless without her contacts. It was worth it just for that.
‘… you can’t simply accuse a man of murder because he doesn’t like you. Sometimes I don’t like you. You can be an intensely annoying person.’
‘Part of me appeal, Annie.’
Bliss watched a light go out across the road, and then the hillside was as blank as those years of mutual blind distrust. Fast-track Annie, man-hating bitch, daughter of Councillor Charlie Howe, ex-copper, bent. All the poison darts Bliss had aimed at her back. Why should she like him?
He felt, unexpectedly, flimsy. What was she supposed to see in a twat who couldn’t hold anything together, not his job, not his family? Like Kirsty said, You never did put yourself out much, did you, Frank?
True, in a way. He and Annie had fallen into bed within days of Kirsty leaving, both coasting on the euphoria of a crucial result, a key arrest. A cop thing. How much staying power was there in that?
‘What’s the matter?’ Annie said.
Chris says you consistently neglected your wife, Inspector.
‘Francis…?’
She moved away from him. She’d put her nightdress back on, all creased. She was his superior. Better- educated, better-connected, better-looking. Coat hanger with tits? Was Stagg blind?
‘We said when this began that there’d be no analysis,’ Annie said softly. ‘One day at a time. We also said that.’
But there were no days, only nights. Cover of darkness. Cover of Christmas. It should have been his emptiest Christmas ever. Instead, he’d spent the days in work, the nights with Annie. In January they were spending two nights a week together, one at her place, one at his – Annie parking around the corner, walking, all muffled up, to the back door. We’re all right, she’d said, as long as nobody finds out. As long as we’re never seen together. As long as we don’t go out together. As long as we don’t ever do that thing where you drive a hundred miles into Wales or somewhere and have lunch and walk by the river, because there’s always some bloody copper, who used to be in this division, on holiday.
Bliss cleared his throat. Badly wanting to tell Annie about Kirsty, get her input, see if she had any idea at all who might’ve rumbled them. But Annie’s job was as important to her as his was to him. If he told her, she’d restrict their meetings, and he couldn’t stand that, because this was the only thing preventing him exploding into gases and shrapnel.
‘Right, then, Francis…’
In the glacial light from the street lamps he saw that she’d arranged two pillows against the bedhead, sitting back into them, a nipple’s areola vanishing back into the white cotton. Reaching to the bedside table and finding her glasses and putting them on to watch him across the post-midnight greyness. Return of the Ice Maiden.
‘Tell me about Sollers Bull,’ she said.
Gut feelings were no longer encouraged. No place for them in teamwork. Even Bliss was suspicious of gut feelings. Other people’s, anyway.
‘See, even when I was talking to him, I could feel it. I could see him in a pair of them green nylon overalls that farmers wear for mucky jobs.’
