‘Pulling them off, I suppose, as he ran through the fields into the headlights of our correspondent and his girlfriend.’
‘I wanted to go back with a warrant to search his house. I wanted to talk to his hidden wife. Maybe she knows, maybe she doesn’t or maybe she just suspects.’
‘Stay away from her, Francis. Until you have something stronger, anyway. The bottom line is… he has an alibi. Several.’
‘The staff at his caff? It’s still borderline. Time of death’s not that certain, and it’s not that far away. You didn’t see the rage in him. Something about it that was wrong for the situation… skewed.’
Anger was always useful for concealing a hole where grief ought to be, but it was also a good outlet for the hyper excitement that lived in you for hours after you’d done something enormous.
‘I was thinking at first that if there was no real pain there it was because half of him’d be well chuffed at getting the farm.’
‘Perhaps that’s all it was,’ Annie said. ‘We don’t even know he didn’t get on with his brother. OK, different kinds of men – the traditionalist and the young progressive. University education, big ideas.’
‘Enough to cause a rift, when he starts shaking off the steadying hand.’
‘Even if they did hate one another, who’s going to tell you? Not the family, and not the wider community.’
‘Somebody will,’ Bliss said. ‘Always somebody with a grudge, a chip.’
‘We get his DNA, for purposes of elimination?’
‘Yeh.’
‘You feel threatened, Francis?’
‘Me?’
‘He’s put you very much in the firing line. A symbol of what’s gone wrong with the police in this area. Urban cop.’
‘Strange as it may seem, Annie, it wasn’t that urban where I grew up. Not then, anyway. There are fields up there.’ Bliss lay back. ‘Countryside frigging Defiance. Where did that come from?’
‘I Googled them. Much of it’s hunting-based. Aimed mainly, I’d guess, at attracting younger people to the cause. The trad- itional fox-hunting image of a retired colonel and Camilla Parker-Bowles as was… is not terribly evident on their Web site.’
‘Who’s behind it?’
‘Don’t know. They’re also using Facebook and Twitter. Sollers Bull in hunting pink is a gift. Good-looking and a little bit dark and edgy. He was always like that.’
‘Oh?’
‘I didn’t know him well, but I did know him. From his days in the YFC.’
‘ You were in the Young Farmers?’
‘I was a young farmer’s girlfriend for a while. He was a friend of Sollers. This was when I was about sixteen. We were at the same parties, occasionally. He was popular with girls who… had more going for them in the looks department than I ever did.’
‘Don’t sell yourself short.’
‘I’m a realist. Anyway, I didn’t know him well enough to get behind the image.’
‘He’s a liar,’ Bliss said. ‘He was acting. On TV. Just like all those husbands who break down in front of the cameras: Please find the monster who killed my lovely wife. And all the time you’re looking at him.’
The lights were all out in the houses on the hillside, traffic was sparse. Bliss had that feeling he used to get as a kid, of being on an island in the night. It was not unpleasant.
‘He did it, Annie.’
‘I’d be very careful, at this stage, who you share your suspicions with. It’s a small county and Bull has friends all over it.’
‘Including my soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law.’
‘Did you know that your in-laws knew Sollers Bull?’
‘Be surprising if they didn’t. The farm’s only ten minutes away and Chris Symonds has social ambitions. Always asking me if I was up for promotion.’
Annie slid down in the bed, a long thigh against his.
‘You’re obviously up for something,’ Annie said.
Overslept.
It was six-thirty and fully light when the mobile trilled by his side of the bed. Bliss awoke spooned into Annie’s back, experiencing the usual half-shock at whose back this was. His hand had barely found his phone before Annie’s phone made its Nokia noise on the other side.
‘Karen, yeh?’ Bliss said.
Watching Annie fumbling for her glasses, peering at her screen. In Bliss’s phone, Karen Dowell didn’t dress it up.
‘Shit,’ Bliss was clawing the sleep out of his eyes. ‘Where?’
‘City centre, more or less. East Street?’
‘A woman. You did say a woman?’
‘No, boss, I said two.’
Part Three
When I was still young, I thought it a great pity to die. Not that there was anything on earth I wanted to live for…
Julian of Norwich
Revelations of Divine Love
19
Just gone eight, and the city was stirring irritably under a blotchy brown sky, East Street sealed off, end to end.
A barrier was moved to one side, the tape dropped, letting Bliss through to where Terry Stagg was waiting with a blurry excitement on his brick-dust face.
‘Briefly, Tez.’
‘Two females. Mid-twenties? We’re thinking East European.’
Bliss stood in the middle of the street, looking down to a private parking area for office workers, lawyers, hairdressers. You could see the screens projecting from behind a blank yellow end wall. East Street ran narrowly between the city centre and the Cathedral Close. A few discreet shops, refurbished terraced housing, offices, the rear of the Shirehall and a lone bijou black and white property used by chiropractors.
‘And why are we thinking that?’
‘Apart from general appearance,’ Stagg said, ‘one’s wearing this kind of a locket thing, silver, with a little religious-looking picture inside and some foreign words.’
‘Foreign words.’
‘I was off sick when they ran the course on migrant crime.’
Bliss wrinkled his nose. Thousands of East Europeans around the county now: mainly honest, decent migrant workers, a percentage of migrant layabouts and a handful of migrant heavy-duty wrongdoers. There’d been a short course for cops on the kind of societies they came from, their favourite crimes – the more violent ones usually practised against other migrants who were usually reluctant to give evidence.
‘How long’s he been here?’
A silver Beemer was parked up by the little black and white place. The Havana cigar box on the dash identifying Billy Grace’s urban transport.
‘Quite a while,’ Terry Stagg said. ‘He likes the ones where he gets noticed.’
