‘All right.’ Bliss stood up. ‘Let’s see their rooms.’
‘Room. They had one room between them.’
He followed her into the hallway. Two neighbouring hallways once, the dividing wall turned into an archway. A reception desk in one corner had a steel grille to the ceiling – well, this was the Plascarreg. One staircase had been taken out, so the other was isolated in the middle, Hollywood baronial.
‘Anybody else in residence just now, Goldie?’
‘It’s quiet, it is. We got a few comin’ in for Easter.’
‘Anybody staying here in the past week?’
‘Occasional one-nighter.’
‘And the odd one-hourer?’
Goldie was like she hadn’t heard. The bedroom doors had big plastic numbers. They went from Room Three to Room Five, Bliss noticed. Room Four was where they’d had to scrape teenage brain cells off the ceiling. Superstitious old girl, Goldie.
She led him along a corridor with three different carpets, stopped at Room Seven, unlocked the door with her master. Bliss put out an arm.
‘We’re gonna stay in the doorway, Goldie. Nobody goes in till crime-scene gets here.’
‘This en’t no crime scene, Mr Francis! I objects to that!’
‘It’s just that we’ll need to examine all their things very carefully. Yeh, it’s likely whoever attacked them it was a random thing, but it may not be. We also need the passports, papers, all that sort of stuff. We need to find the relatives.’
The room had dingy yellow walls, two beds, two single wardrobes. But it was tidy. There were two holdalls with shoulder straps under the window, Bliss keen to get inside them, but he didn’t move. A wardrobe door was open. The clothes he could see looked clean, new even.
‘What sort of girls were they, Goldie? All right, good girls, but…’
‘Polite. Tidy.’
‘You can do better that that. You have long chats with your guests. Old-fashioned nights with the tarot.’
‘I’m a people person. It’s why I opens my house.’
‘If they had worries, they’d confide in you.’
‘I likes to think.’
‘So…?’
‘Course they had worries. They worried about their family back home. They was expected to send money back, but there was never enough. Not what they expected. I done readin’s, set their minds at rest.’
On the window sill was a small framed picture of a couple on a sofa, smiling. The window overlooked a playground, a swing with the chains cut off near the top so it looked like a gallows.
‘You know what I’m after, Goldie.’
‘They didn’t have no enemies, if that’s what you’re gettin’ at. How could girls like that have- Was they messed with? You can tell me that.’
Good question.
‘I can’t, actually,’ Bliss said. ‘Not yet. But we do think there might be more to it. You said they worked on a strawberry farm. Which one?’
‘Couple, I think. One out near Ledbury, but they left because of the… you know, gettin’ pushed around and messed about.’
‘Messed about how?’
‘You know what conditions is like in these places. Next thing to slave labour. They was passing out, and if they asked for water they got it in an ole petrol can. Disgustin’. ’
‘They’re supposed to’ve cleaned up their act,’ Bliss said, cautious. ‘The worst ones.’
‘You believe that, you’ll believe anythin’. Maria, she told me one of the other farms there was a woman raped by two of the foremen. Took in a shed and raped.’
‘But nobody reported it.’
‘ Course nobody reported it. They knows their place. They got no status. Young fellers, they din’t do what they was told they got the shit beat out of them, and the women was raped. ’Less they gived it up willin’. Them as gived it up willin’ got the easier work. You must’ve heard what goes on.’
Everybody had heard the stories. Karen Dowell had come close once to getting a Polish girl to give evidence against this Albanian minibus driver who was demanding a weekly blow job for getting her to work on time. Then she’d disappeared. They could disappear very easily.
Bliss said, ‘So the girls got out.’
‘They moved to that place out on the Brecon Road. Magnum?’
‘Magnis.’
A complex chime went off downstairs. Bliss thought it was one of the clocks.
‘Doorbell,’ Goldie said.
‘Could be my lads. So they moved to Magnis.’
‘To be near Hereford.’
Coincidence was a lovely thing, but maybe this wasn’t much of one: it was a small county and Magnis was close to the city.
‘When was this, Goldie?’
‘Last summer.’
‘They stay the course this time?’
The bell went again. ‘I better let your men in,’ Goldie said.
‘They’ll wait.’
‘They left there, too,’ Goldie said. ‘The sisters.’
‘Something happen to them?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Were they staying here when they worked at Magnis, or did they live at the camp?’
‘At the camp. They come yere when they left.’ She didn’t look at him. ‘I felt sorry for them, I did. They wanted to go home. They was thinking how to raise enough cash to go home. I’ll go down, let your mates in.’
Bliss waited at the top of the stairs, looking at the holdalls, one pink, one tartan. Never had liked strawberries.
22
The Lady Chapel was a serene shrine to motherhood, recently renovated in quiet golds, muted tints, the gilded panels of its altar screen illustrating the domestic life of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Merrily was alone. Someone had left a newspaper on a chair: today’s Telegraph folded at ‘The Killing Fields of Middle England’. She picked it up, sat down next to a Madonna and Child panel where the infant Jesus had the face and the haircut of a middle-aged estate agent. Did one killing make them killing fields? And when did the Welsh Border become Middle England?
The paper had been left here as if it was part of the Countryside Defiance campaign. Fortress Hereford, all farm doors locked at nightfall, and don’t expect any help from the police.
Something not right about this. Why were people erecting fences, spreading panic?
Answer: they weren’t local people. Local people were cautious, but they didn’t panic.
There was a colour picture of Mansel Bull’s brother, Sollers, in hunting pink and then, downpage, a small shot of Frannie Bliss caught side-on getting out of his car, the now-trademark dark blue beanie covering his close-mown thinning hair. At the foot of the story it said, DI Bliss, who came to Hereford from Merseyside, could not be contacted last night, but a spokeswoman…
West Mercia’s brief quote in support of its officer was lukewarm, a formality. Bastards. Merrily tossed the
