Barry’s hands were efficiently twisting the napkin into another lily. Lol watched, fascinated.
‘They teach you that in the SAS?’
‘Yeah, but with necks,’ Barry said.
In the end, they went in separate cars, Fiona’s blue Honda Jazz leading Merrily north-west along those pale, seemingly pointless new roads which hinted at clandestine development plans. Then familiar wooded hills with an early-spring greening like fresh mould, an occasional long view across the hidden Wye to the notched belt of the Black Mountains.
The side-window down, but the breeze couldn’t blow away the voices
Huwie, he says, just a slight problem. A mere technicality.
A circle of salt. Had Syd also forced himself to visualize the golden rings around and above his body, mentally enclosing himself in an orb of light?
Received wisdom. Received madness from a spidery old woman named Anthea White who called herself Athena and lived in an old folks’ home with her occult library. Supplemented with suggestions from the handbook of the Christian Delivery Study Group. Much thumbed, pages folded over.
Open all the cupboard doors, take out all the drawers, cover the mirrors.
… a chance to step back and rationalize it.
Huw again, with chapel echo.
‘It can’t be rationalized,’ Merrily hissed, as if he were sitting in the car with her. ‘It isn’t rational.’
Carly Horne, the skinny one with black hair slanting down over one eye, thought Bliss talked like that comedian.
‘Yeh, I know,’ Bliss said. ‘Lily Savage.’
Carly said, ‘Who?’
Karen Dowell smiled. Bliss didn’t ask. They were in the least grotty interview room. He sat down next to Karen.
‘So you heard it on the radio news.’
‘Stations I listen to don’t do news, to be honest,’ Carly said. ‘Taylor Magson told me – this bloke at college? He knows which pubs we do and when I said I remembered these Russian girls, he was like, hey, you better go tell the cops?’
‘Romanian,’ Karen said. ‘The girls were Romanian.’
‘Got us an afternoon off college, anyway.’
‘What courses are you on?’
‘I’m doing secretarial, she’s beauty therapy, jammy cow.’
The other one was heavy and sullen-looking. Her hair was cut short and the acid colour of lemon cheese. Her name was Josceline Singleton. She had on a high-necked top and pink leggings.
‘You know those pictures you showed us,’ Carly said. ‘Was that them dead?’
Bliss gave her a rueful smile.
‘That’s really sick,’ Carly said.
Karen said, ‘How long you been going in the pubs, Carly?’
‘Years, but I don’t drink much, to be honest, when I got college next day.’
‘So this is the Monk’s Head,’ Bliss said. ‘Lounge bar. Ten o’clockish?’
‘Bit later, when these women come in. There’s only one bar now, since they started doing live music, weekends.’
‘You ever see these girls before?’
Carly shook her head.
‘Were they on their own?’
‘Yeah. They looked kind of, you know, isolated? I used to feel pissed off about them coming over here taking our jobs and stuff, but I feel sorry for them now, I do. When you read about them having to live like seven of them in one room? That’s why I went over and talked to them, really. Well, I was on my way to the lav, to be honest, and I like bumped their table?’
‘Oh.’ Bliss sat up. ‘So you actually talked to them.’
‘Talk to anybody, me. I mean, we didn’t discuss the government and stuff, it was just like, so where you from, kind of thing? And then she comes out with this place I en’t never heard of, so that was a bit useless. I don’t think they wanted to talk, to be honest. Same with a lot of these ethnics, they don’t really wanner mix with us, do they?’
‘It’s the language,’ Josceline Singleton said. ‘They don’t know a word of English.’
‘Except benefits,’ Carly said. ‘That’s my dad. He’s a bigot, he is.’
Bliss said, ‘You told the sergeant some men followed them out.’
‘Yeah. A few blokes in the pub was looking them over?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Like, you know, grinning at each other, making fists and stuff? Kind of, give her one. You know?’
‘And then followed them out? What time was this?’
‘Not sure. Maybe about quarter past eleven?’
‘How many of them?’
‘How many, Joss? I wasn’t counting, to be honest. Wasn’t like they was good-looking or anything. And quite old. Three? I think there was three. They was ethnics, too.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘You can just tell, can’t you?’
‘Would you recognize them again?’
‘You don’t really take them in, do you, ’less they’re a bit fit.’
‘All right,’ Bliss said. ‘I’m gonna leave you with DS Dowell. I’d like you to try very hard to describe these men – how old, how tall, what they were wearing…’
‘Yeah,’ Carly said. ‘All right. I mean, when you think about it… could’ve been any of us, couldn’t it? Like, murdered?’
It was Jane, with her growing feel for the landscape, who’d pointed out that Credenhill existed on three different levels.
The village itself was strung out aimlessly – modern housing, a line of convenience stores set back from the main road. It was looking already like the suburbia of a much-extended Hereford which it might one day become.
An ignominious future, in the shadow, literally, of its impressive ancient history.
Merrily and Jane had once walked up the huge afforested hill to the east, which carried the remaining earthen ramparts of the biggest Iron Age hill fort in the county. Not much to see now, but some historians said Credenhill had once been the Celtic capital of what became Herefordshire, an elevated fortified community with a population of more than three thousand.
It had once looked down on the later Roman military town of Magnis, long gone. Now, as you followed the winding track, you could see down below, when the trees were bare, a spread of low buildings, vaster than it looked from the road. A quiet, self- contained community, with intersecting roads and parked trucks.
The third and most modern Credenhill, to which the elite warriors of the British Army returned, some of them seared and scorched and riven by demons. Applauded from afar, but not allowed to talk about it.
Except to people like Syd Spicer.
Merrily slowed when the gates of the camp appeared on her left. Two police cars were parked alongside one of the buildings, armed guards at the entrance. None of this, to Merrily’s knowledge, outside of routine. The army housing was across the road. She followed Fiona’s Jazz into the estate, which was like any other housing estate except somehow quieter. Parking behind the Jazz outside an end house next to a wooded field, she guessed their arrival would already have been clocked by somebody, somewhere.
All the hundreds of times she’d driven past. Never actually stopped here before. You didn’t. You just didn’t.
Memories of the Frank Collins book were with her now. Frank, a Christian in the SAS, bothered by the old question of God and warfare. In the end, he’d justified it simply to himself: soldiers killed to prevent innocent people dying. The Regiment as knights, trained to deal with evil. Frank had been raised among tough kids in working-class
