32
Abruptly, Big Liz rose, went over to a sprawling oak sideboard and came back with a green cardboard folder which she handed to Merrily.
‘Just in case you thought we were never happy.’
Liz had wide grey eyes and copious white hair pulled back into more of a cob than a bun. And she was big. Tall, wide-shouldered, wearing a long sheepskin waistcoat.
In the wedding picture, she looked bashful in a complicated white veiled headdress, and the man she’d married was all smouldering hero in his morning suit and winged collar, with his thick dark hair.
‘He could be very charming,’ Liz said. ‘Always good with my parents. That was half the battle, then.’
They were sitting near a bay window in a high-ceilinged, mauvey, chintzy sitting room with a wide stone fireplace and a view across the Golden Valley to the Black Mountains.
‘My father – before I got married, he said, Elizabeth, you’re going to have to be very strong – stronger than an ordinary wife – and very discreet, for the rest of your life. And you’ll have to make allowances, because these are not ordinary men.’
‘Your father was in the army?’
‘No, just very patriotic, and Colin, being a career soldier in an elite regiment, he could do no wrong. I’m not very good at people. I just go along with things.’
Colin Jones. Right.
‘How long have you lived here?’
The stone farmhouse, at Allensmore, south of Hereford, was Victorian and lofty. Big bones, like Liz. There was a small crenellated tower in the roof, aligned to the front porch with its double doors.
‘It was my parents’ house. My mother started the bed-and-breakfast side. I grew up here, and they always said that when Colin came out of the Regiment they’d sell the grounds, retire and move into a cottage and let us take over the house. At the time, Colin seemed delighted but…’ Liz gave a small, helpless shrug ‘… I didn’t realize then that was only because it would give me something to do. Keep me occupied while he did other work.’
‘What kind of other work?’
‘He took a job with one of the private-security companies in Hereford. Went abroad for weeks at a time, as a bodyguard to various businessmen. It was a bit on and off, and then it stopped. That was when he started to write his books. Non-stop, once he’d started one, early morning till late at night. He had a lot of energy. Too much for ordinary things.’
‘He didn’t get involved with your business here?’
‘Wanted nothing to do with it. We had separate lives, almost. Well, except for sex, and that was…’ Liz looked away, out of the bay window ‘… never very loving, but I made allowances. Anyway.’ She placed her hands primly in her lap. ‘There we are. I suppose I thought they were all like that. Oh dear.’
She blew out a short, startled breath, then sat back, looking a little surprised, as if she’d let herself be tricked into saying too much. Merrily looked around at the nests of chairs and coffee tables and saw why Byron Jones might have found it hard to settle here. Even the bookshelves had ornaments on them – little wooden boxes and china figurines and what might have been golf trophies, widely spaced. Liz’s second husband was out playing golf, apparently. It seemed likely she’d arranged this meeting for early in the day not, as Barry had said, because she was expecting guests after lunch but because she knew that this morning they’d be alone.
Big Liz owed Barry. She’d met him on a tourism course. When Byron left, Barry had helped her keep the business afloat, attract some grants. Leading you to think that Barry had been sorry for her and maybe knew more about Byron than he’d revealed last night.
As for Liz… she was oddly incurious, hadn’t once asked why a vicar might want to know about her first marriage. It seemed enough that Merrily had been sent by Barry.
‘I’d begun to think it was all history. Then Barry rang and told me about Syd.’ Liz’s face became glum. ‘Oh dear. You never know what you should or shouldn’t say. I’m still a bit of a patriot, like my dad.’
‘Where did you meet Colin?’
‘Disco. In Hereford. I didn’t go very often, but my cousin was staying with us and she was all for that kind of thing. It wasn’t very long after the Iranian Embassy siege in London, when the Regiment rescued the hostages, and they were national heroes, and all the girls in Hereford… do you remember that? Perhaps you’d be too young.’
‘Well, I wasn’t living here then, but I can imagine what it was like.’
‘Madness. They were like pop stars. It was when young men started pretending they were in the Regiment just to get the girls. Colin, though… I didn’t even find out that he was one of them, not for a while.’
‘He was actually one of the team who got into the embassy?’
‘No, no. Just in the Regiment. Though he never made a thing out of it, never. In fact, not long after we got engaged he said he was thinking of leaving, he’d had enough. But… he didn’t go until he had to. And by then he didn’t want to.’
‘You mentioned something being history. What was that?’
Clouds were lowering like a big gloved hand over the southern Black Mountains and the air was occasionally ripped by the screams of duelling chainsaws from middle-distant woodland.
‘Yes,’ Liz said eventually. ‘The trouble between Colin and Syd. I may have mentioned it to Barry, once.’
‘I’m trying to clear up a few things. Syd and I worked together… in the…’
Merrily lifted a hand to her dog collar. Liz nodded as if she understood, said she thought Colin and Syd had been quite close friends in the Regiment. So she was pleased – at first – when Syd had turned up one afternoon, not long after the publication of the first book.
Just passing through, Syd had said. Colin had been out when he arrived, and he said he’d wait and they had a pot of tea, Syd and Liz, and quite a long chat. Syd had not long been ordained as a minister, and Liz remembered he’d said it was as if his innocence had been restored.
‘I think it was something he’d been building up to. Coming to see Colin. Not just passing at all.’
‘Did they meet in the end?’
‘It was a Sunday. Colin had been out shooting. As soon as he walked in, I sensed… It was like an encounter between two hostile wild animals. Colin still had his shotgun and a bag with what he’d shot – wood pigeons, I think. Standing there with his gun under his arm. I said, Well, I’m sure you two have a lot to catch up on. I was uncomfortable. The whole atmosphere had changed, and I realized there was something badly wrong between them. I don’t think they even noticed me go out.’
‘So you didn’t hear what they talked about.’
‘I didn’t want to.’ Liz looked agitated. ‘I shut myself in the kitchen and put the radio on, loud. Classic FM. If there’d been guests in, I don’t know what I’d’ve done, but it was out of season. I heard Syd shout, in quite an anguished voice, “They’re dead! They’re all dead now!” Didn’t see him leave.’
‘Who might he have meant? All dead.’
Liz looked out of the window. There was a long view over pastureland, channelled by woodland, to the foothills of the Black Mountains and then the smoky shelf of the mountains themselves.
‘I don’t know, my dear. Colin never mentioned it afterwards. I do know that resolving a dispute with Colin was never easy. He didn’t forgive anyone quickly, if at all. And, of course, he always seemed to despise the Church, even though we were married in one. I didn’t like to mention that before, with you being… He once said Christianity was… not a man’s religion. Certainly not a soldier’s religion.’
‘So could the antagonism between Colin and Syd have been anything to do with the fact that Syd had taken up a religion that Colin had no time for?’
Merrily shifted in the squashy chair. For a moment there, she’d felt something of Syd Spicer in the place. The quietness of him, almost an absence, a soul in camouflage.
‘Possibly… I don’t know,’ Liz said. ‘I thought… this sounds silly, but I kept thinking it was something to do with the books.’
