‘You’re quite right there, Jan,’ Bliss said. ‘It very much is.’
He wondered if her girlfriend was fairly well known in the area. And if the husband had any inkling. Jan still looked nervous.
‘You won’t get me to give evidence in court. You do accept that?’
Annie said, ‘We can talk about that later.’
‘There won’t be a later if I don’t get an assurance.’
Annie Howe nodded.
At least they got an accurate location, a good half-mile from where they’d stopped searching for blood traces in the fields. Covered some ground, this guy. The access involved several unmarked single-track lanes. There was a derelict barn you couldn’t miss, Jan said, and the ungated field entrance was about fifty yards after that.
Bliss made notes. Asked her if she’d seen any other vehicles on the way there, and Jan shook her head, said nobody lived up there any more.
‘I’ve walked that whole area. I’m staying in a guest house at Tillington, about three miles away, looking for a cottage, so I’ve done a lot of exploring around. Essential preparation for taking over a local school. Kids can be evil wee sods if they think you’re an innocent abroad.’
‘And your friend? She’s local?’
‘Do we have to go into that?’
Bliss shrugged.
‘Credenhill,’ Jan said. ‘Though not originally.’
Bliss didn’t react. Was it possible that Jan was snuggling up to some SAS man’s missus while he was in foreign parts? That’d make anybody nervous.
‘In your letter,’ Annie said, ‘you called Mansel “Farmer Bull”. Was that how your girlfriend knew him?’
‘It’s what they called him in the local shop.’
Bliss said, ‘When you saw this man in the field, did you also see any sign of a vehicle? Off-road, perhaps? Or any other people?’
‘We didn’t hang around, if I’m honest. Out there in the middle of nowhere, it was pretty frightening. We’d only just arrived, so we still had the engine running and the headlights on when he came rushing out of the dark. As if he’d been blown out by the wind.’
‘You say you couldn’t see his face – what about his hair?’
‘I think he had hair… I mean, I don’t recall him as bald or anything, but… it could’ve been slicked back with the… with the blood. I don’t know.’
‘Tall, short, thin, fat?’
‘He certainly seemed tall. And well-built, I suppose. And quite fit, I’d imagine, the way he was moving. I go to the gym twice a week, but you wouldn’t get me out running in those conditions.’
‘Let me play devil’s advocate here,’ Annie said. ‘How do you know it was blood? How do you know he wasn’t simply plastered with mud? Red Herefordshire mud.’
‘And then I heard about the murder afterwards, you mean, and put two and two together and made eleven?’
‘You wouldn’t be the first to make that kind of mistake in a situation like that.’
‘Chief Inspector, I spent many hours agonizing over whether to send you that letter, knowing that if it got out that a respectable married woman was having a relationship with a gay woman who was about to become head teacher at the school attended by her children…’
‘Yeh, OK,’ Bliss said. ‘What did he do, this feller, when he saw you?’
‘Stopped. I mean, he had to, or he’d’ve run into the front of the car. Then he turned away and ran off. Almost casually. As if he was an athlete running for pleasure, and he was full of endorphins, you know?’
‘What was his… you know, his mood? You gerra sense of that?’
‘It was – this is going to sound crazy – but it was as if he was loving it. Despite all the blood. Obviously, we thought it must be his own blood, and you think… even as you’re backing the car away, you’re thinking, does he need help? And yet that really wasn’t…’
‘Like he was relishing the blood?’ Bliss said. ‘I’m thinking the way a new huntsman – a fox-hunter – when it’s his first time, they splatter him with the fox’s blood?’
Bliss’s eyes met Annie’s, saw a flickering warning there. He smiled.
‘I’m afraid I’ve had nothing to do with blood sports,’ Jan said.
Annie asked her, ‘Do you think he saw you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He must’ve seen what kind of a car you had.’
‘And if you backed up and accelerated out of there, he must have known you’d seen him,’ Bliss said.
He watched Jan playing nervously with a stray blonde curl. Women of a Sapphic persuasion, it wasn’t as easy to identify them any more. In a few ways, she was more girlie than Annie.
‘I did think of that, yes,’ Jan said. ‘Another very good reason not to want to be identified, wouldn’t you say?’
Bliss said, ‘If we were to show you some piccies…?’
Felt Annie Howe’s head coming round on him with the weight of a gun turret.
‘It would be very unlikely that I’d recognize anybody from a photograph,’ Jan said. ‘As I say, it was all terribly fast and rather blurred.’
Bliss saw the waitress leaving the doorway of the bar with their coffee and cups on a tray.
‘What about your friend?’
‘She saw less than I did. Screaming her poor wee head off by then.’
‘I firmly trust you weren’t actually going to do that,’ Annie said. ‘That you were saying it just to annoy me.’
Jan had left. They knew where to find her. Bliss licked his spoon.
‘Why not? It’d be with a selection of other photos.’
‘Planting the idea that West Mercia Police suspect Sollers Bull of killing his brother?’
‘Got that twat’s prints all over it.’
Telling her about his and Karen’s visit to Magnis Berries last night and the reason. Annie scowled. Bliss shrugged.
‘Don’t tell me you wouldn’t’ve done the same.’
‘As it happens, I did know about Mansel selling the land to Magnis.’
‘Done behind Sollers’s back?’
‘According to Sollers, it was a decision made without much forethought. Mansel was using those top fields for training his sheepdogs. And then simply decided he’d had enough. The offer came, and he took it. Shortly before he was killed, he’d arranged to sell all his dogs to Berrows, from Kington, who you’ll know.’
‘Jeremy?’
‘He’s taken them all. Five dogs.’
‘That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’
‘What’s so odd about it, apart from the timing? Mansel presumably didn’t know he was going to be murdered. He’d lost the patience for it, according to Sollers. Not winning trophies any more. That’s all it is.’
Bliss said nothing. Sat and looked at Annie, sitting with her jacket open, her long woollen scarf hanging loose. The slender neck, the carelessly brushed pale hair.
‘Right,’ Annie said. ‘We’d better get back. I’ll send Slim Fiddler to find that field, and I’ll make sure he goes over every last blade of grass.’
‘Good luck.’
Bliss contemplated the oval miniature of his own face wizened into the sugar spoon. Spent a couple of cliff- edge seconds reconsidering his decision not to tell Annie about Kirsty’s first little bombshell:
…when it all comes out, won’t one of you have to move to another division? Isn’t that how it works?
Annie said, ‘Presumably you didn’t get anything useful from Magnis Berries?’
