Just as well. When he got out of the car, not fully closing the door to avoid the noise, he saw another vehicle, a light-coloured Discovery, half hidden on the edge of the pair of fat leylandii which separated the holiday cottages from the farmhouse and threw their front doors into evening shade.
No sign of Kirsty’s Ka. Chris Symonds drove a Discovery; maybe she’d borrowed it to cart stuff around. Worst scenario would be that Chris and Pat were in there, in which case a mere exchange of bitter words would be the least he’d get away with.
Bliss was about four paces from the door when there was muffled click and then he was standing like a social-club compere in overlapping circles of garish lemon light.
He backed off sharpish. Who the hell had installed security spots?
A shadow crossed the upstairs window and he heard a muffled biffing – the heel of a hand repeatedly hitting a jammed window frame. And then, as it gave way, a voice from up there.
‘… bloody thing. See, told you it was nobody. Not even the paparazzi.’
…trailed by a sound he hadn’t heard in a good long while: Kirsty’s little shocked-but-thrilled, plumped-out giggle.
Bliss crouched in the damp grass at the edge of the track until the security lights reached the end of their cycle and went out, and he could see the figure in the window, out of shadow up there.
The shock and the pain came sudden and vicious, like a knife-thrust in some clammy alleyway, as the setting sun showed him that the parts of Sollers Bull visible above the window frame were unclothed.
42
It took a while to come out – it always did around here. The two brothers had been introduced by Bax as Percy and Walter. They lived in a small red-brick cottage, nineteenth-century, at the end of a row of modern houses and bungalows near Kenchester. They travelled in the slow lane. The silent Walter, who was probably over ninety, wore an apron and made the tea. Percy had never heard of anybody called Lol before.
‘Short for Laurence,’ Lol said.
He’d crawled up from Brinsop in the truck, behind a man on a bike.
‘Well, well,’ Percy said.
Walter handed Lol tea in a china cup. A low-wattage bulb, its brown flex hanging over a blackened beam, had probably been on all day. Coal was burning in an iron range. There was a TV set that had to be fifty years old and probably didn’t work any more. The room smelled of… well, it smelled of old blokes.
‘Lol writes songs,’ Bax told Percy.
‘Too many bloody songs, now. All sounds the same.’
Percy was a few years younger than Walter. His hair was white and curly.
‘No, proper songs,’ Bax said. ‘Folk songs. Songs about life. And songs about things what goes on…’ he winked at Lol ‘… that people don’t talk about much no more.’
‘Talk? They wanted me to give a talk, look,’ Percy said. ‘Women’s Institute. Some woman comes round, asks me to give a talk.’
‘That was my missus, Percy.’
‘Wasn’t gonner talk to a load o’ women. They spreads stuff all over, women does. And they gets it wrong.’
‘Always a problem with women,’ Bax admitted.
‘En’t I don’t like to talk.’ Percy nodded at Walter. ‘ He don’t like to talk much, never has, look. I likes to talk, long as folks gets it right, what I tells ’em. Half the buggers, they don’t listen proper, n’more.’
Bax nodded.
‘Talks back, don’t listen,’ Percy said.
After a while he seemed to notice Lol, sitting on a stool by the door. Lol was listening. Percy nodded approvingly.
‘Tell Lol what you seen in the long field that night,’ Bax said.
In the feeble light, the already muted colours in the room had died back into a sombre sepia. Percy did some thinking.
‘Wouldn’t ’appen to ’ave any more o’ that scenty baccy, would you, boy?’ he said eventually.
Halfway down Church Street, Jane began to feel cold and a little stupid in the sawn-off white hoodie that she’d worn in the Swan the night she’d met Cornel. But he’d been pissed then and she needed him to recognize her.
Ready for this now. Knew exactly how she’d handle him. Sure he’d come out of the Ox at some point. Maybe he was here with his cockfighting mates. Eventually she went in and had a glance around.
Mistake.
‘Watkins!’
Slobby Dean Wall at one of the gaming machines.
‘Don’t get excited, Wall,’ Jane said calmly. ‘I’m only looking for somebody.’
‘Yeah.’ Wall looked at her bare bits, sucking in his breath. ‘It looks like you bloody are, too.’
Jane took a couple of steps inside. Stink of stale beer. Only the Ox could sell beer that smelled stale when it was fresh out of the pump. Men’s eyes were flickering her way from all corners of the cramped bar with its tobacco beams and stained flags. A barmaid was clearing glasses from a table. Six pint glasses in two hands, fingers down in the dregs, clinking. She looked up, and it was Lori Jenkin, who worked part-time in the Eight Till Late. Jane leaned over, lowered her voice.
‘I’m looking for Cornel.’
‘Your mum know about this, Jane?’
‘Got a message for him, that’s all. Somebody said he was in here.’
This was going all wrong. She needed to just, like, bump into him.
‘I think he’s in his room,’ Lori said. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘He’s staying here?’
The Ox had two spare bedrooms, which Jane understood were used mainly by sad downmarket commercial travellers too pissed to go back on the road. A guy with a Porsche staying here… that did not sound right.
Lori said, ‘I’ll get somebody to give him a knock, if you like.’
‘ No… No, it’s OK. It’s not urgent, I’ll catch him again.’
Jane got out of the Ox under Dean Wall’s soiled, beery gaze and stood there feeling like a prostitute, shivering. They always underdressed, apparently. This wasn’t working. Give up for tonight, go home.
Rapid footsteps across the street and, oh jeez, it was Mum walking up from the village hall. Jane hung back, keeping close to the shadowed cottages. But, after a few paces, inevitably tonight, Mum looked back and saw her.
Jane walked up, hands jammed in her pockets to pull the hoodie down over the bare bits. How was she going to explain this?
‘Meeting’s over already?’
‘Uncle Ted couldn’t make it, so we had a fairly restricted agenda, thank God. Apparently, he, erm… tried to ring me earlier.’ Mum glancing sideways at Jane, as they walked up to the empty square, taking in the skimpy apparel and then glancing away. ‘Jane, look, I know it’s none of my-’
‘I needed to walk and think and stuff. Didn’t realize how cold it was.’
They reached the square, with its tumble of black and white buildings, the weary lanterns coming on outside the Swan, soon to be owned by…
Jane’s fists tightened.
‘So,’ Mum said, ‘you were thinking. And stuff.’
‘Last day of term. Last school holiday. The future.’
Everybody had been demob happy at school. Those facing A levels probably less so, but nobody quite as
