remote. ‘I’ll talk to him, but I’ll warn him first that under the circumstances there could be things I would feel obliged to pass on to the police. Then he has the option of telling me to push off.’
Bliss didn’t look too unhappy about this.
‘And no tape, no video.’
‘Merrily…’
‘Or I could put your idea to the Bishop. He’d need about two days to think about it, the old worrier.’ She stood up. ‘Frannie, are you even fit to drive?’
Bliss squeezed shut his eyes and opened them again.
‘Wouldn’t have any more coffee in that pot, by any chance?’
11
Just How Funny It Gets
THEY TRAVELLED DOWN the long, misted valley, with steel skeletons striding ahead of them.
This was where Herefordshire and Gloucestershire lay back- to-back on a lumpy mattress of tiered fields rising into old woodland of browning broadleaved trees and conifers high on the hillsides. But the valley didn’t look as if it belonged to either county as much as it belonged to the power industry.
‘You can’t believe they can still get away with this, can you?’ Merrily said.
‘Sorry?’ Frannie Bliss, driving, was somewhere else.
‘The pylons.’ They looked seriously hostile, like an army of the dead, bristling with obsolete weaponry. ‘I mean, would it be all
The joke was that there were so few homes in view that you could probably have electrified the lot with half a dozen windmills. Wreathed now in fog, the pylons were a primitive show of strength. Maybe one day they’d be industrial archaeology. Not yet.
Frannie Bliss glared at the countryside through the windscreen of his black Alfa, as though it was holding out on him. He was still a city cop at heart; you couldn’t accost pedestrians the same in country lanes:
They’d come in from the A40, the dual carriageway pumping heavy goods in and out of Newport and Cardiff and the West Country. Here, lorries lurched past the most voluptuous curves of the Wye Valley and that famous Ross-on-Wye skyline: the tall-steepled church crowning the town, above the river and the water-meadows and the mock-medieval sandstone walls. Dark wooded hills were the Ross backcloth, and those same hills were directly above them now, sunk into wet mist, a few miles beyond the town.
‘No, I was just wondering,’ Bliss said, ‘how many sewerage systems Roddy’s put in around here. Every farm needs one, doesn’t it? Every cottage.’
Merrily saw where this was heading. ‘You could start a terrible scare.’
Bliss nodded, didn’t seem too concerned.
‘You put this out in the media,’ she warned, ‘you get everybody for miles around wondering if they’ve got a dead body under their septic tank.’
In a pocket of her coat, she’d discovered the card that Roddy Lodge had given her last night.
Efflapure
R F Lodge
registered contractor
The Old Garage,
Underhowle,
Nr Ross-on-Wye.
It was in a plastic evidence bag now, locked in the boot of the Alfa. Frannie Bliss seemed close to becoming obsessive about Roddy Lodge.
‘I wouldn’t mind looking under, say, a few
‘You’d know better than me.’ He was changing the subject, but she could sense his anticipation and was unnerved by it.
He glanced at her. ‘How’s Lol?’ He’d encountered Lol during the summer, over the hop-kiln tragedy and the problems surrounding Allan Henry, the developer. Oddly, Bliss and Lol had seemed to understand one another, but that didn’t mean she could trust him with an update.
‘We’re still friends. And how’s
‘Not many private bits left.’
‘What’s that mean?’
He took a sudden right between a Scots pine and an untrimmed hedge. The car skidded on some mud, and Bliss narrowly avoided the hedge.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘just the usual police thing. Your married life suffers on account of the job, and then it gets so bloody messy at home the job becomes a refuge. Like that.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I don’t
‘I wonder how often you’ve said that. Maybe—’
‘All right,’ Bliss said, ‘probe over. We’re nearly there. Listen, when we get to the actual place, I’m not gonna force yer into a Durex suit, but try not to touch anything, eh?’
‘We’re just going to his house, aren’t we? It’s not as if it’s a murder scene…’ She registered his chilly half- smile. ‘Oh.’
‘We don’t know for certain,’ Bliss said. ‘But he had to’ve done it somewhere. And we do know he brought women back here, and when you see inside the place… well, you’ll probably
This was where Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean looked to be stealthily pinching bits of Herefordshire. The lane narrowed between wild saplings growing on the verges. And then, within fifty yards of a sign announcing Underhowle, but before any evidence of a community, they were there: a clearing and a short cindered track opening into a forecourt fronting a building of grey concrete – a classic garage from the 1950s, sectional temple to the motor car, with a white metal sign: R. F. LODGE. In front, the stumps of petrol pumps, behind one of the towering pylons that looked as though it had just walked down from the conifered hillside.
Either side of the garage with its high, twin entrances, shuttered now, stood newer concrete buildings. Frannie Bliss parked the Alfa between a police car and a white van on the forecourt, lowering his window as a uniformed constable came over.
‘Sir, there’s been a deputation of local people demanding to know what’s going on here. DS Mumford didn’t want to speak to them, so I just told them I wasn’t authorized to make a statement, it’d be up to the SIO. Just to put you in the picture. I think they’ll be back.’
‘I do not doubt it, son. Andy’s up at the house, is he?’ Bliss turned to Merrily. ‘I’ve had Andy going through Roddy’s books, phoning his fantasy clients.
‘You’re really building this up, aren’t you?’
‘Merrily, I’m a detective inspector who would like to be a detective
