The Secrets of Pain

18

‘Actually, I do think he did it,’ Bliss said. ‘What’s wrong with that? It’s me job to suspect people.’

Staring up at the plaster moulding around the bedroom ceiling. The curtains were undrawn; you could see blurry lights in the big houses on the hillside across the road.

Cosy. An upstairs flat in a classy Victorian villa set back from the main road out of Great Malvern. Bliss liked it here – at the moment, more than anywhere, especially his crappy semi on the flat side of Hereford. OK, if he was called out in the night it’d take him maybe forty minutes to get back, and he’d need to leave at seven a.m., anyway. But it was worth it. Wasn’t it?

‘Francis, you…’

Annie Howe peering at him, her eyes all soft and woolly and useless without her contacts. It was worth it just for that.

‘… you can’t simply accuse a man of murder because he doesn’t like you. Sometimes I don’t like you. You can be an intensely annoying person.’

‘Part of me appeal, Annie.’

Bliss watched a light go out across the road, and then the hillside was as blank as those years of mutual blind distrust. Fast-track Annie, man-hating bitch, daughter of Councillor Charlie Howe, ex-copper, bent. All the poison darts Bliss had aimed at her back. Why should she like him?

He felt, unexpectedly, flimsy. What was she supposed to see in a twat who couldn’t hold anything together, not his job, not his family? Like Kirsty said, You never did put yourself out much, did you, Frank?

True, in a way. He and Annie had fallen into bed within days of Kirsty leaving, both coasting on the euphoria of a crucial result, a key arrest. A cop thing. How much staying power was there in that?

‘What’s the matter?’ Annie said.

Chris says you consistently neglected your wife, Inspector.

‘Francis…?’

She moved away from him. She’d put her nightdress back on, all creased. She was his superior. Better-educated, better-connected, better-looking. Coat hanger with tits? Was Stagg blind?

‘We said when this began that there’d be no analysis,’ Annie said softly. ‘One day at a time. We also said that.’

But there were no days, only nights. Cover of darkness. Cover of Christmas. It should have been his emptiest Christmas ever. Instead, he’d spent the days in work, the nights with Annie. In January they were spending two nights a week together, one at her place, one at his – Annie parking around the corner, walking, all muffled up, to the back door. We’re all right, she’d said, as long as nobody finds out. As long as we’re never seen together. As long as we don’t go out together. As long as we don’t ever do that thing where you drive a hundred miles into Wales or somewhere and have lunch and walk by the river, because there’s always some bloody copper, who used to be in this division, on holiday.

Bliss cleared his throat. Badly wanting to tell Annie about Kirsty, get her input, see if she had any idea at all who might’ve rumbled them. But Annie’s job was as important to her as his was to him. If he told her, she’d restrict their meetings, and he couldn’t stand that, because this was the only thing preventing him exploding into gases and shrapnel.

‘Right, then, Francis…’

In the glacial light from the street lamps he saw that she’d arranged two pillows against the bedhead, sitting back into them, a nipple’s areola vanishing back into the white cotton. Reaching to the bedside table and finding her glasses and putting them on to watch him across the post-midnight greyness. Return of the Ice Maiden.

‘Tell me about Sollers Bull,’ she said.

Gut feelings were no longer encouraged. No place for them in teamwork. Even Bliss was suspicious of gut feelings. Other people’s, anyway.

‘See, even when I was talking to him, I could feel it. I could see him in a pair of them green nylon overalls that farmers wear for mucky jobs.’

‘Pulling them off, I suppose, as he ran through the fields into the headlights of our correspondent and his girlfriend.’

‘I wanted to go back with a warrant to search his house. I wanted to talk to his hidden wife. Maybe she knows, maybe she doesn’t or maybe she just suspects.’

‘Stay away from her, Francis. Until you have something stronger, anyway. The bottom line is… he has an alibi. Several.’

‘The staff at his caff? It’s still borderline. Time of death’s not that certain, and it’s not that far away. You didn’t see the rage in him. Something about it that was wrong for the situation… skewed.’

Anger was always useful for concealing a hole where grief ought to be, but it was also a good outlet for the hyper excitement that lived in you for hours after you’d done something enormous.

‘I was thinking at first that if there was no real pain there it was because half of him’d be well chuffed at getting the farm.’

‘Perhaps that’s all it was,’ Annie said. ‘We don’t even know he didn’t get on with his brother. OK, different kinds of men – the traditionalist and the young progressive. University education, big ideas.’

‘Enough to cause a rift, when he starts shaking off the steadying hand.’

‘Even if they did hate one another, who’s going to tell you? Not the family, and not the wider community.’

‘Somebody will,’ Bliss said. ‘Always somebody with a grudge, a chip.’

‘We get his DNA, for purposes of elimination?’

‘Yeh.’

‘You feel threatened, Francis?’

‘Me?’

‘He’s put you very much in the firing line. A symbol of what’s gone wrong with the police in this area. Urban cop.’

‘Strange as it may seem, Annie, it wasn’t that urban where I grew up. Not then, anyway. There are fields up there.’ Bliss lay back. ‘Countryside frigging Defiance. Where did that come from?’

‘I Googled them. Much of it’s hunting-based. Aimed mainly, I’d guess, at attracting younger people to the cause. The trad- itional fox-hunting image of a retired colonel and Camilla Parker-Bowles as was… is not terribly evident on their Web site.’

‘Who’s behind it?’

‘Don’t know. They’re also using Facebook and Twitter. Sollers Bull in hunting pink is a gift. Good-looking and a little bit dark and edgy. He was always like that.’

‘Oh?’

‘I didn’t know him well, but I did know him. From his days in the YFC.’

‘ You were in the Young Farmers?’

‘I was a young farmer’s girlfriend for a while. He was a friend of Sollers. This was when I was about sixteen. We were at the same parties, occasionally. He was popular with girls who… had more going for them in the looks department than I ever did.’

‘Don’t sell yourself short.’

‘I’m a realist. Anyway, I didn’t know him well enough to get behind the image.’

‘He’s a liar,’ Bliss said. ‘He was acting. On TV. Just like all those husbands who break down in front of the cameras: Please find the monster who killed my lovely wife. And all the time you’re looking at him.’

The lights were all out in the houses on the hillside, traffic was sparse. Bliss had that feeling he used to get as a kid, of being on an island in the night. It was not unpleasant.

‘He did it, Annie.’

‘I’d be very careful, at this stage, who you share your suspicions with. It’s a small county and Bull has friends all over it.’

‘Including my soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law.’

‘Did you know that your in-laws knew Sollers Bull?’

‘Be surprising if they didn’t. The farm’s only ten minutes away and Chris Symonds has social ambitions. Always asking me if I was up for promotion.’

Annie slid down in the bed, a long thigh against his.

‘You’re obviously up for something,’ Annie said.

Overslept.

It was six-thirty and fully light when the mobile trilled by his side of the bed. Bliss awoke spooned into Annie’s back, experiencing the usual half-shock at whose back this was. His hand had barely found his phone before Annie’s phone made its Nokia noise on the other side.

‘Karen, yeh?’ Bliss said.

Watching Annie fumbling for her glasses, peering at her screen. In Bliss’s phone, Karen Dowell didn’t dress it up.

‘Shit,’ Bliss was clawing the sleep out of his eyes. ‘Where?’

‘City centre, more or less. East Street?’

‘A woman. You did say a woman?’

‘No, boss, I said two.’

Part Three

When I was still young, I thought it a great pity to die. Not that there was anything on earth I wanted to live for…

Julian of Norwich

Revelations of Divine Love