The Secrets of Pain

33

Karen Dowell was on the phone when Bliss got into Gaol Street, just after half-nine, but still managed to flick him a warning look, glancing at his office door. Which was shut. Someone sitting in there.

Bliss decided that if, by some serendipitous anomaly, it was the Chief Constable, he’d smash the bastard before he could get up. Partly because the Chief was bigger than him and partly because he felt like shit this morning – shivery and light-headed, like when some hovering virus was figuring out if you were worth taking down. And partly because it might just be the finest thing he’d ever do in his life.

He nodded to Karen, opened the office door, walked in with his aching head held high, and it was Annie Howe.

The old Annie. The dark trouser suit, the ice-maiden white shirt. The no make-up, the no jewellery. Sitting behind his desk, marking the homework.

Bliss shut the door behind him.

Might have slept last night, but he didn’t think so. He remembered the sun coming up before his wide-open eyes, before the clouds had smothered it. He’d got up, drunk a whole pot of tea, hoping that Annie might call him from Malvern before either of them left for work. Nothing.

‘If you’ve gorra screwdriver on you, Annie, I’ll take me name off the door.’

‘I’m meeting a witness at ten.’ Annie stacked the reports, looked up at him. ‘Why I’m here rather than Oldcastle. I thought you might like to sit in.’

‘Witness to what?’

‘A man in a field? Covered in blood?’

‘Oh.’

‘Agreed to meet in town, if we can protect his identity. Actually, it was the girlfriend who rang in, from a mobile. I’m meeting them at Gilbey’s. Told her I might be accompanied, but that wouldn’t change anything.’

They walked up towards High Town, well apart on the pavement. Annie was wearing a grey double-breasted jacket, a long white woollen scarf.

‘I do hope the Chief realizes this won’t be bloodless,’ Bliss said.

‘Don’t do anything stupid. There may be room for manoeuvre.’

‘Rather be out than have this shite. Chuck in me papers.’

‘You’re being ridiculous.’ Annie quickened her pace. ‘Nobody wants you out of the job. Might even simply be a case of staying in West Mercia, just leaving the division?’

‘No. No, no, no.’ Rage ripping into Bliss as he caught her up on the corner, near the zebra crossing. ‘You don’t understand, do you? I’ve only gorra close me eyes and I can see them… Kairsty and her old man… Sollers Bull and his friggin’ father-in-law from the House of friggin’ Lords. All the foreign hunters behind Countryside Defiance and the tweedy twats who like to think they still control this county, and-’

‘The Chief’s just watching his back. It’s how they survive.’

‘-and right there in the middle… your old man. Charlie Howe with one hand held out for the money and the other making some Masonic sign. Corruption’s embedded in this county, Annie, like… like the blue bits in Danish friggin’ Blue. Try and cut yourself a slice that isn’t riddled with it.’

‘You could say that of just about anywhere.’

‘Yeh, well, I don’t live just about anywhere. And one thing I’ve noticed is that when they go down, the bad guys… when they go down in Hereford, it’s always the outsiders.’

They turned along the narrow passage leading to Gilbey’s bar, where the city’s movers and shakers occasionally moved and shook. In its own secluded little space up against the back of St Peter’s Church.

‘We have to sit outside.’ Annie headed for the farthest table, under a tree and in the shadow of the steeple. ‘You go and order some coffee. I’ll wait here, in case he’s early.’

‘Do we need pink carnations?’

Inside, Bliss scanned the clientele. A few faces that he vaguely recognized. Fortunately, nobody he actually knew. He’d thought maybe Annie had asked him along because she had something encouraging to say to him about how they’d fight this thing together, but that evidently was not going to happen.

When he came out, there was a woman sitting with Annie. Mid-thirties, pale-skinned, wind-straggled blonde hair tucked into the collar of her red leather jacket.

‘This is my colleague, Francis Bliss,’ Annie said. ‘Francis, this is… Janette.’

‘Jan,’ the woman said.

Bliss sat down the other side of Jan.

‘And when will your friend be joining us?’

‘She won’t,’ Jan said.

Bliss looked at Annie, who smiled colourlessly.

‘Jan is our witness, Francis.’

It took a moment.

‘Ah,’ Bliss said.

Jan told them she was taking up an appointment after Easter, as head teacher at a local primary school.

Bliss said, ‘You mean, out there, in the sticks?’

‘Out there, yes.’

Jan said the person she’d been with in the car on the night of Mansel Bull’s murder was married, but wouldn’t be for long. They’d been at college together, found one another again after fifteen years. She was the reason Jan had come looking for work in the Hereford area.

‘There might not be complications with either parents or governors, but there just might. It’s necessary to be discreet and take things slowly. This is, after all, a rural area.’

‘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?’

‘Nothing of immediate significance, no.’

Annie stood up, buttoning her jacket, the tower and steeple of St Peter’s in the wedge of white sky behind her. For a moment Bliss thought she was smiling as she looked down at him.

Then she said, ‘Don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t assure me again that you never hit your wife. I believe you. However, for the foreseeable future…’ she tucked a two-pound coin under the coffee pot ‘… I think we need to be colleagues.’

‘What?’

‘Colleagues,’ Annie said. ‘People who work together.’