To Dream of the Dead

1 The Grotto

Watching the wooden horses bobbing on their golden carousel, Bliss had become aware of darkness like a hole behind the spinning lights.

High Town on a damp midwinter evening, fogged faces around the fast-food outlets. Bliss was waving cheerfully to his kids on the painted horses. Doing the dad thing. His kids not exactly waving back, just minimally hingeing their fingers, sarcastic little sods.

Kirsty’s kids. Hereford kids, somehow fathered by Francis Bliss from Knowsley, Merseyside. His kids had Hereford accents. His kids’ little mates thought he talked weird, laughing at him behind their hands, trying to imitate him, this joke Scouser.

Joke Scouser in Hereford. On two or three Wednesday evenings before Christmas — a tradition now in the city — shops would open until nine p.m. Bliss and Kirsty and the kids had been three years running; must be a tradition for them, too.

So why were the festive lights ice-blue? Why no carol singers, no buskers, no exotic folkies in hairy blankets playing ‘Silent Night’ on the Andean pipes?

Maybe the council’s Ethnic Advisory Directorate had advised against, in deference to Hereford’s handful of Muslims.

‘They’re coming round again,’ Kirsty said. ‘Wave.’

Bliss waved at the carousel. It was like a birthday cake at a frigging funeral tea. Beyond it, too many shopfronts dulled by low-powered security lighting. Car-friendly superstores coining it on the perimeter while the old town-centre family firms starved to death. Now the council was creating this massive new retail mall on the northern fringe, swallowing the old cattle market, answering no obvious need except to turn Old Hereford into something indistinguishable from the rest of the shit cities in landfill Britain.

Watching the random seepage of shoppers — going nowhere, buying not much — Bliss felt lonely. Kirsty had moved away from the carousel, gloved hands turning up the collar of her new sheepskin jacket.

‘All right, Frank, what’s the matter with you?’

He sighed, never able to tell her just how much he hated that. Growing up, it was always Frannie, Francis on Sundays, but Kirsty had to call him Frank.

‘I don’t understand you any more,’ Kirsty said. ‘One night for me and the children. Just one night…’

‘For the children?’ Bliss staring at his wife. ‘Kairsty, they’re only doing it for our sake. They’d rather be at home, plugged into their frigging computers.’

‘Yes,’ Kirsty said grimly. ‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’

‘Don’t think it gives me any pleasure.’

‘What does give you pleasure, Frank?’

Kirsty turning away — not an answer she could face. Bliss breathing in hard and shutting his eyes, the carousel crooning through its speakers about letting it snow, when it so obviously wasn’t going to snow, not tonight and definitely not for Christmas; what it was going to do was rain and rain, and nobody ever sang let it frigging rain.

Bliss spun round instinctively at the sound of a ricocheting tin.

Lager can. It rolled out in front of the Ann Summers store, which seemed to be closed. It had bounced off a bloke wearing an ape suit and an ape mask and a sandwich board pleading DON’T LET DRINK MAKE A MONKEY OUT OF YOU.

Three young lads, early teens, were jetting fizzy beer at the feller in the ape suit. Two community support officers moseying over, a young woman and a stocky man with a delta of cheek veins.

‘Fuck me,’ one of the kids said. ‘Who sent for the traffic warden?’

‘… your language, boy.’ The senior plastic plod visibly clenching up — you had to feel sorry for them. ‘How old are you?’

The boy went right up to him, thin head on an exaggerated tilt, teeth like a shark’s, embryo of a moustache.

‘And how old are you, grandad?’

‘You throw that tin?’

‘What you gonner do, run me over with your Zimmer, is it?’

Bliss purred like a cat, deep in his throat, Kirsty muttering, ‘You’re off duty, Frank.’

The three kids had formed a rough semicircle now, in front of a blacked-out shopfront with a poster on the door: SAVE THE SERPENT.

‘You can’t arrest us,’ another of them said to the support guy. ‘You got no powers of arrest. You can’t fucking touch us, ole man, you’re just—’

‘However…’ In this crazy blaze of… well, it might not be actual pleasure but it was certainly relief, Bliss had found himself at the centre of the action ‘… I can.’

As if he was frigging Spiderman just landed from the roof. Or a magician, his ID appearing like the ace of spades in his left hand. He could hear Kirsty backing off, heels clacking like a skidding horse.

‘What’s more…’ Committed now, Bliss advanced on the biggest kid, the old accent kicking in like nicotine ‘… I also happen to have a key to the notoriously vomit-stained cell we fascist cops like to call Santa’s Grotto.’

Bliss smiling fondly at the kid, and the kid sneering but saying nothing.

‘Fancy a few hours in the Grotto, do we, sonny? Sniffing icky sicky, while we wait for our old fellers to drag their arses out the pub and come and fetch us? Or maybe they won’t bother till morning. I wouldn’t.’

A movement then, from one of the others in the shadow of a darkened doorway — hand dipping into a pocket down his leg. Knife?

Jesus… careful.

Kids. Frigging little scallies. Grown men were easier these days, these three too young and maybe too pissed to understand that sticking a cop bought you zero sanctuary.

Difficult. Bliss didn’t move, snatching a quick glance at the plastic plod who’d got his arms spread like a goalie, which meant that if knifeboy went for him now the old feller would catch it full in the chest. Mother of God, who trained these buggers?

The hand came out of the pocket, the fear-switch in Bliss’s trip-box giving a little tremble. Best to stay friendly.

‘Up to you, son. B-and-B in the grotto, is it?’

Boy’s hand still in shadow. Instant of crackling tension. Wafting stench of hot meat from a fast-food van.

Nah. Empty.

Pretty sure. Most likely the pocket was empty, too. This was still Hereford. Just. Feed him a get-out.

‘Yeh, thought not. Now piss off home, yer gobby little twats.’

Watching them go, one looking back, about to raise a finger, and Bliss taking a step towards him—

‘You do that again, sunshine, and I will frigging burst you!’

— as the mobile started shuddering silently in his hip pocket and the carousel invited them all to have a merry little Christmas.

‘Good of you, sir,’ the community-support woman said. ‘It’s, um, DI Bliss, isn’t it?’

‘No way,’ Bliss said. ‘Not here, luv. Got enough paperwork on me desk.’

Realising he was sweating, and it wasn’t warm sweat. This sharpend stuff… strictly for the baby bobbies and the rugby boys. Ten years out of uniform, you wondered how anybody over twenty-five could keep this up, night after night.

He dragged out his still-quivering phone, flipped it open, feeling not that bad now, all the same, and not considering the possible consequences until he looked up and saw those familiar female features gargoyling in the swirl of light from the carousel and remembered that he wasn’t here on his own.

‘You bastard.’

Gloved hands curling into claws.

‘Kirsty, tell me what else I—’

‘You swore to me you’d left that bloody thing at home.’

Bliss squeezed the phone tight.

‘Never gonner change, are you, Frank?’

Kirsty’s face glowing white-gold as the little screen printed out KAREN. Bliss slammed the phone to an ear.

‘Karen.’

‘Thought you’d want to know about this, boss. Where exactly are you?’

‘Pricing vibrators in Ann Summers.’ Bliss was feeling totally manic now. ‘Complete waste of money nowadays, Karen, what’s a mobile for? Pop it in, get yer boyfriend to give you a ring. Magic.’

Stepping blindly into the extreme danger zone; no way he could share that one with Kirsty.

Like, indirectly, he just had.

‘You could be there in a few minutes, then,’ Karen said.

Bliss looked up at the clock on the market hall. Eight minutes to nine.

‘You shit, Frank!’

‘Kirst—’

‘You stupid, thoughtless, irresponsible piece of shit! Suppose one of them youths’d had a knife? Or even a gun, for Christ’s sake? What about your children?’

‘Jesus, Kirsty, it’s not frigging Birmingham!’

Kirsty spinning away in blind fury, Karen saying, ‘Um, if you’ve got a domestic issue there, boss, I can probably reach Superintendent Howe—’

‘Acting Superintendent.’ Bliss saw the carousel stopping, his kids getting down. ‘Let’s not make it any worse. What is this, exactly? Go on, tell me.’

‘It’s a murder, boss.’

‘We’re sure about that, are we?’

‘You know the Blackfriars Monastery? Widemarsh Street?’

‘That’s the bit of a ruin behind the old wassname—?’

‘Coningsby Hospital. Look, really, if there’s a problem…’

‘No problem, Karen.’

Bliss pulled out his car keys, shrugged in a sorry, out-of-my-hands kind of way, and held them out to Kirsty. It was like pushing a ham sandwich into the cage of the lioness with cubs, but they’d need transport.

‘Five minutes, then, Karen. You’re there now?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You all right, Karen?’

Something in her voice he hadn’t heard before. Other people’s, yes, coppers’ even, but not hers.

‘Yeah, it’s just… I mean, you think you’ve seen it all, don’t you?’

‘Doc ’n’ soc on the way?’

‘Sure.’

‘Don’t bother coming home tonight, Frank.’ Kirsty ripping the bunch of keys from Bliss’s fingers, the two kids looking pitiful. ‘You can go home with Karen. Spend the other five per cent of your time with the bitch.’

Bliss covered the bottom of the phone, the plastics looking on; how embarrassing was this?

Karen said, ‘Before somebody else tells you, boss, I’ve contaminated the crime scene. Threw up. Only a bit. I’m sorry.’

‘It happens, Karen.’

Not to her, though. Bliss was remembering how once, end of a long, long night, he’d watched Karen Dowell eat a whole bag of chips in the mortuary. With a kebab? Yeh, it was a kebab.

Kirsty was walking away, holding Naomi’s hand in one of hers, Naomi holding one of Daniel’s. Of course, the kids were both a bit too old for that; Kirsty was blatantly making a point, the kids playing along, the way kids did.

It was six days from Christmas.

And yeh, he felt like a complete shit.

But not really lonely any more. What could that mean?

‘So don’t say I never warned you, Frannie,’ Karen Dowell said.

2 Moon Sat Up

Coming up to seven p.m., it stopped raining and Jane went to get some sense out of the river.

Slopping in her red wellies across the square, where the electric gaslamps were pooled in mist, and down to the bottom of Church Street, glossy and slippery. On the bridge, she looked over the peeling parapet, watching him licking his lips.

‘You’re not actually going to do this…?’

Zipping up her parka to seal in a serious shiver, because she didn’t recognise him any more. In this county, the Wye was always the big hitter, lesser rivers staying out of the action. In old pictures of the village, this one was barely visible, a bit-player not often even named. Slow and sullen, this guy, and — yeah — probably resentful.

Tonight, though, for the first time Jane could remember, he was roaring and spitting and slavering at his banks. All those centuries of low-level brooding, and then… hey, climate change, now who’s a loser?

‘Only, I thought we had an understanding,’ Jane said, desolate.

Because if this guy came out, there was no way the dig would start before Christmas.

Wasn’t fair. All the times she’d leaned over here, talking to him — influenced, naturally, by Nick Drake’s mysterious song, where the singer goes to tell the riverman all he can about some kind of plan. Nobody would ever know what the plan was because, within a short time, Nick Drake was dead from an overdose of antidepressants, long years before Jane was born, with only Lol left to carry his lamp.

Above a flank of Cole Hill, the moon was floating in a pale lagoon inside a reef of rain clouds. Jane’s hands and face felt cold. She looked away, up towards the haloed village centre and the grey finger of the church steeple. She’d seen the news pictures of Tewkesbury and Upton: canoes on the lanes, homes evacuated. It had never happened here to that extent, never — people kept insisting that.

But these were, like, strange days.

The main roads around Letton — always the first place north of Hereford to go — had been closed just after lunch, due to flash floods, and the school buses had been sent for early. Nobody wanted to spend a night in the school, least of all the teaching staff, and there was nothing lost, anyway, in the last week before Christmas.

Fitting each hand inside the opposite cuff, Jane hugged her arms together, leaning over the stonework, sensing the extreme violence down there, everything swollen and turbulent.

Across the bridge, a puddle the size of a duck pond had appeared in the village-hall car park, reflecting strips of flickering mauve light from the low-energy tubes inside. The lights were on for tonight’s public meeting — which wasn’t going to be as well attended as it ought to be. It had somehow coincided with late-night Christmas shopping in Hereford. No accident, Mum thought, and she was probably right. A devious bastard, Councillor Pierce.

‘Janey?’

Lamplight came zigzagging up the bank, bouncing off familiar bottle glasses, and Jane dredged up a grin.

‘You been snorkelling or something, Gomer?’

Up he came from the riverside footpath, over the broken-down wooden stile, the old lambing-light swinging from a hand in a sawn-off mitten. Patting at his chest for his ciggy tin. Still quite nimble for his age, which was reassuring.

‘What do you reckon, then?’ Jane said. ‘Seriously.’

‘Oh, he’ll be out, Janey, sure to.’

‘Really?’

‘Count on him.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight, mabbe tomorrow.’

Gomer set the lamp on the wall, its beam pointing down at the water.

His specs were speckled with spray and his white hair looked like broken glass.

‘You mean if it rains again?’ Jane said.

‘No ifs about it, girl.’ Gomer mouthed a roll-up. ‘Ole moon sat up in his chair, see?’

‘Chair?’

Jane peered at him. This was a new one. Gomer brought out his matches.

‘Ole moon’s on his back, he’ll collect the water. Moon’s sat up, it d’ run off him, see, and down on us. You never yeard that?’

‘Erm… no.’

‘Yeard it first from my ole mam, sixty year ago, sure t’ be. Weather don’t change, see.’

‘It does, Gomer.’

She must’ve sounded unusually sober against the snarling of the water because he tilted his head under the flat cap, peering at her.

‘Global warmin’? Load of ole wallop, Janey. Anythin’ to put the wind up ordinary folk.’

‘You seen those pictures of the big ice-cliffs cracking up in the Antarctic?’

Gomer’s match went out and he struck another.

‘All I’m sayin’, girl, science, he en’t got all the answers, do he?’

‘Yeah, but something has to be going on, because this hasn’t happened before, has it?’ Jane feeling her voice going shrill; it wasn’t a joke any more — up in the Midlands people had died. ‘I mean, have you seen this before? Like, here? We ever come this close to a real flood?’

‘Not in my time, ’cept for the lanes getting blocked, but what’s that in the life of a river?’ Gomer looked up towards the square, where the Christmas tree was lit up like a shaky beacon of hope. ‘You’ll be all right, Janey. En’t gonner reach the ole vicarage in a good while.’

‘What about your bungalow?’

She didn’t think Gomer’s bungalow was on the flood plain, but it had to be close. Always said it wasn’t where he’d’ve chosen to live but Minnie had liked the views.

Gomer said he’d brought one of his diggers down. Took real deep water to stop a JCB getting through.

‘En’t sure about them poor buggers on the hestate, mind.’

Nodding across the bridge at the new houses, one defiantly done out with flashing festive bling — Santa’s sleigh, orange and white, in perpetual, rippling motion. The estate had been built a couple of years ago, and most of it was definitely on the flood plain — which, of course, nobody could remember ever being actually flooded, although that wouldn’t matter a toss anyway, when the council needed to sanction more houses. Government targets to meet, boxes to tick.

This was possibly the most terrifying thing about growing up: you could no longer rely on adults in authority operating from any foundation of common sense. They just played it for short-term gain, lining their nests and covering their backs. How long, if Gomer was right, before the Christmas Bling house became like some kind of garish riverboat?

‘What about Coleman’s Meadow, Gomer? If the river comes out, could the flood water get that far?’

Twice they’d abandoned the dig — Jane really losing hope, now, that anything significant would be uncovered before the end of the school holidays, never mind the start.

‘Could it, Gomer?’

‘You still plannin’ to be a harchaeologist, Janey?’

‘Absolutely. Two university interviews in the New Year. Fingers crossed.’

Be fantastic if she could someday work around here. The Ledwardine stones could all be in place again by the summer, but there were probably years of excavation to come on the Dinedor Serpent, the other side of Hereford, and who knew what else was waiting to be found? Suddenly, this county had become a hot spot for prehistoric archaeology — two really major discoveries within a year. As though the landscape itself was throwing off centuries like superfluous bedclothes, an old light pulsing to the surface, and Jane could feel the urgency of it in her spine.

‘Gomer, is the meadow likely to get flooded?’

‘Mabbe.’ Gomer took out his ciggy, fingers sprouting from the woollen mittens. ‘Lowish ground, ennit?’

‘The thing is, if they think it could ruin the excavation, they might not even start it till there’s no danger of it all getting drowned.’

Meanwhile, Councillor sodding Pierce, who didn’t give a toss what lay under Coleman’s Meadow, would keep on trying to screw it, like his council had done with the Serpent. Playing for time, and Jane would be back at school before they got to sink the first trowel.

‘You going to the parish meeting, Gomer?’

‘Mabbe look in, mabbe not. Nobody gonner listen to an ole gravedigger. You still banned, is it, Janey?’

‘Well, not banned exactly. Mum’s just…’

… politely requested that she stay away.

It’s not going to help, flower. It’s reached the stage where we need a degree of subtlety, or they’re going to win.

Mum thinking the mad kid wouldn’t be able to hold back, would make a scene, heckling Pierce, making the good guys look like loonies.

The brown water flung itself at the old sandstone bridge, and Jane, officially adult now and able to vote against the bastard, bit her lip and felt helpless. Even the riverman was on the point of betraying her.

‘Dreamed about my Min last night,’ Gomer said.

Jane looked at him. His ciggy drooped and his glasses were as grey as stone.

‘Dreamed her was still alive. Us sittin’ together, by the light o’ the fire. Pot of tea on the hob.’

‘But you—’

‘En’t got no hob n’ more. True enough. That was how I knowed it was a dream.’ Gomer steadied his roll-up. ‘Was a good dream, mind. En’t often you gets a good dream, is it?’

Nearly a couple of years now since Minnie’s death. Close to the actual anniversary. Gomer had put new batteries in both their watches and buried them in the churchyard with Minnie. Maybe — Jane shivered lightly — one of the watches had finally stopped and something inside him had felt that sudden empty stillness, the final parting.

‘You know what they says, Janey.’

‘Who?’

‘Sign of rain,’ Gomer said.

‘Sorry?’

‘What they used to say. My ole mam and her sisters. To dream of the dead…’

‘What?’

‘To dream of the dead is a sign of rain.’

‘That’s…’ She stared hard at him. ‘What kind of sense does that make?’

‘Don’t gotter make no partic’lar sense,’ Gomer said. ‘Not direc’ly, like, do it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘These ole sayings, they comes at the truth sideways, kind of thing.’

‘Right,’ Jane said.

It seemed to have gone darker. The clouds had closed down the moon, and the village lights shone brighter as if in a kind of panic. New rain slanted into Jane’s cheeks, sudden, sharp and arrogant, and she thought about her own troubled nights, worrying about the dig, the future, her own future, Eirion…

‘So, like, what’s supposed to happen,’ she said, ‘if you dream about the rain?’

3 See the Rabbit

One of Hereford’s little secrets, this ruin. In daylight, at the bottom of a secret garden surrounded by depots, offices and a school, you could easily miss it; most people, tourists and locals, didn’t even know it existed.

But with night screening the surroundings, Bliss thought, it was a sawn-off Castle Dracula.

‘So where is it?’

Looking around in case he’d been scammed; wouldn’t be the first time these bastards had done it to him, especially around Christmas, but he wouldn’t have expected it of Karen Dowell.

‘The body, Karen?’

Bending his head on the edge of the blurry lamplight to peer into her fresh, farmer’s-wife face.

‘The body… we don’t exactly know, boss,’ Karen said.

‘What?’

Had to be eight of them in the rose garden in front of the monastery. Bliss had registered DC Terry Stagg, several uniforms and two techies, clammy ghosts in their Durex suits.

On balance, too many for a scam. And there was this little trickle of unholy excitement, which would often accompany shared knowledge of something exquisitely repellent.

Bliss looked around, recalling being here once before. One of the kids had been involved in some choir thing at the Coningsby Hospital which fronted the site on lower Widemarsh Street. Coningsby was only a hospital in some old-time sense of the word, more of a medieval chapel with almshouses and an alleyway leading to the rose garden, where there was also a stone cross set into a little tower with steps up to it.

‘’Scuse, please, Francis. Let the dog see the rabbit.’

Crime-scene veteran Slim Fiddler, seventeen stone plus, squelching across the grass, messing with his Nikon. A strong wire-mesh fence separated the ruins from the St Thomas Cantilupe primary school next door. Slim Fiddler stopped a bit short of it, turned round, and the other techie, Joanna Priddy, moved aside as his flash went off.

Which was when Bliss also saw, momentarily, the rabbit.

Saw why Karen had chucked her supper.

The body… we don’t exactly know, boss.

The cross… its base seemed to be hexagonal. About four steps went up to the next tier, which was like a squat church tower with Gothic window holes, stone balcony rails above them, and the actual cross sprouting from a spire rising out of the centre.

Thought it was a gargoyle, at first. When the flash faded, it had this stone look, the channels of blood like black mould.

‘Fuck me,’ Bliss said quietly.

The face was looking out from one of the Gothic windows.

‘If you’re going up there, best to get kitted up, Mr Bliss.’

Joanna Priddy handed him a Durex suit and Bliss clutched it numbly, as the rain blew in from Wales.

‘Who found it?’

‘Bloke came in for a smoke,’ Karen said. ‘Nobody knows where it’s legal to light up, any more, do they?’

‘Like we’re supposed to care.’

‘Comes round the back of the cross to get out of the wind, flicks his lighter and…’

‘Swallows his cig?’ Bliss said. ‘We looking at gangland here, Karen, or what?’

‘I’d like to think we could rule out a domestic, boss.’

Bliss thought for a moment about two baddish faces he’d eyeballed walking over from High Town. After dark, away from the city centre, the people you passed became predominantly male and increasingly iffy. The whole atmosphere of this Division had changed a good deal in the past few years.

‘Just the head, Karen? No other bits?’

‘Not that we’ve found. There’s a brick behind it, stood on end to prop it up. And a piece of tinsel — you can’t see it now from the ground. It was round the neck, but it’s slipped down.’

‘Like people put round the turkey on the dish?’

‘Probably.’

‘Very festive,’ Bliss said. ‘I presume someone’s checked it’s, you know, real?’

‘Why do you think I threw up? Not much, mind, but it was the shock, you know? Not like anything I’ve…’

Bliss nodded. In no great hurry, frankly, to put on the Durex suit and take a closer look. He clapped his hands together.

‘Right, then. Let us summon foot soldiers. If the rest of this feller’s bits are anywhere in the vicinity, I want them found before morning. I want this whole compound sealed and that school closed tomorrow. Where’s Billy Grace?’

‘Might not actually be Dr Grace,’ Karen said. ‘Somebody’s on the way.’

‘This cross — it’s got a name?’

‘I’m not sure, boss. There’s some kind of information board at the back.’

Karen led Bliss towards the wire fence, the school building on the other side. She held up a torch; Bliss scanned the sign.

‘And when they’d topped him, did they by any chance display this Sir John’s head on his own cross?’

‘I wouldn’t know, boss.’

‘I mean, it’s not some old Hereford tradition?’

‘Not in my time,’ Karen said.

‘Somebody’s looking for maximum impact here, Karen. Kind of Look what I’ve done.’

‘Maybe more impact than you actually… Here.’ Karen handing him the rubber-covered torch. ‘Might not’ve shown up with the flash. Try that. From where you are.’

Bliss switched on the flashlight, tracked the beam up from the base of the cross. The light finding what remained of the neck, black blood, gristle.

‘Boss…’

‘What?’

‘Back off. Move the light up a bit.’

Karen came alongside him and lifted his arm slightly, steadying it when the beam found the…

‘Bugger me,’ Bliss said.

‘Yeah, if you back right off it’s all you can see at first.’

Bliss switched off the torch, took a few steps back, snapped it on again.

‘What’ve they done? It’s like it’s…’

‘Still alive,’ Karen said. ‘Sorry about the smell of sick.’

‘You’re excused,’ Bliss said.

The black hole behind the spinning lights.

How black did you want?

4 Or Die

It was a question of which century you wanted to live in, sleek, thirtyish Lyndon Pierce was telling them. Which millennium, even.

‘Comes down to that, people. All comes down to that.’

Punching the table. People? Pierce had been watching American politicians on TV?

There was silence.

Pierce stopped talking and Merrily noticed the way he patted his gelled black hair, his eyes swivelling around the 1960s pink-brick community hall, as if suddenly unsure of his ground. She leaned over, whispering in Lol’s ear.

‘Misjudged his audience, do you think?’

‘Maybe not quite the audience he was expecting,’ Lol said. ‘Fixing it to coincide with shopping night in Hereford… bad move? Your night shoppers are the local working people. He’s just realising what he’s got here are mainly white settlers.’

‘Mmm.’

Merrily guessing that the house lights would come up at the end of the meeting on too many faces she wasn’t going to recognise. At one time, as parish priest, you’d try to connect with all the newcomers. But turning up on doorsteps in a dog collar these days would cause a few to feel pressurised, patronised or — worst of all — evangelised. The incomers from Off, this was. The ones who were not Lyndon Pierce’s people. The ones who really wanted to be living at least a century ago, as long they didn’t have to go to church.

Almost a majority now in Ledwardine, the weekenders and the white settlers. Many of them coming here to retire, but that didn’t mean what it used to — business people were quitting at forty-five, flogging the London terraced for a million-plus and downsizing to a farmhouse with four acres and outbuildings you could turn into holiday cottages. County Councillor Pierce pressed his palms into the table, leaning forward.

‘Even when I was a boy, look, this was a very different place. Rundown, bad roads, no facilities. Not exactly sawdust on the floor of the Black Swan, but you get the idea.’ He straightened up, shaking his gleaming head. ‘Drunkenness? Violence? Goodness me, people, they talk about binge drinking nowadays, but my grandfather could tell you stories would make your hair curl. Stories of hard times, brutal times. Low pay, poverty, disease…’

Pierce was still shaking his head sadly, Lol shaking his in incredulity, leaning into Merrily.

‘He’s talking bollocks, right? Just tell me he’s talking bollocks.’

‘He’s talking bollocks,’ Merrily said. ‘But it’s clever bollocks.’

Well, sure, times had changed for the better, in many ways. But also for the worse. Herefordshire, never a wealthy county — low wages, far more poverty than showed — was becoming increasingly unbalanced. This village wasn’t the best place to live any more if you weren’t loaded. No mains gas out here, only crippling oil bills. Local kids needed a forklift truck to reach the foot of the housing ladder.

‘Councillor Pierce.’ James Bull-Davies, chairing the meeting, had been fairly quiet so far; now he leaned forward in his high-backed chair, the caged lights purpling his bald patch. ‘For what it’s worth, my family’s been here since the fifteenth century at least. We all realise how deprived the place was in former times, but frankly… don’t see the relevance.’

Probably knowing he was on shaky ground, all the same. Too many of James’s ancestors had grown fat on the backs of deprived peasantry. Pierce didn’t look at him.

‘Give me a moment, Colonel. Even fifteen years ago, this community was dying. Some of you’ll remember how, after a long and bitter fight, we lost our primary school — didn’t have the population to support it.’

James Bull-Davies glared at Pierce. Colonel never went down well. Forced to leave the Army when his father died, to take over the failing family estate, James had shouldered his fate, stiffened his spine and shut the door on that room of his life. Colonel this, Colonel that… meaningless affectation.

Merrily saw the way Pierce was ignoring him. He had people out there to reach. His main advantage being that most of them wouldn’t have been here long enough to know about his agenda.

‘They say that when a village loses its school, it loses its life-force. But Ledwardine survived. Why? Because we learned our lesson. We learned that survival requires growth. Not standing still. Not preserving what we’ve got, like a museum, but carefully planned, considered expansion. Either you makes progress or you falls behind. You grows or you dies. Am I right?’

His eyes panning the dim room for support, passing over Merrily, who’d gone new-native tonight in the black velvet skirt, her cashmere sweater, the lovely terracotta silk scarf Lol had brought back from London.

Pierce had paused. It was clear that he was building up to something. ‘Any second now,’ Lol said, ‘he’s going to call us My Fellow Ledwardinians.’

Merrily smothered a smile behind her woollen glove. The smell of fresh wax wafted from the glistening coat folded on her knees. Lol had bought her that, too, her first actual non-fake Barbour, reproofed in the bathroom this morning with the rain oozing through the cracked putty around the window. She was wishing she’d kept it on now; the heating was, at best, sporadic in the village hall, circa 1964.

Was the heating functioning at all, in fact? Or had Pierce contrived to have it turned off to make the place seem even less, as he would put it, fit for purpose? Give him time and he’d be talking about a new leisure centre, part-funded by a National Lottery grant. Squash courts, pool, sunbeds.

‘So we grew,’ he was saying, ‘and we survived. But government criteria for what constitutes a viable community change all the time. Government get strapped for cash, they looks at what they can close. Think about that. Think what we got to lose.’

A rumble in the audience.

‘Think about the post offices,’ Pierce said. ‘You’ve seen how many of them’ve gone from other villages. And you’ve seen ours put out of its own building into a little cubicle, back of the Eight Till Late.’

Two rows in front, Shirley West sat up. Shirley was running the PO cubicle. Shirley who, as they came in, had peered at Merrily with disapproval — thought a priest should be wearing a cassock and dog collar for hanging washing on the line, mowing the lawn, putting out the bin sacks.

‘So how would you feel,’ Pierce said, ‘if even that was to be axed?’

‘Speaking as chairman of the Parish Council,’ James Bull-Davies said, ‘it’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

‘Colonel, with all respect to the Parish Council, it would hardly be the first body on the consultation list.’

James stood up. We have a role, he’d told Merrily once. That role is to defend. But he looked worn suddenly. Stooping over the table as if the ancestral weight, the centuries of squirearchy, were finally becoming too much for his spine.

‘I… suggest we stop sidetracking, cut to the main issue.’

‘This is the main issue, Colonel.’ Pierce folded his arms. ‘Grow or die, like I say. Grow or die.’

Repeating it like he expected everyone to stand up and start chanting Grow or die, grow or die, grow or die!

And then, while he had the momentum, hitting them with the big one: what if the doctor’s surgery were to go, cosy Kent Asprey replaced by whoever was on duty at the time in some soulless community clinic maybe twelve miles away? Twelve miles to travel when you were sick. How about that, people?

Merrily detected a needle squeal from Edna Huws, sometimes church organist and last headmistress of Ledwardine Primary School, afflicted with a long-term blood-pressure problem.

It had started. Rising flames consuming Pierce’s kindling.

And it was raining again, which wouldn’t help. They didn’t have rain on GetaLife/welshborder, the relocation website all about convincing city-based would-be migrants that they could have a greener, saner way of life out here in the west. So appealing this time of year, when Ledwardine uncovered its sensory time-capsule: cobbles flushed amber, cold evenings softened by carols and woodsmoke, mulled wine from the Black Swan.

Lyndon Pierce looked up at the windows.

‘That’s another thing, look. When I was a boy, the fields all around here would flood regular, and the ditches couldn’t hold it and the lanes would be impassable. Now we got the bypass linking us to the main Leominster road — a lifeline.’

He paused, spread his arms wide.

‘It was growth done that for us. Everything we got now we owe to steady growth. That stops, people, we’re in trouble.’

The rain was driving at the windows now, pools swelling on the sills where the putty had rotted away. Pierce clenched his fists, brought them both down at once like mallets on the table.

‘And that’s why we must not throw out the wrong signals by opposing the development of Coleman’s Meadow. Why we can’t afford to listen to the ramblings of cranks from Off. They don’t care if you got nowhere to collect your pension, send off a parcel, get your prescription signed and dispensed when the village is snowbound. They don’t give a toss if this village lives or dies. They only care about what’s already dead. Dead and buried.’

‘I don’t normally want to kill people,’ Lol said to Merrily, ‘as you know.’

5 Serpent

The sunrise sprayed out from behind Cole Hill like a firework, with shivering shards of orange and gold. Jane was standing in the gateway with her bare arms raised, and she looked free and sexy as hell, like her hands were cupping the sun.

An instant of connection.

Probably her all-time favourite picture of herself. Eirion had taken it on his digital SLR, on that last September weekend, the day before he’d left for university. For a long time it had been her screensaver, until she’d realised it was only making her sad.

Now it was stashed in the Sacred folder on the laptop, along with the membership list of the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society. Jane didn’t know why she’d brought it out tonight, unless it was as a kind of prayer to God or the Goddess or whatever unimaginable force might be represented by the bursting of the light over the holy hill.

Long ago, the way to watch the Cole Hill sunrise would have been between the standing stones in Coleman’s Meadow. The stones toppled and buried centuries ago by some pious or fearful farmer but which next year could be back, ancient silhouettes against the red dawn in awesome testament to the sacred status of this place. A ritual reconnecting of the hidden wires. This was what she’d written in an essay. And like, to be here when that came about. Oh God… If it came about. If they could prevent Lyndon bastard Pierce fixing it so that future dawns would be rising instead over the fake-slate on the roofs of ranks of crappy, post-modern, flat-pack luxury executive homes.

That wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t. With a few thousand members now, worldwide, the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society was a powerful lobby.

OK, maybe not powerful exactly; councils were rarely influenced by people whose strategies involved subtle threats on the lines of If we cannot stop it by any other means, we are prepared to invoke the Site Guardian. But the word was spreading.

Jane had built up the fire in the vicarage parlour. She was sitting on the sofa with Ethel, a mug of chocolate and the laptop on the coffee table, listening to an accelerating wind driving the rain into the 17th-century timbers. At least you could rely on Mum not to take any shit from Pierce tonight. Mum finally understood.

In fact, things were good with Mum right now, had been for a while. Spiritual differences, if not exactly resolved, were acknowledged as being not insurmountable. You couldn’t, after all, operate as a vicar for very long around here without becoming at least half pagan.

Anyway, no open confrontation any more. These days Jane was kind of wincing at the memory of herself a couple of years ago, doing her cobbled-together ritual to the Lady Moon in the vicarage garden. A little girl, back then. A virgin. Pre-Eirion.

Abruptly, she killed the picture and switched off the laptop. Ethel had nosed under her arm and onto her knee, lay there purring, and Jane stroked her slowly, staring into the reddening log fire.

She picked up the mobile, almost cracked and called Eirion in Cardiff, then pulled herself together and tried Neil Cooper again. Thinking she’d leave a message on his machine so that both he and his wife would know that she definitely wasn’t—

‘Cooper.’

‘Oh—’

‘Jane,’ he said, and if she was honest she’d have to admit he didn’t sound over-excited.

‘Sorry, I thought I’d get the machine. Coops, listen, I’m not stalking you or anything. You gave me your home number, in case anything came up?’

‘And what’s come up, Jane?’

‘Erm… well, like… nothing. I mean, that’s the point. Nothing’s happening. It’s all stopped. Why’s it all stopped, Coops?’

She felt stupid, but he must surely understand how important this was to her. She was carrying the blazing torch lit by Lucy Devenish, folklorist of this parish, now dead, and if she let it go out…

‘Weather’s not helping, obviously,’ Neil Cooper said.

‘You’ve got those tent things you can put over the trenches.’

‘Yeah, but it’s not satisfactory. And there’s no desperate hurry, is there? And anyway, I keep telling you, it’s not my—’

‘There is for me, Coops, I’ll be back at school in the New Year.’

‘Jane, they can’t time the whole project to fit your personal schedule.’

‘I just want— Don’t want to interfere or anything, I just want to be there. On the fringe, quiet as a mouse. Just like want to be there when the stones are raised again.’

‘Well, yeah,’ he said. ‘I can understand that.’

There was something Neil Cooper wasn’t telling her. Or maybe he was just pissed off because the dig had been taken out of the hands of the county archaeology department: too big, too important, needed specialists in prehistory.

‘And let’s not forget,’ Jane said, ‘that if it wasn’t for me you might never’ve discovered it in the first place. I mean, I don’t like to keep throwing this at y—’

‘Jane—’

‘Sorry.’

‘None of us will miss anything, OK? It’ll be on TV. All the best bits, anyway.’

‘Huh?’

His voice had sounded damp and sick in a way that didn’t make sense. ‘What would you expect,’ he said, ‘with Blore in the driving seat?’

‘Sorry…’ Jane was on the edge of the sofa. ‘Did you say—what did you say?’

Coops said nothing.

‘Did you say Blore? As in, like, Bill Blore, of Trench One?’

‘I’d hate to think there was another one out there,’ Coops said.

‘Holy shit,’ Jane said.

‘Look, don’t get—’

‘But like, I thought the contract had gone to this… Dore Valley Archaeology?’

He was silent again.

‘Come on, Coops, who am I going to tell?’

‘Dore Valley Archaeology,’ Coops said, ‘no longer exists as an independent contractor. In mid-October it was acquired by Blore’s company, Capstone.’

‘Wow. I didn’t know that. I mean, I didn’t know he had a company.’

‘They all do. Archaeology’s a business. Like everything else. And Capstone have swallowed Dore Valley. More people, more resources, more prestige digs, plus TV documentaries on the side. Blore’s got it sewn up, money at both ends.’

‘Bill Blore,’ Jane said slowly. ‘Wow.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Jane…’

‘Hey, I’m sorry, but Bill—’

‘You’re missing the point, Jane, and maybe I shouldn’t expect you to see the significance, but you’re thinking about the so-called glamorous TV presenter, while I’m seeing the man who is not Herefordshire Council’s favourite archaeologist.’

Jane thought about this for a moment, and then she started to understand.

‘The Dinedor Serpent.’

‘We still prefer to call it the Rotherwas Ribbon,’ Coops said primly. Well, he would. The council stuck to the original name, Ribbon, because that sounded less sexy than Serpent or Dragon. Easier to ignore.

But it was sexy. Unique, probably. Coleman’s Meadow, with real standing stones to uncover, might turn out to be more immediately spectacular, but the Dinedor Serpent was the only one of its kind in Europe. Seriously significant.

So significant that the philistine bastards on Herefordshire Council were shoving a new road across it.

Jane knew all about this. She’d pasted up the news cuttings as part of her A-level project, with a picture of Prof. William Blore next to the partly uncovered Serpent.

‘Coops, come on, what he said… the council were asking for it. You know that.’

‘Let’s not forget that if it hadn’t been for the work on the road, we wouldn’t have found the Ribbon in the first place.’

‘Serpent. Yeah, but—’

‘Same with Coleman’s Meadow and the housing plan. Same with most finds. Most archaeology today is rescue archaeology, you grow to accept that.’

‘Especially in this bloody county,’ Jane said. ‘But that’s what’s so good about Bill Blore. He doesn’t accept bureaucratic bullshit.’

In her picture, big Bill Blore was stripped to the waist, deeply tanned, hard hat at an angle. Thickset, maybe, but not fat. He’d said that Herefordshire, having been neglected for decades, was now yielding stuff that could change our whole perception of Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age societies.

And, because she’d quoted it in an essay, Jane knew exactly what he’d said about the council’s decision to go ahead with the new road, regardless.

‘He said local authorities shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions affecting major national heritage sites. Especially councils as short-sighted, pig-headed and ignorant as Hereford’s.’

‘Words to that effect,’ Coops said stiffly.

‘Those actual words… actually.’ Excitement began to ripple through Jane. ‘Coops, this is just so totally cool.’

‘Jane, it’s not. Blore’s got into Coleman’s Meadow through the back door, now he’s running this prestigious dig right under the nose of an authority he’s publicly trashed. That is not cool. That is a very uncomfortable situation for all of us.’

‘Only if you work for the council.’

‘They’re blaming my department, naturally. Lucky I still have a job. OK, unless Dore Valley had told us themselves, there was no way we could’ve known that Blore was quietly moving in while we were negotiating with them, but that’s not how some people see it.’

‘You wanted to leave the council anyway, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah,’ Coops said. ‘I did.’

Another silence. Jane held her breath. She was picking up stuff she could really use — like at the university interviews? To show how seriously au fait she was with trench gossip.

She’d also be able to tell them she’d worked with Bill Blore.

Wow.

‘Just that when I was asked to join Dore Valley as a field archaeologist,’ Coops said, ‘nobody told me it’d be part of the Blore empire.’

‘But isn’t that, like… good?’

‘Goodnight, Jane,’ Neil Cooper said.

6 Bury them Deeper

Shirley West was, arguably, the most sinister person here. Shirley did foreboding in a way that was supposed to have gone out with the Witchcraft Act.

Impressive in a born-again Christian.

A couple in front of Merrily and Lol had slid away, leaving a clear view of Shirley in that grey, tubular, quilted coat. A lagged cistern with no thermostat, and sooner or later — you just knew — she was going to overheat.

Directly ahead of her, at the front of the stage, two pictures were pinned to a display stand. One was a photo showing an empty field with a five-barred gate, the conical hill rising behind it under an overcast sky.

‘Coleman’s Meadow.’ James Bull-Davies tapped his pen on the photo. ‘Earmarked for development of what are described as executive dwellings — like these.’

Tapping the picture below it: an architect’s sketch of a detached house with a double garage, token timber-framing, landscaped suburban gardens, under a blue-washed summer sky.

‘Field being within the village boundaries, therefore seen by county planners as acceptable infill.’

Merrily swapped a glance with Lol. Especially acceptable to Lyndon Pierce, local councillor and chartered accountant. One of whose clients was, as it happened, the owner of Coleman’s Meadow.

It was blatant, really. And because this was a small county, so much interconnected, so many business and family links, sometimes it seemed almost normal, no big deal.

Pierce had sat down now, was examining his nails, like his part was over. Rain smacked at the windows, making the frames shiver and rattle, smearing the reflections in the glass.

‘Complication, of course,’ James said, ‘being the recent discovery in Coleman’s Meadow, of significant archaeological remains. Now, I don’t want to pre-empt the results of the excavation, but—’

‘Old stones.’ A drawly male voice uncurling from halfway down the hall. Merrily didn’t recognise it. ‘Just a few old stones, long buried.’

‘Megaliths,’ James said. ‘The remains of a Bronze Age monument four thousand years old which people interested in such relics would, understandably, like to have unearthed and conserved.’

‘Not a problem, Colonel,’ Pierce murmured. ‘As I keep saying.’

‘In situ.’

‘Ah.’ Pierce sat back, arms folded. ‘That’s the problem, yes. Should a prime site be sacrificed in its entirety for a few stones that wouldn’t’ve been discovered if it hadn’t been for this project — I think that’s right, isn’t it, Colonel?’

‘Don’t think anyone’s ever denied that. However, we now know about them, and we appear to have two options: re-erecting them as a heritage site or—’

‘Three options, in fact,’ Pierce said mildly. ‘The stones could be dug out and taken away for erection on another site — in a park or somewhere.’

‘Somewhere well away from this village,’ Shirley West said.

She hadn’t moved. All you could see was stiffly permed dark brown hair sitting on the funnel collar of the grey coat.

Merrily held her breath.

‘Because, see, we have to ask ourselves,’ Shirley said, ‘why they were buried in the first place.’

‘Not our place,’ James said, ‘to pre-empt the results of the official excavation. Just to remind you all, the Parish Council will be discussing Coleman’s Meadow early in the New Year. We have no planning powers at this level, as you realise, but we can make our voice heard in Hereford. In theory. So that leaves you two or three weeks to make your individual views known to us. In writing, if you—’

‘But I can tell you why, Mr Davies,’ Shirley said. ‘We don’t need no excavation to tell us they were heathen stones in a Christian country. Heathen stones in the very shadow of our church.’

Our church? Merrily knew for a fact that Shirley West was also a member of some born-again, pentecostal-type group in Leominster.

James said, ‘Mrs West—’

‘Bury them again! Bury them deeper! Or, if you have to dig them up, do as Mr Pierce says, put them in a city park or a museum where none of us have to see them.’

Merrily glanced from side to side. Was nobody going to point out — Jane would go crazy — that the stones erected elsewhere would be meaningless? That they were probably part of a prehistoric landscape pattern, aligned to the summit of Cole Hill?

‘Put iron railings around them. Confine them and—’

‘Yes, Mrs West,’ James said, ‘we take your point—’

‘—and the evil they represent. There’s a deep evil in that place and evil returns to it.’

Someone chuckled. A would you believe this crazy woman? kind of chuckle. Shirley whirled round.

‘Don’t you dare laugh at me! You come yere with your fancy talk and your unbelief. You who deny the Lord.’

‘Well…’ Lyndon Pierce opened his hands. ‘Anyone who knows me knows I’d be the last to make a religious issue out of this. But some of you might be surprised at how many folk’ve expressed similar sentiments to Mrs West’s.’

Opportunist bastard. Right…

Merrily was halfway to her feet when James Bull-Davies flicked her a warning with a slight turn of his head and a discreet one-handed wiping motion. She sat down, a tightness in her chest.

‘You may also,’ James said, ‘wish to examine the situation from the tourism angle — for better or worse, a vital part of our economy. Herefordshire has comparatively few Neolithic monuments, none of them, it might be argued, as potentially spectacular as this one. We could expect a substantial number of visitors.’

‘But what kind, sir? What kind?’

The drawly voice again, from somewhere in the middle of the hall.

‘Mr Savitch,’ James said.

Ward Savitch. Entrepreneur who’d bought up the old Kibble farm on the Dilwyn road, a mile out of the village. Turning it into a pleasure park for city slickers — paintballing weekends and corporate pheasant shoots. Jane wanted him dead.

‘I think,’ Savitch said, ‘that we all know the kind of tourism such places attract, and it’s the kind more likely to steal the milk off your step.’

Merrily watched Lol shaking his bowed head, profoundly glad that Jane had seen sense and stayed away.

‘Pseudo-Druids,’ Savitch said. ‘Witches in robes, or… not in robes. Or not in anything. That the kind of tourism you had in mind, Colonel?’

Nervous laughter, James lifting his hands for quiet.

‘Obviously, I’m being facetious,’ Savitch said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I believe we can embrace the future and still hold on to the past. And in Ledwardine we’ve already got some of the finest period buildings in the county. That’s the kind of heritage we should be looking to conserve, not some lumps of rock.’

‘And the evil they bring yere,’ Shirley West muttered. ‘I know this.’

James Bull-Davies looked tired. ‘Anyone else?’

‘I haven’t quite finished,’ Savitch said. ‘Let’s not pretend, any of us, that we wouldn’t appreciate the improved facilities that would come with growth — supermarket, restaurants…’

‘Places for the nouveau riche to unwind in the evening,’ Lol whispered, ‘when they’ve finished blasting a few hundred tame birds out of the hedge.’

‘And, I believe, a fully equipped leisure-centre,’ Savitch said.

There was an explosion of hard rain on the big windows. The strip lights stuttered.

Lol said. ‘He’s got to be a plant.’

As all the lights came up and the first few people began to leave, collecting umbrellas from the rail by the main door, Merrily saw the man in the three-piece suit.

A young man in a three-piece suit. One of the first out. Black umbrella.

‘Nobody here with a Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society placard,’ Lol was saying. ‘No Save the Stones sweatshirts.’

‘Perhaps that’s no bad thing,’ Merrily said. ‘Some of them might well have pentacles tattooed on their foreheads. Lol, you see that guy who just went out?’

‘Bloke helping Alice Meek?’

‘No, on his own. Suit with a waistcoat. You once saw Jonathan Long, didn’t you?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘No.’ She thought about it. ‘Maybe you didn’t. He came to the vic, just once, with Frannie Bliss.’

‘A cop?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Probably wasn’t him at all.’

Although it was.

‘Um…’ Lol looked at her closely. ‘You did have something to eat before you came out?’

‘I… Yes, I did. Swear to God.’

Merrily stood up, shook out her coat. Yes, she was trying to get regular meals. Yes, she was trying to pull herself together, not get run down again, cut down on the cigs, have reflexology every couple of weeks from, God help her, Mrs Morningwood of Garway Hill. Yes, yes, yes.

‘Ah, vicar…’ James Bull-Davies was stooping between her and Lol, like some long-billed wading bird. ‘Wasn’t really the time, seemed to me, for clerical intervention. West woman’s unlikely to attract much support for Pierce. Unhinged, basically.’

‘In which case, you don’t think it’s worth me putting a bit of distance between us? Pointing out that the Church of England itself doesn’t actually have a problem with megalithic remains, which, of course, it doesn’t… And you’re looking unconvinced.’

‘Might be as well not to appear compromised by your daughter’s demonstrable enthusiasm, if that’s the best word…?’

‘She’s excited. It’s like they’re her stones, and it’s given her a direction at just the right time. James… is there anything in your family records about standing stones in Coleman’s Meadow?’

‘Should there be?’

‘If we could find out why they were buried, just to keep Shirley quiet?’

‘If it was done in secret, wouldn’t be any record. Look, if this site’s as significant as your daughter and her friends appear to think then English Heritage will step in to conserve it and neither that woman nor Pierce will be able to do a bloody thing about it.’

‘He won’t give up. Development of Coleman’s Meadow opens the way for a whole swathe of housing and before you know it… Ledwardine New Town? That’s not conspiracy-theorist talk, James, any more than Lyndon’s plans for this site…’

‘What’ve you heard?’

Merrily said nothing. What she’d heard was that Stu Twigg, another of Pierce’s clients, owned the ground that the village hall was built on. Ground now being eyed by an unnamed supermarket company. So that if the population of Ledwardine grew to a level which made a superstore not only viable but desirable, and the hall was to be replaced by a new leisure centre on a greenfield site elsewhere, the client — and, arguably, his accountant — would be quids in.

‘Forgot you were a close friend of Gomer Parry,’ James said. ‘Man with little understanding of the word slander.’

‘No, you didn’t. Look, nobody’s averse to immigration, all populations change… but surely, in a village, it should be a trickle. And it should be balanced. Right now, virtually the only people who can afford to move in here are the well-off who want to get out of London. So Pierce and his mates build hundreds of executive homes and an army of the retired rich move in, and the local kids have to move out to the cities, and Ledwardine starts to lose its identity… doesn’t even look like a village any more, just a chunk of suburbia with an open-air museum in the centre. I… Sorry.’ She fanned the air with her gloves. ‘Don’t usually go off like that.’

‘Look.’ James smiled thinly. ‘Let’s see how things progress. If English Heritage finds some value in the archaeology, then it’s all academic. If you have something to say, save it for the sermon. Or, on second thoughts, don’t. Night, vicar, Robinson. Ah—’ He looked at Lol. ‘Believe you’ve been asked to give us a bit of a concert?’

Lol didn’t say anything.

‘At the Swan?’ James said. ‘Christmas Eve?’

‘Not sure about it yet,’ Lol said.

Over a year after beating his fear of audiences, he still hadn’t played Ledwardine. No big deal… and yet it was.

‘Shame if you couldn’t,’ James said.

They watched him leave, plucking his umbrella from the rack. The chances of James ever having heard one of Lol’s songs were slight.

‘That mean he’s on our side?’ Lol said.

‘Best not to rely on it.’ Merrily struggled with the zip of her coat, then let it go. ‘Lol, I don’t look ill or anything, do I? I mean, the way you…’

‘No.’ Lol smiled at her. ‘In fact, much as I hate to paraphrase Clapton, you look—’

‘Oh, please. Come on, let’s go and put the kettle on.’

‘Would that be a euphemism?’

‘No! I actually need a cup of tea. And an earlyish night — Tom Parson’s funeral tomorrow at Hereford Crem.’

Lol nodded.

‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘if it wasn’t time for us to…’

She looked up from the bottom of the zip.

‘To what?’

He didn’t reply and Merrily saw, for a moment, the former Lol — detached, uncertain, wearing his past like a stained old overcoat. She thought of the way he’d faced up to the man responsible for smashing his beloved Boswell guitar. Making him pay for it in full but then, instead of replacing the Boswell, giving the money away, splitting it anonymously between three local charities. Tainted, Lol had said.

Last week he’d been to London to record his first-ever TV appearance, but he was still scared to play Ledwardine. Scared of what it might be telling him if he bombed.

They were almost alone now, under the cold strip lights. She worried about him. And worried about him worrying about her. God.

‘Time for us to what?’ Merrily said.

Rain blasted into one of the windows and the glass rattled in its metal frame. Lol drew Merrily towards him and did up the zip for her.

‘Doesn’t matter.’

7 Thing with the Eyes

A big killing carried its own light. The wild electricity of it had brought the place alive, and Bliss could almost see it connecting across the shining rooftops of this low-slung brick and timbered city, magnesium-white sparks hissing in the brimming gutters.

And there was nobody in the Job in Hereford tonight who wouldn’t get a charge out of it.

No detective, anyway. Never let them tell you any different: this was why you were here, why you hacked through all the paperwork, wiped off the abuse like spittle, merely rolled your eyes at the latest edict from a Home Secretary who looked like she might be good at running playgroups. Young cops liked mixing it on the street, tossing yobs into the back of a van, traffic cops liked burning rubber and screaming through red lights. And detectives — no getting round it — liked murder. A headline-grabbing, incident-room, unlimited-overtime murder.

The thing was, Acting Superintendent Annie Howe, fast-tracking at Headquarters, already had one. On her own doorstep, in Worcester, a witness in a high-profile paedophile case found dead in his garage.

Was that not enough for anybody?

Why did the bitch have to nick his?

Bliss put down the phone. Gerry Rowbotham, the greybeard duty sergeant at Gaol Street, looking up and sniffing theatrically.

‘I smell Worcester on the wind?’

‘Well, it wasn’t me, Gerry.’

She’d given him an earful for not alerting her sooner. Calling from HQ, where she’d just dropped in to pick up some people before coming over.

Coming over.

Shit.

Pick up some people.

Fuck.

‘She’s only appointed herself SIO,’ Bliss said. ‘She’s only bringing her own bastard crew.’

‘Well, you know why,’ Gerry said.

‘No, we don’t know why. We’re not sure yet.’

Gerry nodded at Bliss’s laptop.

‘Would it help if I had a glance?’

‘That’s the idea, Gerry,’ Bliss said. ‘If you don’t mind.’

Slim Fiddler, the senior techie, had been the first to venture an ID. He’d done a few courtesy pictures once during an official visit to Gaol Street by the police authority. Pretty sure he’d had this head in his lens when it was still turning on a neck. The pathologist, Billy Grace, also thought he knew the face, but he’d shaken off civic functions years ago so couldn’t be sure. Only one thing Billy had been fairly sure about.

‘Power saw, Francis. So I’d say wherever it was done…’

‘Looks like a spam factory?’

‘Definitely take a while to hoover up all the bits. I’d say chainsaw.’

‘McCullough or Stihl?’

‘Ha.’

Back at Gaol Street, Karen Dowell, divisional computer whizz, had fed some piccies into Bliss’s laptop and Bliss had spent some of his precious time hawking them around. But with what had been done to the face nobody could be quite sure. Bliss had Karen ring the wife, ask for the guy. The wife said he was out. Didn’t know when he’d be back.

‘All right, then.’

Bliss planted the lappie in front of Gerry Rowbotham, who’d been in Hereford since coppers were allowed to slap kids round the ear for pinching apples off the backs of carts in High Town. Through the glass, he saw Karen Dowell coming in through the main door, taking off her baseball cap, shaking a cupful of rain off it.

Gerry put on his reading specs as Bliss opened the laptop’s lid and clicked on the photo icon.

‘There you go.’

The head trembling into focus, coming up sharper and brighter than it had looked in the flesh. And yet artificial, somehow, like it had been sent over from props. Bliss zoomed it up to full screen, looked at Gerry.

Gerry winced.

Bliss said, ‘This is Ayling. You’re sure?’

‘He bought me two pints once. You don’t forget that level of generosity.’

The old feller quite pale in the bilious light. Stepping back, taking a couple of breaths and risking his ticker with another good long look. ‘This was summer, Francis, we’d be turning off all the fans. Gonner throw up more shit than my brother’s muck-spreader.’

A light cough. Bliss waved Karen in.

‘Anything?’

‘Nothing dramatic so far, boss. Problem is, most of the neighbours are elderly people. Almshouses, you know? Doors locked, curtains drawn, tellies on, mugs of Horlicks.’

‘CCTV?’

‘Couple of possibles. One or two iffy hoodies. Trouble is, in this weather everybody’s a hoodie. A live witness would be nice.’

‘Keep at it. Somewhere there’s an old dear who sees all. I want her.’

Preferably before Howe arrived with the entourage.

‘Er…’ Karen trying not show excitement. ‘Actually right, is it, what they’re saying?’

‘Well, yeh.’ Bliss accepted a Polo mint from Gerry Rowbotham. ‘Does indeed begin to look like it. So much for gangland, eh?’

‘God,’ Karen said. ‘What happens now?’

‘It gets corporate. Doesn’t it, Gerry?’

‘Francis,’ Gerry Rowbotham said, ‘You haven’t actually said…’

‘What?’

‘What’s happened to… you know, what they’ve done to his eyes?’

‘Ah, yeh,’ Bliss said. ‘The eyes.’

You didn’t need to be much of a detective to know that the thing with the eyes was going to be central.