To Dream of the Dead

45 Caple End

Going to see the Riverman wasn’t much of a journey any more. On the edge of the cobbles, Jane lost her footing, swaying like a tightrope walker before going down on one knee into a depth of water that surprised her.

Squatting down to squeeze some out of her jeans before her welly could become flooded, she looked up to see an ovoid moon with a wide halo of dirty yellow, like a tallow candle.

Over a Christmas-card village?

No, not at all. Christmas-card villages were always lit with a warm haze of security. Pre-dawn, in the stillness of no-rain, Ledwardine looked stark and stripped, rigid with shock, its black timbers receded into shadows and its white plaster turned to bone.

Slopping down Church Street under moonlit, mushroom-coloured clouds, Jane was glad Eirion hadn’t woken when she’d slid out of his bed to creep back to her apartment to wash and dress.

Last night she’d needed him with her, but afterwards there had been bad dreams. She’d been walking, then running through the churchyard in the blinding rain, trying to find Lucy’s grave. Knowing roughly where it was and taking different turnings, the cold mud thickening on her legs, but the graves always had the wrong names on them, and then she’d wind up on the footpath which led into the old orchard, where she didn’t dare look up because she knew the remains of old Edgar Powell’s blown-off head were up there.

And then she did look up… and awoke.

As one did.

Dreaming of the dead again, but there was no rain this time, only what had already fallen, massively, and now she was alone on the Isle of Ledwardine, under the yellow moon.

She’d thought there might be some people still around. There’d been a few out until well after midnight, bunched together, talking on mobiles, waiting for news. Barry at the Black Swan and his evening staff had kept the long bar open until one, though mainly for coffee. Jane had taken one out to Gomer, waiting on the square with Gwyneth. Who was going to pay Gomer Parry Plant Hire for all this work? Probably nobody. He was doing it for Ledwardine.

Jane stood watching the moon reflected in the deep water at the bottom of Church Street, most of the village bridge invisible now, a few nervous lights on in the hestate, but no more giant Santa’s sleigh. No Christmas lights on the square, either: the Christmas tree had been unplugged before midnight, as if someone had felt there was a need to conserve electricity now that the village had become isolated.

Nobody had seen it happen. Everybody had been very confused last night; nobody could quite grasp what it meant. What are we going to do? If she’d heard that once, she’d heard it a dozen times, from both men and women.

Possibly her last totally clear memory was of Lol coming back into Lucy’s house, where she and Eirion were still sitting by the wood stove, Lol’s new music playing low on the stereo.

What? Jane had demanded, suddenly fearful. What’s happened?

And Lol had said,

It’s the bridge.

Jim Prosser had told him. Jim had been standing in his shop doorway telling everybody that the bridge had collapsed.

What? Jane reeling, springing up and rushing past him, out into the rain because she’d thought he’d meant her bridge, the bridge at the bottom of Church Street.

But it was worse than that. It was the one at the end of the bypass.

Caple End.

Which wasn’t even very old — nineteenth century — and had just given way. Lay in pieces in the river.

Weight of water, Jim Prosser says. Came surging down at about five times the normal—Lol had broken off, then, and stiffened. Where’s Merrily?

Jane had lied. Well, there was no alternative. Small Deliverance job, she’d said. When she’d tried Mum’s mobile it was always engaged. When they’d gone out to join the growing crowd in the street, she’d cornered Jim Prosser. Nobody had been… hurt… had they?

Jim didn’t know.

When Mum eventually rang it was from the bastard Ward Savitch’s farm. Nearest to Caple End, apparently, and there was a fairly wide footbridge on Savitch’s land, originally for getting cattle to and from fields either side of the river. No good for cars, but at least you could get across on foot or a mountain bike or something. The only access now.

Police were sending everybody back, Mum had said, but all the other lanes were flooded. With the bypass cut off, it meant there was no way in and out of Ledwardine for vehicles until the council could get something called a Bailey bridge installed, and that was going to be well after Christmas.

Mum said she’d walk, which might take some time, but at least she had the torch, but Jane had called Gomer, who’d taken his latest old jeep across the fields, all the gates open, now that all the livestock had been taken inside or onto higher ground.

About an hour later, Mum had come stumbling in, hooded and dripping, thrusting the guitar case at Jane: Hide that somewhere, would you, flower?

Surreal.

And now it was Christmas Eve and Mum, up till one, was, Jane hoped, still sleeping. One way or another, this was going to be a very different kind of Christmas.

‘You’ve done just about enough now,’ Jane told the river. ‘You’ve made your point.’

She noticed how the dark water was creeping like a shadow up the pavement towards the steps of the first of the black and white houses, and heard Nick Drake singing,

‘Betty said she prayed today…’

Jane spun round.

‘… for the sky to blow away.’

‘God.’

He was standing in his doorway, in dark clothing and no light behind him. She must’ve walked right past him.

‘You couldn’t sleep either, then,’ Lol said.

‘No.’

She was shaken. It was probably the first time he’d sung to her live, and he’d sounded so much like the dead Nick Drake it was eerie.

‘How long’ve you been there?’

‘Couple of minutes, that’s all.’ Lol pointed down Church Street. ‘See how it’s actually rising?’

‘Even though it’s stopped raining?’

‘It’s coming down from the higher streams now…’

‘That means even if it doesn’t rain for a while, it’s actually going to get worse?’

‘It’s got worse in the past few hours. They’ve put sandbags out at the Ox.’

‘God, sandbags for Christmas?’

‘And now we won’t be able to get the fire brigade in to pump water away. Maybe Pierce is right. If Ledwardine was twice the size it might have its own fire station.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’ Jane had lowered her voice, aware of the echoes they were making in the still, shiny street. ‘What’s going to happen, Lol? I mean, what are people doing?’

‘Bull-Davies and Lyndon Pierce seem to be working together, for once. I think people whose homes are in danger will be encouraged to move out today. Better now than Christmas morning. At least it’s still more or less a working day.’

‘But how can they get out?’

‘Special buses. Coaches. They’ll set up a pick-up point at Caple End, on the other side of what used to be the bridge. Ward Savitch is making a field available as a parking area — where your mum left the Volvo, I imagine. And then they’ll go across his footbridge to the bus.’

‘I suppose Savitch is charging an arm and a leg for parking.’

‘I don’t think he’d dare charge anything,’ Lol said. ‘Somebody was saying he’d been using bales of straw as some kind of cheap flood barrier, and the whole lot had given way and fallen into the river, blocking up the bridge arches. Which may have been what drastically increased the pressure. Or helped, anyway.’

‘Savitch might’ve caused the bridge to collapse?’

Lol shrugged.

‘Lol, look… why don’t you try and get some sleep while you can? Big night tonight.’

‘Won’t be that big. Might not be much of an audience left.’

‘Well, I put it up on the Coleman’s Meadow website. People the world over…’

‘That was a kind thought, but they can’t get in. Anyway, I might have to go out with Gomer again, if it—’

‘Like, no way.’

‘I might be fairly useless,’ Lol said, ‘but I think he trusts me to follow orders.’

‘What if you damage your hand? What about your shoulder?’

His injury from Garway in October. He never mentioned it but she was sure it must flare up. And anyway, there’d be a lot of blokes available to help Gomer now. It wasn’t as if anybody was going to be able to go to work or for last-minute shopping… or anything.

Jane gazed down the skeletal street. It was going to be weird. There’d be no traffic. No one driving in, no one driving out. Nowhere to go.

Almost like a return to medieval times.

46 Pentagram

Around dawn, Bliss’s phone was ringing as if from the bottom of a lift shaft. In fact, from the bottom drawer of his bedside cabinet, where Kirsty had made him keep it. He pulled out the whole drawer to get at it and the drawer came apart, like it was reverting to flatpack, whole shoddy sections dropping into the still-sodden pile of Bliss’s clothes.

‘Boss?’

‘Frigging time you call this, Andy?’

Peering towards what light there was. The sky through the bedroom window looked like a badly bandaged wound.

‘We got you an early Christmas present,’ Mumford said.

Bliss sat up. The bedroom was cold enough to preserve a corpse for a fortnight. Still hadn’t worked out the heating cycle; had had to use the immersion heater when he’d squelched in last night to raise enough hot water for a shower — buggered if he was going to make Charlie Howe’s Christmas by contracting pneumonia.

‘Done a bit of a dawn raid, we have,’ Mumford said. ‘Just like old times, though not for Jumbo, obviously, as he en’t never actually been in the job.’

‘Where the hell are you?’

‘Think of your favourite housing project.’

‘Andy, please tell me you haven’t done anything… stupid.’

‘Got a friend with us. I think he’d like a word. Hang on.’

Bliss heard a slurred voice saying something unintelligible but strongly suggestive of split lip. He swung his bare legs out of bed, sat on the side of the mattress in his underpants, shivering. Still aching, but that might be deeply internal.

‘Got his own place, now en’t you, boy?’ Mumford said. ‘Girlfriend and a youngster on the way and, like he says, not a good time to go away. Reason he wouldn’t mind a word with you, boss, you get my drift.’

‘Jesus, Andy, what’ve you done?’

The phone went dead for a few seconds, then this other voice came on, barking like an old Merthyr mountain ewe in the night.

‘Andy’ve had to walk him round the block, Mr B. Get the circulation back into the boy’s cold feet, kind of thing.’

Jumbo Humphries’s wheezy laugh.

This was all he needed. Bliss scrabbled in the pile for something that felt halfway dry, his head full of images of ex-Detective Sergeant Andy Mumford beating up some low-life tearaway behind a garage block on the Plascarreg.

‘Truth of it is, see, Mr B, he rung me last night, said he couldn’t get you out of his head. He haven’t heard you talk like that, never. Greatly worried about your state of mind. Figured we oughter do what we could, like.’

‘Jumbo… listen to me… who’ve you got with you?’

‘You still there, man? Bloody battery’s on the blink, it is.’

‘Who, Jumbo?’

‘You ever see that ole film, early days of special effects, all these skeletons with swords?’

Bliss sighed. Jason and the Argonauts.

‘We’ll be on the spare ground, end of the first row of garages on the left,’ Jumbo Humphries said. ‘Blue Land Rover, long wheelbase, no side windows. Need to come in from the city. Belmont’s still submerged, see. The real thing, this is, Mr B. You won’t regret it, man, I’m telling you.’

Bliss threw a stiffened sock at the wall. Somebody save him from middle-aged cowboys looking for kicks.

‘Best to come in civvies, mind,’ Jumbo said.

Bliss thought about it all the time he was in the bathroom. He went downstairs, stood by the sad unplugged Christmas tree in the hall, picked up the phone, stood with it in his hand until the computer voice reminded him it was off the hook. Then he stabbed the button to get the line back and called in sick.

Jane wore a grey fleece over a pink T-shirt. She looked fresher but pale. They sat on opposite sides of the refectory table with a pot of tea. It was just after eight a.m., Eirion not yet up, a rare chance to talk, just the two of them.

Merrily poured the tea. Apple, mango and cinnamon, Jane’s current favourite. They were trying not to talk about the bridge and living on an island.

‘Eirion was telling me what Neil Cooper said. About the possibility of more extensive archaeology in Coleman’s Meadow.’

‘Or beyond,’ Jane said.

‘Yes.’

‘And this is where you say, Don’t get carried away about it. Don’t get carried away like you did before, and look what happened.’ Jane gazed down, addressing the table, speaking very slowly and softly. ‘I know what happened. I got humiliated. And now half the nation’s going to see it happen. And all the kids at school. And Morrell. And the heads of every university department of archaeology in the UK, they will all see me getting humiliated. Maybe it’ll even be released on DVD so people who really don’t like me can watch me getting humiliated over and over again.’

‘It’s not been televised yet.’

‘Oh… no.’ Jane’s head came up. ‘You don’t go near him. This is not your problem, Mum. And, like, don’t give me the old your-problems-are-my-problems line, because that doesn’t apply. I’m eighteen, I’m an adult, I need to learn to deal with it. I will deal with it.’

‘All right,’ Merrily said. ‘Help me with my problem, then.’

She put her cigarettes and the Zippo on the table. Told Jane about the Stookes, the various anomalies, proven and alleged, at Cole Barn.

It was legitimate to share this stuff; Jane had been part of it from the start. She only wished it sounded more convincing in the cold, damp morning. Pre-Blore, Jane would’ve become excited, full of the implications of this for Coleman’s Meadow, the energy line, the spirit path.

She just drank some tea, sighed.

‘Well… couldn’t make that up, could you. Mum?’

Ethel pattered across the stone flags to her dish of dried food, began crunching.

‘I couldn’t,’ Merrily said. ‘But could they?’

Jane nodded, already resigned.

‘Was there anything on your website about, say, site-guardian legends?’

‘Mmm. Possibly.’

‘And you had an email from a man who said Coleman’s Meadow had one.’

‘It was the dowser from Malvern who had the argument with Blore in the meadow before he started on me. Lensi was there, doing pictures. She might’ve talked to him.’

Merrily lit a cigarette, noticed there were only three left in the packet. She missed the rumble of the old Aga, a victim of its oil consumption.

‘He seemed a decent bloke,’ Jane said. ‘I haven’t spoken to him about it. If you want, I can email him now.’

‘No, it wouldn’t prove anything. Let’s shelve any discussion about what a guardian is and whether there could be one in the meadow. Let’s deal with the prosaic facts. Go back to your meeting with Leonora at Lucy’s grave — presumably you’d had the email by then?’

‘Weeks before.’

‘Did you mention anything to Leonora to suggest there might be any kind of psychic disturbance in Coleman’s Meadow?’

‘I just told her about the spirit path and the need to maintain a link with the ancestors.’

‘You didn’t suggest to her that there might be something weird about Cole Farm?’

‘I didn’t know there was anything weird about it. What are you suggesting? They might’ve put all this together from bits they picked up from people like me?’

‘Just eliminating various possibilities. Stooke’s looking for material for another book and he’s shown a slightly more than cursory interest in me… and you, of course.’

‘So the bottom line…?’

‘The bottom line might be me telling them their house may have a problem, and they go, well, if you say so, vicar, but what can you do about it? And then I go in and do the business and perhaps they video the whole process from some hidden camera, stupid little priest furthering the spread of primitive superstition… and suppose, instead of being the intelligent, sophisticated types they are, they’d been some poor old couple, et cetera, et cetera. I’m reading it already.’

‘That just… stinks.’

‘They haven’t done anything yet, just told me the kind of stuff that people usually hand me along with a plea for help. But I shall be cool, Jane, I shall make inquiries.’

‘What about Mad Shirley?’

‘And I’ll talk to Mad Shirley. As Huw points out, no need to approach her on behalf of the Stookes. Now she’s telling everybody I’m not a fit person to be the vicar, it’s… personal.’

‘Take her down, Mum.’

‘Yeah, and then I’ll get on the phone and blast the cops for not returning my computer. God, it doesn’t feel like Christmas, does it?’ Merrily finished her tea and stood up. ‘I’m just going to pop over to the shop before it gets crowded. Nearly out of cigs.’

‘What about breakfast?’

‘You and Eirion get something decent. I’ll just have toast and Marmite or something when I get back.’ She grabbed her waxed coat from the peg behind the kitchen door. ‘Won’t be long.’

Eirion had come down in expectation of central heating, gone back for a fleece, still looked cold. Pampered rich kid. Jane moved away from the sink, picked up a towel to dry her hands.

‘She’s annoyed with herself for letting things slide. I’ve seen this before. She needs to walk around the square a couple of times, smoke a cigarette, gear herself up.’

‘Something happened I don’t know about?’ Eirion said. ‘I mean apart from us being cut off until January?’

‘Some people are messing her about, that’s all.’

Jane felt suddenly depressed. Everything seemed so… cheesy.

‘She’s so… not like a vicar, your mother, isn’t she?’ Eirion poured grapefruit juice into a glass. ‘Not like you think of vicars. Especially women. Not what you expect.’

‘What — like they don’t smoke, don’t swear? Don’t sleep with the bloke across the street?’

‘She doesn’t make you go…’ Eirion wiggled his fingers like he was getting rid of something cloying. ‘In a strange way, she’s more human than the rest of us. Forget it, I don’t know what I’m talking about.’

‘It is odd, actually,’ Jane said. ‘I think it’s something about deliverance people. Something that makes them dispense with the bullshit. I don’t quite understand it either.’ She looked over to the window. ‘I wonder if Blore’s going to be back on the site.’

‘They’ll surely be going home for… See, I was about to say Christmas, but he doesn’t do Christmas, does he?’

‘The TV crew won’t be able to get all their stuff out. Unless they moved some of it last night after dark. But then, if the bridge went down around seven…’

‘Maybe they’ll have vans the other side and carry what they can across the footbridge.’

‘We should check it out, all the same. I more or less promised Coops.’

‘Your mum might be right, you know,’ Eirion said. ‘Blore might’ve found nothing. And Cooper’s just embittered because they didn’t give him control of—what?’

Jane had walked over, put her arms around him. She felt a bit tearful.

‘We’re destroying your Christmas, aren’t we?’

Eirion smiled sadly, running a hand down Jane’s hair.

‘So far, it’s the best Christmas I’ve ever had.’

‘Ah. Right.’ Jane looked up at him, solemn. ‘Just for a minute, I forgot you were Welsh.’

Dodging neatly away, grinning, clapping her hands and then, as Eirion chased her round the table, snatching an apple from the bowl and throwing it at him. Eirion caught the apple, tossing it from hand to hand, as a vague smear of sun in the high window opened up this white fan of light in the room.

Jane stopped, catching her breath.

‘Jane…?’

‘Lucy.’

Jane sat down. Eirion did his wry smile, but his eyes were wary. He put the apple on the table.

‘It was just something coming back to me.’

As clear as reality. As clear as if it had been Lucy who’d caught the apple, and Jane was back in the old shop, Ledwardine Lore, the day they cut an apple in half, sideways. Not, as you normally did, through the stalk. She remembered Lucy holding out a half in each hand.

There… what do you see?

And Jane had seen, for the first time, the slender green lines and dots in the centre of the apple which formed a five-pointed star. The pentagram that lay at the heart of every apple but which you only discovered if you cut through it sideways, which people seldom did. The hidden magic in the everyday. Lucy saying, Forget all this black magic nonsense. The pentagram’s a very ancient symbol of purification and protection.

‘I think something’s staring us in the face,’ Jane said.

As if, in that momentary lifting of the spirits, when she’d ducked away from Eirion, picked up the apple, something had opened up for her, like two halves of an idea she couldn’t yet put together.

Let no one talk of the humble apple to me, Lucy had said.

Jane sat down. She felt slightly dizzy. Nothing was quite real.

‘Irene, could you…?’

‘Anything.’

‘If Lol has to go out with Gomer again? Like his hands…?’

‘I’ll help,’ Eirion said. ‘If Gomer will accept me.’

‘And tell Lol not to play “Fruit Tree” tonight.’

Most of the village was lying low. Many people had been up late talking in the street, half anxious, half excited, about the implications. Some of them driving out to see the bridge, just to make sure. Lights still burned here and there in the greyness, shimmered in the dark water, but only James Bull-Davies and Gomer Parry were to be seen, at the top of the square, leaning against Gomer’s jeep.

‘Long ole night, vicar.’

‘I don’t know how you do it, Gomer.’

He looked scarily happy. Shirley West would be seeing the Devil’s light in his bottle glasses.

‘Don’t need much sleep these days, see. Done all my growin’ and never had much in the way of beauty.’ He stood looking down the street, rolling a cig. ‘Dunno what’s left for us to do with the ole river, but I reckon our commander-in-chief yere’ll have a few ideas.’

‘Well, we can’t build a new bloody bridge,’ James said. ‘Not even you.’

‘Erm…’ Merrily sank her hands into her coat pockets. ‘Can I ask you guys something? In confidence.’

‘Ask away,’ Gomer said. ‘Like the ole poet said, What is this life if, full of care, we en’t got time for the little vicar?’

‘Cole Barn. What’s the history? It did belong to your family at one time didn’t it, James?’

‘Gord, vicar, way back everything belonged to my blessed family. Barn itself, no. Ground it’s built on, yes — sorry, said I’d check if there was any mention of stones. No there wasn’t but the Bulls weren’t exactly of an antiquarian bent. If the stones were in the way, they’d’ve buried them or smashed them up and that would’ve been that.’

‘When did your family last own the land?’

‘Cole Farm was… finally sold, I think, in the 1900s, to Albert Evans, family’s estate manager at the time. Inherited by his eldest daughter who’d married into the Pole family, and then finally — as you know — left by Margaret Pole to Gerry Murray, who’s now in with Pierce and capitalises on his inheritance by flogging the barn to the Frenchies.’

‘Any gossip about it?’

‘Sort of gossip?’

‘Erm… my sort of gossip.’

He took it well. Didn’t blink. He had, after all, been a soldier.

‘Not that I’ve ever heard. Called Cole Barn on the sales particulars, but Albert Evans built it as a house, for his retirement. Meant his eldest could move into the existing farmhouse with his family. Didn’t live there very long, though, Albert. Moved down to the village, for convenience. House was eventually gutted, became a cattle shed. That’s it, really.’

‘First I yeard of it,’ Gomer said, ‘was when ole Harold Wescott was renting the land from Maggie Pole, and he put his beasts in there, and they made that much noise at night as Maggie, up at Cole Farm, her couldn’t get no sleep, so her makes Harold transport the beasts two mile to his own barn. That was how it become a tractor shed, see. Tractors don’t moan.’

‘Never knew about that,’ James said. ‘Live and learn.’

‘I done some drainage work there once, for Harold,’ Gomer said. ‘Or tried to. Beggar of a job. Nothin’ went right. Sometimes you finds ground don’t wanner be shifted, see.’

‘What made you think that?’

‘You just gets a feel that a place is tellin’ you summat.’

‘Like bugger off?’

‘Mabbe. Ole digger… ole digger broke down twice — well, I’m saying ole digger, her was new back then, and we never had no real trouble with her since. I goes back to Harold Wescott, I says Harold, en’t there nowhere else you can put this drain? Well, I knowed there was, see, but it’d be longer, and Harold, he was always bloody tight like that, so I told him I’d do it for the same price, and that was that. Sorted.’

‘This was near Cole Barn?’ Merrily said.

‘Twenny yards? There was no front on him then, the ole barn, so I’d keep the digger in there while I was on that job.’

‘And, erm… that wouldn’t have been when you couldn’t get her started, by any chance?’

‘You’re ahead of me there, vicar.’

‘Not been back since?’

‘Not likely to, either. Gerry Murray got his own digger, as we all bloody know.’

‘Sore point,’ James said. ‘Murray was hired to do the preliminary ground-stripping for the archaeological dig. Pierce obviously fixed it.’

‘Bent bastards,’ Gomer said.

The Eight Till Late had only just opened. It was empty.

Apart from Shirley West behind the till.

In the front of the shop, this was. Not in the post office which still had its blind down, concealing the public information posters, the clock and even the iron cross which Shirley had hung very prominently, as if she, definitely not Merrily, was God’s representative in Ledwardine. As if the post office was the centre of the real faith.

Merrily looked into the smoky eyes below the coiled hair, summoning a smile.

‘Morning, Shirley. Jim not in?’

‘Getting his breakfast,’ Shirley said. ‘He stayed open half the night, the poor man. What do you want?’

Charming as ever.

‘What’s going to happen with the post office today, Shirley?’

‘May not open. No mail going in or out. I’m waiting for instructions from head office.’

‘Difficult situation.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t suppose they’ve had this problem before.’

‘No.’

‘And all my fault, apparently,’ Merrily said.

Good a time as any.

47 Beacon

Shirley wore an outsize denim shirt with epaulettes, no make-up, no jewellery. Since acquiring the status of village postmistress she’d put on weight, shed femininity. Something ageless about her now, and monolithic.

Merrily stood in front of the counter, small but immovable.

Yes, well…

‘A short chat, Shirley?’

Shirley had her fingers entwined below her chest, her eyelids half lowered. Her efforts to avoid scented soap and shampoo had left her smelling like a clinic.

‘It’s just that people keep saying to me, if Mrs West is a member of this other church in Leominster, why does she keep coming to yours? While making it fairly clear that she doesn’t like the way you do things. Never really know what to tell them.’

‘You can tell them it’s none of their business,’ Shirley said.

‘And I’d happily do that if you hadn’t put on a floor show for them yesterday.’

Shirley said nothing, but the fingers of her right hand, ringless, began flexing on the counter, next to the till.

‘Not that I haven’t been impressed with what the other place has done for you,’ Merrily said. ‘The confidence. That sense of certainty.’

Along with a refusal to compromise, a blindness to grey areas and a tendency to regard all other spiritual paths as highways to hell.

Welcome to fundamentalism.

‘It’s a bigger organisation than I’d thought, too.’

‘Worldwide.’ Shirley actually smiled. ‘And growing day by day. What can I—?’

‘But its headquarters are in America?’

‘What can I get you, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Or in cyberspace. Possible to build a big congregation on the Net.’

‘Our congregation is growing day by day,’ Shirley said. ‘As we approach the Endtime.’

‘Ah… right. It all comes back to that, doesn’t it?’

‘Look around you,’ Shirley said.

‘The flood?’

‘Read the Book of Daniel.’

‘I’ve read it. Not an easy one.’

‘And does not Daniel say that the flood will take the Antichrist? Before the Rapture?’

‘He does?’

Maybe it wouldn’t help to get pedantic over whether Daniel ever had much to say about the Rapture.

’Before we meet the Lord, in our bodies of light,’ Shirley said.

American cults had traded heavily on the Rapture. Mass suicide one result.

‘Do you… have a particular mission, Shirley?’

‘Each of us carries the Light of the Lord, and if we remain steadfast the light will grow within us until we become light.’

Shirley West becoming light?

Dear God.

An enigma, though, this woman. Nobody could say she was unintelligent. Former bank branch-manager — good head for figures, presumably, extensive knowledge of business and personal finance, ability to keep customers happy.

What happened?

‘We are to keep a vigil at the doorways and raise our lights above them.’

‘Which doorways are those?’

And why was this like trying to tease really obvious information out of a class of small children?

‘In latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons. Many doorways to hell, look.’

‘And there’s one here? A doorway here in the village? Is that what you’re saying? Are we talking about Coleman’s Meadow? Do you have a mission in connection with Coleman’s Meadow, Shirley?’

‘And the evil in your church.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘With its pagan carvings and its worship of the orchard.’ Shirley’s quivering forefinger suddenly extending across the counter. ‘Why do you not eat what God has provided for you?’

‘Let’s not get sidetracked, Shirley, you don’t know what I eat. Tell me about the evil.’

‘I see what you buy. I know the filth you read. I told that woman, you should not allow that filth—’

‘Oh, that filth.’

‘Her shop’s cursed. Full of demons. The witch’s shop.’

Oh, for—

‘You mean Lucy Devenish?’

Not hard to imagine how Lucy would have reacted to a woman able to toss paganism, atheism and vegetarianism together, without any forethought, into the drawer marked hate.

Shirley drew back her shoulders, bulked herself out.

‘And who’s lit the beacon for The Baptist to the Antichrist?’

Silence. The strangeness of no traffic.

‘That woman was laughing at me,’ Shirley said. ‘Always so clever, these Londoners. She laughed. She said, do you know who bought that book?’

A rare gash of winter sunlight struck white sparks from the chromium rim of a freezer.

‘You fooled me at first. Just like you’ve fooled so many others.’ Shirley raised an arm like a club, aiming a forefinger that no longer quivered. ‘You are the doorway. You lit the beacon!’

Seen soldiers turn from perfectly serviceable fighting chaps to Bible-punching lunatics after one week’s leave, James Bull-Davies had said.

Took a little longer with Shirley. Attaching herself to the curate in Leominster, laundering his vestments, polishing his car, before he’d fled down south. After which, she’d moved to Ledwardine, appointing herself as Merrily’s eucharistic handmaiden. Hesitant at first, faintly fawning.

Then the knife going in. Another feature of fundamentalism was the need to cosy up to people perceived as being touched by holiness, and then to demonise them when you moved on.

Shirley stood in silence, hands clenched above her chest now, as if in defiant prayer. Merrily felt guilty. Where was the woman underneath and what had she ever done to reach her? Recalling her faint embarrassment, discomfort at the altar. Maybe all this was her fault.

Shirley lowered her head to stare directly into Merrily’s eyes.

‘The reason I come to your shoddy services and listen to your socalled sermons is to hold up the light so that all may see what you are. It hasn’t gone unnoticed, Merrily Watkins, the way you’ve been dismantling the Christian framework. Reducing the hymns, so that voices are no longer raised in praise. Replacing Evensong with your so-called quiet time, when the demonic can enter in.’

‘Shirley, who exactly runs your church?’

‘All sitting under their candles and opening their hearts to the demonic in the silence that should be full of praise.’

‘Who runs the Church of the Lord of the Light, Shirley?’

‘The Elders. And I am one of them now. Learning to preach the Word of God.’

And already beginning to master that key technique of making everything, no matter how bonkers, sound like holy writ.

‘What about America? Who runs the church’s website in America?’

‘I don’t have to answer your questions. Do you think we’re stupid?’ Shirley began shaking her head very fast like she was trying to present a moving target to incoming demons. ‘Your Church… founded upon lust… is a nest of maggots! First it was women, now it’s homos and perverts. Men who stick their things into other men and think they can preach the word of God.’

‘So what about the founder of the Church of the Lord of the Light?’ Merrily said. ‘What about a priest who inserts a crucifix into a woman’s vagina?’

She felt sick for a moment. Sick at herself for resorting to this. And what if James had got it wrong about Ellis?

Shirley’s mouth had opened like a cavern in a cliff face, air rushing in. Her eyes bulged and her hands grasped the till as if she was about to lift it and hurl it at Merrily across the counter.

‘Why don’t you ask him about it, Shirley? Send him an email.’

Time to go. This was a wasted exercise. If there’d ever been a chance to get through to Shirley West, she’d missed it.

‘Don’t think you weren’t seen,’ Shirley whispered as the shop door opened with a ping of the bell. ‘Walking with the Baptist in the place of stones.’

Edna Huws, the organist, came in with two shopping bags.

‘Isn’t it awful, Merrily? I didn’t know until I switched on breakfast television. I’d gone to bed early, thought it was drunks in the street. Trapped in our own village! I don’t know what’s happening to our world.’

‘We were just talking about that,’ Merrily said.

‘Mr Davies wants me to move out. I won’t go. I told him, I’ve spent the last thirty Christmases in that house, quietly, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, and leaving it only to play the organ in church, the best service of all the year, and I won’t have many more years and I won’t be evicted on Christmas Eve.’ She peered into Merrily’s face. ‘But it won’t happen, will it, Mrs Watkins? It won’t come any further up Church Street. Will it?’

‘We’re all praying it won’t, Miss Huws.’

‘Thank you. Thank you. Oh, good morning, Mrs West. Isn’t it terrible?’

‘It is indeed, Miss Huws.’ Shirley’s arms dropping to her sides. ‘What can I get you, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Just twenty Silk Cut, please, Shirley.’

Shirley smiled.

‘I’m afraid we’re out of cigarettes today, Mrs Watkins.’

Merrily looked up at the shelves, saw packets of pipe tobacco and Rizla papers.

‘Mr Prosser doesn’t keep many now, look. Sold the lot last night. Panic buying. You know what people are like. He was expecting a new delivery today. Not gonner happen now, is it? Now we are an island.’

Shirley West, triumphant.

48 History and Fear

The blue stretch Land Rover was parked on derelict ground on the edge of the Plascarreg — south of the Wye but not as far south as it had been last night. The Wye was hungry and taking big bites out of Hereford.

Bliss walked back very slowly, past the shell of a black Nissan Micra, twocked and burned out. Without the waxy sky above it and the rainwater pool underneath, you could imagine that Jumbo’s blue wagon was an armoured car in the ruins of Baghdad.

For once, even Bliss fitted in. He was wearing what Naomi called Daddy’s SAS kit: Army-surplus camouflage jacket, cargo trousers, hiking boots, green beanie. He’d climbed down from the Land Rover and walked around the brown concrete fringe of the estate for maybe ten minutes, on his own, trying to get his head round this.

‘Feeling better now, is it, Mr B?’

Jumbo Humphries leaning out of the driver’s window, offering him a swig of a half-bottle of Bells. Bliss shook his head, went round and got back in on the other side.

Better would not describe how he was feeling.

‘Jumbo,’ he said. ‘Move this heap somewhere else, would you? If I was a cop and I saw a Land Rover on the Plascarreg…’

If I was a cop? Mother of God, had it come to this?

The back of the Land Rover was like a cell. Vinyl-covered bench seat along one side. No windows. Jason Mebus sharing the seat with Andy Mumford in a donkey jacket.

‘You worked it out now, boss?’

Still finding it hard to contain his delight, Mumford looked fondly at Mebus, who was staring down at his hands like they were already locked into cuffs. Didn’t look up when Jumbo Humphries started the engine and drove them round the back of the estate, into a field entrance. Jumbo was programmed for fields.

‘This all right for you, is it, Mr B?’

‘Safer,’ Bliss conceded.

Jumbo, a before picture for WeightWatchers, got out, squelched through the puddled ground to open the galvanised gate. This way they’d only be disturbed by some farmer, and there weren’t many farmers Jumbo didn’t know. Bliss sank back, hands behind his head: how to play this…

Or even whether to play it. What any copper with sense would do was get on his mobile and summon the troops. Back off, let them deal with it, hoping a result would save his career.

Two possible reasons for what Andy had done. One, excitement: lower-ranking cops were still being pensioned off at fifty — the new thirty, too young to be thinking the most exciting time of your life was history. Yet Bliss had thought Mumford, who’d looked more than a bit pipe-and-slippers at forty, would’ve been able to handle it better than most.

Which suggested it was more likely to be the second possible reason.

Charlie Howe.

It was conceivable that Mumford still had a conscience about helping Charlie cover up that death, way back, maybe nursing a feeling that Charlie should go down one day for something. Wasn’t exactly uncommon, that need to tie up a few ends before you left the service.

And maybe it was actually easier, these days, to come back and tie them: no rules, no stifling paperwork, and you still had all the skills.

Bliss looked over the back of his seat at Jason Mebus. Just a kid. A cold-eyed, corrupted kid, still just about young enough to be at school but with many years of criminal experience. His upper lip was puffed out on one side.

‘I really think,’ Bliss said, ‘that you have to give me a name, Jason. Or, to be more specific, you have to give me the name.’

‘Don’t even know his name.’

‘We think you do, Jason,’ Mumford said.

Mebus flinched slightly.

‘What happened to his mouth, Andy?’

‘Resisting a chat.’

Bliss sighed. No paperwork, no rules.

And a strong element of serendipity.

It came down to history. And fear.

It was not a result that Mumford would have obtained if he’d still been in the job and history hadn’t cut as deep. Jason Mebus knew too much about the tragic death of Mumford’s nephew, Robbie Walsh. Therefore Mebus was afraid of Mumford in a way he wouldn’t be afraid of a serving copper.

Mumford had the look of a brooder.

As it turned out, Jason was already in a state of deep unease. What he’d thought would be no more than some drug-trade disposal had turned out to be part of the highest-profile crime in this town in living memory.

‘Jittery from the off,’ Mumford had whispered. ‘I’m talking about cocaine, and his eyes are all over the place and wondering who Jumbo is. I didn’t do no introductions.’

‘Just fishing at this point?’

‘Trying to get you a bigger fish, boss. I know this bastard. He’s vicious, but he en’t over-ambitious. No way he’d go uptown on his own.’

‘Right.’

Good detective, Mumford. Looking across at the Plascarreg’s prison-block profile, it had already occurred to Bliss that there was no way Gyles Banks-Jones would come down here on his own.

There was someone else in this. A middleman.

‘Go on, Andy…’

‘And I’m saying things like, bit out of your league yere, en’t you, boy? And I’m tossing names at him.’

‘Which names in particular?’

‘The names you give me: Gyles Banks-Jones, Steve Furneaux, Charlie Howe. And that was when he… when he first tried to get out of the vehicle.’

And hurt his mouth on the dash, apparently. And other parts you couldn’t see, Bliss suspected.

Starting to feel queasy right down to his gut. The information better be solid as a rock because — as Mumford, presumptuously, had already apparently conveyed to Jason Mebus — no way was this going anywhere near Gaol Street.

‘I never killed him,’ Mebus said. ‘You gotter believe me, dad. Why would I? Why would I do an ole feller like that? I en’t never even heard of him.’

‘Now, that’s not true, is it, Jason?’ Mumford said. ‘You had every reason to wish him no good.’

Bliss could tell that Mumford hated it when Mebus called him dad. Even the thought of having a son like this…

‘Him being a magistrate and all,’ Mumford said. ‘You don’t remember?’

Bliss smiled, pretty sure that Ayling had come off the bench a good ten years ago, but Mebus wouldn’t know that.

It was about pressure.

‘Don’t tell me you didn’t recognise his face?’ Mumford said.

‘I didn’t fucking look at his face.’

‘Squeamish?’

‘I used to work in a slaughterhouse, dad.’

That was how thick Jason was.

‘Who was with you?’ Bliss said.

‘Justin. My brother. But all he done was drive, yeah?’

‘So the bloke you met…’

‘Never seen his face. Head to foot in waterproofs, and a black balaclava with eyeholes.’

‘No kidding,’ Bliss said.

‘Swear to God—’

‘Where’d you meet him?’

‘In the forest, as arranged.’

‘Which forest?’

‘Dean. In this… where they been clearing trees?’

‘That would be called “a clearing”, Jason. And this was arranged by?’

‘Birmingham.’

They’d been into this. All controlled substances, including supplies to be delivered to Gyles Banks-Jones’s jeweller’s shop, came in from ‘Birmingham’. Mebus was just a distributor, he didn’t know the people he was dealing with. This was normal; if he was nicked, that was where it ended, nobody he could finger to the cops. It was just ‘Birmingham’.

At least, Mebus assumed it was Birmingham.

‘So you’d had a call on the mobile,’ Bliss said. ‘From Birmingham.’

‘I knew the voice.’

‘Male or female?’

‘Male. Brummy accent.’

‘And he asked if you were up for something a bit different. Tell me exactly what he said.’

‘He said somebody was gonner to be topped, kind o’ thing, and—’

‘That was the actual word he used?’ Mumford said.

‘I didn’t know he meant it literally. It was fucking horrible, dad, in the back of that van…’

‘White van, right?’ Mumford said.

‘They said it wasn’t hot. False plates and that. We met in the Forest, he gives me the keys and half the money.’

‘What build? Short? Tall? Fat? Thin?’

‘I dunno — medium? You couldn’t tell how fat or thin under all this gear.’

‘Voice, how old?’

‘He din’t say much. I’d had the instructions on the phone. Where to put the… parts. He just hands over the keys and pisses off. He likely had a car somewhere, or a bike? Motorbike?’

‘So you looked in the back of the van?’

‘Well… yeah.’

‘What did you see.’

‘There was like a… two parcels? The big one, it was like this roll of black plastic. The… littler one, that was just a bin sack.’

‘So you did which one first?’

‘The big one. The river.’

‘They specify which river?’

‘The Wye. We left our wheels in the forest, went off in the van.’

‘No problems?’

‘Nah, not this time of year, at night. We found this track, rolled it down the bank, went round and dragged it to the water. Just unrolled it from the plastic, straight into the river.’

‘What happened to the plastic?’

‘Put it back in the van like I was told.’

‘All right,’ Bliss said. ‘Let’s talk about the small parcel.’

‘Can I have a fag?’ Mebus said.

‘No. I want to know about the head.’

‘I hadn’t to open it till we got there. There was a bag to carry it in, like a holdall?’

‘Carry it where?’

‘Rotherwas Chapel. This old church, back of the council tip? You know the place?’

Bliss nodded. As a matter of fact, he did. Private chapel of the Bodenham family, Catholics. Lovely building. Too lovely to be stuck on the edge of an industrial estate.

‘So what went wrong, Jason?’

‘Two cop cars is what. Two cop cars parked up near the tip. Nearly shit myself. Like they was waiting for us.’

‘Sort of cop cars?’

‘Usual sort. Blue and yellow?’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Turned off, soon’s we could without it looking obvious. Drove straight back into town.’

‘Didn’t you think to try again?’ Mumford asked.

‘Oh yeah. Like if they was still there they wouldn’t notice the same white van? No way, dad. Justin, he wanted to dump the van somewhere, but we had to get back to our own wheels, din’ we?’

‘You had specific instructions where at Rotherwas Chapel to put the head?’

‘In the porch. Somewhere no foxes could get at it, you know? So anyway, we drove around town a bit. I didn’t know what to do. I’m thinking it better be a church, right? I was thinking the porch at the Cathedral, but we got there and there was some service going on or summat, so we was fucked there, too.’

‘Nobody you could call and ask for advice?’

‘I told you, no.’

‘What time was it now?’

‘Dunno, seven-ish? Mabbe a bit later. All the churches round town, there was like nowhere to park or people about. And then I remembered this place, the ole monastery down Widemarsh Street. Had, like… reason to go there before and I knew how quiet it was. We was getting a bit desperate by then, look.’

‘So you parked up…?’

‘Some street round the corner. Takes the bag in there, thinking we could leave him on a wall in the ole monastery?’

‘And that’s where you left the bag, is it?’

‘Nah, we took the bag away with us. Anyhow, we seen this cross thing with the steps. Seemed better than a wall.’

‘Whereabouts did you put the head?’

‘You telling me you don’t know?’

‘No, Jason, I know. I’m just making sure you know. Where exactly did you leave the head?’

‘In one of them spaces. There’s like these openings, like church windows? Justin found this brick to prop it up.’

‘You had to touch it?’

‘We had these rubber gloves. They all went back in the van before we poured the petrol all over it and set it alight.’

‘And you’d been left petrol for that, had you?’

‘Four cans. Had to be a serious fire. We had to hang around, make sure it was well burned out.’

Bliss wondered if Gloucester had found it yet. Wouldn’t be much use DNA-wise, anyway.

‘You said you didn’t look at it much. The head.’

‘It was dark, wannit? We took the bin sack out the bag, lifted it up the cross in the bin sack. Then I gets it in position and like… eased the bag away, real slow and careful.’

‘So you didn’t notice anything odd about it.’

‘Only what we’d been… They said to be real careful and not dislodge these bits of stone? In the eyes?’

Clincher.

‘Kind of stone?’ Bliss said.

‘This, like… like you get on graves and stuff? Bit like that.’

‘So you left the head in the wrong place, eh?’

‘Just done what we thought was best.’

‘You had a reaction to that? From Birmingham?’

‘Nah. But I en’t had the rest of the money neither.’

‘How do you normally receive it?’

‘Sometimes a bloke on a Harley. Varies.’

Bliss glanced at Mumford, who nodded. Would explain why Jason was jittery. Were Birmingham cross with him? And when people like that were unhappy with your performance, how would they convey their displeasure?

‘All right, Jason,’ Bliss said. ‘Let’s go through the highlights again. That first call. Birmingham. They say why they wanted you for this job?’

‘Well, we… handled goods for them for a good while, ennit? They knew us.’

‘Nothing this big, though, I’m guessing, Jason.’

Jason said nothing.

‘Worthwhile, was it?’

‘Not bad.’

‘So when they called you first, they just said this feller was gonna be topped. They give any indication why?’

‘I just thought mabbe somebody they been supplying hadn’t paid his bills. Din’ reckon on no council big shot, no way.’

‘You mean you didn’t ask.’

‘No.’

‘They tell you why they wanted the two bits in different places?’

Mebus shook his head.

‘Didn’t it even occur to you to ask?’

‘It occurred to me…’

‘Mother of God,’ Bliss said. ‘You’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you, Jason?’

‘They said he had to be made an example of. That’s why I thought a poor payer.’

‘You never said that before.’

‘I only just remembered.’

‘Give me strength. Who sawed Ayling’s head off, Jason? Was that you? Deep in the forest, with a chainie that eventually went up in flames with the white van?’

‘No! I told you. It was already done.’

‘So you never saw his eyes.’

‘No.’ Mebus suddenly lurched in his seat, his gaze swivelling from Bliss to Mumford and back. ‘Hey, none of you’s wired, are you?’

Bliss shook his head in weary disdain.

‘How about you escort our friend back to his estate, Jumbo?’

49 Sharpest Knife

Jumbo got the message: time for cop talk. Bliss watched him follow Mebus towards the Plascarreg, clap the kid once on the back, then go his own way diagonally across the field. Leather bomber jacket, bouncy walk; he looked like a battered old medicine ball.

‘Well,’ Bliss said. ‘That was a bit of an eye-opener, wasn’t it?’

‘Thought you’d like it.’

Mumford spread himself on the long back seat, stretched his legs out where Mebus had been sitting.

‘Yeh, but what… what am I gonna do with it, Andy? Walk into Annie’s sanctum, tell her she’s got this case all to cock? Explain exactly how I know she’s fallen for what she was supposed to fall for?’

‘Rotherwas Chapel. I noticed you liked that.’

‘The stones in Ayling’s eye sockets were from what the council still prefers to call the Rotherwas Ribbon.’

‘Was that on the news?’

‘No way, it was what they held back. Served its purpose, too. Told me Mebus wasn’t lying.’

‘So Rotherwas Chapel…’

‘The official ancient monument at the foot of Dinedor Hill. The one they can’t destroy to put a road through. That was just perfect.’

‘If you wanted to fit up the Serpent-lovers?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Likely Jason done ’em a favour,’ Mumford said. ‘Takes you a while to put it together, it don’t look like you were led there by the nose kind of thing.’

‘That’s true. So where’s this go next? I tell Annie she’s a stupid cow, but don’t worry about it because I only know the truth on account of I’ve been working on me own with a private investigator, unethically, on the verge of actual criminality and—Jesus, Andy.’

Bliss thumped the top of the seat. Down the field, two seagulls took off like a storm warning.

‘Funny thing,’ Mumford said. ‘I’ve only realised since I retired how much quicker the process is when you don’t have to make out reports.’

‘Tell me about it.’ Bliss pulled off his beanie, ran a hand through the wasteland of his hair. ‘Doesn’t help that after I spoke to you last night I went to see Charlie Howe.’

He saw Mumford briefly shut his eyes.

‘Boss, you dick.’

‘It was indeed a bad, bad move, Andy.’

‘What did you think, he was getting old? Lost his teeth?’

‘I figured we could have a private chat, agree to keep off each other’s backs. Andy, what’s the matter with me?’

‘I figured you wasn’t yourself on the phone.’

‘Annie’ll’ve heard all about it by now.’ Bliss sank his chin into the pillow of his arms on the back of the passenger seat. ‘Amazing how fast you can go down. Seen it happen to other fellers but usually it gets a bit of a push from the booze or gambling. Never gonna happen to me.’

‘All right,’ Mumford said. ‘You wanner have a think about what you got? Lay it all out?’

Bliss was grateful. Never had a sounding board like Mumford before or since.

‘Half of what’s left of me brain’s turning it over and over as we speak, Andy. How much of Jason can we rely on? I still think the butchering was possibly part of his contract. The killer did a lovely neat job on Ayling — one judicious thrust, one accurate little wound that closed up so fast there wouldn’t be much blood.’

‘Meaning why would he want to do the messy stuff himself if he could pay an ex-slaughterman?’

‘Exactly. I’m guessing there was only one parcel to begin with in the back of that van, and the Mebuses had to haul Ayling down the forest and whizz the head off.’

‘Bone could ruin your chain,’ Mumford said.

Bliss rolled his eyes.

‘Lot of rain to wash the blood away, mind.’

‘Now that is a good point.’

‘Also,’ Mumford said, ‘if anybody found the signs, they’d think it was just evidence of some poacher having a go at one of these wild boar you keep hearing about in the Forest.’

Bliss nodded.

‘And Jason’s keeping quiet about that bit,’ Mumford said, ‘on account of it’s got a smell of violence about it. It’s a bit more than waste disposal. Leaves you asking the question, did he do the whole thing?’

‘What do you think?’

‘En’t got the balls. En’t got the brains.’

‘So we’re looking for a pro, aren’t we?’ Bliss hunched himself higher up the greasy passenger seat. ‘And a contract killer puts the crime into a whole different arena. It’s hard to imagine the Friends of the Serpent having a quick whip round and dispatching their hardest member into the underworld with a bag of unmarked twenties. I think we’re firmly back in Jason’s world.’

‘Drugs?’

‘Fact — Jason and various members of Jason’s family and friends obtain wholesale coke from Birmingham, Bristol, Gloucester, Newport. Comes into the Plascarreg, as we’ve all known for years, for distribution to the usual suspects, plus the new breed of middle-class party animal supplied by the likes of Gyles Banks-Jones. Which is where I came in.’

‘There don’t have to be a connection,’ Mumford said.

‘Yeh, but there is a connection, Andy. And it’s through a man called Steve Furneaux. Steve is Gyles’s next-door neighbour. He was the last person, or — assuming he didn’t do it — the last but one person to see Clement Ayling alive. And, unless all my instincts are playing me wrong, he’s a cokehead. Quite long-term, I’d guess. For a long time, Steve was on the fringe. Suddenly he’s looking like a main player.’

‘Form?’

‘No way. All right, let’s approach it from the other side. Mebus gets a call from Birmingham. I think we have to assume Birmingham is Jason’s euphemism for the people he doesn’t talk about… whether they’re Birmingham or Gloucester or Newport. Whatever, Birmingham calls and discloses to Mebus that a man is going to be topped and an example has to be made of him. Now… if we assume Dinedor is just being used to lay a false trail, who wants Ayling dead? And why?’

‘Not a clue, boss.’

‘OK… Let’s think out of the box, as Steve would say. Ayling, Furneaux and Charlie Howe — all members of the same quango. One of these outfits nobody knows what the hell it does but it’s obviously above the rules of democracy and public scrutiny.’

‘Sounds like Charlie’s kind of thing.’

‘Yeh. Who’s gonna tell us more about Hereforward?’

‘Journalists?’

‘That’s a thought. You know anybody?’

‘Bloke at Three Counties News Service? Freelances are always a better bet, my experience.’

‘Could you give him a call?’

‘I’ll try and find him.’

‘Thanks, pal.’

Silence. Bliss heard a preliminary patter of rain on the wind-screen; probably bring Jumbo back in a minute. It occurred to him he needed to go into Hereford this afternoon, buy some presents for the kids, try and get Karen to wrap them properly ready for the ordeal of taking them over to the in-laws’ farm tomorrow. What a bloody desert his life was. He closed his eyes for a moment, shuffled the cards in his head.

‘All right,’ he said to Mumford. ‘Let’s cut to the heart of it. What do we know about the killer?’

‘Good with a knife?’

‘Either good or lucky. Let’s assume good. And that in itself… if we assume he’s an outsider, brought in to do a quick job, how common is that? Your hit man, almost by definition, uses a firearm. But… there’s no basic reason why not a knife. Knife crime’s breaking records all over the country.’

‘And it’s as old as them fellers in skins who built the ole fort on top of Dinedor,’ Mumford said.

‘Yeh, but the method of dispatch was clearly more scientific than your average slasher, which is why Annie and Brent got a bit excited when they discovered poor old Willy Hawkes might’ve had commando training.’

‘Contract killing en’t what it used to be. Any hard kid in need of a few quid… frightening, really.’

‘It’s what I said to—Shit.’

‘Wassat, boss?’

Bliss thought, Sharpest knife in the drawer.

‘It was Annie I said it to. I was trying to wind her up about leaving this Worcester paedophile witness-killing to take command of the Ayling murder, and I made that same point about kids going into the homicide business.’

‘That’s contract?’

‘And a stabbing. This feller who was gonna give evidence against his brother-in-law, knifed to death in his garage.’

‘Two contract knife-jobs? How often’s that happen? You got the PM report on that one? Where the blade went in?’

‘Well, I haven’t, obviously, but it shouldn’t be difficult to get me hands on it.’

‘Karen?’

Bliss nodded.

‘A good girl. And at least she won’t have to talk to Howe, who—bugger me, Andy!’ Bliss threw his beanie at the roof and caught it on the return. ‘Listen to this… I said to Annie something like, must be a bit of a problem, you know who ordered the hit but you don’t know who actually did it, and she—frigging hell…’

The voice like an ice pick in his head: Actually, it’s the other way round, we’re fairly sure we know who did it, but we don’t know who ordered it.

‘They know him, Andy. They’ve gorra name for this bastard.’

50 The Heart

As the community was splitting up, there was a feeling of its coming together. The people, locals and incomers, relying on one another and knowing that they could.

In the chilly, damp air on Christmas Eve.

Merrily and Jane had spent the morning with James Bull-Davies’s party of volunteers, helping people on the riverside estate to move furniture upstairs: chairs and TV sets and stereos and computers and phones. Carpets and rugs were rolled up, some of them left on the stairs or on the tops of tables. Items that were too heavy to move or plumbed-in — cookers, washing machines — were covered with plastic sheets or polythene feed sacks cut open.

At the split-level home of one retired couple, thousands of books were packed into boxes to be stored on the upper floor. People who lived on the higher ground were accommodating lawnmowers and bikes and, in one case, tropical fish.

Like the Blitz, someone said, and Merrily supposed comparisons weren’t all that misplaced. There had been a sense of that old British wartime spirit, which was heartening.

Some families who’d believed it could never happen had been shaken by breakfast-TV pictures of flooded homes in villages no more than a few miles away, like Eardisland and Pembridge. Even though levels in Ledwardine were conspicuously higher than last night, some people only ever believed what they saw on TV.

And on TV they also saw the bridge. Pictures from last night, all blue and orange lights and the floodlit, whitened river blasting between the exploded arches.

Calls were made, families arranging to be picked up by friends and relatives on the other side of Ward Savitch’s footbridge. Some of the weekenders, fighting to save Christmas, had grabbed what rooms were available in hotels around Hereford and Leominster.

Merrily borrowed Gomer’s jeep to drive over to Savitch’s farm in the late morning, following a family of five, off to spend Christmas at the grandparents’ farm near Hay, the jeep packed with presents the parents didn’t want the kids to see. Helping to carry the stuff across the footbridge to where the grandad was waiting with his 4×4 and a small galvanised livestock trailer.

This strange parade of refugees tramping across the field with their cases. There must’ve been sixty cars behind council and police barriers on the Ledwardine side of the footbridge and several coaches and vans in the free world across the river. And a burger van and a fish-and-chip van, naturally. Lyndon Pierce was there, getting hassled by a guy called Derry Bateman, self-employed electrical contractor.

‘You and your bloody bypass. When was that bridge last examined, eh?’

‘These en’t normal conditions, Derry.’

‘And you en’t gonner give me a proper answer, are you? You know how many jobs this is gonner cost me? How’m I supposed to get my fucking gear out, Lyndon?’

‘Couldn’t you hire a van the other side? Carry it across?’

‘And leave it overnight in some bloody field to get broke into?’

‘We’re doing all we can,’ Pierce said, Derry Bateman turning away in disgust.

‘Tosser.’

Peace on earth: always too good to last. Back on the village square, the Christmas tree was lit up; around it, a cobbled-together choir sang carols from the Christmas service books Merrily had brought from the church and handed round. People making wartime-style jokes as they clustered behind their synthesised smiles.

‘Only difference, in wartime, folks was evacuated to the countryside,’ Jim Prosser said in the shop. ‘Have to impose bloody rationing soon.’

Merrily said. ‘You’re absolutely sure you’ve got no cigarettes?’

Sounding, she was afraid, almost shrill. Jim leaned across the counter, lowering his voice, confidential.

‘I’d put sixty Silk Cut away for you, see. Only somebody found them, din’t they? And sold them.’

The post office hadn’t opened, wouldn’t be opening, and Shirley West had gone.

‘Many you got left, Merrily?’

‘Three.’

‘Packs?’

‘No, Jim, three cigarettes.’

‘Oh hell. Best we all keeps away from you, then.’

Jim laughing, but nervously. It was two and half cigs, actually. She’d lit one automatically after breakfast and put it out when she’d realised.

By lunchtime, for any number of reasons, she wanted to kill Shirley West.

By two p.m., there were no more people in obvious need of help. It looked like a vacant film set: no cars, no kids playing, no dogs barking. Jane and Mum went back to the vicarage, where Mum went upstairs to make two bedrooms habitable and Jane threw cheese and pickle sandwiches together, putting some into a basket with some fruit and taking it down to the river to find the guys.

Easier to find Gwyneth, the big yellow JCB. All three of them behind her, having a breather. A few metres in front of them, this wall of hard-packed soil, rock and red clay.

‘En’t much more we can do, Janey.’ Gomer, in dark green overalls, leaning up against Gwyneth, rolling a ciggy. ‘All down to if it rains again tonight and how hard.’

‘And will it?’

Jane looked up into a sky like frogspawn. A holiday caravan was being towed across the field towards higher ground, somebody’s emergency home in waiting.

‘Count on it,’ Gomer said. ‘Trouble is — and you don’t like to tell ’em — but this could be the best part.’

‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

Gomer mouthed his ciggy, lit up.

‘I done some flood relief once, down South Wales, fifteen, twenny year ago. We come back afterwards, help them clear up. Terrible mess. Get deep water in your house, sometimes it’s buggered for a year or more. Folks comes back to find this thick slime on the floor, whole place stinking to hell. Plaster on the walls all ruined. I seen places had to be stripped back to the breeze-blocks.’

‘Gomer, what about—?’

‘They talks about fire gutting a home, water does it just as well. Sorry, Janey?’

‘I was just going to say, what about your bungalow?’

‘He’ll be all right.’

‘Like you can’t exactly move stuff upstairs, can you? What I was thinking, why don’t we clear out some of your furniture and stuff, store it at the vicarage? We’ve got masses of—’

‘Don’t you get fussed, Janey. I got the important stuff out — Minnie’s things. Put ’em up the roof space.’

‘Yeah, but—’

Minnie had been dead nearly two years.

‘You ask me,’ Gomer said, ‘only place we could have a real problem with — Church Street. En’t no earth we can move there. Only sandbags, and sandbags is a poor substitute for a real barrier.’

‘It’s true,’ Lol said. ‘You’ve already got a lake at the bottom. All it needs is for the water to rise another ten feet up the street and it’ll be into the first black and whites. Maybe for the first time in history.’

‘What about your house, Lol?’

Lol shrugged. There was mud in glistening streaks like snail-trails down the front of his sweatshirt. The square, along with the church, the vicarage, the Black Swan and most of the shops, was at the highest point of the village and therefore considered to be safe, and Lol’s house wasn’t too far down from the square.

‘You’re ready for tonight?’

‘May not be an audience left, way things are going.’

‘You don’t get out of it that easily, Lol. All the people who count are going to be there. You’re coming, aren’t you, Gomer?’

‘Less there’s an emergency, I’ll be there, sure to.’

‘Aw, Gomer, if there’s an emergency, can’t you for once let somebody else—? I mean, you’ve already worked too hard for a—’ Jane broke off, Gomer giving her a hard look ‘—a man who isn’t getting paid.’

That was close. Nearly called him an old guy to his face. Jane felt herself blushing, looked away quickly at the new bank Gomer and Lol and Eirion had made, the way the earth was impacted, the way the structure curved, following the line of the swollen river under the bubblewrap sky. Not exactly like the Dinedor Serpent, more like…

‘Oh my God.’

Eirion lifted himself away from the JCB, watching Jane through narrowing eyes.

‘I’ve got to talk to Coops.’

‘Jane, let the poor guy have a Christmas, huh?’

‘It’s… it’s just so obvious, Irene. It has been staring us in the face.’

Eirion looked doubtful. She knew he believed in her, maybe more than anybody, but he didn’t see the pentagram at the heart of the apple.

‘It’s why it’s special. It’s the whole key to this place. I’m sorry…’ For a moment Jane couldn’t breathe, couldn’t find the breath to say it, totally choked up with emotion. ‘It’s what’s behind the whole thing. The Village in the Orchard.’

51 Manic

‘You don’t ask much, do you, boss?’ Karen Dowell said.

The cusp of lighting-up time. Bliss was back on the fringe of Phase Two. Still no signs of life in Furneaux’s house, but the Christmas tree was twinkling in Gyles Banks-Jones’s front window, shadows moving behind it.

Fearful shadows, with any luck.

‘And what if he checks me out?’ Karen said. ‘How do I explain my interest? And, more to the point, how do I explain why I haven’t just asked Howe?’

Bliss thought about it. Problem was, the DCI babysitting the Lasky case for Howe… he didn’t know this feller at all. Came in from Droitwich a month or two ago. Bliss wasn’t sure he’d even been to Droitwich, and a new DCI with Howe to answer to would be wearing belt, braces and two pairs of underpants.

‘All right, tell him the truth.’

‘Which version of the truth is that?’

‘Tell him it’s a long shot. Tell him that although we’ve gorra man well in the frame for Ayling we’re covering our arses and we’d like to compare wounds just in case. Tell him you’ve been trying to get hold of Annie for the last hour, without success. Come on, Karen, you know what to say. Charm him. And if there’s anything approaching a match on the wounds, take it from there.’

‘What if Howe—?’

‘She won’t. It’s Christmas. The worst she’ll do is make a note to nail you about it when school’s back. Trust me, where Howe’s concerned you have one big thing going for you here, Karen: you are not me.’

Bliss saw a face in Gyles’s window, then another face the other side of the Christmas tree. So they’d spotted him. It didn’t matter; if Furneaux wasn’t available, it would have to be Gyles. Half a story was better than nothing.

‘Gorra go, Karen. Keep me informed.’

‘What if he’s gone home?’

‘So ring him at home.’

‘You sound awful manic, Frannie,’ Karen said.

‘It’s me accent.’

The faces had gone from the window. Manic? Me? Bliss got out of the car, and strolled directly across the road, pushed the bell and stood there until a light came on over the door and Gyles opened it.

Unshaven, crumpled shirt, open cuffs hanging loose.

‘Well,’ Bliss said, ‘I can’t say this was convenient, to be honest, Gyles, it being Christmas Eve and me off duty, but… here I am.’

‘Yes,’ Gyles said.

Bliss waited.

‘Look, I’ve been bailed, Inspector. I don’t—’

‘Why’d you call me, then?’

‘What?’

‘I gave you me mobile number, Gyles, and you called me.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Hang on…’ Bliss got out his mobile, opened it up, held it out towards Gyles. ‘Why else would your number be here, under missed calls?’

‘I don’t know.’

Gyles didn’t look at the phone. Bliss gave him a smile that was wry but full of sympathy for the poor bastard’s situation, as Mrs Jones’s voice elbowed in from the hall behind him.

‘Is it that detective?’

Gyles turned, took a step back, telling her it was.

By then, Bliss was inside.

Bliss supposed the reason he hadn’t taken much notice of Mrs Jones before was that Gyles had just confessed to everything. They’d given the house a good going-over and found nothing that Gyles hadn’t already shown them. He had no form, a cleanie.

His wife had been there all the time, assiduously tidying up after them but hiding nothing, saying nothing.

‘We’re glad you came,’ she said now. ‘Aren’t we, Gyles?’

Kate Banks-Jones was plumpish, had long brown hair and a mouth that turned down but made her look unhappy rather than petulant. She wore a long grey cardigan over a striped jumper and jeans and no conspicuous jewellery. Maybe she’d binned it all, in fury. The tension had wrapped itself round Bliss as soon as he’d walked in.

‘I did not phone you,’ Gyles said.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Kate said briskly. Her face was flushed, her eyes full of stored heat. ‘We’re glad of the opportunity. And I’m glad you’re on your own this time.’

‘Kate, for—’

‘I wasn’t going to say anything in front of all those other police.’ She didn’t look at Gyles. ‘Or the children.’ She spread her arms to show they were alone. ‘Thank God for grandparents.’

A downlighter illuminated a white-framed sepia photo of Hereford Cathedral, misty, across the river. Apart from the artificial tree in the window, that was the only light. No other festive decorations. About five coloured globes hanging from the ceiling looked seasonal but probably weren’t.

‘I’ve made a full statement,’ Gyles said. ‘I’ve admitted everything.’

‘And he thinks that’s an end to it.’

Kate looked up at the ceiling. They were sitting in a triangle, Bliss in a wooden-framed chair that was more comfortable than it looked, the Banks-Joneses at either end of a long settee, a lot of dark blue cushion between them. There was a small plasma telly and a deep bookcase full of books about gems and modern jewellery.

‘Well, yes.’ Bliss leaned slowly forward, hands clasped between his knees, doing sorrowful. ‘It’s very far from the end, Mrs Jones.’ He looked up, from to face. ‘You’ll have read, I’d imagine, about the murder of Councillor Ayling?’

Neither of them expecting that. Kate’s head and shoulders jerked back. Gyles just went rigid. Good, good, good.

‘I’m sorry,’ Bliss said, sliding the blade in. ‘But if you will mix with criminals, it’s no use going into denial about what they might’ve been getting up to when you’re not there.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Gyles said, and his wife turned on him.

‘Don’t be stupid, Gyles.’

Couple of days’ worth of scorn in Kate’s eyes.

‘I’ll be honest with you,’ Bliss said. ‘I’d been taken off the Ayling case to investigate this trivial shite, and I wasn’t best pleased. We do actually prefer working on the big ones. Not well-disposed towards you, Gyles. But I’d forgotten what a small town this was.’

‘It said pagans in the paper,’ Gyles said. ‘I know nothing about any pagans. I don’t see how there can possibly be any connection between Ayling’s murder and… and…’

‘So you have no connections with the local authority? Or anyone who works for it?’

Gyles’s eyes were all over the place, but he never once looked at his wife. Bliss let the silence take over the room.

‘Look.’ Kate Banks-Jones stood up. ‘He couldn’t possibly have any connection with what happened to Ayling. I mean, look at him. Does he look like a drug dealer?’

She bit her lip and sat down, probably realising what a silly question that was.

‘And what does a drug dealer look like, Mrs Jones?’ Bliss said. ‘Have a bit of a think.’

She didn’t reply at first, just stared at Gyles until he looked up at her. A little furtively, Bliss thought.

‘I don’t have to think very hard,’ she said.

‘No.’ Bliss nodded. ‘Didn’t think you would.’

‘Kate, no,’ Giles said quietly. ‘Don’t do this.’

‘Oh, the hell with it,’ Kate said. ‘A real drug dealer looks a lot like our next-door neighbour.’

The breath that came out of Gyles creaked at the back of his throat. Kate turned away from him.

‘I’m trying to put an end to it.’

‘You’ll put an end to both of us.’ Gyles was rocking on the sofa, gripping his knees, his teeth gritted. ‘Think about the kids.’

Bliss sat still, saying nothing, thinking hard. Rapidly turning things over and over and inside out and, whichever way you looked at it, it made perfect sense that Gyles was no more than the frontman, the façade, the patsy.

‘… thought Steve was awfully cool at first,’ Kate was saying. ‘His idea that Gyles should bring selections of jewellery to parties. Steve went to a lot of parties all over the West Midlands. Whole new world, wasn’t it, Gyles?’ A sneer, then turning to Bliss. ‘Look, I’m not saying we hadn’t done any coke before. I mean, when we were first married. We’d been students together. I just didn’t want anything to do with it after we had the kids. But Gyles… Gyles, unfortunately, was into his second adolescence. Plus, of course, he was making lots of lovely money.’

‘You weren’t complaining,’ Gyles said. ‘You’d been on my back for years about how little we were taking in the shop.’

Bliss said, ‘So it was Steve who had the contacts?’

‘Steve has contacts everywhere,’ Kate said. ‘He’s a planner in every sense of the word.’

‘And you are a respectable, long-established family firm.’ Bliss looked at Gyles. ‘Perhaps not doing as well as you once did. Funny, I was in a place the other week, used to be just a rural garden centre, way out in the sticks, now it’s twice the size with a massive jewellery department. Bling up to here. Hard times in the old city, eh, Gyles?’

Gyles said, ‘I want to explain—’

‘I think he wants to explain, Inspector, that our neighbour can be quite unpleasant. People who use cocaine like Steve uses cocaine can get awfully aggressive.’

‘Moderation in all things,’ Bliss said. ‘That’s what my old mam used to say. But they say it doesn’t always work with coke.’

‘He knows some fairly horrible people,’ Kate said. ‘People you don’t want to… I wanted us to move. Sell up, get out. But we’re locked into Hereford. Can’t sell the business because Gyles’s parents own half of it, and they know nothing of this. We were going to… tell them over Christmas.’

‘Didn’t you say your kids were with them?’

‘With my parents. They don’t know, either. We’ve told them we’re terribly busy in the shop — that’s a laugh — and have to work late. You can see the state we’re in. Look at my hands shaking. Some of our older customers are not going to come near us again, are they? And who wants to buy a small shop these days, anyway?’

‘It’s a problem,’ Bliss said. ‘And I’m very sorry for you, but… hard to scrap the charges at this stage.’

‘Not even if we—’

‘We can’t,’ Gyles snapped. ‘He… he’ll take it very badly.’

‘Well, of course he will,’ Bliss said. ‘But look at it this way, Gyles — I’m gonna nail the twat anyway, with or without your assistance. It’s just a question of how long he goes away for. Or if he goes away at all…?’

Bliss crossed his legs, leaned back. Kate started plucking at her cardigan.

Gyles said, ‘We’d get protection?’

‘Just ask your questions,’ Kate said.

At one time there had been an underworld, a criminal community.

Ordinary people had nothing to do with it.

Drugs had changed all that, the ubiquity of drugs. The discovery, by ordinary suburban people who served on the PTA, that snorting a line or two of coke didn’t automatically turn you into a denizen of the gutter.

Thus, the suburban snorters became part of the new Greater Underworld.

As Kate had intimated, it was Steve who had the contacts. Steve coming in from Brum to take up his new appointment with the Herefordshire planning department. Very pleasant chap, Kate thought at first. Steve would flirt with her, in an unthreatening, flattering way. At the time, Gyles had been wanting to double the size of his shop window, to allow for a bigger display of his fine jewellery, but the shop was on the edge of a conservation area and the planners had been inclined to refuse permission.

Until Steve had a quiet word in the right place. Steve tapping his nose at Gyles: between you and me, OK, mate?

So Gyles owed Steve a big one, and that was the start of it.

‘Who arranged deliveries, Gyles, once the basic structure had been set up?’

‘I did. Steve would come round with what he called his shopping list.’

‘And you’d pay Mebus?’

‘Yes. It would come back… threefold. It didn’t seem like crime.’

‘Always for parties?’

‘And personal use. And sometimes he’d come for a large order.’

‘You know what for?’

‘We didn’t ask,’ Gyles said.

‘We didn’t need to.’ Kate sniffed. ‘It was usually before he went away somewhere.’

‘To where?’

‘To something connected with his job. He was on a committee and they went away to thrash out ideas and things.’

‘A blue-sky thinking weekend.’ Bliss smiled. ‘So where’s Stevie now?’

His phone was throbbing in his hip pocket. He placed a calming hand over it.

‘We don’t know,’ Kate said. ‘Birmingham or Gloucester… or London. I really couldn’t say. He has a lot of friends… and a girlfriend who sometimes lives here. Sometimes he brings her back with him.’

‘Not always the same one,’ Gyles said wearily.

‘You think he’ll be back tonight?’

‘’I think so. He says he likes a traditional Christmas. Talked about going to a service in the Cathedral. A place to be seen, I’d guess. And then he’s having a…’

‘Party?’ Bliss said.

‘Inevitably.’

‘Tell me, Mrs Jones, what was his reaction to Gyles getting busted? Sympathy? Some advice about taking it on the chin, pleading guilty and keeping shtum? A gentle warning, perhaps?’

‘Not that gentle, really,’ Kate said.

Gyles, well out of this conversation now, looked like he was about to be sick. Bliss took out his phone and inspected the screen.

‘Right then, guys, I’ll leave you to have a think if there’s anything else you want to tell me. I’ll be just across the road. Someone I need to phone back.’

‘I’m still shaking,’ Karen said. ‘I’d rather abseil down the spire of St Peter’s than do that again.’

‘Good cause, though, Karen.’

‘It better be. Thought I was going to have to sleep with him.’

Bliss stood at the bottom of Gyles and Steve’s shared drive, away from the only street lamp. He had to smile.

‘Karen, I wouldn’t’ve asked—’

‘I know. It’s just I’m not comfortable lying, never have been.’

‘So, cutting to the chase?’

‘The answer’s yes.’

Something throbbed in Bliss’s chest.

‘The wounds?’

‘One through the aorta, but a few more besides. Maybe afterthoughts?’

‘Window dressing.’

‘Yeah. Didn’t fool their pathologist. His feeling was the bloke was dead almost before the knife went in for a second time.’

‘Wooh, wooh, wooh,’ Bliss said.

Between the sporadic clumps of housing he could see the lights of the city, flat as a pinball table, and the silver ball was pinging. Ram another coin into the slot before it stopped.

‘So you asked him for the name.’

‘He said he’d call me back. That was when it got tense. By some incredible good fortune the only guy in the CID room, when he rang to check me out, was Terry Stagg.’

‘He called you back with the name yet?’

‘No.’

‘Give him an hour, then call him again and tell him it’s important we have it.’

‘I so do not want to do this.’ Karen paused. ‘How important?’

‘Well, Karen, I think this might be it.’

‘What’s that mean?’ An edge of panic in her voice. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Turning over stones.’

‘But Frannie, you’re sick.’

Bliss laughed.

‘I mean you’re not part of this, are you? How can you do anything when you’re out there?’

‘I’ll think of something.’

‘It’s Christmas Eve.’

‘Yes.’

He looked across at the city with the thick night clouds on top, like a cold compress. When Karen had gone, as it began to rain, he went back to the car, switched on the radio, low. Sagged back in the seat, closing his eyes as a chapel choir sang Silent night, holy night.

Another idea came to him. He thought about the options, then switched off the radio and rang Ledwardine Vicarage.

52 Blue Light

WHEN THE RAIN came back, it was so hard and loud it was like the scullery window was being thrashed and thrashed with old-fashioned brooms made of twigs. Jane had to hold the heavy Bakelite phone tight to her ear to make out what Coops was saying.

‘… Pure conjecture, Jane, so don’t go…’

‘No. I won’t. Honestly.’

It was like the rain was speeding up with her excitement. She was finding it hard to sit still. Alone in the scullery under the desk lamp, charged up with the importance of this. Could hear the buzz and clink of chat and crockery in the kitchen — Mum in there with Eirion, Lol and Gomer.

‘OK, say the orchard’s been there since medieval times…’

‘Do you actually know that?’ Coops said. ‘I didn’t have much chance to go into the records.’

‘Nobody knows. It’s just always been there. Can’t be the only village in the centre of an orchard.’

‘No.’

‘And it certainly wouldn’t be the only village inside a henge.’

There. She’d said it. Henge. A word you could chew. Jane had her modest collection of archaeological textbooks spread out over the desk, cross-referencing.

She also had the fairly rudimentary map of the village in the centre of an old Ledwardine guidebook, produced in the 1930s when the orchard still formed most of a semicircle and neither the hestate nor the housing at the bottom of Old Barn Lane had even been thought of.

And you could see it. When you knew you could totally see it.

They were all living in the middle of a henge! The whole village part of a ritual site dating back four thousand years.

There was like a blue light inside Jane’s head.

Ledwardine was the pentagram at the heart of the apple.

‘This could mean there are more stones, Coops.’

‘It’s impossible to say. Stones get smashed, taken away, used in buildings.’

‘But even if these are the only stones, Coleman’s Meadow is only a fragment of the monument.’

‘It’s all theoretical, Jane.’

‘You weren’t saying that yesterday. You were totally convinced that Blore had found something, and you were walking all over the orchard in the rain trying to second-guess him. Come on, admit it, you were thinking henge as well.’

‘What I was thinking doesn’t really matter. It’s the purest — There are no obvious signs.’

‘That’s because they’re all under what’s left of the orchard… The orchard was actually planted to cover up the henge — maybe the henge was threatened or somebody—’

‘That’s not something we can ever know,’ Coops said.

What was wrong with him? Had he had a row with his wife or something, down there in Somerset?

‘You’d thought about it before yesterday, too, hadn’t you? You’d thought henge.’

‘Look, all right, it wouldn’t be that unexpected. A henge is just a circular area with a ditch and a bank. As you probably know, they found a massive one a few years ago not twenty miles from here, in Radnor Forest. But not this side of the English border.’

‘What the hell’s that got to do with it? There wouldn’t’ve been a border back then. Why are you being so negative, Coops?’

‘I just… just don’t go spreading this round, Jane. I mean, obviously I can’t stop you but…’

‘Hey, don’t worry, nobody’s going to take any notice of me, Coops, I’m just a disgraced applicant to the University of Middle Earth. Look, I just feel this is so right. The Village in the Orchard. Encircled by the orchard… concealing what was encircling it before.’

‘Jane,’ Coops said, ‘how can I put this? If you start going on about your feelings—’

‘If I hadn’t had any feelings in the first place, where wouldn’t—’

Jane clammed up. He was right. She had to stop claiming credit. That was how she’d fallen into Bill Blore’s net, the precocious, big-mouth teen. Yes, she was a medium for this — one of them, that was all — for something that needed to come out. But if you went round talking like that people would think you were bonkers. That was, the establishment would think you were bonkers; Blore was proof that things hadn’t changed so much since the leading archaeologists of the day had slagged off Alfred Watkins.

She just couldn’t wait for tomorrow, though. Daylight. Christmas Day. Perfect. She’d be out at first light, looking at everything with new eyes. The familiar transformed. Every time she thought about it, something new occurred to her… like where orchard faded into churchyard, she realised that what she’d thought was the remains of a burial mound might actually be part of the bank of the henge.

‘The orchard,’ she said, ‘was preserving it into the Christian era, all through the witch-hunt times. The old pagan spirituality maintained?’

A tradition. From Alfred Watkins to Jane Watkins, via Lucy Devenish.

Miss Devenish would ever wish it so.

Lol was part of this. They were all part of it.

There was only one unfortunate aspect.

‘Of course, there’s Bill Blore.’

Coops said nothing.

‘He’s going to want to keep this to himself, isn’t he?’

Coops still silent.

‘How can we get it out first, Coops, just to stuff him? I mean, come on, he doesn’t deserve it.’

‘No,’ Coops said. ‘He doesn’t deserve anything.’

‘So what can we do? I realise I’m not much use here. I’m just a—’

‘Jane… you don’t understand.’

‘So explain it to me.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Coops… what’s happened?’

‘We’ll talk about it when I get back after Christmas.’

‘No.’ Jane hugged the phone to her ear, the rain blitzing the window. She could feel her heart beating, her blood racing, or something. ‘You can’t do this to me, Coops.’

‘Jane, I know you’ve had a bad couple of days, and you’re right, Blore doesn’t deserve… anything. I just think — don’t take this the wrong way, please — but I don’t think you’re mature enough to deal with it, and I don’t mean that in any…’

Jane gripped the phone with both hands. She wanted to scream at him, but if she went down that road it would just prove him right about her state of maturity.

‘I don’t yet know the full details, OK?’ Coops said. ‘I had a call from my friend in the Chief Exec’s office, and it was very risky for her to get the information, so I don’t want any comeback on her.’

‘All right,’ Jane said. ‘Listen to me. If you tell me—’

‘I can’t. Jane, I’ve got a wife and a baby on the way. I need this job.’

‘If you tell me, I promise it won’t go outside this house.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I might tell Mum, because like we’re not into secrets these days? But Mum’s a vicar and doesn’t go shooting her mouth off.’

‘That doesn’t arise, Jane.’

‘But if you don’t tell me…’ Jane kept her voice low, speaking slowly. ‘I’ll walk up to Blore tonight in front of everybody in the Swan and I’ll tell him—’

‘Jane, you think anyone will take any notice of what you—?’

‘I don’t care, Coops. I don’t give a toss what people think of me any more. I’ll ask him about the henge. I’ll tell him about the henge…’

‘You’ll just make a fool of yourself again. Just stay away from him, OK? Look, give me—’ Coops lowered his voice but brought it closer to the phone. ‘Listen, I’m in enough trouble with the family. I’m not exactly the life and soul. And I’d need time to explain this. I’ll call you back.’

‘But I’ll be—’

‘And when I do, you’d better make sure you’re sitting down, Jane, because this is going to ruin your Christmas.’

53 Won’t

The car was the nearest he had to a home now. At least it didn’t have an unplugged Christmas tree and a newly emptied wardrobe — he’d noticed that this morning, along with spaces on the walls, gaps on the shelves; Kirsty must’ve come back, plundered the place.

Bliss sat there chewing his nails, the rain weeping down the windows, the mobile in his lap.

The Banks-Joneses knew where he was, if they had anything else to tell him. Occasionally one or the other would come to the window, like a kid watching for Santa Claus. It would be too dark to see him now, parked in the foundations of Phase Two.

Tried three times to reach the reverend. Engaged, engaged, engaged. He rolled his forehead against the top of the steering wheel.

Christmas Eve. It was a bad joke. This time next year he could be kipping in frigging doorways. When the phone began to vibrate, he fumbled it to his ear without looking at the screen.

‘Karen…’

‘Hate to disappoint, boss.’

‘Andy. Sorry. I’m—’

‘Talked to my friend Fred Potter. Three Counties News Service?’

‘I’d forgot about that.’ Bliss straightened up, remembered his chewing gum and reached across the dash. ‘You were asking him about Hereforward, right?’

‘You likely know this already, boss, it was in the Hereford Times. Least, some of it was. Hereford councillor rushed to hospital in the Cotswolds?’

‘Can’t say I recall it.’

‘Heart attack. Councillor suffered a heart attack during a weekend away with other members of the Herefordshire advance-planning group, Hereforward.’

‘When was this?’

‘Last summer. Potter says Hereforward’s one of these names gets mentioned so often on council reports you stop seeing it after a while and folk give up asking what it does. But they have weekends away. They’ll go and look at what’s happening in some other city. Fact-finding mission. Or else just brainstorming weekends, kind of thing.’

‘I like that word brainstorming.’

‘Well, then, about six months ago — in the summer, anyway — they go for a session at a country-house hotel on the edge of the Cotswolds. Hire the conference suite, as usual, so their intensive deliberations won’t be disturbed. Late Saturday night, a member of the committee gets rushed to hospital with this heart attack. Touch and go for a while, but he pulls through.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘There were whispers, however, of a toxicology report revealing a high level of cocaine in the blood.’

‘Well, well.’

Bliss mouthed a wafer of gum.

‘Known for putting a strain on the heart, coke is,’ Mumford said. ‘They reckon if they keep fit, go jogging and confine the snorting to weekends they can handle it. Big mistake, apparently.’

‘My understanding,’ Bliss said, ‘is that a heart attack is often the result of a novice snorter overdoing it. I did a short course once, very illuminating. Nobody we know, this councillor?’

‘Nobody I know. Youngish chap. I’ve mailed you the cutting, but it won’t tell you much. Just a heart attack, mercy dash, lucky to be alive, all this stuff.’

‘How did they know about the toxicology?’

‘Hospitals leak.’

‘Oh, they do.’

‘But it went no further, anyway. No papers touched the story. Too much trouble, Potter says, too many legal hurdles.’

‘Would Ayling have been on this weekend?’

‘Potter thinks not. Doesn’t think Ayling was co-opted on to Hereforward until a couple of months later.’

‘Still.’ Bliss chewed slowly. ‘Something’s definitely coming together here, Andy. I can feel it.’

A weekend of euphoric brainstorming. He could imagine them coming back with pages and pages of brilliant ideas, looking at them on Monday morning, thinking, what on earth is all this shite?

‘I wonder what else they get up to, apart from coke.’

‘You’re thinking what’s in it for Charlie Howe?’

‘Can’t help it, Andy. Eats away at me.’

‘Quite a liberating experience, cocaine,’ Mumford said thoughtfully. ‘So I’m told.’

‘Plays hell with the inhibitions.’

‘Old days,’ Mumford said, ‘we always thought of councillors and officials as stuffy ole buggers. Fellers in tweeds, retired headmistresses. Times changed, ennit? Plus you got consultants.’

‘Consultants. I like that word. You reckon they have extra consultants on their blue-sky weekends, Andy?’

‘I’m sure they do,’ Mumford said. ‘But let it go, boss. Don’t go making a dick of yourself again. Don’t you bloody well go near him.’

‘I won’t, I won’t.’

‘You need any help, you give me a call.’

‘It’s Christmas Eve, Andy.’

‘You seen the state of Christmas TV?’

Bliss tried Ledwardine Vicarage again. Still engaged. He was reaching for another stick of chewie when his windscreen lit up red.

Tail lights.

Car pulling into Furneaux’s drive, just as the phone started trembling.

‘Yeh.’

Karen said, ‘He won’t.’

‘He won’t?’

‘He wants to speak to Howe.’

‘Shit. You told him—?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I said I’d been trying to get hold of her. He said when I did I should respectfully ask her to call him. Sounding a bit distant.’

‘Didn’t you point out to him—?’

‘I didn’t point out anything to him. I don’t like it when they start sounding distant. When they start calling you sergeant instead of Karen.’

‘Jesus.’

Bliss squeezing his eyes shut.

‘It didn’t exactly surprise me, boss. Would you share the name of a suspected killer with some unknown DS from Worcester?’

The tail lights swam in the windscreen, duplicated by brake lights now.

‘You think I’ve lost it, don’t you, Karen?’

‘I think you’ve had a very bad few days, boss. I think you should try and relax.’

‘Where? In front of the telly in me house, on me own? And if that sounds like self-pity, it is.’

‘Oh, Frannie, I’d say you could come round here, but—’

‘Your boyfriend wouldn’t like it, and quite right, too. All right. No worries. There’ll be a way round this. There’s always a way.’ Bliss watched the red lights go out. ‘You have a good Christmas, Karen. I owe yer.’

Who didn’t he owe?

‘You won’t do anything daft, will you, boss?’

‘You know me, Sergeant.’

‘I do. That’s the trouble.’

‘Merry Christmas, Karen,’ Bliss said. ‘I’m blowing you a kiss.’

Option One: he could go back across the road on his own. He could do that.

No warrant, no evidence, but you didn’t need any of that for a…

… A cosy chat.

Like the one he’d been ready to have with Steve last night, and what a mistake that would’ve been. Could’ve blown everything.

Could still.

All right, Option Two. Ring Gaol Street, see who was on tonight: Stagg, Wintle? Tell them he was feeling much better now, invite whoever it was to accompany him. Or pull a little team together. Go in mob-handed. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas, Steve, don’t mind the reindeer.

But what was the betting that, in the wake of the busting of Gyles, Steve had absolutely nothing on the premises?

And anyway, how would that tell him who paid the knifeman?

And also he really hated this twat now. That never helped.

Which left Option Three.

Jesus.

The thought of Option Three just made Bliss want to curl up and die.

54 Cold Turkey

Standing under the market hall, looking down Church Street, a slow slope, you could see that the centre of Ledwardine really was on fairly high ground. What did that mean? Could you have a henge on high ground?

‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘Picture this. If it came around what’s now the market square, enclosing the church and the vicarage, the cut-off point would be…’ she pointed through the rain ‘… about there, just past Lol’s house.’

Right on the rim of the henge. Maybe there would be signs of a ditch, or at least a depression, in what was left of the orchard behind Lol’s house. That was the first place to check tomorrow.

‘I just don’t know enough, that’s the trouble. Don’t have enough basic knowledge. Like, maybe that’s how Church Street began, as some kind of processional avenue leading up from the river and into the henge.’

‘Cooper told you not to get carried away, Jane,’ Eirion said. ‘I think he told you that once before?’

‘I hear exactly what you’re saying, Irene, but I need this. I need this so much.’

‘You need it, Blore needs it… Cooper needs it.’

‘And Ledwardine needs it. And it just has to be ours. It must not be Blore’s.’

Jane had told them all about the henge. Eirion and Lol and Gomer and Mum — who was interested but seemed vague tonight, disconnected from everything. The problem was obvious and simple: too much to think about and no cigarettes to help her keep it all under control.

Cold turkey. Poor Mum. Cold turkey for Christmas, and too much pride to go round bumming cigs off other people. She wasn’t a heavy smoker, compared with some, and if every smoker in the village who had a few to spare would donate just one to Mum… well, that might be better for everybody. It certainly hadn’t seemed like a good time to tell her that Coops was hiding something he didn’t think her daughter was mature enough to handle.

However, because it was really eating at her she’d dragged Eirion out to the square and laid it on him.

They were alone under the market hall. The village Christmas tree had been switched off due to worries about the wiring and all the water swirling around its base, ambered now by the fake gaslamps. Even where there was no flooding the water lay like a skin on the ground, constantly topped up as fast as it was absorbed by the vainly gulping drains. The Eight Till Late was still open, although its food stocks were well down. Emergency service, Jim Prosser said. Eight Till very Late.

‘OK, listen,’ Eirion said. ‘If Cooper confirms that a henge is a major possibility, maybe we could get something in the press. They’re always desperate for stories just after Christmas. Nothing much happening in politics anywhere in the world. I could call somebody on Boxing Day, email the story about the possible discovery of a new henge surrounding a village… that would screw Blore.’

‘Yeah, but it might also screw Coops. But… I’ll ask him.’

‘The other thing is, if Blore actually knew about the henge before he officially started work here…’

‘How would he?’

‘Looked up your website. Which basically floats the idea of some large-scale prehistoric landscape feature at the bottom of Cole Hill. For which three or four standing stones in a field might just be the tip of the iceberg. I mean I don’t know. But maybe he came over himself, on the quiet, and poked around. And his experienced eye led him in directions which you, as — sorry Jane — an amateur, would’ve missed. Identifying the possibility of an original henge, which he’s now confirmed. It makes sense. You could even say that’s why he stitched you up.’

‘He said… that I’d come to the right conclusions for all the wrong reasons.’

Ley lines… God help us.

‘Seems ridiculous that a leading archaeologist would want to discredit a schoolgirl,’ Eirion said. ‘But maybe he also wanted to make sure you’d keep well out of his way for the duration of the dig. And that’s worked, hasn’t it?’

‘You think that’s what Coops wasn’t telling me?’

‘Maybe. He knows what you’re like. Tell you one thing, though, Jane. When this comes out, it’ll not only mean no development in Coleman’s Meadow, it could throw a protection order around the whole village.’

Jane stared at him, blue lights everywhere.

‘What?’

‘Think about it. The excavation alone, something this big could take years, and if there were even just a few more stones buried under the village it could qualify as a Grade One ancient monument. You couldn’t build anywhere near it.’

‘Holy sh— Irene, that means Lyndon Pierce would be…’

‘Stuffed.’ Eirion put an arm round her. ‘Totally. But just take it slowly, huh?’

‘Slowly?’ She looked up at him, pulling away. Her face felt flushed, she was trembling. ‘Are you crazy? Irene, this is mega.’

‘Only if it’s true.’ He put his hands on her arms, like he was fitting a straitjacket. ‘Only if there really is a henge. Jane, look, time’s getting on. We need to get across to the Swan, make sure the visual stuff’s all set up for Lol.’

‘Yeah. That’s part of it, you know? It’s all coming together.’

‘I’m sure it is.’

‘I’m not mad, Irene.’

‘I never thought you were.’

‘I just need to go to Lucy’s grave now. Tell her about this.’

Eirion sighed the long-suffering sigh of a much older guy.

‘Of course you do.’

When Merrily came back from the phone, Gomer had left to get himself cleaned up and Lol was looking up at the clock.

‘I think I need to be getting over to the Swan.’

‘No!’ Merrily froze. Pressed him back into the chair. ‘You can’t go. Not yet.’

‘Who was on the phone? Is something wrong?’

‘A lot’s wrong, but I want to keep the lid on it until after Christmas. That was… that was Bliss. Wants me to ring Sophie for him. He wants a number for Helen Ayling.’

‘Why can’t he ring her?’

‘Because Sophie, like a lot of people, is suspicious of him, and he says he’s got no time to deal with that. I’ve said I’ll ring her for him and then… just give me twenty minutes. Can you do that? It’s important.’

He looked at her, his head tilted. He was still wearing the Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt. He’d insisted he’d be wearing it for the gig, wiping some of the mud off with a damp cloth but not all of it.

Ledwardine red mud. For luck.

She loved him beyond all reason, but sometimes he irritated the hell out of her.

‘Stay,’ she said, like to a dog.

Back in the scullery, she took her last cigarette out of the pack and sniffed it as she dialled.

Wasn’t the same. She’d been across to the shop and bought four packets of extra-strong mints, had already eaten two and a half. She was sure they were making her want to go to the toilet.

‘I tried to ring you twice,’ Sophie said. ‘As soon as I heard about the bridge. You really can’t get out of there?’

‘Not in a car.’

The past two years she’d gone into Hereford on Christmas Eve, when it was quiet in the late afternoon, and she and Sophie had drunk tea together, reviewed the year, exchanged small gifts.

‘What are you going to do?’ Sophie said.

‘What can we do? Sit it out. Almost a third of the population’s left the village, to spend Christmas with relatives or at hotels. Some people’s furniture’s in storage in case the worst happens.’

‘What about your meditation service?’

‘Still on. I’ve been over to the church, set up the usual circle of pews and chairs at the top of the nave. Maybe it’ll mean more this year. Or maybe people won’t have the heart to turn out. Or maybe I should just offer the midnight Eucharist.’

‘You sound exhausted.’

‘I’m OK. There’ve been one or two problems which I’ll tell you about when we get liberated.’

‘They’ll put a temporary bridge in?’

‘Bailey bridge, yeah. Sophie, listen, do you have a phone number for Helen Ayling that I can pass on to Frannie Bliss?’

‘You’re using it,’ Sophie said. ‘However—’

‘She’s still there?’

‘In the end, she didn’t want to leave until she was allowed to have a funeral. Much calmer now, but I’d very much take exception to her being upset on Christmas Eve by your friend Bliss.’

‘He’s got problems. Domestic problems.’

‘Not, I’m sure, on Helen’s scale. What does he want?’

‘Well,’ Merrily said, ‘I do actually know what he wants.’

Suspecting something like this, she’d told Bliss she’d be prepared to talk to Helen Ayling herself.

‘It relates to drugs. Bliss wants to know about Clement Ayling and drugs.’

Sophie said sharply, ‘What about them?’

‘Anything.’

Sophie said, ‘Are you serious?’

Merrily tried to call Bliss back at once, but his mobile was engaged. She brought the Boswell guitar in its case through from the back hallway, laid it on the scullery sofa. Then she went back to Lol.

He was standing by the window. She went over and found herself clinging tightly to him, feeling flimsy as an insect, breathing in the unfamiliar smell of the earth on him, and they were kissing for too long.

‘It’s only another gig,’ Lol whispered.

‘No, it’s not.’

When they finally separated, she pulled a rusted flake of dried mud from the shoulder of his sweatshirt. He bent and kissed her again, on the side of her mouth.

‘Look… if you really want me to change I’ll go home and do it. I don’t want to—’

‘No. Keep the luck. Just… you know… don’t take that sweatshirt to America with you. They won’t understand the reference.’

‘Doesn’t arise,’ Lol said. ‘I hadn’t thought it out. I wouldn’t even get a visa or whatever you need.’

‘Huh?’

‘I have a conviction for indecent assault on an underage girl.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake…’ She pulled away, stared into his eyes. ‘Everybody knows that was a gross miscarriage of—’

‘No, they don’t. In the eyes of the law, I’m a sex-criminal.’

‘Lol, you can get it waived.’ Merrily was almost shouting. ‘If you apply to the American Embassy for a visa and tell them the circumstances, you’ll almost certainly get it waived.’

‘There’s no certainty at all, and anyway—’

‘Lol… look… What happened twenty years ago… it’s now very widely known that you were set up. Wrongly convicted. Been in various papers… floating round on the Net. Nobody in their right mind…’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does matter.’

Not going to America because it might not be such a brilliant career move at this stage, that was one thing, but not going because America might refuse him entry as a convicted felon…

‘And besides…’ God, she needed a cigarette. ‘We also know the identity of the real offender.’

‘Who’s untouchable,’ Lol said. ‘Who will never be convicted. On account of being dead.’

‘Your conviction’s discredited. I’m telling you they’ll waive it.’

‘Mud sticks.’ Lol looked down at his sweatshirt. ‘You know that. Look, I’ll have to go.’

‘Wait.’ She was backing towards the door. ‘There’s… I was going to give you this tomorrow, but it’s important you should have it tonight. You need to have it tonight. Just… stay there. Stay.’

The churchyard was bloated and squelchy, like walking on an old mattress, pools of water everywhere, headstones and crosses looking like groynes at the seaside.

Jane ploughed through it in her red wellies, looking up at the church, its steeple edged with amber from the lights on the square. Some churches were floodlit; Mum wouldn’t have that. Has its own light, she’d said. Floodlighting also wasn’t very green, these days, but Jane couldn’t help thinking that for special nights… and compared with total abominations like Las Vegas…

The lantern over the porch still gilded the cindered path, which had been the old coffin trail, and it was enough.

‘Could be some of the neolithic stones are in the church’s foundations,’ Jane said. ‘I know — don’t get carried away, Jane. But Lucy always used to say the church was built on a pagan site.’

She was back in high spirits, since Eirion’s suggestion that what Coops hadn’t wanted her to know was the way Blore had manipulated her. And totally energised by the thought of what this could mean for the future of the village. Despite the endless rain, the night seemed incandescent. She looked up into the sky, throwing back her hood, letting it all come racing down on her, washing away the uncertainty.

She was remembering standing on top of Cole Hill, bare-armed in the summer, and seeing the steeple as the gnomon of a great sundial. And she’d been right. She’d been right all along. It didn’t matter what the sneering students thought, or the professors of archaeology behind their narrow-minded, self-protective—

‘Oh Christ,’ Eirion said.

Jane looked down to find him bending over Lucy’s grave, water glinting in the moss on the headstone’s curve. The moss should never be removed, it said in Lucy’s will. Let the stone be a stone.

She ran to Eirion’s side, slithering on the slimy grass.

It had been done in white and not too long ago. Despite the rain you could still smell the paint.

Letters splashed diagonally across the stone, obliterating the lines from Traherne.

Jane looked at it for a long time.

She knelt down in the wet grass, laid her hands either side of the headstone’s wet, velvety rim, holding in her fury.

‘It’s all right,’ she said.

She stood up. Eirion had his hands in his pocket. He stamped the ground angrily with a heel.

‘Turps,’ Jane said. ‘That gets it off, doesn’t it?’

‘There might be something better,’ Eirion said. ‘I’ll go over to the shop—’

‘No, you need to help Lol. You get off to the Swan. I’ll do it.’

‘Jane—’

‘It’s all right. It’s only paint. And she’s mentally ill, anyway.’

‘You know who…?’

‘I’ll scrub it off.’

‘You should tell the police.’

‘What are they going to do, send a helicopter? I don’t want anyone to see this. I want it gone by daylight.’

She walked away, face into the rain, back to the church. Eirion drew alongside her.

‘You can scream, you know. You don’t have anything to prove about maturity. I’d scream, if somebody did that to my friend’s grave.’

‘Lucy would laugh.’ Jane kept on walking, not looking back. ‘And I’ll do my screaming after Christmas. Through the plate-glass screen at the post office.’

‘What are you—?’

‘Let’s go and see if Jim’s got some paint-stripper.’

Her hands felt sticky; she must’ve touched it. She stopped in revulsion and bent down and swirled them around in the surface water on the cinders outside the church porch. Wouldn’t do any good against enamel or whatever this was, but it made her feel…

Oh.

Standing up, under the dusty glow of the wrought-iron lantern above the church porch, she saw that both porch doors had been pulled closed.

And what had been daubed across them.

‘Now you’ll have to tell the police,’ Eirion said.

This was also in white, still wet and bubbled with rainwater.

‘And we’re going to have to tell Mum,’ Jane said. ‘She doesn’t need this.’

Eirion went up the doors. They hadn’t been quite closed, and there was a crack of light.

‘The lights are on inside. Are they usually kept on?’

‘Not any more.’

Eirion grasped both ring handles, pushed the doors open and went in.

55 Option Three

It was probably Victorian but looked older. Georgian or Queen Anne or something. Bliss wasn’t an expert on architecture. It was just a big white house with tall windows converted into flats. Behind it, thousands of lights revealed the spread of the Severn Valley below.

A cool place to live. Classy address, outstanding views and only a short journey to work.

There was the car, the deep green Saab, on the forecourt. He’d been worried that the flat might’ve been vacated in the fifty-five minutes since he’d rung, number withheld, hanging up when he’d had an answer.

Longer drive than expected. Floods everywhere in Worcestershire. Worse than Herefordshire, according to Traffic, advising him on the safest route to Great Malvern. This was around eight p.m., after the Banks-Joneses had been in — statement from Kate, additional statement from Gyles. He’d rung them from Phase Two so as not to alert Steve, and they’d made their own way to Gaol Street.

Not too bad up here, far above river level. He’d left his car parked by the side of the main road. Thought about phoning to say he was here, request an audience. Might be difficult if he was to walk in on a cosy Christmas Eve with the girlfriend.

Decided against, in the end.

There was a short wall around the forecourt. He climbed over it. The rain was lighter here, and he stood for quite a while outside the white-painted front door. The four bell buttons and the names alongside them, surnames only, were softly lit up.

Option Three. Was he really up for this? Was this any less stupid and short-sighted than driving over to Charlie’s place last night?

As he stood with his finger suspended over the second bell push from the top, the one with the shortest name alongside it, the door opened.

Just as smoothly as you’d expect, place like this.

CCTV. Might’ve guessed.

She was wearing light-coloured jeans and a stripy woollen top, and her hair was down and looked freshly washed. She wasn’t smiling, but then it wasn’t Christmas yet.

‘I don’t honestly know what persuaded me to come down, Francis. Must be some kind of warped forensic curiosity.’

She could soften her appearance, but obviously nothing to be done about that drab, vinyl voice.

‘I, um…’ Bliss coughed. ‘I don’t know where the other bloody carol singers’ve got to, Annie, but I’ve gorra tell you I sound terrible on me own. Would it be all right if I just talked?’

The lounge bar was the Black Swan at its most Jacobean. Those deep, leaded mullion windows. Half an oak wood on the walls and ceiling. Beautifully ill-lit.

Lol had never seen it so empty.

‘It’s early,’ Barry said.

He was also, as usual, in black and white. Essex boy, way back, but he’d spent all his adult years in Hereford. An old-style manager. He said people liked that, and they probably did.

‘Not going to be quite what I expected, mate, but nothing I can do about that. Act of God. We’ve been getting calls all day from people who were going to come over for it — one as far away as Chester, ready to book a double room. Asking if there was any way into the village. I said it’d be a two-mile walk across flooded fields, but possible with the right kit.’ Barry shrugged. ‘Couldn’t figure why they lost interest.’

‘Probably because, unlike you, they’d never been in the SAS,’ Lol said.

Barry nodded, sage-like. Lol saw James Bull-Davies walking through from the public bar with Alison Kinnersley. Alison smiled and waved. It seemed half a lifetime since he’d lived with Alison and written a bitter-sweet song for her including most of the place names in the Golden Valley. He wouldn’t play it tonight.

‘You’ll still get the same fee, of course,’ Barry said.

‘Barry, forget the fee. Why don’t we just call it off?’

‘Good God, bunch of local people been really looking forward to it. It’s Christmas Eve, mate. The water’s rising. There’s nothing else to look forward to.’ Barry wiped his brow with a paper napkin. ‘I’m not putting this very well, am I? What I mean is, I think we’ll get a few locals who would normally give it a miss. A percentage would’ve been going into Hereford tonight, or to parties outside. I think the situation makes people want to get together. Kind of security in numbers. Take their mind off it.’

‘Social service.’

‘Exactly.’ Barry patted Lol on the shoulder. ‘We’ll make bugger-all money out of it, but we’ll feel better about ourselves in the morning.’

Lol sat down next to his Guild acoustic amplifier and opened the Boswell’s case. It shone up at him, like there was a halo around it. Although it had a sophisticated adjustable bridge and an internal pick-up based on the Takamine, something about it seemed older than the Black Swan.

He didn’t know what to do. He knew how much Merrily earned, and there was no way she could afford this. He hadn’t been able to say half of what he’d wanted to say because she’d almost pushed him out of the door, saying she had an urgent phone call to make.

When he’d gone running home to change into clean jeans and dry socks, he’d found a message on his machine

This is about love, Laurence, Al Boswell said. The guitar… well, at least you deserve the guitar.

Light laughter.

Click.

‘Actually,’ Annie Howe said, ‘I do know why I came to the door. I doubt I’d get to sleep tonight if I didn’t find out why Karen Dowell had rung Mark Connelly to ask for the name of the man we think did the knifing for Lasky’s merry band of kiddy-fiddlers.’

‘Ah.’

‘And then, when I saw you drowning on the step, something just kind of clicked.’

‘Right.’

‘My God, Bliss, you really do have to be in some kind of shit to turn up here.’

‘Yeh,’ Bliss said. ‘I think that would more or less encompass the situation. However, Karen… it’s not her fault. She was obeying an instruction I should never’ve given her. It was an abuse of power. Mea culpa.’

He sipped his coffee and looked around. What had surprised him most about Annie Howe’s apartment was not its spartan aspects — went without saying — but all the books. Could be a couple of thousand, and not just to fill tastefully fitted shelves, because the shelves weren’t tasteful or fitted, some of them no more than planks of new pine separated by bricks — clean bricks, but still… Bliss could see a lot of law up there — she had a law-degree, he knew that much — and criminology, but also history and geology and a few dozen paperback crime novels. Normal stuff. Human-being stuff.

Maybe she was storing them for a friend.

‘I thought you’d be out,’ he said. ‘It’s Christmas. I think.’

‘Where?’ Howe said. ‘On the town? Clubbing? Binge-drinking with my mates?’

She was sitting under a blue-shaded brass standard lamp in a rocking chair that was clearly second-hand, a threadbare powder-blue rug underneath it. Bliss was high up on an overstuffed settee, feeling stupid on account of his feet barely touched the stained floorboards.

Also a trifle gobsmacked at discovering a woman who didn’t care about decor. Kirsty’s lip would be curled double in disgust.

‘After the past week,’ Howe said, ‘I’m more than happy to lock the door, take off my shoes and open a bottle of wine. Perhaps a scented bath with one of my lesbian lovers.’

Bliss tried for the right kind of smile, suspecting there wasn’t one.

‘Or maybe both of them at once,’ Howe said. ‘It’s quite a generous bath.’

A tiny fibre-optic Christmas tree on the mantelpiece over the blocked-in fireplace changed from mauve to silver.

‘Actually,’ Howe said, ‘if the only men out there were the kind of crass bastards generally found in the police service, I think I might well have gone gratefully down that road.’

‘For what it’s worth,’ Bliss said, ‘I didn’t actually place a bet.’

‘You parsimonious bastard, Francis.’

‘Shit,’ Bliss said. ‘It wasn’t for charity, was it?’

Jesus, did Annie nearly laugh then?

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I won’t waste your time. I’ll just lay this out on the floor and if you don’t like it you can kick it down the lift shaft. Essentially, the suburban coke affiliate that was supposed to keep me out of the way until Twelfth Night has turned out to link directly into Ayling.’

Howe was rocking gently. Near-white hair fluffed over her eyes. Glasses — the rimless Gestapo-issue — on the end of her nose. What had happened to the contacts?

‘Connection comes through a council planning officer called Steve Furneaux,’ Bliss said quickly, ‘who turns out to be the main player, while Gyles Banks-Jones…’

‘Frontman.’ Howe stopped the movement of the chair with the tip of a trainer. ‘Well recompensed, I’d guess, to take all the risks. Idiot, basically.’

‘Well… yeh.’

‘Furneaux’s a reptile.’

Bliss grew cautious, tilted himself forward so both feet were firmly on the floor.

‘Worked in local government and public relations in Birmingham,’ Annie Howe said, ‘and the Black Country. West Midlands have a slim but meaningful file on him.’

‘What’s he done?’

‘Well, nothing we know about, obviously, or they’d have had him years ago. That house in Hereford, though, he paid cash. He also has a very nice flat in Solihull, which he rents out, and a time-share in Menton. And in case you’re wondering about private income, his parents are still alive, both low-grade schoolteachers, so nothing from that end.’

Bliss shuffled uncomfortably to the edge of the sofa.

‘And you know all this… how?’

‘Mainly from my dad. They serve together on a quango called…’

‘Hereforward.’

‘I believe that’s the name. Whenever someone mentions it, I plead ignorance because — you’ve probably noticed this yourself — no two people ever give the same explanation of what it actually does.’

‘And what, uh…’ Bliss hesitated. ‘What does County Councillor Howe say it does?’

‘You should ask him.’

‘I tried. Tried to ask him about a few things.’

‘And?’

‘He said I was a sick, twisted little Scouser with no friends and no prospects who ought to go home and probably throw himself in the Mersey. But you knew that.’

‘Didn’t, actually. When was this?’

‘Last night.’

‘Before you went off sick.’

‘I got very wet. Charlie having expressed a wish that I should die of pneumonia.’

Annie smiled, a bit twisted.

‘That’s my pa.’

‘I was able though, before I left, to inquire about his new hip, and he said Mr Shah had done an excellent job.’

‘I’ve heard he’s the best.’

Bliss stood up.

‘What are you doing, Annie? What are you doing?’

‘Sometimes, Francis, I almost think I know.’ Howe used a heel to start the chair’s momentum, in a slow, meditative rhythm. ‘Sit down. Tell me what you hoped to achieve by disrupting my quiet Christmas Eve in.’

‘Well…’ Bliss sat. ‘There’s that information that Mark Connelly wouldn’t give to Karen Dowell without your say-so. I think your guy also killed Ayling.’

‘It’s a possibility. The wounds weren’t identical.’

‘But you’ve got Willy Hawkes in the frame.’

‘Wilford Hawkes has gone home for Christmas. His chainsaw’s clean. We were interested that it had a new chain, and he’d forgotten what he’d done with the old one but we eventually found it. One of the women he lived with had borrowed it to loop over a five-barred gate to hold it to the post. That tells you how blunt it had become, but it wasn’t blunted on flesh or bone. Tests yielded sawdust, nothing else. He may be charged in connection with a threatening phone call, but possibly not.’

‘Why were you so keen to nail him?’

‘Because all the evidence pointed at the Dinedor Serpent.’

‘No other reason?’

‘Like not wanting to investigate my father?’

‘I’m saying nothing, ma’am.’

‘Don’t call me ma’am again. I know what it means when you use it, and it isn’t a term of respect. No, I didn’t want to investigate my father. All through my career I’ve been hoping I would never have to investigate Charlie Howe… and you breathe a word of this outside this room, Bliss, and you are history.’

‘You know I won’t,’ Bliss said, ‘or you wouldn’t be telling me. Anyway. I’ve got no friends, me.’

‘Really hasn’t lost his touch, has he?’

Annie Howe grinned. A phenomenon like the northern lights and UFOs: you’d heard of other people who’d seen them. Bliss blinked, and it had gone.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I need to hear it from you. Why you handed me the Gyles case.’

‘You’ll have a long wait, Francis.’

‘Here’s my version, then. Sometime in the past, Charlie must’ve said something to you about Furneaux. Maybe asking you to look into him. Maybe suspicious of Furneaux’s affluence. And maybe you made a few inquiries to keep the old guy happy?’

Annie Howe looked up at the cream-washed moulded ceiling, didn’t nod, didn’t shake her head.

‘Was he happy? Was he happy to know Furneaux was without form, therefore clever? Therefore…’ in for a penny ‘… safe to have dealings with?’

‘Be careful.’

‘I bet you never forgot Steve’s name, did you?’

Maybe she was a better detective than he’d given her credit for. She couldn’t possibly have been in the cops for — what, twelve, fourteen years? — without hearing the Charlie stories.

‘What happened? You run into Furneaux at some social event?’

‘As everyone keeps pointing out,’ Annie said, ‘it’s a small city.’

‘Not for very long if the council have anything to do with it. Hear about the toxicology report following a heart attack at that Hereforward weekend spree?’

‘I read the toxicology report. And I was very relieved that Councillor Howe wasn’t there. He was…’ hollow breath ‘… on holiday in the South of France.’

‘Not…’ oh joy ‘… staying at Steve’s time-share in Menton?’

‘Shut up now…’

‘How lovely,’ Bliss said.

‘It’s not a crime.’

‘No, no. But when Ayling got topped, I bet you had Charlie on the phone in minutes, assuring you… well, making certain assurances.’

‘It would have been odd if he hadn’t phoned me under those circumstances.’

‘Did he, uh… suggest it might not be a good thing in general for the city of Hereford if a certain nasty little Scouse cop with a chip on his shoulder was in charge of the investigation?’

‘That sound like my father?’

‘Totally. And did he, by great good fortune, happen to be making a post-op visit to the orthopaedic surgeon who’d done his hip, and…’ Bliss sighed. ‘Jesus, Annie that was a sad bloody excuse for a complaint, wasn’t it?’

‘I’ve heard better.’

‘But I tell you what would look bad… if it subsequently emerged that there was a link between Steve Furneaux, Hereforward and Clem Ayling’s killing, and Councillor Howe’s daughter, leading the investigation, had conspicuously—’

‘All right!’ Howe stopped rocking. ‘Being fast-tracked to the top isn’t an automatic indication of someone with an honours degree but no basic nous. What’ve you got?’

‘Jesus, you deliberately put me in from the other side to find out if Charlie—?’

‘I told you you’d have a long wait and I meant it.’

‘You sent me in there with a shitload of grudge against your ole man…’

‘If you couldn’t involve him then he wasn’t involved.’

‘And if I could involve him?’

‘Can you?’

‘You still think he might actually—’

‘You tosser!’ Annie Howe sprang to her feet. ‘I’ve known the bastard for thirty-five years. I know every lie he told my mother, and some even she doesn’t know about. I know how, despite telling everybody who’ll listen how proud he is of my success, that he did everything in his power to keep me out of the police. Now what’ve you got?’

Bliss sat with his feet not quite touching the floor. He couldn’t remember when he’d last fancied a woman this much. How crass did that make him?

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I know who disposed of Ayling’s body. I don’t know who actually killed him, but I think I know why he was killed. And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Charlie was connected to the murder.’

‘Furneaux?’

‘Furneaux for definite.’

‘All right,’ Annie said. ‘Let’s go and spoil his Christmas.’

56 Corrupt

Jane sprayed torchlight at the church porch door, watching Mum recoil.

Heartsick. That word on her church…

Mum had been upstairs in the bedroom, dressing for the gig — cashmere and the black velvet skirt, the last cigarette half-smoked and then carefully pinched out. She’d flung on her cape to cover the skirt, but nothing was totally protected in this weather. Pools were already forming around their wellies, and the splashing of the rain made it hard to hear what she was mumbling.

‘… come off. Everything comes off, somehow.’

Not easily. It was old wood. Eirion had reckoned they might wind up having to sand it down. She’d sent Eirion to the Swan. Nothing he could do now. It was evidence, anyway.

‘I’ll… have a go later if you like,’ Jane said.

‘… Think I’m inclined to leave it till after Christmas. Let everybody see it. That was the idea, presum—’ Mum broke off, her eyes unnaturally wide in the torch beam. ‘My God, what did I just say?’

‘Makes sense to me. Let everybody see what she’s done.’

‘And then they can all cross the road when she walks up the street? Use another post office?’

‘Saves having to listen to a lot of born-again bollocks.’

‘Talk about her behind her back? And maybe some kids will go and spray-paint her front door, thinking they have an excuse for it now?’

‘She’d love it. Make her feel like a real martyr.’

Jane played the torch beam through a wall of rain like gilded splinters to the white-sprayed words

‘What does it mean, anyway?’

‘It means exactly what it says. After gradually stripping away traditional Christianity in Ledwardine in favour of a kind of neopaganism, I’m now going all the way… Jane, its—’

‘No, go on…’

‘Conspiring with the satanic baptist Mathew Elliot Stooke to celebrate, on the stroke of midnight, not the holy birth but some demonic intrus— I can’t even say it.’

‘They truly believe that?’

‘Who knows? Maybe she thinks this will deter people from coming tonight. Perhaps it will.’

‘Somebody has to stop her.’

‘I can’t do anything.’ Mum numbly shaking her head, shoulders slumped. ‘In the absence of the police — and they’d be unlikely to come before Christmas anyway — I’m not going to be… judge and jury.’

‘Mum…’

‘And the truth is, we don’t even know it’s her, do we?’

‘Oh, come on—’

‘There are supposed to be other members of her… church around. Jane, let’s just go home and get— We’ve got ten minutes before Lol starts, right? So let’s just get a bucket, some det—’

‘Mum…’ Oh God. ‘You haven’t been inside.’

Mum looked at Jane who turned away, tearful. She’d looked so pretty in her best clothes and… kind of glowing. As if tonight at the Swan, with the Boswell and everything, would be the start of a new phase for her and Lol. Maybe even the prospect of…

‘Mum, listen, she — whoever it is — is mentally ill. This has nothing to do with religion. Nothing to do with you. You’ve done everything you could possibly—’

‘There’s more, right?’

‘Yeah.’

Jane shone the torch at the ring handles, but Eirion had left the doors slightly ajar anyway. She pushed one open with the end of the rubber torch and followed Mum inside.

To where the chairs and pews arranged for the meditation service had been tipped over, thrown into disarray, a couple of the lighter chairs smashed…

… Along with the bottom left-hand corner of the Eve stainedglass window with its red apple that always caught the sunset. A hole punched in it, glass gone, lead strips twisted, rainwater exploding on to the sill down the wall to spread over the flags.

Mum stood and looked up, past the organ, up towards the chancel and, as if her gaze had been guided, to the rood screen.

Sixteenth century. With those exquisitely carved-out apple shapes at the bottom.

The ancient wood chopped out around them, the delicate tracery of the screen cracked and splintered.

You could still almost feel the frenzy, hear violent echoes from the stone.

It wouldn’t have taken long, with a hammer or a hatchet. Nobody came across to the church at this time of day.

Certainly not in this kind of weather, and there weren’t that many people left in the village anyway.

And nobody outside would hear the hacking through the noise of the rain.

Lol looked up from his tuning in some surprise. It wasn’t so much the noise as…

… The hush, when he played a couple of experimental chords, the Boswell plugged into the old Guild acoustic, a basic E-minor as thrilling and visceral in this crowded, tarted-up Jacobean alehouse as a pipe-organ in an empty church.

He looked around bemused. A swirl of faces. Could be a hundred or more, seated at tables pushed together round the walls, some groups standing in the alcoves. He’d heard them coming in, thought they were just going for drinks. Kept his head down, concentrating on preparing a guitar he’d never played before. No need, really, the tuning was perfect and stayed perfect — in the small accessories compartment in the Boswell case he’d found a note from Al saying the guitar had been strung three days earlier, lightweight strings tuned daily, played once for four minutes, retuned.

Was ready.

Like Al had known about this.

The rain hissed and rattled in the leaded windows. He sat in a corner, unobtrusive like a sideshow. Couldn’t see Jane, or Merrily or anyone he really knew, but Barry was here, leaning over, whispering.

‘Whole bunch of people up from Hereford, did the full two-mile walk across the footbridge, over the fields… Coach party. Someone said it was like a pilgrimage.’

‘For this?’

‘Bigger than you thought, mate.’

Pilgrimage.

He recalled Jane this morning in deserted Church Street: Well, I put it up on the Coleman’s Meadow website. It was support for Jane, for the meadow, for the stones; he was just a focus. That made him happier.

‘And Merrily says, don’t forget, not a word,’ Barry murmured. ‘Whatever that means.’

It was the last thing she’d said to him before she’d pushed him out of the vicarage, the way Moira Cairns had pushed him on stage that terrible night at the Courtyard in Hereford, the kick-start of his solo career. Don’t dare mention me in connection with the Boswell. Just… play it.

Barry grinned.

‘We’re in profit after all. You ready, mate?’

‘Hang on—’

Lol leaned into the amp, gave it a little extra concert-hall depth, the merest hint of reverb, tapped the voice mike — too loud.

‘You want an introduction?’ Barry said. ‘I don’t really know how these things are done.’

‘I’ll just go into it,’ Lol said.

‘Good boy.’

Lol felt the first shoulder-twinge in days as Barry stepped away, lifting a hand to Eirion, and the lights went down and, on the plasma screen behind him, the first thin red slit of sunrise began to burn between the earthen ramparts on Cole Hill.

Holding the new Boswell close like a woman, he let his fingers find the only riff he figured most of them would know, from Flicks in the Sticks showings of ‘The Baker’s Lament’, named after this song. Lol closed his eyes, took a breath. One more time, for propulsion, and…

‘The shoemaker… made me some shoes…’

The sound low and warm and woody. A rush of applause soaking up the rain.

Merrily pulled off her cape, pushed back her hair.

The oak-panelled reception, lantern-lit heart of the New Cotswolds. No mirrors.

‘Look reasonably OK?’

‘You look fantastic,’ Jane said. ‘Now just—’

‘Just go in, damn you.’ James Bull-Davies blocking the door to the square. ‘Pair of you. I’ll get Parry, we’ll deal with this.’

‘James, look…’ Merrily clutching his arm. ‘I’ll cancel it. It’ll be simpler.’

‘The hell you will. My family kept that church from collapse for four centuries. Damned if I’m going to let some lunatic—’

‘We don’t know.’

‘Suspect list pretty damn short.’

Barry came through, rubbing his hands.

‘Two coachloads. Supporters of the Serpent. Sounds like some sort of secret society. Don’t normally allow walking boots in the lounge, but under these conditions, what can you say?’

‘Don’t let these Watkins women out again, Barry,’ James said as the Stookes came in behind him, shaking out an umbrella. ‘Find them ringside seats and tie them down.’ He stood over Merrily. ‘Plan to board the bottom of the window, drape something over the damaged area of the rood screen for tonight. Cover the doors with opaque plastic sheeting rather than risk damaging the wood with paint-stripper. Couple of hours max, OK?’

‘James, I’m very grateful but I’m not sure, after that level of violence and… malevolence, call it what you like… that the atmosphere’s going to be exactly conducive. I think I’d rather put it off.’

James was arching forward, peering at her under half-lowered eyelids.

‘Correct me if I’m wrong, vicar, but one rather thought dealing with atmospheres was your thing.’

She started to laugh. And maybe he was right. There was time. Maybe.

‘James… have you met, erm, Leonora and Elliot—’

‘Stooke,’ Elliot Stooke said firmly, the mauve ring around his white smile. He unwound a black scarf. ‘We’re at Cole Barn.’

Well, well…

‘This is James Bull-Davies, Leonora. You… met his ancestor.’

‘How’re you?’ James said. ‘Talk later, if you don’t mind. Work to do.’

‘God.’ Leonora watched him striding out into the downpour. ‘Isn’t he so wonderfully feudal?’

‘Except we don’t pay tithes or whatever to the Bulls any more,’ Merrily said, ‘and he still feels responsible for us. I’m sorry, we’ve had a bit of trouble — nothing you wouldn’t understand, so maybe we could have a drink later. If you want to go in… sounds like he’s between numbers.’

Still be hard pushed to say she actually liked Leonora Stooke.

Lol was talking into the mike about how Lucy Devenish had introduced him to Thomas Traherne, at a time when his life was turning around and he’d just met a woman who was going to be more important to him than he ever imagined a woman could be.

Jane rolled her eyes, beaming, Merrily shutting hers, aware of a blush coming up. The Stookes went into the passage leading to the lounge and then two men emerged from it.

‘… Come in for a quiet drink, and we have to listen to this shit.’

Merrily figured County Councillor Lyndon Pierce was at least halfway drunk. He was with his client Gerry Murray, twenty years older, a fair bit heavier, the owner of Coleman’s Meadow, inherited. Pierce’s gelled black hair was slicked over his forehead. Merrily said nothing, didn’t bother smiling, hoped Jane hadn’t heard.

As if.

Jane said, ‘Why don’t you make one of your speeches instead, Mr Pierce, then they’d really know what shit sounded like?’

Bugger.

‘Jane,’ Merrily said, ‘I don’t think—’

‘It’s the famous archaeologist, Gerry,’ Pierce said. ‘I hear Professor Blore was suitably impressed.’

Merrily said, ‘Jane—’

The craving for tobacco making her shiver. Couldn’t keep a limb still. What would help right now was if Barry came back. She looked across to the doorway to the passage leading to the lounge bar.

Neither Barry nor anyone else emerged. Lol began a song she didn’t recognise. Jane restrained herself commendably until Murray was halfway through the main door, Pierce following him, and then she said loudly,

‘Mum, wasn’t that Lyndon Pierce, the notoriously corrupt councillor?’

Merrily watched Pierce turn, like in slow motion, walk right up to Jane.

‘What did you say?’

Jane backed up a little. Maybe his breath.

‘Nothing you haven’t heard before, surely.’

‘You heard it, didn’t you, Gerry?’ Pierce said. ‘That gives me an independent witness when I take this girl to court.’

‘You shouldn’t’ve said that about Lol.’ Jane was blinking uncertainly. ‘He was asked to play, and a lot of people have come through the floods to see him.’

‘Well, that was another good reason to get out of there.’

‘And I’m sure they’re all glad you did, you… uuuh.’

He’d gripped her arm, hard.

‘Cocky little bitch—’

‘Get your—’ Merrily pushed him. He spun round in surprise and stumbled to one knee, and she dragged Jane away. ‘You’re drunk, Lyndon. Bugger off!’

She was panting in fury, trembling. Her legs felt weak and the yellow light from the lanterns hurt her eyes. She saw Pierce coming slowly to his feet, dusting off his suit trousers, then pointing a finger at Jane.

‘You won’t be laughing—’

‘I’m not laughing now.’

‘You won’t be laughing when the real truth comes out about Coleman’s Meadow.’

He turned and walked out. He didn’t look back. Lol sang about honey flowing from rocks.

Jane said, ‘What’s he talking about? Look, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t stop myself after he said that about Lol’s music. What did he mean?’

‘He’s drunk.’

‘He meant something.’

‘Let’s go in. Let’s just—’

‘You go in.’ Jane had her mobile out. ‘I’m going to call Coops.’

57 Deadwood

Annie Howe had noticed the parcels in the back of Bliss’s car.

‘Your kids?’

‘Yeh.’

‘How long were you…?’

‘Nine years.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Sorry? Jesus, last week it had been, I don’t know what your problem is… my information is that it’s personal and domestic. But you’d better either keep it under control or seek counselling.

Could be she was a night person, and when the sun came up the frost would form again.

Bliss drove down into the centre of Malvern. They were going in the one car to discuss strategy. He’d have cleaned the Honda up inside if he’d known she’d be wearing the near-white mac.

‘But I still think you could’ve told me,’ he said.

Even ordering him to forget the original Furneaux interview. Like, what if he’d actually done as he was told? He gave her a sideways glance. She’d had a psychological profile done on him, or what?

‘What difference would that have made?’ she said. ‘And no, I couldn’t.’

‘Or got Brent to look into it.’

‘I wanted a result, not a massage.’

‘What if I hadn’t come looking for you tonight?’

‘You had till Boxing Day.’

Bliss finally smiled, waiting for a bunch of kids firing party poppers at one another on a zebra crossing. She was right, of course. If she’d come clean he wouldn’t have believed her, he’d’ve thought it was something she and Charlie had cooked up between them. And no way would he have gone near Andy Mumford.

‘But if we don’t get Furneaux tonight,’ Annie said, ‘your arrangement with Mebus—’

‘Uh-huh. No way, Annie. I’m not saying we shouldn’t make every effort to snatch the twat for something else, but I’m not breaking Mumford’s word. And, with respect, ma— With respect, you also need not to offend Andy Mumford, because if anybody knows the truth about your old man and what happened in the Frome Valley all those years ago… yeh?’

No reply; she was looking out of the side window at the statue of Elgar and the fountain all lit up in the centre of Malvern. Bliss thought Malvern looked good. The floodlit priory and the old hotel in the dip, all mellow. Closest he’d felt to Christmas spirit in… a long time.

Still hadn’t got a name out of her, though, for the lad who’d turned his white van over to the Mebus brothers and gone to retrieve his motor bike from the forest. He needed to give her Furneaux.

Giving him this uncertain Do I know you? look under the bulkhead light on the wall over his front door. It had a Christmas wreath on it, this door. Buy one, get one free at Sainsburys.

Bliss pulled off his beanie.

‘DI Bliss, Mr Furneaux. This is Detective Superintendent Howe.’

‘Francis… I’m so sorry. How nice to see you again.’

‘All right if we come in, Steve?’

‘Well, sure, but—’

‘Ta. This won’t take long.’

Steve’s sitting room had a look of second home and IKEA summer sale. Two airport-looking yellow sofas, a fitted TV. Also a surprisingly attractive Asian girl who didn’t look at all surprised at strangers walking in on Christmas Eve.

‘Get you a drink, Francis and… Anne, isn’t it? Think I know your father.’

‘Lorra driving to do, thanks, Steve,’ Bliss said. Howe just shook her head and Steve glanced at the girl.

‘Yasmin likes early nights, so if…?’

‘We certainly do not expect Yasmin to entertain us, Steve,’ Bliss said. ‘This is strictly about you, cocaine, Clem Ayling, cocaine, Hereforward, cocaine… Oh, and did I mention cocaine?’

At one stage, Steve actually said it.

At first, he just looked slightly huffed, a touch put-out, saying to Annie, ‘I hope you realise, Superintendent, that I’m merely on the edge of this committee. Purely an adviser.’

And then a bit later, so far up against the wall that he just had to come out with it.

‘Inevitably, if I go down, a number of people go with me. Including, of course, your father, Anne. An elected representative, a decision-maker. While I… am a mere adviser.’

Adviser. This was the key word. Consultant. The government spent millions every year on fellers like Steve. Well, maybe not quite like Steve, although many of them would look not unlike him tonight, in his violet silk shirt and his Italian jeans.

Bliss turned to Annie, next to him on the flatter of the two sofas.

‘I said you’d like him, didn’t I, ma’am?’

He’d told Steve that they would, if necessary, search the premises and himself and Yasmin. Pointing out that, from his landing window, he might be able to make out the roof of a police car containing DC Terrence Stagg and two uniforms, one of them female. And the duty spaniel was on call. Even if he’d got rid of all the stuff, the dog would pinpoint where he used to stash it. Steve wasn’t daft. He knew that one white millicrumb was enough to have him banged up for Christmas and no Waitrose pudding with extra cognac.

‘It’s good here, though, isn’t it, Steve?’ Bliss said. ‘Some areas of Britain, local government tends to be under less scrutiny than others, and Herefordshire’s one of them. Right on the edge of Wales, no daily paper, hardly any local news coverage on the box. And only a bunch of sheep-shaggers to take for a ride. Perfect, eh?’

‘I don’t know what you mean. And I think you’re being rather insulting to a very beautiful part of the country and its people.’

‘I’m one of its people, Mr Furneaux,’ Annie Howe said. ‘And what I take offence at is patronising bureaucrats who think we’re simple country folk on whom democracy is wasted, so, hey, why bother with it?’

‘Ms Howe—’

‘Clement Ayling,’ Anne Howe said. ‘Although I didn’t actually know him on a personal level, I do know his type. Not averse to short cuts in the interests of putting one over on the opposition or central government. Not incapable of deceit in defence of his local authority or his party. But essentially, not the sort to have his drive tarmacked by the highways department. Old school. Rather straitlaced. Especially where… drugs are concerned.’

Annie looked at Bliss, who picked up the story.

‘And not just a generation thing, Steve. You ever hear about Clem’s daughter, Nerys? Not many people know this — he hated to talk about it. Anybody asked why Nerys didn’t take over the electrical shop — used to work there, apparently, ran it very well, for a while — oh, she’d left the area. Difficult to run a business from a psychiatric hospital.’

Bliss looked at Steve. Steve didn’t react.

‘Been in hossie for many years now, Steve. Quite advanced schizophrenia. Never mentioned it, did he?’

‘No.’

‘Or that it seems to have begun with what we now know as cannabis psychosis. Tragic.’

‘Of course Ayling knew that cocaine wasn’t the same as cannabis,’ Annie Howe said. ‘It being a Class A drug, compared with Class C.’

‘A downgrading which left Clem appalled and disgusted, naturally,’ Bliss said. ‘But he wasn’t a man to go into battle without full ammunition. He did some research on the Internet about the very real perils of cocaine. Or rather, not being too adept with the old dot coms, he got his computer-literate wife Helen to check it out. This would’ve been some time after the near-fatality during a Hereforward Blue-Sky Thinking Weekend near Stowe-on-theWold.’

‘Knowing — as I do — Ayling’s type,’ Annie said, ‘the very last thing he would do would be to make something like this public by raising it at a meeting or going to the police and tarnishing the image of an authority he’d served loyally for many years. What he’d do, having carried out his own discreet investigation and determined the source, would be to confront the perpetrator of this abomination and tell this man he wanted it to stop forthwith. And, naturally, he would want this man to pack his bags, without delay, and remove his shabby arse from God’s own county.’

‘And that,’ Bliss said, ‘seems to be how Clement Ayling signed his own death warrant. Doesn’t it, Steve?’

‘Wildest conjecture.’ Steve shook his sandy head. ‘I don’t believe you have an atom of evidence for any of this.’

‘True. All we have at present is more than enough evidence to nick you in connection with the supply of a controlled substance.’

‘What evidence?’ Steve leaning far back into the yellow IKEA stretch sofa, but his face was redder by now than his hair. ‘Francis, you’re beginning to make me quite angry. I have a number of friends on the police authority who’d be appalled at the idea of Hereford CID behaving as irresponsibly as this.’

‘I’m from Off,’ Bliss said. ‘I don’t know any better.’ He leaned forward. ‘All right, let me put it this way, Steve. Some hard kid — been in more courts than Venus Williams by the time he’s twelve — is often difficult to break, I’ll admit that. But take a grown man with no form, pop him in the blender, and you don’t even have to switch on.’

Bliss let the subtext get fully absorbed and then turned to Annie, like the newsreader quizzing the special correspondent.

‘Ma’am, from your local knowledge, why would someone like Steve, with a good job, risk his pension by introducing responsible local administrators to this vile pastime?’

Annie slowly unbelted her mac and undid some buttons, like she was preparing for a long night chez Steve. This woman was becoming more admirable by the minute.

‘It’s about power, I suppose, Francis. Some users like to say cocaine isn’t addictive, but of course — while not in heroin’s league — it very much is. Though perhaps reliance is probably a more exact word. And there’s a reliance, too, on the supplier. In more ways than one, because you are, of course, partners in crime, and that can be quite a significant bond. Quite a significant bond.’

Bliss looked across at the window. The hammering rain could only be increasing the pressure.

‘How was it done, Steve? At the end of the day, the only member of that committee who could’ve participated in the final act would be you. What did you do? Offer to give him a lift because of the rain? Or tell him there was something you wanted to discuss with him privately?’

Annie Howe said, ‘But Francis, if Ayling had already warned Mr Furneaux about his behaviour, wouldn’t he be a bit alarmed about going with him… anywhere?’

‘With respect, ma’am, I don’t think Clem would be in the least worried about being physically damaged by someone like Steve — even if he does go to the gym. Big man, Clem. A very confident man. A man who’d shaken hands with prime ministers, Bill Clinton… But then, perhaps it wasn’t Steve who actually put the knife into him…’

‘How could you even imagine—?’ Steve springing from the back of the sofa, clean red hair wafting. ‘Superintendent, you have to call a halt to this nonsense.’

Difficult to know how to interpret this. Perhaps Steve thought it was time to start feigning the protestations of an innocent man. Bliss ignored him, the way you ignored a child clamouring for attention.

‘I suppose what we’re looking at here, ma’am, is the difference between actual murder and conspiracy to murder. Usually many years’ difference.’

Annie looked unconvinced, wrinkled her nose.

‘We know that the body was taken to the Forest of Dean for butchery. We know that the disposal was handled by other parties with links to the Hereford cocaine trade. Personally, I think it’s quite reasonable to presume that the actual killing was done by Mr Furneaux…’

‘Who maintains he’s just an adviser.’

Howe did the Ice Maiden’s brittle laugh. Bliss turned at last to Furneaux.

‘Committee decision, was it, Steve?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I mean, all the aspects of this — particularly the false trail to the Dinedor Serpent — suggest it needed more than one adviser. That it could be on a bigger scale than we imagined.’ Bliss turned to Annie Howe. ‘I mean, yeh, if we’re looking for an easy result, it’s Steve getting rid of a man threatening his long and lucrative career. But I’m guessing there’d be quite a few other people who wouldn’t be sorry to see Ayling gone. A dinosaur. Deadwood.’

‘Far-fetched, Francis. In my experience, the small, squalid solution is usually the correct one.’

‘Maybe you’re right. And it is Christmas. It’s all government targets, isn’t it, and you don’t get extra points any more for being clever.’ Bliss stood up, walked over to the other sofa. ‘Steven Furneaux, I’m arresting you on suspicion of supplying a controlled substance and also on suspicion of the murder of Clement Ayling. You don’t have to say anything, but it may seriously fuck up your defence if you—’

‘All right,’ Steve said. ‘Just… just give me a minute, will you?’

‘Aw, Steve you’ve made me lose me place. Now I’ll have to start all over again.’

‘Suppose I… had an idea who’d killed Ayling.’

‘He’s wasting our time,’ Annie Howe said. ‘Call Stagg, Francis, and let’s get him processed.’

‘Suppose there was a… a contractor.’

‘Of course,’ Bliss said. ‘That’s the way local authorities work, isn’t it. Maybe you invited tenders.’

‘Stop it!’ Steve was on his feet. ‘I can help you.’

‘You’ve helped us no end already, pal. All wrapped up for Christmas, and very cheaply, too. Annie’s friend the Home Secretary’s gonna be—’

‘Suppose it isn’t finished. The contract… Suppose there’s another one to… complete.’

Little patch of silence. Bliss glanced at Howe; she made the merest suggestion of a nod.

‘Sit down, Steve,’ Bliss said.

58 Padded Cell

Jane was close to learning the worst.

‘It’s unjust,’ Coops said, ‘it stinks, but we’ve got a baby on the way and I need this job.’

She was alone in the Black Swan reception, with the mobile.

‘You think this isn’t more important than anyone’s bloody job?’

‘Jane—’

‘Jane, Jane, everybody’s — You tell me right now, Coops. You tell me right now why I won’t be laughing when the truth comes out about Coleman’s Meadow. Or I go and ask Blore. Blore’s pissed. Blore’s pissed and Pierce is pissed and I’m stone-cold sober and I’m getting a feeling of everything falling apart.’

‘And you’re the last person who’s going to be able to hold it together. Or me, come to that. We’re little people fighting whole industries and all the tiers of government—’

‘Tell me.’

‘People watching all this crap on TV, they think that’s how it is, the whole of Britain’s like a big sandpit for archaeologists, strolling along with their trowels like the seven bloody dwarfs. It’s not like that any more. In fact, you should probably be grateful to Blore for deflecting you from a profession that would only bring you hassle and… heartbreak.’

‘All right.’ Jane carried the phone down the passage leading to the lavatories. ‘I’m taking the phone into the loo. I’m going into the furthest cubicle where nobody can hear me scream.’

‘Let it go, Jane, try and enjoy your Chris—’

‘I’m pushing the main door open now. I’m completely alone. They’re listening to Lol’s wonderful concert, where I wanted to be but this is more important.’

The toilets in the Black Swan had been massively upgraded in the best New Cotswold tradition; in fact you probably wouldn’t find toilets this good in the swishest pub in the old Cotswolds. Framed photographs on the walls of Ledwardine at its most luscious, sunrise and sunset. Even the cubicles had thick walls and oak doors, and Jane locked herself in the end one and sat on the closed lid of the seat.

‘I’m going to offer you a deal, Coops. I’ll seriously aim to say nothing to anyone except Mum and Lol and, OK, maybe Gomer Parry ’cause he’s my best mate, but if I have to take it further I’ll say Lyndon Pierce told me when he was drunk, which he was. He’ll never remember he didn’t tell me. So just…’

‘Let me sit down,’ Coops said. ‘If you think this isn’t getting to me…’

‘It so obviously is. Go on.’

‘Stop me if I’m telling you something you already know. When archaeologists are called in to investigate a site proposed for development, everybody thinks it’s the council that pays for it. In fact it’s the developer. I was trying to tell you this the other night but I’m not sure it sank in.’

‘But that’s ridiculous. They’re like… they’re the very people who don’t want anything important to be found.’

‘That’s why most archaeology is just a matter of record. Establishing where something is or used to be. But building still goes ahead on the site, you can’t stop progress.’

‘But not if it’s standing stones, surely.’

‘Probably not… but only if those standing stones are found to be in the place were they originally stood, because then the site itself is of major importance.’

‘And that’s my point about Coleman’s Meadow. You only have to stand on Cole Hill…’

‘No… you only have to stand on Cole Hill.’

‘You’re taking Blore’s side, suddenly?’

‘Jane, I’m on our side, and I still think there’s enough evidence of a henge to warrant a number of separate excavations around the centre of Ledwardine. Coleman’s Meadow, however… the excavation is likely to be closed down in the New Year.’

‘What…?’

Jane stood up. The walls of the cubicle seemed tight around her, like a padded cell.

‘Blore’s submitted a private preliminary report to the council resulting from his own geophysics and limited excavation of the site. The bottom line is that the report suggests the stones were buried here quite recently and probably from somewhere else.’

‘Like… landfill?’

‘Good analogy. He says there used to be a small quarry run by the Bull family in the eighteenth century. Long disused, but—’

‘They’re standing stones! You said they were.’

‘Blore’s report says there’s no evidence that they ever stood. That they were ever prehistoric ritual stones.’

‘How… how can he—?’

‘The conclusive proof seems to be the discovery of masonry underneath one of the stones. Masonry dating back no more than a couple of centuries.’

‘That’s impossible!’

‘It isn’t impossible. If you’d asked me yesterday I would have said it was extremely unlikely but, no, it’s not impossible. The report also says the remains of a tool’s been discovered under the same stone, and it’s not a flint axe-head. It’s a… pickaxe. Probably early Victorian.’

‘He’s lying!’

‘He encloses photographs.’

‘When was all this found?’

‘They haven’t officially been found at all yet.’ Coops sounded close to tears. ‘And the chances are they won’t be found until next week, when it’ll all be filmed for… Trench One.’

‘He’s going to mock it up?’

‘You remember that edition of Time Team, when they discovered a collection of authentic Celtic swords and things on a site in South Wales, and it turned out to be someone’s private collection that had been buried? Still made a good programme, didn’t it? And so will this, probably starting off with that interview with you, showing how a young girl’s fantasy—’

‘Don’t! I can’t — It’s—’

‘It’s wrong and it’s disgusting, but if you say a word about it now there’ll be a big investigation about how it got out, and I’ll lose my job and the nice woman who read the letter to me will lose her job and probably her pension, and she’s a widow and—’

‘All right!’

‘Leave it till I get back, and I’ll find a way of hearing about it officially, and then I’ll protest and see what happens. You can tell your mum, but please, nobody else.’

‘OK.’

‘Jane, I’m so desperately sorry. I’d love to think he’s faked the evidence, but he’s a powerful and respected figure. Look, I’ve got to go, all right?’

‘Coops—’

‘Try to have a good Christmas, Jane.’

‘Neither of us is going to, are we?’

He’d gone.

Jane leaned against the cubicle wall, holding the phone in front of her, tears in freeflow now.

59 Charming Myth

Periodically, in a break between songs, while Lol was retuning, someone who recognised Merrily would lean across and whisper Where’s Jane? Usually, one of the Serpent people from Hereford. How did they know whose mother she was, out of uniform? Hoped to God she wasn’t on the CM website like Lol and Lucy.

‘We’re Coleman’s Meadow activists now.’ A guy in his sixties, completely bald, white beard, an earring with a red stone in it. ‘We lost on the Serpent, but those bastards won’t take the Meadow.’ He looked angry. ‘I’ll strap myself to one of the stones before I’ll let them take it away. Go on hunger strike — that always gets results if it en’t a terrorist.’

‘It’s important,’ Merrily said, ‘but it’s not worth a life.’

Wondering where she’d heard that. Blore. On the radio before he demoralised Jane. She could see him over by the bar, his dense hair tied back, presumably so it wouldn’t dangle in his beer. He seemed to be drinking a lot of beer and laughing a lot.

Unlike the Stookes, who weren’t talking to anyone, not even one another. Life, for the Stookes, must be tense and formless. What happened after you’d taken on the biggest target possible and would never know if you’d won until you died… and only then if you’d lost.

Merrily smiled. Stupid — she was looking at their lives from her perspective. Better go and talk to them afterwards.

Lol said, ‘I’m going to kind of hum, but if you imagine it as a cello, OK? Now. If you know Elgar’s Cello Concerto, the main bit goes like…’

She was proud of him. Totally in control, as if, performing, he was possessed by the spirit of an extrovert. Mouth close to the mike, he hummed the rolling-hill melody that would always take her back to Whiteleafed Oak on the edge of the Malverns and would always be tinged with tragedy. Melancholy enough, already.

‘If you all want to hum along we can maybe cover up the fact that we don’t have a cello. Try it…’

They didn’t need asking twice. No need for the old hand behind the ear, I can’t hear you routine. Merrily thinking how she gigged every Sunday, and never captured this much attention. Maybe she needed to learn to play something.

Barry had found her a seat by the door. She drank a spritzer, finding it didn’t go too well with extra-strong mints. Nothing went with extra-strong mints except more mints.

But she knew this song and its origins, had been there at its birth. It was about how, close to the end, Elgar seemed to have lost his faith, his lifelong Catholicism. But all he really wanted, in Lol’s view, was to sidestep the complicated spiritual bureaucracy of Catholic death, the Catholic afterlife, have his spirit absorbed into the landscape that had given him his music… specifically, this music.

After a couple of minutes, Lol let the audience do the humming and began to build a guitar structure under it, finally picking up Elgar’s tune with his own words, the percussive rain behind it like he was singing from the eye of some inner storm.

Lol’s voice dipping into a valley on agony. Then rising to welcome a dawning euphoria. He held up a hand to fade the humming. Merrily saw Eirion messing with the two amps and then, with the flat screen full of bubbling water, Lol’s voice rose up clear but distant, with a faint echo, as if from distant hills.

Lol and the lights went blurred. Merrily wiped her eyes discreetly, one at a time.

‘Didn’t think he’d mind too much,’ Lol said afterwards into the dying applause. ‘He was all right, Ed.’

‘That was amazing, but I didn’t fully get what it was about,’ the bald guy with the ruby said. ‘Dunno much about Elgar. What’s the Angel of the…?’

‘Agony.’

Lol, clearly loving this interplay with his audience, explained about Elgar’s attempt to glimpse his God in the choral masterpiece The Dream of Gerontius, from Newman’s epic poem about the progress of a soul through the various tiers of the Catholic afterlife.

‘So the Angel of the Agony is this mournful combination of sin eater and celestial advocate, pleading for the soul’s admission into Heaven. But close to the end Elgar’s Catholicism had kind of lost its grip, and when he was dying he told a friend that if he was ever walking in the Malvern Hills and he heard the tune you’ve just been humming… Ed said, Don’t be afraid. It’ll just be me. He’d told everybody he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at the confluence of the River Severn and the River Teme, but he was talked out of it.’

‘I’ve been to his grave,’ a woman said. ‘Little Malvern? It’s interesting the way his wife’s name is at the top of the stone, as if Elgar is bowing to the female principle in nature.’

‘Not sure about that,’ Lol said. ‘All I feel is he wanted to be part of the landscape, for all eternity, and… I think he probably is.’

‘In the end, that’s paganism…’ The long straight hair identified Sara, the Dinedor witch from the Sunday Telegraph. ‘Or at least pantheism. And that line about singing the trees’ songs, that’s from what it says under the Elgar statue in Hereford? Hearing the trees singing his music… or is he singing theirs? Hey, why not?’

‘Actually,’ Elliot Stooke said, ‘the biography I read suggested very strongly that Elgar had lost his faith completely. The idea that he reverted to some sort of paganism is… a bit of speculation?’

‘Probably is,’ Lol said.

‘And he was using the idea of his ghost haunting the Malverns as a metaphor, surely?’

‘Metaphors on his deathbed?’ Lol said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘If you believe he was channelling the spirit of the landscape,’ Sara the witch called out, ‘the whole thing makes—’

‘Another charming myth,’ Stooke said.

‘All I know…’ the bald guy stood up ‘… is that I came out of a very bad experience today with the clear conviction that if we lose our spiritual bond with the land there’ll be nothing left of us as a nation.’

‘Part of the earth. I’ll go with that.’ Bill Blore was on his feet, tankard clamped to his chest. ‘Bury me in a Bronze Age fucking longbarrow with a flint axe in my hand, that’ll do me.’

When the laughter died, Lol said, ‘Well, Elgar was here, we know that… and there’s even evidence that he visited Coleman’s Meadow when Alfred Watkins…’ he smiled at Bill Blore ‘… found the ley running through it.’

Merrily couldn’t make out Blore’s reaction. She spotted a few local people, including Brenda Prosser and her daughter, Ann Marie — Jim still working in the shop.

‘But if anyone really inhabits this landscape…’ Lol stroked a chord ‘… we’re probably looking at a woman.’

The lights dipped and the room went quiet as the only known image of Lucy Devenish took form on the screen.

Merrily was startled.

It was the lack of definition that produced the effect, and the way the brown tones of the picture faded into the shadows of the crooked old room. And Eirion had rephotographed it, so it was digital now.

Pixels. It was pixels.

Lucy middle-distant in her poncho, the blur of her face as she tried to avoid the camera, the amplified grain on the blown-up photo converted into pixels… fragments of the essence of Lucy separating and re-forming, suggestive of movement, creating new splinters of some old wildness in those falcon’s eyes.

‘Christ,’ someone said, ‘the old girl just turned her head.’

Someone pushed urgently past Merrily’s table and she looked up in the dimness and saw, in Mathew Elliot Stooke’s face, the confusion of expressions she’d seen and been unable to work out just before she left Cole Barn last night, after Stooke had said:

Some kind of Stone Age warrior. Short cloak or a skin…

Merrily rose abruptly and followed him out.

60 New Void

They were sitting in Bliss’s car, watching the diminishing tail lights of the police car containing Terry Stagg, two uniforms and Steve Furneaux on his way to Gaol Street to be processed.

Now they were alone, Bliss dared to breathe. Let it come out in one big spasm of relief, his body arching over the wheel and then falling back into the seat.

‘We did well,’ Annie Howe said.

She was staring through the windscreen like somebody interested in rain.

‘He can still get away with this, mind,’ Bliss said. ‘He hasn’t killed anybody personally. He’s merely given his professional advice, and a committee decision’s been made. We’re contemplating the dark underbelly of democracy, Annie.’

It was the way things were going. People realising how little time they had left to get rich before the planet melted.

‘Let’s go over it,’ Howe said, ‘and then make a decision. Two men to talk to. We either bring them in or we go to them.’

‘If they’re where I think they are neither of those options is gonna be exactly a walkover… Or in fact a frigging walkover might be exactly what we’re looking at.’

What had finally smashed Steve’s defences was dropping those names. Experimental, taking a chance, but he’d been fairly confident.

‘Where did you get those names?’ Annie said.

‘Got Blore from Steve himself at that first meeting in Gilbies. He was their consultant on the Serpent. I remember him saying Blore didn’t help an awful lot… considering we were paying him.’

‘Hereforward were paying him?’

‘And then, while still acting as consultant to Hereforward, he publicly slags off the council for its attitude towards the Dinedor Serpent. Lunacy… they’re never going to employ him again, are they? All right, he’s making a bomb from telly, but it still didn’t feel right to me. Didn’t seem too significant at the time, mind.’

Annie Howe looked at him. She was snuggled into a corner under the seat-belt hook, her face in shadow.

‘Why did Hereforward need a consultant on the Dinedor Serpent?’

‘In case the city might be missing out on a massive tourist attraction. Fortunately for the council, the idea of the Serpent is more exciting than what you can see.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘So William Blore was publicly pro-Serpent while secretly advising Hereforward that it was unlikely to make the county much money. What does that tell us?’

‘Shows he’s capable of double-dealing. But, more to the point, think of the technical advice he’d be able to offer anyone planning to take out Ayling and direct the blame towards the Serpent supporters. The quartz glittering in the head? The body in the river?’

‘It’s not enough. You could get all that from the Internet.’

‘It rebounded nicely on Steve, though, Annie. Soon as we throw him the word Blore, he starts to roll over.’

‘True.’

Howe patted her wet, ash-blonde hair, Bliss finding himself wondering for the first time if it was natural.

‘So there’s something else,’ he said. ‘Something we’re missing.’

‘Something we don’t know but perhaps he thinks we do. Connected with the second name you dropped on him?’

‘Lyndon Pierce. Blore’s in charge of the dig at Ledwardine, where Pierce is the local councillor. When I first talked to Steve in Gilbies he said, the local councillor wanted us to intervene. I thought he meant Pierce wanted them to stop Blore getting the Ledwardine contract, maybe because he’d attract too much publicity… to an excavation Pierce was hoping would be inconclusive.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘Pierce is backing a plan to put expensive housing on that site. He doesn’t want there to be anything exciting under there that might spell conservation. Furneaux told me he’d asked Hereforward for help, but they weren’t overfussed because it was just a housing scheme, not like a major new road. However, if what I was told is right, this housing scheme is the key to this massive redevelopment and expansion of Ledwardine.’

‘This is from Mrs Watkins, is it?’

‘I don’t know what you’ve got against that woman.’

‘Ask her what she’s got against me.’

Bliss smiled. Women were weird. Like when the WPC, Sammy Nadel, went up to tell Yasmin it looked like Steve would be spending the night in town, Yasmin apparently just acknowledged it and went back to sleep. No big deal. Merry Christmas.

‘All right,’ Bliss said. ‘Officially Hereforward isn’t helping Lyndon. But you’ve gorra bunch of mates here. Coke-buddies. One of whom is the archaeologist in charge of the Ledwardine dig.’

‘Coke-buddies. God.’

‘Only buddies until the shit hits the fan. Furneaux is pretty sure in his mind that if we’re talking to Blore and Pierce, both of them are going to try and hang the whole deal on him.’

‘Probably quite rightly. He’s the ideas man, the guy who’s turned Hereforward into a dirty-tricks department. He’s… what do they call it? An enabler?’

‘He thinks out of the box. But this time the lid’s coming down too fast and he takes a wild leap. He’s probably regretting he told us about the second contract, because I really don’t think he knows who it is or why. And if he’s already too late, that’s gonna make it a whole lot worse for him than if he’d kept his mouth shut.’

I swear I’ve told you all I know…

Then how do you know there’s going to be another, Steve?

Because, Steve had said, sweating now, I know how much he charges, and I know how much he got.

The man called Glyn Buckland.

Annie said, ‘Francis, I need a coffee. My head’s…’

‘You planning to interview Steve tonight?’

‘I’m inclined to let him stew. A night in a cell works wonders with someone who’s never been in one before. Especially Christmas Eve. And the good thing about tomorrow is that we get a holiday from the press. What’s the time?’

‘Half ten, thereabouts. A pub? Bar?’

‘Yeah, why not? But we need to make it quick.’

Nobody else in the packed, shiny bar in Broad Street was drinking coffee. Nobody else seemed to be over thirty, but it hadn’t been hard to find a table; the only ones who were sitting down were the ones who looked like they were about to be sick.

‘He was born in London,’ Annie said. ‘Brought up in Worcester.’

‘Any particular reason you’ve been sitting on that for so long?’

‘Only because we weren’t completely sure. It’s the new generation, Francis. I’m thirty-five and I can’t connect with it. You said it yourself. Kids who’ll do it for a few hundred pounds — couple of thousand, anyway — knowing the worse they’ll get is eight or nine years.’

‘And a degree in sociology. Don’t forget that. What’s this lad’s history?’

‘We learned about him from his older sister, as a result of the BBC Crimewatch programme. That something you’d ever consent to watch, Francis?’

‘Not often. I hate to see old mates behaving like complete tits. We need to get this man, Kirsty, before he strikes again.’

The presenter being called Kirsty, that didn’t help. What a weird, weird night this was turning out to be. If you’d told him he’d be sharing an intimate pot of coffee with the Ice Maiden, surrounded by binge-drinkers on Christmas Eve…

‘Crimewatch can be useful,’ she said, ‘often in unexpected ways. We got a piece on, a year or so ago, about a fatal stabbing up in Evesham, and this woman rang in convinced it was her brother. Been fascinated with knives since he could crawl. Once stabbed their mother in the thigh when he was about ten — they’d covered that up, as parents are inclined to, telling the hospital she’d done it herself. Slicing an onion while sitting down or something.’

‘As you do.’

‘Anyway, he wasn’t our guy, as it turned out. We got someone else within a couple of days, DNA and all. But what Buckland’s sister had to say was fairly alarming. Things like he’d ask for books on anatomy for his birthday?’

‘Don’t tell me — the parents thought he wanted to be a hospital consultant when he grew up.’

‘You know more about parenting than I do.’ Howe coughed. ‘Sorry.’

‘You kept an eye on him, then.’

‘Oh, sure, we had a round-the-clock obbo on his flat.’

‘Yeh, yeh, insufficient manpower and no brownie points for prevention. How you can be mates with that frigging dim—’

‘Leave it out, Francis. We’ll talk about the Home Secretary when we’ve nothing more urgent — Oh shit…’

Some kid had backed into their table. Howe mopped up spilled coffee with a paper napkin.

‘Where’s Buckland now?’ Bliss said.

‘We don’t know.’

‘Yeh, that’s helpful.’

‘He’s entirely respectable. Twenty-seven years old, probably looks younger. No form.’

‘At all?’

‘No record except as a victim. He was badly beaten up in a pub when he was seventeen.’ Annie released a brittle laugh. ‘Main guy responsible was found stabbed to death in a car park. Killer never found.’

‘Presumably CID talked to him about that?’

‘It was four and a half years after the pub incident. And several years before we learned about Glyn’s lifelong fascination with blades. And no DNA traces, no basis for reopening the inquiry.’

‘Dish best served cold?’

‘Cold’s the word. In the current moral climate, you no longer have to be a psycho to kill without remorse. When did you last encounter a knifeboy with a conscience?’

‘Or even one who could spell it.’

‘Conscience?’

‘I was thinking knife.’

Howe laughed.

‘Actually, Buckland’s intelligent enough. And in full-time employment. Self-employment. Moves around, which is why he’s difficult to track. Also been known to use different names — for security reasons, allegedly. He’s in the security business.’

‘What kind?’

‘Any kind. Driving factory wages to advising on burglar alarms. My guess is that’s how he meets people who are feeling threatened enough to want to take extreme measures. Just… another kind of security.’

‘How sure are you that he did the Lasky job?’

‘Circumstantial, but good circumstantial. He worked for Lasky fairly regularly. Lasky recommended him to his clients. Just not quite enough to bring him in for a chat. But I’d be reluctant to, anyway.’

‘Because he doesn’t know about the sister coming to you. He has no reason to think you’re onto him.’

‘That’s the situation. Leave him alone until we’re sure of him.’

‘All right,’ Bliss said. ‘If we’re looking at a Hereforward subcommittee, does that include Bill Blore, maybe Lyndon Pierce in a consultative capacity?’

‘Anyone else?’

‘You’re wondering about Charlie?’

‘If I have to, I have to.’

Her narrow face was flushed, her hair flung over to one side of it in white waves. There was a little coffee stain, like a birthmark, on the side of her mouth. She didn’t look like Charlie.

Bliss said, ‘I think Charlie was fixed up with totty to keep him sweet, and maybe that’s where it ends. I think we’re looking at Ledwardine here, but I’m buggered if I know why.’

‘It’s not a big place.’

‘Not yet, no. But unless Traffic knows otherwise, it’s not a place you can get a car into tonight. It’s got a moat round it.’

‘Blore’s there?’

‘I’m sure Pierce is. How do we play it?’

Howe tapped the table slowly with a sugar spoon.

‘This feller…’ Bliss said. ‘You’ve gorra have a fairly low moral threshold to whack a bloke to get a bunch of paedos off the hook.’

‘He’s a child of the new void,’ Annie Howe said.

Still tapping.

61 See You Shine

Merrily watched Stooke throw open the front door of the Swan and walk out into the rain. She stood for a moment, undecided, looking behind her. Nobody had followed her out of the lounge bar.

Lol was beginning a song she hadn’t heard before, Lucy rearing over him like a guardian bird of prey.

Guardian?

Oh God, it was late. It had been a long, long day. The church had been desecrated. She was full of the jitters of nicotine-deprivation. She stood looking down at her hands. It was pixels. Pixels right?

Behind her, behind two oak doors, Lol sang softly,

‘… and then you feel your heart can’t let it go

Miss Devenish would ever wish it so…’

Sod it.

She straightened up and walked out into the night.

Jane sat hunched for a long time, elbows on her knees, head in her hands. Was this it? Was this the final severance? Could she even bear to go on living here? Perhaps she’d form a mild attachment to whichever college town she ended up in. Maybe Cardiff, to be near Eirion, if he still wanted a manic-depressive. Somewhere too big and chaotic to feel a responsibility for.

Mum would be left on her own, of course. No good. She should marry Lol and move away. A perfect time now Lol was on a roll. Only she’d feel she had to stay out of some misplaced, masochistic sense of mission. Nothing left here, though, nobody worth saving… well, except Gomer, Jim at the shop, a few other people.

And Lucy. Lucy would always be here, a forlorn, broken ghost around her besmirched grave.

God, God, God. Jane stood up, furious. No justice, anywhere. Scum rises, bastards rule. She unlocked the cubicle door and walked out to the wash basins. Didn’t look in the mirror; perhaps people would think she’d been moved to tears by Lol’s songs. Only hoped that Blore had gone back to his caravan to bed one of his students, because if she saw him again tonight, doing his booming laugh, she’d smash his beer glass into his…

At the door of the Ladies, she stopped, the water gargling in the pipes, and someone…

… someone sobbing in one of the cubicles?

Merrily found Mathew Elliot Stooke alone between the two oak pillars at the end of the market hall, looking down Church Street to the end of the world.

‘You’re not wearing a coat,’ he said.

The rain was slower now, but the water was deep enough on the cobbles to reflect the inner globes of the fake gaslamps. You were walking on light.

‘I’m guessing this isn’t the first time,’ Merrily said. ‘Merrily…’ Stooke didn’t look at her ‘… while you’re not quite the last person I’d want to talk to at the moment…’

‘It’s actually not that uncommon — I mean denial. Even religious people often go that way because they don’t think it’s—’

‘No.’

‘No what?’

‘No basis for discussion here.’

‘You were keen enough to question me the other day.’

‘Because I’m a journalist, and you’re… someone with an axe to grind.’

Merrily peered down Church Street. Couldn’t see the water at the bottom, not from here at night, but you could sense it somehow, and you knew it would be higher again tonight. She tried again.

‘Not Lenni, you said. You didn’t think Lenni had seen it, just you.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Go back and listen to your boyfriend.’

‘You do, though, Elliot. You do know what I’m talking about.’

‘Look.’ He turned at last to face her, the Devil’s spin doctor haloed in amber. ‘I made it up. My wife wanted you to get that woman off our backs. Didn’t bother me, personally. And you… you have to keep on fooling yourself to justify the absurdity of your job.’

‘The other night, you described a warrior-figure with a short cloak that you’d seen in the field, near the orchard. As if it was somebody from Shirley’s church, but I don’t think anybody from Shirley’s church has been here, ever. I think she’s keeping you for herself. Whether she’s been in contact with Ellis in America and he’s manipulating her, the way he always could with women…’

She thought about it. It was the way Ellis would work, grooming Shirley by email, making her feel important, chosen. Getting inside her mind, the way he used to use a crucifix… and she must keep it to herself.

‘Lucy Devenish,’ Merrily said. ‘When the picture of Lucy faded up on the screen… Lucy, in her poncho, always reminded me of an old Red Indian warrior.’

‘You’re mad, Merrily. You’re as mad as any of them. I find that very disappointing.’

‘Lucy’s face, whether or not it moved, as some people seemed to think… Well, the important thing for me was your face. That look of shocked recognition followed by this… not quite hunted, more something… catching up with you. Again.’

He hissed in contempt and half turned away, a stocky, irritated man in a black fleece. Merrily closed her eyes for a moment.

‘I don’t think that was the first time. Dreams, premonitions, figures in the bedroom when you were a kid? Unpleasant? Scary? And always the fear of madness. Then, when you’re grown up and it’s still happening, you think, sod this, I’m going to turn and fight it, I’m going to kill it. Stamp it into the ground.’

He said nothing, didn’t move.

‘And then, just when you think you’ve kicked it to death, there it is again, right in front of you and you’re out of there. Out… here.’

‘I walked out,’ Stooke said, ‘because I’d had a row with my wife, who’d dragged me here knowing I’m not a particular lover of this kind of music. I walked out because I couldn’t bear to spend any more time in the middle of all those wispy New Age clowns with their oh-so-serious drivel about the female principle in nature. I told my wife I’d walk home and she could come back when she liked. Now go back into the pub, you’ll catch cold.’

‘If you’d come out with the intention of walking over half a mile home, you’d have brought a coat, an umbrella…’

‘I was going back to get them.’

‘Your wife… as good as told me you were a hack, in it for the money. I think it’s much more complex than that. Sure, you were in a business full of cynics, which must’ve helped, not as if you were sailing against a tide…’

‘How can I get rid of you, Merrily?’

‘You can tell me the truth.’

From somewhere came ribbons of laughter. There were lights in most of the houses, a splash of fluorescent white from the glass door of the Eight Till Late.

‘These things,’ Stooke said. ‘Anomalous phenomena. All down to brain-chemicals.’

‘Sure. To an extent.’

‘Let’s say a glimpse of an old woman did cause some aberration. False memory, déjà vu. Where part of your brain thinks you’ve seen something before but in fact you haven’t.’

Merrily laughed.

‘But above all…’ Stooke spun at her, throwing out a sudden white smile. ‘Above all, it in no way suggests a god. Above all, it does not imply that’.

Merrily caught a squeal from the bottom of the street.

‘You know that,’ Stooke said. ‘You spend time — waste your life, some of us might say — ministering to people who… their bulbs blow, ornaments fall off their shelves. It doesn’t mean anything. What does that say about divine purpose? It’s random. It’s anomalies… blips. Pointless. It means nothing, Merrily.’

‘You’re right.’ She watched the amber lights bobbing in the waterlogged cobbles below the steps of the market hall. ‘In the end, we all still face the chasm. No matter what we’ve seen or think we’ve seen, that leap of faith is still required. The admission of helplessness which, in the end, makes us all equal… you and me and Einstein and Dawkins. Charles Darwin, Lucy Devenish…’

‘Bullshit.’

Stooke was shaking his head as another cry came echoing up Church Street. A cry conveying outrage, disgust. More lights were coming on in houses on both sides of the street, upstairs and downstairs, outshining the sprinkling of coloured Christmas lights, like they were sending signals to each other. Signals of distress.

‘I think someone’s in trouble, Elliot.’

‘Not me,’ Stooke said.

‘No, I mean—’

‘The flood.’ He sighed. ‘I’m tired of the very word.’

‘Could be into the houses. We’d better get help.’

‘All right,’ Stooke said. ‘You go back to the pub and fetch some people. I’ll go down there and see what I can do.’

‘Be careful, it’s going to be very deep now.’

‘I won’t do anything stupid.’ He walked out of the market hall, turning to face her with another glowing smile. ‘Doesn’t mean we’re selfish, you know. Doesn’t mean we don’t care. All this talk of Christian charity, as if you’ve cornered the market. That really makes me sick.’

‘I’ll catch up with you,’ Merrily said.

Jane burst back into the lounge in the slipstream of her fury. Had to get this out, now: the hypocrisy, the treachery.

She stood in the doorway, laughter blossoming around her in an atmosphere mellow with lamplight and the haze of beer and spirits.

Needed Mum, and there was no sign of her. Lol would know what to do, but Lol was busy. Busy winning. No space any more between him and his audience. No divide either between the locals and the Serpent people who’d come in the coach from Hereford.

Ken Williams, the farmer who’d let Gomer build the new riverbank on his land, stood up in the middle of the floor, pint glass in one hand.

‘Tell you what, boy,’ he said seriously to Lol, ‘you’re wasted on plant hire.’

Even Jane smiled for a moment. Somebody was asking Lol why he hadn’t written a song about the Dinedor Serpent. Jane spotted Eirion, with his sound mixer and his remote control for the video and began to squeeze through the crowd. She saw Lol pausing to think for a moment before pulling the new Boswell on to his knee and hitting a couple of chords.

‘Actually, I can only remember the chorus, which… Anyway, you can sing along just as soon as you pick it up.’

Lol looked around, eyes glittering between his little brassrimmed glasses, high on the energy. Singing lightly.

Jane stopped, recognising the tune: ‘Sidewalk Surfer’ by Super Furry Animals. Perfect fit.

‘That’s it?’ a guy said.

‘That’s it,’ Lol said.

He did it again. He smiled.

‘Altogether now, Dinedor Serpent…’

If this had been a summer festival, they’d all have lit matches, held them up. River of light. Jane spotted Eirion rocking back in glee.

‘Eirion!’

His grin fading as she stepped over wires and collapsed next to him at his card-table under the deepset window. She hadn’t called him Irene.

‘Listen…’

He couldn’t hear her, with the whole audience going, ‘We’d do anything… to see you shine.’

Everybody loving it. Everybody loving it so much they wouldn’t notice Mum come in with her hair all soaked and her make-up running. Jane leapt up, but the crowd had closed between them.

62 En’t Good

You could smell him now. Smelled foul. It was almost sexual, Jane thought. Swollen, invasive, obscene, the river engorged.

Bastard hadn’t listened to a word she’d said. Rapists never did.

Jane, in her rain-darkened parka — she lived in the thing now — skipping back in disgust as he licked at her wellies. Eirion steadying her as she backed up against someone’s wall, clutching her mini Maglite torch like a votive candle.

Too late for prayers. You could tell why flood was such a powerful biblical device: fire consumed, flood just degraded everything, turned it into sludge.

God’s verdict on the vanity of the New Cotswolds.

Somebody had driven a car, a Mercedes four by four, halfway down the street and left it in the middle of the road with the engine running and the headlights on full, turning the churning water caramel, finding the roof and blind windows of another car, this one drowned. Parked on what used to be the street.

Jane and Eirion were standing just above the Ox. It had been evacuated; you could see tables piled on top of tables under the sallow bulbs of the public bar, its pool-table covered with heavy plastic, its gaming machines unplugged. The water, knee deep on the floor, looked like bad, gassy beer and smelled worse, and the road outside was full of people, like extras discarded by Hieronymus Bosch. Glistening like slugs as they struggled into waterproofs, joining the trickle down Church Street to the banks of the new lake.

The river was already a quarter way up the walls of the lowest two houses either side of the street, swirling like dark oil here, out of the headlights, and rising, rising, rising; if you tried to reach one of the door-knockers, the water would be to your chest.

‘Oh God,’ Jane said. ‘Poor Miss Huws.’

The last evacuee. You could see bits of her life washed into the street, a wooden stool, the floating lid of a breadbin, a loaf of sliced bread.

‘I can’t,’ she was sobbing. ‘Not in that!’

Gomer’s Matbro, this yellow hydraulic lift. The extended metal platform closing in on an opened upstairs window, its frame banging back against the wall. Someone was standing up in the platform, holding on to the metal guard rail, leaning across to the window.

‘Coming in, Miss Huws.’

James Bull-Davies.

‘Probably the first time a man’s ever been inside that bedroom,’ Jane murmured to Eirion.

It wasn’t funny, though. Edna Huws, a frail moth in her parchment-coloured clothes, shrilling at James in front of a crowd of sympathetic voyeurs.

‘I can’t! Where will I go?’

‘Rooms at the Swan,’ James shouted. ‘Barry’s attending to it now. Just leave the window—’

‘What can I wear? My clothes, my night-things—’

‘Worry about that when we get you out, old girl.’

‘This should not have happened, Mr Davies!’

‘Well, I’m afraid it bloody well has.’

‘Jane.’

Hand on her arm. Jane turned to find Mum at last.

‘God, you’re soaked to the skin.’ Horrifying reversal of usual roles. ‘You’ve got to go back, Mum, and get out of those clothes.’

‘Is Miss Huws OK?’

‘James Bull-Davies is in there, trying to persuade her to come out through the window. They’ve got all the people out of the other houses. And two labradors. Mum, listen—’

‘Good. You can’t believe it, can you? How quickly it happens.’

‘The point is there’s nothing you can do here. Come back to the vic, please. Look at you, your skirt’s all covered with—’

‘Where’s Lol?’

‘Putting his gear away. Barry was saying they should lock it in. He’s worried about looters.’

‘In Ledwardine?’

‘Yeah, well… Look, Mum, please? Something I have to tell you.’

James was helping Edna Huws out of the window and into the Matbro, putting a small suitcase in after her. Miss Huws had a long raincoat round her shoulders; she was making kind of chicken noises as the platform came down to ridiculous cheers. All this crazy goodwill that came with communal adversity and Christmas.

‘Mum! Vicarage!’

‘I seem to have lost a heel.’

Mum reached down and pulled something from a shoe, hobbling back up the street against the flow of water coming down from the square.

All the same, the rain was easing off and the sky was actually clearing, disclosing a fragment of moon now, like one edge of a silver ring in a crumpled grey tissue of cloud.

But it was no better on the ground. Reaching the entrance to Old Barn Lane, Jane saw another, smaller crowd assembling halfway down where there was a dip in the road — like a reservoir now. Front gardens were underwater, all the lights were on in all the houses and there were people with plastic buckets and washing-up bowls vainly trying to send it back.

‘Oh Christ!’

A man’s voice, falsetto with shock. He came stumbling out of the water, shaven head, earring like a coiled spring. Derry Bateman, the electrician.

‘Anybody know about artificial respiration?’

‘A bit…’

Mum started limping over to the crowd making a semicircle on the edge of the flood.

‘I thought it was a sandbag, I did.’ Derry Bateman looking shattered. ‘Oh, bloody hell. Everybody get back, this en’t good.’

‘I think it’s too late, anyway,’ a woman said.

The water almost thigh-high on two men dragging a body. Torchbeams converging.

A woman screaming, ‘Please God, no.’

‘Here…’ Derry guiding Mum to the waterside. Jane didn’t even know she could do artificial respiration. ‘Turn him over.’

The woman said, ‘I think he’s dead.’

Someone else howling, ‘Who is it? Who is it?’

I’m telling you…’ A quavery, elderly voice. ‘Someone was sitting—’

‘I don’t know him,’ Derry shouted. ‘I’ve never seen him before.’

‘You don’t know what you saw, Reg.’

‘I tell you I saw someone… I thought they was sitting on a sack, but they was sitting on him…’

‘Who was?’

‘He went that way. All in black, look. I en’t making this up.’

‘Everybody looks black in this—’

Jane ran down after Mum, but Eirion was holding on to her arm.

‘You don’t know artificial respiration, do you Jane?’

‘Well, no, but—’

‘I saw a boy once who’d drowned,’ Eirion said. ‘Believe me, you don’t want to see this.’

Derry Bateman and a couple of neighbours had carried him out of the flood and laid him in the back of Derry’s van, surrounded by compartments of tools and electrical supplies. Nobody could think of anywhere better. Nobody was volunteering to accommodate a drowned man in a sitting room all decked out for Christmas.

Derry had covered him with blue plastic sheeting, like the stuff draped over cookers and washing machines on the riverside estate.

Merrily was wiping her dripping hands on her sodden skirt. She felt heartsick.

‘You say you know who he is, vicar?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Derry said. ‘There really was nothing we could do.’

‘Nobody see what happened?’

‘Nobody seen a thing, else we’d’ve gone to help him. I still don’t see how he could’ve gone in that far, less he was drunk.’

‘Derry, who’s Reg?’

‘Reg Sutton? David Sutton’s old man. I think he’s Reg, en’t he, Peter? He only come to live yere a couple of weeks ago. He’s pretty old, you can’t really rely on too much he says.’

‘Where’s he live?’

‘He’s… one, two… five houses down, end of the terrace. White gate.’

‘Thanks.’

Derry nodded uncomfortably at the body.

‘Who is he, vicar?’

‘He’s the guy who rents Cole Barn.’

She could still hear him, the exasperated voice of reason: anomalies… blips… means nothing. Saw his fluorescent white smile.

Merrily flattened her back against a gatepost, gazed up at the moon, coddled in smoky cloud.

Above all, it in no way suggests a god. Above all, it does not imply that.

And now he knew. Or not. She looked down at the plastic bundle, fogged and glistening and it was very hard to believe in a life after that. And, oh, this was not right. There was nothing right about this, and certainly nothing to be salvaged from the Book of bloody Daniel.

‘What’s he doing down yere then, vicar?’

‘I don’t know.’

Maybe somebody had called out to him. Maybe there were too many lights at the bottom of Church Street. Christ.

‘We better call the police,’ Derry said. ‘Though how they’re gonner get here tonight, less they can get a helicopter.’

‘I’ll call them,’ Merrily said.

‘Only, if there’s any way of… I mean, I don’t really want…’

‘No, you’re right. He can’t stay here. Why don’t you drive him up to the church? We’ve got a long table in the vestry. Do you mind carrying him again?’

‘En’t got no choice, do we?’

‘I need to find his wife.’

And the old man had said: I saw someone… thought they was sitting on a sack.

Someone. Man or a woman?

She saw Jane and Eirion standing near the top of the lane, hand in hand, like children. All she could think of, as she walked up towards them, was Shirley West. She hadn’t seen Shirley anywhere tonight, only the marks of her madness.

63 Do the Dying

When she called Bliss on his mobile, from the vicarage, he answered in seconds, sounding wide-awake, focused. Excited, even.

‘Merrily, touch nothing.’

‘Too late. They had to bring him out of the water, he might’ve been alive. And we couldn’t leave him in the van.’

‘So where is he?’

‘In the church. Vestry.’

She’d managed to find James Bull-Davies, give him the keys and he was over there supervising it. Well, where else could Stooke’s body have gone, where else?

Bliss sighed.

‘So what are you saying, Frannie, I should’ve got out one of my many rolls of police tape? Cordoned off the area?’

‘Well, don’t let anybody in the frigging vestry.’

‘Damn,’ she said bitterly, ‘and I was planning to charge admission.’

‘You all right, Merrily? You don’t sound well.’

‘I’m fine.’

Could hardly keep her voice steady. Jane was standing in the doorway with arms full of a bath towel and dry clothes. She’d plugged in the electric fire, all three bars.

Bliss said, ‘Tell me why you think he’s been killed.’

‘I… I just think it can’t be ruled out, that’s all.’

Signalling to Jane to put the clothes on the sofa, telling Bliss quickly about Shirley West, the Church of the Lord of the Light, the damage, the graffiti. He didn’t say anything. He got her to go over a couple of points again. He asked her if Stooke had had any other obvious injuries. Twice he said drowned isn’t right. Clearly he was not impressed.

‘Is there…’ shaking now ‘… something I don’t know?’

‘A lot. Listen, gorra get things organised this end, then I’ll call you back from the car. We’re coming over. Only problem is how we get into the village.’

‘You’ll have to leave your vehicles the other side of the footbridge at Caple End, and I’ll have to persuade people to pick you up. How many?’

‘Say half a dozen, initially. More later if we agree with you. Or if…’

‘What?’

‘Keep your mobile on, I’ll see you at Caple End.’

‘It won’t be me. I have a service to do.’

‘Oh, Merrily!’

‘It’s Christmas Eve. It’s what I do. How long before you get here?’

‘Thirty, forty minutes. I can call you back in five from the car.’

‘All right, I’ll wait.’

Despite dry clothes and the electric fire, she was still shivering. The rain was no more than a peppering now and, through the scullery window, you could see the grey-blue froth of night clouds.

Gomer was going to Caple End with his big Jeep, Jane and Eirion to the church to tell people the service would be a little delayed. But first…

Jane came into the scullery alone, shut the door behind her.

‘It won’t wait, will it?’ Merrily said. ‘Only—’

‘No,’ Jane said, ‘I don’t think it will.’

Jane told her about Professor Blore’s private report to the Council. His alleged discovery of comparatively modern masonry and artefacts under one of the stones.

‘What does Neil Cooper say?’

‘He thinks Blore’s lying. Really he’s scared to say what he thinks. Scared of losing his job. Looks like Blore could’ve been got at by… I don’t know.’

‘A combination, probably. Landowner, developers… maybe several of them already getting in line for a stake in Ledwardine New Town.’ Merrily instinctively reaching for a cigarette, letting her hand fall empty to the desk. ‘Would take a lot, mind, to make it worthwhile for Blore to virtually destroy everything. The henge? How sure are you and Neil about the henge?’

‘It’s got to be more than wishful thinking. It’s just—’

A tapping on the window. Lol’s face. Thank God.

‘I’ll let him in,’ Jane said.

‘No, I’ll do it. You go to the church with Eirion. Tell whoever’s there, if anybody, that I’m sorry and I’ll be with them in ten minutes, soon as I’ve spoken to Bliss again.’

‘Mum, you don’t have to do this. We’re in the middle of a crisis here. Even the church has been—’

‘That’s why I have to do it.’

‘And I haven’t finished,’ Jane said.

But Merrily was already into the passage, and the phone was ringing behind her.

You could only see the ghost of the last word now. Witch.

James Bull-Davies had been as good as his word. The Bull, Lucy used to call him, always having difficulty separating him from his more unsavoury ancestors. Maybe she would now, having seen him scrubbing at her gravestone.

He was in the church, making sure nobody went near the vestry. His old car wouldn’t start, and Eirion had gone in his place to Caple End to ferry cops to Ledwardine. Jane put her hands on the shoulders of Lucy’s stone. It was becoming a natural thing to do, made her feel stronger and less confused. In theory.

‘That your gran, is it?’

She looked up, mildly startled; hadn’t noticed him coming over.

‘What are you doing here? I thought you’d gone home for Christmas. Thought you’d be legless in High Town by now.’

‘Bleeding bridge. Should’ve left earlier. The fucking sticks, eh?’

‘You could’ve gone on one of the coaches.’

‘Prefer me own wheels, sweetheart,’ Gregory said. ‘Anyway, I don’t live in Hereford. Not enough happening for me. Figured in the end might as well stay here as go there.’

‘You went to Lol’s gig?’

‘Who?’

‘Lol Robinson? The gig at the Swan?’

‘Didn’t you see me?’

‘I didn’t get to see much of it in the end.’

‘It was good,’ Gregory said.

The night was lighter now. Not much, but enough to make out his thin features. He looked starved. He was wearing a short leather jacket and tight black trousers that looked like they were fused to his legs.

‘You’re soaked.’

Really soaked. He even smelled wet. ‘Where’s your bloke, Jane?’

‘He’s… gone to help bring some people from Caple End.’

‘Coppers?’

‘Maybe.’

‘They’ve even closed the footbridge now. Nobody can get across the river without having to walk about ten miles to the next bridge. That’s what people’s saying. What’s that about?’

‘Somebody got drowned.’

‘That a fact.’

‘Guy who lived near your site, actually. Cole Barn?’

‘Don’t know it.’

‘You never walked over there?’

‘What for?’

‘Just… a walk.’

‘A walk,’ Gregory said. ‘You people kill me.’

‘What people?’

‘People who can live in a shithole like this and go for… walks.’

‘Hey, it’s not my fault you got wet.’

‘Never said it was.’ He seemed on edge. Angry. ‘Not seen Blore, have you?’

‘Not for a while.’

‘He’s got the keys to my bleedin’ caravan. Give him the keys when I thought I was leaving.’

‘If I see him, I’ll… get somebody to tell him you’re looking for him.’

‘Thanks.’

Jane said, ‘Gregory… you know all that stuff you were giving us about Blore having sex with his students?’

‘So?’’

‘Anybody special?’

‘When?’

‘Currently?’

‘Nah. He don’t separate them out much when he’s pissed. It’s all fires and mantelpieces with Blore.’ Gregory nodded at the people filing into church. ‘Wass all this?’

‘Midnight service… delayed. They’re waiting for my mum. She’s the vicar.’

‘Must be popular, night like this.’

‘I think people are a bit… spooked. The flood. The drowning. Want a bit of reassurance. And — I keep forgetting — it’s Christmas. Come in if you want.’

‘What happens?’

‘Well, it won’t be an ordinary midnight mass. In view of everything, I think she’ll be playing it by ear.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to one. I mean… you know…’ Gregory shrugged awkwardly ‘… why?’

‘You don’t believe in anything?’

‘Never thought about it. Wassa point? It don’t get you anywhere, do it?’

‘You don’t think it’s, like… interesting to think there might be something, somewhere, bigger than all this?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, you know, a life beyond this life? Somewhere you go after you die?’

‘Best thing is not to die. Let other people do it.’

‘Huh?’

‘The dying,’ Gregory said roughly. ‘The trick is to let other people do the dying.’