To Dream of the Dead mw-10 Read online

  To Dream of the Dead

  ( Merrily Watkins - 10 )

  Phil Rickman

  The village of Ledwardine has never been flooded in living memory, but as the river continues to rise with December rains, within days it will be an island. Electricity has been cut and the church is serving as a temporary mortuary for two people who drowned. Only one man feels safe: an aggressively atheist author who has been moved — for his own safety — into a secluded house just outside the village. Meanwhile, archaeologists — assisted by Merrily Watkins’s teenage daughter, Jane — are at work unearthing an ancient row of standing stones that some people would prefer stay buried. The atheist’s temporary home is close to the site, and his young wife is becoming conspicuously agitated. Is it the fear of discovery? With the flood water washing up Church Lane towards the vicarage and the shop running out of cigarettes, it looks to be a cold and complex Christmas for Merrily Watkins.

  Phil Rickman

  To Dream of the Dead

  The relocation bible

  LEDWARDINE

  Once known as The Village in the Orchard, this community may have begun as simply that. The old centre of the village is still partly enclosed by the remains of an apple orchard dating back at least to medieval times, as do some of its black and white timber-framed houses. Earlier settlement is suggested by recent archaeological discoveries at the foot of Cole Hill, whose Iron Age fortifications are a reminder of a turbulent past. Today, Ledwardine (Jewel of The New Cotswolds — Daily Telegraph) is serene and inviting. The cobbled village square, with its small, open market-hall supported by oak pillars, is enlivened by a variety of retail outlets, including bookshop, gallery and delicatessen, as well as the 15th-century Black Swan Inn, noted for its fine food.

  FACILITIES: the village, although largely self-sufficient, is a mere ten-minute drive from the nearest town of Leominster and no more than twenty-five minutes from the progressive cathedral city of Hereford, now undergoing extensive commercial renewal. Several highly reputable private schools are within easy reach.

  STAR-RATING and rising!

  WE SAY: buy now, while prices are competitive and this area is still relatively obscure.

  WEDNESDAY

  Betty said she prayed

  today For the sky to blow away

  Nick Drake ‘River Man’

  1

  The Grotto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘What does give you pleasure, Frank?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘And how old are you, grandad?’

  ‘You throw that tin?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Nah. Empty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘You bastard.’

  Gloved hands curling into claws.

  ‘Kirsty, tell me what else I—’

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

  Bliss squeezed the phone tight.

  ‘Never gonner change, are you, Frank?’

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

  ‘Karen.’

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

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

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

  Like, indirectly, he just had.

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

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

  ‘You shit, Frank!’

  ‘Kirst—’

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

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

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

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

  ‘It’s a murder, boss.’

  ‘We’re sure about that, are we?’

  ‘You know the Blackfriars Monastery? Widemarsh Street?’

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

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

  ‘No problem, Karen.’

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

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

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You all right, Karen?’

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

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

  ‘Doc ’n’ soc on the way?’

  ‘Sure.’

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

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

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

  ‘It happens, Karen.’

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

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

  It was six days from Christmas.

  And yeh, he felt like a complete shit.

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

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

  2

  Moon Sat Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But these were, like, strange days.

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

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

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

  ‘Janey?’

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

  ‘You been snorkelling or something, Gomer?’

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

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

  ‘Oh, he’ll be out, Janey, sure to.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Count on him.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight, mabbe tomorrow.’

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

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

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

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

  ‘Chair?’

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

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

  ‘Erm… no.’

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

  ‘It does, Gomer.’

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