To Dream of the Dead (MW10) Page 12

  Merrily nodded. What could you say?

  ‘No,’ Jim said, ‘I never thought anything like this would ever happen yere, but then I never thought to see so many strangers in the city – criminals, a lot of’em – only gotter read the court cases in the Hereford Times. It’s out of control, it is. We’re all rushing to the edge of the bloody cliff. I dunno how you do your job – trying to find the good in people.’

  ‘Jim, if we—’

  ‘Brenda wants to sell up,’ Jim said.

  ‘The shop?’ Merrily looked up at him, one hand in her wallet. ‘Leave the shop?’

  ‘Gonner be sixty-six next time. Old enough to remember how, when you caught a youngster nicking sweets, you clipped him round the yearole and told his dad, and his dad’d give him a good hiding on top. Nowadays you just gotter raise your voice, bloody dad’s in threatening to take you apart.’

  Merrily sighed.

  ‘You know what done it for Brenda? That armed robbery up in Shropshire – you see that on the local news? Country village, shop just like this, with a post office at the back. Brenda says, that’s it, time to get rid.’

  Merrily glanced up to the top of the store, where Shirley West hunched behind reinforced glass. It was widely known that Brenda Prosser had never wanted to take on the post office, for this very reason: all that money on the premises. But with the Post Office flogging off most of its premises, it was the back of the Eight Till Late or nothing.

  Neither Jim nor Brenda was qualified to run a post office, but if they’d refused it wouldn’t have gone down at all well in Ledwardine. Fortunately, Shirley West, having left the bank in Leominster for reasons undisclosed, had been looking for a job. And Shirley had once worked in a post office.

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Jim. It just wouldn’t be the same.’

  ‘It already isn’t the same,’ Jim said. ‘Anything else I can get you?’

  ‘No, I don’t—Yes. Well, just information. The people at Cole Barn . . .?’

  ‘The Wintersons? If you’re thinking of trying to get them into church I wouldn’t bother, they’re only renting. Nobody was gonner buy at the kind of price that French outfit were asking. Not now.’

  ‘No.’

  Cole Barn had been acquired, derelict, for conversion by a subsidiary of the company which now owned the Black Swan. Speculators, in other words, and nobody was too upset when it backfired. Executive homes or standing stones, neither would be good news for the privacy of Cole Barn, still on the market after over a year.

  ‘Yere today, gone tomorrow, these folks,’ Jim said. ‘Not worth the bother.’

  ‘I’m not allowed to say that. What are they like?’

  ‘They’re . . . from the Home Counties somewhere. Woman’s friendly enough in an eyes-everywhere kind of way – I’ll have one of these, some of that . . . Bit hyper. The husband I’ve never seen. Something you’ve heard, Merrily?’

  ‘Me? When do I ever hear anything?’ Merrily picked up her cigarettes. ‘You’re not really thinking of going, are you?’

  ‘Likely next spring. Look at it this way . . . what’s this shop gonner be worth with a Tesco or a Co-op down the bottom of Church Street? Bugger-all.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Say nothing yet, eh?’ Jim said. ‘We don’t want talk.’

  Merrily nodded, zipping up her coat. It had held off raining for all of half an hour but as she left the Eight Till Late it was starting again, like some automated cyclical sprinkler. She moved along the side of the square and under the market hall, walking to the end where, between the oak pillars, you could see into the window of the new bijou bookshop called – God forbid – Ledwardine Livres. Nine thirty, and it was opening a good hour earlier than usual – Christmas market. The blind went up to reveal a narrow window with a display including, she noticed, Richard Dawkins, Ian McEwan and Philip Pullman. Healthy balance towards atheism, then. Or was this paranoia? Maybe not. Above Dawkins’s The God Delusion was a book with a silver-blue cover. The Hole in the Sky.

  The O in Hole actually had a hole in it. Merrily went in, collecting a wry smile from the proprietor, Amanda Rubens, late of Stoke Newington, when she laid a copy on the counter.

  ‘Know thine enemy, vicar?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Merrily said.

  She hadn’t noticed any books in here about local folklore, mysticism, earth mysteries. How things had changed since the shop had been Ledwardine Lore, run by the late Lucy Devenish.

  The car was still stinking of last night’s chips. Bliss sat in the parking lot, behind Gaol Street, the session with Annie Howe replaying itself in his head like one of those sick-making seasonal supermarket tape loops of Slade and Roy Wood wishing it could be frigging Christmas every frigging day. Bliss wanting to beat his head on the dash to dislodge Howe’s final ringing dismissal.

  ‘Go!’

  Turning away, like she couldn’t bear to look at him. Like he was some kind of old shit the police service needed to scrape off its new boots. Unbelievable. The Senior Investigating Officer in the crucial early stages of the biggest murder case in Hereford since Roddy Lodge, making time in her schedule to tell him—

  Bliss let the window down.

  —about one of the consultant orthopaedic surgeons at the County Hospital preparing to file a complaint regarding the treatment of his son by a plain-clothes officer of this division in an incident which had occurred—

  Bliss turned his face into the rain.

  —two nights ago, during the extended opening period for Christmas shopping in High Town.

  ‘Mr Shah . . .’ Howe fingering a report on her desk ‘. . . alleges that the boy and two friends were being harassed by an over-zealous community support officer who had wrongly accused them of dropping litter.’

  ‘Wrongly accused them?’

  ‘When they began to protest their innocence, a man identifying himself as a police officer intervened, threatening to throw Mr Shah’s child into a cell and, I quote, beat the shit out of him.’

  Bliss sitting there, staring at Howe. The other side of the glass door, the hall was filling up with cops.

  ‘The officer did not give his name but, when he began to scream obscenities at the boys—’

  ‘Scream ob—?’

  ‘—They noticed he had what was described as a distinctive northern accent. Similar, according to one of the boys, to the comedian Paul O’Grady.’

  ‘How much flattery can a man take?’

  ‘You’re not denying you were the officer concerned.’

  ‘Annie, what I am denying—’

  ‘Even though, for some reason, DI Bliss, we can’t seem to put our hands on your report of the incident.’

  ‘That is ridiculous. It wasn’t an incident, by any stretch of the—How old d’you say the kid was?’

  ‘Thirteen. And why do we have incident reports? Remind me?’

  ‘This thirteen-year-old was drinking Stella. Not exactly the weakest of lagers.’

  ‘Orange squash—’

  ‘Balls.’

  ‘—According to Mr Shah.’

  ‘Mr Shah. Right. OK. Let’s deal with that aspect first, in case you’re about to—It was night and half the shops were shut. I did not even notice what colour the kid was. I assure you – and community support will corroborate it – that this kid was chugging full-strength lager and appeared intoxicated. And he did throw it down in the street, after spraying lager at this long-suffering anti-drink campaigner in a monkey suit. As for the obscene language . . . I told them to piss off. That was it.’

  ‘You told a thirteen-year-old boy to piss off.’

  ‘You should’ve heard him!’

  ‘And did you also call him a twat?’

  ‘Aw, Jesus, I call everybody a twat! It’s hardly . . .’ Bliss shut his eyes. After all his efforts to tone down his language, successfully reducing fucking to frigging, for the sake of his kids, he just wasn’t having this. ‘And – you can confirm this with the plast
ic plods – I never laid a hand on any of those kids, nor did I threaten to. I most certainly did not threaten to beat the shit out of him. Come on . . . in the centre of town? In public?’

  ‘It seems you expressed a preference for somewhere less public. Like a cell stinking of vomit?’

  ‘Jesus, it’s what you do, isn’t it? You give the little—You give them a bit of a scare and send them on their way. It saves a lorra . . .’ Paperwork. Bliss shut up. Howe’s entire career had been fabricated out of paper.

  Silence. Even the frigging rain holding off.

  ‘No.’ Annie Howe’s voice like ice splitting on a January pond. ‘It isn’t what you do. It’s what some stupid, crass policemen used to do. In the bad old days.’

  And then she’d filled in the background for him – why this was not something he could just walk away from, with two fingers in the air. Seemed that most of what happened had been witnessed by a neighbour of Shah’s from Lyde, north of the city. Thought next day that he ought to tell Shah that his son had been involved in what appeared to be a binge-drinking incident in the centre of Hereford. The little twat had obviously lied through his teeth about what had happened to avoid a backlash at home.

  A public incident; now this Mr Shah wanted a public apology.

  ‘In that case,’ Bliss had told Howe, ‘I will personally pay a visit to Mr Shah and put him fully in the pic—’

  ‘You will not go near Mr Shah.’

  ‘Jes—’ Bliss gripping his knees. ‘All right, what about the plastic plods? You’ve presumably got their statements?’

  ‘We have.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The community support officers say that while the accusation of littering was legitimate—’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘—Both agree that what happened was an entirely manageable situation and they had not – nor would have – requested any assistance.’

  ‘Aw, come on, there was no way—’

  ‘They say, in fact, that the situation was undoubtedly inflamed by your uncalled-for and unnecessary—’

  ‘The lying shites!’

  ‘Bliss . . .’ Howe finally rising up. ‘I don’t care which of you is lying. What I do care about is having a senior officer implicated in a trivial but potentially damaging and highly public incident while the rest of us are working flat-out on what’s turning out to be the most—’ Howe waving the Daily Press in Bliss’s face ‘—high-profile homicide investigation in the history of this city. Now, 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 . . . and meanwhile give some serious thought to drafting a suitably arse-licking apology to this bloody man before he takes it any further.’

  ‘Ma’am, I think you ought to—’

  ‘Don’t say anything else. Get out of here. Talk to the people we discussed and give me a report. You know what I’m looking for.’ And, as he was leaving, she’d told him explicitly where he stood, looking down at the papers on her desk, making the odd note, delivering the message as a partly absent afterthought.

  ‘If anybody can get you out of this,’ Annie Howe had said, ‘it will probably have to be me.’

  She hadn’t looked up. No need to.

  Bliss laid his head on the steering wheel, forehead against the fuzzy tiger-striped cover the kids had bought him last Father’s Day. Remembering the hollow quiet in the incident room, half-full by then, when he went back that way, looking for Karen Dowell.

  Aware also that, having been briefed by Howe and sent out on his own by nine a.m., he’d effectively been excluded from Morning Assembly and was in no position to complain.

  Lol ran downstairs and flung open the front door. The rain washed Merrily inside. Lol was exasperated.

  ‘You’ve got a key . . .’

  Why did she never seem to use her key, like she might be some kind of intrusion into his space?

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ Slipping out of her coat, hanging it over the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, where Lucy Devenish used to hang her poncho. ‘I forgot it. I just . . . walked out. Needed to talk to somebody.’

  ‘Somebody?’

  ‘Sorry.’ She put her arms around him. ‘This is ridiculous.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘This.’

  Merrily went back to her coat, pulled a brown paper bag from a pocket, handed it to him. Lol shook out the paperback book, recognised it at once, from hoardings in London and the sides of bus shelters.

  It was the hole that did it. It wasn’t a black hole, just grey. A grey hole in a shiny, silver-blue sky, and when you opened the cover it exposed not a title page but a blank page, all grey, at the bottom of which it said:

  nothing . . . what did you expect?

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Lol said. ‘You bought this?’

  ‘Just now.’

  ‘You bought Mathew Stooke’s best-selling guide to living—’ he read from the back cover ‘—a balanced, guiltless life without the pointless tedium of God . . .?’

  ‘Begrudging every penny,’ Merrily said. ‘But I suppose we ought to support our neighbours.’

  20

  Government Health Warning

  THE WOOD-BURNING stove wasn’t very big, but was more than enough for this room. One of the newer ones with glass that didn’t fog, two reddening logs melting into one another, the whole chamber flushed pink and orange, a beacon in the greyness of the day.

  Sinking into the sofa under the giant Mars Bar beam, legs extended into the heat, Merrily almost fell asleep. Damn it, so much cosier here than the big, draughty vicarage.

  Marry me, Lol. Take me away.

  She blinked, shocked at herself, sat up. Lol was coming in from the kitchen with mugs of tea. She put out a hand, looked up into the eyes behind his round brass-rimmed glasses.

  ‘Where am I? How did I get here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He bent, kissed her hand before placing a mug in it. ‘But you’re rather attractive, so hang around if you want.’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’

  She sipped her tea. Lol had been working. Scrawled lyrics on paper upon paper on the desk under the window, his acoustic guitar leaning next to it. This was the Takamine, plugged into the old wooden-cased Guild amplifier that looked like a big valve radio set from the 1950s or something, its red power light aglow.

  This was where the Boswell used to sit. Lol never mentioned the Boswell. She hoped she was doing the right thing; it was going to be an awful lot of money, more than she’d ever spent on anything – even a car, come to think of it.

  ‘Does anybody else know this Stooke’s living here?’

  Lol was leaning over the back of the sofa, arms either side of her, his mug of tea in one hand. Merrily shook her head.

  ‘I’m guessing not. He’s here under a false name, anyway.’

  ‘He’s not exactly inconspicuous, is he?’

  Lol opened The Hole in the Sky to the inside back cover: full-page photo of a man with shoulder-hugging black, curly hair, a full dark beard.

  ‘And I believe he weighs in at about eighteen stone,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Got it off the Internet. I couldn’t actually get back to sleep after Jane broke the news. Sitting in front of the computer at half past two, frantically Googling Mathew Stooke.’

  ‘Of course that might not even be him,’ Lol said. ‘Maybe they borrowed the reserve bass-player from Iron Maiden.’

  ‘To disguise his identity in the wake of all the threats to his life?’ Merrily shut the book. One of the reviews on the back said, In the current climate, Stooke must be seen as almost insanely brave. ‘You see, that’s completely wrong for a start,’ Merrily said. ‘In the current climate, Stooke’s right in the vanguard. The current climate is aggressively secular.’

  ‘It means Islam, doesn’t it? The fact that Christians hate him . . . with all respect, no big problem. Not in this country, anyway. B
ut when you offend the Muslims . . .’

  ‘To my knowledge, they haven’t stuck a fatwa on a writer since Rushdie. And fundamentalist Islam . . . terrorism – that’s the main reason for the growth of the secular state. Secularism’s become a kind of refuge. A political safe haven.’ Merrily put the book on an arm of the sofa. ‘That’s what’s so depressing about it. Nobody’ll admit it, but it’s all about fear.’

  ‘God gets a government health warning?’

  ‘That’s next.’ Merrily sank back wearily into the sofa. ‘Still, at least this resolves one issue.’

  Reminding Lol about the guy in the three-piece suit she’d spotted after the parish meeting. Jonathan Long. Special Branch. Telling him what she’d learned – or hadn’t learned – from Bliss.

  ‘So it is political,’ Lol said. ‘Or it’d be the ordinary cops. It’s national security.’

  ‘All these guys get death-threats. The publishers are probably disappointed if they don’t get death threats.’

  ‘So this Long would’ve been organising some protection for him?’

  ‘Possibly. I don’t know. It doesn’t entirely make sense. I mean, he’s not exactly in deep cover if Jane’s rumbled him inside a day. And why here, Lol? What’s he doing here? And why – this is the real issue – why’s his wife cosying up to my daughter?’

  ‘Well, if she’s a journalist . . .’ Lol finished his tea, put the mug on the floor. ‘They’re living on the edge of Coleman’s Meadow. Coleman’s Meadow’s a story. Or it will be.’

  ‘What do you think I should do about it?’

  Lol lay back, stretching his legs towards the stove.

  ‘Out him, maybe?’

  ‘Does that really sound like the kind of thing I’d do?’