Friends of the Dusk (17 page)

Casey smiled wanly.

‘Dinnis doesn’t really do that. He finds relaxation strissful?’ The smile died on her face like an early sunbeam. ‘He tell you about the feeling he had that night, in the Castle Room?’

‘He said he felt sick.’

‘Just that?’

‘Emotionally sick.’

Casey sighed into the wind, dusty with fragments of dead vegetation.

‘He thought he’d grown closer to the house. Giving it what it wanted. Restoring some of its heart. And what he got back was this… withering disdain. He doesn’t like to talk about that.’

Merrily shouldered the airline bag. By the time they reached the gate, Dennis was walking away back up to the house, retreating like the morning light. The way the day had dulled was fusing everything together, bushes, trees and masonry, so that it looked as if the house had been sewn into the hills.

The longcase case clock at the bottom of the stone stairs was silent and nobody acknowledged it. The Kellows let Merrily lead the way upstairs, with her prayer book and flask. They
followed her meekly with the Lord’s Prayer, the old version:
Thy
name,
Thy
kingdom come. Ending on
deliver us from evil
, which never resonated more than in a room with the windows shut and all the cupboard doors open.

Occasionally, there would be a sign of something at this stage – something expelled or something lifting.

Nothing. In the Castle Room, the tools stayed on the workbench and the door stayed almost shut.

Outside it, afterwards, she glimpsed something behind the velvet curtain across the left-hand passage and pulled it aside, revealing the edge of a frame, one of a couple, containing a mosaic type design and some calligraphy. The Islamic side of the house.

Merrily paused, glanced from Dennis to Casey.

‘We need to get them on board,’ Casey said.

‘Think of the house as an organism, divided into two.’ Merrily gestured at the frames. ‘Two faiths. Who knows what effect that might have. I don’t.’ She needed advice. ‘How would you feel about me talking to someone about this?’

Casey looked at Dennis.

‘Who?’

‘It would be someone outside the diocese. I wouldn’t be disclosing your names or the location.’

‘Need to ask Nadya,’ Dennis said.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ Casey said. ‘Could we call you?’

‘Let me finish your side of the house before I leave. What have I missed?’

Windows closed, cupboard doors open. Sprinkles and prayers, sprinkles and prayers. She was finding it easier these days to slip into the optimum state of mind, a quietness that was nothing like trance – the irony of this catching up with her between the kitchen and the sitting room.

Just as you were reaching a degree of competence, someone in a purple shirt came to take it away.

*

The Freelander was balanced on a hump of brackeny ground at the end of a passing place in the single-track lane, Merrily leaning against its flank, looking down on the valley, huge old trees on either side. She was on about the same level as the castle ruins across the valley. Cwmarrow Court had vanished. Nothing in sight that was lived in by people.

She’d stopped here to check her phone because there was no signal in the valley, leaving the Court reliant on landlines which, in this part of the world, would often come down in bad weather. If there was heavy snow you could be trapped for weeks.

All kinds of lines were down here. She was guessing she wasn’t being told things because there were things they weren’t even telling one another. The family, virtually any family, was a seedbed of secrets and lies. Secrets guarded from everyone outside the family, bigger secrets inside it. Not like she hadn’t been there with Jane.

And then there was religion. Bring religion into the situation and there was nobody you could entirely trust.

They’d offered her lunch. She hadn’t felt hungry. Sometimes, after a blessing, you actually did feel very hungry. She just felt empty, which was different. She got back into the Freelander, took a wrong turning but kept on and eventually finished up on the edge of the village of Dorstone, which was no bad thing; you could take the steep and twisty single-track lane over Dorstone Hill and pick up the road towards Leominster and home.

Near the top of the hill, wooded either side, the phone chimed, making her heart bump in a way it never had before. Oh God. Time to replace the chimes with the blues riff or the barking dog before they were rendered terminally eerie. The chiming and the stroke. Even priests were hardwired for superstition. She really had to talk to somebody about this. The idea of something non-physical inflicting physical harm was outside her experience.

She dropped down to second gear, took a slippery incline to the right and parked close to the exposed Neolithic burial chamber, Arthur’s Stone.

Nobody else here; there rarely was. Perhaps there were times of day when Arthur’s Stone – actually a rough arrangement of big stones – would look sinister and forbidding, but mostly it made her think of a prehistoric mechanical digger trundling towards the edge of the hill.

She got out of the car and laid the phone on the capstone’s tilting table. The phone displayed a four bar signal. The screen said
missed call.
The number was the gatehouse office. She called it back.

‘Merrily, where
are
you? I’ve rung seven times in the past two hours.’

‘I… I’ve been out of signal. It’s Saturday. Is there something wrong?’

What was Sophie doing in the office on a Saturday?

‘You left a message asking me to make you an appointment with the Bishop. He could see you today.’

‘Sorry, I was thinking Monday. The Bishop doesn’t usually—’ Or the old Bishop didn’t.

‘Or rather, he said he could see you before lunch.’

‘I never thought. Bernie would’ve been watching the football.’

‘Where did you say you were?’

‘Erm, getting a puncture mended.’ Dear God, it had come to blatant lies now. ‘In… in Leominster.’

‘I’ll see if it’s still possible, but you’ll need to make it later. He has a meeting with the Archdeacon in about ten minutes, say an hour for that. I can perhaps get you some time when he comes out.’

‘Right.’

She leaned on the stone. Across the Golden Valley, the so-called holy mountain, the Skirrid, had its nose above the horizon, sky and mountain fused by rainclouds. She was sorry she’d asked for the meeting. She was tired. She felt steadied here, didn’t want to leave.

Sophie was the person she would normally have told about the pointing finger, the chiming clocks. And couldn’t.

‘Merrily. When you go in with him…’

‘Mmm.’

‘Be very careful what you say.’

‘About what?’

‘About anything,’ Sophie said.

24

Appropriate adult

U
SUALLY
J
ANE DRANK
cider. This afternoon, in the Black Swan, it was grapefruit juice, and no explanation.

Years since Lol had given up psychotherapy for full-time music, but Jane… well, you just couldn’t help studying Jane. People with kids went on about the joys of parenting ending at about eleven, before the teenage years inflicted some kind of horrific trial-by-combat, but Lol was glad he’d been on the sidelines during the crazy years. Whatever happened for him and Merrily, he and Jane were never going to have a father/daughter relationship grown from loving memories of bedtime stories and bottle-feeding.

‘So how’s Eirion?’ he said, as the Black Swan’s posher barroom filled up around them.

‘Oh.’ Jane looked into her glass. ‘Fine.’

A whoop went up the other side of the bar – somebody scoring on the big-screen TV in the public.

Fine
. Where did you go from here? Try to find out what was bothering her – because something was, and badly – or just back away and let it emerge in its own time?

‘I was just thinking he always used to come over at weekends,’ Lol said.

‘Not every weekend.’

Jane’s eyes flickered.

They’d met on the square, Jane looking into the window of the bookshop, Ledwardine Livres, Lol just looking around, feeling his way back into the village and hoping Merrily might
drive in from wherever she’d gone. She’d talked last night about the Bishop but not so much about Raji Khan or what Khan had wanted. Maybe none of his business. Nor was this, really. He was Jane’s friend, that was all.

‘Eirion was with you, wasn’t he?’ Lol said. ‘In Pembrokeshire.’

‘Just for the first few weeks. Until he had to go back to Cardiff.’

Eirion was entering his second year at Cardiff University. Then he’d go on to journalism college. He was a nice guy, but he’d been Jane’s first real boyfriend, and an attractive, curious kid like Jane, living in a society that scorned moral parameters… Lol wondered if she ever felt she’d missed out on a wild youth.

As the bar filled up, background chat rising, they talked about Lol’s first production job, at Prof Levin’s studio, for mad Belladonna, once iconic. A woman who wanted to work with him as a fellow neurotic. Whom he’d first met, memorably, by candlelight at the top of the church tower at Ludlow.
Who the fuck are you?
Bell had said, with death on her mind. Bell was famous for her recording of ‘Gloomy Sunday’, the Hungarian suicide song.

‘Is it good?’ Jane asked. ‘The album?’

‘Er, depends what you’re looking for.’

‘Lot of late nights?’

‘Coming back here, it’s like I’m in jetlag.’

Jane grinned. It was a mature grin. She’s a woman now, Lol thought, and I’m not her dad. There’s nothing we can’t say to one another. Why not ask?

He leaned back, looking at the blue light cast on her face through the square of thick old mullioned glass, working up to it.

‘So. Here we are, then. Back within a day of each other. At Hallowe’en. Is that an omen?’

Jane said nothing.

‘You do still believe in omens?’

She looked uncomfortable.

‘Not obsessively.’

Lol stared at her. Jane raised her hands.

‘Yeah, I know, whatever happened to Mystic Jane? Look… if she eventually does go to university to study archaeology, ancient history, whatever, she probably needs to wipe the slate clean. Come to it without preconceptions. Avoid looking like a loony. Mystic Jane… cold storage.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Myths and legends,’ Lol said, ‘I think they ground us. Connect us to where we are. But then I just write songs.’

Jane sighed. Lol thought, You really don’t know where you are, do you?

He took a breath.

‘So, Eirion—’

‘Laurence!’ Another stool was dragged up to their table, a black beanie dropped down between the glasses. ‘How yer doing, son?’

‘Francis,’ Lol said.

Frannie Bliss, the cop, sat down, beamed at Lol, then at Jane.

‘Can’t stay long, kiddies, I’m on me lunch hour. Well, me lunch twenty minutes today, and I should be having it at me desk under the circs, but I just wanted a quick chat with Jane.’

Jane blinked but recovered fast.

‘Sorry about the tag, Inspector. Must’ve come off. I’ll bring it in when I find it.’

Bliss smiled fondly.

‘Been across to the vicarage, but there was only the cat in. With this being business, I thought your ma ought to be around. But Lol’s probably OK, if he doesn’t mind.’

‘What – as my Appropriate Adult?’ Jane raising her eyes to the beams, lowering them slowly to give him the hard stare. ‘You cheeky
sod
, Bliss, I’m nineteen!’

‘Mother of God,’ Bliss said. ‘Doesn’t time fly?’

‘Apparently that’s when you get past a certain age. What am I supposed to have done?’

Bliss sighed.

‘What a pity it is, Jane, that your first encounter with the law should’ve involved an officer less soft-shoed and deferential than meself.’

‘If you were Annie Howe, I wouldn’t even be talking to you now.’

‘She’s a changed woman, Jane.’ Bliss looked sorrowful. ‘Word is she’s found love.’

‘Like with some sad little bloke who gets off on being beaten and whipped?’

‘I wouldn’t know, Jane. Listen, I believe you went to talk to a certain Mr Cooper, of the county archaeologist’s department, the other day. What was that about?’

‘And that concerns West Mercia Police… why?’

‘Humour me.’

‘If you must know, I was offering to sleep with him in exchange for temporary employment.’

Lol flashed Bliss an expression to say this was just Jane being Jane, because it had gone beyond banter. She’d always got on with Bliss, knew her mum liked him, but she was behaving like she might have done a few years ago when she was at the difficult kid stage.

But Bliss was looking wry and patient. Which was also odd. According to Barry, there was a murder investigation on in Hereford.

‘Cooper says you met him on Castle Green and you arrived escorted by a guy called Tristram Greenaway.’

Jane shrugged and picked up her grapefruit juice, swirled it around.

‘I just knew he was called Tris. What’s
he
done?’

‘He’s got himself murdered, Jane.’

The glass went down hard, Jane searching Bliss’s face.

‘It was on TV and radio this morning, victim not named because we hadn’t talked to his next of kin.’

Jane had slumped.

‘Bloody hell.’

‘I’m sorry if you and he…’

Bliss was watching her, Lol wondering if he was here because he’d wanted to see Jane’s reaction when she heard this guy was dead. Surely not…

‘Me and him, nothing,’ Jane said. ‘That was the first time we’d met, and our relationship lasted possibly twenty minutes?’ Mild pain in her eyes now. ‘A nice… nice guy. What happened to him?’

‘We’re waiting for the post-mortem. Thing is, Jane, you seem to have been among the last people to talk to him before he was killed.’

‘If you want an alibi, I was with Mum for the rest of the day. I may be wrong, but I think it might be against her religion, covering up a murder.’

‘So you didn’t know him.’

‘I went to the office looking for Coops, and Tris said he was at Castle Green and offered to show me where it was. I suppose I was flattered because he was good-looking.
Very
good-looking. So I didn’t tell him I knew the way.’