Friends of the Dusk (27 page)

‘Jerry Soffley,’ Bliss said. ‘Don’t like him. Called me sergeant. And Frank.
Frank
.’

Annie rolled her eyes. He’d told her some time ago about
his
dad, Francis Bliss senior, known as Frank, who’d counted domestic violence amongst his hobbies in the days before it was considered much of a crime. Dead now. Old twat fell off the Liverpool pier head, Bliss liked to say, although it wasn’t that simple. What he’d never told Annie was that Kirsty, his wife, had also called him Frank towards the end, knowing exactly what she was saying. Knowing also that it wasn’t true, but she could be vindictive, Kirsty.

‘He did bring his laptop in, mind,’ Bliss said. ‘Soffley. Turns out he actually lives above the shop, some squalid little one-bed flat. Used to have a place at Bobblestock. Must be on his uppers.’

‘What if he deleted things before he brought the laptop in?’

‘To keep Karen out, he’d have to’ve extracted his hard disk and driven over it a few times, and even then… What bothers me is that he might have a number two lappie tucked away. I really wanna go and see him again, but I need something to nail on him. Don’t wanna be accused of goth-bashing.’

‘Goths.’ Annie frowned. ‘I really didn’t want us to have to go there. Waste of space, people like that. Fantasists.’

Meaning she didn’t understand what drove them. New Age dark. More than just a fashion thing. Annie didn’t even understand New Age lite.

‘People who post on Neogoth,’ Bliss said. ‘All right, let’s go out on a limb here. Let’s suppose that somewhere there’s a nutter who wants that skull for what he
thinks
it is.’

‘I thought Cooper knew exactly what it was.’

‘Yeh, yeh, he does. But it’s nuts and bolts to him, it’s not, I dunno,
magic.
’

Annie looked pained.

‘All right.’ Bliss brought up the picture on his phone. ‘The stone in its gob, like an Uncle Joe’s Mint Ball…’

‘A what?’

‘Never mind. Under the circumstances – i.e. that he’s let it slip through his fingers – Cooper’s not gonna big that up for us or anybody. But that stone, that’s the best evidence Greenaway has that this is a significant skull. The head of a feller thought to be a vampire.’

Annie sighed. Flicking off the skull picture, Bliss noticed he had an email from Billy Grace, the pathologist, but he kept on talking.

‘I got Vaynor to go into it on the Net. Stone in the mouth, not uncommon in a deviant burial. If it’s a white stone, it might have significance in a Christian burial as a symbol of resurrection. In a good way – put there to benefit the deceased. This doesn’t look like a white stone to me, though it could just’ve got mucky over the centuries, but let’s assume it’s not. To some of the weirdos who do their shopping with Jerry Soffley, this feller’s a vampire.’

‘Have we talked to experts?’

‘Yeh, we put in a call to the University of the Undead. Aw, come on, Annie, who’s an expert in this kind of crap? Unless, of course…’

Annie sat up.

‘No.’

‘What did I say?’

‘You didn’t. Don’t.’

Bliss smiled.

‘Mrs Watkins does, in the course of her job, run into people with unorthodox beliefs.’

‘
No.
’

‘I realize you never liked her much.’

Annie reached for the coffee pot, looked at Bliss who shook his head. This wasn’t a caffeine kind of night. Annie poured some for herself.

‘Francis, look. It’s nothing to do with that. I saw another side of her the night you were hurt. More rational than I’d realized. And intuitive.’

‘You said.’

‘Did I mention that the chief constable and I had lunch with the new Bishop of Hereford?’

‘I thought that was just…’

‘A social formality. The chief wanted me to go along because his knowledge of Hereford isn’t extensive. New Bishop’s a man called Innes. New broom. Not like Dunmore. Didn’t appear to think we had any mutual interests. More interested in what we could do for him, in relation to church security and the increase in thefts. The chief proudly reminding him about all the stolen statuary we’d recovered and offering to provide advice for the diocese on more efficient locks, burglar alarms, et cetera, et cetera. And I said, without thinking much about it, that we were grateful for the occasional assistance of some of his people, notably Merrily Watkins, in providing information leading to certain significant arrests.’

Bliss put down his phone.

‘You didn’t tell me about saying that.’

‘Why would I? Anyway, it didn’t go any further. He brushed it aside. Said he was glad the diocese had been helpful, but any future consultation with any of his staff should be directed through his office.’

‘Ah, they all start like that.’

‘I think he was serious.’

‘So?’

‘I’m just passing it on, Francis. Mrs Watkins may not be as accessible to you as she has been in the past.’

‘She’s me mate,’ Bliss said.

‘Just be bloody careful, that’s all. The chief doesn’t like to offend the institutional hierarchy.’

Bliss shook his head in disgust. But, yeh. Maybe it wouldn’t be helpful to damage Annie’s promotional aspirations. For as long as they were both here.

‘You ever feel all the old doors are closing on you?’

Annie didn’t reply. He let it go and opened the email from Billy Grace, the reply to his query of last night.

Bliss showed it to Annie; she didn’t look impressed.

‘What was the
point
of that?’

‘Dunno, Annie.’ Bliss shrugging uneasily. ‘It was the middle of the night. You get daft ideas. Like if you boiled all the flesh off Greenaway’s head, right now he’d look not unlike our friend.’

He detected something less positive than disbelief on Annie’s face.

‘You emailed Grace on impulse while I was
asleep
? With the non-availability of Mrs Watkins, does this mean you’re trying to think like her?’

‘I’m a maverick.’

‘Because it doesn’t really make any kind of sense, does it?’

‘All right, no,’ Bliss said. ‘It doesn’t. It’s not rational.’

36

More

T
HE FLAT SQUARE
package had come in the post yesterday. Well, Lol knew what it would be and had resisted opening it, thinking it might be nice if he did it when Merrily was here. An introduction to a possible future.

Never mind. He risked his bass-string thumbnail slitting the tape.

Inside, a slim, brown-paper parcel, just over twelve inches square – wouldn’t be the same in millimetres. At its centre, a Knights Frome Studios card carrying a short message from Prof Levin.

Lol slid out the album with the matt sleeve: firelight from an inglenook, a spindly rocking chair, a guitar – the Takamine, not the Boswell, which had been indisposed at the time. But at last you could make out the titles of the paperbacks on the rug:
Thomas Traherne
,
Selected Poetry and Prose
and
Select Meditations.
Impossible to read on the CD cover.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Jane said.

‘Yup.’ Lol nodding. ‘And if Prof wants to claim the barren years for all the years without vinyl, who am I to object?’

‘The first Hazey Jane II album, was that vinyl?’

‘Came out in that transitional time, so it was actually vinyl, cassette and one of those new, exciting digital compact discs. Never liked the cover, mind. This is so much more seductive.’

Jane held the LP well away from the stove, probably thinking it was in danger of melting if it got warm. Although actually it might be. It looked fragile and precious; the days of scratches and chewing gum were long gone.

‘So, like… will it sound all crackly and intimate when we put it on?’

Ah. Well. Actually, I don’t know. Mainly due to not having a turntable any more. Perhaps I’ll drive into town tomorrow, see how much they cost these days.’

‘I see.’ Jane sat down primly on the sofa, pulling off what Lol recognized as her mum’s red beret. ‘So, to get this right, you phoned, asking me to come over to show me some vinyl we can’t play.’

‘Well, not necessarily tonight. I was thinking maybe tomorrow. I was actually planning to go to the meditation..’

Where sometimes he’d just sit in a back pew, eyes half open, watching Merrily looking soft and shadowy, the rest of the congregation faded out. Act of worship.

‘And, uh… just also wanting to remind you that I was… here.’

‘Lol, you said—’

‘… in case you needed to discuss anything. Someone to listen. You know?’

‘You said there were “a couple of things”…’

‘Did I?’

‘I thought that meant ASAP, and with Mum out of the way for an hour or so…’

‘And you agreed, I think, that maybe there were things you needed to discuss.’

Lol sat down in the armchair opposite Jane on the sofa, with the LP across his knees. Maybe tonight was not a good time for this. Better if they’d both gone to the meditation.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I happened to be talking to Eirion. On the phone. Eirion, your… can we still use that word boyfriend?’

He watched Jane’s head bend in almost a spasm, tangled hair falling forward over her eyes.

He was remembering what Eirion had said about the archaeologists in Pembrokeshire. How Jane had been worried that she’d get sneered at, belittled for her interest in folklore and the crazy twentieth-century hippy theories about the arrangement of prehistoric sites and mysterious energies

All of this dating back to when the TV archaeology programme,
Trench One
, had come to record in Herefordshire and Jane had been humiliated.

Lol thought – they’d all thought – that she’d recovered from that. She was a kid. Kids bounced back. But she hadn’t been a kid, she’d been on the cusp of probably the biggest change she’d ever go through, maybe the last time she’d have total freedom to choose what happened next.

This had never even occurred to him before, but suppose she’d only made the decision to go for a university course in archaeology just to
prove
she’d got over it, that she was undamaged. That would be so Jane.

‘Eirion said you were worried about not fitting in. At first.’

‘True. I suppose.’

‘But after he’d left you called him and said you’d found some people with the same interests.’

‘That’s… an exaggeration. In fact there was just one.’

Her voice sounded dry, almost a croak, but she’d refused anything to drink. She was wearing an old Gomer Parry Plant Hire hoodie, coming apart at the neck.

‘Most of the others were even more cynical than I’d figured. And then the worst happened. One of them said he’d seen the rushes for the
Trench One
edition that never got screened. Where Bill Blore takes me apart as somebody who ought to be applying to… to…’

‘The University of Middle Earth.’

‘They never let it go after that. Little snide remarks. Well, it’s not like I can’t take a joke, but when it doesn’t stop…’

‘When it doesn’t stop it’s become bullying.’

‘So you keep laughing, knowing that it’s a relatively small world, archaeology, and there could be guys here I might wind up working for or attending their lectures, and I’ll always be Mystic Jane from the University of Middle fucking Earth. I just… I wanted out, Lol. Actually cried myself to sleep one night. It was going to follow me around, you know?’

‘You can’t be alone, Jane, in thinking there’s more…’

‘Yes you
can
. There are professionals and there are loonies. It’s like Mum – there are like hundreds of clergy who think she’s bonkers. And that’s the bloody Church, which is supposed to believe in the One God and all his… all his sodding angels.’ Jane had clearly given up pretending she wasn’t crying. ‘I’m a mess, Lol.’

‘We’re all a mess. People who don’t think they’re a mess are just stupid. Go on.’

Jane smiled through it.

‘One day, these guys arrive.’

Guys with dowsing rods. Not kids, middle-aged guys who said they were members of the British Society of Dowsers on a field trip. They were on their way to Carn Ingli, the famous mystical summit in the Preseli Hills. Lol thinking,
Oh God…

‘They’ve spotted the dig,’ Jane said, ‘and they’d pulled in to have a look. Normally, I mean, dowsers, I’d be dying to talk to them.’

‘Well, it works,’ Lol said carefully. ‘Doesn’t it?’

‘Lol, the guys I’m with, they’ve got geofizz, they’ve got ground radar. Does that suggest they’re ready to believe they could do their surveys so much cheaper with a couple of bent coat-hangers?’

‘See your point.’

‘They’re quietly taking the piss. Leaning on the vehicles, making smart remarks. I was making tea, and…’

‘You offered them some, right?’

‘How insane was
that
? The looks I was getting, I was close to asking if they could quietly give me a lift back to Milford. But then… Sam comes over and starts talking to them. And like, Sam’s pretty smart. Sam is, you know, Dr Burnage? And wrote a couple of books, published by some American university like Yale… serious stuff, you know? And I realize Sam’s not being sarcastic, not rubbishing it at all. Thinks it’s entirely reasonable to think Neolithic people used to dowse for water sources when they were looking for places to settle. And the fact that blind springs tend to be found under standing stones… there
is
a mystery here.’

Jane’s face was reddening, only partly because of the stove. She’d said,
You can’t tell Mum any of this… not any of it.
And he’d sworn that he wouldn’t.
And especially Eirion…
No, no, not a word. And he wouldn’t, although he suspected this was going to be difficult.