To Dream of the Dead (15 page)

‘And of course you might like to consider,’ Howe said, ‘if you know anyone else with a knowledge of religious fanatics in this area and the borderline insane.’

Uh oh
.

‘Yeh, I’ll have a think,’ Bliss said, cautious.

‘I’d make an approach myself but the person I’m thinking of is clearly not comfortable with educated women.’

Bliss didn’t laugh.

‘There’s also the daughter. The daughter, as you know, is . . . maladjusted and seems to have contact with many of the crank elements in this area. I’m interested in who she might know.’

‘You want
me
to—’

‘Get what you can, but be careful how much you disclose. Nothing, obviously, from those particular reports. Not that I need to—’

‘No, you don’t.’

Bliss stood up, needing to get out before he said anything he’d regret.

‘Sit down, Francis,’ Howe said. ‘I haven’t finished with you.’

Haven’t finished with you?

Mother of God, you could only take so much of this shite. Bliss put his hands on Howe’s desk, took a breath.

‘Look . . .’ close enough now to notice she wasn’t wearing perfume ‘. . . whatever’s on your mind, why don’t you just frigging come out with it, Annie? Because I’m getting a bit pissed off with—’

‘Sit
down
, Bliss.’

Howe hadn’t moved. Bliss sat down. The next ten minutes brought him closer to throwing in his warrant card than at any other time in his nineteen years as a cop.

P
ICKING UP SOME
cigs in Big Jim Prosser’s Eight Till Late, Merrily saw that Hereford had exploded, debris all over the morning papers.

The
Birmingham Post
had Clem Ayling pictured last summer at the opening of a new woodland craft centre. Wearing a yellow hard hat, symbolically holding an axe, lavishly smiling. A grinning death mask now, glaringly surreal.

‘I met him just the once.’ Jim stacked up more papers near his checkout, stooping over them. Last of the old-fashioned shopkeepers, four pens in his top pocket. ‘Odd, really. You couldn’t dislike the feller, whatever you think of his council. An ole rogue, but you expect that.’

‘Don’t expect this, though, Jim. Not here.’

‘Aye. Lyndon Pierce was in earlier. Never seen him look as shattered. Like it might be him next. No such bloody luck.’ Jim smiled. ‘Sorry, Merrily.’

‘You can’t be
totally
against the village doubling in size.’

‘Can’t I?’

‘They’d all want papers.’

‘Aye . . .’ Jim dropped the papers; a nerve had been exposed. ‘From some bloody supermarket where the village hall is, when Pierce swings his lottery grant for a new leisure centre. It stinks, Merrily. It’s not the place we moved to.’

‘It hasn’t happened yet, Jim, we can still ob—’

‘I meant the whole
county
. Nobody’s ever gonner forget it was Ayling who stuck to it as half the secondary schools would be gone within five years because of the council getting squeezed. But that en’t how I see it. If they can afford new shopping centres, they can afford to keep the schools open. We got more bloody supermarkets in Hereford than any city of its size in the country – did you know
that? All the time, they’re expanding on what we
don’t
need and cutting back on what we do, and it . . . it’s bloody wrong.’

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 plastic 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.’