To Dream of the Dead (24 page)

The woman was carrying a computer, its wire wound around an arm. She smiled kind of stiffly.

‘You’ll have it back very soon, I promise. Maybe tomorrow.’

‘I hope so,’ Mum said in this dull, flat voice. ‘Because—’

The man said, ‘Is this your daughter?’

‘Because all the parish stuff is on there as well,’ Mum said.

The woman nodded. The air between Mum and these people was like cling film stretched tight.

F
OR CONFIRMATION,
M
ERRILY
had the radio tuned to Hereford and Worcester, the floodline programme with news inserts. The teatime studio presenter was talking to a reporter out on location; you could hear the rain splattering a car roof.

‘. . .
one of those places everyone knows. Almost like a seaside resort in the summer because there’s a kind of pebbly beach, and people go bathing in the river
.’

The reporter was on the phone. Bella Finch again, out on location, talking about something they’d found in the Wye.

‘. . .
level’s extremely high, and a lot of debris has been washed downstream, up against the bridge. What looks like a whole tree and lots of branches, and apparently that was where the body was found, entangled in debris. Must have been a terrible shock for somebody
.’

‘
Do we know who found it
?’

‘
No, we don’t, and the police have been quite sparing with information. It was only, as you know, after we received a call to the floodline from one of our listeners about police activity around the bridge that we learned about this
.’

‘
Yes, and please keep those calls coming in, because we’re all aware that the flood situation isn’t getting any better in the two counties. But what
are
the police saying, Bella?
’

‘
Very little, I’m afraid, Kate. They won’t even confirm at this stage whether
—’

Merrily switched off, watching Jane shrug.

‘They found the rest of him, then. Had to turn up somewhere, sooner or later.’

Jane was sitting at the table, a mug of tea going cold in front of
her. Her face smoky and mutinous in the kitchen’s amber lamplight. It was progress. A year ago she’d have been screaming and storming out.

‘Bodies and rivers,’ Merrily said. ‘You know the Celtic stuff.’

‘
Heads
and rivers,’ Jane snapped. ‘Because the head was the home of the soul and water was the entrance to—Anyway, what would
they
know about any of it?’

‘They
do
know about it. They know about the theory that the Serpent connected Dinedor Hill with the Wye. They also have very strong forensic evidence linking Clem Ayling’s murder with the Serpent.’ Merrily sat down. ‘Jane, they’re in a hurry.’

‘So?’

‘It means all I could do was delay them. No way I’d be able to stop them. And any attempts to delay them would just make them more suspicious and more determined.’

‘Who cares? If I’d been here—’

‘If you’d been here and refused to give them your laptop and gone on about living in a police state, that guy Brent might well have formed the wrong opinion. He doesn’t know you, he doesn’t know me—’

‘Where’s bloody Bliss, then?’

‘I don’t know. The woman, Karen, I thought she was Bliss’s regular assistant, Andy Mumford’s replacement. But not today, apparently.’

‘You’re saying they might’ve
nicked me
?’

‘They’d have made life very difficult. Brent wanted those names and he wanted them tonight. He actually said, for heaven’s sake, he said,
Mrs Watkins, there’s an easy way and a hard way
. . .’

‘How did they even
know
we had the names?’

‘Jane, you were in the
papers
.’

And Frannie Bliss knew. He’d even laid out a broad hint this morning in the car, suggesting that giving him a list of Coleman’s Meadow activists
might be the soft-option
. Where was he now? Once or twice, she’d caught Karen Dowell’s eye, and Karen had given her a harassed look that said
this is not my fault
.

‘I’ve betrayed them,’ Jane said.

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘
I
’ve betrayed
you
. But it seemed like the best solution.’

Jane looked at her, still some anger in her eyes but mainly confusion, bewilderment.

‘You’re eighteen,’ Merrily said. ‘I wasn’t in a position to give them your laptop, nor would I have.’

‘So you handed over
your
computer, with the database on it. Hoping to get it out of the house before I came back.’

‘Basically, yes.’

‘Do not
dare
say you did that to protect me.’

‘No.’ Merrily ached for a cigarette but didn’t get up. ‘I just didn’t have time to think. You don’t. It’s how they do it. Doorstep you.’

The last time it had happened – serious-faced police at the door,
May we come in?
– had been when they’d arrived to tell her about Sean.

‘I was tired and wet, and I couldn’t see a way out and I . . . still can’t. If they’d had to come back with the paperwork . . .’

She’d looked at DI Brent’s bland, detached, civil-servant face and seen School of Annie Howe. Remembered how Bliss always said that, where the police were concerned, a refusal often offended and offence usually led to a blind determination to nail you to the wall.

‘So what will they do with it?’ Jane said.

‘Copy everything. Then go through the names. They’ll start straight away, probably with the local ones. The local ones who seem most . . . extreme. Jane, have you . . . ever heard of a group calling itself the Children of the Serpent?’

‘Who are they?’

‘They haven’t been in contact with you?’

‘No. I’ve never heard of them. You think I wouldn’t remember something like that? Who are they?’

‘There was a threatening message on Clem Ayling’s answering machine from someone claiming to represent the Children of the Serpent.’

Jane looked genuinely blank.

‘Good,’ Merrily said.

‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘What’s to stop me sending out a round-robin email to everybody on the Coleman’s Meadow database saying we’ve been raided by the police and had our computer seized and warning them there’s going to be a witch-hunt.’

‘Nothing.’

‘And what’s to stop me ringing Eirion and getting him to tell his media friends? Getting it out in the papers?’

‘Nothing,’ Merrily said again.

‘But?’

‘But . . . I suppose, in most other situations it would look like some kind of breach of civil liberties. But this is a high-profile, decidedly horrific murder. It’s on the cards that somebody on that database, if they didn’t do it, at least has links to whoever did. So it’s one thing protecting somebody over a cause you believe in . . . shielding a murderer is something else. And what if . . . Let me get you a fresh cup of tea.’

‘What if he does it again, right?’

‘Mmm.’

‘This is a totally,
totally
shit situation.’ Jane lowered her head into her hands. ‘And things were going so well. I just . . .’ she looked up ‘. . . just met Bill Blore.’

‘
You
did?’

‘At the Meadow. They’re all set up.’

‘Yes, I was going to tell you about that.’

‘I had a call from Coops at school. He said Bill Blore wanted to meet me. And, like . . . he did. He’s going to interview me tomorrow. On camera.’

‘That’s fantastic.’

‘So I get interviewed for
Trench One
at the same time as friends of Coleman’s Meadow, people who I got to sign my petition, people who rallied round to help me are—’

‘Jane . . .’

‘Getting pulled in by the—’ Jane gripped the edge of the table. ‘By the cops. Maybe old people again, taken down the cells and . . . I dunno . . . beaten up . . .’

‘All right.’ Merrily stood up. ‘I’m going to ring Bliss.’

At just after seven, its cobbles glazed with rain and milky light from the Christmas tree, the square looked like an ice tableau. Certainly felt cold enough, and looking at Bliss made Merrily feel colder. Off duty now, he wore jeans and an old Stone Roses T-shirt under a thin jacket. She guessed he didn’t want to go home to an
empty house, but he wouldn’t come into hers either. Probably didn’t want to face Jane. Even case-hardened cops had a cut-off point.

‘I didn’t know about it,’ he said. ‘I’d’ve told you. Maybe Karen didn’t get a chance to call me.’

He’d parked next to the market hall, and they were standing under it, alone on the square. It wasn’t raining; an intermission, that was all. But it was coming back; it always came back.

‘Actually, I thought if they ever went that far they’d send me,’ he said. ‘I was prepared for that. I’m sorry. I really am sorry, but . . .’

‘I suppose it was finding Ayling’s body in the river.’

‘They told you about that?’

‘Karen Dowell told me when we were alone in the scullery for about thirty seconds, while Brent had a snoop. And it’s since been on the radio.’

‘I met this archaeologist at Rotherwas. He made the connection with the river, I put in a report. And
that
. . .’ Bliss leaned into the car, hands on the edge of the roof like he was about to start a sequence of push-ups ‘. . . that was the grand finale of my contribution to the Ayling inquiry.’

‘Frannie?’

‘I’ve been returned to what are laughingly described as “normal duties”.’ He straightened up. ‘More specifically, this petty suburban coke dealership we’ve been eyeing up for a few weeks. Chickenshit, basically. Nobody who’s running away.’

‘So why—?’

‘Why now, you ask, three days before Christmas when we’re already stretched to buggery?’

‘You’re still thinking Charlie Howe?’

‘I went too near him once before. He doesn’t forget. Charlie spots large dollops of the brown stuff floating inexorably towards the Xpelair, he calls his only daughter.’

Bliss leaned back against the wet car and told Merrily about getting carpeted by Howe this morning for failing to report a face-off with three drunken teenagers, one of them a hospital consultant’s son now claiming he’d been threatened with violence by a foulmouthed cop. He didn’t need to explain how the Ice Maiden was manipulating the situation.

Merrily dug her hands down into her coat pocket, recalling how Bliss had once helped Lol put the screws on Charlie, to get Annie Howe off
her
back. Maybe that was when his name had been added to Charlie’s blacklist.

‘You think she really knows what Charlie got up to in his police days? Because whatever else you think about Annie Howe . . .’

‘He’s her
dad
, Merrily. Any shit coming off Charlie makes the greasy pole Annie’s squirming up even greasier. Whether she’s bent or straight doesn’t come into it.’

A white car pulled into the square, an elderly couple getting out, along with handbag, gloves. Dinner at the Swan.

‘Come over to the vic, Frannie. Have something to eat. Jane’s not going to scream at you.’

He shook his head.

‘I’m not that crap a cook, am I?’

‘You’re
fairly
crap,’ Bliss said.

‘You look tired.’

‘I’ve always looked tired, Merrily. Me ma used to say I looked like a little old man at three.’

‘No word from Kirsty?’

‘I’m guessing I’ll be hearing from her solicitor first.’

‘And is that what you want?’

‘Is that what
I
want?’

‘Sorry,’ Merrily said. ‘I just had a feeling you—’

‘We never should’ve patched it up. Maybe I realised that, some part of me. The part that kept shaking the cage.’

‘You were deliberately shaking the cage?’

‘Possibly.’ He started pushing at the car again. ‘Thing is, you can keep walking the tightrope, carrying this fragile thing in both hands, keeping it dead steady, one foot in front of the other, not daring to blink . . . and then one day you think, Shit, is this a
life
?’

‘It is for some couples. I suppose.’

‘Sad cases, Merrily.’

He talked about coppers who started out all bright-eyed and
let’s nail the bad guys
. All the boyish enthusiasm getting rapidly suffocated by paperwork, regulations, baseless complaints, time wasted enforcing crap new laws.

‘And when it’s going right, when you’ve had a result and you
come home full of it, and you wanna talk about it to somebody . . .’ He shook his head. ‘She just didn’t get it, Merrily.’

‘Kirsty?’

‘Never got it.’

‘And . . . I mean . . . were you getting what
she
wanted from life? Sorry, Frannie, I don’t mean to . . .’

‘Doesn’t know what she wants. Only what she
doesn’t
want.’

‘You still love her?’

‘I need an early night.’ Bliss beeped open the car door. ‘I have to orchestrate a
dawn raid
. How’m I gonna cope with the excitement?’

‘Frannie . . .’

‘What?’

‘I don’t want Jane’s name . . .’

‘I’ve tried to explain, Merrily, I’ve no influence any more. All I can do is ask Karen to keep me in the loop.’

‘Then you keep me in the loop?’

He nodded.

‘Just so you know,’ Merrily said, ‘I went through some of the Coleman’s Meadow petition emails. Not thoroughly, but I didn’t see any mention of the Children of the Serpent. And Jane says she hasn’t heard of them, and I believe her.’

‘Good.’

‘Although there
was
somebody in Chichester claiming to have cursed Hereford Council.’

‘Yeh, well, we’ve all been down that road.’ Bliss slid into the car, started the engine, ran the window down and leaned out. ‘Maybe I’ll jack it in. Join Andy Mumford, go and work as a private eye for Jumbo Humphries, videoing straying husbands. What do you reckon?’

‘I reckon you’re overtired.’

Merrily walked into the Eight Till Late for cigarettes. Now Jim Prosser had told her they were planning to leave next year, the atmosphere in here, the whole feel of the place, seemed dimmer and more melancholy, like low-energy bulbs when you first switched them on. Or perhaps it had been gradually changing since the coming of Shirley West, caged at the bottom of the store.