To Dream of the Dead (47 page)

‘Good cause, though, Karen.’

‘It better be. Thought I was going to have to sleep with him.’

Bliss stood at the bottom of Gyles and Steve’s shared drive, away from the only street lamp. He had to smile.

‘Karen, I wouldn’t’ve asked—’

‘I know. It’s just I’m not comfortable lying, never have been.’

‘So, cutting to the chase?’

‘The answer’s yes.’

Something throbbed in Bliss’s chest.

‘The wounds?’

‘One through the aorta, but a few more besides. Maybe afterthoughts?’

‘Window dressing.’

‘Yeah. Didn’t fool their pathologist. His feeling was the bloke was dead almost before the knife went in for a second time.’

‘Wooh, wooh, wooh,’ Bliss said.

Between the sporadic clumps of housing he could see the lights of the city, flat as a pinball table, and the silver ball was pinging. Ram another coin into the slot before it stopped.

‘So you asked him for the name.’

‘He said he’d call me back. That was when it got tense. By some incredible good fortune the only guy in the CID room, when he rang to check me out, was Terry Stagg.’

‘He called
you
back with the name yet?’

‘No.’

‘Give him an hour, then call him again and tell him it’s important we have it.’

‘I
so
do not want to do this.’ Karen paused. ‘
How
important?’

‘Well, Karen, I think this might be it.’

‘What’s that mean?’ An edge of panic in her voice. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Turning over stones.’

‘But Frannie, you’re
sick
.’

Bliss laughed.

‘I mean you’re not part of this, are you? How can you do anything when you’re out there?’

‘I’ll think of something.’

‘It’s Christmas Eve.’

‘Yes.’

He looked across at the city with the thick night clouds on top, like a cold compress. When Karen had gone, as it began to rain, he went back to the car, switched on the radio, low. Sagged back in
the seat, closing his eyes as a chapel choir sang
Silent night, holy night
.

Another idea came to him. He thought about the options, then switched off the radio and rang Ledwardine Vicarage.

W
HEN THE RAIN
came back, it was so hard and loud it was like the scullery window was being thrashed and thrashed with old-fashioned brooms made of twigs. Jane had to hold the heavy Bakelite phone tight to her ear to make out what Coops was saying.

‘. . . Pure conjecture, Jane, so don’t go . . .’

‘No. I won’t. Honestly.’

It was like the rain was speeding up with her excitement. She was finding it hard to sit still. Alone in the scullery under the desk lamp, charged up with the importance of this. Could hear the buzz and clink of chat and crockery in the kitchen – Mum in there with Eirion, Lol and Gomer.

‘OK, say the orchard’s been there since medieval times . . .’

‘Do you actually know that?’ Coops said. ‘I didn’t have much chance to go into the records.’

‘Nobody knows. It’s just always been there. Can’t be the only village in the centre of an orchard.’

‘No.’

‘And it certainly wouldn’t be the only village inside a henge.’

There. She’d said it.
Henge
. A word you could chew. Jane had her modest collection of archaeological textbooks spread out over the desk, cross-referencing.

A kind of circular ritual monument unique to the British Isles with a ditch and a bank . . .

. . . May include megaliths, like Stonehenge and Avebury, or timber posts, as at Woodhenge and Durrington Walls.

She also had the fairly rudimentary map of the village in the
centre of an old Ledwardine guidebook, produced in the 1930s when the orchard still formed most of a semicircle and neither the hestate nor the housing at the bottom of Old Barn Lane had even been thought of.

And you could see it. When you knew you could
totally see it
.

They were all living in the middle of a henge! The whole village part of a ritual site dating back four thousand years.

There was like a blue light inside Jane’s head.

Ledwardine was the pentagram at the heart of the apple
.

‘This could mean there are more stones, Coops.’

‘It’s impossible to say. Stones get smashed, taken away, used in buildings.’

‘But even if these are the only stones, Coleman’s Meadow is only a fragment of the monument.’

‘It’s all theoretical, Jane.’

‘You weren’t saying that yesterday. You were totally convinced that Blore had found something, and you were walking all over the orchard in the rain trying to second-guess him. Come on, admit it, you were thinking henge as well.’

‘What I was thinking doesn’t really matter. It’s the purest—There are no obvious signs.’

‘That’s because they’re all under what’s left of the
orchard
. . . The orchard was actually planted to cover up the henge – maybe the henge was threatened or somebody—’

‘That’s not something we can ever know,’ Coops said.

What was
wrong
with him? Had he had a row with his wife or something, down there in Somerset?

‘You’d thought about it before yesterday, too, hadn’t you? You’d thought
henge
.’

‘Look, all right, it wouldn’t be
that
unexpected. A henge is just a circular area with a ditch and a bank. As you probably know, they found a massive one a few years ago not twenty miles from here, in Radnor Forest. But not this side of the English border.’

‘What the hell’s
that
got to do with it? There wouldn’t’ve
been
a border back then. Why are you being so negative, Coops?’

‘I just . . . just don’t go spreading this round, Jane. I mean, obviously
I
can’t stop you but . . .’

‘Hey, don’t worry, nobody’s going to take any notice of me,
Coops, I’m just a disgraced applicant to the University of Middle Earth. Look, I just feel this is so
right
. The Village in the Orchard. Encircled by the orchard . . . concealing
what was encircling it before
.’

‘Jane,’ Coops said, ‘how can I put this? If you start going on about your feelings—’

‘If I hadn’t had any feelings in the first place, where wouldn’t—’

Jane clammed up. He was right. She had to stop claiming credit. That was how she’d fallen into Bill Blore’s net, the precocious, big-mouth teen. Yes, she
was
a medium for this –
one
of them, that was all – for something that needed to come out. But if you went round talking like that people would think you were bonkers. That was, the
establishment
would think you were bonkers; Blore was proof that things hadn’t changed so much since the leading archaeologists of the day had slagged off Alfred Watkins.

She just couldn’t wait for tomorrow, though. Daylight. Christmas Day. Perfect. She’d be out at first light, looking at everything with new eyes. The familiar transformed. Every time she thought about it, something new occurred to her . . . like where orchard faded into churchyard, she realised that what she’d thought was the remains of a burial mound might actually be part of the bank of the henge.

‘The orchard,’ she said, ‘was preserving it into the Christian era, all through the witch-hunt times. The old pagan spirituality maintained?’

A tradition. From Alfred Watkins to Jane Watkins, via Lucy Devenish.

Miss Devenish would ever wish it so
.

Lol was part of this. They were
all
part of it.

There was only one unfortunate aspect.

‘Of course, there’s Bill Blore.’

Coops said nothing.

‘He’s going to want to keep this to himself, isn’t he?’

Coops still silent.

‘How can we get it out first, Coops, just to stuff him? I mean, come on, he doesn’t deserve it.’

‘No,’ Coops said. ‘He doesn’t deserve anything.’

‘So what can we do? I realise I’m not much use here. I’m just a—’

‘Jane . . . you don’t understand.’

‘So explain it to me.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Coops . . . what’s happened?’

‘We’ll talk about it when I get back after Christmas.’

‘No.’ Jane hugged the phone to her ear, the rain blitzing the window. She could feel her heart beating, her blood racing, or something. ‘You can’t do this to me, Coops.’

‘Jane, I know you’ve had a bad couple of days, and you’re right, Blore doesn’t deserve . . . anything. I just think – don’t take this the wrong way, please – but I don’t think you’re mature enough to deal with it, and I don’t mean that in any . . .’

Jane gripped the phone with both hands. She wanted to scream at him, but if she went down that road it would just prove him right about her state of maturity.

‘I don’t yet know the full details, OK?’ Coops said. ‘I had a call from my friend in the Chief Exec’s office, and it was very risky for her to get the information, so I don’t want any comeback on her.’

‘All right,’ Jane said. ‘Listen to me. If you tell me—’

‘I can’t. Jane, I’ve got a wife and a baby on the way. I need this job.’

‘If you tell me, I promise it won’t go outside this house.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I might tell Mum, because like we’re not into secrets these days? But Mum’s a vicar and doesn’t go shooting her mouth off.’

‘That doesn’t arise, Jane.’

‘But if you
don’t
tell me . . .’ Jane kept her voice low, speaking slowly. ‘I’ll walk up to Blore tonight in front of everybody in the Swan and I’ll tell him—’

‘Jane, you think anyone will take any notice of what
you
—?’

‘I don’t
care
, Coops. I don’t give a toss what people think of me any more. I’ll ask him about the henge. I’ll
tell
him about the henge . . .’

‘You’ll just make a fool of yourself again. Just stay away from him, OK? Look, give me—’ Coops lowered his voice but brought it closer to the phone. ‘Listen, I’m in enough trouble with the family. I’m not exactly the life and soul. And I’d need time to explain this. I’ll call you back.’

‘But I’ll be—’

‘And when I do, you’d better make sure you’re sitting down, Jane, because this is going to ruin your Christmas.’

T
HE CAR WAS
the nearest he had to a home now. At least it didn’t have an unplugged Christmas tree and a newly emptied wardrobe – he’d noticed that this morning, along with spaces on the walls, gaps on the shelves; Kirsty must’ve come back, plundered the place.

Bliss sat there chewing his nails, the rain weeping down the windows, the mobile in his lap.

The Banks-Joneses knew where he was, if they had anything else to tell him. Occasionally one or the other would come to the window, like a kid watching for Santa Claus. It would be too dark to see him now, parked in the foundations of Phase Two.

Tried three times to reach the reverend. Engaged, engaged, engaged. He rolled his forehead against the top of the steering wheel.

Christmas Eve. It was a bad joke. This time next year he could be kipping in frigging doorways. When the phone began to vibrate, he fumbled it to his ear without looking at the screen.

‘Karen . . .’

‘Hate to disappoint, boss.’

‘Andy. Sorry. I’m—’

‘Talked to my friend Fred Potter. Three Counties News Service?’

‘I’d forgot about that.’ Bliss straightened up, remembered his chewing gum and reached across the dash. ‘You were asking him about Hereforward, right?’

‘You likely know this already, boss, it was in the
Hereford Times
. Least, some of it was. Hereford councillor rushed to hospital in the Cotswolds?’

‘Can’t say I recall it.’

‘Heart attack. Councillor suffered a heart attack during a
weekend away with other members of the Herefordshire advance-planning group, Hereforward.’

‘When was this?’

‘Last summer. Potter says Hereforward’s one of these names gets mentioned so often on council reports you stop seeing it after a while and folk give up asking what it does. But they have weekends away. They’ll go and look at what’s happening in some other city. Fact-finding mission. Or else just brainstorming weekends, kind of thing.’

‘I like that word
brainstorming
.’

‘Well, then, about six months ago – in the summer, anyway – they go for a session at a country-house hotel on the edge of the Cotswolds. Hire the conference suite, as usual, so their intensive deliberations won’t be disturbed. Late Saturday night, a member of the committee gets rushed to hospital with this heart attack. Touch and go for a while, but he pulls through.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘There were whispers, however, of a toxicology report revealing a high level of cocaine in the blood.’

‘Well, well.’

Bliss mouthed a wafer of gum.

‘Known for putting a strain on the heart, coke is,’ Mumford said. ‘They reckon if they keep fit, go jogging and confine the snorting to weekends they can handle it. Big mistake, apparently.’

‘My understanding,’ Bliss said, ‘is that a heart attack is often the result of a novice snorter overdoing it. I did a short course once, very illuminating. Nobody we know, this councillor?’

‘Nobody
I
know. Youngish chap. I’ve mailed you the cutting, but it won’t tell you much. Just a heart attack, mercy dash, lucky to be alive, all this stuff.’

‘How did they know about the toxicology?’

‘Hospitals leak.’

‘Oh, they do.’

‘But it went no further, anyway. No papers touched the story. Too much trouble, Potter says, too many legal hurdles.’

‘Would Ayling have been on this weekend?’

‘Potter thinks not. Doesn’t think Ayling was co-opted on to Hereforward until a couple of months later.’

‘Still.’ Bliss chewed slowly. ‘Something’s definitely coming together here, Andy. I can feel it.’