Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain (10 page)

A wholesome country girl, but smart.

‘Karen, what were his relations with Mansel, do you think?’

‘Big old family.’

‘It’s not the frigging
Royal
family, Karen.’

‘It’s near enough, in this county. You should know, you married into the fringes of… all that.’

Bliss scowled.

‘Sorry,’ Karen said.

‘I was sensing a distance, between Sollers and his brother,’ Bliss said. ‘The way he kept telling me what a well-respected man he was. No conspicuous affection.’

‘With respect, boss, he wouldn’t show that in front of you.’

‘But they weren’t
mates
. Big age gap. Not exactly grief-stricken, is what I’m saying.
And
he’s very likely going to inherit a big slab of prime riverside acreage, plus a small mansion. Mansel had no wife left, no kids.’

‘I heard that’s why they’re history,’ Terry said, ‘the wives.’

‘That’s what Billy Grace thought. Mansel wanted an heir to Oldcastle but refused to believe it might be his fault he didn’t get one. Bottom line, looks like Sollers could be in line for most of it. They
were
partners.’

‘You want to be a bit careful, boss, that’s all,’ Karen said. ‘Under the circumstances.’

‘I’m doing me
job
.’ Bliss threw up his hands. ‘He’s got form.’ ‘He was nicked for exercising his countryman’s right to protest about what he considered to be an unjust law.’

‘
You
think he’s a hero, do you, Karen?’

‘I think he’s clever. University, then business college? Big on diversification – farm shop, restaurant…’

‘We frequent his restaurant, do we?’

‘No, but my mum works there.’ Karen split a Kit Kat. ‘What’s the DCI’s line? Something this big, I keep expecting her to come stalking in, rapping knuckles. But she stays in Worcester. Odd, that.’

‘She’s been in court.’

‘Not over the weekend. I mean, she
was
here, but not for long.’

Terry Stagg said, ‘Maybe keeping out of the line of fire. Let the DI cop the flack.’

‘Not the only odd thing, when you think about it,’ Karen said, thoughtful. ‘She does that spell as acting-super here and then gets offered Thames Valley, which – unless I’ve got this wrong – would’ve been about six months under a superintendent
coming up to retirement.
On a promise
. Why didn’t she go for that? Not the Howe we know, is it?’

Terry Stagg smiled greasily through his unsightly stubble.

‘Maybe she has other things she wouldn’t want to leave behind.’ Grinned at Bliss. ‘Father’s daughter?’

‘OK,’ Bliss said, ‘let’s just…’

‘That’s crap.’ Karen shaking her head. ‘Even I don’t think she’s bent.’

‘That case…’ Terry brushing crumbs off his tie ‘… maybe she’s finally getting herself seen to.’

Shit
. Bliss was looking down at his desk, turning over the forensics, feigning lack of interest, when he heard Karen go, ‘It’s not you, is it?’

His gut went tight as a drum.

His head came up very slowly – a struggle to frame some flip reply, until he saw she was looking at Terry Stagg.

A joke. How many of these frigging jokes could his heart take? He watched Stagg shudder.

‘Why is Karen trying to give me nightmares, boss?’

‘She’s actually not bad-looking,’ Karen said. ‘In her austere way.’

‘Karen…’ Terry Stagg blinked. ‘That woman’s a metal coat hanger with tits. It’d be like, you know, with a plastic doll or something? Staring over your shoulder with glazed eyes. Anyway, nobody’s yet proved to
me
she’s not a lezzer.’

‘
How
many times we been through that?’ Karen said.

‘Does a brilliant impression of a woman who hates men.’

‘Gay women cops, Staggie – man-friendly. Always. Am I right, boss?’

‘Sorry, Karen?’ Bliss tried not to look too concerned either way. ‘I was just wondering how Terry knows so much about having sex with a plastic doll. That was a very telling detail about the way their eyes stare over your shoulder.’

Karen giggled.

‘Sod off,’ Terry Stagg said, going not quite red.

‘Boss.’ Bliss relaxed. As best he could these days.

***

He stood fingering the loose change and the car keys in his pockets, unhappy about the way Annie Howe’s uncharacteristic professional restraint had been spotted. Had they also noticed how readily she’d trusted him to handle a major inquiry of national interest?

‘Karen?’

On their own now in his office, Terry Stagg heading back to the crime scene.

‘Mmm?’

‘Karen, look, I’m gonna come over all pathetic now. Is there any kind of rumour going round? About me.’

‘What? About being gay?’ Karen grinned, then saw his face. ‘Sorry, boss, I’m not sure what you’re asking me. If you mean Kirsty… a wonky marriage’s hardly got novelty value in this place.’

‘Nothing else? I apologize for sounding girlie.’

‘Thank
you
.’

‘Well?’

‘Unless I’ve failed to pick up on something, I’d say the pressure of a high-profile murder investigation, combined with your domestic issues, is making you just a bit paranoid.’

‘So nothing?’

‘Nothing. Frannie, I’d know. And if I knew, I’d tell you.’

Should’ve kept his gob shut. She’d be curious now. And Kirsty… Kirsty still knew something. But from whom? Who’d found out about him and Annie and passed it on?

‘Things’ll get better, boss,’ Karen said.

‘Yeh,’ Bliss said, as Gwyn Adamson, office manager on the Mansel inquiry, came over with an envelope.

‘Couple of things, Francis. One’s an eyewitness report from a petrol station at Leominster. Bloke apparently was dropped from a car and then escorted by two men into a four-by-four. As he was getting in, someone pulled a bag over his head.’

‘When was this?’

‘Last Wednesday night. Two nights before Mansel was killed. No indication of duress. Witness thought it was a joke. However
this…’ Gwyn handed Bliss the envelope ‘… is more interesting. Came in the lunchtime post, just addressed to Police, Hereford.
Could
be a crank job, but…’

Bliss accepted a folded sheet of A4. Computer printout.

The word BLOOD all over it.

THESE WERE TWO pains that shewed in the blessed head: the first wrought to the drying while his body was moist, and that other slow, with blowing of wind from without, that dryed him more
…

The sky, through the scullery window, was scored with raw pink cloud. Easter was coming, and Easter Week at the end of March would sometimes mean snow. Nobody here would be surprised after what last winter had hurled at them.

…and pained with cold, more than my heart could hold… and The shewing of Christ’s pains filled me full of pains
.

Merrily folded down the corner of the page, shut the paperback. It was still scary. It had the feel of reportage. Informed, forensic, almost dispassionate reportage. Nothing quite like it before or since.

There’d been a few blank faces when she’d brought it out in church yesterday, Palm Sunday.

This had been after the evening meditation, attended by the more thoughtful, committed parishioners, all ten of them.

‘Julian of Norwich.’ Holding up the paperback. ‘A woman. Mother Julian. A nun. An anchoress, or recluse, and a mystic. In 1373, when she was just thirty, she became very ill and nearly died, and that was when she experienced the series of visions she discusses here.’

Or fever dreams, hallucinations, whatever.

‘Leaving us with this profoundly, harrowing, gritty account of what crucifixion must really have been like. Which, erm… I
was thinking we could use as a basis for the Good Friday meditation.’

A suitably sombre prelude to the proposed vigil in the church through Saturday night to Easter Day. Amanda Rubens, the bookseller – looking a little nunlike herself in a long black dress – had probably spoken for most of them.

‘And you really want us to dwell on wounds and killing… exactly a week after what happened at Oldcastle Farm?’

It had been all over Ledwardine by the time she’d arrived home from Brecon. Ten miles was nothing in the country. Ten miles was somewhere you could see, across the fields, between the trees.

Although she’d never met or heard of Mansel Bull, she knew a relative, James Bull-Davies, last remnant of the Ledwardine squirearchy. And Gomer Parry had once dug a pond for Mansel. And Jim Prosser in the Eight Till Late, his brother-in-law had had a sheepdog pup off Mansel less than a year ago. Merrily’s own grandad had farmed at Mansel Lacy after which the dead man, apparently, had been named. Connections everywhere: an act of sudden, blinding violence ricocheting like a pinball around the countryside, setting off vibrating lights, jarring the whole table.

The Sunday papers had pictures of a red-brick farmhouse on the edge of an orchard above the Wye and a smiling thickset man leaning on a gate.

This morning, a new
For Sale
sign had appeared in Church Street to join the existing four. All of them reactions to the winter and the fatal flooding which had turned the church into a no-go area on Christmas Day. The mopping and the mourning into New Year, when the snow came.

And then the bitter winds, driving the sleet, heralding the murder of Mansel Bull at Oldcastle, whose high chimneys you could see from Cole Hill in the lifting of the morning mist.

Some weeks, during the frozen months, there had been no actual meditation in church. Too cold in here, even with all the heat on. They’d just sat around, in their coats, and talked.
Ledwardine shivering in chill fatalism, and the village still looked raw and flaking. Not much energy here, except around The Court, where Ward Savitch hosted upmarket action weekends and shooting parties to reawaken hunter-gatherer instincts in men from Off.

‘Obviously we should do it,’ Gus Staines had said.

Gus was a plump little woman with a semi-permanent goblin smile. She’d come up from London in January to join Amanda, her long-time partner, who had been making an adequate and decorous living here in the New Cotswolds… until the weekend visitors began to be repelled by the snow and the electricity kept failing, and the shops didn’t get supplied so often.

‘We’ve all gone soft,’ Gus said stoutly. ‘We
should
throw ourselves into the full horror of the Crucifixion. The violence and the misery. Because that’s the reality of what people do to each other still. This is not the time to turn away.’

Merrily had glanced over to where Jane was sitting on the edge of the circle. Jane had been to the meditation most weeks since Christmas. Not saying much, which was probably just as well. She didn’t say anything now, but she looked mildly interested. And then…

‘It’s a magical ritual,’ she’d said last night. ‘You’re playing with the Big Forces here. Community shaman.’

‘Dear God.’

‘Resurrection of Christ, resurrection of Ledwardine. Correct?’

The kid was sitting, as she often did, on a cushion at the edge of the hearth with the reddening log fire behind her, Ethel the black cat on her knees, the eyes of both glittering like LEDs.

‘The role of the shaman being to lead the tribe out of the dark. Like, out of the tunnel of winter onto the sunlit hillside of spring. Pain and death, a vigil through midnight and then, boom… catharsis…
Easter!
’

‘Sod off, Jane.’

‘You’re going into denial already?’

‘Not exactly
denial
…’

‘Easter was the most profound of all seasonal festivals way before Christianity. Even the Last Supper has pagan origins. And, like… I think you said Julian of Norwich actually
wished
for her illness… invoking mortality in the hope of rebirth? Experiencing those visions in like the delirium of near-death?’

Merrily sighed.

‘It’s all totally valid,’ Jane said. ‘The village has lost its mojo. You need to kick-start the ancient engines. And some asses.’

Jane looking down, slowly massaging Ethel under the chin. Ancient engines. They’d been here before. The creaking and stirring of old Ledwardine, spiritual sap seeping eerily into centuries-dead oak timbers. Jane’s favourite picture of herself was the one taken by Eirion, her boyfriend, in Coleman’s Meadow, bare arms raised to the sun. Handmaiden of the Goddess.

‘Needs to be seriously harrowing, Mum. Like, when a place gets into disaster mode, expecting the worst all the time, the worst just seems to go on happening. Unless you step in with an act of sacrifice.’

‘Jane, how can I put this? We don’t actually want to scare people?’

Although we do, obviously
, Huw Owen said now in Merrily’s head, watching a bulb swing like some sinister censer.

Merrily had spent an hour underlining passages in
Revelations of Divine Love
. Normally on a Monday afternoon, she’d have driven into Hereford to go through the deliverance diary with Sophie, but the Monday before Easter was for planning and organizing the weekend ahead.

There was also a parish council meeting on Wednesday. Uncle Ted, senior churchwarden, had a proposal to create a permanent café in the church. Turn it into the heart of the village again, he said. Also make some money. So what would happen to the
silence? Where would you go when you needed to be alone with something that didn’t judge, didn’t question, didn’t ask you if you wanted to buy a raffle ticket?

Merrily looked up, out of the scullery window at the lesions in the sky. The sky was momentarily blurred. Maybe she needed glasses. A middle-age thing. It would come, sooner rather than later. Now she had an adult daughter.
God
…

The phone rang. She shut her eyes for a second before picking up.

‘All right, lass?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

Hadn’t spoken to him since Saturday morning. A sparse breakfast, just the two of them, Syd Spicer having left silently before first light, as they’d both known he would.

‘Just had a call.’

‘What did he want?’

Merrily watched the daffodils still huddled in their buds. You didn’t have to be psychic.