‘You serious?’
‘Yeah,’ Fred said. ‘Yeah, I am actually.’
‘These women – they didn’t like her.’
‘I think it’s fair to say they did not like poor Stephie. One of them started whispering that she was probably a bit mental, and who knows what her husband had to put up with, and then another one’s shouting, “Hey, this isn’t going to be in the papers, is it?” and of course that was it for me – everybody clams up. Well, no way was it going in the papers, even if he didn’t get charged last night – this is the victim; if you make a victim sound too much like a slag, the level of interest goes right down.’
‘Meaning the amount of space you get, the amount of money…’
‘Well… yeah.’
‘What about the haunting? Did she ever talk about that at work? I mean, she must have, after that spread in the People.’
‘Somebody apparently said something like, “How can you go on living there?” but she just laughed, and then the boss sent her off to this garage, Tanner’s, temping, so they never saw her again.’
‘What’s the name of the agency?’
‘The Joanna Stokes Bureau.’
Merrily made a note. ‘Thanks, Fred.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ve been wanting to tell somebody. It’s like I’ve been carrying her around.’ A little laugh, part cynical, part embarrassed… part something else.
‘It’s different, isn’t it,’ Merrily said, ‘when a murder victim is somebody you knew, however slightly. Somebody you’d seen not long before it happened.’
‘Yes,’ Fred Potter said, ‘it’s different. Look, is it OK if I ring you again, if I… if you…?
‘Of course.’
She gave him her mobile number. She didn’t usually do that. It was that phrase carrying her around.
29
The Plagues of Frome
EVEN FROM A few feet away, it looked as though the wheelchair was gliding through the undergrowth, cutting brambles like Boudicca’s legendary chariot with the knives in the wheels.
In fact, Isabel knew where the overgrown path went burrowing through the tangled churchyard to the bank of the Frome. Where the wheelchair stopped you could see the river down below, like smoked glass.
‘Look at that,’ she said contemptuously. ‘No rocks, no rapids. Seemed such a nice boring place, it did, after Wales. No historical baggage, see – no ruins, no megalithic sites. No history at all that wasn’t to do with hops.’
She wore a short-sleeved tropical top, with big golden flowers, and cord jeans. Her hair had amber highlights. There was a thin, grey shawl folded on her lap.
‘Perfect, it was,’ she said. ‘Perfect for us. And now – blood everywhere.’
‘Everywhere?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Huh?’
Isabel shook her head. Apparently, she’d sent the vicar off on a pastoral visit to the farthest of his four parishes, up towards Ledbury. Missionary work.
‘Starting to mope, see. Becomes dangerous when he mopes.’ She looked up coyly at Lol. ‘ “You want a church run by politicians or by people who actually give a shit?” I like that. That’s telling Him.’
Of course, she’d overheard it all, every whispered word.
‘And now you’re throwing it all back at Simon. Can’t blame you for that. Fair play, though, he did say bring her along to see him first, if she had plans to go into that place.’
‘We tried,’ Lol said tonelessly. ‘You weren’t at home. You were in Hereford, shopping.’
‘My fault. He was moping, and I got the feeling he was getting ready to… go in there himself.’
‘To exorcize the kiln?’
‘Or whatever was needed.’
‘He’d made it pretty clear he didn’t think anything was needed!’
‘Ah, well,’ said Isabel, ‘what he says and what he thinks…’
‘You’re saying,’ Lol looked up in despair at the flawless sky, ‘he did think something was needed.’
‘I’m not saying what he thought. You can blame me, like I said. I didn’t want him in there. I didn’t mind him warning your lady friend, that was only right. But I didn’t want him in there. So you see… It’s me to blame.’
Lol didn’t say anything. Isabel wheeled herself back from the river bank, along the path, to the base of an arthritic-looking apple tree.
‘Funny, though, isn’t it, this whole religion business? God working in mysterious ways. How do people expect Him to work – bolts of lightning all the time? And there I am, sitting at the door, and you pleading for enlightenment: “Isn’t it time it all came out?” Me thinking, I must be it – the mysterious way. What a bloody honour.’
Lol shook his head, mystified.
Hands folded on the shawl on her lap, Isabel fixed him with a gaze blazing now with what looked like a fearsome candour, and her voice acquired a flint edge.
‘Time for us to talk, isn’t it, boy?’
She got him to push her back to the vicarage gates and then down towards the main road. The haze had been burned out of the sky and the tarmac was beginning to sweat. There were hops on either side of them now, high on their frames, the fruit tight and green on the bines.
‘Preserve the beer, they do,’ Isabel said. ‘And the memories, I bet. And all the old hate.’
Lol sensed a stage being set out and climbed up onto it. ‘So who do you think killed Stewart Ash?’
‘Does it matter?’ Isabel gazed downhill towards the just-visible roof of the hop museum. ‘Wasn’t Adam Lake himself, was it?’
‘No?’
‘Hasn’t got the balls. Big man, macho image, but no balls. I reckon, see, that what Stock was trying to suggest the other night was that Lake got somebody else to do it. No balls, plenty of money – that’s what Stock was saying.’
‘But like Lake said, would he really kill somebody just get back another little bit of his old man’s estate?’
‘Ah, well,’ Isabel said, ‘you’ve got to look at the whole picture, isn’t it? Son of his father, when all’s said and done.’
Lol recalled what Gerard Stock had said in the Hop Devil about Conrad Lake. ‘You mean some kind of Nazi?’
‘Wasn’t far out. They still don’t say too much out loud, round yere, about all that, because old Perry-Jones isn’t dead yet, and Perry-Jones and Conrad Lake were part of the same disease.’
‘Armbands, Stock said.’
‘Nothing so obvious. Right-wing politics, racist stuff – you don’t get so much of that in the country. You get Tories, of course. They’re all bloody Tories, the old kind, stuck into their Little England feudal ways. No tub-thumping, though, no rabble-rousing. It’s the cities where the real extremism starts, isn’t it, the cities where all the immigrants go? How many black faces you ever see behind the wheel of a tractor? Life just trundled on in places like this: the same families, the same faces, the same hairstyles…’ Isabel reached out and fingered a bine. ‘Except in September, of course.’
‘The hop harvest.’
‘September, see, that was when the people of the Frome Valley had a taste of what life was like in the cities – drunkenness, debauchery, robbery, violence. All those thousands of common working-class folk from the Black Country and the Valleys. People like me. In fact my mam and my auntie used to come round yere hop-picking when they were young. Great times, she always says. Hard work, but a lot of laughs.’
‘Debauchery?’