‘In relation to what?’
‘Whatever problem he’s got.’
‘Which is…?’
The step was soaked through; Merrily pulled her coat under her bum. This was obviously going to take a while. Across in the rectory, a light blinked on.
‘That’ll be Spicer now,’ Huw said.
‘He’s in your bloody rectory?’
‘He were stopping t’night here anyroad.’
Two lights were on now in the rectory. Merrily folded her arms.
‘You see, what strikes me as odd is that when I was invited down to Syd’s parish in the Malverns, it was because he, basically, did not do this stuff. Had no time for any of it.’
There are leaps I can’t make, he’d said to her.
And Merrily had said, You’re worried by the non-physical.
And he’d said, Samuel Dennis Spicer, Church of England.
Name, rank and number. You could pull out all his teeth and that was the most you’d get from the Rev. Syd Spicer, former sergeant with 22 SAS, the Special Air Service, Hereford’s finest.
The UK’s finest, come to that. Some said the world’s.
Huw sat down at the other end of the step.
‘Remind me about the time you worked with him. Briefly.’
‘Series of road accidents in the Malverns, near his rectory. All in more or less the same place. Survivors saying they’d swerved to avoid a man on a bike.’
‘Who wasn’t there. And Spicer didn’t believe that.’
‘Kept saying he had a problem with paranormal phenomena,’ Merrily said. ‘He wanted me to look into it, do the roadside blessing bit and reassure local people that it was sorted. Which led to-’
‘I know what it led to. Did he believe at the end? When it was over?’
‘Probably not. So if you’re asking whether I’m surprised to see him on a deliverance course, yes, I am.’
Huw said, ‘I were also wondering why he hadn’t gone to you in the first place.’
‘Over what? What did he tell you?’
‘He said – and I quote – an old evil had come back into his life. And he needed to deal with it.’
‘Exhaust. That’s why you set me up to talk about Denzil Joy?’
‘Don’t get me wrong, lass, I think it were a useful exercise for all of ’em. It’s the most explicit case of possible demonic possession I’ve heard of in a while, and I thought you’d tell it well, and you did. None of them buggers is going to forget about Denzil. But whatever it is it’s likely in your manor, and I thought you should know about it. And I thought he should be reminded about you.’
‘Syd isn’t expecting to see me again tonight, is he?’
‘Aye, well… he’ll think you’ve gone. He won’t know your car’s trapped behind a tree.’
‘Huw, you’re a-’
‘Bastard, aye.’
Even the weather played into Huw’s hands.
‘I take it, Merrily, that when that business were on in the Malverns, Spicer wasn’t frightened.’
‘No, he wasn’t.’
‘He is now.’
‘You reckon?’
‘A man who’s served in likely the hardest regiment in the entire history of the British Army.’ Huw stretched out his legs into the dark, greasy grass. ‘Now then, lass, what could possibly scare the shit out of him?’
8
Bliss had come alone, parking outside a metal gate at the top of the drive, eventually having to climb over because he couldn’t work the bolt in the dark. A spotlight speared him as he hung astride the shivering tubular bar. At the top of the drive, a door had opened. A man stood there. Green gilet, high boots.
‘Police,’ Bliss said.
Feeling like a twat as he came down from the gate, stumbling to his knees. The countryside could always bugger you up when it felt like it. He stumbled towards the bungalow, built of old brick like the big house – an outbuilding, possibly a converted coach house.
‘Mr Bull?’
A nod, maybe.
‘Francis Bliss, Mr Bull. West Mercia CID.’
Bliss pulled off his beanie, held up his ID. The guy in the doorway didn’t look at it.
‘You’re the man who married Chris Symonds’s daughter.’
‘I am, yes.’
Bliss sighed. Maybe they’d met at one of the agonizing county functions Kirsty had dragged him to, some creaking conveyor belt of dinner jackets.
‘Chris is a friend,’ Mr Bull said. ‘I see him often.’
Well, that could hardly be more explicit. A blast of wind caught Bliss as he stowed away his ID. Loose bits of his life getting blown in his face.
‘Mr Bull, can I say that I’m very sorry-’
‘For my loss?’
Bliss said nothing.
‘You can take your routine commiserations, Inspector Bliss, and insert them into your rectum,’ Mr Bull said.
Bliss nodded wearily and followed him into the house.
Grief took many forms, aggression one of the commonest.
Low-energy bulbs laid a mauve wash on the kitchen. It had costly customized fittings and strong new beams of green oak. When a phone started ringing, Sollers Bull unplugged the lead from the wall.
‘Everybody who needs to know knows.’
‘Next few days will be difficult,’ Bliss said.
‘ Days? ’
Sollers Bull stood gazing into wide windows that looked to be triple-glazed. Nothing much to see but the reflection of himself and Bliss and a double-oven Aga in tomato red. Sollers had told Stagg he’d spent the early evening at a staff meeting at his farm shop. It checked out.
‘Chris says you consistently neglected your wife, Inspector,’ Sollers Bull told Bliss’s reflection. ‘Neglect seems to be your force’s forte.’
‘Where’s your wife, Mr Bull?’
‘Not your concern.’
‘Well, you know, actually it is,’ Bliss said quietly. ‘With an extremely violent killer on the loose.’
‘Then why aren’t you out there looking for him?
Mr Bull turned at last to Bliss. A wedge of stiff dark hair was razored clear of his ears, a tiny diamond stud winking out of one of them – the one that TV cameras always caught when, with his handsome head held high, Sollers was striding in and out of court.
Bliss said, ‘Your brother reported intruders on his land.’
‘We both did. On separate occasions. Did you know that?’
‘I… no.’
‘Doesn’t particularly surprise me, Inspector Bliss, because preventing crime-’
‘Look…’ Bliss held up both hands. ‘I understand your distress and your anger, but alleged trespass isn’t necessarily police business at all, let alone CID business. For a start, it has to be trespass with intent -’
‘And preventing crime is low-priority stuff nowadays, isn’t it? Counts for nothing in the target culture. Nil points.’
You got this every day now, every little twat nicked for a minor offence accusing you of using him to make the figures tally.
‘Mr Bull, we don’t like the target culture any more than you, and I try not to let it get in the way of being a good copper. I’m not saying if I’d heard about your intruders we’d’ve come rushing over with a chopper and an armed response unit, because our resources are limited at the best of times but…’ Bliss drew out a chair from under the kitchen table but didn’t sit down ‘…I think I need to know about it now, sir. Don’t you?’
Sollers Bull crossed the room, switched off the main bulbs, as if to dim his anger. The moon was in and out, now that the storm was over. Through the window you could see poplars waving blackly, like they were fanning away shreds of cloud.
Mr Bull, sharp face scarred with shadows, told Bliss he’d seen two of them, around the end of last week, Thursday, perhaps. Two men and a vehicle. ‘Wasn’t quite dark. I could quite easily have shot one.’
‘Probably as well you didn’t, though,’ Bliss said patiently. ‘You don’t know this was down to the people you saw. Whom I’m presuming you didn’t recognize… or did you?’
‘I don’t know who they are, but I know what they are.’
‘Who did you speak to, Mr Bull, when you rang the police?’
‘Rang what I thought was Hereford police and it turned out to be some anonymous call centre… might as well have been in fucking Delhi, like the rest of them. Sometime later, I actually received a call back to ask if the intruders were still in the vicinity because the police were rather busy…’