Merrily saw Lol bent over his guitar in a corner, his music drowned out by the laughter of loud-voiced, faux -rural thugs.
‘They look out from their penthouses across all the lights,’ Lol said. ‘And they can’t see it but they know it’s there… all those thousands of square miles of it, all dark and empty. It just… it starts to irritate them. They’re thinking, what’s it doing? We’re the masters of the universe, why isn’t it giving us anything?’
Merrily was nodding gloomily. Had it ever been otherwise, since Norman kings designated thousands of acres as hunting ground? Great slabs of it going to the barons, who settled and grew, in their brutal way, to love it and eventually became the old squirearchy.
The Bulls and the Bull-Davieses.
Until they, in turn, started to lose it under the weight of inheritance taxes, leaving it prey to the new money. Savitch.
Cycles of exploitation.
The last fake gas lamp on the square was behind them now. A merciful mesh of shadows claiming them for its own. Lol brought out the keys to the terraced cottage where Lucy Devenish used to live. The folklorist. The guardian of the soul of the village. Jane’s first mentor.
‘I suppose what gets me,’ Lol said, ‘is that most people don’t seem to mind. The first time somebody off the TV comes to stay at the Swan, bit of glamour, they’re all in favour of it. It’s brought the village alive… but not in the right way.’
‘A bit of glamour,’ Merrily said. ‘Maybe we all need that.’
Her eyes felt damp.
Lol held open the front door for her. Inside, the wood stove was burning a surprising terracotta red.
Merrily’s black woollen top was off before they reached the sofa.
18
‘Actually, I do think he did it,’ Bliss said. ‘What’s wrong with that? It’s me job to suspect people.’
Staring up at the plaster moulding around the bedroom ceiling. The curtains were undrawn; you could see blurry lights in the big houses on the hillside across the road.
Cosy. An upstairs flat in a classy Victorian villa set back from the main road out of Great Malvern. Bliss liked it here – at the moment, more than anywhere, especially his crappy semi on the flat side of Hereford. OK, if he was called out in the night it’d take him maybe forty minutes to get back, and he’d need to leave at seven a.m., anyway. But it was worth it. Wasn’t it?
‘Francis, you…’
Annie Howe peering at him, her eyes all soft and woolly and useless without her contacts. It was worth it just for that.
‘… you can’t simply accuse a man of murder because he doesn’t like you. Sometimes I don’t like you. You can be an intensely annoying person.’
‘Part of me appeal, Annie.’
Bliss watched a light go out across the road, and then the hillside was as blank as those years of mutual blind distrust. Fast-track Annie, man-hating bitch, daughter of Councillor Charlie Howe, ex-copper, bent. All the poison darts Bliss had aimed at her back. Why should she like him?
He felt, unexpectedly, flimsy. What was she supposed to see in a twat who couldn’t hold anything together, not his job, not his family? Like Kirsty said, You never did put yourself out much, did you, Frank?
True, in a way. He and Annie had fallen into bed within days of Kirsty leaving, both coasting on the euphoria of a crucial result, a key arrest. A cop thing. How much staying power was there in that?
‘What’s the matter?’ Annie said.
Chris says you consistently neglected your wife, Inspector.
‘Francis…?’
She moved away from him. She’d put her nightdress back on, all creased. She was his superior. Better-educated, better-connected, better-looking. Coat hanger with tits? Was Stagg blind?
‘We said when this began that there’d be no analysis,’ Annie said softly. ‘One day at a time. We also said that.’
But there were no days, only nights. Cover of darkness. Cover of Christmas. It should have been his emptiest Christmas ever. Instead, he’d spent the days in work, the nights with Annie. In January they were spending two nights a week together, one at her place, one at his – Annie parking around the corner, walking, all muffled up, to the back door. We’re all right, she’d said, as long as nobody finds out. As long as we’re never seen together. As long as we don’t go out together. As long as we don’t ever do that thing where you drive a hundred miles into Wales or somewhere and have lunch and walk by the river, because there’s always some bloody copper, who used to be in this division, on holiday.
Bliss cleared his throat. Badly wanting to tell Annie about Kirsty, get her input, see if she had any idea at all who might’ve rumbled them. But Annie’s job was as important to her as his was to him. If he told her, she’d restrict their meetings, and he couldn’t stand that, because this was the only thing preventing him exploding into gases and shrapnel.
‘Right, then, Francis…’
In the glacial light from the street lamps he saw that she’d arranged two pillows against the bedhead, sitting back into them, a nipple’s areola vanishing back into the white cotton. Reaching to the bedside table and finding her glasses and putting them on to watch him across the post-midnight greyness. Return of the Ice Maiden.
‘Tell me about Sollers Bull,’ she said.
Gut feelings were no longer encouraged. No place for them in teamwork. Even Bliss was suspicious of gut feelings. Other people’s, anyway.
‘See, even when I was talking to him, I could feel it. I could see him in a pair of them green nylon overalls that farmers wear for mucky jobs.’
‘Pulling them off, I suppose, as he ran through the fields into the headlights of our correspondent and his girlfriend.’
‘I wanted to go back with a warrant to search his house. I wanted to talk to his hidden wife. Maybe she knows, maybe she doesn’t or maybe she just suspects.’
‘Stay away from her, Francis. Until you have something stronger, anyway. The bottom line is… he has an alibi. Several.’
‘The staff at his caff? It’s still borderline. Time of death’s not that certain, and it’s not that far away. You didn’t see the rage in him. Something about it that was wrong for the situation… skewed.’
Anger was always useful for concealing a hole where grief ought to be, but it was also a good outlet for the hyper excitement that lived in you for hours after you’d done something enormous.
‘I was thinking at first that if there was no real pain there it was because half of him’d be well chuffed at getting the farm.’
‘Perhaps that’s all it was,’ Annie said. ‘We don’t even know he didn’t get on with his brother. OK, different kinds of men – the traditionalist and the young progressive. University education, big ideas.’
‘Enough to cause a rift, when he starts shaking off the steadying hand.’
‘Even if they did hate one another, who’s going to tell you? Not the family, and not the wider community.’
‘Somebody will,’ Bliss said. ‘Always somebody with a grudge, a chip.’
‘We get his DNA, for purposes of elimination?’
‘Yeh.’
‘You feel threatened, Francis?’
‘Me?’
‘He’s put you very much in the firing line. A symbol of what’s gone wrong with the police in this area. Urban cop.’
‘Strange as it may seem, Annie, it wasn’t that urban where I grew up. Not then, anyway. There are fields up there.’ Bliss lay back. ‘Countryside frigging Defiance. Where did that come from?’
‘I Googled them. Much of it’s hunting-based. Aimed mainly, I’d guess, at attracting younger people to the cause. The trad- itional fox-hunting image of a retired colonel and Camilla Parker-Bowles as was… is not terribly evident on their Web site.’
‘Who’s behind it?’