‘Don’t know. They’re also using Facebook and Twitter. Sollers Bull in hunting pink is a gift. Good-looking and a little bit dark and edgy. He was always like that.’
‘Oh?’
‘I didn’t know him well, but I did know him. From his days in the YFC.’
‘ You were in the Young Farmers?’
‘I was a young farmer’s girlfriend for a while. He was a friend of Sollers. This was when I was about sixteen. We were at the same parties, occasionally. He was popular with girls who… had more going for them in the looks department than I ever did.’
‘Don’t sell yourself short.’
‘I’m a realist. Anyway, I didn’t know him well enough to get behind the image.’
‘He’s a liar,’ Bliss said. ‘He was acting. On TV. Just like all those husbands who break down in front of the cameras: Please find the monster who killed my lovely wife. And all the time you’re looking at him.’
The lights were all out in the houses on the hillside, traffic was sparse. Bliss had that feeling he used to get as a kid, of being on an island in the night. It was not unpleasant.
‘He did it, Annie.’
‘I’d be very careful, at this stage, who you share your suspicions with. It’s a small county and Bull has friends all over it.’
‘Including my soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law.’
‘Did you know that your in-laws knew Sollers Bull?’
‘Be surprising if they didn’t. The farm’s only ten minutes away and Chris Symonds has social ambitions. Always asking me if I was up for promotion.’
Annie slid down in the bed, a long thigh against his.
‘You’re obviously up for something,’ Annie said.
Overslept.
It was six-thirty and fully light when the mobile trilled by his side of the bed. Bliss awoke spooned into Annie’s back, experiencing the usual half-shock at whose back this was. His hand had barely found his phone before Annie’s phone made its Nokia noise on the other side.
‘Karen, yeh?’ Bliss said.
Watching Annie fumbling for her glasses, peering at her screen. In Bliss’s phone, Karen Dowell didn’t dress it up.
‘Shit,’ Bliss was clawing the sleep out of his eyes. ‘Where?’
‘City centre, more or less. East Street?’
‘A woman. You did say a woman?’
‘No, boss, I said two.’
Part Three
When I was still young, I thought it a great pity to die. Not that there was anything on earth I wanted to live for…
Julian of Norwich
Revelations of Divine Love
19
Just gone eight, and the city was stirring irritably under a blotchy brown sky, East Street sealed off, end to end.
A barrier was moved to one side, the tape dropped, letting Bliss through to where Terry Stagg was waiting with a blurry excitement on his brick-dust face.
‘Briefly, Tez.’
‘Two females. Mid-twenties? We’re thinking East European.’
Bliss stood in the middle of the street, looking down to a private parking area for office workers, lawyers, hairdressers. You could see the screens projecting from behind a blank yellow end wall. East Street ran narrowly between the city centre and the Cathedral Close. A few discreet shops, refurbished terraced housing, offices, the rear of the Shirehall and a lone bijou black and white property used by chiropractors.
‘And why are we thinking that?’
‘Apart from general appearance,’ Stagg said, ‘one’s wearing this kind of a locket thing, silver, with a little religious-looking picture inside and some foreign words.’
‘Foreign words.’
‘I was off sick when they ran the course on migrant crime.’
Bliss wrinkled his nose. Thousands of East Europeans around the county now: mainly honest, decent migrant workers, a percentage of migrant layabouts and a handful of migrant heavy-duty wrongdoers. There’d been a short course for cops on the kind of societies they came from, their favourite crimes – the more violent ones usually practised against other migrants who were usually reluctant to give evidence.
‘How long’s he been here?’
A silver Beemer was parked up by the little black and white place. The Havana cigar box on the dash identifying Billy Grace’s urban transport.
‘Quite a while,’ Terry Stagg said. ‘He likes the ones where he gets noticed.’
The private parking area was almost a little square. Uneven levels, low brick walls and the arse-ends of buildings in need of repair. A weeping birch tree grew incongruously at its centre and its horizons were tarted up by the tower and steeple of St Peter’s and the Shirehall’s little cupola with its flagpole and Union Jack.
‘This where it happened – or were they dumped?’
‘Unlikely,’ Terry Stagg said. ‘Blood and gunge over a fairly wide area.’
‘Who found them?’
‘Elderly bloke from over there.’ Terry nodding at a modernized brick terrace. ‘Woke up to screams and yells not long after midnight.’
‘You mean… we actually came out here last night?’
‘No, he didn’t report it. Thought it was kids, pissed. Seems he’s complained twice in recent weeks and, um, no action was taken. And you don’t go out to remonstrate any more, do you?’
‘I presume the DCI’s en route?’ Bliss said.
A practised insouciance – getting good at this. Annie’d given him ten minutes’ start so they wouldn’t be seen arriving together.
‘And presumably we’re knocking on doors. Those windows overlooking the car park? Pubs, clubs, night workers, minicab firms.’
‘And CCTV,’ Stagg said. ‘The whole city centre.’
‘Good,’ Bliss said. ‘Right, then. Let’s go and put me off me breakfast.’
Turned towards the tape and the canvas, and Terry handed him the Durex suit, and they walked down past the offices of the Hereford Herd Book Society, whatever that meant.
Sollers frigging Bull would know.
Most of the video had been shot, but they were still taking stills from different angles. Images to wither your soul. Breathing in all the degrading smells of violent death, Bliss heard a man distantly protesting, ‘No, I work here, of course. Come in early because I have clients. How long am I supposed to hang around? Can’t you at least…?’
‘Twat,’ Bliss said.
It came out a bit choked up, surprising him. It wasn’t the horror as much as the sad banality: the two red shoes shed in different places, the blue vinyl handbag sprung open, letting out lipsticks and tissues and photos, left where they’d fallen. He saw a picture of a middle-aged couple, hand in hand on the edge of a field, with a white dog.
‘Only one handbag, Slim?’
‘Nothing else here.’ Slim Fiddler, head SOCO, came up like a hippo from a swamp. ‘And I can’t imagine they shared.’
The first body… it was as if she’d been thrown like discarded clothing over a low wall, maybe the foundation of a demolished outbuilding. She was wearing jeans and a black fleece, half off. A thin arm was draped over the bricks, the hand already bagged. You could only see one of her eyes; it was like sun-dried tomato.
‘Looks like the head was banged repeatedly into the sharp edges of the bricks,’ Billy Grace said. ‘The other one… is less of a big-production number.’
Beaming the way only Billy Grace ever beamed.
The other one lay a few paces away in a patch of scrubby grass. The pink fleece and the way she was half-curled made her look like a prawn, Bliss thought, a giant prawn, for God’s sake. One hand down between her legs.
‘Sexual assault?’
‘Probably.’ Billy bent down. ‘Dress ripped here. Didn’t do that herself. But the rest of it, as you can see, is far less… frenzied… than the other one.’
Her face was unmarked. It was a doll’s face – not a baby’s doll, more like one of those Russian dolls where one was inside another and so on. The hair was brown with gold highlights.
‘Probably died quite quickly,’ Billy Grace said. ‘I’d guess she fell back on the corner of that brick – see the blood there? Then perhaps somebody pulled her away, let her fall again.’