The room had dingy yellow walls, two beds, two single wardrobes. But it was tidy. There were two holdalls with shoulder straps under the window, Bliss keen to get inside them, but he didn’t move. A wardrobe door was open. The clothes he could see looked clean, new even.
‘What sort of girls were they, Goldie? All right, good girls, but…’
‘Polite. Tidy.’
‘You can do better that that. You have long chats with your guests. Old-fashioned nights with the tarot.’
‘I’m a people person. It’s why I opens my house.’
‘If they had worries, they’d confide in you.’
‘I likes to think.’
‘So…?’
‘Course they had worries. They worried about their family back home. They was expected to send money back, but there was never enough. Not what they expected. I done readin’s, set their minds at rest.’
On the window sill was a small framed picture of a couple on a sofa, smiling. The window overlooked a playground, a swing with the chains cut off near the top so it looked like a gallows.
‘You know what I’m after, Goldie.’
‘They didn’t have no enemies, if that’s what you’re gettin’ at. How could girls like that have- Was they messed with? You can tell me that.’
Good question.
‘I can’t, actually,’ Bliss said. ‘Not yet. But we do think there might be more to it. You said they worked on a strawberry farm. Which one?’
‘Couple, I think. One out near Ledbury, but they left because of the… you know, gettin’ pushed around and messed about.’
‘Messed about how?’
‘You know what conditions is like in these places. Next thing to slave labour. They was passing out, and if they asked for water they got it in an ole petrol can. Disgustin’. ’
‘They’re supposed to’ve cleaned up their act,’ Bliss said, cautious. ‘The worst ones.’
‘You believe that, you’ll believe anythin’. Maria, she told me one of the other farms there was a woman raped by two of the foremen. Took in a shed and raped.’
‘But nobody reported it.’
‘ Course nobody reported it. They knows their place. They got no status. Young fellers, they din’t do what they was told they got the shit beat out of them, and the women was raped. ’Less they gived it up willin’. Them as gived it up willin’ got the easier work. You must’ve heard what goes on.’
Everybody had heard the stories. Karen Dowell had come close once to getting a Polish girl to give evidence against this Albanian minibus driver who was demanding a weekly blow job for getting her to work on time. Then she’d disappeared. They could disappear very easily.
Bliss said, ‘So the girls got out.’
‘They moved to that place out on the Brecon Road. Magnum?’
‘Magnis.’
A complex chime went off downstairs. Bliss thought it was one of the clocks.
‘Doorbell,’ Goldie said.
‘Could be my lads. So they moved to Magnis.’
‘To be near Hereford.’
Coincidence was a lovely thing, but maybe this wasn’t much of one: it was a small county and Magnis was close to the city.
‘When was this, Goldie?’
‘Last summer.’
‘They stay the course this time?’
The bell went again. ‘I better let your men in,’ Goldie said.
‘They’ll wait.’
‘They left there, too,’ Goldie said. ‘The sisters.’
‘Something happen to them?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Were they staying here when they worked at Magnis, or did they live at the camp?’
‘At the camp. They come yere when they left.’ She didn’t look at him. ‘I felt sorry for them, I did. They wanted to go home. They was thinking how to raise enough cash to go home. I’ll go down, let your mates in.’
Bliss waited at the top of the stairs, looking at the holdalls, one pink, one tartan. Never had liked strawberries.
22
The Lady Chapel was a serene shrine to motherhood, recently renovated in quiet golds, muted tints, the gilded panels of its altar screen illustrating the domestic life of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Merrily was alone. Someone had left a newspaper on a chair: today’s Telegraph folded at ‘The Killing Fields of Middle England’. She picked it up, sat down next to a Madonna and Child panel where the infant Jesus had the face and the haircut of a middle-aged estate agent. Did one killing make them killing fields? And when did the Welsh Border become Middle England?
The paper had been left here as if it was part of the Countryside Defiance campaign. Fortress Hereford, all farm doors locked at nightfall, and don’t expect any help from the police.
Something not right about this. Why were people erecting fences, spreading panic?
Answer: they weren’t local people. Local people were cautious, but they didn’t panic.
There was a colour picture of Mansel Bull’s brother, Sollers, in hunting pink and then, downpage, a small shot of Frannie Bliss caught side-on getting out of his car, the now-trademark dark blue beanie covering his close-mown thinning hair. At the foot of the story it said, DI Bliss, who came to Hereford from Merseyside, could not be contacted last night, but a spokeswoman…
West Mercia’s brief quote in support of its officer was lukewarm, a formality. Bastards. Merrily tossed the paper back onto the chair.
Maybe the woman in green Gore-Tex had seen the annoyance on her face; she’d stopped a few paces away. Merrily stood up.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you coming.’
Shoulder-length straight dark hair under a black woolly hat. Cursory make-up. She lowered a leather shoulder bag to the flags, turned candid brown eyes on Merrily.
‘You’re angry.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Yeah, well, me too,’ Fiona Spicer said.
It was about surviving marriage to a man who would vanish overnight, usually for weeks at a time, and sometimes she didn’t know where in the world he was, or why, or when she’d see him again, or if.
‘Exciting boyfriends, for a while.’ Fiona Spicer’s voice was thoughtful and seldom lifted. ‘But, as husbands… problematical.’
Most people, this might’ve been small talk, ice-breaking stuff: the partner’s little quirks, how Fiona had known Syd before he joined the army. How they’d met on holiday, a teenage seaside romance, exchanging letters for a couple of years before they even saw each other again. And it got no better.
‘For more than half my marriage, my husband’s keeping secrets from me – me and the rest of the country. Where he’s going, what he’s doing there.’ They’d moved to the corner near the votive stand where three candles were alight. ‘I thought all that was over, when he left the Army. But part of them doesn’t leave, ever. He’d keep going to the window, as if he was looking for a reason to walk out. Sometimes I’d wake up in the night, and he’d be at the window in the dark.’
‘They come out of the Regiment at forty, is that right?’
‘At Sam’s level. You get a hazy kind of honeymoon period before they start wondering what they’re for. If their life has meaning any more.’
Fiona took off her wool hat, laid it on her knees.
‘I suppose I was luckier than most. Just a few months of agonizing before he hit God like a ground-to-air missile.’
‘ Syd?’
‘God’s warrior. All gunfire and smoke. As if saving a soul was the same as rescuing a civilian from terrorists. He did settle down, eventually. Probably as a result of Emily going off the rails.’
‘You must be relieved all that’s over.’
‘One problem ends, another opens up. Suddenly… it’s like the old days again: secrecy, lies, obfuscation.’
‘Because he’s back in Credenhill?’
‘He was never at Credenhill. But, yes. Back to the Regiment. Assuring me it was going to be entirely different this time. First and foremost, he’d be a priest. And that would be different. I almost believed the bastard. Then the curtain came down again. The vagueness, the false optimism. Everything’s fine. Everything’s going to be all right. And you know he means afterwards.’