‘Let me play devil’s advocate here,’ Annie said. ‘How do you know it was blood? How do you know he wasn’t simply plastered with mud? Red Herefordshire mud.’
‘And then I heard about the murder afterwards, you mean, and put two and two together and made eleven?’
‘You wouldn’t be the first to make that kind of mistake in a situation like that.’
‘Chief Inspector, I spent many hours agonizing over whether to send you that letter, knowing that if it got out that a respectable married woman was having a relationship with a gay woman who was about to become head teacher at the school attended by her children…’
‘Yeh, OK,’ Bliss said. ‘What did he do, this feller, when he saw you?’
‘Stopped. I mean, he had to, or he’d’ve run into the front of the car. Then he turned away and ran off. Almost casually. As if he was an athlete running for pleasure, and he was full of endorphins, you know?’
‘What was his… you know, his mood? You gerra sense of that?’
‘It was – this is going to sound crazy – but it was as if he was loving it. Despite all the blood. Obviously, we thought it must be his own blood, and you think… even as you’re backing the car away, you’re thinking, does he need help? And yet that really wasn’t…’
‘Like he was relishing the blood?’ Bliss said. ‘I’m thinking the way a new huntsman – a fox-hunter – when it’s his first time, they splatter him with the fox’s blood?’
Bliss’s eyes met Annie’s, saw a flickering warning there. He smiled.
‘I’m afraid I’ve had nothing to do with blood sports,’ Jan said.
Annie asked her, ‘Do you think he saw you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He must’ve seen what kind of a car you had.’
‘And if you backed up and accelerated out of there, he must have known you’d seen him,’ Bliss said.
He watched Jan playing nervously with a stray blonde curl. Women of a Sapphic persuasion, it wasn’t as easy to identify them any more. In a few ways, she was more girlie than Annie.
‘I did think of that, yes,’ Jan said. ‘Another very good reason not to want to be identified, wouldn’t you say?’
Bliss said, ‘If we were to show you some piccies…?’
Felt Annie Howe’s head coming round on him with the weight of a gun turret.
‘It would be very unlikely that I’d recognize anybody from a photograph,’ Jan said. ‘As I say, it was all terribly fast and rather blurred.’
Bliss saw the waitress leaving the doorway of the bar with their coffee and cups on a tray.
‘What about your friend?’
‘She saw less than I did. Screaming her poor wee head off by then.’
‘I firmly trust you weren’t actually going to do that,’ Annie said. ‘That you were saying it just to annoy me.’
Jan had left. They knew where to find her. Bliss licked his spoon.
‘Why not? It’d be with a selection of other photos.’
‘Planting the idea that West Mercia Police suspect Sollers Bull of killing his brother?’
‘Got that twat’s prints all over it.’
Telling her about his and Karen’s visit to Magnis Berries last night and the reason. Annie scowled. Bliss shrugged.
‘Don’t tell me you wouldn’t’ve done the same.’
‘As it happens, I did know about Mansel selling the land to Magnis.’
‘Done behind Sollers’s back?’
‘According to Sollers, it was a decision made without much forethought. Mansel was using those top fields for training his sheepdogs. And then simply decided he’d had enough. The offer came, and he took it. Shortly before he was killed, he’d arranged to sell all his dogs to Berrows, from Kington, who you’ll know.’
‘Jeremy?’
‘He’s taken them all. Five dogs.’
‘That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’
‘What’s so odd about it, apart from the timing? Mansel presumably didn’t know he was going to be murdered. He’d lost the patience for it, according to Sollers. Not winning trophies any more. That’s all it is.’
Bliss said nothing. Sat and looked at Annie, sitting with her jacket open, her long woollen scarf hanging loose. The slender neck, the carelessly brushed pale hair.
‘Right,’ Annie said. ‘We’d better get back. I’ll send Slim Fiddler to find that field, and I’ll make sure he goes over every last blade of grass.’
‘Good luck.’
Bliss contemplated the oval miniature of his own face wizened into the sugar spoon. Spent a couple of cliff-edge seconds reconsidering his decision not to tell Annie about Kirsty’s first little bombshelclass="underline"
…when it all comes out, won’t one of you have to move to another division? Isn’t that how it works?
Annie said, ‘Presumably you didn’t get anything useful from Magnis Berries?’
‘Nothing of immediate significance, no.’
Annie stood up, buttoning her jacket, the tower and steeple of St Peter’s in the wedge of white sky behind her. For a moment Bliss thought she was smiling as she looked down at him.
Then she said, ‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t assure me again that you never hit your wife. I believe you. However, for the foreseeable future…’ she tucked a two-pound coin under the coffee pot ‘… I think we need to be colleagues.’
‘What?’
‘Colleagues,’ Annie said. ‘People who work together.’
34
Halfway along the Golden Valley, a green hill bounced up on the right, its summit shaped by the earthen ramparts of another British camp. Tiny compared with Credenhill, but they were everywhere, a whole layer of landscape sculpted by ancient Britons. Still here, still dominant.
Merrily was driving slowly, under clouds like the rolling smoke from a grass fire. She’d brought a flask of holy water up from the car and done the blessing, with Liz. An appeal for calm and light in an oppressed place. Most times you were uncertain: an unaccountable man-stench in the tower-room – wishful thinking, Miss Pleston?
And yet a faint sensation of something resistant had come back at her, and she’d walked downstairs feeling unexpectedly drained. Maybe she was just overtired and underfed, or affected by the mind-altering properties of Jeyes Fluid.
No, Barry had been right. Byron Jones was not funny.
It would’ve been interesting to see the books he’d kept in the tower. Old pagan religions and the occult. Merrily thought about the people of the hilltop camps, whose priests had been Druids. Talk to Jane, and they were kindly nature-worshippers and all they ever used a sickle for was cutting down mistletoe. Read the Roman accounts, and you got blood-drenched savages, well into human sacrifice. They probably didn’t smell too good, either.
In the straggling village of Peterchurch, she pulled into the parking area opposite the Norman church, called home to check the machine and found just the one message:
‘ Merrily, this is Fiona Spicer. I think we have loose ends.’
A voice still perfectly contained, wholly together. A widow of one day. Merrily sat staring across the parking area at a children’s playground which looked like a small power station. Lit a cigarette and called Fiona.
Lol had been in Danny Thomas’s barn since eight. Danny was walking up and down in the straw, rehearsing a verse of ‘Trackway Man’, talking it into the mic.
‘“Among the hills where shepherds watch, we’ll march towards the skyline notch. From tump to twt we’ll mark the route…” What the hell’s a twt, Lol?’
‘I thought you were Welsh.’
‘I’m from Radnorshire, it en’t quite the same.’
‘I thought it was a Radnorshire word. I dunno, maybe a burial mound, a small tump. Rhymes with route, anyway, that’s all that matters.’
‘This don’t seem like your kind o’ song, somehow,’ Danny said. ‘Them Biblical quotes at the start. “Set me up waymarks, writes Jeremiah”?’