They were fired? Dismissed… for that?
They was causing upset. Bad vibes. Praying out loud. Lighting candles. Is fire risk! Health and Safety!
Vasile had said he thought they were, in the end, happy to take some money to go. Maybe they took the ghosts with them. Or maybe they didn’t, all the murmurings that went on afterwards.
Bliss could hear Jeremy Berrows telling him about places where the air was loaded and Mansel’s sheepdogs had become uncontrollable. He’d thought of going back, alone, to talk to Vasile again, man to man. But the problem was that when people’s testimony bordered on the unlikely it negated everything else they’d told you, making them useless as witnesses. Guaranteed to get you laughed out of court.
He turned the car at the next junction and headed back to his father-in-law’s farm.
Jane lit a candle on the altar and sat down in the choirmaster’s chair.
She was alone, hadn’t seen much of Mum tonight – parish meeting at the village hall, Uncle Ted, usual trivial crap, but at least it kept her out of the church.
The full preparation now, systematic relaxation.
Sitting upright, hands on knees, slowly sensing the body from the toes to the top of the head. It was getting a lot easier. Practice. Jane was finding she could almost slide into a relaxed state these days, without the tedious preliminaries.
Meditation: probably the only procedure which actually transcended all the halfway-workable religions. Of course, Jane only did this in here when she was sure she wouldn’t be disturbed by Uncle Ted or some other tosser. Didn’t want anyone to think she’d found Mum’s God.
The Easter holiday had begun tonight. Tomorrow would be the first day of what was, in effect, the last school holiday she’d ever have. When the big summer holiday began, it wouldn’t count because she’d have left school. Not a break, but a springboard into adult life. Whatever that was about.
Jane listened to her breathing. She’d brought along the copy of Revelations of Divine Love from Mum’s desk. Mum had marked a section where Mother Julian was welcoming the sickness she’d contracted at the age of thirty, wanting it to bring her as close as possible to death. To know the reality of dying, in the hope this would cleanse her and bring about a spiritual rebirth. OK, a touch masochistic but this was not a woman who messed around. Maybe knowing there were some secrets you could only learn through pain. Jane went into some chakra breathing, a kind of energy conveyor belt, but soon lost the cycle. The body was still, but the mind wouldn’t switch off.
She’d seen Cornel again tonight. He’d parked his Porsche on the square but, instead of going into the Swan, he’d followed his jutting chin down Church Street, like some zombie on the prowl, and she’d watched him enter the Ox, where the serious drinkers went. She’d almost gone after him – Mum would be in the village hall for at least two hours – but wasn’t sure she was ready to handle it.
Had to be done right.
Getting off the school bus, she’d run into Gomer outside the Eight Till Late. He’d looked embarrassed. Admitting, as they walked down Church Street together, that he was getting nowhere. Talked to everybody he could think of, either side of the border, and, while some could remember when there were illegal cockfights, nobody knew of any happening hereabouts at present. Gamecocks were still being bred, but for collectors, poultry buffs, not for fights.
En’t gived up, mind, Gomer had said. Jane didn’t think he was optimistic. But, look, that was OK. That was actually good. It meant local people weren’t involved. Now the finger of suspicion could only be pointing one way.
She knew a lot about cockfighting, now. Not something she’d ever wanted to study, but this was not a responsibility she could walk away from. She’d sat down in her apartment and spent nearly two hours on the Internet, downloading everything except the cockfight videos. Fights had been staged for over two thousand years and were still happening, mainly in the Far East, South America. Less publicly in the UK, where they’d first been introduced by Roman invaders.
Bastards. She couldn’t stop thinking about the bird with the lion’s mane.
But mainly she couldn’t stop replaying what she’d heard last night, outside the kitchen door.
James Bull-Davies.
Complicated times, Mrs Watkins… what, with Savitch bidding to buy the Swan…
Dear God, the final insult. The oak-panelled Jacobean core of the community. How many people knew? Mum had obviously known already and taken a decision not to tell the kid. Hey, let’s not have Jane doing something stupid. But she wasn’t a bloody kid any more and whatever she did wouldn’t be stupid.
Jane concentrated on her breathing, taking the air down to the solar-plexus chakra.
Preparation.
Curved bars of blackening cloud made the western sky look like an old ribcage as Bliss turned, like he had hundreds of times, along Chris Symonds’s farm track.
In a glow of excitement, once upon a time, at the thought of seeing Kirsty, in tight black jeans and a straining top, waiting for him where the track forked by an ancient oak tree with a trunk wider than his car.
A dirt track in those days. Now it was tarmac. The real thing, not one of your itinerant-gang jobs that cracked up in weeks; this one was in better nick than the county roads. Possibly even quietly laid by a few of the same fellers, Bliss had heard. The word was that Chris was putting himself up for the council next time.
He turned left at the fork, driving slowly without lights, following the track leading to the stone outbuildings converted into classy stone holiday cottages, one of them currently occupied by Kirsty and the kids. Bliss slowed, did a tight three-point turn and parked on the grass verge a good distance away. Didn’t want her looking out and recognizing his Honda and not answering the door.
Just as well. When he got out of the car, not fully closing the door to avoid the noise, he saw another vehicle, a light-coloured Discovery, half hidden on the edge of the pair of fat leylandii which separated the holiday cottages from the farmhouse and threw their front doors into evening shade.
No sign of Kirsty’s Ka. Chris Symonds drove a Discovery; maybe she’d borrowed it to cart stuff around. Worst scenario would be that Chris and Pat were in there, in which case a mere exchange of bitter words would be the least he’d get away with.
Bliss was about four paces from the door when there was muffled click and then he was standing like a social-club compere in overlapping circles of garish lemon light.
He backed off sharpish. Who the hell had installed security spots?
A shadow crossed the upstairs window and he heard a muffled biffing – the heel of a hand repeatedly hitting a jammed window frame. And then, as it gave way, a voice from up there.
‘… bloody thing. See, told you it was nobody. Not even the paparazzi.’
…trailed by a sound he hadn’t heard in a good long while: Kirsty’s little shocked-but-thrilled, plumped-out giggle.
Bliss crouched in the damp grass at the edge of the track until the security lights reached the end of their cycle and went out, and he could see the figure in the window, out of shadow up there.
The shock and the pain came sudden and vicious, like a knife-thrust in some clammy alleyway, as the setting sun showed him that the parts of Sollers Bull visible above the window frame were unclothed.
42
It took a while to come out – it always did around here. The two brothers had been introduced by Bax as Percy and Walter. They lived in a small red-brick cottage, nineteenth-century, at the end of a row of modern houses and bungalows near Kenchester. They travelled in the slow lane. The silent Walter, who was probably over ninety, wore an apron and made the tea. Percy had never heard of anybody called Lol before.
‘Short for Laurence,’ Lol said.