‘I’ll do it now.’
But when Lol brought out his phone it was playing the riff from ‘Sunny Days’.
‘Lol? That you, man?’
‘Eirion?’
‘I’ve been everywhere,’ Eirion said. ‘Left messages. She doesn’t do this. I mean, you never know which way she’s going to jump, but she doesn’t stand you up. You know?’
‘Jane?’
70
Annie Howe – you thought you knew how she was wired, but now it was as if something in the system had gone awry. This normally emotionless woman pinched and twisted by some painful, insistent electricity. She’d had a shock and she was still getting aftershocks. Her questions were fluid and focused but some of them seemed disconnected and illogical, and somehow not…
… not police questions.
Merrily drank a second cup of coffee – too much, but she needed to be on top of this.
‘I can’t quite believe what you’re implying,’ Sollers Bull said. ‘You really think I’ve been serving up pedigree livestock for some kind of ritual slaughter?’
‘Somebody has, Mr Bull.’
‘We’re not talking about halal?’
‘We’re not talking about halal.’
‘Then perhaps you should be looking at rustlers rather than poor bloody farmers. That hidden heap of uninvestigated crimes in the countryside.’
Sollers was on his feet, leaning back against the Aga’s chromium bar. Annie Howe sitting next to Merrily at the table, the long coat hanging open.
‘Do you know Kenny Mostyn, Mr Bull?’
‘I’ve bought items from his shops.’
‘What kind of items?’
‘Guns. A shotgun for me, an airgun for my son.’
‘How old’s your son?’
‘Were you thinking you might want to arrest him, Annie?’
Annie. That was it. That small county thing again. Howe and Sollers Bull knew each other socially, but how well? Had it ever been more? They were around the same age.
Howe looked down at the table, her white-blonde hair turning rose-gold in the kitchen light. Then she looked up slowly.
‘The woman who was leaving as we arrived…’
‘A neighbour. Collecting for a local charity.’
‘So soon after your brother’s murder? She must’ve been keen.’ Annie pushing a straying strand of hair behind an ear. ‘Mr Jones’s peculiar religion… did you know about that, Mr Bull?’
‘No.’
‘Does it surprise you?’
‘Nothing like that surprises me. Country areas are full of eccentrics who think they can get away with whatever they’re doing more easily out here.’
‘How did you feel when your brother sold the top field to Magnis Berries?’
Sollers blinked, then expelled an impatient breath, shaking his head as if he found the question meaningless. Annie Howe didn’t move.
‘You don’t have to answer any of my questions, Mr Bull, but-’
‘But it might look suspicious if I don’t? For God’s sake, Annie, I’ve cooperated fully from day one. I’ve given you a DNA swab for elimination purposes, I’ve explained exactly where I was when my brother was killed and who was with me…’ Sollers upturned his head, bit his lip, sniffed, looked back at Howe. ‘All right, I don’t like selling ground, and I did not understand why my brother had done so.’
‘You took it up with him.’
‘Of course I did. He was my brother.’
‘And?’
‘He glossed over it. He’d actually bought that land some twenty years ago from a neighbour, and he said he’d never really felt it was part of the farm, so when he was offered a good price he chose to get rid of it.’
‘And that satisfied you?’
‘Look, my brother and I were different people. His kind of farming was more of its time… instinctive…’
Merrily said, ‘What does that mean, Mr Bull?’
‘He’d often follow his feelings rather than agricultural economics. Farming was in his blood. He used to laugh at my business degree – in a good-natured way, I should add.’
‘Was he superstitious?’
‘What a ridiculous question.’
Annie Howe said, ‘Is it possible that your brother supplied bulls to Mr Jones?’
‘As for that suggestion-’
‘But he did keep Herefords.’
‘You know he did. What are you doing, Chief Inspector – trying to prove in front of your subordinate that us being old friends in no way prejudices your inquiries?’
‘We were friends of friends,’ Annie Howe said. ‘That was all.’
Subordinate. Merrily smiled. At least it showed that Sollers had no idea who she was. She turned the smile on him.
‘The boss doesn’t have anything to prove to me, Mr Bull.’
A faintly amused twitch at the corner of Annie’s mouth, but it didn’t last.
‘You feel happier now about your neighbours, Mr Bull? Magnis Berries?’
‘And I certainly don’t see how that -’
‘I’m told you’ve been a regular visitor. In a manner of speaking.’
‘I like to keep an open mind about these things,’ Sollers said.
‘What things?’
‘Polytunnels. Much condemned.’
Howe nodded.
‘And the migrant workers? You suggested to my colleague, DI Bliss, that migrant workers might be at least partly responsible for the increase in rural crime.’
‘I was saying all kind of things that night. I’d just seen my brother’s butchered body. And I’m sure your colleague exaggerated my comments.’
‘We’ll come back to that, if you don’t mind. How well do you know Ward Savitch?’
‘We’re acquainted.’
‘What do you think of him?’
Another odd question.
‘I’m just interested,’ Annie Howe said.
‘He’s just a rich man in search of an identity. Wants to recreate the countryside as somewhere that makes him feel welcome. Lots of them around, in the so-called New Cotswolds, some of them TV celebs, like Smiffy Gill. And now they have an official voice.’
‘Countryside Defiance.’
‘Ostensibly the voice of the local people. In fact financed and run by incomers for incomers. I believe it began as a kind of business-class social networking site on the Internet. Then various resources got pooled, and they were away. Good luck to them.’
‘But you’re their figurehead, and you’re not an incomer.’
Sollers bent forward, ear stud winking.
‘I’m their much-prized well-known local person, who can get them into both grass-roots farming circles and hunt balls.’
‘And what’s in it for you?’
‘I don’t like being treated like a suspect, Annie.’
‘This is really not how I talk to a suspect, Mr Bull, but if that’s how you want to-’
‘Some of us need incomers. They buy meat from my farm shop, they eat in my restaurant…’
‘And I suppose it means you get to dictate some of Countryside Defiance’s policies?’
‘Don’t like the word dictate. They listen to me.’
‘Influence, then. The campaign against rural policing, for example?’
‘The campaign for rural policing.’
‘Which particularly targets DI Bliss.’
Sollers snorted.
‘Man’s a liability, as I’m sure your masters are beginning to realize. A crass little man, who was particularly insensitive on the night my brother died.’
‘Why do you think that was?’
‘Because he’s in the wrong place. Because he has no sympathy with country people.’
‘Especially,’ Annie Howe said, ‘when they’re shagging his wife.’
Merrily knocked her cup over.
Annie Howe said, ‘That was Mrs Bliss, wasn’t it, on her way out as we arrived? The woman you identified as a neighbour. Not exactly a close neighbour. Well, in a manner of-’
‘Don’t you fucking sneer at me, Annie. Kirsty and I… we’ve known each other many years, long before her marriage to that…’
‘Oik?’
‘… which had turned sour long before she and I got together again.’
‘And your wife…?’
‘My wife knows. We’ve had separate lives for some time, but we’re being responsible about it. We’ll stay married until the children leave home.’