Merrily prayed silently, alone, eyes wide open, head still fogged with shock.
Annie Howe said, ‘I need to get a feeling for what might have happened on the night Mansel Bull died. I think I actually need to get yours.’
She walked away, across the flags, to a taped-off area halfway between the biggest barn and the house.
‘You can waste a lot of time looking for a motive. Forensics have overtaken psychology. You no longer need to show why someone did it, just that they did. Most convicted murderers come out of court in the back of the van and we still don’t know why.’
‘You still seemed to be presenting Sollers Bull with a selection of motives.’
‘Oh yes. Did Mansel know about the affair with Bliss’s wife, and how did he feel about that? He and Kirsty’s father were the biggest farmers in the area – were they friends or was there rivalry? Did Sollers want Mansel out of the way because the growing divergence of their ideas on the future of farming was threatening his plans? Was he afraid that Mansel was going to marry again, maybe this time producing offspring? And then there’s the sale of the land to Magnis Berries. Did Mansel really do it without consulting Sollers? Now – why did you ask Sollers if his brother was superstitious?’
‘You won’t like this.’
‘I didn’t even like you asking the question.’
‘It was when Sollers said Mansel didn’t feel it was part of his farm. An old-fashioned farmer. Instinctive. Meaning he followed his feelings. The implication was that he didn’t like that ground, even though he’d bought it himself. Was it just not productive… or what?’
Annie Howe said, ‘You’ll need to explain, as if to an idiot.’
‘Everything here is built on or around the Roman town Magnis. There are superstitions connected with parts of the area. It’s unlikely that Mansel hadn’t heard the stories. A particular field gets a reputation for being unlucky. Crops failing, stock dying, tractor accidents…’
Merrily sensed a dampening of the air between them.
‘It’s what I do, Annie. The alternative path. You get tired of being defensive in the face of the secular society. Even your copper down there…’
‘Didn’t trust the full moon.’
‘You get the same with paramedics and nurses in A and E. Night of the full moon, increased violence. Surveys prove it. Apparently. So tell me, where does irrational superstition begin? There’s an old farmer out at Bishopstone or somewhere who’s seen misty figures in the river mist, and some appear real and some don’t. He talks of one with a bird’s head. Followers of Mithras would wear masks to signify whichever grade they’d attained. One of the grades is the raven.’
Men who had been reappearing.
‘So who was the hallucination drenched in blood?’ Annie said.
When they reached the barn doors, two spotlights blazed into life high up on the house wall. As though a play was about to begin on the stage of weathered stone flags. Annie Howe fingered the police tape.
‘Around six forty-five p.m., on the night of the storm, Mansel Bull sets out for his parish council meeting, then receives a call on his mobile from the council clerk to say it’s been called off because of the weather. Mansel turns his Range Rover round and heads home. Who knew he’d be attending a council meeting? The other councillors and the clerk. And his brother, Sollers.’
She moved to the double doors opposite the farmhouse.
‘In both these barns there were cattle. Herefords. Including, in a separate stall, one bull.’
‘You know that?’
‘From Sollers himself who initially was pointing us at rustlers. Now if – for the sake of argument – there was a plan to take some of Mansel’s cattle, the night of the parish council, which Mansel never missed, might be seen as the most appropriate time.’
‘Wouldn’t Sollers know if something on that scale was happening? It would take several people.’
‘The coach house is lower down the hill, screened by trees and reached by a different turn-off from the main drive. They could easily get up here without being seen. And, on a night like that, without being heard. Perfect conditions, in fact, for crow-barring a barn door.’
‘ Was the barn door forced?’
‘No. Perhaps because it didn’t get that far. Because Mansel returned in the middle of it.’
‘And they killed him?’
‘Could easily be that simple. If Jones and his Mithraism are irrelevant. Now give me your take on it.’
‘Me?’
‘Tell me something insane.’
From the top of the farmyard you could make out, in the moonlight, the silver eel that was the River Wye. Always venerated, sometimes claiming sacrifices. Part of the landscape that the Romans knew.
Oldcastle was part of it, too, a vantage point, perhaps built inside the long-flattened ramparts of a minor Iron Age hill fort. Or a Roman site, with Roman masonry now built into the foundations of this house. Sollers hadn’t been specific. Perhaps he didn’t know. Perhaps he did.
Back at the edge of the police tape, Merrily bent and lit a cigarette. She was wearing Annie Howe’s checked woollen coat. The sleeves were too long, but it was a cold night.
‘In weather like that, most of us prefer to go home and bar the doors against the wind, but when you’re encouraged to go out and use its energy…’
‘Paganism again.’
‘Most kinds of paganism work with natural energy. If you’re in what might be considered a haunted landscape, or one that you believe to be conditioned by over a thousand years of military endeavour… I’m just giving you the received wisdom. Tell me to stop whenever you like. I was interested in Byron’s description of sacrificial ritual that doesn’t end in blood.’
‘This is the man who makes his own way here, camps in a field, goes on a fast… Is it necessary for the sacrifice to be done in the temple?’
‘I don’t know. If this was a Roman site, part of the extended Magnis… then they might find some justification for doing it right here. Leave quite a mess though, wouldn’t it?’
‘Rustlers have been known to butcher animals in the fields,’ Annie said. ‘That’s what it would look like – butchery. For the meat. All right. So, developing the idea that there was a plan to take Mansel’s bull and have it slaughtered…’
‘The candidate arrives at the height of the storm. Maybe accompanied, maybe not. Part of the challenge? You have to imagine someone who’s been through all the grades – the heat and the cold and the near-death, whatever – has now reached the point where he’s ready to take on, for a short time, the role of the god himself. He’s on fire.’
‘But these are…’ Tension creases in Annie Howe’s spotlit face illustrating the hard time she was having with all this. ‘These are educated men?’
‘Annie, high-level Freemasons, ritual magicians… they’re all educated men. Businessmen, financiers, guys in massively competitive industries, powered by testosterone, not known for their sensitivity… And right now they’re angry and disillusioned, reeling under accusations of collapsing the Western economy and walking away with their massive unde-served bonuses.’
‘Fallen masters of the universe. OK, I’ll buy it for the moment. How might this escalate to the murder of a man? Anybody can be a killer if there’s enough anger, greed, ambition, repressed sexuality. How about the candidate?’
‘You get drawn into something and if it’s changing your life for what seems like the better, you’re not going to jump off when it starts to get… extreme. Artificial stimulants might also be involved. The Romans seem to have used something called, I think, haoma.’
Miss White’s drug of war. Combined with dogma and ritual and a physical regime built around commitment to a deity, real or symbolic. Could it be recreated? Bull’s blood and magic mushrooms.
‘Nothing like a brew.’ Merrily smiled wearily. ‘As they say in the Regiment.’
Chemically-enhanced excitement in the middle of a raging wind where you could hardly hear yourself think.