‘The situation is that I’m quite happy for you to remain with all the other iffy bastards in the House of Lords,’ he said eventually. ‘I’d just be worried if I’d heard you’d gone back to having direct responsibility for psychiatric patients.’
‘That isn’t likely to happen,’ Shipston said.
‘In that case, as long as neither Merrily nor I have any further problems with Saltash or Fyneham or anybody else who may have been unknowingly dragged into it, you won’t hear from me again. Or from Helen Weeks.’
‘Is that blackmail, Mr Robinson?’
‘Is that paranoia?’ Lol said, and Shipston cut the call, Lol just hoping he didn’t go so far as to check out poor Helen Weeks and find out that she’d died in one of those notorious train crashes on the outskirts of London some years ago. She’d been going back to hospital at the time, accompanied by her sister.
Some people never had any luck.
The sun was setting behind the stubby-pillared market hall as Lol crossed the cobbles to the vicarage. Sunday evening and the street was full of people, but very few of them coming from the church where, in the absence of Ledwardine’s own vicar, the Rev. Dennis Beckett was conducting evensong.
Lol didn’t recognize most of these people or their posh four-by-fours.
It’s all changing, Laurence, Lucy Devenish murmured at his shoulder, frowning down her nose, which had been a little like Belladonna’s, except not so… well, not so attractive, not that Lucy would care.
The new type of incomer, Lol reflected. In the days, not so long ago, when property in Herefordshire and Shropshire and mid-Wales was still relatively cheap, you’d get the pioneer type, the urban romantics with rural dreams who wanted a smallholding, their own veg garden, a few sheep and chickens. Now the Border had become the new Cotswolds and it was the wealthy people who were moving in, and they were not satisfied with a low-key existence, side by side with the farmers and the old village families.
They wanted to possess.
There were two more modest cars in the vicarage drive, and he thought he recognized both of them.
‘We’re not here, Laurence,’ Frannie Bliss said. ‘Neither of us.’
‘Ghosts?’ Lol pulled out a chair next to Merrily’s at the refectory table. ‘Everybody’s a ghost.’
Mumford looked up from his tea, his eyes muddy.
‘Andy here didn’t want to come to HQ,’ Bliss explained. ‘And I didn’t want to be seen with him, either – Annie Howe’s much too close to that prick from Shrewsbury.’
Lol didn’t understand, and couldn’t see any reason why he might need to.
‘Jane’s out with Eirion.’ Merrily poured him some tea. ‘I think they’re celebrating something. So I thought it would be a good time to, you know…
‘Complicate my life,’ Bliss said.
‘It might be rubbish, Frannie. Bell might be absolutely right in her belief that Jon Scole killed Robbie. Maybe, but I just don’t want it to be him. I don’t think he had his adoptive parents killed, either. The people you liked, you don’t want them to have been the bad guys. Whereas the people you don’t like…’
Merrily looked at Mumford, who, for his part, had wanted it to be this Jason Mebus. Mumford didn’t even look up. He was wearing a suit and tie, and didn’t look retired. He looked safe again. Retired people, Lol had decided, were the new delinquents. Lol had heard that, following a phone call from Gomer Parry, Mumford might soon be head-hunted by Jumbo Humphries, Welsh Border garage-owner, feed dealer and private investigator. It would keep Mumford off the streets.
‘You must be awful glad you didn’t kill the twat, Andy,’ Bliss said.
Mumford grunted. ‘Was never on the cards.’
Bliss smiled, looked at Lol and Merrily, and lifted his eyebrows.
Merrily said, ‘I’m probably just being stupid.’
‘Look,’ Bliss said. ‘It’s pretty clear that nobody thought Robbie was an accident, and suicide looks increasingly unlikely. So if there has to be a third suspect, fair enough, I’m always happy to get another lawyer out of the system.’
‘I just lay awake thinking about it, and then I woke up thinking about it.’ Merrily shook out a cigarette. ‘I thought that, well, if Jon Scole wasn’t bothered about all the money going to Robbie, here was somebody who definitely was.’
‘Go on, then. Spell it out.’
‘Well… her childhood was disrupted after her father dumped her mother for Bell. She was virtually expected to be Bell’s nursemaid whenever she spent any time with them. And, after her father went off to America, it was her real mother who got her the job with Smith, Sebald. And then she gets saddled with Bell again.’
‘She could’ve said no, Merrily.’
‘With Bell in the same town, and her father saying please look after her? OK, on the one hand a good client, but it must have been hell constantly covering things up, wondering what the firm’s good name was going to be dragged into next. And then there’s her future father-in-law, who… well, a lot of unexplained alienation there that must already be putting a strain on her relationship with Stephen Lackland.’
‘And then,’ Bliss said, ‘the mad woman announces that she’s adopting the son of – pardon me, Andy – this grasping bint from the Plascarreg, and making arrangements to ensure he and the new Palmers’ Guild get the bulk of her considerable estate. Do we know if Susannah Pepper attempted to talk Belladonna out of it?’
Merrily shook her head. ‘Dunno, but – something else that occurred to me – if Bell died, Susannah would’ve been left as Robbie’s guardian. Not the way anyone would want to start their married life.’
‘Could she die?’
‘That’s her lifetime’s ambition, Frannie. Anyway, you could never prove it about the lawyer. I just wanted to unload it. Sorry.’
‘No, no… I’ll pass it on, discreetly. No doubt the lads in Ludlow will be observing them together when Bell appears in court to face charges of wilful damage to a stiff, or whatever we cobble together. Charge might, of course, get thrown out – who knows?’ Bliss finished his tea. ‘So you’ve placed her in the custody of Huw Owen. Interesting.’
For both of them, Lol thought.
It had been Merrily’s idea to ask Huw Owen to take care of Bell. They’d told her last night that The Weir House was already surrounded by the media, and they’d brought her back here to the vicarage. It was safe enough for her – and safe from her, Lol had thought – in that it wasn’t Ludlow.
Although at one stage she’d become disorientated and appeared to think that it was a country-house hotel, Bell had slept for perhaps the first time in over twenty-four hours. By the time she was awake this morning, around eleven, Huw was already here, looking like the stand-in keyboard player from some acid-rock band that had never made it into the 1970s. Bell had acted strange and subdued and seemed in some way hollow, as though some part of her had indeed rolled like a fireball from the church tower, and was already haunting the back streets of Ludlow.
Well, Huw knew all the spiritual retreats and the sanctuaries that could turn people around. Plus he had a murky kind of charisma. And he liked strange women.
They hadn’t consulted Susannah Pepper.
Just after dawn, Lol had awoken suddenly in Merrily’s bed – well, it had been late when they’d got back here, and there was Belladonna to see to – convinced for a knife-edge moment that he was still up there on that tower and that the remaining two candles hadn’t inexplicably gone out when Bell had lowered herself over them.