Boy’s hand still in shadow. Instant of crackling tension. Wafting stench of hot meat from a fast-food van.
Nah. Empty.
Pretty sure. Most likely the pocket was empty, too. This was still Hereford. Just. Feed him a get-out.
‘Yeh, thought not. Now piss off home, yer gobby little twats.’
Watching them go, one looking back, about to raise a finger, and Bliss taking a step towards him—
‘You do that again, sunshine, and I will frigging burst you!’
— as the mobile started shuddering silently in his hip pocket and the carousel invited them all to have a merry little Christmas.
‘Good of you, sir,’ the community-support woman said. ‘It’s, um, DI Bliss, isn’t it?’
‘No way,’ Bliss said. ‘Not here, luv. Got enough paperwork on me desk.’
Realising he was sweating, and it wasn’t warm sweat. This sharpend stuff… strictly for the baby bobbies and the rugby boys. Ten years out of uniform, you wondered how anybody over twenty-five could keep this up, night after night.
He dragged out his still-quivering phone, flipped it open, feeling not that bad now, all the same, and not considering the possible consequences until he looked up and saw those familiar female features gargoyling in the swirl of light from the carousel and remembered that he wasn’t here on his own.
‘You bastard.’
Gloved hands curling into claws.
‘Kirsty, tell me what else I—’
‘You swore to me you’d left that bloody thing at home.’
Bliss squeezed the phone tight.
‘Never gonner change, are you, Frank?’
Kirsty’s face glowing white-gold as the little screen printed out KAREN. Bliss slammed the phone to an ear.
‘Karen.’
‘Thought you’d want to know about this, boss. Where exactly are you?’
‘Pricing vibrators in Ann Summers.’ Bliss was feeling totally manic now. ‘Complete waste of money nowadays, Karen, what’s a mobile for? Pop it in, get yer boyfriend to give you a ring. Magic.’
Stepping blindly into the extreme danger zone; no way he could share that one with Kirsty.
Like, indirectly, he just had.
‘You could be there in a few minutes, then,’ Karen said.
Bliss looked up at the clock on the market hall. Eight minutes to nine.
‘You shit, Frank!’
‘Kirst—’
‘You stupid, thoughtless, irresponsible piece of shit! Suppose one of them youths’d had a knife? Or even a gun, for Christ’s sake? What about your children?’
‘Jesus, Kirsty, it’s not frigging Birmingham!’
Kirsty spinning away in blind fury, Karen saying, ‘Um, if you’ve got a domestic issue there, boss, I can probably reach Superintendent Howe—’
‘Acting Superintendent.’ Bliss saw the carousel stopping, his kids getting down. ‘Let’s not make it any worse. What is this, exactly? Go on, tell me.’
‘It’s a murder, boss.’
‘We’re sure about that, are we?’
‘You know the Blackfriars Monastery? Widemarsh Street?’
‘That’s the bit of a ruin behind the old wassname—?’
‘Coningsby Hospital. Look, really, if there’s a problem…’
‘No problem, Karen.’
Bliss pulled out his car keys, shrugged in a sorry, out-of-my-hands kind of way, and held them out to Kirsty. It was like pushing a ham sandwich into the cage of the lioness with cubs, but they’d need transport.
‘Five minutes, then, Karen. You’re there now?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You all right, Karen?’
Something in her voice he hadn’t heard before. Other people’s, yes, coppers’ even, but not hers.
‘Yeah, it’s just… I mean, you think you’ve seen it all, don’t you?’
‘Doc ’n’ soc on the way?’
‘Sure.’
‘Don’t bother coming home tonight, Frank.’ Kirsty ripping the bunch of keys from Bliss’s fingers, the two kids looking pitiful. ‘You can go home with Karen. Spend the other five per cent of your time with the bitch.’
Bliss covered the bottom of the phone, the plastics looking on; how embarrassing was this?
Karen said, ‘Before somebody else tells you, boss, I’ve contaminated the crime scene. Threw up. Only a bit. I’m sorry.’
‘It happens, Karen.’
Not to her, though. Bliss was remembering how once, end of a long, long night, he’d watched Karen Dowell eat a whole bag of chips in the mortuary. With a kebab? Yeh, it was a kebab.
Kirsty was walking away, holding Naomi’s hand in one of hers, Naomi holding one of Daniel’s. Of course, the kids were both a bit too old for that; Kirsty was blatantly making a point, the kids playing along, the way kids did.
It was six days from Christmas.
And yeh, he felt like a complete shit.
But not really lonely any more. What could that mean?
‘So don’t say I never warned you, Frannie,’ Karen Dowell said.
2
Moon Sat Up
Coming up to seven p.m., it stopped raining and Jane went to get some sense out of the river.
Slopping in her red wellies across the square, where the electric gaslamps were pooled in mist, and down to the bottom of Church Street, glossy and slippery. On the bridge, she looked over the peeling parapet, watching him licking his lips.
‘You’re not actually going to do this…?’
Zipping up her parka to seal in a serious shiver, because she didn’t recognise him any more. In this county, the Wye was always the big hitter, lesser rivers staying out of the action. In old pictures of the village, this one was barely visible, a bit-player not often even named. Slow and sullen, this guy, and — yeah — probably resentful.
Tonight, though, for the first time Jane could remember, he was roaring and spitting and slavering at his banks. All those centuries of low-level brooding, and then… hey, climate change, now who’s a loser?
‘Only, I thought we had an understanding,’ Jane said, desolate.
Because if this guy came out, there was no way the dig would start before Christmas.
Wasn’t fair. All the times she’d leaned over here, talking to him — influenced, naturally, by Nick Drake’s mysterious song, where the singer goes to tell the riverman all he can about some kind of plan. Nobody would ever know what the plan was because, within a short time, Nick Drake was dead from an overdose of antidepressants, long years before Jane was born, with only Lol left to carry his lamp.
Above a flank of Cole Hill, the moon was floating in a pale lagoon inside a reef of rain clouds. Jane’s hands and face felt cold. She looked away, up towards the haloed village centre and the grey finger of the church steeple. She’d seen the news pictures of Tewkesbury and Upton: canoes on the lanes, homes evacuated. It had never happened here to that extent, never — people kept insisting that.
But these were, like, strange days.
The main roads around Letton — always the first place north of Hereford to go — had been closed just after lunch, due to flash floods, and the school buses had been sent for early. Nobody wanted to spend a night in the school, least of all the teaching staff, and there was nothing lost, anyway, in the last week before Christmas.
Fitting each hand inside the opposite cuff, Jane hugged her arms together, leaning over the stonework, sensing the extreme violence down there, everything swollen and turbulent.
Across the bridge, a puddle the size of a duck pond had appeared in the village-hall car park, reflecting strips of flickering mauve light from the low-energy tubes inside. The lights were on for tonight’s public meeting — which wasn’t going to be as well attended as it ought to be. It had somehow coincided with late-night Christmas shopping in Hereford. No accident, Mum thought, and she was probably right. A devious bastard, Councillor Pierce.