‘I’ve betrayed them,’ Jane said.
‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘I’ve betrayed you. But it seemed like the best solution.’
Jane looked at her, still some anger in her eyes but mainly confusion, bewilderment.
‘You’re eighteen,’ Merrily said. ‘I wasn’t in a position to give them your laptop, nor would I have.’
‘So you handed over your computer, with the database on it. Hoping to get it out of the house before I came back.’
‘Basically, yes.’
‘Do not dare say you did that to protect me.’
‘No.’ Merrily ached for a cigarette but didn’t get up. ‘I just didn’t have time to think. You don’t. It’s how they do it. Doorstep you.’
The last time it had happened — serious-faced police at the door, May we come in? — had been when they’d arrived to tell her about Sean.
‘I was tired and wet, and I couldn’t see a way out and I… still can’t. If they’d had to come back with the paperwork…’
She’d looked at DI Brent’s bland, detached, civil-servant face and seen School of Annie Howe. Remembered how Bliss always said that, where the police were concerned, a refusal often offended and offence usually led to a blind determination to nail you to the wall.
‘So what will they do with it?’ Jane said.
‘Copy everything. Then go through the names. They’ll start straight away, probably with the local ones. The local ones who seem most… extreme. Jane, have you… ever heard of a group calling itself the Children of the Serpent?’
‘Who are they?’
‘They haven’t been in contact with you?’
‘No. I’ve never heard of them. You think I wouldn’t remember something like that? Who are they?’
‘There was a threatening message on Clem Ayling’s answering machine from someone claiming to represent the Children of the Serpent.’
Jane looked genuinely blank.
‘Good,’ Merrily said.
‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘What’s to stop me sending out a round-robin email to everybody on the Coleman’s Meadow database saying we’ve been raided by the police and had our computer seized and warning them there’s going to be a witch-hunt.’
‘Nothing.’
‘And what’s to stop me ringing Eirion and getting him to tell his media friends? Getting it out in the papers?’
‘Nothing,’ Merrily said again.
‘But?’
‘But… I suppose, in most other situations it would look like some kind of breach of civil liberties. But this is a high-profile, decidedly horrific murder. It’s on the cards that somebody on that database, if they didn’t do it, at least has links to whoever did. So it’s one thing protecting somebody over a cause you believe in… shielding a murderer is something else. And what if… Let me get you a fresh cup of tea.’
‘What if he does it again, right?’
‘Mmm.’
‘This is a totally, totally shit situation.’ Jane lowered her head into her hands. ‘And things were going so well. I just…’ she looked up ‘… just met Bill Blore.’
‘You did?’
‘At the Meadow. They’re all set up.’
‘Yes, I was going to tell you about that.’
‘I had a call from Coops at school. He said Bill Blore wanted to meet me. And, like… he did. He’s going to interview me tomorrow. On camera.’
‘That’s fantastic.’
‘So I get interviewed for Trench One at the same time as friends of Coleman’s Meadow, people who I got to sign my petition, people who rallied round to help me are—’
‘Jane…’
‘Getting pulled in by the—’ Jane gripped the edge of the table. ‘By the cops. Maybe old people again, taken down the cells and… I dunno… beaten up…’
‘All right.’ Merrily stood up. ‘I’m going to ring Bliss.’
At just after seven, its cobbles glazed with rain and milky light from the Christmas tree, the square looked like an ice tableau. Certainly felt cold enough, and looking at Bliss made Merrily feel colder. Off duty now, he wore jeans and an old Stone Roses T-shirt under a thin jacket. She guessed he didn’t want to go home to an empty house, but he wouldn’t come into hers either. Probably didn’t want to face Jane. Even case-hardened cops had a cut-off point.
‘I didn’t know about it,’ he said. ‘I’d’ve told you. Maybe Karen didn’t get a chance to call me.’
He’d parked next to the market hall, and they were standing under it, alone on the square. It wasn’t raining; an intermission, that was all. But it was coming back; it always came back.
‘Actually, I thought if they ever went that far they’d send me,’ he said. ‘I was prepared for that. I’m sorry. I really am sorry, but…’
‘I suppose it was finding Ayling’s body in the river.’
‘They told you about that?’
‘Karen Dowell told me when we were alone in the scullery for about thirty seconds, while Brent had a snoop. And it’s since been on the radio.’
‘I met this archaeologist at Rotherwas. He made the connection with the river, I put in a report. And that…’ Bliss leaned into the car, hands on the edge of the roof like he was about to start a sequence of push-ups ‘… that was the grand finale of my contribution to the Ayling inquiry.’
‘Frannie?’
‘I’ve been returned to what are laughingly described as “normal duties”.’ He straightened up. ‘More specifically, this petty suburban coke dealership we’ve been eyeing up for a few weeks. Chickenshit, basically. Nobody who’s running away.’
‘So why—?’
‘Why now, you ask, three days before Christmas when we’re already stretched to buggery?’
‘You’re still thinking Charlie Howe?’
‘I went too near him once before. He doesn’t forget. Charlie spots large dollops of the brown stuff floating inexorably towards the Xpelair, he calls his only daughter.’
Bliss leaned back against the wet car and told Merrily about getting carpeted by Howe this morning for failing to report a face-off with three drunken teenagers, one of them a hospital consultant’s son now claiming he’d been threatened with violence by a foulmouthed cop. He didn’t need to explain how the Ice Maiden was manipulating the situation.
Merrily dug her hands down into her coat pocket, recalling how Bliss had once helped Lol put the screws on Charlie, to get Annie Howe off her back. Maybe that was when his name had been added to Charlie’s blacklist.
‘You think she really knows what Charlie got up to in his police days? Because whatever else you think about Annie Howe…’
‘He’s her dad, Merrily. Any shit coming off Charlie makes the greasy pole Annie’s squirming up even greasier. Whether she’s bent or straight doesn’t come into it.’
A white car pulled into the square, an elderly couple getting out, along with handbag, gloves. Dinner at the Swan.
‘Come over to the vic, Frannie. Have something to eat. Jane’s not going to scream at you.’
He shook his head.
‘I’m not that crap a cook, am I?’
‘You’re fairly crap,’ Bliss said.
‘You look tired.’
‘I’ve always looked tired, Merrily. Me ma used to say I looked like a little old man at three.’
‘No word from Kirsty?’
‘I’m guessing I’ll be hearing from her solicitor first.’
‘And is that what you want?’
‘Is that what I want?’
‘Sorry,’ Merrily said. ‘I just had a feeling you—’
‘We never should’ve patched it up. Maybe I realised that, some part of me. The part that kept shaking the cage.’