‘You were deliberately shaking the cage?’
‘Possibly.’ He started pushing at the car again. ‘Thing is, you can keep walking the tightrope, carrying this fragile thing in both hands, keeping it dead steady, one foot in front of the other, not daring to blink… and then one day you think, Shit, is this a life?’
‘It is for some couples. I suppose.’
‘Sad cases, Merrily.’
He talked about coppers who started out all bright-eyed and let’s nail the bad guys. All the boyish enthusiasm getting rapidly suffocated by paperwork, regulations, baseless complaints, time wasted enforcing crap new laws.
‘And when it’s going right, when you’ve had a result and you come home full of it, and you wanna talk about it to somebody…’ He shook his head. ‘She just didn’t get it, Merrily.’
‘Kirsty?’
‘Never got it.’
‘And… I mean… were you getting what she wanted from life? Sorry, Frannie, I don’t mean to…’
‘Doesn’t know what she wants. Only what she doesn’t want.’
‘You still love her?’
‘I need an early night.’ Bliss beeped open the car door. ‘I have to orchestrate a dawn raid. How’m I gonna cope with the excitement?’
‘Frannie…’
‘What?’
‘I don’t want Jane’s name…’
‘I’ve tried to explain, Merrily, I’ve no influence any more. All I can do is ask Karen to keep me in the loop.’
‘Then you keep me in the loop?’
He nodded.
‘Just so you know,’ Merrily said, ‘I went through some of the Coleman’s Meadow petition emails. Not thoroughly, but I didn’t see any mention of the Children of the Serpent. And Jane says she hasn’t heard of them, and I believe her.’
‘Good.’
‘Although there was somebody in Chichester claiming to have cursed Hereford Council.’
‘Yeh, well, we’ve all been down that road.’ Bliss slid into the car, started the engine, ran the window down and leaned out. ‘Maybe I’ll jack it in. Join Andy Mumford, go and work as a private eye for Jumbo Humphries, videoing straying husbands. What do you reckon?’
‘I reckon you’re overtired.’
Merrily walked into the Eight Till Late for cigarettes. Now Jim Prosser had told her they were planning to leave next year, the atmosphere in here, the whole feel of the place, seemed dimmer and more melancholy, like low-energy bulbs when you first switched them on. Or perhaps it had been gradually changing since the coming of Shirley West, caged at the bottom of the store.
Jim was on his own at the top till.
‘Hell, Merrily, you’re looking…’
‘Knackered?’
‘Let’s say careworn,’ Jim said.
‘Been a wearing sort of day.’
‘You too? Brenda’s been in bed all afternoon, she has. Touch of migraine.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
Jim sighed, rueful smile.
‘Kind of migraine brought on by proximity to certain folks.’
‘Oh.’
Jim looked from side to side, as if someone might be hovering, and then along the single aisle towards the post office, with its blind down, its big CLOSED sign, its… was that a metal cross on the wall?
‘Truth of it is,’ Jim said, ‘that’s another reason Brenda reckons she can’t stick it n’ more. One hand, it’s a good thing having the post office here. Good for business, passing trade. Other hand…’
‘Shirley.’
‘When that office shuts, it’s like a bloody weight’s been lifted. I got nothing against religion, as you know, but nine hours a day?’ Jim looked uncertainly at Merrily. She put down a ten-pound note, pointed at the cigarette shelves.
‘This church she goes to, in Leominster… she mention that much?’
‘She do, but I don’t listen.’ He picked up the tenner. ‘Wanted me to put a poster up for it. I said, no, we got a good church yere, and a good vicar.’
‘Thank you. How did she react?’
‘Scowled. I said, why’d you wanner go to two churches?’
‘She explain? Sorry, Jim, it’s just I had a strange kind of card from this church. Maybe I should ask her. Try and have a talk.’
Jim laid a packet of Silk Cut on the counter, with Merrily’s change. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Let her be for a while, I would.’
‘You have a particular reason for saying that?’
‘Well, it…’ Jim started fiddling with the biros in his top pocket. ‘It’s clear she’s keepin’ an eye on you. I don’t suppose I’m saying anything you don’t…’
‘Priests shouldn’t smoke or have boyfriends? Or enter church when not suitably attired?’
‘Or spurn the meat the Lord has provided,’ Jim said.
‘What?’
‘She was asking me why you never bought meat from us — I don’t know what that’s about. She watches, see. All the time she bloody watches. Main thing now is the, er… the blasphemous book.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake… how does she even know about that?’
‘Running a post office, you learns everything sooner or later, I reckon. Like a confessional, it is, behind that bulletproof screen. Learns more than’s good for her.’
Well, thank you Amanda, of Ledwardine Livres.
‘That book,’ Jim said. ‘Hole in the front of it?’
‘There is, yes.’
‘All the way down to hell,’ Jim said. ‘Apparently.’
‘And that’s where I’m going, is it?’
‘I’d been thinking I’d be broken up to leave this place,’ Jim said. ‘But mabbe not.’
SATURDAY
… a Bible which is presented
to be without error or contradiction
is a dangerous and possibly
harmful weapon in the hands of
fallible and corruptible human beings.
29
Nutters
Dirty pink light had fallen on Jane’s face in the bathroom mirror. A drawn and worried face. A face reflecting the awareness that today could actually be more life-and-death crucial than she’d figured.
She’d awoken long before daylight, heartsick about selling out the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society — turned against her own people by the disgusting police state. Yet there was a painful logic in Mum’s argument about possibly sheltering someone who thought barbaric violence could further the cause. In the pre-dawn sludge, the slaughter of an old man and the taking of his head was real and frightening, and when she tried to summon the startling excitement of yesterday — the epiphany — something else came bobbing up like a cork in a toilet. Something Coops had said, in Coleman’s Meadow last night, about Bill Blore and Trench One.
… got it scheduled for early in the next series — and that starts in the New Year.
As she rolled out of bed, the implications came crunching into place. She had two university interviews set up for late January. If Bill Blore’s programme on Ledwardine was near the start of the new Trench One series, then the university guys doing the interviews would almost certainly have seen it.
Seen and heard Jane Watkins talking about Coleman’s Meadow. And they’d remember. As soon as they met her they’d remember. So this just had to be good. Didn’t it? However bad everything else was, she had to make this interview work for her.