Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain

‘That include gang-rapists? Drunk.’

‘I dunno. Something’s not quite right.’

‘Be able to give you a more formal verdict on the sexual aspect later today.’

‘Won’t be me, Billy. I’ll be off back to Oldcastle. Where I might even get left alone for a bit. DCI’ll be here soon. This is the big one.’

‘You think so? Mansel Bull’s a pillar of the rural community, whereas these pitiful young things…’

‘Careful, Billy.’

‘I’m too old to care, Francis. This your mistress now?’

What?

Bliss tensed, but didn’t look at him. Up in the street, Annie Howe, in her light grey trenchcoat, was getting out of her Audi, bringing her mobile to her ear.

Just a figure of speech, that was all. Not a chance in a million that Billy Grace knew or even suspected. Just a frigging stupid, flip remark.

Bliss turned his back on the crime scene to walk slowly, as if reluctantly, towards Annie.

‘No!’ he said. ‘No, listen, that’s not what’s gonna happen…’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

Back in the Audi. Bliss in the passenger seat, all the windows up. Annie behind the wheel, no make-up. Bliss hunched himself up against the passenger door, explicit body language for anybody watching: he didn’t want to be here with this woman.

‘Apart from anything, you know exactly what it’s gonna look like.’

‘Actually, I don’t think it will,’ Annie said. ‘That’s the point. This is a double murder. By any criteria, the biggest case. It’s also going to be immensely high-profile, controversial and politically sensitive.’

‘And urban.’

‘Nobody’s going to make that distinction, Francis. And, anyway, it’s what God wants, so we have to live with it.’

She’d been talking to the Chief on the Bluetooth, driving here. Fait accompli. Fit-up. The church clock at St Peter’s began to chime the hour. Annie passed a folded paper across to Bliss, under dash-level.

He stared at her.

‘I don’t like the friggin’ Guardian. It’s all opera and foreign stuff.’

‘It’s the Daily Mail. I had to pick it up on the way here. Just read it, will you?’

Sourly, Bliss opened the paper out to a double-page spread. A panorama of Oldcastle Farm on its bank above the Wye, photographed across the fields between bands of police tape.

RURAL IDYLL OR KILLING FIELDS?

Police ‘don’t want to know’

In another picture, the Countryside Defiance banner. In the middle of the page, a shot of a man sitting with his head in his hands. The caption,

Sollers Bull: shattered.

‘If it’s painful, you can skip to the end,’ Annie said.

‘Not sure I can move me reading finger that fast.’

Annie turned away, tapping the steering wheel slowly with her nails. Bliss sighed. Near the bottom of the story, it said:

West Mercia police confirmed last night that the detective leading the inquiry, DI Francis Bliss, is an incomer from Merseyside.

‘DI Bliss has been with us for several years now,’ a spokeswoman said, ‘and we’re fully confident both of his ability and the extent of his local knowledge.

‘We consider the claims made by Countryside Defiance to be ill-founded and obstructive.’

‘So just get on with it,’ Annie said. ‘And be nice to the television people. Look, it’s the best solution. Except, possibly, for me, but I’ll cope.’

‘Two incident rooms?’

‘You get Gaol Street. I’ll be taking a caravan over to Oldcastle.’

‘Will there be a generator and a primus stove?’

‘You’ll also get some extra bodies from Worcester and two translators, that’s been agreed.’

Translators. Wonderful. Bliss could foresee long hours of watching people’s eyes for traces of guilt while listening to the soundtrack of a foreign film without the subtitles.

‘And you can have Karen Dowell.’ Annie Howe went on looking out of the windscreen down the length of East Street. ‘Look, I’m adapting to instructions, Francis. It’s what I do. Adapt. Known for it. Off you go. Get the bastards before they can leave the country. Oh-There are two Lithuanian nationals in the cells, apparently, brought in pre-dawn, drunk and incapable. That’ll be a start for you.’

‘Thanks, I’ll eat them later.’ Bliss shouldered open the passenger door. ‘Just remember what I said, Annie.’

‘About what?’

‘You know what.’

Bliss stepped out, looked up into the sheeny sky, scraped with brown clouds like the chickenshit on a new-laid egg.

‘Annie… check him out, yeh? Just… check him out.’

Despite the Metropolitan fantasies of a few power-crazed councillors, Hereford was still a big village. When a very bad thing happened, Merrily was thinking, ordinary life didn’t yet accelerate around it. Something lurched, shifted down a gear.

With East Street sealed off, traffic concertinaed, it had taken her ten minutes to get from the top of Broad Street to the Cathedral Gatehouse. You could walk it in two. She’d left the old Volvo in the Bishop’s Palace yard, meeting one of the canons, Jim Waite, who explained what had happened.

Slaughter was the word he’d used.

He hadn’t said, Where the hell is God in this?

Up in the gatehouse office, Sophie was at the window, gazing down into Broad Street, then across the Cathedral Green towards Church Street. Both of them linked into the – hitherto more obscure East Street.

The killings must have happened close to the centre of Hereford’s medieval triangle of big churches: All Saints, St Peter’s, the Cathedral. An alleyway linked East Street directly to the Cathedral Close, winding past the house once occupied by Alfred Watkins, the antiquarian.

And where the hell was God? A question that the previous owner had pencilled into the margin of her second-hand copy of Frank Collins’s Baptism of Fire, the book she’d been reading till after one a.m.

‘It’ll become commonplace here sooner than we know, Merrily.’ Sophie turned sharply away from the window, her glasses swinging on their chain. ‘Like Birmingham and Manchester. Society’s losing all cohesion.’

She went to sit down at her desk. She’d had her hair cut shorter for spring – too soon, as it had turned out. She was still wearing the winter cardie long after its time. She looked – unusual for Sophie – lost.

‘One only has to look into the hopeless faces of the drunks in Bishop’s Meadow. Lost souls in a purgatory of disillusion and charity shops.’ Both Sophie’s hands were placed flat on the desk, as if for stability. ‘I have no doubt that the vast majority are decent people, trying to earn an honest living. But they’re not the ones who create the need for a policeman almost full-time on the door at Tesco.’ She looked down at herself. ‘Dear God, stop me, Merrily.’

‘Questioning the impact of social change isn’t quite the same as joining the British National Party,’ Merrily said.

Sophie winced.

‘And we don’t know what’s happened, yet, do we?’ Merrily said. ‘We don’t know if it’s a sexual thing or a robbery or a… private matter.’

‘A private matter. That’s just it, isn’t it?’ Sophie said. ‘We don’t know what they’ve brought with them. We don’t understand what kind of demons drive them. And we do need to, because we’re not London, we’re a country town. We know who we are. Or we always used to. Now, one can feel a… a weight of silent resentment. And an apprehension.’

‘But that…’

Merrily had been about to say that it wasn’t exactly new. In the Middle Ages there’d been resentment in the city about the increasing Jewish community, even the revered bishop Thomas Cantilupe railing against them.