Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain

Bliss had done six TV interviews, including satellite. Only one reporter had slipped in a rogue question: You feeling more comfortable on an urban case, Inspector?

‘They didn’t use it, far as I know. Maybe they’ll save it for if the rural-cops issue comes up again.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Annie said. ‘Which it well might, I’m afraid.’

Here it comes. Bliss moved out into the rain.

Annie said, ‘The Chief Constable’s had an e-mail document, copied to both MPs, from Countryside Defiance. Containing what purports to be a list of over two hundred unsolved rural crimes in this division over the past year.’

‘Like what?’

‘Theft of equipment and vehicles. Arson. Damage to property – a rural bus company having seats repeatedly slashed…’

‘Yeh, by a rival bus firm, if it’s the one I’m thinking of. Point of honour for some of these redneck bastards to settle their own scores. Half your rural crimes, it’s stuff they keep to themselves. Feud-linked, neighbours with a grudge. Leaving each other’s gates open, cutting fences…’

‘According to Countryside Defiance,’ Annie said, ‘some farmers apparently have given up reporting crimes because they’re tired of wasting hours of the working day-’

‘Balls!’

‘-on worthless interviews and statements when in the end no one is ever arrested and they never get their property back.’

‘Most thefts from farms are twats in vans, cruising the lanes, seeing what’s unlocked. Chancers from the West Midlands, South Wales. It’s not organized. What are we supposed to do about that? Put all the dozens of friggin’ patrol cars we haven’t got into hundreds of miles of twisty little lanes? Stop and search? You imagine how well that’d go down?’

‘And there’s something else,’ Annie said.

At some point, Bliss forgot where he was. Finding himself the other side of the main road, by the steps to the magistrates’ court, some drunk staring at him from under a street lamp. It was pissing down now, reminding him of the night during the floods when he’d doorstepped Annie’s dad, and come off worst.

Go home boy. Charlie’s finest sneer. Go back to Liverpool or wherever it was you crawled from. Long outstayed your welcome down yere.

Ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Charlie Howe, former head of Hereford CID. It was all different now, the organization, more remote. Bliss had met the Chief Constable just the once. He recalled a mild-mannered bloke, not a big sense of humour, but that had never been a qualification.

‘The fucker wants me out?’

‘Essentially… yes.’

‘He told you on the Bluetooth this morning, didn’t he? On your way to East Street.’

‘I didn’t say anything then because I didn’t really think he was serious. And it… didn’t seem a good time to discuss it.’

‘The cowardly twat.’

‘Francis, they’re all the same. It’s a difficult job at a difficult time.’

‘“Difficult time”-’

The drunk was still staring at him. Bliss lowered the phone, advanced on him.

‘Will you piss off!’

A sardonic, rubbery grin and a finger, and the drunk moon-walked away.

‘I’m sorry,’ Annie said. ‘It’s knee-jerk and it’s probably unjust. And it’s…’

‘A small county?’

‘Not quite set in stone. Not yet.’

‘If he’s told you, Annie, it’s as friggin’ good as.’

‘He’s told me because he’s heard there’s a long-standing hostility between us. He’s told me, because he’s hoping I’ll expedite it. I imagine he thinks I’ll quite enjoy expediting it.’

‘He say how he expects it done?’

‘The usual. It’s to be made clear to you, quietly, that DI is very much as far as you’re going if you stay here. Other opportunities will be aimed in your direction.’

Bliss stood with his face tilted into the rain, letting it come.

‘Francis…?’

‘I’m going home. I’m switching off.’

‘No, listen, that…’ Annie sounded tired and distressed. ‘That’s… not the half of it.’

Bliss sat in his kitchen until getting on three a.m. Under the naked bulb, from which Kirsty had taken the lampshade. One of the clutch of low-energy bulbs that came free from the lecky company, coiled white tubes like frozen intestine.

He’d been picturing Annie’s incident room. Her little outpost at Mansel’s yard. A message to the farmers: we’re here for you. And we’re local people. Maybe you remember my father. Maybe you were in his Lodge.

Bliss stood up, took his mug to the sink and held it under the tap with both hands for too long, numbingly cold water cascading over his wrists. Remembering something else Charlie had said that night in the rain.

You never deserved Kirsty. Nice girl. Good sensible head on her shoulders. Well rid of you, boy. Well rid.

Small county.

He turned away from the sink, hands dripping, staring at the bright, new brass lock on the back door. The locks had been changed now, front and back. Kirsty would never again get in to sniff the sheets, check the bathroom cabinet for cosmetic anomalies, the kitchen cabinet where the Brazilian decaff was, the only bit of exotica that Annie had ever introduced.

It was now entirely possible that Annie would never come here again, with her overnight bag and her expensive Brazilian decaff.

Bliss dried his hands, switched off the coiled bulb and went and sat down at the table in the dark. In his head, he was joining the wires. They ran from his father-in-law, Chris Symonds, would-be gentleman farmer, to Sollers Bull, who knew the family. To Charlie Howe, who knew the family.

And what about Lord Walford, Sollers’s father-in-law and former member of the police authority? Former? Made no odds, he’d still have the contacts.

Chris Symonds says you consistently neglected your wife, Mr Bliss .

Had it actually come from Kirsty? No stranger to False Memory Syndrome, his wife. Of course I won’t be doing anything about it. He’s not worth it. I’ll just be glad never to have to see him again.

Bliss could still hear Annie’s voice in the mobile as he was standing in the rain outside the mags’ court. The words still tight in his head like a migraine.

Abuse. Physical.

Confused at first. I’m not getting this, Annie. Hadn’t realized who she was talking about.

They’re saying… that your abuse of your wife also had a physical dimension.

And then, Who? Who, who, who…? he’d been screaming into the phone, until he realized that might make him sound like someone who easily lost it and…

… lashed out at his wife.

‘ There was no abuse. Do you understand, Annie? Making his voice very calm. Physical or otherwise. Or, if there was, it was one-sided. She knows that all too well.

Well, of course she knew it, but that didn’t matter. Didn’t matter whether he had or he hadn’t. Didn’t matter. In a small county.

Bliss sat there in the dark, head in his hands, remembering, as he often did, the first time he’d seen the DCI as a woman. Opening her front door to him on a December night, wearing the jeans and the loose stripy top. Hair down, glasses on the end of her nose. Those little blue sparks of static electricity. Maybe he should’ve seen the way this would go.

Sometimes I don’t like you.

Just last night. And then this morning, in her car, after her Bluetooth discussion with the Chief: I’m adapting to instructions, Francis. It’s what I do. Adapt. Known for it.

Thing was, he had seen the way it might go. His eyes had been open the whole way. He knew what Annie was and what he wasn’t. After that unexpected, glorious compatibility on the night they’d nailed Steve Furneaux, together, he’d been fully prepared for a slow descent into the old brittle, viper-tongued, day-to-day disparaging. A relationship as workable as a frozen toilet.