What we are
IN THE END, Bliss just had to call Annie.
They’d have gone through the ridiculous, but necessary procedure of checking her alibi and concluding that whoever had shot Charlie Howe, it wasn’t his daughter. They’d have finished with her mobile by now but, if it still wasn’t safe to call her, Bliss didn’t care. He was tired; he wanted a long, warm back to stretch out against until it was light.
So when his car wouldn’t start outside the country pub he’d gone to for an evening meal simply because he’d never been there before, didn’t know anyone, he didn’t call the AA, he called Annie on her mobile. Finding she was staying at the motel near the Plascarreg, in case she was needed in Hereford. Double room, he was hoping, but he didn’t care.
She came out into the Hereford tundra and picked him up in her little Yeti, and he told her about Darth Vaynor’s meeting with one of Jack Kenny’s bagmen. Vaynor following Bliss’s script because of Bliss’s need to keep his head below the counter.
‘Seems Kenny didn’t actually throw it out,’ he said as they abandoned his Honda, in the pub car park. ‘In fact he put it into the system. For the morning.’
‘Only you would think the morning might be too late, Francis.’
‘The sooner somebody goes down for Charlie, case closed, the more likely it is that we walk out from under this. The longer it takes to get a result, the more likely it is that they come back to you. And Friday night at Charlie’s place. When somebody will have seen us.’
She started back towards town, very slowly, on some very nasty roads.
‘I keep wondering,’ she said after a while, ‘if it’s best to simply tell them about Friday. Let them take us apart, find there’s nothing there. Come to an arrangement, leave Hereford. Maybe one of us keeps a job. I don’t mind if it’s you.’
‘That what you want, Annie? It’s part of us, being coppers. I mean us as an item. Part of what we are.’
‘It’s a pretty sorry reason to stay together. Sounds like convenience.’
It was friggin’ inconvenience. And not only because the police wouldn’t have senior officers in the same bed, even though they knew it happened. If it could be turned into a good reason for killing Charlie, even if they couldn’t make it stand up they wouldn’t let it simply fade into Gaol Street folklore.
‘If it does turn out to be Hurst,’ Annie said, ‘you’d need to stay well out of it and let Jack Kenny walk away with all the credit. If your ego can stand that.’
There was, he had to admit, sense in this. He leaned back. They’d passed a couple of abandoned cars and even the Yeti, good for its size, was struggling.
‘I cried,’ Annie said after a silence, pushing on towards the main road at Belmont. ‘I actually cried. For a long time. Don’t know what I was crying for. Maybe for the dad I used to have a long time ago. On which basis, perhaps it was the kind of crying I should’ve done years ago. Doesn’t matter. It’s done now.’
‘I’ve never seen you cry,’ Bliss said.
‘It’s not pretty. I was battering the headboard and telling him what a bastard he was, and if he thought I was going to his state funeral he could fuck off.’
Suspecting she was crying now, he answered his mobile.
‘Bliss,’ she heard.
Over the wheezing and the sobbing, the rumble of the engine, the poisonous hiss, and the sound of stumbling feet around a snowbed already unmade, brown and slushy and soured.
He won’t come, you know, Darvill had said.
Iestyn? He might.
Oh, he came. He was there. You couldn’t see the driver, but Gomer Parry had recognized the machine.
‘That’s Iestyn Lloyd’s fancy American sprayer!’
‘Frannie…’ Merrily panting into the phone, weaving between the gravestones, looking frantically all around. ‘Please… get us some help. You need to get some people here. I mean fast. All kinds of people.’
In the ill-lit night, through the falling sky, it looked like one of those busy Bruegel snow scenes. But Bruegel, to her knowledge, had never done panic and pain, confusion. His people did not have hands over their faces, moaning and sobbing and calling out for one another, asking why.
‘You’re still at Kilpeck, right?’ Bliss said.
‘Yes. Still at Kilpeck.’
Where the smell was sweet. Like caramel. The smell that was part of the falling snow.
‘Let me stop you there, Merrily. Have other people called the police? If not, get them to do it.’
‘They’re doing it now. Phones everywhere.’
What people did now; they reached for their phones.
To video it. Some of them, amongst the ones who weren’t burned or fighting for breath, were bloody filming it.
‘Right then,’ Bliss said. ‘Calm down. Tell me.’
‘It’s pesticide.’ She’d reached the edge of the wall, looking down. Where were they? Jane, Lol, Eirion. Please. Any of them. ‘It’s a pesticide sprayer, like…’ When she’d first seen its extending arms splayed out, she’d thought of the Kilpeck pylon, split down the middle and collapsed. ‘… like a big tractor with wings and nozzles. It’s got Iestyn Lloyd inside it, and he’s spraying this filth everywhere.’
‘Then where’s—’
Her face was stinging with snow.
Hands gripping her arms, now, pulling her back from the edge of the wall round the church’s mound.
‘Come back, Merrily,’ Rachel Peel insisted. ‘Now.’
Snow didn’t sting. She knew that. Snow didn’t hurt your eyes.
‘I can’t see them.’ Her eyes filling with tears, or something. ‘I can’t see them anywhere.’
‘Let’s just get you back,’ Rachel said.
Outside Clehonger village, normally just a few minutes away from the main road into Hereford, a breakdown crew was disentangling a people carrier from a bus shelter. And there was Big Patti Calder from Traffic, old mate of Bliss, running the show. Annie spotted her too and was already reversing, sliding all over the road, and pulling in under some trees out of sight, to wait this out, wait until anybody who might know them had cleared off.
They might get back to Hereford by dawn. They wouldn’t have made it to Kilpeck.
He had Vaynor back on the phone. Vaynor said the incident was known about, but nobody was there yet.
‘I’m looking at a sprayer now on the computer, boss. Half-tractor, half-microlight. They’re bad enough in a field, slaughtering wildlife. But this doesn’t bear thinking about. You’re sure he’s spraying people?’
‘That’s what I’ve been told.’
‘Do we know what with?’
Annie had been on her own phone, examining the possibilities. Most of them were long words you didn’t want to read twice.
‘Probably something that deals very efficiently with wild flowers in potato fields,’ Bliss said, ‘and evidently also causes skin burns and respiratory problems to human beings. Let me know when you find something out. My contact’s vanished.’
‘Listen, boss, what I wanted to tell you, they brought me in on an interview as local knowledge man. Guy called Adrian Ripley, who is Lyndon Pierce’s partner in accountancy. He was very, very scared.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘I won’t say all of it came out, but it’s certainly enough to keep the Charlie team going for most of tomorrow.’
‘This is Pierce’s link with Charlie?’
‘That was taken for granted. This is better. This is Pierce and Liam Hurst. Yes, Pierce does indeed handle Iestyn Lloyd’s accounts, which is one big earner to start with, but they’re never satisfied, are they? It’s fact that Iestyn’s been losing it up top for a while. Hurst’s been… helping him out, shall we say?’
‘Fingers in the pie.’
‘More like a whole arm. There’s a deal on the table, involving Pierce, Hurst and a building firm whose name you’ll know immediately, to make available all the land needed for what would amount to something like Ledwardine New Town.’
‘That’d be big.’
‘Massive, boss. The fly in the ointment was Aidan Lloyd, who was pushing him towards a different kind of farming. They last thing he’d go for would be selling lovely farmland for Ledwardine New Town. Hurst’s saying to Pierce, Well, let’s not worry about Aidan at this stage, shall we? He’ll come round. Few weeks later, bang. And then Hurst’s saying Let’s not worry about Iestyn, he’ll come round.’
‘He was gonna do Iestyn too?’
‘Maybe just let him vanish into the sunset. Why rush things? But they do, don’t they, once they’ve started. For Pierce, there was very big money in this, but even he was thinking, Oh shit, what have I got myself into? Pierce was greedy, ruthless, all of that, as Ripley’s only too glad to confirm, but removing human obstacles is a different league, isn’t it? Pierce realizes he might be in bed with a monster, but what can he do? Shares his fears with Ripley – after all, nothing illegal’s happened yet involving Pierce. Should he go to the police and risk them looking into his previous iffy deals? And then it comes to him – why not talk to his respected colleague, Councillor Howe, a man who’d know the best way to take it to the police, by the front door or the back.’
‘And Charlie, of course,’ Bliss said, ‘sees a much more satisfying way of using this information and launches his private investigation with a trip to Hewell. This is nice, Darth. We may never find out how Hurst gorra hint that Pierce was presenting Charlie with his scalp, but let’s try and harden this up. Go and talk to Kenny’s bagman again, claim all the deductive credit and gerrit over to them that they need to get a warrant to raid his place. Tonight.’
‘What are they looking for?’
‘You need to go in with them. You’ll know.’
From the road ahead, there was this sickening, rending screech as the people carrier was parted from the bus-shelter under the white spotlights and the blues and twos.
In the grey snowlight, phone off, Bliss looked at Annie.
‘You gorra charger for the mobile? Could be on this all night.’
He watched her fumbling around in a side pocket. There was a funny side to this: directing a major inquiry, secretly, from the sidelines, through a third party, over a mobile phone. So funny he was close to tears.
He thought about Hurst. Wasn’t the big thing it used to be, killing. He thought about the famous Joanna Dennehy, who’d knifed three men to death on the other side of England then, just for the fun of it, went on a stabbing spree in Hereford where she was caught. The whole world now knew that picture of Joanna brandishing a huge, serrated blade like an executioner.
Hurst wasn’t like that.
‘Some fellers live for it,’ Bliss said. ‘A hell of a lorra fellers live for it. Bang – something flying up out of the grass, the bigger the better. Foxes, badgers, they can justify it – stock gerrin slaughtered, lambs, chickens, cattle contracting TB. They still gerra lorra fun out of it, but…’
‘The justification almost makes a virtue out of it,’ Annie said.
‘Exactly. Some of these fellers – never admit to it in a million years – dream of killing a human being. Even good old Slim Fiddler came close to it. They’d like to be in the SAS. Obviously not the bit where you’ve gorra jog twenty-five miles with a fifty-pound pack on your back, but the endgame, where it’s kill or be killed. Preferably without the being-killed bit.’
‘Why didn’t we have Hurst in the frame earlier?’
‘Because we’re not looking for fellers like him right now. We never have. We’re all looking for Islamic terrorists and creepy blokes with computers full of kiddie-porn. And because killers are invisible in the countryside. And because—’ Bliss choked back the dark laughter. ‘Because he’s a civil sairvant.’
‘Linked to a bureaucracy geared to making more and more farmland available for development,’ Annie said. ‘Run by politicians financed by builders. He’s killing for the economy. Or this could all be madness. No clear explanation.’ She sank back behind the wheel. ‘What the hell am I saying? This is not how I talk.’