The Magus of Hay (8 page)

14

A hollow in time

B
LISS LOOKED SOMEHOW
askew, walking uneasily like a soldier conscious of roadside bombs. A defensiveness behind the sloping smile.

Not brain damage, brain
stem
damage. Different. Google said some functions impaired, but not mental capacity. Not for too long, anyway. Usually.

‘Frannie.’

‘Ta for this, Rev.’

Mid-morning in Cusop Dingle might have been early evening somewhere else. Wet, white sunlight was strained through the canopy of heavy trees hanging over the black Freelander, Bliss’s Honda and a small police car in the opening of a track leading across the bridge to some hidden house.

More people lived down here than you’d think. A few cottages edged the narrow lane but the bigger houses were set back on higher ground enclosed by dripping trees. Full of shady glades on a sunny day but in weather like this it was, Merrily thought, quite a dark place.

She pointed up the track, which curved away into woodland.

‘It’s up there?’

‘No, this was just the only place for us all to park without blocking the road. If we shurrup, you can hear the falls.’

Following the sound of water-rush, she peered down over a roadside rail. Jutting shelves of rock, foam. The clear pool below was bound to be deeper than it looked.

‘Another bloke was drowned there years ago,’ Bliss said. ‘And someone once drove a car through the fence above it, but narrowly escaped. So it’s got form.’

‘This is a
suspicious
death, Frannie?’

‘Well,
I’m
suspicious, but it’s like a disease with me.’

Not suspicious enough on the night he’d stumbled into an illegal cockfight in a sweaty cellar below the Plascarreg estate in Hereford. Getting his head trampled into the sawdust.

Bliss said, ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

Yesterday he’d even snapped at Sophie –
snapped
at
Sophie
.

‘And he’s a bit unusual, our man,’ Bliss said, ‘as you’ll see. Which makes his death by apparent drowning open to a little extra scrutiny. Humour me, Merrily.’

He set off under tree canopies heavy as tarpaulin then crossed the lane to another track, leading uphill into more woodland.

‘Where we going, Frannie?’

‘Not far. Norrin these shoes.’

‘You in charge now, at Gaol Street?’

‘Not exactly. There’s Brent. Acting-DCI
Dr
Brent.’

‘You have coppers now with doctorates?’

‘My guess is he gorrit online. Sixty dollars from the University of Dry Gulch, Arizona.’

The track curved round, the ground rising quite steeply out of the dingle. Bliss took a breath and started to walk again, faster, as if to prove he could. Merrily caught him up.

‘So do
all
more-senior officers have to be your adversary necessarily? Is it part of the job description? Because Annie Howe—’

He stopped.

‘She’s back in Worcester.’

‘I mean I know you were never exactly best mates but, when you were hurt, she did seem… concerned to an unexpected degree.’

‘Probably concerned I might recover.’

‘Everybody changes, Frannie. That a castle tump?’

‘What?’

She pointed towards the top of the track. It was over the hedge, a low, green mound, flat-topped.

‘No idea,’ Bliss said.

‘You don’t want anybody to think you’re unfit for frontline duty, right?’

‘Who’s saying that?’

‘Nobody’s saying it.’

‘I
look
unfit?’

‘You look… I dunno, really.’

‘Had the medicals. Passed with flying— Passed, anyway.’

‘When?’

‘When what?’

‘When did you have the medicals?’

‘Last one a couple of weeks ago. More to come, but—’

He stumbled slightly, hissed, walked on, his face taut, his thinning hair cut close.

‘I meant what time of day?’ Merrily said. ‘Only I was reading how people with your kind of injury feel tired more quickly, so if you were seen earlier in the day—’

‘Mother of God! You gonna friggin’ stop this at some point, Merrily? Pray for me in your own time.’

Bliss had stopped at a stone gatepost, a bit taller than he was. There had once been perhaps a lion or an eagle on top, but it was just a crooked projection now, like a broken thumb. Another post, about ten feet away, had been reduced to a stump. A track between the posts led down into thickets and a copse and, presumably, the brook. Merrily looked for gables, tall chimneys.

‘The house far away?’

‘No distance. The reason you can’t see it, it’s a bungalow.’

‘With pretensions?’

‘I’m told there used to be a big Victorian farmhouse on the site, demolished years ago. At a time when farmers got to preferring less maintenance and oil-fired heating.’

‘But I take it this David Hambling wasn’t a farmer.’

Bliss said nothing, waved her between the gateposts.

It was nice to feel wanted.

In the clergy, you spent many hours in the homes of the recently dead. While drawn curtains, or any marks of mourning, were no longer exactly commonplace, there was an atmosphere you came to recognize: a sense of quiet, sober unreality, a hollow in time.

But this wasn’t like that.

A tidy fitted kitchen, pine units, bottle-green roller blinds, spotlamps on a lighting track. Light ochre walls that looked sunny even on a day like this. There was milk and sugar on the dresser with a packet of chocolate digestives, a bottle of red wine, a copy of the
Radio Times
opened to last Sunday’s TV. This was the room of someone who had… just popped out.

She thought of that comforting homily, often read at funerals, about the dead person being only in the next room.

There was a young policewoman waiting for them.

‘Merrily, this is PC Winterson. Tamsin, Mrs Watkins is here in a consultative capacity. So this is between us, right?’

The girl was nodding quickly, evidently flattered at being included. Bliss was like that, oblivious of rank and pecking order. You were his mate till you let him down. He pulled out a chromium-framed stool and sat on it.

‘
I
think… we might help ourselves to a pot of Mr Hambling’s tea. Would you mind, Tamsin, if it’s norra terribly sexist request? Could
mairder
a cuppa.’

Tamsin smiled, took a stainless steel teapot to the stainless steel sink. She was pale and freckly, ginger hair tied back with a rubber band.

Merrily remembered the first time Bliss had asked her to take a look at someone’s house. Specifically two white walls of photos of women, now dead.
You’re looking at his inspiration. These are the ones he wishes he’d done. The ones he wishes he’d got to first
.
Deceptive, in the end, but he wouldn’t have taken liberties there with the teapot.

‘Is this… any kind of a crime scene, Frannie?’

‘Not that we know of.’

‘Mr Hambling – how old did you say?’

‘Over ninety. Which is one reason why nobody but me and Tamsin’s thinking of crime. Yet.’

‘No relatives, Frannie?’

‘May take some time to get them up here. He had a wife, from whom he seems to have been estranged but not divorced. And who we think is now dead. We also think he’s gorra daughter… somewhere. But Tamsin’s the expert, Tamsin’s local to the area and therefore in possession of that distinctive Welsh border character-trait where you drip-feed information gradually in case you’re talking to an enemy. Taken me friggin’ ages to gerrit out of her. You were born on a farm at…?’

‘Dorstone, sir.’ Tamsin was blushing to the roots of her pulled-back hair. ‘Near there. Few miles from here. It’s where I live. But I had this friend from school who lived at Cusop, and I used to spend a lot of time here, and she told me, way back, about Mr Hambling. How kids used to dare one another to sneak up and… well just dare to come here, really.’

‘Because…?’

Bliss waited. He evidently knew the answers to all these questions, wanted Merrily to get them first hand.

‘Stupid, really. It seemed stupid at the time, but we were all reading like Harry Potter in those days? We wanted to believe it could be like that. In real life?’

She looked at Bliss, who nodded, good as saying,
Don’t tell me, tell her; she gets paid not to laugh at this shit
.

15

Catered for

T
AMSIN SAID
, ‘I just assumed it was because he looked like one. And because it was supposed to be haunted up here.’

The bungalow overlooked Cusop Dingle on one side. Another offered a view across fields to the castle at Hay-on-Wye, the lesser-known side, the part that was more like a mansion on a hill.

This bungalow, unusually big, solidly built of brick and stone, was itself on a small promontory surrounded by decaying outbuildings inside a half-circle of oak and thorn and yew trees. Another stream was frothing over shallow rocks below it and down to the dingle. But it was an ordinary enough bungalow, surely no more than fifty or sixty years old.

‘How old would he have been then?’ Bliss asked.

‘Seemed like out of the Old Testament at the time. Or Charles Dickens? With his white hair, white whiskers. From a distance, it was like— I remember thinking, it was like a halo, all around his face. He’d’ve been eightyish, I reckon, but he was pretty sprightly. Chase you off. And catch you. Sometimes.’

‘And was he nasty? When he caught you? Or… nice?’

‘He never caught me. Well, I never went that close. Too spooky for me up yere.’

Merrily said, ‘Why do you say that?’

‘They used to say you could see like strange… lights? My friend reckons she seen it once. Like the countryside was lit up from inside? It was only for a fraction of a second. Like one of
those… like a UFO experience. Nothing to say it was anything at all to do with Mr Hambling, except it was near his house. I’m just telling you this ’cos the DI said to tell you everything, no matter how daft it sounded.’

‘So just part of local folklore,’ Merrily said.

‘Don’t know how far it went back. I probably wasn’t born before Mr Hambling was here. My friend, she asked a bloke and he said she wasn’t the first to see it, the light. It’s just something you can’t confirm one way or the other. Sorry.’

‘Mrs Watkins,’ Bliss said, ‘specializes in peculiar tangents.’

‘Your parents know about all this?’ Merrily said to Tamsin. ‘Did they tell you off for being silly?’

‘Or maybe
warn
you off?’ Bliss said. ‘In case he caught you.’

Tamsin shook her head.

‘I never heard any adults mention Mr Hambling, to be honest. Not until I started talking to them last night. People I’d known since I was a little girl.’

‘When he caught kids,’ Bliss said, ‘was he… unexpectedly friendly, perhaps?’

‘Not that I heard. They said he could get a bit annoyed if he’d been interrupted.’

‘Doing what?’

‘I don’t know. I mean, I think I know where you’re going with this, sir, but I really don’t think there was anything like… that. Like, it’s not as if we didn’t know about it going on, even as country kids – there was this bloke we were all told to keep away from, but he was quite young. He moved to Abergavenny, where I think he got nicked finally for kiddy-fiddling. Besides, my friend, when we got older, she used to say she… that she thought Mr Hambling was well catered for in that department.’

‘Which department?’

‘Women, sir.’

Bliss raised both eyebrows.

‘You haven’t told me about this, have you, Tamsin?’

‘No sir.’ Tamsin didn’t blush this time. ‘I was getting round to
it when you went to look for Mrs Watkins. Situation was that David Hambling, he used to have quite a number of visitors, and some of them were women. Quite young women. Well, compared to him.’

‘When was this?’

‘All the time. I mean, still. I thought I’d better check before saying anything, so I phoned my friend at work, and she phoned her mum who said there was one here like a few days ago?’

‘One what?’

‘A young woman. Well… young
ish
. Thirty-five? Driving a red Audi. My friend’s mum reckons they did his shopping for him.’

‘There’s no car here, is there?’

‘He’s never had one. He liked to go everywhere on foot. They reckoned he’d walk miles at one time, up into the mountains, along the Wye. Like I said, he must’ve kept himself very fit. But if he needed to go any distance, there’d always be someone to take him.’

‘All strangers to the locals?’

‘I think so. Not that he wasn’t friendly with local people… he was. He’d help them out, do things for them.’

‘Like?’

‘Well, he… he like knew a lot of old things that doctors don’t do any more. Like if you dislocated a bone he could put it back? And he knew about herbs. He could take away headaches. And people who were run-down, he’d get them going again.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Merrily said.

‘And they reckoned if you’d lost something important he could find it sometimes. But he wouldn’t take money for any of it. All he asked in return was that they should respect his privacy. And not talk about it.’

‘Somebody obviously talked about it to you,’ Bliss said.

‘Yeah, but I reckon that’s only ’cos he’s dead. It’s a funny place, Cusop, sir, people’s privacy does get respected. Like the King of Hay,
his
home’s in Cusop. His family home, but I bet not many people know exactly where it is. Lot of people who run things in
Hay, they live in Cusop, ’cos it’s separate. No estates down yere, and most of the houses are secluded. And the Dingle, it’s a dead-end – far as cars go anyway. You get to the end, you’re near enough in the mountains. Somebody once said to me it was like a bottle. You put the stopper on and nothing gets out. Sorry, sir, you prob’ly didn’t want all this.’

‘No, carry on, Tamsin, you’re doing really well here. So nobody recognized any of the women who came to see him?’

Tamsin looked uncertain.

‘It’s possible they
did
. But not ’cos they were local. They recognized them from other places. Newspapers and television. Well, famous people do come to Hay, don’t they? Writers and TV people and politicians. So it’s not that much of a big deal. With the women, people used to be a bit scandalized by it, at one time, but not any more. It was more like, you know, good luck to the ole devil, kind of thing. That’s the impression I got.’

Bliss said, ‘When you say they brought his shopping…’

Merrily followed his gaze around the kitchen, past the Stanley oil-fired cooker and the big fridge/freezer to another door and three rows of shelves with branded items and jars and pots.

‘That’s where Tamsin found his dope, Merrily. In a jar conveniently marked
herbs
. I never asked, Tamsin, but what led you to it?’

‘Just the smell, sir. In his study… his library. Unmistakable, really.’

Merrily said, ‘He smoked dope?’

‘Or he entertained people who did,’ Bliss said. ‘Me first thought was who’s his dealer? Was he linked into the kind of people who wouldn’t think too hard about nudging an old feller into a pool and robbing his gaff? But there’s over six hundred quid in a wallet in his desk. You couldn’t easily miss that.’

‘So you’re thinking he had his cannabis or whatever delivered with the groceries?’

In a guilty way, she was starting to enjoy this. It was calming to be hanging out with working coppers. Their needs were so much simpler. She turned to Tamsin Winterson.

‘Tamsin, I’m still not getting this. Why exactly
did
kids think he was a wizard? Apart from the herbs and bone-setting.’

‘Well… they look through windows, kids, don’t they?’

Tamsin looking a little sheepish.

‘Was there anything particularly odd or unexpected about the way he died, Frannie?’

‘Not expecting much from the PM. He had a head wound, which might’ve been from a bump on one of those big shelves of rock at the bottom of the falls. Was he attacked here, then towed down the field and thrown in the pool? We don’t know. Nobody would think that was likely.’

‘So why are you convinced somebody killed him?’

‘I’m
not
convinced and I’m still looking for a reason. With all the fences and stiles involved, it wouldn’t be easy unless there was more than one person. Or did he go to the pool with someone who then pushed him in? Or clobbered him and then pushed the body in? We’ve done a little house-to-house, yielding no sightings. We’ve had a SOCO skim this place. Although there’s no obvious reason to regard it as a crime scene.’

‘You need witnesses.’

‘Dog walkers,’ Bliss said. ‘We need more dog walkers.’

Tamsin brought them tea in some rather classy stoneware mugs. Milk, sugar in a bowl.

‘Just the job,’ Bliss sipped. ‘Earl Grey, too. You’ve gorra big future, PC Winterson.’

‘In CID, sir?’

Bliss set his cup down on the worktop, tilted his head, exposing his spreading thin patch.

‘That’s the way you’re thinking?’

‘It is, actually.’

‘Well,’ Bliss said, ‘I’ll bear that in mind, Tamsin. Not that I get listened to much.’

‘Thank you, sir. Sir—’

‘Tamsin, how about you just call me boss? The usual mode of address in the casual, freewheeling world of CID. Also, I friggin’ hate
sir.’

Tamsin nodded seriously.

‘Sir, I don’t— I don’t want to give the impression – boss – that Hambling had like a harem. Obviously, I’m not qualified to say. Sometimes, apparently, there’d be a few cars in quick succession, with both women and men in them?’

‘An orgy?’

‘His coven, they used to say. I’m told.’

‘Lovely. That’s a very evocative word.’

‘And there’s one other thing. I haven’t been able to check this out properly, I only got it this morning. Sometimes, people visiting Mr Hambling would park up at the church?’

‘Is that close?’

‘Just at the top, past the castle mound. Not far to walk, and there’s good, flat parking. The night before Mr Hambling was found, there were cars parked up there. More than usual.’

‘How late was this?’

‘Don’t know. I had it from an old lady, and she don’t stay up very late. There’s nothing to say… I mean, they could’ve parked there for any reason. But…’

‘But there could’ve been a gathering at his house in the hours before he died.’

‘It’s possible, isn’t it?’

‘Anything’s poss— What are you smiling at, Merrily?’

‘Nothing.’

What if the David Hambling affair was just a kite being flown by a young, rural copper looking for a step up? You noticed, over time, that Bliss tended to reserve his impressive range of sardonic put-downs for senior officers, was never patronizing to underlings. You could tell he liked this kid.

Bliss picked up his cup, made for the door next to the fridge/freezer.

‘You want to say a little prayer first, Merrily? Before we enter the inner temple?’

‘Not just now, thanks.’

‘Boss…’ Tamsin was blushing again. ‘This is just so I’ve told you everything, right?’

‘There’s something else?’

‘The lights I mentioned? I’m just telling you what this old lady said. Just so you know.’

‘Yeh, yeh, not gonna hold it against you, Tammy.’

‘Tamsin, sir. Boss. She said it was like a flashgun going off, back in the days when they went pop, only there was no sound, just everywhere lit up white. Only like in negative, where the dark things are light. That’s what she said. And she said it felt… unearthly, kind of thing. As if you were seeing through the land. Anyway, that’s—’

‘And she saw this when?’

‘The night before Mr Hambling was found. Through her bedroom window just as she was going to bed, so before midnight.’

‘Right,’ Bliss said.

‘She thought it was like an omen. Though that was obviously after she’d heard about Mr Hambling. She’s quite a well-spoken old lady. I can give you her name.’

‘We’ll have a think about that,’ Bliss said. ‘The temple’s through there, Merrily.’

‘You keep saying temple?’

‘What do I know?’ Bliss said.