The Echo of Crows, page 11
‘As a possible descendant of King Harold?’ Bliss said through a half-smile.
‘He also sold her late dad’s paintings of the Black Mountains,’ Vaynor said. ‘Very popular with people who’ve been staying here. Moody.’
‘Yeh, OK, find out what his game is, and what brings so many other people. Anything you can glean about Autumn and Eddy Davies? Was he in conflict with anybody? Was she?’
‘Well, he’d clearly fallen under Autumn’s spell,’ Vaynor said. ‘You soon learn she was widely fancied, so he could have had a rival.’
‘And being suddenly a very rich man, Eddy thought he had a good chance of knowing her better… a lot better?’
‘Mmmm. He may have thought that, but…’
‘And he had a small house she clearly wanted, conveniently on his doorstep,’ Bliss said.
‘Perhaps feeling she should restore her family’s link with this area and the people who lived here over the centuries.’
‘His brother said Eddy wanted to give her the little home,’ Vaynor said, ‘which would have put her very much in his debt but, if she was only renting for very little money…’
‘She’d likely stay good friends with him. But there’d be no immediate… er… pressure to become more intimate,’ Bliss said. ‘Right. You arrange to see Highgrove first thing tomorrow and get Karen to look out for answers from the bank.’
Bliss stood up. ‘You haven’t heard yet but Autumn was suffering the effects of Rohypnol.’
Vaynor said, ‘Phew, that explains a lot but gives us a lot she can’t explain.’
‘Well put, Darth. And it means we can release her and put her somewhere she’ll be looked after and monitored.’
*
She sat like a bird on a fallen branch: Autumn Wise in a black, hooded sweatshirt. It was dark outside but she looked less tired than he’d seen her before.
‘Inspector,’ she was saying distantly, ‘all I remember after giving the talk was having a glass of orange juice, which must have been spiked, I guess. I’ve been trying to remember who gave it to me but with the group milling around and chatting, I can’t pinpoint anyone.’
‘Huh?’
Bliss turned slowly. Few people called him Inspector; he didn’t encourage it. Too formal to attract confidences.
‘How did you come to know Eddy?’
‘Well, I just knew of him and saw him around occasionally after my mum and dad rented the place we had to leave. I didn’t really get to know him till they died and he offered to help any way he could. After his win, though, he went above and beyond. He couldn’t do enough and he really pushed on with buying his farmhouse and the outbuildings and getting them habitable and then he offered to give me The Old Dairy or any of the others. Give it to me. It was a really generous offer but I couldn’t take it. I was at my grandparents’ place and very cramped but at least we could console each other and that helped, us grieving together. Eddy persisted, though. He knew I needed more space to study and said the offer was always open with no strings attached. He was just really caring and generous. Anyway, months later, I knew I’d have to find a place but, with nowhere else I could afford to rent, he eventually agreed on a tiny sum, just to please me, I think. He wouldn’t accept more and then, out of the blue, he bought me a fancy gun. Goodness knows why but he seemed pleased and I didn’t want to disappoint him by refusing. He just put it in his gun cabinet, ready for when I wanted to try it out.’
Karen Dowell, who’d appeared at the open cell, suddenly intervened. ‘You know how to use a shotgun, though. Your gran told me your dad taught you. He wanted you to be able to use a gun if necessary.’
‘Yes,’ Autumn said. ‘But I—’
‘Only shot clay pigeons,’ Bliss said.
Karen said, ‘Only?’
‘I think so.’ Autumn’s eyes lowered. ‘It was years ago.’
‘You haven’t said you didn’t shoot Eddy Davies,’ Karen said. ‘Think about it. Did you?’
Bliss said, ‘You could’ve denied it, but you didn’t. Instead, you asked if you would hang. Why? We don’t have the death penalty any more.’
‘I’m not sure,’ Autumn said and looked like she really wasn’t. ‘It just came out.’ Then, folding a blanket round herself and curling up with a fearful look, she added, ‘Please don’t send me back there.’
‘We won’t,’ Bliss said, leaving. ‘We’ll get you in a safe place today.’
21
Sensed evil
No engine noise, no rattle in the brakes. The unmarked police car was parked, untidily, about halfway up the vicarage drive into which Merrily now stepped, in her slippers.
‘You like the leckie wheels?’ Frannie Bliss slid out of the driver’s door and slammed it quickly behind him. ‘I won’t have it for long. Still an experiment. A police pool car powered by big batteries. The future is here, some like to say.’
‘It means those dawn raids will be even more discreet?’
‘Or sometimes won’t happen at all if there’s been a power cut.’
‘You cynic. I’m into energy-saving. The vicarage power bills give me a jolt every quarter.’
Merrily switched off the outside light, Frannie Bliss following her into the kitchen. Doors were closed. He’d rung briefly nearly an hour ago to make sure she’d be there. Saying he might be passing through the village if she could spare a mug of tea. Not the first one he’d blagged.
She filled the kettle before nipping back to check that Ethel was safely curled up on the sitting-room sofa.
‘Is the investigation going well?’
‘Not bad but could be better,’ Bliss said.
Merrily spooned tea into the pot. Police business was like church business: you didn’t know exactly how it began or where it ended. Many of the basics were the same: you should not steal, must do no murder. Then it got complicated.
He wouldn’t be showing up here early evening unless this was one of those infrequent cases where he sensed evil but could detect no obvious infringement of the law. He’d once told her, memorably, that he sometimes thought she could see down to a level of evil the law couldn’t reach.
‘Here’s the situation,’ he said, resting both elbows on the table. ‘Autumn Wise can’t remember what happened up at Longtown because she had a dose of Rohypnol.’
‘Oh my God, Frannie. Life just gets worse for her, poor girl.’
‘Yeh, but the more things come to light, the less likely it seems she was involved in the shooting, so I don’t think she poses a threat to anyone. She can’t stay with us any longer and doesn’t want to go back to the farm but, vicar, she needs looking after and someone to tease out whatever information she’s got.’
Bliss watched the burbling water being poured.
‘And, as you’re a good listener and she obviously wanted to talk to you before all this…’ Merrily finished his sentence. ‘You want her to stay here and that was the favour you didn’t get round to asking earlier.’
The mood had hardened, the air darkening or seeming to. Merrily opened up the wood stove and lifted a charred and flaking log with the poker to let small flames out. Bliss had been dropping in occasionally for several years now, on the basis that they were both outsiders, whatever that meant.
‘She’s frightened of something,’ Bliss said, taking hold of the teapot. ‘And far more than the fact that she was found holding a gun that had been fired… a gun the victim gave her as a pressie.’
Merrily was taken aback. ‘He gave her a gun?’
‘And she came close to passing sentence on herself. Asking – and not in any kind of jokey way, you understand – if we thought she’d be hanged.’
Merrily dropped the poker with a clang.
‘You heard Autumn say that?’
‘No,’ Bliss said, ‘but Darth Vaynor did. Karen, too. And I’m wondering, vicar, whether, as the holder of one of your cards, she’s ever said anything like that to you.’
‘No. Like I told you, the conversation was to be continued, today.’
‘I know this sounds crackpot,’ Bliss said, ‘but it’s as if she was speaking from another time. Maybe tapping into what her ancestors had seen and heard. Ancestors her late mother believed went back to, er, King Harold. Look, I can’t believe I’m saying all this, Merrily. Don’t understand what I’m saying, really.’
Hesitantly, he told her what Maya, the TV producer, had said she’d learned from Autumn Wise. Merrily listened intently while pouring two teas.
*
Jane had written down on Mum’s sermon pad, very hard, in thick, black lettering if we thought she’d be hanged.
Then ripped off the top sheet and folded it up. Didn’t listen any more. She’d been planning to stop doing this. It was wrong, demeaning. Exorcism was the only really meaningful part of Mum’s archaic job, and Jane knew she should stay out of it, but, bloody hell, some of the things she happened to overhear were crying out for attention.
Things that had gone blurred and then emerged again into tight focus. She was back into the eerily persistent issue of judicial hanging.
Jane tightened the belt of her white dressing gown and replaced the heavy books she’d taken off the shelves to clarify the voices of Mum and Bliss through the wall from the kitchen next door.
*
Bliss said, ‘You are still the exorcist around here? Not just the vicar?’
‘You think the vicar stuff’s negligible? A sideline?’
Merrily’s voice bouncing back at her as she realized she was talking to a man who specialized in noting down what people said and then using it against them in court.
‘Would you like anything to eat?’
She placed the biscuit tin in front of him, thinking she could hardly deny it was her business.
‘You all right, Merrily?’
‘Fine. I’m just… a bit tired.’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘I realize a heathy scepticism is now becoming fashionable among senior clergy, but for me the God stuff is… part of life and most definitely part of the job.’
‘Yeh, I get that.’
‘Occasionally, I do seem to connect with something that most people try to appear completely unaware of.’
‘Occasionally?’
‘You try for a formula, want it to be like that…’ A snap of the fingers. ‘And if it doesn’t always happen, you still think it should. Part of your contract, opening yourself to unexpected answers.’ She took the pot to the kettle for a refill. ‘Tell me what led up to the weird hanging question.’
Bliss took another gulp of tea and Merrily topped him up. ‘Darth had found her with a gun – a match to the one that might have killed Eddy Davies. She asked him – sounding a bit confused and we now know why – if he thought she’d be hanged.’
‘Certainly strange. And why was that on her mind?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to figure,’ Bliss said. ‘As we’ve noticed, she thinks in the distant past a lorra the time. But, underneath it all, I think she’s scared of something she’s not opening up to us about. And that could have a bearing on the inquiry.’
He drank from the refilled mug so fast it might have burned his mouth, then quickly put it down.
‘I’m saying “scared” in a way that you might understand, vicar… when you tell yourself you’re connecting with something that most people appear to be unaware of.’
Merrily moved to the door.
‘Give me a minute.’
She slipped into the office and snapped on the light. Nobody was in there. Maybe Jane had given up monitoring her activities but she’d eavesdropped on significant visitors before…
Merrily returned to the kitchen. At least Jane probably wouldn’t have heard the new police car arrive, especially if she was in the shower.
Bliss said, ‘I’ll have to tell yer this. Darth Vaynor thinks Autumn Wise is herself impressed by what she picks up. In the same way, I suspect, as I’ve been impressed by unlikely things you come up with…’
‘Frannie—’
‘Merrily, it’s taken a good while for me to be able to ask you about this stuff. I’m a cop and most weeks my faith in the Job sags several times. All I want is for you to see her again – hopefully accommodate her for a few days – and find out what’s on her mind, what’s happened.’
‘You’re not asking much, then.’
‘You’ll do it?’ Bliss came to his feet. ‘I can’t detain her for just being weird. I’ve never actually nicked you, have I?’
‘Even if you’ve been close.’
‘Maybe I wanted you to think I might. Listen, I’ve gorra get off home.’
‘When will she be coming?’ Merrily cut him short.
Relief showed in Bliss’s smile. ‘I’d be very, very interested to know whatever you can find out. You’d be helping her as well as me.’
‘Is it possible she knows who shot him?’
‘Merrily…’ Bliss walked to the door. He didn’t look like what she thought of as a senior investigating officer. ‘I’m not sure she actually knows what she knows just now. She won’t be able to recall a significant chunk but you might get a few important pieces for my jigsaw.’
Merrily looked up to the ceiling with a long sigh. ‘You’re not asking much, then? I play detective, psychiatrist and a bit of priest thrown in.’
‘Thanks, Merrily, you’ve got it in one.’ Bliss grinned widely. ‘As to when, er… actually, she’s in the back of the car. OK if I bring her in?’
22
Good noose
JANE HAD CREPT up the back stairs to her vicarage apartment, flinging herself on the bed, finding a story on the laptop – yes!
NO NOOSE IS GOOD NOOSE, the Sun had said on page 17. The Radio Hereford and Worcester piece had been picked up and developed by regional freelance reporter Fred Potter. He’d got it into some evening papers last night, and now a few of today’s nationals – in a relatively small way, but what could you expect?
Jane liked the Sun’s No Noose line, arising from Fred’s discovery that newcomers to Ledwardine really didn’t want their new lane linked to old hangings. She was amused at the way the story had rebounded on Eirion whose news editor now knew about his Herefordshire connection and had wondered if there were any Gallows Lanes in south-east Wales or any other streets with off-putting identities. The editor himself had known of a Leper’s Lane and a Misery Road leading into it. He was thinking Eirion could turn it into a small feature for the paper’s weekend magazine. It would be worth researching, even if it only made a short diary item assessing which country had hung on longer to public executions – Wales or England?
Soon Jane was ringing Eirion’s mobile.
‘I’ve found you one… It’s not quite in Wales, but only a few metres over the border.’
‘What? Where?’
‘Longtown,’ Jane said. ‘Where, when it was more of a town, there used to be public hangings. And it’s very nearly in Wales. Well, would have been in Wales sometime or other when the border moved around.’
She didn’t tell him how the cop friend of Mum’s had a female prisoner, who had asked
…if she’d be hanged.
There hadn’t been a hanging anywhere in Britain, surely since before Mum was born. The recent omnipresence in Jane’s life of death by hanging… that was pure coincidence… pure. Jane didn’t believe in that kind of purity any more.
And she’d looked into this hanging in Longtown, knowing that Mum had been asked to fathom the fallout from another killing there.
Eirion said, ‘I might not get away with it, Jane, if it’s not in Wales. Depends how good it is.’
‘A man and a woman, hanged side by side… and she was from Wales. The paper can’t say no to it. When do you figure we could go to Longtown?’
‘I expect it’ll be early tomorrow,’ Eirion said. ‘Unless anything else comes up. Of course, I’ll have to keep quiet about you coming along, as this is work. So you keep quiet about it, too, OK? I’ll phone you later. Meanwhile, uh… Jane, what makes it important that you come with me on a softish feature?’
‘I’m just interested. They haven’t got an actual Gallows Lane in Longtown, but it certainly has a well-known execution site and I’d like to remind people of that.’
‘Is that the only reason?’
She couldn’t let him know what Bliss had told Mum or how she’d come to overhear it. But why was the tragic if intriguing Autumn Wise saying she didn’t know whether she’d shot the lottery winner? Did she? And why the hell was she speculating that this might get her hanged when hanging was history? This was… mega. Big news story from either side of the Welsh border. Quite terrifying if you accepted this spooky stuff as background to a serious killing on the English side.
Jane now accepted she had to go with Eirion on the search for old execution sites. On her laptop screen, images were being changed: torn metal smouldering on rural tarmac, then three police cars outside farm gates. Images of far more real journalistic significance than anything concerning exorcism, which most journalists were conditioned to disparage, the way that Mum said much of the Church now did.
‘Maybe I’ll tell you more when we’re there,’ Jane said. ‘I need to do some serious thinking about this.’
Knowing now that she’d snared his interest and would need to be careful. She smiled. Even if recent immigrants to Ledwardine didn’t much like the old Gallows Lane name, it was out there now and wouldn’t be forgotten.
She’d been aware that the village’s most famous hanging had taken place not in Gallows Lane but in the old orchard not far from the parish church. The executed person was a seventeenth-century vicar, Wil Williams, a predecessor of Mum’s – and more like her than was generally realized. All the Herefordshire history books she knew said Wil had hanged himself after local people had accused him of dancing with the fairies at night. Which was entirely untrue: he hadn’t danced with fairies any more than he’d hanged himself.
Mum had found out the truth about Wil soon after they came to the village, although still nobody talked much about it and none of the local books had been corrected. Jane had sworn she’d research the whole story one day, and maybe that day was coming, sooner than she’d imagined. If it ever came out, Mum would want it handled sensitively because of the local families involved, some of whom were still in the village.
