The Fever of the World, page 16
Merrily nodded. So many people who retired to the country realized in dismay that they were regarded as no more than long-term tourists and searched around for a role.
‘Peter understood,’ he said. ‘I’ll miss him. In an area like this, one gets to know people surprisingly quickly, and when they die…’
‘A death tends to echo in the countryside,’ Merrily said.
‘Indeed. All the way to the Far Hearkening Rock.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I was being whimsical.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘It’s a natural rock across the river from the Seven Sisters, where Peter fell. Supposed to bounce sound back up the valley. Once used, apparently, as an alert for poachers or something. I always meant to go and find it. Perhaps I will now, though I suppose that part of the valley will always make me feel rather sad.’
Merrily said, ‘Were you surprised to hear Mr Portis had died in a fall there? I gather it was near his home. He fell from rocks he probably knew rather well…’
‘Or thought he did. Many people have made that mistake. And climbers probably accept that the most beautiful places can’t always be trusted to be the most kind.’ He looked at Merrily. ‘Have you talked to the family yet?’
‘May not be too necessary,’ Siân said. ‘This will be quite rudimentary. Think burial rather than funeral, as we all have to do in a pandemic.’
Keep social distance, Merrily thought. Dig a hole, drop him in. Wondering how it was being done in Huw Owen’s parish, south of Brecon.
Part Three
‘Men of taste’ were beginning to lose their sense of disgust at the sight of barren, useless mountains and to experience them with a sense of pleasant horror.
Susan Peterken,
Landscapes of the Wye Tour
(Logaston Press, 2008)
28
Darth
OPENING THE FRONT door in the dark, Merrily was realizing that in the seventeenth century, all vicarage doorways must have been conspicuously lower. Even today, it was as if this visitor was stooping out of the future, half his head lopped off by the lintel.
‘Who…?’
Oh God, she’d completely forgotten he was coming tonight and that he was so tall. She didn’t know him well – had only seen him a couple of times, although she could hardly forget him; policemen weren’t so obviously lofty any more.
Frannie Bliss had a name for him. A name from a popular film. Apart from his size, he didn’t resemble the character at all.
‘I’m David Vaynor.’ The visitor put out a hand then swiftly snatched it back, remembering. ‘Sorry. I think we’ve met before, briefly. But I realize this might be inconvenient… against government advice, even…’
‘Nothing’s convenient right now.’ Merrily took a step back into the hallway. ‘But Frannie Bliss thinks, for some reason, that we need to talk, so… please come in.’
He bobbed down, revealing the rest of his face in the light above the door. He was even younger than she remembered, and he looked more than a little unsure. She knew that Frannie Bliss liked him but, with a foot in height and a PhD between them, wasn’t yet sure why.
‘I suppose you know what I’m supposed to do in this diocese,’ she said.
‘Though I’m not sure I understand what it means.’ He followed her into the kitchen, where she kept the length of the refectory table between them. ‘I’m supposed to be a detective, but I accept there are things I can’t detect.’
Her dog collar lay on the table in front of her. Not for the first time, she wished she could make it disappear. Or that she had an intelligent dog it would fit.
Vaynor said, ‘The DI sometimes thinks people are responsible for certain things that are wrong but that we, as police, can’t move against them in the normal way. Is that something you can get your head round, Mrs Watkins?’
She nodded because that was what Bliss would expect.
‘Things happen… that we can’t always explain. For some reason, Frannie thinks they don’t happen for him, but occasionally do for me. Which may not be right, but… call me Merrily. We’ll see how it goes.’
*
It was about seven p.m. and she’d been alone. Jane was up in her apartment, probably on the phone to Eirion, assuring him that a specialist had suggested on the radio tonight that both of them were in an age group too low to attract the virus. Vaynor clearly couldn’t be even ten years older than Jane, but at an age where ten years was a long time. Merrily pulled out a chair for him.
‘I’ve not had the virus, but… no obvious symptoms. I’m not coughing and I can still taste things. And the church is closed – most of my regular congregation seems to be isolating.’
The lamp on the dresser was mellowing the old room. She sat down at the kitchen table. It would at least reduce the faintly ludicrous height difference between them.
‘We’ve not really had much to do with each other before,’ she said. ‘Frannie Bliss phoned me a couple of hours ago. The arrangement is that I won’t phone him back. Whatever you tell me stays in here, and he accepts that.’
‘Church rules?’
‘You won’t get any unsolicited advice, prayers or offers of spiritual help from me,’ Merrily said. ‘I’d offer you a mug of tea, but I don’t think I’m supposed to – Downing Street rules.’
*
Halfway across the scullery, Jane stopped.
Whoever this was, he must have parked in the street outside the gates and walked quietly to the front door, otherwise she’d have heard him from her apartment.
She always counted on creeping to the kitchen via the back stairs to the scullery. It was just that she didn’t want Mum to know she was borrowing a Wordsworth book before they all went back to Lol tomorrow. Wordsworth – a bit tedious to her at school – was suddenly deeply interesting. Most of the teachers at Jane’s school, if they thought he was any good, had probably decided that the young Wordsworth must have been quite a decent atheist. In fact – why was this always covered up at schools and colleges? – he’d been a pagan. Worshipping the gods of nature. Her kind of poet, and no damn teacher had ever told her.
Jane heard through the wall that Mum and the guy were talking about Frannie Bliss now, which suggested this visitor was another cop. Whatever that meant. Cops, like clergy-people, weren’t widely respected any more. Last night Jane had watched one of those police actuality programmes, where the cops had been failing to impress these kids they’d taken pills away from. The kids inviting them to fuck off, no immediate arrests made. You were almost surprised the cops hadn’t given them back the pills.
Jane sat quietly down at the scullery desk and began to listen closely. You never knew when overhearing these private discussions might be useful.
Still pleased that Lol had liked her suggestion that he should build a song around the little girl with the departed siblings who’d inspired Wordsworth. And, bloody hell, no wonder she’d inspired him. The kid was cool.
*
‘I admit to checking you out, online,’ Vaynor told Merrily. ‘I’m not really sure what being an exorcist means these days, and I don’t know why the DI wants me to talk to you. But I don’t think there were clergy like you around when I was growing up here.’
Abruptly, Merrily stood up and drew the long curtains, concealing them both from the yard and any more possible visitors.
‘There’ve always been clergy like me around places like Hereford, Mr Vaynor. Just not women… although we’re not actually sure about that any more.’
She looked round the room a little nervously, as if she might glimpse the shade of her seventeenth-century Ledwardine predecessor, Wil Williams, who’d been more than a bit ahead of his time.
‘You… talked to the DI about something our senior officers don’t usually want to discuss,’ Vaynor said hesitantly.
‘Essentially…’ Merrily leaned forward, spoke quietly but fast. ‘Frannie Bliss doesn’t want to know what you’ve done, in case he feels obliged to share it. But he thinks somebody should know. Somebody who understands certain things outside the box… and perhaps isn’t a mate of the chief constable. Or the Bishop, come to that. Are you following me?’
Vaynor leaned back. He’d picked up a book from a small pile in the middle of the table left there by Jane. A thick book with a blue binding, no dust jacket, waiting to go back to Lol.
‘You’re reading Wordsworth?’
‘I think my daughter’s been reading him. How seriously I don’t know.’
‘I once studied him fairly seriously,’ Vaynor said. ‘He’s further off the wall than most people realize.’
Merrily looked up.
‘Jane’s interested in a little girl who lived at Goodrich and met Wordsworth. The one in the poem called “We Are Seven”. Which you’ll know.’
‘I once did some work on that child,’ Vaynor said. ‘Trying to find out who she was. There were a couple of families with seven children in that part of Goodrich at the time, but neither seemed quite right to me.’
‘Jane thinks that, if she existed, the girl had psychic abilities. Would sometimes see her siblings.’
‘After they’d died?’’
‘And talk to them. In the graveyard next to where she lived. Over supper. As, I’m afraid, Jane would’ve done herself. Or tried to.’
Vaynor produced a small smile.
‘Psychic matters were not exactly in fashion in the early nineteenth century. Which didn’t necessarily mean they didn’t happen, but science, essentially, was taking over.’
Merrily said, ‘I’m told Wordsworth was actually advised to drop the poem from a book that he and the Ancient Mariner guy were putting together.’
‘Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads, it was called. One of his most significant collections. In Wordsworth’s poems, ghost stories tended to be attributed to other people. He sits on the fence, usually, and so I’m afraid he was unlikely ever to have consulted someone like you.’
‘I don’t doubt that, Mr Vaynor.’
Vaynor was silent for a moment.
‘I don’t think he wanted to be thought of as someone who was completely open to that sort of thing,’ he said eventually. ‘Although he did come close to it when he spent time around here, as you probably know… or can imagine.’
Merrily said nothing. No, she didn’t know but was starting to imagine. Vaynor tapped the complete poems.
‘Have you read the one usually just called “Tintern Abbey”, although the abbey’s not in it? Perhaps he just wanted to obscure the real location.’
‘No. Well… not since I was at school, when I expect I thought it was a bit mixed up. I guess I was too young then to make much of it.’
‘It’s usually said to be Wordsworth’s best work,’ Vaynor said. ‘Written at the time when his genius was becoming evident. When I think something got into him, stimulating him in a way he hadn’t known before.’
‘I seem to remember it’s actually set several miles upstream from Tintern Abbey. In fact, here in Herefordshire. You think something in this area stimulated him?’
‘And would eventually scare him into toning down his poetry,’ Vaynor said. ‘My, um… my PhD thesis set out to find out what that was. But I don’t think I managed it.’
The electrified oil lamp on the kitchen dresser seemed to go dimmer for a moment. Or perhaps she just thought it did because it had before when something uncanny was being tentatively approached. Like the way a briar used to scrape the outside wall of the scullery under the window. In this job, you noticed the recurrence of small things that meant nothing or perhaps hadn’t happened at all.
‘And please… don’t call me Mr Vaynor,’ he said.
Merrily smiled. She now remembered learning about Darth a year or so ago, before being asked by Bliss to watch some interview-room video of Vaynor looming over a suspect, probably not intending to appear menacing.
‘I don’t think it was meant to be flattery,’ Vaynor said, ‘but it doesn’t matter. At least it doesn’t sound like an academic.’
‘You don’t want to sound like an academic?’
‘It hasn’t helped me much in the police.’
She began to understand why his DI might have taken to him. Because he had this lurid Scouse accent, Bliss was regarded by colleagues as a hard man, but when you’d grown up surrounded by people who spoke like that and maybe used to a bit yourself, you saw another side of him.
‘Frannie Bliss is very clever,’ she said.
‘Cleverest man in Gaol Street.’ Vaynor nodding. ‘By a mile.’
‘Including you?’
He smiled, appeared to relax. Both had the same opinion of Bliss who probably hadn’t progressed far beyond GCSE level.
‘Darth, erm… do you have a copy of your thesis anywhere?’
She wanted to read it. Wanted know where he was coming from.
He shook his head.
‘I gave it away. The rights to it. Gave it all to a girl who now seems to have dumped me for walking away from my qualifications.’
‘You did that?’
‘She thought I’d done the wrong thing, joining the police.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Obviously did to her. And perhaps people in CID by now. You’ll find it online. Under the pen name Al Fox.’
Vaynor gazed into the wood stove.
‘All I know is that both of us have reasons to instinctively dislike the same man. With me that went back to schooldays. But I’m not sure that makes him a murderer.’
29
Finger
WANTED TO BE a detective for as long as he could remember, originally because his grandad said it was the best job in the world. A detective sergeant, up in Cheshire, Grandad was – one of the good guys committed to nailing the bad guys, but not necessarily with a hammer.
Vaynor’s dad, who worked for the NatWest bank as a clerk, wasn’t impressed and hadn’t seen all that much of his old man. Got himself switched to the Hereford branch, and the family moved down-country and, though David didn’t get to spend much time any more with his grandad, the stories didn’t stop.
In the end, the main problem, Vaynor said, was that his parents were increasingly euphoric about him doing so well at school, and when he was accepted to read Eng Lit at Oxford… well, he could hardly puncture their pride at that stage, could he?
And he’d worked it out to his own satisfaction, how the two careers merged: a detective found and followed narratives in people’s lives, which he infiltrated in periods of high drama, apprehension and sometimes naked fear.
Vaynor explained how the conflict didn’t exactly go away in his last year at Oxford when he wound up renting two rooms in the suburban house of Eddie and Mary Masters. Eddie was a DCI coming to the end of his thirty with Thames Valley Police and already checking out cold-case openings for retired detectives on the basis that the brain shouldn’t have to quit if it was still functioning to full capacity.
Merrily realized the wood stove was burning low and picked up a log. Vaynor said he’d never told anybody all this before. He edged to the front of his chair, said that for a long time he hadn’t known which way to turn. Having nightmares about it. Analysing detailed crime reports in the papers and at the same time working on his PhD and remembering his last years at school and how, when you were six and a half feet tall, you didn’t get bullied, just avoided.
He’d been new at the Cathedral school, a scholarship boy, from a less-affluent part of town than most of his class.
‘Nobody knew me. I didn’t know Royce Portis but I did learn quite soon that he was a bully who other boys didn’t mess with. Had to do well for my dad, so I worked hard and got into Oxford.’
‘Well done,’ Merrily said carefully.
‘Knowing there’d be a major row when I told them I wanted to go into the police, not education. And that I’d be putting out the wrong signals if I tried to finger Royce Portis.’
‘Finger him for…?’
‘For the money he was collecting from fellow pupils. For a few things. Like protection from another boy, who was a heroin dealer… and a violent kid on the side.’
‘Was Royce protecting you?’
‘He might have offered, and I turned it down. I didn’t have any money then, anyway. And this guy… the police got him in the end – not because of me. He’s off the hook again now, and back in business, I believe. But he’s not clever, and we’ll get him again…’
‘You’re saying you had a drug dealer at a private school?’
‘No, not at the school,’ Vaynor said. ‘But Royce Portis had friends in town, connected with drug business. Small-time dealers. He did recreational… I didn’t finger him, not wanting to be known as some kind of grass. Kept quiet. And then it was the end of term, and Royce left, went to join his dad’s estate agency, as he was expected to – his career was mapped out. I wasn’t aware of him again until I came to Gaol Street, but I guess he remembered we’d been at school together.’
Merrily said nothing.
‘It’s a small city,’ Vaynor said. ‘We were the two tallest boys at the school. He was the tallest until I turned up, and I was an inch higher despite being a year younger. And at the time he was never going to forgive me for that. No matter how mild and inoffensive I was… I had no idea at the time what he—’
He broke off. Merrily stared at him, wanting him to spell it out… about the indefinite thing at the core of this. So far, she couldn’t see any reason Bliss might have seen for her to be involved.
‘In most cases,’ Vaynor said, ‘a property is the most valuable item a man or woman will ever acquire. If you own property, you’re on the way to owning people.’
‘Some people do seem to think that.’
‘Some people think he’s on his way to owning much of the posh end of the Wye Valley,’ Vaynor said. ‘You can see all his signs on property and land. And an estate agent’s not just a shopkeeper.’
‘If his firm seems to have bought a lot of property there, does that suggest…?’
