I decided that I was going to go with my mum on this one.
Eventually I got up, showered and dressed in the one pair of jeans Molly thought worth packing, and a green cotton shirt with a button-down collar that both my parents would have approved of. Having learnt never to trust the countryside, I bypassed my good shoes and stuck my PSU boots back on.
When I stepped outside I found Beverley waiting for me on the lawn.
She was sitting in a folding canvas chair by a rickety outdoor table with a chipped pink Formica top. She was wearing an orange and red gypsy skirt with matching halter top and enough beady jewellery to keep a Camden Market stall in merchandise for a year. A floppy wide-brimmed straw hat had been jammed on top of her dreads, a pair of round smoked-glass sunglasses were perched on her nose and she was reading a battered paperback book with a distinctive cover of black and white diagonal stripes.
‘What’re you reading?’ I asked.
She waved the book at me, and as she lifted her hand a cascade of enamelled blue and silver bracelets slipped down her forearm.
‘Val McDermid,’ she said. She kicked a blue and white plastic beer cooler that was sitting in the shade under the table. ‘I brought you something to drink.’
I sat down in the second folding chair by the table and watched the curve of her bare back as she bent down to fish a couple of bottles out the cooler. They were squat little things made of thick brown glass and sealed with stoppers. There was no label, but when I opened mine I caught a sharp whiff of fermented apple.
‘Cider?’ I asked.
‘Scrumpy,’ said Beverley.
‘What’s the difference?’
Beverley thought about it for a moment or two.
‘It’s not made in a factory,’ she said.
‘So, no quality control then?’
‘Are you going to talk about it or drink it?’
I took a swig – it was tart, alcoholic and tasted of apples. About what I look for in a cider, really.
‘Like it?’
‘Let’s talk about last night,’ I said.
‘Which bit?’ Beverley folded over the corner of her page and put the book down on the table.
‘The “Oh my god I shouldn’t be here, we’re in violation of treaty, Captain” etcetera,’ I said.
‘Violation of treaty?’ asked Beverley demonstrating why, when you’re asking questions, it pays to be literal. ‘What treaty is that?’
‘You know what I’m talking about,’ I said, and took another swig of the scrumpy.
‘Okay,’ said Beverley. ‘If you really want to know.’ She leaned over the table towards me and beckoned me to do the same and we didn’t stop until I could feel her breath against my cheek, could smell the clean warmth of her skin and see the verdigris discolouring the frame of her sunglasses.
‘You see us now?’ she murmured. ‘Close enough to whisper, close enough for me to smell the magic clinging to your skin, close enough that – if you had the bottle – you could kiss me?’
So I kissed her – just a brush pass, by way of polite inquiry.
‘Let’s see if we can keep this all metaphorical just for the moment,’ said Beverley, which is the story of my life, really. ‘The fact that we’re close together means that we’re undergoing an immediate and involuntary set of interactions – right?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Immediate and involuntary.’
‘Now imagine you’ve got your face this close to a total stranger,’ she said. ‘What happens next?’
‘I pull back,’ I said.
‘What if you can’t? What if they literally won’t get out of your face?’ she asked.
‘Then I’d have to take steps, wouldn’t I?’
‘Exactly,’ said Beverley and kissed me.
I kissed her back – an immediate and voluntary action. It didn’t last quite as long as I would have liked because Beverley pulled back to stare at me over the rim of her sunglasses, her lips twitching into a smile.
‘But if you were stuck on the tube you might have to put up with being that close to a total stranger, right?’ she said. ‘Because all these things are contingent, aren’t they?’
Her dark brown irises, I noticed, were tinged with amber and gold around the pupils.
‘So it’s like personal space?’ I asked.
‘Only more sort of geographical,’ said Beverley.
Because on any other night she might have skipped merrily along the trail with no cares at all. Running into that kind of hostility had been a bit of a shock since Beverley, according to Beverley, generally gets to go where she likes.
I pointed out that I’d had to rescue her from the goddess of the River Teme and her daughters because she’d unwittingly trespassed on their territory, but Beverley waved that away with another cascade of bracelets.
‘That was a minor misunderstanding,’ she said. ‘And anyway, we came to a mutually beneficial arrangement.’
‘Which was?’
She leaned back in her chair and reached out to tap my bottle with her fingernail. ‘Drink your scrumpy,’ she said. ‘We’re going to a party.
I did as I was told and drained the bottle. Then I followed Beverley over the fence and along the boundary of the old orchard towards the parish hall. Ahead, I heard what sounded like a big pub crowd. Wood smoke rose lazily in the warm air and I realised I was going to get a close up look at what happens when the good people of Rushpool push the boat out.
Or at least how the Marstowe family half of it did.
As it was explained to me, later, by Dominic’s mum, it hadn’t been planned exactly. The Marstowe family being as widespread and persistent as fungus it had already turned out to volunteer for the search teams. When they got news that Hannah and Nicole had been found, the volunteers had congregated at the village hall to wait for further developments. Naturally, given the good news, a celebratory drink was in order.
By midday, wives, parents, husbands and partners had started driving up from homes in Leominster, Hereford, Ludlow and Kidderminster. Depriving the county, Dominic estimated, of about a third of its taxi drivers and about half its hairdressers. Many of them brought food, and the trestle tables were taken out of the community hall and into the field at the back so that everyone could share. Since there were a lot of people, including a mass of children, it seemed sensible to have a bit of a whip-round and do a couple of runs to the supermarket. At some point someone decided it would be a good idea to build a bonfire – and if you’re going to do that you might as well have a barbecue.
Dominic’s dad, being Andy Marstowe’s second cousin, qualified as one of the family and so was obliged to persuade one of the available PCSOs to keep the media out.
There were a couple of hundred people in the field by the time we climbed over the makeshift stile. I looked over the crowd, the trestle tables covered in bowls and trays and tinfoil, the ranks of bottles, the kids running around the legs of the grown-ups and, oh yes, the granny corner – Dominic’s mum plus half a dozen cronies ensconced on a couple of garden loveseats that had been transported in from who knew where.
‘This is strangely familiar,’ I said, because you could have dropped my mum smack in the middle and she would have felt right at home – although the blandness of the food would have been a bit of a shock.
‘Isn’t it just?’ said Beverley. ‘All it’s missing is a decent sound system.’
‘There he is,’ shouted a woman, ‘there’s my fucking hero.’
Joanne, pale-blonde hair spiky with sweat and dressed in a loose denim sundress, bore down on me and threw her arms around my neck. The open bottle of cider she’d been carrying thumped into my back and I had to throw my arms around her to stop her from falling over.
‘God, you’re beautiful,’ she said, and gave me a boozy kiss – on the lips thankfully, with no tongue. ‘I’d kiss Dominic as well,’ she said without slackening her grip. ‘But I don’t know how he’d take it.’
I felt a shudder run through her back and she buried her face in my shoulder. I held her tight for a minute while she shook and then abruptly she pushed me gently back and held me at arm’s length. There were tear tracks down her cheeks, but she was smiling.
‘We need to get you properly drunk,’ she said.
‘Where’s Hannah?’ I asked.
‘Over there somewhere,’ she said. ‘With her cousins.’
‘What about Nicole?’
‘Still at the hospital, poor thing – running a fever,’ said Joanne, and there was definitely a touch of smugness when she told me that Hannah had come out of the experience much better than her friend. She then dragged me off by the arm in search of some alcohol – a manoeuvre that degenerated into a rough spiral movement which probably would have ended in us tripping over a table if Beverley hadn’t interrupted and presented us with a couple of bottles of her bootlegged scrumpy.
Beverley casually put her hand on my shoulder and left it there.
Joanne looked her up and down and gave me a grin.
‘Oh, you’re a lucky boy,’ she said. ‘You want to make sure you enjoy it while you can – and whatever you do, don’t let anyone, ever, tell you who you can fuck.’ And with that she lurched off back into the crowd.
‘Hail the conquering hero,’ said Beverley and held up her bottle to clink.
‘
Sic transit Gloria mundi
,’ I said, because it was the first thing that came into my head – we clinked and drank. It could have been worse. I could have said
Valar Morghulis
instead.
Beverley took my hand. ‘Let’s see what the local food is like,’ she said.
It turned out to involve a surprisingly large amount of pasta salad. While we were heaping our paper plates I saw a bunch of kids loitering under a canvas sunscreen by the parish hall and recognised one as Hannah. I did a quick scan and swiftly located Andy Marstowe, who wasn’t hovering but was definitely maintaining line of sight.
I would have liked to have a quick word. But interviewing a key witness, never mind a child, without going through the SIO would have been a disciplinary offence – not to mention a serious breach of etiquette.
Beverley decided, once we’d eaten, that we needed something to sit on. So we slipped into the dark resin-scented interior of the hall to see what we could scrounge up. The overlapping OS maps were still pinned to the cork notice board, with the last set of search areas still drawn in with chinagraph pencils on the plastic covering. I traced the route we’d taken from the Whiteway Head down to the River Lugg where Beverley had done her Arwen impression. Pokehouse Wood had been searched, so had School Wood – especially near where Stan’s stash had gone missing. And so had the ancient Iron Age fort of Croft Ambrey. The big question was, where had the girls been hidden for seven days? Looking at the map, I reckoned that Edmondson and DCI Windrow would be looking north of the ridge. I tapped the spot where, despite not being marked, I knew the Bee House was – they’d pretty much overlooked the whole area.
Another visit might be in order. And if I could prise a little bit more history out of Hugh, so much the better.
Beverley called my name, and I turned to find her trying to pull a stack of folding chairs out from underneath a shelf. She’d had to bend over to get a grip and I watched the play of muscle under the skin of her bare back until she snarled at me to stop mucking about and give her a hand.
We carried the chairs outside where all but two were cheerfully taken off our hands and distributed amongst the needy, the infirm, and the somewhat sloshed.
Just after five, Dominic and Victor turned up with a freshly dead sheep in the back of the Nissan Technical. I thought for a mad second that this was part of the case, but Andy and a couple of other men grabbed hold of it and manhandled it up the far end of the party field. After twenty minutes of discussion, the knives and skewers came out and I made sure I was about as far from the butchery as I could get. Dominic joined me.
‘It’s a country thing,’ he said. ‘They’re all desperate to prove that they’re not a bunch of soft townies.’
‘You’re not going to help Victor, then?’
‘I worked six months on a pig farm,’ said Dominic. ‘I have nothing to prove – trust me.’
It can take a surprisingly long time to roast a sheep, especially when you have too many cooks. But, by seven thirty, authentically greasy chunks of mutton were being distributed along with a choice between stone ground wholemeal bread or Morrisons’ best buy plastic white. I took the wholemeal and the last dollop of English mustard scraped from its jar.
By that time someone had turned up an amp and a deck from somewhere and we were treated to ten repetitions of Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’, because it was Hannah’s current fave, before she was bundled off to bed by her father, her mother having gone to sleep in a folding chair with a bottle of beer in one hand and a contented smile on her face.
As it grew darker and the air began to cool, the focus of the party tightened around the bonfire, bottles of spirits made their appearance and I was handed a plastic cup with a quadruple measure of Bacardi which Beverley confiscated and handed on to someone else.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, and drew me away from the fire. ‘I’ve got other plans for you.’
When she steered me out the front and down the lane towards the cowshed I reckoned my luck was in – which just goes to show that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle affects everything, including my love life. Instead of bed we ended up in the Asbo, Beverley driving, and heading into the evening.
Maybe she doesn’t like the cowshed, I thought.
Less than fifteen minutes later we turned into the car park at the Riverside Inn, which would have suited me fine. Only, instead of going inside, Beverley dragged me down to the edge of the river. There she threw her arms around my neck and kissed me – hard. I felt her breasts push against my chest and behind them her heart beating with a frightening urgency.
She let go with one arm long enough to untie her halter and then guide my hand into the waistband of her skirt. I pushed it down slowly, letting my palm slide inside her knickers and down the smooth skin of her thighs. Her fingers fought with the belt and the buttons on my jeans and I nearly lost my balance when she grabbed hold of me and gave me a couple of experimental tugs.
I was acutely aware that we were less than five metres from a busy gastro-pub but unless the patrons came out with searchlights and dogs there was no way I was stopping on their account.