An MP3 player was wedged behind the gear lever and plugged into the sound system. They were halfway across the bridge, Merrily connecting her seat belt, when the man’s voice came through the speakers. A phone voice, close-up, muffled but precise.
‘
You are a disgrace, Ayling. Like the rest of your stinking council, you are a disgrace to Hereford
.’
‘Oh.’ She let the seat belt come apart. ‘This is Ayling’s answering machine?’
‘
You have betrayed your heritage. You have tried to smother the Serpent, in the cause of naked, corporate greed
. . .’
Bliss reached out a hand, put the player on pause.
‘You recognise the voice, Merrily?’
‘It’s local.’
‘Local varies.’
‘Hereford, rather than real border.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘Sounds like he’s reading it. Like an agreed statement.’
‘Through a handful of Kleenex.’
Bliss drove slowly past the village hall, where the puddles on the car park were starting to join together, forming a moat which continued, deepening, when Church Street became a country lane.
‘I’d turn round when you can, Frannie. Only the four-by-fours are risking it down here.’
‘Always defer to local knowledge.’ Bliss pulled into a passing place, began a three-point turn, the wipers on high speed. ‘And you’ve not answered me question yet.’
‘If it wasn’t for the bypass we’d be almost an island by now. Why are you asking
me
?’
‘I’ll give you the honest answer, Merrily. Your name was mentioned as someone whose work sometimes brings her into contact with religious eccentrics.’
‘Mentioned by . . .?’
‘The headmistress.’
‘Just that religious
eccentrics
didn’t sound like her kind of term.’
‘It wasn’t, I just didn’t want to offend you. In truth, her experience of you – can’t for the life of me think why – seems to be as someone who is generally hostile and unhelpful.’
‘That is so hurtful.’
‘Yet seems to have the impression that you and I have a certain rapport. Me being raised a lapsed papist and all.’
‘She instructed you to sound me out?’
‘In her way.’ Bliss put out a hand to the player. ‘Let me give you the rest.’
‘. . .
But the Serpent is not dead. Your storm troopers cannot trample the Serpent underfoot. Under tarmac. The Serpent will not sleep, but will writhe in anger under the hill and grow a new skin. Do not imagine it’s over, Ayling. When your road is open and strewn with wreckage and blood . . . you will remember the Serpent. You will remember what you did
.’
Pause.
‘
We are the Children of the Serpent
.’
Click.
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’ Bliss switched off the player. ‘You heard of them?’
‘The Children of the Serpent? Can’t say I have.’
‘You quite sure?’
‘Frannie, what
is
this?’
‘Do you recognise the voice?’
‘No.’
‘That was a frigging long time coming.’ Bliss leaned back, his hands slackening on the wheel. ‘You know it’s important we eliminate people. You do realise why? Otherwise a lot of innocent loonies are gonna get harassed.’
They were back in Church Street. Before the square, Bliss turned left into Old Barn Lane, accelerated towards the bypass. Evidently determined not to take her home. Wanting her in
his
car, next best thing to an interview room. She’d never known him like this.
‘Are you OK, Frannie?’
‘This tape, by the way – you haven’t heard it. I’m not supposed to take it out. Got it from Karen, who gets trusted with copying stuff onto hard disk and MP3.’ Bliss slowed. ‘And you’re not surprised, are you? You knew about it. What happened – Helen Ayling told Sophie and Sophie . . .?’
‘Something like that.’
‘I don’t know why I bother. You wanna hear it again?’
‘Frannie, I really
don’t
know the voice.’
‘Maybe Jane?’
‘Can we leave Jane out of it? She’s—’
‘An adult – correct? I’m gonna leave you the player. Let her hear it. You’ll know if she recognises the voice, won’t you?’
‘What, so you and Annie Howe can bring her in and shine a bright light in her face until she fingers somebody?’
‘Now let’s be sensible.’
‘All right then, let’s talk about Mathew Stooke.’
Bliss braked, his hands squeezing the wheel.
‘You little sod, Merrily.’
‘Calm down, I didn’t make any inquiries. It just . . . reached me. From another source.’
‘What . . . God?’
‘And nobody knows, as far as I’m aware, outside my . . . immediate family.’
‘You’ve
seen
Stooke?’
‘No, I . . . If Long’s involved, does that mean Cole Barn is some kind of safe house? I mean, there’ve been threats, right?’
‘My, we are au fait with the spook terminology.
Safe house
. I ask you. Nothing so melodramatic, Merrily. Yeh, there’ve been threats, but it’s considered low-risk.’
‘Islamic, though?’
‘Just threats. It’s even been in the papers. He made a statement through his publishers. Said, if you remember, that he stood by everything he’d written and he wasn’t gonna hide from religious maniacs.’
‘When was this?’
‘When the book came out in paperback. Two months ago? Bit of a coincidence, some people thought.’
‘What are you saying? He was claiming he’d had death threats to get publicity for the paperback?’
‘Always a first thought. Especially as publicity, in this case, had been subcontracted by the publisher to an outside PR company. Naturally, they denied it.’
‘How were the threats made?’
‘Anonymous letters. I think there were three or four of them within about a fortnight.’
‘Long told you this?’
‘Merrily, it was in the frigging papers. Don’t you
read
the papers?’
‘Well, it’s been a bit . . . So what’s he doing here?’
‘Keeping a low profile. He wants a bit of privacy to finish his next . . . whatever shite he’s working on now. And his wife wanted to live in the country. She likes to walk. Apparently.’
‘Actually,’ Merrily said, ‘a village is not a bad solution. You get gossip
within
a village, but it very rarely transfers to the outside world. So Jonathan Long . . .’
‘A formality. I gather Mr Winterson, as I believe he’s known, has been left with a phone number, for if he spots anything suspicious.’
‘Like a woman in a dog collar?’
‘Merrily, he eats vicars for breakfast. He’d destroy you with his withering logic.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You just want to see if he’s got little horns, don’t you?’
‘Well, that too.’
‘I gather you wouldn’t recognise him. He’s lost a lot of weight. Anyway, avoid. Don’t betray my trust.’
‘It didn’t come from you. No trust involved. Where are we going?’
‘God knows,’ Bliss said. ‘It’s been a crap day.’
‘You want to talk about it?’
‘Not really. Howe’s under pressure to wrap this up quickly. Probably political, and naturally we’re all getting the heat.’
‘
Political
pressure?’
‘Killing a senior councillor is tantamount to sedition.’
‘Only if it was done for political
reasons
. You surely can’t be letting your whole inquiry be dominated by one message on an answering machine. Does nobody remember the Yorkshire Ripper hoax tape?
I’m Jack?
Put the whole investigation back months, and he was still . . . ripping. And all the cops charging down the wrong alley.’
‘This is different.’
‘Really?’
They were on the bypass now. Not the costliest of bypasses, less than a mile of it before it joined the original Leominster road near a nineteenth-century bridge across the river at a spot known as Caple End. But maybe this was the best kind: not really a bypass at all, when you thought about it, just a more direct way in and out of Ledwardine. Bliss pulled into a long lay-by the other side of Caple End bridge. It was wider than the village bridge, a place where summer tourists would stop to picnic by the river.
‘Gorra feller coming over from Worcester in about an hour. Archaeologist in charge of the excavation of the Dinedor Serpent. I’ve been directed by the headmistress to meet him on the site.’
‘You going to play
him
the message?’
‘Word is some of the archaeologists aren’t too pleased at being told to wrap up their dig and bugger off so the new road can go in. So . . . no.’
‘You think the Children of the Serpent could be disgruntled archaeologists?’
Bliss wrinkled his nose.
Merrily said, wanting to help him, ‘
Wreckage and blood?
You know what that might be implying, do you?’
‘Remind me.’
‘Can I have a cigarette?’
‘It’s a
police
vehicle.’ Bliss let go the wheel, sagged in his seat. ‘Yeh, go on. But open your window a bit.’
Pulling out the Silk Cut and the Zippo, Merrily wondered how Jane would explain this. Think it out.
‘OK, sometimes . . . when there’s an accident black spot – the kind where there’s no obvious cause, no blind bends, whatever – some people may suggest drivers’ concentration could be impaired, or their perceptions altered, because the road is aligned with – or crosses—’
‘A ley line?’
‘Let’s call it a line of energy. Which our remote ancestors apparently knew about but we, with our dulled senses, can no longer perceive.’
‘Yeh, I know all that. But – pardon me if I’m stating the obvious here – the so-called serpent is not a line, is it? It’s a . . .’ Bliss did the gestures ‘. . . wavy thing.’
‘Still some kind of energy path. According to Jane, it’s possibly connecting the River Wye with the earthworks on Dinedor Hill and reflecting the curves of the river. I’m just trying to give you an idea of how
they
might see it.’
‘
Reflecting
the curves?’
‘Literally, perhaps, because of the pieces of quartz which would reflect moonlight.’
‘So the new road cutting through all this . . .’
‘Would be seen as breaking an ancient spiritual link. The secular world, with its noise and its exhaust fumes bursting through the coils of the serpent.’
‘Which our friend insists is writhing under the hill.’ Bliss sighed. ‘I can’t believe we’re discussing this.’
‘Isn’t this what you wanted? How whoever made that call might be thinking? But the person who made the call . . . how likely is that,
really, to be Ayling’s killer? As Jane’s always saying, these are people who abhor violence.’
‘Go on, all the same. Finish it.’
‘Well . . . the theory might be that you’ve got all this rogue energy misdirected now, affecting the attention of drivers, if only for a second. So whenever there’s an accident on that road . . .’
‘Certain people will be nodding their little heads knowingly. Which people?’
‘Frannie—’
‘Members of the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society, for instance?’
‘Look . . . I just can’t. I can’t give you a list, OK?’
‘It might . . .’ Bliss looked at her steadily, finger-drumming the vinyl in the centre of the wheel. ‘It might be the soft-option, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘It’s ridiculous. These people—’
‘Merrily, eight of them were arrested for refusing to leave the council offices when the cabinet was meeting to discuss the new road. That shows a certain . . . determination.’
‘Frannie . . .’ Merrily heard the echo of Jane:
We live in a police state! Nobody’s allowed to object any more
‘It’s bollocks. I doubt any of the eight people arrested were even pagans, practising or otherwise. Just ordinary people with an interest in their heritage who didn’t think the democratic process was being followed. You really have no
solid
connection between the Dinedor Serpent and the murder of Clement Ayling.’
‘Wanna bet?’
She turned to face him, her back against the door, smoke from the cigarette wisping out of the open window, stray raindrops spraying in. She said nothing.
‘What I’m about to tell you, Merrily . . . there’s always something we like to keep in our back pocket, right? Something known only to the investigating team and the killer?’
She kind of nodded, not entirely sure she wanted to become the third party.
‘So you know what that means,’ Bliss said. ‘It means not a word, Reverend. Not to Lol, not to Jane . . .
especially
not to Jane.’
Merrily saw the water whirlpooling around the arch of the
bridge. One of those moments where you backed away from the edge or you got pulled in.
‘Look, whatever it is, you really don’t have to tell me. You know how I hate to feel compromised.’
‘Yeh, well, on past experience,’ Bliss said, ‘I prefer to have you compromised.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And it’s been a crap day.’
‘So you want to ruin someone else’s?’
‘His eyes were gone,’ Bliss said.
Merrily swallowed some smoke, coughed. An empty stock lorry came rattling over the bridge, headlights full on, yellow smears on Bliss’s blotched windscreen.
‘Ayling’s eyes had been gouged out and pebbles placed in the sockets. Bits of gravel, it looked like.’
‘Gravel?’
No
. . .
‘Which turned out, on examination last night, to include fragments of quartz.’
‘Oh God.’
‘Almost certainly originating in the so-called Dinedor Serpent. Somebody’d carefully jammed bits of the serpent into Clem Ayling’s eye sockets.’
Merrily squeezed out the cigarette, burned her thumb.
‘Being a cynical, case-hardened detective, I never let on, but I’ll admit it spooked even me at first.’
‘As it was . . . meant to?’
‘Yeh. Me or somebody. Torchlight, see. Councillor Ayling’s severed head, with the eyes lit up like little bulbs on a Christmas tree. Not something you easily forget, Merrily, to be honest.’
I
T SHOULDN’T BOTHER
her, of course. With less than ten per cent of the population of Ledwardine ever showing up at a service, there had to be scores of atheists in this village.