‘So the girls are still listed as missing.’
‘In some dusty database.’ Gwyn Arthur leaned back in his rickety chair. ‘Tell me… are you – or, indeed, Francis Bliss – seeing a connection here with PC Winterson’s disappearance?’
‘Just me at the moment. Not particularly on anyone’s behalf.’
‘Christian duty?’
‘Unwanted holiday. Bit of a loose end. Just doesn’t feel right walking away.’
He nodded.
‘Christian duty.’
Merrily smiled. He’d been very patient, so she told him how, because of what she did and the kind of people she occasionally had to mix with, Bliss had asked her to take a look through Rector’s library. How she’d wound up looking into matters that he wouldn’t, especially with Brent at the wheel, be permitted to waste time on.
‘Become your case then, has it? I’m not being patronizing here—’
‘Don’t really like sticking my nose into police business.’
‘People in this area do tend to. A vast area, it is, with not so many people. Or noses. Few longer than mine.’
The bar’s swing door had opened. Several people had come in, including a man and a woman silhouetted against the globe lights. The woman had blond hair and the man came with a walking stick.
46
Naked talk
PARKED NEAR THE entrance of the Oxford Road car park, Bliss called Annie. He guessed she’d be at home, at the flat in Malvern, but he rang the mobile.
‘Francis.’
He pictured her in her pale-green bathrobe on the sofa, soft towelling around those sharp bones, freshly washed hair in a turban. The unexpected domestic side of Annie, what a turn-on that had been, along with the shop-talk: talk dirty to me, talk to me about criminal investigation.
‘What’s been on the telly?’ Bliss said.
‘You don’t know?’
‘Just tell me.’
‘Never watch daytime TV, as you know, but it was second lead on the radio news. Just the basics. Hunt for a missing police-woman on the Welsh Border. Soundbite from Brent, appealing for anyone, et cetera, et cetera.’
‘No background? Nothing about a feller helping with inquiries?’
‘Is there one?’ He could almost hear her sitting up. ‘Does that mean it’s known that she’s dead?’
‘I’m sure Brent’s hoping she is. Be a career-sealer in Hereford, pulling a cop-killer. Or a first-class ticket out of Hereford.’
Telling her about the seller of weird books who’d left his truck on the car park overnight, got drunk and claimed to have slept in his shop. Who, on being grilled in the street by the latently thuggish Stagg, had not sounded convincing.
‘Doesn’t seem all that likely to me,’ Bliss said. ‘You start disturbing the surface, creeps like this will always come crawling out, blinking in the daylight.’
‘Takes the pressure off you, anyway.’
‘I’m not with you.’
‘Oh hell—’ Annie sighed irritably. ‘I was hoping to tell you this in person. Brent phoned me early this morning.’
‘He fancy you or something?’
‘Actually,’ Annie said, ‘he fancies you, and not in a good way. He thinks you may know more about Winterson’s disappearance than you’re admitting.’
‘Well, he would. I’m a wild card, me.’
‘No listen,’ Annie said. ‘In its ridiculous way, this is worse than you realize. Sheer wishful thinking on his part, but he has a way with psycho-jargon. Which I’ll translate for you. Just don’t over-react, all right?’
‘Hang on, I wanna better signal for this.’ Bliss got out of the Honda and went to sit on the low wall at the top of the car park. ‘Go.’
‘He thinks you’re damaged. Unstable. Unreliable. Before you were hurt you were merely erratic and wilful. You thought you were clever and invulnerable, a city-wise cop amongst the yokels.’
Annie speaking in the old ice-maiden voice to hold his attention.
She had it.
‘But then your wife left you for another man. And then, for the first time in your police career, you were badly hurt, physically. Brain damage.’
‘He said this to you?’
‘He suggested that this, so closely following the discovery of your wife’s affair, may have raised you to a different and quite dangerous level of instability. He cites your determination to come back to work before you were fully fit – he suspects some deception there, by the way, some calling in of favours. You had something to prove and not only in the job. You inflate an old man’s accidental drowning into a possible murder case and you drag an impressionable young PC into your fantasy. A girl who’s already slightly in awe of you.’