The Magus of Hay(15)

JUNE, end of


My Cabinet was picked in five minutes in the pub. Most were wearing jeans and there was a high proportion of lorry drivers.

Richard Booth

My Kingdom of Books

(Y Lolfa, 1999)





7

Sad case


THE NOISE OF the waterfall was like mass excitement, but not in a good way. Bliss was thinking of football frenzy before a grudge game. Wincing at a jagged memory from when he was a young copper in Liverpool, getting his wrist broken on a barricade at Goodison Park. He’d loved it then, the Job. Really hated how long that wrist had kept him off the streets.

In retrospect, it was bugger all, a broken wrist. Fully fixable.

Bliss could’ve wept.

He was unsteady and locked an arm around one of the young trees growing out of the steepening bank just before the rushing water went into its lemming dive. On a warm day it might even be nice here, dappled sun through big trees, white splatter like a vanilla milkshake. Not today. Not with a dead man down in the pool.

He saw one of the divers heaving himself up on to a rounded rock-shelf, mask on his forehead. Grinning up at Bliss.

‘Wanna stay put there for a bit, boss? Should we call for risk assessment?’

‘Piss off,’ Bliss said mildly enough. ‘Left me wellies in the car, that’s all.’

How much did the diver know about his condition? How much did any of them know? He looked down into the pool and felt dizzy. The diver and his mate were at the water’s edge, below the fall. Apparently it was deeper than it looked, this pool.

Bliss glanced back the way he’d come and saw two rapid streams, side by side. Shit. Hands linked around saplings either side, he leaned forwards, his neck inclined until the two streams coalesced into one, and he straightened up.

‘Just get him out, eh?’

Back in Hereford, he’d seen Terry Stagg exchanging a look with Darth Vaynor – why would the DI want to drive all the way out to the rim of Wales for a body spotted in a pool, likely a routine drowning?

Why had he? He could’ve just told them he was taking an early lunch, gone out and sat in his car till the numbness subsided.

Terry Stagg had been smiling thinly, probably thinking Bliss was trying to put some ground between himself and acting DCI Twatface Brent, who’d been running the show while he was in hospital and Annie Howe still working out of Worcester. Well, fair enough, he wasn’t exactly best mates with Brent and better Staggie thought that than nurture any suspicions about the dangerous brightness of office lights.

Bliss gripped the trees. The truth was that it went further. He couldn’t take the city at all any more. It came at you mob-handed. Sensory overload, bit like this frigging waterfall.

He’d been thinking it’d be some peaceful stagnant pond in the middle of a field, but no, the pool was right next to the lane and filled up by a mini cataract shooting almost sheer from the tarmac’s edge, white foam harsher on the eye than a fluorescent tube and a noise like you were inside an espresso machine.

The diver raised a hand to his mate, lowered his mask and slid into the pool. Bliss took a long breath and edged towards the falls, tree to tree. There was a crash barrier at the side of the road; to reach the falls in safety you had to cross a bridge, follow the stream through a field and then negotiate the bank. Worse and worse.

After a while, the diver came up, in no apparent hurry.

‘Just an old man, boss.’

You could hear the disappointment. Bliss inclined his head, reducing two pools to one. It seemed squalid down there now, like a broken stone lavatory in perma-flush. He even thought he could see the body, half under a projecting rock. It seemed to be moving. But then, in his state, everything bloody did.

‘That’s a shame,’ he said, ‘but how about we still bring him out, eh?’

Yeh, he got the inference. Old people would often wander out into the night. In winter, hypothermia would get them. In summer, they might fall into a pool. With drowned old people, the suspicious-death meter tended to drop below the police concern threshold. He’d take one look and leave them to it. Maybe drive into Hay and sit over a coffee in the ice cream parlour, deal with his blood sugar.

The rattle of a vehicle made him turn his head, the sides of his vision squeezing in like an accordion. Billy Grace’s old Defender was reversing into the entrance of the nearest big house. This valley was full of big houses, mostly hidden away behind mature trees. Cusop Dingle. He’d never been here before and he probably wouldn’t need to come back, ever.

‘Try not to damage him, eh? We don’t know anything for certain yet. Bring him up to some level ground, for the doc.’

Only seen one drowned person before, a child, again back when he was a young scally, not long before he did his wrist on the barricade. Little kid brought out of a grotty canal, laid on the bank next to the old bike frame his foot had been wedged in. Bliss had had to tell the parents. First time. That night he’d been ready to put his papers in.