More people lived down here than you’d think. A few cottages edged the narrow lane but the bigger houses were set back on higher ground enclosed by dripping trees. Full of shady glades on a sunny day but in weather like this it was, Merrily thought, quite a dark place.
She pointed up the track, which curved away into woodland.
‘It’s up there?’
‘No, this was just the only place for us all to park without blocking the road. If we shurrup, you can hear the falls.’
Following the sound of water-rush, she peered down over a roadside rail. Jutting shelves of rock, foam. The clear pool below was bound to be deeper than it looked.
‘Another bloke was drowned there years ago,’ Bliss said. ‘And someone once drove a car through the fence above it, but narrowly escaped. So it’s got form.’
‘This is a suspicious death, Frannie?’
‘Well, I’m suspicious, but it’s like a disease with me.’
Not suspicious enough on the night he’d stumbled into an illegal cockfight in a sweaty cellar below the Plascarreg estate in Hereford. Getting his head trampled into the sawdust.
Bliss said, ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
Yesterday he’d even snapped at Sophie – snapped at Sophie.
‘And he’s a bit unusual, our man,’ Bliss said, ‘as you’ll see. Which makes his death by apparent drowning open to a little extra scrutiny. Humour me, Merrily.’
He set off under tree canopies heavy as tarpaulin then crossed the lane to another track, leading uphill into more woodland.
‘Where we going, Frannie?’
‘Not far. Norrin these shoes.’
‘You in charge now, at Gaol Street?’
‘Not exactly. There’s Brent. Acting-DCI Dr Brent.’
‘You have coppers now with doctorates?’
‘My guess is he gorrit online. Sixty dollars from the University of Dry Gulch, Arizona.’
The track curved round, the ground rising quite steeply out of the dingle. Bliss took a breath and started to walk again, faster, as if to prove he could. Merrily caught him up.
‘So do all more-senior officers have to be your adversary necessarily? Is it part of the job description? Because Annie Howe—’
He stopped.
‘She’s back in Worcester.’
‘I mean I know you were never exactly best mates but, when you were hurt, she did seem… concerned to an unexpected degree.’
‘Probably concerned I might recover.’
‘Everybody changes, Frannie. That a castle tump?’
‘What?’
She pointed towards the top of the track. It was over the hedge, a low, green mound, flat-topped.
‘No idea,’ Bliss said.
‘You don’t want anybody to think you’re unfit for frontline duty, right?’
‘Who’s saying that?’
‘Nobody’s saying it.’
‘I look unfit?’
‘You look… I dunno, really.’
‘Had the medicals. Passed with flying— Passed, anyway.’
‘When?’
‘When what?’
‘When did you have the medicals?’
‘Last one a couple of weeks ago. More to come, but—’
He stumbled slightly, hissed, walked on, his face taut, his thinning hair cut close.
‘I meant what time of day?’ Merrily said. ‘Only I was reading how people with your kind of injury feel tired more quickly, so if you were seen earlier in the day—’
‘Mother of God! You gonna friggin’ stop this at some point, Merrily? Pray for me in your own time.’
Bliss had stopped at a stone gatepost, a bit taller than he was. There had once been perhaps a lion or an eagle on top, but it was just a crooked projection now, like a broken thumb. Another post, about ten feet away, had been reduced to a stump. A track between the posts led down into thickets and a copse and, presumably, the brook. Merrily looked for gables, tall chimneys.
‘The house far away?’
‘No distance. The reason you can’t see it, it’s a bungalow.’
‘With pretensions?’
‘I’m told there used to be a big Victorian farmhouse on the site, demolished years ago. At a time when farmers got to preferring less maintenance and oil-fired heating.’
‘But I take it this David Hambling wasn’t a farmer.’
Bliss said nothing, waved her between the gateposts.
It was nice to feel wanted.
In the clergy, you spent many hours in the homes of the recently dead. While drawn curtains, or any marks of mourning, were no longer exactly commonplace, there was an atmosphere you came to recognize: a sense of quiet, sober unreality, a hollow in time.
But this wasn’t like that.
A tidy fitted kitchen, pine units, bottle-green roller blinds, spotlamps on a lighting track. Light ochre walls that looked sunny even on a day like this. There was milk and sugar on the dresser with a packet of chocolate digestives, a bottle of red wine, a copy of the Radio Times opened to last Sunday’s TV. This was the room of someone who had… just popped out.