‘You’ve spoken to him?’
‘The Bishop’s spoken to him. Ms Merchant said she hadn’t yet made up her mind what action to take. She said she needed thinking time.’
‘Part of which was spent coming here.’
‘When? What did she say?’
‘Night before last. She didn’t say anything – not to me, anyway. I was across the road, just leaving Lol’s cottage, when she got out of a car and walked over to the vicarage, knocked on the front door. I didn’t approach her, just watched. She then went to the church, presumably to see if I was there. The point being that she obviously knew I wasn’t on holiday. In fact… that was what she said on a postcard that I found behind the door tonight.’
‘She wrote to you?’
‘It says she’ll be back. It says we’ll be back. And I don’t think she was referring to her solicitor.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘She seemed to be talking to somebody. But she was quite alone. I think you know what I’m saying.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘She mention Alys Nott to George?’
‘She wouldn’t talk to George about her bereavement. He told the Bishop she didn’t appear to be unduly distressed. Very pleasant and almost cheerful. Brave face. Didn’t want to talk about you, either, as I say. However… did you happen to notice her bookshelves while you were there?’
‘I didn’t even get into her living room.’
‘George says they were all reference books – film guides, a book on opera, regional guides. Books for consulting rather than reading for pleasure. And a whole row on psychic subjects. George said his eye was drawn to a familiar black and orange spine.’
‘I see.’
The Deliverance Study Group’s handbook on exorcism. Not exactly easy to find.
‘George suspects she obtained the book to see for herself the procedures you ought to have followed.’
‘Did follow!’
‘Of course,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m sorry.’
But the damage was done.
28
Report it
BLISS HAD BEEN here before. Hated it.
Not Dorstone. Other places, three of them, all in the years before he came down to Hereford. Bigger places, with more people to disappear.
All of them in summer, as it happened. One had been the home of the kid who drowned. Missing for a night before they found him, and Bliss remembered the overcrowded living room, all the helpful neighbours swelling the anxiety until the critical moment when it all went down around the mother’s arid wail.
That had been on a former council estate on Merseyside, this was a farmhouse at the end of a pitted track with wooded Dorstone Hill behind it. Still at the arse-end of the day, but all the lights were blazing, as if someone thought Tamsin might be out there and had forgotten where she lived.
Annie parked the BMW on the edge of the field, close to the entrance to the yard.
‘Better not come in with you.’
‘I know.’ He was struggling into his jacket to cover up the baseball sweater with the big, cheerful numbers on the chest. Just grateful she’d driven him out, knowing what he was like at the wheel when it got late. ‘You’re not here.’
It was a sagging, rubblestone house, quite low, not very big. The man standing in front of the porch was wearing an unfarmery light suit. Robert Winterson, dressed for a night out with his wife that never happened. He held out his hand to Bliss and they shook under a domed security lamp projecting from the side of the house, showing Winterson to be about forty, thickset, close-cropped hair.
‘Like I said…’ Bliss turned his back on the light. ‘I don’t want you to start gerrin too worried. Not yet.’
‘It’s my mother, it is. She’s the baby of the family, you know? My mother never wanted her to be in the police, see. Not the way it is now, women doing the full job.’
Bliss saw a woman’s face at the nearest window, all the lights on in there, walls, ceiling, table.
‘She’s a clever girl, and she’s a good copper. There’ll be a reason for this.’
‘Of course,’ Robert Winterson said. ‘Course there will. I feel bad about bothering you.’
‘Hell, no, you did the right thing.’
‘Anyway, we got Kelly yere,’ Robert Winterson said. ‘She insisted on coming over.’
‘Kelly?’
‘Kelly James – Tamsin’s mate? From Cusop?’
‘Sorry, yeh…’ Sometimes he wanted to kick his own head in. ‘Good.’
When he’d called back, Robert Winterson had said this Kelly had rung the farm, expecting a call from Tamsin that hadn’t come.