‘Yeh.’
‘And I don’t care what anybody says, we’d be better off if Annie Howe hadn’t gone to Worcester. Could be a cold bitch, but you knew where you were with her.’
Bliss said nothing. The big car park was just round the corner and up the hill from the community centre. Karen was parked near the top, the little Renault Clio cordoned off at the bottom. Karen pointed beyond it towards the foothills of the Black Mountains.
‘That’s Cusop, just there, see. Those big houses in the trees? Easy walking distance through the fields.’
Shielding his eyes, Bliss saw movement across there. Bunch of uniforms already doing the walk, like soldier ants. Dogs and sticks. And after that, it was big country time, chopper terrain. In case she’d been injured or collapsed on a run up there. The last hope had been that Tamsin would arrive for work as normal this morning, having spent the night with some bloke.
‘Karen, what’s she done? Farm girl. Knows her way around. What can she possibly have done?’
He kept getting images of her in her perfectly pressed, spotless uniform, the thin red hair, the freckles, the solemn expression. Call me boss, he’d said, as if she already had a foot inside the CID room.
Didn’t usually get emotionally involved. It didn’t help.
Maybe he wasn’t out of the woods.
35
Cold history
THEY SAID THAT if you drove west from London, the Black Mountains would be the first actual wilderness you encountered. Probably true. Living in Hereford, in the river valleys, you were unaware of them for much of the time. Unless you were a hiker or a fell runner or a member of the SAS, you really didn’t know your way around the high ridges and exposed summits with arcane names that weren’t on the road maps. Didn’t know your Black Hill from your Cat’s Back.
A secret wilderness, Merrily was thinking, and destined to stay secret because no road crossed the mountains from England. Capel-y-ffin wasn’t much more than a mile over the Welsh Border, but it still took over half an hour to get there from the Hereford side.
Along the Gospel Pass. The best road, not to say the only road, twisting roughly north–south through the mountains. So called because legend said St Paul had been this way, maybe St Peter, too.
How remotely likely was it that Middle-Eastern Biblical icons would have travelled this route? Seemed more likely the stories had been invented by the monks at Craswall Priory in the north or remote Llanthony Priory to the south, in the days when monks knew all there was to know about everything, and needed money.
Still, if St Peter and St Paul had been this way, chances were they’d still recognize it. You forgot what kind of road this was, how many times you had to pull into the hedge, as it climbed and climbed, like a vein up an arm, to let oncoming all-terrain vehicles through and a few ambitious tourists.
She was late. There’d been a hold-up in Hay, some problem on the car park. Already late getting away from the vicarage with having to show Martin how the kitchen worked while resisting, one more time, his determination to explain – oh God – the circumstances of his sacrilege.
But he was OK, really, was Martin. Nothing wrong with being vulnerable, insecure, paranoid. If it came to it, he was likely to get more out of Sylvia Merchant than George Curtiss had.
She held the Freelander on the handbrake at an awkward junction. Craswall? No, couldn’t be. She followed the twist to the right and came out on the road to Hay Bluff, a sheep-shorn plateau with vast views. Popular with walkers, a meeting place for hang-gliders and probably the last place offering safe, level parking before Capel-y-ffin.
Two empty cars and a Land Rover, lined up alongside the stone circle by the roadside. A pagan statement on the Gospel Pass, if not much of one; it was ragged and irregular, only one stone of any size, bent over like a lonely gravestone beside a pool of brown water. From here, the road was only going to get worse.
Unlikely this was going to be worthwhile, now. Any obsession of Huw’s would be interesting, but Bliss… she was feeling, with hindsight, a bit annoyed with Bliss.
That’s not how we work, the police. Not many points for preventing the hypothetical.
But then, quite suddenly, hypothetical was no longer the word.
The CD player in the Freelander was playing up, kept cutting out, so she’d had the radio on, and the ten o’clock news had it as second lead.
‘Police on the Welsh Border have begun a major operation to find a twenty-two-year-old policewoman missing from her home in Herefordshire. More than a hundred officers from two forces are involved in the search for PC Tamsin Winterson, who…’
What?
Merrily braked, reversed back to the stone circle, while a policeman, not Bliss, was saying Tamsin Winterson was a capable officer with a good knowledge of the area, but…