‘Excuse me, are you with the police?’
She was looking at him, uncertainly, and he realized he was still wearing his baseball sweater with the big numbers on the front. He nodded.
‘Only somebody asked me to tell the first policeman I saw. They’re saying a body’s been found in the river.’
42
Unfinished
WALKING DOWN TOWARDS the clock, they saw shoppers sitting at tables outside one of eateries, some examining books they’d bought, some looking around, aware of something happening that wasn’t quite normal.
Under a darkening sky, Merrily and Huw grabbed one of the tables outside the Granary, across from the clock tower. Merrily pulled out her cigarettes.
‘OK to smoke here, you think?’
‘You’ll soon know if it isn’t.’
‘Huw, they’ve got better things to do.’
Merrily guessing you rarely saw any police at all, on foot, in the streets of Hay-on-Wye. You wouldn’t see this many on a normal day in a city, and they looked more menacing now, more militaristic with all those straps and pouches. Like the addition of a gun for every cop was only one strip of Velcro away.
‘So you met her,’ Huw said, ‘the missing copper?’
‘She was very… She is very likeable. Very keen.’
Lighting up, she had a vivid mental image of eager, freckly Tamsin Winterson, back in Rector’s stone bungalow.
CID, sir?
I’ll bear that in mind, Tamsin.
Telling her to call him boss, as if she was already halfway there. Oh God, this was awful. She felt like some tourist voyeur in her jeans and T-shirt and a fading grey fleece.
‘Doesn’t look too good for her, does it?’ Huw said. ‘Police don’t go missing.’
‘But with a police officer, they’re never going to give up the search.’
They’d stopped their cars at the ruined stone circle by Hay Bluff, Huw pointing out where the Convoy used to gather. Open common land, once a big bus station for psychedelic single-deckers and luminous haulage vans with windows punched in their sides. Fence-post fires, generators for the music, astral travel, courtesy of the psilocybin mushroom. A woman and a girl slipping away into the crazy night, forever.
They’d seen a police helicopter, so low that it appeared almost to be grazing the hills.
‘If you want to hold the table, I’ll get us summat to eat. Anything in particular?’
‘Anything.’ She got out her purse. ‘But not much. If they still do those goat’s cheese open sandwiches… Or whatever’s similar.’
‘Put that away, lass. I’ve got a private income.’
‘Have you?’
‘No. Listen, if you get time, after, go and have a quick look at Father Richard Williams’s Marian grotto. You might like it.’
‘Oh… the church. Yeah, I will. Might pray for guidance.’
By the time he was back out, with two teas, her phone was chiming. She inspected it. Oh, hell.
‘It’s Martin Longbeach. I’ll have to call him back.’
‘Just hope he’s not desecrated your church already.’
‘What I’ve always admired about you, Huw,’ Merrily said. ‘That overwhelming compassion.’
Looked like rain was coming in.
Martin came directly to the point. He said Sylvia Merchant had called in at the vicarage around mid-morning.
‘Just like that?’
‘She asked when you’d be back. I said you’d be away from the vicarage for ten days. I said – I hope you don’t mind – that you were upset about what had happened. She said she wouldn’t want that for the world.’
‘That doesn’t sound like her, Martin.’
‘Or words to that effect.’
‘So obviously you told her I’d mentioned it.’
‘Well, yes. And then I invited her in for coffee and we had a long chat. I told her about Daniel. She asked if I’d… seen him? You know? I said I hadn’t.’
‘She was, erm… alone, I presume.’
‘Oh, yes.’
Merrily saw a policeman talking into his radio and then hurrying away down the street, several nearby shoppers watching him, expelling low, anxious whispers, a sorrowful excitement on their faces.
Oh God. Merrily throwing her concentration into the phone.
‘Martin, I’m curious. Did she ever specifically say to you that she was gay?’
‘She didn’t say she wasn’t. The thing is, Merrily, those of us who have never been any other way or sought to conceal it, we don’t make an issue of it. The longer I live, the more I think that’s the cause of all the ill-feeling, all the dissent. I’m not a gay priest, I’m just a priest. Should there be gay bishops? There always have been gay bishops. Just not with a capital G.’