The Magus of Hay by Phil Rickman Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    One of the three uniforms was waiting for him on the edge of the field, slim, freckly, red-haired girl.
    Bliss said, ‘The dog walker thought there was some blood, did I get that right?’
    ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that was what he thought . On one of those sticky-out shelves of rock? Long washed away though now, obviously, sir. But then, if the gentleman fell from the other side… that is, went over the barrier from the road…’
    ‘If the dog walker saw blood on the rocks, it suggests he was on the scene not long after the old feller went in.’
    ‘I suppose. This was not yet six, still pretty dark down here amongst the trees.’
    ‘Early risers,’ Bliss said. ‘The SOCO’s friend, your dog walker.’
    The numbness was in his forehead, travelling down the left side of his face. He started to sweat.
    ‘We have a possible name, sir. The chap recognized his hat. He wore a distinctive hat, with like a