The Remains of an Altar

31 On the Line

No point in worrying. It probably wouldn’t be in today’s paper, anyway. After Jane had asssured him that no other media had been in touch, Jerry Isles had said they might well hold it over for a day. Later, media-savvy Eirion had explained that it was a soft story, therefore expendable.

Every time she’d awoken in the night, Jane had been hoping, increasingly, that they’d just dump it. After all, it wasn’t much of a story in the great scheme of things, was it? And what, in the end, was it likely to achieve, apart from dropping her in some deep shit with Morrell?

Still, she was up before Mum and outside the Eight Till Late not long after it opened, this horrible queasy feeling at the bottom of her stomach. Despite the shop’s name, Big Jim Prosser opened around seven, with all these morning papers outside on the rack – Suns, Mirrors, Independents.

No Guardians, however, this morning. Maybe not many people took it in Ledwardine, or they’d all gone for delivery.

The air was already warm, in line with the forecast on Eirion’s car radio last night that this would be the first really hot day of the summer. Ledwardine looked impossibly beautiful, quiet and shaded and guarded by the church, with its glistening spire, and the enigmatic pyramid of Cole Hill. Everything serene and ancient and … vulnerable. Jane felt as though she was carrying the weight of all that late-medieval timber-framing on her shoulders, and was about to duck away when Big Jim appeared in the shop doorway.

‘Lovely morning, Jane. Looking for anything in particular, is it?’

‘No, I—’

‘Daily Telegraph? Times?’

‘Erm, it was just a Guardian, but if they’ve all gone it doesn’t matter.’

‘Just a Guardian, eh?’ Jim Prosser had his hands behind his back, looking kind of smug. ‘Oh, they’ve gone, all right. Every single one. Last one got snapped up five minutes before you come in. ’Fact, I just had to turn one feller away.’

‘Oh.’ Jane edged towards the door. ‘Right. Never mind, then.’

This didn’t necessarily mean anything.

‘Lyndon Pierce, it was,’ Jim said happily, the words coming down like the blade of a guillotine. ‘I think he’s driven over to Weobley to try and get one there. Didn’t look a happy man, somehow. Can’t imagine why.’

‘Oh God.’ Jane went hot and cold. ‘They used it, didn’t they?’

‘Used what?’

‘Don’t make me suffer even more, Jim. What did it say?’

‘Well, seeing it’s you, Jane…’ Jim brought a paper out from behind his back. ‘I’ll let you have a quick glance at my own copy, if you like.’

‘You take the Guardian?’

‘I do today,’ Jim said.

He led her inside and spread the paper on the counter, folded at an inside news page, and, Oh God, there it was: in Guardian terms, a big spread, although – Oh God, no – most of the space was taken up by the full-colour picture.

The photographer had been standing on the stile at the bottom of Cole Hill, focusing down on Jane, and now you could see why she’d done it from that angle: Jane’s face was in close-up, unsmiling, moody, with the path racing away over her shoulder, all the way to the church steeple. They’d done something to it with a computer, shading the edges so that the ley looked almost as if it was glowing.

Underneath, a second picture showed a section of Ordnance Survey map, with the ley points encircled, just like Alfred Watkins used to do it.

Altogether, not a story you could easily miss.

Village future on the line, schoolgirl warns

—————————

Jeremy Isles

—————————

A schoolgirl is fighting county planners to defend the legacy of the man whose discovery of ley lines has been causing nationwide controversy for more than eighty years.

Planning officials in Herefordshire were ready to accept an application for new housing in the historic village of Ledwardine in the north of the county, when the vicar’s daughter Jane Watkins, 18, accused them of destroying the sacred heritage of the community.

Ms Watkins says a proposed estate of 24 ‘luxury homes’ would obliterate what she insists is a prehistoric straight track, or ley, linking several sacred sites including her mother’s church and the summit of what she claims is the village’s ‘holy hill’. Ley hunters all over Britain are now set to join the protest.

The theory of ley lines was floated in 1925 by Alfred Watkins (no relation), a Hereford brewer and pioneer photographer, in his book The Old Straight Track, which is still in print and something of a bible for New Agers and ‘earth mysteries’ enthusiasts. The latest theories suggest that Watkins’s leys are lines of earthenergy or possibly spirit paths along which the souls of the dead were believed to be able to travel.

However, Hereford councillors and officials charged with implementing new government demands for more rural housing are taking a hard line on the issue.

At the end of the story, a council spokesman was quoted as saying, ‘It’s a storm in a teacup. We have consulted our county archaeologist who assures us that ley lines are simply a quaint myth. We applaud Jane Watkins’s interest in local traditions, but consider this would be a very silly reason to forsake our commitment to allow quality new housing to be built on suitable sites.’

However, they also had a quote from J. M. Powys, described as ‘an author specializing in landscape phenomena’, who said, ‘Although the concept of leys has been widely dismissed almost since Watkins first came up with it, he was definitely on to something, and his ideas have been powerfully influential. There’s a lot about the ancient landscape we really don’t understand, and I’d be interested in taking a look at this alignment – which looks like one that Watkins missed, even though it was virtually on his own doorstep.’

Earlier in the piece Jane had been quoted as describing council officials as…

‘Philistine morons?’ Jim Prosser said. ‘You actually said that, did you, Jane?’

‘Oh God, Jim.’ Jane covered up her face. ‘I thought we were just having like a preliminary chat? He was really sympathetic, you know? I thought he’d come out with the photographer to interview me properly – I didn’t realize that was it, he was doing it over the phone.’

Jim stood there, slowly shaking his head and smiling the smile of a man who couldn’t quite believe this. He held out the paper.

‘You wanner take this copy, show your mother before somebody else does?’

‘Christ, no … I mean, it’s OK, she’s going out early.’ Jane felt clammy under her school shirt. ‘Look … what do you think, Jim? What have I done? Is this, like, going to cause trouble?’

‘Hard to say, really. Twenty-four houses, that’s another twenty-four bunches of papers and magazines for me. On the other hand, disturbing the spirits of the dead…’

‘You don’t believe a word, do you? You think it’s all total bollocks.’

‘Well, you know us primitive, superstitious rural types, Jane…’

‘Do you think anybody here is going to agree with me?’

‘Tough question,’ Jim said. ‘Go on, take the paper, you might need one.’

‘Thanks.’

Jane went out and stood by the oak pillars of the medieval market hall. The brilliant sun was suspended over Cole Hill, as though it was either declaring its support or making some kind of ironic gesture. Jane screwed up her eyes and looked up, pleading.

It had been like a dream. Taking herself off to the end of the playing field yesterday lunchtime and sitting down and trying to see it from all sides. Mum’s position in the village – no conflict there, she was supposed to be responsible for the collective soul of the community. And Morrell, always on about liberal causes and free speech and Amnesty International and stuff like that.

Once the decision had been made, it had been like being on a speeded-up escalator. A call to the photographer and then to Eirion on his mobile, and he’d blagged some time off and been waiting, parked down the lane, just out of sight, when she’d slipped away from the school soon after one p.m. Eirion finally dropping her off at the church so that she could walk the ley from there on her own, just to be … sure. And she had been sure.

Yesterday, the high. Today, the cold turkey.

Jane was getting a mental image, now, of Morrell with the Guardian on his desk – it was his favourite paper, normally. Folding it neatly … and then instructing his secretary to have all copies removed from the school library and the sixth-form common room before any of the students arrived. Then maybe a smarmy, self-defensive call to the woman on the education authority before sitting back to devise a suitable form of retribution.

Bloody unfair, really. Another couple of weeks and the term would’ve been over and she’d have been immune until September.

A few villagers were wandering over to the shop. Jane slipped behind a pillar of the market hall and didn’t move. She felt disoriented and distanced from … from her usual self. Like she’d taken – beginning with that first small lie about her age to Jerry Isles – a decision to become a separate person, detached also from The School and The Sixth Form.

A slightly premature adult, in other words, and it felt lonely.

The sun was hot on her head and her arms. She felt as if she wanted to walk away and fade into the spirit path the way she almost had yesterday. Or was that … was she just going a little crazy, through stress and anxiety?

Across at the vicarage she could see Mum reversing the Volvo onto the side of the road. Looked like she was in a hurry. Well, good. But she wouldn’t leave before she’d seen her daughter.

Jane raised a hand and wandered over, hiding the Guardian in the hedge. Best not to burden her with this.

Or the migraine.

Oh yeah, there was definitely a migraine coming on today.

32 A Polka for the Loonies

There were no curtains at Lol’s bedroom window. When he’d awoken, not long after dawn, the sky was slashed with red, bringing up ugly thoughts of the dead man on the stone in the Malverns.

Something Lol had not seen, but Merrily had, and Lol was lying there under the reddening duvet, thinking about all the times he’d sat fingering the frets of the graceful Boswell guitar, conjuring ephemera, while Merrily waded in spiritual sewage.

Increasingly, he worried about her. She was living much of the time on cigarettes instead of proper meals and sooner or later all this chasing around after madness – the kind of madness she’d never be able to validate – would start to take its toll.

Not many nights, lately, had passed without him waking in the dark or the early dawn, cold with this formless fear of losing Merrily.

And walking back in the late evening from Coleman’s Meadow to the market square, splitting up to go to their separate beds … there’d been a disturbingly elegiac quality to that.

Recalling this, he’d felt a moment of anxiety that was close to panic and, turning it into determination, got up into the streaming red dawn and made some tea and a list of what he needed to find out.

Finding himself thinking about Winnie Sparke. The way she’d moved in on him: Pardon me … but I think I know who you are? The tumbling hair, the semi-see-through dress. Ready to come on to him that night, but now she wasn’t talking. Not to Merrily. Protecting the enigmatic Tim Loste. So what was there to protect?

At around eight-thirty, Lol sat at his writing desk in the window overlooking Church Street and rang Prof Levin at the Knight’s Frome studio.

‘Five weeks,’ Prof said. ‘In five weeks, I have a window for approximately ten days. If we can’t break its back in ten days we’re not trying.’

‘Sorry … ?’

‘Your … second … solo … album?’

‘Well, it’s coming.’ Lol could hear Prof pouring coffee from his cafetière. ‘I’m just … not there yet.’

‘Shit,’ Prof said. ‘You haven’t even started, have you, you useless bastard?’

‘No, I’ve started. I start every day. Except today. Today, I’m not starting.’

‘Because?’

‘Tim Loste,’ Lol said. ‘What do you know about Tim Loste?’

The answer came back, sailing past on a breath like there’d been no need for thought.

‘Avoid,’ Prof said.

‘I see.’ Lol inched his chair further into the desk, picked up a pencil, gathered in his lyrics pad. ‘Why, exactly?’

Prof said, ‘Laurence, we’re all mad, in our way, aren’t we? Me, you, Loste, Elgar.’

‘Sorry, did I mention Elgar?’

‘You mentioned Loste, which means that sooner or later we’d get around to Elgar. And madness. Elgar grew up with it. Used to hang around the local lunatic asylum at Worcester.’

‘Yes, but that’s because he was Director of Music there.’

‘Yeah. Thirty quid a year, and five shillings every time he wrote a polka for the loonies to dance to. But even then he’s thinking, there but for the grace of God…’

‘You’re saying Elgar was mentally ill?’

‘But also, fortunately, touched with genius. Imagine what it’s like if you’re mental and only touched with mediocrity.’

‘Loste?’

‘Terrific conductor, arranger … facilitator. Pure creativy? Nah.’

‘You know him personally?’

‘Mmmf.’ Prof swallowing too-hot coffee. ‘Laurence, mate, everybody knows him. If you’re a halfway-proficient serious musician or a singer, the chances are he’s been in touch at one time or another, offering you the chance to make your name. No money in it, of course, just the honour and the glory of working with the young master. This is in his manic phases.’

‘In the clinical sense?’

‘Whether it’s been diagnosed I wouldn’t know. But in his depressive phases, it’s best to stay out of his way – and also in his manic phases, obviously. That’s why I say just avoid. Tell you about me and him, shall I?’

It seemed that Loste, having heard about this new recording studio at Knight’s Frome, had called Prof, introducing himself as a one-time soloist with the English Symphony Orchestra. Asking whether it was possible that Prof could put together a mobile unit to record his choir in Wychehill Church.

‘Complicated job, Laurence, if you’ve never recorded a choir before, having to mike up this huge church on your own. So what’s wrong with the studio? I’m asking him. Oh no, Loste insists it has to be the church. Not a church, this church. But … he had the money. I should argue.’

‘You went to Wychehill?’

‘Charming crowd, on the whole. The women worshipped Loste, this bumbling overgrown schoolboy … imprecise, incoherent.’

‘You mean drunk?’

‘Well … high, certainly. Or just, like I said, manic. And yet, in the end, unexpectedly, I was impressed. He’s a bloody good conductor. He channels inspiration. Shouldn’t’ve been any good at all, bunch of amateurs in a country church, but the atmosphere in there was … something else.’

‘This was Elgar?’

‘Ah, well, that’s the point, you see. For Loste, it all comes through Elgar. Elgar was always moaning that nobody understood him; Loste understands him. Totally. And the combination of Elgar and Loste somehow brings something extraordinary out of amateurs. I remember the Angelus, particularly. Shivers-up-the-spine stuff. Or so it seemed to me whose skills have, for too long, been squandered on three-chord wonders such as your good self.’

‘Four now.’

‘Congratulations. Loste, meanwhile, his ambition is to do the full Gerontius with a choir and orchestra. On the strength of what we recorded already, it wouldn’t be an embarrassment. Except he’ll need to get somebody else to twiddle the knobs on it because Gerontius scares me. Too big, too complicated. Also, an attempted orchestration of the afterlife with angels and demons … am I going there? With Loste? I think not, Laurence. Definitely not with Timothy Loste.’

Lol said, ‘Prof, was there a woman with Loste when you did the recording? A writer called Winnie Sparke?’

‘Cheesecloth and glittery bits?’

‘That would probably be her, yes.’

‘All right,’ Prof said, ‘you remember Yoko Ono in the film they made of the session for Let It Be? Sitting there, watchful? More than a bit like that, only less of the inscrutable. Not a promising relationship, was my feeling. She looks at him, sees toyboy; he looks at her … mummy.’

‘You know anything about her?’

‘Not much. She’s a writer. Does these Mystic Meg kind of books. What’s your angle?’

‘She’s told Merrily that she and Loste are on the edge of the solution to a great and beautiful mystery.’

‘Merrily?’ Prof said. ‘This is a Merrily situation? Oh, for fuck’s sake. A great and beautiful mystery? Avoid, avoid, avoid!’

‘Well, it’s not too hard to avoid him at the moment,’ Lol said. ‘He’s in custody. The cops are questioning him about a murder on Herefordshire Beacon.’

‘Loste? This is the man found in the old fort, his throat cut from ear to ear? You’re serious?’

‘The guy worked at this hip-hop palace at the Royal Oak, outside Wychehill. Which Loste apparently believes is…’

‘An evil presence sapping his creativity. I heard that. Only, he doesn’t have any creativity. He’s an interpreter. A facilitator. That’s as far as it goes. Bloody hell, Lol. I mean, bloody hell.’

Someone was knocking on Lol’s back door.

‘Do you see him as someone who could kill?’ Lol asked.

‘Loste?’ Prof swallowed some coffee. ‘Big bloke. Conducting, he snaps batons. But he— With a knife? Blood spurting everywhere?’

Lol heard the back door opening and shutting. The door of the living room opened, and Jane stood there in her school uniform. She wasn’t smiling. She was unusually pale. When Lol pointed her to the sofa, she sat down with her hands clasped between her legs, biting her lip.

‘Prof, can I ring you back?’

‘Listen,’ Prof said, ‘if you really want to know more about Loste’s games, I can put you in touch with one of the people in his choir. In fact, there’s one guy might be more than happy to talk to you in particular. I’ll call him, get him to ring you. OK?’

Lol saw that Jane had been crying.

‘“Great and beautiful mystery”,’ Prof said. ‘I’ll tell you one thing about that. Like Elgar, Loste is obsessed with himself and his ideas. People, he can take or leave most of the time. Music is all. Nothing outside music, to Loste, could be both great and beautiful. Tell Merrily that.’

‘Right,’ Lol said. ‘Thanks.’

‘But, yeah. If there was some threat to his music, I suppose, when you think about it, he could kill,’ Prof said.

33 A Result, Anyway

There was a new sign and it said Starlight Cottage.

Of course. Winnie Sparke had told them how she’d changed the name from Wyche Cottage. Almost the first thing she’d said that evening with the choir laying its serene spell over Wychehill. This was what Lol had remembered.

The cottage was built of rubble stone and was not much bigger than Hannah Bradley’s place, lower down the lane. Its back garden was formed around plates of rock and ended abruptly in a kind of cliff edge with an iron fence. Merrily looked down and saw the road.

Yours etc., Starlight. Winnie, according to Spicer, had certainly been impressed by the letter supposedly sent to Elgar and passed on to Longworth.

Which posed some interesting questions. But even at 9.30 a.m., with most of the cottage still pooled in shadow, the bloody woman wasn’t around to deflect them. Frustrating, after an early night and only one remembered dream, which had been a dream of Cole Hill seen from Coleman’s Meadow; the only detail that Merrily could recall was the sense of pain and the disembodied, breeze-blown voice of Winnie Sparke saying that the hill was hurting. Odd the way that view, once seen, nested in your mind.

Merrily peered through one of the small windows, but all she could make out was a dim wall of books. She’d left her car in the lane, right outside. She gave the wind chimes above the front door a final flick and went back to it and the copy of the weekly Malvern Gazette which lay on the passenger seat.

‘RITUAL’ MURDER –LOCAL MAN HELD

Tim Loste hadn’t been named, which was normal if there were no charges yet. However, this was a weekly paper, printed yesterday, so if Loste had been charged late last night it wouldn’t have made the edition. The front-page story said the brutal killing on the Beacon had shattered a community already reeling from last weekend’s double fatal road accident (see page three).

On page three the rigid features of Leonard Holliday were in close-up against the blur of the road, under the headline:

‘THIS CARNAGE WILL GO ON…’

The story said that WRAG, the Wychehill Residents’ Action Group, was calling for the immediate closure of the Royal Oak pub as a music venue. Late-night traffic had increased dramatically on roads ‘not much wider than bridleways’ and ‘inner city’ nightlife had left residents living in fear. Mrs Joyce Aird, a widow living alone, said, ‘It’s terrifying. I’m a prisoner in my own home from Friday night to Sunday morning.’

The owner of the Royal Oak, promoter and gallery owner Rajab Ali Khan, had said, ‘I have no intention of pre-empting the inquest verdict on these two unfortunate people, but I am anxious to cooperate fully, if Mr Holliday can provide me with any evidence at all of damage to the property or person of any of his neighbours.’ It sounded like a quote that Raji had run past his solicitor.

Folding the paper, Merrily looked up to see a hare sitting at the top of Winnie’s narrow, down-sloping driveway, its black-tipped ears seeming to quiver for a moment before it bounded away into the hedge. At the top of the lane, the Cobhams’ tarted-up barn shone from its elevated site with an alien glamour, like some Pyrenean villa. It would look spectacularly seductive in the estate agent’s window, where wealthy tourists would project upon it their doomed bucolic fantasies.

Meanwhile … Stella. When Merrily had stopped in Ledbury to buy the Gazette, she’d checked her mobile, and Frannie Bliss had called from home to say he had some information from Traffic about Stella. She’d called him back at once. What he had to tell her had made the air in the car seem stale.

Might as well get this over, then.

Leaving the Volvo outside Starlight Cottage, Merrily walked up to the barn. Ignoring the front door this time, going round the back. There was a low gate on a latch, and she lifted it and went through to where a paved area had been laid. There was a wooden table and a pink and yellow striped sunshade and a woman sitting there with a mug of pungent-smelling coffee and her back to Merrily, who coughed lightly.

‘Morning, Mrs Cobham.’

Stella spun out of her chair, her red hair flaring up like a bonfire, the aggression emphasized by the kimono she wore, with yellow dragons on black and a hot slap of coffee, now, down the front.

‘Yes?’

‘Sorry to startle you.’

‘You.’ Stella subsided, pulling off her sunglasses and mopping at her kimono with a tissue. ‘Didn’t recognize you in ordinary clothes. What do you want? We’ve never encouraged people to just turn up.’

‘Well … after the way you led me on and then did a neat U-turn on the phone, that really doesn’t bother me too much.’

‘How dare—?’

‘And is this really a good time to be selling a house in Wychehill?’

Merrily placed the Malvern Gazette on the table.

‘Makes no difference.’ Stella barely glanced at it. ‘None of the potential purchasers ever come from this area. Look, Paul’s only gone into Ledbury, and he’ll be back soon and the things I’m guessing you want to talk about, if they get raised again it’s going to spoil his day, big time. And right now, our marriage, let me tell you, is hanging on … that.’

She held a thumb and forefinger about a millimetre apart.

‘So this move’s a new start, is it?’ Merrily said.

‘Darling, this—’ Stella slumped back into her canvas-backed chair. ‘This was supposed to be the new start. He “retired”.’ She did the quote marks in the air. ‘Should’ve realized what a horribly ominous word that is for a man. Strongly suggestive of impending impotence.’

‘What, these days, when everybody seems to be retiring at fifty?’

‘With Paul, it means something to prove. We originally bought this place as just a holiday home – he was in wood stoves, British end of a firm in New England, so a lot of transatlantic travel. He wanted to move out there but I wanted to do this up as a permanent home. Disastrous idea. Flung together in isolation – for ever! – with a man you realize you really never properly knew because he’d spent so much time away.’

‘Rows?’

‘Lots.’

‘Like on the night you crashed?’

Stella looked up at Merrily, squinting at the sun, fumbling her dark glasses back on.

‘What are you after? I rather thought you’d had your money’s worth the other night.’

‘Just the truth, this time. Why you lied to the police and everybody else.’

‘Fuck off!’

‘Well, actually, it’s fairly obvious why you lied. I’d just like to confirm it, and maybe ask a few supplementary questions. It won’t go any further. And you’re leaving anyway. You are actually leaving, or was that also—?’

‘No!’

Stella peered into her coffee. It looked like the coffee you made after a long and sleepless night, its hours counted out on fingers of alcohol. She sniffed and stood up.

‘I lie all the time, actually. Paul’s not in Ledbury, he’s in London and he won’t be back until tomorrow. But, yes, we are leaving. You want some of this, or would you like to give me an excuse to open a bottle of wine?’

Stella was away in the house for some time. Merrily gazed at the wounded rocks behind the trees and smoked a cigarette and checked the vicarage answering machine on her mobile.

There were five messages.

At barely ten a.m.?

Oh, God.

First message: ‘Hello, Mrs Watkins, you might remember me – it’s Amanda Patel from BBC Midlands Today. Not about you this time, you’ll be glad to know, but we’ve seen the story about your daughter in the Guardian and we’d like to follow it up for tonight’s programme. I’ve been on to the school, but she’s apparently not shown up, so I wonder if…’

Not shown up at school? Guardian?

‘…So if you could call me ASAP. I’ll probably be on my way to Ledwardine, so I’ll leave my mobile number…’

Merrily switched off the phone and put out her cigarette, trying to clear her head as Stella Cobham came out. Wearing a green silk robe, she was carrying an opened bottle of Chardonnay, the level already conspicuously down, and two glasses.

‘What’s your driving licence look like, Merry?’

‘I can’t remember.’

Stella peered at her.

‘You all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, mine’s got enough points on it that I’m just barely on the road. Can you imagine what it would be like living here if you didn’t have a car?’

‘I…’ Concentrate. ‘Yes, I can understand why you didn’t need a conviction for careless driving.’

‘I wasn’t drunk. I was just in a blind rage.’

Stella pulled her robe closer to her throat with one hand and reached out with the other for her wineglass, picking it up and then immediately putting it down again, as if this was some kind of testament to her sobriety on the night.

‘Then afterwards I was standing there in the road, with these whingeing bloody German tourists totting up the damage, and it was obviously my fault, and I’m thinking, Oh shit oh shit, what am I going to do? … when it came to me. I’d heard about the mad Loste claiming to’ve seen Elgar, and I thought, what’s to lose? And then … there was no going back.’

Stuck to the story in every detail, Bliss had said. Wouldn’t budge. Said there was this other bloke who’d seen it and she’d bring him into court. Report went to the CPS, and they don’t get many like this – at least, not where it’s an intelligent, eloquent, opinionated woman who’s going to be red-hot in the box and get it all over the papers. So the CPS made what was considered at the time to be a cautious and sensible decision. No charge.

‘And I suppose,’ Merrily said, ‘that you repeated the story in the church the other night…’

‘Because I was sick of the snide comments, and I suppose I felt a bit sorry for you. And I wanted to wipe the complacent smile off Devereaux’s face because, in a way, if it hadn’t been for him…’

‘Devereaux?’

‘The reason I was so mad … going like a bat out of hell … swerved too late … I … Paul had started going for long walks to “keep in condition”. I figured it was long walks down the hill and back up again, and in through a different gate.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I thought he was shagging someone. That weird bitch with her cheap see-through frocks and her kittenish fawning and her Oh, don’t you look so cool today, Paul.’

‘Winnie?’

‘Yeah, I accused him of having a fling with Sparke. I know he fancied her … and she was so blatantly available. You watch her. Any given situation, she’ll home in on the nearest man. Which is interesting for a woman who goes on about goddesses all the time.’

Merrily recalled Winnie on the hill that first night, going straight to Lol. Like, are you the exorcist?

‘And were they? Having a fling?’

‘He would’ve done, no question. I mean, that was the point. And I was convinced she … I mean, she was so knocked sideways when she got dumped by Devereaux, so—’

‘Preston Devereaux?’

‘Sorry, I forgot you’re not … It was fairly widely known in Wychehill. Nothing wrong with that, both single. I remember thinking it was quite nice, actually. She seemed genuinely besotted with the guy: Mr Countryman – wellies, cap, Land Rover, gun over his shoulder. Most of those types, they’re a bit thick, no conversation, but Devereaux’s educated, been around. And rich. Rich enough to rescue a poor woman washed up – and I mean washed up – in a foreign country.’

‘But it didn’t work out?’

‘She came round here one night, she was gutted. Shocked and insulted. I was stupid enough to commiserate. Stayed half the night, couldn’t get rid of her. Most of the people here don’t want to know you, but she’s all over you. When it suits.’

‘So Devereaux dumped her?’

‘Winnie wanted too much. He’s been single for a long time, and that’s how he likes it. I mean, she isn’t normally clingy, far as I can see – too arrogant, had too many attractive men – but she was with him. Mr Darcy senior. The American dream. And she clearly needs a lot of money. She was married to some guy, brought her over to London and then pissed off. But does a man like Devereaux— I mean in the end, does he want crystal balls and Tarot cards?’

‘When was this?’

‘Few weeks ago. I mean, some people think she’s got a thing going with Tim Loste, but it’s clear to me it’s not that kind of thing. He thinks it’s for conducting his choir. She just dominates him and after Devereaux she’s devoting all her time … no wonder he finally went insane. Mind you, that was a bloody shock, wasn’t it?’

Stella nodded at the Gazette and took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were crimson-rimmed, almost the colour of her spiky hair. It looked like she’d been doing some crying.

‘Drink and drugs. This place is sick.’

‘Loste really was doing drugs?’

‘Not heroin. More like LSD or something. Magic mushrooms? You see him coming down from the hill sometimes, he’s all over the place, although that could be the drink. Once I came across him lying in the heather, mumbling stuff. You stop questioning it after a while. I can’t wait to leave, now. Not that I’m saying that to Paul; he thinks he’s dragging me away from my dream situation. There’s no honesty between us any more.’

‘Maybe it’ll be different in America.’

‘I don’t know.’ Stella shook her head in disgust. ‘I think Sparke’s doing the Rector now.’

‘What?’

‘Now that he’s on his own.’

‘That’s rumour, is it?’

‘Who knows?’ Stella flipped a hand. ‘She’s been seen going into the rectory more than once. People notice these things.’

‘Which people?’

‘Holliday, for one. He doesn’t like the rector … or anyone much. Well…’ Stella looked across at the hill, near-vertical here, because of the quarrying. ‘Sorry to spoil your day. I suppose, people in your job, it must make you feel quite worthwhile when you think you’ve found a real one. Especially if it’s somebody distinguished. Elgar. You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?’

‘It’s a result, anyway,’ Merrily said tightly.

She stood up, and Stella Cobham swung round to face her.

‘Who told you about that? Somebody obviously did.’

‘I have a friend. At the CPS.’

What harm would another lie do, in a place like this?

34 Don’t Do Sorry

‘Awful,’ Jane said. ‘Barbaric.’

She said there were three double rows of barbed wire, more than chest high and with new stakes. And like a plastic screen over part of it, so you couldn’t even see through.

‘Like some high-security … like Guantanamo Bay or something. Like Guantanamo Bay’s just appeared in Coleman’s Meadow.’

Lol said, ‘You didn’t—?’

‘No. Well, I’d’ve had to go back to Gomer’s for the wire-cutters. And anyway, it was very thick wire. Heavyduty. A proper fence, like I say. Impossible. Plus there were these two blokes there, putting up a big sign.’

‘I’m guessing it doesn’t say Welcome to the Coleman’s Meadow Ley Line.’

‘It says Private Land. Keep Out. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. And the word Will is underlined in red. Like somebody’s splattered it on in a rage.’

‘Can they just fence it off like that, if it’s a public footpath?’

‘Is it a public footpath, though? I don’t know.’ Jane didn’t look at him. ‘I should’ve checked it out, and I didn’t. It’s not marked as any kind of footpath on the OS map. This is all so totally my fault, isn’t it? You get carried away with the romance and the excitement and you don’t check the basic nuts and bolts. Didn’t even check whether it was a right-of-way and I ignored the fact that it wasn’t in The Old Straight Track. I’m naive and immature. I’m an idiot, Lol.’

Jane punched her knee and winced and started to cry. The Guardian was crumpled up on the hearthrug. Lol thought it was actually a bit magnificent. Jane wouldn’t look at it.

‘Ever wish you hadn’t started something?’

The warmest day of the summer so far and she looked starved. Lol eyed her, curious. He’d never before heard her wishing she’d never started something.

‘When I first saw the fence I was shocked and then I was furious. And then I saw … when you’re right up to it, the worst thing is … you can’t even see Cole Hill. I felt just … sick. I just walked away and sat down in a quiet part of the orchard and howled.’

‘Jane…’

Lol sat next to her on the sofa. This was the time to put a comforting arm around her, but he never had. They were close, but she wasn’t his daughter and there was an old barbed-wire fence in his head that had never quite rusted away and probably never would.

‘And you know what?’ Jane said. ‘When I stopped howling, I realized I was sitting right on the ley, and there was … nothing. Nothing to feel. No ancient energy. No shades of Lucy.’

‘Because they’d … blocked the line, you think?’

‘Oh, Lol…’ Jane squeezed his hand. ‘There’s absolutely no need to be kind. I just wanted … just wanted there to be some magic left.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘It’s naive. People like me who listen to Nick Drake singing “I Was Born to Love Magic” and go all shivery. See, what I should’ve done – what a mature person would’ve done – I should’ve just objected to the housing, got some backing for that. Kept quiet about the ley. But no, I’m too smart for that. I go doorstepping a bunch of council guys at Pierce’s … in effect, tipping the bastards off. Now they know what it’s all about and they’ve turned it into some disgusting no-man’s-land. So nobody will ever see the magic again.’

‘Do you know who they are?’

Jane shrugged. ‘This guy Murray, the owner? Lol, look, if—’ She glanced towards the door. ‘If anyone comes, you haven’t seen me. Only, when I got back from the meadow just now, Jim Prosser’s like, Oh, Radio Hereford and Worcester are looking for you and some newspaper people, and they’ve all been ringing the vicarage and getting no answer. So now I can’t even go home in case anyone … I mean, I can’t talk to them now – I’m supposed to be at school. And I haven’t any evidence. They’d just walk all over me. I’m just totally dead, Lol.’

Lol stood up and went to the window. Saw two men and a woman walking up Church Street – people he didn’t know, and it was too early in the day for tourists. He stepped back and saw his own shadowy reflection in the dark side of the pane and knew that it wasn’t Jane who’d been stupid. She was a schoolgirl, below voting age, in no real position to object to a private housing plan or attempt to influence a local authority to veto it.

He, on the other hand…

… Had just stood and watched, perhaps only really concerned that Jane shouldn’t do anything to embarrass Merrily as parish priest.

‘You’re right. Best if you don’t talk to anybody at this stage. Best if you stay here while we work out how to handle this.’

‘We?’

‘If you have no objections.’ Lol turned his back on the street. ‘Interesting how fast this fence has gone up. They didn’t even wait for it to appear in the paper. The cattle had already gone last night.’

‘I noticed that. Jim said they belong to the guy who bought the Powell farm, rents the grazing from Murray.’

‘So if the cattle were removed yesterday – before the story appeared – that suggests that it was set up as soon as they heard the media were on to the story. OK … I’ll go and check it out. You stay here, don’t answer the door and be careful who you answer the phone to.’

‘You don’t have to—’

‘I do have to. Listen, while I’m gone, could you … My laptop’s under the desk. Could you put Wychehill Church into Google, see what you can find?’

‘What for?’

‘Think of it as Brownie points with your mum. You might need them.’

Jane smiled. Bit watery, but it was there. He told her about Prof Levin and the recording of the choir that had to be made at Wychehill.

‘You’re looking for connections with music. Choirs. Singing. I don’t know. Any link with Elgar in particular would be good. Use your intuition.’

‘Don’t you think that’s caused enough damage?’ Jane folded up the Guardian, put it behind a cushion, out of sight. ‘I can’t bear it. Why couldn’t I have just smiled? The photographer was going, no, no, don’t smile, but I didn’t have to play along, did I? Now I totally look like some evil slapper. An ASBO waiting to be issued. Lol … ?’

‘Mmm?’

‘I’m sorry for getting you involved.’

‘Pull yourself together, Jane,’ Lol said. ‘You don’t do sorry.’

The men who’d put up the fencing had gone but it looked, as Jane had said, like a not-so-open prison. Lol was furious. The way governments, national and local, were operating now. Even the council had its cabinet, where iffy issues could be sorted in secret. Any hint of opposition, doors closed, locks turned, walls went up.

And barbed wire.

OK, there was no proof that anyone from the council was involved in this. But it was likely, at least, that the landowner had the support of the Establishment.

And they’d fenced off something they didn’t believe existed. They’d blockaded an idea.

Standing on the edge of the old orchard, Lol began to sense some of Jane’s feelings about Alfred Watkins, who stood for independence of thought. Well into his sixties, a respected local figure, when The Old Straight Track was published, and the archaeological establishment had immediately turned on him. A barrier had gone up, and it was still up.

Independence of thought. Always a crime in the eyes of the Establishment. Lol was starting to feel suffocated, as if the air had been turned into shrink-wrap, when Gomer Parry came ambling out of the orchard, an inch of roll-up gummed to his lips.

‘Lol, boy…’

Gomer extracted his ciggy, blew out a grey balloon of smoke. Lol wondered if a disused orchard was now classed as a public place where, although it might be entirely legal to light a massively carcinogenic bonfire, nobody was allowed to smoke.

Gomer nodded at the wire.

‘Janie seen this yet?’

‘What do you think?’

Gomer said, ‘What I think is, Lucy Devenish was still alive, she’d drag Lyndon Pierce yere by the scruff, make the bugger tear it down with his bare hands.’

Lol thought what a pity it was that this kind of organic, natural justice was purely the preserve of old ladies.

‘You think Pierce had something to do with this?’

Gomer’s shoulders twitched under his summer tweed jacket.

‘You know this guy Murray, who owns the land?’

‘By sight. Never worked for him. Big farm, and does his own drainage.’

Does his own drainage. Lowest of the low in the planthire world.

‘Knowed his auntie, though, Maggie Pole, her as left him the meadow. Nice lady. Always very fond o’ that meadow.’

‘I don’t think I knew her.’

‘Left before you was here, boy. Went to an old folks’ home, over towards Hay. Hardwicke.’

‘The Glades?’ Lol smiled. ‘I used to know somebody there. How do you mean, fond of the meadow?’

‘Used t’ be a bench near the gate, and her’d go and sit there sometimes on a nice day. Peaceful place, nobody disturbed her. That was all I remembered, but after Jane come over the other night, I went to see an ole boy name of Harold Wescott. Know him?’

Lol shook his head. Gomer pinched the ciggy from between his lips with his thumb and forefinger.

‘Gotter be over ninety, now, has Harold, but still got his own house. Can’t tell you what he had off the meals-on-wheels yesterday, but you wanner know about anything happened in Ledwardine fifty year ago, he’s your man. Anyway, Harold, he knowed Maggie Pole pretty well, and he remembers her was real careful who her let the meadow out to, for grass. Wouldn’t have no overgrazin’, no ploughin’ up. Said it was a piece o’ history.’

‘Did she?’

‘Don’t get too excited, boy, wasn’t nothin’ to do with ley lines, far as Harold knows. ’Fact, he didn’t know nothin’ about ley lines. Not many of the old folks does. That was harchaeology – not for the likes of we.’

‘So why was the meadow a piece of history?’

‘Dunno. Harold reckoned it was Maggie’s mother used to go on about it. Maggie’s dad, ole Cyril Pole, he was a bit of a rough bugger, but her ma was a lady – real cultured, read books, had her own wind-up gramophone. Point is, Harold Wescott says Maggie told him her ma always said Coleman’s Meadow wasn’t to be touched.’

‘And it … you’re saying it was left to Maggie Pole on that basis?’

‘Sure t’be. But things get forgot, ennit? No kids, see, Maggie, never married, so that’s why it all went to the nephew and the niece. Niece got the money, this Murray had the ground.’

‘Did anybody else know the meadow wasn’t to be touched? Could be important, don’t you think?’

Gomer put the last inch of ciggy into his mouth, took a puff.

‘Hard to say, boy. Been all overgrown, round there, see, for a good while, since the orchard started goin’ to rot. Hell, aye, I’m sure some folks knowed, over the years, but mabbe they thought it best kept quiet about, like all these things. I’ll keep askin’ around. Where’s Janie now?’

‘My place. Should be at school, really, but she’s hiding from the papers and the TV. Not so sure any more that she’s got it right, you know? What are people saying in the village?’

‘Hippie thing,’ Gomer said. ‘That’s what they’re sayin’, boy. Sorry.’

Figured. In this area, the antique term hippie applied to any incomer of relatively unconventional appearance who couldn’t afford a luxury executive home.

‘What about the housing scheme, the loss of the field, the view of Cole Hill?’

‘Don’t affect many folks, see. They’ll do bugger-all, ’less it affects them personal. You listens to ’em, spoutin’ off in the shop…’

‘What are they saying about Jane?’

‘Leave it, Lol. These is just folks as don’t know the girl. Not like what we does.’

‘No, come on … what are they saying?’

Gomer squeezed his ciggy out.

‘They’re just ignorant people with too much time.’

‘Gomer … ?’

‘Ah … sayin’ it’s no wonder her’s goin’ off the rails when her … when her ma en’t around half the time. And no wonder Janie’s livin’ in a bit of a fantasy world when the vicar spends her time chasin’ things as don’t exist.’

‘Instead of looking after the parish.’

‘Ar, more or less. Sorry, boy, but you assed.’

35 Three Choirs

Walking down the lane towards the church, Merrily tried Lol’s number again. Still engaged. Tried his mobile and Jane’s. Both switched off. Left a message that just said, in a voice which she hoped did not sound over-hysterical, ‘The Guardian?’

She’d asked Stella Cobham if they happened to take the Guardian. They didn’t.

She replayed the message from Amanda Patel of BBC Midlands Today, watching Mrs Aird leaving the church with a shopping bag, crossing the road and becoming gradually shorter as if she was sinking into the green verge on the other side. Wychehill people disappearing into their homes like rabbits into burrows.

There were now six more messages on the machine about Jane: BBC Hereford and Worcester, Central News, Daily Mail, Hereford Times, Hereford Journal. And a clipped and icy Robert Morrell, school director, Moorfield.

‘Mrs Watkins, perhaps you can call me, ASAP.’

No wonder the bloody kid was out early. Merrily walked into the churchyard. Where, for heaven’s sake, was she going to get a Guardian in Wychehill? She was recognizing the onset of a cold sweat when a seventh message was delivered by a voice like suede and sounding close enough to lick her ear.

‘Mrs Watkins. Khan.’

Quite a long pause, as if Mr Khan was used to people dashing to disable their answering machines and pick up once they knew it was him. And then he said, ‘Call me back, would you?’ A patina of impatience. ‘I’m in my Kidderminster office.’

She plucked half a pencil and a cigarette packet from her shoulder bag and sat down on the steps of the Longworth tomb to write down the number. No hurry to call him back. It was probably going to be a courtesy call, apologizing for bothering him. Any requiem now was likely to be a cosmetic exercise.

She ought to call Morrell. At least he’d be able to tell her what was in the Guardian. On the other hand, if she revealed to Morrell that she didn’t know, what was that going to look like?

Leaning her head into the still-cool shadow of the stovelike tomb Merrily found herself staring up into the grotesque inverted rictus of the Angel of the Agony.

Purgatory. I think we can deal with purgatory right here, Winnie Sparke had said.

How true that was.

It’s as good as over. Directing this thought at the Angel of the Agony. I expect you know all about being burdened with crap.

She’d knocked on Hannah Bradley’s door. No answer. Probably one of her days at the Tourist Office in Ledbury. The mountain bike wasn’t around. If Stella had lied and Loste was delusional, how likely was it that Hannah had told her the truth?

But she’d been so convincing. It had been like a breath of pure air. Who could you trust?

Merrily stared at the writing on the tomb.

‘ALL HOLY ANGELS PRAY FOR HIM

CHOIRS OF THE RIGHTEOUS PRAY FOR HIM.’

So the quarry owner, Joseph Longworth, had seen an invented angel in a blaze of light and built a huge and costly church?

Wondering if Tim Loste’s choir was praying for him, she heard not prayer but laughter and, peering around the tomb, saw two people walking into the church drive.

One of them was Winnie Sparke in her long, pale, flimsy dress. Winnie was laughing, her good and abundant hair thrown back.

Merrily slid down behind the tomb.

The man with Sparke was a very big man. Overweight, but with the height, almost, to carry it. Wide-shouldered, wearing a flannely sort of shirt outside his trousers. His dark hair was long and brushed back, and he had a moustache – not Lord Lucan, not Freddie Mercury, but a wide, black, muscular kind of moustache, like the one on the face on the back of a twenty-pound note.

Jane had washed her face; her eyes were bright but a little wild.

‘I can’t find the printer.’

‘Haven’t got one.’

Lol shut the front door and, for some paranoid reason, barred it. Although Church Street was deserted, there would be eyes at windows. This was Ledwardine.

‘Lol … you’ve got a laptop but no printer?’

‘Just an oversight. I’ll get one sometime.’

‘Jeez.’ Jane stood up. ‘Did you see anybody?’

‘Gomer. The fence guys’ve gone now. Gomer’s not sure what’s happening there either, but he does know a lot of people.’

‘He’s still on our side, though?’

‘Jane, this is Gomer Parry. Anybody rung?’

‘Bloke called Dan. Friend of Prof Levin’s. I said you’d call him back. Then I had to go on-line. You ought to get broadband.’

‘Don’t use it enough. What did you find?’

‘I was going to print it out when you got back, but under the circs I’d better give you the basics.’

Lol sat down on the sofa. Jane had the laptop on the desk, with a curtain half-drawn.

‘Wychehill Church. Dedicated to St Dunstan, who’s one of the patron saints of music. He was Bishop of Glastonbury in the eleventh century, and he played the harp or something. But the church was only dedicated in the 1920s. Built in the Victorian Gothic style by Joseph Longworth, quarry owner, after his conversion which – get this – was said to have followed a visionary experience on the hill.’

‘What kind of visionary experience?’

‘Haven’t been able to find out. This was a boring ecclesiastical website, mainly dates and architectural features. All it says is that Longworth was stricken with remorse at the damage his quarrying had done to what he now realized was “holy ground”. And so he went to Little Malvern Priory and prayed for forgiveness and was subsequently directed to this spot.’

‘By God?’

‘That’s all it says about that. But something must’ve directed him because when he got there he found the remains of what was described as “a single-cell rectangular building” which was thought to be a monk’s cell or a hermit’s sanctuary.’

‘Next to the road?’

‘There wasn’t a road there in those days, just a quarry track, and that was a few hundred yards away, so the road must’ve been put in later, probably after Longworth was dead. So he built his church on top of the foundations of the single-cell rectangular building – you could get away with that kind of thing in those days. It says he built a church big enough to take a full choir and orchestra.’

‘Interesting.’

‘And then he built the rectory and houses for the church warden and the choirmaster. And then other people built houses there, as the Malverns had become fairly sought-after with the spa and everything. So Longworth is actually credited with establishing what is now considered to be Wychehill. Lol – is all this anything to do with that guy getting his throat cut on the Beacon?’

‘Anything’s possible,’ Lol said. ‘It’s a holistic world.’

‘You want me to keep searching?’

‘No, give it a rest. I’ll ring this bloke. Thanks, Jane.’

‘Took my mind off things a bit.’ Jane closed the laptop. ‘Feel like a … fugitive.’

‘We’ll deal with it.’

‘It’s not your problem.’

‘I suppose I’d like to think it was,’ Lol said.

‘Sorry.’ Jane smiled. A strained kind of smile. ‘I’d be honoured to be your problem. Especially if you can restrain Mum.’

Dan turned out to be the choir guy and he lived up near the Frome Valley, which was presumably how he came to know Prof Levin. He also knew…

‘Lol Robinson! I was at your concert at The Courtyard. Amazing. Shit hot. I mean it, man. A comeback in the truest sense.’

‘Well … thank you. That’s very kind.’

‘Best tenor in these parts, me,’ Dan said. ‘But I’d give it all away for a croak if I could write songs like you. Seriously, I’d rather be in a band – Robert Plant, or something, big-voice stuff – but if you’ve got the finest tenor in Much Cowarne you’re expected to use it. Cross to bear, man. On the plus side, you get to work with some unexpectedly wild people.’

‘Tim Loste?’

‘Yeah.’ Dan’s voice came down like he’d been unplugged. ‘Prof told me. It’s crazy, man. You look at Tim Loste, you think, yeah, wouldn’t like to meet him on a dark night in a back alley. You talk to Tim Loste … no way. With a knife? Utterly out of the question. Problem is, the police talk to him … different wavelengths, you know?’

‘Can you tell me a bit about his … wavelength?’

‘Oh man, I could bend your ear for hours about Lostie. Only, I’m still in the choir, in a loose way, so none of this came from me, right?’

‘Count on it.’

‘Well, it’s a big choir. The Loste boys – and girls. Drawn from maybe a fifty-mile radius. And you don’t have to totally love Elgar, but it helps. Me, I like him better than I used to – when you’re born in this area, you get the guy shoved down your throat from an early age. You live in Elgar Country. It’s an honour. Yeah, thanks.’

‘So you sang at Wychehill Church?’

‘St Timothy’s. As we call it. Acoustics are amazing. The quarry tycoon who had it built … Longthorne? You know that story?’

‘Longworth?’

‘That’s the man. Venerated Elgar, saw himself as like Gerontius, from the oratorio, an ordinary man who’d sinned a bit, and now he’s facing the final judgement and he’s shitting himself. So the guy builds a bloody church. Stairway to heaven or what?’

‘A very big church designed for sacred music.’

‘I think he wanted to buy into the Three Choirs.’

‘Right. That would be The Three Choirs Festival? Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire?’

‘Oldest fest of its kind in the country. Dates back to about 1700. But it’s a cathedral thing, mainly, so I don’t suppose Wychehill was much involved. The road wouldn’t’ve been much more than a quarry track in those days. But it obsesses Tim. I don’t get too close, to be honest, you get … roped into stuff, and for every one that works there’s a lot of time-wasters. He’s inclined to exploit people – fair enough, he is a bit inspirational, and the women fancy him, not that they can get too close with the Witch of Endor around.’

‘Winnie?’

‘Spooky.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Just is. She gets the ideas. There was one where we were divided into groups of twelve, and Tim fixed up for us to use three different churches – Wychehill, Little Malvern Priory and St Bart’s at Redmarley D’Abitot. We had to go to these separate churches and sing a set programme at the same time. I copped for Little Malvern – the parish church now, it is – and we had mobile phones connected with Tim and Winnie at Wychehill. And he’d give the word, and we’d all start singing simultaneously.’

‘Singing what?’

‘Gregorian chant, to start off, the warm-up. Then Elgar’s Kyrie Eleison. These solid C of E establishments reverting to their Catholic roots. Strange at first but quite … moving. The other thing I remember is how weird it felt, but I don’t dwell on these things.’

‘Weird how?’

‘I dunno … unexpectedly exciting, really. We did it by candlelight – that was Winnie’s idea, too. Dunno whether you know the Priory church, but it’s quite small and narrow. And it was, you know, quite a thrilling experience. I was a bit cynical about the whole idea at first, taking the piss, as you do, but … I’d do it again tomorrow, I mean it, I’d travel a long way to do it.’

Dan sounded like he’d surprised himself, saying that. Lol waited. He was fascinated. He sometimes thought about playing in a church, not in some dumb happy-clappy band, but … he didn’t know; he just wanted, sometimes, to put himself into a situation where his music might find a different level.

‘It was the things that were happening in my head,’ Dan said. ‘And my whole body, really. A vibration going through you, like wiring, and it’s like different parts of you are lighting up in sequence. Can’t explain it. I mean, all right, the chant usually gives you a bit of a lift. But this time the interconnectedness thing … it wasn’t just three churches coming together, it was like being inside a big … orb of sound. Like we’d broken through to another place. I mean it. More than that, really, I … bugger me, I sound like I’d taken something, don’t I?’

‘Why those particular churches?’

‘Well, Tim never explained, he never does. He’s an inarticulate bugger at the best of times; you think if he could talk in notes and chords, instead of words, he would, you know? They say he was a useless teacher. But we worked it out, kind of. Comes down to the three churches being in the Three Counties – Wychehill in Herefordshire, Little Malvern Priory in Worcestershire and Redmarley D’Abitot in Gloucestershire. So what he’d done, he’d assembled his own Three Counties choir … the Three Counties united in sacred chant. Weird.’

‘And he never tells you what’s behind all this?’

‘Not talked about, Lol. We’re all a bit funny about that kind of thing, en’t we? One woman – this is just one woman, mind, and I don’t know her very well, but she was white as a sheet when we come out. Said that when we were doing the Mass, she seen like a figure, up at the altar. Tall hat. Well, a bishop’s mitre. And he’s standing there with his arms raised. Like … like a bishop, I suppose. She was pretty shocked, but it might’ve been just the state we were all in.’

‘This happened when you were singing music from the Mass – Elgar’s music?’

‘Well, yeah, but I later found out there was a famous photo taken in there where you’re supposed to be able to see the ghostly shape of a bishop with his crozier. So she may’ve come back down with that in her head. You’re a bit high with the singing and you find you’re focused on the same spot that you’ve seen in the picture, and it’s all candlelit. When she told us, she wasn’t frightened exactly, it was more white with awe. And I remember thinking, Yeah, we woke him up, and he’s celebrating the Mass. And suddenly the idea of celebrating the Mass made sense to me for the first time.’

‘Well,’ Lol said. ‘Thanks.’

‘You should write a song about him,’ Dan said.

36 The Dream

Stashing away the notebook and the phone and shouldering her bag, Merrily walked directly over. But Winnie was already blocking the porch, her hands out, long nails, and her eyes almost black in the full sunlight.

‘No way.’

‘They let him go?’

‘I’m asking you, Merrily, with civility, to back off.’

‘That was him, wasn’t it?’ Merrily said.

‘Whaddaya think, it’s Elgar’s freaking ghost?’

Tim Loste had vanished into the church and the oak doors were shut. At the porch entrance, Winnie Sparke didn’t move. Her arms were slim but unexpectedly muscular, tanned and taut.

‘And this is just as close as you get today, lady. He’s in a delicate state. You need to show some respect.’

‘You were laughing.’

‘I’m laughing, he isn’t. I’m happy he’s out.’

‘I need to talk to him.’

‘Some other time. Jeez, he was accused of killing a guy … with a knife? They had him in some interrogation cell, threw the whole damn package at him, hour after hour, different cops, good cop/bad cop, all that shit. How they make you confess to what you didn’t do. Come at you and come at you till you don’t know whether it’s night or freaking day.’

‘Bad experience, Winnie, but I didn’t get him arrested. My business here’s road accidents. And that’s as good as over. I’m just drawing lines under things.’

‘Well, you go draw your lines someplace else.’

‘Why don’t you want me to talk to him?’

‘That’s how you choose to see it, you go right ahead. You put it all on me.’

Unbelievable. Was this really the same woman who, a couple of nights ago, in this very spot, had been all let’s-get-together and explaining how the rocks were in pain, telling Merrily how cute she was?

… And her kittenish fawning and her, Oh, don’t you look so cool today, Paul.

‘All right,’ Merrily said. ‘How about I just talk to you?’

‘Later.’ Winnie Sparke’s eyes were like smoked glass. ‘I have to take care of Tim.’

In the church, the organ started up, low and growling chords. Winnie smiled.

‘Giving himself a fix.’

‘He’ll be OK on his own for a while, then.’

‘Look, I’ll call you sometime. OK?’

‘It’s a public place, the church. I often go into other churches to pray. I think I feel the need—’

‘No…’

Winnie’s hands were out, clawed again.

‘You really going to scratch my eyes out? Winnie, I’ve been messed about for days, and my daughter’s got some problems and I need to go home. I’m asking for a few minutes of your time. Or if you’re determined to have an unseemly cat fight to prevent me entering a church…’ Merrily unslung her bag, dropped it at her feet. ‘Then let’s do it.’

The sun burned down and the church shimmered.

‘OK.’ Winnie Sparke’s hands fell, her shoulders slumping. ‘But give me three minutes to go talk to him.’

‘I expect there’s a back door, right?’

‘You have my word,’ Winnie said.

Merrily sighed.

‘Save me some time, Frannie,’ Merrily said into the phone. ‘Just tell me why he’s out.’

Bliss left the line open while he went downstairs to the car park.

‘Yeh, it’s true.’

‘I know it’s true. I’ve just seen him. When did they let him go?’

‘Your friend Sparke collected him from Worcester about an hour ago. The DNA evidence was, to say the least, inconclusive. But, mainly, other developments have altered the focus of the case in a way more meaningful for me, as an observer.’

‘Can you tell me?’

‘With the usual proviso. The murder I told you about in Pershore – the drug dealer tortured and shot in his car, Christopher Smith? We may have his killer.’

‘In custody?’

‘In a manner of speaking, although he won’t be signing a confession. What happened, two mates of Smith’s, encouraged by a modest reward and considerably emboldened, no doubt, by news of Roman Wicklow’s death, have now come forward to say that they saw Mr Smith leaving a nightclub in Worcester on the night of the killing, in the company of Mr Wicklow. Mr Wicklow being, as we’ve learned, a man who inspired considerable fear in his community.’

‘Wicklow murdered Smith?’

‘It begins to look like it.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘Apparently we do not, at this stage. But it’s usually a simple territorial dispute.’

‘So if they were both dealers and Wicklow was working for Khan, who was Smith working for?’

‘Dunno. It was part-time with Smith, he had a day job in an abattoir. Maybe he was also working for Khan. These situations get complicated. Maybe Smith had been unreliable and Wicklow was assigned to take him out. We don’t know, Merrily, that’s the honest answer.’

‘But Loste is off the hook.’

‘’Course he isn’t. They just had to let him go for the moment. No DNA pointers, and the CPS advised that there was insufficient evidence to support a murder charge.’

‘So they could have him in again?’

‘He’s a big lad, Merrily, and clearly three sheets in the wind.’

‘But surely the idea of a former music teacher killing a man who’s now emerging as a cold and practised assassin…’

‘Look,’ Bliss said, ‘I agree with you. Like I said, I think it’s drug-related and even though there’s evidence of Loste trading with Wicklow on the Beacon, if it was me I’d be looking to talk to the friends of Mr Smith – the ones we don’t know about yet. And Raji, naturally. But it’s not me, it’s Annie Howe, and Howe’s still keen on Mr Loste. On the points scale, one nice, educated, upper-middle-class killer is worth at least five street urchins.’

Surprisingly, Winnie Sparke came out of the church. Alone, but it was a start.

Merrily guided her to Longworth’s tomb under the Angel of the Agony. Winnie seemed uneasy about this, glancing up a couple of times before perching on the edge of a step. The Angel’s half-spread wings were shielding them against the sun, but in a predatory way.

The hell with him. Merrily sat down and leaned a shoulder into the lower folds of his marble robe.

‘Sometimes this job can be quite damaging to your faith, Winnie.’

‘I don’t care for faith. Faith is intellectually lazy.’

‘OK, skip the theological debate.’

‘It’s your show.’

‘Until I ask you something you don’t want to answer.’

Winnie shrugged. The organ started up again, something that Merrily half recognized. Not Elgar, too clipped, like fine topiary. Bach?

‘Bottom line, here?’ Winnie said.

‘Bottom line is the ghost of Edward Elgar. It’s the only reason I’m here, and I’ve wasted enough time on it. And I’m fed up with being circuitous. Did Tim make it up, or did he, in some way, conjure it up? Is he disturbed, sick or just a drunk?’

‘You want me to place a tick against one of the above?’

‘Or if a fourth possibility got missed out along the way…’

‘And what if I was to tell you…’ Winnie looked down into her lap ‘… that I didn’t know?’

‘I thought you’d at least have an opinion, all the esoteric subjects I assume you’ve studied.’

‘In order to write books, it helps to study.’

‘Is that still what you do?’

‘It’s an income. Not a good one. Better in the States. Life is more expensive here, and Mind, Body, Spirit books don’t sell so many.’

‘Are you doing a book on this?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Is that why you’re playing it close to the chest?’

Winnie didn’t answer.

Merrily said, ‘I don’t write books. Sometimes I have to make reports, but they’re internal. Say, for the Bishop, or as a safeguard against comebacks, or background notes for my successor in the job.’

‘This may be the book I get remembered for,’ Winnie said.

‘Not just another New Age paperback.’

‘No. I came over ten years ago on account of an English guy who was … who proved to be not Mr Right. Not even Mr Halfway Right. Couple years ago, I realized that if I was to stay – and I kind of like it here – I needed a project that would turn over some bigger money. I conceived the idea of a book that would explore the spiritual roots of musical creativity, through Elgar and the Malverns. I have a degree in ancient history and anthropology, although I knew I was gonna need some help with the music.’

‘You had a new angle on this?’

‘I visited here, found Longworth’s church and also this cottage that was proving hard to shift off the agent’s books on account it was too small and the quarrying had left no place to extend and it was dangerous for kids and stuff like that. I could afford to buy, if I sold my apartment in London, which was what I did. And then, at a conference on Elgar at the Abbey Hotel in Malvern, I met Tim.’

‘Someone who could help you with the music.’

‘More than that. A whole lot more. Tim grew up in Sussex, near Elgar’s home there, Brinkwells. He’d always felt there was something between him and Elgar that was … going someplace.’

‘Creatively?’

‘Creatively, yes. Which basically was how he wound up in Malvern. In most other areas, around this time, I should tell you, his life was a mess. He’d split with his girlfriend, he was starting to drink too much and he was pretty close to getting fired from his job at the college.’

‘When was this?’

‘This would be just over a year ago.’

‘So you and Tim…’

‘Began to work together. To get this out of the way, I need to tell you that there’s no physical relationship. Situation was, there was someone else in my life at the time.’

‘Preston Devereaux?’

‘Stop.’ Winnie’s expression didn’t alter.

‘Don’t go there?’

‘On no account.’

‘OK.’

‘Tim’s parents live in France, and he was closest to his grandmother. When she died, he inherited a substantial sum of money. By this time, I’d researched the situation here, pertaining to this gentleman.’ Winnie gently tapped the tomb. ‘I drew Tim’s attention to a house that’d come on the market in Wychehill.’

‘Caractacus.’

‘It seemed too perfect. It’s an ugly house, but it’s in the right place, and I … I should’ve explained that Tim’s primary problem was an inability to reach the heights as a composer. He’d always written music, his knowledge and his technique were never in doubt. He taught with flair and sympathy. His original work was … of a standard. There was a barrier between him and … what I call the sublime. The fact that he could never get beyond that caused him intense emotional pain.’

‘But he bought the house…’

‘He didn’t want to know about the house. He didn’t want to see me. I gave up on him. A week later, he swallowed a bottle of pills with most of a bottle of whisky, walked out in the street and collapsed. I didn’t know about this, I’d been down in London, tying up the ends of my divorce and seeing friends. I didn’t know how close he came to death. I didn’t know anything about it until he showed up at my door, couple of weeks later, and said he’d had a dream, while they were fighting to save him in the hospital. Like The Dream of Gerontius. You listened to all of that yet?’

‘Twice. In my uneducated way.’

‘Gerontius dies. He’s an old man, not a young man like Tim, but no matter. Gerontius either dies or he’s in a deep coma. Whatever, he sheds the body load and loses the weight of his pain. And he meets with his guardian angel.’

‘A woman, in my version.’

‘It’s always a woman. So Tim arrives at my door – a moment I relive quite frequently – and he tells me that he now understands that I am his guardian angel.’

‘And how does he know that?’

‘From his dream. He says he awoke in hospital knowing it. And now he goes along with me. He buys the house and we meet with the Rector and Tim starts to play the organ in church – there was an old guy who fumbled his way around the keys, he was happy to let it go. And then, quite quickly, the choir was formed. People love to sing. They love to have the music drawn through them, like silk. The choir comes out of the three counties, building its reputation, refining its membership. It’s a fine choir, growing toward the sublime.’

‘So Tim has died and come through to a new level? His old life has dropped away, he’s in a new place, with a new—’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘This was what you meant when you said you believed that purgatory could be dealt with in this life. Tim is physically purged, with a stomach pump, and then—’

‘Gradually, I became aware of a pattern. A grand design of cosmic proportions. And I can see from your eyes, Merrily, that you’re sorry we got here.’

‘No, I— He hasn’t exactly stopped drinking, has he?’

Winnie Sparke stood up. Her face and neck shone with sweat.

‘Go deal with your kid, huh? You’re Episcopalian, and this is Catholic theology. You have an inbuilt antipathy.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘Women priests … that’s a political thing. I’m not being … I mean, there’s no spiritual basis to it, right?’

Like she was the very first person to say that.

‘Is it part of your image, to come over as mercurial, Winnie?’ The heat was getting to Merrily’s patience. ‘Or are we simply approaching another area that you feel it would not be advantageous to get into?’

‘You’re not ready. You need to go away and consider this. I don’t believe you’re ready, spiritually, emotionally or intellectually, to feel the heat of the sublime.’

‘Whereas … you are?’

‘You have to excuse me,’ Winnie said. ‘I have things to do.’

37 Spiritual Malnutrition

A tractor and trailer were rattling past, down the lane from the track which led into the hills. Merrily climbed into her boiling car in front of Starlight Cottage and slammed the door, the mobile clamped tight to her ear.

‘Sorry, couldn’t hear for the traffic.’

‘I just said, she’s here,’ Lol said.

She closed her eyes and tipped her head back, the direct sun making a pulsing orange light show on her eyelids.

‘Thank God for something.’

‘And the piece in the Guardian…’ Lol said. ‘I’ll read it out to you.’

When he’d finished, she asked him if he’d mind reading it again. He read it again, slowly, while Merrily was opening all the car windows.

‘It could be worse, couldn’t it? She lied about her age.’

‘To make her an adult,’ Lol said.

‘And obviously her terminology –Philistine morons, for heaven’s sake. But the worst thing—’

‘She should have told you.’

‘That’s the worst thing, yes.’

‘It all happened so quickly, and you weren’t around. But she should have told you, and she knows that.’

‘I’m a lousy mother.’ Merrily leaned out of the window for more air. ‘I’ll come home. I’ll be home in an hour.’

‘No,’ Lol said. ‘Don’t.’

‘Don’t— Ow!’ Merrily pulled her bare forearm away from the Volvo’s scorching bodywork. ‘Sorry. Don’t come home?’

‘I mean not yet. There’s a TV crew around, and they’ll doorstep you, and you won’t know what to say.’

‘You’re right, I suppose.’ Merrily ran fingers through her hair; her head felt full of swirling fragments. ‘It’s just—’

‘Better to wait until late afternoon, when they’ve all filed their pieces – and without Jane they won’t be able to do much. Most of them might even drop it. It’s not a huge story, after all. And it’s Friday, and … How are things over there?’

‘Well, since you ask, it’s starting to seriously piss me off.’

It was good to unload it all on someone entirely non-judgemental. She told him everything, from Stella Cobham to Winnie Sparke who was all over the place.

‘First she’s doing the New Age paganism bit – springs and water goddesses – and then it’s High Catholic theology and getting lofty about women priests! It gets very hard to listen politely to this crap.’

‘I talked to an interesting guy.’

Lol told her about Prof Levin and a chorister called Dan who, working with Loste, thought he’d broken through to a higher place.

‘That must have been nice for him. What a dismal life of spiritual malnutrition we lead in the Anglican Church.’

‘But at least you never become bitter and cynical.’

‘Sparke…’ Merrily wiped sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘Winnie Sparke virtually accused me of not being equipped to grasp the profundity of it. Not equipped to feel the heat of the sublime!’

‘The bitch,’ Lol said.

‘Time to talk to Syd Spicer. And I mean talk. You’ll look after Jane?’

‘Merrily, you sound like—’

‘And I also need to ring Morrell.’

Morrell. What was it about Morrell? You tried to like these people – as a priest, you tried to like virtually everybody, but…

‘Before you say anything else, Mr Morrell, it’s my fault entirely. I kept her off school. I decided it wasn’t fair to inflict this situation on you, and as it was near the end of term…’

‘But surely,’ Morrell said, ‘you must realize the normal procedure would have been to consult me first. I might well have agreed.’

‘Well, yes, but there wasn’t really time. I mean, there it was, in the paper … and I had an appointment.’

‘You didn’t know it was going to be in the paper?’

‘Well … not this particular day…’

‘But you evidently knew, Mrs Watkins, that she was embarking on this madness—’

‘Madness? What’s so mad about—?’

‘—Under the pretext of an A-level project, and didn’t think to inform me.’

‘According to Jane you already knew.’

‘One thing I most certainly did not know was that she’d taken this unscientific nonsense to the media. But I had warned her that repeatedly playing truant in order to pursue some misguided campaign against the local authority was going to get her into seriously hot—’

He must have heard Merrily catch her breath.

‘Did I surprise you there, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Well, I—’

‘Could it be that you didn’t know about Jane’s recurrent migraine?’

‘Migraine.’

She shut her eyes against the sun. Even with all the windows down it was getting unbearable in here. Migraine?

‘I gather your curious job keeps you away from home quite a lot these days.’ Morrell’s voice was plumped out with satisfaction. ‘But you must know this is not something I can be seen to overlook. Yes, I value my reputation as a liberal, even radical school director, but if I allow students to come and go to pursue their whims I’m undermining my own authority. So I have to tell you that what I’m looking for now is Jane Watkins outside my room on Monday morning, with a full explanation, an abject apology and a readiness to accept whatever retribution I consider necessary.’

‘I see.’

‘And if that isn’t forthcoming, I also have to tell you I don’t expect to see her at all.’

‘You’re talking about suspension?’

‘Oh, I’m talking about a bigger word than that, Mrs Watkins. And also, in line with the usual procedure, I’m talking to the governors about it. I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse me, I have another call waiting.’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘If you hang up on me now, I’m—’

Jesus, what? She was sweating. He’d have the governors in his pocket.

Dead noise. He might have gone; you could never tell with a mobile. Or he might just want her to think he’d gone.

‘If you hang up on me, Mr Morrell … or take any extreme action against my daughter until I’ve had a chance to sort this out … Heaven’s sake, you’ve got kids dealing drugs, assaulting teachers, here’s one, all she’s doing is making a stand against something in her own village – not even in the school – that she feels is wrong? OK, something that you, as an atheist and an arch-sceptic, probably wouldn’t understand. And, yes, she’s never exactly tactful, and she gets up people’s noses. But if you go to the governors with this – some of whom are bound to be on the bloody council – I’m going straight to the national press, and I’ll make it my business to ensure that everybody knows what a pompous, smug, self-seeking, hypocritical prick you’ve become.’

Merrily cut the line, dropped the mobile on the passenger seat.

She was shaking. Her sweat was turning cold. She fastened her seat belt, fumbling with it, started the car and drove down to the church parking bay. Stared for a moment through the windscreen, past the church entrance to the gables of the Rectory, its windows smoky-black against the sun.

Not many people left to antagonize.

Spicer wasn’t answering the bell and she couldn’t hear it ringing inside the Rectory. Merrily banged on the front door, stepped back, scanned all the windows for movement.

Nothing. She went round the side of the house – like her own rectory, too damned big – and hammered on the back door, then walked away onto the lawn that rose into the forestry, a screen concealing quarrying scars and who knew what else.

So many screens in Wychehill, but the afternoon sun was high and hot and relentless and drove her back into the shade of the open back porch, where she stood beating one last time on the back door. Leaning on the lever-handle in frustration – and the door opened.

It swung back with no creak, and she was looking into a utility room with a Belfast sink, a pair of Wellingtons standing underneath it, a balding Barbour on a peg.

Merrily said, ‘Syd?’

No reply.

‘Syd, are you in?’

She was experiencing an unseemly urge to search the house, find the secret photos in the drawers, uncover Syd Spicer’s hidden history. The door at the end might not be locked, but she was reluctant to approach it. Afraid to? Maybe.

For reasons that she was reluctant to examine, she backed away, closed the porch door and went down the drive to the roadside.

Back in the car she rang Rajab Ali Khan’s office in Kidderminster, returning his call to her answering machine.

‘If that’s Mrs Watkins,’ a woman said, ‘Mr Khan said to tell you he’ll be at the Royal Oak for the rest of the day. He says if you can spare the time he’d like to see you.’

38 Local Democracy

Jane had found Redmarley D’Abitot church on the OS map, ringing it in pencil.

‘This is interesting. Look…’

‘One second…’

Lol peered around the curtain. Mid-afternoon, and the tourists were out on Church Street, the camera-hung carousel with its tape-loop of soundbite conversations. Only today, some of the visitors would be media and they knew, from the Guardian, what Jane Watkins looked like.

‘Go on…’

He polished his glasses on his T-shirt, put them back on to examine the map folded on the desk. Redmarley, on the other side of the M50 motorway, just over the Gloucestershire border, was almost due south of the Malvern range.

‘I know I’m obsessed with leys at the moment,’ Jane said. ‘But it’s almost like there is one, going up from Redmarley, interlinking the three counties, the full length of the Malverns. See?’

Jane had drawn in the line. It wasn’t connecting ancient sites as much as hilltops. Lol counted five: Midsummer Hill, Hangman’s Hill, Pinnacle Hill, Perseverance Hill, North Hill.

‘And look at this…’

She’d also marked the two major Iron Age hill forts, Herefordshire Beacon and Worcestershire Beacon. But the line didn’t go through the middle of either – it skirted the first to the right and the second to the left.

‘That’s not a problem, it’s how it seems to work,’ Jane said. ‘Alfred Watkins noticed that leys almost always cut along the edge of a hill fort rather than through the middle. If you look on the map, it’s the same with Cole Hill – although when you’re actually on the line it looks as if you’re looking directly towards the summit.’

‘What does that mean?’ Lol said. ‘Cutting to the sides.’

‘Simple. Iron Age people lived in the middle of those hill forts. There were huts and things. You don’t want powerful spiritual energy in your actual home, do you? You’d go slowly insane with the intensity of it. So you live to the side of the ley. Churches built on sites of ritual worship are something else, obviously.’

‘Being places you actually go to for a spiritual buzz?’

‘Uh-huh. So Redmarley Church is right on the line. Now, the other church where they had a choir going, Little Malvern Priory, that’s not on the great north–south ley. It is on a ley, though, another one that’s cutting left to right, across the north–south line. Now here’s Wychehill…’

‘Where the two lines cross.’

‘Cool, huh?’

‘You may be on to something here,’ Lol said. ‘I just wish I knew what.’

‘We’re looking at a whole range of holy hills. That would make this a massively important area, geopsychically.’

She looked up at Lol and sighed softly.

‘You know, I love this. It reinforces your sense of … I dunno … Like, you just put your pencil on the map, and it’s like the choir guy said, you’re suddenly at the centre of something immense. Almost like you’re making a personal connection with…’ Jane shook her head rapidly ‘… bollocks.’

‘Maybe all great ideas start off as bollocks,’ Lol said. ‘It’s the way—’

‘Oh hell, who’s this?’

Jane snatched a quick glance around the curtain and then moved away from the window, her head down. Someone was knocking on the front door.

‘Go upstairs,’ Lol said.

‘Mr Robinson, is it? Sorry to bother you, but I understood you might know where the vicar is.’

He was wearing a suit and a wine-coloured tie which – first thing Lol noticed – matched his plump lips. Swaying a little, rattling small change and keys in his pockets. It seemed so not his generation, rattling your keys. He couldn’t be more than thirty.

‘Sorry,’ Lol said. ‘I’m not really sure where she is. Her work takes her all over the diocese.’

‘Daughter with her, do you know?’

‘Wouldn’t imagine so. It’s, um, Mr Pierce, isn’t it?’

‘Lyndon Pierce, that’s right.’ Gelled hair glinting in the sunlight like the roof of a black cab. ‘Sure we must’ve met sometime or other. Been trying to get around to see all the newcomers to the village, one by one.’

‘I’ve been here a few years now, actually,’ Lol said. ‘You probably didn’t notice me. Is there … anything I can do? Any message I can pass on?’

‘That’s very possible, Mr Robinson, yes.’

Lyndon Pierce’s local accent seemed to have acquired a transatlantic roll. He glanced meaningfully over his shoulder at a Japanese dad photographing his family on the edge of the square.

‘You want to come in?’ Lol said.

‘Thank you.’ Pierce rubbed his hands. ‘Won’t keep you a minute, Mr Robinson, but there are some things that I think Mrs Watkins should know about, if you happen to be in … contact with her.’

Letting him into the living room, Lol felt unexpectedly nervous. The guy represented aspects of life he’d avoided: never needed to consult a local councillor, never earned enough to need an accountant.

Pierce was standing on the hearthrug, taking in the orange ceiling that Jane had recommended, the crystals that Jane had positioned in the window, the Boswell guitar. No doubt thinking, neo-hippie.

‘Lot of people’re looking for Mrs Watkins today, Mr Robinson. And … Jane, of course. Girl seems to have started something she’ll likely live to regret. Her mother, too, mabbe.’

He must have figured, from the contents of the room, that the chances of ever getting the occupant’s vote were remote enough for him to skip the niceties.

‘Unfortunate, but people do tend to blame the parents for the behaviour of the child, don’t they, Mr Robinson?’

‘You’d call Jane a child?’

The door to the hall and the stairs was not quite closed. Please don’t let her be behind it.

‘Likely not to her face.’ Lyndon Pierce laughed. ‘Look, all right, Mr Robinson, I’ll come directly to the point. We got quite a serious problem yere. I was phoned up a few hours ago by Gerry Murray – owner of Coleman’s Meadow? Not a happy man, as you can imagine. I went to check out the situation for myself and then I gave him my suggestion, which was to get the police in.’

Lol blinked. ‘To arrest Jane?’

‘I’m sure a lot of folk would think that wasn’t a bad idea, actually, Laurence.’

Using Laurence now, in the power-trip way of young policemen when they pulled you over for speeding.

‘I’m sorry, Lyndon,’ Lol said. ‘I don’t get out much. Something’s happening in Coleman’s Meadow?’

Pierce sniffed. ‘All look the same to me – green activists, animal liberationists, ragbag of scruffs from God knows where. They say it’s a demonstration … we might consider it threatening behaviour.’

‘You mean … there’s a protest?’ Lol was fighting a smile. ‘About the ley line?’

‘You’re telling me you didn’t know? Very, very stupid people, Laurence. ’Bout a dozen of ’em. Posters, placards. Trying to protect something we all know don’t exist.’

Lol saw Pierce taking in the OS maps on the desk with the ancient sites ringed and the pencil lines connecting them. He began to fold them up as Pierce smirked.

‘Yes, I can see you didn’t know a thing about it.’

‘It was in the Guardian.’

‘And who put it there, Laurence? I’ll admit I’m having difficulty with this, see. Why you and that girl and those cranky sods out there wanner put the mockers on a much-needed development in an otherwise useless, derelict area.’

‘But … isn’t there a statutory notice posted at the site for the actual purpose of inviting objections?’

‘Aimed at local council-tax payers with a legitimate viewpoint, not sad buggers with nose rings who come from miles away ’cause they feel lost if they en’t got a protest to go to. And not adolescents getting above themselves and trying to cause trouble. In fact…’ Pierce looked down at his shoes and then back at Lol. ‘I think I should tell you that people are beginning to feel it’s time that girl’s mother did something to curb her behaviour before—’

‘Before the community does? A curfew? Court order banning her from going within half a mile of Cole Hill?’

‘Don’t get silly, now.’

Lol raised both eyebrows. ‘All because she feels strongly about preserving the village heritage?’

‘Laurence, that’s balls. One of our experts says it en’t even in that feller’s book. She made it up. It don’t exist. It never existed. It’s a bloody joke. It’s … flying-saucer stuff. Me, I’m simply trying to be reasonable, here, see both sides of it. When she’s a bit more mature, she’ll likely realize that, like all these villages, Ledwardine has to grow or die.’

‘Grow into what?’

‘All I’m saying … if people consider we’re now within commuting distance of London, then we got to run with that. Home Counties overrun with asylum seekers, decent hard-working folk gotter move somewhere. If they wanner sell up and bring their money here, who’re we to—?’

‘Grow into an extension of London suburbia? Three hours is now commuting distance?’

‘Or quicker, with a fast car.’

‘Jesus,’ Lol said.

‘You people…’ Lyndon went back on his heels. ‘You really make me laugh. You’re living in the bloody past. I’m an accountant, boy, we’re the first to see the signs. I see the farmers’ profits going on the slide, year after year. It’s patently clear that agriculture can’t sustain the county any longer and the county can’t sustain agriculture. If cheap imports are killing farms and the government don’t want ’em growing food n’ more, there en’t nothing we can do about that. Farmer wants to survive, he sells what ground he can for quality housing at the best price he can get. Our job’s to support the farmers.’

‘That’s a very twisted kind of logic, Lyndon.’

‘And I’ll give you some more. City people, weekend folk, are used to more sophisticated facilities than we’ve been able to provide, and if they wants ’em on the doorstep we gotter give them that in Ledwardine itself – more shops, proper supermarkets, and at the same time—’

‘Jim Prosser know about that?’

‘Jim Prosser’ll be retired soon. And we can catch up on what the rural areas’ve been missing all these years. You don’t think local people should have sophisticated facilities, Laurence? Decent leisure centre?’

‘Has anybody asked them?’

‘Laurence…’ Lyndon Pierce blew air slowly down his nostrils. ‘That’s why you elect councillors. It’s called local democracy.’ He beamed, case proven. ‘Anyway, if you do hear from Mrs Watkins, put her in the picture, would you? If she wants to speak with me about this matter I’ll be available.’

‘Are these … ?’ Lol heard the stairs creak. ‘Are these protesters still there?’

‘Not for long. New legislation’s made it easier to deal with time-wasting scum. Likely we’ll have it sorted before teatime without any arrests.’

‘What with, water cannon? Rubber bullets?’

‘People like you worry me,’ Pierce said. ‘Vicar be back home tonight, will she?’

‘Far as I know.’

‘Only, folks keep saying to me as how she spends so much time out of the parish these days we might as well not have a vicar at all.’

‘Who would that be, specifically, Lyndon?’

‘Pretty hard, seems to me, for a parish vicar to win back support once it starts to slip, Laurence. Specially if her daughter’s setting a bad example to other kids, skipping school, making trouble. I’ll leave you to think about the implications of that.’

Pierce placed a hand on the living-room doorknob, then turned back to Lol with a minimal smile.

‘Oh … and if certain people who en’t local don’t like the way we do things around yere, seems to me they might think about moving on? Knowing they can always get a good price for their period cott—’

The door opened, pushing Lyndon Pierce back into the room. Jane was standing there, face as white as her school shirt, gazing at Pierce with all the warmth of a November twilight.

‘You mean if people don’t like things being run by bent councillors?’

Pierce’s smile was history. Lol watched, with a horrified kind of fascination, as the man tongued his full lips as though he was trying to tease it back.

‘Or maybe,’ Jane said, ‘maybe if they don’t like bastards who used to shoot blue tits off the nut-containers with their airguns?’

‘You…’ Pierce’s forefinger came up ‘… had better watch your mouth.’

‘Lyndon,’ Lol said softly. ‘She’s just a child.’

Pierce spun round at him.

‘As for you … vicar know you’ve had her daughter upstairs? ’Cause it looks like she’s gonner find out, ennit? But don’t you worry, Laurence, it won’t be from me. Not directly, boy, not directly.’

Lol had to grab Jane and hold on to her to stop her going for Pierce. Or maybe it was the other way round.

Whichever, them holding one another like this, he knew as soon as Pierce stepped briskly outside and all the heads began to turn that it wasn’t going to look good from the crowded street.

39 Temple of Sound

In the copy of the Malvern Gazette open on Raji Khan’s ebony desk, there was a hole where the face of Leonard Holliday used to be.

Mr Khan stabbed it again with his gold Cross pen.

‘Why are they doing this to me, Mrs Watkins? Can you tell me that?’

He was wearing a cricket shirt and cream slacks and white shoes. His black hair hung beyond his shoulders, cavalier style. In his left ear he wore what might have been an emerald. Merrily sat on the other side of the desk in a dark wood chair which was meaningfully lower than his.

‘Probably just that … this is not what they expect to find,’ she said carefully, ‘in a place like this? Have you tried inviting the Wychehill Residents’ Action Group up here to discuss it?’

Mr Khan’s office, upstairs at the Royal Oak, was like something out of Sherlock Holmes: drapery and brass standard lamps, deep maroon walls and a grey picture-rail. Didn’t really work in summer, but with a coal fire on a December day it would be awfully cosy. A middle-aged Asian woman who dressed like Sophie had shown Merrily up. No doormen apparent on the premises, no DJ Xex.

‘You know, I once did invite them,’ Mr Khan said. ‘They wouldn’t meet me. I am, it would appear, the very spawn of Satan.’

‘And I left the holy water in the car.’

Mr Khan beamed. At first, she’d been thinking how surreal all this was, how unlike anyone’s idea of a drug baron’s lair. But it was, in effect, like a traditional drug baron’s lair, and Mr Khan was behaving curiously like the kind of urbane, educated executive criminal you saw in old films. While she didn’t feel uncomfortable here, it might have made sense to tell Bliss she was coming.

‘Now.’ Mr Khan was leaning back in his leather swivel chair, hands behind his head. ‘Tell me again. You are planning to hold … ?’

‘A requiem.’

‘A requiem?’

Repeating it in the manner of Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, disarming young fogey that he was. An expensive education hadn’t quite ironed Wolverhampton out of his accent.

‘Requiem Eucharist, Mr Khan. A Holy Communion for the dead. I wasn’t sure whether your own faith might present some—’

‘Oh, not a problem at all, Mrs Watkins. In my capacity as a patron of the arts and popular culture, I’ve attended no small number of Christian funerals. My initial problem, however … is the fact that I simply didn’t know these poor people as individuals. Many hundreds, thousands, now frequent Inn Ya Face and travel many miles to do so. Did you know the late Mr Cookman?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘And yet you’re proposing to conduct a service in his memory and that of his girlfriend.’

‘Not exactly that. Or rather, not entirely that. It also relates to the circumstances of their deaths and the effects all of that has had on the community.’

‘All of that?’

‘There have been a number of other accidents. Very minor, in comparison, but there’s a general atmosphere of … discomfort.’

‘Discomfort.’

‘I’d like this to be a service of closure. Of healing. Which, in my experience, can be quite … all-embracing. Which is why I thought it would be appropriate for you to be there.’

‘And why is it being conducted by you, rather than by Mr Spicer?’

‘Because…’ Aware of painting herself into a corner. ‘Because I specialize in this kind of healing.’

‘You’re a spiritual healer. A faith healer.’

‘That would not be a description I’d welcome.’

‘And what would be?’

Mr Khan waited, his prominent chin uptilted.

‘I’m the Deliverance Consultant for Hereford Diocese,’ Merrily said. ‘I suppose I should explain what that—’

‘You think I don’t know? It certainly suggests that your earlier reference to holy water was not entirely in jest.’

‘It was entirely in jest, but I can understand your … misgivings.’

‘We hear so much nowadays about so-called deliverance.’ Mr Khan frowned. ‘Children and babies being exorcized to the point of abuse and beyond, because they are believed to be harbouring evil spirits.’

‘Not us. If we’re ever invited to exorcize a young child, the social and psychiatric reports come first. And the situation in Wychehill, fortunately, is nothing to do with kids. We’re looking at the relatively high incidence of problems on the road and other … problems. Which have been linked to experiences of a possibly paranormal nature.’

‘I can’t wait to hear this, Mrs Watkins.’

‘People say they’ve become aware of a figure on a bicycle. In the road. Before an accident. That’s it, basically.’

Coming out with this kind of stuff cold was, Merrily often thought, the hardest part of the job. Sometimes you could almost feel the derision on your skin.

‘How extraordinary, Mrs Watkins. And did the civilized Mr Devereaux witness this apparition?’

‘We haven’t yet discussed it in any depth. But it seemed to me that a Requiem Eucharist for two people who’d recently died on the road would be a calming influence, as well as bringing together the local community in a spiritual way. I think I’m right in saying that Islamic theology accepts that social and atmospheric disturbances can be caused by various discarnate … presences.’

‘Oh, very much so. Very much so.’ Mr Khan stood up and moved to the window. ‘So this has absolutely nothing to do with the murder of my employee Mr Wicklow.’

‘Not directly,’ Merrily said. ‘But I’m sure he’ll be very much in our minds.’

He smiled. ‘What diplomacy.’

‘It seems he was a violent man, Mr Khan.’

‘Yes, apparently he was. But still a man. And still, in the end, a victim. Who is mourned. Look…’

Mr Khan beckoned her and she walked over to the window. Down in the courtyard, a man was adjusting the driving seat of a bright orange sports car with an ENGLAND sticker in the rear window. Two women looking on, the older one clutching a tissue.

‘His family?’

‘They’ve been here most of the day, to attend the opening of the inquest and collect his personal possessions – his car, his clothing, his jewellery. His mother’s taken it very badly. He was her only son.’

Merrily said nothing, wondering about the mothers of dead junkies whose habits had been fed by Roman.

‘Perhaps I was naive,’ Mr Khan said, ‘in watching my head doorman walk out onto the hills with his knapsack and his binoculars and being gratified by his seeming appreciation of the natural world. It’s been a sobering experience for all of us.’

He turned away from the window.

‘And you don’t really believe me, do you, Mrs Watkins? You don’t believe I knew nothing about Roman’s enterprise. Perhaps you even think I’m involved in it myself.’

Hadn’t been expecting that.

‘Well…’ She went back slowly to her chair. ‘I don’t think you’re naive. Not all your regulars like to keep going all night unassisted. It’s a chemical culture. If you were widely known for taking a hard line against drugs, this wouldn’t be considered a very cool venue, would it?’

Khan gave Merrily a sharp look which, she thought, was close to conveying respect.

‘I’ll tell you one thing.’ He sat down again and prodded the newspaper on his desk, opened at ‘THIS CARNAGE WILL GO ON…’ ‘This is a quite ludicrous exaggeration. A couple of weeks ago, I made a point of parking my own car in Wychehill early on a Sunday morning to see for myself the alleged havoc we were wreaking. No one, in the course of an hour and a half, seemed to stop there, and there was no noise. And although we sell alcohol, like any other country pub, I’m aware of no drink- or drug-related convictions, so far this year, that are connected with Inn Ya Face. And the traffic police do target us – they’d be foolish not to.’

Merrily chanced her arm. ‘But not the drug squad?’

‘Why are you—?’ He spread his arms. ‘Mrs Watkins, why are you pursuing this? The police aren’t. The media are still calling Roman’s death some sort of ritual murder. The police have been inclined to view it as an extreme reaction to something considered … culturally alien to the area. While you … is this a holy war?’

‘Do you know DCI Howe well?’

Khan’s eyes narrowed, for just an instant, and then he smiled.

‘She’s a fine officer. Her record on community relations is impeccable.’

‘Clearly going right to the top,’ Merrily said.

And wondered what their relationship was, Annie Howe and Raji Khan. He’d surely be an informer to die for.

‘I do hope so,’ he said. ‘The police service needs more people like Annie.’

‘And I hope you’ll be able to attend the service.’ She stood up. ‘Erm … if you don’t mind me asking, how did you get into this business?’

‘This murky business?’ He laughed, a yelp of delight. ‘This world of gangland rivalry and territorial wars? Mrs Watkins, you have such a … a darkly romanticized view of the nightclub scene.’

‘I tend to watch a lot of trash TV. To unwind from the pressures of the job.’

Raji Khan came around the desk.

‘I shall tell you why, rather than how – despite coming down from Cambridge with a moderately acceptable second – I got into this business. I came into it, Mrs Watkins, because I absolutely love it. I love it to death … the music, the atmosphere, the milieu … have loved it since escaping from my dormitory at fourteen, with a friend, to attend my very first rave on a hillside in Wiltshire. Electrifying. Pure, ecstatic, naked vibration. You leave everything behind … your mind, your body, your— I’m sorry, was that your generation – acid house, drum-’n’-bass – or did you miss out? Do you know what I’m talking about? Or are you persuaded, like Mr Holliday and his cohorts, that we are demonic?’

‘Well, I…’

‘I am a Sufi,’ Raji Khan said. ‘Music is a sacred form to me. I tell people that Inn Ya Face has been transformed from a common drinking den into a temple of sound.’

‘Yes.’

Two wires connecting in Merrily’s head with an almost audible fizz.

‘Have I said something, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Mmm, I think you have. Have you got something on tonight?’

‘Of course. It’s Friday. We have an old friend of mine, the good Dr Samedi.’

‘From Kidderminster? Jeff?’

Khan looked startled.

‘He was hired for a party in our village, a couple of years ago. With his voodoo hip-hop show. He still doing that? Not so famous then, of course.’

‘My, my,’ Raji Khan said.

He escorted her to the car park. Roman Wicklow’s family had gone. Two white vans were arriving.

‘Well,’ Khan said, ‘I’m not sure whether I shall be able to attend your requiem. But I do hope that you can help to stop the carnage.’

40 Netherworld

All Jane wanted was to leave, go running back to the vicarage, bar the doors and spend the night slapping tin after tin of white paint on the Mondrian walls. But Lol said that leaving now would only make it worse, like they actually did have something to hide, so she just kept walking round and round the little front parlour like a caged tiger – hamster, more like – ending up face-down on the sofa, beating the cushions in blind despair at a world where the scum always came out on top.

And at the bottom of it all, like a cold stone in her gut, was the knowledge that this was all so totally her fault. This half-arsed venture had been cursed from the start, and the curse was spreading and, of all the people she never in her life wanted to harm, of all the people who didn’t deserve it…

Lol was always tethered to his past, that was the problem. He’d stretch it just so far and then something would send it snapping back, old rope twisting itself into a new noose.

After the disgusting Pierce had gone, Lol had sat at the desk assuring her that this was really not a problem, and the kind of people who’d believe someone like Lyndon were the kind who were not worth worrying about.

But he must be worried, terribly worried about the damage Pierce could do, with a word here and a word there, scattered like rat poison over all the places he went in his capacity as a democratically elected member of the Herefordshire Council. Democratically elected, Lol said, because nobody could be bothered to stand against him.

Lol’s personal history, however, would always stand against him.

She’d been called Tracy … Cooke? Jane had known all about this for a couple of years now. Anyway, her name was Tracy and she’d been aged about fifteen at the time.

Lol would have been only eighteen or so himself when he was set up by the bass player in his band who’d wanted Tracy’s mate and had got them all, Lol included, hopelessly drunk … and then had decided he was having both girls and had crept into Lol’s hotel room and virtually raped Tracy while Lol was sleeping it off. Slipping away and leaving Lol – who knew nothing about it, hadn’t even had sex with the girl – to face the police investigation that would crush his career, turn his loopy, born-again Christian parents against him and tip him down the chute into what he’d called in a song the medicated netherworld of psychiatric so-called care.

Taken years to drag himself out of the System and, while he wasn’t exactly on that register, he must still have a record for a distant sex offence. An offence that never was, but which explained everything about Lol: all the caution, the timidity, the fear of facing an audience which he’d seemed finally to be leaving behind.

Did Lyndon Pierce know about this, or was it just a lucky stab? Villages were such evil places.

At least she wasn’t under-age, just the bloody vicar’s bloody daughter, so, even if anyone believed it, the worst they could say…

Oh God, God, God…

Harsh colours collided behind Jane’s eyelids, a small universe exploding.

When she eventually opened her eyes, she saw that Lol was looking surprisingly calm – a danger sign, surely? Sitting there at the desk in his black T-shirt with the alien motif, his little round glasses on his nose, fine slivers of grey in his hair, and the phone at his ear, and he was going, ‘Yes, thank you … Look, I wonder if it’s possible to speak to Mrs Pole.’

Jane scrambled to her feet. ‘Lol?’

Lol was saying, ‘Margaret Pole, yes … Oh … Oh no. I didn’t know. I’m so … I’m really very sorry…’

Jane didn’t know what was happening. She wanted to snatch the phone out of his hand and start shaking him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a friend of the family. I came to visit her once, a few years ago. I’ve, um, been abroad. It’s just that I’m not far from Hardwicke, and I was thinking … I had some flowers and chocolates and … Well, never mind. Sorry you’ve been…’

Lol’s face tightening in concentration. Jane felt almost panicked now. Why was he trying to reach a woman who was evidently dead? What if something had gone wrong in his head? Or hers.

‘Unless…’ Lol said. ‘Look, she had a friend there, I remember, we got on very well. Miss White. Athena White. I expect she’s dead, too, by now.’

Lol listened. When he put the phone down, he was looking kind of excited.

‘She’s still there, Jane. When I said I expect she’s dead, too, the woman said, No, I’m afraid not.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Miss White. Athena White is still a resident at The Glades Residential Home at Hardwicke.’

‘So?’

‘Maybe you never met her. I don’t suppose Merrily would have gone out of her way to introduce you. Not then, anyway. Jane, will you do something for me?’

‘I’ll do bloody anything, Lol, if you’ll just tell me what’s happening?’

‘If I give Gomer a call, will you go down to his place and stay there until Merrily gets back?’

‘Why?’

‘Because, under the circumstances, I don’t want you on your own. And if we’re seen driving out of here together – and we will be seen…’

‘Where are you going? This is not funny, Lol – we’ve got to warn Mum about Pierce.’

‘I’m just following up something that Gomer told me. Won’t take long. I’m going to try and find out about Coleman’s Meadow.’

‘Does that matter any more?’ Jane said bleakly.

Lol pulled his old denim jacket from the back of the chair.

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

Merrily drove away from the Royal Oak still undecided about Raji Khan. It could be that Bliss, for once, was entirely wrong and that Khan was no more than what he seemed: arrogant and pompous in a way that was almost engaging because you could detect, behind it, something young and almost naive.

Mr Khan was delighted with himself and a system in which an enterprising Englishman from an Asian family could capitalize on his cultural roots to an unprecedented degree.

On the way out, he’d shown her how the Royal Oak had morphed discreetly into Inn Ya Face. It was not a listed building, and so it had been possible to remove internal walls, creating a series of archways and turning two ground-floor bars and a restaurant area into something cavernous. Black-painted wooden shutters had been installed at the windows. Although it was at ground level, with the shutters across it would be like a cellar. Yes, it did now resemble a temple, and the stone-based stage, built out from a big fireplace, was its altar.

And it had a feeling of permanence that belied Preston Devereaux’s insistence that Raji Khan wouldn’t be here long.

Would Khan risk destroying all this by involving himself in the wholesale distribution of illegal drugs? Or did he have relationships inside West Mercia Police permitting a certain … freedom of movement?

Whatever you thought about Annie Howe as a human being, it was hard to imagine her operating on that level.

Not exactly a deliverance issue, anyway.

But this was…

Driving past Wychehill Church, Merrily braked hard, drove across the road into the Church Lane cutting and turned the Volvo around, swinging back into the parking bay in front of the lantern. By the time she was running through the gates, he’d gone into the church. If it was him.

In the porch, getting her breath back into rhythm, she hesitated, the way she’d done at the Rectory.

Dealing with eccentrics … fruitcakes … imaginative and inspired people – whatever they were, it was important to keep reminding yourself that it was not about what you believed could happen so much as what they believed could happen. And it was about accepting that, when someone believed strongly enough, something could happen.

There was a lot she didn’t know, but she was getting closer.

She pushed at the double doors into the body of the church. The doors resisted her.

Locked?

He’d locked himself in?

Merrily rapped on the bevelled glass.

‘Syd?’

She could hear his footsteps on the flags. Then they stopped and she sensed him staring at the doors from the other side, the one word she’d spoken insufficient for him to identify her.

‘It’s Merrily. Are you going to let me in?’

He must have kept her waiting for a good half-minute before she heard the key turning, and then his footsteps going away again.

When she pushed open the doors and entered the vast parish church, Syd was standing in front of the chancel with its capacious semicircular choir stalls. He was wearing his cassock, and she thought what a particularly constraining garment it must be for a one-time man of action.

He looked around, with his arms out, at the empty pews, the oak-framed pulpit, the organ pipes like giant shell-cases.

‘Can you do anything about this?’

There was nothing to see. But Merrily could smell the incense.

41 Protect the Memory

There used to be a setting sun on the sign, Lol recalled. But it had been replaced now with less scary white lettering on a sky-blue background.

The Glades Residential Home: a one-time Victorian gentleman’s residence at the end of a drive close to the border with Wales. Wide views of the Radnorshire hills. Big, long sunsets.

Lol sat in the old white Astra in the car park, knowing he was here at least partly because, after shutting the door on Lyndon Pierce, he’d needed to be somewhere else – and fast. Him rather than Jane.

He’d watched her walking with Gomer down the street to Gomer’s bungalow, in her school uniform. Girls in uniform: always suggestive of sexual impropriety? Ironic, really: he wasn’t at all fond of uniforms, especially nurses’ uniforms. Kissing a woman in a dog collar had taken an act of will, the first time.

When he left the car, a mantle of heavy windless heat settled around him. A woman came towards him out of the stern gabled porch, a big woman in a light blue overall, late fifties, bobbed blonde hair.

‘Brenda Cardelow,’ she said. ‘Mr Robinson?’

The situation at The Glades had changed. The proprietors Lol remembered, the Thorpes, had left over a year ago, Mrs Cardelow had told him on the phone. Burn-out. She’d laughed.

‘You’re a lucky man, Mr Robinson. She appears to remember you. She’s usually inclined to deny all knowledge of visitors.’

‘One of the privileges of age,’ Lol said, but Mrs Cardelow looked unconvinced.

‘I tried to persuade her to come down to the residents’ lounge, but she insists on seeing you in her room, so I hope you’re prepared for that.’

‘I’ve never been in her room. But I’ve heard a lot about it.’

‘I’m sure you must have,’ Mrs Cardelow said.

The old woman wore a black woollen cardigan and a black wool skirt. A fluffy scarf, also black, was around her neck. Her eyes were hard and bright like cut diamonds. Nestling in the window seat, among the cushions and the books and the Egyptian tapestries and the wall-hung Turkish rugs and more books and more cushions, she was like a tiny, possibly malevolent story-book spider.

‘Robinson.’

Crooking a finger with a purple-varnished, finely pointed nail. Same sherbet-centred voice. The air in here was tinged with incense.

‘Miss White,’ Lol said.

‘Of course I remember him.’ Miss White flung a brief, barbed glance at Mrs Cardelow. ‘Nervous, would-be paramour of an unusually attractive little clergyperson – quite a curiosity at the time, amongst all those horse-faced lezzies in bondage clobber. How goes it, Robinson? Been inside the cassock yet?’

‘Anthea!’ Mrs Cardelow turned to Lol. ‘They’ve all read that damned poem that goes on about “when I’m an old woman I shall dress in purple”. They think that shedding their inhibitions will keep senility at bay, but in my experience it only hastens the onset.’

‘You’ll be demented long before me, Cardelow,’ Miss White said in her baby-kitten voice.

‘Yes,’ Mrs Cardelow said sadly. ‘I’m afraid she could be right.’

‘Mind’s on the blink already. Keeps calling me Anthea.’

‘That’s what it says on your pension book.’

‘Then it’s a misprint. Go away, Governor. Lock us in the cell if you must, but kindly leave us alone.’

Mrs Cardelow raised a martyr’s eyebrow at Lol on her way out. Lol settled himself on a piano stool with no piano.

‘Still demoralizing the screws, then, Athena.’

‘Passes the time. Where are the chocolates? She said you’d brought me chocolates.’

‘Sorry, left them in the car. Black Magic still appropriate?’

Miss White giggled. Lol remembered how Merrily had reacted when she’d first encountered her – called in within weeks of being appointed Deliverance consultant to look into claims by elderly residents that The Glades was being haunted by a handsome man of a certain era. Treading on eggshells in the big shoes of Canon Dobbs, Hereford’s last Diocesan Exorcist. On a later occasion, knowing that Merrily needed help but was afraid of what Athena White might represent, Lol had gone on his own to tap into her knowledge of forbidden things.

Finding he got on rather well with this one-time highly placed civil servant who’d decided to devote her retirement to the study of the complex esoteric disciplines popularized by Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner and Dion Fortune. Maybe a stretch on psychiatric wards had helped.

‘So?’ she said. ‘Have you been inside the cassock?’

‘Never really been turned on by women in uniform.’

‘Don’t be evasive.’

Miss White used to say she’d forgone the high-maintenance, roses-round-the-door cottage to set up what she called her eyrie in an old people’s home because it gave her more inner space. Lol had no idea how old she was, but, like an elderly radio, all her valves still appeared to be glowing.

‘OK. Out of uniform, it’s much easier,’ he said, and Miss White clapped her tiny hands.

‘Splendid! And you needn’t explain why the clergy-person isn’t with you. I always felt she regarded me as a potential patroller of the Left-Hand Path, with whom it would not be at all appropriate to be publicly associated.’

‘I’m the go-between,’ Lol said.

‘You lied to Cardelow. Told her some frightful porkie about first meeting me when you came to visit poor Pole.’

‘That was because I wanted to talk to you … about Maggie Pole,’ Lol said.

‘She died.’

‘I know.’

‘In her sleep. And in the middle of a quandary. She thought I was a spiritualist, you know. A medium. Some of the inmates do. Frightfully insulting, to be lumped in with the pygmies. But I tend not to disabuse them – they wouldn’t understand the distinction.’

‘Mrs Pole asked you to help her, as a … spiritualist?’

Athena White didn’t respond for a while, exploring him with her eyes.

‘Robinson, are you still working with that dreadful shrink in Hereford?’

‘Dick Lydon?’

‘So-called psychotherapist.’

‘No, I gave all that up. It didn’t seem to be actually curing people.’

‘Good,’ Miss White said. ‘Psychoanalysis was the great folly of the twentieth century. Leads nowhere except up its own bottom.’

‘In what way did Maggie Pole ask you to help her?’

‘Robinson, I know the woman’s dead, but there are certain proprieties to be observed. Why do you want to know?’

‘All right,’ Lol said. ‘When I first came to see you … you remember? We talked about Moon, the archaeologist, and Hereford Cathedral and its connection, along the ley line, with Dinedor Hill?’

‘Ley lines?’ Miss White placed a purple-tipped finger on her chin. ‘Watkins? Your friend’s called Watkins, isn’t she?’

‘So’s her daughter. Jane. I don’t think you’ve ever met Jane, but she … Jane feels very strongly about things, and she doesn’t give up. And she’s only seventeen and still at school, and she’s thrown herself into something which is backfiring on her. And I’m feeling guilty, because I didn’t get involved and she’s vulnerable and I’m not … well, not in that way.’

‘Oh, I think you are, Robinson. You didn’t want to interfere in case it should harm your relationship with her mother, which you appear to value above life itself.’

‘You ought to be—’

‘Don’t you dare tell me I ought to be a psychologist. How does this connect with Margaret Pole?’

‘Jane’s found what she thinks is a forgotten ley line, which somebody wants to build across. In Ledwardine. It’s called Coleman’s Meadow. We’re told that Margaret Pole’s mother left it to her, having apparently said she didn’t want it touched. I wondered what had made Maggie Pole change her mind. When I heard she’d been at The Glades I thought if anyone might know something about this it would be … you?’

Miss White withdrew into her cushioned grotto like some little English guru.

‘Ah…’ It came out like a tiny puff of white smoke. ‘A ley line. Could that have been what it was about?’

‘This makes sense?’

‘She wanted me to contact her mother.’

‘You mean on the…’

‘In the land where the dead sit in an eternal garden among eternal fountains, discussing trivia and eating fairy cakes. Wanted me to contact her mother to ask if she was doing the right thing. A man kept coming to visit her – all too frequently in her last year. Well, you see this all the time. You don’t have to be here very long to recognize a vulture in a suit. He was … some relation.’

‘Nephew?’

‘I listened to Pole talking to the inmates – sometimes sit in the lounge, pretending to be asleep. She’d ramble on about how worried she was that he was going to have to give up his farm – the last farm in a farming family, for umpteen generations. Falling prices, imports, the usual problems. I was thinking, what does he want from her?’

‘Maybe a piece of land that he knew he could sell for a lot of money, for housing? Which she’d promised not to sell.’

‘Yes. On which basis, I think he wanted her to give him the land. As a way of saving his farm. Trying to persuade her it was futile to preserve it as … I don’t know, some sort of memorial? Do you know what kind of memorial?’

Lol shook his head.

‘Rather intriguing. Pole used to talk of her mother as some frightfully elevated creature with aesthetic sensibilities far beyond those of her slug of a husband. Perhaps she’d met a lover in that meadow. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Pole never told me.’

‘But she came to you … eventually.’

‘A dilemma. Said she was sure the last thing her mother would have wanted was for her grandson, or whatever he was, to lose everything. Keeping her awake at nights – well, you know how old people dwell on these things. So yes, in the end, after much heart-searching, she came to me.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘Oh, we had a seance. Great fun! Most of the old dears were absolutely terrified – they do so love to be terrified. And then Cardelow appeared in the middle of the proceedings like some great dollop of rancid ectoplasm and broke it up.’

‘And did you … ?’

‘Of course I didn’t. Never been drawn to necromancy … well, not in that way. The seance was a sham. My attitude was to take the path of least resistance. If Pole’s mother was such an elevated soul, she’d hardly be worried about the loss of one field. Obvious way to go was for Pole to keep her promise not to sell it in her lifetime and simply agree to leave it to the sod. I said an angel in Grecian attire appeared to me in a dream and passed on that little snippet.’

‘So, um … the fate of Coleman’s Meadow is probably your fault.’

‘I suppose it is, yes. But you know, Robinson…’ Miss White smiled sweetly. ‘We really aren’t meant to have much of an effect.’

‘And I suppose we’ll never find out what Mrs Pole knew about the significance of that field.’

‘What does the girl think is significant?’

‘Jane? She thinks it more or less holds the secret soul of the village. It connects the church and a few other sites with Cole Hill, which Jane thinks is the village’s holy hill – like Dinedor is to Hereford. She’s at a … an intense age.’

‘A perceptive age,’ Miss White said. ‘Although they often need assistance in decoding their perceptions. What are yours?’

‘Oh, I … just think a particular councillor has a stake in it.’

‘Hmm.’ Miss White kicked off her slippers. She wore a black bow around one ankle. ‘There is a niece, you know. Elizabeth … Kington? Kingsley?’

‘Who got the money.’

‘And the memories. In two suitcases. She came to collect them. I made a point of beckoning her over. I said protect the memory. As if I knew what I was talking about. She knew who I was – or thought she knew what I was. She said, If you get any more messages – oh dear! – and left me her address. I have it somewhere.’

‘Yes, that might…’

Not once had Athena White stopped looking at Lol. Or through him. Eyes like miniature fairy lights. If he hadn’t been feeling so empty inside, it might have been disconcerting.

‘What else?’ she said. ‘Come on, Robinson, you must make the most of me before I’m called away to spend whole aeons in atonement. What ails you? Can’t get it up?’

‘Something like that,’ Lol said.

42 All the Time in the Worlds

Gomer’s kitchen was this cheerful but fading memorial to Minnie, full of bright, shiny, literal objects like BISCUIT tins with biscuits printed on the side in crumbly brown letters. The letters on the bread bin were badly worn; time after time, when Jane looked up she read ‘bread’ as DEAD.

Even Gomer seemed jittery, unsteady. Around six, he agreed to go and monitor the situation at Coleman’s Meadow, and Jane switched on her mobile to check the answering service. Couldn’t put it off any longer. Supposed if it was all too heavy to handle – follow-up calls from Jerry Isles, threats from Mum – she could always pretend she’d left the phone at home.

Didn’t remember the last time she’d felt this low, this useless.

‘Where the hell are you?’ Eirion was demanding, on voicemail. ‘We’re getting masses of emails referred from the EMA site. Have you any idea at all what’s going down here?’

She called him back. She told him she knew exactly what was going down. Told him about Pierce, how she’d played it all wrong, couldn’t restrain herself, ended up shafting Lol.

‘The Meadow,’ Eirion said. ‘What’s happening at the Meadow?’

‘Fenced off.’

Jane told him about the ragged protest, and how terrible she felt that she hadn’t been there supporting them. But she didn’t dare show her stupid, notorious face, and at least it sounded like it was all over for tonight.

‘Over?’ Eirion said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘They got the police in. I’m dead in the water, Irene. I haven’t been to school again. I’m stuffed.’ Disgusted at how she must sound, how waily. ‘I’m probably going to have to leave, as from like now, get a job or something. Grow up, you know?’

He’d been talking; she’d only half-heard.

‘… The Deathroad Society, of Antwerp? Conservers of coffin tracks in the low countries. Particularly pissed off. Their chairman, Ronald Verheyen—’

‘All right.’ Jane sat down. ‘I’m sorry. What are you on about?’

Eirion laid it out for her. If Alfred Watkins wasn’t much honoured in his home town, it looked like there were thousands of people all over the world to whom he was some kind of minor deity, and earth-mysteries geeks and landscape anoraks from the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, wherever, were now blasting Herefordshire Council with electronic hate-mail. Far as Eirion could make out, just about every department in the authority – planning, health, chief executive’s, trading standards – they’d all been getting it.

‘It’s somehow got tied into the whole international Green politics thing. These guys are picking up email addresses wherever they can find them. Apparently, individual councillors have even been targeted at home.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Because the EMA have had an approach from the council’s lawyers. Jesus, Jane, if the council hated you before…’

‘Irene…’ Jane swallowed. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

She felt hot and swollen all over, like she’d invaded a wasps’ nest and been multi-stung. Gomer’s phone started ringing just as he came in and he hooked it from the wall by the fridge.

‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire yere.’

‘The EMA guy says if it gets too hot he’ll have to pull the story,’ Eirion was saying. ‘I mean, they haven’t got any lawyers or any money, not to speak of. But it’s too late, anyway, now it’s been picked up by the general media. You watching Midlands Today?’

‘I don’t want to know.’

‘Well, I can’t see it either, in Wales, but I gather—’

‘I don’t care! Oh shit, Irene. This explains Pierce. What do I do?’

‘Just keep your head down, I suppose. I’d come over and try and take your mind off it, but it’s Gwennan’s birthday, and Dad’s got this surprise party, where we all have to pretend nobody speaks English.’

‘Her’s on the mobile right now, boy,’ Gomer said into the phone. ‘I get her to call you back?’

Jane said, ‘I’ll call you back, Irene.’

Clicked him off and went over to secondary-smoke Gomer’s ciggy.

‘All right,’ Gomer said. ‘Will do, boy.’ Handed the phone to Jane. ‘Lol.’

‘Look, what Pierce said before— I didn’t—’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Lol said, ‘I’m over that. It doesn’t get to me any more. Can you write something down?’

The very fact that he knew instantly what she was talking about showed he was far from over it. Jane made scribbling motions to Gomer and he brought her a pen and a receipt book with Gomer Parry Plant Hire billheads. Lol said that if she and Gomer wanted to get out of the village for a while there was a woman they could check out. It might be something or nothing, Lol said. She needed to be polite. Thanks.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m still at The Glades.’

‘I’m bad news today, Lol. Nothing works out for me. Can’t you do it?’

‘No, I’m … I think I’m getting into something else,’ Lol said.

His voice sounding disconnected, like he was with someone, or his mind was already working on the something else.

‘Sholto.’ Lol folded up his mobile. ‘I think that was his name.’

‘Frightfully good-looking. Essence of Ronald Colman.’ Athena was gazing wistfully into a corner of the room. ‘So few of us remember Ronald Colman any more, even here.’

‘I bet they all remember Sholto, though,’ Lol said.

‘We needed him, Robinson. As I think I told your paramour at the time, who among the living could we attract any more?’

The alleged haunting of The Glades, as described by Merrily, had involved a languid shadow on the landing, blown bulbs. Hadn’t there been a smell of cigarette smoke, the flicking of a lighter?

‘The point being,’ Lol said, ‘that Sholto had no history at The Glades. He was just a face from an old photo album. Someone whose image you’d somehow contrived to … appropriate. And insinuate into people’s consciousness.’

‘What fun he was, though.’

‘But he was a … a product of persuasion?’

‘If you say so.’

‘Oh, come on, Athena.’

‘Well, it’s all so devalued now.’ She looked cross. ‘The techniques of projection. Used to be frightfully effective, but since that annoying young man on the television, Derren Somebody-or-other…’

‘Brown?’

‘Derren Brown, yes. Little twerp. Makes a point of insisting that it’s all psychology and suggestion, because it makes him look cleverer and the whole business less metaphysical and out of his control. Deserves a good spanking.’

‘Can I describe something to you?’

‘Why not?’ Athena stretched like a small cat, purple claws extended. ‘I have all the time in the worlds.’

Still unsure where he was going with this, Lol told her about Tim Loste and Sir Edward Elgar and Wychehill.

‘I’m afraid it’s a very, very different situation,’ Athena said.

She’d made some fragrant Earl Grey tea. They drank it out of small china cups. The teapot had a Tarot symbol on it – the Hanged Man, dangling from a tree by one foot.

‘You see, this place is ideal for it,’ Athena said. ‘Old women living for much of the time inside their own heads, inside their distant memories. Hothouse of hopeless fantasies. Frightfully easy to insinuate an image.’

‘And how exactly would you … ?’

‘Beyond that…’ Athena lifted both palms ‘… I’m revealing no tradecraft. Except to say that it soon begins to generate its own energy. Now, the village you’re describing seems far from a hothouse. If the dwellings are well separated and the residents have little in common and don’t mix socially … hopeless.’

‘It was only an idea,’ Lol said. ‘I was just—’

‘Being a little helpmate?’ Athena squealed. ‘Robinson, you infuriate me! She is a lowly … parish … priest. In the Church of England – half-baked, miserably unfocused, spiritually stagnant and led by a dithering Welshman who thinks that looking like an Old Testament prophet is half the battle. Now— Sit down, I haven’t finished.’

Athena White stood up, plumped out her cushions and curled up again in the window seat.

‘You’ve intrigued me now. Mentioned Elgar. Now there’s a man with problems. Repressed, frustrated … trapped, for much of his life, inside petty conventions and constraints. A spirit yearning for a freedom which he was foolish enough to think was only granted to children. Do you know The Wand of Youth – piece he wrote when young himself, about children and fairyland?’

‘Only read about it.’

‘He kept trying to revive it at various times, as if he could rediscover the oneness with nature that he believed he had possessed as a child. Now. If you were to ask me if Edward Elgar could be summoned back to his beloved hills, I would say that it was quite conceivable that much of him never left. In other words—’

Athena’s head came forward, like a tortoise’s from its shell. She seemed quite excited.

‘… A man who indeed might haunt.’

Not what Lol had wanted to hear.

He watched Athena placing both her hands on top of her head, as if to prevent significant thoughts from fluttering away like butterflies.

‘Elgar’s biographers, you see, tend to be terribly highbrow music buffs with too much academic credibility to lose. His esoteric side is usually glossed over.’

‘You’ve read the biographies?’

‘Robinson, I spend at least seven hours a day reading. I’ve also known several people – some of them in this very mausoleum – who met him when young. Not always the most delightful of experiences, I’m afraid: he could be a rather negative presence.’

‘Someone said manic-depressive.’

‘There you go again with your silly psychiatric generalizations. Stop it.’

‘Sorry. What did you mean by his esoteric side?’

Lol was feeling confused. Everybody seemed to have a piece of Elgar, and all of them with jagged edges. He was a kind man, an inconsiderate and self-obsessed man; he was arrogant, he was insecure; he was a no-nonsense, self-made, practical man, and he was a mental case; he was a patriot and he was an artist resentful of the taint of patriotism. He was a staunch Catholic, and yet…

‘He was, like so many prominent figures of his time, drawn to the otherwordly,’ Athena said. ‘“Fond of ghost stories” is what the books usually say. But it was clearly more than that. His intermittent Catholicism was never enough to satisfy his curiosity. What do you know about The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn?’

‘Top people’s magical club,’ Lol said. ‘Aleister Crowley, W. B. Yeats…’

‘They all began there, certainly. Yeats was prominent in it, and Elgar worked with Yeats. But his favourite was Algernon Blackwood. Did the music for Blackwood’s play The Starlight Express, and the music contained elements of The Wand of Youth. About children and the otherworld. Bit of a disaster, but they had fun. Blackwood was a likeable cove. Met him once at my uncle’s house – my Uncle Thomas was a latter-day member of the GD. Left me all his “secret papers”. Which was what started me off, I suppose.’

Athena smiled at the memory. Lol drank what remained of his Earl Grey.

‘But Elgar wasn’t a member of the Golden Dawn, was he?’

‘I think he might well have joined if it hadn’t been for his wife and her top-drawer conservative family. Alice, to whom he owed so much. Fortunately, however, Alice liked Blackwood and Blackwood liked Alice. She wrote in her diary of the “out of the world” conversations Elgar had with Blackwood. Blackwood…’

Athena pursed her lips.

‘I may have read one of his stories once,’ Lol said. ‘When I was a kid. “The Haunted and the Haunters”? Very scary.’

‘No, that was Bulwer-Lytton – ah, there, you see, Elgar liked his stories, too. Was said to have based one of his piano pieces on a novel of Bulwer-Lytton’s. Oh, Robinson, how intriguing … what is happening here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m trying to think…’ Athena pressing fingertips to her temples. ‘Yes … now … Blackwood wrote a strange novel about music, The Human Chord. It’s about a group of people – singers – brought together by a retired clergyman to intone the constituent notes in an archaic, mystical chord that will allow them to sound the secret names of God and thus draw down immense power from the heavens. It’s a mad, romantic book but – as with all Blackwood’s fiction – was drawn from his personal experience, in this case with The Golden Dawn. Now…’

Athena rose and went to one of the floor-to-ceiling cupboards. When she opened it up, Lol saw that its sagging shelves were bulging with books. Athena knew what she was looking for, however, and brought it back to her window seat.

‘We’re looking at Plato. And, of course, Pythagoras. And probably some forgotten ancient Egyptian before that. We’re looking at a time when music was not “a branch of the arts” but a medium of construction … the construction of the universe itself. Pythagoras saw an exquisite mathematical harmony in the universe, and the harmony was held together by music. Music was formed upon strict laws … music was the law. Can you comprehend any of this?’

‘I’m trying.’

Lol wondered what time it was, if Jane and Gomer had gone to find Margaret Pole’s niece, if Merrily…

‘Keep going, Athena,’ he said.

‘Oh, I could go on all night and all through tomorrow. But I think what you need to know is that the planets were said to vibrate and respond to one another in a musical sequence – the Music of the Spheres. You’ve heard the term?’

Lol nodded. ‘But I always imagined that as a poetic … metaphor?’

‘It is a metaphor, like all these images, for an internal process. As above, so below. A connection between our inner selves and God, forged through the power of music. This was studied in some depth by The Golden Dawn, and Blackwood used some of what he’d learned there in The Human Chord – Blackwood being a writer first and foremost, rather than a true seeker after cosmic consciousness. A romantic, if you like.’

‘Like Elgar.’

‘Absolutely like Elgar. And for Blackwood not to have seized the opportunity to discuss what he’d learned about the origins of music with the most famous composer in the land is … well, so unlikely as to be not worth consideration.’

Lol said, ‘The play – musical, whatever – that Elgar and Blackwood worked on. You said it was called The Starlight Express? The house where Winnie Sparke – Tim Loste’s mentor – lives, at Wychehill, is called Starlight Cottage.’

Athena White squeaked in delight.

‘Starlight, as it happens, was Elgar’s nickname for Blackwood! They used nicknames as a kind of code.’

‘There’s a letter,’ Lol said, ‘in the Wychehill parish records from someone signing himself Starlight … suggesting Wychehill as a highly suitable place for a church because no area of southern Britain was more conducive to the … to the creation and performance of the most spiritually exalted music … does that make any—?’

‘Sounds like something Blackwood would write, and if he signed himself Starlight he could only have been addressing Elgar.’

‘The letter’s to “Sirius”.’

‘The dog star?’ Athena’s eyes glittered. ‘Yes! Elgar was frightfully fond of dogs. That would make absolute sense. Oh, Robinson, I wonder … I wonder…’

Athena began leafing through the book she’d brought from the cupboard, a fairly slim hardback with a plain green cover, called City of Revelation.

‘I think where this brings us,’ she said softly, ‘is to the Whiteleafed Oak.’

43

The One Per Cent

Syd Spicer looked like a priest feeling unwelcome in his own church and uncomfortable – or was she imagining this? – in his own cassock.

‘So he’s out, right?’

Spicer looked pale. Few people, in the current weather, looked pale. Regiment men, always getting dispatched to sun-kissed hell-holes, never did; only their wives. That was the standing joke in Hereford: foolproof way of recognizing an SAS man – suntanned bloke, pale wife.

‘He was released this morning, without charge,’ Merrily said. ‘But I gather they haven’t lost interest in him.’

‘Who could?’

But, for some reason, he looked relieved. Merrily sniffed the air.

‘He burns incense in here?’

‘Not when I’m here, he doesn’t. But, yeah, who else? Or Winnie.’ He sat down in one of the choir stalls, looking down the aisle with distaste. ‘It’s got to end.’

‘What has?’

‘I don’t like this church much – have I indicated that?’

‘A few times.’

‘Sometimes there’s a peculiar energy in here. You can feel it on your skin, abrasive, like on a cold morning when you’ve cut yourself shaving. And sometimes you can still smell the incense when Loste hasn’t been in for days.’

Merrily looked around. With the afternoon sunlight in free fall through the diamond-paned windows, it was like being inside a great stone lantern.

‘Something’s needed doing for a while, but I couldn’t do it,’ Spicer said.

‘Couldn’t do what?’

‘What you do. Maybe that’s another reason I called you last weekend. Maybe I couldn’t admit it to myself, but something needs sorting here.’

She sat down next to him. ‘You trying to make me feel worthwhile or something, Syd?

He was still gazing down the nave, his eyes like currants. She could feel him becoming quiet. The screensaver routine. She looked at him, saying nothing, trying to be as still as he was. But she couldn’t manage it.

‘It’s a technique,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Makes me look heavy. On nodding terms with minor seraphim. I’m just a fucked-up old soldier, Merrily, and coming into the Church was a mistake. I can’t hack it.’

‘What?’

Spicer pulled a box of matches out of his cassock, followed by a packet of cigarettes. He flipped it open, offered it to Merrily. She blinked.

‘We’re, erm, in church.’

‘Don’t go spiritually correct on me, Merrily. You think he cares? It’s smoking, not sex.’

‘You’re right, but I don’t think I will right now, all the same.’

‘Fair enough.’

He lit up, the striking match a sacrilegious gasp. He stretched out his legs in the direction of the central aisle, watching the smoke float up and dissipate at pulpit level.

‘At the core of the Special Air Service, there’s a harsh kind of mysticism. Kind you won’t find in any other area of the armed forces. Connected with survival. I used to think survival was ninety per cent training and preparation, nine per cent luck, and one per cent … one per cent something you could call on when you were at breaking point.’

‘I can imagine the closer you get to—’

Merrily shut up. She didn’t know. How could she possibly know?

‘I’m not gonna tell you when and where this happened to me,’ Syd said. ‘But there’s always one time when it all drops away – all your training and your discipline – and your insides turn to water. At first you’re just afraid of dying. Not death, dying. The way it’s gonna happen. The fear of … of fear itself, I suppose. Of giving in to fear. Of dying in it. Dying as someone who you can only despise. And when you’re suddenly confronted with that sorry person – with the sight and the smell of your own terror … that’s a big, gaping moment, Merrily.’

She nodded. She kept quiet. They didn’t know one another, not at all. All they had in common was the one per cent.

‘So I started to pray,’ Spicer said. ‘Prayed the way those poor buggers probably prayed when they jumped off the twin towers, out of the flames.’

Merrily nodded.

‘And something happened. Not a flash-of-lightning kind of thing … just a bloke behaving in a way he wouldn’t normally behave in the circumstances, and me finding a sudden unexpected strength. I won’t go further into it … except I thought, afterwards, I can respect this. A source of strength infinitely greater than your training’s ever gonna give you – and in the Regiment, training’s all, to a level of aptitude and precision that you believe makes you equal to anyone. Any one. But in that moment, the one per cent had become a hundred per cent. And I suppose it still is.’

‘Yes.’

‘What I’ll admit to being good at,’ Syd Spicer said, ‘is helping the dying. Having been there, very close, twice, I can find them strength. I know there’s gonna be help for them, and I can take the weight off just enough for them to feel it. The way you help your mates in a shit situation. So the dying … they’re the only people I tell exactly what happened at my times. Times and places, nothing concealed. It’s me passing on something precious, and they value it, and I think they take it with them.’

‘Syd,’ Merrily said, ‘how on earth can you say you can’t hack it?’

‘Because I could do that without being a priest.’

The phone was ringing when Lol got home. He caught the call just before the machine lifted it.

‘Lol, Dan.’

‘Sorry?’

‘From Much Cowarne?’

‘Sorry … out of breath.’

‘Me too, I expect, by the end of the night. Look, when you talked to Mr Levin, did you know something was about to happen?’

‘Like what?’

‘Just had a call from Tim. I’m glad to say they let him out – did you know?’

‘I’d heard. But I don’t know much more than that.’

‘Reason he was calling … I’m one of the three coordinators of the choirs. I told you about the three choirs, who did the three churches simultaneously?’

‘You did.’

‘OK, well, there’s a pool of about sixty of us, right? Three coordinators who can each pull twelve compatible choristers together at short notice. Twelve out of twenty’s usually a safe bet. Tim called me about half an hour ago. They’re trying to arrange Redmarley and Little Malvern Priory to join in with Wychehill again. Another simultaneous chant.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight. Like we did before, only longer. It has to last, somehow, from nine tonight until three a.m. Luckily, it’s Saturday tomorrow.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s what I’m ringing for, Lol. I wondered if you knew.’

‘He won’t tell you?’

‘He never tells you. He rambles. He gets incoherent. You stop asking because you think maybe he doesn’t know the answer anyway, but it don’t matter, you know you’re gonner get something out of it. Bit of a coincidence, though, ennit?’

‘I don’t know. Honestly. You going to be able to organize it in time?’

‘Won’t be too much of a problem,’ Dan said. ‘After last time, nobody’s going to want to miss it. Even the ones who went home scared.’

A priest could go through his entire career without facing this kind of situation. That was the irony of it.

‘Not a lot frightens me. I can deal with most physical pain, emotional pain, stress. I can achieve separation from the weakness of the body. But there are leaps I can’t make. Aspects I can’t face.’

‘You’re worried by the non-physical?’

Syd leaned back and took a deep pull on his cigarette.

‘Samuel Dennis Spicer,’ he said. ‘Church of England.’

‘Because you can’t resist it, overpower it … slot it? Is that what you mean?’

‘Samuel Dennis Spicer. Church of England.’

Merrily smiled.

‘You talked about any of this to Winnie Sparke?’

‘Winnie?’ He’d been about to bring the cigarette back to his mouth. He brought his arm down. ‘Why would I?’

‘They’re saying in Wychehill that you’re seeing a lot of her.’

‘Told you.’ He leaned his head back over the chorister’s stall. ‘Didn’t I?’

‘You told me about the Ladies of Wychehill.’

‘I assisted Winnie Sparke with her researches into the origins of the church. Parish records. And a few other things. Anything else…’ He squeezed out the cigarette between finger and thumb. ‘Anything else, my wife really wouldn’t like.’

‘Your—?’

‘In essence, stories of our separation are overstated. Having three parishes can be an advantage, Merrily. You go missing for a while, they all think you’re in one of the others. Fiona took the kids down to Reading to get away from a difficult situation. We have a house, and her family’s down there, so it seemed expedient. I go down every week, or we meet somewhere. Yesterday it was in Berkshire. Hungerford.’

‘That works?’

‘Separation – she’s used to that. Least I’m less likely to get killed as a clergyman. Seemed easier to let people think we’d split, otherwise there’d be three restless parishes wondering how long before the new guy.’

‘But why didn’t you? Why didn’t you just leave? Go for a new—’

‘Because I was sent here. Never yet failed to complete a mission. One way or another.’

Like God was his field commander. But obviously Merrily understood.

‘And the difficult situation … that would be drugs?’

‘Partly. Emily’s been a problem. Shrinks say she has an addictive personality. As a kid she overate. You tried to cut down the Mars Bars to three a day … tantrums. Cold turkey on Mars Bars, you believe that? With adolescence, it stopped, all the weight dropped away, and we were so relieved that it was quite a while before we realized what’d replaced it. The shoplifting conviction was a clue. Then robbing the offertory box.’

‘She was in rehab?’

‘Joyce told you all this, I assume. Joyce, the parish talking-newsletter.’

‘And then the Royal Oak changed hands,’ Merrily said. ‘And suddenly it was all on your doorstep. Like a sweetshop.’

‘Yeah. There’s a group of us, county-wide – parents of kids with drug problems. We attend briefing sessions with the police, regional seminars. We learn what to look out for.’

‘Like Roman Wicklow? Did you know about him?’

‘Suspected.’

‘But you didn’t tell the police.’

‘One man with a rucksack?’ Spicer snorted. ‘Take Wicklow out of the picture and there’s another one in place by next week, in a different beauty spot. Better the devil you know.’

‘If they’d arrested him, he could’ve fingered others…’

‘His sort don’t finger people.’

‘What about Raji Khan?’ Merrily said.

‘Raji Khan –’ he looked almost amused ‘– is a very clever boy. Somebody like me says a word against him, it’s like the Crusades are back – I must be starting a holy war. Anyway, not your problem. Your problem’s more ethereal. It’s my problem too but … we’ve been into that.’

‘What are you asking me to do?’

‘Your requiem should be broadened. I was thinking a wider brief. For a start, you might give this place some attention.’

‘What are you trying to lose?’

‘Longworth, for a start. I don’t know what his problem was, but I reckon St Dunstan’s only compounded it. You look at the records, you find that what existed on this site could have been no more than a single monk’s cell. A Celtic hermit’s primitive stone hut. So he builds a pseudocathedral. Look—’

Spicer sprang up, walked into the nave, pointing out empty stone ledges, blank areas of wall.

‘When I first came, there were terrible pictures on these walls, of saints and angels … figurines in niches.’

Merrily looked around. Light oak furniture, a marbled font. He was right: there was little of the period clutter that even churches less than a century old accumulated.

‘They’re in storage. None of them great works of art. No treasure. Phoney High-Church iconography, reeking of … hierarchy. Grotesque, to me. Forbidding – like that hideous angel on Longworth’s tomb. When we had one small statue nicked, I talked the parish council – well, Preston Devereaux – into safeguarding the rest. He didn’t need much encouraging. His family always found Upper Wychehill an intrusion. His grandfather’s on record as having attempted to stop Longworth building.’

‘You’ve virtually … stripped the place?’

‘Best we could, bit by bit, over a period. They’re all newcomers here, nobody missed anything. But I didn’t get rid of it. It’s as if it’s built into the stone.’

‘What is?’

‘Longworth’s grandiose concept. Longworth himself. He brought something here that’s caused an imbalance. This church is disproportionate to its surroundings and to the community. It’s a big stone ego-trip, and it’s like the houses are hiding away from it … below the road,over the road, squeezing into the rocks. It explains a lot about Wychehill. I found a journal kept by one of my predecessors, thirty, forty years ago. Even then, the population was unstable, people buying and selling, coming and going.’

Syd Spicer’s voice was crisp and carried across the body of the church with hardly an echo. Whatever you thought about Joseph Longworth, he’d known who to consult about acoustics.

‘I know a bit about geology,’ Spicer said. ‘Rock-climbing used to be my specialist skill. I was an instructor some of the time, so I know about rock. There’s a small fault through Wychehill, did you know that? I mean, the whole of the Malverns, that was volcanic, but a long time ago. The shifts in this area – there’s been more recent action here. I say recent – eighteenth, nineteenth centuries.’

‘A history of earth-movement and then quarrying?’ Merrily followed him down the central aisle. ‘No wonder Winnie Sparke says the hills are in pain.’

‘She’s not a stupid woman,’ Syd Spicer said. ‘She gives you all this fey stuff, but that’s her screen. If you think she’s more gullible than you are, you start to lose your inhibitions, tell her more than you intended to. C. Winchester Sparke – former professor of anthropology, back in the US. Did you know that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Specializing in ancient history, comparative religion, philosophy, anthropology. Smart woman. Don’t be fooled. We had a serious talk about this once. Her theory is that the whole of the Malvern range was one huge ritual site … because it was so volatile. People didn’t live here, they came here to experience transcendence … to have visions. That’s the pagans and the early Christians.’

‘The hermits in their cells and their caves. Like in Tibet.’

‘Presumably. That’s not the point of Christianity, though, is it? That’s smoke. Smoke and … incense.’

‘Wasn’t Longworth supposed to have had a vision?’

‘I have a theory about that.’ Spicer sat down on the edge of a pew. ‘Well, it’s not my theory, but it fits. You mess around on volatile rocks, on operations or just on exercises, and you become aware of occasional phenomena, linked particularly to fault lines and places where the Earth’s crust has been been disrupted. Lights, usually. Balls of light.’

‘You’ve seen it?’

‘Couple of times. It’s like ball lightning. Might have been ball lightning. Gets people excited about UFOs, but it’s natural, I think. The Ministry of Defence knows about it. I think that’s what Longworth saw.’

‘Preston Devereaux says the story is that Longworth saw the Angel of the Agony in a blaze of light. Which, presumably, is why there’s a representation of it on his tomb.’

‘I’d go for just the blaze of light.’

‘Is there any actual record of what Longworth believed he saw? Did he ever describe it?’

‘If he did, it wasn’t around this locality. Maybe he told Elgar. It’s all smoke, Merrily. And I’d like to get rid of it. Starting with the music.’

‘I’m sorry – which music?’

‘Loste’s music. His lush, extravagant choral works. It’s become clear to me that that’s part of the problem. It’s not the place for music like that. And certainly not the place for experiments.’

‘I know what you’re saying…’ And it was odd, Merrily thought, that a man inclined towards a blanket rejection of the numinous should be saying it. ‘I think you’re saying that, for sacred music to be effective, it needs a strong, working spiritual foundation – an abbey, a cathedral. Like the difference between a puddle and a well.’

‘And if you’re being literal about that, the Wychehill well disappeared with the quarrying.’ Spicer shrugged. ‘I might be wrong. If I am … But I thought about it all the way back from Berkshire and it was the only conclusion I could reach. Which means that as from next week Tim Loste and his choir can go and look for a new home.’

‘You mean you’re … ?’

‘Evicting him. I’m within my rights, as priest in charge – I checked. What’s more, I think it’s for his own good. He’s being drawn into an unhealthy fantasy.’

‘When are you going to tell him?’

‘I’ve already told him, Merrily. I went in the back way from the rectory while you were talking to Winnie Sparke. I told him there were probably dozens of other churches and halls that would be overjoyed to have him and the choir. I said he might want to think about moving. That this place wasn’t good for his … health.’

‘That must’ve sounded like a threat.’

‘Not the way I put it, I assure you.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said … he said he didn’t know how he was going to tell Winnie.’

‘Syd…’ God almighty, no wonder Spicer had needed a cigarette. ‘She’ll go completely bloody berserk. This – whatever she’s trying to reach through Loste – this has become the central focus of her life.’

‘Merrily, if the central focus of her life is producing a bestselling book on the secret source of Elgar’s inspiration … well, she can do that anywhere, can’t she?’

‘I’m not sure she can. Not the way she sees it. And I’m not sure that’s the entire—’

‘She needs to get out of here, too, the quicker the better. Out of the area.’

‘What are you saying?’

Spicer stood up and stepped out of the pew.

‘And, of course, this had to be done before Sunday evening.’

‘Oh, I see. Jesus, Syd…’

‘You have a problem with that?’

‘You mean so that, on Sunday evening, we can solemnly invite God to wipe away every last taint of Longworth and Loste’s brand of Anglo-Catholicism?’

‘Think about it. It makes sense.’ He walked towards the main doors. ‘Maybe you should stay for a few minutes on your own, get the feel of the place?’

Merrily sat down in a pew, the confluence of at least three sunbeams.

Spicer probably didn’t want them to be seen leaving together. People might talk.

What a total bloody … It wasn’t quite a sectarian isssue, but it was close. She wondered if he’d served with the SAS in Northern Ireland and something had left a bad taste.

No, that was ridiculous. His decision to stop the choral singing could be justified purely on the basis of what they’d said about puddles and wells.

But there was already a bad taste in her own mouth.

And Spicer still hadn’t told her everything he knew, of course. Merrily was sure of that.