The Remains of an Altar

44 The Plant-Hire Code

Jane thought, there are still women like this?

‘My husband’s out,’ she’d said. ‘You should really come back when my husband’s in.’

It was a detached bungalow on an estate on the wrong side of Hereford – not that there was a right side any more, with all the roadworks connected with the building of new superstores that nobody wanted except Lyndon Pierce and his power-crazed mates. Taken Jane and Gomer most of an hour just to get here, and Jane wasn’t planning on moving without some answers.

‘Mrs Kingsley, it’s you I wanted to talk to. If that’s all right.’

Mrs Kingsley was a tired-eyed woman in an apron, sixtyish, with a resigned sort of look. She didn’t seem like a Guardian reader.

‘But I don’t really understand what you want,’ she said. ‘As I say, my husband deals with our finances.’

OK, wrong approach. Stupid to say it was about her inheritance. Stupid to try and sound mature and official. Shouldn’t have nipped home to change out of the school uniform. Start again.

‘My name’s Jane Watkins. And I’m doing a project. For … for school. I’m a … you know … a schoolgirl?’

‘Oh.’ Mrs Kingsley looked happier. ‘Which school is that?’

‘Erm … Moorfield? It’s near—’

‘Yes, I know it. I had a nephew there.’

‘Well, I probably—’

‘He’s a bank manager now, in Leominster. Now, what did you want to know again?’

‘Well, it’s this project on … on my great-grandfather? Alfred Watkins? You know who I mean? He was a county councillor and a magistrate, back in the 1920s and…’

‘Mr Watkins?’ Mrs Kingsley smiled at last and nodded and came down from her front doorstep. ‘Yes, I know about Mr Watkins. And his photography, and his ley lines. And he was…’ She looked suddenly uncertain. ‘Your great-grandfather?’

Oh no. ‘Sorry…’ Jane did some rapid arithmetic. ‘I always get this wrong. Great-great-grandfather. It takes me ages to trace it back through the generations. We’re all over the place now, you know, the Watkinses.’

Jane glanced back at Gomer, sitting at the roadside in the old US Army jeep he was driving now. He’d said he probably wouldn’t be much use, not knowing Mrs Kingsley, only her late aunt.

‘Of course, it was my grandmother knew Mr Watkins, not me,’ Mrs Kingsley said. ‘I’m not that old. My grandmother, you see, was very well connected, that was what I was always told, although I was quite small when she died. I imagine she could’ve told you some marvellous stories about Mr Alfred Watkins.’

‘Really … ? Well, that … that’s what I heard,’ Jane said. ‘You see, we live in Ledwardine—’

‘Yes, that’s where my aunt—’

‘And all the main people in Ledwardine told me the person I could’ve spoken to, if I wanted to know about Alfred’s connections with the village, was Mrs … Pole.’

‘Do you know Mr Bull-Davies?’

‘James Bull-Davies! Absolutely. James said Mrs Pole was, erm … he said she was a real lady.’

‘Oh, she was. I’m so glad Mr Bull-Davies remembers her.’

‘They all do, Mrs Kingsley. Ted Clowes, the senior churchwarden? Ted said, Jane, you want to be sure and get Mrs Pole into your project. And her family. Which, erm, could eventually be published, of course, by the Ledwardine Local History Society.’

‘So that was what you meant when you mentioned my inheritance,’ Mrs Kingsley said.

‘Well, it…’

‘You meant Coleman’s Meadow,’ Mrs Kingsley said.

‘I think that was what it was called.’

‘Well, I’m afraid I didn’t inherit the land, dear. That was my cousin. He’s the farmer.’

‘Well, yes, but—’

‘As you’d probably have known if you’d seen the local television news tonight,’ Mrs Kingsley said. ‘Where he was interviewed.’

‘Oh.’

Shit.

‘The reporter did say they’d tried to find the instigator of the protest, but you were keeping a low profile. Although they did have quite a good photograph of you, from one of the newspapers.’

Just when you thought you were being so smart.

‘It was strange, though,’ Mrs Kingsley said, ‘that they didn’t mention you were the great-great-granddaughter of Alfred Watkins.’

‘Well, it’s not something I…’

‘Talk about,’ Mrs Kingsley said. ‘No. I don’t suppose you do, you silly little girl.’

Which was when Gomer came over.

He wasn’t even smoking, and he’d buttoned his tweed jacket.

‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire.’ Handing one of his cards up to Mrs Kingsley. ‘Once put in a new soakaway for your auntie, but I don’t suppose her’d’ve talked about it much at family gatherings.’

For a man of seventy-odd he moved fast. Must have seen Jane’s face folding up, and he’d been there before she reached the bottom of the steps.

Mrs Kingsley stood on the top step, holding the card. The ambering sunlight flashed from windows all over the estate and boiled in Gomer’s bottle glasses.

‘Brung Janie over on account o’ the importance o’ this, see. Good girl, means well, but her gets a bit … emotional. Takes things to heart.’ Gomer took off his cap. ‘Got herself in a real state over this argy-bargy, missus, as you can likely see.’

Mrs Kingsley looked at the card, said faintly, ‘Plant hire?’

Gomer looked solemn. It was touching, really. The words plant hire, for Gomer, represented some old and honourable tradition of saving the countryside from flood and famine, bringing mighty machinery to the aid of the needy. A plant-hire code of decency was implied and it shone out of Gomer’s glasses.

‘You see much of your cousin Gerry?’ Gomer said. ‘Gerry Murray, Lyonshall?’

‘No.’

‘Ar,’ Gomer said. ‘What I’d yeard.’

Jane looked at him, curious. He’d had very little to say in the jeep on the way here. But Gomer knew about the local network, its grudges and its feuds, and what he didn’t know he’d find out.

‘You know him?’ Mrs Kingsley said.

‘No. But I knows of him. If you see what I mean.’

Standing there with his hands behind his back, not pushing it. Little and lean, the cords in his neck like plaited bailer twine.

‘Gerry … knows what he wants and makes sure he gets it,’ Mrs Kingsley said. ‘One way or another.’

‘Yeard that, too. And your Auntie Maggie … seems to me her was a bit like Janie, yere – worried too much about what was right and what was wrong, kind o’ thing.’

Mrs Kingsley looked down, brushing her apron. It was beige, with black cats on it.

‘My aunt did talk about you once or twice, Mr Parry,’ she said. ‘You’re making this very difficult for me.’

‘Ar?’

‘I have some letters … and photographs.’

‘What Mrs Pole left you.’

‘You obviously know about them.’

‘Mabbe.’

‘I was going to offer them to the Hereford Museum. Or perhaps the Woolhope Club.’

Gomer looked blank.

‘The naturalist and local history club that Alfred Watkins belonged to,’ Jane said. ‘It still exists.’

‘Mr Watkins was a member, yes. Among other important people. The photographs belonged to my grandmother, Hazel Probert. I think it’s what she would have wanted, after all this time.’

Mrs Kingsley looked out over the housing estate. You could hear lawn-mowers and strimmers and a few children shouting. Across the estate and another estate, on higher ground, you could see the top of Dinedor, Hereford’s own holy hill.

Jane found she was holding her breath.

‘After the TV item, I brought them down,’ Mrs Kingsley said. ‘On television, it didn’t look like the same place – all that fencing and the signs.’

‘That’s nothing to what it’ll look like when it’s covered with executive homes,’ Jane said.

‘Well,’ Mrs Kingsley said, ‘I can’t let you take the photographs. But I can let you see them. I suppose they explain why my grandmother might not have wanted someone like Gerry Murray to have the meadow.’

45 Of Great Renown

Merrily got in, and there was nobody there except Ethel. Forking out a tray of Felix, drifting through to the scullery, it felt like weeks since she’d last been in here, doing ordinary things. The answering machine was overfed, no longer accepting messages. The air was stale and stuffy, and there was the rattle and hum of a bluebottle in the window.

She opened the window, sat down at the desk with a bag of crisps and rang Lol: no answer. Rang his mobile: engaged.

She needed advice, wanted to pray but wasn’t sure what she’d be asking for. She’d never felt so confused. Laying her head on the sermon pad, she closed her eyes. Forget the answers, some coherent questions would help.

Despite the open window, the bluebottle wouldn’t go out, as though it was determined to tell her something. All the buzzing things that wouldn’t go away.

Merrily jerked upright. The phone was ringing right next to her ear. Last birthday, Jane had bought her another old-fashioned black bakelite phone with a real ring, loud and warm and thrilling, like the church bells which had once pealed across the land from steeple to steeple to warn of impending invasion. She grabbed the phone in a panic, something quaking in her chest.

‘Merrily?’

‘Frannie?’

‘You all right?’

She shook herself, blinking, rubbing at her eyes.

‘Sorry, I was…’

‘I don’t know why I’m calling you, really,’ Bliss said. ‘I didn’t plan to. I was just tearing through the CID room with no time at all to spare – not now, no bloody way – but a little voice is going, ring Merrily.’

‘You’re not a man who responds to little voices.’

‘Nah, you’re right. You been listening to the local radio at all today, Merrily?’

‘Haven’t even had it on in the car. Probably afraid of hearing people talking about Jane. Just tell me this isn’t about Jane.’

‘Not unless she’s shot somebody.’

‘The problem was my grandfather,’ Mrs Kingsley said. ‘It seems Mr Watkins turned up at the door this day – quiet sort of chap, my grandma always said, according to my mother. Very polite, and could he have a look at their bottom meadow?’

Jane clung to an arm of the sofa. He came? He knew? He really knew about the Ledwardine ley?

‘My grandma was all of a flutter, of course, that such a man as Mr Watkins should be calling on the likes of them. She was quite young at the time, not so very long married. They’d all heard of Mr Watkins, quite a public figure by then, though not because of ley lines.’

‘This was … when, exactly?’ Jane asked.

‘About 1924, I would guess. The Old Straight Track hadn’t been published, I’m fairly sure of that, so not many people knew what it was all about. To be told you had an ancient trackway across your land which had been used by Stone Age people … well, it didn’t mean anything. Certainly not to my grandfather.’

Gomer said, ‘He’d’ve likely been in the First World War, then, your ole grandad?’

‘Yes, he was, Mr Parry. And came back a different man. Not the man Grandma married, my mother used to tell me. He just wanted a quiet life surrounded by his own land. Positively antisocial. It wasn’t a very big farm, even if you included the orchard, and he was determined to hold on to it. My grandma liked to go to concerts and the plays, but he would have none of it. Wouldn’t take a holiday. And was suspicious of anyone who appeared on his land. Particularly someone with strange equipment, like Mr Watkins. I expect you can guess what that was, Jane.’

‘Didn’t he sometimes use, like, surveying tools?’

‘Surveying tools?’ Mrs Kingsley laughed. ‘Good heavens, he wouldn’t have got as far as the gate. No, his camera … that was enough. Aunt Margaret, who would have been a very small child at the time, thought she remembered some of this, but I suppose the details were filled in for her later. As she described it, Mr Watkins stood for a while at the field gate then walked the length of the meadow to the other gate, near the foot of Cole Hill, and then he came back, and he said, “Mr Probert, would you permit me to take some photographs?”’

‘I suppose his camera was … pretty big.’

‘And on a tripod. In those days, there weren’t that many cameras in Herefordshire. Having your photo taken was a big occasion. Almost ceremonial. It was a matter of taking your place in history and you had to look your very best. And, of course, that field didn’t. Despite all Grandad’s efforts, it was still poorly drained and there’d been floods, and so Grandad says “No, absolutely not.” Because it would be a permanent reflection on him, you see, the state of that field, and he was a very proud man.’

Mrs Kingsley held out a faded sepia photograph of a couple standing in front of a fairly run-down-looking cottage. The man wore a tie and a waistcoat and a bowler hat, and he wasn’t smiling.

‘Well, Mr Watkins tried his best to explain that the field was very important, archaeologically, and he wanted to include it in a book … and of course this made things worse. A book! The state of that field preserved for all eternity, to be sniggered over by farmers all over the county. My grandad took what he believed to be the only reasonable action open to him and respectfully ordered Mr Watkins to leave his property at once. Mr Watkins appealed to him to think again and said he would call the next time he was passing. And he did call again, but in the meantime my grandad had been talking to some other councillor who told him not to worry as Mr Watkins’s ideas were nonsense.’

‘Nothing changes, does it?’ Jane said bitterly.

‘Mr Watkins said please could he just take some photographs if he promised they wouldn’t be used in his book or published in any way at all. Just as evidence of what was. But Farmer Probert, I’m afraid, refused to believe him. He couldn’t get his head round the idea of just taking a photograph and not doing anything with it. He didn’t think Mr Watkins would be so wasteful of an expensive plate, and he turned the poor man away again. Of course, my grandma was deeply embarassed by now. She was, as I say, quite a refined lady, with her books and her wind-up gramophone.’

‘Not many folks yereabouts had a wind-up gramophone back then,’ Gomer said.

‘Definitely not, Mr Parry. And, do you know, I think it was that gramophone that saved the day.’

Mrs Kingsley rose and went over to a sideboard under a framed colour photo of some children and a horse.

‘I’ve done quite a lot of research on all this since it came into my possession. As you’ll see, it’s our family’s claim to fame. Our small place in history.’

Gomer looked at her shrewdly.

‘Wouldn’t reckon Gerry Murray be all that interested in hist’ry?’

‘Nor as hard-up as he led my Aunt Margaret to believe.’ Mrs Kingsley snorted. ‘Bringing his accountant to convince her of the parlous state of his finances.’

Jane looked at Gomer.

‘Brung his accountant, did he, missus?’ Gomer said.

Mrs Kingsley didn’t reply. She unlocked the top section of the sideboard and took out a stiff parchment envelope.

‘Mr Watkins was always very polite but he was … canny, I think the word would be. The next time he came back, it was market day, when he knew my grandad would be in town and my grandma would be on her own. And this time … he had a friend with him.’

She brought the envelope back to the sofa where Jane and Gomer sat. It had a wing-clip which she undid.

‘A titled gentleman,’ she said, ‘of great renown. Great renown, and not only in Hereford. I should imagine my grandma was practically on her knees, when she saw who it was.’

Jane said, ‘The Prince of Wales?’

‘I’ll show you in a minute. But first I’ll tell you the result of it. Mr Watkins offered her a deal. If my grandfather let him take pictures of the meadow, for the record, he’d take some other pictures – of Grandma and the distinguished gentleman, together. And he would give her the pictures to keep.’

Cool, Jane thought. The man was a true Watkins.

‘Well, there was absolutely no way that Hazel Probert was going to turn Mr Watkins away. Certainly not with his distinguished companion, and the promise of the souvenir of a lifetime. And so the photos were taken that very day, while Grandad was at the market.’

‘Brilliant,’ Jane said.

‘And – do you know? – I don’t think they were ever shown to him or even mentioned from that day until the day he died. She kept them secret for the whole of her life. You can imagine her hiding them away in her bottom drawer and only bringing them out when her husband was at market. Sharing her pride with no one.’

‘Then how—?’

‘And they were only entrusted before she died – the week before she died – to Aunt Margaret, the eldest daughter. Her mother thinking she was the only one who would understand.’

Mrs Kingsley handed the opened envelope to Jane. Jane looked at her hands to make sure that they were clean.

‘Don’t worry, I checked when you came in,’ Mrs Kingsley said. ‘We’ll have a cup of tea when they’re safely away again.’

Aware that her breathing had become shallow, Jane carefully slid out the pictures. There were four of them, in cardboard frames, each one protected by tissue paper. She was going to be the first outsider to see original and almost certainly historic photos taken by Alfred Watkins himself. She could almost feel him bending over her, with his pointed beard and his glasses on the end of his nose. She shivered slightly.

‘Go on,’ Mrs Kingsley said.

The first one was a bit faded but, like all Watkins pictures, nice and sharp. Jane saw a woman she guessed to be in early middle age, but could have been younger – hard to tell, the severe way they had their hair in those days. She was dressed in a long skirt and she had a little handbag and a bashful smile. And she was standing…

… On the ley…

… The trackway even clearer then than it was now. And this…

… This was just everything Jane could have wanted: incontestable proof that the great Alfred Watkins had photographed Coleman’s Meadow.

The picture had been taken from the Cole Hill side, with the steeple of Ledwardine Church soaring above the woman’s head and the head of the man who Jane hadn’t really noticed at first. Quite an ordinary-looking elderly guy. Serious-looking, with a big white moustache, a hairy jacket and a trilby hat.

Jane thought she might’ve seen him somewhere before but … well, she hadn’t really expected to recognize him, anyway. There were two other pictures of the couple and a third taken from the other side, the old guy on his own pointing towards Cole Hill and he was kind of smiling, and he…

Hang on…

‘Gomer … ?’

Jane showed the photo to Gomer.

He scrutinized the picture very carefully, holding it up to his glasses.

Then he lowered it slowly.

‘Bugger me, Janie … that’s ole wassisname, ennit?’

46 Black Vapour Trails

Bliss said it was nothing fancy, this one. Not some ritual-looking killing in a beauty spot that Annie Howe would take away from him for the headlines.

‘This is an old-fashioned, down-home, nasty, sordid, backstreet— I woke you up, didn’t I?’

‘I’m not in bed,’ Merrily said. ‘I just … go on.’

‘Malcolm France. Forty-six years old. Independent security adviser. Know what that means, do we?’

‘Minder?’

‘Partly. Also a private inquiry agent. Which wasn’t attracting enough business for a full-time occupation, so Mal did everything from following wives, to recommending burglar alarms on commission and guarding the rich or the famous when necessary. It was a living. It’s where a lot of us go when they kick us out.’

‘I’m sorry, Frannie. I hadn’t realized he was an ex-colleague. What happened?’

‘Not a colleague, no. I knew him, but not well – all that animosity between cops and private eyes, that’s for the story books. We keep in with them now, with an eye to the future. He was found early this afternoon, back of St Owen’s Street. Broad daylight, Merrily. Not a robbery. I hate that kind of thing. Makes me angry. A crime committed with never a thought that they aren’t going to get away with it. We think they were even on view. Two men in white coveralls – familiar sight nowadays, with all the health-and-safety regulations – were seen by a number of witnesses to walk into the building carrying a paint spray. Nobody saw them come out, which suggests that the coveralls were packed away in a case, and the fellers who came out were wearing nice suits.’

‘In Hereford?’

‘That didn’t use to happen in Hereford, did it?’ Bliss said.

Merrily heard a car pulling into the vicarage drive. The bluebottle was still making hysterical circuits of the window, or maybe it was another bluebottle. She was very tired of people buzzing her and then flying out of range.

A key turned in the front door. Thank God.

‘And did you … explain why you’re ringing me?’

‘I said it wasn’t robbery, but we think his laptop had been taken and some disks. No sign of case notes or files lying around the office, anyway. So we got permission from his family to check out his bank accounts. Discovering that, among recent payments, was one from a Ms C.W. Sparke, of Wychehill, Malvern.’

Merrily’s body jerked; the chair legs scraped the thinning carpet.

‘That’s a surprise, then, is it?’ Bliss said.

‘What was he doing for her?’

‘I don’t know. All we have is a receipt for £250, including exes.’

‘Winnie Sparke paid this man £250?’

‘Peanuts, Merrily. He’d get more than that for finding a lost dog. Most clients, it runs into thousands. Anyway, there it is. She’s among a dozen or so of his customers we’re checking out. Although it may have nothing do with his current business. However, what do you know about her?’

‘She’s a writer. From California, but she’s lived here quite a few years. Divorced.’

‘I was thinking more about her links to our friend Mr Loste, actually. She paid for his lawyer and she collected him from Worcester nick. It might be just a coincidence, but it’s interesting.’

‘She’s working on a book with Loste. He’s probably very important to her career at this stage.’

‘Any indication she might not trust him, might want him checked out?’

‘It’s possible, but unlikely. She told me stuff about his origins that she might not have … I don’t know, Frannie, that’s the truth. I mean … Loste? Even you’re thinking Loste? Knifes a man on the Beacon and then … You did say this was a shooting?’

‘Head and chest. Pistol. Looks like the gun got completely emptied into him – more enthusiastic than efficient.’

‘I saw Loste go into the church, late morning. That rule him out?’

‘Hard to say yet. You going back to Wychehill tonight?’

‘Hope not.’

‘Only, there’ll be some uniforms keeping tabs on tonight’s young persons’ social event, at the Royal Oak. You haven’t seen the TV?’

‘Haven’t seen anything.’

‘Me neither, but it seems there’s trouble following press and TV items with a bloke called Holliday who reckons inner-city trash elements have turned his village into an apocalyptic battlefield. Mr Holliday’s now saying that he’s received personal threats.’

‘From whom?’

‘From anonymous supporters of the Royal Oak, presumably. It’s not significant enough to worry us, but I thought I’d pass it on.’

Merrily turned at a shadow and saw Lol in the scullery doorway. They had one another’s keys now.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘If I come across anything—’

‘Don’t worry about it. It’s possible that Mal’s murder is linked to his former occupation, in which case I’ll probably be sidelined again. Look, I’ve gorra go—’

‘What was his former occupation?’

‘Like a number of local security advisers in this general area who weren’t formerly in the police, until six years ago, he was a serving soldier.’

‘In … Hereford?’

‘Thereabouts,’ Bliss said.

It was clear that Lol had a lot to tell Merrily, but there were things that needed to be dealt with first. Fears racing like black vapour trails across an already darkening sky.

Before she could think about any of it, there was Jane to deal with.

‘Jane’s with Gomer,’ Lol said. ‘They’ve gone to check out some details about the history of Coleman’s Meadow.’

‘She’s OK, though?’

‘She’s fine. She’s with Gomer.’

‘And under the circumstances, that’s OK? I mean, Gomer has no axe to grind here.’

‘I … I’m pretty sure it’s OK.’

‘All right. Look, thanks for … It must’ve been…’

‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

‘I’ll do it. Need to keep moving. There are some things I want to run past you, and if you tell me it’s all crap, I just might not go insane.’

Merrily filled the kettle and plugged it in. The clock said 7.01, and the light on the cream-washed walls was beginning to weaken.

‘I don’t know whether you got any of that, but Bliss is investigating the murder of a security consultant and private investigator. Who was a former member of the SAS. As was Syd Spicer.’

‘And a few hundred other blokes in this county,’ Lol reminded her.

‘I was told that Spicer’s marriage had broken up, but he tells me today he’s just sent his wife and daughter down south while he stays here. Because, he says, his “mission” is not yet over. The daughter, Emily, became a serious user in Hereford and he was worried about the proximity of the Royal Oak.’

‘Heroin?’

‘I don’t know. He doesn’t tell you a lot. And, although he’s with an anti-drug group in Herefordshire, he doesn’t involve himself in the campaign by the Wychehill Residents’ Action Group. Neither does the chairman of the parish council, Preston Devereaux. Whose eldest son appears to have had similar problems and, I’m told, went out with Spicer’s daughter. Devereaux – a man who is conspicuously sitting on a lot of bitterness and rage about the government and the way the countryside gets treated – becomes curiously blasé when you mention the Royal Oak. It won’t last, he says. Raji Khan will move on. Move on is Devereaux’s favourite expression.’

Merrily put tea bags in the pot, thinking this out.

‘Although the anti-drugs group works with the police, Spicer admitted tonight that he suspected Roman Wicklow was dealing on the Beacon and didn’t see the point in telling the police.’

‘OK, that’s odd,’ Lol said.

‘So … Spicer and Devereaux. Two strong, self-sufficient, arguably dangerous men, who know each other well but don’t conspicuously hang out together. Two men in public positions locally who, nonetheless, keep low profiles.’

‘You’re suggesting they don’t trust the police to do a proper job? They’ve got some vigilante thing?’

‘Bliss thinks Raji Khan is behind the influx of heroin, crack and whatever sells … into the market towns. Bliss suggests that Khan, with his social position, his connections, has a bit of a charmed life. I met Khan this afternoon and – just a feeling – wondered about a special relationship with Annie Howe. He’s very cool. Far less wary than … than Spicer, for heaven’s sake.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’ Lol paced the flagged floor. ‘SAS men are well trained in the use of knives to dispose of people without any fuss. But Wicklow – that wasn’t exactly discreet, was it?’

‘God,’ Merrily said. ‘Spicer’s a—’

‘But you don’t really have anything other than conjecture, do you?’

‘Nothing at all. He’s also a priest…’

‘Priests have done worse,’ Lol said, ‘even in your limited experience. Well, one priest. And he wasn’t even trained to kill. Look, why not just unload it all on Bliss?’

‘But if it turns out it’s nothing at all to do with Spicer, a fellow priest, what does that make me?’

‘Cautious. How does any of this tie into the killing of this guy in Hereford?’

‘Turns out that Winnie Sparke was one of his clients – Bliss doesn’t know why.’

‘You have any ideas?’

Merrily shook her head. ‘But Spicer and France had to know each other. They’re about the same age – they must’ve served together.’

‘Well … yes … but what does that … ?’

‘I don’t know. I’m just a humble bloody vicar. What do I do with this, Lol? Do I call Bliss back?’

‘I don’t know, either,’ Lol said. ‘But I can give you a very good reason to call Winnie Sparke.’

47

A Perfect Universe

‘This is Starlight Cottage,’ Winnie said. ‘Who is that?’

‘This is Merrily Watkins, Winnie.’

‘What do you want?’

When it came to it, nobody could do cold better than someone from the Sunshine State.

‘I wanted to talk to you about the Whiteleafed Oak,’ Merrily said.

Pause.

‘Whiteleafed … ?’

‘Oak.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m sorry, Winnie, but I think you do,’ Merrily said, gripping the big bakelite phone for some kind of support. ‘Whiteleafed Oak is a hamlet at the southern tip of the Malverns. It seems to be the joining point of the three counties: Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire.’

Winnie was silent.

‘The three counties that come together every year for what seems to be the world’s oldest music festival, the Three Choirs. Which, although it only officially dates back to the eighteenth century, reflects something a lot older. I mean, the concept of … perpetual choirs?’

It had taken most of an hour to become basically conversant with this from the information that Lol had picked up from Athena White (Oh God, Athena White?) and it was coming up to eight p.m., and half of the churchyard wall was in shadow.

At one stage, Merrily had gone up to Jane’s apartment in search of books which might illuminate the subject, coming down with a paperback entitled Sound and the Shaman and not discovering, until she’d laid it on the desk in front of Lol, that it had been published by an American company called Taliesin and written by one C. Winchester Sparke – the name appearing in small, perfunctory lettering under a picture of an Irish bodhran drum with feathers attached to its frame. One of those books which sold purely on subject, and the author’s identity was of little significance.

In the beginning, the book began, was – and is – the sound.

‘The idea of perpetual choirs seems to have begun as a Druidic concept. It also seems to link into the theory of the Music of the Spheres, attributed to Pythagoras, way back before Christ. In which the planets are believed to resonate according to a musical pattern that maintains celestial harmony. A perfect universe.’

Merrily paused, looking at Lol. Felt like she was in the pulpit. Lol was nodding.

‘The perpetual choirs – stop me if you start to lose interest – were supposed to have maintained that level of harmony on earth. As above, so below. Each choir would have at least twelve members – monks in Christian times, bards or whatever before that. Singing in shifts so that it never stopped. And the choirs were said to have been set up in churches or temples on the perimeters of huge circles in the countryside.’

But where did this idea come from? Merrily had demanded desperately, watching Lol spreading out an OS map on the carpet. A map with black lines and circles drawn on it.

He had, after all, obtained the information from Athena White, a little old woman whom Merrily had encountered perhaps twice, in those scary early days of Deliverance. A long-retired civil servant with a child’s voice and a child’s instinctive, remorseless cunning. A repository of arcane data who’d made that intimidating new assignment seem even more like a journey to the centre of the Earth. Merrily had been slightly afraid for the woman’s soul, whereas wary, tentative Lol could casually approach Athena – real name Anthea, it helped to keep reminding yourself of that – and emerge … enlightened?

Or at least slightly infatuated. The musician lit up by this beautiful but possibly apocryphal concept resurrected in the early 1970s in England by the earth-mysteries scholar John Michell, who had suggested that maintaining the perpetual chant was how the Druids kept control over the Celtic tribes – presumably because nobody would risk breaking the sonic connection between heaven and earth. And then it was absorbed by Christian communities, perhaps using Gregorian chant, and…

‘Only fragments of knowledge seem to remain. Apparently it was thought that there were twelve choirs in a circle, like a big clock. But, as I say, only fragmentary … Three Choirs. Twelve choristers. The figures one and two adding up to—’

‘Who told you all this?’

Winnie Sparke’s voice was distant, as if she was looking away from the phone, into space.

‘Of course, you can explain anything with numbers. Biblical scholars do it all the time, but … chanting, in any religion you can name, is designed to induce a higher state of consciousness. And something – psychological or whatever – something certainly seemed to work when Tim Loste put choirs of twelve into three churches, one in each of the three counties. Two ancient churches and Wychehill, which was built on an ancient site.’

‘You did some homework.’

‘I had help. We … don’t have a record of Druidic chant, but Gregorian chant goes back a long, long way. And Elgar … while Elgar’s music is modern, it arose from his grounding in the Catholic church and I think much of it was nurtured and developed by the Three Choirs Festival.’

The festival rotates among the cathedrals of Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester, right? Lol had said. All of which are at least medieval. Obviously, Loste doesn’t have access to cathedrals, but little-used ancient parish churches are easier, and the three he chose are roughly equidistant to Whiteleafed Oak, where the counties converge. And there’s more…

‘Over the years, Elgar wrote a lot of music for the Three Choirs, I believe,’ Merrily said. ‘Having been connected with the festival since, I understand, the age of nine. Or, if you want to be esoteric about it, that would be three times three.’

‘Listen.’ Winnie Sparke’s voice was higher now, and sounding satisfyingly abraded. ‘I don’t have time for this right now.’

‘You keep saying that.’

‘You don’t understand. I have to go collect Tim.’

‘Where from, his self-defence class?’

‘Goddamn you, Merrily—’

‘I’m sorry, that was— You have something planned for tonight, don’t you? Choirs singing in the three counties from nine p.m. till three a.m. Is that because this is the last chance you’ll get to approach what you—?’

‘That your doing?’ Winnie’s voice was like cracking ice. ‘Getting us kicked out of the church?’

‘No, of course it isn’t. It had already happened when I…’

Merrily waited, the big phone clammy against her ear.

‘OK, listen,’ Winnie said, ‘I spend all of Friday and Saturday evenings with Tim. When the Royal Oak starts up. He’ll go crazy, else. I get down there well before dark and sometimes we have to get out of Wychehill. We go … we go someplace.’

‘Like Whiteleafed Oak,’ Merrily said. ‘Was that where you sent Tim when the parish meeeting was on in Wychehill?’

‘Why can’t you just leave us alone?’

‘I wish I could, but I can’t.’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘Because nobody tells me the whole truth. And when so much is being hidden—’

‘Sometimes things have to be hidden, you stupid woman. For the sake of preservation.’

‘I didn’t mean that. This is—’

So difficult. So easy for the cops, but a priest had no right to demand answers and you were on shaky ground even asking questions.

‘Malcolm France,’ Merrily said. ‘Do you know about that?’

‘Who?’

‘Malcolm France was found dead this afternoon, at his office in Hereford.’

Two seconds of silence almost sizzling on the line.

‘What are you doing?’ Winnie screamed. ‘Why are you lying? Why are you giving me this shit?’

‘France was murdered. He was shot, repeatedly. I’m sorry if—’

Winnie’s breathing was turning to panting.

‘I want to help,’ Merrily said. ‘I would like to help you.’

And then she kept quiet, not wanting to give away how little she knew.

‘France was killed?’

‘In his office.’

‘Listen … this is crazy. That was a personal thing. Nobody was supposed to … I got fucking human rights…’

And this was a terrible mistake. How could Merrily possibly know about Winnie being a client of France’s? If Winnie chose to push this, it would rebound heavily on Bliss.

Winnie said, ‘Who else knows this?’

‘Probably half the county – it’s been on the radio.’

‘No, the oak. The oak.’

‘Just me. And my friend Lol, who you met last Monday night. The guy you thought was the exorcist.’

‘OK, listen,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘You wanna talk about all of this, we’ll meet you. We’ll meet you there in an hour. Give me time to talk to Tim. We’ll meet you there. But you have to promise to leave us when I say. Before nightfall. OK?’

‘Sure … OK.’

‘Park where you can and go through the five-bar gate and keep walking. You won’t miss it. Nobody could.’

‘Won’t miss what?’

‘It’s about the only goddamn place I feel safe.’

‘Winnie…’

‘One hour.’

‘Where?’

‘The oak.’

48

Neighbours

Gomer and Jane drove to the east of the city, down the deep shadow of St Owen’s Street, with its heavy, brooding Shirehall, where two police cars and a van were parked.

‘Small town, see, Janie,’ Gomer said when they stopped at the lights. ‘Calls itself a city, but it en’t like Worcester and Gloucester. Small town, out on its own on the border. Even smaller back in the 1920s. So everybody of a partic’lar class knowed each other. And them bein’ neighbours for years…’

‘It could make a difference,’ Jane said. ‘Couldn’t it? In Ledwardine?’

‘Mabbe. But mabbe not. Don’t get your hopes up. Still don’t prove that ole line’s any more’n a bit of a sheep track.’

‘Yes, but now we can show that Alfred Watkins knew about it, and it was really important to him … and he wasn’t the only one.’

‘Dunno, girl. Comes down to it, it’s just a couple ole boys helpin’ each other out.’

They rattled through the lights to the Hampton Bishop road where Jane had come with Eirion the other day in search of Alfred Watkins. This fairly pleasant tree-shaded suburb, and the river wasn’t far away. Gomer turned the old jeep left into Vineyard Lane, where they’d looked for Alfred’s house, and then they got out into the smell of rich mown grass and walked back to the main road, towards the setting sun.

The big white Victorian house was on the corner, converted into flats now. The usual plaque revealing its historic importance. Jane hadn’t even noticed it the other night with Eirion, although it had been mentioned a few times in school, over the past couple of years.

Plas Gwyn. The white place.

For nine or ten years, these two men had been close neighbours, even if only one of them had been famous at the time.

It wasn’t really Jane’s idea of a nice house, although back in Edwardian days she supposed it must have looked really modern and flash. It had four floors and a verandah. It was … well, functional.

In those days, Mrs Kingsley had told them, there weren’t many houses around here, and Plas Gwyn had had major views across the river and the water meadows to the Black Mountains … across the border country to Wales, and Elgar had loved the idea of that when, newly knighted, at the height of his fame, he’d moved here in 1904 with his wife Alice and his daughter Carice.

Wow.

Mr Alfred Watkins and Sir Edward Elgar. It made total sense that they should’ve been mates. Elizabeth Kingsley had drawn up a chart showing that they’d been almost exact contemporaries – Elgar had been born in 1857 and had died in 1934, Watkins was born in 1855 and died in 1935.

And so much in common.

Both of them photographers – Elgar was said to have had a darkroom here at Plas Gwyn, where he also, like Watkins, invented things.

Both of them members of the Woolhope Club.

Both them fascinated by the landscape.

And most of Elgar’s Hereford years had been kind of slow and uninspired where music was concerned. He hadn’t composed much here at all, Mrs Kingsley said, leaving him time to spare for his other interests. The council, in search of some reflected glory, had even offered to make him Mayor of Hereford, but he’d politely – and wisely, in Jane’s view – turned it down.

Jane remembered Mrs Waters, the art teacher at Moorfield, talking about this, when the Elgar sculpture was being planned for the Cathedral green. And how Elgar got disillusioned because, although he was this mega-celeb, he thought nobody really understood his music.

Elgar at low ebb in Hereford just as the great revelation was coming to sixty-ish Alfred Watkins, billowing towards him across the humpy fields in great waves of vision.

Of course, by the time The Old Straight Track was published, Elgar had left this house. But he loved the city, Mrs Kingsley had said, and he was always coming back to stay, especially when the Three Choirs Festival was held here. Used to meet his old friends, like the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was always trying to encourage Elgar to get back into some serious composing after the death of his wife in 1920.

‘So he and Alfred Watkins stayed in touch, obviously.’

‘Sure t’be,’ Gomer said.

Jane getting a picture in her head of these two elderly guys, Alf and Ed, standing on Dinedor Hill with the city’s churches aligned below them in the vastness of the old-gold evening. The air filling with ancient energy and orchestral murmurings.

Alf going, Bit of a problem, d’ye see? Best ley I ever found and I en’t allowed to go in there with my camera.

Something I could help with, you think, old chap? Ed tilting his head to one side. People seem to think a lot of me these days … for all the wrong blasted reasons, of course.

Well … mabbe. Alf’s beard splitting into a slow grin. Mabbe you could, too.

‘It’s weird, Gomer,’ Jane said. ‘How things happen, kind of simultaneously. Mum’s into this ridiculous situation over at Malvern where some people think that, like … Elgar’s ghost has returned?’

She stood on the pavement in front of Plas Gwyn and checked for messages on the mobile.

‘Jane, I’m so sorry.’ Mum sounded … upset? What? ‘I’ve come home, and obviously there’s a lot we need to … only I’ve got to go out again. With Lol. Shouldn’t be too late. Could you stay with Gomer? Please?’

The sun was dropping like a great molten weight into Wales, and the air was warm and airless. Jane’s bare arms, for some reason, were tingling.

49

The Lesson

There was, at first, a cramped, dead-end kind of feel, as they edged out of the Volvo. Merrily had had to squeeze it onto a rough verge, one wheel partly overhanging a ditch. Might be somebody’s parking place, but there was nobody about in the hamlet of Whiteleafed Oak to ask. A few bungalows, cottages, and nowhere to park because the lane was so narrow.

But it was wooded, sun-dappled, intimate. It didn’t have the wide-viewed isolation of Wychehill. Locking the Volvo, Merrily could hear a radio from an open window, and there was a small trampoline and a yellow bike in one of the sloping front gardens. Whiteleafed Oak was lived-in.

The sun was burning low in a sky like tarnished brass, the air was heavy and humid, and the only sacred sound was placid evening birdsong.

Merrily looked around. There were no directional signs, no indication of where to find whatever was to be found.

Lol opened out the OS map on the bonnet of the Volvo. There were several pencil lines drawn on it, one of them, lengthways, more defined than the others.

‘This is what Jane found. A north–south line along the spine of the range, touching all these hills – Midsummer Hill, Hangman’s Hill, Pinnacle Hill, Perseverance Hill, North Hill – on, or at least close to, their summits. Cutting along the side of Herefordshire Beacon and passing through Wychehill Church.’

‘You can’t fault the alignment,’ Merrily admitted. ‘Not without a bigger map, anyway.’

‘And if we extend the line south…’ Lol continued it with a thumb ‘… we can see that it begins at…’

Whiteleafed Oak.

‘Obvious when you know,’ Lol said.

‘Is this a ley line?’

‘I don’t know. Most of these are natural features. But they were probably all ritual sites.’

‘Or part of one huge ritual site,’ Merrily said. ‘Moel Bryn. The sacred Malverns.’

She was quite glad to see Whiteleafed Oak marked on the map. Didn’t even recall seeing any road signs pointing to it. Although it was only a few miles out of Ledbury, past the Eastnor Castle estate and into a twisting single-track lane, this was a place you would never find by accident. Nor particularly search out. Nearby villages like Eastnor and Eastwood were picturesque in the traditional sense, Whiteleafed Oak was not.

Lol folded up the map.

‘Better find this place before it gets any darker.’

Still be light enough to find your way. Park where you can and go through the five-bar gate and keep walking.

‘Which five-barred gate?’ Merrily opening out her hands. ‘Over there? Along there?’

‘It’s apparently the hamlet itself which marks the point at which the three counties merge.’

‘Nothing obvious here. Not even a church.’

‘Only a possible Druidic processional way.’

This was what Athena White had told Lol although she hadn’t been here in many years.

The fact that they’d been directed here by Athena White was why Merrily was wearing, under her thin sweatshirt, her pectoral cross. Why she’d slipped a pocket Bible into her jeans and taped to the Volvo’s dash the text, as if she could ever forget it, of St Patrick’s Breastplate.

Merrily said, ‘What on earth happened here?’

Thinking, And why didn’t I know about it?

With the hamlet of Whiteleafed Oak out of sight, nearly half a mile behind them, she was standing on what might have been – might still be – a processional way.

Looking around in the calm of the evening. Finding that the place was instantly familiar and perceptibly strange. Familiar because of well-known landmarks, like the stone obelisk projecting like a stubby pencil from Eastnor Park in Herefordshire. And May Hill, in western Gloucestershire, identifiable from the Black Mountains to the Cotswolds by the stand of pines on its summit.

At the tail of the Malverns, three counties were drawn together by landmarks and legend. The closer countryside was scabbed with odd mounds before it scrolled out into low hills, woods and copses and isolated clumps of conifers, all of it textured like velvet in the softening light.

And it was strange because none of this seemed random. It was as though each feature of the landscape had a special significance, a role to play in some eternally unfolding drama. And if they carried on walking into the arena – and it did feel like an arena – they’d be given their own parts to play.

Perhaps this was the great lesson to be learned about all of nature, although there were only certain spots where you could receive it with any intensity. Places of – oh God, wake me up before I turn into Jane – palpably sentient scenery.

They were alone in the landscape but, as they followed a vague path over a shallow rise, the sunset turning flat fields into sandbanks, she couldn’t lose the feeling that something knew they were coming.

You won’t miss it, Winnie Sparke had said. Nobody could.

She was right.

Merrily saw that Lol had stopped about twenty paces away, as though he was wondering how best to approach it, if he should take off his shoes.

‘Nobody said it was still here.’ His voice quite hoarse.

‘Nobody said it was still in use,’ Merrily said.

OK, it probably wasn’t the original one, after which the place was named, but it had to be many centuries old. Even without white leaves, it had grown into the heart of an earlier belief system which conspicuously lived on.

There were several other oak trees nearby, young satellite churches around this ancient, ruinous cathedral.

‘Venerated,’ Merrily said. ‘Still. On a serious scale.’

There was enough veneration to cover several Christmas trees, but the great oak, with its enormous swollen bole, had easily absorbed it all.

Offerings. Ribbons tied to twigs, fragments of coloured cloth, foil, labels with handwritten messages, flowers, balls of wool. Tiny intimate, symbolic items stuffed into folds and crevices, snagged in clawed branches. Hundreds of them, some fresh, some decaying, some fusing with fungi on the blistered bark.

Small sacrifices. People were still coming here – now – to make small sacrifices. Immense in the muddied light, the oak represented an everyday, naked paganism.

‘You uncomfortable with this, Merrily?’

Lol walking softly all around the oak – considered steps as if he was moonwalking or something.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just … It’s very … human. All these people making their pilgrimages, leaving their small offerings in … what? A celebration of survival?’ She dared to touch the tree with one hand. ‘What about you?’

‘To be quite honest, it kind of excites the hell out of me.’

‘Mmm, thought it might.’

‘Like, you read about ancient theories on music, and it seems so remote and … theoretical. But when you actually find a link with a bit of landscape only an hour or so from where you live. And then you come, for the first time, and it’s…’

‘It’s a tree, Lol.’

‘Merrily, it is so palpably not … just … a … tree.’

‘Well, it … it’s certainly the oak in the big picture over Tim Loste’s fireplace. I’m sure of that.’

It was all rolling at her like the ball lightning that Spicer had talked about, connections forming: all the saplings in the pots outside Loste’s house and the one planted in his garden … had they been grown from acorns picked up here, descendants of the Whiteleafed Oak?

It was as well to keep reminding yourself that the central reason you were here was finally to get to meet Tim Loste, without whom…

Lol stepped back, as if the atmosphere was too charged so close to the massive tree. You brought a blocked musician to what was alleged to be the most powerful source of musical energy within his ambit, you had to expect a certain … fascination.

‘If a few white leaves appeared on your oak tree, it was taken as a sign of major change.’

‘Athena?’

‘So if there was a tree here that was full of white leaves, maybe it was seen as a place where you could find transformation.’

‘That figures. Winnie’s blueprint for Tim Loste seems to be all about transformation. Like The Dream of Gerontius. The processing of the soul.’

‘You mentioned there were some other pictures on Loste’s walls,’ Lol said.

‘Mostly, they were places I didn’t recognize. Hills. Churches. But some were well known.’

‘Stonehenge?’ he said. ‘Glastonbury?’

She stared at him.

‘What the hell else did that woman tell you?’

Lol sat down in the grass, outside the growing shadow of the oak.

‘I didn’t want to confuse you with the bigger picture before you rang Winnie. The Three Choirs is only the local part of the story.’

‘I’m not sure I can handle this.’

Merrily sat next to him and he told her, his face shining in the blush of evening, about the big picture: twelve of them. A dozen perpetual choirs in south-west Britain, on the perimeter of a vast circle – supposedly. Their locations including Stonehenge, Glastonbury and Llantwit Major in South Wales, site of an ancient monastic college.

Not exactly recorded history. Poetic history. It could be valid, but scepticism, Merrily thought, might be safer at this stage.

‘If you plot the big circle,’ Lol said, ‘you find Whiteleafed Oak is the centre – equidistant from Stonehenge, Glastonbury and Llantwit. The pivot.’

‘But these – Stonehenge, Glastonbury, et cetera – were the only known sites?’

‘The only ones actually named in early Welsh literature. The others have been identified in places like Meifod, near Welshpool, Llandovery in west Wales and Goring-on-Thames – the word Goring comes from Cor, which means choir.’

‘So we’re … sitting at the centre of…’

‘… Arguably the most important focus of musical energy in Britain’s oldest established culture. A culture in which music was not one of the arts, part of entertainment … but a crucial element in the structure of life. An element in religion but also part of science and mathematics. And all the more spiritual for that.’

‘So all these offerings…’

‘Oh … I should’ve mentioned that some people visiting the presumed sites of perpetual choirs have said that they can still be heard. As a kind of droning, like distant bees. But then … people are impressionable.’

‘Erm … ?’

‘Just the birds,’ Lol said.

‘Thank God for that. So, we’re assuming that Elgar knew this place.’

‘Elgar said there wasn’t a single lane in Worcestershire that he hadn’t been down. Would’ve been an easy walk from Birchwood. Where he was living when he composed Caractacus. Is this his sacred oak? Look.’

Lol stood up and walked down below the tree where, guarded by younger oaks, there was a depression in the ground, a hollow. Merrily looked down at a charcoal stain near its centre. Fires were still being lit here. Worn bits of branches were lying around in the shallow pit like discarded bones. So much here suggestive of bone. A knobbly outgrowth at the base of the great oak itself was like a big bovine skull with one jagged eye socket.

‘Everything has its dark side,’ Lol said.

The last segment of sun went into the ground like a household fire collapsing in a shower of bright red sparks.

‘So this,’ Merrily said, ‘is where New Age paganism meets High Catholicism.’

‘This very spot.’

‘The Three Counties, though … I mean, the Three Choirs Festival is this posh, prestigious … the sort of thing that Sophie attends. Are we really looking at something distantly descended from some folk memory of pagan chanting?’

‘The official version is that it was set up as a clerical charity about three hundred years ago. Religious music performed – Handel and Purcell. But who knows? Be interesting to hear what Loste has to say.’

‘Except they’re not here.’ Merrily stepping away from the edge of the pit, looking all around. ‘She said an hour.’

‘Or they might be waiting for darkness,’ Lol said. ‘According to Dan, the choirs start at nine. Until three in the morning. Would they really be here, rather than with one of the choirs?’

‘Maybe Loste standing under that tree, remotely conducting his three choirs from the centre of the circle?’

‘Maybe we’ll get to see.’

‘Don’t build up your hopes. Between us and him there’s Sparke.’

The western sky was like dull copper and the air was heavy with stored heat. Merrily noticed that she and Lol were almost whispering, as if the oak might be absorbing it all, to be replayed to future generations.

Lol said, ‘You want to go back to Wychehill, see if she’s around?’

‘What if they come here while we’re gone? They won’t necessarily come the same way we did. Loste knows the hidden paths.’

‘I’ll stay, if you like.’

‘On your own? Here?’

He shrugged. Merrily tried to make out his expression, but it was too dim now, veils of mauve and sepia.

‘It’s less than ten minutes away,’ Lol said, ‘and we’ve both got mobiles. I’ll walk with you back to the car and when you’re on your way back you call me, so I can be waiting for you. If they turn up, I’ll call you straight away.’

‘OK. Just … you know…’

‘Don’t do pagan things? Merrily, I’m not Jane. I don’t even know any pagan things.’

They walked back, hand in hand, towards the hamlet of Whiteleafed Oak. The night was warm and the air smelled like a wholefood shop. Only a few weeks to the first hay harvest and that rich caramel scent which Merrily would always associate now with the Frome Valley and the first night she’d spent with Lol.

Some things were not worth risking.

‘They’ll come back,’ she told him.

‘Loste and Winnie?’

‘The songs. Your songs. They’ll come back. You know they will.’

She looked back at the oak, a fat old open-air preacher. Or maybe a conductor, the branches like a blurring of arms, summoning and gathering in three hundred and sixty degrees of sacred sound.

The trees are singing my music … or am I singing theirs?

Jesus.

Merrily was quite glad to be leaving. But not glad that Lol was staying.

50

In the Country, After Dark

Travelling back to Ledwardine in the open-top jeep, the thoughts blowing through Jane’s head were exhilarating and bewildering. Couldn’t wait to tell Mum and Lol, get some idea of where this could take them.

She was on firm ground at last. She could speak out. The council guys had made so much of the fact that the Coleman’s Meadow ley wasn’t in The Old Straight Track. Now she had proof that Watkins had known about it and seen its importance, and…

… And so had Elgar.

Britain’s greatest composer? This figure of serious international distinction, whose involvement nobody could ignore?

It was just a question of getting one of those incredible pictures photocopied – and, although they hadn’t pushed it at all, it had seemed like Mrs Kingsley was well up for that. Clearly no love lost between her and Murray.

And this breakthrough was entirely down to Gomer.

Ciggy between his teeth, glasses like goggles, his cap in his lap and his dense white hair like smoke in the dusk. Driving like he was really concentrating on the road, but he was clearly concentrating on something else.

About three miles from home, he slowed.

‘This new leisure centre. What you reckon o’ that, girl?’

‘Came out of the blue, didn’t it? Nobody ever said we needed one. Mum doesn’t know where it came from.’

‘Ah, well,’ Gomer said. ‘Where it all d’ come from, I reckon, is Stu Twigg.’

‘Huh?’

‘He owns the land what the village hall’s built on.’Herited it off his ole man last year. Gwyn Twigg? No? Had a petrol station over towards Monkland. Supermarket opens up at Leominster, cheap petrol, Gwyn shuts down, but he’s got these bits o’ ground all over the place, worth a good few hundred grand, so he’s all right, ennit? When he dies, Stu’s in the money. Lazy bugger, though, Stu Twigg. Calls hisself a mechanic, all he does is messes around soupin’ up ole bangers and scarin’ the life out o’ folks in the lanes.’

‘Got him now,’ Jane said. ‘I think. White Jaguar?’

‘That’s the boy.’

‘Came round a corner once, had Irene in the ditch. He’s insane.’

‘Not insane enough he don’t know the value of land,’ Gomer said. ‘Ground rent on the village-hall site, that’s peanuts, see – only public-spirited gesture Gwyn Twigg ever made. Mabbe owed somebody on the parish council a favour. Anyway, word is, Stu’s been talkin’ serious to one o’ the supermarket chains.’

‘You mean with a view to … ?’

‘Only one suitable site for a supermarket in Ledwardine, they reckons. Only it’s got a village hall on it.’

This didn’t take a lot of thinking out. The village hall was 1960s and a bit run down. Not exactly a listed building.

Jane said, ‘So if there was a new village hall … like one that was built somewhere else … ?’

‘Or a posh new leisure centre with playin’ fields, what’d need a bigger site. Mabbe a greenfield site, outside the village kind o’ thing. If you had some’ing like that…’

‘Stu could flog the village-hall site to the supermarket and clean up. And we’d have a big flash superstore dominating the bottom of Church Street like a … a shrine to commercialism.’

‘Ar. Some’ing like that. You wanner take a guess who Stu’s accountant is, Janie?’

‘Wow.’ Jane lurched forward against her seat belt. ‘You are kidding.’

‘Open secret, girl. Like I tole you, startin’ off thinkin’ your local councillor’s bent always saves a bit o’ time.’

‘Gomer, that is just so—’

‘En’t even the whole story, girl. Supermarket chain, they got a limit, kind o’ thing – what I mean is, a place needs to have a partic’lar head o’ population to make it worthwhile movin’ in. And Ledwardine’s borderline. Needs mabbe a hundred or so new houses to qualify. See where I’m goin’ yere?’

‘Luxury … executive…’ Jane lost her breath ‘… homes.’

‘It’s a start.’

‘That’s—’

‘And it don’t stop there. I been talkin’ to Jack Brodrick, see. Jack was a surveyor with the ole Radnorshire Council. He d’reckon Coleman’s Meadow’s a key strategic move. Strategic, see. His word. What it means is this: you got housing on Coleman’s Meadow, you gets to put a road through the ole orchard as was. Which opens up the whole of the east side o’ Ledwardine. And then you’re off, and big time, Janie. More new estates up the back of Ole Barn Lane, out towards the bypass, and all the way to…’

Gomer gave Jane a sideways glance and crushed out his ciggy.

Jane pictured it. The back of Old Barn Lane? That would take the housing to…

‘The bottom of Cole Hill, from the other side?’

‘Sure t’be.’

‘Which would mean … with Coleman’s Meadow built on, Cole Hill would be totally boxed in.’

‘’Course, this is only what Jack Brodrick reckons.’

‘Christ, Gomer!’

‘Shrewd ole bugger, Jack, mind.’

‘Pierce is quietly stitching up the whole village! We’ll be like … like a new town.’

‘Looks that way.’

‘How long have you known?’

‘I don’t know, Janie. It’s all guesswork, ennit?’

‘It’s not.’ Jane leaned back against the passenger door, her head out of the jeep, as if this would blow away the images of black and white houses crushed by an avalanche of pink brick.

Gomer drove on towards the Ledwardine turning.

‘Is it?’ Jane screamed against the slipstream.

‘Mabbe not,’ Gomer said.

As Gomer slowed for the Ledwardine turn, Jane checked her mobile, found the message from Mum. So what was new? Maybe Mum and Lol would be home by the time she got in. Anyway, she didn’t want to call back now. There was just too much to say. And she was too angry.

They came into the village. Ledwardine in the smoky dusk. The black and white houses timeless and ghostly in the fake gaslight from the square and the orange and lemon light spilling from the diamond-paned windows of the Black Swan. No neon.

Outside the Swan, the high-powered cars and SUVs of smug diners. A few young guys of fourteen or so with lager cans on the square.

Imagine it in five years, with twice the population.

Two ways it could go: either a refuge of the rich with high gates and burglar alarms and suspicion and unfriendliness. Or teeming streets, vandalism, drunkenness, fights, burglaries and gutters full of infected needles and crack pipes.

Not that there was anything new about all that, even in Ledwardine. In centuries past, the gutters would probably have been overflowing nightly with blood and vomit. And, like … well, everybody got drunk sometime, it was just…

… Just that the kind of mass drunkenness you got in the cities now was symptomatic of something scary: an almost suicidal hopelessness seeping through society. Jane had done this really heartfelt essay on it for the school magazine. The attitude was: the world is made of shit, the politicians of all three major parties are clueless tossers on the make, the country’s already more than halfway down the toilet, so if you don’t get pissed tonight, tomorrow could be too late.

There’d been times when she’d felt that way herself, obviously. And although she hadn’t used the words pissed or shit in the essay, it had still been censored. Good old Morrell. Good old Rob. Maybe it was time to leave, make her own way. Somehow.

‘Home, is it?’

‘Huh? Sorry, Gomer, I was…’

‘You wanner check if the vicar’s back, Janie?’

Gomer had stopped the jeep at the edge of the market square, engine clattering.

‘Actually, Gomer, I wouldn’t mind – like, now there’ll be nobody about – checking out Coleman’s Meadow? See if they’ve taken the fence down or anything.’

‘They en’t gonner do that, girl.’

‘Only … I feel bad about just going to ground all day. Not having the courage of my convictions.’

‘Wisest thing. You hadn’t got no proof.’

‘Yeah. And now we have. Can you take me back to Mrs Kingsley’s in the morning? Get those pictures photocopied?’

‘I’Il do that.’

‘You’re a star, Gomer.’

But still tomorrow morning seemed a long way off. What if – call it paranoia, but anything could happen in this sick world – what if Mrs Kingsley had changed her mind? What if Lyndon Pierce and Gerry Murray had found out and persuaded her to hand over the photos, and by tomorrow morning they were ashes?

‘Best to stay away from the meadow, I reckon, Janie. Don’t invite no trouble till you’re ready for it.’ Gomer pulled the jeep onto the square, switched off the engine. ‘I’ll come over the vicarage with you. If they en’t back, mabbe get some chips?’

‘Brilliant. See, all I was thinking … maybe more protesters might’ve turned up. I’ve got this fantasy of … like one of these old peace camps? Where people come and occupy the site?’

‘Got new laws to prevent all that, now.’

‘They’re stifling everything spontaneous, aren’t they? Free speech. Whatever happened to that?’

‘En’t gonner stifle me, girl,’ Gomer said. ‘Too old to be stifled, see.’

They walked across the square and under the market hall. It was around ten p.m. and the only light was in the northern sky – a strange light, with swirls of white, like cream in dark coffee.

There were no lights in the vicarage.

‘Chips then, is it?’ Gomer said.

‘Yeah, why not? My treat. You’ve done a great job tonight, Gomer. All we have to do now is make sure everybody knows … and about the leisure centre and everything. We’ve got to wake up the village.’

‘Easier said than done, Janie. Thing is—’

Gomer froze.

‘What?’ Jane said.

‘Y’ear that?’

All Jane could hear was the sound of a distant engine, like a lorry or something, carrying the way sounds did in the country after dark. Gomer stepped back onto the square, his head on one side.

‘It’s a JCB, ennit? Gimme a couple more minutes, I could mabbe tell you what size and how old.’

Jane smiled. Gomer Parry Plant Hire never sleeps.

Gomer wasn’t smiling. He stood hunched, looking down at his Doc Martens, listening hard.

‘Comin’ from the orchard, it is.’

‘I don’t—’

‘Seems to me there en’t many places back there where you can manoeuvre a JCB. Specially at night, see.’ He looked at Jane, and there was no light in his glasses. He took the ciggy out of his mouth and coughed unhappily. ‘You know what they’re doin’, don’t you?’

51

The Blade

Of course, Lol had half-lied to Merrily, and he hated that, but now he was compelled to go through with it.

By evening light, the sacred oak had seemed inspirational – its weight, its setting. The glow of sunset had instilled a transitional tension which was unsettling. And he needed that. Badly needed to be unsettled again. Have something reawoken in him, even if it was through fear of the unknown.

It was odd. Since the sun had gone down, the sky seemed brighter. The landscape, as he neared the oak, had the eeriness of a vast attic lit by a single candle. The voice of Dan the chorister was crackling behind his ears like tinnitus: I was a bit cynical about the whole idea at first but … I’d do it again tomorrow, I mean it, I’d travel a long way to do it.

Maybe the words of Dan the chorister had been quietly playing at the back of his mind for hours.

… Vibration going through you, like wiring … different parts of you lighting up in some kind of sequence … 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.

Lol was wondering when, since the terror and adrenalin rushes of the comeback concert at the Courtyard, he’d last experienced anything approaching that level of connection. What use was he to Merrily or Jane if he couldn’t feel their level of commitment? The way both of them, from their different directions, were driven, while he was just the hanger-on, the timid inhabitant of the witch’s cottage who hadn’t been able to construct a serviceable song for over a month.

Night had widened the landscape. Nothing visible between Lol and Stonehenge and Glastonbury Abbey. Two tawny owls conversed across the valley.

He stopped and looked up: stars … planets … spheres.

And then, as the naked, dead, topmost branches of the sacred oak appeared over the nearest horizon like a claw, he was shaking his head because this was faintly despicable. He should have gone with Merrily.

But Lol kept on walking until, at some point, the whistling arose.

Jane followed the tiny beacon of Gomer’s ciggy through the churchyard, through the wicket gate and into the orchard, which had once encircled the village. All that was around her now was the sluggish sound of the JCB flexing its metal muscles.

A friendly sound, normally. She’d always associated JCBs with Gomer. Gomer Parry Plant Hire: drain your fields, clear your ditches, lay your pipes, dig your soakaway.

Now it was a grinding headache, maybe the fantasy-migraine she’d invented coming back to haunt her, karmic retribution: clanking, dragging, ripping, an organ of destruction. Darkness closing in on mellow old Ledwardine.

‘Slow, Janie,’ Gomer said.

They were beyond the church, into the patch of ground where Jane had found the circular bump that might be a Bronze Age burial mound. Too dark now to make it out. There was a moon somewhere, but its meagre light wasn’t getting in here, and the nettles were high; she must have been stung a dozen times already, but that didn’t matter. Sweating, grit in her eyes, she stopped at the sound of a heavy blade on stone, raw friction, a pulling back, a meshing of gears.

‘Careful, girl – wire.’

Gomer, breathing hard, was feeling his way along an old barbed-wire fence, not the kind of fence you tried to climb over at night without a torch. He’d wanted to go back to the jeep for his lambing light, but Jane had been frantic by then, and anyway … there were headlamps on the JCB. She could see them at last through the trees, and the shape of the big yellow digger itself, monstrous now and brutal, an implement of scorched earth.

Gomer found the stile and tested its strength with both hands before climbing over and waiting to help Jane down. But Jane didn’t need any help and she hit the ground running, ripping the back of a hand on the bottom of the sign on which she could have read, if there’d been any light, Herefordshire Council Planning Department.

‘Bast—’

‘Janie—’

‘Stop it!’ Jane screamed. ‘You total bastards!’

Bursting into Coleman’s Meadow where they’d taken down a section of the new fencing to let the JCB in. The JCB that was approaching the middle of the meadow along twin bars of yellow-white headlamp beam. Moving in for another attack.

Jane ran out towards the digger – and hands grabbed her. The JCB reared up like a rampant dinosaur and its mud-flecked lights went spearing across the meadow towards Jane as she wrenched herself away, and then ricocheted from the yellow hard-hat worn by the man who’d held her arms.

‘Health and Safety regulations are very explicit,’ he said. ‘That’s as far as you go.’

Jane backed away, coughing, pulling hair out of her eyes, as he bent and picked up a lamp, throwing the beam full in her face.

‘Might’ve known,’ he said.

‘This is…’ She could hardly speak for the rage and the shock. ‘This is wrong. This is illegal. This is a crime against—’

‘Not wrong at all,’ Lyndon Pierce said, ‘and certainly not illegal. This is private land, and the man in the digger is the owner of the land. And also of the digger, as it happens.’

The lamp beam swung to one side to find Gomer. He was panting and his ciggy had gone.

‘By God, you en’t bloody changed, Lyndon, boy. En’t changed one bit.’

‘Not your problem, Mr Parry. I don’t know what you’re doing here.’ Pierce’s tone was remote; he didn’t look at Gomer. ‘But I strongly suggest you leave immediately and take this … girl with you before she gets into any more trouble. It’s not your business.’

‘En’t your business, either. You’re supposed to be a councillor, boy. Supposed to see both bloody sides.’

‘I’m not taking sides. I’m observing. I’m here as a member of the Herefordshire Council Planning Committee. An official … observer.’

He looked out across the meadow, and Jane followed his gaze. The digger had reversed back into a corner of the meadow, its blade up and retracted, its headlights illuminating what it had already done to Coleman’s Meadow, revealing the extent of the massacre.

‘Here I go now, in fact,’ Lyndon Pierce said. ‘Observing.’

Jane was too shattered to cry. It looked like pictures she’d seen of the Somme. More than half the central track had been dug up, ripped away. The surface turf torn off and dumped in rough spoil heaps, and deeper, more jagged furrows dug out where the ground was softer. Water coming up from somewhere, pooling in the glistening clay-sided trenches.

They’d systematically destroyed it. They’d all but obliterated the ley. They’d waited until it had got dark and the few protesters had gone and then they’d opened the fence and let in the JCB. Like letting a hungry fox into a chicken house, to do its worst.

The enemy was pointing at them across the meadow and Jane could see the shape of its driver, hunched behind the levers in the reinforced glass cab. Gerry Murray, presumably. Sitting there watching them now, waiting, an agent of the darkness.

‘Stop him.’ Jane’s fingers were sticky. ‘Stop him while you can. While there’s still some of the track left. Because it’s not going to look good for you tomorrow when … when the truth comes out.’

‘Truth?’

Pierce laughed. Jane felt the delta of blood washing down from the back of the hand she’d slashed on the sign, oozing between her fingers.

‘Jane, the only truth that’s coming out is the kind of truth that’ll be damaging to you and your mother and your mother’s hippie boyfriend. Now go home quietly before you make things worse.’

‘Like I’m really going to let you destroy an ancient monument?’

‘We’ve been there, Jane. This is no more an ancient monument than your friend Mr Parry.’

‘You’re just … you’re just a scumbag and a…’

All the names she wanted to spit at him, but that would just be abuse and childish, like the sad underage drivers you saw howling wanker at the traffic cops in all those cheap TV documentaries.

‘Why do you—’ She stared up at him, and then turned quickly away, feeling tear-pressure. ‘Why do you have to do this?’

‘I’ll remind you one more time,’ Pierce said, ‘that you’re on a development site and you’re not wearing protective clothing. If you don’t go, I’ll be calling the police to have you removed, and we’ll see how good that looks in the papers. Now be a good girl and let Mr Murray finish the preparation of his ground.’

‘Preparation? He hasn’t even got planning permission yet, even if it’s as good as a done deal. This is just sick, mindless … peevish … destruction. Why do you have to do this?’

‘Because of you, you stupid little—’ Pierce’s face coming at her, dark with evening-stubble. ‘What do you think all this fencing cost, to keep those cranks out? Eh? What if they come back tomorrow and there’s even more of them? What then?’

‘Well, good…’

‘No. Not good, Jane. Bad for all of us. Costly. So, to forestall the possibility of further public disturbance, Mr Murray took the entirely sensible decision to remove what our county archaeologists have formally confirmed was never there in the first place. And invited me, as the local representative, to come along and observe that no regulations were breached, and that’s what I’m doing. That’s it. All right?’

He turned away, adjusting his hard hat. He was wearing a khaki-coloured shirt and cargo trousers, like he was in the SAS or something, on a special high-risk mission.

‘So he invited you, is it?’ Gomer said.

‘I gotter say everything twice for you, is it, Mr Parry?’

‘Sure you din’t invite yourself? Strikes me this is just the sorter thing you’d think of all by yourself, that’s all.’

Lyndon Pierce didn’t reply.

‘Because, like, all you care about,’ Jane said, ‘is protecting your corrupt schemes and the bungs you’re getting from the guy who’s flogging his land to the supermarket firm, and the bungs you’re probably getting from the developers of the luxury, executive…’

Pierce turned slowly. Too late to stop now.

‘You’re just … totally fucking bent. Just like your dad. With your crap Marbella-style villa and your naff swimming pool and your … You couldn’t lie straight in bed.’

Gomer said quietly, ‘Janie…’

‘Right…’

Pierce turning to Gomer, the lamp under his face, uplighting it, the way kids did to turn themselves into monsters.

‘Now, I want you to remember this, Mr Parry. First off, I don’t give a fig what this nasty little girl says, on account she’s too young to think of any of it for herself—’

‘Like fuck she is!’

‘Janie—’

‘So I’m holding you solely responsible for that actionable shite. Even though nothing you say counts for a thing round yere and never did. Never did, ole man.’

Jane kept quiet. Stopped breathing.

Because Pierce had lost it. His accent had broken through again, and his language had broken down. Gomer went silent, too. This was, like, confirmation. Well, wasn’t it?

Pierce shone his hand-lamp from Gomer’s face to Jane’s face and back again.

‘You’re halfway senile, Mr Parry. You and your bloody plant hire. You don’t even know what bloody plant hire means. You’re a joke, ole man. You en’t even safe to climb into one of them no more.’ Pierce jerking a thumb at the JCB, his words coming faster. ‘And everybody knows … everybody knows you always got it in for farmers like Gerry, does their own drainage rather than paying good money, out of pity, to a clapped-out ole fart like you for half a fuckin’ job.’

Gomer didn’t say anything, but something tightened in his neck and he went rigid, the lamplight swirling like liquid in his glasses. For a terrified couple of seconds, Jane thought, Oh Christ, he’s having a stroke.

Wanting to kill Pierce and only dimly aware of the JCB’s engine revving up, until Pierce turned to the meadow, his hard-hat tipping back as his arm came up like the arm of some petty Roman-emperor figure.

‘You wanner watch?’ he said. ‘All right, you watch.’

‘No!’ Jane screamed. ‘No!’

Pierce brought his arm down, a chopping motion.

On the other side of Coleman’s Meadow the big digger rocked, its blade lowering. And then it began to roll on its caterpillars towards the last, pathetic piece of old straight track.

‘Oughter be in an old folks’ home, you ought, Parry,’ Pierce said as he walked away. ‘I should think about that, I were you.’

He’d been blocking the long view of Cole Hill, which never entirely faded away on summer nights. A lick of moon had risen behind it like a candle on a coffin. Down below, the last four or five metres of track made a perfect shadow.

‘Stop him! Please stop him!’ Jane arching forward, screaming at Pierce’s back. ‘You shit!’

He was gone. He’d walked casually away into the orchard, and all there was left was the yellow lights and the roaring, and Jane looked back at Gomer. But Gomer wasn’t moving, he was just standing there, a bit bent now, like one of the old, dying apple trees in the derelict orchard behind him.

It was almost over.

Jane was on her own. She’d failed. She’d mishandled everything, through immaturity, her eagerness to do something, be somebody. She couldn’t live with that.

She was only half aware of running blindly towards the digger’s bobbing lights. Running out, sobbing, into the meadow, where the ruined ley carried what remained of the ancestry of an historic village.

Oh, not historic in the sense of having kings or dukes living there or battles fought on its soil. More important than that.

She heard a shout from behind her, glanced over her shoulder and saw Gomer stumbling after her, and she shouted back at him, ‘No…’ But he was already slipping sideways into a new-made trench, sinking down on his knees, and her heart lurched and she desperately wanted to go rushing back to help him, but she was too far now, too far gone.

And convinced, despite the savaging of the meadow, that she could still see the mystic line, glowing and alive and fresh with the clean, crisp scent of apples … sharp with the cool, dry tang of the cider … hardened by the hooves of Hereford cattle with hides the colour of the soil … marked out by the shadow of the church, where the bells had called generations of farm workers to prayer … still walked by the sombre shades of Alfred Watkins and his distinguished musical associate and the spirit…

… The sad, sepia spirit of Lucy Devenish herself, hiding her anguish in the folds of her poncho as Jane threw herself into the gutted ground and rolled in front of the blade.

52

Remembering the Hurt

Half past ten and no signs of apocalypse.

Parked alone in the bay outside Wychehill Church, with the window down, Merrily could just about hear the choir. Not what she’d expected, not the fulsome, floating sound which had gilded the air last Monday night when she and Lol had arrived in Wychehill. This was low-level and travelled in pulses.

She’d walked quietly down to the church, some of whose windows were quietly aglow. Sliding into the porch with the idea of inching open the doors to see if Loste or Winnie was in there. But the doors were locked. No audience for this choir tonight.

She’d crept outside again, found a metal bucket and positioned it upside down below one of the clear windows and stood on it.

‘Ave Mary,’ she heard. Low and liquid. ‘Ave Mary.’

She saw a group of heads in the chancel, in a nest of candelight. A candle in a pewter tray on the lectern, a candle on the pulpit, eerily Dickensian.

Also workmanlike. Not a performance.

Anyway, the conductor was bald. Merrily had fled back to the car.

Two police vehicles went past slowly: a lurid traffic car and a dark blue van. Perhaps the action wouldn’t start until the early hours. Perhaps it wouldn’t start at all. Perhaps Khan was right and what worried people like Leonard Holliday was not so much the reality of the Royal Oak as the idea of it, any challenge to the idyll. Hard, however, to imagine Holliday ever experiencing an idyll.

She lit a cigarette, looked across at the Rectory. Like everywhere else, it was in darkness. Ledwardine Vicarage was never entirely in darkness. If there was no light on in the house, a low-powered bulb would be burning in one of the outside lanterns. The light of the world. The glow of sanctuary.

No sanctuary here.

She got out and locked the car and walked up through the cutting into Church Lane, saw a TV flicker in Hannah Bradley’s cottage and thought about knocking. No time. Stay focused.

She walked on up the lane, surprised at how bright the night was with a moon that was far from full. There was a single guiding lamp at the top of the steep path down to Starlight Cottage, but the place itself was unlit and clearly deserted, even the windchimes unmoving in the herb-scented silence. Wind chimes: part of the illusion of innocence.

If Sparke had deliberately misdirected her, neither she nor Loste were going to be easily discovered tonight. Merrily didn’t hang around, walked quickly back up to the lane and down the hill towards the church.

A bulkhead light blinked on across the lane and a door opened.

‘Hey, I thought it was you,’ Hannah said. ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘Looking for Winnie, that’s all.’ Merrily walked across the road. ‘You haven’t seen her?’

‘I never look out for her.’ Hannah was standing by her gate. She wore a Keane T-shirt and shorts. ‘She looks out for herself.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Nice bloke, Tim Loste. Used to be. I don’t know what he’s like now.’

‘I wouldn’t know, either,’ Merrily said. ‘I haven’t been allowed to talk to him.’

‘Join the club. Phew, it’s hot tonight, innit? Yeh, I do a bit of running on the hill, you know, and I ran into Tim a few times. I thought he’d be all up in the air and highbrow, but he wasn’t. Not like that at all. Quite uncomplicated, really. We went to the theatre in Malvern once. Matinée. It had some quite famous actors in it, from TV. It was a laugh. Then she found out.’

‘Winnie?’

‘And that was it. Our paths, as they say, stopped crossing. And not for want of me going out of my way, I’ll tell you.’

‘When was this, Hannah?’

‘Few months ago. I think he’s back drinking now. She won’t stop him. She’ll bloody kill him before she’s done, and that’s a shame.’

‘Go on. Tell me.’

Merrily leaned on the gate. Hannah looked up and down the lane and then lowered her voice but not much.

‘When we were in Malvern, right? We ran into this old mate of Tim’s, from when he was a teacher. And I remembered his name after and I rang him up to ask him, like, you know, what’s the situation with Tim. And he said the Sparke woman was the reason his engagement was broken off…’

‘Tim’s? What, you mean she—’

‘Oh, nothing like that. She’d eat him for breakfast. She just tells him he’s a genius. She’s good at making people feel special. I don’t know if he’s a genius or not, but what’s it matter if genius is being miserable all the time? You know he tried to top himself? If you see her, you can tell her what I said. I don’t care any more. I wish I could get between them, but he won’t listen.’

‘And how are things with you?’

‘I just don’t go that way any more on the bike,’ Hannah said. ‘You getting anywhere with it?’

‘To be honest … don’t know.’

Back at the car, Merrily lit another cigarette, brought out the phone, watched it flare up, singing in her hand, and called Jane again. Her call could not be taken. Left another message on the voicemail and then called Gomer’s landline – Gomer’s partner Danny Thomas kept the firm’s only mobile, as Gomer had never been known to charge it up.

No answer.

At least this was likely to mean that wherever Jane was, Gomer was also there. Made no difference; she should be there. There was nothing much to be done here. If Loste and Winnie were doing a Last Night of the Proms before they were barred from Wychehill Church, it was perhaps none of her business.

On the other hand, when somebody had deceived you…

She rang Bliss: voicemail.

‘Frannie,’ Merrily said, ‘I don’t really know what to say to you except that something’s not right here. Which of course you— Oh, sod it, just call me back.’

She killed the connection and her cigarette, leaned back into the seat. Time to go and collect poor Lol. Drive back to Whiteleafed Oak hamlet and then call him on the mobile, call him away from the perpetual choirs.

Nice concept, lovely imagery. The great and beautiful mystery: how Elgar tapped into the music of the spheres. The ultimate unprovable theory. But also undis provable. Clever Winnie.

She decided to drive back to the Ledbury road by the slightly longer route that would take her past the Royal Oak which, after all, she’d never seen fully operational – the moral cesspit, the gateway to hell. The road taking her past the gaunt Edwardian home of Tim Loste, which she hadn’t yet checked. She made out its wall and its peeling railings. No lights on here either, and she hadn’t expected any, but, as she accelerated away, something did catch her eye. Not a peeling railing, but…

Oh hell.

Merrily braked, lowered her window, looked behind her for oncoming headlights and, when it was clear there was nothing, reversed along the road to the front of the house and switched off the engine.

She couldn’t see it from here and had to get out. The narrow house rose up against the hill like an upended domino, double blank, and, halfway into Loste’s cramped driveway, she was able to confirm what she’d seen from the car.

It was the oak sapling planted in his tiny front garden, the tree which eventually would have crumbled his foundations and fused destructively with his supporting walls. The oak which she now knew represented something infinitely bigger. A symbol of something, is all, Winnie had said. A symbol he could use for meditation.

Merrily walked up to the front of the house and held the sapling in both hands, halfway up, where it was gleaming white.

Not white leaves. Somebody had snapped its trunk.

Jane tasted the earth.

It was cold and gritty and bitter, and her ears were full of roaring night.

‘Get up.’

‘Nergh.’

Jane rolled away from the blade but kept on hugging the earth.

‘Get up out of there before I pull you out.’

A voice she didn’t know. Then a voice she did.

‘Don’t touch her, Gerry. You must never touch them these days.’

‘I’d like to fucking—’

‘I’ve already called the police,’ Lyndon Pierce said. ‘Jane, you know what’ll happen if the police have to move you. You’ll be arrested. You’ll be charged. You’ll appear in court, and when you’ve appeared in court once, at your age, that’s the slippery slope.’

Jane dug her fingers into the soil, opened her eyes slightly and saw the white eyes of the JCB, heard its engine idling. She saw the boots of Gerry Murray, heard the voice of Lyndon Pierce again.

‘—Mother won’t survive that. Be on your way, the pair of you. No skin off my nose. Women vicars, that was always gonner be a mistake.’

Jane concentrated on the roaring of the engine in her ears and gripped the earth, one hand aching where the grit was in the bleeding cut. The earth smelled rich and raw and warm, now. Warm as the grave.

‘I been talking to Tessa Bird, in Education,’ Pierce said. ‘Looks like you’re finished at the school anyway. You’re maladjusted, Jane. Always been a problem child—’

‘What the fuck—?’

She heard the change in the engine’s tone. A gear change like a huge throat-clearing. When she opened her eyes, the digger’s lights were receding.

Murray screaming, ‘Get the fuck out of there, you mad ole bastard!’

Swallowing wet clay, Jane saw the swirl of the digger’s lights, and then the night went mad.

It wasn’t the wind; there was no wind. It wasn’t an accident, either. The sapling was too thick in its lower trunk for Merrily to clasp a hand around.

Someone had bent it over until it split. It wasn’t quite severed but the top three or four feet of it were hanging off.

She felt the violence still in the air, could almost smell someone’s sweat. It was, in some indefinable way, like when she and Syd Spicer had been standing by the remains of Lincoln Cookman’s car. As if the violence had been inflicted on the atmosphere itself and the atmosphere wanted you to know that it was remembering the hurt.

She went around the path to the back door to see if the oaks in plant pots had been damaged. They seemed to be intact, although one was knocked over. But the back door, which Tim Loste was said never to lock, was ajar, and the bar of pinkish light down the side was, amidst so much darkness, a lurid shock.

Merrily took a step back and waited. No suggestion of movement inside. She didn’t go in, but she prodded the door a little wider open and called out.

‘Mr Loste?’

Not really expecting an answer. But from out on the hill behind the house she could hear a distant sound, both explosive and staccato, like duelling machine guns: dance music from the Royal Oak somehow deflected from the hill, bouncing back toward the house and the road.

I spend all of Friday and Saturday evenings with Tim. When the Royal Oak starts up. He needs me – he’ll go crazy, else.

If they weren’t here and they weren’t at Whiteleafed Oak, where were they?

With her left trainer, Merrily pushed the door further open, saw into the kitchen, which she hadn’t really taken in when she was here with Annie Howe. It was basic but not small. Pine units and cupboards up to the high ceiling. A microwave, a dishwasher, a coffee-machine. An empty pizza packet on the worktop near the microwave. All of this lit by one long, thin peach-coloured strip light.

No conspicuous damage, no sounds of intrusion. So who had left the door open? Had the sole objective been the killing of the oak tree?

Who would have known its importance? Presumably, only Winnie Sparke. And Merrily, now, and Lol.

She stepped cautiously over the threshold.

‘Mr Loste?’

It seemed so unlikely that she hadn’t met this man she knew so much about. Or did she? Like all the impressions you received of Elgar, the individual portraits of Tim Loste didn’t quite match. He was inspired and inspirational; he was crazy and manipulative.

There was certainly nothing of him in this kitchen. Opposite her, the door to the hall was wide open. The hall was in darkness. She started thinking about the big framed photograph of Whiteleafed Oak over the mantel-piece in the living room and all the other pictures of the sites of the perpetual choirs. Obvious and easy targets if someone really wanted to upset him.

She went into the hall. Always hated being inside someone else’s house when they weren’t there.

Especially in the dark. Merrily felt around for a light switch, and as soon as her hand found it – one of those little metal nipples – the light from a white crystal bowl in the ceiling sprang into the otherworldly eyes of Edward Elgar, urging Mr Phoebus out of the shadows towards her.

It also fanned unevenly into the living room, where the glass protecting the photo of the whiteleafed oak had indeed been smashed, the picture tipped so that it looked as if the whole room was awry … as if a sudden gust of wind had rushed into it, tossing Winnie Sparke’s slight body back into the bookshelves in a hot shower of blood.

53

Unseeingness

The line was open, but there was no voice. Then the signal cut out and the screen went dark and the music from Inn Ya Face was going whoomp, chissa, hiss, whoomp like machinery deep inside the hill.

‘Frannie?’ Merrily said urgently. ‘Frannie.’

She looked up in blank despair from the lawn behind Caractacus. The moon was high but the house was in the shadow of the hill.

All right, she’d try him.

She went back to the path, opening up the phone again, illuminating the screen and scrolling down the list to bring up Bliss’s mobile number.

Sorry, Bliss said, I’m norrin. Leave me a message.

‘Frannie. Please.’ Letting some very real distress come through – like she could prevent it. ‘Get back to me. Get back to me now.’

When she snapped the phone shut, her hand was shaking. She could see this in the peachy glow from the kitchen door. She squeezed the phone hard, gripped the shaking hand with the other hand. Tried to pray for self-control. Couldn’t.

She didn’t have a choice any more. She had to go back in there. Make sure. Merrily felt the tautness of impending panic in her chest, turned away and saw a glinting from the edge of the lawn, where it met the path.

Knife?

Merrily walked around it, the hill going whoomp, chissa, chissa, hiss, whoomp, the perpetual techno-choir from hell. She bent down and found the remains of a Bell’s whisky bottle, possibly smashed against the wall of the house. Tim Loste’s whisky. Smashed on his way out, after he…

She shook the phone.

Call me. Lol … Frannie … call me…

What if they didn’t? What if Bliss didn’t call back for an hour or more? She should go back to Whiteleafed Oak. After … after she’d been back in there. After she’d gone back and checked once more. Made, dear God, absolutely certain that there was going to be no need for an ambulance.

Calm down. This can’t be done without calm.

It definitely was the Cello Concerto. But where a cello was veined and richly visceral, the whistled theme was faint and remote and fusewire-thin and painfully isolated.

It was as if, Lol thought … as if this was how it was meant to be heard, to convey its meaning.

In which case, its meaning was: solitary.

The sky was clear and starry and smeared with a buttery northern light, and the whistling made slow, luminous coils and lonely whorls on the silence.

Twice it had stopped and then started up again from a different direction, the way tawny owls might answer one another across the vastness of the valley.

The oak tree was flat and featureless, like a massive spidery blot of Indian ink. Lol kept on walking towards it.

A joke. But who, in this situation, wouldn’t be unnerved? It would be eerie enough after dark outside your own front door on Ledwardine market square – one reason being that nobody did this any more. Nobody seemed to whistle. No window cleaners, no butchers’ boys with baskets. And nobody whistled this achingly sad, regretful…

As he approached the oak tree, the whistling seemed to develop a slow and rolling rhythm, like the breath-pattern induced, Lol caught himself imagining, by even, heavy pedalling on a gradual incline.

Only me…

He’d thought it was coming from under the tree, perhaps from the hollow that looked like a sacrificial pit. But when he reached the oak, the whistling was still some distance away, across to the right.

It stopped again. Lol crept up to the oak and lowered himself between two of its varicose roots, pushing himself back into the bole, spreading out his legs against the roots, gripping cakes of bark in his palms and staying very still, just another part of the tree, an offering of himself in return for shelter – shelter against madness – as it began again.

The moon was higher now, with an amber cast, and he saw, over to the right – the east? where the distant Eastnor obelisk was, anyway – he thought he saw a movement. He kept still, and the tune continued, fluidly, long beyond the point where his own version might have feebled out. Under the circumstances, with your own breath coming faster, all rational judgement in suspense, it was impossible not to imagine for one thought-dissolving moment…

This time, when it was over, Lol spent some seconds with his eyes closed, trying to breathe evenly, before lifting his hands and beginning – with as lazy and relaxed a rhythm as he could summon – to applaud.

Merrily took three or four long breaths before stepping into the kitchen.

Walking directly through to the hall, this time touching nothing. Activating the living-room light by brushing the metal switch with her sleeve.

Last time, she’d seen it only by the light washing in from the hall. Now, two big white wall brackets were flaring theatrically, scattering shadows, and it was so much worse: blood on the books, blood on the pictures, blood on the walls, blood on the writing table, gouts and drips and smears, and Winnie Sparke in silent freeze-frame.

Winnie wore one of her long filmy dresses which seemed now as if it was hanging together in threads of blood and tissue. Her arms spread out across the bookcase, with books pulled out, and the empty fireplace. Her buckled bare knees, touchingly girlish. A breast partly exposed, cut into like a flaccid fruit. Her face ripped in several places, top lip joined to her nose by strings of blood and mucus. Her throat slashed many times.

But the worst of it was never the gore. It was always the unseeingness of the eyes and the open mouth through which no breath passed.

The room was hot and clammy and stank and, worst of all, it was so waxily still. Merrily swallowed bile, and then something overtook her and she was just standing there raging.

‘You got him out … You brought him home. Keeping your secrets, playing your cards —Why couldn’t you just talk to me? Talk to anybody?’

She froze. What if he’s still here? What if he’s upstairs? What if he’s halfway down the stairs and listening?

Not likely. Believe it. Seriously not likely. He was long gone. He’d gone lurching out with his whisky, draining the bottle and smashing it against the wall in his agony and self-hatred – please God, let it be self-hatred and repentance, let there be no more of this – and then he’d gone walking out on to the hill.

Why?

‘I mean why, for Christ’s sake, has he done this to you, Winnie? His saviour, his mentor, his—?’

There could be no halfway-rational explanation, not this time, not like the disposal of the drug dealer on the Beacon. This was frenzied. This was full on, the killer looking her in the eyes, as it was being done. This screamed insanity.

Merrily looked into Winnie Sparke’s last frozen cry. Could only see one eye through the blood and the hair. Winnie Sparke’s good hair. And the eye was a dead eye. It had been floating in blood and now the blood had congealed around it like a stiff collar.

‘Why couldn’t you talk about it?’

Letting the sob empty itself out of her, as she did all there was left to do.

Pray.

Her job.

Take her and hold her and calm her. Take her from this place now. Take her into light.

Following this with the Lord’s Prayer, the oldest exorcism.

‘… Power and the glory, for ever and ever, amen.’

Quelling the dread, she opened her eyes.

And was able, for just a moment, to hold herself in and remain calm in the presence of a new shadow in the room.

Winnie Sparke hung there, no less dead. It was not Winnie Sparke who was breathing, who said, ‘Amen,’ softly from the doorway behind her.

54

Snaps Batons

‘Shouldn’t have done that,’ he said sternly. ‘You broke the vibration.’

Looming over Lol, nodding his head as though it was too heavy for him. He wore baggy grey sweatpants and a white singlet with dark stains and smudges on it.

‘Percussive noises…’ Clapping his hands clumsily; sometimes they missed. ‘… Break the connection. Gone.’

He moved in his bent, shuffling way over to a half-collapsed bale of straw, flopping down on it with his legs apart, his hands clasped between them, his body rocking slowly.

‘Take a pew, old cock.’

Lol found another damaged bale to sit on. There was a lamp on the floor between them, one of those battery-powered lanterns with a blue plastic shade, spraying a light like watered milk over the long shed that was either an open-fronted barn or a horse shelter.

Whatever, it was a walk of only a minute or so from the oak, and he’d come wading out of it soon after Lol had started clapping. Staggering behind his lantern, dazed survivor of some Iron Age tribal skirmish. Lol had recognized him at once from Merrily’s brief description and his accent and the way his words came blustering out as if his lungs were organ bellows.

‘Wasn’t working anyway, tell the truth. Ran out of puff. You need to do the whole jolly thing. All the way through until you become—’

He stopped, blinking slowly. Sliding back along his bale, bringing down a straw-storm from another, his mouth slack.

‘Really don’t know … wassa matter with me tonight.’

What was obviously the matter was coming sickly sweet and sour off his breath. Lol didn’t get too close. It was as well to remember this guy was only here because of a shortage of evidence.

His weighty, ragged moustache hung down either side of his mouth, more Mongol warlord than Victorian composer, his stomach overhanging his sweatpants, like a bag of sugar under his singlet.

‘I look all right to you?’

‘I suppose,’ Lol said.

Aware of Tim Loste really looking at him now, trying to focus over the moist pink bags under his eyes.

‘Trying to remember … where exactly are you from?’

‘Me? Led—’ Lol thought about it, changed his mind. ‘Knights Frome.’ He paused. ‘Mate of Dan’s?’

‘Dan?’

‘Dan from Much Cowarne?’

‘Dan! Good Lord, yes.’ Tim made to clap his left knee, missed and clapped the hay, tumbling sideways, kicking over the lantern. Lol caught it. Tim pulled himself upright. ‘Super chap. Just … you know … went into it. Didn’t inter … inter … lectulise…’

‘Finest tenor in Much Cowarne,’ Lol said.

‘Absolutely. Wherever the fuck Much Cowarne is.’

They both laughed. Lol looked out of the open front of the barn across the moonlit landscape. It was like being in a grandstand. The field seemed luminous, and there was another oak tree with two dead branches, bleached like bones.

‘You on your own?’

Tim squinted up at the wooden rafters and the flaking galvanized roof. The light was fanning out from the circular lamp like a merry-go-round with moths riding it.

‘For the moment,’ Tim said.

‘Where is she?’

‘She?’ ‘

Winnie Sparke.’

Tim let his head fall forward into his big hands, began breathing hard into them, like some kind of exercise to head off an asthma attack. Lol saw dark stains between Tim’s fingers.

He said, ‘Are you…’

Tim’s shoulders were heaving.

‘Are you hurt?’

‘I’m…’ Tim peered out through his fingers. ‘I think I’m in a bit of a mess, frankly, old cock.’

‘You walked here?’

‘Don’t remember.’

‘Where’s Winnie?’

Tim looked at him silently through those discoloured fingers.

‘Winnie said you’d meet us here. She talked to my friend. On the phone. She said you’d meet us here.’

‘Winnie? I…’ His voice dropped. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘Did she walk over with you? From Wychehill?’

‘No. Just the two of us.’

‘But you’re alone.’

‘I think … think something happened.’

Lol felt a small abdominal chill. His glasses kept misting. He took them off, rubbed them on his sleeve, put them back quickly.

‘On the way here?’

‘Don’t remember,’ Tim said.

‘Look…’ Lol brought out his mobile, flipped it open. ‘I think we could do with some help here.’

‘Help,’ Tim repeated. Vaguely, like he was recalling something. ‘Help me.’ His voice melting into a wail, as he came to his feet. ‘Help me, I’m— Who’re you calling, old cock?’

‘Just a friend.’ Lol brought up Merrily’s number. ‘She’ll get us some help.’

Peering at the keys through misting glasses, he sent the call, listened to Merrily’s phone ringing.

And then Tim lurched at him, ramming him off the bale, snatching the phone as it flew up. Lol leaping up, making a grab for it, but Tim was taller and fumbled it well out of his reach.

Lumbering out of the barn into the night, twisting around, his arm going back, this monstrous baby throwing something out of its pram.

Lol saw his phone disappearing into the night like a tiny silver spacecraft.

For a while, in the red-spattered white room, neither of them spoke.

Syd Spicer was in dark jeans, black clerical shirt, dog collar. His small eyes were flat and unmoving.

‘Well done,’ he said.

Merrily came shakily to her feet, her jeans damp at the knees. Didn’t even remember kneeling down.

‘Not many of us would’ve done that, Merrily. Not alone, in a situation like this.’

Neither of them spoke again until they were on the back lawn and the air was the kind you were prepared to breathe.

She waited while Spicer shut the back door. He was, she noticed, wearing black gloves.

‘I was once,’ he said, ‘in another life, given some crude medical training. I think what you need is a hot, sugary brew and a sit-down.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘Of course you’re not all right. Who could be?’

‘Can you get the police? I need to go somewhere. Right away.’

‘Merrily—’

‘I have to collect Lol. I’ll come straight back.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Just bear with me.’ She prodded Lol’s number into the mobile. It rang and rang. Christ. ‘Call the police.’

‘That’s in hand. Merrily, you can’t go anywhere.’ She walked away down the side of the house. It had gone too far, now. She was in over her head, just wanted to get over to Whiteleafed Oak, find Lol. Patch things together, make sure Jane was all right and then go to the police and, if necessary, answer questions until the sun came up. She looked back at Spicer.

‘What about Tim Loste?’

‘He can take care of himself, I hope.’

‘I mean, what’s he going to do now? Where’s he going to go?’

‘Merrily—’

‘He’ll have gone out on the hill.’ Stopping next to the brutalized oak, failing to prevent her voice rising to an unnatural shrillness. ‘He always does. He has a place he goes to. Where he went to with Winnie. Which is the place where I left Lol because Winnie said they’d meet us there. And Lol’s not answering his phone. And there’s a man out there fresh from…’ pointing wildly at the house ‘… that!’

Spicer stepped back, shaking his head. Merrily walked down towards the road, feeling in her left-hand hip pocket for her keys, aware that he wasn’t following her. At the bottom of the drive, she realized the car keys weren’t in her pocket.

Must have left them in the ignition. She’d only got out to look at the sapling.

She stopped at the side of the road, looked from side to side. Couldn’t take it in at first. She turned on Spicer, bewildered. He shrugged.

‘I meant to tell you. That was why I came in. Only it got … superseded.’

‘Someone’s nicked my car.’

‘Yeah. I saw you drive past. About twenty minutes later, the car comes back the other way, couple of kids in it. I didn’t figure you’d have asked them to go down the shop and get you some cigarettes.’

She leaned against the railings. Closing her eyes.

‘A gift is a gift,’ Spicer said. ‘Sadly, for what it’s worth, I reckon you’ve just become the first genuine victim of the notorious criminal element frequenting the Royal Oak.’

Suddenly, without preamble, like a baby, Tim was howling. Crashing back and flinging himself face down into the rotting hay and straw, beating his fists into the broken bales. Lol ran past him into the open, saw how long the grass was and the nettles. Saw that the chances of finding the phone before the morning were remote, and even then…

Better to take off fast, get away, run back to the centre of the hamlet, wait there for Merrily. Bang on someone’s door and ask to use the phone. He started to walk away.

‘Don’t … go.’ Sour whisky-breath on the air. Tim Loste standing very close behind him. ‘Think I need help.’

It was as if throwing the phone out of the barn had expelled what remained of his energy. Blown out his candle. He went back and sat down meekly on his bale, looking at the baked mud floor, then up at Lol in the lamplight.

‘I remember Dan. Dan’s got a beard. Tall as me. Bald.’

Lol stood in the open mouth of the barn, considering the options. He could probably walk out of here now and keep walking and Tim wouldn’t necessarily follow him. But what would that achieve?

‘You’re not Dan, are you?’ Tim said.

‘I’m Lol.’

‘Kind of name’s that?’

‘Short for Laurence.’

‘Lol.’ Loste sounding it like a bass note.

‘And who are you?’ Lol asked him.

‘Me?’ Tim Loste leaned back into the hay. ‘I’m the chap who’s come here to see God.’

55

Build a Cathedral

Mustn’t push it. Move yourself into deep shadow, introduce the subject of Edward Elgar and watch it forming in the milky lamplight … what your old boss, Dick Lydon, the Hereford psychotherapist, would have called an elaborate fantasy structure.

Except maybe it wasn’t.

There was clearly something wrong with Tim Loste. No question there, except what was it? There was whisky breath, but this wasn’t normal intoxication. For long periods, his thoughts would appear fluid. Usually when he was interested in the subject under discussion.

Elgar. Anyone who didn’t understand what Elgar was about, Tim had no time for them. Fortunately, he hadn’t had to mix with many people like that. The only child of orchestral musicians, he’d grown up in Sussex, not far from Brinkwells, Elgar’s house when the composer was living down south.

The place where he’d met Algernon Blackwood, writer of ghost stories and sometime-magician.

Lol came back to sit on the bale. He said he knew about Brinkwells.

‘Ah…’ Tim beaming whitely in the lamplight. ‘So not like most of the airy-fairy types who come out here.’

‘Friend of Dan’s,’ Lol reminded him.

‘Dan … ?’

‘Finest tenor in Much Cowarne?’

‘Good old Dan.’ Tim’s eyes were cloudy again. ‘Often meet people here, all times of the day and night. Disappointing. Wispy types. Never want to talk about Elgar.’

‘Brinkwells,’ Lol said. ‘You were at Brinkwells.’

‘I was drawn to it from an early age. Six? Maybe earlier. Had a nanny, for when the parents were on tour. Used to take me to Brinkwells until I could go on my own – just the fields around there, you know? Better when I could go alone. We’d go for walks, and he’d be pointing out things. Look at this, young ’un.’

‘Your nanny was a bloke?’

‘Not the nanny, old cock.’

Tim leaned forward, hands on knees, his big face uptilted, summoning memories. Or the ones he’d fabricated earlier?

‘Used to wait for him. Or he’d wait for me. There were some old trees – bit like this. You could stand by the trees and he’d be there. He loved those trees. There was a legend that they were supposed to have been monks who got bewitched. When Blackwood came to visit, he took him to see the trees.’

‘Were they oaks?’

‘Suppose they must’ve been. What do you make of these, young ’un, he’d say. Can you see the monks?’

Lol wondered how much of this Tim had blocked in, years later. It wasn’t unusual for an only child to have a famous imaginary companion. Even one who must, even at the time, have been dead for over forty years.

‘He loved all trees, didn’t he?’ Lol said.

‘I’ll say.’

‘What about the Whiteleafed Oak?’

‘Well, of course. This was his favourite walk. This was where Caractacus was formed. And then Gerontius. Everything leading up to Gerontius. But he kept jolly quiet about Whiteleafed Oak. People do. It’s a place of powerful initiation.’

‘Elgar said that?’

‘Did he?’

‘No, I mean was that Elgar or … Winnie Sparke?’

Tim looked away.

‘That lamp getting fainter, do you think, Dan? Need to bring some new batteries. Should we switch it off?’

‘You keep the lamp here?’

‘Under the hay. With this.’ Tim tugged out a stiff-backed folder covered in brown leather and opened it up on his knees. ‘Don’t always need light here, though, if there’s a moon.’

‘You come here a lot?’

Lol leaned into the light so that he could see what was on the pages. Tim closed the book quickly. It was musical manuscript. A score.

Tim leaned over and switched off the lamp, inflating himself into this hulking shadow against the chalk-dust night.

‘Tim…’ Lol hesitated. ‘Do you think Elgar knew about the idea of the perpetual choirs?’

Tim looked for him.

‘Who did you say you were?’

‘Friend of Dan’s.’

‘Yes, but … were you in my choir once?’

‘Dan talks about you. You made a big impression. He told me about the night you divided them into three and sent some of them to Little Malvern Priory and some to Redmarley D’Abitot.’

‘Hmm, yes.’ Tim seemed to relax. ‘Redmarley – that was terribly significant, you see. Elgar’s mother’s family came from there. His mother carried the strand. A countrywoman. My mother – bit of a townie, didn’t like me to go out without a mac or walk on the wet grass. But Elgar’s mother encouraged her offspring to go out in all weathers, so that they were always at home with nature whatever the conditions. So they were, you know, part of it. Yes, Ann Elgar’s family were actually from Redmarley.’

It was like talking to very old people. Ask them what they had for lunch and their minds went opaque, but talk about the past and the stories came spinning out, green-mouldy tape gliding smoothly past still-keen magnetic heads.

‘What about Little Malvern?’

‘Well, that was important because it’s where Elgar’s buried – at the Catholic church there, St Wulstan’s. Didn’t want to be planted there – didn’t want to be buried at all. They had to talk him into it, and I suppose he agreed for the wife’s sake. Terribly proper, Alice, a traditionalist. What Elgar really wanted was for his ashes to be scattered where the River Severn meets the River Teme.’

Lol gazed out between the uprights supporting the open front of the barn at the secondary oak tree with the white, dead branches.

‘And when you separated the choirs, it was important that the three churches were in the Three Counties.’

‘It was just an idea,’ Tim said. ‘Played around with different permu— permutations. Different churches. Winnie…’

‘It was Winnie’s idea?’

‘It was all Winnie’s idea, at first.’

Tim’s voice down to a whisper.

‘Dan was telling me about Wychehill Church,’ Lol said. ‘St Dunstan’s. He was a patron saint of music, wasn’t he? Was that the quarry guy, Joseph Longworth’s idea? He was paying for it so he got to choose?’

‘St Dunstan was an Abbot of Glastonbury.’

‘Where one of the original perpetual choirs was said to be.’

‘Yes. Winnie … spotted that at once. She always says that once something is put in train, all sorts of wonderful coincidences occur in a pre-ordained sort of way.’

Tim fumbled around in the straw and then looked up, dismayed.

‘Didn’t bring it, did I? I always bring water from the Holy Well. Can’t understand—’

‘Maybe you dropped it somewhere.’

‘No, I—’ Tim was clenching and unclenching his fists like the grab mechanism on a crane. ‘Must’ve left in … in a hurry.’

‘Never mind,’ Lol said. ‘Why did Winnie want you to come to Wychehill?’

I’m the chap who’s come to see God.

‘Well … the church had been built for the performance of choral music. Longworth wrote to Elgar asking what he could do to make amends … having heard that Elgar and Bernard Shaw were jolly miffed about the damage caused by the quarrying. Elgar … not in the best of moods at the time … wrote him a cursory reply saying something like, Oh, go and build a damn cathedral! Winding Longworth up, really. Quite surprised when Longworth wrote back saying, where do you want your cathedral, then?’

‘Where did you find out about this, Tim?’

‘Parish records. It’s all documented. More or less. So when Elgar realized the chap actually had a few quid to spare, he decided that he’d better give it some thought, and he consulted some people. Blackwood and a chap he knew in Hereford. Watson. Ley-line man, you’ve probably heard of him – all you Whiteleaf Oakies, as Winnie used to call them, are into … all that.’

‘You mean Watkins? You mean Alfred Watkins?’

‘I … sure. Yah. Watkins. Friend of Elgar’s when he lived in Hereford. He’d been doing some work around the Beacon, mapping out his lines, and he’d come across the foundations of what appeared to be an ancient chapel or a monk’s cell at Wychehill and told Longworth that if he built his church there it would be a very significant thing to do.’

‘So what you’re saying … Watkins and Elgar advised Longworth to build his church on the ley from Whiteleafed Oak along the Malverns. Was Blackwood involved in this, too?’

‘Winnie was sure he must’ve been. Former member of … something or other…’

‘The Golden Dawn.’

‘That’s the outfit. Studied magic.’

‘Blackwood wrote a novel, The Human Chord, about a man’s attempt to recreate celestial music. Call out the secret names of God.’

‘You really know your stuff, don’t you? Glad we met. But you know, I don’t think I’m even supposed to talk about this.’

‘Tim, is it possible that Elgar – in later years, perhaps by talking to Blackwood – did know about the supposed significance of Whiteleafed Oak?’

‘Winnie thought he must have been at least instinctively aware of— Why am I here? Do you know? I don’t remember. I don’t—’ Tim began to tremble like he’d been hot-wired, his engine coming alive. ‘What am I doing? Can you help me?’

Lol bit his lip, hands pressing into his knees.

‘God?’

Tim’s eyes filled with panic.

‘Ed,’ he said. ‘Where’s Ed? Can’t do it without Ed.’

56

Tennis Courts

No choice. Merrily had to go with Spicer.

And she was close to frantic.

‘It’ll take twenty minutes. Please.’

They were getting into Spicer’s Golf outside the rectory. His car, he could call the shots.

‘Merrily, if there was one thing I learned in my former life it’s that preparation and intelligence are invariably more important than skill, technique and courage, all that stuff from the comics. There’s something I need to know before we go anywhere. Something I need to check before we pick up your Mr Robinson. It won’t take long, and it won’t wait.’

‘Are you going to phone the police, then, or shall I?’

‘I told you, it’s in hand. I made a call while you were screaming at poor Winnie. Thought you needed to get that out of your system.’

‘Good of you.’

‘I’ve a trusted friend who’ll contact the right person in the police and explain it fully. Otherwise it could get messy. And another thing you need to know. Tim Loste didn’t kill Winnie. You got that? He didn’t kill Wicklow and he didn’t kill Winnie.’

She stared at him, his face flecked with the colours of the dashlights.

‘On what basis can you possibly—?’

‘Oh, and I didn’t either, in case you were considering that possibility. This is not what you thought. There is evil here. On an almost unimaginable scale. And we do need to collect your friend at some point. Right now, though, there are things I need to know that could save us all some grief.’

‘Grief?’

‘I blew it, Merrily. I left things too late. If it’s anybody’s fault, what’s happened to Winnie, it’s mine. Should have got them out of that church a week ago. Should never have let them in.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Nor me, yet. Not fully.’

Spicer turned left.

‘This is the road to—’

‘Old Wychehill Farm.’ He put on the headlights. ‘Now listen to me. We’re going to be quite open about this. If Preston’s here, it’s best you stay in the car, and I’ll run some parish business past him. It’ll be unconvincing but it doesn’t matter a lot at this stage. I don’t think he’ll be here, but I need to be sure.’

Spicer drove carefully into the valley, on full beams, and pulled up conspicuously in the centre of the courtyard, gravel spurting.

There were lights in the big house and a couple of wrought-iron lanterns twinkling romantically among the stone holiday units. But the outbuildings themselves were in complete darkness and there were no other cars around. No signs of holidaymakers in residence. The Victorian turret, the pines and the monkey puzzles were stage-set silhouettes against the pale, powdery night.

The idyllic effect spoiled only by the figure, naked from the waist up, legs braced, the shotgun levelled at the windscreen of the Golf.

‘You fucking stop there!’

Spicer kept the engine running.

‘Best if you don’t get out just yet, Merrily.’

‘You really think…’ Merrily was sinking slowly down the passenger seat ‘… I’m going to get out?’

‘Get fucking back! I’ll take your fucking head off!’ Spicer lowered his window.

‘Hugo?’

‘One more step I’ll blow your fucking windows out!’

The twelve-bore vibrating, shards of moonlight on the twin barrels.

‘Kid’s a bag of nerves,’ Spicer murmured. ‘Something took him over the edge.’ Shouting out of his side window. ‘Syd Spicer, son. Come for your old man.’

‘You’re fucking lying!’

‘Been a bad night, ain’t it, Hugo? Don’t make it worse. I’m coming out. All right? I’m gonner walk under the lamp, to your left, so you can see it’s me. Promise you I won’t come any closer. Just under the lamp, yeah, so you can ID me?’

‘You keep back…’

A jerk of the shotgun.

‘No worries.’ Spicer got out of the car, walked across to a wrought-iron lamp projecting from one of the buildings. ‘Now. See?’

‘Who’s that with you?’

‘That’s Mrs Watkins. The lady vicar? You’re making her nervous, Hugo.’

Finally recognizing Spicer, Preston Devereaux’s younger son lowered the gun just fractionally. Through the car window Merrily could smell fumes like a smouldering bonfire or an incinerator.

‘Sorry to scare you, son,’ Spicer said.

‘I wasn’t—’

‘Nah, nah, you got good reason to be wary, way things’ve been lately. Louis with you?’

‘He’s with Dad. They’re meeting a guy about … installing tennis courts.’

Tennis courts?

‘Tennis courts, eh? Smart move.’ Spicer walked up to the boy. ‘Be having an eighteen-hole golf course next.’

‘Yeah. Look, I’ll tell them you—’

Spicer’s back blurred across the windscreen. Merrily didn’t see how it happened, but it happened in near-silence, and when Spicer stepped aside he was holding the shotgun and Hugo Devereaux was writhing on the lamplit gravel.

She gasped, sat up, springing open the car door and rolling out to find Spicer breaking the shotgun, taking out both cartridges, putting them one by one in his pocket.

He looked down at the boy. ‘God have mercy on you, son.’

But she saw that he’d taken off his dog collar.

What followed was surreal and desperately chilling. Reality distanced, like she was watching down the wrong end of a telescope. The mind’s way of handling an experience that was both alien and vividly shocking.

They’d followed Hugo Devereaux into the house and Spicer, still wearing his black gloves, was opening doors and cupboards like a burglar. Seemed to know his way around as well as if he had the layout in his head.

Kicking open the door of the Beacon Room with its long window, the British Camp like a high altar, hard under the haloed moon. Syd stopping to listen in the churchy stillness.

‘Cellars, Hugo?’

‘By the back stairs.’

‘Keys?’

‘I’ll get them. But there’s nothing down there.’

‘Good. You go first.’

Spicer no longer had the shotgun with him, just a bunch of keys on a ring. Merrily followed them, hanging back, trying to filter out what was most important: primarily that, if Spicer was correct and Loste hadn’t murdered Winnie or Wicklow, Lol was in no direct danger at Whiteleafed Oak. It was something.

Spicer had followed Hugo to the top of some stone steps going down. Curving. No handrail. Fluorescent lights were stammering on. Hugo – couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen – was stumbling in front of Spicer without argument, his head bent, his body occasionally twitching in pain. Merrily staying well back, a hand on the wall on either side. Not trusting Spicer, not by a long way.

The cellars at the bottom had strip lights at crazy angles on the low ceilings. There were several rooms and Spicer checked them all before motioning the boy into a square and windowless cell where wooden crates and cardboard boxes were stacked.

‘Can I ask you to do something, Merrily? Could I ask you to go back to the car and, if Mr Devereaux or Louis or both should happen to appear in their new Land Rover – or, indeed, if anyone appears in anything – drive out past them and blow the horn, once.’

‘And what will you be doing?’

‘I’ll be talking to my friend Hugo, and if he helps me, as I’m sure he will, I’ll join you in a very short time.’

‘Why have you taken off your collar?’

‘I was hot. I swear to you before God that I’m doing the best I can to spare lives, prevent violence. I might be proved wrong, and that’s my responsibility—No!’

Hugo had been edging towards the door.

‘Don’t, son,’ Spicer said wearily. ‘Please. I can hurt you very badly in a very short time, and if you insist on making me prove it we’ll both be very upset. No shame in this. In your place I’d cooperate fully because I’d realize the situation was seriously weighted against me. We understanding one another, Hugo?’

Hugo’s narrow face was white under the striplight, except for eyes which looked hot and red. His cheek was grazed and flecked with grit from where he’d fallen outside.

Spicer said, ‘I’m sure Mrs Watkins would be more inclined to do what I’m suggesting if she thought you weren’t going to get hurt.’

‘Fuck off,’ Hugo said.

It had never sounded feebler.

‘Man’s world, eh, Hugo?’ Spicer said. ‘Was that what it felt like when you were dealing with Winnie? That wasn’t like Wicklow, was it? Wait in the cave or somewhere out of sight, then a quick bang on the head and the rest is just … well, just basic butchery, piece of cake for a country boy. Done some slaughtering, have we? Pigs, maybe? Enjoy that, did we? Made us feel like a big, grown man? Power of life and death?’

Hugo sniffed hard, wouldn’t look at Spicer.

Spicer said, ‘Maybe Wicklow was even easier than pigs.’

He glanced at Merrily. She didn’t move, avoiding eye contact. In the blueish, gassy light, Spicer’s face was flat, like his voice.

‘But when they’re in front of you, facing you full on, and they know it’s coming and they’re fighting to stay alive, that’s not so easy, is it?’

He took a step towards Hugo, who edged himself into a corner, stumbling over a crate.

‘I mean, that is unbelievably more difficult. Even when it’s two of you, hard boys against one little woman.’

Merrily’s mouth was suddenly dry.

‘Amazing how long the life stays in them, isn’t it?’ Syd Spicer said. ‘You slash and you slash and they’re all over the place – wouldn’t have believed it, would you, how much life there is to deal with when they’re determined to keep it. Hacking it away, bit by bit, but it still clings on, and you start to panic, too, and she’s screaming and crying and flailing and spitting just to hold on to that precious God-given gift of life. So precious to her and so cheap to you, up to now. And maybe this is when you realize for the first time what a huge item life is. But you can’t stop now, and you just keep slash—’

‘Stop it! Fuck you … !’ Hugo running at him, face red and wet and twisted. ‘Just—’

Syd Spicer sidestepped and tipped him almost gently to the stone flags. He said over his shoulder, ‘Would you do that, Merrily? Wait in the car. Keep a lookout?’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t think so.’

57

Difficult Times in Old England

‘The line,’ Lol said. ‘The line from here, from Whiteleafed Oak through all the hilltops and Wychehill Church … how does Winnie see that? An energy line or a … spirit path?’

There was silence, except for an owl somewhere. Lol was thinking about Jane and Coleman’s Meadow.

‘Where the dead can travel,’ he said. ‘I’m just trying to help you to remember.’

Tim began to rock backwards and forwards, his bulk alternately blocking out the moon and then exposing it. He’d gone soft and rambling again.

‘Exercises to do.’

‘Winnie gave you exercises?’

‘Breathing and meditation. Pretty hard at first, but I kept on. I persevered and then it … I had to visualize him walking. And Mr Phoebus. We had a photo enlarged to life-size and put it in the hall, so it looked as if he was there, waiting to … to ride out.’

‘And you visualized this…’

‘Yes. Sometimes, when I was walking the hills at night, I … felt I was able to hear what he could hear … the hidden themes in the whistling of the wind. I’d just start walking, and he’d bring me here. Come along, young ’un. He loved to come to Whiteleafed Oak. One of his favourite walks when he lived at Birchwood. When he was working on G—, on Gerontius. When his mind was hovering between life and death and … whatever comes. He was walking this path in his dreams. And he still does.’

‘Yes. So you visualized Elgar…’

‘Coming along the path, to and from Whiteleafed Oak. Or along the road with Mr Phoebus.’

‘To Wychehill Church.’

‘Or the other way.’

‘So, earlier on, when you were whistling the Cello Concerto … ?’

‘Sometimes, when you do it properly, all the way … it’s as if there are two of you whistling it. It’s … very weird. And thrilling.’

Lol succumbed to a small shiver.

‘And is that where you walk … along the spirit path, from hilltop to hilltop, by the Iron Age sites and the monastic chapels and shrines, from Wychehill … to the Beacon … Hangman’s Hill … Midsummer Hill … Whiteleafed Oak.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s the way you came tonight?’

Tim’s face contorted.

‘To escape from the demons.’

‘I’m sorry … ?’

‘Just when you think you’ve come through it all, the demons are there.’ Tim swung round. ‘It’s the price you have to pay.’

‘For what?’

‘For daring to reach for the Highest. You have to get past the demons first.’

‘And who are the demons?’

Tim stood up, moved to the open front of the barn, holding on to one of the supporting uprights, began to beat his head against it.

In the end, Merrily had agreed to go out and move the car out of the yard into a space suggested by Spicer behind one of the barns. She’d just had to get out of there.

She took the opportunity to try again to get through to Lol: voicemail. Jane: voicemail. Gomer: endless ringing in an empty bungalow. And now it was late, getting on for eleven, surely. She didn’t try Bliss again.

As she stood in the yard, breathing in the soft, sweet summer air, a different countryside lay revealed. The moon was high now, and white and hard, less of a security lamp than a hunting tool. Owl sounds flickered through the woodland, a screen for shadowy slaughter. Owls hunting, talons out. Jets of blood and small lives taken, big lives too, and God looking diplomatically away, supervising the sunrise in another hemisphere.

Merrily felt numb, isolated. Cored by outrage and horror. Also, starved of light, starved of knowledge. A spectator who didn’t even understand the game.

When she went back, the atmosphere in the cellar was tight with a stripped-down harshness. Syd Spicer’s sleeves were rolled up.

The Reverend S. D. Spicer. Try to imagine him celebrating communion, visiting the sick, organizing a donkey for the church nativity play.

‘The gullet,’ he was saying, nodding. ‘Yeah, that makes sense. I should’ve thought of that.’

Syd and Hugo were sitting on upturned crates. Hugo looked up when Merrily came in, then looked away. Merrily noticed a new bruise just below his left eye. But, more than that, he looked emotionally beaten, dulled by defeat. He sniffed occasionally, his eyes watering, his thin face bony in the purply fluorescence. Resentment there, and self-pity. The sullen ugliness of corrupted youth.

She looked at Syd, at his still, small eyes.

The gullet.

‘Hugo is on his gap year, Merrily,’ Syd said. ‘He was going to spend it with the West Malvern Hunt, but of course the ban put a stop to that. They’re not even doing drag hunts, Hugo?’

‘What’s the point of that?’ Hugo said. ‘It’s a joke.’

‘A lot of disappointment in your family, then.’

Hugo snorted.

‘And a lot of rage,’ Syd said. ‘To understand this, you need to understand the rage, the way it ferments. The ingredients. Remember when the MP for Worcester was in the forefront of the campaign for a total ban? Must’ve seemed like a betrayal from within.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Betrayal upon betrayal. The hunting ban was just the final insult. Years before that they’d killed your grandfather, turned your dad’s life around. The government. The EC. The way the farmers in every other European country seemed to ignore the new rules, but Britain’s farmers got away with nothing. And then the great plagues: Mad Cow Disease and the ban on exports. Foot and Mouth. When the countryside smelled of smoke and burning flesh.’

‘It’ll never be the same,’ Hugo said. ‘We built this country. We made it what it was, and now they’ve giving it all away to the scum. Eating their cheap foreign meat from supermarkets owned by foreigners.’

‘And the one law they pass that isn’t crawling up the Euro-arse, it’s a ban on hunting. They’ll be coming for your guns soon. Land of hope and glory. Mother of the free.’

‘Joke.’

Syd said, ‘You know, sometimes – thinking back to the Regiment – it was hard to work out who you were fighting for. Had to come down to values in the end. You start thinking you’re doing it for Blair and Brown, it don’t work at all. Luckily, we still got Her Maj.’ Syd smiled. ‘Obviously it’s worse for an old family. Came with the Conquest, the Devereauxs? 1066?’

‘Bit later.’

‘Good long time, though. Longer than the Windsors. A long and glorious history going down the pan.’

‘We’re not the only ones.’

‘No, I appreciate that,’ Syd said. ‘Difficult times in Old England. Tell me about Wicklow.’

‘Came to my father for a job.’

‘Did he? Cheeky.’

‘It was a bit like … close to blackmail. Thought he was clever, but he didn’t know anything really. Thought he was hard and we were middle-class and soft. They don’t know what hard is.’

‘The city boys?’

‘Strip off all the bling and boasting, take their guns away, they’re weak. Thick as shit. It’s why they always get caught. You don’t need scum like that.’

‘And was I right?’ Syd said. ‘You waited for him in the cave.’

‘No, he was using the cave. Dealing out of there. Thought that was smart. We waited for him to come out of the cave. We were in the trees then the rocks behind the cave.’

‘You and Louis.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Bang. Pro job.’

‘Then Louis sent the text to Khan.’

‘Text? What was that for?’

Hugo shut his mouth. Syd put his head on one side, looking sorrowful, his fingers flexing slightly. It was enough.

‘Louis had these lines about Druid sacrifice from an Elgar CD,’ Hugo said. ‘We put it in the text to Khan from Wicklow’s phone. Louis said it was like a warning of what he was taking on.’

‘Old England showing its teeth,’ Syd said. ‘How dare these lowlifes pollute the Malverns with their noxious substances. And the Elgar – that would also be why the police pulled Tim? Neat. Double whammy.’

‘Dad didn’t think so. He didn’t think it was cool doing him on the stone, either. He’s like, You don’t get flash. You don’t get cocky. And if it looks a bit intelligent the police can narrow it down right away. But Louis’d done it by then. And it did work. Nearly.’

‘But then someone else figured it out. Someone your ole man really did underestimate for a while.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Your dad know what you did to her tonight?’

Hugo stared at the stone flags.

‘Does now.’

‘He was here when you came back?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Mad?’

‘Pretty pissed off.’ Hugo’s head jerked forward. ‘He’d’ve wanted it done, though. He said he—’

‘Pissed off that you couldn’t handle it? Or that Louis made you go with him?’

‘Mainly…’ Hugo found a sickly smile. ‘Mainly, he was mad that Loste wasn’t in the Gullet.’

Merrily said, ‘The gullet?’

Syd ignored her. ‘So where’s he now, your old man? And Louis.’

‘Out there. He—’

‘Finishing the job?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know.’

Syd tilted his head, put his hands on his knees as if he was about to get up. Terror bloomed in Hugo’s eyes. Merrily went cold.

‘I don’t know. Please!’ Hugo rolled off his crate onto the flags, putting his hands up. ‘Honest to God!’

Syd stood up.

Hugo rolled away. He was weeping.

‘I’m locking you in, son.’ Syd stepped away from him. ‘At some stage, the police’ll be told where you are. When they arrive, I’d cooperate fully, if I were you.’

Hugo nodded, sagging, not trying to get up.

‘It’s completely finished, Hugo. But I’m guessing you knew that in Loste’s back room. There’s a point where you cross a barrier, and Louis led you right to the wire, and you didn’t go over. It’s a life you didn’t quite take, and you’ll be grateful for that.’

Hugo said nothing. Syd motioned to Merrily and followed her out of the door. The door was oak and reinforced and not very old. Syd tried various keys until one of them locked it.

‘I hope you didn’t want to pray with the boy, Merrily, but I’m afraid that would’ve conveyed the wrong message.’

‘Unlike hitting him again…’

‘Once. God forgive me, but experience suggested it needed underlining, or he might’ve thought he could get away with lies or half-truths. Intelligent lad, and he’d’ve been able to string the cops along. For a while. But we don’t have a while. We did the best we could. We hit on the weak link. That was the easy part. I suspect we’ve exhausted our quota of good fortune for one night.’

Merrily went ahead of Spicer up the stone steps into the manure-smelling back hall, with its coat hooks and its wellies, and waited for him by the door to the courtyard. She felt reduced and dirty and a long and twisted way from God.

‘What’s the gullet?’

Syd Spicer hung the bunch of keys on one of the coat hooks.

‘The Gullet is this deep pool, flooded quarry, up near the Beacon. People get drowned there sometimes. Kids thinking it’s safe for a swim on summer nights like this. Only it’s very, very cold.’

‘And?’

‘It’s on Tim Loste’s regular route – they knew this; they’d followed him enough times – takes him close to the Gullet. The plan was to mess him with Winnie’s blood and turn him loose and catch up with him near the Gullet, and then oops. Only, what happened with Winnie, Hugo couldn’t take it, he’s only a boy. Hugo went badly to pieces and Louis had to take him outside, case he left vomit anywhere. And of course by the time Louis’d slapped some sense into Hugo, Tim was away. Not quite on the usual path, either, which was understandable under the circumstances, and they couldn’t find him.’

‘They were going to … ?’

‘Toss him in the Gullet. Drown him. Nothing easier. So many accidents there, but this would be suicide. Louis’s scenario ends with the recovery from the Gullet, maybe tomorrow, of the body. Winnie’s blood not quite washed away. Murder and suicide. Case closed. Only Tim had wandered off. Can’t trust drugs. Where did you put the car, Merrily?’

‘What drugs?’

‘Where’s the car?’

‘In the Dutch barn, like you said.’ Trying to keep pace with Spicer across the yard. ‘What am I not getting? What crucial piece of information have I been denied?’

Spicer kept on walking, pointing around the courtyard, building to building, the density of it, row upon row, nicely leaning stone and timbered alleyways reaching back into the fields and the woodland.

Merrily persisted. ‘Drugs?’

‘They’d spiked his Scotch. Roofies.’

‘What?’

‘Rohypnol. Know what that is?’

‘The date-rape drug?’

‘Compliance. Do what you want with them. Softened up. Plus, it causes short-term memory loss, which is useful. Tim habitually leaves his door unlocked, for Elgar or whoever. Hugo comes in earlier in the day, spikes his whisky with Rohypnol. Tasteless, odourless. Works well with alcohol, as we all know. On men as well as women. If you get the dose right, the effects are usually predictable. Can be used in combination with certain drugs to improve the high.’

‘Hugo told you this?’

‘Emily, once.’

‘Your—’

‘Don’t ask. But whether that means Loste was sitting there with a vacant smile on his face when they were killing Winnie—’

‘Oh my God.’

‘We don’t know that. We don’t know how much he had, but that sounds likely. It can take hours to wear off. Maybe he’s asleep somewhere on the hill, maybe … I don’t know. Time he comes out of it, blood on his hands and his clothes, he may even think Winnie was down to him. But … the plan was he wouldn’t come out of it.’

They reached the car, and Merrily handed Spicer the keys. Glad she wouldn’t be driving.

‘Syd, what is this?’

Thinking what Bliss had said about outrage killing. Fight for our traditions, we’re branded criminals, Devereaux had said. This government’s scum. Anti-English. Don’t get me started.

Rage against the system? Little Englander vigilantism gone mad?

Winnie. Hacked to death by the sons of a former lover, like the climax of some old and bloody folk-ballad.

‘We could spend all night going over the farm,’ Spicer said, ‘and I could doubtless show you signs – things that are obvious when you know – but it would take a long time and I’m afraid we don’t have that kind of time. Whiteleafed Oak, you said. That’s where he goes.’

‘Loste?’

‘Loste, yes.’ He was gripping her shoulders. ‘You’re sure about this.’

‘We were supposed to meet them there tonight, Loste and Winnie. Lol’s waiting in case he—’

‘They’ll find him, then. Maybe they already have.’

‘What about Lol?’

‘I don’t think we should hang around, Merrily.’

‘What will they do to Lol? They surely—’

‘Why don’t I drop you in the village, give you the keys to the rectory?’

‘Don’t even think about it.’

‘All right.’ Spicer opened the passenger door for her. ‘Perhaps a serious prayer wouldn’t come amiss. I can never seem to do it when I’m driving.’

58

Mr Phoebus and the Whiteleafed Oak

Tim Loste and the oak stood together under the moon with its acid-green halo.

‘Tell me about the demons,’ Lol said.

He’d followed Tim out of the barn, leaving the lamp behind in the hay. Tim no longer staggered, as if beating his head on one of the uprights had unblocked something. He looked slowly around the whitewashed wooded valley and finally up at the great oak, its branches laden with dark foliage and glittering things like some weird midsummer hoar frost.

‘A living symphony, this tree. Look at the complexity of it. We’re old mates now. I’m bringing up some of the children.’ Tim started to laugh. ‘Sat here, meditating for hours. All weathers. Freezing cold. Snowed on, soaked to the skin.’

‘Elgar’s mother would have approved.’

‘Yes.’

‘Was nobody curious about what you were doing?’

‘The few people who come here, if you’re meditating they leave you alone. They understand that much.’

Lol tried again.

‘The demons. That is the Royal Oak? The demonic counterpoint to what you’re doing. Like when the demons come for the soul of Gerontius … they’re discordant. They’re taunting him.’

‘Didn’t really notice it,’ Tim said. ‘Not at first.’

‘You didn’t hear the noise?’

‘I could block it out with headphones. Put on the old cans, close my eyes and I’m in a concert hall. Or a cathedral. Or when I’m writing just put them on, unplugged, and it’s a blank canvas. But she made me take them off. She said it was meant.’

‘Winnie?’

‘Made me take my headphones off while I was writing, to experience the violence. Suppose I didn’t react strongly enough. So we walked down the hill one night, a Saturday night – we’d been drinking … well, I’d been … and she said, this is evil. It’s deriding you. And it was filling the valley, terribly loud, and I was getting pretty sick of it and I said, can’t we go? And then she took me to where there was a loose stone in the wall.’

‘She made you throw the stone through the window?’

‘Had a few drinks. And you learn not to make her annoyed.’

‘And then…’

‘Just stood there, thinking, what the bloody hell have I done now? Next thing, they’re all on me. Big chaps. Beat the shit out of me.’

‘And where was Winnie?’

‘Gone for help.’

‘She let them beat you up.’

Tim sat down under the tree.

‘She’s a writer,’ he said.

Driving through Wychehill, picking up speed but not too much, Syd Spicer said, ‘You understand about Louis Devereaux, now? Loves to kill.’

Merrily fumbled out a cigarette, both hands shaking. Once you sat down, it all caught up with you again.

‘Odd thing was, Emily was always anti-hunting till she started going out with Louis. And then it was, Oh he just does it for the riding and the excitement. I wasn’t too happy about a teenage kid going out with a bloke six years older. So I asked around. There’s a few hunting types in my other parishes. Some of them very doubtful about Louis.’

They passed the gates of Wychehill Church, with its cracked lantern alight.

‘Can’t you go any faster, Syd?’

‘Too many traffic cops. They’ll stop anybody tonight.’

Merrily had rung Bliss again and left a slightly hysterical, urgent message on his voicemail. Now she was even wondering about trying to get Howe. Meanwhile, groping for self-reassurance. No way anyone’s going to mistake Lol for Tim Loste. Not even in the countryside in the dark.

Please God.

She lit the cigarette.

‘Let’s have the worst, then.’

‘I’m telling you this in case we run into him. Heroics are inadvisable. Louis will kill anything. Example: when the hounds start to slow up in the chase, they get shot, a side of hunting seldom advertised. Louis would volunteer to do it. For other hunts as well, which made him popular with kennel men, who mainly dislike that side of it. There’s more, of course, mostly hearsay. Essentially, people who love to kill will find or create a need for it. Justification. What it tells me is that killing Wicklow, after Louis justified it to himself, would have been an act done in a frenzy of pure excitement.’

‘You understand that feeling?’

‘I understand the rush you get when you convince yourself that, in the great scheme of things, it’s not only justified but necessary. When you know that a difficult situation can only be resolved by an act of swift, efficient, intense and quite colossal violence.’

‘And to a woman?’

‘No,’ Spicer said. ‘No, I could never see that far.’

Merrily thought, irrationally, of Lyndon Pierce and the blue tits: tiny, mean, cowardly violence, with no risk to self.

For the Devereaux boys, something far bigger. A war.

But Winnie?

‘Sometimes it’s a fine line, Merrily. Luckily, in the armed forces, especially the more hands-on areas, there’s also a very thick line, and it’s called training.’

‘And without that?’

‘Without training there’s no efficiency and no safe judgement. In this instance, we’re looking at a perceived justification gone wild.’

‘Your daughter had a relationship with Louis.’

‘Wouldn’t hear a word against him. Well, he’s a charming boy. OK, he was arrested for attacking an MP’s minder during a pro-hunt protest – well, a lot of strong feelings at the time. OK, he went to pieces when the ban went through – poor boy, his life dismantled. Goes off to the city at weekends to work off his frustrations … nicked for possession of coke, gets a caution. Well, he was chastened by that. And look how he’s changed.’

Merrily was thinking about the five minutes or less she’d spent in the company of Louis Devereaux: posh, educated, good-looking, flirtatious.

‘He was one of the reasons you wanted Emily out of Wychehill?’

‘He was one of the reasons I wanted Winnie out of Wychehill.’

‘So stopping them using the church—’

‘Partly.’

‘Syd…’ Merrily gulping smoke. ‘I still don’t know why they did this. Wicklow, yes, an invader from the hated cities. But Winnie … I’m not getting it.’

Syd swerved into the Ledbury road under the ramparts of Herefordshire Beacon.

‘Take too long, Merrily, and I’m still not totally sure of my facts. And your bloke’s out there. And he doesn’t know what else is, does he?’

At first, seeing the curious white clouds in the northern sky, Lol had thought for a moment that time itself, at Whiteleafed Oak, was unreliable and this was the dawn. But the visible landmarks had told him the lights were in the wrong part of the sky; these were just unusually pale clouds over the southern Malverns, gassy, white and luminous, as if they were chemically producing their own glow.

It lit up the valley like a vast sports stadium, and Lol was starting to see the pattern … the structure.

This much was not fantasy: Tim Loste was working on a piece of music, in the dramatized, semi-operatic style of The Dream of Gerontius. And it was about Gerontius. Or rather, about the spiritual and emotional challenges, for Elgar, of composing what was regarded as his greatest work: orchestrating a metaphysical world.

But it was also about Loste’s own links with both Gerontius and Elgar. Some perceived by Loste, some perceived – or constructed – by Winnie Sparke. Bizarre. But art was allowed – even expected – to be bizarre.

‘When you came to Wychehill, it was as if you were entering a different world. Elgar’s world. And Winnie’s your guardian angel. That really came to you in a dream?’

Tim’s eyes widened. There was enough light now to see that they were not yet normal. Like an owl’s eyes.

‘Had a horrible, ghastly dream. Dreamed that Winnie was bleeding. I heard her screaming her heart out. I saw … the shadows of demons. But I couldn’t do anything. Why couldn’t I do anything?’

Lol looked at the stains on Tim’s singlet.

‘When was this?’

‘I don’t know. Last night? Gha … ghastly.’ He stared at Lol, his eyes still too wide. ‘Look, I don’t … How do you know all this about me?’

‘Just know people who’ve worked with you. Whose lives you’ve changed.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I think I … wanted to learn. I’m a musician. Of sorts.’

‘Yes.’ Tim seemed to accept that, his mind veering off again. ‘Used to walk the hills night after night. Listening to G along the path.’

‘Gerontius.’

‘Wanting to die because I knew I was never going to be as good as that. I was engaged, and she wanted us to go to London – chance of a teaching job with some conducting, on the side, with a jolly decent choir. But Winnie was on the scene by then, said I mustn’t leave Elgar. Got the ring thrown back at me. Pretty bad times at work. All got too much. Kept on listening to G, over and over. Got drunk. Embraced death.’

‘But then Winnie told you that you didn’t have to die. She rescued you. You called her the guardian angel.’

‘She said the journey could be accomplished in this life through the use of symbolism. With great art as a byproduct.’

‘What’s it going to be called?’

Tim looked blank for a moment. The white clouds were like pillows on the lumpy mattress of the hills.

‘Mr Phoebus,’ he said at last. ‘Mr Phoebus and the Whiteleafed Oak.’

‘I like it. It’s a wonderful title.’

‘Winnie’s doing a book, too. All about me and Elgar.’

‘Elgar’s biographer, Kennedy, says Elgar scored Gerontius in a kind of trance,’ Lol said.

‘Yes. Composing G, he said he could look out from Birchwood and see the soul rise. Tremendous emotional experience. State of near-ecstasy when he’d finished it. That was the summer he’d learned to ride a bike. In his element, laughing and joking … and then…’ Tim’s chin sank into his chest.

‘Then it all went wrong.’

‘First performance in Birmingham … complete disaster. Chorus was under-rehearsed and performed badly. The chorus master had died suddenly and the man they brought in to replace him wasn’t up to the job. All went to pieces. Elgar was suicidal.’

‘Actually suicidal?’

‘It brought on the most dreadful depression. I wish I were dead, he kept saying. He wrote, I’ve always said God was against art. Swore he’d never again attempt to write religious music. Closed his mind against the spiritual. ’Course, in later years G would be beautifully performed, its genius exalted, but in the early days…’

‘Elgar thought it was cursed? Why?’

‘Because he thought God was punishing him for overreaching his … mere humanity. For daring to approach … to approach God, I suppose. Head-on.’

‘You mean through the music.’

‘After the soul has withstood the torments of the demons, after his encounter with the Angel of the Agony, as he approaches judgement … he’s given one glimpse – sudden, cataclysmic – of the Holiest.’

‘God.’

‘A glimpse of God, yes.’

‘And Elgar had to convey that in music.’

‘Couldn’t do it,’ Tim said. ‘Or wouldn’t. Shied away from it. As a Catholic, he was afraid it might be approaching blasphemy. Anyway, thought he’d finished – I’ve put my heart’s blood into the score, he said, and sent the manuscript to his publishers. Thought he’d got away with it, but his friend there – friend and confidant – August Jaeger, accused him of bottling it, running scared of the big moment. Jaeger’s saying, you’re not doing enough with this. You’re not showing us God … you’re not giving us the moment. Pushing him. And Elgar, the timid Catholic, going, Can’t. Not humanly possible, almost blasphemous to try to convey in music the ultimate blinding light.’

Tim’s deceptively warlike face glowing now with sweat in the unnatural night whiteness.

‘And this, you see … in my own work, this is Elgar’s most agonized solo. We agreed, Winnie and I, that it should contain elements of foreboding … perhaps a premonition of that disastrous first performance in Birmingham.’

‘Nice touch,’ Lol said.

‘Jaeger was joshing him, knew exactly how to handle the poor chap. He said something like, Of course, conveying the full glory of God, that would take a Wagner…’

Lol nodded. Elgar’s major influence had been Wagner.

‘So Elgar goes back? To try again?’

‘Looks like muso-banter to us now, Jaeger winding Elgar up. But it would have cut him to the quick. Yes, of course he went back.’

‘Back here. To Whiteleafed Oak?’

‘Where else?’

‘And … what happened?’

‘On a basic level, I suppose you’d say he … simply restructured some chords to manufacture a climactic moment. This short series of swiping chords, and then … Do you know G?’

‘To a point.’

Certainly this point. The Guardian Angel had warned the soul that the momentary vision would blow him away with its power. When it finally happened, it was barely flagged-up and it went through your spine, that single chord, every time you heard it, like a razor-edged, shining scythe.

‘You see, my job here … I have to capture the moment it came to Elgar. Or Mr Phoebus fails.’

‘That’s why you’re here?’

‘Have to catch the moment, and more.’

‘More?’

‘No good just copying Elgar, Dan. You have to try to take it further or what’s the point?’

‘Further than Elgar?’

‘Winnie believes that whatever happened to him was so personal and terrifying that he was still afraid to orchestrate the full intensity of it. Clearly, the build-up to that one frightening, revelatory slashing chord was enough to convince Jaeger. Winnie – God knows, Dan, I’m not the bravest chap on the block either – but Winnie believes I can widen the crack in the door.’

‘That’s…’ Lol stepped back. ‘That’s a big thing, Tim.’

‘The biggest.’

‘That’s what the preparation’s all been about? Those three simultaneous choirs in the three churches?’

‘Yes. And the…’

‘She’s not without ambition, is she, Winnie?’

‘And the exercises. The meditation and the visualization. Endless. And the need for Elgar to be part of it. I just couldn’t hack it at first. Too much of an ordinary bloke, Dan.’

Tim sighed, sat down on the grass.

‘There was a girl. On a bike. Legs pumping up and down. For a while we … No!’ His voice going shrill and transatlantic. ‘Don’t you realize you will never have a chance like this again? You gonna throw it all away?’

‘Winnie.’

‘I owe her so much, you see. Saved my life. Made my life.’

Lol said nothing. Tim blotted the sweat from around his eyes with the heel of his palm.

‘Yes, we had a practice, in the three churches. Would have been wonderful to have the three cathedrals, hundreds of choristers, but even Winnie’s energy doesn’t extend that far.’

‘And did you come here – to Whiteleafed Oak – when the choirs were in the three churches?’

‘No, I was at Wychehill, then drove to Little Malvern. It was a run-through. Only a run-through.’

‘Did Winnie think it was going to be just a run-through?’

‘Dan, I was scared. Quite often scared. Gerontius has always scared me. You think it’s easy to live with something so … cosmically huge? Day in, day out? And the nights. Tried to psych myself up, on the quiet. Booze wasn’t doing it. I even went up the hill one night, scored a few – not my thing at all, normally – few grams of coke off— They said I’d killed him, did you know that?’

Lol nodded.

‘I was scared, Dan. This hallowed place. I don’t know. Is it hallowed? Are we fed – still – by the old choirs? Help me.’

‘Would be good to think so.’

And Lol saw it all now. The psychology of it. She said the journey could be accomplished in this life through the use of symbolism. With great art as a by-product.

All it needed was for Tim to believe in it strongly enough, through months of meditation, visualization, conditioning, and the magic would happen.

‘Are you frightened?’ Lol said.

Tim covered his face with his hands for a moment and then tore them away and looked all around at the strange, blanched landscape, a winter landscape in the heat of June. Looked up into the northern sky where the white, gaseous clouds hung like smothered lamps over the southern Malverns.

‘A great orchestral slash of light, Dan. His one shattering glimpse of God. And Gerontius sings … worshipful submission as a kind of triumph…’

Tim stepping away from the tree, raising his arms, releasing this vast torn and piercing tenor.

‘Take me awayyyyyyyyyy!’

Tim sank to his knees, kept his eyes down.

‘Think it’s time for you to bugger off, Dan.’

‘You need to be alone for this?’

‘Otherwise there’s no courage required,’ Tim said. ‘Is there?’

‘Suppose not.

‘What are you going to do?’

Tim placed a hand on his chest, over the stained singlet.

‘All happens in here.’

‘Right.’ Lol turned and walked away from the oak. ‘Just … be careful.’

Tim grinned.

After a few paces, Lol looked over his shoulder to see what he knew he was going to see: what the combination of the moon and those northern clouds had done to the leaves of the oak.

59

Life-Force

A painfully slow and twisting half-mile short of Whiteleafed Oak, Syd Spicer asked Merrily to feel under her seat for a small leather case.

‘Night glasses. High-tech.’ He cleared his throat. ‘We all loved our gadgets, the Hereford boys.’

‘The Hereford boys.’ She found the case. ‘Look, there’s something I should’ve mentioned, but with Winnie—’

Merrily gripped the sides of her seat. Every time she thought of the name, she saw the breathless mouth, the unseeing eyes. The body ripped up like old clothes. A woman who was sometimes a life-force and sometimes a vampire.

‘We can see this place from some distance, right?’

‘Reasonably well. But there’s lots of cover when you get there. Dells, copses.’

Within a minute, a small green area came up in the headlights. A display case for local notices.

‘This the village?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the five-barred gate?’

‘End of that little lane, but you can’t get … I mean you’ll just block the track.’

‘I’ll pull in here, then. Close your door quietly when you get out.’

At the five-barred gate, Spicer pointed ahead of them. He was still wearing his thin black gloves.

‘Know what that is?’

‘Shiny white clouds. Weird.’

‘Noctilucent clouds. Quite rare. Sometimes caused by chemicals, sometimes natural. Second night this week we’ve had them. Maybe a good thing, maybe not, but something to be aware of. What were you going to tell me back there?’

‘When you mentioned the Hereford boys … I don’t know whether you heard this on the news. A former SAS man’s been shot. In Hereford.’

Spicer kept on looking over the gate, but he’d gone still.

‘A security consultant,’ Merrily said.

‘Do you know his name?’

‘Malcolm France.’

He went on watching the bright clouds.

‘Bliss – the detective I know – called me about it. His records had been stolen, but they found out from the bank that he’d once been paid two hundred and fifty pounds. By Winnie Sparke. Syd…’

He was standing so still you’d swear he wasn’t breathing.

‘Just tell me,’ Merrily said.

‘My mate. We were working together. Until a few seconds ago, I thought we still were.’

‘Oh God, I’m—’

Syd Spicer held up his palms for silence. ‘

I’ll give you the basics. Winnie’s convinced she’s going to be the next Mrs Devereaux and all her money problems are over. When he dumps her, she starts obsessing over whether there’s someone else. Kind of woman she is. Life on the scrap heap, not for Winnie. Comes to bits on my kitchen table. I tell her there’s this mate of mine could check him out. She doesn’t have much money to spare, and there’re things I want to know, too. It was expedient. I put up some of the fee. On the side. Cash in hand.’

‘I should’ve told you about him ages ago, but it … circumstances intervened.’

‘How were you to know?’

‘I did know. I knew Winnie had been his client.’

‘Yeah, well, another thing you should know,’ Syd said. ‘He was the guy I rang. Back at Wychehill, soon as I saw the body. I left a half-coded message. I told him to go to the police with everything he knew. Mal always checked his messages very assiduously every hour. I was about to call him back, bring him up to date. He has … had police contacts and credibility.’

Merrily felt light-headed. Now nobody in the police could know they were here. She watched Syd Spicer opening the gate.

‘He was a bloody good guy. Went through the first Gulf War. Did Bosnia.’

Syd kicked the five-barred gate, hard, once, until it jammed against the long grass and quivered.

‘We’re on our own,’ he said.

‘And your training says go back, phone for help.’

‘Except your bloke’s…’

‘Yes, he is.’

Lol didn’t go far. How could he? Where was he supposed to go?

Was he going to leave a damaged man to wait, like some half-demented hermit in the rocks, for God?

Elgar had been right, it was a kind of blasphemy, or at least arrogance. Not really Tim Loste’s arrogance; he was the tool of someone’s else’s ambition.

All he was going to face tonight was the cold, unredemptive shining of his own madness. His own induced madness.

And yet…

Lol walked away over the rise and followed a slow arc back towards the open barn, went down on his knees as he approached it, patting the grass in search of his phone.

And yet he understood. He understood the desperation of Elgar who had done it before, made art, and was afraid – as you always were, every time – that you were never going to be able to do it again, that your best had gone.

And he knew that what Elgar was drawing from the landscape was not – like his contemporary, Vaughan Williams – inspiration from an English rural tradition, because Elgar’s style was influenced more by German music … Wagner.

No, this was about pure, electrical energy. Energy was what Elgar, with his daily walking and his fifty-mile bike rides, was all about. What he was tapping from the countryside was its life-force.

The trees are singing my music or am I singing theirs?

What happened when the trees stopped singing? Or, in Loste’s case, never had sung much. How far would you go?

Lol looked into the sky where strange white lights were kindling pale sparks in the springing antennae of the ancient oak. He imagined Tim Loste huddled like a goblin into its bole.

The difference was that Elgar had been a natural. He didn’t need photo blow-ups or three choirs singing Praise to the Holiest at the stroke of midnight or whatever kind of Golden Dawn ceremonial magic they were planning. He didn’t need a structure.

This was wrong. Lol, on all fours, felt his heart beating and discovered one hand was embedded in a patch of nettles.

It came out stinging like hell and holding the mobile phone.

Still switched on, and it still had battery life. Lol let out a long breath, stumbled to his feet and took it into the barn. Crouching in the hay, he found three messages, the last of which ended, ‘… Winnie murdered. Keep away from it. I love you.’

He’d started to call her back when he heard a voice.

Tim’s voice, conversational. If he was talking to God, it hadn’t taken long to break the ice.

Lol moved out of the barn, up the rise. He saw Tim, with roots humped around him like serpents and, across his knees, the leather-bound book open to the score of Mr Phoebus and the Whiteleafed Oak.

The man sitting next to him handed him a hip flask and Tim drank.

60

Into the Pit

Merrily watched Preston Devereaux screw the top back on his hip flask and stow it inside his dark green overalls. She slipped back behind Syd Spicer, with no idea how to play this.

Looking at Lol coming up the rise and willing him not to move, not to speak. Looking across at Syd and realizing he had no idea how to react either.

Seeing Preston Devereaux coming slowly to his feet among the roots of the sacred oak. Tim Loste huddling into the tree.

Nobody spoke. Syd was watching Devereaux. The vapour trail of a plane you couldn’t hear was like a chalk scribble on the shiny sky.

It struck Merrily the chances were that none of them could be entirely sure what the others were doing here or how much each of them knew.

In which case, go for it.

She walked up to the base of the tree, put out a hand.

‘Mr Loste? My name’s Merrily. I’ve been trying to talk to you for days.’

Relief was amazing. At first it weakened you, and then it flung you back into life with an unexpected strength and a vividly heightened sense of reality. Suddenly, there was nothing you couldn’t handle.

Which was probably dangerous, but what the hell?

Tim Loste was on his feet now, his back to the bole of the oak. His hand felt like soft cheese.

Merrily glanced at Lol, gave him a half-smile, her eyebrows slightly raised, and then turned back to Tim.

He had Winnie’s blood all over him. She wondered if he’d even noticed it. Without Syd, the chances of him talking his way out of this one would have been remote. Annie Howe would have him charged by daybreak and a press release put out.

Merrily wondered how long the effects of Rohypnol lasted.

Wondered what was in Preston Devereaux’s hip flask.

How much of it Tim had drunk.

‘I’m sorry we had to meet like this, Mr Loste, but we heard you were coming to Whiteleafed Oak and Syd very kindly offered to show me the way.’ She looked up at Devereaux. ‘Of course, we didn’t expect…’

‘I like to walk,’ Devereaux said slowly, ‘when the tourists have gone home. Don’t get many nights like this, where you can see for miles.’

‘Syd said it’s … what did you call it?’

‘Noctilucence,’ Syd said. ‘Happens more often in … other countries I’ve spent time in.’

‘Quite an intimate place, really, the Malverns.’ Merrily looked at Lol. ‘I’d imagine it’s hard to go anywhere without running into people you know. Sorry, you are … ?’

‘Dan,’ Lol said. ‘I’m in Tim’s choir.’

Merrily nodded, chanced her arm again.

‘We thought Winnie might be here. Didn’t meet her on the way.’

‘We haven’t seen her,’ Lol said.

‘On your own, Preston?’ Syd walked across and stood with his back to the tree. ‘Only thought I saw one of the boys. Possibly Louis.’

He hadn’t, had he?

‘Yes, I’m on my own tonight, Syd. Nice to get away for a while.’

Merrily’s relief twisted into tension as she moved close to Lol.

‘Well,’ Devereaux said. ‘If you’ve come all this way to talk to Tim, Merrily, I should leave you to it. I don’t know what the subject of your discussion’s going to be, but if it’s what I think it is … well, you know my views. I’ll say goodnight to you.’

He walked away, Merrily whispering to Lol, ‘Did you get my—?’

‘Just.’

‘Does Loste know about Winnie?’

‘No.’

‘What’s he doing here on his own?’

‘Long story. Basically, he’s come to expose himself to the blinding light of God. Like Gerontius. Take me away.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah, ’night, Preston,’ Syd called out. ‘Careful of the Gullet.’

Preston Devereaux walked no more than forty paces before he stopped and shrugged and turned back.

Four of them sitting on the ridged and knobbly earth at the edge of the sacrificial pit, like some surreal midnight picnic party. Tim Loste hadn’t moved from the oak. Syd Spicer was hunched between Devereaux and Merrily, his legs overhanging the hollow as if he was conducting a confirmation class at the front of his church.

Careful of the Gullet.

He’d wanted this confrontation. Some payback for all those weeks without his family. Or something. Merrily was furious and anxious. If this was an example of the benefits of training, the bastard hadn’t left the Regiment a day too soon.

‘I suppose we’re people who know each other, mostly,’ Syd said. ‘And what we are.’

Preston Devereaux had his cap tilted over his eyes. Reluctant returned exile, begetter of murderers.

‘You, for instance, are such a clever man, Preston. With such stupid sons.’

Devereaux didn’t look at him.

‘Should’ve stopped when you were ahead. All you needed was to sit tight and do nothing.’

Devereaux slipped him a look.

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought,’ Syd said. ‘That’s exactly what you were doing. Nothing been shifted through Old Wychehill for quite a while, or Mal would’ve known. You should’ve ignored Wicklow, too. Somebody else would’ve had him sooner or later. Maybe you were ignoring him. But not Louis … Louis’s a real hard man. Louis has to act.’

Merrily sat with goose bumps forming on her folded arms, unsure of the sense of this. Fears over Lol had blocked all meaningful consideration of what might be happening, the phrase outrage crime covering all.

‘Family. You always reckoned it was a curse.’ Syd turned to Merrily. ‘The boy Louis likes to show off. Show how inventive he is. For a long time, I was thinking, I wonder if Preston knows. Do I have a word? But sometimes God saves us from ourselves. You noticed that?’

Preston Devereaux said, irritably, ‘All the conversations we’ve had, Syd, you never brought God into it, not once. This is not a good time to start.’

‘Fair enough. To answer your earlier question, Merrily, Winnie gave Mal two hundred and fifty quid, up front, to find out if Preston was seeing another woman – Winnie, against everything she stood for, being crazy about Preston. On a whim, I bunged Mal a quiet grand to extend the inquiry.’

‘Into—?’

‘Not that he wouldn’t’ve done it anyway, purely out of interest. Maybe a bit bored with the work he was getting. This was the real thing again. We sat up late one night at the rectory and planned it like an operation – the Hereford boys ride again. Winnie was Mal’s cover story, if they rumbled him. He liked that. We both liked it, I’m afraid.’

‘Am I supposed to know who you’re talking about?’ Devereaux sounding bored.

‘Oh, I’m very upset about Mal, Preston, and – God help me – very angry. My guess is it was someone came in from Wales rather than Louis, but that changes nothing. It still all comes back to Old Wychehill.’

Merrily coughed. ‘I’m not…’ Badly wanting a cigarette. ‘Not really getting this.’

‘Diversification, Merrily. Preston decided to follow the government’s advice to the letter. Government helps destroy the basis of traditional agriculture, farmers complain, government says, Use your heads, be adventurous … diversify. Preston Devereaux, a deeply embittered man, full of hatred – some of it justified, fair play – says, Thank you for the advice, I’ll do just that.’

‘Putting words into my mouth, Syd.’

Merrily realizing, even as Devereaux spoke, that there was no need to.

And we turned it around, by God we did, in spite of the shiny-arsed civil servants and the scum from Brussels.

She gazed into the pit. Dear God.

61

Trying to be a Priest

‘Mal tailed Preston day after day,’ Syd Spicer said. ‘Into Worcester, Gloucester and Cheltenham, parts of Birmingham. Finally, down towards Tregaron, near where the old acid factory was, back in the 1970s. The only deals Preston cuts in Wychehill at the moment are with people who come to stay in his holiday apartments, but I’m guessing that in the early days it was buzzing.’

Preston Devereaux slid his hand into a pocket of his overall. Syd moved closer to him. Devereaux brought out a packet of cigarettes, held it up. Syd nodded.

‘But Preston’s still got to be directing the business, else why would he be making the visits? Sometimes, he goes alone to Worcester or Cheltenham, sometimes it’s him and Louis. Mal had to lie a bit to Winnie, because occasionally they’d drop into clubs and massage parlours as well – sampling the pleasures of the cities they were poisoning. But mostly it was private houses, or the offices of an independent cattle-feed dealer, or a couple of family-owned abattoirs. The service industries.’

‘Victims of Blair’s slow demolition of England’s oldest industry,’ Devereaux said.

Merrily shifted on the baked earth, still resisting the urge to smoke.

‘How long since Mal France told you all this, Syd?’

‘Over a period. Up to last night, on his way back from the West Wales coast. Had to leave in a hurry to lose someone on a motorbike. Seems to be a string across the border counties and down through Mid-Wales. Couple of coastal landowners. Some of it, mainly smack, comes in that way, all courtesy of selected tight-lipped farmers. And no profession has tighter lips than farming. Inbred silence, inbred resentment. Watertight. Supplemented, in this case, by people who lost jobs after the hunting ban. A feudal thing, really. Old feudal instincts. Almost – God forbid – a crusade.’

Devereaux lit a cigarette. Syd moved away from the smoke.

‘Not quite sure how long it’s been going on, maybe two years, maybe four. It only starts to make serious sense when you look back to Preston’s formative years. His university years.’

‘Oxford?’ Merrily said. ‘Balliol?’

‘In the 1960s. Wasn’t that guy, the Welsh guy, Mr Nice … ?’

‘Howard Marks?’

‘That’s him. World-class dope dealer. Living legend in his field. And, as it happens, a student at Balliol College in the 1960s. You knew him, Preston?’

‘Before my time.’

‘Not that much before, by my reckoning. Maybe you just had some of the same contacts – I’m guessing here, you understand, I’m just a simple cleric. But where Mr Marks stuck with dope – marijuana-based goods…’

‘Evangelical, with him,’ Merrily remembered.

‘Yeah, a real calling. So he’s always maintained. The fact that he also made a few fortunes before he was nicked and banged up in the States … Preston, it’s different. Different background altogether. And different attitude. Fuelled by this self-righteous, blind resentment. Powerful. It’s in his Norman blood. Blood of the Vikings.’

Devereaux smiled. Merrily saw Lol stand up and wander over to the oak tree.

‘Mal reckoned it probably wasn’t as difficult as you might think,’ Syd said. ‘Just a question of renewing old student contacts and making connections with new ones. Cultures have changed, of course. Would’ve taken patience at first, convincing the sources. But when they know you’re a safe pair of hands, and that you mean it – that’s the important thing. Showing them that just because you come from money, that doesn’t mean you’re soft.’

Merrily said, ‘Wicklow … ?’

‘Would reverberate nicely. But the way it was done … stupid. Attention-grabbing. But, like I say, Louis’s immature. He thinks it’s hugely clever. The sacrificial stone.’

‘He sent a text about human sacrifice to Raji Khan. From Elgar’s Caractacus. Whether that was intended to point to Tim…’

‘Whatever, it came off. When you’re arrogant and cocksure and on a high, things often do come off. For a while. But it’s clever-clever and so immature. Preston knows that. Anybody in their right mind, if it was really necessary to get rid of Wicklow, they’d do it the way someone got rid of that guy in Pershore … forget his name…’

‘Chris Smith. Which the police think was Wicklow. Smith worked in an abattoir.’

‘Ah. One of your boys, Preston?’

Devereaux said nothing. Not once had he admitted to anything specific.

‘Farms, abattoirs, feed merchants. Little crack labs, some of them. The stuff moved in cattle transporters, feed trucks. The kind of country-road vehicles the police were never going to search in a million years. Shambolic but also very neat. I believe we might also be looking at secret compartments in the SUVs and people-carriers of the holidaymakers coming to stay in Preston’s luxury units. Bet you’d find some of those holidaymakers had only just been on holiday. Some to Spain, some to less-favoured resorts like … which is it these days, Rotterdam?’

‘Be more than happy,’ Devereaux said, ‘for the police to search all my buildings. I’d challenge them to find a trace of anything.’

‘Lying fallow at the moment, are we, Preston? Movable feast, innit? What – a dozen farms? More? Whichever way you look at it, this has to be the most successful farmers’ cooperative since the first Iron Age village.’

‘What about Raji Khan?’ Merrily said.

‘Still a bit of a mystery there,’ Syd said. ‘He’s not clean, obviously. But he must be a very small player by comparison. Can’t be involved, or he’d never have been allowed to move in so close. What was that like, Preston, Raji moving in? You must’ve been awful nervy. Did he know, or didn’t he? If he ever found out, that could be tricky – and always a possibility with ambitious little men like Wicklow around. And do you officially support the opposition? Leonard Holliday and WRAG? Difficult one.’

‘Especially if it attracted too much publicity,’ Merrily said. ‘Thus engaging the attention of hundreds of thousands of Elgar enthusiasts, all over the world. You really had to curb Mr Holliday, didn’t you?’

‘And maybe do something about Tim Loste,’ Syd said. ‘Very much a wild card. And supported –more than supported – by your former good friend but not any more, Winnie Sparke. I tried to warn her, best I could. She wouldn’t buy it. Syd, she said,this is England.’

Lol didn’t do drugs. The only reason he had to be grateful to his psychiatric hospital: a sojourn in Medication City and you never wanted to swallow so much as an aspirin ever again.

The white in the sky had dulled, the oak was going grey. A great and beautiful mystery had shrunk to something squalid. Lol sat down next to Tim, whispered to him.

‘How much did you drink from the hip flask?’

‘Chap offers you a swig, not the thing to decline, Dan.’

‘Depends who’s offering.’

‘Raised it to my lips. Faked it.’

‘Oh.’

‘If he brought it back now, I’d drink the lot. Elgar was right, old cock. God’s against art.’

‘May just be,’ Lol said, ‘that artists don’t have mystical experiences. Artists are a medium. Think of it as an internal process you’re not aware of. You don’t have to see blinding light and the heavenly host. You might sit down tomorrow and it’ll all come out in the music.’

‘You’re full of bullshit, Dan. Anyone ever tell you that?’

‘Never,’ Lol said honestly. ‘I’m normally a low-key sort of bloke. But it did seem to me as if the leaves had turned white. Don’t give up. Give it a try.’

‘For Winnie?’ Tim said.

‘Tim—’

‘Thought it was a dream. Thought it was a fucking dream.’

‘I didn’t know, either. I’m sorry.’

‘Blocked it out. Why didn’t I stop them? Why couldn’t—?’

‘Because, somehow, you were drugged. Sedated. I’ve been there. Seen it happen. I can tell you for certain there was nothing you could’ve done.’

‘It’s a sick fucking joke, Dan. I’ve been sitting here all this time, waiting for—’

Tim’s hands squeezing the roots either side of him.

‘As a gentleman, I’m listening to you,’ Devereaux said. ‘Just not talking to you.’

‘A gentleman?’ Merrily sat up. ‘A gentleman who kills kids? Teenagers with infected syringes? Teenagers who murder old ladies in their own homes to steal enough to keep them going for another week?’

Preston Devereaux stared into the shadows below his feet.

‘The cities are a lost cause, Mrs Watkins. Reinfecting themselves on their own sewage. Nothing to be done about that. The road to ruin. No doubt the two of you can find Biblical parallels.’

‘And out of the ruins will rise … what?’

‘Better government,’ Devereaux said.

At first Merrily thought he was coughing over his cigarette. But he was laughing. She looked at Syd Spicer. Where was he going with this? Did he have some plan that she couldn’t see? Why hadn’t he just let Devereaux walk away? Why did he have to throw out that remark about the Gullet?

‘Why did you kill Winnie Sparke?’ Syd asked.

‘I didn’t.’

‘Whoever murdered France took his files,’ Merrily said, just wanting to end this. ‘Presumably that’s where they found Winnie’s name. Who would recognize that but you?’

‘Winnie’s name’s on Mal’s books,’ Syd said, ‘so it must be Winnie who’s paying him to look into the drug operation. And Winnie being Winnie, a loose cannon— My fault. Should’ve been my name.’

‘Syd, this is not something you could ever have predicted.’

‘Who rumbled Mal?’ Syd said. ‘I’d like to know that, Preston.’

Devereaux tossed his cigarette end into the pit.

‘Who told you about the Gullet?’ he said.

‘You were going to take Tim back that way, right? You waited for … Mr Robinson to leave, and then you were in with the spiked Scotch and time to go home, Tim. How desperate was that?’

‘Who told you about the Gullet?’

‘Hugo, actually.’

‘Hugo?’ Devereaux looking at him at last.

‘We have to get our information where we can.’

‘Where is he? Syd, he’s a boy.’

‘He’s no more a boy than half the drug barons in Birmingham. And if you tell me he hasn’t killed anybody, I wouldn’t be sure and neither could you. Can’t control these boys like you used to, can you? Let them go too far down the road. Maybe that’s another reason Old Wychehill’s been fallow for a bit, you trying to rein Louis in before it’s too late. Tell me who rumbled Mal.’

‘Or what?’

‘Or tell the police when they get here, I don’t mind. It’ll add to what they’ll have learned from Hugo, already naming names faster than they can write them down.’

‘Hugo doesn’t know any names.’

‘Boy goes around with his eyes shut, does he? It’s over, Preston, it’s disintegrating as we speak. That’s what I’m trying to get across to you.’

‘You’ve told me some far-fetched theories, that’s—’

‘That’s because I’m not trying to trick you, mate. And because I’ve been trying, maybe not too successfully, to be a priest. Sometimes, especially lately, I have to keep reminding myself that that’s what I am now. I can look at this situation and see clearly what would be the best way of dealing with it if I was still in the Army.’

‘The situation being?’

‘The situation being a dangerous young man out there, and probably more dangerous because he’s frightened and not really, with his background, the big gangster he thinks he is. He’s clever, but clever’s not the same as smart. Police see what Louis did, it’s an Armed Response Unit. Marksmen all over the hills. The soldier in me would take him out ASAP. Expedience. But the priest doesn’t want another death. Not even Louis’s.’

‘And how would the priest avoid that?’

‘I think … by letting you walk away like you did a short time ago. You presumably know where he is, so you can explain to him what I’ve just explained to you, and then the two of you can walk into a police station of your choice.’

‘Or leave the country.’

‘Leaving young Hugo to take all the weight? Nah. You’ve got some honour left. It’s the best thing you can do as a father and a clever man. Exercise some control over your boy. Tell him it’s pointless.’

Preston Devereaux straightened his back, hands on his knees. There was a glaze of sweat on his forehead under the line of his cap.

‘Where’s the point in that, Syd, when you’ve already told him?’

Perhaps Louis Devereaux had been there the whole time. Plenty of cover. Coppices and dells.

Perhaps Syd had known this. He half-turned and looked up at Louis with no surprise.

Merrily was on her feet, backing away, instinctively looking for Lol, but seeing only Louis Devereaux, a half-silhouette in the grey light, as still, for a moment, as any of the oaks, arms extended, rigid as dead branches, both hands clasped around the pistol.

‘Where’d you buy that, Louis?’ Syd said mildly. ‘Very professional. They say you can get them in Hereford these days. Glock?’

The gun twitched.

‘Move away from my father, Rector.’

‘What for? Which one of us you planning to shoot to prove your old man isn’t in control any more?’

‘And shut up.’

‘Shouldn’t that be shut the fuck up? Got to get the tone right, the correct phraseology.’

‘Shut the—’ Louis’s hands jerking around the pistol. ‘I could kill you now.’

‘Or blow me away, even. Blow all of us away. That’d simplify things a lot. Like that feller in Hungerford in the 1980s. You probably don’t remember that, you’d’ve been just a kid, but he shot himself in the end. Like the bloke at Dunblane. It always ends where they shoot themselves.’

Merrily couldn’t move. Louis was panting with rage and frustration and probably fear. On a hot night, it was the most unstable combination imaginable. And all Syd had was…

‘The other ending is death by Armed Response Unit. Like I’ve already told your father, lots of police marks-men all over the hills. Automatic rifles. Night sights. Make that thing look like a spud gun and you like the crass amateur you undoubtedly are.’

‘You make one more … remark like that and then—’

‘And for a while you get to learn what it was like for all the foxes you used to hunt. Only with not even the faintest possibility of an earth to escape to. No escape at all from those boys. Terrorism-trained, now, and they don’t take any chances. At some stage one of them gets you in the cross-hairs and takes you out. You don’t even see him taking aim. Like a wasp doesn’t see the rolled-up newspaper.’

Syd standing there with his arms by his sides, an unmoving target. Merrily’s heart going, Please God, please God, please God.

‘We can get away,’ Louis said. ‘Any time we want. Just a question of whether—’

‘Nah. It doesn’t happen, son, not at this level.’

‘—Whether we leave you fucking dead when we go.’

‘You don’t understand. You graduated to a new level of achievement tonight, mate,’ Syd said. ‘In the big school now. Where they spend millions hunting you down.’

Preston Devereaux stood up.

‘Can I talk to my son?’

‘Don’t ask me, Preston – he’s got the weapon.’

‘What do I do?’ Louis’s whole body bending backwards like a water-skier, tensed around the swivelling pistol. ‘What do I do?’

‘You probably give the gun to me,’ Preston said.

‘We can still get out of this. He’s got to be lying about armed police. We could—’

Louis turned, the pistol pointing directly at Merrily. She felt a spasm below her heart like a long needle going in.

‘—Take Mrs Watkins with us?’

‘And then what, Louis?’ Syd said. ‘Demand a helicopter? Grow up, son.’

‘Stay fuck—’ Louis spun but not at Syd. ‘Stay fucking there!’

Merrily, heart jumping, heard a cry from Lol.

‘… Tim!’

Tim Loste was lumbering out from the tree. In his stained singlet, he looked like an old-fashioned butcher, arms sleeved in sweat, finger out, pointing at Louis.

‘You were wearing a … a balaclava.’

‘Don’t come any closer,’ Louis said, ‘you wanker.’

‘Recognize your voice. Wearing a balaclava with eyeholes.’

‘Louis,’ Preston Devereaux said, ‘it’s not necessary.’

‘Big knife. You had this big— She was screaming at you to stop, screaming and screaming and … and crying and you just … you bloody bastard—’

Tim tumbled, sobbing, into Louis and Louis shot him twice.

62

Seventeen

‘I went to sleep,’ Tim said. ‘Now I’m refreshed.’

He tried to laugh. A dry, skittering noise came out.

Merrily vaguely recognized the first words sung by the soul, after death, in The Dream of Gerontius.

‘Feel so much lighter,’ he said. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘That’s very good.’ Time seemed to have slowed. The white clouds had diminished and so had the humidity. A small night breeze rattled among the boughs.

Tim said, ‘You’re jolly pretty. I didn’t … didn’t realize you’d be so young. Way Winnie talked, it was as if you were some old…’ He stopped for a breath. It was a terrifying noise, like a small breeze in a mound of dead leaves. ‘Doesn’t matter what Winnie said, does it?’

‘I suppose not.’

She’d rung for an ambulance, said she’d found a man badly injured, didn’t know how. Syd’s advice. What they didn’t need was an Armed Response Unit. She’d given them directions from the hamlet of Whiteleafed Oak, her name and her mobile number, telling them they could probably get an ambulance across the common without any difficulty if they took it slowly.

Lol had brought half a bale of straw up from the barn, and they put some of it under Tim, raising his legs. Syd’s advice.

He walked over.

‘Both gone?’ Merrily said.

‘Nothing I could do. Not without more of this. Maybe they’ll get to a vehicle in time. Maybe they have arrangements in hand. Maybe they’ll be on a boat out of Fishguard by morning. Can’t see that he wouldn’t’ve made provision: bolt-holes, foreign bank accounts.’

Syd had phoned West Mercia Police on the general number, someone from Worcester coming back to him. Merrily didn’t know what had been said, but Spicer’d had the impression that they already knew some of what he was telling them and they’d confirmed this by asking if he was the man who’d left a message on Malcolm France’s mobile.

Some explaining, then, for Syd. Later.

She whispered to him, ‘There’s hardly any blood.’

‘Internal, then. Keep him warm. Don’t move him.’ Merrily’s head was filled with a prayer that she couldn’t articulate. She felt as if she was hovering over the entire scene, the wooded arena with its hints of neolithic mounds, its ghost of a processional way and the sacred, magisterial oak stuffed with twinkling symbols of vain hopes and dreams and, at its splayed feet, a man whose plea to be taken away had been answered in a blinding flash.

Tim Loste looked up at her from his bed of straw, his face creamed in sweat.

‘Hannah’s pretty.’

‘Yes, she is.’

‘Used to watch out for her when she came past. On her bike. Wished I had a bike. Follow her down. Two of us, whizzing down the hill. Super.’

‘Mmm.’

‘All I ever wanted, really. Thought I might buy a bike, but … Winnie said it would be the wrong kind.’

‘Not like Mr Phoebus.’

‘No.’

‘But you rode Mr Phoebus sometimes. In your … daydreams?’

With Hannah.

Tim’s eyes filled up with tiny pools of moonlight.

‘Know what I don’t want?’

Merrily bent close to him now. His sweat smelled sour.

‘You know what I … really don’t want? Where’s Dan?’

‘I’m here.’

Lol was kneeling on the other side.

‘Dan knows.’

‘Remind me?’ Lol said.

It was possible to speak with normal voices now, but they were whispering because Tim Loste was whispering. Tim smiled under his Edward Elgar yardbrush moustache, through his sweat.

‘Don’t want the Angel of the blasted Agony.’

‘Would anybody?’ Lol said.

Tim looked at Merrily and started to say something. But he was suddenly fighting for breath. She beckoned Syd, urgently, and he pushed more straw under Tim’s legs.

‘Lessens strain on the heart. Don’t move him, and don’t let him get too hot.’

Syd being the soldier again – as if too many priests would spoil the prayer. From quite a distance away, Merrily heard a single gunshot. Not uncommon, except this wasn’t, she was sure, a shotgun. She exchanged a glance with Syd. He went still.

Tim was mumbling something to Lol, who was shaking his head.

‘No, no … you haven’t failed. Winnie failed, that’s all. It couldn’t work for someone like Winnie. You must’ve known that.’

Of course it couldn’t. Winnie and her academic magic, her hit-and-miss, mix ’n’ match spirituality. Try this, try that. Merrily suddenly saw the callousness of it. Whatever happened to Tim, Winnie would have had a book out of it. She could almost see the hovering spirit, outlined in the acid colours of the moon’s halo, making notes. An even better book if Tim was dead.

‘You just need to change the end,’ Lol said. ‘It’s easy.’

‘Seven,’ Tim said.

‘Seven?’

Lol turned to Merrily as Tim said something else. She shook her head.

‘Was that … seventeen?’

Lol thought for a moment and then he smiled.

Tim’s eyes lit up, a quiet glow appearing on the edges of the pupils. Faraway, unknowing eyes, like the light through clouds.

Merrily took in a rapid breath just before the second shot came out of the forestry.

She heard the night-shredding squawks of emergency vehicles and took Tim Loste’s hand and began to pray.

63

A List

‘Merrily,’ Bliss said quietly on the mobile. ‘Before you say anything, I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do. Not tonight, anyway.’

‘Frannie,’ she said wearily, ‘where the hell have you been?’

They were in Syd Spicer’s kitchen, her and Lol. It was nearly two a.m.

‘I just called to leave a message. Never imagined you’d still be up.’ He sounded knackered, his accent thickening. ‘Just gorrin from Shrewsbury. Went up to talk to a guy my victim Malcolm France was working for. Bloke with serious form, and it looked promising, but it wasn’t what we thought and I’m pig-sick, and I know it’s your daughter and I know that Parry’s a family friend, but this time—’

‘What?’

‘You know I’ve always liked Gomer, pairsonally, but some things…’

‘What are you on about?’

Bliss paused. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m— Tell me what you were talking about, first.’

‘The charges against Gomer Parry? I did pick up your messages, but I was on a major investigation. I might be able to pull the odd string, but not tonight. CID were consulted but it’s a uniform thing now. Out of my hands.’

‘Gomer. Gomer and Jane? What have they done?’

‘Do you know a place called Coleman’s Meadow?’

‘Heard of it. Vaguely.’

‘They’ve trashed it with a JCB. Taken a fence out and destroyed an expensive vehicle.’

‘Are they all right?’

‘Oh they’re all right. For the present. That old man’s a complete maniac, of course, which you know, and Jane … Listen, I can suggest someone you might possibly talk to tomorrow, but I can’t get involved, Merrily, I can’t pull any—’

‘That’s why you didn’t return my calls? You thought I was going to ask you to pull strings on behalf of Jane and Gomer?’

‘I’ve had a bloody long night, Merrily. I’ve gorra mairder inquiry.’

‘Not any more, Frannie,’ Merrily said.

Hadn’t really been his week, had it? Or anyone’s she knew.

She needed to go home, but…

The police had found both bodies in the forestry. No back-road network, farm to farm to Fishguard and the ferry to Ireland.

Louis had been shot in the back of the head, evidently while relieving himself, his dad presumably having offered to hold the gun for him. Preston had been found some distance away. He’d fumbled it, blown a piece of his head away but was not dead. He’d died, like Lincoln Cookman, in the ambulance.

It was numbing.

‘I can’t question it,’ Syd Spicer said. ‘You know what the suicide rate is among ex-SAS? You come out into a shrunken world and it’s like your coffin’s being assembled around you. Every day another little screw going in. The sudden smallness of everything, the petty regulations, the way your hands are tied by the kind of people you just want to smack.’

He talked about that feeling of confinement. How you had to find a way out of that. Preston Devereaux’s answer was to slide out of the system by shedding his humanity like excess weight.

Merrily lit a cigarette.

‘Ironically, dumping your humanity now seems like the best way to survive in farming. A cow’s no longer Daisy, it’s a product with a government bar code.’

‘The State penetrating your life at every level,’ Syd said. ‘Nobody’s more aware of that than the farmer, whose only rulers used to be the elements. State doesn’t like the idea of guys out there being independent. Officials come swarming over your land like maggots, and you’re clawing away to get them off before they start eating into your brain. Maybe Preston felt he was finally reclaiming his Norman heritage as a robber baron. The Normans controlled the hunting in the Malverns. The Devereaux dynasty controls the drugs.’

‘But knowing that at any time it could all go to pieces? That he could lose everything his family had built up over the centuries? Did that add to the necessary sense of danger?’

‘Maybe,’ Lol said, ‘he thought he’d already lost everything. That it was just useless packaging. And the only part of it worth preserving was the … whatever was still alight inside him.’

Merrily thought about this. About Devereaux telling her how he’d put all his valuable furniture into the holiday units. Stripping his own life back. She saw him in the Beacon Room in his anonymous, muted green overalls, surrounded by mementoes of the past – the fox heads and the picture of him with Eric Clapton. She looked at Syd.

‘You knew that if you could get them to walk away … ?’

Syd had changed into his cassock, as if in some vain attempt to convince himself that what had happened in the last several hours had happened to someone else.

‘Didn’t see him having any taste for life as a fugitive. Still less as a prisoner who – even if he hadn’t actually personally killed anybody—’

‘He had killed, though, hadn’t he?’ Merrily said. ‘What about Lincoln Cookman and his girlfriend?’

‘I meant murder.’

‘Yes, well…’ Merrily bent her head into her hands. ‘This is probably nonsense, but when I went to talk to Raji Khan at the Royal Oak, Roman Wicklow’s family were there, collecting his stuff. Including his small sports car. Quite a deep colour of orange, which might look red at night, I don’t know. It was just a feeling I had, and I don’t get them often.’

Syd sat back. ‘A Mazda?’

‘I think it was a Nissan, but about the same size and shape, and late at night, coming towards Preston Devereaux at speed, with a black guy inside … He told me he was very tired at the time. He said if he hadn’t been so tired it wouldn’t have happened.’

‘An impulse thing?’

‘If Wicklow was preying on his mind…’

‘You said Wicklow killed that man in Pershore?’

‘He was tortured before he was shot,’ Merrily said. ‘Maybe he gave Wicklow information leading Wicklow back to Devereaux.’

‘Then Wicklow turns up at Old Wychehill to ask for a job. Blackmail in a thin disguise. What if Wicklow tells Khan? Assuming Khan doesn’t already know.’

Suspecting that Khan had a charmed-life arrangement with Annie Howe, Merrily didn’t think he did know.

‘I could be totally wrong about the Wychehill crash, anyway. How could he know they’d both be killed?’

‘He couldn’t,’ Syd said. ‘But he was a massively angry man in a business that brutalizes. I remember he was in a very … excited state that night. In fact, I don’t rule out that Preston, like Louis, partook of the produce. In his careful way.’

‘It could even be that Cookman had been involved with Wicklow. The police did find a bag of crack under his spare wheel.’

‘Anything’s possible and most of it won’t come out. The cops have too many angles to follow up. Could take weeks with several forces involved. Could be dozens of people charged. But it’s not our problem. Is it?’

‘Meanwhile,’ Lol said, ‘do we ring A and E at Worcester Hospital?’

‘They’ll ring us,’ Merrily said. ‘Tim has no known relations in the country. Not that anybody knows of.’

She pushed her cup away. One of the parameds had mentioned the possibility of damage to the pulmonary artery. The kitchen seemed dim. The garden, where it was lifted towards the bald hill, was pallid with tired moonlight and what remained of the so-called noctilucence.

‘I may’ve screwed up badly.’ Syd plucked at his cassock. ‘Probably gonna get out of this now.’

‘The cassock?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Quitting’s not in your nature, Syd. Or your training.’

He smiled faintly.

‘Increasingly, I admire you, Merrily. You’ve watched it fall to pieces from your point of view. Every deliverance angle going, one after another, down the toilet.’

‘That’s what you think?’ Merrily sank her head into her arms, looking up at him from table-top level. ‘You really don’t see anything bordering on the paranormal?’

‘You mean you do?’

‘Syd,’ she said. ‘When I’ve slept, I’ll make you a list.’

‘You think there should still be some form of requiem?’

‘I don’t know. You think that would make everything all right in Wychehill? Sweetness and light and harmony and Mr Holliday inviting Mr Khan to afternoon tea?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I suppose I think truth sometimes heals on its own. Winnie said there was a festering wound in the hills. Maybe she added to the infection. Maybe she – let’s be fanciful – annoyed Elgar, bringing him to judgement when all he wanted was to pedal up and down, whistling his sad little up-and-down cello tune.’

‘Bringing him to judgement?’

‘What right did she have? It was essentially a magical ritual, you know, what they were—’ She stood up. ‘What they’re still doing, presumably, in your church.’

Merrily had never been a hymn kind of person, but she knew them. Most of the words, if not the tune in this case.

‘Oh wisest love that flesh and blood

Which did in Adam fail. . .’

‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height. That’s … ?’

‘What the heavenly choir sings before the appearance of the Angel of the Agony,’ Lol said. ‘Tim’s expanded it, I think. Dan said it goes into a speaking-in-tongues kind of chant. He said that’s when you start to get high.’

They were in the parking bay outside Wychehill Church. The singing was much louder now than when Merrily had last heard it, standing on an upturned bucket below a window. As if the choristers had been pacing themselves like athletes.

‘You think we should stop them?’ Syd Spicer stood under the cracked lantern, his eyes uncertain. ‘How long’s it got to go?’

‘What time is it now, Syd?’

‘Two-twenty.’

‘It ends at three,’ Lol said.

‘Let them finish then.’ Syd brought out his keys. ‘You want to go in?’

Lol nodded. Merrily had caught a movement in the churchyard.

‘Join you in a few minutes. OK?’

Sliding among the bushes and the graves not a moment too soon because within a few seconds there were voices behind her, talking to Syd, and one of them was Annie Howe’s. ‘No, I’m not sure,’ she heard Syd say. ‘She was here not long ago. Do you want to talk to me first?’

She was standing under the statue of the Angel of the Agony, pink cardigan over a summer dress with cartwheels and roses on it. Male and female voices cascaded down through the warm air, fluid and ethereal, coloured rain.

‘God’s presence and his very Self

and Essence—’

‘I thought,’ Merrily said, ‘that on Friday and Saturday night you stayed in behind locked and barred doors.’

‘Sometimes I sit at the window,’ Mrs Aird said. ‘From the front dormer I can just see the church gates. I had the window open tonight, to hear the choir. Then I saw you come in with the Rector and the other gentleman.’

Merrily sat on the edge of the tomb, looked up into her face, meagrely lit by the candles inside the church.

‘What don’t I know about you, Mrs Aird?’

‘Oh dear, is it that obvious?’

‘I did think of ringing Ingrid Sollars, but there hasn’t been much time.’

‘Oh well,’ Mrs Aird said. ‘Ingrid doesn’t know anything really. I don’t make a point of telling people my family history. Not round here, especially. There’s still quite a bit of strong feeling in certain quarters.’

She glanced up at the Angel of the Agony, whose face, even by diffused candlelight, reflected none of the compassion that you might expect.

‘Oh,’ Merrily said. ‘I see … I think.’

‘He was my grandfather.’

‘Joseph Longworth.’

‘I don’t remember him. He died when I was very young. I didn’t even know where he was buried for a long time. It was quite a shock when I first came here.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘He left some money, in trust for Wychehill Church. The interest to be handed over as a lump sum every ten years, as directed by the principal trustee. Which at present is me, as the eldest in the family. He wanted the money to perpetuate the church’s connection with Elgar.’

‘Ah…’

‘What I was told was that Elgar’s music was not very popular by the time my grandfather discovered it in the 1920s. He became, you know, besotted with it. He thought it was the greatest music ever made in England. He wanted to help. And to make up, in a small way, for all the damage done by the quarrying. And I suppose he’s been proved right, hasn’t he, about the music?’

‘Somebody said he created Wychehill Church as … almost an altar to Elgar?’

‘Well, I came to tend it,’ Mrs Aird said. ‘I’m the first of our family – including my grandfather – ever to live in Wychehill, and it’s all been very strange. Very strange indeed. I used to be afraid to stand here, especially after dark.’

‘You came – twenty-five years ago?’

‘Twenty-four. When my husband retired. He was some years older than me. You didn’t have to wait long for a house to come on the market here. It’s always been like that. It was a very unhappy place when we came. I made it my business to try to cheer people up. It was a … a vocation, you might say. It made me feel content here. I felt my grandfather – this will sound silly…’

‘Probably not to me.’

‘I felt he was helping me. So when Mr Loste came and established his choir…’

‘Good way to … perpetuate Elgar’s music?’

‘I made a donation, from the fund. Towards the choir and hiring musicians sometimes.’

‘You gave Tim money?’

‘Anonymously. Through my solicitor. I didn’t want them to know. I didn’t want that woman … I heard she … is it true?’

‘I’m afraid it is.’

‘Dear God.’ Mrs Aird sank down on to the tomb. ‘What’s happening here, Mrs Watkins?’

Merrily told her, without mentioning names, that the people responsible were no longer a threat. That there was nobody out there any more to be afraid of.

She wondered if that was true and if the divide which had opened up all those years ago, like a fissure in the rocks, between Longworth and the Devereaux family, Old Wychehill and Upper Wychehill, might in some way be closed. What would happen to Old Wychehill now? In theory, it was Hugo’s. But what would happen to Hugo?

‘As soon as I handed over the money,’ Mrs Aird said, ‘I knew it was wrong, somehow, and I didn’t know why. I had terrible dreams. One night…’ She hugged her arms. ‘I saw him.’ She looked up. ‘Him.’

‘The angel?’

‘I was watching the sunset and just after the sun had gone down, he was there in my garden. Don’t think I’m mad—’

‘No.’

‘And the next day the lorry crashed into the church wall. It was probably a coincidence, but that’s not what you think, is it, at the time?’

‘Did you … see him again?’

‘No.’

‘And the light the lorry driver said he saw … ?’

‘He thought it was the sun, but it was too early. Perhaps it was like the policeman said, he was overtired. But I thought of the ball of light that my grandfather’s supposed to have seen. And then Mr Loste … and then Hannah. I didn’t know what to believe. It was getting too much for me. And then I talked to Ingrid and…’ Mrs Aird let her arms drop and turned to Merrily. ‘How much of it was lies? Do you know?’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t. Sometimes you never do. Sometimes you just have to push on regardless and hope you get … some…’

Help? She looked up. Something had happened.

She saw, through the steep, plain-glass window, a very small glow, as if only one candle was left alight. And the choir had faltered, voices trailing like ribbon. She stood up.

The last candle didn’t go out, but the choir stayed silent. Merrily heard the church door opening, and Lol came out, and she walked over to him. He looked anxious.

‘He … the conductor was this guy, Dan. He’d stepped in at the last minute because the usual guy couldn’t make it. And he just … he stopped it. He said he had to sit down. Suddenly felt cold … and weak. And then he got up again and went round blowing out the candles. It was … weird. Who’s that?’

Merrily turned and saw Mrs Aird walking back along the drive towards the road. There was darkness there. The cracked lantern at the entrance had gone out.

Cold inside with dread, she took out her mobile and opened it up, its screen flaring orange and white, and called the hospital in Worcester where Tim Loste had been taken.

64

Helium

It was unearthly seeing Elgar like this. Disorientating.

In his striped casual jacket and his hat with the brim raffishly upturned at the sides. And was that a cigarette, for heaven’s sake, between his fingers?

He wasn’t exactly smiling, but you felt that, under that Wild West marshal’s moustache, he was on the edge of one, standing on the track with his arms spread as if emphasizing its width. Yes, it had to be a cigarette – that was smoke in the air

You spent all week searching for him in the Malverns, and here he was in Ledwardine.

Something mischievous and yet rueful about that near-smile. The main difference between Watkins and Elgar, at this stage of their lives, was that Elgar was more or less played out in his sixties, while Watkins was only just beginning his greatest work, crackling with vision.

Maybe Elgar, in Ledwardine, was returning a favour – for getting Longworth off his back? No, don’t get fanciful.

‘Whenever I think I’m getting somewhere.’ Jane lowered her face into her hands. ‘Just when I think I’m breaking through, I screw up. It’s like there’s something inside me, something demonic—’

‘Stop right there, flower.’

Jane looked up. Annoyance turning to something between hopelessness and an unhealthy kind of repentance.

Anyway, it was almost pitiful.

‘I was going to say, “Don’t call me ‘flower’ like I’m seven years old.” But yeah, call me flower. Call me flower till I grow up. Maybe getting thrown out of school … maybe that’s what I need. Maybe I should go away, where I can’t harm anybody.’

Merrily thought of telling her that the one person this didn’t seem to have harmed was Gomer Parry who, when she’d seen him in the Eight till Late, had looked ten years younger, despite facing charges which could include taking a mechanical digger without the owner’s consent and criminal damage to a fence and a silver BMW.

He said he’d deny that this last offence had been criminal as he’d had no way of knowing that Pierce had brought his car round in order to drive Gerry Murray home so Murray could leave his JCB on site overnight, which was plain daft, anyway.

‘More likely to’ve banged Pierce,’ Gomer said. ‘Bloody little crook.’

Merrily had advised resisting making that point to the police. Bliss had suggested that Gomer might get a caution … but only if he admitted an offence of, say, Aggravated Taking Without Consent. Which, Gomer being Gomer…

She wondered if she should ring Robert Morrell at home and make a crawling apology, telling him how stressed-out she’d been and what a difficult year it had been for Jane. Wondered whether this might actually work, or whether Jane would just despise her.

Probable answers: no and yes.

Just before twelve, Syd Spicer had rung to say that he’d spoken to Tim Loste’s parents in France. He’d asked Merrily how she’d feel about conducting the funeral. The full Requiem, as High Church as she was prepared to go.

Incense, even.

She’d said OK.

The young guy at the door was in jeans and a Mappa Mundi T-shirt.

‘Neil Cooper. Herefordshire Council.’

‘I think I’ve seen you somewhere before,’ Merrily said.

‘It’s possible, yes. I wondered if Jane was in.’

‘Well, she—’

Jane appeared in the hall.

‘Oh—’

‘This is Mr Cooper, Jane. From the Council.’

‘Look,’ Jane said. ‘I overreacted. I behaved like a kid. But on the other hand I’m not going to apologize.’

‘I don’t expect you to.’ Neil Cooper looked grim. ‘But I think you ought at least to come and see the extent of what you’ve done, you and your … volatile friend.’

‘For what it’s worth, I’m accepting full responsibility. Gomer thought I was in danger, and that’s why he did it. In fact it was an act of protest.’

Merrily said, ‘Jane—’

‘Also, he was insulted by Lyndon Pierce. Made to look small. And old and knackered. Gomer’s a proud sort of guy in his way, and he’s a good guy, and he could drive a JCB in his sleep, and Pierce was stupid to leave his car there with no lights.’

‘I really don’t want to argue,’ Cooper said. ‘If you’re prepared to face up to—’

‘All right, I’ll come. OK? But if you’re going to offer me any kind of a deal, like the police did, to drop Gomer in it…’

Merrily watched them go, wondering what all this was going to cost, in terms of money and their future in the village. Then she went over to Lol’s.

Lol was sitting on his sofa with the Boswell guitar. Merrily sat down next to him and listened while he played a couple of strange, drifting chords, singing in a low mumble.

‘Don’t need … The Angel of the Agony.

Don’t want … the pomp and circumstance.’

He put the guitar down.

‘Lay down here when we got in. Slept for a couple of hours and I woke up and that was in my head. Crap?’

‘It’s haunting,’ Merrily said.

‘Develop it, do you think?’

‘And when you record it, have Simon St John on cello.’

‘Elgar would hate it.’

‘Tell me – would that have bothered you before?

‘Um…’

‘Seventeen,’ Merrily said. ‘You remember?’

‘It wasn’t.’

‘Wasn’t seventeen?’

‘It was Severn … Teme. Elgar said he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at the confluence of the River Severn and the River Teme.’

‘So Tim meant…’

‘There wasn’t much cremation back then. They talked him out of it, and now he’s with Alice in Little Malvern.’

‘Where does the Severn meet the Teme?’

‘No idea.’

‘I wonder if there’s a country church near there. And an amenable vicar with a fondness for Elgar. Take some arranging and negotiations with relatives, of course, but…’

‘You’re thinking Tim?’

‘Thinking both of them. Tim … and Elgar, in essence. But…’

Faraway eyes and a lonely bicycle lamp in the dusk. A floating sadness.

‘… I just don’t know,’ Merrily said.

It was a mess, no arguing with that. A spreading wound in the belly of the village. OK, some of it had been done by Gerry Murray before they arrived, but a lot of it was clearly down to Gomer. The way the fence had been smashed down and spread across the field. The way the council sign describing the plans for luxury executive homes had been snapped off halfway up its post and crunched and splintered into the mud that used to be Coleman’s Meadow.

And Pierce’s car, of course. The car was still there. Pierce’s BMW with its windscreen smashed and its bonnet turned into a sardine can. Well, it had been dark. How was Gomer supposed to know that Pierce was giving Murray a lift home? And wasn’t the fact that Pierce was doing this a clear demonstration that they were in this together? Pierce wouldn’t want that coming out. Would he?

He wouldn’t give a toss. He had Jane, unhinged, crazy as a binge drinker on New Year’s Eve, and dragging an old man into it.

He wouldn’t get jail for a first offence – Jane hoped – at his age, but there’d be a heavy fine and, worst of all, the possibility of some kind of ban, and if they stopped Gomer driving his JCB he’d just slink off and die.

All her fault.

If anything happened to Gomer because of what she’d done she just couldn’t go on living here.

Didn’t want to live here any more, anyway.

The afternoon was dull and sultry. A bleak posse of clouds had gathered around Cole Hill. It was like a sign. Coleman’s Meadow was desolate, an old battlefield, but the only blood was hers.

‘Why are you doing this to me?’ Jane said. ‘I’ve messed up. I admit it.’

Neil Cooper strolled out to the middle of the field. He wasn’t bad-looking in an insubstantial kind of way.

‘But it is a ley,’ Jane shouted after him. ‘Or it was.’

‘I’m not sure I believe in leys,’ Cooper said.

‘Yeah, well, you wouldn’t.’

‘Look at the state of this.’ He bent down. ‘Come on. Look at it.’

‘Sod you,’ Jane said. ‘You’re determined to rub my nose in it, aren’t you?’

‘Will you come here?’

Jane sighed. How much more of this? Monday she’d have to face Morrell. Tuesday she’d be looking for a new school. Or a job. Maybe stacking shelves for Jim Prosser.

‘It’s my day off, actually,’ Neil Cooper said. ‘I just heard about it on the radio and thought I’d wander over. OK, here—’

She went and looked over Neil Cooper’s shoulder to where a great slice of soil and clay had been peeled away like a giant pencil-shaving. Murray’s work, but somebody had been at it with a spade and there was a trench there now. Neil Cooper tapped the bottom of it with a trowel. It rang sharply off something.

‘Oops, shouldn’t’ve— You know what this is, Jane?’ Jane stood sullenly on the edge of the trench, which was still roughly aligned with the ley.

‘No.’

‘It’s a stone,’ Neil Cooper said. ‘Approximately four metres long. Like a very big cigar. It was about half a metre under the surface. A large part of it would’ve been underground, but when it was standing it would’ve been taller than me.’

Jane said, ‘Standing?’

Cooper walked lightly along the bottom of the trench and then stopped.

‘It seemed even longer at first and then I realized that…’ He bent down, tapped again with his trowel. ‘That this was a separate one.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘And then I brought in a couple of mates and we found a third.’

‘What?’

‘Have you ever seen Harold’s Stones at Trellech? What’s that – forty miles from here?’

‘Thereabouts.’

She and Eirion had been. Twice. Harold’s stones were magnificent. Jane felt herself growing pale.

‘Probably not going to be quite that tall,’ Neil Cooper said. ‘But when we get them up, at least as high as Wern Derys, which is the tallest prehistoric stone in Herefordshire. And, of course, as a stone row. . .’

‘Who are you?’

‘I get the feeling we met once before, when I was working on the renovation of the Cantilupe tomb in the Cathedral. I certainly recognized your mum. I’m with the County Archaeologist’s Department now.’

Cooper was on his feet.

‘Jane, they’ve been buried for centuries. They’re way beyond living memory, and there are no records. There was a time when farmers would do this because the old stones got in the way of ploughing.’

‘Bury them?’

‘Broke them up, sometimes. Fortunately that didn’t happen here, although the one at the far end was quite badly chipped by Mr Murray’s JCB. But then, if he hadn’t been so determined to destroy your bit of … ley line, we wouldn’t have found out about it – if we ever did find out – until the housing estate was well under way, and then it would’ve been just rescue archaeology because the estate would have planning permission. Whereas now—’

‘These are real, actual, prehistoric standing stones?’

Jane felt like her body had filled up with helium and her voice was coming out in this thin squeak.

‘I’d stake my future career on it,’ Neil Cooper said.

‘What … what does that mean?’

‘Means a long and careful excavation, and then, with any luck, the stones will get raised again and carefully repositioned just as they once were.’

‘And the … and the housing estate?’

‘What housing estate?’ Neil Cooper said.

Jane went down on her knees in the trench, rubbing away the soil, getting dirt all over the big plaster on the back of her hand. She closed her eyes and saw a swirl of faces: Neil Cooper looking down on her with Elgar on one side of him and Alfred Watkins on the other, peering over his glasses, eyes alight, and all of them in the enveloping shadow of the batwing poncho of Lucy Devenish.

‘This time, we’ll call the media,’ Neil Cooper said. ‘If that’s all right with you?’

‘I need to talk to my agent,’ Jane said.