The Plague Stones

by James Brogden

  The air in the barn was heavy with the smell of dung and the warmth of the two oxen who slept with their heads curled in towards their flanks; disturbed by her entrance, they woke and surged to stand upright, puffing and snorting in confusion. She stroked them down their long noses, hushing and calming them, then turned to look for where the stranger was sleeping. Perhaps her father had changed his mind, listened to his wife and turned the man back out into the rain after all.

  But Dick Attlowe would never change his mind once it was set on a course of action. The only thing stronger than his Christian piety was his stubbornness – a trait which he shared with his daughter.

  The man was asleep on a pile of sacking by the barn’s main door. In the candlelight he looked very ordinary: dressed in homespun wool, with brown hair and a beard, and a large nose which looked red with cold. If he was an angel, Hester wasn’t sure how she would know, or what to expect. Father Cuthbert’s sermons were sometimes about saints being visited by angels but frustratingly short of detail about what they actually looked like. She assumed there would be light and the singing of heavenly choirs, or at least a sense of being in the presence of the Holy Spirit, whatever that felt like.

  The stranger shifted in his sleep, moaned, and coughed. They were wet, hacking coughs, and they left blood on his lips.

  Then Hester remembered that there were other angels – the kind that killed every firstborn son of Egypt, and appeared at the time of Revelation to unleash calamity upon humankind in the form of war, and famine, and plague.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she moaned, backing away. ‘I didn’t mean to. Please, I’m sorry.’ She wasn’t sure exactly who she was apologising to, or for what. Her mother? For disobeying her orders? The Lord, for her stubborn curiosity and doubt? Had she somehow brought this down on the poor man herself, like Eve, by giving in to temptation? She blew out the candle and blundered out of the barn, past the shifting, restless shapes of the oxen, latching the door closed behind her with a clatter and not caring if it woke anyone up, for what now could it possibly matter? She fled back to her bed, pressing herself as closely as she could to the underside of the roof thatch, wishing that she could disappear into it like the birds that nested there. She knew she should say something, but he was in the barn, wasn’t he? He couldn’t have had that much contact with her family and neighbours. He’d be gone by morning. And lurking underneath all of that rationalisation was the plain fact that she was simply scared, for she was, after all, just a child.

  9

  JOBS FOR THE BOYS

  PETER SHRUGGED ON THE HI-VIS VEST, STRAPPED ON the hard hat that Nash gave him, and followed through the gated entrance of the construction site.

  ‘Safety first, eh?’ said Nash, and chuckled as if at some private joke. ‘How long is it now? Two weeks?’

  ‘Nearly three.’

  ‘Superb.’

  They made their way along an access road between the half-constructed skeletons of residential houses; it was muddy and potholed, but if Nash was bothered by the mud spattering his shiny shoes and the cuffs of his suit trousers, he didn’t show it. The Clegg Farm development had been fields on the city’s periphery six months ago, but now it was almost the size of a small village itself, with new residents already having moved into properties at the town end while at furthest edge the plots were still little more than foundation trenches and piles of scaffolding. Where Peter and Nash were currently walking the only thing finished was the maze of roads and cul-de-sacs with the empty plots between them.

  ‘So how long have you been an electrician?’

  ‘Pretty much forever. Since school.’ The only thing he’d ever really been good at as a kid was taking things apart and putting them back together, but high school had turned out to be not the total shit-show everybody was expecting and he’d just about scraped decent enough grades to get onto a college training course. ‘Mostly domestic. Fuse boxes, house extensions, that sort of thing.’

  ‘And it pays the bills?’

  Peter shrugged, uncomfortable with talking about his family’s finances. ‘We get by. I’m self-employed – means I can take the jobs I want. My diary’s generally pretty full.’

  ‘Of course with all the Poles and Romanians buggering off back home that means more work for the home-grown talent.’

  ‘If you say so.’ On the occasions when he’d worked on bigger projects he’d always found the European lads to be hard-working and polite, and had never begrudged them a day’s work. It was more than could be said for some of the new ‘home-grown’ lads he’d seen coming through. Nash had offered to take him to meet the guy in charge of the sparkies working for the site’s electrical contractor, an invitation too good to pass up. It wouldn’t be an interview, he was told, just an introduction. As much as he disliked the kind of favouritism which invited his son to jump the queue into a prestigious school, he was pragmatic enough to appreciate that you didn’t get offered work if you didn’t put yourself forward. ‘This is some serious development,’ he said, to change the subject.

  Nash nodded with the indulgent pride of a lord showing one of his guests around the family estate. ‘It’s all part of the Trust. Not quite the tea-and-crumpets, cricket-on-thevillage-green type of thing you were expecting? Oh, we have all that, of course. St Sebastian’s, the White Hart. There is even a village green and a pond with actual ducks. Not to mention Stone Cottage,’ he added, with a little elbow nudge. ‘But you know that because you’re part of it now. It looks great on the website and attracts a few tourists – as well as a nice little bit of funding from various heritage charities. It’s what I like to call the village’s heart. Its inner core. That core has remained the same for a good couple of centuries, even as we’ve been swallowed up by the city sprawl; it’s only in the last few decades since the war that things have really… expanded, shall we say.

  ‘These days the Trust directly covers about one and a half square miles – that’s a thousand acres, give or take, with a population of twenty thousand. The vast majority of those people are just normal householders for whom living in the Trust is no different from anywhere else in the city, except that they pay an annual charge in return for slightly better services. Did you get hit by that bin strike the other year?’

  ‘Did we?’ Peter snorted. ‘We had a ground-floor flat, right by the bins. I had to borrow a snow shovel to get to the road. Christ, the smell of it.’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’ Again, the indulgent nod. ‘Never touched us here. Good links with trusted private contractors. And I don’t mean that to sound like bragging,’ Nash added hurriedly. ‘Just that I’m not ashamed to say that we look after our own, and we do it bloody well. Approximately fifteen per cent of our residents are classified as “in need” and the Trust is subsidised by the city council as a registered social landlord providing housing to some of the most deprived families in the city. We’re building two hundred homes here, and a third of those will be “affordable” for first-time buyers. That’s a lot of fuse boxes and extensions, if you take my meaning.’

  ‘For a trusted private contractor.’

  ‘Indeed. Come on, I’ll introduce you to Dino. Top man.’

  As they were approaching the ziggurat of stacked Portakabins which was the site’s offices, Peter’s phone rang, and he answered it to the tones of Trish’s furious indignation.

  ‘Wait, whoa, slow down,’ he said. ‘Tell me that again in full sentences.’ Turning to Nash, and aware of the man’s curiosity, he said, ‘Excuse me a moment,’ and turned away to walk a little back down the road, although there was a fair chance Nash would be able to hear her shouting through the receiver anyway. Peter had rarely heard her so enraged.

  ‘I said the letting agency has refused to return our security deposit! Absolute bastards!’

  ‘Why? What did they say?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know, some bullshit about breaching the terms of the original contents report and not leaving the flat in a “sufficiently neat and tidy condition”, the way the
y always do. How dare they? I scrubbed that place from top to bottom the day before we left! Absolute fucking bastards!’ He could hear tears in her voice now. ‘That’s nearly a thousand pounds, Peter! We can’t afford to lose that kind of money. What are we going to do?’

  He was tempted to say something about how now, without a mortgage to pay, they probably could afford to let it go, but he didn’t think that would help the situation. Scraping that deposit together when they’d been living in her parents’ spare room had been the first real test of their combined strength as a couple, and its worth was more than just monetary – it was pride in their self-sufficiency. He felt her anger stoking his. Someone in an office was trying to screw them over, and it didn’t matter whether it was for one pound or a thousand.

  ‘It’s going to be okay,’ he said. ‘There has to be some kind of appeal we can make. Just as soon as I’m done here I’ll come home and we’ll make an appointment with Consumer Advice, or something.’

  Gradually she calmed, though not by much, and when he hung up he found Nash had moved to a discreet distance but couldn’t hide the fact that he’d heard Peter’s side of the conversation. ‘Problem?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘It didn’t sound like nothing to me. In fact, it sounded very much like an angry and upset wife. I should know.’ He gave a rueful chuckle. When Peter summarised for him what had happened, he nodded as if this was the sort of unfortunate thing one could only expect from letting agencies. ‘Let me see what I can do,’ he offered.

  ‘No, really, it’s fine. I can take care of this.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Peter, I’m not threatening to cut off your dick,’ said Nash, exasperated. ‘I’m offering to help. I know people in housing. This is exactly my area of expertise. Now you can either accept that as freely and honestly given or you can go home and explain to Patricia why you turned it down and spend the next six months fighting it through arbitration and the small claims court.’ He took a step closer. ‘You might not be, but she is a Trustee, and we look after our own.’

  Peter relented. ‘Okay, thanks. I suppose I’m not used to having other people fight my corner.’

  Nash clapped him on the shoulder as they continued walking towards the Portakabins. ‘There’s fighting, and then there’s dirty fighting,’ he said.

  * * *

  Two days later, Nash was sitting across the desk from a Mr Cyril Doherty, manager of Doherty Property Lettings, a man who looked like someone had taken a meerkat, shaved it, and put it in a suit. He even had the twitchy head movements, which had increased as he’d become more incensed as Nash had laid out his case for why the Feenans should be given their deposit back immediately.

  ‘You’re out of your mind!’ Doherty sputtered. ‘You can’t just come swanning in here, demanding this, that and the other!’

  Nash looked at his watch. He was enjoying himself immensely. Sometimes it was a relief to get out of the citadel and mix it up with the mob, safe in the knowledge that any collateral damage wouldn’t wash up against his own walls. ‘Well I did try calling several times,’ he said, ‘but you seemed to be out of the office quite a bit so I just thought I’d pop down on the off-chance that you were in.’ He smiled and spread his hands. ‘And voila, here you are. It must be my lucky day.’

  ‘Get the fuck out of my office now, or I’ll call the police!’

  Nash sighed and stood, straightening the cuffs of his coat. ‘Very well, Mr Doherty, I understand that you’re a busy man, so I won’t impose on your time any further. Just as a friendly courtesy, though, just between fellow property managers, to show that there are no hard feelings so to speak, I would suggest that you make sure all your properties are fully compliant with environmental health standards. Angela Parry-Jones – sorry, did I tell you that I was on good terms with the council’s chief environmental health officer? Lovely woman is Ange – very, very thorough, and some of those fines can be quite steep. Not quite as steep as the cost of having to repair the damage should anything, ah, happen to them, of course, but a lot more than the Feenans’ pissy grand we’re talking about here.’

  ‘You’re threatening me—?’

  ‘No,’ he sighed. ‘I’m not threatening you. I’m having a perfectly reasonable conversation with a fellow professional about the importance of making sure that one’s properties are fully compliant with health and safety legislation, and incidentally asking him to reconsider an unhelpful decision regarding some new friends of mine. As they say, it never hurts to ask.’ He checked his watch again. Somewhere in the main office outside, a phone was ringing, and just as Mr Cyril Doherty of the oh-so-amusingly-rhymed Doherty Property Lettings was seething to his feet, scarlet with rage, his office door opened and a young man with an apocalyptic acne condition popped his head around.

  ‘Er, Mr Doherty—?’

  ‘Not now, Barry, can’t you see I’m in a fucking meeting?!’

  Barry flinched. ‘Er, yes, sir, but it’s the police on the phone.’

  Mr Doherty stopped, his mouth open, head jerking like an electrocuted chicken.

  ‘The…’

  ‘Yes, sir. Apparently there’s been a fire at one of the properties. A ground-floor flat on Amphlett Way. They say that fortunately it was empty at the time but it looks like it’s been completely gutted. Shall I put them on hold?’

  ‘No, I’ll… Put them through.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Barry’s head retreated and a moment later a red light began to blink on Mr Doherty’s desk phone.

  ‘That sounds nasty,’ tutted Nash. ‘Still, I suppose it could be worse. According to my information, your company currently manages twenty-seven rental properties in the Brownhills area, for a combined insurance cost of, ooh, half a million pounds, I’d say.’ He spread his hands as if the answer had been simple and out in the open all along. ‘All I’m asking for is a single thousand.’ He nodded at the phone. ‘You’d better answer that.’

  It was the efficiency of it that he liked most, Nash decided as he walked back to his car. Killing two birds with one stone. For the Feenans, the deposit was more than just money – it was a demonstration and a reassurance that the Trust would protect them. But if they did decide to do a runner when the inevitable happened, their old flat was now a nice, big, smoking reminder that there was nowhere safer that they could run to. No home other than Haleswell. No going back.

  10

  WITCH MARKS

  TRISH FOUND THE FIRST ONE WHEN SHE WAS EXAMINING the wide fireplace in the living room. At some point in the past it had been covered over with plasterboard and a gas fire put in – a truly ugly one with fake coals and a red light which was meant to give the impression of it being a real fire, despite the fact that the space for an actual fire was sealed up behind. As soon as they’d seen it, she and Peter had looked at each other and experienced one of those moments of marital telepathy in which each knew exactly what the other was thinking: roaring open fire, bottle of wine, sheepskin rug. They might even be able to get something that she could use to bake bread over the open fire, if that were possible. She knew that she was getting a bit ahead of herself on that score – her early experiments had left the kitchen looking like an explosion in a flour mill. It would take some work to rip out all the junk and restore the hearth to its former glory, but it was the kind of project that both of them loved – she as project manager, him as grunt monkey.

  All that remained visible at the moment, however, was a massive oak beam set lengthways in the wall above the fake fire, which had both supported the original opening and acted as a six-inch-deep mantelpiece. It looked like a medieval ship’s timber, dark with both age and the centuries of fires that had been lit beneath it. She was exploring it – curious as to how far back it went into the wall, how much it must weigh, and whether it was still structurally sound – when her fingertips detected carving in the middle of the underside. She bent down to look.

  Six perfect circles, overlapping to form a crude flower shape. The
kind of thing you drew in primary school with a pencil and compass, but etched deep into the oak. It couldn’t have been decorative because it was hidden on the underside, and it was too deliberate to be idle doodling.

  She took a photo and texted it to Natalie. Just found this. Any idea?

  She was surprised when Natalie called her back, almost immediately.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ asked the director of property and development.

  ‘Underneath the mantelpiece in the living room. Why? Do you know what it is? It’s not vandalism, is it?’

  ‘Not as such, no.’ There was something in the other woman’s voice – some sense that she was dancing around an uncomfortable truth that she didn’t want to admit – that made Trish uneasy.

  ‘If you know what it is, just tell me. You don’t have to worry about us backing out of the move – we’re in now. This is my home.’

  ‘Well,’ Natalie drew a deep breath. ‘It’s a witch mark.’

  ‘A what mark?’

  ‘No, a witch mark.’

  ‘Ha ha. You mean as in broomsticks, pointy hats, black cats, dancing naked in the moonlight?’

  ‘I mean as in just that. Loads of old houses have them. Back in the day when people actually believed that witches existed, they drew protective marks above doorways, windows, fireplaces, in roofs and cellars – anywhere they thought a witch might be able to sneak in.’

  ‘So there might be others?’

  ‘There may well be. Listen, if you find any others, don’t be tempted to remove them, will you? They’re part of the historical fabric of the building.’

  ‘Why on earth would I? This is all kinds of exciting – it’s like having a direct link back to the people who used to live here. I can’t wait to show Toby. He loves this kind of thing.’