by Phil Rickman
But these people clustered in the base of the bowl under the midday sun, they were not the dead.
The severely beautiful elderly woman, weeping, and the sharp-faced, white-haired man with an arm around her and the plump woman in a wheelchair and the leather-faced, crewcut man demanding an ambulance – surely somebody had a bloody mobile phone. And Lol, standing apart from the others, looking thoughtful.
And the pale, naked woman under the hop-frame, lying with the padded airline bag under her head. Not even she was dead.
Keep her here? Would that contain it? For how long? How long?
Merrily looked up at the sun.
Simon St John understood. ‘Get back. Please. Just a couple of yards, please.’ Simon was OK, he was in the clear – the woman was not dead, had not been dead when she walked under the wires. Simon was all right with this. Wasn’t he?
‘Yes,’ the woman agreed irritably, ‘Just keep back. I’m all right. I’ll be all right.’ She coughed, her head thrown back over the airline bag, a bubble of saliva and a half-masticated hop-petal in a corner of her slack mouth. ‘I’ll be with you in… just give me… give me a moment… give me a bloody minute.’
Merrily looked up at Simon. He nodded towards the woman. The hop-bine was still curled around her legs, yellowed petals crumbled into her pubic hair.
Simon said, ‘You know her?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Merrily knelt down, was immediately enclosed in a dense aura of sweat and hops. ‘Annie, listen to me – were you in the kiln? Were you in the kiln, just now?’
‘Cordon it off!’ The eyes were still blurred. ‘We… need the fire service. There’s probably—’
‘Yes,’ Merrily said.
‘Gases. An escape of gases.’
‘Or sulphur.’
‘I don’t… I got out of there, but I must have lost… Put somebody on the door. Don’t let anybody go back in there. It may be… I think I lost consciousness, just for a moment. You—’ She seemed to register Merrily for the first time. ‘What the hell are you—?’
‘I’m going back to the village,’ Charlie said. ‘We need an ambulance.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Annie Howe tried to sit up. ‘That’s—’
‘Who’s he?’ Simon demanded. The woman in the wheel-chair had made it from the path, breathing hard from her struggle across the baked ground. Simon was holding her hand.
‘Her father,’ Merrily told him. ‘Charlie, she’s right. Forget the ambulance. But—’ She met his eyes, his copper’s eyes now, hard as nuts. ‘There’s something else we need to do, and we need to do it now. I’m not kidding, Charlie, we’ve got a problem here, you must be able to see that.’
‘And possibly a solution,’ Simon St John said.
‘Dad?’ Annie Howe struggling to sit up. ‘What the hell are you—?’
‘Stay where you are, girl,’ Charlie said softly. ‘Everything’s all right.’ He looked down at Merrily. ‘She been attacked?’
‘Not in the way you think, no. In the way I think – do you know what I’m saying?’
‘I don’t know, Merrily, her clothes…’
Lol was there. ‘I think it’s pretty obvious she took them off herself, Charlie. The things we saw strewn across…?’
‘I’ll fetch them,’ Sally Boswell said.
Merrily came to her feet. ‘Charlie, I swear to God. I swear to you that this is not some scam. She was in the kiln just now – on her own. The wrong place at the wrong time. Charlie, it all comes down to that place.’
‘I was simply’ – Annie shook her ash-blonde head in irritation – ‘taking a final look round before we handed the keys back to…’ She looked vague for a moment. ‘Before we handed over the keys to S–Stock’s solicitors. Is there some water? If I can just have some water…’
Merrily said, ‘Charlie, I don’t have time to explain. You have got to—Please trust me.’
‘Look,’ Annie Howe said, ‘where’s the fucking car?’ She finally sat up. ‘Get these people—’
‘Stay where you are, Anne.’ Charlie’s jaw was working from side to side. ‘You’re naked, girl.’
‘What are you—?’ Annie Howe rose up suddenly, and Charlie Howe stepped to one side so that Annie was in the full sun.
There was a moment of silence, and then she started to scream, her head tossed back, eyes squeezed shut against the blast of light. Her spine arched in a spasm, her white breasts thrust towards the sun, her mouth opening into a big, hungry smile, as if—
In the instant that the screaming turned to laughter, Merrily was down by Annie’s side, both hands on her burning forehead. The eyes opened once, a flaring of panic and outrage under the sweat-soaked white-blonde hair.
It wasn’t all sweat, though. The top must finally have come off the flask inside, because the airline bag, where Annie’s head had lain, was soaked now with holy water.
Rebekah, Merrily said calmly, somewhere deep inside herself. Listen to me.
For an instant, hugging the Lady of the Bines, in all her persons, absorbing their coarse, racking sobs, she found the core – or maybe the core found her. The coin spun in the air and stayed in the air, caught in a confluence of sunbeams, and kept on spinning, bright new copper.
She could do this.
St Paul said: Put love first.
That simple: bypassing fear and revulsion, the heaving aside of a great concrete slab of personal resentment, ignoring even the stunning irony.
Behind her, Simon St John stood quietly, made the sign of the cross in the air above them.
Love is patient. Love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful, nor conceited. Love keeps no score of wrongs. There is no limit to its faith, its hope and its endurance.
Merrily felt her hands becoming very warm, warmer than the skin beneath. She was in a void, an emptiness that was infinitely vast and yet also movingly intimate. She didn’t understand. She didn’t have to understand. At some point, the words came automatically, from the final verse of the old Celtic anthemic prayer.
Let them not run from the love that you offer
But hold them safe from the forces of evil
On each of their dyings shed your light…
– ONE –
Love Lightly?
‘TWO,’ PROF LEVIN said over the phone. ‘Let me get this right. You’re showing me two songs?’
Tomorrow, the legendary producer was returning home for a few days. Tom Storey’s slow disembowelling of the blues, he said, was making everyone close to clinically depressed; they needed a break. This was costly, sure, but if Storey had any real need to worry about expense he’d be recording at Knight’s Frome.
Lol sat on one of the packing cases in the kitchen. It was almost dark. The sky was lime green in the north, and there were great banks of cloud. A storm was coming on and it was very humid.
‘I suppose, if I was being honest,’ he admitted, because this was a night for complete honesty, ‘I’d have to say the last verse of the first one needs rewriting. And I might have to dump the second one altogether, on account of it… Maybe it wasn’t my place to write it, not really.’
There was a long silence.
Prof said, ‘So, basically, just half a song, correct?’
‘Hopefully. I’m really sorry, Prof.’ And he was. He should feel ashamed. He had a lot of work to do.
‘It’s that bloody Boswell guitar,’ Prof said. ‘I knew it would be cursed.’
‘Oh, no,’ Lol said quickly. ‘No curse. I don’t think so. Probably no curse after all.’
No need, surely, for the burning of the Boswell vardo to become any kind of issue – although Al had told Lol that maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, he would not be over-surprised to wake up in the Lower World with a whole lot of explaining to do. He insisted he was taking nothing for granted; he would be grateful for each fresh day with Sally and the ponies and Stanley the donkey. He was grateful, too, obviously, to the drukerimaskri – if he’d had to borrow a place in which to be fo
und dead, he hadn’t particularly wanted to borrow it from Adam Lake.
So, Lol wondered, had he actually encountered Rebekah as he sat in the hop-yard under the midday sun? Had he, in fact, journeyed to the Lower World?
These were not questions that a gaujo had any right to ask, Al had said sternly. But, well, if the little priest had managed to retrieve the Romany soul of poor Rebekah, he would not deny having performed a little essential groundwork.
Al smiled: gypsies lied.
‘I’ve been thinking about you, Lol,’ he’d said finally, leaning on the fence around his paddock, watching Stanley browse the buttercups. ‘You and this thing about the Frome. This rootlessness, this having no home? As you may have gathered, we Romanies prefer to see this as a benefit – no estates, no cities, no cathedrals.’
‘But I’m a gaujo,’ Lol pointed out.
‘In which case,’ Al kept on smiling, ‘consider it the first stage in your personal development.’
Walking away, in the sunset, Lol had observed Sally coming down from the museum to meet Al. She wore a long, white dress, embroidered around the bosom, wide and flouncy at the hem, and at least forty years out of fashion.
Prof said, ‘The other thing – and I want the truth here, Laurence, no placatory bullshit – has that insane bastard been near the place?’
‘Who?’
‘Who? Stock, of course! The impossible creep who claims he’s being haunted out of his home. If you recall, around the time I was suggesting you should be thinking about producing at least four fresh songs, I also gave express instructions that Stock should not be admitted to the premises while I was gone, yes?’
Lol sighed. ‘You don’t read the papers much, do you, Prof… when you’re working?’
‘I don’t read the papers at all. I don’t read the mail. I don’t read menus, either, because when I’m working, with my stomach the way it is these days, I don’t even eat. No, I don’t read the sodding papers.’
‘Evidently not,’ Lol agreed.
He moved through the silent studio, where the Boswell guitar, in all her quiet beauty, sat on the stand, where the preliminary – and possibly final – tape of ‘The Cure of Souls’ still occupied the deck.
After a lot of noise, it was very quiet now.
A thousand questions still echoing; just a few answers.
Gomer Parry had brought Jane and Eirion across to Prof’s, and Eirion’s dad’s secretary had arrived in the BMW – she’d come up to Hereford by train with a spare set of keys to pick up the car from the police station where it had been accommodated overnight. And to collect Eirion. Jane had considered her options for a while before getting in the car with them. ‘Can’t let the poor dab face this alone.’
This was after the police had been and gone: Frannie Bliss, with DS Mumford. DCI Howe had left, it was presumed, with her father. ‘She’ll deny any of it happened,’ Merrily had said to Lol afterwards, as they waved the kids away to Pembrokshire. ‘Especially to herself. She’ll have had someone tell the press she was called away on another case, and she’ll never talk about it, not even to her dad. And she’ll hate me worse than ever. But that’s the price you pay.’
Lol said, ‘What would have happened to her, if you hadn’t—’
Merrily had just shrugged, and Lol had conjured, then dismissed, nebulous images of a hungry, promiscuous Annie Howe darkening into corruption.
Like her old man?
‘You think?’ Merrily had asked him.
‘I don’t really know. He went out of his way to tell you about Allan Henry and the corruption he wasn’t involved in. I just… don’t know.’
‘He told me you were going to blackmail him,’ Merrily said, ‘to keep Annie off my back.’
‘You see? He told you that. It doesn’t fit with him having something to hide, does it? I bet he does, though.’
‘Oh yeah,’ Merrily said. ‘No doubt at all. Would you have?’
‘Blackmailed him? I never even thought of it that way. I’ve never done anything like that before.’ He’d blushed. ‘Maybe.’
‘I don’t deserve it,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t deserve any of you… Sophie… Jane – don’t ever tell her I said that! I just… flounder about from one irrational scenario to another, making a balls of things, coming to false conclusions – appealing to God, apologizing to God… being terrified of coming one day to reject God. I mean, before all this began I was supposed to recruit a back-up team. I don’t know where to start. Simon—’
‘Forget Simon,’ Lol said. ‘Like you don’t have enough problems.’
‘He came through today, though.’
‘You don’t know what he’s like tonight.’
‘I do have a situation he could help with. If he’d be willing to talk to someone with the same kind of… sensitivity problem.’
‘Amy Shelbone?’
‘Either she represses it and it goes on causing trouble. Or she gets advice from the wrong kind of people and becomes something monstrous. She won’t get sent to a detention centre, but she might get put into the psychiatric system – and who’s that going to help? Not Amy, and certainly not any other patients she comes into contact with.’
‘Psychiatric medicine doesn’t allow for people like that,’ Lol said. ‘No use talking to Simon, though. He’ll only say he’d screw her up even more. How about I talk to Isabel and she talks to Simon?’
‘Would he talk to the Shelbones, too, do you think? As a psychic and a clergyman?’
‘But not in those jeans,’ Lol had said.
Merrily had yawned and asked if it was OK to go up to her cell in Prof’s cottage and lie down for a while.
There was no need to show her to the room; she knew the way. And, anyway, Prof had rung then.
It was evening now, with a premature darkening of the sky. Probably the coming of the long-forecast storm. Lol sat down in the booth with the Boswell, fingered the opening chords of the River Frome song. He needed to sleep; didn’t think he’d be able to.
He thought about the Boswell Romany philosophy: live lightly. And love lightly? He couldn’t love lightly, didn’t think Al Boswell could either. He found himself wondering, not for the first time, what would have happened if Al and Sally hadn’t found them in the hop-yard last night. Decided he wasn’t going to think about that ever again.
Or about Gerard Stock hanging in his cell.
‘Why did he have to kill himself?’ Merrily had said. ‘So many things nobody will ever know. Everyone said he wasn’t the suicide type.’
‘Circumstances can change the kind of person you are,’ Lol said.
‘Wolverhampton?’
‘Experience. I…’ He’d hesitated. ‘Suppose he had a… prison visitor…?’
Merrily had said, ‘Huw Owen uses the term “visitor” to describe the appearance of a relative or close friend – a comfort thing, usually.’
‘Maybe I mean burglar. Maybe that’s not logical. Where would it find female energy in the remand centre?’
‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past year,’ Merrily said, ‘it’s that human logic doesn’t often come into it. But… there might be absolutely no paranormal context to Stock’s death. I mean, I might have to operate on the basis that the Unseen permeates everything, but society functions well enough – if a little colourlessly – without it.’
Lol padded up the steps, along the minstrel’s gallery and into his loft, as the first thunder sounded from the west. He took off his round, brass-rimmed glasses and popped them into their case on the plywood onion box serving as his bedside table.
A vivid mauve light filled the skylight above him. It was open a little, and the loft was filled with the rich caramel smell of ripened hay from the meadow.
Lol felt inexplicably upset.
Well, perhaps not that inexplicably.
He let himself fall back on to the camp bed. But it wasn’t there. He came down on hay. He looked up at the blurred purple square of the skylight. Huh? Was he so over
tired he’d climbed up to the wrong loft?
He reached for his glasses on the onion box.
A hand closed around his wrist.
With so little sleep in two days, they’d both been beyond exhaustion, but this had somehow made it both more intense and more nebulous. Maybe the fatigue was responsible, also, for that sense of been-here-before, if only in dreams, and Lol had been afraid to sleep in case this should turn out to be another one.
It was the storm that awoke him, creamy lightning in the skylight, and he jumped up to close it against the inevitable rain, climbing on the camp bed, which she’d folded up before spreading the hay and straw and the duvet on top of it.
She said she’d dreamed of Stock. The carcass turning slowly, from side to side.
‘You see what you get sleeping with me,’ Merrily said.
They made love again, under the thunder, and then she lay on her back, and the rain began to hit the skylight in long, slow drops, as if each one had been calculated.
– TWO –
Strung Up
MID-MORNING, MERRILY went back to the vicarage, and then she planned to go and visit the Shelbones – or try to. Lol wanted to go with her, and then thought no: love lightly. Don’t seek to possess.
He went into the studio to think about creating a new song before Prof arrived back. Any new song; he knew it wasn’t going to be a problem. The sky was washed clean. The Boswell guitar felt like a living thing.
It was around eleven-thirty when DI Frannie Bliss phoned from Leominster.
‘Hope you don’t think I lied to yer about that press statement, Lol, but it’s not happened, has it? And now the lovely Snow Maiden’s gone on a few days’ leave. Which was unexpected.’
‘It’s God, Frannie. God looks after key personnel.’
‘You didn’t talk to anybody yourself, then?’
‘Never really got chance, in the end.’
‘Ah well…’ Pause. ‘Merrily wouldn’t be there, would she?’