Friends of the Dusk

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Not sure. More by the time I got back.’

  ‘Who were they?’

  ‘Nobody I knew. I imagine word was spreading. Shops not long closed. I was trying to be polite and tell them there was nothing to see, but it was clear it had got out about the bones. People love bones, don’t they?’

  ‘You reckon?’

  Neil Cooper bent, lifted a brick so he could draw back a corner of the plastic sheet, plywood slats underneath. He lifted one, beckoning Vaynor to shine his lamp down. In the earth, Bliss made out what might have been part of a ribcage, flattened like old rubber. Interesting but hard to love.

  ‘Not exactly the first bones found here, right?’

  ‘What? Oh no. Good God, no. And the nearer you get to the Cathedral… it’s like one big charnel house under there. Bones upon bones, upon bones. Thousands of skeletons, men, women, children discovered in The Close. And people were buried here – on what became Castle Green – before there was a cathedral. Hundreds of bodies found.’

  ‘So how come they missed this feller?’

  ‘Just that we don’t make a habit of destroying mature trees to see what might be underneath. But when one happens to blow down…’

  ‘Was it a full skeleton? When it was first revealed?’

  Cooper winced. Behind him, the dying wind was wheezing like an old Hoover.

  ‘What I’m asking, Neil, is are you absolutely sure it originally had a head?’

  ‘Francis, leaning over the hole I was this….’ Cooper opened his muddied hands to the width of a brick, ‘this far away from it. I was staring into its eye-sockets. Amazingly, the roots had not become entangled in the skeleton, or the bones would’ve been dragged up and they’d be all over the place. The roots stopped just above the bones, so it was virtually all exposed.’

  ‘So when did it not have a head?’

  ‘All right.’ Cooper nodding hard, drawing breath. ‘It was still raining so I covered it over lightly with some soil before I went to call the police.’

  ‘Having already phoned your colleagues to come and assist?’

  ‘By the time I got back they were here with the truck.’

  ‘So who was here while you were on the phone?’

  ‘You’ve asked me that before. I don’t know. It was very dark.’

  ‘And when the police came… did they see the head, the skull?’

  Vaynor tapped Bliss’s arm, shaking his head. Figured. On a night like this Mills and Calder would’ve lost interest rapidly when they learned the corpse wasn’t exactly fresh. Called in, cleared off.

  ‘And you’ve looked all around?’ Bliss said.

  ‘Best we could, with all this mess. We’re not really going to get anywhere without chainsaws, and that’s not going to happen till tomorrow. Yes, I suppose it’s possible somebody might’ve picked up the skull and then thrown it down somewhere.’

  ‘Or even in the river.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  Cooper turning away.

  ‘It’s really not your fault, mate,’ Bliss said. ‘Bloody chaos here, these conditions.’

  ‘Couldn’t just have got mislaid, kicked away, I’m sure of that. Somebody had to have gone down in the hole and lifted it out. Now who would want to do that?’

  ‘Neil…’ Bliss exchanged a lamplit glance with Darth Vaynor. ‘I’m not saying that’s a naive question exactly, but… Were there any kids here? Teenagers?’

  ‘Kids?’

  The team erecting the head-high protective fence had nearly finished and were waiting, a respectful distance away, with the last section at their feet and a sign saying DANGER.

  Neil Cooper sank his hands into his jacket pockets.

  ‘If it is kids, it’ll be in pieces by now.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Bliss said. ‘Could be on a shelf in a teenager’s bedroom. A ciggy between its teeth.’

  ‘Thanks for that, Francis.’

  Cooper didn’t look at him. Well, what did he think – that they’d be doing house-to-house, putting out a photofit of some bugger who’d passed on eight centuries ago? Was body-snatching still an offence? Was this body-snatching, or just petty theft? And from whom? Who owned rotting old bones?

  Police life was too short for this. And yet…

  ‘Nothing else you want to tell me, is there, Neil? Something that might not be obvious to dumb coppers?’

  Lifting an apologetic hand to Vaynor, who had some totally unnecessary posh degree from Oxford.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Cooper said.

  ‘Well, if you think of anything, Neil,’ Bliss said, ‘you know where I am.’

  For a while, anyway.

  Till he was forced to leave Hereford due to the resurrection of something old but recent enough to stink.

  Bliss turned back into the wind, gritting his teeth, firming up his beanie.

  3

  Hallowe’en. Normal, irrational anxieties

  HUW OWEN’S PHONE voice always brought up the same portrait, in the style of Whistler’s Mother only sloppier. Spiritual director in repose in a severe rectory in the Brecon Beacons. Sitting back, stretching out his legs in frayed jeans, no shoes. Rag-haired Welshman with a Yorkshire accent and holes in his socks.

  ‘Just my annual Hallowe’en call, lass,’ he said.

  Merrily said nothing. She didn’t recall him ever phoning her at Hallowe’en before. More likely, he’d just sat down, examined his mental agenda and noticed the word Merrily had found its way to the top.

  Sitting at her desk in the old scullery, in a circle of light from the Anglepoise lamp, she sipped tea and winced: too hot, too strong, no sugar.

  ‘Well, come on,’ Huw said. ‘How’d it go?’

  ‘How did what go?’

  ‘Him. Him in the Bishop’s Palace.’

  ‘I haven’t met him yet.’

  ‘I thought it were today.’

  ‘It’s tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh.’

  They’d not spoken for a couple of weeks. Not since she’d run the name of the new Bishop of Hereford past him and his reaction had been fast and… the word was probably forthright. And then he’d calmed down, said maybe he’d overreacted, ignore him, he had a lot of work on. So she’d ignored him, put it out of her head that there might be dark history between Huw Owen and the new Bishop of Hereford, who’d replaced poor old Bernie Dunmore with unusual speed.

  It was too warm, the warmest Hallowe’en she could remember. Rain had blown through, leaving the roads faintly steaming. The neck of her clerical shirt was undone, the dog collar on the desk by the phone. The last day of October. It was unnatural.

  ‘You’ve been quiet,’ Huw said.

  ‘Well… domestic stuff. Jane came back yesterday. Lol’s coming back tomorrow. Getting organized. All that.’

  A silence.

  ‘That woman sorted? Her in the hairdresser’s house?’

  ‘Hopefully.’

  A few weeks ago she’d expected to be summoned to give evidence at crown court where a woman was being tried for murder. Knowing that, when the case was reported in the media, she would be the defendant, forced to explain to a jury exactly what she did, as a so-called exorcist, and why she thought it was necessary and relevant. All the time knowing she’d only been put in the witness box to be taken apart, bit by bit, in front of a roomful of sceptics so that the defence could show how an already disturbed woman had been pushed over the edge by the belief that her home was still occupied by a dead previous occupant.

  A belief that the so-called diocesan deliverance minister had done nothing to discourage.

  But the woman had pleaded guilty. No trial.

  Salvation. For now.

  ‘Still getting the anxiety dreams, mind,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Aye.’

  More silence, several heartbeats’ worth. Then his voice was louder in the old Bakelite phone.

  ‘I’m always here, you know. Might be a miserable old bugger, but I’m not going anywhere. Yet.’

  ‘Goo
d. I’m glad.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘What?’ She swallowed too much tea and burned her tongue. ‘Why does everybody suddenly think I want out?’

  ‘Who else thinks you want out?’

  ‘I dunno, I— You remember Anthea White?’

  ‘Athena?’

  ‘As she prefers to be known. Athena, yes.’ She didn’t think Huw had met Miss White. If they ever did, it would be epic, gladiatorial. ‘I dropped in on her, last week.’

  ‘She’s a witch.’

  ‘Actually, she despises witches.’

  ‘In the original sense. How come you keep putting yourself through it?’

  ‘I dunno. She’s been helpful to me, as you know, even though I feel it would be wrong to tell her that. She knows all the places… all the places angels fear to tread. Because of what they might pick up on their sandals.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  ‘Also I know she’s never going to admit how lonely she is. And so, occasionally, I… expose myself to it. I’d hate to think we’re two halves of something, but… Anyway she looks at me in that knowing, baleful way, like some evil granny, and she asks me if I’m thinking of packing it in.’

  ‘The Night Job.’

  The Night Job. Jane had been the first to call it that. Huw loved it, had added it to his lexicon of secret-service style euphemisms for this madness.

  ‘The lot, actually. The whole fancy-dress party. Cassock in the Oxfam bank, as she put it. Which was odd because I’d just been thinking about that, in quite a level, realistic kind of way. I’d been over to Hay, to look in on the Thorogoods in their shop. See how things are now.’

  ‘Aftercare.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Part of the deliverance programme; in the end, she’d done a minor exorcism of place in the shop in Back Fold. Betty Thorogood had phoned, Merrily asking her what they’d be doing tonight, for Samhain, the Celtic Feast of the Dead. Nothing, Betty had said. It doesn’t matter any more.

  And Merrily had found that disturbing because she’d thought it did matter. They’d followed a spiritual path, believing in something bigger, albeit pagan, and now, because they felt it had rebounded on them…

  Supporting the heavy old phone with both hands, she stared into the empty dog collar on the desk. She could hear Jane coming downstairs, home prematurely from Pembrokeshire. After so many weeks alone in the house, it sounded like burglars. Jane had once delighted in paganism, too. A couple of years ago, the kid would be galvanized by Samhain. This morning, she hadn’t mentioned it, perhaps hadn’t even noticed the date.

  ‘It’s a secular society, Huw. Comparatively few of us will now admit to believing in anything unscientific. I can accept that half the world thinks I’m fooling myself. What’s harder to take is that a proportion of the other half think I’m trying to fool them.’

  ‘You’re grasping at straws, thinking any kind of spirituality – paganism, whatever – is better than nowt?’

  ‘And how far the night job is conditioning my own faith. No, of course, I don’t want out. It’s just that sometimes you examine your reasons for carrying on.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said.

  Like he knew what was coming, and maybe he did.

  ‘Bottom line, I’ve even asked myself if I could do one without the other now. And that’s not good at all. The Night Job’s become a touchstone.’

  ‘Touchstone,’ Huw said. ‘What a lovely word that is.’

  ‘Like I’m starting to measure everything against whatever evidence of transcendence – or an afterlife or something else – that I’ve collected through working as an exorcist. Like I’m using the woo-woo stuff as support for an increasingly unstable belief system.’

  ‘Highlighting a failure of faith?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  The phone felt damp against her skin. She scrabbled around for her cigarettes and then remembered. Bugger.

  ‘Listen,’ Huw said, ‘I can’t tell you how strong your faith is. That’s summat between you and Him. Or Her, depending. Or it might be faith’s just a device to enable us to carry on in the face of all the shit, and some of us need that bit of extra hands-on to top it up. For which—’

  ‘Yeah, but if we need that—’

  ‘—for which, if you hadn’t realized this, we bloody suffer. We get extra shit.’

  ‘We can’t win?’

  His laughter crackled in the heavy old phone, multiple creaks suggesting he was coming to his feet.

  ‘Jesus Christ, you want to be seen to win now?’

  She was silent. The whole house was silent. Last night, she and Jane had crouched over an open fire in the sitting room, and she’d sensed an uncertainty in Jane about the future, about what kind of adult she wanted to be. She’d been working with real archaeologists in West Wales to get an idea of whether she wanted to become one, whether real archaeology would support her fascination with ancient myths in the landscape or crush it.

  ‘You still there, lass?’

  ‘Sorry. I try to be open to possibilities while, at the same time, sceptical and impervious to people like Anthea White who undoubtedly know how to mess with minds. But I don’t know what kind of person this is turning me into.’

  And was she going to be the same person Lol had loved?

  He was coming home tomorrow after a long summer of touring, session work, production work. All of it good for him. Maybe too good. So good he’d be restless. So good that Ledwardine, the village he’d once been almost agoraphobically reluctant to leave, would probably seem tame and restrictive.

  Normal, irrational anxieties. Hints of an early menopause? God, don’t start that again. Merrily found the e-cig in her bag. It had run out of charge. She had a packet of cigarettes in a drawer in the kitchen, but if Jane smelled smoke…

  ‘So, it’s tomorrow.’

  ‘Huh? Oh… yeah, the Bishop. He’s coming over to the gatehouse. Sophie says he wants to see the set-up.’

  ‘Sophie’s staying on as Bishop’s secretary?’

  ‘And mine. I hope. And probably whoever comes after me.’

  ‘She said owt to you?’

  ‘No.’

  It had all happened with unexpected haste. They’d thought at first that Bernie Dunmore’s stroke would be less disabling. Hadn’t expected him to call it a day so rapidly. And suddenly he’d gone and there was a new Bishop of Hereford.

  Huw said, ‘What’s the word in the cloisters? About the new regime.’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I don’t spend time in the cloisters.’

  ‘Happen you should. Them Cathedral lads always hear the whispers.’

  ‘Huw—’

  ‘Course, he might’ve changed.’

  ‘You keep saying that… When I first hung his name on you, you asked me to pardon your French and then you called him—’

  ‘I know what I called him. And it were thoughtless of me to burden you, wi’ my prejudices.’

  ‘Might’ve been less thoughtless if you’d gone on to tell me what they were. No! Sorry. I don’t want to know. I’ll make up my own—’

  ‘Quite right.’ Huw paused. ‘So what time are you scheduled to meet the cunt?’

  ‘Two-thirty tomorrow afternoon. You want me to give you a call afterwards?’

  ‘If you want. I’ll happen send up a prayer for you, lass.’

  4

  Win-win

  FOR A FEW moments, it looked to Lol like the old days. Car lights on the square warped in ancient glass, the shifting of apple logs in the hearth. Familiar cider taps on the bar top. Except that Barry was wearing a raffish black eye patch and, against the Jacobean oak of the pillars, the smoke pluming around Gomer Parry was Vatican-white.

  It couldn’t be…

  He pulled out a stool under the long mullioned window, next to Gomer, who glanced at him, nodding.

  ‘Ow’re you, boy.’

  Lol registered that it wasn’t smoke.

  ‘Gomer?’

  The old guy looked down, thro
ugh his glasses, at the device in his hand, smiled.

  ‘Janey, this is.’

  ‘Gave you that?’

  ‘Present from Pembroke.’

  ‘And you’re… getting on OK with it?’

  ‘En’t bad,’ Gomer said.

  God, you really had to hand it to Jane. The old guy must’ve been doing roll-ups for well over sixty years.

  Barry was watching from behind the bar, formally attired with it being Friday night: black suit, black eye patch. In no time at all, the patch had become part of his legend, another ex-SAS emblem, except it was more recent. Lol felt close to tears, all they’d gone through together, these guys and him. He never wanted to leave this village for so long again. Maybe wouldn’t have to.

  He nodded at Gomer’s cider glass.

  ‘Another one?’

  Whole weeks had passed over the summer and early autumn with Lol only occasionally getting back to Ledwardine, each time having to leave after less than two days. No half measures with touring. He hadn’t liked it one bit, but he’d done it.

  Proving he could.

  And then, just as it was coming to an end, Prof Levin had called to say Belladonna was demanding his services as session man – sole session man – on the comeback album nobody other than Bell was going to describe as long-awaited. It had taken the best part of a month at Knight’s Frome studio. Another month away. With Bell, you couldn’t snatch days off, couldn’t even count on a full night’s sleep. A woman that age with so much latent creative energy, it was scary.

  But he was a professional again. Hell, not even again, this was probably the first time. He’d earned the right to return, look guys like Barry in the eye when he walked into the Black Swan.

  And then, as he was preparing to leave this morning, job done, Prof, instead of just handing him an envelope, had taken him into the office to write a cheque.

  But that wasn’t the half of it.

  Bloody hell.

  ‘Thing is,’ Gomer said, ‘I can do it in yere and he can’t say nothin’, see.’

  ‘Not yet, anyway,’ Barry said. ‘Government’ll doubtless find a way of screwing it. Or taxing it bigtime. It’s what those bastards live for.’

  Gomer wafted the vapour at him as the e-cig lit up green. The tube looked like a combination of opium pipe and hypodermic.