Friends of the Dusk

by Phil Rickman

  ‘This means something to you, boss?’

  ‘I don’t honestly know. Might just be coincidence, but Neil Cooper lost an old human skull during the storm.’

  ‘Is one skull important to these guys? Cathedral seems to be built on bones.’

  ‘Let’s just eliminate it.’

  ‘I could just email this address, ask them who they are.’

  ‘No, let’s not talk to them till we know who they are. Neogoth – that’s a server?’

  ‘Not exactly btinternet. Could take a while to pin down.’

  ‘Anybody here can do it, it’s you.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Karen said.

  20

  Work in progress

  ‘WHAT IS IT, then?’ Mrs Kellow said calmly. ‘What is it if not an act of violence?’

  ‘Casey—’

  ‘He won’t face up to it. It’s like it nivver happened.’

  Dennis Kellow glared into his lap.

  ‘It’s how I deal with it. Is that all right?’

  Even in the daytime this was a three-lamp room. A small room from a time before glass. The mean, squarish windows were high up in walls of rubble stone – muscle ribbed by irregular, sinewy beams. Stone floor with worn rugs like old stains. A room where sunbeams would rarely reach the ground.

  It seemed more medieval inside than it had from the yard, despite the lamps and the plump-cushioned easy chairs. Merrily had watched Dennis Kellow sinking gratefully into one.

  ‘Coincidence,’ he said. ‘I’m far from a sceptic, but this was all coincidence.’

  ‘Whatever that means,’ his wife said.

  Casey Kellow was from New Zealand – way back, the accent fading in and out. She had a long, slender body, long legs, and white-blonde hair that made petals around her small features. Seemed placid and yet hardy and ageless, like someone who bent with the winds. Like a daffodil.

  ‘Stroke,’ she said. ‘What a nice, calm word that is. Like you stroke a cat.’

  Merrily nodded. A stroke was incredible violence, like a gunshot to the head.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it too much,’ Dennis Kellow said. ‘I do keep saying I need to put some distance between me and it. I’m doing everything I can to make sure I never have another, and that’s all there is to say.’

  Casey sniffed. He glared at her. She was quiet, he was volatile.

  ‘Well, I bloody am! And it helps if I don’t have to talk about it like some… old man. Like somebody who… who’s reached the age where you need to live near a fucking hospital. It’s bad enough—’

  He punched his right fist into his left palm. Perhaps he’d been about to say something about his son-in-law, the doctor, being brought to live with them like some ministering angel. Merrily worked on an understanding smile.

  ‘You need to let Mirrily be the judge,’ Casey said, ‘about how many coincidences you’re allowed before it stops looking like coincidence. Need to tell her the whole thing, Dinnis, it’s not like she’s…’

  ‘You’re not the imam, is what she means,’ Dennis said. ‘Our daughter, Nadya, who used to be Nicole, insisted we talk to the imam, and we were a bit worried about what he might do, OK?’

  ‘Well, I’m not qualified to say how he might’ve approached it, but I suspect it might not be all that different.’

  Was that right? Did Muslims deal with these anomalies in the same way? Did they even experience them in the same way?

  ‘I thought I could live anywhere in England, Mirrily,’ Casey said. ‘Anywhere in the sticks. Which is probably why we’re still together after all these years and all the leaking hovels he’s dumped me in. But this is… challenging.’

  ‘You’ve been over here long?’

  ‘Since art college. Where we met. Both of us ristless and looking for something that didn’t exist any more. He thinks this is it. Shangri flamin’ La.’

  ‘Came out here as an artist,’ Dennis said. ‘Turned into a builder. Same thing, really, just heavier. More of a restorer, I suppose. Restoring the big picture.’

  They gave Merrily tea and told her their story. One she already knew. Everyone who lived around here knew it. There was a breed of incomers who’d become naturalized and were now close to essential in the sticks. Middle-class young people who had arrived in the post-hippy years, white settlers buying decrepit cottages with a few acres. Sheep and chickens. Some hadn’t stuck it, the smallholdings became overgrown, the money ran out. But others had spotted openings, their once-suppressed business instincts beginning to stir. Soon, they were modernizing the hovel, selling it into a rising rural market, moving into a bigger one, flogging that. Discovering a talent for transformation. And then, against all their aspirations, finding themselves becoming millionaires. Secret millionaires, driving old Land Rovers, ashamed to expose their wealth because they were from Off.

  Casey Kellow picked up the packet of Lambert and Butler from a small leather-topped table.

  ‘You don’t, I suppose?’

  ‘My daughter’s trying to convert me to e-cigs. Unexpectedly, they do the business, though I’m enjoying telling her how hard the transition is.’

  Casey looked sceptical.

  ‘Wouldn’t work it for me, lovey. Too old now. And anyway, what’s five a day?’

  She lit one, and then Dennis Kellow, out of nowhere, came to the point.

  ‘Nobody in my business rubbishes the idea of ghosts. The kind of places we work in, so many odd things happen that, after a while, you hardly notice them. Not coincidence, but it’s no big deal either. I don’t know what happens, I do know it’s never particularly pleasant. But I’d never encountered anything that seemed as if it might actually be worth worrying about. Nothing physically harmful, you know?’

  ‘Means he nivver wanted to worry about it,’ Casey said.

  ‘I didn’t want anything getting between me and the project in hand, no. Certainly not something I couldn’t do anything about.’

  There was silence. A big old Scandinavian-type wood-stove sat in the inglenook, all cast-iron solid, no glass, no visible flames. Only the warmth in the room told you it was active. Whatever was happening here, it probably wasn’t happening in this room.

  ‘Tell her,’ Casey said. ‘And don’t play it down.’

  ‘Should we go to the room? Tell it there.’

  ‘What’s wrong with here?’ Casey said.

  ‘I won’t give into superstition.’ Dennis Kellow sat his mug on the table. ‘I’m not going to have another bloody stroke just talking about it. Come with me, m’dear.’

  Casey Kellow squeezed her cigarette out between finger and thumb, didn’t move.

  ‘Take your coat, Mirrily.’

  The upstairs was reached by a half-spiral staircase of stone slabs. The handrail was a rope, thick as Merrily’s arm. A low-wattage bulb glowed in a rusting bulkhead cage bolted to the wall at the top. Dennis led the way.

  ‘Back in the day – by which I mean the fifteenth century – the upstairs used to be a hayloft. Then it all got extended. There’s a more modern staircase at the other side, accessing the seventeenth, eighteenth-century extension where the Maliks live. Could be worse – means we don’t have to meet all that often.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s not like that.’ Dennis waited for her on a short, ill-lit landing, musty-smelling. ‘Not really. He’s not a bad chap, Adam.’

  ‘I meant to ask,’ Merrily said. ‘Your daughter and granddaughter – are they here?’

  ‘They went into Hereford. Aisha has a violin lesson then she meets friends. Nic— Nadya said she’d be back.’

  He didn’t sound confident about this. Merrily joined him on the landing. To the right was a short passage with a door each side and another at the end. To the left, a passage with a dark velvet curtain across. Dennis jerked a thumb at it.

  ‘Maliks that way. We have two small bedrooms and a bathroom here.’

  ‘Your daughter’s a convert to Islam, is that right?’

  ‘What di
d Khan say?’ He reached up to a rusted iron bracket reinforcing a beam, letting it take his weight. ‘Odd little bugger. What did he say about us?’

  ‘Not much. He said he was just an intermediary. Because he knew me, slightly.’

  ‘Our vicar talks too much,’ Dennis said.

  ‘When you say “our vicar”…’

  ‘Call ourselves Christians on the census forms. Which means, like most of the others, that we never go to church except for the occasional Christmas Eve midnight mass. But we try not to kill anyone or worship graven images. How much did Khan tell you?’

  ‘Very little. He said I needed to hear it from you. Or rather Mr Malik. He said the imam—’

  ‘That was all down to Nadya – we called her Nicole, she calls herself Nadya. She… When this became a bit too much to take, she got Adam to go and see the imam in Worcester, not expecting the fellow to say what he said. Bit of a surprise. She thought he’d be able to deal with it himself, keep it in the… in the faith. Never thought she’d be talking like that, she… You probably should know that, for all her adult life, where we’d written Christian, she put atheist. That was when atheists were still radical. She likes to be radical. Probably gets it from me, if truth were known.’

  ‘She switched from atheism to Islam?’

  ‘Maybe not that simple. Nothing’s simple with Nadya. Now…’ He walked along the passage to the end door, boards creaking. He brought out some long keys but still had to lean on the door to force it open. ‘This is the Castle Room. Work in progress.’

  He held the door open. Merrily walked through into a gloomy space with open beams and a floor of wide, warped-looking boards. The only light fell from high in the apex of an end wall. It was a grey light. Two walls were plastered, two were naked rubble stone. The only furniture was a couple of wooden stools and a long trestle workbench with a few tools on it.

  ‘This, I suppose, is the haunted room,’ Dennis said. ‘Somebody, at some time, had put in a dormer window to let more light in, but when I was working for Kindley-Pryce he asked me to get rid of it. Reinstate that—’ He pointed to the slitty aperture in the apex. ‘—as the primary light source. That was part of the original barn. This room would’ve been a loft, running the length of the original, early medieval building. I said, you do realize how dark that’s going to make it? I remember him beaming at me. Good, he said.’

  Merrily stood in the centre of the room and felt a familiar tension – in her, not the room. The room had probably been waiting for her with… in old houses, it sometimes felt like contempt. Today, she almost relished it. It might well, after all, be the last. The last time. The last haunting.

  Before she’d left home this morning, she’d called the gatehouse, left a message on Sophie’s machine asking if she could see the Bishop. One to one. Some approach to the truth.

  ‘You all right, Merrily?’

  ‘Bit cold, that’s all.’

  ‘Not something I can do anything about right now.’

  ‘Dennis…’ Pulling on the Barbour Casey had advised her to bring up here. ‘… before we go into anything, could you tell me a bit about the previous owner?’

  ‘Kindley-Pryce?’

  ‘I probably should know about him, but I don’t.’

  ‘What d’you want to know?’

  ‘Not sure. But he seems to have started all this. He employed you, I think. To do something that you think needs to be finished.’

  ‘Yes.’ Dennis went to lean against his workbench. ‘He started it, all right. Poor old bugger.’

  He was a curiosity. His dreams had been Utopian, but also medieval. Dennis said he didn’t fully understand Kindley-Pryce, but he didn’t think that mattered. They had Cwmarrow in common.

  ‘Casey didn’t like him much. Thought he was selfish, but she didn’t really know him. Casey didn’t like him because she thought I’d caught his disease, and maybe that’s true.’

  Selwyn Kindley-Pryce had been born in London but came, he always claimed, from an old Welsh Border family. He’d discovered the area in his students days, at Oxford, where he became a full-time academic. Early medieval history. Those were the days when property round here was dirt cheap and he’d bought a cottage out near Vowchurch, installed his young wife and their baby son there, while he spent most of the week in Oxford.

  ‘Which was selfish of him, I suppose. But he wanted a stake in the area. He’d started what was to become a lifelong study of aspects of local history and folklore. But he and his wife divorced – she found out what he’d been doing with some of his female students.’ Dennis laughed. ‘Always a ladies’ man. Anyway, paying her off meant he had to sell the cottage and he went to America, where there were lucrative opportunities for an English medievalist. His wife moved to Hereford with the child who is, of course, Hector Pryce.’

  ‘Seen the name somewhere…’

  ‘Probably on the side of a bus. Hector Pryce coaches?’

  ‘Ah. Of course.’

  Not one of the bigger public-transport firms, but well established.

  ‘He’s bigger than that now, for sure,’ Dennis said. ‘Married Lynne Hamer, widow of Malcolm Hamer, who owned a restaurant in town and crashed his plane. Now he owns all sorts. Pubs, restaurants. I was afraid he was going to develop this place when the old man went, but should’ve realized, not his style at all. Father and son, very different people. Hector was only too glad to see the back of it.’

  ‘No family rift while Kindley-Pryce was around, though.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem to have been. His wife married again, might be dead now. Selwyn returned from America a moderately wealthy man, having heard Cwmarrow was for sale.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Twenty-odd years ago? He’d published several books by then, renewed some connections in Oxford. Bought it all, the Court, the castle, the valley. A romantic, inspired by the medieval microcosm, the enchanted valley with the castle on the hill. But also an expert – history, architecture.’

  ‘What was the house like then?’

  ‘A wreck. But he was fit, prime of life, relishing the challenge. Inspired by his vision.’

  Dennis hadn’t put lights on in here. There were no working lights. He said he’d get to that. Merrily zipped up the Barbour and waited.

  ‘Some of this I don’t understand,’ Dennis said. ‘But I’m just a builder.’

  ‘Who went to art college.’

  ‘A builder with a soul. I want to restore what can be restored. Maybe get round a few of the rules for the sake of aesthetics, but no outlandish ambition. Just to live out what’s left of my life here and leave it secure in its beauty. But not a visionary like him. He used to say he could see new community rising out of the overgrown foundations of the village. Artistic… creative. A lot of artistic people, writers, poets, musicians would come down for events, small festivals – he installed a few caravans in the paddock at the back for those who wanted to stay. Summer nights of music and storytelling. He loved storytelling, the oral traditions.’

  ‘I’ve not heard of any of this.’

  ‘It wasn’t advertised, Merrily. Strictly word of mouth. It was actually a bit ramshackle. But it paid for some of the continuing work on this house, the cost of which he seriously underestimated. I actually think he was in two minds about having people around. Once asked me about floodlighting the castle, then changed his mind because he realized it’d become a tourist attraction. In the end, I think he wanted it for himself.’

  ‘I’m still…’ She curled cold hands inside her sleeves. ‘… not really getting a picture of him, somehow.’

  ‘He wouldn’t want you to. He cultivated the mysterious. All a pipe dream, really. He had a few people who were sympathetic to his ideas putting money into it, including his son. But I think that was for appearance’s sake. Hector’s a very different kind of guy. Hard-nosed go-getter.’

  ‘So… what happened?’

  Dennis Kellow may have grimaced, too dark to be sure. He talked about the
problems of remedievalizing. Attempts had been made, in various centuries, to modernize the place, but Kindley-Pryce had wanted it closer to its original state. Which wasn’t easy, because a listed building was more or less in aspic from the day it was listed, and if it had been listed in the 1970s, you had problems.

  ‘Can’t just walk in and strip everything back to the year 1450 or whenever just because the owner prefers rudimentary. We had a battle to be rid of the dormers. Obviously, he never finished it, even with me at work. Let alone uncovered what might remain of the village. Thought he finally had the answer when he met Caroline Goddard. You heard of her?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Children’s writer and illustrator. Like a creature from folklore herself. Hair long enough to sit on. They had a relationship, working and otherwise, and out of it came a couple of books for kids, under the pseudonym Foxy Rowlestone. Which were building substantial sales. All looking promising. But then…’

  Merrily looked around the room where shadows were draped like dustsheets.

  ‘He died here? I mean, in the house?’

  Dennis Kellow blinked.

  ‘Did I say he died?’

  21

  Bad guy

  THERE SEEMED TO be even more boxes in Neil Cooper’s flat. Nothing like moving home to make you realize how much shite there was in your life. Bliss put his phone on a packing case in front of Cooper. The phone was displaying a picture demonstrating that even death didn’t get you out of the shite.

  Cooper, sitting on an upturned toy box, stared blankly at the picture then at Bliss.

  ‘What is this?’

  His fair hair was dusty, his face looked stretched. He seemed to have aged since they last saw him, less than two hours ago. The day had aged, too, the sash window shut against an irritable sky and intermittent rain.

  ‘It’s a dirty old skull, Neil,’ Bliss said. ‘But is it your skull?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your missing skull from the Castle Green – is that it?’

  ‘It’s just an image. I can’t tell from an image.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t rule it out.’