To Dream of the Dead (MW10)

by Phil Rickman

  ‘I’m not really getting an image, Harri.’

  Bliss was cold and his hands were going numb and whatever the Serpent had been they’d reburied it, so the council could put their road across it. Just another construction site now.

  ‘Ever seen the Uffington White Horse in Berkshire, Mr Bliss?’

  Bliss shook his head. Didn’t recall ever being in Berkshire. He did remember a white horse in Wiltshire, in the context of a miserable camping holiday with Kirsty before they were married. Kirsty whingeing the whole week.

  ‘May have seen one on the Wiltshire Downs. Chalk?’

  ‘That’ll do. Now, forget the chalk and instead of a horse think of a snake. Or, if you like, think of a river. Think of the Wye. Could our structure have been designed to replicate the actual course of the Wye, winding from the top of the hill to the banks of the river itself?’

  ‘That far?’

  ‘It’s not very far. The river’s down there, behind those industrial buildings. This is about the hill, the river and the moon.’

  Harri told him the theory about this sinuous spectral form winding its moonlit way to the top of the hill.

  ‘Prehistoric son et lumière?’ Bliss said.

  ‘The sound would be chanting. A sacred hill, see. A lot of hills were sacred. And the river. Water was always very significant, and the Wye’s a magnificent river so it would be venerated above all others in the west. Therefore, if we imagine . . .’

  Harri walked to the top of the mound and started weaving his arms about, the way blokes used to air-sketch a voluptuous woman.

  ‘. . . If we imagine something mystically – and very visibly – connecting the hugely powerful River Wye with the highest hill in these parts. Something suggestive of a coming-together, a confluence, of these great power symbols, the hill, the river and the moon.’

  ‘Now about to be trashed by a new road slicing through the middle, courtesy of the Hereford Council,’ Bliss said. ‘Would that be a fair assessment?’

  ‘Hey . . .’ Harri Tomlin put up his hands. ‘Wasn’t me done him, guv.’

  ‘So much for a quick result. Where do you lads go from here, Harri?’

  ‘Probably try to extend the excavation in the direction of the river, see how far the Serpent goes. Which means digging on private land, so may take a while to organise.’

  ‘And when you say these places are sacred, what’s the significance of that, in terms of what they were doing here back then?’

  ‘Ritual.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Search me. That word covers up a lot of ignorance. We don’t know what rituals were involved, of course we don’t.’

  ‘Human sacrifice, maybe?’

  ‘Ah, see, people like to think there was human sacrifice all over the place, but it probably wasn’t all that widespread. It’s common to think of Bronze Age people as primitive savages, but they must’ve been quite sophisticated.’

  ‘Savagery itself, Harri,’ Bliss said quietly, ‘can sometimes be quite sophisticated.’

  Harri Tomlin looked across at the stripped ground and the slaughtered trees, his legs apart, his fluorescent yellow jacket gleaming with rain. Then he looked at Bliss.

  ‘What are you after? You really think somebody killed Ayling because he was being so negative about this discovery? I mean, you actually think that’s a possibility?’

  ‘It’s a possibility, Harri.’

  ‘Can you tell me why you’ve made this connection, because from my point of view—’

  ‘Nothing personal, Harri, but it’s not my decision how much we reveal and when. I can tell you there was a ritualistic element. And the connection with this site . . . that’s beyond argument.’

  ‘Which is why you borrowed some quartz chippings from us yesterday?’

  ‘And if you can think of anything else that might help us, I hope you won’t hold back.’

  Bliss let the silence dangle, looking at Harri Tomlin through half-closed eyes.

  ‘Look,’ Harri said. ‘You want me to get fanciful here, is it? I mean, I’m not going to have to repeat all this in court at some stage?’

  ‘I’m not writing it down, Harri, and I’m not wired. Be as fanciful as you like.’

  ‘All right, then,’ Harri said. ‘Heads.’

  ‘Heads, plural?’

  ‘I’m not so much thinking of the guys who laid out the Serpent, I’m thinking the people who built the camp or fort on Dinedor Hill. The Iron Age Celts, who came over here from Europe, two or three thousand years ago. They were very into heads. They believed that the seat of consciousness – the soul, if you like – was located in the head. So the Celts tended to take off the heads of their enemies.’

  ‘That a fact.’

  ‘After death, this is. And, from your point of view, it possibly gets better. A contemporary Roman account tells how they’d preserve the head of a distinguished enemy in cedar oil and keep it in a chest for display. Or they might offer it up to the gods. Skulls have also been found, in quite large numbers, at shrines and other sacred places.’

  ‘Like the old Blackfriars Monastery?’

  ‘No, no, Mr Bliss – medieval, that is.’

  ‘Couldn’t be a Celtic site or something underneath?’

  ‘If there is, we haven’t found it yet. Sorry.’

  ‘So, let’s look at this a minute, Harri. We’ve gorra mixture of historical periods. But wouldn’t this serpent . . . wouldn’t that still have been around in Celtic times?’

  ‘We think not. A Roman ditch cuts across it, so it was certainly silted over by then. However, the hill itself would still have been venerated and perhaps a memory of the Serpent remained. Perhaps it still . . . For instance, while I’ve been working here, people have told me how families used to follow a path to the top of Dinedor on special days, like a pilgrimage?’

  ‘To this day?’

  ‘Near enough,’ Harri Tomlin said. ‘That’s a ritual, too, in its way, isn’t it? Beliefs and customs often last longer than physical remains. There’s also – I don’t suppose this helps you, particularly, but there’s a link between heads and water – specifically wells and rivers. Skulls have been found in rivers.’

  Bliss was gazing up at Dinedor Hill, trying to stitch all this together. The important thing was that Harri Tomlin was strongly supporting the ritual element in the killing.

  ‘You get many . . . I dunno, modern pagan-types coming to see the site, Harri?’

  ‘Oh, some days . . .’ Harri was smiling ‘. . . you’d look up from your trench and they’d be coming out of the woods like the Celts of old. Home-made, multicoloured sweaters and dowsing rods. Harmless enough. Quite respectful, in general. You tell them not to walk across the site, they won’t. Very respectful. Give me pagans any day, rather than bored kids.’

  ‘You get to know any of them?’

  ‘Not by name. One weird beardie is much like another, I find. We don’t get them now, mind – had to be a lot more strict about sightseers since the accident.’

  Bliss blinked at him.

  ‘Two of the boys cutting down trees. If it’s a big one, one of them goes some distance away to get the wider view and then gives a whistle when he can see it’s clear. Boy with the chainsaw, he swore he’d heard the whistle, see . . .’

  Harri put a hand behind an ear by way of illustration. Bliss waited.

  ‘Well, the other fellow never whistled because he wasn’t out of the way himself. Tree comes down, wheeeeeee.’ Harri lowered his arm, slowly. ‘Fractured skull, smashed shoulder. Two operations on that shoulder.’

  ‘You were here at the time?’

  ‘Worn my hard hat religiously ever since, Mr Bliss.’

  Bliss handed his back. Five past one. Time to leave, if he was going to make Gilbies by half past.

  ‘All the way to the ambulance, he was swearing he hadn’t whistled,’ Harri said, like Bliss might want to make something of it. ‘Funny how your senses can play tricks in a big open space like this.’
/>   24

  Poisoning the Apple

  MERRILY WENT INTO the church, up into the chancel, to meditate . . . pray.

  Taking off Jane’s red wellies and sitting, thick-socked, in the old choirmaster’s chair. Hands palms-down on her knees, eyes almost closed, breathing regulated. This was how she went about it now, when she was on her own. Less liturgical, more meditative. Feeling for answers . . . truth.

  Feeling for anything, actually, today, as the rain tumbled on the roof, rushed into the guttering, roared inside her head – a punishing noise. Her reward, probably, for opening The Hole in the Sky at random.

  . . . understand this: Christianity has already entered its final phase. By the end of this century, ‘Jesus Christ’ will be nothing more than a mild oath, the origins of which will be a mystery to most people under the age of seventy.

  She’d put the book down. Not thrown it down, just laid it next to the sermon pad.

  It was not the issue. It was meaningless, like the arrival in Ledwardine of Mathew Stooke. No significant coincidence here – all the picturesque backwaters, forget it, the guy had to live somewhere.

  This was not the reason she needed to go into the church.

  Merrily had spent about twenty minutes mentally laying out the real issue, walking all around the house and ending up in Jane’s attic apartment where there were stacks of old magazines: back copies of Pagan Dawn, Pentacle, White Dragon, other homespun journals representing Wicca, Druidry and all pagan points in between. Bought and absorbed by thousands of people far too shy to dance naked around a woodland fire.

  And people who weren’t. And people who did.

  A long-established subculture was renewing itself, Jane would insist, while Christianity withered, in these days of industrial abuse, greed, neglect and consequent climate change. As the Earth bled, paganism was the only practical belief system and if the Church wanted to survive it needed to alter its remit accordingly.

  Jane’s view of it was rose-tinted, of course – paganism just this all-embracing term for Earth-related green spirituality, a striving for oneness with the elements, sometimes personified as gods and goddesses, the male and female energies in nature. Pagans were more aware of their immediate environment, more connected to the land – this land, these hills, these fields. And when the land was raped and its ancient shrines desecrated by secular governments, pagans felt the pain, almost physically. Felt the violence. A spear into our spiritual heart, as the Irishman, Padraig Neal, had put it.

  But this wasn’t some enlightened, half-faerie super-race. Pagans and green activists were just more flawed human beings, prone to anger, frustration, irrational hatreds, mental imbalance . . . and firing off inflammatory emails.

  Emails were not like letters. Emails were shot from the hip and, by the time you’d realised you’d gone too far, it was too late, you’d sent it. Sure, there was a lot of anger about, but there was a big difference between sending a knee-jerk email and going out there with a knife or a machete.

  And yet . . .

  you will – be assured – have local by-elections within the year.

  What was she supposed to do about this?

  Perhaps sit down tonight with Jane and have a long discussion in the hope of convincing her that they should go through the entire correspondence of the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society, compiling a list of possibly dangerous extremists. Which would take most of the night.

  And then what?

  What?

  What if there was another killing?

  At lunchtime, when she got the call on her mobile, Jane was still smouldering.

  Last day of term, and in morning assembly they’d all had to stand up and do a minute’s silence for Councillor Clement Ayling, who had apparently been Chairman of Education. Morrell paying a sincere tribute to Ayling’s vision and all that crap. Meaningless to the little kids at the front of the hall. Jane, at the back, glowering down at her shoes, thinking, What a total hypocritical scumball.

  Another Catcher in the Rye moment. Been getting them a lot lately. This was the situation: Morrell – who insisted his job title was School Director – was the worst kind of New Labour, and Ayling had been this lifelong worst kind of Old Tory. Not only that but he was one of the guys behind the plan to close down a whole bunch of Herefordshire schools, primary and secondary.

  Well, not close them down, merge them – that was the get-out term. What you did was to put two fairly successful small secondary schools under one big roof.

  Thus creating a massive new sink school where nobody learned anything except where to get good crack, and they had to lower the academic goalposts and fiddle the results and the cops spent so much time on the premises you might as well set up a permanent incident room on the playing field.

  And why was Morrell quietly supporting this? Why had Morrell – whose party claimed to stand for education, education, education – been up Ayling’s bum? Simple. This school had a lot of land, and fields all around, perfect for expansion. So, if Ayling’s scheme went through, while some other bastard might be out of a job, Morrell could find himself director of an operation twice the size, with a much bigger salary.

  That was how much of a socialist Morrell was. Right now, curled up on the rescued sofa in a corner of the sixth-form leisure suite, Jane just couldn’t wait to leave this lousy place for good.

  ‘You thinking about sex again, Jane?’

  Sweaty Rees Crawford chalking his snooker cue, getting in some final practise for this afternoon’s Big Match, the final of the Sixth Form Championship in which he was playing Jordan Hare – Ethan Williams taking bets on the outcome. Jane couldn’t decide.

  ‘Look,’ she snarled, as her mobile went off inside her airline bag. ‘Don’t you go projecting your sad fantasies on me, Crawford. You screw that thing around much faster, there won’t be any chalk left. Who’s this?’ Snapping into the phone.

  ‘You don’t sound too happy, Jane.’

  ‘Coops?’

  ‘Oh, Coops,’ Rees Crawford said, leering at her, and Jane gave him the finger.

  ‘It is OK to call you now, is it?’ Neil Cooper said. ‘Your lunch break, right?’

  ‘Sure.’ Not like it would matter anyway, the way she was feeling. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Only I said I’d keep you up to speed. It’s starting tomorrow.’

  ‘The dig?’ Jane gripping the phone tight. ‘The dig’s happening?’

  ‘Officially starting tomorrow.’

  ‘So Bill Blore . . .’

  ‘He’s here. Don’t say wow. Please do not say wow.’

  ‘He’s in the village?’

  ‘He’s actually been over a few times, doing geophysics, making sure we haven’t got it all wrong and what’s under there are concrete lamp-posts or something. You, er . . . want to meet him?’

  ‘Me?’ Jane lowered her feet to the floor. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘Actually,’ Coops said, ‘he wants to meet you.’

  ‘Stop taking the piss. I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘No, really. He’s meeting all the people involved with Coleman’s Meadow from the outset. You were the outset. What time’s your school bus get in – half-four? Should still be some light. So if you want to come over to the site when you get home?’

  ‘Wow, you are serious.’

  ‘All I’d say, Jane,’ Coops said, ‘is, don’t get carried away. Whatever he tells you, don’t get carried away.’

  ‘You know me, Coops,’ Jane said, tingling. ‘Ms Cool.’

  On a good day, Merrily would have been leaving the church nursing some new and unforeseen possibility, the softly gleaming ingot of an idea. Saved again.

  Or at least not feeling sick with dread.

  When she walked out, in Jane’s red wellies, under the dripping lych-gate, it was like Ledwardine was drifting away from her. All its colours washing out, daytime lights in the shops burning wanly behind the sepia screen of slanting rain. Gutted by the feeling that the vi
llage was getting bigger and, at the same time, more amorphous, more remote.

  Like God?

  All she’d seen, in meditation, were the small crises she’d failed to react to, the issues she’d back-burnered. All coming together like coalescing clouds, making darkness.

  Crossing to the Eight Till Late, she saw a pale orange poster in one of the mullioned windows of the pub on the edge of the square.

  Christmas Eve at The Black Swan Inn.

  Ledwardine’s own

  LOL ROBINSON

  (‘The Baker’s Lament’)

  in concert.

  9 p.m.

  All welcome.

  God, Barry hadn’t wasted any time, had he? All welcome. Would that work? Already she could hear the background noise from the bars, people talking and laughing while Lol, bent over his guitar, murmured his tribute to Lucy Devenish whom most of the Swan’s clientele had either never known or considered mad.

  From Brenda Prosser at the shop, she bought a box of All Gold for Sarah Clee.

  ‘They must be mad.’ Brenda apparently continuing a conversation she’d been having with the previous customer who’d already left the store. ‘Merrily – pardon me for being nosy, but do you get properly recompensed? I mean for all these flowers and fruit and chocolates you keep buying for sick parishioners?’

  ‘Erm . . . no. Who must be mad?’

  ‘Those archaeologists. All turning up this morning in their Land Rovers. And a TV camera team, too – what’s that programme . . .?

  ‘Trench One? They’ve arrived? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘And a big tall crane. We didn’t know there was going to be TV. What can they hope to do in this weather?’

  ‘I actually think they like it, in a way,’ Merrily said. ‘Makes it look more dramatic on TV if they’re fighting the elements and they’re all covered in mud. Makes archaeology look like . . . trench warfare?’

  ‘Rather them than me.’ Brenda shivered. ‘All the farmers have moved their sheep from within about half a mile of the river, did you know?’