by Phil Rickman
‘See, I used to think that was a pretty shoddy thing to do, but now I realise some people deserve it.’
‘Well, yeah, obviously,’ Eirion said, ‘but—’
‘Really arrogant people? Bastards who destroy other people without a thought?’
The rushing river beside her was brown with churned-up silt and gassy like cheap draught bitter. Eirion stopped.
‘So we’re talking about Professor Blore, are we?’
Jane kept on walking, forcing him to come after her. She wished it would start raining, give her an excuse for looking messed-up. Bloody rain, always there except when you needed some.
‘Blore?’
Eirion shouting like maybe she hadn’t heard. A bit out of breath now, she noticed. So he wasn’t doing gym, just missing meals.
‘Why would it be?’ Jane said.
‘Because when you rang last night to set this up, it was like, Oh Bill Blore’s going to save the Meadow, Bill Blore and me, Bill Blore who’s like totally cool and—’
‘Shut up, you—!’
Jane spun and stumbled, one foot going down the river bank, Eirion trying to grab her but she reeled away, fell on her bum on the soaking grass.
‘Oh, Jane . . .’
‘I need to rethink my future, OK?’ Jane refusing his hand, refusing to get up, feeling sick and stupid. ‘It’s no big deal. There are loads of other careers. No big deal. The world’s my . . . hairball.’
Blinking back tears like some little kid, an auto-reaction to the unexpected.
‘It is, Jane.’ Eirion standing with his arms by his sides now, shaking his head. ‘It’s a bloody great mega-deal. You had it all sorted. You knew totally where you were going. You couldn’t understand why you hadn’t spotted the obvious.’
‘I can make a mistake.’
‘Yeah, but you usually can’t bring yourself to admit it, which is why this is so totally . . . What happened? What did Blore do? Is he still around?’
‘Dunno.’
‘I mean, I can go and ask him. Corner him in the pub. Get him up against a wall, like, what’ve you done to my . . .?’
Behind Jane, the river surged and frothed, pitiless. But Eirion had dried up. God, he didn’t know what to call her any more: My former girlfriend? My ex?
She was shocked.
Eirion came and sat down next to her on the sodden grass in what was clearly a new jacket – worse, new trousers.
‘Start at the beginning,’ he said.
The hestate behind them now, they were walking more slowly, hand in hand, like thirteen-year-olds on a first date. Or at least like thirteen-year-olds did when Jane was thirteen. Five years ago . . . hell, that was a long time ago. So much pressure to grow up fast, pressure to put your life into a Jiffy bag, tick the boxes, meet the targets. Pressure, pressure, pressure.
‘He did exactly what he said he was going to do.’ Jane took a steadying breath. ‘Shot me.’
Eirion looked at her, up and down, like for exit wounds.
‘Can’t say I wasn’t warned, Irene. Like, Coops had said he was probably going to be in a crap mood. He said it was best not to approach him afterwards.’
‘Coops.’
‘Neil Cooper. County archaeologist guy?’
‘I know who you mean,’ Eirion said.
‘A friend, Irene. That’s all. Married.’
‘I’m sorry. Go on.’
‘I didn’t approach Blore, I really didn’t. I was just, like, standing around, and I could see him keep looking at me, like he was trying to remember who I was and what I was doing here. So I just kind of smiled and didn’t go over. I mean, it wasn’t just me, everybody was giving him a wide berth. The students, the camera crew . . .’
‘He’s an archaeologist, Jane, not bloody Brad Pitt.’
‘He’s a distinguished archaeologist. He has an entourage – students and . . . what’s the word . . . like fossils?’
‘Acolytes?’
‘Yeah. So then this other guy was there who wasn’t supposed to be. This dowser, with his divining rods?’
A man Jane remembered from a meeting of the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society last summer. Schoolteacher-looking guy with grey hair and a white beard. A member of the British Society of Dowsers, who said he’d used his rods and his pendulum to track the ley line – the energy line – from Cole Hill to the church. Telling Jane to point out to Mum that the energy passed directly through the pulpit and if she ever felt in need of spiritual fuel for a sermon she need only become aware of the line and energy would flow through her. And then telling Jane – like he’d once put in an email – that Coleman’s Meadow had a site-guardian attached to it, some kind of elemental force, and anyone who tried to damage it could expect a hard time.
‘I mean, he wasn’t doing anything bad. Just walking round with these copper dowsing rods. He’d been waiting there since first light, apparently. Told Coops he’d been waiting weeks to get into the site, see if the line corresponded to his calculations or whatever.’
‘I had a go at that once,’ Eirion said. ‘Dowsing. Farmer near us hired this bloke to tell him where to sink a borehole. It works, I think, but that was underground water, not . . . earth energy.’
‘Same thing.’ Jane looked at the river. ‘That’s serious energy. Anyway, Coops said this guy could have ten minutes. Just don’t get in the way and remember that he couldn’t come in after they’d started the dig. He was this really polite, inoffensive guy, you know?’
Eirion nodded.
‘So he must’ve had his ten minutes, and he was just walking back towards the gate, following whatever his rods were picking up, when Bill Blore practically walks into him. He’s just like standing in his path, like looming over him? And he’s, like, what are you doing on my site? And the guy like smiles and starts explaining about the energy line, and then Bill Blore says has he ever calculated how far a dowsing rod would go up his arse before it—’
Eirion winced.
‘And looking like he . . . like he wanted to actually do it? And then . . . I was outside the gate with Coops, staying out of the way, so he hadn’t seen me, and he goes, Where’s that fucking girl? Let’s get all the shit out of the way, then we can do some work.’
‘So that’s when you left, is it?’ Eirion said.
‘No,’ Jane said. ‘That’s when I should’ve left.’
It was that feeling of being locked into destiny. That it was all meant. That the secret of Coleman’s Meadow would have remained undiscovered, if she hadn’t come here.
Arrogance. She was just as bad as Bill Blore, who . . .
‘. . . said we just hadn’t got time to go to the top of Cole Hill with the crew. Well, I should’ve realised then. How could I explain how I first, like, perceived the line, if I couldn’t stand up there, in the Iron Age ramparts and point to the steeple and the impression of the path across the meadow. You need to see it.’
‘Maybe he was thinking they could get some shots from up there afterwards,’ Eirion said. ‘Or from a helicopter. So they could overlay your description of it with the pictures.’
‘Yeah, that’s what he said. Don’t worry about it, they could overlay it. Whatever, I went along with it and they decided to record it on the edge of the meadow, by the gate, and he’s like, “So tell us how you first became interested in Coleman’s Meadow.” And I’m trying to explain, the best I could with nothing to point to.’
Telling him about discovering Alfred Watkins’s seminal work The Old Straight Track and realising how magically this line fitted Watkins’s concept of ley lines, which actually made a lot more sense than some people wanted to admit.’
Magically. Bill Blore nodding. I see.
Jane telling him that of course she knew how archaeologists had rubbished Watkins and ley lines both, back in the 1920s, and how it was lucky they were so much more open-minded now.
‘And Bill Blore’s like . . . he’s just standing there with this kind of sardonic smile on his face?’
&n
bsp; Occasionally shaking his head, slowly. There were two cameras, one on Jane, one on him. And this director guy, Mike, who was talking more to the camera guys than to Blore, giving them signals and stuff. And, of course, there were all these students gathered round, about six of them.
‘You’ll have seen how he works with students.’
‘Points out how they’ve got it all wrong,’ Eirion said. ‘Throwing away what they thought was rubbish and it’s actually a tiny piece of Roman mosaic.’
‘Like that, yeah.’
Bill Blore had let her ramble on for several minutes about leys and earth mysteries and the incredible moment of illumination she’d experienced on the top of Cole Hill. And then he’d gone, Thanks, Jane, and turned to the students, a camera following him.
Interesting, eh? Blore had said. This, you see, is how myths are created. A youngster comes to the right conclusions . . . for all the wrong reasons. Ley lines. Gawd help us.
Then turning back to Jane, smiling kindly.
All the same, we’re grateful to you. What are you going to do next? University?
And Jane had gone, Maybe . . . hopefully, archaeology. Probably blushing a bit.
One of the students had smirked.
Bill, is there a degree course in ley lines now? Which university would that be at?
Jane wanting to deck the bastard, who was only about a year older than her, probably Eirion’s age, and so grateful when Bill Blore immediately turned on him.
George, you are so fucking ignorant!
Bill said fuck a lot on TV, like Gordon Ramsey. Like it was part of his contract to get one in every couple of minutes. But the student still backed off, red-faced, going, Sorry, Bill.
And Blore had gone after him.
So you should be, George. And then, with a barely perceptible snigger clotting in his throat, he said, Have you never heard of the University of Middle Earth?
There was about half a trembling second of hollow silence . . . before this explosion of laughter, probably shattering enough to distort the soundtrack.
Everyone, including Bill Blore, stepping away. Jane becoming aware that she was on her own, encircled by it. The laughter. Which had been hissing between her ears like some foul tinnitus ever since.
‘The bastard,’ Eirion said.
‘And you know what was worst of all? Because it was him . . . because it was Bill Blore who’d said it . . . I was laughing, too.’
Laughing in desperation, through the tears gathering in her eyes, the way they were gathering now.
It hadn’t even ended there. Bill Blore, still on camera, had given the students a short lecture about the danger of damaging the credibility of their profession by allowing the core disciplines of archaeology to be undermined by fashionable fads and the drivel spouted by gullible New Age cranks determined to prove spurious links between ancient civilisations and all kinds of sad psychic shit.
The last thing archaeology needed, Bill Blore said – glancing with this kind of cold affection at Jane – was a following of cranks . . . however cute they might appear.
Remember that.
All the time, the other camera focusing implacably on Jane, like some gleaming evil eye, and there was nowhere to hide.
When it was over, and the cameras were switched off, Bill Blore had seemed so much more relaxed. Loosened up, smiling at people. Finally, moseying over to Jane, looking down benignly, squeezing her arm. Well done, girlie.
Patting her once on the shoulder before strolling away, followed by his entourage, like some high-powered surgeon in a crap hospital drama who’d just saved somebody’s life against impossible odds.
Wicked stuff, Bill, the director guy had murmured, within Jane’s hearing. And all done in one take.
Jane followed the lamp into the orchard. Still some old frost-rotted apples lying on the ground, winter rations for the blackbirds
‘Girlie?’ Eirion called after her. ‘He called you girlie?’
Coops had been sympathetic, of course. He’d said Blore was a shit anyway, everybody knew that, and when you caught a shit on a bad day you just put it down to experience, wiped it out of your head. Coops just hadn’t realised, and she hadn’t even told him what she was now trying to explain to Eirion.
‘This is going on TV, right?’
‘Well, it . . . I mean Trench One . . .’ Eirion shuffling about, trying to make it better. ‘It hasn’t got a really big audience.’
Even he hadn’t quite put it together.
‘But what it has got . . .’ Jane’s throat was parched ‘. . . is an audience of archaeologists? Almost certainly including professors of archaeology at, like, universities?’
‘Oh,’ Eirion said.
‘Are they going to forget the gullible, airy-fairy, cranky girl who got lucky against all the rules? Ever?’
‘They’ll probably just . . . feel sorry for you,’ Eirion said.
‘Yeah, right, you put your finger on it there, Irene. They’ll feel sorry for me.’ Jane rocked back against a rotting stump. ‘Are you kidding? They’ll despise me. Totally. Terminally. I’m finished with archaeology before I even started.’
She was feeling physically sick. The humiliation would go on reverberating down a corridor as long as the rest of her life.
SUNDAY
The Atheist is a Prodigious miracle in
this world, a walking carcase in the
Land of the Living . . .
Thomas Traherne
The Fourth Century.
34
Recovery Space
LIFE ALWAYS SPEEDED up before Christmas. Not yet dawn, but the top end of the secret bypass was already a red river of tail lights.
Bliss could remember when all this used to be country, but good flat land didn’t stay green-belt for long. North-west of the city, a mesh of unexplained roads had appeared. No signposts, but what it amounted to was another unpublicised back way round the city, and housing had sprouted around it like pink fungi.
These were the more expensive properties, detached and set back from the road but still built too close together, with shared driveways. Bliss and the van parked round the corner.
As they walked up the drive, a landing light came on in a central upstairs window. Soft red walls, a glimmering in the bubble glass in the front door, and you knew all the radiators would be coming on, and those reassuring standby lights in the big, tidy kitchen.
Bliss thought of his own cold, messed-up kitchen, the heating clock he’d never had to master before. He wiped his mind, like with a wet cloth, and pulled himself into the situation.
Dawn raid. The go go go stuff. Coppers in face-shield headgear like international cricketers. The front door splintering under the enforcer. Police! Police! Police! Like the FBI without the weaponry.
Some part of Bliss would have quite liked all that. Meanwhile, in the real world . . .
Under his porch light, Mr Banks-Jones, up surprisingly early after last night’s party over at Tupsley, was struggling with the Sunday papers, a too-thick bundle rammed into a too-thin letter box. Clearly unable to pull them through from the inside, he’d come out.
‘Idiots. Nobody takes any care at all any more. Look at the way the Observer’s torn all the way—’ He looked over his shoulder, exasperated, then quickly straightened up. ‘Oh. I’m so sorry, I thought you were my neighbour.’
‘West Mercia Police, sir,’ Bliss said. ‘Are you Gyles Banks-Jones?’
One of the uniforms was already round the back, on the off chance that Mrs Banks-Jones was on her way down a drainpipe with a carrier bag full of recreational drugs. Gyles stood there in the rain, in his dressing gown, a thin, studious-looking guy in early middle age.
‘Oh, lord. I knew this would happen one day. But . . . Christmas?’
‘Life is unfair, Mr Jones,’ Bliss said. ‘All right if we pop inside?’
‘Look . . . I’ve got two young children.’
‘Snap. DI Francis Bliss, my name, and this is DC Wintle, who att
ended the same party as you last night. Undercover.’
‘How do you do. I, ah . . .’ Gyles Banks-Jones swallowed, moistened his lips. ‘Any chance we can be civilised about this?’
It wasn’t a lot, really. Bliss wasn’t well-up on current street prices, but he reckoned no more than about six grand. Plastic bags in the velvet linings of jewel boxes stacked in Gyles’s workshop extension, back of the house.
He’d showed them where to look, then had sat down next to his wife on the sofa downstairs. His kids had slept through it all.
Now, in the interview room. Gyles, gardening fleece over his denim shirt, was telling Bliss that while it wasn’t all for personal use, he would certainly object very strongly to being called a dealer.
‘If it’s just for your friends,’ Bliss said, George Wintle silent at his side, ‘you seem to have quite a wide social circle.’
‘Inspector Bliss,’ the solicitor said, ‘I believe my client has told you—’
‘And I don’t believe him, Mr Bilton,’ Bliss said.
The solicitor looked about nineteen. Glasses, puppy fat, new briefcase and an earring. He’d materialised unusually rapidly for a Sunday morning; even so, Gyles Banks-Jones was in a fairly frayed state by then. As anyone would be, exposed to the smelly street-scrapings occupying the neighbouring cells two days short of Christmas.
‘Mr Bliss,’ Gyles said, ‘I realise that the law of the land obliges you to regard me as a common criminal, but society—’
‘Please do not give me society, Gyles. You can help me, or you can be difficult . . . with whatever effect that may have on the length of your sentence.’
‘Now that’s ridiculous. Do you think I’m naive? I watch the news, I read the papers. Nobody goes to prison these days for a first offence of . . . of this nature. The prisons are overcrowded. Everybody knows that.’ Gyles flashing an imploring glance at his solicitor, but the solicitor pretended he was searching for something in his case. Bliss – leaning back, hands behind his head – let the silence inflate like a breath-test kit, and then he yawned.