by Phil Rickman
Back into the countryside. Only ten minutes from home now, in normal conditions. Water was pumping out of the fields into the basin of the road, and the rain ricocheted from the tarmac like a thousand plucked stitches in the headlights.
On the passenger seat the mobile chimed.
Merrily drove up onto the grass verge, kept the engine running, watching the silver container lorry disappearing between dirty curtains of rain.
‘Go on then,’ Huw Owen said. ‘Let’s hear it. What happened at Stooke’s place?’
All the way to Knights Frome and all the way back she’d been blanking this out. It needed a cool head.
‘I was going to call you when I got a bit nearer home. I can’t park here, Huw, I’ll have to—’
‘Christ, you’re not bloody well out in this, are you? It’s just I rang your landline but t’machine were on.’
‘I had to go and see someone. I’ll find somewhere and call you back.’
‘Just get home.’
‘No, we do need to talk about this. Give me two minutes.’
44
Nightwatchman
BLISS WATCHED HIM walking stiffly down the pavement, leaning only slightly on his aluminium crutch. Once, he stopped and lifted it up to point at something. Only Charlie Howe could make a lightweight crutch look like a twelve-bore.
Bliss was relieved to see him. At least somebody was coming home tonight.
Just a chat, Charlie, one to one. Only way to deal with this. Get the elephant out of the toilet cubicle.
Charlie was under a big black umbrella held by a woman with big blonde hair. Not young young but had to be a good thirty years younger than Charlie. About Annie’s age, in fact. Annie’s mother, Bliss had heard, was like Cleopatra – ancient history.
As well as the brolly, the woman was carrying a plastic carrier bag with what looked like bottles in it. Bliss guessed they’d been to Morrisons. Maybe Charlie had even met her there; supermarkets were good for pick-ups.
Whoever she was, she’d need to be persuaded to leave them alone for an hour. Bliss got out of the car as they went in through Charlie’s gate, up the short path to the front door, where Charlie started fumbling in his pocket for his keys.
Bliss trotted up behind.
‘Hold your crutch, Charlie?’
The woman spun, but Charlie turned slowly, water crashing down on the umbrella, the downpour swollen by overflow from the guttering.
‘Least I can do,’ Bliss said, ‘after all you’ve done for me.’
Charlie leaned his crutch against the door frame, to show he could manage without it, peered out from under the brolly. He looked like he always had: ski-resort suntan, white hair in a crewcut out of vintage movies with Elvis in them.
‘Brother Bliss, would that be?’
‘Just happened to be passing, Charlie. Thought I’d see how you were getting on with the new plazzie hip.’
Charlie said nothing.
‘Lucky to get it done before the festive season. I heard they’d been suspended, all the hip ops. Virus? Ward closures?’
‘Wasn’t affected,’ Charlie said. ‘Got in just in time. What do you want, Brother Bliss?’
Bliss stood there. He was soaked through already. He could feel the damp on his chest and the weight of dark shoulder pads of saturation. It didn’t look as though Charlie was going to introduce his friend.
‘We have a chat, Charlie?’
‘Certainly. Ring my secretary. Make an appointment.’
‘I was thinking now.’
‘Not convenient, I’m afraid.’
‘Do a good job, then, did he?’ Bliss said. ‘Bit of a whizz with hips, what I hear, Mr Shah.’
‘I’m told it all went very smoothly,’ Charlie said. ‘You’re getting wet.’
‘Nice feller, too, everybody says that,’ Bliss said.
‘A gentleman.’
‘Pity about his kid.’
Bliss stared at Charlie, blinking the rain out of his eyes. In truth, he couldn’t even see Charlie any more, only a black mist. He just sensed a thin smile.
‘What are you doing, Brother Bliss?’
Drowning, Bliss thought.
The Zippo sputtered and sparked before finding a flame. Merrily lit up. She’d pulled into a long lay-by behind a tump of gravel, where the Leominster road let you into the bypass. She was two miles from home and about half a mile from the bridge at Caple End, where she’d sat in Bliss’s car and he’d told her about the pieces of quartz shining in Clem Ayling’s eye sockets.
‘Now that,’ Huw Owen said, ‘is a bugger.’
Didn’t think she’d forgotten anything: fluctuating temperature, bulbs popping, smoke alarms whining in the night, car failing to start, and that staggering electricity bill.
’Something taking the energy,’ Huw said. ‘There were a fairly well-documented case over at Brecon some years ago, before your time.’
‘I’ve heard about it.’
‘Lot of others I’ve heard about where all that occurs alongside a volatile.’
‘If they need the heating on at that level because, if they turn it down, it’s suddenly colder than the grave . . . OK, you could say that’s a case of soft city folk. But she isn’t from the city.’
‘What was the attitude when they were telling you all this?’
‘Annoyed. Annoyed at the level of workmanship, annoyed at the electricity company, the owners, the owners’ agents . . .’
‘Nowt more than annoyed?’
‘Like it wouldn’t even cross their minds, either of them. But, then, they have an image to support. How could they not be in total, one hundred per cent denial?’
‘It’s a bugger, lass.’
‘Don’t keep just saying that, Huw. What do I do about it? I get called in all the time on stories far less convincing than this. First rule of deliverance?’
Huw laughed. Both of them remembering their first encounter on Huw’s deliverance course in his parish deep in the heart of SAS training country.
First rule of deliverance: always carry plenty of fuse wire.
Second rule: never leave the premises without at least a prayer.
As if . . .
‘Of course,’ Huw said, ‘as you say, it might be a scam.’
‘Might very well be. She’s told me about his need for new material. How book two might have to be just a diary of his adventures since the publication of Hole. Thing is, she was very frank about all that, about him being basically a hack with no great evangelical need to convert society to non-belief.’
‘Happen lull you into a sense of false security. You wouldn’t’ve gone near that place otherwise, would you?’
‘Maybe not. And yet . . . I’ll tell you one thing. There was a look Stooke gave me just before I left – this is Stooke, not Lensi. It was full of almost a kind of pain. Like he’s saying, Denial? Of course I’m in denial. What the hell would you expect?’
‘All right,’ Huw said. ‘Let’s talk about the figure in the field. On the edge of the orchard?’
‘It was too dark to get him to show me the exact spot. Apart from it bucketing down.’
‘Assuming it’s not a scam,’ Huw said. ‘Nightwatchman, you reckon?’
Charlie didn’t even look at the blonde woman. He didn’t stop looking at Bliss. He held the keys out over his shoulder.
‘Make us some coffee, Sasha.’
Accepting the umbrella, keeping it well away from Bliss as the blonde went into the house and lights came on.
‘You know where my daughter is tonight, brother?’
Still at her desk, popping pills to stay awake? Having Willy Hawkes woken up with a halogen spotlight in the eyes, every hour on the hour till he coughed to Ayling’s murder?
‘No,’ Bliss said.
The water was sluicing over his ears, down the back of his neck until he could feel it cold on his spine.
‘Private party in the Home Secretary’s constituency,’ Charlie said. ‘They been good friends for so
me years.’
‘Of course, yeh. Keep forgetting how relatively local the Home Seckie is. Think Annie’ll be offered a Home Office consultancy? House of Lords next? Baroness Howe. Has a ring of . . . I dunno . . . destiny.’
‘In your dreams, boy. Anne’s a copper through and through. In the genes, it is. She en’t going nowhere she won’t be able to pick up the likes of you and drop you where you belong. And neither am I.’
Bliss had started to shiver. You could go through a car-wash on full cycle and not get this wet. And Charlie in the dry, not a droplet on him.
Story of Charlie’s life.
‘Well, for her sake you can only hope . . .’ Bliss wiped a hand across his face ‘. . . that Annie’s DNA managed to bypass the bent gene.’
The rain was suddenly lit up in colours. Bliss turned to see one of those charity Christmas floats rolling past, probably on its way home but the lights still blazing, Bliss thinking, Jesus, did I really just say that?
And turning back round to find the rubber foot of Charlie’s metal crutch up against his throat.
‘Didn’t catch that, Francis? Hard to make out what you’re saying in this rain.’
Well, he could snatch the crutch away, and then maybe Charlie would lose his footing on the wet, slimy driveway. And the woman would, of course, be watching, from an upstairs window, a witness to this unprovoked assault on an elderly man recovering from hip surgery. Yes, that was one option.
Bliss backed off.
‘Why don’t we go inside, then? Where it’s quiet. Lot to talk about, Councillor. Talk about Hereforward?’
The presence of the woman complicated everything. The woman and the rain. The noise of the rain meant there was no way neighbours or passers-by could overhear anything that might embarrass Councillor Howe and make it sensible to get Bliss inside.
A quiet one-to-one. Even half an hour would do it. Mumford was probably right, Charlie wasn’t a killer. Just a cover-upper. Official cover-upper for Hereforward. All quangos had secrets, and this one . . .
‘Why don’t you just go home, Brother Bliss?’ Charlie lowering the crutch. ‘Modern policing got no use for a one-man band.’
‘Yeh, well, that’s because no fucker wants to take individual responsibility any more. The new ethos of arse-shielding, Char—’
He was spluttering. The rain was in his mouth. Even the weather was on Charlie’s side. This was a waste of time. Nothing for him here. Nothing but more grief, another chance to test his self-destruct button.
‘Go home, boy,’ Charlie said amiably. ‘Go back to Liverpool or wherever it was you crawled from. Long outstayed your welcome down yere, you must see that. You got no friends, you got no—’
‘Shah told you the lies his son fed him.’ Bliss had started to shout, just needing to get it out. ‘You told Shah you’d get it dealt with.’
‘—got no wife, now, either. No wife . . . no kids?’
How the . . .? Bliss clawed rain out of his eyes.
‘You’re a sick little man, Brother Bliss. Come down yere thinking you were God’s gift to West Mercia. Smart young city copper full of the ole Northern grit, show the country boys how it’s done. Make a swift rise to the top.’
‘That’s bollock—’
‘Only it never happened. You weren’t good enough. Fooled ’em for a while and then they saw what you were. And now you en’t going no higher and you know it and my, that’s made you bitter, ennit? Bitter, twisted, sick little man. I know about you, Brother Bliss, known for a long time.’
‘You don’t know shit!’
‘But I do know your father-in-law.’ Charlie raising the umbrella so Bliss could see him grinning. ‘Didn’t know that, did you?’
Shit, shit, shit.
‘Same lodge?’ Bliss tried.
‘Same county, Brother Bliss, that’s all it takes. Very small county and you got a big, big mouth. You never deserved Kirsty. Nice girl, good, sensible head on her shoulders. Well rid of you, boy. Well rid.’
‘You know the truth, Charlie?’ Bliss in free fall now. ‘I used to love being in this city when I first came. It was small, and it had . . . this freshness. Wherever you looked you could see a green field or a hill or a wood. You could breathe.’
‘Stand there much longer, boy, your breathing days gonner be limited. Get pneumonia and die, and what a mercy that’d be, for all of us.’
‘I used to like the way you could breathe. And now . . .’ Bliss took a step forward, soaking socks fused to his frozen feet. ‘Now all I can see is frigging greed and opportunism, and I don’t enjoy breathing any more because whenever I breathe in I can smell somebody like you. I can fucking smell you, Charlie.’
Jesus, how pathetic was this?
Charlie stepped back, and his front door opened behind him. He let down his umbrella, gave it a good shake in Bliss’s direction and went into the warm and shut the door very quietly behind him.
Through the windscreen, Merrily saw small smears of light, like glowing tadpoles.
Nightwatchman.
Huw had always preferred his own euphemisms: visitors, volatiles, insomniacs, hitch-hikers. Flavouring the unknowable with a measure of comforting familiarity.
‘That’s your word for a guardian, is it?’
‘An entity or thought-form attached to the site to deter intruders who might want to damage or corrupt it,’ Huw said. ‘We could talk about cases where thunder and lightning resulted from somebody sticking a spade into a burial mound. And horrific phantasms, obviously. But you probably know all them. How close is the barn to the buried stones, lass?’
‘Next field. Tell me about nightwatchmen, Huw.’
‘Happen less harmful than they look, in most cases.’
‘Less harmful? How?’
‘Sometimes the images people receive may appear demonic. But that might be more a result of their own conditioning. If we operate on the basis that true demonic is, by definition, satanic and therefore something explicable only in terms of Christian theology, well . . . Neolithic’s a long time pre-Christian. Unless it’s been reactivated by more recent activity, you might be looking at no more than an old imprint.’
‘By definition, a place memory without soul or consciousness.’
‘If you accept, as I would, that ritual sites were usually in places of strong natural energy, that makes sense, aye.’
‘What if it’s something of human origin?’
‘Way back?’
‘For the sake of argument.’
‘Happen a ritual sacrifice, then. Could even be a willing sacrifice, someone who’d elected or consented to look after the ritual site for all eternity and was then ceremonially slaughtered and buried there, or cremated.’
‘But that’s all theoretical, isn’t it? And can only ever be. Goes too far back.’
‘In that case, if there’s owt there you’ve got a few centuries of experience to tap. You could talk to folk. Got to be some memory.’
‘But if the people living there have not requested assistance and are never likely to . . .’
Merrily paused for a reality check – if the Stookes were lying, all this was academic.
In the windscreen, the tadpoles were still aglow and wriggling. The lights of Ledwardine? Couldn’t be. Not from this distance, in conditions of seriously reduced visibility.
‘You could still go it alone, if you felt it was necessary. Or you could – as there’s already controversy over it – offer to bless the stones. And then make it a bit more than a blessing.’
‘That’s not a bad idea.’
‘You’d have to decide, on the evidence, whether a personality is involved,’ Huw said. ‘Whether you’re asking for the place to be calmed or a spirit to be released. You could argue that if the stones are about to be put back up, with a conservation order, well . . . a nightwatchman’s entitled to redundancy. Retirement. A nice, long rest.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Keep us informed, anyroad,’ Huw said. ‘Now bugger off home.’
He was gone.
Merrily got out a cigarette and smoked half of it before fastening her seat belt and leaning over to make sure that the Boswell guitar case was safely wedged in the gap between the front and rear seats. She switched on the wipers, and pulled into the road. The lights in the windscreen were closer, and they actually were moving and some of them were blue. Shadows paddled across the lights. She flipped the headlamps up to full beam.
Two men coming towards her, carrying something between them.
White lettering on blue.
ROAD CLOSED.
Merrily braked.
But hang on, this was the link to the bypass, the great lifeline. It was on fairly high ground, this couldn’t be about flooding. We never looked back, Lyndon Pierce said. Benefits of progress, people.
She lowered her window. Guy coming over – traffic cop, yellow slicker, fluorescent armbands. Merrily leaned out into the rain.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Road’s closed.’
‘Yes, I can—What is it, a crash? An accident?’
Always seemed to be one, coming up to Christmas. Joy to the world.
‘Can I ask you to turn round, please, madam? Just turn round here and get yourself back on the main road.’
‘But how long—?’
‘And take a different route, if you don’t mind.’
‘But the other road’s going to be flooded, isn’t it? How do I get into Ledwardine?’
‘You don’t,’ the traffic cop said. ‘Nobody does tonight.’ He sighed. ‘Or even, I’d say, this side of Christmas . . .’
CHRISTMAS EVE
When powerful interest groups combine, archaeological guidance can be subverted or ignored.
Huw Sherlock, archaeologist,
Third Stone
45