by Phil Rickman
‘Not me,’ Stooke said.
‘No, I mean—’
‘The flood.’ He sighed. ‘I’m tired of the very word.’
‘Could be into the houses. We’d better get help.’
‘All right,’ Stooke said. ‘You go back to the pub and fetch some people. I’ll go down there and see what I can do.’
‘Be careful, it’s going to be very deep now.’
‘I won’t do anything stupid.’ He walked out of the market hall, turning to face her with another glowing smile. ‘Doesn’t mean we’re selfish, you know. Doesn’t mean we don’t care. All this talk of Christian charity, as if you’ve cornered the market. That really makes me sick.’
‘I’ll catch up with you,’ Merrily said.
Jane burst back into the lounge in the slipstream of her fury. Had to get this out, now: the hypocrisy, the treachery.
She stood in the doorway, laughter blossoming around her in an atmosphere mellow with lamplight and the haze of beer and spirits.
Needed Mum, and there was no sign of her. Lol would know what to do, but Lol was busy. Busy winning. No space any more between him and his audience. No divide either between the locals and the Serpent people who’d come in the coach from Hereford.
Ken Williams, the farmer who’d let Gomer build the new riverbank on his land, stood up in the middle of the floor, pint glass in one hand.
‘Tell you what, boy,’ he said seriously to Lol, ‘you’re wasted on plant hire.’
Even Jane smiled for a moment. Somebody was asking Lol why he hadn’t written a song about the Dinedor Serpent. Jane spotted Eirion, with his sound mixer and his remote control for the video and began to squeeze through the crowd. She saw Lol pausing to think for a moment before pulling the new Boswell on to his knee and hitting a couple of chords.
‘Actually, I can only remember the chorus, which . . . Anyway, you can sing along just as soon as you pick it up.’
Lol looked around, eyes glittering between his little brassrimmed glasses, high on the energy. Singing lightly.
‘Dinedor Serpent
‘I’d do anything
To see you shine’.
Jane stopped, recognising the tune: ‘Sidewalk Surfer’ by Super Furry Animals. Perfect fit.
‘That’s it?’ a guy said.
‘That’s it,’ Lol said.
He did it again. He smiled.
‘Altogether now, Dinedor Serpent . . .’
If this had been a summer festival, they’d all have lit matches, held them up. River of light. Jane spotted Eirion rocking back in glee.
‘Eirion!’
His grin fading as she stepped over wires and collapsed next to him at his card-table under the deepset window. She hadn’t called him Irene.
‘Listen . . .’
He couldn’t hear her, with the whole audience going, ‘We’d do anything . . . to see you shine.’
Everybody loving it. Everybody loving it so much they wouldn’t notice Mum come in with her hair all soaked and her make-up running. Jane leapt up, but the crowd had closed between them.
62
En’t Good
YOU COULD SMELL him now. Smelled foul. It was almost sexual, Jane thought. Swollen, invasive, obscene, the river engorged.
Bastard hadn’t listened to a word she’d said. Rapists never did.
Jane, in her rain-darkened parka – she lived in the thing now – skipping back in disgust as he licked at her wellies. Eirion steadying her as she backed up against someone’s wall, clutching her mini Maglite torch like a votive candle.
Too late for prayers. You could tell why flood was such a powerful biblical device: fire consumed, flood just degraded everything, turned it into sludge.
God’s verdict on the vanity of the New Cotswolds.
Somebody had driven a car, a Mercedes four by four, halfway down the street and left it in the middle of the road with the engine running and the headlights on full, turning the churning water caramel, finding the roof and blind windows of another car, this one drowned. Parked on what used to be the street.
Jane and Eirion were standing just above the Ox. It had been evacuated; you could see tables piled on top of tables under the sallow bulbs of the public bar, its pool-table covered with heavy plastic, its gaming machines unplugged. The water, knee deep on the floor, looked like bad, gassy beer and smelled worse, and the road outside was full of people, like extras discarded by Hieronymus Bosch. Glistening like slugs as they struggled into waterproofs, joining the trickle down Church Street to the banks of the new lake.
The river was already a quarter way up the walls of the lowest two houses either side of the street, swirling like dark oil here, out of the headlights, and rising, rising, rising; if you tried to reach one of the door-knockers, the water would be to your chest.
‘Oh God,’ Jane said. ‘Poor Miss Huws.’
The last evacuee. You could see bits of her life washed into the street, a wooden stool, the floating lid of a breadbin, a loaf of sliced bread.
‘I can’t,’ she was sobbing. ‘Not in that!’
Gomer’s Matbro, this yellow hydraulic lift. The extended metal platform closing in on an opened upstairs window, its frame banging back against the wall. Someone was standing up in the platform, holding on to the metal guard rail, leaning across to the window.
‘Coming in, Miss Huws.’
James Bull-Davies.
‘Probably the first time a man’s ever been inside that bedroom,’ Jane murmured to Eirion.
It wasn’t funny, though. Edna Huws, a frail moth in her parchment-coloured clothes, shrilling at James in front of a crowd of sympathetic voyeurs.
‘I can’t! Where will I go?’
‘Rooms at the Swan,’ James shouted. ‘Barry’s attending to it now. Just leave the window—’
‘What can I wear? My clothes, my night-things—’
‘Worry about that when we get you out, old girl.’
‘This should not have happened, Mr Davies!’
‘Well, I’m afraid it bloody well has.’
‘Jane.’
Hand on her arm. Jane turned to find Mum at last.
‘God, you’re soaked to the skin.’ Horrifying reversal of usual roles. ‘You’ve got to go back, Mum, and get out of those clothes.’
‘Is Miss Huws OK?’
‘James Bull-Davies is in there, trying to persuade her to come out through the window. They’ve got all the people out of the other houses. And two labradors. Mum, listen—’
‘Good. You can’t believe it, can you? How quickly it happens.’
‘The point is there’s nothing you can do here. Come back to the vic, please. Look at you, your skirt’s all covered with—’
‘Where’s Lol?’
‘Putting his gear away. Barry was saying they should lock it in. He’s worried about looters.’
‘In Ledwardine?’
‘Yeah, well . . . Look, Mum, please? Something I have to tell you.’
James was helping Edna Huws out of the window and into the Matbro, putting a small suitcase in after her. Miss Huws had a long raincoat round her shoulders; she was making kind of chicken noises as the platform came down to ridiculous cheers. All this crazy goodwill that came with communal adversity and Christmas.
‘Mum! Vicarage!’
‘I seem to have lost a heel.’
Mum reached down and pulled something from a shoe, hobbling back up the street against the flow of water coming down from the square.
All the same, the rain was easing off and the sky was actually clearing, disclosing a fragment of moon now, like one edge of a silver ring in a crumpled grey tissue of cloud.
But it was no better on the ground. Reaching the entrance to Old Barn Lane, Jane saw another, smaller crowd assembling halfway down where there was a dip in the road – like a reservoir now. Front gardens were underwater, all the lights were on in all the houses and there were people with plastic buckets and washing-up bowls vainly trying to send it back.
A man’s voice, falsetto with shock. He came stumbling out of the water, shaven head, earring like a coiled spring. Derry Bateman, the electrician.
‘Anybody know about artificial respiration?’
‘A bit . . .’
Mum started limping over to the crowd making a semicircle on the edge of the flood.
‘I thought it was a sandbag, I did.’ Derry Bateman looking shattered. ‘Oh, bloody hell. Everybody get back, this en’t good.’
‘I think it’s too late, anyway,’ a woman said.
The water almost thigh-high on two men dragging a body. Torchbeams converging.
A woman screaming, ‘Please God, no.’
‘Here . . .’ Derry guiding Mum to the waterside. Jane didn’t even know she could do artificial respiration. ‘Turn him over.’
The woman said, ‘I think he’s dead.’
Someone else howling, ‘Who is it? Who is it?’
I’m telling you . . .’ A quavery, elderly voice. ‘Someone was sitting—’
‘I don’t know him,’ Derry shouted. ‘I’ve never seen him before.’
‘You don’t know what you saw, Reg.’
‘I tell you I saw someone . . . I thought they was sitting on a sack, but they was sitting on him . . .’
‘Who was?’
‘He went that way. All in black, look. I en’t making this up.’
‘Everybody looks black in this—’
Jane ran down after Mum, but Eirion was holding on to her arm.
‘You don’t know artificial respiration, do you Jane?’
‘Well, no, but—’
‘I saw a boy once who’d drowned,’ Eirion said. ‘Believe me, you don’t want to see this.’
Derry Bateman and a couple of neighbours had carried him out of the flood and laid him in the back of Derry’s van, surrounded by compartments of tools and electrical supplies. Nobody could think of anywhere better. Nobody was volunteering to accommodate a drowned man in a sitting room all decked out for Christmas.
Derry had covered him with blue plastic sheeting, like the stuff draped over cookers and washing machines on the riverside estate.
Merrily was wiping her dripping hands on her sodden skirt. She felt heartsick.
‘You say you know who he is, vicar?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Derry said. ‘There really was nothing we could do.’
‘Nobody see what happened?’
‘Nobody seen a thing, else we’d’ve gone to help him. I still don’t see how he could’ve gone in that far, less he was drunk.’
‘Derry, who’s Reg?’
‘Reg Sutton? David Sutton’s old man. I think he’s Reg, en’t he, Peter? He only come to live yere a couple of weeks ago. He’s pretty old, you can’t really rely on too much he says.’
‘Where’s he live?’
‘He’s . . . one, two . . . five houses down, end of the terrace. White gate.’
‘Thanks.’
Derry nodded uncomfortably at the body.
‘Who is he, vicar?’
‘He’s the guy who rents Cole Barn.’
She could still hear him, the exasperated voice of reason: anomalies . . . blips . . . means nothing. Saw his fluorescent white smile.
Merrily flattened her back against a gatepost, gazed up at the moon, coddled in smoky cloud.
Above all, it in no way suggests a god. Above all, it does not imply that.
And now he knew. Or not. She looked down at the plastic bundle, fogged and glistening and it was very hard to believe in a life after that. And, oh, this was not right. There was nothing right about this, and certainly nothing to be salvaged from the Book of bloody Daniel.
‘What’s he doing down yere then, vicar?’
‘I don’t know.’
Maybe somebody had called out to him. Maybe there were too many lights at the bottom of Church Street. Christ.
‘We better call the police,’ Derry said. ‘Though how they’re gonner get here tonight, less they can get a helicopter.’
‘I’ll call them,’ Merrily said.
‘Only, if there’s any way of . . . I mean, I don’t really want . . .’
‘No, you’re right. He can’t stay here. Why don’t you drive him up to the church? We’ve got a long table in the vestry. Do you mind carrying him again?’
‘En’t got no choice, do we?’
‘I need to find his wife.’
And the old man had said: I saw someone . . . thought they was sitting on a sack.
Someone. Man or a woman?
She saw Jane and Eirion standing near the top of the lane, hand in hand, like children. All she could think of, as she walked up towards them, was Shirley West. She hadn’t seen Shirley anywhere tonight, only the marks of her madness.
63
Do the Dying
WHEN SHE CALLED Bliss on his mobile, from the vicarage, he answered in seconds, sounding wide-awake, focused. Excited, even.
‘Merrily, touch nothing.’
‘Too late. They had to bring him out of the water, he might’ve been alive. And we couldn’t leave him in the van.’
‘So where is he?’
‘In the church. Vestry.’
She’d managed to find James Bull-Davies, give him the keys and he was over there supervising it. Well, where else could Stooke’s body have gone, where else?
Bliss sighed.
‘So what are you saying, Frannie, I should’ve got out one of my many rolls of police tape? Cordoned off the area?’
‘Well, don’t let anybody in the frigging vestry.’
‘Damn,’ she said bitterly, ‘and I was planning to charge admission.’
‘You all right, Merrily? You don’t sound well.’
‘I’m fine.’
Could hardly keep her voice steady. Jane was standing in the doorway with arms full of a bath towel and dry clothes. She’d plugged in the electric fire, all three bars.
Bliss said, ‘Tell me why you think he’s been killed.’
‘I . . . I just think it can’t be ruled out, that’s all.’
Signalling to Jane to put the clothes on the sofa, telling Bliss quickly about Shirley West, the Church of the Lord of the Light, the damage, the graffiti. He didn’t say anything. He got her to go over a couple of points again. He asked her if Stooke had had any other obvious injuries. Twice he said drowned isn’t right. Clearly he was not impressed.
‘Is there . . .’ shaking now ‘. . . something I don’t know?’
‘A lot. Listen, gorra get things organised this end, then I’ll call you back from the car. We’re coming over. Only problem is how we get into the village.’
‘You’ll have to leave your vehicles the other side of the footbridge at Caple End, and I’ll have to persuade people to pick you up. How many?’
‘Say half a dozen, initially. More later if we agree with you. Or if . . .’
‘What?’
‘Keep your mobile on, I’ll see you at Caple End.’
‘It won’t be me. I have a service to do.’
‘Oh, Merrily!’
‘It’s Christmas Eve. It’s what I do. How long before you get here?’
‘Thirty, forty minutes. I can call you back in five from the car.’
‘All right, I’ll wait.’
Despite dry clothes and the electric fire, she was still shivering. The rain was no more than a peppering now and, through the scullery window, you could see the grey-blue froth of night clouds.
Gomer was going to Caple End with his big Jeep, Jane and Eirion to the church to tell people the service would be a little delayed. But first . . .
Jane came into the scullery alone, shut the door behind her.
‘It won’t wait, will it?’ Merrily said. ‘Only—’
‘No,’ Jane said, ‘I don’t think it will.’
Jane told her about Professor Blore’s private report to the Council. His alleged discovery of comparatively modern masonr
y and artefacts under one of the stones.
‘What does Neil Cooper say?’
‘He thinks Blore’s lying. Really he’s scared to say what he thinks. Scared of losing his job. Looks like Blore could’ve been got at by . . . I don’t know.’
‘A combination, probably. Landowner, developers . . . maybe several of them already getting in line for a stake in Ledwardine New Town.’ Merrily instinctively reaching for a cigarette, letting her hand fall empty to the desk. ‘Would take a lot, mind, to make it worthwhile for Blore to virtually destroy everything. The henge? How sure are you and Neil about the henge?’
‘It’s got to be more than wishful thinking. It’s just—’
A tapping on the window. Lol’s face. Thank God.
‘I’ll let him in,’ Jane said.
‘No, I’ll do it. You go to the church with Eirion. Tell whoever’s there, if anybody, that I’m sorry and I’ll be with them in ten minutes, soon as I’ve spoken to Bliss again.’
‘Mum, you don’t have to do this. We’re in the middle of a crisis here. Even the church has been—’
‘That’s why I have to do it.’
‘And I haven’t finished,’ Jane said.
But Merrily was already into the passage, and the phone was ringing behind her.
You could only see the ghost of the last word now. Witch.
James Bull-Davies had been as good as his word. The Bull, Lucy used to call him, always having difficulty separating him from his more unsavoury ancestors. Maybe she would now, having seen him scrubbing at her gravestone.
He was in the church, making sure nobody went near the vestry. His old car wouldn’t start, and Eirion had gone in his place to Caple End to ferry cops to Ledwardine. Jane put her hands on the shoulders of Lucy’s stone. It was becoming a natural thing to do, made her feel stronger and less confused. In theory.
‘That your gran, is it?’
She looked up, mildly startled; hadn’t noticed him coming over.
‘What are you doing here? I thought you’d gone home for Christmas. Thought you’d be legless in High Town by now.’
‘Bleeding bridge. Should’ve left earlier. The fucking sticks, eh?’
‘You could’ve gone on one of the coaches.’