To Dream of the Dead mw-10

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Don’t need much sleep these days, see. Done all my growin’ and never had much in the way of beauty.’ He stood looking down the street, rolling a cig. ‘Dunno what’s left for us to do with the ole river, but I reckon our commander-in-chief yere’ll have a few ideas.’

  ‘Well, we can’t build a new bloody bridge,’ James said. ‘Not even you.’

  ‘Erm…’ Merrily sank her hands into her coat pockets. ‘Can I ask you guys something? In confidence.’

  ‘Ask away,’ Gomer said. ‘Like the ole poet said, What is this life if, full of care, we en’t got time for the little vicar?’

  ‘Cole Barn. What’s the history? It did belong to your family at one time didn’t it, James?’

  ‘Gord, vicar, way back everything belonged to my blessed family. Barn itself, no. Ground it’s built on, yes — sorry, said I’d check if there was any mention of stones. No there wasn’t but the Bulls weren’t exactly of an antiquarian bent. If the stones were in the way, they’d’ve buried them or smashed them up and that would’ve been that.’

  ‘When did your family last own the land?’

  ‘Cole Farm was… finally sold, I think, in the 1900s, to Albert Evans, family’s estate manager at the time. Inherited by his eldest daughter who’d married into the Pole family, and then finally — as you know — left by Margaret Pole to Gerry Murray, who’s now in with Pierce and capitalises on his inheritance by flogging the barn to the Frenchies.’

  ‘Any gossip about it?’

  ‘Sort of gossip?’

  ‘Erm… my sort of gossip.’

  He took it well. Didn’t blink. He had, after all, been a soldier.

  ‘Not that I’ve ever heard. Called Cole Barn on the sales particulars, but Albert Evans built it as a house, for his retirement. Meant his eldest could move into the existing farmhouse with his family. Didn’t live there very long, though, Albert. Moved down to the village, for convenience. House was eventually gutted, became a cattle shed. That’s it, really.’

  ‘First I yeard of it,’ Gomer said, ‘was when ole Harold Wescott was renting the land from Maggie Pole, and he put his beasts in there, and they made that much noise at night as Maggie, up at Cole Farm, her couldn’t get no sleep, so her makes Harold transport the beasts two mile to his own barn. That was how it become a tractor shed, see. Tractors don’t moan.’

  ‘Never knew about that,’ James said. ‘Live and learn.’

  ‘I done some drainage work there once, for Harold,’ Gomer said. ‘Or tried to. Beggar of a job. Nothin’ went right. Sometimes you finds ground don’t wanner be shifted, see.’

  ‘What made you think that?’

  ‘You just gets a feel that a place is tellin’ you summat.’

  ‘Like bugger off?’

  ‘Mabbe. Ole digger… ole digger broke down twice — well, I’m saying ole digger, her was new back then, and we never had no real trouble with her since. I goes back to Harold Wescott, I says Harold, en’t there nowhere else you can put this drain? Well, I knowed there was, see, but it’d be longer, and Harold, he was always bloody tight like that, so I told him I’d do it for the same price, and that was that. Sorted.’

  ‘This was near Cole Barn?’ Merrily said.

  ‘Twenny yards? There was no front on him then, the ole barn, so I’d keep the digger in there while I was on that job.’

  ‘And, erm… that wouldn’t have been when you couldn’t get her started, by any chance?’

  ‘You’re ahead of me there, vicar.’

  ‘Not been back since?’

  ‘Not likely to, either. Gerry Murray got his own digger, as we all bloody know.’

  ‘Sore point,’ James said. ‘Murray was hired to do the preliminary ground-stripping for the archaeological dig. Pierce obviously fixed it.’

  ‘Bent bastards,’ Gomer said.

  The Eight Till Late had only just opened. It was empty.

  Apart from Shirley West behind the till.

  In the front of the shop, this was. Not in the post office which still had its blind down, concealing the public information posters, the clock and even the iron cross which Shirley had hung very prominently, as if she, definitely not Merrily, was God’s representative in Ledwardine. As if the post office was the centre of the real faith.

  Merrily looked into the smoky eyes below the coiled hair, summoning a smile.

  ‘Morning, Shirley. Jim not in?’

  ‘Getting his breakfast,’ Shirley said. ‘He stayed open half the night, the poor man. What do you want?’

  Charming as ever.

  ‘What’s going to happen with the post office today, Shirley?’

  ‘May not open. No mail going in or out. I’m waiting for instructions from head office.’

  ‘Difficult situation.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they’ve had this problem before.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And all my fault, apparently,’ Merrily said.

  Good a time as any.

  47

  Beacon

  Shirley wore an outsize denim shirt with epaulettes, no make-up, no jewellery. Since acquiring the status of village postmistress she’d put on weight, shed femininity. Something ageless about her now, and monolithic.

  Merrily stood in front of the counter, small but immovable.

  Yes, well…

  ‘A short chat, Shirley?’

  Shirley had her fingers entwined below her chest, her eyelids half lowered. Her efforts to avoid scented soap and shampoo had left her smelling like a clinic.

  ‘It’s just that people keep saying to me, if Mrs West is a member of this other church in Leominster, why does she keep coming to yours? While making it fairly clear that she doesn’t like the way you do things. Never really know what to tell them.’

  ‘You can tell them it’s none of their business,’ Shirley said.

  ‘And I’d happily do that if you hadn’t put on a floor show for them yesterday.’

  Shirley said nothing, but the fingers of her right hand, ringless, began flexing on the counter, next to the till.

  ‘Not that I haven’t been impressed with what the other place has done for you,’ Merrily said. ‘The confidence. That sense of certainty.’

  Along with a refusal to compromise, a blindness to grey areas and a tendency to regard all other spiritual paths as highways to hell.

  Welcome to fundamentalism.

  ‘It’s a bigger organisation than I’d thought, too.’

  ‘Worldwide.’ Shirley actually smiled. ‘And growing day by day. What can I—?’

  ‘But its headquarters are in America?’

  ‘What can I get you, Mrs Watkins?’

  ‘Or in cyberspace. Possible to build a big congregation on the Net.’

  ‘Our congregation is growing day by day,’ Shirley said. ‘As we approach the Endtime.’

  ‘Ah… right. It all comes back to that, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Look around you,’ Shirley said.

  ‘The flood?’

  ‘Read the Book of Daniel.’

  ‘I’ve read it. Not an easy one.’

  ‘And does not Daniel say that the flood will take the Antichrist? Before the Rapture?’

  ‘He does?’

  Maybe it wouldn’t help to get pedantic over whether Daniel ever had much to say about the Rapture.

  ’Before we meet the Lord, in our bodies of light,’ Shirley said.

  American cults had traded heavily on the Rapture. Mass suicide one result.

  ‘Do you… have a particular mission, Shirley?’

  ‘Each of us carries the Light of the Lord, and if we remain steadfast the light will grow within us until we become light.’

  Shirley West becoming light?

  Dear God.

  An enigma, though, this woman. Nobody could say she was unintelligent. Former bank branch-manager — good head for figures, presumably, extensive knowledge of business and personal finance, ability to keep customers happy.

  Wh
at happened?

  ‘We are to keep a vigil at the doorways and raise our lights above them.’

  ‘Which doorways are those?’

  And why was this like trying to tease really obvious information out of a class of small children?

  ‘In latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons. Many doorways to hell, look.’

  ‘And there’s one here? A doorway here in the village? Is that what you’re saying? Are we talking about Coleman’s Meadow? Do you have a mission in connection with Coleman’s Meadow, Shirley?’

  ‘And the evil in your church.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘With its pagan carvings and its worship of the orchard.’ Shirley’s quivering forefinger suddenly extending across the counter. ‘Why do you not eat what God has provided for you?’

  ‘Let’s not get sidetracked, Shirley, you don’t know what I eat. Tell me about the evil.’

  ‘I see what you buy. I know the filth you read. I told that woman, you should not allow that filth—’

  ‘Oh, that filth.’

  ‘Her shop’s cursed. Full of demons. The witch’s shop.’

  Oh, for—

  ‘You mean Lucy Devenish?’

  Not hard to imagine how Lucy would have reacted to a woman able to toss paganism, atheism and vegetarianism together, without any forethought, into the drawer marked hate.

  Shirley drew back her shoulders, bulked herself out.

  ‘And who’s lit the beacon for The Baptist to the Antichrist?’

  Silence. The strangeness of no traffic.

  ‘That woman was laughing at me,’ Shirley said. ‘Always so clever, these Londoners. She laughed. She said, do you know who bought that book?’

  A rare gash of winter sunlight struck white sparks from the chromium rim of a freezer.

  ‘You fooled me at first. Just like you’ve fooled so many others.’ Shirley raised an arm like a club, aiming a forefinger that no longer quivered. ‘You are the doorway. You lit the beacon!’

  Seen soldiers turn from perfectly serviceable fighting chaps to Bible-punching lunatics after one week’s leave, James Bull-Davies had said.

  Took a little longer with Shirley. Attaching herself to the curate in Leominster, laundering his vestments, polishing his car, before he’d fled down south. After which, she’d moved to Ledwardine, appointing herself as Merrily’s eucharistic handmaiden. Hesitant at first, faintly fawning.

  Then the knife going in. Another feature of fundamentalism was the need to cosy up to people perceived as being touched by holiness, and then to demonise them when you moved on.

  Shirley stood in silence, hands clenched above her chest now, as if in defiant prayer. Merrily felt guilty. Where was the woman underneath and what had she ever done to reach her? Recalling her faint embarrassment, discomfort at the altar. Maybe all this was her fault.

  Shirley lowered her head to stare directly into Merrily’s eyes.

  ‘The reason I come to your shoddy services and listen to your socalled sermons is to hold up the light so that all may see what you are. It hasn’t gone unnoticed, Merrily Watkins, the way you’ve been dismantling the Christian framework. Reducing the hymns, so that voices are no longer raised in praise. Replacing Evensong with your so-called quiet time, when the demonic can enter in.’

  ‘Shirley, who exactly runs your church?’

  ‘All sitting under their candles and opening their hearts to the demonic in the silence that should be full of praise.’

  ‘Who runs the Church of the Lord of the Light, Shirley?’

  ‘The Elders. And I am one of them now. Learning to preach the Word of God.’

  And already beginning to master that key technique of making everything, no matter how bonkers, sound like holy writ.

  ‘What about America? Who runs the church’s website in America?’

  ‘I don’t have to answer your questions. Do you think we’re stupid?’ Shirley began shaking her head very fast like she was trying to present a moving target to incoming demons. ‘Your Church… founded upon lust… is a nest of maggots! First it was women, now it’s homos and perverts. Men who stick their things into other men and think they can preach the word of God.’

  ‘So what about the founder of the Church of the Lord of the Light?’ Merrily said. ‘What about a priest who inserts a crucifix into a woman’s vagina?’

  She felt sick for a moment. Sick at herself for resorting to this. And what if James had got it wrong about Ellis?

  Shirley’s mouth had opened like a cavern in a cliff face, air rushing in. Her eyes bulged and her hands grasped the till as if she was about to lift it and hurl it at Merrily across the counter.

  ‘Why don’t you ask him about it, Shirley? Send him an email.’

  Time to go. This was a wasted exercise. If there’d ever been a chance to get through to Shirley West, she’d missed it.

  ‘Don’t think you weren’t seen,’ Shirley whispered as the shop door opened with a ping of the bell. ‘Walking with the Baptist in the place of stones.’

  Edna Huws, the organist, came in with two shopping bags.

  ‘Isn’t it awful, Merrily? I didn’t know until I switched on breakfast television. I’d gone to bed early, thought it was drunks in the street. Trapped in our own village! I don’t know what’s happening to our world.’

  ‘We were just talking about that,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Mr Davies wants me to move out. I won’t go. I told him, I’ve spent the last thirty Christmases in that house, quietly, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, and leaving it only to play the organ in church, the best service of all the year, and I won’t have many more years and I won’t be evicted on Christmas Eve.’ She peered into Merrily’s face. ‘But it won’t happen, will it, Mrs Watkins? It won’t come any further up Church Street. Will it?’

  ‘We’re all praying it won’t, Miss Huws.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you. Oh, good morning, Mrs West. Isn’t it terrible?’

  ‘It is indeed, Miss Huws.’ Shirley’s arms dropping to her sides. ‘What can I get you, Mrs Watkins?’

  ‘Just twenty Silk Cut, please, Shirley.’

  Shirley smiled.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re out of cigarettes today, Mrs Watkins.’

  Merrily looked up at the shelves, saw packets of pipe tobacco and Rizla papers.

  ‘Mr Prosser doesn’t keep many now, look. Sold the lot last night. Panic buying. You know what people are like. He was expecting a new delivery today. Not gonner happen now, is it? Now we are an island.’

  Shirley West, triumphant.

  48

  History and Fear

  The blue stretch Land Rover was parked on derelict ground on the edge of the Plascarreg — south of the Wye but not as far south as it had been last night. The Wye was hungry and taking big bites out of Hereford.

  Bliss walked back very slowly, past the shell of a black Nissan Micra, twocked and burned out. Without the waxy sky above it and the rainwater pool underneath, you could imagine that Jumbo’s blue wagon was an armoured car in the ruins of Baghdad.

  For once, even Bliss fitted in. He was wearing what Naomi called Daddy’s SAS kit: Army-surplus camouflage jacket, cargo trousers, hiking boots, green beanie. He’d climbed down from the Land Rover and walked around the brown concrete fringe of the estate for maybe ten minutes, on his own, trying to get his head round this.

  ‘Feeling better now, is it, Mr B?’

  Jumbo Humphries leaning out of the driver’s window, offering him a swig of a half-bottle of Bells. Bliss shook his head, went round and got back in on the other side.

  Better would not describe how he was feeling.

  ‘Jumbo,’ he said. ‘Move this heap somewhere else, would you? If I was a cop and I saw a Land Rover on the Plascarreg…’

  If I was a cop? Mother of God, had it come to this?

  The back of the Land Rover was like a cell. Vinyl-covered bench seat along one side. No wi
ndows. Jason Mebus sharing the seat with Andy Mumford in a donkey jacket.

  ‘You worked it out now, boss?’

  Still finding it hard to contain his delight, Mumford looked fondly at Mebus, who was staring down at his hands like they were already locked into cuffs. Didn’t look up when Jumbo Humphries started the engine and drove them round the back of the estate, into a field entrance. Jumbo was programmed for fields.

  ‘This all right for you, is it, Mr B?’

  ‘Safer,’ Bliss conceded.

  Jumbo, a before picture for WeightWatchers, got out, squelched through the puddled ground to open the galvanised gate. This way they’d only be disturbed by some farmer, and there weren’t many farmers Jumbo didn’t know. Bliss sank back, hands behind his head: how to play this…

  Or even whether to play it. What any copper with sense would do was get on his mobile and summon the troops. Back off, let them deal with it, hoping a result would save his career.

  Two possible reasons for what Andy had done. One, excitement: lower-ranking cops were still being pensioned off at fifty — the new thirty, too young to be thinking the most exciting time of your life was history. Yet Bliss had thought Mumford, who’d looked more than a bit pipe-and-slippers at forty, would’ve been able to handle it better than most.

  Which suggested it was more likely to be the second possible reason.

  Charlie Howe.

  It was conceivable that Mumford still had a conscience about helping Charlie cover up that death, way back, maybe nursing a feeling that Charlie should go down one day for something. Wasn’t exactly uncommon, that need to tie up a few ends before you left the service.

  And maybe it was actually easier, these days, to come back and tie them: no rules, no stifling paperwork, and you still had all the skills.

  Bliss looked over the back of his seat at Jason Mebus. Just a kid. A cold-eyed, corrupted kid, still just about young enough to be at school but with many years of criminal experience. His upper lip was puffed out on one side.

  ‘I really think,’ Bliss said, ‘that you have to give me a name, Jason. Or, to be more specific, you have to give me the name.’

  ‘Don’t even know his name.’