Remains of an Altar mw-8

by Phil Rickman

  ‘No … what?’

  ‘That’s what…’ Mrs Aird leaned further forward as if the place was bugged. ‘That’s what broke up their marriage. The stress of dealing with the girl.’ She paused.

  ‘Drugs.’

  ‘Syd’s daughter?’

  ‘It’s everywhere, my dear. Young people can’t seem to face normal life any more, can they? Mr Spicer’s daughter … even Mr Devereaux’s elder son, when he gave up his job with the hunt. Went clean off the rails when it was banned, and they say he went on drugs. Luckily, he came round. But Mr Spicer’s daughter ended up in rehab.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So you can imagine what it was like for them when the Royal Oak changed hands.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘And that’s very much part of it, if you ask me. The evil.’

  ‘Evil … ?’

  ‘Ingrid said you weren’t the kind to dismiss it like so many of the modern clergy do.’

  Mrs Aird looked out of her wall-to-wall picture window across the valley with its pastures and orchards.

  ‘Expect I’ll have to go, soon. You wouldn’t believe how often the houses change hands up here. It’s like Mr Walford says – he’s disabled but a very intelligent man, we do crosswords together – and he often says, This is what I always wanted, a place up here, and then when you get it you suddenly wake up one day and realize you’re too old for it. This is not a place to be old, Mrs Watkins, though I’ll miss my sunsets.’

  Merrily looked around the room, everything modern and convenient and sparkling in the sunshine.

  ‘The Royal Oak,’ she said. ‘Is that a pub?’

  ‘Pub?’ Mrs Aird said. ‘It’s the gateway to hell. I don’t even want to talk about that, if you don’t mind. I’ve had all the locks changed and I shut myself away at weekends, go to bed with my mobile phone in case they cut the wires. And unfortunately it’s not something you can do anything about.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you while I’m here?’

  ‘No, I’m quite self-sufficient really. I’ve been a widow nearly twenty years, and I can cope with most things.’

  ‘Everybody needs help,’ Merrily said.

  Mrs Aird looked down into her lap for a moment; when she looked up she seemed, in some way, younger, her expression more focused.

  ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, Mrs Watkins, you seem a nice girl. But you don’t look very much like my idea of a … you know.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry.’ Merrily looked down at her sweatshirt. ‘The Rector asked me to … I don’t think he wanted to draw attention to me being here.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Ingrid says you know what you’re doing. It’s just that I don’t have many friends in Wychehill, and this girl … that’s what worries me most.’

  And there might be another one, Syd Spicer had said, which is … a bit weird. Joyce Aird can tell you. They won’t talk to me about it.

  ‘She’s a single mother, Mrs Watkins. She’s on her own in that house. And she’s had the worst of it. She’s … this is why something needs to be done.’

  ‘I’m a single mother, too. I have a daughter of seventeen.’

  ‘You can’t be old enough for…’ Mrs Aird’s eyes lost their focus. ‘Oh, you lose touch at my age. Everybody under fifty looks like a child.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Hannah.’

  ‘She lives in Wychehill?’

  ‘Thinks she’s possessed,’ Mrs Aird said. ‘It’s not good, is it?’

  7

  The Dead of Ledwardine

  Lol let Jane into his terraced cottage in Church Street. In the living room, the sunlight jetted through the window-hung crystals – Jane’s house-warming present – making quivering rainbow balls on the walls and the face of the Boswell guitar. Making the guitar seem to vibrate with possibilities which would vanish like the rainbow balls as soon as he picked it up.

  ‘Well, go on.’ Jane planting herself next to the writing desk. ‘Ring them.’

  ‘I don’t know the—’

  ‘I have it here. Copied it from the notice.’

  Jane consulted her right wrist, read out the row of numbers biroed on it. She was left-handed. Sinistral. Therefore dangerously unpredictable. How was he supposed to handle this? Encourage her to go ahead with what seemed like a valid protest? Or, bearing in mind Merrily’s situation in the village, do what he could to talk her out of it?

  ‘And the code, of course, is 01432,’ Jane said.

  Lol rang the council’s planning department, Jane drumming her fingers on the desk the whole time. What he eventually learned, from a guy called Charles, was in no way likely to wind her down.

  ‘He says it’s up for discussion next week.’

  ‘They’ll make a decision then?’

  ‘The impression I got is that there’ve been no objections. The site being fairly secluded, inside the development line as laid down in the local plan, and not visible from the village centre. Perfect housing site.’

  ‘But it’s on a … Why didn’t you tell him it’s on a crucial—?’

  ‘Jane—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, the council doesn’t believe they exist. Anywhere else with, like, a really major figure like Alfred Watkins, there’d be a statue in High Town, and all the key leys, like Capuchin Way, would be marked by brass plaques. But this bunch of crass, self-serving tossers—’

  ‘Jane, the government’s demanding new housing all over the country. And there is a case for Ledwardine needing … starter homes?’

  ‘And like, luxury executive dwellings fit into that category?’

  Lol sighed. They’d called in at the Eight Till Late to quiz Big Jim Prosser on the ownership of Coleman’s Meadow. Jim had identified a farmer called G. J. Murray, who lived at Lyonshall, about seven miles away. This Murray had inherited Coleman’s Meadow from his aunt and had been touting it to development companies ever since.

  Which was the way of it. People wrote to the Hereford Times, moaning about all the locally born young people being driven out of the county because they couldn’t get onto the housing ladder, but when they had a chance to develop some field for housing, it was usually luxury executive dwellings. Where the safe money was.

  ‘And, like, even with starter homes, most of them just go to people from outside,’ Jane said. ‘All the guys in my class who were born around here, they just can’t wait to get the hell out … rent an inner-city apartment near some cool shops. Or emigrate. We’re a nomadic race.’

  ‘Unfortunately, the council can’t operate on that basis.’

  Didn’t you just hate playing the responsible adult? Especially when she was right. They really needed more executive homes, another two dozen SUVs clogging the village?

  ‘Anyway, it’s not going to happen, is it, Laurence? We’re going to get it stopped.’

  ‘We?’ Lol said. ‘We?’

  ‘Either you’re for me or against me.’

  ‘Jane, I am one hundred per cent for you. It’s just that we’re not talking about protecting an ancient monument, are we?’

  ‘Of course we are … sort of.’

  Jane sat down and drew a diagram on Lol’s lyric-pad. Cole Hill … Coleman’s Meadow track … tumulus … market place … Ledwardine Church … ancient crossroads … standing stone.

  ‘… Six, seven points if you include the market place. It’s beyond dispute. If I had a big enough map, I could probably trace it all the way to the Neolithic settlements in the Black Mountains. It’s a living ancient monument.’

  ‘Still be there in essence, though, won’t it, even if they build on it?’

  ‘It won’t be visible. This is a genuine, existing old straight track, probably an ancient ritual route, right? By the time they’ve finished, the way the land slopes, you probably won’t even be able to see Cole Hill from the church any more for all these identical luxury homes with their naff conservatories. It’s a crime against the ancient spirit. It’ll sour th
e energy!’

  ‘Energy,’ Lol said. ‘That’s not something you can easily see, is it?’

  ‘It’s something our remote ancestors were, like, instinctively aware of.’

  Jane went into lecturer mode, telling him things he already kind of knew: how the old stones had been erected on blind springs and the leys had energized and sustained the land and the people who lived on the land. How the oldest churches had also been built on ancient pagan sites because even in medieval times the people still remembered. And, of course, the leys were also lines of contact with … the ancestors.

  ‘The dead. Burial mounds. Circular churchyards growing up on the sites of Neolithic stone circles. The spirits of the dead were believed to walk the alignments so, in the old days, a coffin would have to be carried to the church along a particular track to prepare the spirit for the afterlife. It was a crucial thing. We should get Mum to reinstate it.’

  ‘It’s a theory,’ Lol said, nervous.

  ‘Ties in with folklore the world over, Lol. What it means is that the path through the church to the holy hill is the village’s link with its ancestors … its origins. You obliterate the path, you sever the link, and Ledwardine loses its … its soul!’

  Jane sprang up, as though the ancient energy was surging underneath the cottage floor.

  ‘Who do I complain to? Who do I lobby?’

  ‘The MP? Downing Street?’ Where it would go into the shredder marked fruitcakes. ‘Maybe best to start with the local councillor.’

  ‘Gavin Ashe?’

  ‘Gavin Ashe resigned, Jane. New guy is Lyndon Pierce. Lives at the end of Virgingate Lane.’

  ‘Which party?’

  ‘Non-party. He’s an independent.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? That means he doesn’t have to follow any party line on housing, right? It’s a start.’

  Lol said nothing. ‘Independent’ also meant you were free to jump into anybody’s pocket.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose you could approach him on a preservation-of-heritage basis. If you show him the picture in The Old Straight Track.’

  ‘Erm … yeah,’ Jane said. ‘I could…’

  ‘Because I’d guess that area hasn’t changed at all since Watkins was around in the 1920s?’

  ‘No. Probably not.’ She looked uncertain, suddenly. ‘Right. So that’s Lyndon … ?’

  ‘Pierce. He’s a chartered accountant. Jane…’ Lol didn’t really want to ask this. ‘Coleman’s Meadow is shown in the book, isn’t it?’

  ‘Look, Lol, you couldn’t…’ Jane frowned. ‘Obviously Watkins couldn’t include every ley in the county.’

  ‘You mean, no picture?’

  ‘Well, no, but that doesn’t—’

  ‘The most perfect, visible ley and he didn’t take a picture of it?’

  ‘Maybe he just didn’t use it.’ Jane was backing awkwardly towards the door. ‘Maybe it didn’t come out, I don’t know. Don’t look at me in that sorrowful, pitying—’

  ‘So, basically, this is not an Alfred Watkins ley, this is … a Jane Watkins ley.’

  Lol thought he saw a glitter of tears. This was about more than just a ley line and the soul of the village. It was also about being nearly eighteen and the realization that you were entering a world where changes were seldom for the better.

  ‘Jane, did … did Watkins even mention this line, or even Ledwardine?’

  ‘No.’ Jane looked down at her feet. ‘It’s the one thing I can’t understand.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s the real thing, though, Lol.’ She looked up, defiant again. ‘I mean you thought it was. You weren’t just—?’ ‘Well, I suppose it doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t find it.’

  ‘Now you’re humouring me. Don’t do that.’

  ‘No, really. He might have discovered it too late to get it into the book.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘It’s possible. And I mean, I’m no kind of expert, but it does seem like a perfect ley.’

  Jane looked him in the eyes. ‘So you think I’m doing the right thing.’

  A weighty moment. For a second or two, Lol felt the presence in the room of the cottage’s last owner, Lucy Devenish, Jane’s friend and mentor. His, too. Dead for over two years now. But sometimes when he came in at night he could still believe he’d seen, in the fractured instant of snapping on the lights, the folds of Lucy’s trademark poncho hanging over the newel post at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘I suppose that depends very much on what you’re planning to do,’ he said carefully.

  When Jane had gone, Lol could still feel her agitation in the air, bobbing and flickering around like the rays from the crystals.

  He picked up the Boswell guitar. Prof Levin had studio time available in the second half of September, which left less than three months to develop this horribly difficult second-album-after-the-comeback. The one which had to be appreciably better than the first or your career was in meltdown.

  Again.

  Lol sat down on the sofa with the Boswell and tried again with ‘Cloisters’, a mainly instrumental number which, no matter how he moved it around, and despite the experiments with Nick Drake tuning, continued to sound ordinary. As in flat. As in lifeless. More or less like every other song he’d half-finished in the past several weeks – a period in which, otherwise, he’d felt contented, balanced … normal. It was surely too much of a cliché that you had to be emotionally raw, broken, ragged, wretched or lovelorn to write a worthwhile song.

  Maybe it just needed a string arrangement.

  He lay back on the sofa with his arms around the guitar, an image coming to him of the dead of Ledwar-dine in some half-formed procession from the steeple to the holy hill, bisected by a stream of unheeding SUVs.

  8

  Dead to the World

  Caractacus.

  It was carved into a stone slab by a gate in a hedge enclosing a house and an empty carport. A flat, blank house built of the same squarish stones as the church. It was about a minute’s walk down the hill from the Rectory but very much on its own.

  Merrily had a sudden sense of isolation, vulnerability. She shook herself.

  Caractacus, as most schoolkids learned, was the ancient British hero defeated by the Romans and taken back to Rome, where he was treated with some respect. The final conflict was supposed to have taken place on Herefordshire Beacon, but that was only a legend, discredited, apparently, by historians.

  If Caractacus had retired here at least he’d have been spared a view of the Beacon. The house was tucked so tightly into the hill that all you could see behind it was a steep field vanishing rapidly into the forestry.

  To get to the front door, Merrily had to push away a sapling taller than she was. Disbelieving, she inspected a leaf.

  An oak? Within a couple of years it’d be pushing the glass in. In thirty years it would probably have the house down. Tim Loste must surely be planning to transplant it somewhere – but where? His front garden was the size of a smallish bathroom and there clearly wasn’t much space behind the house, either.

  On the wall beside the front door was a bell pull. Merrily could hear the jingling inside the house. No other sounds. She waited at least two minutes before edging around the oak and walking back to the road, pulling her mobile from her shoulder bag.

  ‘Couldn’t check out a couple of things for me, could you, Sophie?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The Royal Oak. It’s a pub not far from Wychehill which seems to have undergone some kind of transformation, making it … unpopular. Might be something on the Net.’

  ‘I may even have heard something about this. I’ll look into it. Anything else?’

  ‘Syd Spicer. Is it true he’s ex-Regiment?’

  ‘I don’t know. The Bishop would be able to tell us for certain, but he’s taken his grandson to a county cricket match in Worcester. That’s rather interesting, Merrily, isn’t it? I’ll find out what I can about Mr Spicer’s hi
story which, given the traditions of the SAS, is likely to be very little. What are you doing now?’

  ‘Trying to understand what’s happening here.’ Merrily looked up the hill towards the church, concealed by dark deciduous trees. ‘Spicer’s right about this place. You wouldn’t know you were in it.’

  She’d left the twenty-year-old Volvo in the parking bay in front of the church. She walked up past it, seeing nobody, following the grey-brown churchyard wall into a short, steep cutting which accessed a lane running parallel to the main road but on a higher level, like a sloping gallery.

  Time to seek help to remove the evil from our midst, Joyce Aird had apparently said to Syd Spicer.

  Midst of what?

  All the same, she brought her small pectoral cross out of her bag and slipped it on, letting it drop down under the T-shirt. You could never be too careful.

  Hannah’s cottage was low and pebble-dashed and painted a buttermilk colour. Rustic porch and a clematis, and a mountain bike propped up under a front window.

  It was just gone one p.m. and the sun was hot and high. Hannah was wearing shorts and a stripy sleeveless top revealing a butterfly tattoo on one shoulder.

  She didn’t have sunken eyes or a deathly pallor.

  ‘I feel dead stupid now.’ She was maybe a year or two younger than Merrily: pale hair in a ponytail, no makeup, a diamond nose-stud. ‘I’m glad you’re not … you know…’ Pointing at her neck.

  ‘Too hot for all that.’ Merrily had shed the sweatshirt, was down to her green Gomer Parry Plant Hire T-shirt. ‘I used to have a black one with a dog collar on it in white but I couldn’t find it this morning.’

  ‘It’s OK, I know you’re the real thing. Joyce Aird rang.’

  ‘Mmm. Thought she might.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with Joyce,’ Hannah said. ‘Better than local radio, normally, so it’s killing her keeping quiet about this.’

  Hannah wasn’t local either. Northern accent. East Lancashire, maybe.