Remains of an Altar mw-8

by Phil Rickman

  Holliday must have police contacts. Maybe Masonic?

  ‘No, I didn’t know,’ Preston Devereaux said wearily. ‘I have a business to run. I don’t have much time for gossip.’

  ‘Ecstasy tablets, Chairman. They say one can buy them like sweeties at the Royal Oak.’

  OK, maybe his contacts weren’t that good.

  ‘And you know why the district council, as the licensing authority, will not act against that place?’ Holliday jabbing a forefinger at nobody in particular. ‘You know why they won’t shut it down – and I can disclose this with some authority, having worked in local government for forty years, and damned glad to be out of it…’

  ‘Mr Holliday—’

  ‘The reason they will not act, Chairman, is that, as with so many tourist areas, the level of government grant-aid is now, to a large extent, dependent on the council and the tourism bodies being able to prove that they are attracting a sufficient number of black and Asian visitors. This is a fact. And these … music nights at the Oak are seen as especially attractive to that particular—’

  ‘All right.’ Preston Devereaux banging his gavel. ‘As most of you seem to be members of the Wychehill Residents’ Action Group, I don’t think we need to complicate matters by going further into this issue tonight.’

  He was at a table set up at the foot of the chancel steps, the chair next to him empty. The chancel was large and unscreened, its choir stalls in a semicircular formation, like a concert hall. More like a concert hall, in fact, than a place of worship, and as stark as a Welsh chapel.

  It was just after nine p.m., the atmosphere thickening. Merrily wore a dark skirt and one of Jane’s hoodies, zipped up to cover the dog collar. She’d slipped into a shadowy and empty back pew, just after eight-thirty. Thirty or forty people sitting in front of her, including … was that Joyce Aird? The normal parish meeting seemed to have started at seven; three people had left in the past half-hour.

  Syd Spicer didn’t seem to be here. She wasn’t sure what this meant, but it probably wasn’t a good sign. Preston Devereaux leaned back, looking through half-lidded eyes out into the uncrowded nave.

  ‘I think we need to keep cool heads as we come to the final item … although, to be quite honest, I don’t want to come to it at all. In fact, I feel embarrassed to be chairing a discussion of this nature, having no wish to watch this community casting off what remains of its reason.’

  Devereaux was lean and weathered and keen-eyed, with longish hair the colour of Malvern stone, sideburns ridged like treebark. His accent was local, educated, grounded. He wore a brown leather jacket over a shirt and tie.

  ‘However, because I find myself tragically implicated in this situation, I feel obliged to give it a public hearing. Essentially, we have a road-safety issue caused, I believe, by an increase in traffic through the village, due to increased tourism and … other developments.’

  Somebody laughed. It had a bitter edge.

  ‘However,’ the chairman said, ‘there has been quite a sharp increase in the number of road accidents lately, which has given rise to rumours which I shall describe conservatively as outlandish. Who’s going to start us off on this? Helen—’

  A woman stood up in one of the front pews.

  ‘Helen Truscott. I use this road probably more than any of you, and I don’t believe in ghosts.’

  Someone clapped. Helen Truscott turned to face the assembly. Mid-fifties, brisk, attractive. You’d trust her judgement.

  ‘I’m a district nurse by profession, and I’m also the carer for my disabled dad. And he worries when I’m out, particularly at night, and I’d like to clear this matter up, so that he can stop worrying.’

  This would be the daughter of D. H. Walford who had written to the Rector.

  ‘Thank you, Helen. We take your point. Anybody else? Mrs Aird?’

  ‘Well…’ Joyce Aird stood up, alone in a pew halfway down the nave. ‘I think when there are a number of accidents, one after the other, we’re all bound to feel a little nervous, and we can’t help wondering if there’s something going on that we don’t understand. Especially those of us who live alone and perhaps have too much time to think. I’m a churchgoer, so I … when I get upset I turn to God. But I suppose I’m in the minority these days, so I … I’ll…’

  She sat down. Merrily noticed that the two vases of fresh lilies she must have put out on the chairman’s table were on the flagged floor beside it.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Aird,’ Devereaux said. ‘As we’re all churchgoers tonight, I’m sure God will be sympathetic. But I think this issue lies rather with the creations of man. The problem here’s always been that, because of the positioning of the dwellings in Wychehill, mostly out of sight of the road, motorists do not realize there’s a community here – scattered though it may be – of more than two hundred people. And so they tend to speed. Mr Holliday—’

  Holliday was back on his feet, making it clear that the Wychehill Residents’ Action Group, now extending to at least four other communities in the area, would be dissociating itself from any course of action designed to legitimize superstition.

  ‘And indeed, Chairman, the very idea of suggesting that the ghost of Sir Ed—’

  Clack. The end of his sentence was chipped off by the gavel.

  ‘The cyclist, sir, if you please. There’ll be no ridiculous conjecture in my meeting.’

  ‘The idea that the story of the cyclist –’ Holliday smirked ‘– would generate wider publicity for our campaign now seems…’ He coughed. ‘It seems clear to me that this would succeed only in leaving us open to ridicule.’

  ‘But you thought about it, didn’t you, Leonard?’ Devereaux said.

  ‘It did occur to me, yes, I’m rather ashamed to say, and I’ve now rejected it.’

  ‘Very wise of you, sir.’ Devereaux smiled. ‘Now, I think we have a proposal…’

  A man stood up.

  ‘I’d like to propose that, in the wake of the weekend’s fatality, we renew our call to the County Council and the police for the installation of speed cameras.’

  ‘Right, proposal by Mr Sedgefield, of The Wellhouse.’

  ‘Seconded,’ another guy said without getting up. ‘Perhaps they’ll capture this bloody ghost on film – then we’d all be able to see it.’

  Laughter. Preston Devereaux gavelled for silence, letting his smile fade.

  ‘I don’t really see there’s much more we can do than that. But before I close the meeting, regarding the very regrettable incident involving myself at the weekend, several people have asked me two questions which, with the meeting’s permission, I’d like to answer publicly tonight. Question one: no, I’m glad to say I was not hurt, for which I have to thank the famously robust physique of the British Land Rover. I very much wish, mind, that I’d been in my ordinary car – might’ve been able to get out of the way in time and the whole thing might’ve been less serious. But fate decided otherwise. Therefore, I’d like to propose that the whole community join me in expressing our condolences to the families of the two young people. Because, whatever some of us may think about the Royal Oak…’

  Subdued murmurs were lifted by the church’s crisp acoustics into a substantial expression of assent.

  ‘Good,’ Preston Devereaux said. ‘Now … question two. Simple answer: no, of course I bloody didn’t!’

  Laughter. Devereaux half-rose.

  ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Now, unless anyone has something to add, I’d like to formally close this meet— I’m sorry, was that a hand at the back?’

  ‘Yes, if I could just…’

  She’d probably regret this later, Merrily thought, but you could only stand so much of this kind of crap.

  She stood up, pulling down her zip.

  The admonishing angel in her head looked a lot like Sophie.

  ‘Oh, wow, look over there…’

  Jane was standing on the massive, half-collapsed capstone, this huge jutting wedge. She was gazing to the south-w
est, the evening light thickly around her like the pith of some vast luminous orange, and she felt that if she jumped off now she’d go on flying, in a dead straight line to the crooked mountain on the horizon.

  Arthur’s Stone was the most impressive prehistoric monument in Herefordshire. It crouched like a dinosaur skeleton on Merbach Hill, above the Golden Valley, which melted like grilled cheese into Wales. Arthur’s Stone was not one stone but many … the remains of a dolmen or cromlech, a Bronze Age burial chamber which had once been covered with earth.

  Alfred Watkins had found several leys passing through here, connecting it with country churches and unexcavated burial mounds and the remains of a medieval castle on an ancient hilltop site at Snodhill.

  And if you stood where Jane was standing, on top of the monument, you could see, in misty profile…

  ‘It’s the Skirrid, isn’t it?’ Eirion said.

  Like he could fail to recognize the holy mountain of Gwent, which he could see every day from his bedroom window just like Jane could see Cole Hill. The volcanic mountain cleft in two, according to legend, at the moment when Christ died on the cross.

  Lying in Eirion’s bed in the heat of the afternoon Jane had found herself visualizing the elemental force that split the mountain just as…

  Oh God, was that some kind of sacrilege?

  The day replayed itself in her memory: one of those wild, hazy days when you weren’t aware of how magical it had been until it was nearly over.

  She’d persuaded Eirion not to go to school – school hardly mattered at his stage of the game, A levels over, future in the lap of the gods. They’d gone back to his dad’s place at Abergavenny and compiled the Coleman’s Meadow document on his computer, with the photos and quotes from The Old Straight Track. Eirion had rewritten Jane’s rant, draining off some of the vitriol, and, she had to admit, it now seemed more rational and convincing. And then, with his dad and his stepmother safely away at the same conference in North Wales, they’d gone to bed.

  Afterwards, she’d tried to ring Mum at the vicarage to imply subtly, without actually lying, that Eirion was picking her up from school. But Mum wasn’t there, and the mobile was switched off most of the time. And then she’d remembered that Mum was going to be at a meeting over on the other side of the county for most of the evening, which left her and Eirion whole hours to go in search of the old straight track.

  Eirion, in his post-coital whatever mood, had been cool about it, so they’d started off by looking for Alfred Watkins himself. First and foremost a Herefordshire man, it had said in his obituary in the Hereford Times in 1935, as native to the county as the hop and the apple.

  Jane had found that in the Watkins biography by Ron Shoesmith, which had taken them in search of Vineyard Croft, the house near the River Wye, on the edge of the city, where Alfred had lived for about thirty years with his wife, Marion. But they couldn’t find it; they found a Vineyard Road, but it seemed all suburbs around there now. It was much easier to locate the house the Watkinses had moved to, just off the Cathedral green. It actually had a plaque on it, identifying its importance – probably the nearest thing to a monument to Alfred in the entire county.

  ‘There ought to be an official Watkins memorial ley,’ Eirion had said. ‘Where you can stand and have the whole line pointed out for you.’

  ‘So that even councillors could see what it was about?’

  ‘They’d only be able to follow it if it was marked out in new branches of Asda and B & Q.’

  We really understand each other, don’t we? Jane thought. And in a few weeks he’ll be gone.

  She felt very close to tears and climbed down from the stone before she was tempted to throw herself into the horizon.

  In the normal way of things, you were consulted by worried individuals whose world-view had been jogged out of focus – frightened people mugged by skewed circumstance. Since yours was the only hand reaching out they switched off their scepticism and clasped it.

  Always individuals. Never a community, a society, a committee. In any random group, scepticism ruled.

  ‘I’m confused, Mr Chairman,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Can’t have that.’ Preston Devereaux peered into the growing gloom. ‘I pride myself on clarity. May we have your name, madam?’

  ‘I’m, erm, Merrily Watkins.’

  ‘Are you indeed?’

  ‘I’m a consultant to the Diocese of Hereford on matters … paranormal. And…’ she saw Joyce Aird had turned, looking both grateful and worried ‘… the Rector asked me to come tonight.’

  ‘He must’ve forgotten to mention it to me,’ Devereaux said. ‘And as that particular item has now been dealt with—’

  ‘It hasn’t really been dealt with, though, has it? It’s just been pushed under the table.’

  Lot of heads turning, some muttering. No going back now.

  ‘Mrs Watson—’

  ‘Watkins. And I’m not a big conspiracy theorist, but I’ve encountered enough cover-ups in the past couple of years to recognize—’

  ‘Madam!’ The gavel came down with a crack that must have dented the table. ‘Let no one accuse me of that.’

  ‘I’m not accusing—’

  ‘I think you’d better forsake the shelter of your back pew and attempt to justify it, Reverend.’

  Preston Devereaux pulled out the chair next to his, calling out to the back of the church.

  ‘Can we have some decent light on the proceedings?’

  19

  Unload It

  Merrily stood up in the brittle, glassy light. She felt weak with fury.

  Moved into the aisle, reaching into her bag to switch off her mobile. Would have felt better about this if Jane had called. In the end she’d gone round to Lol’s, asked if he’d mind staying behind and trying to find her. OK, she was seventeen, for heaven’s sake, nearly an adult. And yet…

  Oh God, get me through this.

  She stepped behind the table next to the chairman, looking out at twenty or thirty people, widely spaced, Winnie Sparke standing out in a crocheted white woollen shawl.

  Lights came on, as if to dispense with the possibility of anything beyond normal occurring here. They were theatre-type spotlights, directed at the chancel, presumably for use during the choral concerts. The lights put the congregation into shadow and hurt your eyes when you looked up.

  Merrily looked down.

  ‘The main qualification for this job is, I’ve discovered, a high embarrassment threshold.’

  Nobody even smiled.

  ‘I was told – by the Rector, who doesn’t seem to be here tonight – that at least four people had had experience of an inexplicable light, sometimes accompanied by a figure, in the road outside. Each sighting preceding an accident of some kind.’

  She paused. Were they out there now? Tim Loste, Stella Cobham? Or had they been persuaded, by whoever had gagged Joyce Aird, to stay away? She thought about all the hours she’d spent, dragging Lol out to Wychehill, fruitlessly knocking on doors, needlessly infuriating the uniquely invaluable Sophie.

  ‘The message spelled out tonight by Mr Holliday is that it’s all superstitious rubbish. And he was thoughtful enough to put all that on my answering machine earlier today, when he phoned to advise me not to bother coming.’

  A few murmurs at last. She could see Holliday, stiff-faced, in a left-hand pew, second row.

  ‘Now what I’m gathering from what’s been said is that Mr Holliday had earlier considered that the alleged phenomenon might have been useful as a publicity gimmick … to focus attention on his campaign against what’s happening at the Royal Oak. Get the protest into the national papers. Maybe on TV.’

  Merrily paused again, looking over to where she’d last seen Holliday, giving him a warm smile – the pompous, duplicitous git.

  ‘You can see the TV reports now, can’t you? Long shot of the hills at sunset, overlaid with some suitably serene pastoral music written by … the cyclist.’

  Preston Devereaux�
��s chair creaked.

  ‘Mrs Watkins, I think—’

  ‘And then it goes dark,’ Merrily said. ‘And we see the Royal Oak throbbing with purple strobe lights and a blast of drum-’n’-bass all over the forecourt. And then Mr Holliday steps into shot with a grim face and a petition to the council.’

  ‘Mrs Watkins.’

  ‘All right … I’m sorry.’ Putting up her hands, turning to Preston Devereaux. ‘Mr Chairman, I take it that you were tacitly informing us a few minutes ago that in the moments before that horrific crash you did not see a strange light or a strange cyclist. But where are the people who insist that they did? Is Mr Loste here tonight, for instance? Because I’d’ve thought if this meeting was to make a decision it ought to hear all the evidence. Mr Loste?’

  She peered into the lights. Silence.

  ‘Well … thanks, Mr Chairman. That’s all I wanted to say, really. Just didn’t want anyone to think that, having been invited, I’d failed to show up. Thank you.’

  Merrily shouldered her bag amid a rush of whispers. Preston Devereaux said nothing. She slid around the table and walked away, out of the spotlight pool, down into the shadows of the left-hand aisle, aware of hushed discussions opening up on both sides, like a small motor coming to life, and then the scuffling sound of someone standing up.

  ‘Wait…’ A tall woman, black top, spiky red hair, standing sideways in the pew space.

  Merrily stopped and leaned against a pew-end.

  ‘I saw it,’ the woman said. ‘This fully formed man on a bike – high up on his bike, this great, black…’ she stared around the church ‘… pulpit of a bike. Right there in front of me. And I wasn’t drunk, whatever people are saying. I hadn’t been drinking. When they gave me a breath test, it was totally negative. But I’m telling you I saw him. He was there. Absolutely and totally … bloody there.’

  ‘You’re…’ Merrily felt a small worm of excitement uncurling in her spine. ‘You’re Mrs Cobham, right?’

  ‘Correct. I swerved and he vanished and I went into this bloody camper van about half a second later.’