by Phil Rickman
If she was going to be head of CID for the proposed new Midlands mega-force before turning forty she didn’t have any time to waste.
Watching Howe talking tersely into her mobile, listening and nodding, functioning, Merrily felt useless, irrelevant. Chasing shadows, chasing lights. Sometimes it seemed that deliverance amounted to little more than this.
People nudging one another. Who’s that? What does she do? Oh, you’re kidding … Her role nebulous, her focus blurred. Why was she here? Who, in the end, would be healed?
What was clear, however, was that nobody else would try too hard to make sense of Loste, his obsession with Elgar, his oak-tree fetish.
Oaks. Sacred oaks. The Royal Oak. Too many oaks. Did any of this link into the history or even the folklore of the area? It wasn’t as if there was some ancient resident whose memory she could tap into. Nobody had lived here longer than a quarter of a century.
Well … except for one person.
Not someone she particularly wanted to approach, but…
Merrily slipped away, knowing that Annie Howe, having failed to get anything useful out of her, would have forgotten by now that she’d even been here.
28
Curse Came Down
The name on the gate was Old Wychehill Farm, suggesting that perhaps this was what remained of the original hamlet, while the present village was just fragments of a repair job for a quarry-ravaged hill.
In fact, Old Wychehill Farm was big enough to have been a hamlet in itself. Sunk into its own valley, half-circled by mature broadleaf trees with the swizzle-stick profiles of pines and monkey puzzles poking out of the mix.
The farmhouse, at the end of nearly half a mile of private drive, turned out to be the turreted house in the valley which Merrily had noticed that first morning – the turret crowning a Victorian Gothic wing added to a much older dwelling with timbers like age-browned bones.
She parked in the farmyard – courtyard, really. No animals in view, no free-range chickens. The three-storey house was enclosed by outbuildings of the same grey-brown stone. Some of the more distant buildings had curtains at their diamond-paned windows.
My lovely holiday lets.
A black pick-up truck eased in behind her. A stylish truck with chrome side-rails and silver flashes on its flanks. Two men getting out, squinting into the sun, one of them strolling across.
‘Help you?’
‘Looking for Mr Devereaux.’
‘Which one?’
‘Preston Devereaux?’
The man stood looking her up and down, pinching his unshaven chin.
‘Shame about that.’
Apart from golden highlights and a sharper jawline, he looked a lot like Preston Devereaux. Same narrow features, same loose, unhurried gait as he’d wandered over. Except this guy was over thirty years younger and the other one was the younger son, Hugo.
‘Louis, this is Mrs Watkins,’ Hugo said.
‘Merrily.’ The face of Louis Devereaux, former huntsman, alleged former substance-abuser, split into this voracious and undeniably attractive grin. ‘And we’re stuck with Spicer. The injustice of it.’ Louis turned to his brother. ‘You better go and find the old man. No hurry. Want to come with me, Merrily?’
‘Is it safe?’
‘I’m a country gentleman,’ Louis said, ‘from a long, long line of country gentlemen. Of course it isn’t safe.’
He strode past her across the yard, turning the handle on a plain door. It didn’t open; it was jammed at the bottom. He gave it a kick.
‘Whole place is seizing up.’
His accent was posher than his father’s. Probably been away to public school. She looked up at him as he held open the door.
‘I really won’t keep him long.’
‘He might want to keep you, though,’ Louis said. ‘I would. End of the passage, look.’ He bent down, put an arm around her shoulders, pointing. ‘The Beacon Room.’
Following her into the passage. There was an old manure smell, as if this entrance had been used for the changing of generations of farm boots. It was a rear hallway, low, earth-coloured, windowless, the only light funnelled down the well of some narrow back stairs to her left … until she pushed open the door at the end into lavish sunshine from a long window framing a wow-gasp view of the great tiered wedding-cake of Herefordshire Beacon.
The Beacon Room. Obviously built into the Victorian wing to accommodate this view. The hill was a couple of miles away, as if it had been aligned for maximum impact.
‘Quite impressive, isn’t it?’ Louis said. ‘As crime scenes go. Lit up like a housing estate last night. Cops swarming all over it.’
‘Exciting?’
‘Yeah, I guess it was. I suppose when it’s somebody you don’t know … Well, I’ve probably seen him, if he’s the one I think he is. At the Oak.’
‘You go there?’
‘Now and then. Not as often as I used to. Quite good for … you know … girls.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘And, of course, for pissing off Len Holliday and the Wychehill Residents’ Action Group,’ Louis said. ‘One tries to sympathize, but that guy…’
‘Don’t suppose you’re really aware of the Royal Oak down here. Or the road.’
‘Don’t suppose we are, particularly,’ Louis said.
She looked around the room. Lofty, wood-panelled, definitely a man’s room, even a young man’s room – minimal furniture apart from stereo speakers the size of small wardrobes. Racks of CDs and vinyl and potentially interesting framed photographs. Over the baronial fire-place was a period poster behind glass advertising Pink Floyd and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown at the Roundhouse in London. The names were wreathed in coloured smoke from a pipe smoked by a reclining naked man like some stoned 1960s version of Michelangelo’s Adam.
I was a wild boy, too. Drove too fast, inhaled my share of blow.
On the panelled wall over a writing desk with a worn leather top there was a framed black and white photo of a bunch of young long-haired men, one of whom was … Eric Clapton? The lean, grinning guy on the end was also unmistakable. He looked like Louis Devereaux with longer hair and lush sideburns.
‘Blimey,’ Merrily said. ‘Is that—?’
‘Dad was very well connected. Once upon a time.’
‘Images of a misspent youth, Mrs Watkins.’
Merrily jumped. Preston Devereaux was standing in the doorway, an older, duller figure than she remembered from the other night, a working man wearing a farmer’s green nylon overalls and a nylon cap.
‘Didn’t know him well,’ he said. ‘But you don’t throw away a picture like that, do you?’
‘Were you in a band?’
‘Never had the talent. Managed a couple, when I was up at Oxford in the late 1960s. Which meant carrying the amps, back then, and inventing light shows. I was good at that.’
‘Oh Gawd, Memory Lane time,’ Louis said. ‘I’m out of here.’
He bowed to Merrily, made an exaggerated exit.
‘Twenty-four next week,’ Devereaux said. ‘Going on ten.’
‘If ten means pre-pubertal, I’m not sure I’d agree. What were you doing at Oxford?’
‘Physics.’
‘So … what happened? I mean…’
‘What happened?’ Devereaux walked over to the Beacon window. ‘That happened. History. Roots. No escape. You think there is, but there en’t. Anyway…’
He stood in front of Merrily, hands behind his back.
‘No escape for me either, Mr Devereaux. What you said the other night about dealing with something in a discreet and dignified fashion…’
‘Have you?’
Merrily shook her head.
‘Become too complicated. When you’ve had a man murdered, and when the local man under suspicion of having killed him—’
‘Local man?’ Preston Devereaux almost left the ground. ‘There are no local men up there, Mrs Watkins. Why I was forced to come back.’
&nbs
p; ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, I’m sorry. Continue.’
‘I was just going to say that the man suspected of murder is also the man I most needed to talk to about … the cyclist.’
‘You can say Elgar in here, Merrily.’
‘Thank you. Anyway, it means I haven’t been able to get to Loste. And in the meantime, other questions have opened up.’
‘Like?’
‘He was the first to identify the image in the road as Elgar. He’s obsessed with Elgar. He apparently hates what the Royal Oak has become.’
‘So I understand, yes.’
‘If his hatred of the Royal Oak has now led to a murder, I don’t … well, I don’t know how relevant that makes my idea of a requiem for two road-accident victims. And I do appreciate that one woman agonizing over the technicalities of a church service must seem entirely trivial to you…’
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘You’re … as you’ve just implied, you’re the only person whose experience of this area goes back longer than about twenty years. I’d just like to get your opinion on a few things. Memory Lane, I’m afraid.’
‘Memory Lane. With all its potholes and its road kill.’
Preston Devereaux went back and shut the door. Above it were three wooden shields, one bearing a coat of arms and a motto in Latin. Each of the others, on either side, displayed a fox’s head, neither of them moth-eaten the way foxes’ heads usually were in these displays. Mementoes, perhaps, of Louis’s carefree youth.
Devereaux strode back to the Beacon window, pulling off his cap.
‘Must be the most spectacular view in the Malverns,’ Merrily said.
‘Hated it, Merrily. With a vengeance. A forsaken stronghold, symbol of defeat. Turned my back on it and everything that the Malverns’d come to stand for, all the starchy gentility of it. And then my father died.’
‘When was that?’
‘Back end of ’85. You learn that a farm that’s been in your family since the Conquest, that’s a family curse you can’t lose. And periodically the curse strikes, giving you a little reminder that it is a curse. Like in the 1980s, when you had new patterns in farm subsidy, new regulations, the EC. Getting so a farmer didn’t feel he owned his own land. My old man could see that was only the beginning. Which partly explains why he strung himself up in the tower.’
‘Oh…’ Merrily’s gaze went instinctively to the ceiling. ‘I didn’t know. I’m sorry.’
‘Which effectively did for my glittering future as a career scientist. Doing research at the time, bit of teaching. Having a good time. Had a smart city woman and a kid, and when I came home to bury the old man, everything in me was screaming, don’t look, don’t look. Don’t look at the state of the place, just get it on the damned market. And then I found out, as I say, that there was not a single local family left in Wychehill. And the curse came down.’
‘Your mother was still alive?’
‘Moved my ma down to Ledbury – she wouldn’t live here after that. Told her I’d take a couple of years off to pull it all together, before resuming the glittering career. Then we had Hugo. More roots.’
‘What … happened to the boys’ mother?’
‘Left a long time ago. Wilful London girl, didn’t get on with the country. Bit like Syd Spicer’s missus. We weren’t married, so no complications in those days. She went abroad, I got the boys. And we turned it around, by God we did, in spite of the shiny-arsed civil servants and the scum from Brussels. Diversification.’
‘I remember that as a buzz word put around by the Min of Ag.’
‘The pragmatic farmer’s way out of the agricultural crisis. Thatcher’s message. And, fair play, it worked for some of us. You felt a bit sick about it, but it worked. My case, luxury self-catering holidays. Not that they self-cater, they all eat out. But it works, and it provides employment locally. All nicely old-fashioned, and folks come back year after year, all the sad townies, and we charge ’em more every time and they still come.’
Preston Devereaux slumped into a wing-backed chair next to the big dead fireplace, smoke-blackened and flaked with log ash. He waved Merrily to a faded chaise longue.
‘All the antique furniture from the house we put in the units – what do we need with antiques, me and the boys? Install a Queen Anne writing desk in your stone holiday chalet, that’s worth an extra two hundred a week on the bill. You see the buildings out there?’
‘Very classy.’
‘Turned over all the old stone barns and stables and chicken houses to holiday units, added a few new ones in the same style. Put the farm, what’s left of it, into new galvanized sheds painted dark green and nicely screened off. And the farm life, what’s left of that, goes on around the townies. Give them an illusion of what it’s like, let them into what country pursuits we’re allowed to practise now – shooting parties and the like, hunting, before it was banned. Joining what they think of as the Old Squirearchy for a fortnight.’
‘So the boys are part of that? Plenty for them to do. Don’t want to move away like you did?’
‘They won’t leave. All changed since my day, look. It was either/or back then. Now you can take what you want from the city and come back next day. And growing up in the country hardens you. We can deal with the towns better than the townies can deal with us.’
‘Only I heard that Louis…’
Merrily looked up at the foxes’ heads above the door – the way their mouths were always forced open around their pointed canines, to make them look like savage beasts gloriously killed.
‘Heard Louis what?’ His voice spiking.
‘Had some kind of breakdown? After hunting was banned?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Can’t be sure.’
‘Selective memory you got there, Mrs Watkins.’ Preston Devereaux, relaxed again. ‘Aye, he loved his hunting. We ran the Countryside Alliance campaign in this area. Fight the Ban posters everywhere. Boy lost his rag at a demo, belted a copper guarding some Blairite toady. Weekend in custody. That’s the state we’re in – fight for our traditions, we’re branded criminals. This government’s scum. Anti-English. Don’t get me started. We lost. You move on. You ask me a question? I can’t remember.’
Merrily was confused by all the contradictions here. Trying to understand a man who, having been determined to escape his roots, came back to be driven by a born-again fervour fuelled by bitterness.
‘Oak trees,’ she said. ‘Tim Loste has a lot of oak trees. Which, for a man with a tiny garden…’
‘Does he?’
‘Elgar and oak trees. Is there some connection I might not have heard about?’
‘No idea. The only oak I know’s the Royal Oak. Which is a pretty common name for a pub, relating, surely, to the tree where Charles II hid from his enemies.’
‘No local legends about oaks?’
‘Not that I know of. Can I get you a drink? Some coffee?’
‘Thanks, but I’ll have to be off in a few minutes. I shouldn’t have come, anyway, without ringing.’
‘Drop in anytime, we’ve nothing to hide.’
‘Is there any kind of mystery … legend … rumour, connecting Elgar with Wychehill?’
‘Only the church. Longworth and his so-called visionary experience.’
‘What was that?’
‘They say it’s what he has on his tomb.’
‘The angel?’
‘Gruesome bloody thing, ennit? Not my idea of an angel. Story I was told as a child is that it appeared to the mad old bugger up on the hill, in a blaze of light, and drove him in a state of blind fear to religion.’
‘And to Elgar.’
‘Same thing. Elgar’s become a religion now. I’m not a fan, Merrily, as you may have gathered. If he hadn’t encouraged Longworth to build that bloody church there’d’ve been no Upper Wychehill for the townies to colonize. And what did Elgar ever do for the Malverns, anyway?’
‘Massive tourism?’
> Devereaux snorted.
‘We’ve always had that. We got the scenery, don’t need the bloody incidental music. Bugger always claimed he got his inspiration here but he cleared off soon enough when he was famous. And when he came back, as an old man, he came back as an incomer, that’s what gets to me.’
‘I don’t understand. If he—’
‘He’d changed. Starts out as a country boy, I’m not disputing that, even went foxhunting, according to some accounts. But then, soon as he makes it big, he’s off … big house in Hereford, then London, mixing with the nobs and the arty-farty veggies, George Bernard Shaw and the like. And when he finally returns, as this distinguished old man, he’s turned into one of them – having places laid at the table for his bloody dogs. Likely, he thought the hills’d give him his inspiration back, but it never happened, did it? Closed door this time. Given up his soul to mix with the great and the good and – excuse my terminology – lost his balls. Never wrote another thing that was worthwhile. No wonder he’s an unhappy bloody spirit. You believe that?’
‘That he’s unhappy, or that he’s…’
Devereaux leaned his head into a wing of his chair and looked at Merrily sideways through a bloodshot eye.
‘That dead Elgar still bikes the hills.’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Ha!’
‘Sorry. I’m not usually so … no, I suppose I am. I suspect there’s something happening … in the atmosphere. I’m just not sure it’s anything to do with Elgar.’
‘Well…’ Preston Devereaux smiled. ‘If you ever decide it is and you want to exorcize the old bastard … you can go ahead, far as I’m concerned. By all means. Wipe whatever’s left of him off the hills for good and all. Just keep quiet about it.’
29
Stoolie
Thursday began badly and got worse. Just as Merrily was about to corner Jane on the Coleman’s Meadow issue, Winnie Sparke was on the phone.
‘Merrily, you talked to the cops?’
‘Well, I have, but—’
‘Only I’ve heard nothing. Last night I barely slept. See, the one time Tim called me, Iwantedtofixhim a lawyer, he kept saying there was no need. He said it was crazy they could think he did it. He said they’d know that soon enough.’