by Phil Rickman
‘Sophie rang me,’ the Bishop said. Doleful.
‘Two seconds, Bernie.’
Merrily took the mobile into the kitchen, where the cold air was like a razor. The Aga had swallowed two gallons of oil a day, but it had had its compensations.
‘I suppose a grovelling apology’s due,’ the Bishop said. ‘All I can say is that I kept nothing from you. Not intentionally.’
‘That’s reassuring. Kind of.’
‘And I’m still no wiser, Merrily. Although, yes, I am now inclined to believe that the initial information I was given by Adam Eastgate is … probably incomplete.’
‘Incomplete. That’s a very elastic word, Bernie.’
‘Whether any concealment of information is down to the Duchy I would personally doubt. I don’t think Adam’s the sort of man to play a double game. However I, ah … Sophie did say she’d felt obliged to tell you that we’d also had a call from, ah …’
‘A private number in Canterbury?’
‘Yes, well, whoever it was from, I was advised that the best way of dealing with this might be simply to allow my Deliverance consultant to devote herself to uncovering what there is be uncovered. Without the usual constraints on her time.’
It was Canterbury who wanted the investigation?
‘So — let’s just clarify this, Bernie — there is more to it than a decidedly iffy haunting.’
‘I’m assuming there is. I honestly do not know.’
‘But someone in Canterbury does.’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Bernie, we’re not somehow … indirectly working for the security services, are we?’
‘Good God, Merrily …’
‘All right. Suppose I was to conclude that the ghost story was a fabrication.’
‘You can do that?’
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘Then please do it,’ the Bishop said. ‘Soonest.’
Afterwards, she felt exhausted, but couldn’t settle. With the half-eight Eucharist tomorrow, she ought to be in bed, but …
She made two mugs of hot chocolate, took one to Jane in the parlour then came back, sat down in the scullery and reopened the phone. Rang Felix Barlow and asked if it would be OK to come and speak to Fuchsia tomorrow.
‘I know it’s late, Felix, but I need to fit it into my fairly rigid Sunday schedule. I’m sorry.’
‘Hang on, would you?’
Felix didn’t sound happy. Merrily heard him moving back into his tin home, and thought there were raised voices. She drank some chocolate, lit a cigarette, still unsure of what to make of this. It wasn’t unprecedented, but — if you excluded council tenants desperate to be rehoused — it was rare for anyone to invent a ghost story. Rarer still for anyone to transpose a relatively well known fictional story into a real situation.
After just over a minute, Felix returned and told Merrily that Fuchsia didn’t want to talk to her.
‘No offence to you, Mrs Watkins. She gets like this. Maybe leave it a few days?’
‘A few days?’
‘We’ll get back to you, all right?’
‘No. I’m afraid it’s not all right. I’m under a certain pressure to get this sorted one way or—’
‘You’re under pressure …’ She heard the clangs of him hurriedly clambering down the caravan steps into the night, then his voice, upclose and frayed. ‘Tell the Duchy we won’t be touching that job now under any circumstances, all right?’
‘But that—’
‘Yeah, I know this is me burning my boats with them for ever, and that’s some kind of madness, and I’m going to regret it for a long time, but that’s the size of it.’
He was panting.
‘Has something happened, Felix?’
‘We’ve told you everything we can. Why do you need us any more?’
‘Because …’ Merrily really didn’t want to say any of this to him, she needed to put it directly to Fuchsia, but it was late and she was overtired, and … ‘… because I’m not sure you have told me everything.’
‘I have to go now.’
‘Where is she?’
‘In the … bathroom. Doing her hair. She got soaked.’
‘Tell me one thing. Has anyone else been to talk to her about that house? Or to you?’
‘Why would they?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You think Fuchsia’s holding something back, is it, Mrs Watkins? Or do you think she’s lying?’
‘I think we need to discuss it again, that’s all.’
‘You think she’s lying, Mrs Watkins?’
Oh God, why had she made this call? Why hadn’t she thought about it first? Or maybe prayed for advice, sat in silence and listened to the voice inside.
‘How’s she been, Felix, since the blessing?’
Through the scullery’s open doorway, the kitchen clock ticked off the seconds of silence in the phone.
‘I think she’s been back,’ Felix said.
‘Back?’
‘To Garway. To the Master House. I had to go and collect some timber for the barn, and when I got home she wasn’t here. Gone off in the van. When she got back it was dark. She said she’d been shopping in Hereford. Which is something she never does on a Saturday. Hates crowds.’
‘How do you know she went back to the house?’
‘Because we still got a key to the place. When I said I’d take it back to the Duchy, Adam said no hurry. Likely still thinking we might go back to the job one day.’
‘And the key was missing?’
‘It’s back now. And, no, she won’t talk about it.’
‘All right,’ Merrily said. ‘How about I come over now?’
‘No!’
‘I think it might help.’
‘It might help you, it wouldn’t help me. If she won’t let me go back to the bloody place because it’s so evil, why did she go there again? You explain that?’
‘I can’t. I wish I’d known. I was in Garway this afternoon, too.’
‘At the house?’
‘No. I was at the church. I didn’t go to the house.’
‘Why not?’
Good question. Because I’d decided I was being misused, under-informed, short-changed. Because I was pissed off. Because it was raining.
‘If I’d known she was there, I would have, obviously.’ Christ, what a mess. ‘Felix, can you ask her to ring me? Can you tell her it’s very important?’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and get her to call you.’
‘Any time. Doesn’t matter how late.’
‘Yes.’
On which basis, Merrily took the mobile to bed and kept waking up in the night, thinking she was hearing its electronic chimes.
Although she never did.
12
Ghosts and Scholars
Usually, after a Eucharist, you were aware of subtle ambient changes: a charge of energy, a sharpening, a recolouring — on a fine day, shards of sunlight spilling between the apples in the rood screen, raising shivers of gold dust in the air.
This was not a fine day. When Merrily unlocked the church, under a sky like a gravestone, the interior had been unresponsive. Sixteen people had since taken Holy Communion. Afterwards, nothing much seemed to have altered. Or so she felt, blaming herself and her headache.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Shirley West said in the vestry, cradling the empty chalice like a sick baby. ‘I’m so terribly clumsy. I just get nervous, I’m afraid, Merrily.’
‘But you didn’t knock it over.’
‘I very nearly did.’
‘Shirley, I nearly do most weeks. I’ve stopped worrying about it.’
You were often told that a Mass was supposed to be like perfect theatre, conducted with precision and …
‘Grace,’ Shirley said. ‘I have no grace.’
‘Shirley …’ Merrily shook her head. ‘That’s not true.’
Which was a lie, but what could you say?
Shirley had come to live in
Ledwardine a few months ago and had shown up in the church before the removal van had left. She was in her early forties, overweight, divorced, a bank manager in Leominster. She had family here. She’d come to virtually every service, moving up rapidly to giving out hymn books, arranging flowers and assisting, eventually, with the Eucharist.
Altar girl.
‘Someone said in the shop,’ Shirley said, ‘that there’s been talk of those old stones they found in the ground being put back up.’
‘Mmm. It’s a possibility.’
Merrily looked up from the chalice into deep-set brown eyes full of worried fervour.
‘Shouldn’t we be doing something to try to stop it?’
‘Stop it?’
‘The raising of heathen stones opposite our church?’
‘Erm … well, you won’t see them from the church, will you, Shirley? You’ve got the market square in between, and the market hall. Besides, I suppose they were here first.’
‘And duly toppled over and buried. There was a Christian purpose to that, surely.’
‘I think it was probably more to do with three big stones getting in the way of ploughing and haymaking.’
Evidently nobody had told Shirley about Jane’s pivotal role in the discovery of the Coleman’s Meadow stone row. Parish life. Complications everywhere.
‘The thing is, Shirley, quite a lot of medieval churches were actually built on the sites of prehistoric stone circles and burial chambers.’
‘Exactly. Burying the evil under the house of God, surely.’
‘I’m not sure if pre-Christian necessarily means evil.’
‘Our Lord was born into a world full of darkness. He was the Light of the World.’
‘And, in fact, looking at it in a practical way, most archaeologists seem to think the early Christians put the new churches in the places where local people were used to worshipping.’
‘I’ve never heard that.’
Shirley looked at her, eyes narrowed.
Merrily sighed.
‘Nothing’s ever quite as it seems,’ Huw Owen said on the answering machine. ‘Give me a call, would you?’
Priests rarely phoned one another on Sundays.
Merrily had twenty minutes before having to go back for the Morning Service. She’d only slipped home in the hope of finding a message from Fuchsia or, at least, Felix — she’d been worrying about it on and off since waking into the grey light. Suppose Felix had gone back into the caravan and told Fuchsia that she was being accused of lying?
Before calling Huw back, she tried ringing Felix. Phone switched off. For possibly the first time ever, she took the mobile back to the church with her, calling Huw from a damp bench in the graveyard, catching him in his Land Rover, between parishes. The signal wasn’t brilliant.
‘… Might be pu … oincidences …’ Huw on the hands-free, breaking up. ‘… You should know … James collection … foreword mentions … based … ordshire … call you back.’
‘Mobile, Huw — on the mobile!’
Getting interested glances now from fragments of congregation filtering through the lych-gate. In most parishes, the Morning Service was as good as it got, congregation-wise, Evensong having been dumped through low attendance. Here, mornings had actually been overtaken by the Sunday-evening meditation, even though the rumours of healing had long since died down. It was satisfying, a good reason to be able to be here tonight rather than at Mrs Murray’s guest house in Garway.
Merrily waved to James Bull-Davies, a fairly impoverished remnant of the Ledwardine squirearchy, and his partner Alison Kinnersley who, when she and Jane had first come to Ledwardine, had been living with Lol. Always faintly troubled, Alison would return tonight for the meditation — alone. James wasn’t into silence.
A nervous sun tested the clouds, and the phone chimed.
‘“The Stalls of Barchester”,’ Huw said.
‘Sorry?’
‘M. R. James mentions in his foreword to the collected edition that his Barchester Cathedral was partly based on Hereford Cathedral. I’d forgotten that. Herefordshire was also the imagined setting for one of the later stories, “A View from a Hill”.’
‘I thought they were always set in East Anglia.’
‘Sorry to complicate matters, lass.’ No engine rattle now; he’d parked up somewhere. ‘But it seems that James — Monty, as he was known — came to relate to rural Herefordshire extremely well. You could even say it became a refuge for him.’
‘You didn’t know this before?’
‘Of course I didn’t, else I’d’ve mentioned it.’
‘How come you know it now?’
‘How does any bugger know owt these days? I Googled Montague Rhodes James and found an unusually erudite website called Ghosts and Scholars, devoted entirely to the man. How much do you know about him?’
‘Hardly anything. He was an academic, wasn’t he?’
‘Divided his career between Eton — his old school — and King’s College, Cambridge. Son of a clergyman, brought up in the parish of Livermere in Suffolk — moody sort of place, apparently, very inspirational. In later years, he reckoned there was only one area to match it.’
‘Let me guess.’
‘Aye. Specifically, the countryside around Kilpeck and Much Dewchurch. Four miles from Garway? Five?’
‘Thereabouts.’
‘The trail, however, does lead to Garway itself.’
Merrily pulled her cloak over her knees, wanting a cigarette. Watching an unexpected sunbeam stroking a mossy headstone. Where was this going?
‘Monty never married,’ Huw said. ‘But he did have a close, though presumed platonic, female friend called Gwendolen McBryde. Widow of his good mate James McBryde, a talented artist, illustrated some of the early stories. Gwen was pregnant when he died, very young, and gave birth to a daughter. Mother and daughter moved to Herefordshire.’
‘As youngish widows with daughters sometimes do.’
Oh, sod it. She pulled her bag onto the bench, found the cigarettes. ‘Seems Monty would visit Gwen on quite a regular basis,’ Huw said. ‘Finding the countryside much to his taste, like I said. Monty was very fond of old churches and extremely knowledgeable about them. No big surprise that he’d visit Garway.’
‘If you say so.’
‘This is the point. After Monty’s death, Gwen published a collection of his letters — Letters from a Friend. In one of them, James recalls a particular visit to Garway in, I think, 1917. Actually, there are two mentions of Garway, but one just in passing. The one you need to know about … Well, I’ve already emailed it to you. Best if you read it when you get back home.’
‘Huw, for heaven’s sake—’
‘The woman who edits the website, Rosemary Pardoe, says Monty appears to have had, quote, a peculiar experience at Garway, the nature of which is, quote, tantalizingly unclear, but which he writes about with typical spooky Jamesian humour.’
‘Saying …?’
‘Read it when you get back. I don’t want you thinking I’m embroidering it, winding you up. Some places just attract this kind of thing.’
‘Huw—’
‘Have to be off, anyroad. I’ve work to do, and so have you.’
And then he wasn’t there, the bastard.
But if he’d thought it was so important, surely he’d have told her.
13
Couldn’t Make it Up
After the service, when everybody else, even Shirley West, had gone, Merrily had a furtive cigarette with Gomer Parry behind the tower. Asking him what the feeling was in the village about the resurrection of the old stones in Coleman’s Meadow. Maybe most people would actually prefer a new estate of executive homes?
‘En’t so much that, vicar,’ Gomer said. ‘Few more fancy houses en’t the argument. Tip o’ the muck-heap. It’s who’s in bed with Lyndon Pierce. Who wants to see the village turned into a town? Supermarkets and posh restaurants. And who’s on young Janey’s side.’
�
��And yours, Gomer. Let’s not forget that.’
‘Ar. I’ll be doin’ my bit, sure to, to see Pierce gets his arse kicked, vicar.’
The light was back, big time, in Gomer’s wire-rimmed glasses, his white hair topping his weathered brown face like the froth on beer. Councillor Pierce had said Gomer Parry was halfway senile, an old joke who ought to be in a home. Gomer would need to be a long way into senility to forget that.
‘Harchaeologists needs a JCB and a driver,’ he said. ‘Won’t be no charge from me.’
‘That’s very generous of you, Gomer. I’m sure Jane’ll see it gets back to the right people. Erm … you know Felix Barlow?’
‘Barlow …’ Gomer adjusted his cap, screwed up his eyes. ‘Builder?’
‘From Monkland. Knows Danny.’
‘Ar. Met the feller a few times over the years. He don’t build no mock-Tudor rainbow-stone crap. Don’t build nothin’ new at all, far’s I can see.’
‘Good bloke?’
‘Oh, straight, I reckon. Liked a drink at one time, so I yeard. That’d be when he was married.’
‘When was that?’
‘Eight years, nine … I lose track. But I remember his wife. Oh, hell, aye, I remember her, all right.’
It started to rain. Merrily leaned into the base of the tower.
‘You know Lizzie Nugent?’ Gomer said. ‘Widow, up by Bearswood?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Husband left her with two kids and a twenty-acre smallholdin’. I was over attendin’ to some ditchin’ one day, early March it’d be, when the gales blows the roof off Lizzie’s cowshed. Smashed to bits. So I calls a few people, see if we could get some galvanized, cheapish, and somebody puts me on to Felix Barlow. He comes round in his truck that same day, with these sheets off a shed he’s took down, and we fixed the ole roof between us. Took us n’ more’n a few hours, and when he found out Lizzie en’t got no insurance he was very reasonable about it, was Felix, no question ’bout that.’
Gomer ignited his roll-up, hands cupped around it.
‘We’re havin’ a cuppa with Lizzie afterwards when up comes this bloody great white BMW. Woman inside leanin’ on the horn till Felix goes out. Givin’ him hell, we could all of us year it. Folks in the next village’d likely year it — all this, what you doin’ yere when you oughter be up at Lady So-and-So’s? What you think you are, bloody registered charity?’