by Phil Rickman
He glanced at Karen, who shook her head.
‘Posh festivals sounds like white settlers.’
‘Dinner parties,’ Vaynor said. ‘Cocktails on the veranda. Don’t invite the natives, unless you have nobody to serve the drinks.’
‘Mother of God,’ Bliss said. ‘Is everybugger here an inverted snob?’
‘Still doesn’t sound quite right to me, boss,’ Vaynor said. ‘We still don’t know what Friends of the Dusk was really about, do we? Sounds a bit airy-fairy. And how organized was it? Was it a proper members’ club or just an affectation? Something that sounded mysterious, but didn’t amount to much. Or did it really involve celebs and aristocracy with an unhealthy interest in sucking each other’s blood?’
‘They do exist,’ Karen said. ‘And I can’t imagine it’s in any way illegal.’
‘For what it’s worth, by the way…’ Vaynor smiled. ‘… the Royal Family’s apparently distantly descended from Vlad the Impaler.’
‘The Russian president?’
Vaynor sighed.
‘The medieval east European serial-slaughterer thought to be the model for Dracula. It was in the documentary I told you about. Which was, I’m afraid, insufficiently arty to have been made by Jim Turner.’
Vaynor had spoken to a TV producer called Leo Defford who’d worked with Turner way back. Defford said Turner had made a lot of money very quickly, though it didn’t compare with what he was hauling in these days, in the States, where Vaynor had been trying to track Turner down. Unsuccessfully so far; the States could be unhelpful if you were looking for a rich bastard. America loved rich bastards.
‘There’s one question we’ve been avoiding,’ Vaynor said. ‘One person we don’t really know about.’
The lad didn’t like to appear intellectually superior; he just couldn’t help himself. Bliss nodded.
‘Yeh. Exactly. Who the fuck is Steve?’
47
At peace
FROM LEDWARDINE, IT was less than half an hour’s drive to Lyme Farm. Into Leominster, skirting the centre and then out again through the old part of town where it splintered into flat countryside and squally rain, getting wetter and squallier mile by mile.
The journey home would be worse, but there was no way she should avoid this. If Selwyn was beyond communication, at least she’d know.
But what if he wasn’t?
A quick check on the Net had shown her that, with Alzheimer’s, for example, most sufferers died within five years. But this man was still around after more than ten, and not on a geriatric ward.
What if his condition had stabilized – or even improved – after he’d finally let them separate him from Cwmarrow Court?
Disappeared into his own fantasy world, Dennis Kellow had suggested. But surely it was more than that; he’d spent a lot of money creating his fantasy world. Obsessively building it around him, literally. Remedievalizing.
So if you took him away from the source of the obsession…
Well, who knew?
As she drove out towards the border with Shropshire, the rain stopped, although the wind kept coming at the Freelander in slow wafts from across the fields, to the sound of a barking dog on the passenger seat.
She pulled into the side of a lane too narrow to park in safely.
‘Let me call you back, Huw.’
‘Where you off?’
She told him and cut the call. A mile or so down the road she blocked a farm entrance but kept the engine running in case a tractor needed access.
‘Turn the car round,’ Huw said. ‘This is mad.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Deliverance was mad, they both knew that.
‘I’m telling you, you don’t need this right now. You need to be low-bloody-profile, not marching into some posh people’s bloody nursing home telling them one of their inmates might be carrying an infection.’
An infection. That was a new one
‘I don’t march anywhere, and I wasn’t planning to tell anybody anything that might—’
‘Let me handle it. I can take a couple of days off.’
‘Oh, Huw, that’s—’ Merrily flung herself back into the seat. ‘I know you’re only trying to help, but they came to me.’
‘Unofficially. Under the table. Khan the dealer? Jesus wept, lass, this is all a bit bloody timely, if you ask me. How do you know it’s not a set-up?’
‘I never know it’s not a set-up.’
‘Anybody asks, I can say I’m looking into it for a mate and you know nowt about it.’
‘But I do know. It’s no good, Huw. Please, just, you know… back off… let me try this.’
He was quiet for a moment. Either that or the wind was getting louder.
‘All right. Listen. You tell me everything.’
‘I will.’
‘Every step of the bloody way. I’m covering your back here. Best I can.’
‘I know.’
But she didn’t know. What did he mean?
‘You’re still daft, Merrily.’
‘Yeah, I know that, too.’
Borderlight was not a slow read, and by mid-afternoon Jane had finished with it and was leaning back from the refectory table, breathing out slowly, feeling almost personally menaced.
She sat for over five minutes with her arms folded, her face upturned to the highest window and the sky of deepening grey. She could almost feel the dusty autumn air around her head and face, brittle fragments of leaves like rapid, stinging thoughts.
It was a horrible story, really. Jane got up to put an apple log into the stove, Ethel moseying over to lie on the mat in front of it.
‘You really don’t have to look far, Ethel,’ Jane said. ‘It’s all here. The Nightlands, everything.’
Ethel looked up. All cats knew the nightlands.
Borderlight was lying closed on the kitchen table. It was like one of those early books in museums where you could only turn the pages if you wore special gloves. Not the kind of book people bought to read, just to have. It was the size of a prayer book, made thicker by the quality of the tawny pages, browner around the edges to suggest age. The illustrations were mainly engravings – new ones, though you wouldn’t think it – and some had been coloured like stained glass. The print was old-fashioned, and the first letters of each story were illuminated.
It was a labour of love.
Love was… did she even know what it was?
Jane put on all the lights in the kitchen, laid the book on the refectory table and photographed several pages with her iPad. All of them were from a single chapter relating to a medieval Latin manuscript De Nugis Curialium. Its translators included the great ghost story writer, M.R. James. Who used to stay in the Golden Valley. How things kept coming around in smoky cycles. She needed to break one.
No rules, Jane.
New era. All barriers down.
Jane checked the pictures were OK then slid the book inside the Ledwardine Livres bag and took it into the hall, where she put on her boots and parka and went out by the front door and across the cobbled square, into the driven rain.
This time.
We go where it’s fun.
We don’t have long…
In this job, as congregations aged, you were increasingly in and out of nursing homes. They’d changed a fair bit over the past few years, after all the public inquiries and exposés. You used to be able to recognize them with your eyes shut, by the smells. Or even, with your eyes open, by the drab furniture.
But places like Lyme Farm, owned by some company in Birmingham, were up there with all the five-star hotels Herefordshire didn’t have: a cluster of white cottages interlinked by lawns and low glassed-in passages like long conservatories.
The downside of spending your last years in a haven like this was selling everything except the clothes you no longer stood up in.
‘They’ll tell you, it’s like being on permanent vacation.’ Donna had a cultured possibly Californian accent. ‘Like a cruise shi
p in the fields, one lady said. I thought that was lovely. We’re going to put it on our website.’
Donna, sixtyish and slim, wore a dark green dress that could never be called a uniform or an overall but might serve as both. She led Merrily down a wide passage with skylights, past two different hairdressers’ shops, a newsagent, a cinema and the entrance to the swimming pool with a wheelchair park.
Enjoy your day, Donna would say to the people they passed, most of them wearing leisurewear and trainers and not all of them old.
‘We encourage visitors,’ Donna said. ‘People enjoy coming here – even young people. They can eat in the restaurant, walk the grounds. And the residents like to see them wandering around. Gives a sense of balance – young and not so young. A sense of social life. It’s like never having left the real world but without all those pressures.’
A sense of social life?
They came out in a cubical room with a picture window framing a view down the long fields of north-west Herefordshire and across rusting woodland to the Welsh border at its least threatening.
Donna turned left. Merrily followed her down a passageway with triple-glazed windows and a door to a courtyard with dwarf apple trees, a fountain and seating. A overhead rustic sign said, The Old Stables.
‘Mr Kindley-Pryce has one of our larger apartments – living room, bedroom with en suite and a library.’
‘He still reads?’
Donna smiled confidentially.
‘Let’s say he likes to have books around him.’
‘Is he well?’
‘Physically, very well, I’d say.’
‘And… happy?’
‘He’s contented. Sure doesn’t try to abscond.’ Donna laughed lightly. ‘His accommodation was customized. We try to make transition easier by accommodating some of the residents’ own furniture. They choose a small number of much-loved pieces and we try to furnish around them.’
‘That sounds nice.’
‘To give you an example, Mr Kindley-Pryce had a very large bed to which he was greatly attached? We took apart a builtin wardrobe to fit this monster into the bedroom but it still didn’t work. So – lateral thinking – the living room is now the bedroom, and the former bedroom is his den, what he likes to call his study. We adapt, you see. We’re flexible.’
‘Wonderful.’
‘We think so. We’re well staffed, and this enables us to remain unobtrusive, instead of a few people hurling themselves around everywhere. There’s a button in every room – not emergency buttons, we don’t like that word. Now—’
They’d entered another glassed-in area overlooking the courtyard and stopped outside three adjacent light pine doors, one with a large 3 on it and a white button next to a small speaker. Donna turned to face Merrily who’d come in civvies – the short, belted, dark blue woollen coat, the skirt, the beret.
‘—could you remind me of the nature of your kinship with Mr Kindley-Pryce?’
‘Erm… none. Friend of a friend.’
Explaining about Dennis Kellow, who’d worked for Mr Kindley-Pryce for years, as a builder, and ended up buying his beloved house. Who often talked about him, wondering how he was getting on.
‘Dennis was – you know what men are like, Donna – a little afraid to come and visit him and, you know, see what the years had done to him. I’m more used to it, in my job, so…’
‘You’re a nurse?’
‘Erm, no, I’m…’ Sometimes you had to use it. ‘I’m in the Church. A vicar.’
‘Right.’
‘And knowing I was going to be in the area today, I said I’d call in.’
It sounded weak, but it would do. Donna nodded.
‘Well, I don’t think you’ll find this too upsetting. He’s remarkable for his age. You’d think he was ten years younger. Comes from not worrying about a thing. Partly, I guess, because of the nature of his disability, but also because he’s at peace with the world. I really feel that. At peace with his world.’
‘Erm, what kind of dementia does he have?’
Donna frowned at the word.
‘We’re not permitted to discuss medical details, Mrs Watkins.’
‘No… I’m sorry.’
‘He still has quite a few visitors. His son, nieces. Sometimes they take him out for the day. Might not recognize all of them, but they’re OK with that.’
Donna pressed the white button. After two or three seconds, a soft voice was in the speaker.
‘Hello there.’
‘Good afternoon, Mr Kindly-Pryce, it’s Donna. With a visitor?’
Odd. Talking to him, she pronounced his name Kindly.
A warm chuckle in the speaker.
‘Man or woman?’
‘It’s a lady, Mr Kindly-Pryce.’ Donna smiled. ‘A young lady. The Reverend Watkins. A friend of an old friend, Mr…?’
‘Kellow,’ Merrily said. ‘Dennis Kellow.’
‘Mr Kellow?’
‘Ah yes… yes. I know.’
Donna bent her head to Merrily’s ear.
‘He truly doesn’t know.’
Merrily nodded.
48
Kingsize
IT PROBABLY HAD been part of a stable. You’d accommodate a couple of shire horses in here, no problem. Sections of stone wall had been left exposed in the creamwashed plaster between wide new windows, triple-glazed, and rafters and purlins were uncovered overhead, globular lamps attached to them, switched off.
The furniture, two chairs and a small dining table, was Shaker-plain and functional, and you might have said most of it was modern if most of it had not been the bed.
God…
A big room, but the bed made it claustrophobic. It was beyond kingsize. There were two carpeted steps with a handrail to get you into it, this work of gross art, its stained oak headboard reaching halfway up a buttermilk wall, fat corner posts rising to tiered pinnacles ending in pine-cone finials. Merrily was reminded uncomfortably of the monstrous pulpit in her nightmare about Jenny Roberts.
‘My dear.’
She jumped. The voice, soft and breathy, came from a deep chair beside the bed.
‘How marvellous to see you again.’
He was wearing a thick black velvet dressing gown with a red collar, like a long smoking jacket. His lower legs were bare, feet in black moccasins.
‘No, please…’ Merrily said, ‘don’t get up.’
But he was up already, a large and bony hand wrapping around hers. Donna waited in the doorway, smiling.
‘You’re looking… very well,’ Merrily said to Mr Kindley-Pryce.
He released her hand, standing quite tall, only a little stooped. His face was vertically fissured like an almond.
He pointed.
‘Green chair, please.’
‘He wants you to sit there,’ Donna murmured.
‘Thank you.’
When you sat down, you were looking up at the bed. No matter where you sat you’d be looking up at the bed. It had thronelike status in the room. Because of the bed, she could only see half the window from here, the half full of low, loaded sky.
‘Red chair somewhere,’ Mr Kindley-Pryce said.
There was. It was leather-covered and behind him, and he lowered himself back into it, his wide mouth settling into a smile. He had a Mr Punch kind of smile that made his face seem longer. The red chair and the green chair faced one another at the side of the bed. She should’ve brought something for him. Should’ve asked on the phone what he liked to eat… drink.
‘So,’ he said, ‘all the way from England.’
‘Erm…’
‘My accent, I guess,’ Donna said. ‘He spent many years in the States. He sometimes thinks…’
‘Oh, I see.’ It seemed wrong to lie to him, so she just went for it. ‘I’ve come from Cwmarrow, Mr Pryce.’
Only a moment of incomprehension before his face seemed to light up like a fairground lantern.
‘How marvellous,’ he said.
‘Yes. Yes it
is.’
‘And how is Sir William?’
‘Erm…’
‘I’ll leave you, then,’ Donna said.
Giving Merrily time to remember that Sir William had been a character in The Summoner, the knight away at the Crusades. As the door closed almost silently behind Donna, Merrily felt a sense of vacuum, as if her ears had popped. The triple glazing meant you could see the wind bending trees outside but you could barely hear it. A disturbing sense of separation, as if it was back-projection, a storm with the sound turned down.
She said, ‘Sir William who lived at the castle?’
Mr Kindley-Pryce fixed her with eyes like knots in wood. A little glimmering back there.
‘I see him in… in…. in clouds.’
‘Oh?’
Sometimes they couldn’t find the right words. She didn’t know what he meant. He was nodding to a slow rhythm, eyes half closed, as if nodding himself to sleep. The rain spattered silently and rolled down the window. Dennis Kellow’s voice came back to her.
Slept in a massive old bed where he claimed he’d often wake up to the sounds of the village.
His eyes opened.
She smiled at him.
‘Good that you still have the bed, Mr Pryce.’
‘Bed?’
‘From Cwmarrow.’
‘The bed.’ It had a heavy maroon quilt. He reached up and stroked it. ‘Had it all my years.’
‘This bed?’
Unless he’d brought it back from America, that couldn’t be true. She looked directly into his eyes. You should always try to hold their gaze, Kent Asprey, the Ledwardine doc, had told her once. Let them see they have your full attention.
‘Dennis is still working on the house. You remember Dennis?’
He looked at her for long moments, tiny points of light far back in his eyes and no source of light in the room to cause them.
He rose up in his chair, his neck craning, his lips forming a word.
‘Cwmarroooooo.’ He sat back. His mouth opened in hoarse laughter. ‘Kee, kee, kee.’
He seemed still to have most of his teeth. How old was he… eighty-five? Older than that?
