by Phil Rickman
‘Aw, Steve you’ve made me lose me place. Now I’ll have to start all over again.’
‘Suppose I . . . had an idea who’d killed Ayling.’
‘He’s wasting our time,’ Annie Howe said. ‘Call Stagg, Francis, and let’s get him processed.’
‘Suppose there was a . . . a contractor.’
‘Of course,’ Bliss said. ‘That’s the way local authorities work, isn’t it. Maybe you invited tenders.’
‘Stop it!’ Steve was on his feet. ‘I can help you.’
‘You’ve helped us no end already, pal. All wrapped up for Christmas, and very cheaply, too. Annie’s friend the Home Secretary’s gonna be—’
‘Suppose it isn’t finished. The contract . . . Suppose there’s another one to . . . complete.’
Little patch of silence. Bliss glanced at Howe; she made the merest suggestion of a nod.
‘Sit down, Steve,’ Bliss said.
58
Padded Cell
JANE WAS CLOSE to learning the worst.
‘It’s unjust,’ Coops said, ‘it stinks, but we’ve got a baby on the way and I need this job.’
She was alone in the Black Swan reception, with the mobile.
‘You think this isn’t more important than anyone’s bloody job?’
‘Jane—’
‘Jane, Jane, everybody’s—You tell me right now, Coops. You tell me right now why I won’t be laughing when the truth comes out about Coleman’s Meadow. Or I go and ask Blore. Blore’s pissed. Blore’s pissed and Pierce is pissed and I’m stone-cold sober and I’m getting a feeling of everything falling apart.’
‘And you’re the last person who’s going to be able to hold it together. Or me, come to that. We’re little people fighting whole industries and all the tiers of government—’
‘Tell me.’
‘People watching all this crap on TV, they think that’s how it is, the whole of Britain’s like a big sandpit for archaeologists, strolling along with their trowels like the seven bloody dwarfs. It’s not like that any more. In fact, you should probably be grateful to Blore for deflecting you from a profession that would only bring you hassle and . . . heartbreak.’
‘All right.’ Jane carried the phone down the passage leading to the lavatories. ‘I’m taking the phone into the loo. I’m going into the furthest cubicle where nobody can hear me scream.’
‘Let it go, Jane, try and enjoy your Chris—’
‘I’m pushing the main door open now. I’m completely alone. They’re listening to Lol’s wonderful concert, where I wanted to be but this is more important.’
The toilets in the Black Swan had been massively upgraded in the best New Cotswold tradition; in fact you probably wouldn’t find toilets this good in the swishest pub in the old Cotswolds. Framed photographs on the walls of Ledwardine at its most luscious, sunrise and sunset. Even the cubicles had thick walls and oak doors, and Jane locked herself in the end one and sat on the closed lid of the seat.
‘I’m going to offer you a deal, Coops. I’ll seriously aim to say nothing to anyone except Mum and Lol and, OK, maybe Gomer Parry ’cause he’s my best mate, but if I have to take it further I’ll say Lyndon Pierce told me when he was drunk, which he was. He’ll never remember he didn’t tell me. So just . . .’
‘Let me sit down,’ Coops said. ‘If you think this isn’t getting to me . . .’
‘It so obviously is. Go on.’
‘Stop me if I’m telling you something you already know. When archaeologists are called in to investigate a site proposed for development, everybody thinks it’s the council that pays for it. In fact it’s the developer. I was trying to tell you this the other night but I’m not sure it sank in.’
‘But that’s ridiculous. They’re like . . . they’re the very people who don’t want anything important to be found.’
‘That’s why most archaeology is just a matter of record. Establishing where something is or used to be. But building still goes ahead on the site, you can’t stop progress.’
‘But not if it’s standing stones, surely.’
‘Probably not . . . but only if those standing stones are found to be in the place were they originally stood, because then the site itself is of major importance.’
‘And that’s my point about Coleman’s Meadow. You only have to stand on Cole Hill . . .’
‘No . . . you only have to stand on Cole Hill.’
‘You’re taking Blore’s side, suddenly?’
‘Jane, I’m on our side, and I still think there’s enough evidence of a henge to warrant a number of separate excavations around the centre of Ledwardine. Coleman’s Meadow, however . . . the excavation is likely to be closed down in the New Year.’
‘What . . .?’
Jane stood up. The walls of the cubicle seemed tight around her, like a padded cell.
‘Blore’s submitted a private preliminary report to the council resulting from his own geophysics and limited excavation of the site. The bottom line is that the report suggests the stones were buried here quite recently and probably from somewhere else.’
‘Like . . . landfill?’
‘Good analogy. He says there used to be a small quarry run by the Bull family in the eighteenth century. Long disused, but—’
‘They’re standing stones! You said they were.’
‘Blore’s report says there’s no evidence that they ever stood. That they were ever prehistoric ritual stones.’
‘How . . . how can he—?’
‘The conclusive proof seems to be the discovery of masonry underneath one of the stones. Masonry dating back no more than a couple of centuries.’
‘That’s impossible!’
‘It isn’t impossible. If you’d asked me yesterday I would have said it was extremely unlikely but, no, it’s not impossible. The report also says the remains of a tool’s been discovered under the same stone, and it’s not a flint axe-head. It’s a . . . pickaxe. Probably early Victorian.’
‘He’s lying!’
‘He encloses photographs.’
‘When was all this found?’
‘They haven’t officially been found at all yet.’ Coops sounded close to tears. ‘And the chances are they won’t be found until next week, when it’ll all be filmed for . . . Trench One.’
‘He’s going to mock it up?’
‘You remember that edition of Time Team, when they discovered a collection of authentic Celtic swords and things on a site in South Wales, and it turned out to be someone’s private collection that had been buried? Still made a good programme, didn’t it? And so will this, probably starting off with that interview with you, showing how a young girl’s fantasy—’
‘Don’t! I can’t—It’s—’
‘It’s wrong and it’s disgusting, but if you say a word about it now there’ll be a big investigation about how it got out, and I’ll lose my job and the nice woman who read the letter to me will lose her job and probably her pension, and she’s a widow and—’
‘All right!’
‘Leave it till I get back, and I’ll find a way of hearing about it officially, and then I’ll protest and see what happens. You can tell your mum, but please, nobody else.’
‘OK.’
‘Jane, I’m so desperately sorry. I’d love to think he’s faked the evidence, but he’s a powerful and respected figure. Look, I’ve got to go, all right?’
‘Coops—’
‘Try to have a good Christmas, Jane.’
‘Neither of us is going to, are we?’
He’d gone.
Jane leaned against the cubicle wall, holding the phone in front of her, tears in freeflow now.
59
Charming Myth
PERIODICALLY, IN A break between songs, while Lol was retuning, someone who recognised Merrily would lean across and whisper Where’s Jane? Usually, one of the Serpent people from Hereford. How did they know whose mother she was, out of uniform? Hoped to God she wasn’t on the CM website like Lol and Lucy.
/> ‘We’re Coleman’s Meadow activists now.’ A guy in his sixties, completely bald, white beard, an earring with a red stone in it. ‘We lost on the Serpent, but those bastards won’t take the Meadow.’ He looked angry. ‘I’ll strap myself to one of the stones before I’ll let them take it away. Go on hunger strike – that always gets results if it en’t a terrorist.’
‘It’s important,’ Merrily said, ‘but it’s not worth a life.’
Wondering where she’d heard that. Blore. On the radio before he demoralised Jane. She could see him over by the bar, his dense hair tied back, presumably so it wouldn’t dangle in his beer. He seemed to be drinking a lot of beer and laughing a lot.
Unlike the Stookes, who weren’t talking to anyone, not even one another. Life, for the Stookes, must be tense and formless. What happened after you’d taken on the biggest target possible and would never know if you’d won until you died . . . and only then if you’d lost.
Merrily smiled. Stupid – she was looking at their lives from her perspective. Better go and talk to them afterwards.
Lol said, ‘I’m going to kind of hum, but if you imagine it as a cello, OK? Now. If you know Elgar’s Cello Concerto, the main bit goes like . . .’
She was proud of him. Totally in control, as if, performing, he was possessed by the spirit of an extrovert. Mouth close to the mike, he hummed the rolling-hill melody that would always take her back to Whiteleafed Oak on the edge of the Malverns and would always be tinged with tragedy. Melancholy enough, already.
‘If you all want to hum along we can maybe cover up the fact that we don’t have a cello. Try it . . .’
They didn’t need asking twice. No need for the old hand behind the ear, I can’t hear you routine. Merrily thinking how she gigged every Sunday, and never captured this much attention. Maybe she needed to learn to play something.
Barry had found her a seat by the door. She drank a spritzer, finding it didn’t go too well with extra-strong mints. Nothing went with extra-strong mints except more mints.
But she knew this song and its origins, had been there at its birth. It was about how, close to the end, Elgar seemed to have lost his faith, his lifelong Catholicism. But all he really wanted, in Lol’s view, was to sidestep the complicated spiritual bureaucracy of Catholic death, the Catholic afterlife, have his spirit absorbed into the landscape that had given him his music . . . specifically, this music.
After a couple of minutes, Lol let the audience do the humming and began to build a guitar structure under it, finally picking up Elgar’s tune with his own words, the percussive rain behind it like he was singing from the eye of some inner storm.
Save me from the Angel of
The Agony. I want
No pomp
Or circumstance
I’ll take my chance.
Lol’s voice dipping into a valley on agony. Then rising to welcome a dawning euphoria. He held up a hand to fade the humming. Merrily saw Eirion messing with the two amps and then, with the flat screen full of bubbling water, Lol’s voice rose up clear but distant, with a faint echo, as if from distant hills.
Where the Severn joins the Teme
I’ll drift downstream
And feel release
And sing the trees
Their own song . . .
Lol and the lights went blurred. Merrily wiped her eyes discreetly, one at a time.
‘Didn’t think he’d mind too much,’ Lol said afterwards into the dying applause. ‘He was all right, Ed.’
‘That was amazing, but I didn’t fully get what it was about,’ the bald guy with the ruby said. ‘Dunno much about Elgar. What’s the Angel of the . . .?’
‘Agony.’
Lol, clearly loving this interplay with his audience, explained about Elgar’s attempt to glimpse his God in the choral masterpiece The Dream of Gerontius, from Newman’s epic poem about the progress of a soul through the various tiers of the Catholic afterlife.
‘So the Angel of the Agony is this mournful combination of sin eater and celestial advocate, pleading for the soul’s admission into Heaven. But close to the end Elgar’s Catholicism had kind of lost its grip, and when he was dying he told a friend that if he was ever walking in the Malvern Hills and he heard the tune you’ve just been humming . . . Ed said, Don’t be afraid. It’ll just be me. He’d told everybody he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at the confluence of the River Severn and the River Teme, but he was talked out of it.’
‘I’ve been to his grave,’ a woman said. ‘Little Malvern? It’s interesting the way his wife’s name is at the top of the stone, as if Elgar is bowing to the female principle in nature.’
‘Not sure about that,’ Lol said. ‘All I feel is he wanted to be part of the landscape, for all eternity, and . . . I think he probably is.’
‘In the end, that’s paganism . . .’ The long straight hair identified Sara, the Dinedor witch from the Sunday Telegraph. ‘Or at least pantheism. And that line about singing the trees’ songs, that’s from what it says under the Elgar statue in Hereford? Hearing the trees singing his music . . . or is he singing theirs? Hey, why not?’
‘Actually,’ Elliot Stooke said, ‘the biography I read suggested very strongly that Elgar had lost his faith completely. The idea that he reverted to some sort of paganism is . . . a bit of speculation?’
‘Probably is,’ Lol said.
‘And he was using the idea of his ghost haunting the Malverns as a metaphor, surely?’
‘Metaphors on his deathbed?’ Lol said. ‘I don’t know.’
‘If you believe he was channelling the spirit of the landscape,’ Sara the witch called out, ‘the whole thing makes—’
‘Another charming myth,’ Stooke said.
‘All I know . . .’ the bald guy stood up ‘. . . is that I came out of a very bad experience today with the clear conviction that if we lose our spiritual bond with the land there’ll be nothing left of us as a nation.’
‘Part of the earth. I’ll go with that.’ Bill Blore was on his feet, tankard clamped to his chest. ‘Bury me in a Bronze Age fucking longbarrow with a flint axe in my hand, that’ll do me.’
When the laughter died, Lol said, ‘Well, Elgar was here, we know that . . . and there’s even evidence that he visited Coleman’s Meadow when Alfred Watkins . . .’ he smiled at Bill Blore ‘. . . found the ley running through it.’
Merrily couldn’t make out Blore’s reaction. She spotted a few local people, including Brenda Prosser and her daughter, Ann Marie – Jim still working in the shop.
‘But if anyone really inhabits this landscape . . .’ Lol stroked a chord ‘. . . we’re probably looking at a woman.’
The lights dipped and the room went quiet as the only known image of Lucy Devenish took form on the screen.
Merrily was startled.
It was the lack of definition that produced the effect, and the way the brown tones of the picture faded into the shadows of the crooked old room. And Eirion had rephotographed it, so it was digital now.
Pixels. It was pixels.
Lucy middle-distant in her poncho, the blur of her face as she tried to avoid the camera, the amplified grain on the blown-up photo converted into pixels . . . fragments of the essence of Lucy separating and re-forming, suggestive of movement, creating new splinters of some old wildness in those falcon’s eyes.
‘Christ,’ someone said, ‘the old girl just turned her head.’
Someone pushed urgently past Merrily’s table and she looked up in the dimness and saw, in Mathew Elliot Stooke’s face, the confusion of expressions she’d seen and been unable to work out just before she left Cole Barn last night, after Stooke had said:
Some kind of Stone Age warrior. Short cloak or a skin . . .
Merrily rose abruptly and followed him out.
60
New Void
THEY WERE SITTING in Bliss’s car, watching the diminishing tail lights of the police car containing Terry Stagg, two uniforms and Steve Furne
aux on his way to Gaol Street to be processed.
Now they were alone, Bliss dared to breathe. Let it come out in one big spasm of relief, his body arching over the wheel and then falling back into the seat.
‘We did well,’ Annie Howe said.
She was staring through the windscreen like somebody interested in rain.
‘He can still get away with this, mind,’ Bliss said. ‘He hasn’t killed anybody personally. He’s merely given his professional advice, and a committee decision’s been made. We’re contemplating the dark underbelly of democracy, Annie.’
It was the way things were going. People realising how little time they had left to get rich before the planet melted.
‘Let’s go over it,’ Howe said, ‘and then make a decision. Two men to talk to. We either bring them in or we go to them.’
‘If they’re where I think they are neither of those options is gonna be exactly a walkover . . . Or in fact a frigging walkover might be exactly what we’re looking at.’
What had finally smashed Steve’s defences was dropping those names. Experimental, taking a chance, but he’d been fairly confident.
‘Where did you get those names?’ Annie said.
‘Got Blore from Steve himself at that first meeting in Gilbies. He was their consultant on the Serpent. I remember him saying Blore didn’t help an awful lot . . . considering we were paying him.’
‘Hereforward were paying him?’
‘And then, while still acting as consultant to Hereforward, he publicly slags off the council for its attitude towards the Dinedor Serpent. Lunacy . . . they’re never going to employ him again, are they? All right, he’s making a bomb from telly, but it still didn’t feel right to me. Didn’t seem too significant at the time, mind.’
Annie Howe looked at him. She was snuggled into a corner under the seat-belt hook, her face in shadow.
‘Why did Hereforward need a consultant on the Dinedor Serpent?’
