by Phil Rickman
‘You might just have enjoyed getting her excited,’ Bliss said mildly, and Connor-Crewe came out of his chair.
I… have… taken… enough of this mélange of ill-informed speculation and cheap innuendo!’ He gripped the desk, leaning across. ‘So you… can either get to the point or get out.’
Frannie Bliss didn’t move. ‘Imagine how Lynsey feels… when she finds that this ancient site of pagan rites and blood sacrifice is currently the workplace of her favourite builder, sex maniac, amateur abortionist and… who knows what else she knew about him? Anyway, the man who’d given her the times of her life ten years earlier… and this time no wife around. Just the two of them.’
Connor-Crewe sat down, with his arms folded, gazing beyond Bliss at the walls of books. ‘I know nothing about this.’
Bliss said, ‘The indications in the diary are that the atmosphere of the place sparked something off between them. See, this was a woman fascinated with the high priest of sex magic, the late Aleister Crowley, self-styled Great Beast of the 1920s or whenever it was, who…’ He faltered. ‘… Who Merrily knows more about than me.’
Especially after last night’s lengthy examination of the diary with Huw; Crowley was another guy you could learn too much about. Merrily sighed.
‘He and West were both obsessed with deviant sex,’ she said. ‘The difference is that Crowley was an intellectual who had consciously made himself into what he was – embracing the dark. Whereas West, like Lynsey, was a natural. A man with absolutely no moral sense. A man who didn’t even recognize what was taboo. As long as… he got off on it, it was all right.’
‘Didn’t philosophize about it, just did it,’ Bliss added. ‘And it was West, we have to assume, who enabled Lynsey to, to—’
‘Free her dark side,’ Merrily said.
‘Exactly. Filthy mind, filthy hands, perverse and insatiable,’ said Bliss. ‘And here he was again, ten years on, working on his own in this magical place, obviously with the keys to the premises. And now here’s Lynsey in there with him. Don’t tell me you didn’t know about that, Piers.’
‘I swear…’ Connor-Crewe was pale now, but it might simply ‘have been outrage. ‘I swear to God I did not know that man had even been in Underhowle. And I did not know about him and Lynsey.’
‘What sort of people came to your parties, Piers?’
‘Certainly nobody like him.’
‘So you don’t know what went on in the chapel while it was being converted into a bottling plant?’
‘As I’ve already stated.’
‘When the water venture failed, the chapel was sold to Roddy Lodge. And then Lynsey started “going out” with Roddy, while still giving her address as the home of Paul Connell, father of two of her children. And while maintaining a friendship with you, and even working here sometimes.’
‘She was easily bored. Enjoyed variety.’
‘Why do you think she became interested in Roddy Lodge?’
‘Presumably because he was quite well off. How should I know? She’d often latch on to men.’
‘Oh, Piers, please. She was initially interested in Lodge because he was the new owner of the chapel which was now more important than ever to her – after whatever she and Fred did there.’
‘All right,’ Connor-Crewe said, as if suddenly weary. ‘She did ask me if I knew Lodge and whether he had anything in mind for the building. I understood he’d simply bought it as part of the deal for the old garage.’
Bliss was silent, thinking.
Merrily said, ‘Whose idea was it to buy the chapel from Lodge and turn it into a museum?’
‘We… we all thought it was a good idea, but I imagine it was Cody who said why don’t we buy it? Both he and Lodge were enjoying their wealth, the ability to buy and sell. And as Cody’s solicitor was now representing the Development Committee, it made it—’
Bliss looked up. ‘Mr Nye?’
‘It simplified things,’ Connor-Crewe said.
‘Something here stinks like the inside of an Efflapure,’ Bliss said. ‘But we’ll let that go for the present. What were Roddy and Lynsey doing in the chapel?’
‘I wouldn’t know that. I never went in there. I did ask Lodge’s permission once to do some minor excavation of the area immediately around the chapel. This was after I’d made some small finds – coins and things – in nearby fields.’
‘And was Roddy accommodating?’
‘He even lent me his small digger to put in a couple of trenches.’
‘Did you find anything?’
‘I found the statue of Diana, as we like to call it. Eight inches long, headless, not terribly well preserved, but what it tells us about the site is significant.’
‘Right.’ Abruptly, Bliss stood up. ‘Thank you very much, sir – for the moment.’
Merrily could almost feel the heat coming off Bliss as he stood on the edge of the raised area around the Market House in the heart of Ross, with traffic edging past down the hill and the rain starting. He was stabbing at his mobile as if it was a detonator.
‘Frannie,’ she said, ‘why don’t you just tell Fleming? If you’re right, he’ll see it as a selfless gesture from someone he thought wasn’t capable of one. But if you’re wrong, and he finds out…’
He stared at her like she’d suggested that he throw himself under a truck. He put the phone to his ear and waited for nearly half a minute before snapping it shut in irritation.
‘Yeh, yeh, I’m dog meat. I’m already dog meat. Now, where’s Gomer, Merrily? Where can I try? Does he have a mobile?’
Merrily sighed. ‘He could be on his way to Underhowle. As the local gravedigger was refusing to dig one for Lodge, I thought I’d better make provision. He’s meeting Huw over there about… now-ish.’
The tip of Bliss’s tongue crept to a corner of his mouth.
‘You little beauty, Merrily.’
‘So what happened with Kirsty?’
‘First things first,’ Bliss said coldly.
44
Void
‘NOW WE’RE MOVING,’ Frannie Bliss said.
In fact, Gomer was the only one of them moving – walking slowly, head down, across the acre of land that ran parallel to the paddock behind Roddy Lodge’s bungalow. Like he was dowsing, but without the divining rod: plant-hire instinct.
Merrily and Bliss were standing up against a rotting five-bar gate, snatching lunch from a bag of vegetable pasties she’d bought from a health-food shop in Ross. The rain had stopped, but the wind was rising. The sky was sepia and flecked with shrivelled leaves. It was 1.25 p.m. The stone chapel stood in front of them, like a beached hulk, against the light.
In front of the chapel stood Gomer’s truck with the mini-JCB on the back. Piers Connor-Crewe had grudgingly given them permission to excavate here – no real choice, with Bliss in this mood – yet had elected not to join them.
‘Which I find very odd,’ Merrily said when Bliss mentioned it in passing.
‘Smug public-school twat.’ Bliss finished his pasty in a small, triumphant cloud of crumbs. ‘Probably gone to alert Mr Nye.’
‘Think about it,’ Merrily said. ‘If you were any kind of serious student of archaeology and the police were coming to dig up your prime site, if you couldn’t stop it you’d at least want to watch, wouldn’t you? So you could jump in the trench and check out anything that looked interesting in the way of archaeology, prevent anything being despoiled. Wouldn’t you?’
Bliss watched Gomer bending down, patting the grass. ‘So?’
‘So why isn’t he here? Did you hear him once asking you to be very careful with that digger?’
‘Maybe he assumes he’s exhausted the site.’
‘Well, yeah, that’s one possibility.’ She looked over at the back fences of the houses in Goodrich Close, about two hundred yards away, the village sloping up behind them to the parish church, which was actually only a couple of fields away. ‘The other is that he couldn’t care less because there never was a
site.’
‘Not quite following you,’ Bliss said.
‘I think Merrily’s implying an element of fabrication, lad.’
Huw Owen drank spring water from a small plastic bottle. He hadn’t eaten. Merrily felt guilty about this, although Huw had insisted she should eat.
‘The site of Ariconium was always said to be at Weston- under-Penyard, right?’ She pointed down the valley. ‘I mean, they haven’t found all that much there, either, but that was where the evidence always pointed. Now, when I was talking to Sam Hall this morning, he said Piers was not popular in Weston. Which Piers would always laugh about – saying Weston was a pretty place that had never deserved Ariconium anyway. Underhowle, however…’
‘He faked it?’ Bliss stood away from the gate. ‘How would that be possible? What about all the bits of pottery, the statue, the—?’
‘Bits of Roman pottery and mosaic are not that hard to come by. Lots of them about, and not too expensive. Piers does antiquarian books and he’s surrounded by antique dealers. Not too much of a problem to pick up a few odds and ends, then either pretend to have found them or bury them for someone else to find. Not much of a problem convincing people, either, when everybody local wants to believe.’
‘Had me going,’ Huw admitted. ‘I were quite ready to believe the chapel’s on the site of a Roman temple, complete with spring. And of course it might be.’
‘Exactly,’ Merrily said. ‘It might be. Even if they had an archaeological dig there that found nothing, that still wouldn’t disprove it.’
‘Let me get this right,’ Bliss said. ‘You’re suggesting the whole Ariconium thing’s a scam, to give Underhowle historic status? The Roman town never was underneath here?’
‘I think Sam Hall suspects it. Ingrid Sollars, too, obviously, and she knows about local history. But if we’re only talking a couple of miles, and if it isn’t harming anyone, and it helps put Underhowle back on the tourist map…’
‘All down to Connor-Crewe?’
‘One of his academic jokes. A few finds, a lot of informed conjecture. And they’ll have their visitor centre with audiovisuals and maps and computer-generated mock-ups put together by real experts at Cody’s. All very state-of-the-art. Are they even breaking any laws?’
‘Not if you ignore obtaining large sums of money, in the form of substantial grants, by deception,’ Bliss said. ‘Might have some difficulty proving it. But, when all this is over, we can try really, really hard.’
‘I could be totally wrong.’
‘The fact that it’s even occurred to you – a little priest who tries to think well of us all – might suggest otherwise.’ Bliss looked across at the village, scattered down the hill like the crumbs on his shirt. ‘These obscure little places do attract them, don’t they? Connor-Crewe a liar, Cody with form…’
Merrily blinked. ‘Form?’
‘It’s not exactly in his brochures – and I didn’t, of course, tell you this – but he did a little time. Detention centre, as a teenager. Street crime in London. Car theft, mainly, finally earning him nine months in a grown-up prison.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Merrily said.
‘Which, of course, was where he learned about computers. Discovered a wondrous natural aptitude. Came out directly into software, making more out of it than crime ever paid. And then, when he got into the hardware too, it was probably expedient to move to somewhere he wasn’t known. He’d got relatives in the Forest, and so… Yeh, Andy Mumford, it was, stumbled on that one. One day, if he gets really big, it’ll be part of the Cody legend. But not yet.’
‘Ah, well…’ Huw’s smile was sour. ‘For every sinner who repents and becomes a millionaire…’
‘The morality’s skewed,’ Merrily said, ‘but it’s a flawed world. Look at what Cody’s done for Underhowle in terms of jobs and morale and education.’
Huw nodded at the hillside, where the mobile-phone transmitter poked out of its clearing. ‘And health.’
‘A very flawed world,’ Merrily acknowledged sadly.
Huw turned his face into the rising wind and gazed down the valley, where the Roman road had led from Ariconium to Glevum, the city of light, the way marked now by electricity pylons. And spirits, Merrily thought uneasily. She could almost see the cracks opening in the façade of Underhowle, in the soil and the tarmac, like ruptured graves on Judgement Day.
Gomer came over. ‘Right then, folks. Three places I can see there’s been a bit o’ digging. Nothing recent, mind.’
‘How not recent?’ Bliss asked.
‘Not since summer. Can’t say n’more’n that. So… I got two hours for you, boy.’ He turned to Merrily. ‘That all right with you, vicar? I been up the churchyard with Mr Owen yere. Lodge plot’s out on the edge where it joins the field and the ground’s soft. Reckon I can do the grave by hand – less noise, ennit?’
‘If you’re sure.’
‘He’s sure,’ Bliss confirmed. ‘Right.’ He dug into a pocket of his hiking jacket and presented Merrily with his mobile. ‘If you wouldn’t mind holding on to that for me. I’ve asked Mumford to try and get me some more background on Lynsey Davies, since she’s now centre-stage, so to speak. So if he calls I’ll take it. If it’s any bastard from headquarters, you don’t even know where I am.’ He clapped Gomer on the back. ‘Let’s do it, son. We’re looking for a body, female. Maybe more than one.’
* * *
‘And what are you looking for, Huw?’ Merrily screwed up the bag that had held the pasties and stuck it in her pocket. She wished all this was over: the digging, the exposure, the secret funeral.
‘Looking for an end, lass.’
She realized she didn’t want to know what he meant.
Frannie Bliss was helping Gomer bring down the mini- digger, a grown-up yellow Tonka Toy with caterpillar tracks. Here was Gomer starting to work again, resilient, his demons dealt with – not entirely satisfactorily, but no longer burning inside his head. But Frannie was like a failing footballer at the start of a winter game: jumpy, rubbing his hands. Dangerous.
Merrily said, ‘What happens now?’
‘All down to you.’ Huw looked her in the eyes – an old wolfhound, trusting.
Deceptively trusting. She was fairly sure now that Huw must have had a hand in setting her up for the Lodge funeral. A quiet call to the Bishop, a favour called in. Huw, by virtue of what he did – a responsibility that few would shoulder – could quietly pull ropes that made bells ring in cathedrals. Huw had unfinished business, and he was looking for a way in, and she was it: the female Deliverance minister, the vulnerable one who relied on guidance.
‘Family wants a small funeral,’ Huw said. ‘Quickie. No hymns, no eulogies. Everybody’d like that. You could give ’em their quickie and walk away. Let Underhowle get on with its bright, clean future full of new jobs and computer literacy.’
‘I could do that. What should I do?’
‘Modern world, lass,’ he went on, as though he hadn’t heard her. ‘And not even your parish. It’s Jerome’s – good old turn-a- blind-eye-for-tomorrow-we-retire-to-the-seaside Jerome. You’re just the hired help, the dishrag.’
‘Yes. Thanks. Now, what do you think I should do?’
‘I’d think about the full requiem.’
She stared at him. ‘A requiem eucharist… for Roddy Lodge?
Are you serious?’ This was not the Roman Catholic Church, not High Anglican. ‘We don’t do requiems in this area, except even for the seriously devout, and…’
Huw regarded her solemnly. The yellow digger trundled slowly past, Gomer in the saddle, Bliss walking in front like he had Gomer on a rein.
‘… The unquiet dead,’ Merrily said. ‘Ah, yes.’
‘The insomniacs,’ Huw agreed.
‘Huw, this is an actual funeral. At night.’
‘Exactly,’ Huw said. ‘Things need to be laid to rest. Anyroad, if these lads find a body, the whole place’ll be alight by then.’
‘I don’t know.’ In Deliver
ance, a requiem eucharist was employed to unite a disturbed, earthbound spirit with God. ‘Who are we talking about? Roddy… Lynsey? Or… ?’
‘Or the whole village, if you like. And the evil that’s come into it.’
‘For most people,’ Merrily said, ‘nothing’s come into this village but progress. Therefore, good.’
‘And what do you think?’
‘I don’t know.’ She gripped the top bar of the gate with both hands. It was greasy with lichen. ‘You’re like Sam and his death road. You’re following a black trail all the way from Gloucester, and I don’t know how valid that is. I don’t know if it exists. You always told us to question everything – question, question, question. So now I’m questioning you. Like, how objective is this?’
In her coat pocket, a phone began to buzz. She pulled out two: her own and Frannie’s.
Hers.
‘Mrs Watkins?’ Female, young-sounding. ‘My name’s Libby Porterhouse, from the Mail on Sunday. I know you’re rather busy at the moment, but I wonder if we could have a chat.’
Not what she needed, but if there was one thing you learned about dealing with the press it was never to say no comment. Express interest, surprise, ask some questions of your own, but never let them think you had any reason to be unhelpful.
‘Well, I’ll tell you what I can,’ Merrily said, ‘but I’m not sure I’m the best person. I’m just the hired help on this one.’
‘Ah, we may be talking at cross purposes,’ Libby Porterhouse said. ‘I know you’re involved with this serial killer funeral row in the Wye Valley, but this is something entirely different. I’m with Features, and I’m doing quite an extensive piece on Jenny Driscoll.’
‘What about her?’
‘I understand she’s a friend of yours.’
‘We live in the same village.’
‘And that she’s given you a large sum of money. I’d like to ask you about that and a few other things, get your side of the story.’
‘Story?’
‘How long have you known Jenny Driscoll?’
