by Phil Rickman
‘In Ross?’
Cola exploded with laughter. ‘Ross? And make actual money at it? Listen, I know some of these women – they’re lucky if they can turn over a hundred a night in Hereford. Hey…’ She blinked. ‘You didn’t go with Lynsey ever, did you, at some time?’
Lol shook his head.
‘That’s not supposed to be insulting, by the way,’ Cola said, ‘because that woman could pull, you know? Where’d I put my cigs?’
Lol spotted them on the computer table with a book of matches. He went over and collected them for her.
‘Ta,’ Cola said. ‘Well, that’s something.’
‘A lot of people around here went with her?’
‘That a serious question?’
Lol recalled her saying, when they were digging up Piers Connor-Crewe’s Efflapure, Let’s be honest, she was good at men. He went back to sit on the plastic pouffe. ‘It’s just I remember you saying, when we were at the Rectory, that Lynsey Davies had this fierce determination to grab everything from life.’
‘Did I?’
‘I’m kind of a writer too, Cola. Despite “Sunny Days”. I remember these lines.’
Cola grinned and yawned and stretched. ‘Yeah, all right, the play’s about her. She’s the protagonist. Lynsey. She wanted to grab things from life that maybe you aren’t supposed to, and she scares the shit out of me, still. But you got to write about what scares you, otherwise it’s all meaningless, right?’
‘Why does she scare you still?’ Lol asked.
‘Do I have to? Couldn’t we just have sex?’
‘Please don’t give me a hard time,’ Lol said. ‘I have a feeling this is somehow very important.’
She lit up. ‘Why?’
‘Because of the reason I can’t have sex with you.’
‘A woman, right?’ Rueful smile through the smoke. ‘What else? Well, I’m glad for you. I read the stuff on the Website and I’m glad for you, OK?’ Cola rolled off the bed, leaned across him to the chest of drawers, brought out a wine case from behind the ouzo lamp. ‘But this is gonna fuck up your night’s sleep even more, sunshine, believe me.’
It had the feel, Merrily thought, of some desperate ballroom in the Depression, where, although it was semi-derelict, people still came to dance against the darkness.
How old?’ Huw asked.
‘About 1740, originally, but it was completely refurbished early last century, which, I expect, is why it avoided being listed.’ Ingrid Sollars offered a smile to Huw; it was thin but it was a smile. In the twenty minutes or so while Merrily had been with the TV people, he appeared to have sought out and charmed the formidable Sollars, so spiky and unhelpful to Frannie Bliss.
‘So 1740, that’d be… what?’ Huw said. ‘A century or so after they broke away from the C of E?’
‘They were a new and radical movement in those days, Mr Owen, and this was one of the earliest chapels. Nearly as old as the one at Ryeford, down the valley. I expect you’re surrounded by the things in your part of Wales.’
‘Not like this,’ Huw said.
It was big. Bigger than most village churches in this area. Coming in through the door – Victorian Gothic, like the school, so not the original one – there had been that numinous vacuum waft you always got when a small door opened into a disused auditorium. And then what Merrily always thought of as the slightly soured stench of spent spirituality.
Ingrid Sollars said, ‘Since it was abandoned as a place of worship in the 1970s, it’s seen service as a warehouse, a kind of sports hall and finally a water-bottling plant – another local enterprise that bit the dust.’
Huw said, ‘Water from… ?’
‘There’s a spring virtually underneath.’
‘Is there?’
‘Not a terribly reliable one, unfortunately.’ Mrs Sollars’s weathered face seemed more open than Merrily remembered; her dusty bun of hair less tight. ‘No one was surprised when the business failed, because things generally did, you see. That’s the story of Underhowle – a short wave of industry, then a long, slow, bloodless decline. We are – we were – hoping for a stronger foundation this time. Industry supported by education.’
‘So you’re the historian here, Ingrid,’ Huw said. ‘The curator.’ ‘I ran a small tourist initiative here years ago, when my husband was alive, had a few hundred leaflets printed. We had trekking ponies at the riding school then, making us probably the only tourist enterprise in the village. They… Well, I suppose the committee keep me on in recognition of that pioneering initiative – and as the token local.’
‘And how do you feel about them turning this place into a museum?’
‘I’m in charge of the project,’ she said, as though this effectively prevented her from commenting. ‘I’m the keyholder.’
‘So?’
She didn’t blink. ‘And I suppose I must be unhappy about it, in some way, or I wouldn’t have let you in.’
Merrily took a proper look around. The chapel walls had been replastered, and an old gallery was being rebuilt, presumably for museum exhibits. But the altar was long gone, and the pulpit, of course. There were large areas of shadow, resistant to the naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling on frayed black flex. The bulbs, twelve of them, were probably high-wattage, but you could see all their filaments inside the straining veins of light.
‘Unhappy?’ Huw prompted.
Mrs Sollars didn’t expand, clearly wasn’t going to without some more effort on their part. It would be a matter of asking the right questions.
‘The Lodge family worshipped here,’ Merrily said. ‘And I think it was once actually owned by Roddy Lodge?’
‘Both the chapel and the garage were owned by the bottling company, and the whole lot was sold off when they went bankrupt. At the time, as I recall, Roddy Lodge had his bequest, which I believe was quite substantial – his father had sold the land on which the council estate was built – and he bought it for a silly price and then sold this building to the Underhowle Development Fund last year.’
‘Not short of money, are they?’ Merrily said.
‘They’re clever at attracting grants. And Christopher Cody puts funding into it as some sort of tax hedge. The Fund is administered by his solicitor, Ryan Nye.’
‘Who was also Roddy’s lawyer.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Ingrid Sollars said, ‘but this is a small world. The same fingers in many pies.’ She paused. ‘As you’ll have gathered, I’m rather proprietorial about this village. My father was the last… squire – I guess you’d call it that – and he lost most of his money through unwise investment, and my family moved away. I was the only one who chose to stay. Found it hard to separate from my roots, you might say.’
Ingrid Sollars was very slim, and Merrily thought of a small, tough thorn tree on a hillside, bending with the wind.
‘My ambition was to see some stability here in my lifetime,’ Ingrid said. ‘I thought, perhaps foolishly, that this might at last be in sight, but it seems it only takes one disaster…’
Merrily said tentatively, ‘This protest…’
‘Crass. Stupid. The whole thing’s entirely out of hand and likely to draw even more unwelcome attention to something that should have been allowed to die quietly. But we live in times of gracelessness and excess.’
There was silence, echoes absorbed by the dust sheets on the flagstoned floor and others draped from the gallery like the frayed and mournful curtains in a dying theatre.
‘I suppose Jerome phoned you,’ Huw said. ‘Told you we’d been to see him.’
‘Mr Banks said that you were attached to what he called, rather disparagingly, the Spook Squad and that he’d informed you about reports of an atmosphere here.’
‘That his word or yours?’
Ingrid Sollars hesitated. ‘Mine.’
Atmosphere, Merrily thought. Yes. And it was very cold. Her body acknowledged it; she shivered inside the duffel coat.
Huw didn’t seem aware of the atmosphere. H
e was walking around slowly, looking down, shards of old plaster cracking under his shoes. ‘So this is where some of the Roman stuff was discovered.’
‘Notably a statuette of what we think is Diana,’ Ingrid Sollars said. ‘It was found by Piers Connor-Crewe about a year ago. And some pottery. And the usual coins.’
‘More here than other places?’
‘That’s what Connor-Crewe always says. Not that he’s as much of an expert as he likes to think. But bookshop owners are often like that, don’t you find?’
Merrily said to Huw, ‘You’re thinking this was possibly the site of a Roman temple, aren’t you? Because of the spring.’
‘Aye. If not also pre-Roman.’
‘That’s also what Connor-Crewe thinks. I suspect he’d quite like to knock this building down just to find out for sure.’
‘It makes a certain sense, Ingrid.’ Huw said. ‘Folks think churches were no longer being built on ancient sacred sites after medieval times. All the mystics and the visionaries involved in Nonconformism tend to get overlooked, because of the puritan element.’
Merrily shivered again. She didn’t like this place with its hanging shadows and straining bulbs.
Huw turned to Ingrid. ‘Was it you who went to Banks originally?’
‘Could hardly go over his head. I attend his services.’
‘And he said what?’
‘Suggested it might be better if I consulted a Baptist minister, in Ross.’
‘Nice get-out. But you wouldn’t do that, would you?’
‘I was hardly going to bring in an outsider.’
‘When was this, lass?’
‘Five months ago, something like that. When the conversion work started for the museum. When the first grant came through. When the builders started asking me if it was haunted.’
‘Because?’
‘Footsteps when there was nobody there. Laughter – sniggers, they said. And items disappearing – tools. Although the doors were locked each night and there were no signs of breaking and entering.’
And you said?’
‘I said, quite truthfully, that I had no knowledge of the former Baptist chapel being haunted. And then there was the accident.’
‘Ah.’
‘One of the builders was working near the ceiling – up there, I think, in that top corner, knocking away damp plaster – when he claimed the hammer was snatched out of his hand. He was so shocked that he reeled away, dislodging his own ladder and falling to the ground. Broke a hip.’
Huw looked up. ‘Bloody lucky it weren’t his neck.’
‘After the first phase,’ Mrs Sollars said, ‘the firm told us they couldn’t fit Phase Two into their schedules for at least a year. In other words, they were pulling out.’
Merrily asked her, ‘What did the Development Committee have to say about that?’
‘Not the kind of publicity we need. Get another firm.’
‘Think back,’ Huw said. ‘It was converted into a bottling plant – when?’
‘Oh, quite recently. It didn’t take long for businesses to crash in Underhowle. Early nineties?’
‘Any trouble then?’
‘If there was, I didn’t hear about it.’
Merrily said, ‘The power lines go right over here, don’t they? Did they follow the same route then?’
‘I don’t think anything’s changed,’ Mrs Sollars said. ‘But I get all that from Sam.’
‘Good old Mr Hall,’ Huw said, and she glanced at him sharply.
‘I don’t have to share his obsession, Mr Owen, but I respect his right to have one.’
‘I see.’ Huw smiled. ‘So you’ve got new builders in now.’
‘Starting on Phase Two in a couple of weeks.’
‘You felt anything in here yourself?’
‘I don’t come in alone unless I really have to.’
‘And if you do…’
‘There’s an atmosphere, I’ll go that far. You have a feeling of… being observed.’
‘In what way?’
She didn’t look at him directly. ‘Sam says that’s a symptom of electrical hypersensitivity, but I certainly haven’t exhibited any of the others. I live, like him, on the hill, well away from the power lines.’
‘So what do you think it is, lass?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s not a good thing.’
‘Would you like us to say some prayers?’
‘Whatever you think might help.’
Huw said, ‘But there’s summat else, isn’t there, Ingrid?’
The wine case was sealed along the top with brown parcel tape. Cola set it down on the hessian rug by the computer table under the window, slipped a fingernail under the tape and slit it open.
‘I want free tickets for your gig for this.’
‘They’ll be on the door,’ Lol said. If he didn’t make it, at least she’d enjoy Moira.
‘Nah, I didn’t mean that,’ Cola said. ‘I don’t want anything.’
‘They’ll still be on the door.’
They knelt together on the rug. Cola lifted the box’s cardboard flaps. ‘So you were actually there when Roddy went to the angels. I wasn’t. I waste all that time watching you not finding a body under Piers’s tank and then I miss the big one. Some writer. OK, here they are.’ She took out some books, trying to hide the first one, but he saw it. It was a children’s Bible with Noah’s Ark on the front.
‘Scary,’ Lol said.
‘That’s mine. I’m embarrassed.’ She held the children’s Bible to her chest.
The second book was a thick black paperback, but its spine was white with fishbone creases: Aleister Crowley’s Magick. Then a hardback: The Secret Rituals of the OTO, by Karl Wurtz. Cola let this one fall open to show Lol some scribblings, in black biro, in the margins. There were two more books on Kundalini serpent power and sex magic. ‘You know about this stuff?’
‘A little.’ Lol noticed that since she’d opened the box, all the bounce had gone from her voice, like a rubber ball rolling away.
‘Sex magic – you use the build-up to an orgasm to channel and focus energy for a particular purpose and then… boom. I mean, I’ve only been a little way along that road, but it is scary. You just have to look at some of the people who went in for it. Aleister Crowley? I mean that guy was a total shit, he was a professional shit. But she’s like – this is Lynsey – “Oh Crowley, he was a pioneer, he knew about real freedom, he didn’t give a fart for anybody. ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ Brilliant!” She actually wrote it out – Do what thou wilt, et cetera – in big Gothic letters, had it as a kind of frieze over her bed.’
‘The OTO was the magical society founded on all that – is that right?’
‘Ordo Templi Orientis, something like that. Yeah, still going, I think. Lynsey studied everything she could find, and she got quite a few people into it.’
‘Not the OTO?’
‘Nah, she wasn’t in anything. But she was into everything, if you see what I mean. Into pushing out boundaries – sexual boundaries. Overcoming your inhibitions and breaking through to, like, real enlightenment. Overcoming pain, humiliation and… well, revulsion sometimes.’ She paused, looking at him almost shyly. ‘Coprophagia – you know what that is?’
‘It’s, er, an old album by The Who, isn’t it?’
Cola grinned.
‘Not really, was she?’ Lol said.
‘Don’t ask.’ She gathered the books into a pile. ‘See, I was always having to keep stuff like this for her since the day she had a row with this guy Paul, who she was living with, and he burned some of her books. She said she didn’t mind when they had fights – I mean actual fights, black-eye, split-up stuff – but she drew the line at him messing with her stuff. She had two kids, I think it was, with Paul. Big guy, Jamaican, smoked dope on an industrial scale. If you’d told me Paul had done for her, in a barney, I wouldn’t’ve been that surprised. His ma has the kids now, which is just as well.’
‘I
f she was still with this Paul,’ Lol said, ‘where did Roddy Lodge come in?’
‘The word “with” is relative.’ Cola dipped back into the wine case and brought out a cardboard folder. ‘I feel better for this, really. I still had this stuff when she died, and I thought, do I take it to the cops or what? But I couldn’t think how it was gonna help anybody and… you know…’
‘You had this idea for a play.’
‘See… you understand. Another creative person. I still haven’t decided whether to do Lynsey herself – kind of documentary – or have a character based on her. You’d have to tone it down, either way. People wouldn’t believe the – you know – the appetite.’
‘You said, good at men…’
‘You ever seen her? Look…’ She opened the folder and slid out a photograph but kept most of it covered up so that Lol could just see the top half of a woman with frizzy black hair and deep-set eyes. ‘I’m not a man, but I could feel it sometimes, you know?’
‘How well did you know her?’
‘From the pubs. And of course from the shop. From Piers.’
‘Piers was…?’
‘Oh yeah! Payment for books was how it started. Piers likes to interface with his customers, says a bookseller should be like a good doctor or a herbalist – give you advice, supply you with what you need to cure your… mineral deficiencies.’ Cola tried half-heartedly to wink and her eyebrow ring dipped. ‘It’s a bigger shop than it looks. Some punters get to go up into the attic or down into the basement, if you see what I mean.’
‘Sorry, I’m naive,’ Lol said. ‘You mean for books or…’
‘Yeah, books. Books, too. Mainly books. Heavy books, heavier than this stuff. The other activities, it’s The Old Rectory mostly.’ He also does’ – Lol tapped the books – ‘this stuff?’
