by Phil Rickman
Piers Connor-Crewe listened without uttering a word, as if his interest was academic. Piers was useful, Sam Hall had said on the phone, because he had extensive marketing know-how, having been in publishing, and of course he knew a great deal about ancient and Roman history. In the background Merrily had heard Ingrid saying brusquely, ‘Man fancies himself as Nero, if you ask me.’
‘So there we are, sir,’ Bliss said. ‘For Lynsey, the end of a golden era. The most excitement she’d ever had. And now she’s got to go back to the boring old Forest of Dean.’
‘As I understood it,’ Connor-Crewe said, ‘she had a relationship with a man, and at least one child.’ Which she seems to have rehomed, like with kittens – she was very good at that, apparently. Then she came to work in Ross – as a barmaid, I think – where she pursued her interest in the dark arts, acquiring some books from this little treasure house and usually paying, I’m told, in kind.’
Connor-Crewe’s eyes flared. ‘That’s—’
‘Irrelevant. The point is you had a relationship with her, founded on a mutual interest in the occult, whether commercial or private, and she spent time at your old rectory, full of bedrooms… which, in a strange kind of way, must’ve rekindled a few happy memories for Lynsey, perhaps sparked a few ideas.’
Connor-Crewe’s hand came down hard on the desk. ‘That is an utterly outrageous—’
‘Piece of gossip in the village of Underhowle,’ said Bliss. ‘Mr Connor-Crewe and his house parties and all those young guests.’
‘I think I ought to telephone my solicitor, don’t you?’
‘The ubiquitous Mr Nye, sir? Who is perhaps not quite as young as he looks, and probably likes a good party himself.’
‘And is doubtless well acquainted with the law relating to slander.’
Bliss looked blank. ‘What did I say?’
‘I think you accused me of allowing Lynsey Davies to use my home to recreate whatever filth took place twenty years ago in Cromwell Street.’
‘I think that’s your dirty mind at work, sir, but if you say so… Anyway, Ms Davies soon became interested in another property.’
Bliss flicked over a couple of pages in the magical diary. In between the impenetrable esoteric formulae, the text was an uneven record of what Lynsey considered to be significant episodes in her ‘spiritual development’. These entries, at least, were very clear – hand-printed and phrased in a schoolgirlish mixture of the colloquial, the portentous and the breathless prose of the romantic pulp novel.
***
We have been bound together by the stars and I knew we would meet again and so it has come to pass! Saw him in Ross yesterday, after ten years, and it turns out he’s working locally, and he took me to see the Place, which he says he has already become attached to. I was immediately picking up a powerful energy there and feel certain it’s on the sight of pagan Roman worship with blood sacrifice. We could do really incredible stuff there, the two of us, to reawaken the power. It is just mindblowing how things work out just when you need a buzz in your life.
‘Who’s she talking about here, Mr Crewe?’
‘Once again, why would I know?’
‘Because if she was in Underhowle I think you’d have known about it. And what she was doing. I take it you know which building she’s referring to.’
‘I can only guess the Baptist chapel.’
‘Where I understand you yourself have discovered Roman remains. Was it you who told Lynsey it was the site of an ancient Roman temple?’
‘I may have done. It’s an interest of mine.’
‘And was it an interest of hers?’
‘She was interested in anywhere she thought might have been used for ancient and mysterious rituals. She was… romantic, in that way.’
Merrily thought about Jane, who would also have been fascinated. Would have, once. She said, ‘Lynsey seems to have been very excited by the idea that the site was used for blood sacrifices. Did you tell her that?’
‘I doubt it. I told you, my interest is largely academic. It may have been, say, a Mithraic temple, but nothing’s been found there to suggest that. So why would I have told her something for which there was no archaeological evidence?’
‘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 Cod
y’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.
