by Phil Rickman
‘Well, yes. And then I invited her in for coffee and we had a long chat. I told her about Daniel. She asked if I’d… seen him? You know? I said I hadn’t.’
‘She was, erm… alone, I presume.’
‘Oh, yes.’
Merrily saw a policeman talking into his radio and then hurrying away down the street, several nearby shoppers watching him, expelling low, anxious whispers, a sorrowful excitement on their faces.
Oh God. Merrily throwing her concentration into the phone.
‘Martin, I’m curious. Did she ever specifically say to you that she was gay?’
‘She didn’t say she wasn’t. The thing is, Merrily, those of us who have never been any other way or sought to conceal it, we don’t make an issue of it. The longer I live, the more I think that’s the cause of all the ill-feeling, all the dissent. I’m not a gay priest, I’m just a priest. Should there be gay bishops? There always have been gay bishops. Just not with a capital G.’
‘Funny. Huw Owen makes the same point.’ She glanced at him. ‘If in a slightly blunter fashion.’
‘I suppose it’s just the same way, as Sylvia didn’t, for quite a while, say she was a spiritualist, although it became clear that she—’
‘What?’
‘You didn’t know?’
‘No.’
‘Doesn’t mean she’s one of these people who go to public seances every week. Seems to attend only one church, which is the Cathedral. What she wanted to know – and that, I’m guessing, is what she wanted to approach with you – is whether spiritualism is considered compatible with Church of England worship.’
‘She didn’t mention this.’ The scream of an oncoming emergency vehicle forcing Merrily to switch the phone to her other ear. ‘She told Sophie I was treating her best friend as if she was an evil spirit requiring major exorcism. Which was, of course—’
‘Merrily, grief—’
‘Even allowing for what grief does. I don’t understand this. Or why she also avoided discussing it with George Curtiss from the Cathedral.’
A police car went past at speed, full squeal.
‘I think she just wanted to talk to you,’ Martin said. ‘To have an intelligent discussion, one-to-one.’
‘About spiritualism?’
‘Which we had. An intelligent discussion. And I thought I should tell you, as soon as possible, that she has no intention – nor ever did have – of making an official complaint against you.’
‘That’s not what she told Sophie.’
‘Merrily, it was a cry for help. She wanted attention. I’m glad that I was able to give it to her. Permitted to give it. No offence at all to you. She probably opened up to me because I’m gay.’
‘And what did you tell her – about compatibility?’
‘I told her it was a broad church and we never turned anyone away, but that our belief – or at least mine – was that attempting to maintain contact with our loved ones on the other side of death was unlikely to be beneficial to either.’
‘And she said?’
A woman came out of the Granary with their lunch on a tray. Merrily pushed her chair back and signalled to Huw to eat.
‘She said there was sometimes unfinished business,’ Martin said.
‘There’s nearly always unfinished business. This is still not making any sense, Martin. You tell her you don’t condone communion with the dead, where does this get her?’
‘Well, I hope I’ve made it clear that it’s nothing for you to worry about. You’re on holiday and you can relax.’
‘So you’re going to see her again? Unfinished business?’
‘She wants me to meet her medium. To make it clear to me, as she said, that there’s nothing unhealthy in it.’
‘And you’re going to—’ She waited for another police car to go through. ‘You’re actually going to do that?’
‘Can’t do any harm. It’s not as if I’m going to become a convert. Relax, Merrily.’
‘Be very careful, Martin. We’re both on unsafe ground here.’
She watched the blue lights dispersing oncoming traffic like fly repellent, nobody relaxing here.
43
Weight of bone
NEVER REALLY LIKED to get there first, and it rarely happened, thank Christ, but this was a small town, being on foot an advantage.
If you could call it that.
Bliss had alerted Rich Ford and then followed the woman downhill through the back streets on the English edge of town. She said she hadn’t seen it herself; a canoeist in a wetsuit had asked her if she knew where the police station was, telling her his mate had spotted it near the bank. Was it a man or a woman? She didn’t know, was pointing now across the narrow main road to a turning alongside a vet’s clinic.
It ended at a car park next to a concrete building – sewage works. Then there was rough grass and a beach of pale brown stones sloping into the river, and what looked like an explosion of blood against the greyness of the water and the sky.
‘Police,’ Bliss said quietly.
Out of breath, forehead numbing, as they parted for him.
‘In all his finery,’ someone said. ‘Rather eerie.’
The sun had gone in completely, and the scene was sombre, a mist of funereal rain draped over the dark trees on the opposite bank. The red was lurid, maybe just a blanket thrown over the body.
And then someone laughed.
Mother of God.
Bliss pushed urgently through.
* * *
Laid out in his sodden robes: the full-length cape edged with fake ermine, held together by a chrome pin. The tall crown of beaten gilt on his head. In his left hand the sceptre made from the ballcock from a lavatory cistern with the small H on top like a tiny version of an old-fashioned TV aerial.
H for Hay.
Bliss was like, ‘What the f— What’s this?’
Two patrol cars, blues and twos, screeching into the concrete car park behind him.
‘Don’t you recognize him?’ a man said gravely. ‘It’s the King of Hay.’
‘Couldn’t believe it.’ A boy of about sixteen was crouching beside it. ‘We had to get him out, didn’t we?’
He was wearing a pale blue wetsuit. Behind him, another boy, same gear, and two orange canoes pulled up from the river.
‘And you found him where?’ Bliss said.
‘Just by there.’ The wetsuit boy had a Welsh Valleys accent. ‘He was floating, he was, not far from the bank. At first, we thought it was a… you know. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yeh,’ Bliss said. ‘You would.’
He bent to hold up the bottom of the scarlet cape to reveal a pair of shapeless, too wide, dark grey trousers and scuffed, black lace-up shoes. He used a pen to lift up the bottom of a trouser leg, flesh colour underneath.
Two uniforms either side of him now.
‘Jesus, boss, that was a scare.’
‘Just a bit odd, Darren. It appears to be the torso of a male dummy from a shop window. But quite an old one. Wooden, in fact. See how the feet are screwed in?’
‘You blokes mind moving back just a bit?’ A guy pushing through, TV camera on his shoulder. ‘That’s fine. Thanks.’
‘Hold it, pal,’ Bliss said. ‘We need to be quite sure about a couple of things.’
The cameraman moved back, shooting Bliss, who recognized the reporter with him, Amanda Patel, from BBC Midlands today.
‘Giss a minute, Mandy.’
‘What is this about, Frannie? We thought—’
‘Yeh, we all thought. It’s a bloody relief.’
Amanda let the cameraman finish recording, from a distance, before turning to the crowd, looking baffled.
‘Can anybody… does anybody know what this is about?’
‘It’s the King of Hay,’ an elderly man said. ‘Someone made a very accurate effigy of the King of Hay, Richard Booth, and sent it floating down the River Wye.’
‘It’s jolly lifelike,’ Amanda said. ‘Sca
red me for a minute. No, really, is it a leftover from a carnival or something?’
‘We haven’t had a carnival this year. Nor last.’
‘I remember when they were going to execute the King, or something like that, for a publicity stunt. But this… I mean it’s not really the best time for jokes, is it?’
‘You are quite right there,’ the elderly man said.
‘Can’t be the actual crown jewels, can it?’
‘I think you’ll find they’re still in the window of the King of Hay shop in town. But someone’s gone to considerable trouble to create facsimiles. And then throws the whole lot in the river.’
‘Bit sick, if you ask me. We’ve got some shots, in case it ever means anything, but…’ Amanda Patel shook her head. ‘I think I’m going to leave it alone, Frannie. Just looks like bad taste, anyway, with the hunt for Tamsin. And after what happened to that old man at Cusop. Come on, Paul.’ She nodded at Bliss. ‘Thanks, Frannie.’
The cameraman lowered his camera and followed Amanda Patel, who glanced once over her shoulder, looking uncertain. A kid was leaning over the King trying to pull off his crown.
‘Hey!’ Bliss was on his feet. ‘Geroff!’
‘It’s glued on, boss,’ Darren said.
Like the sceptre was to the hand. No wonder nothing had come off in the water.
‘Always factions in Hay,’ the elderly man said. ‘People who support an independent Hay, other people who think Booth’s held up progress by scaring off big business.’
‘Some countries they’d have put out a bleedin’ contract on him.’
An Asian guy in a Mumbai Indians T-shirt, with a bearded man in his thirties who was looking quite amused, prodding the effigy with his trainer.
‘As he isn’t seen here as often as he was, I don’t see the relevance of a public drowning.’
‘Especially not now, when something far more serious is consuming everyone’s attention.’
This was a tall man with a half-moon face that Bliss recognized.
‘Hello, Gwyn. I thought you’d retired.’
‘Don’t rub it in, boy.’
‘What you doing here?’
‘As I have to keep telling everybody, I live here. Bookseller, now. How’s it going, Francis?’
‘Going nowhere fast,’ Bliss said. ‘And this kind of incident doesn’t help.’
He’d worked with Jones a couple of times. Shrewd. Deceptively quiet. Called by both his first names because Gwyn Joneses were ten a penny in Wales. He had that look of loss and longing in his eyes, the look that Bliss was dreading one day seeing in the mirror.
‘Like so much that happens here,’ Jones said, ‘it doesn’t make immediate sense.’
The boy in the wetsuit came to his feet.
‘Leave it with you, then, should we?’
‘Yeah, we’ll do something with it.’ The bearded man looked at Jones. ‘What you reckon, Gwyn? Should I dispose of it? Don’t want to cause embarrassment for the King.’
‘And if it turns up on the television?’
‘It won’t, though, will it? You heard what she said. If they already have a big story in Hay, they’re not going to want a bit of whimsy.’
‘Not sure he wasn’t actually in England when they found him,’ Gwyn Arthur Jones said. ‘This is the exact border, I think.’ He pointed across the rough grass, where it formed a kind of peninsula between the river and quite a wide stream bursting into it. ‘That’s the brook, is it not?’
‘The Dulas Brook?’ Bliss went to the edge, peered down. ‘This is where it comes out in the river?’
‘The official border between Wales and the other place.’ Jones bent to the effigy, fitted his hands underneath its arms and raised its upper half from the stones. ‘Not too heavy. No, boy, I don’t think we should dispose of it at all.’ He looked at Bliss. ‘Something here I instinctively mistrust. If somebody wants it in the river, I’d quite like to see it stays out. I’ve a little room at the back of my shop… all right with you, Francis?’
‘How far’s your shop?’
‘Halfway to the clock. Yellow sign. It’s called The Cop Shop.’
‘Of course it is.’
‘Give you a hand?’ The bearded guy lifted up the head and shoulders. ‘If I take this end and Jeeter takes the feet we can carry it between us and that way nobody gets soaked.’
Bliss shrugged. The effigy’s head lolled, as if it was a real head with the weight of bone, Bliss guessing papier mâché with a thin skein of plaster of Paris, which had suffered in the water. The features were inexact. In the greying, blurring light, it looked like a real face that might be about to try and speak.
44
The mountains and the word
BY THE TIME she was back at the car, it was raining. Merrily had a headache. Found a packet of Anadin in the glove box, just one left.
False alarm, someone had told her and Huw outside the Granary. They’d thought there was a body in the Wye, near where the Dulas Brook flowed into it, but it had turned out to be an effigy of the King. What a bloody mindless thing to do, a woman had said, when the town had its heart in its mouth about Tamsin Winterson, known to many of the folks here since before she could walk.
Merrily swallowed the Anadin. Huw had gone home. This was one of those times when she might have gone home, too, and directly into the church to let it all out, but the prospect of meeting an angsty Martin Longbeach in there, gearing himself up for Sunday’s service…
She stood for a few moments in the rain, then made a conscious decision, stripped off the wet fleece.
She pulled her newly waxed Barbour jacket from the back seat and walked out into the rain.
Little lights everywhere. A fairy grotto.
In the middle of the altar, attended by small figurines of the Virgin Mary, a tabernacle held the host under glowing candles and a starry blue dome.
St Mary’s, Hay.
Oh, this was the real thing, all right. And yet she felt embraced by the shadows rather than the lights, wondering if she, or any woman priest, was welcome here. It was a broad church, the C. of E. and the Church in Wales, but few of her colleagues had been tempted, not even Martin Longbeach. Not anyone in Herefordshire where Bernie Dunmore wouldn’t have touched it with a six-foot crozier.
Not that he could totally prevent it, if some minister wanted it. She knew for a fact that Richard Williams, the Anglo-Catholic vicar, had taken over an average congregation of about half a dozen, and now, apparently, it was averaging forty.
The lure of old ways.
She should be so lucky.
She stepped back, took off her coat and sat in one of the right-hand pews, next to a painted virgin and child.
St Mary’s Church, Hay. Another St Mary’s Church at Capel-y-ffin.
And Cusop… St Mary’s. Marian country. How far did that go back? Did the alleged visions of the Lady of Llanthony have origins pre-dating Father Ignatius? She sat with hands flat on her knees, closing her eyes, and now the scent of incense was powerfully on the air, and she set her thoughts adrift, opening herself to some kind of understanding.
Voices would intrude.
…that Peter Rector was, at that time, a darker man. A man who wanted to play with the elements, if he could, and people’s minds…
Like he owned the place… like he knowed the place. And it knowed him.
… what better place than this, where the very air was full of spiritual energy?
When she opened her eyes, it was to the rows of candles alight on the votive stand. How many of them had been lit today for Tamsin Winterson?
Big mysteries that hung like the incense on the air. Small mysteries ripping families, whole communities apart. Small flickerings of hope.
Before she left, she lit another, with a short, intense prayer, and left her last fiver in the offertory box.
Outside, the rain had stopped, a sputtering sun gilding a corner of the sky. She walked all around the low-lying, squat-towered church, counting the a
ncient yew trees, shapeless sentinels flagging up pre-Christian origins. The church itself must have medieval foundations, but seemed to have been substantially rebuilt over the centuries. Quite an ordinary church, really, from the outside.
But its site was not.
Coming down from the circular churchyard, she saw its immediate neighbour, a green mound, evidently a castle motte, smaller and perhaps older than the hill at the top of the town where Hay Castle reared, with no church beside it. She followed the sound of water, down a steepening path beside the mound, found a fast-flowing steam dividing it from the church, and a place where the water went tumbling vertically over a small cliff, like a quarry face. She followed the path to where it joined another, found a spring coming out of a rock.
Stone and water everywhere, all this rushing, swirling energy so close to the River Wye but separated from it, the river obscured by trees, a living screen, as if the sight of it might be too much.
She began to tingle in a way that Jane might tingle, at the perception of something powerfully primeval. Oh God, why were all the sudden thrills so pagan-tainted these days?
The sun was burning away the clouds as she crossed a wooden footbridge over the stream, moving away from the church, but there were some old buildings ahead, quite low, and the sound of traffic.
From a short alley between some almshouses, probably nineteenth century, once humble, now bijou, she emerged on to the main road, some way below the Swan Hotel and almost directly opposite the opening of Forest Road, the long and winding lane – the only lane – leading to the Gospel Pass.
For a blinding moment, the main road and its traffic disappeared, and she saw, like a bright ribbon, the ancient connection between the church at Hay and the little oilcan church of Capel-y-ffin, both encircled by yews denoting prehistoric ritual origins, both dedicated to St Mary the Virgin who opened her ruined fingers to the sky.
St Peter and St Paul carrying the word down from the mountains, to Hay.
While at the opposite end of the town, the Dulas Brook, bypassing another church of St Mary, at Cusop, offered itself to the River Wye… so sacred that the town was afraid to look at her. Merrily stood at the side of the road, water glistening on the sleeves of the freshly waxed Barbour.
