by Phil Rickman
All things in their proper place, the verse concluded, My soul doth best embrace.
A place of energy, not death. She had a picture of Lucy’s grave up on the Coleman’s Meadow website now, alongside the only picture of Lucy because, whatever was being achieved here, this woman deserved the credit.
‘We’re in this together, right?’
Jane gave the headstone a final squeeze, for luck, and ran off through the churchyard and the wicket gate into the orchard. Leys should be travelled. Every time she came this way, with a purpose, she was reinforcing her links with the ancestors and the life-force of the village. The orchard had been the life-force and the church had been at the centre of the orchard, Lucy telling Jane, Which came first, I wouldn’t like to say, though I suspect the orchard. She’d said that perhaps there’d been a pre-Christian shrine where the church now stood. As if she’d felt it, or perhaps the presence of the buried stones, not so far away in Coleman’s Meadow. The way Jane had surely felt it on a summer night on Cole Hill.
Hurrying now along the slippery path through the ruins of the orchard, the light almost gone, the path obliterated by sodden dead leaves, but her feet knew the way. Her heart, too. When she’d got drunk, one long-ago night, on cider, Lucy had said, The cider’s the blood of the orchard. It’s in your blood now.
And although the orchard was looking derelict and moribund, the blood was pounding by the time Jane reached the edge of Coleman’s Meadow. Well out of breath, but the excitement fizzing up as soon as she saw all the vehicles.
Mainly 4×4s and a van with Capstone on its flank. All parked on the edge of the meadow in an area cordoned off with orange tape. They’d taken away the old stile and ripped down the brutal strands of barbed wire that Pierce had had put up to protect the proposed building site. There was now a less hostile green wire fence with rustic posts and a galvanised farm-gate, and it was open.
Walking through the new entrance, Jane saw that khaki-coloured tents had gone up and two portable lavatories between the two caravans, which had been there for a few days now. About a dozen people were wandering around and looking up at the charcoal sky.
And Jane… standing on the edge of the meadow her gaze inevitably drawn towards Cole Hill’s dark Iron Age ramparts behind naked trees, Jane was bathed in a moment of what James Joyce and those guys had called epiphany.
Like the long, heavy velvet curtains were going back to reveal the next, crucial stage of her life. This sense of pure joy. And she was fully aware of it. How often did that happen?
‘Got a pass, have we, my darling?’
The guy who’d come out of the smaller caravan wasn’t much older than Jane. He was wiry, had gelled hair and wore leather jeans and a security armband. Wandering over, kind of springy and officious, but Jane was too high to be brought down by some jobsworth.
‘Pass? Listen, I live here. What sort of—?’
‘Hey! Whoa! I dunno! They just told me to be sure and keep the riff-raff out.’
‘I look like riff-raff?’
‘I’m not sure. Don’t move.’ He came up close, smelling of something pungent in the way of aftershave. ‘Hmm.’ Putting on a thoughtful look and then breaking out a black-stubbled smile. ‘You could always bribe me. What you got on tonight?’
‘She’s feeding her bloody kids, what do you think?’ a guy in a suit said. ‘Probably doing her homework, Gregory. Back off, you randy oik.’
The security guy stepped back, put on this stiff, solemn face and saluted. ‘Whatever you say, Mr Blore, sir.’
‘Professor Blore, you little fuck!’
The security guy grinned, and Jane jumped back as the man in the suit turned and examined her, and — wow — it was. Hadn’t recognised him, not in the suit and tie, and with his hair brushed. His accent was posher, too, encased in a bigger and deeper voice. Resonant, Jane thought. Out of the earth.
She saw that Coops was with him, looking young, wispy and spare, because Bill Blore really was a big guy. Bigger than on TV. Well, certainly wider, built like Hadrian’s Wall or something. He’d grown his hair — like for the winter? — and it was swept back and tied in a ponytail, and you didn’t see many of those any more.
Coops said, ‘Bill, this is Jane Watkins.’
Maybe she blushed. She certainly felt like blushing. In fact, oh God, she felt like running away.
She didn’t move.
‘Jane.’
His face was just like on the box, good-looking in this kind of swarthy way, his eyes maybe just a bit more bulgy, his smile… fun. She’d seen that smile so many times, usually when he’d proved the geophysics guys wrong, taken a gamble and they’d found some Roman’s thigh bone in Trench One.
‘Hi,’ Jane said.
It came out like the smallest mouse-squeak.
‘Uh, it was Jane who…’ Coops giving Bill Blore an unsure kind of glance ‘… first got the idea there might be something here?’
‘Cooper, I know.’ Bill Blore bent, this big, callused hand coming out. ‘Jane, it’s a privilege to meet you.’ The hand closing around Jane’s like the bucket of a JCB as he turned to Coops. ‘Where’s Declan?’
‘I think he’s putting his gear away.’
‘Why does that bastard always go to earth when it goes dark? I like dark. We do have lights, don’t we?’
‘I think he’s put those away, too.’
‘Arse,’ Bill Blore said. ‘I was rather thinking we might shoot Jane.’
‘I think quite a lot of people would go along with that,’ Coops said.
Jane frowned, but Bill Blore didn’t get it. He looked up at the sky, then back at Jane.
‘All right. Tomorrow, then. What are you doing tomorrow, Jane?’
‘Erm, nothing. That is, like… whatever you want?’
‘What I want is to keep it in sequence.’ Bill Blore turned back to Coops. ‘If it starts with Jane, then that’s where we should start, before the site gets too mucked up.’
‘Right,’ Coops said.
‘How about ten o’clock? Ten a.m., Jane, that OK for you? We’ll shoot you at the top of the hill or something.’
‘You mean…’ The sodden ground below Jane’s muddied school shoes had become suddenly unsteady. ‘For, like… TV? For your programme?’
‘Well, it’s certainly not going to be for young Gregory’s private DVD collection.’
‘Wow,’ Jane said. ‘I mean… sure. I’ll be here. I mean, I didn’t really think you’d want to…’
‘We’ll get you on the hill, and you can take us through the story of how you found the stones, yah?’
‘Well, it wasn’t just me.’
‘Sweetheart…’ Bill Blore put his big hands on her shoulders, looked into her eyes, his own eyes brown as lubricating oil. ‘For the purposes of my film, it was just you.’ He looked up. ‘Look, excuse me, there’s a guy I need to grab…’
Spinning away, raising a hand to somebody, and Jane thought of something important.
‘But I can still help… can’t I?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Neil said I could probably help? With the dig? Like I don’t expect to be allowed a trowel or anything, but I could… you know, carry stuff around, take messages.’
‘Oh… absolutely,’ Bill Blore said. ‘We’re fighting the weather on this dig, so we’ll need all the help we can get. Excuse me, OK?’
As he tramped off, his suit trousers tucked into tan leather boots, Coops came and stood next to Jane.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Jane said. ‘I know, don’t get carried away. He’s a bit of a presence, though, isn’t he?’
Watching Bill Blore striding across the dark meadow, planting a hand on some guy’s shoulder, giving him instructions on something.
‘Yeah,’ Coops said. ‘A presence.’
Jane felt a bit sorry for him, remembering the afternoon last summer when she’d followed him here. When the grass had been all churned up after Lyndon’s Pierce’s bid to destroy the straight track, making the meadow — Pie
rce thought — unsuitable for anything but building on. Remembering Coops’s excitement as he’d shown her those first partly exposed stones.
Jane had been like, These are real, actual prehistoric standing stones? And Coops — she was always going to remember this — had said, I’d stake my future career on it.
And Jane, beyond euphoric, had, in that moment, fallen just slightly in love with him. Seemed a long time ago now.
‘He’s really ready to go tomorrow?’
‘So he insists, Jane. He seems to’ve got it scheduled for early in the next series of Trench One — and that starts in the New Year.’
‘Wow, that’s tight.’
‘I don’t think the ratings were fantastic for the last series. Too many big digs that yielded a couple of pottery shards and not a lot else. He needs something spectacular, and he’s not going to let the weather or Christmas stop him getting it.’
They watched an orange-coloured digger manoeuvring through the entrance. Shame they couldn’t’ve employed Gomer, but Jane supposed they needed somebody used to archaeological procedure.
‘Tell you one thing, Coops — he’s not going to let Pierce get away with moving the stones, is he? They’ve lost the Serpent, he’s not going to let us lose this.’
‘I never count on anything,’ Coops said.
It started to rain, but not too heavily. Nothing was too heavy tonight.
‘Hey… I’m going to be on Trench One, Coops. He did say that, didn’t he? I mean, I didn’t just dream it?’
‘No.’ Coops let a smile fade through. ‘No, you didn’t dream it. And by early spring I’d guess you’ll be having your picture taken next to the raised stones.’
‘Makes you kind of shiver to think about it,’ Jane said.
* * *
Jane walked back on to the square to find it aglow. The fake gaslamps reflected in the swimming cobbles, warm amber light in the mullioned windows of the Black Swan. Plus the Christmas tree’s lights, just white ones this year — more sophisticated, apparently, which was incomer bollocks, but Jane couldn’t be annoyed about anything tonight.
Mum’s car was in the vicarage drive, and there was another one outside. Jane let herself in through the side door, near the back stairs, and slipped into the kitchen just as a man and a woman were going out the other way, through to the hall, watched by Mum, still in her wet coat.
The woman was carrying a computer, its wire wound around an arm. She smiled kind of stiffly.
‘You’ll have it back very soon, I promise. Maybe tomorrow.’
‘I hope so,’ Mum said in this dull, flat voice. ‘Because—’
The man said, ‘Is this your daughter?’
‘Because all the parish stuff is on there as well,’ Mum said.
The woman nodded. The air between Mum and these people was like cling film stretched tight.
28
Shaking the Cage
For confirmation, Merrily had the radio tuned to Hereford and Worcester, the floodline programme with news inserts. The teatime studio presenter was talking to a reporter out on location; you could hear the rain splattering a car roof.
‘… one of those places everyone knows. Almost like a seaside resort in the summer because there’s a kind of pebbly beach, and people go bathing in the river.’
The reporter was on the phone. Bella Finch again, out on location, talking about something they’d found in the Wye.
‘… level’s extremely high, and a lot of debris has been washed downstream, up against the bridge. What looks like a whole tree and lots of branches, and apparently that was where the body was found, entangled in debris. Must have been a terrible shock for somebody.’
‘Do we know who found it?’
‘No, we don’t, and the police have been quite sparing with information. It was only, as you know, after we received a call to the floodline from one of our listeners about police activity around the bridge that we learned about this.’
‘Yes, and please keep those calls coming in, because we’re all aware that the flood situation isn’t getting any better in the two counties. But what are the police saying, Bella?’
‘Very little, I’m afraid, Kate. They won’t even confirm at this stage whether—’
Merrily switched off, watching Jane shrug.
‘They found the rest of him, then. Had to turn up somewhere, sooner or later.’
Jane was sitting at the table, a mug of tea going cold in front of her. Her face smoky and mutinous in the kitchen’s amber lamplight. It was progress. A year ago she’d have been screaming and storming out.
‘Bodies and rivers,’ Merrily said. ‘You know the Celtic stuff.’
‘Heads and rivers,’ Jane snapped. ‘Because the head was the home of the soul and water was the entrance to — Anyway, what would they know about any of it?’
‘They do know about it. They know about the theory that the Serpent connected Dinedor Hill with the Wye. They also have very strong forensic evidence linking Clem Ayling’s murder with the Serpent.’ Merrily sat down. ‘Jane, they’re in a hurry.’
‘So?’
‘It means all I could do was delay them. No way I’d be able to stop them. And any attempts to delay them would just make them more suspicious and more determined.’
‘Who cares? If I’d been here—’
‘If you’d been here and refused to give them your laptop and gone on about living in a police state, that guy Brent might well have formed the wrong opinion. He doesn’t know you, he doesn’t know me—’
‘Where’s bloody Bliss, then?’
‘I don’t know. The woman, Karen, I thought she was Bliss’s regular assistant, Andy Mumford’s replacement. But not today, apparently.’
‘You’re saying they might’ve nicked me?’
‘They’d have made life very difficult. Brent wanted those names and he wanted them tonight. He actually said, for heaven’s sake, he said, Mrs Watkins, there’s an easy way and a hard way…’
‘How did they even know we had the names?’
‘Jane, you were in the papers.’
And Frannie Bliss knew. He’d even laid out a broad hint this morning in the car, suggesting that giving him a list of Coleman’s Meadow activists might be the soft-option. Where was he now? Once or twice, she’d caught Karen Dowell’s eye, and Karen had given her a harassed look that said this is not my fault.
‘I’ve betrayed them,’ Jane said.
‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘I’ve betrayed you. But it seemed like the best solution.’
Jane looked at her, still some anger in her eyes but mainly confusion, bewilderment.
‘You’re eighteen,’ Merrily said. ‘I wasn’t in a position to give them your laptop, nor would I have.’
‘So you handed over your computer, with the database on it. Hoping to get it out of the house before I came back.’
‘Basically, yes.’
‘Do not dare say you did that to protect me.’
‘No.’ Merrily ached for a cigarette but didn’t get up. ‘I just didn’t have time to think. You don’t. It’s how they do it. Doorstep you.’
The last time it had happened — serious-faced police at the door, May we come in? — had been when they’d arrived to tell her about Sean.
‘I was tired and wet, and I couldn’t see a way out and I… still can’t. If they’d had to come back with the paperwork…’
She’d looked at DI Brent’s bland, detached, civil-servant face and seen School of Annie Howe. Remembered how Bliss always said that, where the police were concerned, a refusal often offended and offence usually led to a blind determination to nail you to the wall.
‘So what will they do with it?’ Jane said.
‘Copy everything. Then go through the names. They’ll start straight away, probably with the local ones. The local ones who seem most… extreme. Jane, have you… ever heard of a group calling itself the Children of the Serpent?’
‘Who are they?’
‘They haven’
t been in contact with you?’
‘No. I’ve never heard of them. You think I wouldn’t remember something like that? Who are they?’
‘There was a threatening message on Clem Ayling’s answering machine from someone claiming to represent the Children of the Serpent.’
Jane looked genuinely blank.
‘Good,’ Merrily said.
‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘What’s to stop me sending out a round-robin email to everybody on the Coleman’s Meadow database saying we’ve been raided by the police and had our computer seized and warning them there’s going to be a witch-hunt.’
‘Nothing.’
‘And what’s to stop me ringing Eirion and getting him to tell his media friends? Getting it out in the papers?’
‘Nothing,’ Merrily said again.
‘But?’
‘But… I suppose, in most other situations it would look like some kind of breach of civil liberties. But this is a high-profile, decidedly horrific murder. It’s on the cards that somebody on that database, if they didn’t do it, at least has links to whoever did. So it’s one thing protecting somebody over a cause you believe in… shielding a murderer is something else. And what if… Let me get you a fresh cup of tea.’
‘What if he does it again, right?’
‘Mmm.’
‘This is a totally, totally shit situation.’ Jane lowered her head into her hands. ‘And things were going so well. I just…’ she looked up ‘… just met Bill Blore.’
‘You did?’
‘At the Meadow. They’re all set up.’
‘Yes, I was going to tell you about that.’
‘I had a call from Coops at school. He said Bill Blore wanted to meet me. And, like… he did. He’s going to interview me tomorrow. On camera.’
‘That’s fantastic.’
‘So I get interviewed for Trench One at the same time as friends of Coleman’s Meadow, people who I got to sign my petition, people who rallied round to help me are—’
