by Phil Rickman
‘Back to the Ox afterwards?’
‘Where they apparently spent the night drinking,’ Jane said, ‘though not excessively. They’d asked Bing for a key, saying they might want to go out later and walk it off.’
‘How much later?’
‘Put it this way, he watched them leave not long before midnight. Bing was a bit suspicious. Unusual for him, must’ve been something about them. He looked out of an upstairs window and saw them on the little car park at the back, unpacking what looked like a couple of those long cricket bags from the back of one of the Land Rovers. And then they took off their funeral gear and got changed behind the vehicles. Then they put on overcoats or whatever, to cover it all up, and just walked off. Over the river bridge and out of the street lights, and he didn’t see them after that. Anyway, I went down there, and I’m guessing they took the footpath on the right, after the bridge.’
‘Across the fields? Around what’s left of the orchard?’
‘Where they’d be able to pick up the old coffin path and follow it to the churchyard the back way. Bing didn’t follow them, obviously, he wasn’t that curious. I’m guessing, if he thought there was anything iffy he just didn’t want to be involved. Landlords, I mean it’s all about discretion if you want to keep your clientele. Also, some of them were big blokes, apparently.’
‘Mmm.’
Merrily wondering what had led Jane to the Ox. Also trying to equate an all-male, post-funeral night out with the apparition in the fog.
‘He wouldn’t’ve found it that iffy, anyway.’ Jane brought the laptop over to the coffee table by the wood stove. ‘Must’ve seemed like a joke.’
She tapped the pressure pad and the YouTube video came up, in black and white.
No, it was in colour. It was just the central figures that weren’t.
A dull day somewhere in middle England. The camera pulling back to expose a holiday-type crowd lining what looked like a town square, bunting strung between lamp-posts and trees displaying a first pale glimmer of spring greenery.
The black and white figures in the middle carried sticks. Otherwise, they were like Victorian beggars in greasy-looking bowler hats and jackets ripped into strips. Like clothing thrown away, Merrily thought, after being attacked with a Stanley knife by some embittered wife.
‘It’s called a rag jacket,’ Lol said.
Merrily turned to him in surprise.
‘Um, I think,’ he said.
Their faces were blackened. They moved around like big spiders and then faced one another, the jackets suddenly spraying out like feathers. A smack of sticks as they closed in. Laughter. And then the music began.
‘There were several clips to choose from,’ Jane said when it was over. ‘That was the clearest, but this is the one that brought the shivers on.’
In the second clip they were in silhouette against a sunrise. Raggedy crowlike things prancing on some hilltop, devilish.
‘This is definitely the version that originates around here. I don’t know how we’ve managed to avoid them.’
‘We haven’t,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s just that the local ones I’ve seen are not like this. They’re more… you know, white shirts and flowers in the hats?’
Thinking how, when she was a kid, in another part of the country, morris dancing, like the maypole, had been all about little girls and handkerchiefs and posies. Not that she’d ever participated; even then, when she was about nine, it had seemed silly and twee.
‘This is Border morris,’ Lol said as the crow-people flapped and spun. ‘Not too many around these days. Couple up in Shropshire, but I think the only ones left in Herefordshire are down in Ledbury and Bromyard. And Leominster, of course.’
Merrily turned away from the screen to look at Lol. His expression was hard to read.
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Because, I…’
He looked slightly embarrassed now. Jane’s mouth fell open.
‘Oh Lol, you didn’t!’
‘Well, not for long. It was ages ago, before the band took off. We did a gig at a pub in the Cotswolds and there was morris dancing – Cotswold, obviously, rather than Border – and I… just kind of wound up getting in with the dancers. I was no good at it, but it was… fun. Then one of them was diagnosed with a cardiac problem and it all fell apart.’
Merrily said, ’So you’re saying if you’d seen them last night, you’d’ve recognized…’
‘I wouldn’t like to say that.’
Jane froze the video.
‘Mum, it was foggy, and it was totally unexpected, and all we were aware of was some kind of sluggish movement. You would not, even if you knew about this stuff, automatically think morris dancing.’
She started up the daytime dance again. A small band – accordion, guitar, fiddle – provided the slow, deliberate music. At one stage a song started up, about an old woman tossed up in a basket, nineteen times as high as the moon. No smiles, no element of playing to the crowd, no suggestion of friendship among the dancers. White men with black faces – could you even get away with that these days?
They met abruptly and sprang apart, leaving a clack in the air.
Not the thock of last night. Perhaps those sticks had been muffled.
If not the intent. You got the impression of a restrained savagery as the wind spread the coats out into streamers, like they’d been through a paper-shredder, and the bells rattled on their calves.
‘I think it was the bells that gave it away to Bing,’ Jane said. ‘They took the bells, on these leather pads, out of one of the cricket bags. Then evidently decided not to wear them. Too noisy? We didn’t hear them anyway.’
‘And muffled the sticks. Some of this is not quaint,’ Merrily said, ‘not gentle, not picturesque. Quite… bleak.’
‘And you’re not laughing,’ Jane said. ‘You’re not even picturing Lol in bells.’
One of the dancers split from the others, let out a feral roar. The crowd laughed nervously.
‘Aggression,’ Merrily said. ‘Testosterone.’
She did not feel good about this. The apparent explanation was far from enlightening. It should have made her embarrassed about the very real fear she’d felt last night, but watching the ragged figures on the screen doing their wintry dance only brought it back, and it was still very real.
‘What does it mean? Anybody?’
In the stove, a log collapsed into orange-white ash.
‘A new grave?’ Jane said. ‘On a new grave?’
‘Yes.’
Aidan Lloyd not twelve hours buried and some men had come out of the night, along the coffin path, to dance on his grave.
12
Having a laugh
IT WASN’T A crime. She didn’t see how it could be a crime. And yet…
On Lol’s laptop a different bunch of Border morris men were dancing on a hill against a deep grey sky. The music – accordion, concertina, drum – was slow and seismic, like rock strata shifting. A suggestion of entirely unexpected menace, like Santa Claus coming down the chimney with a machete.
Jane scowled and stood up. Lol took over her place at the laptop and lost the sinister dance.
‘What you mean is,’ Jane said, ‘it isn’t against the law to dance on a grave.’
‘It isn’t even trespass, flower, it’s just weird and sick. Practical application of an old cliché.’ Merrily looked at Lol. ‘Was it Elvis Costello, that song where he didn’t quite say it was about Margaret Thatcher?’
‘I think Costello was just offering to tread the dirt down,’ Lol said. ‘Whether he ever did is anybody’s guess. Probably not.’
‘Could it be a breach of the peace? A hate crime?’
‘Might just be an expression of extreme, if perverse, joy,’ Jane said. ‘Somebody’s delighted that Aidan Lloyd’s gone.’
‘You sense any joy last night, flower?’
Jane just walked over to the window and glared into the fading light over the vicarage across the road. Merr
ily saw her reflection in the glass, and it was like looking into a hazy mirror. Only twenty years between them. In another twenty they’d be at opposite ends of middle-age. She was feeling achingly tired now.
‘Breach of the peace.’ Lol looking up from the laptop. ‘“Where harm is done or is likely to be done to a person or their property in their presence, or they’re in fear of being harmed through assault, affray, riot or other disturbance.” Doesn’t mention the dead.’
‘I’m prepared to say I was afraid of being harmed,’ Jane said. ‘I could say it was why we buggered off.’
‘And did nothing,’ Merrily said.
‘Just because we haven’t done anything yet…’ Jane spinning back into the room. ‘We do have to. You know that.’
‘What if it was just a few blokes…’
The words slipped lamely away. Jane waited, expressionless.
‘… having a laugh?’ Merrily said. ‘Blokes having a laugh. Or they did it for a bet.’
‘That’s what you really think, is it, Mum?’
‘I just ask the question. It’s not that silly. Or at least not much sillier than the whole—’
‘It’s bloody not silly. Were you there last night, or what?’
‘They were drunk.’
‘No! They’d been drinking, but not to excess, according to Bing, and he should know. And no spontaneity about this, no conspicuous… merriment. They’d come with the serious intention of doing what they did. All carefully planned. Even the route. The coffin path.’ Jane turned to Lol. ‘Am I wrong? Is there any other way of looking at this?’
‘The question is, were these real morris dancers?’ Lol said. ‘Where from? You really want to ring up Leominster Morris and ask if they have a tradition of grave-dancing?’
‘It did not feel good, Lol. Mum knows that. In all kinds of ways. Unhealthy. Although when…’ Jane not quite meeting Merrily’s eyes. ‘… when I said we had to do something, I didn’t necessarily mean you.’
‘Oh, right,’ Merrily said. ‘Thank you. That’s me off the hook, then.’
‘Jesus wept…’
‘Well, what could we do? Jane, we’re the only witnesses and we didn’t accost them. Our word against eight of them? Even if we found out who they were, it’d just be raking up something that’s going to distress relatives. You just have to accept that sometimes there are things that are never going to be entirely—’
The phone chimed in her bag on the floor and she brought it out.
It was Abbie Folley. Merrily covered the phone.
‘Sorry, I think I need to take this.’
Lol let her into the kitchen and closed the door behind her.
Abbie said the Legion meeting had lasted no more than an hour after lunch. Clive Wells, already out on a limb with his Anglo-Catholicism, had fielded Crowden’s question about the wisdom of referring to their group, even ironically, as the Legion. Not the funniest of jokes, Clive had said wearily, but it was a way of discouraging higher clergy. The Legion was a low-key, entirely unofficial gathering for the workers at the coalface. An opportunity to unload. Extra-mural. Off the record.
‘Anybody ask where I’d gone?’
‘I told them you weren’t looking at all well and I’d persuaded you to go home. Lot of truth in that. Bit worried now, mind, that I said the wrong things. Don’t want you thinking I’m some kind of conspiracy theorist. Although, fair play, I am, obviously. Couldn’t grow up in my family without thinking they were watching you round the bloody clock.’
‘They?’
‘The Tory government, in my dad’s case. Overreacting – would’ve taken half the spooks in Whitehall to keep tabs on all the red-hot Marxists in our valley. I don’t want to overreact, but he was the first to leave. After you didn’t come back.’
‘Look… don’t worry about me. I’ll find out somehow what Crowden’s doing, and if I’m the only one in the firing line I can either slip quietly away or I can sit tight and wait for it either to blow over or… blow up. There’s nothing I can actually—’
Do. Nothing I can do. Just like she’d said to Jane. She felt a sudden contempt for herself. Yes, the deliverance ministry was about keeping your head down, wasn’t a licensed role in any diocese, was as important or as negligible as any individual bishop saw fit to make it, but…
‘It’s not just you.’ Abbie’s voice growing almost shrill. ‘You’re not getting the sense of an attack on the whole ethos? What I’m saying, Merrily, is it looks like they’re using you as a warning for all of us on where not to go. Like, all the times you’ve worked with the police. All right, never exactly been all over the papers, but it’s pretty well-known. I’m thinking Crowden’s repeated use of the term psychic investigator…’
‘Yeah, well, I’m not psychic, never claimed to be, but it’s like Nick Cowan said, we might be dealing with frightened people but they’re not gullible any more.’
‘What we’re dealing with,’ Abbie said, ‘is the nearest most people get to… I’m not going to call it God… ineffable, he is. Make of him what you want. Call him a metaphor for the positive. We’re never going to bloody well know, not in this life. Best we can hope for is a sense of something at work. But most of what we actually get is a sense of… you know?’
‘Lesser phenomena.’
‘Lesser phenomena… listen, that in itself… that can be bloody blinding when it happens to you. My mother? Did I tell you about my mam? What really got me into this madness?’
‘Because they were atheists?’
‘My dad’s talking to me again now. My mam never did. At least… not while she was alive.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’
‘Angina. Complications. Sixty-two.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry. That’s what I heard her say. I’m sorry, sugar. Always used to call me sugar, my mam. The night she died – went in her sleep in hospital, she did, none of us knew till next morning – but that night she’s standing by my pillow, in my flat. I’m sorry, sugar. My mam, this is, who didn’t believe in God or his angels. In a white dress. And I wasn’t dreaming and I hadn’t been drinking. So when Crowden’s talking about bereavement apparitions and patronizing old ladies for their comfort-projections, that really pisses me off, you know?’
‘Right.’
‘We’re the only ones inside this bloody great asylum we still call the Church… the only ones helping people make sense of that kind of experience. Assure them they’re not loopy. End of the day, we might be crap, but officially we’re all there is. And they want to get rid of us? Don’t you bloody dare slip quietly away into that good night.’
Merrily smiled. It was exactly what she wanted to do. Jane, too, probably, but they needed to get something to eat first. And, oh God, it was Sunday tomorrow and she had a sermon to finish.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she said.
It was colder now. Lol opened up the stove to a red bed, Jane carefully kneeling down and handing him small logs from the back of the inglenook.
‘She’s in denial, you know. Don’t know if it’s because she doesn’t want to attract attention from the Bishop or just doesn’t want to worry me, but there was something happening last night that was not good, and it wasn’t a joke.’ Jane looked around. ‘Lucy would know. You ever feel her looking over your shoulder?’
Lol said nothing, thinking that Lucy, when she was alive, hadn’t always been easy to share a village with, never mind a house.
‘Maybe Mum should give the Church the elbow and move in here. Now you’re making serious money.’
‘Yes, well that—’
‘The Church is going to destroy her. Nasty. Always was, and especially now it’s threatened with extinction. The level of nastiness inside an organization dedicated to spirituality… I mean, you know that.’
Lol closed the stove, stood up.
‘Not your problem. You’re going to university. You’re going to be a leading archaeologist with a mystical aura, presenting anci
ent history programmes on the box.’
‘Huh. If I learned anything in Pembrokeshire it was that, with so little money in archaeology nowadays, competition for TV jobs is cut-throat. And you have to write crap academic books that nobody wants just to look credible?’
Lol saw the old sadness forming around her. It didn’t take much. He glanced at the kitchen door, checking it was closed, bringing his voice down to a murmur.
‘You, uh, heard from, uh, Sam?’
Jane shook her head, hard, probably regretting she’d taken him into her confidence about the drunken night in Pembrokeshire, the sharing of a bed.
‘Eirion?’
‘Not recently.’ She brushed flecks of bark from her sweater. ‘Who am I kidding? It’s well over. Eirion will have another girlfriend by now. He deserves another girlfriend. Somebody normal. Anyway…’ Jane arranged herself on the rug, one of the hearth cushions under her ankle. ‘… did you know Aidan Lloyd?’
‘Not at all.’
‘That’s the thing, see. We don’t know anything about him. We don’t know anybody with a reason to hate him. Except these guys who came especially to tread the dirt down. I am not letting this fade away. If Mum won’t go after them, I might as well. Nothing better to do.’
‘No more digs?’
‘Probably are. If I texted Sam, she’d come up with something, but what’s she going to be thinking? She’s a nice woman, I don’t want to lead her on.’
‘No, I can… I can see the problem.’
‘Meanwhile… I don’t want to drop Mum into it, but these bastards are just… they’re not getting away with it.’
The room was dim, but he thought he saw Jane’s hand shake. She gripped the wrist with the other hand. Whatever had happened last night had genuinely frightened her, in her own village, and Jane would resent that.
‘It’s my responsibility. I heard them. Saw them. Got Mum out of bed.’
‘Oh, Jane…’
‘It’s not like either of you can stop me, is it?’
‘Yeah, well, I think we realize that, but—’
‘But you could help. I mean you, not Mum. You could find them, couldn’t you? You’re booking people for the folk-fest. You might want some morris dancers.’
