All of a Winter's Night

by Phil Rickman

  The spade was sunk into the turf of what – oh Christ – could only be Aidan Lloyd’s grave.

  Lol went still, smelling rich earth and smoke.

  There were no sounds of dancing, no sounds at all until the footfall behind him.

  Merrily rolled over in bed. The cold had numbed her hands, disconcerting because, on the edge of real winter, she’d had a dream of the sticky end of summer. There had been ripening apples and the threatening bass rumble of men in a semicircle, auld ciderrrrr …

  Sitting up in the darkness, rubbing her hands together to get the blood flowing, and something tumbled to the floor.

  Ella Mary Leather’s The Folklore of Herefordshire. It explained the dream. As sometimes happened when you were overtired, she’d got to bed and been unable to sleep and started looking up Mrs Leather’s references to morris dancing, for some reason expecting the dance to be connected with the old harvest rites. But Mrs Leather, writing in the years before World War I, had said she could find only one morris side, in the north of the county. She’d watched them dance at Christmas in 1909. They had staves and blackened faces.

  She picked up the book, set it down on her bedside table next to the phone and lay back, bundled in the duvet, in a place where priests had lain for centuries, eyes wide open to the same blotchy dark. Early nights never worked. They disrupted your sleep rhythm and you woke up worried.

  Ought to have phoned Huw Owen who had apparently educated Paul Crowden in deliverance, who knew as much about the Innes agenda as she did, if not more, who had taken the Bishop on, in a direct, artless fashion that could lead only to cold war. He’d done that for her. He’d done enough. Maybe she shouldn’t phone him after all.

  How many ghosts do you find in the Bible? Craig Innes from that iPhone recording, talking to Siân, the Archdeacon. Surely the message… is that we should disregard the probably – mythological byways – which distract from our focus on God.

  Innes trying to justify on theological grounds his crisp, new, modern fundamentalism, a stripped-back approach that allowed the Church to avoid the noises in the night. How could they have sent Innes to Hereford, the diocese on the border?

  When she closed her eyes again, she heard the clash of sticks, the grunts and the springing apart, the clumping bass, the pounding of feet on impacted soil, the treading down of the dirt.

  All right… yes… tomorrow…

  Tomorrow, between Holy Communion and Morning Worship, she’d go to Aidan Lloyd’s grave and do something. A blessing. Holy water. Something to top up an inadequate burial service.

  She fell asleep devising something suitable from the mythological byways, and awoke again, what must have been only minutes later, from another foetid ciderhouse dream, the chanting men looking down at their boots, and then one looking up, and this time it had been Iestyn Lloyd, whispering Devil took him, devil took him, devil took him.

  Something about him that was outside of time. He was all over those old brown postcards of rural life in the nineteenth century. An archetype. Indestructible, like baler-twine.

  Lol sank back against Lucy’s stone.

  ‘Nobody else here is there?’

  ‘Only the dead’uns,’ Gomer Parry said.

  Lol’s flashlight brought up a dull glow in Gomer’s glasses, their lenses speckled with flakes of something that looked like dried blood. He was in his overalls. A canvas holdall lay near his feet. He lugged it, rattling, towards the lamp on the raised turf.

  ‘See this, boy? En’t never happened to me before.’

  He hadn’t asked what Lol was doing here after midnight. It didn’t seem to matter to him. He bent and slid his fingers into the ground, easing out a turf about a foot square.

  ‘Looked like a proper job, but it weren’t. No, no, shine him down there, that’s it. You gotter have him so you can’t see the joins, right? One o’ the first things you learns. No gaps, no bumps. And you gives him space to settle. You knows exackly how much he’s gonner need. Precision, see.’

  ‘Gomer—’

  ‘It’s like I tole young Janey, I wouldn’t normally come back next day. Let the earth do what he do. Then, bugger me, if I din’t look down and see what I seen. Bloody hell.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘You can’t see? It’s a bloody tragedy, boy! Well, I hadda come back, obviously, but not when folks could watch. Don’t look good messin’ with a grave. Specially when you knows you done him perfect, and now he bloody en’t. After all these years, you gets to know what your own work looks like. And this, Lol, boy, this en’t my work no more.’

  He picked up the spade, moonlight glinting off old, worn steel, then he was prising out a second turf.

  ‘Take a few o’ these off, and you can see how it was all put back in a hurry. Course you’d need a full hexumation to be sure, and there’d be red tape, but now you’re yere—’

  ‘Hex…?’ Lol taking a startled step back. ‘What exactly are you saying, Gomer?’

  Gomer let the turf slide from the spade.

  ‘Nights is gettin’ real cold. Ole ground hardenin’ up. Figured this might be the last chance I was gonner get.’ He sniffed. ‘Hadda know, see. One way or the other. Hadda know. And now I do. Some bugger’s had him out, Lol, sure t’be. This boy been dug up.’

  16

  Turn her head away

  THE MOON HAD been swallowed by night cloud. Gomer lifted up the metal battery lamp to reveal what was now a rectangle of red, abraded ground. He prodded it with a boot.

  ‘See how loose the ole soil is? Put back real quick. They thinks if they puts the turfs on top reg’lar nobody gonner notice.’

  ‘You’re saying he’s… not down there?’

  ‘En’t sayin’ that, no.’ Gomer sniffed. ‘What I’m sayin’ is, the box been took out. And… you watch this.’

  He lowered the lamp to the edge of the grave tump, shifted some surface soil with the spade, then kept going, steadily until a stab of the spade sent it down vertically, very fast, and he stumbled and let go, jumping back.

  ‘See? That’s what happens when you shovels it in fast. You year that? No mistakin’ it, boy, when you hits a coffin. Done it a few times when you got what you think’s a virgin plot and there’s some other bugger down there.’

  Lol was confused.

  ‘So the coffin’s still there. He— Aidan Lloyd’s still down there, right?’

  ‘No, boy… the box is still down there. That don’t mean he’s in it, do it? Box en’t down as deep as he oughter be, not by two, three feet. Sure sign he got put back too fast and likely at an angle. Amateur job.’

  ‘I believe you, Gomer.’ Lol didn’t like this – come on, who would? ‘It’s just I don’t think you can—’

  ‘You’re a witness, Lol, boy. I needs a witness.’

  ‘Gomer—’

  ‘If that en’t proof… En’t no way a coffin’s gonner float up through two or three feet of bloody soil.’

  ‘No… listen…’ Lol picked up the spade. ‘It isn’t evidence of anything except you digging up a grave at night, and that’s… that’s against the law.’

  ‘It’s my bloody grave!’

  Gomer snatching the spade back, glaring at him through the torchlight, sparks of electricity in his glasses. Oh God, this was personal now, but…

  ‘Sorry…’ Lol backed off. ‘It isn’t your grave, Gomer. Not any more. Not now it’s… occupied. It’s theirs, the Lloyd family. Listen, you… you have to put all the soil back and the sods and we have to get out of here. We’ll go back in the warm, make a pot of tea and talk about this.’

  ‘Woulder took more’n one feller to do it, mind.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Haul him outer the ground. Even with ropes around him both ends, that en’t a one-man job.’

  ‘The coffin?’

  ‘Unless,’ Gomer said, ‘unless all they needed to do was… open him up, kind o’ thing.’

  ‘Nobody would want to do that.’

  … would
they?

  ‘Now then.’ Gomer leaned on the spade. ‘I remember yearin’, not that long back, about a hincident like this down the Forest o’ Dean. Woman got dug up for her rings or summat. Some relation who got left out o’ the will, figured he was entitled. Some folks, they gets obsessive about what they’s owed.’

  Lol thought it was unlikely Aidan Lloyd was blinged up. He watched Gomer arranging the uplifted squares into two neat piles, like carpet samples, so he’d know exactly how they fitted when he put them back. Didn’t look like he planned to do this anytime soon. Lol felt exposed among the bare trees and eroded stones with the church steeple behind them, a rigid, admonishing finger.

  Gomer straightened up, bringing out his ciggy tin.

  ‘Now then, boy, what if it’s empty?’

  ‘The grave?’

  ‘The box. What if the boy got took out o’ the box?’

  ‘That’s not something we’re ever going to—’

  ‘We could find out.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘En’t more’n a couple o’ feet down. Take no more’n about five minutes to have him out, the ole box.’

  God, no. Lol backed off, hands up. Please.

  ‘Don’t even contemplate it, Gomer. You’ve broken enough laws already.’

  ‘You don’t have to stay, Lol, boy. All I’m askin’ is you keeps quiet about it. Suppose they decides to put another in yere… mabbe Iestyn, when he goes? And there’s the boy halfway up. What they gonner say? That bloody ole Parry… botched job. No way, boy. No bloody way.’

  It had been a mistake thinking this was personal. It wasn’t, it was professional, and that went much deeper – the dissing of Gomer Parry Plant Hire, working the border for decades with big diggers and a reputation for solid workmanship. Plant Hire was the business now, but gravedigging was the bedrock and Gomer took a serious pride in doing by himself what he’d keep doing till they had to lift him off the mini-JCB and into a box of his own.

  The half-moon shone down like a lopsided grin.

  ‘I seen that funeral,’ Gomer said. ‘I seen them folks round this grave, faces like rock. Next day I seen Janey walkin’ down yere, and her couldn’t hardly walk at all and her still hadda come. Didn’t make no sense. And then I seen what these buggers done. And that wouldn’t be nobody in this village, ’cos they all knows me, and they’d know as I’d know. And they’d all know what that d’mean.’

  Lol sighed.

  ‘And then you turns up. I en’t asked you what you’re doin’ out yere middle o’ the night, Lol, boy, and mabbe it en’t none o’ my business. But what all this says is that summat really and truly en’t right. You tellin’ me I’m wrong?’

  Lol spun at sudden footsteps on the path.

  ‘You’re not wrong, Gomer,’ Jane said.

  Lol’s fists tightened. How bad could this get?

  What was she supposed to have done? Turn her head away from the window, go back to bed and try to forget about something that might never go away, as long as they lived here, that would go on creeping like ivy over the wall between the garden and the grave?

  ‘Oh, and I’m walking a lot better now, by the way,’ Jane said.

  Hadn’t hurt too much when she put on her boots. Letting herself out of the back door this time. Bringing the long black Maglite. You could really hurt somebody with that, especially if you saw him first, and she was far from ashamed of wanting to.

  But not Lol. Not Gomer, placidly rolling a ciggy.

  ‘You got the vicar with you, Janey?’

  ‘The vicar’s asleep. I checked. Anyway, this is nothing to do with Mum. This is just me unable to keep from looking through windows.’

  The moonlight was sharpening the barbs on the wire that separated Aidan Lloyd’s grave from the field. Jane frowned. Never used to be barbed wire there.

  She looked at Lol, doubtless here because he was trying, as usual, to do the right thing. But sometimes what seemed like the wrong thing was actually the right thing.

  ‘How long have you been here, Jane?’

  ‘You mean how much have I heard? I’m guessing most of it.’

  Lol seemed to sag.

  ‘Just behind that mouldy pile with the Celtic cross,’ Jane said. ‘Mum and me were here last night, and we saw… well, not much, to be honest. But now we know, don’t we? And, like, all I can say…’ Squeezing the Maglite with both mittened hands. ‘… is as long as I don’t have to watch, just do it. We don’t want to keep coming back here night after night.’

  Gomer put his ciggy back into the tin. Jane thought she saw Lol closing his eyes. She turned away.

  ‘Yeah, we all know it’s against the law. But Gomer knows what he’s doing. And I… could do the lookout thing.’

  Lol looked down at his trainers. They’d be sodden. His feet were freezing. He spread his hands.

  ‘All right. I’ll help Gomer. But you should…’

  ‘I’m not leaving, Lol, I’m just not looking.’

  Jane watched Gomer’s soil-reddened fingers picking up the spade, a dreadful excitement growing. Whatever had happened last night, it was clear the old guy was about to make it very real. His big, sudden grin was close to demonic.

  He pointed at the lamp.

  ‘Hold that, boy.’

  ‘No.’ Lol was stepping forward, a hand out. ‘You’ve done enough for one night. I’ll dig.’

  Gomer looked at the gloved hand.

  ‘Nobody woulder thought twice about it, my day. Even the coppers’d turn a blind eye if they knowed you.’

  ‘I can imagine. Now just…’

  Gomer hesitated then shrugged and handed over the spade, its blade worn to a lethal edge by decades of digging. Jane thought he could probably shave with that spade. He bent to his workbag and brought out a roll of something bound up with a rubber band, which turned out to be a green plastic groundsheet. Gomer spread it out on the edge of the grave, weighting opposite corners with a hammer and a trowel, then he and Lol were both up on the tump, taking off the rest of the turf. You could see how loose the soil was underneath. She’d often wondered if Gomer would one day uncover some massive megalith, physical evidence of the Ledwardine henge, but that was for another night.

  Jane huddled in her parka, fists clenched in pockets, the bitter soil an acrid taste in her throat. No megalith down there, only Aidan Lloyd in his coffin…

  … or not.

  ‘Take it slowly, boy,’ Gomer said.

  Before long, Lol had a steady rhythm going with the spade, she could see his breath and an earthmound accumulating on the groundsheet. She could feel him trying not to think about what he was doing. In the past he’d enjoyed helping Gomer, being a labourer, but this—

  This was actually awful. Jane backed slowly away, the enormity of what they were doing washing over her like freezing water.

  The lookout thing. She spun away and switched on the Maglite, shone it back along the path then amongst the graves. She started thinking about last night, about being sprawled, helpless, with a twisted ankle a very short distance from a bunch of men and an open grave and an exposed body in a shroud of fog.

  Lol’s spade clinked on what was probably a stone, but in Jane’s head it was bone, and she winced, pulling her beanie down over her ears. All too soon Lol was knee-deep in the grave. Sooner or later Mum would have to learn about this. Or would she? It would depend on what they found.

  She switched off the torch. It was no good; she had to force herself to face this. She drew a long breath.

  As she turned back towards the open grave, there was a scraping sound and Lol came out of the hole very fast, saying he hadn’t thought it would be so close to the surface. His voice unsteady as he leaned over the spade. Under the moon, he and Gomer both looked wavery and indistinct like characters from some black and white gothic movie.

  Jane didn’t move. She couldn’t see the coffin. Hoped not to and was ashamed.

  ‘Look at that,’ Gomer said. ‘Looks like they din’t put no sc
rews back. Clear the top off and the ole lid, he’ll just slide off kinder thing.’

  Lol didn’t move. Waxy silence. No owls, no rustles in the undergrowth, no sounds from the village or the church. Jane looked warily up into the tangle of trees screening the side wall of the vicarage.

  Somebody should stop them.

  Lol was saying, ‘Jane, why don’t you go and wait by… with Lucy. Your mum would—’

  ‘Listen,’ she said before she could change her mind. ‘I’ve got my phone here, if you want me to try for some… pictures.’

  What? What had she said?

  ‘Like, I’m thinking for Mum? For Mum to see, if necessary. If there’s nothing in there…’

  Seeing something through a lens, surely that separated you from it. And she’d probably seen worse. Wasn’t as if Aidan Lloyd was someone she’d known personally. She thought of the worst experiences of her life, involving Colette Cassidy and Cornel the banker, then pushed away the images. They didn’t make her feel any more prepared.

  ‘Uh… thanks, Jane, but I don’t think so.’ Lol stepped back down into the grave, she heard his feet on wood. ‘Don’t want anything incriminating on your phone, do you?’

  She listened to the scraping as Lol cleared the top of the coffin with the tip of the spade.

  ‘That should do, boy,’ Gomer said.

  Jane turned away as both of them bent into the grave. Would Gomer have tried to do this on his own if Lol hadn’t arrived? Probably.

  ‘No hurry, boy. He’ll come off. Right, now, if you hops out…’

  Hugging herself for warmth, she watched Lol hauling himself gratefully from the grave. He’d be so hating this. If Mum was here, once she’d got over hissing at them to stop, she might be mumbling a prayer in their defence. Was there a prayer for the disturbance of the dead? Oh God, Lol was leaning back now to accept the coffin lid with both hands, ducking under it, his shoulders against the loose mound of excavated earth.