by Phil Rickman
Went up the steps. The Zippo flared at the fourth attempt, and she lit two candles.
* * *
‘Tell me about that night. You prepared to do that?’
Gareth Brewer shuffled out a smile.
‘En’t got much of a choice, do I? Not if I wanner stay married.’
‘You said that didn’t—’
‘Sorry. Bit nervous, I am.’ He clasped his hands between his knees. ‘Sir Lionel had me book us in at the Ox. Couple of us hung around on the fringe of the burial, so we’d know… what we needed to know. Then we all met up at the pub. Got something to eat. And drink. We’re just blokes, look. There’s some things you can’t do sober.’
‘You knew you weren’t going to be in any state to drive home, which was why you booked into the Ox?’
‘They got a reputation for not asking questions, long as you pay up front, and get through a fair bit of beer. We knew the funeral tea was at the Swan, so we just showed up at the Ox in dark suits. Didn’t hide that we were there for the funeral. And we stayed there.’
‘Until it was time to dance.’
He let out a breath but didn’t reply. Merrily shifted in her chair.
‘On Aidan’s grave. You danced on Aidan’s grave, and then you—’
His hands came up.
‘Wasn’t like that.’
‘What was it like?’
‘It was to put things right.’ He lowered his head, pushing stiffened fingers through his hair, deciding something. He looked up, swallowed. ‘He was a Kilpeck boy. And a Kilpeck Morris man. The rector tell you about the fire?’
‘The effigy.’
‘That’s it. Thought it was a real man at first. You hear about these religious nutters pouring petrol over themselves. Some big public gesture. I’m thinking, oh God, it’s somebody Lionel’s offended real bad. Sometimes, he don’t care what he says.’
‘Does he know who phoned him about it?’
‘Muffled voice. I met him at the church. He was yelling at me to fetch a rug from the truck to smother the flames. I was trying to tell him it was too bloody late. This man, he had to be dead – bound himself to a wooden frame before setting hisself alight? But there was no smell of… you know… we’ve all been to a pig roast, nothing like that. Then we seen it was just a fencing post stuck into the ground, with a crosspiece for the arms, the rag jacket hung over the crosspiece.’
‘A crude effigy. Got up in dancing kit.’
‘Aidan’s kit. Aidan’s actual kit.’
‘Ah. What made you think that?’
‘We knew. Bells proved it when we seen them after they’d cooled off. Bells made special so they sounds partic’lar notes. We recognized the bells, the maker’s marks. They’d stuck the post in the ground where it could be seen a way off and set light to it, like a beacon. Message for Sir Lionel.’
‘From?’
‘Iestyn Lloyd, sure t’be. We reckoned he found Aidan’s kit, going through his stuff. Same time as he found the dope. Well, he din’t know, did he? He din’t know any of it. Least of all that Aidan was still dancing with the KM.’
The candles on the altar had long flames now, but the more he’d talked about fire, the colder it had felt in here, Merrily wishing she hadn’t taken her coat off to look like a real vicar, in the clerical shirt and the dog collar.
‘So Iestyn…’
‘He’d’ve felt betrayed, wouldn’t he? By his dead son. All these years betraying him. Smoking dope and dancing with…’
‘Dancing with the enemy. As the… what did you call it, the green man…? Julie told me.’
He looked at her, candlelight paling one side of his face.
‘He was the Man of Leaves. Some sides have a straw man. Or a man with a horse’s head. He was the fool. The wild card. Sir Lionel likes to call him the Man of Leaves.’
‘Why? I mean, what’s his purpose?’
‘He’s part of the side, but he’s out of it, too, mingling with folks watching the dance. In and out. Scaring them. The joker in the pack, only he en’t that funny, not really. And in this case, they already know him from the church. Like he’s down from the church, out of the ole stone.’
The face in the archway image came to her. The vegetable yawn. They weren’t exactly ubiquitous, green men, but they were around, on the walls of churches, mainly rural, and they were all different: hair of stone twigs and leaves, stone stems in their teeth. It would have been odd if, amongst its famous bestiary, its knights and its Sheela-na-gig, Kilpeck hadn’t had a green man.
‘So he always wore a mask. A foliate face.’
Suddenly, she was collecting moments: flash-images superimposed, one upon another. Something Jane had vaguely described from the open coffin colliding with something she’d seen herself in the fog and mistaken, in that instant, for a crown of thorns.
‘He was different then, look,’ Gareth said. ‘As the Man of Leaves. A different person. Normally, he’s this quiet boy, bit shy. Christ, he — Sorry. Sorry for my language. He’d go a bit mad, as the Man. Prancing around, in and out of the dance, rearing up in your face, spouting nonsense. But he was special, for Sir Lionel. He had the instinct.’
‘Instinct for…?’
‘The instinct. You know? Dunno what else you’d call it. All I know is that the whole atmosphere of the dance changed when he was in it. He took you somewhere else. If you were up for that. If you were up for following him.’
It was old, Ledwardine church, and probably built, like most of the churches in the border country, on a sacred site older than Christianity. In the middle of a long-buried henge, according to Jane. Layer upon layer.
But nothing as demonstrative as St Mary and St David at Kilpeck, whose walls carried the frames in a medieval cartoon that nobody today could follow.
‘You said he came down from the church,’ Merrily said. ‘The Green Man… the dancer… the Man of Leaves. What did you mean by that?’
‘We all come down at one time or another. All the dancers were out of the church. The dances Lionel taught us, sometimes we’d all take on different characters from the walls. Like in one dance, you’d be the knights from the doorway, and your sticks’d be the swords. But Aidan, he was always the Man of Leaves. Aidan Lloyd didn’t exist in Kilpeck, see? Only the Man of Leaves.’
‘Like when he came home to Kilpeck he was taking on a different identity?’
‘That’s it.’
‘And when you said he was a natural…’
‘It’s what Lionel’d say. We didn’t ask. I didn’t ask. I got obligations, but I also got a wife and kids. Don’t need complications. The church and the dance… they’re part of the same thing.’
‘That’s why you don’t do it anywhere else? Why you don’t… dance around?’
‘Wouldn’t work the same.’
‘How does it affect you? Personally. The dance.’
‘Well, it… I dunno.’
‘Can you try to explain?’
‘If I tell you…’ He looked uncomfortable, moistened his lips. ‘Some nights, I’ll put in a day’s work, then we’ll dance, and I feel I could do another day’s work… just to work it off.’
‘It brings out energy you didn’t know you had.’
‘That’s it. It don’t always happen like that.’ He looked down at his clasped hands, then looked up. ‘If I tell you about Bob Rumsey – part-time college lecturer, a local historian. Studious kind of bloke, lives in a cottage where you can’t move for books. Bob got in a fight outside the pub. On the green, with the Trafalgar oak.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Big tree. Planted to commemorate the victory at Trafalgar. Anyway, this was after the dance. Somebody taking the piss. Bob, he just beat the sh— Hammered the other feller into the ground at the foot of the tree. Nearly got hisself arrested. One-off, never happened again. It just takes you by surprise sometimes. Summat getting into you.’
‘When did Aidan get drawn into it? The dance.’
‘He was just a boy. His mo
ther, Sarah, she never wanted him to join the dance – ’cos of the asthma, look. Din’t want him struggling to keep up with fitter men, not wanting to let the side down, but not finding the breath, you know?’
‘Right.’
‘But it was the makin’ of him. Lionel, he’d known Aidan since he was a little dab and Lionel was in his teens. Aidan’d had this asthma, pretty bad, nearly died couple of times. Not much use on the farm, disappointment to his dad.’
‘This was before the rift opened up between Henry Darvill and Iestyn Lloyd?’
‘Don’t get Sir Henry wrong. He didn’t push it too hard with Lloyd. He was learning how to do it, how to run a farm, how to buy and sell stock, manage the mix. A real learner, Sir Henry. Been at this college… a college for folks too old for college, and mabbe that changed how he approached things. What I’m saying is, he didn’t come strolling in like the big boss, saying what was what. None of that.’
‘You were here then?’
‘I was still a boy, I din’t really see it. My dad – he was a farrier, too, retired now – he told me all this much later, after Sir Henry was dead. How humble he was. Ready to be a pupil was how my dad put it. And then, once he knew what he was doing, he’d start to make changes, developing his own ideas. He’d have Iestyn Lloyd banging his bloody head against walls, and he’d just be walking away, real casual. Not fazed at all. All the rows, they was started by Lloyd, seeing his power base getting undermined.’
‘Power base?’
‘It’d been his farm, how he saw it. The Lloyds used to be real big landowners both sides of the border, but Iestyn’s ole man, he was a big drinker and it all went to shit. It was Sir Peter took Iestyn on board, give him a free hand. Iestyn who built that place up to what it was and now here’s Henry Darvill taking it apart.’
It was the most he’d said all night. Much happier talking about situations he hadn’t been involved in, situations he couldn’t change.
‘And during all this,’ Merrily said, ‘Aidan’s asthma…?’
‘Lionel’d took the boy under his wing, and the sick kid got better, ’gainst all the odds. But this was around the time of the split, so Iestyn stopped Aidan dancing, or thought he had. And then they moved out and come up by yere.’
He said Iestyn’s marriage, never too solid, had finally broken up around the time of the move. Iestyn feeling everyone was against him, reacting with aggression and a determination to see his new farm expand and prosper. And that was when Aidan, aged around fifteen, started quietly coming back to Kilpeck, to dance.
‘All that way?’
‘Twenny miles or so. His ma used to bring him. He’d be spending more time at the farm now, with the asthma gone, but still living with Sarah in Hereford weeknights, after they got him into the Cathedral School. And she’d be bringing him over to Kilpeck – anything to stick one on Iestyn. Then, when he was old enough, he had a motorbike. No problem then.’
‘And it was all still kept secret? Behind the leafy mask?’
‘That’s it.’
‘So Iestyn really didn’t find out till Aidan was killed.’
She saw Iestyn Lloyd looking down into the grave. Throwing no earth, only his rage.
‘So you think he brought the effigy himself?’
‘Mabbe had somebody else do it. Lot of employees, now, and he’s not as young as he was. But he was behind it, no argument there. I don’t expect you to understand how deep this goes.’
‘Doesn’t take a degree in psychology, Gareth. He’s lost his only son, his only child, which for any farmer is… well, it goes beyond personal grief, doesn’t it? And then learning his son’s been dancing with Darvill’s men. OK, it was a fairly extreme reaction but… you know… nowhere near as extreme as what Darvill did next. Or rather got you to do.’
No reply.
‘That’s the big puzzle you see, for me. What you did.’
She saw Gareth Brewer biting his upper lip. She looked hard at him, but he was looking at the candles.
‘You didn’t just dance on his grave, did you?’
She saw his hands were squeezed together, white-knuckle tight.
‘He follows me.’
‘Who?’
‘You wouldn’t see him come in sometimes. He was always like that. He’d just be there, watching. Never talked much. You always felt much more was going on inside him. He’ll be sitting next to me in the van. That four-day stubble still around his mouth. I’ll be in the forge and he’s there. See him through the sparks.’
‘Aidan?’
‘And with the horses. I’m out shoeing a horse, and the horse knows. Got kicked twice. Spooked. Funny we always say that, ennit? Spooked. I en’t making this up, Mrs Watkins. The world we’re living in, it’s more than we need to understand.’
He was gazing not far over her head. She glanced up at the rood screen with its wooden apples, realized that wasn’t it. They were sitting where, just a few days ago, Aidan’s coffin had been, on its bier.
‘You dug it up,’ she said. ‘The coffin.’
‘We’d… brought the spades earlier, look. Left ’em under a bush. On Iestyn’s ground.’
He was sitting very still, and his gaze never shifted. She felt colder than ever before in her own church. She hugged her arms.
‘What was he wearing? When you opened the coffin?’
‘Suit and tie. But his face, it was, it was gone. All just sewed up. We cut them off him, the clothes, with a Stanley knife. Took them away with us and burned ’em later. In the forge.’
‘And you’d brought a rag jacket with you.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘And a top hat. And bells. And you—’
‘How’d you—?’ He’d started to shake. ‘How’d you know that?’
‘You dressed him as a dancer. And then you put the mask over his face? Made him into the Man of Leaves again?’
Not Jesus Christ and his crown of thorns, and oh dear God, the truth of it seared her, as if she’d grabbed one of the candles and squeezed the hot wax between her fingers.
He brought his gaze down, to face her.
‘It’s like a bad dream, Merrily, what we done.’
‘And turned into one.’
His eyes blurred with candle-glimmer… and guilt, fear, misery, what? Strange new feelings, maybe, for a farrier who always had to be relaxed and steady, to win the trust of the horses and ponies and donkeys he was approaching with a bagful of tools.
He was shaking freely now. The images rolled: the men in top hats with ribbons in the fog, the men like hawks, in pairs, coalescing, then parting to show that they were…
‘… dancing with him?’ Merrily said. ‘With the body? You’d pulled Aidan Lloyd out of his coffin and made him dance again?’
37
Engage
NEVER JANE’S FAVOURITE room, the scullery. It was small and didn’t lead anywhere, and all its window showed you was the churchyard wall, reminding you that life would one day dump you on the other side of it. Particularly ominous on a moonlit night, like this one, when the phone was ringing.
She’d bought Mum the phone a couple of years ago, a present. The kind of phone you associated with doctors’ surgeries and village police stations in old black and white British movies. It had seemed cool at the time; tonight it seemed like the kind of phone the angel of death would use and felt heavy and portentous when she uncradled it.
‘Ledwardine Vicarage,’ Jane said.
A relieved breath was trapped in the earpiece then a woman’s voice.
‘Merrily, I’m sorry to ring you at this time of night, but we have a problem.’
‘Erm… Sophie, it’s Jane.’
‘Oh. You sounded just like her.’
Was that supposed to be a compliment?
‘She’s out,’ Jane said. ‘I’m not sure when she’ll be back. Did you call before?’
‘Twice.’
‘It’s been a complicated night. Apparently.’
‘Trust me, Jane,
it isn’t going to get any easier if I don’t speak to your mother soon. Is it possible she can be reached on the phone, wherever she is?’
‘Erm…’ Jane sat down behind the desk, felt around for the Anglepoise switch. ‘I don’t think she’d want me to bother her right now. She’s in the church.’
A period of, like, restraint at Sophie’s end. Jane tilted the cup of the Anglepoise lamp so that it made a tight circle of light on the desktop with its sermon book and stubby pencils. She sank back into deep shadow and felt inexplicably calm.
‘You said there was a problem.’
‘If you could just ask her to call me…’
‘She’ll probably be very tired, so if you could tell me—’
‘… as soon as she gets in. In fact, if you can reach her on her mobile…’
‘In church?’
‘It’s not a service, presumably.’
‘Depends what you mean by service. Look, I know you think I’m still some irresponsible kid, all clothes and clubbing and stuff, but—’
‘I never quite thought that of you, Jane.’
Never quite thought that?
‘But when I’m here and not injecting heroin into my arm I do try and relieve her of some of the burden. And I don’t talk about things to anybody outside the loop. As she thinks of you as inside the loop, I can tell you that this is what we like to call a night job?’
‘Damn. Does it involve someone from Kilpeck?’
‘I think it does.’
‘In which case I’m probably too late. How long’s she been gone?’
‘Over an hour. Look—’ Jane sprang out of shadow. ‘I do know about Innes and what a knife-edge Mum’s on. And I actually don’t want her to have to leave this place because of that bastard or anyone else, so anything you can tell me…’
‘Let me think about this. If I don’t hear from Merrily in the next hour I shall have to call you back.’
‘Thank you so much,’ Jane said.
Only Ethel was waiting in the kitchen. She put some Felix out in the cat bowl and went to the dresser to cut herself a slice of fruit cake. She was carrying it back into the scullery when the phone rang again. That hollow, visceral ring that shrilled emergency, emergency. Bloody hysterical phone.
