All of a Winter's Night

by Phil Rickman

  Darvill reached out his hands for heat.

  ‘Keating was as good as most of the painters he faked. So good that he had to plant anachronisms and deliberate mistakes in his pictures to prove they were intentional fakes, avoid fraud charges. And he’s come to the right place. Fake.’

  Jane glanced at Lol. He was looking all round the room with its bumpy ochre walls. Then he turned to Darvill, eyebrows raised.

  ‘All this?’

  ‘My old man didn’t like the farmhouse he inherited from his brother. Been rebuilt too many times and horribly modernized. Fortunately, it wasn’t listed, so he knocked it down. Started again about fifty yards away, on what the dowsers told us was a Bronze Age tumulus – burial mound. Not on the map, never been excavated. Perfect.’

  Jane stared at him.

  ‘This house is new?’

  ‘Not new, girl, just fake. There’s a difference. The old man bought a collapsed barn for the timbers, raided the salvage yards, found a builder who knew what he was doing, and it gradually took shape.’

  ‘Wow. It looks…’

  ‘Looks older than most old houses. It’s like Tom Keating – start by faking it and then something takes hold. The spirit enters.’

  Jane felt momentarily breathless.

  ‘That’s why you were able to have a green man carved into your back doorway.’

  ‘Another practical advantage. Dad didn’t want an old house, in government aspic, dependant on some awkward little shit from the council for every minor alteration. New house made from ancient materials, it can be what it ought to be. Yes, quite right, the Man of Leaves – three representations of him around the place. None of them in aspic. He’s not a historical image at all. He’s absolutely contemporary. His time’s now. Do you understand? No, you don’t.’

  He wheeled himself further into the firelight, and Jane saw he had a flat wooden box across his knees. He opened it, brought out a folded board, like a chessboard, and when he opened that out, Jane saw the concentric squares from the beam in the hall.

  ‘Ever played Nine Men’s Morris, Jane?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Not many do any more.’

  There were holes and black and white pegs inside the squares. The square in the middle was raised up and painted pure white.

  ‘What’s it mean?’

  ‘The three squares date back to prehistory. Found in caves, burial chambers, ancient Egyptian monuments. Widely played in medieval days and also by the Romans. A crude labyrinth. The pristine square in the centre is where you want to be.’

  ‘And how would I get there?’

  Darvill’s eyes found hers. They were brown. Kind of wolf-eyes. Something passed between them that she found slightly disturbing as he talked in his even, educated way.

  ‘The number nine has significance in most parts of the world. Triple-trinity, trinity squared. The symbol is a guide to marking out the boundaries between worlds, temporal and spiritual. These pegs, or counters…’ Darvill lifted one out. ‘… seem to create a dance as they move towards the centre. Or many dances. Many ways to the centre. Could you…?’

  He held out the board, and Lol took it from him.

  ‘Academics will tell you the connection with morris dancing has never been proved, but fuck them. Put it on the table, Robinson. That’s just a modern one, made by George the carpenter – has a workshop here. I admit to never having heard of Nine Men’s Morris until, a few years ago – get this – an investigation of the castle mound yielded the remains of a medieval board. Well, stone, actually. An interesting enough find for everyone involved, but I doubt any of them quite shared my excitement when I found out what it was. Sit down, please, don’t like being loomed over.’

  ‘It matters to you…’ Lol found his old place in the corner of the Chesterfield sofa. ‘… that it is connected to morris dancing? The symbol.’

  ‘No doubt in my mind that they’re from the same source. The concentric squares, like the dance, are found in Sufi tradition. Dervishes would attain trance-states in the innermost square, the most protected area. Did you know that? No, you didn’t.’

  ‘So the dancers…’

  ‘Given the right conditions, the dancers are connecting with new energies. The energies enter the limbs through movement. Landscape and history inform this house and bring it alive. The body moves on the earth and fires the mind.’

  ‘Old English esoteric secrets,’ Lol said.

  Darvill’s jaw jerked.

  ‘Nothing to do with esoteric secrets. Are no secrets any more, except for the ones we hide from ourselves. You think I’m running a fucking cult here?’

  A log shifted in the hearth sending up a small storm of bright splinters. Darvill slid his chair back. Jane began to smile again. She was really starting to like it here, maybe too much.

  ‘That’s what we’ve come to.’ Darvill stared into the window’s tight, square panes. ‘Anyone who wants to get back to truth and honesty and the natural way of life, pre-chemicals, is a crank. Way things are going, this part of the border will be the last truly fertile area of southern Britain not to be shagged to death. You can see the rapists cruising the lanes with their crop-spraying machinery – too big for these old lanes. Unwieldy, menacing, loaded with tubes. Coiled and bloated like diseased veins. Out in the fields, skeletal metal arms extended to dispense species-genocide.’ His fingers tightening on the worn leather chair-arms and then his face split into the vulpine grin. ‘Sorry – get carried away.’

  Jane caught her breath. He was opening himself out to them. He was a shit, but he was turning out to be her kind of shit.

  ‘Tell me about the dance,’ Lol said quickly. ‘If there’s no secret…’

  Darvill leaned back into the worn leather of his chair.

  ‘Cecil Sharpe, the folk song and dance man, was getting hints of it over a century ago, when he attempted to establish rules for morris dancing – no, no, it must be done this way. Old boy missed the point. Morris dancers don’t learn from books and diagrams. Their own bodies teach them. Eventually.’ Darvill settled back, hands in his lap. ‘Well…?’

  ‘I get that,’ Lol said cautiously. ‘I think.’

  ‘I know you do. Otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to you now.’

  ‘Never any good at it,’ Lol said. ‘But some barrier eventually came down. Cotswold Morris, this was. Just the basics.’

  ‘Basics are everything,’ Darvill said. ‘Start to analyse and it’ll go away.’

  ‘Too late, anyway. The side broke up and… other things happened to me.’

  ‘An outsider,’ Darvill said softly. ‘Like Drake. Dad used to say Drake was pulled between worlds. Like this girl, too, I suspect.’

  That feral gaze settling on Jane almost fondly. She felt herself blushing. God knows what he was like when he could walk.

  ‘I suppose’ – She started to talk too fast – ‘that the discovery of this stone game in the ruins confirmed something for you. That Kilpeck and the morris…’

  ‘I didn’t need confirmation, Jane. It was more of an affirmation. A sign that we’d been acknowledged.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘Go figure. As Nora would say.’

  He wheeled himself to the hearth, picked out a fat log, its bark falling away,

  ‘What do you want from us?’ Lol said.

  Darvill tossed the log with both hands into the fire. Something collapsed in a blizzard of sparks.

  ‘Want your souls,’ Darvill said. ‘What did you expect?’

  48

  A line

  MERRILY DRANK STRONG black tea and vacuumed the downstairs rooms, going at it hard. It was an old Hoover, and it was loud, but not loud enough to blank out Sophie’s voice in her head telling her that it would happen, perhaps within days, and then she’d be in trouble.

  Not dressing it up. No reassurance. This was Sophie isolated. Sophie close to screaming, Do something.

  The Hoover crunched over a bump in the big parlour rug.

&n
bsp; The Bishop tells me less and less. Everything on a need-to-know basis.

  Sophie on the way out. Un-bloody-thinkable. Do something.

  Nothing she could do except go for Innes. She began to laugh, all the caffeine in the tea fuelling hopeless rage. If it was difficult for a bishop to remove a vicar, turn that around and you were facing the thirteenth labour of Hercules.

  The black tea burned into her head and the Hoover picked up something metallic and screamed, and when she’d unplugged it and was down on her hands and knees on the floor with a hand between the brushes, the phone began ringing.

  Take it in the scullery. She picked herself up, tore through the hall and the kitchen and the back hall and snatched the receiver across the desk.

  ‘All right, lass?’

  The only Yorkshire accent that lifted you to the South Wales snow-line.

  ‘Huw.’

  ‘Rung a few times, lass, but—’

  ‘No, I should’ve rung you.’ Groping her way round the desk, sinking into the captain’s chair. ‘Things just got a bit…’

  ‘I’ve got a course on, see. In and out of the chapel. Didn’t get your message till late, anyroad.’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t realize.’

  ‘Not too late, mind. I were still there for you. Happen you smelled the beer?’

  ‘What?’

  She sat down hard in the captain’s chair.

  ‘Left the buggers in the pub, arguing about the existence of black-eyed kids. You had any of them little sods?’

  ‘Thankfully, no.’

  ‘Anyroad, I’d had a pint or two but I managed to find the church keys. Now, what exactly did I say?’

  ‘Sorry, I—?’

  ‘Just then. When I said happen you smelled the beer, summat went wrong with your voice.’

  ‘Oh. Well…’ Here we go. ‘I didn’t smell beer, Huw, but I did smell marijuana. In the chancel.’

  ‘Nowt do wi’ me. Not since I were a lad, anyroad. Me and a mate went to Glastonbury once. Lebanese Red. Well, that’s what they said it were. Sorry… go on.’

  ‘Only three of us in there. But the man we were doing the Requiem for, people claimed he was stoned when he died. I imagined that scent, obviously.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Still, I took it as a sign to myself that we were… connecting. You know?’

  ‘And you had a result.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I give up worrying about these details long ago, me. But you’re not happy, are you? I know that voice. That’s your not-happy voice. Plus, I’ve just heard on the radio about the lass over at Ewyas Harold. Which might’ve been what prompted me to ring. You knew her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thought you might. Go on.’

  ‘She was the priest who referred the case to me. All a bit coincidental.’

  A crisp, Bakelite silence.

  ‘It’s a very long story, Huw.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

  ‘I’d come over but for this course. They don’t get easier. Scepticism’s one thing but some of these buggers, it’s like they’ve studied under the saintly Dawkins. Half of ’em think God’s a brain-chemical and the Virgin Birth were just Mary being a bit coy wi’ Joe the joiner. Or would’ve been if she’d existed. Never mind, not your problem. Who you reckon killed this Julie, then, Merrily?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you might know why?’

  ‘I think I should know why.’

  ‘Gone through the system, what you did last night?’

  ‘Yes, thankfully.’

  ‘What’s Sophie say?’

  ‘Sophie. Yes. That’s the other thing.’

  She told him about Sophie, who no bishop could reduce to a two-day week, only stop paying her for the other five.

  ‘And happen change the locks,’ Huw said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a bugger, Merrily. That really is a bugger. You need Sophie. She’s your eyes and ears at the Big Church. Owt I can do? About Innes.’

  ‘You’ve done enough. And you couldn’t get to him, anyway. We don’t see him. He’s keeping his head down, but he’s not giving up. Working quietly, through others.’

  ‘Don’t do owt rash, lass, that’s all I’d say.’

  ‘There’s somebody at the door, Huw.’

  ‘That just summat you’re telling me to avoid a long conversation?’

  ‘You want me to lift the phone up so you can hear the knocker?’

  ‘I’ll be back,’ Huw said.

  Though wearing a suit of muted tweed, Liam Hurst looked uncomfortable in his role as Iestyn Lloyd’s representative in the non-agricultural world.

  ‘No, I won’t have a cup of tea, thank you.’ He stood in the hall by the Light of the World. ‘In fact, I really don’t want to be here, Mrs Watkins so, if you prefer to tell me to push off, have no fear of causing offence.’

  ‘We never tell anybody to push off, Mr Hurst. It’s not in the contract.’

  He smiled shyly. She could see why he was able to work with farmers. None of the ones she knew in this area responded to pushy people.

  ‘I take it you’re here on behalf of Mr Lloyd?’

  ‘And Aidan, I suppose. I’m here to talk about a particular church service. For Aidan.’

  Christ.

  How much worse could this day get?

  ‘Erm… you’d better come in.’

  ‘Iestyn… hears things.’ Liam followed her into the kitchen, bent his wiry frame into a seat at the refectory table. ‘He doesn’t talk to a great many people, but they tend to be the people who know what’s happening.’

  God, God, God… How? Nobody knew what had happened in the church last night except Jane, Lol, Huw, Abbie Folley… and Gareth Brewer himself – the only one of them who knew Iestyn personally. The only one she hadn’t spoken to since the Requiem. It could only have come from Gareth, but why would he…?

  She sat down at the top of the table and looked helplessly into Liam Hurst’s thin, freckled face.

  ‘Sometimes you have to make quick decisions.’

  ‘Must’ve been a difficult day for you,’ he said. ‘I know it’s the other end of the county, but I expect you all know each other.’

  ‘Been a difficult few days.’

  ‘I can imagine. Did you know this… sorry… can’t remember her name.’

  ‘Oh… yes. Julie. Duxbury. Yes, I… did know her. A very nice, good-hearted woman. We’re all…’

  ‘Horrible,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s safe any more.’ Shaking his head, his short ginger hair up in spikes. ‘The countryside’s not what it was when I was growing up. Even out here. I’ve been talking to a man who’s running for, what is it, Police and Crime…? Charles Howe?’

  ‘Yes, I know him. From when he was a governor at my daughter’s former school. And other… events.’

  ‘He sees a worsening situation. He’s known Iestyn for some years and came to talk about Aidan. He’s talking about migrants without a proper licence, driving like maniacs on country lanes then fleeing the country before they can be brought to court. Not good.’

  ‘He does seem to be using the rise in rural crime to support his campaign. Look, if I can just explain…’

  Just get this over. Yes, she could have tried to get through to Iestyn Lloyd about the Requiem for his son, but it would have taken a lot of explanation and he may well have objected. Couldn’t tell his stepson that.

  ‘If it’s impossible,’ Liam said, ‘it’s impossible. I know Christmas is approaching and it must get difficult to fit these things in. It’s just that Iestyn would like to draw a line under it. Especially the drugs. Charlie Howe sees Aidan as a victim of criminal intrusion into the countryside. They’re even selling drugs now in the lanes outside some rural schools. From Land Rovers, for heaven’s sake. Howe’s attitude is, don’t cover it up, bring it out in public. And if it’s in a church, at a memorial service…’

 
‘I’m sorry…?’

  ‘You could, of course, expect a donation.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The room lightened. A memorial service. They wanted a memorial service for Aidan. Nothing to do with a Requiem; they knew nothing about that. Thank you, God. She felt her spine relax.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sure. Of course. I’d be happy to. You’re right, it would draw a line.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘If you could let me know what days you have free… an evening, I suppose.’

  ‘And perhaps you could supply me with, erm…’

  ‘Biographical details. Without limitations, this time. Yes. It was a mistake, the funeral. And there’ll be eulogies this time.’

  ‘Iestyn?’

  He grinned.

  ‘That’s unlikely. But I’ll step into the breach as… as usual.

  And there’s Charlie Howe, of course. Not that the idea of a memorial service being used as a political platform appeals to me that much, but, as I say… drawing a line. I’m sure you could steer him towards discretion.’

  ‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘I imagine I could… do that.’

  The phone rang; she let the machine take it.

  When he left, she was shaking. Couldn’t go on like this.

  49

  Made up

  BLISS GOT BACK just after nightfall and found Annie in his office chair, her scarf and trench coat tossed across his desk. He’d missed her on the national TV news but heard her on the Radio Four six o’clock, where she got about five seconds asking for people to come forward – witnesses, anyone who’d seen a strange vehicle in country lanes miles from the nearest CCTV.

  ‘That was awful,’ Annie said. ‘I’d forgotten.’

  ‘Doing telly?’

  She peered up at him. She looked tired, a bit raddled which, for some reason, he found sexy as hell. He wanted to take her home. But that wouldn’t be happening for some hours yet. Not with what he was bringing back from Hewell.