by Phil Rickman
‘Not true at all. What I’m doing is, I’m actually trying to protect her, OK? She has a position in this village, obviously, and, like, how often have I done anything … OK, anything locally … that could cause her embarrassment? OK, don’t answer that, but listen … this is what Lucy would want.’
Jane looked at Lol and then at Gomer, hoping they would both understand this.
Not that it mattered. She could almost see Lucy Devenish rising above the lych-gate, the darkening sky woven into the shadowed folds of her poncho.
21
Playing Purgatory
Winnie Sparke looked past Merrily, out through the porch door into the waxy evening. Her white shawl was hanging loose like a priest’s stole.
‘You really shook things up in there, lady.’
‘Wasn’t me. I think something was just waiting to blow. You can’t just sit on something like this.’
Winnie Sparke walked out into the night, Merrily following her.
‘I don’t suppose you know where Mr Loste is?’
‘He isn’t here.’
‘I’d gathered that. But I would like to talk to him.’
‘Maybe I could fix that. It’s possible. Leave it with me.’
‘With you?’
‘Tim is … kinda fragile. Like a lot of people with huge talent, he needs someone to hold him together. Oops, mind you don’t—’
‘Oh my God, what’s—?’
It had risen up like a column of smoke in the dusk, its eye sockets black, its mouth hanging open and the wings half-extended behind its arms. Its shoulders were black against a slash of red in the sky like the bar of a burning cross. Hands reaching up, palms outwards as if they were awaiting nails.
‘Kinda weird, huh?’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘They say kids from the Royal Oak come in here and make out on the graves. But, hey, not on this one.’
The angel was standing on a tomb the size of a double-oven Aga, the lettering on the side big enough to read even in the ebbing light.
JOSEPH LONGWORTH, 1859 – 1937
‘All holy angels pray for him
Choirs of the righteous pray for him.’
‘Guy who built the church,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘Found God and Elgar, not necessarily in that order.’
‘I’m trying to place the quote.’
‘You’re excused. It’s Roman Catholic. Newman – The Dream of Gerontius.’
‘I was listening to it on the way here.’
While she’d been trying to engage Elgar in conversation, an exasperated Sophie had gone out and bought her three CDs. Next to the spare and moody Cello Concerto, the fifty minutes of Gerontius that she’d heard seemed both complex and a little dreary, heavy on the deathbed angst.
‘Scary stuff,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘All those layers of celestial bureaucracy. OK, you know how after the soul comes round on the Other Side, he gets a pep talk from his guardian angel and then these demons start messing with him? Then he gets just one tantalizing glimpse of God?’
‘I’m not sure I got that far.’
‘OK, well, between the demons and God he gets handed over to this guy.’ Winnie Sparke reached up and tapped the arm of the grotesque figure on the tomb. ‘The Angel of the Agony.’
‘I don’t know anything about him.’
Merrily looked up into the wretched marble face, grateful, on the whole, that there was nothing like this in Ledwardine churchyard.
‘His job is to plead with Jesus to spare the soul of Gerontius,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘It’s a judgement thing. But you know what I think? I’m like, the hell with this guy, I think we can deal with purgatory right here.’
‘In Wychehill?’
‘On Earth, I meant. But Wychehill … yeah, sure. Wychehill’s as good, or maybe as bad a place as any for throwing off your demons. Maybe we can discuss this sometime.’ She flicked her shawl over a shoulder. ‘You’re gonna come back, now you won through?’
Merrily shrugged.
She lit a cigarette under the church lantern, one of its glass panes spider-cracked as if by a thrown stone or an air gun pellet. If Bliss was picking her up, she didn’t want to go back in there and get pulled into a discussion. Besides, if a requiem was going to be held, Syd Spicer would need to make the arrangements.
There was a mauve, last-light glaze on the road, a faintly rank smell. She kicked what appeared to be a shrivelled condom into the side of the wall. Obtained from a vending machine at Inn Ya Face?
‘Smoker, eh?’
She jumped.
Preston Devereaux was leaning on the wall under one of the oak trees. He, too, had a cigarette.
‘Congratulations, Mrs Watkins.’
‘I’m sorry. I was just … a bit…’
‘You were bloody furious. A woman scorned.’
‘I’m sorry. You’ve had a pretty bad week, too.’
‘Had better.’
‘How are you feeling now?’
‘Me?’ Devereaux leaned back against the wall, scratched his jaw. ‘Well, since you ask, last night I got drunk. Today, I sold the offending Land Rover for peanuts. Couldn’t stand to see it any more. I’m OK. Something happens, you live with it, move on. You don’t pick at it, like a townie.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Sorry if I’m causing offence again. I assumed you were local, name like Watkins.’
‘Local origins. I’ve moved around.’
‘Well, me too. But we came back, didn’t we? God help us.’
‘I hoped I’d be able to talk to you before the meeting,’ Merrily said. ‘But I think you answered my questions back there, anyway.’
‘You were really going to ask me that? If I’d seen the ghost of Sir Edward Elgar on his bike before the crash? Good God.’
Merrily shrugged. ‘My job.’
‘Well, if you get to know me better you’ll know it’s not in my nature to make excuses or throw the blame at anyone living or dead. I was tired. Had a long drive, wanted to get home. Perhaps, if I hadn’t been so tired, I’d’ve reacted quicker and there’d be two fewer funerals in Worcester. Who knows?’
‘If you’d been less tired, you might have been going faster and the result would have been the same. Only you’d probably have been seriously injured.’
‘I really don’t know.’ Devereaux shook his head slowly. ‘But what I won’t do, Mrs Watkins, is associate myself with the clowns who say this road’s haunted. So if that’s your idea of a cover-up, I’m sorry.’
‘Clowns?’
‘I don’t know what’s happening to places like this. At one time, we absorbed things. We, the community. Communities closed ranks, healed themselves. Scabs formed that eventually dropped off. Kind of people you got here now, the townies, they just got to keep picking and picking at it.’
‘What about the Royal Oak?’
‘The Royal Oak?’ He snorted. ‘Problem at the moment, but it won’t last. They never do, these places. We just got to sit it out. Make a fuss, you just give them more notoriety, and they love that. Look, I’m more sorry than I can say about what happened to those two kids. I was a wild boy, too, drove too fast, inhaled my share of blow. Not for me to take a moralistic stance. But, this all-encompassing fear of the Royal Oak … live with it, is what I say. Nobody can seem to live with anything any more.’
‘Well, yeah, everybody expects a perfect life. But it’s been suggested that a lot of Class A drugs pass through the Royal Oak. I don’t know if that’s right, but that’s what they say.’
Devereaux stared at her. ‘Do they? Who?’
Merrily didn’t know how to reply, never entirely happy about being Bliss’s snout, even if it was a two-way street.
‘Aye, well, they’re probably right, Mrs Watkins. And that’s not good. But it’ll pass. Be surprised if that place hasn’t changed hands again by this time next year. Raji Khan’s a businessman. When it goes off the boil he’ll get rid.’
‘You know him?’
‘Stayed with me when he was looking
over the Oak. Stayed in one of my lovely holiday lets. Clever man, young Mr Khan. Knows how to surf the economic tides.’
‘You mean Mr Holliday was right about tourism grants to bring ethnic groups into the sticks?’
‘It’s the way this government operates.’ Devereaux took a long pull on his cigarette, holding it between forefinger and thumb. ‘But you know what makes me, laugh, Merrily – you don’t mind if I call you that … ?’
‘Not at all.’
‘What makes me laugh, my dear, is the way middle-class white folks move here from the harmless, peaceful suburbs, saying how glad they are to get away from the big, bad city, with all the drugs and the crime. Truth is, that was an imagined situation fuelled by Crimewatch and the Daily Mail. They’d never actually seen any of it…’
He laughed, at length, the cigarette cupped in his hand.
‘And now here’s the so-called ghost of Edward Elgar – poor dysfunctional bugger he was – and half of them think he’s a traffic hazard and half of them think he’s on their side against Raji Khan. What can you do with people like that? Hello—’
A young man in a rugby shirt was edging round the church gate. He stood in front of Devereaux and did a theatrical salute.
‘They’ll be out in approximately five minutes, sir.’
‘Good lad.’ Devereaux turned to Merrily. ‘My younger boy, Hugo. Took the precaution of stationing him in the vestry, out of sight. What’s the verdict, son?’
Hugo shrugged. ‘No problems, really. Well, that Stella got a bit hysterical, but they talked her down. I think they’re going for what Mrs Watkins suggested.’
‘Which is what? I’d left by then.’
‘Well, I’m not really…’
Hugo was about nineteen, lean like his dad, gelled dark hair and an earring. He looked at Merrily.
‘Mr Devereaux,’ she said, ‘are you saying you had a spy in the vestry all the time?’
‘Dad’s the worst kind of control freak,’ Hugo said.
‘Local intelligence is very important,’ Devereaux said. ‘You live in a village, Merrily, you know what it’s like. They weren’t going to say much with me there, were they? Too official.’ He smiled. ‘No, I exaggerate. Hugo was at the back already, doing the lights.’
He put out his cigarette in a fizzing of sparks against the church wall.
‘Tell me what you’re proposing,’ he said.
‘Well … it’s a requiem service in the church. A holy communion for the dead. So that would be a service for the two people who … died in the accident.’
‘Why them?’
‘Because they’re dead. It’s a big thing, death, but funerals today are often cursory and don’t bring … don’t always bring down the curtain. Don’t bring peace, or even the promise of peace, for the living.’
‘And how would this service achieve that?’
‘Mr Devereaux, we could sit down and I could give you the theology in depth and take up the rest of your night. Let’s just say that it does.’
‘You’re very confident.’
‘I’m not confident at all. That is, it’s not self-confidence, it’s…’
She raised her gaze to the darkening sky. Preston Devereaux laughed.
‘Well … who am I to argue with that? All right, then, go ahead. It’s your show now. This is just a straightforward service, I take it?’
‘Inasmuch as any service is straightforward.’
‘What I mean is, you wouldn’t be conducting what the press could call an exorcism?’
‘You’re right, I wouldn’t.’
‘Because none of us wants silly publicity, and if you can deal with it for us in a discreet and dignified fashion we’d be most grateful to you. Discuss it with the Rector, I should. I think you’ll find he agrees.’
‘Really.’
‘Nice to talk, Merrily. Goodnight to you.’
Preston Devereaux clapped a hand on his son’s back and they walked away to a dark 4x4 parked in front of Merrily’s Volvo. She watched them go, feeling faintly sick. A bat sailed in front of the church lamp like a blown leaf.
Deal with it for us. Coming out of the church she’d felt halfway in control again, now she was a puppet with strings so tangled you couldn’t tell who was pulling them. Merrily heard the voices of the villagers emerging from the church and walked rapidly away along the roadside towards the vicarage.
A car pulled alongside.
‘You all right, Merrily?’
Bliss’s face at the car window. She’d actually forgotten all about Bliss and his incident. She pulled back in mid-stride.
‘Is this going to improve my night, Frannie?’
‘Quite honestly,’ Bliss said, ‘I’d say probably not.’
22
Power of Place
Merrily jerked her head away. ‘Oh God…’
The DC, who was called Henry, pulled back his lamp.
‘You could’ve waited over by the truck,’ Bliss said. ‘I did warn you.’
And maybe she would have hung back, but a call a few minutes ago from Lol to say that he’d found Jane had fortified her, made her feel obliged to go across to join Bliss and what lay, in its abattoir splatter, across the jutting shelf of stone.
Bliss had driven up to the car park opposite the Malvern Hills Hotel at the foot of the Beacon, where they’d got into Henry’s police 4x4. A roundabout route along dirt tracks had taken them to the other side of the hill, Henry parking in some woodland before leading them by lamplight, like a shepherd, along an uphill mud footpath.
It had brought them to a wide-mouthed cave in a wall of rocks, like a black gable under a roof. Two uniformed policemen were in the opening, smoking cigarettes. Incident room, Bliss had said, and laughed.
Merrily swallowed. Being sick wouldn’t help the forensics.
‘Frannie?’
‘Uh?’
‘You think there’s a chance he did this to himself?’
The Home Office pathologist, Dr McEwen, looked at Bliss, probably to check that it was OK to speak in front of the woman in the dog collar. Bliss nodded.
‘I’d say the chances that your man did this to himself are fairly remote.’ McEwen was a soft-voiced Irishman in a red and blue baseball cap. ‘With a suicide – if we assume this is something the individual has never attempted before – he’s usually unsure of the best place to go in, so you’ll normally find two or three test cuts above and below the main wound. Now, if you see here…’
This time Merrily didn’t look, turning away towards the few lights of somewhere in Worcestershire laid out like a broken necklace under the ochre-streaked charcoal sky.
‘But there is more than one cut.’ Bliss’s fluorescent orange hiking jacket creaking as he bent down.
‘Sure, but they’re not what anybody would call test cuts,’ McEwen said. ‘This one here looks like knife-skid, but this one, arguably a secondary slash, is far too deep. See what it’s done to the trachea and the muscle there? There’s also a wound on the back of the head, which might … Look, give me a few minutes more, all right?’
‘Are these wounds consistent with that knife?’
‘Back of the head, though, that looks more like your blunt instrument. I haven’t seen the knife – you got it there?’
‘Bagged up,’ Bliss said. ‘Kitchen knife, eight-inch blade. Found in the grass not far from his right hand.’
‘Assume he didn’t do it to himself. And I’d guess you’re looking for more than one person, Francis. Probably more than two. If it happened here, which is how it looks by the blood-spatter, then … a muscular young feller like this, he’d take some holding down, wouldn’t he?’
‘Maybe somebody else holding his head back by the hair over the top of the stone to expose his throat for the knife. Henry, what did you say about this stone?’
‘Known locally as the Sacrificial Stone, boss. That’s all I can tell you.’
‘There you go, Merrily. Can’t say fairer than that.’ Bliss took her arm
and led her away, back up towards the cave. ‘And this is Midsummer’s Eve, right? Talk me through this.’
‘Through what?’
‘Ritual sacrifice. Just to get me started.’
‘That’s why you wanted me to come up with you?’
‘No doubt we’ll find a proper expert tomorrow, if we need one. But as you’re here … fair to say your personal experience extends to aspects of pagan worship?’
Merrily glanced back at the stone, a steep wedge in the hillside, the dead man, with his black bib of gore, arching back over it like he’d been been using it for working out, about to perform some dynamic form of sit-up.
‘Frannie…’ She dug both hands hard into her jacket pockets, turned away to where the path wound around to the earthen ramparts of the Iron Age fort. ‘It doesn’t happen, does it?’
‘What doesn’t?’
‘Ritual sacrifice.’
‘Yes, it does,’ Bliss said. ‘You think of that poor kiddie found in the Thames a few years back.’
‘Yes, but that wasn’t—’
‘One of ours? Tut, tut. This is multicultural Britain, Merrily. Suggesting that the only valid form of ritual sacrifice in this country should be conducted by white men in white robes with sickles is tantamount to—’
‘Oh, I see. Because this guy’s black—’
‘A black man found with his throat cut at a famous Ancient British monument … that’s slightly cross- cultural, isn’t it? I don’t think it’s anything like that, but we need to eliminate it. Tell me about Midsummer’s Eve.’
‘Most traditional forms of paganism would focus on the solstice sunrise. Which is still a few hours away. But it’s stupid anyway … modern pagans just don’t do this kind of thing.’
‘Never say that, girl. There’s always some bastard who’ll do anything. But I take your point.’
‘Also … I mean, how long’s he been dead?’
‘Few hours, max. Found by some kids. Teenagers.’
‘So he was probably killed before dark. Still be a few walkers about. They’re going to stage a sacrificial ritual with the constant risk of an audience?’
