by Phil Rickman
It was from Amazon.
Most popular results for Dr C. Winchester Sparke
Homing (trade paperback, March 2004)
A Healer’s Diary (with Declan Flynn, hardback, October 2001)
Life-defining: a self-help tutor (paperback, June 2000)
Legacy of the Golden Dawn (paperback, reissued 2002)
‘A writer,’ Merrily said. ‘It makes sense. I wondered what an American woman was doing living in the Malverns on her own. Kept meaning to ask people, but it never … A writer can live anywhere.’
‘All her books appear to fall under the general heading of Mind, Body and Spirit,’ Sophie said, with faint distaste, ‘so I’m not sure how seriously we can take the Doctor.’
‘New Age. She comes over as very … almost archetypally New Age.’
‘Be careful,’ Sophie said.
25
Village Idiot
Winnie Sparke cupped her hands, drank from the holy spring and then looked up at Merrily, holy water rippling down her face, hands pushing her wet curls back over both ears.
For a moment she looked stricken and feral, like some captured wood nymph.
‘You have to help me. He’ll die in there, I’m not kidding.’
Inside the nineteenth-century gabled building which enclosed the Holy Well, the once-sacred healing water ran from a thin plastic pipe into a stone sink. On the floor, a red cross was marked out in tiles. On the wall above the pipe someone had scrawled, in black, The Goddess For Ever.
Neo-pagan graffiti. Up in the wooded hills on the outskirts of town, it all seemed a little sad, a New Age fringe thing, no longer part of mainstream Malvern.
‘You have contacts in the police, I know you do,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘You have to get it over to them that Tim didn’t do this thing.’
Like Wychehill on a grand scale, Great Malvern clung to the sides of hills, its houses and shops and public buildings like the seats in a long stadium with the vast Severn Plain as its arena. The difference being that the real action had been up here, where a village had grown into a fashionable resort town founded on a Victorian faith in the curative powers of spring water.
Now all that was long over, and Great Malvern was just a busy town with heavy scenery. Steep streets, an historic priory church built of exotically coloured stones, a good theatre and most of the wells and springs hidden away. Nowadays, if you wanted to drink the pure, healing water you were advised by the health police to boil it first, C. Winchester Sparke had said in disgust.
‘Like, nobody understands any more. Nobody gets it about the energy of springs. The water’s gushing and gurgling all through these rocks, like a blood supply, and nobody’s revelling in it any more. It’s become repressed, stifled … like the long-forgotten Wychehill well.’
‘There was a well at Wychehill?’ Merrily said.
‘According to legend. Hell, more than that – according to history. There was this holy well at Wychehill that was supposed to have stopped flowing and nobody knows where it is. My theory is that it was blocked during the damn quarrying. Explains a lot about Wychehill.’
Winnie Sparke had said they had to meet here because Wychehill had too many furtive, prying eyes. Including Annie Howe’s this afternoon, Merrily thought, so it wasn’t a bad idea. They were lone pilgrims at the Holy Well. She’d found Winnie sitting on its steps, wearing a white summer dress and a cardigan decorated with ancient Egyptian figures making camp hand gestures.
‘Why would they think he killed this man, Dr Sparke?’
Merrily stood in the doorway arch, looking down at the trees softening the vast green vista of the plain. Obviously, she couldn’t tell Winnie Sparke about the text.
‘Please don’t call me Dr Sparke. People over here, an American called Dr Something, they think you purchased it off the web for like thirty dollars?’ Winnie smiled wanly through the water-glaze. ‘There’s a public bridle-way across there.’
‘With a park bench,’ Merrily said. ‘Do you mind if we sit on the bench? I didn’t get to bed until first light.’
‘OK, we’ll sit on the bench. Whatever. It’s just I’m feeling like I need to move, make things take off … This is a very stressful time.’
In full daylight, Winnie looked older. A woman well into middle age but with good skin and good hair. They walked down from the Holy Well, across a small parking area and on to the bridleway, which sloped scenically away into the trees. They sat on the bench.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t really know … you and Tim Loste?’
‘Friends. And fellow searchers. Tim came to Wychehill for a purpose. He had an inheritance which allowed him to throw up his teaching job and pursue his … calling.’
Merrily waited. The sun, hidden for most of the day, was now warm on her face.
‘Elgar. People keep calling it an obsession – I hate that word, it implies a sickness rather than a penetrating, inspirational, creative focus. Is it so bad to be driven?’
‘Depends what you’re driven towards, I suppose.’
‘Towards what drove Elgar. What made him into the greatest composer these islands ever had.’
‘And does Tim Loste know what that was?’
‘Oh, sure. I believe we’ve gotten close to that. The results will be Tim’s own piece for orchestra and choir, with a divine theme, involving Elgar himself as a character. A major work about the stress and agony leading up to the realization of a great and beautiful mystery.’
‘And your part is … ?
‘I get to write the words, the libretto.’
Winnie looked away, at the view.
‘And what is the mystery?’
‘It’s a mystery,’ Winnie said. ‘Hell, if we were in Wychehill, I wouldn’t even be telling you this much. But, believe me, it’s an awesome thing.’
‘You don’t like Wychehill?’
‘I like my cottage. I like my views, I love the Malverns. No, I don’t like Wychehill the way it is right now. I bought in a hurry after my divorce, and at some stage I’m gonna move on. I’m being frank with you. See, in Wychehill, they regard Tim not as a precious, fragile talent but as some kind of village idiot, a liability. You ask people there, like that asshole Holliday, if they think he killed the guy on the hill, they’ll go, sure, why not … look at the history.’
‘I heard he … smashed a window at the Royal Oak?’
‘Oh wow, a window, yeah.’ Winnie sighed. ‘Sure, he did that. And got himself caught and beat up on by the muscle there. Who told you about that? Syd?’
A worrying idea settled on Merrily like cold air around her shoulders.
‘Who exactly … who was it beat him up, do you know?’
‘The muscle! They have these doormen who— Oh.’ Winnie’s head began to nod like a dog ornament on a car’s rear-window shelf. ‘OK, right, now I see where you’re coming from. You think this guy, Roland…’
‘Roman.’
‘OK. Look, maybe it was him, maybe it wasn’t, I wouldn’t know. Only the cops could think that was significant. Truth of it is, Tim wouldn’t even remember who it was beat up on him. The night it happened – two, three months ago? – he was up on the Beacon trying to puzzle something out in his work, and the wind was in the wrong direction, blew it up the hill, this techno, hiphop shit – barbaric, he called it, like an invasion. He couldn’t shut it out. It was filling up his head and he went a little crazy.’
‘He’d been drinking?’
‘I’m working on that.’ Winnie Sparke looked down. ‘I’m trying to clean it out of him with meditation.’
‘What happened next?’ Merrily said.
‘He coulda just walked away. He can walk seven, eight miles up there on a clear night, I’ve known him do that. But … he stormed off down to the Royal Oak, took a rock out the wall, and he hurled it through a window. And then he like … he just stood there on the parking lot, screaming like a mad person. Like, if it was me, I’d’ve put the damn rock through the glass, run like hell. He just stood
there screaming. Like he wanted them to come out for him. I guess he has a certain masochistic streak. And they obliged, my God, did they oblige…’
‘He was badly hurt?’
‘Those guys don’t pull punches and they hit where it doesn’t show. It was lucky Helen – the roving nurse? – was passing in her car, and she went to fetch Syd and they pulled him out, took him home. Didn’t leave the house for five days. I wanted to have a doctor check him over, but he said … he refused. I guess the main damage was emotional. Spiritual. He became depressed, couldn’t work for maybe two weeks. But hey, nobody could think he’d take such an extreme…’
Winnie’s dark eyes were shining hot and bruised under the heavy curls.
‘I checked you out. On the Church of England Deliverance website. Also, some news stories. A lot happened to you, very quickly. Guess that was to do with being a woman in this job. Not too many women exorcists?’
‘Not many, no.’ Merrily anticipated the way this might be going. ‘Maybe I’ll write a book about it. In about thirty years.’
Winnie smiled ruefully in the shadows of her hair.
‘Wicklow…’ Merrily groped for a way of putting this without mentioning the text message. ‘Roman Wicklow’s body was found on what’s called the Sacrificial Stone. Nobody seems to be sure whether it ever was that, but it’s … obviously in a place immortalized in Elgar’s Caractacus, as the site of Druidic blood rituals. It wouldn’t be too hard for the police to see connections. I mean, the music Tim Loste puts on with his choir in the church. Obviously Elgar, but … ?’
‘They did Caractacus once.’ Winnie Sparke looked down at her hands, still wet, in her lap. ‘OK. Tim is director of an amateur choir made up of men and women from all over the three counties. They did Caractacus, with incomplete instrumentation, and in spite of all of that it was pretty awesome. Tim wanted to stage it, open-air, on the Beacon, tap into that original energy, but the expense ruled it out. And the logistics. Getting an orchestra up there? And if it rained? And, worse than that, what if there was some rave thing on at the Oak, at the same time? Some nights, the amplified sound carries miles, drowns the valley.’
‘I imagine it must’ve become the bane of his life, that pub?’
Winnie Sparke gave Merrily a hard look, like she was beginning to wonder if she wasn’t talking to the wrong person.
‘I’m just trying to look at it from the police’s point of view,’ Merrily said.
‘That an artistic guy like Tim Loste could overpower some professional thug and then take out his throat?’
‘I don’t know … anything about him. I don’t know how big he is or how old…’
‘He’s a creative person who hates violence, is all.’
They stopped talking while two women on horses clopped past.
‘And he wasn’t at the meeting at the church last night,’ Merrily said. ‘I would’ve expected him to be there.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Winnie shook her curls. ‘I wouldn’t let him near the church last night. I came on his behalf. See, when he heard about that meeting, he was scared you were gonna try to work some kind of exorcism … to dispel the spirit of Elgar? Me, too. I was just so mad at Syd for bringing in an exorcist, I wanted you to realize the hugeness of this thing you were being asked to do. Like if you’d jumped the wrong way in the church, I was ready to take it to the media – hey, here’s the Church of England gonna drive the spirit of Elgar out of his beloved hills?’
‘Nobody would dare consider anything like that. There’d be a national outcry.’
‘Yeah, you say that now. But if you saw Tim, the state he was in, believe me, you might’ve been ready to look at something drastic. He needed … he needed to calm down some.’
‘So you told him to stay away.’
‘I was scared he’d start yelling, say something stupid.’
‘Where did you find him, in the end?’
‘The place I left him. The one place I could be sure … and I’m not gonna tell you, OK? You don’t need to know that.’
‘The police might need to. If you can prove he couldn’t have been anywhere near the Beacon when—’
‘I can’t prove it, I wasn’t with him, OK?’ Winnie looked away. ‘I can’t talk to cops, their minds run on narrow rails.’ She stood up. ‘I’m sorry, I need to walk.’
Merrily followed her along the bridleway, thinking that the Malverns weren’t exactly wild any more; few areas of this long, bumpy spine were unreachable by well-used footpaths.
‘The gentle heart of England,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘Miles of fertile, tranquil lowland … and then, suddenly, you have these volcanic rocks. Like a long altar rising from the plain of the Severn. And, you see, that … is precisely what it was – a place of spiritual significance since the Stone Age. To the early Christians, a dark place.’
‘You mean a stronghold of pagan worship?’
‘Still rich in stories of curses and the devil. So I guess what you had was a wilderness place for early Christian hermits to test their faith. A retreat for hermits and seers and prophets, riddled with springs – life-force. And I guess what you have now, Merrily – battered, hacked-at and under-esteemed – is the remains of an altar.’
‘An altar to Elgar?’
‘Sure, for some people. Hell, for a lot of people. But where was Elgar’s altar?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘He pulled music from out the air. He used to say that.’
‘And he listened to the trees.’
‘He had a thing going with trees,’ Winnie said. ‘This is true. I’ll explain all this to you one day, but not right now. I…’ She took Merrily’s arm. ‘You’re a spiritual person. Syd, too, but Syd was a soldier and he doesn’t talk about it.’
‘He’s a priest. He has to talk about it.’
‘He doesn’t talk about himself. You don’t know how he’s reacting. Sure, he’s helped Tim, but that doesn’t mean he understands.’
‘And you’re a writer.’
‘It’s a living,’ Winnie said. ‘Just about. Listen, I … Thank you for hearing me out. We can be friends, right?’
‘I hope so.’
‘I don’t have too many friends in Wychehill. It’s like I said about the rocks. Wychehill’s built on a place hacked out from the rocks. A great open wound, prone to infection. Part of what Tim’s doing at the church, with the music … it’s about that.’
‘Healing the rocks?’
‘As a priest, you should maybe think about that. Meantime, you remember what I said about Tim. And you tell … whoever … that wherever they’re holding him they should look out for him, you know what I’m saying? Day and night.’
Merrily had just a few minutes to get back to Wychehill to meet Annie Howe, for whatever reason. Only about three miles, so no problem. She drove past the British Camp car park at the foot of the Beacon, where two marked police cars were on display. Also, outside the hotel across the road, a bill for the Worcester Evening News which read: HUNT ON FOR MALVERN RITUAL KILLER.
Maybe the holding of Tim Loste was not yet official. But he looked far more guilty to Merrily now than he had before she’d spoken to Winnie Sparke.
26
Weight of the Ancestors
On the computer in the scullery, Jane tapped in the URL that Eirion had dictated. She found, with an unexpected sense of shock and dismay, the picture of herself looking what he’d described as pissed-off but sexy. Behind her, Cole Hill was serene and enigmatic in its morning gauze of bright mist.
Oh God, why had she let him talk her into this? Probably all that stuff about the firm young breasts inside the school blouse. Underneath, she was just a whore.
‘Yeah, got it,’ she said into the mobile. ‘What site is this?’
‘EMA,’ Eirion said. ‘Earth Mysteries Affiliates. It’s a campaigning outfit – kind of a mystical Greenpeace. Didn’t waste any time, did they? But then it’s probably the best story they’ve had all year.’
Un
der the picture, it said: Jane Watkins – fighting for Alfred’s ley. Below that, the hand-drawn map that she and Eirion had scanned, showing all the points on the Cole Hill line.
‘But it’s only been up a few hours. How could the Guardian have got on to it so soon?’
‘They wouldn’t have. What’s obviously happened is that one of the guys who runs the EMA site saw there was a potential news story here and scored himself a tip-off fee. I mean, I could’ve tried that, but the papers are never as interested if it comes from the people involved – just looks like you’re desperate for publicity.’
Eirion was at home in Abergavenny. He’d left school early; you could apparently do that on the smallest excuse when your final days as a schoolkid were ebbing away.
‘I’m not sure I am now,’ Jane said.
‘Not sure you’re what?’
‘Desperate for publicity.’
Feeling a little intimidated, to be honest. She told him about Morrell.
‘Jane, you can’t have it both ways. You started this. When are you going to call him back?’
‘The Guardian guy? Don’t know whether I am. I mean, the national press? Like, I thought it was OK pissing off the council, but that bitch can really damage me. And Mum, probably.’
‘I doubt it,’ Eirion said. ‘She’s only a councillor, isn’t she? A servant of democracy.’
‘She doesn’t think she’s a servant. Vice-chair of Education? She thinks that’s serious power. It’s obvious she went straight to Morrell and told him that one of his students was making trouble for her mates.’
‘It’s the way they work. He’s their employee. But she couldn’t really threaten him. Least, I don’t think she could.’
‘Irene, Morrell is, like, insanely ambitious, and he’s quite young. Moorfield’s just a stepping stone. He’s not going to offend a powerful councillor for the sake of one student … who he hates and would really like to get rid of anyway.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘You’ve never seen him! All right … what should I do?’
