by Phil Rickman
There was a silence.
Come on, there shouldn’t be a silence! Eirion’s dad was a BBC governor in Wales and he had a cousin who was news editor on the Western Mail in Cardiff. Eirion was, like, totally steeped in the media.
‘I don’t know,’ Eirion said.
‘Thanks.’
‘Let me think about it. I’ll call you back.’
‘Soon?’
‘Soon. I’m sorry, Jane.’
‘It’s OK.’
She sat staring at the screen, feeling terminally forlorn.
Jane Watkins – fighting for Alfred’s ley. As Lol had pointed out, there was no proof that it was Alfred’s ley. Alfred might not even have known about it. Or, worse, he might have discounted it. There could be some element here that totally disqualified Coleman’s Meadow. Just because it looked right…
Could be she’d stitched herself up.
Jane couldn’t face looking at that smug pout any more and switched off the computer. Just sat there waiting, dolefully stroking Ethel who was sitting in the in-tray. Best thing would be to leave it for a day or two, give the dust time to settle.
On the other hand, the planning committee would be meeting next week to make a decision on Coleman’s Meadow.
Sure, she could leave it. She could walk away and spend the rest of her life regretting it, despising her own cowardice.
Or she could take some more time off school, in open defiance of her head teacher, and follow it through, because…
… Forget earth-energy, forget spirit paths; at the very least, whether Alfred Watkins had known about it or not, this was a rare alignment of ancient sacred sites which had somehow survived for maybe…
… Four thousand years?
Four thousand years of mystical tradition against one more year of schooling for somebody who wasn’t sure whether she even wanted to go to university at the end of it.
Jane felt the weight of the ancestors on her shoulders.
This was probably one of those situations where Mum would go to the church and pray for guidance – Jane thinking that if she did that, after all she’d said over the years, it would at least give God the best laugh he’d had since he hit the Egyptians with a plague of locusts.
The scullery phone rang.
‘Look, Irene,’ Jane said, ‘I’ve been thinking—’
‘Jane, I’m really sorry…’
‘Oh. Mum.’
‘I’m also sorry for not being Eirion. Listen, flower, you can probably guess what’s coming.’
‘You have to go back to Malvern. Don’t call me flower.’
‘Right. I’m sorry. I’m there now, and I have someone else to meet. Will you be OK?’
‘Sure. I’ve already fed Ethel. I’ll get something for me later.’
‘Is everything all right?’
‘Everything’s fine.’
‘I won’t be late. I promise I won’t be late this time.’
‘Honestly, take as long as you like,’ Jane said.
She hung up and felt tearful. Felt like a stupid, ineffectual kid who got caught up in fads and crazes and thought she was so smart and spiritually developed but, faced with a crunch situation, didn’t basically have the nerve to follow through.
27
Bugger-All
Tim Loste’s house. The heart of the enigma.
A flat, grey Victorian or Edwardian town house that just happened to have been built in the country. A tiny front garden held in by iron railings. An oak tree that shouldn’t be here.
Merrily stepped into the house called Caractacus with some trepidation and an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. Well, not quite, because she knew where this feeling was coming from, remembering when Bliss had invited her to the home of a suspected serial murderer obsessed with the Cromwell Street killings. All black sheets and pin-up pictures of dead celebrities.
‘Stay with me,’ Annie Howe said, ‘and don’t touch anything. We’ve been over it forensically, but— What?’
‘Nothing,’ Merrily said.
In the dim, narrow, camphor-smelling hallway, she’d come face to face with a dead celebrity.
He was life-size, in bowler hat and hacking jacket. Standing there behind his black, yard-brush moustache and the high handlebars of Mr Phoebus, as if he was about to wheel the bicycle out of the shadows towards the front door.
‘Yes, rather startling at first, isn’t it?’ Howe said.
The black and white photograph, massively blown-up, had been fixed to a wooden frame and propped up against the end wall of the passage so that it filled almost the full width, and when you came in by the front door you were looking directly into the grainy eyes.
Of all the pictures of Elgar, why this one? Merrily had the feeling that the huge, stately Mr Phoebus, important to Elgar, was also very important to Tim Loste: a bike that meant business, could take Elgar anywhere, a symbol of the mobility of the spirit.
It still didn’t have a lamp.
‘What are you thinking?’ Annie Howe said.
‘Just wondering what I’m doing here.’
Howe said, ‘My understanding is that you’ve been here two or three times in the past few days.’
‘I’ve never been here before.’
‘In the village, then. Before and possibly even during the murder of Roman Wicklow. So I thought I’d like to hear about the purpose of your visits.’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘Well, frankly, the version of it that one of my officers was told seemed too ridiculous.’
‘Even for me, huh?’
Merrily had come directly to Loste’s cottage because this was where the police car was parked, along with a silver BMW, presumably Howe’s. There had been a uniformed constable at the gate and Howe, in a mid-grey cotton suit, had been in the front garden, examining the oak sapling. Her fine, light hair was clipped close to her skull, her make-up minimal. Jane had once said she looked like a Nazi dentist. Unfair. Sort of.
Howe opened a panelled door to the right, stepping back.
‘Living room. If you take a careful look around, perhaps you could tell me if there’s anything there that strikes as much of a chord for you as the Elgar blow-up evidently did.’
An atmosphere like a faded sepia photograph and more old photographs hanging from a wooden picture rail all around the mustard-coloured walls. Some of them were portraits of Elgar, some landscapes – Merrily recognized Stonehenge and Glastonbury Tor, but the rest were less easy: unknown hill scenery, might be Malverns, might not. Also churches, none of them obvious, no Hereford or Worcester cathedral, no Malvern Priory.
Over the tiled fireplace was a large framed photo of an obvious oak tree, a huge and ancient one, bulging black against the light. It was the only one in colour, but all the colour was in the sky. On the mantelpiece below it was a scattering of acorns and a bottle of whisky, half empty.
Howe looked at Merrily.
When beneath the sacred oak. Obvious where Howe was coming from. But what could Merrily add to it? Nothing. She was mystified.
‘Well, he … clearly has a fascination with oak trees, Annie. But I expect your well-honed deductive skills had told you that already.’
On the way in, she’d spotted a line of what she’d thought were potted plants until she’d noticed the leaves. Somehow, she felt this was Winnie Sparke’s doing, filling the place – filling Tim’s life – with oak trees. Why? Druidry, Caractacus? What was this about?
‘Maybe he can get some kind of weird buzz by smoking acorns or something,’ Merrily said and then regretted it. Howe was in there.
‘So what exactly have you heard about Mr Loste and illegal drugs?’
‘Nothing … I was being…’ Merrily sighed. ‘Facetious. Something about you brings out the child in me.’
She looked around. There was a long writing desk with a musical score on it and an empty whisky bottle in the footwell. A bookcase, a CD cabinet. Two leather easy chairs but no television or radio.
‘I m
ean … what do you want me to say? He has a thing about oaks. How that ties in with the Royal Oak I have no idea. Is that one of the reasons you’ve nicked him?’
Howe said, ‘Do you know of a connection between oaks and Elgar?’
‘No, do you?’
Howe took down a book with pages marked by luminous Post-it stickers. It was a biography of Elgar, whose name, as far as Merrily could see, occurred on the spine of virtually every volume in the bookcase. Howe opened it out on the writing desk. A paragraph was marked by a pencil line.
In July 1918, about two months after the Elgars had moved to Brinkwells, they were visited by their friend Algernon Blackwood, writer of ghost stories. Elgar took Blackwood to see a copse of, according to Alice Elgar, ‘sinister’ trees which were said – although Blackwood may have invented this – to have once been Spanish monks punished for practising black magic. Elgar found them fascinating.
Merrily looked up. ‘Doesn’t say they were oak trees. Where’s Brinkwells?’
‘Sussex.’
‘Sussex?’
‘Elgar lived there for a while before returning to Worcestershire.’
‘So what does that tell us? Anything at all?’
‘Evidently not.’ Howe shut the book. ‘But it was the only marked page in any of the books that wasn’t self-explanatory.’
‘I don’t get it. What are you looking for, exactly?’
‘Part of your … curious job, as I understand it, Ms Watkins, is to monitor the activities of religious cults.’
‘Wouldn’t put it that strongly.’
‘Are there practising Druids in the area that you’re aware of?’
‘There are Druids everywhere. It’s a popular form of paganism. No strict rules, no dogma, dress optional.’
‘And the veneration of oak trees.’
‘That’s traditional. And still valid, sure. But if you want me to look around here and tell you that Tim Loste is an obvious Druid, I’d say it was far from obvious … and even unlikely, unless you’ve found robes and pentacles and stuff in his wardrobe.’
Howe said nothing. Merrily was reminded of those infamous satanic child-abuse investigations of the 1980s and 1990s when McCarthyite social workers would seize, as damning evidence, any fragment of conceivably occult paraphernalia, like a broomstick in the broom cupboard or a video of Rosemary’s Baby.
‘Also, modern Druids don’t practise human sacrifice. They tend towards vegetarianism.’
‘Not historically, however.’
Evidently still trying to stitch something onto that texted quote from the choral work after which this house was named.
‘Have you asked him where this sudden interest in oaks comes from? Well, of course you have, but what did he say?’
‘He said nothing. He froze up on me. Why do you think I’m here asking you?’
‘I dunno.’ Merrily shook her head. ‘You’ve got bugger-all, really, haven’t you, Annie? You’re holding this guy on a few tenuous threads.’
‘Let’s go outside,’ Howe said.
* * *
DCI Annie Howe: always a problem here. Howe was an ironclad atheist, therefore suspicious of the clergy and now clearly appalled that modern womanhood should also have descended, at this stage of human evolution, to medieval dressing-up games.
As for Deliverance…
There had been one surreal happening, in the heat of midday in a hop yard in the Frome Valley, when the reinforced walls of Howe’s scepticism might have been badly breached … if she’d allowed it. If her reaction had not been flat denial, the whole incident apparently edited from her conscious memory.
Merrily followed her into the overgrown pocket garden, with its centrepiece oak sapling, thinking there was no real reason for Howe to have brought her here. It was as though she had to seize on any opportunity to look Merrily in the face and repeat, wordlessly, Nothing has ever happened to dent my belief that you are wasting your intelligence on fairy tales.
They walked to the rear of the house under the galvanized metal car port. Still no car in it. Presumably Loste hadn’t got it back yet, after his crash. A small square yard ended at an iron gate opening to a well-trodden mud path leading directly on to the hill – the hill far closer here than in the Rectory garden.
‘This is how Loste gets to the Herefordshire Beacon, or indeed into the whole network of Malvern footpaths,’ Howe said. ‘He spends whole days walking up there, and – I’m told – whole nights sometimes.’
‘I think if I had to live in this house I might do that, too,’ Merrily said.
‘Never locks his back door. Seems to feel a certain … ownership.’ Howe opened the gate and went through. ‘His hills.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Merrily shook her head. ‘Elgar’s.’
‘Elgar’s dead,’ Howe said.
‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘The music lives on, I suppose. Loste sometimes takes the music with him. He has an MP3 player containing, I’d guess, everything Elgar ever wrote, some of it repeated with different orchestras, soloists, et cetera.’
‘And that could be a bit mind-blowing, you think?’ Merrily stepped onto the path. ‘Up on the Beacon, head full of Caractacus, Druids chanting about human sacrifice? Something explodes in his brain and he goes for the nearest drug dealer with a knife he just happens to have on him?’
‘You know Caractacus, Ms Watkins?’
‘Sophie knows it. Sophie in the office.’
Howe deliberated for a moment.
‘We have – and this is confidential – another link to Loste, relating directly to the concept of Druidic sacrifice as described in Caractacus.’
‘What kind of link?’
Howe didn’t reply.
‘I suppose a lot of people around here are likely to know all the gory bits,’ Merrily said.
‘Not all of these people are as vocal in their opposition to the Royal Oak as Timothy Loste, or as … demonstrative.’
‘As in throwing a stone through a window?’
‘An act of wilful damage as a result of which several people suffered minor injuries. He would, if we’d known about it at the time, have faced charges.’
‘If he hadn’t been severely beaten up by the injured parties, making them less inclined to press charges.’
‘One of the men forced to restrain him,’ Howe said, ‘was Roman Wicklow.’
‘You know that for certain now?’
‘We’ve spoken to both of the other doormen, who’ve signed statements to that effect, also providing us with a full and graphic description of Loste’s behaviour that night and some of the threats issued by him during the struggle.’
‘Oh.’
‘So you see we don’t quite have bugger-all.’
‘No.’
Merrily looked away, up the steep path into the hills, soon barricaded by hard blue sky. It didn’t look that good for Tim Loste, did it? No longer seemed like a case of Howe’s people going for the easy option first, to save laboriously unravelling strands of rivalry in the West Midland drug community. She wondered how she was going to bring up the suggestion that the police should keep a serious eye on Loste for as long as he was in their care because of the risk of suicide or self-harming.
‘What about blood on his clothes? Forensic evidence … DNA?’
‘We should have some results tomorrow morning,’ Howe said. ‘I think it likely that they’ll enable us to move on to the next stage.’
She stepped onto a small tump by a gorse bush, looked down to the road where another police car was pulling in. Looked down at Merrily.
‘Right. I’ve been as open as I possibly can with you, Ms Watkins. I’ve put my cards on the table. I’d now like you to reciprocate. I’d like you to tell me – off the record for the present – exactly why you were called to Wychehill and what you know about the night Timothy Loste crashed his car into a telegraph pole.’
‘I wasn’t there.’
‘I don’t care if you were there or not – I�
�m looking for background information, not a witness statement. Gossip, if you like. I’m trying to get a picture of his mental condition, and my information is that he’s so obsessed with the late Edward Elgar that he’s seeing the man’s ghost around every corner.’
‘I’d say that’s an exaggeration. And, as far as that particular ghost story goes, he’s not the only one. At least, that’s the basis on which I was asked to look into it.’
‘Yes,’ Howe said, ‘we do know about the other one.’
‘Also, you and I … we wouldn’t necessarily agree on what claiming to have seen a ghost says about someone’s state of mind.’
‘I can think of very little that we’d agree on,’ Howe said.
‘And apart from anything, we’re talking about an artist, a professional dreamer. Which, in his line of work, is not necessarily a pejorative term. Elgar was a dreamer, Loste is supposed to be writing a musical work about Elgar.’
‘You know what? I’m getting bloody sick of this.’ Annie Howe came down from the mound, her scrubbed face actually colouring. ‘As if all so-called artists were wispy little tree-huggers. Have you ever seen Timothy Loste?’
‘I’ve tried, Annie. God knows I’ve tried.’
‘Then I’ll describe him for you. Loste is forty years old and, despite his alcohol problem, extremely fit. Has been known to walk virtually the length of the Malverns and back within a day by a different route. Knows those hills like the back of his hand, every rock and cave and crevice.’
‘Yes, but that hardly—’
‘At the Royal Oak that night, as I may have implied, it took three experienced doormen to subdue him … as he’s also about half a head taller than Wicklow was. And built, Ms Watkins, like the side of a house. Oh, and the rock he put through that window was, at a rough estimate, the size of a small television set and maybe twice as heavy.’
‘Oh.’
‘Now tell me again that we’re talking about a harmless, inoffensive little dreamer with a natural abhorrence of violence.’
A buzzard passed silently overhead. A uniformed policeman appeared in the garden.
‘They’ve been trying to get you, ma’am.’
Howe lifted her head. ‘Thanks, Robert. I’m coming now.’
