by Phil Rickman
Earlier in the piece Jane had been quoted as describing council officials as…
‘Philistine morons?’ Jim Prosser said. ‘You actually said that, did you, Jane?’
‘Oh God, Jim.’ Jane covered up her face. ‘I thought we were just having like a preliminary chat? He was really sympathetic, you know? I thought he’d come out with the photographer to interview me properly – I didn’t realize that was it, he was doing it over the phone.’
Jim stood there, slowly shaking his head and smiling the smile of a man who couldn’t quite believe this. He held out the paper.
‘You wanner take this copy, show your mother before somebody else does?’
‘Christ, no … I mean, it’s OK, she’s going out early.’ Jane felt clammy under her school shirt. ‘Look … what do you think, Jim? What have I done? Is this, like, going to cause trouble?’
‘Hard to say, really. Twenty-four houses, that’s another twenty-four bunches of papers and magazines for me. On the other hand, disturbing the spirits of the dead…’
‘You don’t believe a word, do you? You think it’s all total bollocks.’
‘Well, you know us primitive, superstitious rural types, Jane…’
‘Do you think anybody here is going to agree with me?’
‘Tough question,’ Jim said. ‘Go on, take the paper, you might need one.’
‘Thanks.’
Jane went out and stood by the oak pillars of the medieval market hall. The brilliant sun was suspended over Cole Hill, as though it was either declaring its support or making some kind of ironic gesture. Jane screwed up her eyes and looked up, pleading.
It had been like a dream. Taking herself off to the end of the playing field yesterday lunchtime and sitting down and trying to see it from all sides. Mum’s position in the village – no conflict there, she was supposed to be responsible for the collective soul of the community. And Morrell, always on about liberal causes and free speech and Amnesty International and stuff like that.
Once the decision had been made, it had been like being on a speeded-up escalator. A call to the photographer and then to Eirion on his mobile, and he’d blagged some time off and been waiting, parked down the lane, just out of sight, when she’d slipped away from the school soon after one p.m. Eirion finally dropping her off at the church so that she could walk the ley from there on her own, just to be … sure. And she had been sure.
Yesterday, the high. Today, the cold turkey.
Jane was getting a mental image, now, of Morrell with the Guardian on his desk – it was his favourite paper, normally. Folding it neatly … and then instructing his secretary to have all copies removed from the school library and the sixth-form common room before any of the students arrived. Then maybe a smarmy, self-defensive call to the woman on the education authority before sitting back to devise a suitable form of retribution.
Bloody unfair, really. Another couple of weeks and the term would’ve been over and she’d have been immune until September.
A few villagers were wandering over to the shop. Jane slipped behind a pillar of the market hall and didn’t move. She felt disoriented and distanced from … from her usual self. Like she’d taken – beginning with that first small lie about her age to Jerry Isles – a decision to become a separate person, detached also from The School and The Sixth Form.
A slightly premature adult, in other words, and it felt lonely.
The sun was hot on her head and her arms. She felt as if she wanted to walk away and fade into the spirit path the way she almost had yesterday. Or was that … was she just going a little crazy, through stress and anxiety?
Across at the vicarage she could see Mum reversing the Volvo onto the side of the road. Looked like she was in a hurry. Well, good. But she wouldn’t leave before she’d seen her daughter.
Jane raised a hand and wandered over, hiding the Guardian in the hedge. Best not to burden her with this.
Or the migraine.
Oh yeah, there was definitely a migraine coming on today.
32
A Polka for the Loonies
There were no curtains at Lol’s bedroom window. When he’d awoken, not long after dawn, the sky was slashed with red, bringing up ugly thoughts of the dead man on the stone in the Malverns.
Something Lol had not seen, but Merrily had, and Lol was lying there under the reddening duvet, thinking about all the times he’d sat fingering the frets of the graceful Boswell guitar, conjuring ephemera, while Merrily waded in spiritual sewage.
Increasingly, he worried about her. She was living much of the time on cigarettes instead of proper meals and sooner or later all this chasing around after madness – the kind of madness she’d never be able to validate – would start to take its toll.
Not many nights, lately, had passed without him waking in the dark or the early dawn, cold with this formless fear of losing Merrily.
And walking back in the late evening from Coleman’s Meadow to the market square, splitting up to go to their separate beds … there’d been a disturbingly elegiac quality to that.
Recalling this, he’d felt a moment of anxiety that was close to panic and, turning it into determination, got up into the streaming red dawn and made some tea and a list of what he needed to find out.
Finding himself thinking about Winnie Sparke. The way she’d moved in on him: Pardon me … but I think I know who you are? The tumbling hair, the semi-see-through dress. Ready to come on to him that night, but now she wasn’t talking. Not to Merrily. Protecting the enigmatic Tim Loste. So what was there to protect?
At around eight-thirty, Lol sat at his writing desk in the window overlooking Church Street and rang Prof Levin at the Knight’s Frome studio.
‘Five weeks,’ Prof said. ‘In five weeks, I have a window for approximately ten days. If we can’t break its back in ten days we’re not trying.’
‘Sorry … ?’
‘Your … second … solo … album?’
‘Well, it’s coming.’ Lol could hear Prof pouring coffee from his cafetière. ‘I’m just … not there yet.’
‘Shit,’ Prof said. ‘You haven’t even started, have you, you useless bastard?’
‘No, I’ve started. I start every day. Except today. Today, I’m not starting.’
‘Because?’
‘Tim Loste,’ Lol said. ‘What do you know about Tim Loste?’
The answer came back, sailing past on a breath like there’d been no need for thought.
‘Avoid,’ Prof said.
‘I see.’ Lol inched his chair further into the desk, picked up a pencil, gathered in his lyrics pad. ‘Why, exactly?’
Prof said, ‘Laurence, we’re all mad, in our way, aren’t we? Me, you, Loste, Elgar.’
‘Sorry, did I mention Elgar?’
‘You mentioned Loste, which means that sooner or later we’d get around to Elgar. And madness. Elgar grew up with it. Used to hang around the local lunatic asylum at Worcester.’
‘Yes, but that’s because he was Director of Music there.’
‘Yeah. Thirty quid a year, and five shillings every time he wrote a polka for the loonies to dance to. But even then he’s thinking, there but for the grace of God…’
‘You’re saying Elgar was mentally ill?’
‘But also, fortunately, touched with genius. Imagine what it’s like if you’re mental and only touched with mediocrity.’
‘Loste?’
‘Terrific conductor, arranger … facilitator. Pure creativy? Nah.’
‘You know him personally?’
‘Mmmf.’ Prof swallowing too-hot coffee. ‘Laurence, mate, everybody knows him. If you’re a halfway-proficient serious musician or a singer, the chances are he’s been in touch at one time or another, offering you the chance to make your name. No money in it, of course, just the honour and the glory of working with the young master. This is in his manic phases.’
‘In the clinical sense?’
‘Whether it’s been diagnosed I wouldn’
t know. But in his depressive phases, it’s best to stay out of his way – and also in his manic phases, obviously. That’s why I say just avoid. Tell you about me and him, shall I?’
It seemed that Loste, having heard about this new recording studio at Knight’s Frome, had called Prof, introducing himself as a one-time soloist with the English Symphony Orchestra. Asking whether it was possible that Prof could put together a mobile unit to record his choir in Wychehill Church.
‘Complicated job, Laurence, if you’ve never recorded a choir before, having to mike up this huge church on your own. So what’s wrong with the studio? I’m asking him. Oh no, Loste insists it has to be the church. Not a church, this church. But … he had the money. I should argue.’
‘You went to Wychehill?’
‘Charming crowd, on the whole. The women worshipped Loste, this bumbling overgrown schoolboy … imprecise, incoherent.’
‘You mean drunk?’
‘Well … high, certainly. Or just, like I said, manic. And yet, in the end, unexpectedly, I was impressed. He’s a bloody good conductor. He channels inspiration. Shouldn’t’ve been any good at all, bunch of amateurs in a country church, but the atmosphere in there was … something else.’
‘This was Elgar?’
‘Ah, well, that’s the point, you see. For Loste, it all comes through Elgar. Elgar was always moaning that nobody understood him; Loste understands him. Totally. And the combination of Elgar and Loste somehow brings something extraordinary out of amateurs. I remember the Angelus, particularly. Shivers-up-the-spine stuff. Or so it seemed to me whose skills have, for too long, been squandered on three-chord wonders such as your good self.’
‘Four now.’
‘Congratulations. Loste, meanwhile, his ambition is to do the full Gerontius with a choir and orchestra. On the strength of what we recorded already, it wouldn’t be an embarrassment. Except he’ll need to get somebody else to twiddle the knobs on it because Gerontius scares me. Too big, too complicated. Also, an attempted orchestration of the afterlife with angels and demons … am I going there? With Loste? I think not, Laurence. Definitely not with Timothy Loste.’
Lol said, ‘Prof, was there a woman with Loste when you did the recording? A writer called Winnie Sparke?’
‘Cheesecloth and glittery bits?’
‘That would probably be her, yes.’
‘All right,’ Prof said, ‘you remember Yoko Ono in the film they made of the session for Let It Be? Sitting there, watchful? More than a bit like that, only less of the inscrutable. Not a promising relationship, was my feeling. She looks at him, sees toyboy; he looks at her … mummy.’
‘You know anything about her?’
‘Not much. She’s a writer. Does these Mystic Meg kind of books. What’s your angle?’
‘She’s told Merrily that she and Loste are on the edge of the solution to a great and beautiful mystery.’
‘Merrily?’ Prof said. ‘This is a Merrily situation? Oh, for fuck’s sake. A great and beautiful mystery? Avoid, avoid, avoid!’
‘Well, it’s not too hard to avoid him at the moment,’ Lol said. ‘He’s in custody. The cops are questioning him about a murder on Herefordshire Beacon.’
‘Loste? This is the man found in the old fort, his throat cut from ear to ear? You’re serious?’
‘The guy worked at this hip-hop palace at the Royal Oak, outside Wychehill. Which Loste apparently believes is…’
‘An evil presence sapping his creativity. I heard that. Only, he doesn’t have any creativity. He’s an interpreter. A facilitator. That’s as far as it goes. Bloody hell, Lol. I mean, bloody hell.’
Someone was knocking on Lol’s back door.
‘Do you see him as someone who could kill?’ Lol asked.
‘Loste?’ Prof swallowed some coffee. ‘Big bloke. Conducting, he snaps batons. But he— With a knife? Blood spurting everywhere?’
Lol heard the back door opening and shutting. The door of the living room opened, and Jane stood there in her school uniform. She wasn’t smiling. She was unusually pale. When Lol pointed her to the sofa, she sat down with her hands clasped between her legs, biting her lip.
‘Prof, can I ring you back?’
‘Listen,’ Prof said, ‘if you really want to know more about Loste’s games, I can put you in touch with one of the people in his choir. In fact, there’s one guy might be more than happy to talk to you in particular. I’ll call him, get him to ring you. OK?’
Lol saw that Jane had been crying.
‘“Great and beautiful mystery”,’ Prof said. ‘I’ll tell you one thing about that. Like Elgar, Loste is obsessed with himself and his ideas. People, he can take or leave most of the time. Music is all. Nothing outside music, to Loste, could be both great and beautiful. Tell Merrily that.’
‘Right,’ Lol said. ‘Thanks.’
‘But, yeah. If there was some threat to his music, I suppose, when you think about it, he could kill,’ Prof said.
33
A Result, Anyway
There was a new sign and it said Starlight Cottage.
Of course. Winnie Sparke had told them how she’d changed the name from Wyche Cottage. Almost the first thing she’d said that evening with the choir laying its serene spell over Wychehill. This was what Lol had remembered.
The cottage was built of rubble stone and was not much bigger than Hannah Bradley’s place, lower down the lane. Its back garden was formed around plates of rock and ended abruptly in a kind of cliff edge with an iron fence. Merrily looked down and saw the road.
Yours etc., Starlight. Winnie, according to Spicer, had certainly been impressed by the letter supposedly sent to Elgar and passed on to Longworth.
Which posed some interesting questions. But even at 9.30 a.m., with most of the cottage still pooled in shadow, the bloody woman wasn’t around to deflect them. Frustrating, after an early night and only one remembered dream, which had been a dream of Cole Hill seen from Coleman’s Meadow; the only detail that Merrily could recall was the sense of pain and the disembodied, breeze-blown voice of Winnie Sparke saying that the hill was hurting. Odd the way that view, once seen, nested in your mind.
Merrily peered through one of the small windows, but all she could make out was a dim wall of books. She’d left her car in the lane, right outside. She gave the wind chimes above the front door a final flick and went back to it and the copy of the weekly Malvern Gazette which lay on the passenger seat.
‘RITUAL’ MURDER –LOCAL MAN HELD
Tim Loste hadn’t been named, which was normal if there were no charges yet. However, this was a weekly paper, printed yesterday, so if Loste had been charged late last night it wouldn’t have made the edition. The front-page story said the brutal killing on the Beacon had shattered a community already reeling from last weekend’s double fatal road accident (see page three).
On page three the rigid features of Leonard Holliday were in close-up against the blur of the road, under the headline:
‘THIS CARNAGE WILL GO ON…’
The story said that WRAG, the Wychehill Residents’ Action Group, was calling for the immediate closure of the Royal Oak pub as a music venue. Late-night traffic had increased dramatically on roads ‘not much wider than bridleways’ and ‘inner city’ nightlife had left residents living in fear. Mrs Joyce Aird, a widow living alone, said, ‘It’s terrifying. I’m a prisoner in my own home from Friday night to Sunday morning.’
The owner of the Royal Oak, promoter and gallery owner Rajab Ali Khan, had said, ‘I have no intention of pre-empting the inquest verdict on these two unfortunate people, but I am anxious to cooperate fully, if Mr Holliday can provide me with any evidence at all of damage to the property or person of any of his neighbours.’ It sounded like a quote that Raji had run past his solicitor.
Folding the paper, Merrily looked up to see a hare sitting at the top of Winnie’s narrow, down-sloping driveway, its black-tipped ears seeming to quiver for a moment before it bounded away into the hedge. At
the top of the lane, the Cobhams’ tarted-up barn shone from its elevated site with an alien glamour, like some Pyrenean villa. It would look spectacularly seductive in the estate agent’s window, where wealthy tourists would project upon it their doomed bucolic fantasies.
Meanwhile … Stella. When Merrily had stopped in Ledbury to buy the Gazette, she’d checked her mobile, and Frannie Bliss had called from home to say he had some information from Traffic about Stella. She’d called him back at once. What he had to tell her had made the air in the car seem stale.
Might as well get this over, then.
Leaving the Volvo outside Starlight Cottage, Merrily walked up to the barn. Ignoring the front door this time, going round the back. There was a low gate on a latch, and she lifted it and went through to where a paved area had been laid. There was a wooden table and a pink and yellow striped sunshade and a woman sitting there with a mug of pungent-smelling coffee and her back to Merrily, who coughed lightly.
‘Morning, Mrs Cobham.’
Stella spun out of her chair, her red hair flaring up like a bonfire, the aggression emphasized by the kimono she wore, with yellow dragons on black and a hot slap of coffee, now, down the front.
‘Yes?’
‘Sorry to startle you.’
‘You.’ Stella subsided, pulling off her sunglasses and mopping at her kimono with a tissue. ‘Didn’t recognize you in ordinary clothes. What do you want? We’ve never encouraged people to just turn up.’
‘Well … after the way you led me on and then did a neat U-turn on the phone, that really doesn’t bother me too much.’
‘How dare—?’
‘And is this really a good time to be selling a house in Wychehill?’
Merrily placed the Malvern Gazette on the table.
‘Makes no difference.’ Stella barely glanced at it. ‘None of the potential purchasers ever come from this area. Look, Paul’s only gone into Ledbury, and he’ll be back soon and the things I’m guessing you want to talk about, if they get raised again it’s going to spoil his day, big time. And right now, our marriage, let me tell you, is hanging on … that.’
