Remains of an Altar mw-8

by Phil Rickman

‘The charges against Gomer Parry? I did pick up your messages, but I was on a major investigation. I might be able to pull the odd string, but not tonight. CID were consulted but it’s a uniform thing now. Out of my hands.’

  ‘Gomer. Gomer and Jane? What have they done?’

  ‘Do you know a place called Coleman’s Meadow?’

  ‘Heard of it. Vaguely.’

  ‘They’ve trashed it with a JCB. Taken a fence out and destroyed an expensive vehicle.’

  ‘Are they all right?’

  ‘Oh they’re all right. For the present. That old man’s a complete maniac, of course, which you know, and Jane … Listen, I can suggest someone you might possibly talk to tomorrow, but I can’t get involved, Merrily, I can’t pull any—’

  ‘That’s why you didn’t return my calls? You thought I was going to ask you to pull strings on behalf of Jane and Gomer?’

  ‘I’ve had a bloody long night, Merrily. I’ve gorra mairder inquiry.’

  ‘Not any more, Frannie,’ Merrily said.

  Hadn’t really been his week, had it? Or anyone’s she knew.

  She needed to go home, but…

  The police had found both bodies in the forestry. No back-road network, farm to farm to Fishguard and the ferry to Ireland.

  Louis had been shot in the back of the head, evidently while relieving himself, his dad presumably having offered to hold the gun for him. Preston had been found some distance away. He’d fumbled it, blown a piece of his head away but was not dead. He’d died, like Lincoln Cookman, in the ambulance.

  It was numbing.

  ‘I can’t question it,’ Syd Spicer said. ‘You know what the suicide rate is among ex-SAS? You come out into a shrunken world and it’s like your coffin’s being assembled around you. Every day another little screw going in. The sudden smallness of everything, the petty regulations, the way your hands are tied by the kind of people you just want to smack.’

  He talked about that feeling of confinement. How you had to find a way out of that. Preston Devereaux’s answer was to slide out of the system by shedding his humanity like excess weight.

  Merrily lit a cigarette.

  ‘Ironically, dumping your humanity now seems like the best way to survive in farming. A cow’s no longer Daisy, it’s a product with a government bar code.’

  ‘The State penetrating your life at every level,’ Syd said. ‘Nobody’s more aware of that than the farmer, whose only rulers used to be the elements. State doesn’t like the idea of guys out there being independent. Officials come swarming over your land like maggots, and you’re clawing away to get them off before they start eating into your brain. Maybe Preston felt he was finally reclaiming his Norman heritage as a robber baron. The Normans controlled the hunting in the Malverns. The Devereaux dynasty controls the drugs.’

  ‘But knowing that at any time it could all go to pieces? That he could lose everything his family had built up over the centuries? Did that add to the necessary sense of danger?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Lol said, ‘he thought he’d already lost everything. That it was just useless packaging. And the only part of it worth preserving was the … whatever was still alight inside him.’

  Merrily thought about this. About Devereaux telling her how he’d put all his valuable furniture into the holiday units. Stripping his own life back. She saw him in the Beacon Room in his anonymous, muted green overalls, surrounded by mementoes of the past – the fox heads and the picture of him with Eric Clapton. She looked at Syd.

  ‘You knew that if you could get them to walk away … ?’

  Syd had changed into his cassock, as if in some vain attempt to convince himself that what had happened in the last several hours had happened to someone else.

  ‘Didn’t see him having any taste for life as a fugitive. Still less as a prisoner who – even if he hadn’t actually personally killed anybody—’

  ‘He had killed, though, hadn’t he?’ Merrily said. ‘What about Lincoln Cookman and his girlfriend?’

  ‘I meant murder.’

  ‘Yes, well…’ Merrily bent her head into her hands. ‘This is probably nonsense, but when I went to talk to Raji Khan at the Royal Oak, Roman Wicklow’s family were there, collecting his stuff. Including his small sports car. Quite a deep colour of orange, which might look red at night, I don’t know. It was just a feeling I had, and I don’t get them often.’

  Syd sat back. ‘A Mazda?’

  ‘I think it was a Nissan, but about the same size and shape, and late at night, coming towards Preston Devereaux at speed, with a black guy inside … He told me he was very tired at the time. He said if he hadn’t been so tired it wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘An impulse thing?’

  ‘If Wicklow was preying on his mind…’

  ‘You said Wicklow killed that man in Pershore?’

  ‘He was tortured before he was shot,’ Merrily said. ‘Maybe he gave Wicklow information leading Wicklow back to Devereaux.’

  ‘Then Wicklow turns up at Old Wychehill to ask for a job. Blackmail in a thin disguise. What if Wicklow tells Khan? Assuming Khan doesn’t already know.’

  Suspecting that Khan had a charmed-life arrangement with Annie Howe, Merrily didn’t think he did know.

  ‘I could be totally wrong about the Wychehill crash, anyway. How could he know they’d both be killed?’

  ‘He couldn’t,’ Syd said. ‘But he was a massively angry man in a business that brutalizes. I remember he was in a very … excited state that night. In fact, I don’t rule out that Preston, like Louis, partook of the produce. In his careful way.’

  ‘It could even be that Cookman had been involved with Wicklow. The police did find a bag of crack under his spare wheel.’

  ‘Anything’s possible and most of it won’t come out. The cops have too many angles to follow up. Could take weeks with several forces involved. Could be dozens of people charged. But it’s not our problem. Is it?’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ Lol said, ‘do we ring A and E at Worcester Hospital?’

  ‘They’ll ring us,’ Merrily said. ‘Tim has no known relations in the country. Not that anybody knows of.’

  She pushed her cup away. One of the parameds had mentioned the possibility of damage to the pulmonary artery. The kitchen seemed dim. The garden, where it was lifted towards the bald hill, was pallid with tired moonlight and what remained of the so-called noctilucence.

  ‘I may’ve screwed up badly.’ Syd plucked at his cassock. ‘Probably gonna get out of this now.’

  ‘The cassock?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Quitting’s not in your nature, Syd. Or your training.’

  He smiled faintly.

  ‘Increasingly, I admire you, Merrily. You’ve watched it fall to pieces from your point of view. Every deliverance angle going, one after another, down the toilet.’

  ‘That’s what you think?’ Merrily sank her head into her arms, looking up at him from table-top level. ‘You really don’t see anything bordering on the paranormal?’

  ‘You mean you do?’

  ‘Syd,’ she said. ‘When I’ve slept, I’ll make you a list.’

  ‘You think there should still be some form of requiem?’

  ‘I don’t know. You think that would make everything all right in Wychehill? Sweetness and light and harmony and Mr Holliday inviting Mr Khan to afternoon tea?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I suppose I think truth sometimes heals on its own. Winnie said there was a festering wound in the hills. Maybe she added to the infection. Maybe she – let’s be fanciful – annoyed Elgar, bringing him to judgement when all he wanted was to pedal up and down, whistling his sad little up-and-down cello tune.’

  ‘Bringing him to judgement?’

  ‘What right did she have? It was essentially a magical ritual, you know, what they were—’ She stood up. ‘What they’re still doing, presumably, in your church.’

  Merrily had never been a hymn kind of person, but s
he knew them. Most of the words, if not the tune in this case.

  ‘Oh wisest love that flesh and blood

  Which did in Adam fail. . .’

  ‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height. That’s … ?’

  ‘What the heavenly choir sings before the appearance of the Angel of the Agony,’ Lol said. ‘Tim’s expanded it, I think. Dan said it goes into a speaking-in-tongues kind of chant. He said that’s when you start to get high.’

  They were in the parking bay outside Wychehill Church. The singing was much louder now than when Merrily had last heard it, standing on an upturned bucket below a window. As if the choristers had been pacing themselves like athletes.

  ‘You think we should stop them?’ Syd Spicer stood under the cracked lantern, his eyes uncertain. ‘How long’s it got to go?’

  ‘What time is it now, Syd?’

  ‘Two-twenty.’

  ‘It ends at three,’ Lol said.

  ‘Let them finish then.’ Syd brought out his keys. ‘You want to go in?’

  Lol nodded. Merrily had caught a movement in the churchyard.

  ‘Join you in a few minutes. OK?’

  Sliding among the bushes and the graves not a moment too soon because within a few seconds there were voices behind her, talking to Syd, and one of them was Annie Howe’s. ‘No, I’m not sure,’ she heard Syd say. ‘She was here not long ago. Do you want to talk to me first?’

  She was standing under the statue of the Angel of the Agony, pink cardigan over a summer dress with cartwheels and roses on it. Male and female voices cascaded down through the warm air, fluid and ethereal, coloured rain.

  ‘God’s presence and his very Self

  and Essence—’

  ‘I thought,’ Merrily said, ‘that on Friday and Saturday night you stayed in behind locked and barred doors.’

  ‘Sometimes I sit at the window,’ Mrs Aird said. ‘From the front dormer I can just see the church gates. I had the window open tonight, to hear the choir. Then I saw you come in with the Rector and the other gentleman.’

  Merrily sat on the edge of the tomb, looked up into her face, meagrely lit by the candles inside the church.

  ‘What don’t I know about you, Mrs Aird?’

  ‘Oh dear, is it that obvious?’

  ‘I did think of ringing Ingrid Sollars, but there hasn’t been much time.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Mrs Aird said. ‘Ingrid doesn’t know anything really. I don’t make a point of telling people my family history. Not round here, especially. There’s still quite a bit of strong feeling in certain quarters.’

  She glanced up at the Angel of the Agony, whose face, even by diffused candlelight, reflected none of the compassion that you might expect.

  ‘Oh,’ Merrily said. ‘I see … I think.’

  ‘He was my grandfather.’

  ‘Joseph Longworth.’

  ‘I don’t remember him. He died when I was very young. I didn’t even know where he was buried for a long time. It was quite a shock when I first came here.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘He left some money, in trust for Wychehill Church. The interest to be handed over as a lump sum every ten years, as directed by the principal trustee. Which at present is me, as the eldest in the family. He wanted the money to perpetuate the church’s connection with Elgar.’

  ‘Ah…’

  ‘What I was told was that Elgar’s music was not very popular by the time my grandfather discovered it in the 1920s. He became, you know, besotted with it. He thought it was the greatest music ever made in England. He wanted to help. And to make up, in a small way, for all the damage done by the quarrying. And I suppose he’s been proved right, hasn’t he, about the music?’

  ‘Somebody said he created Wychehill Church as … almost an altar to Elgar?’

  ‘Well, I came to tend it,’ Mrs Aird said. ‘I’m the first of our family – including my grandfather – ever to live in Wychehill, and it’s all been very strange. Very strange indeed. I used to be afraid to stand here, especially after dark.’

  ‘You came – twenty-five years ago?’

  ‘Twenty-four. When my husband retired. He was some years older than me. You didn’t have to wait long for a house to come on the market here. It’s always been like that. It was a very unhappy place when we came. I made it my business to try to cheer people up. It was a … a vocation, you might say. It made me feel content here. I felt my grandfather – this will sound silly…’

  ‘Probably not to me.’

  ‘I felt he was helping me. So when Mr Loste came and established his choir…’

  ‘Good way to … perpetuate Elgar’s music?’

  ‘I made a donation, from the fund. Towards the choir and hiring musicians sometimes.’

  ‘You gave Tim money?’

  ‘Anonymously. Through my solicitor. I didn’t want them to know. I didn’t want that woman … I heard she … is it true?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is.’

  ‘Dear God.’ Mrs Aird sank down on to the tomb. ‘What’s happening here, Mrs Watkins?’

  Merrily told her, without mentioning names, that the people responsible were no longer a threat. That there was nobody out there any more to be afraid of.

  She wondered if that was true and if the divide which had opened up all those years ago, like a fissure in the rocks, between Longworth and the Devereaux family, Old Wychehill and Upper Wychehill, might in some way be closed. What would happen to Old Wychehill now? In theory, it was Hugo’s. But what would happen to Hugo?

  ‘As soon as I handed over the money,’ Mrs Aird said, ‘I knew it was wrong, somehow, and I didn’t know why. I had terrible dreams. One night…’ She hugged her arms. ‘I saw him.’ She looked up. ‘Him.’

  ‘The angel?’

  ‘I was watching the sunset and just after the sun had gone down, he was there in my garden. Don’t think I’m mad—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the next day the lorry crashed into the church wall. It was probably a coincidence, but that’s not what you think, is it, at the time?’

  ‘Did you … see him again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the light the lorry driver said he saw … ?’

  ‘He thought it was the sun, but it was too early. Perhaps it was like the policeman said, he was overtired. But I thought of the ball of light that my grandfather’s supposed to have seen. And then Mr Loste … and then Hannah. I didn’t know what to believe. It was getting too much for me. And then I talked to Ingrid and…’ Mrs Aird let her arms drop and turned to Merrily. ‘How much of it was lies? Do you know?’

  ‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t. Sometimes you never do. Sometimes you just have to push on regardless and hope you get … some…’

  Help? She looked up. Something had happened.

  She saw, through the steep, plain-glass window, a very small glow, as if only one candle was left alight. And the choir had faltered, voices trailing like ribbon. She stood up.

  The last candle didn’t go out, but the choir stayed silent. Merrily heard the church door opening, and Lol came out, and she walked over to him. He looked anxious.

  ‘He … the conductor was this guy, Dan. He’d stepped in at the last minute because the usual guy couldn’t make it. And he just … he stopped it. He said he had to sit down. Suddenly felt cold … and weak. And then he got up again and went round blowing out the candles. It was … weird. Who’s that?’

  Merrily turned and saw Mrs Aird walking back along the drive towards the road. There was darkness there. The cracked lantern at the entrance had gone out.

  Cold inside with dread, she took out her mobile and opened it up, its screen flaring orange and white, and called the hospital in Worcester where Tim Loste had been taken.

  64

  Helium

  It was unearthly seeing Elgar like this. Disorientating.

  In his striped casual jacket and his hat with the brim raffishly upturned at the sides. And was that a cigarette, for heaven’
s sake, between his fingers?

  He wasn’t exactly smiling, but you felt that, under that Wild West marshal’s moustache, he was on the edge of one, standing on the track with his arms spread as if emphasizing its width. Yes, it had to be a cigarette – that was smoke in the air

  You spent all week searching for him in the Malverns, and here he was in Ledwardine.

  Something mischievous and yet rueful about that near-smile. The main difference between Watkins and Elgar, at this stage of their lives, was that Elgar was more or less played out in his sixties, while Watkins was only just beginning his greatest work, crackling with vision.

  Maybe Elgar, in Ledwardine, was returning a favour – for getting Longworth off his back? No, don’t get fanciful.

  ‘Whenever I think I’m getting somewhere.’ Jane lowered her face into her hands. ‘Just when I think I’m breaking through, I screw up. It’s like there’s something inside me, something demonic—’

  ‘Stop right there, flower.’

  Jane looked up. Annoyance turning to something between hopelessness and an unhealthy kind of repentance.

  Anyway, it was almost pitiful.

  ‘I was going to say, “Don’t call me ‘flower’ like I’m seven years old.” But yeah, call me flower. Call me flower till I grow up. Maybe getting thrown out of school … maybe that’s what I need. Maybe I should go away, where I can’t harm anybody.’

  Merrily thought of telling her that the one person this didn’t seem to have harmed was Gomer Parry who, when she’d seen him in the Eight till Late, had looked ten years younger, despite facing charges which could include taking a mechanical digger without the owner’s consent and criminal damage to a fence and a silver BMW.

  He said he’d deny that this last offence had been criminal as he’d had no way of knowing that Pierce had brought his car round in order to drive Gerry Murray home so Murray could leave his JCB on site overnight, which was plain daft, anyway.

  ‘More likely to’ve banged Pierce,’ Gomer said. ‘Bloody little crook.’

  Merrily had advised resisting making that point to the police. Bliss had suggested that Gomer might get a caution … but only if he admitted an offence of, say, Aggravated Taking Without Consent. Which, Gomer being Gomer…