by Phil Rickman
‘Computers,’ Mr Sandford said.
‘Oh?’ Lol took a careful sniff at the earth: decay, yes – but vegetable, surely nothing more than that. Gomer had said grimly, You’ll know, boy, when you finds it. Like he was certain they were going to.
‘You’re not local?’ Mr Sandford said.
‘No, not very.’ Lol began to prod tentatively at the pea-gravel around the bottom of the tank.
‘In which case, you wouldn’t know this is Silicon Valley in the making.’
‘You’ve got a factory?’
‘Not me personally. Chris Cody’s the genius. Saved the whole village from a slow death. Seventeen new jobs this year, if you include part-time employment for cleaners and so on. That’s big-time here. And it’s just the start.’
What, software manuf—?’ Lol recoiled as his spade found something in the gravel. Black. Could be a shoe. He looked up at Gomer.
‘The lot.’ Sandford hadn’t noticed it. ‘We make computers. Right now, the big thing’s computers for kids.’
It was a pipe, just a thick, black pipe.
‘I thought…’ Lol collected some breath, unsure if this was relief because, of all the bits you might uncover first, a shoe would probably be the least distressing. ‘I thought kids could use anything. Eight-year-old hackers getting into the White House and… all that.’
‘Nah, little kids, this is. Simple computers for four-year-olds, three-year-olds, two or younger. With games they can understand. By the time they get to school they’re computer-literate and most of ’em can read and write. Puts ’em a couple of years ahead of other kids. Fantastic. Might look run-down and primitive round here, but this place is the future, and that’s why—’
‘All right.’ Gomer jumped down from the digger, tossing his ciggy into the mud. ‘I’ll come in there now, boy.’
‘You sure, Gomer?’ Lol was already out of the pit, a shiver up his back.
‘But you do not expect this,’ Mr Sandford said, watching the Efflapure, as if they were excavating Hell itself in his half-acre garden.
‘Careful now.’ Jenny Box pulled back the rug in her oak-panelled hall, revealing the hatch in the crooked wooden floor.
‘Chapel House…’ Merrily said. ‘You mean… ?’
‘Even the estate agents didn’t try to make anything of it,’ Mrs Box said. ‘They thought ’twas just a little cellar – a “wine cellar” they called it – which they thought would sound more appealing to the kind of people they were expecting to buy the house.’ She pulled back a bolt and slipped slender fingers under a black cast-iron ring. ‘This hatch is Victorian, I’m guessing, and they’d have made a feature of it, but for most of last century it’d have been nothing but a storage space.’
The hatch came up easily. Jenny Box laid it down flat. She depressed a switch in the oak panelling. Stone steps were softly lit from below.
‘After you, Reverend,’ Mrs Box said.
Merrily put a toe on the first step. She was still wary of enclosed and windowless spaces after a harrowing night last Candlemas, in a private mausoleum in Radnorshire. Maybe she always would be.
‘There used to be a rail,’ Mrs Box said, ‘but it’d fallen off and I didn’t replace it. ’Twas always my feeling that, going down there, a certain sense of danger would be not inappropriate. Sometimes, if I’m feeling a little daring, I’ll go down in the dark and light a candle.’
‘You should be a bit careful,’ Merrily said. ‘What if you fell and got trapped?’
‘Tssk,’ Jenny Box said scornfully.
Merrily went down the steps, which curved. She was wondering: some kind of priest’s hole? Was the house old enough for that? As she came to the bottom step, she glanced back over her shoulder, trepidation lightly brushing her, as if the hatch might come crashing down, the bolt thrown, sealing her underground with… what?
There was an absurd moment of relief when she saw Jenny Box following her. She went forward, ducking – not something she had to do very often, even in the oldest cottages, but here the curved ceiling was, at its highest, only an inch or so above her head.
Mrs Box laughed lightly. ‘Kneeling room only, for most people today. I guess people were all a lot shorter when this was built.’
A round lantern, with an electric bulb, hung close to the wall, and Merrily saw she was in a short, narrow passage, its walls recently replastered and painted white. A smell. Incense? She didn’t move. She felt cold down here, despite still wearing her coat – the short woollen one, newish; she hadn’t wanted to look too poor this morning.
She wants me to know… is that possible?
‘Go on.’ Jenny Box was behind her, not quite touching her. ‘Go through.’
The passage opened out into a small white room lit by a second lantern and given focus by a low wooden altar. The atmosphere was suddenly so pervasive that, if she hadn’t been so unsettled, it might have brought Merrily instinctively to her knees.
‘I didn’t know this even existed.’
She’d been expecting something contrived, something fabricated, something faintly naff. But there were places where you could be brought in blindfold and you’d still be instantly aware of the energy of prayer.
The altar was of dark oak, its top a good four inches thick. It had on it a small golden cloth, a heavy gilt cross on a stand and two thick yellow candles in trays. Before it, a gold-coloured rug lay on the flagged floor and the ceiling was painted gold, like a chantry. There was an oak settle against the back wall. An incense-burner hung from what looked like a meat-hook in a corner and behind the altar was a tall picture involving a misty white figure with a down-pointing arm extending to form what could be a sword.
From a small alcove in the stone wall to their left, Jenny Box took down a box of cook’s matches, and moved to the altar.
‘When I contacted the previous owners… well, no, not them because they were only here two minutes, but the daughter of the people who’d owned Chapel House for about a half-century before that, she said they always knew there was something “funny” about this cellar, and in fact local people used to say it was haunted. The daughter said her parents just used it as storage space, for junk. They didn’t know its history – nobody seems to, but I don’t think that matters.’
‘No.’
‘I mean, I could tell straight off that there was something. I had it cleaned out completely, did most of it myself. Scrubbed for hours at the floor – the first time I’d scrubbed a floor in many, many years. It seemed like… an important thing to do. Like washing the feet of…’ She broke off and smiled almost bashfully. ‘It had obviously even been used as a coal cellar at one time. The walls were pretty filthy. So I started to scrub away at them, too. And that was when the cross appeared.’
Merrily looked around.
‘Oh, it’s not there now.’ Jenny Box struck a match. ‘It disappeared again, I’m afraid. There I was, scrubbing at the wall one day, and the plaster came off, and it left the exact, perfect shape of a cross, but when I came back the next morning all the rest of the plaster had fallen off. It wasn’t for anyone else, you see.’ Her faced tilted; she sought out Merrily’s eyes. ‘It was to show me,’ she said. ‘You know?’
Merrily said nothing. This was no place for scepticism. Although it was still cold, there seemed to be no intrusive air down here, and when Mrs Box lit the candles their flames rose elegantly and brought the painting behind the altar to flickering life. She saw a stormy sky over a church steeple and, parting the thunderclouds, the figure of white smoke with what was now clearly a naked sword.
‘It’s not exact,’ Jenny Box said. ‘A friend of mine did it in London. She’s a fashion designer, so I suppose the whole thing’s a bit glib and glossy, but she did her best with what I outlined to her.’
‘An angel?’
‘Well, someone said it must be the archangel Uriel, the one with the flaming sword, and perhaps there is something in that. I wish I could’ve painted it myself, but I’ve never been very
good that way. ’Twas all I could do to paint the walls.’
It was hard to imagine Jenny Box sweating in overalls, collecting those unavoidable emulsion spots on her delicate skin.
‘Well, I couldn’t let anyone else in. Not after I realized what it had been before. I couldn’t have vulgar fellers smoking and swearing down here, now could I?’
Jenny Box smiled down at Merrily, arms by her sides, her black dress simple and monastic, except for the way its velvet cord hung loose just above her hips. In this moment, Merrily was entirely sure that this woman had left the money, unpretentiously in the black plastic bin sack. And in the next moment, she recognized the church steeple in the painting. And the wooded hills behind it.
‘It’s…’
‘Oh, that part’s exact,’ Mrs Box said. ‘I gave her a fine set of postcards to work from.’
Merrily took a good hard look at the picture. It was about two feet by four, in a plain, matt-white wooden frame. The paint was probably acrylic, and it looked surreal now, like a Magritte – the church hard-edged, an almost-photographic image, no brush strokes either in the clouds. Airbrush, probably – very professional. She turned to ask a simple question: What does it signify?
Jenny Box had gone to sit on the oak settle, her hands folded primly on her lap, her face lambent like some Rembrandt saint.
Merrily saw that the question wasn’t going to be needed.
Three tanks raised, and still nothing. Relief for the Sandfords and two other householders, frustration for Mumford. They’d moved almost in a circle around Underhowle but had never gone into the village itself. The last Efflapure had fallen back suddenly into its pit, and Lol had twisted his ankle hurling himself out of the way.
‘One more,’ Mumford said, ‘and then likely we’ll call it a day.’ Like he’d been doing the digging.
At the last place, there’d been a bunch of curious villagers and this pitiful middle-aged couple from Monmouth whose nineteen-year-old daughter had been missing for five months. A relative in Ross had told them about a man being arrested and the police digging for bodies.
Anything, they said, was better than not knowing.
It was heartbreaking. And probably unnecessary, Lol thought. He was aching all over by then. Earlier, he’d listened to Mumford talking to Bliss on the phone, arranging for the couple to meet him.
‘When do you decide this isn’t working?’ Lol asked Mumford as they were unloading the gear for the fourth time. No point in appealing to Gomer, for whom this was personal.
‘Isn’t for me to decide,’ Mumford said. ‘Likely, the boss’ll turn up in person at some point.’
They were on the gravel forecourt of a tall Victorian stone house with an ‘Old Rectory’ nameplate on the gate. A woman of about twenty-five with short fair hair and an eyebrow ring was standing watching, hands on her narrow hips. After a while, she sashayed over to Lol.
‘You don’t really think Roddy’s a mass murderer, do you?’
‘Don’t actually know the bloke,’ Lol said.
‘He’s just a little weird.’
‘Is he?’
‘You people, if somebody’s weird they’re automatically some raging psychopath, right?’
‘I’m not a copper,’ Lol said. ‘He’s the copper.’
She looked over at Andy Mumford and rolled her eyes. ‘Forget it.’
Mumford went to meet a man coming out of the house. ‘Mr Crewe?’
‘Connor-Crewe. Piers. How’s it going, Inspector?’
Big guy – well, overweight, certainly. Fiftyish, with luxuriant grey-speckled hair and a wide, easy smile. He wore a denim shirt overhanging baggy corduroy trousers.
‘Sergeant, sir,’ Mumford said, in the resigned way that told you sergeant was as high as he was going and even that had been unexpected. ‘That’s Mr Parry over there. He’s a professional drainage contractor, he won’t take long, and he’ll leave your ground without a blemish.’
‘I’m sure that’s true.’ Mr Connor-Crewe beamed, his big, round face like the friendly planet in a space picture book Lol had owned as a kid. ‘Just as sure as I am that you’re all wasting your time here. Not that it’s my place to offer an opinion.’
‘At this stage, sir,’ Mumford said, a very slight eye-movement conveying what Lol judged to be intense interest, ‘we’re open to anyone’s opinion. Did you know Mr Lodge?’
Well, obviously he installed this set-up for me, and it’s worked efficiently enough so far.’
Gomer sniffed in contempt.
‘And he had an assistant, like your man here,’ Mr Connor- Crewe said, ‘and they were both very civil, very obliging.’
Which must have saved Mumford a question. At each of the other places, he’d asked if there’d been anyone helping Roddy Lodge. In each case it had been someone different, and, no, they hadn’t been there all the time. Mumford had said Lodge was known to use cheap, casual labour, usually pulling someone from what he said was a bottomless local pool of fit blokes claiming sickness benefit.
‘Or, rather, not like your man,’ Mr Connor-Crewe said. ‘In this case, the assistant was the – I believe late – Lynsey Davies.’
The young woman stared at him. ‘You never told me she was helping.’
‘Aha,’ said Connor-Crewe. ‘Lots of things I haven’t told you, my sweet.’
‘Shit, Piers,’ she said. ‘He might have dumped her here.’
‘He certainly might have killed her here, the way they were carrying on – violent arguments one minute, practically shagging in the mud the next.’
Mumford got out his notebook. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s have a proper chat, shall we, sir? In the house.’
At first, Lol had thought she must be Connor-Crewe’s daughter. Evidently not. She stayed outside with him and Gomer, after Mumford and his notebook had followed Connor-Crewe into the Old Rectory, watching them mark out a circle around the Efflapure, which was sunk into a paddock behind the house.
‘That was a shock, mind,’ she said. ‘Lynsey.’ She looked out across the paddock and another couple of fields to the tops of some houses: Underhowle. ‘We all knew Lynsey, in Ross. Everybody’s saying she was a slag. Which is… yeah, I suppose, dropping babies everywhere, but that’s not the whole story. She was smart.’
‘Who’s looking after them babbies now?’ Gomer said, as Lol uncovered the top of the globular tank.
She shrugged. ‘Who’s always looked after them? Grannies, ex-boyfriends, ex-boyfriends’ mums. Having kids never held Lynsey back. Ace at palming them off on people. “Can you just mind him for a hour?” And then she don’t come back for six weeks. You had to admire it, in a way. She had this fierce determination to experience everything she could get out of life. Used to buy these heavy books from Piers’s shop, which was how I got talking to her. I mean, she wasn’t stupid. When she wasn’t around any more we just figured she’d gone off with some bloke – could be anywhere. You just… couldn’t imagine her being dead, that’s all.’
‘If her wasn’t stupid’ – Gomer slid an oily tow-rope under one of the thick rubberized loops on top of the tank – ‘how come her wound up with Lodge?’
‘Dunno. Probably because he had a fair bit of money – like a lot of money compared to Lynsey’s usual men – and a fast car. She did use people. Let’s be honest, she was good at men.’
‘You said Lodge was weird.’ Lol stepped back from the tank, started to cut into the turf around it with his spade. He was wondering how deeply involved in all this Merrily might have become, because of Bliss.
‘Yeah, well, he is. You talk to people round here, they’ll tell you like… how he works at night, that kind of thing.’
‘Ar?’ Gomer came over. He got out his tobacco tin. There was one cigarette already rolled in there, and he offered it to the girl.
‘Cheers.’ She stuck it in her mouth; Gomer lit it for her.
‘Works a lot at night then, do he?’
‘It’s what people say. Bound to get all blown up
now, so like suddenly he’s become like this vampire.’ She took a long, needy drag and let the smoke out. ‘Piers and me were in the pub last night, in Underhowle. Nobody was talking about anything else, obviously, but the place was divided between the people who couldn’t believe he’d done a murder and the ones who’d always known he was a psycho. Like when he did Mike Sandford’s sewerage Lorna was uptight ’cause he was out there most of the night. They could see him prowling under the full moon, digging.’
‘That’s it for weird?’ Lol said. ‘He works nights?’
‘Well, you know, mood changes. Up in the clouds one day – drinks-are-on-me, chasing all the women. Next day he’s slinking around like he don’t want to know you or anybody.’
‘Like manic depression?’ Lol said.
‘Oh, sorry.’ She peered closely at him. ‘I didn’t realize you were a psychologist.’
Lol smiled sadly.
‘Sure you’re not a copper? I mean, you don’t look like a copper, but you don’t look like… whatever he is, either.’
‘No?’ Lol was disappointed; he hadn’t been this muddied-up in years. Not physically.
‘I do like to suss people – as a writer. Short stories, plays. Poetry, when I’m moved. Dennis Potter was going to look at my TV play – he lived in Ross, you know? But then he snuffed it.’
‘And your… has a bookshop?’
‘Piers? Yeah, in Ross. Second-hand, antiquarian. I work there couple of days a week, more in summer. Piers phoned me, said I might want to come up this afternoon – as a writer – because you were digging for bodies. He’s thoughtful like that.’ Something caught her eye. ‘Oh, look, the poor police can’t get a signal.’
Lol turned and saw Mumford had come out of the house, was backing away, staring at his mobile held at arm’s length. He ended up next to Gomer’s truck, the phone now tight to his ear.
‘Ariconium,’ the young woman said. ‘Last defensive outpost against the techno-invasion.’ She came right up to Lol. She wore a black fleece, the zip pushed halfway down apparently by the pressure of her breasts. ‘I’m Cola French.’
