December (57 page)

      
He sat at the wheel several minutes with the engine running,
shaking as violently as the gearstick, before forcing himself to go into a
phone kiosk, feeling in his pocket for the out-of-date diary in which he'd
written Kaufmann's and Stephen Case's numbers.

      
Trying to call Case, it was just like being in one of those
blurred, inexact dreams; his fingers kept hitting the wrong buttons and he'd
have to keep starting over.

      
He felt pitifully grateful when the crisp female voice
answered TMM?' And almost a warm affection for the cool, offhand, 'Dave, glad
you called. You need to know that Simon St John's booked you a room at a pub
called ... have you got a pen?'

      
He must have been looking strange because, when he left the
phone box, clutching his diary, an elderly couple stared at him - he a retired colonel
type with a tight, grey military moustache and she with knife-crease trousers,
silk scarf and, around her fine, white coiffure ... a very pronounced quivering
nimbus of deepening purple and black.

      
No. No! No! No! The old couple staring at him and then turning
and hurrying away, Dave laid his head against the cool, wet windscreen of his
Fiat.

      
December again. Maybe, this time of year, tension thrust his
psychic circuitry into overload, feeding his mind with misinformation. Maybe
his eyes were going, he needed glasses. Maybe he had a brain tumour.

      
nobody said it teas
gonna be easy, Dave. Sometimes you just gorra take the rough with the rough.

      
'Bugger off,' Dave said.

The Castle Inn was on the
old Hereford road, eight miles east of the Abbey, almost under the Skirrid.
Despite its name, it was no older than the century, a bright, compact place; it
felt OK.
      
Simon decided it would do.

      
Going directly to the Abbey would be beyond crazy; they needed
to meet, talk things over, work out some kind of strategy. Maybe the closeness
of the Skirrid would help.
         
His
head felt like a spin-drier. Everything was happening at whirlwind speed, and
yet it seemed as if time had been slowed, the machine pre-programmed to
accommodate everything that needed to be arranged.

      
Sile Copesake had been on the phone at ten a.m. Calling from
where? From the Abbey? He hadn't even thought to ask. Sile had told him, in
essence, that the other members of the Philosopher's Stone had been contacted
and were ready to record within the week. Sile had given him the number of a
man called Stephen Case at TMM, who would be co-ordinating the operation.

      
Simon couldn't believe the way it was happening. In his admittedly
limited experience, recording sessions usually took months to set up. He felt
as if he was spiralling in a vortex. Which was exactly how it had happened last
time, fourteen years ago. Whisked into Goff's magical new studio. The psychology:
don't give them time to think too hard.

      
The other difference being that, then, they'd believed it was
safe. Holy ground. Now they knew nowhere was safe, least of all the Abbey. This
time, they were going to have to be prepared. Physically and spiritually.

      
Hence, the Castle Inn. He'd called Stephen Case, given him
very detailed directions. Said he would be booking four rooms; no way could
this band be plunged cold into the Abbey. To his slight surprise. Case had
eventually said OK; he'd pass on the information.

      
Needing for there to be at least one technical difficulty,
some small moral or ethical hitch, he'd called his bishop. And the Bishop had
said, to his incredulous dismay, 'Simon, what an absolutely splendid idea, I had
absolutely no idea you were a musician. I think it's awfully important for the
Church to be involved in aspects of youth-culture, and ... I say, let's tell
the Press!'

      
Simon had talked him out of that one, at least. For the present.

When he got back to the
vicarage after checking out the Castle Inn and its ambience he found an
envelope behind the door. No stamp.

      
SIMON, it said.

      
And over the top of that,

      
PRIVATE. URGENT.

      
The note inside was handwritten.

I've been
trying to get hold of you since last night. If you don't know already. I've had
one of the brown candles analysed. It's believed to be made from animal fat,
possibly human. I'm afraid I was forced to call in the police. Expect a visit
from Supt. GA Jones. Try and see me before he sees you, for God's sake.

                                          
Eddie

      
Simon read the note twice.

      
'I really thought it was simply tallow,' he whispered, as if
the policeman was already questioning him. 'Tallow, brown with age.'

      
He went to the study window to check the lane.
      
Nobody about, thank God. Quietly,
he let himself out of the house and ran to his car.

'Thought I was leaving it
behind, see, transferring to Gwent,' mused Gwyn Arthur to Eddie Edwards over
pints of Welsh bitter in the Dragon.
      
'Filthy weather?'

      
'Not exactly that. Not only that. The things that happened in
the West that you had problems explaining in a police report. I thought that
here, being so close to the Border and barely an hour from Cardiff, it would
all be so much less ... do you know the word "numinous"?'

      
Eddie Edwards, never a man to throw his academic background in
anyone's face, said he thought he probably did.

      
'Well, like that,' Gwyn Arthur said, cleaning out his pipe
with his car key. 'Know why I sent myself on this job instead of one of my
youngsters? Because I had a feeling, Eddie. A feeling.'

      
He craned his neck to see out of the window, where the pub's
tiny car park went into a drastic slope towards the valley road. 'Where's that
go to?'

      
'Abaty Ystrad Ddu'
said Eddie, 'to quote the bilingual sign which disappeared last year and was
never replaced. Now, as far is the Welsh Office highways department is concerned,
it goes to the heart of nowhere.'

      
Gwyn nodded. 'Feelings,' he said. 'Not much place for feelings
any more in police work. If it isn't on the National Computer we don't want to
know.'

      
'Like everything else, these days.'

      
'My day off, this is. Can't leave well alone, can I? Your
vicar, now, think he knows all about those candles? Why is he avoiding me?'

      
'You think he might know something about it?'
      
'And the rest,' said Gwyn Arthur.
'And the rest.'
      
'And what do you think the rest is?'

      
'I think,' said Gwyn Arthur, 'that we shall probably see. And
soon. The Heart of Nowhere", you said? Very good. I like that.'

I

Old
Love

Out of the brown hedges,
above the fields of sheep and cows, a hill jutted like a cut thumb. It jolted
Dave; it was the first landmark he'd recognised since crossing the Severn
Bridge.

      
The Skirrid. The Holy Hill, said to have been split by an
earthquake or a bolt of lightning when the darkness fell over Calvary. You
never forgot the Skirrid.

      
Rusting, late-afternoon clouds were setting respectfully
around the summit of the hill. It did nothing to dispel the dream state.

      
And at that moment, in this narrow, switchback lane, the
Fiat's engine began to die. Dave trod the accelerator flat to the rubber mat,
but the energy was draining away into a parched kind of death-rattle.

      
He didn't say
shit
or anything like that. He didn't shake the wheel or thump the dash. He felt
curiously calm when the old car finally gave up the ghost on the single-track
country lane, within pushing distance of a gated field-entrance.

      
Dave shrugged. He got out, let the handbrake off, walked the
car down a gentle gradient into the field entrance, applied the hand brake,
locked the car and left it there, his suitcase in the boot.

      
And walked off along the road.

      
He knew it must be getting cold, it was, after all, December,
but it didn't feel cold. He was wearing an old grey cotton jacket over a
polo-neck sweater.

      
The deserted lane led in almost a direct line towards the
Skirrid. It was as if some form of magnetism in the rock had stilled the
engine. Like he was destined to do this stretch on foot. Like it was all meant.

      
Dave walked towards the mountain. It only looked like a
mountain because it was on its own in the fields, the only mark on the sky, a
solitary pilgrim in a wintry wasteland.

      
There ought to be a sense of sacred peace, but there wasn't.
Close up, the hill looked crooked, crippled. There was a cindery projection,
like a scab, a wound only partly-healed.
          
More
than anything, the feeling the Skirrid was giving off was one of unrest. Dave remembered
seeing it for the first time in 1980. Max Goff had sent each of them a
guidebook to the area to prove what a safe and sanctified spot this was. The
booklet told how local people had collected holy soil from the God-smitten
hill. How tons of the stuff had been carried down and dumped in the foundations
of churches, the way alleged splinters from the One True Cross had once been
handed around.

      
There was supposed to have been a chapel up near the top
dedicated to St Michael, God's senior bruiser, but there wasn't much left of
it, apparently.

      
And it just didn't feel holy.

      
Maybe these legends were thrown up not so much by Christianity
as ancient paganism. Other places, it was less exalted - you had a strange-looking
chunk out of a hill, it was caused by some giant with big boots. Here, inside a
wide circle of medieval castles and abbeys, it had to be an Act of God. Dismayed
by developments in the Middle East, the Almighty decides to punch a hole in a
small mountain in South Wales. Divine logic.

      
The nearness of the Skirrid made him think of the Abbey half a
dozen miles the other side. And that led to thoughts of Moira Cairns and an
image of a woman trailing a guitar along a beach, the word
deathoak
scrawled in the sand, and the hideous bonnet and an echo
of Prof Levin asking, after hearing the Black Album, if she was still alive and
everything.

      
And am I ever gonna see
you again?

      
I doubt it

      
I doubt
it.

      
Bloody song kept drifting into his head. He
hated
that song. That song was the worst
thing he'd ever done.

      
can't take it back now,
Dave.

      
'Shut up,' he screamed at the song locked in his brain. 'Shut the
fuck up, will you?'

      
yeh, that was about the
size of it. If you can't do better than that, shurrup. It was very hurtful.

      
He had to laugh. 'You're a bastard, John.'

      
famous for it. You read
that one about me takin' the piss out of cripples in the street? In the Pool
that'd be, or maybe it was Hamburg. Don't remember it meself, I was probably
pissed.

      
'I didn't mean it, you know.'

      
on a Bad Day? Course you
meant it.

      
'Well, all right. I did mean it. At the time.*

      
On a Bad Day. The words written down, for the first and last
time, on the torn-off lid of a box of Maltesers. Hadn't eaten a Malteser from
that day to this.

      
Chorus line,

           
And are we ever
gonna see you
           
Ever gonna see you again?
           
I doubt it
           
I doubt it.