To Dream of the Dead (23 page)

She stood panting on the edge of the pavement. Her hood had been blown back, her hair was soaked and water was dripping into her eyes as she walked miserably into Church Street.

Dawkins, you watched him on TV, you sensed the sneer.
Come on
, you felt him saying, with a certain embittered weariness,
hate me. Hate me because you know I’m right
.

But Stooke . . . Stooke was nothing like his book. Polite, defer-ential, self-deprecating. God, she’d almost liked him. Maybe
had
liked him.

She walked into the square, by the side of the Christmas tree, not yet lit, although shop lights blazed defiantly. No human life on the cobbles. It was one of those days when you wouldn’t even notice the onset of darkness.

And somehow she’d allowed Mathew Stooke to interview her. Done a few interviews with journalists in the past; there was always curiosity about deliverance. What they’d later written was sometimes cynical but usually fair.

But Stooke didn’t do articles, he did books, and he didn’t do
fair
. Bliss had said,
He wants a bit of privacy to finish his next . . . whatever shite he’s working on now
. Even Lol had warned her to leave him alone. But she couldn’t, could she? She’d taken his presence personally.
All the picturesque backwaters
. Just had to go and find him, put herself through the test.

And now he’d contrived to interview her. Just like his wife had interviewed Jane.

Merrily hurried into the drive, past a parked car, both its doors opening. When she reached the front door, she half-turned to find her key and found two people behind her in the wet and muddied half-light.

A woman in a bulky blue fleece and a woollen hat. A blond-haired man in his twenties, ready with his ID.

‘Mrs Watkins?’

‘Yes?’

‘DI Brent, West Mercia CID. This is DS Dowell. May we come in?’

Dowell?
Karen
Dowell? Pushing wet hair out of her eyes, Merrily peered at the woman: stocky, pink-cheeked, thirtyish. Bliss’s bagman, right? Bliss always spoke well of Karen. And yet . . .

She wasn’t smiling; she looked tense, her face overlaid in Merrily’s thoughts with stark and grainy images from dark dramas and fly-on-the-wall police documentaries.

And one recalled instant of frozen reality.
May we come in?

When they said that it was never good news.

W
HEN
J
ANE GOT
off the bus, the rain was lighter, and she didn’t mess around: throwing her airline bag over her shoulder and hurrying across the square, under the lych-gate and into the churchyard, where she stood for a moment with her hands either side of the curve of Lucy’s gravestone, feeling the energy coursing up both arms.

All things in their proper place
, the verse concluded,
My soul doth best embrace
.

A place of energy, not death. She had a picture of Lucy’s grave up on the Coleman’s Meadow website now, alongside the only picture of Lucy because, whatever was being achieved here, this woman deserved the credit.

‘We’re in this together, right?’

Jane gave the headstone a final squeeze, for luck, and ran off through the churchyard and the wicket gate into the orchard. Leys should be travelled. Every time she came this way,
with a purpose
, she was reinforcing her links with the ancestors and the life-force of the village. The orchard had been the life-force and the church had been at the centre of the orchard, Lucy telling Jane,
Which came first, I wouldn’t like to say, though I suspect the orchard
. She’d said that perhaps there’d been a pre-Christian shrine where the church now stood. As if she’d felt it, or perhaps the presence of the buried stones, not so far away in Coleman’s Meadow. The way Jane had surely felt it on a summer night on Cole Hill.

Hurrying now along the slippery path through the ruins of the orchard, the light almost gone, the path obliterated by sodden dead leaves, but her feet knew the way. Her heart, too. When she’d got drunk, one long-ago night, on cider, Lucy had said,
The cider’s the blood of the orchard. It’s in
your
blood now
.

And although the orchard was looking derelict and moribund, the blood was pounding by the time Jane reached the edge of Coleman’s Meadow. Well out of breath, but the excitement fizzing up as soon as she saw all the vehicles.

Mainly 4×4s and a van with
Capstone
on its flank. All parked on the edge of the meadow in an area cordoned off with orange tape. They’d taken away the old stile and ripped down the brutal strands of barbed wire that Pierce had had put up to protect the proposed building site. There was now a less hostile green wire fence with rustic posts and a galvanised farm-gate, and it was open.

Walking through the new entrance, Jane saw that khaki-coloured tents had gone up and two portable lavatories between the two caravans, which had been there for a few days now. About a dozen people were wandering around and looking up at the charcoal sky.

And Jane . . . standing on the edge of the meadow her gaze inevitably drawn towards Cole Hill’s dark Iron Age ramparts behind naked trees, Jane was bathed in a moment of what James Joyce and those guys had called
epiphany
.

Like the long, heavy velvet curtains were going back to reveal the next, crucial stage of her life. This sense of pure joy. And she was fully aware of it. How often did that happen?

‘Got a pass, have we, my darling?’

The guy who’d come out of the smaller caravan wasn’t much older than Jane. He was wiry, had gelled hair and wore leather jeans and a security armband. Wandering over, kind of springy and officious, but Jane was too high to be brought down by some jobsworth.

‘Pass? Listen, I
live
here. What sort of—?’

‘Hey! Whoa! I dunno! They just told me to be sure and keep the riff-raff out.’

‘I look like riff-raff?’

‘I’m not sure. Don’t move.’ He came up close, smelling of something pungent in the way of aftershave. ‘Hmm.’ Putting on a thoughtful look and then breaking out a black-stubbled smile. ‘You could always bribe me. What you got on tonight?’

‘She’s feeding her bloody kids, what do you think?’ a guy in a suit said. ‘Probably doing her homework, Gregory. Back
off
, you randy oik.’

The security guy stepped back, put on this stiff, solemn face and saluted. ‘Whatever you say, Mr Blore, sir.’

‘
Professor
Blore, you little fuck!’

The security guy grinned, and Jane jumped back as the man in the suit turned and examined her, and – wow – it
was
. Hadn’t recognised him, not in the suit and tie, and with his hair brushed. His accent was posher, too, encased in a bigger and deeper voice. Resonant, Jane thought. Out of the earth.

She saw that Coops was with him, looking young, wispy and spare, because Bill Blore really
was
a big guy. Bigger than on TV. Well, certainly wider, built like Hadrian’s Wall or something. He’d grown his hair – like for the winter? – and it was swept back and tied in a ponytail, and you didn’t see many of those any more.

Coops said, ‘Bill, this is Jane Watkins.’

Maybe she blushed. She certainly felt like blushing. In fact, oh God, she felt like running away.

She didn’t move.

‘Jane.’

His face was just like on the box, good-looking in this kind of swarthy way, his eyes maybe just a bit more bulgy, his smile . . . fun. She’d seen that smile so many times, usually when he’d proved the geophysics guys wrong, taken a gamble and they’d found some Roman’s thigh bone in
Trench One
.

‘Hi,’ Jane said.

It came out like the smallest mouse-squeak.

‘Uh, it was Jane who . . .’ Coops giving Bill Blore an unsure kind of glance ‘. . . first got the idea there might be something here?’

‘Cooper, I
know
.’ Bill Blore bent, this big, callused hand coming out. ‘Jane, it’s a privilege to meet you.’ The hand closing around Jane’s like the bucket of a JCB as he turned to Coops. ‘Where’s Declan?’

‘I think he’s putting his gear away.’

‘Why does that bastard always go to earth when it goes dark? I
like
dark. We do have
lights
, don’t we?’

‘I think he’s put those away, too.’

‘Arse,’ Bill Blore said. ‘I was rather thinking we might shoot Jane.’

‘I think quite a lot of people would go along with that,’ Coops said.

Jane frowned, but Bill Blore didn’t get it. He looked up at the sky, then back at Jane.

‘All right. Tomorrow, then. What are you doing tomorrow, Jane?’

‘Erm, nothing. That is, like . . . whatever you want?’

‘What
I
want is to keep it in sequence.’ Bill Blore turned back to Coops. ‘If it starts with Jane, then that’s where
we
should start, before the site gets too mucked up.’

‘Right,’ Coops said.

‘How about ten o’clock? Ten a.m., Jane, that OK for you? We’ll shoot you at the top of the hill or something.’

‘You mean . . .’ The sodden ground below Jane’s muddied school shoes had become suddenly unsteady. ‘For, like . . . TV? For your programme?’

‘Well, it’s certainly not going to be for young Gregory’s private DVD collection.’

‘Wow,’ Jane said. ‘I mean . . . sure. I’ll be here. I mean, I didn’t really think you’d want to . . .’

‘We’ll get you on the hill, and you can take us through the story of how you found the stones, yah?’

‘Well, it wasn’t
just
me.’

‘Sweetheart . . .’ Bill Blore put his big hands on her shoulders, looked into her eyes, his own eyes brown as lubricating oil. ‘For the purposes of my film, it
was
just you.’ He looked up. ‘Look, excuse me, there’s a guy I need to grab . . .’

Spinning away, raising a hand to somebody, and Jane thought of something important.

‘But I can still help . . . can’t I?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Neil said I could probably help? With the dig? Like I don’t expect to be allowed a trowel or anything, but I could . . . you know, carry stuff around, take messages.’

‘Oh . . . absolutely,’ Bill Blore said. ‘We’re fighting the weather on this dig, so we’ll need all the help we can get. Excuse me, OK?’

As he tramped off, his suit trousers tucked into tan leather boots, Coops came and stood next to Jane.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Jane said. ‘I know, don’t get carried away. He’s a bit of a presence, though, isn’t he?’

Watching Bill Blore striding across the dark meadow, planting a hand on some guy’s shoulder, giving him instructions on something.

‘Yeah,’ Coops said. ‘A presence.’

Jane felt a bit sorry for him, remembering the afternoon last summer when she’d followed him here. When the grass had been all churned up after Lyndon’s Pierce’s bid to destroy the straight track, making the meadow – Pierce thought – unsuitable for anything but building on. Remembering Coops’s excitement as he’d shown her those first partly exposed stones.

Jane had been like,
These are real, actual prehistoric standing stones
? And Coops – she was always going to remember this – had said,
I’d stake my future career on it
.

And Jane, beyond euphoric, had, in that moment, fallen just slightly in love with him. Seemed a long time ago now.

‘He’s really ready to go tomorrow?’

‘So he insists, Jane. He seems to’ve got it scheduled for early in the next series of
Trench One
– and that starts in the New Year.’

‘Wow, that’s tight.’

‘I don’t think the ratings were fantastic for the last series. Too many big digs that yielded a couple of pottery shards and not a lot else. He needs something spectacular, and he’s not going to let the weather or Christmas stop him getting it.’

They watched an orange-coloured digger manoeuvring through the entrance. Shame they couldn’t’ve employed Gomer, but Jane supposed they needed somebody used to archaeological procedure.

‘Tell you one thing, Coops –
he
’s not going to let Pierce get away with moving the stones, is he? They’ve lost the Serpent, he’s not going to let us lose this.’

‘I never count on anything,’ Coops said.

It started to rain, but not too heavily. Nothing was too heavy tonight.

‘Hey . . . I’m going to be on
Trench One
, Coops. He did
say
that, didn’t he? I mean, I didn’t just dream it?’

‘No.’ Coops let a smile fade through. ‘No, you didn’t dream it. And by early spring I’d guess you’ll be having your picture taken next to the raised stones.’

‘Makes you kind of shiver to think about it,’ Jane said.

Jane walked back on to the square to find it aglow. The fake gaslamps reflected in the swimming cobbles, warm amber light in the mullioned windows of the Black Swan. Plus the Christmas tree’s lights, just white ones this year – more sophisticated, apparently, which was incomer bollocks, but Jane couldn’t be annoyed about anything tonight.

Mum’s car was in the vicarage drive, and there was another one outside. Jane let herself in through the side door, near the back stairs, and slipped into the kitchen just as a man and a woman were going out the other way, through to the hall, watched by Mum, still in her wet coat.