To Dream of the Dead (53 page)

‘Try to have a good Christmas, Jane.’

‘Neither of us is going to, are we?’

He’d gone.

Jane leaned against the cubicle wall, holding the phone in front of her, tears in freeflow now.

P
ERIODICALLY, IN A
break between songs, while Lol was retuning, someone who recognised Merrily would lean across and whisper
Where’s Jane?
Usually, one of the Serpent people from Hereford. How did they know whose mother she was, out of uniform? Hoped to God she wasn’t on the CM website like Lol and Lucy.

‘We’re Coleman’s Meadow activists now.’ A guy in his sixties, completely bald, white beard, an earring with a red stone in it. ‘We lost on the Serpent, but those bastards won’t take the Meadow.’ He looked angry. ‘I’ll strap myself to one of the stones before I’ll let them take it away. Go on hunger strike – that always gets results if it en’t a terrorist.’

‘It’s important,’ Merrily said, ‘but it’s not worth a life.’

Wondering where she’d heard that.
Blore
. On the radio before he demoralised Jane. She could see him over by the bar, his dense hair tied back, presumably so it wouldn’t dangle in his beer. He seemed to be drinking a lot of beer and laughing a lot.

Unlike the Stookes, who weren’t talking to anyone, not even one another. Life, for the Stookes, must be tense and formless. What happened after you’d taken on the biggest target possible and would never know if you’d won until you died . . . and only then if you’d lost.

Merrily smiled. Stupid – she was looking at their lives from
her
perspective. Better go and talk to them afterwards.

Lol said, ‘I’m going to kind of hum, but if you imagine it as a cello, OK? Now. If you know Elgar’s Cello Concerto, the main bit goes like . . .’

She was proud of him. Totally in control, as if, performing, he was possessed by the spirit of an extrovert. Mouth close to the mike,
he hummed the rolling-hill melody that would always take her back to Whiteleafed Oak on the edge of the Malverns and would always be tinged with tragedy. Melancholy enough, already.

‘If you all want to hum along we can maybe cover up the fact that we don’t have a cello. Try it . . .’

They didn’t need asking twice. No need for the old hand behind the ear,
I can’t hear you
routine. Merrily thinking how she gigged every Sunday, and never captured this much attention. Maybe she needed to learn to play something.

Barry had found her a seat by the door. She drank a spritzer, finding it didn’t go too well with extra-strong mints. Nothing went with extra-strong mints except more mints.

But she knew this song and its origins, had been there at its birth. It was about how, close to the end, Elgar seemed to have lost his faith, his lifelong Catholicism. But all he really wanted, in Lol’s view, was to sidestep the complicated spiritual bureaucracy of Catholic death, the Catholic afterlife, have his spirit absorbed into the landscape that had given him his music . . . specifically, this music.

After a couple of minutes, Lol let the audience do the humming and began to build a guitar structure under it, finally picking up Elgar’s tune with his own words, the percussive rain behind it like he was singing from the eye of some inner storm.

Save me from the Angel of
The Agony. I want
No pomp
Or circumstance
I’ll take my chance
.

Lol’s voice dipping into a valley on
agony
. Then rising to welcome a dawning euphoria. He held up a hand to fade the humming. Merrily saw Eirion messing with the two amps and then, with the flat screen full of bubbling water, Lol’s voice rose up clear but distant, with a faint echo, as if from distant hills.

Where the Severn joins the Teme
I’ll drift downstream
And feel release
And sing the trees
Their own song
. . .

Lol and the lights went blurred. Merrily wiped her eyes discreetly, one at a time.

‘Didn’t think he’d mind too much,’ Lol said afterwards into the dying applause. ‘He was all right, Ed.’

‘That was amazing, but I didn’t fully get what it was about,’ the bald guy with the ruby said. ‘Dunno much about Elgar. What’s the Angel of the . . .?’

‘Agony.’

Lol, clearly loving this interplay with his audience, explained about Elgar’s attempt to glimpse his God in the choral masterpiece
The Dream of Gerontius
, from Newman’s epic poem about the progress of a soul through the various tiers of the Catholic afterlife.

‘So the Angel of the Agony is this mournful combination of sin eater and celestial advocate, pleading for the soul’s admission into Heaven. But close to the end Elgar’s Catholicism had kind of lost its grip, and when he was dying he told a friend that if he was ever walking in the Malvern Hills and he heard the tune you’ve just been humming . . . Ed said,
Don’t be afraid. It’ll just be me
. He’d told everybody he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at the confluence of the River Severn and the River Teme, but he was talked out of it.’

‘I’ve been to his grave,’ a woman said. ‘Little Malvern? It’s interesting the way his wife’s name is at the
top
of the stone, as if Elgar is bowing to the female principle in nature.’

‘Not sure about that,’ Lol said. ‘All I feel is he wanted to be part of the landscape, for all eternity, and . . . I think he probably is.’

‘In the end, that’s paganism . . .’ The long straight hair identified Sara, the Dinedor witch from the
Sunday Telegraph
. ‘Or at least pantheism. And that line about singing the trees’ songs, that’s from what it says under the Elgar statue in Hereford? Hearing the trees singing his music . . . or is he singing theirs? Hey, why not?’

‘Actually,’ Elliot Stooke said, ‘the biography I read suggested very strongly that Elgar had lost his faith completely. The idea that he reverted to some sort of paganism is . . . a bit of speculation?’

‘Probably is,’ Lol said.

‘And he was using the idea of his ghost haunting the Malverns as a metaphor, surely?’

‘Metaphors on his deathbed?’ Lol said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘If you believe he was channelling the spirit of the landscape,’ Sara the witch called out, ‘the whole thing makes—’

‘Another charming myth,’ Stooke said.

‘All I know . . .’ the bald guy stood up ‘. . . is that I came out of a very bad experience today with the clear conviction that if we lose our spiritual bond with the land there’ll be nothing left of us as a nation.’

‘Part of the earth. I’ll go with that.’ Bill Blore was on his feet, tankard clamped to his chest. ‘Bury me in a Bronze Age fucking longbarrow with a flint axe in my hand, that’ll do me.’

When the laughter died, Lol said, ‘Well, Elgar was here, we know that . . . and there’s even evidence that he visited Coleman’s Meadow when Alfred Watkins . . .’ he smiled at Bill Blore ‘. . . found the ley running through it.’

Merrily couldn’t make out Blore’s reaction. She spotted a few local people, including Brenda Prosser and her daughter, Ann Marie – Jim still working in the shop.

‘But if anyone really inhabits
this
landscape . . .’ Lol stroked a chord ‘. . . we’re probably looking at a woman.’

The lights dipped and the room went quiet as the only known image of Lucy Devenish took form on the screen.

Merrily was startled.

It was the lack of definition that produced the effect, and the way the brown tones of the picture faded into the shadows of the crooked old room. And Eirion had rephotographed it, so it was digital now.

Pixels. It was pixels.

Lucy middle-distant in her poncho, the blur of her face as she tried to avoid the camera, the amplified grain on the blown-up photo converted into pixels . . . fragments of the essence of Lucy separating and re-forming, suggestive of movement, creating new splinters of some old wildness in those falcon’s eyes.

‘Christ,’ someone said, ‘the old girl just turned her head.’

Someone pushed urgently past Merrily’s table and she looked up in the dimness and saw, in Mathew Elliot Stooke’s face, the
confusion of expressions she’d seen and been unable to work out just before she left Cole Barn last night, after Stooke had said:

Some kind of Stone Age warrior. Short cloak or a skin
. . .

Merrily rose abruptly and followed him out.

T
HEY WERE SITTING
in Bliss’s car, watching the diminishing tail lights of the police car containing Terry Stagg, two uniforms and Steve Furneaux on his way to Gaol Street to be processed.

Now they were alone, Bliss dared to breathe. Let it come out in one big spasm of relief, his body arching over the wheel and then falling back into the seat.

‘We did well,’ Annie Howe said.

She was staring through the windscreen like somebody interested in rain.

‘He can still get away with this, mind,’ Bliss said. ‘He hasn’t killed anybody
personally
. He’s merely given his professional advice, and a committee decision’s been made. We’re contemplating the dark underbelly of democracy, Annie.’

It was the way things were going. People realising how little time they had left to get rich before the planet melted.

‘Let’s go over it,’ Howe said, ‘and then make a decision. Two men to talk to. We either bring them in or we go to them.’

‘If they’re where I think they are neither of those options is gonna be exactly a walkover . . . Or in fact a frigging walkover might be
exactly
what we’re looking at.’

What had finally smashed Steve’s defences was dropping those names. Experimental, taking a chance, but he’d been fairly confident.

‘Where did you
get
those names?’ Annie said.

‘Got Blore from Steve himself at that first meeting in Gilbies. He was their consultant on the Serpent. I remember him saying Blore didn’t help an awful lot . . .
considering we were paying him
.’

‘Hereforward were paying him?’

‘And then, while still acting as consultant to Hereforward, he publicly slags off the council for its attitude towards the Dinedor Serpent. Lunacy . . . they’re never going to employ him again, are they? All right, he’s making a bomb from telly, but it still didn’t feel right to me. Didn’t seem too significant at the time, mind.’

Annie Howe looked at him. She was snuggled into a corner under the seat-belt hook, her face in shadow.

‘Why did Hereforward
need
a consultant on the Dinedor Serpent?’

‘In case the city might be missing out on a massive tourist attraction. Fortunately for the council, the
idea
of the Serpent is more exciting than what you can see.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘So William Blore was publicly
pro
-Serpent while secretly advising Hereforward that it was unlikely to make the county much money. What does that
tell
us?’

‘Shows he’s capable of double-dealing. But, more to the point, think of the technical advice he’d be able to offer anyone planning to take out Ayling and direct the blame towards the Serpent supporters. The quartz glittering in the head? The body in the river?’

‘It’s not enough. You could get all that from the Internet.’

‘It rebounded nicely on Steve, though, Annie. Soon as we throw him the word
Blore
, he starts to roll over.’

‘True.’

Howe patted her wet, ash-blonde hair, Bliss finding himself wondering for the first time if it was natural.

‘So there’s something else,’ he said. ‘Something we’re missing.’

‘Something we don’t know but perhaps he thinks we do. Connected with the second name you dropped on him?’

‘Lyndon Pierce. Blore’s in charge of the dig at Ledwardine, where Pierce is the local councillor. When I first talked to Steve in Gilbies he said, the
local councillor wanted us to intervene
. I thought he meant Pierce wanted them to stop Blore getting the Ledwardine contract, maybe because he’d attract too much publicity . . . to an excavation Pierce was hoping would be inconclusive.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘Pierce is backing a plan to put expensive housing on that site. He doesn’t want there to be anything exciting under there that
might spell conservation. Furneaux told me he’d asked Hereforward for help, but they weren’t overfussed because it was just a housing scheme, not like a major new road. However, if what I was told is right, this housing scheme is the key to this massive redevelopment and expansion of Ledwardine.’

‘This is from Mrs Watkins, is it?’

‘I don’t know what you’ve got against that woman.’

‘Ask her what she’s got against me.’

Bliss smiled. Women were weird. Like when the WPC, Sammy Nadel, went up to tell Yasmin it looked like Steve would be spending the night in town, Yasmin apparently just acknowledged it and went back to sleep. No big deal. Merry Christmas.

‘All right,’ Bliss said. ‘Officially Hereforward isn’t helping Lyndon. But you’ve gorra bunch of mates here. Coke-buddies. One of whom is the archaeologist in charge of the Ledwardine dig.’

‘
Coke-buddies
. God.’

‘Only buddies until the shit hits the fan. Furneaux is pretty sure in his mind that if we’re talking to Blore and Pierce, both of them are going to try and hang the whole deal on him.’

‘Probably quite rightly. He’s the ideas man, the guy who’s turned Hereforward into a dirty-tricks department. He’s . . . what do they call it? An
enabler
?’

‘He thinks
out of the box
. But this time the lid’s coming down too fast and he takes a wild leap. He’s probably regretting he told us about the second contract, because I really
don’t
think he knows who it is or why. And if he’s already too late, that’s gonna make it a whole lot worse for him than if he’d kept his mouth shut.’

I swear I’ve told you all I know
. . .