To Dream of the Dead (6 page)

‘Anything?’

‘Nothing dramatic so far, boss. Problem is, most of the neighbours are elderly people. Almshouses, you know? Doors locked, curtains drawn, tellies on, mugs of Horlicks.’

‘CCTV?’

‘Couple of possibles. One or two iffy hoodies. Trouble is, in this weather everybody’s a hoodie. A live witness would be nice.’

‘Keep at it. Somewhere there’s an old dear who sees all. I want her.’

Preferably before Howe arrived with the entourage.

‘Er . . .’ Karen trying not show excitement. ‘Actually right, is it, what they’re saying?’

‘Well, yeh.’ Bliss accepted a Polo mint from Gerry Rowbotham. ‘Does indeed begin to look like it. So much for gangland, eh?’

‘God,’ Karen said. ‘What happens now?’

‘It gets corporate. Doesn’t it, Gerry?’

‘Francis,’ Gerry Rowbotham said, ‘You haven’t actually
said
. . .’

‘What?’

‘What’s happened to . . . you know, what they’ve done to his eyes?’

‘Ah, yeh,’ Bliss said. ‘The eyes.’

You didn’t need to be much of a detective to know that the thing with the eyes was going to be central.

But we should not criticise councillors because of their ineptitude. We wouldn’t berate an idiot for not comprehending quantum theory
.

Reader’s letter to the
Hereford Times
,
February 2008

T
HE HEATING, SUCH
as it was, was due to kick in at seven, for a strict one and a half hours. A cost-of-oil thing. You could get twenty-five per cent of your fuel costs from the parish, for business use of the vicarage, but Merrily had never bothered. Stupid, probably, but too late to start now, at these prices. So she and Jane had cut back. Lost the old Aga, for a start.

Merrily moved rapidly around the kitchen, putting the kettle on, activating the toaster, feeding Ethel, and then running back into the hall, calling up from the bottom of the stairs.

‘Flower?’

Her lips could hardly frame the word, all the nerves in her face deadened by the cold. On the wall by the door, Jesus Christ looked down from Holman Hunt’s
Light of the World
with a certain empathy, obviously not drawing much heat from his lantern.

‘Jane!’

The kid was definitely up. She’d been wandering around at least half an hour ago. Probably trying for stealth, but when there were only the two of you in a big old vicarage you developed an ear for creaks.

No reply from up there, no sound of radio or running water. Merrily went back to the kitchen and cracked three eggs into a bowl. Tom Parson’s funeral was at eleven at Hereford Crem. Old Tom, local historian, one-time editor of the parish magazine, now the third village death in a fortnight. Another funeral, another empty cottage up for grabs at a crazy price, removal vans more common in this village now than buses.

The cold came for her again, and she went scurrying back into the hall.

‘Jane!’

Nothing. Merrily pulled her robe together and ran upstairs, two flights, to what Jane liked to call her apartment, in the attic. A big bedsit, essentially, with all the kid’s spooky books, her desk, her stereo, her CDs. The door was hanging open. Merrily snapped on the light and saw the duvet in a heap, one pillow on the floor.

What was
this
about? Jane waking up aggrieved because her craven parent hadn’t stood up at last night’s meeting and fought for Coleman’s Meadow? She hadn’t
seemed
annoyed last night, but Jane . . . one day she might become vaguely predictable, no signs of that yet.

Merrily sat on an edge of the bed, wondering what it would be like this time next year when Jane was gone. Was she really going to carry on here on her own? With Lol on
his
own in Lucy’s old house? If they put this place on the market, the Church could clean up.
The Old Vicarage, Ledwardine, 17th century, seven bedrooms, guest-house potential
. One day they’d do it, transfer the vicar to one of the estate houses, and on mornings like this it didn’t seem such a bad idea.

A videotape was projecting from the vintage VCR under Jane’s analogue TV. Give the kid her due, she’d never pined for home cinema – on a vicar’s stipend, still many years away.

The tape was labelled
T-1 Feb
. Recorded last winter, long before Jane had been drawn towards a career in archaeology.
Trench One
was never less than watchable but not exactly crucial viewing. Why this one now?

Oh, and you’ll never guess
– the kid calling back casually over her shoulder as she went upstairs to bed last night –
who’s going to be in charge of the dig
. Merrily waiting in vain for a name, but Jane always liked suspense.

Activating the VCR and the TV, Merrily shoved in the tape and watched pre-credit shots of a sinister grey landcape under a sky tiered with clouds like stacked shelves.

A man appeared, solid, bulky, shot from below the tump he was standing on.
Trench One
had three regular presenters who took turns to direct an excavation, present a different viewpoint, argue over the results. It was about conflict and competition.

‘So we’ve studied the reports of the original 1963 dig . . .’

He was wearing some kind of bush shirt, with badges sewn on, an Army beret and jeans with ragged holes in the knees. In case anyone had any doubts, the caption spelled out:

Prof. William Blore
.

‘. . . been over the geophysics, taken a stack of aerial pictures, and it now seems pretty clear to me that this is where we need to sink . . .’ Lavish grin splashing through smoky stubble. ‘
Trench One!
’

Blore jumping down from the tump and standing for a moment rubbing his hands like he couldn’t wait to get into the soil, and then the sig tune coming up in a storm of thrash-metal as he slid on his dark glasses and people began to gather around him.

Young people, his students.
Trench One
had begun as an Open University programme on BBC 2. Very rapidly acquiring a cult following, which built and built until they gave it peak screening. The format had altered slightly: Blore as guru, channelling youthful vigour. Merrily recalled a profile in one of the Sunday magazines describing him as
genial, profane and disarmingly intolerant
.

She stopped the tape. Red herring, surely. No way would Coleman’s Meadow be put into the hands of the man who’d told
BBC Midlands Today
that anyone who thought the Bronze Age builders of the Dinedor Serpent were primitive obviously hadn’t met the philistines running Herefordshire Council.

Wondering how
genial, profane and disarmingly intolerant
might translate.

‘What do
you
think, Lucy?’

She looked up at the framed photo over a stack of Jane’s esoteric books. An elderly woman in her winter poncho. The wide-brimmed hat throwing a tilted shadow across bird-of-prey features blurred by the process of turning away. Jane had found the picture in the vestry files and cleaned it up, had copies made and framed the original.

The only known portrait of Lucy Devenish who, like the old Indian warriors she’d so resembled, had probably thought cameras could steal your soul.

Merrily thought the picture looked unusually grey and flat this morning, lifeless.

The river was still frothing like cappuccino in the lamplight, but at least he wasn’t going anywhere new.

And the rain had eased. There was some ground mist, but the sky was clearing. Looking up, Jane saw the morning star pulsing like a distant lamp.

A breathing space. She walked slowly back up Church Street towards the square. Most of the guys at school hated getting up in the morning, but she’d never found it a problem. Around dawn you were more receptive to . . . impressions.

Was that weird? Was
she
weird? Over the last couple of years, she’d done all the usual stuff – been totally hammered on cider, got laid – but somehow it wasn’t enough. Was she alone at Moorfield High in thinking it wasn’t enough?

Probably.

There were very few lights in Church Street, none in Lucy’s old house where Lol lived now. Sometimes, pre-dawn, you’d see him by lamplight, working on a song for his second solo album, at his desk under the window. But Lol had been at the meeting with Mum, listening to Pierce’s New Ledwardine bullshit, which was enough to sap anybody’s creativity.

A breeze blundered into the square, ripping away the mist like a lace-curtain and rattling the stacks of morning papers barricading the doorway of the Eight Till Late. The only sign of life. Not long ago, even in the bleak midwinter, you’d have had clinking milk bottles and the warm aroma of baking bread. Preparations for a day. Now even the morning post wouldn’t be here for hours, and the milk came in plastic bottles in the supermarkets, and soon nobody would be seen on the streets of Ledwardine until about ten when the dinky delicatessen opened for croissants.

Jane stopped on the edge of the square and looked out, over the crooked, 16th-century black and white houses and shuttered shops, towards Cole Hill, the first point of contact with each new day. Hearing Mum again, from last night.

I won’t dress this up, flower. When the stones are exposed and studied or measured or whatever happens, they want them taken away. Possibly erected somewhere else. Or . . . not erected
.

This was Lyndon Pierce plus transient scum like Ward Savitch, of pheasant-holocaust fame. Mum had admitted she’d managed to say
nothing; as the meeting was supposed to be for public information only, the words
powder
and
dry
had seemed appropriate. Jane was aware of trembling.

The church clock said 6.30, just gone. Still a while off daylight, and Mum wouldn’t be up for another half-hour. Jane walked under the lych-gate and into the churchyard, switching on her lamp, cutting an ochre channel through the mist which put ghostly wreaths around the graves.

The beam seemed to find its own way to the only stone with a quotation from Thomas Traherne:

No more shall clouds eclipse my treasures
Nor viler shades obscure my highest pleasures
. . .

Jane knelt. If she was late for breakfast, late for school, it didn’t matter. This was important. This was the person to whom she’d have to answer if the village lost its ancient heart.

‘Lucy,’ she whispered to the headstone, ‘the bastards want to have them ripped out. Put on a flatbed truck and taken away.’

Sometimes, when she was on her own in the early morning or at twilight, calm and focused, she’d almost see Lucy Devenish, eagle-faced and huddled in her poncho on the edge of some folkloric otherworld.

‘So, like, if there’s anything you can do?’

She’d been coming here every day for weeks now, far longer than she’d been going to the river. Talking to Lucy, keeping her up to date. It was important.

Jane looked up to see only steeple, mist and morning star, felt damp seeping through the knees of her jeans. She stood up, on the edge of the old coffin path along which the dead of Ledwardine had once been carried.

As she walked away, there was a tiny sound like a snapping twig on the path to her left, as if someone was walking beside her. Only some small mammal, but it made her smile as she set off along the ancient trackway which would later proceed, in perfect alignment with the gateways at each end of Coleman’s Meadow, to the Iron Age camp on Cole Hill.

It was like you were walking the border between worlds. Walking
with ghosts. Could be down to Bill Blore, now, to stop the sacrilege, let Lucy walk in peace.

A voice came bubbling in the soggy air.

It said, ‘Who’s Lucy?’

Lol lay listening to the gunslinger wind prowling Church Street. Scared now. For a couple of days after London, it had been simple bewilderment and gratitude to whatever had got him through it. But this morning he’d awoken into darkness, the swaggering wind, anxiety.

Five days ago now, London, and reduced to a dream-sequence. Last night, to put it in its place, he’d been set on doing something real. Like maybe standing up and laying into Lyndon Pierce, this bastard who last summer had said to him,
If certain people who en’t local don’t like the way we do things round yere, seems to me they might think about moving on
.

Moving on?
In London for just two days, Lol had been semi-paralysed by a fear of
not getting back
.

He looked up at the oak beam over the bed, thinking about its permanence, how it had become stronger with age. How, if you tried to bang a nail into it now, the nail would snap off.

A lot like the woman who used to live here.

But how unlike either the woman or the beam
he
was.

Remembering the routine cowardice assailing him as he’d climbed on the stool with his guitar to do ‘Baker’s’ in the big BBC studio, surrounded by an audience top-heavy with
real
musicians. Superstitiously sure he was going to fail because he was playing the Takamine rather than the ill-fated Boswell.

I want to know about everything
, Jane had demanded when he finally did get home.
Everything and everybody
.

Lol had said they’d probably view the performance and then decide to lose him from the final edit. Jane had looked sinister. ‘Only if Holland and his producer want to be stalked for the rest of their lives by a vicar’s psychotic daughter with a machete.’

He’d smiled and told her everything. Everything he could remember about his big day out in the big city, recording ‘The Baker’s Lament’ for BBC 2’s flagship music programme,
Later With Jools Holland
. The New Year’s Eve programme. Hadn’t realised until
he was in the studio that this was the one where they all had to feign excitement as the hands of the big clock closed in on midnight and the pipers waded in. A producer had said they’d have to do it live next year, in line with the BBC’s new drive towards truth and honesty.