Phil Rickman - Remains of an Altar

‘And you think he’ll be happy to have his beloved Elgar exorcized? There, I’ve said the forbidden name, too. You don’t understand about Tim, do you?’

‘I understand what I saw , Mrs Truscott…’

‘You don’t understand what state that man’s in. You leave him alone.’

‘Look, I was told people would say I was sick or mental or drunk, like Loste, and I … I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Merrily.’

‘Well, Merry, whatever they’re saying.’ She swung her head angrily from side to side like a gun turret. ‘I’m telling you there is something wrong here. The cyclist … Jesus.’

In the swollen silence, Merrily looked around and saw … individuals. All these people together but essentially still pews apart. Maybe they knew one another by sight, by name, by reputation, but they were no more than a cluster of islands with separate climates, separate cultures.

Isolation. Midsummer Eve, and a chill in the air in a too-big church.

‘Excuse me.’ Preston Devereaux was brushing past. ‘I suspect this meeting is now over. Would the last lunatic out of the building please turn off the lights?’

‘Yeah, you go, Mr Devereaux!’ Stella Cobham snarling at his back. ‘You piss off. You keep nice and quiet about whatever you saw. You play it down. You weren’t for playing everything down when the fox-hunting thing was on, were you?’

Devereaux stopped. ‘That’s over. It’s over and we lost. You move on .’

Which was what he did. He walked out. At the same time, Merrily saw Leonard Holliday and three or four other people moving down the second aisle towards the main door … and more faces were swimming towards her.

‘If this—’ She took a breath, inspiration coming. ‘If this is really an issue, I’d just like to point out that the possibility of me or anyone attempting to exorcize Sir Edward Elgar … that is very much not an option. And even if there was a connection with Elgar—’

‘You can take it from me,’ Helen Truscott said, ‘that the connection was entirely in one unbalanced mind.’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘And the devious heads of a few opportunists, who I hope have now seen the error of their ways.’

‘What I was going to say, Mrs Truscott, is, if there really is evidence of some pervading negative spiritual presence here, then a small roadside blessing is probably neither sufficient nor appropriate. I was going to say that another way of dealing with it would be to hold a full Requiem Eucharist, here in the church … perhaps extending out to the roadside?’

‘What’s that?’ Stella Cobham said.

‘A requiem is basically a funeral service. It’s not something we do lightly, but it’s sometimes a way of drawing a line under something.’

‘You want to hold a service for the cyclist?’

‘As some of you are a bit unsure about that, I’d be more inclined to suggest a service for the two people who died here last weekend, Lincoln and … Sonia? But I wouldn’t do it unless I was persuaded that there was a good reason, and I’d need to consult the relatives.’

The mobile began to chime in Merrily’s shoulder bag. She didn’t even remember switching it back on. She saw Joyce Aird staring at her, mouth half-open.

‘You want to hold a full requiem – a communion service – for those drug dealers ?’

‘Think I need to take this call, if you don’t mind.’ Merrily backed off. ‘Look, that’s just a proposal, OK? If you want to have a bit of a discussion about this, I’ve got some cards in my bag with my phone number and my email if anyone wants to … talk about anything privately or tell me anything. Excuse me, I’ll be back.’

She hurried to the door, pulling out the phone, slumping on a bench in the porch with her bag on her knees.

‘Jane?’

‘Where are you, Merrily?’

Bliss.

‘I’m at Wychehill Church. Why? What’s happened?’

‘You don’t know?’ Bliss said.

She went cold, thinking as always, Jane .

‘Stop messing about, Frannie.’

She could hear the sounds of a car engine, the intermission of Bliss thinking.

‘Don’t go away,’ he said. ‘Might pick you up on the way, if that’s all right with you.’

‘The way to where?’

‘We’ve gorran incident.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Look, if you want to stick around I’ll pick you up on me way. Be about half an hour. Yeh, do that, would you? Stick around.’

The line was cut. Bloody cop-speak. Why did they never spell it out? What was she supposed to do now? She stood in the church doorway, the sky outside the colour of the flash around a blackened eye. It must be nearly half past ten.

Behind her, the church door swung to and someone coughed lightly. There was a whiff of jasmine on the air.

‘You’re cute,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘I thought the exorcist was the guy with you, and you didn’t put me right.’

Her face was white and blurred, her hair curling into the shadows in the porch.

‘What’s wrong with this place?’ Merrily said.

‘You noticed that, huh?’

‘Sorry, I think I was talking to myself.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you, anyway. Too much quarrying, way back, is what’s wrong. Way back for us, that is, but like yesterday in the memory of rocks millions of years old. The hills are still hurting.’

‘You think?’

‘This is not a place to settle, believe me. Bad place to be, when the rocks are in pain, and you can take it from me, lady, these rocks hurt like hell.’

He was winding the new lime-green line into his brush-cutter head without even looking at it – finishing up with the two ends of line exactly the same length and pointing in different directions, the way the manufacturers and God had intended.

Incredible. Jane had tried this once, with just an ordinary garden strimmer, and about fifteen metres of the stuff had come spinning off the reel like one of those joke snakes out of a tin.

Gomer Parry had probably left school at about fourteen, and he could reload a brush cutter in three minutes, sink a septic tank, devise a stormproof field-drainage system…

… And he also knew where the bodies were buried in Ledwardine. Knew better than anybody since Lucy Devenish.

‘Bent?’ Jane said. ‘You’re serious?’

‘Not as I could prove it.’ Gomer snipped off the nylon line with his penknife. ‘But I’d prob’ly give you money on it.’

He clicked the rubberized top back on to the head and, whereas Jane would’ve been beating it against the church wall and still one corner would be hanging off, it just … stayed in place.

She became aware that she was squeezing her hands together, impatient. Which was really childish. And this was not a childish matter. It had to be got right … might just turn out to be the most important thing she would ever do.

With Mum still not back when Eirion had dropped her off at home, Jane had walked down to Gomer’s bungalow, ostensibly to return the wire-cutters she’d borrowed but really to sound him out about Lyndon Pierce. Gomer hadn’t been at home but then, coming back across the square, in the gloom of a now-sunless sunset, she’d heard the whine of the brush cutter in the churchyard.

Gomer propped the cutter against the lych-gate while he took out his ciggy tin and opened it up and inspected the contents through the specks of shredded grass on the thick lenses of his glasses.

‘Gotter be a bit careful, Janey. Walls got years. Even church walls.’

Jane looked around the churchyard and out through the lych-gate to the village square. Nobody in sight except James Bull-Davies getting into his clapped-out Land Rover.