Phil Rickman - Remains of an Altar

‘And the oak was the sacred tree of the Druids. Even I know that. What does it tell us?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe Annie Howe does?’

‘You know,’ Bliss said, ‘if it turns out Annie’s pulled the right man within just a few hours … I’d really hate that.’

When Merrily got back from the health-food shop with some hard-looking bean and chick-pea pasties, Sophie was printing out a document.

‘Didn’t take long to find her.’

It was from Amazon.

Most popular results for Dr C. Winchester Sparke

Homing (trade paperback, March 2004)

A Healer’s Diary (with Declan Flynn, hardback, October 2001)

Life-defining: a self-help tutor (paperback, June 2000)

Legacy of the Golden Dawn (paperback, reissued 2002)

‘A writer,’ Merrily said. ‘It makes sense. I wondered what an American woman was doing living in the Malverns on her own. Kept meaning to ask people, but it never … A writer can live anywhere.’

‘All her books appear to fall under the general heading of Mind, Body and Spirit,’ Sophie said, with faint distaste, ‘so I’m not sure how seriously we can take the Doctor .’

‘New Age. She comes over as very … almost archetypally New Age.’

‘Be careful,’ Sophie said.

Winnie Sparke cupped her hands, drank from the holy spring and then looked up at Merrily, holy water rippling down her face, hands pushing her wet curls back over both ears.

For a moment she looked stricken and feral, like some captured wood nymph.

‘You have to help me. He’ll die in there, I’m not kidding.’

Inside the nineteenth-century gabled building which enclosed the Holy Well, the once-sacred healing water ran from a thin plastic pipe into a stone sink. On the floor, a red cross was marked out in tiles. On the wall above the pipe someone had scrawled, in black, The Goddess For Ever .

Neo-pagan graffiti. Up in the wooded hills on the outskirts of town, it all seemed a little sad, a New Age fringe thing, no longer part of mainstream Malvern.

‘You have contacts in the police, I know you do,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘You have to get it over to them that Tim didn’t do this thing.’

Like Wychehill on a grand scale, Great Malvern clung to the sides of hills, its houses and shops and public buildings like the seats in a long stadium with the vast Severn Plain as its arena. The difference being that the real action had been up here, where a village had grown into a fashionable resort town founded on a Victorian faith in the curative powers of spring water.

Now all that was long over, and Great Malvern was just a busy town with heavy scenery. Steep streets, an historic priory church built of exotically coloured stones, a good theatre and most of the wells and springs hidden away. Nowadays, if you wanted to drink the pure, healing water you were advised by the health police to boil it first, C. Winchester Sparke had said in disgust.

‘Like, nobody understands any more. Nobody gets it about the energy of springs. The water’s gushing and gurgling all through these rocks, like a blood supply, and nobody’s revelling in it any more. It’s become repressed, stifled … like the long-forgotten Wychehill well.’

‘There was a well at Wychehill?’ Merrily said.

‘According to legend. Hell, more than that – according to history . There was this holy well at Wychehill that was supposed to have stopped flowing and nobody knows where it is. My theory is that it was blocked during the damn quarrying. Explains a lot about Wychehill.’

Winnie Sparke had said they had to meet here because Wychehill had too many furtive, prying eyes. Including Annie Howe’s this afternoon, Merrily thought, so it wasn’t a bad idea. They were lone pilgrims at the Holy Well. She’d found Winnie sitting on its steps, wearing a white summer dress and a cardigan decorated with ancient Egyptian figures making camp hand gestures.

‘Why would they think he killed this man, Dr Sparke?’

Merrily stood in the doorway arch, looking down at the trees softening the vast green vista of the plain. Obviously, she couldn’t tell Winnie Sparke about the text.

‘Please don’t call me Dr Sparke. People over here, an American called Dr Something, they think you purchased it off the web for like thirty dollars?’ Winnie smiled wanly through the water-glaze. ‘There’s a public bridle-way across there.’

‘With a park bench,’ Merrily said. ‘Do you mind if we sit on the bench? I didn’t get to bed until first light.’

‘OK, we’ll sit on the bench. Whatever. It’s just I’m feeling like I need to move, make things take off … This is a very stressful time.’

In full daylight, Winnie looked older. A woman well into middle age but with good skin and good hair. They walked down from the Holy Well, across a small parking area and on to the bridleway, which sloped scenically away into the trees. They sat on the bench.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t really know … you and Tim Loste?’

‘Friends. And fellow searchers. Tim came to Wychehill for a purpose. He had an inheritance which allowed him to throw up his teaching job and pursue his … calling.’

Merrily waited. The sun, hidden for most of the day, was now warm on her face.

‘Elgar. People keep calling it an obsession – I hate that word, it implies a sickness rather than a penetrating, inspirational, creative focus . Is it so bad to be driven?’

‘Depends what you’re driven towards, I suppose.’

‘Towards what drove Elgar. What made him into the greatest composer these islands ever had.’

‘And does Tim Loste know what that was?’

‘Oh, sure. I believe we’ve gotten close to that. The results will be Tim’s own piece for orchestra and choir, with a divine theme, involving Elgar himself as a character. A major work about the stress and agony leading up to the realization of a great and beautiful mystery.’

‘And your part is … ?

‘I get to write the words, the libretto.’

Winnie looked away, at the view.

‘And what is the mystery?’

‘It’s a mystery ,’ Winnie said. ‘Hell, if we were in Wychehill, I wouldn’t even be telling you this much. But, believe me, it’s an awesome thing.’

‘You don’t like Wychehill?’

‘I like my cottage. I like my views, I love the Malverns. No, I don’t like Wychehill the way it is right now. I bought in a hurry after my divorce, and at some stage I’m gonna move on. I’m being frank with you. See, in Wychehill, they regard Tim not as a precious, fragile talent but as some kind of village idiot, a liability. You ask people there, like that asshole Holliday, if they think he killed the guy on the hill, they’ll go, sure, why not … look at the history.’

‘I heard he … smashed a window at the Royal Oak?’

‘Oh wow, a window, yeah.’ Winnie sighed. ‘Sure, he did that. And got himself caught and beat up on by the muscle there. Who told you about that? Syd?’

A worrying idea settled on Merrily like cold air around her shoulders.

‘Who exactly … who was it beat him up, do you know?’

‘The muscle! They have these doormen who— Oh.’ Winnie’s head began to nod like a dog ornament on a car’s rear-window shelf. ‘OK, right, now I see where you’re coming from. You think this guy, Roland…’

‘Roman.’

‘OK. Look, maybe it was him, maybe it wasn’t, I wouldn’t know. Only the cops could think that was significant. Truth of it is, Tim wouldn’t even remember who it was beat up on him. The night it happened – two, three months ago? – he was up on the Beacon trying to puzzle something out in his work, and the wind was in the wrong direction, blew it up the hill, this techno, hiphop shit – barbaric , he called it, like an invasion. He couldn’t shut it out. It was filling up his head and he went a little crazy.’