Phil Rickman - Remains of an Altar

Lol’s personal history, however, would always stand against him .

She’d been called Tracy … Cooke? Jane had known all about this for a couple of years now. Anyway, her name was Tracy and she’d been aged about fifteen at the time.

Lol would have been only eighteen or so himself when he was set up by the bass player in his band who’d wanted Tracy’s mate and had got them all, Lol included, hopelessly drunk … and then had decided he was having both girls and had crept into Lol’s hotel room and virtually raped Tracy while Lol was sleeping it off. Slipping away and leaving Lol – who knew nothing about it, hadn’t even had sex with the girl – to face the police investigation that would crush his career, turn his loopy, born-again Christian parents against him and tip him down the chute into what he’d called in a song the medicated netherworld of psychiatric so-called care.

Taken years to drag himself out of the System and, while he wasn’t exactly on that register, he must still have a record for a distant sex offence. An offence that never was, but which explained everything about Lol: all the caution, the timidity, the fear of facing an audience which he’d seemed finally to be leaving behind.

Did Lyndon Pierce know about this, or was it just a lucky stab? Villages were such evil places.

At least she wasn’t under-age, just the bloody vicar’s bloody daughter, so, even if anyone believed it, the worst they could say…

Oh God, God, God …

Harsh colours collided behind Jane’s eyelids, a small universe exploding.

When she eventually opened her eyes, she saw that Lol was looking surprisingly calm – a danger sign, surely? Sitting there at the desk in his black T-shirt with the alien motif, his little round glasses on his nose, fine slivers of grey in his hair, and the phone at his ear, and he was going, ‘Yes, thank you … Look, I wonder if it’s possible to speak to Mrs Pole.’

Jane scrambled to her feet. ‘Lol?’

Lol was saying, ‘Margaret Pole, yes … Oh … Oh no . I didn’t know. I’m so … I’m really very sorry…’

Jane didn’t know what was happening. She wanted to snatch the phone out of his hand and start shaking him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a friend of the family. I came to visit her once, a few years ago. I’ve, um, been abroad. It’s just that I’m not far from Hardwicke, and I was thinking … I had some flowers and chocolates and … Well, never mind. Sorry you’ve been…’

Lol’s face tightening in concentration. Jane felt almost panicked now. Why was he trying to reach a woman who was evidently dead? What if something had gone wrong in his head? Or hers.

‘Unless…’ Lol said. ‘Look, she had a friend there, I remember, we got on very well. Miss White. Athena White. I expect she’s dead, too, by now.’

Lol listened. When he put the phone down, he was looking kind of excited.

‘She’s still there, Jane. When I said I expect she’s dead, too, the woman said, No, I’m afraid not .’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Miss White. Athena White is still a resident at The Glades Residential Home at Hardwicke.’

‘So?’

‘Maybe you never met her. I don’t suppose Merrily would have gone out of her way to introduce you. Not then, anyway. Jane, will you do something for me?’

‘I’ll do bloody anything, Lol, if you’ll just tell me what’s happening ?’

‘If I give Gomer a call, will you go down to his place and stay there until Merrily gets back?’

‘Why?’

‘Because, under the circumstances, I don’t want you on your own. And if we’re seen driving out of here together – and we will be seen…’

‘Where are you going? This is not funny, Lol – we’ve got to warn Mum about Pierce.’

‘I’m just following up something that Gomer told me. Won’t take long. I’m going to try and find out about Coleman’s Meadow.’

‘Does that matter any more?’ Jane said bleakly.

Lol pulled his old denim jacket from the back of the chair.

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

Merrily drove away from the Royal Oak still undecided about Raji Khan. It could be that Bliss, for once, was entirely wrong and that Khan was no more than what he seemed: arrogant and pompous in a way that was almost engaging because you could detect, behind it, something young and almost naive.

Mr Khan was delighted with himself and a system in which an enterprising Englishman from an Asian family could capitalize on his cultural roots to an unprecedented degree.

On the way out, he’d shown her how the Royal Oak had morphed discreetly into Inn Ya Face. It was not a listed building, and so it had been possible to remove internal walls, creating a series of archways and turning two ground-floor bars and a restaurant area into something cavernous. Black-painted wooden shutters had been installed at the windows. Although it was at ground level, with the shutters across it would be like a cellar. Yes, it did now resemble a temple, and the stone-based stage, built out from a big fireplace, was its altar.

And it had a feeling of permanence that belied Preston Devereaux’s insistence that Raji Khan wouldn’t be here long.

Would Khan risk destroying all this by involving himself in the wholesale distribution of illegal drugs? Or did he have relationships inside West Mercia Police permitting a certain … freedom of movement?

Whatever you thought about Annie Howe as a human being, it was hard to imagine her operating on that level.

Not exactly a deliverance issue, anyway.

But this was…

Driving past Wychehill Church, Merrily braked hard, drove across the road into the Church Lane cutting and turned the Volvo around, swinging back into the parking bay in front of the lantern. By the time she was running through the gates, he’d gone into the church. If it was him.

In the porch, getting her breath back into rhythm, she hesitated, the way she’d done at the Rectory.

Dealing with eccentrics … fruitcakes … imaginative and inspired people – whatever they were, it was important to keep reminding yourself that it was not about what you believed could happen so much as what they believed could happen. And it was about accepting that, when someone believed strongly enough, something could happen.

There was a lot she didn’t know, but she was getting closer.

She pushed at the double doors into the body of the church. The doors resisted her.

Locked?

He’d locked himself in?

Merrily rapped on the bevelled glass.

‘Syd?’

She could hear his footsteps on the flags. Then they stopped and she sensed him staring at the doors from the other side, the one word she’d spoken insufficient for him to identify her.

‘It’s Merrily. Are you going to let me in?’

He must have kept her waiting for a good half-minute before she heard the key turning, and then his footsteps going away again.

When she pushed open the doors and entered the vast parish church, Syd was standing in front of the chancel with its capacious semicircular choir stalls. He was wearing his cassock, and she thought what a particularly constraining garment it must be for a one-time man of action.

He looked around, with his arms out, at the empty pews, the oak-framed pulpit, the organ pipes like giant shell-cases.

‘Can you do anything about this?’

There was nothing to see. But Merrily could smell the incense.

There used to be a setting sun on the sign, Lol recalled. But it had been replaced now with less scary white lettering on a sky-blue background.