Phil Rickman - Remains of an Altar

The Glades Residential Home: a one-time Victorian gentleman’s residence at the end of a drive close to the border with Wales. Wide views of the Radnorshire hills. Big, long sunsets.

Lol sat in the old white Astra in the car park, knowing he was here at least partly because, after shutting the door on Lyndon Pierce, he’d needed to be somewhere else – and fast. Him rather than Jane.

He’d watched her walking with Gomer down the street to Gomer’s bungalow, in her school uniform. Girls in uniform: always suggestive of sexual impropriety? Ironic, really: he wasn’t at all fond of uniforms, especially nurses’ uniforms. Kissing a woman in a dog collar had taken an act of will, the first time.

When he left the car, a mantle of heavy windless heat settled around him. A woman came towards him out of the stern gabled porch, a big woman in a light blue overall, late fifties, bobbed blonde hair.

‘Brenda Cardelow,’ she said. ‘Mr Robinson?’

The situation at The Glades had changed. The proprietors Lol remembered, the Thorpes, had left over a year ago, Mrs Cardelow had told him on the phone. Burn-out . She’d laughed.

‘You’re a lucky man, Mr Robinson. She appears to remember you. She’s usually inclined to deny all knowledge of visitors.’

‘One of the privileges of age,’ Lol said, but Mrs Cardelow looked unconvinced.

‘I tried to persuade her to come down to the residents’ lounge, but she insists on seeing you in her room, so I hope you’re prepared for that.’

‘I’ve never been in her room. But I’ve heard a lot about it.’

‘I’m sure you must have,’ Mrs Cardelow said.

The old woman wore a black woollen cardigan and a black wool skirt. A fluffy scarf, also black, was around her neck. Her eyes were hard and bright like cut diamonds. Nestling in the window seat, among the cushions and the books and the Egyptian tapestries and the wall-hung Turkish rugs and more books and more cushions, she was like a tiny, possibly malevolent story-book spider.

‘Robinson.’

Crooking a finger with a purple-varnished, finely pointed nail. Same sherbet-centred voice. The air in here was tinged with incense.

‘Miss White,’ Lol said.

‘Of course I remember him.’ Miss White flung a brief, barbed glance at Mrs Cardelow. ‘Nervous, would-be paramour of an unusually attractive little clergyperson – quite a curiosity at the time, amongst all those horse-faced lezzies in bondage clobber. How goes it, Robinson? Been inside the cassock yet?’

‘Anthea!’ Mrs Cardelow turned to Lol. ‘They’ve all read that damned poem that goes on about “when I’m an old woman I shall dress in purple”. They think that shedding their inhibitions will keep senility at bay, but in my experience it only hastens the onset.’

‘You’ll be demented long before me, Cardelow,’ Miss White said in her baby-kitten voice.

‘Yes,’ Mrs Cardelow said sadly. ‘I’m afraid she could be right.’

‘Mind’s on the blink already. Keeps calling me Anthea.’

‘That’s what it says on your pension book.’

‘Then it’s a misprint. Go away, Governor. Lock us in the cell if you must, but kindly leave us alone.’

Mrs Cardelow raised a martyr’s eyebrow at Lol on her way out. Lol settled himself on a piano stool with no piano.

‘Still demoralizing the screws, then, Athena.’

‘Passes the time. Where are the chocolates? She said you’d brought me chocolates.’

‘Sorry, left them in the car. Black Magic still appropriate?’

Miss White giggled. Lol remembered how Merrily had reacted when she’d first encountered her – called in within weeks of being appointed Deliverance consultant to look into claims by elderly residents that The Glades was being haunted by a handsome man of a certain era. Treading on eggshells in the big shoes of Canon Dobbs, Hereford’s last Diocesan Exorcist. On a later occasion, knowing that Merrily needed help but was afraid of what Athena White might represent, Lol had gone on his own to tap into her knowledge of forbidden things.

Finding he got on rather well with this one-time highly placed civil servant who’d decided to devote her retirement to the study of the complex esoteric disciplines popularized by Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner and Dion Fortune. Maybe a stretch on psychiatric wards had helped.

‘So?’ she said. ‘ Have you been inside the cassock?’

‘Never really been turned on by women in uniform.’

‘Don’t be evasive.’

Miss White used to say she’d forgone the high-maintenance, roses-round-the-door cottage to set up what she called her eyrie in an old people’s home because it gave her more inner space . Lol had no idea how old she was, but, like an elderly radio, all her valves still appeared to be glowing.

‘OK. Out of uniform, it’s much easier,’ he said, and Miss White clapped her tiny hands.

‘Splendid! And you needn’t explain why the clergy-person isn’t with you. I always felt she regarded me as a potential patroller of the Left-Hand Path, with whom it would not be at all appropriate to be publicly associated.’

‘I’m the go-between,’ Lol said.

‘You lied to Cardelow. Told her some frightful porkie about first meeting me when you came to visit poor Pole.’

‘That was because I wanted to talk to you … about Maggie Pole,’ Lol said.

‘She died.’

‘I know.’

‘In her sleep. And in the middle of a quandary. She thought I was a spiritualist, you know. A medium. Some of the inmates do. Frightfully insulting, to be lumped in with the pygmies. But I tend not to disabuse them – they wouldn’t understand the distinction.’

‘Mrs Pole asked you to help her, as a … spiritualist?’

Athena White didn’t respond for a while, exploring him with her eyes.

‘Robinson, are you still working with that dreadful shrink in Hereford?’

‘Dick Lydon?’

‘So-called psychotherapist.’

‘No, I gave all that up. It didn’t seem to be actually curing people.’

‘Good,’ Miss White said. ‘Psychoanalysis was the great folly of the twentieth century. Leads nowhere except up its own bottom.’

‘In what way did Maggie Pole ask you to help her?’

‘Robinson, I know the woman’s dead, but there are certain proprieties to be observed. Why do you want to know?’

‘All right,’ Lol said. ‘When I first came to see you … you remember? We talked about Moon, the archaeologist, and Hereford Cathedral and its connection, along the ley line, with Dinedor Hill?’

‘Ley lines?’ Miss White placed a purple-tipped finger on her chin. ‘Watkins? Your friend’s called Watkins, isn’t she?’

‘So’s her daughter. Jane. I don’t think you’ve ever met Jane, but she … Jane feels very strongly about things, and she doesn’t give up. And she’s only seventeen and still at school, and she’s thrown herself into something which is backfiring on her. And I’m feeling guilty, because I didn’t get involved and she’s vulnerable and I’m not … well, not in that way.’

‘Oh, I think you are, Robinson. You didn’t want to interfere in case it should harm your relationship with her mother, which you appear to value above life itself.’

‘You ought to be—’

‘Don’t you dare tell me I ought to be a psychologist. How does this connect with Margaret Pole?’

‘Jane’s found what she thinks is a forgotten ley line, which somebody wants to build across. In Ledwardine. It’s called Coleman’s Meadow. We’re told that Margaret Pole’s mother left it to her, having apparently said she didn’t want it touched. I wondered what had made Maggie Pole change her mind. When I heard she’d been at The Glades I thought if anyone might know something about this it would be … you?’