Phil Rickman - Remains of an Altar

Miss White withdrew into her cushioned grotto like some little English guru.

‘Ah…’ It came out like a tiny puff of white smoke. ‘A ley line. Could that have been what it was about?’

‘This makes sense?’

‘She wanted me to contact her mother.’

‘You mean on the…’

‘In the land where the dead sit in an eternal garden among eternal fountains, discussing trivia and eating fairy cakes. Wanted me to contact her mother to ask if she was doing the right thing. A man kept coming to visit her – all too frequently in her last year. Well, you see this all the time. You don’t have to be here very long to recognize a vulture in a suit. He was … some relation.’

‘Nephew?’

‘I listened to Pole talking to the inmates – sometimes sit in the lounge, pretending to be asleep. She’d ramble on about how worried she was that he was going to have to give up his farm – the last farm in a farming family, for umpteen generations. Falling prices, imports, the usual problems. I was thinking, what does he want from her?’

‘Maybe a piece of land that he knew he could sell for a lot of money, for housing? Which she’d promised not to sell.’

‘Yes. On which basis, I think he wanted her to give him the land. As a way of saving his farm. Trying to persuade her it was futile to preserve it as … I don’t know, some sort of memorial? Do you know what kind of memorial?’

Lol shook his head.

‘Rather intriguing. Pole used to talk of her mother as some frightfully elevated creature with aesthetic sensibilities far beyond those of her slug of a husband. Perhaps she’d met a lover in that meadow. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Pole never told me.’

‘But she came to you … eventually.’

‘A dilemma. Said she was sure the last thing her mother would have wanted was for her grandson, or whatever he was, to lose everything. Keeping her awake at nights – well, you know how old people dwell on these things. So yes, in the end, after much heart-searching, she came to me.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘Oh, we had a seance. Great fun! Most of the old dears were absolutely terrified – they do so love to be terrified. And then Cardelow appeared in the middle of the proceedings like some great dollop of rancid ectoplasm and broke it up.’

‘And did you … ?’

‘Of course I didn’t. Never been drawn to necromancy … well, not in that way. The seance was a sham. My attitude was to take the path of least resistance. If Pole’s mother was such an elevated soul, she’d hardly be worried about the loss of one field. Obvious way to go was for Pole to keep her promise not to sell it in her lifetime and simply agree to leave it to the sod. I said an angel in Grecian attire appeared to me in a dream and passed on that little snippet.’

‘So, um … the fate of Coleman’s Meadow is probably your fault.’

‘I suppose it is, yes. But you know, Robinson…’ Miss White smiled sweetly. ‘We really aren’t meant to have much of an effect.’

‘And I suppose we’ll never find out what Mrs Pole knew about the significance of that field.’

‘What does the girl think is significant?’

‘Jane? She thinks it more or less holds the secret soul of the village. It connects the church and a few other sites with Cole Hill, which Jane thinks is the village’s holy hill – like Dinedor is to Hereford. She’s at a … an intense age.’

‘A perceptive age,’ Miss White said. ‘Although they often need assistance in decoding their perceptions. What are yours?’

‘Oh, I … just think a particular councillor has a stake in it.’

‘Hmm.’ Miss White kicked off her slippers. She wore a black bow around one ankle. ‘There is a niece, you know. Elizabeth … Kington? Kingsley?’

‘Who got the money.’

‘And the memories. In two suitcases. She came to collect them. I made a point of beckoning her over. I said protect the memory . As if I knew what I was talking about. She knew who I was – or thought she knew what I was. She said, If you get any more messages – oh dear! – and left me her address. I have it somewhere.’

‘Yes, that might…’

Not once had Athena White stopped looking at Lol. Or through him. Eyes like miniature fairy lights. If he hadn’t been feeling so empty inside, it might have been disconcerting.

‘What else?’ she said. ‘Come on, Robinson, you must make the most of me before I’m called away to spend whole aeons in atonement. What ails you? Can’t get it up?’

‘Something like that,’ Lol said.

Gomer’s kitchen was this cheerful but fading memorial to Minnie, full of bright, shiny, literal objects like BISCUIT tins with biscuits printed on the side in crumbly brown letters. The letters on the bread bin were badly worn; time after time, when Jane looked up she read ‘bread’ as DEAD.

Even Gomer seemed jittery, unsteady. Around six, he agreed to go and monitor the situation at Coleman’s Meadow, and Jane switched on her mobile to check the answering service. Couldn’t put it off any longer. Supposed if it was all too heavy to handle – follow-up calls from Jerry Isles, threats from Mum – she could always pretend she’d left the phone at home.

Didn’t remember the last time she’d felt this low, this useless.

‘ Where the hell are you? ’ Eirion was demanding, on voicemail. ‘We’re getting masses of emails referred from the EMA site. Have you any idea at all what’s going down here? ’

She called him back. She told him she knew exactly what was going down. Told him about Pierce, how she’d played it all wrong, couldn’t restrain herself, ended up shafting Lol.

‘The Meadow ,’ Eirion said. ‘What’s happening at the Meadow?’

‘Fenced off.’

Jane told him about the ragged protest, and how terrible she felt that she hadn’t been there supporting them. But she didn’t dare show her stupid, notorious face, and at least it sounded like it was all over for tonight.

‘Over?’ Eirion said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘They got the police in. I’m dead in the water, Irene. I haven’t been to school again. I’m stuffed .’ Disgusted at how she must sound, how waily . ‘I’m probably going to have to leave, as from like now, get a job or something. Grow up, you know?’

He’d been talking; she’d only half-heard.

‘… The Deathroad Society, of Antwerp? Conservers of coffin tracks in the low countries. Particularly pissed off. Their chairman, Ronald Verheyen—’

‘All right.’ Jane sat down. ‘I’m sorry. What are you on about?’

Eirion laid it out for her. If Alfred Watkins wasn’t much honoured in his home town, it looked like there were thousands of people all over the world to whom he was some kind of minor deity, and earth-mysteries geeks and landscape anoraks from the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, wherever, were now blasting Herefordshire Council with electronic hate-mail. Far as Eirion could make out, just about every department in the authority – planning, health, chief executive’s, trading standards – they’d all been getting it.

‘It’s somehow got tied into the whole international Green politics thing. These guys are picking up email addresses wherever they can find them. Apparently, individual councillors have even been targeted at home.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Because the EMA have had an approach from the council’s lawyers. Jesus, Jane, if the council hated you before…’

‘Irene…’ Jane swallowed. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’