Phil Rickman - Remains of an Altar

Merrily walked up to the front of the house and held the sapling in both hands, halfway up, where it was gleaming white.

Not white leaves. Somebody had snapped its trunk.

Jane tasted the earth.

It was cold and gritty and bitter, and her ears were full of roaring night.

‘Get up.’

‘Nergh.’

Jane rolled away from the blade but kept on hugging the earth.

‘Get up out of there before I pull you out.’

A voice she didn’t know. Then a voice she did.

‘Don’t touch her, Gerry. You must never touch them these days.’

‘I’d like to fucking—’

‘I’ve already called the police,’ Lyndon Pierce said. ‘Jane, you know what’ll happen if the police have to move you. You’ll be arrested. You’ll be charged. You’ll appear in court, and when you’ve appeared in court once, at your age, that’s the slippery slope.’

Jane dug her fingers into the soil, opened her eyes slightly and saw the white eyes of the JCB, heard its engine idling. She saw the boots of Gerry Murray, heard the voice of Lyndon Pierce again.

‘—Mother won’t survive that. Be on your way, the pair of you. No skin off my nose. Women vicars, that was always gonner be a mistake.’

Jane concentrated on the roaring of the engine in her ears and gripped the earth, one hand aching where the grit was in the bleeding cut. The earth smelled rich and raw and warm, now. Warm as the grave.

‘I been talking to Tessa Bird, in Education,’ Pierce said. ‘Looks like you’re finished at the school anyway. You’re maladjusted, Jane. Always been a problem child—’

‘What the fuck—? ’

She heard the change in the engine’s tone. A gear change like a huge throat-clearing. When she opened her eyes, the digger’s lights were receding.

Murray screaming, ‘Get the fuck out of there, you mad ole bastard!’

Swallowing wet clay, Jane saw the swirl of the digger’s lights, and then the night went mad.

It wasn’t the wind; there was no wind. It wasn’t an accident, either. The sapling was too thick in its lower trunk for Merrily to clasp a hand around.

Someone had bent it over until it split. It wasn’t quite severed but the top three or four feet of it were hanging off.

She felt the violence still in the air, could almost smell someone’s sweat. It was, in some indefinable way, like when she and Syd Spicer had been standing by the remains of Lincoln Cookman’s car. As if the violence had been inflicted on the atmosphere itself and the atmosphere wanted you to know that it was remembering the hurt.

She went around the path to the back door to see if the oaks in plant pots had been damaged. They seemed to be intact, although one was knocked over. But the back door, which Tim Loste was said never to lock, was ajar, and the bar of pinkish light down the side was, amidst so much darkness, a lurid shock.

Merrily took a step back and waited. No suggestion of movement inside. She didn’t go in, but she prodded the door a little wider open and called out.

‘Mr Loste?’

Not really expecting an answer. But from out on the hill behind the house she could hear a distant sound, both explosive and staccato, like duelling machine guns: dance music from the Royal Oak somehow deflected from the hill, bouncing back toward the house and the road.

I spend all of Friday and Saturday evenings with Tim. When the Royal Oak starts up. He needs me – he’ll go crazy, else .

If they weren’t here and they weren’t at Whiteleafed Oak, where were they?

With her left trainer, Merrily pushed the door further open, saw into the kitchen, which she hadn’t really taken in when she was here with Annie Howe. It was basic but not small. Pine units and cupboards up to the high ceiling. A microwave, a dishwasher, a coffee-machine. An empty pizza packet on the worktop near the microwave. All of this lit by one long, thin peach-coloured strip light.

No conspicuous damage, no sounds of intrusion. So who had left the door open? Had the sole objective been the killing of the oak tree?

Who would have known its importance? Presumably, only Winnie Sparke. And Merrily, now, and Lol.

She stepped cautiously over the threshold.

‘Mr Loste?’

It seemed so unlikely that she hadn’t met this man she knew so much about. Or did she? Like all the impressions you received of Elgar, the individual portraits of Tim Loste didn’t quite match. He was inspired and inspirational; he was crazy and manipulative.

There was certainly nothing of him in this kitchen. Opposite her, the door to the hall was wide open. The hall was in darkness. She started thinking about the big framed photograph of Whiteleafed Oak over the mantel-piece in the living room and all the other pictures of the sites of the perpetual choirs. Obvious and easy targets if someone really wanted to upset him.

She went into the hall. Always hated being inside someone else’s house when they weren’t there.

Especially in the dark. Merrily felt around for a light switch, and as soon as her hand found it – one of those little metal nipples – the light from a white crystal bowl in the ceiling sprang into the otherworldly eyes of Edward Elgar, urging Mr Phoebus out of the shadows towards her.

It also fanned unevenly into the living room, where the glass protecting the photo of the whiteleafed oak had indeed been smashed, the picture tipped so that it looked as if the whole room was awry … as if a sudden gust of wind had rushed into it, tossing Winnie Sparke’s slight body back into the bookshelves in a hot shower of blood.

53

Unseeingness

The line was open, but there was no voice. Then the signal cut out and the screen went dark and the music from Inn Ya Face was going whoomp, chissa, hiss, whoomp like machinery deep inside the hill.

‘Frannie?’ Merrily said urgently. ‘ Frannie. ’

She looked up in blank despair from the lawn behind Caractacus. The moon was high but the house was in the shadow of the hill.

All right, she’d try him .

She went back to the path, opening up the phone again, illuminating the screen and scrolling down the list to bring up Bliss’s mobile number.

Sorry , Bliss said, I’m norrin. Leave me a message .

‘Frannie. Please .’ Letting some very real distress come through – like she could prevent it. ‘Get back to me. Get back to me now .’

When she snapped the phone shut, her hand was shaking. She could see this in the peachy glow from the kitchen door. She squeezed the phone hard, gripped the shaking hand with the other hand. Tried to pray for self-control. Couldn’t.

She didn’t have a choice any more. She had to go back in there. Make sure. Merrily felt the tautness of impending panic in her chest, turned away and saw a glinting from the edge of the lawn, where it met the path.

Knife?

Merrily walked around it, the hill going whoomp, chissa, chissa, hiss, whoomp , the perpetual techno-choir from hell. She bent down and found the remains of a Bell’s whisky bottle, possibly smashed against the wall of the house. Tim Loste’s whisky. Smashed on his way out, after he…

She shook the phone.

Call me. Lol … Frannie … call me …

What if they didn’t? What if Bliss didn’t call back for an hour or more? She should go back to Whiteleafed Oak. After … after she’d been back in there. After she’d gone back and checked once more. Made, dear God, absolutely certain that there was going to be no need for an ambulance.

Calm down. This can’t be done without calm .

It definitely was the Cello Concerto . But where a cello was veined and richly visceral, the whistled theme was faint and remote and fusewire-thin and painfully isolated.