Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Not like this,’ Huw said.

It was big . Bigger than most village churches in this area. Coming in through the door – Victorian Gothic, like the school, so not the original one – there had been that numinous vacuum waft you always got when a small door opened into a disused auditorium. And then what Merrily always thought of as the slightly soured stench of spent spirituality.

Ingrid Sollars said, ‘Since it was abandoned as a place of worship in the 1970s, it’s seen service as a warehouse, a kind of sports hall and finally a water-bottling plant – another local enterprise that bit the dust.’

Huw said, ‘Water from… ?’

‘There’s a spring virtually underneath.’

‘ Is there?’

‘Not a terribly reliable one, unfortunately.’ Mrs Sollars’s weathered face seemed more open than Merrily remembered; her dusty bun of hair less tight. ‘No one was surprised when the business failed, because things generally did, you see. That’s the story of Underhowle – a short wave of industry, then a long, slow, bloodless decline. We are – we were – hoping for a stronger foundation this time. Industry supported by education.’

‘So you’re the historian here, Ingrid,’ Huw said. ‘The curator.’ ‘I ran a small tourist initiative here years ago, when my husband was alive, had a few hundred leaflets printed. We had trekking ponies at the riding school then, making us probably the only tourist enterprise in the village. They… Well, I suppose the committee keep me on in recognition of that pioneering initiative – and as the token local.’

‘And how do you feel about them turning this place into a museum?’

‘I’m in charge of the project,’ she said, as though this effectively prevented her from commenting. ‘I’m the keyholder.’

‘So?’

She didn’t blink. ‘And I suppose I must be unhappy about it, in some way, or I wouldn’t have let you in.’

Merrily took a proper look around. The chapel walls had been replastered, and an old gallery was being rebuilt, presumably for museum exhibits. But the altar was long gone, and the pulpit, of course. There were large areas of shadow, resistant to the naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling on frayed black flex. The bulbs, twelve of them, were probably high-wattage, but you could see all their filaments inside the straining veins of light.

‘Unhappy?’ Huw prompted.

Mrs Sollars didn’t expand, clearly wasn’t going to without some more effort on their part. It would be a matter of asking the right questions.

‘The Lodge family worshipped here,’ Merrily said. ‘And I think it was once actually owned by Roddy Lodge?’

‘Both the chapel and the garage were owned by the bottling company, and the whole lot was sold off when they went bankrupt. At the time, as I recall, Roddy Lodge had his bequest, which I believe was quite substantial – his father had sold the land on which the council estate was built – and he bought it for a silly price and then sold this building to the Underhowle Development Fund last year.’

‘Not short of money, are they?’ Merrily said.

‘They’re clever at attracting grants. And Christopher Cody puts funding into it as some sort of tax hedge. The Fund is administered by his solicitor, Ryan Nye.’

‘Who was also Roddy’s lawyer.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Ingrid Sollars said, ‘but this is a small world. The same fingers in many pies.’ She paused. ‘As you’ll have gathered, I’m rather proprietorial about this village. My father was the last… squire – I guess you’d call it that – and he lost most of his money through unwise investment, and my family moved away. I was the only one who chose to stay. Found it hard to separate from my roots, you might say.’

Ingrid Sollars was very slim, and Merrily thought of a small, tough thorn tree on a hillside, bending with the wind.

‘My ambition was to see some stability here in my lifetime,’ Ingrid said. ‘I thought, perhaps foolishly, that this might at last be in sight, but it seems it only takes one disaster…’

Merrily said tentatively, ‘This protest…’

‘Crass. Stupid. The whole thing’s entirely out of hand and likely to draw even more unwelcome attention to something that should have been allowed to die quietly. But we live in times of gracelessness and excess.’

There was silence, echoes absorbed by the dust sheets on the flagstoned floor and others draped from the gallery like the frayed and mournful curtains in a dying theatre.

‘I suppose Jerome phoned you,’ Huw said. ‘Told you we’d been to see him.’

‘Mr Banks said that you were attached to what he called, rather disparagingly, the Spook Squad and that he’d informed you about reports of an atmosphere here.’

‘That his word or yours?’

Ingrid Sollars hesitated. ‘Mine.’

Atmosphere , Merrily thought. Yes . And it was very cold. Her body acknowledged it; she shivered inside the duffel coat.

Huw didn’t seem aware of the atmosphere. He was walking around slowly, looking down, shards of old plaster cracking under his shoes. ‘So this is where some of the Roman stuff was discovered.’

‘Notably a statuette of what we think is Diana,’ Ingrid Sollars said. ‘It was found by Piers Connor-Crewe about a year ago. And some pottery. And the usual coins.’

‘More here than other places?’

‘That’s what Connor-Crewe always says. Not that he’s as much of an expert as he likes to think. But bookshop owners are often like that, don’t you find?’

Merrily said to Huw, ‘You’re thinking this was possibly the site of a Roman temple, aren’t you? Because of the spring.’

‘Aye. If not also pre-Roman.’

‘That’s also what Connor-Crewe thinks. I suspect he’d quite like to knock this building down just to find out for sure.’

‘It makes a certain sense, Ingrid.’ Huw said. ‘Folks think churches were no longer being built on ancient sacred sites after medieval times. All the mystics and the visionaries involved in Nonconformism tend to get overlooked, because of the puritan element.’

Merrily shivered again. She didn’t like this place with its hanging shadows and straining bulbs.

Huw turned to Ingrid. ‘Was it you who went to Banks originally?’

‘Could hardly go over his head. I attend his services.’

‘And he said what?’

‘Suggested it might be better if I consulted a Baptist minister, in Ross.’

‘Nice get-out. But you wouldn’t do that, would you?’

‘I was hardly going to bring in an outsider.’

‘When was this, lass?’

‘Five months ago, something like that. When the conversion work started for the museum. When the first grant came through. When the builders started asking me if it was haunted.’

‘Because?’

‘Footsteps when there was nobody there. Laughter – sniggers, they said. And items disappearing – tools. Although the doors were locked each night and there were no signs of breaking and entering.’

And you said?’

‘I said, quite truthfully, that I had no knowledge of the former Baptist chapel being haunted. And then there was the accident.’

‘Ah.’

‘One of the builders was working near the ceiling – up there, I think, in that top corner, knocking away damp plaster – when he claimed the hammer was snatched out of his hand. He was so shocked that he reeled away, dislodging his own ladder and falling to the ground. Broke a hip.’

Huw looked up. ‘Bloody lucky it weren’t his neck.’

‘After the first phase,’ Mrs Sollars said, ‘the firm told us they couldn’t fit Phase Two into their schedules for at least a year. In other words, they were pulling out.’