Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

Behind her, the church door swung to and someone coughed lightly. There was a whiff of jasmine on the air.

‘You’re cute,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘I thought the exorcist was the guy with you, and you didn’t put me right.’

Her face was white and blurred, her hair curling into the shadows in the porch.

‘What’s wrong with this place?’ Merrily said.

‘You noticed that, huh?’

‘Sorry, I think I was talking to myself.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you, anyway. Too much quarrying, way back, is what’s wrong. Way back for us, that is, but like yesterday in the memory of rocks millions of years old. The hills are still hurting.’

‘You think?’

‘This is not a place to settle, believe me. Bad place to be, when the rocks are in pain, and you can take it from me, lady, these rocks hurt like hell.’

Accidents Happens

He was winding the new lime-green line into his brush-cutter head without even looking at it – finishing up with the two ends of line exactly the same length and pointing in different directions, the way the manufacturers and God had intended.

Incredible. Jane had tried this once, with just an ordinary garden strimmer, and about fifteen metres of the stuff had come spinning off the reel like one of those joke snakes out of a tin.

Gomer Parry had probably left school at about fourteen, and he could reload a brush cutter in three minutes, sink a septic tank, devise a stormproof field-drainage system…

… And he also knew where the bodies were buried in Ledwardine. Knew better than anybody since Lucy Devenish.

‘Bent?’ Jane said. ‘You’re serious?’

‘Not as I could prove it.’ Gomer snipped off the nylon line with his penknife. ‘But I’d prob’ly give you money on it.’

He clicked the rubberized top back on to the head and, whereas Jane would’ve been beating it against the church wall and still one corner would be hanging off, it just… stayed in place.

She became aware that she was squeezing her hands together, impatient. Which was really childish. And this was not a childish matter. It had to be got right… might just turn out to be the most important thing she would ever do.

With Mum still not back when Eirion had dropped her off at home, Jane had walked down to Gomer’s bungalow, ostensibly to return the wire-cutters she’d borrowed but really to sound him out about Lyndon Pierce. Gomer hadn’t been at home but then, coming back across the square, in the gloom of a now-sunless sunset, she’d heard the whine of the brush cutter in the churchyard.

Gomer propped the cutter against the lych-gate while he took out his ciggy tin and opened it up and inspected the contents through the specks of shredded grass on the thick lenses of his glasses.

‘Gotter be a bit careful, Janey. Walls got years. Even church walls.’

Jane looked around the churchyard and out through the lych-gate to the village square. Nobody in sight except James Bull-Davies getting into his clapped-out Land Rover.

‘Please, Gomer…’

Gomer made her wait until he’d rolled his ciggy. He was wearing his green overalls and his Doc Martens and a new work cap that looked pretty much like the old one and probably the one before that.

‘Ole churchyard’s gonner need doin’ twice a week soon.’

‘ Gomer! ’

Gomer did his gash of a grin, the little ciggy clamped between his teeth.

‘En’t no rocket science, Janey. Councillors… all this on the election leaflets about directin’ their skills for the good o’ the community… load of ole wallop, and they knows it and they knows you knows it.’

Gomer sniffed the air.

‘Well, all right, mabbe ’bout thirty per cent of ’em is straightish. Or, at least, when they first gets elected. Don’t last, see, that’s the trouble. All them good intentions goes down the toilet soon as they gets a chance of a slap o’ free tarmac for their path, or their ole ma needs plannin’ permission for a big extension to the house what her’s gonner leave ’em when her snuffs it. So all I’m sayin’ is, if you has to have dealings with your local councillor, best way’s to start off assumin’ he’s bent. Saves time.’

‘But, like, Lyndon Pierce, specifically…?’

‘Lyndon Pierce, he en’t the sort of feller gets hisself elected juss so’s he can call hisself Councillor Pierce.’

‘Well, yeah, I realize councillors are always taking bribes from builders and people like that, so the chances are Pierce is getting a bung to make sure the Coleman’s Meadow scheme-’

‘Janey-’

Gomer started coughing, snatching his ciggy out of his mouth.

‘I’m only saying that to you, Gomer. I’m not going to shout it all over the village, am I?’

‘You don’t even whisper it, girl, less you got the proof.’

Gomer took off his glasses, blotted his watering eyes on his sleeve. Jane bit a thumbnail, dismayed. Reticence was not his style. Gomer did not do restraint.

She stood there, chewing her nail. Since Minnie died, Gomer had become almost family, which was cool, because he was good to have around – like a grandad, only better. Well past normal retirement age now, but he’d never given up work. Kept his plant-hire business going with the help of Danny Thomas, dug graves for Mum with his mini-JCB, free of charge, treated the churchyard like his own garden.

And the great thing about Gomer was that he was… untamed. Untamed by age. In a way that made you think there might actually be something quite interesting about being old, if you knew the secret.

He went over to one of the ancient caved-in tombs, where there was a big gap in the side and it was obvious that the body was long gone. He sat down on it and smoked for a while, Jane watching him and the tomb fading into the dusk.

‘When I first went into Coleman’s Meadow,’ she said, ‘I felt… I felt the last person to go there and actually see it for what it was… was Lucy Devenish.’

Gomer’s ciggy was like an ember in the shadows.

Jane said, ‘I could almost see her.’

Could almost see her now, in fact: the batwing swirl of the poncho, the hooked nose of an old Red Indian, the sharp gleam of a glancing eye, like a falcon’s.

‘Lucy hovers over this village, like a guardian of the old ways,’ Jane said. ‘That’s the way I see it.’

‘All right.’ Gomer stood up, brushing ash from his overalls. ‘First knowed him when he was a mean-minded little kid.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Pierce. One day, middle of January, Lucy caught him shooting at the blue tits with his air-rifle, when they come down to the nut feeder Alf Hayden used to hang by the ole gate into the orchard.’

‘Bastard. How old was he then?’

‘Mabbe fourteen? I wasn’t living yere then, but we was dealing with a drainage problem, side of the orchard, for Rod Powell, and I’m in the ole digger when I years Lucy’s voice shoutin’ at somebody to hand over that gun now, kind of thing. So I goes trundlin’ over, in the digger, and there’s Lyndon Pierce pointin’ the bloody thing at Lucy.’

‘He was threatening to shoot Lucy?’

Jane started to tingle. It was – wow – like she’d been guided to this.

‘Kids is daft,’ Gomer said. ‘Don’t think ’fore they acts. ’Course, when he sees the digger, he hides the gun behind his back, but I leaves the engine running, see, jumps down the other side, grabs it off him. As I recall, it wound up under one of the caterpillars of the JCB. Accidents happens, Janey.’

‘I am so proud of you, Gomer.’

‘Boy tells his dad I’ve stole the gun off him. Dad rings me, threatens me I’ll get no more work in this village ever again.’

‘How could he do that?’