Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

There was a mauve, last-light glaze on the road, a faintly rank smell. She kicked what appeared to be a shrivelled condom into the side of the wall. Obtained from a vending machine at Inn Ya Face?

‘Smoker, eh?’

She jumped.

Preston Devereaux was leaning on the wall under one of the oak trees. He, too, had a cigarette.

‘Congratulations, Mrs Watkins.’

‘I’m sorry. I was just… a bit…’

‘You were bloody furious. A woman scorned.’

‘I’m sorry. You’ve had a pretty bad week, too.’

‘Had better.’

‘How are you feeling now?’

‘Me?’ Devereaux leaned back against the wall, scratched his jaw. ‘Well, since you ask, last night I got drunk. Today, I sold the offending Land Rover for peanuts. Couldn’t stand to see it any more. I’m OK. Something happens, you live with it, move on. You don’t pick at it, like a townie.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Sorry if I’m causing offence again. I assumed you were local, name like Watkins.’

‘Local origins. I’ve moved around.’

‘Well, me too. But we came back, didn’t we? God help us.’

‘I hoped I’d be able to talk to you before the meeting,’ Merrily said. ‘But I think you answered my questions back there, anyway.’

‘You were really going to ask me that? If I’d seen the ghost of Sir Edward Elgar on his bike before the crash? Good God.’

Merrily shrugged. ‘My job.’

‘Well, if you get to know me better you’ll know it’s not in my nature to make excuses or throw the blame at anyone living or dead. I was tired. Had a long drive, wanted to get home. Perhaps, if I hadn’t been so tired, I’d’ve reacted quicker and there’d be two fewer funerals in Worcester. Who knows?’

‘If you’d been less tired, you might have been going faster and the result would have been the same. Only you’d probably have been seriously injured.’

‘I really don’t know.’ Devereaux shook his head slowly. ‘But what I won’t do, Mrs Watkins, is associate myself with the clowns who say this road’s haunted. So if that’s your idea of a cover-up, I’m sorry.’

‘Clowns?’

‘I don’t know what’s happening to places like this. At one time, we absorbed things. We, the community. Communities closed ranks, healed themselves. Scabs formed that eventually dropped off. Kind of people you got here now, the townies, they just got to keep picking and picking at it.’

‘What about the Royal Oak?’

‘The Royal Oak?’ He snorted. ‘Problem at the moment, but it won’t last. They never do, these places. We just got to sit it out. Make a fuss, you just give them more notoriety, and they love that. Look, I’m more sorry than I can say about what happened to those two kids. I was a wild boy, too, drove too fast, inhaled my share of blow. Not for me to take a moralistic stance. But, this all-encompassing fear of the Royal Oak… live with it, is what I say. Nobody can seem to live with anything any more.’

‘Well, yeah, everybody expects a perfect life. But it’s been suggested that a lot of Class A drugs pass through the Royal Oak. I don’t know if that’s right, but that’s what they say.’

Devereaux stared at her. ‘Do they? Who?’

Merrily didn’t know how to reply, never entirely happy about being Bliss’s snout, even if it was a two-way street.

‘Aye, well, they’re probably right, Mrs Watkins. And that’s not good. But it’ll pass. Be surprised if that place hasn’t changed hands again by this time next year. Raji Khan’s a businessman. When it goes off the boil he’ll get rid.’

‘You know him?’

‘Stayed with me when he was looking over the Oak. Stayed in one of my lovely holiday lets. Clever man, young Mr Khan. Knows how to surf the economic tides.’

‘You mean Mr Holliday was right about tourism grants to bring ethnic groups into the sticks?’

‘It’s the way this government operates.’ Devereaux took a long pull on his cigarette, holding it between forefinger and thumb. ‘But you know what makes me, laugh, Merrily – you don’t mind if I call you that…?’

‘Not at all.’

‘What makes me laugh, my dear, is the way middle-class white folks move here from the harmless, peaceful suburbs, saying how glad they are to get away from the big, bad city, with all the drugs and the crime. Truth is, that was an imagined situation fuelled by Crimewatch and the Daily Mail. They’d never actually seen any of it…’

He laughed, at length, the cigarette cupped in his hand.

‘And now here’s the so-called ghost of Edward Elgar – poor dysfunctional bugger he was – and half of them think he’s a traffic hazard and half of them think he’s on their side against Raji Khan. What can you do with people like that? Hello -’

A young man in a rugby shirt was edging round the church gate. He stood in front of Devereaux and did a theatrical salute.

‘They’ll be out in approximately five minutes, sir.’

‘Good lad.’ Devereaux turned to Merrily. ‘My younger boy, Hugo. Took the precaution of stationing him in the vestry, out of sight. What’s the verdict, son?’

Hugo shrugged. ‘No problems, really. Well, that Stella got a bit hysterical, but they talked her down. I think they’re going for what Mrs Watkins suggested.’

‘Which is what? I’d left by then.’

‘Well, I’m not really…’

Hugo was about nineteen, lean like his dad, gelled dark hair and an earring. He looked at Merrily.

‘Mr Devereaux,’ she said, ‘are you saying you had a spy in the vestry all the time?’

‘Dad’s the worst kind of control freak,’ Hugo said.

‘Local intelligence is very important,’ Devereaux said. ‘You live in a village, Merrily, you know what it’s like. They weren’t going to say much with me there, were they? Too official.’ He smiled. ‘No, I exaggerate. Hugo was at the back already, doing the lights.’

He put out his cigarette in a fizzing of sparks against the church wall.

‘Tell me what you’re proposing,’ he said.

‘Well… it’s a requiem service in the church. A holy communion for the dead. So that would be a service for the two people who… died in the accident.’

‘Why them?’

‘Because they’re dead. It’s a big thing, death, but funerals today are often cursory and don’t bring… don’t always bring down the curtain. Don’t bring peace, or even the promise of peace, for the living.’

‘And how would this service achieve that?’

‘Mr Devereaux, we could sit down and I could give you the theology in depth and take up the rest of your night. Let’s just say that it does.’

‘You’re very confident.’

‘I’m not confident at all. That is, it’s not self -confidence, it’s…’

She raised her gaze to the darkening sky. Preston Devereaux laughed.

‘Well… who am I to argue with that? All right, then, go ahead. It’s your show now. This is just a straightforward service, I take it?’

‘Inasmuch as any service is straightforward.’

‘What I mean is, you wouldn’t be conducting what the press could call an exorcism?’

‘You’re right, I wouldn’t.’

‘Because none of us wants silly publicity, and if you can deal with it for us in a discreet and dignified fashion we’d be most grateful to you. Discuss it with the Rector, I should. I think you’ll find he agrees.’

‘Really.’

‘Nice to talk, Merrily. Goodnight to you.’

Preston Devereaux clapped a hand on his son’s back and they walked away to a dark 4x4 parked in front of Merrily’s Volvo. She watched them go, feeling faintly sick. A bat sailed in front of the church lamp like a blown leaf.

Deal with it for us. Coming out of the church she’d felt halfway in control again, now she was a puppet with strings so tangled you couldn’t tell who was pulling them. Merrily heard the voices of the villagers emerging from the church and walked rapidly away along the roadside towards the vicarage.