Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

Winnie looked away, at the view.

‘And what is the mystery?’

‘It’s a mystery,’ Winnie said. ‘Hell, if we were in Wychehill, I wouldn’t even be telling you this much. But, believe me, it’s an awesome thing.’

‘You don’t like Wychehill?’

‘I like my cottage. I like my views, I love the Malverns. No, I don’t like Wychehill the way it is right now. I bought in a hurry after my divorce, and at some stage I’m gonna move on. I’m being frank with you. See, in Wychehill, they regard Tim not as a precious, fragile talent but as some kind of village idiot, a liability. You ask people there, like that asshole Holliday, if they think he killed the guy on the hill, they’ll go, sure, why not… look at the history.’

‘I heard he… smashed a window at the Royal Oak?’

‘Oh wow, a window, yeah.’ Winnie sighed. ‘Sure, he did that. And got himself caught and beat up on by the muscle there. Who told you about that? Syd?’

A worrying idea settled on Merrily like cold air around her shoulders.

‘Who exactly… who was it beat him up, do you know?’

‘The muscle! They have these doormen who- Oh.’ Winnie’s head began to nod like a dog ornament on a car’s rear-window shelf. ‘OK, right, now I see where you’re coming from. You think this guy, Roland…’

‘Roman.’

‘OK. Look, maybe it was him, maybe it wasn’t, I wouldn’t know. Only the cops could think that was significant. Truth of it is, Tim wouldn’t even remember who it was beat up on him. The night it happened – two, three months ago? – he was up on the Beacon trying to puzzle something out in his work, and the wind was in the wrong direction, blew it up the hill, this techno, hiphop shit – barbaric, he called it, like an invasion. He couldn’t shut it out. It was filling up his head and he went a little crazy.’

‘He’d been drinking?’

‘I’m working on that.’ Winnie Sparke looked down. ‘I’m trying to clean it out of him with meditation.’

‘What happened next?’ Merrily said.

‘He coulda just walked away. He can walk seven, eight miles up there on a clear night, I’ve known him do that. But… he stormed off down to the Royal Oak, took a rock out the wall, and he hurled it through a window. And then he like… he just stood there on the parking lot, screaming like a mad person. Like, if it was me, I’d’ve put the damn rock through the glass, run like hell. He just stood there screaming. Like he wanted them to come out for him. I guess he has a certain masochistic streak. And they obliged, my God, did they oblige…’

‘He was badly hurt?’

‘Those guys don’t pull punches and they hit where it doesn’t show. It was lucky Helen – the roving nurse? – was passing in her car, and she went to fetch Syd and they pulled him out, took him home. Didn’t leave the house for five days. I wanted to have a doctor check him over, but he said… he refused. I guess the main damage was emotional. Spiritual. He became depressed, couldn’t work for maybe two weeks. But hey, nobody could think he’d take such an extreme…’

Winnie’s dark eyes were shining hot and bruised under the heavy curls.

‘I checked you out. On the Church of England Deliverance website. Also, some news stories. A lot happened to you, very quickly. Guess that was to do with being a woman in this job. Not too many women exorcists?’

‘Not many, no.’ Merrily anticipated the way this might be going. ‘Maybe I’ll write a book about it. In about thirty years.’

Winnie smiled ruefully in the shadows of her hair.

‘Wicklow…’ Merrily groped for a way of putting this without mentioning the text message. ‘Roman Wicklow’s body was found on what’s called the Sacrificial Stone. Nobody seems to be sure whether it ever was that, but it’s… obviously in a place immortalized in Elgar’s Caractacus, as the site of Druidic blood rituals. It wouldn’t be too hard for the police to see connections. I mean, the music Tim Loste puts on with his choir in the church. Obviously Elgar, but…?’

‘They did Caractacus once.’ Winnie Sparke looked down at her hands, still wet, in her lap. ‘OK. Tim is director of an amateur choir made up of men and women from all over the three counties. They did Caractacus, with incomplete instrumentation, and in spite of all of that it was pretty awesome. Tim wanted to stage it, open-air, on the Beacon, tap into that original energy, but the expense ruled it out. And the logistics. Getting an orchestra up there? And if it rained? And, worse than that, what if there was some rave thing on at the Oak, at the same time? Some nights, the amplified sound carries miles, drowns the valley.’

‘I imagine it must’ve become the bane of his life, that pub?’

Winnie Sparke gave Merrily a hard look, like she was beginning to wonder if she wasn’t talking to the wrong person.

‘I’m just trying to look at it from the police’s point of view,’ Merrily said.

‘That an artistic guy like Tim Loste could overpower some professional thug and then take out his throat?’

‘I don’t know… anything about him. I don’t know how big he is or how old…’

‘He’s a creative person who hates violence, is all.’

They stopped talking while two women on horses clopped past.

‘And he wasn’t at the meeting at the church last night,’ Merrily said. ‘I would’ve expected him to be there.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Winnie shook her curls. ‘I wouldn’t let him near the church last night. I came on his behalf. See, when he heard about that meeting, he was scared you were gonna try to work some kind of exorcism… to dispel the spirit of Elgar? Me, too. I was just so mad at Syd for bringing in an exorcist, I wanted you to realize the hugeness of this thing you were being asked to do. Like if you’d jumped the wrong way in the church, I was ready to take it to the media – hey, here’s the Church of England gonna drive the spirit of Elgar out of his beloved hills?’

‘Nobody would dare consider anything like that. There’d be a national outcry.’

‘Yeah, you say that now. But if you saw Tim, the state he was in, believe me, you might’ve been ready to look at something drastic. He needed… he needed to calm down some.’

‘So you told him to stay away.’

‘I was scared he’d start yelling, say something stupid.’

‘Where did you find him, in the end?’

‘The place I left him. The one place I could be sure… and I’m not gonna tell you, OK? You don’t need to know that.’

‘The police might need to. If you can prove he couldn’t have been anywhere near the Beacon when-’

‘I can’t prove it, I wasn’t with him, OK?’ Winnie looked away. ‘I can’t talk to cops, their minds run on narrow rails.’ She stood up. ‘I’m sorry, I need to walk.’

Merrily followed her along the bridleway, thinking that the Malverns weren’t exactly wild any more; few areas of this long, bumpy spine were unreachable by well-used footpaths.

‘The gentle heart of England,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘Miles of fertile, tranquil lowland… and then, suddenly, you have these volcanic rocks. Like a long altar rising from the plain of the Severn. And, you see, that… is precisely what it was – a place of spiritual significance since the Stone Age. To the early Christians, a dark place.’

‘You mean a stronghold of pagan worship?’

‘Still rich in stories of curses and the devil. So I guess what you had was a wilderness place for early Christian hermits to test their faith. A retreat for hermits and seers and prophets, riddled with springs – life-force. And I guess what you have now, Merrily – battered, hacked-at and under-esteemed – is the remains of an altar.’