Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

DCI Annie Howe: always a problem here. Howe was an ironclad atheist, therefore suspicious of the clergy and now clearly appalled that modern womanhood should also have descended, at this stage of human evolution, to medieval dressing-up games.

As for Deliverance…

There had been one surreal happening, in the heat of midday in a hop yard in the Frome Valley, when the reinforced walls of Howe’s scepticism might have been badly breached… if she’d allowed it. If her reaction had not been flat denial, the whole incident apparently edited from her conscious memory.

Merrily followed her into the overgrown pocket garden, with its centrepiece oak sapling, thinking there was no real reason for Howe to have brought her here. It was as though she had to seize on any opportunity to look Merrily in the face and repeat, wordlessly, Nothing has ever happened to dent my belief that you are wasting your intelligence on fairy tales.

They walked to the rear of the house under the galvanized metal car port. Still no car in it. Presumably Loste hadn’t got it back yet, after his crash. A small square yard ended at an iron gate opening to a well-trodden mud path leading directly on to the hill – the hill far closer here than in the Rectory garden.

‘This is how Loste gets to the Herefordshire Beacon, or indeed into the whole network of Malvern footpaths,’ Howe said. ‘He spends whole days walking up there, and – I’m told – whole nights sometimes.’

‘I think if I had to live in this house I might do that, too,’ Merrily said.

‘Never locks his back door. Seems to feel a certain… ownership.’ Howe opened the gate and went through. ‘ His hills.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Merrily shook her head. ‘Elgar’s.’

‘Elgar’s dead,’ Howe said.

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘The music lives on, I suppose. Loste sometimes takes the music with him. He has an MP3 player containing, I’d guess, everything Elgar ever wrote, some of it repeated with different orchestras, soloists, et cetera.’

‘And that could be a bit mind-blowing, you think?’ Merrily stepped onto the path. ‘Up on the Beacon, head full of Caractacus, Druids chanting about human sacrifice? Something explodes in his brain and he goes for the nearest drug dealer with a knife he just happens to have on him?’

‘You know Caractacus, Ms Watkins?’

‘Sophie knows it. Sophie in the office.’

Howe deliberated for a moment.

‘We have – and this is confidential – another link to Loste, relating directly to the concept of Druidic sacrifice as described in Caractacus.’

‘What kind of link?’

Howe didn’t reply.

‘I suppose a lot of people around here are likely to know all the gory bits,’ Merrily said.

‘Not all of these people are as vocal in their opposition to the Royal Oak as Timothy Loste, or as… demonstrative.’

‘As in throwing a stone through a window?’

‘An act of wilful damage as a result of which several people suffered minor injuries. He would, if we’d known about it at the time, have faced charges.’

‘If he hadn’t been severely beaten up by the injured parties, making them less inclined to press charges.’

‘One of the men forced to restrain him,’ Howe said, ‘was Roman Wicklow.’

‘You know that for certain now?’

‘We’ve spoken to both of the other doormen, who’ve signed statements to that effect, also providing us with a full and graphic description of Loste’s behaviour that night and some of the threats issued by him during the struggle.’

‘Oh.’

‘So you see we don’t quite have bugger-all.’

‘No.’

Merrily looked away, up the steep path into the hills, soon barricaded by hard blue sky. It didn’t look that good for Tim Loste, did it? No longer seemed like a case of Howe’s people going for the easy option first, to save laboriously unravelling strands of rivalry in the West Midland drug community. She wondered how she was going to bring up the suggestion that the police should keep a serious eye on Loste for as long as he was in their care because of the risk of suicide or self-harming.

‘What about blood on his clothes? Forensic evidence… DNA?’

‘We should have some results tomorrow morning,’ Howe said. ‘I think it likely that they’ll enable us to move on to the next stage.’

She stepped onto a small tump by a gorse bush, looked down to the road where another police car was pulling in. Looked down at Merrily.

‘Right. I’ve been as open as I possibly can with you, Ms Watkins. I’ve put my cards on the table. I’d now like you to reciprocate. I’d like you to tell me – off the record for the present – exactly why you were called to Wychehill and what you know about the night Timothy Loste crashed his car into a telegraph pole.’

‘I wasn’t there.’

‘ I don’t care if you were there or not – I’m looking for background information, not a witness statement. Gossip, if you like. I’m trying to get a picture of his mental condition, and my information is that he’s so obsessed with the late Edward Elgar that he’s seeing the man’s ghost around every corner.’

‘I’d say that’s an exaggeration. And, as far as that particular ghost story goes, he’s not the only one. At least, that’s the basis on which I was asked to look into it.’

‘Yes,’ Howe said, ‘we do know about the other one.’

‘Also, you and I… we wouldn’t necessarily agree on what claiming to have seen a ghost says about someone’s state of mind.’

‘I can think of very little that we’d agree on,’ Howe said.

‘And apart from anything, we’re talking about an artist, a professional dreamer. Which, in his line of work, is not necessarily a pejorative term. Elgar was a dreamer, Loste is supposed to be writing a musical work about Elgar.’

‘You know what? I’m getting bloody sick of this.’ Annie Howe came down from the mound, her scrubbed face actually colouring. ‘As if all so-called artists were wispy little tree-huggers. Have you ever seen Timothy Loste?’

‘I’ve tried, Annie. God knows I’ve tried.’

‘Then I’ll describe him for you. Loste is forty years old and, despite his alcohol problem, extremely fit. Has been known to walk virtually the length of the Malverns and back within a day by a different route. Knows those hills like the back of his hand, every rock and cave and crevice.’

‘Yes, but that hardly-’

‘At the Royal Oak that night, as I may have implied, it took three experienced doormen to subdue him… as he’s also about half a head taller than Wicklow was. And built, Ms Watkins, like the side of a house. Oh, and the rock he put through that window was, at a rough estimate, the size of a small television set and maybe twice as heavy.’

‘Oh.’

‘Now tell me again that we’re talking about a harmless, inoffensive little dreamer with a natural abhorrence of violence.’

A buzzard passed silently overhead. A uniformed policeman appeared in the garden.

‘They’ve been trying to get you, ma’am.’

Howe lifted her head. ‘Thanks, Robert. I’m coming now.’

If she was going to be head of CID for the proposed new Midlands mega-force before turning forty she didn’t have any time to waste.

Watching Howe talking tersely into her mobile, listening and nodding, functioning, Merrily felt useless, irrelevant. Chasing shadows, chasing lights. Sometimes it seemed that deliverance amounted to little more than this.

People nudging one another. Who’s that? What does she do? Oh, you’re kidding… Her role nebulous, her focus blurred. Why was she here? Who, in the end, would be healed?

What was clear, however, was that nobody else would try too hard to make sense of Loste, his obsession with Elgar, his oak-tree fetish.