Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

Oaks. Sacred oaks. The Royal Oak. Too many oaks. Did any of this link into the history or even the folklore of the area? It wasn’t as if there was some ancient resident whose memory she could tap into. Nobody had lived here longer than a quarter of a century.

Well… except for one person.

Not someone she particularly wanted to approach, but…

Merrily slipped away, knowing that Annie Howe, having failed to get anything useful out of her, would have forgotten by now that she’d even been here.

Curse Came Down

The name on the gate was Old Wychehill Farm, suggesting that perhaps this was what remained of the original hamlet, while the present village was just fragments of a repair job for a quarry-ravaged hill.

In fact, Old Wychehill Farm was big enough to have been a hamlet in itself. Sunk into its own valley, half-circled by mature broadleaf trees with the swizzle-stick profiles of pines and monkey puzzles poking out of the mix.

The farmhouse, at the end of nearly half a mile of private drive, turned out to be the turreted house in the valley which Merrily had noticed that first morning – the turret crowning a Victorian Gothic wing added to a much older dwelling with timbers like age-browned bones.

She parked in the farmyard – courtyard, really. No animals in view, no free-range chickens. The three-storey house was enclosed by outbuildings of the same grey-brown stone. Some of the more distant buildings had curtains at their diamond-paned windows.

My lovely holiday lets.

A black pick-up truck eased in behind her. A stylish truck with chrome side-rails and silver flashes on its flanks. Two men getting out, squinting into the sun, one of them strolling across.

‘Help you?’

‘Looking for Mr Devereaux.’

‘Which one?’

‘Preston Devereaux?’

The man stood looking her up and down, pinching his unshaven chin.

‘Shame about that.’

Apart from golden highlights and a sharper jawline, he looked a lot like Preston Devereaux. Same narrow features, same loose, unhurried gait as he’d wandered over. Except this guy was over thirty years younger and the other one was the younger son, Hugo.

‘Louis, this is Mrs Watkins,’ Hugo said.

‘ Merrily.’ The face of Louis Devereaux, former huntsman, alleged former substance-abuser, split into this voracious and undeniably attractive grin. ‘And we ’re stuck with Spicer. The injustice of it.’ Louis turned to his brother. ‘You better go and find the old man. No hurry. Want to come with me, Merrily?’

‘Is it safe?’

‘I’m a country gentleman,’ Louis said, ‘from a long, long line of country gentlemen. Of course it isn’t safe.’

He strode past her across the yard, turning the handle on a plain door. It didn’t open; it was jammed at the bottom. He gave it a kick.

‘Whole place is seizing up.’

His accent was posher than his father’s. Probably been away to public school. She looked up at him as he held open the door.

‘I really won’t keep him long.’

‘He might want to keep you, though,’ Louis said. ‘I would. End of the passage, look.’ He bent down, put an arm around her shoulders, pointing. ‘The Beacon Room.’

Following her into the passage. There was an old manure smell, as if this entrance had been used for the changing of generations of farm boots. It was a rear hallway, low, earth-coloured, windowless, the only light funnelled down the well of some narrow back stairs to her left… until she pushed open the door at the end into lavish sunshine from a long window framing a wow-gasp view of the great tiered wedding-cake of Herefordshire Beacon.

The Beacon Room. Obviously built into the Victorian wing to accommodate this view. The hill was a couple of miles away, as if it had been aligned for maximum impact.

‘Quite impressive, isn’t it?’ Louis said. ‘As crime scenes go. Lit up like a housing estate last night. Cops swarming all over it.’

‘Exciting?’

‘Yeah, I guess it was. I suppose when it’s somebody you don’t know

… Well, I’ve probably seen him, if he’s the one I think he is. At the Oak.’

‘You go there?’

‘Now and then. Not as often as I used to. Quite good for… you know… girls.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘And, of course, for pissing off Len Holliday and the Wychehill Residents’ Action Group,’ Louis said. ‘One tries to sympathize, but that guy…’

‘Don’t suppose you’re really aware of the Royal Oak down here. Or the road.’

‘Don’t suppose we are, particularly,’ Louis said.

She looked around the room. Lofty, wood-panelled, definitely a man’s room, even a young man’s room – minimal furniture apart from stereo speakers the size of small wardrobes. Racks of CDs and vinyl and potentially interesting framed photographs. Over the baronial fire-place was a period poster behind glass advertising Pink Floyd and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown at the Roundhouse in London. The names were wreathed in coloured smoke from a pipe smoked by a reclining naked man like some stoned 1960s version of Michelangelo’s Adam.

I was a wild boy, too. Drove too fast, inhaled my share of blow.

On the panelled wall over a writing desk with a worn leather top there was a framed black and white photo of a bunch of young long-haired men, one of whom was… Eric Clapton? The lean, grinning guy on the end was also unmistakable. He looked like Louis Devereaux with longer hair and lush sideburns.

‘Blimey,’ Merrily said. ‘Is that-?’

‘Dad was very well connected. Once upon a time.’

‘Images of a misspent youth, Mrs Watkins.’

Merrily jumped. Preston Devereaux was standing in the doorway, an older, duller figure than she remembered from the other night, a working man wearing a farmer’s green nylon overalls and a nylon cap.

‘Didn’t know him well,’ he said. ‘But you don’t throw away a picture like that, do you?’

‘Were you in a band?’

‘Never had the talent. Managed a couple, when I was up at Oxford in the late 1960s. Which meant carrying the amps, back then, and inventing light shows. I was good at that.’

‘Oh Gawd, Memory Lane time,’ Louis said. ‘I’m out of here.’

He bowed to Merrily, made an exaggerated exit.

‘Twenty-four next week,’ Devereaux said. ‘Going on ten.’

‘If ten means pre-pubertal, I’m not sure I’d agree. What were you doing at Oxford?’

‘Physics.’

‘So… what happened? I mean…’

‘What happened?’ Devereaux walked over to the Beacon window. ‘ That happened. History. Roots. No escape. You think there is, but there en’t. Anyway…’

He stood in front of Merrily, hands behind his back.

‘No escape for me either, Mr Devereaux. What you said the other night about dealing with something in a discreet and dignified fashion…’

‘Have you?’

Merrily shook her head.

‘Become too complicated. When you’ve had a man murdered, and when the local man under suspicion of having killed him-’

‘ Local man? ’ Preston Devereaux almost left the ground. ‘There are no local men up there, Mrs Watkins. Why I was forced to come back.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, I ’m sorry. Continue.’

‘I was just going to say that the man suspected of murder is also the man I most needed to talk to about… the cyclist.’

‘You can say Elgar in here, Merrily.’

‘Thank you. Anyway, it means I haven’t been able to get to Loste. And in the meantime, other questions have opened up.’

‘Like?’

‘He was the first to identify the image in the road as Elgar. He’s obsessed with Elgar. He apparently hates what the Royal Oak has become.’