Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

Lol said, ‘Prof, was there a woman with Loste when you did the recording? A writer called Winnie Sparke?’

‘Cheesecloth and glittery bits?’

‘That would probably be her, yes.’

‘All right,’ Prof said, ‘you remember Yoko Ono in the film they made of the session for Let It Be? Sitting there, watchful? More than a bit like that, only less of the inscrutable. Not a promising relationship, was my feeling. She looks at him, sees toyboy; he looks at her… mummy.’

‘You know anything about her?’

‘Not much. She’s a writer. Does these Mystic Meg kind of books. What’s your angle?’

‘She’s told Merrily that she and Loste are on the edge of the solution to a great and beautiful mystery.’

‘Merrily?’ Prof said. ‘This is a Merrily situation? Oh, for fuck’s sake. A great and beautiful mystery? Avoid, avoid, avoid!’

‘Well, it’s not too hard to avoid him at the moment,’ Lol said. ‘He’s in custody. The cops are questioning him about a murder on Herefordshire Beacon.’

‘ Loste? This is the man found in the old fort, his throat cut from ear to ear? You’re serious?’

‘The guy worked at this hip-hop palace at the Royal Oak, outside Wychehill. Which Loste apparently believes is…’

‘An evil presence sapping his creativity. I heard that. Only, he doesn’t have any creativity. He’s an interpreter. A facilitator. That’s as far as it goes. Bloody hell, Lol. I mean, bloody hell.’

Someone was knocking on Lol’s back door.

‘Do you see him as someone who could kill?’ Lol asked.

‘Loste?’ Prof swallowed some coffee. ‘Big bloke. Conducting, he snaps batons. But he- With a knife? Blood spurting everywhere?’

Lol heard the back door opening and shutting. The door of the living room opened, and Jane stood there in her school uniform. She wasn’t smiling. She was unusually pale. When Lol pointed her to the sofa, she sat down with her hands clasped between her legs, biting her lip.

‘Prof, can I ring you back?’

‘Listen,’ Prof said, ‘if you really want to know more about Loste’s games, I can put you in touch with one of the people in his choir. In fact, there’s one guy might be more than happy to talk to you in particular. I’ll call him, get him to ring you. OK?’

Lol saw that Jane had been crying.

‘“Great and beautiful mystery”,’ Prof said. ‘I’ll tell you one thing about that. Like Elgar, Loste is obsessed with himself and his ideas. People, he can take or leave most of the time. Music is all. Nothing outside music, to Loste, could be both great and beautiful. Tell Merrily that.’

‘Right,’ Lol said. ‘Thanks.’

‘But, yeah. If there was some threat to his music, I suppose, when you think about it, he could kill,’ Prof said.

A Result, Anyway

There was a new sign and it said Starlight Cottage.

Of course. Winnie Sparke had told them how she’d changed the name from Wyche Cottage. Almost the first thing she’d said that evening with the choir laying its serene spell over Wychehill. This was what Lol had remembered.

The cottage was built of rubble stone and was not much bigger than Hannah Bradley’s place, lower down the lane. Its back garden was formed around plates of rock and ended abruptly in a kind of cliff edge with an iron fence. Merrily looked down and saw the road.

Yours etc., Starlight. Winnie, according to Spicer, had certainly been impressed by the letter supposedly sent to Elgar and passed on to Longworth.

Which posed some interesting questions. But even at 9.30 a.m., with most of the cottage still pooled in shadow, the bloody woman wasn’t around to deflect them. Frustrating, after an early night and only one remembered dream, which had been a dream of Cole Hill seen from Coleman’s Meadow; the only detail that Merrily could recall was the sense of pain and the disembodied, breeze-blown voice of Winnie Sparke saying that the hill was hurting. Odd the way that view, once seen, nested in your mind.

Merrily peered through one of the small windows, but all she could make out was a dim wall of books. She’d left her car in the lane, right outside. She gave the wind chimes above the front door a final flick and went back to it and the copy of the weekly Malvern Gazette which lay on the passenger seat.

‘RITUAL’ MURDER -LOCAL MAN HELD

Tim Loste hadn’t been named, which was normal if there were no charges yet. However, this was a weekly paper, printed yesterday, so if Loste had been charged late last night it wouldn’t have made the edition. The front-page story said the brutal killing on the Beacon had shattered a community already reeling from last weekend’s double fatal road accident (see page three).

On page three the rigid features of Leonard Holliday were in close-up against the blur of the road, under the headline:

‘THIS CARNAGE WILL GO ON…’

The story said that WRAG, the Wychehill Residents’ Action Group, was calling for the immediate closure of the Royal Oak pub as a music venue. Late-night traffic had increased dramatically on roads ‘not much wider than bridleways’ and ‘inner city’ nightlife had left residents living in fear. Mrs Joyce Aird, a widow living alone, said, ‘It’s terrifying. I’m a prisoner in my own home from Friday night to Sunday morning.’

The owner of the Royal Oak, promoter and gallery owner Rajab Ali Khan, had said, ‘I have no intention of pre-empting the inquest verdict on these two unfortunate people, but I am anxious to cooperate fully, if Mr Holliday can provide me with any evidence at all of damage to the property or person of any of his neighbours.’ It sounded like a quote that Raji had run past his solicitor.

Folding the paper, Merrily looked up to see a hare sitting at the top of Winnie’s narrow, down-sloping driveway, its black-tipped ears seeming to quiver for a moment before it bounded away into the hedge. At the top of the lane, the Cobhams’ tarted-up barn shone from its elevated site with an alien glamour, like some Pyrenean villa. It would look spectacularly seductive in the estate agent’s window, where wealthy tourists would project upon it their doomed bucolic fantasies.

Meanwhile… Stella. When Merrily had stopped in Ledbury to buy the Gazette, she’d checked her mobile, and Frannie Bliss had called from home to say he had some information from Traffic about Stella. She’d called him back at once. What he had to tell her had made the air in the car seem stale.

Might as well get this over, then.

Leaving the Volvo outside Starlight Cottage, Merrily walked up to the barn. Ignoring the front door this time, going round the back. There was a low gate on a latch, and she lifted it and went through to where a paved area had been laid. There was a wooden table and a pink and yellow striped sunshade and a woman sitting there with a mug of pungent-smelling coffee and her back to Merrily, who coughed lightly.

‘Morning, Mrs Cobham.’

Stella spun out of her chair, her red hair flaring up like a bonfire, the aggression emphasized by the kimono she wore, with yellow dragons on black and a hot slap of coffee, now, down the front.

‘Yes?’

‘Sorry to startle you.’

‘You.’ Stella subsided, pulling off her sunglasses and mopping at her kimono with a tissue. ‘Didn’t recognize you in ordinary clothes. What do you want? We’ve never encouraged people to just turn up.’

‘Well… after the way you led me on and then did a neat U-turn on the phone, that really doesn’t bother me too much.’

‘How dare -?’

‘And is this really a good time to be selling a house in Wychehill?’

Merrily placed the Malvern Gazette on the table.

‘Makes no difference.’ Stella barely glanced at it. ‘None of the potential purchasers ever come from this area. Look, Paul’s only gone into Ledbury, and he’ll be back soon and the things I’m guessing you want to talk about, if they get raised again it’s going to spoil his day, big time. And right now, our marriage, let me tell you, is hanging on… that.’