Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

‘ No,’ Merrily said. ‘If you hang up on me now, I’m-’

Jesus, what? She was sweating. He’d have the governors in his pocket.

Dead noise. He might have gone; you could never tell with a mobile. Or he might just want her to think he’d gone.

‘If you hang up on me, Mr Morrell… or take any extreme action against my daughter until I’ve had a chance to sort this out… Heaven’s sake, you’ve got kids dealing drugs, assaulting teachers, here’s one, all she’s doing is making a stand against something in her own village – not even in the school – that she feels is wrong? OK, something that you, as an atheist and an arch-sceptic, probably wouldn’t understand. And, yes, she’s never exactly tactful, and she gets up people’s noses. But if you go to the governors with this – some of whom are bound to be on the bloody council – I’m going straight to the national press, and I’ll make it my business to ensure that everybody knows what a pompous, smug, self-seeking, hypocritical prick you’ve become.’

Merrily cut the line, dropped the mobile on the passenger seat.

She was shaking. Her sweat was turning cold. She fastened her seat belt, fumbling with it, started the car and drove down to the church parking bay. Stared for a moment through the windscreen, past the church entrance to the gables of the Rectory, its windows smoky-black against the sun.

Not many people left to antagonize.

Spicer wasn’t answering the bell and she couldn’t hear it ringing inside the Rectory. Merrily banged on the front door, stepped back, scanned all the windows for movement.

Nothing. She went round the side of the house – like her own rectory, too damned big – and hammered on the back door, then walked away onto the lawn that rose into the forestry, a screen concealing quarrying scars and who knew what else.

So many screens in Wychehill, but the afternoon sun was high and hot and relentless and drove her back into the shade of the open back porch, where she stood beating one last time on the back door. Leaning on the lever-handle in frustration – and the door opened.

It swung back with no creak, and she was looking into a utility room with a Belfast sink, a pair of Wellingtons standing underneath it, a balding Barbour on a peg.

Merrily said, ‘Syd?’

No reply.

‘Syd, are you in?’

She was experiencing an unseemly urge to search the house, find the secret photos in the drawers, uncover Syd Spicer’s hidden history. The door at the end might not be locked, but she was reluctant to approach it. Afraid to? Maybe.

For reasons that she was reluctant to examine, she backed away, closed the porch door and went down the drive to the roadside.

Back in the car she rang Rajab Ali Khan’s office in Kidderminster, returning his call to her answering machine.

‘If that’s Mrs Watkins,’ a woman said, ‘Mr Khan said to tell you he’ll be at the Royal Oak for the rest of the day. He says if you can spare the time he’d like to see you.’

Local Democracy

Jane had found Redmarley D’Abitot church on the OS map, ringing it in pencil.

‘This is interesting. Look…’

‘One second…’

Lol peered around the curtain. Mid-afternoon, and the tourists were out on Church Street, the camera-hung carousel with its tape-loop of soundbite conversations. Only today, some of the visitors would be media and they knew, from the Guardian, what Jane Watkins looked like.

‘Go on…’

He polished his glasses on his T-shirt, put them back on to examine the map folded on the desk. Redmarley, on the other side of the M50 motorway, just over the Gloucestershire border, was almost due south of the Malvern range.

‘I know I’m obsessed with leys at the moment,’ Jane said. ‘But it’s almost like there is one, going up from Redmarley, interlinking the three counties, the full length of the Malverns. See?’

Jane had drawn in the line. It wasn’t connecting ancient sites as much as hilltops. Lol counted five: Midsummer Hill, Hangman’s Hill, Pinnacle Hill, Perseverance Hill, North Hill.

‘And look at this…’

She’d also marked the two major Iron Age hill forts, Herefordshire Beacon and Worcestershire Beacon. But the line didn’t go through the middle of either – it skirted the first to the right and the second to the left.

‘That’s not a problem, it’s how it seems to work,’ Jane said. ‘Alfred Watkins noticed that leys almost always cut along the edge of a hill fort rather than through the middle. If you look on the map, it’s the same with Cole Hill – although when you’re actually on the line it looks as if you’re looking directly towards the summit.’

‘What does that mean?’ Lol said. ‘Cutting to the sides.’

‘Simple. Iron Age people lived in the middle of those hill forts. There were huts and things. You don’t want powerful spiritual energy in your actual home, do you? You’d go slowly insane with the intensity of it. So you live to the side of the ley. Churches built on sites of ritual worship are something else, obviously.’

‘Being places you actually go to for a spiritual buzz?’

‘Uh-huh. So Redmarley Church is right on the line. Now, the other church where they had a choir going, Little Malvern Priory, that’s not on the great north-south ley. It is on a ley, though, another one that’s cutting left to right, across the north-south line. Now here’s Wychehill…’

‘Where the two lines cross.’

‘Cool, huh?’

‘You may be on to something here,’ Lol said. ‘I just wish I knew what.’

‘We’re looking at a whole range of holy hills. That would make this a massively important area, geopsychically.’

She looked up at Lol and sighed softly.

‘You know, I love this. It reinforces your sense of… I dunno… Like, you just put your pencil on the map, and it’s like the choir guy said, you’re suddenly at the centre of something immense. Almost like you’re making a personal connection with…’ Jane shook her head rapidly ‘… bollocks.’

‘Maybe all great ideas start off as bollocks,’ Lol said. ‘It’s the way-’

‘Oh hell, who’s this?’

Jane snatched a quick glance around the curtain and then moved away from the window, her head down. Someone was knocking on the front door.

‘Go upstairs,’ Lol said.

‘Mr Robinson, is it? Sorry to bother you, but I understood you might know where the vicar is.’

He was wearing a suit and a wine-coloured tie which – first thing Lol noticed – matched his plump lips. Swaying a little, rattling small change and keys in his pockets. It seemed so not his generation, rattling your keys. He couldn’t be more than thirty.

‘Sorry,’ Lol said. ‘I’m not really sure where she is. Her work takes her all over the diocese.’

‘Daughter with her, do you know?’

‘Wouldn’t imagine so. It’s, um, Mr Pierce, isn’t it?’

‘Lyndon Pierce, that’s right.’ Gelled hair glinting in the sunlight like the roof of a black cab. ‘Sure we must’ve met sometime or other. Been trying to get around to see all the newcomers to the village, one by one.’

‘I’ve been here a few years now, actually,’ Lol said. ‘You probably didn’t notice me. Is there… anything I can do? Any message I can pass on?’

‘That’s very possible, Mr Robinson, yes.’

Lyndon Pierce’s local accent seemed to have acquired a transatlantic roll. He glanced meaningfully over his shoulder at a Japanese dad photographing his family on the edge of the square.

‘You want to come in?’ Lol said.

‘Thank you.’ Pierce rubbed his hands. ‘Won’t keep you a minute, Mr Robinson, but there are some things that I think Mrs Watkins should know about, if you happen to be in… contact with her.’