Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

Lol’s face tightening in concentration. Jane felt almost panicked now. Why was he trying to reach a woman who was evidently dead? What if something had gone wrong in his head? Or hers.

‘Unless…’ Lol said. ‘Look, she had a friend there, I remember, we got on very well. Miss White. Athena White. I expect she’s dead, too, by now.’

Lol listened. When he put the phone down, he was looking kind of excited.

‘She’s still there, Jane. When I said I expect she’s dead, too, the woman said, No, I’m afraid not.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Miss White. Athena White is still a resident at The Glades Residential Home at Hardwicke.’

‘So?’

‘Maybe you never met her. I don’t suppose Merrily would have gone out of her way to introduce you. Not then, anyway. Jane, will you do something for me?’

‘I’ll do bloody anything, Lol, if you’ll just tell me what’s happening?’

‘If I give Gomer a call, will you go down to his place and stay there until Merrily gets back?’

‘Why?’

‘Because, under the circumstances, I don’t want you on your own. And if we’re seen driving out of here together – and we will be seen…’

‘Where are you going? This is not funny, Lol – we’ve got to warn Mum about Pierce.’

‘I’m just following up something that Gomer told me. Won’t take long. I’m going to try and find out about Coleman’s Meadow.’

‘Does that matter any more?’ Jane said bleakly.

Lol pulled his old denim jacket from the back of the chair.

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

Merrily drove away from the Royal Oak still undecided about Raji Khan. It could be that Bliss, for once, was entirely wrong and that Khan was no more than what he seemed: arrogant and pompous in a way that was almost engaging because you could detect, behind it, something young and almost naive.

Mr Khan was delighted with himself and a system in which an enterprising Englishman from an Asian family could capitalize on his cultural roots to an unprecedented degree.

On the way out, he’d shown her how the Royal Oak had morphed discreetly into Inn Ya Face. It was not a listed building, and so it had been possible to remove internal walls, creating a series of archways and turning two ground-floor bars and a restaurant area into something cavernous. Black-painted wooden shutters had been installed at the windows. Although it was at ground level, with the shutters across it would be like a cellar. Yes, it did now resemble a temple, and the stone-based stage, built out from a big fireplace, was its altar.

And it had a feeling of permanence that belied Preston Devereaux’s insistence that Raji Khan wouldn’t be here long.

Would Khan risk destroying all this by involving himself in the wholesale distribution of illegal drugs? Or did he have relationships inside West Mercia Police permitting a certain… freedom of movement?

Whatever you thought about Annie Howe as a human being, it was hard to imagine her operating on that level.

Not exactly a deliverance issue, anyway.

But this was…

Driving past Wychehill Church, Merrily braked hard, drove across the road into the Church Lane cutting and turned the Volvo around, swinging back into the parking bay in front of the lantern. By the time she was running through the gates, he’d gone into the church. If it was him.

In the porch, getting her breath back into rhythm, she hesitated, the way she’d done at the Rectory.

Dealing with eccentrics… fruitcakes… imaginative and inspired people – whatever they were, it was important to keep reminding yourself that it was not about what you believed could happen so much as what they believed could happen. And it was about accepting that, when someone believed strongly enough, something could happen.

There was a lot she didn’t know, but she was getting closer.

She pushed at the double doors into the body of the church. The doors resisted her.

Locked?

He’d locked himself in?

Merrily rapped on the bevelled glass.

‘Syd?’

She could hear his footsteps on the flags. Then they stopped and she sensed him staring at the doors from the other side, the one word she’d spoken insufficient for him to identify her.

‘It’s Merrily. Are you going to let me in?’

He must have kept her waiting for a good half-minute before she heard the key turning, and then his footsteps going away again.

When she pushed open the doors and entered the vast parish church, Syd was standing in front of the chancel with its capacious semicircular choir stalls. He was wearing his cassock, and she thought what a particularly constraining garment it must be for a one-time man of action.

He looked around, with his arms out, at the empty pews, the oak-framed pulpit, the organ pipes like giant shell-cases.

‘Can you do anything about this?’

There was nothing to see. But Merrily could smell the incense.

Protect the Memory

There used to be a setting sun on the sign, Lol recalled. But it had been replaced now with less scary white lettering on a sky-blue background.

The Glades Residential Home: a one-time Victorian gentleman’s residence at the end of a drive close to the border with Wales. Wide views of the Radnorshire hills. Big, long sunsets.

Lol sat in the old white Astra in the car park, knowing he was here at least partly because, after shutting the door on Lyndon Pierce, he’d needed to be somewhere else – and fast. Him rather than Jane.

He’d watched her walking with Gomer down the street to Gomer’s bungalow, in her school uniform. Girls in uniform: always suggestive of sexual impropriety? Ironic, really: he wasn’t at all fond of uniforms, especially nurses’ uniforms. Kissing a woman in a dog collar had taken an act of will, the first time.

When he left the car, a mantle of heavy windless heat settled around him. A woman came towards him out of the stern gabled porch, a big woman in a light blue overall, late fifties, bobbed blonde hair.

‘Brenda Cardelow,’ she said. ‘Mr Robinson?’

The situation at The Glades had changed. The proprietors Lol remembered, the Thorpes, had left over a year ago, Mrs Cardelow had told him on the phone. Burn-out. She’d laughed.

‘You’re a lucky man, Mr Robinson. She appears to remember you. She’s usually inclined to deny all knowledge of visitors.’

‘One of the privileges of age,’ Lol said, but Mrs Cardelow looked unconvinced.

‘I tried to persuade her to come down to the residents’ lounge, but she insists on seeing you in her room, so I hope you’re prepared for that.’

‘I’ve never been in her room. But I’ve heard a lot about it.’

‘I’m sure you must have,’ Mrs Cardelow said.

The old woman wore a black woollen cardigan and a black wool skirt. A fluffy scarf, also black, was around her neck. Her eyes were hard and bright like cut diamonds. Nestling in the window seat, among the cushions and the books and the Egyptian tapestries and the wall-hung Turkish rugs and more books and more cushions, she was like a tiny, possibly malevolent story-book spider.

‘Robinson.’

Crooking a finger with a purple-varnished, finely pointed nail. Same sherbet-centred voice. The air in here was tinged with incense.

‘Miss White,’ Lol said.

‘Of course I remember him.’ Miss White flung a brief, barbed glance at Mrs Cardelow. ‘Nervous, would-be paramour of an unusually attractive little clergyperson – quite a curiosity at the time, amongst all those horse-faced lezzies in bondage clobber. How goes it, Robinson? Been inside the cassock yet?’

‘Anthea!’ Mrs Cardelow turned to Lol. ‘They’ve all read that damned poem that goes on about “when I’m an old woman I shall dress in purple”. They think that shedding their inhibitions will keep senility at bay, but in my experience it only hastens the onset.’