Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

‘All right. Look, thanks for… It must’ve been…’

‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

‘I’ll do it. Need to keep moving. There are some things I want to run past you, and if you tell me it’s all crap, I just might not go insane.’

Merrily filled the kettle and plugged it in. The clock said 7.01, and the light on the cream-washed walls was beginning to weaken.

‘I don’t know whether you got any of that, but Bliss is investigating the murder of a security consultant and private investigator. Who was a former member of the SAS. As was Syd Spicer.’

‘And a few hundred other blokes in this county,’ Lol reminded her.

‘I was told that Spicer’s marriage had broken up, but he tells me today he’s just sent his wife and daughter down south while he stays here. Because, he says, his “mission” is not yet over. The daughter, Emily, became a serious user in Hereford and he was worried about the proximity of the Royal Oak.’

‘Heroin?’

‘I don’t know. He doesn’t tell you a lot. And, although he’s with an anti-drug group in Herefordshire, he doesn’t involve himself in the campaign by the Wychehill Residents’ Action Group. Neither does the chairman of the parish council, Preston Devereaux. Whose eldest son appears to have had similar problems and, I’m told, went out with Spicer’s daughter. Devereaux – a man who is conspicuously sitting on a lot of bitterness and rage about the government and the way the countryside gets treated – becomes curiously blase when you mention the Royal Oak. It won’t last, he says. Raji Khan will move on. Move on is Devereaux’s favourite expression.’

Merrily put tea bags in the pot, thinking this out.

‘Although the anti-drugs group works with the police, Spicer admitted tonight that he suspected Roman Wicklow was dealing on the Beacon and didn’t see the point in telling the police.’

‘OK, that’s odd,’ Lol said.

‘So… Spicer and Devereaux. Two strong, self-sufficient, arguably dangerous men, who know each other well but don’t conspicuously hang out together. Two men in public positions locally who, nonetheless, keep low profiles.’

‘You’re suggesting they don’t trust the police to do a proper job? They’ve got some vigilante thing?’

‘Bliss thinks Raji Khan is behind the influx of heroin, crack and whatever sells… into the market towns. Bliss suggests that Khan, with his social position, his connections, has a bit of a charmed life. I met Khan this afternoon and – just a feeling – wondered about a special relationship with Annie Howe. He’s very cool. Far less wary than… than Spicer, for heaven’s sake.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’ Lol paced the flagged floor. ‘SAS men are well trained in the use of knives to dispose of people without any fuss. But Wicklow – that wasn’t exactly discreet, was it?’

‘God,’ Merrily said. ‘Spicer’s a-’

‘But you don’t really have anything other than conjecture, do you?’

‘Nothing at all. He’s also a priest…’

‘Priests have done worse,’ Lol said, ‘even in your limited experience. Well, one priest. And he wasn’t even trained to kill. Look, why not just unload it all on Bliss?’

‘But if it turns out it’s nothing at all to do with Spicer, a fellow priest, what does that make me?’

‘Cautious. How does any of this tie into the killing of this guy in Hereford?’

‘Turns out that Winnie Sparke was one of his clients – Bliss doesn’t know why.’

‘ You have any ideas?’

Merrily shook her head. ‘But Spicer and France had to know each other. They’re about the same age – they must’ve served together.’

‘Well… yes… but what does that…?’

‘I don’t know. I’m just a humble bloody vicar. What do I do with this, Lol? Do I call Bliss back?’

‘I don’t know, either,’ Lol said. ‘But I can give you a very good reason to call Winnie Sparke.’

A Perfect Universe

‘This is Starlight Cottage,’ Winnie said. ‘Who is that?’

‘This is Merrily Watkins, Winnie.’

‘What do you want?’

When it came to it, nobody could do cold better than someone from the Sunshine State.

‘I wanted to talk to you about the Whiteleafed Oak,’ Merrily said.

Pause.

‘Whiteleafed…?’

‘Oak.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m sorry, Winnie, but I think you do,’ Merrily said, gripping the big bakelite phone for some kind of support. ‘Whiteleafed Oak is a hamlet at the southern tip of the Malverns. It seems to be the joining point of the three counties: Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire.’

Winnie was silent.

‘The three counties that come together every year for what seems to be the world’s oldest music festival, the Three Choirs. Which, although it only officially dates back to the eighteenth century, reflects something a lot older. I mean, the concept of… perpetual choirs?’

It had taken most of an hour to become basically conversant with this from the information that Lol had picked up from Athena White (Oh God, Athena White?) and it was coming up to eight p.m., and half of the churchyard wall was in shadow.

At one stage, Merrily had gone up to Jane’s apartment in search of books which might illuminate the subject, coming down with a paperback entitled Sound and the Shaman and not discovering, until she’d laid it on the desk in front of Lol, that it had been published by an American company called Taliesin and written by one C. Winchester Sparke – the name appearing in small, perfunctory lettering under a picture of an Irish bodhran drum with feathers attached to its frame. One of those books which sold purely on subject, and the author’s identity was of little significance.

In the beginning, the book began, was – and is – the sound.

‘The idea of perpetual choirs seems to have begun as a Druidic concept. It also seems to link into the theory of the Music of the Spheres, attributed to Pythagoras, way back before Christ. In which the planets are believed to resonate according to a musical pattern that maintains celestial harmony. A perfect universe.’

Merrily paused, looking at Lol. Felt like she was in the pulpit. Lol was nodding.

‘The perpetual choirs – stop me if you start to lose interest – were supposed to have maintained that level of harmony on earth. As above, so below. Each choir would have at least twelve members – monks in Christian times, bards or whatever before that. Singing in shifts so that it never stopped. And the choirs were said to have been set up in churches or temples on the perimeters of huge circles in the countryside.’

But where did this idea come from? Merrily had demanded desperately, watching Lol spreading out an OS map on the carpet. A map with black lines and circles drawn on it.

He had, after all, obtained the information from Athena White, a little old woman whom Merrily had encountered perhaps twice, in those scary early days of Deliverance. A long-retired civil servant with a child’s voice and a child’s instinctive, remorseless cunning. A repository of arcane data who’d made that intimidating new assignment seem even more like a journey to the centre of the Earth. Merrily had been slightly afraid for the woman’s soul, whereas wary, tentative Lol could casually approach Athena – real name Anthea, it helped to keep reminding yourself of that – and emerge… enlightened?

Or at least slightly infatuated. The musician lit up by this beautiful but possibly apocryphal concept resurrected in the early 1970s in England by the earth-mysteries scholar John Michell, who had suggested that maintaining the perpetual chant was how the Druids kept control over the Celtic tribes – presumably because nobody would risk breaking the sonic connection between heaven and earth. And then it was absorbed by Christian communities, perhaps using Gregorian chant, and…