Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

Jane sprang up, as though the ancient energy was surging underneath the cottage floor.

‘Who do I complain to? Who do I lobby?’

‘The MP? Downing Street?’ Where it would go into the shredder marked fruitcakes. ‘Maybe best to start with the local councillor.’

‘Gavin Ashe?’

‘Gavin Ashe resigned, Jane. New guy is Lyndon Pierce. Lives at the end of Virgingate Lane.’

‘Which party?’

‘Non-party. He’s an independent.’

‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? That means he doesn’t have to follow any party line on housing, right? It’s a start.’

Lol said nothing. ‘Independent’ also meant you were free to jump into anybody’s pocket.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose you could approach him on a preservation-of-heritage basis. If you show him the picture in The Old Straight Track.’

‘Erm… yeah,’ Jane said. ‘I could…’

‘Because I’d guess that area hasn’t changed at all since Watkins was around in the 1920s?’

‘No. Probably not.’ She looked uncertain, suddenly. ‘Right. So that’s Lyndon…?’

‘Pierce. He’s a chartered accountant. Jane…’ Lol didn’t really want to ask this. ‘Coleman’s Meadow is shown in the book, isn’t it?’

‘Look, Lol, you couldn’t…’ Jane frowned. ‘Obviously Watkins couldn’t include every ley in the county.’

‘You mean, no picture?’

‘Well, no, but that doesn’t-’

‘The most perfect, visible ley and he didn’t take a picture of it?’

‘Maybe he just didn’t use it.’ Jane was backing awkwardly towards the door. ‘Maybe it didn’t come out, I don’t know. Don’t look at me in that sorrowful, pitying-’

‘So, basically, this is not an Alfred Watkins ley, this is… a Jane Watkins ley.’

Lol thought he saw a glitter of tears. This was about more than just a ley line and the soul of the village. It was also about being nearly eighteen and the realization that you were entering a world where changes were seldom for the better.

‘Jane, did… did Watkins even mention this line, or even Ledwardine?’

‘No.’ Jane looked down at her feet. ‘It’s the one thing I can’t understand.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s the real thing, though, Lol.’ She looked up, defiant again. ‘I mean you thought it was. You weren’t just-?’ ‘Well, I suppose it doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t find it.’

‘Now you’re humouring me. Don’t do that.’

‘No, really. He might have discovered it too late to get it into the book.’

‘You think?’

‘It’s possible. And I mean, I’m no kind of expert, but it does seem like a perfect ley.’

Jane looked him in the eyes. ‘So you think I’m doing the right thing.’

A weighty moment. For a second or two, Lol felt the presence in the room of the cottage’s last owner, Lucy Devenish, Jane’s friend and mentor. His, too. Dead for over two years now. But sometimes when he came in at night he could still believe he’d seen, in the fractured instant of snapping on the lights, the folds of Lucy’s trademark poncho hanging over the newel post at the bottom of the stairs.

‘I suppose that depends very much on what you’re planning to do,’ he said carefully.

When Jane had gone, Lol could still feel her agitation in the air, bobbing and flickering around like the rays from the crystals.

He picked up the Boswell guitar. Prof Levin had studio time available in the second half of September, which left less than three months to develop this horribly difficult second-album-after-the-comeback. The one which had to be appreciably better than the first or your career was in meltdown.

Again.

Lol sat down on the sofa with the Boswell and tried again with ‘Cloisters’, a mainly instrumental number which, no matter how he moved it around, and despite the experiments with Nick Drake tuning, continued to sound ordinary. As in flat. As in lifeless. More or less like every other song he’d half-finished in the past several weeks – a period in which, otherwise, he’d felt contented, balanced… normal. It was surely too much of a cliche that you had to be emotionally raw, broken, ragged, wretched or lovelorn to write a worthwhile song.

Maybe it just needed a string arrangement.

He lay back on the sofa with his arms around the guitar, an image coming to him of the dead of Ledwar-dine in some half-formed procession from the steeple to the holy hill, bisected by a stream of unheeding SUVs.

Dead to the World

Caractacus.

It was carved into a stone slab by a gate in a hedge enclosing a house and an empty carport. A flat, blank house built of the same squarish stones as the church. It was about a minute’s walk down the hill from the Rectory but very much on its own.

Merrily had a sudden sense of isolation, vulnerability. She shook herself.

Caractacus, as most schoolkids learned, was the ancient British hero defeated by the Romans and taken back to Rome, where he was treated with some respect. The final conflict was supposed to have taken place on Herefordshire Beacon, but that was only a legend, discredited, apparently, by historians.

If Caractacus had retired here at least he’d have been spared a view of the Beacon. The house was tucked so tightly into the hill that all you could see behind it was a steep field vanishing rapidly into the forestry.

To get to the front door, Merrily had to push away a sapling taller than she was. Disbelieving, she inspected a leaf.

An oak? Within a couple of years it’d be pushing the glass in. In thirty years it would probably have the house down. Tim Loste must surely be planning to transplant it somewhere – but where? His front garden was the size of a smallish bathroom and there clearly wasn’t much space behind the house, either.

On the wall beside the front door was a bell pull. Merrily could hear the jingling inside the house. No other sounds. She waited at least two minutes before edging around the oak and walking back to the road, pulling her mobile from her shoulder bag.

‘Couldn’t check out a couple of things for me, could you, Sophie?’

‘Tell me.’

‘The Royal Oak. It’s a pub not far from Wychehill which seems to have undergone some kind of transformation, making it… unpopular. Might be something on the Net.’

‘I may even have heard something about this. I’ll look into it. Anything else?’

‘Syd Spicer. Is it true he’s ex-Regiment?’

‘I don’t know. The Bishop would be able to tell us for certain, but he’s taken his grandson to a county cricket match in Worcester. That’s rather interesting, Merrily, isn’t it? I’ll find out what I can about Mr Spicer’s history which, given the traditions of the SAS, is likely to be very little. What are you doing now?’

‘Trying to understand what’s happening here.’ Merrily looked up the hill towards the church, concealed by dark deciduous trees. ‘Spicer’s right about this place. You wouldn’t know you were in it.’

She’d left the twenty-year-old Volvo in the parking bay in front of the church. She walked up past it, seeing nobody, following the grey-brown churchyard wall into a short, steep cutting which accessed a lane running parallel to the main road but on a higher level, like a sloping gallery.

Time to seek help to remove the evil from our midst, Joyce Aird had apparently said to Syd Spicer.

Midst of what?

All the same, she brought her small pectoral cross out of her bag and slipped it on, letting it drop down under the T-shirt. You could never be too careful.

Hannah’s cottage was low and pebble-dashed and painted a buttermilk colour. Rustic porch and a clematis, and a mountain bike propped up under a front window.