who’d
Lol looked up at the oak beam. How old? Four hundred years? Longer, maybe twice as long, because it had been a tree, born into red Welsh Border soil.
The guy had been wrong.
The right people
He’d toured a wide area of western Britain, but not within ten miles of this village. All the times Barry at the Black Swan had invited him to do a gig, and Lol had backed off.
Because, apart from Barry, nobody who lived here had ever acknowledged what he did. None of the locals, none of the incomers. He doubted anyone in Ledwardine had ever bought his solo album and certainly not anything he’d done years ago with Hazey Jane.
A cold audience. He’d played twice, in the past year, to cold audiences. He’d played in bars where they carried on drinking and chatting amongst themselves. He’d played one pub where a dozen people had carried their drinks outside because they couldn’t hear themselves laugh. It hadn’t mattered that much; he just wouldn’t go back there again.
But this… was where he lived. In Lucy’s old house — there should be a blue plaque outside. This was where he wrote the songs that were so much a part of who he was. That, in some ways, were
But if he said
Lol saw Merrily looking down the street directly towards this window, and pulled his face away, stood clutching the wooden sill with both hands while the west wind rattled the panes as if it was trying to shake some sense into him.
The whining of the wind seeming to echo Councillor Pierce.
9
Where the Dead Walk
Two women in a graveyard before dawn… this was not the kind of encounter you could easily walk away from. A sense of deja vu had thrown Jane off balance, but she kept on walking along the side of the church, the woman and the wind keeping pace with her.
‘Been out every morning for about a
Jane’s lamplight had found the costly lustre of a big camera with a fat lens, the kind of kit that made Eirion’s prized SLR look like a budget disposable from Tesco.
‘Yeah.’ She looked up; the sky was paler, but there were none of the pastel streaks that preceded an actual sunrise. ‘We get a clear night, and then it all closes in again.’
‘What are you, a poacher?’
‘Do I look like a poacher?’
‘Dunno. Too dark to see. I was thinking, the lamp? Don’t poachers lamp things?’
‘So I believe,’ Jane said. ‘But, like, not often at a quarter to seven in the morning.’
Incomers: what could you say?
Be a bit rude to lamp her directly, but the haze on the edge of the beam had revealed bushy red-gold hair, and the posh, musky voice suggested fairly young — probably a bit younger than Mum, maybe early thirties? Still sexy, anyway, and aware of it.
The deja vu had explained itself — Jane recalling meeting another photographer, from the
‘Oh… down there.’
‘No, I mean who are you with? Which paper?’
‘Oh, I see. Freelance.
Jane nodded. Wasn’t as if hacks and snappers were scarce in Ledwardine, not since the village had been identified as the principal centre of the —
‘Lensi.’
‘Sorry?’
‘People call me Lensi. Used to be Lenni, but now it’s Lensi — L-EN-S-I. For obvious reasons.’
She had what Jane was starting to think of as a New Cotswold accent. Posh, but a trace of London. And… jolly. The only word for it. Super-confident, no sense of intruding.
‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Cool.’
‘And you are?’
‘Jane.’
They’d come through the small gate at the top of the churchyard and out onto the still-deserted square, where the fake gaslamps exposed a biggish woman in light-blue Gore-Tex, gleamingly new. Wide face, wide mouth, lovely even, white teeth. Also sapphire earrings and Ugg boots — Chelsea wellies.
‘Well,’ Jane said. ‘I’d better be—’
‘So who
‘She was a friend.’
‘Was?’
‘The graveyard? Flat stones with, like, names carved into them?’
Jane stopped by the unlit Christmas tree, over twice her height and swaying in the wind. She could see lights in the vicarage. Should be getting back. Mum had a funeral; she wouldn’t be in the best of moods by now.
‘Her name was Lucy Devenish. Used to have a shop just over there, called Ledwardine Lore. Got knocked off her moped. Killed. On the bypass.’
‘And you… still like to chat with her, do you?’
‘Look,’ Jane said, ‘if you want to catch the best of the early light, you could go down that alley, and you’ll come to a stile which takes you into the remains of an old orchard, with a gateway into—’
‘Coleman’s Meadow. I know. It’s the way I came.’
Jane stared at her, silent.
‘I live near there,’ Lensi said. ‘For nearly seven weeks now, on and off. We’re in a barn conversion.’
‘Cole Barn?’ Jane backed up into one of the oak pillars of the market hall. ‘You’ve bought Cole Barn? But it’s—’
‘Just renting it, actually,’ the woman said. ‘We’re checking out the area generally, to see if we like it, before deciding whether we should buy ourselves in.’
‘And I was reading about all this kerfuffle over prehistoric remains, so now I’m sort of keeping an eye on it for the