To Dream of the Dead

unusually rapidly for a Sunday morning; even so, Gyles Banks-Jones was in a fairly frayed state by then. As anyone would be, exposed to the smelly street-scrapings occupying the neighbouring cells two days short of Christmas.

‘Mr Bliss,’ Gyles said, ‘I realise that the law of the land obliges you to regard me as a common criminal, but society—’

‘Please do not give me society, Gyles. You can help me, or you can be difficult… with whatever effect that may have on the length of your sentence.’

‘Now that’s ridiculous. Do you think I’m naive? I watch the news, I read the papers. Nobody goes to prison these days for a first offence of… of this nature. The prisons are overcrowded. Everybody knows that.’ Gyles flashing an imploring glance at his solicitor, but the solicitor pretended he was searching for something in his case. Bliss — leaning back, hands behind his head — let the silence inflate like a breath-test kit, and then he yawned.

‘Gyles. Little toe-rags from one-parent families, with only five convictions for TWOC and crack by the age of seventeen — they don’t go to prison, on account of the System says we have to give them a chance to turn their little lives around. Respectable, middle-class, liberal-minded gentlemen with good incomes, however, who sadly fall from grace just the once…’ Bliss dropped his hands, sat up hard. ‘Bang! That was your cell door, Gyles. I’d say five months.’

Enjoying this now. The day having totally turned around when they were leaving Gyles’s place in daylight and he’d looked up at a window of the house across the double drive, and seen a face peering out.

Gyles looked at his solicitor, who clicked his case shut and set it down beside his chair.

‘How do you collect the coke?’ Bliss said.

‘They… bring it to my shop. In cardboard boxes. Cardboard boxes I’ve given them. As if it’s supplies from a wholesaler.’

Banks-Jones’s had turned out to be the jewellers — oh, the irony of it — from whom they’d bought Kirsty’s engagement ring. Gyles’s dad had run the shop, back then.

‘And when you say they…?’

No answer. For the first time, Bliss smelled fear. There was a particular person here that Gyles really did not want to finger. Someone who very much knew where he lived.

‘How was it sourced, Gyles? Take me back. How’d you make the first contact?’

‘I… I teach at the art college, one day a week. Jewellery. Someone I met there… I can’t—’ Gyles shook his head as though he’d just woken up. ‘I can’t do this. I have to live in this city. These people are not criminals.’

‘Who aren’t?’

‘Certainly none of the people at last night’s party. Or the person who introduced me to… to…’

‘… To the real criminals?’

‘We keep them at very much arm’s length. None of us can be seen to… We’re all either self-employed, with all the stress that involves these days, or with taxing jobs. We’re not… lowlife. It’s about relaxation, unwinding… recovery space.’

Bliss said, ‘You’re a twat, Gyles. You know that?’

‘Do you know what some of these people are like?’

‘Jes — Of course I know what these people are like. On which basis, I’d far rather put them away than you. So let’s start again, shall we? Play your cards right, you could be home for Christmas dinner — which I’d guess tastes better from a nice plate rather than one of them tin trays with little compartments. So let’s talk about the friends and neighbours whose senses you help to stimulate. Would that include the man next door, by any chance?’

‘Why can’t you just charge me and—?’

‘Let you go round and warn everybody? Please, Gyles, don’t insult my intelligence. You know what I’m after.’

‘Look… I keep my distance. I don’t try to get to know them. And if I’d known what sort of people they were, I would never have—’

‘How do you know what sort of people they are?’

‘I know where they live. Roughly.’

‘Let me take a wild guess — the Plascarreg? Don’t worry, I gather nobody can get out of there today, with the Belmont roundabout only open for canoes.’

‘This is unbearable,’ Gyles Banks-Jones said. ‘This is an absolute nightmare.’

35 Paganus

Paganism was all over this church: glistening in the holly on the sills, glowing dully in the red apple held by Eve in a window that was more about orchard fertility than original sin.

Merrily paused, looking down into the central aisle, meeting nobody’s eyes. She had some lights on, high in the rafters over the nave, and a couple of spots. Say it.

‘Last week, I was virtually accused of being one.’

A pagan.

Better if there’d been more people to hear it, but the Sunday before Christmas you rarely got many in church. And it would get around — these things always did.

Secretly standing on a hassock, Merrily gripped the sides of a high Gothic pulpit that was too big for her. Never really liked the pulpit. A glorified play-fort.

She’d told them there were things that needed saying about Coleman’s Meadow. What it meant for the village.

About thirty-five punters; could be worse with Sunday opening, all those last-minute presents to buy. Which reminded her, with a jolt, that she’d need to get over to Knights Frome to pick up the Boswell guitar. Could she fit that in before tonight’s meditation?

No — phew — it was OK. No Sunday evening meditation this week; it was happening on Christmas Eve instead. Tomorrow. God. The medieval sandstone walls seemed to close together under the lights, crushing her like a moth.

She closed her eyes, drew a breath. The noise in the windows was like a battering of arrows. The relentless thuggery of the rain had awoken her well before the sky was diluted into daylight, so vicious you expected to find craters in the road. She raised her voice against it. ‘Most of us will be aware of the archaeologists who started work yesterday. They could even be working this morning — I don’t think I see any of them here.’

Just as well, perhaps.

Last night had been almost unprecedented. Jane looking cowed, hunted. Not even angry, just… dulled and unreachable. From the moment they’d got back Eirion had kept looking at Merrily, his eyes clouded with worry, wide with mute appeal: do something.

In the end, Lol had created an opening, announcing he’d had an unexpected cheque from album sales in Germany. Enough to buy them all dinner at the Black Swan.

Jane had looked immediately panicked, said she was, like, really tired? Merrily, throwing Lol a glance, had said why didn’t he and Eirion go to the Swan, talk music and stuff? Eirion having met Lol before he’d even known Jane, back when he was in a schoolboy rock band with the son of Lol’s psychotherapist friend Dick Lyden. Merrily thinking that if she didn’t get the full facts out of Jane, Lol would at least hear it from Eirion.

When they’d gone she’d built up the fire in the parlour, and they’d sat for two hours going over the implications.

‘The bottom line,’ Merrily told Lol on the phone, after midnight, ‘is that this has virtually destroyed archaeology for her. It’s something she’s never going to forget — or be allowed to. And if you take away the possibility of some ancient magic in the distant past and all you’re left with is…’