To Dream of the Dead

‘Bits of pottery and old bones,’ Lol said. ‘Not enough for Jane.’

‘I can’t believe he could do that to her.’

She’d been on the mobile in her bedroom, Eirion and Jane in their separate beds a floor apart. Presumably.

‘She was in the way,’ Lol said. ‘He’d had a bad morning, and Jane was in the way.’

‘And the dowser he threatened to impale on his own rods?’

‘Just warming up. Jane tell you how relaxed he was afterwards, when he’d turned it around?’

‘And that tells you what? As a psychotherapist.’

‘Failed psychotherapist. It may, of course, be nothing to do with psychology, just cold professionalism. It’s the Trench One format, isn’t it, now? It’s had to become one of those programmes founded on friction, confrontation.’

‘Cruelty.’

‘But the victims have to look like they deserve it. I’m guessing Blore had been encouraging Jane to get carried away with her own discovery, so she’d come over as a bit… you know, precocious, full of herself. Get the audience on Blore’s side before he…’

‘Takes her down?’

‘With a beautifully timed joke. At the end of a sequence leaving him looking witty and sharp. Couldn’t’ve been better with a script.’

‘You think maybe there was a script?’

‘Probably nothing that formal, but the way Eirion told it, it just struck me that the student had been set up as a feed. Obviously, you’d never prove that. And if you could… so what? It’s Blore’s job.’

‘To make an eighteen-year-old girl feel two feet high?’

‘I had to stop Eirion going for him in the pub.’

‘Blore was there?’

Merrily supposed that was why Jane hadn’t wanted to go near the Swan.

‘Mr Conviviality,’ Lol said. ‘Buying nearly as many drinks as he consumed. Eirion wanted to threaten him with bad publicity. It wouldn’t’ve helped. Eirion’s not a journalist yet. Blore would’ve swatted him like a wasp.’

‘You think there’s anything we can do to stop it going out?’

‘Probably not by appealing to his sense of moral decency. He’s not going to throw away five minutes of great telly.’

‘No.’

The worst thing about this was that Jane would feel she couldn’t go back to Coleman’s Meadow as long as Blore and his crew were there. So she probably wouldn’t see the stones raised. Her stones.

It had taken Merrily another hour and a half to get to sleep, and then the rain had awoken her twice before she’d given up, struggled into her robe and gone down to make tea before the dawn had arrived like industrial smoke, and the rain had really set in.

Enough of the congregation had been at the parish meeting and knew this already, but it bore repeating.

‘Coleman’s Meadow,’ Merrily said, ‘was already seen as quite a controversial issue because the archaeology could, if it was significant enough, prevent housing development in the village. But there are other possible housing sites, so that’s not so vitally important.’

Except to the people who knew that only full development of Coleman’s Meadow could swiftly open the way for the kind of serious, large-scale expansion that would very soon become unstoppable. A lot of money at stake here, and she was tempted to talk about that… but, although Lyndon Pierce wasn’t here, it would get back to him. And his lawyers.

‘The other reason for controversy is that what’s being uncovered is a pagan site. Again, not that many people would see this as a problem.’ Who, in fact, apart from Shirley West? She didn’t look at Shirley in the corner of a pew halfway down the nave in her padded raincoat, but she could feel Shirley looking at her. A public figure now, the postmistress, status.

‘But, because this is basically a religious issue, I suppose I should be the one to address it.’

Focusing on James Bull-Davies because he wasn’t looking at her. James was in the old Bull family pew, an elbow on the prayer-book rack, head lowered into forked forefingers, listening. Two rows behind him, Jim and Brenda Prosser glanced at one another.

Merrily had called in at the shop just before eight, on the way to Holy Communion, and Jim had shown her the Sunday paper spreads.

ROAD-RAGE, PAGAN-STYLE.

The Sunday Telegraph was the only paper to connect the Dinedor Serpent with the Tara Hill row in Ireland, quoting the poet Seamus Heaney and other luminaries on the way that determinedly secular governments, fuelled by fat bags of Euro-loot, were happy to lay tarmac over sacred ground.

In Hereford, the chairperson of the Save the Serpent group was quoted as saying, They’re cutting the ancient umbilical between Hereford and its mother hill.

Lower down, a local landowner said, with some bitterness, If this road was in danger of going through a mosque we’d be diverting it without a second thought.

But had Clem Ayling actually been killed because of his ridiculing of the Serpent? The Telegraph feature writer, maintaining his distance and a healthy irony, had discovered a woman called Sara Starkey, described as a Wiccan High Priestess. Sara, whom Merrily had never encountered, hadn’t held back.

The Serpent was sanctified to the Old Ones. I’ve walked there and, in a psychic state, seen ceremonies of night and fire. I’ve seen a torchlight procession led by Druid priests, clad all in white, moving slowly down the hill towards the river, where the moon’s reflection swims, following the coils of the Serpent. I’ve felt the anger and the sorrow resounding down the ages, and I’m telling you that this road, if it goes ahead, will be subject to forces which no surveyor can control.

Already, one man has been badly injured felling trees on the site. On any road that goes through there, cars and lorries will go wildly out of control, and there’ll be serious accidents. Drivers will be slamming on the brakes for human shapes that do not exist… in their world.

Merrily had smiled. Got that one right, then.

But it was interesting, the way the pagan aspect had been emphasised. You’d think nobody else cared. But even Jane’s database suggested that the majority of the Coleman’s Meadow protesters were people with no obvious spiritual affiliation, simply an interest in prehistory and heritage, and the Dinedor Serpent campaigners were likely to be even more orthodox. However, somebody — very probably Annie Howe, via the police press office — had inflated the religious angle. Hence yesterday’s headlines about pagan nutters.

The Telegraph had a picture of Sara, a sharp-faced middle-aged woman with long straight hair standing on the earthen ramparts of Dinedor hill fort.

I’m speaking in sorrow, but from experience. When we ignore the spiritual traditions of the ancestors, in full awareness of what we are doing, we deserve all we get. However, the idea that a Wiccan or a follower of any other earth-related spiritual path would commit a murder is proof only that the accusers know nothing of the pagan way.

Retribution they’d leave to the gods.

Before Lol and Eirion came back from the pub, Merrily had asked Jane about the worst the cops might find on the Coleman’s Meadow database.

‘Do you want me to tell the media that the police took away the computer? I’m prepared to do that. They haven’t brought it back, have they?’