There was something that no one ever mentioned, but which Alton couldn’t help thinking about whenever he saw the virulent green of the plant life burgeoning in his churchyard. Part of the problem was that in the older areas of the churchyard, the vegetation had too many nutrients to feed on. The sides of the ancient burial caskets would have been breached many years ago, allowing the peaty soil to trickle through the cracks in the wood and mingle with the bones and the mouldering clothes of the dead. And with the soil would go the insects and all the things that lived underground in the dark. And behind them, the roots of the plants colonizing the surface - pale, thin tendrils twining into the crevices and attaching themselves to wood and bones and desiccated flesh. Earth to earth, indeed. And then from earth back into the light, in an unstoppable burst of energy as nutrients surged up the stems of the plants into a green eruption every spring. It was almost as if the dead were always able to come back and overwhelm the living.
Because energy never died - it simply dispersed into the rest of the world and re-formed itself. In the churchyard of St Asaph’s, it seemed to re-form itself into brambles and thistles, docks and dandelions, everything that was green and damp and grew faster than he was able to control.
The vicar sighed at such thoughts. They had never entered his head until he had arrived in Withens and Hey Bridge. But he couldn’t be blamed. Even the bishop didn’t blame him. People still died in Withens. But there had not been a single wedding in his time in the village, nor a christening. It was as if the people had no objection to wearing funereal black to enter the church, but they drew the line at the frivolity of a white wedding gown or a christening robe, at bridesmaids in satiny pastels and bright buttonholes.
310
Alton heaved on the mat of vegetation. It began to come away in a large lump, a long, tangled blanket of it. It had shallow roots that came away in thin, white tendrils ending in clumps of peaty soil that crumbled and trickled back on to the ground. Alton found he had exposed a wide area of ground that hadn’t seen the light for many months. There were lots of insects wriggling and scurrying to get out of the way, and small snails dropping from the brambles on to the ground.
He hadn’t realized quite how shallow the peat was in the churchyard, but there seemed to be part of the bedrock showing below the surface. It was a wonder that anyone had ever found enough depth for burials. Maybe that was why the huge slabs had been laid horizontally, to conceal the fact that the graves themselves were shallow instead of the traditional six feet deep.
But then Alton frowned. He knew perfectly well that the bedrock here was millstone grit, not limestone - that was further south in the White Peak. The rock beneath the peat should be dark, not light grey, as this lump was that protruded through the surface among the insects and snails.
Finally, his eyes seemed to focus properly, and he saw the other grey shapes exposed on the surface. There was a series of curved strips like the bars of a cage. There was a flattened edge like a spatula. And there were dark holes in the object he had originally taken for a stone - holes full of shadows that seemed to stare back at him accusingly.
‘No!’
Without thinking, he threw the mat of vegetation back, covering the bones he had exposed, as if putting them out of sight would make them cease to exist. Alton screwed up his face, wishing that he could reduce the bones to dust by the power of his thoughts.
‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Oh, God, why have you done this to me?’
311
28
Tor heaven’s sake, get these people moved away/ said DI Kitchens.
A couple of uniformed officers moved into action. Ben Cooper hadn’t noticed the small crowd that had been gathering on the other side of the churchyard wall. He saw some of the Oxley boys among them, and their neighbour, Mrs Wallwin. And there was Fran Oxley, too, at the back of the crowd. Unlike the others, she wasn’t staring at the bones on the ground, but at Cooper himself. He met her eyes, wondering what it was she was trying to tell him. Of all the Oxleys, she was the one he felt he had come closest to communicating with. Yet even Fran wasn’t able to speak to him directly, to tell him anything of what she knew. Cooper was an outsider. And that was too much of a boundary for her to cross.
‘Where’s the vicar now?’ said Kitchens. ‘Mr Alton, is it?’
‘He’s inside, sir.’
‘See if he’s ready to make a statement yet.’
Cooper noticed that the ivy covering the wall of the church had been cut back at some time. It had clambered over the guttering and spread right across the roof towards the ridge before a line had been drawn. If it had been left to itself, no doubt it would have crossed the ridge, too, and spread down the other side, until the entire church was covered. But the ivy stems had been brutally hacked off about three feet below the gutter and the suckers had been peeled from the stonework. You could still see the little white marks where the ivy had taken a grip.
But whoever had cut back the ivy here hadn’t bothered to remove the tendrils that had been growing through the gaps between the roof tiles. Cut off from their parent stem, they had turned black and dry, some of them still sticking vertically into
313
the air. Cooper supposed that trying to get them out would have pulled the tiles loose. But now there was a little petrified forest on the roof.
Down on the wall, the ivy was re-growing, of course. Bright green shoots were creeping up the brickwork, inching their way back towards the gutter. He could see from the marks on the bricks that the plants had already grown about twelve inches since they were cut back. Well, that was the way of nature. It never stopped. It would always win in the end, if only out of sheer persistence.
Derek Alton was sitting in one of the front pews of the church. As Cooper walked up the aisle, he could see only the back of the vicar’s bowed head, and he thought he must be praying. Alton looked up when he heard Cooper’s footsteps.
‘Has it gone yet?’ he said.
‘You mean the remains? No, sir. There are procedures to go through while they’re still in situ.’
‘Photographs, I suppose.’
‘That kind of thing, yes.’
‘I don’t want to see it again. I don’t want to come out until it’s gone.’
That’s not a problem, sir.’
‘I’m a Jonah, aren’t I?’ said Alton.
‘Jonah? I’m not as familiar with the Old Testament as you are, but wasn’t he the one who got involved with the wrong end of a whale?’
