not necessarily a pejorative term. Elgar was a dreamer, Loste is supposed to be writing a musical work about Elgar.’
‘You know what? I’m getting bloody sick of this.’ Annie Howe came down from the mound, her scrubbed face actually colouring. ‘As if all so-called artists were wispy little tree-huggers. Have you ever seen Timothy Loste?’
‘I’ve tried, Annie. God knows I’ve tried.’
‘Then I’ll describe him for you. Loste is forty years old and, despite his alcohol problem, extremely fit. Has been known to walk virtually the length of the Malverns and back within a day by a different route. Knows those hills like the back of his hand, every rock and cave and crevice.’
‘Yes, but that hardly-’
‘At the Royal Oak that night, as I may have implied, it took three experienced doormen to subdue him… as he’s also about half a head taller than Wicklow was. And built, Ms Watkins, like the side of a house. Oh, and the rock he put through that window was, at a rough estimate, the size of a small television set and maybe twice as heavy.’
‘Oh.’
‘Now tell me again that we’re talking about a harmless, inoffensive little dreamer with a natural abhorrence of violence.’
A buzzard passed silently overhead. A uniformed policeman appeared in the garden.
‘They’ve been trying to get you, ma’am.’
Howe lifted her head. ‘Thanks, Robert. I’m coming now.’
If she was going to be head of CID for the proposed new Midlands mega-force before turning forty she didn’t have any time to waste.
Watching Howe talking tersely into her mobile, listening and nodding, functioning, Merrily felt useless, irrelevant. Chasing shadows, chasing lights. Sometimes it seemed that deliverance amounted to little more than this.
People nudging one another. Who’s that? What does she do? Oh, you’re kidding… Her role nebulous, her focus blurred. Why was she here? Who, in the end, would be healed?
What was clear, however, was that nobody else would try too hard to make sense of Loste, his obsession with Elgar, his oak-tree fetish.
Oaks. Sacred oaks. The Royal Oak. Too many oaks. Did any of this link into the history or even the folklore of the area? It wasn’t as if there was some ancient resident whose memory she could tap into. Nobody had lived here longer than a quarter of a century.
Well… except for one person.
Not someone she particularly wanted to approach, but…
Merrily slipped away, knowing that Annie Howe, having failed to get anything useful out of her, would have forgotten by now that she’d even been here.
28
Curse Came Down
The name on the gate was Old Wychehill Farm, suggesting that perhaps this was what remained of the original hamlet, while the present village was just fragments of a repair job for a quarry-ravaged hill.
In fact, Old Wychehill Farm was big enough to have been a hamlet in itself. Sunk into its own valley, half- circled by mature broadleaf trees with the swizzle-stick profiles of pines and monkey puzzles poking out of the mix.
The farmhouse, at the end of nearly half a mile of private drive, turned out to be the turreted house in the valley which Merrily had noticed that first morning – the turret crowning a Victorian Gothic wing added to a much older dwelling with timbers like age-browned bones.
She parked in the farmyard – courtyard, really. No animals in view, no free-range chickens. The three-storey house was enclosed by outbuildings of the same grey-brown stone. Some of the more distant buildings had curtains at their diamond-paned windows.
My lovely holiday lets.
A black pick-up truck eased in behind her. A stylish truck with chrome side-rails and silver flashes on its flanks. Two men getting out, squinting into the sun, one of them strolling across.
‘Help you?’
‘Looking for Mr Devereaux.’
‘Which one?’
‘Preston Devereaux?’
The man stood looking her up and down, pinching his unshaven chin.
‘Shame about that.’
Apart from golden highlights and a sharper jawline, he looked a lot like Preston Devereaux. Same narrow features, same loose, unhurried gait as he’d wandered over. Except this guy was over thirty years younger and the other one was the younger son, Hugo.
‘Louis, this is Mrs Watkins,’ Hugo said.
‘ Merrily.’ The face of Louis Devereaux, former huntsman, alleged former substance-abuser, split into this voracious and undeniably attractive grin. ‘And we ’re stuck with Spicer. The injustice of it.’ Louis turned to his brother. ‘You better go and find the old man. No hurry. Want to come with me, Merrily?’
‘Is it safe?’
‘I’m a country gentleman,’ Louis said, ‘from a long, long line of country gentlemen. Of course it isn’t safe.’
He strode past her across the yard, turning the handle on a plain door. It didn’t open; it was jammed at the bottom. He gave it a kick.
‘Whole place is seizing up.’
His accent was posher than his father’s. Probably been away to public school. She looked up at him as he held open the door.
‘I really won’t keep him long.’
‘He might want to keep you, though,’ Louis said. ‘I would. End of the passage, look.’ He bent down, put an arm around her shoulders, pointing. ‘The Beacon Room.’
Following her into the passage. There was an old manure smell, as if this entrance had been used for the changing of generations of farm boots. It was a rear hallway, low, earth-coloured, windowless, the only light funnelled down the well of some narrow back stairs to her left… until she pushed open the door at the end into lavish sunshine from a long window framing a wow-gasp view of the great tiered wedding-cake of Herefordshire Beacon.
The Beacon Room. Obviously built into the Victorian wing to accommodate this view. The hill was a couple of miles away, as if it had been aligned for maximum impact.
‘Quite impressive, isn’t it?’ Louis said. ‘As crime scenes go. Lit up like a housing estate last night. Cops swarming all over it.’
‘Exciting?’
‘Yeah, I guess it was. I suppose when it’s somebody you don’t know
… Well, I’ve probably seen him, if he’s the one I think he is. At the Oak.’
‘You go there?’
‘Now and then. Not as often as I used to. Quite good for… you know… girls.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘And, of course, for pissing off Len Holliday and the Wychehill Residents’ Action Group,’ Louis said. ‘One tries to sympathize, but that guy…’
‘Don’t suppose you’re really aware of the Royal Oak down here. Or the road.’
‘Don’t suppose we are, particularly,’ Louis said.
