She looked around the room. Lofty, wood-panelled, definitely a man’s room, even a young man’s room – minimal furniture apart from stereo speakers the size of small wardrobes. Racks of CDs and vinyl and potentially interesting framed photographs. Over the baronial fire-place was a period poster behind glass advertising Pink Floyd and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown at the Roundhouse in London. The names were wreathed in coloured smoke from a pipe smoked by a reclining naked man like some stoned 1960s version of Michelangelo’s Adam.
I was a wild boy, too. Drove too fast, inhaled my share of blow.
On the panelled wall over a writing desk with a worn leather top there was a framed black and white photo of a bunch of young long-haired men, one of whom was… Eric Clapton? The lean, grinning guy on the end was also unmistakable. He looked like Louis Devereaux with longer hair and lush sideburns.
‘Blimey,’ Merrily said. ‘Is that-?’
‘Dad was very well connected. Once upon a time.’
‘Images of a misspent youth, Mrs Watkins.’
Merrily jumped. Preston Devereaux was standing in the doorway, an older, duller figure than she remembered from the other night, a working man wearing a farmer’s green nylon overalls and a nylon cap.
‘Didn’t know him well,’ he said. ‘But you don’t throw away a picture like that, do you?’
‘Were you in a band?’
‘Never had the talent. Managed a couple, when I was up at Oxford in the late 1960s. Which meant carrying the amps, back then, and inventing light shows. I was good at that.’
‘Oh Gawd, Memory Lane time,’ Louis said. ‘I’m out of here.’
He bowed to Merrily, made an exaggerated exit.
‘Twenty-four next week,’ Devereaux said. ‘Going on ten.’
‘If ten means pre-pubertal, I’m not sure I’d agree. What were you doing at Oxford?’
‘Physics.’
‘So… what happened? I mean…’
‘What happened?’ Devereaux walked over to the Beacon window. ‘ That happened. History. Roots. No escape. You think there is, but there en’t. Anyway…’
He stood in front of Merrily, hands behind his back.
‘No escape for me either, Mr Devereaux. What you said the other night about dealing with something in a discreet and dignified fashion…’
‘Have you?’
Merrily shook her head.
‘Become too complicated. When you’ve had a man murdered, and when the local man under suspicion of having killed him-’
‘ Local man? ’ Preston Devereaux almost left the ground. ‘There are no local men up there, Mrs Watkins. Why I was forced to come back.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, I ’m sorry. Continue.’
‘I was just going to say that the man suspected of murder is also the man I most needed to talk to about… the cyclist.’
‘You can say Elgar in here, Merrily.’
‘Thank you. Anyway, it means I haven’t been able to get to Loste. And in the meantime, other questions have opened up.’
‘Like?’
‘He was the first to identify the image in the road as Elgar. He’s obsessed with Elgar. He apparently hates what the Royal Oak has become.’
‘So I understand, yes.’
‘If his hatred of the Royal Oak has now led to a murder, I don’t… well, I don’t know how relevant that makes my idea of a requiem for two road-accident victims. And I do appreciate that one woman agonizing over the technicalities of a church service must seem entirely trivial to you…’
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘You’re… as you’ve just implied, you’re the only person whose experience of this area goes back longer than about twenty years. I’d just like to get your opinion on a few things. Memory Lane, I’m afraid.’
‘Memory Lane. With all its potholes and its road kill.’
Preston Devereaux went back and shut the door. Above it were three wooden shields, one bearing a coat of arms and a motto in Latin. Each of the others, on either side, displayed a fox’s head, neither of them moth-eaten the way foxes’ heads usually were in these displays. Mementoes, perhaps, of Louis’s carefree youth.
Devereaux strode back to the Beacon window, pulling off his cap.
‘Must be the most spectacular view in the Malverns,’ Merrily said.
‘Hated it, Merrily. With a vengeance. A forsaken stronghold, symbol of defeat. Turned my back on it and everything that the Malverns’d come to stand for, all the starchy gentility of it. And then my father died.’
‘When was that?’
‘Back end of ’85. You learn that a farm that’s been in your family since the Conquest, that’s a family curse you can’t lose. And periodically the curse strikes, giving you a little reminder that it is a curse. Like in the 1980s, when you had new patterns in farm subsidy, new regulations, the EC. Getting so a farmer didn’t feel he owned his own land. My old man could see that was only the beginning. Which partly explains why he strung himself up in the tower.’
‘Oh…’ Merrily’s gaze went instinctively to the ceiling. ‘I didn’t know. I’m sorry.’
‘Which effectively did for my glittering future as a career scientist. Doing research at the time, bit of teaching. Having a good time. Had a smart city woman and a kid, and when I came home to bury the old man, everything in me was screaming, don’t look, don’t look. Don’t look at the state of the place, just get it on the damned market. And then I found out, as I say, that there was not a single local family left in Wychehill. And the curse came down.’
‘Your mother was still alive?’
‘Moved my ma down to Ledbury – she wouldn’t live here after that. Told her I’d take a couple of years off to pull it all together, before resuming the glittering career. Then we had Hugo. More roots.’
‘What… happened to the boys’ mother?’
‘Left a long time ago. Wilful London girl, didn’t get on with the country. Bit like Syd Spicer’s missus. We weren’t married, so no complications in those days. She went abroad, I got the boys. And we turned it around, by God we did, in spite of the shiny-arsed civil servants and the scum from Brussels. Diversification.’
‘I remember that as a buzz word put around by the Min of Ag.’
‘The pragmatic farmer’s way out of the agricultural crisis. Thatcher’s message. And, fair play, it worked for some of us. You felt a bit sick about it, but it worked. My case, luxury self-catering holidays. Not that they self- cater, they all eat out. But it works, and it provides employment locally. All nicely old-fashioned, and folks come back year after year, all the sad townies, and we charge ’em more every time and they still come.’
Preston Devereaux slumped into a wing-backed chair next to the big dead fireplace, smoke-blackened and flaked with log ash. He waved Merrily to a faded chaise longue.
‘All the antique furniture from the house we put in the units – what do we need with antiques, me and the boys? Install a Queen Anne writing desk in your stone holiday chalet, that’s worth an extra two hundred a week on the bill. You see the buildings out there?’
‘Very classy.’
‘Turned over all the old stone barns and stables and chicken houses to holiday units, added a few new ones in the same style. Put the farm, what’s left of it, into new galvanized sheds painted dark green and nicely screened off. And the farm life, what’s left of that , goes on around the townies. Give them an illusion of what it’s like, let them into what country pursuits we’re allowed to practise now – shooting parties and the like, hunting, before it was banned. Joining what they think of as the Old Squirearchy for a fortnight.’
‘So the boys are part of that? Plenty for them to do. Don’t want to move away like you did?’
‘They won’t leave. All changed since my day, look. It was either/or back then. Now you can take what you want from the city and come back next day. And growing up in the country hardens you. We can deal with the towns better than the townies can deal with us.’
