‘Only I heard that Louis…’
Merrily looked up at the foxes’ heads above the door – the way their mouths were always forced open around their pointed canines, to make them look like savage beasts gloriously killed.
‘Heard Louis what?’ His voice spiking.
‘Had some kind of breakdown? After hunting was banned?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Can’t be sure.’
‘Selective memory you got there, Mrs Watkins.’ Preston Devereaux, relaxed again. ‘Aye, he loved his hunting. We ran the Countryside Alliance campaign in this area. Fight the Ban posters everywhere. Boy lost his rag at a demo, belted a copper guarding some Blairite toady. Weekend in custody. That’s the state we’re in – fight for our traditions, we’re branded criminals. This government’s scum. Anti-English. Don’t get me started. We lost. You move on. You ask me a question? I can’t remember.’
Merrily was confused by all the contradictions here. Trying to understand a man who, having been determined to escape his roots, came back to be driven by a born-again fervour fuelled by bitterness.
‘Oak trees,’ she said. ‘Tim Loste has a lot of oak trees. Which, for a man with a tiny garden…’
‘Does he?’
‘Elgar and oak trees. Is there some connection I might not have heard about?’
‘No idea. The only oak I know’s the Royal Oak. Which is a pretty common name for a pub, relating, surely, to the tree where Charles II hid from his enemies.’
‘No local legends about oaks?’
‘Not that I know of. Can I get you a drink? Some coffee?’
‘Thanks, but I’ll have to be off in a few minutes. I shouldn’t have come, anyway, without ringing.’
‘Drop in anytime, we’ve nothing to hide.’
‘Is there any kind of mystery… legend… rumour, connecting Elgar with Wychehill?’
‘Only the church. Longworth and his so-called visionary experience.’
‘What was that?’
‘They say it’s what he has on his tomb.’
‘The angel?’
‘Gruesome bloody thing, ennit? Not my idea of an angel. Story I was told as a child is that it appeared to the mad old bugger up on the hill, in a blaze of light, and drove him in a state of blind fear to religion.’
‘And to Elgar.’
‘Same thing. Elgar’s become a religion now. I’m not a fan, Merrily, as you may have gathered. If he hadn’t encouraged Longworth to build that bloody church there’d’ve been no Upper Wychehill for the townies to colonize. And what did Elgar ever do for the Malverns, anyway?’
‘Massive tourism?’
Devereaux snorted.
‘We’ve always had that. We got the scenery, don’t need the bloody incidental music. Bugger always claimed he got his inspiration here but he cleared off soon enough when he was famous. And when he came back, as an old man, he came back as an incomer, that’s what gets to me.’
‘I don’t understand. If he-’
‘He’d changed. Starts out as a country boy, I’m not disputing that, even went foxhunting, according to some accounts. But then, soon as he makes it big, he’s off… big house in Hereford, then London, mixing with the nobs and the arty-farty veggies, George Bernard Shaw and the like. And when he finally returns, as this distinguished old man, he’s turned into one of them – having places laid at the table for his bloody dogs. Likely, he thought the hills’d give him his inspiration back, but it never happened, did it? Closed door this time. Given up his soul to mix with the great and the good and – excuse my terminology – lost his balls. Never wrote another thing that was worthwhile. No wonder he’s an unhappy bloody spirit. You believe that?’
‘That he’s unhappy, or that he’s…’
Devereaux leaned his head into a wing of his chair and looked at Merrily sideways through a bloodshot eye.
‘That dead Elgar still bikes the hills.’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Ha!’
‘Sorry. I’m not usually so… no, I suppose I am. I suspect there’s something happening… in the atmosphere. I’m just not sure it’s anything to do with Elgar.’
‘Well…’ Preston Devereaux smiled. ‘If you ever decide it is and you want to exorcize the old bastard… you can go ahead, far as I’m concerned. By all means. Wipe whatever’s left of him off the hills for good and all. Just keep quiet about it.’
29
Stoolie
Thursday began badly and got worse. Just as Merrily was about to corner Jane on the Coleman’s Meadow issue, Winnie Sparke was on the phone.
‘Merrily, you talked to the cops?’
‘Well, I have, but-’
‘Only I’ve heard nothing. Last night I barely slept. See, the one time Tim called me, Iwantedtofixhim a lawyer, he kept saying there was no need. He said it was crazy they could think he did it. He said they’d know that soon enough.’
‘Well, Winnie.’ Merrily sat down at the desk in the scullery. ‘Erm
… I think there might be a need for a lawyer now.’
‘I have to know. I have to call his parents in France-What did you just say?’
‘Just that I think he may well need a lawyer. I’ve been trying to confirm the situation since last night but I’m not getting anywhere.’
She’d phoned Bliss, who’d come back to her late last night to say that Worcester were still holding Loste and studying lab reports, and that was all he could find out at this hour without inviting awkward questions.
‘So, like, how long can they hold a guy without a charge?’
‘No, look, Winnie, what I’m trying to say is-’
Merrily waved to Jane, hovering in the scullery doorway with her airline bag, meaning hang on. Jane raised a hand, smiled a worryingly wan kind of smile and was gone. Bugger.
‘-What I’m trying to say is I don’t know that there hasn’t been a charge, in the light of new forensic evidence. I-This is confidential?’
‘OK.’
‘I talked at some length to the officer heading the inquiry, and frankly, after what she told me, even I ’d have pulled Tim in for questioning. Even if it was only to have a look around inside his house. He comes across as a very strange person, Winnie, and he’s clammed up on them and that makes it look worse.’
‘And strange equals psychotic, right?’
‘No, but-’
‘Did you say you went into his house?’
‘With the police. I was asked to take a look at… some things.’
‘What things?’
‘Photographs, books…’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’re trying to get a handle on him, find out exactly where he’s coming from.’
‘They had no goddamn right. You had no right.’
‘I tried to explain a couple of points, as best I could. I don’t think I was very successful. There was just too much I didn’t know. For instance, his background. I mean, how long have you actually known him?’
