‘Samuel Dennis Spicer. Church of England.’
Merrily smiled.
‘You talked about any of this to Winnie Sparke?’
‘Winnie?’ He’d been about to bring the cigarette back to his mouth. He brought his arm down. ‘Why would I?’
‘They’re saying in Wychehill that you’re seeing a lot of her.’
‘Told you.’ He leaned his head back over the chorister’s stall. ‘Didn’t I?’
‘You told me about the Ladies of Wychehill.’
‘I assisted Winnie Sparke with her researches into the origins of the church. Parish records. And a few other things. Anything else…’ He squeezed out the cigarette between finger and thumb. ‘Anything else, my wife really wouldn’t like.’
‘Your-?’
‘In essence, stories of our separation are overstated. Having three parishes can be an advantage, Merrily. You go missing for a while, they all think you’re in one of the others. Fiona took the kids down to Reading to get away from a difficult situation. We have a house, and her family’s down there, so it seemed expedient. I go down every week, or we meet somewhere. Yesterday it was in Berkshire. Hungerford.’
‘That works?’
‘Separation – she’s used to that. Least I’m less likely to get killed as a clergyman. Seemed easier to let people think we’d split, otherwise there’d be three restless parishes wondering how long before the new guy.’
‘But why didn’t you? Why didn’t you just leave? Go for a new-’
‘Because I was sent here. Never yet failed to complete a mission. One way or another.’
Like God was his field commander. But obviously Merrily understood.
‘And the difficult situation… that would be drugs?’
‘Partly. Emily’s been a problem. Shrinks say she has an addictive personality. As a kid she overate. You tried to cut down the Mars Bars to three a day… tantrums. Cold turkey on Mars Bars, you believe that? With adolescence, it stopped, all the weight dropped away, and we were so relieved that it was quite a while before we realized what’d replaced it. The shoplifting conviction was a clue. Then robbing the offertory box.’
‘She was in rehab?’
‘Joyce told you all this, I assume. Joyce, the parish talking-newsletter.’
‘And then the Royal Oak changed hands,’ Merrily said. ‘And suddenly it was all on your doorstep. Like a sweetshop.’
‘Yeah. There’s a group of us, county-wide – parents of kids with drug problems. We attend briefing sessions with the police, regional seminars. We learn what to look out for.’
‘Like Roman Wicklow? Did you know about him?’
‘Suspected.’
‘But you didn’t tell the police.’
‘One man with a rucksack?’ Spicer snorted. ‘Take Wicklow out of the picture and there’s another one in place by next week, in a different beauty spot. Better the devil you know.’
‘If they’d arrested him, he could’ve fingered others…’
‘His sort don’t finger people.’
‘What about Raji Khan?’ Merrily said.
‘Raji Khan -’ he looked almost amused ‘- is a very clever boy. Somebody like me says a word against him, it’s like the Crusades are back – I must be starting a holy war. Anyway, not your problem. Your problem’s more ethereal. It’s my problem too but… we’ve been into that.’
‘What are you asking me to do?’
‘Your requiem should be broadened. I was thinking a wider brief. For a start, you might give this place some attention.’
‘What are you trying to lose?’
‘Longworth, for a start. I don’t know what his problem was, but I reckon St Dunstan’s only compounded it. You look at the records, you find that what existed on this site could have been no more than a single monk’s cell. A Celtic hermit’s primitive stone hut. So he builds a pseudocathedral. Look-’
Spicer sprang up, walked into the nave, pointing out empty stone ledges, blank areas of wall.
‘When I first came, there were terrible pictures on these walls, of saints and angels… figurines in niches.’
Merrily looked around. Light oak furniture, a marbled font. He was right: there was little of the period clutter that even churches less than a century old accumulated.
‘They’re in storage. None of them great works of art. No treasure. Phoney High-Church iconography, reeking of… hierarchy. Grotesque, to me. Forbidding – like that hideous angel on Longworth’s tomb. When we had one small statue nicked, I talked the parish council – well, Preston Devereaux – into safeguarding the rest. He didn’t need much encouraging. His family always found Upper Wychehill an intrusion. His grandfather’s on record as having attempted to stop Longworth building.’
‘You’ve virtually… stripped the place?’
‘Best we could, bit by bit, over a period. They’re all newcomers here, nobody missed anything. But I didn’t get rid of it. It’s as if it’s built into the stone.’
‘What is?’
‘Longworth’s grandiose concept. Longworth himself. He brought something here that’s caused an imbalance. This church is disproportionate to its surroundings and to the community. It’s a big stone ego-trip, and it’s like the houses are hiding away from it… below the road, over the road, squeezing into the rocks. It explains a lot about Wychehill. I found a journal kept by one of my predecessors, thirty, forty years ago. Even then, the population was unstable, people buying and selling, coming and going.’
Syd Spicer’s voice was crisp and carried across the body of the church with hardly an echo. Whatever you thought about Joseph Longworth, he’d known who to consult about acoustics.
‘I know a bit about geology,’ Spicer said. ‘Rock-climbing used to be my specialist skill. I was an instructor some of the time, so I know about rock. There’s a small fault through Wychehill, did you know that? I mean, the whole of the Malverns, that was volcanic, but a long time ago. The shifts in this area – there’s been more recent action here. I say recent – eighteenth, nineteenth centuries.’
‘A history of earth-movement and then quarrying?’ Merrily followed him down the central aisle. ‘No wonder Winnie Sparke says the hills are in pain.’
‘She’s not a stupid woman,’ Syd Spicer said. ‘She gives you all this fey stuff, but that’s her screen. If you think she’s more gullible than you are, you start to lose your inhibitions, tell her more than you intended to. C. Winchester Sparke – former professor of anthropology, back in the US. Did you know that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Specializing in ancient history, comparative religion, philosophy, anthropology. Smart woman. Don’t be fooled. We had a serious talk about this once. Her theory is that the whole of the Malvern range was one huge ritual site… because it was so volatile. People didn’t live here, they came here to experience transcendence… to have visions. That’s the pagans and the early Christians.’
‘The hermits in their cells and their caves. Like in Tibet.’
‘Presumably. That’s not the point of Christianity, though, is it? That’s smoke. Smoke and… incense.’
‘Wasn’t Longworth supposed to have had a vision?’
‘I have a theory about that.’ Spicer sat down on the edge of a pew. ‘Well, it’s not my theory, but it fits. You mess around on volatile rocks, on operations or just on exercises, and you become aware of occasional phenomena, linked particularly to fault lines and places where the Earth’s crust has been been disrupted. Lights, usually. Balls of light.’
‘You’ve seen it?’
‘Couple of times. It’s like ball lightning. Might have been ball lightning. Gets people excited about UFOs, but it’s natural, I think. The Ministry of Defence knows about it. I think that’s what Longworth saw.’
‘Preston Devereaux says the story is that Longworth saw the Angel of the Agony in a blaze of light. Which, presumably, is why there’s a representation of it on his tomb.’
‘I’d go for just the blaze of light.’
