sick, mindless… peevish… destruction. Why do you have to do this? ’
‘Because of you, you stupid little-’ Pierce’s face coming at her, dark with evening-stubble. ‘What do you think all this fencing cost, to keep those cranks out? Eh? What if they come back tomorrow and there’s even more of them? What then?’
‘Well, good…’
‘No. Not good, Jane. Bad for all of us. Costly. So, to forestall the possibility of further public disturbance, Mr Murray took the entirely sensible decision to remove what our county archaeologists have formally confirmed was never there in the first place. And invited me, as the local representative, to come along and observe that no regulations were breached, and that’s what I’m doing. That’s it. All right?’
He turned away, adjusting his hard hat. He was wearing a khaki-coloured shirt and cargo trousers, like he was in the SAS or something, on a special high-risk mission.
‘So he invited you, is it?’ Gomer said.
‘I gotter say everything twice for you, is it, Mr Parry?’
‘Sure you din’t invite yourself? Strikes me this is just the sorter thing you’d think of all by yourself, that’s all.’
Lyndon Pierce didn’t reply.
‘Because, like, all you care about,’ Jane said, ‘is protecting your corrupt schemes and the bungs you’re getting from the guy who’s flogging his land to the supermarket firm, and the bungs you’re probably getting from the developers of the luxury, executive…’
Pierce turned slowly. Too late to stop now.
‘You’re just… totally fucking bent. Just like your dad. With your crap Marbella-style villa and your naff swimming pool and your… You couldn’t lie straight in bed.’
Gomer said quietly, ‘Janie…’
‘Right…’
Pierce turning to Gomer, the lamp under his face, uplighting it, the way kids did to turn themselves into monsters.
‘Now, I want you to remember this, Mr Parry. First off, I don’t give a fig what this nasty little girl says, on account she’s too young to think of any of it for herself-’
‘Like fuck she is!’
‘Janie-’
‘So I’m holding you solely responsible for that actionable shite. Even though nothing you say counts for a thing round yere and never did. Never did, ole man.’
Jane kept quiet. Stopped breathing.
Because Pierce had lost it. His accent had broken through again, and his language had broken down. Gomer went silent, too. This was, like, confirmation. Well, wasn’t it?
Pierce shone his hand-lamp from Gomer’s face to Jane’s face and back again.
‘You’re halfway senile, Mr Parry. You and your bloody plant hire. You don’t even know what bloody plant hire means. You’re a joke, ole man. You en’t even safe to climb into one of them no more.’ Pierce jerking a thumb at the JCB, his words coming faster. ‘And everybody knows… everybody knows you always got it in for farmers like Gerry, does their own drainage rather than paying good money, out of pity, to a clapped-out ole fart like you for half a fuckin’ job.’
Gomer didn’t say anything, but something tightened in his neck and he went rigid, the lamplight swirling like liquid in his glasses. For a terrified couple of seconds, Jane thought, Oh Christ, he’s having a stroke.
Wanting to kill Pierce and only dimly aware of the JCB’s engine revving up, until Pierce turned to the meadow, his hard-hat tipping back as his arm came up like the arm of some petty Roman-emperor figure.
‘You wanner watch?’ he said. ‘All right, you watch.’
‘No!’ Jane screamed. ‘ No! ’
Pierce brought his arm down, a chopping motion.
On the other side of Coleman’s Meadow the big digger rocked, its blade lowering. And then it began to roll on its caterpillars towards the last, pathetic piece of old straight track.
‘Oughter be in an old folks’ home, you ought, Parry,’ Pierce said as he walked away. ‘I should think about that, I were you.’
He’d been blocking the long view of Cole Hill, which never entirely faded away on summer nights. A lick of moon had risen behind it like a candle on a coffin. Down below, the last four or five metres of track made a perfect shadow.
‘Stop him! Please stop him!’ Jane arching forward, screaming at Pierce’s back. ‘You shit!’
He was gone. He’d walked casually away into the orchard, and all there was left was the yellow lights and the roaring, and Jane looked back at Gomer. But Gomer wasn’t moving, he was just standing there, a bit bent now, like one of the old, dying apple trees in the derelict orchard behind him.
It was almost over.
Jane was on her own. She’d failed. She’d mishandled everything, through immaturity, her eagerness to do something, be somebody. She couldn’t live with that.
She was only half aware of running blindly towards the digger’s bobbing lights. Running out, sobbing, into the meadow, where the ruined ley carried what remained of the ancestry of an historic village.
Oh, not historic in the sense of having kings or dukes living there or battles fought on its soil. More important than that.
She heard a shout from behind her, glanced over her shoulder and saw Gomer stumbling after her, and she shouted back at him, ‘ No…’ But he was already slipping sideways into a new-made trench, sinking down on his knees, and her heart lurched and she desperately wanted to go rushing back to help him, but she was too far now, too far gone.
And convinced, despite the savaging of the meadow, that she could still see the mystic line, glowing and alive and fresh with the clean, crisp scent of apples… sharp with the cool, dry tang of the cider… hardened by the hooves of Hereford cattle with hides the colour of the soil… marked out by the shadow of the church, where the bells had called generations of farm workers to prayer… still walked by the sombre shades of Alfred Watkins and his distinguished musical associate and the spirit…
… The sad, sepia spirit of Lucy Devenish herself, hiding her anguish in the folds of her poncho as Jane threw herself into the gutted ground and rolled in front of the blade.
52
Remembering the Hurt
Half past ten and no signs of apocalypse.
Parked alone in the bay outside Wychehill Church, with the window down, Merrily could just about hear the choir. Not what she’d expected, not the fulsome, floating sound which had gilded the air last Monday night when she and Lol had arrived in Wychehill. This was low-level and travelled in pulses.
She’d walked quietly down to the church, some of whose windows were quietly aglow. Sliding into the porch with the idea of inching open the doors to see if Loste or Winnie was in there. But the doors were locked. No audience for this choir tonight.
She’d crept outside again, found a metal bucket and positioned it upside down below one of the clear windows and stood on it.
‘ Ave Mary,’ she heard. Low and liquid. ‘ Ave Mary.’
She saw a group of heads in the chancel, in a nest of candelight. A candle in a pewter tray on the lectern, a candle on the pulpit, eerily Dickensian.
Also workmanlike. Not a performance.
Anyway, the conductor was bald. Merrily had fled back to the car.
Two police vehicles went past slowly: a lurid traffic car and a dark blue van. Perhaps the action wouldn’t start until the early hours. Perhaps it wouldn’t start at all. Perhaps Khan was right and what worried people like Leonard
