‘Nothing of immediate significance, no.’
Annie stood up, buttoning her jacket, the tower and steeple of St Peter’s in the wedge of white sky behind her. For a moment Bliss thought she was smiling as she looked down at him.
Then she said, ‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t assure me again that you never hit your wife. I believe you. However, for the foreseeable future…’ she tucked a two-pound coin under the coffee pot ‘… I think we need to be colleagues.’
‘What?’
‘Colleagues,’ Annie said. ‘People who work together.’
34
Halfway along the Golden Valley, a green hill bounced up on the right, its summit shaped by the earthen ramparts of another British camp. Tiny compared with Credenhill, but they were everywhere, a whole layer of landscape sculpted by ancient Britons. Still here, still dominant.
Merrily was driving slowly, under clouds like the rolling smoke from a grass fire. She’d brought a flask of holy water up from the car and done the blessing, with Liz. An appeal for calm and light in an oppressed place. Most times you were uncertain: an unaccountable man-stench in the tower-room – wishful thinking, Miss Pleston?
And yet a faint sensation of something resistant had come back at her, and she’d walked downstairs feeling unexpectedly drained. Maybe she was just overtired and underfed, or affected by the mind-altering properties of Jeyes Fluid.
No, Barry had been right. Byron Jones was not funny.
It would’ve been interesting to see the books he’d kept in the tower. Old pagan religions and the occult. Merrily thought about the people of the hilltop camps, whose priests had been Druids. Talk to Jane, and they were kindly nature-worshippers and all they ever used a sickle for was cutting down mistletoe. Read the Roman accounts, and you got blood-drenched savages, well into human sacrifice. They probably didn’t smell too good, either.
In the straggling village of Peterchurch, she pulled into the parking area opposite the Norman church, called home to check the machine and found just the one message:
‘ Merrily, this is Fiona Spicer. I think we have loose ends.’
A voice still perfectly contained, wholly together. A widow of one day. Merrily sat staring across the parking area at a children’s playground which looked like a small power station. Lit a cigarette and called Fiona.
Lol had been in Danny Thomas’s barn since eight. Danny was walking up and down in the straw, rehearsing a verse of ‘Trackway Man’, talking it into the mic.
‘“Among the hills where shepherds watch, we’ll march towards the skyline notch. From tump to twt we’ll mark the route…” What the hell’s a twt, Lol?’
‘I thought you were Welsh.’
‘I’m from Radnorshire, it en’t quite the same.’
‘I thought it was a Radnorshire word. I dunno, maybe a burial mound, a small tump. Rhymes with route, anyway, that’s all that matters.’
‘This don’t seem like your kind o’ song, somehow,’ Danny said. ‘Them Biblical quotes at the start. “Set me up waymarks, writes Jeremiah”?’
Lol explained how Alfred Watkins had collected bits from the Bible which seemed to support the idea of ley lines. He was thinking it would be quite good to use them with a kind of monastic echo. Resonant.
‘Just trying to connect, Danny. You were born here, I’m just… don’t know.’
Passing through?
‘Just ’cause you lives yere, it don’t necessarily mean you connects.’ Danny squatted down in the straw between a vintage Marshall amp and Jimi the sheepdog. ‘Did once, mind. Had what you might call a spiritual experience where I seen the poetic truth of ley lines. Looked at the veins in my wrist and seen the arteries of the countryside. Magic, that was.’
‘I thought it was acid.’
‘Well, aye, it was, but a vision’s a vision, ennit? Bloody hell, what a long time ago that was. I was only a kid. Thirteen, fourteen?’
‘You were dropping acid at thirteen?’
‘Very progressive area, Radnorshire, in the ole days, boy. ’Sides, nobody knowed, back then, what it could do to your brain.’
‘Radnorshire?’
Danny grinned. Then, abruptly, his face was solemn.
‘Seen much of young Jane, past day or so?’
‘Uh… not really.’
‘That business in the Swan, where she poured that feller’s beer… Got a bit overshadowed, that did, when the word come in about Mansel Bull.’
‘An ill wind.’
‘Never seen her like that before. Serious. The changes round yere – gettin’ to her. Savitch.’
‘Getting to all of us, one way or another.’
‘Only, Gomer and me, we got a problem,’ Danny said.
Fiona said, ‘No commiserations. Sympathy cards, I won’t even open. Don’t want to be treated like an invalid. When you’ve lived with a vicar, you know all the bereavement rituals. ’
Merrily thought naked grief was easier to handle.
‘You’re not still on your own, are you?’
‘Emily’s on the way up to Hereford, with her boyfriend. And I have things to organize. Better than thinking. I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk last night, and I’m grateful for what you did. And what you might have done if we… if we’d been in time. You will take the funeral?’
‘Well, if you… I don’t do quickies, Fiona.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Well, it doesn’t mean endless eulogies. But there are things I need to understand. Whatever he wouldn’t tell me, it’s not going to rebound on him now. Which… is one reason I’ve just been over to Allensmore. To talk to Byron Jones’s ex-wife.’
‘That was quick.’
‘When you were talking about the books that Syd was reading, back in the Cathedral, I don’t recall you mentioned Byron Jones. So when I found that book, with the others…’
‘I was certainly surprised to see a copy of that book on the desk.’ A pause. ‘OK, the last time I saw one was when we were at Wychehill. A parcel arrived one day with a copy of Caradog inside. Newly published.’
‘This was when they were still friends?’
‘I thought they were. A short time afterwards, I opened the wood stove, because it seemed to be nearly out and… you know how you can tell something used to be a book, for just a second, before the ashes collapse?’
‘Syd burned the book? Without even reading it?’
‘He never explained. Though he now seems to have acquired another copy. They were good friends, once. Byron was a bit older than Sam. He came out of the army first, but they stayed in touch.’
‘Was Syd in Byron’s local-history group?’
‘His what?’
‘Liz says Byron was in – or might even have set up – a society to study the history around Stirling Lines. Romano-British history. The inference being that this was where he got much of the background for his fiction.’
‘I know nothing about that. Though it’s hardly something you’d need to keep secret.’
