‘What?’
‘The taller guy. How come you know him?’
‘Because I go to school with him, Jane.’
‘He’s like… one of the students?’
‘Well, he’s not the bloody Head, is he?’
‘Irene, that’s… I mean.’ Jane backed into the doorway of a darkened shop. ‘Oh God…’
He moved in next to her. ‘You all right?’
‘What’s his actual name?’
‘The streak of piss? J.D. Fyneham. He’s in my media-studies group.’
‘Media studies, huh?’ Jane said.
‘It’s a fairly new thing. There’s only a few of us serious about it, the rest are just skiving off.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Fyneham? Obsessive. Also, reckons he knows it all on account of his dad was a journalist, and he’s had tips from all his dad’s mates. Refuses to write for the school magazine, because it’s so unprofessional.’
‘Um… how long’s he been writing for
‘In his dreams.’
‘No, Irene, listen… he’s the guy who interviewed Lol.’
Silence.
‘What are you saying, Jane…?’
‘Irene, I’m not kidding. I saw him with Lol. On the square. Taking his picture. It was definitely him, no question… That… I mean, that’s not very likely, is it?’
‘J.D. fucking Fyneham?’
‘Gave his name as Jack Fine, Lol said.’
Eirion stood on the kerb. The lights here weren’t terrific, but his face looked, like, black with rage. Eirion stepped back onto the pavement, turned back towards Bridge Street.
‘Right…’
‘No!’ Jane grabbed his arm. ‘Let’s… let’s think about this…’
As Lol didn’t have a table yet, they’d spread the notes out on the kitchen unit, from ‘vicerage’ to ‘your a sick man’.
‘Same writing,’ Merrily said. ‘No question. If it isn’t connected, it’s a bit of a coincidence.’
She was relieved that, without having left the house all day, Lol seemed to know more about this than she did, thanks to Gomer Parry. You could always count on Gomer — the crucial disc in the spine of the village since Lucy Devenish died. The fact that Gomer had been round, taken the initiative, made her feel a little better.
‘Or the writer simply reacts to events,’ Lol said. ‘An opportunist.’
‘Do you have any idea who it might conceivably be?’
Lol shook his head. ‘You?’
‘Well… yes.’
‘You do?’
‘Not the notes, but certainly the rumours. It’s a bit obvious, but… Sian Callaghan-Clarke knew everything, OK? I can see only one direct route from Ledwardine to Sian, and it goes through Saltash. Therefore it has to go via the surgery. Because, every week, Saltash goes jogging with Kent Asprey.’
‘Asprey told him?’
‘Breeding ground for germs and gossip, that surgery. Asprey would have been one of the first to know.’
‘I don’t get it. Does Asprey have anything against either of us?’
‘He’d pass it on to Saltash without thinking. A doctor thing.’
‘We can take it neither of them wrote these, then,’ Lol said.
‘Huh? Oh… too legible.’
‘Grammar too correct, also.’
They stood there in Lol’s kitchen, smiling at one another like fools, making light of it. Yeah, trivial, really, something and nothing.
But even though the power was connected now, the place was full of shadows. It was as if some great cosmic force — to which Merrily refused to put a name — had decided that she and Lol… this unlikely liaison was never going to be allowed to work out.
Unsurprisingly, the confrontation by the river and its aftermath had stripped the night of what passed for romance in Hereford, and Jane got taken home well before midnight.
Eirion — normally well balanced and philosophical to the point where you wanted to shake him — was seriously pissed off. She knew he’d been quietly committed for some time to building a career in the media, and the idea that a guy at school his age already had one… Driving back to Ledwardine, Eirion had conceded that it was just about conceivable that this Fyneham had contributed snippets, maybe even the odd concert review to
She hadn’t seen him like this before — saying how he was going to crack this wide open, and he wasn’t going to wait till Monday, because if this bastard was scamming Lol…
Well, right. Enough shit had happened to Lol, and so J.D. Fyneham was on borrowed time with Jane. too. But she wouldn’t get in Eirion’s way on this; she’d go to Ludlow tomorrow with Mum, do the dutiful-daughter thing.
It was good to find, when she let herself into the vicarage, that Mum was still at Lol’s. She put the kettle on, went up to the apartment, raided her shelves for any books that might mention Ludlow and brought them down to the scullery, where she sat with Ethel and switched on the computer.
J. Watkins, pagan-consultant. She could very much live with that.
However, paganism-wise, apart from the siting of the church, there didn’t seem to be much happening in Ludlow itself… although there were more suggestions that the wider area had been significant in the Bronze Age. Over twenty prehistoric burial mounds had been found at Bromfield, a mile or two north of the town — the Bromfield Necropolis. Cool term.
She checked out the church tumulus again, downloading more detail.
The Irish saints whose remains were found inside the mound were identified as Cochel, Fercher and Ona, who had come to live in the area. However, holy relics were much prized in those days…
Et cetera, et cetera…
Mum had come in, was leaning over her shoulder.
‘It’s OK, I’m quite willing to accept they were more likely to have been the remains of three guys with big beards and horns on their helmets.’
Jane looked up. ‘You sound happier.’
‘We rationalized the situation.’
‘Lol’s OK with it?’
‘Yeah, Lol’s… more OK than I expected.’
Jane smiled and nodded. Best not to tell Mum about J.D. Fyneham until it was confirmed one way or the other. She pointed at the screen, which showed an aerial photo of Ludlow with the church and the castle vying for prominence and the church probably winning, even though the castle had much more ground and the church was crowded by streets on three sides.
‘I think we should maybe check out the church, before we see her,’ Jane said. ‘OK?’
‘But before that we should pop into our own church.’
Jane looked over her shoulder. ‘Why?’
‘I’m not making a big thing of this. I’d just like us to do St Pat’s breastplate and the Lord’s Prayer… if that’s OK?’
‘You think we need spiritual protection?’
‘There’s nothing lost.’
‘OK.’ Jane shrugged. ‘I’ve never been a chauvinistic pagan. But, like, you really think this achingly sad, faded, 1980s icon is a source of satanic evil?’
‘I’ll be honest — I don’t know. We don’t know what she’s collected over the years.’
‘No gold discs, that’s for sure,’ Jane said. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’
She thought of the last time they’d done something like this, before the Boy Bishop ceremony in Hereford
