‘OK, let’s go and talk to people about a ghost on a bike.’
The Volvo jangled on the long incline.
It was half a steepish mile further on, towards the top of the hill. Coming in from the south-west, you could see how the community had been constructed on the ravages of quarrying, houses and bungalows forming alongside new forestry, on their separate levels.
More than half hidden, it was like the shadow of a village.
But tonight it was sprinkled with gold dust.
Both their windows were down as they drove in, and, on the cusp of evening, the warm air around Wychehill was glistening with the moist and luminous soundtrack of medieval heaven.
12
Nearness
A ribbon of road under hunched, conifered shoulders. Like Spicer had said, no evidence of community or enclosure: no shop, no pub, no kids on bikes, no dog-walkers. Only on the top of Herefordshire Beacon, maybe two miles away, could you see figures moving, like flies on a cow-pat.
At just after seven p.m. Merrily pulled into a long bay in front of the church behind five other cars.
The church was set well back from the road but the distance was reduced by its size. At the end of an aisle- like path from the bay, its porch door was closed, its squat tower had no window slits. It stared sightlessly towards the road and couldn’t see the lushness of the valley which opened up below it on the other side.
And yet this unpromising, sullen hulk – post-Victorian-Gothic, built of still-unmellowed stone blocks – was … exalted.
Merrily shut her car door as softly as she could.
‘It’s got to be a record … a CD.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Lol said.
He stood in the church entrance by the black sign with gold lettering: St Dunstan’s. Above it, a heavy lantern on a wrought-iron bracket, one of its glass panels shattered.
The voices, male and female, poured down like a slow fountain.
‘It’s … Gregorian chant?’ Lol said.
‘I don’t know. I mean, that’s…’
‘Something like that, maybe. It’s certainly Latin.’
‘But that’s … I know things aren’t as hard and fast these days … but this is an Anglican church.’
Lol shrugged.
‘You want to go in?’
‘Better deal with what we came for.’
Merrily unfolded the order-of-service for a funeral, on which Syd Spicer had written the names and addresses, beginning with
‘He’s got to be conducting it, hasn’t he?’
‘Hell of a choir for a village this size,’ Lol said.
‘A village where, according to the Rector, people don’t even talk to each other much. So, like, they just sing? Why didn’t Spicer tell me Loste wouldn’t be available tonight?’
‘I don’t suppose he knew you were coming. How far away are the others?’
‘Chairman of the parish council has a farm about half a mile away. I was going to save him till last, as he apparently hasn’t yet claimed to have seen anything. The other’s a Mrs Cobham. Converted barn. Two minutes’ walk, according to Spicer. Call that ten for the likes of us.’
‘He
‘Mmm.’
‘Is it common for an ex-SAS man to go into the Church?’
‘Church welcomes hard men. Good for the image. Bit of balance.’
They walked through the cutting, past Hannah Bradley’s cottage. No sign of Hannah. Although there was nobody about, Merrily felt conspicuous and zipped up her thin black fleece over her dog collar. Now the road was curving away around a hill defined by ascending houses and bungalows, several of them hidden behind conifer walls.
‘How about for him?’ Lol said. ‘Not a bit tame?’
‘We have people in the C of E make the Taliban look like a tennis club.’ Merrily stopped, looked up the hill. ‘Do you think
The barn-conversion was set back from the lane, its bay filled with plate-glass panels, mirrors of gold in the early-evening light. Expensive. The new gravel driveway had been given a curving route to make it seem longer, maples planted in careful stockades either side of it. A white Mercedes 4?4 sat at the top, outside the oak front door.
‘This is the woman whose car apparently went out of control and hit a camper van.’
But, again, there was nobody in. Merrily felt that, even before Lol let the knocker fall twice against its steel plate, the clunks echoing inside the barn like footsteps in an empty ballroom. She stepped back.
‘Not my night, obviously.’
‘Maybe it’s the wrong house.’
‘So which other one couldn’t we miss?’
Lol knocked again.
‘Maybe they’re in the choir.’
‘A whole village of brilliant, classically trained singers?’
Merrily moved back towards the lane which, beyond the barn, became a dirt track.
‘It’s like someone we can’t see is laughing at us.’
Maybe Syd Spicer. Maybe the Rector of Wychehill was laughing at them. Laughing silently, lying in some ditch, covered with branches, his face streaked with dark mud, like in the old days.
He should be here, as back-up. The protocol was that the local priest came with you, the first time, didn’t just throw the addresses at you and leave you to get on with it.
Merrily went to the edge of the lane and looked down into a bucolic kaleidoscope: swirls of woodland and cider-apple orchards and maybe vineyards, around sheep fields which glowed like emerald and amber stained glass as the sun began its scenic dive into the Black Mountains forty miles away.
By the time they’d walked back towards the church, the chant had stopped.
‘Maybe the whole community turns out to listen.’ Lol walked into the entrance, along the gravel path bordered with yew trees, turning to look back at Merrily. ‘You’re
‘I don’t know that I am, to be quite—’
‘Pardon me?’
A blur of movement. Merrily turned slowly. A woman had appeared out of the trees by the entrance. She wore a pale sleeveless dress so long that it completely covered her feet, and it seemed somehow as if she’d risen from the ground.
‘You’re looking for someone?’
‘Well, we—’
‘Is there a concert on?’
Lol had wandered back. The woman smiled at him.
‘Choir practice, is all.’
She had a loose, wide mouth and big, deep-sunk eyes that seemed swirlingly aglow.
‘You’re in the choir?’
‘I don’t sing, although I have an interest. I was taking some air during the break. I live in a cottage back there. Wyche Cottage? Like the Wyche in Wychehill, which means salt, only, the real-estate guy in Ledbury, when he told me the name on the phone, I thought it was
