transcription. ‘I was instructed not to put it into the computer.’
‘What is it?’ Merrily looked up. ‘Black Sabbath?’
‘It’s…’ Sophie frowned ‘… Elgar, I’m afraid. His librettist, anyway. It’s an extract from the cantata we discussed.’
‘
‘
‘Oh. The one set on…’
‘Herefordshire Beacon. British Camp.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘Literally. The passage relates to where Caractacus, facing his final confrontation with the Romans, is directed by various prophecies from what you might call Druids of the old school. The libretto … particularly on paper, it lacks a certain subtlety of expression. Elgar wasn’t famous then. It was written by a neighbour, a Mr Acworth. A retired civil servant, as I recall.’
‘And this bollocks was texted to Khan?’
…
Merrily stood up and turned to the window: Broad Street traffic, T-shirts, summer frocks.
Inn Ya Face.
The phone went again and Sophie took it, her reading glasses dropping down on their chain. She wasn’t on long.
‘I’ll tell her,’ she said. ‘If I see her. Thank you.’ When she looked up at Merrily, her face was creasing with an unexpected, almost motherly concern. ‘You can’t react to everything.’
‘Just tell me.’
‘Detective Chief Inspector Howe’s office. She would like to meet you in Wychehill later this afternoon.’
‘Howe wants to see
‘The sergeant said she very much hopes it will be convenient.’
‘Which means if I don’t show there’ll be a police car outside the vicarage at some ungodly hour.’
‘I’m sorry, Merrily.’
What the hell was
‘No idea,’ Bliss said. ‘But whatever the bitch wants, you keep me well out of it. What do you reckon about the text?’
‘If it wasn’t so bad it’d be creepy. How many people would recognize the words of an Elgar cantata?’
‘In the Malverns,’ Sophie murmured, ‘about four thousand.’
‘Not a great many rival dealers,’ Bliss said. ‘That’s for sure. We must be looking at one of the principal reasons for them picking up Mr Loste.’
‘Maybe he’s just advising them, as an exper— No. Sorry, I’m overtired. It was texted to Raji Khan personally?’
‘To the Royal Oak landline.’
‘Would that work?’
‘You can text a landline and the message gets read out over the phone.’
‘Loste has an oak,’ Merrily said.
‘Sorry?’
‘I just thought. Loste has an oak planted in his front garden.’
‘That’s uncommon?’
‘It is when your garden’s barely big enough for a dwarf apple-tree. A lot of oaks here, that’s all I was thinking. Sacrificial oak. Royal Oak…’
‘And the oak was the sacred tree of the Druids. Even I know that. What does it tell us?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe Annie Howe does?’
‘You know,’ Bliss said, ‘if it turns out Annie’s pulled the right man within just a few hours … I’d really hate that.’
When Merrily got back from the health-food shop with some hard-looking bean and chick-pea pasties, Sophie was printing out a document.
‘Didn’t take long to find her.’
It was from Amazon.
Most popular results for Dr C. Winchester Sparke
‘A writer,’ Merrily said. ‘It makes sense. I wondered what an American woman was doing living in the Malverns on her own. Kept meaning to ask people, but it never … A writer can live anywhere.’
‘All her books appear to fall under the general heading of Mind, Body and Spirit,’ Sophie said, with faint distaste, ‘so I’m not sure how seriously we can take the
‘New Age. She comes over as very … almost archetypally New Age.’
‘Be careful,’ Sophie said.
25
Village Idiot
Winnie Sparke cupped her hands, drank from the holy spring and then looked up at Merrily, holy water rippling down her face, hands pushing her wet curls back over both ears.
For a moment she looked stricken and feral, like some captured wood nymph.
‘You have to help me. He’ll die in there, I’m not kidding.’
Inside the nineteenth-century gabled building which enclosed the Holy Well, the once-sacred healing water ran from a thin plastic pipe into a stone sink. On the floor, a red cross was marked out in tiles. On the wall above the pipe someone had scrawled, in black,
