The lettering tiny, and no dates. Lucy’s will had requested no dates, and somehow Mum had been able to comply, probably against all the regulations. And if this wasn’t a sign that Lucy had believed herself to be an eternal presence in Ledwardine, no date for her arrival, no date for her passing…
This always made Jane shiver, but with a kind of delight.
Underneath the name were the lines Lucy had chosen from Thomas Traherne (
Jane placed her hands on the top of the stone for a moment. It always, even in winter, felt warm.
She stood up and looked back towards the church. Lucy’s grave was at the very end of the churchyard, right beside the path which led, through a small wooden gate, to the orchard, which had once virtually surrounded the village.
Way back, corpses would have been carried in, ceremonially, through the orchard. There was a long, flat, backless bench, probably the successor to generations of wooden benches on which the bearers had rested the coffins. The lych-gate at the front of the church had been a comparatively modern addition.
Jane looked towards the steeple and imagined what Lucy might have seen –
Jane remembered the day Lucy had cut an apple in half and showed her the five-pointed star, the pentagram at the heart of every apple. An indestructible symbol of the paganism at the heart of Ledwardine. In those days – the days when she’d painted the Mondrian walls – Jane had seen paganism as the
It didn’t seem as simple now. The church steeple was a powerful symbol and far more effective than a stone circle at indicating, from long distances, the alignment with Cole Hill. Now Jane felt – and arrangements like this underlined it – that paganism and Christianity had often walked together on the same straight path. She was sure that this was what Alfred Watkins had instinctively felt when archaeologists were slagging him off for including medieval churches in the otherwise Neolithic ley system.
Jane walked through the churchyard, past the south door and out through the lych-gate into the market place. Perhaps an old cross or an outlying marker stone might have stood here.
Across into the alley, through the broken gate and into the derelict orchard behind Church Street, past the hump of the burial mound, if that was what it was. And so to Coleman’s Meadow – the meadow of the earth- shaman – to Cole Hill, the sacred hill, the mother hill.
She felt choked up with emotion now, remembering the night she’d got drunk on cider with poor Colette and had started hallucinating in the orchard.
This had to be the right path.
Jane began to drift and, as on the night of Colette and the cider, could hardly feel the grass beneath her feet. When she stepped onto the ley it was as if she was floating on sunlit air-currents, and she saw Lucy waiting for her as she began to walk towards the steeple and the holy hill beyond.
‘Hi,’ Lucy said. ‘Are you Jane?’
Jane stood there, blinking. The woman wore not a poncho but a kind of denim smock with lots of pockets, and there was a square metal case at her feet.
‘Sally Ferriman. For the
‘Oh,’ Jane said. ‘Hi.’
‘You ready, Jane?’
Jane looked at Sally Ferriman, then up at Cole Hill, discovering that she had one of her own hands pressing down on top of her head as if she was trying to stop some part of it floating away.
‘Yes,’ Jane said. ‘I think so.’
Merrily reached the church door and then turned back.
She wasn’t ready. She went back to the vicarage and sat in front of the list of people whom she needed to tell about the idea for a requiem on Sunday. Crosses against Mrs Cookman and Stella Cobham. She tried the number for Sonia Maloney’s parents: still no answer.
One more name on the list. She’d agonized about this one, had wondered whether to consult Syd Spicer – or even Bliss – about it first.
She rang Bliss’s mobile. Switched off, but he rang back within a minute from outside the building.
‘They’ve still got Loste, and they may make an application to hold on to him, but there’s been no charge. They may still be waiting for forensics. However … it doesn’t look good from his point of view. They now have a witness who’s identified Loste as someone seen conducting what may have been a transaction on the side of the Beacon with a black man in a woolly hat.’
‘Loste bought drugs from Wicklow?’
‘That’s what it looks like. Usual rules, of course, Merrily.’
‘Not a word to anyone.’
‘So,’ Bliss said, ‘what do
‘Erm … another question?’
‘Jesus, Merrily, I can’t believe how one-sided this relationship’s become.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. This probably isn’t something you can answer, anyway.’
‘Fair enough. I’ll see you around, then—’
‘It’s probably a Traffic matter.’
‘In that case, all the abuse I’ve thrown at Traffic over the years,
‘It’s my Wychehill road accidents. I just – this is stupid – just want to be sure they actually happened as they were described to me. Or indeed happened at all. Loste had a crash that wasn’t reported to the police, so I can’t do anything about that. But there was a lorry driver supposed to have gone into the church wall.’
‘Name?’
‘No idea.’
‘Date?’
‘Can’t give you an exact … Never mind, it was just a thought.’
‘Merrily, even a brilliant investigator like myself…’
‘The only one where I do have a name, although I gather there was no charge in the end, so it may not be instantly accessible either … Stella Cobham? And it was early this month. Could you possibly get anything from that … ?’
She heard the sound of grinding traffic and the gasp of air brakes.
‘Frannie?’
‘The doughnuts are on you, Merrily,’ Bliss said. ‘Probably for the rest of your life.’
And she’d forgotten to ask him about the final name on the requiem list.
But then, why
Merrily switched on the computer to check the emails and, while it was booting up, stared at the phone. Should she?
Sod it. What was there to lose? She went into Yellow Pages for the number and then rang the Royal Oak at Wychehill and asked to speak to Mr Rajab Ali Khan.
