Remains of an Altar

‘Few months ago. I think he’s back drinking now. She won’t stop him. She’ll bloody kill him before she’s done, and that’s a shame.’

‘Go on. Tell me.’

Merrily leaned on the gate. Hannah looked up and down the lane and then lowered her voice but not much.

‘When we were in Malvern, right? We ran into this old mate of Tim’s, from when he was a teacher. And I remembered his name after and I rang him up to ask him, like, you know, what’s the situation with Tim. And he said the Sparke woman was the reason his engagement was broken off…’

‘Tim’s? What, you mean she—’

‘Oh, nothing like that. She’d eat him for breakfast. She just tells him he’s a genius. She’s good at making people feel special. I don’t know if he’s a genius or not, but what’s it matter if genius is being miserable all the time? You know he tried to top himself? If you see her, you can tell her what I said. I don’t care any more. I wish I could get between them, but he won’t listen.’

‘And how are things with you?’

‘I just don’t go that way any more on the bike,’ Hannah said. ‘You getting anywhere with it?’

‘To be honest … don’t know.’

Back at the car, Merrily lit another cigarette, brought out the phone, watched it flare up, singing in her hand, and called Jane again. Her call could not be taken. Left another message on the voicemail and then called Gomer’s landline – Gomer’s partner Danny Thomas kept the firm’s only mobile, as Gomer had never been known to charge it up.

No answer.

At least this was likely to mean that wherever Jane was, Gomer was also there. Made no difference; she should be there. There was nothing much to be done here. If Loste and Winnie were doing a Last Night of the Proms before they were barred from Wychehill Church, it was perhaps none of her business.

On the other hand, when somebody had deceived you…

She rang Bliss: voicemail.

‘Frannie,’ Merrily said, ‘I don’t really know what to say to you except that something’s not right here. Which of course you— Oh, sod it, just call me back.’

She killed the connection and her cigarette, leaned back into the seat. Time to go and collect poor Lol. Drive back to Whiteleafed Oak hamlet and then call him on the mobile, call him away from the perpetual choirs.

Nice concept, lovely imagery. The great and beautiful mystery: how Elgar tapped into the music of the spheres. The ultimate unprovable theory. But also undis provable. Clever Winnie.

She decided to drive back to the Ledbury road by the slightly longer route that would take her past the Royal Oak which, after all, she’d never seen fully operational – the moral cesspit, the gateway to hell. The road taking her past the gaunt Edwardian home of Tim Loste, which she hadn’t yet checked. She made out its wall and its peeling railings. No lights on here either, and she hadn’t expected any, but, as she accelerated away, something did catch her eye. Not a peeling railing, but…

Oh hell.

Merrily braked, lowered her window, looked behind her for oncoming headlights and, when it was clear there was nothing, reversed along the road to the front of the house and switched off the engine.

She couldn’t see it from here and had to get out. The narrow house rose up against the hill like an upended domino, double blank, and, halfway into Loste’s cramped driveway, she was able to confirm what she’d seen from the car.

It was the oak sapling planted in his tiny front garden, the tree which eventually would have crumbled his foundations and fused destructively with his supporting walls. The oak which she now knew represented something infinitely bigger. A symbol of something, is all, Winnie had said. A symbol he could use for meditation.

Merrily walked up to the front of the house and held the sapling in both hands, halfway up, where it was gleaming white.

Not white leaves. Somebody had snapped its trunk.

Jane tasted the earth.

It was cold and gritty and bitter, and her ears were full of roaring night.

‘Get up.’

‘Nergh.’

Jane rolled away from the blade but kept on hugging the earth.

‘Get up out of there before I pull you out.’

A voice she didn’t know. Then a voice she did.

‘Don’t touch her, Gerry. You must never touch them these days.’

‘I’d like to fucking—’

‘I’ve already called the police,’ Lyndon Pierce said. ‘Jane, you know what’ll happen if the police have to move you. You’ll be arrested. You’ll be charged. You’ll appear in court, and when you’ve appeared in court once, at your age, that’s the slippery slope.’

Jane dug her fingers into the soil, opened her eyes slightly and saw the white eyes of the JCB, heard its engine idling. She saw the boots of Gerry Murray, heard the voice of Lyndon Pierce again.

‘—Mother won’t survive that. Be on your way, the pair of you. No skin off my nose. Women vicars, that was always gonner be a mistake.’

Jane concentrated on the roaring of the engine in her ears and gripped the earth, one hand aching where the grit was in the bleeding cut. The earth smelled rich and raw and warm, now. Warm as the grave.

‘I been talking to Tessa Bird, in Education,’ Pierce said. ‘Looks like you’re finished at the school anyway. You’re maladjusted, Jane. Always been a problem child—’

‘What the fuck—?’

She heard the change in the engine’s tone. A gear change like a huge throat-clearing. When she opened her eyes, the digger’s lights were receding.

Murray screaming, ‘Get the fuck out of there, you mad ole bastard!’

Swallowing wet clay, Jane saw the swirl of the digger’s lights, and then the night went mad.

* * *

It wasn’t the wind; there was no wind. It wasn’t an accident, either. The sapling was too thick in its lower trunk for Merrily to clasp a hand around.

Someone had bent it over until it split. It wasn’t quite severed but the top three or four feet of it were hanging off.

She felt the violence still in the air, could almost smell someone’s sweat. It was, in some indefinable way, like when she and Syd Spicer had been standing by the remains of Lincoln Cookman’s car. As if the violence had been inflicted on the atmosphere itself and the atmosphere wanted you to know that it was remembering the hurt.

She went around the path to the back door to see if the oaks in plant pots had been damaged. They seemed to be intact, although one was knocked over. But the back door, which Tim Loste was said never to lock, was ajar, and the bar of pinkish light down the side was, amidst so much darkness, a lurid shock.

Merrily took a step back and waited. No suggestion of movement inside. She didn’t go in, but she prodded the door a little wider open and called out.

‘Mr Loste?’

Not really expecting an answer. But from out on the hill behind the house she could hear a distant sound, both explosive and staccato, like duelling machine guns: dance music from the Royal Oak somehow deflected from the hill, bouncing back toward the house and the road.

I spend all of Friday and Saturday evenings with Tim. When the Royal Oak starts up. He needs me – he’ll go crazy, else.

If they weren’t here and they weren’t at Whiteleafed Oak, where were they?

With her left trainer, Merrily pushed the door further open, saw into the kitchen, which she hadn’t really taken in when she was here with Annie Howe. It was basic but not small. Pine units and cupboards up to the high