He laid the watch on the parched grass near the base of a pole. Stood there in his dog collar and his ruined jeans, with his fair hair looking almost white and as dead as the grass, and his hands on his hips.
‘Over to you,’ he said. ‘Drukerimaskri.’
46
Every Evil Haunting and Phantasm
CHARLIE HOWE CLEARLY knew the TV cameraman – grey-haired bloke crouching near the sign saying knight’s frome, getting the church into shot. The old Jaguar pulled in next to him and Charlie leaned out of the window, bawling out, ‘Jim!’
Lol brought the Astra up behind the Jag, as the cameraman turned in irritation, then saw who it was and grinned, lowering his camera. ‘Knew they’d never be able to manage without you, Charlie. Come to take over the inquiry, is it?’
Charlie poked a finger out of the window. ‘Now don’t you go saying that to Anne, boy.’
Jim said he wasn’t that brave, and they laughed, and then Charlie said, ‘Talking of whom, you seen that girl at all?’
Lol spotted a slender woman walking through the churchyard, about two hundred yards away. He thought it was Sally Boswell, with someone else, a child it looked like from where he was.
He got out of the car as the cameraman said, ‘Nobody here yet, Charlie, only me, shooting wallpaper till the reporter shows. What you doing with yourself now?’
‘Creating the new Hereford, most of the time,’ Charlie told him. ‘So Anne’s due when?’
‘Two o’clock, outside the pub. That’s what I was told.’
Lol ran past them, towards the churchyard.
Sally wore a faded yellow dress and a straw sunhat, and it wasn’t a child with her but Isabel St John in her wheelchair. Isabel looked defiant. Her crimson top began just above her nipples.
‘Laurence.’ Sally pulled off her hat; her misty hair was pushed back over her ears and her skin was pale as moth wings. She tucked the hat under an arm, drew a tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose. ‘Hay fever. Isn’t it ridiculous? Haven’t suffered in years.’
Lol thought she’d been crying.
Isabel glanced back, almost disparagingly, at the church. ‘Been trying to do our bit, isn’t it?’
‘Supportive prayer,’ Sally said. ‘Though I’m afraid I don’t particularly feel any closer to the Deity in there.’
Isabel raised her eyes. ‘Should’ve said. Out here’s all right.’ A Red Admiral butterfly landed on an arm of her wheelchair and stayed there, as though it had been sprayed with lacquer.
‘Where’s Al?’ Lol said. The air seemed hushed and heavy, not only around the church but over the whole valley. He wasn’t aware of any birds singing. He could see Charlie Howe walking towards them, but couldn’t hear his steps.
‘Al?’ said Sally. ‘Don’t you know?’
‘Al’s with Simon,’ Isabel said. ‘And your lady. Chasing the gorgeous, pouting Rebekah. Dredging her up from the slime.’ Her voice had gone harsh with distress. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘Now? Today?’
‘For noon.’
‘They’re doing it now?’
Sally put a hand on his arm. Her fingers felt like lace. ‘Don’t interfere, Laurence. It does have to be done, I’m afraid. Al and I quarrelled over it. I didn’t want…’ She half turned away. ‘He believes he has no choice. He believes he’s responsible for her. That’s all there is to it.’
‘What about Merrily? Who’s she res—’
‘You want to concentrate more on your music, Lol,’ Isabel said. ‘Form a new band. Employ Simon, get him out of this crappy job.’ The butterfly still hadn’t moved. Isabel looked as if she wanted to swat it. ‘Nobody needs this in their lives. We can deal with it, if we have to, when we’re dead.’
‘Where are they?’ Lol said.
‘Leave it,’ Sally told him. ‘Whatever has to happen will happen.’
‘While we get to wait on the shore.’ Isabel put on a pair of very dark sunglasses. ‘Keep the bloody home fires burning.’
The butterfly finally took off, fluttered to a nearby grave. Lol said, ‘Why do they need Merrily? Why couldn’t they have done this in the first place? I can’t believe Simon was scared.’
‘What do you know, Lol?’ Isabel said with venom. ‘What do you know of what he’s been through over the years? You think it isn’t a terrible bloody burden for a priest to be psychic?’
‘I’m sure it is. But if he thinks Merrily can come in and shoulder it—’
‘Nobody can shoulder it. He has to face it on his own.’
‘Then why do they need Merrily? Is it because Rebekah will only come to a woman?’
‘Stop it,’ Sally said. ‘Both of them are Christians. Neither of them is part of the tradition. If anything happens to anyone…’ She opened her bag, took out a parchment-coloured, egg-shaped label and handed it to Lol. ‘I found this when I came back.’
He recognized it at once. It was what you saw when you peered down the soundhole of a well-loved guitar, with the sacred name ‘Boswell’ printed quite small.
Sally said, ‘It’s the price you pay. For preserving the balance. What you borrow must be repaid, if not in itself then… in kind. Sometimes with interest.’
Below the name was an inner oval in which the serial number of each instrument would be stamped. In this space was hand-printed:
My love
Don’t burn
the vardo
The hop-frames were constructed from now-faded creosoted poles, ten to fifteen feet high and leaning inwards. The cross-pieces of some were fixed below the top, forming two actual crosses, joined. Merrily took this as significant, and she and Simon each stood under a cross, close to the entrance of the alley.
Al Boswell sat at the far end, seventy or eighty yards away. His head was bowed.
Dead bines hung limp from several frames.
With the airline bag at her feet, Merrily laid the Lord’s Prayer on the still, already humid air.
When she’d finished, there was a strange silence in the yard that seemed close to absolute. No birds was what it meant, she decided – there seemed to be nothing here for them to feed on. The hop-yard and adjacent fields were almost in a bowl of earth, the landscape curving up to wooded hills, only the highest ridge of the Malverns visible.
And only one building, the one with the witch’s-hat tower. Should I say it came out of the kiln on the smoke of Rebekah’s cremation? Was it scattered with her ashes?
What came out? What was at the core of this? As Simon had pointed out, there was no agreed ritual for this situation.
Merrily glanced up the alley towards Al Boswell. His hands were raised now, in supplication, and he seemed to be chanting, though she couldn’t hear anything – was Al’s consciousness down there in the Lower World, home of the ancestors and the dead, bargaining with his father, the chovihano, for the soul of Rebekah? What was he offering? What did he expect to pay? She felt scared for him because he came from a culture which was, in essence, unbending.
She also felt an agitation and a tension emanating like cold steam from Simon St John. She banished it, closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on her breathing without changing its rhythm.
In her hands she held a slim prayer book. Into her mind came the image of Rebekah in her sleeveless white blouse. No earrings – the girl wouldn’t have wanted to look like a gypsy for the picture editor at Tit Bits. Poor kid. Poor Rebekah: brazen hussy of 1963, blinded by her own sexuality. As if she’d like to seize the whole world in her teeth.