Merrily watched them go, wondering what all this was going to cost, in terms of money and their future in the village. Then she went over to Lol’s.
Lol was sitting on his sofa with the Boswell guitar. Merrily sat down next to him and listened while he played a couple of strange, drifting chords, singing in a low mumble.
‘Don’t need … The Angel of the Agony.
Don’t want … the pomp and circumstance.’
He put the guitar down.
‘Lay down here when we got in. Slept for a couple of hours and I woke up and that was in my head. Crap?’
‘It’s haunting,’ Merrily said.
‘Develop it, do you think?’
‘And when you record it, have Simon St John on cello.’
‘Elgar would hate it.’
‘Tell me – would that have bothered you before?
‘Um…’
‘Seventeen,’ Merrily said. ‘You remember?’
‘It wasn’t.’
‘Wasn’t seventeen?’
‘It was Severn … Teme. Elgar said he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at the confluence of the River Severn and the River Teme.’
‘So Tim meant…’
‘There wasn’t much cremation back then. They talked him out of it, and now he’s with Alice in Little Malvern.’
‘Where does the Severn meet the Teme?’
‘No idea.’
‘I wonder if there’s a country church near there. And an amenable vicar with a fondness for Elgar. Take some arranging and negotiations with relatives, of course, but…’
‘You’re thinking Tim?’
‘Thinking both of them. Tim … and Elgar, in essence. But…’
Faraway eyes and a lonely bicycle lamp in the dusk. A floating sadness.
‘… I just don’t know,’ Merrily said.
It was a mess, no arguing with that. A spreading wound in the belly of the village. OK, some of it had been done by Gerry Murray before they arrived, but a lot of it was clearly down to Gomer. The way the fence had been smashed down and spread across the field. The way the council sign describing the plans for luxury executive homes had been snapped off halfway up its post and crunched and splintered into the mud that used to be Coleman’s Meadow.
And Pierce’s car, of course. The car was still there. Pierce’s BMW with its windscreen smashed and its bonnet turned into a sardine can. Well, it had been dark. How was Gomer supposed to know that Pierce was giving Murray a lift home? And wasn’t the fact that Pierce was doing this a clear demonstration that they were in this together? Pierce wouldn’t want that coming out. Would he?
He wouldn’t give a toss. He had Jane, unhinged, crazy as a binge drinker on New Year’s Eve, and dragging an old man into it.
He wouldn’t get jail for a first offence – Jane hoped – at his age, but there’d be a heavy fine and, worst of all, the possibility of some kind of ban, and if they stopped Gomer driving his JCB he’d just slink off and die.
All her fault.
If anything happened to Gomer because of what she’d done she just couldn’t go on living here.
Didn’t want to live here any more, anyway.
The afternoon was dull and sultry. A bleak posse of clouds had gathered around Cole Hill. It was like a sign. Coleman’s Meadow was desolate, an old battlefield, but the only blood was hers.
‘Why are you doing this to me?’ Jane said. ‘I’ve messed up. I admit it.’
Neil Cooper strolled out to the middle of the field. He wasn’t bad-looking in an insubstantial kind of way.
‘But it is a ley,’ Jane shouted after him. ‘Or it was.’
‘I’m not sure I believe in leys,’ Cooper said.
‘Yeah, well, you wouldn’t.’
‘Look at the state of this.’ He bent down. ‘Come on. Look at it.’
‘Sod you,’ Jane said. ‘You’re determined to rub my nose in it, aren’t you?’
‘Will you come here?’
Jane sighed. How much more of this? Monday she’d have to face Morrell. Tuesday she’d be looking for a new school. Or a job. Maybe stacking shelves for Jim Prosser.
‘It’s my day off, actually,’ Neil Cooper said. ‘I just heard about it on the radio and thought I’d wander over. OK, here—’
She went and looked over Neil Cooper’s shoulder to where a great slice of soil and clay had been peeled away like a giant pencil-shaving. Murray’s work, but somebody had been at it with a spade and there was a trench there now. Neil Cooper tapped the bottom of it with a trowel. It rang sharply off something.
‘Oops, shouldn’t’ve— You know what this is, Jane?’ Jane stood sullenly on the edge of the trench, which was still roughly aligned with the ley.
‘No.’
‘It’s a stone,’ Neil Cooper said. ‘Approximately four metres long. Like a very big cigar. It was about half a metre under the surface. A large part of it would’ve been underground, but when it was standing it would’ve been taller than me.’
Jane said, ‘Standing?’
Cooper walked lightly along the bottom of the trench and then stopped.
‘It seemed even longer at first and then I realized that…’ He bent down, tapped again with his trowel. ‘That this was a separate one.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘And then I brought in a couple of mates and we found a third.’
‘What?’
‘Have you ever seen Harold’s Stones at Trellech? What’s that – forty miles from here?’
‘Thereabouts.’
She and Eirion had been. Twice. Harold’s stones were magnificent. Jane felt herself growing pale.
‘Probably not going to be quite that tall,’ Neil Cooper said. ‘But when we get them up, at least as high as Wern Derys, which is the tallest prehistoric stone in Herefordshire. And, of course, as a stone row. . .’
‘Who are you?’
‘I get the feeling we met once before, when I was working on the renovation of the Cantilupe tomb in the Cathedral. I certainly recognized your mum. I’m with the County Archaeologist’s Department now.’
Cooper was on his feet.
‘Jane, they’ve been buried for centuries. They’re way beyond living memory, and there are no records. There was a time when farmers would do this because the old stones got in the way of ploughing.’
‘Bury them?’
‘Broke them up, sometimes. Fortunately that didn’t happen here, although the one at the far end was quite badly chipped by Mr Murray’s JCB. But then, if he hadn’t been so determined to destroy your bit of … ley line, we wouldn’t have found out about it – if we ever did find out – until the housing estate was well under way, and then it would’ve been just rescue archaeology because the estate would have planning permission. Whereas now—’
‘These are real, actual, prehistoric standing stones?’
Jane felt like her body had filled up with helium and her voice was coming out in this thin squeak.
‘I’d stake my future career on it,’ Neil Cooper said.
‘What … what does that mean?’
‘Means a long and careful excavation, and then, with any luck, the stones will get raised again and carefully repositioned just as they once were.’
‘And the … and the housing estate?’
‘What housing estate?’ Neil Cooper said.
Jane went down on her knees in the trench, rubbing away the soil, getting dirt all over the big plaster on the back of her hand. She closed her eyes and saw a swirl of faces: Neil Cooper looking down on her with Elgar on one side of him and Alfred Watkins on the other, peering over his glasses, eyes alight, and all of them in the enveloping shadow of the batwing poncho of Lucy Devenish.