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 ceiling. A microwave, a dishwasher, a coffee-machine. An empty pizza packet on the worktop near the microwave. All of this lit by one long, thin peach-coloured strip light.
No conspicuous damage, no sounds of intrusion. So who had left the door open? Had the sole objective been the killing of the oak tree?
Who would have known its importance? Presumably, only Winnie Sparke. And Merrily, now, and Lol.
She stepped cautiously over the threshold.
‘Mr Loste?’
It seemed so unlikely that she hadn’t met this man she knew so much about. Or did she? Like all the impressions you received of Elgar, the individual portraits of Tim Loste didn’t quite match. He was inspired and inspirational; he was crazy and manipulative.
There was certainly nothing of him in this kitchen. Opposite her, the door to the hall was wide open. The hall was in darkness. She started thinking about the big framed photograph of Whiteleafed Oak over the mantel-piece in the living room and all the other pictures of the sites of the perpetual choirs. Obvious and easy targets if someone really wanted to upset him.
She went into the hall. Always hated being inside someone else’s house when they weren’t there.
Especially in the dark. Merrily felt around for a light switch, and as soon as her hand found it – one of those little metal nipples – the light from a white crystal bowl in the ceiling sprang into the otherworldly eyes of Edward Elgar, urging Mr Phoebus out of the shadows towards her.
It also fanned unevenly into the living room, where the glass protecting the photo of the whiteleafed oak had indeed been smashed, the picture tipped so that it looked as if the whole room was awry … as if a sudden gust of wind had rushed into it, tossing Winnie Sparke’s slight body back into the bookshelves in a hot shower of blood.