‘Keep at it. Somewhere there’s an old dear who sees all. I want her.’
Preferably before Howe arrived with the entourage.
‘Er…’ Karen trying not show excitement. ‘Actually right, is it, what they’re saying?’
‘Well, yeh.’ Bliss accepted a Polo mint from Gerry Rowbotham. ‘Does indeed begin to look like it. So much for gangland, eh?’
‘God,’ Karen said. ‘What happens now?’
‘It gets corporate. Doesn’t it, Gerry?’
‘Francis,’ Gerry Rowbotham said, ‘You haven’t actually said…’
‘What?’
‘What’s happened to… you know, what they’ve done to his eyes?’
‘Ah, yeh,’ Bliss said. ‘The eyes.’
You didn’t need to be much of a detective to know that the thing with the eyes was going to be central.
THURSDAY
But we should not criticise councillors because of their ineptitude. We wouldn’t berate an idiot for not comprehending quantum theory.
8
Viler Shades
The heating, such as it was, was due to kick in at seven, for a strict one and a half hours. A cost-of-oil thing. You could get twenty-five per cent of your fuel costs from the parish, for business use of the vicarage, but Merrily had never bothered. Stupid, probably, but too late to start now, at these prices. So she and Jane had cut back. Lost the old Aga, for a start.
Merrily moved rapidly around the kitchen, putting the kettle on, activating the toaster, feeding Ethel, and then running back into the hall, calling up from the bottom of the stairs.
‘Flower?’
Her lips could hardly frame the word, all the nerves in her face deadened by the cold. On the wall by the door, Jesus Christ looked down from Holman Hunt’s Light of the World with a certain empathy, obviously not drawing much heat from his lantern.
‘Jane!’
The kid was definitely up. She’d been wandering around at least half an hour ago. Probably trying for stealth, but when there were only the two of you in a big old vicarage you developed an ear for creaks.
No reply from up there, no sound of radio or running water. Merrily went back to the kitchen and cracked three eggs into a bowl. Tom Parson’s funeral was at eleven at Hereford Crem. Old Tom, local historian, one-time editor of the parish magazine, now the third village death in a fortnight. Another funeral, another empty cottage up for grabs at a crazy price, removal vans more common in this village now than buses.
The cold came for her again, and she went scurrying back into the hall.
‘Jane!’
Nothing. Merrily pulled her robe together and ran upstairs, two flights, to what Jane liked to call her apartment, in the attic. A big bedsit, essentially, with all the kid’s spooky books, her desk, her stereo, her CDs. The door was hanging open. Merrily snapped on the light and saw the duvet in a heap, one pillow on the floor.
What was this about? Jane waking up aggrieved because her craven parent hadn’t stood up at last night’s meeting and fought for Coleman’s Meadow? She hadn’t seemed annoyed last night, but Jane… one day she might become vaguely predictable, no signs of that yet.
Merrily sat on an edge of the bed, wondering what it would be like this time next year when Jane was gone. Was she really going to carry on here on her own? With Lol on his own in Lucy’s old house? If they put this place on the market, the Church could clean up. The Old Vicarage, Ledwardine, 17th century, seven bedrooms, guest-house potential. One day they’d do it, transfer the vicar to one of the estate houses, and on mornings like this it didn’t seem such a bad idea.
A videotape was projecting from the vintage VCR under Jane’s analogue TV. Give the kid her due, she’d never pined for home cinema — on a vicar’s stipend, still many years away.
The tape was labelled T-1 Feb. Recorded last winter, long before Jane had been drawn towards a career in archaeology. Trench One was never less than watchable but not exactly crucial viewing. Why this one now?
Oh, and you’ll never guess — the kid calling back casually over her shoulder as she went upstairs to bed last night — who’s going to be in charge of the dig. Merrily waiting in vain for a name, but Jane always liked suspense.
Activating the VCR and the TV, Merrily shoved in the tape and watched pre-credit shots of a sinister grey landcape under a sky tiered with clouds like stacked shelves.
A man appeared, solid, bulky, shot from below the tump he was standing on. Trench One had three regular presenters who took turns to direct an excavation, present a different viewpoint, argue over the results. It was about conflict and competition.
‘So we’ve studied the reports of the original 1963 dig…’
He was wearing some kind of bush shirt, with badges sewn on, an Army beret and jeans with ragged holes in the knees. In case anyone had any doubts, the caption spelled out:
Prof. William Blore.
‘… been over the geophysics, taken a stack of aerial pictures, and it now seems pretty clear to me that this is where we need to sink…’ Lavish grin splashing through smoky stubble. ‘Trench One!’
Blore jumping down from the tump and standing for a moment rubbing his hands like he couldn’t wait to get into the soil, and then the sig tune coming up in a storm of thrash-metal as he slid on his dark glasses and people began to gather around him.
Young people, his students. Trench One had begun as an Open University programme on BBC 2. Very rapidly acquiring a cult following, which built and built until they gave it peak screening. The format had altered slightly: Blore as guru, channelling youthful vigour. Merrily recalled a profile in one of the Sunday magazines describing him as genial, profane and disarmingly intolerant.
She stopped the tape. Red herring, surely. No way would Coleman’s Meadow be put into the hands of the man who’d told BBC Midlands Today that anyone who thought the Bronze Age builders of the Dinedor Serpent were primitive obviously hadn’t met the philistines running Herefordshire Council.
Wondering how genial, profane and disarmingly intolerant might translate.
‘What do you think, Lucy?’
She looked up at the framed photo over a stack of Jane’s esoteric books. An elderly woman in her winter poncho. The wide-brimmed hat throwing a tilted shadow across bird-of-prey features blurred by the process of turning away. Jane had found the picture in the vestry files and cleaned it up, had copies made and framed the original.
The only known portrait of Lucy Devenish who, like the old Indian warriors she’d so resembled, had probably thought cameras could steal your soul.
Merrily thought the picture looked unusually grey and flat this morning, lifeless.
The river was still frothing like cappuccino in the lamplight, but at least he wasn’t going anywhere new.
And the rain had eased. There was some ground mist, but the sky was clearing. Looking up, Jane saw the morning star pulsing like a distant lamp.
A breathing space. She walked slowly back up Church Street towards the square. Most of the guys at school hated getting up in the morning, but she’d never found it a problem. Around dawn you were more receptive to… impressions.