December (18 page)

      
'Nor me,' Moira said softly. 'And yet, from time to time,
since the day she gave me the comb, she's been ...
there. And it's been bugging the hell out of me, Donald. If she knew
inside that she was gonna die, why did she no' send for me?'

      
Donald was staring down at the paper, mouthing the words
BREADWINNER and DEATHOAK over and over again.

      
'Do
you
know why?'

      
He looked up at her. His mouth stopped moving. Moira tried not
to get riled but her next question came out in a low growl.

      
'Why'd you have her rigged up wi' her eyes wide like something
out the chamber of horrors?'

      
Donald stared at her mournfully, lips stitched up like a badly
darned sock.

The vicar wondered how far
he could trust Eddie Edwards. The old chap wasn't exactly a gossip, more a
collector of gossip, who probably acquired much more than he gave out. The
vicar decided he would take a small step towards him.

      
Well,' he said tentatively. 'How do
you
feel about the Abbey?'

      
'Drab,' said Mr Edwards. 'Neglected. And full of an old sorrow.'
      
'Why sorrow?'

      
'Perhaps it goes back to Aelwyn. You know of him.'

      
'A little. Welsh harpist who witnessed the Abergavenny massacre
in eleven ... er, eleven-something.'

      
'Seventy-five. And fled the scene pursued by Norman soldiers.
Came for sanctuary to the Abbey, and his pursuers caught up with him on the
steps and cut him to pieces.'

      
'Making him a kind of instant martyr. Every great
ecclesiastical building should have one.'

      
'So cynical, you are,' Mr Edwards said.
      
'Aelwyn Breadwinner, they called
him, didn't they? I often wondered why.'

      
'Corruption of the Welsh, that is. The language hasn't been
spoken much in this area, to its shame, for a couple of centuries at least. So,
what happens, when they come across a difficult Welsh name, bit of a mouthful,
turn it into an English word, they do, that sounds the same. Aelwyn Breadwinner
indeed! If he ever existed.'

      
The vicar blinked. 'I thought it was fully documented.'
      
'Oh, the massacre is. Little doubt
what happened there. Aelwyn may be no more than a legend, one of those romantic
tales that no one ever bothers to go into, except for retired folk with time on
their hands. There are a number of anomalies, see. Things that don't add up. I
tell you what... if you're interested - don't want to bore you, see, us old
retired folk can get carried away - if you're interested, I can take you
through it some time.'

      
'Yes,' the vicar said warily. 'I suppose I am interested.'
      
'But still, you're a busy man with
your fifty square miles your five churches to look after and your music ...'
      
Mr Edwards paused.
      
The vicar said nothing.

      
'A shame, it is, that we don't have a Christmas concert in Ystrad
any more
. Could have given us a
tune ...'
      
The vicar said nothing.

      
Mr Edwards beamed. 'I wondered if that was why you were interested
in Aelwyn, see ...'

      
'Did I say I was particularly interested?'

      
'You being a fellow musician. What is now the cello? And the
electric guitar?'

      
'Bass.' The vicar sighed, gave up. 'The electric bass. But I
don't play any more.'

      
The vicar had carefully concealed his instruments in the loft
- the old bastard must have been chatting up Mrs Pugh.

      
'Shame. The wicker chair was wobbling with Mr Edwards delight
at having got the vicar with his back to the wall at last. Were you in one of
these pop groups, ever?'

      
'I was, er, classically trained,' the vicar said. 'But I've
never really done much with it.'

      
Oh,' said Mr Edwards. 'There's sad. A good name, it is, for a musician,
Simon St John.'

'Sometimes ... Sometimes,
Moira ...' Donald's voice slurred and broadened by his discomfort '...
sometimes, the dead, they just willnae lie doon. Sometimes they'll no close up
their eyes. y'ken?'

      
Moira said, 'She lay down again, when she'd seen me. As if
she'd said her piece.'
      
'Aye,' Donald said.
      
'Proving your point, huh?'

      
Donald was silent for a moment, then he said, 'She wid always
do things for you.'

      
Meaning the times when the Duchess had altered the course of
human nature. Like when Moira had been defying
 
her gran over the length of her hair and it was getting to a crisis
point, complaining to the headmaster or some such. And something would happen to
divert the old girl's attention, some minor ailment, or Gran's attitude would
simply soften inexplicably.

      
'See, this song, Donald - "The Ballad of Aelwyn" -
no record was ever released, nor ever could've been. The recording was ...
never finished. And I've never sung it since. What I'm saying, this song has
never existed outside of that recording studio.
The Duchess could never've heard it.'

      
Donald remained expressionless. He wasn't at all surprised.
Eventually, he looked down at the paper and then looked up at her again.

      
Deathoak? It's just a nonsense word,' Moira said uncertainly
it's all nons—'
      
She felt her throat constrict.

      
In a much smaller voice, she said, if this ... this shit was corning
through to her ... if it was, like, coming for me and she intercepted it, you
know? Something coming out of the past, and she caught it? Was that why she
wouldn't have me come to her? Thinking she could deal with it on her own, just
like she sorted out Gran, way back? That how it was, Donald?'
      
Moira sighed.

      
'It's me should be dead, not her. Everybody here knows that,
you can see it in their faces.'

      
'Ach,' Donald said, 'she had a stroke. She wisny expecting it.
There is no evidence otherwise.'

      
'Yeah. Time I grew up.' She stood up, folded the paper and
stuffed it in her bag. 'I realise that. Maybe that's why I gave the comb back.'

      
He rose at once to his feet. 'The comb?'

      
Moira said, 'Don't get mad at me. She needed it more, I
figured if she'd put herself in the way of this shit, she needed the protection
of the ancestors more than me. OK?'

      
'What?' She saw the flicker of fear in his old eyes, quickly
doused, like a poacher's light in the woods. 'What have you
done
?'

      
'Aw,' Moira said uncomfortably, 'I just put the comb in the
coffin with her. Between her hands.'

      
'
What
?' Now sorrow
swam openly with naked terror in the bottomless pools of his eyes. 'You buried
the comb?'
      
'Made sense, Donald.'

      
'Sense? You stupid wee bitch, what wid you know about sense?
You're as bloody green now as when you took that man's gold. By
Christ
...!'

      
He snatched his hat off, clutched it to his chest, inserted
forefingers of each hand into the hole and tore the hat the length of its crown.
'By Christ, hen, you're on your own now, all right. And naked.'

It was the third day. Time
for the tapes to rise from the grave. Prof Levin had been hanging around his
flat all morning, waiting for the call. Steve Case had rung him twice, the
first time before nine a.m., demanding to know if they had a result.

      
Prof had called Audico at nine. No, Maurice was not in yet.
Things sounded confused. He'd left a message. Tried again at eleven; no answer.
No answer? This was a bloody factory!
      
When the phone finally rang,
mid-afternoon. Prof was at the bathroom mirror, idly trimming his beard, mostly
white nowadays; did that look distinguished or decrepit?

      
Maurice said, 'Your tapes, Prof.' He sounded upset, regretful,
weary as hell. Bad news, then.

      
'Oh well,' Prof said, for some reason relieved, it was worth a
try.'

      
There was a long pause.

      
'You've been busy today,' Prof said. 'I rang several times.'

      
The silence in the phone was cavernous.

      
'You could very well say that,' Maurice said after a while,
and there was another silence and then he said, very precisely, 'Mr Levin,
would you like to do me one great big favour? Do you think' - a tremor under
his voice - 'that before I lose control of myself and throw the bastard things
into the furnace, there is any chance of you getting these tapes out of my
factory, and soonest?'

V

A Moth in Winter

First there was no light
and no sound.
      
He waited.
      
After a few seconds, he thought
he'd break the silence with a light laugh, just to show he wasn't taking this
at all seriously, wasn't letting it
get
to
him. But he was on his own in the dark, so who was he trying to convince?

Maurice, of Audico, had
said,

      
'You
think I'm joking? You think I'm having you on? I'm not. Listen, there was
nearly a walk-out. I've had a deputation in here. I've had the police. You
think this is funny?'

Prof Levin had put the
wooden box on the back seat of his car but kept seeing it in his mirror and
thinking about what Maurice had said. It was just a black wooden box, brass
corners, broken brass lock. Just a wooden box.

      
He'd pulled over on to the hard shoulder of the M25, coming
back into London - and he'd stowed it away in the boot before setting off
again.

      
Which was a completely ridiculous thing to do.

      
Also, he hadn't taken it into his flat last night, but left it
in the car boot in the lock-up garage he rented.

      
Which was crazy; he'd had his car nicked twice from this garage.

'They're probably laughing about it now, Prof, the
ones who know. Well, you do, don't you, when it's all over? There are things
you don't want to believe. Well, I'm still not laughing.'

Prof had arrived shortly
before ten a.m. at this tiny commercial studio under a scruffy South London
record shop. It had been discreetly hired by Steve Case, who was to meet him
here at twelve, not before, OK?

      
Recording engineers were just technicians who put the gilt on
other people's creativity; not their job to question anything. Well, sod that.
The bloke in the shop was a dozy bastard; Prof had bluffed his way into the
studio, no great problem.

      
He unpacked the box. The tape looked very clean; despite
everything, Maurice's people had done a proficient job, obviously. He wound the
first reel into the machine, around half a dozen metal capstans, on to the
take-up spool. There were twin speakers, on a tilt, just above his head.

      
He hit the 'play' button and - as he usually did - removed his
glasses and switched off the lights.

      
A mistake, although he didn't realise it at first.

'This factory is - what? -four years old? It's on a
business park, for God's sake. It's surrounded by other factories, all
air-conditioned, dust-free, hi-tech units. Before they turned it into a
business park, it was a football pitch, a school playing field. You know what
I'm saying, Prof? I'm saying it wasn't an old battlefield or an overgrown
graveyard or anything like that. Shit, I can't believe I'm saying this to you
at all...'

On the first half dozen
reels, he found four songs, unmixed, several takes of each. Scraps of
conversation, musicians talking to each other - a handful of men and one woman.
The producer, whose voice came in occasionally, sounded like Russell Hornby. One
of the musicians had a bit of Merseyside in his voice could well have been Dave
Reilly.