Friends of the Dusk (14 page)

‘You don’t, I suppose?’

‘My daughter’s trying to convert me to e-cigs. Unexpectedly, they do the business, though I’m enjoying telling her how hard the transition is.’

Casey looked sceptical.

‘Wouldn’t work it for me, lovey. Too old now. And anyway, what’s five a day?’

She lit one, and then Dennis Kellow, out of nowhere, came to the point.

‘Nobody in my business rubbishes the idea of ghosts. The kind of places we work in, so many odd things happen that, after a while, you hardly notice them. Not coincidence, but it’s no big deal either. I don’t know
what
happens, I do know it’s never particularly
pleasant
. But I’d never encountered anything that seemed as if it might actually be worth worrying about. Nothing physically harmful, you know?’

‘Means he nivver wanted to worry about it,’ Casey said.

‘I didn’t want anything getting between me and the project
in hand, no. Certainly not something I couldn’t do anything about.’

There was silence. A big old Scandinavian-type wood-stove sat in the inglenook, all cast-iron solid, no glass, no visible flames. Only the warmth in the room told you it was active. Whatever was happening here, it probably wasn’t happening in this room.

‘Tell her,’ Casey said. ‘And don’t play it down.’

‘Should we go to the room? Tell it there.’

‘What’s wrong with here?’ Casey said.

‘I won’t give into superstition.’ Dennis Kellow sat his mug on the table. ‘I’m not going to have another bloody stroke just talking about it. Come with me, m’dear.’

Casey Kellow squeezed her cigarette out between finger and thumb, didn’t move.

‘Take your coat, Mirrily.’

The upstairs was reached by a half-spiral staircase of stone slabs. The handrail was a rope, thick as Merrily’s arm. A low-wattage bulb glowed in a rusting bulkhead cage bolted to the wall at the top. Dennis led the way.

‘Back in the day – by which I mean the fifteenth century – the upstairs used to be a hayloft. Then it all got extended. There’s a more modern staircase at the other side, accessing the seventeenth, eighteenth-century extension where the Maliks live. Could be worse – means we don’t have to meet all that often.’

‘I see.’

‘It’s not like
that
.’ Dennis waited for her on a short, ill-lit landing, musty-smelling. ‘Not really. He’s not a bad chap, Adam.’

‘I meant to ask,’ Merrily said. ‘Your daughter and granddaughter – are
they
here?’

‘They went into Hereford. Aisha has a violin lesson then she meets friends. Nic— Nadya said she’d be back.’

He didn’t sound confident about this. Merrily joined him on the landing. To the right was a short passage with a door each side and another at the end. To the left, a passage with a dark velvet curtain across. Dennis jerked a thumb at it.

‘Maliks that way. We have two small bedrooms and a bathroom here.’

‘Your daughter’s a convert to Islam, is that right?’

‘What did Khan say?’ He reached up to a rusted iron bracket reinforcing a beam, letting it take his weight. ‘Odd little bugger. What did he say about us?’

‘Not much. He said he was just an intermediary. Because he knew me, slightly.’

‘Our vicar talks too much,’ Dennis said.

‘When you say “our vicar”…’

‘Call ourselves Christians on the census forms. Which means, like most of the others, that we never go to church except for the occasional Christmas Eve midnight mass. But we try not to kill anyone or worship graven images. How much
did
Khan tell you?’

‘Very little. He said I needed to hear it from you. Or rather Mr Malik. He said the imam—’

‘That was all down to Nadya – we called her Nicole, she calls herself Nadya. She… When this became a bit too much to take, she got Adam to go and see the imam in Worcester, not expecting the fellow to say what he said. Bit of a surprise. She thought he’d be able to deal with it himself, keep it in the… in the faith. Never thought she’d be talking like that, she… You probably should know that, for all her adult life, where we’d written
Christian
, she put
atheist
. That was when atheists were still radical. She likes to be radical. Probably gets it from me, if truth were known.’

‘She switched from atheism to Islam?’

‘Maybe not that simple. Nothing’s simple with Nadya. Now…’ He walked along the passage to the end door, boards creaking. He brought out some long keys but still had to lean
on the door to force it open. ‘This is the Castle Room. Work in progress.’

He held the door open. Merrily walked through into a gloomy space with open beams and a floor of wide, warped-looking boards. The only light fell from high in the apex of an end wall. It was a grey light. Two walls were plastered, two were naked rubble stone. The only furniture was a couple of wooden stools and a long trestle workbench with a few tools on it.

‘This, I suppose, is the haunted room,’ Dennis said. ‘Somebody, at some time, had put in a dormer window to let more light in, but when I was working for Kindley-Pryce he asked me to get rid of it. Reinstate that—’ He pointed to the slitty aperture in the apex. ‘—as the primary light source. That was part of the original barn. This room would’ve been a loft, running the length of the original, early medieval building. I said, you do realize how dark that’s going to make it? I remember him beaming at me.
Good
, he said.’

Merrily stood in the centre of the room and felt a familiar tension – in her, not the room. The room had probably been waiting for her with… in old houses, it sometimes felt like contempt. Today, she almost relished it. It might well, after all, be the last. The last time. The last haunting.

Before she’d left home this morning, she’d called the gatehouse, left a message on Sophie’s machine asking if she could see the Bishop. One to one. Some approach to the truth.

‘You all right, Merrily?’

‘Bit cold, that’s all.’

‘Not something I can do anything about right now.’

‘Dennis…’ Pulling on the Barbour Casey had advised her to bring up here. ‘… before we go into anything, could you tell me a bit about the previous owner?’

‘Kindley-Pryce?’

‘I probably should know about him, but I don’t.’

‘What d’you want to know?’

‘Not sure. But he seems to have started all this. He employed you, I think. To do something that
you
think needs to be finished.’

‘Yes.’ Dennis went to lean against his workbench. ‘He started it, all right. Poor old bugger.’

He was a curiosity. His dreams had been Utopian, but also medieval. Dennis said he didn’t fully understand Kindley-Pryce, but he didn’t think that mattered. They had Cwmarrow in common.

‘Casey didn’t like him much. Thought he was selfish, but she didn’t really know him. Casey didn’t like him because she thought I’d caught his disease, and maybe that’s true.’

Selwyn Kindley-Pryce had been born in London but came, he always claimed, from an old Welsh Border family. He’d discovered the area in his students days, at Oxford, where he became a full-time academic. Early medieval history. Those were the days when property round here was dirt cheap and he’d bought a cottage out near Vowchurch, installed his young wife and their baby son there, while he spent most of the week in Oxford.

‘Which
was
selfish of him, I suppose. But he wanted a stake in the area. He’d started what was to become a lifelong study of aspects of local history and folklore. But he and his wife divorced – she found out what he’d been doing with some of his female students.’ Dennis laughed. ‘Always a ladies’ man. Anyway, paying her off meant he had to sell the cottage and he went to America, where there were lucrative opportunities for an English medievalist. His wife moved to Hereford with the child who is, of course, Hector Pryce.’

‘Seen the name somewhere…’

‘Probably on the side of a bus. Hector Pryce coaches?’

‘Ah. Of course.’

Not one of the bigger public-transport firms, but well established.

‘He’s bigger than that now, for sure,’ Dennis said. ‘Married Lynne Hamer, widow of Malcolm Hamer, who owned a restaurant in town and crashed his plane. Now he owns all sorts. Pubs, restaurants. I was afraid he was going to develop this place when the old man went, but should’ve realized, not his style at all. Father and son, very different people. Hector was only too glad to see the back of it.’

‘No family rift while Kindley-Pryce was around, though.’

‘Doesn’t seem to have been. His wife married again, might be dead now. Selwyn returned from America a moderately wealthy man, having heard Cwmarrow was for sale.’

‘When was this?’

‘Twenty-odd years ago? He’d published several books by then, renewed some connections in Oxford. Bought it all, the Court, the castle, the valley. A romantic, inspired by the medieval microcosm, the enchanted valley with the castle on the hill. But also an expert – history, architecture.’

‘What was the house like then?’

‘A wreck. But he was fit, prime of life, relishing the challenge. Inspired by his vision.’

Dennis hadn’t put lights on in here. There
were
no working lights. He said he’d get to that. Merrily zipped up the Barbour and waited.

‘Some of this I don’t understand,’ Dennis said. ‘But I’m just a builder.’

‘Who went to art college.’

‘A builder with a soul. I want to restore what
can
be restored. Maybe get round a few of the rules for the sake of aesthetics, but no outlandish ambition. Just to live out what’s left of my life here and leave it secure in its beauty. But not a visionary like him. He used to say he could see new community rising out of the overgrown foundations of the village. Artistic… creative. A lot of artistic people, writers, poets, musicians would come down for events, small festivals – he installed a few caravans in the paddock at the back for those who wanted to stay. Summer
nights of music and storytelling. He loved storytelling, the oral traditions.’

‘I’ve not heard of any of this.’

‘It wasn’t
advertised
, Merrily. Strictly word of mouth. It was actually a bit ramshackle. But it paid for some of the continuing work on this house, the cost of which he seriously underestimated. I actually think he was in two minds about having people around. Once asked me about floodlighting the castle, then changed his mind because he realized it’d become a tourist attraction. In the end, I think he wanted it for himself.’

‘I’m still…’ She curled cold hands inside her sleeves. ‘… not really getting a picture of him, somehow.’

‘He wouldn’t want you to. He cultivated the mysterious. All a pipe dream, really. He had a few people who were sympathetic to his ideas putting money into it, including his son. But I think that was for appearance’s sake. Hector’s a very different kind of guy. Hard-nosed go-getter.’

‘So… what happened?’

Dennis Kellow may have grimaced, too dark to be sure. He talked about the problems of remedievalizing. Attempts had been made, in various centuries, to modernize the place, but Kindley-Pryce had wanted it closer to its original state. Which wasn’t easy, because a listed building was more or less in aspic from the day it was listed, and if it had been listed in the 1970s, you had problems.

‘Can’t just walk in and strip everything back to the year 1450 or whenever just because the owner prefers rudimentary. We had a battle to be rid of the dormers. Obviously, he never finished it, even with me at work. Let alone uncovered what might remain of the village. Thought he finally had the answer when he met Caroline Goddard. You heard of her?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Children’s writer and illustrator. Like a creature from folklore herself. Hair long enough to sit on. They had a relationship, working and otherwise, and out of it came a couple of books
for kids, under the pseudonym Foxy Rowlestone. Which were building substantial sales. All looking promising. But then…’

Merrily looked around the room where shadows were draped like dustsheets.

‘He died here? I mean, in the house?’

Dennis Kellow blinked.

‘Did I say he died?’

21

Bad guy

T
HERE SEEMED TO
be even more boxes in Neil Cooper’s flat. Nothing like moving home to make you realize how much shite there was in your life. Bliss put his phone on a packing case in front of Cooper. The phone was displaying a picture demonstrating that even death didn’t get you out of the shite.

Cooper, sitting on an upturned toy box, stared blankly at the picture then at Bliss.

‘What
is
this?’

His fair hair was dusty, his face looked stretched. He seemed to have aged since they last saw him, less than two hours ago. The day had aged, too, the sash window shut against an irritable sky and intermittent rain.

‘It’s a dirty old skull, Neil,’ Bliss said. ‘But is it
your
skull?’

‘What?’

‘Your missing skull from the Castle Green – is that it?’

‘It’s just an image. I can’t tell from an image.’

‘But you wouldn’t rule it out.’

‘Francis, it’s something I saw once, by lamplight in the middle of a storm. Yes, it could be, but then it might not be. The central fracture to the cranium roughly corresponds, as far as I can remember, and it’s obviously come out of the earth. But I can’t be certain. Didn’t even get to examine it before it vanished. Why are we talking about this… now?’

Bliss exchanged a glance with Vaynor who was standing in the window recess.

‘All right, let me ask you another question, Neil. Tristram Greenaway. Could he have taken it?’

‘The picture?’

‘The skull.’

‘Why…?’ Cooper shook his head, mouth open, not getting it. ‘Why would Tris take the skull?’

‘I’m asking,
could
he have? On the night.’

‘Well, obviously he could have. He was there, and I’d hardly be supervising him.’

‘He have anything with him he could’ve put it in?’

‘He had a… a small backpack, I think. Which he often carried. Kept a trowel, maps, gloves…’ He looked up at Bliss. ‘Where exactly did you find this skull?’