Authors: Phil Rickman
43
Weight of bone
N
EVER REALLY LIKED
to get there first, and it rarely happened, thank Christ, but this was a small town, being on foot an advantage.
If you could call it that.
Bliss had alerted Rich Ford and then followed the woman downhill through the back streets on the English edge of town. She said she hadn’t seen it herself; a canoeist in a wetsuit had asked her if she knew where the police station was, telling her his mate had spotted it near the bank. Was it a man or a woman? She didn’t know, was pointing now across the narrow main road to a turning alongside a vet’s clinic.
It ended at a car park next to a concrete building – sewage works. Then there was rough grass and a beach of pale brown stones sloping into the river, and what looked like an explosion of blood against the greyness of the water and the sky.
‘Police,’ Bliss said quietly.
Out of breath, forehead numbing, as they parted for him.
‘In all his finery,’ someone said. ‘Rather eerie.’
The sun had gone in completely, and the scene was sombre, a mist of funereal rain draped over the dark trees on the opposite bank. The red was lurid, maybe just a blanket thrown over the body.
And then someone laughed.
Mother of God.
Bliss pushed urgently through.
* * *
Laid out in his sodden robes: the full-length cape edged with fake ermine, held together by a chrome pin. The tall crown of beaten gilt on his head. In his left hand the sceptre made from the ballcock from a lavatory cistern with the small H on top like a tiny version of an old-fashioned TV aerial.
H for Hay.
Bliss was like, ‘What the f— What’s
this
?’
Two patrol cars, blues and twos, screeching into the concrete car park behind him.
‘Don’t you recognize him?’ a man said gravely. ‘It’s the King of Hay.’
‘Couldn’t believe it.’ A boy of about sixteen was crouching beside it. ‘We had to get him out, didn’t we?’
He was wearing a pale blue wetsuit. Behind him, another boy, same gear, and two orange canoes pulled up from the river.
‘And you found him where?’ Bliss said.
‘Just by there.’ The wetsuit boy had a Welsh Valleys accent. ‘He was floating, he was, not far from the bank. At first, we thought it was a… you know. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yeh,’ Bliss said. ‘You would.’
He bent to hold up the bottom of the scarlet cape to reveal a pair of shapeless, too wide, dark grey trousers and scuffed, black lace-up shoes. He used a pen to lift up the bottom of a trouser leg, flesh colour underneath.
Two uniforms either side of him now.
‘Jesus, boss, that was a scare.’
‘Just a bit odd, Darren. It appears to be the torso of a male dummy from a shop window. But quite an old one. Wooden, in fact. See how the feet are screwed in?’
‘You blokes mind moving back just a bit?’ A guy pushing through, TV camera on his shoulder. ‘That’s fine. Thanks.’
‘Hold it, pal,’ Bliss said. ‘We need to be quite sure about a couple of things.’
The cameraman moved back, shooting Bliss, who recognized the reporter with him, Amanda Patel, from BBC Midlands today.
‘Giss a minute, Mandy.’
‘What
is
this about, Frannie? We thought—’
‘Yeh, we all thought. It’s a bloody relief.’
Amanda let the cameraman finish recording, from a distance, before turning to the crowd, looking baffled.
‘Can anybody… does
anybody
know what this is about?’
‘It’s the King of Hay,’ an elderly man said. ‘Someone made a very accurate effigy of the King of Hay, Richard Booth, and sent it floating down the River Wye.’
‘It’s jolly lifelike,’ Amanda said. ‘Scared me for a minute. No, really, is it a leftover from a carnival or something?’
‘We haven’t had a carnival this year. Nor last.’
‘I remember when they were going to execute the King, or something like that, for a publicity stunt. But this… I mean it’s not really the best time for jokes, is it?’
‘You are quite right there,’ the elderly man said.
‘Can’t be the actual crown jewels, can it?’
‘I think you’ll find they’re still in the window of the King of Hay shop in town. But someone’s gone to considerable trouble to create facsimiles. And then throws the whole lot in the river.’
‘Bit sick, if you ask me. We’ve got some shots, in case it ever means anything, but…’ Amanda Patel shook her head. ‘I think I’m going to leave it alone, Frannie. Just looks like bad taste, anyway, with the hunt for Tamsin. And after what happened to that old man at Cusop. Come on, Paul.’ She nodded at Bliss. ‘Thanks, Frannie.’
The cameraman lowered his camera and followed Amanda Patel, who glanced once over her shoulder, looking uncertain. A kid was leaning over the King trying to pull off his crown.
‘Hey!’ Bliss was on his feet. ‘Geroff!’
‘It’s glued on, boss,’ Darren said.
Like the sceptre was to the hand. No wonder nothing had come off in the water.
‘Always factions in Hay,’ the elderly man said. ‘People who support an independent Hay, other people who think Booth’s held up progress by scaring off big business.’
‘Some countries they’d have put out a bleedin’ contract on him.’
An Asian guy in a Mumbai Indians T-shirt, with a bearded man in his thirties who was looking quite amused, prodding the effigy with his trainer.
‘As he isn’t seen here as often as he was, I don’t see the relevance of a public drowning.’
‘Especially not now, when something far more serious is consuming everyone’s attention.’
This was a tall man with a half-moon face that Bliss recognized.
‘Hello
, Gwyn. I thought you’d retired.’
‘Don’t rub it in, boy.’
‘What you doing here?’
‘As I have to keep telling everybody, I
live
here. Bookseller, now. How’s it going, Francis?’
‘Going nowhere fast,’ Bliss said. ‘And this kind of incident doesn’t help.’
He’d worked with Jones a couple of times. Shrewd. Deceptively quiet. Called by both his first names because Gwyn Joneses were ten a penny in Wales. He had that look of loss and longing in his eyes, the look that Bliss was dreading one day seeing in the mirror.
‘Like so much that happens here,’ Jones said, ‘it doesn’t make immediate sense.’
The boy in the wetsuit came to his feet.
‘Leave it with you, then, should we?’
‘Yeah, we’ll do something with it.’ The bearded man looked at Jones. ‘What you reckon, Gwyn? Should I dispose of it? Don’t want to cause embarrassment for the King.’
‘And if it turns up on the television?’
‘It won’t, though, will it? You heard what she said. If they already have a big story in Hay, they’re not going to want a bit of whimsy.’
‘Not sure he wasn’t actually in England when they found him,’ Gwyn Arthur Jones said. ‘This is the exact border, I think.’ He pointed across the rough grass, where it formed a kind of peninsula between the river and quite a wide stream bursting into it. ‘That’s the brook, is it not?’
‘The Dulas Brook?’ Bliss went to the edge, peered down. ‘This is where it comes out in the river?’
‘The official border between Wales and the other place.’ Jones bent to the effigy, fitted his hands underneath its arms and raised its upper half from the stones. ‘Not too heavy. No, boy, I don’t think we should dispose of it at all.’ He looked at Bliss. ‘Something here I instinctively mistrust. If somebody wants it in the river, I’d quite like to see it stays out. I’ve a little room at the back of my shop… all right with you, Francis?’
‘How far’s your shop?’
‘Halfway to the clock. Yellow sign. It’s called The Cop Shop.’
‘Of course it is.’
‘Give you a hand?’ The bearded guy lifted up the head and shoulders. ‘If I take this end and Jeeter takes the feet we can carry it between us and that way nobody gets soaked.’
Bliss shrugged. The effigy’s head lolled, as if it was a real head with the weight of bone, Bliss guessing papier mâché with a thin skein of plaster of Paris, which had suffered in the water. The features were inexact. In the greying, blurring light, it looked like a real face that might be about to try and speak.
44
The mountains and the word
B
Y THE TIME
she was back at the car, it was raining. Merrily had a headache. Found a packet of Anadin in the glove box, just one left.
False alarm, someone had told her and Huw outside the Granary. They’d thought there was a body in the Wye, near where the Dulas Brook flowed into it, but it had turned out to be an effigy of the King. What a bloody mindless thing to do, a woman had said, when the town had its heart in its mouth about Tamsin Winterson, known to many of the folks here since before she could walk.
Merrily swallowed the Anadin. Huw had gone home. This was one of those times when she might have gone home, too, and directly into the church to let it all out, but the prospect of meeting an angsty Martin Longbeach in there, gearing himself up for Sunday’s service…
She stood for a few moments in the rain, then made a conscious decision, stripped off the wet fleece.
She pulled her newly waxed Barbour jacket from the back seat and walked out into the rain.
Little lights everywhere. A fairy grotto.
In the middle of the altar, attended by small figurines of the Virgin Mary, a tabernacle held the host under glowing candles and a starry blue dome.
St Mary’s, Hay.
Oh, this was the real thing, all right. And yet she felt embraced by the shadows rather than the lights, wondering if she, or any woman priest, was welcome here. It was a broad church, the C. of E. and the Church in Wales, but few of her colleagues had been tempted, not even Martin Longbeach. Not anyone in Herefordshire where Bernie Dunmore wouldn’t have touched it with a six-foot crozier.
Not that he could totally prevent it, if some minister wanted it. She knew for a fact that Richard Williams, the Anglo-Catholic vicar, had taken over an average congregation of about half a dozen, and now, apparently, it was averaging forty.
The lure of old ways.
She should be so lucky.
She stepped back, took off her coat and sat in one of the right-hand pews, next to a painted virgin and child.
St Mary’s Church, Hay. Another St Mary’s Church at Capel-y-ffin.
And Cusop… St Mary’s. Marian country. How far did that go back? Did the alleged visions of the Lady of Llanthony have origins pre-dating Father Ignatius? She sat with hands flat on her knees, closing her eyes, and now the scent of incense was powerfully on the air, and she set her thoughts adrift, opening herself to some kind of understanding.
Voices would intrude.
…
that Peter Rector was, at that time, a darker man. A man who wanted to play with the elements, if he could, and people’s minds…
Like he owned the place… like he knowed the place. And it knowed him.
… what better place than this, where the very air was full of spiritual energy?
When she opened her eyes, it was to the rows of candles alight on the votive stand. How many of them had been lit today for Tamsin Winterson?
Big mysteries that hung like the incense on the air. Small
mysteries ripping families, whole communities apart. Small flickerings of hope.
Before she left, she lit another, with a short, intense prayer, and left her last fiver in the offertory box.
Outside, the rain had stopped, a sputtering sun gilding a corner of the sky. She walked all around the low-lying, squat-towered church, counting the ancient yew trees, shapeless sentinels flagging up pre-Christian origins. The church itself must have medieval foundations, but seemed to have been substantially rebuilt over the centuries. Quite an ordinary church, really, from the outside.
But its site was not.
Coming down from the circular churchyard, she saw its immediate neighbour, a green mound, evidently a castle motte, smaller and perhaps older than the hill at the top of the town where Hay Castle reared, with no church beside it. She followed the sound of water, down a steepening path beside the mound, found a fast-flowing steam dividing it from the church, and a place where the water went tumbling vertically over a small cliff, like a quarry face. She followed the path to where it joined another, found a spring coming out of a rock.
Stone and water everywhere, all this rushing, swirling energy so close to the River Wye but separated from it, the river obscured by trees, a living screen, as if the sight of it might be too much.
She began to tingle in a way that Jane might tingle, at the perception of something powerfully primeval. Oh God, why were all the sudden thrills so pagan-tainted these days?
The sun was burning away the clouds as she crossed a wooden footbridge over the stream, moving away from the church, but there were some old buildings ahead, quite low, and the sound of traffic.
From a short alley between some almshouses, probably nineteenth century, once humble, now bijou, she emerged on to the main road, some way below the Swan Hotel and almost directly
opposite the opening of Forest Road, the long and winding lane – the only lane – leading to the Gospel Pass.
For a blinding moment, the main road and its traffic disappeared, and she saw, like a bright ribbon, the ancient connection between the church at Hay and the little oilcan church of Capel-y-ffin, both encircled by yews denoting prehistoric ritual origins, both dedicated to St Mary the Virgin who opened her ruined fingers to the sky.
St Peter and St Paul carrying the word down from the mountains, to Hay.
While at the opposite end of the town, the Dulas Brook, bypassing another church of St Mary, at Cusop, offered itself to the River Wye… so sacred that the town was afraid to look at her. Merrily stood at the side of the road, water glistening on the sleeves of the freshly waxed Barbour.
How the mountains came to Hay. The mountains and the word.
And what else?
What else?
Walking back into the town centre, she felt, at last, connected. Getting a feel for it. It didn’t feel Welsh, but then it didn’t feel like England either, and that odd sense of being abroad seemed central to the experience.
But then that was the same for the whole of the border area. It was as if Hay, despite all its incomers, was somehow the quintessence of the border. A kind of alchemy at work here, taking in outsiders and then changing them in its own eccentric image.
And that was good… wasn’t it, transformation?
There was a tiny pop inside her head, like a bubble bursting, followed by an acute sense of awareness… not self-awareness, something more objective: a vivid sense of being in a particular place, as if she were watching herself on a film. Probably a state of consciousness that Peter Rector and Athena White could bring on at will; it might happen to her once or twice a year and she was never quite sure if she liked it or not.
Hadn’t happened in the church, but it might have been as a result of being in there, the mind-altering qualities of a re-coloured faith. Looking up Castle Street, there was a sense of timelessness, as if the whole area had been chemically preserved. An orange cast on the scene, as the sun peeled back the clouds, like she was viewing it through one of those old cellophane Lucozade wrappers from her remotest childhood. Almost as soon as it happened, it began to fade, but not completely.
She shook herself.
There was a shop on Castle Street called The King of Hay, its windows a little museum of Independent Hay. Richard Booth might have lost the castle and his biggest bookshop, but he was still a presence, which was probably important.
He made that town the best little bloody town in the country
, Gomer Parry had said. ‘Both
bloody countries
!
Two men were looking into the window, one wearing a T-shirt with a design involving the word Mumbai.
‘… you are, boy,’ the other man said, ‘there’s the originals, all intact. Now isn’t that odd? Why would anyone go to all that trouble?’
‘I fought London was a mad place, Gwyn. Hay, I give up trying to work it out.’
Merrily glanced between them and saw the crown jewels in the window, in all their pound-shop splendour, and was aware of the taller man looking down on her then leaning over to her, with a smile and a murmur.
‘You’re looking well, Mrs Watkins.’