The Echo of Crows, page 6
Amiss? Lol mulled the word over, like it was a lyric needing a rhyming word. Bliss, wedded bliss?
What was also particularly amiss at present was his own career, as a songwriter. It had actually seemed like a career for some years, then, gradually, less of one as his income declined. This was happening to a lot of people in the music world where streaming swallowed sales and the appreciation of quality songs began to fade in favour of rap and inconsequential, fast-passing pop.
He sank back into the pillow, watching the door still slowly closing itself. He felt cold, too.
*
Huw Owen was clawing for the ceiling with both hands. He wanted to hold the white sky and look down into the bent and bloodied grass and then slowly look up… and enter an intense discussion about why some places merely existed. A discussion which would be hard to follow because it was most likely in medieval Welsh, and he could hear only one side of it. His own, which he didn’t understand. And the other participant was dead. Killed by…
Who was it? Who had come out of the long grass all those centuries ago, and why did it still matter?
Some historical accounts said Clydawg had been out hunting deer and was killed by a Saxon nobleman for political reasons. Most just said he’d been cut down by the man who wanted the woman to whom he was betrothed.
No version – politics or love – would ever be proved. Huw let go of the sky and awoke. This piece of history wouldn’t leave the area or him alone, all these centuries later, and he didn’t know why. Why had Clodock not been developed? Why had the Victorians left its too-big church isolated in the Middle Ages, a shrine to a martyred king?
Was it becoming an obsession to find out?
*
Karen Dowell, looking tired, was waiting in the CID room when DI Francis Bliss arrived, armed with a box of doughnuts.
‘All the details are in my report on your desk, boss,’ Karen said.
‘Yeh, I’ve read it twice. Lots in there. I came in early then went out again to get these. Help yourself.’
‘I’ve been up and down from the cells and mostly with Autumn Wise and the doctor.’ Karen shook excess sugar from what would be a makeshift breakfast. ‘Our medic took samples after checking her over. She’s so vague and sleepy, he wanted to check for any drugs. Keeps mentioning crows and dresses like one.’
‘What?’ Bliss said, dropping most of his doughnut. He retrieved it and went over to open the window to feed it to Sonia, the gull who was already loitering on an adjacent roof. ‘You mean, in modern parlance, she identifies as a CROW! Not a Furry but a Feathery?’
‘Well, I don’t really know.’ Karen looked puzzled as well as tired. ‘She calls them her friends. But it’s a bit more than that. Sonia’s your friend but you don’t dress like a gull.’
Bliss smiled. ‘Lucky you haven’t seen the grey and white pyjamas. Wonder if I’d get arrested for swiping ice cream cones from folk strolling past? Must control the urge, eh, Sonia? You do that?’ The gull looked up and flew off with the last piece of the offering.
Karen managed a tired smile as Bliss picked up the case notes, giving her her cue.
‘We’ve confirmed the victim is the lottery winner and it looks like his elder brother will get the money, property, et cetera. But we’re not sure, so that’s something to check on.’ Karen started to bite into another sugary circle. ‘The body’s with the pathologist.’
‘I’d better get over to Longtown, then.’ Bliss moved to the door. ‘Will Darth be there?’
‘Yes, he phoned a little while ago, after a few hours’ sleep in a squad car. Can’t have been comfortable, specially for somebody his size.’
‘You better get some sleep, then. You’ve done a good job.’
‘Couple of hours will do me,’ Karen said. ‘Will the chief be coming in?’
Bliss paused, having left Detective Chief Inspector Annie Howe’s warm bed in Malvern a couple of hours earlier. Their relationship was still secret and they were at pains, sometimes agonies, to keep it that way.
‘I presume so,’ he said airily, ‘but I think she’d want you to take care of things for a while. There’ll be a lot of media to deal with but she can handle that, as and when.’
Bliss left then bobbed his head round the door. ‘Tell you what, I’ll just pop in on our bird friend in the cage before I go. Need to see what we’re dealing with.’
*
Had to be thirty or even forty years since Huw had spoken to Stu Bakersfield. Though phone numbers had been exchanged in Christmas cards, he still thought he’d got through to the wrong one.
‘Sorry,’ Huw said. ‘I was trying to get Stuart Bakersfield. Has he moved…?’
‘I’m Bakersfield. I… Blimey. That’s… that’s not… Huwie Owen… is it?’
‘Bloody hell,’ Huw said, slowly emphasizing both words.
‘Yeah,’ the man answering Stu Bakerfield’s phone said. ‘I’ve moved. Kept the same number, man. Different place. Different woman, bigger car. But it’s me.’
‘But your voice…’
‘That’s my solicitor’s voice. Not long ago, I was told if you wanna move on, let your accent go first. Is that Huw Owen?’
Clearly, you had to leave your origins behind. Huw had read in one of his Sunday papers that far more regional accents and dialects had vanished in the past twenty years than in the last century. Then, another survey said that broadcasters were encouraging a regional mix. Whatever, Huw was determined to keep his, trendy or not.
He sighed.
‘Aye, it’s me. Have you gone upmarket lad?’
‘Nobody wiv my old accent gets well-off clients no more. Or gets to retire.’ He paused. ‘Well, then, it’s Huw and Stu back again – I retired two years ago, rejoined the Apparitionists but not the theology, unlike you. I’d heard you were now high-up in deliverance.’
‘No money in that, Stu. You ’appen heard that, too.’
‘Evidently I did, mate. That’s why I could retire before decrepitude. I’m still into the woo-woo and it’s an interest that costs me nuffink, although it can take its toll on the unguarded. What’s it cost you, Huwie?’
Huw paused, thought about it and decided what the hell?
He said solidly, ‘Cost me a good income, a good woman and probably a good life. But… happen I’ve helped a few folks along the way which is more than most buggers can say.’
‘Stone me,’ Stu Bakersfield said, ‘you ain’t changed much, have you?’
Huw sat down next to his phone in the dimmest part of his hallway. High-up in deliverance. Ain’t changed much. What did that mean?
‘I ask meself at least once a week,’ Stu said, ‘if I done the right fing.’
His old London voice was back, sounding a bit tired and worn now. Huw felt obscurely better. Maybe he hadn’t thrown everything away.
‘I was just reading your piece on visiting Clodock,’ he said.
‘Clodock? Stone the crows.’
‘Apparently there are a fair few crows up there,’ Huw said.
Both of them were silent for about fifteen seconds before Stu Bakersfield unloaded his story and Huw made notes on his phone-pad. He heard how Stu had abandoned his theology course to revert to his original plan to become a solicitor, thinking he could make decent money while still satisfying those metaphysical urges.
Not quite as he’d imagined. Within five years he was on a touring holiday with a few mates, and they wound up at Clodock and Stu checked out the church and had a memorable experience that he’d recently felt obliged to share.
‘That’s more or less what you said in Apparitionism,’ Huw reminded him. ‘That you knew straight away that you weren’t alone in there. The first time you’d ever felt like this, and that was as far as you went.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So who was it you saw?’
‘I dunno.’
Huw growled. Of course the bugger knew.
He said, ‘Was it God?’
‘How would I know that, Huwie?’
‘What did you see, Stu? You didn’t put any of that into the Apparitionism piece.’
‘Dint see nuffink. Just wasn’t alone.’
‘Was it a good feeling?’
No reply for over a minute, then:
‘No,’ Stu said.
‘Why not?’
‘Somebody was… OK, to the point… getting murdered.’
Huw tensed. ‘Who?’
‘Me. At least, that was how it felt,’ Stu Bakersfield said. Huw sensed the discomfort in his voice. ‘Er… I… I’ve put this to the back of my mind for years. Far, far back. Not somefink you like to remember. But, here goes; I felt somefink sharp go in. Went in far. Never felt pain like it. Was this God? I imagined if I went into that powerful church I’d feel God, but…’
He’d packed in his theology course because it hadn’t done anything to his mind. Hadn’t changed him in any powerful way. More than half the guys on that course had expected an explosion, something mind-blowing. They went into churches like kids hoping to discover a new Santa’s grotto at Christmas, Huw thought. In medieval times, that was how churches were presented – like magical grottos to poor people with hard and colourless, limited lives. In Victorian days, it all stiffened up, was formalized. But somebody had decided Clodock should continue to be a medieval shrine – that pulpit soaring towards heaven. But…
‘Just felt pain, searing, unbearable pain,’ Stu said. ‘Knew what it felt like being murdered, knowing there wasn’t a fink you could do except take it. Knowing what it was like to die in agony by a small blade on the end of a shaft. Going in hard and flighted by malice. To be on the receiving end of malice and feeling robbed of all your hopes and plans. Your whole life draining away…’
Stu Bakersfield’s voice was being slowly weakened by what sounded to Huw like a flow of tears that seemed to be soaking down the phone line. ‘Gotta go,’ he sniffed, ‘and bury all this again.’
The call ended abruptly.
Huw waited more than a minute before putting his phone down. He decided he’d let Stu recover and ring back sometime when whatever it was had been dealt with. But he did want to go back to Clodock. He needed to. And now. Should have gone yesterday but daylight had eluded him. The distant past was suddenly less elusive and manifestly unburied.
11
End-time
IT HAD RAINED hard overnight, leaving some of Herefordshire’s potholed roads flooded and closed and a few cars abandoned to the elements. In Ledwardine, shop windows were streaming and hanging lamps glimmered dimly. When the rain briefly stopped, the black and white village was looking swollen and somehow tearstained.
In the Black Swan bar just one table was in use. Under a narrow, milky old window, it was occupied by a leather briefcase, a teapot, mugs, milk, sugar… and two women, one pensively tapping the case.
‘What I want to show you,’ the Archdeacon of Hereford said, ‘would, of course, be entirely dismissed by the Bishop, who’d consider it all primitive and infantile. But he knows that even he can’t easily disregard it now.’ Siân Callaghan-Clark wore her green cloche hat and a quiet smile. ‘Even the Bishop thinks he has to be careful.’
Siân had phoned an hour ago to set up this meeting, Merrily Watkins expecting ominous news because that was mostly what you got these days from senior clergy. She was watching the small applewood fire defiantly trying to dispel any dampened spirits.
‘Merrily, let me spell this out for you.’
Resting both elbows on the table, Siân looked… handsome was possibly the appropriate word; she’d appear handsome, until she became distinguished. One day, Merrily thought, Siân would surely become a bishop herself, and her diocese, whichever one it turned out to be, would have very firm hands around it, probably for quite a long time unless the Church of England soon became part of history.
‘As you know, the recent pandemic rather changed patterns of worship in Britain,’ Siân said. ‘Because of the ban on large gatherings, and churches closing their doors, some congregants lost their habit or impetus to go to church when parishes finally tried to return to normal service patterns.’
‘The pandemic’s long over,’ Merrily said. ‘But this still looks like the end-time for the Church as we know it. It’s no good pretending it isn’t happening. The virus simply speeded it up.’
The Archdeacon nodded.
‘But I’d have to say that it doesn’t look quite like the end-time for you personally.’ Siân unclipped her briefcase, then slid out a sheaf of A4 printouts, some stapled together. ‘You may have seen some of these, though possibly not the one from the New York Times, a paper which I suspect tends not to reach Ledwardine.’
‘No. Don’t think it competes with the tabloids at the village shop.’ Merrily took the papers. Top one was from the Sunday Telegraph. She read the headline and smiled thinly.
‘This was perhaps the first of what became a small but meaningful trend,’ Siân said. ‘Some of us thought it would fade, as it usually does after a while. But it didn’t. This is quite an old cutting already, but things don’t seem to have changed since it was published.’
Pandemic held responsible for increases in ‘ghostly goings on’
Merrily said. ‘It was only a matter of time.’
The paper’s science editor had written: The spectre of the recent pandemic has cast a dark shadow over the lives of everyone. But for some it is more than just a metaphor. Ghost sightings have soared, with paranormal investigators besieged with reports of hauntings, unexplained knocks, text messages from beyond the grave and poltergeist activity.
A science editor writing about spooky stuff? Something had certainly changed if paranormal incidents were being accepted as worthy of study.
Siân said, ‘The sources include BBC people and someone from the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University. It’s not just a Sunday space filler. When it says “Pandemic held responsible”, that’s because people were suddenly confined to their homes, aware of every shadow and every old creaking floorboard.’
‘And traffic decreasing,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t ever remember streets that quiet, even in heavy snow or floods.’
She suddenly recalled Jim Prosser at the Eight Till Late shop showing her this story when the paper came out. Merrily remembered shaking her head. Not round here. Jim responding with a half-smile. Not yet, maybe, but you’ll see…
‘It’s a few years now, but I have to say everyone was aware of the dramatic increase in mortality,’ Siân said. ‘Seeing the increasing cheapness of life and thinking – as we all do at some time – is this really it? Is this all there is?’
‘That’s the question that used to bring people to Church,’ Merrily said. ‘Though clearly not in great numbers any more. Just a few new ones.’
‘Traditional services are finally returning on Sundays,’ Siân said. ‘But the Bishop and I are still receiving reports of some congregations failing to recover. And I’m afraid vicars who retire or become redundant are simply not being replaced… except by imams in some areas. If not here, yet.’
Merrily didn’t react. No sign so far of her church being replaced by a mosque…
‘However…’ Siân poured herself more tea, ‘…your meditation sessions are becoming more popular than your more formal worship ever was… and over a much wider area. People want to somehow open themselves, in the hope that something will come in. Did you realize that, in the light of your success, similar groups are starting elsewhere in the diocese?’
‘No… no one’s told me that.’
‘At least two, I’m told,’ Siân said. ‘Attracting younger people who don’t want to stand in the cold any more, singing Victorian hymns. And, in this day and age, meditation may seem a bit more…’
‘Secular? Despite that not being what was intended.’
Outside, the rain was hissing, a soiled blanket wrapping itself around the village.
‘“Secular” was not the word I was looking for,’ Siân said, ‘but… perhaps it reflects the way the Church appears to be going. People searching inside themselves for something they can relate to.’
She snapped her case shut and slid it to the floor, having left the stack of photocopies on the table. Merrily picked up the pile of cuttings and stuffed it into her shoulder bag for later perusal. Outside the window, rain was now ricocheting from the cobbled pavements and puddles were forming in the roadway as Merrily tried to close her bag.
‘The Bishop’s always going to be sceptical about a revival of interest in…’ she hesitated, ‘…what increasingly is getting called “woo-woo”.’
‘But a significant number of people out there tend not to share his reservations,’ Siân said. ‘And that’s why, despite the reticence of many bishops – including ours – and Huw Owen’s impending departure…’
‘I can manage on my own…’
‘And you will be on your own. The Bishop can’t be seen to support your rather esoteric role.’
‘He doesn’t support me. Exorcism is on borrowed time. Yes, during the medical scare, everything seemed to appear different – to me, anyway…’
She was remembering stopping the car in a country lane, aware of the silence and the new mass of wild flowers she didn’t recognize, the whole world seeming to have gone into a steep tilt.
‘Siân, I’m trying to be rational here. I assume the Bishop still believes that anything involving the paranormal is fundamentally primitive and infantile. But if it’s causing enough fear to start filling up his churches again, we simply can’t ignore it.’
‘He will ignore it but if some people still need something to fill a spiritual hole in their lives…’ Siân leaned back. ‘Do you know what I’m saying?’
‘Well, yes, obviously, but…’
‘And if I’m telling you that you’re one of the few vicars in this diocese – very few, I have to admit – whose congregations have not decreased…’
‘Are you telling me that?’
