The Fever of the World, page 7
‘You OK, there?’
Mrs Portis with a tray.
‘Just dreaming about living there,’ Vaynor made himself say. ‘One day.’
‘Good time of year to buy, Inspector Vaynor.’ She bent with the tray, proffered coffee. ‘Before the spring.’
‘Not on my money. And it’s, um, Detective Constable.’
‘Won’t be for long.’ She sat next to him on the sofa. ‘If you can’t handle a big mortgage yet, you will, sooner than you think.’
Vaynor didn’t reply. He slowly turned his head to Mrs Portis.
‘So your husband takes over the business now?’
‘He’s been more or less in charge for a few years.’ She watched him sugaring his coffee. ‘I suppose you do need a bit of a reputation to get taken on by the Met. Can’t see this case doing it for you, however.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Not a crime to jump off a high rock, is it?’
‘You think that’s what he did?’
‘Unlike Royce, I probably do think that. If he was starting to lose his grip on the rocks, if his feet were failing to find that essential cleft… But we’ll never know, will we?’
Won’t we?
The pictures on the TV had switched from individual homes to wide views of the area, and then it went aerial, as if shot from a drone taking off like one of the peregrine falcons that apparently nested in the tower-block cliffs. The screen was suddenly full of a precipitous view of the Wye under a dizzying wild blue sky. Like the view you’d get if you came off one of the Seven Sisters on a summer morning. He felt his stomach clench, looked away.
‘Your signs are everywhere in the lower Wye Valley.’
‘It’s our best area. We know what works it.’
Vaynor wondered what exactly she meant by that, but he didn’t ask her.
‘Mrs Portis, when a mature, experienced rock climber falls to his death, with no known witnesses, there mustn’t be too many questions left hanging around in the air. If you see what I mean.’
‘Perhaps it was part of his make-up. If he was out for a walk and it turned into what most people would consider a climb, he wouldn’t turn back.’
‘No matter how dangerous?’
‘“Challenging” would be his term for it. What exactly are you looking for? Or is this a case of “We ask the questions, lady…”’ She was leaning back against an arm of the sofa, eyes flickering mischief. ‘I could see you wanted to ask my husband something that you thought might offend him. Well, you don’t always have to ask Royce. I can be much more forthcoming… and less sensitive.’
Vaynor had a long, slow sip to take the dryness from his mouth. On the TV, the drone camera was racing through a chasm that made his gut throb, before cutting to a shot of what looked like a sequence of giant keyholes in the side of a low cliff.
‘Is that King Arthur’s Cave?’ he said.
It would appear on the screen now.
She said, ‘You know it?’
He hesitated.
‘I… slept in it once.’ Voice sounded unsteady even to him. ‘Almost.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘It was raining hard and getting dark, and my tent had got ripped. Not a very high quality tent, and there were no lights to show me the way back. This was when I was a post-graduate student.’
‘You do know,’ she said, ‘that there are some stories about that cave?’
‘I know a few things about it,’ Vaynor said. ‘I’m sure you do, too, growing up not far away.’
Thinking, This could be the time, if it happened. But where had he seen her if it hadn’t?
She didn’t rise to it. Perhaps she’d never been in that cave. Perhaps he’d never seen her before.
But having grown up in this small county, he couldn’t say that about anybody with any certainty. You saw people time and time again without knowing their names. Returning from Oxford, he’d realised what a small city Hereford was.
At least he was sure of that. Wasn’t he?
On his way back to the car, he walked out of Corpse Cross Street and up towards Ross’s dominant church steeple. He looked down to the bottom of the graveyard, saw where he guessed scores of people had been buried, uncoffined, a few centuries ago: all plague victims, apparently. And now it was all happening again. Wholesale death from a new kind of plague. No certainty that the pandemic wouldn’t spread here, and soon.
Vaynor stopped, leaning back hard against the churchyard wall, breathing faster and aware of a growing confinement involving both space and time. He gazed down towards where he guessed the river was. It occurred to him that very little had changed recently in this old town, where whole centuries had shrunk but the same horizons remained.
‘Are you all right?’
Someone else he knew. A voice. He snapped back against the wall to avoid bumping into a young woman in a cream puffer jacket, holding a phone.
‘Oh…’ Her hand holding the mobile dropped to her side. ‘The policeman. From last night.’
Dark-brown hair blew across her face, and he at once remembered her as the finder of the body of Peter Portis.
‘Maya Madden,’ she said.
Vaynor said, ‘Sorry that you saw him land. At your feet, more or less. Hell of a shock.’
She shuddered.
‘I don’t think you’ll be needed for the opening of the inquest,’ Vaynor said. ‘But it’s early days yet. Are you going to be around for a while?’
‘I’m not sure. It depends on whether our programme goes ahead, and I’m guessing it probably won’t, not yet. Everything’s very uncertain at the moment, with all this… chaos.’
‘If you go ahead, how long will you be here?’
She looked uncertain.
‘We just need to know where to find you.’
‘I like to think it depends on William Wordsworth,’ Maya Madden told him. ‘If he wants to help me unscramble some things about his time here. It’s his two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, as I expect you know.’
‘So I believe,’ Vaynor said stiffly.
‘But I imagine you know quite a lot about him, so perhaps you could talk to us, briefly, if we go ahead. Dr Vaynor?’
‘Well, I don’t think…’
‘Just briefly. A police woman told me about your literary background.’
‘I haven’t got a literary background. Just a degree.’
‘A doctorate,’ Maya Madden amended.
Part Two
…And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me
William Wordsworth
On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye
11
Creeping erosion
IT NEVER USED to happen, but these days you found screwed-up sandwich wrappers in the Cathedral gatehouse, and plastic cups left by the people who were using it on the days Sophie wasn’t here. Which was most days now.
You sensed the nearness of the palace and the pale, flickering eyes of Bishop Innes. You felt somebody was trying to starve you out of here in the damp, dreary weeks before spring, if there was going to be one this year.
Sophie Hill, who ‘worked for the Cathedral’, reduced to a two-day week with the barely veiled implication that she should consider resigning quietly and melting away into unrecorded history. Merrily’s old chair had been replaced by something made of mangled metal and foam rubber. She turned to the window, looking down at the thinning traffic through thickening rain.
Sophie wore a grey woollen jacket, its collar pulled up into her white hair and – dear God – a pair of those mittens with the fingers chopped off to enable her to type through the cold. Her smile was placid but somehow disfigured. It was like looking up at the tower and observing a creeping erosion in the stone.
‘What I sometimes want to do now,’ Merrily said, ‘is stroll over to the palace, pick up the Bishop’s crozier and…’
Sophie looked up patiently from her keyboard.
‘I’d make it quick.’ Rebelliously out of uniform, in jeans and a sweater, Merrily stretched out her legs under the desk, kicking off her shoes. ‘Wouldn’t want him suffering for too long.’
She shivered. Kill the Bishop? Was it possible she was turning into Jane?
Sophie’s chained glasses had fallen into the folds of her white silk scarf. She replaced them. She seemed to have been typing formal letters on behalf of Innes. Thank you, the Bishop would be pleased to… Regrettably, the Bishop has a prior appointment. Et cetera. Mindless routine. Sophie was still, in theory, the Bishop’s lay secretary, but no longer trusted with anything sensitive because she was too close to Merrily and, even worse, to Huw Owen, who had once planted a fist on Innes in this very office – an incident fully witnessed but then quickly forgotten by Sophie.
Rather than sack her, Innes would keep Sophie at this level until she disappeared. Letting her gradually shrink into shame at taking a wage from the diocese for doing nothing important.
Merrily pulled her bag on to her knees, found the vape stick.
‘Sophie, I’m going to have to ask. What’s the background with Ripley?’
‘Oh,’ Sophie said. ‘You’ve heard from him, then.’
‘He phoned me.’
Sophie didn’t look up.
‘Well… Although I can’t say I cared for his TV drama, he seems an agreeable enough person. The Bishop, I think, was delighted to welcome him, as a priest, into his diocese. Especially to its premier holiday area.’
Merrily nodded. To Innes, Ripley would mean bums on pews. A TV face in the pulpit. It would be worth any tourist’s twenty in the collection box to take home a selfie with the former Simon Wilding. And he wouldn’t lose value too quickly. A successful cop series hung around for years on the repeat channels.
But was she right to take Ripley’s ghost story on board? She didn’t want to float the question directly until she knew how close this man was to the Bishop.
‘He’ll be getting a lot of requests to open summer fetes,’ Sophie said, ‘but if his main reason for getting out of Bristol was press attention, I imagine the last thing he’d want now would be a known connection with deliverance. If it was picked up by the press it would be rather more newsworthy than he probably needs.’
‘Which is why he wants to unload it on me?’
‘Especially if it’s not true,’ Sophie said. ‘The woman works in television. You have to consider she might have a professional interest in him.’
‘If she just wants to get close to him, I’d only be in the way,’ Merrily said.
‘If it’s not genuine. I’m sorry to inflict it on you… as there’s something else at Goodrich you may want to explore.’
‘Oh?’
Sophie looked out of the window again.
‘Look, as we both know, I may not be here long…’
‘Sophie, I really…’ A pause, then Merrily spoke very softly, but with insistence. ‘I really don’t intend to let that happen.’
Sophie snorted faintly.
‘It’ll be well out of your hands. The writing’s been on the wall for some time. Merrily, please… please listen. If you’re working in Goodrich, there are some things you need to know about. Relating to your predecessor, Canon Dobbs. Things about which I’ve been rather too reticent. But now you may benefit from knowing.’
Merrily was surprised, said nothing. It was true they hadn’t talked in any depth about Thomas Dobbs who someone had once likened to Poe’s doleful raven, with its repetitive call of Nevermore, nevermore. Her most significant memory of the late Dobbs was the brief, unsigned note he’d left for her, pinned to his door, just across the road in Gwynne Street, where she couldn’t miss it.
Jesus Christ was the first exorcist, it had read. By which Dobbs had been emphasizing that Jesus was not a woman. As close as he’d ever come to raising the issue with her. At the end, he’d collapsed in the Cathedral in the middle of what could only be described as a final exorcism. He had not supported the bishop who’d appointed her. She guessed he would not support Innes, but for different reasons.
‘Canon Dobbs was not, as you know, an advocate of women priests,’ Sophie said.
‘As he made fairly clear.’
She remembered feeling bad about replacing him. Wanting very much to discuss with him the job. The night job. But he’d never see her alone. She’d only been close enough to speak to him about exorcism in those last days when he was semi-conscious.
‘If the canon had any spare time,’ Sophie said, ‘he’d devote it to research. I still have some of his notes, which were kept in box files in the cabinet here behind my desk. I would have shown the notes to you if they’d had any connection with something you were working on, but I always thought you had enough to think about.’
Merrily smiled. Dobbs would hardly have wanted to share his thoughts with a woman who thought she was a real priest, even after he was dead.
‘I’ve seen his box,’ she said. ‘Didn’t try to open it. I always thought that if he’d investigated something I was looking into… you’d tell me about it yourself when there was time.’
Sophie stood up.
‘Now we have to make some time,’ she said.
Sophie lived in a posh street behind the Cathedral, with her husband, a semi-retired architect. They had a big house and she’d often used a spare room there for office overflow.
‘I concluded the gatehouse was no longer safe from prying eyes and duplicate keys,’ she said now. ‘In the canon’s day, nothing was ever preserved digitally. The notes were for his own reference. There were some files he ordered me to destroy not long after he’d learned he was to be replaced. I kept them, regardless.’ Sophie pulled on gloves to replace the ones with no fingers. ‘These matters tend not to fade away with time. You might have need to consult them at some point. How well do you know the old village of Goodrich?’
‘Not as well as I should, apparently. I’ve only driven through it. It’s where—’
‘And how much do you know about Sir Samuel Meyrick?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick?’
‘I’ve think I’ve heard the name, but…’
Sophie said. ‘Goodrich Court?’
‘Is that another name for Goodrich Castle?’
The best-preserved medieval castle in the county. She and Jane had been once. It occupied a prime position above the River Wye. Ruined, but still impressive. As it had been in the poet Wordsworth’s time when he’d met a little girl there.
‘No,’ Sophie said. ‘It’s not that one. Not the medieval castle.’
She crossed in front of Merrily’s chair, making for the door.
‘This virus madness makes me need to do everything now because I never know how much time’s left,’ Sophie said. ‘But if there’s an hour or so before dark… I can more or less show you what remains of Goodrich Court. And tell you what was bothering the canon. Can you bring your car round?’
12
Struck by lightning
WHEN HE PUT his head round the door, Jane could see his sauce-bottle glasses were crooked and one lens had a slight crack. When she pointed this out, he didn’t seem too worried about it.
‘En’t no big problem,’ Gomer Parry said. ‘He’s done that before and I had him fixed by… by that specs feller in town. Half an hour, all it took. He knows me, see, I done his ma’s drains a year or two back.’ He straightened his glasses. ‘Don’t fuss, girl, en’t nothing. Shop’ll be open again when this pandemonium’s over.’
‘They’ll probably fix them right away, if it’s an emergency, Gomer. I’ll just call the shop, find out when I can take them in. And if you need a new pair, I’ll see to that, too.’
‘You’re a good girl, Janey,’ Gomer said, ‘but it’ll have to wait.’
He hadn’t asked her in. There was a warm spray of sparks reflected on the wall behind the front door, a small stack of logs in the hall. Gomer shook his head, a new ciggy clenched between his improbably white front teeth. She and him, they were mates. Only in a place like Ledwardine could you look at somebody of the opposite sex, sixty years older than you, and realistically think, Gomer… he’s my mate.
Sometimes he seemed younger than she was. Was it possible to be, like eighty… and still a teenager in spirit?
‘It’s cold out here on the path,’ Jane said. ‘Are you OK, Gomer?’
‘Every bugger asses me that,’ Gomer said. ‘But it’s a healthy place, this. Long as they don’t let it get took over by the estate.’
He waved a dismissive hand at the new houses. The nearest were a small field away. Some were empty – holiday homes, their owners supposed to stay in London or wherever until the virus was over. The lane outside Gomer’s gate followed the river out of town – which, with its banks all sagging and sloppy, had seemed, up to a fortnight ago, to be the biggest current threat to the village if the water level continued to rise.
‘Us’ll be all right,’ Gomer said. ‘Be OK if we stays round yere, ennit?’
Nobody could forget the flood panic from just over a year ago, because the water had already been back. Nearly every other village hereabouts had got it again this January, only worse. But Gomer and Danny Thomas had had both JCBs out: the diggers Gomer was supposed to be too old to handle, and they’d be out again soon, finding new graves in the expanding churchyard if this virus did what the papers were predicting.
Busy time for Mum, when the funerals started building up. Except they wouldn’t be big funerals, with all the new restrictions. Now a maximum of nine people – and did that include the vicar and the undertakers?
Gomer just stood there with the front door half-open, still didn’t invite her in. Was he worried she might be carrying the virus? People Jane’s age were supposed to survive it after a few hours’ coughing and a temperature in flux. But they could always pass it on to vulnerable old people, who’d get the symptoms a whole lot worse. Old people like Gomer Parry himself, who now plucked the ciggy out of his mouth and began to cough.
Jane winced.
‘Listen, I’ll deal with the glasses,’ she said. ‘You need to get down to the surgery and get yourself checked out, just to be sure.’
