December (50 page)

      
Beyond the backbeat of London traffic, a seagull keened.

When Meryl rang, Martin
Broadbank was microwaving a TV dinner-for-one purchased from his own
supermarket in Cirencester, still unsure about whether he was supposed to take
the disgusting thing out of the packet first.

      
'Where are you?' he demanded.

      
'Martin.' Meryl sounding strangely breathy. 'I'm with … I've
found Tom Storey. Perhaps you could tell Mrs ... Shelley that he's all right.'

      
'Well, that's super,' Martin said. 'That's the news I've been
hovering over the phone waiting for all day. Tom Storey, the deranged hermit
who destroyed my dinner party, is all right. God, that's taken a load off my
mind. Now where the hell are you, Meryl?'

      
'It's very complicated, Martin. More complicated than I can begin
to tell you.'
      
'Try me.'

      
'I can't, Martin. Really. It involves spheres of existence which
you ... I can't. Just tell Shelley. He wants Shelley to know that he's OK. And
that he'll be in touch when he ... when he gets himself sorted out.'

      
'Spheres of existence?' Martin roared. 'Get back here! At once!'

      
'I can't. Maybe tomorrow, the day after. He needs me ... my
help.'

      
'Oh, he needs your
help
…'

      
'We're connecting, Martin, it's ...'

      
'And I
don't
need
your help? I just pay to hear your voice from a distant phone box? Meryl, I've
spent the entire day pacifying the police, entertaining Storey's charming but
conversationally limited daughter, handling Shelley with kid gloves, or rather
not handling her at all. And now I come home to a dark, silent house and a cold
bed and you tell me you're out there "connecting" with this lunatic.
Who's going to cook my breakfast in the morning, Lady fucking Bluefoot?'

      
Seconds later he let the phone slip from his ear. He couldn't believe
it.

      
Meryl had hung up on him.

The police arrived
informally, shortly before 8 p.m.

      
Eddie Edwards, watching from behind a curtain in the darkened
front bedroom at his home, the Old Vicarage, was rather disappointed at first,
when merely this elderly, grey Ford Sierra pulled up under his porch light and
just one man emerged and with no great hurry.

      
He was tall but slumped. Walked with his neck bent, looking
from a distance like an old-fashioned lamp-post.

      
'Coffee, I think, my love,' Eddie called to his wife, to get
her out of the way, waiting for the ring before moving towards the door. Only
one man; maybe it wasn't such a big deal after all.

      
'Mr Edwards?'

      
To his surprise, the policeman had a denser Welsh accent than
you generally found in this part of the world, indicating origins considerably further
west. He had a long, thin, pale face, like a half-moon.

      
'Oh, ah, Superintendent Gwyn Arthur Jones, sir, Gwent Police.'
Sounded as if it was already well past his bedtime.

      
'You're not from these parts,' Eddie said brightly.

      
'Nor indeed, it seems, are you,' said Supt. Jones, adding hopefully,
'Siarad Cymreig?'

      
'Lapsed, I'm afraid. Used to, see, but you get out of it,
especially around here. Carmarthen, is it, you're from, Mr Jones? Come in, sit
down.'

      
The policeman handed his overcoat to Eddie and bent his head
to enter the sitting-room, which still had an air of Vicarage about it, thanks
to Marina and a lot of chintz.

      
'From Pontmeurig, I come, sir, originally.'

      
'My God, there's an outpost. Must seem like the bright lights
where you are now. Newport?'

      
'Abergavenny. Mind if I smoke? So many people in horror of the
humble cigarette these days, I live in constant fear of an even more terrible
backlash against my historic pipe. And his pipe did indeed look historic. Eddie
spread his hands in happy acquiescence. Something less forbidding, somehow,
about a pipe-smoker.

      
'Part of our great heritage, the pipe.' Superintendent Gwyn
Arthur Jones bent over an old-fashioned chromium lighter with a flame like oxy-acetylene.
'Course, I haven't seen this candle yet, but I don't somehow think I'd care for
one on my fiftieth birthday cake.'

      
'Not ... not for a few years yet, surely,' Eddie said, thrown a
little by the unobtrusive way this man changed gear.

      
'Week on Friday,' said Superintendent Jones mournfully. 'At
least advancing age allows one to exhibit eccentricities. I could go quite over
the top, see, on this business. Get the church sealed off, fill it up with
little men in plastic suits, have my boys doing house-to-house. Make no
mistake, Mr Edwards, we are talking Dead People here. Babies even, who knows until
we hear from the lab.'

      
'Babies. Good God, man!'

      
'Newborn babies, it's been known.'

      
'You have reports on this kind of thing?'
      
'Like most men of limited intellect,
I take the
News of the World
,' Gwyn
Arthur Jones said drily. 'What I am getting at, Mr Edwards, is that other men
might call out the troops but brought up in Pontmeurig one learns caution. Your
vicar, now what does he have to say?'

      
Eddie hesitated. 'He, er, he doesn't know yet, Superintendent.
I haven't had a chance to see him. I did call, see, but he wasn't in. It's a
busy job nowadays, for a vicar, with all these cutbacks. Four churches, he has,
to look after.'

      
In fact, he'd been several times to the vicarage, banging
furiously on the door, but not a sound, not a light.

      
'As cautious as myself, you are, obviously.' Gwyn Arthur Jones
observing him shrewdly through a brackish smoke which reminded Eddie of autumn
bonfires. 'So tell me all about it. No hurry. Do I smell coffee?'

      
It occurred to Eddie Edwards that at least you knew where you
were with a handful of police cars with sirens and Alsatian dogs. With Gwyn
Arthur Jones it was probably going to be less spectacular but rather more
complicated.

Simon St John, sweating now,
said, 'I don't know whether I can.'

      
Sile Copesake had bounded to the ground, like a man half his
age, leaving the engine running for the lights. Now he was holding open the
passenger door for Simon.

      
The Abbey sprouted all around them like a giant fungus
stimulated by the light. Simon imagined it was sensing him. As if each broken
arch had exposed nerve-endings.

      
'When I was a lad,' Sile said, 'I used to come here at night, alone,
just to see if I dared.'

      
He put out a hand to help Simon down. Simon took it and held
it but stayed where he was.

      
The hand was dry and firm. Simon held on to the hand, for what
it might tell him.
Is he frightened now?
Can he sense it too?

      
The first time he'd shaken hands with Tom Storey, over fifteen
years ago, there'd been a burning sensation all the way up to his shoulder,
coloured lights in his head.
      
Nothing. He let Sile Copesake's
hand go.
      
'OK, Simon?'

      
To Copesake, this would be just a ruined building, scary at
one time, when he was a kid, because it was old and isolated and he knew what
it had been. But now ...

      
An incredibly obvious question occurred to Simon. It came very
slowly, the way thoughts did in dreams, taking a long time to shake itself out
of the mists.

      
He said, 'What are we doing here, Sile?'

      
Having intended to ask, what are
you
doing here? By this time only vaguely aware of clinging to a
rock face in a deliberate position of extreme jeopardy and Sile Copesake
materialising like an angel beamed from the Skirrid.

      
Simon stepped down from the Discovery feeling like someone
getting out of bed after a long illness. Sometimes situations developed which
seemed so charged with significance that your over-developed senses missed the
obvious, the prosaic, the truth.

      
Sile had said:

      
What you should know is
that I'm on the board of TMM these days.

      
Not that he'd been sent to save him, to extricate him from his
madness. Just that he represented a major recording company.

      
'Let me show you something,' Sile, the recording company
shareholder, said nonchalantly, walking towards the shadowy hulk of the Abbey.

      
What
is
this?

      
Very warily, Simon followed the wiry, leathery figure through
the ruins, keeping away from the stone. Mustn't touch the stone; full of old
blood, might bleed on .you.

      
Sile had left the headlights on, with the engine obediently
running, to light them along the path through the east transept or the south
chapel or whatever the fuck it was, to the base of the tower. This was the
other side from the courtyard where the cars had been parked during sessions.

      
'Mind the steps.' Rattle of keys.

      
'We're going in? How come you've got keys?'

      
'Because we own it, Simon. You could say we inherited it from
the fat man.'

      
'But you knew it as a kid. You personally. You told me that.'

      
Stone steps led downwards. This side, you entered the building
on a lower level.

      
Sile was just a voice talking easily in the darkness at the bottom
of the steps.

      
'Been used for all kinds of enterprises, this place - hotel,
outward-bound centre. And it was for sale again, summer 1980. And it was cheap.
And Max Goff thought, what an amazing place for a studio. Everybody was doing
it in those days, competing to offer the weirdest setting for big money bands
to record in. Castles, disused railway stations. Bids going in for the pyramids,
I shouldn't wonder.'

      
'And Max Goff,' Simon said slowly, 'being into New Age
philosophy and psychic studies ..." Did the guy think he didn't know all
this?

      
'Cemented in blood,' Sile said. 'Soon as he heard that, he was
fishing for his cheque book. He loved old places with an atmosphere. Yeah, I
knew it as a kid, and it was a shock coming back in the seventies, seeing the state
it was in. Poor old Abbot Richard wouldn't even recognise the location. It
needed somebody like Goff to throw money at it.'

      
Simon still wouldn't go down the steps. A cold rain was flushing
out his brain at last.

      
'It was only cheap, Sile,' he said, 'because it had a
reputation. It was unlucky. Still collecting blood. You know about the young
couple who fell out of the tower?'

      
Silence.

      
'
We
didn't know
that,' Simon said. 'We were given all this holy ground, spiritual haven
garbage. So when things started to go wrong, we naturally thought it must be us
sinners.'

      
'Yeah.' Sile's voice was coming out of the well of darkness
like some kind of Delphic oracle. 'It fucked you up, right? All four of you.'

      
'You have a nice line in understatement, Sile.' Wondering how
much Copesake knew.
      
A lot, as it turned out.

      
Tom Storey climbs into bed,' Sile said, 'and pulls the covers
over his head. Moira Cairns melts back into the folk circuit. Reilly emerges as
some screwed-up kind of alternative comic. And you take holy orders. That's
drastic, Simon.'

      
'I think that part would have happened anyway,' Simon said
cautiously. 'Sooner or later. Maybe, without the Abbey episode, it would have
turned out less ... fraught. I don't know.'

      
He heard Sile unlocking a big door with, presumably, a big
key. A lot of echo, like entering a dungeon in some medieval epic.

      
Simon still didn't move. 'I don't think I want to go down.'