To Dream of the Dead (19 page)

‘And it contains a lot of quartz?’ Bliss said.

‘Fair amount.’

‘And it was exposed for a while after you found it.’

‘For too long. Even after a few weeks, there was some erosion. We were actually glad to get it covered over again.’

‘Weeks,’ Bliss said. ‘So in that time anybody could’ve nipped up here, under the fence, and pinched a handful.’

‘Or a bucketful. That’s what worried us. Sightseers often like to go home with a souvenir.’

‘So people
were
actually nicking stones?’

‘It’s ten metres wide. How could we tell? Why do you want to know if some were missing, Mr Bliss? If you don’t mind me asking.’

‘How long is it?’ Bliss said.

‘How long’s a piece of string? We cleared sixty metres, but that might be just a small segment. May go all the way up the hill, to the Iron Age camp on the top, behind those trees. The Serpent is
pre-
Iron Age, obviously, but then there could’ve been something interesting up there before the camp.’

‘I’m not really getting an image, Harri.’

Bliss was cold and his hands were going numb and whatever the Serpent had been they’d reburied it, so the council could put their road across it. Just another construction site now.

‘Ever seen the Uffington White Horse in Berkshire, Mr Bliss?’

Bliss shook his head. Didn’t recall ever being in Berkshire. He did remember a white horse in Wiltshire, in the context of a miserable camping holiday with Kirsty before they were married. Kirsty whingeing the whole week.

‘May have seen one on the Wiltshire Downs. Chalk?’

‘That’ll do. Now, forget the chalk and instead of a horse think of a snake. Or, if you like, think of a river. Think of the Wye. Could our structure have been designed to replicate the actual course of the Wye, winding from the top of the hill to the banks of the river itself?’

‘That far?’

‘It’s not very far. The river’s down there, behind those industrial buildings. This is about the hill, the river and the moon.’

Harri told him the theory about this sinuous spectral form winding its moonlit way to the top of the hill.

‘Prehistoric
son et lumière
?’ Bliss said.

‘The sound would be chanting. A sacred hill, see. A lot of hills were sacred. And the river. Water was always very significant, and the Wye’s a magnificent river so it would be venerated above all others in the west. Therefore, if we imagine . . .’

Harri walked to the top of the mound and started weaving his arms about, the way blokes used to air-sketch a voluptuous woman.

‘. . . If we imagine something mystically – and very visibly – connecting the hugely powerful River Wye with the highest hill in these parts. Something suggestive of a coming-together, a confluence, of these great power symbols, the hill, the river and the moon.’

‘Now about to be trashed by a new road slicing through the middle, courtesy of the Hereford Council,’ Bliss said. ‘Would that be a fair assessment?’

‘Hey . . .’ Harri Tomlin put up his hands. ‘Wasn’t me done him, guv.’

‘So much for a quick result. Where do you lads go from here, Harri?’

‘Probably try to extend the excavation in the direction of the river, see how far the Serpent goes. Which means digging on private land, so may take a while to organise.’

‘And when you say these places are sacred, what’s the significance of that, in terms of what they were doing here back then?’

‘Ritual.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Search me. That word covers up a lot of ignorance. We don’t know what rituals were involved, of course we don’t.’

‘Human sacrifice, maybe?’

‘Ah, see, people
like
to think there was human sacrifice all over the place, but it probably wasn’t all that widespread. It’s common to think of Bronze Age people as primitive savages, but they must’ve been quite sophisticated.’

‘Savagery itself, Harri,’ Bliss said quietly, ‘can sometimes be quite sophisticated.’

Harri Tomlin looked across at the stripped ground and the
slaughtered trees, his legs apart, his fluorescent yellow jacket gleaming with rain. Then he looked at Bliss.

‘What are you after? You really think somebody killed Ayling because he was being so negative about this discovery? I mean, you actually think that’s a possibility?’

‘It’s a possibility, Harri.’

‘Can you tell me
why
you’ve made this connection, because from my point of view—’

‘Nothing personal, Harri, but it’s not my decision how much we reveal and when. I
can
tell you there was a ritualistic element. And the connection with this site . . . that’s beyond argument.’

‘Which is why you borrowed some quartz chippings from us yesterday?’

‘And if you can think of anything else that might help us, I hope you won’t hold back.’

Bliss let the silence dangle, looking at Harri Tomlin through half-closed eyes.

‘Look,’ Harri said. ‘You want me to get fanciful here, is it? I mean, I’m not going to have to repeat all this in court at some stage?’

‘I’m not writing it down, Harri, and I’m not wired. Be as fanciful as you like.’

‘All right, then,’ Harri said. ‘Heads.’

‘Heads, plural?’

‘I’m not so much thinking of the guys who laid out the Serpent, I’m thinking the people who built the camp or fort on Dinedor Hill. The Iron Age Celts, who came over here from Europe, two or three thousand years ago. They were very into heads. They believed that the seat of consciousness – the soul, if you like – was located in the head. So the Celts tended to take off the heads of their enemies.’

‘That a fact.’

‘After death, this is. And, from your point of view, it possibly gets better. A contemporary Roman account tells how they’d preserve the head of a distinguished enemy in cedar oil and keep it in a chest for display. Or they might offer it up to the gods. Skulls have also been found, in quite large numbers, at shrines and other sacred places.’

‘Like the old Blackfriars Monastery?’

‘No, no, Mr Bliss – medieval, that is.’

‘Couldn’t be a Celtic site or something underneath?’

‘If there is, we haven’t found it yet. Sorry.’

‘So, let’s look at this a minute, Harri. We’ve gorra mixture of historical periods. But wouldn’t this serpent . . . wouldn’t that still have been around in Celtic times?’

‘We think not. A Roman ditch cuts across it, so it was certainly silted over by then. However, the hill itself would still have been venerated and perhaps a memory of the Serpent remained. Perhaps it still . . . For instance, while I’ve been working here, people have told me how families used to follow a path to the top of Dinedor on special days, like a pilgrimage?’

‘To this day?’

‘Near enough,’ Harri Tomlin said. ‘That’s a ritual, too, in its way, isn’t it? Beliefs and customs often last longer than physical remains. There’s also – I don’t suppose this helps you, particularly, but there’s a link between heads and water – specifically wells and rivers. Skulls have been found in rivers.’

Bliss was gazing up at Dinedor Hill, trying to stitch all this together. The important thing was that Harri Tomlin was strongly supporting the ritual element in the killing.

‘You get many . . . I dunno,
modern
pagan-types coming to see the site, Harri?’

‘Oh, some days . . .’ Harri was smiling ‘. . . you’d look up from your trench and they’d be coming out of the woods like the Celts of old. Home-made, multicoloured sweaters and dowsing rods. Harmless enough. Quite respectful, in general. You tell them not to walk across the site, they won’t. Very respectful. Give me pagans any day, rather than bored kids.’

‘You get to know any of them?’

‘Not by name. One weird beardie is much like another, I find. We don’t get them now, mind – had to be a lot more strict about sightseers since the accident.’

Bliss blinked at him.

‘Two of the boys cutting down trees. If it’s a big one, one of them goes some distance away to get the wider view and then gives a whistle when he can see it’s clear. Boy with the chainsaw, he swore he’d heard the whistle, see . . .’

Harri put a hand behind an ear by way of illustration. Bliss waited.

‘Well, the other fellow never whistled because he wasn’t out of the way himself. Tree comes down,
wheeeeeee
.’ Harri lowered his arm, slowly. ‘Fractured skull, smashed shoulder. Two operations on that shoulder.’

‘You were here at the time?’

‘Worn my hard hat religiously ever since, Mr Bliss.’

Bliss handed his back. Five past one. Time to leave, if he was going to make Gilbies by half past.

‘All the way to the ambulance, he was swearing he hadn’t whistled,’ Harri said, like Bliss might want to make something of it. ‘Funny how your senses can play tricks in a big open space like this.’

M
ERRILY WENT INTO
the church, up into the chancel, to meditate . . . pray.

Taking off Jane’s red wellies and sitting, thick-socked, in the old choirmaster’s chair. Hands palms-down on her knees, eyes almost closed, breathing regulated. This was how she went about it now, when she was on her own. Less liturgical, more meditative. Feeling for answers . . . truth.

Feeling for anything, actually, today, as the rain tumbled on the roof, rushed into the guttering, roared inside her head – a punishing noise. Her reward, probably, for opening
The Hole in the Sky
at random.

. . . understand this: Christianity has already entered its final phase. By the end of this century, ‘Jesus Christ’ will be nothing more than a mild oath, the origins of which will be a mystery to most people under the age of seventy.

She’d put the book down. Not thrown it down, just laid it next to the sermon pad.

It was not the issue. It was meaningless, like the arrival in Ledwardine of Mathew Stooke. No significant coincidence here –
all the picturesque backwaters
, forget it, the guy had to live somewhere.

This was
not
the reason she needed to go into the church.

Merrily had spent about twenty minutes mentally laying out the real issue, walking all around the house and ending up in Jane’s attic apartment where there were stacks of old magazines:
back copies of
Pagan Dawn, Pentacle, White Dragon
, other homespun journals representing Wicca, Druidry and all pagan points in between. Bought and absorbed by thousands of people far too shy to dance naked around a woodland fire.

And people who weren’t. And people who did.

A long-established subculture was renewing itself, Jane would insist, while Christianity withered, in these days of industrial abuse, greed, neglect and consequent climate change. As the Earth bled, paganism was the only
practical
belief system and if the Church wanted to survive it needed to alter its remit accordingly.

Jane’s view of it was rose-tinted, of course – paganism just this all-embracing term for Earth-related green spirituality, a striving for oneness with the elements, sometimes personified as gods and goddesses, the male and female energies in nature. Pagans were more aware of their immediate environment, more connected to the land –
this
land,
these
hills,
these
fields. And when the land was raped and its ancient shrines desecrated by secular governments, pagans felt the pain, almost physically. Felt the violence.
A spear into our spiritual heart
, as the Irishman, Padraig Neal, had put it.

But this wasn’t some enlightened, half-faerie super-race. Pagans and green activists were just more flawed human beings, prone to anger, frustration, irrational hatreds, mental imbalance . . . and firing off inflammatory emails.

Emails were not like letters. Emails were shot from the hip and, by the time you’d realised you’d gone too far, it was too late, you’d sent it. Sure, there was a lot of anger about, but there was a big difference between sending a knee-jerk email and going out there with a knife or a machete.

And yet . . .

you will – be assured – have local by-elections within the year.

What was she supposed to do about this?

Perhaps sit down tonight with Jane and have a long discussion in the hope of convincing her that they should go through the entire correspondence of the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation
Society, compiling a list of possibly dangerous extremists. Which would take most of the night.

And then what?

What?

What if there was another killing?

At lunchtime, when she got the call on her mobile, Jane was still smouldering.

Last day of term, and in morning assembly they’d all had to stand up and do a minute’s silence for Councillor Clement Ayling, who had apparently been Chairman of Education. Morrell paying a sincere tribute to Ayling’s vision and all that crap. Meaningless to the little kids at the front of the hall. Jane, at the back, glowering down at her shoes, thinking,
What a total hypocritical scumball
.

Another
Catcher in the Rye
moment. Been getting them a lot lately. This was the situation: Morrell – who insisted his job title was
School Director
– was the worst kind of New Labour, and Ayling had been this lifelong worst kind of Old Tory. Not only that but he was one of the guys behind the plan to close down a whole bunch of Herefordshire schools, primary and secondary.

Well, not close them down,
merge
them – that was the get-out term. What you did was to put two fairly successful small secondary schools under one big roof.

Thus creating a massive new sink school where nobody learned anything except where to get good crack, and they had to lower the academic goalposts and fiddle the results and the cops spent so much time on the premises you might as well set up a permanent incident room on the playing field.

And
why
was Morrell quietly supporting this?
Why
had Morrell – whose party claimed to stand for
education, education, education
– been up Ayling’s bum? Simple.
This
school had a lot of land, and fields all around, perfect for expansion. So, if Ayling’s scheme went through, while some other bastard might be out of a job, Morrell could find himself
director
of an
operation
twice the size, with a
much bigger salary
.