Feeling as if she was balancing on Ludlow’s curving spine, she stopped and listened again. No movement, and no obvious place of concealment in the narrows of The Linney. There was a sign announcing a new restaurant, and someone had stuck a white paper flyer on it that read, The Lord will tear down the temples of gluttony!
After the last house, a path to the left… surely the path that burrowed among the castle foundations, the path she’d taken with Jon Scole to the yew tree where Marion fell, where Jemima Pegler fell with the heroin raging through her veins.
Here, the ground softened underfoot and the texture of the night seemed to have altered, the shapes of trees morphing into matt shadows and the woodsmoke aroma becoming the raw stench of damp earth.
And the castle was a hard form, a stronghold again, the land falling invisibly away to the right of the track, through the trees and into darkening fenced fields, sports clubs, and the river and the woodland around The Weir House.
And Merrily knew, then, that it was too quiet.
There should be wildlife-rustlings, foxes prowling, badgers scrabbling, night birds, and… and there wasn’t anything.
She stopped.
Sometimes on still evenings, before a church clock chimed somewhere, you would be aware of a pause in the atmosphere itself – a soft, hollowed-out moment, all movement suspended. And then a vibration, like a shiver, as if the air knew what was coming. When you spent days and nights hanging around churches, it became a familiar phenomenon. It seemed like part of the mechanism, and maybe it was – some ancient acoustic collusion between night and clocks.
Usually it was clocks. In a town like Ludlow, on a night like this, it ought to have been clocks.
She reached up and felt for the ridge of the tiny cross under the fleece and the T-shirt, pressing it into the cleft between her breasts, and heard a voice, hollow with pain.
Might have been just an owl inside the castle grounds. Or, a moment later, two distinct species of owl in sequence: the breathless fluting of the woodland tawny overtaken by an ethereal screech – barn owl. That was all, that was—
As she was plunging into pockets for the cigarettes and the Zippo, it started up again, bloating into something swollen and visceral that wasn’t like any kind of owl but definitely like a woman.
Then a harsh, white shriek.
‘TAKE ME!’
The castle wall was caught by a blade of moonlight.
‘TURN ME!’
Merrily stood looking up, frozen. The jagged windows of the Hanging Tower were holes in mouldy cheese,
‘TAKE ME, TURN ME… TEACH ME…
‘PLOUGH ME, PLY ME, PLEACH ME!’
The words seemed to be crawling up the wall.
‘TAKE ME, RAKE ME…’
She knew it, of course. It was from Nightshades. It was twenty years old.
When it stopped, the air was alive again, as if the night was frayed and abraded.
And from below the Hanging Tower, the same voice, only different. Soft and breathy, ethereal.
Wee Willie Winkie running through the town
Upstairs, downstairs, in his nightgown
Rapping on the—
A stifled sob. In the distance, Merrily heard a car horn, the furry rumble of an aeroplane. And then there was coughing and the voice came back, husky and earthen and bitter.
‘You lie like carrion…’
And then rising, fainter and frailer but spiralling up again like pale light.
‘… I’ll fly like Marion.’
Mumford
THE DOOR WAS on a chain, a strip of light sliding out over the concrete landing and her teeth bared at him in the gap.
‘Never get the message, do you? You’re not wanted yere, you was never wanted. Got nothin’ to say to each other. Not at half-past one in the morning, not any time.’
Half-one? Was it really? How time flew when you were plugged in again.
Aye, he’d accept it was a bit late to be calling on even your closest living relative. But he’d seen the lights on, guessing they stayed up half the night and then went to bed till the afternoon: the half-life of the worthless.
‘Just wanner talk a while, Angela,’ Mumford said calmly. ‘En’t gonner keep you more’n half an hour. Just some things I need to get sorted out.’
‘Well, you can fuck off,’ Ange said through those guard-dog teeth, ‘and you leave us alone from now on. I don’t wanner see your fat face ever again, yeah? Clear enough?’
Mumford nodded. Fair play, he’d started out politely enough, telling her he thought he should inform her it was Mam’s funeral on Tuesday and listening, without comment, to the expected response – not even bothering to wipe what had accompanied it from his face. Being imperturbable.
He could smell the spliff from here, knowing that the reason Ange instead of Mathiesson had come to the door was that Mathiesson would be busy flushing it all down the toilet in case Mumford wasn’t on his own. Probably a few ounces of blow wasn’t the half of it, but when the boys raided the estate they’d likely let this particular flat alone, thinking mabbe this family had suffered enough and Mathiesson was only small-time, anyway. Bliss could be thoughtful, on occasion.
‘Well,’ Mumford said, like his feelings were hurt, ‘if that’s how you feel, en’t much more I can say.’
Backing off as he spoke, his eyes on the tension in the chain, and when he saw it go slack as she was about to slam the door in his face, he turned his shoulder and met it with the full force of his fifteen and a half stone.
Ange’s screech was simultaneous with the splintering of wood as the chain came away, pulling out a wad of cheap Plascarreg door frame, the door flying back and Mumford going in there fast, grabbing her as she spun away, desperate to stop her falling because she was, after all, pregnant.
Holding her arms tight to her side, he manoeuvred her backwards into the living room. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of making her scream again, but he held on because, if he slackened his grip, she’d have one of his fingers between her teeth before he knew it.
She was her father’s daughter, was Angela.
Mumford gave her the heavy-lidded, level stare.
‘’Fore you says a word, I’ll pay for it, all right? I’ll leave a hundred on the table when I go. And you can tell that scum he can stop flushing, ’cause I en’t remotely interested in what he puts up his nose tonight.’
Ange breathing through her teeth, eyes black with what Mumford took as hate. He went on staring into them, imperturbable.
‘All right?’ He saw her mouth working on the saliva, and he gave her a little shake. ‘No. Now you listen to me… no, listen!’
‘Your level now, Mumford, eh?’ Mathiesson standing in a doorway, stripped to the waist. ‘Pregnant woman?’
‘You wanner dispense with the heroics, boy, seeing as we’re in your place and it’s all your stuff that gets broken?’
Looking at the stuff in here, this was no bad deal he was offering. Sony TV size of a double wardrobe, screening some slasher-horror DVD with the sound down. Had to be ten grand’s worth of hardware. A subtle hint here that Ange and Mathiesson were existing on a bit more than the sickness benefit from Mathiesson’s famous bad back.
Mumford thought about Robbie Walsh’s broken neck and his snapped spine, and a surge of the old volcano went through him, and he caught himself hoping that Mathiesson would try and take him. But Mathiesson didn’t move and Mumford turned back to Ange.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘either I holds on to you the whole while, or we all sits down nice and quiet and you answer my questions, in full. On the basis I en’t a copper no more and nobody gets nicked, or—’