Blind to the Bones (47 page)

Alton realized he was babbling, and ground to a halt. Philip appeared to be paying no attention to his words at all, but kept his eyes turned down, thinking about something else entirely. The vicar felt himself beginning to grow warm under his coat.

‘I went to see the police yesterday,' said Philip.

‘Yes, of course. Are they any nearer …? Did they give you an idea …? It's been nearly six days now. Surely –'

Philip shook his head in a gesture of impatience ‘Please, Vicar.'

‘Sorry.'

A little bit of sun appeared through a break in the mist that hung between the yew trees. It looked as if someone had switched a light on. For now, it was pale and yellow, and ringed with a faint halo. But soon, it would dissipate the mist and the day would be fine.

‘It was more a question of me giving them information,' said Philip. ‘That's what I wanted to tell you.'

‘Information?' said Alton.

‘Well, among other things, I thought I ought to tell them that Neil was gay.'

For some reason, Alton found himself latching on to the wrong phrase. ‘What other things?'

Philip looked at him then, with an enigmatic smile. ‘Nothing else that concerns you, Vicar.'

‘I see.'

‘But obviously, the police will be wanting to talk to people again now. People who were involved with Neil in some way.'

‘Yes, I suppose so.'

‘I thought you ought to know.'

Alton had promised himself that he'd make a determined attack on the overgrown churchyard today, provided the weather was fine. That was why he was early this morning, so that he could be outside and ready for action as soon as the mist had gone. He had neglected the job too long already, and no one was going to help him now. He was on his own.

Philip Granger was watching him, waiting for a reaction. ‘You get what I'm saying, Vicar? It's something you ought to know.'

‘Yes, Philip. Thank you. Thank you very much.'

‘It's a good thing to tell what you know, isn't it?' said Philip. ‘That is, unless there's a very,
very
good reason not to.'

Derek Alton nodded. But all he could think of were the dock plants growing in his churchyard. He couldn't quite explain why the leaves of the docks disturbed him so much more than the other plants. When he pulled at them, they stretched and wrinkled in his hands, like aged skin. They might be warm on the surface, where they had been touched by the sun. But underneath, they were always cold and damp, like the grave.

P
hilip Granger mounted his motorbike and put on his helmet. He looked across the bridge at Withens. He had one more job he wanted to do, one more person to see. Then, perhaps, he could get on with his life and pretend that everything was OK. Then he could leave it to others to sort out the mess.

As he rode north through the village, he looked for his uncle and cousins near Waterloo Terrace, but could see no signs of them. Philip smiled. He knew that the Reverend Alton would be able to tell where he was heading by the sound of his bike engine, but he didn't care. There was, after all, only one place he could be going once he had passed through Withens in this direction.

W
hen Michael Dearden had finishing inspecting the locks and bolts on the doors of the house, he went around all the windows. There were a lot of windows in Shepley Head Lodge, some of them in out of the way corners that could be reached unobserved from outside. He might have to block a few of them up some time.

Gail said it wasn't logical to check the security of the house in the morning when he got up, as well as at night before he went to bed. She said it was obsessive. But Gail knew nothing. If their security had been breached during the night, it was vital to be aware of it straight away. There would be evidence to be gathered, a crime scene to be preserved intact for the arrival of the police. Not that the police would come, of course. But at least they wouldn't be able to blame
him
for not having followed the proper procedures.

So Dearden made it a regular routine to carry out his inspection first thing every morning before he did anything else, particularly before Gail started drifting around the house, disturbing evidence without even noticing anything was wrong.

When he was finally satisfied that the lodge hadn't been ransacked during the night, Dearden looked outside. Because of the elevated position of the house, he had a good view of the frontal approach, where the drive swung up off the road. There was no sign of anyone out there this morning. The postman might be along later on, if he came at all. Dearden had once investigated the possibility of buying the last hundred yards of the road from Withens and closing it off. The road wasn't adopted by the highways authority beyond the village, so it wasn't an official highway. But it had turned out that this section belonged to the farmer who owned the land on either side, and the farmer wouldn't listen to reason when Dearden raised the idea.

The back of the house was the big problem. The yard and the huddle of outbuildings backed into the hillside. He was sure this was the way they had come in when they raided his property before. There were walls built against the hill, but they were bulging and slipping under the pressure and were no barrier to anyone determined enough.

Dearden walked out into the yard and knew immediately that something was wrong. He saw that somebody had knocked over the dustbin. They had strewn rubbish all across his yard.

‘Mr Dearden?'

Dearden jumped in alarm. How could he not have noticed the person standing near his side gate?

‘How did you get here?'

‘On my motorbike.'

‘What motorbike?'

‘It's here, behind the wall.'

The motorbike was invisible on the other side of the stone wall. Dearden realized he might be making a mistake by only keeping an eye out for cars on the road.

‘What are you doing here?' said Dearden.

‘Do you know who I am? I'm Philip Granger.'

‘Yes. It was your brother who was killed. Alex knew him.'

‘That's right.'

Dearden struggled for a moment over what to say. Then he looked at the young man's motorcycle leathers and black hair.

‘You're related to the Oxleys, aren't you?'

‘Lucas is my uncle,' said Philip.

‘I'll give you two minutes to get off my property.'

‘Sorry?'

Dearden gestured at the tipped-over dustbin. ‘Do you know anything about this? Were you here last night with some of your cousins?'

‘No. I –'

‘I don't want you here. Your family is nothing but trouble.'

‘All I wanted to say was –'

‘Now you've got one minute.'

‘OK, OK, I'm going.'

With narrowed eyes, Dearden watched Philip Granger start up his bike and leave. Those people from Withens were getting even more brazen if they were wandering on to his property in broad daylight. Serious action would have to be taken.

D
erek Alton picked up the stick that Lucas Oxley had given him. He bounced it in his palm a few times, enjoying the feel of the wood. He liked its solidity, and the smoothness of its grain. It had a satisfying weight and balance, as if it were a natural extension of his arm. When he held the stick up to the light, he could see the bruises and scarring along the length of the wood. But it was good, thick blackthorn. Blackthorn was best. He was lucky to get it, because there wasn't much of it growing around Withens.

Then Alton frowned at the sight of a stain on the stick. It looked like a splash of red wine. Like communion wine, perhaps? But surely not at the altar of St Asaph's.

With a sudden burst of energy, he swung the stick through the air, as if striking at something around head height. He had to imagine the noise and the impact. But the physical action, the rush of air, and the movement of the muscles in his shoulders all made him feel good, even exhilarated. He wanted to do a little jig on the stone flags, to open his lungs and let out a shout of joy. But this wasn't the place or the time.

‘Death and renewal. Winter and spring. The darkness and the light.'

Though his voice was still quiet, it carried the entire length of the church. The sound bounced off the dusty stone lintels and the dark oak roof timbers. The word ‘light' seemed to return to him in the cool air with a different note, sharper and more peremptory, as if it had been spoken by someone else. Alton swung the stick again, listening to the swish of its movement through the air. The sound was almost like music, a distant whisper of otherworldly voices, sighing for the coming moment, for the time to be right.

‘The beauty and the sorrow, death and renewal. The powers of light and new life.'

Alton wasn't even sure that the Church of England fitted naturally into the landscape in this part of the country. Perhaps Withens needed something more muscular and rugged, more in tune with the cycle of the seasons and the implacability of nature. Perhaps it ought to be able to call on something more in keeping with the preoccupations of those wretched men who had been the first to live and die in Withens – the men killed and maimed in their hundreds building the tunnels. The men no one had cared about.

He had wondered about that when he first came to the place and had learned about its history. It had been the prosperous traders and landowners who had subscribed to build St Asaph's, as an act of charity. But it was the blood of the ordinary working men that had consecrated the landscape.

Now he was getting too absorbed in the past again. It always made him feel depressed. He swung his arm once more, trying to work out what it was about the acoustics that made his voice sound so unfamiliar.

‘The darkness and the light. The
light
.'

Sometimes, it seemed to Alton that the entire area might be on the verge of reverting to paganism. Only the previous year, the May Day bank holiday festivities in the town of Glossop had culminated in the burning of a wicker man. Alton had thought this was the sort of thing that only happened in films, and when he had first read about it, he had an uneasy frisson. But he reassured himself that these things were most likely done for the benefit of the tourists these days. There couldn't be any real belief involved in the rituals, could there? Yet local residents in Glossop had written their bad memories in envelopes and attached them to the wicker man, so they would be carried away by the flames. Superstition, that's all.

His feelings were even more confused by the fact that the ritual had taken place at the Glossop Labour Club. Not only that, but events leading up to the burning of the wicker man had included an opening ceremony conducted by the local member of parliament, along with a pie and pea supper, a coffee morning and craft fair. For the children, there had been a short-story competition, a summer pageant, and a bouncy castle. All these were things that in other areas were associated with church fêtes.

There were times when he felt as though he was trying to fight back more than the encroaching nettles and bracken in his churchyard. Now and then, a dark shadow seemed to fall across his day-to-day reality, and he had a vision of himself battling against something just as insidious and persistent, and just as impossible to defeat.

Alton held the stick up to his face and squinted towards the tip. The stain on the wood was dark and had soaked deep into the grain of the blackthorn. Its shape was rather like a map of Derbyshire – a long trickle running away to the north, where it pooled into a smear at the Yorkshire border. He nodded with satisfaction at the image. The village of Withens was somewhere in that smear that was border country, a lost and forgotten speck in miles of empty peat moor. And St Asaph's sat on the edge of the village, gradually disappearing in a mass of encroaching undergrowth, like the burnt-out Ford Fiesta on the grass verge at the top of the road. In most Peak District villages, there would be a committee whose aim was to win the Best-Kept Village competition, and they wouldn't have rested until they had got the abandoned car removed or the churchyard cleared. Not in Withens, though.

All the members of his congregation were either old, or strange. Often both. Services were held at St Asaph's only every alternate Sunday. Most of the elderly residents of the bungalows came, and a few people made the journey from Hey Bridge. But not many others. For the modern generation, attending church was a cause for suspicion. To admit to being a Christian was like confessing to a social problem.

But then again, attending church didn't make you a Christian, any more than standing in a garage made you a car.

Sometimes Alton felt sorry for St Asaph. The saint had carried hot coals in his cloak to warm his master, without burning himself or his garments, which had proved his holiness, or so it was said. But carrying hot coals wasn't much to be remembered for, was it? Some people would suggest it was a foolhardy thing to do.

But if anyone who wasn't holy enough tried to carry those hot coals, they would certainly be burned.

B
en Cooper looked up the road past Waterloo Terrace. He had been planning to call at the church in Withens to see if the Reverend Alton was around. He wanted to ask him about the Border Rats, and maybe to get a look at Craig Oxley's grave, if he really was buried at St Asaph's. Cooper had started to feel that everything he was told by someone in Withens had to be double-checked.