December (42 page)

      
The phone didn't stop.

      
He snatched it up. 'Found it, have you?'

      
'Nah.' A voice like a broken coffee-grinder. 'Me, I can't even
remember what I was looking for. And when I find it I'll be too pissed to recognise
it.'

      
'Oh.' Dave collapsed across the bed. 'Prof. I thought you were
somebody else.'

      
'If only. David, I've been making a few inquiries. Woke some
people up. Sod 'em, if
 
I
can't sleep, why should they? Anyway,
it seems Russell Hornby, your erstwhile producer, is currently recording a band
at the Manor in Oxford.'

      
'Why should I want to know that?'

      
'Seemed to me you might want to talk to him about certain
tapes and how and why they came to be saved from the inferno.'

      
'Shit, Prof,' Dave said. 'You're determined to get me involved
in this, aren't you?'

      
'And you aren't involved at all, are you? I mean, you were never
there, you nor Tom nor whatsername, Moira ...'

      
Moira.

      
I'm not ready to think about this. Talk to me about Russell Hornby,
John Lennon, Aelwyn Breadwinner. Just don't mention Moira.

      
'You still there, David?'

      
Don't talk to me about long beaches, cold sea, messages in the
sand. Don't talk to me about black bonnets.
      
'David!'
      
'Yeh,' he said.
      
'Pick me up at eleven.'

III

Can
This Bastard
See My Aura?

Ghosts.
      
The word itself. Whispering it was
like creeping through a carpet of soft, damp leaves.
      
Meryl whispered it as she curved
the Peugeot around the traffic island to find the Gloucester road out of
Cirencester. It was a bright morning now and brisk rather than cold, for late November.
The brightness and the sharp air made her feel comfortably alert, despite so
little sleep.

      
Two and a half hours, to be precise. Meryl had lain down - in
her own bedroom, not Martin's - and slept immediately, until it was light. She'd
always been a good sleeper. Nothing kept her awake, least of all the Lady
Bluefoot.
      
Least of all the ghosts.

      
Meryl Coleford
, Miss
Burns had demanded sternly.
What's this
you've got?

      
It would always be a paperback of ghost stories. At the
school, the teachers had been vaguely disapproving, the other girls curious but
always a mite fearful.
      
Not Meryl.

      
It's a wonder you can
stay awake in class, all the sleepless nights you must have.

      
I never
have sleepless nights. Miss. And I never have any nightmares.

      
At the church school, in the village where she lived now with
Martin, every day had begun with a scripture lesson, and the only words in the
Bible Meryl had found inspirational had been

      
Holy Ghost

      
Religion, the way they
taught it at school, was very boring. God and his angels were surely
supernatural beings, but they might have been members of the parish council for
all the charisma allotted to them by these sedate, matronly teachers. And when
Meryl had asked the vicar himself how might she
see
God, where might she go to watch an angel and if she spent a whole
night by herself in the church would she ... the vicar had replied: Don't be
silly.

      
She'd always remember that.
Don't be silly.
      
But if nobody in the village had
ever spotted God or even a solitary angel in the vicinity of the parish church,
one or two had certainly seen ghosts of the dead, holy or otherwise. John Westbury,
for instance, who was gardener at the Hall, could be persuaded of a summer
evening to sit on his upturned barrow, light up his clay pipe and talk of the
Lady Bluefoot, an apparition of such glamour and romance that God and the
angels seemed, by comparison, terribly ordinary ... and so distant, whereas She
was
here.

      
One day,
Meryl had
told herself, aged twelve,
I'm gonner
live at the Hall and me and the Lady Bluefoot's gonner be best friends.

      
Well, the Hall itself had been abandoned and become a
picturesque ruin by the time Meryl was grown up, but the Hall Farm remained,
and this, after all, was where Lord Rendall had Iain when they brought his body
from the fields and where his lady had seen him first. But although Meryl
indeed lived here now and although she'd found a spiritualist church where the supernatural
nature of God was not exactly played down, she'd become ever-so-slightly disillusioned.
Yes, she
did
like to consider the
Lady her best friend now, but it
had
all been rather one-sided, with no great mystical revelations and no ... actual

... manifestation.
      
Until last night.

      
The reality, the urgency of it, made Meryl grip the steering wheel
tightly with both hands.

      
It had been a hard, harsh lesson. Revelation had come not with
a soft and scented vaporous thing in blue shoes, but with the hideous vision of
a man with a hole in his face who had shown to her the future - or, at least,
the short-term future of Sir Wilfrid and Lady Tulley.

      
And the future of Stephen Case?

      
And of Martin and Shelley Storey?

      
In the white-hot exhilaration of having
seen
, Meryl had put to the back of her mind the sight of the other
bloodied bodies around the table.

      
But as she drove, she thought,
Surely the future is not written in stone, else why should anyone he
sent such a clear precognitive experience?

      
Should she so eagerly have sent Martin off with Shelley
Storey, in whose bloody breast his head had been buried, just to get him out of
the way so she could pursue her own quest? Should she not have warned him, in
the interests of his own survival, to forget Mrs Storey and her magnificent
mammaries?

      
Meryl was in no doubt of the extent of her power over Martin;
she was certainly of more lasting value to him man an hour or two with Shelley's
nipples in his ears. He would listen to her. But she must be surer of her
ground.

      
The way had been opened for her. She must follow it as far as
it led.

      
Oh Lord, if only ...

      
About eleven miles out of Cirencester, Meryl's heart lurched
at the sight of a red and white flag against the light-brown of distant hills,
a little man with a tall white hat and a frying pan.

      
She pulled into the forecourt of the Little Chef, past the garage,
to a long, low building with a big sign:

      
TRAVELODGE.

      
There'd been a Little Chef on this road for years, but the
motel part was new, had been open for barely three months.
      
Meryl held her breath as she slid
the Peugeot slowly towards a small group of parked cars and

      
Oh my Lord

      
one was a dusty, dark blue Volvo estate, obviously parked in a
hurry, hopelessly askew and straddling a white dividing-line so you couldn't
see whether it was outside apartment nine or apartment eleven.

      
Oh. This was almost uncanny. She'd
known.
      
Meryl sat for several minutes,
trembling at the sudden precision of her intuition. Had proximity to
him
brought this about? She felt suddenly
quite nervous. He was a temperamental man, by all accounts. As well he might be
with his peculiar talents.

      
Then, 'Come along, girl,' she said aloud. Switching off the
engine and shouldering her door open, she gathered up her bag and her resolve
and went to hammer on the door of number eleven.

At the Manor Studio in
rural Oxfordshire, quite a few people recognised Prof Levin.

      
'Blimey, Prof,' an engineer said. 'Must be a fair while since
you last showed your face here. Branson himself still around, was he?'

      
'Branson was just a kid,' said Prof. 'But it ain't changed,
has it?'

      
'I'll see if I can find Russell for you,' the studio manager
said. She didn't know Prof; too young. 'He's here somewhere. That's his car, if
you'd like to go and have a worship.'

      
'Stone me.' Prof stared at the bronze monster under the trees.
'That's a ... a whatsit.'

      
'Rolls-Royce Corniche,' Dave said. 'Makes you wonder.'

      
'I heard he was doing all right for himself. I didn't realise
it was this much all right.'

      
'Whether it's made him happy,' the manager said drily, 'is
debatable. Look, maybe he's not up yet. They were recording until about three
this morning.'

      
'No hurry,' Prof said. 'We'll have a wander around, see what's
new.'

      
The Manor was a real manor, a mellow fifteenth-century house in
fifty acres at Shipton, a few miles outside Oxford. The studio was in the barn;
the musicians slept in the house, in luxury rooms with round-the-clock service.
There was a swimming-pool and a tennis court. The sun shone.

      
Dave had never been before. If made him feel
nostalgic for all the albums he'd never made.

      
'The Abbey, it's not.' He was looking up at a brass chandelier
and a mural depicting Richard Branson, founder of the studio, and Mike Oldfield
and their mates, all in medieval costume. The romance of yesteryear - the early
seventies, this would be.

      
'EMI own the place now,' Prof said. 'If there's a TMM
connection, I don't know about it. But anybody can hire the Manor, if they've
got the loot.'

      
On the way here, Dave driving, Prof had told him everything:
about the box under the late Max Goff's bed, about the baking of the tapes and
the chaos at Audico. Was that likely? Could mouldy recording tape do that? Was
Prof going mad? Was Maurice of Audico losing his marbles? Did this tape, once listened
to, ever go away?

      
You're talking about energies, Dave had said. Who can say?
      
And what about the woman's voice?
What about the tape coming out of the oven, freezing cold? Was that kind of
business inside Dave's experience?

      
Dave had nodded. Maybe. Hadn't elaborated.

      
Prof had laughed. He said that in tracking down Russell Hornby
this morning one of the people he'd called up was Maurice at Audico and the
last thing Maurice had said was: Listen, the other day, I was overwrought. I
was talking out of the seat of my trousers. We'd had a break in, I was
confused, was angry. Disregard it. I'm sorry. Forget about it.

      
And Dave had smiled nervously. People did get deluded, he'd
said, thinking - hoping - me too.

      
He and Prof walked out into the grounds, the house behind
them, the lawn overhung by this huge and ancient tree, branches moving like a
blurred photograph of juggling hands.
      
Dave s breathing became unsteady.
      
Prof noticed. 'Somebody walk over
your grave?'

      
'Tom Storey wouldn't even have come here. Tom didn't like old
places.'
      
'Why not?'

      
'Energies.'

      
'That's a useful word, David. What's it mean really?'

      
'Come on,' Dave said. 'Let's go back.'

      
Thinking, I'm cracking up. This is the Manor. This is a
different studio.

      
The manager was waiting for them at the door to the kitchens.
Russell, it seemed, was having breakfast.

      
'It's half-past bloody one,' Prof protested.

      
'He says - let me get this right - that you should have rung
first, that he can't offer you any work. But if you won't go away, can he see
you at the Crown in an hour?'