To Dream of the Dead by Phil Rickman Read Free Book Online Page A

the attic. A big bedsit, essentially, with all the kid’s spooky books, her desk, her stereo, her CDs. The door was hanging open. Merrily snapped on the light and saw the duvet in a heap, one pillow on the floor.
    What was
this
about? Jane waking up aggrieved because her craven parent hadn’t stood up at last night’s meeting and fought for Coleman’s Meadow? She hadn’t
seemed
annoyed last night, but Jane . . . one day she might become vaguely predictable, no signs of that yet.
    Merrily sat on an edge of the bed, wondering what it would be like this time next year when Jane was gone. Was she really going to carry on here on her own? With Lol on
his
own in Lucy’s old house? If they put this place on the market, the Church could clean up.
The Old Vicarage, Ledwardine, 17th century, seven bedrooms, guest-house potential
. One day they’d do it, transfer the vicar to one of the estate houses, and on mornings like this it didn’t seem such a bad idea.
    A videotape was projecting from the vintage VCR under Jane’s analogue TV. Give the kid her due, she’d never pined for home cinema – on a vicar’s stipend, still many years away.
    The tape was labelled
T-1 Feb
. Recorded last winter, long before Jane had been drawn towards a career in archaeology.
Trench One
was never less than watchable but not exactly crucial viewing. Why this one now?
    Oh, and you’ll never guess
– the kid calling back casually over her shoulder as she went upstairs to bed last night –
who’s going to be in charge of the dig
. Merrily waiting in vain for a name, but Jane always liked suspense.
    Activating the VCR and the TV, Merrily shoved in the tape and watched pre-credit shots of a sinister grey landcape under a sky tiered with clouds like stacked shelves.
    A man appeared, solid, bulky, shot from below the tump he was standing on.
Trench One
had three regular presenters who took turns to direct an excavation, present a different viewpoint, argue over the results. It was about conflict and competition.
    ‘So we’ve studied the reports of the original 1963 dig . . .’
    He was wearing some kind of bush shirt, with badges sewn on, an Army beret and jeans with ragged holes in the knees. In case anyone had any doubts, the caption spelled out:
    Prof. William Blore
.
    ‘. . . been over the geophysics, taken a stack of aerial pictures, and it now seems pretty clear to me that this is where we need to sink . . .’ Lavish grin splashing through smoky stubble. ‘
Trench One!
’
    Blore jumping down from the tump and standing for a moment rubbing his hands like he couldn’t wait to get into the soil, and then the sig tune coming up in a storm of thrash-metal as he slid on his dark glasses and people began to gather around him.
    Young people, his students.
Trench One
had begun as an Open University programme on BBC 2. Very rapidly acquiring a cult following, which built and built until they gave it peak screening. The format had altered slightly: Blore as guru, channelling youthful vigour. Merrily recalled a profile in one of the Sunday magazines describing him as
genial, profane and disarmingly intolerant
.
    She stopped the tape. Red herring, surely. No way would Coleman’s Meadow be put into the hands of the man who’d told
BBC Midlands Today
that anyone who thought the Bronze Age builders of the Dinedor Serpent were primitive obviously hadn’t met the philistines running Herefordshire Council.
    Wondering how
genial, profane and disarmingly intolerant
might translate.
    ‘What do
you
think, Lucy?’
    She looked up at the framed photo over a stack of Jane’s esoteric books. An elderly woman in her winter poncho. The wide-brimmed hat throwing a tilted shadow across bird-of-prey features blurred by the process of turning away. Jane had found the picture in the vestry files and cleaned it up, had copies made and framed the original.
    The only known portrait of Lucy Devenish who, like the old Indian warriors she’d so resembled, had probably