Chapter One

Stanwell Coombe — Thursday, 19 September 2024

The timber came down from the Back Walls at three in the morning, because that was the hour it had always come.

There was a rick of it behind the building yard, under a corrugated roof on four brick piers, and it was ash and oak and nothing else. If a man took a length out of it for a gate post he was expected to put a length back in, and the stack behind the yard had therefore been the same size for sixty years, seasoning and reseasoning itself, older at the bottom than anyone working the yard. Bidmead's grandfather had built the piers. Bidmead's father had built the roof. Bidmead, who was fifty-nine and had a bad hip and had been up since one, stood in the yard with a torch under his arm and counted the loads out onto the flatbed himself, because there was a right number and he was the only one left who knew it.

They took it up Back Walls and along the bottom of Sheep Street with the lights off, which was custom and not law, and nobody in the houses complained about the noise, and several of the upstairs windows had people standing at them in the dark.

The square had been cleared the evening before. The market stalls were folded and stacked against the wall of the Corn Hall. The setts in front of the Talbot had been lifted in a rectangle nineteen feet by eleven, numbered in chalk on their undersides, and carried away in barrows, and a steel plate laid in the hole, and eighteen inches of sand carted in on top of it and raked flat. The same four men had lifted the setts and would relay them, and two of them had done it before.

They built without nails. The base course went down as three squared oak bearers, and the courses after that were jointed and pegged, ash on oak and oak on ash, and the pegs were riven out of the same wood so that nothing in the structure would burn at a different rate from anything else. It was slower than it needed to be. Nobody suggested being quicker.

At the top course they set the cradle. It came up from the forge on a barrow, wrapped in sacking, and Trinder walked beside it with his hands in his pockets. It was a shallow iron frame, seven feet by two and a half, with eight legs and no ornament of any kind, and it was black and it was pitted and it had been in and out of eleven fires. It was the only part of the whole arrangement that would not be consumed. After a burning it was raked out of the ash while it was still too hot to touch, and stood in the yard for a week, and then went back to the forge to be looked over and put away.

Trinder's father had made it in 1963. There had been an argument at the time about whether it should be made at all, and the argument had been about permanence, and the man who lost the argument had lost it to Anton Lytle.

By half past five the stack was chest height. By seven it was finished, ten feet from the sand to the top course, and a man standing on it could look level into the first-floor windows of the Talbot, and Bidmead sent everybody home to wash and change, and went and sat on the step of the Corn Hall on his own for a while.

The roads had been filling since midnight.

They came up the Fosse from the south in a slow unbroken chain with their headlights on, and down off the A44 from Moreton, and across country from Burford on lanes that were not built for it, and by four in the morning the lane out to Sezincote was blocked in both directions by two vehicles that had each tried to reverse into the same gateway. There was no police presence on any of the approaches. There were sixteen-year-olds from the school in high-visibility vests with torches, and there were men from the sports estate on quad bikes, and there was a boy of about eleven at the top of Sheep Street who had been given a clipboard by somebody and had decided on his own initiative to write down the registration of every car that went past him, and had filled eleven pages by six.

The dog field below the cricket ground took four hundred vehicles. The cricket ground itself was not used and nobody had needed to say so. When the dog field was full they opened the forty acres of the sports estate and put cars down the headlands in rows, and when that was full they took the hay meadow on the Evenlode side and accepted that they would be regrassing it in October.

At twenty past five a black car with two motorcycles ahead of it came up from the Fosse and turned into the top of Sheep Street and was stopped by a girl in a school vest who told the outriders they could not go down there and that the field was to the left. There was a pause of some seconds. One of the outriders said something into his sleeve. Then the car turned left into the field with everybody else and parked between a Transit belonging to a scaffolding firm in Cumbernauld and a Fiat with Italian plates, and the man got out into the wet grass in his good shoes and walked up the hill like the rest of them.

That happened four times before eight o'clock, with variations.

Two aircraft came into Brize overnight that were not on any published movement, and their passengers came the last eighteen miles in hired cars because there was nowhere at Stanwell Coombe to put a helicopter and permission had been refused for the two fields where there might have been. The refusal had been signed by the estate office at eleven o'clock the previous morning and had gone out to nine separate applicants in identical terms.

Nobody was met. Nobody was received. There was no line, no rope, no seating plan and no order of precedence, and by seven in the morning the square held perhaps two thousand people standing shoulder to shoulder in the wet, with the stack in the middle of them, and among those two thousand were a former head of a European government, the chief executive of a bank, six men from Glasgow in their eighties who had come down on a coach, a Sicilian family of nineteen including four children under five, the entire staff of the abattoir, three professors, an archbishop in an ordinary overcoat, and a woman who cleaned at the Institute and had cleaned there since 1988.

They stood in the same rain. Several of them knew each other and did not speak. Most of them did not know each other at all.

At the Manor House the estate office had been open since Sunday and the lights had not been turned off once.

There were four telephones in the back room and all four had been ringing without pause since the Saturday morning, and by Monday they had put a second desk in the passage and moved the antiques ledgers up to the landing to make room. The business of the house — the sales, the shipping, the consignments out of Belgium, the two lots that were supposed to go to Lyon on the Friday — had simply stopped, and a card had been put in the window of the shop front on the square that said CLOSED and gave no date.

Carmelo had not slept since Sunday night and did not look like a man who had not slept.

He was seventy-one. He wore a dark suit that was neither new nor old and a black tie and no coat, and he stood at the long table in the hall with three sheets of paper in front of him, and the sheets were handwritten, and he had written them himself. One was people. One was hours. One was food.

The food was the largest of the three. It ran to both sides. It began at the bottom with bread and it had against it, in pencil, the names of eleven pubs and hotels within nine miles and the number of covers each had agreed to produce and the hour by which the vans would come, and beside three of the entries there was a small tick and beside one there was a question mark and a time, and at ten past six the man from the Talbot came in and said something quietly and Carmelo put a tick against the question mark and did not comment.

He gave instructions in a voice that did not carry past the person he was giving them to. He never raised it. Twice in the course of the morning somebody important asked him a question and he answered it in the same tone he used for the girl who came to say the second urn had failed, and the girl got slightly more of his attention.

At half past six he was asked, by a man who had flown in overnight and who had known Anton for thirty years, what the arrangements were and where he ought to stand.

"Anywhere you like," Carmelo said.

The man waited for the rest of it, and there was no rest of it, and after a moment he said thank you and went out into the square and stood in the rain at the Digbeth Street corner next to two women from the vet's.

There was one item on the first sheet that Carmelo had not delegated and had not written down. At a quarter to seven he went out through the kitchen and down the back way alone and was gone forty minutes.