A Crown of Lights

1 The Local People

BETTY WAS DETERMINED To Keep the lid on the cauldron for as long as possible, which might just – the way she’d been feeling lately – mean for ever.

The arrival of the old box was no help.

It turned up on the back step at St Michael’s only a few days after they had moved into the farmhouse and a week after Betty turned twenty-seven. It wasn’t her kind of present. It seemed like a direct threat – or at least confirmation that their new life was unlikely to be the idyll that Robin expected.

For Betty, the first inkling of this – if you could call such experiences inklings – had already occurred only minutes before on that same weird evening.

The new year had been blown in, battered and dripping, and the wind and the rain still bullied the hills. Tonight, though, it looked like being clean and still and iron-hard with frost, and Robin had persuaded Betty to come with him to the top of the church tower – their church tower – to witness the brilliant winter sunset.

This was the first time she’d been up there, and the first time she’d ever been into the church out of daylight hours. It wasn’t yet five p.m. but evening still came early to the Radnor Valley in late January – the dark side of Candlemas – and Robin was leaning over the cracked parapet to watch the final bloodrush over an otherwise unblemished sky.

‘I guess what we oughta do,’ he murmured playfully, ‘is shake down that old moon.’

The Forest was laid out before them: darkening storybook hills, bearded with bracken. There were few trees – misleadingly, it had been named forest in the medieval sense of a place for hunting. Betty wondered how much of that still went on: the lamping of hares, the baiting of badgers. Maybe some night Robin would be standing up here and would see a party of silent men with guns and dogs. And then the shit would fly.

‘So, uh, how would you...’ Robin straightened up, slapping moss from his hands, ‘... how would you feel about that?’

‘You mean now, don’t you?’ With both hands, Betty pushed back her wild, blonde hair. She backed away from the edge, which had got her thinking about the death of Major Wilshire. Down below, about six feet out from the base of the tower, two flat tombstones had been exposed beneath a bush blasted back by the gales. That was probably where he’d fallen. She shivered. ‘You actually mean out here?’

He shrugged. ‘Why not?’ He wore his orange fleece and his ludicrous flattened fez-thing with tiny mirrors around the side. The way Betty saw it, Robin Thorogood, having grown up in America, had yet to develop a functioning sense of the absurd.

‘Why not?’ Betty didn’t remember exactly when ‘shaking down the moon’ had become his personal euphemism for sex, but she didn’t altogether care for the term. ‘Because this is, you know, January?’

‘We could bring up blankets.’ Robin did his abandoned puppy face.

Which no longer worked on Betty. ‘Mother of God, I bet it’s not even safe! Look at the floor... the walls! We wind up down in the bloody belfry, in a cloud of plaster dust, with multiple fractures, what happens then?’

‘Aw, come on. It’s been here for six... eight centuries. Just because—’

‘And probably falling apart for most of the last hundred years!’

Betty gripped one of the battlements, then let go quickly in alarm, convinced for a second that a lump of mortar, or whatever medieval mixture those old masons used, was actually moving underneath it. The entire tower could be crumbling, for all they knew; their funds had run to only a cursory survey by a local bloke who’d said, ‘Oh, just make sure it doesn’t fall down on anybody, and you’ll be all right.’ They ought to bring in a reliable builder to give the place a going-over before they contemplated even having a picnic up here. If they could ever afford a builder, which seemed unlikely.

Robin stood warrior-like, with his back to the fallen sun, and she knew that in his mind he was wearing animal skins and there was a short, thick blade at his hip. Very like the figure dominating his painting-in-progress: Lord Madoc the intergalactic Celt, hero of Kirk Blackmore’s Sword of Twilight. Seven hundred pages of total bollocks, but it was misty cover designs for the likes of Blackmore that were going to have to meet the mortgage premiums until Betty dared come out locally as a herbalist and healer, or whatever was socially acceptable.

‘Just I had a sensation of what it would be like afterwards,’ the great visionary artist burbled on, unabashed, ‘lying here on our backs, watching the swirl of the cosmos, from our own—’

‘Whereas I’m getting a real sensation of watching the swirl of tomato soup with croutons.’ Betty moved to the steps, took hold of the oily rope, feeling about with a trainered foot for the top step. ‘Come on. We’ll have years to do all that.’

Her words lingered in a void as hollow as these ruins. Betty could not lose the feeling that this time next year they would not even be here.

‘You know your trouble?’ Robin suddenly yelled. ‘You’re becoming sensible before your time.’

‘What?’ She spun at him, though knowing that he’d spoken without thinking... that it was just petulance... that she should let it go.

‘Well...’ He looked uneasy. ‘You know...’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘OK, OK...’ Making placatory patting gestures with his hands, too late. ‘Wrong word, maybe.’

‘No, you’ve said it now. In normal life we’re not supposed to be sensible because we’re living the fantasy. Like we’re really not supposed to bother about everyday stuff like falling to our deaths down these bloody crumbling steps, because—’

‘There’s a guy over there,’ Robin said. ‘In the field down by the creek.’

‘It’s a brook.’ Betty paused on the top step.

‘He’s looking up.’ Robin moved back to the rim of the tower. ‘He’s carrying something.’

‘A spear of light, perhaps?’ Betty said sarcastically. ‘A glowing trident?’

‘A bag, I think. A carrier bag. No, he’s not in the field. I believe he’s on the footway.’

‘Which, of course, is a public footpath – which makes him entitled to be there.’

‘Naw, he’s checking us out.’ The sunset made unearthly jewels out of the tiny round mirrors on Robin’s fez. ‘Hey!’ he shouted down. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Stop it!’ Sometimes Betty felt she was a lot older than Robin, instead of two years younger. Whole lifetimes older.

‘He went away.’

‘Of course he did. He went home to warm his bum by a roaring fire of dry, seasoned hardwood logs.’

‘You’re gonna throw that one at me all night, I can tell.’

‘Probably. While we’re sitting with our coats on in front of a lukewarm stove full of sizzling green pine.’

‘Yeah, yeah, the wood guy ripped me off. He won’t do it again.’

‘Dead right he won’t. First rule of country living: show them, from the very start, that you’re not an urban innocent.’

Robin followed her down the narrow, broken stone steps. ‘While being careful not to antagonize them, right?’

Betty stopped on the spiral, looked back up over her shoulder. It was too dark to see his face.

‘Sooner or later,’ she said, ‘there is going to be antagonism – from some of them at least. It’s a phase we’re going to have to go through and come out the other side with some kind of mutual respect. This is not Islington. This is not even Shrewsbury. In Radnorshire, the wheels of change would grind exceeding slow, if they’d ever got around to inventing the wheel.’

‘So what you’re saying, making converts could take time?’

‘We won’t live that long. Tolerance is what we aspire to: the ultimate prize.’

‘Jeez, you’re soooo— Oh, shit—’

Betty whirled round. He’d stumbled on a loose piece of masonry, was hanging on to the hand-rope.

‘You OK?’

‘Third-degree rope burn, is all. I imagine the flesh will grow back within only weeks.’

She thought of Major Wilshire again and felt unsettled.

‘I was born just twenty miles from here,’ she said soberly. ‘People don’t change much in rural areas. I don’t want to cause offence, and I don’t think we need to.’

‘You changed.’

‘It’s not the same. I’m not from yere, as they say.’ Betty stepped out of the tower doorway and onto the frozen mud of what she supposed had once been the chancel. ‘My parents just happened to be working here when I was born. They were from Off. I am, essentially, from Off.’

‘Off what?’

‘That’s what they say. It’s their word. If you’re an immigrant you’re “from Off”. I’d forgotten that. I was not quite eleven when we left there. And then we were in Yorkshire, and Yorkshire flattens all the traces.’

Curtains of cold red light hung from the heavens into the roofless nave. When Robin emerged from the tower entrance, she took his cold hand in her even colder ones.

‘Sorry to be a frigid bitch. It’s been a heavy, heavy day.’

The church was mournful around her. It was like a huge, blackened sheep skeleton, with its ribs opened out. Incongruously, it actually came with the house. Robin had been ecstatic. For him, it had been the deciding factor.

Betty let go of Robin’s hand. She was now facing where the altar must have been – the English side. And it was here, on this frigid January evening, that she had the flash.

A shivering sense of someone at prayer – a man in a long black garment, stained. His face unshaven, glowing with sweat and an unambiguous vivid fear. He’d discovered or identified or been told something he couldn’t live with. In an instant, Betty felt she was suffocating in a miasma of body odour and anguish.

No! She hauled in a cold breath, pulling off her woollen hat, shaking out her sheaf of blonde hair. Go away. Don’t want you.

Cold. Damp. Nothing else. Shook herself like a wet dog. Gone.

This was how it happened. Always without warning, rarely even a change in the temperature.

‘And it’s not officially a church any more,’ Robin was reminding her – he hadn’t, of course, sensed a thing. ‘So this is not about causing offence. Long as we don’t knock it down, we can do what we like here. This is so cool. We get to reclaim an old, pagan sacred place!’

And Betty thought in cold dismay, What kind of sacred is this? But what she actually said, surprised at her own calmness, was, ‘I just think we have to take it slowly. I know the place is decommissioned, but there’re bound to be local people whose families worshipped here for centuries. And whose grandparents got married here and... and buried, of course.’

There were still about a dozen gravestones and tombs visible around the church and, although all the remains were supposed to have been taken away and reinterred after the diocese dumped the building itself, Betty knew that when they started to garden here they’d inevitably unearth bones.

‘And maybe,’ Robin said slyly, ‘just maybe... there are people whose distant ancestors worshipped here before there was a Christian church.’

‘You’re pushing it there.’

‘I like pushing it.’

‘Yeah,’ Betty agreed bitterly.

They moved out of the ruined church and across the winterhard field and then over the yard to the back of the house. She’d left a light on in the hall. It was the only light they could see anywhere – although if they walked around to the front garden, they would find the meagre twinklings of the village of Old Hindwell dotted throughout the high, bare hedge.

She could hear the rushing of the Hindwell Brook, which almost islanded this place when, like now, it was swollen. There’d been weeks of hard rain, while they’d been making regular trips back and forth from their Shrewsbury flat in Robin’s cousin’s van, bringing all the books and stuff and wondering if they were doing the right thing.

Or at least Betty had. Robin had been obsessed from the moment he saw the ruined church and the old yew trees around it in a vague circle and the mighty Burfa Camp in the background and the enigmatic Four Stones less than a couple of miles away. And when he’d heard of the recent archaeological discoveries – the indications of a ritual palisade believed to be the second largest of its kind in Europe – it had blown him clean away. From then on, he needed to live here.

‘There you go.’ He bent down to the back doorstep. ‘What’d I tell ya?’ He lifted up something whitish.

‘What’s that?’

‘It is a carrier bag – Tesco, looks like. The individual by the river had one with him. I’m guessing this is it.’

‘He left it on our step?’

‘House-warming present, maybe? It’s kinda heavy.’

‘Put it down,’ Betty said quietly.

‘Huh?’

‘I’m serious. Put it back on the step, and go inside, put on the lights.’

‘Jeeeeeeez!’ Robin tossed back his head and howled at the newborn moon. ‘I do not understand you! One minute I’m over reacting – which, OK, I do, I overreact sometimes, I confess – and this is some harmless old guy making his weary way home to his humble fireside... and the next, he’s like dumping ten pounds of Semtex or some shit—’

‘Just put it down, Robin.’

Exasperated, Robin let the bag fall. It clumped solidly on the stone. Robin unlocked the back door.

Betty waited for him to enter first. She wouldn’t touch the bag.

It was knotted at the top. She watched Robin wrench it open. A sheet of folded notepaper fell out. He spread it out on the table and she read the type over his shoulder.

Dear Mr and Mrs Thorogood,

In the course of renovation work by the previous occupants of your house, this receptacle was found in a cavity in the wall beside the fireplace. The previous occupants preferred not to keep it and gave it away. It has been suggested you may wish to restore it to its proper place.

With all good wishes,

The Local People

‘ “The Local People”?’

Robin let the typewritten note flutter to the tabletop. ‘All of them? The entire population of Old Hindwell got together to present the newcomers with a wooden box with...’ He lifted the hinged lid, ‘... some paper in it.’

The box was of oak. It didn’t look all that old. Maybe a century, Betty thought. It was the size of a pencil box she’d had as a kid – narrow, coffin-shaped. You could probably fit it in the space left by a single extracted brick.

She was glad there was only paper in there, not... well, bones or something. She’d never seriously thought of Semtex, only bones. Why would she think that? She found she was shivering slightly, so kept her red ski jacket on.

Robin was excited, naturally: a mysterious wooden box left by a shadowy stranger, a cryptic note... major, major turn-on for him. She knew that within the next hour or so he’d have found the original hiding place of that box, if he had to pull the entire fireplace to pieces. He’d taken off his fleece and his mirrored fez. The warrior on the battlements had been replaced by the big schoolboy innocent.

He flicked on all the kitchen lights – just dangling bulbs, as yet, which made the room look even starker than in daylight. They hadn’t done anything with this room so far. There was a Belfast sink and a cranky old Rayburn and, under the window, their pine dining table and chairs from the flat. The table was much too small for this kitchen; up against the wall, under a window full of the day’s end, it looked like... well, an altar. For which this was not the correct place – and anyway, Betty was not yet sure she wanted an altar in the house. Part of the reason for finding a rural hideaway was to consider her own future, which – soon she’d have to confess to Robin – might not involve the Craft.

‘The paper looks old,’ Robin said. ‘Well... the ink went brown.’

‘Gosh, Rob, that must date it back to... oh, arguably pre-1980.’

He gave her one of those looks which said: Why have you no basic romance in you any more?

Which wasn’t true. She simply felt you should distinguish between true insight and passing impressions, between fleeting sensations and real feelings.

The basic feeling she had – especially since her sense of the praying man in the church – was one of severe unease. She would rather the box had not been delivered. She wished she didn’t have to know what was inside it.

Robin put the paper, still folded, on the table and just looked at it, not touching. Experiencing the moment, the hereness, the nowness.

And the disapproval of his lady.

All right, he’d happily concede that he loved all of this: the textures of twilight, those cuspy, numinous nearnesses. He’d agree that he didn’t like things to be over-bright and clear cut; that he wanted a foot in two countries – to feel obliquely linked to the old worlds.

And what was so wrong with that? He looked at the wild and golden lady who should be Rhiannon or Artemis or Titania but insisted on being called the ultimately prosaic Betty (this perverse need to appear ordinary). She knew what he needed – that he didn’t want too many mysteries explained, didn’t care to know precisely what ghosts were. Nor did he want the parallel world of faerie all mapped out like the London Underground. It was the gossamer trappings and wrappings that had given him a profession and a good living. He was Robin Thorogood: illustrator, seducer of souls, guardian of the softly lit doorways.

The box, then... Well, sure, the box had been more interesting unopened. Unless the paper inside was a treasure map.

He pushed it towards Betty. ‘You wanna check this out?’

She shook her head. She wouldn’t go near it. Robin rolled his eyes and picked up the paper. It fell open like a fan.

‘Well, it’s handwritten.’ He spread it flat on the tabletop.

‘Don’t count on it,’ Betty said. ‘You can fake all kinds of stuff with computers and scanners and paintboxes. You do it all the time.’

‘OK, so it’s a scam. Kirk Blackmore rigged it.’

‘If it was Kirk Blackmore,’ Betty said, ‘the box would have ludicrous runes carved all over it and when you opened it, there’d be clouds of dry ice.’

‘I guess. Oh no.’

‘What’s up?’

‘It’s some goddamn religious crap. Like the Jehovah’s Witnesses or one of those chain letters?’

‘OK, let me see.’ Betty came round and peered reluctantly at the browned ink. ‘ “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, amen, amen, amen...” Amen three times.’

‘Dogmatic.’

‘Hmmm.’ Betty read on in silence, not touching the paper. She was standing directly under one of the dangling light-bulbs, so her hair was like a winter harvest. Robin loved that her hair seemed to have life of its own.

When she stepped away, she swallowed.

He said hoarsely, ‘What?’

‘Read.’

‘Poison pen?’

She shook her head and walked away toward the rumbling old Rayburn stove.

Robin bent over the document. Some of it was in Latin, which he couldn’t understand. But there was a row of symbols, which excited him at once.

Underneath, the words in English began. Some of them he couldn’t figure out. The meaning, however, was plain.

In the name of the Father Son and Holy Ghost Amen Amen Amen...

O Lord, Jesus Christ Saviour Salvator I beseech the salvation of all who dwell within from witchcraft and from the power of all evil men or women or spirits or wizards or hardness of heart Amen Amen Amen... Dei nunce... Amen Amen Amen Amen Amen.

By Jehovah, Jehovah and by the Ineffable Names 17317... Lord Jehovah... and so by the virtue of these Names Holy Names may all grief and dolor and all diseases depart from the dwellers herein and their cows and their horses and their sheep and their pigs and poultry without any molestation. By the power of our Lord Jesus Christ Amen Amen... Elohim... Emmanuel...

Finally my brethren be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might that we may overcome all witches spells and Inchantment or the power of Satan. Lord Jesus deliver them this day – April, 1852.

Robin sat down. He tried to smile, for Betty’s sake and because, in one way, it was just so ironic.

But he couldn’t manage a smile; he’d have to work on that. Because this was a joke, wasn’t it? It could actually be from Kirk Blackmore or one of the other authors, or Al Delaney, the art director at Talisman. They all knew he was moving house, and the new address: St Michael’s Farm, Old Hindwell, Radnorshire.

But this hadn’t arrived in the mail. And also, as Betty had pointed out, if it had been from any of those guys it would have been a whole lot more extreme – creepier, more Gothic, less homespun. And dated much further back than 1852.

No, it was more likely to be from those it said it was from.

The Local People – whatever that meant.

Truth was they hadn’t yet encountered any local local people, outside of the wood guy and Greg Starkey, the London-born landlord at the pub where they used to lunch when they were bringing stuff to the farm, and whose wife had come on to Robin one time.

Betty had her back to the Rayburn for warmth and comfort. Robin moved over to join her. He also, for that moment, felt isolated and exposed.

‘I don’t get this,’ he said. ‘How could anyone here possibly know about us?’

2 Livenight

THERE WERE FOUR of them in the hospital cubicle: Gomer and Minnie, and Merrily Watkins... and death.

Death with a small ‘d’. No angel tonight.

Merrily was anguished and furious at the suddenness of this occurrence, and the timing – Gomer and Minnie’s wedding anniversary, their sixth.

Cheap, black joke. Unworthy of You.

‘Indigestion...’ Gomer was squeezing his flat cap with both hands, as if wringing out a wet sponge, and staring in disbelief at the tubes and the monitor with that ominous wavy white line from a thousand overstressed hospital dramas. ‘It’s just indigestion, her says. Like, if she said it enough times that’s what it’d be, see? Always works, my Min reckons. You tells the old body what’s wrong, you don’t take no shit – pardon me, vicar.’

The grey-curtained cubicle was attached to Intensive Care. Minnie’s eyes were closed, her breathing hollow and somehow detached. Merrily had heard breathing like this before, and it made her mouth go dry with trepidation.

It’s rather a bad one, the ward sister had murmured. You need to prepare him.

‘Let’s go for a walk.’ Merrily plucked at the sleeve of Gomer’s multi-patched tweed jacket.

She thought he glanced at her reproachfully as they left the room – as though she had the power to intercede with God, call in a favour. And then, from out in the main ward, he looked back once at Minnie, and his expression made Merrily blink and turn away.

Gomer and Minnie: sixty-somethings when they got married, the Midlands widow and the little, wild Welsh-borderer. It was love, though Gomer would never have used the word. Equally, he’d never have given up the single life for mere companionship – he could get that from his JCB and his bulldozer.

He and Merrily walked out of the old county hospital and past the building site for a big new one – a mad place to put it, everyone was saying; there’d be next to no parking space except for consultants and administrators; even the nurses would have to hike all the way to the multi-storey at night. In pairs, presumably, with bricks in their bags.

Merrily felt angry at the crassness of everybody: the health authority and its inadequate bed quota, the city planners who seemed bent on gridlocking Hereford by 2005 – and God, for letting Minnie Parry succumb to a severe heart attack during the late afternoon of her sixth wedding anniversary.

It was probably the first time Gomer had ever phoned Merrily – their bungalow being only a few minutes’ walk away. It had happened less than two hours ago, while Merrily was bending to light the fire in the vicarage sitting room, expecting Jane home soon. Gomer had already sent for an ambulance.

When Merrily arrived, Minnie was seated on the edge of the sofa, pale and sweating and breathless. Yow mustn’t... go bothering about me, my duck, I’ve been through... worse than this. The TV guide lay next to her on a cushion. An iced sponge cake sat on a coffee table in front of the open fire. The fire was roaring with life. Two cups of tea had gone cold.

Merrily bit her lip, pushing her knuckles hard into the pockets of her coat – Jane’s old school duffel, snatched from the newel post as Merrily was rushing out of the house.

They now crossed the bus station towards Commercial Road, where shops were closing for the night and most of the sky was a deep, blackening rust. Gomer’s little round glasses were frantic with city light. He was urgently reminiscing, throwing up a wall of vivid memories against the encroaching dark – telling Merrily about the night he’d first courted Minnie while they were crunching through fields and woodland in his big JCB. Merrily wondered if he was fantasizing, because it was surely Minnie who’d forced Gomer’s retirement from the plant hire business; she hated those diggers.

‘... a few spare pounds on her, sure to be. Had the ole warning from the doc about that bloody collateral. But everybody gets that, ennit?’

Gomer shuffled, panting, to a stop at the zebra crossing in Commercial Road. Merrily smiled faintly. ‘Cholesterol. Yes, everybody gets that.’

Gomer snatched off his cap. His hair was standing up like a small white lavatory brush.

‘Her’s gonner die! Her’s gonner bloody well snuff it on me!’

‘Gomer, let’s just keep praying.’

How trite did that sound? Merrily closed her eyes for a second and prayed also for credible words of comfort.

In the window of a nearby electrical shop, all the lights went out.

‘Ar,’ said Gomer dismally.

Through the hole-in-its-silencer roar of Eirion’s departing car came the sound of the phone. Jane danced into Mum’s grim scullery-office.

The light in here was meagre and cold, and a leafless climbing rose scraped at the small window like fingernails. But Jane was smiling, warm and light inside and, like, up there. Up there with the broken weathercock on the church steeple.

She had to sit down, a quivering in her chest. She remembered a tarot reader, called Angela, who had said to her, You will have two serious lovers before the age of twenty.

As she put out a hand for the phone, it stopped ringing. If Mum had gone out, why wasn’t the answering machine on? Where was Mum? Jane switched on the desk lamp, to reveal a paperback New Testament beside a newspaper cutting about the rural drug trade. The sermon pad had scribbles and blobs and desperate doodles. But there was no note for her.

Jane shrugged then sat at the desk and conjured up Eirion. Who wasn’t conventionally good-looking. Well, actually, he wasn’t good-looking at all, in some lights, and kind of stocky. And yet... OK, it was the smile. You could get away with a lot if you had a good smile, but it was important to ration it. Bring it out too often and it became like totally inane and after a while it stopped reaching the eyes, which showed insincerity. Jane sat and replayed Eirion’s smile in slow motion; it was a good one, it always started in the eyes.

Eirion? The name remained a problem. Basically, too much like Irene. Didn’t the Welsh have some totally stupid names for men? Dilwyn – that was another. Welsh women’s names, on the other hand, were cool: Angharad, Sian, Rhiannon.

He was certainly trying hard, though. Like, no way had he ‘just happened to be passing’ Jane’s school at chucking-out time. He’d obviously slipped away early from the Cathedral School in Hereford – through some kind of upper-sixth privilege – and raced his ancient heap nine or ten miles to Moorfield High before the buses got in. Claiming he’d had to deliver an aunt’s birthday present, and Ledwardine was on his way home. Total bullshit.

And the journey to Ledwardine... Eirion had really spun that out. Having to go slow, he said, because he didn’t want the hole in his exhaust to get any bigger. In the end, the bus would’ve been quicker.

But then, as Jane was climbing out of his car outside the vicarage, he’d mumbled, ‘Maybe I could call you sometime?’

Which, OK, Jane Austen could have scripted better.

‘Yeah, OK,’ she’d said, cool, understated. Managing to control the burgeoning grin until she’d made it almost to the side door of the vicarage and Eirion was driving away on his manky silencer.

The phone went again. Mum? Had to be. Jane grabbed at it.

‘Ledwardine Vicarage, how may we help you? If you wish to book a wedding, press three. To pledge a ten-thousand-pound donation to the steeple fund, press six.’

‘Is that the Reverend Watkins?’

Woman’s voice, and not local. Not Sophie at the office. And not Mum being smart. Uh-oh.

‘I’m afraid she’s not available right now,’ Jane said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘When will she be available?’

The woman sounding a touch querulous, but nothing threatening: there was this deadly MOR computer music in the background, plus non-ecclesiastical office noise. Ten to one, some time-wasting double-glazing crap, or maybe the Church Times looking for next week’s Page Three Clerical Temptress for dirty old canons to pin up in their vestries.

‘I should try her secretary at the Bishpal tomorrow,’ Jane said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The Bishop’s Palace, in Hereford. If you ask for Sophie Hill...’

Most of the time it was a question of protecting Mum from herself. If you were a male vicar you could safely do lofty and remote – part of the tradition. But an uncooperative female priest was considered a snotty bitch.

‘Look.’ A bit ratty now. ‘It is important.’

‘Also important she doesn’t die of some stress-related condition. I mean, like, important for me. Don’t imagine you’d have to go off and live with your right-wing grandmother in Cheltenham. Who are you, anyway?’

Could almost hear the woman counting one... two... three... through gritted teeth.

‘My name’s Tania Beauman, from the Livenight television programme in Birmingham.’

Oh, hey! ‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously,’ Tania Beauman said grimly.

Jane was, like, horribly impressed. Jane had seen Livenight four times. Livenight was such total crap and below the intelligence threshold of a cockroach, but compulsive viewing, oh yeah.

‘Livenight?’ Jane said.

‘Correct.’

‘Where you have the wife in the middle and the husband on one side and the toyboy lover on the other, and about three minutes to midnight one finally gets stirred up enough to call the other one a motherfucker, and then fights are breaking out in the audience, and the presenter looks really shocked although you know he’s secretly delighted because it’ll all be in the Sun again. That Livenight?’

‘Yes,’ Tania said tightly.

‘You want her on the programme?’

‘Yes, and as it involves next week’s programme we don’t have an awful lot of time to play with. Is she in?’

‘No, but I’m Merrily Watkins’s personal assistant, and I have to warn you she doesn’t like to talk about the other stuff. Which is what this is about, right? The Rev. Spooky Watkins, from Deliverance?’

Tania didn’t reply.

‘I could do it, of course, if the money was OK. I know all her secrets. I’d be very good, and controversial. I’ll call anyone a motherfucker.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Tania said drily. ‘We will bear you in mind, when you turn twelve.’

‘I’m sixteen!’

‘Just tell her I called. Have a good night.’

Jane grinned. That was all Eirion’s fault. Making her feel cool.

In the silence of the scullery, the phone went again.

‘Jane?’

‘Mum. Hey, guess wh—’

‘Listen, flower,’ Mum said, ‘I’ve got bad news.’

3 Loved Like That

‘SO, LIKE... HOW long will you be?’

‘I just don’t know, flower. We came here in Gomer’s Land Rover. It was all a bit of a rush.’

‘She was never ill, was she?’ Jane said. ‘Like really never.’ The kid’s voice was suddenly high and hoarse. ‘You can’t count on anything, can you? Not even you.’

Merrily sighed. Everybody thought she could pull strings. Gomer and Minnie’s bungalow had become like the kid’s second home in the village, Minnie the closest she’d ever had to an adopted granny.

‘Flower, I’ll have to go. I’m on the pay phone in the corridor, and I’ve no more change. As soon as I get to know something...’

‘She’s not even all that old. I mean, sixty-something... what’s that? Nobody these days—’

Jane broke off. Remembering, perhaps, how young her own father had been when his life was sliced off on the motorway that night. But that was different. His girlfriend was in the car, too, and the hand of fate was involved there, in Jane’s view.

‘Minnie’s strong. She’ll fight it,’ Merrily said.

‘She isn’t going to win, though, is she? I can tell by your voice. Where’s Gomer?’

‘Gone back in, to be with her.’

‘How’s he taking it?’

‘Well, you know Gomer. You wouldn’t want him prowling around in your sickroom.’

Gomer, in retirement, groomed the churchyard, cleared the ditches, looked out for Merrily when Uncle Ted was doing devious, senior-churchwarden things behind her back. And dreamed of the old days – the great, rampaging days of Gomer Parry Plant Hire.

‘He’ll just smash the place up or something, if they let her die,’ Jane concurred bleakly.

Meaning she herself would like to smash something up, possibly the church.

How many hours had they been here? Hospitals engendered their own time zones. Merrily hung up the phone and turned back into the ill-lit passage, teeming now: visiting hours. Once, she’d had a dream of purgatory, and it was like a big hospital, a brightly lit Brueghel kind of hospital, with all the punters helpless in operation gowns, and the staff scurrying around, feeding a central cauldron steaming with fear.

‘Merrily?’

From a trio of nurses, one detached herself and came across.

‘Eileen? I thought you were over at the other place.’

‘You get moved around. We’ll all end up in one place, anyway, if they ever finish building it, and won’t that be a fockin’ treat?’ Eileen Cullen put out a forefinger, lifted Merrily’s hair from her shoulder. ‘You’re not wearing your collar, Reverend. You finally dump the Auld Feller, or what?’

‘We’re still together,’ Merrily said. ‘And it’s still hot.’

‘Jesus, that’s disgusting.’

‘Actually, I had to leave home in a hurry.’ Merrily spotted Gomer coming out of the ward, biting on an unlit cigarette, for comfort. ‘I came with a friend. His wife’s had a serious heart attack – unexpected. You won’t say anything cynical, will you?’

‘What’s his name?’ Sister Cullen was crop-haired and angular and claimed to have left Ulster to escape from ‘bloody religion’.

‘Gomer. Gomer Parry.’

‘Well then, Mr Parry,’ Cullen said briskly as Gomer came up, blinking dazedly behind his bottle glasses, ‘you look to me to be in need of a cuppa – with a drop of something in there to take away the taste of machine tea, am I right?’ She beckoned one of the nurses over. ‘Kirsty, would you take Mr Parry to my office and make him a special tea? Stuff’s in my desk, bottom drawer.’

Gomer glanced at Merrily. She moved to follow him, but Cullen put out a restraining hand. ‘Not for you, Reverend. You’ve got your God to keep your spirits up. Spare me a minute?’

‘A minute?’

‘Pity you’re out of the uniform... still, it’s the inherent holiness that counts. All it is, we’ve got a poor feller in a state of some distress, and it’ll take more than special tea to cope with him, you know what I’m saying.’

Merrily frowned, thinking, inevitably, of the first time she’d met Eileen Cullen, across town at Hereford General, which used to be a lunatic asylum and for one night had seemed in danger of reverting back.

‘Ah no,’ said Cullen, ‘you only get one of those in a lifetime. This isn’t even a patient. More like your man, Gomer, here – with the wife. And I don’t know what side of the fence he’s on, but I’d say he’s very much a religious feller and would benefit from spiritual support.’

‘For an atheist, you’ve got a lot of faith in priests.’

‘No, I’ve got faith in women priests, which is not much at all to do with them being priests.’

‘What would you have done if I hadn’t been here?’

Cullen put her hands on her narrow hips. ‘Well, y’are here, love, so where’s the point in debating that one?’

The corridor had cracked walls and dim economy lighting.

‘I’d be truly happy about leaving this dump behind,’ Cullen said, ‘if I didn’t feel sure the bloody suits were building us a whole new nightmare.’

‘What’s his name, this bloke?’

‘Mr Weal.’

‘First name?’

‘We don’t know. He’s not a man who’s particularly forthcoming.’

‘Terrific. He seen Paul Hutton?’ The hospital chaplain.

‘Maybe.’ Cullen shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But you’re on the spot and he isn’t. What I thought was... you could perhaps say a prayer or two. He’s Welsh, by the way.’

‘What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?’

‘Well, he might be Chapel or something. They’ve got their own ways. You’ll need to play it by ear on that.’

‘You mean in case he refuses to speak to me in English?’

‘Not Welsh like that. He’s from Radnorshire. About half a mile over the border, if that.’

‘Gosh. Almost normal, then.’

‘Hmm.’ Cullen smiled. Merrily followed her into a better lit area with compact, four-bed wards on either side, mainly elderly women in them. A small boy shuffled in a doorway, looking bored and aggressively crunching crisps.

‘So what’s the matter with Mrs Weal?’

‘Stroke.’

‘Bad one?’

‘You might say that. Oh, and when you’ve said a wee prayer with him you could take him for a coffee.’

‘Eileen—’

‘It’s surely the Christian thing to do,’ Cullen said lightly.

They came to the end of the passage, where there was a closed door on their right. Cullen pushed it open and stepped back. She didn’t come in with Merrily.

She was out of there fast, pulling the door shut behind her. She leaned against the partition wall. Her lips made the words, nothing audible came out.

She’s dead.

Cullen shrugged. ‘Seen one before, have you not?’

‘You could’ve explained.’

‘Could’ve sworn I did. Sorry.’

‘And the rest of it?’

‘Ah.’

‘Quite.’ What she’d seen replayed itself in blurred images, like a robbery captured on a security video: the bedclothes turned down, the white cotton nightdress slipped from the shoulders of the corpse. The man beside the bed, leaning over his wife – heavy like a bear, some ungainly predator. He hadn’t turned around as Merrily entered, nor when she backed out.

She moved quickly to shake off the shock, pulling Eileen Cullen a few yards down the passage. ‘What in God’s name was he doing?’

‘Ah, well,’ Cullen said. ‘Would he have been cleaning her up, now?’

‘On account of the NHS can’t afford to pay people to take care of that sort of thing any more?’

Cullen tutted on seeing a tea trolley abandoned in the middle of the corridor.

‘Yes?’ Merrily said.

Cullen pushed the trolley tidily against a wall.

‘There now,’ she said. ‘Well, the situation, Merrily, is that he’s been doing that kind of thing for her ever since she came in, three days ago. Wouldn’t let anyone else attend to her if he was around – and he’s been around most of the time. He asks for a bowl and a cloth and he washes her. Very tenderly. Reverently, you might say.’

‘I saw.’

‘And then he’ll wash himself: his face, his hands, in the same water. It looked awful touching at first. He’d also insist on trying to feed her, when it was still thought she might eat. And he’d be feeding himself the same food, like you do with babies, to encourage her.’

‘How long’s she been dead?’

‘Half an hour, give or take. She was a bit young for a stroke, plainly, and he naturally couldn’t come to terms with that. At his age, he was probably convinced she’d outlive him by a fair margin. But there you go: overattentive, overpossessive, what you will. And now maybe he can’t accept she’s actually dead.’

‘I dunno. It looked... ritualistic almost, like an act of worship. Or did I imagine that?’ Merrily instinctively felt in her bag for her cigarettes before remembering where she was. ‘Eileen, what do you want to happen here?’

Cullen folded her arms. ‘Well, on the practical side...’

‘Which is all you’re concerned about, naturally.’

‘Absolutely. On the practical side, goes without saying we need the bed. So we need to get her down to the mortuary soon, and that means persuading your man out of there first. He’d stay with her all night, if we let him. The other night an auxiliary came in and found him lying right there on the floor beside the bed, fast asleep in his overcoat, for heaven’s sake.’

‘God.’ Merrily pushed her hands deep down into the pockets of Jane’s duffel. ‘To be loved like that.’ Not altogether sure what she meant.

Cullen sniffed. ‘So you’ll go back in and talk to him? Mumble a wee prayer or two? Apply a touch of Christian tenderness? And then – employing the tact and humanity for which you’re renowned, and which we’re not gonna have time for – just get him the fock out of there, yeah?’

‘I don’t know. If it’s all helping him deal with his grief...’

‘You’re wimping out, right? Fair enough, no problem.’

Merrily put down her bag on the trolley. ‘Just keep an eye on that.’

Well, she didn’t know too much about rigor mortis, but she thought that soon it wouldn’t be very easy to do what was so obviously needed.

‘We should close her eyes,’ Merrily said, ‘don’t you think?’

She put out a hesitant hand towards Mrs Weal, thumb and forefinger spread. The times she’d done this before were always in the moments right after death, when there was still that light-smoke sense of a departing spirit. But, oh God, what if the woman’s eyelids were frozen fast?

‘You will,’ Mr Weal said slowly, ‘leave her alone.’

Merrily froze. He was standing sentry-stiff. A very big man in every physical sense. His face was broad, and he had a ridged Roman nose and big cheeks, reddened by broken veins – a farmer’s face. His greying hair was strong and pushed back stiffly.

Without looking at her, he said, ‘What is your purpose in being here, madam?’

‘My name’s Merrily.’ She let her hand fall to her side. ‘I’m the... vicar of Ledwardine.’

‘So?’

‘I was just... I happened to be in the building, and the ward sister asked me to look in. She thought you might like to... talk.’

Could be a stupid thing to say. If there ever was a man who didn’t like to talk, this was possibly him. Between them, his wife’s eyes gazed nowhere, not even into the beyond. They were filmed over, colourless as the water in the metal bowl on the bedside table, and they seemed the stillest part of her. He’d pulled the bedclothes back up, so that only her face was on show. She looked young enough to be his daughter. She had light brown hair, and she was pretty. Merrily imagined him out on his tractor, thinking of her waiting for him at home. Wife number two, probably, a prize.

‘Mr Weal – look, I’m sorry I don’t know your first name...’

His eyes were downcast to the body. He wore a green suit of hairy, heavy tweed. ‘Mister,’ he said quietly.

‘Oh.’ She stepped away from the bed. ‘Right. Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you... any further.’

There was a long silence. The water bowl made her think of a font, of last rites, a baptism of the dying. Then he squinted at her across the corpse. He blinked once – which seemed, curiously, to release tension, and he grunted.

‘J.W. Weal, my name.’

She nodded. It had obviously been a mistake to introduce herself just as Merrily, like some saleswoman cold-calling.

‘How long had you been married, Mr Weal?’

Again, he didn’t reply at once, as though he was carefully turning over her question to see if a subtext dropped out.

‘Nine years, near enough.’ Yerrs, he said. His voice was higher than you’d expect, given the size of him, and brushed soft.

Merrily said, ‘We... never know what’s going to come, do we?’

She looked down at Mrs Weal, whose face was somehow unrelaxed. Or maybe Merrily was transferring her own agitation to the dead woman. Who was perhaps her own age, mid to late thirties? Maybe a little older.

‘She’s... very pretty, Mr Weal.’

‘Why wouldn’t she be?’

Dull light had awoken in his eyes, like hot ashes raked over. People probably had been talking – J.W. Weal getting himself an attractive young wife like that. Merrily wondered if there were grown-up children from some first Mrs Weal, a certain sourness in the hills.

She swallowed. ‘Do you, er... belong to a particular church?’ Cullen was right; he looked like the kind of man who would do, if only out of tradition and a sense of rural protocol.

Mr Weal straightened up. She reckoned he must be close to six and a half feet tall, and built like a great stone barn. His eyebrows met, forming a stone-grey lintel.

‘That, I think, is my personal business, thank you.’

‘Right. Well...’ She cleared her throat. ‘Would you mind if I prayed for her? Perhaps we could—’

Pray together, she was about to say. But Mr Weal stopped her without raising his voice which, despite its pitch, had the even texture of authority.

‘I shall pray for her.’

Merrily nodded, feeling limp. This was useless. There was no more she could say, nothing she could do here that Eileen Cullen couldn’t do better.

‘Well, I’m very sorry for the intrusion.’

He didn’t react – just looked at his wife. For him, there was already nobody else in the room. Merrily nodded and bit her lip, and walked quietly out, badly needing a cigarette.

‘No?’ Eileen Cullen levered herself from the wall.

‘Hopeless.’

Cullen led her up the corridor, well away from the door. ‘I’d hoped to have him away before Menna’s sister got here. I’m not in the best mood tonight for mopping up after tears and recriminations.’

‘Sorry... whose sister?’

‘Menna’s – Mrs Weal’s. The sister’s Mrs Buckingham and she’s from down south and a retired teacher, and there’s no arguing with her. And no love lost between her and that man in there.’

‘Oh.’

‘Don’t ask. I don’t know. I don’t want to know.’

‘What was Menna like?’

‘I don’t know. Except for what I hear. She wasn’t doing much chatting when they brought her in. But even if she’d been capable of speech, I doubt you’d have got much out of her. Lived in the sticks the whole of her life, looking after the ole father like a dutiful child’s supposed to when her older and wiser sister’s fled the coop. Father dies, she marries an obvious father figure. Sad story but not so unusual in a rural area.’

‘Where’s this exactly?’

‘I forget. The Welsh side of Kington. Sheep-shagging country.’

‘Charming.’

‘They have their own ways and they keep closed up.’

The amiable, voluble Gomer Parry, of course, was originally from the Radnor Valley. But this was no time to debate the pitfalls of ethnic stereotyping.

‘How did she come to have a stroke? Do you know?’

‘You’re not on the Pill yourself, Merrily?’

‘Er... no.’

‘That would be my first thought with Menna. Still on the Pill at thirty-nine. It does happen. Her doctor should’ve warned her.’

‘Wouldn’t Mr Weal have known the dangers?’

‘He look like he would?’ Cullen handed Merrily her bag. ‘Thanks for trying – you did your best. Don’t go having nightmares. He’s just a poor feller loved his wife to excess.’

‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ Merrily said. ‘I think he’s going to need help getting his life back on track. That’s the kind of guy who goes back to his farm and hangs himself in the barn.’

‘If he had a barn.’

‘I thought he was a farmer.’

‘I don’t think I said that, did I?’

‘What’s he do, then? Not a copper?’

‘Built like one, sure. No, he’s a lawyer, as it happens. Listen, I’m gonna have a porter come up and we’ll do it the hard way.’

‘A solicitor?’

Cullen gave her a shrewd look. She knew Sean had been a lawyer, that Merrily herself had been studying the law until the untimely advent of Jane had pushed her out of university with no qualifications. The difficult years, pre-ordination.

‘Man’s not used to being argued with outside of a courthouse,’ Cullen said. ‘You go back and find your wee friend. We’ll sort this now.’

Walking back towards Intensive Care, shouldering her bag, she encountered Gomer Parry smoking under a red No Smoking sign in the main corridor. He probably hadn’t even noticed it. He slouched towards her, hands in his pockets, ciggy winking between his teeth like a distant stop-light.

‘Sorry about that, Gomer. I was—’

‘May’s well get off home, vicar. Keepin’ you up all night.’

‘Don’t be daft. I’ll stay as long as you stay.’

‘Ar, well, no point, see,’ Gomer said. He looked small and beaten hollow. ‘No point now.’

The scene froze.

‘Oh God.’

She’d left him barely half an hour to go off on a futile errand which she wasn’t up to handling, and in her absence...

In the scruffy silence of the hospital corridor, she thought she heard Minnie Parry at her most comfortably Brummy: Yow don’t go worrying about us, my duck. We’re retired, got all the time in the world to worry about ourselves.

Instinctively she unslung her bag, plunged a hand in. But Gomer was there first.

‘Have one o’ mine, vicar. Extra-high tar, see.’

4 Repaganization

TUESDAY BEGAN WITH a brown fog over the windows like dirty lace curtains. The house was too quiet. They ought to get a dog. Two dogs, Robin had said after breakfast, before going off for a walk on his own.

He’d end up, inevitably, at the church, just to satisfy himself it hadn’t disappeared in the mist. He would walk all around the ruins, and the ruins would look spectacularly eerie and Robin would think, Yes!

From the kitchen window, Betty watched him cross the yard between dank and oily puddles, then let himself into the old barn, where they’d stowed the oak box. Robin also thought it was seriously cool having a barn of your own. Hey! How about I stash this in... the barn?

When she was sure he wouldn’t be coming back for a while, Betty brought out, from the bottom shelf of the dampest kitchen cupboard, the secret copy she’d managed to make of that awful witch charm. She’d done this on Robin’s photocopier while he’d gone for a tour of Old Hindwell with George and Vivvie, their weekend visitors who – for several reasons – she could have done without.

Betty now took the copy over to the window sill. Produced in high contrast, for definition, it looked even more obscurely threatening than the original.

First the flash-vision of the praying man in the church, then this.

O Lord, Jesus Christ Saviour Salvator I beseech the salvation of all who dwell within from witchcraft and from the power of all evil... Amen Amen Amen... Dei nunce... Amen Amen Amen Amen Amen.

Ritualistic repetition. A curious mixture of Catholic and Anglican. And also:

By Jehovah, Jehovah and by the Ineffable Names 17317... Holy Names... Elohim... Emmanuel...

Jewish mysticism... the Kabbalah. A strong hint of ritual magic. And then those symbols – planetary, Betty thought, astrological.

It was bizarre and muddled, a nineteenth-century cobbling together of Christianity and the occult. And it seemed utterly genuine.

It was someone saying: We know about you. We know what you are.

And we know how to deal with you.

Inside the barn, the mysterious box was still there, tucked down the side of a manger. All the hassle it was causing with Betty, Robin had been kind of hoping the Local People would somehow have spirited this item away again. It was cute, it was weird but it was, essentially, a crock of shit. A joke, right?

The Local People? He’d found he was beginning to think of ‘the local people’ the way the Irish thought of ‘the little people’: shadowy, mischievous, will-o’-the-wispish. A different species.

Robin had established that the box did originally come from this house. Or, at least, there were signs of an old hiding place inside the living-room inglenook – new cement, where a brick had been replaced. So was this the reason Betty had resisted the consecration of their living room as a temple? Because it was there that the anti-witchcraft charm had been secreted?

Betty’s behaviour had been altogether difficult most of the weekend. George Webster and his lady, the volatile Vivvie, Craft-buddies from Manchester, had come down on Saturday to help the Thorogoods get the place together, and hadn’t left until Monday afternoon. It ought to have been a good weekend, with loud music, wine and the biggest fires you could make out of resinous green pine. But Betty had kept on complaining of headaches and tiredness.

Which wasn’t like her at all. As a celebratory climax, Robin had wanted the four of them to gather at the top of the tower on Sunday night to welcome the new moon. But – wouldn’t you know? – it was overcast, cold and raining. And Betty had kept on and on about safety. Like, would that old platform support as many as four people? What did she think, that he was planning an orgy?

Standing by the barn door, Robin could just about see the top of the tower, atmospherically wreathed in fog. One day soon, he would produce a painting of it in blurry watercolour, style of Turner, and mail it to his folks in New York. This is a sketch of the church. Did I mention the ancient church we have out back?

And ancient was right.

This was the real thing. The wedge of land overlooking the creek, the glorious plot on which the medieval church of St Michael at Old Hindwell had been built by the goddamn Christians, was most definitely an ancient pagan sacred site. George Webster had confirmed it. And George had expertise in this subject.

Just take a look at these yew trees, Robin, still roughly forming a circle. That one and that one... could be well over a thousand years old.

Red-haired, beardy George running his hands down the ravines in those huge, twisting trunks and then cutting some forks of hazel, so he and Robin could do some exploratory dowsing. What you did, you asked questions – Were there standing stones here? Was this an old burial place, pre-Christianity? How many bodies are lying under here? – and you waited for the twig to twitch in response. Admittedly, a response didn’t happen too often for Robin, but George was adept.

No, there’d been no stones but perhaps wooden poles – a woodhenge kind of arrangement – where the yews now grew. And yes, there had been pre-Christian burials here. George made it 300-plus bodies at one time. But the area had been excavated and skeletons taken away for reburial before the Church sold off the site, so there was the possibility that some pagan people been taken away for Christian burial. The arrogance of those bastards!

What happened, way back when the Christians were moving into Britain, was some smart-ass pope had decreed that they should place their churches on existing sites of worship. This served two purposes: it would demonstrate the dominance of the new religion over the old and, if the site was the same, that might persuade the local tribes to keep on coming there to worship.

But that was all gonna be turned around at last. Boy, was it!

Robin stood down by the noisesome water, lining up the church with Burfa Hill, site of an Iron Age camp. He couldn’t remember when – outside of a rite – he’d last felt so exalted. Sure, it only backed up what he’d already instinctively known from standing up top of the tower the other night. But, hell, confirmation was confirmation! He and Betty had been meant to come here, to revive a great tradition.

It was about repaganization.

They hadn’t talked too much about long-term plans, but – especially after the weekend’s discoveries – it was obvious these would revolve around in some way reinstating the temple which had stood here before there ever was a Christian church. Physically, this process had already begun: the church had fallen into ruins; if this continued, one day only the tower would remain... a single great standing stone.

Beautiful!

So why wasn’t Betty similarly incandescent with excitement? Why so damn moody so much of the time? Was it that box? He’d wanted to tell George and Vivvie about the box and what it contained, but Betty had come on heavy, swearing him to silence. It’s no one else’s problem. It’s between us and them. We have to find our own way of dealing with it.

Them? Like who? She was paranoid.

And also, he knew, still spooked about what had happened to Major Wilshire, from whose widow they’d bought this place.

The Major had died after a fall from a ladder he’d erected up the side of the tower. Hearing the story, George Webster – who’d drunk plenty wine by then – had begun speculating about the site having a guardian and maybe needing a sacrifice every so many years. Maybe they could find out if anyone else had died in accidents here...

At which point Robin had beckoned George behind the barn and told him to keep bullshit ideas like that to himself.

Besides, if there was any residual atmospheric stress resulting from that incident, Robin figured the best answer would be to do something positive on the tower itself to put things right, and as soon as possible.

Some kind of ritual. Betty would know.

Back in the house, he placed the oak box on the kitchen table. Betty’s sea-green eyes narrowed in suspicion.

‘We have to deal with this, Bets,’ Robin told her. ‘Then we forget about it for ever.’

‘But not necessarily now,’ Betty said irritably.

But Robin was already reading aloud the charm again, the parts of it he could decipher. He suspected Betty could interpret some of those symbols – as well as being more psychically developed, her esoteric knowledge was a good deal deeper and more comprehensive than his own – but she was not being overhelpful here, to say the fucking least.

‘OK,’ he conceded, ‘so it’s probably complete bullshit. I guess these things must’ve been real commonplace at one time – like hanging a horseshoe on your gate.’

‘Yes,’ Betty said with heavy patience. ‘I’m sure, if we make enquiries, we’ll find out that there was a local wise man – they called them conjurors in these parts. They were probably still going strong in the nineteenth century.’

‘Like a shaman?’

‘Something like that. Someone who dealt in spells and charms. If a couple of dozen lambs went down with sheep-scab or something, the farmer would start whingeing about being bewitched and call in the conjuror. It was usually a man – probably because farmers hereabouts didn’t like dealing with women. The conjuror would probably write out a charm to keep in the fireplace, and everyone would be happy.’

‘There you go. We just happened to be exposed to this one when we were overtired and stressed-out and ready to leap to gross conclusions.’

Betty nodded non-committally. Against the murk of the morning, she was looking a little more vital, in her big, red mohair sweater and her moon talisman. She’d already gotten sweating piles of pine logs stacked up both sides of the Rayburn. Yesterday, she and Vivvie had hung Chinese lanterns on the naked bulbs and called down blessings. But when George had suggested consecrating the temple in the living room itself, Betty had resisted that. Not something to be rushed into. Give the house spirits time to get to know them. Which had sounded unusually fey, for Betty.

‘You know, if I’d followed my first instinct when I spotted that guy from the tower, I’d’ve run down directly and caught him dumping the carrier bag.’

Betty shook her head. ‘If whoever it was had come face to face with you on the doorstep, he’d just have made some excuse – like seeing lights in the house, coming over to check everything was OK. He’d have pretended the bag was his shopping and just taken it away with him.’

He didn’t argue; she was usually right. He put his hands on the box, closed his eyes, imagined other hands on the box – tried for a face.

‘I did that already,’ Betty said, offhand. ‘Nothing obvious.’

Robin opened his eyes. If she’d tried it and gotten nothing then there was nothing to be had. He had no illusions about which of them was the most perceptive in that way. He didn’t mind; he still had his creative vision.

‘Put it back, now huh, Rob?’

‘In the fireplace?’

‘In the barn, dickhead! Let’s not take any chances. Not till we know where it’s been.’

‘Ha!’ He sprang back. ‘You just have to know, dontcha?’

‘I’d quite like to know,’ Betty said casually.

‘Bets...’ He walked over, took her tenderly by the shoulders. ‘Look at me... listen... What the fuck’s it matter if someone does know we’re pagans? What kind of big deal is that these days?’

‘No problem at all,’ Betty said, ‘if you live in Islington or somewhere. In a place like this—’

‘Still no problem is my guess. Bets, this is not you. It’s me does the overreacting. Me who won’t leave the house if there’s only one magpie out in the garden. I’m telling you, this is a good place. We’re meant to be here. We came at the right time. Meant, right? Ordained. Making the church site into a sacred place again. All of that.’

Betty gently disengaged his hands. ‘I thought I might go and see Mrs Wilshire. The note says, “The previous occupant preferred not to keep it and gave it away.” So presumably they’re talking about Mrs Wilshire. Or more likely her husband.’

‘He was an old soldier. He’d have thought this was pure bullshit.’

‘Before he died,’ Betty said.

‘Whooo!’ Robin flung up his hands, backed away, as if from an apparition. ‘Don’t you start with that!’

‘They didn’t even get to live here, did they? They get the place half-renovated and then the poor old Major is gone, crash, bang.’

Robin spread his arms. ‘Bets, it’s like... it’s an ill wind. It’s a big pile of ifs. If the Wilshires had gotten all the renovation work done, everything smoothed out and shiny, and then put the place on the market, it’d’ve been way out of our price league. If people hereabouts hadn’t been put off by the tragic reasons for the sale, there might’ve been some competition... If it hadn’t gone on sale in November, all the holiday-home-seekers from London woulda been down here. If... if... if... What can I say? All the ifs were in our favour. But, if it makes you feel better, OK, let’s go see her. When?’

‘What?’

‘The widow Wilshire.’

‘Oh. No, actually, I thought I’d go alone. She struck me as a timid kind of person.’

‘And I would spook her?’

‘We don’t want to look like a delegation. Anyway, you’ve work to do.’

‘I do. I have work.’

The Kirk Blackmore artwork was complete, and would now be couriered, by special arrangement, not to the publishers but to Kirk himself. But the idea of producing a painting of the church, fog-swathed, had gotten hold of Robin, and if he mentioned it to Betty she’d be like: If you’ve got time for that, you’ve got time to emulsion a wall. But while she was gone, he could knock off a watercolour sketch of the church. He was already envisioning a seasonal series... a whatever you called a triptych when there were four of them.

‘Besides...’ Betty walked to the door then turned back with a swirl of her wild-corn hair. ‘I’m sure there are lots of new things you want to play with, without me on your back.’

Robin managed a grin. With Betty around it was sometimes like your innermost thoughts were written in neon over your head. Sometimes, even for a high priestess, this broad was awesomely spooky.

And so beautiful.

Face it: if he really thought there was an element of risk here, any danger of it turning into an unhappy place, they would be out of here, no matter how much money they lost on the deal.

But that wasn’t going to happen. That wasn’t a part of the package. How they’d come to find this place was, in itself, too magical to ignore: the prophecy... the arrival of the house particulars within the same week, the offer of the Blackmore contract along with the possibility of a mega-deal for the backlist.

It was like the road to down here had been lit up for them, and if they let those lights go out, well that would really attract some bad karma.

The Local People?

Assholes. Forget them.

5 Every Pillar in the Cloister

‘PAGANISM.’ THE BISHOP spooned mustard on to his hot dog. ‘What do we have to say about paganism?’

‘As little as possible?’ Merrily suggested.

The bishop put down his spoon on Sophie’s desk. ‘Exactly.’ He nodded, and went on nodding like, she thought, one of those brushed-fabric boxer dogs motorists used to keep on their parcel shelves. ‘Absolutely right.’

The e-mail on the computer screen concluded:

The programme will take the form of a live studio discussion and protagonists will probably include practising witches, possibly Druids, and ‘fundamentalist’ clergy. Would you please confirm asap with the programme researcher, Tania Beauman, in Birmingham?

‘So, it’s a “no”, then. Fine.’ Merrily stood up, relieved. ‘I’ll call them tonight. I’ll say it’s not a debate to which we feel we can make a meaningful contribution. And anyway, it’s not something we encounter a particular problem with in this diocese. How does that sound?’

‘Sounds eminently sensible, Merrily.’ But the bishop’s large, hairless face still looked worried.

‘Good. Nobody comes out of an edition of Livenight with any dignity left. The pits of tabloid TV – Jerry Springer off the leash.’

‘Who is Jerry Springer?’ asked the bishop.

‘You really don’t want to know.’

‘One finds oneself watching less and less television.’ He brushed crumbs from his generously cut purple shirt. ‘Which is wrong, I suppose. It is, after all, one’s pastoral duty to monitor society’s drab cavalcade... the excesses of the young... the latest jargon. The ubiquity of the word “shag” in a non-tobacco context.’

‘I’ll get my daughter Jane to compile a glossary for you.’

The bishop smiled, but still appeared strangely apprehensive. ‘So this...’ he peered at the screen ‘... Livenight is not current affairs television?’

‘Not as you know it. How would you describe Livenight, Sophie?’

‘Like a rehearsal for Armageddon.’ A shudder from the bishop’s lay secretary, now permanently based in Merrily’s gatehouse office. Sophie tucked a frond of white hair behind one ear and used a tissue to dab away a blob of English mustard which the bishop had let fall, appropriately, on the head of the burger-gobbling Homer Simpson on the computer’s mouse mat. ‘They begin with a specific topic, which is loosely based on a Sunday paper sort of news item.’

‘Say you have a suburban husband who pimps for his wife,’ Merrily said, ‘is she being exploited, or is it a valid way of meeting the mortgage premiums?’

‘Invariably,’ Sophie said, ‘they contrive to fill the studio with loud-mouthed bigots and professional cranks.’

Merrily nodded. ‘And if you’re insufficiently loud-mouthed, bigoted or cranky they just move on to the psycho sitting next to you who’s invariably shaking at the bars to escape onto live television. Whole thing makes you despair for the future of the human race. I don’t really think spreading despair is what we’re about.’

‘No,’ the bishop said uncomfortably, ‘quite. It’s just that if you don’t do it, we... we have a problem.’

Merrily stiffened. ‘What are you saying exactly, Bernie?’

Bernie Dunmore had taken to wandering down to the Deliverance office on Tuesdays for a snack lunch with Merrily. He always seemed glad to get away from the Bishop’s Palace.

Which was understandable. He was not actually the Bishop of Hereford although, as suffragan Bishop of Ludlow, in the north of the diocese, the caretaker role had fallen to him in the controversial absence of the Right Reverend Michael Hunter.

In the end, though, Mick Hunter’s disappearance had not detonated the media explosion the diocese had feared, coinciding as it had with the resignation of two other Church of England bishops and the suicide of a third – all of this following calls for an outside inquiry into their personal expenses exceeding £200,000 a year, and the acceptance of unorthodox perks.

Questions had also been asked about Hunter’s purchase of a Land Rover and a Mercedes, used by his wife, and, as neither the press nor the police had been able to substantiate anything more damaging, the diocese had been happy to shelter behind any other minor scandal. Now the issue had been turned around: four bishops had spoken out in a Sunday Times feature – ‘Keeping the Mitre on C of E Executive Stress’ – about the trials of their job in an increasingly secular age. There was, inevitably, a picture of Mick Hunter in his jogging gear, ‘escaping from the pressure’.

Was it better, under the circumstances, that the truth had not come out? Merrily wasn’t sure. But she liked Bernie Dunmore, sixty-two years old and comfortably lazy. Prepared to hold the fort until such time as the search for a suitably uncontroversial replacement for Mick Hunter could begin. No one, in fact, could be less controversial than Bernie; the worst he’d ever said about Hunter was, ‘One would have thought the Crown Appointments Commission would have been aware of Michael’s personality problems.’

As Mick’s appointee, Merrily had offered Bernie her resignation from his Deliverance role, citing the seasoned exorcist Huw Owen’s warning that women priests had become a target for every psychotic grinder of the dark satanic mills who ever sacrificed a cockerel.

‘All the more reason for you to remain, my dear,’ Bernie had told her, though she couldn’t quite follow his reasoning. She hoped it wasn’t just because he enjoyed his Tuesday lunchtimes here sitting on the Deliverance desk with a couple of hot dogs and a can of lager.

‘You explain, Sophie,’ the bishop said.

His lay secretary sat up, spry and elegant in a grey business suit with fine black stripes, and consulted her memo pad.

‘Well, as you know, this programme approached us some weeks ago, with a view to Merrily taking part in a general discussion on supernatural phenomena – which Merrily declined to do.’

‘Because Merrily was afraid of what they might already know about recent events in Hereford,’ added Merrily.

‘Indeed. I then received a personal call from Ms Tania Beauman relating to this week’s proposed paganism programme, again requesting Merrily.’

‘They’ve obviously seen that understatedly sexy photo of you, my dear,’ said Bernie.

Merrily sighed, looked at the clock: 1.35. She had to be back in Ledwardine by three for Minnie Parry’s funeral.

Sophie said, ‘You’ll probably both recall the story in the papers last Thursday about the pagan parents in Somerset who demanded that their child be allowed to make her own religious observances at the village primary school.’

The bishop winced.

‘Livenight’s programme peg for this week,’ Sophie explained. ‘It’s now claimed there are over a hundred thousand active pagans in Britain. Either belonging to groups – covens – or nurturing their beliefs independently.’

‘Complete nonsense, of course.’ The bishop sniffed. ‘But figures like that can’t be proved one way or the other.’

‘The programme will discuss the pagans’ claim that they represent the traditional old religion of the British Isles and, as such, should be granted rights and privileges at least equivalent to those accorded to Islam, Buddhism and other non-indigenous faiths.’

Bernie snorted. ‘Most of their so-called traditions date back no further than the fifties and sixties. They’re a sham. These people are just annoyed because they’ve been refused charity status.’

‘In a secular state,’ Merrily said, ‘it could be argued that their superstitions are just as valid as ours – I’m doing my devil’s advocate bit here.’

The bishop jutted his chins and straightened his pectoral cross. ‘My question, though, is should we be actively encouraging people to strip off and have sex with each other’s wives under the full moon while pretending it’s religion? I think not. But neither do I think we should be engaging them in open battle – boosting their collective ego by identifying them as representatives of the Antichrist.’

‘However,’ Sophie said, ‘that does reflect the general approach of one of our more... outgoing rural rectors: the Reverend Nicholas Ellis.’

‘Oh,’ Merrily said.

‘In his sermons and his parish magazine articles, he’s tended to employ... quite colourful terminology. Livenight’s own kind of terminology, you might say.’

Sophie and the bishop both looked enquiringly at Merrily. She shook her head. ‘I know of him only through the press cuttings. Loose-cannon priest who dumped his churches. Spent some years in the States. Charismatic. Direct intervention of the Holy Spirit... Prophecy... Tongues.’

‘Split the community,’ Bernie said, ‘when he expressed disdain for actual churches and offered to conduct his charismatic services in community halls, barns, warehouses, whatever. So Mick Hunter agreed to appoint a regular priest-in-charge in the area, to appease the traditionalists, and let Ellis continue his roving brief.’

Merrily recalled that Ellis now belonged to a fast-growing Anglican anti-Church faction calling itself the Sea of Light.

‘Awfully popular figure, this Nicholas, I’m afraid,’ Bernie Dunmore said. ‘Since we cut him loose, he’s set up in some run-down village hall and he’s packing it to the rafters with happy-clappies from miles around. Which makes him somewhat unassailable, and yet he’s not a demonstrative bloke in himself. Quiet, almost reticent, apparently. But came back from America with a knowledge of agriculture and farming ways that seems to have rather endeared him to the Radnorshire people.’

Merrily grimaced, recalling what Eileen Cullen at the hospital had said about the piece of Wales just over the border: They have their own ways and they keep closed up.

Bernie flicked her a foxy smile. ‘The man was after your job, did you know?’

Her eyebrows went up. ‘Deliverance?’

‘Wrongly assuming you’d be on the way out in the aftermath of Michael’s, er, breakdown. Soon as I showed my face in Hereford, there was Nicholas requesting an audience.’

‘Did he get one?’

‘Showed him the door, of course, but tactfully. Good God, he’s the last kind of chap you want as your exorcist. Sees the Devil behind every pillar in the cloister. Fortunately, Deliverance is rarely up for tender. Press-gang job, in my experience.’ He beamed at Merrily. ‘And all the better for that.’

‘Is he currently doing any deliverance work?’ she asked warily.

‘Frankly, my dear... one doesn’t like to enquire. Though if there are any complaints, I suppose we’ll have to peer into the pond. Meanwhile... this Livenight.’ The bishop snapped back the ringpull on his can of lager and accepted a tall glass from Sophie. ‘Apparently, he has been mentioned as a possible – what do you call it? – front-row speaker.’

‘Having already been approached by Ms Beauman,’ Sophie said, ‘and having apparently said yes.’

‘But not on behalf of the diocese,’ Merrily said. ‘Just a lone maverick, surely?’

The bishop shrugged, spilling a little lager. ‘One can’t stop the man appearing on national television. And one can’t be seen to try to stop him.’

‘But if he starts shooting his mouth off about the invasion of sinister sects and child sacrifice and that kind of stuff, it’s going to reflect on all of us.’

‘In the wake of recent events here,’ said the bishop, ‘we were all rather looking for a quiet life for a while.’

Merrily looked into the big, generally honest face of the suffragan Bishop of Ludlow, a lovely old town in south Shropshire from which he was commuting and to which he clearly couldn’t wait to get back.

‘Well...’ Sophie folded a square of green blotting paper into a beer mat for the bishop, giving herself an excuse not to look directly at Merrily. ‘Ms Beauman did intimate to me that they might be prepared to consider rescinding their invitation to the Reverend Mr Ellis... if they could recruit for their programme the person they originally had in mind.’

There was an uneasy silence. The bishop drank some lager and gazed out of the window, across Broad Street. It was starting to rain.

‘Shit,’ Merrily said under her breath.

6 Unkind Sky

‘A BOX?’ LIZZIE Wilshire looked vaguely puzzled. But more vague than puzzled, Betty thought.

‘Inside the fireplace.’

‘I did rather like that fireplace,’ Mrs Wilshire recalled. ‘It had a wonderful old beam across the top. It was the one emphatic feature of a rather drab room.’

‘Yes, the living room.’

‘You thought there ought to be beams across the ceiling too. Bryan said there still must be, underneath all the plaster. But I did like the fireplace, if precious little else.’

The fireplace to which Mrs Wilshire’s chair was presently pulled close was forlornly modern, made of brownish dressed stone. It surrounded a bronze-enamelled oil-fired stove – undernourished flames behind orange-tinted glass.

Mrs Wilshire frowned. ‘It also had woodworm, though.’

‘The box?’

‘The beam, dear. That worried me a little, until Bryan said, “Lizzie, it will take about three hundred years for the worms to eat through it.” I would still have wanted it treated, though.’ She blinked at Betty. ‘Have you had it treated, yet?’

‘Not yet. Er, Mrs Wilshire... there was a box. It was apparently found in the fireplace, while you were having some repairs done to the walls. It contained a paper with a sort of... prayer. I suppose you’d call it a prayer.’

‘Oh!’ Understanding came at last to the bulging eyes of frail Lizzie Wilshire – big eyes which made her look like an extraterrestrial or a wizened, expensive cat. ‘You mean the witch paper!’

‘Yes,’ Betty said softly, ‘the witch paper.’

It wasn’t that she was particularly old, early seventies, Betty reckoned, but she had arthritis – obvious in her hands – and accepted her own helplessness. Clearly, she’d never been used to doing very much for herself or making decisions. ‘It’s so confusing now,’ she said. ‘So many things I know nothing about. Things I don’t want to have to know about. Why should I?’

She was still living in this colonial-style bungalow on the edge of New Radnor, the tiny town, or big village, where she and the Major had lived for over fifteen years, since his retirement. Just a stopgap, the Major always said, until they found the right place... an interesting place, a place he could play with.

She told Betty how she thought he’d finally accepted that he was too old to take on something needing extensive refurbishment when, out on a Sunday drive, they’d found – not three miles away, at Old Hindwell – the house with which Major Bryan Wilshire, to the utter dismay of his wife, had fallen hopelessly in love.

‘It was empty, of course, when we saw it. It had belonged to two reclusive bachelor farmers called Prosser. The last surviving one had finally been taken into a nursing home. So you can imagine the state it was in.’

Betty already knew all this from the estate agents, and from their own searches. Also she’d sensed a residual sourness and meanness in rooms left untouched by Major Wilshire. But she let his widow talk.

‘And that awful old ruined church in the grounds. Some would say it was picturesque, but I hated it. Who could possibly want a disused church? Except Bryan, of course.’

The Major had found the church fascinating and had begun to delve into its history: when it had last been used as a place of worship, why it had been abandoned. Meanwhile, the house was to be auctioned and, because of its poor condition, the reserve price was surprisingly low. This was when the market was still at low ebb, just before the recent property boom, and there was no rush for second homes in the countryside.

‘There was no arguing with Bryan. He put in an offer and it was accepted, so the auction was called off. Bryan was delighted. It was so cheap we didn’t even have to consider selling this bungalow. He said he could renovate the place at his leisure.’

A reputable firm of contractors had been hired, but Major Wilshire insisted on supervising the work himself. The problem was that Bryan was always so hands-on, climbing ladders and scaffolding to demonstrate to the workmen exactly what he wanted doing. Lizzie couldn’t bear to look up at him; it made her quite dizzy. But Bryan had always needed that element in his life, serving as he had with that regiment in Hereford. The SAS, Betty presumed, and she wondered how an all-action man like Major Wilshire had ended up with a wife who didn’t like to look up.

At least that had spared Lizzie an eyewitness memory of the terrible accident. This had been brought about by the combination of a loose stone under a slit window in the tower, a lightweight aluminium ladder, and a freak blast of wind from the Forest.

At first they’d told her it was simply broken bones, and quite a number of them; so it would have taken Major Wilshire a long time to recover. Many months. But no internal injuries, so it could have been worse. He’d at least be home in a matter of weeks. Mrs Wilshire meanwhile had determined that he would never again go back to that awful place.

But Bryan had never come home again. The shock – or something – had brought on pneumonia. For this energetic, seemingly indestructible old soldier, it was all over in four days.

There was one photograph of the Major on the mantelpiece: a wiry man in a cap. He was not in uniform or anything, but in the garden, leaning on a spade, and his smile was only a half-smile.

‘So quick. So bewilderingly quick. There was no time at all for preparations,’ Mrs Wilshire said querulously. ‘We’d always made time to prepare for things; Bryan was a great planner. Nothing was entirely unexpected, because he was always ready for it. Whenever he had to go away, my sister would come to stay and Bryan would always pay the bills in advance and order plenty of heating oil. He always thought ahead.’

How ironic, Betty thought, that a man whose career must have involved several life-or-death situations, and certainly some gruelling and risky training exercises, should have died after a simple fall from a ladder.

From a church? Was this ironic, too?

When it started to rain harder, Robin packed up his paints and folded the easel. A few stray drops on a watercolour could prove interesting; they made the kind of accidental blurs you could use, turned the painting into a raincolour. But if it came on harder, like now, and the wind got up, this was the elements saying to him: Uh-huh, try again.

He stood for a moment down below the church ruins, watching the creek rush into a small gorge maybe fifteen feet deep, carrying branches and a blue plastic feed-sack. Wild! There was a narrow wooden footbridge which people used to cross to get to church. The bridge was a little rickety, which was also kind of quaint. Maybe this even explained why the church had become disused. Fine when the congregation came on foot from the village, but when the village population had gotten smaller, and the first automobiles had arrived in Radnorshire... well, not even country ladies liked to have to park in a field the wrong side of the Hindwell Brook and arrive in church with mud splashes up their Sunday stockings.

In the distance, over the sound of the hurrying water, Robin could hear a vehicle approaching. It was almost a mile along the track to reach the county road, so if you heard any traffic at all, it had to be heading this way. Most often it was Gareth Prosser in his Land Rover – biggest farmer hereabouts, a county councillor and also a nephew of the two old guys who used to own St Michael’s. Robin would have liked if the man stopped one time, came in for a beer, but Gareth Prosser just nodded, never smiled to him, never slowed.

Country folk took time to get to know. Apparently.

But the noise wasn’t rattly enough to be Prosser’s Land Rover, or growly enough to be his kids’ dirt bikes. It was a little early to be Betty back from the widow Wilshire’s, but – who knew? – maybe she at last had developed the hots again for her beloved husband, couldn’t wait to get back to the hissing pine fires and into the sack in that wonderful damp-walled bedroom.

Sure.

Robin kicked a half-brick into the Hindwell Brook, lifting up his face to the squally rain. It would come right. The goddess would return to her. Just the wrong part of the cycle, was all. He offered a short, silent prayer to the spirits of the rushing water, that the flow might once again go their way. Winter was, after all, a stressful time to move house.

The vehicle appeared: it was a Cherokee jeep. When the driver parked in the yard and got out, Robin stared at him, and then closed his eyes and muttered, ‘Holy shit.’

He didn’t need this. He did not need this now.

‘But we don’t believe in those things any more, do we, my dear? Witches, I mean.’

How on earth had the wife of an SAS officer managed to preserve this childlike, glazed-eyed innocence? Betty smiled and lifted the bone china teacup and saucer from her knees in order to smooth her long skirt. Jeans would have been the wrong image entirely and, after the assault on the house over the past few days, she didn’t have an entirely clean pair anyway.

Clean was paramount here. It was a museum of suburbia; it had actual trinkets. Betty guessed that the Major’s wife had secretly been hoping that the renovation work at St Michael’s would never be completed, that it would be simply a long-term hobby for him while they went on living here in New Radnor – which, although it was on the edge of the wilderness and still dominated by a huge castle-mound, was pleasant and open, with a wide main street, neat cottages, window boxes in the summer, a nice shop. Unlike Old Hindwell, it kept the Forest at arm’s length.

Mrs Wilshire said, ‘It was silly, it was slightly unpleasant. And, of course, it wasn’t even terribly old.’

‘About 1850, as I recall.’

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Wilshire. ‘Have you found another one?’

‘No, I think it’s the same one,’ Betty said patiently. ‘Someone brought it back, you see.’

‘Who in the world would do that?’

‘We don’t know. It was left on the doorstep.’

‘What an odd thing to do.’

‘Yes, it was odd, which is why we’d like to find out who did it. I was hoping you might be able to tell me who you gave the box to when you... gave it away. Do you remember, by any chance?’

‘Well, Bryan saw to that, of course. Bryan always knew where to take things, you see.’

‘Would there perhaps have been... I don’t know, a local historian or someone like that who might have had an interest in old documents?’

‘Hmmm.’ Mrs Wilshire pursed her tiny lips. ‘There’s Mr Jenkins, at the bookshop in Kington. But he writes for the newspapers as well, and Bryan was always very suspicious of journalists. Perhaps it was the new rector he gave it to.’

‘Oh.’

‘Not that he was terribly fond of the rector either. We went to one of his services, but only once. So noisy! I’ve never seen so many people in a church – well, not for an ordinary evensong. They must have come from elsewhere, like football supporters. And there were people with guitars. And candles – so many candles. Well, I have nothing against all that, but it’s not for the likes of us, is it? Are you a churchgoer, Mrs Thorogood?’

‘Er... No. Not exactly.’

‘And your husband? What is it your husband does for a living? I’m sure I did know...’

‘He’s an artist, an illustrator. He does book covers, mainly.’

‘Bryan used to read,’ Lizzie Wilshire said distantly. ‘He’d go through periods when he’d read for days in his sanctum.’ Her big eyes were moist; Betty thought of parboiled eggs.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘is there anything I can do, while I’m here? Vacuum the carpet? Clean anything? Prepare you something for tea? Or is there anywhere you need to go? You don’t drive, do you?’

‘Bryan never wanted me to use the car. He always said rural roads were far more dangerous because of the tractors and trailers. And we have a local man, Mr Gibbins, who runs a sort of part-time taxi service. He takes me into Kington twice a week and carries my shopping for me. You mustn’t worry about me, my dear, with all the work you must have on your hands, getting that old place ready to move into.’

‘We moved in last week, actually.’

Mrs Wilshire’s small mouth fell open. ‘But it was an absolute hovel when—’

She stopped, possibly remembering that her own estate agent had preferred phrases like ‘characterful and eccentric’.

‘It’s still got one or two problems,’ Betty said, more cheerfully than she felt, ‘but it doesn’t let the rain in. Well, not in most of the rooms. Mrs Wilshire, is there anyone else apart from the rector that your husband might have handed that box to – or even told about it?’

Mrs Wilshire shook her head. ‘He brought it back here to examine it, but he didn’t keep it very long, I know that, because I wouldn’t have it in the house – so dirty. I do rather remember something, but...’

Betty sighed. ‘Look, let me wash up these cups and things, at least.’

‘No dear, I can manage.’ She fumbled her cup and saucer to the coffee table, but the cup fell over and spilled some tea, which began to trickle over the edge of the table onto the carpet. Betty snatched a handful of tissues from a box nearby and went down on her knees.

Mopping, she glanced up at Lizzie Wilshire and saw years of low-level pain there, solidified like rock strata. And then, as sometimes happened when observing someone from an oblique angle, she caught a momentary glimpse of Lizzie’s aura. It was not intact and vibrated unevenly. This woman needed help.

Betty gathered up the cups and saucers. ‘Are you having treatment for the... arthritis?’

‘Oh, yes, Dr Coll. Do you know Dr Coll?’ Betty shook her head. ‘Dr Coll says I shall need a new hip, soon, and perhaps a new knee. But that may mean going all the way to Gobowen. Sixty miles or more! In the meantime, I’m on a course of tablets. Can’t have new hands, unfortunately, but Dr Coll’s been marvellous, of course. He—’

‘Steroids?’

Mrs Wilshire looked vague again. ‘Cortisone, I believe. And something else – some different pills. I have to take those twice a day. I haven’t been taking them very long. Just since after Bryan died... It seems to have got so much worse since Bryan died. All the worry, I suppose.’

‘Mrs Wilshire... I hope you don’t mind me asking, but have you ever tried anything... alternative? Or complementary, as some people prefer to say.’

‘You mean herbs and things?’

‘Sort of.’

‘I would be very wary, my dear. You never know quite what you’re taking, do you?’

Betty carried the cups and saucers into a large kitchen – made pale, rather than bright, by wide windows, triple-glazed, with a limited view of a narrow garden, a steep, green hillside and a slice of unkind sky. At the bottom of the garden was a shed or summer house with a small verandah – like a miniature cricket pavilion.

Betty’s compassion was veined with anger. Lizzie Wilshire was happily swallowing a cocktail of powerful drugs, with all kinds of side-effects. An unambitious woman who’d let her husband handle everything, make all her decisions for her, and was now willingly submitting to other people who didn’t necessarily give a shit.

When Betty came back, Lizzie Wilshire was staring placidly into the red glow of the oil heater.

‘Are you going to stay here?’ Betty asked.

‘Well, dear, the local people are so good, you see... You youngsters seem to flit about the country at whim. I don’t think I could move. I’d be afraid to.’ Mrs Wilshire looked down into her lap. ‘Of course, I don’t really like it at night – it’s such a big bungalow. So quiet.’

‘Couldn’t you perhaps move into the centre of the village?’

‘But I know Bryan’s still here, you see. The churchyard’s just around the hillside. I feel he’s watching over me. Is that silly?’

‘No.’ Betty gave her an encouraging smile. ‘It’s not silly at all.’

She walked out to the car feeling troubled and anxious in a way she hadn’t expected. That unexpected glimpse of the damaged aura suggested she was meant to come here today. Prodding the little Subaru out onto the long, straight bypass, under an already darkening sky, Betty decided to return soon with something herbal for Mrs Wilshire’s arthritis.

It would be a start. And she was getting back that feeling of having come right round in a circle. It was as a child in Llandrindod Wells, fifteen or so miles from here, that she’d first become fascinated by herbs and alternative medicines – perhaps because the bottles and jars containing them always looked so much more interesting than those from the chemist. There was that alternative shop in Llandrindod into which she was always dragging her mother then – not that she was interested.

They were both teachers, her parents: her mother at the high school, her dad in line for becoming headmaster of one of the primary schools. Betty was only ten when he failed to get the job, and soon after that they moved to Yorkshire, where he’d been born.

Teaching? Until she left school, she didn’t know there was any other kind of job. Her parents treated it like a calling to which they were both martyrs, and it was taken for granted that Betty would commit her life to the same kind of suffering. As for those ‘flights of imagination’ of hers... well, she’d grow out of all that soon enough. A teacher’s job was to stimulate the imagination of others.

Her parents were unbelieving Anglicans. Their world was colourless. Odd, really, that neither of them was sensitive. If it was in Betty’s genes, it must have been dormant for at least two generations. One of her earliest memories – from a holiday up north when she was about four – was her grandma’s chuckled ‘Go ’way wi’ you’ when she’d come up from the cellar of the big terraced house in Sheffield and asked her who the old man was who slept down there.

Betty drove slowly, feeling the countryside. The road from New Radnor cut through an ancient landscape – the historic church of Old Radnor prominent just below the skyline, like a guardian lighthouse without a light. Behind her, she felt the weight of the Radnor Forest hills – muscular, as though they were pushing her away. At Walton – a pub, farms, cottages – she turned left into the low-lying fertile bowl which archaeologists called the Walton Basin, suggesting that thousands of years ago it had been a lake. Now there was only the small Hindwell Pool, to which, according to legend, the Four Stones went secretly to drink at cockcrow – an indication that the Hindwell water had long been sacred.

To the goddess? The goddess who was Isis and Artemis and Hecate and Ceridwen and Brigid in all her forms.

It was at teacher-training college in the Midlands that Betty had been introduced to the goddess. One of her tutors there was a witch; this had emerged when Betty had confessed she found it hard to go into a particular changing room where, it turned out, a student had hanged herself. Alexandra had been entirely understanding about her reaction and had invited Betty home... into a whole new world of incense and veils, earth and water and fire and air... where dreams were analysed, the trees breathed, past and present and future coexisted... and the moon was the guiding lamp of the goddess.

The recent Walton Basin archaeological project had discovered evidence of a prehistoric ritual landscape here, including the remains of a palisade of posts, the biggest of its kind in Britain. Being here, at the centre of all this, ought to be as exciting to Betty as it was to Robin, who was now – thanks to George – totally convinced that their church occupied a site which too had once been very much part of this sacred complex.

So why had her most intense experience there been the image of a tortured figure frenziedly at prayer, radiating agony and despair, in the ruined nave of St Michael’s? She’d tried to drive it away, but it kept coming back to her; she could even smell the sweat and urine. How sacred, how euphoric, was that?

Three lanes met in Old Hindwell, converging at an undistinguished pub. Across the road, the former school had been converted into a health centre – by the famous Dr Coll, presumably. The stone and timbered cottages had once been widely spaced, but now there were graceless bungalows slotted between them. In many cases it would be indigenous local people – often retired farmers – living in these bungalows, freed at last from agricultural headaches, while city-reared incomers spent thousands turning the nearby cottages into the period jewels they were never intended to be.

She didn’t particularly remember this place from her Radnorshire childhood, and she didn’t yet know anyone here. It was actually pretty stupid to move into an area where you knew absolutely nobody, where the social structure and pattern of life were a complete mystery to you. Yet people did it all the time, lured by vistas of green, the magic of comparative isolation. But Betty realized that if there was to be any hope of their long-term survival here, she and Robin would have to start forming links locally. Connecting with the landscape was not enough.

Robin still had this fantasy of holding a mini fire festival at Candlemas, bringing in the celebrants from outside but throwing open the party afterwards to local people. Like a barbecue: the locals getting drunk and realizing that these witches were OK when you got to know them.

Candlemas – Robin preferred the Celtic ‘Imbolc’ – was barely a week away, so that was madness. Lights in the old church, chanting on the night air? Somebody would see, somebody would hear.

Too soon. Much too soon.

Or was that an excuse because Wicca no longer inspired her the way it did Robin? Why had she found George so annoying last weekend? Why had his ideas – truths and certainties to him – seemed so futile to her?

When she got home, Robin was waiting for her in the cold dusk, down by the brook. He wore his fez-thing with the mirrors, no protection at all against the rain. He looked damp and he looked agitated.

‘We have a slight difficulty,’ he said.

Robin was like those US astronauts; he saved the understatements for when things were particularly bad.

7 Possession

EVEN IN EMBITTERED January, the interior of Ledwardine Church kept its autumnal glow. Because of the apples.

This was an orchard village and, when the orchards were bare, Merrily would buy red and yellow apples in Hereford and scatter them around: on the pulpit, down by the font, along the deep window ledges.

The biggest and oldest apple there was clasped in the hand of Eve in the most dramatic of Ledwardine’s stained-glass windows, west-facing to pull in the sunset. Although there’d been no sun this afternoon, that old, fatal fruit was still a beacon, and its warmth was picked up by the lone Bramley cooking apple sitting plump and rosy on Minnie’s coffin.

‘Um... want to tell you about this morning,’ Merrily said. ‘How the day began for Gomer and me.’

She wasn’t in the pulpit; she was standing to one side of it, in front of the rood screen of foliate faces and carved wooden apples, viewing the congregation along the coffin’s shiny mahogany top.

‘Somehow, I never sleep well the night before a funeral. Especially if it’s someone I know as well as I’d got to know Minnie. So this morning, I was up before six, and I made a cup of tea, and then I walked out, intending to stroll around the square for a bit. To think about what I was going to say here.’

There must have been seventy or eighty people in the church, and she recognized fewer than half of them. As well as Minnie’s relatives from the Midlands, there were several farmer-looking blokes who must have known Gomer when he was digging drainage ditches along the Welsh border. You wanner know why most of them buggers’ve come yere, he’d hissed in Merrily’s ear, you watch how high they piles up their bloody plates with pie and cake in the village hall afterwards.

Now, she looked across at Gomer, sitting forlorn in the front pew, his glasses opaque, his wild white hair Brylcreemed probably as close to flat as it had ever been. Sitting next to him was Jane, looking amazingly neat and prim and solemn in her dark blue two-piece. Jane had taken the day off school, and had helped prepare the tea now laid out at the village hall.

‘It was very cold,’ Merrily said. ‘Nobody else in the village seemed to be up yet. No lights, no smoke from chimneys. I was thinking it was true what they say about it always being darkest just before the dawn. But then... as I walked past the lychgate... I became aware of a small light in the churchyard.’

She’d approached carefully, listening hard – remembering, inevitably, the words of Huw Owen, her tutor on the Deliverance course. They’ll follow you home, they’ll breathe into your phone at night, break into your vestry and tamper with your gear. Crouch in the back pews and masturbate through your sermons... Little rat-eyes in the dark.

The light glowed soft in the mist. It was down at the bottom of the churchyard, where it met the orchard, close to the spot where Merrily had planned a small memorial for Wil Williams, seventeeth-century vicar of this parish and the vicarage’s onetime resident ghost.

The light yellowed the air immediately above the open space awaiting Minnie Parry. Merrily had stopped about five yards from the grave and, as she watched, the light grew brighter.

And then there was another light, a small red firefly gleam, and she almost laughed in relief as Gomer Parry, glowing ciggy clamped between his teeth, reached up from below and dumped his hurricane lamp, with a clank, on the edge of the grave.

‘Oh, hell.’ Gomer heaved himself out. ‘Din’t disturb you, nor nothing, did I, vicar? Din’t think you could see this ole lamp from the vicarage. Din’t think you’d be up, see.’

‘I didn’t see it from the vicarage. I was... I was up anyway. Got a lot of things to do before... Got to see the bishop – stuff like that.’ She was burbling, half embarrassed.

‘Ar,’ said Gomer.

Merrily was determined not to ask what he’d been up to down there in the grave; if he was doing it under cover of darkness, it was no business of anyone else’s. Besides, he’d made himself solely responsible for Minnie’s resting place, turning up with his mini-JCB to attack the ice-hard ground, personally laying down the lining.

‘Fancy a cup of tea, Gomer?’

Gomer came over, carrying his lamp.

‘Bugger me, vicar,’ he said. ‘Catch a feller pokin’ round your churchyard at dead of night and you offers him a cup o’ tea?’

‘Listen, pal,’ Merrily said, echoing the asphalt tones of the verger of the Liverpool church where she’d served as a curate, ‘I’m a bloody Christian, me.’

Gomer grinned, a tired, white gash in the lamplight.

‘So... we went back to the vicarage.’ Merrily’s gaze was fixed on the shiny Bramley on Minnie’s coffin. ‘And there we were, Gomer and me, at six o’clock in the morning, sitting either side of the kitchen table, drinking tea. And for once I was at a bit of a loss...’

She heard light footsteps and saw a stocky figure tiptoeing up the central aisle; recognized young Eirion Lewis, in school uniform. He was looking hesitantly from side to side... looking for Jane. He must be extremely keen on the kid to drive straight from school to join her at the funeral of someone he hadn’t even known.

It was, you had to admit, a smart and subtle gesture. But Eirion had been raised to it; his old man ran Welsh Water or something. Eirion, though you wouldn’t know it from his English accent, had been raised among the Welsh-speaking Cardiff aristocracy: the crachach.

When he saw that Jane was in the front pew, a leading mourner, he quietly backed off and went to sit on his own in the northern aisle which was where, in the old days, the women had been obliged to sit – the ghetto aisle. Eirion was, in fact, a nice kid, so Jane would probably dump him in a couple of weeks.

Merrily looked up. ‘Then, after his second mug of tea, Gomer began to talk.’

‘All it was... just buryin’ a little box o’ stuff, ’fore my Min goes down there, like. So’s it’ll be underneath the big box, kind of thing. En’t no church rules against that, is there?’

‘If there are,’ Merrily had said, lighting a cigarette, ‘I can have them changed by this afternoon.’

‘Just bits o’ stuff, see. Couple o’ little wedding photos. Them white plastic earrings ’er insisted on wearing, ’cept for church. Nothing valuable – not even the watches.’

She had stared at him. He looked down at his tea, added more sugar. She noticed his wrist was bare.

‘Mine and Min’s, they both got new batteries. So’s they’d go on ticking for a year or so. Two year, mabbe.’

Don’t smile, Merrily told herself. Don’t cry. She remembered Gomer’s watch. It was years old, probably one of the first watches ever to work off a battery. And so it really did tick, loudly.

‘Dunno why I done it, really, vicar. Don’t make no sense, do it?’

‘I think, somehow...’ Merrily looked into the cigarette smoke, ‘it makes the kind of sense neither of us is clever enough to explain.’

‘And I’m not going to try too hard to explain it now,’ she said to the congregation. ‘I think people in this job can sometimes spend too long trying to explain too much.’

In the pew next to Gomer, Jane nodded firmly.

‘I mean, I could go on about those watches ticking day and night under the ground, symbolizing the life beyond death... but that’s not a great analogy when you start to think about it. In the end, it was Gomer making the point that he and Minnie had something together that can’t just be switched off by death.’

‘Way I sees it, vicar, by the time them ole watches d’stop ticking, we’ll both be over this – out the other side.’ Gomer had pushed both hands through his aggressive hair. ‘Gotter go on, see, ennit? Gotter bloody go on.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What was it like when your husband... when he died?’

‘A lot different,’ Merrily said. ‘If he hadn’t crashed his car we’d have got divorced. It was all a mistake. We were both too young – all that stuff.’

‘And we was too bloody old,’ Gomer said, ‘me and Min. Problem is, nothin’ in life’s ever quite... what’s that word? Synchronized. ’Cept for them ole watches. And you can bet one o’ them buggers is gonner run down ’fore the other.’

Gomer smoked in silence for a few moments. He’d been Minnie Seagrove’s second husband, she’d been Gomer’s second wife. She’d moved to rural Wales some years ago with Frank Seagrove, who’d retired and wanted to come out here for the fishing, but then had died, leaving her alone in a strange town. Merrily still wasn’t sure quite how Minnie and Gomer had first met.

Gomer’s mouth opened and shut a couple of times, as if there was something important he wanted to ask her but he wasn’t sure how.

‘Not seen your friend, Lol, round yere for a while,’ he said at last – which wasn’t it.

‘He’s over in Birmingham, on a course.’

‘Ar?’

‘Psychotherapy. Had to give up his flat, and then he got some money, unexpectedly, from his old record company and he’s spent it on this course. Half of him thinks he should become a full-time psychotherapist – like, what mental health needs is more ex-loonies. The other half thinks it’s all crap. But he’s doing the course, then he’s going to make a decision.’

‘Good boy,’ Gomer said.

‘Jane still insists she has hopes for Lol and me.’

Gomer nodded. Then he said quickly, ‘Dunno quite how to put this, see. I mean, it’s your job, ennit, to keep us all in hopes of the hereafter: ’E died so we could live on, kinder thing – which never made full sense to me, but I en’t too bright, see?’

Merrily put out her cigarette. Ethel, the cat, jumped onto her knees. She plunged both hands into Ethel’s black winter coat.

The big one?

‘Only, there’s gotter be times, see, vicar, when you wakes up cold in the middle of the night and you’re thinkin’ to youself, is it bloody true? Is anythin’ at all gonner happen when we gets to the end?’

From the graveside there came no audible ticking as Minnie’s coffin went in. Gomer had accepted that his nephew, Nev, should be the one to fill in the hole, on the grounds that Minnie would have been mad as hell watching Gomer getting red Herefordshire earth all over his best suit.

Walking away from the grave, he smiled wryly. He may also have wept earlier, briefly and silently; Merrily had noticed him tilt his head to the sky, his hands clasped behind his back. He was, in unexpected ways, a private person.

Down at the village hall, he nudged her, indicating several tea plates piled higher with food than you’d have thought possible without scaffolding.

‘Give ’em a funeral in the afternoon, some of them tight buggers goes without no bloody breakfast and lunch. ’Scuse me a minute, vicar, I oughter ’ave a word with Jack Preece.’ And he moved off towards a ravaged-looking old man, whose suit seemed several sizes too big for him.

Merrily nibbled at a slice of chocolate cake and eavesdropped a group of farmer-types who’d separated themselves from their wives and didn’t, for once, seem to be discussing dismal sheep prices.

‘Bloody what-d’you-call-its – pep pills, Ecstersee, wannit? Boy gets picked up by the police, see, with a pocketful o’ these bloody Ecstersee. Up in court at Llandod. Dennis says, “That’s it, boy, you stay under my roof you can change your bloody ways. We’re gonner go an’ see the bloody rector...” ’

‘OK, Mum?’

Merrily turned to find Jane holding a plate with just one small egg sandwich. Was this anorexia, or love?

‘What happened to Eirion, flower?’

‘He had to get home.’

‘Where’s he live exactly?’

‘Some gloomy, rotting mansion out near Abergavenny. It was quite nice of him to come, wasn’t it?’

‘It was incredibly nice of him. But then... he is a nice guy.’

‘Yeah.’

Merrily tilted her head. ‘Meaning he’d be more attractive if he was a bit of a rogue? Kind of dangerous?’

‘You think I’m that superficial?’

‘No, flower. Anyway, I expect he’ll be going to university next year.’

‘He wants to work in TV, as a reporter. Not – you know – Livenight.’

‘Good heavens, no.’

‘So you’re going to do that after all then?’ Jane said in that suspiciously bland voice that screamed hidden agenda.

‘I was blackmailed.’

‘Can I come?’

Merrily raised her eyes. ‘Do I look stupid?’

‘See, I thought we could take Irene. He’s into anything to do with TV, obviously. Like, he knows his dad could get him a job with BBC Wales on the old Taff network, but he wants to make his own way. Which is kind of commendable, I’d have thought.’

‘Very honourable, flower.’

‘Still, never mind.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Sure. You told that – what was her name? Tania?’

‘Not yet.’

‘She’ll be ever so pleased.’

And Jane slid away with her plate, and Merrily saw Uncle Ted, the senior churchwarden, elbowing through the farmers. He was currently trying to persuade her to levy a charge for the tea and coffee provided in the church after Sunday services. She wondered how to avoid him. She also wondered how to avoid appearing on trash television to argue with militant pagans.

‘Mrs... Watkins?’

She turned and saw a woman looking down at her – a pale, tall, stylishly dressed woman, fifty-fiveish, with expertly bleached hair. She was not carrying any food.

‘I was impressed,’ she said, ‘with your sermon.’ Her accent was educated, but had an edge. ‘It was compelling.’

‘Well, it was just...’

‘... from the heart. Meant something to people. Meant something to me, and I didn’t even know... er...’

‘Minnie Parry.’

‘Yes.’ The woman blinked twice, rapidly – a suggestion of nerves. She seemed to shake herself out of it, straightened her back with a puppet-like jerk. ‘Sister Cullen was right. You seem genuine.’

‘Oh, you’re from the hospital...’

‘Not exactly.’ The woman looked round, especially at the farmers, her eyes flicking from face to florid face, evidently making sure there was nobody she knew within listening distance. ‘Barbara Buckingham. I was at the hospital, to visit my sister. I think you saw her the other night – before I arrived. Menna Thomas... Menna...’ Her voice hardened. ‘Menna Weal.’

‘Oh, right. I did see her, but...’

‘But she was already dead.’

‘Yes, she was, I’m afraid.’

‘Mrs Watkins,’ the woman took Merrily’s arm, ‘may I talk to you?’ Not a request. ‘I rang your office, in Hereford. Sister Cullen gave me the number. She said you were probably the person to help me. The person who deals with possession.’

‘Oh.’

‘I rang your office and they said you were conducting a funeral here, so I just... came. It seemed appropriate.’ She broke off. She was attracting glances.

‘It’s a bit crowded, isn’t it?’ Merrily said. ‘Would you like—?’

‘I’ll come to the point. Would it be possible for you to conduct a funeral service for me?’

Merrily raised an eyebrow.

‘For my sister, that is. I suppose I mean a memorial service. Though actually I don’t. She should have... she should have a real funeral in church. A proper funeral.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m not getting this.’

‘Because I can’t go, you see. I can’t go to the... interment.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because... it’s going to take place in that bastard’s garden.’ Her voice rose. ‘He won’t let her go. It’s all about possession, Mrs Watkins.’

‘I don’t...’ Several people were staring at them now, over their piled-up plates.

‘Possession of the dead by the living,’ explained Barbara Buckingham.

‘I think we’d better go back to the vicarage,’ Merrily said.

8 The E-Word

‘OH MY GOD,’ Betty said. ‘The only time I go out on my own, in walks number one on the list of situations I wouldn’t trust you to handle.’

Robin couldn’t keep still. He was pacing the kitchen, touching walls and doors, the sink, the fridge – as if the permanence of this place in his life was no longer certain.

‘So he’s in this old green Cherokee, right? And he has on this well-worn army jacket with, like, camouflage patches. And it’s unzipped, and all the time I’m hoping what’s underneath is just gonna turn out to be some kind of black turtleneck. With, like, a thick white stripe around the neck.’

Betty took off her coat, hung it behind the door and came to sit down. It wasn’t the vicar that worried her – every newcomer sooner or later had a visit from the vicar. It was how Robin had dealt with him.

‘Pretty damn clear from the start he wasn’t just coming to ask the way to someplace.’ Robin went over to the kitchen table; there were two half-pint glasses on it and four small beer bottles, all empty. ‘Guy wanted to talk. He was waiting for me to ask him in.’

‘I don’t suppose he had to wait long.’

‘Soon’s we get inside, it’s the firm handshake. “Hi, I’m Nick Ellis.” And I’m wondering do these guys drink beer? So I offer him a Michelob from the refrigerator.’

‘Normal practice is to offer them tea, Robin.’

‘No... wait... Transpires he spent some years in the States – which became detectable in his accent. And then – what can I say? – we...’

‘You exchanged history. You drank beer together.’

‘I confess, I’m standing there pouring out the stuff and I’m like...’ Robin held up a glass with a trembling hand. ‘Like, all the time, I’m half-expecting him to leap up in horror, pull out his cross... slam it in my face, like the guy in the Dracula movies. But he was fine.’

She looked sceptical. ‘What did you tell him about us?’

‘Well... this was hard for me. I’m a straight person, I’ve no time for deception, you know that.’

‘What did you tell him?’ Clenching her hands. ‘What did you say about us?’

‘Fucksake, whaddaya think I said? “Hey, priest, guess how we spent Halloween”?’ Robin went over and pulled out a chair and slumped down. ‘I told him I was an illustrator and that you were into alternative therapy. I told him you were British and we met when we were both attending a conference in New England. I somehow refrained from identifying the conference as the Wiccan International Moot in Salem, Mass. And although I did not say we were married I didn’t mention handfasting either. I said we had gotten hitched.’

‘Hitched?’

‘Uh-huh. And when he brought up the subject of religion, as priests are inclined to do when they get through with football and stuff, I was quite awesomely discreet. I simply said we were not churchgoers.’

Betty breathed out properly for the first time since sitting down. ‘All right. I’m sorry. I do trust you. I’ve just been feeling a little uptight.’

‘Because you’re not being true to yourself and your beliefs,’ Robin said severely.

‘So what was he like?’

‘Unexceptional at first. Friendly, but also watchful. Open, but... holding back. He’s of medium height but the way he holds himself makes him look taller. Rangy, you know? Looks like a backwoods boy. Looks fit. He drank just one beer while I appear to have drunk three. His hair is fairish and he wears it brushed straight back, and in a ponytail, which is cool. I mean, I have no basic problem with these guys – as a spiritual grouping. As a profession.’

‘But?’

Robin got up and fed the Rayburn some pine. The Rayburn spat in disgust. Robin looked up at Betty; his eyes were unsteady.

‘But, if you want the truth, babe, I guess this is probably a very sick and dangerous example of the species.’

Robin had been anxious the priest remained in the kitchen. He would have had problems explaining the brass pentacle over the living-room fireplace. Would not be happy to have had the Reverend Nicholas Ellis browsing through those books on the shelves. He was glad his guest consumed only one beer and therefore would be less likely to need the bathroom.

And when Ellis asked if he might take a look at the ancient church of St Michael, Robin had the back door open faster than was entirely polite.

Still raining out there. The priest wore hiking boots and pulled out a camouflage beret. They strolled back across the farmyard, around the barn into the field, where the ground was uneven and boggy. And there it was, on its promontory above the water, its stones glistening, its tower proud but its roofless body like a split, gutted fish.

‘Cool, huh, Nick?’ Robin had told the priest about St Michael’s probably becoming disused on account of the Hindwell Brook, the problem of getting cars close enough to the church in the wintertime.

The priest smiled sceptically. ‘That’s your theory, is it, Robin?’

‘Well, that and the general decline in, uh, faith. I guess some people’d started looking for something a little more progressive, dynamic.’

The Reverend Ellis stopped. He had a wide, loose mouth. And though his face was a touch weathered, it had no lines, no wrinkles. He was maybe forty.

‘What do you mean by that, Robin?’

‘Well... uh...’ Robin had felt himself blushing. He talked on about how maybe the Church had become kind of hidebound: same old hymns, same old... you know?

The minister had said nothing, just stood there looking even taller, watching Robin sinking into the mud.

‘Uh... what I meant... maybe they began to feel the Church wasn’t offering too much in the direction of personal development, you know?’

And then Ellis went, ‘Yeah, I do know. And you’re dead right.’

‘Oh. For a minute, I was worried I was offending you.’

‘The Church over here has lost much of its dynamism. Don’t suppose I need tell you that in most areas of the United States a far higher proportion of the population attends regular services than in this country.’

‘So how come you were over there?’ Robin had grabbed his chance to edge the talk away from religion.

‘Went over with my mother as a teenager. After her marriage ended. We moved around quite a bit, mainly in the South.’

‘Really? That’s interesting. My mom was English and she met my dad when he was serving with the Air Force in the north of England, and she went home with him, to New Jersey. So, like—’

‘And it was there,’ Nicholas Ellis continued steadily, ‘that I first became exposed to what you might consider a more “dynamic” manifestation of Christianity.’

‘In the, uh, Bible Belt?’ Snakes and hot coals?

‘Where I became fully aware of the power of God.’ The priest looked up at the veiled church. ‘Where, if you like, the power of the Holy Spirit reached out and touched me.’

No, Robin did not like. ‘You notice how the mist winds itself around the tower? As a painter, that fascinates me.’

‘The sheer fervour, the electric momentum, you encountered in little...’ Ellis’s hands forming fists for emphasis, ‘little clapboard chapels. The living church – I knew what that meant for the first time. Over here, we have all these exquisite ancient buildings, steeped in centuries of worship... and we’re losing it, losing it, Robin.’

‘Right,’ Robin had said neutrally.

Ellis nodded toward the ruins. ‘Poets eulogizing the beauty of country churches... and they meant the buildings, the surroundings. Man, is that not beauty at its most superficial?’

‘Uh... I guess.’ Robin considered how Betty would want him to play this and so didn’t rise to it. But he knew in his soul that what those poets were evoking, whether they were aware of it or not, was an energy of place which long pre-dated Christianity. The energy Robin was experiencing right there, right this minute, with the tower uniting with the mist and the water surging below. Sure, the Christians picked up on that, mainly in medieval times, with all those soaring Gothic cathedrals, but basically it was out of their league.

Because, Robin thought, meeting the priest’s pale eyes, this is a pagan thing, man.

And this was when he had first become aware of an agenda. Sensing that whatever the future held for him and this casual-looking priest in his army cast-offs, it was not going to involve friendly rivalry and good-natured badinage.

‘Buildings are jewellery,’ Ellis had said, ‘baubles. When I came home, I felt like a missionary in my own land. I was working as a teacher at the time. But when I was subsequently ordained, ended up here, I knew this was where I was destined to be. These people have their priorities right.’

‘How’s that?’

Ellis let the question go by. He was now talking about how the States also had its bad side. How he had spent time in California, where people threw away their souls like candy wrappers, where the Devil squatted in shop windows like Santa Claus, handing out packs of tarot cards and runes and I Ching sets.

‘Can you believe those people?’ Robin turned away to control a grin. For, albeit he was East Coast raised, he was those people.

‘Over here, it’s less obvious.’ Ellis shuddered suddenly. ‘Far more deeply embedded. Like bindweed, the worst of it’s underground.’

Robin hadn’t reacted, though he was unsure of whether this was the best response or not. Maybe some normal person bombarded with this bullshit would, by now, be telling this guy he had things to do, someplace else to go, calls to make – nice talking with you, Reverend, maybe see you around.

Looking over at the rain-screened hills, Ellis was saying how, the very week he had arrived here, it was announced that archaeologists had stumbled on something in the Radnor Valley – evidence of one of the biggest prehistoric wooden temples ever discovered in Europe.

Robin’s response had been, ‘Yeah, wasn’t that terrific?’

When Ellis had turned to him, there was a light in his eyes which Robin perceived as like a gas jet.

‘He said it was a sign of something coming to the surface.’

‘Them finding the prehistoric site?’ Betty sat up, pushing her golden hair behind her ears.

‘It was coming out like a rash, was how he put it,’ Robin said. ‘Like the disease under the surface – the disease which you only identify when the rash starts coming out?’

‘What’s he talking about?’

‘Man with an agenda, Bets.’ Robin detected a half-inch of beer in one of the Michelob bottles and drained it, laid down the bottle with a thump. ‘If there’s anything I can recognize straight off, it’s another guy with an agenda.’

‘Robin, you don’t have an agenda, you just have woolly dreams.’

‘You wanna hear this, or not?’

‘Sorry,’ Betty said, frayed. ‘Go on.’

Robin told her that when Ellis had first come here, before the Church let him go his own way, he looked after four small parishes, on both sides of the border. New Radnor was the biggest. All the parishes possessed churches, except one of these was in ruins.

‘But don’t take this the wrong way. Remember this is a guy doesn’t go for churches. He’s into clapboard shacks. Now, Old Hindwell is a village with no church any more, not even a Baptist chapel. But one thing it does have is a clapboard fucking shack. Well, not exactly clapboard – more like concrete and steel. The parish hall in fact.’

‘Is there one?’

‘Up some steps, top of the village. Built, not too well, in the early sixties. Close to derelict, when Ellis arrived. He hacks through the brambles one day and a big light comes down on him, like that guy on the road to Damascus, and he’s like, “This is it. This is my church!” You recall that film Witness, where the Amish community build this huge barn in, like, one day?’

‘Everybody mucking in. Brilliant.’

‘Yeah, well, what happens here is Christians converge from miles around to help Nick Ellis realize his vision. Money comes pouring in. Carpenters, plumbers, sundry artisans giving their work for free. No time at all, the parish hall’s good as new... better than new. And there’s a nice big cross sticking out the roof, with a light inside the porch. And every Sunday the place is packed with more people than all the other local churches put together.’

Robin paused.

Betty opened out her hands. ‘What do you want me to say? Triumph of the spirit? You think I should knock that?’

‘Wait,’ Robin told her. ‘How come all this goes down in a place with so little religious feeling they abandoned the original goddamn church?’

‘Evangelism, Robin. It spreads like a grass fire when it gets going. He’s a new kind of priest with all that American... whatever. If it can happen there, it can happen here – and obviously has. Which shows how right we were to keep a low profile, because those born-again people, to put it mildly, are not tolerant towards paganism.’

Robin shook his head. ‘Ellis denies responsibility for the upsurge. Figures it was waiting to happen – to deal with something that went wrong. Something of which Old Hindwell church is symptomatic.’

Betty waited.

‘So we’re both moving in closer to the church, and I’m finding him a little irritating by now, so I start to point out these wonderful ancient yew trees – how the building itself might be medieval but I’m told that the yews in a circle and the general positioning of the church indicate that it occupies a pre-Christian site. I’m talking in a “this doesn’t mean much to me but it’s interesting, isn’t it?” kind of voice.’

‘Robin,’ Betty said, ‘you don’t possess that voice.’

Ellis was staring at him. ‘Who told you that, Robin?’

Robin floundered. ‘Oh... the real estate agent, I guess.’

Furious with himself that, instead of speaking up for the oldest religion of these islands, he was scuttling away like some shamed vampire at dawn, allowing this humourless bastard to go on assuming without question that his own 2,000-year-old cult had established a right to the moral high ground. So how did they achieve that, Nick? By waging countless so-called holy wars against other faiths? By fighting amongst themselves with bombs and midnight kneecappings, blowing guys away in front of their kids?

‘All right,’ Ellis had then said, ‘let me tell you the truth about this church, Robin. This church was dedicated to St Michael. How much do you know about him?’

Robin could only think of Marks and freaking Spencer, but was wise enough to say nothing.

‘The Revelation of St John the Divine, Chapter Twelve. “And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought Michael and his angels.” ’

Robin had looked down at his boots.

‘ “And the great dragon was cast out... that old serpent called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world. He was cast out... into the earth.” ’

‘Uh, right,’ Robin said, ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

‘Interestingly, around the perimeter of Radnor Forest are several other churches dedicated to St Michael.’

‘Not too much imagination in those days, I guess.’

Ellis had now taken off his beret. His face was shining with rain.

‘The Archangel Michael is the most formidable warrior in God’s army. Therefore a number of churches dedicated to him would represent a very powerful barrier against evil.’

‘What evil would this be precisely, Nick?’ Robin was becoming majorly exasperated by Ellis’s habit of not answering questions – like your questions are sure to be stupid and inexact, so he was answering the ones you ought to have asked. It also bugged Robin when people talked so loosely about ‘evil’ – a coverall for fanatics.

Ellis said, ‘I visit the local schools. Children still talk of a dragon in Radnor Forest. It’s part of the folklore of the area. There’s even a line of hills a few miles from here they call the Dragon’s Back.’

Robin shrugged. ‘Local place names. That so uncommon, Nick?’

‘Not awfully. Satanic evil is ubiquitous.’

‘Yeah, but is a dragon necessarily evil?’ Robin was thinking of the fantasy novels of Kirk Blackmore, where dragons were fearsome forces for positive change.

Ellis gave him a cold look. ‘It would seem to me, Robin, that a dragon legend and a circle of churches dedicated to St Michael is incontrovertible evidence of something requiring perpetual restraint.’

‘I’m not getting this.’

‘A circle of churches.’ Ellis spread his hands. ‘A holy wall to contain the dragon. But the dragon will always want to escape. Periodically, the dragon rears... and snaps... and is forced back again and again and keeps coming back...’ Ellis clawing the air, a harsh light in his eyes, ‘until something yields.’

Now he was looking over at the ruins again, like an army officer sizing up the field of battle. This was one serious fucking fruitcake.

‘And the evil is now inside... The legend says – and you’ll find references to this in most of the books written about this area – that if just one of those churches should fall, the dragon will escape.’

Then he looked directly at Robin.

Robin said, ‘But... this is a legend, Nick.’

‘The circle of St Michael churches is not a legend.’

‘You think this place is evil?’

‘It’s decommissioned. It no longer has the protection of St Michael. In this particular situation, I would suggest that’s a sign that it requires... attention.’

‘Attention?’

Robin put on a crazy laugh, but his heart wasn’t in it. And Betty didn’t laugh at all.

‘What does he want?’

‘He...’ Robin shook his head. ‘Oh, boy. He was warning me. That fruitcake was giving me notice.’

‘Of what? What does he want?’

‘He wants to hold a service here. He believes this church was abandoned because the dragon got in. Because the frigging dragon lies coiled here. And that God has chosen him, Ellis, given him the muscle, in the shape of the biggest congregations ever known in this area, given him the power to drive the dragon out.’

Betty went very still.

‘All he wants, Bets... all he wants... is to come along with a few friends and hold some kind of a service.’

‘What kind of a service?’

‘You imagine that? All these farmers in their best suits and the matrons in their Sunday hats and Nick in his white surplice and stuff all standing around in a church with no roof singing goddamn “Bread of Heaven”? In a site that they stole from the Old Religion about eight hundred years ago and then fucking sold off? Jeez, I was so mad! This is our church now. On our farm. And we like dragons!’

Betty was silent. The whole room was silent. The rain had stopped, the breeze had died. Even the Rayburn had temporarily conquered its snoring.

Robin howled like a dog. ‘What’s happening here? Why do we have to wind up in a parish with a priest who’s been exposed to the insane Bible-freaks who stalk the more primitive parts of my beloved homeland? And is therefore no longer content with vicarage tea parties and the organ fund.’

‘So what did you say to him?’

‘Bastard had me over a barrel. I say a flat “no”, the cat’s clean out the bag. So, what I said... to my shame, I said, Nick, I could not think of letting you hold a service in there. Look at all that mud! Look at those pools of water! Just give us some time – like we’ve only been here days – give us some time to get it cleaned up. How sad was that?’

Just like Ellis, she didn’t seem to have been listening. ‘Robin, what kind of service?’

‘He said it would be no big deal – not realizing that any kind of damn service here now, was gonna be a big deal far as we’re concerned. And if it’s no big deal, why do it? Guy doesn’t even like churches.’

‘What kind of service?’ Betty was at the edge of her chair and her eyes were hard.

‘I don’t know.’ Robin was a little scared, and that made him angry. ‘A short Eucharist? Did he say that? What is that precisely? I’m not too familiar with this Christian sh—’

‘It’s a Mass.’

‘Huh?’

‘An Anglican Mass. And do you know why a Mass is generally performed in a building other than a functioning church?’

He didn’t fully. He could only guess.

‘To cleanse it,’ Betty said. ‘The Eucharist is Christian disinfectant. To cleanse, to purify – to get rid of bacteria.’

‘OK, let me get this...’ Robin pulled his hands down his face, in praying mode. ‘This is the E-word, right?’

Betty nodded.

An exorcism.

9 Visitor

THE ANSWERING MACHINE sounded quite irritable.

‘Mrs Watkins. Tania Beauman, Livenight. I’ve left messages for you all over the place. The programme goes out Friday night, so I really have to know whether it’s yes or no. I’ll be here until seven. Please call me... Thank you.’

‘Sorry.’ Merrily came back into the kitchen, hung up her funeral cloak. ‘I can’t think with that thing bleeping.’

Barbara Buckingham was sitting at the refectory table, unwinding her heavy silk scarf while her eyes compiled a photo-inventory of the room.

‘You’re in demand, Mrs Watkins.’ The slight roll on the ‘r’ and the barely perceptible lengthening of the ‘a’ showed her roots were sunk into mid-border clay. But this would be way back, many southern English summers since.

Walking through black and white timber-framed Ledwardine, across the cobbled square to the sixteenth-century vicarage, the dull day dying around them, the lights in the windows blunting the bite of evening, she’d said, ‘How quaint and cosy it is here. I’d forgotten. And so close.’

Close to what? Merrily had made a point of not asking.

‘Tea?’ She still felt slightly ashamed of the kitchen – must get round to emulsioning it in the spring. ‘Or coffee?’

Barbara would have tea. She took off her gloves.

Like her late sister, she was good-looking, but in a sleek and sharp way, with a turned-up nose which once would have been cute but now seemed haughty. The sister’s a retired teacher and there’s no arguing with her, Eileen Cullen had said.

‘I didn’t expect you to be so young, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Going on thirty-seven?’

‘Young for what you’re doing. Young to be the diocesan exorcist.’

‘Diocesan deliverance consultant.’

‘You must have a progressive bishop.’

‘Not any more.’ Merrily filled the kettle.

Mrs Buckingham dropped a short laugh. ‘Of course. That man who couldn’t take the pressure and walked out. Hunt? Hunter? I try to keep up with Church affairs. I was headmistress of a Church school for many years.’

‘In this area? The border?’

‘God no. Got out of there before I was twenty. Couldn’t stand the cold.’

Merrily put the kettle on the stove. ‘We can get bad winters here,’ she agreed.

‘Ah... not simply the climate. My father was a farmer in Radnor Forest. I remember my whole childhood as a kind of perpetual February.’

‘Frugal?’ Merrily tossed tea bags into the pot.

Mrs Buckingham exhaled bitter laughter. ‘In our house, those two tea bags would have to be used at least six times. The fat in the chip pan was only renewed for Christmas.’ Her face grew pinched at the memories.

‘You were poor?’

‘Not particularly. We had in excess of 130 acres. Marginal land, mind – always appallingly overgrazed. Waste nothing. Make every square yard earn its keep. Have you heard of hydatid disease?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘Causes cysts to grow on internal organs, sometimes the size of pomegranates. Originates from a tapeworm absorbed by dogs allowed to feed on infected dead sheep. Or, on our farm, required to eat dead sheep. Human beings can pick it up – the tapeworm eggs – simply through stroking the sheepdog. When I was sixteen I had to go into hospital to have a hydatid cyst removed from my liver.’

‘How awful.’

‘That was when I decided to get out. I doubt my father even noticed I was gone. Had another mouth to feed by then. A girl again, unfortunately.’

‘Menna?’

‘She would be... ten months old when I left. It was a long time before I began to feel guilty about abandoning her – fifteen years or more. And by then it was too late. They’d probably forgotten I’d ever existed. I expect he was even grateful I’d gone – another opportunity to try for a son, at no extra cost. A farmer with no son is felt to be lacking in something.’

‘Any luck?’

‘My mother miscarried, apparently,’ Mrs Buckingham said brusquely. ‘There was a hysterectomy.’ She shrugged. ‘I never saw them again.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Found a job in Hereford, in a furniture shop. The people there were very good to me. They gave me a room above the shop, next to the storeroom. Rather frightening at night. All those empty chairs: I would imagine people sitting there, silently, waiting for me when I came back from night classes. Character-building, though, I suppose. I got two A levels and a grant for teacher-training college.’

It all sounded faintly Dickensian to Merrily, though it could have been no earlier than the 1970s.

‘So you never went back?’ The phone was ringing.

‘After college, I went to work in Hampshire, near Portsmouth. Then a husband, kids – grown up now. No, I never went back, until quite recently. A neighbour’s daughter – Judith – kept me informed, through occasional letters. She was another farmer’s daughter, from a rather less primitive farm. Please get that phone call, if you want.’

Merrily nodded, went through to the office.

‘As it happens’ – closing the scullery door – ‘she’s here now.’

‘Listen, I’m sorry,’ Eileen Cullen said. ‘I couldn’t think what else to tell her. Showed up last night, still unhappy about the sister’s death and getting no co-operation from the doctor. I didn’t have much time to bother with her either. I just thought somebody ought to persuade her to forget about Mr Weal, and go home, get on with her life. And I thought she’d take it better coming from a person of the cloth such as your wee self.’

‘Forgive me, but that doesn’t sound like you.’

‘No. Well...’

‘So she didn’t say anything about holding a special service in church then?’

‘Merrily, the problem is I’m on the ward in one minute.’

‘Bloody hell, Eileen—’

‘Aw, Jesus, all the woman wants is her sister laid to rest in a decent, holy fashion. She’s one of your fellow Christians. Tell her you’ll say a few prayers for the poor soul, and leave it at that.’

There was an unexpected undercurrent here.

‘What happened with Mr Weal after I left the other night?’

‘Well, he came out. Eventually.’

‘Eventually?’

‘He came out when she did. And he chose to accompany her down to the mortuary.’

‘Is that normal?’

‘Well, of course it isn’t fockin’ normal. We’re not talking about a normal feller here! It was a special concession. Merrily, I really have to go. If the sister’s tardy, how can you expect the nurses—’

‘Eileen!’

‘That’s all I can tell you. Just persuade her to go home. She’ll do no good for herself.’

‘What’s that supposed to—’

Cullen hung up.

It was dark outside now, and the thorns were ticking against the scullery window.

When Merrily returned to the kitchen, Barbara Buckingham was standing under a wall lamp, her silk scarf dangling from one hand as if she was wondering whether or not to leave.

‘Mrs Watkins, I don’t want to be a pain...’

‘Merrily. Don’t be silly. Sit down. There’s no—’

‘I try to be direct, you see. In my childhood, no one was direct. They’d never meet your eyes. Keep your head down, avoid direct conflict, run neither with the English nor the Welsh. Keep your head down and move quietly, in darkness.’

The woman had been too long out of it, Merrily thought, as the kettle boiled. She’d turned her spartan childhood into something Gothic. ‘Tell me about the... possession.’

‘In essence, I believe, your job is to liberate them. The possessed, I mean.’

Merrily carefully took down two mugs from the crockery shelf. ‘Milk?’ Through the open door, she could still hear that damned rosebush scratching at the scullery window.

‘A little. No sugar.’

Merrily brought milk from the fridge. She left her own tea black, and carried both mugs to the table.

‘It’s a big word, Barbara.’

‘Yes.’

‘And often abused – I have to say that.’

‘We should both be direct.’

‘And I should tell you I’ve yet to encounter a valid case of possession. But then I’ve not been doing this very long.’

‘It may be the wrong word. Perhaps I only used it to get your attention.’ Looking frustrated, Barbara tossed her scarf onto the table. ‘I’ve attended church most of my life. Much of the time out of habit, I admit; occasionally out of need. I have no time for... mysticism, that’s what I’m trying to say. I’m not fey.’

Merrily smiled. ‘No.’

‘But Menna has been possessed for years. Do you know what I mean? Weal suffocated her in life; now he won’t let her go after death.’

Cullen: He asks for a bowl and a cloth and he washes her. Very tenderly, reverently you might say. And then he’ll wash himself: his face, his hands, in the same water.

And followed her down to the mortuary. Did Barbara know about that?

Merrily heard a key in the side door, beyond the scullery, and then footsteps on the back stairs: Jane coming in, going up to her apartment.

‘They were our family solicitors,’ Barbara said. ‘Everybody’s solicitors, in those days, it seemed. Weal and Son... the first Weal was Jeffery’s grandfather, the “and son” was Jeffery’s father R.T. Weal. Weal and Son, of Kington, and their gloomy old offices with the roll-top desks and a Victorian chair like a great dark throne. I first remember Jeffery when he was fifteen going on fifty. A lumbering, sullen boy, slow-moving, slow-thinking, single-minded, his future written in stone – Weal and Son and Son, even unto the ends of the earth. I hated them, the complete unchangingness of them – same chair, same desk, same dark tweed suits, same dark car creeping up the track.’

‘Eileen Cullen told me she thought he probably became a father figure,’ Merrily said. ‘After Menna had spent some years looking after her own father. Your dad was widowed, presumably.’

‘Sixteen or seventeen years ago. I had a letter from Judith – my friend in Old Hindwell. My father wouldn’t have told me; I no longer existed for him. And he was ailing, too. Later I learned that Menna never had a boyfriend or any social life, so she lost the best years of her life to her bloody father, and the rest of it to Weal. Who, of course, became the proverbial tower of strength when the old man died.’

‘He looked after her then?’

‘Seized his chance with a weak, unworldly girl. I... came to find her about two years ago. I’d recently taken early retirement. My daughter had just got married, my husband was away – I was at a very loose end. One morning, I simply got in my car and drove up here, and knocked on their door...’ She stared into space. ‘Menna seemed... unsurprised, unmoved, entirely incurious. I’d forgotten what these people can be like. She just stood there in the doorway – didn’t even ask me in. Talked in an offhand way, as though I was a neighbour whom she saw occasionally but didn’t particularly care for.’

‘And you actually hadn’t seen each other since she was a baby?’

The woman shook her head. There was distance now in her voice. ‘She... wore no make-up. She was pale, in an unnatural, etiolated kind of way, like grass that’s been covered up. And quite beautiful. But she didn’t seem to either know or care who I was. She might as well already have been dead.’

Jane nicked the cordless from Mum’s bedroom and took it upstairs to the trio of attic rooms that now made up her apartment: bedroom, sitting room–study and a half-finished bathroom. She put on the lights, took off her jacket, sat on the bed. Thinking about poor Gomer going home on his own to a house full of Minnie’s things. It made her cry.

Fucking death!

Jane dried her eyes on a corner of the pillowcase. Gomer wouldn’t cry. Gomer would get on with it. But how much in life was really worth getting on with? Where was it leading? Was Minnie any closer now to knowing the answer? Oh God.

Jane picked up the phone and looked at it and shrugged. If this didn’t work, it didn’t work. She rolled up her sleeve. The Livenight number was written in fibre-tip on the inside of her left arm. Jane pushed in the numbers, asked for Tania Beauman. The switchboard put her on hold and made her listen to Dire Straits – which could have been worse, though Jane would never admit it.

She leaned back against the headboard and contemplated the Mondrian walls, wondering if anyone else had ever had the idea of painting the squares and rectangles between sixteenth-century beams in different colours. She wondered what Eirion would think of it.

If she was ever to bring him up here.

If? Time was running out if she was going to fit in two serious lovers before she hit twenty. Serious could mean six months. Longer.

‘Tania Beauman.’

‘Oh, hi.’ Jane sat up. ‘You know who this is?’

‘Oh,’ said Tania.

‘Hey, don’t be like that. I may have cracked it for you.’

‘Cracked... what?’

Jane swung her feet to the floor. ‘I’m telling you, Tania, it wasn’t easy. She really didn’t want to know. Livenight? Pff! But I’m, like, “Look, Merrily, being elitist is what put the Church of England in the hole it’s in today. You can’t just turn a blind eye to paganism and pretend it isn’t happening all over again. Or before you know it there’ll be more of them around than you...” ’

‘That’s a very cogent argument,’ Tania said, ‘but why aren’t I talking to your mother?’

‘Because I’ve, like, nearly got her convinced – but I’m not quite there yet.’

‘Well, I have to tell you, you don’t have much time.’

‘But do I have the incentive, Tania? That’s the point.’

‘I wondered if there’d be a point.’

‘To be blunt,’ Jane said, ‘I need a very, very small favour.’

Home burial. It was becoming, if not exactly commonplace, then less of an upper-class phenomenon than it used to be. Merrily tried to explain this to Barbara Buckingham: that it was a secular thing, or sometimes a green issue; that you often didn’t even need official permission.

‘The main drawback for most people is the risk of taking value off their house if and when it’s sold. No one wants a grave in the garden.’

‘He’s not...’ Barbara had picked up her scarf again; she began to wind it around her hands. ‘He is not going to bury Menna; that’s the worst of it. She’s going into a... tomb.’ She pulled the scarf tight. ‘A mausoleum.’

‘Oh.’ To be loved like that.

‘He has a Victorian house at Old Hindwell,’ Barbara said. ‘The former rectory. Do you know Old Hindwell?’

‘Not really. Is it in this diocese, I can’t remember?’

‘Possibly. It’s very close to the border, about three miles from Kington, on the edge of the Forest. Radnor Forest. Weal’s house isn’t remote, but it has no immediate neighbours. In the garden there’s a... structure – wine store, ice house, air-raid shelter, I don’t know precisely what it is, but that’s where she’s going to be.’

‘Like a family vault?’

‘It’s sick. I went to see a solicitor in Hereford this morning. He told me there was nothing I could do. A man has a perfect legal right to keep his dead wife in a private museum.’

‘And as a solicitor himself, your brother-in-law is going to be fully aware of his rights.’

‘Don’t call him that!’ Barbara turned away. ‘Whole thing’s obscene.’

‘He loved her,’ Merrily said uncertainly. ‘He doesn’t want to be parted from her. He wants to feel that she’s near him. That’s the usual reason.’

‘No! It’s a statement of ownership. Possession is – what is it? – nine points of the law?’

‘That word again. Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Go ahead.’

Merrily lit a Silk Cut, pulled over an ashtray.

‘What about the funeral itself? Is it strictly private? I mean, are you kind of barred?’

‘My dear!’ Barbara dropped the scarf. ‘It’s going to be a highly public affair. A service in the village hall.’

‘Not the church?’

‘They don’t have a church any more. The minister holds his services in the village hall.’

‘Ah. And the minister is...?’

‘Father Ellis.’

‘Nick Ellis.’ Merrily nodded. This explained a lot.

‘I don’t know why so many Anglicans are choosing to call themselves “Father” now, as if they’re courting Catholicism. You know this man?’

‘I know of him. He’s a charismatic minister, which means—’

‘Not happy-clappy?’ Barbara’s eyes narrowed in distaste. ‘Everybody hugging one another?’

‘That’s one aspect of it. Nick Ellis is also a member of a group known as the Sea of Light. It’s a movement inside the Anglican Church, which maintains that the Church has become too obsessed with property. Keepers of buildings rather than souls. They claim the Holy Spirit flows through people, not stones. So a Sea of Light minister is more than happy to hold services in village halls, community centres – and private homes, of course.’

‘And the same goes for burial.’

‘I would guess so.’

‘So Jeffery has an accomplice in the clergy.’ Barbara Buckingham stood up. ‘He would have, wouldn’t he? It’s such a tight little world.’

‘Look,’ Merrily said, ‘I know how you feel, but I really don’t think there’s anything you can do about it. And if Nick Ellis is conducting a funeral service at the village hall and a ceremony in J.W. Weal’s back garden, I’m not sure I can hold another one in a church. However—’

‘Mrs Watkins... Merrily...’ She’d failed with the solicitor, now she was trying the Church.

Merrily said awkwardly, ‘I’m really not sure this is a spiritual problem.’

‘Oh, but it is.’ Barbara splayed her fingers on the table, leaned towards Merrily. ‘She comes to me, you see...’

The bereavement ghost: the visitor. Maybe sitting in a familiar chair or walking in the garden, or commonly – like Menna – in dreams. Barbara Buckingham, staying at a hotel near Kington, had dreamt of her sister every night since her death.

Menna was wearing a white shift or shroud, with darkness around her.

‘You’d prefer, no doubt, to think the whole thing is a projection of my guilt,’ Barbara said.

‘Perhaps of your loss, even though you didn’t know her. Perhaps an even greater loss, because of all those years you might have known her, and now you realize you never will. Is your husband...?’

‘In France on a buying trip. He has an antiques business.’

‘How do you feel when you wake up?’

‘Anxious.’ Barbara drank some tea very quickly. ‘And drained. Exhausted and debilitated.’

‘Have you seen a doctor?’

‘Yes. As it happens’ – a mild snort – ‘I’ve seen Menna’s doctor, Collard Banks-Morgan. We were at the same primary school. “Dr Coll”, they all call him now. But if you were suggesting that a little Valium might help to relax me, I didn’t go to consult him about myself.’

‘You wanted to know why she’d suffered a stroke.’

‘I gatecrashed his surgery at the school in Old Hindwell. Made a nuisance of myself, not that it made any difference. Bloody man told me I was asking him to be unethical, preempting the post-mortem. He was like that as a child, terribly proper. If they’d had a head boy at the primary school, it would’ve been Collard Banks-Morgan.’

‘Did you find out if there was a long-term blood pressure problem?’

‘No.’ Barbara Buckingham put on her scarf at last. ‘But I will.’

‘Look,’ Merrily said, ‘why don’t we say a prayer for Menna before you go? For her spirit. Why don’t we pop over to the church?’

‘I’ve taken too much of your time.’

‘I think it might help.’ Fifth rule of Deliverance: whether you believe the story or not, never leave things without at least a prayer. ‘I would like to help, if I can.’

And there was more to this. Merrily was curious now. Everything suggested there was more. Why should this woman feel robbed of a sister she’d never really known?

‘Then come to the funeral,’ Barbara said.

‘Me?’

‘Is that too much of an imposition?’

‘Well, no but—’

‘You were at the hospital with her.’

Merrily agonized then about whether she should tell Barbara Buckingham what she’d witnessed in the side ward. It was clear Cullen hadn’t or Barbara would have mentioned that. She remembered the feeling she’d had then of something ritualistic about the way Weal was putting dabs of water on Menna’s corpse and then himself. Refusing to let the nurses try to feed her. Refusing to let Merrily pray for her. Wanting to do everything himself. It was, she supposed, a kind of possession.

But she decided to say nothing. It might only inflame an already fraught situation.

‘OK. I’ll try to come. What day?’

‘Saturday. Three-thirty. Old Hindwell village hall.’

‘That should be OK. If something comes up, where can I get a message to you?’

‘Doesn’t matter. If you aren’t there, you aren’t there.’

‘I’ll do my best. Have you... spoken to Mr Weal?’

‘I’m not ready for that yet,’ Barbara said. ‘But I shall do. Thank you, Merrily.’

10 Nightlife of Old Hindwell

ROBIN HAD THE map spread out under a wine-bottle lamp on the kitchen table, after they’d finished supper.

‘Come take a look, Bets.’ Holding his thick, black drawing pencil the way he held his athame in a rite. ‘Whole bunch of churches around the Forest.’

The lamplight sheened his dense, Dark Ages hair. Betty leaned over him. He smelled sweet and warm, like a puppy. She felt an unexpected stirring; he was so lovably uncomplicated.

And so simplistic, sometimes, in his thinking. Why, since they’d arrived here, had any physical desire always been so swiftly soured by irritation? She gazed around the still-gloomy farmhouse kitchen. Why, with the stove on for over a week, was there still an aura of damp – always worse after sunset? She felt clammy and uncomfortable, as though she had the curse. If Robin had said, ‘Let’s give this place up, and leave now, tonight,’ she wouldn’t have hesitated.

But since that mention of the E-word, his attitude had unsubtly altered. A couple of seconds of trepidation then the male thing was kicking in. Robin wanted to find out precisely where Ellis was coming from, then get in his face. It hadn’t been helped, Betty guessed, by Ellis wearing army gear. Combat gear? She was appalled to think that she might even once have shared Robin’s zeal. If only this had been someone else’s house, the home of a fellow pagan in need of moral support.

If only she wasn’t already growing to hate their church too much to want to defend it.

She’d tried to remember her reaction on first seeing it, and couldn’t. Probably because she was being practical at the time and paying more attention to the farmhouse, leaving Robin to moon over the ruins, take dozens of photographs.

He’d now finished ringing churches on the Landranger map. Although it didn’t identify individual ones except by symbols, nearby place names sometimes would give a clue to the dedication. Betty could help him out there a little, from childhood knowledge of Welsh. She put a thumbnail to the southernmost symbol.

‘That one: the village is Llanfihangel nant Melan. Llanfihangel’s Welsh for “The Church of St Michael”.’

‘Cool.’ Robin drew an extra ring around the church and then tracked around the others with the tip of his pencil until he came to the northern part of the forest perimeter. ‘What’s this? Same word, right?’

‘Llanfihangel Rhydithon. That’s another, yeah. And then ours, of course. Three St Michael churches around the Forest. He was right, I suppose.’

‘Gotta be more. Three doesn’t make a circle.’

With swift, firm pencil strokes, he redrew the plan on his sketch-pad. Graphics were important to Robin. Making a picture made things real.

‘Of course,’ Betty said, ‘there’s nothing to suggest all these churches were built at the same time. I vaguely remember going to Llanfihangel Rhydithon as a kid, and I don’t think it’s even medieval.’

‘It’s the site that counts. Come on, Bets, what are you, agnostic now? Look through Ellis’s eyes. Guy thinks he’s fighting an active Devil.’

‘Or, more specifically, in the absence of people actually sacrificing cockerels and abusing children on his doorstep – against us,’ Betty said bitterly.

‘I’m still not sure he knows. Ellis was fishing. Like, who could’ve told him? Who else knows, or could’ve seen anything? We didn’t even use removal men.’

Betty said, ‘It scares me. I don’t want this.’

‘Aw, come on,’ he said. ‘You’re a witch. Hey, you know, damn near all these churches have just gotta be on older sites, when you see how close they are to standing stones and burial mounds.’ He leaned back in satisfaction. ‘This valley’s a damned prehistoric ritual freaking wonderland. Which explains everything.’

‘It does?’

‘You got all these sacred sites, right? It’s a good bet most of them were still being used by surviving pagan groups well into medieval times, and probably long after that. This was a remote area with a small and scattered population. Closed in, secretive. I think it’s fair to assume that even when they’d been brutally eradicated from most of the rest of the country, the Old Ways were still preserved here.’

‘Possibly.’

‘The Archangel Michael’s the hard guy of the Church. It’s them saying to the pagans, you bastards better come around, or else. Ellis, as a fundamentalist, relates to all of that. Plus, he’s been influenced by insane Bible Belt evangelists who persecute snakes. Plus, his ego’s already been blown up sky high by the size of congregations he’s pulling when all the neighbouring churches are going down the tubes. I’ve decided the guy sucks. The only remaining question is how long we keep stalling before we tell him that he and his exorcism squad can go screw themselves.’

‘I was going to say that if we don’t make an issue of it, if we let it go quiet, then he’ll probably forget about us,’ Betty said lamely.

‘Not gonna happen. Believe me, this guy’s on some kind of crusade under the banner of St Michael. Hey! Would that explain the army surplus stuff? Shit.’

Robin smiled at his own flawed logic. Betty saw, with a plummeting heart, that he wanted to be a target of Christian fanaticism.

‘When we look at those ruins,’ he said, ‘we see a resurgence of the true, indigenous spirituality. Whereas he sees a naked tower giving him and his religion the finger. He so wants to be the guy who killed the dragon and claimed it all back. It’s an ego thing.’

‘You and him both.’

The smile crashed. ‘Meaning what?’

‘You have a few beers together, you size each other up, and now you’re both flexing your muscles for the big fight. You can’t wait, can you? You love it that he’s got this huge mass of followers and there’s just the two of us here, newcomers, isolated...’

‘Now listen, lady.’ Robin was on his feet, furious. ‘My instinct was to kick his ass, right from the off, but no... I play it the way I figure you would want me to! Mr Nice Guy, Mr Don’t Frighten The Horses... Mr Take A Faceful Of Shit And Keep Smiling kind of guy!’

‘No, you didn’t. You thought you could play with him, lead him around the houses, take the piss out of him a little... when in fact he was playing with you.’

‘You weren’t even there!’

‘And you’ve never given a thought to where this could leave us. We have to live here... Whatever happens, we have to live here afterwards. And we will have to live here, because – in case you haven’t thought about this – who is going to buy a rundown house along with a ruined church which the local minister insists is infested with demonic evil?’ She spun away from him.

‘You shithead.’

Robin snatched in a breath that was halfway to a sob then threw his pencil down on the table. ‘I need some air.’

‘You certainly do!’

He turned his back on her, strode across the kitchen like Lord bloody Madoc and tore open the back door. Before he slammed it behind him, she heard the rushing of the rain-swollen Hindwell Brook in the night, like a hiss of glee.

Betty let her head fall into her hands on the tabletop.

What have we done? What have we walked into?

Robin stomped across the yard, hit the track toward the gate and the road. It was cold and the going wasn’t so easy in the dark, but he was damned if he was going back for a coat and flashlight.

Why, why was whatever he said, whatever he did, whatever he tried to do, always the wrong fucking thing?

Four years he and Betty had been together and, sure, they were different people, raised in different cultures. But they’d previously come through on shared beliefs, a strong respect for natural forces and each other’s destiny.

And he’d thought the road to Old Hindwell was lit for them both.

All the portents had been there, just as soon as they decided they would look for a place in the countryside where they might explore the roots of the old spirituality. They’d let it be known on the pagan network that they were looking for something rural and it didn’t have to be luxurious. The Shrewsbury coven had worked a spell on their behalf and, before that week was out, they’d received – anonymously, but with a wellwisher’s symbol and the message ‘Thought you might be interested in this... Blessed Be!’ – the estate agent’s particulars of St Michael’s Farm. And – in the very same post – a letter from Al Delaney at Talisman to say that Kirk Blackmore was impressed with Robin’s work and would like him to design the new cover... with the possibility of a contract for the soon-to-be-rejacketed backlist of SEVEN VOLUMES!

Even Betty had to agree, it was like writing in the sky.

Robin joined the lane that led first past the Prosser farm and then on to the village. The farm was spread across the council roadway, like it owned it, sheds and barns on either side, mud from tractor wheels softening the surface of the road. A Land Rover was parked under an awning. It had a big yellow sticker in the back window, and even at night you could read ‘Christ is the Light!’ in luminous yellow. Robin gave a moan, stifled it. He hadn’t known about this. If Ellis denounced them, they’d have no support from their neighbours.

When he got clear of the farm he surveyed the night. Ahead of him, the moon lay on its back over a long hill bristling with ranks of conifers – a hedgehog’s back, a dragon’s back. Robin held out his arms as if to embrace the hill, then let them fall uselessly to his sides and walked on down the middle of the narrow lane, with ditches to either side and banks topped by hedges so savagely pleached they were almost like hurdles. Gareth Prosser was clearly a farmer who liked to keep nature under his thumb. His farm, his land. Robin wondered how Prosser had reacted to the team of archaeologists who’d moved in and sheared the surface from one of his fields to uncover postholes revealing that, four thousand years ago, the farm had been a key site of ritual pagan worship. Maybe Prosser had gotten Ellis in to sanctify the site.

Whatever, there was virtually nothing to see there now. Robin had sent off to the Council for British Archaeology for the report on the Radnor Valley dig. A couple of weeks ago, when he and Betty had driven down with a vanload of books, he’d checked out the site but found just a few humps and patches where the soil had been put back and reseeded. The team had taken away their finds – the flint arrowheads and axes – and hundreds of photos, and given the temple back to the sheep.

And to the pagans.

Well, why not? The night before they moved in, they’d agreed there should be a sabbat here at Imbolc – which Betty preferred to call by its old Christian name, Candlemas, because it was prettier. They’d agreed there should be the traditional Crown of Lights, which Betty would wear if there was no more suitable candidate. At the old church above the water, it was all going to be totally beautiful; Robin had had this fantasy of the village people coming along to watch or even join in and bringing their kids – this atmosphere of joy and harmony at Imbolc, Candlemas, the first day of Celtic spring, the glimmering in the darkness.

But that had not been mentioned since, and he was damned if he was gonna bring it up again.

Robin walked on, uphill now. Presently, the hedge on the right gave way to a stone wall, and he entered the village of Old Hindwell. As if to mock the word ‘Old’, the first dwelling in the village was a modern brick bungalow. A few yards further on was the first streetlight, a bluish bulb under a tin hat on a bracket projecting from a telephone pole. Older cottages on either side now. At the top of the hill, the road widened into a fork.

On the corner was the pub, the Black Lion, the utility bulkhead bulb over its porch clouded with the massed corpses of flies. It was an alehouse, not much more; the licensee, Greg Starkey, had come from London with big ideas but not pulled enough customers to realize them.

Tonight, Robin could have used a drink. Jacketless, therefore walletless, he dug into his pockets for change, came up with a single fifty-pence piece. Could you get any kind of drink for fifty-pence? He figured not.

‘Robin. Hi.’

‘Jeez!’ He jumped. She’d come out of an entrance to the Black Lion’s back yard. ‘Uh... Marianne.’

Greg’s wife. She moved out under the bulb, so he could see she was wearing a turquoise fleece jacket over a low-cut black top. Standard landladywear in her part of London, maybe, but not so often seen out here. But Marianne made no secret of how much she’d give to get back to the city.

‘Haven’t seen you for days and days, Robin.’

‘Oh... Well, lot of work. The house move, you know?’

The last time he’d seen her was when he’d driven down on his own with a vanload of stuff, grabbing some lunch at the Lion. She’d seemed hugely pleased that he was moving in, with or without a wife. Anything you wanna know about the place, you come and ask me; Wednesdays are best, that’s when Greg goes over to Hereford market.

Yeah, well.

‘Bored already, Robin? I did warn you.’

She was late thirties, disillusion setting up permanent home in the lines either side of her mouth.

Robin said, ‘I, uh... I guess I just like the night.’

‘Robin, love,’ she said, ‘this ain’t night. This is just bleedin’ darkness.’

She did this cackly laugh. He smiled. ‘So, uh... you still don’t feel too good about here.’

‘Give the boy a prize off the top shelf.’

Her voice was too loud for this village at night. It bounced off walls. She moved towards him. He could smell that she’d been drinking. She stopped less than a foot away. There was no one else in sight. Robin kind of wished he’d turned around at the bottom of the street.

‘This is the nearest I get to a night out, you know that? We got to work. We got to open the boozer every lunchtime and every bleedin’ night of the week, and we don’t get the same day off ’cause we can’t afford to pay nobody, and we wouldn’t trust ’em to keep their fingers out of the bleedin’ till, anyway.’

‘Aw, come on, Marianne...’

‘They all hate us. We’ll always be outsiders.’

‘Come on... Nobody hates you.’

‘So we take our pleasures separately. Greg whoops it up at Hereford market on a Wednesday. Me, I just stand in the street and wait for a beautiful man to come along who don’t stink of sheep dip.’

‘Marianne, I think—’

‘Oh, sorry! I forgot – except for this Saturday when I’m going to a funeral. Because it is potilic... what’d I say? Politic – that’s what Greg says: politic. I’m pissed, Robin...’ Putting out her hands as if to steady herself, gripping his chest. ‘And you’re very appealing to me. I been thinking about you a lot. You’re a different kind of person, aincha?’

‘I’m an American kind of person is all. Otherwise just a regular—’

‘Now don’t go modest on me for Gawd’s sake. I tell you what...’ She started to rub her hands over his chest and stomach. ‘You can kiss me, Mr American-kind-of-person. Think of it as charity to the Third World. ’Cause if this ain’t the Third bleedin’ World...’

‘Uh, call me old-fashioned’ – Robin gently detached her hands – ‘but I really don’t think that would be too wise.’

‘Well, if anybody’s watching...’ Marianne’s voice rose. ‘If anybody’s spying from behind their lace bleedin’ curtains, they can go fuck themselves!’

Robin panicked; no way he wanted to be associated with this particular attitude. He backed off so fast that Marianne toppled towards him, clawed vaguely at the air and fell with her hands flat on the cindered surface of the pub’s parking lot.

Where she stayed, on all fours, looking down at the road.

Oh shit.

Robin moved to help her. She looked up at him and bared her teeth like a cornered cat. ‘You pushed me.’

‘No, no, I really didn’t. You know I didn’t.’

Marianne staggered to her feet, hands waving in the air for balance.

‘How about we get you inside,’ Robin said.

‘You pushed me!’ Backing towards the yard entrance, holding up her scratched hands like she was displaying crucifixion scars. If the people of Old Hindwell hadn’t been watching from behind their curtains before, they sure were now.

‘Fuck you!’ Marianne said. ‘Fuck you!’ she screamed and flew at him like a crazy chicken.

Robin backed off and spun around and found himself running any which way, until he was out of breath.

He stopped. Apart from his own panting, the place was silent again. He looked around, saw only night. The buildings had gone. He didn’t know where he was.

And then he looked up and there, set into the partially afforested hillside, was the tip of a golden light, a shining ingot in the dense, damp, conifered darkness. It was, by far, the brightest light in Old Hindwell village and, as he stepped back, it lengthened and branched out. Became a cross, in golden neon.

Nick Ellis’s clapboard church.

The cross hung there as if unsupported, like a big, improbable star.

The truth was, Robin found it kind of chilling. It was like he’d been driven into a trap. Away in the darkness, he heard footsteps. He froze. Was she coming after him?

Too heavy, too slow. And the steps were receding. Robin walked quietly back the way he’d come and presently the light above the pub door reappeared. He moved cautiously into the roadway in case Marianne was still around, claws out.

A few yards ahead of him, passing the entrance to the school-turned-surgery, was a man on his own. A man so big he was like an outsize shadow thrown on a wall. Must be a head taller than most of the farmers hereabouts. But he hadn’t come out of the pub. He was not drunk. He had a steady, stately walk and, as he passed the pub, Robin saw by the bulkhead light that the man was dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt and tie. The kind of attire farmers wore only for funerals.

The guy walked slowly back down the street, the same way Robin was headed. After a dozen or so paces, he stopped and looked over his shoulder for two, three seconds. Robin saw his face clearly: stiff, grey hair and kind of a hooked nose, like the beak of an eagle.

The guy turned and continued on his way down the street. Robin, having to take the same route, hung around a while to put some distance between them; he didn’t feel too sociable right now, but he did feel cold. He stood across from the pub, shivering and hugging himself.

The big guy was a shambling shadow against curtained windows lit from behind. Halfway down the street, he stopped again, looked back over his shoulder. Looked, not glanced. Robin only saw his face in silhouette this time. He was surely looking for someone, but there was no one there.

Robin shook his head, uncomprehending – a little more spooked.

The nightlife of Old Hindwell.

11 No Ghosts, No God

HUDDLED IN JANE’S duffel coat, she walked past the village square, where the cobbles were glassy with frost. The moon was in the west, still hard and brighter than the security lamp beside the front door of the Swan.

It was five-thirty a.m. She clutched the church keys in a gloved hand. She planned to pray before the altar for Barbara Buckingham and for the soul of her sister, Menna.

Merrily walked in through the lychgate. Somewhere, beyond the orchard, a fox yelped. Down in the churchyard she saw a soft and now familiar glow.

‘Last time, vicar. Honest to God.’

‘Gomer, I don’t mind, really.’

‘Unnatural, sure t’be. Be thinkin’ I’m some ole pervert, ennit?’

Merrily smiled. He was crouching by Minnie’s grave, an area of raised earth, an elongated mole-tump, with the hurricane lamp on it. No memorial yet. No sound of underground ticking.

‘I was just thinking, like,’ Gomer said. ‘I don’t want no bloody stone. I got to have a stone?’

‘Don’t see why.’

‘Wood. I likes wood. En’t no good with stone, but I could carve out a nice piece of oak, see.’ He looked up at Merrily, lamplight moons in his glasses. ‘En’t nothing to do with the money, like. Be a proper piece. We never talked about it, but her liked a nice bit of oak, my Min. I’ll put on it about Frank as well, see.’

‘Whatever you like, Gomer. Whatever you think she’d have wanted.’

‘Summat to do, ennit? Long ole days, see, vicar. Long ole days.’

Merrily sat on a raised stone tomb, tucking her coat underneath her. ‘What else will you do, Gomer?’

‘Oh.’ Gomer sniffed meditatively. ‘Bit o’ this, bit o’ that.’

‘Will you stay here?’

‘Never thought about moving.’

‘Jane thought you might go back to Radnorshire.’

‘What for?’

‘Roots?’

Gomer sniffed again abruptly. ‘People talks a lot of ole wallop ’bout roots. Roots is generally gnarled and twisted. Best kept buried, my experience.’

‘Yeah, you could be right.’ She had a thought. ‘You ever know a family called Thomas down on the border?’

‘Knowed ’bout half a dozen families called Thomas, over the years. Danny Thomas, up by Kinnerton, he’s a good ole boy. Keeps a ’lectric guitar and amplifiers in his tractor shed, on account his wife, Greta, she hates rock and roll. They was at Min’s funeral.’

‘Around Old Hindwell, I was thinking.’

‘Ole Hindwell.’ Gomer accepted a Silk Cut from Merrily’s packet. ‘Gareth Prosser, he’s the big man in Ole Hindwell. Laid some field drainage for him, years back. Then he inherits another two hundred acres and a pile o’ cash, and the bugger buys ’isself a second-hand digger at a farm sale. Always thought theirselves a cut above, the Prossers. County councillor, magistrate, all this ole wallop.’

‘These particular Thomases had two daughters. Barbara was one?’

‘Got you now. Her runned away?’

‘That’s right.’

‘An’ the other one wed Big Weal, the lawyer.’

‘Menna.’

‘Their ole man was Merv Thomas, Maesmawr, up by Walton. Never worked for ’em, mind – too tight, digged their own cesspits, never drained a field. Merv’s dead now, ennit? Ar, course he is. Her’d never be wed otherwise.’

‘You know Weal?’

‘Always avoided lawyers,’ Gomer said. ‘Thieving bastards, pardon me, vicar. Weal’s ole-fashioned, mind, but that don’t make him any less of a thieving bastard. Looks after his wife, though, ’cordin’ to what they says.’

‘Menna’s dead, Gomer.’

‘Never!’ Gomer was shocked enough to whip the ciggy out of his mouth.

‘Died in the County, same night as Minnie.’

‘But her was no more’n a kiddie!’

‘Thirty-nine. A stroke.’

‘Bugger me.’ Gomer stared down at the soil. ‘Big Weal must be gutted.’

‘Could say that.’

Gomer put his ciggy back, shook his head. ‘Ole Hindwell, eh? You know what they says about that place, don’t you, vicar?’

‘Tell me.’ Merrily managed to get her cigarette going before the breeze doused the Zippo.

‘ “Place as God give up on”,’ explained Gomer.

‘Lot of places like that.’

‘With the church, see. Lets their church fall into ruin and never had another.’

‘Until now.’

‘Ar?’

‘There’s a kind of missionary minister who’s holding services in the parish hall. Father Ellis?’

‘Oh hell, aye.’ Gomer puffed on his ciggy. ‘Nutter.’

‘That’s what they say about him, is it? Nutter?’

‘Had two or three proper, solid ole churches under his wing, and they says he favoured Ole Hindwell village hall above the lot of ’em. An’ all this clappin’ and huggin’ and chantin’ and stuff. Mind, in Ole Hindwell they wouldn’t notice another bloody nutter if he was stark naked in the snow.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Inbreedin’.’ Gomer chuckled. ‘We always says that. Some places gets that kind o’ reputation for no reason at all other’n being a bit off the beaten track. And havin’ its church falled into ruins.’

‘Why did it fall into ruins? Apart from God giving up.’

‘Now, there’s a can of ole worms, ennit?’

‘Is it?’

‘Last but one vicar, they reckoned he went mad.’

‘Like Ellis?’

‘No, mad mad. All kinds o’ rumours, there. Never come out, proper. You got a problem out there, vicar?’

‘Well, erm... Mr Weal seems to be set on putting Mrs Weal into some kind of tomb in his garden.’

‘Well, well,’ Gomer said non-committally.

‘And Barbara doesn’t think that’s a good idea. She doesn’t think Weal’s quite grasped the need to let go of the dead. And she wants me to go to the funeral with her, to hold her hand... or maybe to restrain her. And I think there’s something odd about that whole situation. Would, er, would you happen to know anybody who might know the score there?’

Gomer nodded slowly. ‘I reckon.’

‘And maybe a bit about Barbara and why she hates that area so much.’

‘Likely. Anythin’ else?’

‘Father Ellis? Seems to me that for everybody who thinks he’s a nutter, there must be another five can’t get enough, if you see what I mean.’

‘No accountin’ for the way folks is gonner go, them parts. Seen it before, oh hell, aye. Gimme a day or two.’

This time, Gomer declined the offer of tea and breakfast, said he’d got himself a nice, crusty cob needed using up. She could tell he was pleased to have something to occupy his time.

And digging was what Gomer did best.

Merrily went into church and prayed for Barbara and Menna and asked the Boss about another matter – kind of hoping she’d get a strong negative response.

Back at the vicarage just before seven, she punched out Tania Beauman’s Livenight number. Waited for the answering machine to kick in.

‘Oh... this is Merrily Watkins at the Hereford Diocese. Sorry for not getting back to you last night. I’ll be in the office from about half nine, if you want to talk about... what I might be able to contribute to your programme. Thanks.’

No backing out now.

Be something different, anyway: bright lights, hi-tech hardware, the fast chat, the tat, the trivia, the complete, glossy inconsequentiality of it.

Jane came down for breakfast, all fresh and school-uniformed.

‘Been up long, Mum?’

‘Couple of hours. Couldn’t sleep.’

‘So, you rang Livenight, then?’

‘Not much gets past you, does it, flower?’

‘It’ll be fun.’

‘Be fun for you, watching at home.’

‘Er... yeah,’ Jane said airily.

That night, after a wedding rehearsal at the church for a couple whose chief bridesmaid would be their own granddaughter, Merrily phoned Eileen Cullen from the scullery.

‘I just got the feeling you might have heard from Barbara Buckingham again.’

‘And why would you be thinking that, Reverend?’ Cullen sounded more than usually impatient, as if she was carrying an overflowing bedpan in her other hand.

‘She’s keen to find out why Menna died.’

‘High blood pressure.’

‘Well, yes, sure. But why did she have high blood pressure at her age?’

‘I told you why, and I haven’t changed my mind. I reckon she’d been on the Pill for longer than she ought to’ve been. Years longer, that’s my guess. Prolonged ingestion of synthetic oestrogen. Bad news – but then you’d know all that.’

‘Eileen, I live the life of a nun. I’ve forgotten all that.’

‘Well, it’s not your problem, and it’s not mine either and it’s not poor Menna’s any longer.’ A pause, then she came back a little softer. ‘Listen, if you’ve got the Buckingham woman on your back in a big way, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I sent her over, so I am.’

‘You must have felt at the time that she had a valid problem.’

‘Just wanted her out of me hair. You know what I’m like.’

‘Mmm, that’s why I don’t think you’re being entirely upfront.’

‘Jesus Christ, I’m always upfront. Nobody in this fockin’ job’s got time to go round the side any more.’

‘Did you by any chance tell her about Weal and that business with the water?’

‘You mean so they could have a big row and disturb all my patients? Are you kidding? Did you tell her?’

‘No.’

‘Well, good.’

‘Confidentially—’

‘Merrily, when the hell do we ever talk any other way?’

‘Barbara’s getting troubled dreams.’

‘Troubled, how?’

‘Says she sees Menna.’

A pause. ‘Does she?’

‘Night after night.’

‘Stress,’ Cullen said. ‘Look, I’ve got to—’

‘Well, you would say that. No ghosts, no God. You think my whole life’s a sorry sham.’

‘Aye, but you’re a well-meaning wee creature. Listen, I really do have to go.’

‘So you haven’t seen her then?’

‘Of course I haven’t fockin’ seen her!’ Cullen snapped. ‘What the hell d’you think I am?’

Merrily’s head spun. She stared at the circle of light thrown on the Holy Bible. The rosebush chattered at the dark window.

‘I meant Barbara,’ Merrily said.

‘I have to go.’ Cullen hung up.