A Crown of Lights

12 Bear Pit

SHE FIRST BECAME aware of him in the green room.

Her initial thought was that he must be a priest, because he was wearing a suit, though not a dog collar – well, how many did these days, outside working hours? And then, because he was so smooth and assured, and – perhaps, she thought afterwards, because his shirt was wine-coloured – she even wondered if he might be a bishop.

He brought her a coffee. ‘This stuff could be worse,’ he said. ‘BBC coffee is much worse.’

‘You do this kind of thing fairly often then?’ she said. God, that wasn’t quite, ‘Do you come here often?’ but it was dangerously close.

‘When I must,’ he said. ‘Edward Bain, by the way.’

‘Merrily Watkins.’

‘I know,’ he said.

He was, of course, attractive: lean, pale features and dark curly hair with a twist of grey over the ears. He’d made straight for Merrily across the green room – it sounded like some notoriously haunted, country house bedchamber, but was simply the area where all the participants gathered before the show. It was long and narrow and starting to look like a pantomime dressing room because of some of the costumes: Dark Age chic meeting retro-punk in a tangle of braids and bracelets.

The producer and his team mingled with the main guests and the support acts, observing and listening, picking out the potential stars-for-an-hour. Meanwhile the guests drank tea and coffee and spring water – no alcohol – and nibbled things on sticks, talking a lot, losing inhibitions, unblocking their adrenal glands, developing that party mentality. As if most of them hadn’t brought it with them.

‘Lord,’ Edward Bain murmured, ‘do they really want to be taken seriously?’ He looked at Merrily with a faint, pained smile.

The smile chilled her. It was Sean’s smile – her dead husband’s. Boyish, disarming. Sean’s smile when accused. She turned sharply away, as though distracted by an argument in progress between a tight-faced security officer and a ginger-bearded man wearing a short, white cloak over a red tunic with a belt. Into the belt was stuck a knife with a black handle.

‘It’s my fucking athame, man. It’s a religious tool. You wouldn’t ask a fucking bishop to hand over his fucking crozier!’

Edward Bain’s smile became a wince, wiping away the similarity to Sean. If it had ever really been there. Merrily swallowed.

The security man turned to Tania Beauman for support. Tania wrinkled her nose. ‘Oh, leave it, Grant. I suspect it looks more dangerous than it actually is.’

‘Tania, it’s a knife. If we start allowing weapons in the studio, we may as well—’

‘It’s a f—’ The ginger guy blew out his cheeks in frustration, turned to Tania. ‘This doorman is really hacking me off, you know? This is religious persecution.’

‘Sure.’ Tania was a short, capable bottle-blonde of about forty. ‘If we just agree that it’s purely ornamental – yeah, sorry, religious – and that you won’t be taking it out of—’

‘Of course I won’t be fucking taking it out!’

‘And if you use that word on camera before midnight, you realize you’ll be excluded from the debate, yeah?’

The ginger man subsided in a surly kind of way, a semi-chastened schoolboy.

‘That’s his card marked,’ Edward Bain told Merrily. ‘He’ll be used purely for decoration, now. Won’t get asked a single question unless it starts to slow up and they’re really desperate for confrontation.’

‘I don’t see that happening, somehow,’ Merrily said, ‘do you?’

‘The boy’s an idiot, anyway. If the athame is to have any potency at all it should hardly be displayed like some sort of cycling club badge.’

He smiled down at Merrily – instant Sean once more – and glided away, leaving her feeling clammy. And she thought, Oh my God. He’s one of them.

‘Ooooooooh.’ Tania went into a sinuous shudder. ‘Magnetic – and more.’

Over by the door, Edward Bain was into an intense conversation with a woman in a long, loose, classical kind of dress, like someone from rent-a-Muse. Merrily saw now that one of Bain’s middle fingers wore a silver ring with a moonstone. She saw him and the woman clasp hands lightly and smile, and she imagined tiny blue electric stars crackling between their fingers. She wondered if they’d even met before tonight.

‘Who is he?’ Merrily muttered. ‘I mean, what is he?’

‘Don’t you vicars ever read the News of the World?’

‘Only if we’re really desperate for a sermon.’

‘He’s the Man,’ Tania said. ‘If you call him something like King of the Witches, he’ll look pained. He doesn’t like the word “witch”. He’s a champagne pagan, if you like. Works as a publishing executive and would rather be profiled in the Observer than the News of the World... and, yeah, he’s getting there.’

‘By way of Livenight?’

Tania frowned. ‘Don’t take this programme too lightly, Merrily. You can get deeply shafted out there. And we are watched by all kinds of people you wouldn’t expect.’

Especially this week! By the acting Bishop of Hereford this week, and probably half of Lambeth Palace. Take it lightly? She’d had to put down her glass of spring water because she couldn’t hold it still. Ridiculous; she conducted services every Sunday, she talked to hostile teenagers, she talked to God, she...

Sean was there, smiling in her mind. In getting here, she’d had to drive past where he died, on the M5, in flames. Go away!

She said, too loudly, ‘Tania, can you... give me a rundown? Who else is here?’

‘OK.’ Tania nodded briskly. ‘Well, we get the programme peg out of the way first, right? The couple who want their kid to be allowed to do his pagan prayers and whatnot at school.’ She nodded towards a solemn, bearded man in a home-made-looking sweater. His partner had a waist-length plait. They might have been Muslims. They might even have been Christians.

Merrily said, ‘Am I right in thinking you’re not going to be spending very long on them?’

‘Dead right. Boring, boring, boring. Actually, the headmaster of the school’s going to be better value. Born-again Christian. Actually talks like Sir Cliff, like he’s got a boiled sweet in his cheek. OK, over there... Patrick Ryan – long hair, velvet jacket – Cambridge professor who’s done a study of pagan practices. And shagged half the priestesses in the Home Counties by all accounts, but I doubt he’ll be discussing that. If Ryan’s too heavy, the little guy with the shaven head’s Tim Fagan, ex-hack from the Sun, was sent out to do an exposé on some sexy coven and wound up joining them. Now edits a popular witchy magazine called – ha ha – The Moon.’

Edward Bain excepted, they all looked fairly innocuous.

‘What about the other side?’

‘Right. Well, we’ve got a really angry mother who claims paganism turned her daughter into a basket case. She is very strong. The kid got drawn into white witchcraft and ended up peeing in churches. Which leads neatly into you, I think.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Mmm.’ Tania had revealed on the phone that she had seen news cuttings on last year’s Herefordshire desecration case, involving the sacrifice of a crow in a country church. Not entirely appropriate, in Merrily’s view.

‘I mean, I can’t say that was your orthodox paganism – if there is such a thing, which I doubt. It was a peculiar kind of black magic. It was a one-off.’

Tania Beauman shrugged.

‘By “the other side”,’ Merrily said, ‘I actually meant us, the Church. You said I wouldn’t be on my own here.’ How pathetic did that sound?

Tania looked mildly concerned. ‘I didn’t say that, did I? I’m sure I didn’t say that.’

‘You did, Tania.’

‘Oh, well, what happened, the other bloke let us down. I think his wife had a miscarriage or something.’ She was blatantly improvising. ‘But if you’re looking for back-up, the headmaster’s brought along a few members of his church. See the guy in the white—’

‘Which church would that be?’

‘Well, Christian, obviously, but I suppose you’d probably call it more of a cult.’

‘Wonderful.’

‘They’ll be doing some heavy apocalyptic stuff about the Antichrist walking the earth disguised as... Hang on – looks like Steve wants to do his pep talk.’

A bald man of about thirty, in white jeans and a crumpled paisley shirt, strode into the centre of the green room, lifted up his arms for silence, and went – Merrily guessed – into autopilot.

‘OK, listen up, everybody, my name’s Steve Ewing. I’m the editor of Livenight. I’d like to welcome you all to the programme and point out that we’ll be on the air in about fifty minutes. You’ve all seen the show – if not, then that’s your problem for sticking with boring old Paxman or the dirty movie on Channel 5. OK, now what I mainly want to stress to you is that Livenight is like life – you don’t get a second chance.’

A woman cackled. ‘All you know, mate.’

‘Yeah, very good.’ Steve Ewing smiled thinly. ‘What I’m trying to get over here is that we don’t hang around and neither should you. If you have something to say, don’t hold back, because it’ll be too late and we’ll have moved on to another aspect of the debate, and you’ll be kicking yourself all the way home because you missed your chance of getting your argument across on the programme.’

Merrily looked around for any exit sign. Wasn’t too late to get the hell out of here.

‘What I’m looking for,’ said Steve, ‘is straight talking and – above all – quick, snappy responses. There’s a lot of choice material to get across, and we want to help you do that. So it’s straight to the point, no pussyfooting, and if it’s going to take longer than about thirty seconds, save it for your PhD thesis. John Fallon’s the ringmaster. You won’t meet him until you go in, but you’ve all seen John, he’s a smart guy, a pro, and his bullshit threshold is zero. Any questions?’

There was some shuffling but no direct response.

‘Why don’t we get to meet Fallon before the programme?’ Merrily whispered.

Tania Beauman hardly moved her lips. ‘You’d know more about this than me, but I don’t imagine they’d normally introduce the Christians to the lion.’

They called this the gallery. It was a narrow room with a bank of TV monitors, through which the director and the sound and vision mixers could view the studio floor from different angles. Once the show was on the air, the director would be in audio contact with the producer and the presenter, John Fallon, down in the bear pit. They actually called it that. In fact, Jane had found it a little disappointing at first. It was much smaller than it looked on the box – like a little theatre-in-the-round, with about six rows of banked-up seating.

‘Does the whole audience have some angle on the debate?’ she asked a white-haired bloke called Gerry, an ex-Daily Star reporter who was the senior member of Tania Beauman’s research team.

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a decent enough budget now, but it’s not that big. The audience are just ordinary punters bussed in – tonight’s bunch is from a paint factory in Walsall: packers, cleaners, management – a cross section of society.’

Gerry glanced at Eirion, who looked awfully young and innocent – and not happy. He had no stomach for subterfuge, Jane was realizing. He’d been appalled to discover that her mum, down there, did not know they were up here. Or, indeed, within sixty miles of Livenight.

Even in Eirion’s car, with the patched-up silencer, it hadn’t taken long to get here. The Warehouse studio complex had been quite easy to find, on the edge of a new business park, under a mile from the M5 and ten miles out of the central Birmingham traffic hell.

It was not until they’d actually left the motorway that Jane had revealed to Eirion the faintly illicit nature of this operation. ‘Irene, I’m doing this for you. This could be your future. This is like cutting-edge telly. It’s an in, OK. You might even get a holiday job.’

Eirion had looked appalled, like a taxi driver who’d just discovered he was providing the wheels in a wages snatch. He’d thought they were only driving up separately because Jane’s mum might have to stay the night. He did not know how Jane came to have Tania Beauman in her pocket, and would probably not be finding out. Neither would Mum; the plan was, they’d clear off about two minutes before the programme ended, go bombing back down the motorway, and Jane would be up in her apartment with the lights out by the time Mum got home.

Tania Beauman had turned out to be actually OK. She’d told both Gerry and the grizzled director, Maurice, that Jane was her cousin, doing a media studies college course. Which could well be true, one day.

‘How old is she?’ Maurice had enquired suspiciously.

‘Nineteen next month,’ Jane said crisply. Eirion looked queasy.

‘Stone me,’ Gerry muttered. ‘When the nineteen-year-olds start looking fourteen, you know you’re getting too old for it.’

Maurice took off his cans. ‘See, the problem with this particular programme is that we’re not Songs of Praise and this is not the God Slot. What we do not want is a religious debate. We don’t want the history of Druidism, we want to know what they get up to in their stone circles when the film crew’s gone home. We don’t want to hear about the people the witches’ve healed, we want to know about the ones they’ve cursed and the virgins they’ve deflowered on their altars. This is late-night TV. Our job – to put it crudely – is to send you off to bed with a hard-on.’

‘I’ll be interested to see how the little priest handles it,’ Gerry said thoughtfully. ‘She’s got enough of her own demons.’

Jane stared at him.

‘Marital problems,’ Gerry said. ‘Husband playing away... though what the hell possessed him, with that at home.’

‘You never know what goes on behind bedroom doors.’ Maurice shook his head, smiling sadly. ‘You turned all that up, did you, Gerald?’

‘And then, when it’s all looking a bit messy... Bang! The husband goes and gets killed in the car, with his girlfriend. Merrily wakes up a widow... and soon after that she’s become a priest. Interesting, do I detect guilt in there somewhere, or do I just have a suspicious—’

‘Christ!’ Jane snarled. ‘She didn’t become a bloody nun! She—’ She felt Eirion’s hand on her arm and shook it off and bit her lip.

Gerry grinned. ‘My, my. Women do stick together, don’t they?’

‘Lay off, Gerald.’ Maurice slipped on his headphones, flipped a switch on his console. ‘You there, Martin? Speak to me, son.’

‘So.’ Gerry leaned against the edge of the mixing desk. ‘There you are, Jane. Now you know how easy it is to get people going. You just watch the monitors. Within about seven minutes, everybody’s forgotten there are cameras.’ He pencilled a note on a copy of the programme’s running order; Jane made out the word Merrily. ‘Be a lot of heat, tonight, I think. When it gets going, it’s very possible one of those weirdos is gonna try some spooky stuff.’

Eirion stiffened. ‘Spooky stuff?’

‘I dunno, son. A spell or something, I suppose. Something to prove they can make things happen. I dunno, basically – it’s all cobblers, anyway.’

Jane looked at Eirion. She was still shaking. They had a little file on Mum; if the show lost momentum, shafting her became an option.

13 A Surreal Memory

BETTY’S DAY CLEARLY hadn’t been too great either. You could tell not so much from her face as from her manner: no bustle.

‘You don’t tell me yours, and I won’t tell you mine.’ Robin didn’t even lift his head from the kitchen table where he’d fallen into a sleep of dismay and frustration. ‘We’ll call it a shit amnesty.’

Ten-fifteen on this cold, misty, moonless night. Betty had been out since mid-afternoon. She’d been to see the widow Wilshire in New Radnor again, taking with her an arthritis potion involving ‘burdock and honeysuckle, garlic and nettle and a little healing magic’. Betty was good with healing plants; after pissing off her parents by walking out of teacher training, she’d worked at a herb garden and studied with a herbalist at nights for two and a half years. She’d gone to a whole lot of trouble with this potion, driving over to a place the other side of Hereford yesterday to pick up the ingredients.

‘How is she now?’

‘Oh... more comfortable. And happier, I think.’

Around six she’d phoned him to say she was hanging on there a while. Seemed Mrs Wilshire’s home help had not made it this week and she was distressed about the state of her house and her inability to clean it up. So Betty would clean up, sure she would. Wherever she went, Betty added to her collection of aunts.

‘OK,’ Robin said, ‘if she’s so much better, I give up. Where’s the bad stuff come in?’

‘It isn’t necessarily bad – just odd.’ Betty took off her coat, hung it behind the back door, went to get warm by the stuttering Rayburn. ‘So you first. It’s Ellis, isn’t it?’

‘No, haven’t heard a word from Ellis. This is Blackmore. He faxed. He doesn’t like the artwork.’

‘Oh.’ Betty pushed her hands through her hair, letting it tumble. ‘I did say it was a mistake, dealing with him directly. You should have carried on communicating through the publishers. If he can get hold of you any time he wants, he’ll just keep on quibbling.’

‘It was what he wanted. And he is Kirk Blackmore. And, frankly, quibbling doesn’t quite reach it.’

‘Not something you can alter easily?’

Robin laughed bleakly. ‘What the asshole doesn’t like is... everything. He doesn’t like my concept of Lord Madoc – his face is wrong, his hair is wrong, his clothes are wrong, his freaking boots are wrong. Oh, and he walks in the wrong colour of mist.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Betty came round the back of his chair, put her hands on his shoulders, began to knead. ‘All that work. What does it mean? What happens now?’

‘Means I grovel. Or I take the one-off money and someone else’s artwork goes on the book.’

‘There’s no way—’

‘Betty... OK. I am a well-regarded illustrator. Any ordinary, midlist fantasy writer, they’d have to go with it. Blackmore, however, is now into a one-and-a-half-million-pound three-book deal. He walks with the gods. Different rules apply.’

Betty scowled. ‘Doesn’t change the fact that he writes moronic crap. Tell him to sod off. It’s just one book.’

He sat up. ‘It’s not moronic. The guy knows his stuff. And it’s not just one book. His whole backlist’s gonna be rejacketed in the Sword of Twilight format, whoever’s artwork that should be. Which is seven books – a lot of work. Face it, I need Blackmore. I need to have my images under his big name. Also, we need the money if we’re gonna make a start on getting this place into any kind of good condition. We were counting on that money, were we not?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Right, end of story. Back to the airbrush.’

She bent and kissed his hair. ‘You’ve gone pale.’

‘Yeah, well, I didn’t expect it. It was a kick in the mouth. Do me good – getting too sure of myself. All right, go ahead. Regale me with the unglad tidings you bring back from the big metropolis.’

They’d taken to calling New Radnor the big metropolis, on account of it having three shops.

‘Well...’ Betty sat down next to him. ‘Mrs Wilshire was all worked up because she remembered she’d promised to get the home help to hunt out some of the Major’s papers relating to... this place. He kept them in a wooden summer house in the garden. And of course, the home help didn’t show up. Anyway, she gave me the key. That’s why I’m so late. I was in there for over an hour. Quite a little field HQ the Major had there: lighting, electric heater, kettle, steel filing cabinet.’

‘And she let you loose in there? Almost a stranger?’

‘She needs somebody to trust.’

‘Yeah.’ People trusted Betty on sight; it was a rare quality.

‘And she wanted it sorting out, but quite clearly couldn’t face going down there, because of the extra responsibility it might heap on her, which she’s never been good at. And also because there’s a lot of him still there. You can feel him – a clean, precise sort of mind; and frustration because he couldn’t find enough to do with it. So when he was buying a house, he was determined to know everything, get the very best deal.’

‘Not like me, huh?’

Betty smiled. ‘You’re the worst kind of impulse buyer. You even hide things from yourself. You and the Major wouldn’t have got on at all.’

‘So what did you find?’

‘Mrs Wilshire said I could bring anything home that might be useful. I’ve got a cardboard box full of stuff in the car.’

‘But you didn’t bring it in?’

‘Tomorrow.’ Betty leaned her head back. ‘I’ve read enough for one night. No wonder he kept it in the shed.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I mean, in one respect, Major Wilshire was like you – once he’d seen this place, he had to have it. But it also had to be at the right price. And of course he wasn’t remotely superstitious. An old soldier, he wasn’t afraid of anything that couldn’t shoot him. But I suppose that if he happened to come up with certain information that might upset any other potential buyers...’ Betty stopped and rolled her head around to ease tension. ‘It’s funny... the first time I ever went in those ruins, I thought, this is really not a happy place.’

‘This is something the agent should’ve told us? We get to sue the agent?’

‘How very American of you. No, I rather doubt it. All too long ago. Anyway, they told us about Major Wilshire’s death, which was the main drawback, presumably, as far as they were concerned.’

‘So what is this? The ruins are haunted?’

‘We jumped to conclusions. We assumed the church was abandoned because of flooding or no access for cars. Or at least you did.’

‘I assumed. Yeah, assuming is what I do. All the time. OK.’ Robin stood up. ‘I can’t stand it. Gimme the car keys, I’ll go fetch your box of goodies.’

When he arrived back with the stuff, she had cocoa coming up. He slammed and barred the door. He was tingling with cold and damp.

‘Whooo, it’s turned into fog! Was it like that when you were driving home?’

‘Some of the way.’

Just as well he’d fallen asleep earlier and hadn’t known about the fog; he’d have been worried sick about her, with the ice on the roads and all.

He dumped the cardboard wine box on the table. ‘Best not to go out at night this time of year, living in a place like this. Suppose it was so thick you drove into the creek?’

‘Brook,’ Betty said.

‘Whatever.’ Robin unpacked the box. Mostly, it seemed to be photocopies, the top one evidently from some official list of historic buildings.

CHURCH OF ST MICHAEL, OLD HINDWELL.

Ruins of former parish church. Mainly C13 and C14, with later south porch and chancel. Embattled three-stage tower of late C14, rubble-construction with diagonal buttresses to north-west and south-west...

And so on. There were a couple more pages of this stuff, which Robin put aside for further study.

‘Like you said, looks like the Major built up a fairly comprehensive background file.’

He turned up some sale particulars similar to the one he and Betty had received. Same agent – and same wording, give or take.

‘A characterful, historic farmhouse with outbuildings and the picturesque ruins of a parish church, in a most unusual location...’

All true enough, as far as it went. Next, Robin found several pages ripped out of a spiral-bound notebook and bunched together with a bulldog clip. There was handwriting on them, not too intelligible, and a string of phone numbers.

‘What’s this?’

‘Don’t know. Couldn’t make it out. There’s all kinds of junk in there. Mrs Wilshire told me to take it anyway. I think she just wanted to get rid of as much as she could. Right, there you are... that’s the start of it.’

He lifted out a news cutting pasted to a piece of A4. The item was small and faded. ‘Rector Resigns due to Ill Health.’

It said little more than that the Reverend Terence Penney had given up the living of Old Hindwell and had left the area. A replacement was being sought.

‘When was this?’ A date had been scrawled across the newsprint but he couldn’t make it out.

‘Nineteen seventy-seven.’

‘That late? You mean the Old Hindwell church was still operational until seventy-seven?’

‘’seventy-eight, actually.’

‘Why did I have it in mind it must have been abandoned back in the thirties or forties?’

‘Because you were sold on the idea that it was due to motor vehicles and the brook. Read the letter underneath. It’s from the same woman who wrote the piece in the newspaper.’

It had been typewritten, on an old machine with an old ribbon.

Lower Lodge

Monkshall

Leominster

Herefordshire

18 May

Dear Major Wilshire,

Thank you for your letter. Yes, you are quite right, I did have the dubious honour of being appointed Radnor Valley correspondent of the Brecon and Radnor Express for a few years in the 1970s, receiving, if I recall correctly, something like one halfpenny a line for my jottings about local events of note!

My reports on the departure of the Reverend Penney were not, I must say, the ones of which I am most proud, amounting, as they did, to what I suppose would be termed these days a ‘cover up’. But my late husband and I were comparatively recent incomers to the area and I was ‘walking on eggshells’ and determined not to cause offence to anyone!

However, I suppose after all this time there is no reason to conceal anything any more, especially as there was considerable local gossip about it at the time.

Yes, the Reverend Penney was indeed rather a strange young man, although I am still inclined to discount the rumours that he ‘took drugs’. There were some hippy types living in the area at the time with whom he was quite friendly, so I suppose this is how the rumour originated.

In retrospect, I think Mr Penney was not the most appropriate person to be put in charge of St Michael’s. He was a young man and very enthusiastic, full of ideas, but the local people were somewhat set in their ways and resistant to any kind of change. The church itself was not in very good condition (even before Mr Penney’s arrival!), and the parish was having difficulty raising money for repairs – there were not the grants available in those days – and it was a big responsibility for such a young and inexperienced minister.

Yes, I am afraid that what you have been told is broadly correct, though I must say that I never found any signs of mental imbalance in Mr Penney, in his first year at least. He was always friendly, if a little remote.

My memories of THAT day remain confused. Perhaps we should have suspected something after the small fire, the slippage of tiles from the roof and the repeated acts of apparent vandalism (I realize no charges ever resulted from these continued occurrences, so I hope I can trust you, as a soldier, to treat this correspondence as strictly confidential), but no one could really have predicted the events of that particular October morning. It would not have seemed so bad had it not been raining so hard and the brook in such spate. Naturally, quite a crowd – for Hindwell – gathered and there was much weeping and wailing, although this was quickly suppressed and after that day I do not remember anyone speaking of it – quite extraordinary. It was as if the whole village somehow shared the shame.

No, as you note, the big newspapers never ‘got on’ to the story. Small communities have always been very good at smothering sensational events almost at birth. And what was I, the village correspondent, supposed to write? I was not a journalist, merely a recorder of names at funerals and prize-winners at the local show. Furthermore, later that day, I received a visit from Mr Gareth Prosser Snr, together with Mr Weal, his and our solicitor, who stressed to me that it would ‘not be in the best interests of the local people’ for this to be publicized in any way. Mr Prosser was the county councillor for the area and served on the police committee and was a personage of considerable gravitas. It was not for me, a newcomer, to cross him over an issue of such sensitivity!

The Church of England (the village is in Wales, but the parish is in the Diocese of Hereford) chose not to take any proceedings against Mr Penney. After his departure, another minister was appointed but did not stay long and thereafter the parish became part of a ‘cluster’ which is not so uncommon these days! I suppose one could say Old Hindwell ‘lost heart’ after the extraordinary behaviour of Mr Penney.

I do hope I have been able to help you, but I am rather ‘out of touch’ with events in Old Hindwell. Although I live no more than half an hour’s drive away.

I seem never once to have revisited the village since we moved house in 1983. Old Hindwell is one of those places which it is easy to forget exists, except as a rather surreal memory!

With very best regards,

Juliet Pottinger (Mrs)

‘The Local People,’ Robin said. ‘Whoooeee! Those local people sure like to wield power.’

‘No more than in any small community.’ Betty brought over cocoa for them both. She knew he’d go for the cover-up aspect first, rather than the significance of the event that had been covered up. She almost wished she could have censored the papers before letting him see them.

The idea of this panicked her. It was like the Wilshires in reverse. Until they came here, she’d never even thought of keeping secrets from Robin.

‘And who is this Weal?’ he said. ‘Was the plan that they might have to lean on this old broad legally?’

‘She wouldn’t have been an old broad then. She was probably quite a young broad.’

‘Whatever, this smells of real redneck intrigue. Prosser Senior – that would be Gareth Prosser’s old man?’

‘Sounds like it,’ Betty said. And then came to the point. ‘But the main issue is, what happened to the Reverend Penney? What did he do that day that scandalized the community so much that he had to resign on so-called health grounds?’

‘Didn’t the widow Wilshire know any of this?’

‘She’d never even seen the letter. Bryan would not have wanted to worry the little woman.’

‘Well,’ Robin said, ‘it’s clear that the Reverend Penney was under a lot of pressure and it drove him a little crazy. She talks about him feeling isolated. Maybe he came from some English city, couldn’t cut it in the sticks. And the Local People resented him, gave him a hard time.’

‘To the extent of vandalizing his church? Starting a fire? You don’t think that sounds a little inner-city for a place like this?’

‘Sounds like he was getting some hassle. Sounds like there could be something the Local People are a tad ashamed about, wouldn’t you say?’

He looked pleased about this. He would make a point now of finding out precisely what had happened and what, if anything, the community had to hide. Betty, on the other hand, could sympathize with Juliet Pottinger’s low-profile approach. Yes, it would be necessary to find out what had happened on what was now their property – but not to go about this in a conspicuous way. They were incomers and foreigners. And had a different religion, which may somehow have become known to certain people. Unspoken opinion might already be stacked against them; they must not be seen to be too nosy or too clever. They must move quietly.

‘After Penney left,’ she said, ‘the church appeared to “lose heart”. It was in full use until nineteen seventy-eight and now it’s a ruin. In just over thirty years. Not exactly a slow decay.’

‘Aw, buildings go to pieces in no time at all when they’re left derelict. She implies in the letter that it was already falling apart. And maybe in those days the authorities weren’t so hot on preserving old buildings. I’m more curious about what the Local People did to this Penney. Where’s he now?’

‘I don’t know. And we’re the last people to know anyone in the clergy who might be able to find out. We—’

‘Look, I’ll go find out the truth tomorrow. I’ll go see Prosser. We’re gonna need more logs – real logs. I’ll go find out if Prosser knows a reputable log dealer and at the same time I’ll ask him about Reverend Penney. See if he tries to lean on me, do the rural menace stuff.’

‘I’ll go, if you like,’ Betty said, without thinking.

Robin put down his cocoa mug. ‘Because I will rub him up the wrong way? Because I will be gauche and loud and unsubtle? Because I will say, you can’t touch me, pal, I got the Old Gods on my side?’

‘Of course not. I’m sorry. You’re right. You should go. Men around here prefer to deal with other men.’

‘What I thought.’ He looked at her and grinned. ‘This is nothing to worry about.’

‘No,’ Betty said.

Far from representing her and Robin’s destiny and the beautiful future of the pagan movement in this country, she was now convinced that the old church of Michael was a tainted and revolting place that should indeed be left to rot. But how could she lay all this on him now, after his crushing disappointment over the Blackmore illustrations?

‘Let’s go to bed,’ she said.

14 Armageddon

NO WAY COULD she ever have imagined it was going to be like this.

She’d thought that it could never be worse than the pulpit that first time, up in Liverpool, when those three creaking wooden steps were like the steps to the gallows.

And may God have mercy on your soul.

She’d drunk very little of the spring water on offer in the green room, never once thinking of the fierce heat from the studio lights and what it might do to the irrigation of the inside of her mouth.

With ten minutes to go, she’d popped outside for a cigarette, sharing a fire-escape platform with two sly-smiling New Age warriors and their seven-inch spliff, shaking her head with a friendly, liberal smile when they’d offered it to her.

Never really imagining that the nerves wouldn’t just float away once they were on the air. Because... well, because this was trivial, trash, tabloid television, forgotten before the first editions of tomorrow’s papers got onto the streets.

This really mustn’t be taken too seriously.

Merrily froze, two thousand years of Christianity setting like concrete around her shoulders. The light was merciless and hotter than the sun. She was in terror; she couldn’t even pray.

‘Merrily Watkins,’ he’d said, ‘you’re a vicar, a woman of God. Let’s hear how you defend your creator against that kind of logic. Isn’t there really a fair bit of sense in what Ned’s saying?’

He was slight, not very tall. His natural expression was halfway to a smile, the lips in a little V. He was light and nimble and chatty. He earned probably six times as much as a bishop – the shiny-suited, eel-like, non-stick, omnipotent John Fallon.

‘Well, Merrily,’ he said. ‘Isn’t there?’

And yet, there were no tricks, no surprises. It had started, exactly as Tania Beauman had said it would, with the parents Jean and Roger Gillespie, goddess-worshippers from Taunton, Somerset, who wanted their daughter’s religion to be formally accepted at her primary school. They’d have a second child starting school next year; later a third one; they wanted new data programmed into the education machine, respectful references to new names: Isis, Artemis, Aradia. Roger was an architect with the county council; he maintained that his beliefs were fully accepted on the executive estate where the Gillespies had lived for three years.

They were both so humourless, Merrily thought, as Jean demanded parity with Islam and boring old Christianity, and special provision for her family’s celebration of the solstices and the equinoxes, the inclusion of pagan songs, at least once a week, at the school assembly.

Fallon had finally interrupted this tedious monotone. ‘And what do you do exactly, Jean? Do you hold nude ceremonies in your garden? What happens if the neighbours’ve got a barbecue going?’

‘Well, that’s just the kind of attitude we don’t get, for a start.’ Jean’s single plait hung like a fat hawser down her bosom. ‘Our rituals are private and discreet and are respected by our neighbours, who—’

‘Fine. Sure. OK.’ John Fallon had already been on the move, away from Jean, who carried on talking, although the boom-mic operator had moved on. Fallon had spun away through ninety degrees to his next interviewee: the elegant Mr Edward Bain, nothing so vulgar as King of the Witches.

‘We’re here to talk about religious belief,’ Fallon had read from the autocue at the beginning of the show, ‘and the right of people in a free society to worship their own gods. Some of you might think it’s a bit loony, even scary, but the thousands of pagan worshippers in Britain maintain that theirs is the only true religion of these islands, and they want their ceremonies – which sometimes include nudity, simulated and indeed actual sex – to be given full charitable status and full recognition from the state and the education system...’

When he had his back to Merrily, she saw the wire to his earpiece coming out of his collar, like a ruched scar on the back of his neck. Relaying instructions or suggestions, from the programme’s director in some hidden bunker.

‘Ned Bain,’ Fallon said, ‘you’re the high priest of a London coven – can we use the word “coven”? – and also a publisher and an expert on ancient religions of all kinds. I want you to tell me, simply and concisely, why you think paganism is, today, more relevant and more important to these islands than Christianity.’

And Edward Bain had sat, one leg hooked casually over the other like... like Sean had sat sometimes... a TV natural, expounding without pause, his eyes apparently on Fallon, but actually gazing beyond him across the studio. His eyes, in fact, were lazily fixed on Merrily’s... and they – she clutched her chair seat tightly – they were not Sean’s.

‘Well, for a start, they’ve had their two millennia,’ he said reasonably. ‘Two thousand years of war and divison, repression and persecution, torture, genocide... in the name of a cruel, despotic deity dreamed up in the Middle East.’

From the seats tiered behind Merrily came the swelling sound of indrawn breath, like a whistling in the eaves. Part awe, part shock, part admiration at such cool, convincing blasphemy.

‘Two thousand years of the cynical exploitation, by wealthy men, of humanity’s unquenchable yearning for spirituality... the milking of the peasants to build and maintain those great soaring cathedrals... created to harness energies they no longer even understand. Two thousand years of Christianity... a tiny, but ruinous period of Earth’s history. A single dark night of unrelenting savagery and rape.’

There was a trickle of applause. He continued to look at Merrily, his mouth downturned in sorrow but a winner’s light in his eyes. The space between them seemed to shrink, until she could almost feel the warm dusting of his breath on her face. On a huge screen above him was projected the image of a serene, bare-breasted woman wearing a tiara like a coiled snake.

‘Now it’s our turn,’ he said softly. ‘We who worship in woods and circles of rough stone. We who are not afraid to part the curtains, to peer into the mysteries from which Christianity still cowers, screaming shrilly at us to come away, come away. To us – and to the rest of you, if you care to give it any thought – Christianity is, at best, a dull screen, a block. It is anti-spiritual. It was force-fed to the conquered and brutalized natives of the old lands, who practised – as we once did, when we still had sensitivity – a natural religion, in harmony with the tides and the seasons, entirely beneficent, gentle, pacific, not rigid nor patriarchal. The Old Religion has always recognized the equality of the sexes and exalted the nurturing spirit, the spirit which can soothe and heal the Earth before it is too late.’

The trickle of applause becoming a river. John Fallon standing with folded arms and his habitual half-smile. Someone had dimmed the studio lights so that Ned Bain was haloed like a Christ figure, and when he spoke again it might have been Sean there, being reasonable, logical. Merrily began to sweat.

‘The clock of the Earth is running down. We’ve become alienated from her. We must put the last two thousand years behind us and speak to her again.’

And the river of applause fanned out into a delta among not only the myriad ranks of the pagans, but also the shop-floor workers and the wages staff and the middle and upper management of the paint factory in Walsall. The claps and cheers turned to an agony of white noise in Merrily’s head and she closed her eyes, and when she opened them, there was the fuzzy boom-mic on a pole hanging over her head, and the camera had glided silently across like an enormous floor-polisher and John Fallon, legs apart, hands behind his back, was telling her and the millions at home, ‘... really a fair bit of sense in what Ned’s saying? Well, Merrily... isn’t there?’

She’s frozen, Jane thought in horror, as two seconds passed.

Two entire seconds.... on Livenight! A hush in the bear pit.

‘Come on, love.’ Gerry’s hands were chivvying at the monitors. ‘You’re not in the bloody pulpit now.’

Maurice, the director, said into his microphone, ‘John, why don’t you just ask her, very gently, if she’s feeling all right?’

Jane wanted to haul him from his swivel chair and wrestle him to the ground among the snaking wires. But then, thank Christ, Mum started talking.

It just wasn’t her voice, that was the problem. She sounded like she’d just been awakened from a drugged sleep. Well, all right, it was going to be a tough one. Ned Bain was a class act, a cool, cool person, undeniably sexy. And Jane admittedly felt some serious empathy with what he was saying. Like, hadn’t she herself had this same argument with Mum time and again, pointing out that paganism – witchcraft – was a European thing, born in dark woodland glades, married to mountain streams. It was practical, and Jane didn’t even see it as entirely incompatible with Christianity.

The camera was tight on Mum – so tight that, oh no, you could see the sweat. And she was gabbling in that strange, cracked voice about Christianity being pure, selfless love, while paganism seemed to be about sex at its most mechanical and... feelingless.

Feelingless? Jesus, Jane thought, is that a real word? Oh God.

‘This is bloody trite crap, especially after the pagan guy,’ Maurice told John Fallon. ‘Let’s come back to her when, and if, she gets her shit together.’

‘All right.’ John Fallon spun away, a flying smirk. ‘That’s the, ah, Church of England angle.’

Someone jeered.

Oh God! When she was sure the camera was away from her, Merrily dabbed a crumpled tissue to her forehead, knowing immediately what she should have said, how she could have dealt with Bain’s simplistic generalizations. Now wanting to jump up and tug Fallon back. But it was, of course, too late.

From halfway up an aisle between rows of seats, she caught a glance from Steve Ewing, the producer, his mouth hidden under a lip-microphone as used by ringside boxing commentators. It was as if he was ironically rerunning his pre-programme pep talk: ‘... you’ll be kicking yourself all the way home because you missed your chance of getting your argument across on the programme.’

From the adjacent seat to her left, a hand gently squeezed her arm: Patrick Ryan, the sociologist who was supposed to have shagged half the priestesses in the southern counties while compiling his thesis on pagan ritual practice. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he whispered.

She nodded. She sought out the eyes of Ned Bain, but they were in shadow now; he seemed to be looking downwards. He appeared very still and limp, as though his body was recharging. She thought, He was staring at me the whole time. And afterwards I couldn’t do a thing.

‘... gonna talk to Maureen now,’ John Fallon was saying, back on the other side of the studio floor, just across the aisle from Ned Bain. ‘Maureen, your teenage daughter was into all this peaceful, New Age nature worship. But that was only the start, because Gemma ended up, I believe, in a psychiatric unit.’

Oh, sure... blame Bain for your own deficiencies. Merrily shook herself, furious. Blame poor dead Sean.

‘She’s still attending the unit, John.’ Maureen was a bulky woman, early fifties, south London accent. ‘Apart from that, she won’t hardly leave the house any more, poor kid.’

‘She became a witch, right?’

‘She became a witch when she was about seventeen, when she first went to the tech college. There was a lecturer there like... him.’ Maureen jerked a thumb at Ned Bain, who tilted his head quizzically. ‘Smooth, good-looking guy, on the make.’

Ned chuckled. Really nothing like Sean. How could she have—

‘But let’s just make it clear,’ Fallon said, ‘that this was not Ned Bain here. So this other man recruited Gemma into a witch coven.’

Maureen described how her daughter had been initiated in a shop cellar converted into a temple, and within about six months her personality had completely changed. She’d broken off her engagement to a very nice boy who was a garage mechanic, and then they found out she was into hard drugs.

‘But I never knew the worst of it till her mate come to see me one day. This was the mate she’d joined the coven with, and she told me Gemma had got involved with this other group what was doing black magic. She said Gemma went with the rest of them to St Anthony’s Church – and I know this happened, ’cause it was in the papers – and they desecrated it.’

‘Desecrated, how?’

‘Well... you know... did... did their dirt.’ The big face crumpled. ‘Things like—’

‘John, let me say...’ Ned Bain was leaning forward. The camera pulled back, the boom-mic operator shifted position. ‘This is satanism, and satanism is a specifically anti-Christian movement. It is entirely irrelevant to Wicca or any of the other strands of paganism. We do not oppose Christianity. We—’

‘The hell you don’t!’ Merrily was half out of her seat, but well off-mic.

‘We are an alternative to Christianity,’ Bain stressed. ‘And also, I should perhaps point out at this stage, a precursor, of the tired, politicized cult of Jesus. And I say precursor, because there’s evidence that Christianity itself is no more than a fabrication, a modification of the cult of Dionysus, in which the story of the man-god who dies and is resurrected...’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Fallon stopped him. ‘Fascinating stuff, Ned, but I want to stay with satanism for a moment.’

‘As you would,’ Merrily muttered.

‘Now, Ned, you would say that satanism is as much anathema to pagans as it is to the Christian Church. And yet young Gemma graduated – or descended – to some kind of devil worship after being initiated as a witch. I want to come back...’ Fallon wheeled ‘... to Merrily Watkins...’

Merrily’s hands tightened on the arms of her chair. Please God...

‘Now, what we didn’t say before about Merrily is that, as well as being one of the new breed of female parish priests, she’s also the official exorcist – I believe Deliverance Minister is the correct term these days – for the Diocese of Hereford. That’s right?’

‘Yes.’ Ignore the camera, the lights. Don’t look at Bain’s eyes.

‘So what I want to ask you, do people like Maureen often come to you with this same kind of story?’

‘I...’ She swallowed. How could she say she hadn’t been in the job long enough to have accumulated any kind of client base. ‘I have to say... John... that what you might call real satanism is uncommon. What you have are kids who’re playing old Black Sabbath albums and get a perverse buzz out of dressing up and doing something horribly antisocial. Quite often, you’ll find that these kids will join a witch coven in the belief that it’s far more... extreme, if you like, than it actually is. That they’re entering a world of sex rites and blood sacrifice.’

‘Which is your fault!’ one of the pagans shouted. ‘Because that’s how the Church has portrayed us for centuries.’

‘She’s saying,’ Maureen shrilled, extending a finger at Merrily, ‘that my daughter only joined the witches because she thought they were evil?’

‘No, what I’m—’

‘She’s sitting on the fence!’ A heavy man bounded down one of the aisles. ‘That’s what she’s doing.’

Two security heavies moved in from different directions. Fallon blocked the man’s path. ‘You are?’

‘The Reverend Peter Gemmell.’ He was grey-bearded and big enough to take on either of the two security men. ‘You won’t find me on your list. I’m an industrial chaplain, and I came with the factory group from Walsall. But that’s beside the point. What I want is to tell you all the truth that my colleague here is too diplomatic, too delicate, too wishy-washy to introduce. And that is to say that Satan himself is present in this studio tonight.’

‘Oh hell,’ Jane said glumly, ‘a fruitcake. Just when I thought she might be really cooking.’

‘Lovely.’ Gerry leaned back in his canvas chair with his hands behind his head.

Voice-crackle from Maurice’s cans. He nodded, scanning the monitors to make sure Gemmell was alone. ‘OK, Steve, thanks, will do. John, let’s see where this one goes, OK?’

Eirion looked shell-shocked. ‘Anything could happen down there, couldn’t it? Suppose that guy had a gun?’

‘Probably wouldn’t be that much use against Satan, anyway,’ Jane reasoned.

‘Why don’t you tell them?’ The Rev. Peter Gemmell hissed at Merrily. ‘Why don’t you tell them that Satan is in our midst? That he’s here now. Why don’t you stand up and denounce him?’

Fallon saved her.

‘Well, you tell us, Peter, since you’re here. You point him out. Where exactly is Satan sitting?’

‘I shall tell you.’ Gemmell didn’t hesitate. ‘He’s sitting directly behind you.’

Fallon stepped aside to reveal Ned Bain smiling and shaking his head, pityingly.

‘That man...’ Gemmell glared contemptuously at Bain. ‘That man speaks from the Devil’s script. From his lips spews the slick rhetoric of Satan the seducer.’

Sea of Light? Merrily wondered.

‘ “The satyr shall cry to his fellow!” ’ Gemmell roared. ‘ “Yea, there shall the night hag alight, and find for herself a resting place!” Isaiah.’

Merrily thought of the number of interpretations you could put on that. In fact, she was sure there was a rather more innocent translation in the Revised English Bible. She just couldn’t remember what it was. Couldn’t remember anything tonight.

‘The satyr,’ Gemmell explained, ‘is the so-called horned god of the witches – the god Pan. The night hag is the demon Lilith. And so the Bible tells us quite plainly that paganism invites the demonic to share its bed. And that is as true today as it was when it was written.’

‘The Old Testament,’ Bain said wearily. ‘This guy comes down here and quotes at me from a hotchpotch of myth and legend and old wives’ tales...’

‘The voice of Satan!’ Gemmell snarled, and Merrily was aware of Steve Ewing to her right, putting the bouncers on alert.

‘Thank you, Peter.’ John Fallon placed an arm on the big priest’s shoulder. ‘We’re grateful for that, but I don’t think we’re quite ready for the battle of Armageddon tonight.’

‘I have made my point,’ Gemmell said with dignity and, with a baleful glance at Merrily, walked back up the aisle and then stopped and turned and, before the security men could reach him, roared out, ‘We must – and will – put out the false lights in the night of filth!’

‘Good man,’ Fallon said. ‘Well... Ned Bain’s either the saviour of our planet or he’s the Antichrist. But before that interruption, Merrily, you were saying so-called satanists are just a bunch of delinquent kids...’

‘No, what I said was that real satanism is uncommon. I do know it exists. I have encountered the use of occult practices for evil purposes and I think Ned’s being a bit optimistic if he thinks all pagans are in it to heal the earth.’ Her mouth was dry again. She swallowed.

‘Go on,’ Fallon said.

‘Well, I know for a fact that pagan groups are infiltrated by people with less... altruistic aims – whether it’s money, or drugs or iffy sex.’

‘Black propaganda!’ a woman screeched. Fallon held up a hand for quiet.

‘I do know a young girl,’ Merrily said carefully, thinking of Jane watching at home. ‘She’s a girl who was very nearly ensnared by the people who were secretly running what appeared to be a fairly innocent mystical group for women. It’s a minefield. In the glamorous world of goddesses and prophecy and... and nude dancing at midnight, it’s very hard to distinguish between the people who truly and sincerely believe all this will heal the earth and free our souls... and the ones who are into personal power and gratification of their—’

‘What group?’ the woman shouted. ‘She’s making it up! John, you make her tell us where it was!’

‘Ssssh,’ Fallon said. ‘OK, where was this, Merrily?’

‘It was... around Hereford. Around the Welsh border. Obviously, I’m not going to name anybody who—’

‘All right.’ Fallon turned to the young woman who’d shouted out. ‘It’s Vivienne, right? And you’re the priestess of a coven in Manchester. How do you know what kind of people you’re initiating? How do you vet them?’

‘You just... know.’ Vivienne had cropped hair and earrings that seemed to be made from the bejewelled bodies of seahorses. ‘The initiation process itself weeds out the scum bags and the weirdos. It’s a psychic thing. You learn to pick up on it, and the goddess herself—’

‘That is rubbish,’ Merrily interrupted.

Vivienne paused. John Fallon smiled.

Merrily said, ‘People don’t get vetted before they’re allowed to mess with other people’s minds. You don’t have any real organization or any fixed creed. Your rituals don’t go back to pre-Christian times, they were all made up in the last half century. You’re a complete ragbag of half-truths and good intentions and bad intentions and—’

‘And that’s any different from your Church?’ Vivienne reared out of her seat. ‘Half of you don’t believe in a Virgin Birth! Half of you don’t believe in the Resurrection! And you call us a ragbag. I’m telling you, lady, you’ll have come to bits long before we do. It’s happening right now. And you... you’re part of the decay. We look at you and the blokes see a pretty face and nice legs, and that’s just the Church’s latest scheme to deflect attention from the rot in its guts.’

A build-up of cheers among the pagan ranks. John Fallon stepped back to let the camera catch it all.

‘Your Church is dying on its feet!’ Vivienne grinned triumphantly. ‘It’s not gonna see the new century out. You took our sacred sites from us, and we’re gonna take them back. Your fancy churches will fall, and honest grass will grow up through their ruins, and towers will stand alone, like megaliths—’

‘Whoah!’ Fallon stepped back into the action. ‘What are you banging on about?’

‘All right,’ Vivienne said. ‘She’s from the Welsh border, yeah? I can show you a church on her actual doorstep where that’s already happened. I can show you a church with a tower and graves and everything... which is now a pagan church. You don’t know what’s happening on your own doorstep. You don’t know nothing!’

15 Fairground

‘MOVE IT!’ JANE raced along the bright corridor, trailing her fleece coat over a shoulder. The building appeared to be still only half finished; there were lumps of plaster everywhere, and the panes of many windows still had strips of brown tape across them. ‘Irene, move!’

‘I was just trying to thank Maurice and Gerry.’

‘We’ll write them a letter! Come on. Believe me, she is not going to hang on here. She’s going to be out of that bear pit before any of them can pin her in a corner. She’ll be driving like a bat out of hell down the motorway, swearing that she’ll never, never, never again...’

‘I thought she did OK,’ Eirion said, blundering behind her, ‘in the end. She got that woman very annoyed.’

‘You thought she did OK. I think she just about managed to rescue the situation. She’ll think she was absolutely crap and like disgraced the Church and the bishop and... Jesus Christ!’ Jane hit a pair of swing doors, still running. ‘Can’t you move any faster? I thought you were in the rugby team.’

‘The chess team.’ Eirion caught the doors on the rebound. ‘You know it was the chess team.’

In the old Nova, with Jane leaning back, panting, against a peeling headrest, Eirion said, ‘I wonder what Gerry meant, when that woman was going on about the pagan church.’

‘Huh?’

‘He said, “That’ll flog, if I’m quick,” and made a note on his script.’

‘That church, you mean?’

‘No, the story, I suppose.’ Eirion drove out of the parking area, past a red and white striped barrier which was already raised. ‘He means sell the story.’

‘Who to?’

‘Who would you normally sell a story to? To the papers. He was a tabloid journalist, wasn’t he? And John Fallon didn’t even follow it up on the programme, so...’

‘He doesn’t follow up anything that’ll take longer than thirty seconds or won’t lead to a fight. Irene, was that crass, meaningless and totally inconclusive, or what?’

‘Bit like the Welsh Assembly without a vote.’

‘You still want to do TV one day?’

‘What? Oh... well, not quite that, obviously. Not exactly that. I want to be a TV news reporter.’

‘So did those guys at one time, I expect. I mean, nobody starts out wanting to shovel shit for a living, do they?’

‘That was you, wasn’t it?’ Eirion slowed for a roundabout. ‘We’re looking for M5 South, aren’t we?’

‘Huh?’

‘Yeah, this one.’ Eirion hit the slip road. ‘That girl your mother was talking about. The girl who nearly got ensnared by those people running that women’s mystical group in Hereford.’

‘You already know it was me. You saw how it ended.’

‘I wasn’t sure.’

‘Well, it was.’

‘And yet you’re still interested in paganism and all that. Because that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? I mean, I know you did think I might get something out of it, career-wise... but you are kind of drawn to all that, aren’t you? I mean, still.’

Jane snorted a laugh. A big motorway sign loomed up, wreathed in tendrils of mist: ‘Worcester. The South West’. So many options. The motorway was romantic at night, despite those dark, blurred, nightmare memories that were more nightmare than memory, but fading.

‘Like, despite everything,’ Eirion persisted, ‘you’re still turned on by weird mystical stuff.’

‘Irene, it’s not “weird mystical stuff”, it’s about what we are and where we’re going. Do you never lie in bed and wonder what we’re part of and where it all ends?’

‘I could lie awake all night and agonize about it, but it wouldn’t make any difference, would it? I don’t like the look of this fog, Jane.’

‘But suppose it would? Suppose you could? I mean, suppose you could go places, deep into yourself and into the heart of the universe at the same time?’

‘But I know I couldn’t. I wouldn’t have the – what is it? – the application. Neither would most of those people there tonight. They think they can discover enormous, eternal, mind-blowing truths by summoning gods and spirits and things, but they’re just fooling themselves. I mean they were just... kind of sad tossers.’

‘Ned Bain wasn’t sad.’

‘Course he was. He was just the tosser in the suit.’

Eirion drifted onto the motorway. It wasn’t too foggy, but you couldn’t see the sky. Jane hoped Mum wasn’t feeling too choked about her performance to drive carefully.

She said, ‘He was making the point that paganism is no longer a crank thing; that it has to be taken seriously as a major, continuing tradition in this country and a genuine, valid force for change. He was like... very controlled and eloquent. I’d guess he’s quite a way along the Path.’

‘You mean the garden path?’

‘You know exactly what I mean.’

‘He’s manipulative. You couldn’t trust him.’

‘Because he’s kind of good-looking?’

‘Well,’ Eirion said, ‘that’s obviously a small plus-factor with you.’

‘Sod off. If I was that superficial, would I be going out with you?’

‘Are you?’

‘Superficial?’

‘Going out with me?’

‘Possibly. I don’t know. I might be too weird for you.’

‘Yeah, that’s my principal worry, too,’ Eirion said, deadpan.

‘Bastard.’ Jane leaned her shoulder into his. ‘I wish there’d been time to wait and grab that Vivienne when she came out.’

‘She wouldn’t have told you where that church is. You notice how quick she clammed up, as though she knew she’d said too much? Because if some witchcraft sect are secretly practising at a Christian church... well, I don’t know. If they haven’t actually broken in, is that some kind of crime? Probably not.’

‘Well, there you go.’

‘Your mother’s going to have to find out about it, though, isn’t she?’

‘Probably.’

‘And what will she do when she does find out?’

‘Go in there with a big cross? How should I know?’

‘You could be more sympathetic to her.’

‘I am sympathetic.’

‘You’re also sympathetic to paganism.’

‘I’m interested. I’ve had... experiences, odd psychic things I can’t explain.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it really.’

‘Oh.’ Eirion drove in silence. Yellow fog-warning lights signalled a forty mph speed limit.

‘I’m not being funny,’ Jane said. ‘This just isn’t the time.’

‘No.’

‘Haven’t you? Had things happen to you you can’t explain? Feelings about places? Things you thought you saw? Times when your emotions and your, like, sensations are so intense that you feel you’re about to burst through into... something else. Some other level? I mean, the Welsh are supposed to be like...’

‘My gran’s a bit spooky.’

‘Tell me in what way.’

‘No, you tell me about your mum. Tell me about your dad.’

‘That bloody Gerry,’ Jane said.

Eirion was hesitant. ‘Was what he said...?’ The rest of it was lost under the rattling of a lorry passing them in the centre lane, a low-loader without a load, fast and free in the night.

‘Yeah,’ Jane said. ‘He had it more or less right. My dad met my mum at university, where they were both studying law, and she... got pregnant with me and left the university, and he carried on and became a bent solicitor.’

‘There was a special course for bent solicitors?’

‘Ha ha. They were both going to do legal aid stuff and defend people who couldn’t afford solicitors and all kinds of liberal, crusading stuff like that, according to Mum. But Dad wanted money – because of me, maybe he’d have said. Because of the responsibility. Though Mum says she was already learning things about him she didn’t like. And, anyway, he got into iffy deals with some clients and Mum found out about it and there was this big morality scene, not helped by him screwing his clerk.’ Jane paused for breath. ‘Around this time, Mum had been helping the local vicar with community work and also she had this quite heavy experience of her own.’

‘What sort of experience?’

‘This was when things were really, really bad, and she was desperately trying to sort things out in her own head. She drove off into the sticks and came across this tiny little church in a wood or something and there was, like, a lamplit path...’

‘It was night?’

‘No, it was daytime, dickhead. The lamplit path was, like, metaphorical or in her head or a visionary thing. And listen, if she ever asks, I didn’t tell you this, because she hates... Can’t you go any faster?’

‘There’s a speed limit.’

‘I can’t even see any fog now. Because if she catches us up...’

‘There’s still a speed limit. And so your dad was killed?’

‘He hit a motorway bridge. They were both killed. I mean, Karen, too. I read some newspaper cuttings I wasn’t supposed to find. It was horrible – a ball of fire.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It was years ago,’ Jane said without emotion.

‘Which motorway?’

‘The M5. I suppose this is the M5, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a long motorway.’

‘Well, it wasn’t on this stretch, I don’t think. I don’t quite know where it was. I didn’t read that bit. You don’t want to keep looking out for a certain bridge all your life, do you?’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘What Gerry said about a guilt trip, that’s bullshit. I mean, why should she feel guilty? She was never mixed up in any of those crooked deals. Well, all right, it’s easier for a widow to get into the Church than a newly divorced woman. Maybe she did feel guilty at the way that decision was so neatly taken out of her hands.’

‘How do you feel about your dad?’

‘He was kind of fun,’ Jane said, ‘but I was very little. Your dad’s always fun when you’re little. What was your home like? Did you all speak Welsh? I mean, do you?’

‘Only when we have certain visitors. As everybody can speak English and English is a much bigger language and more versatile, you don’t have to speak Welsh to anybody. But there are some people it’s more correct to speak Welsh to. If you see what I mean.’

‘Wow, minefield.’

‘It’s a cultural minefield, yeah. But I like Welsh. It’s not my first language, but it’s not that far behind.’

‘Do you swear in Welsh? I mean you could swear in Welsh at school, in front of the teachers, and nobody would know.’

‘That’s an interesting point,’ Eirion said. ‘Actually, most Welsh people, when they swear, revert automatically to English. They’re walking along the street conversing happily in Welsh, then one trips over the kerb and it’s, like, “Oh, shit!” ’

‘Oh shit,’ Jane whispered.

It was sudden – like a grey woollen blanket flung over your head.

‘Oh, dear God,’ Jane said.

It was like they’d entered some weird fairground. Red lights in the air. Also white lights, at skewed angles, intersecting across all three carriageways.

She heard Eirion breathe in sharply as he hit the brakes and spun the wheel. Spun into a carnival of lights. Lights all over the place. False lights in the night of filth. Grabbed by her seatbelt, Jane heard screams, dipping and rising like the screams of women on a roller coaster.

The engine stalled. The car slid and juddered.

And stopped? Had they stopped?

Under the fuzzed and shivering lights, there was a moment of massive stillness in which Jane registered that Eirion had managed to bring the car to a halt without hitting anything. She breathed out in shattered relief. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

‘It’s a pile-up,’ Eirion said. ‘I don’t know what to do. Should we get out?’

‘We might be able to help someone.’

‘Yeah.’

There was fog and there was also steam or something. And the silhouettes of figures moving. Even inside the car, there was a smell of petrol. Jane scrubbed at the windscreen, saw metal scrunched, twisted, stretched and pulled like intestine. The fog swirled like poison gas, alive with shouting and wailing and the waxy, solidified beams of headlights.

Jane screamed suddenly and thudded back into the passenger seat. Eirion frenziedly unbuckled his seatbelt, leaned across her. ‘Jane?’

‘I saw an arm. In the road. An arm sticking out. With a hand and fingers all splayed out and white. Just an arm, it was just—’

Brakes shrieked behind them.

Behind.

You never thought about behind. Jane actually turned in time to see it, the monster with many eyes, before it reared and snarled and crushed them.

16 Lurid Bit

GARETH PROSSER WAS loading hay or silage or whatever the hell they called it in these parts onto a trailer for his sheep out on the hills. He was panting out small balloons of white breath. He didn’t even look up when Robin strolled over, just muttered once into the trailer.

‘’Ow’re you?’

Robin deduced that his neighbour was enquiring after his health.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, although he still felt like shit after the Blackmore put-down. ‘Nice morning. Specially after all that fog last night.’

‘Not bad.’

Gareth Prosser straightened up. He wore a dark green nylon coverall and an old discoloured cap. Behind him, you could hardly distinguish the grey farmhouse from the barns and tin-roofed shacks. There was a cold mist snaking amongst a clump of conifers on the hillside, but the sun had risen out of it. The sun looked somehow forlorn and out of place, like an orange beachball in the roadway. It was around eight-fifteen a.m.

‘Wonder if you can give me some advice,’ Robin said.

Gareth Prosser looked at him. Well, not in fact at him, but at a point just a couple degrees to his left, which was disconcerting – made you think there was someone behind you with an axe.

‘Firewood,’ Robin said. ‘We need some dry wood for the stove, and I figured you would know a reputable dealer.’

Gareth Prosser thought this over. He was a shortish, thickset guy in his fifties and now well overweight. His face was jowly, the colour and texture of cement.

Eventually, he said, ‘Mansel Smith’s your man.’

‘Ah.’ Robin was unsure how to proceed, on account of, if his recollection was accurate, the dealer who had sold them the notorious trailerload of damp and resinous pine also answered to the name of Mansel Smith.

‘You get your own wood from, uh, Mansel?’

Prosser slammed up the tailgate on the trailer.

‘We burns anthracite,’ he said.

‘Right.’ If Mansel Smith was the only wood dealer around, Robin could believe that. And yet somehow he thought that if Gareth Prosser did ever require a cord of firewood from Mansel it would not be pine and it would not be wet.

‘Well, thanks for your advice.’

‘No problem,’ Prosser said.

Right now, if this situation was the other way about, Robin figured he himself would be asking his neighbour in for a coffee, but Prosser just stood there, up against his trailer, like one of those monuments where the figure kind of dissolves into uncarved rock. No particular hostility; chances were this guy didn’t know or didn’t care that Robin was pagan.

Well, this was all fine by Robin, who stayed put, stayed cool. If there was one thing he’d learned from the Craft it was the ability to become still, part of the landscape like an oak tree. Prosser stayed put because maybe he was part of the landscape, and Robin figured they could both have stood there alongside that trailerload of winter fodder until one of them felt hunger pains or he – unlikely to be Prosser – burst out laughing.

But after about five seconds, the farmer looked up when a woman’s voice called out, ‘Gareth! Who was that?’

Prosser didn’t reply, and she came round the side of one of the sheds onto the half-frozen rutted track.

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘Hi there,’ Robin said.

The woman was a little younger than Gareth, maybe fifty, and a good deal better preserved. She wore tight jeans and boots and a canvas bomber jacket. She had a strong, lean face and clear blue eyes and short hair with, possibly, highlights.

‘Good morning,’ the woman said distinctly. ‘I’m Councillor Prosser’s wife.’

‘Hi. Robin Thorogood. From, uh, next door.’

‘Judith Prosser.’

They shook hands. She had a firm grip. She even looked directly into his eyes.

‘I’ve got some coffee on,’ she said.

‘That would be wonderful.’

‘I’ll be in now,’ Gareth said.

Robin had learned, from Betty, that when they said ‘now’ they meant ‘in a short while’. So he smiled and nodded at Gareth Prosser and gratefully followed Judith up the track toward the farmhouse complex. In the middle distance, their two teenage sons were wheeling their dirt bikes out to the hill. There was a sound like a chainsaw starting up and one of the boys splattered off.

‘Be an international next year, our Richard,’ Judith Prosser said proudly. ‘Had his first bike when he was four. All Wales Schoolboy Scrambling champion at eleven. Perfect country for it, see.’

‘Doesn’t it mess up the fields?’

‘Messes up the footpaths a bit.’ Mrs Prosser smiled ruefully. ‘We gets complaints from some of the rambling groups from Off. But not from the local people.’

Robin nodded.

‘Councillor Prosser’s boys, see,’ Mrs Prosser said, like it was perfectly reasonable that being a councillor should automatically exclude you from certain stifling social impositions. Robin didn’t detect any irony, but maybe it was there.

‘I see,’ he said.

‘This is Juliet Pottinger.’ An efficient and authoritative Scottish voice. ‘I’m afraid I am away this weekend, but you may wish to leave a message after the tone. If you are a burglar uninterested in thousands of books which are essentially old rather than antiquarian, then I can tell you that you are almost certainly wasting your time.’

Betty thought she sounded like a woman who would at least give you a straight answer – if not until Monday.

Bugger. She cleared away the breakfast things, ran some water for washing-up. Whatever Robin learned about the Reverend Penney from the Prossers, she didn’t trust him not to put some pagan-friendly spin on it, and it was important to her now to find out the truth. What had Penney done to cause ‘weeping and wailing’ in the village? Why had the local people hushed it up? Did the priest, Ellis, know the full story and did this explain why he was so determined to subject the site to some kind of exorcism? She’d never settle here until she knew.

The phone rang, had her reaching for a towel before the answering machine could grab the call.

‘Oh, my dear, I’m sure it’s working already!’

‘Mrs Wilshire?’

‘I have had what, without doubt, was the best night’s sleep I’ve had in months!’

‘That’s, er, wonderful,’ Betty said hesitantly, because the likelihood of her arthritis remedy kicking in overnight was remote, to say the least.

‘I can bend my fingers further than... Oh, I must show you. Will you be in this area today?’

‘Well, I suppose...’

‘Marvellous. I shall be at home all day.’

‘Er... you didn’t stop taking your cortisone tablets, did you? Because steroids do need to be wound down slowly.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t take any chances.’

‘No.’

It was psychological, of course, and Betty felt a little wary. Mrs Wilshire was a woman who could very easily become dependent on people. If Betty wasn’t careful, she’d wind up having to call in to see her every other day. Still, if it hadn’t been for Mrs Wilshire they would never have got onto the Penney affair.

‘OK, I’ll drop in later this morning if that’s all right. Er, Mrs Wilshire, the papers you kindly let me take – about the church? There was one from a Mrs Pottinger, relating to the Reverend Penney. Do you know anything about that?’

‘Oh, there was a lot of trouble about him, my dear. Everyone was very glad when he left, so I’m told.’

‘Even though the church was decommissioned and sold soon afterwards?’

‘That was a pity, although I believe it was always rather a draughty old place.’

‘Er, do you remember, when you bought the house – and the church – did the Reverend Ellis come to visit you there?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I was hardly ever there. It was Bryan’s project. Bryan’s house, until it was finished. Which I confess I really rather hoped it never would be.’

‘So you don’t know if the Reverend Ellis went to see Bryan there?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t. Though I’m sure he would have mentioned it. He never mentioned Mr Ellis in connection with that house. I don’t remember him ever mentioning Mr Ellis.’

‘No suggestion of Mr Ellis wanting to conduct a service in the church?’

‘A church service?’

‘Er... yes.’

‘Oh no, my dear. I’m sure I would have remembered that.’

Just us, then.

The first thing Mrs Judith Prosser asked him was if they would be keeping stock on their land. Robin replied that farmers seemed to be having a hard enough time right now without amateurs creeping in under the fence. Which led her to ask what he did for a living and him to tell her he was an artist.

‘That’s interesting,’ Mrs Prosser said, though Robin couldn’t basically see how she could find it so; there wasn’t a painting on any wall of the parlour – just photographs, mainly of men. Some of the photos were so old that the men had wing collars and watch chains.

As well as chairman’s chains. Robin wondered if ‘Councillor’ was some kind of inherited title in the Prosser family – like, even if you had all the personality of a bag of fertilizer, they still elected you, on account of the Prossers knew the way to County Hall in Llandrindod.

Mrs Prosser went through to the kitchen, leaving the door open. There was a black suit on a hanger behind the door.

‘We have a funeral this afternoon,’ she explained.

‘I guess councillors have a lot of funerals to attend.’

She looked at him. ‘In this case, it’s for a friend.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘We all are. Sit down, Mr Thorogood.’

The furniture was dark and heavy and highly polished. The leather chair he sat in had arms that came almost up to his shoulders. When you put your hands on them, you felt like a dog begging.

Funerals. Was this an opening?

‘So it’s, uh, local, this funeral?’ Boy, how soon you could grow to hate one simple little word.

‘In the village, yes.’

‘So you still have a graveyard – despite no church?’

Mrs Prosser didn’t reply. He heard her pouring coffee. It occurred to him she hadn’t commented on him being American. Maybe ‘from Off’ was all-inclusive; how far ‘Off’ was of no major consequence.

He raised his voice a little. ‘I guess there must’ve been problems with funerals when the old St Michael’s Church was in use. What with the creek and all.’ OK, it might not be in the best of taste to keep on about funerals, but it was his only way into the Reverend Penney, and he wasn’t about to let go.

‘Because of the brook, no one’s been buried there in centuries.’ She came back with two brown cups and saucers on a tray.

‘Thank you, uh, Judith. Hey, I met the vicar. He came round.’

‘Mr Ellis is a good rector.’

‘But not local,’ Robin said.

‘You don’t get local ministers anywhere any more, do you? But he brings people in. Very popular, he is. Quite an attraction.’

‘You like to see new people coming in?’

She laughed: a good-looking woman, in her weathered way. ‘Depends what people they are, isn’t it? Nobody objects to churchgoers. And the collections support the village hall. They’re always very generous.’

‘Just Nick doesn’t seem your regular kind of minister,’ Robin said.

‘He suits our needs,’ said Mrs Prosser. ‘Father Ellis’s style of worship might not be what we’ve been used to in this area, but a breath of something new is no bad thing, we’re always told. Jog us out of our routine, isn’t it?’

‘I guess.’ He tasted the coffee. It was strong and surprisingly good. Judith Prosser put the tray on a small table and came to sit on the sofa opposite. She was turning out to be unexpectedly intelligent, not so insular as he’d figured. He felt ashamed of his smug preconceptions about rural people, local people. So he went for it.

‘From what I hear, this area seems to attract kind of off-the-wall clergy. This guy, uh... Penney?’

‘My,’ she said, ‘you have picked up a lot of gossip in a short time.’

‘Not everybody finds themselves buying a church. You feel you oughta find out the history.’

‘Or the lurid bits, at least.’

‘Uh... I guess.’ He gave her his charming, sheepish smile.

‘Terry Penney.’ Judith sipped her coffee. ‘What’s to say? Quiet sort of man. Scholarly, you know? Had his study floor-to-ceiling with books. Not an unfriendly person, mind, not reclusive particularly. Not at first.’

‘He didn’t live at the farmhouse – our house?’

‘Oh, no, that was always a farm. No, the rectory was just out of the village, on the Walton road. Mr Weal has it now – the solicitor.’

Robin recalled the name from someplace. Juliet Pottinger’s letter?

‘So...’ He put down his coffee on a coaster resting on the high chair arm. ‘The, uh, lurid bit?’

‘Restrain yourself, Mr Thorogood, I’m getting there.’

Robin grinned; she was OK. He guessed the Christ is the Light sticker was just the politically correct thing to do in Old Hindwell.

‘Well, it was my husband, see, who had the first inkling of something amiss – through the county council. Every year Old Hindwell Church would apply for a grant from the Welsh Church Acts Committee, or whatever they called it then, which allotted money to old buildings, for preservation. Although the church was in the Hereford diocese it’s actually in Wales, as you know. However, this particular year, there was no request for money.’

She turned on a wry smile. She was – he hadn’t expected this – enjoying telling this story.

‘The Reverend Penney had been yere... oh, must have been nearly eighteen months by then. Thought he must have forgotten, we did, so Councillor Prosser goes to see him. And Mr Penney, bold as you please, says, oh no, he hasn’t forgotten at all. He doesn’t want a grant. He doesn’t think the church should be preserved!’

Robin widened his eyes.

‘The church is wrong, says Mr Penney. It’s in the wrong place. It should never have been built where it is. The water’s not healthy. The fabric’s rotten. Parking’s difficult. Oh, a whole host of excuses. He says he’s written to the diocese and whoever else, suggesting that they dispense with St Michael’s at the earliest possible opportunity.’

Robin was fazed. ‘He called for them to get rid of his own church? Just like that?’

‘Just like that. No one could believe it.’

‘Wow.’ Robin was thinking furiously. Had Penney realized this was a powerful pagan site? Was it that simple? Had he made some kind of discovery? He tried to hide his excitement. ‘Was he mad?’

‘Perhaps he’d always been a little mad,’ said Mrs Prosser. ‘But we just never saw it until it was too late.’

‘So, like... what did he do?’

Judith Prosser put down her coffee. ‘No one likes to talk about it. But, as the owner now, I suppose you have a right to be told.’

One of the few good things about living here was that the post usually arrived before nine; in some rural areas you couldn’t count on getting it before lunchtime.

Today’s was a catalogue from a mail order supplier of garden ornaments – how quickly these people caught up with you – and a letter addressed to ‘Mrs’ Thoroughgood with a Hereford postmark.

That ‘Mrs’ told her what this was going to be.

She sat down at the table with the letter in front of her. Usual cheap white envelope. They’d received two when they were living in Shrewsbury. They said things like: We Know About Your Dirty Nude Ceremonies Worshipping Heathen Gods. The Lord Will Punish You.

How had they found out? Who’d told them? Had Robin been indiscreet?

Betty felt gutted. The sick irony of this was that she hadn’t practised as a witch since they moved here and, the way she was feeling now, never would again – at least, not in any organized way.

She contemplated tossing the letter in the stove unopened. But if she did that it would dwell in her, would be twice as destructive.

With contempt, Betty slit the envelope.

She read the note three times. Usual capitals, usual poor spelling.

But otherwise not quite what she’d expected.

YOU HAD BETTER TELL THAT LONG HAIRED LOUT THAT IF HE WANTS TO GO HELPING HIMSELF TO THE FAVOURS OF THE BIGGEST HORE IN THE VILLAGE HE OUGHT TO BE MORE DISCREAT ABOUT IT.

17 Revelations

IT WAS INCREDIBLE! So wonderfully bizarre that, walking back to St Michael’s Farm, Robin forgot all about agonizing over that asshole Blackmore who thought bestsellerdom had conferred upon him an art critic’s instincts.

On the footbridge over the Hindwell Brook, he stopped a moment, evoking the incredible scene on that October morning back in the sixties when the brook was in flood. Had anyone photographed it? Could there be pictures still around?

Naw, anyone who’d pulled out a camera would probably have been compelled by some local by-law to hand over the film to Councillor Prosser – whichever Prosser happened to be the councillor at the time.

Judith Prosser had let him out the front way, through a dark-beamed hallway with some nice oak panelling. Up against the panelling there had been an outsize chair with a leather seat and a brass plate on the back. The chairman’s chair, Judith had explained when he asked about it, from the Old Hindwell Community Council, disbanded some years ago under local government reorganization. And, yes, Gareth had been its chairman – twice.

Robin wondered if Judith Prosser called her husband by his title. Maybe got a little bedtime buzz out of it: Oh, oh... give it to me harder, Councillor...

He grinned at the winter sun. He felt a whole lot lighter. Holy shit, he’d actually spoken, in a meaningful way, to a Local Person! It was a seminal thing.

Indeed, when he looked across at the church on its promontory he even had the feeling that the Imbolc sabbat could go back on the schedule. He could see it now – using his visualization skills to cancel the brightness, and paint the sky dark, he could see lights awakening in the church, its ruins coming alive. He conjured the sound of Celtic drums and a tin whistle. Son et lumière. He saw, in the foreground, Betty’s graceful silhouette – Betty in her pale cloak and a headdress woven from twigs. And, in the headdress, a ring of tiny flames, a sacred circle of candle-spears, a crown of lights.

He came in through the back door of St Michael’s farmhouse so much happier than when he’d gone out of it. Returning with the breeze behind him.

‘Siddown, babe,’ he told her. ‘You should hear this.’

‘Should I?’ She was already sitting down.

Robin halted on the stone flags. His mood fell, like a cooling meteor, to earth.

Her voice was flat as nan bread. At gone ten in the morning she was still in her robe. She looked pale and swollen-eyed, sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of the hot water she sometimes drank early in the day.

‘You OK?’

Her hair also looked flat, like tired barn-straw. She’d been sleeping when he’d slipped out of bed around seven. He’d first made some coffee and toast for himself, not keeping especially quiet, and left a note for her on the table before he went over to the Prosser farm. He was half suspecting then that it was going to be one of those days, the kind he’d hoped there wouldn’t be any more of after they moved to the country. In fact, since they’d moved here those days had accumulated one after the other, sure as sunrise. It was now reaching the point where it seemed they could never, simultaneously, be in a good mood. Like the sun would only shine on one of them at any one time.

Is this a psychic malaise? Could this be solved?

‘Bets?’ He was burning to bring her comfort, but he didn’t know how. There were always going to be areas of her he could not reach; he accepted this. He also accepted that in some ways he was no more than her attendant. This was not necessarily sad, was it?

‘I’m sorry. Time of the moon.’ She gave him the palest smile he could recall. ‘Tell me what you learned at the farm.’

She was evidently not going to talk about whatever it was. He sat down opposite her and, in a voice from which the oil of narrative enthusiasm had now been well drained, told her what he’d learned about the Reverend Penney.

It was obviously his change of mood, but now he saw beyond the bizarre; he saw the sadness of it all.

‘It’s like early in the morning, still only half light and a mist down by the water, so not everyone sees it. Just the Prossers, that’s the two brothers who lived here, and their older brother – Gareth’s father – and his wife. And Gareth himself, who’d have been in his twenties back then. And this Mrs Pottinger, she was there soon enough, in her role as the eyes and ears of Old Hindwell for the Brecon and Radnor Express. Because she’d seen a... what do you call that thing they kneel on to pray?’

‘Hassock,’ Betty said. ‘I think.’

‘Yeah. Pottinger was out for an early walk with the dog and she’d seen a hassock floating down the brook. Maybe her first thought was that this was the vandals she talked about in her letter to Major Wilshire. Seems she wanted to call the cops, but she ran into the Prossers, and the Prossers stopped her. They knew it was an inside job.’

‘Yes,’ Betty said, like she knew it would have to be.

‘Well, the brook was already high, with all the rain, and close to bursting its banks, and that’s what they think’s happened at first. It’s overflowed into the field by the barn and it’s halfway up the promontory where the church is. It’s like there’s a dam – like a tree or something fell into the brook – but as the day gets lighter they can see the full extent of what’s going down here.’

While he told her, he was seeing it so clearly, hearing the voices over the rushing and roaring of the water. Shrieks of shock from the women, Pottinger’s dog barking in excitement. Judith Prosser hadn’t been there, of course; it would be another fifteen years before she and Gareth were married, but she must have heard the story many times since.

‘Everything!’ Robin said. ‘Everything that wasn’t part of the fabric or nailed down. All the pews, the lectern, a big tapestry from the wall, the choir stalls... all floating down the Hindwell Brook. Until the first stuff reaches the bend and gets snagged on some branches and it all starts to pile up.’

He could see the great dam, one of the pews on end, wood groaning and splintering like the wreck of a sailing ship on the rocks, the water rising all around. He wanted so much to paint it, like Turner would have painted it, all mist and spray.

Betty said, ‘The altar?’

‘Oh yeah, that too. He’d stripped off the cloth and dragged it out through the doors and out to the end of the promontory, like he’d done with all the pews, and just... just tipped it into the water.’

Visualizing the great spout of water as the altar crashed into the brook.

‘He was apparently a big guy. Played rugby. Very strong. His most impressive feat was to rip out the stone font. He must’ve rolled it out the double doors. They found it sticking out of the water, like a big rock.’

Betty glanced bleakly across at him, then picked up her glass and drank the rest of the warm water like it was a double Scotch.

‘And where was he? Where was Penney?’

‘Gone. They never saw him again. The Prossers and some other guys they could trust salvaged what they could. Took about four of them to get the font out – they waited nearly a week till the water level dropped down, and draped tarpaulin and stuff over it meantime. Couple of weeks later, the diocese gets a cheque for several thousand. Whole damn thing was hushed up.’

‘They never found out why he did it?’

‘Just he’d grown to hate the church, was all. There was no further explanation. He’d cleaned it out. Musta taken him hours, working at it through the night, by the oil lamps – no electricity in there. Trashing his own church like a maniac. When they went inside, it was all bare. Just the Bible from off of the lectern. The Bible lying there in the middle of the nave. Lying open.’

Betty waited a long time before she asked him.

‘Open at?’

Robin smiled, shaking his head.

‘The Book of Revelations, wouldn’t you guess? About Michael and his angels taking on the Devil and his angels? The great dragon getting cast out into the earth? All of this underlined in ink.’

‘I see.’ Betty stood up.

‘Shows us where Ellis is coming from, doesn’t it? He’s clearly heard about Penney and the dragon fixation that gets him so screwed up he trashes his own church. Well, OK, maybe the poor guy experiences some pre-Christian energy on that site which is so awesome it shakes his Christian faith, scares the shit outa him. To Penney it’s devilish. It blows his mind... he wrecks the joint.’

‘Thereby becoming a vehicle for this energy, I suppose,’ Betty said wearily.

‘Holy shit!’ A big light came on in Robin’s head. ‘Hey, that’s so cool! The priest is unwittingly helping the church to cast off Christianity – to revert.’

Betty took her glass to the sink, not looking at him, like she didn’t want to hear what was coming next. But, hell, he had to say it. It was staring them right in the face.

‘Bets... it’s down to us, now, isn’t it? To, like, finish the job. It puts us hard against Ellis, but... like, is this fate, or what?’

He was tingling with excitement. This was their clear future.

At the sink, Betty put down the glass, turned both taps on full. She was staring into the water running out of the taps. ‘I doubt this is as simple as you imagine.’

‘Or maybe it just is. Maybe it’s also fate that the local people weren’t so attached to the church the way it was that they wanted to fight to save it.’

‘It was in a poor state, anyway. It was going to cost a fortune in repairs. That’s what the Pottinger woman said.’

‘And maybe Ellis was right about something coming to the surface. Bad news for him... but not for us, babes.’

‘Oh, don’t be so bloody simplistic! Just for a moment stop trying to make everything fit into your dream scenario.’

‘Well, sure... OK.’ He felt hurt. ‘I mean let’s talk this thing through.’

‘I have to go out. I have to go and see Mrs Wilshire.’

‘Again? What the fuck is this?’

‘It’s not your problem.’

‘Oh really?’ Hell, this needed saying, this was long overdue. ‘Well what is my problem is why you always have to find excuses to get out of here. Like going in the car. Why don’t you ever even go into the village? The place we live next to? Why don’t you get to know the people here? People like Judith Prosser next door. OK, Gareth might be a dumb bastard, but she’s OK, not what I imagined. Maybe we were wrong to start condemning the local people as total redneck bigots, purely on your flawed fucking childhood memories.’

Betty didn’t flare up. She just stared hard at him for a couple of seconds, and he stared back.

And then she said, ‘I never said that. I’m sure there are some decent, liberal, perceptive, outward-looking people down there.’ She went to the table, picked up a piece of white notepaper, pushed it at him. ‘Like, for instance, the person who sent that.’

18 Cold, Earthly, Rational...

THE GOTHIC LETTER D was still on the office door, but hanging loose now, at an angle. D for Deliverance – Bishop Hunter’s idea.

As had been the Reverend Watkins becoming Deliverance Consultant.

She stood on the stone stairs, in front of the closed door, and decided, after all, to go back home. Her head ached. What the hell was she doing here? As she turned to creep back down the stairs, the office door opened.

‘I thought it was!’

Merrily stopped, and slowly and sheepishly turned around again.

‘I thought it was your car.’ Sophie was expensively casual in a blue and white Alpine sweater. ‘What on earth are you doing here? Nobody would have expected you to come in today.’

She’d spoken briefly to Sophie on the phone, asking her to put the bishop in the picture.

‘Merrily, you look—’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘Starved.’ Sophie stood aside for her.

Merrily slung Jane’s duffel coat on the back of her chair, and slumped into it. ‘If I hadn’t come in today, I might never have come in again.’

Sophie frowned and began making tea. Through the gatehouse window, above Broad Street, the late morning sun flickered unstably in and out between hard clouds. The air outside had felt as though it was full of razor blades. The weather forecast had said there might be snow showers tonight – which was better than fog.

‘The bishop tried to ring you.’ Sophie laid out two cups and saucers. ‘He said if I spoke to you to tell you there was no need to phone back.’

‘Ever.’

‘Don’t be silly, Merrily. On reflection, I’m glad you did come in. Are you listening to me?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘You cannot drive to Worcester.’

‘I’ll be perfectly—’

‘You will not. I shall drive you. Leave your car here. I don’t want an argument about this, do you understand?’

‘Well, I can take a bit of a rest this afternoon. They’re not releasing her until after five.’

‘She should stay there another night,’ Sophie said stiffly. ‘Concussion’s unpredictable.’

‘I think, on the whole, I can probably do without her discharging herself and stalking the streets of Worcester at midnight.’

‘I should have thought that she’d be sufficiently penitent not to dare to—’

‘Sophie’ – Merrily cradled her face in cupped hands, looked up sorrowfully – ‘this is Jane we’re talking about.’

‘If she were my daughter...’

‘Don’t give yourself nightmares.’ Merrily dropped her hands, trying not to cry from exhaustion, anxiety, confusion and a terror which seemed to be lodged deep inside her, which every so often would pulse, hot-wiring her entire nervous system.

‘Delayed shock, Merrily.’

‘If you tell me I need trauma counselling, I’ll put this computer through the window.’

Sophie brought over a chair, sat down opposite Merrily.

‘Tell me then.’

The sun had put itself away again. Sophie added two sugars into Merrily’s tea and switched on the answering machine.

Sophie? Sophie in her incredibly expensive Alpine sweater. Sophie who served the cathedral and all it represented. Yeah, why not?

‘When you really contemplate the nature of this job,’ Merrily said, ‘you can start to think you’re more than half mad. When the line between reality and whatever else there is... is no longer distinct. When it’s no longer even a line.’

And when you swerve around a crashed lorry in the fog, and there’s a figure staggering in the road that you just know you’re going to hit, and in the last second, while you’re throwing yourself around the wheel, you see her face.

‘I’m starting actually to understand the Church’s conservatism on the supernatural. Shut the door and bar it. Block the gap at the bottom with a thick mat. Let no chink of unnatural light seep in, because a chink’s as good as a... whatever you call a big blast of light that renders you blind.’

‘As in Paul on the road to Damascus?’ Sophie said.

‘Not exactly. Paul was... sure.’

‘You are tired.’

‘I mean, I’m sure... I’m just not quite sure what I’m sure of. It’s only by being dull and conservative that the Church remains relatively intact. Bricks and mortar and Songs of Praise. Leave the weird stuff to Deliverance. It’s a dirty job, and they’ve never been totally convinced someone has to do it.’

‘I did watch the Livenight programme,’ Sophie said. ‘I didn’t really see how else you could have handled it. Without coming over as a... crank.’

‘Or a bigot. Both of which are probably better than a drowning wimp.’ Merrily drank her tea, both hands around the cup, like someone pulled out of the sea and wrapped in a blanket. ‘You spend an interminable hour making a fool of yourself on TV, you walk out thinking all religion’s a joke. You’re unhappy and ashamed and cynical all at the same time. You get in your car, you drive maybe not quite as carefully as you ought to, given the ubiquitous fog warnings and the fact that your husband just happened to have died horrifically on this same stretch of motorway. You drive into a fog bank. You become aware of two dull specks of red that you think must be a hundred yards away and which turn out to be this bloody great crashed lorry dead in your path. You spin the wheel in panic. You become aware of a figure dragging another figure across the road in front of you. The second figure stares full into your headlights, and you see... you see the face of your daughter who you know for a fact is at home in bed fifty-odd miles away. Your daughter’s face... blank, white, expressionless. Like the face of a corpse.’

Sophie shuddered. ‘It must have been... I can’t imagine what that must have been like.’

‘Like... Nemesis,’ Merrily said. ‘You know what I was thinking about in the few minutes before? I was thinking about this woman who believes she’s seeing her sister’s ghost. I was just deciding she really didn’t have a psychiatric problem— Oh no!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I told her I’d go with her to her sister’s funeral. It’s this afternoon. It’s in about two hours. Or less.’

‘Oh, Merrily, nobody could possibly expect—’

‘I’ve got to.’

‘You’ve had no sleep.’

‘Oh, I’ve had... had an hour on the sofa. Fed the cat, grabbed a slice of toast, rung Worcester Infirmary twice to make sure Jane’s not... worse. No, look, I’ve got to go, because...’ Because if I don’t and something awful happens... ‘Because it’s something I can’t just leave in the air.’

‘Then you must lie down for a while first. I’ll find somewhere in the palace. Look at you – you’re trembling. Are you saying this pile-up actually happened in the same area where your husband was killed?’

‘Well, that was on the other side, the northbound lanes. He was... I suppose he was on my mind, when...’

When she’d walked into that studio? Was Sean stalking her then? Was he already deep-harboured in her head when she’d entered the TV building? Having driven along the same stretch of the M5, under the very same bridge against which his car had balled on impact and bounced in its final firedance, while he and Karen were torn and roasted.

Couldn’t tell Sophie any of that. Couldn’t tell her about the eloquent pagan, Ned Bain, sitting there with his lazy, knowing Sean-like eyes, and even his legs crossed à la Sean.

Just stay with the main event.

‘And, you think... what you think is that this can’t be happening. And if it can’t be happening then it’s a hallucination. And you know you’re not hallucinating. Therefore – click, click – it has to be a paranormal experience, just like all the paranormal experiences other people have told you about and you’ve nodded sagely and given your balanced opinion.’

‘But only you would think that. Only someone in your—’

‘Only someone in my weird, cranky job.’

‘But you didn’t hit her,’ Sophie said intensely. ‘Did you? You did not hit Jane.’

‘No. There was no impact. I didn’t hit anyone. But still a complete nightmare – I mean dreamlike. You haven’t physically driven into your daughter, therefore it must be a premonition: a vision of killing your own child.’

‘But it wasn’t, was it?’

‘I could see Sean in her face... that little bump in the nose, the twist of the lips. I could see Sean in her, like I’d never seen him there before.’

‘Juxtaposition of ideas,’ Sophie said, ‘or something.’

‘I swerved, violently. Stopped the car and got out, terrified out of my mind. Only to discover...’ Sophie reached across the desk, squeezed Merrily’s cold right hand. ‘... that this really was Jane. The actual Jane, being pulled away by a terrified Eirion after being very nearly killed when this speeding low-loader smashed into the back of his car. She was pale and expressionless not because she was dead, but because she was semi-concussed. This is the mind-blowing perversity of it, that there is an absolutely cold, earthly, rational explanation... for everything. For every aspect of it. Why do I find that even more frightening? The most horrifying moment in my life, and there is, in the end, a simple, rational explanation.’

‘You’re afraid that you’ve stopped looking for simple rational explanations? Is that what you mean?’

‘Maybe.’

‘How many people were killed?’ Sophie asked. ‘In the end.’

‘Three. And one critical in hospital. I think about four slightly hurt, including Jane. There were about six cars involved, and a couple of lorries. Seemed like the parameds and the fire brigade were on the scene before I was out of my car. There was one poor woman...’

Merrily shook her head, blinked away the unbelievably horrific image of a torn-off arm on the central reservation.

‘You were very lucky, both of you. And the boy?’

‘Eirion. His car was a write-off.’

‘He’s not injured, that’s all that matters.’

‘Some whiplash. They kept him in for the night, too, but I think his father picked him up this morning. Or his father’s chauffeur. I talked to his stepmother on the phone. Eirion seems to be blaming himself for what happened. Nice kid.’

‘So, altogether...’

‘What I keep coming back to is, suppose I’d arrived one second earlier? Suppose I’d killed her? In one of those one-in-a-billion freak family tragedies? What would I have done with the rest of my life? What would any of it be worth?’

‘But you didn’t. Someone didn’t want to lose you – and didn’t want you forever damaged either.’

Merrily leaned back, shook out a cigarette. ‘You ever thought of getting ordained, Sophie?’

‘God forbid.’ Sophie stood up. ‘Put that thing away and get your coat.’

‘It’s Jane’s coat. What for?’

‘Jane’s coat, then. I’m going to drive you to this funeral. You can perhaps sleep on the way. If we leave now, we might even stop for a sandwich.’

‘Sophie, it’s Saturday. You can’t... You have things to do.’

‘Oh,’ Sophie said, ‘I think Hereford United can manage without me for one week.’

Merrily blinked. Sophie unhooked a long, sheepskin coat and a woollen scarf from the door. It did rather look like the sort of outfit you would wear to a football match in January. Bizarre?

‘This is above and beyond, Soph.’ Merrily got unsteadily to her feet.

‘I should be grateful if you didn’t smoke in my car,’ Sophie said.

19 Abracadabra

THE MAIN ROAD from Old Hindwell to New Radnor passed through the hamlet of Llanfihangel nant Melan. The church of St Michael was right next to the road and, although it didn’t actually look very old, there were indications of a circle of ancient yew trees, which suggested it had been rebuilt.

Although there were a number of other cars nearby, Betty stopped the Subaru. She was in no mood to talk to Mrs Wilshire or anybody else right now. She would check out the atmosphere of the church. It might even calm her down.

She was still furious with Robin. If he’d been accosted the other night by the drunken wife of Greg Starkey, feeling him up in the street, why hadn’t he told Betty when he arrived home? Old Hindwell wasn’t exactly known for its red-light quarter. So why had he kept quiet?

Why? Because they’d just had a goddamn row over his handling of Nick Ellis. Because he’d slammed out of the house and didn’t think she’d be speaking to him anyway. Because he was cold and tired. Because.

So why hadn’t he mentioned it the next day, even?

Because... Jeez, was it important? Did she think he enjoyed it? Did she think he’d snatched this chance to feel Marianne’s tits?

Actually, she didn’t think that. What she thought was that Robin hated to tell her anything that might make her think less of Old Hindwell. Why don’t you get to know the people here? Like Judith Prosser – she’s OK, not what I imagined.

Dickhead.

Betty walked over to the church. The stonework suggested extensive Victorian renovation. Did anything remain of the church built as part of some alleged St Michael circle? How would this one feel inside?

Sooner or later, when Robin was not around, she would have to go back into the Old Hindwell ruins to face the question now looming large: the stained and sweating, fear-ridden man at prayer – was that him? Was that the Reverend Terry Penney? Was he dead now?

But this wasn’t an exercise in psychic skills. Before she went back there, she wanted to know all there was to be known about all the churches in the St Michael circle.

However, in Llanfihangel Church, she was immediately accosted by a man in a light suit who asked her if she was on the bride or the groom’s side. So much for standing there in the silence and feeling for the essence of the place. Betty apologized and escaped with a handful of leaflets, which she inspected back in the Subaru.

And just couldn’t believe it. One, apparently produced as a result of a community tourism initiative, was blatantly entitled, ‘Where sleeps the Dragon on the trail of St Michael’s churches’.

Betty slumped back in her seat, broke into a peal of wild, stupid laughter. A tourist leaflet. Was that how all this had started?

The text explained that there were four St Michael churches around Radnor Forest – at Llanfihangel nant Melan, Llanfihangel Rhydithon, Cefnllys and Cascob. It presumably didn’t mention Old Hindwell because it was a ruin, now on private land.

An inside page was headed: ‘St Michael and the Dragon of Radnor Forest’.

It referred to the introduction by Jewish Christians of ‘angelology’. Angels guarded nature and local communities. St Michael guarded Israel and was named in the Book of Revelations, etc., etc. Most Welsh churches dedicated to him had appeared in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

The specific Radnor reference had been pulled from a book called A Welsh Country Parson by D. Parry-Jones, who recounted a legend that the last Welsh dragon slept in Radnor Forest and, to contain it, local people had built four St Michael churches in a circle around the Forest. It was said that if any of these churches was destroyed, the dragon would awaken and ravage the countryside once more.

This was it? This was the source of Nicholas Ellis’s paranoia?

Crazy!

Still, it did look as though Robin and Ellis were right. Assuming there was no fire-breathing elemental beast locked into the landscape, this appeared to be a simple metaphor for paganism, the Old Religion.

... if any one of these churches is destroyed...

Old Hindwell had been virtually destroyed... and initially by its rector, which didn’t make any obvious sense. Why would a clergyman make a gesture which was bound to be adversely interpreted by anyone superstitious enough to give any credence to the dragon legend?

Unless Penney had been a closet pagan. Was that likely?

Not really. Something was missing. For a moment, Betty smelled again the rich, sickening stench from the praying man in the skeletal nave.

She drove off too quickly, the Subaru shuddering.

Lizzie Wilshire greeted her with a spindly embrace.

‘I don’t know whether it’s your herbal mixture or just you, my dear, but I feel so much better.’ Holding out her right hand and making it into a claw, the fingertips slowly but effectively closing on the palm.

‘Gosh,’ Betty said.

‘I haven’t been able to do that for months!’ Those ET eyes shining like polished marbles. ‘You’re a wonder, my dear!’

‘I wouldn’t quite say that.’

Psychological? The potion couldn’t possibly have had such a spontaneous and dramatic effect unless her problem was essentially, or to an extent, psychosomatic.

And yet... Betty caught an unexpected sidelong glimpse of Lizzie’s aura. It was, without a doubt, less fragmented. And she was talking constantly, garrulous rather than querulous now.

‘Were you originally called Elizabeth? Like me?’

‘A long time ago,’ Betty admitted, as they sat down.

‘A long time ago, my dear, you weren’t even born.’ Lizzie Wilshire laughed hoarsely. ‘Now, were those papers useful? If not, just throw them away. I’m in a clearing-out mood. Clutter frightens me. I’m even thinking of selling the summer house. Every time I look out at it, I expect to see Bryan walking across the garden. Do people buy summer houses second-hand like that? Can they take them away?’

‘I should think so. You could advertise it in the paper. I could do that for you, if you want.’

‘Oh, would you? That’s terribly kind. Yes. I told Dr Coll – I hope you don’t mind...’

‘About the summer house?’

‘About you, of course! About your wonderful herbal preparation. He called in this morning, even though it’s Saturday – such a caring, caring man – and said how much better I was looking, and naturally I told him about you.’

‘Oh.’ In Betty’s experience the very last thing a doctor liked to be told was that some cranky plant remedy had had an instantaneous effect on a condition against which powerful drugs had thus far failed to make a conspicuous impact.

‘He was delighted,’ Lizzie said.

‘He was?’

‘Far be it from him, he said, to dismiss the old remedies. Indeed, he’s often suggested I might benefit from attending one of the Reverend Ellis’s services – but that’s all too brash and noisy for me.’

‘He must be a very unusual doctor.’

‘Simply a very caring man. I didn’t realize how pastoral country doctors could be until Bryan died. Bryan had a thing about the medical profession, refused to call a doctor unless in dire emergency. He’d have liked you. Oh, yes. His army training involved finding treatments in the hedgerows. A great believer in natural medicine, was Bryan. Although, one does need to have a fully qualified medical man in the background, don’t you think?’

‘Yes,’ Betty said. ‘I suppose so. Shall I make some tea?’

She knew now where everything was kept. She knew on which plate to arrange which biscuits. On which tray to spread which cloth. All of which greatly pleased Mrs Wilshire. When it was done, Betty sat down with her and they smiled at one another.

‘You’ve brightened my life in such a short time, Betty.’

‘You’ve been very helpful to me, too.’

‘I won’t forget it, you know. I never forget a kindness.’

‘Oh, look...’

‘We never had children, I’ve no close relatives left. At my age, with my ailments, one doesn’t know how long one has left...’

‘Come on... that’s daft.’

‘I’m quite serious, my dear. I said to Dr Coll some time ago, is there anything I can do to help you after my death? Is there anything you need? New equipment? An extension to the surgery? Of course, he brushed that aside, but I think when you’ve been treated so well by people, by a community, it’s your duty to put something back.’

‘Well...’

‘In the end, the most he would do was give me the name of a local charity he supports, but... Oh dear, I’ve embarrassed you, I’m so sorry. We’ll change the subject. Tell me how you’re getting on with that terrible old place. Have you been able to do anything with the damp?’

‘These things take time,’ Betty said, careful not to mention the need for money.

Getting into the car, she felt deeply uncomfortable. It might be better if she didn’t return to Mrs Wilshire’s for a while. The old girl probably wasn’t aware of trying to buy attention, even if it was only with compliments about a very ordinary herbal preparation, but... Oh, why was everything so bloody complicated, suddenly?

She leaned back in the seat, rotating her head to dispel tension. She noticed the dragon leaflet on the passenger seat. Where, out of interest, was the next church on the list?

Cascob.

Nestles in the hills near the head of the Cas Valley... village appears in the Domesday Book as Casope – the mound overlooking the River Cas.

Promising, she supposed. And was about to throw the leaflet back on the seat, when another word caught her eye.

It was ‘exorcize’.

A couple of miles into Radnor Forest, Betty became aware of an ominous thickening of cloud... and, under it, a solitary signpost.

She must have passed this little sign twenty times previously and never registered it, perhaps because it pointed up that narrow lonely lane, a lane which didn’t seem to lead anywhere other than: Cascob.

Strange name. Perhaps some chopped-off, mangled Anglicization of a Welsh phrase which meant ‘obscure-church-at-the-end-of-the-narrow-road-that-goes-on-for-ever’. Or so it seemed, perhaps because this was the kind of road along which no stranger would dare travel at more than twenty mph. It was deserted, sullen and moody. Robin would be enchanted.

There wasn’t much to Cascob. A bend in a sunken, shaded lane, a lone farmhouse and, opposite it, a few steep yards above the road, the wooden gate to the church itself, tied up with orange binder twine. Betty left the Subaru in gear, parked on the incline, untied the twine around the gate.

Sheep grazed the sloping, circular churchyard among ancient, haphazard gravestones and tombs that were crumbly round the edges, like broken biscuits. There was a wide view of a particularly lonely part of the Forest, and the atmosphere was so dense and heavy that Betty couldn’t, for a while, go any further.

Some places, it was instantaneous.

The old man in the cellar at Grandma’s place in Sheffield... that had probably been the first. None of them had frightened her for quite a while, not until she’d learned from other kids that you were supposed to be afraid of ghosts. Until then, she’d been affected only by the particular emotions specific to each place where something similar happened: fear, hatred, greed and – the one emotion she hadn’t at first understood – lust.

She steadied her breathing. Cascob Church squatted under low, grey cloud. It looked both cosy and creepy. To what extent had the present sensations been preconditioned by what she’d read in the leaflet?

... to exorcize a young woman...

She walked on, towards the church.

The stone and timbered building, like many this old, seemed to have grown out of the site organically. There were oak beams in its porch and under the pyramid-cap of the tower. It snuggled against an earthmound which was clearly not natural, possibly a Bronze Age tumulus. From the base of the mound grew an apple tree, spidery winter branches tangled against the cold light. There was a gate across the porch – more twine to untie.

Betty stepped inside. There were recent posters on the wall and a framed card invited all who entered to say a prayer before they left. She would not be so crass as to offer a prayer to the goddess. When she put out a hand to the oak door, Cascob Church seemed to settle around her, not unfriendly, certainly ancient and comfortably mysterious.

And locked.

She wondered for a moment if this was a sign that she was not supposed to enter this place. But then, all churches were kept locked these days, even – perhaps especially – in locations this remote.

She walked back across the churchyard and the narrow road to the farmhouse to enquire where she might borrow a key. The bloke there was accommodating and presented her with a highly suitable one, about six inches long. It made her right hand tingle with impressions, and she twice passed it quickly to her left hand and back again before reaching the porch.

The lock turned easily. She went in and stood tensely, with the door open behind her.

The church inside was dark and basic. Betty stood poised to banish anything invasive. But there was nothing. It was quiet. So far removed from the foetid turmoil swirling in the Old Hindwell ruins that she banished that from her thoughts, lest she somehow infest Cascob.

The place was tiny and probably little changed since the fourteenth or fifteenth century. A farmers’ church, with a font for christenings but no room for gentry weddings.

There was a wooden table with literature on it, including the sleeping dragon leaflet and a similar one about Cascob Church itself. A collection box had Betty fumbling for a fiver, an offering to appease the god of the Christians. She stood for a moment behind one of the back pews, not touching its dark wood, her head hanging down so as not to face the simple altar. It was not her altar, it faced the wrong direction, and she’d turned away from all this eight years ago.

Betty closed her eyes. It had been her decision. She’d turned from the east to face the north: a witch’s altar was always to the north. There was no turning back... was there?

When she reopened her eyes, she was facing the whitewashed north wall, where a document hung in a thin, black frame.

Betty looked at it, breathed in sharply. The breathing came hard. The air around her seemed to have clotted. She stared at the symbols near the bottom of the frame.

And saw, with an awful sense of déjà vu:

She felt almost sick now, with trepidation. There was nothing coincidental about this.

At the top of the document, under the funeral black of the frame, was something even more explicit.

ABRACADABRA

ABRACADABR

ABRACADAB

ABRACADA

ABRACAD

ABRACA

ABRAC

ABRA

ABR

AB

A

Betty spun away from the wall, snatched up one of the leaflets about the church and ran outside.

Under the Zeppelin cloud, she opened the leaflet to a pen-and-ink drawing of the church and a smaller sketch of the Archangel Michael with wings outstretched and a sword held above his head.

Under the drawing of the church, she read:

‘... the Abracadabra charm, dated from the seventeenth century, purported to have been used to exorcize a young woman. Heaven knows what she went through, but it sheds an interesting light on the state of faith in Radnorshire at the time.’

Betty stilled herself with a few minutes of chakra breathing, then went back into the church and up to the document itself, again leaving the door open for light.

What she’d read was a transcript of the original charm produced, it said in a tiny footnote, by an expert from the British Museum. The original was at the bottom: a scrap of paper with the ink faded to a light brown and now virtually indecipherable. There were no details about exactly how or when it had been found in the church.

But there was no inglenook fireplace where a box might be placed.

Hands clenched in the pockets of her ski jacket, Betty read the transcript. The two charms might be a century or more apart, but the similarities were obvious.

In the name of the Father, Son and of the Holy Ghost Amen X X X and in the name of the lord Jesus Christ I will delive Elizabeth Loyd from all witchcraft and from all Evil Spirites and from all evil men or women or wizardes or hardness of heart Amen X X X

It went on with a mixture of Roman Catholic Latin – pater noster, ave Maria – and cabbalistic words of power like ‘Tetragrammaton’, the name of God. At the bottom were two rows of planetary symbols. The sun, the moon and Venus were obvious. The one that looked like a ‘4’ was Jupiter.

Wizards... spirits... hardness of heart. All too similar. Another solid link, apart from St Michael, between the two churches.

There was more obsessive repetition:

I will trust in the Lord Jesus Christ my Redeemer and Saviour from all evil spirites and from all other assaltes of the Devil and that he will delive Elizabeth Loyd from all witchcraft and from all evil spirites by the same apower as he did cause the blind to see, the lame to walke and that thou findest with unclean spirites to be in thire one mindes amen X X X as weeth Jehovah Amen. The witches compassed her abought but in the name of the lord i will destroy them Amen X X X X X X X

It was signed by Jah Jah Jah.

Poor Elizabeth Loyd. A ‘young woman’. How old?

Twenty? Seventeen? Was she really possessed by evil? Or was she schizophrenic? Or, more likely, simply epileptic?

Heaven knows what she went through, but it sheds an interesting light on the state of faith in Radnorshire at the time.

Had it been carried out here, in the church? If so, Betty wasn’t picking up anything. What kind of minister had mixed this bizarre and volatile cocktail of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, paganism, cabbalism and astrology?

Or was it the local wise man, the conjuror?

Or were they one and the same?

Betty was glad the charm lay behind glass, that she wouldn’t have to force herself to touch it, where it had been held by the exorcist, didn’t even like to look too hard at the original manuscript, was glad that the ink had faded to the colour of soft sand.

She walked back outside into the churchyard and was drawn back – felt she had no choice – to that spot amongst the graves where she’d previously felt the weight of something. She wondered what had happened if, after the exorcism, the epilepsy or whatever persisted? There was something deeply distasteful about the whole business – and there had probably been villagers at the turn of the eighteenth century who also found it disturbing. But they’d have to keep quiet. Especially if the exorcism was performed by the minister.

She was gazing out towards the Forest – yellowed fields, a wedge of conifers – when the pain came.

It was so sudden and so violent that she sank to her knees in the long, wet grass, both hands at her groin. There was an instant of shocking cold inside her, and then it was over and she was crawling away, sobbing, to the shelter of a nearby gravestone.

She stayed there for several minutes, her breathing rapid and her heart rate up. She pushed her hair back out of her eyes and found that it was soaked with sweat.

When she was able to stand again, she was terrified there might be physical damage.

She stumbled back to the church wall and, trembling, wrote a huge banishing pentagram, clockwise on the air.

And then followed it with the sign of the cross.

20 Blessed Beneath the Wings of Angels

BEEN A WHILE since he was here last, but it might as well have been yesterday. Nothing changed, see. A new bungalow here, a fancy conservatory there. A few new faces that started out bright and shiny and open... and gradually closed in, grew cloudy-eyed and worried.

Like this boy in the pub. Londoner, sounded like. Gomer had seen it before. They came with their catering certificates and visions of taking over the village inn and turning it into a swish restaurant with fiddly little meals and vintage wine, fifty quid a time. Year or so later, it was back to the ole steak pie and oven chips and a pint of lager – three diners a night if they was lucky, at a fiver apiece.

Gomer sucked the top off his pint of Guinness. Ole Hindwell, he thought, where city dreams comes to die.

‘Not seen you around before,’ the London boy said.

‘That’s on account you en’t been around yourself more’n a week or two,’ Gomer told him.

‘Two years, actually. Two years in March.’ The boy had dandruffy hair, receding a bit, greying a bit. You could tell those two years had felt to him like half a lifetime. He’d be about forty years old; time to start getting anxious.

‘Bought the place off Ronnie Pugh, is it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Ar.’ Gomer nodded, spying the creeping damp, already blackening walls they must have rewhitewashed when they moved in. ‘Tryin’ to get rid for six year or more, ole Ronnie.’

‘So it appears,’ the boy said, regrets showing through like blisters.

As well they might. Never fashionable, the Forest. No real old money, see. Radnorshire always was a poor county: six times as many sheep as people, and you could count off the mansions on one hand. Not much new money, neither: the real rich folk – film stars, pop stars, stockbrokers, retired drug dealers and the like – went to the Cotswolds, and the medium-rich bought theirselves some rambling black and white over in Herefordshire.

While Radnorshire – no swish shops, no public schools, no general hospital, no towns with much over 3,000 people – collected the pioneer-types. Trading in the semi in Croydon or Solihull for two scrubby acres, a dozen sheep and a crumbly old farmhouse with rotting timbers, loose slates and stone-lice.

And the pensioners. Radnorshire got them too, by the thousand. Couples like Minnie and Frank, buying up the old farm cottages and the cheap bungalows. And then one of them dies and the other’s stuck, all alone in the middle of nowhere, on account of Radnorshire property prices don’t rise much year to year, and the poor buggers can’t afford to move away.

‘Not going up the funeral?’ the boy said. Though the car park was full, there was only himself and Gomer in the Black Lion. Mourners for Menna Weal had parked up outside, stopped in for one drink, and trailed off to the village hall. Funny old setup, doing church services at the village hall. But that was Radnorshire – lose your church and you makes do.

Gomer shook his head. ‘Well, I never knowed her that well, see.’ Truth was, with Min only days in the ground, he couldn’t face it, could he? Good to help the little vicar, but he realized the vicar was only giving him something to do to take his mind off his own loss; she wouldn’t want him attending no funeral.

‘Nor me,’ the boy said. ‘Mrs Weal never came in here. Her husband comes in occasionally.’

‘Picks up his business in the pub, what I yeard. Folks from Off. Friendly local lawyer, sort o’ thing.’ Gomer had heard this from a few people. He didn’t say much, Big Weal, played his cards close, but he put himself about in all the right places.

The boy came over bashful. ‘He picked us up, actually. He was in here when we were looking over the place. Knew the agent, wound up doing the conveyancing.’ He laughed, a bit uncomfortably. ‘Bloke’s so big you don’t feel you dare refuse, know what I mean?’

‘Likely it was the same with poor Mrs Weal,’ Gomer said.

He’d gathered a fair bit of background about Menna from Danny Thomas, the rock-and-roll farmer at Kinnerton who, it turned out, was a distant cousin. Danny had fancied her himself at one time, but Merv Thomas kept her out of the way of men. Selfish bastard, old Merv, especially after his wife passed on; he had to have another woman around doing the things women had been put on God’s earth to do.

Frail, pale little person, Menna, it seemed. All right for washing and cleaning, but too frail for farming, definitely too frail for Merv Thomas’s farm. Sons was what Merv had needed, but never got. So now the Thomas farm had gone to folk from Off, the deal sorted by J.W. Weal who then married the profits. What a bloody waste, Danny Thomas had said, guitar on his knee in the barn, crunching Gomer’s eardrums with something called ‘Smoke on the Water’.

‘Like I said, he never brought her in here.’ The boy leaned over his bar, confidentially. ‘You never saw her round the village neither. We used to wonder if she had agoraphobia or somefing, but I never liked to ask.’

‘Ar.’ Wise attitude. Nobody liked a new landlord nosing into the affairs of local people. ‘Her never had no friends yere, then?’

‘Mrs Prosser, Councillor Prosser’s wife, she used to go there once or twice a week, apparently.’

Judy Prosser. This figured. Judy Prosser was born and raised the other side of the quarry, no more than half a mile from Merv Thomas’s farm. She’d have known the Thomas girls, likely Barbara better than Menna, being nearer her age. Judy Prosser would know the score. Smart girl that one; not much got past her, whereas most everything got past that dull bugger Gareth.

Well, Gomer had always got on well enough with Judy, in the days before Gareth bought his own digger. Likely he’d hang around here, see if she came in the pub after the funeral.

‘My missus went across there once,’ the boy continued.

‘To visit Menna?’

‘They’d be about the same age, near enough, and she reckoned maybe they could be friends. But she got short shrift. Never got further’n the doorstep.’

‘This is the ole rectory?’

‘Blooming great big place for just the two of them. Never seemed to have guests to stay or anyfing, even in the summer. Never went on holidays either.’

‘Solicitor, see,’ Gomer said. ‘Gotter have ’isself a big house. Status in the community. Plus, his ole man likely got a good deal on it when they ditched the church. You drinking...?’

‘Greg. Fanks very much,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll have a half. So you were from round here, originally, Mr—’

‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire,’ Gomer said. ‘Radnor Valley born an’ bred. Used to run a bunch o’ diggers and bulldozers. We done drainage, soakaways, put roads in, all over the valley. My nephew, Nev, he does it now, see.’

‘Oh, yeah, I know. He was filling in after the archaeological digs, yeah? Used to come in for a sandwich and a pint at lunchtime?’

‘Sure t’be.’

‘They were digging all over the place. We all got excited when it came out they’d found an old temple. We fought it was gonna be like Stonehenge and we’d get thousands of tourists. But all it was – it was just a few holes in the ground where there’d been like wooden posts what rotted away centuries ago. Noffing to see, apart from all the stone axe-heads and stuff they dug up. Terrible disappointment.’

‘Ar. Typical Radnorshire tourist attraction, that is.’ Gomer took out his tin to roll a ciggie. ‘Sounds good till you sees it.’

Crossing the Welsh border, you came, unexpectedly, out of darkness into light, Merrily thought, raising herself up in the passenger seat of Sophie’s Saab. The last English town, Kington, with its narrow streets and dark surrounding hills, had been more like a Welsh country town. The hills beyond were densely conifered until the trees thinned to reveal a rotting cathedral of fissured rocks.

And then, suddenly, the Radnor Valley opened up and the whole landscape was washed clean under a sandy sky, and Merrily sank back again, just wanting to go on being driven through the winter countryside, not having to make any decisions... not having to answer difficult questions with a boom-mic hanging over her like a club.

Sophie took a left, and the car began to burrow under high banks and high, naked hedges. As the lanes narrowed, Old Hindwell began to be signposted, but by now they might just as well have followed any vehicle on that road; every car and Land Rover seemed to contain people dressed in black.

‘One forgets,’ Sophie mused, ‘that rural funerals are such social events.’

The lanes seemed to have brought them in a loop, back into conifer country. The official Old Hindwell sign was small and muddied. Just beyond it, set back into a clearing, sat a well-built, stone Victorian house with a small, conical turret at one end. In most of its windows, curtains were drawn; the others probably didn’t have curtains.

‘The old rectory, do you think?’ Sophie said.

‘Weal’s house? You could be right. There’s obviously nobody about. If it is the rectory, we ought to be able to see the old church nearby.’

She peered among the trees, an uneasy mixture of leafless, twisted oaks and dark, thrusting firs.

‘I suppose it must have occurred to you,’ Sophie said, ‘that the old church here might have been the one referred to by that woman on your TV programme.’

‘The pagan church, mmm?’ The road took them through a farm layout – windowless buildings on either side. ‘But let’s not worry about that until someone asks us to.’

The first grey-brown cottages appeared up ahead.

And the cars. The village was clogged with cars.

The pub car park was full, as was the yard in front of what had once been a school. Cars and Land Rovers also lined the two principal lanes, blocking driveways and entrances, until the roads became so narrow that another parked vehicle would have made them impassable. Could it possibly be like this every Sunday?

Sophie slowed for a drab posse of mourners. They crossed the road and filed into a tarmac track between two big leylandii.

‘The village hall,’ Merrily said, unnecessarily.

It stood on what she judged to be the western edge of the village, partly concealed a little way up a conifered hillside, and was accessed by a footpath and steps. Sophie wondered aloud how they got any wheelchairs up there, for all the disabled people who thought Nicholas Ellis’s prayers might cure them.

‘So it’s true then?’ Merrily said. ‘He does healing, too?’

‘I copied cuttings from the local papers onto your computer file.’ Sophie reversed into a field entrance to turn round again in the hope of finding a space. ‘I don’t suppose you had time to read them yet. I don’t know how many people he’s actually supposed to have healed.’

‘You don’t usually get statistics on it.’

Sophie frowned. ‘That sort of thing is just not Anglican, somehow.’

‘No? What about the shrine of St Thomas, in the cathedral?’

‘Not the same thing.’

‘What – because Ellis spent some time in the States?’

‘My information is that he learned his trade with the more extreme kind of Bible Belt evangelist.’ Sophie shuddered. ‘Would you like to borrow my coat? It may not be exactly funereal, but it’s at least...’

‘Respectable?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Sophie said. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Of course you didn’t.’ When Merrily smiled her face felt so stiff with fatigue that it hurt. ‘If anyone does notice me, I could pretend to be a poor single-parent whom Mr Weal defended on a shoplifting charge.’

When the strangers came in, Gomer was getting the local take on the planting of Menna Weal in the rectory garden.

‘Most people couldn’t equate it wiv him being a lawyer and into property,’ Greg said. ‘Who’s gonna wanna buy a house wiv a bleedin’ great tomb? They say he’ll leave it to his nephew who’s started in the firm, but would you wanna live in a house wiv your dead auntie in the garden?’

Gomer wondered how he’d feel if his Min was buried in the back garden, and decided it wouldn’t be right for either of them. In the churchyard she wasn’t alone, see. Not meaning the dead; it was the coming and going of the living.

‘But what I reckon...’ Greg said. ‘That building’s right down the bottom of the garden, OK? You could lop it off, make it separate. A little park, with a footpath to it. The Weal memorial garden. I reckon that’s what he’s got in mind.’

‘Nobody ask him?’

‘Blimey, you don’t ask him nothing. Not even the time – you’d get a bleedin’ bill. It’s like there’s a wall around him, wiv an admission charge. And no first names. It’s Mr Weal. Or J.W., if you’re a friend.’

‘He got many friends?’

‘He knows a lot of people. That’s the main fing in his profession.’ Greg turned to his two new customers. ‘Yes, gents...’

They wore suits – but not funeral suits. Both youngish fellows, in their thirties. One was a bit paunchy, with a half-grown beard; he ordered two pints.

‘Not here for the funeral?’ Greg said.

‘Ah, that’s what it is.’ The plump, bearded one paid for their drinks. ‘Must be somebody important, all those cars.’

‘Oh, that’s not unusual. There’s a mass of cars every Sunday. Popular man, our minister. You get people coming from fifty miles away.’

Gomer looked up, gobsmacked. Most of these folks were not here for Menna at all, but part of some travelling fan club for the rector? Bloody hell.

‘Hang on,’ the plump feller with the beard said. ‘Are there two churches, then?’

‘Kind of,’ Greg said. ‘Our minister uses the village hall for his services.’

‘But the old one, the old church – that’s disused, right?’

‘Long time ago. It’s a ruin.’

‘Can you still get to it?’

‘You probably can,’ Greg said, ‘but it’s on private land. It’s privately owned now.’

‘Only my mate wanted to take some pictures. With permission, of course. We don’t want to go sneaking about. Who would we ask? Who owns it?’

‘Well, it’s new people, actually – only been moved in a week or so. There’s a farmhouse, St Michael’s. If you go back along the lane, past the post office, and on out of the village, you’ll see a big farm, both sides of the road, then there’s a track off to your left. If you go over a little bridge and you get to the old rectory, on your right, you’ve gone too far.’

‘They all right, the people?’

‘Sure,’ Greg said. ‘Young couple. He’s American, an artist – book illustrator. Yeah, they’re fine.’

‘What’s the name?’

Gomer was suspicious by now. Gomer was always suspicious of fellers in suits asking questions. Not Greg, though; suspicious landlords didn’t sell many drinks.

‘Oh blimey, let me think. Goodfellow. Goodbody? Somefing like that.’

The paunchy bloke nodded. ‘Thanks, mate, we’ll go and knock on their door.’

‘You can take a picture of my pub, if you like,’ Greg said. ‘What is it, magazine, holiday guide?’

The two men looked at each other, swapping grins.

‘Something like that,’ said the one who did the talking.

The village hall was like one of those roadside garages built in the 1950s, with a grey-white facade and a stepped roof. From its summit projected a perspex cross which would obviously light up at night. Conifers crowded in on the building, so you had the feeling of a missionary chapel in the jungle.

It was coming up to 3.45 p.m., the sky turning brown, the air raw. As Sophie drove away, Merrily felt unexpectedly apprehensive. From inside, as she walked up the steps, came the sound of a hymn she didn’t recognize.

Below her, Old Hindwell was laid out in a V-shape. Beyond one arm arose the partly afforested hump which, Sophie had told her, was topped by the Iron Age hill fort, Burfa Camp. The northern horizon was broken by the shaven hills of Radnor Forest. The small, falling sun picked up the arc of a thin river around the boundary, like an eroded copper bangle.

Across the village, divided from it by a fuzz of bare trees, she could see the tower of the old church. She wondered if Nicholas Ellis would have made Old Hindwell his main base if that church had still been in use. Arguably not, since using the community hall was a good demonstration of his personal creed: the Church was people, ancient churches were museums.

The hymn she didn’t know, sung unaccompanied by organ or piano, came to an end, and then there was the sound of a communal subsidence into rickety chairs. Merrily pushed open the double doors and went in.

Into darkness. Into a theatre with the house lights down. But the stage – she stifled a gasp – was lit, as though for a Nativity play. Just not Anglican, somehow. Gently, she pulled the doors together behind her and stood under a cracked green exit sign.

There was a row of shadowed heads and shoulders no more than four feet in front of her. The chairs were arranged like theatre-in-the-round under the girdered ceiling. The industrial window blinds were all lowered.

It was alarmingly like the Livenight studio, and the audience must have been at least as big: maybe two hundred people, some on wooden benches pushed back to the walls. Spotlights in the ceiling lit the stage where stood a man in a white, monkish robe, head bowed, eyes cast down to hands loosely clasped on his stomach.

Merrily’s first, disappointing glimpse of the Reverend Nicholas Ellis was a definite so-what moment.

‘... is a particularly poignant occasion for me,’ she heard. ‘It’s only weeks since Menna came to me, with her loving husband, to be baptized again, to pledge herself to the Lord Jesus in the presence of the Holy Spirit. I wonder... if somehow... she knew.’

His face was bland and shining, his mouth wide, like a letter box. His light brown hair was brushed straight back, a modest ponytail disappearing into the folds of his monk’s cowl. Monastic gear was less unorthodox than it used to be for Church of England ministers, but in dazzling white this was hardly a sign of humility. Too messianic for Merrily. His words rang coldly in the factory acoustic.

‘I conducted the solemn but joyful service of rebaptism at their home. And on that day the very air was alive with hope and rejoicing, and these two souls were blessed beneath the wings of angels.’

From the shadows, someone, a man, cried out – involuntarily, it seemed, like a hiccup – ‘Praise God!’ As though the heavenly host had suddenly burst through the ceiling.

Nicholas Ellis was silent for a moment. Merrily couldn’t make out his expression because the spotlights in the ceiling were aimed not at him but at the uncovered coffin.

Lidless! In the American style, Menna Weal lay in an open casket. Wrapped in her shroud. Her face looked like marble under the lights. A curtain of shadows surrounded her.

Merrily didn’t like this, found it eerie. She looked for Barbara Buckingham in the congregation, but in this light it was hopeless. How could Barbara, wherever she was, stand this performance? How could any of them?

Eerie – what a funeral should never be.

Nicholas Ellis said, ‘And it is to that same loving home that, in a short time, Menna’s body will return. The final laying to rest of these earthly remains will be a small private ceremony which, in the context of that loving relationship, is as it should be.’

Merrily saw the seated figure of J.W. Weal, hunched like a big rock, gazing steadily at the body of his wife. Her thoughts were carried back to the county hospital, that first sight of him with his bowl of water and his cloth. An act of worship?

‘Let us thank God for love,’ Ellis said, ‘when the black dragon wings of evil beat above our heads and the night air carries the stench of Satan.’

Merrily wrinkled her nose.

‘... let us remember that only the strong light of love can bring us through the long hours of darkness. Now let us all rise and, with Menna and Jeffery together in our hearts, sing number two on our hymn sheet, “Take Me, Lord, To Your Golden Palace”.’

The lights blinked on, so that they could all read the words. Everyone rose, with a mass scraping of metal chair legs that was almost a shriek, and Merrily saw, at the front, one broad head thrust above all the others. J.W. looking down on the remains of his wife.

A statement of ownership, Barbara had said. Possession is nine points of the law.

Merrily found herself outside in the cold again, feeling slightly shocked.

She stopped about halfway down the steps, with her back to a Scots pine tree. The sand colour in the sky had all but disappeared, washed under the rapid, grey estuary of dusk. Below her, Old Hindwell settled into its umbered shadows. Merrily stood watching for the lights of Sophie’s Saab, listening for its engine.

Just not Anglican, somehow.

You could say that again. She sank her hands far into her coat pockets.

It had been a singalong, gospelly, country-and-western hymn. It was cloying, trite – no worse but certainly no better than the stilted Victorian hymns which Merrily had been trying for months to squeeze out of her services. She’d had no hymn sheet, but the dipping of the house lights told her when the last verse had finished. Then words that were not on the hymn sheet took over – when, in the darkness, the tune and the rhythm disappeared but the singing itself did not stop.

Merrily stood silent, not having been exposed for quite some years to this phenomenon: the language of the angels according to some evangelists. Nonsense words, bubbling and flowing and ululating between slackened jaws.

Tongues. The gift of. The sign that the Holy Spirit was here in Old Hindwell village hall.

Right now, she was in no position to dispute this. It wasn’t the hymn or its ghostly coda which had brought her out here, nor the sight of the silent, sombre Jeffery Weal, his gaze still fixed on his wife while the congregation summoned angels to waft her spirit into paradise.

It was just that, during the hymn, while the lights were on, she’d had an opportunity to investigate the congregation, row by row, and Barbara Buckingham was definitely not there. And while that meant she hadn’t had to listen to Ellis’s Gothic nonsense and stand in fuming silence while all around her sang themselves into a religious stupor, it did raise a possible problem.

Barbara was a determined woman. She had a serious grudge against this area, arising from a deprived childhood, which had become narrowed and focused into a hatred of the lumbering, sullen, slow-moving, single-minded Jeffery Weal.

Suppose she was already at Weal’s house? Outside somewhere, waiting for the mourners at the small private ceremony that would follow.

Merrily hurried down the rest of the steps. After what she’d seen in there, she too wanted very much to know how this was going to end.

21 Lord Madoc

‘ROBIN, IT’S AL.’

But this was not Al. Al was so cheerful that if he called you too early in the morning it hurt.

And this was not early morning, it was late afternoon and Betty had gone to see the goddamn widow Wilshire again and the voice on the phone was like the voice of a relative calling to say someone close to you was dead.

As art director handling Talisman, the fantasy imprint of the multinational publisher, Harvey-Calder, Al Delaney did not know any of Robin’s relatives; he kept his dealings strictly to artists and writers and editors. So Robin was already feeling sick to his gut.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’

With the light failing fast, he stood by the window in his studio. Or, at least, the north-facing room that was to go on serving as his studio until they’d gotten enough money together to convert one of their outbuildings. The room had two trestle tables, one carrying his paints and his four airbrush motors, only two of which now worked. Airbrushes seemed to react badly to Robin. Must be all that awesome psychic energy.

Haw!

‘I’m calling you from home,’ Al said.

‘That would be because it’s Saturday and the offices are closed, right?’

‘And because I’ve just heard from, er... Kirk Blackmore.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Robin moistened his lips.

‘And I’d rather say what I want to say from home. Like that Blackmore’s an insufferable egomaniac who’d stand there and tell Botticelli he couldn’t draw arses, and that there are a few of us who’d like to use the Sword of Twilight to publicly disembowel him. But, tragically—’

‘Tragically, he is also the hottest fantasy writer in Britain, so it would be unwise to say that to his face. Yeah, yeah. OK, Al, just listen for one minute. Since I got Blackmore’s fax, I’ve been giving it a whole lot of thought and I’ve come up with something which I think he’s gonna like a whole lot more. I accept that the purple mist was too lurid, the lettering too loud, so what I propose, for starters—’

‘Robin, he now doesn’t want you to do it at all.’

On the second table, the work table, lay Robin’s preliminary watercolour drawings for the proposed new Kirk Blackmore format, the one which would run down the backlist like gold thread. The one, in fact, which would launch the fund which would finance the restoration of the outbuildings – providing Betty with her own herbal haven and Robin, in a year or two, with the most wonderful, inspiring, sacred studio.

‘He just... he just said he didn’t like the painting,’ Robin said. His whole body seemed very light. ‘He said he... he said there were elements of the painting he didn’t like, was all.’

Al said, ‘He wants someone else to do it, Robin.’

‘Who?’ Robin couldn’t feel his hands.

‘It doesn’t matter who. Nobody in particular – but not you. Mate, I’m sorry. I was so convinced you were the man for this, I would’ve... I had to tell you today. I didn’t want you spending all weekend working out something that wasn’t even going to get—’

‘And the backlist?’

‘The backlist?’

‘What I’m saying, this isn’t just the one cover he doesn’t like...?’

‘It is the one cover he doesn’t like, obviously, and you’ll get paid in full for that, no problem at all. But it’s also... How many ways can I put this? He wants... he wants another artist. He doesn’t want you.’

Robin held up the core design which Blackmore should have loved, took a last look into the eyes of Lord Madoc who, in times of need, would stand in his megalithic circle and summon the Celtic Ray.

Robin’s Madoc – who would not now be Blackmore’s Madoc. A lean, noble, beardless face, its hairstyle – or glorious neglect of style – shamelessly modelled on Betty’s own delicious profusion. Sympathetic magic: Madoc’s hair was full of electricity and pulsed in the mist around him; Madoc, the hack fantasy hero, had been permitted to reflect the bright essence of Betty’s holy power. How could frigging Blackmore have failed to respond to that?

And what were they gonna live on now?

Maybe not love. He recalled Betty’s face before she had gone out, the light gone from her eyes, the shine from her skin. And her hair all brushed. She’d brushed her hair flat!

She also wore a skirt he didn’t even remember her owning, a dark, mid-length skirt – a very ordinary skirt. This was the true horror of it. When she left the house she was looking like an ordinary person.

And it was his fault. Ever since they got here, everything he did was wrong. And everything he didn’t do – or say.

Jeez, he’d never even thought much about what had happened with Marianne outside the pub. That whole sequence was like a dream – the glowing cross in the sky, the big, weird guy looking over his shoulder at no one right behind him. Robin had gone home and he’d slept, and tomorrow had been another lousy day.

He felt cold to his gut. Lately, Betty had lain with her back to him in bed, feigning sleep, a psychic wall between them.

Very tired, she would say, with the move and all.

‘Fuck!’ Robin tore the Madoc drawings end to end and let the strips fall to the floorboards. ‘Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.’

Trying to picture Blackmore as he was ripping them, but he’d never seen the guy. The face that came to him was the smug, unlined, holy face of the Reverend Nicholas Ellis. Ellis had done this. Ellis who had made Robin his devil, focused his smug, holy Christian hatred on the ruins of St Michael’s, the lair of the dragon. Ellis had brought down bad luck on them.

And they were innocent.

He broke down and wept in frustration and despair, his head among the scattered paint tubes. Robin Thorogood, illustrator, seducer of souls, guardian of the softly lit doorways? What a fucking joke.

By seed, by root, by bud and stem, by leaf and flower and fruit, by life and love, in the name of the goddess, I Robin, take thee, Betty, to my hand, my heart and my spirit at the setting of the sun and rising of the stars.

A handfasting. None of this till-death-do-us-part shit.

In the fullness of time we shall be born again, at the same time and in the same place as each other, and we shall meet and know and remember and love again.

It made you cry. Every time you thought of that it made you cry. How much of the prosaic Christian marriage ceremony could do that to you?

Robin cried some more. He saw her in her wedding dress. He saw her slipping out of the dress, when they were left alone, for the consummation, the Great Rite.

How could it be that their souls were sailing away from each other? How could this happen in the sacred place which, it had been prophesied – it had been fucking prophesied – was their destiny?

Robin rose from the table. He figured what he would do now was take a walk down to the barn.

And from the barn he would retrieve the box containing the charm which promised to protect this house and all the chickens and pigs and local people therein from the menace of the Old Religion.

And he, Robin Thorogood, guardian of the softly lit doorways, would take this box and carry it to the edge of the promontory on which the Christians had built their church and, with due ceremony and acknowledgement to the Reverend Penney, hurl the motherfucker into the hungry torrent of the Hindwell Brook.

Robin wiped his eyes with a paint cloth. He thought he heard a knocking at the front door.

Local people. It was probably only Local People. Like the deeply local person who wrote the anonymous letter to his wife, shafting him good.

Well, these local people could just remove themselves from off of his – and the building society’s – property. Robin’s fists bunched. They could very kindly evacuate their asses from said property right now.

The guy said, ‘Mr Thorogood?’

Not a local person. Even Robin was getting so he could separate out British accents, and this was kind of London middle class.

Two of them, and one carried a biggish metal-edged case.

When Robin saw the case, he thought sourly, Whaddaya know, it’s another local person bringing us another box with another charm to guard us against ourselves and thus turn our idyllic lives into liquid shit.

‘Mr Thorogood, my name’s Richard Prentice. This is Stuart Joyce.’

Robin flicked on the porch light. Overweight guy with a beard, and a thinner, younger guy in a leather jacket. Double-glazing, Robin figured; or travelling reps from some company that would maximize your prospects by investing the contents of your bank account in a chain of international vivisection laboratories.

‘We both work for the Daily Mail newspaper,’ Prentice said. ‘If it’s convenient, I’d like a chat with you – about your religion.’

‘About my...?’ Robin glanced at the case. Of course, a camera case.

‘I understand you and your wife are practising witches.’

Robin went still. ‘How would you have come to understand that?’

Relax. No camera around the thin guy’s neck.

Prentice smiled. ‘You didn’t happen to watch a TV programme called Livenight, by any chance?’

‘We don’t have a TV.’

‘Oh.’ The man smiled. ‘That would certainly explain it. Well, Mr Thorogood, you and your wife were referred to on that programme.’

‘What?’

‘Not by name – but your situation was mentioned. Now, it sounds as though we’re the first media people to approach you. And that’s a good thing for both of us, because—’

‘Hold on a moment,’ Robin said.

‘If, as you say, we are witches – which, in these enlightened times, I’m hardly gonna deny... Why are you interested? There are thousands of us. It’s, like, the fastest growing religion in the country right now. What I’m saying is, what kind of big deal is that for a paper like yours?’

‘Well, I’ll be straight with you, Robin, it’s primarily the church. How many witches have actually taken over a Christian church for their rituals?’

‘Well, Richard,’ Robin said, ‘if I can reverse that question, how many Christian churches have taken over pagan sites for their rituals?’

Richard Prentice grinned through his beard. ‘That, my friend, is an excellent point, and we’d like to give you the opportunity to amplify it.’

‘I don’t think so, Richard.’

‘Could we come in and talk about it? It’s perishing out here.’

‘I really don’t think so. For starters, my wife—’

‘Look,’ Prentice said. ‘You were more or less outed – if I can use that term – on a TV programme watched by millions of viewers. I’d guess you’re going to be hearing from a lot of other journalists over the next few days. And I mean tabloid journalists.’

‘Isn’t that what you are?’

‘We like to call ours a compact paper. There’s a difference.’

‘Don’t make me laugh, Richard.’

‘Robin... look... what we have in mind – and this would be for Monday’s paper, so we’d have a whole day to get it absolutely right – is a serious feature explaining exactly what your plans are for this church, and why you believe you’re no threat to the community.’

‘Somebody say we’re a threat to the community here?’

‘You know what local people are like, Robin.’

‘Out,’ Robin said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Go, Richard.’

‘Robin, I think you’ll find that we can protect you from the unwanted intrusion of less responsible—’

‘Leave now. Or I’ll, like, turn you into a fucking toad.’

‘That’s not a very sensible attitude. Look, this was probably a bad time. I can tell something’s happened to upset you. We’re going to be staying in the area tonight. I suggest we come back in the morning. All right?’

Robin stepped out of the porch. Through the trees, he could hear the racing of the Hindwell Brook.

‘OK,’ Prentice said, ‘that’s your decision.’

And if they’d gone at that moment, things might all have been so much less fraught.

Unfortunately, at this point the porch and Robin were lit up brightly, and Robin realized the younger guy suddenly had a camera out.

The rushing of the brook filled his head. Cold white noise. Robin thought of silent Betty with her back to him in the sack. He thought he heard, somewhere on the ether, the rich sound of Kirk Blackmore laughing at his artwork.

Robin made like Lord freaking Madoc.

22 Wisp

MERRILY COULD SEE the battlemented outline of Old Hindwell church tower over the bristle of trees, and the spiteful voice cawed in her head.

I can show you a church with a tower and graves and everything... which is now a pagan church. You don’t know what’s happening on your own doorstep.

If these pagans had been around for a while, it would explain why Ellis had adopted Old Hindwell – extremes attract extremes. The only other abandoned Anglican church she could think of in the diocese was at Llanwarne, down towards Ross-on-Wye, and that was close to the centre of a village and open to the road, a tourist attraction.

But whether this was or wasn’t the alleged neo-pagan temple was not the issue right now. What she needed to make for was the former rectory, which was not ruined, far from abandoned... but about to accommodate its first grave.

She would probably encounter Sophie’s car along the way.

And Barbara Buckingham?

That grumbling foreboding in her stomach – that was subjective, right? Merrily walked faster, aware that the only sound on the street was the soft padding of her own flat shoes. She walked into the centre of the village, where there was a small shop and post office – closed already – and the pub had frosted windows and looked inviting only compared with everywhere else.

In one of the cottages, a dog howled suddenly, a spiralling sound; maybe it had picked up a distant discordant wailing emanating from the village hall. Something which was not, perhaps, quite human.

The pub car park was still full. With the cars – of course – of outsiders. The singing in tongues should have given it away: many people in today’s congregation were not, in fact, family mourners or friends or long-time clients of J.W. Weal, but core members of Nicholas Ellis’s church.

And the tongues was not a spontaneous phenomenon; for them it had become routine, a habit, almost an addiction, a Christian trip. She’d learned that while at theological college when a bunch of students, well into the born-again thing, had persuaded her to join them at a weekend event known as the Big Bible Fest, held in a huge marquee near Warwick. Two long days of everybody smiling at everybody else and doing the ‘Praise Him!’ routine like kids with a new schoolyard catchphrase, and by the end of the first day Merrily had been ready to swing for the next person who addressed her as ‘sister’.

It had been Jeremy, one of the faithful, who’d told her that the cynical bitch persona was simply concealing her fear of complete surrender to the Holy Spirit. He was challenging her to go along that night with an open mind, without prejudice, without resistance. Praise Him! So, OK, she’d attended a service where all the hymns had been simple, rhythmic pop anthems, sung by happy people in Hawaiian shirts and sweatpants – and all ending in tongues.

Tongues was the gift of Christ, originally granted to a select few. The Bible did not spell out what tongues actually sounded like, its linguistic roots, its grammatical structure, but modern evangelical Christians insisted it was a way of talking directly to God, who Himself did not necessarily speak English.

Not entirely convincing, but for the first two hymns she’d held out. After all, hadn’t her own formative mystical moment occurred in total silence, lit by the blue and the gold, alone in a little hermit’s cave of a church?

And then – Praise Him, praise God! – her mouth had been open like everyone else’s, and out it all came like those flimsy coloured scarves produced by conjurers. Words which were flowing and lyrical and meant nothing, but sounded as if they ought to. Lush, liquid worship. Dynamic, wordless prayer. A disconnecting of the senses. A transcendent experience, up there around the marquee’s striped roof.

She could, in fact, still bring it on when she wanted to, could summon that wild Christian high, simple as popping a pill, as though just doing it that once had been a lifetime’s initiation. It was easy.

Maybe too easy.

She wondered to what extent the locals had joined in. Were slow-speaking farmers now singing in tongues? Did they say ‘Praise God’ when they met by the sheep pens on market day, instead of the time-honoured ‘’Ow’re you?’

You couldn’t rule that out. After all, it was in Wales that traditional church worship had been massively abandoned in the rush to build stark, spartan Noncomformist chapels. So how far down the charismatic road did Old Hindwell go? Was it like the Toronto Blessing, with people collapsing everywhere? Were they discovering Galilean sand in the palms of their hands and gold fillings in their teeth?

But how appropriate was this at a funeral?

Merrily scanned the cars by the pub. Was one of them Barbara’s? What make had Barbara been driving? Merrily didn’t know.

She turned and walked on down the darkening street, a headache coming on, although it was dulled by the cold. Beyond the village shop and a lone bungalow with a 1970s-style rainbow-stone porch, the grass verge came to an end, so Merrily walked in the road, down into a conifered valley which would eventually open out to the hill country of Radnor Forest.

Soon afterwards, she heard the low mutter of approaching vehicles, and then dipped headlights began to cast a pale light on the road, and she pressed close to the hedge as the cortège came past.

As the mourners had started coming for their cars, Gomer had moved to the pub window to look out for Gareth and Judy Prosser. Chances were the Prossers would be on foot, but they’d still have to come this way. Most of the people picking up their vehicles Gomer didn’t recognize.

‘There a funeral tea up the hall?’ he asked Greg.

‘If there is, we weren’t asked to provide it. Nah, they say Father Ellis don’t go for eating and drinking in church.’

‘It’s a bloody village hall!’

‘Not when he’s there it ain’t.’

Gomer looked over his shoulder at Greg polishing glasses for the customers that didn’t come in. ‘You’re not a churchgoer, then, boy?’

‘Never was. But the bloody pressure’s on now.’ The anxious look flitted across Greg’s face again. ‘Lot of people’ve started going. He don’t look much, Ellis, but they reckon you come out feeling on cloud nine. I mean, whatever it is, I’m not sure I wanna catch it. The wife’s gone to this funeral. And I let ’em use the car park – all his fans from miles around. Not that many of ’em drop in for a pint or anyfing afterwards. Don’t need drink when you’re high on God.’

‘You got a few yere now, boy,’ Gomer observed. ‘Stand by your pumps.’

Two men and three women came in, all in black. One of the men was Tony Probert, farmer from Evenjobb – Gomer knew him to speak to, just about – and one of the women was...

‘Gomer Parry!’

‘Greta,’ Gomer said, ‘’ow’re you?’

Greta Thomas, wife of Danny, the rock-and-roll farmer from Kinnerton. She was little and busty, with a voice Nash Rocks could’ve used for blasting. Used to be receptionist for Dr Coll.

‘I hope you’re lookin’ after yourself, Gomer,’ Greta yelled. ‘Not goin’ back to the wild?’ Never one to make a meal of the ole condolences; once the funeral was over Greta believed it was time to start cheering you up.

‘I’m doing fine, Gret.’

‘’Cause if Min thought you was on the bevvy...’

‘Moderation in all things, you know me, girl. I dunno, I seen bloody Danny earlier, he never said you was goin’ to see Menna off.’

‘Never remembers nothing, ’cept his bloody chords. Tony and Julie was coming, so I had a lift.’ Greta pulled Gomer towards a table. ‘Reckoned somebody ought to represent Danny’s side of the family.’

‘Nothin’ to do with wantin’ to see the famous Reverend Ellis in action without goin’ to a reg’lar service, like?’

Greta looked sheepish. ‘No harm in that, is there?’

‘Worth it, was it?’

‘Well... strange, it is, actually, Gomer.’

‘Ar?’

‘Specially the funny singing. Like a trance – beautiful really, when it gets going. The voices are like harmonizing natural, the men and the women. Really gets you. It’s quite... I don’t know... sexy. That’s a stupid thing to say, ennit?’

‘Better get you a drink, Gret.’

He went to Greg at the bar, bought Greta a brandy. He might learn something here, and it beat going home to an empty bungalow with no fire, no tea, nothing but crap Saturday night telly and then a cold bed.

Greta looked up at him from under a fringe of hair dyed the colour of Hereford clay.

‘I didn’t mean that how it sounded, Gomer. I mean, I’ve never been that religious, but it makes you think. A lot of people’s saying that. Dr Coll – even Dr Coll – reckons Mr Ellis is the best thing ever happened to this area.’

‘Why do he reckon that?’ Clergy, in Gomer’s experience, came and went and never got noticed much, unless they started messing with people’s wives – or they were little and pretty.

‘The way it’s bringing the community together,’ Greta said. ‘You’d never get that with an ordinary parson and an ordinary church. When did you ever see local people and folk from Off hugging each other?’

‘En’t natural,’ Gomer conceded.

‘And they also reckons you can get a private consultation.’

‘What for?’

‘Anything, really. Sickness, emotional problems...’

‘What’s he do for that?’

‘Fetches them out of you, Gomer. Lays his hands on you, fetches it all out.’

‘Bloody hell, Gret.’

‘There’s folk swears by it.’

‘Bloody hell.’

He leaned back and thought for a bit. Doctor’s receptionist for what – ten years? Her’d have been no more than a young girl when her first went to work for Dr Coll’s old feller. Still...

‘How well did you actually know Menna Thomas, Gret?’

Doctors’ receptionists, it was easier for them to talk about the dead than the living, and Greta Thomas was still talking when Tony Probert and his wife and the other couple had finished up their drinks and looked a bit restive, so Gomer told them it was OK, he’d take Greta home himself.

On the way, he said, ‘And how well did you know her sister Barbara?’

Which was how he found out the truth about the hydatid cyst.

Behind the hearse came an old-fashioned taxi, like a London black cab. Merrily saw brake lights come on about a hundred yards down the lane and she moved quietly towards them. Stone posts stood stark against the last of the light and she heard the grating of metal gates.

Silhouettes now. Someone in a long overcoat pushing a bier. Merrily watched the coffin sliding onto it under the raised tailgate of the hearse, saw the bier pushed through the gates. It was followed by several people fused into one moving shadow.

Against the band of light below the grey roller blind of evening, she could see the roof of the old rectory. No lights on there. The taxi started up, rolled away down the lane. No sign of another car.

No sign of Barbara Buckingham.

Suppose Barbara had accosted Weal, made a nuisance of herself, and Weal – as a solicitor, able to expedite these things – had responded with some kind of injunction to restrain her. In which case, why hadn’t Barbara told Merrily? Why hadn’t she left a message?

At the gates, peering down an alley of laurels, Merrily was pulled sharply back by the realization that this whole situation was entirely ridiculous. Only Jane would do something like this. But then more headlights were glaring around the bend behind her, and she slipped inside the gates to avoid them.

The vehicle went past on full beams: not Sophie’s Saab but a fat four-wheel drive with two men in it. Leaving Merrily standing on the property of J.W. Weal as, somewhere beyond the laurels, a single warm light was anointing the bruised dusk with an amber balm.

She followed the laurel alley towards the house, now only half expecting the dramatic eleventh-hour appearance of Barbara Buckingham like the dissenting wedding guest with just cause for stopping the service.

By the house, the drive split into a fork, one prong ending at a concrete double garage, the other dropping down a step and narrowing into a path, its tarmac surface fragmenting into crazy paving to cross the lawn – which was wedge-shaped and bordered by spruce and Scots pine. At the narrow end of this wedge stood a conical building, the source of the light.

The wine store... the ice house... Menna’s waiting tomb.

Merrily stood by the last of the laurels, on the edge of the lawn, and looked up at the Victorian house – substantial, grey and gabled, three storeys high. The light from the open door of the tomb, maybe forty yards away, was bright enough to outline the regular stone blocks in the back wall of the house. She could see the shadows of heavy, lumpen furniture in the room immediately behind a bay window on the ground floor. This house was very J.W. Weal.

At its end of the lawn, the mausoleum was a squat Palladian temple. Victorian kitsch, its interior was creamed with electric light from two wrought-iron hanging lanterns. Then the light was suddenly blocked and diffused... two men looming. Merrily backed up against the house wall, laurel leaves wet on her face.

‘Mind the step, George.’

‘He could use a light.’

‘Knows his way down yere in his sleep, I reckon.’

The undertakers maybe? Must be the departure of the last outsiders.

Feeling very much on her own now, Merrily moved down the lawn, stopping about fifteen yards from the door of the mausoleum. From an oblique angle, she could see inside, to where mourners were grouped around a stone trough set into the middle of the floor. She saw Ellis, in his white robe. She saw a wiry bearded man, a squat bulky man, and a woman. They were still as a painted tableau, faces lit with a Rembrandt glow. And she thought, aghast, This is intrusion, this is voyeurism, this is none of my business!

This was about a man – not an affable man, not an immediately likeable man, but a man who had loved his wife, who had treated her with great tenderness till the last seconds of her life. Who had – whatever you thought of rebaptism, rebirth in the faith – come with her to Christ. Who could not bear to be entirely parted from her. Who had chosen to gaze out every morning from their bedroom window, probably for the rest of his life, across to where she lay.

That’s it. I’m going. She turned abruptly away.

And walked into the man himself.

Her face was suddenly buried in the cold, crisp shirt-front in the V of his waistcoat.

It smelled of camphor.

For a moment, she was frozen with shock, let out a small ‘Oh’ before his big arms came around her, lifting her off her feet. For a flowing second, she was spun in space through the path of light from the tomb, and then put down in shadow and held.

‘Men-na,’ he breathed.

The great body rigid, compressing her. Camphor. Carbolic. She was gripped for a too-long moment, like a captured bird, and then the arms sprang apart.

‘I’m sorry...’ she whispered.

He was silent. Neither of them moved.

A small night breeze had arisen, was rippling the laurels and sighing in the conifers. The firs and pines were like sentries with spears. J.W. Weal was just another shadow now; she didn’t feel that he was looking at her. The line of light shivered, and Merrily saw figures standing in the doorway of the mausoleum. Nobody spoke, nobody called to her. It was dreamlike, slow-motion.

She turned and walked away – trying not to run – across the lawn, in and out of the path of light, her arms pressed into her sides, as though his arms were still around her. The strong light from the mausoleum haloed the old rectory, illuminating the inside of the bay-windowed room on the ground floor.

And then, as she was looking up at that same window, it became dark all round. The door of the mausoleum had been closed. They’d been waiting for Jeffery Weal to return from the house, and now they’d shut themselves away for the finale, leaving darkness outside. The lawn was black, the track of light from the tomb having vanished. Merrily felt small and bewildered and ashamed, like a child who should be in bed but had peered through the bannisters into an unknown, unknowable, grown-up world.

Men-na.

What was he thinking then?

She searched for the entrance to the drive. Without light, she would need to go carefully.

Yet there was light: a dull, diffused haze behind the bay window, where the backs of chairs threw rearing shadows up the interior walls. She now hated that room. She knew it was very cold in there, colder than it was out here. She didn’t want to be looking in. She didn’t want to see...

... the pale figure flitting across the wide windows, from pane to pane.

The slight, moth-like thing, the wisp of despair.

She didn’t want to see it. She couldn’t see it.

But as the room came out to her, enclosing her in its pocket of cold, she could almost hear the flimsy, flightless, jittering thing beating itself against the glass in its frenzy, with a noise like tiny crackling bones.

Merrily flailed and stumbled into the laurels, slipped on numbed legs and grabbed handfuls of leaves to keep from falling. Only these weren’t the laurels; they had thorns, winter-vicious. Still she clutched them in both hands, almost relishing the entirely physical pain, then she scrambled up and onto the drive, hobbling away towards the gateposts.