A Crown of Lights

23 Tango with Satan

SINCE COMING HOME to her apartment at the vicarage, Jane had... well, just slept, actually. Longer, probably, than she’d ever slept before. She woke up briefly, thought of something crucially important, went back to sleep, forgot about it. Just like that for most of a day.

It was the hospital’s fault. Hospitals were, like, totally knackering. Unless you were drugged to the eyeballs, you never slept in a hospital – be more relaxing bedding down on a factory floor during the night shift. Naturally, Jane had tried telling them this, but no, they’d insisted on keeping her in, in case her skull was fractured or something worse. Which she knew it wasn’t, and they knew really, but it was, like – yawn, yawn – procedure, to forestall people suing the Health Service for half a million on account of her having gone into a coma on the bus.

Sleep was all you really needed. Real sleep, home sleep. Sleep was crucial, because it gave the body and the brain time to repair themselves, and because it was a natural thing.

And, also, in this particular case, because it postponed that inevitable Long Talk With Mum.

The Long Talk had not taken place, as expected, in the car coming home from Worcester Royal Infirmary last night, because it was Sophie’s car and Sophie was driving it, and Sophie – to Jane’s slight resentment – seemed more concerned about Mum, who had herself at one point fallen asleep in the passenger seat and awoken with a start – like a really seismic start – which made Sophie judderingly slam on the brakes going down Fromes Hill. Mum had shaken herself fully awake and said – in that flustered, half-embarrassed way of hers when lying – that something must have walked over her grave.

And, like, trod on her hands? Why were both her hands clumsily criss-crossed with broad strips of Elastoplast, like she was the motorway pile-up casualty?

Fell among thorns, was all Mum would say when they finally got home, must have been around ten. Bewilderingly, she’d hugged Jane for a long time before they’d staggered off to their respective bedrooms, without mention of the impending Long Talk.

Odd.

Jane slept through most of Sunday morning, venturing dowstairs just once for a bite to eat from the fridge – lump of cheese, handful of digestive biscuits – while Mum was out, doing the weekly pulpit gig. Then leaving her plates conspicuously on the draining board so that Mum would know she’d eaten and wouldn’t come up to ask about lunch and initiate the Long Talk.

She vaguely remembered awakening to see Mum standing by the bed in her clerical gear, like a ghost, but she must have fallen asleep again before either of them could speak. She kept half waking to hear the ting of the phone: a lot of calls. A lot of calls. Was this about the accident? Or Livenight – Mum apologizing to half the clergy for screwing up on TV?

For Sunday lunch, alone with Ethel the cat, Merrily had just a boiled egg and a slice of toast. Which was just as well because, before two p.m., the bishop was on the phone, enquiring after Jane and revealing himself to be a worried man.

The Daily Mail had phoned him at home. Did he know that a former church in his diocese had become a temple for the worship of pagan gods?

Well, of course he did. He’d seen the damned TV programme like everyone else, but he was hoping that either nothing more would be heard of it or it would turn out to be safely over the border in the Diocese of Swansea and Brecon.

Not that he’d told the Mail that. He’d told the Mail he was ‘concerned’ and would be ‘making enquiries’.

And this was one of them.

‘As it happens,’ Merrily said, ‘I was in Old Hindwell yesterday.’

Bernie Dunmore went quiet for a couple of seconds.

‘That’s an extraordinary coincidence,’ he said.

‘It is. But nothing more than that.’

‘Did you see the church?’

‘Only the tower above the trees. I didn’t see any naked figures dancing around a fire, didn’t hear any chanting. Is it really true? Who are they?’

‘Witches, apparently. People called Thorogood, ironically enough. Young couple, came from Shrewsbury, I think. But he’s American.’

‘In parts of America, witchcraft is awfully respectable these days.’

‘Merrily, this is Radnorshire.’

‘Er... quite.’

‘As for the church – well, strictly speaking it isn’t a church at all any more. Did all the right things when they let it go. Took away the churchyard bones to a place of suitable sanctity. Virtually gave it to the farming family whose land had surrounded it for generations. Stipulating, naturally, that relatives of people whose names were on the graves should be able to visit and lay flowers, by arrangement.’

‘Why did they let it go? It’s not as though the village has an alternative church.’

‘Usual reasons: economics coupled with a very convenient period of public apathy.’

‘You could dump half the parish churches in Britain on that basis.’

‘Also, this isn’t a building of any great architectural merit,’ Bernie said. ‘Old, certainly, but the only history it seems to have is one of more or less continuous major repairs and renewals, dating back to the fifteenth century or earlier. The dear old place never seems to have wanted to stay up, if you get my meaning. Close to a river or something, so perhaps built on ground prone to subsidence. Things apparently came to a head when the rector at the time actually suggested it should be decommissioned.’

‘Really?’

‘Anyway, all that’s irrelevant. The unfortunate fact is, if it’s got a tower or a steeple and a handful of gravestones, the general public will still see it as holy ground, and there’ll be protests.’

‘But there’s nothing you can do about that, is there? You can’t actually vet new owners.’

‘The Church can vet them, obviously, when the Church is the vendor. And the Church does – we’re not going to sell one to someone who wants to turn it into St Cuthbert’s Casino or St Mary’s Massage Parlour. But when it’s being sold on for the second or, in this case, third time, you’re right, it’s more or less out of our hands.’

‘So is there any reason for this to escalate into anything?’

‘Merrily, this is Nicholas Ellis’s patch. This is where he holds his gatherings... in the village hall.’

‘I know. I was there for a funeral. The congregation was singing in tongues over the coffin.’

The bishop made a noise conveying extreme distaste.

‘But the point I was about to make, Bernie, is that Ellis is Sea of Light. He doesn’t care about churches.’

‘Oh, Merrily, you don’t really believe the bugger isn’t going to start caring very deeply – as of now?’

‘You’ve spoken to him?’

‘Never spoken to the man in my life, but the press have. They didn’t tell us what he said, but I expect we’ll all be reading about it at length in the morning.’

‘Oh. Anything I can do?’

Bernie Dunmore chuckled aridly. ‘You’re the Deliverance Consultant, Merrily, so what do you think you could do?’

‘That’s not fair. Look, I’m sorry I messed up so badly on TV, if that’s what—’

‘Not at all. No, indeed, you were... fine. As well as being probably the only woman on that programme who looked as if she shaved her armpits. Was that sexist? What I’m trying to say... you’re the only one of us who officially knows about this kind of thing and is able to discuss it in a balanced kind of way. Not like Ellis, that’s what I mean. Obviously, I can’t forbid the man to speak to the media, but I’d far rather it were you...’

‘The only problem, Bishop—’

‘... and if all future requests for information could be passed directly to our Deliverance Consultant. As the official spokesperson for the diocese on... matters of this kind.’

Merrily felt a tremor of trepidation. And recalled the whizz and flicker, the crackle and tap-tap on the window of a room full of shadows.

‘But, Bernie, this job... deliverance—’

‘I know, I know. It’s supposed to be low-profile.’ He paused, to weight the punchline. ‘But you have, after all, been on television now, haven’t you?’

Ah.

‘I won’t dress it up,’ Bernie said. ‘You’ll probably have problems as a result. Extremists on both sides. The pagans’ll have you down as a jackboot fascist, while Ellis is calling you a pinko hippy doing the tango with Satan. Still, it’ll be an experience for you.’

She stripped off the plasters Sophie had bought from the pharmacy at Tesco on the way to Worcester last night – a fraught journey, from the moment she’d stumbled into the Saab’s headlight beams somewhere on the outskirts of the village.

She then changed out of her clerical clothes and went up to the attic to check that Jane was OK.

The kid was asleep in her double bed under the famous Mondrian walls of vermilion, Prussian blue and chrome yellow. Merrily found herself bending over her, like she hadn’t done for years, making sure she was breathing. Jane’s eyes fluttered open briefly and she murmured something unintelligible.

Merrily quietly left the room. They’d assured her at the hospital that her daughter was absolutely fine but might sleep a lot.

Downstairs, the phone was ringing. She grabbed the cordless.

It was Gomer. He’d just been to the shop for tobacco for his roll-ups and learned about the motorway accident.

‘Her’s all right?’

‘Fine. Sleeping a lot, but that’s good.’

‘Bloody hell, vicar.’

‘One of those things.’

‘Bloody hell. Anythin’ I can do, see?’

‘I know. Thanks, Gomer.’

‘So you wouldn’t’ve gone to Menna’s funeral then? I never went to look for you. One funeral’s enough... enough for a long time.’

‘You were in Old Hindwell yesterday?’

‘Reckoned it might be a good time. Found out a few things you might wanner know, see. No rush, mind. You look after the kiddie.’

‘In the morning?’

‘Sure t’be,’ Gomer said.

Good old Gomer.

‘Mum.’

‘Flower!’

Jane was standing in the kitchen doorway in her towelling dressing gown. She looked surprisingly OK. You wouldn’t notice the bruise over her left eye unless you were looking for it.

‘You hungry?’

‘Not really. I just went to the loo and looked out the window, and I think you’ve got the filth.’

‘What?’

‘He’s outside in his car, talking on his radio or his mobile. Overweight guy in a dark suit. I’ve seen him before. I think it’s that miserable-looking copper used to tag around after Annie Howe, the Belsen dentist. I’ll go for another lie-down now, but just thought I’d warn you.’

Merrily let him in. ‘DC Mumford.’

‘DS Mumford, vicar. Amazingly enough.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘They have accelerated promotion for young graduates like DI Howe,’ Mumford said heavily. ‘For plods like me, it can still take twenty-odd years. How’s your little girl?’

‘You’re just a late starter,’ Merrily assured him. ‘You’ll whizz through the ranks now. Jane’s doing OK, thanks. But that’s not why you’re here?’

Andy Mumford’s smile was strained as he stepped into the kitchen. Another two or three years and he’d be up for retirement. Merrily had coffee freshly made and poured him one. She’d left the door open for Jane, for once hoping she was listening – a strong indication of recovery.

‘You’ve been in contact with Mrs Barbara Buckingham,’ Mumford said. ‘We traced her movement back through the hospital. Sister Cullen says she referred her to you.’

Merrily stiffened. ‘What’s happened?’

‘She’s been reported missing, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Barbara? By whom?’

‘Arranged to phone her daughter in Hampshire every night while she was here. But hasn’t rung for two nights. Does not appear to have attended her sister’s funeral.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘Checked with Hampshire before I came in. No word there. It’s an odd one, Mrs Watkins. Teenagers, nine times out of ten they’ll surface after a while. A woman Mrs Buckingham’s age, middle class, we start to worry.’ Mumford sipped his coffee. ‘You saw her last when?’

‘Tuesday evening, here. It was the only time. How much did Eileen Cullen tell you?’

‘She said Mrs Buckingham was very upset, not only over her sister’s premature death but the fact that she wouldn’t be getting buried in the churchyard like normal people. She said she thought you’d be the minister most likely to give the woman a sympathetic hearing.’

‘I’m just the only one Eileen knows.’

Mumford smiled almost shyly. ‘To be honest, Mrs Watkins, I got the feeling there might have been another reason she put the lady on to you, apart from this objection to the burial. But that might just be promotion making me feel I ought to behave like a detective. Of course, if you don’t think that would throw any light on our inquiry...’

‘Well... there was another reason, relating to my other job. You can put this down to stress if you like but don’t go thinking she was nuts because I don’t think she was – is.’

‘Not my place, Reverend.’

‘She was having troublesome dreams – anxiety dreams probably – about her sister. Barbara left home in Radnorshire when Menna was just a baby, and they’d hardly seen each other since. Anybody would feel... regrets in that situation. She’s a Christian, she was headmistress at a Church school. Eileen thought she might appreciate some spiritual, er, counselling.’

‘She explain why she was alone? Why her husband wasn’t with her?’

‘She said he was away – in France, I think. He deals in antiques.’

‘Didn’t say anything about him leaving her, then?’

‘Oh God, really?’

‘For France, read Winchester.’ Mumford pulled out his pocketbook. ‘Richard Buckingham moved out two months ago.’

‘Another woman?’

‘That’s the information we have from the daughter. So, were you able to ease Mrs Buckingham’s mind? I mean, if I was to ask you if you thought there was any possibility of her taking her own life...?’

‘Oh no. She was too angry.’

‘Angry.’

‘Yeah, I’d say so.’

‘At anybody in particular?’

‘At J.W. Weal, I suppose. Know him?’

‘Paths have crossed in court once or twice. He used to do quite a bit of legal aid work, maybe still does. I don’t get out that way much these days.’

‘Really?’ She’d made a joke out of it to Sophie, but she couldn’t imagine Weal defending small-time shoplifters and car thieves and dope smokers; that would mean he’d have to talk to them. ‘I had him down as a wills and conveyancing man.’

‘Place like that, a lawyer has to grab what he can get,’ said Mumford. ‘Mrs Buckingham didn’t care for her brother-in-law, I take it.’

‘Not a lot. You have a situation where Menna spends her young life looking after her widowed father and then gets married to a much older bloke, in the same area. No life at all, in Barbara’s view. And then can’t even get away when she dies.’

‘You don’t like him either then, Mrs Watkins?’

‘I don’t know him.’

Mumford considered. ‘You’d wonder, does anybody? So, when you spoke to her, did Mrs Buckingham give you any idea what she was going to do next?’

‘She wanted me to go to the funeral with her. I went along, but she apparently didn’t.’

‘You were there?’

‘We were supposed to meet.’

‘Seems an unusual arrangement, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘I thought she needed somebody.’

‘You didn’t know Mrs Weal, then?’

‘Well, I was actually at the county hospital, with a friend, just after she died. But, no, I didn’t actually know her. I don’t really know why I said I’d go along. It’s not like I don’t have enough to do. Maybe...’ Why did coppers always make you feel unaccountably guilty? ‘Maybe I thought Barbara might do something stupid if I wasn’t there, which I might have been able to prevent. It’s hard to explain.’

‘Stupid how?’

‘Maybe cause some kind of scene. Start hurling accusations at J.W. Weal, or something, at the funeral.’

‘But you didn’t find her there?’

‘To be honest, it was a difficult day. I had Jane to pick up from hospital in Worcester. If I’d known Barbara had been reported missing, I’d have... tried harder.’

She returned from seeing Mumford out to find Jane at the kitchen table. The kid was dressed in jeans and her white fluffy sweater. She looked about ten. Until, of course, she spoke.

‘He thinks she’s dead.’

‘Police always think that, flower.’

‘I think you think she’s dead, too.’

‘I don’t think that, but I do feel guilty.’

‘You always feel guilty,’ Jane said.

24 Against the World

OLD HINDWELL POST office was a brick-built nineteenth-century building a little way down from the pub, on the opposite side of the street. Betty was there by eight-fifteen on this dry but bitter Monday morning. The newsagent side of the business opened at eight. There were no other customers inside.

‘Daily Mail, please.’

The postmistress, Mrs Eleri Cobbold, glanced quickly at Betty and went stiff.

‘None left, I’m sorry.’

‘You’ve only been open fifteen minutes.’ Betty eyed her steadily. It was the first time she’d been in here. She saw a thin-faced woman of about sixty. She saw a woman who had already read today’s Daily Mail.

‘Only got ordered copies, isn’t it?’ Mrs Cobbold swallowed. ‘Besides two extras. Which we’ve sold.’

Betty was not giving up. She glanced at the public photocopier at the other end of the shop. ‘In that case, could I perhaps borrow one of the ordered papers and make a copy of one particular page?’

Mrs Cobbold blinked nervously. ‘Well, I don’t...’

Betty sought her eyes, but Mrs Cobbold kept looking away as though her narrow, God-fearing soul was in danger. She glanced towards the door and seemed very relieved when it was opened by a slim, tweed-suited man with a neat beard.

‘Oh, good morning, Doctor.’

‘A sharp day, Eleri.’

‘Yes. Yes, indeed.’ Mrs Cobbold bent quickly below the counter and produced a Daily Mail. She didn’t look at Betty. ‘You had better take mine. Thirty-five pence, please.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Cobbold whispered.

This was ridiculous.

‘Thank you.’ Betty also bought a bottle of milk and a pot of local honey. She took her purse from her shoulder bag. She didn’t smile. ‘And if I could have a carton of bat’s blood as well, please.’

This, and the presence in the shop of the doctor, seemed to release something.

‘Take your paper and don’t come in here again, please,’ Mrs Cobbold said shrilly.

The doctor raised a ginger eyebrow.

Betty started to shake her head. ‘I really can’t believe this.’

‘And’ – Mrs Cobbold looked at her at last – ‘you can tell that husband of yours that if he wants to conduct affairs with married women, we don’t want to have to watch it on the street at night. You tell him that.’

Betty’s mouth fell open as Mrs Cobbold stared defiantly at her. The doctor smiled and held open the door for her.

Robin paced the freaking kitchen.

She wouldn’t let him fetch the paper. She didn’t trust him not to overreact if there were any comments... to behave, in fact, like a man who’d been cold-shouldered by his wife, told his artwork was a piece of shit and then stitched up by the media.

She’d been awesomely and unapproachably silent most of yesterday, like she was half out of the world, sealing herself off from the awful implications of the whole nation – worse still, the whole village – knowing where they were coming from. Implications? Like what implications? A lynch mob? The stake? Their house torched? Was this the twenty-first century or, like, 1650?

Later in the day he’d actually found her sunk into a book on the seventeenth-century witch-hunts. The chapter was headed ‘Suckling Demons’; it was about women accused of having sex with the Devil. But she wouldn’t talk about it. He just wanted to snatch away the book and feed it to the stove.

She’d hardly moved from the kitchen for the rest of the morning, drinking strong herbal tea and smoking – Robin counted – eleven cigarettes. And still he hadn’t told her the truly awful news, about Blackmore, because things were bad enough. He’d just spent the entire day trying to persuade her just to talk to him, which was like trying to lure a wounded vixen from her lair.

Was she blaming him for the truth leaking out – like he’d been down the pub handing out invitations to their next sabbat. And the journalists... well, how was he supposed to have handled them? Invite the bastards in to watch them perform the Great Rite on the hearthrug?

Some chance.

If he’d had the brains he was born with, she’d told him, her voice now inflected with hard Yorkshire – this was while they were still speaking – he’d’ve kept very quiet, not answered the door. There was no car there, so they could quite easily have been away from home.

What? This had made him actually start pulling at his hair. Like, how the fuck was he supposed to know it was the god-damned media at the door? Might have been insurance salesmen, the Jehovah’s freaking Witnesses. How could he have known?

No reply. No reply either when he’d twice called George Webster and Vivvie, up in Manchester, to see if they knew anything about this damn TV show. He’d left two messages on their answering machine.

And then yesterday, after a lunch of tomato soup and stale rolls, Betty had said she needed time to think and went outside to walk alone, leaving Robin eking out the very last of the sodden pine wood. Maybe she went to the church to try and communicate with the Reverend freaking Penney. Robin wasn’t interested any more. When she came back, she started moving furniture around and drinking yet more herbal tea.

Maybe there was something on her mind he didn’t know about. Dare he ask? What was the damn use?

It was like she was waiting for something even worse to happen.

This was all down to Ellis. No question there. It was Ellis sicked the press on them.

Goddamn Christian bastard.

She came in from the post office and laid a newspaper on the kitchen table. She didn’t even look at Robin. ‘I’m going to change,’ she said and went out. He heard her going upstairs.

The room felt cold. The colours had faded.

This was bad, wasn’t it? It was going to be worse than he could have imagined, although he accepted that he maybe hadn’t endeared himself to the Mail hacks by going for their camera like that.

He looked at the paper. At least it wasn’t on the front. Nervously, he turned over the first page.

Holy shit...

Just the whole of page three, was all.

Down the right-hand side was a long picture of St Michael’s Church, in silhouette against a sunset sky, the tower starkly framed by winter trees. It was a good picture, black and white. The headline above it, however, was just crazy: ‘Witches possess parish church. “Nightmare evil in our midst,” warns rector’.

‘Evil?’ Robin shouted. ‘They really listened to that crazy motherfucker?’

But it was the big picture, in colour, that made him cringe the most.

It was a grainy close-up of a snarling man, eyes burning under long, shaggy black hair. On his sweat-shiny cheeks were streaks of paint, diluted – if you wanted the truth – by bitter tears, but who was ever gonna think that? This was blue paint. It had obviously come off the cloth he’d used to wipe his eyes. In the picture, it looked like freaking woad. The guy looked like he would cut out your heart before raping your wife and slaughtering your children. Aligned with the picture, the story read:

This is the face of the new ‘priest’ at an ancient village church.

Robin Thorogood is a professional artist. He and his wife, Betty, are also practising witches. Now the couple have become the owners of a medieval parish church – while the local rector has to hold his services in the village hall.

‘This is my worst nightmare come true,’ says the Rev. Nicholas Ellis. ‘It is the manifestation of a truly insidious evil in our midst.’

Now the acting Bishop of Hereford, the Rt Rev. Bernard Dunmore, is to look into the bizarre situation. ‘It concerns me very deeply,’ he said last night.

It is more than thirty years since the church, at Old Hindwell, Powys, was decommissioned by the Church of England. For most of that time, it stood undisturbed on the land of farming brothers John and Ifan Prosser. When the last brother, John, died two years ago it passed out of the family and was bought by the Thorogoods just before Christmas.

Robin Thorogood, who is American-born, says he and his wife represent ‘the fastest-growing religion in the country’.

He claims that many of Britain’s old churches were built on former pagan ritual sites – one of which, he says, he and his wife have now repossessed.

However, when invited to explain their plans for the church, Mr Thorogood became abusive and attacked Daily Mail photographer Stuart Joyce, screaming, ‘I’ll turn you into a f—ing toad.’

Now villagers say they are terrified that the couple will desecrate the ruined church by conducting pagan rites there. They say they have already seen strange lights in the ruins late at night.

The Thorogoods’ nearest neighbour, local councillor Gareth Prosser, a farmer and nephew of the former owners, said, ‘This has always been a God-fearing community and we will not tolerate this kind of sacrilege.

‘These people sneaked in, pretending to be just an ordinary young couple.

‘Although this is a community of old-established families, newcomers have always been welcome here as long as they respect our way of life.

‘But we feel these people have betrayed our trust and that is utterly despicable.’

‘Trust?’ Robin exploded. ‘What did that fat asshole ever trust us with?’ Jeez, he’d hardly even spoken to the guy till a couple days ago, and then it was like Robin was some kind of vagrant.

He sat down, beating his fist on the table. It was a while before he realized the phone was ringing. By that time, Betty had come down and answered it.

When she came off the phone she was white with anger.

‘Who?’ Robin said.

She didn’t answer.

‘Please?’

She said in low voice, ‘Vivvie.’

‘Good of them to call back after only a day. Did they know anything about that programme? For all it matters.’

‘She was on the programme.’

He sat up. ‘What?’

‘They were both there in the studio, but only Vivienne got to talk.’ Betty’s voice was clipped and precise. ‘It was a late-night forum about the growth of Dark Age paganism in twenty-first-century Britain. They had Wiccans and Druids, Odinists – also some Christians to generate friction. It’s a friction programme.’

Robin snorted. TV was a psychic drain.

‘Vivienne was one of a group of experienced, civilized Wiccans put together by Ned Bain for that programme.’

‘Jesus,’ Robin said, ‘if she was one of the civilized ones, I sure wouldn’t like to be alone with the wild children of Odin.’

And Ned Bain? Who, as well as being some kind of rich, society witch, just happened to be an editorial director at Harvey-Calder, proprietors of Talisman Books. Robin had already felt an irrational anger that Bain should have allowed Blackmore to dump a fellow pagan – although, realistically, in a big outfit like that, it was unlikely Bain had anything at all to do with the bastard.

Betty said, ‘She claims she lost her cool when some woman priest became abusive.’

‘She doesn’t have any freaking cool.’

‘This priest was from Hereford. Ned Bain had argued that, after two thousand years of strife and corruption, the Christian Church was finally on the way out and Vivienne informed the Hereford priest that the erosion had already started in her own backyard, with pagans claiming back the old pagan sites, taking them back from the Church that had stolen them.’

Robin froze. ‘You have got to be fucking kidding.’

She didn’t reply.

‘She... Jeez, that dumb bitch! She named us? Right there on network TV?’

‘No. Some local journalist must have picked it up and tracked us down.’

‘And sold us to the Mail.’

‘The paper that supports suburban values,’ Betty said.

The phone rang. Robin went for it.

‘Mr Thorogood?’

‘He’s away,’ Robin said calmly. ‘He went back to the States.’ He hung up. ‘That the way to handle the media?’

Betty walked over and switched on the machine. ‘That’s a better way.’

‘They’ll only show up at the door.’

‘Well, I won’t be here.’

He saw that she was wearing her ordinary person outfit, the one with the ordinary skirt. And this time with a silk scarf around her neck. It panicked him.

‘Look,’ he cried, ‘listen to me. I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry about that picture. I’m sorry for looking like an asshole. I just... I just lost it, you know? I’d just had... I’d just taken this really bad call.’

‘From your friend?’ Betty said.

‘Huh?’

‘From your friend in the village?’

The phone rang again.

‘From Al,’ he said. ‘Al at Talisman.’

The machine picked up.

‘This is Juliet Pottinger. You appear to have telephoned me over the weekend. I am now back home, if you would like to call again. Thank you.’

‘Look’ – Robin waved a contemptuous hand at the paper – ‘this is just... complete shit. Like, are we supposed to feel threatened because the freaking Bishop of Hereford finds it a matter warranting deep concern? Because loopy Nick Ellis sees us as symptoms of some new epidemic of an old disease? What is he, the Witchfinder freaking General, now?’

He leapt up, moved toward her.

Betty’s hair was loose and tumbled. Her face was flushed. She looked more beautiful than he’d ever seen her. She always did look beautiful. And he was losing her. He’d been losing her from the moment they arrived here. He felt like his heart was swollen to the size of the room.

‘We’re not gonna let them take us down, are we? Betty, this is... this is you and me against the world, right?’

Betty detached her car keys from the hook by the door.

‘Please,’ Robin said. ‘Please don’t go.’

Betty said quietly, ‘I’m not leaving you, Robin.’

He put his head in his hands and wept. When he took them down again, she was no longer there.

25 Cyst

LEDWARDINE SAT SOLID, firmly defined in black and white under one of those sullen, shifty skies that looked as if it might spit anything at you. Just before nine Merrily crossed the square to the Eight-till-Late to buy a Mail.

A spiky white head rose from the shop’s freezer, its glasses misted.

‘Seems funny diggin’ out the ole frozen pasties again, vicar.’

They ended up, as usual, in the churchyard, where Gomer gathered all the flowers from Minnie’s grave into a bin liner.

‘Bloody waste. Never liked flowers at funerals. Never liked cut flowers at all. Let ’em grow, they don’t ’ave long.’

‘True.’ She knotted the neck of the bin liner, spread the Daily Mail on the neighbouring tombstone and they sat on it.

‘Barbara Buckingham’s missing, Gomer. Didn’t show up for Menna’s funeral. Never got back to me, and hasn’t been in touch with her daughter in Hampshire either.’

‘Well,’ Gomer said, ‘en’t like it’s the first time, is it?’

‘She just go off without a word when she was sixteen?’

‘Been talkin’ to Greta Thomas, vicar. No relation – well, her man, Danny’s second cousin twice removed, whatever.’

‘Small gene pool.’

‘Ar. Also, Greta used to be secertry at the surgery. Dr Coll’s. En’t much they don’t find out there. Barbara Thomas told you why her was under the doctor back then?’

‘Hydatid cyst.’

Barbara had talked as though the cyst epitomized all the bad things about her upbringing in the Forest – all the meanness and the narrowness and the squalidness. So that when she had it removed, she felt she was being given the chance to make a clean new start – a Radnorectomy.

Gomer did his big grin, getting out his roll-up tin.

Merrily said, ‘You’re going to tell me it wasn’t a hydatid cyst at all, right?’

Gomer shoved a ready-rolled ciggy between his teeth in affirmation.

‘I never thought of that,’ Merrily said. ‘I suppose I should have. What happened to the baby?’

‘Din’t go all the way, vicar. Her miscarried. Whether her had any help, mind, I wouldn’t know. Even Greta don’t know that. But there was always one or two farmers’ wives in them parts willin’ to do the business. And nobody liked Merv much.’

‘Hang on... remind me. Merv...?’

‘Merv Thomas. Barbara’s ole feller.’

‘Oh God.’

Gomer nodded. ‘See, Merv’s wife, Glenny, her was never a well woman. Bit like Menna – delicate. Havin’ babbies took it out of her. Hard birth, Menna. Hear the screams clear to Glascwm, Greta reckons. After that, Glenny, her says, that’s it, that’s me finished. Slams the ole bedroom door on Merv.’

Merrily stared up at the sandstone church tower, breathed in Gomer’s smoke. She’d come out without her cigarettes.

‘Well, Merv coulder gone into a particlar pub in Kington,’ Gomer said. ‘Even over to Hereford. Her’d have worn that, no problem, long as he din’t go braggin’ about it.’

‘But Merv thought a man was entitled to have his needs met in his own home.’

It explained so much: why Barbara left home in a hurry, also why she had such a profound hatred of Radnor Forest. And why Menna had invaded her conscience so corrosively – to the extent, perhaps, that after she was dead, her presence was even stronger. When Menna no longer existed on the outside, in a fixed place in Radnorshire, she became a permanent nightly lodger in Barbara’s subconscious.

‘But the bedroom door musn’t have stayed closed, Gomer. Barbara said her father was determined to breed a son, but her mother miscarried, and then there was a hysterectomy.’

Gomer shrugged.

‘But then his wife died. Hang on, this friend of yours...’ Merrily was appalled. ‘If she knew about Barbara, then she must’ve known what might have been happening to Menna.’

‘Difference being, vicar, that Menna had protection. There was a good neighbour kept an eye on Menna, specially after her ma died. Judy Rowland. Judy Prosser now.’

Judy... Judith. ‘Barbara said she had letters from a friend called Judith, who was looking out for Menna. That eased her conscience a little.’

‘Smart woman, Judy. I reckons if Judy was lookin’ out for Menna, Menna’d be all right. Her’d take on Merv, would Judy, sure to.’

‘She still around?’

‘Oh hell, aye. Her’s wed to Gareth Prosser – councillor, magistrate, on this committee, that committee. Big man – dull bugger, mind. Lucky he’s got Judy to do his thinkin’ for him. Point I was gonner make, though, vicar, I reckon Judy was still lookin’ out for Menna, seein’ as both of ’em was living in Ole Hindwell.’

‘You mean after her marriage?’

‘No more’n five minutes apart, boy at the pub told me.’

‘So if she also still kept in touch with Barbara, maybe Barbara went to see her, too, while she was here.’

‘Dunno ’bout that, but her went to see Greta, askin’ questions ’bout Dr Coll.’

Gatecrashed his surgery. Made a nuisance of myself. Not that it made any difference. Bloody man told me I was asking him to be unethical, pre-empting the post-mortem.

‘What did Barbara want to know about Dr Coll?’

‘Whether he was treatin’ Menna ’fore she died, that kind o’ stuff.’

‘What’s he look like, Dr Coll?’

‘Oh... skinny little bloke. ’Bout my build, s’pose you’d say. Scrappy bit of a beard.’

‘He was at Menna’s funeral. The private bit.’

‘Ar, would be.’

‘So where’s Barbara then, Gomer? Where is Barbara Thomas?’

‘I could go see Judy Prosser, mabbe. Anybody knows the score, it’s her. I’ll sniff around a bit more. What else I gotter do till the ole grass starts growin’ up between the graves again?’

It was colder now. The mist had dropped down over the tip of the steeple. Gomer’s roll-up was close to burning his lips. He took it out and squeezed the end. He looked sadly at the grave, his bag of frozen pasties on his knees and his head on one side like a dog, as if he was listening for the ticking of those two watches under the soil.

‘I’ve got to go back there today.’ She told him about Old Hindwell seemingly metamorphosed into Salem, Mass. ‘You, er, don’t fancy coming along?’

Gomer was on his feet. ‘Just gimme three minutes to put these buggers in the fridge, vicar.’

Jane was not happy. Jane was deeply frustrated. She telephoned Eirion from the scullery.

‘They’ve found out where that church is! The pagan church? I had completely forgotten about it! The one that woman was going on about on Livenight? I’d forgotten about it. Like, you apparently lose all these brain cells when you have a bump, and I just didn’t remember that stuff, and then bits started coming back, and I knew there was something vital, but I couldn’t put my fing— Anyway, it’s all over one of the papers. It’s somewhere just your side of the border. And she’s just raced off over there... on account of there’s this major scene going down.’

‘Major scene?’ Eirion said.

‘And I’m, like, I have got to check this out! But would she let me go with her? Like, she’s even taken Gomer with her. But not me – the person who is profoundly interested in this stuff? And, like, because of the other night there is, of course, not a thing I can do about it. She just puts on this calm, sorrowful expression and she looks me in the eyes, and she’s like, “You’re going to stay here, this time, aren’t you, flower?” I am completely, totally, utterly stuffed.’

Eirion said calmly, ‘So how are you now, Eirion? How’s the whiplash? Is there any chance your car isn’t a complete write-off?’

‘Ah.’ Jane sat down at the desk. ‘Right. Sorry, Irene. You have to understand that self-pity is, like, my most instinctive and dominant emotion.’

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah, slept a lot. Still feel a bit heavy when I first get up, but no headaches or anything. No scars at all. Like I said, some things I can’t remember too clearly. About that programme and stuff. But... yeah. Yeah, I’m OK.’

‘My stepmother spoke to your mother. I’ve been feeling I ought to ring her, too. Do you think she’d be OK about that?’

‘With you she’d be fatally charming. So is it a write-off?’

‘Interesting you should ask about the car before asking about me.’

‘I know you’re OK. Your stepmother told Mum you were OK.’

‘I might have subsequently suffered a brain haemorrhage in the night.’

‘Did you?’

Eirion paused. ‘Yes, it is a write-off. A car that old, if you break a headlamp, it’s a write-off.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I loved that car. I worked all summer at a lousy supermarket for that little Nova. I should get just about enough on the insurance to replace it with a mountain bike.’

‘Irene, I’m really, really sorry.’ Jane felt tears coming. ‘It’s all my fault. Everything I touch these days I screw up. I don’t suppose you want to see me ever again, but one day – I swear this on my mother’s... altar – I’ll get you another car.’

‘What, you mean in fifteen years’ time I’ll come home one day in my Porsche and find a thirty-year-old Vauxhall Nova outside my penthouse?’

‘In my scenario,’ Jane said, ‘you’re actually trudging home to your squat.’

‘Let’s forget the car,’ Eirion said. ‘You can sleep with me or something instead.’

‘OK.’

Silence.

Eirion said, ‘Listen, I’m sorry. That just came out. That was a joke.’

‘I said it was OK.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Eirion said. ‘I don’t want it to be like that.’

‘You don’t want to sleep with me?’

‘I mean, I don’t want it to be like... like you shag first and then you decide if you want to know the person better. I don’t want it to be like that. It never lasts. Most of the time that’s where it all ends.’

‘You’ve done a lot of this?’

‘Well... erm, I was in a band. You get around, meet lots of people, hear lots of stories. It’s just not how I want it to be with us, OK?’

‘Wow. You don’t mess around on the phone, do you?’

‘Yeah, I’m good on the phone,’ Eirion said. ‘Listen... It’s been weird. I can’t stop thinking about that stuff. I’ve just been walking round the grounds and turning it all over and over—’

‘Oh, the grounds...’

‘I can’t help my deprived upbringing. No, I was thinking how close we came to being like—’

‘Dead?’

‘Well... yeah, it really bloody shakes you up when you start thinking about it.’

‘Brings your life into hard focus. Unless you’ve had concussion, when it seems to do the opposite most of the time.’

‘I started thinking about your mum, what that would’ve done to her, with both her husband and her daughter – and it doesn’t matter what kind of shit he was, he was still her husband and your dad – like, both her husband and her daughter wiped out on the same bit of road. And maybe her, too, if she hadn’t stopped in time – these pile-ups can just go on and on in a fog. And... I don’t know what I’m trying to say, Jane...’

‘I do. It was like when I said to you in the car – I remember this because it was just before it happened. I said, do you never lie in bed and think about where we are and how we relate to the big picture?’

‘I just don’t lie in bed and think about it, I tramp around the grounds and the hills and think about it.’

‘That’s cool,’ Jane said.

‘And I was thinking how, when we were talking to Gerry earlier... you remember Gerry, the researcher?’

‘Gerry and... Maurice?’

‘That’s right. You remember Gerry saying, before the show started, that he wouldn’t be surprised if one of them – one of the pagans in the studio – tried some spooky stuff, just to show they could make things happen?’

‘He said that?’

‘He said spooky stuff. And I said, “What? What would they do?” And Gerry said a spell or something, just to prove they could make things happen. It was just after he was going on about your mum, and how your dad was killed and maybe she felt guilty—’

‘Oh yeah – the bastard.’

‘And you jumped down his—’

‘Sure. I mean, where did he get that stuff?’

‘He got it from that guy Ned Bain.’

‘Ned...? Oh, the really cool—’

‘The smooth-talking git,’ Eirion said. ‘But that whole thing was getting to me. Because they didn’t do anything, did they? There was no spell, no mumbo-jumbo, no pyrotechnics; they were all actually quite well behaved. But somehow Gerry had got it into his head that they were going to pull some stunt. So, anyway, I rang him this morning. You know... how I’m that bloke who wants to be a TV journalist? So I’m writing a piece on my adventures in the Livenight gallery for the school magazine...’

‘You’re not!’

‘Of course I’m not. It’s just what I told Gerry to get him talking. I told him I was explaining in my piece how the programme researchers get their information, and there were things I didn’t have a chance to ask him there on the night.’

‘And where do they get it?’

‘Cuttings files, obviously. But they also talk to the guests beforehand. Like this Tania talked to your mum... and Gerry talked to Ned Bain and a few others. But Gerry reckoned it was Bain had provided all this detailed background on the Church of England’s first woman diocesan exorcist.’

‘Gerry just told you that?’

‘It took a bit of digging, actually, Jane. After which Gerry said how he thought I had a future in his profession; said to give him a call when I get through college.’

‘Wow, big time.’

‘Sod off.’

‘So he was genned up on Mum? Like know thine enemy?’

‘But is that sort of stuff about your dad going to be readily available from the Hereford Times or something?’

‘She won’t do interviews about herself.’

‘So where did he get it?’

‘It’s no big secret, Irene. Maybe it’s all floating around on the Internet.’

‘Exactly. I’m going to check it out, I think.’

‘Who told Gerry they were going to pull a stunt? That from Ned Bain too?’

‘Gerry claimed he’d never said that. He said I must’ve misunderstood. But he bloody did say it, Jane. He just didn’t want it going in a school magazine that they were happy for stuff like that to happen on a live programme.’

‘Stuff like what?’

‘I don’t know, it just—’

‘I mean, OK, let’s spell it out, bottom line. Are you suggesting the evil Ned Bain and his satanic cronies did some kind of black magic resulting in a fog pile-up which caused the deaths of several people? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Not exactly that...’

‘What are you, some kind of fundamentalist Welsh Chapel bigot?’

‘Unfair, Jane.’

‘So what are you suggesting?’

‘I don’t know, I just... I mean no, it would be ridiculous to suggest that those tossers in fancy dress could do anything like that, even if they were evil, and I don’t think they are. Not evil, just totally irresponsible. They’re like, “Oh, can we work hand in hand with nature to make good things happen and save the Earth?” How the fuck can they know that what they’re going to make happen is going to be good necessarily?’

‘You sound like Mum.’

‘Well, maybe she’s right.’

‘Don’t meddle with anything metaphysical? Throw yourself on God’s mercy?’

‘Unless you know what you’re doing, maybe yes. And they don’t, they can’t know what they’re doing. How can they, Jane?’

‘It never occurred to you that by working on yourself for, like, years and years and studying and meditating, you can achieve wisdom and enlightenment?’

‘But most of those people haven’t, have they? It’s just, “Oh, let’s light a fire and take all our clothes off...” ’

‘That is a totally simplistic News of the World viewpoint.’ Jane’s head was suddenly full of a dark and fuzzy resentment. ‘You haven’t the faintest idea...’

‘At least I’m not naive about it.’

‘So I’m naive?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

There was a moment of true, sickening enlightenment. ‘You’ve been talking to her, haven’t you?’

‘Who?’

‘My esteemed parent, the Reverend Watkins. She didn’t just speak to your stepmother on the phone, she spoke to you as well, didn’t she?’

‘No. Well only at the hospital. I mean you were there some of the time.’

‘That’s why there’s been no big row. Why she hasn’t asked me what the hell I was doing on the M5 at midnight. Why she’s so laid-back about it.’

‘Look, Jane, I’m not saying Gwennan didn’t also fill her in on some of the details, but I’ve never even—’

‘I’ve been really, really stupid, haven’t I? It really must have destroyed some of my brain cells. While I’m sleeping it off, you’re all having a good chat. You told her how I’d rigged the whole trip, making you think she knew all about us going. Then she’s like, “Oh, you have to understand Jane found it hard coming to terms with me being a priest, has to go her own way.” This cosy vicar-to-cathedral-school-choirboy tête-à-tête. Gosh, what are we going to do about that girl?’

‘Jane, that is totally—’

‘And you’re like, “Oh, I’m trying to understand her too, Mrs Watkins. If you think I’m just one of those reprehensible youths who only want to get inside her pants, let me assure you—” ’

‘For Christ’s sake, Jane—’

‘That is just so demeaning.’

‘It would be if it—’

‘You are fucking well dead in the water, Irene.’

‘J—’

26 Demonstration of Faith

MERRILY PULLED THE old Volvo up against the hedge.

‘I’m sure that wasn’t there on Saturday.’

A cross standing in a garden.

‘Mabbe not,’ Gomer said.

It wasn’t any big deal, no more than the kind of rustic pole available from garden centres everywhere, with a section of another pole nailed on as a horizontal. It had been sunk into a flowerbed behind a picket fence in the garden of a neat, roadside bungalow about half a mile out of Walton, on the road leading to Old Hindwell. There were three other bungalows but this was the only one with a cross. Although it was no more than five feet high, there was a white light behind it, leaking through a rip in the clouds, and the fact that it was out of context made you suddenly and breathlessly aware of what a powerful symbol this was.

The bungalow looked empty, no smoke from the chimney. Merrily drove on. ‘You know who lives there?’

‘Retired folk from Off, I reckon.’

‘Mmm.’ Retired incomers were always useful for topping up your congregation. If the affable local minister turned up to welcome them, just when they were wondering if they were going to be happy here among strangers, they would feel obliged to return the favour, even if it was only for the next few Sundays. But if the friendly minister was the Reverend Nicholas Ellis, drifting away after a month or so could be more complicated.

This was what Bernie Dunmore had been afraid of. She’d received a briefing on the phone from Sophie before they left.

Apparently there was something of a record turn-out at the village hall yesterday. The bishop understands that a number of people were out delivering printed circulars last night, and bulletins were posted on Christian websites, warning of pagan infestation. Today there’s to be what’s been described as ‘a Demonstration of Faith’, which the bishop finds more than a little ominous.

‘I wonder what he said to them in his sermon. You know any regular churchgoers in the village, Gomer?’

‘We’ll find somebody for you, vicar, no problem.’

The bishop’s in conference all day...

Unsurprisingly.

... but what he wants you to do initially, Merrily, is to offer advice and support to the Reverend Mr Ellis. By which I understand him to mean restraint.

What was she supposed to do exactly? Put him under clerical arrest?

But if Merrily felt a seeping trepidation about this exercise, it clearly wasn’t shared by Gomer, who was hunched eagerly forward in the passenger seat, chewing on an unlit ciggy, his white hair on end like a mat of antennae. Describing him to someone once, Jane had said: ‘You need to start by imagining Bart Simpson as an old man.’

The lane dipped, darkening, into a channel between lines of forestry. The old rectory appeared on the left, in its clearing. Merrily kept her eyes on the narrowing road. How would she have reacted if she’d turned then and seen a pale movement in a window? She gripped the wheel, forestalling a shudder.

‘Not a soul, vicar,’ Gomer observed ambivalently.

‘Right.’ Her voice was huskier than she would have liked. The towering conifers were oppressive. ‘This must be the only part of Britain where you plunge into the trees when you leave the Forest.’

‘Ar, we all growed up never thinkin’ a forest had much to do with trees.’

Merrily slowed at the mud-flecked Old Hindwell sign. A grey poster with white lettering had been attached to its stem.

‘Christ is the Light!’

That hadn’t been there on Saturday either. She accelerated for the hill up to the village. Halfway up, to the right, the tower of the old church suddenly filled a gap in the horizon of pines. It was like a grey figure standing there.

The manifestation of a truly insidious evil in our midst.

A seriously inflammatory thing to say – Ellis playing it for all it was worth.

She’d read the Daily Mail story twice. Robin Thorogood sounded typical of the type of pagan recruited for Livenight. Primarily political, and an anarchist – what they used to call in Liverpool a tear-arse – but not necessarily insidiously evil. She wondered what his wife was like; no picture of her in the paper.

Sophie had said, The bishop would like you to point out to whoever it might concern that, while this might have previously been a church, it is also now this couple’s private property, and they do not appear to be breaking any laws – which the Reverend Ellis and his followers might well be doing if any of them sets foot inside it.

Merrily slowed to a crawl at the side road to the church and farm. This was where you might have expected to find a lychgate. There was a small parking area, and then an ordinary, barred farm gate. She saw that, while St Michael’s Church had never been exactly in a central position, trees and bushes had been allowed to grow around what was presumably the churchyard, hedging it off from the village. Somewhere in there, also, was the brook providing another natural barrier.

They moved on up the hill. ‘I wouldn’t mind taking a look at that place without drawing attention. Would that be possible, Gomer?’

‘Sure t’be. There’s a bit of an ole footpath following the brook from the other side. They opened him up a bit for the harchaeologists last summer, so we oughter be able to park a good way in.’

‘You know everything, don’t you?’

‘Ah, well, reason I knows this, vicar, is my nephew, Nev, he got brought in to shovel a few tons o’ soil and clay back when the harchaeologists was finished. I give Nev a bell last night. Good money, he reckoned, but a lot o’ waitin’ around. Bugger me, vicar, look at that...’

Merrily braked. There was a cottage on the right, almost on the road. It had small windows, lace-curtained, but in one of the downstairs ones the curtains had been pushed back and a candle was alight. Although the forestry was thinning, it was dark enough here for the flame to be visible from quite a distance. Power cut?

Not exactly. The candle was fixed on a pewter tray, which itself sat on a thick, black book, almost certainly a Bible. Christ is the Light.

‘Annie Smith lives there,’ Gomer said. ‘She’s a widow. Percy Smith, he had a little timber business, died ten year ago. Their boy, Mansel, he took it over but he en’t doin’ too well. Deals mostly in firewood now, for wood-burners and such.’

Merrily stopped the car just past the cottage. ‘She overtly religious, this Annie Smith?’

‘Never made a thing of it, if she is. But local people sticks together on things, see. Gareth Prosser goes along with the rector, say, then the rest of ’em en’t gonner go the other way. It’s a border thing: when the Welsh was fightin’ the English, the border folk’d be on the fence till they figured out which side was gonner be first to knock the ole fence down, see. And that was the side they’d jump down on. But they’d all jump together, see.’

‘Border logic.’

‘Don’t matter they hates each other’s guts the rest o’ the time, they jumps together. All about survival, vicar.’

‘And does Gareth Prosser go along with the rector?’

‘They d’say he’s got one o’ them Christ stickers in the back of his Land Rover.’

‘What does that mean, then?’

‘Means he’s got a sticker,’ Gomer said.

Before they reached the village centre, they’d passed five homes with candles burning in their windows, and two of them with Bibles stood on end, gilt crosses facing outwards. A fat church candle gleamed greasily in the window of the post office. Merrily, usually at home with Bibles and candles, found this uncanny. We don’t do this kind of thing any more.

‘It’s medieval, Gomer. One couple. One pagan couple – OK, young, confrontational, but still just one couple. Then it’s like there’s a contagious disease about, and you put a candle in the window if it’s safe to go inside. Is this village... I mean, is it normally... normal?’

‘Just a village like any other yereabouts.’ He pondered a moment. ‘No, that en’t right. Ole Hindwell was always a bit set apart. Not part o’ the Valley, not quite in the Forest. Seen better times – used to ’ave a little school an’ a blacksmith. Same as there used t’be a church, ennit? But villages around yere, they grows and wanes. I never seen it as not normal.’

A big, white-haired man was walking up the hill, carrying something on his shoulder.

‘They d’say he does a bit o’ healin’,’ Gomer said.

‘Ellis? Laying on of hands at the end of the services?’

At the Big Bible Fest in Warwickshire, the spiritual energy generated by power prayer and singing in tongues would often be channelled into healing, members of the congregations stepping up with various ailments and chronic conditions and often claiming remarkable relief afterwards. It was this aspect Merrily had most wanted to believe in, but she suspected that, when the euphoria faded, the pain would usually return and she hated to hear people who failed to make it out of their wheelchairs being told that their faith was not strong enough.

‘They reckons he does a bit o’ house-to-house. And it en’t just normal sickness either.’

‘Know any specific cases?’ A snatch of conversation came back to her from Minnie’s funeral tea at Ledwardine village hall. Boy gets picked up by the police, with a pocketful o’ these bloody ecstersee. Up in court... Dennis says, ‘That’s it, boy, you stay under my roof you can change your bloody ways. We’re gonner go an’ see the bloody rector...’

When the big man stepped into the middle of the road and swung round, the item on his shoulder was revealed to be a large grey video camera. He took a step back, to take in the empty, sloping street, where the only movement was the flickering of the candles. He stood with his legs apart, recording the silent scene – looking like the sheriff in a western in the seconds before doors flew open and figures appeared, shooting.

No doors opened. Clouds hung low and heavy; there was little light left in the sky; the weather was co-operating with the candles. The cameraman shot the scene at leisure.

‘TV news,’ Merrily said. ‘There’ll be a reporter around somewhere, too. I’m supposed to make myself known to them.’

Gomer nodded towards the cameraman. ‘Least that tells you why there’s no bugger about. Nobody yere’s gonner wanner explain on telly about them candles.’

Even if they could, Merrily thought.

‘What you wanner do, vicar?’

‘It’s not what I want to do,’ Merrily said, ‘but I do have to talk to the Reverend Nick Ellis. He lives on the estate. Would that be...?’

Past the pub, about a hundred yards out of the village centre, were eight semi-detached houses on the same side of the road.

‘That’s the estate.’ Gomer pointed, as they approached.

Merrily parked in front of the first house. Though these were once council houses, fancy gates, double glazing and new front doors showed that most of them had been purchased.

They all had candles in the windows.

Only one house, fairly central, kept its maroon, standard-issue front door and flaking metal gates. It was the only one still looking like a council house. Except for the cross on the door: wood, painted gold, and nailed on.

There was a large jeep crowding the brief drive. A sticker over a nameplate on the gate announced that Christ was the Light. In the single downstairs window, two beeswax candles burned, in trays, on Bibles.

Merrily had heard that Ellis was living in a council house because, when he’d given up his churches, he’d also given up his rectory. The Church paid the rent on this modest new manse. A small price to pay per head of congregation, and it wouldn’t do Ellis’s image any harm at all, and he would know that.

She felt a pulse of fury. From singing in tongues to erecting a wall of silence, this man had turned a whole community, dozens maybe hundreds of people, against a couple who hadn’t yet been here long enough for anyone really to know them. The Thorogoods would need to be very hard-faced to survive it.

27 Spirit of Salem

‘THIS IS NO COINCIDENCE,’ George said on the phone. ‘This is fate. We all know what tomorrow is.’

‘Probably the last day of my freaking marriage.’

‘You have to go with it, Robin. We can turn this round. We can make it a triumph.’

Robin wanted to scream that he couldn’t give a shit about Imbolc; he just wanted things to come right again with his wife, some work to bring in some money, his religious beliefs no longer to be national news. He just wanted to become a boring, obscure person.

In the background, the old fax machine huffed and whizzed. He watched the paper emerge.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live

Poison faxes? Creepy Bible quotes? Someone had unleashed the Christian propaganda machine. The spirit of Salem living on.

‘It’s all our fault, man,’ George said.

‘Not your fault. Vivvie’s fault.’

‘I share the blame. I was there too. I also now share the responsibility for getting you and Betty through this.’

‘We could maybe get through this, George, if people would just leave us the fuck alone.’

He wasn’t so sure about that, though, the way Betty was behaving.

By nine a.m. the answering machine had taken calls from BBC Wales, Radio Hereford and Worcester, HTV, Central News, BBC Midlands and 5 Live. And from some flat-voiced kid who said he was a pagan too and would like to pledge his support and his magic.

Already they were starting to come to the front door. By eleven a.m., there’d been four people knocking. He hadn’t answered. Instead he’d closed the curtains and sat in the dimness, hugging the Rayburn. He’d listened to the answering machine, intercepting just this one call from George.

The whole damn story was truly out; it had been on all the radio stations and breakfast TV. Was also out on the World Wide Web, with e-mails of support – according to George – coming from Native Americans in Canada and pagans as far away as India. George claimed that already this confrontation was being seen as a rallying flashpoint for ethnic worshippers of all persuasions. Strength and courage were being transmitted to them from all over the world.

‘We don’t want it,’ Robin told George. ‘We came here for a quiet life. Pretty soon I’m gonna take the phone off the hook and unplug the fax.’

‘In that case,’ George said, ‘surely it’s better that the people you know—’

‘You mean people you know. Listen, George, just hold off, can you do that? I would need to talk to Betty.’

‘When’s she going to be back?’

‘I don’t know when she’s gonna be back. She’s mad at me. She thinks I screwed up with the Mail guys. I think I screwed up with the Mail guys. I’m mad at me.’

‘You need support, man. And there’s a lot of Craft brothers and Craft sisters who want to give you some. I tell you, there’s an unbelievable amount of strong feeling about this. It’ll be very much a question of stopping people coming out there.’

‘Well you fucking better stop them.’

‘Plus, the opposition, of course,’ George said. ‘We don’t know how many they are or where they’re coming from.’

Robin peered round the edge of the curtain at the puddles in the farmyard and along the side of the barn. It looked bleak, it looked desolate. In spite of all the courage and strength being beamed at them, it looked lonely as hell. Sure he felt vulnerable; how could he not?

When he sighed, it came out rough, with a tremor underneath it.

‘How many were you thinking?’

‘Well, we need a coven,’ George had said. ‘I’ll find eleven good people which, with you and Betty makes... the right number. We could be there by nightfall. Don’t worry about accommodation, we’ll have at least two camper vans. We’ll bring food and wine and everything we need to deck out the church for Imbolc. Be the greatest Imbolc ever, Robin. We’ll set the place alight.’

‘I dunno. I dunno what to do.’ For George this was cool, this was exciting. If you’d put it to Robin, even just a few days ago, he’d have said yeah, wow, great. It was what he’d envisaged from the start: the repaganized church becoming a centre of the old religion at the heart of a prehistoric ritual landscape. The idyll.

But this was not Betty’s vision any more – if it ever had been.

‘Leave it with me, yeah?’ George said. ‘Blessed be, man.’

‘I’m quite psychic, you know.’ Juliet Pottinger had what Betty regarded as a posh Lowland Scottish accent. ‘I was about to go into town, and then I thought, no, if I go out now I shall miss something interesting.’

Which was a better opening than Betty could have hoped for.

Lower Lodge was an extended Georgian cottage on the edge of a minor road about two miles out of Leominster and a good twenty-five miles east of Old Hindwell. Once away from Old Hindwell, Betty’s head had seemed to clear. The day was dull but dry, the temperature no worse than you could expect in late January. Out here, she felt lighter, less scared, less oppressed.

Mrs Pottinger’s house was full of books. Six bookcases in the hall, with two piles of books beside one of them, propped up by an umbrella stand. In the long kitchen, where she made Betty tea, the demands of reading and research seemed to have long since overtaken the need for food preparation. Books and box-files were wedged between pans on the shelves and under cups and plates on the dresser. The only visible cooker was a microwave, and an old Amstrad word processor with a daisywheel printer took up half the kitchen table. There was – small blessing – no sign of a Daily Mail.

Juliet Pottinger was about sixty-five, with a heavy body, layered in cardigans, and what you could only call wide hair. Her seat was a typist’s chair, which creaked when she moved. She was working, she said, on a definitive history of the mid-border.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t phone first,’ Betty said. ‘I just happened to be... passing.’

‘But you live at Old Hindwell, you say?’

‘At St Michael’s.’

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Pottinger. ‘Oh...’

It meant Betty didn’t have to spend too long explaining her interest in the church, and no need to make reference either to her religion or the ruined building’s palpable residue of pain.

‘The widow sold it, then?’ said Mrs Pottinger. ‘Thought she would. It was in the Hereford Times about Major Wilshire... old regiment man. The SAS. He wrote to me – as you know, of course.’

‘Mrs Wilshire passed over to me some documents relating to the house and the church, and your letter was one of them. That’s how we learned about Mr Penney.’

‘Oh, I feel such a terrible wimp about that, Mrs Thorogood. I wanted to write up the whole story, but I doubt the Brecon and Radnor would have printed it, for legal reasons. Also, I ramble so, become over-absorbed in detail – always been more of a historian than a journalist. And, of course, the local people were against anything coming out.’

‘Why do you think that was?’

‘In case it reflected poorly on them, I suppose. In case it drew attention to their affairs. Gareth Prosser the elder was the councillor then, upholding the family’s local government tradition of conserving the community in whatever ways are most expedient and saying as little as possible about it in open council. My brief, as local correspondent for the paper, was to report nothing that everyone didn’t already know. Except, of course, in the case of poor Terry, when I was instructed not to report what everyone already knew. Oh dear, it really has not been a happy place, I’m afraid.’

‘You felt that?’

‘I always knew that. However, I don’t want to depress you. You do, after all have to...’

‘Live with it? That’s why I need to know about its true history. It oppresses me otherwise.’

‘Does it?’ Mrs Pottinger’s eyes became, in an instant, shrewdly bird-like.

‘Yes, it... I...’ Betty’s banging heart was confirming that it was too late for subterfuge. ‘I’m, I suppose you’d say, sensitive to atmosphere – acutely sensitive.’

‘Are you indeed?’

‘The first time I saw that ruined church, I had a very negative reaction, which I kept to myself because my husband loved it... was enraptured. For some time I kept trying to tell myself we could, you know, do something about it.’

‘You mean feng shui or something?’

‘Or something,’ Betty said carefully. ‘The place upsets me. It unbalances me in ways I can’t handle. After we moved in, that became stronger, until I could feel it almost through the walls of the farmhouse. I hope I don’t sound like an idiot to you, Mrs Pottinger.’

She was amazed at what she’d just said – all the things she hadn’t been able to say to Robin. Mrs Pottinger did not smile. She pulled off her half-glasses and thought for a few moments, tapping one of the arms on a corner of the Amstrad.

‘While we were living in Old Hindwell,’ she said at last, ‘we acquired for ourselves a dog. It was a cocker spaniel we called Hopkins. My husband would take him for walks morning and evening. By using the footpath which follows the brook past the church, it was possible almost to circumnavigate the village. Have you walked that particular path yet?’

‘I haven’t, but I think my husband has.’

‘It’s a round trip of about a mile and a half, a perfect evening walk. But would Hopkins follow it? He would not. Within about twenty yards of the church – approaching from either direction – that dog would be off! Disappeared for a whole night once. Well, after this had happened two or three times, Pottinger tried putting him on a lead. But when they reached some invisible barrier – as I say, about twenty yards from the church, where the yew trees began – Hopkins would start tugging in the opposite direction with such force that he almost strangled himself. Pottinger used to say he was afraid the poor creature would choke himself to death rather than continue along that path.’

Mrs Pottinger replaced her glasses.

‘As you can imagine, that’s another story I didn’t write for the Brecon and Radnor Express.’

Betty found the story chilling, but not surprising. The only time she’d ever seen anyone on that path was the night the witch box was delivered.

‘Did you try to find out what might have scared your dog?’

‘Naturally, I did. I was fascinated, so I went to visit Terry.’

Betty registered that Penney was the only male – not even her own husband – whom Mrs Pottinger had referred to by his first name.

‘It was the first time I’d actually been up to the rectory, as he never seemed to invite people there. Normally I’d collect his notes and notices for the B and R at the church, on Sundays after morning service. The rectory was far too large for a bachelor, of course – or even for a married clergyman with fewer than four children. One can understand why the Church is now shedding so many of its properties, but in those days it was still expected that the minister should have a substantial dwelling. Terry, however, was... well, it was quite bizarre...’

Betty remembered how Mrs Pottinger’s letter to Major Wilshire had ended, with the suggestion that Old Hindwell existed for her now as little more than a ‘surreal memory’.

‘His appearance, I suppose, was becoming quite hippyish. He’d seemed quite normal when he first arrived in the village. But after a time it began to be noticed that he was allowing his hair to grow and perhaps not shaving as often as he might. And when I arrived at the rectory that day – it was about this time of year, perhaps a little later – Terry showed me into a reception room so cold and sparsely furnished that it was clear to me that it could not possibly be in general use. I remember I put my hand on the seat of an old armchair and it was actually damp! “Good God, Terry,” I said, “we can’t possibly talk in here.” I don’t know about you, Mrs Thorogood, but I can’t even think in the cold.’

Betty smiled. The book-stuffed kitchen was stiflingly warm.

‘And so, with great reluctance, Terry took me into his living room. And when I say living room... it contained not only his chair and his writing desk, but also his bed, which was just a sleeping bag! He told me he was repainting his bedroom, but I wasn’t fooled. This single room was Terry’s home. He was camping in this one room, like in a bedsitter, and, apart from the kitchen, the rest of the rectory was closed off. I doubt he even used a bathroom. Washed himself at the sink instead, I’d guess – when he even remembered to. Not terribly... Is there something the matter, Mrs Thorogood?’

Betty shook her head. ‘Please go on.’

‘Well, he’d chosen this room, I guessed, because of the builtin bookshelves. He might not have had much furniture or many private possessions, but he had a good many books. I always examine people’s bookshelves, and Terry’s books included a great deal of theology, as one would expect, but also an element of what might be termed the esoteric. Do you know the kind of thing I mean?’

‘The occult?’

‘That word, of course, merely means hidden. There was certainly a hidden side to Terry. He was perfectly affable, kind to the old people, good with children. But his sermons... I suppose they must have been beyond most of the congregation, including me occasionally. They were sometimes close to meditations, I suppose – as though he was still working out for himself the significance of a particular biblical text. When I told him about our dog Hopkins, he didn’t seem in the least surprised. He asked me how much I knew about the history of the area. At that time not a great deal, I admit. He asked me, particularly, if I knew of any legends about dragons.’

Betty cleared her throat. ‘Dragons.’

‘In the Radnor Forest.’

‘And did you?’

‘No. There’s very little recorded folklore relating specifically to Radnor Forest. The only mention I could find was from... Hold on a moment.’

Mrs Pottinger jumped up, her hair rising like wings, an outstretched finger moving vaguely like a compass needle. ‘Ah!’ She crossed the room and plucked a green-covered book from the row supported by tall kitchen weights on a window ledge. ‘You are enlivening my morning no end, Mrs Thorogood. So few people nowadays want to discuss such matters, especially with a garrulous old woman.’

She laid the book in front of Betty. It was called A Welsh Country Parson, by D. Parry-Jones. It fell open at a much-thumbed page.

‘Parry-Jones records here, if you can see, that a dragon had dwelt “deep in the fastnesses” of the Forest. And he records – this would be back in the twenties or thirties – a conversation with an old man who insisted he had heard the dragon breathing. All rather sketchy, I’m afraid, and somewhat fanciful. Anyway, it soon became clear to the people he was involved with on a day-to-day basis that Terry was becoming quite obsessed.’

Betty looked up from the book, shaken.

‘As a symbol of evil,’ Mrs Pottinger said, ‘a satanic symbol, the dragon from the Book of Revelation represents the old enemy. My impression was that Terry thought he was in some way being tested by God – by being sent to Old Hindwell, where the dragon was at the door. That God had a mission for him here. Well, English people who come to Wales sometimes do pick up rather strange ideas.’

Mrs Pottinger put on a rather superior smile, as though Scots were immune to such overreaction. Ignoring this, Betty said, ‘Did he believe there were so-called satanic influences at work in the Forest? I mean, is there a history of this... of witchcraft, say?’

‘If there was, not much is recorded. No famous witchcraft trials on either side of the border in this area. But, of course’ – a thin, sly smile – ‘that doesn’t mean it didn’t go on. Quite the reverse, one would imagine. It may have been so much a part of everyday life, something buried so deep in the rural psyche, that rooting it out might have been deemed... impractical.’

‘What about Cascob?’

‘Cascob? Oh, the charm.’ Mrs Pottinger beamed. ‘That is rather a wonderful mixture, isn’t it? Do you know some of those phrases are thought to have been taken from the writings of John Dee, the Elizabethan magus, who was born not far away, near Pilleth?’

‘Do you know anything about the woman, Elizabeth Loyd?’

‘Some poor child.’

‘Could she have been a witch? I mean, the wording of the exorcism suggests she was thought to be possessed by satanic evil. Suspected witches around that time were often thought to have... relations with the Devil.’

... some women are known to have boasted of it, Betty had read yesterday. The Devil’s member was described as being long and narrow and cold as ice...

‘Nothing is known of her,’ Mrs Pottinger said, ‘or where her exorcism took place, or who conducted it. The historian Francis Payne suggests that the charm was probably buried to gain extra potency for the invocation.’

‘Buried?’

‘It was apparently dug up in the churchyard.’

Betty sat very still and nodded and tried to smile, and felt again the weight of a certain section of Cascob’s circular churchyard, and the chill inside the building.

‘Mrs Pottinger,’ she said quickly, ‘what finally happened to Terry Penney?’

‘Well, he’d virtually destroyed his own church – an unpardonable sin. He had effectively resigned. He’d already left the village before the crime was even discovered, taking with him his roomful of possessions in that old van he drove.’

‘You suggested in your letter to Major Wilshire that there’d been previous acts of vandalism.’

‘Did I? Yes, minor things. A small fire in a shed outside, spotted and dealt with by a churchwarden. Other petty incidents, too, as though he was building up to the main event.’

‘Where did he go after he left?’

‘No one knows, or much cared at the time. Except, perhaps, for me, for a while. But the Church was very quickly compensated for the damage done, so perhaps Terry had more money than it appeared. Perhaps his frugal lifestyle was a form of asceticism, a monkish thing. Anyway, he just went away – after setting in train the process which ultimately led to the decommissioning of Old Hindwell Church. And the village then erased him from its collective – and wonderfully selective – memory.’

‘You really didn’t like the place much, did you?’ Betty said bluntly.

‘You may take it that I did not feel particularly grateful to some of the inhabitants. We left in eighty-three. My husband had been unwell, so we thought we ought to live nearer to various amenities. That was what we told people, at least. And that’s...’ Mrs Pottinger’s voice became faint. ‘That’s what I’ve been telling people ever since.’

She sat back in her typing chair, blinked at Betty, then stared widely, as if she was waking up to something.

Betty returned the stare.

‘You’re really rather an extraordinary young woman, aren’t you?’ Mrs Pottinger said in surprise, as though she’d ceased many years ago to find young people in any way interesting. ‘I wonder why it is that I feel compelled to tell you the truth.’

‘The truth?’

‘Tell me,’ Mrs Pottinger said, ‘who’s your doctor?’

28 A Humble Vessel

THERE WAS NO doorbell, so she knocked twice, three times. She was about to give up when he answered the door.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Reverend Watkins.’ Registering her only briefly before bending over the threshold, apparently to inspect the candles in the neighbouring windows. ‘Good.’

Meaning the candles, she guessed.

‘I’m sorry to bother you, Mr Ellis...’

‘They told me you’d be dropping in.’ He shrugged. ‘I accept that.’

‘I feel a bit awkward...’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you must do. Do you want to come in?’

She followed him through a shoebox hall which smelled of curry, into a small, square living room which had been turned into an office. There was a steel-framed desk, two matching chairs. A computer displayed red and green standby lights on a separate desk, and there was a portable TV set on a stand with a video recorder underneath.

‘The war room,’ Nicholas Ellis said with no smile.

His accent sounded far more transatlantic than it had during Menna’s funeral service. He wore a light grey clerical shirt, with pectoral cross, and creased grey chinos. His long hair was loosely tied back with a black ribbon. His face was windreddened but without lines, like a mannequin in an old-fashioned tailor’s shop.

He waved her vaguely to one of the metal chairs.

‘Not much time, I’m afraid. I’ll help you all I can, but I really don’t have much time today, as you can imagine. Events kind of caught up on me.’

When he sat down behind his desk, Merrily became aware of the aluminium-framed picture on the wall behind him, over the boarded-up fireplace. It was William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun. Sexually charged, awesomely repulsive. Ellis noticed her looking at it.

‘Revoltingly explicit, isn’t it – shining with evil? I live with it so that when they look in my window they will know I’m not afraid.’

They? The war room?

Merrily sat down, kept her coat on.

‘So...’ he said, as if he was trying hard to summon some interest. ‘You are the, uh... I’m sorry, I did write it down.’

‘Diocesan Deliverance Consultant.’

It had never sounded more ludicrous.

‘And the suffragan Bishop of Ludlow has sent you to support me. Well, here I am’ – he opened his arms – ‘a humble vessel for the Holy Spirit. Have you ever truly experienced the Holy Spirit, Merrily?’

‘In my way.’

‘No, in other words,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t happen in your way, it happens in His way.’

‘Damn,’ Merrily said, prickling. ‘You’re right.’

He looked at her with half a smile on his wide lips. ‘Diocesan... Deliverance... Consultant. I guess you’re like one of those young female MPs... what did they call them... Blair’s Babes? I suppose it was only a matter of time before we had them in the Church.’

‘Like woodworm.’

He didn’t reply. He’d lost the half-smile.

‘Meaning I look vaguely presentable,’ Merrily said, ‘even though I must know bugger all.’

‘And you feel you must throw in the odd swear word to show that the clergy doesn’t have to be stuffy and pious any more.’

‘Gosh,’ Merrily said, ‘it doesn’t take you long to get the measure of a person, does it?’

Ellis smiled at last. ‘My, we really aren’t getting along, are we? You aren’t going to want to “support” me at all, are you? Well, other priests tend not to, as I’m a fundamentalist. That’s what the Anglican Church calls someone who truly believes in the living God.’ He leaned back. ‘I’m sorry. Let’s start again. How do you propose to support me?’

‘How would you like to be supported?’

‘By being left alone, I guess.’

‘That’s what I guessed you’d say.’

‘Aren’t you clever?’

He was looking not at her, but through her, as though she was, for him, without substance – or at least insufficiently textured to engage his attention. It made her annoyed, but then it was designed to.

She pressed on, ‘Um... you said “war room”.’

‘Yes.’

‘And, obviously, quite a few people here seem to agree with you on that.’

‘Yes.’

‘And it all looks quite dramatic and everything.’

‘You make it sound like a facade. It’s an initial demonstration of faith in the Lord. It will spread. You’ll see twice as many candles on your way out.’

‘Isn’t it a bit... premature to call this a war zone? One story in a newspaper? Two amateur witches in a redundant church? Unless...’

He gave her just a little more attention. ‘Unless?’

‘Unless this goes back rather further than this morning’s Daily Mail.’

‘It goes back well over two thousand years, Merrily. “The satyr shall cry to his fellow. Yea, there shall the night hag alight, and find for herself a resting place.’

‘Isaiah.’ Merrily remembered the taunts of the industrial chaplain, the Rev. Gemmell, in the Livenight studio, inviting her to stand up and denounce Ned Bain as an agent of Satan in front of seven million viewers. ‘Meaning that, whether they accept it or not, all followers of pagan gods are actually making a bed for the Devil.’

‘In this case,’ Ellis said, ‘to reflect the imagery of the Radnor Forest, a nest for the dragon.’

‘Because the former church here is dedicated to St Michael?’ Merrily glanced up at the Blake print, in which the obscene and dominant dragon, viewed from behind, was curly-horned and not really red but the colour of an earthworm. It was hard not to believe that William Blake himself must have seen one.

‘One of five churches positioned around Radnor Forest and charged with the energy of heaven’s most potent weapon. Cefnllys, Cascob, Llanfihangel nant Melan, Llanfihangel Rhydithon, Old Hindwell.’

‘The Forest is supposed to be a nest for the dragon? Is that a legend?’

‘No legend is simply a legend,’ Ellis said. ‘We have the evidence of the five churches dedicated to the warrior angel. If one should fall, it creates a doorway for Satan. You see merely two misguided idiots, I see the beginnings of a disease which, unless eradicated at source, will spread until all Christendom is a mass of suppurating sores. This is what the Devil wants. Will you deny that?’

‘Hold on... You say there’s a legend that if one of the churches falls, et cetera... Yet you’re not interested in preserving churches, are you? I mean, as I recall, when the Sea of Light group was inaugurated, someone said that the only way faith could be regenerated was to sell off all the churches as museums and use the money to pay more priests to go out among the people.’

‘Correct. And in the village here, a resurgence of faith has already restored a community centre which had become derelict, a home for rats. Look at it now. Eventually, the church will move out, put up its illuminated cross somewhere else. But in the meantime, God has chosen Old Hindwell for a serious purpose. I can see you still don’t understand.’

‘Trying.’

‘You see a ruined church, I see a battleground. Look...’

He stood up and strode to the computer, touched the mouse and brought up his menu, clicked on the mailbox icon. His in-box told him he had two unread e-mails. One was: From: warlock. Subject: war in heaven. He clicked. The message read, ‘I am a brother to dragons and a companion to owls.’

‘Book of Job,’ Merrily said.

Ellis reduced and deleted it. ‘There’s one every day.’

‘Since when?’

‘They like to use that Internet provider, Demon. Today’s is a comparatively mild offering.’

‘You reported this to the police?’

‘The police? This is beyond the police.’

‘They can trace these people through the server.’

‘It’ll only turn out to be some fourteen-year-old who received his instructions anonymously in a spirit message from cyberspace, and the police are gonna laugh. I would hardly expect them to understand that there’s a chain of delegation here, leading back, eventually, to hell. That, of course’ – he nodded at the computer – ‘is Satan’s latest toy. I keep one here, for the same reason I have that repulsive picture on the wall.’

Masochism, Merrily thought. A martyrdom trip.

‘I’m a defiant man, Merrily. Don’t go thinking this began with the arrival of the Thorogoods. I’ve been set up for this. I’ve been getting poison-pen letters for months. And phone calls – cackling voices in the night. Recently had a jagged scratch removed from my car bonnet: a series of vertical chevrons like a dragon’s back.’

‘Maybe you do need support.’

He hit the metal desk with an open palm. ‘I have all the support I will ever need.’

‘What do you plan to do?’

‘God shall cast out the dragon – through Michael. I made a civilized approach to Thorogood. I told him I wanted to perform a cleansing Eucharist in the church. He put me off. He can’t do that now. He faces the power of the Holy Spirit.’

‘And the cold shoulder from the people of Old Hindwell.’

‘You mean our Demonstration of Faith? You disagree with that?’

She shrugged. ‘Candles are harmless. I just hope that’s where it ends.’

‘My dear Merrily’ – Ellis walked to the door – ‘this is where it begins. And, with respect, it’s not your place to hope for anything in relation to my parishioners.’

‘Aren’t the Thorogoods also your parishioners?’

He expelled a mildly exasperated hiss.

‘And if they’re trying to make a point about reclaiming ancient sites, hasn’t it occurred to you that you’re just helping to publicize their cause?’

‘And what’s Bernard Dunmore’s policy on the issue?’ Ellis demanded. ‘Say nothing and hope they won’t be able to maintain their mortgage repayments? Try to forget they’re there? Is that, perhaps, why the Church is no longer a force in this country, while evil thrives unchallenged? Perhaps you should find out for yourself what kind of people the Thorogoods really are. Maybe you could visit their property. Under cover of darkness again?’

Damn! She stood up. ‘OK, I’m sorry. It was a private funeral, and I had no right. But I was looking for someone. Someone who, as it happens, has now been reported missing from home.’

‘Oh?’ For the first time, he was thrown off balance.

‘Barbara Buckingham, née Thomas? Menna’s sister?’

‘I’ve never heard of her. I didn’t even know Menna had a sister.’

Merrily blinked. ‘Didn’t you ever talk to Menna about her background?’

‘Why should I have probed into her background?’

‘Just that when I have kids for confirmation we have long chats about everything. Rebaptism, I mean. I’d have thought that was something much more serious.’

‘Merrily, I don’t have to talk about this to you.’

She followed him into the hall. ‘It’s just I can’t believe you’re one of those priests who simply goes through the motions, Nick.’

‘I do have an appointment. I’m sorry.’

‘Splish, splash, you’re now baptized?’

When he swiftly lifted a hand, she thought, for an incredible moment, that he was going to hit her and she actually cringed. But all he did was twist the small knob on the Yale lock and pull open the front door, but when he noticed that momentary cower, he smiled broadly and his smooth face lit up like a jack-o’-lantern.

She didn’t move. ‘I still don’t fully understand this, Nick.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘And you must ask yourself why.’

‘I mean I don’t understand why you’re using the enviable influence you’ve developed in this community to put people in fear of their immortal souls. You didn’t have to make that inflammatory statement to the Mail.’

He looked at her as if trying, for the first time, to bring her into focus and then, finding she was too flimsy to define, turned away. ‘I can’t believe,’ he said, ‘that you have somehow managed to become a priest of God.’

She walked past him through the doorway, glanced back and saw a man with nothing much to lose. A man who had stripped himself down to the basics: cheap clothes, a small council house, a village hall for a church, and even that impermanent. There was something distinctly medieval about him. He was like a friar, a mendicant.

‘Of course,’ she said from the step, ‘they’re also helping to publicize you. And maybe the villagers aren’t afraid for their immortal souls at all, they’re just assisting their rector to build his personal reputation. If you were in a town, virtually nobody would think this was... worth the candle.’

‘This is a waste of time,’ Nick Ellis said. ‘I have people to see.’

The door closed quietly in her face.

Merrily stood on the path. She found she was shaking.

She hadn’t felt as ineffectual since the Livenight programme.

29 Dark Glamour

AS MERRILY GOT back into the car, Gomer pointed to the mobile on the dash.

‘Bleeped twice. Third time, I figured out how to answer him. Andy Mumford, it was, that copper. Jane gived him your number. He asked could you call back.’

‘He say what about?’

‘Not to me.’

She picked up the phone, entered the Hereford number Gomer had written on a cigarette paper, having to hold the thin paper close to the window because it was beyond merely overcast now – and not yet one p.m. Three fat raindrops blopped on the windscreen. This was, she told herself, going to be positive news.

‘DS Mumford.’

‘It’s Merrily Watkins.’

‘Ah.’

‘Has she turned up?’

‘Afraid not, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Oh.’ She heard Ellis’s front door slam, and saw him coming down the path. He was carrying a medium-sized white suitcase. He walked past her Volvo without a glance and carried on towards the village centre.

‘But I’m afraid her car has,’ Mumford said. ‘You know the Elan Valley? Big area of lakes – reservoirs – about thirty miles west of Kington? They’ve pulled her car out of one of the reservoirs.’

‘Oh God.’

‘Some local farmer saw the top of it shining under the water. Been driven clean through a fence. Dyfed-Powys’ve got divers in there. When I checked, about ten minutes ago, they still hadn’t found anything else. Don’t know what the currents are like in those big reservoirs. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Reverend, but I thought you’d want to know.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘If I hear anything else, I’ll get back to you. Or, of course, if you hear anything. It’s been known for people to...’

‘What, you think she might have faked her own death?’

‘No, I’m a pessimist,’ Mumford said. ‘I tend to think they’ll pull out a body before nightfall.’

It began as a forestry track, then dropped into an open field with an unexpected vista across the valley to the Radnor Forest hills of grey green and bracken brown, most of which Gomer knew by name.

And strange names they were: the Whimble, the Smatcher, the Black Mixen. Evocative English-sounding names, though all the hills were in Wales. Merrily and Gomer sat for a moment in the car and took in the view: not a farm, a cottage or even a barn in sight. There were a few sheep, but lambing would come late in an area as exposed as this: hill farming country, marginal land. She remembered Barbara Buckingham talking about her deprived childhood – the teabags used six times, the chip fat changed only for Christmas. As they left the car at the edge of the field, she paused to say a silent prayer for Barbara.

She caught up with Gomer alongside a new stile which, he said, had been erected by Nev for the archaeologists. This was where the track became a footpath following the line of the Hindwell Brook, which was flowing unexpectedly fast and wide after all the rain. It had stopped raining now, but the sky bulged with more to come. Gomer pointed across the brook, shouting over the rush of the water.

‘Used to be another bridge by yere one time, but now the only way you can get to the ole church by car is through the farm, see.’

‘Where was the excavation?’

‘Back there. See them tumps? Nev’s work.’ He squinted critically at a line of earthmounds, where tons of soil had been replaced. ‘Boy coulder made a better job o’ that. Bit bloody uneven, ennit?’

She went to stand next to him. ‘You’d like to get back on the diggers, wouldn’t you?’

‘Minnie never liked it,’ Gomer said gruffly. ‘Her still wouldn’t like it. ’Sides which, I’m too old.’

‘You don’t think that for one minute.’

Gomer sniffed and turned away, and led her through an uncared-for copse, where some of the trees were dead and branches brought down by the gales had been left where they’d fallen.

‘Prosser’s ground, all of this – inherited from the ole fellers. But he don’t do nothin’ with it n’more. Muster been glad when the harchaeologists come – likely got compensation for lettin’ ’em dig up ground the dull bugger’d forgotten he owned.’

‘Why’s he never done anything with it?’

‘That’s why,’ Gomer said, as they came out of the copse.

And there, on a perfect promontory, a natural shelf above the brook, on the opposite bank, was the former parish church of St Michael, Old Hindwell.

‘Gomer...’ Merrily was transfixed. ‘It’s... beautiful.’

The nave had been torn open to the elements but the tower seemed intact. A bar of light in the sky made the stones shimmer brown and grey and pink between patches of moss and lichen.

‘It’s the kind of church townsfolk dream of going to on a Sunday. I mean, what must it be like on a summer evening, with its reflection in the water? How could they let it go?’

Gomer grunted, rolling a ciggy. ‘Reverend Penney, ennit? I tole you. Went off ’is trolley.’

‘Went off his trolley how, exactly?’ She remembered that Bernie Dunmore had made a brief allusion last night to the rector at the time actually suggesting that Old Hindwell Church should be decommissioned.

Now, with a certain relish, Gomer told her what the Reverend Terence Penney, rector of this parish, had done with all that ancient and much-polished church furniture on an October day in the mid-1960s.

‘Wow.’ She stared into the water, imagining it foaming around the flotsam of the minister’s madness. ‘Why?’

‘Drugs,’ Gomer said. ‘There was talk of drugs.’

‘Where is he now?’

Gomer shrugged.

She gazed, appalled, at the ruin. ‘I bet we can find out. When we get back to the car, I’ll call Sophie. Sophie knows everybody in a dog collar who isn’t a dog.’

They went back through the dismal, dying copse.

‘Not many folks walks this path n’more,’ Gomer said, ‘’cept a few tourists. Place gets a bad reputation. Then this feller fell off the tower, killed ’isself.’

Merrily stopped. ‘When?’

‘Year or so back? Bloke called Wilshire, army man, lived New Radnor way. Falls off a ladder checkin’ the stonework on the ole tower. That’s how come these Thorogoods got it cheap, I reckon.’

‘I see.’

At the car, despite the extensive view, the mobile phone signal was poor and she had to shout at Sophie, whose voice kept breaking up into hiss and crackle, shouting out the name Penney.

Gomer said, ‘You wanner go talk to the witches, vicar?’

‘Dare we?’ She thought about it. ‘Yeah, why not.’

But when they drove back to the farm gate, there was a TV crew videotaping a thirtyish couple with a ‘Christ is the Light’ placard. You could tell by their outward bound-type clothing that they were not local. Merrily found herself thinking that some people just didn’t have enough to do with their lives.

She was confused. She didn’t know this place at all. It was like one of those complicated watches that did all sorts of different things, and you had to get the back off before you could see how the cogs were connected. Problem was, she didn’t even know where to apply the screwdriver to prise off the back.

‘Black Lion?’ Gomer suggested. ‘I’ll buy you a pint and a sandwich, vicar.’

At the Black Lion there were no visible candles – no lights at all, in fact.

Merrily saw Gomer glance at his wrist, before remembering he’d buried his watch. ‘About a quarter to two,’ she said.

Gomer frowned. ‘What’s the silly bugger playin’ at, shuttin’ of a lunchtime with all these TV fellers in town?’

Merrily followed him up a short alley into a yard full of dustbins and beer crates. There was a door with a small frosted-glass window and Gomer tapped on it. Kept on tapping until a face blurred up behind the frosted glass, looking like the scrubbed-over face of one of the suspects in a police documentary. ‘We’re closed!’

‘Don’t give me that ole wallop, Greg, boy. Open this bloody door!’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire.’ Sounding like he was planning to take a bulldozer to the side of the pub if he couldn’t gain normal access.

Bolts were thrown.

The licensee was probably not much older than Merrily, but his eyes were bagged, his mouth pinched, his shirt collar frayed. He’d shaved, but not well. Gomer regarded him without sympathy.

‘Bloody hell, Greg, we only wants a pot o’ tea and a sandwich.’

The man hesitated. ‘All right... Just don’t make a big fing about it.’

They followed him through a storeroom and an expensive, fitted kitchen with a tomato-red double-oven Aga, and the sound of extractor fans.

‘Busy night, boy?’

‘Yeah.’ But he didn’t sound happy about it. ‘Go frew there, to the lounge bar. I won’t put no lights on.’

‘Long’s we can see what we’re eatin’.’

The lounge bar, grey-lit through more frosted glass, looked to have been only half renovated, as if the money had run out: new brass light fittings on walls too thinly emulsioned. Also a vague smell of damp.

‘I can make you coffee, but not tea,’ Greg said without explanation.

‘We’ll take it.’ Gomer pulled out bar stools for Merrily and himself.

Greg threw out the dregs of a smile. ‘Hope this is your daughter, Gomer?’

‘En’t got no daughter,’ Gomer said gruffly. ‘This is the vicar of our church.’ As Greg’s smile vanished, Gomer sat down, leaned both elbows on the bar top. ‘Who made you close the pub, then, boy?’

‘The wife.’

‘And who made her close it?’

‘Look,’ Greg said, ‘I’m not saying you’re a nosy git, but this is your second visit inside a few days, asking more questions than that geezer from the Mail. What are you, Radnorshire correspondent for Saga magazine?’

Merrily was quietly zipping up her coat. It was freezing in there. ‘Well, Mr...’

‘Starkey.’

‘Mr Starkey, the nosy git’s me. I’m with the Hereford Diocese.’

Greg’s eyes slitted. ‘Wassat mean?’

‘It means... Well, it means I’m interested, among other things, in what the Reverend Ellis is getting up to – you know?’ Greg snorted; Merrily unwound her scarf to let him see the dog collar. ‘This seems to be one of the few places without a candle in the window.’

Greg pushed fingers through his receding hairline. He looked as if there wasn’t much more he could take.

‘You wanna know what he’s getting up to? Like apart from destroying marriages?’

‘No, let’s include that.’ Merrily sat down.

Greg said there’d been a full house last night.

‘First time in ages. Folks I ain’t never seen before. Not big drinkers, but we got frew a lot of Cokes and shandies and if you know anyfing about the licensing trade you’ll know that’s where the big profit margins lie, so I got no complaints there.’

‘Thievin’ bugger,’ Gomer said. ‘So what brought this increase in trade, boy?’

‘Wife went to church, Gomer. That funeral. Mrs Weal. Never come back for a good while after you’d left. I mean hours. Said she’d got talking to people. First time she’d really talked to anybody since we come here.’ He scowled. ‘Including me.’

‘She’d never been before?’ Merrily said. ‘To church – to the hall?’

‘Nah. Not to any kind of church. See, what you gotta realize about Marianne – and I’ve never told a soul round here, and I would bleedin’ hate for anybody—’

‘Not a word, boy,’ Gomer said. ‘Not a word from us.’

‘She got problems.’ Greg’s voice went down to a mutter. ‘Depression. Acute depression. Been in hospital for it. You know what I mean – psychiatric? This is back in London, when we was managing a pub in Fulham. She was getting... difficult to handle.’

Merrily said nothing.

‘Wiv men and... and that.’ Greg waved it away with an embarrassed shake of the head. ‘Ain’t a nympho or noffink like that. It was just the depression. We had a holiday once and she was fine. Said she was sure she’d be fine the whole time if we went to live somewhere nice, like in the country.’ He snorted. ‘Country ain’t cheap no more. Not for a long time.’

‘’Cept yere, mabbe,’ Gomer said.

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s a trap, Greg, boy.’

‘Tell me about it. I’ve had people in here – incomers, you can pick ’em out from the nervous laughter – still lookin’ for strawberries and cream on the village green and the blacksmith taptappin’ over his forge. Be funny if it wasn’t so bleedin’ tragic.’

‘That was you, was it?’ Merrily said softly. ‘When you first came here?’

‘Her – not me. I ain’t a romantic. I tried to tell her... yeah, all right, maybe I did fink it was gonna be different. I mean, there’s noffink wrong with the local people, most of ’em...’

‘I coulder tole you, boy,’ Gomer said. ‘You come to the wrong part o’ the valley. Folks back there...’ he waved a hand over his shoulder, back towards New Radnor. ‘They’re different again, see. Bit of air back there. Makes a difference.’

‘So your wife went to church again yesterday?’ Merrily prompted.

‘Yeah. Off again. Up the village hall. Couldn’t get out this place fast enough. I didn’t want this. Sure, I wanted her to make friends, but not this way. I said, come on, we ain’t churchgoers and it’d be hypocritical to start now.’

‘Without the hypocrites, all our congregations would be sadly depleted,’ Merrily admitted. ‘But she went anyway. And came back all aglow, right?’

Greg didn’t smile.

‘Made lots of new instant friends,’ Merrily said. ‘People she’d only nodded to in the village shop hugged her as she left. She realized she’d never felt quite so much at home in the community before.’

‘Dead on,’ Greg said sourly.

‘And she wants you to close the pub and go to church with her next week.’

‘Says it’s the only way we’re gonna have a future. And I don’t fink she meant the extra business. It won’t...’ He looked scared. ‘It won’t last, will it, Miss...?’

‘Merrily.’

‘It can’t last. Can it? She’s not a religious person. I mean... yeah, I coulda foreseen this, soon as people starting whispering about the new rector, what a wonderful geezer he was, how their lives was changed, how he’d... I dunno, helped them stop smoking, straightened out their kids, this kind of stuff. All this talk of the Holy Spirit, and people fainting in church. And Marianne kind of saying, “Makes you fink, don’t it? Never had no luck to speak of since we moved in. Wouldn’t do no harm, would it?” ’ Greg looked at Merrily’s collar. ‘Not your style, then, all this Holy Spirit shite?’

‘Not my style, exactly...’

Gomer said, ‘Don’t do any good to let your feet get too far off the ground, my experience.’

‘Why did they want you to close the pub today?’ Merrily asked.

‘Aaah.’ Shook his head contemptuously. ‘You seen the paper. He told ’em all yesterday this was coming off. Got bloody Devil-worshippers in the village and they gotta be prepared. Bleedin’ huge turnout. Standing room only up the hall, ’cording to Marianne, when I could get any sense out of her. People hanging out the doors, lining the bloody steps.’

‘This is local people or... newcomers?’

‘Mainly newcomers, I reckon. A few locals, though, no question. And apparently Ellis is going...’ Greg threw up his arms. ‘ “There’s a great evil come amongst us! We got to fight it. We are the chosen ones in the battle against Satan!” ’ Satan is this Robin Thorogood? All right, a Yank, a bit loud – in your face. But Satan? You credit that?’

‘You know him, then?’

He shrugged. ‘Americans. Talk to ’em for half an hour, you know ’em. His wife’s more down to earth. I didn’t know they was witches, though. They never talked about that. But why should they?’

‘You were going to tell us why you’d closed the pub.’

‘He don’t want any distractions. He wants concentration of faith.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Merrily said. ‘Why?’

‘Mondays he holds his healing sessions,’ Greg said. ‘Up the village hall.’

‘So?’

There was a lot of pain and bewilderment in his eyes.

‘I can help,’ Merrily said. ‘Just tell me.’

Greg breathed heavily down his nose. ‘Last night, she says to me, “I’m unclean.” Just like that – like out the Bible. “I’ve been tempted by Satan,” she says.’

‘En’t we all, boy?’ Gomer said.

‘By Thorogood. Suddenly, she’s being frank all the time. She’s telling me stuff I don’t wanna know. Like she was... tempted sexually by Robin Thorogood, agent of Satan. She was possessed by his “dark glamour”. She wanted to sh— sleep wiv him. She comes out wiv all this. To me.’

‘Wanted to sleep with him?’

‘Ah, noffink bleedin’ happened. I’m sure of that. He ain’t been here two minutes. Plus she’s ten years older than what he is, gotta be, and if you seen his wife... Nah, I doubt he even noticed Marianne. It’s just shite.’ Greg shook his head, gutted. ‘I’ll go get your coffee.’

‘Greg, hang on... “Possessed by his dark glamour”?’ This wasn’t his wife speaking, this was Ellis. ‘Did she actually use the word “possessed”?’

‘I reckon, yeah. To be honest, I couldn’t take no more. I was knackered out. I went to bed. This is totally stupid. This don’t happen in places like this. This is city madness, innit?’

‘And she’s up at the hall now?’

Merrily slid from her stool, picked up her scarf.

30 Handmaiden

OUT IN THE pub car park, she was ambushed.

‘Mrs Watkins – Martyn Kinsey, BBC Wales. I gather you’re speaking for the diocese today.’

‘Well, I am, but—’

‘We’d like to knock off a quick interview, if that’s OK.’

He’d probably recognized her from Livenight. She asked him if there was any chance of doing this stuff later. From where she stood she could see the top of the cross on the village hall, and it was lit up, and it hadn’t been lit before.

‘Actually’ – Kinsey was a plump, shrewd-eyed guy in his thirties – ‘if we don’t do it now, I suspect we could be overtaken by events. Nick Ellis is over there in the hall, having a meeting with some people. We’re expecting him to come out and announce plans for a march to St Michael’s Church, probably tonight.’

‘That’s what he’s doing in there, is it?’ The cross was lit up for a policy meeting? I don’t think so.

‘Isn’t that going to be too late for your programme?’

‘Oh sure – much too late. We might get a piece in the half nine slot, though that’ll be only about forty seconds. But I think it’s going to be a damp squib anyway, with no one there to protest at. The Thorogoods have been smart enough to vacate the premises.’

‘You’ve not been able to speak to them?’

Kinsey shook his head. ‘That’s why we’re going to have to make do – if you don’t mind me putting it like that – with people like you. Just tell us where the Church stands on this issue. A straightforward response. Won’t take more than a couple of minutes.’

Of course, it wasn’t straightforward. And, with the positioning and the repositioning and the cutaways and the noddies, it took most of twenty minutes. Kinsey asked her if the diocese was fully behind Ellis; Merrily said the diocese was concerned about the situation. So would she be joining in tonight’s protest? Not exactly; but she’d be going along as an observer.

‘So the diocese is actually sitting on the fence?’

Merrily said, ‘Personally, I don’t care too much for witch-hunts.’

‘So you think that’s literally what this is?’

‘I just wouldn’t like it to turn into one. The Reverend Ellis has a perfect right – well, it’s his job, in fact – to oppose whatever he considers evil, but—’

‘Do you think it’s evil?’

‘I haven’t met the Thorogoods. I wouldn’t, on face value, condemn paganism any more than I’d condemn Buddhism or Islam. But I would, like everyone else, be interested to find out what they’re proposing to do in Old Hindwell Church.’

‘You’d see that potentially as sacrilege?’

‘The significant point about Old Hindwell Church is that it’s no longer a functioning church. It’s been decommissioned.’

‘What about the graveyard, though? Wouldn’t relatives of dead people buried there—’

‘There never were all that many graves because the proximity of the brook caused occasional flooding. What graves there were are quite old, and only the stones now remain. Obviously, we’re concerned that those stones should not be tampered with.’

‘What about the way the village itself has reacted? All the candles in the windows... how do you feel about that?’

Merrily smiled. ‘I think they look very pretty.’

‘What do you think they’re saying?’

‘Well... lots of different things, probably. Why don’t you knock on a few doors and ask?’

Kinsey lowered his microphone, nodded to the cameraman. It was a wrap. ‘Out of interest, Martyn,’ Merrily said, ‘what did people have to say when you knocked on their doors?’

‘Sod all,’ said Kinsey. ‘Either they didn’t answer or they backed off or they politely informed us that Mr Ellis was doing the talking. And in some cases not so politely. Off the record, why is Ellis doing this? Why’s he going for these people – these so-called pagans?’

‘You tell me.’

‘I can’t. He’s not your usual evangelical, all praising God and bonhomie. He’s quiet, he chooses his words carefully. Also he gets on with the locals... which is unusual. They’re canny round here, not what you’d call impressionable. Anyway, not my problem. You going to be around, if we need anything else?’

‘For the duration,’ Merrily said.

‘Well, good luck.’

‘Thanks.’

She ran all the way to the village hall, meeting nobody on the way, bounding up the steps and praying she wasn’t too late, because if it was all over... well, hearsay evidence just wasn’t the same.

At the top, she stopped for breath – and to assess the man in the porch, obviously guarding the closed doors to the hall. Slumped on a folding chair like a sack of cement. He was an unsmiling, flat-capped bloke in his fifties. She didn’t recognize him.

He didn’t quite look at her. ‘’Ow’re you?’

‘I’m fine. OK if I just pop in?’

‘No press, thank you. Father Ellis will be out in a while.’

‘I’m not press.’

‘I still can’t let you in.’

Merrily unwound her scarf. He took in the collar, his watery eyes swivelling uncertainly.

‘You’re with Father Ellis?’

‘Every step of the way,’ Merrily said shamelessly.

He ushered her inside. ‘Be very quiet,’ he said sternly, and closed the doors silently behind her.

Suddenly she was in darkness.

She waited, close to the place where she’d stood at Menna’s funeral service, until her eyes adjusted enough to reassure her there was little chance of being spotted. Here, at the end of the hall, she stood alone.

All the window blinds had been pulled down tight, and it seemed to have a different layout, no longer a theatre-in-the-round. Whatever was happening was happening in a far corner, and all she could see of it was a white-gold aura, like over a Nativity scene, a distant holy grotto.

And all she could hear was a sobbing – hollow, slow and even.

Merrily slipped off her shoes, carried them to the shelter of a brick pillar about halfway down the hall. It was cold; no heating on.

She waited for about half a minute before peering carefully around the pillar.

The glow had resolved into two tiers of candles. The sobbing had softened into a whispery panting. Merrily could make out several people – seemed like women – some sitting or kneeling in a circle, the others standing behind them, all holding candles on small tin or pewter trays, like the ones in the windows of the village.

Women only? This was why the guy on the door had let her in without too much dispute.

The scene, with its unsteady glow and its umber shadows, had a dreamlike, period ambience: seventeenth or eighteenth century. You expected the women to be wearing starched Puritan collars.

‘In the name of the Father... and of the Son... and of the Holy Ghost...’

Ellis’s voice was low-level, with that transatlantic lubrication. User-friendly and surprisingly warm.

But only momentarily, for then he paused. Merrily saw him rise up, in his white monk’s robe, in the centre of the circle, the only man here. Next to him stood a slender table with a candle on it and a chalice and something else in shadow, probably a Bible.

His voice rose, too, became more distinct, the American element now clipped out.

‘O God, the Creator and Protector of the human race, Who hast formed man in Thine own image, look upon this Thy handmaiden who is grievously vexed with the wiles of an unclean spirit... whom the old adversary, the ancient enemy of the earth, encompasses with a horrible dread... and blinds the senses of her human understanding with stupor, confounds her with terror... and harasses her with trembling and fear.’

Merrily’s feet were cold; she bent and slipped on her shoes. She wouldn’t be getting any closer; from here she could see and hear all she needed. And she was fairly sure this was a modified version of the Roman Catholic ritual.

Ellis’s voice gathered a rolling energy. ‘Drive away, O Lord, the power of the Devil, take away his deceitful snares.’

At some signal, the women held their candles high, wafting out the rich and ancient aroma of melted wax.

With a glittering flourish, Ellis’s arm was thrust up amid the lights.

‘Behold the Cross of the Lord! Behold the Cross and flee, thou obscene spirits of the night!’

His voice dropped, became intense, sneering.

‘Most cunning serpent, you shall never again dare to deceive the human race and persecute the Holy Church. Cursed dragon, we give thee warning in the names of Jesus Christ and Michael, in the names of Jehovah, Adonai, Tetragrammaton...’

Merrily stiffened. What?

She leaned further out to watch Nick Ellis standing amongst all the women, brandishing his cross like a sword in the light, brandishing words which surely belonged originally to the Roman Church, to Jewish mysticism, to...

The candles lowered again, to reveal a single woman crouching.

More like cringing?

Ellis laid the cross on the tall table and bent down to the woman.

‘Do you embrace God?’ His voice had softened.

The woman looked up at him, like a pet dog.

‘You must embrace God,’ he explained, gently at first. ‘You must embrace God, embrace Him, embrace Him...’ His right arm was extended, palm raised, the loose sleeve of his robe falling back. ‘Embrace Him!’

Shadows leaping. A short expulsion of breath – ‘Hoh!’ – and a sound of stumbling.

Merrily saw he’d pushed the woman away; she lay half on her back, panting.

‘Say it!’ Ellis roared.

‘I... embrace Him.’

‘And do you renounce the evil elements of this world which corrupt those things God has created?’

‘Yes.’ She came awkwardly to her feet. She was wearing a white shift of some kind, possibly a nightdress. She must feel very cold.

‘Do you renounce all sick and sinful desires which draw you away from the love of God?’

She began to cry again. Her London accent said this had to be Greg Starkey’s wife, Marianne, the sometime sufferer from clinical depression, not a nympho in the normal sense, but tempted by the dark glamour of the witch Robin Thorogood. Was that it? Was that really the extent of her possession?

And, oh God, even if there was a whole lot more, this was not right, not by any stretch.

‘Say it!’

Her head went back. She started to sniff.

‘Say, “I so renounce them”!’

‘I s... so... renounce them.’

‘And do you, therefore, wish with all your heart to expel the lewd and maleficent spirit coiling like a foul serpent within you?’

Her head was thrown right back, as if she expected to be slapped, again and again.

‘I ask you once more...’ Softly. ‘Do you wish, with all your heart...?’

‘Yes!’

‘Then lie down,’ Father Ellis said.

What? Merrily moved away from the pillar. She could see now that Ellis was pointing at a hessian rug laid out on the boarded floor. Marianne drew an unsteady breath and went to stand on the rug. The watching women kept still. But she caught a movement from a darkened doorway, with a ‘Toilets’ sign over the top, and moved back behind her pillar.

There was a man in that doorway, she’d swear it.

Ellis said, ‘Don’t be afraid.’

He turned to the table and took up another cross from a white cloth. Merrily saw it clearly. About nine inches long, probably gold-plated. He held it up to the candlelight, then lowered it again. One of the women leaned forward, handed him something.

Involuntarily, Merrily moved closer. The woman held up her candle for Ellis. Merrily saw a yellow tube, then an inch of pale jelly was transferred to Ellis’s forefinger. She saw him smearing the jelly along the stem of the crucifix.

What?

Ellis nodded once. Marianne Starkey crumpled to her knees then went into an ungainly squat, holding the nightdress up around her thighs.

‘Be calm now,’ Ellis said. ‘Sit. Relax.’

The woman sat still. Ellis raised his eyes from her. ‘O God of martyrs, God of confessors, we lay ourselves before Thee...’ He glanced at Marianne, whispered, ‘Lie back.’

Merrily watched Marianne’s body subside onto the rough matting, her knees up, the nightdress slipping back. Ellis knelt in front of her.

‘I ask you again,’ he whispered. ‘Is it your heart’s wish that the unclean spirit might be expelled for ever?’

‘Yes.’

‘And do you understand that a foul spirit of this nature may effectively be purged only through the portal of its entry?’

‘Yes...’ Marianne hesitated then let her head fall back over the edge of the mat and onto the boarded floor with a dull thump. She closed her eyes. ‘Yes.’

Ellis began to pray, a long, rolling mumble, slowly becoming intelligible.

‘Let the impious tempter fly far hence! Let thy servant be defended by the sign...’ Ellis rose and put the cross swiftly on Marianne’s forehead. ‘... of Thy Name.’ He placed the cross against her breast. ‘Do Thou guard her inmost soul...’

Merrily thought, He won’t. He can’t. It isn’t possible, not with all these women here.

Ellis reared over Marianne. ‘Do Thou rule...’ Then he bent suddenly. ‘... her inmost parts.’

Marianne gave a low and throaty cry, then Ellis sprang up, kissing the cross, tossing it to the table, and it was over. And women were hugging Marianne.

And Merrily was frozen in horror and could no longer see a man in the doorway.

31 Jewel

THE CONVERGING LANES were filling up with vehicles – like last Saturday. When Ellis and the women – but not Marianne – came down the steps, they were joined by more people. By the time they all reached the road there were about thirty of them, with Ellis seeming to float in their midst, glowingly messianic in his white monk’s habit.

The sick bastard.

Merrily turned away, found her hands were clenched together. Shame. Fury. When she could stand to look again, she saw that someone was bearing a white wooden crucifix aloft, in front of Ellis. At the apex of the village hall roof, the neon cross became a beacon in the rain. Like it was all a crusade.

She didn’t recognize anyone in Ellis’s group, but why should she? She guessed they were not locals anyway. A couple of the men wore suits but most others were casually but warmly dressed, like members of a serious hiking club. Nobody was speaking. Shouldn’t they be singing some charismatic anthem, swaying, clapping?

Killing the shakes, Merrily walked erratically along the lane to the corner where a bunch of reporters stood under umbrellas and Gomer was waiting for her in the rain, an unlit ciggy drooping from his mouth.

‘Vicar... you all right, girl?’ Following her behind a Range Rover parked under some fir trees, he regarded her gravely. ‘You looks a bit pale.’

‘Don’t fuss, Gomer.’ Merrily dropped a cigarette in the process of trying to light it.

Gomer straightened his glasses.

‘Sorry.’ She touched his arm. ‘It’s me. I’m furious with me, that’s all.’

‘Happened in there, vicar?’

‘Exorcism – of sorts. I ought to have stopped it. I just’ – she thumped her thigh with a fist – ‘stood there... let it happen.’

‘Hexorcism?’ Gomer said, bewildered. ‘This’d be Greg’s missus?’

‘Must’ve been.’

‘The bugger hexorcized Greg’s missus for fancyin’ a feller?’

‘For embracing the dark,’ Merrily said, with unsuppressible venom. ‘For letting herself become possessed by most unholy and blasphemous lust.’

‘Load of ole wallop. You gonner tell Greg?’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘Boy oughter know,’ said Gomer, ‘whatever it was.’ He nodded towards a man getting into the Range Rover. ‘Dr Coll,’ he observed.

The cameramen were backing away down the street ahead of Ellis and his entourage. Dr Coll drove away in his Range Rover, leaving Merrily and Gomer exposed.

‘I can’t believe I let it happen,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe it was happening. I can’t tell Greg. You saw the state he was in. He’d go after Ellis with a baseball bat. That... bastard.’

Ellis walked without looking to either side. When a couple of the reporters tried to get a word with him, his anoraked minders pressed closer around him – the holy man. Merrily and Gomer walked well behind, Merrily turning things over and over.

Internal ministry, it had been called when the phenomenon had first been noted in the North of England. Mostly it was for supposed incidents of satanic child abuse – a number of allegations, but not much proven. It was a charismatic extreme, an evangelical madness: the warped and primitive conviction that demonic forces entered through bodily orifices and could only be expelled the same way.

It had all happened too quickly, clinically, like a doctor taking a cervical smear. The fact that it was also degrading, humiliating – and, as it happened, amounted to sexual assault – would not be an issue for someone who had convinced himself of it being a legitimate weapon in the war against Satan. Someone invoking the power of the Archangel Michael against a manufactured dragon.

When, in fact, he was the monster.

Got to stop him.

But if she spoke out there would be a dozen respectable women ready to say she was a liar with a chip on her shoulder; about a dozen women who had watched the ritual in silence. Then, afterwards, tears and hugs and ‘Praise God!’

‘Gomer... those women over there, who are they?’

Gomer identified Mrs Eleri Cobbold, the village sub-post-mistress, Mrs Smith whose cottage they’d passed, Linda Llewellyn who managed a riding stables towards Presteigne. The others he didn’t know. Mostly from Off, he reckoned.

Marianne wasn’t among them.

‘No back way out of the hall, is there?’

‘Yes, but not without comin’ down them steps, vicar, less you wants to squeeze through a fence and lose yourself in the forestry.’

So she was still up there. That made sense; they’d hardly want to bring her out looking like a road casualty, not with TV crews around.

Ellis had reached the car park of the Black Lion. He was evidently about to hold a press conference.

‘Gomer, could you kind of hang around and listen to what he says? I need to go back in there.’

All eyes were fixed on Ellis as Merrily walked inconspicuously back through the rain towards the steps.

Nobody on the door this time. Inside the hall, all the blinds were now raised, the chairs were spread out and a plain wooden lectern stood in the centre of the room. This time, one corner looked very much like another and only a vague smell of wax indicated that anything more contentious than an ad hoc meeting of the community council had taken place.

No, there was something else: the atmosphere you often caught in a church after a packed service – tiny shivers in the air like dust motes waiting to settle.

A black coat slung over one of the chairs suggested someone was still around, if only a cleaner. Presently, Merrily became aware of voices from beyond the door with the ‘Toilets’ sign above it – where that solitary man had stood. She crossed the hall, not caring about the sound of her shoes on the polished floorboards.

The door opened into an ante-room leading to separate women’s and men’s lavatories. It contained a sink and one of the chairs from the main room – Marianne sitting in it. A woman was bending over her with a moistened paper towel, patting her brow. Marianne didn’t react when the door swung shut behind Merrily, but the other woman looked up at once, clear blue eyes unblinking.

‘We can manage, thank you.’

The voice echoed off the tiles: cold white tiles, floor to ceiling, reminding Merrily of the stark bathroom at Ledwardine vicarage.

‘How is she?’

‘She’s much better, thank you. Had problems at home, haven’t you, my love?’

The woman wore jeans and a black and orange rugby shirt. She had a lean, wind-roughened face, bleakly handsome. A face which had long since become insensitive to slaps from the weather and the world. A face last seen lit by the lanterns in Menna’s mausoleum.

The woman dabbed at Marianne’s cheek, screwed up the paper towel and looked again at Merrily, in annoyance. ‘You want the lavatory, is it?’

‘No. I’d just like a word with Marianne – when you’ve finished.’ Merrily unwound her scarf. ‘Merrily Watkins. Hereford Diocese.’

‘Oh? Come to spy on Father Ellis, is it? We’re not stupid. We know what the diocese thinks of him.’

Marianne looked glassy-eyed. She didn’t care one way or the other.

‘And anyway,’ the woman said, ‘Mrs Starkey hasn’t been through anything she didn’t personally request. Father Ellis doesn’t do a soft ministry.’

‘Obviously not.’

‘Practical man who gets results. She’ll be fine, if people will let her alone. If you want to talk to anybody, you can talk to me. Judith Prosser, my name. Councillor Prosser’s wife. Come outside.’

She gave Marianne’s shoulder a squeeze then went and held open the door for Merrily, ushering her out and down the central aisle of the hall, past Ellis’s lectern. She picked up the black quilted coat from a chair back, and they went out through the main doors.

The rain had stopped. At the top of the steps, Judith Prosser didn’t turn to look at Merrily; she leaned on the metal railings and gazed over to the village centre, where Ellis and his entourage were assembling for the media.

‘And was it the diocese sent you to Menna’s funeral, too, Reverend Watkins?’

Above Old Hindwell, a hopeless sun was trying vainly to burn a hole in the clouds. Mist still filigreed the firs on Burfa Hill but the tower of the old church was clear to the north.

‘I didn’t think you’d recognized me,’ Merrily said.

‘Well, of course I recognized you.’

This was the intelligent woman who Gomer seemed to admire. Who did her husband’s thinking for him. Who could sit and watch another woman physically invaded in the name of God.

‘For what it’s worth, that was nothing at all to do with the diocese,’ Merrily told her. ‘I’d arranged to meet Barbara Buckingham at her sister’s funeral. You remember Barbara?’

Judith Prosser’s head turned slowly until her eyes locked on Merrily’s.

‘Had you now?’

‘She was referred to me by a nurse at Hereford Hospital, after her sister died there. I do... counselling work, in certain areas.’

‘Didn’t come to the funeral, though, did she?’

‘She’s disappeared,’ Merrily said. ‘She spent some days here and now she’s disappeared. The police are worried about her safety.’

‘Oh, her safety? An eyebrow arched under Judith’s stiff, short hair. ‘And what are we to assume they mean by that?’

‘We both know what they mean, Mrs Prosser.’

The sun had given up the struggle, was no more than a pale grey circle embossed on the cloud.

‘Poor Barbara,’ Judith said.

Merrily did some thinking. While she hadn’t come up here to discuss Barbara and Menna, as soon as the conversation had been diverted away from Ellis himself, Judith Prosser had become instantly more forthcoming.

‘Barbara told me you used to write to her.’

‘For many years. We were best friends for a time, as girls.’

‘So you know why she left home.’

‘Do you?’

‘I know it wasn’t a hydatid cyst.’

‘Ha. Good informants you must have. What else did they tell you?’

‘That you were looking out for Menna, and keeping Barbara informed. Menna was a source of... disquiet... for Barbara. Especially after their mother died.’

‘Ah.’ Judith Prosser nodded. ‘So that’s it.’ She leaned back with her elbows against the railings. ‘Well, let me assure you right now, Mrs... is it Mrs? Let me assure you emphatically that Mervyn Thomas never touched Menna. I know that, because I warned him myself what would happen to him if he ever did.’

‘But you’d have been just a kid... or not much more.’

‘This was not when Menna was a child. Good heavens, Merv was never a child-molester. He’d wait till they filled out. Ha! No, there was never anything for Barbara to worry about there. Nothing. She could go on living her rich, soft, English life without a qualm.’

‘Hasn’t she been to see you in the past week or so?’

Judith sniffed. ‘I heard she was around, pestering people – including you, it seems. Evidently she couldn’t face me.’

‘Wasn’t it you who told her about Menna’s stroke?’

‘I sent her a short note. Somebody had to.’

‘But not her husband.’

Mrs Prosser smiled and nodded. ‘Let me also tell you, Mrs Watkins, that Jeffery Weal was the best thing that could have happened to Menna. If you knew her – which Barbara, lest we forget, never really did – Menna was a wispy, flimsy little thing. Insubstantial, see, like a ghost. She—Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ Merrily swallowed. ‘I’m fine. Why was Mr Weal so good for her?’

‘If you knew her, you would know she would always need someone to direct her life. And while he was not the most demonstrative of men, he adored her. Kept her like a jewel.’

In a padded box, Merrily thought, in a private vault.

‘Anyway,’ Judith said, ‘I do hope the Diocese of Hereford is not going to interfere with Father Ellis. He suits this area very well. He meets our needs.’

‘Really? How many other people has he exorcized?’

Judith Prosser sighed in exasperation. ‘As far as local people are concerned, he’s giving back the church the authority it used to have. Time was when we had a village policeman and troublesome youngsters would get a clip around the ear. Now they have to go up before people like my husband, Councillor Prosser, and receive some paltry sentence – a conditional discharge, or a period of community service if they’re very bad. Time was when sinners would be dealt with by the Church, isn’t it? They weren’t so ready to reoffend then.’

‘The way Father Ellis deals with them?’

Judith smiled thinly. ‘The way God deals with them, he would say, isn’t it? Excuse me, I must go back and minister to Mrs Starkey.’

Halfway down the steps, Merrily encountered Gomer coming up. There were now a lot of things she needed to ask him. But, behind his glasses, Gomer’s eyes were luridly alive.

‘It’s on, vicar.’

‘The march?’

‘Oh hell, aye. Tonight. No stoppin’ the bugger now. Somebody been over to St Michael’s, and they reckons Thorogood’s back. En’t on his own, neither.’

Merrily felt dejected. All she wanted was to get home, do some hard thinking, ring the bishop to discuss the issue of internal ministry. She didn’t want to even have to look at Nicholas Ellis again tonight.

‘Bunch o’ cars and vans been arrivin’ at St Michael’s since ’bout half an hour ago. One of ’em had, like, a big badge on the back, ’cordin’ to Eleri Cobbold. Like a star in a circle?’

‘Pentagram,’ Merrily said dully.

‘Ar,’ said Gomer, ‘they figured it wasn’t the bloody RAC.’

‘How’s Ellis reacted?’

‘Oh, dead serious. Heavy, grim – for the cameras. Man called upon to do God’s holy work, kind o’ thing.’

‘Yeah, I can imagine. But underneath...’

‘Underneath – pardon me, vicar – like a dog with two dicks.’

‘I don’t need this,’ Merrily said.

32 Potion

BETTY LEFT MRS Pottinger’s lodge in weak sunshine, wanting nothing more than to collapse in front of that cranky farmhouse stove and pour it all out to Robin.

Except that Robin would go insane.

She called for a quick salad at a supermarket cafe on the outskirts of Leominster. By the time she reached the Welsh border, it was approaching an early dusk and raining and, in her mind, she was back in the shop with Mrs Cobbold and the slender man with the pointed beard.

Oh, good morning, Doctor.

A sharp day, Eleri.

Dr Coll.

She needed to tell somebody about Dr Coll and the Hindwell Trust. She wished it could be Robin. Wished she could trust him not to go shooting his mouth off and have them facing legal action on top of everything else.

The Hindwell Trust, Juliet Pottinger had explained, was a local charity originally started to assist local youngsters from hard-pressed farming families to go on to higher education. To become – for instance – doctors and lawyers, so that they might return and serve the local community.

A local people’s charity.

Juliet Pottinger had come to Old Hindwell because of her husband’s job. Stanley had been much older, an archaeologist with the Clwyd-Powys Trust, who had continued to work part-time after his official retirement. He was, in fact, one of the first people to suspect that the Radnor Basin had a prehistory as significant as anywhere in Wales. His part-time job became a full-time obsession. He was overworking. He collapsed.

‘Dr Collard Banks-Morgan was like a small, bearded, ministering angel,’ Mrs Pottinger had said wryly. ‘Whisked poor Stanley into the cottage hospital. Those were the days when anyone could occupy a bed for virtually as long as they wished. Stanley practically had to discharge himself in the end, to get back to his beloved excavation.’

And while Stanley was trowelling away at his favoured site, a round barrow at Harpton, Dr Coll paid Mrs P. a discreet visit. He informed her, in absolute confidence, that he was more than a little worried about Stanley’s heart; that Stanley, not to dress up the situation, had just had a very lucky escape, and he could one day very easily push the enfeebled organ... just a little too far.

‘Oh, don’t tell him that. Good heavens, don’t have him carrying it around like an unexploded bomb!’ said Dr Coll jovially. ‘I shall keep tabs on him, myself.’ Chuckling, he added, ‘I believe I’m developing a latent interest in prehistory!’

Dr Coll had been discretion itself, popping in for a regular chat – perhaps to ask Stanley the possible significance of some mound he could see from his surgery window or bring him photocopies of articles on Victorian excavations from the Radnorshire Transactions. And all the time, as he told Juliet with a wink, he was observing Stanley’s colour, his breathing, his general demeanour. Keeping tabs.

She thought the man’s style was wonderful: perfect preventative medicine. How different from the city, where a GP could barely spare one the time of day.

And Betty was rehearing Lizzie Wilshire: Dr Coll’s been marvellous... such a caring, caring man.

Juliet Pottinger had said as much, without spelling anything out, to their most solicitous solicitor, Mr Weal, who was handling their purchase of a small strip of land – ‘for a quite ludicrous amount’ – from the Prosser brothers. How could she possibly repay Dr Coll’s kindness?

Oh, well, said Mr Weal, when pressed, there was a certain local charity, to which Dr Coll was particularly attached. Oh, nothing now, he wouldn’t want that, he’d be most embarrassed. But something to bear in mind for the future perhaps? And please don’t tell Dr Coll that he’d mentioned this – he would hate to alienate a client.

It was two years later, while they were on holiday in Scotland – a particularly hot summer – that Stanley, exhibiting symptoms of what might be sunstroke or something worse, was whisked off by his anxious wife to a local hospital. Where two doctors were unable to detect a heart problem of any kind.

‘Stanley died three and a half years ago of what, in the days before everything had to be explained, would have been simply termed old age,’ said Mrs Pottinger.

‘And did you ever take this misdiagnosis up with Dr Coll?’ Betty was imagining Juliet waking up in the night listening for his breathing, monitoring his diet, being nervous whenever he was driving. It must have been awfully worrying.

‘I took the coward’s way out, and persuaded Stanley to move somewhere else, a bit more convenient. I said I was finding the village too claustrophobic, which was true. By then I’d discovered that Dr Coll had... well, appeared to have created a... dependency among several of his patients, and all of them, as it happened, incomers to the area. People who might be feeling a little isolated there, and would be overjoyed to find such a friendly and concerned local GP.’

‘Making up illnesses for them, too?’

‘I don’t know. People don’t like to talk about certain things. People are only too happy to praise their local doctor, to boast about what a good and caring GP they have. Perhaps ours was an isolated case. Certainly, some of them did die quite soon. One rather lonely elderly couple, childless and reclusive, died’ – her voice faded – ‘within only months of each other.’

‘And did they by any chance leave money,’ Betty asked her, ‘to this...?’

‘The Hindwell Trust. Yes, I rather believe there was a substantial bequest.’

‘Did you never say anything?’

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Mrs Pottinger snapped. ‘Was I supposed to go to the police? I’d have been a laughing stock. I believe Dr Coll even helped out as a police surgeon for some years. Yes, I did, when we were about to leave the village, suggest to the Connellys, who’d bought a rather rundown smallholding... but... No, it was a waste of time. Dr Coll is a very popular man: he has five children, he hosts garden parties at his lovely home on the Evenjobb road. Even now, I don’t necessarily believe—’

‘What about the solicitor?’

‘Oh, Mr Weal and Dr Coll go right back. Fellow pupils at the Old Hindwell Primary School. In fact, Mr Weal administers the Hindwell Trust – and its trustees include Councillor Gareth Prosser. You see?’

I see. Oh yes, I do see.

Such a caring, caring man.

Driving out of the hamlet of Kinnerton, Betty felt a rising panic, an inability to cope with this news on her own. The Radnor Valley was all around her, a green enigma. Abruptly, she turned into a lane which she already knew of because it led to the Four Stones.

She stopped the car on the edge of a field beyond Hindwell Farm – Hindwell, not Old Hindwell. Different somehow – placid and open and almost lush in summer. She could see the stones through the hedge. She loved this place, this little circle. She and Robin must have been here ten or fifteen times already. It was still raining, but she got out of the car and climbed eagerly over the gate. It felt like coming home.

The Four Stones were close to the hedge, not high but plump and rounded. Betty went down on her knees and put her arms around one and looked across the open countryside to the jagged middle-distant hillside where stood the sentinel church of Old Radnor. She hugged the stone, surrendering to the energies of the prehistoric landscape.

This was the religion – and the Radnorshire – that she understood.

The rain intensified, beating down on her out of a blackening sky. Betty didn’t care; she wished the rain would wash her into the stone. When she stood up, she was pretty well soaked, but she felt better, stronger.

And angry. Bitterly angry at the corruption of this old and sacred place. Angry at the bloody local people, the level to which they appeared to have degenerated.

She drove to the end of the lane and, instead of turning left towards Walton and Old Hindwell, headed right, towards New Radnor, against the rain.

Even if the woman’s bungalow was strewn with copies of the Daily Mail, she would charm Lizzie Wilshire around to her side. She would ask her directly if the Hindwell Trust was mentioned in her will.

‘Above all,’ Max said, pouring himself a glass of red wine, ‘we can challenge them intellectually.’

Max had this big, wildman beard. You could’ve lost him at a ZZ Top convention. But any suggestion of menace vanished as soon as he spoke, for Max had a voice like a one-note flute. He was a lecturer someplace; he liked to lecture.

‘St Michael equates with the Irish god Mannon, of the Tuatha de Danaan. Mannon was the sea god, and also the mediator between the gods and humankind and the conductor of souls into the Otherworld. In Coptic and cabbalistic texts, you will find these roles also attributed to Michael. Therefore, every “Saint” Michael church is, regardless of its origins, in essence a pagan Celtic temple. Which is why this reconsecration is absolutely valid.’

Normally, even coming from Max, Robin would have found this amazing, total cosmic vindication. Right now he really couldn’t give a shit.

Because it was close to dark now, and still Betty had not returned, had not even called.

He walked tensely around the beamed living room, which they had taken over, stationing candles in the four corners, feeding gathered twigs to a feeble fire they’d gotten going in the inglenook where the witch-charm box had been stored. When George and Vivvie had come down, the first weekend, Betty had stopped them establishing a temple in this room. But now, in her absence, they’d gone right ahead.

Altar to the north – some asshole had cleared one of the trestle tables in Robin’s studio and hauled it through. Now it held the candle, pentacle, chalice, wand, scourge, bell, sword.

There had to be a power base, George said. There would be negative stuff coming at them now from all over the country. It was about protection, George explained, and Betty would understand that.

If she was here. She’d never been away this long before, without at least calling him. Robin imagined the cops arriving, solemn and sympathetic and heavy with awful news of a fatal car crash in torrential rain.

Never, for Robin, had a consecration meant less. Never had a temple seemed so bereft of holiness or atmosphere of any kind.

‘She’ll be back, Robin.’ A plump middle-aged lady called Alexandra had picked up on his anxiety. She’d been Betty’s college tutor, way back, had been present at their handfasting. Her big face was mellow and kind by candlelight. ‘If anything had happened to her, one of us would surely know.’

‘Sure,’ Robin said.

‘I just hope she’ll be happy we’ve come.’

‘Yeah,’ Robin said hoarsely. See, if she’d only called, he’d have been able to prepare her for this. He knew he should have held them off until he’d consulted with her. But when George had come through on the mobile, Robin had been already majorly stressed out, beleaguered, and it hadn’t immediately occurred to him that they would have to accommodate a number of these people in the farmhouse, with sleeping bags being unrolled in the kitchen, and more upstairs.

And kids, too. Max and Bella’s kids: two daughters and a nine-year-old son called Hermes – Robin had already caught the little creep messing with his airbrushes. At least they weren’t gonna sleep in the house; the whole family were now camped in the big Winnebago out back. It had a pentagram in the rear window, the same place Christians these days liked to display a fish symbol.

Robin went over to the window again, looking out vainly for small headlights.

Sometimes suspicion pierced his anxiety. He wondered if this whole thing had been in some way planned. While George was into practicalities like dowsing and scrying, Vivvie was essentially political. For her, Robin sometimes thought, paganism might just as easily have been Marxism. And it was Vivvie who had accidentally, in the heat of the moment, let it out on TV. He never had entirely trusted Vivvie.

And now they were looking at a serious showdown with some seriously fanatical fundamentalist Christians. Two of the Wiccans, Jonathan and Rosa, had been down to the village to take a look, and had seen a gathering of people around a man in white. Ellis? This confrontation, Max said, must not be allowed to get in the way of the great festival of light. But George had grinned. George loved trouble.

‘What is terrific about this,’ Max piped, waving his wineglass, ‘is that only two deities were directly filched from the Old Faith by Christianity. One was Michael, the other was the triple-goddess, Brigid, who became associated with Saint Brigid, the Abbess of Kildare – who was, in all probability, herself a pagan worshipping in an oak grove. So, as we know, Imbolc is the feast of Brigid, Christianized as Candlemas – the feast of Saint Brigid...’

Max beamed through his beard in the candlelight. There was no particular need for him to go on; they all knew this stuff, but Max was Max and already a little smashed.

‘Therefore... it is absolutely fitting that this church should be reconsecrated on that sacred eve, in the names of both Mannon and Brigid, with a fire festival, which will burn away...’

Jesus. Robin stared out of the window into the uninterrupted night. He wondered if Betty, once away from here, had decided never to come back.

There was a green Range Rover parked in front of Lizzie Wilshire’s bungalow, so Betty had to leave the car further down the lane, under the outer ramparts of the New Radnor castle mound, and run through the rain. It didn’t matter now; this was the same rain that was still falling on the Four Stones.

When she reached the Range Rover, the clear, rectangular sign propped in its windscreen made her stop. Made her turn and walk quickly back to her car.

The sign said, DOCTOR ON CALL.

She had to think. Was this a sign that she was supposed to go in there, tackle Dr Coll face to face?

Betty sat in the driving seat, thankful for the streaming rain obscuring the windscreen and her face from any passers-by.

She went over it all again in her head. Dr Coll, who was here. Mr Weal, the solicitor whose home was not so far from St Michael’s Farm and whose wife had recently died.

So how did Mr Weal become your solicitor?

He’s simply there. He becomes everyone’s solicitor sooner or later. He’s reliable, it’s an old family firm, and his charges are modest. He draw up wills virtually free of charge.

I bet he does.

I don’t suppose any of this will affect you at all. You’re too young: you’ll see both of them out. It probably wouldn’t have affected Major Wilshire, either. He was ex-regiment, a fit man with all his wits about him.

Lizzie Wilshire: Bryan had a thing about the medical profession, refused to call a doctor unless in dire emergency. A great believer in natural medicine, was Bryan.

All his wits about him.

... it was, unfortunately, entirely in character for Bryan to attempt such a job alone. He thought he was invulnerable.

A light tapping on the rain-streaming side window made Betty jump in her seat. She was nervous again, and the nerves had brought back the uncertainty. She could be getting completely carried away about this. She hurriedly wound down the window.

‘Mrs Thorogood?’

Betty was unable to suppress a gasp.

Raindrops glistened in the neat, pointed beard under his rugged, dependable face.

‘I’m sure Mrs Wilshire wouldn’t want you hanging around out here in the rain. Why don’t you come into the house?’

‘I didn’t want to intrude,’ Betty said. ‘I was going to wait till you’d gone.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Dr Collard Banks-Morgan. ‘As much as anything, I’d very much like to talk to you about the herbal medicine you so generously prepared for Mrs Wilshire.’

He held open the car door for her. He was wearing the same light-coloured tweed suit, a mustard-coloured tie. On his head was a tweed hat with fishing flies in it. He had an umbrella which he put up and held over her, guiding her briskly past his green Range Rover and up the path to the bungalow.

For a moment, it was almost like an out-of-body experience – she’d experienced that twice, knew the sensations – and she was watching herself and Dr Coll entering the porch together. As though this was the natural conclusion to a sequence of events she’d set in motion when she’d decided she had to leave Robin at the mercy of the media and seek out Juliet Pottinger.

She was now being led into a confrontation with Collard Banks-Morgan, in the presence of Mrs Wilshire. Bright panic flared, she was not ready! She didn’t know enough!

But something evidently had taken over: fate, or something. Perhaps she was about to be given the proof she needed.

Betty could hardly breathe.

‘Won’t be a jiff.’ Dr Coll stood in the doorway, shaking out his umbrella. ‘Go through if you like. Mrs Wilshire’s in the sitting room, as usual.’

Betty nodded and went through. Though it was not yet three o’clock, the weather had made the room dark and gloomy, so that the usually feeble-looking flames in the bronze-enamelled oil stove were brazier-bright, making shadows rise around Mrs Wilshire, in her usual chair facing the fireplace. She didn’t turn when Betty came in.

‘I’m sorry about this, Mrs Wilshire,’ Betty said. ‘I wasn’t going to come over until the doctor had left.’

Mrs Wilshire still didn’t turn round.

The shadows leapt.

The force of her own indrawn breath flung Betty back into the doorway.

‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’

Not, Oh, Mother! which she only said, still self-consciously, at times of minor crisis.

Her hand went to her mouth. ‘Oh no...’

There was a small click and wall lights came on, cold and milky blue.

‘Go and look at her, if you like,’ said Dr Coll. ‘I think you ought to.’

He walked over to the fireplace, stood with an elbow resting on the mantelpiece.

‘You aren’t afraid of death, are you, Mrs Thorogood? Just a preliminary to rebirth, isn’t that what you people believe?’

Betty found she was trembling. ‘What happened to her?’

Dr Coll raised an ironic eyebrow. ‘Among other things, it seems you happened to her.’

Betty edged around the sofa, keeping some distance between her and the doctor. When she reached the window, a movement outside made her look out. Another car had parked next to the Range Rover. A policeman and a policewoman were coming up the path.

Betty spun and saw Lizzie Wilshire, rigid and slightly twisted in her chair with a little froth around her bluing lips and her bulbous eyes popped fully open, as if they were lidless.

Dr Coll stepped away from the fireplace. He was holding up a round, brown bottle with a half-inch of liquid in the bottom.

‘Is this your herbal potion, Mrs Thorogood?’

33 The Adversary

FROM OFF, THEY were, nearly all of them, Gomer reckoned. He’d told Merrily he could never imagine too many local people sticking their heads above the hedge, and he was right. There were maybe fifty of them – not an enormous turnout under the circumstances – and the ones Merrily could hear all had English accents.

Two TV crews had stayed for this; they were pushing microphones at the marchers as they came to the end of the pavement, a line of lamps, moving on into the lane past Annie Smith’s place, bound for the Prosser farm and St Michael’s. Telly questions coming at them, to get them all fired up.

‘But what are you really hoping to achieve here?’

‘Do you actually believe two self-styled white witches can in some way curse the whole community?’

‘Don’t people have the right, in the eyes of the law, to worship whatever they want to?’

And the answers came back, in Brummy, in Northern, in cockney London and posh London.

‘This is not about the law. Read your Bible. In the eyes of God they are profane.’

‘Why are there as many as five churches around the Radnor Forest dedicated to St Michael, who was sent to fight Satan?’ A woman in a bright yellow waterproof holding up five fingers for the camera.

There was a central group of hardcore Bible freaks. This was probably the first demonstration most of them had ever joined, Merrily thought. For quite a number, it was probably the first time they’d actually been closely involved with a church. It was the isolation factor: the need to belong which they never realized they’d experience until they moved to the wild hills. And the fact that Nicholas Ellis was a quietly spoken, educated kind of fanatic.

‘It’s true to say,’ a sprightly, elderly woman told ITV Wales, ‘that until I attended one of Father Ellis’s services I did not truly believe in God as a supernatural being. I did not have faith, just a kind of wishy-washy wishful thinking. Now I have more than faith, I have belief. I exult in it. I exult. I love God and I hate and despise the Adversary.’

For a moment, Merrily was grabbed by a sense of uncertainty that recalled her first experience of tongues in that marquee near Warwick. Whatever you thought about Ellis, he’d brought all these people to God.

Then she thought about his slim, metal crucifix.

Ellis himself was answering no questions tonight; gliding along, half in some other world, no expression on his unlined, shiny face. Self-belief was a great preserving agent.

Hanging back from the march, Merrily rang to check on Jane, walking slowly with the phone.

‘It was on the radio,’ the kid said. ‘That Buckingham woman’s probably dead, isn’t she?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘But if she is, you don’t think she topped herself, do you?’

‘That’s something the police get to decide, flower.’

Jane made a contemptuous noise. ‘The police won’t do a thing. They don’t have the resources. The only reason this area has the lowest level of crime in southern Britain is because half the crimes don’t even get discovered, everybody knows that.’

‘So cynical, so young.’

‘I read the story in the Mail. Totally predictable right-wing stitch-up.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Yeah. Mum... Listen, the truth, OK? Have you spoken to Irene since we were in Worcester? Like, him telling you all about me conning him into taking me to Livenight by saying you knew all about us going and it would help his career. And then – like, in his role as a Welsh Chapel fundamentalist bigot – asking if you knew how seriously interested I was in alternative spirituality, and maybe that what I secretly wanted was to get to know some of those people – the pagans – and then you both agreeing that this was probably a spiteful teenage reaction against having a mother who was a priestess and into Christianity at the sexy end.’

The kid ran out of breath.

Merrily said, ‘Was this before or after Eirion said to me, “Oh God, I’m so sorry, this is all my fault, what if she’s got brain damage?” And I said, “No, it’s all my fault, I should never have agreed to do the bloody stupid programme”? Was it after that?’

Jane said nothing.

‘Look,’ Merrily said, ‘after the initial blinding shock of seeing you in the middle of the motorway, it didn’t take a lot of creative mental energy to form what looked like a complete picture of how you and Eirion came to be in the neighbourhood of Birmingham anyway. Complete enough to satisfy me, anyway, without any kind of tedious, acrimonious inquest. I mean, you know, call me smug, call me self-deluded, but the fact is – when you really look at it – I’m actually not that much older than you, flower.’

Silence.

‘Shit,’ Jane said at last. ‘OK, I’m sorry.’

‘I know.’

‘Er, might that have been the Long Talk, by any chance?’

‘I think it might.’

‘Phew. What time will you be back?’

‘Hard to say.’

‘Only, that nurse phoned.’

‘Eileen?’

‘Said whatever time you get back, could you ring her? She sounded weird.’

‘Weird how?’

‘Just not the usual “Don’t piss me about or I’ll take your bedpan back” voice. Kind of hesitant, unsure of herself.’

‘I’ll call her.’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said. ‘Somehow, I would if I were you.’

When the procession reached the Prosser farm, Merrily saw two people emerge discreetly from a gate and join it without a word: Judith Prosser and a bulky, slab-faced man.

‘That’s Councillor Prosser, Gomer?’

‘Impressive, en’t he? Wait till you hears him talk. Gives whole new meanin’ to the word orat’ry.’

‘Not that you don’t rate him or anything.’

‘Prince among men,’ said Gomer.

By the time the march reached the track to St Michael’s Farm, a police car was crawling behind. That figured: even good Christians these days had short fuses. They walked slowly on.

‘That reminded me,’ Gomer said. ‘Learned some’ing about the Prossers and this Ellis ’fore I left the Lion. Greg yeard it. One o’ the boys – Stephen? – got pulled over in a nicked car in Kington. Joyridin’, ’e was. ’Bout a year ago, this’d be. Woulder looked real bad for a magistrate’s boy.’

‘It happens.’

‘Not yere it don’t. First offence, mind, so Gareth talks to Big Weal, an’ they fixes it with the cops. Gareth an’ Judy promises the boy won’t put a foot out o’ line again. Just to make sure of it, they takes him to the Reverend Ellis, gets him hexorcized...’

Merrily stopped in the road. ‘I’m not hearing this.’

The mobile bleeped in her pocket. She pulled it out, hearing Judith Prosser’s words: Time was when sinners would be dealt with by the Church, isn’t it?

‘Merrily?’

‘Sophie!’ She hurried back along the lane to a quieter spot.

‘Is this convenient? I tracked down a Canon Tommy Long, formerly the priest in charge of St Michael’s, Cascob. He was more than glad to discuss something which he said had been puzzling him for many years. Shall I go on?’

‘Please.’

‘Seems that, in the late summer of nineteen seventy-five, he had a visit from the Reverend Mr Penney. A very odd young man, he said – long-haired, beatnik-type, and most irrational on this occasion – who suggested that, as Cascob was a remote place with no prospect of anything other than a slow and painful decline in its congregation, the Reverend Long might wish to seek its decommissioning by his diocese.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Once he realized this was far from a joke, the Reverend Long asked Mr Penney to explain himself. Mr Penney came out with what was described to me as a lot of nonsensical gobbledegook relating to the layout of churches around Radnor Forest.’

‘St Michael churches?’

‘In an effort to deflect it, the Reverend Tommy Long pointed out a folk tale implying that if one of the churches were destroyed it would allow the, ah, dragon to escape. Mr Penney said this was... quite the reverse.’

‘Why?’

‘Mr Long wasn’t prepared, at the time, to hear him out and now rather wishes he had.’

‘What happened then?’

‘Nothing. Mr Long pointed out that the Church in Wales would hardly be likely to part with a building as historic and picturesque as Cascob, especially as it contains a memorial to William Jenkins Rees, who helped to revive the Welsh language in the nineteenth century. The Reverend Mr Penney went somewhat sullenly away and, some months later, committed his bizarre assault on St Michael’s Old Hindwell.’

‘When he went away, where did he go? Does Mr Long know?’

‘There’s no happy ending here, Merrily. Mr Long says he was told some years later that Terry Penney died in a hostel for the homeless in Edinburgh or Glasgow, he isn’t sure which. The poor man had been a heroin addict for some time. I think I shall go home now, Merrily.’

Robin spotted some lights, but they were the wrong lights.

He saw them through the naked trees, through the bald hedgerow further along from the barn. They were not headlights.

George came to stand alongside him at the window.

‘What do you want to do, Robin? Shall we all go out and have a few words with them – in a civilized fashion?’

Vivvie dumped her glass of red wine and came over, excited. ‘Is it them?’ She had on a long red velvet dress, kind of Tudor-looking, and she wore those seahorse earrings that Robin hated. The bitch was ready to appear on TV again. ‘What I suggest is we—’

‘What I suggest,’ Robin said loudly, ‘is we don’t do a god-damn thing. This is still my house... mine and... Betty’s.’

The whole room had gone quiet, except for the damp twigs crackling in the hearth.

‘I’m gonna go talk to them,’ Robin said.

George smiled, shaking his head. ‘You’re not the man for this, Robin. You tend to speak before you’ve thought it out, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘I do mind, George. I mind like hell...’

‘And you’re tired,’ Alexandra said kindly. ‘You’re tired and you’re upset.’

‘Yeah, well, damn freaking right I’m upset. I’ve been accused by that bastard of being a manifestation of insidious evil. How upset would you feel?’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

Robin backed up against the window, gripping the ledge behind him with both hands. ‘So, I’m gonna go out there on my own.’

‘That’s really not wise,’ Vivvie said, appealing to the coven at large.

Max cleared his throat. ‘What I would suggest—’

‘Don’t you...’ Robin threw himself into the room. ‘Don’t any of you tell me what’s wise. And you...’ He levelled a shaking finger at Vivvie. ‘If it hadn’t been for you and your goddamn big mouth—’

‘Robin...’ George took his arm, Robin shook him off.

Vivvie said, ‘Robin, I’ll thank you not to use the expression God-damned...’

‘Shut the fuck up!’

Robin saw that it had begun to rain again. He saw the lights curling into rivulets on the window.

He took off his sweater.

The gate to St Michael’s Farm was shut.

Through the bare trees you could see lights in the house, you could see the black hulk of what seemed to be a barn. But you could not see the church. The itinerant congregation formed a semicircle around Nicholas Ellis at the gate. The two men with garden torches stood either side of the gate.

A white wooden cross was raised – five or six feet long, like the one in the bungalow garden on the road from Walton.

Merrily felt an isolated plop of rain. Umbrellas went up: bright, striped golf umbrellas. A cameraman went down on one knee on a patch of grass, as if he’d found God, but it was only to find a low angle, to make Ellis look more like an Old Testament prophet.

Disgracefully, Ellis responded to it. A kind of shiver seemed to go through him, like invisible lightning, and his wide lips went back in a taut grimace.

‘My friends, can you feel the evil? Can you feel the evil here in this place?’ And then he was crying to the night sky. ‘Oh Lord God, we pray for your help in eradicating this disease. You who sent Your most glorious warrior, Michael, to contain the dragon, the Adversary, the Old Enemy. Oh Lord, now that this infernal evil has once again returned, we pray that You will help us drive out these worshippers of the sun and the moon and the horned gods of darkness. Oh Lord, help us, we pray, help us!’

And the chant was taken up. ‘Help us! Help us, Lord!’ Faces were turned up to the rain.

Merrily winced.

Ellis cried, ‘... You who send Your blessed rain to wash away sin, let it penetrate and cleanse this bitter earth, this soured soil. Oh Lord, wash this place clean of Satan’s stain!’

His voice rode the slanting rain, his hair pasted to his forehead, the hissing torchlight reflected in his eyes. Until I attended one of Father Ellis’s services I did not truly believe in God as a supernatural being.

Now Ellis was spinning round in the mud, his white robe aswirl, and putting his weight against the gate and bellowing, ‘Come out! Come out, you snivelling servants of the Adversary. Come out and face the sorrow and the wrath of the one true God.’

‘Fuck’s sake, Nick...’

Ellis sprang back.

The weary, American voice came from the other side of the gate. The TV camera lights found a slightly built young guy with long, shaggy hair. He wore a plain T-shirt as white as Ellis’s robe, but a good deal less suited to the time of year. He was just standing there, arms by his side, getting soaked. When he spoke, the tremor in his voice indicated not so much that he was afraid but that he was freezing.

‘Nick, we don’t need this shit, OK? We never touched your lousy church. There’s no dragon here, no Satan. So just... just, like, go back and tell your God we won’t hold you or your crazy stuff against him.’

The man with the cross stood alongside Ellis, like a sentinel. One of the garden torches fizzed, flared and went out. There was a gasp from the crowd, as though the flame had been a casualty of demonic breath. To charismatics, everything was a sign. Merrily moved in close to the gate. She needed to hear this.

Ellis put on a grim smile for the cameras. ‘Let us in, then, Robin. Open the gate of your own free will and let us – and Almighty God – be readmitted to the church of St Michael.’

He waited, his white habit aglow. ‘Praise God!’ a man’s voice cried.

Robin Thorogood didn’t move. ‘I don’t think so, Nick.’

He was watching Ellis through the driving rain – and fighting just to keep his eyes open. To Merrily, he looked bewildered, as if he was struggling to comprehend the motivation of this man who was now his enemy on a level he’d never before experienced. He finally hugged himself, bare-armed, his T-shirt soaked, grey and wrinkled, into his chest. Then, defiantly, he let his arms fall back to his sides, still staring at Nick Ellis, who was now addressing him sorrowfully and reasonably in a low voice which the TV people might not pick up through the splashing of the rain.

‘Robin, you know that we cannot allow this to go on. Whether you understand it or not – and I believe you fully understand it – if you and your kind proceed to worship your profane, heathen deities in a temple once consecrated in His holy name, you commit an act of gross sacrilege. You thereby commend this church into the arms of Satan himself. And you curse the community into which you and your wife were innocently welcomed.’

‘No.’ Robin Thorogood shook his sodden hair. ‘That is bullshit.’

‘Robin, if you don’t recognize it, I can’t help you.’

The big cross was shaking in the air. One of the men screamed out, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!’

Merrily tensed, expecting an invasion – when something struck Ellis in the chest.

34 Kali

JANE AGONIZED FOR a while, cuddling Ethel the cat, and then rang Eirion at what she always pictured as a grim, greystone mansion beyond Abergavenny. The line was engaged.

She went back to the sitting room, still holding the cat, and replayed the tape she had recorded of the Old Hindwell story on the TV news.

There was a shot of the church from across a river. The male voice-over commented, ‘The last religious service at Old Hindwell Parish Church took place more than thirty years ago. Tomorrow night, however, this church could be back in business.’

Cut to a shot of a dreary-looking street, backing onto hills and forestry.

‘But the people of this remote village close to the border of England and Wales are far from happy. Because at tomorrow night’s service, the ancient walls will echo to a different liturgy.’

Ancient black and white footage of naked witches around a fire, chanting, ‘Eko, eko, azarak...’

‘And to one local minister, this is the sound of Satan.’

Talking head (Eirion had taught her the jargon) of a really ordinary-looking priest, except that he was wearing a monk’s habit. The caption read: ‘Father Nicholas Ellis, Rector’.

This Nicholas Ellis then came out with all this bullshit about there being no such thing as white witchcraft. His voice was overlaid with pictures of candles burning in people’s windows – seriously weird – and then they cut back to Ellis saying, ‘It’s out of our hands. It’s in God’s hands now. We shall do whatever he wants of us.’

Over shots of their farmhouse, the reporter said that Robin and Betty – Betty, Jesus, whoever heard of a witch called Betty? – were in hiding today, but ‘a member of their coven’ had confirmed that the witches’ sabbath would definitely be going ahead tomorrow at the church, to celebrate the coming of the Celtic spring.

‘The Diocese of Hereford says it broadly supports Father Ellis, but seems to be distancing itself from any extreme measures.’

Then up came Mum: ‘Personally, I don’t care too much for witch-hunts.’

On the whole, Jane felt deeply relieved.

She called Eirion again. This time it rang, and she prepared to crawl.

Eirion’s stepmother, Gwennan, answered – a voice to match the house, or maybe it just sounded that way because she answered in Welsh. Jane almost expected her to hang up in disgust when she found it was someone who could only speak English, but the woman was actually quite pleasant in the end.

‘He’s in his room, on the Internet. Seventeen years old and still playing with the Internet, how sad is that? Hold on, I’ll get him.’

‘OK. I’m sorry,’ Jane said when he came on. ‘I am so totally sorry. Everything I said... I’m brain-damaged. I make wrong connections. I don’t deserve to live.’

‘I agree, but forget that. Listen...’

‘Charming.’

‘Are you online yet?’

‘No, I keep telling you. Mum’s got the Internet at the office in Hereford. If there’s anything I need, I look it up there. Too much surfing damages your—’

‘I was going to give you a Web site to visit.’ Eirion sounded different, preoccupied, like something was really getting to him. ‘I’d like you to see it for yourself, then you’ll know I’m not making it up.’

‘Why would I think that?’

‘I mean, the Web... sometimes it’s like committing yourself into this great, massive asylum.’

‘Irene...?’

‘I was checking out pagan Web sites, trying to find out what I could about Ned Bain and these other people, OK?’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m off school and I got fed up with walking the grounds contemplating the infinite.’

‘And where did it get you?’

‘To be really honest, into places I didn’t think existed. You start off on the pagan Web sites, which are fairly innocent, or at least they seem innocent afterwards, compared with the serious occult sites you get referred to. It’s like you’re into a weedingout process and after a while it’s kind of, only totally depraved screwballs need apply, you know? Like, you can learn, among other things, how to effectively curse someone.’

‘What’s the address for that one? Let me grab a pen.’

‘Jane,’ he sounded serious, ‘take my word for it, when you actually see it on the screen it suddenly becomes less amusing. It’s like getting into some ancient library, where all the corridors stink of mould and mildew. All these arcane symbols.’

‘Sounds like Dungeons and Dragons.’

‘Only for real. You start thinking, Shit, suppose I pick up some... I don’t know... virus. And periodically you get casually asked to tap in your e-mail address or your name and your home address... or maybe just the town. And sometimes you almost do it automatically and then you think, Christ, they’ll know where to find me...’

‘Wimp.’

‘No. Even if you put in a false name, they can trace you, and they can feed you viruses. So, anyway, I got deeper and deeper and eventually I reached a site called Kali Three.’

‘You mean, like...’

‘Like the Indian goddess of death and destruction. That Kali.’ Eirion paused. ‘And that was where I found her.’

Found her? For some reason, Jane started thinking about Barbara Buckingham. A shadow crossed the room and she sat up, startled.

It was Ethel. Only Ethel.

Jane said, ‘Who?’

‘Your mum,’ Eirion said. ‘Merrily Watkins, Deliverance Consultant to the Diocese of Hereford, UK.’

‘Wha—’

‘She came up on Kali Three pretty much immediately. There was a picture of her. Black and white – looked like a newspaper mugshot. And then inside there was kind of a potted biography. Date of birth. Details of the parish in Liverpool where she was curate. Date of her installation as priest-in-charge at Ledwardine, Herefordshire. Oh... and “daughter: Jane, date of birth...” ’

‘Picture?’ Jane said bravely.

‘No. But there’s a picture of your dad.’

‘What?’

‘Another black and white. Bit fuzzy, like a blow-up from a group picture. Sean Barrow. Date of birth. Date of... death. And the place. I mean the exact place, the flyover, the nearest junction. And the circumstances. All of what Gerry said at Livenight and more. It says “Sean and Merrily were estranged at the time, which explains why she afterwards retained the title Mrs but switched back to her maiden name.” It says that “She is”... hang on, the print goes a bit funny here... yeah, that “she is still vulnerable”... something... “the death of her husband. Without which she might have found it harder to enter the Church.” ’

Jane exploded. ‘Who are these bastards?’

‘I don’t know. There are several names, but I don’t think they’re real names. I think it’d take you a long time to find out who they are – if you ever could. They could be really heavy-duty occultists or they could just be students. That’s the problem with the Net, you can’t trust anything on there. A lot of it’s lies.’

‘But... why? What kind of...?’

‘That’s what scares me. There’s a line at the bottom. It says, “The use of the word ‘Deliverance’ is the Church’s latest attempt to sanitize exorcism. Having a woman in the role, particularly one who is fairly young and attractive, is an attempt to mask what remains a regime of metaphysical oppression. This woman should be regarded as an enemy.’

Jane felt herself going pale. ‘Mum?’

‘And there are all these curious symbols around the bottom, like runes or something – I’ve no idea what a rune looks like. But it – this is the worrying bit – it points out that “Anyone with an interest can see Merrily Watkins on the Livenight television programme”, and it gives the date, and it says that the programme will be coming live from a new Midlands studio complex, just off the M5. So that’s out of date now, but it must have been there before the programme took place, obviously. And it says that if anyone is interested in further information, they can get it from... and then there’s a sequence of numbers and squiggles which I can’t make any sense of, but I don’t think it’s another Web site, more like a code, so... Jane?’

‘Yeah.’ A whisper.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to hear it like this, because I could be making it up, couldn’t I? To support the stuff you were rubbishing this morning.’

‘Irene... what am I going to do?’

‘I don’t know. What happened... happened to other people. It’s not even a good coincidence. I mean, who believes in any of this crap?’

‘You do.’

‘I don’t know whether I do or not. And anyway, I’m just a fundamentalist Welsh Chapel bigot.’

‘Were there any other people mentioned on this Web site, apart from Mum?’

‘Probably. I didn’t look, to be honest. What if there’d turned out to be a whole bunch of names and biographies of people and they were all recently dead or...? Shit, that’s how it’s supposed to work, isn’t it? Preying on your mind?’

‘Like, suppose there was this big hex thing and people... all over the country... the world... were being invited to, like, tune in and focus on Mum, the enemy, to put her off. Because, we both know how rubbish she was on that programme. I mean, she was fine on TV tonight, wasn’t she? Kind of cool, almost. Suppose it wasn’t just nerves that night. Suppose there were hundreds – thousands – of people sending her hate vibes or something. And then they all started focusing on that piece of road, where Dad... It’s horrible!’

‘It’s also complete crap, Jane. We’re just stretching things to fit the facts. We’re playing right into their hands.’

‘Whose hands?’

‘Anybody who frequents the Web site – including, presumably, Ned Bain, if he was the one putting it round about your mum. That doesn’t mean he’s behind any of it. It just tells us where he got his information.’

‘It’s still creepy.’

‘It’s meant to be creepy.’

‘Can you tell when it was originally pasted on the site?’

‘Somebody else might be able to, but not me. For all I know, somebody could have pushed it out after the show, to make it look... I don’t know. It’s all crap, and it makes me mad.’

‘Irene, I’m going to have to tell her.’

‘I think you should. I’ll try and find out some more.’

‘You’re wonderful,’ Jane said. Whoops. ‘Er... how’s the whiplash?’

‘Well, it just kind of hurts when I look over my shoulder.’

Jane instinctively looked over hers and shivered, and it wasn’t an exciting frisson kind of shiver. Not now.

35 This is History

‘A MARTYR?’ THE rain had eased. Merrily pushed back the dripping hood of her saturated, once-waxed jacket. ‘With his chest all splattered. Perhaps that was what he wanted.’

When the police had gone in, she’d walked away from it all. Her first instinct had been to stay on Robin Thorogood’s side of the fence, maybe go and talk to him, but now the cops were doing that. Journalists and cameramen were together in another group by the gate at St Michael’s Farm, waiting for someone to emerge.

Ellis had been driven away in a white Transit van, the cross and the torches packed away in the back. His followers watched the white van’s tail lights disappear along the end of the track, talking quietly in groups. There was an air of damp anticlimax.

‘For just one moment,’ Merrily said to Gomer, ‘I thought—’

‘Coppers thought that, too. Out o’ their car in a flash.’

‘It looked like blood.’

‘Shit does, in a bad light.’

‘It really was?’

‘Sheepshit, or dogshit more like, stuck on a bloody great lump o’ soil. He din’t smell too fragrant then. Likely the real reason he’s buggered off so quick.’

‘Whoever threw it... that wasn’t a great idea. Thorogood was winning their argument.’

‘Young kiddie, it was. ’E had it on the end of a spade. Seen him come up behind the boy in the T-shirt.’

‘Still look good in the press, though,’ Merrily said glumly. ‘On their pictures he will look like a martyr. I...’ She glanced over the gate to where two police were still talking to Thorogood.

‘Look out, vicar,’ Gomer murmured.

Judith Prosser was heading over, without her Gareth. She wore a shiny new Barbour, a matching wide-brimmed hat.

‘They’ve found Barbara’s car, then, Mrs Watkins.’ She spotted Gomer. ‘Ah... I see you have your informant with you.’

‘’Ow’re you, Judy?’

‘Gomer. I heard your wife died. I’m sorry.’

‘Things ’appens,’ Gomer said gruffly. He shook his head, droplets spinning from his cap.

Judith nodded. ‘So what about Barbara, Mrs Watkins? She down there, in Claerwen Reservoir, is it?’

‘Well, I don’t know those reservoirs, Mrs Prosser. But I think if Barbara’s body was in there, they’d have found it by now. I reckon the answer to that mystery’s much more likely to be found here.’

‘Do you indeed?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘You like a mystery, do you?’

‘How’s Marianne?’ Merrily said.

‘Mrs Starkey is quite well’ – wary now – ‘I assume.’

‘Those lustful demons can be difficult to extract.’

The caution was suddenly discarded as Judith laughed. ‘Don’t you believe all you hear.’

‘Like what?’

‘All kinds of nonsense gets talked about, Mrs Watkins. Be silly for you to start passing on rumours, isn’t it? I certainly haven’t heard anything to upset me.’

She smiled; she had good teeth.

‘In that case, you must have a strong constitution, Mrs Prosser,’ Merrily said.

Left to himself, Robin would have kicked the kid’s ass.

Hermes, nine years old, brother of Artemis, twelve, and of Ceres, six and a half.

Max and Bella did not kick Hermes’s ass. They were not the ass-kicking kind. They would, presumably, explain to him later, in some detail, what effect having tossed shit at the Christian priest might have on him karmically.

No hassle from the cops for Hermes, either. Soon as they found out this was a kid, and that they didn’t get to lean on a grown pagan, they didn’t hang around. Soon as the cops had gone, the media went off too, back to the Black Lion. None of them came to the house.

Robin peeled off his sodden T-shirt, towelled himself dry, stood in front of the cheery fire with a bath towel around his shoulders.

‘They’ll be back tomorrow night,’ George said with a good lashing of relish, ‘when we’re in the church. And this time there’ll be hundreds of them. It’s going to get really, really interesting, man.’

Robin said, ‘Did she call?’

‘Betty? Er, no.’

‘That car’s old, Robin,’ Vivvie said. ‘Maybe it’s just broken down.’

‘I listened to the weather forecast,’ George said. ‘The rain’s likely to have passed by morning. It’ll get colder, but tomorrow looks like being dry, so we’ll have all day to prepare the site.’

Robin shivered under the towel. ‘You guys don’t get it, do you? This is not gonna happen without Betty. If Betty doesn’t come back... no Imbolc.’

‘You’re tired, man,’ George said.

‘She will come back,’ Vivvie promised with intensity. ‘She won’t want to miss this.’ Her eyes glowed. ‘Imbolc... the glimmering of spring. This really is the start of an era. This is history. Like Max was saying while you were outside, it’s going to be the biggest thing since the Reformation. But whereas that was just Henry VIII plundering the riches of the Catholic Church, this is about the disintegration and decay of pride and vanity... and the regrowth of something pure and organic in the ruins. This is so beautifully symbolic, I want to cry.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Robin said. ‘I’m starting not to give a shit.’

‘You don’t mean that. You did a terrific job tonight.’

‘I most likely looked a complete asshole. I just wasn’t gonna cringe in front of that creep in his monk’s robes, was all. I was gonna look as white as he was.’

And maybe less pretentious. He wasn’t gonna go out there swinging a gold pentacle. He’d wanted to handle the confrontation with simple human dignity. Because what he’d really hoped for was that Betty would be out there watching – that she’d gotten home OK, but had been unable to come through the gate on account of the march, so was out there watching her tactless, thoughtless, irresponsible husband handling a difficult situation with some kind of basic human dignity.

And then fucking Hermes had blown it all away.

If you were looking for omens, you sure had one there. What kind of headlines were they gonna get tomorrow? ‘Witches Hurl Shit at Man of God’. The perfect follow-through to Robin looking like a freaking cannibal that last time.

‘Robin...’ The motherly Alexandra smiled a tentatively radiant candlelight smile at him across the room.

‘Sorry?’

‘Robin, there’s a small car just come into the yard.’

‘Huh...?’

He shot to the window, the bath towel dropping to the flags. He shaded his eyes with his cupped hands, up against the glass, hardly daring to hope that he’d see...

A little white Subaru Justy.

Oh God. Oh God. Robin sagged over the big, wide window sill, staring down between his hands and working on his breathing until he no longer felt faint with relief.

He straightened up. ‘Look, would you mind all staying here? I have to do some explaining.’

The Black Lion was packed, the air in the bar full of damp and steam, coming off journalists, TV people, even a few of the Christian marchers – all wet through, starved, in need of a stiff whisky. Greg was run off his feet. No sign of Marianne yet.

Gomer fetched Merrily a single malt and one for himself. There was nowhere to sit except in a tight corner by the window next to the main door. Whenever the door opened, they had to lean to one side, but at least they weren’t overheard as Merrily told Gomer the plain truth about Marianne’s exorcism.

Gomer didn’t blink. He weighed it up, nodding slowly. He laid out a row of beer mats on the table – and, with them, Merrily’s dilemma.

‘Gotter be a problem for you, this, girl. Question of which side you’re on now, ennit?’

‘Yes.’ Merrily lit a cigarette. She’d taken off her wet coat, but still had the scarf wound round her neck. She was still seeing Robin Thorogood there on his own, vastly outnumbered, not wearing anything witchy, not countering Ellis’s talk of Satan and sacrilege with any pagan propaganda. It could have been an act, to appear ordinary in the face of all the cross-waving – and yet it was too ordinary to be feigned.

‘What you gonner do, then, vicar?’

‘Gomer, how could Judith Prosser and those other women sit there and watch it? Can they really believe in him to that extent?’

Gomer took out a roll-up. ‘Like I said, it’s about stickin’ together, solid. Ellis’s helped the right people, ennit? Judy and Gareth with their boy. And who knows what else he done.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘Vicar?’

Merrily drank the rest of her whisky in a gulp.

‘Menna,’ she murmured. ‘Menna...’

Robin turned on the bulkhead lamp. It was no longer raining, but the wind had gotten up. A metal door creaked rhythmically over in the barn; it sounded like a sailing boat on the sea making him wish he and Betty were alone together, far out on some distant ocean.

Still naked to the waist, he stood on the doorstep and watched her park next to one of the Winnebagos. She stepped out of the car and into a puddle. The whole of the yard was puddles tonight.

She didn’t seem to care how wet her feet got. Her hair was frizzed out by the rain, uncombed.

Oh God, how he loved this woman. He tried to send this out to her. I take thee to my hand, my heart and my spirit at the setting of the sun and the rising of the stars...

He saw her standing for a moment, entirely still, taking in the extra cars in the yard, the two Winnebagos.

Then she saw him.

He came out of the doorway, walked towards her. She still didn’t move. If it was cold out here, he wasn’t feeling it yet.

‘Bets, I...’

He stopped a couple of yards from his wife. The back of his neck felt on fire.

‘Bets, I couldn’t stop them. It was either them or... or all kinds of people we didn’t know. It had all gotten out. You just couldn’t imagine... It was all over the Internet. We were getting hate faxes and also faxes from people who were right behind us – like, religious polarization, you know, over the whole nation? Or so... so it seemed.’

Betty spoke at last, in this real flat voice.

‘Who are they?’

‘Well, there... there’s George and Vivvie, and... and Alexandra. And Stuart and Mona Osman, who we met at some... at some sabbat, someplace. And Max and Bella... Uh, Max is kind of an all-knowing asshole, but they’re OK where it matters. I guess. And some other people. Bets, I’m sorry. If you’d only called...’

There was no expression at all on her face; this was what scared him. Why didn’t she just lose her temper, call him a stupid dickhead, get this over?

‘See, we always said there was gonna be a sabbat at Imbolc. Didn’t we say that? That we were gonna bring the church alive with lights? A big bonfire to welcome the spring? So like... maybe this was destined to come about. Maybe there was nothing we could do to get in the way of it. Like it’s meant to be – only with more significance than we could ever have imagined.’

Why did this all sound so hollow? Why was she taking a step back, away from him?

There was a splish in a puddle. Her car keys? She’d dropped the car keys. Robin rushed forward, plunged his hand and half his arm into the puddle, scrabbling about in the black, freezing water, babbling on still.

‘Look... Ellis was here, with his born-again buddies. Chances are they’re gonna be back tomorrow – only more of them. There was like this real heavy sense of menace. You and me, we couldn’t’ve handled that on our own, believe me.’

He hated himself for this blatant lie, but what could he say? He pulled out the dripping keys, hung on to them.

Betty said, ‘Give me the keys, Robin.’

‘Why? No!’

‘I can’t stay here tonight.’

‘Please... you don’t know... Bets, it’s gotten bigger than us two. OK, that’s a cliché, but it’s true. What’s happening here’s gonna be—’

‘Symbolic,’ a voice said from behind him. He turned and saw Vivvie on the step. Vivvie had come out to help him. Vivvie alone.

The worst thing that could’ve happened.

‘Symbolic of the whole struggle to free this country from two millennia of religious corruption and spiritual stagnation. He’s right, Betty. We have to play our part. We have to reconsecrate the church and it has to be tomorrow night. It’s why we’re here.’

Betty started to shake her head, and the light from the bulkhead caught one side of her face and Robin saw the dark smudges, saw she’d been crying hard.

‘Bets!’ He almost screamed. ‘Look, I know things haven’t been right. I know you never connected with this place. Honey, please... once this is over we’ll sell up, yeah? I mean, like, Jeez, from what I’ve been hearing there’s gotta be about a hundred pagans ready to take it off our hands. But this... Imbolc... this is something we have to go through – together, yeah? Please let it be together.’

‘Give me those keys.’

‘I will not let you leave!’

‘You will not stop me,’ Betty said. ‘And she certainly won’t.’

She turned away, walked across the yard toward the track.

Robin ran after her, managed four paces before the cold, suddenly intense, bit into his chest and his breathing seemed to seize up. But that was nothing to the pain right dead centre of his heart chakra.

His eyes flooded up.

‘Don’t follow me,’ Betty said. ‘I mean it, don’t take one more pace.’

36 The Atheist

‘YOU’RE BACK HOME?’ Eileen Cullen’s relief was apparent, even over hospital corridor echo and clattering trays.

Merrily switched on the engine, turned the heater up all the way and shook a cigarette into her lap. ‘I’m in my car on a pub car park in Old Hindwell, and wet and cold.’

‘You’re still out there? Oh hey, one of the porters saw you on the box tonight, said he fancied the hell out of you. Listen, you’ve heard about Buckingham? The car in the reservoir?’

‘It doesn’t mean she’s dead, Eileen.’

‘It’s scary, Merrily. Civilized woman like that, if she wanted to do away with herself, why not a bottle of Scotch and a handful of pills?’

‘I still can’t believe she has.’

‘Aye, well, sometimes you...’ Cullen hesitated. ‘Sometimes there’s things you just don’t want to believe, no matter what. What are the alternatives, after all? It’s suicide, face it. And don’t you go feeling guilty. There’s nothing you could’ve done.’

‘How can you say that?’

‘Because, Reverend, that’s the official motto of the National Health Service. Listen, will you be in town tomorrow?’

‘Probably not tomorrow.’

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Are we not talking now?’

‘What I want to talk about, you don’t on the phone. Well you don’t at all if you’ve got any sense. I could come and see you... at your home.’

‘Eileen?’ Jane was right; Cullen, hard as a hospital potato, had never sounded less assured.

‘Truth is... I’ve not been frank with you, Merrily – or with meself, come to that. There’s things I ought to’ve said.’ She dropped her voice to just above a whisper. ‘About the night Menna Weal died. And I can’t talk here, I’m on the public phone.’

‘You’ve got an office, haven’t you?’

‘It’s open house in there, so it is. Anyway, I won’t talk in this place, and I don’t get off now until the morning. You’ve got my home number, so call me when you can.’

‘Eileen, don’t... do not hang up. Let’s just talk about Menna, OK? The stroke could have been brought on by stress, right? Severe emotional stress?’

‘Hypertension due to emotional trauma. Distended arteries, then a clot gets shunted into the brain. What kind of trauma you thinking about?’

‘Exorcism,’ Merrily said.

‘Oh, terrific,’ Cullen said drably.

‘The expulsion of an evil entity. Intended expulsion.’

‘I know what it is, I was raised a Catholic. But, excuse me, Reverend, would not someone in your job be seeing it everywhere you bloody look?’

‘Just... bear with me, OK? You get some ministers – of an evangelical or charismatic persuasion – who believe that demonic forces... and angelic forces, come to that... are all around us in all kinds of guises. Like there are probably a few in California who’d offer to exorcize me in order to expel the demon nicotine.’

‘You mean eejits.’

‘So here’s poor Menna – withdrawn, maladjusted maybe, communication problems. OK, I won’t go into details, but there’s good reason to think she was abused by her dad.’

‘Is that a fact,’ said Cullen, who’d heard it all many times before.

‘Probably over a long period. But not necessarily when she was a kid.’

‘So you could be talking about more of an unnatural relationship.’

‘If she was as naive and immature as I’ve been told, I think we’re still talking about abuse.’

Merrily lit another cigarette and gathered her thoughts, staring out along the village street. From here, she could count candles in nine separate windows. The street lighting was so meagre and widely spaced that some of the candles seemed disproportionately bright through the rain-blobbed windscreen and unintentionally jolly, like Christmas lights.

She just wanted to air this stuff, to another woman.

‘I don’t want to speculate too much about the state of the Weal marriage... but it seems likely the obsessive love there was fairly one-sided. And Weal must have realized that – that the father was still very much in the background, even though dead.’

‘You mean Weal’s thinking he might be having a happier time altogether if he can remove whatever emotional block’s been left behind in Menna by her having a sex beast for a father.’

‘I doubt the concept of happiness means much to him, but yeah... And he wouldn’t have her seeing a psychiatrist or a therapist because that’s not the kind of thing you’re seen to do in Old Hindwell. So, after a lot of agonizing and soul-searching, perhaps, he goes to the priest.’

‘Who you say’s not your regular kind of priest, yeah?’

‘Mmm. At the funeral, Ellis disclosed that Weal and Menna were baptized together, not long before she died. I think that means she was exorcized. Historically, baptism’s always been linked with exorcism. In the medieval Church, it was more or less believed that until it was baptized, a baby was the property of the Devil and if it died before baptism it would be consigned to the fires of hell.’

‘No offence to you, personally,’ Cullen said, ‘but how I hate the Church.’

‘So, suppose Weal believed that having Menna rebaptized into the faith would free her from the influence of her father... from the effects of her childhood. And suppose the ceremony – conducted in the privacy of their home – involved... well, something considerably more stressful than a sprinkling of holy water. And I mean more stressful.’

‘Then, sure, you could be into stroke country.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘And...’ Cullen hesitated, ‘as you’ve mentioned baptism, the anointing of the forehead with water, if we cast our minds back to a certain wee side ward...’

‘Mmm.’

‘I always thought any anointing of a corpse was down to the priest.’

‘Me, too.’

Long silence.

‘Possession is nine points of the law,’ Merrily said. ‘That was what Barbara Buckingham said.’

‘Possession?’ Cullen said.

‘Possession of the dead by the living, was how she put it, ostensibly meaning the private tomb. But I think there were other things she wasn’t prepared to put into words, maybe even to herself.’

‘Ah, Merrily...’

‘Pretty much like you, really. Why don’t you just tell me the rest?’

Cullen said, ‘This is a pressure job, you know? You get overtired, so you do.’

‘And imagine things.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Like?’

‘Like things you don’t believe in.’

‘Did something happen when you went down to the morgue?’

Cullen sighed. ‘Maybe.’

‘He went along with you – which is not usual.’

‘Not only that, he sent the porters away. He asked could he spend some time with her, say his goodbyes.’

‘How long?’

‘A clear hour. To cut a long story short, they sent for me, in the end, to exercise my fabled diplomacy on the man. When I get down there, I’m delighted to see he’s finally leaving. Has on his hat and coat, a big dark solicitor’s overcoat, like he’s on his way to court. I didn’t approach him, but I thought it was as well to follow him, to make quite sure he left the premises. So I did that. I followed him.’

Cullen broke off. There was the sound of someone calling from a distance, then Cullen said, ‘Two minutes, Josie, all right?’

‘Bloody hell,’ Merrily said, ‘don’t stop now.’

‘Ach, normal way of things you wouldn’t get this out of me with thumbscrews. All right. Weal goes out by one of the back doors near the consultants’ car park. You can get across the yard there to the temporary visitors’ car park. It’s the quickest way, if you don’t mind there being no lights. Which I wish to God there had’ve been, then I could’ve said it was a reflection.’

Merrily revved the engine to blow more heat into the Volvo.

‘I could still say it was,’ Cullen said defiantly. ‘I can say any damn thing I want to, as I’m an atheist. I do not believe in God, I do not believe in angels or demons.’

‘And you don’t believe what you saw. A lot of people say that. That’s OK.’

‘Feel free to be patronizing, Reverend. I’ve woken up about seven times in the night since then. Gets into me fockin’ dreams, the way you get a virus in your computer. And everything freezes on you.’

‘I know.’

‘Oh, you know everything, so you do!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m standing in the doorway, just the other side of the big plastic doors, and I’m watching him walk across to the visitors’ car park, which is all but empty now. Nobody about but him and this... Jesus.’

Merrily’s eyes turned this way and that, determinedly counting nine candles in nine windows, banishing all wildly flickering thoughts of the old rectory garden, while Cullen kept her waiting.

Until, at last, over the sound of footsteps in the hospital corridor and a woman squealing, she whispered, ‘Just a hovering thing, you know? Like a light. Not a bright light... more kind of greyish, half there and half not. That’s as best as I can tell you. You could see it and then you couldn’t. But you knew... you bloody knew. I went very cold, Merrily. Very cold, you know?’

‘Mmm.’

‘And him... Oh, he knew it was there, all right. I swear to God he knew it was there. Twice, he looked back over his shoulder. I... Aw, hell, I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud. It made me go cold, you know?’

‘I do know,’ Merrily said.

37 Night Hag

GOMER WAS STANDING up at the bar with Greg Starkey, talking to him between other customers buying drinks. Greg glanced at Merrily through bloodshot eyes, trying to keep his voice muted, not succeeding.

‘I’m on eggshells, trying to run a boozer, while she’s up inna bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring into space. If I put a hand on her it’s like I’ve hit her, you know? Like she got no skin? That’s what it does to them, is it? A blessing?’

A blessing? ‘How much did she tell you about it?’ Merrily asked.

‘Not a lot. I fought it was all gonna be “Praise the Lord” and that. I was geared up for that. Woulda been better than the battered wife routine. Who’s that bastard fink he is?’

‘Thinks he’s St Michael,’ Merrily said soberly. ‘Greg, do you think she’d talk to me?’

‘I just told Gomer I’ll put it to her. Soon’s I get a minute, which could be closing time. How long you got?’

‘As long as it takes.’

‘I’ll do what I can. Yes, sir... Carlsberg, is that?’

Merrily beckoned Gomer back to the cold place nobody else wanted, near the door. She told him what she’d discussed with Eileen Cullen, about the reasons they figured J.W. Weal might have wanted Menna cleansed.

Gomer said shrewdly, ‘You reckon Barbara Thomas knew?’

‘About the baptism? It’s possible, isn’t it?’

The steamy light pooled in Gomer’s glasses. ‘Likely what Barbara Thomas found out got her killed then, ennit?’

‘Good God, Gomer!’

Gomer sniffed. ‘Reckoned I’d say it ’fore you did. Mind your back, vicar.’

A young woman had come in alone. She stood on the mat, shaking back wild, corn-coloured hair that somehow looked not only out of place in Old Hindwell, but out of season. She drew a breath, scanned the crowd in the bar and then walked through.

‘Until there’s a body,’ Merrily said, ‘she hasn’t been killed. Until there’s a body she isn’t dead.’

‘Who you got lined up for it, then? Big Weal ’isself?’

‘Shhhh!’

Gomer looked around, unconcerned. ‘He en’t yere.’

‘OK,’ Merrily whispered, ‘considered objectively, it seems ridiculous. I mean, if Barbara found out Weal arranged to have his wife exorcized by Ellis, as some kind of primitive pyschological therapy... well, he might not want that out in the open, but it’s only slightly dirty washing. And it is Christianity, of a sort. It’s no reason to kill somebody. And would he really expect to get away with it in a place like this?’

Gomer threw up his hands. ‘Place like this? Nowhere bloody easier, vicar! Local people protects local people. Might keep any number o’ secrets from each other, but if they gets a threat from Off, they’ll close in real tight till it’s over and gone. They thought J.W. Weal had done it, they’d be happy to shovel shit over his tracks, ennit?’

‘The other thing that struck me,’ Merrily said, ‘is that the doctor who kept prescribing all that oestrogen that sent Menna’s blood pressure up...’

‘Dr Coll, eh? Now there’s a respected man.’

‘If Menna did develop dangerously high blood pressure, furred arteries, serious danger of fatal clotting, why didn’t he warn her? Why wasn’t he monitoring her? If she was on the Pill for... I don’t know, twenty years or more...’

Gomer said, ‘What you wanner do is you wanner talk to Judy. Proper, though. None o’ this circlin’ round each other. Talk to her straight.’

‘Tonight?’

‘As well as Mrs Starkey? Busy ole night you got lined up there.’

‘OK, tomorrow.’ She pulled out her cigarettes and then put them back. ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this. Why am I doing this, Gomer?’

‘Because... ’ang about.’ Gomer turned towards the bar. Merrily saw Greg Starkey frantically beckoning them over. ‘I think the boy wants you,’ Gomer said.

Greg opened the solid wooden gate in one side of the bar, to allow Merrily and Gomer through.

‘Just walks in like noffink’s happened, asks for a room for the night. Well, I’ve only got two rooms, ain’ I, and they’ve both gone to reporters. I can’t turn her away, but what if the wife comes out, nursing her Bible, and finds the bleedin’ spawn of Satan under a blanket on the settee?’

‘Gomer,’ Merrily said, ‘just don’t call me vicar in front of her, OK?’

Greg led them into the well-fitted kitchen with the tomato-red Aga. A woman stood next to it, gripping the chromium guard rail, as though she was on the deck of a small boat in a gale.

The night hag.

Couldn’t be more than late twenties. Pleated skirt, dark sweater, ski jacket, all that blond hair.

‘This is my friend,’ Greg said, ‘wiv the accommodation. Merrily Watkins.’

Merrily watched the young woman’s eyes. No recognition at all. Clearly not a Livenight viewer, not even that particularly relevant edition.

OK, she’d said to Greg, in a snap decision, just tell her I’m someone with a big house who does B and B sometimes.

B and B? Sanctuary? What a vicarage was for.

Good Samaritan. The good Samaritan, who went to the aid of someone from a different culture, a different ethos.

‘It’s only for one night,’ Betty Thorogood was saying. ‘Probably.’

‘And this is Gomer Parry,’ Greg said.

‘’Ow’re you?’ Gomer flashed the wild-man grin.

Gotter be a problem for you, this, girl. Question of which side you’re on now, ennit?