Midwinter of the Spirit

3 Storm trooper

THEY WENT TO look at Hereford Cathedral – because it was raining, and because Jane had decided she liked churches.

As distinct, of course, from the Church, which was still the last refuge of tossers, no-hopers and sad gits who liked dressing up.

Jane wandered around in her vintage Radiohead sweatshirt, arms hanging loose, hands opened out. Despite the presence of all these vacuous, dog-collared losers, you could still sometimes pick up an essence of real spirituality in these old sacred buildings, the kid reckoned. This was because of where they’d been built, on ancient sacred sites. Plus the resonance of gothic architecture.

Merrily followed her discreetly, hands in pockets, head down, and didn’t argue; a row was looming, but this was not the place and not the time. And anyway she had her own thoughts, her own decision to make. She wondered about consulting St Thomas, and was pleased to see Jane heading for the North Transept, where the old guy lay. Kind of.

They passed the central altar, with its suspended corona like a giant gold and silver cake-ruff. On Saturdays, even in October, there were usually parties of tourists around the Cathedral and its precincts, checking out the usual exhibits: the Mappa Mundi, the Chained Library, the John Piper tapestries, the medieval shrine of…

‘Oh.’

In the North Transept, Merrily came up against a barrier of new wooden partitioning, with chains and padlocks. It was screening off the end wall and the foot of the huge stained-glass window full of Christs and angels and reds and blues.

Jane said, ‘So, like, what’s wrong, Reverend Mum?’ She put an eye to the crack in the padlocked partition door. ‘Looks like a building site. They turning it into public lavatories or something?’

‘I forgot. They’re dismantling the shrine.’

‘What for?’ Jane looked interested.

‘Renovation. Big job. Expensive. Twenty grand plus. Got to look after your saint.’

‘Saint?’ Jane said. ‘Do me a favour. Guy was just a heavy-duty politician.’

‘Well, he was, but—’

‘Thomas Cantilupe, 1218 to 1282,’ Jane recited. ‘Former Chancellor of England. Came from a family of wealthy Norman barons. He really didn’t have to try very hard, did he?’

Well, yes, he did, Merrily wanted to say. When he became Bishop of Hereford, he tried to put all that behind him. Wore a hair shirt. And, as a lover of rich food, once had a great pie made with his favourite lampreys from the Severn, took a single succulent bite, and gave the rest away.

‘Must have had something going for him, flower. About three hundred miracles were credited to this shrine.’

‘Look.’ Jane pushed her dark brown hair behind her ears. ‘It’s the power of place. If you’d erected a burger-bar here, people would still have been cured. It’s all about the confluence of energies. Nothing to do with the fancy tomb of some overprivileged, corrupt…’

She stopped. A willowy young guy in a Cathedral sweatshirt was strolling over.

‘It’s Mrs Watkins, right?’

‘Hello,’ Merrily said uncertainly. Was she supposed to recognize him? She was discovering that what you needed more than anything in this job was a massive database memory.

‘Er, you don’t know me, Mrs Watkins. I saw you with the archdeacon once. Neil Cooper – I’m kind of helping with the project. It’s just… I’ve got a key if you want to have a look.’

While Merrily hesitated, Jane looked Neil Cooper over, from his blond hair to his dusty, tight jeans.

‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Cool. Let’s do it.’

Under the window, a fourteenth-century bishop slept on, his marble mitre like a nightcap. But the tomb of his saintly predecessor, Thomas Cantilupe, was in pieces – stone sections laid out, Merrily thought, like a display of postmodern garden ornaments.

There were over thirty pieces, Neil told them, all carefully numbered by the stonemasons. Neil was an archaeology student who came in most weekends. It was, he said, a unique opportunity to examine a famous and fascinating medieval tomb.

Jane stood amongst the rubble and the workbenches, peering around and lifting dustcloths.

‘So, like, where are the bones?’

An elderly woman glanced in through the door, then backed quickly away as if dust from the freshly exposed tomb might carry some ancient disease.

Jane was prepared to risk it. She knelt and stroked one of the oblong side-slabs, closing her eyes as though emanations were coming through to her, the faint echo of Gregorian chant. Jane liked to feel she was in touch with other spheres of existence. Nothing religious, you understand.

‘Sorry,’ said Neil. ‘There aren’t any.’

‘No bones?’

Hands still moving sensuously over the stone, Jane opened her eyes and gazed up at Neil. He looked about twenty. An older man; Jane thought older men were cool, and only older men. It was beginning to perturb Merrily that the kid hadn’t found any kind of steady boyfriend her own age, since they’d arrived in Herefordshire.

Neil glanced at Jane only briefly. ‘What happened, Mrs Watkins, is some of the bones were probably taken away for safekeeping at the time of the Reformation. And some were apparently carried around the city during the plague in the hope they might bring some relief, and I expect a few of those didn’t come back. So he’s widely scattered, although part of the skull’s supposed to be back in Hereford, with the monks over at Belmont Abbey.’

Jane stood up. ‘So it was like completely empty when you opened it, yeah?’

‘Lot of dust,’ said Neil.

The side-slab was divided into six sections; on each a knight in armour had been carved, their swords and shields and helmets and even chain-mail fingers crisply discernible, but all the faces gone – flattened, pulped. It didn’t look as if time was entirely responsible.

‘So, in fact,’ Jane said, ‘this great historic, holy artefact is like an empty shell.’

‘It’s a shrine,’ Merrily said.

‘Of course, that’s one of the continuing problems with the Anglican Church.’ Jane smiled slyly, before sliding out the punchline. ‘So much of it’s just a hollow shell.’

Merrily was careful not to react. ‘We’re delaying you,’ she said to Neil Cooper. ‘It was good of you to let us in.’

‘No problem, Mrs Watkins. Drop in any time.’ He smiled at Merrily, ignoring Jane.

Jane scowled.

‘I expect you’ll be around quite often,’ Neil said. ‘I gather they’re giving you an office in the cloisters.’

‘Nothing’s fixed yet,’ Merrily said, too sharply. ‘And, anyway, I’d only be here one-and-a-half days a week. I have a parish to run as well.’ God, she thought, does everybody know about this? So much for low-profile, so much for discretion.

‘Look in anytime,’ Neil repeated. ‘Always nice to see you.’

‘The trouble with older men,’ said Jane, as they left the Cathedral, ‘is that the cretins seem to fancy even older women.’

As they walked into Broad Street, the rain dying off but the sky threatening more, Merrily noticed that Jane seemed taller. A little taller than Merrily in fact, which was not saying much but was momentarily alarming. As though this significant spurt had occurred during the few days they’d been apart: Merrily experiencing weirdness in Wales, Jane staying with trusty villagers Gomer and Minnie, but returning to the vicarage twice a day to feed Ethel the cat.

Merrily felt disoriented. So much had altered in the ten days since she’d last been to the Cathedral. Ten days which – because the past week had been such a strange period – seemed so much longer, even part of a different time-frame.

She felt a quiver of insecurity, glanced back at the ancient edifice of myriad browns and pinks. It seemed to have shrunk. From most parts of the city centre, the spires of All Saints and St Peter’s were more dominant. The Cathedral had long since lost its own spire, and sat almost modestly in a secluded corner between the River Wye and the Castle Green and a nest of quiet streets with no shops in them.

‘Tea?’ Merrily said desperately.

‘Whatever.’

The late-afternoon sky was a smoky kind of orange. Merrily peered around for cafés, snackbars. She felt like a stranger, needing to ground herself.

‘The Green Dragon? They must do afternoon tea.’

Jane shrugged. They crossed towards Hereford’s biggest hotel, nineteenth-century and the longest façade on Broad Street.

‘So you’ve learned about Thomas Cantilupe at school?’

‘Only in passing. He didn’t figure much nationally. Nothing that happened in Hereford seems to have made much of a difference to anything in the big world.’

Useless arguing with Jane in this mood. The kid had consented to come shopping, a big sacrifice on a Saturday; it was now Merrily’s task to tease out of her what was wrong, and Jane wasn’t going to assist. Tiresome, timehonoured ritual.

They found a window table in the Green Dragon, looking back out on to Broad Street, the Saturday crowds thinning now as the day closed down. Sometimes November could bring a last golden surge, but this one had seemed colourless and tensed for winter. Merrily was aware of a drab sense of transience and futility – nothing profound. Maybe just wishing she was Jane’s age again.

‘Cakes,’ she said brightly.

‘Just tea, thanks. Black.’

Merrily ordered two teas and a scone. ‘Worried about our weight, are we, flower?’

‘No.’

‘What are we worried about then?’

‘Did we say we were worried?’

The bored, half-closed eyes, the sardonic tuck at the corner of the mouth. It was pure Sean – as when Merrily was trying to quiz him about some dubious client. You don’t see your daughter for a week, and in the interim she’s readmitted her father’s soiled spirit.

Merrily tried again. ‘I, er… I missed you, flower.’

‘Really?’ Jane tilted her soft, pale face into a supportive hand, elbow on the table. ‘I’d have thought you had far too much to think about, poncing about in your robes and practising your Out, Demons, Out routine with the soul police.’

‘Ah.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what this is about – the soul police? You think I’m…’

What? An anachronism? A joke? Though Jane was basically spiritual, she just didn’t believe the Church of England was. Bad enough to have your own mother walking around in a dogcollar, never mind the holy water and the black bag now. Was that it?

That was probably too simple. Nothing about Jane was ever really simple.

A man striding up the street towards All Saints glanced through the window, blinked, paused, strode on. Oh God, not him, not now. Merrily turned away from the window, stared across the table at Jane.

The kid pushed back her tumbling hair. ‘OK, look…’

Yes? Merrily leaned forward. A crack, an opening? Yes…

Jane said, ‘I’m uncomfortable about what you’re doing, Merrily.’

‘I see.’

Jesus. Merrily? A major development. Now we are sixteen, time to dump this Mum nonsense. We are two grown women, equals.

This needed some thinking about.

‘I don’t think you do see,’ Jane said.

‘So tell me.’

‘They’re dragging you in, aren’t they?’

‘Who?’

‘The Church. It’s all political.’

‘Of course it is.’

‘All those fat, smug C-of-E gits, they’re worried about losing their power and their influence, so they’re appointing cool bishops: smooth, glossy people like Michael Hunter… Mick Hunter, for God’s sake.’

‘Bishops are still appointed by Downing Street.’

‘Yeah, well, exactly. Old mate of Tony Blair’s. I can just see them swapping chords for ancient Led Zeppelin riffs. Like, Mick’s superficially cool and different, but he’s really Establishment underneath.’

‘Phew,’ said Merrily theatrically. ‘Thank God, my daughter has finally become a revolutionary. I thought it was never going to happen.’

Jane glared at her.

‘You really don’t understand, do you?’

‘Sure. You think I’m a glossy, superficial bimbo who’s—’

‘More like a trainee storm-trooper, actually.’

‘What?’

‘Look…’ Jane’s eyes flashed. ‘It seemed really interesting at first when you said you were going to do this Deliverance training. I’m thinking, yeah, this is what it’s all about: the Church actually investigating the supernatural nitty-gritty instead of just spouting all this Bible crap. And this course and everything, it all seemed really mysterious. So, like… Wednesday night, I go back to the vicarage to feed Ethel. I think maybe I should check the answering machine, see if there’s anything urgent. So I go into your office and I find… hang on…’

From a pocket of her jeans, Jane dragged a compacted square of printed paper which she opened out on the tabletop.

‘And suddenly I saw what it was all really about.’

Merrily pulled towards her a Deliverance Study Group pamphlet heralding a forthcoming seminar entitled:

NEW AGE… OLD ENEMY.

She’d forgotten about it. It had come in a package from the DSG the morning she left for the Brecon Beacons.

‘I haven’t read it, flower.’

‘I bet.’

‘But, sure, I can guess what it’s about.’

She picked up the leaflet.

Meditation-groups, sweat-lodges, healing-circles… it may all seem innocuous, but so-called New Age pursuits are often the marijuana which leads to the heroin of hard-core Satanism. Introducing the discussion, Canon Stephen Rigbey will examine the allure of alternative spirituality and suggest ways of discouraging harmful experimentation.

Merrily said steadily, ‘You happen to notice the key word in this?’

‘Don’t try and talk all around it.’

‘It’s “discussion” – meaning debate.’

‘It’s bloody spiritual fascism,’ said Jane.

‘Oh, Jane, listen—’

‘You listen, for once. The New Age is about… it’s about millions of people saying: I want to know more… I want an inner life… I want to commune with nature and the cosmos and things, find out about what we’re really doing here and who’s running the show, and like what part I can play in the Great Scheme of Things. Right?’

‘Pretty much like Christianity, in fact.’ Merrily lit a cigarette.

‘No, that’s bollocks.’ Jane shook her head furiously. ‘The Church is like: Oh, you don’t have to know anything; you just come along every Sunday and sing some crappy Victorian hymns and stuff and you’ll go to heaven.’

‘Jane, we’ve had this argument before. You just want to reduce it to—’

‘And anybody steps out of line, it’s: Oh, you’re evil, you’re a heretic, you’re an occultist and we’re gonna like burn you or something! Which was how you got the old witch-hunts, because the Church has always been on this kind of paternalistic power trip and doesn’t want people to search for the truth. Like it used to be science and Darwinism and stuff they were worried about, now it’s the New Age because that’s like real practical spirituality. And it’s come at a time when the Church is really feeble and pathetic, and the bishops and everybody are shit scared of it all going down the pan, so now we get this big Deliverance initiative, which is really just about… about suppression.’ Jane sat back in her chair with a bump.

‘Wow,’ Merrily said.

‘Don’t.’

‘What?’

‘You’re gonna say something patronizing. Don’t.’ Jane snatched back the leaflet and folded it up again. Evidence obviously. ‘I bet you were mega-flattered when Mick offered you the job, weren’t you? I bet it never entered your head that they want people like you because you’re quite young and attractive and everything, and like—’

‘It did, actually.’

‘Like you’re not going to come over as some crucifix-waving loony, what?’

‘It did occur to me.’ Merrily cupped both hands around her cigarette; she wasn’t sure if they allowed smoking in here. ‘Of course it did. It’s still occurring to me. Not your let’s-stamp-out-the-New-Age stuff, because I can’t quite believe that. But, yeah, I think he does want me for reasons other than that I’m obviously interested in… phenomena, whatever. Which is one reason I haven’t yet said yes to the job.’

Jane blinked once and they sat and stared at one another. Merrily thought about all the other questions that were occurring to her. And what Huw Owen had said to them all as they gathered outside the chapel in the last minutes of the course.

Maybe you should analyse your motives. Are you doing this out of a desire to help people cope with psychic distress? Or is it in a spirit of, shall we say, personal enquiry? Think how much deeper your faith would be if you had evidence of life after death. How much stronger your commitment to the calling if you had proof of the existence of supernatural evil. If that’s the way you’re thinking, you need to consider very carefully after you leave here. And then, for Christ’s sake, forget this. Do something else.

Merrily dragged raggedly on her cigarette.

‘You really want it, though, don’t you?’ Jane said. ‘You really, really want it.’

‘I don’t know,’ Merrily lied.

Jane smiled.

‘I have a lot of thinking to do,’ Merrily said.

‘You going to tell Mick you’re in two minds?’

‘I think I shall be avoiding the Bishop for a while.’

‘Ha.’ Jane was looking over her mother’s left shoulder.

Merrily said wearily, ‘He just came in, didn’t he?’

‘I think I’ll leave you to it. I’ll go and have a mooch around Waterstone’s and Andy’s. See you back at the car at six?’

The waitress arrived with the tea.

‘The Bishop can have mine if he likes,’ Jane said.

4 Moon

IT WAS WHAT happened with the crow, after the rain on Dinedor Hill. This was when Lol Robinson actually began to be spooked by Moon.

As distinct from sorry for Moon. Puzzled by Moon. Fascinated by Moon.

And attracted to her, of course. But anything down that road was not an option. It was not supposed to be that kind of relationship.

Most people having their possessions carried into a new home would need to supervise the operation, make sure nothing got broken. Moon had shrugged, left them to get on with it, and melted away into the rain and her beloved hill.

There really wasn’t very much stuff to move in. Moon didn’t even have a proper bed. When the removal men had gone, Lol went up to the Iron Age ramparts to find her.

He walked up through the woods, not a steep slope because the barn was quite close to the flattened summit where the ancient camp had been, the Iron Age village of circular thatched huts. Nothing remained of it except dips and hollows, guarded now by huge old trees, and by the earthen ramparts at the highest point.

And this was where he found Moon, where the enormous trees parted to reveal the city of Hereford laid out at your feet like an offering.

Lol was aware that some people called the hill a holy hill, though he wasn’t sure why. He should ask Moon. The ancient mysteries of Dinedor swam in her soul.

She was standing with her back to him, next to a huge beech tree which still wore most of its leaves. Her hair hung almost to the waist of the long medieval sort of dress she wore under a woollen shawl.

Making Lol think of drawings of fairies by Arthur Rackham and the centrefolds of those quasi-mystical albums from the early seventies – the ones which had first inspired him to write songs. The kind of songs which were already going out of fashion when Lol’s band, Hazey Jane, won their first recording contract.

Moon would still have been at primary school then. She seemed to have skipped a whole generation, if not two. Hippy nouvelle. Down in the city, she sometimes looked pale and nervy, distanced from everything. Up here she was connected.

Dick Lyden, the psychotherapist, had noticed this and given his professional blessing to Moon’s plan, despite the fears of her brother Denny, who was jittery as hell about it. ‘She can’t do this. You got to stop her. SHE CANNOT LIVE THERE! OUT OF THE FUCKING QUESTION!’

But she was a grown woman. What were they supposed to do, short of getting her committed to a psychiatric hospital? Lol, who’d been through that particular horror himself, was now of the opinion that it should never happen to anyone who was not dangerously insane.

When he first saw Moon on the ramparts, even though her face was turned away, he thought she’d never seemed more serene.

She glanced over her shoulder and smiled at him.

‘Hi.’

‘OK?’

‘Yes.’ She turned back to the view over the city. ‘Wonderful, isn’t it? Look. Look at the Cathedral and All Saints. Isn’t that amazing?’

From here, even though they were actually several hundred yards apart, the church steeple and the Cathedral tower overlapped. The sky around them was a strange, burned-out orange.

Moon said, ‘Many of the ley-lines through other towns, you can’t see them any more because of new high-rise buildings, but of course there aren’t any of those in Hereford. The skyline remains substantially the same.’

Lol realized he’d seen an old photograph of this view, taken in the 1920s by Alfred Watkins, the Hereford gentleman who’d first noticed that prehistoric stones and mounds and the medieval churches on their sites often seemed to occur on imaginary straight lines running across the landscape. Most archaeologists thought this was a rubbish theory, but Katherine Moon was not like most archaeologists. ‘It’s at least spiritually valid,’ she’d said once. He wasn’t sure what she meant.

‘Moon,’ he said now, ‘why do some people call it a holy hill?’

She didn’t have to think about it. ‘The line goes through four ancient places of worship, OK? Ending at a very old church in the country. But it starts here, and this is the highest point. So all these churches, including the Cathedral, remain in its shadow.’

‘In the poetic sense.’

‘In the spiritual sense. This hill is the mother of the city. The camp here was the earliest proper settlement, long before there was a town down there. Over a thousand Celtic people lived up here.’ She paused. ‘My ancestors.’

There was a touching tremor of pride in her voice.

‘So it’s kind of…’ Lol hesitated, ‘… holy in the pagan sense.’

‘It’s just holy.’ Moon still had her back to him. ‘This was before the time of Christ. Over a thousand people keeping sheep and storing grain, doing their spinning and weaving and dyeing. It would’ve been idyllic – for a time.’

‘What happened to them? The Dinedor People.’

‘Some of them never went away. And the spirit remains.’

Moon gazed down over the spread of the city towards the distant Black Mountains and Welsh border. Slowly she turned towards him.

‘And some… some of us have returned.’

He saw tears shining in her eyes.

And then he saw the black thing clasped to her stomach.

Katherine Moon…

Dick Lyden, the therapist, had briefed Lol as best he could about three months ago.

Twenty-six. Bright girl, quite a good degree in archaeology, but an unfortunate history of instability. Runs in the family, evidently. Her brother Denny, he’s the sanest of them; might look like a New Age traveller, but Denny’s a businessman, has his head screwed on.

After university, Dick said, Katherine had spent a couple of years freelancing on various archaeological digs across Britain. This was how she became obsessed with dead Celtic civilizations. Began wearing primitive clothing and strange jewellery, smoking too much dope, tripping out on magic-mushroom tea. When she arrived back in Hereford, the Katherine bit had gone; she was just Moon, and more than a little weird.

The reason she’d come back to Hereford was the lure of the big Cathedral Close dig. Also, perhaps, the impending death of her mother – as if Moon had sensed this coming. Her mother had died after several years in and out of expensive psychiatric residential homes – one of the reasons Denny had kept working so hard. Now it looked like he had another one to provide for.

But Denny’s wife, Maggie, had decreed that Katherine wasn’t living with them, no way – this stemming from the Christmas before last, when Moon had come to stay and Maggie had found her stash under the baby’s cot. What a dramatic Christmas that had been. Now it was: Let her take her inheritance, smoke it, snort it, inject it into her arm… Just keep the mad bitch well out of our lives.

No wonder Maggie was paranoid. Denny’s mother seemed to have picked up psychiatric problems simply by marrying into the Moon family, like their instability was infectious.

Meanwhile, Katherine had flipped again. Bought some speed from a dealer in Hereford, disappeared into pubs and clubs for three days, and been pulled in by the police after nicking two skirts from Next. Denny had taken her to Dick Lyden, as part of the deal for a conditional discharge by Hereford magistrates.

He’d refurbished the flat over one of his shops for her, suggesting she ran the store for a while. Knowing this wasn’t entirely satisfactory – right in the city centre, too convenient for pubs and clubs and dealers, it was not really where he’d wanted her. But where did he want her? Well, somewhere safe. Somewhere he wouldn’t have to visit her too often and risk domestic strife.

But certainly not Dinedor Hill. Not in a million years. As for fucking Dyn Farm…

We got to stop her, man! Denny with his head in his hands, beating it on the shop counter when he heard about the barn. She can’t DO this!

But Moon had the money from her mother’s bequest. She’d already signed the lease with the latest people to own the farmhouse and its Grade Two listed outbuildings.

Think about it this way, Denny, Dick Lyden had suggested. The hill might have terrible memories for you, but she was just a child at the time. She has no memories of it at all. To Moon it’s simply the birthright of which she was robbed. So going back to the hill – to part of the actual family farm – could be a healing thing. Who knows? Might even be the making of her. If I were you, Denny, and I couldn’t disguise my feelings, I’d keep my distance. Now she’s done it, it would not be good for her to be exposed to any negativity.

And then Dick had said, Tell you what, why don’t we get Lol here to keep an eye on her? Most inoffensive chap I know, this. Patting Lol on the arm. No threat, you see? She mustn’t feel pressured in any way – that’s the important thing.

So Lol Robinson, ex rock-star (almost), sometime songwriter, former mental patient, had become Moon’s minder. Possibly because no one else really wanted to take that responsibility.

But that was OK. Lol needed some responsibility. It was fine.

Until this.

The rain had begun again. It misted Lol’s glasses and made a glossy slick of Moon’s waist-length hair, falling black and limp down her back.

As black and limp as the dead crow she held.

She was leaning back against the tree now, her right hand cupped under the bird.

‘Moon?’ Lol took a step backwards, stumbled to his knees in the mud, looking up at her. She was beautiful. Her big eyes were penetrating, like an owl’s.

‘Look,’ she said.

There was a spreading patch of blood, already the size of a dinner plate, on her dress from the stomach to the groin.

‘It fell dead at my feet,’ Moon said, ‘out of the sky. Isn’t that incredible?’

‘Is it?’ Lol said faintly. Appalled to see that her left hand, bloodied to the wrist, was actually moving inside the body of the crow. Loose feathers were sticking to the blood on her dress.

‘To the ancient Celts the crow or raven was a sacred and prophetic bird.’ Moon spoke as though she was addressing not one person but a group of students in a lecture room. ‘The hero Bran was possibly a personification of a raven god. There were also several crow or raven goddesses: Macha, Nemain, Badb and the Morrigan.’

Lol stood up but moved no closer to her.

‘It fell dead at my feet,’ she said again. ‘It was a gift – from the ancestors. A greeting on this the day of my homecoming.’

‘Like a housewarming present,’ Lol said before he could think.

He expected her to flare up, but she smiled and her eyes glowed.

‘Yes!’ She looked at Lol for the first time, and began to cry. ‘Oh, Lol, I can’t tell you. I can’t express…’

Her hand came out of the crow then, full of organs and intestines and bloody gunge.

Lol felt sick. ‘Moon, if it’s a gift—’

‘The gift,’ Moon said happily, ‘is prophecy! And inner vision. The point is that the crow was endowed with supernatural powers. It was honoured and feared and revered, OK? When this one fell to the earth, it was still warm and there was a small wound in the abdomen and I put my little finger into the wound and it just…’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Because it was meant, of course! By bathing my hands in its blood, I’m acquiring its powers. There’s a legend of Cuchulainn, where he does that. I…’ She held out the bird to Lol. ‘I don’t know what to do next.’

‘Bury it, I think,’ Lol said hopefully.

And Moon nodded, smiling through her tears.

Lol let her put the mutilated bird into his hands, trying not to look at it, fixing his gaze out over the city, where the Cathedral tower still merged with the steeple of All Saints under an orange-brown cloudbank.

Down below the ramparts, in the bowl of the ancient camp, they covered the crow with damp, fallen leaves. Lol wondered if maybe he should say some kind of prayer, but couldn’t think of one.

‘You’ll fly again,’ he said lamely to the leafy mound. ‘You will.’

He felt dazed and inadequate. Poor crow.

Poor bloody Moon.

She stood up, her long grey dress hemmed with mud. As he followed her out of the hollow, Lol thought of Merrily Watkins, whom he hadn’t seen since leaving Ledwardine. Would a priest conduct a funeral service for a carrion crow? He thought Merrily would.

Moon gathered her dark woollen shawl around her. Numbed, he followed her along the slippery path. Ahead of them was a nowfamiliar oak tree with the single dead branch pointing out of the top like a finger from a fist. This was where another steep, secret path dropped towards Moon’s new home in its dripping dell.

When the path curved to the left, and the barn’s metal flue poked out of the trees, Moon’s mood changed. Her face was a tremulous dawn.

‘I still can’t believe it.’ She stopped where the path became a series of long, shallow earthen steps held up by stones and rotting boards. ‘I’m back. I’m really back. And they want me back. They’ve given me their sign. Isn’t that just…?’ Moon shook her head, blown away.

Leaving Lol in a quandary – his hands sticky with crow bits and blood. Should he tell Denny about this? Or just Dick? Or not mention it at all?

‘I’d like to sleep now, Lol,’ Moon said.

‘Good idea,’ he said gratefully.

‘I can’t tell you how wonderful I feel.’

‘Good,’ Lol said. ‘That’s, er… good.’

Driving the old Astra back through the semi-industrial sprawl of Rotherwas and into the city, he couldn’t even think about it. He thought instead about stupid things, like maybe buying a bike, too, and getting fit like Moon who insisted she’d be pedalling to the shop in Capuchin Lane six days a week all through the coming winter.

He parked in a private yard behind the shop, in a spot which would have been Moon’s if she possessed a car, and he walked through an alley and into Capuchin Lane. It was also known these days as Church Street, but he and Moon both preferred its old name.

This was a wonderful street to live in: narrow, ancient, cobbled and closed to traffic, full of little shops and pubs, and ending at the Cathedral – presenting, in fact, the most medieval view of it, especially at dawn and in the evening when all the shops were closed and the hanging signs became black, romantic silhouettes.

The flat over the shop called John Barleycorn – one of Moon’s brother’s shops – had been semi-derelict when Moon had first lived here. This was when she was helping with the archaeological excavation in the Cathedral Close, before the digging site was released for a new building to house the Mappa Mundi and the Chained Library. More than a thousand skeletons had been unearthed, and Moon had spent her days among the dead and her nights on a camp bed in this same flat. Walking out each morning to the Cathedral – the dream developing.

She kept a photograph of herself holding two medieval skulls from the massive charnel pit they’d found – all three of them wearing damaged grins. When the excavation ended and the bones were removed, Moon wanted to stay on there and Denny wanted her to leave, so there was tension, and soon afterwards Moon stole the skirts from Next, and the police found her stoned on the Castle Green. And that was when Dick had finally agreed to renovate the flat over the shop as a proper home for her.

Moon had seemed fairly content here in Capuchin Lane. Only Dinedor Hill, in fact, could have lured her away – and it did.

Lol, in need of somewhere to live, had then himself taken over the flat. Denny was glad about that, as it meant Lol could keep an eye on Moon during her working hours, and watch out for any hovering dope-dealers.

He had his key to the side door, but went in through the shop to report to Denny.

Moon’s much older, and very much bulkier, brother sat on a stool behind the counter, trying to tune a balalaika. Although there was only one customer in the store, a girl flicking through the CDs, it seemed quite full; for in a street of small shops this was the very smallest. And it was full of the busy sound of Gomez from big speakers – and Denny was here, a one-man crowd in himself.

‘It go all right then, my old mate?’

‘Fine.’

‘Shit.’

As well as this shop, Denny ran a specialist hi-fi business, and his own recording studio in the cellar of his house up towards Breinton. Lol had produced a couple of albums for him there: local bands, limited editions. Denny was keen to get him back on to the studio floor, but Lol wasn’t ready yet; the songs weren’t quite there – something still missing.

Denny said, ‘No fights, breakages, tears?’

‘Would you count tears of joy?’

‘Shit.’

Lol decided to keep quiet about the crow.

Denny twanged the balalaika and winced. ‘Don’t get yourself too comfy in that flat, mate. She changes like the wind, my little sister.’ He shook his bald head, and his gold-plated novelty earring swung like a tiny censer.

‘You hope.’ Lol couldn’t remember feeling exactly comfy anywhere.

‘Yeah,’ Denny said. ‘Don’t go back, that’s my philosophy. Never in life do you fucking well go back.’

Lol shrugged, helpless. ‘Whatever that place does to you, it has the opposite effect on her. You can’t get around it: she’s happy. She walks into the woods, up to the camp—’

‘Yeah… and all the time passing the place where her fucking father topped himself! What does that say to you?’

Denny sniffed hard and plucked twice at the balalaika’s strings, then laid it on the counter in disgust. ‘What use is a three-string shoebox on a stick? Kathy bought it from this poor, homeless busker, probably got the BMW parked round the corner.’

‘Soft-hearted,’ Lol said.

‘Soft in the head! I’ll tell you one thing: first sign of unusual behaviour, any hint of dope up there – she’s out. Kicking and screaming or…’ The CD ended and Denny lowered his voice. ‘Or however. Right?’

Lol nodded.

‘Long as we agree on that, mate,’ Denny said, as the girl customer turned around from the CD racks clutching a copy of Beth Orton’s Trailer Park, a slow delighted smile pushing her tongue into a corner of her mouth.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Lol Robinson, wow.’

‘Oh,’ Lol said. It seemed like ages since he’d seen her. He smiled, realizing how much he’d missed her even though sometimes, like Moon, she could be trouble. Well, not quite like Moon.

‘Hey, cool,’ the girl said. ‘And that same old Roswell sweatshirt. Is that the same one, or did you buy a set?’

‘Hello, Jane,’ Lol said. He wondered how much she’d overheard.

‘So, like who’s Kathy?’ Jane Watkins said. Dark mocking eyes under dark hair. A lot like her mother.

5 The Last Exorcist

THE BISHOP SMILED hard, talked fast, and wore purple as bishops do.

‘The Church, OK?’ His voice was public-school with the edges sanded off. ‘The Church is… hierarchical, conservative, full of rivalry, feuding, back-stabbing. And inherently incapable of ever getting anything bloody well done.’

The Bishop wore purple all over: a tracksuit and jogging gear. The Bishop jogged all over the city and its outskirts, usually in the early mornings and the evenings, covering, according to the Hereford Times, a minimum of thirty miles a week.

‘Now you’d think, wouldn’t you, that organizing an office in the Cathedral cloisters would be the easiest thing? Scores of cells and crannies and cubicles, but… all of them the Dean’s. And if the Dean says there isn’t an office to spare, I’m not even permitted to argue. Within the precincts of the Cathedral, even God bows to the Dean. So we shall have to look elsewhere. I’m so sorry, Merrily.’

‘It’s probably meant, Bishop.’

‘Mick,’ corrected the Bishop. ‘Meant? Oh it was meant, for sure. The bastard means to frustrate me. Who, after all, is the oldest member of his Chapter? Dobbs.’ The Bishop tossed the name out like junk-mail. ‘The old man’s ubiquitous, hovering silently like some dark, malign spectre. I’d like to… I want to exorcize Dobbs.’

‘Well, I feel very awkward about the whole thing.’ Merrily poured tea for them both.

‘Oh, why?’ The Bishop quizzically tilted his head, as though he really didn’t understand. He sugared his tea. ‘You know the very worst thing about Dobbs? He actually frightens people – imagine. You have what you are convinced is an unwelcome presence in your house, your nerves are shot to hell, you finally gather the courage – or the sheer desperation – to go to the Church for help. And what should arrive at your door but this weird, shambling creature dressed like an undertaker and mumbling at you like Poe’s doleful raven. Well, you’d rather hang on to the bloody ghost, wouldn’t you?’

The Bishop, Merrily had noticed, said ‘bloody’ rather a lot, but nothing stronger, always conscious of the parameters of his image as a cool Christian. She was determined to be neither overawed nor underawed by Mick Hunter this afternoon, neither bulldozed nor seduced. She wished he was more like Huw Owen, but men like Huw never ever got to be bishops.

‘Listen… Merrily…’ His voice dropping an octave – latenight DJ. ‘I realize how you must feel. If you were the kind of person who was utterly confident about it, I wouldn’t want you in this job.’

… not a fundamentalist, not a charismatic or a happy-clappy, you’ve no visible axe to grind and I can see why he was drawn to you. You’re in many ways almost exactly the kind of person we need in the trenches.

‘Do you know Huw Owen?’ she asked.

‘Only by reputation. Quite a vocal campaigner for the ordination of women long before it became fa… feasible.’

Fashionable, he’d been about to say. Until it became fashionable, Mick Hunter would have kept very quiet on the issue. Merrily was trying to see him as Jane saw him, but it wasn’t easy; Mick’s blue eyes were clear and blazing with a wild integrity. He had a – somehow unepiscopal – blue jaw. He smelled very lightly of clean, honest, jogger’s sweat and of something smokily indistinct which made her think, rather shockingly, of what a very long time it had been since she’d last had sex.

‘Your late husband was a lawyer, wasn’t he?’ he said, startling her upright, tea spilling.

‘Yes.’ She was blushing. ‘I… me too. I mean, I was going to be one too. Until Jane came into the picture, and a few other things changed.’

‘Shame,’ the Bishop said. ‘Road accident, wasn’t it?’

‘On the M5. He… he hit a bridge.’

They hit a bridge. Sean and Karen Adair, his clerk and girlfriend and accomplice in a number of delicate arrangements with iffy businessmen. Dying flung together in a ball of fire, at the time when Merrily was balancing an inevitable divorce against her chances of ordination, and Jane was just starting secondary school. How much of this did the Bishop know? All of it, probably.

‘Look,’ she had to say this, ‘the thing is, Huw’s position on the ordination of women doesn’t extend to Deliverance ministry – did you know that? He doesn’t think we’re ready for all that yet.’

His eyes widening. She realized he’d probably sent her on this particular course precisely because he knew Huw was sympathetic to women priests.

‘Not ready for all that?’ The eyes narrowing again. ‘All what?’

‘He doesn’t feel that we have the necessary weight of tradition behind us to take on… whatever’s out there.’

‘Which is a little bit preposterous’ – Mick Hunter leaned back – ‘don’t you think?’

‘It’s not what I think that matters.’

‘No, quite. At the end of the day, it’s what I think. The Deliverance consultant’s responsible to the Bishop, and only to the Bishop. And I think – without any positive discrimination – that, if anything, this is a job a woman can do better than a man. It demands delicacy, compassion… qualities not exactly manifested by Dobbs.’

‘I’ve… I’ve been trying, you know, to work out exactly how you do see the job.’

Mick Hunter stirred his tea thoughtfully. Two tables away, a couple of well-dressed, not-quite-elderly women were openly watching him. Beefcake bishop – a new phenomenon.

‘OK, right,’ he said. ‘While you were in Wales, we had some basic research carried out. Quick phone-call to all the parish clergy: a few facts and figures. Did you know for instance that in the past six months, in this diocese alone, there have been between twenty and thirty appeals to the Church for assistance with perceived psychic disturbance?’

‘Really? My God.’

‘And rising.’ Mick smiled. ‘If the Church was a business, we’d be calling this a major growth area.’

The Bishop then talked about apparent psychic blackspots revealed by the survey – the north of the diocese was worst – and Merrily thought about how fate pushed you around, all the unplanned directions your life took. Whether she would ever actually have become a lawyer had she not become pregnant while still at university. If she would ever have become a priest had Sean not died when he did and if she hadn’t discovered he was a crook. If she would ever have been drawn into the strange shadow-world of Deliverance, had her own vicarage in Ledwardine not been tenanted by an essence of something which no one else had experienced.

She felt targeted, exposed. She wanted to leap up from the table and run to the car and smoke several cigarettes.

Instead she said, ‘What exactly are we talking about here?’

The Bishop shrugged. ‘Mostly, I suspect, about paranoia, psychiatric problems, loneliness, isolation, stress. Modern society, Merrily. Post-millennial angst. We’re certainly not talking about the medieval world of Canon Dobbs. Nor, I think, should we be sending the local vicar along just to have a cup of coffee and intone a few prayers, which is what happens in most cases now.’

She began to understand about the office. He would want one that actually said DELIVERANCE CONSULTANT on its door. He wanted to bring the job out of the closet.

‘I’m glad the awful word Exorcism’s been ditched,’ he said, ‘though I’m not entirely happy with Deliverance either. A less portentous term would be “rescue”, don’t you think?’

Rescue Consultant? Spiritual Rescue Service? SRS? She raised her cup to mask a smile. He didn’t notice.

‘It would still be part of the parish priest’s role to deal, in the initial stages, with people who think they’re being haunted or little Darren’s got the Devil in him or whatever. But the public also need to know there’s an efficient machinery inside the Church for dealing with such problems, and that there’s a particular person to whom they can turn. And I don’t want that person to look like Dobbs. We need to be seen as sympathetic, non-judgemental, user-friendly. You’ve read Perry’s book on Deliverance?’

‘The set text, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a start. I find Michael Perry rather too credulous, but I like his insistence on not overreacting. The job’s about counselling. It’s about being a spiritual Samaritan – about listening. You notice that Perry seldom seems to advocate exorcizing a place?’

‘He suggests a Major Exorcism should primarily be focused on a demonically possessed person, and then only when a number of other procedures have proved ineffective.’

Mick Hunter put down his cup. ‘I never want to hear of a so-called Major Exorcism. It’s crude, primitive and almost certainly ineffective.’

Merrily blinked. ‘You don’t think that in the presence of extreme evil…?’

‘Evil’s a disease,’ the Bishop said. ‘In fact it’s many diseases. If we’re going to deal with it, we have to study the symptoms, consider the nature of the particular malady, and then apply the correct treatment with sensitivity, precision and care. The Major Exorcism, quite frankly, is the kind of medieval bludgeon which in my opinion the post-millennial Church can do without. Are you with me here?’

I don’t know, Merrily thought wildly. I don’t know…

‘It’s hard…’ She took a breath to calm herself. Mick Hunter’s enthusiasm picked you up and carried you along and then put you down suddenly, and you didn’t know where you were. ‘It’s hard to express an opinion about something you’ve really had no experience of. I don’t think anyone can possibly—’

‘Merrily…’ He put his hand over hers on the white tablecloth. ‘One of my faults is expecting too much of people too soon, I realize that. But I know from my predecessor that you’ve proved yourself to be a resourceful, resilient person. The appalling Ledwardine business – I know you don’t like your part in all that to be talked about…’

‘No.’

‘But you’ve shown you have nerve and wisdom and you can think on your feet. OK, I’m aware that we’re breaking new ground here, but it’s the direction I believe every diocese will be going in within five years.’ He paused. ‘I’ve had a word with Gareth, by the way.’

‘The Archdeacon?’

‘Under the reorganization, you were due to be awarded two extra parishes before the end of the year. I pointed out to Gareth that, under the circumstances, that would be far too much of a burden.’

‘You mean it’s either the Deliverance role or two more parishes to run?’

‘The two parishes would be a lot easier, Merrily – a quieter life.’

‘Yes.’

‘If it’s a quiet life you want?’

What she wanted was a cigarette, but she knew the Bishop hated them. What she wanted was for Huw Owen to have been proved wrong, but everything Huw had forecast had been dead right. She would wind up with her picture in the Hereford Times, although probably without the crucifix.

‘I’m going to have to play this slowly and diplomatically,’ Mick Hunter said. ‘Dobbs won’t go until he’s too shaky to hold a cup of holy water, and as long as he’s here he has the support of the Dean’s cabal. Well, all right, he can still be an exorcist if he wants. That doesn’t prevent me appointing a consultant to, say, prepare a detailed report on the demand for Deliverance services.’

Merrily said, ‘I don’t like this.’

‘Merely politics. I’m afraid I’m quite good at politics.’

She sighed. ‘You’ve given me a lot to think about, Bishop.’

‘Mick.’

‘Could I have some time?’

‘To pray for guidance?’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said, ‘I suppose that’s what I’ll do.’

‘Call my office if you’d like another meeting.’ Mick stood up, zipped his purple tracksuit top.

‘Er… if you can’t get an office in the cloisters, that means I’d be working from home then?’

At least she wouldn’t have to see the rather scary Dobbs.

‘Oh no.’ Mick grinned. ‘The Dean doesn’t screw me so easily. I told you I’m quite good at this. I’m going to put you in the Palace.’

In the car going home, Merrily put on Tori Amos’s From the Choirgirl Hotel because it was doomy and gothic and would keep Jane quiet. The kid would want to know what the Bishop had been so keen to talk about, but first Merrily needed to work it out for herself.

It certainly wasn’t what Jane had imagined, a clandestine return to witch-hunting, sneaky rearguard action by a defensive Church. There was no sign of New Age, Old Enemy paranoia in Mick Hunter. He was simply enfolding the Deliverance ministry into his campaign to project the diocese further into the new millennium as a vibrant, caring, essential institution. Was that so wrong? But what did he see as the enemy?

… paranoia, psychiatric problems, loneliness, isolation, stress, post-millennial angst…

Clearly, the Bishop’s liberalism did not extend to the supernatural. Merrily suspected he didn’t believe in ghosts, and that for him the borderline between demonic possession and schizophrenia would not exist – which was worrying. To what extent was healthy scepticism compatible with Christian faith? And what did he mean: Put you in the Palace?

‘… little record shop in Church Street?’

‘Huh? Sorry, flower.’

Jane reached out and turned down the stereo. Merrily glanced across at her. Jane turning down music – this had never happened before.

‘I said, who do you think I ran into in that poky little record shop in Church Street?’

It was almost dark, and they were leaving the city via the King’s Acre roundabout, with a fourteenth-century cross on its island.

‘Close. Lol Robinson.’ Jane said. ‘You do remember… ?’

‘Oh,’ Merrily said casually. There was a time when she could have become too fond of Lol Robinson. ‘Right. How is he?’

Jane told her how Lol had just started renting this brilliant flat over the shop, with a view over the cobbles and two pubs about twenty yards away.

‘Belongs to the guy who owns the shop. His sister used to live there but she’s moved out. Her name’s Katherine Moon, but she’s just known as Moon, and I think she and Lol… Anyway, he looks exactly the same. Hasn’t grown, same little round glasses, still wearing that black sweat-shirt with the alien face on the front – possibly symbolic of the way he feels he relates to society and feels that certain people relate to him.’

‘So, apart from the sartorial sameness, did he seem OK?’

‘No, he was like waving his arms around and drooling at the mouth. Of course he seemed OK. We went for a coffee in the All Saints café. I’ve never been in there before. It’s quite cool.’

‘It’s in a church.’

‘Yeah, I noticed. Nice to see one fulfilling a useful service. Anyway, I got out of Lol what he’s doing now. He didn’t want to tell me, but I can be fairly persistent.’

‘You nailed his guitar hand to the prayerbook shelf?’

‘Look, do you want to know what he’s doing or not?’

‘All right.’

‘You ready for this? He’s training to be a shrink.’

‘What? But he was—’

‘Well, not a shrink exactly. He hates psychiatrists because they just give you drugs to keep you quiet. More a kind of psychotherapist. He was consulting one in Hereford, and the guy realized that, after years in and out of mental hospitals, Lol knew more -ologies and -isms than he himself did, so now he’s employing him a couple of days a week for sort of on-the-job training, and Lol’s doing these night classes. Isn’t that so cool?’

‘It…’ Merrily thought about this. ‘I suppose it is, really. Lol would be pretty good. He doesn’t judge people. Yeah, that’s cool.’

‘Also, he’s playing again. He’s made some tapes, although he won’t let anybody hear them.’

‘Even you?’

‘I’m working on it. I may go back there – I like that shop. Lots of stuff by indy folk bands. And I’m really glad I saw him. I didn’t want to lose touch just because he moved out of Ledwardine.’

Merrily said cautiously, ‘Lol needed time to get himself together.’

‘Oh,’ Jane said airily, ‘I think he needed more than that, don’t you?’

‘Don’t start.’

‘Like maybe somebody who wasn’t terrified of getting into a relationship because of what the parish might think.’

‘Stop there,’ Merrily said lightly, ‘all right?’

‘Fine.’ Jane prodded the music up to disco level and turned to look out of the side window at the last of the grim amber sinking on to the shelf of the Black Mountains. A desultory rain filmed the windscreen.

‘Still,’ Merrily thought she heard the kid mumble, ‘it’s probably considered socially OK to fuck a bishop.’

That night, praying under her bedroom window in the vicarage, Merrily realized the Deliverance issue wasn’t really a problem she needed to hang on God at this stage. Her usual advice to parishioners facing a decision was to gather all the information they could get from available sources on both sides of the argument, and only then apply for a solution.

Fair enough. She would seek independent advice within the Church.

She went to sit on the edge of the bed, looking out at the lights of Ledwardine speckling the trees. They made her think of what Huw Owen had said about the targeting of women priests.

Little rat-eyes in the dark.

She hadn’t even raised that point with Mick Hunter. He would have taken it seriously, but not in the way it was meant by Huw.

Merrily shivered lightly and slid into bed, cuddling the hot water bottle, aware of Ethel the black cat curling on the duvet against her ankles, remembering the night Ethel had first appeared at the vicarage in the arms of Lol Robinson after she’d received a kicking from a drunk. She hoped Lol Robinson would be happy with his girlfriend. Lol and Merrily – that would never have worked.

Later, on the edge of sleep, she heard Huw Owen’s flat, nasal voice as if it were actually in the room.

Little rat-eyes in the dark.

And jerked awake.

OK. She’d absorbed Huw’s warning, listened to the Bishop’s plans.

It was clear that what she had to do now, not least for the sake of her conscience, was go back to Hereford and talk to Canon Dobbs.

The Last Exorcist.

Merrily lay down again and slept.

6 Sweat and Mothballs

‘OH YES,’ MOON said, ‘he was outside the window, peering in – his face right up to the glass. His eyes were full of this awful, blank confusion. I don’t think he knew who I was. That was the worst thing: he didn’t know me.’

‘He was in the… garden?’ How do I handle this? Lol thought. She’s getting worse.

‘I ran out,’ Moon said. ‘Then I saw him again at the bottom of the steps leading up to the camp. And then he wasn’t there any more.’

She was sitting on a cardboard box full of books. There were about two dozen boxes dumped all over the living area. Lol hadn’t been into the kitchen or the bathroom but, except for the futon in the open loft, it looked exactly the way it had been the last time he was here. She’d refused offers of help from Denny and Lol, and from Dick Lyden’s wife Ruth. You had to arrange your possessions yourself, she’d insisted, otherwise you’d never know where anything was.

But nothing at all seemed to have been put away, nothing even unpacked. It was as though she’d gone straight to bed when he left her on Saturday and had just got up again, four days later.

Sleeping Beauty situation, fairytale again.

The point about Moon was that she was utterly singleminded. Most of the time she had no small talk, and no interest in other people, although she could be very generous when some problem was put under her nose – like buying the busker’s balalaika.

But now she’d found her father, and nothing else mattered.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘and he was wearing a flat cap which I recognized.’

Moon was wearing an ankle-length, white satin nightdress which had collected a lot of dust, a thick silver torc around her neck. She’d had on nothing over the nightdress when she’d opened the door to Lol. She didn’t seem cold. It was wildly erotic. Lol wondered how doctors coped with this.

‘It was this grey checked one with all the lining hanging out. Mummy always kept it – I mean for years, anyway. She talked about all the times she used to try and get him to throw it away. Denny threw it away in the end, I suppose. Now my father has it back.’

Delusional, Lol thought. Because she doesn’t seem scared. It has to be wishful thinking. But what did it mean, that she’d wished up a father who didn’t seem to recognize her?

The long nightdress rustled like leaves as Moon stood up, glided to the window.

‘When I was little, I used to wonder if that was the cap he’d worn when he shot himself, so that was why it was all torn. Of course, the gun would have made much more of a mess than that, but you don’t know these things when you’re little, do you?’

It occurred to him that this was the first time she’d spoken about her father.

Her father had killed himself when she was about two years old. Denny said she had no memories of him, but there was probably some resentment because his folly was the reason they’d had to sell up and leave the hill.

This fucking insane investment. Some mate of the old man’s had developed this sweet sparkling cider he reckoned was going to snatch at least half the Babycham market. Dad threw everything at it – sold off about fifty acres, left the farm non-viable.

They’d lost the farm. Which was said to have been in the family since at least the Middle Ages. Or much longer, if you listened to Moon.

Denny had said, The day we left, the old man took his shotgun for a last, short walk. It’s a thing farmers do when they feel they’ve let their ancestors down.

‘How, um…?’ Lol’s mouth was dry. He sat down on another box of books. ‘How do you feel about your dad now?’

Moon turned to Lol, her eyes shining. ‘I have to reach out to him. The ancestors have enabled me to do that, OK?’

The crow. By bathing my hands in its blood, I’m acquiring its powers.

‘They sent him back. He doesn’t know why, but he will. He has to know who I am – that’s the first stage. I have to let him know I’m all right about him.’

‘You’re not… just a bit scared?’

‘He’s my father. And I’m his only hope of finding peace. He knows he’s got a lot of making up to do. To Mummy as well, but that’s out of our hands now.’

She went silent, the fervour in her eyes slipping away.

‘Your mum… do you feel she’s at peace?’ Lol didn’t know why he’d asked that, except to get her talking again.

‘I don’t know. She was never the same afterwards. I mean, all my life she had problems with her nerves. It was lucky Denny was practically grown-up by then, and so he took charge. It was Denny who was always pushing me to do well at school, determined I should go to university because he hadn’t. Taking the father’s role, you know? He owes Denny too, I suppose.’

‘How can he make it up to you?’ Lol said softly. ‘How can your father help?’

She blinked at him, as if that was obvious. ‘With my book, of course – my book about the Dinedor People. He can help me with the book. He can make them talk to me. They sent him to me, so I must be able to reach them through him.’

‘Who?’

‘The ancestors.’

The barn was quite small: just four rooms. It had been converted initially as extra holiday accommodation by the present owners of the farmhouse, some people called Purefoy, who apparently ran a bed-and-breakfast business. But this had not been a very good summer for weather or tourism, and they’d presumably realized they could make more money with a longterm let. Not much ground, of course. No room for a garage, quite difficult access, but a beautiful rural situation.

Moon had come up here on the mountain-bike Denny had bought her in the aftermath of the shoplifting case. It was a hot day and she was pushing the bike up towards the camp when she suddenly, as she put it, felt her ancestors calling out to her.

It was the most incredible experience. Like the one Alfred Watkins must have had, when he first saw those lines in the landscape. Except I was aware of just one line, leading from me to the hill and back through the centuries. The hill was vibrating under me. I was shaking. I realized this was what I’d been training for, during all those years of digging people up. But that was only bones. I want to unearth real people. I want to communicate with them. I knew I had to discover the story of the hill and the Dinedor People. It was just an amazing moment. I felt as light as a butterfly.

Moon had been up here until the dusk came. She’d found herself almost frantically knocking on the doors of farmhouses and cottages all around the hill to find out who was living here and who had lived here for the most generations. Discovering, as she’d suspected she might, that the oldest Dinedor family was her own. Moon maintained that her family had come out of the original settlement on Dinedor Hill, all those years before the time of Christ.

But none lived here any more. Her father had snapped the line.

Close to sunset, Moon had arrived at Dyn Farm, at the old, mellowed farmhouse near to the camp, to find the Purefoys – Londoners, early-retired – in the garden.

Usually, as you know, I’m so shy, unless I’ve taken something. But I was glowing. They didn’t seem very friendly at first, a bit reserved like a lot of new people, but when I told them who I was, they became quite excited and invited me in. Of course, they were asking me all sorts of questions about the house that I couldn’t really answer. I was just a toddler when we left.

Then they showed me the barn. And I felt that my whole life had been leading up to that moment.

Moon came over and stood in front of Lol, close enough for him to see her nipples through the nightdress. Oh God! He kept looking at her face.

‘I wanted to tell him – my father – that it was OK, it was me, I was back. I was here. I wanted to tell him it was all right, that I’d help him to find peace.’

‘You tried to talk to him?’

‘No, not last night. I couldn’t get close enough to him. This was the first night… last Saturday. Yeah, I had a sleep and then I went for a walk in the woods, where he shot himself. I went there when it was dark.’

‘You saw him then?’ This is eerie. This is not good.

‘I didn’t see him then. That was when I started to call out for him.’

‘Literally?’

‘Maybe. I remember standing in the woods and screaming, “Daddy!” It was funny… It was like I was a small child again.’

Lol said tentatively, ‘You, um… you think that was safe, on your own?’

‘Oh, nothing will ever happen to me on the hill. I intend to walk and walk, day and night, until I know every tree and bush of those woods, every fold of every field. I’ve got to make up for all those years away, you know? I have to absolutely immerse myself in the hill – until it goes everywhere with me. Until it fills my dreams.’

‘So when you… when you saw him, that was a kind of dream, was it?’

She looked down at him. Her nightdress smelled of sweat and mothballs. Her hair hung down over each shoulder, like a stole.

She said, ‘Are you supposed to be my therapist now, Lol?’

‘I don’t think so, not officially. I just help Dick.’

‘Dick’s hopeless, isn’t he? Dick’s a dead loss. He doesn’t believe in anything outside of textbook psychology.’

‘He’s a nice bloke,’ Lol said awkwardly. ‘He wants to do his best for you.’

‘He’s an idiot. If you told Dick I’d seen my father, he’d come up with a beautiful theory involving hallucinations or drugs. But you see I don’t have any drugs. I don’t need anything up here; it’s a constant, natural high. And it would be kind of an insult anyway. And I have never had hallucinations, ever.’

Her hair swung close to his face. It was the kind of hair medieval maidens dangled from high windows so that knights could climb up and rescue them.

‘So it’s not official,’ she said. ‘I mean us: we’re not counsellor and patient or anything.’

Lol was confused. He felt himself blushing.

‘We’re a bit official,’ he said.

‘You have to report back to Dick?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You’ll tell him about this?’

‘Not if…’

Moon turned away and dipped like a heron between two boxes, coming up with a dark green cardigan which she pulled on.

‘Then it was a dream.’ She bent and pouted at him, a petulant child. ‘It was all a dream.’

7 Graveyard Angel

A MYSTERIOUS SUMMONS to the Bishop’s Palace.

Wednesday afternoon: market day, and the city still crowded. Merrily found a parking space near The Black Lion in Bridge Street. She might have been allowed to drive into the Palace courtyard, but this could be considered presumptuous; she didn’t want that – almost didn’t want to be noticed sliding through the shoppers in her black woollen two-piece, a grey silk scarf over her dog-collar.

Looking out, while she was in the area, for Canon Dobbs, the exorcist.

What she needed was a confidential chat with the old guy, nobody else involved. To clear the air, maybe even iron things out. If she took on this task, she wanted no hard feelings, no trail of resentment.

Contacting Dobbs was not so easy. In Deliverance, according to Huw Owen, low-profile was essential, to avoid being troubled by cranks and nutters or worse. But his guy was well below the parapet – not even, as she discovered, in the phone book. As a residential canon at the Cathedral he had no parishioners to be accessible to, but ex-directory?

Evensong at Ledwardine Church had recently been suspended by popular demand, or rather the absence of it, so on Sunday night – with Jane out at a friend’s – Merrily had found time to ring Alan Crombie, the Rector of Madley. But he wasn’t much help.

‘Never had to consult him, Merrily – but I remember Colin Strong. When he was at Vowchurch, there was a persistent problem at a farmhouse and he ended up getting Dobbs in. I think he simply did it through the Bishop’s office. You leave a message and he gets in touch with you.’

Well, that was no use. It would get right back to Mick Hunter.

‘So ordinary members of the public have no real access to Dobbs?’

‘Not initially,’ Alan Crombie said. ‘It’s strictly clergy-consultation. That’s normal practice. If you have a problem you go to your local priest and he decides if he can cope with it or if he needs specialist advice.’

‘What happened at Vowchurch? Did Dobbs deal with it?’

‘Lord knows. One of his rules is total secrecy. Anything gets in the papers, I gather his wrath is awesome to behold. Do you have another little problem in that department yourself, Merrily?’

‘No, I…’ Oh, what the hell! ‘Off the record, Alan, the Bishop’s asked me to succeed Dobbs when he… retires.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Silence, then a nervous laugh. ‘Well… rather you than me.’

‘I realize I may have to buy a black bag and a big hat.’

‘God, you don’t want to go in for that kind of thing,’ Alan had said with another nervous laugh. ‘Have all kinds of perverts following you home.’

Merrily walked along King Street, the Cathedral up ahead filling her vision. She had no idea what Dobbs looked like and saw no men in big hats with black bags.

Although it didn’t look much from the front, the Bishop’s Palace was perhaps the most desirable dwelling in Hereford: next door to the Cathedral but closer to the River Wye, and dreamily visible from the public footpath on the opposite bank, with its big white windows on mellow red brick, tree-fringed lawns sloping to the water.

Inside, she’d never been further than the vastly refurbished twelfth-century Great Hall where receptions were held. Today she didn’t even make it across the courtyard. Sophie Hill, the Bishop’s elegant white-haired lay-secretary, met her at the entrance, steering her through a door under the gatehouse and up winding stone stairs, about twenty of them.

‘It’s not very big, but Michael thought you’d like it better that way.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Merrily pulled off her scarf.

‘It could be quite charming’ – Sophie reached beyond her to push open the door at the top of the steps – ‘with a few pictures and things. To the left, please, Mrs Watkins.’

There were two offices in the gatehouse: a bigger one with a vista of Broad Street… and this.

Sloping ceiling, timbered and whitewashed walls, a desk with a phone. A scuffed repro captain’s chair that swivelled, two filing cabinets, a small bookcase with a Bible and some local reference books, including Jane’s one-time bible, The Folklore of Herefordshire by Ella Mary Leather.

Merrily walked uncertainly over to the window overlooking the courtyard and the former stables, a few parked cars and great stacks of split logs for the Bishop’s fires.

‘Welcome to Deliverance Tower,’ said Sophie deadpan. ‘The computer’s on order.’

Walking dazed into the blustery sunshine on Broad Street, Merrily felt the hand of fate so heavily on her shoulder that she nearly threw up an arm to shake it off.

It had felt good up in the gatehouse, almost cosy. On top of the city and yet remote from it – a refuge, an eyrie. It had felt right.

Careful. Don’t be seduced on the first date.

Sophie had said the Bishop had planned to see her himself, but Mrs Hunter had an important appointment and her own car was being serviced. This appeared to be true; through the window, Merrily had watched Mick, in clerical shirt under what was almost certainly an Armani jacket, accompany his wife to a dusty BMW in British racing green. She saw that Val Hunter was very tall, nearly as tall as the Bishop. Angular, heronlike, tawny hair thrown back, a beauty with breeding. They had two sons at boarding school; although Mick had confessed, in an interview with the Observer, to having very mixed feelings about private education. Merrily suspected his wife didn’t share them.

‘He’s still rather feeling his way,’ Sophie had confided, ‘but he does want change, and I’m afraid he’ll be terribly disappointed if you walk away from this, Mrs Watkins. He regards it as a very meaningful step for the female ministry.’

At the top of Broad Street now, Merrily stared at the rings in a jeweller’s window, and saw her reflection and all the people passing behind her – one man with a briefcase looking over his shoulder at her legs while her back was turned.

She began to tremble. She needed a cigarette.

Actually, even stronger than that, came the realization that she needed to pray.

Like now.

Abruptly, as though obeying some hypnotic command, she turned back towards the Cathedral, rapidly crossing the green and once again guiltily winding the scarf about her throat to cover the collar. She wanted no one to see her, no one to approach.

Within yards of the north door, she thought of going around the back to the cloisters, asking the first person she didn’t recognize where Canon Dobbs lived, but by now the compulsion to pray was too strong, a racing in the blood.

She breathed out. Jesus!

It happened only rarely like this. Like the day she drove into the country with a blinding headache, and ended up following a track to a cell-like church dedicated to some forgotten Celtic saint where – when she’d most needed it; when she was just finding out the sordid truth about Sean’s business – there’d been this sudden blissful sense of blue and gold, and a lamplit path opening in front of her.

A group was entering the Cathedral; it looked like a Women’s Institute party. ‘Isn’t there a café?’ someone said grumpily.

Merrily felt like pushing past, but waited at the end of the line as the women moved singly through the porch. When she was inside, she saw them fanning into the aisles, heard echoes of footsteps and birdlike voices spiralling through sacred stone caverns.

And she was just standing there on her own and tingling with need.

‘Welcome to Hereford Cathedral.’ An amplified voice from the distant pulpit, the duty chaplain. ‘If you’d all please be seated, we’ll begin the tour with a short prayer. Thank you.’

Sweating now, almost panicking, Merrily stumbled through the first available doorway and slithered to her knees in the merciful gloom of the fifteenth-century chantry chapel of Bishop John Stanbury, with its gilded triptych and its luxuriously carved and moulded walls and ceilings merging almost organically, it seemed, in a rush of rippling honeyed stone.

When she put her hands together she could feel the tiny hairs on the backs of them standing electrically on end.

‘God,’ she was whispering. ‘What is it? What is it?’

That sensation of incredible potential: all the answers to all the questions no more than an instant away, an atom of time, a membrane of space.

‘There’s this picture of her,’ Jane said, ‘that she once threw away, only I rescued it from the bin for purposes of future leverage and blackmail and stuff. I think she knows I’ve got it, but she never says anything.’

They walked past the school tennis courts, their nets removed for the winter, and across to the sixth-form car park where Rowenna’s Fiesta stood, six years old and lime-green but otherwise brilliant.

‘She’s wearing this frock like a heavy-duty binliner, right? And her hair’s kind of bunched up with these like plastic spikes sticking out. She’s got on this luminous white lipstick. And her eyes are like under about three economy packs of cheap mascara.’

Rowenna shook her head sadly.

‘Her favourite band,’ Jane said, ‘was Siouxsie and the Banshees.’

‘Don’t,’ said Rowenna, pained.

‘Well, actually they weren’t bad.’

Rowenna unlocked the Fiesta. ‘You could always sell the picture to the tabloids.’

‘Yeah, but she’d have to do something controversial first, to get them interested. Just another woman priest who used to be a punk, that isn’t enough, is it? I suppose I could take it to the Hereford Times.’

‘Who’d pay you about enough to buy a couple of CDs.’

‘Yeah, mid-price ones.’ Jane climbed into the passenger seat. ‘No, the point I was trying to make: you look at that picture and you can somehow see the future priest there. You know what I mean, all dark and ritualistic?’

‘What, she’s some kind of vestment fetishist?’

‘No! It’s just… oh shit.’

Dean Wall and Danny Gittoes, famous sad Ledwardine louts, were leaning over the car, Dean’s big face up against the passenger window. Jane wound it down. Dean fumbled out his ingratiating leer.

‘All right for a lift home, ladies?’

‘Not today, OK?’ Rowenna said.

‘In fact, not ever.’ Jane cranked up the window. ‘Like, no offence, but we’d rather not wind up raped and the car burned out, if that’s OK with you.’

Dean was saying, ‘You f—’ as Jane wound the window the last inch.

‘Foot down, Ro.’

Rowenna drove off, smiling.

‘Nicely handled, kitten. Thanks.’

Rowenna was new at the school, but nearly two years older than Jane. On account of her family moving around a lot and a long spell of illness, she’d got way behind, so she’d needed to re-start her A-level course. She was a cool person – in a way a kind of older sister, a role she seemed to like.

‘You don’t mean,’ said Jane, astounded, ‘that you have actually given those two hairballs a lift? Like, how did you get the slime off the upholstery?’

Rowenna laughed. ‘I see now it was a grave mistake, and I won’t do it again. What were you saying about your mother? I didn’t quite grasp the nature of the problem.’

‘Oh, it’s just…’ Jane cupped her hands over her nose and mouth and sighed into them, ‘… just she’s worth more than this, that’s all. Like, OK, maybe she was drawn into it by this spiritual need and the need to bring it out in other people, you know what I mean?’

‘Maybe.’ Rowenna drove with easy confidence. Within only a couple of hundred yards of the school, they were out into countryside with wooded hills and orchards.

‘But I mean, the Church of England? Like, what can you really expect of an outfit that was only set up so Henry VIII could dump his wife? Spiritually they’re just a bunch of nohope tossers, and I can’t see that the ordination of women will change a thing.’

‘I suppose even the Catholics kind of look like they’ve got something together.’ Rowenna’s father was an Army officer, possibly SAS, and the family had spent some time in Northern Ireland.

‘But you know what I mean?’ Jane hunched forward, clasping her hands together. ‘I imagine her in about forty years’ time, sitting by the gas fire in some old clergyperson’s home, full of arthritis from kneeling on cold stone floors, and thinking: What the hell was that all about?’

Rowenna laughed, a sound like ice in a cocktail glass. She looked innocent and kind of wispy, but she was pretty shrewd.

‘And this Deliverance trip, right?’ Jane knew she wasn’t supposed to discuss this, but Rowenna’s military background – high-security clearance, all that stuff – meant she could be trusted not to spread things around. ‘It’s obvious she thinks this is a kind of cutting-edge thing to do, and will maybe take her closer. You know what I mean?’

‘To the spiritual world?’

‘But it’s actually quite the opposite. From what I can see, the job is actually to stop people getting close. She has to actively discourage all contact with the occult or anything mystical – anything interesting. I think that’s kind of immoral, don’t you?’

‘It’s kind of fascist,’ Rowenna said.

‘Let’s face it, almost any kind of spiritual activity is more fun than going to church.’

‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’

And then, as usual, it was suddenly gone.

Sometimes you were left floating on a cushion of peace; occasionally there was an aching void. This time only silence coloured by the placid images of the Cathedral and the Wye Bridge in the small stained-glass window just above her head.

Merrily stood up shakily in the intimacy of Bishop Stanbury’s exquisite chantry. She stood with her arms by her sides, breathing slowly. It was like sex: sublime at the time but what, if anything, had it altered? What progression was there?

Outside, in the main body of the Cathedral, the prayer was over and there was a communal rising and clattering. She stood quietly in the doorway of the chantry, her grey silk scarf dangling from her fingers.

‘Go away. Go away.’ A few yards away, a man’s voice rose impatiently. ‘I can’t possibly discuss this here.’

‘I don’t understand…’ A woman now, agitated. ‘What have I been doing wrong?’

‘Hush!’

A stuttering of footsteps. Merrily stepped out of the chantry, saw a woman, about sixty, who drew breath, stifled a cry, turned sharply and walked quickly away – across to the exit which led to the Cathedral giftshop. She wore a tweed coat and boots and a puffy velvet hat. She never looked back.

From the aisle to the left of the chantry, the man watched her go.

Merrily said, ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—’

He wore a long overcoat. He glanced at her. ‘I think your party is over in the Lady Chapel.’

Then he saw her collar and she saw his, and the skirt of the cassock below his overcoat. And although she’d never seen him before, as soon as she discerned cold recognition in the pale eyes in that stone face – the face of some ancient, eroded graveyard archangel – she knew who he was.

And before she was aware of them the words were out. Possibly, under the circumstances, the stupidest words she could have uttered.

‘Is there anything I can do, Canon Dobbs?’

He looked at her for a long time. She couldn’t move.

Eventually, without any change of expression, he walked past her and left the Cathedral.

8 Beautiful Theory

FOR MANY YEARS, Dick Lyden had been something stressful in the City of London. Now he and his wife were private psychotherapists in Hereford. Dick was about thirty pounds heavier, pink-cheeked, income decidedly reduced, a much happier man.

‘And Moon – in her spiritual home at last?’ He beamed, feet on his desk. ‘How is Moon?’

‘Moon is…’ Lol hesitated. ‘Moon is what I wanted to see you about.’

Dick and Ruth lived and practised in half of a steep Edwardian terrace on the western side, not far from the old water-tower. Dick’s attic office had a view across the city to Dinedor Hill, to which Lol’s gaze was now inevitably being pulled. When Dick expansively opened up his hands, allowing him the floor, Lol turned his chair away from the window and told Dick about the crow which Moon claimed had mystically fallen dead at her feet.

Dick swivelled his feet from the desk, rubbed his forehead, pushing back slabs of battleship-grey hair. ‘And do you think it really did?’

‘I didn’t see it happen.’

‘So she may just have found it in the hedge and made the rest up.’

‘It’s possible,’ Lol said.

‘And the blood… she actually… That’s extraordinary.’ Dick rubbed his hands together, looking up at a plaster cornice above Lol’s head. ‘And yet, you know, while it might seem horrible to the likes of us, she’s spent quite a few years scrabbling about in the earth, ferreting out old skulls with worms in their eyes.’

‘This was a bit different, though.’

Yes, it was, Dick conceded. In fact, yes, what they were looking at here was really quite an elaborate fantasy structure, on the lines of one of those impossibly complicated computer games his son James used to play before he discovered rock music. Except this wasn’t dragons and demons; this was built on layers of actual history.

‘Let’s examine it. Let’s pull it apart.’ Dick dragged a foolscap pad towards him, began to draw circles and link them with lines.

‘What’ve we got? An extremely intelligent girl with a degree in archaeology, some years’ experience in the field… and this absorbing, fanatical interest in the Iron Age civilization, which became an obsession – the Celtic jewellery, the strange woollens. She still wear that awful sheepskin waistcoat thing?’

‘Not recently.’

‘That’s one good thing. Anyway… suddenly she’s aware she can explain this obsession in the context of her own family history. She’s been told the family roots in that particular spot go back to the Dark Ages and before – which is probably complete nonsense, but that’s irrelevant. She forms the idea that this is what she was born to do, because of the place she was born – on the side of this Iron Age fort or whatever it is.’

Dick drew a crude hill with battlements.

‘Perhaps believing… that there’s some great secret here… that only she can recover. Some Holy Grail. But of course… what she really wants to find is a key… to her father’s suicide.’

Dick smiled happily at Lol. He loved finding cross-references.

‘Who knows, Laurence? Who knows what horrors lodged in the mind of a two-year-old child in circumstances like that? And Dinedor Hill never talked about, Denny going dark with anger if the subject of their father arises. So much mystery. Well, she doesn’t want to believe her old man topped himself because he messed up his finances. It’s got to be more profound than that.’

‘It’s profound enough,’ Lol said. ‘By losing the farm, he let down his family, and his ancestors. Scores of farmers have killed themselves in the past few years for similar reasons. And we’re talking about a very historic family.’

‘Absolutely. She’s bunched all that together into an epic personal quest, with all the pseudo-mystical and supernatural overtones of James’s trashy computer games.’

‘Is that a good thing, though, Dick? Moon living at the centre of a fantasy?’

‘I don’t see that it’s necessarily bad. And if it’s all going to be providing material for her book… Do we know what kind of book she has in mind?’

‘A history of Dinedor Hill seen through the eyes of the people who live there now—’

‘Splendid,’ Dick interrupted.

‘—and the people who lived there over two thousand years ago.’

‘Constructed from archaeological evidence and what she feels is her own instinctive knowledge of her ancestors? Well, that could be a very valid book, couldn’t it? One can certainly imagine a publisher going for that. I could talk to some people myself.’

‘I don’t know.’ Lol had been doubtful about this book from the start. A book wasn’t like a song; you couldn’t knock it out in a couple of hours when the inspiration was there. ‘She doesn’t seem organized enough for anything like that. For instance, Denny’s managing the shop for a few days while she gets the barn sorted – supposedly. But this morning virtually nothing had changed: everything still in boxes. Which was what Denny said it’d be like: chaos – and Moon living inside herself.’

Dick shrugged. ‘So after the excitement of the move, there’s a period of emotional exhaustion. Then she dusts herself off, starts to pick up the pieces. Then the rehab begins. I’ll give her a couple of days and then I’ll go and have a chat myself. Or we can both go, yes?’

‘OK.’

‘You don’t seem too sure. Is there something else?’

Dick’s hopeless, isn’t he? Dick’s a dead loss. He doesn’t believe in anything outside of textbook psychology.

Moon had predicted that Dick would come up with a beautiful theory, and he had – without Lol even mentioning her story about seeing her father at the window.

You have to report back to Dick? You’ll tell him about this?

Dick tore off the top sheet of the pad and crumpled it up. ‘I think you’d better spit it out, Lol.’

Yes, he had to. There was a professional arrangement here. Dick had insisted Lol should be paid a retainer to keep an eye on Moon and report back once a week. It was complicated: at first Lol had been paying Dick for analysis; now Dick was paying Lol.

In his kindly way, Dick was devious. Lol was still not sure whether observing Moon was not supposed to be part of his own therapy.

Women had been Lol’s problem. Women and religion.

He’d wound up first consulting Dick Lyden during the summer, while still trying to sell his roses-round-the-door cottage on the edge of an orchard out at Ledwardine. To which he’d moved with a woman called Alison who he thought had rescued him from the past and the shadow of the psychiatric hospital. But Alison had her own reasons for coming to Ledwardine, and they didn’t include Lol.

The people who actually had tried to rescue him had come from the village itself. They included a brusque old biddy called Lucy Devenish, now dead. And also the parish priest-in-charge.

At this stage in Lol’s life, priests of any kind were to be avoided. His parents had been drawn into this awful evangelical-fundamentalist Christian church and had decided that Lol, with his strange songs and his dubious lifestyle, was no longer their son. At his mother’s graveside, Lol’s father had turned his back on him. Lol had henceforth been suspicious of everything in a dog-collar that was not a dog.

Until the Vicar of Ledwardine.

Who in the end had been the reason for him leaving the village. The Vicar was, after all, a very busy and respected person, and Lol was this pathetic little sometimes-songwriter living on hackwork and royalties from before the fall. He wasn’t sure she realized how he felt. He was sure she didn’t need this.

So he left her his black cat and moved to Hereford, putting his bits of furniture in store and lodging for a while in a pub just down the street from Dick Lyden. Dick’s local, as it happened – also Denny Moon’s. Which had led to several sessions in Denny’s recording studio and a few consultation sessions with Dick, because Lol still couldn’t rely on his own mental equilibrium.

Christ, Dick had said one afternoon, you know more about this bloody trade than I do. Fascinated by Lol’s extensive knowledge of psychiatry – absorbed over hours, then weeks and months spent in the medical library at a lax and decaying loony-bin in Oxfordshire. Apart from a general self-esteem deficit, this is probably your principal problem – you’re a kind of mental hypochondriac. Perhaps you need to help diagnose other people for a while, to take your mind off it.

Loonies taking over the practice. The idea had really appealed to Dick: the idea of Lol keeping an experienced eye on another of his clients – twenty-something, gorgeous, weird. Dick loved it when clients could help each other, his practice becoming a big family. It was still small, this city; he liked the way relationships and associations developed an organic life, spread like creeper on a wall, and therefore strengthened his own latent roots in Hereford.

Thus, Lol had been introduced to Katherine Moon – and perhaps also because Dick couldn’t quite get a handle on Moon.

‘Her father’s ghost,’ Dick said calmly.

‘Twice.’

‘Right.’ Dick hunched intently forward. ‘Now, think carefully about this, Lol. What effect did this alleged manifestation have on her? What kind of an experience was it? Soothing? Frightening? Cathartic?’

‘Not frightening.’

‘So, a man’s face at the window at dead of night. A young woman all alone in a still-strange dwelling… and she’s not frightened. What does that tell us?’

‘She said she had the impression he was more scared than she was. Disturbed and confused. She thought he didn’t recognize her. Didn’t know who she was.’

‘Interesting.’

‘She said she wanted to tell him it was OK.’

Dick spread his hands. ‘Moon as healer.’

‘She wants him to find peace.’

‘And when he does, she will too,’ Dick said. ‘I really don’t see a problem there. Seems to be all bubbling away quite satisfactorily in Moon’s subconscious. She finds a dead crow and inflicts upon the poor bird all of her not inconsiderable knowledge of Celtic crow-lore. The crow’s been sent by the ancestors to give her the sight. So what’s she going to see first?’

‘That’s very good, Dick.’

‘It makes sense, my boy. It’s about belonging, isn’t it? Look at me. I do feel I’ve found my spiritual home here in this city – so tiny after London, and knowable. Ruth tells me I’m continually pulling this town to my bosom. But a hill… a hill’s much more embraceable, isn’t it?’ Dick leaned over to the window to scan the horizon. ‘You know, I’m not even sure I know which one it is.’

‘The one with all the trees.’

In the afternoon sunshine, the woods were a golden crust on the long, shallow loaf.

‘Hmm,’ Dick turned away, ‘not particularly imposing, is it? And this was where the first settled community was? This hill is what you might call the mother of Hereford, I suppose.’

‘The holy hill.’

‘Super,’ Dick said with firm satisfaction. ‘One must feel a weight of responsibility to one’s ancestors if one was born on a holy hill. And her father’s suicide… a ready-made open wound for her to heal?’

Lol felt unhappy. He didn’t like the way Dick seemed to assume that once you’d made a neat psychological package out of something, that was it. Sorted. In Lol’s experience, real life was endlessly messy.

Dick leaned back in his leather swivel-rocker, hands comfortably enfolded over his lightbulb gut. ‘The way we create our destiny on an epic, computer-game scale – would that it was as simple for all of us. Do you know, I rather suspect there’s a paper in this. Let’s go and see her. What are you doing tomorrow morning?’

‘So you think it was a dream?’ Lol said.

‘Hmm?’

‘Her father – a dream? Or an invention?’

‘Well, good God, man,’ Dick threw up his arms, ‘what the hell else could it have been?’

9 Clerical Chic

DRIVING HOME, MERRILY hardly noticed the countryside: the shambling black and white farms and cottages, the emptied orchards. Over it all, as though bevelled in the windscreen glass, hovered the unchanging, weathered face of the archaic monument that was Canon T. H. B. Dobbs.

That silent confrontation in the Cathedral had erased time. She could no longer remember praying in Bishop Stanbury’s beautiful chantry – only the stumbling in and the creeping out. The interim was like an alcoholic haze.

But she had her answer.

Didn’t she just?

In the late afternoon the wind had died, leaving the sky lumpy and congealed like a cold, fried breakfast. Beneath it the historic village of Ledwardine looked sapped and brittle, the black and white buildings lifeless, as indeed several now were. Nothing remained, for instance, of Cassidy’s Country Kitchen except a sign and some peeling apple-transfers on the dark glass; and five For Sale signs had sprouted between Church Street and Old Barn Lane.

The village looked like it needed care and love and a shot of something – an injection of spirit. Of God, perhaps? Introduced by a conscientious, caring priest without selfish ambitions she wasn’t equipped to fulfil?

Confess: you were stimulated. You’d had a meaningful brush with the paranormal and you wanted to know more. In fact – admit it – it was you that Huw Owen was addressing when he said prospective Deliverance ministers should analyse their motives, consider if they needed evidence of life after death to sustain their faith, proof of the existence of supernatural evil to convince them of a power for good.

Huw had been full of foreboding. Jane had been dismissive. Only Mick Hunter was enthusiastic, and Mick Hunter was a politician.

And now God had arbitrated, signalling – in the silence of Canon T. H. B. Dobbs – His unequivocal negative.

Of course, that could have been pure coincidence – if we’re being rational about this.

But the compulsion to rush into the Cathedral, the waiting chantry, Dobbs being right there when she emerged? She’d wanted a sign, she’d received a sign. End of story. Later this evening she would phone the Bishop and tell him what wasn’t, after all, going to happen.

Mature trees seemed to push the old vicarage back from the village centre. Beneath them was parked a lurid luminous-green Fiesta.

Which had to be something to do with Jane. If it was a boyfriend, Merrily only hoped he was under twenty.

Because of the size of the house, Jane had taken over the entire top floor, formerly attics, as her private apartment, and had finally re-emulsioned her sitting-room/study as the Dutch painter Mondrian might have envisaged it – the squares and rectangles between the timbers in different primary colours. If the Inspector of Listed Buildings ever turned up, the kid was on her own.

She wasn’t on her own up there now, though, was she? Merrily edged the Volvo around the little car and parked in the driveway. Although she talked a lot about ‘totty’, Jane’s relations with boys had been curiously restrained. You waited with a certain trepidation for The Big One, because the kid didn’t do things by halves, and the first stirring of real love would probably send her virginity spinning straight out of the window.

So Merrily was half-relieved when she opened the front door to find Jane in the hall with a girl in the same school uniform.

An older girl, though not as vividly sophisticated as Jane’s last – ill-fated – friend, Colette Cassidy. This one was ethereal, with long, red, soft-spun hair which floated behind her as she gazed around.

‘Oh, hi. I was just going to show Rowenna the apartment.’ Jane gestured vaguely at Merrily. ‘That’s the Reverend Mum.’

The girl came over and actually shook hands.

Jane sat down on the stairs. ‘Rowenna’s dad’s with the SAS.’

‘With the Army,’ Rowenna said discreetly. ‘This is a really amazing house, Mrs Watkins. Wonderfully atmospheric. You can feel its memories kind of vibrating in the oak beams. I was just saying to Jane, if I lived here I think I’d just keep going round hugging beams and things. Our place is really new and boring, with fitted cupboards and wardrobes and things.’

‘I bet it’s a lot easier to heat and keep clean, though,’ Merrily said ruefully. ‘You live locally, Rowenna?’

‘Well, you know, up towards Credenhill, where the base is.’ Rowenna wrinkled her nose. ‘I wish we were down here. It’s on a completely different plane. The past is real here. You feel you could just slip into it.’

‘Right,’ Merrily said. ‘If that’s what you want.’

‘Yes.’ Rowenna didn’t blink. ‘Most of the time, yes.’

Merrily thought it was a sad indictment of society when young people wanted not so much to change the world as to change it back – to some golden age which almost certainly never was.

‘Oh, hey, listen to this!’ Jane sprang up. ‘Rowenna’s dad goes running – right? – with Mick Hunter.’

‘Well, not exactly.’ Rowenna looked a bit uncomfortable. ‘The Bishop has this arrangement to go along with the guys on some of their routine cross-country runs. It’s kind of irregular, apparently. I’m not really supposed to talk about it.’

God, thought Merrily, he’d just have to go training with the SAS, wouldn’t he?

‘Isn’t that just so cool?’ Jane drawled cynically.

Merrily smiled.

‘She’s not what I expected at all.’ Rowenna went to sit on Jane’s old sofa, staring up at the Mondrian walls. ‘Most of the women priests you see around look kind of bedraggled. But with that suit and the black stockings and everything, she makes the dogcollar seem like… I don’t know, a fashion accessory.’

‘Clerical chic,’ Jane said. ‘Don’t tell her, for God’s sake. She only stopped wearing that awful ankle-length cassock because this guy was turned on by all those buttons to undo.’

‘Which guy?’

‘Her former organist, creepy little git.’

‘No special person in her life?’

‘Only the Big Guy with the long beard – and the Bishop.’

Rowenna shot her a look.

‘Hey, just professionally,’ said Jane, ‘I hope. Sure, the first time I saw him, I thought, wow, yeah, this is the goods. But then I couldn’t believe I’d been that shallow. Besides, he’s got a wife and kids.’

‘Whatever that counts for these days.’

‘Yeah, he’d probably quite like to get his leg over Mum. If you can keep it inside the priesthood, it probably saves a lot of hassle. I just hope she’s more sensible. You want a coffee?’

‘No thanks, I have to be off in a minute.’ Rowenna stood up and moved across to Jane’s bookcase. ‘You’ve got it all here, haven’t you? Personal transformation, past-life regression, communicating with Nature spirits…’

‘Yeah, I’m a sad New Age weirdo. Don’t spread it around.’

‘It’s not weird to be interested in what’s going to happen to us. Do you do anything like, you know, meditation or anything like that?’

‘I’ve thought about it after… when I once had a couple of odd things happen to me.’

Rowenna sat down again. ‘Go on.’

‘It was probably just imagination. I mean, you can make something out of everything, can’t you? Like, Mum, she reckons she sometimes gets these images of blue and gold when she’s saying her prayers, and so she connects it with God because that’s like the container she’s in. But it could be anything, couldn’t it?’

‘So what happened to you?’

‘I don’t talk about it much. I reckon if you try to analyse this stuff it just evaporates.’

‘Not around me, kitten.’

‘OK, well, I just feel this intense connection to some places. Like you were talking about hugging beams, I feel I want to hug hills and fields and—Hey, this is really, really stupid. It’s just hyper-imagination.’

‘Oh, Jane! Don’t stop now.’

‘Sorry. OK, well, like time passes and you’re not aware of it. It’s like you’re here but you’re not here, and then you’re here again – some kind of shift in reality. Maybe it happens to everybody but most people disregard it. There was an old woman in the village I used to be able to talk to about this stuff, but she’s dead now.’

‘I think there’s another side to all of us we need to discover,’ Rowenna said. ‘Especially us… I mean our generation. We’re growing up into this awesome millennial situation where all the old stuff’s breaking down… like political divisions and organized religion. That’s not knocking your mum or anything.’

‘It’s OK,’ Jane said. ‘She knows it’s all coming to pieces. She got these quite sizeable congregations at first on account of being a woman, but the novelty’s wearing off already. When the Church is just surviving on gimmicks you know it’s the slippery slope. Go on.’

‘All I was saying is that we shouldn’t pass up on the opportunity to expand our consciousness wherever possible.’

‘I’ll go along with that. What sort of stuff have you done?’

‘Oh, I’ve just kind of messed around the edges.’ Rowenna flicked the pages of a paperback about interpreting dreams. ‘Like, when we were in Salisbury I had this friend whose sister did tarot readings, and she showed me two layouts. I was doing it at school for a few weeks. It was really incredible how accurate it was. Then I did this reading for a girl who was getting to be quite a good friend, and it came out really horrible and she got meningitis soon afterwards and nearly died, and she never came back to school – which kind of spooked me.’

Jane shrugged. ‘That doesn’t mean it was the cards gave her meningitis. Can you still remember how? Would you be able to do a reading for me?’

‘Mmm… don’t think so. Rather not.’

‘Wimp.’

‘Maybe. Tell you what, though, I saw this poster down the health-food shop, right? There’s a psychic fair on in Leominster next weekend.’

‘Cool. What is it?’

‘You’ve never been to one? There are loads about.’

‘Rowenna, my mother’s a vicar. I lead this dead sheltered life.’

Rowenna smiled. ‘Well, actually I’ve just been to one and it was seriously tacky and full of freaky old dames in gypsy clobber, but good fun if you didn’t take it too seriously. We could check it out.’

‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘I suspect I’d better not tell Mum.’

‘I suppose she wouldn’t be cool about that stuff. Alternative spirituality – subversive.’

‘Actually, she’s pretty liberal. Well, to a point. Things could be just a tiny bit dicey at the moment, though. So I wouldn’t want to, you know…’

Jane thought about the soul police. Then she looked at Rowenna and saw that this was someone intelligent and worldly and kind of unfettered. Someone she could actually share stuff with.

‘I mean, I guess Mum feels that any kind of spirituality is better than none at all,’ Jane grinned, ‘which I suppose is how I feel about the Church of England.’

That night, Merrily and Jane made sandwiches and ate them in front of a repeat of an early episode of King of the Hill. And then Jane said she’d go to her apartment and have a read and an early night. So Merrily returned, as she usually did, to the kitchen.

She always felt more in control in the kitchen. It was a bit vast, but they’d had lots of cupboards put in, and installed a couple of squashy easychairs and some muted lighting. Recently, she’d converted the adjacent scullery into an office. She supposed this was her apartment.

Which meant that, with just the two of them, huge areas of the vicarage remained unused. Stupid and wasteful. No wonder the Church was selling off so many of its old properties, and installing vicars in modest estate-houses.

At least Merrily was no longer so intimidated by all those closed bedroom doors, which had played their own sinister role in the paranormal fluctuations that might – if she’d then heard of him – have sent her to consult Canon Dobbs. It had been quiet up there for several months now. A day or two ago she’d caught herself thinking she would almost welcome its return: a chance to study an imprint at close hand.

But, then, probably not. Not now.

It was ten fifteen. The Bishop had given her his private number, with instructions to call anytime, but she never had. This was probably too late.

Don’t be a wimp.

Merrily went through to the scullery, switched on the desk lamp. The answering machine had an unblinking red light; for once, nobody had called. On the desk sat the Apple Mac she’d bought secondhand. God knows what was being installed in the Deliverance Office. If she didn’t stop it now.

She pulled down the cordless phone and stabbed out the number very quickly. It rang only twice before Mick Hunter came on. The late-night DJ voice.

‘Hi. Val and Mick are unavailable at the moment. Please leave a message after the tone. God bless.’

Merrily hesitated for a second before she cut the line. She’d do this properly tomorrow: call his office and make an appointment. She was aware that when you came face to face with Mick Hunter, your doubts and reservations tended to be tidal-waved by his personality, but that wasn’t going to happen this time.

She thought of calling Huw Owen at his stark stone rectory in the Brecon Beacons. But to say what?

Realizing, then, that the only reason she would be calling Huw at this time of night was some tenuous hope that he’d changed his mind about the suitability of women priests for trench warfare.

Unhappy with herself, she switched out the lights, and went up to bed, Ethel the black cat padding softly behind her.

The bedside phone bleeped her awake.

‘Reverend Watkins?’

‘Yes.’ Merrily struggled to sit up.

‘Oh… I’m sorry to disturb you. It was your husband I wanted. Is he there?’

‘I’m afraid he’s dead.’ Merrily squinted at the luminous clock, clawing for the light switch over the bed, but not finding it.

Nearly ten past two?

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said. ‘Have I got the right number? I’m trying to contact the Reverend Watkins.’ Northern Irish accent.

‘Yeah, that’s me.’

‘Oh. Well, I… This is Sister Cullen at Hereford General.’

‘General? What… sorry?’

‘The General Hospital.’

Jesus!

Merrily scrambled out of bed into a wedge of moonlight sandwiched between the curtains. ‘Is somebody hurt? Has there been an accident?’

Jane!

She went cold. Jane had crept out again after Merrily had gone to bed? Jane and her friend in the car, clubbing in Hereford, too much to drink. Oh no, please…

‘It’s nothing like that,’ the sister said, almost impatient. ‘It was suggested we call you, that’s all. We have a problem. One of our patients is asking for a priest, and the hospital chaplain’s away for the night. We were given your number as somebody who should be the one to deal with this. There are some complications.’

‘I don’t understand. I’m ten miles away.’ Scrabbling on the floor for her cigarettes. ‘Who suggested…?’

‘We were given your number. I’m sorry, they never told me you were a woman.’

‘That make a difference?’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything offensive. I don’t know what to do now.’

‘Look, give me half an hour, OK? I’ll get dressed. What are the complications you mentioned?’

‘I’m sorry, it’s not the sort of thing we discuss over the phone.’

Give me strength!

‘All right, the General, you said. It’ll take me about twenty, twenty-five minutes, Sister…’

‘Cullen. Ask for Watkins Ward.’

‘What?’

It was starting to feel like a dream. The house had done this to her before.

‘The Alfred Watkins Ward,’ said Sister Cullen. ‘Don’t bother looking for your Bible. We’ve got one here.’

10 Denzil

REVERSING THE CLANKING Volvo out of the vicarage drive, she saw Dobbs’s grim, stone face again, as though it was superimposed on the windscreen or the night itself. As if the old bastard had been in the car waiting for her. As if he was staying with her until she’d formally walked away from his job. As if—

This has got to bloody stop!

Merrily gripped the wheel, shaking it violently, but really shaking herself. She’d become oppressed by the dour image of Dobbs. When she’d had the chance to say a final No, thank you to Mick Hunter and to Deliverance, she was going to keep well away from the Cathedral precincts, because she – squeezing the wheel until her hands hurt – never… wanted… to… see… him… again.

OK – steadying her breathing – this was no state in which to minister to a dying man.

On the cobbles of the marketplace she thought she could see a glaze of frost. The wrought-iron mock-gaslamps had gone out, leaving only a small, wintry security light by the steps to the Black Swan.

She drove slowly across the square, not wanting to wake anyone. She’d left a conspicuous note for Jane on the kitchen table in case she didn’t get home by morning; you never knew with hospital vigils.

Virtually alone on the country roads, too tense to be tired, she found the kid’s all-time favourite album, the complex OK Computer, on the stereo and tried to concentrate on the words. But her perception of the songs, full of haunted darkness, only reminded her of Dobbs.

She stopped the music. She would go over this thing once more.

The truth was, after the shock of seeing Dobbs in the Cathedral, when she’d been all charged up and unstable, her mind inevitably had contrived this divinely scripted scene: he was there because she was.

But what about the unknown woman Dobbs had been with?

‘What have I been doing wrong?’ the woman had cried. What was all that about?

Well, it made no obvious sense, so forget it. The simple, rational explanation was that Merrily had walked, unexpected, into Dobbs’s scene. Perhaps he was just as shocked when who should suddenly emerge from the chantry but the notorious female pretender.

All right. Stop it, there. Stop looking for a way out. You made your decision, you stick to it.

The General Hospital was an eighteenth-century brick building with the usual unsightly additions. Messy at the front but, like the Bishop’s Palace, with a beautiful situation on the Wye, a few hundred yards downstream from the Cathedral. No parking problems at pushing three a.m.; Merrily left the Volvo near a public garden where a path led down to the suspension footbridge over the river, all dark down there now.

Been here many times to visit parishioners, of course, but never at this hour. And never to the Alfred Watkins Ward, named presumably after the Herefordian pioneer photographer, brewer, magistrate and discoverer of ley-lines. No relation of hers, as far as she knew, but then she didn’t know the Herefordshire side of the family very well.

‘Bottom of the corridor,’ a passing paramedic advised. ‘Turn left and immediately left again, through the plastic doors, up the stairs, left at the top and through the double doors.’

These old buildings were wonderful, Merrily thought, for almost everything except hospitals. A plaque on the wall near the main entrance discreetly declared that this used to be a lunatic asylum and, as you walked the unevenly lit, twisting passages, you could imagine the first ever patients wandering here, groping vaguely for their senses, the air dense with disease and desperation.

Despite the directions received, she lost herself in the dim labyrinth, and it was over five minutes before she found a sign to Alfred Watkins Ward. At its entrance, two nurses were talking quietly but with a lot of gesturing. When they saw Merrily, they separated.

She smiled. ‘Sister Cullen?’

‘On the ward,’ the younger nurse said. ‘Who shall I say?’

‘Merrily Watkins.’

The younger nurse pushed through the double doors into the gloom of the ward itself. Merrily unzipped her waxed jacket, feeling better now she was here. The presence of the dying used to scare her, but recently she’d become more comfortable with them, even slightly in awe – aware of this composure they often developed very close to the end, a calm anticipation of the big voyage – assisted passage. And she would sometimes come away with a tentative glow. Over her past three years as a cleric, several nurses had told her shyly that they’d actually seen spirits leaving bodies, like a light within a mist.

‘Oh hell!’ The older nurse spotted the dog-collar, took a step back in dismay. ‘You’re the priest?’

‘At three a.m.,’ Merrily said, ‘you don’t get an archbishop.’

‘Oh, look…’ The nurse was plump, mid-fifties, agitated. ‘This isn’t right. Eileen Cullen shouldn’t have done this. She’s an atheist, fair enough, but she should’ve had more sense. Isn’t there a male priest you know?’

Merrily stared in disbelief at the woman’s face, pale and blotched under the hanging lights. And fearful too.

‘Don’t look at me like that. I’m sorry, Miss… Reverend. It’s just that what we don’t need is another woman. Look, would you mind waiting there while I go and talk to Sister Cullen?’

‘Fine,’ Merrily said tightly. ‘Don’t worry about me. I don’t have to go to work until Sunday.’

‘Look, I’m sorry, all right? I’m sorry.’

‘Sure.’ Merrily sat down on a leather-covered bench, pulled out her cigarettes.

‘And I’m afraid you can’t smoke in here.’

Sister Cullen was about Merrily’s age, but tall, short-haired, sombre-faced. More like a priest than I’ll ever look.

Behind her, the ward diminished into darkness like a Victorian railway tunnel.

‘I may have misled you on the phone,’ Cullen said. ‘I was confused.’

‘You’re confused.’ Merrily stood up. ‘Forgive me, but sometimes, especially at three in the morning and without a cigarette, even the clergy can get a trifle pissed off, you know?’

‘Keep your voice down, please.’

‘I’m sorry. I would just like to know what this is about.’

‘All right.’ Cullen gestured at the bench and they both sat down. ‘It’s Mr Denzil Joy… that’s the patient. Mr Joy’s dying. He’s unlikely to see the morning.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘With respect, Mrs Watkins, you’ll be the only one.’

‘Huh?’

‘This is a difficult situation.’

‘He’s asked for a priest, hasn’t he?’

‘No, that… that’s where I misled you. He hasn’t.’

She jerked a thumb at the double doors. Behind the glass, Merrily saw the other two nurses peering out. They looked like they wanted to escape, or at least stand as close as possible to the lights outside.

‘They did,’ Sister Cullen said. ‘They asked me to call a priest.’

Following Cullen through the darkened ward, she was reminded of those war-drawings by Henry Moore of people sleeping in air-raid shelters, swaddled and anonymous. The soundtrack of restive breathing, ruptured snores, shifting bodies was inflated by muted hissings and rumblings in the building’s own decaying metabolism. And also, Merrily felt, by slivers of tension in the sour sickness-smelling air.

‘He’s in a side ward here,’ Cullen whispered. ‘We’ve always had him in a side ward.’

‘What’s his… his condition?’

‘Chronic emphysema: lungs full of fluid. Been coming on for years – he’s been in four times. This time he knows he’s not going out.’

‘And he isn’t… ready. Right?’

Cullen breathed scornfully down her nose. ‘Earlier tonight he sent for his wife.’

Merrily looked for some significance in this. ‘She’s not here with him now?’

‘No, we sent her home. Jesus!’

A metal-shaded lamp burned bleakly on a table at the entrance to the side ward, across which an extra plastic-covered screen had been erected.

‘There’s an evil in this man.’ Sister Cullen began sliding the screen away. ‘Brace yourself.’

Merrily said, ‘I don’t understand. What do you…?’

And then she did understand. It was Deliverance business.

Huw Owen had stressed: Compose, prepare, protect yourself – ALWAYS.

Directing them to the prayer known as St Patrick’s Breastplate, very old, very British, part of our legacy from the Celtic Church, Huw had said, and Merrily had seen the strength of the hermit in him, the hermit-priest in the cave on the island.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,

Christ behind me, Christ before me,

Christ beside me, Christ to win me,

Christ to comfort and restore me,

Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ in quiet, Christ in danger…

Binding yourself with light Huw had said; this was what it was about. A sealing of the portals, old Christian magic, Huw had said. Use it.

But she hadn’t even thought of that. She’d made no preparations at all, simply dashed out of the house like a junior doctor on call. Because that was all it was – a routine ministering to the dying, a stand-in job, no one else available. Nobody had mentioned…

We were given your number as somebody who should be the one to deal with this. There are some complications.

… it had simply never occurred to her that the hospital had been given her name as a trained Deliverance minister. It never occurred to her that this was what she now was. Who had directed them? The Bishop’s office? The Bishop himself?

I’ve been set up, she thought, angry – and afraid that, whatever needed to be done, she wouldn’t be up to it.

There were two iron beds in the side ward, one empty; in the other, Mr Denzil Joy.

His eyes were slits, unmoving under a sweat-sheened and sallow forehead. His hair was black, an unnatural black for a man in his sixties. A dying man dyeing, she thought absurdly.

Two pale green tubes came down his nostrils and looped away over his cheeks, like a cartoon smile.

‘Oxygen,’ Cullen explained in a whisper.

‘Is he asleep?’

‘In and out of it.’

‘Can he speak?’

Trying to understand what she was doing here, looking hard at him, wondering what she was missing.

Like little horns or something? What do you expect to see?

‘With difficulty,’ Cullen said.

‘Should I sit with him a while?’

‘Fetch you a Bible, shall I?’

‘Let’s… let’s just leave that a moment.’ Knowing how ominous a black, leathered Bible could appear to the patient at such times, wishing she’d brought her blue and white paperback version. And still unclear about what they wanted from her here.

There was a vinyl-covered chair next to the bed, and she sat down. Denzil Joy wore a white surgical smock thing; one of his arms was out in view, fingers curved over the coverlet. She put her own hand over it, and almost recoiled. It was warm and damp, slimy somehow, reptilian. A small, nervous smile tweaked at Cullen’s lips.

In the moment Merrily touched Denzil Joy, it seemed a certain scent arose. The kind of odour you could almost see curling through the air, so that it entered your nostrils as if directed there. At first sweet and faintly oily.

Then Merrily gasped and took in a sickening mouthful and, to her shame, had to get up and leave the room, a hand over her mouth.

The other hand, not the one which had touched Denzil Joy.

One of the patients on the ward was calling out, ‘Nurse!’ as loudly as a farmer summoning a sheepdog over a six-acre field.

At the door Merrily gulped in the stale hospital air as if it was ozone.

‘Dr Taylor found a good description for it.’ Eileen Cullen was standing beside the metal lamp, smiling grimly. ‘Although he never quite got the full benefit of it, being a man. He said it was like a mixture of gangrene and cat faeces. That seems pretty close, though I wouldn’t know for sure. Never kept cats myself. Excuse me a minute.’

She padded down the ward towards the man calling out, one hand raised, forefinger of the other to her lips. As soon as she’d gone, the plump middle-aged nurse appeared from the shadows, put her mouth up to Merrily’s ear.

‘I’ll tell you what that is, Reverend. It’s the smell of evil.’

‘Huh?’

‘He can turn it on. Don’t look at me like that. Maybe it’s automatic, when his blood temperature rises. It comes to the same thing. Did you feel him enter you?’

‘What?’

‘We can’t talk here.’ She took Merrily’s arm, pulled her away and into a small room lit by a strip light, with sinks and bags of waste. She shut the door. The disinfectant smell here, in comparison with that in the side ward, was like honeysuckle on a summer evening.

‘I’m a strong woman,’ the nurse said, ‘thirty years in the job. Everything nasty a person can throw off, I’ve seen it and smelled it and touched it.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘No, you can’t, my girl.’ The nurse pushed up a sleeve. ‘You have no idea. Look at that, now.’ Livid bruising around the wrist, like she’d been handcuffed.

‘What happened was: Mr Joy, he asked for a bottle – to urinate in, you know? And then he called me back and he said he was having… trouble getting it in. Well, some of them, they say that as a matter of course, and you have a laugh and you go away and come back brandishing the biggest pair of forceps you can find. But Denzil Joy was a very sick man and he seemed distressed, so I did try to help.’ She pulled down her sleeve again. ‘You see where that got me.’

‘Oh.’

‘Grip like a monkey-wrench, my dear. Thought I’d never get fooled again. You understand now why we wanted a male priest?’

Surely, what you wanted, Merrily thought, was a male nurse. ‘Look, Nurse… I’m sorry?’

‘Nurse Protheroe. Sandra.’

‘Sandra, this is a dying man, OK? He knows he’s dying. He’s afraid. He’s looking for… comfort, I suppose. That doesn’t make him possessed by evil. I don’t know what his background is. I mean…’

‘Farm-labourer and slaughterman. Been in a few times before, he has. When he wasn’t so bad – not so seriously ill, that is.’

‘Farm-labourer? So his idea of comfort might be a bit… rough and ready?’

Sandra snorted. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s more than that, girl. You’re not getting this, are you? I’ve dealt with that type more times than you’ve done weddings and funerals – rough as an old boar and ready for anything they can get. But Mr Joy, he’s different. Mr Joy’s an abuser, a destroyer – do you know what I mean? He likes causing pain and death to animals, and he likes doing it to women, too. Hurting them and humiliating them. Degrading them.’

‘Yes. That might very well be true. But it doesn’t—’

‘That smell… that’s not natural, not even in a hospital. That’s his smell. That’s the smell of all the things he’s done and all the things he’d still like to do. We even put Nil-odour under his bed one night.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Undertaker’s fluid. They put it in coffins sometimes, so it’s less offensive for the relatives.’

‘You put undertaker’s deodorant under a dying patient’s bed?’

‘It didn’t work. You can’t remove the smell of evil with chemicals. You spend a night in here with that man, you can’t sleep when you goes home. You keep waking up with that…’ Protheroe hugged herself. ‘As for young Tessa – white, that girl was. This was after his wife come in this afternoon.’

‘Sandra, look…’ Merrily moved to the door. This wasn’t how state-registered nurses were supposed to behave. She needed to talk to the duty doctor. ‘You say I don’t get this. You’re dead right, I don’t get this at all. All right, he might not be a very nice man, he may not smell very good, but that’s no excuse to make his last hours a total misery. I mean, what does his wife say about all this?’

‘Mrs Joy don’t talk,’ said Sandra. ‘Being as how you’re a priest, I’ll tell you about Mrs Joy, shall I?’

‘If you think it’ll help.’

Sandra exhaled a sour laugh. ‘About twenty years younger than him, she is, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her, state she’s in, the poor miserable cow. No, not a cow, a rabbit… a poor frightened little wretch. We left them alone for about half an hour, as you do at times like this. Then Dr Taylor comes on his rounds and he has to see Mr Joy, obviously, and Tess goes in to ask Mrs Joy will she come out for a couple of minutes, and—’

Footsteps outside. Sandra stopped talking, looking at the door. The footsteps passed. Sandra lowered her voice.

‘The chair’s pushed right up next to the bed, see? That chair you were just sitting on?’

‘Yes.’ Merrily found her hands were clasped in front of her, rubbing together. She wanted to wash them, but not in front of Sandra Protheroe. ‘Go on.’

‘So Mrs Joy’s standing on that chair, leaning over the bed. She’s holding her dress right up above her waist. She’s got her knickers round her ankles.’

Merrily closed her eyes for a moment.

‘And Denzil’s just lying there with his tubes up his nose and all the spittle down his chin, wheezing and rattling with glee, and his little eyes eating her up. But that’s not the worst thing, see.’

She swallowed, backed up against a sink, looking down at her shoes and shaking her head.

‘The worse thing is her face. What Tessa said was that woman’s face was completely blank. No expression at all – like a zombie. She’s just looking at the wall, and her face’s absolutely blank. She knows Tessa’s there, but she don’t get down. Showing no embarrassment at all, though God knows she must have been as full up with shame and humiliation as it’s possible to be. But she just stands there staring at the wall. Because he hadn’t told her she could get down.’

Merrily’s mouth was dry.

‘This is a dying man,’ Sandra said. ‘And he knows it and she knows it, and she’s still terrified of him. In his younger days, see, he thought he was God’s gift. A woman who knows the family, she told me about all the women and girls he’d had, and the way he abused them but they kept coming back. He charmed them back, he did. Not by his looks, not by his manners, he just charmed them. And then he got older and he got sick and he got married, and he controls the wife by fear. And he’s lying there delighting in Tessa seeing the poor little woman giving him an eyeful of what he owns. If that’s not evil then I don’t know what evil is.’

What is evil? Huw Owen had said. It’s the question you’re never going to answer. But when you’re in the same room with it, you’ll know.

Merrily said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what I can do.’

‘Protection. She wants protection.’

The door had opened. Sister Cullen was standing there, the darkness behind her.

‘She’s right, he’s a bad man with a black charm. But he’s just a man, and that’s where it ends as far as I’m concerned. I’m from Derry, so I’ve seen what religion does to people, and I want none of it. But this is one patient where I’m more concerned about his nurses.’

‘It’s getting stronger the nearer he comes to death,’ Sandra said. ‘Tell her.’

‘Sandra’s convinced the smell’s getting worse.’

‘And if you don’t do something, when he dies this ward’s going to be polluted for ever. And I’m not coming back tomorrow. I’m out.’

‘Let me get this right.’ Merrily looked from one to the other, the believer and the atheist, but both essentially of the same mind. ‘You’ve called me out in the middle of the night, not because you want comfort for a distressed terminal patient but because… you want protection from him?’

Cullen said with resignation, ‘If there’s anything you think you can do about it, feel free, but I’d strongly advise you not to touch the evil bastard again.’

‘Sister…’ The young nurse Tessa in the doorway. She was crying. ‘Can you come, please?’

11 Scritch-scratch

MERRILY THOUGHT OF the almost-poetic abstraction of imprints and visitors and weepers and breathers.

She thought about the hitchhiker – the disembodied spirit which took over someone’s body for a period, usually for some specific if illogical purpose, and then went away.

She considered probably the worst of them all – Huw had discussed this in detail over the last two days of the Deliverance course – the squatter.

And then thought about the pathetic, stinking, wheezing, nasal-cathetered reality of Denzil Joy, who fitted into none of the slick categories which Charlie Headland had said reminded him of the fictionalized world of espionage. What was Denzil Joy other than an unpleasant man coming to the end of his run? Was he, indeed, any of her business?

There were several tests you had to implement before a subject could reasonably be considered possessed by an external, demonic evil – most importantly, the psychiatric assessment. Now, how could anyone assess a man apparently in the last hours of his life, a person unable to speak? It was an impossible situation.

‘I’m sorry, Sister,’ Tessa said. ‘It was just that his breathing sort of altered and I thought he was starting to… go.’

All four of them stood watching Denzil from outside the door.

‘Gone, has he?’ An old man warbling from the ward. ‘What’s happening over there?’

‘Everything’s fine, Francis,’ Eileen Cullen hissed. ‘Go to sleep now, will you.’

Merrily took a closer look at Denzil Joy, his face half-lit by the lamp on a table just outside the door. Black hair over shallow forehead, small, sucking mouth. His frame thin and wiry, with bony arms. Grip like a monkey-wrench, my dear.

‘Does he never say anything? Never ask for anything? Doesn’t he talk to you?’

‘Doesn’t like talking to women,’ Cullen said. ‘Prefers to communicate with us in other ways.’

Sandra instinctively massaged her bruised wrist. ‘I reckon he didn’t do this on his own. That’s what I think now.’

Merrily turned to her. ‘You’re a Christian, Sandra?’

‘I attend St Peter’s,’ Sandra declared piously. ‘Well, not every week – sometimes shifts don’t allow, obviously. But one week in every three – at least that.’

‘And you don’t believe, Eileen.’

‘I’m aware of evil,’ she snapped. ‘Of course I am. I just think there’s quite enough of it on this earth to be going on with.’

‘Tessa?’

‘I’m scared.’ In her uniform, no make-up, Tessa looked about Jane’s age, although she surely must be several years older. She had quite a posh accent. ‘I thought he was Cheyne-Stoking. I didn’t want to be alone with him when he died.’

Merrily glanced at Cullen, who beckoned her away from the door.

‘She means the kind of sporadic breathing that tells you they’re on their way out.’

Merrily nodded, remembering other bedsides.

‘The smell’s gone, Eileen. At least it’s not what it was.’

‘I don’t know, he seems to be able to turn it on and off at will. That’s what gets to Protheroe – him controlling his smell. Particularly when a woman gets close. There’s a psychological solution, if you ask me.’

‘He’s kind of drawing energy through sexual arousal?’

‘I can’t imagine there’s any physical arousal, and I don’t feel inclined to check. I’ve about had it with this one.’ Cullen wiped her brow with the side of a fist. ‘See, earlier on, Sandra was threatening to walk out. That’s when I called you. She knows if I took any disciplinary action over this there’d be unfavourable publicity of the kind nobody wants. I’m going through the motions, so I am, and I’d be happy if you could just do the same.’

‘Primarily, we need to consider what’s best for him.’

‘I just think he’s an evil bastard, you know? I wish he’d just die, then we could get him portered the hell out of here.’

Merrily sighed. No putting this off any longer. ‘I’ll go in and say a few prayers for him.’

‘That’s it? I thought you were an exorcist of some kind?’

‘Some kind,’ Merrily said.

‘I bind unto myself the Name,

‘The strong Name of the Trinity.

‘By invocation of the same,

‘The Three in One and One in Three.’

She was back in the sluice-room, alone this time, murmuring St Patrick’s Breastplate to the pale grey walls. A window was open; she heard a siren coming closer – police, or an ambulance bringing someone into Casualty. The normal world out there – and here she was in a former lunatic asylum, getting into Dark Age armour. Relying on her God to pull her out of this, if it should turn out to be misguided.

Don’t ever fall into the trap of thinking it’s you that’s doing it, Huw had stressed. You’re never any more than the medium, the vessel. We don’t want any of this Van Helsing crap, wielding the crucifix like it’s a battle-axe. Always preferred a titchy little cross, meself. Lets you know where you stand in the great scheme of things.

She wore her own cross under her jumper, and it too was pretty small.

What she could do was limited, anyway. She wasn’t allowed to perform an exorcism – and quite right, too – without the permission of the Bishop. Knowing Mick Hunter, he’d call for a written report, spend at least two days considering the ethics of it and how he’d look if it leaked out.

Merrily stepped out on to the ward, where most of the patients slept noisily on, shuffling and muttering. Few people got a peaceful night in a hospital. The silent digital wall-clock said 4.25.

‘I’d better come in with you,’ the night sister said.

‘Perhaps not, Eileen.’

Whenever possible, have other Christians with you as back-up – or witnesses in case there’s any shit flying round afterwards in the media. Or, put it this way, if you’re having people with you, make sure you know where they’ve been.

‘Because I’m not a bloody Bible-basher? Jesus! All right… Nurse Protheroe, what about you? You started all this.’

Sandra shrank away. ‘I can’t.’

‘Superstition,’ Cullen said, with contempt. ‘I can never accept that in a professional. Well, there has to be a staff nurse in there. This is a hospital, in case anybody’s forgotten.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Tessa said.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Sandra whispered harshly.

Merrily thought of Jane. She wouldn’t want the kid within a mile of this. She thought: My God, this is some kind of awful first. Four women gathering like a bunch of witches to plot against a dying man. This ever gets out, we’ll look ridiculous or dangerously paranoid. Or cold conspirators – heartless, vindictive. Are we?

‘Look,’ she said. ‘I’ll be all right on my own. I’m not going to be doing anything dramatic – no holy water. You can all watch through the window if you like.’

‘No,’ said Cullen.

‘I teach Sunday school,’ Tessa offered solemnly, and they all looked at her. ‘I can handle it as long as I’m not alone in there.’

‘All right, then.’ Eileen Cullen shrugged, perhaps still wanting to shame Sandra Protheroe into it, but Sandra didn’t react. ‘Just as long as you realize it’s not an instruction. And you make sure and stay well back from the Reverend, you hear? Any trouble, you come and get me. You know what I mean by trouble?’

‘I think so.’ Tessa nodded. She bit her upper lip, plucked a stray ash-blonde hair from her forehead.

Merrily put a hand on Tessa’s shoulder, leaned in to look for her eyes. ‘You sure about this?’

‘It’s best, isn’t it?’

‘All right. Do you want to come in here a minute.’

The sluice-room as temporary chapel. Merrily faced the girl over the rubbish sacks full of swabs and bandages soaked with bodily fluids and God-knows-what.

‘Tessa, I… How old are you?’

‘Nineteen.’

‘OK, look… I just want to say I’m not too sure about any of this. Whatever Mr Joy’s done in his time, it’s not my job to judge him. We’re just going in to pray with him and try to bring him some peace. To calm down whatever sick yearnings he’s harbouring so that he can end his life in some kind of grace. I mean, probably none of this will be necessary, but when I’ve started, I’ve got rules to follow, so I’d like to… close our eyes a moment. Our Father…’

She said the Lord’s Prayer softly, Tessa joining in, then placed her hands either side of the girl’s bowed head.

‘Jesus… surround her and hold her… safe from the forces of evil.’

It again entered her head that this was all a crazy, hysterical over-reaction; there were no forces of evil, no Je—

She kicked out mentally, sent the thought spinning away. She opened the door.

‘Come on.’

Denzil Joy’s terrible breathing was through the mouth: liquid, strangulated, the sound of an old-fashioned hot-water geyser filling up. In the side ward, with the door closed, it seemed all around them, underscored by that hum you couldn’t seem to escape in hospital wards, and the throaty chortle of the overhead heating pipes.

The green oxygen tubes were clipped together behind his head, which was supported by three pillows. There were scabs of mucus where the tubes fitted into his nostrils.

‘You want me to do anything?’ Tessa asked.

‘Just grab a chair from somewhere.’

‘I’d rather stand. Is that OK?’

‘However you feel comfortable.’

Merrily sat in the vinyl-covered chair on which the wretched Mrs Joy was said to have stood. Its seat was sunken in the middle.

OK. She pushed up a sleeve of her black jumper, reached over in the half-light and took Denzil’s hand, instantly screwing up her eyes because it was undeniably vile, like picking up a cold turd.

Stop it!

Sliding her hand away from his fingers with their long yellow nails, and up to his bony wrist, holding it gently, calming her breathing.

‘Denzil…’ She cleared her throat. ‘I don’t know if you can hear me. My name’s Merrily. I’m… er, the Vicar of Ledwardine. I’m just doing the rounds – as we vicars do.’

If he was even half awake, he wouldn’t be aware of what time it was, how unlikely it was that a vicar would be doing the rounds. At all costs she mustn’t alarm him.

‘I wanted to say a few prayers with you, if that’s OK.’

His breathing didn’t alter. His eyes remained three-quarters closed. He seemed unaware of her. She looked down at his thin, furtive face, the spittle bubbling around his mouth. And she pleaded with God to send her some pity. Nobody should die an object of fear and hatred and revulsion.

‘He’s very, very weak,’ Tessa murmured in her ear. ‘I don’t know how he’s holding on.’

Merrily nodded. ‘Almighty God, our Heavenly Father,’ she said softly. ‘We know, all of us, that we’ve done bad things and neglected to do good things we might’ve done.’

She felt Denzil’s wrist turn under her hand: other than the breathing, the first sign of life. The wrist turned so that the palm was upwards, the position of supplication, as though he was responding, holding out his hand for forgiveness.

‘For the sake of Jesus Christ, our Lord, Your Son, we beg You to forgive us, close the book on the past. Calm our souls.’

She squeezed the hand encouragingly. Outside, Nurse Sandra Protheroe passed the door without looking in.

‘We know Your nature is to have mercy, to forgive. We beg You to free Denzil from whatever bonds are binding his spirit.’

One of Denzil’s fingernails began to move slowly against her palm, like the claw of an injured bird. It felt, actually, quite unpleasant. Suggestive. She wished she’d never spoken to Sandra Protheroe.

Tessa was standing beside the door with her hands behind her back. She managed a rather wounded smile.

‘We ask You this,’ Merrily said, ‘in the name of our saviour Jesus Christ.’ She felt slightly sick and closed her eyes.

At once, the light scratching of Denzil’s nail on her palm picked up momentum, acquired a rhythm. A small highpitched wheeze was detectable under his rasping, snuffling breath, and the sweet sour stench was back – suddenly and rapidly unravelling from him like a soiled string, seeming to spiral through the thin, stale air directly into Merrily’s nose and coil there.

Cat faeces and gangrene.

Oh God! She felt clammy and nauseous but also starved, like she had flu coming on.

I’ll tell you what that is, Reverend. It’s the smell of evil.

It’s not evil. It’s sickness. It’s disgusting, but it’s not evil.

Still, she tightened her lips against it, fighting the compulsion to snatch her hand away. She must not, she must let it lie there, mustn’t react. It’s my job, it’s my job, it’s what I do, it’s—

She could almost hear it now. Scritch-scratch – the tiniest movement of a curling nail on the end of a yellow finger. Suspecting that in the mind of Denzil Joy this was not a mere finger.

He can enter you without moving an inch, that man.

Slide away, squirm away, get out of here.

Scritch-scratch, as though he was teasing away layers of skin in the centre of her palm to get his finger under the flesh. But that was imagination. His strength, his lifeforce, was so depleted this was the most he could manage: scritch-scratch. Poor guy – reach out to the humanity in him. Poor guy, poor guy, poor guy, poor guy…

She was aware of him taking in a long, long shuddering breath. Tessa moving towards the bed.

The breath was not released. There was an awesome cliffedge of silence. The scratching stopped.

‘This is it,’ Tessa said quietly. So much composure in the kid. ‘He’s Cheyne-Stoking, no question this time.’

In the breathless silence, Merrily would swear she could feel the heat of him, slithering from his mind to her mind, while his finger lay still in her hand like a small cigar.

It seemed much darker and colder in here now – as though, in its hunger for life-energy, the shrivelled body in the bed was absorbing all the electricity, all the light, all the heat in the room.

‘In fact I think he’s gone,’ Tessa said.

Darkness. Cold. Stillness. And the sinuous, putrid smell. Gently, Merrily attempted to slip her hand out of his.

And then it seized her.

Grip like a monkey-wrench.

Like a train from a tunnel, his breath came out and in the same moment his fingers pushed up between hers and tightened; a low, sniggering laugh seemed to singe the air between them.

And Merrily felt something slide between her legs.

Knowing in a second that she’d felt no such thing, that it was all imagination, conditioning. But it was too late: the cold wriggled fiercely into her groin, jetted into her stomach like an iced enema. She’d already torn her hand away, throwing herself back with so much force that she slipped from the chair to the shiny grey floor and slid back against the second bed, hearing herself squealing,

‘I bind unto myself the Name,

‘The strong Name of the Trin—’

And, hearing Tessa screaming shrilly, she cried out helplessly.

‘Begone!’

Not knowing who or what she meant.

There was a wrenching, snapping sound; she saw the green tubes writhing in the air like electric snakes, torn from Denzil’s nostrils as suddenly, in a single, violent ratchet movement, he sat up in his bed.

Tessa shrieking, ‘Noooooooooooo!’ and falling back against the door, stumbling out when it was flung open by Eileen Cullen – who just stood there with Denzil Joy’s upright, stiffened, shadowed shape between her and Merrily.

12 Soiled

SHE DISCOVERED SHE was in the corridor outside. And that she was half sobbing and half laughing, but it wasn’t real laughing. On the other side of a film of tears, a small flame was approaching.

‘It’s not allowed, is it?’ Was that her voice, that mad cackle?

‘The hell it isn’t,’ said Cullen, lighting Merrily’s cigarette and then one for herself.

They sat on the bench outside the ward. It was no longer quiet in there.

‘We told them Tessa had seen a mouse, but patients, especially old fellers – it’s like spooking the horses in a stable, you know? We’ll give them half an hour to get themselves back to sleep before we get somebody up here to take him out.’

‘I’m sorry, Eileen.’ Merrily blew her nose. ‘This is ridiculous.’

‘It’s that, all right. How the devil he found the strength to sit up like that is beyond me. He was a husk, so he was. Nothing left. What the hell did you do?’

‘Do?’ She crushed the wet tissue into her palm – the palm of the scritch-scratch. ‘God knows.’

‘You reckon?’

‘How would I know? I was completely out of my depth. No real idea what I was supposed to be doing. This is a bloody mug’s game, Eileen. A charade, maybe. Play-acting?’

My bit was play-acting; his was real.

‘Hey, I didn’t hear that. This is your profession.’ Cullen put a hand on her knee. ‘We’ll go into my office for a cuppa, soon as I get Protheroe to do the necessary.’

‘The necessary?’

‘Lay the poor bastard out. We’re none of us scared of dead bodies, are we? Not even this one, although… you didn’t see his face, did you?’

Merrily shook her head. ‘I was on the floor by then. Could only see the back of his head and those tubes flying out of his nose when he… rose up.’

She shuddered. The snapping of the tubes; she could still hear it.

‘That’s lucky. You’ll maybe get some sleep tonight.’ Eileen Cullen dragged on her cigarette. ‘Jesus, he was frightened. I thought at first it was me he was looking at. But he’s staring over my shoulder, out of the door into thin air. Nobody there. Nobody I could see. And the look on his face: like somebody was coming for him, you know? Like the person he feared most in all the world was standing in that doorway, waiting to… Oh, Jesus, the things you see in this job, you could go out of your mind if you hadn’t so much to bloody do.’

‘Waiting to take him away,’ Merrily said drably. ‘Whatever it was was waiting to take him away.’

‘It’s the chemicals is all it is. The chemicals in the brain. Some people that close to the end, the chemicals ease the way, you know?’

‘The angels on the threshold.’ Merrily blew her nose again into the sodden tissue.

‘Or the Devil. Whatever cocktail of volatile chemicals was sloshing round in that man’s head, they must’ve shown him the Devil and all his works.’

‘Which means I failed.’

‘Natural justice, Merrily.’

‘That’s not the way it’s supposed to work.’ There was a question she needed to ask, a really obvious question. What was it? She couldn’t think.

‘Come and have that cuppa.’

‘Thanks, but I need to get home. I’ve got my daughter.’

‘You want someone to drive you? I think you’re in shock, you know.’

‘God no, I’ll be fine. Maybe I should come back later and… cleanse the place?’

‘What, with all the patients awake?’ Cullen stood up. ‘You in there flashing the big cross and doing the mumbo-jumbo? Forget it. Mop and bucket’ll see it right. It’s over.’

‘Is it?’

‘What do you want me to say? I’m a non-believer. Was all chemicals, Merrily, maybe a few of yours as well, don’t you think? You go sleep it off. We’ll tell the Bishop or who you like that you did a terrific job.’

The Bishop?

‘I’d rather you said I’d never even been.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘Tell them I didn’t answer the phone when you rang.’

‘Get yourself some rest. Call me at home sometime. I’ve written the number on your ciggy packet.’ Sister Cullen squeezed her shoulder. ‘Thank you, Merrily. You did OK, I reckon.’

‘For a Bible-basher?’

The Bishop?

Had the Bishop set her up for it?

This was the question she’d meant to ask. She remembered that as she was leaving the building, pulling on her coat. Who exactly had told them to contact her? Who had advised them that Merrily Watkins was Deliverance-trained and available for work?

Had to be him. He was dangerous. Michael Hunter – Bishop Cool – was a dangerous man to have organizing your career.

There was light in the sky and a cold wind. What the hell time was it? Where had she left the car all those hours ago when all she’d had to think about was Dobbs? She hurried down the drive and into the deserted street full of fresh cold air from the hills.

It was the cold inside that scared her. She stood and shivered by the entrance to the shambling jumble of a hospital where the body of Denzil Joy lay cooling.

I was raped. Like icy letters in the sky. He raped me.

She felt greasy, slimy, soiled, used. He’d made his smell go into her, had scratched himself an entrance hole. And then he’d died, he’d gone away, but he’d left his filthy essence inside her. She needed a long shower, needed to pray. Needed to think. Because this would not, could not have happened to a male priest, a male exorcist.

I need exorcizing.

Violently she zipped up her fading waxed coat and strode away into the pre-dawn murk. She would find a church that was open or, failing that, would go to her own church in Ledwardine. She couldn’t take the pitiful, disgusting dregs of Denzil home to Jane. She would have to go into a church and pray for his soul. Pray for it to be taken away somewhere and stripped and cleaned.

She saw that the old blue Volvo had been very badly parked, even for three in the morning: standing half on the grass near the little gardens where the footpath went up and then down to the Wye. Another six inches and she’d have backed into a sign saying: NO PARKING. KEEP ENTRANCE CLEAR. She fumbled out her keys.

‘Excuse me, madam.’

He’d blundered out of the bushes, a big heavy guy in some kind of rally anorak, luminous stripe down one arm. ‘Is this your car?’

‘Who are you?’

‘Police. How long has the car been here, please?’

All she needed.

‘Look, I’m sorry, I was in a hurry and I thought it’d be OK.’

‘When did you park it?’

‘About three, I suppose.’

‘To go to the hospital?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘Look,’ Merrily said, exasperated, ‘it could’ve been parked a whole lot better, I agree. I’m very sorry. Give me a ticket or whatever. I’m a bit knackered, OK?’

‘It isn’t about parking, miss. Would you mind telling me your name, please?’

‘After I see your ID.’ Merrily unlocked the Volvo. If he took any time producing his warrant card, she was out of here. You didn’t trust big guys in the semi-dark – not these days.

‘It’s all right, Peter. It’s her.’ A woman in a long white raincoat emerged from the river path. ‘Ms Watkins, Person of the Cloth. I’ll deal with this.’

The big man nodded, trudged back up the footpath.

Merrily sighed. ‘DI Howe.’

‘Acting DCI, actually.’

‘The old fast track’s moved up a gear, has it?’ Weariness loosening Merrily’s reserve. ‘Let me guess, I’ve walked into some kind of stake-out. Colombian drugs barons are bringing a consignment up the Wye?’

Annie Howe didn’t laugh. It occurred to Merrily that she had yet ever to hear Annie Howe laugh. Her short, ashen hair gleamed dully like a helmet in the early light.

‘You priests work long hours. Sick parishioner?’

‘Dead,’ Merrily said. ‘Just now.’

‘Obviously a night for it, Ms Watkins.’

‘For what?’

Annie Howe came to stand next to her, glancing into the Volvo. She was maybe five years younger than Merrily – a smooth, efficient, over-educated CID person, both feet on the escalator. During the police hunt in Ledwardine earlier this year, Jane had remarked that Howe reminded her of a Nazi dentist. You could tell where the kid was coming from.

‘We’ve pulled a body out of the Wye, Ms Watkins. Just down there, not far from Victoria Bridge.’

‘Oh God. Just?’

‘Couple of hours ago.’

She remembered hearing the siren from the sluice-room window. ‘What happened?’

‘We’re not sure yet. But it didn’t appear to have been in the water an awfully long time, so we’re rather keen to talk to anyone who might have seen something’ – Howe smiled thinly – ‘or heard a solitary splash, perhaps.’

‘Not me.’

‘You arrived about three, I hear that right?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Nobody about at all?’

‘Not that I can recall.’

‘You ever been down to the river this way?’

‘Not really.’

‘It’s quite pretty,’ Howe said. ‘Come and see.’

Merrily sighed and followed her past some flowerless beds and a bench to a little parapet. Below them was a narrow suspension bridge, grey girders across the dark, misty river. A glimmering of pale plastic tape, and two policemen.

Howe said, ‘It’s just that if there’s a particular parking place most convenient for the river, then your car’s in it. We thought it might be the dead man’s at first. Quite a disappointment really, when your name came up as the owner.’

‘And when the body wasn’t a woman about my age in a dog-collar.’

‘Not quite what I meant. It just made it less easy to put a name to him. But we will.’

‘How old was he?’

‘Quite young. Thirties.’

‘Suicide?’

‘It’s a possibility, given the time of day. So’s accidental death.’ Annie Howe looked at Merrily. ‘So’s murder.’

‘He didn’t drown?’

‘We should know quite soon.’

‘But he came off the bridge?’

Howe shrugged.

‘If you knew it was my car, why didn’t you come into the hospital and ask for me?’

‘We did. Nobody seemed to know you were there.’

‘The Alfred Watkins Ward, if you want to check. Ask for Sister Cullen. I’ve been with her for the last three hours or so.’

Howe nodded. ‘So it’s unlikely you would’ve seen anything. Ah, well, nothing’s ever simple, is it, Ms Watkins? Thanks for your help. I don’t suppose we’ll be in touch, but if you remember anything that might be useful…’ the wind whipped the skirt of Howe’s raincoat against her calves, ‘you know where to find me.’

Merrily looked down into the swirling mist and dark water. It looked somehow warmer than she felt – and almost inviting.

13 Show Barn

IT WAS RARE to see genial Dick Lyden in a bad mood.

When Lol arrived just after eight a.m., Dick was pacing the kitchen, slamming his right fist into his left palm.

‘The little shit,’ he fumed. ‘The fucking little shit!’

‘He’s just trying it on,’ Mrs Ruth Lyden, fellow therapist, said calmly. ‘He knows you too well. He’s got you psyched out. He knows your particular weak spot and he goes for it.’

There was plenty of room for Dick to pace; the Lydens’ kitchen was as big as a restaurant kitchen, more than half as big as Lol’s new flat over the shop. It was all white and metallic like a dairy.

‘His psychological know-how goes out of the window when he’s dealing with his own son,’ Ruth told Lol. She was a large, placid, frizzy-haired woman who’d once been Dick’s personal secretary in London.

‘Well, you can’t, can you?’ Dick sat down at the banquetsized table. ‘You simply can’t distance yourself sufficiently from your own family – be wrong even to try. I think we’re probably even worse than ordinary people at dealing with our own problems.’

Lol didn’t like to ask what the present personal problem was; Ruth told him anyway.

‘James has been chosen as Boy Bishop.’ She searched Lol’s face, eyebrows raised. ‘You know about that?’

‘Sorry,’ Lol said. ‘I’m not that well up on the Church.’

‘Medieval Christmas tradition. Used to happen all over the place, but it’s almost unique to Hereford now. A boy is chosen from the Cathedral choristers, or the retired choristers, to replace the Bishop on his throne on St Nicholas’s Day. Gets to wear the mitre and wield the staff and whatnot. Terribly solemn and everything, though quite fun as well.’

‘It’s actually a great honour,’ Dick said. ‘Especially for newcomers like us. Little shit!’

‘And of course James now says he’s going to refuse to do it.’ Ruth poured coffee for Lol. ‘When they offered it to him, he was very flattered in a cynical sort of way. But now he’s announced it would be morally wrong of him to do it – having decided he’s an atheist—’

‘What the fuck difference does that make?’ Dick snarled. ‘At least twenty-five per cent of the bloody clergy are atheists!’

‘—and that it isn’t in line with his personal image or his musical direction. He’s sixteen now, and at sixteen one’s image is awfully well defined. How quickly they change! One year an angelic little choirboy, and then—’

‘A bloody yob,’ said Dick. ‘Where’s his guitar? I’m going to lock it in the shed.’

‘He’s taken it to school with him.’ Ruth hid a smile behind her coffee cup. ‘Told you he had you psyched.’

‘Devious little bastard.’ Dick drained his cup, coughed at the strength of the coffee. ‘Right, I’ll get my coat, Lol. Be good to go out and deal with something straightforward.’

‘Moon is straightforward?’

‘Well, you know what I mean. Straightforwardly convoluted.’

‘Poor Dick,’ Ruth said when he’d left the kitchen. ‘It’s an honour for him rather than James. A sign that he’s really been accepted into the city. He needs that – needs to be at the hub of things. He’s a terrible control-freak, really, in his oh-so-amiable way.’

Lol said, ‘Do you guys psychoanalyse one another all the time?’

Ruth laughed.

Outside, it began to rain, a sudden cold splattering.

‘Wow.’ Jane was observing her mother from the stove. ‘You really do look like shit.’

‘Thank you. I think we’ve established that.’

Merrily had told her about being delayed by the police investigating a body in the Wye. But that evidently didn’t explain why she looked like shit.

‘You need a hot bath,’ Jane said. ‘And then off to bed.’

‘The bath certainly.’ No question about that. Merrily watched the rain on the window. It looked dirty. Everything looked dirty even after twenty minutes before the altar. Scritch-scratch.

‘So.’ Jane shovelled inch-thick toast on to a plate. ‘You want to talk about the other stuff?’

‘What makes you think there’s other stuff?’

‘Do me a favour,’ Jane said.

The kid had realized, from quite soon after Sean’s death, that her mother would need someone on whom she could lay heavy issues. There were times when she instinctively became a kind of sensible younger sister – with no sarcasm, point-scoring, storage of information for future blackmail.

‘Hang on, though.’ Merrily looked up. ‘What time is it? The school bus’ll be going without you.’

‘I’m taking the day off. I have a migraine.’

‘In which case, flower, you appear to be coping with the blinding agony which defines that condition with what I can only describe as a remarkable stoicism.’

‘Yeah, it’s a fairly mild attack. But it could get worse. Besides, when you’ve really sussed out the way teachers operate, you can take the odd day off any time you like without missing a thing.’

‘Except you never have – have you?’

‘A vicar’s daughter has to be flexible. If I went to school, you’d stay up and work all day, and by the time I got home you’d be soooo unbearable.’

‘Jane—’

‘Don’t argue. Just have some breakfast and bugger off to bed. I’ll stick around, make a brilliant log fire – and repel all the time-wasting gits.’

Merrily gave up. ‘But this must never happen again.’

Jane shrugged.

‘All right,’ Merrily said. ‘No egg for me, thanks. My digestive system can just about cope with Marmite.’

‘Right.’ Jane brought the teapot to the table and sat down. ‘What’s disturbed it exactly?’

Merrily sighed a couple of times and watched the rain blurring the window. And she then told Jane about Denzil Joy.

Some of it.

Rain sheeted down on Dinedor Hill, the twisty road narrowing as they climbed.

Dick was clearly disappointed when they ran out of track for the massive Mitsubishi Intercooler Super Turbo-Plus he’d borrowed from Denny for the weekend. Dick was contemplating a move into four-wheel drive.

Lol unbuckled his seatbelt. ‘If you go any further, English Heritage’ll be down on you. It’ll be in the Hereford Times – “City Therapist Squashes Ancient Camp”.’

‘You may scoff. But I do feel it’s important to be a good citizen. We chose to come here – which confers responsibility.’ Dick braked and reversed into something satisfyingly deep and viscous. ‘Even to something that just looks like any other hill.’

‘You have no soul, Dick.’

Dick squinted through the mud-blotched windcreen. ‘Buggered if I’m staggering up there in this weather. What am I missing?’

‘Nice view over the city. For the rest, you need a soul.’

‘Imagination.’ Dick leaned back in the driving seat, allowing the glass to mist. ‘I have very little, thank goodness. The ancestors… Jung would have found plenty to go at, but I’ve never been particularly drawn to the idea of the collective-unconscious, race memories, all that. It sounds good, but… what do you think?’

‘I’m inclined to believe it. I’ve got a bit in common with Moon, I suppose.’

‘And you fancy her. Well, of course you do. Awfully sexy creature.’

‘Yes.’ Lol had been half expecting this. ‘She is.’

‘So what’s the problem?’ Dick started ticking off plus-factors on his fingers. ‘You’re both on your own. I’m her actual therapist, not you, so no ethical barriers. Do find her attractive, don’t you?’

‘She’s beautiful.’

‘But you think she doesn’t fancy you – that it? Oh, I think she does, old son. I think she does.’

Lol felt awkward. ‘Maybe we wouldn’t be too good for each other. You don’t get to laugh much around Moon.’

‘Not a terrific sense of humour, no,’ Dick conceded.

‘Like, you want to make her happy, but you don’t somehow think she’d be happy being happy.’

And that was it really: you couldn’t help feeling that life with Moon was destined to end in a suicide pact.

‘Lol,’ Dick said, ‘I realize you’re a sensitive soul, but you don’t particularly need to think about psychology when you’re shagging someone, do you?’

‘Yuk,’ Jane said. ‘I mean… yuk!’

‘Quite.’

‘I mean, it’s awful, it’s tragic, and everything. But it’s also… really inconsiderate. I really think you should’ve walked out. Like, how were you to know these nurses weren’t lying? Nobody should have to make a decision like that, with the old guy’s clock running down the whole time.’

‘It wasn’t an actual exorcism. It wasn’t much at all, in the end.’

‘Sounds like that’s what the older nurse wanted, though. An exorcism.’

‘Possibly.’ The parts Merrily hadn’t mentioned included the scratching finger and other sensations. The subjective aspects.

‘Face it.’ Jane poured the tea. ‘It’s a crap deal, Mum. They send you in armed with a handful of half-assed prayers and platitudes which are supposed to cover all eventualities. You’re holding a duff hand from the start.’

‘Well, not—’

‘It’s like with these evangelical maniacs, where you like go along and you’re looking a bit off-colour and in about three minutes flat they’ve discovered you’re possessed by seventeen different demons and the next thing you’re rolling around on the floor throwing up. You could really damage people.’

‘It’s a bit more disciplined than that but, yeah, I know what you mean. It is a minefield.’

‘And it’s just useless liturgy. Like, with all respect, what real actual practical training have you had? It’s not like you’ve even done any meditation or yoga or anything. I mean… theological college? Does that even equal, say, two weeks at a respectable ashram?’

‘I think it possibly does,’ Merrily said, but wondering.

‘But you’re not really spiritually developed, are you? Not like Buddhist monks and Indian gurus and guys like that. Like, you can’t – I don’t know – leave your body or anything. You’ve just read the books. And yet they want you to mess with people’s souls.’

‘It’s supposed to be God who does the actual messing. That is, we don’t believe we have any special powers. We kind of signpost the way for the Holy Spirit.’

‘You ever ask yourself, if the Holy Spirit is so ubi… all-overthe-place and on the ball, why does it need a signpost?’

‘We have to invite the Holy Spirit in, you know?’

‘Why?’

‘Because that’s one of the rules. Deep theology, flower.’

‘Bollocks,’ Jane murmured. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t let Hunter get away with this.’

Merrily paused with the mug at her mouth. ‘He’s the guv’nor.’

‘He’s a tosser.’

‘But I will call him. I’ll have a bath and a rest and then I’ll call him.’

‘Maybe Rowenna could get some of the SAS cross-country guys to elbow the flash git into a deep ditch,’ Jane mused. ‘Muddy his fetching purple tracksuit.’

The rain was battering the barn windows, and Lol was sure there was an element of sleet to it now. But Dick was all sunshine, like his row with the boy James had never happened.

‘Well, this is super.’ Clasping his herbal tea to his chest. ‘This is quite magnificent.’

And it was. The little barn was transformed. All the boxes had disappeared, everything put away, everything tidy. A bright coal-fire on the simple, stone hearth. Fragments of black pottery arranged on a small shelf. On the wall alongside the steps to the bedroom loft was a detailed pen-and-ink plan of, presumably, the Dinedor Iron Age community – round huts with stone bases and conical thatched roofs. Moon had made mysterious marks on it: dots and symbols – archaeologist stuff.

Ideal Homes show barn?

‘You were right and we were wrong,’ Dick told Moon. But he was smiling at Lol and the smile said: I was right and you were wrong.

Above the fireplace was a gilt-framed photograph of a smiling man leaning against a Land Rover. The man’s smile was Moon’s smile.

‘We thought you’d be a bit, ah, cut off up here,’ Dick said. ‘A bit lonely? But this is your place, Moon. What are you going to do?’

‘Well, I’m going back to work in the shop.’ Moon wore the long grey dress, freshly washed; without mud on the hem it looked like a hostess dress. Her very long hair was in a loose, lush plait. ‘For a while, anyway.’

‘Playing it day by day.’

‘I’m not an alcoholic, Dick.’

She didn’t smile. She hadn’t looked at Lol. He felt he’d betrayed her.

‘What I meant, Moon,’ Dick said, ‘is that you clearly no longer feel the need to hurry – rush from one experience to another. You’ve been away, you’ve been through all kinds of changes, and now you’ve returned to repossess your past. Your past, your place, firm ground – it must feel wonderful.’

Moon said nothing. Dick took this as agreement, and nodded enthusiastically. It was the conclusion he wanted, the neat outcome of a very singular case. He had her all packaged up in his head: at least an article for Psychology Today or whatever he subscribed to. Moon was getting better. Moon was taking responsibility for herself.

So why, to Lol, had she never seemed more of an enigma? What had caused her suddenly to launch into this place like a team of industrial cleaners? As if she’d known they were coming. Or someone else? Determined that the barn should project the image of a balanced, settled academic individual.

It was a façade; it had to be.

And the picture of her smiling father disturbed him. If Dick had noticed it, he didn’t comment. Lol looked closely at the photograph. When it was taken, Moon’s father would have been about Denny’s age – early to mid forties. He looked more like Moon than Denny did, the same smile and the same deepsunk, glittering eyes. Something black and gnarled lay on the mantelpiece below the picture. Lol bent to examine it.

‘Don’t touch that!’ Moon almost ran across the room, eased herself between Lol and the fireplace.

Lol stepped back. ‘I’m sorry…’

‘It’s very delicate.’

‘What is it?’

‘I found it. It was only about ten yards from the barn. Someone had started digging out a pond some time ago and never finished it, and there was a heap of soil where the ground was turned over, and it was actually projecting – sticking out.’

She moved aside to let them see, now they realized they mustn’t touch. It was knobbled and corroded, about ten inches long.

‘Anyone else, if they didn’t know about these things, they’d think it was just an old tractor part or something. I mean, nothing much has ever been found up here. A trench was once cut from the ramparts to the centre of the camp, and nothing much was found there except lots of black pottery and an axe-head.’

‘It’s a dagger,’ Lol decided.

‘A sword. Confirmation for me that this farm – not so much the house, but the farm – has been here since the Iron Age. It was waiting for me to find it. You see, now?’

‘Fate,’ Lol said hollowly.

‘Oh no,’ Moon said. ‘Far less random than fate.’

‘What’s that mean?’

Moon shook her head. He thought she smiled.

‘You could take it to a museum, have it cleaned up by experts.’

Moon was horrified. ‘Nobody’s going to touch it but me. I don’t want the flow blocked by anyone else’s vibrations.’

‘Good for you, Moon,’ said Dick. ‘Look, we must have a good long chat.’

‘Yes, but not today,’ Moon said. ‘My landlords are coming over for lunch. Tim and Anna Purefoy? From the farm?’

‘Ah.’ Dick nodded. ‘Excellent. Getting to know the neighbours.’

‘I’m meeting all the people who live around the hill – for my book. If I’m going to trace how the community’s changed over two millennia, I have to examine its components. Quite a few of the newcomers here are very interested too. They’re going to help me.’

‘Terrific.’ Dick looked like he wanted to pat her on the head. ‘Can’t wait to read it.’

Later, when Dick went to have fun reversing the Mitsubishi out of the morass in front of the barn where someone had once started to dig a pond, Moon came to stand next to Lol in the doorway.

‘Don’t bring him here again.’

‘He’ll hear you.’

‘I don’t care if he does. I don’t want him here. He’s an idiot. Denny only employed him to get the court off our backs.’

‘Your back, Moon.’

‘He’s an idiot.’

‘He means well.’

‘Lol, If you come here again as Dick’s assistant, I won’t tell you anything in future. I don’t need people around me I can’t trust.’

The slanting rain plucked at the mud.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lol said. ‘Do you want me to come back?’

She looked at him, smiling almost coyly. ‘Only as yourself.’

As Merrily rolled gratefully into bed, the phone rang.

‘Unplug it!’ Jane screeched from the landing. ‘Unplug it now! I’ll get it downstairs.’

‘Hello,’ Merrily said. ‘Ledwardine Vicarage.’

‘Merrily? It’s Sophie at the Bishop’s office. Michael asked me to ring. We wondered if you’d be popping into town today and, if so, could you call in?’

‘Well, I wasn’t planning…’ On the one hand, she very much needed to talk to the Bishop; on the other, not in this state. ‘Bit tied up this morning.’

‘Oh. Well, this afternoon there’ll be nobody here. Better make it tomorrow, I suppose. It’s just a little job – in connection with the Deliverance side of things.’

‘Oh?’

‘I don’t imagine it’s terribly urgent.’

‘Good. Sophie, do all the Deliverance cases come through your office?’

‘Well, it’s intended that they should. I’m afraid Canon Dobbs was less organized.’

‘What about the problem last night at the General Hospital?’

‘At the hospital? Was there a problem?’

‘So it didn’t come through the office?’

‘It didn’t come through me.’

‘If you weren’t there, would the Bishop have handled it himself?’

‘They wouldn’t normally get through to the Bishop. Anyway he wasn’t here last night. He was at his parents’ home in the Forest of Dean. They thought his father had suffered another heart attack but it was a false alarm, I’m glad to say.’

‘Oh,’ Merrily said, ‘good.’

‘Did you have to go to the hospital, then, Merrily?’

‘Yes, I did.’ She gripped the phone tightly. If Hunter had been away, then who had directed the hospital to approach her? Who set her up for Denzil Joy’s grisly farewell party?

‘Merrily, are you all right?’

‘Yes, I… This other job – can you tell me what that is?’

‘I’m not sure I should over the phone.’

‘You don’t need to mention names.’

‘Well, it’s… a haunting. At a home for the elderly. Near Dorstone, out towards the Welsh border.’

‘And where did that come from? Who told you about it?’

‘It came from the new vicar of Dorstone, I believe. Michael had asked me to keep him informed of any reports of this nature, and when I mentioned it to him he said he’d like you to… take a crack at it, as he put it. He…’ She hesitated. ‘What he went on to say, if I’m not speaking out of turn, is that it would be a test of how committed you were.’

‘Committed?’

‘Frankly, he feels you’re rather stalling. He’d expected a firm answer by now. When we spoke on the phone, he asked if I’d heard from you.’

‘I see. So if I sidestep this haunting, or suggest the Vicar of Dorstone handles it himself, he’ll take that as a no.’

‘I may be wrong about that.’

Sophie was never wrong. Merrily felt she could almost see the hand of fate, grey-gloved in the half-light of the bedroom.

From the landing, Jane called out, ‘For Christ’s sake, Mum!’

In Merrily’s head, the demonic Denzil Joy sat up in bed for the last time, tubes flying out of his nose in twin puffs of snot. Huw Owen’s voice echoed over the Brecon Beacons. Might as well just paint a great big bullseye between your tits.

And, she thought, it was Dobbs, wasn’t it? It was bloody Dobbs – it has to be. Dobbs set me up.

She felt light-headed with fatigue. She knew that later, when she awoke again, she was going to be very angry, but now the rage was still misty and distant.

So were the words she spoke, so faintly that she wasn’t sure she hadn’t merely thought them. ‘I’ll come in tomorrow then, Sophie. Ten? Ten-thirty?’

She didn’t hear the reply, wasn’t even aware of hanging up the phone.

There were no dreams, thank God.

14 The First Exorcist

SHE STOPPED AT the top of the gatehouse stairs, rubbing circulation back into her hands. It seemed to have become winter overnight. The waxed jacket felt as flimsy as a bin-liner. No good, she’d have to get herself a proper coat when she had time.

When she saw the office door, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or turn around and creep quietly away.

The white panels were adorned by a single, black gothic letter. Above it, a simple, black cross.

The Rev. Charlie Headland was chuckling softly in her head. More like MI5…

Too late to turn around and creep out. Sophie – grey suit, pearls, neat white bun, half-glasses on a chain – stood in the adjacent doorway.

‘Merrily, good morning. Did you see a few specks of snow? I’m convinced I saw snow. Heavens, come up.’

‘Do I have to sign in? Maybe pass through a detector?’

Sophie smiled wryly. ‘Michael’s specific instructions. In one respect I suppose it’s rather elegant.’

‘Sophie, it looks like the entrance to a bloody chapel of rest.’

‘Oh.’ Sophie looked put out. She was the Bishop’s person, whoever the current bishop happened to be.

The new arrival on the office desk was an Apple Mac and a printer, and something Merrily took to be a scanner.

‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘All I know how to do on one of these is type.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Sophie said, a little cool now. ‘I’m your secretary as well, for a while. Michael wants me to open a Deliverance database: filing and categorizing the various cases, and giving area breakdowns. He also wants me to arrange a meeting with the Director of Social Services, the Chief Executive of the Health Authority, charities like MIND – and also the police.’

Merrily flopped down behind the desk. ‘What?’

‘And you’re to have an e-mail address, possibly a website.’

She looked into the blank computer screen as though it were a crystal ball, conjuring up Huw Owen’s tired, rugged face. I don’t want stuff letting in. A lot of bad energy’s crowding the portals. I want to keep all the doors locked and the chains up…

Her new secretary stood by the window, hands linked demurely at the waist of her tweed skirt.

‘Look… Sophie,’ Merrily moistened her wind-roughened lips, ‘the thing about Deliverance, it needs to be low-profile. I wouldn’t go as far as to use the word “clandestine”, but there’s a danger of attracting time-wasters and fanatics and loonies and… other undesirable elements. The Bishop doesn’t seem to have grasped this basic point.’

‘Deliverance is getting a high priority, Merrily.’ Sophie slipped into the visitor’s chair. ‘Look… I really wouldn’t worry about this. Michael’s a very young man to be a bishop, and he perhaps feels he’s been put in place to make an impression, help push the Church firmly into the twenty-first century. He’s also a very clever man, with an impeccable pedigree which he tends to underplay. Father and an uncle were both bishops… father-in-law’s the Dean of Gloucester. Michael feels that if people are aware of the amount of work undertaken by the Deliverance ministry, they may be more inclined towards what you might call spiritual preventative medicine.’

‘You mean what we used to call “Going to Church”?’

Sophie smiled wryly.

‘I know,’ Merrily said wearily. ‘It all makes a kind of sense. I just wish there was less… bollocks.’

‘I don’t doubt that you’ll cope, Merrily. You’ll find the details of the Dorstone haunting on your computer, if you click on the desktop file marked Memo. I shall be next door if you want me.’

‘Thanks.’ Merrily shed her coat and switched on the computer.

And then closed the door and picked up the phone and rang Eileen Cullen at home.

‘Timed it well, Merrily. Come off shift, whizz round Tesco, home to bed.’ Away from the ward, Cullen’s voice sounded softer. ‘How are you now?’

‘Bit confused.’

‘Ah-ha. Well… what can I tell you? There’s a palpable sense of relief on the ward. We laid him out – he made the scariest corpse I ever handled – then we fumigated the side ward. Too much to expect that he’d take his smell down to the mortuary with him.’

Almost immediately, Denzil’s reptilian odour was in her head. Merrily stifled a cough.

‘Oh, and later in the morning,’ Eileen Cullen said, ‘I’m told that the old man came in and said a prayer or two.’

‘Old man?’ Merrily tingled.

‘I don’t even know his name, but his collar was the right way round so nobody questions it.’

‘His name is Dobbs,’ Merrily said.

‘Aye, that’s the feller, I suppose.’

‘He already knew about Denzil. Didn’t he?’

‘He must’ve. Though how he’d have found out the man was dead, I don’t know. We’ve hardly got the time to put out a general bulletin to the clergy.’

‘OK, look, let’s not keep walking around each other – I’ll explain. Canon Dobbs is the Diocesan Exorcist. I’m the one being set up to take over from him. He doesn’t want to go, and he certainly doesn’t want to be replaced by a woman. I’m coming round to thinking he set me up with Denzil last night to give me a taste of just how nasty and squalid the job could be. And why it’s not a suitable job for a woman.’

After a moment Cullen said, ‘That wasn’t very nice of him then, was it?’

‘Not awfully. So I’d appreciate just… knowing. Like, anything you can remember. Entirely off the record, Eileen.’

‘Aye,’ said Cullen, ‘you get surgeons like that. They love to leave you holding the shit end of the stick. All right, I’ll tell you what I know. He did know Denzil Joy. Whether this was from Denzil’s life outside of hospital I wouldn’t know. Probably. But he came in once – I didn’t see this, I wasn’t there, but Protheroe was – and they had to ask him to leave. Denzil’s spitting at him, coming out with all kinds of foul stuff you don’t want to be hearing from a sickbed, and it carried on that way after the priest was well out of the building. It’s why we put him in solitary the past two times. Though obviously his wife lived to regret that.’

‘Did anyone ask Dobbs about the incident?’

‘Oh, he wouldn’t talk to the likes of us – except very briefly to Protheroe. He said to let him know if we had any further trouble with Mr Joy. So, naturally, the other night, after the business with the wife, Protheroe’s screaming, “Call the priest, call the priest, the man’s possessed with evil.” ’

‘And you called him?’

‘I called the number she gave me and a woman answered, and I told her what it was about and she said to hang on, and then she came back and said to call the Reverend Watkins. Does that solve your problem?’

‘Do you remember the phone number you rang for Dobbs?’

‘Oh, I probably wrote it down and threw it away. Protheroe probably keeps it in a gold locket around her neck.’

‘Well, thanks. You’ve been very helpful.’

‘Aye.’ A pause. ‘How’re you feeling yourself, Merrily? Like, did he do anything to you?’

‘I… maybe.’

‘I don’t want to worry you,’ Cullen said, ‘but they say it comes back sometimes. Like the ache you get with the shingles, you know?’

‘I’ve never had shingles.’

‘Pray you never do,’ Cullen said. ‘Seems daft saying this to a priest, but if you ever want a chat about anything, you’ve got the number.’

‘Thanks,’ Merrily said. ‘Thanks.’

She clicked on Memo.

STRICTLY PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

Mrs Susan Thorpe, proprietor, the Glades Residential Home,

Hardwicke (between Dorstone and Hay-on-Wye) requests a

discreet meeting with regard to unexplained occurrences.

Sophie’s head came round the door just then, as if she’d heard the click of the mouse. ‘Would you like me to call her for you? Make an appointment?’

‘Just leave the number on the desk. Sophie, could you give me another bit of information?’

‘It’s what I’m here for, Merrily.’

‘Could you tell me exactly where in the Close Canon Dobbs lives?’

Sophie removed her half-glasses. ‘Ho-hum,’ she said.

‘The Bishop’s specific instructions are to keep Dobbs and me well apart, right?’

‘Michael doesn’t discuss Canon Dobbs. Perhaps you could try the telephone directory?’

‘Of which you know he’s ex-.’

Sophie sighed. ‘He moved out of the canonry when his wife died. He lives in a little terraced house in Gwynne Street.’

‘That’s…?’

‘Less than fifty yards from where I sit – just down from the Christian bookshop. And I didn’t tell you that.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I suppose you had to get this over at some stage.’ Sophie refixed her glasses. ‘Don’t forget your haunting, will you?’

Frost-blackened plants dripped down the sides of a hanging basket next to the door. The green door needed painting. Paint was peeling from the wooden window ledge; the wood was rotting. The house itself rather let Gwynne Street down.

The street was narrow, almost like an alley, following the perimeter wall of the Bishop’s Palace, and sloping downhill towards the river. The house was one of the lower ones, before they gave way to warehouses and garages near the banks of the Wye.

There was no bell, no knocker. Merrily banged on the door with a fist, which hurt and brought more paint flying off.

There was no answer. She peered in at the window. The curtains were drawn against her. She looked around in frustration. There was no sign of another way in. Above her, the sky was tight and dark-flecked like stretched goatskin.

‘Hello, Merrily. All right, luv?’

‘I don’t really know.’

‘Oh.’ Silence on the line as Huw Owen mulled this over. ‘That sounds like you took on the job. I thought you wouldn’t back out.’

‘I was actually about to turn it down.’ Merrily lit a cigarette, looking out of the window into the Bishop’s Palace yard. ‘Then a case happened.’

‘Just happened, eh?’ Huw said. ‘Just like that. Well, what’s done’s done, in’t it? How can I help?’

‘I don’t suppose any of the others’ve called. Charlie? Clive?’

‘Never off, lass. “Do excuse me bothering you again, Huw, but I have a teensy problem, and I’m not entirely sure if it’s a weeper or a breather.” ’

Merrily blew an accidental smoke-ring. ‘So I’m the first to come crying to the headmaster.’

‘I always liked you the best, anyroad, luv. Charlie and Clive’ll fall on their arses sooner or later, but they won’t tell me.’

She started to laugh, picturing him sitting placidly in his isolated, Brontë-esque rectory, like some ungroomed old wolfhound.

‘Let’s hear it then, lass.’

She told him about Denzil Joy. She told it simply and concisely. She missed out nothing she thought might be important. Scritchscratch. And then the Dobbs link. It took over fifteen minutes, and it brought everything back, and she felt unclean again.

‘My,’ Huw said, ‘that’s a foxy one, in’t it?’

‘What d’you think?’

‘Could be a few things. Could be just a very nasty little man. Or it could be a carrier.’

‘A carrier. Did you tell us about carriers?’

‘Happen I forgot.’

‘Meaning you deliberately forgot. Would carriers be the people who pick up hitchhikers?’

‘You’re not daft, Merrily. I said that, din’t I? Provable carriers are… not that common. And not easy to diagnose. And they can lead to a lot of hysteria of the fundamentalist type. You know, if one bloke’s got it, it must be contagious? And then you get these dubious mass-exorcisms, everybody rolling around and clutching their guts.’

‘Just one man,’ Merrily said, ‘so far.’

‘That’s good to know. Well, a carrier is usually a nasty person who attracts more nastiness to him – like iron filings to a magnet. Usually there’s a bit of a sexual kink. An overly powerful sex-drive and probably not bright. Not a lot up top, too much down below.’

‘Anything I need to do now he’s gone?’

‘To make sure he don’t come back? Sounds like Mr Dobbs has done it. Not going quietly into that good night, is he?’

‘Clearly not.’

‘Might not work, mind. That’s the big irony with Deliverance – half the time it don’t work. But in somewhere like a hospital it’ll fade or get consumed by all the rest of the pervading anguish. You could happen do a protection on yourself periodically. Oh, and leave off sex for a week.’

‘Gosh, Huw, that’s going to be a tall order.’

‘Oh dear,’ Huw said. ‘So you’re still on your own, eh? What a bloody waste. God hates waste.’

Before lunch, Merrily made an appointment to meet Mrs Susan Thorpe at the Glades Residential Home at eleven o’clock the following morning. There must have been somebody in the room who didn’t know about this issue, because Mrs Thorpe kept addressing her as if she were Rentokil coming to deal with an infestation of woodworm.

Sophie was meeting a friend for lunch at the Green Dragon. Merrily decided to see what was on offer at the café inside All Saints Church: a fairly ingenious idea for getting bums on pews or at least close to pews.

But first – Sod it, I’m not walking away from this – she slipped round the wall and back into Gwynne Street.

There was a weak, cream-coloured sun now over Broad Street, but Gwynne Street was still in shadow. The only point of light was in the middle of Dobbs’s flaking green door.

It turned out to be a slender white envelope trapped by a corner in the letterbox flap. As she raised a fist to knock on the door and wondered if she ought to push the envelope through, she saw the name typed on the front:

Mrs M Watkins

She caught a movement at an upstairs window and glanced up, saw a curtain quiver. He was there! The old bastard had been in the whole time. He’d watched her standing here knocking more paint from his door.

And now he’d left her a letter.

The street was deserted: no cars, no people, no voices. She felt like smashing Dobbs’s window. Instead she snatched the envelope out of the box and walked away and didn’t look back.

She walked quickly out of Gwynne Street, past the Christian bookshop and the Tourist Information Shop, and round the corner into King Street, where she stood at the kerb and tore open the envelope. She hoped it was a threat, something abusive.

There was a single sheet of notepaper folded inside. In the centre, a single line of type:

The first exorcist was Jesus Christ.

This was all it said.

15 Male Thing

THE WOMAN BEHIND the counter was, by any standards, dropdead gorgeous. Worse still, kind of pale and mysterious and distant, with hair you could trip over.

A woollen scarf masking her lower face, Jane watched from outside the shop window. Saturday morning: bright enough to bring thousands of shoppers into Hereford from all over the county and from large areas of Wales; cold enough for there still to be condensation on the windows, even in sheltered Church Street.

Jane had come in on the early bus, the only bus out of Ledwardine on a Saturday. At half-twelve, Rowenna was picking her up outside the Library. It was Psychic Fair day.

Which left her a couple of hours to kill. It was inevitable she’d wind up here at some point.

She almost wished she hadn’t; this was so awful. Lol had written songs about creatures like this. And now he lived above the same shop. Maybe during the lunch hour the woman would weave her languorous way up some archaic spiral staircase, and he’d be waiting for her up on the landing, where they’d start undressing each other before making their frenzied…

‘Jane?’

Damn. He must have come out of a side entrance. She must remain cool, show no surprise.

‘So that’s her, is it, Lol?’

‘Who?’

He was shivering in his thin, faded sweatshirt. His hair needed attention; it had never looked the same since he’d cut it off at the back and lost the ponytail. Made him look too grownup, almost like a man of thirty-eight.

‘Moon?’ Jane lowered her scarf. Inside the shop, the woman saw them looking at her and smiled absently, arranging a display of CDs on the counter. ‘She’s quite ordinary-looking, isn’t she?’

‘Almost plain,’ Lol said. ‘Jane, how much would it cost to make you go away and stop embarrassing me?’

‘More than you’ve got on you. Much more.’

‘How about a cappuccino?’

‘Yeah, that’ll do,’ Jane said.

It was set in deep countryside, a kind of manor house, rambling but not very old, maybe early nineteenth-century. Squat gateposts with plain stone balls on top, and a notice in the entrance – THE GLADES RESIDENTIAL HOME – stencilled over a painted purple hill with the sun above it. A bright yellow sun with no suggestion of it setting, which would have been the wrong image altogether.

There was a small car park in front, with a sweeping view of the Radnor hills, but a woman appeared around the side of the house and beckoned her to drive closer to her.

Merrily followed the drive around to a brick double-garage and parked in front of it, the woman hurrying after her.

‘You’re wearing your… uniform,’ she said in a loud, dismayed whisper, when Merrily got out of the car. ‘I’m sorry, I should have emphasized the need for discretion.’

Merrily smiled. ‘Don’t worry about that.’ Don’t worry yet; we may not even paste your case on the Deliverance website.

‘It’s all been very difficult,’ the woman said. ‘We didn’t want to call in the local vicar – far too close – so the obvious person was Mr Dobbs, but then… such a bombshell – we won’t talk about that. I’m Susan Thorpe. We’ll go in this way.’

She was a big woman, dark blonde hair pushed under a wide, practical hairslide. She led Merrily through a small back door, down a short drab passage and into what was clearly her private sitting room: very untidy.

‘Have a seat. Throw those magazines on the floor. I’ve sent for some coffee, is that all right? God, I didn’t need this, I really didn’t need this. Everything comes at once, don’t you find that? Now I discover I have to find a room for my mother.’

‘Must be a problem, if you run a home like this and your mother gets to the age—’

‘Oh, it’s not like that. Mother’s fitter than me. She’s lost her job, that’s all, and her home – she was someone’s housekeeper. I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Merrily Watkins.’

‘Merrily. And you’re the new diocesan exorcist. I was in quite a quandary, Merrily, so I rang the Diocese. I said, “Could you send anybody but Dobbs.” ’

Dobbs? Merrily still had his one-liner in her bag: The first exorcist was Jesus Christ. Hence, Jesus must be our role model, and Jesus was not a woman. ‘Why didn’t you want Canon Dobbs?’

‘This problem… I was very loath at first to think it was a problem – your kind of problem, anyway. Old people can be such delinquents. They’ll break a teapot because they don’t like the colour, wet the bed because they don’t like the sheets.’

‘This is a volatile… er, poltergeist phenomenon?’

‘Oh no, the point I was making is that, when one of the staff complains of strange things happening, I immediately suspect one or other of the residents. In this case, neither I nor – so far, thank God – any of the residents have seen or heard a thing.’

‘So who has?’ Merrily still hadn’t received an answer to her question about Dobbs. Was this another of his set-ups, another attempt to show her why she, as a woman, was unfit to follow in the footsteps of Jesus?

‘Chambermaids,’ said Mrs Thorpe. ‘Well, domestic careworkers, actually, but we do try to make it seem like a hotel for the sake of the residents, so we call them chambermaids. The other week, one simply gave in her notice – or rather sent it by post, having failed to return after a weekend away. Gave no explanation other than “personal reasons”. It was only then that my assistant manager told me the woman had rushed downstairs one evening white as a sheet and said she wasn’t going up there again.’

‘Where?’

‘To the third floor.’

Merrily tensed, thinking of her own third-floor problem, currently in remission, at the vicarage. ‘Did she elaborate?’

‘No, as I say, she simply left and we thought no more about it and took on a replacement, a local woman who didn’t want to live in but was prepared to work nights. Well, at least she couldn’t just bugger off without an explanation.’

‘She’s had the same experience?’

‘We presume it was the same. Do you want to talk to her?’

‘If that’s possible.’

‘She’ll be coming in with the coffee in a minute.’ Mrs Thorpe pulled a half-crushed cigarette packet from between the sofa cushions. ‘Does smoke interfere with whatever it is you do?’

‘I hope not. Have one of mine.’

‘I’m terrible sorry – with all the persecution these days, one assumes other people don’t smoke. Have you met Canon Dobbs?’

‘Kind of.’

‘He’s going out of his mind, you know.’

‘Oh?’

‘Always been a very, very strange man, but it’s been downhill all the way for the past year. The man ought to be in a… well, a place like this, I suppose. Not this one, though.’

‘So you know him quite well then.’

Susan Thorpe lit up and coughed fiercely. ‘Sorry, thought I told you: my mother was his housekeeper.’

‘Dobbs’s housekeeper? In Hereford?’

‘For five years. When his wife died he moved out of his canonry with about twenty thousand books. Bought two houses in a nearby terrace, one for the housekeeper – and more books, of course.’

‘This is in Gwynne Street?’

‘That’s it. Quite a nice place to live if you like cities. Mother rather wondered if he might do the decent thing and leave it to her when he shuffled off his mortal coil, but then, a couple of days ago, absolutely out of the blue, he just tells her to go, leave. Gives her five thousand quid and instructions to be out by the weekend – that’s today. “Why?” she says, utterly dumbfounded. “What have I done to you?” “Nothing,” he says. “Don’t ask questions, just leave, and thank you very much.” What d’you make of that?’

‘Weird,’ Merrily said. ‘I—’

I don’t understand… What have I been doing wrong? She heard the words, with their long, cathedral echo, saw a woman of about sixty, distressed, walking away in her sensible boots, her tweed coat, her…

‘Mrs Thorpe, does your mother ever wear a green velvet hat, sort of Tudor-looking?’

Go away. Go away, Canon Dobbs had hissed. I can’t possibly discuss this here.

Oh my God, Jane thought. They are. They really are. An item!

In the corner café, she and Lol had a slab of chocolate fudge cake each, which they had to take turns in forking up because the table had one leg shorter than the other three.

‘So, like, this is serious, right? You and Moon.’

‘We’re just…’

‘Good friends?’

‘Kind of.’ He seemed uncomfortable discussing Moon. She must be a good ten years younger. Not that that mattered, of course. Jane was a good twenty years younger than Lol, and she quite…

Anyway.

‘So you’re kind of looking after her flat here, while she’s doing up this barn?’

‘Sort of. Her family came from Dinedor Hill and she’s always been keen to move back. Er… how’s your mum?’

‘Oh, you remember her? How sweet. She’s OK. In fact she’s actually working a couple of days a week out of an office just a few hundred yards from here.’

‘Really?’ He looked up.

‘In the Bishop’s Palace gatehouse. I haven’t been there yet, but I gather it’s cool.’

‘What’s she doing there?’

‘Not so cool. She’s been appointed Deliverance minister. You know – like used to be called exorcist? Like in that film where the kid’s head does a complete circle while she’s throwing up green bile and masturbating with a crucifix? Mum now gets to deal with people like that. Only, of course, there aren’t many people like that, not in these parts – which is why it’s such a dodgy job.’

Lol put down his cake fork. He looked concerned. ‘Why would she want to do it?’

‘Because she thinks the Church should be in a position to give advice on the paranormal, and there was nobody around to give her advice when she needed it.’

‘I remember.’

‘The question you should be asking is why would they want her to do that? And I think it’s to put a pretty face on a fairly nasty, reactionary business. Like, for instance, they’d say that the reason there isn’t much about ghosts in the Bible is that God doesn’t want us to mess with ghosts, or study our own inner consciousness, that kind of thing. God just wants us to toddle off to church on a Sunday, otherwise keep our noses out.’

‘That wouldn’t necessarily be bad advice for everybody,’ Lol said, and she could sense he was thinking about something in particular.

‘That’s the wimp’s attitude, Mr Robinson.’

‘Absolutely. And somebody’s who’s been banged up with mad people, and even madder psychiatrists.’

‘So does that mean you’ll be avoiding Mum like the plague?’

‘Oh that’s… not a problem. I’ve had the plague.’

What was on his mind? Did he still have feelings for Mum, despite the exquisite Moon? Or maybe she wasn’t such a trophy.

‘Lol?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Something bothering you?’

‘Er…’ Lol ate the last bit of his fudge cake. ‘In the film – with the kid’s head spinning round and the green bile and the crucifix? All that doesn’t happen simultaneously.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘Those’re completely different scenes – in the film.’

‘Thank you, Lol,’ Jane said, annoyed with him now. ‘I’ll tell Mum. She’ll be ever so reassured.’

The care assistant’s name was Helen Matthews. She lived in Hay-on-Wye, about five miles away. She was about thirty, had two young children, seemed balanced, reliable. ‘It’s the kids I worry about,’ she said, and Merrily was reminded of the poor woman in the Deliverance Study Group video, who’d said something similar. ‘I wouldn’t want to go taking anything back to them, see.’

Despite having dependants and an iffy husband, the woman in the video had still killed herself – clear evidence that paranormal events could drastically affect a person’s mental equilibrium.

Not a problem here. Merrily felt on relatively firm ground with this one.

‘From what you say, this is what we call an imprint, and it usually belongs to a place. It won’t follow you. It can’t get into you. You can’t take it away. It’s like a colour-slide projected on a wall.’

‘Mrs Watkins…’ Helen Matthews was at the edge of the sofa. She wore a white coat, her short black hair was tied back, and her voice shook. ‘You can tell yourself how it won’t harm you, how it isn’t really there, but when you’re on your own in an upstairs passage and it’s late at night and all the doors are shut and the lights are turned down and you know that… that something is following you, and you finally make… make yourself turn round, to reassure yourself there’s nothing there… and there is… There is.’

She shuddered so violently it was almost a convulsion. She held on to the sofa, near tears. Even Susan Thorpe looked unnerved.

‘OK,’ Merrily said gently. ‘Let’s just be sure about this. You say all the doors were closed and the lights were dimmed. Is it possible one of the doors opened and—’

‘No! Definitely not. And if it was… Well, they’re all old ladies. There are only old ladies here at present. This was a man. Or at least a male… a male thing.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘He looked…’ Helen lost it. ‘He looked like a bloody ghost. He walked out of the wall.’

‘Could you see his face?’

‘I think he had a moustache. And I think he was wearing a suit. Like in the old black and white films: double-breasted, wide shoulders sort of thing.’

Merrily glanced at Susan Thorpe, who shook her head.

‘Description like that, it could have been anyone who lived here over the past three-quarters of a century. We’ve only been here four years – moved from Hampshire to be near my mother. I mean, there were no old photo albums lying around the place, and it was a guesthouse before we came. It could be anybody.’

‘Are there any stories about the house? You’re fairly local, Helen. Are there any… I don’t really know what I’m looking for.’

‘Murders? Suicides? I don’t know, but I could ask around in Hay.’

‘Christ’s sake, don’t do that!’ Susan Thorpe rose up. ‘I know what it’s like in Hay. It’ll be all over the town in no time. This is a business we’re running here. Seven jobs depend on us, so let’s not get hysterical. So far, we’ve managed to conceal it from the residents, let’s keep it that way. And anyway, we haven’t seen anything, and no residents have reported anything in the past four years. Why should this… thing start to appear now?’

‘We believe imprints and place-memories can be activated after years and years,’ Merrily said. ‘Sometimes it’s a result of an emotional crisis or a disturbance.’

‘Absolutely not! Nothing like that here at all.’

‘You said yourself that old people can behave like delinquents. Sometimes mental instability, senile dementia…’

‘Any signs of dementia, they have to go, I’m afraid. We aren’t a nursing home. And the only signs of hysteria have been… well, not you, Helen, but certainly your predecessor…’

‘You didn’t see it,’ Helen said quietly. ‘Have you ever seen one, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Possibly. Put it this way, I know what it feels like. I know how frightening it is. But I don’t want to overreact either. I don’t plan to squirt holy water all over the place. What I’d like to do is go up there now, with both of you, and say a few prayers.’

Susan Thorpe sat up. ‘Aloud?’

‘Of course, aloud.’

‘Oh no, we can’t have that. Some of the residents will be in their rooms. They’ll hear you.’

Merrily sighed.

‘I think it’s a good idea,’ Helen Matthews said. ‘I’ll come.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Susan Thorpe stood up, adjusted her hairslide. ‘I can’t have it. Can’t you do it outside – out of earshot? God’s everywhere, isn’t He? Why can’t you go outside?’

‘I could, but I don’t think that would have any effect.’

Helen said, ‘If I’ve seen it, Mrs Thorpe, it’s only a matter of time before one of the old ladies does. What if someone has a heart attack?’

Merrily thought of the video again, and what Huw had said. Bottom line is that our man in Northampton should not have left before administering a proper blessing, leaving her in a state of calm, feeling protected. Yes, suppose someone did have a heart attack?

‘God,’ Susan Thorpe breathed, ‘this is getting beyond a joke.’

‘It never is a joke,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m starting to realize that.’

‘The problem is finding a time when that passage and all the rooms off it are empty. Look, all right… most of the residents totter off to Hardwicke Church on a Sunday morning, as people of that age tend to. What are you doing tomorrow morning?’

‘I’m going to my church, Susan. I’m a vicar.’

‘Oh.’ Susan Thorpe was unembarrassed. ‘You don’t do this sort of thing full-time then?’ Like this diminished Merrily – a part-timer. Susan became agitated. ‘Well, look… look, there’s going to be a party. One of the residents is a hundred years old; we’re having a small soirée for her. I can tell you, old people never miss a party. Suppose, while it was on, we could smuggle you upstairs and you could do your little ceremony? You do work at night?’

‘Your mother will be here then, I suppose.’

‘I should think.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Merrily said.

It would be very interesting to talk to Mrs Thorpe’s mother. Five thousand quid, and instructions to be out by the weekend? Either Dobbs really was going out of his mind, or there was something very odd here. She had to go carefully, though: mustn’t appear to be checking on him. Casually running into the former housekeeper while processing an imprint… that would do fine.

As she left the Glades, Merrily saw that it was snowing lightly out of a sky like stone. Winter deftly gatecrashing autumn’s mournful party.

16 Real Stuff

THE STALL WHICH made Jane laugh the most was the one selling something called:

The Circlet of Selene

It looked like three strands of copper wire bound together into a bangle or a necklet and secured by small curtain rings. The wording was a bit careful. It didn’t actually promise you more energy, a better night’s sleep and a dynamic sex life; it claimed, however, that many people had found that all this had come about after only three weeks of wearing the Circlet of Selene. Which cost a mere £12.75 for the bangle or £17.75 for the necklet, neither of which must have cost more than 75p to produce.

Still, people were buying them – women mostly. Well, ninety per cent of the punters here were women, in fact. The tottyquotient was pretty bloody lamentable, especially in the marquee which had been erected in a field behind the pub. Most of the blokes had stayed in the bar, as blokes were wont to do, and even that wasn’t exactly crowded with intriguing, dark-eyed, gipsy-looking guys.

The marquee housed most of the stalls – crystals, incenseburners, cosmic jewellery – though it was far too cold a day for a marquee. You’d think the weather situation might have been foreseen, given the number of self-styled psychics and seers on the premises. Most had clearly taken cover in the pub, where it was warmer, but Jane hadn’t felt drawn to consult any of them; they were probably all a bit pricey, too.

‘Taste-lapse.’ She sipped muddy coffee from a plastic cup.

‘Serious, serious taste-lapse, Rowenna.’

They were in a cold corner behind a trestle table displaying lurid healing crystals and supervised by a gross middle-aged couple in matching bobble-hats. Tape-loop relaxation music was trickling out of little speakers, and it got on your nerves.

‘I’m sorry.’ Rowenna looked around. ‘The last one I went to wasn’t this bad, really. Oh, there’s Kirlian Photography over there. You could have your aura photographed.’

‘You ever have yours done?’

‘Once. I got a picture of my hand with what looked like little flames coming out of the fingertips.’

‘What does it prove?’

‘That you’ve got an aura.’

‘If you didn’t have an aura you’d be dead, wouldn’t you?’

‘I’m glad I can’t see yours today,’ Rowenna said. ‘It’d be all dark and negative. You having problems on the domestic front or something?’

‘Not to speak of.’

‘You can speak to me of anything at all, kitten.’ Rowenna touched the tip of Jane’s nose with a gloved forefinger. Her floaty red hair was topped by a black velvet beret. The coat she wore just had to be cashmere. She looked far too cool and upmarket for this shoddy bazaar.

‘Well, I was talking to this bloke,’ Jane said.

‘Bloke?’

‘A bloke I was sure was seriously into Mum at one time, and—’

‘Oh, your mum. How do you mean into?’

‘Well, not into – like not in the fullest sense. I just had it in mind that they’d be good together. He’s quite insecure and vulnerable, but also kind of cool. He was a musician and songwriter when he was young – too young maybe – and he got led astray and into drugs, and wound up in a mental hospital.’

‘The way you do.’

‘It’s surprising how easily that can happen. Anyway, I don’t like guys who are too secure and full of themselves, do you? Like, a certain degree of pathos can be kind of sexy.’

Rowenna looked unimpressed by this. The sound of slow waves breaking on rocks cascaded serenely out of the speakers – which sounded pretty naff in a damp tent in a field near Leominster.

‘So I was telling Lol that Mum was now an exorcist, like in that film where the kid gets possessed and spews green bile everywhere, and how there was no call for dealing with stuff like that around here. But like… I mean there is, you know? When you think about it, it’s really like that. And, whereas in that film you had these heavy-duty, case-hardened Jesuit priests and even they couldn’t handle it…’

‘ “Come into me… come into me,” ’ Rowenna intoned. ‘And then he crashes out of the window to his death. What do you mean, it’s really like that?’

‘She had this mega-nasty job,’ Jane said soberly. ‘Nightmare stuff – and, like, no warning, you know?’

‘I don’t actually believe you.’

‘That’s all right, I’m not supposed to talk about it anyway.’

‘All right, if you tell me I’ll buy you a Circlet of Selene.’

‘Not good enough. You have to promise never ever to buy me a Circlet of Selene.’ It was probably OK to talk about this one, with him being dead and everything. ‘All right. Guy in the hospital – this really awful rapist kind of slimeball, gets off on degrading women, and he’s dying, OK?’

‘OK by me,’ said Rowenna.

‘But he can’t let go of his abiding obsession. You can see it glistening on his skin, like grease.’ Jane shivered with a warped sort of pleasure. ‘Like, she didn’t tell me all of this, but I put it together. Anyway, the nurses, they’re all like really shit-scared of this pervert, because he’s got this totally tainted aura.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Mr Joy. Isn’t that excellent?’

‘You’re embroidering this.’

‘I so am not! His name was Denzil Joy, he was in the Watkins Ward, right up at the top of the hospital where it’s old and spooky, and the nurses were genuinely scared of him. Takes a lot to scare nurses, all the stuff they’ve seen.’

‘What did he do?’

‘She wouldn’t say, but I could tell she was still, like, trembling with revulsion hours later. Heavy trauma scenario. What I think it was… was that this man could like make you feel like you’d been raped; he could invade your body just by thinking about what he wanted to do to you. And that got all boiled together with the sickness and the frustration inside him. The nurses are convinced he was possessed.’

‘Creepy.’

‘The hell with creepy – this was bloody dangerous, if you ask me. And the Bishop just sends her in to sort out this evil scumbag without a second thought, on account of she’s like a priest and priests know what to do. But – seriously – is she equipped for this? Does she know what she’s doing? Does she hell. Occult-wise, she’s probably as naive as all these idiots cooing over the frigging Circlet of Selene. Like, I feel there’s probably a lot I could tell her – to help, you know – but would she listen?’

‘Jane,’ Rowenna said, ‘listen to me. You cannot change other people – only yourself. In the end, the winners in this life are the people who go in with their eyes open and say: I’m not going to let God or Nature or the Bishop of Hereford or whoever fuck about with me. I’m going to call the shots.’

‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘I suppose that’s right.’

‘And it’s great if you can actually see that while you’re still young enough to do something about it – like us, you know?’

And, of course, Jane knew it was right. When someone like Rowenna, who was just that bit older and a cool person too, said this is right, it conferred a kind of responsibility. You felt you had to do something about it.

She tossed her paper cup into a litter bucket. ‘Let’s get out of this amusement arcade.’

‘Good idea,’ said Rowenna. ‘Go find the real stuff.’

‘Huh?’

‘This is just a front, isn’t it? The real heavy-duty clairvoyants are in little back rooms in the pub.’

‘You want to consult a clairvoyant?’

‘Check them out, anyway – see if they’re genuine. If they’re not, it’ll just be a laugh.’

‘Cost an arm and a leg,’ Jane said doubtfully.

‘They usually leave the amount up to you. Hey…’ Tenderly, Rowenna bent and stroked back Jane’s hair and peered into her eyes. ‘You’re not apprehensive, are you?’

‘Christ, no,’ said Jane. ‘Let’s go for it.’

Twice Lol had been down to the shop. Once to see if Moon wanted any help; but she explained that running a record shop wasn’t as easy as he might think, and shooed him away. The second time to see what she was doing for lunch; Moon had brought along two apples and a banana.

Moon insisted she was fine. Dick Lyden also said Moon was fine. If Dick was in two minds about anyone it was probably Lol, who’d claimed that Moon was living in squalor in the barn – until Dick had seen the place looking like a suburban villa, and Moon poised like she was ready to serve the canapés.

Denny also seemed a little happier when he called in, appearing at the door of the flat wearing a plaid overcoat and a big hat with a red feather, halfway to a smile.

‘She’s looking almost healthy,’ he conceded. ‘Is there something I don’t know?’

Lol shrugged. What could he say to him without reference to ghosts or disembowelled crows?

‘Listen, I don’t mind.’ Denny spread himself in the armchair. ‘I think it’s good. I’m glad, all right?’

‘She’s working on her book.’

‘Book? Oh.’ Denny looked uninterested, a touch pained. ‘That’s not really gonna happen, is it?’

‘Does your family go all the way back to the Iron Age?’

Denny’s smile shut down altogether. ‘Could be.’

‘Is it a Celtic name, Moon?’

‘I really don’t know. We weren’t always called Moon. A daughter inherited the farm back in the eighteenth century, married a bloke called Moon. Look…’ Denny pulled on his earring. ‘There’s a little something you gotta help me with here, mate.’

‘Unblocking drains is not my responsibility. You are the landlord, Dennis.’

‘Nothing that simple, little friend. This is a really distasteful job. Dick Lyden fill you in about his kid? This Bishop-for-a-day crap – the kid refusing to play along?’

Lol nodded warily. ‘If they’d told me at sixteen I’d been picked for Boy Bishop, I’d’ve tried to get expelled first.’

‘This kid attends the Cathedral School,’ Denny said. ‘So his father pays good money for him to be publicly humiliated in front of his peers.’

Lol brought two lagers from the fridge, as Denny spelled it out. Dick, it seemed, had resorted to bribery: if the boy James swallowed his cool for just a day, Dick would finance a professionally produced CD by James and his rock band.

Lol winced. ‘What are they called?’

‘Tuneless Little Twats with Fender Strats. Fuck knows, does it matter? I told him you’d do it, Lol.’

‘Me?’

‘Produce them. You’ll get paid, of course.’

‘Sod off.’

‘Laurence, we’re talking EP-length, that’s all. Four tracks – two days’ work, max. A hundred copies, which is where I make my profit. It’s common enough these days – how I keep the studio up and running. I said you’d do it. James knows your stuff. James even likes your stuff.’

‘Suppose I hate his stuff?’

‘Good boy,’ said Denny, ‘I appreciate this. I said we’d give their material a listen tomorrow afternoon, OK? Good. And I’m glad about Kathy and you. I am really glad. God knows, I would do anything, give anything to get her away from there. Meanwhile, if she’s not alone, that’s the best thing I could hope for under the circumstances.’

Lol went still. ‘What has she said?’

‘I’m her brother,’ Denny said. ‘She doesn’t have to say anything to me.’

Later, after Denny had gone, it started to snow a little.

Lol stood by the window in the dark, looking down into lamplit Church Street/Capuchin Lane, the centuries seeping away along with the colours of the day. It was snowing briskly, all the shops had closed, most of the people had gone. If he leaned into the top corner of the window he could see the blackening tower of the Cathedral. Below him, a young guy guided a young woman gently into a shallow doorway and they embraced.

Lol thought of Moon in her dusty white nightdress.

‘If she’s not alone…’

‘Fucking hell, I didn’t expect that.’ Rowenna had gone in first, and when she came out she raised her eyebrows, pulled Jane over to the door.

‘She was good?’

‘She was, actually.’

‘How much?’

‘Twenty. I paid for you as well.’

‘There was no need for that. I’m not—’

‘Forget it. Go on, don’t keep her waiting. She might hang a curse on you.’

‘Shit,’ said Jane.

‘That was a joke.’

‘Sure.’

She didn’t, to be honest, like fortune-tellers one bit, and for the very reasons Rowenna had put to her earlier. Suppose the woman told her she was going to die soon? Or that Mum was? Not that they ever did; they just looked at you sadly from under their headscarves and said: Take your money back, dearie. All of a sudden I’m not feeling too well… And that was when you knew they were genuine and your card was marked.

‘Go on,’ Rowenna hissed.

The booth was just an alcove in the public bar with a wicker screen set up to hide it.

ANGELA. TAROT READINGS.

Rowenna had opted for her because, like she’d said, she herself knew a bit about the tarot, so would be able to tell if Angela was the real McCoy.

Oh, shit. Another thing Jane didn’t like was the way you were kind of putting yourself and your future in someone else’s hands. Whatever they wanted to tell you, it would stay with you, colour your dreams, frame your nightmares. Not Jane’s idea of New Age, which was about self-exploration – wasn’t it?

‘Jane…’

‘Yeah, OK.’

No alternative, no way out. Jane squeezed behind the partition.

17 Wise Women

ANGELA SMILED.

‘You look worried,’ she said. ‘Why is that?’

‘I’m not worried.’

‘There’s no need to be. Have you consulted the tarot before?’

‘Once or twice,’ Jane lied.

Angela smiled. She was sitting at a long pub table of scratched mahogany with wrought-iron legs. Behind her was a narrow window of frosted glass; the light it shed was cold and grey. It was going rapidly dark out there.

Angela’s hands were already in motion, spreading the cards and then gathering them together. Her hands were slender and supple; there were no rings. Suddenly she pushed the full pack in front of Jane.

‘Pick them up.’

‘Me?’

Angela nodded. She was not what Jane had been expecting: no headscarf, no big brass earrings. Jane saw a long oval face and mid-length ash-blonde hair. She wore a pale linen suit which seemed no more suited to this event than Rowenna’s cashmere. Jane reached out for the cards.

‘And shuffle them.’

They were quite big cards and Jane was clumsy. Cards kept sliding out as she tried to mix them up. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s all right, you’re doing fine. Now cut the pack.’

Angela’s voice was the most unexpected thing. It was warm and surprisingly cultured.

Jane cut the cards and left them in two piles.

‘What I want you to understand,’ Angela said, ‘is that the cards are merely an aid. They form a psychic link between us.’ She put the pack together and then lifted her hand sharply as though it had given her an electric shock.

‘Oh!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Oh, Jane…’

Christ, what’s she seen?

Jane said nervously, ‘How do you know my name?’

‘I’m psychic.’ Angela laughed lightly. ‘No, your friend told me, of course.’

‘What else did she tell you?’

‘Well, she certainly didn’t tell me how powerful you were. Has no one told you that before?’ Angela began to lay out the cards, one on top of another.

‘Not that I recall.’ Ah. Right. She was beginning to get the picture now.

‘They will,’ Angela said with calm certainty.

Oh, sure. I wonder how many other people you said that to today. Jane nodded and said nothing. Now she knew it was a scam, she was no longer worried. Did Rowenna realize it was a scam? Of course she did. When she came out she’d just been taking the piss, picking up on Jane’s manifest trepidation.

Angela had the cards laid out in a neat semicircle. They were beautifully coloured, and Jane started looking for the ones she’d seen pictures of on the covers of mystery novels: Death, The Devil, The Hanged Man, The Last Judgement. But none of these was obvious in the dim light; all the designs were unfamiliar.

Angela placed one card face-down below the others, contemplated it for a moment and then turned it over to reveal a faintly smiling woman in a long white robe, sitting on some sort of throne with mystical symbols and artefacts all around her. There were lights on in the pub, but somehow they didn’t penetrate into this alcove, or at least not as far as Angela.

‘Tell me something, Jane. What do you know of your ancestors?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I mean, are you aware of – how can I put this? – wise women, in your family?’

‘I guess that depends on what you mean by wise.’

‘I’m picking up a… I suppose you would say a tradition. I feel… I believe you have much to inherit. Whether it’s immediate ancestry or something further back, it’s hard to say, but it’s there. It came up immediately, no mistaking it at all. So I double-checked and the cards are reinforcing it. There’s a very strong tradition here.’

Mum? Does she mean Mum? Jane found herself holding her breath.

‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’

‘Well… maybe.’ Mum had sometimes talked of experiences she’d had in churches, visions of a cosmic benevolence in blue and gold, the feeling that she really had to—

Don’t tell her what Mum is!

Astonishingly, Angela held up a hand. ‘No, you don’t have to explain – as long as you understand.’

‘Yeah.’ Jane breathed out. Jesus Christ.

Angela was gazing intently at the cards, her attention locked on the layout. She was absolutely still, as though she and the cards were encased in glass. Eventually, without looking up, she said, ‘It’s a big, big responsibility.’

‘Oh.’

‘It needs to be nurtured.’ Angela turned over two more cards which seemed to be in conjunction. ‘Ah, now… there’s been a gap in your life, I think. Someone missing. Would you…? Do you perhaps have just the one parent?’

‘Yes,’ Jane said awed. ‘How did you…?’

‘I don’t think that’s been such a big handicap for you as it might have been for others. You have reserves of emotional and psychic energy which have been sustaining you. But now that reservoir of psychic energy ought to be plumbed, or it may overflow. That can cause problems.’

‘How do you mean?’ Jane felt a slow excitement burning somewhere down in her abdomen. She looked at Angela’s halfshadowed face and saw intelligence there. And beauty too – fine bones. Angela must be over fifty but Jane thought men would find her awfully sexy.

‘Jane, I don’t want to alarm you, but if one is given a talent and one fails to develop it, or allows powerful energy to go its own way, it can become misdirected and cause all sorts of problems, physical and mental – chronic ailments, nervous trouble. Quite a lot of people in hospitals and mental institutions are simply people who have failed to recognize and channel certain energies.’

Angela looked up suddenly. Jane saw her eyes clearly for the first time; they were like chips of flint. She was serious about this. She was dead serious.

She said faintly, ‘What does that mean?’

Angela reached over and touched her fingers. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Please don’t worry. Sometimes I’m concentrating so hard I say the first things that come into my head. It’s just so rare that I get anything as clear and specific as this… I’m probably getting carried away.’

‘No, please go on.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Angela swept all the cards together. ‘I’ve been overloading you with my own impressions, and that’s not a good thing to do. Let’s relax a moment and I’ll tell you about some less far-reaching aspects of your life.’

She asked Jane to shuffle and cut the pack again, then did a couple of smaller layouts and told Jane a few things about herself and her future which were more in line with the stuff you expected to hear. Well, a bit more intimate perhaps… like that she was a virgin but wouldn’t be for long. That she would have more than one serious lover before she was twenty.

Jane smiled. At one time she’d have been fairly excited about that, not to say relieved, but right now it didn’t seem as vital.

Angela told her that she was extremely intelligent and could have her pick of careers, but she might feel herself drawn towards communications or even performance art.

Cool.

But her main choices – Angela sighed, like she’d tried to get away from this but couldn’t – would be in the spiritual realm. Other levels of existence were already becoming accessible to her.

‘Other planes,’ Angela said, ‘other spheres. Someone who has gone before has opened the way. Does that make any sense to you?’

Jane thought at once of her old friend, the late Miss Lucy Devenish, writer of children’s stories and proprietor of the magical giftshop called Ledwardine Lore, who had introduced her to rural mysteries and the mystical poetry of Thomas Traherne. And showed her that spirituality was a shining crystal, of which Christianity was only one face.

‘What…?’ Jane found it hard to speak, her mouth was so dry. ‘What do you think I should do?’

‘Don’t know. It’s not for me to say. This is a very personal issue.’

‘You can’t just leave it like that. I mean, I could buy books and things, but I already do that.’

Angela gathered up the cards. ‘Have you had any personal experiences which have mystified you?’

‘Maybe. Like, there was this time I kind of fell asleep in a field, and when I awoke I felt as though I’d been someone else. It’s like really hard to explain, but—’

‘Don’t tell me. These are messages for you alone. Look, Jane, what I’m going to do is give you a telephone number. Not mine, because I don’t think you should be entirely influenced by one person or feel that you’re being pressed from one direction.’

Angela reached down to a handbag on the floor and pulled out a notepad and a pen. Jane felt a welling excitement and also a small, fizzing trepidation as Angela wrote.

‘This is the number of a young woman called Sorrel, not far from here. You’ll like her. She’s very down-to-earth.’

‘Who… is she?’

‘Just another person with a questing spirit. She runs a healthfood restaurant in Hereford and holds meetings there for people of a like mind: to share experiences and consider methods of developing their skills.’

‘Sounds a bit… I mean, I’d feel a bit…’

‘If you did decide to go, you could always take your friend… Rosemary, was it?’

‘Rowenna.’ Jane felt much better. ‘Yeah, that’d be cool. Er… develop skills? What sort of skills do you think I might have?’

‘Healing? Clairvoyance? It’s not for me to say. Perhaps you can find out.’ Angela tore the top page out of her notebook and placed it in front of Jane. ‘It’s entirely up to you now.’

‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Right.’

When she stood up, her legs felt cold and trembly.

Moon was pulling down the old-fashioned rollerblind over the CLOSED sign on the door.

All the lights were out except for a brown-shaded one on the counter, so that the air in the shop had a deep-shadowed sepia density. The unsaleable balalaika hung forlornly on the wall behind the till. The low-level music from the speakers each end of the single seventeenth-century beam was by Radiohead at their most suicidal: the one about escaping lest you choked.

Lol swallowed. Moon said to him, as though he’d been here for some time, ‘I asked Denny to come over for supper. He said he’d really love to but he was too busy. I knew he’d say that.’

‘Well, he probably is. Work’s piling up in the studio.’

Moon shook her head. ‘It’s his wife. Maggie thinks I’m still doing dope – and I’m poison in all sorts of other ways. Plus, he just doesn’t want to come to the barn.’

She came to stand next to him. She was wearing a long brown cardigan over a too-much-unbuttoned white cotton blouse and jeans. Something dull and metallic hung from a leather thong around her neck.

‘Moon, you can’t go home on your bike, in the dark, up that hill. It’s snowing hard.’

‘I’ve got good lights – and nothing will touch me on Dinedor.’

‘I could try and get it in the back of the car. Or I could take you back in the car now, and pick you up again tomorrow.’

He felt tense – the missing element here, as usual, was lightness. In any situation, Moon was a solemn person: no humour, no banter. As if all the family’s irony genes had been been used up on Denny sixteen years before she was born.

‘Silly making two trips,’ Moon argued.

‘I don’t mind, really.’

‘Or you could stay,’ Moon said. ‘Why not stay over?’

She was very close to him. ‘What exactly did Denny say to you?’

‘He said… that he was glad you weren’t on your own.’

Moon laughed lightly.

‘What did you tell him, Moon?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Poor Denny.’ Moon took Lol’s left hand and held it between both of hers. They were slim hands but strong, hardened by delving in the earth. ‘And stupid Dick. I can’t believe how timid and stupid people can be. Dick and his feeble psychology; Denny hiding behind a wall against the past. And you?’ She looked closely at his hand. ‘Are you timid too?’

‘Oh, I’m more timid than any of them,’ Lol said.

‘What of? What are you frightened of, Lol?’

She was standing close enough now for him to see that there was dust on her blouse. She seemed to attract dust. Dust of ages, Lol thought. The past had become attracted to her.

A long way away, Radiohead were playing Karma Police, about what you got if you messed with Us; he could hardly hear it for the drumming in his head.

‘I think I’m frightened of you,’ Lol whispered in shame, ‘and I don’t know why.’

The movements were so minimal that he’d hardly noticed her creeping into his arms, until they were kissing and his hands were in the long, long hair and something flared inside him like when you finally put a match to a long-prepared fire of brittle paper and dry kindling.

‘So what are you going to do?’ Rowenna asked, as they drove into Ledwardine marketplace, which had a lacing of snow.

‘Stop just here for a while,’ Jane said. ‘You haven’t even told me what she said to you.’

The cobbled square, with its little timbered market-hall, was lit by electric gaslamps on wrought-iron poles and brackets. Rowenna parked under one of these, and its light turned her hair into shivering spirals of rose-gold.

‘She told me my spiritual progression would be very much bound up with a friend’s.’

‘Oh, gosh.’

There were only two cars on the square, both in front of the Black Swan. There was a light visible between the trees which screened the vicarage, and Jane thought she could see a cluster of early stars around the tip of the church steeple, but that might just have been snow. She just so much wanted this to be a magical night.

‘So, are you going to phone this other woman, kitten?’

‘It’s a big step.’

‘No, it isn’t. You can check it out first, and if it sounds iffy you don’t get involved.’

‘I don’t get involved?’

‘All right, we don’t.’

‘What about Mum?’

‘We don’t have to invite her, do we?’

‘You know what I mean. Right now, she would not be cool about this. She’s insecure enough as it is.’

‘Of course she’s insecure. She’s a Christian.’

‘I don’t think I can do it to her.’

‘You’re not doing anything to her!’

‘I’d be lying.’

‘They expect us to lie,’ Rowenna said.

The snow made spangles in the fake gaslight.

‘I need to think about this.’

‘Well, don’t think too long. Like Angela said, repressing it may seriously damage your health.’

Jane sighed. The village seemed deserted. Through the snowflakes, the light in the vicarage looked very far away.

18 Overhead Cables Cut

‘WHERE DID YOU get to, flower?’

‘Oh, Hereford and places. Shopping and stuff.’

‘What did you buy?’

‘Nothing much. Rowenna got… some things.’

‘She seems to have a lot of money,’ Merrily said, heating soup at the stove. ‘I suppose she’s indulged quite a bit, having to be dragged around the country with her father stationed at different bases.’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said noncommittally. She’d arrived home about seven – looking a bit pale, Merrily thought. Outside, it was snowing quite hard and sticking impressively to the ground and the trees. November snow; it couldn’t last, surely.

‘Where did Rowenna live before?’

‘What’s this about?’ said Jane.

‘Just interest. You seem to be spending a lot of time with her, that’s all.’

‘That,’ said Jane, ‘is because she’s interesting. They were at Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Her dad was with the Army at Salisbury or somewhere. They don’t like to talk about it, the SAS, so I don’t ask. Satisfied?’

Later, she said, ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m being a pig. Tired, that’s all. I think I’ll have an early night.’

Merrily didn’t argue; she wanted to be up early herself. She suspected there’d be a bigger congregation tomorrow than usual; people always liked going to church in the snow.

She was in bed by eleven, with a hot-water bottle. Less than ten minutes later, the phone bleeped.

‘Ledwardine Vic—’

‘Merrily, it’s Sophie at the Bishop’s office. I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but we’re having a problem – at the Cathedral. I wonder, could you perhaps come over?’

Big grey snowflakes tumbled against the window. Merrily sat up in bed. It had never felt so cold in here before.

‘What’s happened?’

‘I… it involves Canon Dobbs. I don’t like to say too much on the phone.’

Merrily switched on the bedside lamp. ‘Give me half an hour. Maybe forty-five minutes if the roads are bad.’

‘Oh God, yes, I didn’t realize. Do be careful.’

‘I’ll see you soon.’

When she came out of the bedroom, buttoning her jeans, she found Jane on the landing. ‘I heard the phone.’ She was in her dressing-gown, and mustn’t have been asleep.

‘Some kind of problem at the Cathedral.’

‘Why should that concern you?’

‘I don’t really know.’

‘Shall I come? It looks a bit rough out there.’

‘God, no. You get back to bed.’

‘What if you get stuck? These roads can be really nasty and the council’s mega-slow off the mark – like about three days, apparently.’

‘It’s a big car. I’ll be fine.’

‘This is like Deliverance business again, isn’t it?’

‘To be honest, I just don’t know.’

‘Talk about secrecy,’ Jane said, strangely wide awake. ‘You Deliverance guys make the SAS seem like double-glazing salesmen.’

Why had she imagined the Cathedral would be all lit up? Maybe because that was how she’d been hoping to find it: a beacon of Old Christian warmth and strength.

But in the snow and the night, she was more than ever aware of how set-apart it had become. Once it had stood almost next to the medieval castle, two powerhouses together; now the city was growing away from the river, and the castle had vanished. The Cathedral crouched, black on white, like the Church at bay.

Merrily parked on Broad Street, near the central library. The dashboard clock, always five to ten minutes fast, indicated near-midnight. It had been a grindingly slow journey, with her window wound down to let the cigarette smoke out and the arctic air in, just to keep her awake. She’d taken the longer, wider route east of the Wye, where there was always some traffic, even the chance of snowploughing if anyone in the highways department had happened to notice a change in the weather. The road-surface was white and brown and treacherous, snow-lagged trees slumped over it like gross cauliflowers.

It all still seemed so unlikely – what would Hunter want with her at this time of night? Was he trying to turn Deliverance into the Fourth Emergency Service?

Merrily locked the Volvo, put on her gloves, pulled up her hood and set out across the snow-quilted silence of Broad Street.

No one about, not even a drunk in view. No traffic at all. The city centre as you rarely saw it: luminous and Christmas-card serene, snowflakes like big stars against the blue-black. Merrily’s booted steps were muted on the padded pavement. Behind her only the Green Dragon had lights on. She felt conspicuous. There was no sign of the Bishop or the Bishop’s men. Hadn’t a woman once been raped in the Cathedral’s shadow? Hadn’t the last time she’d been called out at night…?

Christ be with me, Christ within me.

The Cathedral was towered and turreted, the paths and the green lawns submerged together in snow, a white moat around God’s fortress. But no other night defences; its guardians – the canons and the vergers – were sleeping in the warren of cloisters behind. Nobody about except…

‘Merrily!’

Sophie came hurrying around the building, towards the North Porch, following the bouncing beam of a torch attached to a large shadow beside her.

Merrily breathed normally again.

‘Thank heavens you made it.’ The Bishop’s secretary lived not five minutes’ walk away, in a quiet Victorian villa near the Castle Green. She wore a long sheepskin coat, her white hair coming apart under a woollen scarf. ‘We were just wondering whether to call Michael, after all.’

‘But I thought the Bishop—’

‘He doesn’t know anything about this,’ Sophie said quickly.

‘Do you know George Curtiss?’

‘Good evening, Mrs Watkins. I, ah, think we have met.’

‘Oh, yes. Hello.’ He was one of the Cathedral canons: a big, overcoated man with a beard of Greek Orthodox proportions and a surprisingly hesitant reedy voice.

‘George called me to ask if we should tell Michael about this,’ Sophie said. ‘But I suggested we consult you. This is all very difficult.’

‘Look, I’m sorry… Am I supposed to know what’s happening?’

‘You tell her, George.’

‘Yes, it’s… Oh dear.’ George Curtiss glanced behind him to make sure they were alone, bringing down his voice. ‘It’s about old, ah, Tom Dobbs, I’m afraid.’

‘Merrily,’ Sophie was hugging herself, ‘he’s virtually barricaded himself in. We think he’s…’

‘Drunk, I rather fear,’ George said.

‘What?’

‘He’s behind that partition,’ Sophie said. ‘You know, where they’re repairing the Cantilupe tomb?’

‘He’s in there with—?’

‘Chained and padlocked himself in. He won’t talk to us. He’s just rambling. To someone else? To himself? I don’t know. Rambling on and on. Neither of us understands, but I just… well, I rather suspected you might. It’s all… it’s rather frightening, actually.’

‘So there is a’ – Merrily swallowed – ‘a Deliverance context?’

What a stupid question.

‘Oh, yes,’ Sophie said, ‘I think so. Don’t you?’

George Curtiss shuffled impatiently. ‘I trust we can, ah, rely on your discretion, Mrs Watkins. I know he’s an odd character, but I do have a long-standing admiration for the man. As does… as does the Dean.’

‘But I don’t know him. I’ve never even spoken to him.’

‘He’s, ah, had his problems,’ George said. ‘Feels rather beleaguered – threatened by… by certain recent developments. In view of these, we’d rather avoid involving the Dean – or the Bishop – at this stage.’

‘But I don’t know him. And he—’

‘But you know what he does, Merrily,’ Sophie whispered urgently.

‘Do I?’

‘Mrs Watkins.’ George Curtis coughed. ‘We all know what he does, if not the, ah, technicalities of it. It’s just we’re a little nervous about what’s… going on in there.’

‘You want me to try and talk to him?’

‘Just listen, I suppose.’ Sophie tightened her scarf. ‘Interpret for us.’

‘My Latin isn’t what it used to be,’ George said.

‘Latin?’

George dragged a long breath through the brambles of his beard, but his voice still came out weakly. ‘My impression is he’s talking to, ah… to, ah… to St Thomas.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Merrily said.

Sophie almost snapped at her, ‘You think we do?’

They followed George Curtiss and his torch around the building to St John’s door, which was used mainly by the clergy and the vergers. Snow was already spattered up the nearby walls.

‘We’ll go in very quietly,’ George said, as though addressing a party of schoolchildren – he was one of the regular tourguides, Merrily recalled. ‘I sometimes think the Dean has ultrasonic hearing.’

Merrily stepped warily inside – as if a mad-eyed Dobbs might come rampaging at them, swinging his crucifix.

Drunk? If Dobbs had a drink problem, it was the first she’d heard about it. But if the old exorcist had become a public embarrassment, the Dean could no longer be seen to support him. That way the Dean would himself lose face. And if the Bishop found out, he would make the most of it – in the most discreet way, of course – to strengthen his position as an engine of reform, get rid of Dobbs, and perhaps the Dean as well.

Can of worms!

Although it felt no warmer inside, Merrily unzipped her waxed coat and put a hand to the bump in her sweater, her pectoral cross.

This was because the atmosphere in the Cathedral was different.

Live?

Sophie touched her arm. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ Merrily remembered reading once that gothic churches somehow recharged themselves at night, like battery packs. She felt again the powerful inner call to prayer she’d experienced on the afternoon she’d emerged from the shell-like chantry to encounter Dobbs and the woman.

‘I won’t put on any lights,’ George whispered. ‘Don’t want to draw undue, ah… attention.’

He snapped off his torch for a moment. The only illumination now was the little aumbry light over the cupboard holding the emergency sacrament: wine and wafers in a silver container. Merrily felt a desperate, vibrating desire to kneel before it.

There was no sound at all.

‘All right.’ George switched on his torch again, and they followed its bobbing beam through the Lady Chapel and into the North Transept, where the great stained-glass window reared over the temporary screening partition hiding the dismantled tomb of St Thomas Cantilupe. George shone his torch over the various posters drawing-pinned to it, telling the story of Cantilupe – a wise and caring bishop, according to the Cathedral guidebook, who stood firm against evil in all its guises.

George stopped and called out harshly, ‘Thomas?’ as though he hadn’t intended to – as though the word had been wrenched out of him.

Merrily quivered for an instant.

Thomas? – as if he was summoning the spirit of Cantilupe.

He might as well have been. There was no response.

Merrily looked at Sophie. ‘You’re sure he’s still…?’

George moved across and shone his torch on the plywood partition door. Merrily remembered a padlocked chain connecting steel staples on the outside.

‘All this will be taken down quite soon,’ George said. ‘They’re putting the tomb back together next week.’

The chain appeared to have been dragged inside through a half-inch crack between the ill-fitting door and its frame. Dobbs – or someone else – had to be still behind it.

Merrily said, ‘Do you feel anything?’

‘I feel quite annoyed, actually,’ Sophie muttered. ‘Why isn’t he doing… what he was doing earlier? You’ll think we only dragged you here on a such a dreadful night on some sort of perverse whim.’

‘No. The atmosphere, Sophie – the atmosphere’s somehow… I don’t know… disarranged.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never been in here at night before. Not like this, anyway.’

She had a feeling of overhead cables cut, slashed through. Of them hanging down now, still live and dangerous.

‘Thomas?’ George rapped on the plywood door. ‘Thomas, it’s George. Getting a bit anxious about you, old chap.’

‘Something’s happened,’ Merrily said suddenly. ‘Can you break it down?’

‘Thomas!’ George slapped the partition with a leather-gloved hand. ‘Are you there?’

‘Break it down!’

He swung round. ‘This is a cathedral, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Maybe you can snap the chain?’

‘I can’t even reach the chain.’

‘Kick the door.’

‘I… I can’t.’

Merrily hurriedly unzipped her coat and slipped out of it. ‘Stand back, then. I’ll do it.’

‘No, I… Thomas! For God’s sake!’ George put an ear to the crack between the door and the frame. ‘Stop… wait… I can hear…’

Merrily went still.

‘I can hear him breathing,’ George said. ‘Can you hear that?’

She turned her back to the plywood screen, steadying her own breathing. She rubbed her eyes. Think practically, think rationally. When she turned back, both George and Sophie were staring at her. And the air in the high transept was still invisibly untidy with snipped wires.

‘All right.’ Big George began to unbutton his overcoat. ‘I’ll do it.

He wore fat, black boots. Doc Martens probably, size eleven at least. With equipment like that, he could bring the whole damned partition crashing down.

He gave Merrily the rubber-covered torch, which felt moist. By its light, she saw that his brown eyes were wide and scared, and a froth of spittle glistened in his beard.

‘Christ be with us,’ Merrily heard herself saying.

19 Costume Drama

SIREN WARBLING, BLUE beacons strobing – violently beautiful over the snow – the ambulance broke the rules by cutting from Broad Street across the Cathedral Green.

Merrily stood outside St John’s door with Sophie. Feeling useless.

Even in his condition, Dobbs had reared up from the stones at the sight of her, one arm hanging limp, and his face like a waxwork melting down one side. George Curtiss had then taken charge, suggesting she and Sophie should phone for help from the office in the gatehouse.

Merrily had glanced back once before they hurried away, and had seen George fumbling at the wall under the aumbry light.

‘The sacrament.’ Sophie had started to shake. ‘Oh, dear God, he’s asked for the sacrament.’

Merrily wasn’t sure Dobbs had been in any condition, at the time, to voice a request; this was probably George’s own decision. Probably a wise one.

She and Sophie stood back while the paramedics brought the old man out. Multiple headlights creaming the snow and more people gathering – one of the vergers, a couple of policemen.

And the Right Reverend Michael Hunter loping towards them. The Bishop in a purple tracksuit.

‘Merrily, what on earth are you doing here?’

‘Michael, I sent for her,’ Sophie explained at once. ‘I thought—’

‘That’s good,’ the Bishop said. ‘That’s fine. Entirely appropriate.’

Summoned from his bed, no doubt, by the ambulance siren, he seemed neither cold nor tired. Merrily could almost see his athlete’s glow as an actual halo as he raised a palm over the two women, like a blessing.

‘Poor Canon Dobbs,’ Sophie said.

The Bishop nodded. ‘A good and distinguished servant of God.’

Huh? Merrily recalled their discussion in the Green Dragon. ‘The old man’s ubiquitous. Hovering silently, like some dark, malign spectre. I’d like to… I want to exorcize Dobbs.’

Classic episcopal hypocrisy.

‘But he worked himself too hard – and for too long,’ the Bishop said. ‘A stroke, I gather.’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said, ‘that’s what it looks like.’

‘No!’ Cool, efficient Sophie started to cry. ‘Two strokes. It must have been two, don’t you see? We thought he must be… must have been drinking. When we heard his voice all slurred, in fact he was simply struggling to speak after a first stroke – probably only a minor one. And then… I remember my father… Oh God, how stupid we were, how utterly thoughtless.’

‘Sophie,’ Merrily said, ‘if it wasn’t for you, he might still be lying there.’

‘Perhaps it was us shouting at him to come out… perhaps all the fuss threw him into some sort of confused panic and that was what brought on the second stroke.’

‘Sophie, listen.’ The Bishop took his secretary by both shoulders, then eased back her scarf so as to look into her eyes. ‘We all knew that Thomas was long, long overdue for retirement. His particular ministry put him under enormous pressure. Several of us, as you know, tried very hard to persuade him to give it up. I think it was becoming explicitly clear to everyone that this good man’s mind was breaking down. Hey, watch yourself…’

He guided Sophie out of the path of the ambulance as it started up, preparing to bear the stricken Dobbs to the General Hospital. George Curtiss appeared from behind it, breathing hard through his beard.

‘Bishop…’

‘Well done, George.’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t do enough.’

‘I’m sure you did everything humanly possible,’ Mick Hunter said – then, after a pause, ‘except to inform your bishop.’

‘Oh, yes. I, ah, thought… hoped… that it wouldn’t be necessary to involve you – or the Dean.’

‘I want to be appraised of everything, George. You won’t forget that again, will you?’

‘No.’ The big canon, a good ten years older than the Bishop, looked like a chastized schoolboy. ‘I’m sorry, Bishop.’

‘Get some sleep. We’ll talk about this tomorrow. Merrily—’

‘Bishop?’ She was annoyed at the way he’d spoken to George, who’d administered the sacrament to Dobbs, stayed with him, tried to make him comfortable, keep him calm.

The Bishop said, ‘What was Canon Dobbs actually doing when you found him?’

‘He was having a stroke, Bishop,’ Merrily said wearily.

Mick Hunter was silent.

‘I’m sorry,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s been a difficult night.’

‘Has it? I see. I’ll talk to you on Monday, Merrily. This is obviously going to have a bearing on your situation.’ He turned and walked towards the Cathedral.

‘I thought for a moment he was going to say something about God moving in mysterious ways,’ Merrily muttered, ‘to clear the way for the new regime.’

‘He’s wearing trainers,’ Sophie said absently. ‘His poor feet must be absolutely soaked.’

‘Wellies wouldn’t fit the image.’

‘He’s more than image, Merrily,’ Sophie said quietly. ‘I think you know that. He’s a very young man. One day he’ll be a great man, I should think.’

One day he’ll probably be an archbishop, Merrily thought. But I doubt he’ll be a great man.

But she’d said enough.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Sophie said, ‘though clearly it wasn’t a terribly good idea.’

‘Sophie…’ Merrily glanced over her shoulder at the Cathedral, which – although someone, probably the Bishop, had put on lights – was still not the imagined beacon of old Christian warmth, not now. ‘When George said Dobbs was talking to Thomas Cantilupe, what did he mean by that?’

Sophie appeared uncomfortable. ‘Does that matter now?’

‘Yeah, I think it does.’

‘That was George’s surmise. I thought he was talking to himself. Thomas, you see – both of them Thomases. It was as though he… perhaps he was already feeling ill and he was urging himself to hold on.’

‘What were his words?’

‘Well, like that. He did actually say that at least once: “Please God, hold on, Thomas.” And then he’d lapse into mumbling Latin.’

‘How did he get in? Does he have keys?’

‘He must have.’

‘Does he often come here alone at night?’

‘It…’ Sophie sighed. ‘So they say.’

‘What else do they say?’

‘They say he has rather an obsession with St Thomas Cantilupe. I do know he studied the medieval Church, so perhaps he sought some sort of deeper communion with the saint, on a spiritual level. I don’t like to—’

‘You mean because the tomb was lying open, for the first time in over a century, he thought the saint would be more accessible? You have to help me here, Sophie. I don’t understand.’

‘I don’t know what to say,’ Sophie said. ‘I don’t feel it’s right to talk about it now, with the poor man probably dying. I mean, George gave him the sacrament.’

‘Sophie, just let me get this right. Are you saying you called me in because you and George thought Canon Dobbs was attempting to make contact with a dead saint?’

‘I don’t know, Merrily.’ Sophie was wringing the ends of her scarf. ‘Look, I just wanted to protect… Oh, I don’t know who I wanted to protect. The Bishop? Canon Dobbs? Or just the Cathedral? In the end it all comes back to the Cathedral, doesn’t it? I…’ She stamped a booted foot on the snow as if to emphasize it to herself. ‘I work for the Cathedral.’

‘Is there something… is there a problem in the Cathedral? Is that what you’re trying to say?’

Maybe she should talk to George, who was still with the two policemen beside their car at the roadside.

‘Can we talk about this… again?’ Sophie said.

‘If I’m going to help, you’ve got to trust me.’

‘I do trust you, Merrily. That’s why I telephoned for you. And I feel guilty now – you look so awfully tired. Do you really have to drive back? The roads are going to be dreadful.’

‘No worse than when I came. I think the snow’s stopping anyway.’

‘But it’ll probably freeze on top. That’s rather treacherous – and it’s always a little warmer in the city. Look, why don’t you stay with us tonight? We always keep a room prepared, and Andrew will have hot chocolate ready.’

‘Well, thanks. But there’s Jane at home. And tomorrow’s services.’

‘I do feel so guilty about bringing you here.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t fall asleep at the wheel. I’ll smoke.’

‘Hmm,’ Sophie said disapprovingly.

‘Good night, Sophie.’

Watching Sophie walk away towards warmth and hot chocolate, Merrily felt damp and chilled inside her thinning fake-Barbour. She saw the police car pulling away into Broad Street, and George Curtiss had already gone.

Fatigue had induced detachment. She didn’t want to be detached. She remembered how, when she and Sophie and George had first entered the Cathedral tonight, the urge to pray had washed over her like surf, a tide of need. Dobbs’s need?

That had gone now; her prayers weren’t needed – or not so urgently. She ought to have obeyed that call, fallen to her knees, and the whole bit.

Bloody Anglican reserve. The Church of the Stiff Upper Lip.

Abruptly, Merrily went back into the Cathedral, to pray for Dobbs, before it was all locked up again. Knowing she would make for the place where George had kicked down a partition door: the Cantilupe fragments.

What did she know about Cantilupe? Bishop of Hereford in the late thirteenth century. Born into a wealthy Norman baronial family. Educated for the Church. A political career before he came to Hereford in middle age, in the reign of Edward I. A row with the Archbishop of Canterbury which got him excommunicated. Reinstatement, then death, then sainthood. Then the miracles, dozens of miracles around the shrine: the tomb that no longer had a body in it, and that was now in pieces.

The aumbry light still shone: a relic of the medieval Church, seldom needed now. Tonight another medieval relic had required the last rites.

Merrily realized she very much did not want Dobbs to die. She went down on her knees, on the hard coldness, before the aumbry light itself. Let him live. Please God, let him survive. Build some kind of bridge between us. Throw down some quiet light. Let there be…

Useless, incoherent – she was just too tired. She couldn’t find the words to explain herself.

‘Merrily.’

She opened her eyes.

‘I’m sorry I was so abrupt, Merrily. It wasn’t you – it was me, I’m sorry. I felt excluded.’

The late-night DJ voice, resonant, burnt-umber. She should have realized he’d still be here. Perhaps she had.

‘Hello, Mick.’

The Bishop extended a hand. He was very strong, and suddenly she was on her feet again.

‘You look very tired,’ Mick said. ‘I hear you’ve been working hard tonight.’

‘Finding it hard, that’s all.’

‘As you’re bound to.’ His lean face was crinkled by a sympathetic, closed-mouth smile. He surveyed her in the mellow light. ‘It’s a very taxing role: social worker, psychotherapist and virtuoso stage-performer, all rolled into one.’

‘Stage-performer?’

‘We’re all of us actors, Merrily. The Church is a faded but still fabulous costume drama.’

‘Oh.’

‘And, to survive, it has to be considerably more sophisticated these days. Poor Dobbs is strictly Hammer Films, I’m afraid. He should retire, if he recovers, to one of those nice rural nursing homes for ageing clerics. There to write his memoirs, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know what I think.’

‘You’re overtired,’ Mick said. ‘Poor baby, I’m not going to let you drive home, you realize that.’

‘It’s only twenty minutes.’ He was offering to drive her?

‘In these conditions? At least an hour – and requiring rather more attention than I suspect you’d be able to summon. Consider this an executive ruling. Come to the Palace. We’ve lots of spare rooms I always feel guilty about. Perhaps we should make some available to selected homeless people, what do you think?’

‘I think it would be very much an unnecessary imposition on Mrs Hunter.’

‘What, accommodating the homeless? Or accommodating you? Either way, not a problem. Valentina’s away for a couple of days, visiting her ageing parents in the Cotswolds. Old Church, Val’s father – yesterday’s Church. We have endless and insoluble theological arguments, so these days I tend to plead pressure of work.’

Merrily smiled. ‘Look, it’s very kind of you, Mick. It’s just—’ She moved self-consciously towards St John’s door.

‘You’ – he followed her – ‘need all your strength. Just let others look after you sometimes. We can get you back in good time for tomorrow’s services, if that’s what you’re worried about. We have a wonderful old Land Rover at our disposal.’

‘There’s Jane, you know?’

‘Jane?’

‘My daughter.’

She thought he blinked. ‘She’s not a child any more, is she? She must be getting quite used to your nocturnal comings and goings.’

‘I suppose she is.’

‘Well, then…’

He put his hands on her shoulders, as he had on Sophie’s earlier. His hands were big and firm and warm.

‘Merrily, you have to stop shouldering the problems of the world. Besides, it would be a good opportunity for us to talk about the future. It’ll be impossible to keep this out of the papers, you know, especially if the old guy dies on us. We need to be ready, hmm?’

As Mick Hunter lowered his arms from her shoulders, his head bent quickly, and she was sure his lips touched her forehead just once, on the hairline.

‘This means we can stop quietly phasing you in and officially announce the establishment of a Deliverance consultancy. We need to discuss how we’re going to handle that.’

‘But not tonight.’

‘Oh no, not tonight. Tomorrow.’ He paused. ‘Over our breakfast, perhaps.’

The way he said our breakfast. The way he had his arms by his sides now, but had not stepped back. The way he seemed to be closer than when his hands had been on her. She felt an awful compulsion to fall forward, collapse into that strong, muscular episcopal chest.

‘Up to you, of course,’ he said. ‘Coincidentally, we’ve just had a guest suite refurbished. Bathroom with shower, small sitting room – that sort of set-up. You may find you have to overnight in Hereford quite often as your role expands. Consider it available at any time. As you’ll be reporting exclusively to me, it would seem like an arrangement with considerable… possibilities, you know.’

She stayed silent, giving him an opportunity to qualify that, but he didn’t. He just stood there gazing at her, and after a moment he calmly folded his arms – sometimes a defensive gesture, but not this time.

No, this couldn’t be? Couldn’t possibly be how it sounded.

‘Everything’s changing, Merrily,’ Mick said easily. ‘This is a time of transition when traditional values, old restrictions, should be allowed to drift away. We should stop presuming to know what God wants of us.’

Merrily backed against the door, needing cold air, space.

‘We should be prepared to experiment,’ Mick continued calmly, ‘until the waters settle and we know where we are again. For a while.’

He followed her out of the Cathedral, leaving the door for the verger to lock. Outside, an unreal mauvish mist was gathering around white roofs, over white pavements, the grey-white road. A Christmas-card Hereford, out of time. Mick Hunter, in his purple tracksuit, seemed part of the picture. Part of the illusion. Not real.

‘See, no traffic at all,’ he said. ‘Earlier, I believe, the TV and radio stations were warning motorists not to venture out unless it was absolutely vital.’

Time of transition? In the tingling mist, Merrily felt as though she was being drawn into a developing, lucid dream and had to go with it – some of the way, at least – to see if its destination could possibly be what she was half-imagining.

Or make a wild dash across Broad Street for her car. Or…

She heard Jane saying, It’s probably considered socially OK to fuck a bishop, and felt appalled.

‘Mick, look, I actually think it’s beginning to thaw. I can be home in half an hour.’

‘Nonsense. Merrily, you know you don’t really want to do that.’

‘I have to.’

She began to walk away from him towards the road, and then stopped and turned as the Bishop spoke again with quiet insistence.

‘You only have to do what you want to do.’

‘That’s not true…’

This was not the Bishop talking but the bulge in his tracksuit trousers. She closed her eyes briefly and wished him gone.

‘Oh… Excuse me, miss.’

A man stepped out from behind one of the trees like some accosting beggar – one of those homeless that Mick and Val would not be accommodating at the Palace.

‘Not now,’ the Bishop told him irritably.

‘Sorry, sir. Not you – the lady. Are you by any chance the lady whose daughter ordered a minicab?’

‘Huh?’

‘Mrs Watson?’

‘Watkins.’

‘Yeah, that’s it.’

Mick Hunter didn’t move. Merrily shrugged and gave him a bashful smile. ‘I didn’t know she’d done that. Kid does my thinking for me. Thanks anyway, Bishop. What time do you want to see me on Monday?’

‘Eleven o’clock,’ the Bishop said tonelessly, ‘in the Great Hall.’

She nodded.

‘Good night,’ he said.

‘It’s this way,’ said the cabbie.

Mick Hunter had vanished by the time she found out that the cabbie did not have a vehicle with him.

20 Not Good

THEY WALKED IN silence a short way along Broad Street until Merrily was sure the Bishop had returned to the Palace. Then Lol Robinson hurried her discreetly across the whitened green and into Church Street.

‘Little Jane called me, about half an hour ago. Said you were heading this way and you might be able to use a cup of coffee at some stage. I’ve just been… hanging around.’

‘So intuitive, that kid.’ God, she was pleased to see him. Although, under the circumstances, anybody at all would have been a serious blessing.

‘I think she was worried about you,’ he said.

Merrily smiled. ‘I’m sure.’ She felt light-headed – glad, for the first time she could remember, to be out of the Cathedral.

‘Who was that guy in the tracksuit?’ Lol unlocked a recessed door in the alleyway next to the little music shop.

‘That, Laurence, was the Bishop of Hereford.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Lol wore nothing over the familiar black sweatshirt with the Roswell alien face printed on it in flaking grey. He must be freezing. ‘I had him down as some late-night jogger, who… I don’t really know.’

‘Thought I was a prostitute.’

‘Like you always find in the Cathedral Close.’ Lol grinned. ‘Who was the bloke they put in the ambulance?’

‘Canon Dobbs. He’s had a stroke. We found him collapsed in the Cathedral.’

‘Oh.’ Lol shouldered the door open and turned on the light. They entered a hallway with a flight of stairs and a mountain-bike.

‘They called me in,’ Merrily said, ‘because he was… still is the last diocesan exorcist. You know about all that, I suppose.’

‘Well, you know, I’ve talked to Jane.’

‘Then you know everything.’

She looked around the shapeless, lamplit room with its beams and trusses and sash windows with lots of little square panes. Lol’s old guitar rested on a metal stand by the bricked-up fireplace. A stained and sagging armchair she remembered from his old cottage in Ledwardine.

‘Ethel used to sleep in this,’ she said.

‘How is Ethel?’

‘Ethel is fine. You get extra points for being a vicarage cat.’

Lol moved around, opening up radiators. His brass-rimmed glasses had half-misted.

‘This place is better for you?’ Merrily flopped into the chair without taking off her coat. ‘Do you feel better here?’

‘Haven’t been here long enough to think too much about it. It’s OK, I suppose.’ He went into what was presumably the kitchen, leaving the door open, a blue-white light flickering.

‘Very central. Convenient for the Cathedral.’

‘Right.’

She forced herself out of the chair, and went to join him in the kitchen. It had barely room for two people. The fluorescent strip-lighting hurt her eyes, reminding her of the sluice-room next to the Alfred Watkins Ward.

‘That was your idea, the taxi?’

‘All I could think of at the time.’ He had his back to her, filling the kettle.

‘Thank you,’ she said solemnly. ‘You… got me out of something heavy.’

‘Really?’ He turned round, looking happy. ‘Like you did for me and Ethel that night?’

‘Oh, more than that. The way this was going, I might not have had a career.’

‘Well, you know, I didn’t really hear anything.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘OK, I did. How many points for sleeping with a lady vicar?’

‘For a bishop? I honestly can’t recall a precedent. But bishops are survivors – especially this one, I suspect. Lady vicars… they’re expendable. Especially ones caught in sin.’

She was startled at how easy it was to discuss all this with Lol, though they hadn’t spoken for months. It might have been just this morning she last saw him. She looked around the little kitchen: plywood cupboards, a small fridge, a microwave, three mugs with hedgehog motifs on a shelf. Nothing suggestive of permanence. She was looking for a sign that Lol was out of limbo now and not finding one.

‘Erm…’ He turned to pull two of the mugs from the shelf. ‘When you said just now that you might not have had a career, does that mean that if I hadn’t shown up…?’

‘What it would have meant,’ Merrily said slowly, ‘is that, in order to get away from him, I would probably have had to stop pretending he was simply offering me a room for the night.’

‘Right.’ Lol set down the mugs. His glasses had misted again. ‘Jane’ll be glad to know that.’

They sat and drank their coffee, Merrily in Ethel’s old chair, Lol on the floor, his back to the window. She’d have to be going soon if she was going to grab a couple of hours before Holy Communion.

‘Jane said you were training to be a psychotherapist.’

‘Wild exaggeration. I’ve been helping my therapist. Former therapist, hopefully. That means I help a bit with other clients – as a kind of therapy. Well, one other client mainly: the woman who used to live in this flat.’

‘Oh,’ Merrily said, ‘that would be this, er… Moon? Just that Jane implied—’

‘I’ve got a vague idea what Jane implied.’

‘That kid could start wars.’ Merrily stretched. ‘I don’t want to move.’

‘So don’t move.’

‘I have to. Anyway, I think you’d make rather a good psychotherapist.’

‘Being an ex-loony?’

‘Not only that.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You know what I mean. You’ve been swallowed by the system once. You could be good at keeping other people out of the system.’

Lol said, ‘Maybe there are too many therapists and counsellors around already, all talking different kinds of bollocks.’

‘Is this Dick paying you?’

‘Kind of. There’s no big problem with money: the song royalties trickle in. And I might have another album – sometime.’ Lol stood up. ‘I, er… I was thinking of ringing you sometime, actually. What do you do if someone insists they’ve seen a ghost? I mean, not just any old ghost – a close relative. And so maybe they want to see it. To see more of it.’

‘Well… I’d try and find out if it was a real ghost. Maybe I’d ask a psychiatrist – or a psychotherapist – for some advice.’

‘And say this psychotherapist – or somebody else who knew this person well – was fairly convinced that there was something… unusual happening here.’

‘Well…’ Merrily lit a cigarette. ‘I’d probably try and explain to the person that this was not a very good idea. It’s not uncommon, actually, seeing relatives who’ve just passed on.’

‘Twenty-five years ago?’

‘That’s more uncommon. A visitor is the loose term we, er, we tend to use for this kind of… phenomenon.’

‘And it’s a bad thing, is it? Even if the person is not scared by it.

‘Any prolonged contact with a… spirit, or whatever, is unhealthy. It can lead to all kinds of problems. Mental problems obviously, and also… Well, you might think that what you’re seeing is your old mum, but it might be something else. I take it we’re talking about this Moon?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Lol, you only have one client…’

‘OK, it’s Moon.’

‘Who’s she been seeing?’

‘Her father. He died when she was two.’

‘Any complications?’

‘Shot himself.’

‘Oh.’

‘That’s not good, is it?’

‘That’s not good at all,’ Merrily said. ‘Would she see me, do you think?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe if you weren’t wearing… you know?’

‘A dog-collar.’

‘And I introduced you as a friend.’

‘Sounds like a good idea.’

‘She’s working in the shop down below all week.’

‘Maybe I’ll call in on Monday, then,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t know what time yet. I’ll be in the gatehouse if you want me – except mid-morning when I’m having discussions with my friend the Bishop.’

‘Pity you can’t see her house, really – a barn she’s leasing up on Dinedor Hill. She’s quite obsessive about the hill. It’s where she was born, where the family have lived since the Iron Age – or so she claims.’

‘This sounds awfully complicated, Lol.’ Merrily yawned and forced herself out of the chair. ‘Where’d I put my coat?’

‘All I can say is that she’s different when she’s up there. A different person – half… half somewhere else.’ He unhooked her waxed jacket from behind the door. ‘I don’t suppose… No, never mind.’

‘I hate it when anyone says that.’

‘Just that she left her bike here and I drove her home last night, because of the snow. So I have to pick her up on Monday morning, fetch her in to work.’

‘Early?’

‘Ish.’

‘If you could get me back to the gatehouse by eleven, I can come up with you. What’s my excuse, then?’

‘Your car wouldn’t start, so I’m giving you a lift somewhere? She’ll buy that. This is really good of you, Merrily.’

‘It’s my job. We’re told to work with shrinks. The Bishop would approve.’

‘The shrink doesn’t know,’ Lol said. ‘The shrink must never know.’

‘A non-believer, huh?’

‘Of the most intractable kind,’ Lol said. ‘You want me to drive you back now?’

‘No, Lol,’ Merrily annunciated carefully, ‘you’re – not – really – a – minicab – driver. That was for the benefit of the Bishop.’

She went smiling into the snow. She must be overtired.

At least the roads were no worse. Back in the vicarage just before five, she called the General Hospital. She gave them her name and they put her through to the ward. She just knew which one it was going to be – there was an ironic inevitability about it.

‘Reverend Watkins? Not the biggest surprise of the morning, to have you ring.’

‘What was the biggest?’

‘The biggest, to tell you the simple truth,’ Eileen Cullen said, ‘is that the auld feller’s still with us.’

‘Would that be an indication he might be coming through this?’

‘Ah, now, I wouldn’t go taking bets on that. He knows when you’re talking to him – his eyes’ll follow you around the room. But he’s not talking back yet.’

‘Mr Dobbs is not a big conversationalist, in my experience. The room? You haven’t got him—’

‘Christ no. We have this other wee side ward at the far end of the main ward. If Denzil was still with us, Mr Dobbs wouldn’t even be able to smell him.’

Merrily shuddered.

‘So, collapsed in the Cathedral, they say?’ Cullen said nonchalantly.

‘Yes, that’s what they say.’

‘Well, I’m off home in a while, but I’m sure they’ll keep you posted on any developments. I’ll mention it.’

‘Thanks.’

A pause, then Cullen said, ‘Funny, isn’t it, how things come around. Mr Dobbs arranging like that for you to have a mauling from Denzil in his death-throes, and now… You ever find out why he did that to you?’

‘I never did,’ Merrily said. ‘Maybe never will now.’

‘Well,’ Cullen said, ‘a patient’ll talk about all kinds of things, so he will – in the night, sometimes. I’ll keep my ears open.’

21 Chalk Circle

SHE KNEW THE words, of course she did, she knew the words. But they wouldn’t come. She bent close to him – his breath uneven, his eyes closed against her, like this was an act of will. She brought the chalice close to his stony face on the hospital pillow, white as a linen altar-cloth, and tipped her hand very slightly so that the wine rolled slowly down the silver vessel and trickled between his parted lips, a drop remaining on his lower lip, like blood.

Blood. Yes. Yes, of course.

‘The blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ, which was shed for you, preserve your body and soul into everlasting life. Drink this in remembrance that Christ’s blood was shed for you…’

Thomas Dobbs began to suck greedily at the wine. She was so grateful at having remembered the words that she tilted the chalice again, at a steeper angle, and wine flooded between his lips and filled his cheeks, and she began to murmur the Lord’s Prayer.

‘Our Father, Who…’

There was a cracking sound, like splintering stone, and his eyes flicked open, shocking her. Dobbs’s eyes were grey and white and, when he saw who hovered behind the sacrament, they blurred and foamed like a stream over rocks in winter.

‘Hallowed be…’

Dobbs’s shoulders began to quake.

‘Thy kingdom…’

She watched him rising up in the metal bed, his cheeks expanding. She could not move; this was her job. She kept on murmuring the prayer. When, eyes bulging in fury, he coughed the consecrated wine in a great spout into her face, it was indeed as warm as fresh blood, and she felt its rivulets down her cheeks.

This was her job; she could not move.

His hand snaked from under the bedclothes, and when it gripped her wrist like a monkey-wrench, the green tubes were ejected from his nose with a soft popping.

She didn’t scream. She was a priest. She just woke up with a whimper, sweating – after a little over an hour’s sleep on the sofa, and half a minute before the alarm was due to go off.

‘You look awful,’ said Ted Clowes after morning service. As senior churchwarden and Merrily’s uncle, he was entitled to be insulting. ‘This damned Deliverance nonsense, I suppose. I’ve told you, I have an extreme aversion to anything evangelical.’

Uncle Ted, a retired solicitor, had read ‘widely’ (the Daily Mail) about the Toronto Blessing and certain churches in Greater London where parishioners with emotional problems were exorcized of their ‘devils’ in front of the entire congregation. He was monitoring all Merrily’s services for ‘danger signs’.

‘In addition, there’s all the time it seems to take up – time that should be spent in this parish, Merrily.’

‘Ted, I wouldn’t have been doing anything here in the parish in the early hours of this morning.’

‘But look at the state of you! Look at the shadows under your eyes. You look as if you’d been beaten up. I tell you, these things don’t go unnoticed in a village. Half of those old women are not listening to a word of your sermon; they’re examining you inch by inch for signs of disrepair. Anyway, I should get some sleep for an hour or two after lunch. Put that child of yours on telephone duty.’

Jane was sitting in Mum’s scullery-office, with Ethel on her knees and her one purchase from the psychic fair open on the desk: a secondhand copy of A Treatise on Cosmic Fire by Alice A. Bailey. So far, she couldn’t understand how a book with such a cool title could be so impenetrable. It sometimes read like one of those stereotype fantasy sagas she devoured as a kid – well, until about last year, actually – with all these references to The Sevenfold Lords and stuff like that. Except this was for real. But wasn’t there a simpler way to enlightenment?

In her pocket, she had the phone number Angela had given her.

Sorrel.

She took it out, then put it back. Instead she rang Lol. Mum had said very little about last night apart from Dobbs and his stroke – like, tough, but the old guy was plainly out of his tree, as well as being seriously outdated on the issue of women priests. If you had to have soul police – and no way did you – better someone decently liberal like Mum; Dobbs should have bowed out long ago and gone to tend his roses or something.

Jane scratched behind Ethel’s left ear until the black cat twisted her neck, purred luxuriously and faked an orgasm.

Lol wasn’t answering his phone. Mum said she’d had a cup of coffee with Lol, that was all. Not as good as getting completely soaked through, and having to take off all her clothes on Lol’s hearthrug, but a start.

Jane hung up, closed Alice A. Bailey, put Ethel on the carpet.

She took a long, long breath and got out the piece of paper.

Denny had upgraded his studio to 24-track. ‘This is it for me,’ he said. ‘Finito. I think we’ve all been getting too technoconscious. It’s not what rock and roll’s about. When I was a kid you had a two-track Grundig in somebody’s garage and you were bloody grateful.’

‘What on earth is a Grundig?’ asked James Lyden’s friend Eirion, unpacking his bass.

‘Forget it,’ Denny said.

The house was no more than half a mile from Dick’s place, about the same age but detached and with a longish drive. Just as well, with a studio underneath. However, Denny had also allowed for major soundproofing; the creation of an anteroom and homemade acoustic walls had reduced the main cellar to about two-thirds of its original size. Four of them now stood in the glass-screened control room, with Denny’s personalized mixing-board. It was a warm, secure little world.

‘This was the wine cellar?’ James enquired, presumably wondering what Denny had done with all his wine.

‘Coal cellar,’ Denny snapped.

James didn’t have a Stratocaster. He had a Gibson Les Paul copy – a good one; you had to look hard to be sure. He gazed around. ‘I’ve got a rough idea how this set-up operates, but perhaps you could stick around for an hour or two, before you let us get on with it.’

Lol blinked. They expected Denny to leave them here alone with his gear? But Denny wasn’t listening. He was underneath the mainboard now, with a hand lamp, messing with something. Lol wondered if James actually had got the wrong idea about this, or whether he was just trying it on. He looked like the kind of kid who would always try for more.

With a fair chance of success, Lol figured. The boy looked austere and kind of patrician, and tall – a good six inches taller than Dick. A good bit slimmer than Dick, too – who would have ceased to be James’s role model many years ago. Like when James was about six.

‘I used to rather like those Hazey Jane albums,’ he said to Lol. ‘You were a pretty good songwriter. You had that melancholy feel of… what was his name? I can’t remember… Mum had an album of his.’

‘Nick Drake?’ Through the glass, Lol could see the two nonsongwriting band members erecting a drum kit down on the studio floor.

‘Oh, I know… James Taylor.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Lol said.

James nodded knowledgeably. His mother, as a therapist, would have told him about the young James Taylor’s psychiatric problems. Which would be why he’d made the comparison. Letting Lol know he knew the history.

He smiled compassionately down at Lol. ‘You did absolutely the right thing, in my view. I mean packing in when you did. If everybody stopped recording at their peak, we’d have a hell of a lot less dross to wade through, in my view. Like, someone should’ve shot Lennon ten years earlier.’

‘That’s what you think?’

‘They should have shot McCartney first,’ said Eirion. He was from Cardiff – one of those wealthy, Welsh-speaking families – but Eirion spoke English with an accent straight out of Hampstead or somewhere.

‘Eirion reckons twenty-five,’ James said. ‘I say twenty-seven, giving them the benefit of the doubt.’

‘Compulsory retirement age for rock musicians,’ Eirion explained. ‘We argue about it a lot.’

‘Personally, I think semi-voluntary euthanasia’s probably the best answer,’ Lol said. ‘When they stop playing, their health goes or they take too many drugs and become a burden on the state.’

Eirion considered this. ‘They could surely afford BUPA or something, couldn’t they?’

Lol heard rumbles from underneath the mixing-board. Detected sounds resembling fucking, little and shits. He was beginning to enjoy this. In fact, he felt much better today about… well, most of it. This morning the disparate pieces of a song which had been lying around for most of a month had fallen exquisitely into place.

‘So how many songs you actually got, James?’

‘How many, Eirion? Twenty, twenty-two?’

‘Well, yes, but some of them are fairly embarrassing now, actually – things we did over a year ago.’

‘That old, huh?’ said Lol.

James looked sullen. ‘Dad says he’s only paying for four. But he can cock off. That would be a pure waste of time and manpower. Besides, we’ve worked seriously hard and we’re pretty fucking efficient. It wouldn’t take that much longer to lay down the other six.’

‘An album in fact?’

‘Anything less isn’t worth the hassle,’ said James, ‘don’t you think?’

‘We’ll see how it goes,’ Lol said. ‘It’s this bloke’s studio.’

Denny came up, red-faced, from underneath the board, his big earring swinging furiously. ‘Sorted,’ he announced.

‘Oh, I get it.’ James tucked his rugby shirt into his jeans, and strapped on his guitar. ‘You’re the engineer, too.’

‘And the cleaner,’ Denny said menacingly. ‘And the teaboy.’

‘No, I mean… to be tactful about this, we don’t mind you guys hanging around. We do want to be produced, but we need space to experiment, yeah? We’re only into being… guided, up to a point. I mean, you know, I don’t want to sound arrogant or anything.’

‘Perish the thought,’ Lol said.

He kept wondering how he would be feeling now if, instead of meeting Merrily Watkins again, he’d spent last night in Moon’s barn – in Moon’s futon.

But it hadn’t worked out like that, and he was so glad.

Merrily lay awake, tasting the formless dregs of a dream. With the feeling of something wrong – of loneliness. And the recurrent domestic agoraphobia of two small women sharing seven bedrooms.

You’re never really alone, you know. How often had she said that to a bereaved parishioner? Whichever way you looked at Him, God was never another warm body in a cold bed on a winter’s night.

The luminous clock indicated 5.40 p.m. Time to leave for Evensong – except they’d dropped it last September because so few people liked turning out in winter darkness.

She remembered the essence of her dream. Oh God, an image of the lithe and tawny Val Hunter astride Mick under some high, moulded ceiling, with all the lights on. Merrily standing in the doorway, shocked to find herself wearing a very short black nightie. Cold legs, cold feet. Come on, Merrily! the Bishop had shouted impatiently. Don’t be nervous. This is a time of transition. We have to experiment! The king-size bed, a four-poster, had shiny purple sheets.

But that confrontation under the aumbry light now seemed no less unlikely than the dream of the purple sheets. Merrily slid out of bed.

Downstairs there was no sign of Jane. Ethel eyed her sleepily from the basket beside the Aga, as Merrily made herself some coffee. She thought of the night Lol had first arrived with Ethel, after the cat had been savagely kicked by a drunk. They’d examined her on the kitchen table, just there –

Where a note lay, neatly printed from the computer.

MUM: Rowenna turned up. Didn’t want to wake you, so left machine on. Back by ten… swear to God.

Here’s list of phone calls so far.

1. Emily Price, from Old Barn Lane, wanting to firm-up a date for wedding rehearsal.

2. Uncle Ted, in Churchwarden Mode. Didn’t say what it was about – probably usual pep talk about not neglecting parish for glamour of Hereford.

3. Sister Cullen. Can you ring her at home?

That’s it. Love J.

Eileen Cullen said, ‘Don’t worry, the auld feller’s not gone yet.’

‘I was thinking of visiting him. Is he allowed visitors?’

Cullen laughed. ‘Well, it’s funny you should say that, Merrily. Mr Dobbs has had a visitor. That’s why I called you. I thought you’d maybe want to know. Just the one visitor.’

‘Someone I know?’

‘You’ll be on your own if you do.’

‘You’re going to spin this one out, aren’t you?’

‘All right,’ Cullen said, ‘I’ll tell you. First off, I wasn’t there. Young Tessa was there – you remember Tessa? Sunday-school teacher – the plucky kid holding Denzil’s other hand?’

‘I remember.’ Like you could forget anybody there that night.

‘This afternoon, all right, a man in an overcoat carrying an attaché case. A minister, he says, come to pray with Mr Dobbs. But Mr Dobbs can’t speak, Tessa tells him. Doesn’t matter, the priest says. They would like some peace and quiet and nobody coming in.’

‘What was his name?’

‘He didn’t give his name. I told you Dobbs was in another wee side ward, all on his own? Well, the priest’s drawn the curtain across the glass in the door. Except it’s not possible to block the window fully. If you’re nosy enough, you can stand on a chair and look down through the top. Which Tessa did, after she caught the light from the candles.’

‘Candles?’

‘We’re always a bit careful, the range of religious fellers show up these days – and all quite legit, you know? Only Sister Miller’s on her break and Tessa’s a wee bit unsure about this, so she takes a peep. He’d about finished by then, so he had. He was picking up his wee bottles of holy water, scrubbing out his chalk circle.’

‘Chalk circle?’ Merrily sat down hard at the scullery desk.

‘Me telling you like this, it sounds like a joke, but the child was terrified. He’d drawn a circle round the bed, if you please! Yellow chalk. Making a bit of extra room by pushing the visitor’s chair under the door handle, the cheeky sod, so anyone’d have a job getting in even if they wanted to. And some bottles of water, with stoppers, placed around the circle. He also had a black book – very eerie, very frightening.’

‘What did she do?’

‘Went to find Sister Miller. Time the two of them got back, your man had gone. She rang me here during her break.’

‘Well…’ Merrily drew erratic circles on a pad. ‘I’m lost. I don’t understand this.’

‘All I can say is that I was raised a Catholic, and it isn’t one of our… things… our rituals.’

‘Doesn’t even seem like proper religion, Eileen. More like… magic. You sure this was a real priest?’

‘I didn’t see him. Tessa says he was wearing a dog-collar. He had a hat and scarf, so she couldn’t see much of his face.’

‘Did they check Dobbs over after he’d gone?’

‘No change. He lies there still as corpse, so he does. Sometimes his eyes’ll be open, but you never see it happen. What’ll we do? Call the police, you reckon?’

‘I don’t know what the police could do, to be honest. But if he shows up again… would you mind calling me?’

‘Merrily,’ Cullen said, ‘if it’s me that’s on when he shows, I’ll be on to you before the divil’s got both feet on the blessed ward at all.’

22 Edict

MONDAY MORNING, AND Jane felt good – which was rare. She lay and watched for the dawn.

She’d seen like hundreds of dawns from here now, her bed facing the east window. This was not brilliant feng shui-wise, but you did get to see the sun come up over the wooded hill, and that was seriously important today.

Jane replayed last night’s encounter – still amazed at how cool Sorrel had been, inviting her and Rowenna over at once to talk about it all. Jane calling Rowenna, and Ro saying, ‘Look, better not tell them we’re still at school. These people worry about parents finding out and making a fuss.’ That was cool – so they were office working girls. Sorrel, who looked about Mum’s age, had with her an elderly woman called Patricia who was kind of the head of the group and was obviously a really heavy person and had quizzed them in this really soft, knowing voice. How important is it to you to find the Path within yourself? Are you ready for so much hard work at a time when most girls your age are out having fun?

That made you think. You could spend years in search of enlightenment, and still wind up disillusioned at forty or something. The answer was: give it six months and then, if it wasn’t working for you, let it go.

No sign of dawn, and it was getting on for seven. Mum was probably up already, because – yes! – Mum was meeting Lol later in Hereford.

She didn’t know what the meeting was about, and why it was so early, but that didn’t matter. Their meeting was still a major coup for Mystic Jane, who had set the whole thing up the other night. Classic, when you thought about it: Lol taking Merrily in from the cold, offering her sanctuary just like she’d done for him that time. Mum still very big on the sanctuary concept, like with all those hookers she tried to rescue when she was a curate in Liverpool.

It would be really good to have Lol around again, so cool in his vulnerable, nervous way. This Moon – she was entirely wrong for him. You could tell, just by watching her in the shop, that she was remote and self-obsessed. So, OK, she was beautiful and about ten years younger than Mum. But Mum was still sexy. Well, she could be sexy, if she wanted to. If the bloody Church…

Or if they’d met way back – Mum in her Goth frock and her Siouxie Sioux make-up, Lol unhappily on the road with his band, Hazey Jane. You seemed to go all tightened up and inhibited when you got older. Especially when you had your whole life hijacked by the Church. The dogcollar – it was like some sick masochism trip. The punks used to wear actual dog-collars. Had Mum once been into bondage gear, and was that a natural progression to clerical costume?

Jane was just picturing Mum in the pulpit in her Sunday surplice and half a potful of coal-black mascara, when she became aware of the frozen night sky at last beginning to brown with heat from the east. Patricia said you were supposed to wait for the big orb itself but, like, what if it didn’t show until you were on the school bus or something?

She scrambled out of bed and walked slowly to the eastfacing window and opened it as wide as it would go. It was absolutely bloody freezing.

Well, good! Jane steeled herself and flung her arms wide.

Now her first exercise. She had the words Patricia had given them written out on the back of an old birthday card, all ready, balanced on the window ledge. She pictured Rowenna standing at her own window in the big modern house in Credenhill Jane hadn’t yet visited.

She pictured Patricia and Sorrel – sisters, kind of.

OK. She took a mouthful of cold air and coughed. Then she looked into the sandy sky and read aloud from the card.

‘Hail to Thee, Eternal Spiritual Sun

‘Whose symbol now rises in the Heavens.

‘Hail to Thee from the Abodes of Morning.’

Jane lowered her arms, and stayed silent. By tomorrow, she wouldn’t need the card.

She was on the Path.

This time, she was going to do it right.

Merrily dumped her waxed jacket on a front pew and went to kneel in the chancel.

Before her, the altar was a hazy-grey block under a stainedglass window, its colours still sleeping. She hadn’t switched on the lamps or even lit a candle.

Unlocking the church, she’d thought what a shame it was to have to restrict the house of God to not much more than normal working hours. Ted wanted to lock it up at five each evening, but Merrily was insisting on seven at least, even if she then had to go along with her own keys. A church should really be offering sanctuary around the clock. Perhaps you could employ a sympathetic security patrol to filter out the vandals – try getting that one past the parish council.

Enough! Merrily kneeled in silence for maybe ten minutes, letting thoughts drift away, and then began.

Her voice was hesitant, but steady. She kept it low.

‘Christ be with me, Christ within me.

‘Christ behind me…’

Christ and who else? A story in the Church Times last week had revealed two more attacks – one of them sexual – on women priests in their own churches. But you couldn’t wrap yourself in cotton-wool like some religious statuette.

Equally she’d seen with the Denzil Joy incident the potential dangers of not protecting yourself before you went out on a case. And there was a lot about this Moon business she didn’t like. Obsession, for a start, was always dangerous. She’d called Lol last night, while Jane was out, to get some more background. She didn’t like the idea of that newly displayed photograph of the dead father in a room full of Iron Age relics. There was the possibility that this woman was drawing down pagan Celtic elements she would not be able to deal with.

Lol was right: it was necessary to go to the location on this one. To try to see it through Moon’s eyes. But if there was something there, some lurking presence from way way back, would Merrily be able to sense it? While, at the same time, keeping it out?

‘I bind unto myself the Name,

‘The strong Name of the Trinity.

‘By invocation of the same,

‘The Three in One and One in Three…’

Pip-pop! The green tubes ejecting from the nostrils of dying Denzil Joy. Pip-pop!

Merrily cringed.

Stop!

She opened and closed her eyes and pulled the folds of blue and gold around her.

Start again.

‘Christ be with me, Christ within me…’

But Merrily’s visit with Lol to Moon’s barn was not going to happen. Something appalling already had. Something she could not ignore.

Jane took the call while Merrily was making breakfast.

‘It’s some really nasty, officious-sounding bastard.’

‘Not so loud!’ Merrily took it on the cordless phone in the kitchen.

‘Merrily Watkins speaking.’

‘This is Major Weston, area organizer for the Redundant Churches Fund. I make no apologies for calling you before eight. I find it ridiculous that I should have to call you at all. I wanted the local man to deal with it. Bizarrely, the local man tells me all matters of this nature have to be referred directly to you.’

‘What’s the problem, Major?’ She wasn’t aware that the Redundant Churches Fund even had an area organizer.

‘Desecration is the problem, Mrs Watkins. At the Church of St Cosmas and St Damien at Stretford. Do you know where that is?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘I expect you’ll manage to find it. The police already have, for what they’re worth.’

‘What kind of desecration?’

‘What kind? Satanic desecration, of course.’

Jane was furious.

‘You can’t do this to Lol! Whatever it was, you promised him.’

‘I have to. It’s—’

‘Your job – yeah, yeah. You know what I think? I think you’re empire-building.’

‘Flower, it’s not me! I didn’t even know about this, but apparently every vicar or rector or priest-in-charge in the diocese has received an edict from the Bishop’s office to say that anything arising in their parishes possibly related to Deliverance should be referred initially to me. Through the Deliverance office, naturally, but this Major Weston’s obviously had an earful from a local vicar happy to wash his hands of it, and so the Major’s made a special point of finding my home number and getting me up nice and early in the morning. What can I do?’

‘You don’t have to go now.’

‘I do have to go now. They’ve got to get the place cleaned up. It’s a disused church supported by this charity.’

But she was annoyed. Neither Mick nor Sophie had mentioned this memo going out to all the priests. Yes, it did look like empire-building, and whilst a few vicars would be secretly relieved, the majority would resent it. She would have resented it.

‘I’ll call Lol,’ she said.

23 Strawberry Ice

THE MAIN ROAD was a brown channel between banks of snow. The Cathedral – usually seen at its most imposing from Greyfriars Bridge – skulked uneasily in half-lit mist.

Beyond the bridge, the car slid alarmingly towards the kerb where there was a pub called the Treacle Mine. This was not promising. The hill might still be a problem – like the other night.

White hell, then. Not ten minutes out of the city, but the snow had lain undisturbed for longer. Denny’s monster Mitsubishi would, for once, have been useful. Don’t even try the steep bit, Moon had said. You’ll just get stuck. I can walk down from here.

Oh, it’s hazardous out there, Moon. Snow-blindness. Hypothermia.

Lol, the hill’s only five hundred and ninety-five feet above sea level.

Sometimes her humour-vacuum was almost endearing. Ever since they’d left the shop – Moon, in her green padded skijacket, snuggling into his shoulder – Lol had been thinking: I was wrong, I’m crazy. There’s nothing weird going on. All she needs is love.

Anyway, he couldn’t stop now; there was nowhere to turn the car around.

This morning, with no further snow, things were better.

Someone must have been up the hill with a tractor, perhaps even a snowplough. He made it without too much revving and sliding, as far as the little car park for visitors to the ancient camp.

The desolation of the day was getting to him. He’d been looking forward to bringing Merrily up here. But Merrily couldn’t make it. Second thoughts, maybe, about loopy Moon – and loopy Lol, too. He’d misunderstood her.

From the back of the car, he pulled his wellies and his old army combat jacket. The snow around here was untrodden, lying in big drifts. Even where it hadn’t drifted, it was four, five inches deep.

Lol ploughed through. The earth steps had disappeared, becoming a deceptive white ski-run. Lol stopped. He’d imagined the barn below would be winter-picturesque, but it was like a short, blackened toadstool under its snow-swollen roof. Neglected and charmless, most of its windows shrunken by snow.

On Saturday night, a gauzy moon had been nesting in the snow-bent treetops, and Moon had walked across where the patch of garden would be and looked all around like she wanted to establish a memory of how the barn and the surrounding trees looked in their moonlit winter robes.

And Lol had then thought, this is it. Dick whispering in his ear, You do find her attractive, don’t you? Think she doesn’t fancy you? Oh, I think she does, old son. I think she does. And then Denny. I would do anything, give anything to get her away from there. Meanwhile, if she’s not alone, that’s the best thing I could hope for under the circumstances.

Lol crunched carefully down the long earthen steps. It was fully light now, or as light as it was going to get. He knocked on the front door, set into the glassed-over barn bay, long curtains drawn on either side.

There was no answer. After a minute, Lol stepped back on to the snow-shrouded garden and looked around.

A big man was striding out of a wall of conifers on the other side of the barn. He stopped. ‘Hello. Can I help?’

‘I’m looking for Kathy Moon.’

‘Yes, this is where she lives.’ He had a high, hearty voice – not local. He wore a shiny new green Barbour and a matching cap. ‘I’m from the farm. Tim Purefoy.’

‘Lol Robinson. I’m a… friend of hers.’

‘Yes, I’m sure she’s spoken of you.’ Tim Purefoy looked down at Lol, recognition dawning. ‘I know… you were here helping Katherine move in, yes?’ He ambled across to the glassed-over barn bay, squinting through a hole in the condensation. ‘Bit odd – she’s usually up and about quite early. Cycles into town, you know.’

Lol explained about driving Moon home on Saturday, and the bike being still at the shop.

‘Well, I don’t know what to say,’ said Mr Purefoy. ‘Gone for a stroll maybe? Perhaps she wanted to see what the hill was like under snow, before it all vanished. Bit of a romantic about this hill, as you probably know. Anyway, can’t be far away. Come and wait at the farmhouse if you like, and have a coffee.’

‘Actually,’ Lol said, ‘I don’t suppose I could use your phone? It’s possible her brother got worried about her being up here in the blizzard. Maybe he’s collected her.’

‘No problem at all. Follow me.’ Tim Purefoy beat his gloved hands together. ‘Like midwinter already, isn’t it?’

The Dyn farmhouse was unexpectedly close – no more than fifteen yards behind the tight row of Leylandii. It was these conifers that deprived the barn of its view, but when you passed between them…

Lol almost gasped.

They were standing on a wide white lawn sloping away to a line of low bushes which probably hid the road. But it might as well have been a cliff edge.

Below it, the city – a timeless vision in the mist.

‘Startling, isn’t it?’ Tim Purefoy folded his arms in satisfaction. ‘Best view of Hereford you’ll get from anywhere – except from the ramparts of the hillfort itself.’

The snow had made Hereford an island and softened the outlines of its buildings, so that the new merged colourlessly with the old. And because the city had somehow been bypassed by the high-rise revolution of the sixties and seventies, it might all have been seventeenth-century, even medieval, underneath. It was both remote and intimate; it made Lol feel very strange.

‘See how the steeple of All Saints is superimposed on the Cathedral tower?’ Tim said knowledgeably. ‘That’s one of Alfred Watkins’s ley-lines. An invisible, mystical cable joining sacred sites – a prehistoric path of power.’

‘And we’re standing on it?’

‘Absolutely. It goes very close to the house. We had a chap over to dowse it – the earth-energy. They’re energy lines, you know. And spirit paths, so we’re told.’

No wonder this guy had taken to Moon. Standing in the thin rain on the snowy lawn, Lol suddenly felt he could jump off and slide down that mystical cable from the hill to the steeple to the tower in the mist.

‘Probably all nonsense,’ Tim Purefoy said, ‘but at sunset you can feel you own the city. Come and have some coffee, my friend.’

Lol shook himself.

The farmhouse was three-storeyed, ruggedly rendered in white. With lots of haphazard, irregular mullioned windows, it looked as old as the hill itself. How could Moon live out in that sunken, tree-smothered barn, knowing her own family had lost this house, and this view?

‘Anna!’ Tim Purefoy shouldered open the door of a wooden lean-to porch on the side of the house. ‘Coffee, darling!’ He held open the door for Lol. ‘Come in, come in. Don’t worry about the boots. It’s a flagged floor, and the place is a damn mess this morning, anyway.’

Globular hanging lights were switched on in the vast, farmhouse kitchen. It was golden with antique pine, and had an old cream-coloured double-oven Aga which seemed actually to be putting heat into the room. Like a furnace, in fact. Lol felt almost oppressed by the sudden warmth.

‘One second…’ The woman kneeling at the stove wore jeans and a sackcloth-coloured apron tied over a long rainbow sweater. Her fair hair was efficiently bound up in a yellow silk scarf.

‘My wife, Anna.’ Tim Purefoy pulled off his cap, freeing springy white-blond curls. ‘Darling, this chap’s a friend of Katherine – who seems to have gone walkabout in the woods again.’

‘Oh gosh. Not untypical, though.’ Anna Purefoy closed an oven door, sprang up, patting floury hands on her apron. ‘I’m making bread. One can buy a marvellous loaf at any one of a half-dozen places in town, but one somehow feels obliged, living in a house this old. Do you know what I mean?’

Lol nodded. ‘Responsibility to the ancestors.’

‘My God,’ said Tim. ‘This chap does know Katherine.’

‘It’s good to think someone does.’ Anna pulled out chairs from under a refectory table. Concern put lines into her face. She was perhaps fifteen years older than she’d first appeared.

‘Don’t interfere, darling!’ said Tim with affection. ‘You know what we said about interfering. My wife’s lost unless she can find someone to worry about.’

‘There’s a loaf in here for Katherine,’ said Anna. ‘Left to herself, she’d go days without food.’

‘Oh, nonsense, Anna!’

His wife glared at him. ‘Tim, I have been in her kitchen and found the refrigerator absolutely bare, while the girl sits there with all her books and her maps and her notes. Fascinating, what she’s doing, of course, and we’ve learned a lot by helping her, but she’s so obsessive, isn’t she? I feel enormously guilty.’

‘She thinks we twisted her arm to take on the barn.’ Tim pulled off his Barbour, revealing a thick and costly cowboy shirt and a silk cravat. ‘In fact, she virtually twisted ours.’ He focused narrowed eyes on Lol. ‘You know the history, I suppose.’

Lol nodded warily. ‘I, er, know about her father.’

‘Oooh.’ Anna hugged herself with a shiver.

‘Speaking personally,’ Tim said, ‘I wouldn’t want to live within a hundred miles of here under those particular circumstances – but there we are. Telephone’s in the hall. I say, do take off your coat, so you won’t feel it so cold when you go outside again.’

From the square oak-pillared hall, Lol called the shop and got no answer. Then he called Denny at home.

Denny said angrily, ‘Gone? How can she be gone?’

‘So you haven’t seen her? I came to pick her up here—’

‘What you mean, came to pick her up?’

Lol said awkwardly, ‘Denny, there’s… there’s nothing happening between Moon and me. There never has been.’

Denny was quiet for a few seconds, then he said, ‘I don’t believe this. You gay, Laurence?’

‘No.’

‘Then what the fuck…? I can’t… She sometimes goes in to see the idiots next door… at the farm.’

‘That’s where I’m calling from, and they haven’t seen her, either. They say she sometimes goes out for walks, but I can’t see any footprints.’

‘I’m coming over,’ Denny said. ‘Fucking stay there.’

Lol went back outside with both Purefoys.

‘You, er… you still own the barn, presumably?’

‘Oh yes,’ Anna said. ‘Katherine’s indicated several times that she’d like to buy it, but we’re not awfully happy about that idea. It is very near to the house, and suppose she… Well, suppose she had a change of heart or had to sell suddenly?’

Meaning, Lol guessed, suppose she was removed by men in white coats.

‘Anyone could buy it then, couldn’t they?’ Tim said. ‘And it’s awfully close to our house.’

‘So you still have keys, presumably.’

‘Well, we do. But we’d never dream of going in without permission. As I keep telling Anna, it’s not our place to interfere. Or to be… over curious. That is, we try not to notice what we’re not supposed to notice.’

What had Moon been doing?

Lol wondered how long the Purefoys themselves would stay here, once they’d got used to that view, and over the novelty of homemade bread. Houses like this, previously occupied by the same family for centuries, might then change hands half a dozen times in the following twenty years. It was hard to settle under the weight of someone else’s tradition.

And costly, too. You bought a country residence for what seemed like peanuts compared with London, and then you found out how much you had to spend just to keep it standing. Moon must have been a gift to them. They’d probably run out of money halfway through converting the barn, and bodged the rest very quickly once she came on the scene.

‘Are you something to do with the little shop?’ Anna asked, a scarlet parka now setting off her yellow scarf. ‘That place where Katherine works?’

‘Me? Not exactly, I’m just a… friend of hers. And of Denny.’

‘Must be a busy man, her brother,’ Tim said. ‘Never seems to have time to visit her here.’

Lol tried knocking one more time, harder in case she was still asleep.

‘OK if I go round the back and bang on one of the windows?’

‘My dear chap, whatever you want.’

Lol pushed through bushes at one corner. Behind the barn there was, under snow, what must be a small square of lawn up against a low bank. It looked quite pretty – like a cake with pink icing.

Also, like some exotic confection, its design became more complex as he stared. Pink – but pale brown in places where the thaw had already eroded the snow. Strawberry ice-cream in the middle, sorbet round the edges, up against the back wall made of rubble-stone.

All it needed was a cherry in the middle, Lol thought in the wild surrealism of the moment. The red woollen beret Merrily used to wear, that would do. If you threw her beret into the centre of this lawn, it would lodge lusciously in the soft, wet, pink snow like a cherry.

There was a jagged hole in the snow under the nozzle of a pipe poking out of the wall about eighteen inches above the ground.

They’d bodged the plumbing, he thought. That was the overflow from the bath, and it should empty down into a drain.

Oh God!

Lol stood there remembering how completely Moon had changed once they’d reached the door of the barn. Her voice becoming sharp like the night, her eyes glittering like ice under the moon, as she pulled out her keys. She had been talking about Dick Lyden again, and what a clown he was. While separating a long black key and unlocking the door in the glass bay.

Maybe not such a clown, Lol had thought at the time. Confidence had seemed to click into place the minute Moon arrived back here – the strength of the old settlement around her, the child of the Hill. In Dick’s terms of reference, a fantasy structure: The way we create our destiny. The way we form fate.

He’d moved to follow her into the barn, but she’d turned in the doorway, somehow stiffening.

She’d said, No.

Moon?

I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want you to come in.

He’d stepped back.

Thank you, Moon had said. Once she had opened the door, the darkness inside seemed to suck her in and thrust him away.

Now, when Lol walked back round to the front of the barn, he was shaking.

‘No luck, old chap?’

‘I think we’re going to need those keys, Mr Purefoy,’ Lol said.

24 Last Long Prayer

THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH of St Cosmas and St Damien was almost part of a farmyard situated on the edge of a hamlet among windy-looking fields in the north of the county. Not that far from main roads but Merrily, who thought she knew this county fairly well, had been unaware of it.

The church was tiny, the size of a small barn, with a little timbered bell-turret at one end.

St Cosmas and St Damien?

‘Fourth-century Mediterranean saints,’ said Major Weston, ‘connected with physicians and surgeons, for some reason. Local doctors hold the occasional service here. Otherwise it’s disused. Absolute bloody tragedy.’

‘One of all too many these days, Major.’ Powdered snow blew at Merrily’s legs.

‘Call me Nigel,’ suggested Major Weston, whose belligerence had dropped away the moment he saw her. He was about sixty, had a moist and petulant lower lip, and a costly camel coat.

Merrily followed him around the raised churchyard, pine trees rearing grimly on its edge.

‘I think it was the Bishop of Lincoln,’ the Major said, ‘who warned that disused churches were now increasingly falling prey to Satanism. The message seems to be that if your people don’t want them, the Devil’s only too happy to take them on.’

‘It’s not that we don’t want them.’

‘I know, I know, but you don’t, do you? Otherwise my Fund wouldn’t exist. We maintain nearly three hundred churches at present, and the figure’s going up at an alarming rate. Now, when you think what a comparatively tiny population England had when these lovely old buildings were erected…’

‘Yeah,’ Merrily said, ‘tell me about it.’

They stopped outside the porch. She saw that the single long gothic window in the wall beside it had an iron bar up the middle. On one side lay the farm, and some houses on the other – a stone’s throw away.

‘If I was a Satanist, Major, I really don’t think I’d feel too safe performing a black mass here. You wouldn’t be able to chant very loudly, would you, before somebody came in with a torch and a shotgun?’

‘That’s what the police said. Must’ve been lunatics – but then that’s what they are, aren’t they? Not normal, these people. Beggars belief.’

‘I’ve never met one. I’d rather like to.’

He peered at her. ‘Would you, by God?’

‘Just to try and find out why.’

‘What they’ve done in here may just change your mind. Ready to go in?’

‘Sure.’

‘Not squeamish are you?’

‘Let’s hope not.’ She followed him into the porch, and he lifted the latch. ‘There’s no lock!’

‘There should be – and there will be. A new one’s in the course of being made, I believe. Perhaps these scum knew that.’

‘Meanwhile, the church is left without a lock?’

‘You can’t just put any old lock on a building dating back to the twelfth century. In you go, m’dear.’

Holding the door for her, letting her go in first. A gentleman, ha.

It was dim and intimate, no immediate echo. None of that sense of Higher Authority you had in most cathedrals, and big churches like her own at Ledwardine.

It was in fact fascinating, the Church of St Cosmas and St Damien. Quartered by an arcade of stone and a wooden screen with a pulpit in the middle. Two short naves and what seemed to be two chancels with two altars, although she could only see one from where she was standing – a plain wooden table without a cloth.

Against the far wall, and close to the floor, the stone effigies of a knight in armour and his lady shared that last long prayer.

Merrily didn’t move. She was reminded of nowhere so much as the little stone Celtic cell where she’d had the vision of the blue and the gold and the lamplit path. Only the smell was different.

She knew the smells of old churches, and they didn’t usually include urine.

Before Tim Purefoy was even back with his keys, a big vehicle was roaring up to the barn bay, sloshing through the wet snow. The dull gold, bull-barred Mitsubishi, spattered from wheels to windscreen with snow-slicks and mud, skidded to within a couple of feet of the glass wall.

Denny Moon slammed out, looking once – hard – at the barn, as though angry it was still there; not burned out, derelict, toppled into rubble. He wore an old leather jacket and a black baseball cap. Wraparound dark glasses, like he feared snowblindness. He took in the encircling trees and the overgrown Leylandii hedge, sucking air through his teeth.

‘Fucking place!’

Lol walked nervously towards the car. ‘Mr Purefoy’s gone for his keys.’

‘Fuck that. I’ll kick the door down.’ Denny gave him a black stare. ‘Lol, what is it? What is it you know, man?’

‘We just need to get in.’

‘Look at you! Something’s scared you. What is it?’

Tim Purefoy appeared, holding up a long key on an extended wire ring holding also two smaller ones.

At the same time his wife came round from the back of the barn. She looked stricken. ‘Call… call the police,’ she stammered. ‘Better call the police.’

Denny gasped and snatched the keys.

The big room was brightened by snowlight from the highest window, exposed trusses the colour of bone.

‘Kathy!’ Denny bawled. ‘Kathy!’

The smell of candlewax. Blobs of it on the floor.

Denny’s head swivelled. ‘She sleep up there?’ He made for the stairs to the loft. He hadn’t seen the lawn, so he wouldn’t know that what they really needed was the bathroom. ‘Kathy!’

Two doors behind the stairs: one ajar, through which Lol could see kitchen worktops and the edge of a cooker; the other door shut.

Lol opened it and went in.

Into the square, white, bitter-smelling, metal-smelling bathroom, quietly closing the door and snipping the catch, sealing himself in with her. Like he should have done on Saturday night – resisting the hostile thrust of the barn – when she’d said, I don’t want you to come in.

His back against the door, he saw first, on the wall over the bath like an icon, the photograph of a smiling man standing before a Land Rover.

On the rim of the bath were pebble-smooth shards of black pottery, arranged in a line.

‘No sign,’ he heard Denny shout from upstairs, sounding relieved, almost optimistic, because he hadn’t found her dead in her futon.

Lol saw the crusted brown tidemark on the porcelain around the overflow grille, like sloppy dinner deposits around a baby’s mouth. Presumably a tap had been left running and the overflow had gulped it all down and regurgitated it on to the snowy lawn, stopping only when the primitive water tank ran dry.

‘Lol?’ Denny’s feet descending the stairs. ‘Where’d he go?’

It was dreamlike. Lol thought at first – from the position of her, the stillness of the tableau – of Ophelia in that sad, famous Pre-Raphaelite painting.

The thin pine door bulged against him as Denny tried to open it, and then battered it with his fists, making it vibrate against Lol’s back until Lol almost tripped and fell forward towards the bath. And he cried out, ‘Oh God!’ seeing it now as it was: graceless, peaceless, sorrowless – nothing like Ophelia.

Who wouldn’t have been naked or grinning like Moon was grinning, congealing in her stagnant pool of rich, scummy, pinky-brown, cold water. With eyes open, like frosted glass, and lips retracted over stiff, ridged gums and sharp white teeth.

Beautiful Moon, so defiantly disgusting now with her cunning, secret, bloodless grin and her blood-pickled fingers below her breasts – on the waterline, on the bloodline. And the wrists ripped open: not nice neat slits – the skin was torn and ruched.

‘Lol!’ Denny screamed, and the pressure on Lol’s back eased, telling him Denny was about to hurl himself against the door.

She’d been here a long time, you could tell. This hadn’t happened this morning or even last night; this had to be Saturday night, maybe only hours after he’d brought her home and meekly taken no for an answer… almost gratefully, because he’d already had the sense of something dark and soiled. He should have said: Moon, there are things we have to talk about. He should have said this long ago – after the crow. He should have gone long ago to Merrily Watkins.

Swallowing his nausea, he went closer and bent over the bath. On the bottom, between Moon’s legs, lay the eroded filelike blade, ragged and blackened and scabby and old, very old.

He remembered those slender but unexpectedly hardened hands fouled by crow’s blood, and turned away, and opened the door to Denny.

I’d like to sleep now, Lol.

25 Sad Tosser

SOPHIE SAID, ‘Was it very horrible?’

‘It was, actually.’

‘It’s so utterly distressing.’ Sophie’s face creased into shadows. ‘I once read a book by a reformed Satanist who said that when they break into a church and do appalling acts, it has an almost intoxicating effect. Afterwards they feel a terrible elation. Almost… sexual.’

‘Well,’ Merrily said, ‘by the very nature of what they are, they’re not going to walk out feeling disgusted and nauseous, are they?’

Sophie shuddered.

When she’d gone, Merrily rang Huw Owen.

No reply, no answering machine.

She thought about calling Lol to rearrange that chance encounter with his troubled friend, Moon, but then Sophie came through again.

‘Merrily, it’s Chief Inspector Howe on the line.’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘Ms Watkins?’

‘Good morning.’

‘Ms Watkins, I, er… I’d like to consult you – as an expert.’

‘Me?’

‘Indeed,’ Howe said.

‘Heavens.’ What seemed likely was that the Superintendent, after a lunch with the Bishop, had strongly suggested Annie Howe consult Merrily over something, anything. Howe would be disinclined, as acting DCI, to make waves.

‘Ms Watkins?’

‘Sorry, just swallowing one of the pills I’ve been prescribed for moments of overexcitement.’

Howe sighed. ‘Perhaps we could meet. I gather you’ve been cleaning up after devil-worshippers.’

‘Blanket term, Annie. I’m not convinced.’

‘Good. That’s what I wanted to discuss with you.’

‘One o’clock? Pub?’

‘No, I’ll come to your office,’ Annie Howe said, keeping it official, hanging up.

Sophie came back again. ‘The Reverend Owen now. Take it on my phone if you like. I have to powder my nose.’

It seemed that Sophie didn’t feel she was ready to hear about this incident in detail.

‘Hard to get rid of the taste, in’t it, lass?’

‘Hard to lose the smell.’

‘Number twos as well?’

‘Not that I could detect, but I didn’t go prying into too many dark corners.’

‘Aye, well, your problem here,’ Huw said, ‘is deciding whether this is the real thing or just kids who think it’d be fun to play at being Satanists for an hour or so.’

‘I thought you didn’t get away with just playing at it.’

‘In my experience you don’t, but let’s not worry about poor little dabblers at this stage. Tell me again about the bird.’

‘Well, it was… had been a crow or a raven. Is there much difference? I don’t know. It had been cut open, and its entrails spread over the altar. There are kind of twin chancels in this church, but this was the real altar, on the right.’

‘Two chancels?’

‘Side by side. Very unusual. Quite a special little place.’

‘Let me have a think.’

Merrily looked down from Sophie’s window at white roofs on cars and people hurrying. Hereford people were essentially country folk, and country folk had no great love for snow. Certainly not November snow. Never a good sign; winter was supposed to settle in slowly. What if this went on until March or April?

‘Two chancels,’ Huw said. ‘They might see this as representing a dualism: left and right, darkness and light.’

‘Actually, there was some blood on the other table, too, as if the sacrificed crow had been brought from one side to the other.’

‘How do you know it was sacrificed?’

‘I don’t. It would be nice – nicer – to think it was already dead, and they just wanted to make a mess. Huw, the way you’re talking suggests you think this was the real thing.’

‘It’s possible.’

‘If it was the real thing, what would be the motive? What would they be after?’

‘Kicks… a buzz… power. Or – biggest addiction of the lot – the pursuit of knowledge. Nowt you won’t do to feed your craving. Ordinary mortals – expendable like cattle. Kindness and mercy – waste of energy. Love’s a drain, faith’s for feeble minds. Can you understand that? To know is all. Can you get a handle on that?’

‘No. That’s why I’m a Christian.’ Working towards it, anyway. Made it to the pious bitch stage.

‘Mind, a crow splattered over a country church, that still has the touch of low-grade headbangers. What are you going to do about it?’

‘Major Weston was asking for reconsecration. I said that wasn’t necessary, as a consecration’s for all time.’

‘Correct. What you proposing instead?’

‘A lesser exorcism, do you think?’

‘When?’

‘I was thinking early evening, if we could get some people together then. I wouldn’t like to think of the place getting snowed in before we could do it.’

‘You want me to come over?’

‘I couldn’t ask you to do that.’

‘Give me directions,’ Huw said. ‘I’ll be there at five.’

‘I can’t keep leaning on you.’

‘I like it,’ Huw said. ‘Keeps me off the drink.’

Merrily smiled. She saw Annie Howe, in her white belted mac, walking rapidly out of King Street carrying a briefcase. ‘I… suppose you’ve heard about Dobbs.’

‘Aye.’

‘Any thoughts on that?’

‘Poor bugger?’

‘That’s it?’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Huw said.

Sophie pulled up an extra chair for Howe and left them in her office. The Acting DCI kept her mac on. She hated informality.

‘My knowledge of police demarcation’s fairly negligible,’ Merrily said, ‘but aren’t you a bit senior to be investigating the minor desecration of a country church?’

‘I’m not sure I am.’ Annie Howe brought a tabloid newspaper from her case and placed it before Merrily, on Sophie’s desk. ‘You’ve seen this, I imagine.’

A copy of last night’s Evening News. The anchor story:

WYE DEATH: MAN NAMED.

‘Oh, this is the guy…’ Merrily had scarcely given it another thought. All memories of that night were still dominated by Denzil Joy. She scanned the text.

… identified as 32-year-old Paul Sayer, from Chepstow. Mr Sayer had not been reported missing for over a week because his family understood he was on holiday abroad. Acting Det. Chief Inspector Annie Howe, who is leading the investigation, said, ‘We are very anxious to talk to anyone who may have seen Mr Sayer since November 19. We believe he may have arrived in Hereford by bus or train and…

‘No need to read the lot. It’s mainly waffle. His relatives aren’t going to talk, and we ourselves have been rather economical with any information given out to the press.’

‘Aren’t you always.’

‘Need to Know, Ms Watkins,’ Howe said, ‘Need to Know. Let me tell you what we do know about Sayer.’

She brought out a folder containing photographs. Sophie, fetching in coffee for them on a tray, spotted one of them and made a choking noise.

‘Would you mind?’ Howe stood up and shut the door on both Sophie and the coffee.

‘I believe it’s known as the Goat of Mendes,’ Merrily said.

A colour photograph of what seemed to be a poster. Luridly demonic: like the cover of a dinosaur heavy-metal album from the eighties.

‘We’ll return to that,’ Howe said. ‘But this is a photograph of Paul Sayer. He may, for all we know, have been around the city for several days before he was killed.’

He had a fox-like face, the lower half almost a triangle. No smile. Hair lank, looked as if it would be greasy. Though his eyes were lifeless, he was not dead in this picture.

‘Passport photo.’ Annie Howe unbelted her raincoat. ‘Does look like him, though. Recognize him?’

Merrily shook her head. Howe looked openly around the office. Merrily wished the D on the door was removable for occasions like this. She felt self-conscious, felt like a fraud.

Howe smiled blandly, her contact-lensed eyes conveying an extremely subtle sneer. ‘You’re like a little watchdog at the gate up here, Ms Watkins.’

‘Look, if you’re not here specifically to arrest me, how about you call me Merrily?’

‘Actually, the people I call by their first names tend to be the ones I’ve already arrested. Standard interview-room technique.’

‘But the suspects don’t get to call you Annie.’

You might wonder if anyone did, under the rank of superintendent, she had such glacial dignity. She was only thirty-two, Merrily estimated, the same age as the man pulled out of the Wye – Paul Sayer whose photo lay on the desk.

‘I expect you’ll get round to explaining what this poor guy has to do with the Goat and me.’

‘ “This poor guy”?’ said Annie Howe. ‘Why do I suspect your sympathy may be short-lived?’

‘He had, er, form?’

‘None at all. He was, according to his surviving family, a quiet, decent, clean-living man who worked as a bank clerk in Chepstow and lived in a terraced house on the edge of the town, which was immaculately maintained. He was unmarried, but once engaged for three years to a young woman from Stroud who’s since emigrated to Australia. I’ll be talking to her tonight, but one can guess why the relationship foundered.’

Merrily took out a cigarette. ‘Do you mind?’

‘It’s your office.’

‘I’ll open the window. Why did the engagement fall through?’

‘Don’t bother with the window, Ms Watkins. I’m paid to take risks. Well I suppose she must have seen his cellar.’

Cellar?

‘Oh, my God, not a Fred West situation?’

‘Let’s not get too carried away. This is it.’

Six more photographs, all eight by ten. All in colour, although there wasn’t much colour in that cellar.

‘Christ,’ Merrily said.

‘So now you understand why I’m here.’ Howe turned one of the pictures around, a wide-angle taken from the top of the cellar steps. ‘Is this your standard satanic temple, then, would you say?’

‘I’ve never actually been in one, but it looks… well, it looks like something inspired by old Dracula films and Dennis Wheatley novels, to be honest.’

‘The altar,’ Howe said, ‘appears to have been put together from components acquired at garden centres in the vicinity – reconstituted stone. The wall poster’s of American origin, probably obtained by mail-order – we found some glossy magazines full of this stuff.’

‘Sad.’

‘Yes, I admit I have a problem understanding the millions of people who seem to worship your own God, but this… How real are these people? How genuine?’

‘I don’t know… I’d be inclined to think the guy who built this temple is – I may be wrong – what my daughter would call a sad tosser.’

‘But a dead tosser,’ Howe said. ‘And we have to consider that his death could be linked to his… faith.’

Merrily examined a close-up of the altar. ‘What’s the stain?’

‘We wondered that – but it’s only wine.’

‘So, no signs of…?’

‘Blood sacrifice? We haven’t finished there yet, but no.’

‘How did you find this set-up?’

‘We had to break through a very thick door with a very big lock. The local boys were quite intrigued. Not that he appears to have broken any laws. It’s all perfectly acceptable in the eyes of the law, as you know.’

‘Makes you wonder why there are any laws left,’ Merrily said. ‘I’ve always thought Christianity would become fashionable overnight if they started persecuting us again.’

‘So,’ Howe gathered up the photos, ‘you aren’t very impressed by Mr Sayer’s evident commitment to His Satanic Majesty.’

‘No more than I was by the sick bastards who spread a crow over a lovely little old church, but…’

‘Yes, that’s the point. In your opinion, if we were to devote more person-hours than we might normally do to catching the insects who dirtied this church – which amounts to no more than wilful damage and possible cruelty to a wild bird, which is unprovable – might they be able to throw some light on the religious activities of Mr Sayer?’

‘You’re asking if there’s a network in this area?’

‘Precisely.’

‘I’ve no idea. It is our intention to build up a file or database, but I’m only just getting my feet under the table, and nothing like that seems to exist at present. My… predecessor—’

‘Is not going to be saying an awful lot to anyone for quite a while, from what I hear. If ever.’

‘I’m sorry about this.’ Merrily was desperate for another cigarette, but unwilling to display weakness in front of Howe – who leaned back and looked pensive.

‘Ms Watkins, what’s your gut feeling?’

‘My gut feeling… is that… although there’s no obvious pattern, there’s something a bit odd going on. I mean, I was on a course for Deliverance priests. All of us were vicars, rectors… Nobody does this full-time, that’s the point. We were told a diocesan exorcist might receive four, five assignments in a year.’

‘While you…?’

‘You want to see my appointments diary already – plus two satanic links within a week. Yes, you might find it worth following through on the Stretford case. I wonder if they ever return to the scene of the crime.’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘I’m going back tonight to do what we call a minor exorcism.’

‘Interesting. If they’re local, they might not be able to resist turning up.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Thank you, Ms Watkins, we’ll be represented.’ Annie Howe snapped her briefcase shut.

‘Just one thing.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Could you make them Christians?’

‘Who?’

‘The coppers.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Two reasons,’ Merrily said. ‘One is that, if they’re not, I can’t let them in. Two, a few extra devout bodies at an exorcism can only help – I understand.’

‘You understand.’

‘I’ve never done one before, have I?’

26 Family Heirloom

LOL SAT IN the flat above Church Street – Moon’s ‘Capuchin Lane’. He was waiting for Denny.

He’d been waiting for Denny for several hours. It was going dark again. The shop below, called John Barleycorn, had been closed all day. Denny had not yet said he was coming, but Lol knew that sooner or later he would have to.

It was Anna Purefoy who had found the photocopy, about the same time that Lol left the bathroom and Denny went in and they heard him roar, in his agony and outrage, like a maddened bull. It was Mrs Purefoy, Lol thought, who – in the choking aftermath of a tragedy that was all the more horrifying because it wasn’t a surprise – was the calmest of them.

‘Is Katherine dead?’

Lol had nodded, still carrying an image of the encrusted overflow grille. Like the mouth of a vortex, Moon’s life sucked into it.

‘Tim,’ Mrs Purefoy had said then, ‘I think you should telephone the police from our house. I don’t think we should touch anything here.’

And when Tim had gone, she’d led Lol to the telephone table by the side of the stairs. ‘I was about to phone for them myself, and then I saw this.’ Her red parka creaked as she bent over the table. ‘Did you know about this, Mr Robinson?’

It was a copy of a cutting from the Hereford Times, dated November 1984. It took Lol less than half a minute to make horrifying sense of it. He was stunned.

‘Did you know about it?’

A mad question maybe. Would anybody knowing about this have bought the old house?

By then, Denny had emerged from the bathroom, and was standing, head bowed, on the other side of the stairs. After a moment he looked up, wiped the back of a hand across his lips and shook his head savagely, his earring jangling. He didn’t look at Lol or Mrs Purefoy as he strode through the room and out of the barn, the door swinging behind him. You could hear his feet grinding snow to slush as he paced outside.

Mrs Purefoy said, ‘Did you know her very well, Mr Robinson?’

‘Not well enough, obviously,’ Lol said. ‘No… no I didn’t know her well.’

And then the police had arrived – two constables. After his first brief interview, not much more than personal details, Lol had gone out on the hill while they were talking to Denny and the Purefoys. He ascended the soggy earth-steps to the car, freezing up with delayed horror, a clogging of sorrow and shame backed up against a hundred questions.

He’d waited by the barn with Denny until they brought the body out. Hearing the splash and slap and gurgle and other sounds from the bathroom. Watching the utility coffin borne away to the postmortem. And then he and Denny had gone to Hereford police headquarters, where they were questioned separately by a uniformed sergeant and a detective constable. Statements were made and signed, Lol feeling numbed throughout.

He and Denny had had no opportunity to talk in any kind of privacy.

The police had shown Lol the old cutting from the Hereford Times and asked him if he’d seen it before, or if he was aware of the events decribed in the story.

Lol had told them he knew it had happened, but not like this. He’d always understood it had been a shotgun in the woods, but he didn’t remember how he had come to know that.

Later, the police let him read the item again. In the absence of a suicide note, they were obviously glad to have it. It made their job so much easier.

ANCIENT SWORD USED BY SUICIDE FARMER

Hereford farmer Harry Moon killed himself with a twothousand-year-old family heirloom, an inquest was told this week.

Mr Moon, who had been forced to sell Dyn Farm on Dinedor Hill because of a failed business venture, told his family he was going to take a last look around the farm before they moved out.

He was later found by his young son in a barn near the house, lying in a stone cattle trough with both wrists cut. Dennis Moon told Hereford Deputy Coroner Colin Hurley how he found a ten-inch long sword, an Iron Age relic, lying on his father’s chest.

‘The sword had hung in the hall for as long as I can remember,’ he said. ‘It was supposed to have been handed down from generation to generation.’

A verdict of suicide while the balance of mind was disturbed was recorded on 43-year-old Mr Moon, who…

‘And when you left her at the door on Saturday evening,’ the sergeant said, ‘how would you describe Miss Moon’s state of mind?’

‘Kind of… intense,’ Lol had said honestly.

‘Intense, how?’

‘She was researching a book about her family. I had the impression she couldn’t wait to get back to it.’

The sergeant had shaken his head – not quite what he’d expected to hear.

Lol sat now in Ethel’s old chair, shadows gathering around him.

Sometime tonight he’d have to ring Dick Lyden – most famous quote: I realize you’re a sensitive soul. But you don’t particularly need to think about psychology when you’re shagging someone, do you? He couldn’t face it.

Just before four-thirty p.m., he heard a key in the lock, and then Denny’s footsteps on the stairs.

It had been Merrily’s plan to spend an hour meditating in Ledwardine Church before driving nearly twenty miles to meet Huw at the church of St Cosmas and St Damien, but she’d been waylaid in the porch by Uncle Ted in heavy churchwarden mode.

‘Where on earth have you been? I tried to ring your socalled office – engaged, engaged, engaged. It’s not good enough, Merrily.’

‘Ted, I’ve just spent nearly two hours trying to put together a small congregation that absolutely nobody wants to join. I have one hour to get myself together and then I’ve got to go out again.’

‘I’m sorry, Merrily, but if you haven’t got time for your own church, then—’

‘Ted,’ she backed away from him, ‘I really don’t want to go into this now, whatever it is. OK? Can we talk in the morning?’

It was not too dark to see his plump, smooth, retired face changing colour. ‘Were you here this morning? Someone thought they saw you.’

‘Early, yes.’ God, was that only today?

‘What time?’

‘I don’t know… sevenish maybe. What—?’

‘Did you notice anything amiss?’

‘I just went up to the chancel to pray. Don’t say—’

‘Yes, someone broke in. Someone broke into your church last night.’

‘Oh God.’ She thought at once of a dead crow and a smell of piss. ‘What did they do?’

‘Smashed a window.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Come and look.’

She followed him into the church, where the lights were on and they turned left into the vestry, where she saw that the bulb had been smashed in its shade and a big piece of hardboard covered the window facing the orchard.

The vestry. Thank God for that. No stained glass there.

‘Did they take anything?’

‘No, but that’s not the point, is it?’

No blood, no entrails, no urine. Merrily took the opportunity to fumble her way to the wardrobe and pull out her vestments on their hangers. She’d have to change at home now.

‘Have you told the police?’

‘Of course we did – not that they took much interest.’

‘I suppose if nothing was taken… Look, I’m sorry, Ted. I’ll have to take a proper look round tomorrow. I have to tell Jane where I’m going.’

‘And where are you going?’

‘I have to conduct a service over at Stretford. Near Dilwyn.’

‘This damned Deliverance twaddle again, I suppose,’ he said contemptuously. ‘You’re on a damned slippery slope, Merrily.’

Denny’s speech, his whole manner, had slowed down – like somebody had unplugged him, Lol thought, or stopped his medication. Denny seemed ten years older. His oversized earring now looked absurd.

‘You see, Dad – he’d bought this house for us to move to when he sold the farm. At Tupsley, right on the edge of the city.’

Denny had the chair, Lol was on the floor by the bricked-up fireplace. A parchment-shaded reading lamp was on.

‘Far too bloody close, that house,’ Denny said. ‘Christ. I used to wonder, didn’t he ever think about that? How Mum was gonna be able to handle living around here with his suicide hanging over us? The whole family tainted with it? Everybody talking about us? The selfish bastard!’

Lol thought of that smiling man with the Land Rover who threw a shadow twenty-five years long. Denny lit up a Silk Cut from a full packet Merrily had left behind.

‘So after he… died, we flogged the Tupsley house sharpish, and moved over to the first place we could find in Gloucester. We had relatives there, see, and nobody there to blab to little Kathy about what had happened, like kids would’ve done if we’d still been in town – whispers in the schoolyard. Jesus, we never talked about it. It never got mentioned in our house – let alone how it happened. If some bloody old auntie ever let it slip, Ma would go loopy for days after. And me… she’s watching me all the time in case I’m developing the symptoms.’

‘Of what?’

‘Schizophrenia.’

Lol sensed Denny Moon’s personal fears of inheriting some fatal family flaw, some sick gene – Denny keeping the anxiety well flattened under years of bluster, laughter and general loudness.

‘So we… when Kathy’s five or six and starting to ask questions like how come she didn’t have an old man, we told her it was an accident. His gun went off in the woods. No big deal – she never remembered him anyway. When she was older, twelve maybe, I broke it to her that he topped himself, and why. But I stuck with the gun. You know why? Cause I knew she’d make me tell her what it was like, finding him. What he looked like in that trough – like one of them stone coffins you find around old churches.’

‘Yes.’ Lol found himself nodding, remembering the photo of Moon in the Cathedral Close charnel pit, gleefully holding up two ruined medieval skulls like she’d been reunited with old friends. So happy, so at home with images of death – reaching out to the image of her dead father, feverish eyes under the flat cap she thought he might have been wearing when he shot himself.

Sick!

Denny threw him a grateful glance. ‘I was fifteen. All you can do with a memory like that is burn it out of your mind – like they used to do with the stump when you lost an arm in some battle. So she leaves school, goes off to university in Bristol. I get the first shop – inherited, Mum’s side. I come back to Hereford. I meet Maggie. You know the rest.’

‘It never occurred to you she’d find out one day?’

‘Why?’ Denny croaked. ‘Why should she? All those years ago, how many people remember anyway? It was over. And how could I ever have imagined, in any kind of worst-case scenario, that she was gonna rent this place – the same fucking barn? What kind of impossible nightmare coincidence is that? I was amazed it’s still here. Like who’d want to live at a house with that abattoir right next door?’

‘Somebody obviously tried hard to keep the barn out of view.’ Lol thought of the wall of fast-growing Leylandii. Planted there, presumably, by the people who’d bought Dyn Farm from Harry Moon, or by the owners after that. Out of sight, out of mind, out of nightmares. ‘And the Purefoys were incomers. How would they know?’

‘Stupid gits.’

‘You…’ Lol hesitated. ‘You didn’t think of telling her before she moved in?’

‘And what do you think that would’ve achieved, Laurence? You think that would’ve put her off?’ Denny produced wild, synthetic laughter. ‘Her?’

Poor bloody Denny, who wanted to burn away his own last image of Harry Moon like cauterizing a stump – terrified of what might happen if he came up here and it all crashed back on him.

So he’d simply stayed away, paying Dick to look out for his sister, and both of them laying it on Lol. Wanting Lol to get close, move in with her. Lol imagined what Merrily would say about this – a situation so unbelievably flawed and precarious that only men could have allowed it to develop.

And in a way that was right. But Lol could see Denny’s skewed logic: why he’d gone to Dick Lyden instead of a real psychiatrist, and to Dick rather than Ruth. A guy he knew from the pub – a mate, nothing formal. Someone he could talk to, without having to tell all. He’s an idiot, Moon had said.

‘That paper,’ Denny said. ‘That copy of the Times – it never even came into our house. You know anything about this – how she got hold of it?’

Lol shook his head. ‘First time I’ve seen it. I don’t know… Did somebody give it to her? Was she going back through the old newspaper files, part of her research, and came across it that way?’

‘And just laid it out there on the table, where the Purefoy woman found it? Had it all worked out, didn’t she? So bloody happy to join the father she couldn’t even remember.’ Denny began to cry. ‘Happy? You think she was happy?’

Some psychologist, Lol thought… maybe even Dick in his paper for Psychology Today… might draw a flawed parallel with the Heaven’s Gate mass-suicides, all those people in San Diego who came to believe they could hitch a ride on the Hale Bopp comet.

‘I never understood her,’ Lol said.

And always just a little repelled.

‘All down to me,’ Denny said, his voice flat and dry like cardboard. ‘It’s all going down to me. She suddenly learns I lied to her all those years ago; that’s what they’re gonna say. And that fucking sword – and the bath. You know where that bath is, don’t you?’ He sprang up, fists clenched at his sides. ‘That was exactly where the mangers were. For winter feed and water.’

Exactly? Lol felt cold inside.

‘That stone trough… it was where the bath is now, I’d swear to it. They probably used the same holes for the fucking pipes. And the sword – that fucking sword, man! I want to scream. It is not possible.’

‘She said she dug it up.’

‘Where?’

‘Just outside. Somebody had been trying to dig a pond and given up and she saw this thing sticking out where the ground had been excavated. Unless she knew all the time about what your father really did, there’s no way she would have just found this thing and made that connection.’

‘Nooo!’ Denny leapt up, threw his cigarette on to the hearth. ‘You don’t understand, do you? The police… after the inquest, they asked if we wanted it back: the fucking family heirloom. The thing he’d specially sharpened on the old scythe stone, so it’d go through f… flesh… and veins, without much sawing.’

Lol thought about the blackened relic. She must have sharpened that too. Must have honed the edge, testing it on her thumb maybe – rehearsing. You didn’t slash your wrists sideways, you cut upwards into the vein – a fellow patient in the psychiatric hospital had told Lol that. And warm water to prevent muscle cramps and stop the blood clotting. Dreamy, otherworldly, unstable Moon hadn’t done a thing wrong.

‘Police said what did we wanna do with it – this valuable antique. So I took it. Ma was in no state at the time, never would be again, so I took it. Ma signs for it, never knew what she was signing for. I was sixteen by then – big man taking charge. I knew what to do with it. I wrapped it up in some newspaper, stuffed it in my bike bag – brought it up here, back to the old farm. Come up on the bike early one morning, and buried the fucker.’

‘You buried it?’

‘And then, many years later, my poor little mental sister comes along and digs it up – the same blade.’ Denny hissed, ‘It defies fucking belief.’

‘You don’t know that.’ Lol leapt up aghast. ‘You can’t possibly know that.’

‘Don’t know it? It was on our wall for… I dunno, for centuries. That’s why I knew Kathy wasn’t talking total crap about us being in this direct line to the old Celtic village. My grandad, when I was little, he told me that artefact’d been in the family for two thousand years. Sounds balls, don’t it? What family’s been two thousand years in the same spot?’

‘Where did you bury it?’

‘In the shit.’ A short, bitter laugh. ‘There was this kind of slurry pit in front of here in those days. I dug down to the bottom of it. I put the sword in the shit.’

It all fitted so well. Perhaps the Purefoys or their predecessors had found the old pit, thought it was the site of a pond, so dug down – and when no water came up, they abandoned it. It all fitted so horribly well.

‘You tell the police it was the same sword?’

‘They never asked. They knew she’d dug up all this stuff. Far as they’re concerned she was just obsessed with Dad’s suicide. They’re not connecting it beyond an obsession. If you were the police, would you wanner know all this shit about the ancestors? Would you want a hint of anything…’ Denny drew breath and bit his lower lip. ‘Anything paranormal?’

‘You think that?’

‘Sometimes,’ Denny said, ‘it’s the least complicated option.’

‘She said it was telling her things,’ Lol said. ‘She wouldn’t even let me touch it. She said she didn’t want the flow blocked by anyone else’s vibrations.’

‘Madness,’ Denny said. ‘Let’s just call it madness.’

Lol stood up and moved to the window, looked down into Capuchin Lane, snow now in rags against the house walls after a day of shoppers’ shoes. ‘She just wanted to think she was in… almost physical contact with her ancestors.’

‘She’s with the primitive fuckers now,’ Denny said sourly.

27 Protect Her This Night

THE DAY AFTER tomorrow it would be December. Amidst frozen fields, the Church of St Cosmas and St Damien, a small candleshimmer behind its leaded windows, looked peaceful in a humble-stable-at-Bethlehem way. Or so she told herself.

Another attempt to dispel the fear.

Always make time to prepare, Huw would say. All the time she’d made, she’d blown.

An hour fending off Ted Clowes, who saw himself as her lay-supervisor, who was always credited with getting Merrily the Ledwardine living – to ease the worries of her mother, his sister in Cheltenham who was convinced that it was only a matter of time before any female curate in Liverpool was found raped and battered in the churchyard.

Ted would also dump her without a qualm if anything began reflecting badly on himself.

‘I think,’ he’d told her before they finally parted tonight, ‘that this parish is beginning to realize precisely where it stands with you, Merrily.’

And she knew that this time he’d cause trouble. Perhaps a discreet call to the Archdeacon, a question at the parish council which would be recorded in the minutes.

It had left her less than an hour to see to the blessing and bottling of the water and to explain to Jane where she was going and why Jane, who would be more than a bit interested, could not come. The truth was, if there was anything in there, she didn’t want Jane exposed to it. Kids her age were easy prey. It might even have been kids Jane’s age who were behind the desecration.

But Jane seemed unconcerned, said that was OK, as she was going out anyway, to see a movie in Hereford with Rowenna.

Hardly for the first time, as she parked the Volvo at the side of the track next to a Suzuki four-wheel drive and a muddied Mondeo, Merrily wondered why Jane did not have a boyfriend.

She went round the boot to fetch her case, containing the Bibles, the prayer books, the rites of blessing and lesser exorcism that she’d hand-copied on to cards, and the holy water. She was freezing. She’d changed into her vestments before leaving, so now she put on her cowled clerical cloak of heavyweight loden, but it did nothing for the cold inside.

Lights shone from the cottages. The church, however, was in darkness, no candlelight visible from this side.

She saw figures waiting for her at the edge of the churchyard.

‘DS Bliss.’ He shone a torch upwards to his own ginger-topped face. ‘Franny Bliss.’ Merseyside accent. ‘I’m a Catholic. You all right with that, Vicar?’

‘That’s… fine. I’m Merrily.’

‘I know. Seen your piccy in the local rag. This big yobbo’s PC Dave Jones. Nonconformist, him. What was that bloody chapel of yours again, Dave?’

‘Pisgah, sarge. Pisgah Chapel.’ PC Jones was in plain clothes: dark anorak and a flat cap. ‘Not been back in years, mind.’

‘I just love to hear him say it,’ Bliss said. ‘Now, just so’s you know, Merrily, we’ve gor another lad hanging out by the farm. We don’t talk about him – many years lapsed. That’s why he gets to stay in the cold. Anyway, we’re the best the DCI could put together in the time. Where do you want us?’

‘I don’t know how you want to handle it.’ Merrily stood on the parapet surrounding the churchyard, looking out at the bare fields gleaming silver under a sizable moon. The wind plucked at her cloak. ‘This could be a wild-goose chase for you.’

‘Like most of our nights, that is,’ said bulky Dave.

Merrily gathered the cloak around her. She was scared – and had been since changing into her priestly things. Under her cloak, the cassock had begun to feel clammy, the surplice stiff.

‘For a start, who else knows about this?’ Franny Bliss asked.

‘Well, I told Major Weston, and made a courtesy call to my colleague at Dilwyn. Left a message on his machine, anyway. I also rang the farm here and got the numbers of about half a dozen people living in the area, giving them the opportunity to come along if they felt strongly about it.’

‘Or if they fancied watching an exorcism?’

Merrily sighed. ‘Unfortunately, yes. But I said the number allowed inside the church would be limited. And definitely no children.’

‘Would it be all right if we talked to a few of the locals? In areas like this, people hear things.’

‘Afterwards, though.’

‘We’ll ask them to hang on. And we’ll pay particular attention to anyone who doesn’t want to. I do feel quite strongly about it meself. It’s only wilful damage, but if they can do this, they’re capable of a lot of other stuff carrying stiffer sentences, you know what I mean?’

‘I had a chat with Inspector Howe.’

‘And your Bishop’s had a chat with our Divisional Super. It’s about community relations at the highest level.’

‘Ah, I’m sorry about that.’ The Bishop had been hard to pin down, and tonight’s ceremony had, in the end, been cleared with him on his mobile via Sophie.

‘Not that we wouldn’t be here anyway,’ Franny Bliss said, ‘but maybe not three of us. Still, get these lads, and even if we don’t get a line on the body in the Wye, we might get something else.’

‘Might get possessed, sarge,’ PC Jones said heavily.

‘Merrily’ll protect us, Dave. Won’t yer, Merrily?’

There was nothing essentially wrong with Christianity, Patricia said. It promoted a useful, if simplistic, moral code. But it was an import. When it was introduced, it was revolutionary and brash and sometimes brutal and crass. It trampled over ancient wisdom.

Jane saw Rowenna’s glance. None of the rest of the group knew her mother was a vicar. They thought she was a teacher. And they thought Jane was eighteen and working as a secretary.

Blinds were down over the window. A small brass oil lamp burned on a high table. Seven of them sat in a vague semicircle around Patricia, on mats and dark-coloured pillows. There was a faint scent, musty-sweet, perhaps from the oil in the lamp. It was mysterious but also cosy.

‘And Christianity has always been used as a prop for prejudices,’ Patricia continued, ‘creating the myth of the clovenhoofed devil and demonizing black cats, which were tortured and slaughtered in their hundreds.’

Jane thought about Ethel and seethed.

‘So many of these things are forgotten now,’

Patricia said. Patricia had the look of someone much older than she possibly could be, someone who’d been soaking up wisdom for like centuries. She was the elder of the circle and the others deferred to her. Jane wasn’t sure how many others there were in the group. They came from a wide area on both sides of the Welsh border. All women: a couple of old-hippy types – long skirts and braided hair – but mainly the kind you thought of as school-teacherish. Thank heavens none of their own teachers were here.

She and Rowenna were the youngest. The women called themselves ‘the Pod’, after the café itself.

Patricia was saying: ‘It’s the basis of many of our exercises that human beings are the central nervous system of the Earth. Thus we can receive impulses and also send them out. We can effect changes with our minds, and this is a responsibility not to be taken lightly.’

That was the definition of magic, wasn’t it? Effecting change with the mind – Mum’s lot would say that only God could effect changes. Which, from where Jane was sitting, was bollocks basically – all this Serving the Will of God stuff. Like the wholesale slaughter of black cats? The Spanish Inquisition?

But was the Pod a pagan thing? Because, OK, she was entitled to find her own spiritual path, but it would be better if it was like parallel to Mum’s. She wasn’t particularly looking for confrontation and heavy-duty domestic strife.

She just wished someone would explain simple things like that.

‘It’s about consciousness.’ Patricia looked suddenly at Jane, as if she’d picked up her thoughts, her uncertainty.

Jane shivered. She was a little scared of Patricia, with her smoky-grey dress and her tight, parchment-coloured hair. She wanted to ask exactly what Patricia meant by ‘consciousness’. But this was only their second meeting, and she didn’t want to seem stupid. The nature of consciousness was something on which she’d be expected to meditate – she was establishing a special corner for that in her sitting-room/study, next to a big yellow rectangle on one of the Mondrian walls. She’d bought a little incense-burner but hadn’t used it yet.

It was all a little bit frightening – therefore, naturally, wonderful.

Jane glanced up. Patricia was looking directly at her. In the gloom, Patricia’s eyes burned like tiny torchbulbs.

Jane gulped, suddenly panicked. Christ, she’d been rumbled. They’d found out that her mother was an Anglican priest. They thought she was some sort of Church spy. She looked across at Rowenna, but Rowenna was staring away into the darkness. The others were gazing placidly down into their laps. She didn’t really know any of them; Angela, the tarot lady, had not been present at either of the meetings.

Jane had expected all kinds of questions before she was admitted to the circle, but it hadn’t been like that. It was only when you got here and experienced the electric atmosphere – as if this little room was the entrance to an endless tunnel – that you instinctively wanted to keep quiet about yourself. At least, you did if your old lady was a vicar.

‘Don’t worry, Jane,’ Patricia said suddenly. ‘We’re here to help you.’ The woman smiled thinly.

The wind whined in the rafters and the flame of the oil lamp shrank back, as though it was cowering.

Cool!

The church was now lit by two oil lamps supported on brackets, three candles and a hurricane lantern on the central pulpit. It looked deceptively cosy. Huw Owen was there with a curlyhaired, jutting-jawed, youngish minister, who backed away from Merrily in her cloak, as if she was a vampire, throwing up his hands in mock defence.

‘Mrs Watkins, I beg forgiveness.’

‘From me?’

‘I’m Jeffrey Kimball, from Dilwyn. Major Weston approached me this morning, to perform the necessary, and I’m afraid I threw a tantrum and gave him your home number, which I looked up in the telephone book. It was pure pique on my part after that memorandum from the Bishop on the subject of Deliverance, and I’m sorry to have taken it out on you.’

‘I can understand your—’

‘To be quite honest, Mrs Watkins, I tend to object to more or less anything this particular bishop does. I do so hate blatantly political appointments of any kind. Absolutely everyone thought Hereford should have gone to Tom Armstrong – a canon at the Cathedral for five years before he went to Reading as Dean… Immensely able man… and they used a very minor heart problem as an excuse to give it to Hunter. I make no secret of my feelings, and I realize you—’

‘Happen you can save that till after, lad,’ Huw Owen said.

‘Oh.’ The Rev. Kimball let his arms fall to his sides. ‘Yes, of course. I should have thought.’

‘Merrily needs a bit of quiet,’ Huw said.

‘Yes, I shall leave you alone and go out to contemplate the moonlight on the snow.’

‘Aye, give us quarter of an hour, there’s a good lad.’

‘I know his type,’ Huw said as the latch dropped into place behind Kimball. ‘Gets to the age when the bishops are looking younger. How are you, lass?’

She hugged Huw. It was the first time they’d been together since the Deliverance course. He wore what looked like an airforce greatcoat and a yellow bobble-hat.

‘You all right for this, Merrily?’

‘Sure.’ She looked around, sniffed the air, could only smell disinfectant.

‘Who cleared it up?’ Huw asked.

‘I did. Couldn’t ask anybody else, could I? Buried the… remains… just over the wall. Little ceremony.’

‘Hands and knees wi’ a scrubbing brush, eh? What you got in mind for tonight?’

‘We’re looking at minor exorcism.’

‘Never go over the top.’

‘A cleansing. Holy water.’

‘Go right round it, I would. Take one of them coppers with you. Never had a copper at one of mine. Right, make a start? You want to pray together first?’

‘That would be good.’

They sat side by side on the pew nearest the pulpit. ‘I’ll keep it simple,’ Huw said, ‘then we’ll have a bit of quiet. Lord, be with us in this tainted place tonight. Help this lass, Merrily, to repossess it, in Your name, from whatever dark shadows may still hang around it. Protect her this night, amen.’

‘Amen,’ Merrily added.

And, during the ensuing period of quiet, she felt nothing – at first.

When she closed her eyes, she saw neither the blue nor the gold, nor the lamplit path. She saw nothing but a swirling grey untinged by the lamps and the candles.

She was not comfortable on the strange, sloping pew. Found she was squirming a bit, her cassock feeling clammy again. She was actually sweating; she felt damp down her spine. Come on, calm down. She undid the cloak, let it slip from her shoulders. Opened her eyes, but lowered the lids, letting them relax. Shifted position again, and was aware of Huw’s brief sideways glance.

Lamplight flushed the sandstone faces of the knight and his lady, raised only inches above the floor to her left. They were believed, she now knew, to be John and Agnes de la Bere. The de la Beres were lords of the manor for much of the Middle Ages. John wore armour and carried a shield; his wife was gowned and wimpled, slim and girlishly pretty. Another knight, probably John’s father, Robert, lay in the sub-chancel in front with his wife Margaret. Some effigies were terrifying, but these were courtly and benign and truthful. John de la Bere was stocky, had narrow eyes and a big nose.

In other words, she felt OK about them. And about the church. So why was she so uneasy?

She closed her eyes again, pressed her hands formally together, like the hands of John and Agnes de la Bere, and murmured St Patrick’s Breastplate in her mind. She smelled the pine disinfectant she’d borrowed from the farm, and ignored the slow-burning itch which occurred in the palm of her left hand and then the right, as though transmitted from one to the other.

Huw was watching her openly now. She was absolutely desperate for a smoke. She shifted again. The itch in her hands was worse; she couldn’t ignore it, had to concentrate hard to stop herself pulling her hands apart and rubbing her palms on the edge of the pew.

When she could bear it no longer and yearned for relief, she was at last given some help.

Scritch-scratch.

The tiny bird-claw, the curling nail on a yellow finger. The smell of disinfectant had grown sweet and rancid, and was pulled into her nostrils like thin string and down into her throat.

Cat faeces and gangrene.

A rough cough came up like vomit. Merrily began to cough and cough and couldn’t stop. She folded up on the pew, arms flailing, eyes streaming. She felt Huw’s arms around her, heard him praying frantically under his breath, clutching her to him, and still she couldn’t stop coughing and slid down his legs to the stone floor, and he pulled away from her and she heard him scrabbling about.

‘Drink,’ he said urgently. Then a hard ring of glass pushing at her lips, chinking on her teeth.

She gripped it and sucked and Huw held it there.

Merrily fell back against the pew, holy water dribbling down her chin, the lamps and candles blurring into a blaze. Huw brought her gently to her feet and put her cloak around her shoulders.

‘Out of here, lass,’ he said mildly. ‘Don’t come back, eh?’

28 Crone with a Toad

LOL SAW THAT Dick Lyden had become aware of deep waters and was now backing into the paddling area. Dick poured Glenmorangie for Lol and himself. He still looked shaken: not terribly upset exactly, more like unnerved. Almost certainly this was the first time a client of his had taken her own life.

An unexpected minefield then, psychotherapy.

Dick sat down behind his desk lamp, some art-deco thing with a cold blue shade. It created distance.

‘And the police, Lol… the police are saying what?’

‘Keeping the lid on it. No crime, no guilty parties. Probably doing their best to disregard the bizarre bits.’

Dick had finally got through on the phone, demanding Lol should come round at once. Needing to know, for his peace of mind and his professional security, everything that had happened and how it might rebound on him.

This was no longer jolly old Dick revelling in his newfound status as analyst, delightedly knitting strands of experience together into some stupid woolly jumper.

Lol said, ‘As I understand it, they don’t particularly want to know if it’s the same sword, basically.’

‘That’s quite understandable. A suicide is not a murder. This… this wrist-cutting is still not uncommon, I gather, in an age of subtler methods. Not a difficult way to go. More distressing, perhaps, for whoever finds the body. And the weapon? An important symbol for Moon, no doubt, under the regrettable circumstances, but irrelevant as far as the police are concerned. But what the hell was Denny doing sitting on this information? Would I have supported her plan to move into that place if I’d known her father had done it in that actual same… When’s the inquest?’

Meaning: Will I be called? What am I going to say?

‘Going to be opened tomorrow, but that’s just so Denny can give formal identification of the body and they can release her for burial. It’ll then be adjourned for weeks – maybe months – while they put the medical evidence together.’

‘They haven’t been to see me yet.’

‘Maybe you don’t matter, Dick,’ Lol said coldly.

He’d hate to think that Dick was counting on the inquest being economical with the facts, so there’d be more unpublicized material available for his own psychological paper on Moon’s case. He’d really hate to think that.

But the inquest was going to get it all wrong, wasn’t it?

Just that Lol couldn’t see through to the truth either.

‘Look… ahm…’ Dick leaned back, well behind his blue lamp. ‘Lol, I don’t want you to blame yourself for this. You tried to get close to her and it didn’t work out. Perhaps that was a mistake, but we’ll never know. We must accept we’ll never know, and… and… and let it go.’

A subtle restructuring of history here: like it had been Lol’s sole decision to try to get close to Moon, with Dick’s tentative, guarded approval.

‘Well,’ Dick stood up, ‘thanks for coming over. Ahm… this won’t affect the boy’s recording, will it? Denny… well, obviously something creative to occupy his mind.’

Tuneless Little Twats with Fender Strats.

‘I’m sure it’s exactly what he needs,’ said Lol.

‘Good man,’ Dick said. ‘The boy, you see… the boy’s been very difficult and uncommunicative, and when he does communicate, it’s with an unpleasant teenage sneer. Goes out every night now, pushing it as far as he can get. When he’s not with his band, he’s with some girl. Some girl’s got her hooks into him, so I would rather he was with the band in Denny’s studio. At least until after Sunday.’

‘Why Sunday?’

‘His enthronement as Boy Bishop in the Cathedral, during evensong. By the actual Bishop, and before a packed Cathedral. Just let’s get that over with.’

‘You still think he might back out, right?’

‘Not if the little shit knows what’s good for him,’ Dick said through his teeth. Then he laughed at his own venom. ‘Look, Lol, Moon was ill – more ill than any of us knew. Delusional. Shouldn’t have been on her own there. We’re all to blame for that – Denny, you, ah… me, and the Health Service. All I’m saying… the police are right. Let’s not overcomplicate things, or see things that might not be there. That’s how myths are created.’

‘Right,’ Lol said. A small fury ignited inside him.

‘Good man.’ Dick clapped him on the shoulder.

It was thawing at last. Clouds crowded the moon as Lol crossed the main road towards the refashioned ruins of the city wall.

This CD would be his last work for Dick Lyden. He hadn’t been to his psychology night-class for over a fortnight.

The city wall glistened in the moonlight.

So the version of Moon’s death which the inquest would establish would be untrue. The verdict – unless the post-mortem threw up something unexpected – would be a straightforward Suicide While the Balance of Mind was Disturbed. And no blindingly obvious warnings from the coroner afterwards; there was nothing anyone else would learn from this.

And when you left her at the door on Saturday evening, how would you describe Miss Moon’s state of mind?

Kind of… intense. She was researching a book. About her family. I had the impression she couldn’t wait to get back to it.

It was true. When he’d left her, there was no indication at all that she might—

If you were the police, Denny had said, would you want a hint of anything paranormal?

Why had Denny said that? It was the first time he’d ever mentioned the paranormal in connection with Moon, or indeed any connection at all. But how well did he really know Denny? Only well enough to know now that Denny had been putting up a front to conceal unvoiced fears. Perhaps if he’d told Denny, rather than Dick, about the crow and about Moon seeing her father…

Oh, hell!

Lol stood on the medieval bridge, gazing over the parapet into the Wye, numbed by a quiet panic. He didn’t know what to do, which street to go down. Directionless. Working with Dick, while it hadn’t felt exactly right, at least had been a new rope to hold on to.

Very soon he would reach the main road again, having walked in a complete circle. He felt like some aimless vagrant – or worse, closer to the truth, a mental patient returned to the care of the community. He turned abruptly, moved back up Bridge Street, past the off-licence and Peter Bell’s Typewriter Shop, the snow on the pavement reduced to slivers of slush.

Two young women walked out of a darkened doorway about five yards ahead of him and he saw, by an all-night-lighted shopfront, that one of them was Jane Watkins. Perhaps she noticed him; she turned sharply away and hurried on, slightly ahead of her companion.

The doorway belonged to Pod’s, a healthfood café. He’d been in there just once: it was dark and primitive and woody, with secondhand tables and rickety chairs – people who opened healthfood restaurants were into recycling and no frills. On the whitewashed walls, in thin black frames, he remembered, were reproductions of drawings by Mervyn Peake: twisted figures, spindly figures, bulbous figures, in gloomy landscapes. Lol recalled eating a soya-sausage roll under one showing a crone with a toad. He hadn’t stayed long.

When she got in, she put out some food for Ethel and went up to the bathroom, which was still like a 1950s public lavatory, with black and white tiles and a shower the size of an iron streetlamp. She sat on the lavatory, head in hands, her stomach churning. She heard Jane’s key turn in the door, but it was quite a while before Merrily could go down.

‘You’re ill,’ Jane said. Looking up from the omelette mix in the pan. The sight of the yellow slop made Merrily want to throw up.

She shivered damply inside her dressing-gown. ‘I’m sorry, flower, I can’t eat… anything. I’m really sorry.’

‘I’d better stay off school tomorrow and look after you,’ Jane said promptly, ‘if you’re no better by then.’

‘No, thank you… I mean, certainly not.’

‘How long have you been in?’

‘Not long.’ Merrily leaned against the Aga rail next to her daughter.

‘How did it go?’

‘All right, I think.’

‘Did you feel ill then?’

‘Yes. In fact, I… couldn’t do it. But Huw was there. Huw did it.’

Jane sniffed, her eyes narrowing. ‘You’ve been drinking.’

‘Hey, what is this? I called into a pub for something to settle my stomach.’

Everybody trying not to stare at the cloaked figure with the bottom of her cassock showing: the first female whisky-priest in the diocese.

‘Hmm,’ Jane said, ‘why don’t you go to bed? I’ll bring you a drink up.’

‘Thanks, flower.’ She thought she might be about to cry.

Again.

She took up a hot-water bottle, dumped her cassock and surplice in the wash-bin, lay between the sheets and sweated.

She’d been here before: a panic-attack at her own installation service at Ledwardine Church. And hallucinations…

But what kind of sick, warped mind conjures up the filth of Denzil Joy?

Dear God.

Franny Bliss and his colleague had watched her hobble to the car, perhaps waiting to see her safely back to the church of St Cosmas and St Damien, but she hadn’t returned. Out of here, lass.

It was all over. Finished.

Jane brought her hot chocolate.

‘There’s a drop of brandy in it.’

‘You’ll have me at the Betty Ford Clinic, flower.’

Jane smiled wanly.

‘Where did you go tonight?’

‘Just… you know… to see a couple of friends.’

‘They could come here sometime. Lots of room.’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said. ‘Maybe sometime.’

Merrily sank back into the sweat-damp pillow and slithered into a feverish sleep. At times she heard bleeps and voices – which might have been on the answering machine or in her hot, fogged head – like satanic static.

Just before midnight, the bedside phone bleeped.

‘Huw?’ she said feverishly.

‘You were asleep, Merrily?’

‘Yes. Hello, Eileen.’

‘Your man’s back,’ Cullen said, ‘with his candles and his bottles.’

‘Oh.’

‘I said I’d call you.’

She clawed for consciousness. ‘It’s not… visiting time, is it?’

‘Jesus, you must have been sound asleep. Being as Mr Dobbs is in a side ward, any time is visiting time, within reason. This is not exactly within my idea of reason, but the visitor’s a very plausible feller. Whatever the hell kind of weirdness he’s getting up to in there, I have to say I quite took to him.’

‘You… talked to him?’

‘He was very apologetic. Said he’d have come earlier but he had some urgent business to see to… Are you still there, Merrily?’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Oh… late fifties. Longish, straggly grey hair. He had a bobble-hat and he was in this auld blue airman’s coat. Talked like… who’s that feller? Alan Bennett? But a real auld hippy, you know?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s still in there, doing his stuff around Mr Dobbs with his candles. Probably be gone by the time you get here. I could try to keep him talking, if you like…’

‘No,’ Merrily said bleakly, ‘it’s all right now, Eileen. I don’t think I want to see him.’

29 Fog

AT FIRST IT felt like the start of a cold: that filthy, metallic tainting of the back of the throat. And then she was fully awake – knowing what it was, panting in terror.

He’s here!

Rolling out of bed, breath coming in sobs, rolling over and scrambling on to her knees, she began to mutter the Breastplate, groping on the carpet for her pectoral cross.

‘… by invocation of the same

‘The Three in One and One in Three.

‘Of whom all nature hath creation.

‘Eternal Father, Spirit, Word…’

And she fell back against the bottom of the bed, gulping air.

Gone? Perhaps.

After a while she sat up, before reaching instinctively for the cigarettes and lighter, pulling herself to her feet, into the old woollen dressing-gown and out of the cold, uncosy bedroom.

She ached. The light from the landing window was the colour of damp concrete. The garden below looked like her head felt: choked with fog. She stood swaying at the top of the stairs, dizzy, thought she would fall, and hugged the newel post on the landing, the cigarette dangling from her mouth. Repeatedly scraping her thumb against the Zippo, but the light wouldn’t come. Sweating and shaking with panic and betrayal.

‘Mum?’

What?

‘Mum!’

The kid stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking frightened.

Merrily heard a single letter dropping through the box. The postman.

Normality.

She began to cough. No such thing.

Because there was no light, as such, penetrating Capuchin Lane, Lol overslept and awoke to the leaden grind of a harmonium from the shop below, a deep and doomy female voice.

Nico. Mournful, sinister old Nico songs from the seventies. Unshaven, Lol made it down to the shop, past Moon’s lonely mountain-bike, and found Viv, the new manager: a sloppyhippy granny, old friend of Denny’s.

‘Do you like Nico, Lol?’

‘Sometimes,’ Lol said.

‘I love her,’ Viv said. ‘I know she’s not to everybody’s taste. But it’s Moon’s funeral on Friday: a mourning time.’

‘That’s three days away.’ He didn’t know whether Moon had ever even liked Nico; it was not unlikely.

‘I thought I’d play it for an hour every morning, to show that we’re in mourning,’ Viv promised. ‘There’s a letter for you, from London.’

Lol opened it over his toast in the corner café. Ironically it promised money – money, as usual, for nothing. The revered Norma Waterson wanted to use one of his songs on her next solo album. It was ‘The Baker’s Lament’, the one about the death of traditional village life.

He was depressed. By James Lyden’s rules, he should have been dead now for at least ten years. On the other hand, unless folk singers were exempt, Norma Waterson should have been dead for over twenty-five. He stared through the café window into the fog. There was nothing in the day ahead for him. It had come to this.

Whereas Moon, so excited by her research, so driven… had just simply ended it.

He could not believe that what she’d discovered had led her to the conclusion that the only way of repairing the broken link with her ancestors was by joining them.

He’d heard nothing more from Merrily.

Lol finished his toast, walked back to the shop. A customer was coming out, and Lol heard that endless dirge again through the open door. It sounded – because Nico was also dead – like an accusation from beyond the grave, a bony finger pointing.

Sophie was saying into the phone, ‘Have they double-checked? Yes, of course, I’m sorry. But it seems so…’

Merrily pulled off her coat, tossed it over the back of her chair, slumped down into it. She was going to miss Sophie, and even the office with D on the door – almost a second home now, with none of the complications of the first.

Sophie put down the phone, tucking a strand of white hair behind one ear. ‘It’s bizarre, Merrily, quite bizarre. That was George Curtiss. The Dean’s absolutely furious. You know the Cantilupe tomb was due to be reassembled this week, in time for the Boy Bishop ceremony on Sunday? But, would you believe, there’s a piece missing.’

‘A piece?’

‘One of the side panels. You know the side-panels with the figures of knights? Knights Templar, someone suggested.’

‘I know.’ She remembered the knights, blurred by age, their faces disfigured.

‘Well, one had broken away from the panel. Maybe through age or stone-fatigue. It was due to be repaired, but now it’s vanished!’

‘Someone pinched a slab of stone?’

‘So it seems. When the masons were sorting out all the segments it just wasn’t there. It’s not huge – about a foot wide, eighteen inches deep – though heavy obviously.’

‘Not easily shoved in your shopping bag,’ Merrily said. ‘But safely locked up behind that partition, surely?’

‘That’s the point.’ Sophie looked worried. ‘About the only time its removal could have happened was when we were all fussing over Canon Dobbs, after his stroke.’

‘They suspect one of us?’ Maybe, she thought insanely, I could resign under suspicion of stealing a chunk of Cantilupe. It would be easier, less complicated.

‘This Dean will suspect anyone connected with the Bishop,’ Sophie said with rare malice. ‘He’s already calling for a full inquiry. No, I don’t for a minute think they suspect one of us. They just think we might have been more… I don’t know… observant.’

‘Who’d want to nick a single medieval knight not in terrific condition? And what for – a bird-table?’

‘Don’t joke about it in front of the Dean, whatever you do.’

‘I never seem to meet the Dean,’ Merrily said.

‘Personally I never joke in front of the Dean.’ The Bishop had appeared in the doorway. The Bishop at his hunkiest, with the possibly-Armani jacket over a denim shirt and jeans. The only purple now was a handkerchief carelessly tucked into his breast pocket. ‘Good morning, Sophie. Merrily, how did it go last night? Nothing over the top, one trusts. Restraint is our new watchword.’

She said, ‘You haven’t heard?’

‘What should I have heard?’

‘Mick, look…’ She came slowly to her feet. ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Oh yes,’ Sophie said quickly, ‘the blessing at Stretford. I gather you weren’t very well, Merrily.’

‘Who told—?’

‘She really shouldn’t have turned out, Michael,’ Sophie said. ‘You can see how terribly pale she is.’

‘Merrily?’ The Bishop moved into the office, turned his famous blue eyes on her. ‘Lord, yes, you don’t look well at all.’

‘Fortunately,’ Sophie said, ‘Huw Owen was present and able to take over and conduct the service, so that was all right.’

Merrily stared at her. What are you doing?

‘Owen?’ The Bishop’s face stiffened with outrage. ‘Who the hell invited Owen?’

‘I did,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m sorry, I should have told you, shouldn’t I?’

‘Yes, you should. The man’s from outside the diocese. He’s Church in Wales.’

‘It’s my fault,’ Sophie said quickly. ‘Merrily told me she’d asked the Reverend Owen to come in as…’

‘Hand-holder,’ Merrily said. ‘It was my first serious exorcism. As it was to be in a church, I didn’t want to make a mistake.’

‘Well, I should have been told,’ the Bishop said almost peevishly. ‘I realize he was your course tutor, Merrily, but I’ve appointed you, not him. In fact, if I’d known more about Owen at the time, we might not have sent you on that particular course.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Let’s just say’ – the Bishop’s eyes were hard – ‘that his roots are planted in the same general area as Dobbs’s.’

‘Oh, Michael…’ Any further discussion of the dangers of medievalism was forestalled by Sophie informing the Bishop about the missing Cantilupe knight, apparently smuggled out of the Cathedral.

‘And that’s all they took?’ The Bishop slowly shook his head, half-smiling now. ‘Admittedly, we don’t want opportunist tomb-robbers cruising the Cathedral, but it’s hardly cause for a major panic. Surely our guys can construct a temporary substitute if they need to put the shrine together in a hurry. Reconstituted stone or something. Who, after all, is going to know?’

‘Reconstituted stone?’ Sophie said faintly.

‘Poor old boy’s bones are already widely scattered,’ the Bishop said reasonably. ‘It’s not as if those knights have anything to guard any more, is it? Sophie, Val and I shall be leaving earlier for London than planned.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Sophie spun towards her office, ‘I thought the reception was tomorrow.’

‘Well, there’s going to be a dinner now, tonight – with Tony and Cherie. And other people, of course.’ He laughed. ‘One can hardly reschedule these things according to one’s personal convenience. We’ll need to get off before lunch. So… Merrily,’ turning his attention on her like a loaded shotgun, ‘I want you to think about something.’

He stepped back and surveyed her – critically, she thought – in her black jumper and woollen skirt, flaking fake-Barbour over the back of the chair.

Whatever it is now, she thought, not today.

‘Ironic that the question of Dobbs and Owen should arise. Traditionalism – I want all this to be raised at the next General Synod, and I want you, Merrily, to give some thought to producing a paper on what, for want of a better term, I’m officially calling New Deliverance.’

She stared at him. ‘Me?’

‘Very definitely you. I think I may be looking at the very face of New Deliverance.’

‘Bishop, I don’t know what you mean about “New”. Surely the whole point of—’

‘You know very well what I mean, Merrily. Think back to our discussion in the Green Dragon. Anyway, I don’t have time to expand on it now. We’ll talk again before Christmas, yes?’

She couldn’t reply.

‘Excellent,’ the Bishop said crisply. As he left, Merrily’s phone rang.

‘Merrily. Frannie Bliss. Remember? How are you?’

‘I’m… OK.’

‘You don’t sound all that OK to me. You should’ve said something – us keeping you talking outside in the cold all that time. Not that it was much warmer inside. Sorry you had to go off like that, but you probably did the best thing. He’s a card, that Huw, isn’t he? Turned out well for us, anyway.’

‘It did?’

‘I’m not gonna bore you with the run-up to this, but we finally had a chat with two very nice elderly ladies: sisters, churchgoers, and active members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. They put us on to a lad called Craig Proctor, lives out near Monkland. Now young Craig, for reasons you really don’t want to know about, especially if you’re not feeling well, is an expert at trapping wild birds. These old ladies’ve been after him for months, but he’s clever is Craig – or he thought he was. Anyway, after a long and meaningful exchange at Leominster nick this morning, Craig has told us he was approached by a chap he didn’t know, and given a hundred and fifty pounds to procure one live carrion crow.’

‘Christ.’

The fog outside was like a carpet against the window.

‘Yeh,’ Frannie said. ‘Now, what’s that say to you, Merrily?’

‘It says you’re not just looking for a bunch of kids who’ve seen some nasty films.’

‘The real thing, eh?’

‘Yes, though I don’t know what I mean when I say that. Did you get a description out of him?’

‘Young guy – motorbike, moustache, hard-looking. That’s not much help. Craig’s never seen him before, he claims.’

‘You arrest him?’

‘No. He knew we’d no evidence and he wasn’t gonna confess.’

‘You made a deal.’

‘We don’t make deals, as you well know, Merrily. Just have a little think about why somebody would blow a hundred and fifty on setting up some grubby little sacrifice in a church nobody uses.’

‘And taking a considerable risk too,’ Merrily said. ‘Stretford itself might be a bit lonely, but the church is hardly lonely within Stretford.’

‘That too.’

‘Have you asked Huw?’

‘Well, yeh, I did call Huw, to be honest, but he wasn’t there.’

‘He’s a busy man,’ Merrily said quietly.

Sophie had gestured to her something about popping out for a while. Merrily considered waiting for her to return, needing to find out how she’d learned about last night’s disaster, and why she’d been so quick to cover up in front of the Bishop.

But, by lunchtime, Sophie had not come back, so Merrily switched on the computer and typed out the letter.

It had already been composed in her head on the way here. It was formal and uncomplicated. That was always best; no need for details – not that she felt able to put that stuff on paper.

Dear Bishop,

After long consideration and a great deal of prayer and agonizing, I have decided to ask you to accept my resignation from the role of Diocesan Deliverance Consultant.

I do not doubt that this is – or will become – a valid job for a woman. However, events have proved to me that I am not yet sufficiently wise or experienced enough to take it on. Therefore I honestly think I should make a discreet exit before I become a liability to the Church.

I would like to thank you for your kindness and – albeit misplaced – confidence in me. I am sorry for wasting so much of your very valuable time.

Yours sincerely,

Merrily Watkins

It hung there on the screen and she sat in front of it, reading it over and over again until she saw it only as words with no coherent meaning.

She could print it out and post it, or send it through the internal mail. Either way, he would not see it before he and Val left for London. Or maybe e-mail it immediately to the Bishop’s Palace? That would be the quickest and the best, and leave no room for hesitation.

She read it through again; there was nothing more to say. She looked up the Palace’s e-mail address and prepared to send. It would be courteous, perhaps, to show it first to Sophie. Perhaps she’d wait until Sophie returned, perhaps she wouldn’t. What she would not do was ring Huw Owen about it.

As often, the only certainty was a cigarette. Her packet was empty, so she felt in her bag for another, and came up with a creamy-white envelope, the one pushed through the letterbox while she was shivering on the landing. She’d stuffed it into her bag, while arguing with Jane that she was perfectly fit to go to work – no, she did not have flu. It’s mental, flower. I’m coming apart and torturing myself with sick, sexual, demonic fantasies. God’s way of showing me I’m not equipped to take on other people’s terrors. But she hadn’t said any of that either.

She opened the letter, postmarked Hereford and addressed to The Reverend Mrs Watkins. It came straight to the point.

Dear Reverend Watkins,

You should know that your Daughter has been seen brazenly endangering her Soul, and yours, by mixing with the Spiritually Unclean.

Ask her what she was doing last Saturday afternoon at the so-called PSYCHIC FAIR at Leominster. It is well known that such events attract members of Occult Groups in search of converts. Ask her how long she has been consorting with a Clairvoyant who uses the Devil’s Picturebook.

Many people have always been disgusted that your Daughter does not attend Church as the Daughter of a Minister of God ought to. Now we know why.

If it is true that you have been appointed Exorcist then perhaps you should start by cleansing the Filthy Soul of Your Own Daughter.

It was unsigned. Quite expensively done, judged by the standards set by these creeps. Usually the paper was cheap and crumpled, and whereas most of them were pushed into a letterbox, either here or at the church, this one had come by post.

Surprising how many anonymous letters you got. Or perhaps male ministers didn’t get so many – quite a few of these letters muttered that you should stop pretending to be a priest and go out and get yourself a husband like ordinary, decent women did. One or two of them also offered to give her what ordinary, decent women were getting, but she evidently wasn’t. She picked these ones up by one corner and washed her hands afterwards.

Some of them she felt she ought to file, or give to the police in case other women were receiving similar messages and the sender ever got nicked. Some she really didn’t want to take to the police, in case anyone at the station suspected there was no smoke without fire.

But most of them got burned in the grate or the nearest ashtray.

Merrily flicked the Zippo. It would be true, of course. Jane had laid it on the line that altogether fateful afternoon in the coffee lounge at the Green Dragon. The Church has always been on this kind of paternalistic power-trip, doesn’t want people to search for the truth. Like it used to be science and Darwinism and stuff they were worried about. Now it’s the New Age because that’s like real practical spirituality.

Psychic fairs were where people went in search of ‘Real Practical Spirituality’. Merrily didn’t doubt that what the letter said was essentially true. It would explain a lot of things, not least the allure of Rowenna.

She knew the Devil’s Picturebook was the tarot – a doorway.

Et tu, flower. She felt choked by acrid fog. Her head ached.

No option now.

She sent the Bishop his e-mail, walked out of the office and down the stone stairs.