Midwinter of the Spirit

30 Self-pity

SHE FELT COLD, and dangerously light inside, as though a dead weight had rolled away, but releasing nothing. She stepped through a tide of pensioners, a coach party heading towards the Cathedral. The sky was overcast. Nobody seemed to be smiling any more. One of the old men looked a bit like Dobbs.

She should tell Dobbs that it was OK now. That he could go ahead and recover. She’d do that, yes. She’d go to the hospital at visiting time and tell him. Jesus Christ was the first exorcist; the pattern is unbroken. This would draw a final line under everything.

Unless Huw was there, the bastard, with his holy water and his candles.

Jesus!

The city swirled around her in the fog, undefined. She mustn’t look back at the Cathedral. It was no part of her life now. She should go back to her own parish and deal with the church break-in. Head Ted Clowes off at the pass. At Ledwardine – her home.

Or not?

Sweat sprang out on her forehead. She felt insubstantial, worthless. She had no home, no lover, no spiritual adviser, no…

Daughter?

Failed her. Too bound up in your own conceits. Sending her into the arms of New Age occult freaks, a reaction to living with a…

Pious bitch?

Her dead husband Sean had been the first to call her that. After a day quite like this, a headachy day, the desperate day when she’d found out just how bent he was, and screamed at him for his duplicity and his greed, and he’d screamed back: I was doing it for you, you pious bitch.

She hated that word. Don’t ever be pious. Smoke, curse, never be afraid to say Jesus Christ! in fury or astonishment – at least it keeps the name in circulation. Strive to be a good person, a good priest, never a pious priest.

Once, up in Liverpool, she’d conducted a youth service wearing a binliner instead of a cassock. It was half a generation too late; some of the kids were appalled, others sneered. Not so easy not being pious.

Merrily found herself back on the green, watching the Cathedral placidly swallowing the coach party. The fog was lifting, but the sky behind it was darkening. She had no idea which way to go next.

Suppose she’d backed away from the lamplit path and supported Sean, had said, Let’s fight this together? Would he have made the effort for her, found some fresh, uncorrupted friends, a new but much older secretary? Would he, in the end, have survived? Might she have saved his life by not following the Path of the Pious Bitch into the arms of God?

She stood at the barrier preventing cars turning into Church Street. She was panting, thoughts racing again. Wasn’t it true that having women in the priesthood was creating a new divide between the sexes – because men could love both God and their wives, but no truly heterosexual woman could love both God and a man with sufficient intensity to make both relationships potent? Was it all a sham? Was it true that all she was searching for in God were those qualities lacking in ordinary men? Or, at least, in Sean.

Oh Christ. Merrily flattened herself against a brick wall facing the side of the Cathedral. The headache had gone; she wished it was back, she wanted pain. Fumbling at her dogcollar, she took it off and put it in her bag. A cold breeze seemed to leap immediately to her throat, like a stab of admonishment.

She zipped up her coat, holding its collar together, turned her back on the Cathedral and walked quickly into Church Street.

Lol saw Merrily from his window, through the drifting fog: gliding almost drunkenly along the street, peering unseeingly into shop windows newly edged with Christmas glitter.

He ran downstairs, past the bike, past Nico’s sepulchral drone and the very interested gaze of Big Viv.

‘Merrily?’ Close up, she seemed limp, drained.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hi.’ And he was shocked because she looked as vague as Moon had often been, but that was just him, wasn’t it – his paranoia?

But paranoia hadn’t created the shadows and creases, the dark hair all mussed, dark eyes moist, make-up escaping.

He looked around. Not the flat now – it had been too awkward there the other night, as if foreshadowed by the death of Moon.

She let him steer her into the corner café where he and Jane had eaten chocolate fudge cake.

There was no one else in the back room. A brown pot of tea between them. On the wall above them was a framed Cézanne poster – baked furrowed earth under a heat haze.

The letter lay folded on the table, held down by the sugar bowl, revealing only the words ‘known that such events attract members of Occult Groups in search of converts’.

‘But surely,’ he said, ‘they mainly just attract ordinary people who read their daily horoscopes. It doesn’t mean she’s sacrificing babies.’

But he thought of seeing Jane and the other girl coming out of Pod’s last night, long after it was closed. And Jane pretending, for the first time ever, not to have seen him.

‘If this was London,’ she said, ‘I could get away with it. Or if Jane was grown-up and living somewhere else. If she’d even been up-front about it, I could have—’

‘Merrily, it means nothing. I can’t believe you’ve just quit because of this. It’s the Bishop, isn’t it?’

‘Sorry?’

‘He made another move on you, right?’

‘No.’ She smiled. ‘He’s been… fine. And anyway I might have taken that the wrong way: late at night, very tired. No, I’m just… paranoid.’ She held up her half-smoked cigarette as though using it as a measure of something. ‘Also I have filthy habits and a deep reservoir of self-pity.’

He nodded at the cigarette. ‘What are the others, then?’

Merrily tipped it into the ashtray. He saw she was blushing. She had no filthy habits.

‘Just… tell me to pull myself together, OK?’

‘I like you being untogether. It makes me feel responsible and kind of protective – sort of like a real bloke.’

She smiled.

‘So what are you going to do now?’

‘Go back to my flock and try to be a good little shepherd. The Deliverance ministry was a wrong move. I thought it was something you could pick up as you went along. I didn’t realize… I’m a fraud, Lol. I don’t know what I’m doing, let too many people down. I even let you down. I said I’d go and see your friend, Moon…’ She looked vague. ‘Was that yesterday?’

‘Mmm.’

‘I mean, I could still see her. I’m still a minister, of sorts.’

‘She’s not there now,’ he said too quietly.

‘Lol?’ She looked directly at him for the first time since sitting down at the table.

‘She died.’

Her face froze up behind the smoke.

‘No!’ He put up his hands. ‘She was dead long before you could’ve got there. There was nothing you could have done.’

And he told her about it: about the Iron Age sword… about the old newspaper report… why Denny had concealed the truth – why Denny said he’d concealed the truth… why Dick thought they should let it lie.

She kept shaking her head, lips parted. He was relieved at the way outrage had lifted her again.

‘Lol, I’ve never heard anything so… There is something deeply, deeply wrong here, don’t you think?’

‘But what can you do about it? We can’t bring her back. And we can’t find out what was in her mind.’

‘What about this book she was supposed to be writing?’

‘Supposed to be, but I don’t think she’d written a word. But if there is anything lying around, Denny will find it. And if it says anything he doesn’t like, he’ll destroy it without telling anyone.’

‘Will you be called as a witness at the inquest?’

‘I expect so. I was the first to… the first to enter the bathroom.’

‘And what will you say?’

‘I’ll just answer their questions. That should cover about half of the truth.’

‘And the rest of it can’t be the truth, because it has no rationality.’ She looked down into her cup as if there might be a message for her in the tea-leaves. ‘I’m so sorry, Lol.’

The point at which people say, Ah well, one of those things. Except this wasn’t.

After a while, she said, ‘What if all your working life is concerned with things that three-quarters of the civilized world now consider irrational?’

‘That could be stressful,’ he said. There were lights on in the café now, but they didn’t seem to reach Merrily. What was she not telling him?

She said, ‘You know why some vicars busy themselves constantly with youth work and stuff like that? It’s so that if, at any point, they realize there’s no God, they can think: Well, at least I haven’t been wasting my time.’

‘Cynical.’

‘Rational. For the same reasons, some Deliverance ministers prefer to think of themselves as Christian psychologists.’

‘Psychology is wonderful,’ Lol said grimly. ‘Look how much it helped Moon.’

‘Perhaps she had the wrong therapist.’

‘We must get her a better one next time. I think you could have helped Moon. I wish to God I’d told you about her earlier. And I think… I think there must be a lot of other people you could help.’

‘Thanks, but you’re being kind.’ She dropped the cigarettes and lighter into her bag, then folded up the anonymous letter very tightly.

This was not good: nothing had been resolved. He sensed that when she returned to her flock she would be different: a sad shepherd exiled, unfulfilled, into a community that wasn’t a community any more. None of them were; village life, like he’d said in his song, was no more than a sweet watercolour memory. She’d grow old and lined, and end up hating God.

‘Listen.’ Lol lowered his voice to an urgent whisper. ‘My life is pathetic. I’m a failed performer, a mediocre songwriter, an ex-mental patient who can’t keep a woman. My sole function on this earth at the present time appears to be producing an album for a semi-talented, obnoxious little git who’s blackmailing his father. Three days ago, a woman I couldn’t love but needed to help just… shut me out in the snow. And then slashed both her wrists. Now somebody who I care about is holding out on me in exactly the same way. What does this tell me?’

Mega self-pity, he thought as she sat down again. Occasionally it works.

Merrily said, looking down at the table, ‘Sometimes I think you’re the only friend I have left.’

‘Friend,’ he repeated sadly.

She met his eyes. ‘It’s a big word, Lol.’

He nodded, although he knew there were bigger ones.

Outside, it was already going dark, and the fog had never really lifted.

31 Old Tiger

JANE STOOD ON the vicarage lawn, Ethel the cat watching her from inside the kitchen window. There was fog still around, but a paler patch almost directly overhead; the moon was probably just there, behind layer upon layer of steamy cloud.

Right, then.

She’d been told that it was OK to do this from the inside of the house, but she didn’t feel quite right about that. Not with the moon, somehow. And it was a vicarage. Whereas the garden bordered the old and sinister orchard which, though it belonged to the Church, had been here, in essence, far longer. Pre-Christian almost certainly.

The night was young but silent around Jane. You could usually hear some sounds from the marketplace or the Black Swan, but not many people seemed to have ventured out tonight. Also, the fog itself created this lovely padded hush. It lined the hills and blocked in the spaces between the trees in the dense woods above Ledwardine, as if the whole valley had acquired these deep, resonant walls like a vast auditorium.

She wondered if Rowenna was outside in her garden, too. The problem was that there were doubtless other houses overlooking that one, and Rowenna had younger brothers who would just take the piss, so she was probably now in her room – searching for the same moon.

Jane looked up, cleared her throat almost nervously. Probably Mum felt like this in the pulpit. Don’t think about Mum. This is nothing to do with her.

She drew in a long, chilled breath, imagining moonbeams – unfortunately there weren’t any – also being drawn down, filling her with silken, silvery light. And then she called out – not too loud, as villages had ears.

‘Hail to Thee, Lady Moon,

‘Whose light reflects our most secret hopes.

‘Hail to Thee from the abodes of darkness.’

Something about that abodes of darkness making it more thrilling than the sun thing in the morning. Especially in this fog.

And it did work, this cycle of spiritual salutation. It put the whole day into a natural sequence. It deepened your awareness of the connectedness of everything, and your role as part of the great perceiving mechanism that was humanity.

Jane felt seriously calm by now and not at all cold – like she was generating her own inner heat. Or something was. She looked up into the sky again, just as this really miraculous thing began to happen.

The moon appeared.

First as just a grey imprint on the cloud-tapestry. Then as this kind of smoke-wreathed silver figurine: the goddess gathering the folds of her cloud-robes around her.

And finally… as a core of brilliant white fire at the heart of the fog.

Winter glory.

Oh, wow! She heard me.

Jane just stood there and shivered in amazement and delight, like totally transported.

Cool!

Like really, really, really cool.

‘Visiting time’s not for another hour,’ Sister Miller said. ‘It’s teatime and the patients have to eat. You’ll need to come back.’

Sister Miller was all nurse: tough and ageless. Merrily concentrated on her seasoned face, because the view along Watkins Ward was dizzying and oppressive. It would have been hard to come up here alone tonight, any night.

She told Sister Miller that Sister Cullen had said visiting hours were less strict if the patient was in a side ward.

‘Which one?’

‘Canon Dobbs.’

‘That old man?’ said Sister Miller. ‘Are you relatives?’

‘I’m a… colleague.’

‘Because my view is that he doesn’t need to be here now, no matter what Dr Bradley says. Why can’t someone look after him at home? He’s just taking up a bed.’

‘You mean he’s recovering?’

‘Of course he’s recovering. I’ve been in nursing for nearly forty years. Mr Dobbs was walking perfectly well this morning. He can also feed himself. I believe he could also talk, if he wanted to.’ Sister Miller turned on Lol. ‘Have you any idea why he’s refusing to talk?’

Lol thought about it. ‘Perhaps he’s just impatient with routine questions like “How are we today?”.’

‘You have ten minutes and no longer,’ said Sister Miller.

It was like praying over a tomb. He lay on his back, as still as an effigy. Eyes shut. You were not aware of him breathing. He looked dead.

Just a short prayer, then. Nothing clever. Someone else having seen to all the smart stuff. Afterwards, Merrily brushed her knees and sat in the bedside chair.

‘Hello, Mr Dobbs.’

He didn’t move. He was like stone. Could he possibly be awake?

‘We haven’t spoken before, as such. I’m Merrily Watkins.’ Keeping her voice low and even. ‘I’ve come to say goodbye.’

On the other side of the door’s glass square, Lol smiled. OK, that was not the most tactful thing to say in a hospital.

‘By which I mean that I’ve now decided not to accept the Deliverance… role. I just wanted you to know that. We never met formally, and now there’s no reason we ever should.’

The side ward enclosing Dobbs was like a drab chapel. A faintly mouldy smell came from him – not organic, more like the miasma of old books in a damp warehouse.

‘I’m sorry that you’re in here. I’m sorry we didn’t get to you sooner in the Cathedral.’ She half-rose to pull the bedside chair a little closer and lowered her voice to below prayer level. ‘I’m even sorrier you didn’t feel able to tell any of us what you were doing there.’

She leaned her face forward to within six inches of his. They’d kept him shaved, but stubble had sprouted under his chin like a patch of sparse grass on a rockface.

‘It doesn’t matter to me now – not professionally. I’m out of it, feeling a little humiliated, rather slighted. I know Jesus Christ was the first exorcist, but also that half the world’s population is female, and rather more than half the people with problems of psychic disturbance – or so it seems to me – are female too. I believe that one day there will be a female exorcist in this diocese, without the fires of hell burning in High Town. I just wanted you to know that too.’

No reaction. Yet he could apparently walk and feed himself. She felt angry.

‘I probably felt less insulted, but more puzzled, when I heard you’d been avoiding all women. Dumping your housekeeper – that wasn’t a terribly kind thing to do. Why are you scared of women?’

Her hand went instinctively to her throat. She still wasn’t wearing the dog-collar.

‘I don’t know what makes you tick, Canon Dobbs. I’ve been trying to forgive you for setting me up for that final session with Denzil Joy.’

She felt tainted just uttering the name, particularly here. Too much like an invocation?

‘If you wanted to scare me off, show me how unpleasant it could be, you very nearly succeeded. But that wasn’t, in the end, why I decided to quit.’

She stood up. On his bedside table she placed two pounds of seedless grapes and two bottles of Malvern water.

‘Maybe you could share these with Huw Owen – next time he comes with his candles, and his holy water, and his magic chalk.’

She waited. Not a movement. She took a last look at him, but he remained like a fossil.

When she reached the door, she stopped, noticing that Lol’s eyes had widened. She resisted the urge to spin around.

Once out of the door, she turned left towards the ward entrance, refusing even to glance back along Watkins to the top side ward where Denzil Joy’s spirit had left his body.

And gone where?

The sudden shudder ripped up her spine like a razor-blade.

‘OK, he opened his eyes,’ Lol informed her, outside the hospital. ‘As soon as you turned your back and walked away, his eyes snapped open. Then closed again when he saw me standing on the other side of the glass.’

Merrily’s Volvo was parked in a small bay near a little park. By the path to the Victoria footbridge over the Wye. They leaned against it.

‘He heard it all, then?’ she said.

‘Every word. His eyes were very bright, fully aware – and mad as hell when he saw me.’

‘Good. My God!’

‘Mmm.’ Those eyes had spooked Lol. They were burning with the hard, wary intelligence of an old tiger. But the effect of this news on Merrily he found exciting.

The cold had lost its bite and the fog had thinned. He could see the three-quarter moon as through a lace curtain.

Merrily said, ‘Could we go for a short walk? I need to clear my head.’

It was very short. He followed her through the patch of parkland to a kind of viewing platform overlooking the still dark Wye and the suspension footbridge.

‘Last time I stood here, Inspector Annie Howe was showing me where a body had been found.’

‘What exciting times you have, Merrily. Such drama.’

‘Too much drama.’ She stood with her back to the river, beside an ornate lamp standard. ‘Well, this suggests Dobbs was an active participant in Huw’s ritual, doesn’t it? Or maybe even directing it?’

‘You’re the expert.’

‘Obviously not, or I’d know what this was about.’

‘And this Huw going behind your back, that’s the reason you resigned?’

She shrugged.

‘I still don’t see it.’

‘Lol, he was my course tutor: the Deliverance man. He’s the nearest I’ve had or wanted to have to a spiritual adviser. I rated the guy. I really liked him.’

‘I see.’

‘No, you don’t. A father-figure, just about. But, more important, the person you trust to guide you through the… through the hinterland of Hell, if you like. But what if there’s something iffy about what they were both doing?’

‘Iffy?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And you want to?’

‘Yeah.’ Her dark hair shone in the lamplight.

‘More than a professional interest?’

‘I don’t have a professional interest any more. I am just so angry. That shit.’

‘Excellent.’

‘Huh?’

‘I’m happy you’re mad. When I first saw you in Church Street you were about as animated as Mr Dobbs back there. I worry easily.’

She smiled, shaking her head. ‘Lol…’

‘Mmm?’

‘I said some stupid things, all right? Things that weren’t necessarily true.’

‘Which in particular?’

‘You choose,’ Merrily said. Her face seemed flushed.

He thought for a moment. ‘OK, I’ve chosen.’

‘Don’t tell me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because…’

‘Because little Jane doesn’t know where you are?’

‘Little Jane doesn’t bloody care.’

‘I think she does, Merrily. And it’s not my place to say so to a professional good person, but if you take this out on her before you’ve gone into it properly, you might regret it.’

‘You mean I should take steps to find out what she’s doing – and who with?’

‘I can… help maybe, if you want.’

‘Why are you doing this, Lol?’

‘A number of possible reasons.’ Lol stood close to her but looked across the river to the haze of misted lights on the fringe of the city. ‘You choose.’

Merrily sighed. ‘I can’t go to bed with you, you know.’ And, naturally, she looked soft-focus beautiful under the lamp. ‘Not the way things are.’

‘God,’ Lol said sadly. ‘He has a lot to answer for.’

‘It isn’t God,’ Merrily said.

‘Oh.’ He wanted to roll over the rail into the black river. ‘That means somebody else.’

‘Yes.’

She turned away from him and from the light. In the moment before she did, he saw her eyes and he thought he saw a flash of fear there, and he thought there was a shudder of revulsion.

But he was paranoid. Official!

‘I’ll take you back now,’ Merrily said.

32 Fantasy World

JANE THREW OPEN the bedroom window, and the damned fog came in and she started to cough. It was like being with Mum in the scullery-office on a heavy Silk Cut night.

Down on the lawn the last rags of snow had gone. Snow was clean, bright, refreshing. Fog was misery. It was December today, so only three weeks to Midwinter, the great solstice when the year had the first gleam of spring in its eye.

Always darkest before the dawn. This, Jane thought, was like a midwinter of the spirit. She cleared her throat.

‘Hail to Thee, Eternal Spiritual Sun.

‘Whose visible symbol now rises from the Heavens.’

That was a bloody laugh.

‘Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Morning.’

It had been so brilliant last night out in the garden. Maybe she was a night person. Maybe a moon person. And yet the bedtime exercise had not gone too well, the great rewinding of the day.

Before you go to sleep, make a journey back through the day. Starting with the very last thing you did or said or thought, then going back through every small event, every action, every perception, as though you were rewinding a sensory videotape of your day. Consider each occurrence impartially, as though it were happening to someone else, and notice how one thing led to another. Thus will you learn about cause and effect. This reverse procedure also de-conditions your mind from thinking sequentially – past, present and future – and demolishes the web of falsehood you habitually weave to excuse your wrong behaviour.

It was impossible to stay with it. You got sidetracked. You thought of something interesting and followed it through. Or something bad, like Mum being ill, which could plunge you without warning into some awful Stalinist scenario at Gran’s in Cheltenham: As long as your mother is in hospital, Jane, you are under my roof, and a young lady does not go out looking like THAT. Or you remembered seeing some cool male person and, despite what Angela had foretold, you were into the old dyinga-virgin angst. Rowenna never seemed prey to these fears; had she no hormones?

Gratefully, Jane closed the window. Mum had not looked too bad last night. Quiet, though: pensive.

‘You’re not OK! You’re not! You look like sh—’

‘Don’t say it, all right?’

‘It’s true.’

And, Jesus, it was true. That ratty old dressing-gown, the cig drooping from the corner of her mouth. A vicar? Standing on the stairs, she looked like some ageing hooker.

‘It’s the weather,’ Mum said.

‘It so is not the weather! Maybe you should see a doctor. I don’t know about exorcist; you look like completely bloody possessed.’

For a moment, Mum looked quite horrible, face all red and scrunched up like some kind of blood-pressure situation. And then…

‘STOP IT! Don’t you ever ever make jokes about that, do you hear?’

‘And, like whatever happened to the sense of humour?’ Jane backed away into the kitchen, teetering on the rim of tears.

They ate breakfast in silence apart from the bleeping of the answering machine: unplayed messages from last night. ‘Aren’t you going to ever listen to that thing?’ Jane said finally at the front door.

‘I’ll get around to it, flower,’ Mum said drably, turning away because, for less than half a second, Jane had caught her eyes and seen in them the harsh glint of fear.

No, please.

Standing desolate on the dark-shrouded market square, as the headlights of the school bus bleared around the corner, Jane thought, suppose it’s not flu, nor even some kind of virus; suppose she’s found symptoms of something she’s afraid to take to the doctor.

Oh God. Please, God.

The only time Jane ever reverted to the Old Guy was when it was about Mum.

Bleep.

‘Merrily, it’s Sophie. I’m calling at seven o’clock. Please ring me at home.’

Bleep.

‘Ms Watkins. Acting DCI Howe, 19.27, Tuesday. I need to talk to you. Can you call me between eight-thirty and ten tomorrow, Wednesday. Thanks.’

Bleep.

‘This is Susan Thorpe, Mrs Watkins, at the Glades. Could you confirm our arrangement for tomorrow evening? Thank you.’

Bleep.

‘Merrily, it’s Sophie again. Please call me. You must realize what it’s about.’

Bleep.

‘Hello, lass. Time we had a chat, eh?’

Merrily didn’t think so.

Lol said, ‘Viv, you know the Alternative Hereford – I mean, most of the people on that side of things.’

‘My love,’ Big Viv laughed throatily, ‘I am the Alternative Hereford. Just don’t ask me to point you to a dealer.’

‘What happens over that healthfood café in Bridge Street?’

‘Pod’s?’ Viv gave him a sharp look. He saw she had two tight lip-rings on this morning. ‘Well, they used to do a good cashewburger, then they got a different cook and it wasn’t so good. You won’t meet anybody there.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Lol shook his head gently. ‘I’m not looking to score anything chemical.’

He collected another hard look. ‘What then?’

‘I don’t know. Mysticism?’

‘You won’t score that either. Not at Pod’s.’

He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

‘Wrong gender, Lol. It’s a woman thing there. I can put you on to a few other people, if you like, depending what you’re into. Wicca… theosophy… Gurdjieff…?’

‘I’ll tell you the truth,’ Lol said. ‘It involves a friend of mine. She thought her daughter might be involved in something possibly linked to Pod’s, and she’d like to know a bit about it. It’s a peace-of-mind thing.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Jane. Jane Watkins.’

‘Don’t know her.’ Viv went to sit behind the till. ‘All right, I went there a few times, but it got a bit intense, yeah?’

‘What was it into?’

‘Self-discovery, developing an inner life, meditation, astralprojection, occult-lite – you know?’

‘You manage to leave your body, Viv?’

‘No such luck, darling. The best teacher they had just dropped out, then they got very responsible. A bit elitist – no riff-raff, no dopeheads. Like an esoteric ladies’ club, you know? That was when I kicked it into touch. Life’s too short.’

‘For what?’

‘For taking seriously. Plus, it was inconvenient. They started meeting in an afternoon on account of the kind of women they were attracting didn’t want their oh-so-respectable husbands to find out. Anyway, it was all a bit snooty and bit too sombre.’

Lol wondered how sombre was too sombre for a Nico-fan.

‘This is a very intense, intellectual kid, Lol?’

‘Not how I’d describe her. Well… not how I would have described her.’

‘They change so fast, kids,’ Viv said.

The only call Merrily returned was Susan Thorpe’s. A careattendant answered: Mrs Thorpe had left early for Hereford Market. Merrily said quickly, before she could let herself back out, ‘Could you tell her the arrangement still stands.’

She felt really unsure about this, but she very much wanted to speak to Susan Thorpe’s mother – wanted every bit of background she could get on Thomas Dobbs.

And it was only an imprint: a redirection of energies. She could handle that – couldn’t she? – if she protected herself.

‘That’s fine,’ the woman said. ‘Thank you, Mrs Watkins.’

‘OK.’

She lit a cigarette and pulled over the phone book. This was something she should have done days ago.

Napier. Surprisingly, there were three in Credenhill. Would it say Major Napier? Colonel Napier? She didn’t even know Rowenna’s father’s rank. A serving officer in the SAS would, anyway, be unlikely to advertise his situation. Might even be ex-directory. She called the first Napier – no reply. At the second, a woman answered, and Merrily asked if this was where Rowenna lived.

The woman laughed, with no humour. ‘This is where she sleeps’ – London accent? – ‘sometimes.’

There was the sound of a morning TV talk-show in the background, a studio audience programmed to gasp and hoot.

‘Is that Mrs Napier?’

‘No, it’s Mrs Straker.’

‘Would it be possible to speak to Mrs Napier?’

‘I wouldn’t know, dear. Depends if you can afford long-distance.’

Merrily said nothing.

‘I’m Rowenna’s aunt,’ Mrs Straker continued heavily, like she’d had to explain this a thousand times too many. ‘I look after the kids for Steve. He’s my younger brother. He and Helen split up about four years ago. She’s in Canada now. If you want to speak to Steve, you’ll have to call back tonight.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know any of this. My name’s Merrily Watkins. From Ledwardine. My daughter, Jane… she seems to be Rowenna’s best friend, at school.’

No reaction. This wasn’t what she’d expected. She wanted a warm, concerned parent, delighted to hear from little Jane’s mother.

‘I don’t know any Jane,’ Mrs Straker said. ‘See, Mrs…’

‘Watkins. Merrily.’

‘Yeah. See, since her dad bought her that car we never know where she is. I wouldn’t have got it her, personally. I don’t think she should have a car till she’s at college or got a job, but Steve’s soft with her, and now she goes where she likes. And she don’t bring her girl friends back here. Or the men either.’

Merrily sat down, her picture of Rowenna and her family background undergoing radical revision.

‘Sometimes,’ Mrs Straker was saying, ‘I think I should be bothering more than I do, but when she was here all the time it was nothing but rows and sulks, and this is a very small house for the five of us. Where we were before, down in Salisbury, things was difficult, but it was a bigger place at least, you know what I mean?’

‘I suppose your brother has to go away a lot.’ In the SAS, Merrily had heard, you could never rely on not having to be in Bosnia or somewhere at a day’s notice.

‘No,’ said Mrs Straker.

‘He is a… an Army officer, isn’t he, your brother?’

Mrs Straker laughed. ‘That’s what she told you, is it?’

‘Not exactly,’ Merrily said. It was Jane who’d told her.

‘Steve’s a corporal. He works in admin.’

‘I see.’

‘That’s not good enough for Rowenna, obviously. She lives in what I would call a fantasy world. Steve can’t see it, or he don’t want to. I dunno what your daughter’s like, Mrs Watson.’

‘Impressionable.’ Merrily’s stomach felt like lead. ‘She’s been out a lot lately, at night, and she doesn’t always say where. I’m getting worried – which is why I rang.’

‘You want to watch her,’ Mrs Straker said. ‘Keep an eye on her, that’s my advice.’

‘Why would you… advise that?’

Mrs Straker made a pregnant humming noise. There was a lot she could say, would enjoy relating, but she apparently wanted more encouragement.

Merrily said, ‘It’s a bit difficult for me to keep an eye on Jane all the time, being a single mum, you know? Having to work.’

‘Divorced?’

‘Widow.’

‘Yes, I’m a widow too,’ Mrs Straker said. ‘It’s not easy, is it? Never thought I’d end up looking after somebody else’s kids, even if they are my own brother’s. But I can’t watch that girl as well – I told Steve that. Not now she’s got a car. What do you do?’

‘Yes, I can see the problem.’

‘No, what do you do? What’s your job?’

The front doorbell rang.

‘I’m, er… I’m a minister in the Church. A vicar.’

The line went quiet.

‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Straker said, ‘that’s not what I expected at all. That’s very funny that is.’

The doorbell rang again, twice, followed by a rapping of the knocker.

‘Why is that so funny?’

‘That’s your front door, dear,’ Mrs Straker said. ‘You’d best go and get it. Ring me back, if you like.’

‘Why is that so funny, Mrs Straker?’

‘It’s not funny at all, Mrs Watson. You won’t find it funny, I’ll guarantee that.’

33 Wrong Number, Dear

ANNIE HOWE STOOD on the step, young and spruce and clean, fast-track fresh against the swirling murk.

‘Ah, you are there, Ms Watkins. I was driving over from Leominster, so I thought I’d call.’ Her ash-blonde head tilted, taking in the dressing-gown – and the blotches and the bags, no doubt. ‘You really aren’t well, are you?’

‘Not wonderful.’

‘Flu?’

‘No, it’s OK to come in,’ Merrily said. ‘You won’t catch anything.’

‘I seldom do. Is this nervous exhaustion, perhaps?’

‘That might be closer.’

Howe stepped into the kitchen, with a slight wrinkling of the nose. Her own kitchen would be hardwood and stainless-steel, cool as a morgue. She sat down at the table, confidently pushing the ashtray away.

‘Ms Watkins, it’s the Paul Sayer thing again.’

Merrily filled the kettle. ‘That seemed to have gone quiet?’

‘That’s because we’re still choosing not to make too much noise about it. I’m wondering if we ought to.’

‘You want me to discuss it in a sermon?’

Howe smiled thinly. ‘Perhaps a sarcasm amnesty?’

‘Sure. Sorry, go on.’

So what did she do about this? If Howe knew she was in the process of shedding the Deliverance role, this conversation would never reach the coffee stage. Difficult, since she was unable to square it with the Bishop until his return from London. OK, say nothing.

‘You heard from DS Bliss, I believe,’ Howe said.

‘He told me about the supplier of crows. Did you get any further?’

‘Unfortunately not. They appeared to have paid their money, taken their crow, and melted back into their own netherworld. But, as you agreed with Bliss, the fee suggests that the people involved in this are not the usual… how shall I say—?’

‘Toerags.’

‘Quite.’

‘So, let me get this right – have you actually said publicly that Sayer was murdered yet?’

Howe shook her head. ‘We’re staying with the phrase “suspicious circumstances”. The situation is, as you must realize, that we could doubtless get widespread national publicity if we told the press about Sayer’s hobby.’

‘Especially if you gave them the pictures.’

‘Of course. But apart from producing an unseemly double-page spread in the Daily Star, I can’t see that it would help. I’m no longer sure the people we want to talk to would ever read a tabloid. Yes, it’s possible, Sayer may simply be a wanker. We’ve found some videotapes under a floorboard which seem to show ritual activities, but we don’t know if these are events that Sayer was personally involved in or sado-pornographic tapes he acquired for his own gratification. They’re quite explicit.’

‘Not commercial films?’

‘Oh, no, the quality’s not good enough. Lots of camera shake and the picture itself is so poor it seems to have been recorded with either old or very cheap equipment – which suggests it’s not simulated.’

‘What kind of ritual activities?’

‘You can view them if you like.’

‘I’d rather you just told me.’

‘Well, one shows a man penetrating a woman on an altar. She’s wearing a blindfold and a gag, and it looks like rape. The man’s face is not hidden, but well covered by long hair and a beard. In the background are several people whose faces are even less distinguishable. What does that sound like to you?’

‘Any suggestion of location?’

‘Possibly a church. And then there’s the inevitable passinground-the-chalice sequence.’

‘Black Mass?’

‘Someone drinks from the chalice, and there’s residue on the mouth suggestive of blood. But, as I say, the quality is appalling.’

‘You see, on the one hand,’ Merrily said, ‘the Black Mass is the best-known of all satanic rituals, and probably the easiest to carry out if you’re just idiots with a warped idea of fun. You just do everything in reverse – say the Lord’s Prayer backwards, et cetera. And you pervert everything – urinate in the chalice or… use blood instead of wine. Blood is the aspect which could, on the other hand, mean serious business. Blood represents the lifeforce, and it’s seen as the most potent of all magical substances. If you want to make something happen, you use real blood.’

‘Of course, we have no way of knowing whether this is. It looks too thin for ketchup, but it could be soy sauce or something.’

‘I’m not being much help. Am I?’

‘It’s more a question of what help you might be in the future,’ Howe said. ‘We’ve failed to identify a single person who’s been involved in any… any activity with Sayer. Or, indeed, with serious satanic activity of any kind. That’s not including the self-publicists, of course.’

‘When did you ever see a serious, heavy-duty, educated Satanist stripped off in the News of the World?’

‘You mean – as with organized crime – the big operators are the outwardly respectable types you’d never suspect?’

‘I suppose that’s a good parallel.’

‘It’s also largely a myth,’ said Howe. ‘The Mr Bigs of this world are very rare, and we do know who they are. But I’m still interested. Do you personally believe there are high-powered practitioners with big houses and executive posts?’

‘How would I know? I’m only a village vicar. But if Sayer was just a wanker, perhaps he was playing out of his league.’

‘You mean, if he was regarded by some serious and outwardly respectable practitioner as a potential embarrassment…’

‘Or he was getting too ambitious. Or he angered some rival… group. I’m told there’s a lot of jealousy and infighting and power-struggling among certain occult sects.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘It was discussed during a course I was sent on. Is this what you wanted to hear?’

‘Go on.’

‘We were told that there are basically two classes of Satanist – what Huw, our tutor, calls the headbangers who are just in it for the experience or whatever psychic charge they can get; and the intellectuals. These are people who came out of Gnosticism and believe that knowledge is all, and so anything is valid if it leads to more knowledge.’

‘Including murder?’

‘Probably. Although they’d be as reluctant as the rest of us to break the law. Satanists, basically, are the people who hate Christianity. And they hate us because they see us as irrational. They despise us for our pomp and our smugness. All these great cathedrals costing millions of pounds a year to maintain, all the wasted psychic energy… to promote what they see as the idiot myth that you can get there by love.’

‘I see.’

‘Why do I get the feeling you also think it’s an idiot myth?’

‘Because I’m a police-person,’ Howe said. ‘Love is something we seldom encounter.’

When Howe had left, Merrily phoned Mrs Straker back four times, and never got an answer. Her own phone rang three times; she didn’t pick it up, but pressed 1471 each time. The calls were from Sophie, Uncle Ted and Sophie respectively.

She owed Sophie an explanation, but couldn’t face that now. And anyway, when Mick returned tomorrow, she’d have to talk to him – at length, no doubt. Before then, she wanted to have lost this… virus.

In the afternoon, she filled a plastic bottle with tapwater and took it across to the church and into the chancel, where she stood it before the altar. In the choir stalls, she meditated for almost an hour. Blue and gold. Lamplit path.

She went into the vestry and changed into the cassock and surplice she’d worn at St Cosmas and St Damien, since washed and replaced in the vestry wardrobe. She walked, head bowed, along the central aisle, back to the chancel, and stood before the altar.

‘Lord God Almighty, the Creator of Life, bless this water…’

Back in the vicarage, she went up to her bedroom and sprinkled holy water in all four corners. Then across the threshold and at the window, top and bottom.

She went down on her knees and prayed that the soul of our brother Denzil might be directed away from its suffering and its earthly obsessions and led into the Light.

Filtered through fog, the fading light lay like a dustsheet on the bedroom.

Jane felt uncomfortable on the school bus home. Increasingly so, as more and more students got off. The buses had arrived early at the school, on account of the fog which was getting worse; classes had been wound up twenty minutes ahead of time.

The bus was moving very slowly, in low gear. It must be like driving through frogspawn. Jane just hoped to God that Mum was feeling better – was not going to be really ill.

Ledwardine was near the end of the line. Dean Wall, legendary greaseball, knew that, so there was no need at all for him to dump his fat ass on the seat next to Jane. He was on his own tonight, his mate Danny Gittoes off sick, supposedly.

‘Just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss your stop in all this fog. Seein’ as how you en’t much used to buses these days.’

Very funny! Jane gathered her bag protectively on to her lap. ‘Don’t worry about me. I have a natural homing instinct.’

The bus was crawling now. She had no idea where the hell they were.

‘Only tryin’ t’be helpful, Watkins.’ Dean Wall shoved his fat thigh against hers, leaned back and stretched. The fat bastard clearly wasn’t going to move. ‘Goin’ out tonight?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Off with some bloke tonight, then, is she?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

Wall’s big fat lips shambled into a loose smile.

‘Look, just sod off, OK?’ Jane said.

‘I wouldn’t worry, Watkins – you’ll still get yours. Er’s likely bisexual.’

‘Will you piss off?’

‘You don’t know nothin’, do you? You’re dead naive, you are.’

Jane gazed out of the window at dense nothing. ‘Stop trying to wind me up.’

‘I’m tryin’ to put you right, Jane. You wanner talk to Gittoes, you do. ’Cept he en’t capable of speech right now – still recoverin’, like. His ma’s thinkin’ of gettin’ him plastic surgery to take the smile off his face.’

‘I don’t want to know!’

‘I bet you do.’ Dean Wall leaned a little closer and Jane shrank against the streaming window. Dean lowered his voice. ‘’Er give Danny a blow job, back o’ the woodwork building.’

She spun and stared at him.

‘Listen, I en’t kiddin’, Jane.’ He threw up his hands like she was about to hit him. ‘Gittoes was pretty bloody gobsmacked himself, as it were.’

‘You totally disgusting slimeball.’

‘’Er needed a favour, see.’

‘I want you to sit somewhere else, all right?’ Jane said. ‘I’m going to count to five. If you haven’t gone by then, I’ll start screaming. Then I’ll tell the driver you put your hand up my skirt.’

‘Mrs Straker?’

‘Yes?’

‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s Merrily Watkins again. I’ve tried several times to call back, but I suppose you had to go out.’

‘Who’d you say you were?’

‘Merrily – it’s Jane’s mum. She’s Rowenna’s friend. We spoke earlier.’

‘I think you’ve got the wrong number, dear.’

‘We spoke about an hour and a half ago. You said there was something I should know about Rowenna.’

You won’t find it funny. I’ll guarantee that.

‘You must be thinking of somebody else,’ Mrs Straker said. ‘I’ve never spoken to you before in my life.’

She couldn’t talk, Merrily decided. Someone had come into the house who shouldn’t hear this. Or someone she was afraid of.

‘Is there somebody with you? Has Rowenna come back? Is Jane with her? Could you just answer yes or no?’

‘Listen,’ Mrs Straker hissed, ‘I don’t know who you are, but if you pester me again I’ll call the police. That clear enough for you, dear? Now get off the fucking line.’

She lay awake that night for over an hour, a whole carillon of alarm bells ringing.

It was the first evening this week that she and Jane had eaten together. Afterwards, they made a log fire in the drawing room and watched TV, all very mellow and companionable. Later they put out the lamps and moved out of the draughts and close to the fire, sipped their tea and talked. And then she got around to telling Jane about Katherine Moon.

‘Dead?’

So she hadn’t known. It was hard to tell how Jane really felt about this; she seemed to have assumed Moon and Lol had been, at some stage, an item. When Merrily came to Moon’s use of the Iron Age knife – this kind of stuff never seemed to upset Jane particularly, as long as no animals were involved – the kid nodded solemnly.

‘Sure. The later Celtic period, coming up to the Dark Ages, that was like this really screwed-up time.’

‘It was?’ Merrily curling her legs on to the sofa.

‘Bad magic. The Druids were getting into blood sacrifices and stuff. If your family was rooted in all that, you’re quite likely to get reverberations. Plus, who knows what else happened on the site of that barn? I mean way back. It could be really poisoned, giving off all kinds of mind-warping vibrations. If you don’t know how to handle these things, it could go badly wrong for you.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ Merrily had said mildly. ‘Where did you learn all that, flower?’

‘Everybody knows that,’ Jane said inscrutably. She was sitting on a big cushion at the edge of the hearth. ‘So this Moon was bonkers all along?’

‘She had a history of psychiatric problems.’

Which led to a long and fairly sensible discussion about Lol and the kind of unsuitable women into whose ambience he seemed to have been drawn, beginning with his born-again Christian mother, then the problem over a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, when he himself was about nineteen but no more mature than the girl, and then some older woman who was into drugs, and later Alison Kinnersley who’d first drawn him to Herefordshire for entirely her own ends.

‘How’s he taken it?’ Jane set her mug down on the hearth and prodded at a log with the poker.

‘He thinks he should have known the way things were going, which is what people always say after a suicide. But in this case people were trying to help her. It’s very odd. It doesn’t add up.’

‘So, like, Lol… was he in love with her?’

‘I really don’t think so, flower.’

And at this point the phone had rung and she’d waited and dialled 1471, finding it had been Lol himself. She called him back from the scullery-office, still answering monosyllabically, because Jane was sometimes a stealthy mover. So she never did learn how he’d discovered the kid had become involved with something called the Pod, which met above a café in Hereford. It could be worse, however, Lol said: women only, nothing sexual. Self-development through meditation and spiritual exercises. Progressing – possibly – to journeys out of the body.

Oh, was that all?

When she went back to the drawing room, Jane had put on the stereo and it was playing one of the warmest, breathiest, Nick Drake-iest songs on the second and final Hazey Jane album. The one which went, Waking in the misty dawn and finding you there.

Merrily lay on the sofa and listened to the music, her thoughts tumbling like water on to rocks.

During the remainder of the evening, the phone rang twice. Merrily said the machine would get it, although she knew it was still unplugged.

The last caller, she’d discovered from the bedside phone, was Huw Owen. She fell asleep trying to make sense of him and Dobbs.

She lay there, half awake for quite a while, dimly aware of both palms itching, before the jagged cold ripped up her, from vagina to throat, and then she was throwing herself out of bed and rolling away into a corner, where the carpet was still damp from holy water, and she curled up dripping with sweat and terror and saw from the neon-red digits of the illuminated clock that the time was four a.m., the hour of his death in Hereford General.

Across the room, with a waft of cat’s faeces and gangrene, a shadow sat up in her bed.

34 A Party

THE BULKHEAD LIGHT came on and the back door was tugged open.

Somewhere deep in the stone and panelled heart of the Glades a piano was being plonked, a dozen cracked sopranos clawing for the notes of what might have been a hymn.

‘Ah.’ Susan Thorpe stepped out in her Aran sweater, heathery skirt, riding boots. ‘Splendid. We were beginning to think you weren’t going to venture out.’

No ‘How good of you to turn out on a night like this’. Mrs Thorpe appeared to think Deliverance was the kind of local service you paid for in your council tax.

The singing voices shrilled and then shrank under a great clumping chord.

‘I can never say no to a party,’ Merrily said.

She shed her fake-Barbour in the hall. Underneath, she wore a shaggy black mohair jumper over another jumper, her largest pectoral cross snuggling between the two layers. Susan Thorpe looked relieved that she wasn’t in a surplice. But her husband Chris obviously thought she ought to be.

‘This is a proper exorcism, isn’t it?’ He was extremely tall, with a shelf of bushy eyebrow and a premature stoop.

His wife glared. ‘They aren’t all bloody deaf in there, you know.’

‘Let’s get this clear,’ Merrily said. ‘It isn’t going to be an exorcism at all. An exorcism is an extreme measure only normally used for the removal of an evil presence.’

‘How d’you know it isn’t that?’

‘I don’t know what it is yet, Mr Thorpe.’ Yet – that was optimistic. ‘If it does turn out to be, er, malevolent, we shall have to think again.’

Believe me, if you had real malevolence here, you would know…

‘Always believed in belt and braces, myself,’ Chris Thorpe said gruffly. ‘Go in hard. If you’ve got rats, you put down poison, block all the holes.’

Merrily smiled demurely up at him. ‘How fortunate we all are that you’re not an exorcist.’

‘Let it go, Chris.’ Susan Thorpe pushed him into the passage leading to the private sitting room, held open the door for Merrily. ‘The truth is, my husband’s a sceptic. He teaches physics.’

‘Oh, where?’

‘Moorfield High,’ Susan said quickly. Oh dear, a mere state school. The Thorpes were no more than late-thirties, yet had the style and attitudes of people at least a generation older. You couldn’t imagine this was entirely down to living with old people. More a cultivated image over which they’d lost all control.

The sitting room was gloomily lit by a standard lamp with an underpowered bulb, but it was much tidier tonight – possibly the work of the plump woman who sat placidly sipping tea. On her knees was a plate with a knife on it, and cake crumbs.

‘This is my mother, Edna Rees. This is Mrs Merrily Watkins, Mother. She’s Dobbs’s successor.’

The former housekeeper to the Canon had raw red farmer’s cheeks and wore her hat indoors; how many women did that these days? She put down her cup, and studied Merrily at length, unembarrassed.

‘You seem very young, Mrs Watkins.’

‘I’m not sure which way to take that, Mrs Rees.’

‘Oh, I think you are, my dear.’ Mrs Rees’s accent was far more local than her daughter’s – Hereford-Welsh. ‘I think you are.’

Merrily smiled. How do I get to talk to her in private?

Susan Thorpe frowned. ‘I don’t know how long this operation normally takes you, Merrily. But our venerable guest of honour is usually in bed by ten.’

‘So there’s going to be nobody on that floor until then?’

‘Nobody living,’ said Mrs Rees blandly.

Chris Thorpe glanced at Merrily’s shoulder-bag. ‘You have some equipment?’

‘We don’t have to be near any power points, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Chris, why don’t you go and do something else?’ Susan said through her teeth.

‘It’s my house. I’ve a right to be informed.’

‘But I don’t feel you really believe it’s going to achieve anything,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s just that normally we like to do this in the presence of people who are a bit sympathetic – a scattering of actual Christians. I mean, are there any practising Christians around? What about the woman who saw… him? Helen?’

‘Supervising the party,’ Susan said. ‘Making sure it doesn’t get too rowdy. Anyway, she doesn’t want to be involved. Christians? No shortage of them but they’re the ones we’re trying not to alarm. You’re on your own, I’m afraid, Merrily. Can I offer you a fortifying cigarette?’

‘Thanks. Afterwards, I think. If you could just point me at the spot.’

‘Don’t fret.’ Mrs Rees put down her cup and saucer. ‘I’ll go with you.’

Excellent.

‘Did you ever go with Canon Dobbs, Mrs Rees?’

‘Oh no.’ Mrs Rees stood up, shaking cake crumbs from her pleated skirt. ‘Wasn’t woman’s work, was it?’

Jane and Rowenna ordered coffee and doughnuts at the Little Chef between Hereford and Leominster. Jane nervously stirred an extra sugar into hers. ‘I didn’t even tell her I was going out tonight. It’s come to this: separate lives.’

Rowenna was unsympathetic. ‘You’re a woman now. You live by your own rules.’

‘Yeah, well…’ Jane looked through the window at the car park and a petrol-station forecourt. She kind of liked Little Chefs because they sold maps and stuff as well, giving you a feeling of being on a journey. They weren’t travelling far this time, however.

Only to the pub where the psychic fair had been held – there to meet with the gracious Angela. Jane felt like Macbeth going for his second session with the Weird Sisters. Like, face it, the first meeting had changed Jane’s life.

She hadn’t seen much of Rowenna over the past couple of days. Then, this morning, the lime-green Fiesta had slid into Ledwardine market square while she was waiting for the bus.

She’d immediately wondered whether to tell Rowenna what Dean Wall had said. If somebody was spreading that kind of filth about you, you had a right to know. But the minute she got in, Ro was like: ‘Guess who called me last night?’

Jane abandoned half her doughnut, pushed the plate away.

‘Don’t look so worried.’

Rowenna wore a new belted coat of soft white leather; Jane was wearing her school duffel coat. People must think she was like some hitchhiker this genteel lady had picked up.

‘Is she going to give us a reading?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rowenna said. ‘You scared of that?’

‘I was so pissed off when I got up, I forgot to do the sun thing.’

‘So what’s she going to do about that?’ Rowenna said quite irritably. ‘Give you detention? Lighten up, these people are not like…’ With a napkin over her finger, she dabbed a crumb from the edge of Jane’s mouth. ‘Listen, you know what your problem is? Your mother’s dreary Anglicanism is weighing down on you. So gloomy, kitten. You spend your whole life making sacrifices and practising self-denial in the hope of getting your reward in heaven. What kind of crappy deal is that?’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘Going to waste her whole life on that shit – and they get paid peanuts, don’t they? I mean, that great old house and no money to make the most of it? What’s the point? She’s still attractive, your old lady. It’s understandable that it pisses you off.’

‘I can’t run her life.’

‘No? If it was me, I’d feel it was my responsibility to kind of rescue her, you know? She’s obviously got talent, psychicsensitivity, all that stuff, but she’s just pouring it down the drain.’

Jane laughed grimly. ‘Oh sure, I walk in one night and I’m, like: “Look, Mum, I can get you out of this life of misery. Why don’t you come along to my group one night and learn some cool spiritual exercises?” ’

‘You underrate yourself, Jane. You can be much more subtle than that,’ Rowenna said. There was something new about her tonight: an aggression – and a less-than-subtle change of attitude. Remember Listen to me. You cannot change other people. Only yourself. How many days ago did she say that?

‘Come on,’ Rowenna said, ‘let’s go.’

A bulb blew.

Merrily’s right hand slid under her top sweater to grip the pectoral cross. A bright anger flared inside her.

The lights were wall-mounted: low-powered, pearlized, pearshaped bulbs, two on each dusty bracket, the brackets about eight feet apart along the narrow passage. This was the one furthest away, so that now the passage – not very bright to begin with – was dimmed by new shadows and no longer had a visible end. Easy, in this lightless tunnel, to conjure a moving shadow.

Edna Rees chuckled. She was sitting in a pink wicker chair pulled out from a bathroom. Merrily was kneeling on the topmost of three carpeted steps leading up to the haunted east wing.

This was the third floor, and once was attics.

This was a stake-out.

Because you didn’t simply arrive and go straight into the spiel. Spend some time with it, Huw Owen said. Let it talk to you. No, of course they seldom actually talk. And yet they do.

Could she trust anything Huw Owen had told her?

They’d been here twenty minutes. Downstairs, Susan Thorpe would be glaring at her watch. Always take your time, Huw said. Never let any bugger rush you. Where some of these customers come from, there is no time. Don’t rush, don’t overreact, don’t go drowning it in holy water.

Merrily’s bag contained only one small bottle of holy water, for all the use that was. Her only other equipment was a Christian Deliverance Study Group booklet of suitable prayers, most of which she knew off by heart anyway.

She was just going through the motions, with no confidence that it would work.

It doesn’t always work – Huw’s truest phrase. It should be printed on the front of the Deliverance handbook.

It should be the title of the Deliverance handbook.

And where was she really? How far had she come since the four a.m. horror? Since the fleeing of her bedroom, the vomiting in the kitchen sink, the stove-hugging, the burning of lights till dawn and the Oh Christ, why hast thou forsaken me?

There was then the Putting On A Brave Face Until The Bus Takes Jane Away interlude. She’d had the time – hours – to wash and dress carefully, apply make-up. To stand back from the mirror and recoil at the sight of age and fear pushing through like a disease.

Then the staring-at-the-phone phase. The agitated For God’s Sake Ring, Huw moments. He keeps calling you. He wants to explain. So you should call him back. It doesn’t matter that he and Dobbs conspired against you. It doesn’t matter what he did. You need him. You need him to take it away. You need to call him now and say, Huw, I am possessed. I am possessed by the spirit of Denzil Joy.

Yet it was not like that. She might look rough in the mirror, but her dull, tired eyes were not the sleazed-over eyes of Denzil Joy. She didn’t feel his greasy desires. She didn’t know him.

Was not possessed by him.

Haunted, though – certainly that. Useless to paper it over with psychology; she was haunted by him. He followed her, had become her spirit-stalker. Because she’d failed, that night in the General, to redirect his malignant energy, its residue had clung to her. She’d walked out of the hospital with Denzil Joy crawling and skulking behind her like some foul familiar. He was hers now. No one else had caught his disease.

And she’d been unaware of it until – once again insufficiently prepared – she had been collecting herself for the assault on the crow-killer of St Cosmas. Collecting her energy. Then into the cocktail had seeped his essence.

Was that what happened? Had yesterday’s holy-water exercise been a failure because it had been directed only at the bedroom – making the room safe – rather than herself?

Because she was the magnet, right? She’d invited him – sitting by his bedside, holding his kippered hands. The female exorcist attracting the incubus, just as the priest-in-charge had invoked the lust of the organist who’d flashed at her from a tombstone.

Today, she’d concentrated on cleansing herself. Leaving the answering machine unplugged, she’d set out on a tour of churches, a pilgrimage on the perimeter of Hereford. A full day of prayer and meditation.

Finally, parking in a back street near the Cathedral School, and slipping discreetly into the Cathedral, sitting quietly at the back for over an hour while tourists and canons she didn’t know flitted through.

She had not called Huw, or Sophie. Had resisted the impulse to enter Church Street and find Lol. She had left the answering machine unplugged. At four p.m., she’d returned to the vicarage and fed the cat and made a meal for Jane and herself. Then one more visit to the church before the drive – leaving plenty of time – to the Glades.

It was not about proving herself as an exorcist any more. That was over. This was about saving her ministry.

And her sanity?

Leave sanity out of this. Sanity is relative.

Edna Rees looked along the passage, without apparent apprehension, to where the bulb had just blown. ‘Surely that’s not the first time it’s happened to you, my dear?’

Merrily said nothing.

Edna shifted comfortably in her wicker chair. ‘Regular occurrence, it was, in Gwynne Street. Wherever he lived, it happened. So I learned.’

‘Bulbs blowing?’

‘Might’ve put me off if I’d known before I took the job, see. But you get used to it.’

Merrily glanced along the line of bulbs. The loss of one seemed to make all the others less bright, as though they were losing heart. There was probably a simple scientific explanation; she should ask Chris Thorpe.

‘One week we lost five,’ Edna said. ‘I said, you want to charge them for all these bulbs, Canon. Well, expensive they are these days, bulbs. We tried those economy things – cost the earth, take an age to come on, but they’re supposed to last ten years. Not in that house, they didn’t.’

‘What else happened?’

‘Some nights…’ Edna pulled her skirt down over her knees, ‘… you just couldn’t heat that place to save your life, even with all the radiators turned up, the living-room fire banked all day. Wasn’t even that cold outside sometimes, see. And yet, come the night, just when you’d think it’d be getting nicely warmed up…’

Cold spots?

This passage had five doors, all closed. Closed doors were threatening. Doors ajar with darkness within were terrifying. Merrily guessed she just didn’t like doors. Otherwise, there was no sense of disturbance, no cold spots – and certainly nothing like the acrid, soul-shrivelling stench which had gathered around…

Stop!

She turned briskly to Edna. ‘Are you saying that he… brought his work home?’

Edna looked at Merrily from under her bottle-green velvet hat. Her eyes were brown and shrewd, over cheeks that were small explosions of split veins.

‘My dear, his work followed him home.’

She froze. ‘He told you that?’

‘He never talked about his work,’ Edna said. ‘Not to me; not to anyone, far as I know. But when he came back sometimes, it was like Jack Frost himself walking in.’

‘What did he do about that?’

‘Not for me to know, Mrs Watkins.’

‘No,’ Merrily said, ‘obviously not. I… saw you with him the other week, in the Cathedral.’

‘Yes,’ Edna said calmly, ‘I thought it was you.’

‘He was telling you to go away. He said there was something he couldn’t… couldn’t discuss there.’

‘Sharp ears you have.’

‘Is it none of my business?’

‘You must think it is.’

‘Why “here”? Why did he want to get you out of the Cathedral?’

‘For the same reason he wanted me out of his house, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Which is?’

‘Why are you asking me these questions?’

‘Because I can’t ask him. Because he’s lying in hospital apparently incapable of speech. Or at least he doesn’t speak to the female nurses.’

Edna smiled.

‘Any more than he’d speak to me before his stroke. He froze me out, too, on the grounds that I wasn’t fit to do his job. His sole communication with me was a cryptic note saying that Jesus Christ was the first exorcist. There. I’ve told you everything, Edna.’

It was what she wanted.

‘Merrily… Can I call you Merrily?’

‘Please do.’

‘Merrily, this began… I don’t know exactly when it began, but it did have a beginning.’

‘Yes.’

‘I started to hear him praying, very loud and… anguished. I would hear him through the walls: sometimes in what sounded like Latin – the words meant nothing to me. He would shout them into the night. And then, backwards and forwards from the Cathedral he’d go at all hours, in all weathers. I would hear his footsteps in the street at two, three in the morning. Going to the Cathedral, coming from there – sometimes rushing, he was, like a man possessed. I don’t mean that in the…’

‘I know.’

‘And this was when he began cutting himself off: from men too, but especially from women. Would not even see his own sister. He would put her off – I was made to put her off – when she wanted to visit. He would not even speak to her on the telephone. Or to his granddaughters – he has two granddaughters. One of them brought her new baby to show him. He saw her coming down the street and made me tell her he was away. It made no sense to me. He’d been married for forty years.’

‘Does it make sense now?’

‘I have been reading,’ Edna said, ‘about St Thomas of Hereford.’

‘Thomas Cantilupe?’

‘He would not have women near him, either.’

She fell silent.

‘But that was then,’ Merrily said. ‘That was the Middle Ages. Cantilupe was a Roman Catholic bishop. They weren’t allowed to have…’

‘I know that, but where did the Canon go when he went into the Cathedral? Where did he have his stroke?’

‘Cantilupe’s tomb.’

‘I can’t tell you any more,’ Edna said. ‘You had better do what you came for.’

In fact, the routine for this kind of situation usually involved blessing the entire house, room by room, starting at the main entrance, the blessing thus extended to all who passed in and out. But Susan Thorpe was hardly going to permit that.

If you couldn’t tie down a haunting to a specific incident in the history of the house, then you at least should ask: What’s causing it to happen now? Is it connected to the present function of the house, the kind of people living here? Old people feeling unwanted, neglected, passed-over? Confused, their senses fuddled…? Yet Susan Thorpe wouldn’t accommodate that kind of client. Any signs of dementia, they have to go. We aren’t a nursing home.

You could spend days investigating this, and then discover it was a simple optical illusion. Merrily moved a little closer to the dead bulb’s bracket.

‘I don’t know what your son-in-law expected, but—’

‘Stuffed-shirt, he is,’ Edna said. ‘I hope I die, I do, before I have to go into a place owned by people like them. Pretend-carers, they are.’ Out of her daughter’s earshot, Edna’s accent had strengthened. ‘Poor old souls. Grit my teeth, I will, and stay here until I can find a little flat, then you won’t see me for dust.’

‘Good for you,’ Merrily said.

It was quiet. No wind in the rafters. They stood in silence for a couple of minutes and then Merrily called on God, who Himself never slept, to bless these bedrooms and watch over all who rested in them.

35 Sholto

HER HANDS TOGETHER, head bowed.

Even the piano was inaudible up here, and in the silence her words sounded hollow and banal.

‘… and ask You to bless and protect the stairs and the landings and the corridors along which the residents and the workers here must pass to reach these rooms.’

She was visualizing the old ladies gathered around the piano two floors below, so as to draw them into the prayer.

‘We pray, in the name of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, that no spirit or shade or image from the past will disturb the people dwelling here. We pray that these images or spirits will return to their ordained place and there rest in peace.’

This covered both imprints and insomniacs, although she didn’t really think it could be an insomniac. There’d surely be some sign, in that case, some pervading atmosphere of unrest.

‘Amen,’ Edna said.

Merrily held her breath. It had been known, Huw Owen had said, for the spirit itself to appear momentarily, usually at the closing of the ritual, before fading – in theory for ever – from the atmosphere.

Mind, it’s also been known to appear with a mocking smile on its face and then – this is frightening – appearing again and again, bang-bang-bang, in different corners of the room…

Although it was hard not to flick a glance over her shoulder, Merrily kept on looking calmly in front of her under half-lowered eyelids, her body turned towards the darkness at the end of the passage. From which drifted a musty smell of dust and camphor which may not have been there before.

She waited, raising her eyes to the sloping ceiling with its blocked-in beams, and the filigree pouches of old cobwebs over the single curtained window. She straightened her shoulders, feeling the pull of the pectoral cross.

It was darker – well seemed darker. As though there’d been a thirty per cent decrease in the wattage of the bulbs. Possibly something was happening, something absorbing the energy – something which had begun as she ended her first prayer. A mild resistance was swelling now.

Merrily began to sweat, trying not to tense against the ballooning atmosphere. She wondered if Edna was aware of it, or if she herself was the only focus, her lone ritual beckoning it. When she spoke again, her voice sounded high and erratic.

‘If there is a… an unquiet spirit… we pray that you may be freed from whatever anxiety or obsession binds you to this place. We pray that you may rise above all earthly ties and go, in peace, to Christ.’

That sounded feeble. It lacked something. It was too bloody reasonable.

Belt and braces, said the awful Chris Thorpe, stooped like a crane and sneering.

Yes, OK, there was something. Now that she was sure of that, there should perhaps be a Eucharist performed for the blessing of the house. It could be conducted by the local vicar, held under some pretext where all the residents could be invited. Those who were churchgoers would accept it without too many questions.

The atmosphere bulged. She felt a sudden urgent need to empty her bladder.

‘May the saints of God pray for you and the angels of God guard and protect you…’

Either the air had tightened or she was feeling faint. Resist it. She fumbled at the mohair sweater to expose the cross. As she pulled at the sweater, her palms began to—

‘Mrs Watkins.’

Merrily let go of the sweater; her eyes snapped open. Edna Rees was pointing to where, at the top of the three shallow steps, a figure stood.

‘Please, there’s really no need for this,’ it said.

Angela turned over six cards in sequence and then quickly swept the whole layout into a pile.

But not before Jane had seen the cards and recognized three of them: Death… The Devil… The Tower struck by lightning.

‘I can’t do this,’ Angela said. ‘I’m afraid it’s Rowenna’s fault.’

It was the same pub where the psychic fair had been held, but this time they were upstairs in a kind of boxroom. Pretty drab: just the card table and two chairs. Rowenna had to perch on a chest of drawers, her head inches from a dangling lightbulb with no shade.

‘I’m sorry, Angela,’ she said. ‘I really didn’t realize.’

Angela looked petite inside a huge sheepskin coat with the collar turned up. She also looked casually glamorous, like a movie star on location. But she looked irritated, too.

‘I suppose you weren’t to know, but it’s one of my rules in a situation like this to know only the inner person. I don’t like to learn in advance about anyone’s background or situation, because then, if I see a problem in the cards, I can know for sure that this information comes from the Source and is not conditioned by my personal knowledge, preconceptions or prejudices. I’m sorry, Jane.’

Jane heard the rumble of bar-life from the room below.

‘Angela,’ she said nervously, ‘that’s not because you turned up some really bad cards and you don’t think I can take it?’

Angela looked cross. ‘Cards have many meanings according to their juxtaposition.’

‘Looked like a pretty heavy juxtaposition to me,’ Rowenna said with a hint of malice. Angela had already done a reading for Rowenna – her future was bound up with a friend’s, needing to help this friend discover her true identity – something of that nature. Rowenna had seemed bored and annoyed that the emphasis seemed to be on Jane.

Jane said, ‘What was it Rowenna told you?’

‘I told her what your mother was, OK?’ Rowenna said. ‘On the phone last night. It just came out.’

Priest or exorcist? Jane was transfixed for a moment by foreboding. ‘That reading was telling you something about me and Mum, wasn’t it?’

Angela straightened the pack and put it reverently into the centre of a black cloth and then folded the cloth over it. ‘Jane, I’m not well disposed towards the Church. A friend of mine, also a tarot-reader, was once hounded out of a particular village in Oxfordshire because the vicar branded her as an evil infuence.’

‘Vicars can be such pigs,’ Rowenna said.

‘However,’ Angela looked up, ‘I make a point of never coming between husbands and wives or children and parents.’

‘Please, will you tell me what—?’

‘Jane.’ Angela’s calm eyes held hers. ‘When I look at your inner being, I sense a generous and uninhibited soul. But if your mother’s burden is to be constrained by dogma and an unhappy tradition, you really don’t have to share it.’

‘Well, I know, but… mostly we get on. Since Dad died we’ve supported each other, you know?’

‘Admirable in principle.’

‘Like, she’s pretty liberal about most things, but she’s got this really closed mind about… other things.’

‘All right, my last word on this…’ Angela began to exude this commanding stillness; you found you were listening very hard. ‘It might be wise, for both your sakes – your own and your mother’s – for you to keep on walking towards the light. Don’t compromise. Don’t look back. Pray… I’m going to say it… pray that she follows in your wake.’

‘You mean she needs to get out of the Church.’

‘These are your cards, Jane, not hers.’

‘Or what? What’s going to happen to her if she stays with the Church?’

‘Jane, don’t put me in a difficult position. Now, how are things going at the Pod?’

The shadow on the stairs spoke in a surprising little-girly voice.

‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Mrs Rees?’

‘This,’ Edna said with an overtone of resignation, ‘is Miss Anthea White.’

‘Athena!’

‘Miss Athena White. Why aren’t you at the party, then, Miss White?’

‘At the piano with all those old ladies? One finds that sort of gathering so depressing.’ Miss White moved out of the shadows. She was small, even next to Merrily, wearing a long blue dressing-gown which buttoned like a cassock.

Very tiny and elflike. Not as old as you expected in a place like this – no more than seventy.

‘This is Mrs Watkins,’ Edna said.

Miss White inspected Merrily through brass-rimmed glasses like the ones Lol Robinson wore, only much thicker. ‘Ah, there it is. You keep the clerical collar well-hidden, Mrs Clergywoman. I say, you’re very very pretty, aren’t you?’

‘Thank you,’ Merrily said.

‘One had feared the new female ministers were all going to be frightful leather-faced lezzies. Come and have a drink in my cell.’

‘Now,’ Edna said, ‘you know you’re not supposed to have alcohol in your rooms.’

‘Oh, Mrs Rees, you aren’t going to blab to the governor, are you? It’s such a frightfully cold night.’ Light seemed to gather in her glasses. ‘Far too cold for an exorcism.’

‘Perhaps you could excuse me,’ Edna said.

‘Oh, do you have to leave?’

‘I rather understand that I do,’ Edna said tactfully.

‘How did you guess?’ Merrily asked, feeling tired now.

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous.’ Miss White handed her an inch of whisky in what seemed to be a tooth glass. ‘You were hardly here to conduct a wedding.’

Her room was an odd little grotto up in the rafters, with Afghan rugs on the wall, an Aztec-patterned bedspread. And a strange atmosphere, Merrily sensed, of illusion. Twin bottles of Johnnie Walker lurked inside an ancient wooden radio-cabinet. There were several free-standing cupboards, with locks. The room was lit by an electrified pottery oil-lamp on a stand.

Athena White went to sit on the high wooden bed, her legs under her in an almost yogic position, her dressing-gown unbuttoned upwards to the waist. No surgical stockings needed here. Merrily was sitting uncomfortably on a kind of camping stool near the door. It put her head on a level with Miss White’s projecting knees. Miss White seemed relaxed, like some tiny goddess-figure on a plinth.

‘Now then,’ she said. ‘What are you trying to do to Sholto?’

She let the name hang in the air until Merrily repeated it.

‘Sholto?’

A mellower light gathered in Miss White’s glasses. ‘Weren’t you able to see him?’

Merrily made no reply.

‘Come on, young Mrs Clergyperson, either you did or you didn’t.’

‘Let’s say I didn’t.’

‘That’s a shame. Perhaps you were erecting a barrier? That’s what your Church does though, isn’t it? Very, very sad – throwing up barriers, wrapping itself in a blanket of disapproval. And yet’ – Miss White’s head tilted in mild curiosity – ‘you are afraid.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh yes, I can always detect fear. You’re not afraid of Sholto, are you?’

‘Am I to understand Sholto is your ghost?’

‘How perceptive of you to apply the possessive,’ said Miss White. ‘I must say, it’s an awful job you have, Mrs Clergyperson. I never thought to see a woman doing it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Is it a specialist thing, or have you simply been commandeered as Thorpe’s prison chaplain?’

‘Miss White—’

‘Your Church is like some repressive totalitarian regime. Everyone has a perfectly good radio set, but you try to make sure they can only tune in to state broadcasts. Whenever the curtains accidentally open on some sublime vista, you rush in and snap them shut again. That’s your job, isn’t it?’

‘The soul police,’ Merrily said. ‘You should meet my daughter.’

‘Ye gods, are you old enough to have a daughter?’

‘Let’s drop the flattery, Miss White. What are you trying to tell me?’

‘What I am telling you’ – Miss White turned full-face to Merrily, and the light in her glasses became twin pinpoints – ‘is to leave him alone.’

‘Sholto?’

‘Have you any idea what it’s like in one of these places, where all is grey and faded, and romance resides solely in one’s memory?’

‘This room’s hardly grey and faded.’

‘You like my eyrie?’

‘It’s very cosy.’

‘Cosy!’ said Miss White in disgust. ‘Pah!’

‘But to get back to Sholto – that’s your name for him, is it?’

‘That, my dear clergyperson, is his name.’

‘You know his history? Some things about him?’

‘There’s nothing I don’t know about him. He’s a randy sod sometimes, and a frightful lounge lizard, but very, very charming. A look of Ronald Colman, but I suppose you’re too young—’

‘No, I’ve seen some of those old films. And you… have seen him, I take it.’

‘What a stupid question.’

‘And the other residents?’

‘Well, I can’t speak for all the hags. Sholto’s quite choosy – won’t pinch the flabbier old buttocks.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t look like that, girl. He was a man of his time. Men used to pinch bottoms.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Merrily was feeling cramped on the stool. ‘But what exactly are we talking about here? Who… what exactly do you think Sholto is?’

‘What do I think he is?’ A vaguely malevolent elf now, white light spearing from her glasses. ‘What do you think he is?’

An imprint? An insomniac? A volatile? This is the terminology of the Deliverance Age, Miss White.

‘I’ll tell you what he isn’t, Mrs Clergygirl.’ A finger wagging, the face narrowing, and the eyes almost merging behind the glasses. ‘He isn’t doing any harm. So you should go away and forget about him. In this museum of memories, Sholto is necessary.’

Merrily drank more whisky to moisten her mouth. ‘Would you mind if I had a cigarette?’

‘Certainly I would! Pull yourself together. If you don’t realize the importance of willpower in your job…’ Miss White’s neck extended, birdlike. ‘What is the matter with you, child?’

Willpower.

Merrily went cold. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Something was trying to stop me administering the blessing. That was you, wasn’t it? Exercising your… willpower.’

‘Oh, what nonsense!’ Miss White sniffed, delighted.

‘Please,’ Merrily said wearily, ‘no more bullshit, Athena.’

A self-satisfied smile escaped beneath a little portcullis of teeth. ‘Why don’t you just ask yourself… What’s your name, by the way?’

‘Merrily.’

‘Well, ask yourself, Merrily, was what you were doing appropriate? Was it polite?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Did you ask permission? No, you didn’t. It was like a police raid: the way they always go in at dawn and bash someone’s door down. It’s disgraceful – we’re not criminals, even if we are in prison. And what has Sholto done wrong?’

‘Well, he… he’s dead. He shouldn’t be here.’

Miss White’s magnified eyes glowed.

She’s mad, Merrily thought. ‘Look,’ she said reasonably, ‘shouldn’t he be free to move on? That’s what matters. And what keeps him here – that matters, too. Because if what keeps him here is only—’

‘The undying pull of the flesh, one presumes. Perhaps we’re part of his karma. Broke a lot of young hearts in his time, I’d guess. Now all he has to amuse him is a bunch of raddled old bags with their tits round their waists. For him, that’s Purgatory, to use your terminology. But we’re all of us far too old to be corrupted. Sholto is needed here to feed people’s fantasies. He’s not only harmless, he’s essential, and that’s an end to it. I’ll keep him in order, don’t worry. You can tell Thorpe you’ve got rid of him. Now… let’s examine your own problem, which I would guess is a good deal less benign. What are you carrying around with you?’

‘What?’

‘Look at you, all hunched up against the cold. You’re cowering.’

Merrily instinctively straightened as best she could on her camping stool.

‘Oh, stop it! You’re cowering inside. You can’t hide that from me. Come here.’

Merrily found herself standing up.

‘Come and sit on the bed. Come on, I’m not going to touch you up!’ Athena White slid from the bed and leaned, in her tubular robe, over Merrily, peering closely into her eyes. ‘Ye gods, you are buggered up, aren’t you?’

Merrily’s legs felt suddenly quite weak.

‘Don’t struggle,’ Miss White said.

‘This is not right.’

‘It’s not right at all. Look at me – no, focus on me, girl. That’s better. I want to see the inner person. I feel you’re normally quite strong, but he’s certainly depleted you.’

‘Who?’

‘You tell me. Go on. Tell me his name.’

‘I don’t know what you—’

‘Tell me his name: that ball of spiritual pus that’s attached itself to you. What is his name?’

‘Denzil Joy.’

‘That’s better,’ said Miss White.

36 Crow Maiden

BY 9:30, JAMES Lyden and his band had been ejected from the cellar studio in Breinton Lane. Lol got out of there, too, before Denny’s rage could do some damage. By the time the band had been packed into their Transit in the driveway, he was making his excuses – there was someone he needed to call.

Which was true.

‘You can do it from here, man.’ Denny’s bald head was shining with angry sweat.

‘I can’t.’ Lol was backing away out of the drive, pulling on his army-surplus jacket. No way he wanted to discuss this with Denny until he had some background.

‘You…’ Denny was stabbing at the fog. ‘You know more than you’re letting on. Where’s this come from? What’s this crow shit?’

‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘And you can tell that fucking Lyden he’s finished!’ Denny bawled after him down Breinton Lane.

The Transit van had reversed, and was alongside Lol now, James’s Welsh friend, Eirion, at the wheel. It stopped.

‘Mr Robinson,’ Eirion shouted, ‘for heaven’s sake, what have we done?’ He sounded shocked and frightened.

‘Get your cocking head back in here, Lewis,’ Lol heard James say lazily. ‘The old man will sort it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Eirion said, as the van pulled away. Lol wondered what his chances were of talking to Dick before James did.

‘How old are you, Merrily?’

‘Thirty-six.’

She sat at the bottom of the bed, feeling a little unconnected, slightly not-quite-here. She felt guilty because that was not unpleasant. Maybe the whisky…

Or not?

‘When I was your age, I knew nothing,’ Miss White said. ‘Indeed, I knew very little even when I retired from the Civil Service. You would have been only a child then. I, however, was very high-powered in those days, or so I thought. In reality I knew nothing. It was only when I left London that I began to study in earnest.’

She unlocked one of the cupboards, threw open its double doors.

Merrily thought: Oh… my… God…

Books. Hundreds of books – many stored horizontally on the shelves, so as to stuff more in. Madame Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, Israel Regardie, Dion Fortune: recent paperbacks wedged against yellowing tomes on meditation, astrology, the Qabalah. If the other cupboards were similarly stocked, there must be several thousand books in this attic.

A lifetime’s collection of esoteric reading. A witch’s cave of forbidden literature. You wouldn’t have prised Jane out of here this side of breakfast time.

‘They know I have books in my cupboards,’ Miss White said, ‘but I rather imagine they consider me a subscriber to the lists of Messrs Mills and Boon.’

Merrily thought how wary she herself used to be of Jane’s guru: the late folklorist, Lucy Devenish. God only knew what this old girl got up to when the lights were out.

One thing puzzled her.

‘Miss White, I can’t… What are you doing in a place like this?’

‘Ah, yes… why not the bijou black and white cottage? Why not the roses round the door and the Persian cat in the window?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Because then, my little clergyperson, one would be obliged to prune the roses and feed the cat, to shop for food and employ workmen to preserve the ancient timbers. How much more space there is here… inner space, I mean. As well as beautiful hills to walk in, should one be overtaken by the need to commune with nature.’

‘But how can you…? I don’t know how to put this.’

‘Be surrounded by twittering biddies, patronized by the dreadful Thorpe? That is simply the outer life. The Thorpes suspect I have enough money to buy the whole place, so they don’t pressure me. All right, when one gets very, very annoyed with them, one can be… mischievous…’

‘I bet.’

‘… while at the same time’ – Miss White smiled almost seraphically – ‘giving one’s fellow inmates a welcome, nostalgic frisson once in a while.’

His name drifted serenely in the air between them.

‘Sholto,’ Merrily said eventually.

‘A-ha.’

‘How did you do it?’

Miss White selected from the bookshelves what turned out to be a stiff-backed folder, and took out a yellowing photograph pasted on card.

‘This is him?’

He wore a pinstriped suit with wide lapels. His hair was dark and kinked, his moustache trimmed to a shadow.

‘I bought him in a print shop in Hay,’ said Miss White. ‘I liked his little twist of a smile. No idea who he is or where he came from – there’s no name on the photo. I thought he rather looked like a Sholto.’

Merrily said, ‘I’m not going to ask you how you did this.’

‘Good, because I should refuse to tell you. You could find out easily enough, if you studied. It’s a very well established technique.’

‘He isn’t a ghost at all.’

‘He’s a projection. Do you know what I mean by that?’

Merrily said, ‘Can I think about it?’

Projection?

Psychic projection, psychological projection – a grey area. Come on, Huw, what are we dealing with here?

We don’t fully understand this, but if we assume, to put it simply, that an imprint exists on a sensory wavelength or plane parallel to our own, then it follows that some people are capable of tuning into that wavelength, sometimes allowing the imprint to be transmitted in a way that renders it visible to others. They may be able, consciously or unconsciously, to lend it the energy it needs to manifest. They may even create their own imprint, projecting it like a hologram. If you come across one of these, you’re unlikely to be able to get rid of it through prayer or ritual alone. You’ve got to stop the person from doing it.

Merrily imagined, in the part of the passage where the bulb had blown, turning it into a black tunnel, a man in a doublebreasted suit bringing a match to his cigarette, exhaling the smoke towards her – smoke which rose in a V, a grey, sardonic smile – before shrivelling up into his own vapour like a silently bursting balloon.

‘You’re thinking, is this devilry – aren’t you?’ The light through Miss White’s glasses was intense and focused, like when as a kid you used the sun through a magnifying glass to burn a hole in a newspaper.

‘I suppose I am.’

‘Would you settle for naughty?’

‘I’d love to, but I don’t think I’d be allowed to. You see, the problem – as I see it – is that you’ve created an energy form separate from yourself, but possessing a few atoms of your transferred… intelligence?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘How far is that from it acquiring a level of existence of its own? A primitive level, perhaps, but then other – possibly negative – energies might be attracted to it. And then you could have trouble that’s not so easy to control: a volatile – a poltergeist. Or worse.’

‘Yes.’ Athena White sat down next to Merrily. ‘I follow your argument. It’s unlikely, though, especially if I’m here.’

‘But… I’m sorry, Athena, but you’re not always going to be here, are you?’

‘He’ll die when I die.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Oh, you are a pain, Mrs Clergyperson. All right, I’ll consider it. But it’ll be a frightful wrench – for all of us.’

‘I’m sure he’ll live on in all your memories.’

‘I’ve said I’ll consider it,’ Athena snapped. ‘Now tell me about Denzil Joy.’

There was a rapping on the door, and Susan Thorpe said, ‘Miss White, is there a woman in there with you?’

‘I’m here, Susan,’ Merrily said. ‘Miss White’s been helping me.’

‘I hope she can keep her mouth shut.’

Miss White said loftily, ‘You may, for once, count on it, Thorpe. Now leave us.’

‘You know I can’t drag the party out much longer.’

‘Well, tell your husband to take his clothes off.’

‘Oh!’ said Susan Thorpe. They heard her footsteps recede.

‘That makes me feel quite queasy,’ Merrily said.

‘Wait till you’re as old as they are.’ Mrs White stood up. ‘Merrily, I’m very disturbed by this. I think he’s feeding off you.’

‘Don’t.’

‘If one doesn’t face these things, one can’t take remedial action. I suspect you haven’t been yourself for some days. Tired? Depleted? Prone to emotional outbursts?’

‘Well, yes, since you ask. And also flu-like symptoms: vaguely sore throat, blocked nose, temperature. I put it down to stress.’

‘Losing the will to fight it?’

‘Half the time I just want to run away. I mean… Well, to be quite honest, this was going to be my last job as Deliverance consultant… diocesan exorcist.’

‘You were giving it up?’ An eyebrow rose above the spectacles. ‘While, under different circumstances, that is a decision one might wish to applaud—’

‘I felt I couldn’t cope. I felt under attack from all kinds of different directions.’

‘As you may well be. This could be precisely what’s happening. How many people know of your appalling experience with this man?’

‘I don’t know. The nurses involved… my daughter, Jane… my Deliverance course tutor. And Canon Dobbs, of course.’

‘As he appeared to have arranged it for you? The sheer ignorance of the clergy dumbfounds me. Who else?’

‘There’s no one else I’ve told, I don’t think. It’s not something I enjoy talking about. What’s the significance of that, anyway? If I mishandled the job in the hospital, and I’ve let him in, that’s not their fault.’

‘Admittedly, the idea of an unhappy spirit desperately clinging at the moment of death to a living person is not unknown, particularly in a sexually charged situation. But I think you must also consider the possibility of psychic attack by person or persons unknown. Which is far far more common than most people would imagine. Merely thinking ill of someone is its most basic form, but we may be looking at something more complex in this instance. If I were to lend you my copy of Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence…’

‘What are you trying to do to me? I’m a Christian.’

‘As was Fortune herself, after her fashion. Merrily, how soon after the incident at the hospital did this unclean presence make itself apparent?’

‘I felt tired afterwards, but that was natural; I’d been up all night. But I don’t think I really became aware of it until I was called in to cleanse a desecrated church.’

‘Interesting. This was during your service?’

‘Well, I didn’t actually… It was before.’

‘When you entered the church?’

‘I…’ Merrily remembered standing outside the church talking to the policemen – with a stiffness and a clamminess in her vestments. Had she felt that in the car on the way there? Possibly.

‘Think back, Merrily. Who were you with when you first experienced something amiss?’

‘Policemen? I don’t know, can’t think. I’m mixed up and a bit anxious because I’m sitting here, a minister of the Church, unburdening myself to a practising occultist who, by force of willpower, has created a haunted house.’

‘Who would you normally go to for spiritual help?’

‘Huw, my course tutor, who was in the church with me when I exhibited what must have seemed to him like many of the symptoms of demonic possession.’

‘In which case, why the blue blazes—?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘All right.’ Athena White placed a hand on Merrily’s knee. It didn’t feel like a cloven hoof. ‘Go home, pull your bed into the centre of the room, and draw a pentacle…’

‘You have got to be joking!’

‘All right, a circle – in salt, or even chalk – around the bed. Perform whatever rite your religion allows, but supplement it, when you’re lying in bed, by visualizing rings of bright orange or golden light around you and above you, so that you are enclosed in an orb of light. Keep that in your mind constantly until you fall asleep. If you awake in the night, visualize it at once, intact. This should bring you unmolested to the morning.’

‘A circle?’

‘Don’t be afraid of it. There is but one God. Consider it heavenly light – angelic.’

Huw and Dobbs? Merrily frowned. She always knew it had to be something like this.

‘Secondly, take the robes – vestments – you were wearing in the church when you were spiritually assaulted and burn them. You could try to bless them or sprinkle them with holy water, but it’s really not worth it. Get rid of them.’

Merrily supposed this made sense.

‘But that is not enough, and you know it, Merrily. Until you trace it to its source and eradicate it, you’re always going to be a magnet for the obscene advances of this earthbound essence. This Denzil Joy. One can almost see him now, bloating your aura. You absolutely cannot afford to rest – indeed, you will not rest because of who you are – until you put him to rest.’

‘Yes, I was going to ring you,’ Dick Lyden said, agitated. ‘The boy’s back already, and he’s not terribly happy.’

‘He’s not happy…’ Lol dragged the phone over to the armchair.

Dick said, ‘Laurence, it was my understanding that Denny’s studio was a proper professional operation – not some Mickey Mouse outfit. You know what this is costing me, don’t you?’

Lol assured Dick that, while this was not the biggest studio around, it was one in which he personally would be delighted to record.

Dick said, ‘As long as it didn’t bloody well blow up, presumably.’

It didn’t blow up, Lol told him. Denny blew up, pressured beyond reasonable resistance by the song they were laying on him. When Denny had heard enough of it, wires became detached.

‘I’m not paying the man to be a bloody critic,’ Dick said. ‘I don’t like any damned song they do either, and I haven’t even heard them.’

Lol said, ‘Do you and Ruth talk about your work much, over the family supper, comparing notes, that kind of thing?’

‘What the hell has—?’

‘For instance, did you talk much about Moon in front of James?’

Dick’s voice dropped like it had been fast-faded. ‘What are you saying?’

Lol said, ‘James, as you may have gathered, isn’t satisfied with an EP – he wants an album. Denny and me, we were a bit underwhelmed by the quality of what we’d heard so far. We suggested the boys run through the rest of their material, so we’d know what we were looking at. Most of it wasn’t wonderful either.’

To be fair, it wasn’t badly played, and the harmonies were as neatly dovetailed as you might expect from newly retired cathedral choirboys. It was the material – derived from the work of second-division bands which were already derivative of other second-division bands twenty years earlier – that didn’t make it. Denny had, in reality, told Lol – behind the protection of thick glass – that they would make a recording of such pristine quality that the deficiencies in the area of compositional talent would stand out like neon.

‘Well, James’s mate Eirion isn’t entirely insensitive.’

‘Really?’ Dick said. ‘His old man runs Welsh Water.’

‘Eirion can tell Denny isn’t impressed, so after about three routine power-chord numbers he gets the band into a huddle, and then he and James sit down with acoustic guitars and they go into this quiet little ballad which James introduces as “The Crow Maiden”. Perfect crystal harmonies – you could hear every word.’

‘Get to the point.’

‘I tend to remember lyrics – remembered the last verse, anyway, so I wrote it down.’ Lol began to unfold a John Barleycorn paper bag. ‘It’s really subtle, as you can imagine – still you’ll probably get the drift. You ready?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake—’

Lol held up the paper bag, and recited:

‘Found your refuge in the past

‘You hid beneath its shade

‘And when you knew it couldn’t last

‘You took your life with an ancient blade.

‘CROW MAIDEN

‘CROW MAIDEN

‘YOU’RE FADIN’

‘AWAY…’

‘Would you like that again?’

You could hear Dick’s hand squeezing the phone.

‘The little shit,’ Dick said.

37 Faeces and Gangrene

FRIDAY MORNING, SIX a.m. A cold morning moon through new glass. And a smell of putty in the vestry at Ledwardine, where Merrily stood before the wardrobe, frozen with indecision.

She had the Zippo. The Zippo would do it.

What are you waiting for?

She hadn’t slept well, but she had slept until five, with – all right, yes – the bed in the middle of the room inside a circle of salt. All of which she’d swept into a dustpan before she left the vicarage, in case she didn’t return before first light and Jane came looking for her, popped her head around the bedroom door and – God forbid!

She was half ashamed, half embarrassed – and had, as soon as she arose, knelt before the window and apologized to God, if He had been offended by the circle and the salt. But she was, in the end, helplessly grateful. For the first time in days, she had not awakened feeling ill, congested, soiled, or worse.

Grateful to whom, though? She’d prayed for a peaceful night, prayed for the soul of Denzil Joy. But it was, to her disquiet, the orange-gold orb of Athena White which had coloured her dreams.

Was she balancing at the top of the slippery slope into New Age madness? Into Jane country? And if she burned the cassock and surplice?

Last night, in her state of compliance at the Glades, half hypnotized by the extraordinary Miss White, this had seemed entirely logical. This morning, she’d been dwelling on it with increasing horror – a bonfire of these vestments was wholly sacrilegious, the most explicit symbolic rejection of her vows.

She’d prayed hard over this one, kneeling under the window, summoning the blue and the gold. Oh Jesus, give me a sign that this is acceptable in Your eyes.

Please God, don’t take it the wrong way. Infantile? God listened to your heart.

You will not rest – until you put him to rest.

Oh, Miss White, so plausible. This career civil servant – very high-powered – who had committed herself to an old folks’ home to develop her inner life. Damned woman, Susan Thorpe had said afterwards, I could have sworn she was downstairs with the others. But you did manage to complete your exorcism? No problem, Merrily had assured her. Miss White was a surprisingly devout believer. One God. Angelic light.

A dabbler? A minister of God was following the advice of a mad dabbler all the way to New Age hell?

Now Merrily stood in the vestry, with no lights on and her torch switched off – after Sunday night’s break-in, Ted probably had vigilantes watching out for signs of intruders. She felt like a thief: the taking and destruction of priest’s vestments… wilful damage… and worse.

Burn them.

Where? On the drawing-room fire? In the garden, like a funeral pyre of her faith?

It was well meant. She had no bad feelings at all about Athena White as a human being. And the advice was… well meant.

And it was insidiously irresistible last night, after Jane had gone to bed, and Merrily had been standing at the sink, filling her hot water bottle and contemplating the night ahead… smelling his smell, feeling his fingers – scritch-scratch… hearing the ratchet wrench as his body snapped upright in its deathbed, the tubes expelled, pip-pop!

And now remembering how Ethel the cat – who, until this week, had habitually slept at the bottom of Merrily’s bed – had once again padded discreetly and faithlessly up the stairs after Jane.

It was then that she’d reached into the cupboard for the drum of kitchen salt. Taking it with her into the scullery-office, where she’d followed the mad woman’s next instruction – Trace it to its source – and called the Alfred Watkins Ward to ask Eileen Cullen for the address of the widow Joy.

And Eileen, puzzled, asking her, ‘Is there a problem there, Merrily, you think? Would it not be a case of blessed relief for the poor woman?’

‘Sometimes it doesn’t work like that,’ Merrily had said. ‘She may even be feeling guilt that she wasn’t there at the end.’

‘That was my fault, so help me, for not telling the poor cow until it was over. All right, Merrily, whatever your secret agenda is, you made a good case. You know your way to Bobblestock district?’

She’d find it. As soon as Jane was off the premises, she would go and find Mrs Joy. She would take the whole Deliverance kit, and fresh vestments in the car boot.

But not these vestments.

She opened the wardrobe and pulled them down. They’d been washed, of course, since the night at St Cosmas. She hung the cassock and surplice over the arm that held the torch, still not switched on. She opened both doors wide and felt around to make sure she’d taken the correct garments.

Which was when she found the man’s suit.

What?

She pushed the torch inside the wardrobe and switched it on. The suit was on a hanger, pushed to the end of the rail so that it was not visible if you opened only one door.

Merrily pushed her head inside to examine the suit. It was dark green, with a thin stripe of light brown, made of some heavyweight material, and well worn. She touched it. It felt damp.

Or moist, more like.

Merrily screamed. She now had her sign.

She stood, retching, in the moon-washed vestry.

The thin smell the suit gave off had reminded a doctor at the General Hospital of cat faeces and gangrene.

It was around eight, cloudy but fog-free, when Lol spotted the boy in Cathedral School uniform lurking below in Church Street. He went down, and the boy came over: a stocky darkhaired boy with an unexpectedly bashful smile. It was Eirion Lewis, son of the boss of Welsh Water.

‘Hoped you might be about, Mr Robinson. I just… didn’t really feel like going to school until I knew where we stood, you know?’

‘Come on up,’ Lol said.

Once inside, Eirion went straight to the guitar. ‘Wow, is that a Washburn? Could I?’

Lol handed Eirion the Washburn and the boy sat down with it, picking out the opening riff to ‘The Crow Maiden’.

‘I have to play bass in the band because James is rather better on this than me.’

‘Like McCartney,’ Lol recalled.

‘Really?’

‘He was the worst guitarist in the band, so he wound up on bass.’

‘Brilliant bass-player, actually. I… You know, I didn’t mean what I said about how he should have been shot. You feel you’ve got to keep up with James’s cynicism sometimes. Like, he’s younger than me, you know?’

‘Right,’ Lol said.

‘I… Mr Robinson, I really don’t have much time. I just sort of…’ Eirion hung his head over the guitar. ‘I don’t know what we did, but we did something, didn’t we? I mean, this is really important to me, this recording. I don’t want to blow it. You know?’

‘Well, it was that song,’ Lol said.

‘This song? “The Crow Maiden”?’

‘Which of you actually wrote it?’

‘We both did. I do the tunes, James does the words. Like, he gives me a poem or something and I work a tune around it – or the other way about. You know?’

‘It’s a bit more, er, resonant than the other stuff, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘James tell you where he got the idea?’

‘I assumed he made it up – or pinched it from some ancient Fairport Convention album or something. Actually, you know, what can I say? I mean… James is a shit, isn’t he?’

‘Oh?’ Lol tilted his head. ‘Why?’

‘He just is, isn’t he? He kind of tells lies a lot. Enjoys getting up people’s noses. Does kind of antisocial things for the hell of it. Well, lately, anyway. God, this is stupid of me; you’re his dad’s mate, aren’t you? You used to kind of work with him, right?’

‘Oh, well, that’s over now,’ Lol said. ‘Nothing you say will get back to James’s old man, OK. “The Crow Maiden”, it’s about Denny’s sister.’

‘Sorry?’

‘She committed suicide last weekend. She cut her wrists with an ancient blade.’

Eirion’s fingers fell from the frets.

‘Mmm,’ Lol said, ‘I can see you didn’t know that.’

At the front door, Jane sniffed. ‘What’s burning out there?’

‘I can’t smell anything, flower. It’s probably from the orchard. Gomer’s been clearing some undergrowth.’

‘Right.’ Jane inspected her mum in the first bright daylight of the week. ‘You’re looking better.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Pressure off now?’

‘Maybe. You’re going to miss the school bus.’

Jane said casually, ‘You know, if things have loosened up a bit, Mum, you really ought to take the opportunity to think about your long-term future.’

‘It’s not a problem, flower. I’ll be going to heaven.’

‘God,’ said Jane, ‘you Christians are so simplistic. ’Bye.’

‘Work hard, flower.’

When the kid was out of sight, Merrily went around the side of the house to check out the garden incinerator. The vestments were ashes. She made the sign of the cross over them.

Then she burned the suit.

Merrily called directory enquiries for the Reverend Barry Ambrose in Devizes, Wiltshire. She rang his number.

‘I’m sorry, he’s just popped round to the church,’ a woman said pleasantly. ‘He’ll be back for his breakfast any minute. I’m Stella, his long-suffering wife. Can I get him to call you?’

‘If you could. Tell him I really won’t keep him a minute.’

‘That’s no problem. He’s talked a lot about you, Merrily, since you were on that course together. He thinks you’re awfully plucky.’

‘Well, that’s… a common illusion. Has Barry done much in the way of Deliverance so far?’

‘Only bits and bobs, you know. He’s still quite nervous about it, to be honest. And you?’

‘Still feeling my way,’ Merrily said.

Waiting for Barry Ambrose to call back, she went to the bookcase in the hall where they kept the local stuff. She plucked out one she’d bought in the Cathedral shop: St Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford: Essays in His Honour. She hadn’t yet had time to open it.

I have been reading, Edna Rees had said, about St Thomas of Hereford.

In the book, several historians explored aspects of the saint’s life and the effect he’d had on Hereford – enormous apparently. Merrily began to read about Cantilupe’s final months, in 1282, after his dispute with the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham.

This seemed to be a bureaucratic argument about one going over the other’s head, further fired up by a clash of temperament. It had ended with Cantilupe being excommunicated and travelling to Italy to appeal personally to the Pope. On the way back, exhausted, he’d collapsed and died – at dusk on 25 August – while still in Italy. As was the custom (Really? Christ!) the body was boiled to remove the flesh from the bones. The flesh was buried at the monastery church of San Severo, the heart and bones were brought back to England by Cantilupe’s steward, John de Clare. The heart was then kept at Ashridge, in Buckinghamshire, at a college of canons, while the bones came back to Hereford.

Where they began to attract pilgrims – thousands of them. When news of the miracles spread – cures of the crippled and the blind – it became the most important shrine in the West of England. And it made this comparatively remote cathedral very wealthy.

Although several of the bones seemed to have been removed as relics before this, it was not until the shrine was destroyed in the Reformation, on the orders of Henry VIII, that they were dispersed. The book recorded, without further comment, a story that during the journey from Italy the ‘persecuted bones’ had bled.

Barry Ambrose called back. She liked Barry: he was inoffensive, hamsterish, an old-fashioned vicar.

‘Hey, Merrily… you heard about Clive Wells?’

The lofty old-money priest who’d sneered at Huw. ‘Should I have?’

‘He’s packed it in,’ said Barry.

‘What, Deliverance?’

‘The lot. He’s apparently planning to emigrate to Canada with his family. Had some experience he wouldn’t talk about to anybody – now he can’t even go into the church. Can’t even pass a church without going to pieces, so they say.’

‘God.’

‘Makes you think, doesn’t it, Merrily. What can I do for you?’

It was, she admitted, a long shot. ‘There’s a girl moved into this area from Wiltshire… Salisbury.’

‘Oh, they’re very doubtful about me in Salisbury. You know what it’s like.’

‘Yeah. No, it’s just… if you happened to hear anything. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. This girl’s called Rowenna Napier. They left the area earlier this year. It was suggested to me that there was something funny in her past which might not seem very funny to a church minister. I’m sorry, that’s it, I’m afraid.’

Barry was unfazed. ‘Well, I’ve got a name – that’s a start, I suppose. I can only roll it along the Cathedral Close and see if anybody picks it up.’

‘Could you?’

‘Give me a day or two. So, how’s it going, Merrily – really?’ She heard the boxy sound of him covering the mouthpiece. ‘I tell you, it scares seven shades out of me sometimes.’

‘Thank God you said that, Barry. Stella gave me the impression you hadn’t been doing too much.’

‘All she knows,’ Barry said with an audible shudder.

Viv arrived at the shop with a Hereford Times.

‘Not too much about Moon, thank Gawd. They haven’t picked up on her father’s suicide, so that’s a mercy. Maybe nobody’s worked there long enough to remember.’

Or else Denny had refused to talk to them, Lol thought, and they were sitting on it till it all came out at the full inquest.

Viv said, ‘Oh, yeah, I talked to my friend who still goes to the Pod. It’s bizarre, but these two girls turn up out of nowhere: your friend’s kid and an older one, right? Patricia, who is like mother superior in the group, says to make this Jane feel at home, she’s a special person, they have to take care of her, she’s got problems at home – this kind of stuff.’

‘Problems at home?’

‘I only mention this… like maybe you don’t know as much as you think. You got something happening with the mother, is that it? Was that her the other day, when you ran outside?’

Lol didn’t answer. Viv had tossed the Hereford Times on the counter, and he’d just noticed the lead headline.

CROW SACRIFICED IN COUNTY CHURCH HORROR

He snatched up the newspaper…

38 Nevermore

‘DO YOU KNOW how many messagesI have left on your machine in the past two days?’ Sophie demanded angrily. ‘Surely, even if you were ill…’

Ill? Yes, she’d been ill. She saw that now. Merrily sat at the desk in the office with the D on the door. Nothing had altered and yet everything had. The white winter sun lit the room. There were things to do.

‘I’m very sorry, Sophie. I’ve behaved very badly.’

It could have been entirely psychological. If her vestments were tainted, however slightly, with Denzil’s insidious musk, it would have a subliminal effect: expanding at moments of high emotional stress or extreme sensitivity – like the buildup to an exorcism in a country church – into a near manifestation. And it would then take root, and arise again at times – like emerging from sleep – when the subconscious was in free-flow.

Whatever, someone out there had tried to break her. But now, deep in her solar plexus, she was feeling the warm, pulsing thrill of redemption.

Sophie wore a royal-blue two-piece woollen suit. Her white hair was tightly bunned. She looked angry and perhaps overtired, but her eyes also displayed a small sparkle of hope. She’d become like a mother, Merrily realized.

‘Merrily, about your resignation e-mail…’

‘Oh, yes. Has the Bishop received that yet?’ She heard the unconcern in her own voice. It didn’t really matter any more whether or not she was the official Deliverance consultant. That was a spurious, manufactured title which conferred no special powers. It was just a beacon for the rat-eyes in the dark.

‘The Bishop doesn’t read his e-mail,’ Sophie said. ‘I read his e-mail, and print out the relevant items and put them on his desk. This is yours, I think. What would you like me to do with it?’

She placed in front of Merrily a sheet of A4.

Dear Bishop,

After long consideration…

Merrily saw what Sophie wanted – how she could make Sophie much happier. ‘Could you wipe it?’ she said easily. ‘I wasn’t really myself, was I?’

Sophie gripped the desk tightly, and then let go.

‘Sophie?’ Merrily stood up, took her arm.

‘I didn’t want you to go, and leave me alone here.’ Sophie swallowed. ‘Sometimes I feel I’m going mad.’

‘That doesn’t sound like you.’

‘I know. Capable, reliable old Sophie – total commitment to the Cathedral. That’s the problem, isn’t it?’

‘What is?’

‘Something in the Cathedral’s going wrong, and I’m afraid Michael…’

Merrily sighed. ‘Might as well say it, Sophie. He can’t see it, can he? He wouldn’t feel it because he has no basic faith or spirituality? Isn’t that what you’re saying: that the Cathedral’s not safe in Mick’s hands?’

Treason.

‘Sophie?’

Sophie brought a finger to her brow, as if to halt a fastescaping thought. ‘We have to talk, Merrily.’

The phone rang on her desk in the other office.

‘Sure,’ Merrily said. ‘Whenever.’

She went in search of Lol. In John Barleycorn, the large, triballooking woman regarded her with some interest.

‘You must be Jane’s mum.’

‘You know Jane?’

‘Not personally,’ the big woman said with an enigmatic smile. ‘But I’ve got daughters, so I know the problem.’

‘Is there a problem?’ What the hell had Lol been saying? Merrily rocked inside with a blinding urge to wipe away all the rumours and gossip and deceit that had gathered in the days of the fog.

And, oh, there was so much to say to Jane and so much to bring out, after a week in which Merrily had felt so scared of her own daughter that the only way she’d been able to approach this issue was behind the kid’s back.

The shop woman smiled to herself, heavy with superior knowledge.

‘Where’s Lol?’ Merrily snapped.

‘Oh.’ The woman recoiled. ‘I think he’s over in the central library. That’s where he said he was going.’

‘Thank you.’

The day had taken a sharp dive into December dusk. She became aware, for the first time, of Christmas lights. Little golden Santas racing across Broad Street on their sleighs, and the warm red lanterns winking a welcome to wallets everywhere.

Christmas in three weeks: goodwill to all men… school Nativity play in the church… afternoon carol service… midnight eucharist. The churchwardens beadily monitoring those big festive collections. Courtesy visits: Glass of sherry for the vicar, Celia. Not too much – don’t want you falling out of the pulpit, ha-ha.

And the core of cold and loneliness at the heart of it all. The huddling together, with drunken bonhomie and false laughter to ward off the dark.

She stopped outside the library, the lights still blinking universal panic over parties unorganized, presents unbought. For Merrily they emphasized a core of darkness in the little city of Hereford, deep and intense. She stood amid the rush-hour shoppers and she felt it in her solar plexus, where the ghost of Denzil Joy – the ghost that wasn’t – had formed an interior fog. And now it was clear.

Lol was coming down the library steps, with a big brown book under his arm.

‘Merrily!’ Santa-light dancing across his gold-framed glasses.

Lol, she wanted to shout, I’m all right. I’m clear.

And rush into his arms.

And I still can’t go to bed with you. We priests don’t do that kind of thing.

‘We have to talk, Merrily.’

Suddenly everybody wanted to talk.

‘Me too,’ she told him, still on that strange, sensitive high. ‘Let’s go to church.’

The vicar of All Saints had a bigger, more regular congregation than the Cathedral’s.

This was because they’d cleared a big space at the rear of the medieval city-centre church and turned it into a restaurant. A good one too. It might not work in a village like Ledwardine, but it had worked here. This church was what it used to be in the Middle Ages, what it was built to be: the centre of everything. It was good to hear laughter in a church, see piles of shopping bags and children, who maybe had never been in a church before, gazing in halffearful fascination down the nave towards the secret, holy places.

They carried their cups of tea to a table. Lol still had the big brown book under his arm. ‘That’s the Holy Bible, isn’t it?’ Merrily said. ‘Go on, I can take it. Excite me.’

‘Not’ – Lol put down the book – ‘exactly.’

On the spine it said, black on gold:

ROSS: PAGAN CELTIC BRITAIN

‘Damn,’ Merrily said. ‘So close.’

‘The crow,’ Lol said.

‘What?’

‘You didn’t tell me about the bloody crow they spread all over the altar at that little church.’

‘Should I have?’

Lol opened the book. ‘Didn’t anyone give a thought to why they would sacrifice a crow?’

‘Lol, we just want to keep the bastards out. We’re not into understanding them. Maybe you should talk to the social services.’

‘Crows and ravens,’ Lol said. ‘Feared and venerated by the Iron Age Celts. Mostly feared, for their prophetic qualities. But not like the you’re-going-to-win-the-lottery kind of prophecy.’

‘ “Quoth the raven, Nevermore.” ’

‘Right. That kind of prophecy – harbingers of darkness.’

‘Being black. The persecution we still inflict on anything or anybody black, how bloody primitive we still are.’

‘In Celtic folk tales, it says here, crows and ravens figured as birds of ill-omen or… as a form taken by anti-Christian forces.’

Merrily sat up.

‘There’s a story in here,’ Lol said, ‘of how, as late as the seventeenth century, a congregation in a house in the north of Scotland that was used for Christian worship… how the congregation was virtually paralysed by the appearance of a big black bird sitting on a pillar, emanating evil. Nobody could leave that house for over two days. They became so screwed up that it was even suggested the householder’s son should be sacrificed to the bird. This isn’t a legend.’

‘Then why, if it inspires so much primitive awe, would anyone dare to sacrifice a crow?’

‘Possibly to take on its powers of prophecy, whatever. That’s been known to happen.’

‘This makes me suspicious,’ Merrily said. ‘You’re doing my job for me. Why are you doing my job?’

‘Because of something that happened with Moon.’

And he told her about the disturbed woman standing on the Iron Age ramparts at Dinedor, with her hand inside a dead crow.

Merrily, thinking, drank a whole cup of tea, then poured more. She stared down the nave into the old mystery.

Lol said, ‘The way she died – I don’t believe she would have killed herself like that. I can’t believe in the reasons. Like the psychological answer, that she was locked into this fatal obsession, so when she found out how her father died it all came to a head. Or the possible psychic theory that maybe Denny’s been turning over in his mind: some lingering dark force which periodically curses his family with madness, and the only way you can make sure of avoiding it is to stay the hell away from Dinedor Hill.’

‘That can happen, Lol. We believe that can happen. Psychology and parapsychology are so very close. But I don’t necessarily buy a connection between what happened to Moon and the crow sacrifice at St Cosmas.’

‘No,’ Lol said, ‘maybe you’re right. Maybe I just saw the headline in the Hereford Times at the wrong time. Crows were on my mind then.’ He closed the book. ‘You look better, Merrily. Tired, but better.’

‘Tired? I suppose I must be. I didn’t realize. I’ve been dashing about. Oh, I took back my letter of resignation.’

‘Figured you might.’

‘Something… gave.’

‘Like, you found out about this guy Huw and old Dobbs.’

‘No, I… still don’t know about that. But I will, very soon.’

‘And Jane?’

‘Inquiries are in hand.’

Lol said, ‘I’ve had Viv in the shop looking into the Pod.’

‘Ah… that explains her.’

‘Apparently – you might find this interesting, not to say insulting – the women were told to look after Jane. That she was a special person with, er, a problem background.’

Merrily stiffened. ‘A special person? She said that? A special person with a problem background? Where did that come from? Who told these women all this?’

‘Don’t know.’

Merrily breathed out slowly.

That night, Lol dreamed he awoke and went into the living room and stood at the window gazing down into Capuchin Lane, which was murky with pre-dawn mist, no lights anywhere.

He knew she was there, even before he saw her: grey and sorrowful, the dress meeting the mist in furls and furrows, her eyes as black as the eyes of the crumbling skulls she held, one in each hand.

I’d like to sleep now, Lol, she said. But the tone of it had changed; there was anguish.

He awoke, cold and numb, in Ethel’s chair. He didn’t remember going to sleep there.

39 One Sad Person

SHE SLEPT THROUGH, incredibly, until almost ten, without any circles of golden light. Without, come to think of it, any protective prayers, only mumbles of gratitude as she fell into bed.

‘Why didn’t you wake me?’

‘Because you were like mega-knackered,’ Jane said. ‘You obviously needed it.’

Merrily registered the toast crumbs. Jane had breakfasted alone. There was weak sunshine, through mist. It looked cold out there.

‘Nobody rang?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Not even Ted? Not Huw Owen?’ She’d called Huw four times last night, to keep herself in line for last-caller if he should try 1471.

‘Uh-huh.’ Jane shook her head. ‘You need a new dressinggown, by the way. You look like a bag-lady.’

‘Not Annie Howe either?’

‘The ice-maiden of West Mercia CID? You can’t be that desperate for friends.’

‘We commune occasionally.’

‘Jesus,’ said Jane, ‘it’ll be girls’ nights out at the police social club next. And guest spots on identity parades.’

‘Jane.’

‘What?’

Merrily pulled out a dining chair. ‘Sit down.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we need to talk.’

‘I can’t. I’m meeting Rowenna in town.’

‘When?’

‘For lunch at Slater’s, then we’re going Christmas shopping. But I wanted to get into town a couple of hours early because I haven’t got her anything yet, OK?’

‘You’re spending a lot of time with Rowenna, aren’t you?’

‘Meaning like more than with you.’

‘Or even boys,’ Merrily said lightly.

Jane’s eyes hardened. ‘That’s because we’re lesbians.’

‘You going to sit down, flower?’

‘I have to go.’

‘Sit down.’

Jane slumped sullenly into the chair. ‘Why do you hate Rowenna?’

‘I don’t know Rowenna. I’ve only met her once.’

‘She’s a significant person,’ Jane said.

‘In what way?’

‘In a way that I’d expect you to actually understand. Like she has a spiritual identity. She seeks wisdom. Most of the people at school, teachers included, think self-development is about A-levels and biceps.’

‘Rowenna’s a religious person?’

‘I think we’ve had this discussion before,’ Jane said loftily. ‘Religion implies organized religion.’

‘Anything else, therefore, must be disorganized religion.’

‘Ah’ – a fleeting faraway-ness in the kid’s eyes – ‘how wrong can you get?’

‘So tell me.’

Jane looked at her, unblinking. ‘Tell you what?’

‘Tell me how wrong I can get. Tell me why I’m wrong.’

‘Again?’ Jane raised her eyes. ‘It has to be a personal thing, right? You have to work at it. Make a commitment to yourself. I mean, going to church, singing a couple of hymns, listening to some trite sermon, that’s just like, Oh, if I do this every week, endure the tedium for a couple of hours, God’ll take care of me. Well, that’s got to be crap, hasn’t it? That’s the sheep mentality, and when you end up in the slaughterhouse you’re thinking: Hey, why didn’t I just get under the fence that time?’

Merrily felt shadows deepening. ‘So you’re under the fence, are you, flower?’

Jane shrugged.

‘Only I had this anonymous letter,’ Merrily said.

‘Was it sexy? Was it from one of those sad old guys who want to get into your cassock?’

‘I’ll show it to you.’ Merrily went over to the dresser, plucked the folded letter out of her bag, handed the letter to Jane. Glimpsing the words brazenly endangering her Soul, as the kid unfolded it.

‘ “Brazenly endangering her soul and yours,” ’ Jane said, ‘ “by mixing with the Spiritually Unclean.” Well, well. Unsigned, naturally. When exactly did this come?’

‘Few days ago.’

‘So you’ve been kind of sitting on it, right?’

‘I’ve had one or two other things to think about, as you well know.’

Jane held the letter between finger and thumb as though it might be infected. ‘Burn it, if you like,’ Merrily said.

‘Oh no.’ Jane carefully folded the paper. Her eyes glowed like a cat’s. ‘I don’t think so. I’m going to hunt down this scumbag, and when I find out—’

‘I think,’ Merrily said, more sharply than she intended, ‘that you’re missing the point. You went to this so-called psychic fair without even mentioning it.’

‘Why? Would you have wanted to come along?’

‘Maybe I would, actually.’

‘Yeah, like some kind of dawn raid by the soul police.’

‘I accept’ – Merrily kept her temper, which would have gone out of the window long ago if they’d been having this discussion last night – ‘that most of the self-styled New Age people at these events’ – selecting her words like picking apples from an iffy market stall and finding they were all rotten – ‘are perfectly nice, well-meaning…’

‘… deluded idiots!’

‘Jane—’

‘I can’t believe this!’ Jane leapt up. ‘Some shrivelled-up, pofaced old fart sends you a poison-pen letter and you secrete it away in your bag and save it up, probably sneaking the occasional peep to stoke up your holier-than-every-bastard-formiles-around righteous indignation—’

‘Sit down, flower.’

‘No! I thought you were behaving funny. You’re bloody terrified, aren’t you? It’s not, like: How dare this old fart point the finger at my daughter? Oh, no, you’re crapping yourself in case this gets back to Michael and you get, like, decommissioned from the soul police! Jesus, you are one sad person, Mother.’

‘Jane…’ Merrily steadied herself on the Aga rail. ‘Would you come back and sit down? Then we can talk about this like… adults?’

‘You mean like priest and sinner. I don’t think so, Merrily. I’m going upstairs to my apartment. I’m going to light some candles on my altar and probably offer a couple of meaningful prayers to my goddess. Then I’m going out. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.’

‘Light a couple of candles? I see.’

‘Maybe four. They say it’s always so much more effective,’ Jane said, ‘coming from a vicarage.’

‘Really?’

Jane turned away and opened the door to the hall.

‘That’s what they say at the Pod, is it?’ Merrily said.

The phone rang in the kitchen just then, and half a second later in the scullery-office. And it went on and on, and Merrily didn’t dare answer it because she knew Jane would be out of the room before she reached the receiver.

‘You’d better get that. It might be Annie Howe,’ Jane said, and Merrily could see she was trembling with rage. ‘She must… she must’ve already taught you everything she knows. About spying on people, undercover investigations… The soul police will never look back – you fucking nosy bitch.’

‘Right! That’s it!’ Merrily bounced off the stove and into the middle of the room. ‘You think you’re incredibly cool and clever and in control of your own destiny, and all this crap. The truth is you’re either a complete hypocrite or you’re unbelievably naive, and has it never entered your head that the only reason this little… sect is interested in you is because of me and what I—’

‘Me! Me, me, me!’ Jane screeched. ‘You are so arrogant. You are soooo disgustingly ambitious that you can’t see the truth, which is that nobody gives a shit for your Church or the pygmies strutting around the Cathedral Close, not realizing what a total joke they are. Your congregations are like laughable. In twenty years you’ll all be preaching to each other. You don’t matter any more. You haven’t mattered for years. I’m just like embarrassed to tell anybody what you do, you know that? You embarrass me to death, so just get off my back!’

The phone stopped. ‘Get out,’ Merrily said.

‘Fair enough.’ Jane smiled. ‘I may be away some time.’

‘Whatever you like. In fact, maybe you could go and stay at Rowenna’s for a few days. I’m sure there are lots of spare bedrooms in Colonel Napier’s mansion.’

Jane paused in the doorway. ‘Meaning what?’

‘Only that you may not know as much about your very best friend as you thought you did.’

‘You’ve been investigating her too? You’ve been checking up on Rowenna?’

Tears spurted into Jane’s eyes, and Merrily took a step towards her. ‘Flower, please—’

‘You keep away from me. You keep away. You don’t care how low you sink, do you, to protect your piddling little reputation?’

‘Get a life, Jane.’

Jane’s smile was horribly twisted. ‘Oh, I will. I will certainly get a life.’ She was whispering now. ‘You see, there’s no way I could ever trust you again, and if you can’t trust somebody, what’s the point? I don’t have to stay at Rowenna’s. There are loads of places I can live. I know lots of people now – like really good people.’

‘That would be really stupid. You’re sixteen years old.’

‘That’s right, at least you can count.’

‘And these are not good people.’

‘What the fuck would you know, Merrily?’ Jane prodded a finger at the air between them. ‘I’ll tell you something. I’d rather sell my soul to the Devil than spend one more night in this mausoleum.’

‘All right,’ Merrily said. ‘Stop right there. I don’t care what you say about me, but don’t ever say that. Just don’t… ever… say it.’

Jane shrugged. ‘Like… come and get me, Satan?’

She tossed back her hair, which wasn’t really long enough to toss, and went out into the hall and Merrily heard her snatching her coat from the peg and then the creak and judder of the front door.

Merrily stood in the centre of the kitchen. After a while, she was aware of Ethel, the black cat, mewing pitifully at her feet. She picked up the cat, and saw that the mist outside was thickening.

The phone rang again.

She’d been hoping the first call would be from Huw. But now she hoped it was Lol. She needed to tell somebody.

‘Merrily? It’s Barry Ambrose.’

‘Oh… Hello, Barry.’ She sat down at her desk in the scullery-office, hoping, just at this moment, that he was calling to say he hadn’t found out a thing.

‘I found out about that girl, Merrily.’

‘Rowenna?’

‘I hope she’s not too close to you, that’s all,’ Barry said.