Midwinter of the Spirit

40 Dark Hand

THE FOG WAS worse in Leominster, which was why the bus was late, the driver explained. Fog, just when you thought you’d got rid of it!

Then again, if the bus hadn’t been late, Jane would have missed it – thanks to the Reverend Bloody Watkins.

She slumped down near the back and felt sick. That was it, wasn’t it? That was really it. There was no way she could go back there tonight. Outside the bus windows, the hills had disappeared, the view of fields extended about fifty yards, and then all you saw were a few tree-skeletons.

Why had she done this to herself? Why hadn’t she just sat it out, mumbled a few apologies about going to the psychic fair and… but that wouldn’t have worked, would it? Mum knew about the Pod. How the hell did she find that out? Was the Pod leaky? Had it been infiltrated by Christians?

This was just like so totally unfair. Jane felt sad and shabby in her old school duffel coat – hadn’t even had a chance to find something else. If you’re storming out, you had to do it, like, now! You couldn’t blow the whole effect by going up to your apartment to change into your tight black sweater and your nicer jeans, or collect your new fleece coat.

Ironic, really. This morning, doing her salute to the Eternal Spiritual Sun, she’d thought: What is this really achieving? And thinking of the women in the Pod, how basically sad most of them looked. And yet the fact that they were so sad completely discredited Mum’s crap about them only being interested in Jane because her mother was this big-time Church of England exorcist.

This was all so mega-stupid. If the bitch hadn’t been so totally offensive, the two of them could have sorted this out. That remark about Jane having no boyfriend, that was just, like, well out of order. Boyfriend like who? Dean Wall? Danny Gittoes? The really humiliating aspect of this was that Mum herself – not long out of leather pants and tops made out of heavy-duty pond-liner – had been pregnant at nineteen, so presumably had been putting it about for years by then.

Life was such a pile of shit.

When they crawled into the bus station behind Tesco, Jane didn’t want to get off. She had her money with her, but she didn’t feel like shopping. Especially while walking around with Rowenna in all her designer items, and Jane in her dark-blue school duffel. What was she going to buy Rowenna, anyway, that wouldn’t cause mutual embarrassment?

She made her way out of the bus station and across the car park, hoping there was nobody from school around – which was too much to hope for on a Saturday close to Christmas. Everybody came into Hereford on Saturday mornings – where else was there to go?

The fog was cold and she didn’t even have her scarf. Tonight it would probably be freezing fog. Suppose Rowenna couldn’t organize her a room, what would happen then? It was a lie, natch, that Jane knew loads of people; she didn’t know anyone in the Pod well enough to beg a bed. Worst-case scenario, some shop doorway in the Maylords Orchard precinct? Or did they have iron gates on that? And then at two a.m. some dopehead comes along and rapes you.

OK, if it came to it, she probably had enough money to get a room in a hotel. Not the Green Dragon obviously, maybe something between that and the pubs where the junkies went to score. Funny how homely old Hereford took on this new and dangerous aspect when you were alone, and destined to stay alone, possibly for ever.

She turned down where the car park dog-legged and the path led through evergreen bushes to the archway under the buildings and into Widemarsh Street… and then Rowenna laughed lightly and said, ‘Why don’t we do it here? We’d be hidden by the fog. That would be pretty cool.’

Huh?

Jane stopped. There were cars parked fairly tightly here, with thick laurel bushes just behind them.

You could tell there were two people in the bushes, standing up, locked together. Jane backed up to the edge of the main car park. Vehicles were coming up out of the tunnel from the underground part, and one of them hooted at her to get out of the way. So she moved to the edge of the undergrowth and flattened herself against the wall.

They probably would never spot her from the bushes, as she couldn’t see them properly either. She wouldn’t have known it was Rowenna but for the voice. She could see the guy better, because he was pretty tall, and from here it looked like most of his tongue was down Rowenna’s throat.

‘Don’t you think this has appalled me too?’ Dick Lyden was raking his thick, grey hair. ‘I can only offer you my profoundest apologies and assure you that it won’t happen—’

‘It fucking has happened,’ Denny snarled, his back to the door of Lol’s flat, as if Dick might make a break for it. ‘It’s done. It exists. If I hadn’t been listening to the words – which I usually don’t – I’d be down as producing it!’

‘Denny, don’t do this to me,’ Dick pleaded.

‘Don’t do it to you?’

Lol was sitting on the window ledge. He had no meaningful contribution to make to this.

‘How old is your boy?’ Dick said to Denny.

‘Eleven – and a half.’

‘I’d like to think you didn’t have this to come, Denny, but at some stage in his adolescent years you’ll wonder what kind of monster you’ve foisted on the world – as well as trying to think what you did to become the object of his undying hatred.’

Sensing that Dick was actually close to tears, Lol said, ‘Did you find out how he came to write that song?’

‘Oh, well,’ Dick escaped gratefully into anger, ‘an artist… an artist gathers his inspiration wherever he may find it. Art is above pity. Art bows to no taboos. You know the kind of balls they spout at that age. I don’t… I don’t actually know what’s the matter with him lately. He’s become remote, he’s arrogant, he sneers, he does small spiteful things. A complete bastard, in fact.’

Lol said, ‘That’s your professional assessment then?’ and Denny finally smiled. ‘The point is,’ Lol continued, ‘that the song isn’t going to be heard any more, because Eirion Lewis says he’ll refuse to play it. He’s not a bad kid, it seems.’ He glanced apologetically at Dick. ‘A bit older than James, so perhaps he’s come through the bastard phase.’

‘In the final analysis,’ Dick said, ‘this is my fault. Ruth and I discuss cases, and quite often the boy’s pottering about with his Walkman on and one thinks he’s not interested. Little swine was probably making notes. It’s a… I suppose a diverting tale, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a family tragedy,’ Denny growled.

‘Denny, I have learned a lesson.’

‘But the crows, man – how the fuck’d he know about the crows?’

‘It’s an old Celtic harbinger of death,’ Lol said quickly, because he’d never actually told Denny about the crow.

Denny looked dazed for a second, then shook himself like he was trying to shed clinging shreds of the past. He moved away from the door, his earring swinging less menacingly. ‘All right, I’ll let them back in, so long as Lol turns the knobs.’

Dick looked at Lol.

‘OK,’ Lol said. Puzzled about what Denny had meant – how the fuck’d he know about the crows? – and still wondering how James could have been so crazy as to sing that song blatantly in Denny’s face. Like the boy needed to see how far he could go, how much he could get away with, how badly he could hurt.

‘Thanks,’ Dick said humbly. ‘Thank you both. You know I… This is going to sound a bit cranky coming from a shrink, but I am a Christian sort of shrink, and I feel that becoming Boy Bishop will somehow help to straighten the lad out.’

‘What is this Boy Bishop balls, anyway?’ Denny said. ‘You hear about it, read bits in the Times, but I never take much notice.’

‘More people ought to take notice or we’ll lose it, like so many other things. It’s a unique example of the Church affirming Christ’s compassion for the lowly.’

‘But it’s always a kid from the Cathedral School,’ Denny pointed out. ‘How lowly is that?’

‘It’s symbolic – dates back to medieval times. The boy is Bishop until Christmas, but doesn’t do much. Gives a token sermon on his enthronement, makes the odd public appearance – used to be taken on a tour of churches in the county, but I think they’ve dropped that. It also illustrates the principle of the humble being exalted. It’s about the humble and the meek… something like that.’

‘The humble and the meek?’ Lol said. ‘That’s why they chose James?’

‘All right, I know, I know. I suppose they chose James because he was a leading chorister. And he’s a big lad, so the robes will fit. And, of course, he, ah, rather looks the part.’

‘Like I said,’ Denny shrugged, ‘it’s basically balls, isn’t it?’

‘I see it as a rite of passage,’ Dick persisted. ‘I don’t think you can do something like that without experiencing a man’s responsibility.’

Lol thought this was not the best time to talk about a man’s responsibility in front of Denny.

But Denny didn’t react. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Tell the kid I can maybe do the studio Monday. I’ll feel better tonight when the funeral’s over.’

When Dick had gone, he said to Lol, ‘I’m still looking for somebody else to blame for Kathy. He just got in the way.’

Lol nodded.

‘I’m closing this shop, by the way,’ Denny said.

‘This afternoon – for the funeral, Viv said.’

‘For good. We close at lunchtime, we don’t open again.’

‘Ever?’

‘I’m shifting the records to the other place tomorrow. And big Viv, too. Extending the shop space into a store-room. If you’re selling hi-fi, it makes sense to have a record department on the premises. This one was never big enough to take all the stock you need to really get the punters in. It was just… Kathy’s shop. I don’t ever want to come here again.’

‘And this flat?’

‘It won’t affect you unless I can’t manage to let the shop on its own, in which case I’ll maybe sell the whole building. Sorry to spring it on you, mate, but nothing’s permanent. You’re not a permanent sort of guy anyway, are you?’

Lol forced a smile.

‘See you at the crem then,’ Denny added. ‘There won’t be a meal or nothing afterwards. Won’t be enough people – plus I’m not into that shit.’

‘Denny,’ Lol said, ‘when you said to Dick, how did he know about the crows, what did you mean?’

‘Leave it.’ Denny opened the door. ‘Like you said, it was nothing, a coincidence. Just the way some things cause you to remember other things. Some memory pops up, and you put it all together wrong.’

‘What memory?’

‘You don’t let go of things, do you, Lol?’

‘Some things won’t let go of me. It’s guilt, probably.’

‘You didn’t like her, did you?’ Denny said.

‘I liked her more towards the end.’

‘You wouldn’t fuck her because you didn’t like her. That’s the truth, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘That’s kind of honourable, I suppose.’

‘No, it isn’t. Tell me about the crows.’

Denny came back in, shut the door. ‘When she was a kid, they used to put her in her pushchair in the farmyard, to watch the chicks and stuff, yeah? And the crows would come. Crows’d come right up to her. They’d land on the yard and come strutting up to the pushchair. Or they’d fly low and sit on the roof, just over the back door. Sit there like vultures when Kathy was there. Only when she was there.’

Lol thrust his hands in the pockets of his jeans and stiffened his shoulders against the shiver he felt. ‘How long did this go on?’

‘Until the old man shot them,’ Denny said.

‘Do you remember Hilary Pyle?’ Barry Ambrose asked her.

‘I don’t think so. Who was she?’

‘He,’ Barry said. ‘It was in some of the papers, certainly the Telegraph, which always seems to splash Church crises. But they didn’t know the whole story. Even I… I didn’t know that was her name until this morning. Where’s she now, the girl you asked about?’

‘She’s at my daughter’s school.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Barry. ‘But then people do sometimes change, don’t they?’

‘If they want to,’ Merrily said, ‘they have to want to. So what happened to this Hilary Pyle?’

‘She did. He was a canon at the Cathedral, forty-five years old, married, with kids. I didn’t know him particularly well, but I assumed he was a sound bloke. Certainly not the kind you’d imagine taking up with a schoolgirl.’

‘Rowenna?’

‘Soldier’s daughter. Wasn’t named in the papers – I think she was underage – in fact I’m sure she was. Fifteen or something. Also there was some question of rape when they first arrested Hilary, so the girl couldn’t be named in the press, but he certainly was.’

‘Now I remember. About two years ago? But he—’

‘Yes. Poor bloke hanged himself in his garage. Leaving a note – rather a long note. Do you remember that? It was read out at the inquest – he’d apparently requested that.’

‘Remind me.’ Merrily felt a stab of foreboding.

‘It was a rather florid piece of writing; he kept quoting bits of Milton. He said the girl was sent by the Devil, and this caused a bit of amusement in the press. Just the sort of thing some clergyman would say to excuse his appalling behaviour. “Sent by the Devil.” She was a pale little thing, they said, but she knew which levers to pull, if you’ll pardon the, er…’

Merrily found she was writing it all down on her sermon pad.

‘You said there was more… other things that didn’t get into the press.’

‘Oh, yes, I’m frankly amazed it didn’t get out. But I suppose the people who knew about it realized what the bad publicity could do. I think it was probably as a result of this that I, of all people, was asked to take on the Deliverance ministry here. They wanted an outsider, someone previously unconnected with the Cathedral. You see, it’s so easy for a panic to spread. Look at Lincoln and the Imp. Look at Westminster. There are always people who’ll look for the dark hand of Satan, aren’t there?’

‘Not us, of course.’

‘Quite.’

‘So what happened?’

‘After Hilary committed suicide, two other canons confessed to the Bishop that they’d also had relations with this girl.’

‘Jesus!’ She hadn’t been expecting that.

‘It was thought there was another one, but he kept very quiet and survived the investigation. Not a police investigation, of course.’

‘Did anybody talk to the girl herself?’

‘Quite frankly, I don’t think anybody in the Cathedral was prepared to go anywhere near the girl. What happened, I believe, was that the Army arranged for her father to be based somewhere else. Hereford, obviously, though no one here knew where they’d gone – nor wanted to. It cast quite a shadow for a while. Perhaps it still does: I know a number of previously stable marriages have gone down the tubes since then. Poor Hilary’s suggestion of something evil had gathered quite a few supporters before the year was out.’

‘Barry, I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘I don’t know what you’re going to tell your daughter, Merrily,’ Barry said, ‘but if she hangs around with Rowenna Napier she might start growing up a little too quickly, if you see what I mean.’

‘I owe you one,’ Merrily said.

Now she was frightened.

41 Take Me

IN SLATER’S, BEHIND Broad Street, Jane had a deep-pan pizza and stayed cool – reminding herself periodically about Dean Wall, the slimeball, on the school bus in the fog, and what he’d said about Rowenna and Danny Gittoes.

Gittoes was Dean’s best friend, and slightly less offensive, but the thought of Rowenna’s small mouth around whatever abomination he kept in his greasy trousers was still pretty distasteful, especially when you knew it could be true.

‘Calm down, kitten.’ Rowenna had a burger with salad, mayonnaise all over it – oh, please.

‘I just lost it completely.’ Jane was sitting with her back to the door and the front windows, watching the cook at work behind a counter at the far end. The problem with Rowenna was that she was so incredibly charming; she gave you her full attention and you felt so grateful she wanted you as a friend.

‘What did you say to her?’

‘I slagged off the Church, rubbished everything that means anything to her. Said she was ambitious and arrogant – and that I’d rather sell my soul to the Devil than spend another night there. I guess this was not what Angela had in mind when she talked about leading Mum towards the light.’

Rowenna laughed. ‘And you didn’t mean a word of it, right?’

‘I meant it at the time.’ Jane cut another slice of pizza. ‘She also said we were spending too much time together. She suggested I should be going out with boys, can you believe that?’

‘That’s uncommon,’ Rowenna said. ‘They’re usually terrified you’re going to get pregnant.’

‘Like… there’s nothing wrong with me,’ Jane said experimentally. ‘I don’t have problems in that area. I’ve had relationships. It’s just there aren’t any guys around right now that I could fancy that much.’ It occurred to her they’d rarely talked about men.

‘The choice is severely limited.’

‘Almost nonexistent.’

‘Sure.’

‘Like, I travel on the bus every day with Wall and Gittoes.’

‘Don’t,’ Rowenna said. ‘I may vomit.’

She grinned, shreds of chargrilled burger on teeth that were translucent like a baby’s. Come on, Jane thought, it might not have been her at all by the car park. It might not.

‘Could we perhaps lighten up now?’

‘I keep thinking of those tarot cards,’ Jane said seriously. ‘You said it seemed like a pretty heavy layout, right?’

‘Kitten, it’s ages since I even looked at a tarot pack. You forget these things.’

‘You don’t forget. Those are like archetypal images. They’re imprinted on your consciousness.’

‘That guy in the denim jacket fancies you.’

‘He’s looking at you. He’s just wondering how to get me out of the way. Death – that was the first of them.’

‘Yeah, but the Death card can also just mean the end of something before a new beginning.’

‘The Tower?’

‘It’s been struck by lightning. There’s a big crack, with people falling off. That speaks for itself really: some really horrendous disaster, something wrenched apart.’

‘Shit.’

‘Or it could just mean a big clear-out in your life: throwing out the stuff that isn’t important.’

‘Like, if I don’t get away, I’ll go down with the Tower?’

‘Say the Tower, in this instance, represents your mother’s faith in this cruel Old Testament God, and you’ve got to help shatter it.’

‘It could have been a prediction of what began this morning, though, couldn’t it? Everything quiet, right? Me getting ready to go out. She’s had this decent night’s sleep for once – well rested, looking much better. And then like, out of nowhere, we’re into the worst row for like… ages. It just blew up out of nothing – like the Tower cracking up. And then I say that thing to her about the Devil. It just came out; I wasn’t thinking. And that… that was the third card.’

‘Don’t panic.’ Rowenna put down her knife and fork. ‘The Devil isn’t always negative either, you know. The Devil was invented by the Christians as a condemnation of anybody who thought that they, the Christians, were a bit suspect. But actually the Devil’s vital for balance in this world.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Living with a vicar, you’re bombarded with propaganda. But when you look at the situation, all the Devil represents is doing what you want, not what you’re told. Satan is just another word for personal freedom. So maybe Satanists are just people who don’t like rules.’

‘That’s a bit simplistic, isn’t it?’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘OK, what about the low-lifes who killed that crow in the church?’

‘So?’

‘Well, that’s got to be evil.’

‘OK,’ Rowenna said. ‘One, there’s nothing to say they killed the crow. Two, it was a church nobody uses – a redundant church, right? Three, what’s the difference between that and any normal protesters who disagree with what something stands for and go in and trash the place? Suppose these are just people who are seriously pissed off at how rich the Church of England is – and how totally useless, like the House of Lords… a complete con to keep people in order.’

‘Well… maybe.’

‘There’s no maybe. That was your subconscious talking. Your inner self crying out to be free by coming out with the most outrageous thing possible in a vicarage, right?’

‘Or I just wanted to get up her nose.’

‘You’re back-pedalling. You didn’t plan what you wanted to say before it came out, so it has to be an expression of your innermost desire to be free. Listen, do it.’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘There you go again. Put up or shut up. So do it: give yourself to the Devil. You just stand up and open your arms, and you breathe, in your most seductive voice: Lord Satan, take me…’ Rowenna giggled. ‘It’s just words, so it can’t harm you… but it’s also an invitation to your inner self to throw off the shackles. I reckon if you actually said that in a church, you’d get this amazing buzz.’

‘No thanks.’

‘See’ – Rowenna pointed her knife – ‘you’re just completely indoctrinated. You will never escape.’

Jane was uncomfortable. She’d felt cool and superior when she’d first come in, but now Rowenna had turned the tables. She was a wimp again, a frightened little girl.

‘Ro,’ she said. ‘Any chance of sleeping at your place tonight? I can’t go back, can I?’

‘Sure you can go back. Take Satan with you. By which I mean, go back with your head held high, with a new attitude.’

‘It would just be one night.’

‘Oh, kitten…’ Rowenna sighed. ‘That could really be a problem. We have this diplomat from the Middle East staying with us. I’m not supposed to even tell you this, because there are a lot of people want this guy dead. It’s a security job – and we’re the safe-house, you know what I mean? Armed guys in vans parked outside all night? It’s really, really tedious.’

‘Oh.’

‘It happens to us quite often. It means that anybody wants to stay with us, they have to be vetted weeks in advance in case something crops up.’

‘What am I going to do?’

Rowenna leaned over and squeezed Jane’s wrist. ‘You know your problem? You worry too much. You still have this deeply constricted inner-self. OK, the Pod will help sort that eventually – and I mean eventually.’

‘What’s wrong with the Pod?’

‘Nothing. It’s fine as far as it goes. It’s merely a reasonable outlet for bored housewives too timid to have an affair. You must have realized that by now.’

‘I thought it was quite heavy, actually.’

Rowenna smiled sympathetically. ‘Listen, I have to go now. Go on, ask me where. You’re gonna like this.’

‘Huh?’

‘The Cathedral.’

‘I thought we were going shopping!’

‘Yeah, me too,’ Rowenna said ruefully. ‘I just forgot what day it was. I have to meet my cousin, who—’ Rowenna looked up. ‘Who’s this?’

‘Where?’

‘Guy looking at you through the window.’

‘You tried that one earlier,’ Jane said.

‘He’s not bad actually, if you’re into older men. He’s wearing black. He’s all in black. I think he’s coming in.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ Jane bit off a corner of pizza. ‘It’s fucking Satan, right?’

‘He is. He’s coming in for you.’

A draught hit the back of Jane’s ankles as the door to the street opened.

Just when Merrily was in no mood to talk to him, Huw rang.

‘How are you, lass?’

‘I’m OK.’

‘I’ve rung a few times,’ Huw said. ‘I’ve prayed, too.’

‘Thanks.’

‘What’s been the problem?’

As though they’d spoken only last night and parted amicably.

‘Rat-eyes,’ Merrily said, ‘probably.’

‘Oh aye?’ No change of tone whatsoever.

She told him calmly that she had been the subject of what seemed to be a psychic attack. She told him it had now been dealt with.

‘This was what came with you into St Cosmas?’ Huw said.

‘I believe so.’

‘And it’s dealt with?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re clean, then?’

‘I believe I am. How about you?’

Huw left a pause, then he said, ‘About the hospital – I went in last night and I got a bollocking from an Irish nurse with a very high opinion of you. I said I shared that, naturally.’

‘And explained to her why you and Dobbs were shafting me?’

‘I assured her I would explain the situation fully to you at the earliest possible opportunity. Which is why I’m ringing. Can I meet you tonight?’

‘I don’t know,’ Merrily said. ‘I have other problems.’

‘Happen I can help.’

‘Happen I don’t want you to.’

‘Merrily…’

‘What?’

‘We have a crisis.’

‘Who’s we?’

‘You, me, your Cathedral – the C of E.’

‘Do you want to come here?’

‘We’ll meet in your gatehouse at six. We’ll be alone then?’

‘All right,’ she said.

Lol held open the passenger door of the Astra for her. He slammed it shut and got in the other side.

Jane stared at him, coming down off her high. ‘Where are we going?’

He started the engine, put on the lights, and booted the ancient heap out into the traffic. ‘To a funeral, I’m afraid.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Yeah, I’m kidding. I always wear a black suit on Saturdays.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ Jane said. ‘It’s Moon, isn’t it?’

Lol turned right, towards Greyfriars Bridge. She was making a point of not asking him why he’d just swanned into the restaurant like that – looking quite smooth, for Lol. It had been cool, anyway, to play along. Cool, too, that the extreme warmth of her welcome appeared to have shocked him a little.

She grinned. ‘I frightened you, didn’t I?’

‘There’s effusive,’ Lol said, ‘and there’s effusive.’

‘Darling, as it happens I was glad to see you.’ There was no way Lol would let her spend the night in C & A’s doorway. ‘What was her face like?’

‘Whose?’

‘Rowenna’s. I couldn’t see, could I? I was busy expressing my delight at your arrival.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I can still taste the mozzarella.’

‘So how did she react?’

‘She looked surprised.’

‘Excellent,’ Jane said.

Lol crossed four lanes of traffic at the lights, foot down. He must be running late. She suspected there were aspects of Lol’s relationship with Moon she didn’t fully understand. Of course, the problem here was that if he’d taken time to come and find her, in his funeral suit, that suggested he was acting on specific instructions from the Reverend Watkins. In the end you couldn’t get away from her, could you?

‘You weren’t just passing, were you, Lol?’

‘Your mum told me where you were having lunch.’

‘Great,’ Jane said dully.

‘She said you’d had a row.’

‘It was a minor disagreement.’

‘Like between the Serbs and the Croats.’

‘What else did she say?’

‘She said a lot of things I’m inclined to let her explain to you personally.’

‘Look,’ Jane said, more harshly than she intended, ‘tell her to fax it or something. I’m not going back.’

‘You bloody are, Jane.’

‘You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to.’

Lol turned left into the crematorium drive. ‘You’re right.’ He sighed. ‘I probably can’t even trust you to stay in the car while I go inside.’

God, he looks so kind of desolate.

‘Yes, you can,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Lol.’

Denny had been wrong. The modern crematorium chapel was at least half-full. Distant relatives, he explained to Lol – nosey bastards whose faces he only half remembered. Also, a pair of archaeologist friends of Moon’s from Northumberland, where she’d lived for a couple of years. And Big Viv and her partner, Gary. And the Purefoys, Tim and Anna. And Dick and Ruth Lyden.

And Moon, of course. Moon was here.

Denny had booked a minister. ‘Though she’d probably have preferred a fucking druid,’ he said, seeming uncomfortable and aggressive. He wasn’t wearing his earring; without it he looked less amiable, embittered. He looked like he wanted to hit people. His wife Maggie was here, without the children. She was tall, short-haired and well dressed, and talked to the relatives but not much to Denny. He must be difficult to live with right now.

The minister said some careful things about Moon. He said she was highly intelligent and enthusiastic, and it was a tragic loss, both to her brother Dennis and his family and to the world of archaeology.

Denny muttered and looked down at his feet. Anna Purefoy wept silently into a handkerchief. They sang two hymns, during which Lol gazed at the costly oak coffin and pictured Moon inside it, with her strange, hard hands crossed over her breast. To intensify the experience in this bland place, to make it hurt, he made her say, I’d like to sleep now, Lol.

It hurt all the more because he knew that was wrong. She couldn’t sleep. He kept thinking of his dream of the mist-furled Moon in Capuchin Lane, holding the broken heads of the ancestors as she’d held the crow. A dream… like the dreams she’d had of her father. Moon had joined not the ancestors but the grey ranks of the sleepless. When the curtains closed over the coffin, there were tears in Lol’s eyes because he could not love her – had not even been able to help her. It was a disaster.

And it was not over.

Outside, in the foggy car park, Dick Lyden said to Lol, ‘Never seen you in a suit before, old chap,’ then he patted Denny sympathetically on the arm. Denny looked like he wanted to smash Dick’s face in. Lol found the slender, sweet-faced Anna Purefoy at his side.

‘I feel so guilty, Mr Robinson. We should have positively discouraged her. We should have seen the psychiatric problems.’

‘They aren’t always easy to spot,’ Lol said.

‘I taught at a further-education college for a year. I’ve seen it all in young women: manic depression, drug-induced psychosis. I should have seen her as she really was. But we were so delighted by her absorption in the farm that we couldn’t resist offering her the barn. We thought she was perfect for it.’

‘You couldn’t hope to understand an obsession on that scale,’ Lol said. He realized it was going to be worse for the Purefoys than for anyone else here, maybe even for Denny. They would have to live with that barn. ‘What will you do with it now?’

‘I suspect it will be impossible to find a permanent tenant. We’d have to tell people, wouldn’t we? Perhaps we could revert to our original plan of holiday accommodation. I don’t know, it’s too early.’

‘Well, good luck,’ Lol said. He wondered if Merrily might be persuaded to go up there and bless the barn or something. He watched the Purefoys walk away to their Land Rover Discovery. Denny’s wife, Maggie, was chatting to an elderly couple, while Denny stood by with his hands behind his back, rocking on his heels. A lone crow, of all birds, flew over his head and landed on the roof of the crematorium, and stayed there as though it was waiting for Moon’s spirit to emerge in the smoke, to accompany it back to Dinedor Hill.

But nobody could see the smoke in this fog – and the way to Dinedor would be obscured. He imagined Moon alone in that car park, after everyone had gone. Moon cold in the tatters of her medieval dress – bewildered because there was nobody left. Nobody left to understand what had happened to her.

The Astra was parked about fifteen yards away. As he approached, Jane’s face appeared in the blotched windscreen, looking very young and starved. He tried to smile at her; she looked so vulnerable. It was cold in the car as he started the engine.

She said, ‘Lol, that woman you were talking to…’

‘Mrs Purefoy?’

‘The blonde woman.’

‘That was Moon’s neighbour and landlady, Anna Purefoy.’

He drove slowly out of the car park on dipped headlights.

Jane said, ‘You mean Angela.’

‘I thought it was Anna. I could be wrong.’

‘Moon’s neighbour?’

‘On Dinedor Hill. They own the farm where she died.’

After a while, as the car crept back into the hidden city, Jane said, ‘Help me, Lol. Things have got like horribly screwed up.’

42 The Invisible Church

THE GOLDEN SANTAS drove their reindeer across a thick sea of mist in Broad Street. The lanterns glowed red like fog warnings. In the dense grey middle-distance, the Christmas trees twinkling above the shop fronts were like the lights of a different city.

And Merrily, alone in the gatehouse office, with the Cathedral on one side and the Bishop’s Palace on the other, felt calmer now because Lol had called her before she left. Because Jane was with Lol in the flat above John Barleycorn, not three minutes’ walk away, and maybe Lol would now find out how far it went, this liaison with the wan and wispy Rowenna, serial seducer of priests.

Scrabbling about under Sophie’s desk, she found an old two-bar electric fire with a concave chrome reflector, plugged it in and watched the bars slowly warm up, with tiny tapping sounds, until they matched the vermilion of the lanterns outside.

Merrily stood by the fire, warming her calves and watching the lights. They were all part of Christmas, but anyone who didn’t know about Christmas would not see them as linked.

She thought about that devil-worshipper pulled from the river not half a mile from here… the strings of crow-intestine on a disused altar… the inflicted curse of Denzil Joy… the old exorcist lying silent, half-paralysed – or faking it – in a hospital bed inside a chalked circle. And, inevitably, she thought of Rowenna.

Linked? All of them? Some of them? None of them?

After a while she spotted the untidy man – in bobble-hat, ragged scarf, RAF greatcoat – shambling out of the fog, with his exorcist’s black bag, and wondered how many answers he could offer her.

Jane had decided to clean up Lol’s flat: ruthlessly scrubbing shelves, splattering sink-cleaner about, invading the complexity of cobwebs behind the radiators.

A purge, Lol thought.

Just as they were hitting the city centre, she’d asked if they could go somewhere: the village of Credenhill, where the poet Traherne had been vicar in the seventeenth century. Where the SAS had, until recently, been based. And where, just entering dusk, he and Jane had found the perfectly respectable but undeniably small Army house where Rowenna’s family lived. Until the last possible moment, Jane had been vainly searching for some rambling, split-level villa behind trees.

She’d stood for a long time at the roadside, looking across at the fog-fuzzed lights of the little house with the Christmas tree in its front window. ‘Why would she lie? Why would she think it mattered to me if she lived in a mansion or bloody tent? Why does she lie about everything?’

On the way back, Lol considered what Merrily had said on the phone about Rowenna’s sexual history. It had made him look quickly – but very hard – at the girl over Jane’s shoulder in Slater’s. Rowenna was pale, appeared rather fragile – fragile like glass.

Once they were back in his flat, he’d told Jane about the events in Salisbury.

Jane had listened, blank-faced, silent. Then she stood up. ‘This flat’s in a disgusting state.’

Lol sat with Anne Ross’s Pagan Celtic Britain open on his knees, and let Jane scrub violently away at the kitchen floor and her own illusions. In the book, he read that crow-goddesses invariably forecast death and disaster.

At last, Jane came back from the kitchen, red-faced with exertion and inner turmoil.

Lol put the book down.

‘I’m not going to be able to live with any of this,’ Jane announced.

‘But you still shafted me.’

Merrily was feeling her fury reignite – reflected in the red glow of the tinking electric fire, the sparky glimmerings from the Santas over Broad Street.

Trust in God, but never trust a bloody priest.

‘You claimed you hardly knew him.’

Huw had taken off his scarf, but left his woolly hat on. They were sitting at opposite ends of Sophie’s long desk under the window. Huw was just a silhouette with a bobble on top. You had to imagine his faded canvas jacket, his shaggy wolfhound hair.

‘I don’t know Dobbs,’ Huw said, ‘and I never tried to shaft you.’

She shook her head and lit a cigarette, staring out of the window. It was after six now and the traffic was thinning out. A granny and grandad kind of couple were walking a child down Broad Street towards All Saints, the child between them hopping and swinging from their hands under the decorations.

‘I’m trying to explain,’ Huw said. ‘I want to give you a proper picture, as far as I can see it. They didn’t want me to tell you, but there’s no way round that now, so balls to them.’

‘Who didn’t?’

‘The canons, the Dean’s Chapter – well, not officially. None of this is official.’

‘No kidding.’

‘Two fellers came to see me. No,’ raising a shadowy hand, ‘don’t ask. But they’re honourable blokes.’

‘As Mark Antony once said.’

‘Jesus!’ Huw thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘Merrily, there is no conspiracy. These lads are scared. They didn’t know what Dobbs was at, but it put the wind up them. Give us one of them cigs, would you?’

She slid the packet across the desk to him. ‘Didn’t know you did.’

‘You know bugger all about me – nor me about you, when we cut to the stuffing. Ta, lass.’ Huw shook the packet, extracted a cigarette with his teeth. ‘The Devil, what’s he like these days?’

‘What?’

‘The Devil, lass.’

Merrily said, ‘Forked tail, cloven hooves, little horns – deceptively cuddly. And we invented him to discredit the pagan horned god Cernunnos. This is what Jane tells me, over and over.’

‘Canny lass.’ Huw extended his cigarette towards her Zippo, and in its flare she saw his grainy bootleather features flop into a smile. ‘Like her mam.’

‘Thank you.’

And then the smile vanished. ‘So…’ He drew heavily. ‘What do you believe?’

‘I do accept the existence of a dark force for evil,’ Merrily said steadily.

Huw nodded. ‘Good enough.’

When he had first arrived, she’d told him about the projection of the fouled phantom of Denzil Joy: how they’d done it, how well it had worked. She’d told him about the burning of the vestments, and the eucharist she planned for Denzil and Denzil’s mute, abused wife. She was telling him because she needed him to know she was clean, able to deal with things.

Huw started now to talk about evil in its blackest, most abstract form. Evil, the substance. How it was always said that the deepest evil was often to be found in closest proximity to the greatest good. How Satanists would despoil churches for the pure intoxication of it, the dark high it gave them.

‘And does that explain St Cosmas?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve not told Dobbs about that. He smelled it on me, mind, that night. Knew I’d just done an exorcism. Happen that’s what got him talking.’

‘Ah,’ Merrily sat up, ‘so Dobbs has talked to you.’

‘Only in bits, till last night. The other times he were weighing me up, getting the measure of me. See, what he’s done is he’s shut himself down, boarded himself up, put himself into a vacuum. Working out whether he was going to snuff it or be fit enough to go back. I figured it was my job to give him the space he needed. To see he wasn’t pestered – you know what I’m saying?’

‘You sealed him into a kind of magic circle.’

‘Protective circle: the invisible church. Magic is where you use your willpower to bring about changes in the natural pattern, to rearrange molecules. We ask God to do it, if He thinks it’s the right thing – which is subtly different, as you know.’

‘Protecting him from what? The Devil? What, Huw?’

‘I wanted to bring you in on it, Merrily, honest to God I did. I hated going behind your back. But the Dean’s lads are saying no way, no way. It’s the last thing Dobbs’d want. They don’t like the Bishop and you’re the Bishop’s pussycat.’

‘Terrific.’

‘You know that’s not what I think, so stuff the Dean. Let’s talk about this; I really don’t know how much time we’ve got. I’ve not come across it before in any credible situation.’

‘What?’

A shadow had dropped over the room, like a cloth over a birdcage. Merrily saw that a line of golden Santas had gone out over Broad Street.

‘We think there’s a squatter in the Cathedral,’ Huw said.

So, like, how could she go back to that school on Monday and be in the same room with the lying slag? The same building? How?

Lol said, without much conviction, that maybe it was best not to leap to too many conclusions.

‘Yeah?’ Jane collapsed on to the rug. ‘Like which particular conclusions is it best to avoid, Lol? Should I maybe like hang fire on the possibility that Rowenna wants to be my best friend for reasons not entirely unconnected with my mother?’

‘No, that’s valid.’

‘Is she real, Lol? Is she psychotic? Is there a word for women who need to shag priests?’

‘Janey, if we were merely talking about a psychological condition, it would make it all so much simpler. She hasn’t been anywhere near Merrily, has she?’

‘Just the once.’

‘All right,’ Lol said, ‘let’s go back to when you first knew her. This must be before your mum became an exorcist. When did she make the first approach?’

‘She didn’t. It was me. This was when she first started at the school, right? Before her, the last new girl there was me, and I know what it’s like when you come in from out of the area and they’re all kind of suspicious of you. I went over to talk to her, and we just got on. That’s it.’

‘Did she know about Merrily?’

‘Pretty soon she did. See, one of her most… attractive qualities is she likes talking about you. She listens, she asks questions, she laughs at the things you say. She’s sympathetic when you’ve got problems at home. You are the most interesting person in the world when you’re with Rowenna.’

‘You tell her everything.’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said gloomily. ‘You tell her everything.’

‘How soon before the psychic things, the New Age stuff?’

‘I don’t know. It just happened. You’re talking all through the lunch hour, then you discover she’s got her own car, so she gives you a lift home. But, yeah, when I found out she was interested in like otherwordly pursuits, that was the clincher. Soul-mates! It’s just like so brilliant when you find somebody you can talk to about that stuff, and they’re not going: Yeah, yeah, but where do you go on Saturday nights? It just never occurs to you to be suspicious, you’re so delighted. And when she says, Hey, there’s this psychic fair at Leominster, you don’t go, Oh, I’d better ask my mum, do you?’

‘What happened at the psychic fair?’

‘We met Angela.’

‘Mrs Purefoy?’

‘If you say so. Although, when I look back, was she really doing the psychic fair? How do we know she read anybody else’s cards? See, it was Rowenna who first mentioned the fair. It was Rowenna who, when we’d been there a while and it was getting cold and boring, suggested we consult a clairvoyant in the nice warm pub. It was Rowenna who said she’d had a call from Angela wanting to see us again. I will struggle for a long time against things I don’t want to believe, Lol, but when the cracks start to appear…’

‘What was Angela like?’

‘Really, really impressive – not what you were expecting. Very smooth, very poised, very articulate and kind of upperclass. Like, you felt she had your best interests at heart at all times. And, of course, you believed every damn word she said.’

Lol smiled.

‘She said I had extraordinary abilities.’

‘Which, instinctively, you knew.’

Jane scowled.

‘I suppose she recommended you should develop them.’

‘She put me in touch with a group called the Pod.’

‘Meeting over the healthfood caff in Bridge Street.’

‘It was you then. I thought you hadn’t spotted me.’

‘If you’d been your usual friendly little self,’ Lol said, ‘I probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it. So what happens at the Pod?’

‘It’s good actually. It’s just about building up your awareness of like other realms.’

‘Nothing heavily ritualistic?’

‘Not at all. In fact – here we go – Rowenna’s already suggesting it’s kind of low-grade stuff. God, it’s so transparent when you start seeing it from another angle.’

‘It’s not really. It seems quite sophisticated to me. They introduce you into a group full of nice, amiable women who mother you along, don’t scare you off…’

‘So the Pod are part of this?’

‘I don’t know. They seem fairly harmless. Somebody apparently suggested you’d be an asset. That’s what I was told.’

‘Because of Mum? What is all this?’

‘It’s just about women clerics, I think,’ Lol said. ‘They’re still new and sexy, and it’s the biggest and most disruptive thing to happen in the Church for centuries. Angela’s involved with the Pod, right?’

‘I don’t actually think so. She’s never’s been to a meeting in the short time I’ve been going.’

‘She mention your mum?’

‘She said Rowenna’d told her. She said she was annoyed about that because she thought it was ethically wrong – some bullshit like that – to know things about people you were doing readings for. And, yeah, she’s like, “Oh, I can’t tell you anything tonight after all, I’ve probably got it all wrong” – until I’m begging her. And then all this stuff that I have to tease out of her and Ro, about needing to lead Mum into the light. And they’re dropping what now seem like really broad hints that if I don’t, some disastrous situation will develop. They just want to like… corrupt her, don’t they?’

‘I suppose so,’ Lol said. ‘And Merrily’s right: they’re getting at her through you. Whatever you might think, you’re the most important thing in her life. That must be obvious to them – you being the only child of a single parent.’

‘Who’s them?’

‘I don’t know. The idea of all these evil Devil-worshippers targeting priests, it just sounds so… and yet…’

‘We have to do something, Lol. I’m just like so boiling up inside. It’s like I’ve been raped, you know? We…’ Jane sprang up. ‘Hey! Let’s go and see Angela! Now we know who she is, let’s just turn up on her doorstep and, like, demand answers.’

‘No!’

‘Why not?’

‘Not yet, anyway.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’ve got to think about this.’

Jane frowned. ‘This is about Moon again, isn’t it?’

43 Deep Penetration

HUW LIFTED HIS black bag up on to the desk, switched on the lamp, and took out a fat paperback.

Merrily recognized it at once. The Folklore of Herefordshire (1912) by Ella Mary Leather had been, for several months, Jane’s bible, introduced to her by the late Lucy Devenish, village shopkeeper, writer of fairytales for children and a major source of the kid’s problematic interest in all things New Age. It was a formidable collection of customs and legends, gathered from arcane volumes and the county’s longest memories.

Huw opened it.

SECTION IV

SUPERNATURAL PHENOMENA

(1) WRAITHS

Visitors, it would have said now, in Huw-speak.

Mrs Leather revealed that all over Herefordshire it was accepted – at least in 1912 – that the wraith of a person might be seen by relatives or close friends shortly before or just after death. The departing spirit was bidding farewell to the persons or places most dear to it; this was stated as a matter of fact. It seemed amazing that it had taken less than a century for believers in ghosts to be exiled into crank country.

Huw turned the page and pushed the book directly under the desk lamp for Merrily to read. He said nothing.

(3) DEMONS AND FAMILIAR SPIRITS

A Demon in the Cathedral

A very strange story of the appearance of a demon in the Cathedral is told by Bartholomew de Cotton. The event is supposed to have happened in AD 1290.

An unheard of and almost impossible marvel occurred in the Cathedral Church of the Hereford Canons. There a demon in the robes of a canon sat in a stall after matins had been sung. A canon came up to him and asked his reason for sitting there, thinking the demon was a brother canon. The latter refused to answer and said nothing. The canon was terrified, but believing the demon to be an evil spirit, put his trust in the Lord, and bade him in the name of Christ and St Thomas de Cantilupe not to stir from that place. For a short time he bravely awaited speech. Receiving no answer, he at last went for help and beat the demon and put him in fetters; he now lies in the prison of the aforesaid St Thomas de Cantilupe.

She looked up. ‘Who was Bartholomew de Cotton?’

‘No idea.’

‘Where’s the prison of St Thomas?’

‘Don’t know. Bishops did have their own prisons, I believe.’

‘So what does it all mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Huw. ‘It could be an allegorical tale to put the knife in for one of the clerics. Could simply be some penniless vagrant got into the Cathedral and nicked a few vestments to keep himself warm, and it got blown up out of all proportion.’

‘Or?’

‘Or it could be the first recorded appearance of the squatter.’

Merrily became aware of a thin, high-pitched whine nearby. Possibly the bulb in the desk lamp, a filament dying.

She realized fully now why Huw used all these bloody silly words: visitor, hitchhiker, insomniac. It was because the alternatives were too biblical, too portentous.

And too ludicrous?

‘So a squatter,’ Merrily said, ‘is your term for a localized demon – an evil spirit in residence.’

‘If I were trying to be scientific I’d cobble summat together like potentially malevolent, semi-sentient forcefield. Or I might’ve called it a sleeper, but that doesn’t sound noxious enough. You know what a sleeper is, in espionage?’

‘It’s a kind of deep-penetration agent, isn’t it? Planted in another country years in advance, to be awoken whenever.’

Deep-penetration, Huw liked that. Made it sound, he said, like dampness. And it was very like that – in so deep, it was almost part of the fabric. It could be lying there for centuries and only the very sensitive would be aware of it.

‘Like an imprint,’ Merrily suggested.

‘With added evil. Evil gathers around a holy place, like we said. The unholiest ground, they used to say, is sometimes just over the churchyard wall. But if it gets inside, you’ll have a hell of a job rooting it out. It’s got all those centuries of accumulated devotional energy to feed on, and it’ll cause havoc.’

‘But if you accept that this was an evil spirit, how could this canon beat it and put it in fetters? That argues for your first suggestion – that the canon caught some vagrant who’d stolen the vestments.’

‘Or the entire story’s metaphorical. It suggests he was able to bind this evil by ritual and the power of the Lord, and also…’

‘St Thomas Cantilupe.’

‘Aye,’ said Huw, ‘there we have the link – the key to it all.’

The whining in the bulb was making her nervous. It was like a thin wire resonating in her brain.

‘Thomas Cantilupe.’ Huw leaned back, and his chair creaked. ‘Tommy Canty – now there were a hard bastard.’

The Norman baronial background, the years in government, the initial ambition to be a soldier. ‘And you could still think of him as one,’ Huw said. So he already had the self-discipline and, on becoming a bishop of the Church, had taught himself humility – and chastity.

‘He went to Paris once and stayed wi’ a feller, and the feller’s wife – a foxy lady – contrives to get into bed wi’ Tommy. Tommy rolls out t’other side, pretends he’s still asleep. Next morning she asks him how he slept and he tells her he’d have had a better night if he hadn’t been tempted by the Devil.’

Merrily thought of Mick Hunter under the aumbry light. And then she thought of herself and Lol: how close she’d come, in her near despair, to slipping into Lol’s bed.

‘Tommy Canty,’ said Huw. ‘No sleaze. No risks. Warrior for the Lord. What would your lad Hunter have made of him?’

Both fast-track, Merrily thought. Cantilupe had come straight in as bishop. No weddings and funerals for him, presumably. But, yes, in spite of that they’d probably have hated each other’s guts.

‘But think what Cantilupe did for this town,’ Huw said. ‘Most of the religious establishments along the border were well into debt during that period. After St Thomas’s day, Hereford Cathedral never looked back. They were adding bits on to the building, all over the place. Pulling power of the shrine meant thousands of pilgrims, hundreds of accredited miracles, cripples brought in droves.

‘If you were too sick to get to Hereford, you were measured on a length of string and they brought that instead. I don’t know how it worked, but it did. You believe in miracles, Merrily, don’t you? I bet Hunter doesn’t.’

‘Who can say? Look, the demon story – how long had Cantilupe been dead by then?’

‘About eight years. And the shrine’s power was near its peak. How could that demon get in? Was it brought in by one of the pilgrims? Was it already there and something activated it?’

‘Like a sleeper?’

‘Aye, exactly. But, thank God, the unnamed medieval canon, and the power of Christ channelled through the Cantilupe shrine… they contained it. Imprisoned is the word. Not killed or executed, but imprisoned.’

Merrily experienced one of those moments when you wonder if you’re really awake. Mrs Straker, the aunt, had said Rowenna Napier lived in what she would call a fantasy world. But what would she call this? Where was it leading?

‘Tommy Canty’ – Huw liked saying that, maybe a Northerner’s need for familiarity, as if he and the seven-centuries-dead St Thomas wouldn’t be able to work together unless they were old mates – ‘guardian and benefactor of Hereford. Must have been a mightily good man, or there’d be no miracles. Now his bones have all gone, but he’s there in spirit. His tomb’s still there’ – Huw suddenly leaned towards her, blocking out the lamplight – ‘except when it’s not…’

‘Oh.’ She felt a tiny piece of cold in her solar plexus.

‘Know what I mean?’

‘Except when it’s in pieces,’ she said.

And the image cut in of Dobbs lying amid the stones, arms flung wide, eyes open, breathing loud, snuffling stroke-breaths.

‘I want to show you something else.’ Huw bent over the bag, his yellowing dog-collar sunk into the crew-neck of his grey pullover. He brought out a sheaf of A4 photocopies and put them in front of Merrily. She glanced at the top sheet.

HEREFORD CATHEDRAL: SHRINE OF ST THOMAS

CANTILUPE

Conservation and Repair: the History

‘You know what happened when he died?’

‘They boiled his body, separated the bones from the flesh. And the heart—’

‘Good, you know all that. All right, when the bones first arrived in Hereford, they were put under a stone slab in the Lady Chapel. You know about this, too?’

‘Tell me again.’

‘That was temporary. A tomb was built in the North Transept and the bits were transferred there in the presence of King Edward I – in, I think, 1287. The miracles started almost immediately, and petitions were made for Tommy to be canonized, but that didn’t happen until 1320. That’s when he got a really fancy new shrine in the Lady Chapel – which, of course, was smashed up during the Reformation a couple of centuries later, when the rest of the bones were divided and taken away.’

‘So the present one is… which?’

‘It appears to be the original tomb, which seems to have been left alone. According to this document, one of the first pilgrims wrote that he’d had a vision of the saint, which came out of the “image of brass” on top of the tomb. We know there was brass on this one, because the indent’s still visible. Now, look at this.’

Huw extracted a copy of a booklet with much smaller print, and brought out his reading glasses.

‘This is the 1930 account of the history of the tomb, and it records what happened the last time it was taken apart for renovation, which was in the nineteenth century. Quotes a fellar called Havergal, an archaeologist or antiquarian who, in his Monumental Inscriptions, of 1881, writes… can you read this?’

Merrily lifted the document to the light. A paragraph was encircled in pencil.

This tomb was opened some 40 years ago. I have an account written by one who was present, which it would not be prudent to publish.

Huw’s features twisted into a kind of grim beam. ‘You like that?’

‘What does “not prudent” mean?’

‘You tell me. I’d say the person who wrote that account was scared shitless.’

‘By what they found?’

‘Aye.’

‘But the bones had all gone, right?’

‘People aren’t frightened by bones anyroad, are they? Least, they wouldn’t be in them days.’

‘You’re presuming some… psychic experience?’

‘The squatter,’ Huw said. ‘Suppose it was an apparition of the squatter in all his unholy glory.’

‘Oh, please…’ Merrily shuddered. ‘And anyway, nothing happened when they opened it this time, did it?’

‘No. And why didn’t it?’

‘How can I possibly…? Oh, Huw… Dobbs!’

And backwards and forwards from the Cathedral he’d go, at all hours, in all weathers, said Edna Rees. I’d 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.

‘Dobbs exorcized this thing?’

Huw shrugged. ‘Contained it, he reckons – like that canon in the thirteenth century – with the help of St Thomas Cantilupe in whose footsteps our Thomas had so assiduously followed. Until he was struck down.’

Memories of that night snowballed her. Sophie Hill: He’s just rambling. To someone. Himself? I don’t know. Rambling on and on. Neither of us understands. It’s all rather frightening… George Curtiss: My Latin isn’t what it used to be. My impression is he’s talking to, ah… to Thomas Cantilupe.

And the atmosphere in the Cathedral of overhead wires or power cables slashed through, live and sizzling.

‘Dobbs modelling himself on his hero, Tommy Canty,’ Huw said. ‘Keeping his own counsel, thrusting away all temptation… keeping all women out of his life? Making sense now, is it, lass?’

The whining from the lamp was unbearable now, like the sound of tension itself. She was afraid of an awful pop, an explosion. Although she knew that rarely happened, she felt it would tonight.

‘He fired his housekeeper of many years, did you know that? She didn’t know what she’d done wrong.’

‘Strong measures, Merrily, measuring up to Tommy Canty. Very strict about ladies – not only sexually. He kept all women at more than arm’s length, with the exception of the Holy Mother. See, what you have, I reckon, is Dobbs inviting the mighty spirit of Cantilupe to come into him. Happen he thought they could deal with it together.’

‘That’s what he told you?’

‘In not so many words. Not so many words is all he can manage.’

‘You’re saying that when it emerged that the Hereford Cathedral Perpetual Trust had finally managed to put enough money together to renovate the tomb, Dobbs was immediately put on his guard, suspecting something had happened when the tomb was last opened.’

‘He knew it happened. He told me exactly where to find this document. He told me where to look in Mrs Leather’s book. All right, it’s not much, and that’s the end of the documentation, but just because that eye-witness account was never published doesn’t mean it hasn’t been passed down by word of mouth.’

‘Which is notoriously unreliable. All right, what did happen when they opened the tomb this time?’

Huw smiled. ‘When you’ve been with that owd feller a while, you learn he doesn’t like talking. And when he does, there are words he won’t use. Me, I’ll ramble on about squatters and visitors and the like, but Dobbs’ll just give you funny looks.’

‘Helpful.’

‘I don’t know, Merrily. I don’t know that he’s prepared to even think, at the present time, about what it was gave him the stroke. It’s part of shutting down.’

‘So who contained the’ – she couldn’t bring herself to use the word demon, either – ‘squatter, last century?’

Huw shook his head. ‘Don’t know. But if you carry on with this theory, you’ve got two explanations. One is that the then exorcist, or somebody at least, was ready for it. Two is that all you had was a single terrifying manifestation; that there wasn’t sufficient energy around on that occasion for it to take up what you might call serious occupation.’

‘So why should it now? What’s changed?’

‘Jesus Christ, Merrily, you can ask me that?’ He held up a hand against the window, and began counting them off on his fingers. ‘One, the recent Millennium: two thousand years since the birth of Our Lord, and a time of great global religious and cosmic significance. Two, the appointment of a flash, smartarse bishop who doesn’t believe in anything very much…’

‘You can’t say that!’

‘Have you questioned the slippery bastard in any depth, lass? Has anybody? Three—’

Merrily could stand it no longer and clicked off the whining lamp, dipping them back into reddened darkness. Outside, she noticed, a third row of golden Santas had gone out – as if the whole of this end of town was suddenly beset by destructive electrical fluctuations because of what they’d been discussing.

Madness! Stop it!

‘And three is…’

Huw paused.

‘You,’ he said.

44 A Candle for Tommy

‘I KNEW SHE was going to be trouble,’ Sorrel said to Lol.

Patricia would have been the best, but Jane had no idea where she lived, didn’t even know her last name. Sorrel was the one they got because there weren’t many Podmores in the phone book. Sorrel who lived at Kings Acre, in the suburbs, but wouldn’t let Lol come to see her there. She hadn’t wanted to see him at all, until he mentioned police.

‘How old is she?’ Sorrel had finally agreed to meet him at the café in Bridge Street. They sat at one of the rustic tables, with the window blinds down. They sat under the Mervyn Peake etchings of thin, leering men and the fat witch with the toad.

‘Thirteen,’ he said, just to scare her.

Sorrel was plump and nervous. She closed her eyes on an intake of breath. ‘We didn’t know – no way we knew that. She said she was working. We thought she was seventeen at least.’

‘Does she really look seventeen?’

‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’ Sorrel threw up her hands. ‘This should not have happened. We’re a responsible group. We have a strict rule about children.’ She looked hard at Lol. ‘You’re Viv’s friend, aren’t you – the songwriter? She said—’

‘And a friend of Jane’s mother’s,’ Lol said. ‘Her mother the vicar.’

Sorrel paled. Lol was starting to feel sorry for her.

‘This could cause a lot of damage if it got out,’ Sorrel said. ‘I mean damage to the business. You know what people are like. They don’t understand about these things. They’ll think we’re using children for weird rituals. It could close us down – I mean the café.’

‘Mmm.’ Lol nodded.

‘I mean, I’ve got kids myself. And my husband, he doesn’t… It’s got out of hand, you see. They started calling it the Pod only because they were meeting here. It just grew out of healthy eating and Green issues. I’m not really that involved, but the name’s linked now, and it’s very hard for me to… to…’

‘Look,’ Lol said, ‘I realize this is not your fault. You had pressure put on you, right?’

Sorrel didn’t answer.

‘So maybe it’s whoever put on the pressure I need to talk to.’

‘Please’ – she was actually looking scared now – ‘can’t you just leave it?’

‘I wish I could, but her mother’s in the clergy. Things are difficult enough for women priests.’

‘How did she find out?’

‘An anonymous letter.’

‘Bastards,’ Sorrel said.

‘You know what I think, Sorrel? I think you suspected Jane was quite young, but somebody else put the arm on you to take her into the group, and you weren’t in a position to refuse. Who would that have been?’

Sorrel bit her lip.

‘Was it Angela?’

‘I don’t know any Angela.’

‘Anna Purefoy?’

‘Oh Christ.’ Sorrel stood up and walked to the counter, picked up a cloth and began scrubbing Today’s Specials from a blackboard, her back turned to Lol.

He stood up. ‘I gather she’s not actually in the group.’

‘She doesn’t need to be.’

‘Why’s that?’

She turned to face him. ‘Because they own this building.’

‘The Purefoys?’

‘The building came up for sale when our lease had only about six months to run. The chemists next door were going to buy it to extend into, so it would’ve been… over for us. Then suddenly the Purefoys bought it. They knew one of our members…’ Sorrel began to squeeze the cloth between her hands. ‘Mr Robinson, I don’t want to talk about this. I really do need this café. My husband’s about to be made redundant, we’ve got a stupid mortgage… I’m sorry about Jane, but she’s not been with us long, there’s been no harm done. Nothing to interest the police, really.’

‘Quite a bit to interest the press.’

‘What do you want? I’ve said I’m—’

‘How well do you know Rowenna?’

‘I don’t. No more than I know Jane. All right, a bit more. She’s picked up messages here and things.’

‘From whom?’

‘We have a notice-board, as you can see. People leave messages.’

‘And some that aren’t on the board, maybe?’

‘There are no drugs here,’ Sorrel said firmly.

‘I never thought there were. I don’t even assume the Pod gets up to anything iffy. What I think is that maybe Jane will meet other people who aren’t regular members, and she’ll get invited to – I don’t know – interesting parties. And Rowenna makes sure she goes to them, and at these parties there are maybe some slightly off-the-wall things going on, and before you know it her mother receives some pictures of Jane, well stoned and naked on a slab. Just call me cynical, but I used to be in a band.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘You know it’s not.’

Sorrel threw the cloth down. ‘So what do you… want?’

‘I want to know about Anna Purefoy.’

‘I don’t know anything about her.’

‘OK.’ Lol stood up and moved towards the door. ‘Thanks for all your help.’

‘But I… I know somebody who might help you.’

He turned and waited.

‘She used to be our teacher – before Patricia. When she heard the Purefoys had bought this building, she stopped coming. She may or may not need some persuading. But I can tell you where to find her.’

‘In Hereford?’

‘About twenty miles out,’ Sorrel said. ‘If she’s still alive, that is.’

By the time they left the gatehouse, half the street’s Santas and lanterns seemed to have gone out. You felt as though you were on the bridge of a ship leaving port at night, gliding slowly away from the lights.

‘I’m sorry, lass,’ Huw said, ‘but think about it. What does the smart-arse iconoclast new Bishop do first? He breaks a twothousand-year convention by appointing a female exorcist. In a city which history has shown to be periodically in need of a good guard dog, he…’

‘Swaps his Rottweiler for a miniature poodle?’

‘I’ve gone far enough down that road, luv. Don’t want me throat torn out. All I’m saying is that the combination of all these factors – and maybe others we don’t know about – could be felt to be having a dissipating effect. And a weakened body invites infection. Well, I’m telling you how Thomas Dobbs sees it.’

They walked across the green towards the huge smudge of the Cathedral.

‘And you,’ Merrily asked him, ‘what do you believe?’

‘Wait till we’re inside.’

She was struck, as always, by the hospitality of the place: the stones of many colours, almost all of them warm; the simplicity of the arcade of Norman arches; the friendly modern glitter of the great corona, which always seemed to be hanging lopsided, although it probably wasn’t. She knew nothing about medieval architecture, but it just felt right in here.

Ancient centre of light and healing.

They went directly to the North Transept, deserted except for one of the vergers, a tubby middle-aged man in glasses who looked across, suspicious, then relaxed when he saw Huw’s collar and recognized Merrily.

He raised a hand to them. ‘Anything I can do?’

‘I’ve got a key, pal.’ Huw indicated the partitioned enclosure. ‘We’ll be about ten minutes.’

‘I’ll have to stay in the general vicinity,’ the verger said, ‘if you don’t mind. The Dean’s been a bit on edge since that slab was reported stolen.’

Huw stopped. ‘What was that?’

‘I’d forgotten all about it,’ Merrily said. ‘A chunk of one of the side-panels, with a knight carved on it – it’s missing.’

‘Oh no,’ the verger said, ‘it isn’t missing. Somebody must have made a mistake – miscounted. When the mason was in here this morning, he confirmed everything was there. Quite a relief, but it did make us think a bit more about security.’

Huw said, ‘Do you know which piece it was? Which knight?’

‘No idea, sir. The masons will be back on Monday. They’ll now be able to put St Thomas together again. Too late, unfortunately, for the Boy Bishop ceremony. It’ll be the first time he won’t be able to pay his respects.’

‘Boy Bishop?’

Merrily briefly explained about the annual ceremony and its meaning, while Huw unlocked the padlock with what apparently were Dobbs’s keys. She saw where rudimentary repairs had been carried out since George Curtiss had kicked his way in.

Huw surveyed the dismantled tomb, looking more or less as it had the afternoon Merrily and Jane had stood in here with Neil, the young archaeologist. Segments of a stone coffin; knights in relief, with shields and mashed faces. ‘What happens at this Boy Bishop ceremony then, lass?’

‘Never been to one. Harmless bit of Church pageantry, I’d guess.’

‘Is it?’

‘Harmless? Any reason why it shouldn’t be?’

‘Everything worries me tonight.’ Huw shoved his hands into the pockets of his greatcoat. ‘Especially this missing stone business. First a stone’s missing, then it’s not. Church masons don’t miscount.’

‘Which means it’s either still missing…’

‘Or it’s back. In which case, where’s it been meanwhile?’

She wondered for a moment if he meant that the stone had been somehow dematerialized by the demon. Then she realized what he did mean.

‘Hard to comprehend, especially seeing it like this,’ he trudged around the rubble, ‘that this box was once the core of it all. If you try and imagine the amount of psychic and emotional energy – veneration, desperation – poured into this little space over the centuries…’

‘You can’t. I can’t.’

‘And then imagine if – while it was away – that same stone had hot blood and guts spilled on it.’

‘Huw!’

‘And then it was brought back?’ He shrugged. ‘Just a thought.’

Merrily looked up at the huge, lightless, stained-glass window, and saw the dim figure of a knight pushing his spear down a dull dragon’s throat.

‘All right, what would happen if the balance tilted – if the dominant force in here was the force of evil?’

‘Even a bit of evil goes a long way. Take all the aggro they’ve had over at Lincoln Cathedral. Terrible disruption, hellish disputes, and bad feeling and bitterness among the senior clergy. And consider the number of people who put all that down to evil influences emanating from this little old carving in the nave known as the Lincoln Imp. A thousand sacred carvings in that place – and one imp, know what I mean?’

‘Yes.’ Merrily was wondering what damage had been caused at Salisbury by Rowenna’s sexual forays into the canonries.

‘Had a few rows here too, mind,’ Huw recalled. ‘You remember – could be this was before your time – when the first contingent of Hereford women priests staged a circle-dance here in the Cathedral?’

‘I read about it. They were supposed to have been gliding around trancelike, caressing the effigies on bishops’ tombs, which some fundamentalists thought was a bit forward and rather too pagan.’

‘Bloke who organized it, he said it were simply to introduce women to the Cathedral as an active spiritual force for the first time in its history. So as to make their peace with the old dead bishops. The Bishop at the time, he went along with it, but Dobbs went berserk, apparently. It were said he went round from tomb to tomb that night, like an owd Hoover, removing all psychic traces of the she-devils.’

‘Devils?’

‘I exaggerate.’

‘You have a problem with circle-dancing?’

‘Not especially. But I don’t rule out there might be a problem. Cathedrals are just not places you bugger about with, without due consideration. You walk carefully around these old places.’

Merrily found herself wondering what a demon would look like. She tried to imagine one in canon’s clothing, but all she could conjure was the crude cartoon image of a grinning skull, its exposed vertebrae vanishing into a dog-collar. What was the image with which Dobbs – if only in his own mind – had been confronted in the seconds before his stroke?

She thought of the lightning impression of Denzil Joy ratcheting up in her own bed. What if she’d been old, with a heart condition?

‘What are we fighting here, Huw? Your malevolent, semisentient forcefield – and what else? Who else?’

‘I wish I knew. But if Dobbs knew the significance of the dismantled tomb – and it’s been in the newspaper enough times, so other folk did too. And we’re not just talking about the headbangers now.’

He looked at Merrily.

‘Who, then?’ she asked.

Huw scratched his head. ‘Happen the ones with knowledge, and seeking more. Higher knowledge – the knowledge you can’t get from other men. And you won’t get it from God or His angels either, on account of you’re not meant to have it. But demons are different: you can command a demon if you’re powerful enough. Or you can bargain with it.’

‘They found one headbanger floating in the Wye,’ Merrily said. ‘That’s not been released by the police yet, so don’t, you know… but a man whose body was found in the Wye, with head injuries, kept a satanic altar in his basement. With a big poster of the Goat of Mendes, and American stuff, dirty satanic videos, all that.’

‘When was this, lass?’

‘Couple of weeks ago. He was from Chepstow. The police are trying to identify his contacts in satanic circles – without conspicuous success.’

‘Where in the Wye?’

‘Just along the river from here, near the Victoria Bridge. Any relevance, do you think?’

He shook his head. He didn’t know any more than she did. She needed to stop regarding Huw as the fount of wisdom, and start thinking for herself. If the possibility of arousing the demon of Hereford Cathedral had already become an occult cause célèbre, perhaps Sayer had been in here that night.

Merrily was cold and confused. This was all getting beyond her comprehension, and the sight of the empty, segmented tomb was starting to distress her.

She was glad when Huw said, ‘Let’s light a candle for Tommy,’ and they moved out of the enclosure.

There was a votive stand which had previously been sited next to the tomb when it was intact. All its candles were out, so she passed Huw her Zippo and he lit two for them. The little flames warmed her momentarily.

He touched her elbow. ‘Let’s pray, eh?’

She nodded. They knelt facing the partition and the ruins of the shrine. One of the candles went out. She handed Huw the Zippo again, and he stood up and relit the candle. Merrily put out a hand, feeling for a draught from somewhere. No obvious breeze.

As Huw stepped back, the second candle went out.

He waited a moment then applied the lighter to the second candle. As the flame touched the wick, the first candle went out.

A thin taper of cold passed through Merrily, and came out of her mouth as a tiny, frayed whimper.

Outside, in the fog-clogged and freezing night, Huw said, ‘Watch yourself.’

Merrily was shivering badly.

‘What I’m saying is, don’t feel you’ve got summat to prove.’

‘Li… like… like what?’

‘You know exactly what. If anything happened, and you thought the sanctity of the Cathedral was at risk, you might just be daft enough to go in there on your own, to call on Tommy Canty and Our Lord to do the business.’

‘I don’t think I w… would have the guts.’

She felt naked, as though the fog was dissolving all her clothing like acid. She wanted Jane to be with her, and yet didn’t want Jane anywhere near her.

‘Listen to me: it were playing with us, then. It’s saying, I’m here. I’m awake. You asked me what I believe. I believe there’s an active squatter in there.’

‘Suppose it was subjective… Suppose… the c… candles… Suppose that was one of us?’

‘Then it was acting through one of us. You’ll need extra prayers tonight, you know what I mean?’

‘But what do we do, Huw?’

‘A negative presence in the Cathedral itself? We might well be looking at a major exorcism, which in a great cathedral would require several of us, probably including – God forbid – the Bishop himself. Meanwhile, my advice to you, for what it’s worth, is not to go in there alone.’

‘Huw, I—’

‘Not by night nor day. Not alone.’

Her forehead throbbed. She thought of what Mick Hunter had said that seemingly long-ago afternoon in the Green Dragon. I NEVER want to hear of a so-called major exorcism. It’s crude, primitive and almost certainly ineffective.

She wished, at that moment, that Huw had taken the advice of the Dean’s Chapter, and left the Bishop’s pussycat well out of this. She felt she would never have the nerve to light a candle again.

‘You know what you’ve got to do now, don’t you, Merrily?’

‘Go and talk to Mick.’

He put his big hand on her shoulder. ‘He likes you. You’re his favourite appointee. Tell him what’s squatting in his Cathedral. Tell him what’s got to happen.’

45 All There Is

FOR THE FIRST time, it looked like a real palace. There were many lights on, hanging evenly and elegantly in the foggy night. Several cars were parked tightly up against the deep Georgian windows.

Merrily hesitated.

Well, of course she did.

She remembered the end of day three of the Deliverance course in the Brecon Beacons – the lights in the chapel going off, the video machine burning out. Odd how all these power fluctuations seemed to occur around Huw.

First law of Deliverance: always carry plenty of fuse wire.

She’d wanted him to come with her to the Palace. Got to be joking, lass. A lowly rural rector from the Church in Wales creeps on to Hunter’s patch and diagnoses a demonic presence in the man’s own Cathedral? That would get me a big row, and a stiff complaint to the Bishop of Swansea and Brecon. And certainly no action. That would be the worst of it – no action at all. Best he doesn’t know about me. That way, if he doesn’t get involved, happen I can organize something on the quiet. Be a bit of a risk, mind, but it’s a critical situation.

She’d wanted Huw to come and stay the night at Ledwardine vicarage, but he’d said he had to think. First put some mountains between himself and Hereford, then think and meditate – and pray.

She’d watched him walk away under the darkened Santas, into the fog, winding his scarf around his neck. And she wondered…

Fourth one in two years, Huw had said as she’d looked into the scorched mouth of the ruined video. It’s a right difficult place, this.

And It were playing with us, he’d said just now, as the serial snuffing of votive candles threw shiver after shiver into her, convincing Merrily, without a second thought, of his claim that there was a squatter in the Cathedral.

She stood cold and doubt-haunted on the lawn before the Palace, her shopping bag full of supporting documents lying on the grass by her feet. The night seemed as heavy as Huw’s greatcoat around her.

Suppose it was him? What, after all, was a priest but a licensed magician?

And where did this squatter story have its origins? Dobbs, perhaps – the man who had made a point of never once speaking to her directly; who had sent her that single cryptic note; who had made her a little present of Denzil Joy. A man, too, with whom Huw had spent long hours. Had they talked about Merrily? Huw hadn’t said – but how could they have avoided it?

She looked up to where the sky began, below the tops of the chimney stacks.

Help me!

She was only aware that she must have shouted it aloud into the unyielding night when the white door opened, and there, against the falling light was…

‘Merrily? Is that you?’

The Bishop himself, in tuxedo and a bow-tie of dark purple.

‘Merrily!’

‘I…’ She started forward. ‘Can I see you, Bishop?’

‘Mick,’ he reminded her softly. ‘Come in, Merrily.’

She felt the pressure of his hand between her shoulder blades, and found herself in the chandeliered splendour of the Great Hall. Doric pilasters, a domed ceiling at the far end, like God’s conservatory. She was blinded for a moment, disoriented.

The Bishop blurred past her to a table, pulling out two velvetbacked chairs.

‘No,’ she said, her nerve gone. ‘This is terrible. I’m interrupting something. Could I come back early tomorow, perhaps? Oh, God, tomorrow’s Sunday…’

‘Merrily, relax. It’s a perfect, timely interruption of a terminally tedious dinner party with some oleaginous oafs from the City Council and their dreary wives. Val will sparkle all over them until I return. Sit. You look terribly cold. A drink?’

‘No, please…’ She sat down, feeling like a tramp next to the Bishop, with his poise and his elegance. ‘I just need your help, Mick.’

He listened without a word. Twenty minutes and no interruptions.

She talked and talked – except when she dried up.

Or fumbled in her bag for Mrs Leather – a book of local folklore: collected nonsenses.

Or for the report by the late Mr Havergal on the opening of the Cantilupe tomb in the mid-nineteenth century, an eyewitness description of which it had been considered imprudent to publish.

Or for her cigarette packet, which she gripped for maybe ten seconds, as though the nicotine might be absorbed through her stimulated sweat glands and made to flow up her arm, before she let it drop back into her bag.

It was an impromtu sermon given before an expert audience. A dissertation combining medieval theology with the elements of some Hollywood fantasy-melodrama. An exercise in semicontrolled hysteria.

‘I can’t… won’t… ask you to believe the unbelievable. But I’m trying to do the job that you asked me to do… although… it’s… led in directions I could never have imagined it would. Not so soon, anyway. Probably not ever, if I’m honest. But it’s a job where you have to rely on instinct, where you never know what is truth and what’s…’

Tests. Lies. Disinformation.

‘And I’m reporting back to you in confidence, because those are the rules. And you’re probably thinking what’s the silly bitch doing disturbing me at home on a Saturday night, with dinner guests and…’

Looking up at him, wanting some help, but getting no reaction.

‘You must wonder: is she overtired? Has she gone bonkers? The bottom line’ – looking up at the twinkling chandelier, half wishing it would fall and smash into ten thousand crystal shards; that something would happen to make him afraid – ‘is that I believe we should do this cleansing. And that you should be there. And the Dean, too. And as many canons as you feel you can trust.’

The Bishop’s expression did not alter. He neither nodded nor shook his head.

‘It could be carried out in total secrecy, late at night or, better still, early in the morning, at four or five o’clock. It would take less than a couple of hours. It’s… Consider it a precaution. If nothing happens, then either it was successful or it wasn’t necessary. I don’t care if people say later that it wasn’t necessary. It doesn’t matter that…’

A door opened and Val Hunter stood there in black, dramatic. ‘Michael?’

‘Five minutes.’ He lifted one hand.

With a single, long breath down her nostrils, Val went away without even a glance at Merrily.

The Bishop waited until his wife’s footsteps had receded, then he spoke. ‘Have you finished, Merrily?’

She nodded, dispirited.

‘Who was it?’ he said. ‘Come on, it’s either Dobbs, or the Dean – or, more likely, Owen. Who put you up to this?’

All three, she thought miserably. ‘Circumstances,’ she said at last. ‘A lot of individually meaningless circumstances.’

He gave a small sigh. ‘But I’d rather you didn’t list them.’

‘All I can say is I believe my suggestion is valid. We can’t afford to take any risk.’

‘Risk of what?’

‘Of the Cathedral being contaminated.’

‘Tell me, Merrily, who would conduct this major exorcism?’

‘That would be your decision.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘of course.’ He shifted position, looking out through the long windows to the floodlight beams across the lawns, turned to milk chocolate by the fog. ‘May I list once again your items of evidence? From the felling of Thomas Dobbs in the North Transept, to the apparently supernatural extinguishing of two votive candles.’

‘I never said any of that was evidence.’

‘Of course you didn’t. You were merely reporting to me. The decision must be mine – on the advice of my female exorcist, the appointment of whom I was strongly advised against.’

‘At the time, I didn’t know that.’

‘You didn’t? You really didn’t? Oh come, Merrily…’

‘Silly of me. Arrogant, perhaps.’

‘Yes,’ the Bishop said, ‘that’s certainly how it’s going to look when someone leaks to the media that, within weeks of your appointment, you advised me to have my cathedral formally exorcized.’

‘I know.’

‘If you want to go the whole hog, why not have the ceremony conducted entirely by – and in the presence only of – women priests? Obviously, that wouldn’t offend me, being a radical.’

‘Mick, you know there’s nothing political—’

‘Nothing political? Are you quite serious? Tell me, Merrily, do you want to become the subject of a hate campaign in the diocese, as well as receiving an unflattering profile in the Observer and any number of politely vitriolic letters to the Church Times? Do you want to move, quite quickly, to a new and challenging ministry on the other side of the country?’

‘No.’

‘And do you want to damage me?’

Silence. A dismal, head-shaking silence.

Merrily said, ‘So you’d like me to resign?’

Mick Hunter grinned, teeth as white as the Doric pilaster behind him. ‘Certainly not. I’d far prefer you to go home, have a good night’s sleep, and forget this ill-advised visit ever occurred. It isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me, and it won’t be the last time it happens to you. Let it serve to remind you that people like us will always have opponents, enemies, within the Church.’

‘Mick, don’t you think this is far too complicated and too… bizarre to be a set-up?’

‘Oh, Merrily, I can see your experience of being set up is really rather limited. My advice, if you’re approached again by the source of this insane proposal, is that you tell him you questioned the wisdom of informing me and decided against it.’

‘Making it my decision to say no to an exorcism.’

‘It’s a responsible role you now have, Merrily. Learning discrimination is part of it. Or you could go ahead with it, without informing me – which would, of course, were I or anyone else to find out, be very much a matter for resignation. But I don’t think you’d do that, because you don’t really believe any of this idiocy any more than I do. Do you, Merrily?’

‘I don’t know.’ She put her face in her hands, pulling the skin tight. ‘I don’t know.’

Mick stood up and helped her to her feet. ‘Get some sleep, eh? It’s been a difficult week.’

‘I don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘How can I know?’

‘Of course you don’t know.’ He put an arm around her shoulders, peered down into her face, then said, as if talking to a child, ‘That’s what they’re counting on, Merrily, hmm? Look, if I don’t go back and be pleasant to the awful councillors, Val will… be very unhappy.’

At the door, she sought out and held his famous blue eyes.

‘Will you at least think about it?’

‘I’ve already forgotten about it, Merrily,’ he said. ‘Good night. God bless.’

The fog seemed to be lifting, but the grass was already stiff with frost. The Cathedral was developing a hard edge. She crossed the green and walked into Church Street. The door in the alleyway beside the shop called John Barleycorn was opening as she reached it.

‘Hi.’

‘Hello, flower.’

Jane stood outside in the alley, no coat on, her dark hair pushed back behind her ears. Face upturned, she was shivering a little.

‘I lied.’

They stood about five feet apart. Merrily thought: We all lie. Especially to ourselves.

‘I don’t have anywhere else to sleep,’ Jane said. ‘I don’t actually know many people at all. I, uh, don’t even know the people I thought I knew. So… like… the only friends I have are Lol and you. I… I hope…’ She began to cry. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m really, really, really…’

Merrily’s eyes filled up.

‘I think there must be a whole load of things,’ Jane snuffled, ‘that I haven’t even realized I did, yet. Like all the time I was doing this stuff – selling you up the river. I told the bitch everything. I told her about everything. And when I said that to you about selling my—’

‘You didn’t,’ Merrily said very firmly. ‘I didn’t hear you say anything, flower.’

As they clung together on the already slippery cobbles, she thought: This is all that matters, isn’t it? This is all there is.

46 The Turning

SHE WAS LIKE an elderly bushbaby in some ankle-length mohair thing in dark brown. She was waiting for him in the residents’ lounge, where they were now alone – all the others at church, she said, ‘bargaining for an afterlife’. She did not want to know anything about him.

‘Waste of time at my age, Robinson; it’s all forgotten by lunchtime.’

Lol didn’t think so. Her eyes were diamond-bright behind round glasses a bit like his own.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I prefer to make up my own mind.’ And she peered at him, eyes unfocusing. ‘Oh, what a confused boy you are. So confused, aren’t you? And blocked, too. There’s a blockage in your life. I should like to study you at length, but you haven’t the time, have you? Not today. You’re in a frightful hurry.’

Lol nodded, bemused.

‘Slow down,’ she said. ‘Think things out, or you’ll land in trouble. Especially dealing with the Purefoys. Do you understand me?’

‘Not yet.’ Presumably Sorrel Podmore had given her the background over the phone. Which was good: it saved time.

She’d collected all the cushions from the other chairs and had them piled up around her. She was like a tiny, exotic dowager.

‘What do you know about the Purefoys?’

‘Virtually nothing.’

‘That’s a good place from which to start. It’s a very, very unpretty story.’

Jane had stood at the bedroom window for a long time, still feeling – in spite of everything – an urge to salute the Eternal Spiritual Sun.

Without this and the other exercises, without the Pod, there was a large spiritual hole in her life. She wasn’t sure she was ready for Mum’s God. Although part of her wanted to go to morning service, if only to show penitence and solidarity, another part of her felt it would be an empty gesture – hypocrisy.

And, anyway, she was, like, burning up with anger, and if the Eternal Spiritual Sun – wherever the bastard was these days – could add fuel to that, this was OK by Mystic Jane.

While Mum was conducting her morning service, Jane pulled on the humble duffel and walked into still-frozen Ledwardine, across the market square where, at close to midday, the cobbles were still white and lethal. She moved quickly, did not slip, fury making her surefooted. Rage at what they were trying to do to Mum – and what they’d already done.

They? Who? Who, apart from Rowenna?

With whom there was unfinished business.

Jane walked down to the unfashionable end of the village, where long-untreated timbers sagged and the black and white buildings looked grey with neglect.

She and Mum had sat up until nearly two a.m., hunched over this big, comfort fire of coal sweetened with apple logs. Like old times together, except it wasn’t – because Mum was dead worried, and you could understand it. She’d talked – frankly, maybe for the first time – about the dilemmas constantly thrown up by Deliverance. The need to believe and also disbelieve; and the knowledge that you were completely on your own – especially with a self-serving, hypocritical bastard of a bishop like Mick Hunter.

But she wasn’t alone now, oh no.

Jane stopped outside the Ox. The pulsing oranges and greens of gaming machines through the windows were brighter than the pub sign outside. This was as near as Ledwardine came to Las Vegas.

Jane went in. She was pretty sure they would be here. They’d been coming here since they were about thirteen, and they’d be coming till they were old and bald and never had a life.

There was just one bar: not big, but already half full. Most of the men in there were under thirty, most of the women under twenty, dregs of the Saturday-night crowd. Though the pub was old and timbered, the lighting was garish. A jukebox was playing Pearl Jam. It was loud enough, but the voice from halfway down the room was louder.

‘WATKINS!’

Right.

Wall and Gittoes were at a table by the jukebox, hugging pints of cider. Jane strolled over to the fat, swollen-mouthed slimeball and the bony, spotty loser who had once, she recalled, expressed a wish to have unholy communion with her mother.

‘I want to talk to you, Danny – outside.’

Danny Gittoes looked up slowly and blinked. ‘I’m drinking. And it’s cold out there.’

Jane took a chance. She’d gone to sleep thinking about this and she’d woken up thinking about it. If she was wrong, well… she just didn’t bloody deserve to be wrong.

‘Must have been cold in the church, too,’ she said.

‘What are you on about, Watkins?’ Gittoes had this narrow face, dopey eyes.

Dean Wall rose and tucked his belly into his belt. ‘If the lady wants to go outside, let’s do it.’

‘Siddown, Wall,’ Jane snarled, indicated Gittoes. ‘Just… that.’

‘Got no secrets from Dean,’ Gittoes said.

‘I believe you.’ Jane put on her grimmest smile. ‘Rowenna and I, we don’t have secrets either. For Christmas, I’m buying her a whole case of extra-strength mouthwash.’

‘Fetch me a map,’ demanded Athena White. ‘There’s a stack of them in the hall. Fetch me an OS map of Hereford. I want to locate this Dinedor Hill.’

Miss White seemed much happier now she knew precisely what this was about. And what he was about. The process of knowing him – and where he’d been and what made him afraid – had taken all of ten minutes. It would take Dick Lyden maybe four full sessions to get this far.

Lol was impressed – also disturbed. He sensed she could be, well, malevolent, when she wanted to. There was something dangerously alien about Athena White: unmoving, sunk into her many cushions, but her mind was darting; picking up the urgency of this.

Telling her about Katherine Moon had been the right thing to do.

He brought her the map. ‘Spread it out on the floor,’ she commanded. ‘Move that perfectly awful table, there. Oh, dear, it’s what one misses most stuck out here. The seclusion, the study time, yes, but there are things going on that one misses. OK, Dinedor Hill. Why Dinedor Hill? Put your finger on it, Robinson. Can’t make out the damned map, but I can at least see your finger. Now give me your other hand.’

He found himself kneeling on the map, with the forefinger of one hand on Dinedor Hill, while she held his other hand, both of her small hands over his. They were frail and bony and very warm.

‘Look at it, Robinson, look at the hill… no, not on the map, you fool. Picture it in your mind. Feel yourself there. Feel the wind blow, feel the damp, the cold. Think about Moon being there. She’s coming towards you, isn’t she? Now, tell me what you’re seeing.’

‘I’m seeing the crow,’ he said at once. ‘Her hand inside the crow. We’re standing right at the end of the ramparts, with the city below us and the church spire aligned with the Cathedral tower.’

‘Good.’

In the moments of quiet, he could hear crockery clinking several rooms away. Footsteps clumped outside the door, the handle creaked and Athena White let out a piercing squeak. ‘Get away from that door! Go away!’

And the footsteps went away.

Miss White said, ‘She killed that crow, you know.’

‘I wondered about that.’

‘I think she would have brought the crow down and killed it.’

Brought it down how?

Crow Maiden, he thought. And the crows would come, Denny had said. Crows’d come right up to her.

Lol opened his eyes. Through the window, the Radnor hills were firming up as the mist receded; you could see the underside of the sun in the southern sky.

‘You see, it doesn’t really work unless the blood is still warm,’ Athena White explained.

Jane and Danny Gittoes stood in the alley alongside of the Ox. There were men’s toilets here, the foul-smelling kind, and she was starting to get pictures of Danny Gittoes and Rowenna.

‘Jane, I’m sorry, all right. I’m sorry about your mother’s church, but I didn’t take nothing, did I? And it was her idea, all of it.’

‘Yeah, tell that to the police. “I did it for a blowjob, officer.” Real mitigating-circumstances situation, that is. The magistrates will really like you for that, Gittoes.’

‘I’ll pay for it, all right? I’ll pay for the window.’

‘Tell me about the suit.’

‘What about it?’

‘What did she say about the suit?’

‘She said it was a joke – on you and your ma. I didn’t twig it. She had the suit in the back of her car, in one of them plastic suit-bags like you get from the cleaners, and I had to keep it inside the bag till I’d got it in the wardrobe – then take it out of the bag.’

‘Did she go in with you?’

‘She waited outside with the torch. She shone the torch in and she told me where to put the suit, and to make sure it was out of sight. Look, Watkins, this is between you and her, right? This en’t nothing—’

‘You’re going down for it, Gittoes.’

‘Nobody goes down for breaking a window.’

‘It gets in the paper, though, and then everybody knows how pitiful you are. Everybody sees this redhaired stunner, and then they look at you. It does kind of test the imagination, doesn’t it, Danny? It’ll like follow you around for years – Beauty and the Sad Git.’

‘What about her?’

‘You really think she cares what anybody thinks? Hey – wow, I forgot.’ Jane stepped away from him and began to smile. ‘Isn’t your stepfather up for a vacancy on the parish council?’

‘Fuck you, Watkins.’

‘Not even in your dreams.’

‘What do you want? What you want me to do?’

‘Tell me what happened when she first approached you. Was she on her own?’

‘Course she was on her own.’

‘I bet you thought she actually fancied you, didn’t you?’

Gittoes blushed.

‘Don’t worry, she’s good at that,’ Jane said. ‘Come on, don’t stand there like a bloody half-peeled prawn. Talk to me.’

‘I dunno what you want!’

‘What do you know about her?’

‘She’s your friend!’

‘Cooperate,’ Jane hissed, ‘or the first thing that happens – like tonight – is word gets to reach your stepfather.’

‘Please… what you wanner know? You wanner know where she goes when you en’t with her? You wanner know who her real boyfriend is? Cause I followed her – all right? – on the motorbike. Yeah, I thought I was in with a chance – how sad is that? I followed her around. I can give you stuff to, like, even the score… if you’ll leave me alone.’

‘Keep talking, hairball,’ Jane said.

For quite a long time, Miss White continued, she did not really understand what a Satanist was. For a start, nobody would ever admit to being one. You had this absurd American self-publicist, La Vey, with his Church of Satan, following a poor variation of Crowley’s Do What Thou Wilt philosophy. But that was a misnomer: there wasn’t that quality of pure, naked hate which Satanism implied.

Black magic? Ah, not quite the same thing. Black magic was simply the use of magic to do harm. And, yes, Miss White had been tempted, too – was often tempted. Aware, of course, of the easy slope from mischief to malignity, but she had done worse things without the need for magic – hadn’t everyone?

Miss White had practised ritual magic for a number of years before the robes and the swords and the chalices had begun to seem rather unnecessary and faintly absurd. It was during this period that she first encountered Anna Purefoy, or Anna Bateman as she was then.

‘We were both civil servants at the time. Anna worked at the Defence Ministry – secretary to an under-secretary, quite a highly paid post for a girl her age. She never hid her interest in the occult – neither did I. There are a surprising number of senior civil servants practising the dark arts – by which, of course, I do not mean Satanism. To the vast, vast majority of ritual magicians, the idea of worshipping a vulgar creature with horns and halitosis is absolute anathema.’

The change came with Anna’s persecution by Christians in the person of a junior Defence minister with a rigid Presbyterian background. A far more senior civil servant had been linked by a Sunday newspaper to an offshoot of Aleister Crowley’s magical foundation, the OTO. In the resulting purge, Anna’s resignation had been sought and bitterly given.

‘I suppose her resentment and loathing of the Christian Church began there,’ Miss White said, ‘but it really developed when she met Tim.’

Timothy Purefoy: already a rich man and getting richer.

‘Tim, like Anna, was blond and rather beautiful. Terribly charming and infinitely solicitous. Especially to elderly ladies in the area of Oxfordshire where he plied his trade. For in Tim’s hands it was indeed a trade.’

‘What did he do?’ Lol asked.

‘He was a minister of the Church of England, of course. First a curate and then a rector. I think he’d risen to Rural Dean by the time he was thirty. A throwback in many ways: what they used to call a “hunting parson”: field sports and dinner parties, frightfully well connected, etc. And so he often got named – along with the Church itself, of course – in the published wills of wealthy widows. This is common practice, and the Church seldom bats an eyelid as long as it gets its share as well. Timothy was always terribly careful like that. Probably be a bishop by now, if he hadn’t become fatally attracted to Anna, then reduced to a comparatively lowly post with Oxfordshire County Council.’

Miss White assumed that by this time Anna’s bitter resentment of the Church, its prejudices, and the hold it retained on the British establishment had almost certainly become obsessively bound up with her continuing magical studies. The Church had destroyed her promising career, so she felt driven to wound the Church at every opportunity.

Lol was picturing the gentle, sweet-faced woman with flour on her apron in that mellow farmhouse kitchen. Then, later, dabbing her eyes at Moon’s funeral.

‘The destruction, humiliation or corruption of a priest is a great satanic triumph,’ Miss White said. ‘Everyone knows that. But the greatest triumph, the ultimate prize, is the defection, the turning, of an ordained minister.’

‘Does that really happen?’ He thought of big, bluff, jovial Tim Purefoy in his shiny new Barbour and cap. Come to the farmhouse… have a coffee.

‘I don’t know how often it actually happens,’ said Miss White. ‘Perhaps some of them remain ministers while practising their secret arts. How many churches have been clandestinely dedicated to the Devil – how can anyone know? What I do know is how very, very much it must have appealed to Anna, as an ex-MOD person – the idea of turning Tim. The Cold War was at its height, former British agents like Philby flaunted by the Soviets, so how wonderful, how prestigious – among her circle – to convert a priest to Satan? Especially such a recognizably establishment figure as Tim Purefoy.’

Of how it happened, Miss White had no specific knowledge.

‘But one can imagine the Rural Dean’s slow-burning obsession with the sensational blonde in the little cottage… those long, erotic Sunday interludes between Matins and Evensong. The subtler arts of sexual love come naturally to a magician,’ she said enigmatically.

‘But if he’d got such a good thing going, milking widows and being accepted by the county set, why would he give that all up?’

‘Well, he didn’t, of course – not voluntarily.’

Athena believed it was a new curate, some earnest evangelical practising an almost monastic self-denial, who blew the whistle on both of them. It was revealed that Anna had been giving regular tarot readings to villagers, in a cottage in the very shadow of Tim’s parish church. And also once – famously – at the parish fête. It was Anna who was driven out of the village first, by a hate campaign drawing support from fundamentalist Christians for miles around.

‘And meanwhile Tim was photographed leaving her cottage late at night. It rather escalated from there, but it never became a very big scandal, because the Church kept the lid on it. I don’t know whether Tim was dabbling in Satanism by then, or whether that came later – but it did come. By which time both held a considerable grievance against the “witchhunting” Church itself. And the annexing of his spiritual baggage, no matter how corrupted it already was, due to his weak and greedy character, must have been an enormous boost for her own influence among her peers.’

Through the window, Lol could see a platoon of elderly ladies advancing up the drive.

‘Damn,’ Athena said. ‘First they’ll head off to their rooms to freshen up, if that’s a suitable term, then they’ll all come twittering in.’

‘How did the Purefoys carry on making a living?’

‘When a minister defects, he is treated – just like Philby in Moscow – as a great celebrity. He is presented at Court, as you might say.’

‘What do you mean by “Court”?’

‘Oh, Robinson, even I don’t know who most of these people are. Very wealthy, very evil – actual criminals some of them. Certainly the narcotics trade, whatever they call it these days, has a very large satanic element, and has had for decades. The Purefoys had capital, they had contacts, they had a very English charm. With their patronage and advice, lucrative property deals followed, leading, for instance, to the purchase of that building in Bridge Street housing the Pod. I then simply could not continue working with that group any more, which was a great pity, as it did get me out of here once a week – they always sent a car for me. No, I knew what was going to happen, you see.’

‘What?’

‘They would use the Pod as – what do you call it? – a front. Anything from an innocent reception centre to a kind of spiritual brothel. Podmore already told me about your friend’s daughter – but I want to ask you something about that. This friend herself wouldn’t, by any chance, be Merrily Watkins?’

‘How did you know that?’

‘Ha! This clarifies certain small mysteries. Oh, what a target that woman must be for the Purefoys and their ilk. A female exorcist – and such a pretty girl.’

‘Yes.’ Lol began to fold the map.

‘Ah,’ said Athena calmly, ‘I see.’

‘Where’ve you been? I mean where have you been?’ The kid just staring back at her, and Merrily taking a deep breath, gripping the Aga rail. ‘I’m sorry. Christ, what am I saying?’

‘I don’t know, Mum.’

‘I close my eyes in church, I see that lime-green Fiesta reversing into our drive. I come back from church, and you’re not here. I’m sorry. There is no reason at all you have to be here all the time.’

‘No, you’re right,’ Jane said. ‘It was thoughtless of me.’

‘Ignore me, flower. I’m badly, badly paranoid. Previously, I see a stranger in the congregation, and I think: Yes. Wow. Another one! Now, when I glimpse an unfamiliar face, I’m watching for a little sneer at some key moment; I’m watching their lips when we say the Lord’s Prayer. I go round afterwards and sniff where they sat. Jesus, I shouldn’t be saying this to you – you’re only sixteen.’

‘Yes, I am,’ Jane said mildly. ‘And I’ve just been to see Danny Gittoes. Rowenna gave him, like, oral sex in return for breaking into the church and contaminating your cassock with Denzil Joy’s suit. Just thought you should know that.’

Merrily broke away from the Aga.

‘Also – and I’m not qualified to, like, evaluate the significance of this – but Rowenna’s been seeing – euphemism, OK? – seeing a young guy by the name of James Lyden. He goes to the Cathedral School and apparently tonight he’s going to be enthroned in the Cathedral as something called – vomit, vomit – Boy Bishop. Does this mean anything to you?’

47 Medieval Thing

SHE CALLED HUW, but there was no answer. She didn’t know his Sunday routine. Perhaps he drove from church to church across the mountains – service after service, until he was all preached out. If he had a mobile or a car-phone, it wouldn’t work up there, anyway.

She next called Sophie at home. Sophie, thank God, was home. Merrily pictured a serene, pastel room with a high ceiling and a grandfather clock.

‘Sophie, are you going to the Boy Bishop ceremony tonight?’

‘I always do,’ Sophie said. ‘As the Bishop’s lay-secretary, I consider my role as extending to his understudy.’

‘That’s not quite the right word, is it? As I understand it, the boy is a symbolic replacement – the Bishop actually giving way to him.’

‘Well, perhaps. Should I explain it to you, Merrily?’

‘Please.’

She listened, and made notes on her sermon pad.

‘Shall I see you there?’ Sophie asked.

‘God willing.’

‘I should like to talk to you. I’ve delayed long enough.’

An hour later, Merrily called Huw again, and then she called Lol but there was no answer there either, and no one else to call. When she put the phone down, she said steadily to herself, ‘I shouldn’t need this. I shouldn’t need help.’

Jane, coming into the scullery with coffee, said, ‘You can only ever go by what you think is right, Mum.’

‘All right, listen, flower. Sit down. I’m going to hang something on you. And you, in your most cynical-little-bitch mode, are going to give me your instinctive reactions.’

Jane pulled up a chair and they sat facing one another, sideon to the desk.

‘Shoot,’ Jane said.

‘It’s a medieval thing.’

‘Most of Hereford seems to be a medieval thing,’ Jane said.

‘In the thirteenth century, apparently, it was a fairly widespread midwinter ceremony in many parts of Europe. Sometimes he was known as the Bishop of the Innocents. It was discontinued at the Reformation under Henry VIII. The Reformation wasn’t kind to the Cathedral anyway. Stainedglass windows were destroyed, statues smashed. Then there was the Civil War and puritanism. In most cathedrals, the Boy Bishop never came back, but Hereford reintroduced it about twenty-five years ago, and it’s now probably the most famous ceremony of its kind in the country. The basis of it is a line from the Magnificat which goes: He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek.’

‘That’s crap,’ Jane said. ‘I don’t know anybody my age who is remotely humble or meek.’

‘How about if I tell you when to come on with the cynicism. OK, back to the ceremony. After a candlelit procession, the Bishop of Hereford gives up his throne to the boy, who takes over the rest of the service, leads the prayers, gives a short sermon.’

‘Would I be right in thinking there aren’t a whole bunch of boys queuing up for this privilege?’

‘Probably. It’s a parent thing – also a choir thing. The Boy Bishop is almost invariably a leading chorister, or a recently retired chorister, and he has several attendants from the same stable.’

‘So, what you’re saying is, Hunter symbolically gives up his throne to this guy.’

‘No, it isn’t symbolic. He actually does it. And then the boy and his entourage proceed around the chancel and into the North Transept, where he’s introduced to St Thomas Cantilupe at the shrine.’

‘Or, in this case, the hole where the shrine used to be.’

‘Yes, I understand this will the first time since the institution of the ceremony in the Middle Ages that there’s been no tomb.’

‘Heavy, right?’

Merrily said, ‘So you’re following my thinking.’

‘Maybe.’ Jane pushed her hair behind her ears.

Merrily said, ‘If – and this is the crux of it – you wanted to isolate the period when Hereford Cathedral was most vulnerable to… shall we call it spiritual disturbance, you might choose the period of the dawning of a millennium… when the tomb of its guardian saint lies shattered… and when the Lord Bishop of Hereford…’

She broke off, searching for the switch of the Anglepoise lamp. The red light of the answering machine shone like a drop of blood.

‘Is a mere boy,’ Jane supplied.

‘That’s the final piece of Huw’s jigsaw. Is that a load of superstitious crap or what? You can now be cynical.’

‘Thanks.’

‘So?’ Merrily’s hand found the lamp switch and clicked. The light found Jane propping up her chin with a fist.

‘How long do we have before the ceremony starts?’

‘It takes place during Evensong – which was held in the late afternoon until Mick took over. Mick thinks Evensong should be just that – at seven-thirty. Just over three hours from now.’

‘Oh.’

‘Not very long at all.’

‘No.’ Jane stood up, hands in the hip pockets of her jeans. ‘Why don’t you try calling Huw Owen again?’

‘He isn’t going to be there, flower. If he is, it would take him well over an hour to get here.’

‘Try Lol again. Maybe he can put the arm on James Lyden’s dad.’

‘The psychotherapist?’

‘Maybe he can.’

‘All right.’ Merrily punched out Lol’s number; the phone was picked up on the second ring.

‘John Barleycorn.’ A strange voice.

‘Oh, is Lol there?’

‘No, he’s not. This is Dennis Moon in the shop. Sorry, it’s the same line. I’m not usually here on a Sunday, but Lol’s not around anyway. Can I give him a message if he shows before I leave?’

‘Could you ask him to call Merrily, please?’

‘Sure, I’ll leave him a note.’

‘Face it,’ Merrily said, hanging up. ‘This guy is not going to pull his boy out of the ceremony – thus forcing them to abort it.’

‘I suppose not. Actually, it does seem quite scary. What if something did happen and we could have prevented it? But, on the other hand, what could happen?’

‘Well, it won’t be anything like thunder and lightning and the tower cracking in half.’ She saw Jane stiffen. ‘Flower?’

‘Why did you say that?’

‘What?’

‘About the tower cracking in half.’

‘It was the first stupid thing I thought of.’

‘That’s the tarot card Angela turned up for me: the Tower struck by lightning. It’s just… Sorry, your imagination sometimes goes berserk, doesn’t it?’

‘Look.’ Merrily stood up and put an arm around her. ‘Thunder is not forecast, anyway. You don’t get thunder at this time of the year, in this kind of weather. That tower’s been here for many centuries. The tarot card is purely symbolic. And even if something like that did happen…’

‘It did in 1786.’

‘What did?’

‘We did this in school. They had a west tower then, and it didn’t have proper foundations and the place was neglected, and on Easter Monday 1786 the whole lot collapsed.’

Merrily moved away, looked down at the desk, gathering her thoughts. ‘Look, even if it was likely, it’s still not the worst disaster that could happen.’

‘You mean the collapse of spirituality,’ Jane said soberly.

‘Whatever you say about the Church, flower, there’s no moral force to replace it.’

‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘So suppose all the people jumping off the Tower Struck By Lightning are the ones, like, abandoning Christianity as the whole edifice collapses. Suppose the final disintegration of the Church as we know it was to start here?’

Merrily said, ‘Would you care?’

48 Blood

THE CROW.

As the crow flies: a straight line.

Dinedor Hill… All Saints Church… Hereford Cathedral… and two further churches, ending in…

‘What’s this place, Robinson? Can’t make it out.’

‘Stretford.’ For a moment it stopped his breath. ‘This… is the church of St Cosmas and St Damien.’

‘Oh, Robinson,’ Athena White said. ‘Oh, yes.’

Once the old ladies had begun to gather in the lounge, she’d beckoned Lol away and up the stairs. In Athena’s eyrie, with the Afghan rugs and all the cupboards, the OS map of Hereford had been opened out on the bedspread, and the line from Dinedor drawn in.

Athena’s glasses were white light. ‘It was in the Hereford Times, wasn’t it? Was that last week, I can’t remember? The crow… the crow. Why does one never see what is under one’s nose?’

‘They happened the same night. The crow sacrifice, and Moon’s death… and a minister called Dobbs had a stroke in the Cathedral.’

‘Yes!’

It all came out then, in strands of theory and conjecture which eventually hung together as a kind of certainty.

Tim Purefoy had said: That’s one of Alfred Watkins’s leylines. An invisible, mystical cable joining sacred sites. Prehistoric path of power. They’re energy lines, you know. And spirit paths. So we’re told. Probably all nonsense, but at sunset you can feel you own the city.

Now, Athena White said, ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s there or not, Robinson. It’s what the magician perceives is there. The magician uses visualization, driven by willpower, to create an alternative reality.’

Moon had said: The line goes through four ancient places of worship, ending at a very old church out in the country. But it starts here, and this is the highest point. So all these churches, including the Cathedral, remain in its shadow. This hill is the mother of the city. The camp here was the earliest proper settlement, long before there was a town down there.

‘When the first Christian churches were built, Rome ordered them to be placed on sites of earlier worship, places already venerated, so as to appropriate their influence. But you see, Robinson, the pre-Christian element never really went away, because of the continued dominance of Dinedor Hill. So, if your aim was to destabilize the Cathedral and all it symbolizes, you might well decide to cause a vibration in what lies beneath.’

And Lol had said to Merrily – ironically in the café in the All Saints Church, on the actual line from St Cosmas to Dinedor Hill: In Celtic folk tales, crows and ravens figured as birds of illomen or… as a form taken by anti-Christian forces.

‘At one end of the line,’ Athena said, ‘a crow is sacrificed. At the other – at the highest point – is your crow maiden.’

Lol said, ‘Sacrificed?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘They killed her?’

‘Or helped her to take her own life? Probably, yes. I’m sorry, Robinson, I don’t know if this is what you wanted to hear.’

‘It’s just… are you sure about this?’ She’s an old woman, he thought. She lives in a fantasy world. ‘You have to be sure.’

‘And yet,’ she said, ‘these two deaths are so different. Calm down, Robinson, I won’t let you make a fool of yourself. You see, as Crowley once pointed out, a sacrifice was once seen as a merciful and glorious death, allowing the astral body to go directly to its God. This essentially means a quick death, a throat cut… the way the crow presumably died. But your friend’s blood was let out through the wrists. Not quick at all – a slow release…’

‘ “Crow maiden, you’re fadin’ away…” ’

‘What did you say?’

‘Just a line from a song.’

Athena White’s clasped hands were shaking with concentration. ‘Robinson, have we discussed the power of blood?’

On the way back from the Glades, Lol kept glancing at the passenger seat – because of a dark, disturbing sensation of Moon sitting beside him.

I’d like to sleep now.

‘I know,’ he said once. ‘I know you can’t sleep. But I just don’t know what to do about it.’

At the lectern in Ledwardine Church, with the altar behind them, candles lit, Merrily took both Jane’s hands in hers, and looked steadily into the kid’s dark eyes.

‘You all right about this?’

‘Sure.’

Merrily had locked the church doors – the first time she’d ever locked herself in. A church was not a private place; it should always offer sanctuary.

Merrily gripped the kid’s hands more firmly.

‘Christ be with us,’ she said, ‘Christ within us.’

‘Christ behind us,’ Jane read from the card placed in the open Bible on the lectern. ‘Christ before us…’

‘Hello, Laurence,’ Denny said tiredly.

The shop was all in boxes around his knees. Despite the possible implications for his own domestic future, Lol had forgotten about Denny’s decision to shut John Barleycorn for ever. The walls were just empty shelves now, even the balalaika packed away. The ochre wall-lamps, which had lit Moon so exquisitely, did her brother Denny no favours. His face was grey as he wiped his brow with the sleeve of his bomber jacket.

‘I haven’t been totally frank with you, Lol. Another reason for all this is that I’m going to need all the money I can get’ – he looked away – ‘to pay Maggie off.’

Lol remembered the distance between them at Moon’s cremation. ‘You and Maggie…?’

‘Aw, been coming a while. I won’t explain now. Kathy’s death could have saved it. At least, that’s what she thought – Maggie. But the very fact she thought that…’ Denny smashed a fist into a tall carboard box. ‘That made it unfucking-tenable.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Lol said awkwardly, the urge welling up in him to tell Denny what he believed had really happened to Moon. But could Denny, in his present state, absorb this arcane insanity? ‘What about the kids?’ he said instead.

‘She’ll have them.’ Denny taped up the flaps of a box full of CDs. ‘I’m hardly gonner fight that.’ He looked across at the door to the stairs. ‘Do something for me, Laurence. The bike.’

‘Moon’s bike?’

‘Take it away, would you? It’s oppressive. I dream about it.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I dream. I have these fucking dreams. It starts with the bike and then it turns into this, like, cart with the same big wheels… like some old war chariot. I want to get into it, and I know if I do, it’s gonner take me up there again. No fucking way.’

‘To the hill.’

‘No way, man. So, would you do that? Would you get rid of the bike? Somebody’s gonner buy or lease this place, see, and then they’ll make me take the bike out. I’m not touching it – it’s like that fucking sword, you know? Take it away. Flog it, dump it… somewhere I don’t know where it is.’

‘All right. I’ll do that tomorrow.’

‘Thanks. Oh yeah, a woman rang for you. Mary?’

‘Merrily?’

‘Probably. She said could you call her. Look, Lol… I tried to use you to compensate for my brotherly inadequacies. I regret that now – along with all the rest.’

‘There wasn’t a lot you could do, Den. In the end, Moon’s fate was in other hands.’

‘No.’ Denny’s eyes narrowed. ‘I don’t buy this shit, Lol. I’m not buying any more than that she was sick. I’m not having anything else unloaded on me. I won’t go down that road.’

Lol nodded. So he himself would have to go down that road alone.

‘Hello, this is Ledwardine Vicarage. Merrily and Jane aren’t around at the moment, but if you’d like—’

Lol put down the phone and went to sit down for a while in Ethel’s chair, once-insignificant details crowding his mind.

Like the sword. The sword she’d just happened to find in a pit where it looked as though the Purefoys had been digging a pond. The sword sticking up for her to find – like it was meant. They’d put it there, hadn’t they?

Perhaps they’d found it where Denny had buried it, or perhaps it wasn’t the same sword at all – Denny’s own memory refashioning it to fit the circumstances.

At the funeral, Anna Purefoy had said: We were so delighted by her absorption in the farm that we couldn’t resist offering her the barn. We thought she was perfect.

Moon was perfect for them because – according to the tenets of Anna Purefoy’s occultism – Moon’s obsession was a passage to the heart of the hill’s pagan past. By stimulating a resurgence of the once-dominant pagan energy, they were attempting to induce a spiritual reversion. Using the Celtic tradition of vengeful crow-goddess and blood ritual to link that holy hill with the pre-medieval Church at the terminus of the ley-line alignment. Thus feeding something old and corrupt inside the Christian Cathedral.

Belief was all, Athena White had said. It didn’t matter how real any of this was, so long as they believed it. They hadn’t even had to bend Moon to their will. She was already halfway there. But had they actually killed her? Had they used the Celtic sword as a sacrificial blade to cut her wrists? Because, if they hadn’t done anything physical, it was an unprovable crime, bizarrely akin to euthanasia. Perhaps not even a crime at all.

He called Merrily again.

‘Hello, this is Led—’

He put the phone down, then lifted it again and redialled, waiting for the message to end. ‘Merrily,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ve got to tell somebody. It’s about Moon and… and your desecration thing at the little church…’

He talked steadily about crows and sacrifice. After three minutes, the bleeps told him his time was up. He waited for a minute, then called back, waited again for the message to finish. This time he talked about projections. He knew why he was doing this: he had to hear himself saying it, to decide if he could believe it.

Moon’s father: not a ghost but a projection, a transferred image. Transmitting a projection – Athena looking rather coy at this point – was not terribly difficult. Especially if the Purefoys had a photograph to work with. Photographs and memories, half-truth and circumstance – and the power of the ancestors, usurped.

‘By some combination of projection, hypnosis, psychic-suggestion – maybe you have better words for this – they may have steered her to suicide.’

When the bleeps started again, he didn’t call back. He took up his habitual stance at the window, looking down into Christmas-lit Church Street/Capuchin Lane. Moon’s agitated shade was misting the periphery of his vision – Moon with her medieval dress and her rescue-me hair.

What did you do with information like this? What could you do but take it to the police, or try to get it raised at the inquest?

But the man to do this was Denny, the brother. At some stage, Denny – who wanted none of it – would have to be told. Lol went downstairs.

In the shop below, Denny was sitting, his back to Lol, on the last filled box. John Barleycorn was no more.

‘Destroying something can be a very cleansing thing.’ Denny had his hands loosely linked and he was rocking slowly on the box, his earring swaying like a pendulum: tick… tick… tick.

‘You, er… you want to go for a drink?’

‘Nah, not tonight, Laurence.’

‘Only, you were right,’ Lol said, ‘about needing to talk.’

‘Couldn’t face it now, mate.’ Denny stared out of the window. ‘Anyway, you wouldn’t wanner be with me tonight.’ He heaved himself down from the box and grinned. ‘I’ll be off. You look a bit shagged-out, Laurence. Get some sleep. It’ll all seem much clearer in the morning.’

‘It will?’

‘Maybe.’ Denny looked around the skeleton shop. ‘Good night, mate.’ He turned in the doorway. ‘Thanks.’

There was a full moon. They hadn’t seen it coming because of the fog, but tonight was a flawless, icy night and the moon hung over Broad Street – and the Christmas Santas couldn’t compete, Jane thought.

Hail to Thee, Lady Moon,

Whose light reflects our most secret hopes.

Her only secret hope tonight was for Mum to come through this with everything intact: her reputation, her mind…

Hail to Thee from the Abodes of Darkness.

There won’t be any darkness, Jane thought, willing it and willing it. There won’t.

They stood together on the green, watching people file into the Cathedral. The usual Evensong congregation, plus whatever audience the Boy Bishop ceremony pulled in with its pre-Christmas pageantry and extra choral element.

Mum had come in her long, black cloak – the winter-funeral cloak – wearing it partly because you couldn’t turn up for a ceremony at the Cathedral in a ratty old waxed jacket. And partly because it was so much better for concealing—

Oh, please, no…

—the foot-long, gilt-painted, wooden cross she’d taken from Ledwardine Church, prising it out of the rood-screen with a screwdriver, then immersing its prongs in holy water.

The whole bit! The complete, crazy Van Helsing ensemble. And Merrily had no plan. If the worst happened, if there was some indication of what she called infiltration, she was just going to, like, walk out, holding the cross high and shouting the magic words from the Deliverance handbook.

Madness? At the very least, professional suicide. Church of England ministers did not behave like this. She would be making her entire career into this minor footnote in ecclesiastical history, right under the bit about the female priests who circle-danced around the Cathedral touching up dead bishops.

And that was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You always thought it was a wasted life.

No! Uncomfortable, Jane turned away from her mother. She didn’t know. She didn’t know any more. She began to feel helpless and desperate. They needed help and there was none.

She looked up at the Cathedral, warm light making its windows look like the doors in an advent calendar. She was aware of the timeless apartness of the place, even though it was surrounded by city. She thought about its possible future as a tourist attraction, or a carpet warehouse, or something. A rush of confused emotions were creating a panic-bomb, just as a woman came towards them. She wore an expensive suede coat and a silk headscarf – Sophie Hill, the Bishop’s secretary and Mum’s secretary too. Sophie who, Mum explained, didn’t need a secretary’s job, but did need to be part of the Cathedral. Sophie was looking apprehensive.

‘Oh, hello, Jane,’ she began awkwardly.

Which was like Goodbye, Jane. Mum said, ‘Why don’t you go in, flower, and find us a discreet pew with a good view – but not too near the front.’

‘Sure,’ Jane said meekly. She was wearing her new blue fleece coat and a skirt. Respectable. As she slipped away, the panicbomb began to tick.

Walking quickly down towards the Cathedral porch, when she was sure they couldn’t see her, she diverted along the wall and back across the green, running from tree to tree, to the access path, and down into Church Street. Seeing this big, bald guy come out of John Barleycorn and – Thank you, thank you, God! – Lol Robinson behind him in the doorway.

She started waving frantically at Lol as the bald guy vanished down the alley towards High Town.

‘Jane?’

He looked seriously hyped up, nervous, but grateful to see her – all of those. With the overhead Christmas greens and reds strobing in his glasses, his hands making fists, and his mouth forming unspoken words – like he was full of stories that just had to be told.

But as Jane said, ‘Oh, Lol, Mum is in such deep shit,’ and her tears defused the panic, reduced it to mere despair, he just listened. Listened to all the stuff about what Mum and this loopy Huw called ‘the Squatter’. And about the Boy Bishop, who was the weak point, like the fuse in an electric circuit.

This was when Lol finally cut in. ‘How long? How long before the Boy Bishop gets…?’

‘Enthroned?’

‘Yeah. How long?’

He was out in the street now, pulling the shop door closed behind him, shivering in his frayed sweat-shirt.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know where in the service it comes. In half an hour? Maybe only ten minutes.’

She was asking him if he could get to this Dick Lyden first, and make him stop his son from going through with it, but Lol was just shaking his head, like she knew he would, and then he was pushing her away, up the street.

‘Go back, Jane. Stay with her.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m going to… going to do what I can.’

‘You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Lol, I want to come with you.’

‘You can’t.’

‘You really know what’s going to happen, don’t you? At least, you have an idea?’

‘I don’t know anything, Jane. I just—’

‘Lol…’ She stumbled on the iced-up cobbles, clinging to his arm. ‘Dobbs stood up against it, Dobbs put himself in the way – and he wound up as this paralysed, dribbling…’

‘Dobbs was an old man in poor health.’ He held her steady. ‘Go back to her, Jane.’

‘He was also…’ Jane broke Lol’s grip and spun to face him. ‘He was also this really experienced exorcist. He knew all about this stuff; he’d been planning for ages. He knew exactly what he was facing, while Mum’s just—’

‘She wouldn’t thank you for saying she was just a woman.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, it’s more than that.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Lol, who can we call? We can’t raise Huw Owen. The Bishop’s a total tosser. All those guys in dog-collars in there are just like… administrators and wardens and bursars and accountants. All this dark energy gathering, and…’

She flattened herself against a shop window as a bunch of young guys came past, hooting and sloshing lager at each other out of cans. They were lurching up the ancient medieval straight path to Hereford Cathedral – all huge and lit up like the Titanic – and none of them even seemed to notice it.

‘Nobody really gives a shit, any more, do they?’ Jane said.

49 Costume Drama

WHEN JANE REACHED the green again, Mum and Sophie were gone. Into the Cathedral, presumably. She looked behind her, hoping Lol would be there, that he’d changed his mind and would take her with him wherever he was going. But the night was hard and bright and empty; even the cackling lager crew had vanished.

She was alone now, with the frost-rimmed moon and the feeling of something happening, around and within the old rusty stones, that none of them could do a damned thing about.

She walked very slowly down to the Cathedral, hoping that something meaningful would come to her. But all she experienced was a stiffening of her face, as though the tears had frozen on her cheeks.

Should she pray?

And, if so, to whom? She reassured herself that all forms of spirituality were positive – while acknowledging that the Lady Moon looked a pitiless bitch tonight.

Jane went into the porch, and turned left through an ordinary wooden and glazed door into the body of the Cathedral. Always that small, barely audible gasp when you came out into the vaulted vastness of it. You were never sure whether it was you, or some vacuum effect carefully developed by the old gothic architects.

The organ was playing some kind of low-key religious canned music. Jane found herself on the end of a short queue of people. They were mostly middle-aged or elderly.

Which made Rowenna kind of stand out amongst them.

He remembered the last time he’d been up here at night, in the snow, with Moon beside him. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want you to come in.

What if he’d then refused to take no for an answer? What if he’d gone into the barn with her? What if he’d resisted the pushing of the darkness against him?

The pushing of the darkness? As he drove and fiddled vainly with the heater, he tried to re-experience that thin, frigid moment. There was a draught through a crack in the door, more chilling than blanketing cold outside. It felt like the slit between worlds.

He wished Denny was with him. Denny already had no love for the Purefoys – for taking advantage of Moon’s fantasies so as to unload their crappy, bodged barn conversion. Incomers! Stupid gits! He needed the heat of Denny’s honest rage. He needed this bloody heater to work – having run to the car without his jacket, because going back for it would have wasted crucial minutes.

Crucial minutes? Like he knew what he was going to do. Like only time might beat him: little four-eyed Lol, expsychiatric patient, shivering.

Ice under the wheels carried the Astra into the verge, the bumper clipping a fence post. Denny owned a four-wheel drive, had once done amateur rallying. But Denny wasn’t here, so Lol was alone – with a little knowledge, a sackful of conjecture, and the memory of the draught through a thinly opened door.

He came to the small parking area below the Iron Age camp, and killed his headlights. There were no other vehicles there, but what did he expect – black cars parked in a circle, customized number plates all reading 666?

You know what’s going to happen. Don’t you?

Lol got out of the Astra and followed the familiar path. Big, muscular trees crowded him. Between them, he could see a mat of city lights – but none around him, none up here. None here since damp, smoky firelight had plumed within the cluster of thatched huts where families huddled against the dark beating of the crow-goddess’s wings.

He’d never felt so cold.

Only the incense is missing, Merrily thought.

The warm colours of the soaring stone, the rolling contours of the Norman arches, the suspended corona – its daytime smiley, saw-tooth sparkle made numinous by the candles around it. And the jetting ring of red in the bottom of a giant black cast-iron stove near the main entrance.

Now a candlelight procession of choirboys singing plainsong, in Latin. One of the choirboys, the tallest of them, wore robes and a mitre, with a white-albed candle-bearer on either side.

There were about two hundred people in the congregation – not enormous, but substantial. They looked entirely ordinary, mostly over fifty, but an encouraging few in their twenties. Dress tending towards the conservative, but with few signs of the fuss and frothy hats such a service would once have produced.

Sophie sat next to Merrily, just the two of them on a rear central pew. Sophie’s gloved hands were tightly clenched on her lap. What she’d said outside, her face white and pitted as the moon, had been banished to the back of Merrily’s mind; not now, not now.

Her hands were underneath the cloak, clasped around the cross. She prayed it would never have to be revealed. She prayed that, in less than an hour’s time, she and Jane would be walking out of here, relieved and laughing, to the car, where the cross would be laid thankfully on the back seat.

But where the hell was Jane? Not in the nave. Not visibly in the nave – but there were a hundred places in here to sit or stand concealed. But why do that?

Merrily studied James Lyden. He was a good-looking boy, and he clearly knew it. Could she detect an insolence, a knowing smirk, as the choirboy voices swirled and ululated around him? Perhaps not, though. It was probably James’s idea of ‘pious’.

And then there were two…

Here was Mick Hunter on a low wooden seat under the rim of the corona. It was not the first time she’d seen Mick in his episcopal splendour. He wore it well, like some matinée idol playing Becket. We’re all of us actors, Merrily. The Church is a faded but still fabulous costume drama. She noticed the medieval touches, the fishtail chasuble, the primatial cross instead of the crozier; Mick was not going to be upstaged by a schoolboy. Sad, Jane would comment, wherever she was.

As the plainsong ended, the Boy Bishop turned his back on the congregation and knelt to face Mick Hunter on his throne.

Merrily’s fingers tightened on the stem of the cross.

Jane had hidden in the little chantry chapel, where the stone was ridged like a seashell. She crouched where she supposed monks had once knelt to pray – though not ordinary monks; it was far too ornate. The medieval chant washed and rippled around her, so calming.

She must not be calm.

Rowenna stood not ten feet away, leaning against a pillar. Rowenna wearing a soft leather jacket, short black skirt, and black tights.

How would she react if Rowenna was to walk in here now?

Go for her like a cat? Go for her eyes with all ten nails?

Uh-huh, better to keep quiet and watch and listen. Whatever was going to happen here, Rowenna would be central to it. She wasn’t just here to watch her boyfriend – who would not be her boyfriend at all if he hadn’t been the chosen as Boy Bishop.

And Jane suddenly remembered yesterday’s lunch in Slater’s, and Rowenna saying, Listen, I have to go. Go on, ask me where. You’re gonna like this… the Cathedral. Then Jane expressing surprise because she’d understood they were going shopping, and Rowenna going, I just forgot what day it was. I have to meet my cousin – breaking off at this point because Lol had appeared. But it was obvious now: Rowenna would have gone with James to his dress rehearsal, so she’d know exactly…

The evil, duplicitous, carnivorous slag! Jane didn’t think she’d ever hated anyone like she hated Rowenna right now.

But it was wrong to hate like this in a cathedral. It had to be wrong. She emptied her mind as the Bishop’s lovely deep, velvet voice was relayed to the congregation through the speaker system. What Mum had once called his late-night DJ voice – so, like, really sincere.

‘James, you have been chosen to serve in the office of Boy Bishop in this cathedral church. Will you be faithful and keep the promises made for you at your baptism?’

In the silence, Jane heard a small bleep quite close. It was such an un-cathedral noise that she flattened herself against the stones, and edged up to the opening and peeped out just once.

The Boy Bishop said, in a kind of dismissive drawl, ‘I will, the Lord be my helper.’

Jane saw Rowenna slipping a mobile phone into a pocket of her leather jacket.

Mick Hunter said, ‘The blessing of God Almighty – Father, Son and Holy Ghost – be upon you. Amen.’

Silence – as Jane held her breath.

The choir began to sing.

She relaxed. It was done. James Lyden was Boy Bishop of Hereford.

And nothing had happened.

Had it?

Amid the cold trees, below the cold moon, was a panel of light.

Lol stopped on the ice-glossed earthen steps. He thought at first it must be the farmhouse, and that he was seeing it from a different angle, seeing behind the wall of Leylandii.

But it was the barn.

The glazed-over bay was one big lantern.

Lol moved down the frozen steps and saw, behind the plateglass wall, tall candles burning aloft on eight or ten holders of spindly wrought-iron.

A beacon! You would see it from afar, like a fire in the sky laying a flickering path towards the Cathedral tower.

It shocked him into stillness, as if the same candles had been burning on Katherine Moon’s coffin. Behind their sombre shimmering, he was sure shadows were moving. All was quiet: not an owl, not a breath of wind. A bitter, still, rock-hard night.

He was scared.

Calm down, Robinson, Athena White said from somewhere. He ran from the steps to the rubble-stone barn wall and edged towards the lit-up bay. Rough reflections of the candlelight were sketched on to the ridged surface of a long frozen puddle, the remains of the pond-excavation where Moon had said she’d found the Celtic sword.

When he reached the front door, he realized it was lying open. He backed away, recalling the darkness pushing against him – the slit between worlds.

Tonight, however, the door was open, and – perhaps not only because he was so cold – the barn seemed to beckon him inside.

Merrily murmured to Sophie, ‘What happens now?’

A hush as the Boy Bishop and his two candle-bearing attendants faced the high altar. Choristers were ranked either side, poised for an instant on a single shared breath.

As Mick Hunter walked away, smiling, the choir sailed into song, and the Boy Bishop approached the altar.

‘Later,’ Sophie whispered, ‘the boy will lead us in prayer, and then he gives a short sermon. He’ll say how important the choir’s been to him, and that sort of thing. But first there’ll be a kind of circular tour, taking in the North Transept.’

‘The shrine?’

‘I don’t know quite how they’re going to cope with that this time – perhaps they won’t. What are you doing, Merrily?’

‘I’m going to watch.’ She edged out of the pew, holding the cross with one hand, gathering her cloak with the other.

‘Are you cold, Merrily?’

‘Yes.’

‘Me too. I wonder if there’s something wrong with the heating.’

The candle-led procession was leaving the chancel, drifting left to the North Transept. Merrily paused at the pew’s end. She felt slightly out of breath, as if the air had become thinner. She looked at Sophie. ‘Are you really cold, as well?’

Behind her, there was a muffled slap on the tiles.

Sophie rose. ‘Oh, my God.’

Merrily turned and saw a large woman in a grey suit, half into the aisle, her fingers over her face, with blood bubbling between them and puddling on the tiles around her skittering feet.

50 Abode of Darkness

THE BARN WAS like an intimate church. Lol could sense it around him, a rich and velvety warmth. He could see the long beeswax candles, creamy stems aglow, and imagine tendrils of soft scented smoke curling to the rafters.

He stood for a moment, giving in to the deceptive luxury of heat – experiencing the enchantment of the barn as, he felt sure, Moon would have known it. Then catching his breath when the total silence gave way to an ashy sigh – the collapse of crumbling logs in the hearth with a spasm of golden splinters, the small implosion bringing a glint from a single nail protruding from the wall over the fireplace. A nail where once hung a picture of a smiling man with his Land Rover.

Which brought Lol out of it, tensing him – because another black-framed photo hung there now: of a long-haired woman in a long dress.

The candle-holders were like dead saplings, two of them framing a high-backed black chair, thronelike. And, standing beside the chair – Lol nearly screamed – was a priest in full holy vestments.

Merrily was gesturing wildly for a verger, a cleaner, anybody with a mop and bucket – people staring at her from both sides of the aisle, as though she was some shrill, house-proud harpy.

What she was seeing was the defiled altar at St Cosmas, blistered with half-dried sacrificial blood – while this blood was close to the centre of the Cathedral, and it was still warm and it was human blood, bright and pure, and there was so damned much of it.

The choir sang on. The Boy Bishop and his entourage were now out of sight, out of earshot, paying homage to Cantilupe in all his fragments.

She should be there, too. She should be with them in the ruins of the tomb, where the barrier was down, where Thomas Dobbs had fallen. Yet – yes, all right, irrationally maybe – she also had to dispose of the blood… the most magical medium for the manifestation of… what? What? Anyway, she couldn’t be in both places, and there was no one else… absolutely nobody else.

Sophie was tending to the woman, the contents of her large handbag emptied out on the pew, the woman’s head tilted back – Sophie dabbing her nose and lips with a wet pad, the woman struggling to say how sorry she was, what a time for a nosebleed to happen.

‘She has them now and then,’ a bulky grey-haired man was explaining in a low, embarrassed voice to nobody in particular. ‘Not on this scale, I have to say. It’s nerves, I suppose. It’ll stop in a minute.’

Merrily said sharply, ‘Nerves?’

‘Oh,’ he mumbled, ‘mother of the Boy Bishop, all that. Stressful time all round.’

‘You’re Dick Lyden?’

‘Yes, I am. Look, can’t you leave the cleaning-up until after the service. Nobody’s going to step in it.’

‘That’s not what I’m worried about, Mr Lyden. This is his mother’s blood?’ She was talking to herself, searching for the significance of this.

‘I don’t want the boy to see the fuss.’ Dick Lyden pulled out a white handkerchief and began to mop his wife’s splashes from his shoes. ‘He’s temperamental, you see.’

Someone had given James Lyden one of the votive candles from near where the shrine had stood, and he waited there while they pushed back the partition screen.

‘Not how we’d like it to be,’ Jane heard this big minister with the bushy beard say. ‘Still, I’m sure St Thomas would understand.’

‘Absolutely,’ James Lyden said, like he couldn’t give a toss one way or the other.

There was no sign of Rowenna.

Pressed into the side of one of the pointed arches screening off the transept, no more than six yards away from them, Jane saw it all as the bearded minister held open the partition door to the sundered tomb.

Only the minister and the Boy Bishop went up to the stones – as though it was not just stone slabs in there, but Cantilupe’s mummified body. The two candle-bearing boys in white tunics waited either side of the door, like sentries. One of them, a stocky shock-haired guy, saw Jane and raised a friendly eyebrow. She’d never seen him before and pretended she hadn’t noticed.

The bearded minister stood before one of the side-panels with those mutilated figures of knights on it – their faces obliterated like someone had attacked them centuries ago with a hammer and a stone-chisel, and a lot of hatred.

The minister crossed his hands over his stomach, gazed down with closed eyes. He saw nothing.

‘Almighty God,’ he said, ‘let us this night remember Your servant, Thomas, guardian of this cathedral church, defender of the weak, healer of the sick, friend to the poor, who well understood the action of Our Lord when His disciples asked of Him: which is the greatest in the Kingdom of God and He shewed to them a child and set him in the midst of them.’

Jane saw James Lyden’s full lips twist into a sour and superior sneer.

The minister said, ‘Father, we ask that the humility demonstrated by Thomas Cantilupe throughout his time as bishop here might be shared this night and always by your servant James.’

‘No chance,’ Jane breathed grimly, and the shock-haired boy must have seen the expression on her face, because he grinned.

‘It is to our shame,’ the minister went on, ‘that Thomas’s shrine, this cathedral’s most sacred jewel, should be in pieces, but we know that James will return here when it is once again whole.’

Wouldn’t put money on it. This time Jane looked down at her shoes, and kept her mouth shut.

Which was more than James did when he put down his candle on a mason’s bench, and bent reverently to kiss the stone. Jane reckoned he must have spent some while dredging up this disgusting, venomous wedge of thick saliva.

When his face came up smiling, she felt sick. She also felt something strange and piercingly frightening: an unmistakable awareness, in her stomach, of the nearness of evil. She gasped, because it weakened her, her legs felt numb, and she wanted to be away from here, but was not sure she could move. She felt herself sinking into the stone of the arch. She felt soiled and corrupted, not so much by what she’d seen but by what she realized it meant, and she groped for the words she’d intoned with all the sincerity of a budgie – while Mum held her hands – before the altar at Ledwardine.

Christ be with us, Christ within us.

And then the electric lights went out.

‘Look, darling,’ he said, ‘it’s Mr Robinson. You remember Mr Robinson.’

Tim Purefoy held a large glass of red wine close to the tablecloth white of his surplice.

Anna wore a simple black shift, quite low-cut. She was a beautiful woman; she threw off a sensual charge like a miasma. Like an aura, Lol supposed.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I thought, one day, there would be somebody. I really didn’t think it would be you.’

‘The brother, perhaps.’ Tim lowered himself, with a grateful sigh, into the chair. ‘All rage and bombast, amounting, in the end, to very little – like most of them.’

‘Or the exorcist,’ Anna said, ‘Jane’s mother. I did so want to meet her before we moved on.’

‘But not this little chap here. No, indeed. Hidden depths, do you think?’ A bar of pewtery moonlight cut through the high window, reaching almost to the top of Tim Purefoy’s pale curls. He held up a dark bottle without a label. ‘Glass of wine, old son?’

‘No thanks,’ Lol said tightly. ‘I… seem to be interrupting something.’ Everything he said seemed to emerge slowly, the way words sometimes did in dreams, as though the breath which carried them had to tunnel its way through the atmosphere.

‘Not at all.’ Tim Purefoy took a long, unhurried sip of wine. ‘It’s finished now. It’s done. We’re glad to have the company, aren’t we, darling?’

‘Done?’

‘Ah, now, Mr Robinson…’ Tim put down his glass then used both hands to pull the white surplice over his head, letting it fall in a heap to the flags. ‘You must have some idea of what we’re about, or you wouldn’t be here.’

Anna Purefoy brought Lol a chair and stood in front of him until he sat down – like he was going to be executed, sacrificed. Anna looked young and fit and energized, as if she’d just had sex. She must, he thought, be about sixty, however. ‘Sure you won’t have a glass of wine?’

Before you die?

‘Communion wine?’ Lol said.

Tim Purefoy laughed. ‘With a tincture of bat’s blood.’

‘It’s our own plum wine, silly.’ Anna took the bottle from her husband and held it out to Lol. ‘See? You really shouldn’t believe everything you read about people like us.’

Lol remembered her patting floury hands on her apron. One can buy a marvellous loaf at any one of a half-dozen places in town, but one somehow feels obliged, living in a house this old.

He was almost disarmed by the ordinariness of it, the civility, the domesticity: candles like these, in holders like these, available in all good branches of Habitat. He blinked and forced himself to remember Katherine Moon congealing in her bath of blood – glancing across towards the bathroom door, holding the image of the dead, grinning Moon pickled like red cabbage. In that room over there, beyond those stairs. Behind that door.

Visualization, Athena White had said. Willpower.

‘Thank you.’ Lol accepted the stoppered wine bottle from Anna. He held it up for a moment before grasping it by the neck and smashing it into the stone fireplace. He felt the sting of glass-shards as the fire hissed in rage. Rivers of wine and blood ran down his wrist. And down over the hanging photograph of Moon.

‘Now, tell me what you did to her,’ Lol whispered.

The choir faded into trails of unconducted melody.

‘Please remain in your seats.’ The Bishop’s voice, crisply from the speakers. ‘We appear to have a power failure, but we’re doing all we—’ And then the PA system cut out.

Merrily spotted Mick in his mitre, by candlelight amid jumping shadows, before the candles began to go out, one by one, the air laden with the odour of cooling wax, until there was only the oval of light on the corona, like a Catherine wheel over the central altar – the last holy outpost.

She pulled the cross from under her cloak, standing close to the pool of blood on the tiles, though she couldn’t see it now. A baby began to cry.

She looked across the aisle and the pews, towards the main door, to where the big black stove should have been jetting red, and saw nothing. The stove was out, too. The Cathedral gone dark – gone cold.

‘Jesus,’ – Merrily feeling the fear like a ball of lead in her solar plexus – ‘may all that is You flow into me.’

‘James?’ the bearded minister called out. ‘Are you there?’

Jane stepped out from the archway and heard the swish of heavy robes as the Boy Bishop brushed past her in the dark. The candles held by the two attendants, the sentries, were also out. Only one small flame glowed – the two-inch votive candle given to James Lyden, now lying on the mason’s bench. Jane ran and snatched it up, hid the flame behind her hand, and moved out into the transept, listening for the swish of the robes.

Lyden was going somewhere, being taken somewhere, escorted.

She heard him again – his voice this time. ‘Yeah, OK.’ She followed quietly, though maybe not quietly enough, wishing she had her trainers on instead of her stupid best shoes.

She could see him now – a black, mitred silhouette against the wan light from the huge diamond-paned gothic windows in the nave.

Moonlight. Shadows of people, unmoving. Jane heard anxious whispers and a baby’s cry mingling into a vast soup of echoes. Where was Mum? Where was Mum with the cross? Why wasn’t she rushing for the pulpit, because, Christ, if there was a time for an exorcism, a time for the soul police to make like an armed response unit, this was it.

She could no longer see the mitred silhouette. Where had he gone, the sneering bastard who’d spat on the saint’s tomb, and brought darkness? Although, of course, she knew it hadn’t really happened like that. Somebody had hit a big fusebox somewhere. It was all coincidence, theatrics.

Jane stumbled, stepped into space, groping for stone, nearly dropping her stub of a candle. Hearing quick footsteps receding ahead of her.

Steps. Stone steps going down.

The crypt? The Boy Bishop was going into the crypt.

Jane had never been down there, although it was open to visitors. Mum had seen it. Mum said it was no big deal. No, there weren’t stacks of old coffins, nothing like that. Tombs at one end, effigies, but not as many as you might expect. It was just a bare stone cellar really, and not as big as you’d imagine.

Jane stayed where she was at the top of the steps.

Afraid, actually.

Admit it: afraid of being down there with Rowenna’s creepy boyfriend in his medieval robes, afraid of what slimeball stuff she might see him doing. The guy was a shit. Just like Danny Gittoes had broken into Ledwardine Church for Rowenna, James Lyden had spat on the tomb of the saint for her. Another sex-slave to Rowenna, who in turn was a friend of Angela. How long had Rowenna known Angela?

Aware of this long slime-trail of evil unravelling before her, Jane edged down two steps, listening hard.

Nothing.

She raised the stub of votive candle in its little metal holder. Perhaps she held the light of St Thomas, the guardian.

Could she believe that?

What did it matter? Jane shrugged helplessly to herself and went down into the crypt.

51 Sacrilege

‘BLOOD,’ LOL SAID. ‘I’ve been learning all about blood.’

Feeling – God help him – the energy of it.

It had been the right thing to do. Another couple of minutes and the Purefoys would have had him apologizing for disturbing their religious observance.

Tim scowled. ‘Mr Robinson, there are several ways we could react to your outburst of juvenile violence. The simplest would be to call the police.’

‘Do it,’ Lol said.

‘If you think we would have any explaining to do,’ Anna said, ‘you’re quite wrong. We have an interest in ritual magic. It’s entirely legal.’

‘I am an ordained priest of God,’ Tim said. ‘My God is the God of Abraham and Moses and Solomon, the God who rewards knowledge and learning; the God who shows us strength, who accepts that plague and pestilence have their roles…’

‘Stop dressing it up.’

‘… the God to whom Satan was a – an albeit occasionally troublesome – serving angel. Calling me a Satanist, as I suspect you were about to do, is therefore, something of an insult. For which’ – Tim Purefoy waved a hand – ‘I excuse you, because it was said in ignorance.’

‘We were both brought up in the Christian tradition,’ Anna interrupted. ‘It took us a while to realize that Christianity was introduced primarily as a constraint on human potential, which has to be removed if we are to survive and progress.’

‘Let’s say it’s simply run its course,’ Tim added, with the fervour of the converted. ‘The Church has no energy left; it’s riddled with greed and corruption. In this country alone, it’s sitting on billions of pounds which could be put to more sensible use.’

‘Even if we didn’t lift a finger, it would destroy itself within the next fifty years. But the signs are there in the sky – too many to be ignored. We cannot ignore signs.’

‘The signs are what brought us here to Hereford,’ Tim said. ‘But I don’t think you want to know about that. I think you want to know about the death of Katherine Moon. I think you’re here for reassurance that there was nothing you could have done to save her, am I right?’

‘And we’re happy to give you that.’ Anna smiled and reached across the firelight for his bloodied hand. Her fingers were slim and cool.

George Curtiss had taken charge, talking to vergers, organizing people by sporadic candlelight, shouting from the pulpit, explaining.

As though he could.

Merrily noticed that candles had to be repeatedly relit; it was like last night, when she and Huw were at the saint’s tomb. She stumbled past the central altar – only three candles left alight on the corona – looking around for Jane and the Bishop.

She found Mick Hunter eventually in the deep seclusion of his throne beyond the choir-stalls. The throne was of dark oak, many pinnacled, itself a miniature cathedral. He came out to join her, having removed the mitre. His sigh was like an audible scowl.

‘Merrily, of all the people I could do without in this situation…’

‘You really… really have to let me do it, Mick.’ Keeping her voice low and steady. ‘You can look away, you can grit your teeth – but you have to let me do it.’

‘Do it?’

‘You know exactly what I mean. You’ve got darkness and cold and spilt blood in your Cathedral. What you must do now is wind up the service, get the congregation out of here, lock the doors, and just… just let me do it.’

He stared down at her and, although it was too dark to see his face, she sensed his dismay and disbelief.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘why don’t you ask God? Why don’t you go and kneel down quietly in front of your high altar and ask Him? Ask Him if He’s happy about this?’

The Bishop didn’t move. There were just the two of them here in the holiest place. She dropped the wooden cross and bent to pick it up.

‘I made a mistake, didn’t I?’ Mick Hunter said. ‘I made a big mistake with you.’

She straightened up. ‘Looks like you did.’

‘Do you remember what I said to you last night when you asked me if I wanted your resignation from the post of Deliverance Consultant?’

‘You told me to get a good night’s sleep and forget about it.’

‘And?’

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Put it in writing for me tomorrow.’

‘Mick—’

‘Bishop,’ he said, ‘I think.’

Jane heard him breathing, so she knew roughly where he was – like, somewhere in the crypt, because the breathing filled the whole, intimidating blackness of it. She had her coat open and the candle cupped in her hand inside. She caught a finger in the flame and nearly yelped.

Christ be with me, she heard inside her head. In Mum’s voice. Mum be with me – that might be more use!

Just words, like a mantra – words to repeat and hold on to, to try and shout down your fear, like those poor, doomed soldiers in the First World War singing in the trenches. Christ within me.

She walked towards the sound of breathing, which came quicker now, with a snorting and a snuffling. Gross. What was this? Maybe she should get back up the steps and shout for help. But there was a power cut; and by the time she could get someone with a lamp down here, it would be over, whatever it was. Like she couldn’t guess.

She shouted, ‘Freeze!’

Bringing the candle out from under her coat, she held it as high as she could reach.

A hundred quaking shadows broke out over the crypt, and James Lyden’s eyes opened wide in shock, his mouth agape.

‘Oh!’ Jane recoiled in disgust.

There he was, the Boy Bishop, with one gaitered leg on a long-dead woman’s stone face. His chasuble was tented over Rowenna, now emerging – who for just a moment looked so gratifyingly ridiculous on her knees that Jane laughed out loud.

‘You total slimeballs!’

But she was nervous, realizing this wasn’t just some irreverent stunt – the Boy Bishop in full regalia, except presumably for his underpants. This was an act of deliberate sacrilege. It was meant to have an unholy resonance.

Get out of here!

Jane turned and made a dash for the steps.

But crashed into a wall. In the dark you quickly lost any sense of direction.

When she turned back, Rowenna was already between her and the steps leading out. Suddenly James’s arms encircled her from behind, his breath pumping against her neck.

Jane screamed.

Rowenna was easing the candle from between her fingers.

‘Oh, kitten,’ she said thickly. ‘Oh, kitten, what are we going to do with you now?’

Jane glared at her with open hostility. ‘Does our friend here know you do the same with Danny Gittoes?’

Holding the candle steady, between their two faces, Rowenna looked untroubled.

Jane said, ‘Does he know about those clergymen in Salisbury?’

Rowenna shook her head sadly.

‘I now know everything about you,’ Jane continued. ‘I know exactly what you are.’

Rowenna smiled sympathetically. ‘You’re not really getting any of this, are you? What I am is a woman, while you are still very much a child.’

Jane glared at her in silent fury, as Rowenna just shook her head. Looking at her now, you detected the kind of lazy arrogance in her eyes that you hadn’t picked up on before – and the coldness.

‘You must realize we were only friends because someone wanted your mother monitored, yeah?’

‘Who?’

‘And that sort of thing is how I make a bit of money sometimes.’

‘Someone at the Pod? Angela? You set me up for Angela, didn’t you?’

Annoyance contorted Rowenna’s small mouth. ‘Oh, please. I was ahead of where the Pod are years ago. Though it was quite touching to think of you standing at the window in your little nightie, solemnly saluting the sun and moon, and thinking you were plugged into the Ancient Wisdom.’

‘You bitch—’

‘Pity it all went wrong, though. I could have really shown you things that would’ve blown you away.’

‘Oh, you’re just so full of shit, Rowenna. I—’

Rowenna suddenly slapped Jane’s face, knocking her head back into James’s chest. ‘Don’t push your luck with me any more. Given time, I could really do things to you. I could make you totally fucking crazy.’

Jane felt James Lyden’s breath hot on her neck, and struggled vainly. ‘You’re even fooling yourself.’

‘You don’t know anything.’ Rowenna held the candle very close to Jane’s face, so that she could feel its heat. ‘Remember that suit? The greasy old suit I had Danny hide in the vestry?’

‘Yeah, who told you to do that?’

‘Nobody told me. I don’t take anyone’s orders… unless I want to.’ Rowenna wore a really sickly, incense-smelling scent that seemed to fill up the entire crypt. ‘I just couldn’t resist it after you’d told me how Denzil Joy had so badly scared your mother. I thought that would be really interesting – to see if I could make him stick to her.’

‘What?’

Rowenna put her face very close to Jane’s and breathed the words into her. For the first time, Jane knew what it meant to have one’s skin crawl.

‘I found his widow’s name in the phone book, so I sent James round to collect any old clothes for charity. And next I got into her: the Reverend Merrily Watkins. I nicked some of her cigarettes when I was at the vicarage, and I smoked them slowly and visualized, and I did a few other things and… OK, maybe I asked for a little assistance. It’s amazing what help you can get when you’re working on the clergy – on the enemy. And it worked, didn’t it? It really made her sweat; it made her ill. You told me she was ill. And I bet she didn’t tell you the half of it.’

Jane felt sick. She must be lying. She couldn’t have done all that.

‘You’re… just evil.’

‘I’m special, kitten. I’m very special.’ Rowenna moved away.

‘No, you’re not. You’re just… maybe you are a lot older than me. You’re, like, old before your time – old and corrupted.’

‘Right.’ Rowenna stepped away from her. ‘That’s it. James?’

James answered, ‘Yes?’ in this really subservient way.

‘Hit her for me, would you? Hit her hard.’

James said, ‘What?’

‘Hit the little cunt!’

‘No!’ Jane turned and hurled herself against him. Turned in his arms and pushed out at his face.

Which made him angry, and he let go for an instant, and then he punched her hard in the mouth. And then Rowenna’s hand came at her like a claw, grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her forward. Jane felt a crippling pain in the stomach and doubled up in agony. Another wrench at her hair pulled her upright, so James could hit her again in the face – enjoying it now, excited.

‘Yes,’ Rowenna hissed. ‘Yes!’

As Jane’s legs gave way, and the stone floor rushed up towards her.

Perhaps she passed out then. For a moment, at least, she forgot where she was.

‘We can’t!’ she heard from somewhere in the distance.

‘Go on, do it!’

Rowenna? Jane heard Rowenna’s voice again from yesterday. Death can also just mean the end of something before a new beginning. She saw Rowenna pointing her knife across the table… Lord Satan, take me!… the Tower struck by lightning, people falling out of the crack… a long way down, on to the hard, cold stone floor.

Jane felt very afraid. Must get up. She opened her eyes once and saw, in a lick of light, another face right under her own, with dead stone eyelids.

They’d laid her out on one of the effigies.

She tried to lift her head from that stone face. But she couldn’t, felt too heavy, as if all the stones of St Thomas’s tomb were piled on top of her. Then the candlelight went away, as they pushed her further down against the stone surface. She felt stone lips directly under hers.

‘Never go off on your own with an exposed flame,’ Rowenna said. ‘It’s bad news, kitten. Night-night then.’

A stunning pain on the back of her head and neck.

Time passed. No more voices.

Only smoke.

Smoke in her throat. Her head was full of smoke – and words. And Mum whispering…

Let me not run from the love that You offer

But hold me safe from the forces of evil.

But Mum was not here. It was just a mantra in her head.

‘Thank God for that,’ George Curtiss grunted from the pulpit, as the lights came back on.

There was laughter now in the nave – half nervous, half relieved – as George’s words were picked up by the suddenly resensitized microphone.

‘Well, ah… we don’t know what caused this, but it was most unfortunate, very ill timed. However, at least, ah… at least it demonstrates to our Boy Bishop that the life of a clergyman is not without incident.’

The Boy Bishop stood, head bowed, beneath the edge of the corona, in front of the central altar itself. Mick Hunter stood behind him, one hand on the boy’s shoulder.

‘We’d like to thank you all for being so patient. I realize some of you do need to get home…’

Merrily stood in the aisle, near the back of the nave, looking around for Jane, and very worried now. This is all that matters, isn’t it? This is all there is.

Something was wrong. Something else was wrong. The power seemed to be restored, but there was something missing. A dullness lingered – a number of bulbs failing to re-function, perhaps. The round spotlights in the lofty, vaulted ceiling appeared isolated, like soulless security lamps around an industrial compound.

‘It’s been suggested,’ George said, ‘that we now carry on with the ceremony, with the prayers and the Boy Bishop’s sermon, but omit the final hymn. So, ah… thank you.’

And no warmth either. The warm lustre had gone from the stones; they had a grey tinge like mould, their myriad colours no longer separated.

George Curtiss stepped down.

An air of dereliction, abandonment, deadness – as though something had entered under the cover of darkness, and something else had been taken away.

Dear God, don’t say that.

Under her cloak, the cross drooped from Merrily’s fingers, as the choir began – a little uncertainly, it sounded – with a reprise of the plainsong which had opened the proceedings.

Sophie had appeared at her side. ‘What happened?’

‘Sophie, have you seen Jane?’

‘I’m sorry, no. Merrily, what did Michael say to you?’

‘Basically he sacked me.’

‘But he can’t just—’

‘He can.’

She looked for the puddle of blood left by Mrs Lyden’s nosebleed. It was hardly visible, carried off on many shoes into the darkness outside.

‘Don’t give in, Merrily.’ Sophie said. ‘You mustn’t give in.’

‘What can I do?’

Mick had melted away into the shadows. James Lyden, Bishop of Hereford, was alone, sitting on his backless chair, notes in hand, waiting for the choir to finish.

‘I don’t like that boy,’ Sophie said.

The choristers ended their plainsong with a raggedness and a disharmony so slight that it was all the more unsettling. The sound of scared choirboys? By contrast, James Lyden’s voice was almost shockingly clear and precise and confident: a natural orator.

‘A short while ago, when I took my vows, the Lord Bishop asked me if I would be faithful and keep the promises made for me at my baptism.’

‘You must stop him,’ Sophie murmured.

‘I can’t. Suppose it… Suppose there’s nothing.’

‘Of course,’ James said, ‘I don’t remember my baptism. It was a long time ago and it was in London, where I was born. I had no choice then, and the promises were made for me because I could not speak for myself.’

Sophie gripped her arm. ‘Please.’

‘But now I can.’ James looked up. Even from here, you could see how bright his eyes were. Drug-bright? ‘Now I can speak for myself.’

‘Don’t let him. Stop him, Merrily – or I’ll do it myself.’

‘All right.’ Merrily brought out the cross. It didn’t matter now what anyone thought of her. Or how the Bishop might react, because he already had. The worst that could happen…

No, the best – the best that could happen!

… was that she’d make a complete fool of herself and never be able to show her face in Hereford again. Or in Ledwardine either.

Untying the cloak at her neck, she began to walk up the aisle towards James Lyden.

As James noticed her, his lips twisted in a kind of excitement. She kept on walking. The backs of her legs felt weak. Just keep going. Stay in motion or freeze for ever.

Members of the remaining congregation were now turning to look at her. There were whispers and mutterings. She kept staring only at James Lyden.

Who stood up, in all his majesty.

Whose voice was raised and hardened.

Who said, ‘But, as we have all seen tonight, there is one who speaks more… eloquently… than I. And his name… his name is…’

‘No!’

Merrily let the cloak fall from her shoulders, brought up the wooden cross, and walked straight towards the Boy Bishop, her gaze focused on those fixed, shining, infested eyes below the mitre.

52 A Small Brilliance

LOL WAS SEEING himself with Moon down below the ramparts of Dinedor Camp. They were burying the crow, one of his hands still sticky with blood and slime… for him, the first stain on the idyll. He saw Moon turning away, her shoulders trembling – something reawoken in her.

‘Did you ever watch her charm a crow?’ Anna Purefoy asked. ‘It might be in a tree as much as fifty, a hundred yards away, and she would cup her hands and make a cawing noise in the back of her throat. And the crow would leave its tree, like a speck of black dust, and come to her. I don’t think she quite knew what she was doing – or was even aware that she was going to do it until it began to happen.’

It fell dead at my feet. Out of the sky. Isn’t that incredible?

‘It was simply something she could always do,’ Tim added. ‘Further proof that she was very special.’

Lol glanced at the red-stained photograph of Moon over the fireplace. Not one he’d seen before; they must have taken it themselves. Athena White had told him how they would use photographs, memorabilia of a dead person as an aid to visualization.

He turned back to the Purefoys. ‘Why don’t you both sit down.’ He didn’t trust them. He imagined Anna Purefoy suddenly striking like a cobra.

‘As you wish.’ She slipped into one of the cane chairs. Tim hesitated and then lowered himself into the high-backed wooden throne.

‘After she was dead,’ Lol said, ‘you left out that cutting from the Hereford Times, like a suicide note. She’d probably never even seen it, had she?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Tim yawned. ‘That’s a trivial detail.’

Lol made himself sit in the other cane chair, keeping about ten feet between himself and them.

‘How did you kill her?’

‘Oh, really!’ Anna leaned forward in the firelight, a dark shadow suddenly spearing between her breasts.

‘Darling—’

‘No, I won’t have this, Tim. Murder is a crime. We did not kill Katherine. We showed her the path she was destined to find, and she took it – according to the values of the Celtic ethos. We talked for hours and hours with Katherine. She could never relate to this era – this commercial, secular world, this erratic world, this panicking period in history. She knew she didn’t want to be here, and she was looking for a way back.’

‘Bollocks,’ Lol said, although he realized it wasn’t.

‘And anyway,’ Anna said, ‘to the Iron Age Celt, death is merely a short, shadowy passage, to be entered boldly in the utter and total certainty of an afterlife. A Celtic human sacrifice was often a willing sacrifice. Katherine always knew she wouldn’t enjoy a long life – I showed her that in the cards, though she didn’t need me to – and therefore she was able to give what remained of it a purpose.’

‘We helped her return to the bosom of her tradition,’ Tim said comfortably.

‘It was very beautiful,’ Anna said softly. ‘There was snow all around, but the bathroom was warm. We helped her put candles around the bath. She was naked and warm and smiling.’

‘No!’ Lol said.

But he saw again Moon’s thin arms gleaming pale gold, lit by the four tall church candles, one at each corner of the white bathtub. Her teeth were bared. Her hands – something black and knobbled across Moon’s open hands.

‘But you didn’t give her an afterlife, did you?’

He saw those sharp little teeth bared in excitement, Moon panting in the sprinkling light: energized, euphoric, slashing, gouging. And then lying back at peace, relieved to feel her lifeblood jetting from opened veins.

The tragedy and the horror of it made him pant with emotion. The Purefoys had done this, as surely as if they’d waylaid her like a ripper in a country lane. But it was actually worse than that…

Hands sweating on the edge of the chair seat, he flung at them what Athena White had explained to him.

‘If a sacrifice is swift, the spirit is believed to progress immediately to a… better place. But if the death is protracted, the magician has time to bind the spirit to his will, so that it remains earthbound and subject to the commands of—’

‘Oh, really’ – Tim half rose – ‘what nonsense…’

‘It might well be,’ Lol said, ‘but you don’t think it is. You think you still have her… and through her an access to her ancestors and to the whole pre-Christian, pagan Celtic tradition.’

He sprang up. He was sure Moon’s image there on the wall was shining not with the candlelight, nor the moonlight, but with a sad grey light of its own.

‘You just prey on inadequates and sick people like Moon, and attract little psychos like Rowenna and other people desperate for an identity and—’

‘People like you,’ Anna said gently.

‘No.’ He backed away, as she arose.

‘Katherine told us about you, Laurence. She said you would often make her feel better because you were so insecure yourself, and had a history of mental instability.’

‘That was a long time ago.’

Tim laughed. Anna held out her hands to Lol. Her face, in the mellow light, was beautiful and looked so exquisitely kind.

‘It wasn’t such a long time ago. And it doesn’t go away, does it, Laurence? It’s part of you. You have no certainty of anything, and you’re drawn to people who do have.’

He stared into the explicit kindness of her, searching for the acid he knew had to be there, because this was the black siren, the woman who had moulded Moon into her own fatal fantasy and would have taken Jane too – to use as well.

Anna smiled with compassion, and he knew that if he let her touch him his resistance would be burned away.

She said softly, ‘Laurence, think about this. What sent you to Katherine? Why did you come here tonight?’

Lol closed his eyes for just a moment. At once he saw a small, slim dark woman in black, with eyes that had to laugh at the nonsense of it all. He blinked furiously to send her away; this was no place for—

‘Ah.’ Anna was shaking her head, half amused – an infants’ school headmistress with a silly child who would never learn. ‘Why are you… why are you so obsessed with the little woman priest?’

‘You can only…’ His mind rebelled. Up against the far wall, facing this smiling Anna and the candles in the barn bay, he refused to be shocked, refused to believe she’d pulled the image of Merrily from his head. ‘You can only think in terms of obsession, can’t you? Love doesn’t mean a thing.’

There were suddenly two bright orbs in the air.

‘Love,’ Tim Purefoy said, ‘is the pretty lie we use to justify and glorify our lust. And the feeble term used in Christian theology to dignify weakness and sentiment.’

Both Purefoys were gazing with placid candour at Lol, as the bright orbs exploded, and Lol’s ears were filled with roaring and the night went white.

A shadow fell across Merrily as she walked towards the altar with the cross in her hands.

The old priest stood next to her in the aisle. He wore a black cassock, stained, plucked and holed. He looked very ill, pale beyond pale. She had no idea how he came to be here – only why. His eyes looked directly into hers. His eyes were like crystals in an eroded cliff–face. They carried no apology. There was a bubble of spit in a corner of his mouth.

He held out a hand ridged and gnarled as a shrivelled parsnip.

Jesus Christ was the first exorcist – letters on a white page.

And Huw Owen on a mountainside in Wales. I don’t want stuff letting in. A lot of bad energy’s crowding the portals. I want to keep all the doors locked and the chains up.

Merrily nodded.

She put the cross into Thomas Dobbs’s hand and stepped aside, with her back to a pew-end.

Jesus Christ was the first exorcist.

The Boy Bishop stood up, letting his notes flutter to the tiles. He held his crozier at arm’s length, like a spear. His two candlebearers had melted away, but Mick Hunter still stood a few paces behind him. Merrily saw a series of expressions blurring James’s face. She thought of Francis Bacon’s popes.

She thought that James’s face was not now his own.

The Cathedral had filled with a huge and hungry hush.

Thomas Dobbs stopped about ten feet short of the boy – under the jagged halo of the corona. When he spoke, his voice was slurred and growly, dense with phlegm and bile, and the words tumbled out of him, unstoppable, like a rockslide.

‘IN THE NAME OF… OF THE LIVING GOD, I CALL… I CALL YOU OUT!

‘IN… NAME OF… GOD OF ALL CREATION…

‘… NAME OF HIS SON JES… JESUS CHRIST… I CALL YOU OUT…

‘I CALL YOU OUT AND…

‘BANISH YOU.’

Merrily watched his pocked monument of a face, only one side of it working. She could almost feel the strength leaving his body, the despair at the heart of his struggle against his own weakness.

The Boy Bishop let his crozier fall, and ran down the aisle. Merrily saw Dick Lyden squeezing out of his pew, striding after his son. Where the boy had stood, she saw the slightly unclear figure of a slim woman in a long dress, with hair down to her waist, like dark folded wings, and then – as though Merrily had blinked – the woman was no longer there. She saw Dobbs clench his teeth so hard she felt they were going to split and fragment, and she saw his arm winching stiffly upward like a girder, pointing.

‘DEVIL… UNCLEAN SPIR… IT!’

No more than a harsh rasp this time, and then he turned away, stumbling, and he and Merrily came face to face.

He put up a hand to her.

She didn’t move. She didn’t speak. There was nothing to say. She had no tradition.

Slowly, she bowed her head.

Felt the heat of his hand a second before his fingers touched her cheek.

Merrily looked up then, and saw in his old, knowing eyes, a small brilliance, before he died.

53 Silly Woman

LOL GAZED INTO Anna Purefoy’s pale eyes. There was no obvious expression in them: no fear, no alarm. Only perhaps the beginning of surprise, or was he imagining that?

There was dust in her fine, fair hair.

No blood at all – Anna’s neck was simply broken. It wasn’t obvious exactly what had done that, but it wasn’t important, was it? Not important now.

He didn’t touch her. He just stood up. Strangely, although part of the loft had come down, six of the ten candles were still alight. No shadows, other than his own, appeared to be moving.

He couldn’t look for very long at Tim Purefoy, who was, mostly, still in his chair, the chair itself crushed into the stairs. The black bull-bars had torn Tim almost in half. One of his legs was…

God! Lol turned away, towards the car. The smell from Tim’s body was hot and foul, and there was still running blood and what might be intestine over the windscreen of the Mitsubishi Intercooler Super-Turbo-whatever the hell it was called.

And something else, half across the roof, which he thought was Moon’s futon fallen from the toppled loft. Making it impossible to see inside the vehicle. The steaming silence, though, was ominous.

Also, the old oak pillar. Nothing but old oak or steel would have stopped the bull-barred Mitsubishi. It had torn down the glazed bay like cellophane, exploded the urbane Tim Purefoy like a rotten melon. But the pillar had held.

He couldn’t make himself go past Tim; he didn’t want to know the details. Instead he squeezed around the back, stepping over the smashed pieces of the chair he’d been sitting in a few minutes ago. If he hadn’t finally lost it… if Anna Purefoy hadn’t pursued him, gleefully taunting him with her knowledge of his obsession for ‘the little woman priest’… he would have been the first to be hit.

When he reached the other side of the car, he found the driver’s window wound down. Right down – as if that was how it had been when the Mitsubishi rammed the glass-covered bay. As though the driver had needed to hear the impact – and the screams.

But there had been no screams audible above the engine’s roar and the sounds of destruction. All too fast, too explosively unexpected.

Denny smiled out at him. ‘Bodged job, eh? I always said it was a… bodged job. They never meant to… turn it into holiday ’commodation. Never planned to renovate it, till… till Kathy showed up. Dead, are they?’

‘Mm,’ Lol said.

‘But you’re all right. I never… I never thought you’d be here. I thought you were a…’ Denny laughed out some blood. ‘… a bit of a nancy, if I’m honest. No… no… you stay there. Don’t fucking look down here, man. Not having you throwing up on my motor.’

‘Shut up now,’ Lol said. ‘I’ll have an ambulance here as soon as I can find the bloody phone.’

‘I think on the table – bottom of the stairs. Be part of my fucking sump now.’

Lol tried the driver’s door. ‘Don’t be stupid, mate,’ Denny said. ‘You open that, I’ll just fall out in several pieces. An Iron Age Celt dies in his chariot. I tell you about my dream? A mystic now, man – finally a fucking mystic.’

Lol saw that Denny’s earring was gone. Or maybe the ear itself.

‘You’re so… indiscreet, Lol. That’s your problem. You don’t trust yourself – always got to tell somebody.’

Lol sighed. ‘The extension. You heard me leaving that message for Merrily.’

‘Been eavesdropping on your calls for weeks, Laurence. Needed to hear what you were saying to Lyden – about Kathy. Could never figure why you weren’t all over Kathy. She attractive, this vicar?’

‘Listen,’ Lol said. ‘I’m going over to the farm. I’ll have to break in and use their phone.’

‘If that makes you feel better. But if I’ve gone to the ancestors, time you get back…’

‘I’ll be less than five minutes. I’ll smash a window in the kitchen.’

‘Got a lot to say to those primitive fuckers,’ Denny muttered. ‘To the ancestors.’

‘Don’t go away,’ Lol said.

‘No. Cold in here, en’t it? Must be the extra ventilation.’

Denny laughed his ruined laugh.

Headlights and warblers. Déjà vu. The ambulance cutting across the green again, directly to the north porch. A police car behind the ambulance. Behind that, a plain Rover: Howe.

‘Later, Annie,’ Merrily said, ‘please? Is that all right? I need to see that Jane’s…’

‘Just don’t go off anywhere,’ Howe said.

‘No further than the hospital.’

‘No,’ Jane protested, sitting up in the back of the ambulance, a paramedic hanging on to her arm. ‘You’re not coming. I’m not going. This is ridiculous. It’s just like… mild concussion.’

‘Could be a hairline fracture, Jane,’ the paramedic warned.

‘No way. This guy’s just blowing it up on account of having his hands all over me.’

‘I had my hands all over you,’ the boy in white said patiently, ‘because you were on fire.’

‘Sure,’ Jane said. Some of her hair was singed, and she had quite a deep cut on her forehead and bruising on the left side of her jaw and under her left eye. ‘And, like, if you’re wearing a dress and your name’s Irene, you think nobody’s going to suspect anything.’

‘Eirion,’ the boy said. There were black smuts all over his hands and his white alb.

‘Whatever.’

‘I’ll be here for quite a while,’ Annie Howe told Merrily. ‘We have to talk in depth, Ms Watkins.’ She pulled Eirion away from the ambulance. ‘I think you need to tell me how she got on fire.’

‘She was down in the crypt – with a candle. She said she must have tripped, but…’ He hesitated. ‘There was nobody else there when I got to her, OK? But she was face-down and her coat was on fire and… I really think you need to talk to James Lyden.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘The Boy Bishop. His parents were looking for him. They’ve probably taken him home. They live in one of those Edwardian houses in Barton Street. And you need to talk to his girlfriend.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Merrily said, ‘I think you definitely want to talk to James’s girlfriend.’

‘Name?’

‘Melissa,’ Eirion said. ‘But she seems to have gone.’

Merrily said, ‘Melissa?’

‘I don’t know her other name. James told me she lives with her foster-parents on a farm up on Dinedor Hill. He knows where it is – he’s been up there a couple of times.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Merrily said.

She went into the Cathedral and stayed away from everyone, even Sophie. Especially from Sophie – she mustn’t be involved.

Merrily saw that there was a blanket over the body of Thomas Dobbs, and two uniformed policeman guarding it. The nave had a secular feel, like some huge market hall. Spiritual work to be done, here – but by whom?

Jane had absolutely refused to let Merrily go with her to the hospital, but in the end she had accepted Eirion’s company. Merrily smiled faintly. The boy must have masochistic tendencies.

Across the nave, over by Bishop Stanbury’s ornate chantry, she saw Huw Owen pacing about, hands deep in the pockets of his RAF greatcoat. She hadn’t spoken to him yet, although George Curtiss had told her it had been Huw who’d brought Dobbs along, after helping him sign himself out of the General Hospital.

Dobbs’s last stand. Where was the squatter now? Should James Lyden be exorcized, or merely counselled by his father? Where would they go from here? Who would work from the office with on the door? Not a woman, that was for sure.

A hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t turn round. She knew his smell: light sweat, sex.

‘A busy day, Merrily.’

‘Indeed, Bishop.’

‘Were you looking for me?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’

He came round to face her. He’d changed into his jogging gear. His thick brown hair looked damp with sweat.

‘I have to run sometimes, to clear it all away. It’s very calming. I run through the streets and nobody knows who I am.’

‘Oh, I think they do, Bishop. They’ve all seen your picture, running. But you can only run so far, can’t you?’

Mick didn’t smile. ‘Let’s go for a walk, shall we?’

‘All right.’

She followed him out of the south door, towards the cloisters, along a narrow, flagged floor, dim and intimate. She’d left her cloak in the Cathedral and felt cold in her jumper and skirt, but was determined not to show it.

‘This farce will be in the papers,’ he said.

‘Something will be in the papers.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I imagine you’re excellent at news management.’

‘Said in a somewhat derogatory way.’

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I’m impressed.’

‘No, you aren’t. You think I’m just an ambitious administrator, with few spiritual qualities.’

‘If any,’ Merrily agreed. What the hell. Jane was going to be all right, Huw was there in the Cathedral. What the hell!

The Bishop leaned against a door to his left, and the cold bit hard. They were almost outside.

This was the tourist part of the Cathedral – in summer, anyway. A stone-walled courtyard, a snackbar, steps and benches and tables. The Bishop held open the door for her and followed her out, pulling the door shut behind them. They were on a raised stone path bordered by flowerbeds and evergreen shrubs. There was a circular lawn with a dead fountain in the middle, a picturesquely ruined wall behind it, overhung by decorative trees and vines. Idyllic in summer: you could be miles from the city.

Deserted now under the icy moon.

‘You,’ Mick Hunter said mildly, ‘are an unbelievable little bitch – an incredible cock-teaser.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Merrily shook her head, moving back to the door. ‘This is not what I wanted to talk about.’

The Bishop placed himself in front of the door, shaking his head slowly. ‘All right, what do you want to talk about?’

‘Dobbs?’

‘You want me to express regret? Very well, I regret it.’

Merrily folded her arms against the cold. There was no delicate way to put this. ‘When Canon Dobbs was dying, he put out his arm and he pointed, and he managed to say, “Devil… unclean spirit.” And everyone thought he was pointing at James Lyden. But I saw he was pointing at someone standing just to the left of James – in the shadows for once.’

Hunter didn’t deny it. ‘Does it surprise you that he hated me?’

‘Under the circumstances, hardly. When you arrived, he was an old man in bad health. He was due to retire at any time, but you pushed him out. When he wouldn’t resign voluntarily, you chose to humiliate him. Thus antagonizing the Dean and the Chapter and countless other people – people who really counted.’

‘One can’t be sentimental about these things.’

‘This wasn’t pragmatism, Bishop. This was lunacy. When you told me last night that you’d been advised against appointing a female Deliverance consultant, it didn’t strike me at the time, but later I thought, that’s not the kind of thing he does. He’s a politician. He might appoint me later, when he’s proved himself, but not… I mean, I bet the people who advised you against it were those people whose support you really needed.’

He said nothing.

‘It had never really made obvious sense, but I thought – and Sophie often said – that you were young and radical and a bit reckless. But you’re also clever and cautious. You never put a foot wrong. How would some hot-headed revolutionary ever make bishop under the age of forty-five? How could he ever make bishop at all?’

‘Merrily,’ he said. ‘Did it ever occur to you that I simply fancied the hell out of you?’

‘God forgive me, it did. It occurred to me you were looking for a nice, safe legover, and what safer option than a female cleric with ambition and no husband? Sure, I thought that for quite a while. I even came to the conclusion I could handle it if we weren’t alone too often.’

‘How plucky of you.’ He moved out of the doorway. His face was two-dimensionally gaunt – light and shadow – in the moonlight.

‘But I still wondered why it was so important for Dobbs – the hardest, possibly the most uncompromising exorcist in the business – to be out of the way now? And quickly. Who could it possibly help to have a barely qualified novice floundering about? Someone who really didn’t know the score on certain aspects of the situation. Someone whose appointment was politically sensitive. Someone who could be pushed around, blamed, bullied…’

‘You’re talking nonsense, Merrily. It’s been an emotional few days for you, and you’re—’

‘Acting like a silly woman.’

He said, ‘You know, frankly, I couldn’t believe it when you wouldn’t let me take you home and fuck you that night. It was such an amazing night… with the new snow and the ambulance and that wonderful charge in the air. We were all so high.’

‘High?’ She stared at him. ‘High on an old man having a stroke? Wow! Even better tonight, then, Mick. This time he really died. I bet you nearly came in your episcopal briefs.’

The Bishop slapped her face.

She said, ‘What?’

He’d hardly moved his body, simply reached out and done it. Almost lazily, as if to show that if she really annoyed him he could knock her head from her shoulders without breaking more sweat than it took to circuit High Town.

‘There are policemen in the Cathedral,’ Merrily said.

‘It’s a cathedral, Merrily. It has very thick walls and windows which don’t open. You aren’t supposed to hear what goes on outside.’

‘I can’t believe you did that.’

‘You can believe anything you want to believe. You can believe or disbelieve at will.’

‘I think we should go, Bishop, before you do or say something else that won’t help your glittering career.’

She was now realizing how stupid she’d been. She could have told Annie Howe. She could have called Huw over. Earlier, Sophie had offered to come with her. But, as usual, she hadn’t been able to quite believe she wouldn’t be making a complete fool of herself in front of others. And she had thought she’d be quite safe virtually anywhere in the shadow of the Cathedral.

He seemed quite relaxed, but he wasn’t going to let her through the door. She found she was backing away on to the circular lawn.

‘Do you know young James Lyden?’ The Bishop put a foot on to the grass, already brittle with frost.

‘Not really.’

‘Not a popular boy. Even I don’t like him awfully. He behaved rather badly today. What do you think’s going to happen to him?’

‘I don’t know. His father’s a psychotherapist. Perhaps he’ll be able to handle it.’

‘I don’t think so – neither does James. Where do you think he is now?’

‘I believe his parents took him home,’ she said cautiously. What was this about?

‘Wrong,’ the Bishop said. ‘James gave his old man the slip. The last thing James wanted was to go back home in disgrace – Hereford-cred is Dick Lyden’s raison d’être. The boy’s now undone all the good work for him. I told James he could hang out at the Palace for a while. Nobody knows he’s there. Nobody there but me today, as Val left for the Cotswolds this morning. Rather an unpleasant, maladjusted boy, our James.’

‘Yes.’

‘He nearly killed your daughter.’

‘Yes.’

‘And who knows what he’ll do now?’ Mick said.

He came towards her, moving as an athlete, his arms loose. She knew that if she tried to run past him, towards the closed-down snackbar and the steps, he’d catch her easily. She stopped in the middle of the circular lawn, near the fountain with its stone pot on top. She put her hands up. He waited, a couple of yards away, moonlight on his hair.

‘Look—’ She tried to produce a laugh. ‘How about we treat this like last night’s conversation and pretend it never happened?’

Somewhere, over God knew how many intervening walls, she heard a car start up. That was the only sound.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said quietly. ‘I think you’d better carry on talking.’

‘I think I’ve said all I want to say.’

‘But not all I want to know.’

She found she’d now backed up against the ruined wall, far too high to get over. Probably the Bishop’s Palace garden behind.

‘There are people,’ she said, ‘who wish us ill. And I think – whether unwillingly, or because of blackmail, or something – you’ve been playing on their side.’

Her right shoulder rammed against a projecting stone, and she winced.

‘All the signs for them… Cantilupe’s shrine in pieces, I suppose, was the main one… I mean, if Dobbs had still been official, the spiritual defences would have been so much stronger, wouldn’t they? Instead of him having to struggle alone and furtively at night, exposed to whatever psychic influences were at work.’

She began to edge, inch by inch, along the wall. There was a lower section further along, no more than three feet high. OK, she might wind up on the Palace lawn, but she could make it down to the river bank and…

Oh Jesus, that was wrong, wasn’t it?

But what alternative was there? She kept moving – imperceptibly, she hoped.

‘Try pinching yourself,’ the Bishop said. ‘It might all be a dream, a silly fantasy.’

‘I don’t think so. And I still don’t know what you believe, if anything. I don’t even know if you believe that what they’re doing is likely to have any effect whatsoever.’

He smiled and stepped back from her. ‘You know, I never wanted to be a bishop. There’ve been far too many in my family. From an early age I knew what unholy shits most of them were, so I never wanted to be one of them. No, I wanted to be a rock star – or a cabinet minister. I actually quite envied poor Tony, for a while, but politicians… everyone suspects them, don’t they?’

‘Do they?’

‘Politicians are capable of anything, whereas bishops… bishops somehow are still seen as quite remarkably saintly. They might occasionally make some ill-advised remark about the fantasy of a virgin birth, but they don’t embezzle large sums, fuck other people’s wives or… what? What else don’t they do, Merrily? What else don’t bishops do?’

‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Don’t make me say it.’

He straightened up, a foot taller than her.

‘Let’s go in now,’ she said. ‘You’ve already sacked me. I’m pretty stupid, really. A lousy exorcist, too.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll go away immediately. I’ll apply for vicar of Penzance.’

‘Merrily, what else don’t bishops do?’

‘I don’t know that you did it. And if you did, I don’t understand why – or even if it was an accident.’

‘Go on.’

‘Paul Sayer – the Satanist dragged from the river.’

‘Ah,’ he said.

‘I think you know how he died,’ she said.

And she dived for the low wall.

He caught her easily and threw her down, well away from the wall, into the frozen flowerbed under the central fountain. He slapped her hard, backwards, forwards, across both cheeks, shocking away her scream as he straddled her, pushing her skirt up and thrusting a hand between her legs.

He gave a long, ragged, rueful sigh.

Then took his hand away.

She froze up.

‘The really unfortunate part, for me, Merrily,’ he said, ‘is that I cannot give you what you so richly deserve and would probably end up rather enjoying.’

She couldn’t move. She heard herself panting in terror, panting so loud that it might have been coming from someone else lying next to her.

‘DNA,’ he said. ‘D-N-bloody-A.’

Her spine was chilled, literally: the frost melting through her jumper as he pressed her into the soil. She tried to pray, while at the same time looking to each side of her for a possible weapon.

‘Because this isn’t me, of course,’ he told her. ‘Bishops don’t do this. It’s never considered feasible for a bishop to even contemplate doing this to a woman. A bishop’s whereabouts on the night in question are rarely – even in these suspicious times – ever questioned. Especially… if there’s an unpleasant, arrogant, sociopathic teenager like young James Lyden on the loose. Having been found hiding in the Bishop’s Palace and unceremoniously ejected therefrom by the understandably irate Bishop, he wanders the grounds…’

‘You can’t possibly—’

‘My dear child, you have no idea of the things I’ve got away with… I really do believe I am… protected.’

‘You’re mad. I can’t believe—’ She panicked then, pushing against him, tossing her head from side to side, summoning a scream.

He jammed an arm into her mouth. ‘No,’ he said coldly, his other hand flattening a breast. ‘Not that. Never that.’

Over his shoulder, she could see the Cathedral wall and one of the high, diamond-paned windows – with lights behind. With police, and perhaps a doctor summoned to examine Thomas Dobbs’s body, or an electrician to find out what went wrong earlier? Vergers, canons, all within twenty feet – as the Bishop of Hereford placed his long, sensitive fingers round her throat.

‘You rejected me, Mrs Watkins. On a personal level, that was the most insulting thing of all.’

‘I want to pray,’ she said.

He laughed.

‘Does that really mean nothing to you?’

He took his hands from her throat.

‘I don’t believe in God,’ he said, ‘except as something created by man in what he liked to believe was his image. I don’t believe in Satan. I don’t believe in saints – or demons. I accept the psychological power of symbolism, of costume drama.’

She said, ‘You really don’t see it, do you?’ She squirmed to a sitting position, her back to the fountain. ‘You don’t see what you are!’

He recoiled slightly, puzzled.

‘You don’t realize… that a non-believer who manipulates—’ she struggled to her feet as she spoke, ‘… who manipulates the belief system to promote his own power and influence…’ she snatched the stone pot from the top of the fountain; it was heavier than she expected; she almost let it fall; ‘… is the most satanic… person of all.’

She was sobbing.

‘Put it down,’ the Bishop said.

She managed to raise the pot, with both hands, over her head. She backed on to the path.

Mick relaxed, spread his hands. ‘You going to throw that at me?’

He was about four feet away from her. If she threw it at him with all her strength, he would catch it easily. If she came close enough to try to hit him with it, he would simply take it away from her.

His eyes caught the full moon. His eyes were at their wildest; she sensed enjoyment, a need to be at all times very close to the edge.

He shrugged.

‘I was going to let you pray. I was going to let you kneel and pray. I accept the level of your faith. Very well, I’ll use that pot, if you like. You can kneel and pray and, while you’re talking to God, I can bring it down very hard, very cleanly, on the back of your head. Bargain?’

Her arms were aching, but she kept the pot raised, like an offering to the moon.

‘It distresses me that you have to die,’ Mick Hunter said. ‘The way it’s turned out with you, that leaves me sad. I do want you to know that I’m capable of feeling real distress.’

He walked towards her with his arms outstretched.

‘Merrily?’

There was nothing more to say. She arched her back, feeling a momentary acute pain in her spine, and hurled the stone pot into the great gothic diamond-paned window.

54 Friends in Dark Places

YOU COULD SEE him sliding it into her. It was quite dark, but the camera came in close, and there was the beam of a torch or lamp on their fuzzy, shadowed loins. Candles wavered out of focus, balls of light in the background. You could make out the glimmer of a gothic window. Beneath the woman’s buttocks was what might have been an altar-cloth.

‘Is that him?’ Annie Howe asked. ‘Is it as simple as this?’

They knew from his parents that, for a period during his time at Oxford, he’d had long hair – though it was not fashionable at the time – and also a beard. But there seemed to be no actual pictures of him from those days.

‘It could be him,’ Merrily said. ‘Then, again…’

‘You going to invite his wife to look at this?’ Huw wondered.

‘If necessary,’ Howe said. ‘I’m advised it may not be entirely politic at this stage to expose a bishop’s wife to pornography, and ask her if she recognizes her husband. She’s coming back this afternoon from her parents’ house in Gloucestershire. I’ve already spoken to her on the phone, and she didn’t seem as shocked as she might be. Any reason for that?’

‘It’s a marriage,’ Merrily said, ‘and maybe a political marriage, at that. Put it this way, their kids go to boarding school, and Val seems to spend a lot of time away from home.’

‘Interesting,’ Howe said.

Her office at headquarters was no surprise. Minimalist was the word; the TV and video looked like serious clutter. Merrily found this calming for once; there were no layers here. She wondered if she dared light a cigarette. Perhaps not. Beyond the big window, the sky was grey and calm: one of those un-Christmassy mild days which so often precede Christmas.

‘All right.’ Howe stopped Paul Sayer’s tape and rewound it. ‘Let’s look at it one more time.’

‘Actually,’ Lol said, ‘that woman… Could I look at the woman?’

Howe glanced at him with tilted head, and set the tape rolling again.

The woman on the possible-altar wore a blindfold and a gag, but the more times you watched the scene, the less it seemed like rape. Too smooth. She was ready, Merrily thought.

‘It’s Anna Purefoy.’ Lol leaned forward from the plastic chair next to Merrily’s.

‘Are you sure?’ Howe asked him. ‘This woman looks quite young. I’m told the film could be twenty years old. I thought we might be looking at the very early days of home-video, but my sergeant suggests it was transferred from something called Super Eight cine-film. Even so, Anna would have been in her late thirties, early forties.’

‘It’s her,’ Lol insisted.

‘Aye, they like to take care of themselves.’ Huw Owen was occupying a corner of Howe’s desk. He was the untidiest object in the immaculate room.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Owen?’

‘Secret of eternal youth, lass – sometimes you’d think they’d found it. Then they’ll go suddenly to seed, or become gross like Crowley. Drugs were no help, mind, in his case.’

Howe stood with her back to the window. She appeared, for some reason, uncharmed at being addressed as ‘lass’.

‘Well, it’s clear that this tape is never going to be usable in evidence, even if we could put our hands on the original. But it does prompt speculation. Would you like to speculate for us, Mr Owen?’

‘I get the feeling you were at university,’ Huw said. ‘Did they have any kind of occult society at your place?’

‘There were a hundred different societies, but I was never a joiner.’

‘I can imagine,’ Huw said. ‘Well, you look at most universities, you’ll find some kind of experimental mystical group – harmless enough in most cases, but one association leads to another.’

Merrily said, ‘I have a problem with that. I can’t see Mick having any interest at all in mysticism.’

‘Happen a reaction against his solid clergy family?’

‘His reaction, then, would be to avoid any kind of religious experience.’

‘My knowledge of theology is limited,’ Howe said, ‘but what we’ve just been watching is not what I would immediately think of as religious.’

‘No,’ Merrily said, ‘it’s plain sex. If you’re looking for serious motivating forces in Mick’s life, you’d have to put sex close to the top. He’d be nineteen or twenty then, newly liberated from the bosom of what was probably a less-than-liberal family. Suppose he thought he was getting involved with people who could, I don’t know, extend his experience in all kinds of interesting ways.’

‘Very astute, lass.’ Huw patted her shoulder. ‘As you’ve been finding out, clergy and the children of clergy are always fair game.’

‘Yes.’

‘So we’ve got a lad from a high-placed clergy family, up at Oxford. What was he reading?’

‘History,’ Howe said, ‘and politics.’

‘He could have become anything,’ Merrily said, ‘yet winds up following his father into the Church. You just can’t see him as a curate, somehow.’ She looked up at Howe. ‘It’s like imagining Annie here directing traffic.’

Howe scowled.

‘That’s interesting,’ Huw said. ‘Why did he do it? You really want me to develop a theory, Inspector?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘All right. You’ve got this smart, handsome lad from a dogcollar dynasty, putting it around Oxford like a sailor on shoreleave. And he’s drawn into summat – drawn in, to put it crudely, by his dick. He’s having the time of his life – the best time ever. He doesn’t see the little rat eyes in the dark.’

‘Meaning what, Mr Owen?’

‘There is a network. It might not put out a monthly newsletter, but it does exist. The general aim is anti-Christian. They might be several different groups, but that’s their one rallying point – the destruction of the Christian Church.’

‘I’d have thought,’ Howe said drily, ‘that they could simply sit back and watch the Church take itself apart.’

‘She’s got a point,’ Merrily said, the need for a cigarette starting to tell.

‘Merrily, lass, you’d be very naive if you thought the Church’s problems were entirely self-generated.’

‘Sorry, go on.’

“They’ve got a good intelligence network, the rat-eyes. The Internet now, more primitive then but, just like Moscow was head-hunting at Oxford and Cambridge in the sixties, the rateyes had their antennae out.’

Lol said, ‘Anna Purefoy was in Oxfordshire then. She worked for the county council. She’d been fired from the MOD after some fundamentalist junior minister found out she was involved in magic, along with a few other people – a purge.’

‘Part of the honey-trap then,’ Huw said. ‘Beautiful, experienced older woman. Aye, I think we can rule out rape in them pictures. Happen she said she enjoyed being tied up. If that is Hunter, it’s an interesting connection, but I’d be looking for something harder. Suppose they stitched our lad up good? Suppose they had him full of drugs, and suppose he really did rape somebody – a young girl, say. Suppose they even arranged for him to kill somebody.’

Annie Howe began to look uneasy. ‘That stuff’s surely apocryphal.’

‘That stuff happens all the time,’ Huw told her. ‘You coppers hate to think there’s ever a murder you don’t know about, but there’s thousands of folk still missing. All right, say they’ve stitched him up – tight enough to have him looking at public disgrace and a long prison sentence.’

Howe sighed. ‘Go on, then.’

‘What do they want of him? I think they want him in the Church.’

‘Oh, wow,’ Merrily murmured.

‘Make your father a happy man, they’d say. Repent of your evil ways. Make restitution. Join the family business. Either that or go down, all the way to the gutter. Well, he’s in a panic, is our lad: self-disgust and a hangover on a grand scale. In need of redemption. So he goes home to his loving family, and the result, after the nightmares and the cold sweats, is the Reverend Michael Henry Hunter, a reformed character.’

‘It’s a brilliant theory, Huw. Is there a precedent?’

‘Happen.’

‘Meaning one you never proved.’

Huw looked down at his trainers. ‘I once exorcised a young curate from Halifax who admitted celebrating a black mass. It was to get them off his back, he said. Blackmail again. I never met anybody more full of remorse.’

‘You think Mick—?’

‘It’s sometimes what they do. They get in touch after he’s ordained, with “Do us this one thing and we’ll leave you alone for ever.” Ha! You likely don’t know this, Inspector, but having a reverse-eucharist performed by an ordained cleric is a very powerfully dark thing. And a fully turned cleric is… lord of all.’

‘Like Tim Purefoy,’ Lol said.

‘There’s one as is better dead, God forgive me.’

‘Hold on,’ Howe said. ‘Are you saying these – whoever they are… possibly the Purefoys – might have been in touch with Hunter throughout his whole career?’

‘Very likely smoothing his path for him. A satanic bishop? Some prize, eh?’

‘Except he wasn’t really,’ Merrily said. ‘He was a man with no committed religious beliefs at all. Perhaps that’s how he could live with it. “I don’t believe in the Devil” – he said that to me. Perhaps he really believed he was using them.’

‘Very likely, lass.’ Huw opened out his hands. ‘Very likely. But it doesn’t change a thing.’

‘But what a career, Huw! What an incredibly lucky career. He never put a foot wrong, said all the right things to all the right people, charmed everyone he met with his energy and his sincerity. He actually told me he believed he was protected.’

‘Obstacles would be moved out of his path. Look at how he got this job – his one rival has a convenient heart attack. Oh, aye, he could very well come to believe he was protected. But not by God, not by the Devil – by his own dynamism, his willpower, his bloody destiny. But what’s the truth of it, Merrily? The truth is he’s a demonic force, whether he believes in it or not.’

‘He believed he was invulnerable, obviously.’ Annie Howe switched off the TV and went to sit down behind her desk, behind a legal notepad. ‘Certainly, if he seemed to think he could murder Ms Watkins in the actual Cathedral precincts, and we’d simply arrest James Lyden for it…’

‘Do you think you would have, lass?’

‘I hate to think so, but… well, we might have. As Lyden had already, that same evening, attacked Jane Watkins and left her unconscious in the crypt with her coat on fire. We’re trying to persuade the CPS to go for attempted murder on that, by the way, but I don’t suppose they will. Tell me your feelings on Sayer, Mr Owen.’

‘Headbanger.’

‘Meaning an amateur, a hanger-on.’

‘If he possessed this tape, he might have been more than that – or not. Did he have a computer? Was he on the Internet?’

‘He was, come to think of it.’

‘You can dredge all kinds of dirt off the Net. If we assume he did know it was Mick Hunter on that tape, he might’ve tried a bit of blackmail. And Hunter sees the tape… or happen he’s seen it before. He knows it looks bugger-all like him now, so he’s not worried about the tape, but he doesn’t like the idea of this lad Sayer walking round spreading bad rumours. Aye, he might well’ve bopped him over the head and dragged him down to the Wye. Cool as you like, popped him in a boat – I bet he had a boat, didn’t he, athletic bugger like him wi’ a river at the bottom of the garden. Then rowed him downstream. Who in a million years would ever look towards the Bishop’s Palace…?’

‘I don’t think Hunter was even supposed to be here that night,’ Merrily said. ‘Out of town, as I recall.’

Huw snorted.

There was a long silence. Merrily looked at Lol, remembering she hadn’t been all that convinced when he’d first told her about Katherine Moon. And yet Lol himself had actually underestimated the full extent of it. They both needed a long walk – somewhere you could feel you weren’t looking through a dirty spiderweb.

‘There isn’t a shred of evidence for any of this, Mr Owen, is there?’ said Annie Howe.

‘We’re none of us coppers, lass. Just poor clergy and a lad wi’ a guitar.’

‘As for the other stuff: the ley-lines, the sacrifice of crows, the alleged presence in the Cathedral…’ Howe pushed her notepad away. ‘I don’t want to know about any of it. I don’t know how you people can pretend to… to do your job at all. To me, it’s a complete fantasy world.’

Lol said, ‘Have you talked to James Lyden?’

‘I have tried to talk to James Lyden. He blames the girl – Rowenna Napier. We found her car, by the way – at the car park at the Severn Bridge motorway services. We’ve circulated a description. Her family seems to have given up on her. Lyden still thinks she’s called Melissa, and that she lived with her now late foster-parents, with whom he’d spent many an interesting hour at their farmhouse on Dinedor Hill.’

‘She seems to have used a number of identities,’ Merrily said.

‘But, in the end, just one,’ said Huw.

Howe looked at him.

‘The archetypal Scarlet Woman, lass. The temptress.’

Merrily thought, What’s he saying? It was true that everything about Rowenna disturbed her: preying like a succubus on the Salisbury clergy, obviously dominating her own family – why had Mrs Straker suddenly clammed up? – and pulling off that insidiously effective psychic attack with the dregs of Denzil Joy. Rowenna was terribly dangerous – and still out there.

‘She certainly seems to have acquired a considerable amount of money,’ Howe said.

‘For services rendered,’ Huw told her.

‘Certainly the basis for a few questions when we do find her. And I do want to find that girl – and Michael Hunter – before someone at Division decides to take this case out of my hands. Which is why I’m talking to… to people like you. Ms Watkins, when you suggested to Hunter that he knew something about the death of Paul Sayer…?’

‘I’m sorry. I chose that moment to try and get away. Paul Sayer was never mentioned again.’

‘But you raised it with him purely because your secretary told you she recognized Sayer from one of my photographs, yes?’

‘It was the day you came into the Deliverance office. She recognized Sayer as a man who had actually come into the office asking for the Bishop – making Mick angry in a way Sophie says she’d never seen before – in a way that seemed to her… unepiscopal. Sophie’s very discreet and very loyal, but also very observant.’

‘This was not on the night he died, however.’

‘No. A couple of days earlier.’

‘Hold on.’ Howe picked up a phone. ‘Douglas, could somebody bring in Mrs Sophie Hill from the Bishop’s office?… No, now… Thank you.’

‘What you have to understand about Sophie,’ said Merrily, ‘is that the Cathedral is her life. She worried about this thing for days. She kept half-approaching me and then backing off.’

‘Sure,’ Howe said. ‘Damn it, I think I’m going to have some divers in the Wye again.’

Huw slid from her desk. ‘For Hunter?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Unlikely. He moves fast, that lad, in his jogging gear.’

Merrily closed her eyes for a moment, trying to remember which way Hunter had gone after the stone pot had made such a gloriously jagged, noisy hole in ancient glass. He’d stared at her for a moment, then she’d turned and run away – as lights were coming on everywhere, a verger and a policeman thrusting out of the door.

‘And Hunter has friends,’ Huw said. ‘More friends than even he knows. Friends in dark places.’

55 Location Classified

THEY SAT AMONGST the stones and they lit a candle for Tommy Canty.

Huw held the candle over each disfigured knight in turn, making a blessing for each. Merrily wondered if it had been the Bishop himself who had taken away the single knight and then brought it back, making sure that the tomb was still lying in pieces for the time of the Boy Bishop ceremony.

They would probably never know. Huw was convinced Mick Hunter would now be abroad. Italy, he thought; there were a number of dark sanctuaries in Italy. How did he know that?

So many questions.

DS Franny Bliss had been summoned back to St Cosmas and St Damien after reports from the two ornithologist ladies that a couple of people had been seen acting suspiciously close to the church, which the ladies apparently had been virtually staking out ever since. As a result, Craig the crow-catcher was in the cells, now suspected of greater involvement in the desecration than previously thought.

So, once again last night, simultaneous action along the Dinedor Line – with the Cathedral in the middle. Jane had seen Rowenna making a call on her mobile phone – perhaps to the Purefoys – as the Boy Bishop was about to be installed. And then, coincidentally or not, a power failure. Its cause had still not been established.

Lol was convinced that, this time, the Purefoys – always assuming they were controlling the assault, which was by no means certain – believed they were using the very spirit, the element, the essence of Katherine Moon to try to awaken something aggressively pre-Christian. They believed it, so at some level it was happening? And what form had their ritual – over by the time Lol arrived – actually taken? This all needed thinking about. Perhaps Merrily would be compelled to consult (Oh God!) Miss Athena White.

‘But they were right, weren’t they, lass?’ Huw was stroking a stone.

‘Mm?’

‘The demon manifested in clerical clothing?’

‘Yes, I suppose it did.’

And where was it now? Where was the squatter? Did it die with Dobbs? Did it flee with Mick? Was it over?

‘Over?’ Huw laughed a lot. ‘The oldest war in the world, over? I’ll tell you what, though…’ He grew sober. ‘We’re up against it now. The Church is on its knees now, and the more we get weakened by public apathy, the more they’ll put the boot in.’

‘Jane thinks there’s a new spirituality on the rise, replacing organized worship.’

‘With all respect to the lass,’ Huw said, ‘it’s people like Jane who’ll turn religion into a minority sport.’

‘She sees it more in terms of a period of cataclysmic psychic upheaval.’

‘Could be,’ Huw said. ‘But if that happens, they’ll still need somebody to police it. And, all the time, we’re going to have folk like your Inspector Howe dismissing us as loonies. We’re going to have battles with psychologists and social workers. We’re going to be attacked by fellers like that Dick Lyden, who thinks Dobbs was persecuting his poor maladjusted son. And, naturally, we’re always going to be regarded with suspicion within the Church itself.’

Merrily stood up and dusted her knees. ‘Hunter wanted me to draft a paper on New Deliverance. He suggested this would be an approach acceptable to psychologists and social workers.’

‘For New Deliverance, read Soft Deliverance,’ Huw said.

‘I suppose that’s right.’

‘Happen that was going to be one of Mick’s principal contributions: pioneer of Soft Deliverance. On the surface, decently liberal – exorcism by committee – but, underneath, the gradual dismantling of the final human barrier against satanic evil.’

Merrily shook her head, dubious, bewildered.

‘Stick with it, lass,’ Huw said. ‘You’ve come too far now.’

‘I don’t know. The new bishop may not want me.’

‘There’s that,’ Huw said.

‘Anyway, there’s a lot to think about. Lol and I are going to drive up into the Malverns, or somewhere – to do some walking and talking. He’s very confused and spooked, after his showdown with the Purefoys. It’s all going round in his head; he’s realizing how close he came to winding up as dead as they are, and he’s thinking: What is this about?’

‘I gather that lad Denny Moon died this morning.’

‘Yes.’ She didn’t want to talk about what Lol had heard from a porter in the Accident and Emergency unit at the General.

‘Poor bugger. Always some casualties, Merrily, luv. Always.’

The porter said that, a few seconds after Denny was pronounced dead, a woman patient who’d been brought in after falling down some steps had begun to scream, and the nurses had had to open a window to let out a large black bird.

Huw was saying, ‘Incidentally, I don’t know who the Purefoys have left their place to, and I don’t like to think. But I reckon it could do with some attention smartish if we don’t want yet more hassle.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think I could.’

Huw said, ‘Oh, aye, I think you could.’

‘You were the one who tried to talk me out of this whole thing!’

‘That were because there was no tradition then,’ Huw said. ‘I think you’ve started one. Too late to back out now. You know what I’d do?’

‘What?’

‘Bugger the Malverns, they’ll not go away. Take the lad up to Dinedor and do a little service of restitution for the spirit of this Katherine Moon. And for her brother. And their parents. See what happens.’

‘I dread to think.’

‘Don’t dread,’ said Huw. ‘Second Law of Deliverance: never dread. Don’t do it in the barn; it might be dangerous in there – I mean falling masonry and that. Go to the tip of the owd ramparts, and look out down the line, through All Saints and this place, to St Cosmas and St Damien.’

‘Will you come?’

‘I will not. It’s not my patch.’

‘What about the major exorcism? Who do we consult?’

‘I think…’ Huw looked up at the enormous stained-glass window, suddenly aglow with unexpected winter sunshine. ‘I think we can leave it alone. Stand back, lass.’

He began to lug one of the stone panels of the Cantilupe tomb to one side, revealing a bundle of white and gold cloth about the size of a tobacco pouch. He bent down and gathered it up.

Merrily leaned over his shoulder. ‘What on earth have you got there, Huw?’

‘Picked it up before I fetched Dobbs from the hospital. Planted it here before the service – with all due ceremony, naturally – so it was there throughout.’

He unrolled the cloth. There was a fragment of what looked at first like brick: dark red-brown, and brittle.

‘Holy relics, lass.’ Huw said. ‘The undying power of holy relics.’

Dark red.

‘Oh, my God,’ Merrily said. ‘His bones were supposed to have bled, weren’t they?’

‘Bit of the skull, apparently. Borrowed it from some monks. Location classified.’

‘God.’ She put out a finger.

‘Aye, go on, lass. It’s all right. You wouldn’t have got within ten yards of the bugger when he were alive, mind, but there you go. Times change.’

He let her touch the piece of bone, and then rolled it up in its cloth again and slipped it into an inside pocket of his blue canvas jacket, next to his heart.

‘Come on, then, Tommy,’ he said.