The Cure of Souls

Church of England

Diocese of Hereford

Ministry of Deliverance

email: deliverance@spiritec.co.uk

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Psychic abilities, real or pretended, are often used to gain power and influence over groups and individuals. It is very easy to become intimidated by a person who claims to have access to super-normal forces, even though we may suspect these ‘powers’ amount to nothing more than a strong or dominant personality.

This kind of situation usually calls for some personal spiritual defence, beginning with prayer and then perhaps extending, if necessary, to support from a priest.

1 The Wires

IN THE WARM, milky night, Lol was leaning against a five-barred gate, listening for the River Frome. It couldn’t be more than six yards away, but you’d never know; this was the nature of the Frome.

Crossing the wooden bridge, he’d looked down and seen nothing. That was OK. It was a small and secretive river that, in places, didn’t flow so much as seep, dark as beer, obscured by ground-hugging bushes and banks of willowherb. Already Lol felt a deep affinity with the Frome; he just didn’t want to step into it in the dark, that was all.

‘River?’ Prof Levin had said vaguely this morning. ‘That’s a river? I thought it was some kind of sodding drainage ditch.’

Which had only made Lol more drawn to it. Later, he’d sat down in the sun with his old Washburn guitar and started to assemble a wistful song.

Did you ever think you’d reach the sea,

Aspiring to an estuary.

But – hey – who could take that seriously…?

Yeah, who? Like, wasn’t he supposed to have turned his back on all this for good?

Now here was Prof Levin, forever on at him to give it another go. And Prof didn’t give up easily, so Lol had gone wandering out into this milky night feeling guilty and confused, nerves quivering, jagged pieces of his past sticking out of him like shards of glass from a smashed mirror.

Seeking the unassuming tranquillity of the night-time river, nothing more than that. The modern countryside, Prof Levin had insisted this morning, was one big sham.

‘Close to nature? Balls! This is heavy industrial, Laurence. Guys in baseball caps driving machinery you could build motorways with – six-speaker stereo in the cab, blasting jungle. These lanes ain’t wide enough for the bastards any more.’

Grabbing hold of the bottom of Lol’s T-shirt, Prof had towed him to the window, overlooking someone else’s long meadow sloping to the bank of the River Frome.

‘Week or two, they’ll be out there haymaking… techno-hay-making. Come September they start on the hops over there – and that’s all mechanized. Take a look at the size of those tractors, tell me this ain’t heavy industry. They don’t even stop at night! Got lamps on them like frigging great searchlights – doing shift work now! Who ever hears the cock crow any more? This, Laurence… this is the new rural. And here’s me padding out the frigging walls to double-thickness on account of I don’t want to disturb them.’

Prof Levin grinning ruefully through his white nail-brush beard: a shaven-headed, wiry man of over sixty years old – precisely how far over nobody would know until he was dead and not necessarily even then. When Lol had first known him, Prof had been the world’s most reliable recording engineer, always in work, and then, after forty years in the business, he’d emerged as a revered producer, an icon, an oracle.

And now a bucolic oracle. Disdainful of belated acclaim, Prof had quit the mainstream industry. He would produce only material that was worth producing, and only when he was in the mood. He would create for himself a bijou studio, a private centre of excellence in some deeply unfashionable corner of the sticks. Knight’s Frome? Yeah, that sounded about right. Who the hell had ever heard of Knight’s Frome?

Who indeed? Down south, there was at least one other River Frome, only much bigger. The Frome Valley here in east Herefordshire had just the one small market town and a string of villages and hamlets – Bishop’s Frome, Canon Frome, Halmond’s Frome and little Knight’s Frome, all sunk into rich, red loam and surrounded by orchards and vineyards and hop-yards under the Malverns, Middle England’s answer to mountains.

Not that Prof appeared to care about any of this; that it was obscure was enough. In fact, the real reason he was here, rather than the west of Ireland or somewhere, was that an old friend, a one-time professional bass-player and cellist, was currently vicar of Knight’s Frome. It was this unquestionably honest guy who had identified for Prof a suitable property: a cottage with a stable block and pigsties but no land for either horses or pigs, therefore on sale at an unusually reasonable price. And Prof had shrugged: Whatever. He had no basic desire to communicate with the landscape – or with people, for that matter, except through headphones.

Unless, of course, he needed help. Arriving out here, marooned among crates of equipment, Prof had put out an SOS to every muso and sparks he knew within a fifty-mile radius – only to find that most of them had moved on, some to the next life.

In the end, it was only Simon, the vicar, and Lol Robinson, formerly songwriter and second guitar with the long-defunct band Hazey Jane, now on holiday from his college course in psychotherapy. Not that Lol was any good with wiring, but that wasn’t important; it was mainly about making the tea and listening to Prof grouch and taking the blame for malfunctions. This afternoon they’d installed the final wall-panels, and tested the new acoustics by recording – in the absence of anything more challenging – some of Lol’s more recent numbers.

This had continued into the night when, at some point, Prof had stopped cursing and wrenching out leads and replacing mikes… and sat back for a while behind the exposed skeleton of his mixing board, just listening to the music.

And then had stood up and stomped across the studio floor, positioning himself menacingly in the doorway of the booth where Lol sat with the old Washburn on his knees.

‘Laurence! You little bastard, stop right there.’

Lol looking up timidly.

‘Listen to me.’ Prof glowered. ‘How long, for fuck’s sake, have you been sitting on this stuff?’

It was past eleven now, but the night was still awash with pale light, forming long lakes in the northern sky. To the south, a plane tracked across the starscape like a slow pulse on a monitor.

In the middle distance was a round tower, like some story-book castle, except that the tip of its conical hat was oddly skewed. There was a window-glow visible in the tower, unsteady like lantern light. Lol was stilled by the unreality of the moment, half feeling that if he were to climb over the farm gate and walk towards that tower, the entire edifice would begin to dissolve magically into the grey-black woodland behind.

It was, he concluded, one of those nights for nothing being entirely real.

From the shadowed field beyond the gate, he heard the slow, seismic night-breathing of cattle, so loud and full and resonant that it might have been the respiration system of the whole valley. The air was dense with pollen and sweet with warm manure, and Lol experienced a long moment of calm and the nearness of something that was vast and enfolding and brought him close to weeping.

At which point he cut the fantasy. The fairy-tale castle hardened into a not-so-ancient hop kiln. There were dozens of them around the valley, most of them converted into homes.

Sad. Not some rich, mystical experience, just another bogstandard memory of the womb.

… Because therapy, Laurence, is the religion of the new millennium. And we’re the priests.

Lol gripped the top rail of the gate until his hands hurt. Prof was exaggerating, of course. His material wasn’t that strong.

Anyway, Lol was too long out of it. The most he’d done in years had been occasional demos, for the purpose of flogging a few songs to better-known artists – makeweight stuff for albums, nothing special. It was an income-trickle but it wasn’t a career, it wasn’t a life, and he thought he’d accepted the reality of that a long time ago.

Back in January, he’d enrolled on this course for trainee psychotherapists, the only one he could find still with any available places, up in Wolverhampton. It made a surreal kind of sense to Lol, though he didn’t share the irony of it with any of the other students, certainly not with the tutors.

Without actually saying therapy, shmerapy, Prof had managed to convey a scepticism well over the threshold of contempt.

‘I can’t believe you waste your time on this! You want to take money for persuading the gullible to remember how they were abused by their daddies, then they go home and slash their wrists? It’s like I say to Simon: you’re just being a vicar for you, not for them. Who gets married any more? Who wants to hear a sermon, sip lemonade at the vicarage fête? If you want to reach people, cure people, calm people, and you have it in you to give them beautiful music, from the heart… then, Jesus, this is the real therapy, the real spirituality. Forget this counselling bullshit! Who’re you really gonna change?’

Of course, Prof knew all about Lol’s history on the other side of psychiatry, brought about by early exposure to the music business – the blurred fairground ride ending in half-lit caverns with drifting, white-coated ghosts and gliding trolleys, syringes, pills.

Medication: the stripped-down NHS was a sick system, drug-dependent. It made sense to Lol that he should be using his own experience to help keep other vulnerable people out of the system. Otherwise, the medication years were just a damp, rotten hole in his life.

Prof knew all about this, just didn’t accept the logic.

‘Listen to me, boy, I have strong contacts these days… people who trust me, who tend to act on what I say, and I’m telling you, you gotta take these songs into the market place.’

‘Well, sure,’ Lol said obligingly. ‘Anybody who wants one—’

‘No! They’ll want you! Listen to me. I can get you a good tour—’

Lol had been backing away into the booth at this point, the guitar held in front of him like a riot shield, Prof pursuing him, hands spread wide.

‘Laurence, you’re older now, you know the score, you know all the traps. I’m telling you honestly: you don’t do this now, you’ll be a very embittered old man one day. Jesus, what am I saying, one day? How long you been out of it now – ten years, fifteen? That’s three whole generations in this business! How much time you really got left? How long now before the looks start to fade, before the winsome little-boy-lost turns into some sad, wrinkled—? Listen to me!’

‘I can’t… I can’t tour.’ Face it: he couldn’t even play all that well any more.

‘Right, let’s see, now.’ Prof went on like he hadn’t heard. ‘It would have to be as support, the first time. But supporting somebody tasteful – don’t worry about that, it can be arranged. REM, Radiohead… all these guys admit to being influenced by your work. You’re a cult… OK, a minor cult. But a cult is still a cult…’

‘Prof?’ Lol was resting the guitar on his trainers, his fingers among its machine-heads. ‘Be honest – you don’t even know that’s true, do you?’

‘The hell does that matter? Laurence, I apologize in advance if this sounds immodest, but if I’m the one spreading it around, everyone is going to believe it, therefore it becomes the truth.’

‘I can’t tour.’ Lol stood with his back against the partition wall again, his breathing becoming harder at the very thought of on the road.

‘You can tour! You need to tour… this will kick-start your confidence. You’re just using this therapy shit as some kind of buffer against the real world. You’re institutionalized and you don’t even know it. It’s like… like so many schoolteachers are really just kids who were afraid to leave school. Believe me, Laurence.’

And part of Lol did believe him, because Kenneth ‘Prof’ Levin had been down in the half-lit caverns, too – in his case alcoholism, the destruction of a good marriage.

Lol recalled the buzz he’d felt when he’d had the message to call Prof, a couple of weeks ago – around the same time he was concluding that knowing the difference between cognitive therapy and humanistic therapy didn’t make either of them any more effective. In fact, the day after his senior tutor had told him, not with irony but with something approaching pride: Therapy, Laurence, is the religion of the third millennium. And we’re the priests – the voice slick with self-belief, after a few glasses in the wine bar down the road from the college. Everybody needs a church. A confessional. Forgiveness. This senior tutor, this high priest, was younger than Lol, maybe thirty-four.

‘All right!’ Prof Levin had finally backed off. ‘Enough. We’ll talk about this again. For starters, we just do the album.’

‘Album?’

Prof had spread his arms magnanimously. With his own studio set up, he was at last able to make these decisions without consulting anyone in a suit.

And Lol had thanked him for the offer – very profusely, obviously, because having Prof Levin produce an album for you was kind of like having Spielberg take on your screenplay – but then pointed out, reasonably enough, that he had only four songs: not quite half an album.

Prof had smiled beatifically through his white, nail-brush beard.

‘You have the whole summer, my son. This summer… is yours.’

And he had shambled smugly away to his room in the adjacent cottage, leaving Lol to switch everything off before climbing to his own camp bed in one of the old haylofts.

Like he was really going to sleep after this?

Instead, he’d stumbled out, bemused, into the warm night, to commune with the Frome. But the river was already asleep and that was how he ended up following the track running down a line of poplars and out the other side, close to where the hopkilns stood. The sky was now obscured by a tangle of trees, and he was aware of a high, piercing hum that somehow translated itself into Everybody needs a church. A confessional. Forgiveness.

Not exactly the wisest analogy to hang on Lol who, in his late teens, had seen his parents find religion, watched them being swept away on waves of foaming fundamentalist madness, causing them to reject the Godless kid playing the devil’s music – the kid who would always remember coming home one weekend to find that those two small mantelpiece photos of himself as a toddler had been replaced by framed postcards of Jesus. Which was probably how it had started – the alienation.

And then – in just this last year – a surprise development. Lol’s fear and resentment of the Church had been fatally compromised by encounters with a priest called Merrily Watkins who lived and worked, as it happened, less than twenty miles from here… but if this was another reason for coming back to Herefordshire he wasn’t going to admit it, least of all to himself. Their last meeting had followed events so dark that maybe she wouldn’t want to be reminded.

He felt a sharp pain below his knee and stopped, feeling suddenly out of breath. He realized he’d been running, like he sometimes did to try and overtake a dilemma, to put an impending decision behind him. He must have veered from the path and now he was in the middle of an unknown wood and there were brambles tangled around his legs.

Wrong turning, somehow. It was easy enough to do, even in the daytime, even in countryside you thought you knew. In the middle of this unknown, unmanaged wood, snagged with hawthorn, he heard his T-shirt rip, and he stood there, shaking his head.

Lost again. Story of his life.

Knight’s Frome was a scattered hamlet with no real centre, so it wasn’t as if he could look around for a cluster of lights. Or even listen for the river. All he could hear was the humming: a plaintive sound that rose and fell and pulsed as if a melody was trying to escape.

Lol turned, walked back the way he’d come, putting a hand up to his glasses, pushing them tight onto the bridge of his nose; losing your specs was not something you did in a wood at night. When he took his hand away, he saw the trees and bushes had fallen away and there was now a clear space up ahead. A small yellow light appeared, not too bright, a little unsteady, with a black cone above it: a witch’s hat. The kiln tower again.

When the sky was clear of branches, a trailing scarf of brightness told him which direction was north… and then it was suddenly split by something black and rigid that made him reel back, startled. He slipped and stumbled, went down on one knee before it – waiting for the thing to move, bend down, snatch him up, hit him.

Nothing moved. Even the humming had stopped. Lol scrambled warily to his feet.

It was only a pole, half as thick as a telegraph pole, but not tall enough to carry telegraph wires or electricity cables – although it did support wires of some kind. To avoid it, he took a couple of steps to the right. No trees or bushes stood in the way and the ground was level.

A second black pole appeared, rearing hard against the northern sky, and this one had a short crosspiece like – his first thought – a gibbet. From it hung something limp and shrivelled, the skeletal spine of a dead garland; when he passed between the two poles, his bare elbow brushed against the remains with a dry, papery crackle.

Now he could see the extent of it: dozens of black poles against the pale night, in lines to either side of him across the barren ground, most of them with crosspieces, some connected by dark wires overhead. It was like a site laid out for a mass crucifixion. Between the wires, he could still see the yellow kiln-house light, perhaps two hundred yards away. And the nearness of the kiln told him what this was… or should have been.

It was high summer and these poles should be loaded with foliage, the ripening bines high on the wires, rippling with soft green hop-cones. But this whole scene was in black and white and grey, and there was an awning of silence: no owls, no scurryings in the undergrowth. No undergrowth, in fact.

The silence, Lol thought, was like a studio silence: soft, dry, flat and localized. The air seemed cooler now, and he could feel goosebumps prickling on his bare arms as he ventured tentatively into a hop-yard where no hops grew, along an alley of winter-bleak, naked hop-poles, a place as desolate as the stripped-back bed of someone recently dead. He felt a little scared now. There was no contented cattle-breath around this place – it felt less like a memory of the womb than a premonition of the grave.

No reason to stay. Lol started to turn away. Afterwards, he couldn’t remember whether these thoughts of death had occurred in the moment before the humming began again, or whether it was the combination of the sound and the stark setting that conveyed the sense of mourning, loss, lamentation. The bleak keening seemed to be around and above him, as if it was travelling along those black wires, as if they were vibrating with some kind of plangent sorrow.

And then, as he turned, there was another noise – a crispy swishing, like dried leaves in a tentative breeze, like the noise when he’d touched the remains of the dead hop-bine, only continuous – and a pale smear blurred the periphery of his vision like petroleum jelly spread on a camera lens.

Lol saw her.

It was like she was swimming through the night towards him, from the far end of the corridor of crosses.

No sense of unreality here, that was the worst of it. It was not dreamlike, not hallucinatory.

She stopped between the poles, legs apart, leaning back, one moment all shadows, and then shining under the northern sky: a thin, white woman garlanded with pale foliage. Rustling and crackling like something dead and dusty, moved by the wind.

But there was no wind.

Lol backed into a pole, felt it juddering against his spine and the back of his head, as he gasped and twisted away, semistunned and reeling, into a parallel hop-corridor, the poles rushing past him like black railings seen from a train.

Between them, he saw the woman moving. A long, dried-out, bobbled bine was wound around her like a boa, around her neck, under her arms, over her shoulders, pulled up between her legs – the cones crackling and crumbling on her skin, throwing off a spray of flakes, an ashy aura of dead vegetation.

As she drew level with him, he could see, under the winding bine, black droplets beading her breasts, streaks down her forearms, as though the bine was thorned.

She turned to Lol and the bine fell away as she extended her hands towards him.

Lol very nearly took them in his own.

Very nearly.

2 In the Old-fashioned Sense

IT WAS LIKE she’d told the Bishop: anything iffy, out came the coal-tongs and the asbestos gloves, and it made you wonder whatever happened to that old job description: The cure of souls.

‘I’d just said “The blood of Christ keep you in eternal life,” and that was when the girl went slightly crazy,’ Canon Dennis Beckett explained on the phone.

To be fair, he had good reason to feel this wasn’t really his problem. He was retired now, and lived on the other side of the county. He only came across to Dilwyn to take the Sunday services for two weeks a year, when Jeff Kimball, his godson, was away on holiday. Which was a diversion for Dennis, too, and a nice place to drive out to: this neat black and white haven with its village green.

But at the end of it, the thing was, other than on a superficial, hand-shaking level, he didn’t really know these people, did he? And in this case there was a young girl involved – always dicey. Also, for extra tension, a touch of drama, it had happened during Holy Communion.

‘We’ve all had situations of people becoming ill, of course,’ Dennis said, ‘even dying in their pews on two occasions that I can recall. But… well, it’s usually elderly people, isn’t it?’

‘Mmm.’ Since coming to Ledwardine less than two years ago, Merrily had seen a stroke, a blackout, an epileptic fit and a birth. ‘Not invariably.’

She wasn’t yet seeing this as a deliverance issue. She’d met Canon Beckett two or three times at local clergy gatherings, remembered him as grey-bearded, vague, affable. She wondered why, if this incident had occurred last Sunday, it had taken him five clear days to decide he should tell her about it.

It was the first morning of Jane’s school holidays. Friday the thirteenth, as it happened.

‘It was embarrassing rather than anything else, at the time,’ Dennis said. ‘The mother appeared to be affected the most – essentially such a good family, you see, in the old-fashioned sense; a family, in fact, to whom the term God-fearing might once have applied. And I’m afraid you can’t say that of very many of them nowadays, can you?’

‘No.’ Merrily tucked the phone under her chin, leaning forward through a sunbeam to pull over her sermon pad and a felt pen. ‘I suppose not. So, what did happen, exactly?’

‘She dashed – that’s the only word for it – dashed the chalice from my hands. And then she was sick.’

‘She actually—?’

‘Threw up. Copiously. Tossed her cookies, as my grandson would say. In the chancel. On everything. On me.’

‘Oh.’

‘Rather a mess. And the smell soured everything. Hard to continue afterwards.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Everyone was extremely understanding and trying not to react. Someone said, Oh dear, very quietly, and then they all discreetly moved out of the way. The mother was absolutely white with the shame of it, poor woman. She’s one of Jeffrey’s regulars – cleans the church, arranges the flowers. There she was, dragging the child away down the aisle, followed by the father, and I was starting to go after them when this elderly lady suddenly began clutching her chest. I thought, Oh Lord, that’s all we… Anyway, as it turned out, the old dear wasn’t in the throes of some cardiac crisis, which was a mercy, but by the time I reached the door, the whole family had vanished. So… we simply cleaned everywhere up and… resumed. At the time it seemed—’

‘The best thing?’ Merrily said.

‘Luckily, I managed to find a fresh surplice. There were only about five communicants left by then. A few had walked away in… the wake of it.’

Dennis Beckett paused. Through the scullery door, Merrily heard impatient footsteps across the flags in the kitchen.

‘Look, I’m aware this doesn’t sound like much, Merrily,’ Dennis said. ‘Certainly didn’t seem so to me, at the time, but I thought I ought to reassure the parents, so I got their number and when I arrived home I gave them a call. No answer. I made a note to try again the following day, but I’m afraid it got mislaid and other things cropped up, and it wasn’t until this morning that I finally got through to them.’

‘Mum?’ Behind Merrily, the scullery door opened. Jane stood there in jeans and a yellow sleeveless top, summery but somehow waiflike, a bit forlorn. ‘Look, I’m going to get the bus into Hereford, OK?’

Merrily held up a hand, signalling for the kid to hang on until she was off the phone. ‘Sorry, Dennis…’

Dennis Beckett lowered his voice.

‘It was still quite a long time before anyone answered. I was about to hang up when the mother came on, rather abrupt until she realized who I was. Whereupon she simply burst into tears. An eruption. As if she’d been holding it back for days. You know… “Thank God you’ve called. Thank God. I didn’t know what to do. I don’t know what”… No, in fact, her actual words were: “I don’t dare to think what’s got into her.” ’ He paused.

Jane scowled, threw up her arms in exasperation and walked out.

‘ “Got into her”?’ Merrily said cautiously.

‘Her own words. The child’s being generally… not herself. She’s normally a quiet, studious, demure sort of girl. A nice girl. Been taken to church every week since she was about seven. Suddenly, she’s exhibiting signs of a distinct… aversion. Claiming she’s not well on Sunday mornings – headaches, this sort of thing.’

Merrily thought about Jane. ‘Being generally difficult? Mood swings? Emotional?’

‘I gather.’

‘How old?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘Well…’ Merrily tapped her pencil on the desk, remembering similar phases. ‘No need to get too carried away about that. Unless—’ An obvious thought had struck her. ‘Could she be pregnant?’

‘What? Oh… I see what you mean.’ He was silent for a moment, thinking it over. ‘Well, she… seemed to me to be a very young fourteen. She was wearing her school uniform, which in itself is a rather uncommon sight these days, out of school hours.’

‘True.’ Half of Jane’s school clothes seemed to have vanished by the time she reached home.

‘Let me tell you the main thing,’ Dennis said. ‘It seems Amy had been brought along to Holy Communion precisely because her parents were getting worried about her spiritual health. In the old-fashioned sense.’

‘Meaning what, exactly?’

Dennis hesitated and then sighed. ‘Meaning they’re now asking for something I would not personally be happy to undertake,’ he replied eventually.

As Merrily went into the kitchen, Ethel the cat looked up at her from a sun-pool on a deep window sill. No sign of Jane; the kid must have gone back up to her apartment in the attic. Merrily went back into the scullery, stared at the phone for a few seconds and then picked it up and rang Sophie at the gatehouse.

‘I’m just following procedure here, Soph.’

‘Do we have a procedure?’ The Bishop’s lay secretary, servant of the Cathedral and posher than the Queen, would be in her office next to the Deliverance room, from where she also dealt with the admin side of Merrily’s business.

‘We have a rule. There’s only one situation where we have a rule,’ Merrily said, ‘and this is it.’

‘I see.’ A tiny pause, a vacuum snap – Sophie uncapping her gold Cross fountain pen. ‘What would you like me to tell the Bishop? We’re talking major exorcism?’

‘Won’t be an exorcism at all, if I can help it. I suspect they don’t know quite what they want, apart from some reassurance. I’m just informing the Bishop, according to the rule.’

Jane appeared in the doorway. ‘What?’ She saw the phone at Merrily’s ear and rolled her eyes.

‘Sorry, Sophie, I’ve just got to ask Jane something before her very limited patience snaps.’

‘I am sixteen,’ Jane muttered. ‘As you keep telling me, I have all the bloody time in the world.’

‘You know a kid called Amy Shelbone?’

Jane blinked. ‘Know the name. Probably.’

‘I think she goes to your school.’

‘She does?’

‘Not in your class, then?’

‘No, she… I guess she’s probably in the fourth… or the third year. Something like that.’

‘OK.’ Merrily nodded. ‘Thanks, flower.’ Worth a try, but kids in a lower form were pond life. ‘Sorry, Sophie.’

Jane didn’t leave. Merrily frowned at her. ‘You’ll miss the bus.’

‘So like, what’s this Amy Shel… thing done?’

‘Go,’ said Merrily.

She waited until she heard the front door slam. Her dog collar lay in the centre of the pale blue blotter, glowing in the sunbeam. Sophie would disapprove of her discarding it simply because of the heat. The women’s ministry had been hard-won; it was like some ex-suffragette not turning out for the polls because it was raining.

‘Sorry about that.’

‘I think you can assume she’s gone now,’ Sophie said. ‘But you may wish to check the room for listening devices.’

Sophie would also disapprove of Merrily asking the kid about Amy Shelbone, but Merrily knew it would go no further. It had reached the stage, with Jane, where there was a certain trust, forged out of experience. Jane was sixteen; there wasn’t such a huge age-gap between them. They told each other almost everything. Didn’t they?

She sat for a while at her desk, looking down the garden towards the apple trees. She was thinking about Father Nicholas Ellis, the fundamentalist zealot who had interpreted the term cure of souls all too freely, administering exorcism like doctors prescribed antibiotics, without ever consulting the Bishop.

But at least Ellis had certainty, a complete faith not only in God and all His angels, but in himself as the approved wielder of an archangel’s broadsword. How he must have despised her.

Merrily put on her dog collar.

Ellis had crossed the line, big-time. She was never going to do that, God help her. Nor was it up to the priest to decide who was genuine, who was misguided, and who was trying it on.

She knelt by the side of the desk, under the window, put her hands together, the backs of her thumbs against the centre of her forehead. She closed her eyes, let her thoughts fall away. The sunshine through her eyelids made her feel washed in a warm orange glow. It felt good.

Too good. Merrily moved into shadow, facing the white-painted wall of four-hundred-year-old wattle and daub, and prayed for perception.

Since Dennis Beckett had first told her about Amy Shelbone, she’d been thinking, on and off, about the occasion she’d thrown up in church herself – her own church, on the fraught night of her installation as priest in charge. Churches were powerful places; they sometimes amplified emotions, might well have an emetic effect on stored-up stress. It didn’t necessarily mean any kind of invasion.

However, this was at Holy Communion, and a dramatically adverse reaction to the presence of the sacrament was… something that needed to be looked into.

After a few minutes, Merrily picked up the phone and called the number Dennis Beckett had given her for the Shelbones, in Dilwyn.

There was no answer.

3 Stock

THE FIRST TIME Lol saw Gerard Stock, he thought the bloke must have some kind of status here, that maybe he was the original owner of the whole place, including the stables and the pigsties.

This was perhaps because Gerard Stock kind of swaggered.

It was not a word Lol recalled ever mentally applying to anyone before. Stock walked like he was shouldering his way through a crowd of people who didn’t matter, to get to somebody who did. This looked odd, because he was all alone on the track which crossed the hay meadow. No bushes, no banks of nettles, no cows; nothing but lush, knee-high grass in a valley smouldering with summer.

It was eleven-thirty in the morning, and Stock was heading their way.

Prof was not glad to see him. ‘The sodding countryside. You get more privacy in Notting Hill. He wants to know who you are. He always has to know who everybody is, the bastard. He’s obviously seen you walking around here and he thinks you might be someone of significance.’

‘Obviously hasn’t noticed my car, then.’

Lol was standing, with a mug of tea and a slice of toast, at the window of the studio anteroom-cum-kitchen, which had once been a pigsty and now possibly looked even more of one.

‘This guy…’ Prof drained his mug, added it to a pile of unwashed crockery beside the sink. ‘I ask myself, should I have to cope with guys like this any more, my time of life? The business is top-heavy with the bastards, always has been. They know everybody – shared spliffs with Jerry Garcia, toured with Dylan, played jew’s harp on the cut that never made it onto Blood on the Tracks… which, of course, is how come their name was tragically omitted from the sleeve. These guys…’ Prof palmed his stubbly white chin. ‘These guys are losers the likes of which I hoped that by moving out here I should never have to encounter again.’

‘So who exactly is he, Prof?’ Lol saw a man who was not that much taller than he was, but wide and powerful. A man swaggering like he owned the place, but not hurrying. A man wanting them to know he was coming.

Prof snorted. ‘For my sins, my nearest neighbour. He lives, with his distressingly younger wife, in a converted hop-kiln somewhere over there where I’ve never been. He walks over here two, three times a week, in case maybe I got Knopfler or Sting hanging out.’

‘A… hop-kiln.’ Lol had fallen asleep thinking of a woman in a hop-yard near a kiln, then had dreamed of her, and then had awoken this morning thinking Did that really happen?

‘Very sought-after, these old kilns, apparently. So how come such a loser is able to buy one? Answer: he didn’t. It was an inheritance, and not even his own. His wife’s uncle left it to them. What kind of man was this uncle to bequeath this leeching bastard to the community?’

‘Nice guy, actually,’ said the man who was sitting on the floor below the window, his back against the whitewashed bricks, mug between his knees. ‘Though he went a little strange, I suppose, before his death.’

Prof turned on him. ‘And you… when you were selling me on this place, did you mention the proximity of this freeloader, this ligger, even once?’

‘You weren’t interested in the neighbours.’ Simon St John, bass-player, cellist and vicar, had known Prof for many more years than Lol had. ‘As long as they don’t have noisy kids or barbecues, you’re never remotely interested in your neighbours.’

‘Life’s too short for neighbours,’ Prof said gruffly. ‘Whatever time I got left, I want to spend it laying down good music in my own place, at my own pace. Is that too much to ask?’ He glared down at Simon. ‘You knew him well, this uncle?’

‘Prof, I buried him.’ Simon lifted pale hair out of his eyes. ‘But before that, he used to come and see us periodically. He was interested in the history of the church. He was interested in most things local.’ He turned to Lol. ‘You’ll see his books in various shops in Bromyard. Local books, full of pictures – photos. Old ones and new ones he took himself, but he did them in sepia, so they looked like old ones. An Illustrated Guide to the Frome Valley, Past and Present and The Hop-grower’s Year. They’re still selling very well. I think Gerard’s quite annoyed because the income from those books was left to another niece.’

‘And all they got was the house,’ said Prof. ‘Poor little bleeders.’

‘Stewart Ash was his name – the uncle,’ Simon said. ‘Good bloke. What happened to him seemed really shocking, obviously, especially in a close community like this. But in my own defence, Prof, I have to say that when I first told you about this place I hadn’t yet met friend Gerard.’

Prof snorted.

‘Both times I called at the kiln – making my initial pastoral visit, as we do – he appeared not to have heard me knocking.’ Simon flicked a wrist. ‘Naturally, I assumed he was of a reclusive disposition. And not exactly a Christian.’

‘Reclusive? Jesus, nah, you were wearing your bloody uniform – no wonder he wasn’t answering the door. The bastard thinks you’re collecting for the organ fund, and he doesn’t have any money, and of course that’s the very last thing these hustlers are ever going to admit – their private capital’s always tied up in some big-deal promotion they can’t tell you about just yet.’

Lol wanted to ask what had happened to the uncle that had so shocked the community, but there wasn’t going to be time for that. He saw Gerard Stock push through the gate, leaving it open behind him, and cross the yard. Stock’s thinning hair was slicked straight back and he had a beard that was red and gold, fading to grey where it was trimmed to a small, thrusting wedge.

And Lol was still not sure what the bloke actually did.

‘See, if there was a whole bunch of neighbours’ – Prof spread his hands – ‘it might not be so bad. But this guy on his own, with the wife at work all day – oh yeah, it might be her inheritance, but she goes to work while he hangs around here, supposedly engaged in renovation but actually pissing the time away and getting in what remains of my hair. I tell you, if you live in the sticks and you have just the one neighbour, it’s like I would imagine being in prison and sharing a cell. As you’ll find out when I go.’

Lol smiled. Prof kept saying when I go like he was expecting imminent death. In fact, he was going to Abbey Road studio to produce the long-awaited fourth solo album by his old friend, the blues-guitar legend Tom Storey. Lol had agreed to mind the studio while Prof was away – knowing this was Prof’s way of forcing him to work on his own solo album, which was not long-awaited, not by anybody.

There was a knock on the back door. Just the one. Prof jabbed his thumb towards the passage.

‘And if you ever do let Stock in here when I’m gone, you don’t permit him to play a chord or touch a knob on that board, that clear? Not for my benefit I’m saying this, but for yours, because if your album eventually starts to sell in any quantity, he’s gonna swear blind he co-produced it. Am I right, Simon?’

Simon rose languidly to his feet. He wore well-faded jeans and a collarless white shirt. ‘You know me, Prof. I must never allow myself to think the worst of people.’

Prof turned to Lol. ‘If it reaches court, this man will be your principal witness. He don’t play bass so good any more, but his God loves him increasingly.’

Simon St John smiled but didn’t reply. Nothing Prof said ever seemed to offend him; he would bend with it, like a willow. Simon had probably not changed much, or put on a pound in weight, in twenty years. He seemed to know exactly who he was and to feel comfortable with that. He made Lol feel unstable and directionless.

‘Aw, just let the bastard in,’ Prof said, resigned. Then he grinned at Lol. ‘I’ll do you the favour of ensuring that he develops no interest in you from the start.’

As good as his word, Prof handed Gerard Stock a mug of lukewarm tea and jerked a thumb at Lol.

‘Gerry, this little guy is Laurence Robinson. He used to be in a minor band, way back. Now he’s a psychotherapist.’

Lol sighed. He was polishing his glasses on the hem of his T-shirt, so Gerard Stock was just a blue-denim blur, but he could feel the guy’s lazy gaze like a damp towel as Stock cranked out a laugh.

‘Guess we’ve all been down that road at some time.’

Lol put his glasses back on. Stock’s voice had surprised him: underneath the vague mid-Atlantic slur, it was educated, upper-middle-class, like Simon’s. He saw that the bloke had intelligent, canny eyes, a wet little rosebud mouth inside the oval of the beard and moustache.

‘I was in therapy for six months, in the States,’ Stock said. ‘It really fucked me up.’ He laughed again, eyes glinting with challenge.

Lol nodded. ‘It can happen. It isn’t right for everybody.’

Stock drank some tea. ‘And what kind of person isn’t it right for?’

‘Don’t get him going,’ Prof snapped. ‘He’ll bore the arse off you with his psycho-babble. What can we do for you, Gerry? I hate to hurry you, but we need to have this rig up and running. Time is money in this business, I don’t need to tell you that.’

‘You most certainly don’t, Prof,’ Stock said. ‘Actually, I wanted a word with the vicar.’

Prof said nothing, clearly thrown by this.

‘Me?’ Simon said, also thrown, obviously.

‘If you have a few minutes.’

‘Sure.’ Simon shrugged. ‘I was just leaving anyway. I should be out there ministering to my flock, but Prof’s still a novelty, made me self-indulgent. Would you excuse me one minute, while I pop off and have a wee? Then I’ll walk back with you.’

When Simon vanished into the passage, Lol went over to the sink and filled it with hot water for the washing up. When he turned round to find a teacloth, he saw that Gerard Stock was contemplating him, eyes screwed up like he was trying to figure out the species of a bird in the garden.

‘You were in a band? Laurence… Robertson…?’

‘Robinson,’ Lol said. ‘Lol, usually. But you probably wouldn’t—’

‘Ah,’ Stock said triumphantly. ‘Hazey Jane.’

Lol’s turn to be surprised. Maybe it took one loser to recognize another.

‘You did this Nick Drake-y thing,’ Stock recalled, ‘long before the man was rediscovered. All sensitive and finger-picking, when everybody else was crashing about on synths. Brave of you.’

‘Didn’t get us anywhere,’ Lol said lightly.

‘If ten years too early.’ Stock’s teeth were very white and even – Hollywood teeth. He couldn’t always have been a loser. ‘And now everybody’s discovered Drake, it’s probably too late. A hard and ungrateful business, my friend. You’re probably better off, even in psychotherapy.’

‘Unfortunately, everybody’s discovered that, too,’ Lol said. ‘Story of my life.’

‘Sad,’ said Gerard Stock, as Simon returned.

Prof and Lol followed the other two men down the passage and out through the back door, Prof seeming much happier now that he was seeing Stock’s back. The sun was a big white spotlamp, tracking them, and all around the countryside was surging with summer, the meadow lavishly splattered with wild flowers – Mother Nature flaunting herself, happy to be a whore.

Prof stopped in the yard, and sat a Panama hat on his bald head. ‘He piss you off, Laurence?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Not particularly.’

‘Give him time.’ Prof rubbed his beard. His baggy American T-shirt carried the merry message BABES IS ALL. ‘What’s he want with Simon, that’s what I would like to know. He strike you as a man who feels himself in need of spiritual absolution?’

Lol smiled. ‘You jealous?’

‘I shall treat that with the contempt it deserves,’ Prof said.

‘What does Mr Stock actually do? You never said.’

‘Nothing! Strolls about like the squire while the poor wife’s at work, temping for some agency in Hereford. She inherits the house, now she earns the money for them to live there. All right, he was some kind of a freelance publicist, a term that can mean whatever he wants it to mean on any particular day. He offers to handle my PR. I say, Gerard, watch my lips: I do not want any relations with the public.’

Lol watched Stock and the vicar crossing the river bridge at the bottom of the meadow, where the line of poplars began. Where he’d walked last night. He told Prof about the hop-kiln he’d seen, with its fairy-tale tower. Prof nodded.

‘Yeah, I expect that would be his place. It’s not a prime location, Stock maintains, on account of being blocked in on either side by these two enormous great metal barns. Same situation as this, with the land all around it owned by someone else. He should moan – like he paid a penny for it.’

‘They still grow hops there?’

‘Used to.’

‘Only there was this kind of hop-yard with no hops – well, a few shrivelled bits of bine hanging from the wires. I mean, hops had obviously been grown at one time, in quantity, but it was all barren now. Scorched earth and just these poles. It was… depressing.’

‘Hmm,’ Prof said. ‘This would be the wilt, I expect.’

‘What?’

‘Verticulum Wilt… nah, that’s wrong, but some word like that. It’s this voracious hop disease – no known cure. Wipes out your whole crop, contaminates your land like anthrax or something, throwing hop-farmers out of business. You want to know about this stuff, take a walk down to the hop museum by the main road.’ Prof smiled slyly. ‘You’ll like it there – check out the back room.’

‘Why?’

Prof winked. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘apparently that’s how these stables got split off from the farm. The owner has hard times, maybe from the wilt, sells his land bit by bit, flogs off what buildings he can, for conversion. Maybe that’s also how Stock’s wife’s uncle got his kiln, I forget. It’s an ill wind, Laurence.’

It was noon, the time of no shadows, but the sun was momentarily weakened by a trailer of muslin cloud.

‘What’s the, er… what’s the wife like?’ Lol asked.

Prof gave him a curious look. Prof had sensitive, multi-track hearing – sometimes even picking up tracks you hadn’t recorded.

‘Never met her, Laurence. Quiet, I’m told. Often the case with a guy like that – wants a listener.’

‘And what happened to the uncle?’

‘Ha! I’m detecting – forgive me – a burgeoning interest here?’

‘Well, not—’

‘The moment I mention hop-kilns! After our discussion, am I to conclude you went for one of your little strolls and you came back with – dare I suggest – the seed of an idea? I’m thinking of the song you did a year or two back for Norma Waterson – “The Baker’s Tune”?’

‘ “The Baker’s Lament”.’

‘About the slow fading of the old village fabric – a good one. Well, I’m not pushing it, but there are strong themes here, too. Change and decay. Visit the Hop Museum – in fact, I’m going to set that up for you.’

‘Prof, there’s no—’

‘Check it out. Reject it, if you want, but check it out first.’

Lol gave up. In an avalanche, lie down.

‘So what did happen to the uncle?’

‘Aha.’ Prof sat on an old rustic bench against the stable wall, tilting his Panama over his eyes. ‘Well, that, Laurence, was a very sick wind.’

Lol waited. Prof seemed to have a remarkably extensive knowledge of people he claimed he hadn’t ever wanted to meet.

He talked from under his hat, stretching out his legs. ‘I think what Simon didn’t mention about this Stewart Ash was his interest – as an author, a chronicler of social history – in our travelling friends. Not the New Age travellers – the old kind.’

‘Gypsies?’

Prof nodded. ‘Romanies. Used to come here in force every autumn for the hop-picking. Enormous work in those days before the machines. Some of them even travelling over from Europe in their vardos, year after year. A colourful spectacle – you’ll find all this in the hop museum, as well. The Romanies were a little community inside a community, and of course Ash very much wanted to record their memories, for his book – what they thought of the hop-masters, how well they were treated. A man with a social conscience. Well, there’s a few Romany families, not many, still coming back, to help the machinery do the work – though whether they’ll be back this year, after what happened, is anyone’s guess. Anyway, off goes our Mr Ash to talk to them. Only gypsies, by tradition, don’t like to talk. It’s their history, why should the gaujos profit from it?’

Prof tilted up his hat, looking for Lol’s reaction.

‘That’s a point,’ Lol said cautiously.

‘I have sympathy for the Romanies,’ Prof said. ‘A persecuted race, big victims of the Holocaust.’

Prof rarely talked about this; he liked to call himself a ‘lapsed Jew’, but Lol knew from other sources that his family had been considerably depleted by Hitler. Aunts and uncles, certainly, if not his parents. It would explain why Prof, who was accustomed to ignoring his immediate neighbourhood, had taken a certain interest in this story.

‘But Ash, you see, was by all accounts a generous man, and he didn’t expect the stuff for nothing. He established what you might call a rapport with a few of the gypsies. What he might have called a rapport, though they would probably have had a different name for it.’

‘Like, they got more out of him than he got out of them?’

‘They haven’t survived, the Romanies, by passing up on opportunities, though it was probably a little more complicated than ripping off the guy for a bunch of made-up stories. Complicated, for one thing, by Ash being representative of another significant minority.’

‘Oh?’

‘Did he form too close a rapport with certain of his travelling friends? Did they take his money for services rendered? None of this ever came out in court when the case was heard earlier this year. It amounted to two little bleeders breaking in one night. Gypsy boys, brothers. Old man comes down in the night, catches them messing with his cameras and stuff – this was how it was put in the papers. They beat the poor bugger to death.’

‘Christ,’ said Lol.

‘Last year, this would be, late summer. There you go: ain’t what it was, the countryside.’ Prof laughed hoarsely. ‘Bear this in mind, Laurence. Make sure you always lock up at night, when I’ve gone.’

4 The Reservoir

ST MARY THE Virgin guarded Dilwyn like a mother hen: a good, solid medieval parish church with a squat steeple on the tower. But it was always going to be the village below that got the attention: bijou black and white cottages around the green – a movie set, birthday card, timber-framed heaven.

In fact, you only really noticed the church on the way out of the village. And if she hadn’t been leaving the village, Merrily might also have missed seeing the woman, coming down from the porch past ancient gravestones – just a few of them, selectively spaced as if the less-sightly stones had been removed.

She seemed as timeless as the cottages themselves: a big woman, comfortably overweight, walking with her head high, a shopping basket over her arm. You expected there to be big, rosy apples in it, maybe some fresh, brown eggs.

It could be her, couldn’t it? Merrily slowed the car and then reversed, turning on the forecourt of the Crown Inn, and parking next to the village green.

The Shelbones’ bungalow had been easy enough to find, sunk into a lane leading out of the village in the general direction of Stretford whose church of St Cosmas and St Damien – once desecrated with a pool of urine and a gutted crow – had been the scene of Merrily’s first, humiliating exorcism-of-place. The bungalow had lace curtains and flower beds with bright clusters of bedding plants. It was traditional – no barbecue, no water-feature. And no one had answered the door.

But this woman looked promising. She was about the right age – mid-fifties. With her dark green linen skirt and her grey-brown hair loosely permed, you had the impression she didn’t care overmuch if she did resemble her mother at that same age.

Merrily switched off the engine, wound down the window and waited for the woman to reach the green. Late afternoon had brought on the first overcast sky of the week, dense with white heat. Droplets of birdsong were sprinkled over the distant buzz of invisible traffic on the main road above the village.

The woman had stopped to check something in her basket. Wearily, Merrily levered herself out of the car, leaned against the door. She was wearing a blue cotton jacket, a white silk scarf over her dog collar in case the Shelbones didn’t want the neigh-bours knowing they were having visits from strange clergy. She hadn’t bought any new summer clothes last year, and there’d be no need for any this year either. She wasn’t planning to go anywhere. This would be the first summer she’d stayed behind while Jane went off on holiday – joining another family in a big farmhouse in Pembrokeshire where there was sea and surfing.

Not that the kid seemed especially excited. She just slumped around, sluggish and grumpy. Maybe it was the weight of the exams and the weather. Or some unknown burden? Something they needed to discuss? Perhaps there’d be a violent thunderstorm tonight, with the electricity cut off, as it usually was: a time for candlelight confidences to be swapped across the kitchen table, maybe their last chance for a meaningful discussion before Jane went away for a month, leaving Merrily alone in the seven-bedroom vicarage.

The woman was now crossing the road towards the green. Merrily stepped away from the car.

‘Mrs Shelbone?’

‘Good afternoon.’ She looked neither surprised nor curious – in a village this size a stranger would swiftly have rounded up a dozen people who could have pointed her out.

‘I had a call from Canon Beckett, this morning,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m Merrily Watkins. I rang—’

‘I know. It wasn’t convenient to talk to you then. I’m sorry.’ Mrs Shelbone spoke briskly, local accent. ‘I was intending to call you back tonight when we could speak freely.’

Dennis must have told her to expect a call from the Deliverance Consultant, but the girl, Amy, had been in the house, Merrily guessed, at the time she rang. She suddenly felt wrong-footed, because this woman already knew exactly who she was and what she was doing here, and now she was getting that familiar, dismayed look that said: You’re the wrong sex, you’re too young, you’re too small.

She slipped a hand defensively to her scarf. Mrs Hazel Shelbone shifted her shopping basket from one hand to the other. In the basket were two tins of polish and some yellow dusters, neatly folded. No apples, no eggs.

‘Well, my dear,’ Mrs Shelbone said, ‘this isn’t really a good place to leave your car. I should take it a little way down that lane over there. Perhaps we could meet in the church in about five minutes?’ She produced a smile that was wry and resigned. ‘The scene of the crime, as it were.’

In the long church porch with its glassless, iron-barred Gothic windows, Merrily took a few long breaths, whispered a rather feverish prayer.

Jane had once asked, insouciantly, So when do they issue you with the black medical bag and the rubber apron for the green bile?

The truth was that Merrily had never exorcized a person. Deliverance Consultant might be an unsatisfactory title, but it was a more accurate job description than Diocesan Exorcist. Heavy spiritual cleansing had never been more than an infrequent last resort.

Tell me if it’s real, Merrily mumbled to God. Don’t let me get this wrong.

It was only a few steps down from the porch, but the body of the church had a subterranean feel – a cool, grey cavern. Hazel Shelbone was alone there, waiting in a front pew, a few yards from the pulpit and the entrance to the chancel where her daughter had – in the phraseology of Dennis Beckett’s grandson – tossed her cookies.

She half rose. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Watkins, if I was abrupt. It’s been very difficult.’

‘Yes.’

‘I… would like you to understand about me from the outset. I am a Christian. And a mother.’ She said this almost defiantly, her wide face shining in the white light from the leaded windows.

Merrily nodded. ‘Me, too.’

‘You’ve got children?’

‘Just the one. A girl. Sixteen.’

Mrs Shelbone’s brown eyes widened. ‘A child bride, were you?’

‘Sort of. My husband was killed in a car accident. Long time ago.’

The body of the church seemed fairly colourless. There was no stained glass in the nave, but behind the altar was a crucifixion window with blood-red predominant.

‘And you remarried?’

‘No, I…’

‘Found the Church instead.’ A deep nod of understanding from Mrs Shelbone. ‘It’s important to know where your destiny lies, isn’t it? I knew from a very early age that I was destined to be a mother, that this was to be my task in life. My occupation. Do you see?’

Merrily smiled. Hazel Shelbone’s expression rebuked her.

‘But we couldn’t have children, Mrs Watkins! Couldn’t have them. Imagine that. It was enough to shatter my faith. How terribly cruel of God, I thought.’

‘So—’

‘But after a while I began to understand. He intended for me to be a reservoir, do you see? A reservoir of maternal love for little children who were starved of it. When I came to that understanding it was a moment of great joy.’

‘So you—’

‘Foster parents we were, for a number of years. And then we took on Amy as an infant, and God, in his wisdom, decided that she was to stay and become our daughter. We had a big, decrepit old house, up in Leominster in those days, with lots of bedrooms, so we sold that and we moved out here. This was when Amy was five and we knew she was going to be staying.’

‘I didn’t realize she was adopted.’ Merrily was wondering what basic difference this might make. As a foster parent, Hazel Shelbone would probably already have had considerable experience of kids from dysfunctional families, kids with emotional problems. She wouldn’t easily be fooled by them. ‘What does your husband do?’

‘David’s a listed-buildings officer with the Hereford Council. He looks after the old places, makes sure nobody knocks them down or tampers with them. They offered him early retirement last year, but he said he wouldn’t know what to do with himself.’ Her eyes grew anxious. ‘I wish he’d taken it, now. He’s not been in the best of health recently, and now…’

She looked ahead, through the opening in the oak screen, towards the altar, and then suddenly turned, leaning urgently sideways in the pew, towards Merrily.

‘We never pushed the Church on her. We never forced religion on any of our children. We just made sure they knew that God was waiting for them, if and when they were ready. There’s a great difference between indoctrination and bringing up children in a home which is full of God’s love.’

Merrily nodded again. ‘That’s sensible.’

‘And Amy responded better than anyone could have wished. A daughter to be proud of – respected her parents, her teachers and her God.’ Hazel Shelbone paused, looking Merrily straight in the eyes. ‘You understand I’m only talking like this to you now because you’re a woman of God. I don’t make a practice of scattering the Lord’s name willy-nilly on barren ground. The Social Services people one has to deal with in fostering and adoption, many of those people are very left-wing and atheistic, and they’ll automatically take against you if they think you’re some sort of religious fanatic. Well, we’re far from fanatics, Mrs Watkins. We just maintain a Christian household. Which you always think will… will…’

She bit her lip.

‘Will be a protection to them?’ Merrily said softly.

Hazel Shelbone leaned back and breathed in deeply as if accepting an infusion of strength from God for what she was about to say. ‘Sometimes, when I come home and she’s been alone in the house… it seems so cold. There’s a sense of cold. The sort of cold you can feel in your bones.’

Merrily said nothing. Once something started gnawing at your mind, it could produce its own phenomena.

‘Last Sunday, when she was… sick, and we took her from here, I don’t think she even realized where she was. Her eyes were absolutely vacant, as though her mind had gone off somewhere else. Vacant and cold. Like a doll’s eyes. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was only when we got her home that she began to cry, and even then it was like tears of… defiance. I’d never seen that before, not in Amy. We’ve had other children, for short periods, who were resentful and troublesome, but not Amy. Amy became our own.’

Merrily asked carefully, ‘Have you consulted a doctor?’

Hazel Shelbone blinked. ‘You mean a psychiatrist?’

‘Well, not—’

‘We are a Christian household, Mrs Watkins. We seek Christian solutions.’

‘Well, yes, I understand that, but—’

‘You may say we’ve become complacent in our middle years, having a daughter who was always conscientious with her school work, who’d been going happily to church from the age of seven… and was, by the way, confirmed into the Church in March this year by Bishop Dunmore. A girl who even’ – she looked at Merrily, whose silk scarf had come loose, revealing the dog collar – ‘who even talked of one day becoming a minister.’

Merrily thought of Jane who once, in a heated moment, had said she’d rather clean public lavatories.

‘She always kept her Bible on her bedside table – until it went missing and I found it wedged under the wardrobe in the spare room. The Holy Bible wedged there, face down, like some old telephone directory! This was the child who always wanted to be assured, before the light went out, that Jesus was watching over her. Now she doesn’t want go to church any more, she looks down at her feet every time she has to even pass the church…’

‘Since when?’

‘Five weeks? Six weeks? The first time she wouldn’t go, she claimed she was feeling ill, with a bad stomach. Well, she’s always been truthful, never tried to get a day off school, so of course I sent her back to bed at once. The second time… Oh, it was some essay she had to write for school – she’s always been very assiduous about her school work, as I say. Very well, her dad said, you must decide what’s most important, and she promised she would go to evensong that night instead, on her own. And, sure enough, she got changed and off she went. But I know she didn’t turn up. I know that.’

Her voice had become loud enough to cause an echo, and Merrily glanced quickly around to make sure they were still alone.

‘Another time, she made the excuse of having a particularly severe period pain. But when she gave me the same excuse again last Sunday, I counted up the days and I can tell you there’s nothing wrong with my arithmetic. “Oh no,” I said, “up you get, my girl. Now!” And I made her come with us to the early Eucharist.’

‘Did she make a fuss?’

‘She was sulky. Distant. That glazed look.’

‘Has she got a boyfriend?’

‘What does that—? No. She hasn’t got a boyfriend. But she’s only fourteen.’

‘You sure about that?’ What could be better guaranteed to undermine the piety of a starchy fourteen-year-old girl than a sudden, blinding crush on some cool, mean kid who despised religion? ‘For instance… where did she really go, do you think, when she claimed she was off to evensong?’

‘I know what you’re thinking, Mrs Watkins! And yes, I’ve had her to the doctor this week, and no, he couldn’t find anything wrong with her. But… well, I can tell you there certainly has been illness in the house as a result of all this. David’s had migraines again, and my… Anyway, everything has seemed under a cloud. Unhealthy. A darkness, even in the height of summer. And you may say this is subjective, but I know that it isn’t. The child’s become a receptacle for evil.’

Hazel Shelbone stood up, her back against a stone pillar by the pew’s end. Defensive, Merrily thought. If she’s so certain, then there’s something else.

Mrs Shelbone walked into the chancel and faced the altar.

‘I come here, and I polish and polish the bit of rail where she was sick, and I pray for her to be redeemed, and I get down on my knees and ask God what our family could have done to deserve this.’

Merrily went to join her. ‘You seriously believe Amy is possessed by evil.’

‘By an evil spirit.’

‘And you want her to be exorcized.’

‘I feel it’s not something we can ignore.’

‘Yeah, but it’s… it’s not something we undertake without a lot of… There’s a procedure, OK? I’m afraid it would involve bringing in a psychiatrist, initially.’

Hazel Shelbone didn’t turn around. Her whole body had stiffened.

‘We need to be sure.’ Merrily put a hand on her arm. ‘What might at first appear to you or me to be demonic possession could be some form of mental breakdown.’

‘Reverend Watkins…’ Hazel Shelbone stared up at the crucified Jesus in the window above the altar. ‘We’ve had our share of problem children, David and I. We’ve had children from broken homes… children whose parents have been admitted to psychiatric institutions… disturbed children, a child who ran away after smashing up our living room. There’s really not a lot anyone can tell me about child psychology.’

‘We have to be sure,’ Merrily said, and took a step back as the big woman spun round at her.

‘Is this what it’s come to? Has the Church become a branch of the Social Services now? Do I have to sign forms? Mrs Watkins, it’s quite simple – I would like the darkness to be driven out, so that God may be readmitted into the heart of my daughter. Is that too much to ask of a priest?’

‘No. No, it shouldn’t be.’

‘Then?’

Then, Merrily needed advice. This sounded like a simple and sudden adolescent rejection of parental values, but you could never be sure. Before taking this any further, she needed at least to talk to Huw Owen over in Wales. Who, of course, would warn her not to leave the village without praying for and – if possible – with this girl.

‘Mrs Shelbone,’ Merrily said softly, ‘is there something you haven’t told me?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ It came back too quickly.

‘It’s just that for you to want to put your daughter through the stress of a spiritual cleansing—’

‘She knows things,’ Hazel Shelbone mumbled.

‘What?’

‘She knows things she shouldn’t know. Things she couldn’t know.’

‘Like… what?’

Mrs Shelbone bowed her head once, and moved away from the altar. ‘She will look into my eyes sometimes and tell me things she could not possibly know.’

She started to walk quickly back towards the nave, where her homely shopping basket sat on the raised wooden floor at the foot of the front pew.

‘All right.’ Merrily moved behind her. ‘Where is she now?’

‘At home, I assume, in her room. She spends most of her time in her room. I’d better go now. Her father will be home in an hour.’

‘Why don’t we both go and have a chat with her?’ Merrily suggested.

5 Al and Sally

LIKE A FINE-boned girl, he thought: pale and graceful and slim-hipped.

Lol was suddenly besotted. Since coming into the museum he’d been aware of little else. His gaze kept returning to this shadowed alcove, overhung with tumbling bines.

The man standing by the counter covered with books and leaflets was watching him, smiling. He wore a white linen jacket, of Edwardian length, and looked about sixty-five. He had long white hair and a pointed chin, goblinesque, and there were tiny gold rings in both his ears. He gestured towards the alcove. ‘Go ahead.’

Lol moved closer but didn’t touch.

Mother-of-pearl was inlaid around the soundhole but the softwood top was otherwise plain, with a dull sheen but no lacquer, no polish. There was an orange line of yew in the neck. She was like one of those old parlour instruments from the late nineteenth century.

A holy relic. What was it doing here?

Lol said reverently. ‘She’s a Boswell.’

‘Mother of God!’ The man with long white hair strode out from behind the counter. ‘She’s a guitar!’ Carelessly plucking the instrument from its stand, handing it to Lol. ‘Go on, take her. But no plectrum, if you don’t mind. I’d hate to need a scratchboard.’

‘I’m no good with a plec, anyway.’ Lol accepted the guitar, one hand under its sleek butt.

‘Quite right, lad.’ The man clapped his hands, two rings tinking. ‘Plectrums, thumb-picks – condoms for the fingers. Why would God have given us nails?’ His sharp rural accent, with flat northern vowels, was unplaceable, the kind sometimes affected by traditional folk singers.

The guitar was unexpectedly lightweight.

‘Yours?’

The man smiled. Check out the back room, Prof had said earlier, winking. Back room?

‘Ah, you’re embarrassed,’ the goblin man said. ‘All right. I’ll leave you alone with her for a while.’ From behind the counter, he pulled a wooden stool for Lol to sit on. ‘I’ll give you just one tip – don’t be too delicate with her. She won’t repay you.’ He wagged a finger. ‘Remember now, Lol, she’s not sacred. She’s only a guitar.’

Lol looked up at him, unsure whether he’d fallen on his feet or into a trap.

‘The Prof.’ The goblin smiled – a couple of gold teeth on show. ‘The Prof said you’d be around sooner or later.’ He unlatched the door. ‘I shall be back in about ten minutes. Enjoy!’

The Hop Museum was set back from the main road to Bromyard, about fifty yards from the turning to Knight’s Frome. Like Prof’s place, it was the remains of farm buildings, but in this case with a few acres around it. There were two ponies and a donkey in the field in front, and a pond with ducks. Also, a gypsy caravan in green and gold.

The River Frome passed unobtrusively under the access drive, through what looked like a culvert.

Earlier, Lol had played the Frome song for Prof, as far as it went. The chorus had written itself, but sounded a bit trite.

The River Frome goes nowhere in particular

It isn’t very wide

There’s nothin’ on the other side…

Pity it was pronounced froom, to rhyme with doom and gloom. Lol had decided he’d still have it sounding in the song like home and loam so as to carry the vowel in that first line: Frome goes nowhere. He was, after all, a stranger.

‘You don’t know enough about the place to finish this song,’ Prof had said flatly. ‘It might be about what a complete loser you are, but you still need some images to carry it. What do you really know about this sodding river except its name and that it isn’t very wide? You ask me, Laurence, it’s time you went to talk to Sally, down at the hop museum. The river, the hills, the woods, the people – Sally knows everything about them all.’

‘Sally?’ Lol had stared at him. ‘You actually know this woman? I thought you had a policy of not knowing local people unless they could play something useful?’

‘It was an accident,’ Prof said.

It was about five-thirty when Lol had set off to walk the half-mile or so from the studio. The white-haired man had been closing the gates at the foot of the drive but had beckoned Lol in anyway. The only visitor they’d had all afternoon, he said. Admission was a pound, and there were a few items on sale inside.

But not, presumably, the Boswell guitar, handmade by the great Alfonso Boswell who had given all his guitars women’s names. The same instrument on which Lol now played the slow and ghostly Celtic instrumental he called ‘Moon’s Tune’… knowing it was going to remind him of the abandoned hop-yard, the place of the wilt, and the woman he’d seen there. He’d dreamed of her since, twice in one night. Not pleasant, though, as dreams went.

Are you all right? Then letting her approach to within a few inches before he slunk bashfully away. Registering by the rhythm of her movements and her blurred smile that she was not hurt, bar the scratches, and had not been attacked or forcibly stripped… was more likely some stoned moonbather who’d assumed she was alone but didn’t really care.

The low-beamed room, one of three linking up to accommodate the museum, was dim and crowded with annotated exhibits that looked at first like junk. These included the hopcribs – hammocks in frames, in which the cones were separated from the bines; the giant sausage sacks called hop-pockets, in which they were collected; a huge cast-iron furnace, rescued from some subsequently converted kiln.

On the walls were blown-up black and white photographs of kilns like Gerard Stock’s, in which the harvest had been dried on platforms over the furnace. The atmosphere in the museum was humid and laden with a mellow, musky aroma that could only be the hops themselves. And because hops were used to flavour and preserve beer it was easy to find the smell intoxicating. It seemed to soften Lol’s senses, made it easier to accept the curious turn events had taken.

He pulled the Boswell guitar comfortably into his solar plexus. The soundboxes of Boswells had curved backs long before Ovations became ubiquitous but, while Ovations were fibreglass, the back of the hand-crafted Boswell was like a mandolin’s. There were probably fewer than a hundred of these instruments, so it had to be worth more than anything else in the museum. But what was it doing here – and did it have anything to do with hops?

Lol played the opening chords of the River Frome song: B minor, F sharp. The tone was entirely distinctive: deep but sharp, a bit like the voice of the man with the long, white hair.

He stopped playing. No… No, really, it couldn’t be. Because he was dead, wasn’t he? He would surely have to be dead, after all this time.

‘Al,’ he said, jabbing a thumb at his own chest. ‘And this is Sally, my wife.’

They stood together in the doorway, looking strangely like a period couple from a sepia photograph. Sally’s hair was ashgrey, fine and shoulder-length. She was tall and slim and, at surely close to the same age as Al himself, still startlingly beautiful. She wore a long, dark blue dress and half-glasses on a chain.

But her handshake was businesslike and her accent clipped and cultured. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘you thought he was dead. Everybody thinks he’s dead. Which is absolutely no handicap at all when we have one to sell. It gives it a certain patina of antiquity.’

‘You like her, then?’ Al Boswell asked him. ‘You like my baby?’

He meant the guitar.

Al.

Alfonso Boswell: virtuoso blues and ragtime guitarist and perhaps the most revered, if eccentric, guitar-maker of the past half-century.

‘Can’t believe this,’ Lol mumbled.

‘He’s a little older than he looks.’ Sally Boswell flicked at her husband’s snowy hair. ‘But also he’s been making guitars and things since he was just in his teens, so that rather confuses people.’

‘I wanted to stop,’ Al Boswell said, ‘but after I finished the last one, I awoke in the night with what seemed very like the first twinges of arthritis. Well, I’m a superstitious man, from a long line of superstitious men, so I started work again the very next morning.’

Lol thought of the gypsy caravan outside. According to the legend, Alfonso Boswell would travel the country lanes, selecting and cutting his own wood and then set up his workshop in some forest clearing – each instrument growing organically in the open air, under the sun, under the stars. There would be no more than three or four guitars a year; it was never a full-time job, and he’d also be doing seasonal work on the farms: fruit-picking and… hop-picking?

Looked like Al Boswell had uncoupled his caravan and settled down.

‘And if you didn’t know already,’ Sally Boswell said drily, ‘the Rom are renowned for their outrageous lies. Proud of it, too, for reasons that still escape me after all these years.’

‘Non-confrontational is all we are,’ Al said. His face carried very few lines and his skin was lighter-toned than you’d imagine on a pure-bred gypsy. ‘Amazing, it is, how much conflict can be avoided by a well-timed fib. The truth can be hurtful and dangerous sometimes. Come on, lad, what do you really think of the instrument?’

Lol thought this was getting increasingly unreal. He thought, Why should Alfonso Boswell care what the hell I think?

‘We heard your playing,’ Sally said. ‘We were listening outside the door, I’m afraid.’

‘So you’ll know why I’m not worthy even to tune it.’ Lol was embarrassed. He was still holding the guitar but careful to keep his fingers well away from the strings.

‘How long you been playing?’ Al Boswell asked him.

‘Oh…’ Lol blinked nervously. ‘Since I was a kid with a plastic one. Sad, isn’t it?’

‘It’s not the technique, lad. It’s the heart, the relationship. You know that.’ Al tapped the body of the guitar. ‘This one – she’s very young, you see. She’s the first this year. And she’ll probably be the last, I reckon. What she needs is a good playing-in. I never let one go until she’s been played-in. What do you think, now? Is she worth it?’

‘Oh, Al!’ Sally frowned. ‘You can hardly expect a snap judgement. Why don’t you let Mr Robinson take the thing away for a couple of weeks?’

Al stared at her, then he threw up his arms. ‘Well, damn it, why didn’t I think of that? Aye, you take her away, lad. Break her in. Bring her back in – what shall we say? – September? Unless you want to buy her, of course. In which case we can discuss terms.’

Lol was shocked. He put the guitar carefully back on the stand, stepped away from it.

‘Now what’s that mean?’ Al said. ‘Is it some form of gaujo insult?’

Sally closed her eyes, shaking her head.

‘This is all moving too fast,’ Lol said. ‘I just walk in here, you don’t know a thing about me… I can’t just walk out with six thousand quid’s worth of—’

‘Mother of God!’ Al cried. ‘Is that what they’re fetching now? I’ve never had more than two and a half!’

Sally smiled tiredly at Lol. ‘Mr Robinson, a short time ago, Mr Levin rang us to say you were on your way. Al has known him for many, many years. Mr Levin feels you could use a little inspiration.’ She looked at him over her half-glasses. ‘Don’t, as they say, knock it.’

Al Boswell laughed loudly, threw up his arms and walked out of the museum.

‘He loves his little games,’ Sally explained. ‘They’re mischievous sometimes, like elves. He’s just gone to find you a guitar case.’

She bent to adjust the guitar on its stand. When she straightened up she stood taller than Lol. Where Al Boswell was volatile, Sally seemed watchful and serene.

‘Al owes Prof Levin some favours from way back and wanted him to have a guitar, but Mr Levin insisted that a Boswell should never go to someone who couldn’t play. This is the guitar he was promised. Consider yourself an intermediary in this. Play it while you’re there, if it agrees with you, and then perhaps forget to take it with you when you leave. In a few years, I suppose, it’ll be worth ten or twelve thousand to a collector.’

Lol was still bemused. ‘He recorded with Prof?’

‘Mr Levin would always find Al session work when we needed money. He’s a kind man, and he’s very fond of you. He doesn’t want you to fall by the wayside.’

‘The wayside’s OK, sometimes,’ Lol said awkwardly.

She arched an eyebrow. ‘That’s the sort of thing Al says. But we are not Romanies, you and I. When we fall, we don’t just roll over and land on our feet again, grinning all over our faces.’

Lol was curious. ‘Did Prof know Al was going to be here when he bought the stables?’ I have sympathy for the Romanies, Prof had said.

‘Pure coincidence, actually, although Al knew Simon St John, of course. We’re all parts of interlinked circles, aren’t we?’

Lol wondered how this very English woman had come to link up with Al Boswell, pure-bred Romany, apparently luring him off the road for good.

‘But, according to the Prof, you want to know about the Frome Valley,’ Sally Boswell said. ‘Therefore I want to tell you… because there are aspects of life here which do need to be recorded, and nothing keeps memories flowing onwards like songs. And the Frome flows through that guitar – the vein of yew in it came from prunings from a thousand-year-old tree in Simon’s churchyard and there’s also a little willow from a tree which bends over the river itself. The Romany is ever a discreet scavenger. He lives lightly on the earth.’

She led him into the next room. Hop-bines were intertwined along the beams (silent, but as soon as he saw them he could almost hear them crackling and rustling, and he felt a small shiver). More blown-up photographs were spotlit on the walls: men in flat caps, women in print dresses, berets and head-scarves. People laughing. The strange sadness of frozen merriment.

‘Until mechanization began to take over in the sixties, hop-picking was very much a multicultural phenomenon,’ Sally Boswell explained. ‘Well… four cultures, really: the indigenous locals, the Welsh Valleys, the Dudleys, as we called them, from the Black Country, and the gypsies.’

She told him how, at picking time, in September, the local population would expand eight- or tenfold – perhaps a good thing, leaving the locals far less insular than in other rural areas. The hop-masters would have huge barrack blocks for the pickers, and the pubs were always overflowing – the police constantly back and forth, breaking up the fights.

Lol studied a photo in which the smiles seemed more inhibited and there were scowls among the caravans and the cooking pots.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Sally, ‘when did the travellers ever like to be photographed? They were always a settlement apart, but usually very honest and faithful to their particular employers. They liked being able to return to the same establishment year after year.’

‘Al was here, too?’

‘For a while.’

‘That was how you met?’

‘Romanies can be charming.’ She didn’t smile. ‘Also infuriating.’

Lol peered at a picture showing a girl lying in one of the hop-cribs, laughing and helpless, men standing around.

‘Cribbing,’ Sally said. ‘When the picking was almost over, an unmarried girl would be seized and tossed into the crib with the last of the hops. The unspoken implication was that she, too, might be picked before next year’s bines were high on the poles.’ She looked solemn. ‘Al and I met when I was… drawn to the Romany ways. I’ve been planning to write a book. Well, I was planning to. In the end, I gave all my material to Mr Ash, for his book. I suppose this place is better than a book, in the end. More interactive, as they say. And Al, like most Romanies, is suspicious of the written word.’

‘Doesn’t seem to have done Mr Ash much good either,’ Lol said hesitantly, ‘in the end.’

She looked at him thoughtfully, as if deciding how much to say. ‘No,’ she agreed eventually. ‘Stewart was the last casualty – we all hope – in an unhappy chain of events at Knight’s Frome.’ She nodded towards the next doorway. ‘Go through.’

No hop-bines hung in the third and smallest room. It was also the darkest, with no windows and few lights. A long panel in a corner was spotlit. It was a painting on board, in flat oils, or acrylics, of a stark and naked hop-yard at night, with pole-alleys black against a moonlit sky, a tattered bine hanging from one of the frames. Halfway down the central row, hovering above the bare ground, was a woman in a long dark dress, like Sally’s, billowing in the wind. The caption read: The Lady of the Bines: a ghost story.

If Sally noticed he’d gone quiet, she didn’t comment on it.

‘The hop-farmer’s angel of death,’ she said with a curator’s jollity.

There was a half-smile on the face of the woman in the picture.

‘Who painted it?’

‘I did,’ Sally said.

‘It’s really good. It’s as if—’

‘As if I’ve actually seen her?’ She laughed lightly. ‘Perhaps I have. Sometimes I can imagine I have.’

Lol was glad it was dark in here. This was unreal – the sequel to a dream.

‘I expect there’s a story,’ he said.

‘She was the wife of some local lord or knight – maybe the original knight of Knight’s Frome, for all I know. And she couldn’t give him a son. So he sent her away.’

‘Like you do.’

‘Like you did, apparently. What was the point of having the king give you a few hundred acres of stolen land if you couldn’t found a dynasty? Anyway, he threw her out. Gave her some money to go away, and then settled down with his mistress. But the poor, spurned lady pined for the valley. Pined all night long in the fields and the hop-yards.’

‘Is this true?’ It sounded like the theme of a traditional folk song.

‘Until one morning, one beautiful midsummer morning, with the hops ripening on the bines,’ her voice hardened, ‘they found the poor bitch hanging from one of the frames.’

‘When was this?’

‘Don’t know. No one does. It’s a legend. I suppose, if it had any basis in fact, the story couldn’t have dated back earlier than the sixteenth century because hops weren’t grown for brewing in this country until 1520. The postscript is that, from the night she died, the knight’s hops began to wither on the bines and his yard was barren for many years. And if you see her ghost, then your crop will also wither… or someone’s will.’

Lol recalled the shrivelled old hop-garland hanging from the gibbet-like arrangement of poles. He didn’t want to think about the naked woman in the hop-yard. He found himself wanting her to have been a ghost. Ghosts were simpler.

‘She’s become a metaphor for Verticillium Wilt,’ Sally said. ‘And, before that, for red spiders, aphids, white-mould… all the scourges of the hop. Wilt, particularly, renders a hop-yard virtually sterile for a number of years. Perhaps you should write a song about her, Lol.’

‘It’s a thought,’ he said uncertainly – although he knew he could. If he knew what he was writing about.

‘Perhaps we could have it playing softly in this room.’ Sally Boswell laughed. Lol thought she didn’t seem to have much sympathy for either the knight or the Lady of the Bines.

‘She still seen?’

‘Depends who you believe. It’s certainly said she was widely observed in the sixties.’ She nodded towards a black and white photograph of a man with a heavy moustache, who looked a bit like Lord Lucan. ‘But then, people would say that – in the last days of the Emperor of Frome, when all was darkness and chaos.’

She was poised to go on, but for Lol, the darkness and chaos could wait.

He hadn’t planned to ask it. He just did. ‘Does she always have a dress on?’

Sally Boswell’s face was gaunt with shadows. From two rooms away, there was a skimming of strings: the legendary Al stowing away his creation.

‘What an extraordinary question,’ she said coldly.

6 Full of Dead People

MUFFLED SOBBING GAVE way to those time-honoured battle-cries from the generation war.

‘Leave me alone! Just go away! It’s nothing to do with you!’

The clouds were a deep luminous mauve now, and the sky looked like a taut, well-beaten drum-skin through the long window pane in the front door.

It was stifling in the small, rectangular hall with its beige woodchip and wall-lights with peeling coppery shades. Merrily stood under a print in a chipped gilt frame: Christ on the Mount of Olives. Opposite her was a cream door with a little pottery plaque on it.

Amy’s Room

The door was closed, but its plywood panels were not exactly soundproof. Merrily thought David Shelbone, historic-buildings officer, was unlikely ever to see his own home listed, except as a classic example of 1970s Utility. How did the Shelbones spend their money? Probably on their adopted child? Perhaps long, educational holidays.

‘Amy. Please.’

‘I… am… not… going… anywhere! Do you understand? There is nothing wrong with me! And… and if there is, it’s nothing to do with you. It’s nothing to do with her. Just get her out of the house. Please. This is… disgraceful.’

Please? Disgraceful? Comparatively speaking, this was a restrained, almost polite response. In extreme situations, kids were rarely able to contain extreme language. You sad old bitch had sometimes been Jane’s starting point, before things got heated.

Hazel Shelbone murmured something Merrily didn’t catch.

‘No!’ Amy screamed. ‘You… How dare you make out there’s something wrong with me?’

‘Amy, do you really think you’d be in any position to judge, if there was?’

‘What do you know? What do you know about the way I feel? How can you understand? You’re not even—’

Merrily willed her not to say it. This was not the time to say it.

‘—my moth—’

Then the unmistakable and always-shocking sound of a slap. Merrily closed her eyes.

An abyss of silence. Jane would have been composing a response involving the European Court of Human Rights.

Amy just started to cry again, long hollow sobs, close to retching.

But this was surely not the first time she’d thrown out the not-my-mother line. There had to be something additional to have provoked Hazel, the seasoned foster-mother, the reservoir. And when I look into her eyes…

With no windows you could open, it was hard to breathe in here. Merrily ran a finger around the inside of her dog collar, walked away towards the front door. She felt like an intruder. She felt this was becoming futile. She looked across into the placidly glowing face of Jesus in the picture, and Jesus smiled, in His knowing way.

Merrily closed her eyes again, let her arms fall to her sides, stilled her thoughts.

Mrs Shelbone was saying, ‘Oh, my darling, I’m so sorry, but you—’

‘Go away. Just go away.’

‘We only want to—’

‘You can’t help me. Nobody can help me.’

‘The Good Lord can help you, Amy.’

Another silence. No sniffles, no whimpers. Then, as Merrily straightened up, Amy said,

‘There’s no such thing as a Good Lord, you stupid woman.’

‘Amy!’

‘It’s all just a sick, horrible joke! There’s nobody out there who can protect us. Or if… if God exists, he just totally hates us. He watches us suffer and die and he doesn’t do a thing to help us. He doesn’t help us, ever, ever, ever! He enjoys watching us suffer. You can plead and plead and plead, and you can say your prayers till you’re b–blue in the face and nobody’s going to ever save you. It’s all a horrible sick lie! And the Church is just a big… a big cover-up. It’s all smelly and musty and horrible and it’s full of dead people, and I don’t… I don’t want to die in—’

Merrily leaned back against the wall. Christ gave her a sad smile. The door of Amy’s Room opened. Hazel Shelbone stood there, stone-faced. ‘Mrs Watkins? Would you mind—?’

‘Don’t you dare bring her in here! I’m not talking to her, do you understand?’

Merrily took a step back along the hall. Something had happened to this kid. If not a sneering boyfriend, what about some cool, compelling atheistic teacher?

She whispered, ‘Hazel, I… think, on the whole, it might be better if Amy came out, and—’

‘I’m warning you, if she comes in here I’ll smash the window. Do you hear me? I’ll smash the window and I’ll get out of here for good! I’ll throw the chair through the window. Can you hear—?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Mrs Shelbone pulled the door closed behind her, new lines and hollows showing in her wide, honest face. ‘I don’t know what to do. She’s never been quite like this before, I swear to you.’

‘You just keep lying to me. Lies, lies, lies!’

Merrily opened the front door and stepped down to the flagged garden path, followed by Amy’s mother.

The bungalow was detached but fairly small, with a bay window each side of the door. There were other houses and bungalows either side of the country lane, well separated, with high hedges and gardens crowded with trees and bushes.

The sky was the colour of a cemetery. In contrast, a small yellow sports car, parked half up on the grass verge, looked indecently lurid.

‘Hazel, what does she mean by lies?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve told you, this is not my Amy. I don’t know how she can say these things about God.’

But she looked away as she spoke, and Merrily thought perhaps she did know… knew something, anyway.

‘What’s she been like at school?’

‘Well behaved, always well behaved. Her teachers have nothing but praise for her.’

‘Do you know her teachers?’

‘Most of them. We’ve always made it our business to know them. As good parents.’

‘What about her friends?’

‘She’s…’ A sigh. ‘She’s never had many friends. She’s very conscientious, she studies hard. She’s always felt she had to, because… well, she’s bright, but she’s no genius. Because she’s adopted, I think she feels she has to make it up to us. Make us proud, do you see? Good children, children who study hard, they aren’t always very popular at school these days, are they?’

‘Has she been bullied, do you think? Picked on?’

But after that one small confidence, Mrs Shelbone had tightened up again. ‘Look, Reverend Watkins, this isn’t what I expected at all. I think she needs an infusion of God’s love, not all sorts of questions.’

Merrily sighed. ‘I’ll be honest with you. I’m not really sure how to handle this. Can’t take it any further without talking to her, and if I go in there, it’s likely to cause a scene, isn’t it? The last thing I want is to upset her any more. I mean… I suppose I could start by taking off the dog collar.’

Mrs Shelbone’s brown eyes hardened. ‘What’s the point of that? You’re a priest. Aren’t you?’

Merrily stared hopelessly at the close-mown lawn, at the well-weeded flowerbeds. Demonic evil was something you could sense, like a disgusting smell – sometimes precisely that. The only identifiable odour in this house had been floor-cleaner wafting from the kitchen. All she’d sensed in there were confusion, distress… and perhaps something else she couldn’t yet isolate. But it wasn’t evil.

In the end, all she had – the only universally accepted symptom of spiritual or diabolic possession – was the mother’s suggestion of a sudden, startling clairvoyance.

‘You said she knew things. Things she couldn’t have known.’

‘I’m sorry I said that, now.’ A nervous glance back at the house, as though a chair might come crashing through the window. ‘It’s nothing I can prove.’

‘What things?’

‘This isn’t the time, Mrs Watkins.’

‘What kind of… intrusion do you think might be affecting her?’

‘Isn’t that for you to find out? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to—’

‘Help me,’ Merrily said.

Amy’s mother stared over the low hedge, across the lane. ‘The spirit of a dead person.’

Merrily didn’t blink. ‘Specifically?’

There was a movement at the window of a room to the left of the door. The child stood there, not six feet away. She wore a white, sleeveless top. Her fair hair hung limply to her shoulders. She looked maybe twelve. She looked stiff and waxen. The room behind her was all featureless dark, like the background to a portrait. It’s so cold now. There’s a sense of cold. The cold you can feel in your bones.

Merrily tried to attract Amy’s gaze, but the kid was looking beyond her.

She turned. Nothing. Nothing had changed in the lane. There was nobody about; even the yellow sports car was pulling away.

It began to rain – big, warm, slow drops. When she looked back at the bungalow, the girl had vanished.

Hazel Shelbone walked back to the door. ‘My husband will be home presently. I don’t really want him to know you’ve been here. He’s under enough pressure.’

‘I’ll take advice,’ Merrily promised. ‘I’ll be back. I’ll leave you my number but I’ll call you tomorrow, anyway, if that’s all right.’

‘Just pray for her,’ Mrs Shelbone said limply. ‘I expect you can do that, at least.’

No thunder, yet, but the rain was hard and relentless, clanking on the bonnet of the old Volvo like nuts and bolts, turning the windscreen into bubblewrap. Both wipers needed new blades. After a few miles, Merrily was forced into the forecourt of a derelict petrol station where she sat and smoked a Silk Cut rapidly, filling up the car with smoke because she couldn’t open the window in this downpour.

Nothing was ever straightforward, nothing ever textbook.

In the car, behind the streaming windows, she prayed for Amy Shelbone. She prayed for communication to be reopened between Amy and her mother. She prayed for any psychic blockage or interference to be removed. She prayed for the healing of whatever kind of wound had been opened up, by the puncturing of what the kid now evidently believed to be the central lie of her upbringing.

She prayed, all too vaguely, for a whole bunch of whatevers.

With hindsight, if she couldn’t work with Amy, it ought to have been her mother. With extra-hindsight, she and Hazel Shelbone ought to have prayed together before they left the church. Except at that stage, Merrily hadn’t been convinced. She’d needed to see Amy.

And, having seen Amy, having heard her, she still wasn’t convinced.

She could perhaps have persuaded Mrs Shelbone to let her stay until Amy’s dad got home. Perhaps the three of them could have returned to the church this evening and, with Dennis Beckett’s permission, conducted a small Eucharist. Just in case.

In case what?

Six p.m., and she was back in the scullery/office, with the window open and the dregs of the rain dripping from the ivy on the wall. A Silk Cut smouldered in the ashtray. Jane was not yet back from Hereford.

Merrily felt like a cartoon person flattened in the road, watching a departing steamroller.

The phone was life support.

‘It’s the old dilemma,’ she said. ‘Don’t know whether I’m making too much of it, or not enough.’

‘When do we ever?’ said the Rev. Huw Owen. ‘You should know that by now.’

‘Did I tell you? Bernie wants me to set up a deliverance group.’

‘Never liked committees, focus-group crap. But in this case – traps everywhere, folk always looking for some poor bugger to blame when it all goes down the toilet. Do it, I would. Just don’t co-opt a social worker.’

She could picture him in his study in the Brecon Beacons, his legs stretched out, his ancient trainers wearing another hole in the rug. The old wolfhound, her Deliverance mentor, technical adviser to half the exorcists in Wales and the West Midlands.

‘Tell me that last bit again, lass. You asked the mother what she reckoned had got into the girl. And she said…’

‘The spirit of a dead person,’ Merrily said. ‘That was what she said.’

‘Anybody in particular?’

‘That’s what I asked her next, but she didn’t reply. Then she started to backtrack on what she’d said earlier about Amy telling them things she couldn’t possibly have known without—’

‘If they don’t cooperate, you’re buggered.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Basically, you want to know whether they need you or a child-psychiatrist.’

‘Mmm.’

Huw was silent for about a minute. She knew he was still there because she could hear his trainer tapping the fender. No matter how hot it was, he always kept a small fire going. Not that it could ever get over-hot in a rectory well above the snowline.

Outside a late sun was blearily pushing aside the blankets of cloud.

‘Got a favourite coin?’ Huw said at last.

Merrily’s heart sank.

‘Well?’ said Huw.

‘When you told us about this on the first course, I thought you were kidding. Then I read Martin Israel on exorcism, but I still think—’

‘Stop shaking your head, lass. I’ve done it a few times. It’s always worked – far as I could tell. It either tells you what you already knew or it tells you to think again. And once you start thinking again, you find some new angle you hadn’t noticed and that’s the way ahead.’

‘I wouldn’t have the bottle.’

‘Aye, you would. Take an owd coin and bless it and explain to God what you’re doing. I use this old half-crown. Not legal tender any more, therefore not filthy lucre. I keep it in the bottom of a candleholder on the altar.’

Merrily imagined some hapless parishioner wandering in and witnessing the Rev. Owen apparently settling some vexed spiritual issue on the toss of a coin. It could overturn your entire belief-structure.

‘Course, it’s nowt to do with the coin,’ Huw said.

‘Any more than the Tarot is to do with the cards.’

‘Don’t go fundamentalist on me, lass.’

Merrily laughed.

‘Look at Israel – a scientist, a distinguished pathologist. And they made him exorcist for the City of London. What d’you want? Oh aye, I know what you want. You want summat foolproof. You want a solution on a plate.’

‘A second opinion would do.’

‘If you don’t like the cold, come out of the mortuary.’

‘Thanks a bunch.’

‘Any time,’ said Huw.

Merrily sighed.

‘Look, luv, give yourself some credit, eh? I’d’ve kicked you out of the bloody ring meself if I didn’t think you were a contender.’

‘You tried.’

‘That were only before you got your little feet under t’table. Listen, trust your feelings and your common sense. If you want a second opinion, ask Him, not me. Like the song says, make a deal with God.’

‘You’re a complete bastard, Huw.’

Then she remembered that he actually was: born in a little bwthyn halfway up Pen-y-fan and then his mother escaped to Sheffield where he was raised, after a fashion.

‘Sorry,’ Merrily said.

Huw laughed.

At least Jane looked happier when she came into the kitchen. She’d been saving up the money she’d earned working two Saturdays a month at the Eight-till-Late shop, and she was loaded with parcels: clothes for the holiday. No alluring night-wear, Merrily hoped – though, from what she’d heard about Eirion’s father’s extended family, nocturnal recreational opportunities were likely to be seriously limited.

A small carrier bag landed in her lap.

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s a top. It’s for you. You never get yourself any new clothes.’

‘Gosh, flower… that’s very…’ Merrily pulled it out of the bag. It was pale orange, cotton, very skimpy. ‘It’s going to be, er, how can I put this… slightly low-cut, isn’t it?’

‘Won’t go with the dog collar, if that’s what you mean,’ Jane said smugly.

‘Well… thank you.’ Merrily put the top back in its bag. ‘Thank you very much. It was very thoughtful.’

‘If you don’t wear it, I’ll be seriously offended,’ Jane said. ‘It’s going to be a long, hot summer.’

‘That’s what we always say, and it never is.’

‘Yeah.’ Jane sat down, stretched her bare arms. ‘I expect Lol’ll be taking a summer break from his course about now. You do remember Lol?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘The greatest living writer of gentle, lo-fi, reflective songs and also a cool, sensitive person in himself.’

‘Yes, flower, I think I remember.’

‘No, all I was thinking was, if you found me an inhibiting presence, this would be a good opportunity—’

‘Thank you, flower, for considering my emotional welfare.’

‘Any time,’ Jane said. ‘Oh, that Amy Shelbone – I remembered – she does go to our school.’

‘I know.’

‘I suddenly realized who you meant. Kind of old-fashioned. Always tidy. Bit of a pain, basically.’

Merrily nodded. ‘Mm-mm.’

‘So, is there, like, anything I can help you with?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Merrily said, ‘at this stage.’

‘Because, like—’

‘Sure,’ Merrily said. ‘What time’s Eirion picking you up?’

‘Half-nine.’

‘You looking forward to this?’

‘Sure,’ Jane said.

With the kid upstairs, Merrily went into the hall and ran a hand along the top of the tallest bookcase. It was still there, in all the dust, where she’d popped it hurriedly after they’d found it under the bath when they were having – the year’s big luxury – a new shower installed.

It was thick and misshapen, the head of the monarch obscured but Britannia distinct on the other side, also the date: 1797 – over a century after the death of Wil Williams the martyr, Ledwardine’s most famous vicar.

Feeling faintly ridiculous, she slipped the coin into a pocket of her denim skirt.

7 Stealing the Light

IN THE EARLY evening, a sinister, ochre light flared over the Frome Valley before the storm crashed in, driving like a ramraider down the western flank of the Malverns.

Although there wasn’t much thunder, every light on the mixing board went out at 7.02 p.m., leaving only Prof Levin incandescent.

‘Some farmer guy comes on to me in the post office in Bishop’s Frome: “Ah, you want to get yourself a little petrol generator, Mr Levin.” These hayseeds! You imagine recording music with a bloody generator grinding away out there?’

‘But think of the amazing effects,’ Lol said innocently. ‘The lights flicker… the tape stutters. Elemental scratching?’

‘Fah! You’re just being flippant because you got a new toy.’

‘It’s your toy. I’m just minding it.’ Lol had been trying to identify the different fragments of tree involved in the Boswell guitar. Here in the studio, its range and depth were incredible.

‘He’s getting it back,’ Prof said. ‘I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but he’s getting it back. They pulled a fast one on me. I said to Sally, “Help the boy if you can. Inspire him.” That’s all I said. So they palm you off with this ridiculous, overpriced—’ He pulled up the master switch so that everything wouldn’t happen at once if the power ever returned.

‘Still… you at least know where you are now, geographically, I would guess.’

‘Well,’ said Lol, ‘I know why Knight’s Frome’s all in pieces.’

Prof sniffed. ‘The Great Lake,’ he said.

‘Conrad Lake?’

‘A moral tale.’ Prof went back to his swivel chair, behind the board. ‘The Fall of the Emperor of Frome – that’s what they called Conrad, behind his back at first, but they say he grew to like it. She told you how the gods turned against him? His problems with the wilt?’

‘Actually, it wasn’t the wilt as such. It seems that Verticillium Wilt only—’

‘Verticillium! That’s the word.’

‘Only really hit these parts in the seventies. It started in Kent, and took a long time, decades, to reach Herefordshire. But there were other scourges before that: red spiders, aphids, white mould. He got them all, like the Seven Plagues of Egypt.’

They were both talking in epic terms, Lol realized, because it had seemed epic: the bountiful legacy of four generations of hop-masters wiped out in about seven years. Conrad Lake was, in effect, the last – and for a while the biggest and wealthiest – hop-master in Herefordshire. His poles and frames had surrounded Knight’s Frome like a great creosoted barrier. Looking like Belsen, Sally Boswell had said disdainfully, like Auschwitz. The estate was big enough when he inherited it, and twice as big when the first disaster struck.

Lol recalled the portrait photograph of Conrad Lake in the third and smallest room at the hop museum, his smile submerged in a heavy moustache. A difficult, greedy and obsessive man, Sally had said, referred to by the locals, behind his back, as the Emperor of Frome. Twice married and both wives had left him, the second taking his infant son. They never divorced; the boy, Adam, was raised by his mother and grandparents in Warwickshire – never again saw his father, who stayed in Knight’s Frome and fought all through the 1970s against the aphids, the red spiders and the white mould. And against the banks, who kept squeezing him, forcing him to sell off his estate piece by piece.

‘Big drama,’ said Prof laconically.

The land had then been bought by various farmers, most of them from outside Knight’s Frome, which explained why there was no real community any more, why so many of the scattered houses were now owned by incomers like Prof. A few of the old hop-yards had been reinstated, but demand was no longer so great, with so many breweries importing cheaper hops from Germany and the USA. Most of it was grazed now. A pity, in a way, Sally Boswell had said, because the deep river loam in the valleys of the Frome and the Lugg was so perfect for hops. And yet, in a way, not a pity at all; it was no accident that the third room in the museum was the darkest, a sober coda to the song of the hop.

But not everyone, it seemed, believed it was over. Least of all Adam Lake, son of the Emperor.

Though the storm had passed and the evening fields were left steaming under a bashful sun, the power failed to return, and Prof announced in disgust that he was going to bed.

‘You give me a call when it’s dark, Laurence… if we’ve got the bleeding juice back. I always work better after dark, as you know.’

Lol watched him stumping across the yard to the cottage, then went back and sat for a while in the studio, trying the River Frome song again on the Boswell, and then, because he felt bad about deserting it, on his faithful old Washburn.

But the song still lacked direction, and after a while he gave up and went out into the luminous, storm-washed evening. As the trees dripped and the air glistened with birdsong, Lol made his first real foray into what remained of the community of Knight’s Frome.

A soggy rug of slurry unrolled from a farm entrance towards the edge of what passed for the centre of the hamlet. Big old trees, oak and sycamore and horse chestnut, were still dripping onto the roofs of stone and timber-framed cottages that sprouted like wild mushrooms. A humpback bridge straddled the Frome, and on the other side of it was the church, sunken and settled as an old barn, and next to it the white-painted vicarage where Simon St John lived.

There was no shop here any more, but a pub survived – a pub created sixty years ago, Lol had learned, out of a row of terraced cottages, to cater for the hop-picking hordes. It hadn’t changed much. There were no friendly signs promising food or coffee, no rustic fort for the kids, just a rotting bench beside the porch.

The pub was called the Hop Devil; on its sign, nothing more demonic than a red and smoking brazier. The sign was hanging from a gibbet at the road end of the dirt forecourt.

It was reassuring to see places like this still in business, but that didn’t necessarily mean you had to go inside. Lol, the sometime folk singer, the traditionalist, was actually wary of country pubs – often the haunts of old men in worn tweeds and young men in stained denims, bruising you with their stares until you finished your drink too quickly and slid away.

As he padded cautiously past the pub, its scuffed and rust-studded oak door creaked open, releasing a richly brackish old-beer smell and also a man in a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, moleskin trousers stuffed into high tan boots. He came loping angrily over the puddles in the forecourt, a tall bloke with mutton-chop whiskers, swallowing his scowl when he saw he wasn’t alone, glancing briefly over Lol’s head.

‘Evening.’

Lol took a step back into the slurry to avoid having the guy knock him down and walk over him.

‘Needed that storm, I suppose,’ the man called back over his shoulder. He was about thirty-five, with a lean face and a wide, beer-drinker’s mouth. He gave the sky a dismissive glance. ‘Getting too muggy.’

Lol nodded. ‘Was a bit.’

But the big guy appeared to have finished with him, was climbing into a mud-scabbed Land Rover Defender on the edge of the forecourt, and now another voice was curling lazily out of the pub porch.

‘Lol Robinson.’

Prof’s unwelcome neighbour, Gerard Stock, was leaning against the door frame, a whisky glass in his right hand, a roll-up smouldering in his left.

Lol walked over – like he had a choice. The Defender crunched and clattered away through the trees and into the lane, while Stock stood watching it go.

‘Wanker,’ he said. ‘Arsehole.’

Lol realized he was drunk.

‘Wanker strolls in’ – Stock tossed his cigarette into a puddle. – ‘and here’s Gerard Stock sidding at the bar, minding his own. Wanker barks out cursory greeting, then drifts off to the dark end of the bar, engaging Derek, the landlord, in some trivial chat. And all the time, liddle sidelong glances, corner of an eye, wondering whether this is the day to make his move. And Gerard Stock’s just smiling into his glass and saying nothing. And the wanker knows that Gerard Stock knows he’s a phoney liddle arsehole.’

‘I don’t really know too many people around here,’ Lol said. ‘Who was he?’

Stock swallowed some whisky. There was a powerful fug of mixed fumes around him, like, if you struck a match, the air would flare and sizzle.

‘See, I don’t have to talk to people if I don’t want to. It’s a rare skill and I’m good at it, man. I can be very relaxed, very cool, sidding quietly, saying nothing. Liddle-known trick of the trade – people think PR men talk all the time, talk any old shite, but a good publicist has control. Tells you what he wants you to know, when he wants you to know it. Timing. And Gerard Stock, ’case you were wondering, is still a fucking good operator. You coming in, Lol?’

‘Well, I don’t think—’

‘Come ’n have a drink. I’d offer you some spliff, and we could sit out here, chill out, reminisce, but poor old Derek’s very timid, for a country landlord.’ Stock grinned. ‘See, I’ve made you curious. You thought you were supposed to know who the wanker was, and now you want to. You really want to. Technique: I can turn it on, man.’

They were inside the Hop Devil now, small and square and dark as a chapel. The landlord peered out from the shadows around the bar. ‘Sorry, gents, only bottled and shorts. Power’s off, see.’

‘Put your glasses on, Derek, it’s me again,’ said Stock. ‘With a friend. What are we having, Lol Robinson?’

Lol said a half of shandy would be good and Stock groaned. ‘Jesus Christ, no wonder you got yourself out of music.’

‘Have to pay for a pint shandy, I’m afraid,’ the shadowy Derek said. ‘Got to open a bottle of beer, see, and they don’t come in quarter-pints.’

‘And another Macallan,’ Stock said. ‘How long’ve I been here, Derek?’

‘Since just before lunch.’ Derek sighed. ‘On and off.’

After they collected their drinks, Stock steered Lol to a table by the biggest window. The only other customer appeared to be an elderly man with a bottle of Guinness and a copy of the Worcester Evening News he surely couldn’t see to read. Lol made out an inglenook fireplace with a brazier like the one on the sign outside.

‘What’s a hop devil?’

‘Thing they burned coke in. Hop-pickers used to cook their meals over it. You wanna know all this rustic shite, there’s a dear old couple run a hop museum out on the main road. Sold me a hop-pillow.’

He obviously hadn’t discovered who Al Boswell actually was.

‘Supposed to give you a good night’s sleep. Sleep?’ Stock brayed. ‘Fucking hops work like rhino horn. Fact, man. Me and Steph, we’re living in this old kiln, walls impregnated with as much essence of hop as… as the beer poor old Derek can’t pump. My wife’ – Stock swallowed whisky, shook his head and growled, – ‘leaves scratches a foot long down my back. You wan’ see?’

‘I’ll take your word.’ Lol avoided Stock’s eyes, wondering how he could find out what the guy’s wife looked like.

‘Could use some bloody sleep.’ Stock bawled out, ‘Can I sleep here, Derek?’

‘Thought you always did, Gerry,’ said Derek.

‘Gerard, you fucking peasant!’

The old man looked up from the paper he couldn’t see to read.

‘Language, sir,’ said Derek.

‘Derek goes to church, Lol.’ Stock had lowered his voice but not much. ‘Derek listens to Saint Simon’s sermons. Can’t be so pissed, can I, if I can say that? Shaint… Did I tell you I was briefly head of publicity for TMM? For whom Saint Shimon used to record as a young man? Wasn’t so fucking saintly in those days, by all accounts. Shaint Shimon the shirt-lifter—Jesus, that’s an even better one. Shaint Shimon the shirt—’

‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave in a minute, Mr Stock.’

Stock waved an arm in the direction of the bar. ‘I’ll be quiet. Don’t send me home, landlord, I’m too shagged out.’

‘You were going to tell me who that guy was,’ Lol said. ‘The guy with the…’ Putting a hand either side of his face to signify side-whiskers.

Stock beamed. ‘I said, didn’ I? Said I could still do it. You’re curious, yeah?’

Lol sighed. ‘I’m curious.’

‘Liddle shit annoyed the piss out of me, following me in here like that.’

‘You’d already been here about six hours,’ Derek said quietly, ‘before Mr Lake came in.’

‘As if he thought I was going to make the move – that I’d ask him to make me an offer. No chance. No frigging chance.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Lol said. ‘I’m not getting this.’

‘Course you aren’t. I’m about to tell you. Wanker’s Adam Lake. His old man owned Knight’s Frome, more or less. Then lost it. The lot – several farms, this pub, finally even my place, that clapped-out old kiln. Died in penury, well-deserved, by all accounts. And now Adam, the boy—’

‘That was him? With the—’

‘The young squire… the wanker… wants it all back… roots, birthright – the whole, sprawling Lake estate.’

‘Right,’ said Lol. Some of this he’d already had, if less colourfully, from Sally Boswell.

‘Field by field, barn by barn. He’s approaching the buggers who bought land off his old man, one by one, making ’em offers only a complete idiot would refuse. His heritage, geddit? Buying back his heritage. The young Emperor of Frome.’

‘He can afford?’

‘Oh, yeah. Big irony is the liddle shit can well afford. He’s a dot… com… fucking… millionaire.’ Stock spat out the words like cherry stones. ‘Or whatever else they called them ’fore someone coined the term. Adam, we’ve since learned, invested some of his ma’s money, few years ago, in what might’ve appeared at the time to be an off-the-wall software concept proposed by an old university friend… which in fact created the world’s fastest search-engine… at the time. Probably be like a bloody steamroller these days. Sold it off for some obscene sum, and then… Oh, this is boring, it’s not bloody important how the cunt got his millions.’

Lol sipped at his shandy, which was warm. ‘I’m sorry about your wife’s uncle.’

‘Poor old bugger,’ Stock said viciously. ‘Wonder how well he knew the fucking vicar.’

‘That’s it,’ said Derek softly, coming out of the shadows, a bald, middle-aged man with serviceable fists. ‘Out you go, Mr Stock.’

‘Shimon shirtlifter,’ Stock said and giggled into his glass.

Lol couldn’t avoid walking back with him, and for most of the way Stock was talking about his career as a publicist, at TMM and other recording and management companies, and then working solo for book publishers and film and TV companies: outfits that hadn’t known how badly they needed him until they had him on board.

‘And I could do it for Levin, too, man. Doesn’t see it yet, but he will. Poor old guy thinks he’s being cool and enigmatic getting out of London, downsizing, all that shite. Doesn’t realize how soon he’ll be forgotten.’

‘Actually, I think he wants to be—’

‘I could make that hovel of a studio world-famous in six months. A hint here, a line there. I could get Levin on The South Bank Show. Got a good friend at LWT.’

‘Maybe, you—’ Lol gave up. Stock wasn’t the kind of bloke to whom you said: You don’t really know Prof very well, do you?

They left the lane and walked down the track, past Prof’s stables towards the concealed river, under a sky like beaten copper. Gerard Stock raised his face to the sun and it reddened his beard. He looked wide and powerful and ruthless – and yet somehow, Lol thought, unsure of himself, like a Viking on a strange shore.

‘And you, Lol Robinson. Shy boy with the liddle glasses. Very cute, to a certain kind of woman. You were marketable, man. Once.’

Lol said nothing. Stock was talking, the way he had earlier, as if it was all too late for a career which Prof seemed to see as still salvageable. Maybe this was deliberate, to sound him out – or put Prof down.

‘And let us not forget’ – Stock grinned slyly – ‘all those years in and out of the loony bin. Marketable, plus.’ Lol shot him a sidelong glance. ‘Oh, yeah, I know your history. Checked you out soon’s I got home. My business is to know everything about everybody. I am The Man.’

Stock kicked a stone down the track, and then he looked directly into the sinking sun and his voice suddenly sagged.

‘And now – all right – I’m broke. Only cash flow, of course, as we say.’

‘You’ve got the house – the kiln.’

‘Yeah, stroke of luck, there, ’cause we’d been reduced to living in a bloody trailer at the time. Poor old Stewart. Perhaps he should’ve taken the wanker’s offer when he had the chance. You see, buying the kiln back – very, very important to Adam, because that was the site of the original ancestral home.’

‘Conrad Lake’s mansion?’

‘Lord, no, that came later. But this was the original family farm. Twice the size it is now – but not big enough for Conrad, once he was on the up. Built the new place for the new wife, ’bout a mile over the hill there – where Adam lives. All there was left to bequeath to the boy. The old man’d already knocked down half the farmhouse – this is late sixties, when you could still get away with flattening history – just kept the kiln. When he died and the bank or whoever flogged it off, Stewart picks it up for a song.’

They crossed the river bridge, passed between the poplars. And then suddenly the kiln was in view, halfway up a hill – or, rather, part of a conical tower was visible, the tip of its cowl pointing at an angle.

Lol stopped, shocked.

A wall of bright blue corrugated metal concealed the rest of it – the side of some huge industrial building, rising almost as high as the kiln itself. It hadn’t been apparent the other night, except as a patch of shadow that might have been trees or part of the hill. Now, in an area where most of the farms and cottages looked almost organic, its brashness was savage.

Stock watched Lol’s reaction, half-smiling. ‘You like Adam Lake’s barn? There’s another one the other side, even higher. About ten yards away. Man, we’re living in a barn sandwich.’

‘He did that?’

‘Wanker’s land surrounds us. Had the first one put in place after Stewart refused to sell him the kiln.’

‘Can he do that?’ Stock’s fury made sudden sense.

‘Done it, hasn’t he? Yeah, sure he can. Country landowners can throw up whatever kind of monstrosity they want, long as it’s an agricultural building and they can show a need for it. Need. Jesus. You know what those barns are used for? Nothing. They’re empty – great, echoing, empty shells.’

‘He did it just to—’

‘Steal the light.’ Stock was sweating, but he seemed sober now. ‘It’s about stealing the light. You see, this was particularly cruel – though whether Lake was subtle enough to realize that is anybody’s guess – because the old boy was a photographer.’

‘Light being his medium.’

‘Yeah.’ Stock took out his tin to roll a smoke. ‘He loved light. Course, Lake wasn’t trying to force him to sell. He just needed some extra storage facilities for hay and sundry fodder at the extremity of his estate. That’s what he tells you. The cunt.’

‘Didn’t… Stewart make any kind of protest?’

‘Didn’t live long enough, thanks to his good friends, the gypos – those lithe and slippery gypo boys, dear, oh dear. But, yeah, he did make a last, meaningful gesture.’

The path forked – Lol thought this was probably the point at which he’d lost his way the other night – and Stock went to the left and climbed over a stile.

The kiln house was in front of them now. It was built of red brick and was smaller than it had looked by night, and now the full horror of the barn sandwich became apparent. The actual kiln tower, with just one window, was at the front, but most of the other windows seemed to be on the sides, permanently shadowed by industrial metal.

Lol climbed over the stile and found Stock standing on the edge of the field, lighting his roll-up.

‘If you hadn’t guessed, Uncle Stewart’s final gesture was Gerard Stock. Stephie was Stewart’s’ –he coughed out smoke, – ‘favourite niece. Always close to her after her parents split. How’s she repay him? Marries Gerard Stock. Steph’s sweet eighteen, this guy’s twenny years older, smokes a lot of dope, gets both of them busted one time, dear oh dear. And, oh yeah, the clincher: one night Stephie falls downstairs and loses her baby and there’s some internal messiness so there aren’t gonna be any more babies. And this is all Gerard Stock’s fault, naturally. And Stephie, once beloved, gets sliced out of Stewart’s will. We thought.’

They both looked up at the kiln house.

‘Now why,’ said Stock, ‘would the dear old turd-burglar let his beloved home fall into the hands of a man he couldn’t stand the fucking sight of? You’re right. He didn’t bequeath his house to Gerard Stock. He bequeathed Gerard Stock to Adam Lake.’

Stock coughed, then laughed. The sun was sinking fast, and the side of the kiln house facing the nearest barn was already almost black in its shadow.

‘When Lake finds out who inherited, we get a letter from his agent, making an offer. We refuse. That’s when the second barn goes up.’ He nodded at the house. ‘There you go – power’s back on.’

Lights had appeared in two of the windows in the shadowed wall. None of them seemed to be very big windows, Lol noticed, and the Stocks wouldn’t even be allowed to enlarge them because the kiln house would be on the historic-buildings list. Living there couldn’t be easy; it would look like deepest winter all year round.

‘You have to keep lights on all day?’

‘Some. Yeah, we live like moles, but it’s a liddle better than the trailer.’

‘What, even though—?’ Lol broke off. He couldn’t say it.

Stock could. ‘Even though we have our dining table resting on the flagstones where the nice gypsy boys spread Uncle Stewart’s brains?’

He burst out laughing again, but it was shallower this time and soon tailed off. The light that Lol remembered from the other night came on palely below the conical roof of the kiln.

‘Spooky.’ Stock’s cigarette lit up in his rosebud lips, like a spark from the setting sun. He stood with his legs apart, looking like some kind of psychotic troll. ‘It’s a spooky place. You believe in ghosts, Lol?’

Lol thought of the naked woman in the naked hop-yard who, for one icy moment—

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I suppose I do.’

‘I don’t.’ Stock squeezed out his cigarette between finger and thumb and winced. ‘But something needs dealing with.’

8 Mercury Retrograde

LATE SATURDAY AFTERNOON, the vicarage seemed more still and vast than Merrily had ever known it. One woman, seven bedrooms. Even the kitchen was as quiet as a crypt.

Wearing Jane’s old Radiohead T-shirt, she sat down at the table, took out the lumpy old penny from a hip pocket of her jeans, and stared at the blurred woman with the trident. Some broads had all the backbone.

In the dawn-lit chancel, she’d blessed the coin on the altar – and then been unable to go through with the rest, spending the next half-hour on her knees, concluding that she was not a natural psychic and could never imagine herself approaching a state of grace.

And then it had been time to go home and finish the last bits of Jane’s packing and help carry her bags out to the boot of Eirion’s stepmother’s silver BMW, where Eirion stowed it as carefully as if it was the kid’s trousseau and kept looking over his shoulder at Jane, as if to make sure she was still there, his guileless face breaking into the kind of smile that told you everything you didn’t really want to know.

Merrily caught herself thinking he was the sort of guy Jane ought to meet in about ten years’ time, when she’d… been around?

God, it was always so hard. Sometimes you wished they could have some kind of life-experience cell implanted in their brains as soon as they hit puberty.

Jane was being practical, methodical, counting off on her fingers all the things she needed to take – and avoiding Eirion’s eyes, Merrily noticed. Eirion she thought she could understand; Jane was more complex. Jane, she suspected, would always be complex.

Last night, the power hadn’t gone off. They hadn’t managed a proper talk, but what was she supposed to have said, anyway: Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do? At about three and a half years older than Jane, she’d been pregnant.

‘You will be OK, won’t you, Mum?’ The kid wore a high-necked lemon-and-white striped top and white jeans. She’d looked about nine.

‘Yes, flower, I’ll avoid junk food, I won’t drink to excess, I’ll observe speed limits and I’ll try to be home before midnight.’ The kid was still looking too serious; her mood clearly did not match Eirion’s. ‘And, erm… I expect you’ll ring occasionally from Pembrokeshire?’

‘Course.’

‘Got enough money?’

‘I won’t flash the plastic unless things get really tight, if that’s—’

‘Whatever,’ Merrily said. ‘Do you want to take the mobile?’

They still only had one between them.

‘Your need’s far greater than mine. Besides, it’s supposed to be a holiday.’ Jane picked up Ethel, the black cat, and nuzzled her. ‘A whole month. She won’t remember me.’

‘Of course she will.’

‘Anyway, I can borrow Irene’s phone.’

‘Ring any time. Any time at all.’

‘It’s all in.’ Eirion had closed the boot and stood with his back to the car, his baseball cap hanging from both hands at waist level, obviously trying to control his smile, contain a youthful glee that might be viewed as uncool.

‘Off you go, then, flower.’ Merrily accepted Ethel, popping her down on the lawn, where she lifted a paw and began to lick it, unconcerned. Cats.

Hugging them at the gate, Eirion had felt reassuringly stocky and trustworthy. Jane’s face had felt hot.

Now, Merrily laid the coin on the table, her eyes suddenly filling up, a hollow feeling in her chest.

She was thirty-seven years old.

She wondered sometimes if the kid’s dead father, the faithless Sean, could ever see them. She tried to remember if Sean had ever been remotely like Eirion, but the only image she could conjure up was the range of emotions – dismay, anger, resignation and a final apologetic tenderness – warping his twenty-year-old face on the night she’d told him that something that would turn out to be Jane had been detected.

She walked aimlessly into the echoey hall, looked at herself in the mirror, a good two inches shorter than Jane now. On her, the one-size, once-venerated, Radiohead T-shirt looked as baggy as a surplice.

She thought about taking the coin to the church again. But it wasn’t long after five p.m., and there’d probably still be the odd tourist about. Or worse, a local. The vicar tossing a coin at the altar? It’d be all round the village before closing time at the Black Swan.

On impulse, she went out to the Volvo.

Unfinished business: a surprise visit to the Shelbones in the cool of a Saturday evening. Just happening to be passing.

In the churchyard at Dilwyn, the yews threw big shadows across three women leaving the porch. None of them was Hazel Shelbone, and when Merrily reached the bungalow, there was no car in the drive and the garage doors were open – no vehicle inside.

Family outing?

But as Merrily drove slowly past, she caught a flicker of movement at the end of a path running alongside the garage.

She drove on for about two hundred yards, past the last house in the lane, and parked the Volvo next to a metal field-gate. With no animals in the field, she figured it was safe to leave the car there for a while. She got out and walked back to the Shelbones’ bungalow, where she pressed the bell and waited.

No answer. OK. Round the back.

The flagged path dividing the bungalow and the concrete garage ended at a small black wrought-iron gate. As Merrily went quietly through it she heard a handle turning, like a door opening at the rear of the house. Around the corner of the bungalow, she came face to face with Amy Shelbone, emerging from a glassed-in back porch.

The girl jumped back in alarm, her face red and ruched-up, thin, bare arms down by her sides, stiff as dead twigs, fists clenched tight.

‘Sorry, Amy. I rang the bell, but—’

Amy was blinking, breathing hard. She had on a sleeveless yellow dress. Her thin, fair hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She wore white gymshoes, not trainers.

‘They’re not here.’

Merrily turned and closed the metal gate behind her, as if the girl might bolt like a feral kitten. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘perhaps—’ Moving slowly to the edge of the path, taking a step on to the lawn.

‘No!’ The kid backed away towards a small greenhouse in which the sun’s reflection hung like a lamp. ‘No! You just keep away from me!’

Recognition at last, then.

‘It’s OK, I’ll stay here.’ Merrily looked down at her T-shirt. ‘It’s my day off. See – no cross, no dog collar.’

‘Go away.’

Merrily shook her head. ‘Not this time.’

‘You’re trespassing! It’s disgraceful. I’ll call the police.’

‘OK.’

Amy backed against the greenhouse, then sprang away from it and started to cry, her shoulders shaking – a gawky, stick-limbed adolescent in a large, plain, rectangular garden.

‘I only want to talk,’ Merrily said. ‘Or, better still, listen.’

‘Go away.’

‘What would be the point? I’d just have to keep coming back.’

‘People like you make me sick,’ Amy said.

‘So I heard.’

‘Ha ha,’ Amy cawed.

‘I was sick in church once. It’s no big deal.’

Amy looked down at her white shoes in silence.

‘And sometimes I’ve felt God’s let me down,’ Merrily said. ‘You think he’s watching you suffer and not lifting a finger. You think maybe God’s not… not a very nice person. And then sometimes you wake up in the night and you think there’s nobody out there at all. That everybody’s been lying to you – even your own parents. And that’s the loneliest thing.’

Amy didn’t look at her. She walked to the middle of the half-shadowed lawn. The garden, severely bushless and flowerless, backed on to open fields that looked more interesting. Amy stopped and mumbled at her shoes, ‘They did lie.’

‘Your mum and dad?’

‘They’re not—’

‘Yes, they are. They wanted you. Not just any baby… you. That’s a pretty special kind of mum and dad.’

Amy didn’t reply. She was intertwining her fingers in front of her, kneading them, and seemed determined to keep at least six yards between herself and Merrily. With feral cats, you put down food and kept moving the bowl closer to the house. It might take weeks, months before you could touch them.

‘Where are they – your mum and dad?’

Amy produced a handkerchief from a pocket of her frock. A real handkerchief, white and folded. She shook it out, revealing an embroidered A in one corner, and wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

‘Shopping,’ she said dully, crumpling the hanky. ‘They go shopping every second Saturday. In Hereford. She can’t drive.’

‘How long have they been gone?’

‘Why do you want to know?’ Amy hacked a heel sulkily into the grass. Then she said, ‘They went off about nine. They always go off at nine. They’ll be back soon, I expect.’

‘And you stayed home.’

‘There was no point.’

It wasn’t clear what she meant. At first, she hadn’t seemed much like the teacher’s-pet type of girl described by either her mother or – more significantly – Jane. Yet there was something that kept pulling her back from the edge of open rebellion, making her answer Merrily’s questions in spite of herself.

‘Could we go in the house, do you think?’

‘No!’

Merrily nodded. ‘OK.’

‘I don’t have to talk to you.’

‘Of course you don’t. Nobody has to talk to anybody. But you often feel glad afterwards that you did.’

Amy shook her head.

‘You used to talk to God, didn’t you?’ Merrily said. ‘I bet you used to talk to God quite a lot.’

The girl’s intertwined fingers tightened as if they’d suddenly been set in cement.

‘But you don’t do that any more. Because you think God betrayed you. Do you want to tell me how he did that, Amy? How you were betrayed?’

‘No.’

‘Have you told your mum and dad?’

Amy nodded.

‘And what did they—?’ Merrily broke off, because Amy was looking directly at her now. Her plain, pale face was wedge-shaped and her cheeks seemed concave. She did not look well. Anorexics looked like this.

‘I don’t need to talk to God.’ Sneering out the word. ‘God doesn’t tell you anything. God’s a waste of time. If I want to talk, I can talk… I can talk to her.’

Her voice was suddenly soft and reverent. For a moment, Merrily thought of the Virgin Mary.

‘Her?’

Over Amy’s shoulder, the lamp of the sun glowed in the greenhouse.

‘Justine,’ Amy whispered.

‘Justine?’

In the softening heat of early evening, Amy’s lips parted and she shivered. This shiver was particularly shocking because it seemed to ripple very slowly through her. Because it seemed almost a sexual reaction.

Merrily went still. ‘Who’s Justine, Amy?’

Amy’s body tightened up. ‘No!’

‘Amy?’

‘Get out!’ Amy screamed. ‘Just get out, you horrible, lying thing! It’s nothing to do with you!’

As if she’d been planning this for some minutes, she suddenly hurled herself across the lawn, passing within a couple of feet of Merrily, and into the glazed porch, slamming the door, shooting a bolt and glaring in defiance from the other side of the glass, poor kid.

Three times that evening, Merrily tried to call Hazel Shelbone. Twice it was engaged, the third time there was no answer.

When she’d got home, there’d been a message from Jane on the answering machine. Merrily replayed it twice, trying to detect the subtext.

‘Well, we got here. All of us. The whole family. It’s quite a big place, an old whitewashed farmhouse about half a mile from the sea, near an old quarry, but you can see the sea from it, of course. So it’s… yeah… cool. And the whole family’s here. Everybody. So… Well, I’ll call you. Look after Ethel and, like… your little self. Night, night, Mum.’

Hmm. The whole family, huh?

The shadows of apple trees meshed across the vicarage garden. In the scullery, Merrily switched on the computer, rewrote her notes for tomorrow’s sermon and printed them out. It was to be the first one in – well, quite a long time – that she’d given around the familiar theme of Suffer little children to come unto me. A complex issue: how should we bring kids to Christ? Or was it better, in the long term, to let them find their own way?

Merrily deleted a reference to Jane’s maxim: Any kind of spirituality has to be better than none at all. Dangerous ground.

We never pressed the Church on her, David and I, Hazel Shelbone had said. Never forced religion on any of our children.

Bet you did, really, Merrily thought, gazing out at the deepening blue, whether you intended to or not.

She recalled Hazel saying, in answer to her question about what might have got into Amy, The spirit of a dead person, in a voice that was firm and intense and quite convinced.

Now she had a question for Hazel: who is Justine?

She reached out for the telephone and, as often happened, it rang under her hand.

He said his name was Fred Potter. It was a middle-aged kind of name, somehow, but he sounded as if he was in his early twenties, max.

He said he worked for the Three Counties News Service, a freelance agency based in Worcester, supplying news stories to national papers. He said he was sorry to trouble her, but he understood she was the county exorcist.

‘More or less,’ Merrily admitted.

‘Just that we put a story round earlier,’ Fred said, ‘but a couple of the Sundays have come back, asking for a quote from you or the Bishop, and the Bishop seems to be unavailable.’

‘Let’s see… Saturday night? Probably out clubbing.’

‘What? Oh.’ He laughed. ‘Listen, Mrs Watkins, if I lay this thing out for you very briefly, perhaps you could see if you have any comments. I’ve got to be really quick, because the editions go to bed pretty early on a Saturday.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘Right. This chap’s convinced his house is badly… haunted. He and his wife are losing a lot of sleep over this. It’s an old hop-kiln, a man was murdered there. Now they say they’re getting these, you know, phenomena.’

‘I see.’

‘Wow,’ said Fred, ‘it always amazes me when you people say “I see” and “Sure”, like it’s everyday stuff.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Wow,’ Fred said. ‘Brrrr.’

‘Is this person living in the diocese?’

‘Of course.’

‘Just I haven’t heard about it.’

‘Well, this is the point,’ Fred said. ‘Our friend gets on to his local vicar and asks him if he can do something about this problem. And the local vicar refuses.’

‘Just like that?’

‘More or less.’

‘What did the vicar say to you?’

‘He said, “No comment”.’

Odd.

‘So what do you think? Do you think it’s a genuine case of psychic disturbance?’

‘Hey, that’s not for me to say, is it? What I wanted to ask you was, what is the official policy of the diocese on dealing with alleged cases of, you know, ghostly infestation, whatever you want to call it. Like, if you get something reported to you—’

‘We help where we can,’ Merrily said.

‘And how common is it for you to refuse?’

‘I didn’t refuse. It’s never been referred to me.’

‘No, I mean—’

‘Let me tell you the normal procedure with Deliverance, which is the umbrella term for what we do. A person with a psychic or spiritual problem goes to his or her local priest and explains the situation, then the priest decides whether to handle it personally or pass it on to someone like me, right?’

‘Do they have to tell you about it?’

‘No. I’m here if they need me. Sometimes they’ll just ring up and ask for a bit of advice, and if it’s something I can tell them I do… or maybe I’ll need to seek advice from somebody who knows more about a particular type of… phenomenon than I do.’

‘So, if I say to you now, have you had a call or a report from the Reverend Simon St John, at Knight’s Frome, about a plea for help he’s received from a Mr Stock…?’

‘No, not a word. But the vicar doesn’t have to refer anything to me.’

‘Even if he’s refusing to take any action?’

‘Even if he’s refusing to take any action.’

‘Doesn’t it worry you that there’s someone in the diocese who’s plagued by ghosts and can’t get any help from the Church?’

Merrily had dealt with the media often enough to recognize the point where she was going to be quoted verbatim.

‘Erm… If I was aware of someone in genuine need of spiritual support, I would want to see they received whatever help we were able to give them. But I’d need to know more about the circumstances before I could comment on this particular case. I’m sure the Reverend St John has a good reason for taking the line he’s taken.’

There was a pause, then Fred Potter said, ‘Yep. That’ll do me fine. Thanks very much, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Whoa… hang on. Aren’t you going to give me this guy’s address, phone number…?’

‘Mr Stock? You going to look into it yourself?’

‘Just for the record, Fred.’

‘Oh, all right. Hang on a sec.’

She wrote down Mr Stock’s address. Afterwards, she looked up the number of the Rev. Simon St John. She didn’t know the man, but she thought she ought at least to warn him.

No answer.

Lately, everywhere she tried, there was no answer. Jane would explain this astrologically, suggesting Mercury was retrograde, thus delaying or blocking all forms of communication.

Bollocks.

… Always amazes me when you people say ‘I see’ and ‘sure’, like it’s everyday stuff.

Merrily gathered up the printed notes for her sermon and walked into the lonely, darkening kitchen.

9 God and Music

THEY’D TURNED STOCK’S kiln-house into Dracula’s castle, rearing against the light, looking to Lol very much as it had on that first, milky night, only darker, more brooding.

… BLACK HELL

It shrieked at him from the pile of newspapers in the shop, the top copy folded back to page five. Two other customers bought copies while he was still staring.

You believe in ghosts, Lol?

Christ, he hadn’t seen this one coming, had he? Nobody had, judging from the comments in the shop. ‘I’ve heard of this feller,’ a woman in sweatpants told the newsagent. ‘He’s an alcoholic.’

‘On bloody drugs, more like,’ an elderly man said.

The newsagent nodded. ‘Need to be one or the other to live in that place.’

Whichever, it was a development Prof Levin did not need to know about, Lol decided, driving back from Bishop’s Frome with a bunch of papers on the passenger seat. It was eight-thirty, the sun already high: another hot one. Prof was due to leave for London before ten, his cases already stowed in the back of his rotting Range Rover – Abbey Road beckoning. The unstable virtuoso Tom Storey would already be pacing the floor with his old Telecaster strapped on, spraying nervy riffs into the sacred space.

Lol considered leaving the People in the Astra until after Prof had gone. Not as if he’d notice; all the time he’d been staying here, Lol had never once seen him open a newspaper; it was only Lol himself who was insecure enough to need to know the planet was still in motion.

In the end, he gathered the papers into a fat stack, with the Observer on top, and walked into the stables with it under his arm. He found Prof in the kitchen, connected to his life-support cappuccino machine, froth on his beard.

‘Two things, Laurence. One: when I return, I expect to hear demos of five new songs. No excuses. You get St John over to help. If he don’t want to come, you get his wife to kick him up the behind – metaphorically speaking, in her case, as you’ll find out.’

‘The vicar’s married?’

Prof gave him a narrow look. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘No particular—’

Prof frowned. ‘Robinson, I can read you like the Sun. Who’s been talking about the vicar?’

‘What was the second thing? You said two things…’

‘The second thing – maybe I mentioned this before – is you keep that bastard Stock out of here. Bad enough he shows up when I’m around, I don’t want him—What? What’s going down? What’s wrong?’

Lol sighed. He didn’t want to pass on Stock’s innuendo about Simon. He unrolled the newspapers: Observer, Sunday Times, People. He handed the tabloid to Prof.

‘What’s this crap?’ Prof held up the paper, squinting down through his bifocals. ‘What am I looking at?’

Lol said nothing.

After about half a minute, Prof peered over the page at him, looking uncharacteristically bewildered, glassy-eyed, as if he’d been winded by a punch from nowhere to the stomach. He put down the paper on the upturned packing case he was still using as a breakfast bar.

‘This man,’ he said at last, ‘is the most unbelievable piece of walking shit it was ever my misfortune to encounter. Is there nothing in his life he won’t exploit?’

There were two pictures, one of them tall and narrow, running alongside the story. This was the Dracula’s Castle shot of the kiln house, doctored for dramatic effect. The other, near the foot of the page, showed an unsmiling Gerard Stock, holding a candle in a holder, his arm around a younger woman with curly hair.

OUR BLACK HELL IN THE HOUSE OF HORROR

by Dave Lang

A terrified couple spoke last night of their haunted hell in the grim old house where a relative was brutally murdered.

And they claimed that a ‘rural mafia’ had condemned them to face the horror alone.

Gerard and Stephanie Stock say their six-month ordeal in the remote converted hop-kiln has driven them to the edge of nervous breakdowns.

But when they asked the local vicar to perform an exorcism, he refused even to enter the house, which is so dark they need lights on all day, even in summer.

The couple inherited the 19th century kiln house near Bromyard in Here-fordshire from Mrs Stock’s uncle, Stewart Ash, the author and photographer who was beaten to death there by burglars less than a year ago.

Since they moved in at the end of last January, the Stocks say they have endured:

• creeping footsteps on the stairs at night.

• strange glowing lights in an abandoned hop-field at the front of the house.

• furniture moving around a bloodstain that won’t go away.

• an apparition of a hazy figure which walks out of solid brick walls.

‘It’s become a complete nightmare,’ said Mr Stock, a 52-year-old public relations consultant. ‘Everybody locally knows there’s something wrong in this place, but it’s as if there’s a conspiracy of silence. It’s a rural Mafia around here. And now it looks as if even the vicar has been “got at”.’

Turn to page 2

Prof shook his head slowly.

‘Madness, Laurence.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Nah.’ Prof turned over the page and creased the spine of the paper, laid it back on the packing cases next to his coffee cup, contemptuously punched the crease flat with the heel of a fist. ‘Not in a million frigging years. Let me finish this, and then we’ll talk.’

Lol read the story over Prof’s shoulder.

Mr Stock and his thirty-four-year-old wife say the house has proved impossible to heat, and they’ve built up massive electricity bills, running to hundreds of pounds.

And the already gloomy house was made even darker when neighbouring landowner Adam Lake built two massive barns either side of it, blocking light from all the side windows.

Mr Lake has claimed the buildings were necessary for his farming operation.

But Mr Stock claimed the landowner was furious because both they and Stewart Ash had refused to sell him the house and had the giant barns built to make the haunted kiln impossible to live in.

‘Lake showed up here once,’ Prof said. ‘Made me an offer for this place even though it wasn’t part of his old man’s original estate. Crazy. The guy’s as mad and arrogant as Stock. Dresses like some old-style squire twice his age. Campaigns for fox-hunting. Jesus!’

‘I saw him the other night.’

‘He’s a buffoon. And he don’t fully realize the kind of desperate bastard he’s up against – though maybe he does now.’

‘You really think Stock’s making all this up, to try and publicly shame Lake into moving those barns?’

‘Look,’ Prof said, ‘Stock’s on his uppers, right? Suddenly he gets a break; he wins a house. With problems attached, sure, but it’s a wonderfully unexpected gift, and he’s determined to capitalize. He wants the very maximum he can get. He’s gonna use whatever skills he’s got, whatever contacts. What’s he got to lose? Nothing, not even his credibility. What’s he got to gain? Jesus, those barns go, you can add seventy, eighty thousand to the market value of that place.’

‘Why doesn’t he just sell to Lake for some inflated price and walk away?’

Prof opened out his hands in exasperation. ‘Because he is Gerard Stock.’

‘That first barn made poor Stewart’s life into a black hell,’ Gerard Stock says. ‘But he was a stubborn man and refused to give in.’

But Mr Ash’s determined stand was ended the night he surprised two young burglars.

They beat the sixty-six-year-old author to death on the stone floor of his kitchen.

‘I did not believe in ghosts or hauntings, but I’ve often felt Uncle Stewart’s presence in the kitchen,’ says Mrs Stock. ‘I feel his spirit has been somehow trapped in the darkness of this place.’

The Stocks approached the local vicar, the Rev. Simon St John, asking him to exorcize their home.

‘But he didn’t want to know,’ said Mr Stock. ‘He implied that we ought to be looking for psychiatric help. When something like this happens, you become aware of a rural mafia at work. Stewart Ash fell foul of it, and it looks as if we have too.

‘Nobody in the village speaks to us, except other outsiders. I’ve even been refused service in the pub.’

Lol shook his head. ‘He only got thrown out because he was completely pissed and insulting people.’

Prof’s beard jutted. ‘Who was he insulting, Laurence?’

‘Well… Simon. Called him Saint Simon. And other things. Stock said he used to work for TMM when Simon was in a band recording with them.’

‘The Philosopher’s Stone,’ Prof said tonelessly. ‘For your own information, Simon was a classical musician. A session cellist, if you like, and he was brought into this band about twenty years ago. Tom Storey was in it, too, for his sins. I worked with them for a while – for all our sins. It didn’t last.’

‘I think I remember something.’

Prof looked hard at Lol. ‘Whatever you heard, it was probably crap. Whatever Stock said about Simon, you can put it to the back of your mind. For a while, God and music were fighting over Simon, but it was never really a contest. He’s a good man, he loves his music, but he needs his God. And his wife. And whatever else you hear… Simon and Isabel – this is a marriage to die for. You understand?’

‘Whatever you say,’ said Lol, bemused.

‘Of course he refuses to exorcize the house of this despicable scheming bastard! He knows as well as I do that there’s no conceivable basis for this garbage.’

‘Stock asked me if I believed in ghosts,’ Lol said.

Mr Stock added: ‘I never believed in ghosts but after what we’ve witnessed here, it seems to me that the spirit of Stewart Ash cannot rest, even though two young men have been convicted of his murder.

‘I can’t help feeling that the whole truth has not yet come out and perhaps someone in the area knows more than they’re saying.

‘We feel very isolated, but we feel we owe it to the memory of Steph’s murdered uncle to see this through.’

The Rev. Simon St John refused to comment about what he said was ‘a private matter’.

But Hereford’s diocesan exorcist, the Rev. Merrily Watkins, said last night that she would be looking into the case.

‘If I was aware of someone in genuine need of spiritual support, I would want to see they received whatever help we were able to give them,’ she said.

‘Pah.’ Prof tossed the paper to the stained stone flags on the floor. ‘He’s trying to stir the shit. It’s what he does. Now they have to try to shore up this nonsensical crap by calling in some stupid woman who doesn’t know Stock from Adam. And then they wonder why—What’s the matter now, Laurence? What is the matter with you this morning?’

‘Nothing,’ Lol said. ‘That is… I know her, that’s all.’

‘The exorcist?’

‘We lived in the same village – when I was with Alison. And then… not with Alison.’

Prof squinted curiously over his bifocals. ‘You know this exorcist, this woman priest? I thought you couldn’t stand priests.’

Lol shrugged.

‘Except for this one, eh? Nice-looking?’

‘She’s…’ Lol thought he was too old to be blushing; Prof’s little smile indicated that perhaps he wasn’t yet. ‘I haven’t seen her in some months. She’s become a friend.’

‘A friend.’

‘We can all change,’ said Lol. He had a mental image of a small woman in a too-long duffel coat borrowed from her daughter, wind-blown on the edge of an Iron Age hill fort overlooking the city of Hereford. Requiem.

‘My, my.’ Prof stood up and went to rinse his coffee cup at the sink. ‘And see, by the way, that you keep this place in such a condition that we don’t have visits from the jobsworths at the Environmental Health.’ He placed the cup on a narrow shelf matted with dust and grease. He started to whistle lightly.

‘What?’ said Lol.

‘Hmmm. They got room for a mere man, with God in the bed? I don’t think so. Women priests, women rabbis? You ask me, it’s the Catholics got it right on this one.’

‘Not that you’re an old reactionary or anything?’

‘Plus, exorcism, that isn’t a game.’ Underneath the cynicism and bluster, Prof was some kind of believer. Lol had always known this. ‘This Stock crap – this is a game…’

‘You’re entirely sure of that, Prof?’

Lol had kept staring at the picture, of Gerard Stock and Stephanie Stock but, like the shot of the kiln, it was printed for effect, her face two-dimensional in the candlelight. It could be, but he couldn’t be sure. And if it was, what did that say about Stock and his alleged haunting?

‘Listen, don’t get involved.’ Prof unplugged his cappuccino machine, began to roll up the flex. ‘You let Stock and Lake get on with destroying each other. Warn the woman priest to keep out of it as well.’

‘You’re taking that thing with you?’

‘Just work on your songs,’ Prof said. ‘Don’t let any of those people into this place – when I’m gone.’

10 Bad Penny

‘I’M JUST CALLING to apologize,’ Merrily said to the vicar of Knight’s Frome. ‘I wasn’t exactly misquoted, I just wasn’t fully quoted. They didn’t use where I explained that I couldn’t really comment on a case I knew nothing about and I was sure you must have had good reason for refusing to deal with this guy. So I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah, sure. I mean, that’s fine,’ the Rev. Simon St John said. There was a pause on the line. ‘Sorry… which paper did you say it was in?’

What?

It was gone three in the afternoon. It had been before nine this morning when she’d called into the Eight-till-Late in Ledwardine, on her way back from Holy Communion, to ask if she might have a quick flip through the tabloids – actually missing the story first time, never expecting a spread this size.

‘You mean…’ Merrily sat up at the scullery desk. ‘You mean you haven’t read it?’

‘I don’t see the papers much,’ Simon St John said in his placid, middle-England voice.

‘But you must have known they were going to publish it?’

‘I suppose I had an idea, yes.’

‘Had a—?’ The mind boggled. She tried another direction. ‘Erm… the feeling I get is that this Mr Stock is trying to… get back… at the landowner. Mr Lake.’

‘And also his wife’s uncle, I’d guess,’ St John said.

‘The one who’s dead?’

‘It’s rather complicated.’ He didn’t seem unfriendly, but neither did he seem inclined to explain anything.

Last try: ‘You’ve also been accused of being part of a rural mafia,’ Merrily said.

Simon St John laughed. There was laid-back, Merrily thought, and there was indifferent. ‘I’ve been accused of far worse things than that,’ he said eventually. ‘But thanks for letting me know.’

‘That’s… OK.’

‘I expect we’ll get to meet sooner or later.’

‘Yes.’

‘Goodbye, then,’ he said.

It was another of those days: Mercury still retrograde, evidently.

She tried the Shelbones again and let the phone ring for at least a couple of minutes before hanging up and calling back and getting, as she’d half expected, the engaged tone. The implication of this was that someone was dialling 1471 to see who’d called. So maybe they would phone her back.

But they didn’t, and Hazel Shelbone’s excuse that she didn’t want to talk to Merrily while Amy was in the house was wearing thin. Most people now had a mobile, especially senior council officials. Behind that old-fashioned, God-fearing Christianity, deep at the bottom of the reservoir of maternal love, there was something suspicious about this family.

So how was she supposed to proceed? The request for a spiritual cleansing was still on the table. Merrily didn’t think she could just turn away, like Simon St John. Besides, she was curious.

She was finishing her evening meal of Malvern ewe’s cheese and salad when Fred Potter, the freelance journalist, rang again.

‘Before you say anything,’ Merrily said, ‘who alerted you to this story? I mean originally.’

‘Ah, well.’ He laughed nervously. ‘You know how it goes, with news sources.’

‘Yeah, down a one-way street. If someone like me doesn’t disclose something, we’re accused of covering up the truth, while you’re protecting your sources.’ She paused. ‘How about off the record?’

‘Oh, Mrs Watkins…’

‘You know,’ Merrily said thoughtfully, ‘something tells me this won’t necessarily be the last time our paths cross. I do tend to get mixed up in all kinds of things that could make good stories. Who knows when you might—’

‘You’re a very devious woman.’

‘I’m a minister of God,’ she said primly.

The scullery’s white walls were aflame with sunset. She lit a cigarette.

‘All right,’ Fred Potter said. ‘Off the record, it was brought in by our boss, Malcolm Millar. He knows Stock from way back. Stock was in PR.’

‘When was all this? When did you learn about it?’

‘Couple of days ago. Malcolm sent me out to see the Stocks yesterday morning.’

‘So it’s likely they cooked it up between them?’

‘Oh no. I don’t think so. I mean, a ghost story – that’s not something you can verify, is it? I can tell you it’s dead right about how dark it is in there. I couldn’t live in that place. It’s a scandal that this guy, Lake, can just block off someone’s daylight to that extent.’

‘There are laws on ancient lights. It’s one for Stock’s solicitor.’

‘But the press don’t charge a hundred pounds an hour, do we?’

‘What I’m getting at, that’s not our problem, is it? I mean the Church’s. We just come in on the haunting. And if that turns out to be made up—’

‘Please, Mrs Watkins.’

‘I’m not making notes, Fred. I’m just… covering myself.’

‘It’s like asking if I believe in ghosts,’ he said. ‘Maybe I don’t, but a lot of people do, don’t they? Presumably you must.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘OK…’ A pause, as if he was looking round to make sure he was alone. ‘He’s a bit of an operator.’

‘Stock?’

‘He’s been in PR a long time. A lot of PR involves making up stories that sound plausible. If he did want to make up a story, he’d know how to go about it and he obviously knew where to take it. It’s only people close to the media who know that if you want to make a big impact very quickly, you don’t go to a paper and offer them an exclusive, you go to an agency like ours because we can send it all round… national papers, TV, radio…’

‘And the more outlets you send it to, the more money you collect.’

‘Sure, news is a business. But it’s in our interest, at the end of the day, to make sure the story’s sound – or at least, you know, stands up – or else various outlets are gonna stop coming back to us. If you get a reputation for being a bent agency, it’s not good, long-term.’

‘But, bottom line, this probably is a scam.’

Fred hesitated. ‘I don’t know. He’s a bombastic kind of bloke – comes over like big mates soon as he meets you – but underneath… I reckon there was something worrying him. He was really shaky. I mean, when people are quivering and telling you how terrified they are, it could be an act. But when somebody’s got this veneer of cockiness, and something else – call it fear – shows through, that’s harder to fake, isn’t it? Or it could mean he’s got a drink problem or something, I really wouldn’t like to say. You’re not gonna drop me in it, are you? I mean, I’d love to work for the Independent or something, but you’ve got to take what you can get.’

‘Life’s such a bitch, Fred. What did you ring for, anyway?’

‘A follow-up, I suppose, a new line on the story. I mean, you said you were going to look into it…’

‘I didn’t really, though, did I? What I said—’

‘Give me a break, Merrily. I think you’ll find a few papers’ll pick up on this again tomorrow.’

‘Meaning you’ll try and persuade them to.’

‘It’s…’ Fred Potter whistled thinly. ‘It’s a business, like I said.’

‘All right – off the record?’

He sighed. ‘Yeah, OK.’

‘I’m in a difficult position,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s hard for me to move on anything unless the local minister requests assistance. In this case, it strikes me that the local guy, St John, knows exactly what Mr Stock’s up to. So I don’t think we’re going to want to get involved.’

‘But if you do take it any further…’

‘I’ll let you know, promise.’

‘That’s what they all say.’

‘Yeah, but I’m a minister of the Church, Fred.’

‘Hmm,’ Fred Potter said.

Merrily washed up her solitary dinner plate, went back into the scullery and called the Shelbones yet again.

The phone rang and rang, and she just knew the bungalow wasn’t empty. She imagined all three Shelbones standing in the narrow hall, silently watching the base unit quivering. These Shelbones were wearing starched Puritan dress, like the Pilgrim Fathers, and the phone was a dangerous conduit to a bad, modern world that they believed could only do them harm.

She put back the receiver, picked up her cigarettes and lighter and took them into the kitchen, where she put the kettle on. She stood at the west window, waiting for the water to boil, looking out on the twilit garden and the scrum of shadows in the apple orchard where, in 1670, the Rev. Wil Williams, of this parish, was said to have hanged himself to escape a charge of witchcraft. It was claimed Wil had frolicked here with sylphs and fauns. Except it probably hadn’t been so simple.

Merrily recalled Amy Shelbone’s thin body surrendering to that eerie shiver.

Who’s Justine, Amy?

She slid a cigarette between her lips and flicked at the lighter. Nothing happened. Several more flicks raised nothing more than sparks. Merrily took her shoulder bag to the kitchen table and felt inside for matches. Something rolled heavily across the table and fell to the floor.

The room was sinking into the dregs of the day. She put on lights and finally found a book of matches with the logo of the Black Swan Hotel. Its timber-pillared porch stood across the cobbled village square from the vicarage under a welcoming lantern, and she briefly thought how pleasant it would be to wander across there in the dusk and sit in the new beer garden at the back with a glass of white wine.

She sat down at the kitchen table, lit her cigarette and saw, through the smoke, an image of Jane at the front gate yesterday morning. Merrily bit her lip, leaned back out of the smoke, and finally bent and picked up the misshapen penny dated 1797. It must have rolled from her bag, though she didn’t remember putting it in there.

It just kept turning up. Like a bad penny.

If you don’t like the cold, come out of the mortuary, Huw Owen had said mercilessly.

Merrily sat for a while, with Ethel the black cat winding around her ankles, and smoked another cigarette before she left the vicarage.

It was that luminous period, well beyond sunset, when the northern sky had kindled its own cool light show above the timbered eaves of Ledwardine and the wooded hills beyond. The village lights were subdued between mullions, behind diamond panes.

Wearing her light cotton alb, ankle-length, tied loosely at the waist with white cord, Merrily crossed the cobbles and slipped quietly through the lychgate.

The church looked monolithic, rising out of a black tangle of gravestones and apple trees into a sky streaked with salmon and green. In a summer concession to trickle-tourism, the oak door was still unlocked, but she assumed she’d be alone in here; since evensong had been discontinued, Sunday night was the quietest time.

She didn’t put on the church lights, finding her way up the central aisle by the muddy lustre left by dulled stained glass on shiny pew-ends and sandstone pillars. It was cool in the nave, but not cold.

In the chancel, behind the screen of oaken apples, she took out her book of matches and lit two candles on the altar, creating woolly, white-gold globes which brought the sandstone softly to life.

She placed the old penny on the altar, blessing it again.

‘As I use it in faith, forgive my sins…’

It was, she realized now, not a game of chance but a simple act of faith. Of trust. Most priests, in times of crisis, would open the Bible at random, trusting that meaningful lines would leap out, telling them which way to jump.

How different was that to one of Jane’s New Age gurus cutting the Tarot pack?

The difference was Christian faith. There was a huge difference. Wasn’t there?

The candles had hollowed out for her a sanctum of light, with the nave falling away into greyness, along with the organ pipes and the Bull Chapel with its seventeenth-century tomb. The atmosphere was calm and absorbent, the church’s recharging time just beginning. As Jane would point out smugly, this was a site of worship long-predating Christianity. You’re employing some ancient energy there, Mum.

Pre-dating Jesus Christ perhaps, she’d reply swiftly – but not pre-dating God.

Gods. Jane grinning like an elf. And goddesses.

Merrily let the kid’s image fade, like the Cheshire cat, into the flickering air, with its compatible scents of polish and hot beeswax. She knelt before the altar, her covered knees at the edge of the carpet, just within the globes of light.

OK.

She closed her eyes and whispered the Lord’s Prayer and then knelt in silence for several minutes, feeling the soft light around her like an aura. She remembered, as always, those deep and silent moments in the little Celtic chapel where her spiritual journey had begun: the moments of the blue and the gold and the lamplit path.

Her breathing slowed. She felt warm with anticipation and dismissed the sensation immediately.

Then she summoned Amy Shelbone.

More minutes passed before she was able to visualize the child: Amy wearing her school uniform, clean and crisp, tie straight, hair brushed, complexion almost translucently white and clear. Amy kneeling at the altar, as she’d been on the Sunday she was sick.

I don’t know anything about her, Merrily confessed to God. I don’t know what her problem is. I don’t know if she’s in need of spiritual help or psychological help or just love. I don’t know. I want to help her, but I don’t want to interfere if that’s going to harm her.

Her lips unmoving. The words forming in her heart.

Her heart chakra, Jane would insist: the body’s main emotional conduit.

Without irritation, she sent Jane away again and put Amy at the periphery of her consciousness, at the entrance to her candlelit sanctuary. She knelt for some more minutes, losing all sense of herself, opening her heart to…

She’d long ago given up trying to visualize God. There was no He or She. This was a Presence higher than gender, race or religion, transcending identity. All she would ever hope to do was follow the lamplit path into a place within and yet beyond her own heart and stay there and wait, patient and passive and without forced piety.

When – if – the time came, she would ask if Amy might join them in the sanctuary.

Amy and…

Justine?

Three questions hovered, three possibilities: Is the problem psychological, or demonic, or connected with the unquiet spirit of a dead person?

Merrily let the questions rise like vapour, and prayed calmly for an answer. More minutes passed; she was only dimly aware of where she was and yet there was a fluid feeling of focus and, at the same time, a separation… a sublime sense of the diminution of herself… the aching purity and beauty of submission to something ineffably higher.

At one stage – although, somehow, she didn’t remember any of this until it was over – she’d felt an intrusion, a discomfort. And for a long moment there was no candlelight and the chancel was as dark – darker – than the rest of the church and bitterly cold and heavy with hurt, incomprehension, bitterness and finally an all-encompassing sorrow.

She didn’t move, the moment was gone and so, it seemed, was Amy Shelbone. And Merrily’s cheeks were wet with tears, and she was aware of a fourth question:

What shall I do?

Please, what shall I do?

She tossed the heavy old coin and it fell with an emphatic thump to the carpet in the chancel. She had to bring one of the candlesticks from the altar to see which side up it was. But it didn’t matter, she knew anyway. This was only proof, only confirmation.

She held the candle close to the coin. The candle was so much shorter now, the candlestick bubbled with hot wax.

Tails.

Nothing demonic.

She tossed again.

Tails.

No possession by an unquiet spirit.

She nodded, held the coin tightly in her right hand, snuffed out the candles, bowed her head to the altar and walked down the aisle and out of the church.

In the porch, it was chilly. The goosebumps came up on her arms.

In the churchyard, it was raining finely out of a grey sky that was light though moonless. Clouds rose like steam above the orchard beyond the graves. It had been a warm, summer evening when she went in, and now—

Now a figure appeared from around the side of the porch, carrying an axe.

11 One Girl in Particular

THE DEW ON the tombstone was soaking through the cotton alb to her thighs. She had her arms wrapped around herself, one hand still clutching her coin, and she was shivering.

Disoriented, she looked up, following the steeple to the starless sky, puzzled because it was so bright up there, yet she couldn’t see a moon.

‘Oughter get home, vicar,’ Gomer Parry said. ‘Don’t bugger about n’more.’

He was leaning on his spade. It was an ordinary garden spade, not an axe, but could be nearly as deadly, she imagined, in the hands of the wiry little warrior in the flat cap and the bomber jacket. So glad it was Gomer, Merrily tried to smile, but her lips took a while to respond. She felt insubstantial, weightless as a butterfly, and just as transient. She gripped the rounded rim of the tombstone, needing gravity.

‘Wanner get some hot tea down you, girl.’ Gomer’s fingers were rolling a ciggy on the T-handle of the spade.

Now in semi-retirement from his long-time business of digging field drains and cesspits, Gomer saw to the graveyard, where his Minnie lay, and kept the church orchard pruned and tidy. Also, without making much of a thing out of it, he reckoned it was part of his function to look out for the vicar. This vicar, anyway. Been through some situations together, she and Gomer. But still she couldn’t tell him why she’d been in the church tonight or what had happened in there.

The colour of the sky alarmed her. It was streaked with orange cream, laying a strange glare on Gomer’s bottle glasses. Merrily pushed her fingers through her hair. It felt matted with dried sweat.

‘Time… time is it, Gomer?’

‘Time?’ He looked up at the sky behind the steeple. ‘All but five now, sure t’be.’

‘Five in the morning?’

Her knees felt numb. Strips of… of sun were alight between layers of cloud like Venetian blinds over the hills.

Gomer struck a match on a headstone. ‘That Mrs Griffiths, it was, phoned me. Her don’t sleep much n’more since her ol’ man snuffed it. Reckoned there was some bugger in the church, ennit? Bit of a glow up the east window, see. Vicar? What’s wrong?’

‘It can’t be.’ Merrily was shaking her head, frenziedly. Her face felt stiff. ‘It can’t be. I’ve only been—Gomer, I…’ She clutched his arm. ‘I went in there… maybe an hour ago. An hour and a half at the most. It was about ten o’clock… ten-thirty.’

And then the earth turned.

The molten copper of the dawn sent terrifying pulses into Merrily’s head.

Gomer patted her hand.

‘Young Jane… Her’s gone away, then?’

‘Huh?’

‘First time you been alone yere, I reckon, vicar.’

‘It was ten-thirty,’ she said faintly. ‘I swear to God, ten-thirty at the latest.’

She remembered then how far the candles had burned down. It couldn’t be.

Six hours? Those few minutes had become… hours?

Her hands were trembling. The penny dropped out of one and fell onto the tombstone where she’d been sitting.

She recalled a blurred Britannia on the coin. Tails.

Gomer lit his ciggy. ‘Needs a bit of a holiday yourself, you ask me, vicar. Pack a case, bugger off somewhere nobody knows you, or what you do. Don’t say no prayers for nobody for a week, I wouldn’t.’

She bent to pick up the coin. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry for dragging you out, Gomer. I really… Maybe I fell asleep or something.’

‘Sure t’be.’ Gomer Parry stood there nodding sagely, patient as a donkey.

She met his eyes. Both of them knew she didn’t believe she’d been asleep in the church, not for one minute of those six hours.

She invited Gomer back to the vicarage, but he wouldn’t come with her. ‘Strikes me you don’t need no chat, vicar,’ he said perceptively. ‘’Sides which, me and Nev got a pond to dig out, over at Almeley. Get an early start. Makes us look efficient, ennit?’

She walked back to the vicarage lucidly aware of every step, the warming of the air, the shapes of the cobbles on the square, the tension of the ancient black timbers holding Ledwardine together.

Back in the kitchen, she looked around the painted walls, as if walking into the room for the first time. Yes, she’d been away for a while, a night had passed. She put the kettle on and some food out for Ethel. The little black cat didn’t start to eat for quite a while, just sat on the kitchen flags and stared at her, olive-eyed, while she drank her tea.

‘I look different or something, puss?’

Ethel didn’t blink. Merrily went upstairs and had a shower hot enough to hurt. She was aching, but she wasn’t tired. She still felt light and unsteady, slightly drunk. But also strengthened, aware of a core of something flat and firm and quiet in her abdomen. Afterwards, she stood at the landing window, wrapped in a bath towel like someone out of a Badedas ad, and watched the morning sun shining like a new penny.

Lifted up or cracking up? State of grace or a state of crisis?

If she’d been seriously stressed-out last night, she could have understood what had happened: the collapse into the arms of God, the acceleration of time, the flooding of the senses.

Like being abducted by aliens.

She started to laugh and went to get dressed.

It wasn’t about stress. It was about the decision to toss a coin.

She put on the grey T-shirt and the dog collar and an off-white skirt. It was Monday, usually a quiet day in the parish. Meetings with the Bishop in Hereford were on Tuesdays.

With the decision to toss the coin she’d broken through something – probably her own resistance. She went quickly down the stairs and into the kitchen, its walls cross-hatched now with summer-morning light. The kitchen clock said nearly eight. Time still seemed to be moving faster than usual. She needed to ground herself. She needed another tombstone to sit on.

She went on into the scullery and sat behind the desk of scuffed and scratched mahogany. She didn’t plan to wait too long before she phoned the Shelbones. She’d ring just once, and if there was no answer she’d drive over there.

Knowing that this time she would get some straight answers.

She’d make the call at 8.45. She went back into the kitchen to make some breakfast, then decided she wasn’t hungry and cleaned the sink instead, scrubbing feverishly. She had energy to spare. Don’t question it. Don’t question anything about this.

Just after 8.35, as she was drying her hands, the phone summoned her back into the scullery.

‘Merrily,’ Sophie said quietly. ‘Can you come in, please – as early as possible.’

Not a question.

‘Problem?’

‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m afraid there is.’

Merrily lit her first cigarette of the new day.

It was the usual battle getting into Hereford, with the hundreds of drivers who just wanted to get through Hereford… and the inevitable roadworks. Not half a mile from the Belmont roundabout, southern gateway to the city, lorries were feeding pre-cast concrete into what used to be Green Belt and would, when completed, apparently be known as the Barnchurch Trading Estate.

Merrily found herself winding up the car window in response to a sudden sensation of the air itself being polluted by human greed, like poison gas.

Don’t let’s get carried away, vicar…

The traffic started to move again, and this time she made it all the way to Greyfriars Bridge without a hold-up.

Hereford Cathedral sat at the bottom of Broad Street, snug rather than soaring. Behind it, the medieval Bishop’s Palace was concealed by an eighteenth-century and Victorian façade that made it look like a red-brick secondary school with Regency and Romanesque pretensions.

This was Administration; it brought you down to earth.

The morning had dulled rapidly and a fine rain was falling as Merrily parked the old Volvo next to the Bishop’s firewood pile close to the stone and timbered gatehouse, the quaintest corner of the complex. The view under its arch was back into Broad Street; you went through a door in the side of the arch and up some narrow stone steps and came out at the Deliverance office, with the Bishop’s secretary’s room next door, from where Merrily could hear people talking – two male voices. She didn’t know what this was about, hadn’t liked to ask on the phone because it had been clear that Sophie was not alone.

Now Sophie appeared in her doorway. She wore a silky, dark green sleeveless dress and pearls. Always pearls. And also, this morning, a matching pale smile. She slipped out of the room, to let Merrily go in.

‘Ah,’ said the Bishop.

The other man, elderly with grey and white hair, didn’t say anything, and Merrily didn’t recognize him at first.

‘We’ll have tea later, Sophie,’ Bernie Dunmore called out, and then lowered his voice. ‘We shall probably need it. Come in, Merrily, take a seat. You know Dennis, don’t you?’

Oh God, it was, too. Since she’d last seen him, Canon Beckett had shed some weight and his beard. He looked crumpled and unhappy.

‘Dennis?’ Merrily went to sit in Sophie’s chair by the window, overlooking the Cathedral green and the traffic on Broad Street.

‘I, ah… imagine you can guess was this is about,’ the Bishop said. He sat across the desk in the swivel chair he used for dictating letters to Sophie, his episcopal purple shirt stretched uncomfortably tight over his stomach. The Bishop was looking generally uneasy. Canon Beckett just looked gloomy, sitting on a straight chair a few feet away, with his back to the wall.

‘Dennis’s presence offers a clue,’ Merrily said.

‘Merrily, did you go to see this girl Amy Shelbone on Saturday evening, when her parents were out?’

‘Well, I…’ Merrily glanced across at Dennis, who was inspecting his hands. ‘I went over with the intention of talking to her parents, actually. They were – as you say – out. But I met Amy in the garden. I tried to talk to her about – obviously you know what about, Bishop. I mean, Dennis has presumably filled you in on the background?’

‘The child behaved in a disturbed fashion during the Eucharist, as well as exhibiting symptoms of what appeared to be clairvoyance, plus personality changes… enough to convince her parents she was being, ah, visited by an outside influence. You, however, seem unconvinced.’

Merrily nodded. ‘She did seem to have turned away from God, but it seemed to me more like disillusion. Or, if there was an influence, then it was an earthly influence.’

‘You didn’t offer the parents any suggestions as to how she might have become susceptible to whatever was influencing her?’

‘I wondered about a teacher, or a boyfriend.’

‘Boyfriend?’

‘But her mother insisted she didn’t have a boyfriend.’

‘Quite immature for her age,’ Canon Beckett mumbled.

‘The girl went to church with her parents yesterday,’ said the Bishop. ‘Did you know that?’

Merrily raised an eyebrow. ‘No.’

‘Not to Holy Communion this time. To the morning service.’

‘She was all right, then?’

‘Dennis…?’ The Bishop swivelled his chair towards the Canon.

‘She was fine, as far as I could see,’ Dennis said. ‘I kept a close eye on her, obviously. She was a little quiet, sang the hymns somewhat half-heartedly. It seems she and her parents had had a long talk the previous night. After… Mrs Watkins’s visit.’

The Bishop swivelled back to face Merrily across the desk. ‘The child admitted to her parents that she’d been caught up in certain activities involving other pupils from her school. One girl in particular.’

‘Activities?’ Merrily tilted her head.

‘You don’t know about this?’

‘Am I supposed to?’ Was she being naive?

‘Spiritualism,’ the Bishop said. ‘The ouija board. Making contact with… the spirits.’

‘Amy?’

‘Seems unlikely to you?’

‘It would have, at first. She really didn’t seem the sort. Far too prissy. But then—’

‘Prissy?’

‘Inhibited, strait-laced, unimaginative, if you like. But then, on Saturday night, she said – fairly contemptuously – that she didn’t see any point in trying to talk to God, but if she did want to talk she could talk to someone called Justine.’

‘Her mother,’ Dennis Beckett said.

‘What?’

‘Her real mother. She was adopted by these people. Her real mother was called Justine.’

Merrily closed her eyes, bit her lower lip.

‘The apparent opportunity to talk to one’s dead mother,’ said the Bishop, ‘would, I suppose, be sufficient bait to lure even a prissy child into spiritually dangerous terrain.’

Merrily had come down with a bump that was almost audible to her. ‘I’ve been stupid.’ She felt herself sag in Sophie’s chair.

‘Have you?’ the Bishop said.

‘I should have made the connection.’

‘Why?’ asked the Bishop, a lilt in his voice.

‘Why?’

She felt like crying. Driving into Hereford, she’d still felt high, swollen with… what? Faith? Certainty? Arrogance? She’d cast aside her scepticism, opened her heart, broken through – six hours passing like minutes.

Tails. The coin kept coming up tails. She’d been given her answer.

And it wasn’t the answer. It wasn’t any kind of answer. The inspiring and apparently mystical circumstances had obscured the fact that little had been revealed to her. It might even have been misleading.

‘Where did this happen? These ouija board sessions?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘You don’t have to rub it in, Bernie. I don’t know. The kid wouldn’t talk to me.’

The rain was coming harder, rivulets on the window blurring Broad Street into an Impressionist painting. She felt a pricking of tears and looked down into her lap.

‘I really don’t think you do know, do you?’ The Bishop’s voice had softened. She shook her head. ‘Or the identity of the girl who led Amy into these spiritualist games?’

She looked up into his fat, kindly face. His eyes were full of pity.

The room tilted.

‘What are you saying, Bishop?’ She turned on Dennis Beckett. ‘What are you saying?’

Bernie Dunmore shuffled uncomfortably. ‘Your daughter Jane goes to the same school, doesn’t she?’

‘Yes, she—’ It was as if her mouth were full of cardboard. ‘No!’

‘After the service, Merrily, Mr and Mrs Shelbone invited Dennis back to their house, where Amy admitted to Dennis that she’d been lured into what had become quite a craze at Moorfield High School for attempting to make contact with the dead. She said—You’d better relay the rest of it, Dennis, I don’t want to get anything wrong.’

Dennis Beckett cleared his throat. He didn’t look directly at Merrily.

‘Amy told her parents, in my presence, that a Jane Watkins had approached her one day in the playground and told her that a group of them had been receiving messages from a certain… spirit… who kept asking for a girl called Amy. Amy gave this – this Jane short shrift, until the girl told her the woman had identified herself as Amy’s mother, from whom Amy had been parted as an infant. Amy, of course, had always known that she was adopted.’

‘And she was then persuaded to attend one of these, ah, sessions, was she?’ said the Bishop.

‘Which, it seems, proved somewhat convincing – and immensely traumatic, apparently. The child claims she was able to communicate with the spirit of her mother – who gave her some very frightening information. Mr and Mrs Shelbone, however, declined to tell me what this information was.’ Dennis leaned back, as if exhausted, his head against the wall. ‘For which, to be quite honest, I was grateful. Suffice to say that Amy asked the Shelbones certain questions about her birth-mother and then proceeded to give them information about things which they did know but had never revealed to the child. Beginning with the significant disclosure of the mother’s name.’

‘Justine,’ Merrily whispered. ‘Oh God.’

‘They were so shocked to hear her saying these things that Amy could tell at once, from their reactions, that she must be in possession of the truth. All of which was quite enough to reduce both the girl and the parents to a state of absolute dread.’

The spirit of a dead person.

The Bishop said, ‘Did she tell them then, Dennis, about the ouija board sessions? Because—’

‘No, she didn’t. This initial exchange took place immediately following Amy’s… upset, during the Eucharist. When they got home, there was an attempt at a family discussion, which ended rather abruptly when Amy realized that her adoptive parents had concealed this – whatever it was – disturbing information from her. She became resentful and spiteful. She told them she was in contact with her real mother, but she didn’t explain how this had come about. She was, I would guess, behaving in a rather sly way: playing her parents off against her natural mother.’

‘Pretty unnatural mother, if you ask me,’ Bernie Dunmore spluttered. ‘So this, presumably, is what led to the adoptive mother’s request for an exorcism.’

‘Hazel Shelbone didn’t tell me about any of this,’ Merrily said tonelessly. ‘And as for Jane’s—’

‘It was only after Mrs Watkins’s latest visit that Amy explained, somewhat reluctantly, about the ouija board,’ Dennis Beckett said. ‘Which I would imagine carries less kudos than direct personal contact with one’s late mother.’

‘Do we know when the mother died?’ Bernie asked.

‘No.’

‘Not in childbirth, then.’

‘I don’t know, I’m sorry.’

‘Are they still asking for this exorcism?’

‘I was able to pray with the child,’ Dennis said.

Merrily felt the Bishop’s glare this time. More than you were able to do.

‘I think it was sufficient,’ Dennis said. ‘But I’m prepared to go back.’

‘Look…’ Merrily fumbled for words. ‘I… I accept that I probably mishandled this from the beginning. And maybe I shouldn’t even have attempted to talk to Amy when her parents weren’t there. But I can’t accept that Jane’s in any way involved in this.’

‘Merrily,’ the Bishop said, quite gently, ‘I think I’m correct in saying that it wouldn’t be the first time Jane’s exhibited curiosity about things that—’

‘She would not do this.’

There was silence, the two men looking anywhere but at Merrily. The door was open; Sophie, presumably in the Deliverance office next door, would have heard everything.

‘She’s my daughter,’ Merrily said. ‘I would know.’

Bernie Dunmore pulled out a tissue, blotted something on his beach ball of a forehead. ‘You’d better tell us the rest, Dennis.’

‘Amy…’ Dennis Beckett half turned to face the Bishop. ‘I’m afraid that Amy maintains that Mrs Watkins was fully… fully aware of her daughter’s involvement.’

Merrily shut her eyes, shaking her head.

‘And when Mrs Watkins came to see Amy on Saturday evening – when her parents were out – she warned the child very forcibly—’

‘What?’ When her eyes reopened, Dennis Beckett was finally staring directly at her, perhaps to show how much he wasn’t enjoying this.

‘—that she’d better keep quiet about Jane Watkins—’

Merrily sprang up. ‘That’s a complete and total—’

‘—if she knew what was good for her,’ Dennis said.

‘It’s a lie,’ Merrily said.

Bernie Dunmore breathed heavily down his nose. ‘Sit down, Merrily,’ he said. ‘Please.’