The Cure of Souls

Church of England

Diocese of Hereford

Ministry of Deliverance

email: deliverance@spiritec.co.uk

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Haunting or spiritual infestation of property is a complex problem which constitutes most of the work of the Deliverance Service. It falls into a number of clear categories and each case needs careful investigation before a particular course of action is undertaken.

The following pages will attempt to explain the difference between the most common types of haunting: poltergeist activity, ‘imprints’ and ‘the unquiet dead’ and why each demands different treatment.

12 Everybody Lies

‘THE LADY OF the Bines in person?’ The Rev. Simon St John was slumped like a tired choirboy on a hard chair he’d pulled into the centre of the studio floor, his cello case open beside him. ‘Scary.’

He hauled the cello out of its case. It was every bit as dented and scratched as a much-toured guitar. Simon drove the bow over the cello strings, and the sound went up Lol’s spine, like a wire.

‘It was scary at the time.’ He’d decided he had to tell somebody. It wasn’t so long ago that a vicar would have been the very last person he’d have opened up to, but there were aspects of Simon St John that made him more – or maybe less – than what you thought of as a normal clergyman.

Lol had spent the night, as usual, alone in the stables. Prof had said he should move over into the cottage, but he felt more comfortable in the loft room above the studio. All last evening he’d been somehow expecting Stock to turn up, with an explanation of the newspaper story, but Stock hadn’t shown. And then, this morning, when the footsteps sounded in the yard, it had been Simon St John in jeans and trainers, carrying his cello case, looking like a refined version of Tom Petty.

Prof had mentioned that Simon would often drop in on a Monday, to unwind after an entire day of being polite and cheerful to his parishioners. Before moving to Knight’s Frome, he’d been in some bleak sheep-farming parish in the Black Mountains, which thrived on threats and feuds and general hatred and where the vicar was expected to be hard-nosed and cynical.

‘But – am I right? – you didn’t know the story of the Lady of the Bines at the time you saw this woman,’ Simon said.

Lol sat a few feet away, on the hardwood top of an old Guild acoustic amp he’d picked up in Hereford last year. ‘No.’

‘That is quite spooky.’ Simon’s bow skittered eerily across the strings. He winced. ‘And naked, hmm?’

‘And bleeding from superficial cuts, like she’d just run through some spiny bushes or brambles or—’

‘It’s how ghost stories are born,’ Simon said. ‘Give me your chord sequence again. B minor, F sharp…?’

‘Then down to E minor for the intro to the verse.’ This was the River Frome song, for which there were still some lyrics to write.

‘And you made a careful exit,’ Simon said. ‘Wise.’

‘I was thinking drugs, I was thinking witchcraft. I was wondering, should I call the police in case she’s been… you know? But she was… smiling. She seemed relaxed. Have you ever met Stephanie Stock?’

Simon pushed the bow over the strings of the cello in a raw minor key, recoiled. ‘Ouch. I’m just so bloody atrocious these days. No… when he comes to Church – and he’s actually been a time or two recently, the cunning bugger – he comes on his own. She’s a mouse, they say – quiet, goes off to work in Hereford in her little Nissan. Making the best of the dismal place, presumably, when she gets home, because she never goes to the pub with him.’

‘So, what do you reckon?’

‘Dunno, is the short answer. I don’t know what you saw. Why don’t you ring her one night while he’s out? Why were you naked in the old hop-yard, Mrs Stock?’ Simon lifted his bow. ‘No, wouldn’t be such a good idea. Anyway, it doesn’t change my view of the situation. He’s a lying git. “I need an exorcism, Si, soon as you can.” Jesus!’

‘That was what he was asking for when he came here? And you said no.’

‘Damn right. An Anglican exorcism, sanctioned by the Bishop of Hereford, would put God and the Church of England firmly on Stock’s side. Comes to a civil court case, I get called as a witness. Stuff that.’

‘But why would he then go to the papers? Why would he expose himself to public ridicule?’

‘You think that bothers him? He’s a PR man. He knows how transient it all is. News today, chip-paper tomorrow… except in Knight’s Frome. Here, it might send a slow ripple up the river… Still, what’s he got to lose?’

Lol persisted. ‘OK… Prof suggests Stock’s making up the haunting bit to put pressure on Adam Lake to dismantle his big barns and stick them somewhere else. But that still doesn’t quite add up. Getting rid of the barns might put a few thousand on the value of the place. But when you think how many people’d want to live in a house well known as a murder site – and now even better known – at the end of the day, Lake’s going to be the only person really interested in buying it.’

‘All right.’ Simon leaned forward, letting his arms droop over the body of his cello. ‘I’ll tell you what I think, why I think Stock wouldn’t talk to Lake’s lawyer when the first approach was made. I think, in normal circumstances, he’d sell that place tomorrow. He’s a townie, an arch-townie. He hates it here. But I don’t think he can sell. Not to Lake, not to anybody. What did Stock say to you about the reason Stewart Ash left them his house?’

‘He said Ash didn’t bequeath his house to Gerard Stock, he bequeathed Stock to Adam Lake. He wanted to be sure there was someone in that house who wasn’t going to do Lake any favours.’

‘Yeah, but Stock doesn’t do anyone any favours. Especially not someone who’s both dead and stupid enough to leave him a house.’

‘But it was his wife’s inheritance.’

‘His wife does what she’s told. She’s a mouse. What other kind of woman would Stock marry? What I’m trying to suggest to you is that Stewart Ash would never leave his house in the hands of someone like Stock to make sure it didn’t fall into Lake’s hands… if he hadn’t already taken steps to make sure Stock couldn’t sell it, anyway.’

‘You mean some kind of – I don’t know the legal term…’

‘Restrictive covenant. Stock wants us to think he doesn’t want to sell the kiln, when in fact he can’t. I’d put money on it.’

‘It makes sense,’ Lol admitted.

‘It’s the only explanation that does. He’s buying time until he can find some way – legal or otherwise – around it. Maybe the place is going to mysteriously catch fire one night, maybe one of the extra candles he needs to combat the awful darkness topples over. Oh, there are lots of things he could do.’

‘And still emerge looking clean and innocent?’

‘He doesn’t care, Lol, long as he stays out of jail. Look… he wants – ostensibly – to get back at Lake for what he did to the house and to Stewart Ash. He also wants – perversely, it might seem, but not when you get to know him – to get back at Ash for saddling him with a saleable country property that he can’t sell. Which means he’s almost certainly looking at a way of turning the situation into money – maybe even now selling the story, a book, a TV documentary. Something…’ Simon stood up, leaned his cello against the chair seat.

Lol stood up, too. ‘What if you’re wrong? What if he really has got problems in that place?’

‘Why are you so bothered?’

Lol shrugged.

‘Anything to do with your forlorn and possibly unrequited love for the Reverend Watkins?’

Lol sighed. ‘Good old Prof.’

‘Yeah, yeah, he called in at the vicarage before he left for London. And then, lo, she rang me herself. Apologetic, in case she’d said something to the press that might have offended me.’

Lol went still. ‘Merrily?’

‘I truly hope your friend has the sense not to get involved. You don’t have any influence there, I suppose?’

‘I’m a songwriter, Simon. I write songs.’

‘And don’t you go making any silly connections between some doped-up woman and the Lady of the Bines.’

‘Am I allowed to write a song about it?’

Simon made a thoughtful, sibilant sound through his teeth. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’m going to tell you the truth about the Lady of the Bines, OK?’

Lol sat down again.

‘According to the legend,’ Simon said, ‘if you see her, your hops will start to wither before the season’s out. Right?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Once the Wilt hits somebody’s yards, the old codgers in the pub will start muttering about the Lady. You’ll have seen the signs: Keep Out. Danger of Infection. Most big yards have them. The Wilt’s voracious and it can be carried by people just walking in and out of a field. Most people observe the restrictions. Kids, though, are another matter. Always been a problem keeping kids out. And I guess that’s why they made up the story.’

‘Made it up? Who made it up?’

‘They did. I don’t know who, but it’s bollocks, Lol!’ Simon threw out his arms; you could almost see the bat wings of a surplice. ‘The story was made up to scare kids away from the hop-yards. The history of hops in Herefordshire doesn’t go back as far as the days of knights and ladies.’

‘Sally Boswell was spinning me a line?’

‘Maybe she made it up. She’s a clever lady; she’s been around long enough.’ Simon had picked up his bow and was tapping it against his leg like a riding crop. ‘This is the country, Lol. In the country, in certain situations, everybody lies.’

13 Question of Diplomacy

ALTHOUGH SHE WORKED for the Bishop and the Church of England, in essence Sophie Hill served the Cathedral. If you confided in her, only God and those medieval stones would ever know.

She was not exactly a mother-figure – just that little bit too austere – and certainly not an older sister. Agony aunt would probably get closer. Merrily wondered how many perplexed priests in a crisis of faith, or facing divorce or the prospect of being outed as gay had, over the years, consulted Sophie before – or instead of – bishops and deans and archdeacons.

‘Except, I should have done something,’ Merrily insisted. ‘From the start, Huw Owen always used to stress that, regardless of our own opinions, we should never leave the premises without—’

‘Merrily – seriously – how could you?’ Sophie handed her tea in a white china cup. ‘If the girl herself wouldn’t have anything to do with you, and if the mother felt unable to take you completely into her confidence—’

‘She took bloody Dennis into her confidence.’

‘Only because the girl had accused you of threatening her – transparent nonsense which, in my view, throws immediate doubt on her casting of Jane as the instigator.’

Merrily paused, with the cup at her lips. ‘You don’t see Jane involved in this?’

‘There was a time, not too long ago,’ Sophie conceded, ‘when there was very little of which I would have acquitted Jane without a number of serious questions. But no. There’s an element of… malevolence here. Not that I think she was ever malevolent but, with younger children, mischief and maliciousness can be horribly interwoven, and I rather think she’s grown beyond that stage.’

‘Well, thank you.’

‘All the same, you do need to speak to her without delay. Where is she now?’

‘On holiday, with her boyfriend’s—with Eirion’s family. In Pembrokeshire.’

‘Can you contact her on the phone?’

‘If I can’t,’ Merrily said, ‘I’ll be driving down there tonight.’

‘Don’t overreact.’

‘Sophie, I’ve just been accused of menacing a juvenile!’

‘Accused by the juvenile.’

‘I wasn’t aware of Dennis Beckett immediately springing to my defence.’

‘No. But then, Canon Beckett was hardly vociferous in support of the ordination of women.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I’ll make you a list sometime.’ Sophie pushed the phone across the desk to her.

‘Merrily!’ Gwennan squealed. ‘How marvellous it is to hear from you again!’

They’d spoken twice on the phone but never actually met. She hadn’t met Eirion’s father, either, the Cardiff-based business consultant, fixer, member of many quangos and chairman of the Broadcasting Council for Wales. Gwennan was his second wife.

‘Erm… I just wanted a very quick word with Jane, please,’ Merrily said. ‘Something she might have forgotten to tell me before she left.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Gwennan. ‘You’ve just missed her. She’s just this minute taken the children to the beach.’

‘What time will she be back?’

‘Oh heavens… I don’t know really. The problem is, Merrily, that Dafydd and I have a lunch appointment in Haverfordwest, so we won’t be seeing Eirion and Jane until tonight. They’ve taken the children out for the day. Isn’t she marvellous with children?’

Merrily blinked. ‘She is?’

‘What I’ll do, I’ll leave a note in case they come back earlier. Though, knowing Jane, she’ll have too much planned for them all. But she’ll definitely call you tonight, I’ll make sure of it.’

‘If you would. It’s nothing vital, just something I need to check. She’s actually looking after the children, then? Young children?’

‘Eight and eleven,’ Gwennan said. ‘She’s wonderful with them. You don’t have any other children of your own, do you? I expect that’s what it is.’

Merrily put down the phone to the sound of heavy footsteps and puffing on the stairs: the Bishop returning, after seeing Dennis Beckett to his car. He came in and closed the door.

‘I’ve told him to keep this to himself, naturally.’

‘Don’t feel you have to protect me,’ Merrily said bitterly. ‘If it turns out to be remotely true about Jane, I’ll be out of here before you can say Deuteronomy.’

‘Merrily, the very last—’ The Bishop glanced around to make sure the door was firmly shut, then sat down opposite her at Sophie’s desk. ‘The very last thing I want is to lose you from Deliverance because of something—’

‘Bernie, if this is true, I’ll have to leave the parish, the diocese… everything, probably.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘I’ve told her she has to speak to Jane.’ Sophie placed a cup and saucer in front of the Bishop, poured his tea.

‘It looks like it’ll be tonight before I get through to her,’ Merrily told him. ‘I’ll also need to speak to the Shelbones, of course, but not until after I speak to Jane.’

‘No!’ The Bishop dislodged his cup, splashing hot tea on his cuff. ‘Out of the question. You stay well away from that family. Dennis has prayed with the girl, and that’s enough for the present, as far as I’m concerned.’

‘You can’t say that. Now it’s out in the open, I’m going to have to find out about this ouija-board stuff. If that’s not part of the Deliverance agenda, what is?’

‘What this whole business is, my girl, is a pretty firm pointer to why we need a Deliverance support group, without delay. Jobs like this, it’s like the damned police – you need to go out in pairs to give yourself a witness. Have you even provided me with a list of possibles yet?’

‘Well, at least I’ve eliminated Dennis.’ She took out her cigarettes. ‘Would you mind?’

Sophie frowned, but Bernie Dunmore waved a hand. ‘Go ahead, if it’ll make you think clearer.’

‘Suppose I have a word with the headmaster at Moorfield?’

‘Do you know the headmaster?’

‘Bernie, Jane goes there.’

He coughed. ‘Yes. What’s his name?’

‘Robert Morrell.’

‘I don’t think I’ve met him yet.’

‘You probably won’t.’ Merrily lit a cigarette. ‘He’s an atheist.’

‘Aren’t they all? But, sure, go and see him, by all means. Go and see him in your capacity as a concerned parent – if he isn’t already in the Algarve or somewhere.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll call him for you,’ Sophie said.

‘In a moment, Sophie. Merrily, there’s something else we need to look at, on the other side of the county, as it happens. Sophie, could you get that e-mail? You’ll be glad to know, Merrily, that you’re not the only minister in this diocese facing, ah, flak.’

‘I know.’ Merrily took one more puff on the cigarette and then stubbed it out in the empty powder compact she used as a portable ashtray. ‘That was all I needed, thanks. This would be the vicar of Knight’s Frome?’

‘You’ve read the Sunday paper, then.’

‘I was quoted in it, Bernie.’

‘Yes. Of course you were.’ He wiped a hand across his forehead. ‘I think I need a holiday.’

‘And Sunday wouldn’t be Sunday, at Ledwardine Vicarage, without the People and the News of the World. Anyway, I thought I ought to ring him. He certainly didn’t seem over-worried, and he didn’t ask for any help. I’ve also spoken to the guy who – well, let’s just say a journalist. The inference is that the story was engineered by Mr Stock, for reasons of his own. So my feeling is that Simon St John probably knew exactly what he was doing when he said no.’

Bernie Dunmore’s dog collar disappeared under his chins. ‘Just as you did when you said no to Mrs Shelbone on that first occasion?’

Merrily was silent.

When the Bishop had gone, she stood up to let Sophie repossess her desk.

‘He obviously just wants to keep me well away from Dilwyn.’

‘Oh, more than that, I think.’ Sophie scoured her blotter for traces of ash. ‘If it was anyone other than the Reverend St John, he might have let it go. But I don’t think any of us are entirely sure about Mr St John.’

‘Tell me.’ Merrily sat in the chair vacated by the Bishop.

‘And it’s not simply that he used to be in some sort of rock-and-roll group in the eighties, if that’s what you were thinking.’

‘I wasn’t aware of that. Would it be a band I’ve heard of?’

‘You probably would, but I don’t even recall the name. Nor is it the fact that St John isn’t known for his diplomacy… or the delicacy of his language.’ Sophie’s eyes narrowed under her compact coiffure. ‘Even more profane than you, Merrily, by all accounts.’

‘A Quentin Tarantino priest?’

‘Certainly a troubled priest. Or was. I believe he’s come very close to leaving the Church more than once. He seems to have what you might call an attitude problem. Came to us from Gwent, newly married. His wife’s quite seriously disabled. The vicarage at Knight’s Frome had to be considerably modified before they could move in.’

‘How does that affect his ministry?’

‘Not at all – except by eliciting sympathy from the parishioners. Not that Mrs St John appears to welcome sympathy. I think, in the end, it probably does mainly come back to that question of diplomacy. He tends to be volatile and arbitrary. For instance – and this is the instance the Bishop’s no doubt recalling – he once refused to marry a member of a very well-established local farming family, someone with family graves in the churchyard going back at least two centuries, because he said it was a marriage of convenience and the couple clearly didn’t love one another. He told them to… “Eff off to a registry office”.’

Merrily rolled her eyes. ‘The times I’ve wanted to say that.’

‘But you didn’t, did you?’

‘Only because a, I didn’t have the bottle and b, Uncle Ted the churchwarden would’ve had me on toast. Come to think of it, that comes down to bottle, too, doesn’t it?’

‘It’s simply a matter of tempering one’s responses,’ Sophie said. ‘The Reverend St John tends to form personal opinions about people and act on them. Which is why the Bishop feels it might be advisable in this instance to have a second opinion. There’s also this message – probably the first serious response to your Deliverance website.’

Sophie laid in front of her an e-mail printout.

Rev. Watkins,

I am grateful that you were less quick to dismiss my appeal for spiritual assistance than was my local minister. I am assuming you were not misquoted in saying that if you were aware of someone in genuine need of spiritual support, you would wish to see they received whatever help you were able to give them. May I therefore appeal to you as a Christian to at least investigate the situation here before my wife and I are driven to the edge of sanity. May I stress that this is not a ‘wind-up’.

Yours very sincerely,

Gerard Stock.

‘Note where it indicates copies,’ Sophie said.

Merrily read:

Copies: Bishop of Hereford, C of E Press Office, The People, BBC Midlands Today, BBC Radio Hereford and Worcester.

‘That explains everything. So, it’s on TV tonight, is it?’

‘They haven’t approached us yet, but I suppose they will. What do you want me to say?’

‘Better say we’ll be talking to Mr Stock. What choice have we got?’

‘You want me to reply to him, too?’

‘I’ll do that.’

‘I don’t envy you any of this.’ Sophie began to put the cups and saucers back on a tray. ‘Your biggest problem’s always going to be sorting out what’s genuine from what’s—’

‘Complete bollocks,’ Merrily said, unsmiling.

‘One can only hope you don’t get on too well with the Reverend St John.’ Sophie started to carry the tray to the sink in the corner opposite the door and then she put the tray down again. ‘If you don’t mind me saying… you seem different.’

‘I do?’

‘This is none of my business, but has something happened in your personal life?’

‘I don’t have much of a personal life, Sophie.’ Merrily looked out of the window, over Broad Street. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still mainly overcast, layer upon layer of cloud, fading to amber rather than blue. ‘Actually, something odd did happen, but you wouldn’t thank me for pouring it out right now.’

Sophie nodded and picked up the tray. ‘Whenever you want to talk, I’m here.’

‘Thanks. Really.’

She picked up the e-mail, went into the Deliverance office and switched on the computer to reply to Mr Stock, whose copies list alone revealed his media know-how. Was it still conceivable this man could have a genuine psychic problem?

She wondered if Simon St John had tossed a coin.

14 Thankless

THE HEADMASTER SAID it had to be considered heartening to hear of any fourteen-year-old girl who was communicating at all with a parent. Even if the parent was dead.

‘Well, there we are.’ Merrily smiled warmly. ‘Everyone was saying what a complete unbeliever and a rationalist you were. But I had faith – I just knew you’d take it seriously.’

The staffroom had been updated to resemble a kind of scaled-down airport lounge with fitted recliner seats around the walls. There were two computers, a TV set and a video – maybe the teachers played stress-management tapes in their lunch hour. Robert Morrell looked health-club fit in his polo shirt and sweatpants. He’d reacted to hair loss by shaving what was left to within a millimetre of his skull.

‘Put it this way…’ There was a faint smile on his face, but she could tell he was annoyed by her attitude. ‘I’d rate it considerably lower down the scale of antisocial behaviour than marketing drugs in the cloakrooms.’

Morrell was going on holiday with his family tomorrow, which was why the meeting had been arranged for this afternoon, before Merrily would’ve had a chance to talk to Jane. It was clear he would also rather have put it off – probably until next term, when it all might have blown over – but Sophie had enviable ways of dealing with authority figures.

‘However,’ he said, ‘to forestall any accusations of being anti-Christian, I took the liberty of inviting our chairman of governors to sit in. A regular churchgoer, Mrs Watkins.’ He inclined his head to her, patronizing bastard. ‘And, as it happens, a golfing companion of your Bishop’s.’

‘Listen.’ She must have looked pained; like everybody else, he was covering his back. ‘I’m not here to make a big deal out of it, Mr Morrell, I’m just trying to find out what’s happening, who’s involved and if any other kids have been damaged by it.’

‘Damaged?’ A corner of his mouth twisted up; not quite a sneer. ‘Damaged how? Physically? Emotionally? Psychologically?’

She shrugged, reluctant to use a word he would sneer at. Jane despised him for teaching maths, playing electronic Krautrock in his car and joining the older boys for rugby training – his way, the kid reckoned, of getting around the ban on corporal punishment.

Thoughts of Jane made Merrily tense. Maybe she’d still been high from the time-lapse experience, or lack of sleep, but so far she’d managed not to think too hard about the kid’s possible involvement. Now, in this deserted school, with its hostile head teacher, she felt insecure and it seemed altogether less unlikely that Jane had been into some psychic scam.

‘And do you accept the idea of communication with the dead?’ Morrell asked, as heavy footsteps echoed in the corridor outside, like the dead themselves walking in, on cue. Merrily jumped, but Morrell looked relieved. ‘We’re in here, Charlie!’

‘Rob, so sorry I’m—’ The chairman of governors came into the room like someone used to having people wait for him. ‘Oh.’ A leathery face registered unexpected pleasure. ‘I was expecting old Dennis – whatshisname?’

‘This is Mrs Watkins, Charlie. She’s—’

‘I know who she is. She’s the reason Bernie Dunmore spends so much time in Hereford these days instead of walking off some of that weight on the golf course.’ His right hand flashed. ‘Charlie Howe.’

‘Hullo.’ Merrily was letting him squeeze her fingers when she suddenly realized who he was. ‘I think I… may have encountered your daughter.’

‘Yes indeed!’ He beamed. ‘We’re all very proud of Anne.’ His local accent was as mellow as old cider. He wore a light suit and a broad, loose tie. He was in his sixties, had wide shoulders and strong, stiff, white hair in what, in his young days, would have been called a crew-cut.

Charlie Howe: one-time head of Hereford CID, father of its current chief, DCI Annie Howe, the steel angel. Icy blonde with a serious humour deficiency. Merrily searched for family resemblance, could find none at all.

‘She’s done well, Mr Howe.’

‘Youngest head of CID we’ve ever had. She’ll have outranked her old man before she’s finished. Can’t hold you girls down, these days.’ Charlie Howe took a step back to have a proper look at Merrily. ‘My Lord, when I think of your predecessor, old Tommy Dobbs, what a—well, God rest his poor old soul, but what a bloody improvement!’

And she had to smile, not least because this was the kind of sexist remark guaranteed to turn Annie Howe white.

Morrell said, ‘Mrs Watkins believes there’s reason to suspect the school’s become infested with the Powers of Darkness, Charlie.’

Merrily sighed.

They sat at a circular table from which Morrell had discreetly removed a pack of playing cards. ‘You must know,’ he said, ‘that even as the chief executive of this establishment, there isn’t much I can do without knowing the name of either the victim or the instigator.’

Merrily hadn’t felt empowered to name Amy, had revealed only that it involved a girl with a dead mother. She didn’t think Morrell would be able to narrow it down, especially with no staff to consult.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘You asked how the child had been damaged. What you had here was a well-behaved, considerate, hardworking, honest and possibly slightly dull kid who’s turned into someone who is secretive, remote, resentful… and seems to have rejected God while embracing what some people like to call the spirit world. In effect, it seems the dead mother’s become her private support mechanism, to the exclusion of… anyone else.’

‘The way children sometimes find an imaginary friend,’ Morrell said smoothly. ‘To fill a gap in their lonely lives.’

Merrily shook her head. ‘Not really.’

Charlie Howe leaned back on an elbow. ‘Can you believe this young girl might actually be in contact with her mother, Merrily?’

‘I could believe it. But I think it’s more likely to be a contact with… something else.’

‘Like what?’ Morrell’s chair jerked back with a squeak that amplified his outrage.

‘Poor Rob,’ said Charlie Howe, ‘this en’t your world at all, is it?’

Merrily said, ‘When a group of people get together, in a circle – like we are now – with a particular objective in mind, then perhaps that focus of group consciousness could result in – well, it could be like a radio picking up signals. Or maybe like a computer network, and one of the group goes home with a virus attached.’

‘That’s based on science, is it?’ said Robert Morrell.

Merrily shrugged. ‘I’m just telling you it can have harmful effects.’

‘You’re talking about possession?’ said Charlie Howe.

Merrily wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s not my favourite word.’

Morrell said, ‘Mrs Watkins… when I was teaching in Bristol, I used to pass, every day, on my way to work, a former warehouse that sported a large sign proclaiming it to be a Spiritualist Church. A church. Like your own, but less grand. And presumably some of the members of this church had children or grandchildren attending local schools, where the teaching staff were obliged to respect all the various forms of religion, whether Islam or Sikhism or Hinduism or… Voodoo, for all I know.’

‘We’re not talking about religion, Mr Morrell, we’re talking about a bunch of kids hunched up in a cloakroom with an upturned glass and a set of Scrabble letters!’

‘And frankly, as I’ve made clear, Mrs Watkins, I’d have to find something like that a good deal less disturbing than if they were trading their pocket money for pills and then, when the pocket money ran out, clobbering some elderly lady for her pension.’

‘Whoa!’ Charlie Howe put up his hands. ‘Let’s get this into proportion, shall we, folks? I was a copper for nigh on forty years. Sure, I know what drugs can do and I know what some kids’ll do to keep supplied. But I also know, Rob, what… what religion can do. Well, not religion, so much as… well, I don’t know what you’d call it. But I think I know what Merrily’s warning us about, and in my experience it can sometimes lead to offences a sight worse than mugging.’

Morrell’s lips clamped shut. He looked affronted.

‘For instance,’ Charlie Howe said, ‘some years back, I was on the fringe of a very big murder hunt – one that I’m sure we all know about – where the murderer, when he was finally nicked, insisted he’d been told by “voices” to kill a particular kind of woman.’

‘Charlie, that’s—’

‘Give me an hour or two and I could find you a dozen or more other cases in the past ten years where killings, serious assaults and God knows what else, with someone acting entirely out of character, have been put down to—’

‘But Charlie, this is—’

‘This is a juvenile. Certainly. But aren’t youngsters more prone to this kind of thing than adults because their imaginations are that much bigger? I’m going to use the word “delusion”, Merrily, for Robert’s sake. And, anyway, we all know that a delusion can be just as real to the person involved. Now if this child’s become antisocial and starts taking advice from what she reckons is her dead mother, then who knows what her so-called mother’s going to advise her to do next? No, I’d be the last to dismiss this kind of problem out of hand.’

Merrily felt like filling the silence with applause. Morrell spread his hands on the table, looked down between them for a moment.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but what do you suggest we do about it now? The summer holidays have just started. The students are no longer under my jurisdiction. Chances are that, by September, there’ll be some new fad.’

‘The truth of it is,’ Merrily said apologetically, ‘this was supposed to be an informal inquiry.’

‘Nothing formal about me, my dear,’ said Charlie Howe.

‘I was hoping somebody might have some idea about what was going on – like if there were certain kids known to be particularly fascinated by the occult… maybe encouraging or even pressurizing other kids into getting involved. Teachers usually have their noses to the ground.’

‘Tell me,’ said Morrell, ‘have you asked your daughter about this?’

‘She’s… away on holiday.’

‘You see, I’m afraid I really can’t help you. I don’t know anything about any ouija-board sessions. They could very well be happening outside school hours, outside the campus. If you want to give me this girl’s name, we can probably arrange some counselling for her next term.’

‘Or,’ said Charlie Howe, ‘why don’t you ask Merrily to come and give a talk to the sixth-formers? We still have religious education, don’t we?’

‘Social and cultural studies. I’d have to discuss it with my team.’

Merrily pushed back her chair. ‘Well… thanks for listening to me. Although I suspect I’ve wasted your time.’

‘Absolutely not.’ Charlie Howe placed a hand over hers. ‘Emphatically not. Anything that’s affecting the lives of our young people, we want to know about it.’

‘Of course,’ Morrell said.

The car park had a view of playing fields and the distant Black Mountains. Moorfield High, serving scattered villages in north and central Herefordshire, was half a mile from the nearest one and not a church steeple in sight – which wouldn’t displease Morrell, Merrily thought.

Watching the head driving away, the chairman shook his head.

‘It’s his one blind spot, Merrily. He’s a good headmaster in most respects. Knows about discipline. Doesn’t let the little beggars run wild. But he’s an unbeliever. Don’t mind me calling you Merrily, do you, Reverend? I feel I know you, after talking to Bernie.’

‘Whatever’s he been saying?’

‘He just gets anxious about you, poor old devil.’

‘Ah, but he handles anxiety very well,’ said Merrily. ‘It’s part of being a bishop.’

‘You’re not wrong.’ He patted her shoulder, then consulted his watch. ‘Half-four. Fancy nipping over to Weobley for a coffee?’

‘I’d like to, Mr Howe, but I’ve got to… talk to someone.’

‘Charlie. If I can’t be Chief Super any more, I’ll just be Charlie. Least you didn’t call me Councillor Howe.’ He looked sad for a moment, as though his useful life had ended when he retired from the police, which it clearly hadn’t.

‘You’re Chairman of the Education Committee now, aren’t you?’

‘Vice-chairman.’ He put his head on one side, winked at her. ‘As yet. Tell you what, why don’t you come and talk to one of our sub-committees? Tell the beggars a few things they didn’t know.’

‘You think they’d want that?’

‘They never know what they want these days. Think they know what goes on, but they bloody well don’t. I know you’ve got a pretty thankless job. Got to deal with some weird customers.’

‘You’d know all about that.’

‘What, thankless jobs?’

‘I meant weird—’

‘Oh, aye,’ Charlie said. ‘Getting more thankless all the time, policing. I don’t know how they keep going, today’s coppers, with all the restrictions and the human-rights legislation – known criminals laughing at you from behind their slippery lawyers.’

He gazed across the fields towards Wales, sucking air through his teeth. A pillow of cloud lay over the Black Mountains.

‘Your daughter seems to be coping,’ Merrily said.

‘You reckon?’ He looked up at the sky for a moment, as if deciding whether it would be disloyal to take this any further. Then he turned to her. ‘I’ll tell you, Merrily, it was the shock of my life when Anne joined the force. Never told me, you know. Never said a word. Leaves university with a very respectable law degree, moves away, next thing there she is on the doorstep in her uniform.’

‘Not for very long, I imagine.’

‘Oh no. Fast-track, now. Doing undercover work while she was still a PC, out of uniform altogether within a couple of years. Detective Sergeant at twenty-five.’

‘Chief Constable material, then.’

‘Aye,’ Charlie said. His eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘Don’t get on too well with her, do you?’

‘She tell you that?’

‘No need. When it comes to religion, Anne stands shoulder to shoulder with Brother Morrell. Always been her blind spot.’

‘Hasn’t held her back. Not even in a cathedral city.’

‘No.’ Charlie Howe stood with his legs apart, his back to the horizon. He must have cut an intimidating figure as a detective, framed in the doorway of the interview room. ‘Not as a copper, no.’

Merrily, who’d had two encounters with Charlie’s daughter, didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t sure she could have got on with Annie Howe if the woman had been Mary Magdalene with a warrant card.

Charlie took out his car keys and tossed them from one hand to the other. ‘Didn’t tell Brother Morrell everything, did you?’

‘I doubt it would have helped. What do you think?’

‘Oh no, you’re quite right, it wouldn’t’ve helped at all. But you wouldn’t have brought him out here in the school holidays if there wasn’t something about this issue that had you particularly worried – now, would you?’

Merrily met his eyes: they were deep-sunk but glittery, playing with her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t really like this kind of thing. New Age stuff I can put up with – a bit of fortune-telling, astrology, meditation. Trying to contact the dead, that’s unhealthy. Let them go, I say.’

‘And where do the dead go, young Merrily? Heaven? Hell? Purgatory?’

‘Leominster, Charlie. Everybody knows that.’

He grinned. ‘Well, you have a think about talking to my subcommittee. I’ll give you a call in a week or two.’

She stood by the old Volvo and watched him drive away in his dusty Jaguar. She thought she liked him but she wasn’t sure if she could trust him – he was a councillor.

Back in the vicarage, she paused under the picture in the hall: a good-quality print of Holman-Hunt’s The Light of the World. It had been a gift from Uncle Ted, who knew nothing of the lamplit path, and showed Jesus Christ at his most sorrowfully benign. A middle-aged Jesus, laden with experience of humanity at its most depressing.

What am I learning from this? she asked him. Because it seems to me I’m just muddling around, getting up everybody’s noses and not helping a soul.

Summer had never been her favourite season. People expected it to be a time of pleasure: new feathers, cares dropping away like rags. But too often the old feathers refused to fall, and the rags still clung, clammy with sweat.

Inside the house, tiredness came down on Merrily like a tarpaulin. She checked the answering machine – nothing pressing, no Jane – drank half a glass of water and fell asleep on the big old sofa in the drawing room, with Ethel the cat on her stomach.

And dreamed she was back in the church.

It was evening. The sandstone walls were sunset-vivid and the apple glowed hot and red in the hand of Eve in the huge west-facing stained-glass window, and Merrily was standing in a column of lurid crimson light and she could hear her own thoughts as she prayed.

Oh God, please tell me. Is Jane involved in the summoning of the dead? Please tell me. Heads for yes. Tails for no.

Her thumb flicked against old copper; it hurt. The coin rose up sluggishly into the dense air, rose no more than three or four inches and she had to jump back to avoid catching it as it fell. She didn’t see it fall but she saw it land because it appeared dimly on the flags, rolling onto one of the flat tombstones in the floor at the top of the nave, into the gaping, time-ravaged mouth of the skull at its centre.

She peered down, couldn’t make out whether it was heads or tails. She bent over double and the shadows deepened. She went down on her knees and all she could see was a void.

She started to weep in frustration and found she was scrabbling in her bag, buried in the shadows beside the sofa, like a great catafalque in the dreary brown light.

‘Yes…’

‘Mum…?’

‘Jane!’ She struggled to sit up, clutching the mobile phone to an ear.

‘You OK?’

‘I… yeah. Of course I’m OK.’

‘Good.’ Jane’s voice was as light and hollow as bamboo.

‘Are you OK?’ Merrily sat on the edge of the sofa, hunched up. The room was dim and felt stagnant. The dull day, deprived of any summer glory, was refusing to go gently and seemed to be sucking out the last of the light like a vacuum pump. The feeling she had was that Jane was not OK.

15 From Hell

JANE LAY ON Eirion’s single bed, watching the last of the light in the sky over the sea. All kinds of emotions were pressing down on her – guilt, regret, some bitterness. But mainly she was furious, and not only at herself.

‘So what did you tell her?’ Eirion whispered.

‘Everything. What could I tell her?’

Eirion had claimed the only bedroom as yet converted from the attic. It had white walls and the smell of new plaster, and even he could only just stand up in here. But the views towards Porthgain and the old mine workings were incredible.

If would be OK, brilliant even, if it was just Eirion and the views and this amazing moist, translucent feel you got in Pembrokeshire, the mystical otherness of the countryside.

Oh, no, she’d been about to say to Mum, the house is top, it’s the family that’s from hell. But she’d wound up playing that down, in the end, because of the guilt. And the fury.

Eirion stroked Jane’s bare arm. ‘You didn’t tell me about any of this.’

‘What was to tell? All kinds of shit happens at school. You put it behind you, don’t you? And when you get back after the holidays it’s all forgotten and there’s a new kind of shit waiting.’

‘So this Layla… is she a genuine medium?’

‘Dunno. She claims to have psychic powers, gypsy ancestry, all that. And she’s certainly got this… charisma’s not the word, it’s more threatening than that. Can there be like negative charisma? I mean, she lays it on, obviously – she’s clearly found that being threatening, looking brooding, that works… gets you stuff. Even the teachers don’t mess with her – I’ve noticed this. Teachers are very polite to her, especially the men. Arm’s-length situation. They are… kind of scared.’

‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

Jane rolled over. ‘Enlighten me, O Experienced One, Mr Been Around, Mr Done All That.’

‘Yeah, OK,’ Eirion said wearily, ‘you’ve made your point.’

‘So what’s it mean? Half the male staff are shagging Layla Riddock?’

‘It only needs one,’ Eirion said. ‘Or maybe she set one of them up and he was just that bit slow saying, “How dare you, young lady?” They’re only human, aren’t they? And then they start gossiping in the staffroom as well, warn each other of the traps – “Let’s be careful out there”.’

‘She’s certainly got Steve on a string, the groundsman guy.’

‘There you go.’

‘But this kid, this Amy… I didn’t realize how far it went, you know? I mean, how could I? Like, OK, she’s Miss Prim, fourteen going on forty-five-year-old spinster, stiff enough to snap any time.’ Jane turned over, leaned across him and clicked on the bedside table-lamp. ‘And she set me up. She’s scared shitless of Riddock so she set me up. All it was, I just happened to be there… and virtually dragged in anyway. I was nothing to do with it. This Amy’s more or less claiming I organized it! And I told Mum the truth, but all the time I’m thinking, why should she believe me this time?’

‘You should’ve told her in the first place, shouldn’t you? You knew that stuff was right in her ballpark.’

‘Oh, come on, Irene, you don’t, do you? You just bloody don’t. Even if it’s somebody you don’t particularly like, unless it’s life and death, you just don’t grass them up. And now Mum could be in some deep trouble over this.’ She sank back, rolling her head on her bit of pillow. ‘She was really pissed off with me. More than she was saying, because whatever I’d done she wouldn’t want to louse up my holiday – she’s cool that way. But I could tell she thought I was going to say it was all total crap, that I didn’t know a thing about it, that somebody had obviously fitted me up, et cetera. She was like totally shattered to find out there was some truth in it.’

‘Sorry,’ Eirion said. ‘I’m not being very helpful, am I?’

‘It’s not your crisis. Maybe I should have noticed how it was with Amy and Layla Riddock. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?’

‘Bullying? Intimidation?’

‘You ever have days you were so scared to go to school you were faking stupid symptoms? Hasn’t happened to me since I was like really young… eleven, twelve. I was quite small then, for my age. Thought I was going to wind up looking like Mum.’

‘Little and cute?’

‘Little is not cute at school.’

‘Always the ones who are just a bit bigger who go for you, isn’t it?’ Eirion said. ‘The ones who’ve maybe been bullied a bit themselves. They do much worse stuff and they get away with it because nobody suspects them.’

‘And you’re just so scared at the time. Adults are like, “Oh, you should stick up for yourself.” But you know they can do anything to you at school, right under the noses of the staff. Like, even if you die, it’s only going to look like an accident! They’re completely outside the law. Nobody out there realizes how totally evil kids can be. It’s like some false-memory thing sets in with adults, and all kids become cute and need protecting. And that’s how you wind up with teenage psychos like Riddock.’

‘When you’re nine’ – Eirion lay on his back, gazing into the darkness of the room – ‘there are eleven-year-olds who’re like… like Charles Manson.’

‘Who?’

‘This weird American guy who got people to kill for him. Murdered this movie star and all these rich people, just went into their homes and ripped them to pieces. Manson was claiming to be receiving these psychic messages. And the people who killed for him – who included women – they wrote “pigs” and stuff on the wall in the victims’ blood.’

‘You’re right,’ Jane said. ‘You’re really not being very helpful.’

She wondered if he’d grown up thinking of this guy, Manson, as the ultimate bogeyman because his own family was so damn rich.

There was a knock on the bedroom door.

‘Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!’ Jane reached up and snapped off the lamp. Did they never, never, never go to sleep?

‘Eirion?’ That hated tripping, lilting, little-girly voice.

‘What?’ Eirion called out hoarsely.

‘Ydy Jane yno?’

‘Er… no,’ Eirion replied.

‘Wel, ble mae Jane?’

‘Probably gone to the shop.’

‘Aw, Eirion… ma’r siop ar gau!’

‘That does it!’ Jane swung her legs off the bed. She was wearing her jeans and her lemon-yellow top. She moved across the bare boards to the door.

Eirion was looking anxious. ‘Look, don’t,’ he whispered. ‘Can’t you just let it go?’

Jane stopped at the door and thought for a moment, then smiled. She crept back and lay on the bed. Eirion was sitting on the side of the bed by now, shoving his bare feet into his trainers.

‘Sioned?’ Jane called out in this foggy, slurry voice.

‘Jane!’

‘Look, would you mind giving us a few more minutes. We’re having sex, OK? Ni’n, er, yn shaggio.’

A wonderfully awed silence.

Eirion kind of crumpled.

‘Again!’ Jane breathed loudly. ‘Harder! Deeper! Oh God…!’

From hell? Oh yeah.

See, most of the ordinary Welsh people she’d met, Jane liked. This might seem like generalized and simplistic, but they seemed kind of classless, no side to them. Contrary to what everybody said, you could have a laugh with them. Look at Gomer Parry.

Look at Eirion, for that matter: chunky, honest, self-deprecating… and this incredible smile that was (as she’d written in a poem she was never going to show him in a million years) like all the birds starting to sing at once on a soft spring morning.

The poor sod. Raised among the crachach.

This was what they were called – the Welsh aristocracy, the top families. A few of them had titles, but most of them were contemptuous of English honours, although – being sharp business people – they were usually incredibly polite to the English people they encountered.

Eirion said his dad, Dafydd Sion Lewis, was some kind of Welsh quango king. He ‘served’ on the Welsh Development Agency, the Welsh Arts Council, the Wales Tourist Board, the Broadcasting Council for Wales. And he was a major executive shareholder in whatever Welsh Water and Welsh Electricity were calling themselves this week. There was a bunch of them like his dad, Eirion said. The names of the organizations and businesses might change but it was always the same people in control.

Dafydd Sion Lewis was plump and beaming and hearty and, according to Eirion in his darker moments, majorly corrupt.

Gwennan was his second wife, about fifteen years younger. She was a former secondary-school teacher of the Welsh language and now – as a result of being married to the quango king – a key member of the Welsh Language Board, which existed to keep the native tongue alive and thriving.

Not that Jane had a problem with this. She was all for having more languages around: Gaelic, Cornish… anything to keep people different from each other, to create a sense of otherness.

At first, she’d thought that Gwennan, with her two cars and her movie-star wardrobe, was a fairly cool person.

It had taken only one day of the holiday for her to realize what Eirion had already kind of implied: that everything had gone to Gwennan’s head – the wealth, the status, the establishment of the Welsh Assembly. She was now a warrior queen of the New Wales, wielding the language like a spear.

‘Except it isn’t a new Wales at all,’ Eirion had said morosely. ‘It’s the same old place, run by the same old iffy councillors, except they’re now known as Assembly Members, supported by the same old bent financiers, but with this new sense of superiority. Suddenly, they’re looking down on everybody…’

‘Especially the English?’ Jane had suggested.

‘Especially the English because the English don’t have Wales’s unique identity.’

Actually, Eirion said, most of the time he found Gwennan quite amusing. She was essentially superficial and quite naive. And she could be very kind sometimes. When she noticed you.

Unfortunately, Gwennan had come with baggage: Sioned and Lowri, eleven and eight, the little princesses. Bilingual through and through. Pocket evangelists for the language and the culture.

‘No, Jane,’ Sioned would say, wagging her little forefinger until Jane wanted to snap it off. ‘I’ve told you and told you, I’m not doing it unless you ask me yn Cymreig.’

‘You know what I’m really doing here, don’t you?’ Jane said to Eirion when Sioned had gone, presumably to wait for her mother and Dafydd to return to receive the shocking facts. (Was there such a verb as shaggio? They seemed to have converted every other English term coined since about 1750.) ‘You know what I am?’

‘If she says anything, we’ll just simply tell her you were joking,’ Eirion said uncomfortably. ‘Kind of a risqué joke to make to an eleven-year-old, mind, but…’

‘I’m the first English au pair in Wales, that’s what I am. Do you realize that?’

Behind the door in the farmhouse kitchen Gwennan had hung an appointments calendar. Every day this week displayed a lunch date for her and Dafydd. Every evening they went out for dinner in St David’s or Haverfordwest, because several of their friends also had cottages in the area. Because the Pembrokeshire coast was becoming like some kind of Welsh Tuscany.

And who had to look after the bloody kids, meanwhile?

‘It’s exactly like being an au pair,’ Jane said with acidic triumph, ‘because I work my butt off for the privilege of learning the fucking language!’

She began to beat the pillow with her fists.

‘I’m sorry!’ Eirion almost sobbed. ‘I genuinely didn’t realize she’d be quite so…’

‘Opportunistic?’

Eirion was too honest to reply.

It was a big old farmhouse. The first floor had been divided into two sections. There was a separate staircase to Dafydd and Gwennan’s suite; the other staircase led to three small bedrooms: Sioned, Lowri… and Jane in the middle. Most nights the kids fell asleep with their respective boom-boxes still pumping Welsh-language rock through the plasterboard walls either side of Jane’s bed.

Come to think of it, Gwennan and Dafydd were unlikely to be at all put out by the thought of the young master giving one to the English au pair.

Not that he had, yet. The daily and nightly presence of the evil little stepsisters seemed to be intimidating him more than whoever had been his school’s version of Charles Manson.

Stepfamilies: a nightmare.

She’d made the kids’ supper. She’d made them tidy their rooms. She’d made them go to bed at ten p.m. She’d made them go back to bed at ten-fifteen. And in the course of this endlessly crappy evening, she’d been grilled by Mum over the phone and made to feel like shit. At eleven-thirty, probably looking like some totally knackered housewife, she’d followed Eirion up to his attic bedroom and collapsed, fully clothed, onto his bed and poured it all out.

‘Let’s go over it again,’ Eirion said. ‘This Layla and this…’

‘Kirsty.’ Jane moved closer to him, which wasn’t difficult on a single bed.

‘… Find that by staging little seances, or whatever you want to call them, they can wield enormous power over certain kids.’

‘It’s addictive, I reckon. You keep going back, even though you’re terrified. I mean, I’m not terrified – OK, maybe a little scared – but I’m, like, somebody who’s attracted to all this stuff anyway. As you know.’

‘Yeah,’ Eirion said grimly.

‘But this is a buttoned-up kid from some fiercely Christian household, who’s been taught that spiritualism is, like, firmly in the devil’s domain, and her immortal soul is at risk – and she still keeps going back because something about it has… grabbed her.’ Jane gripped what she thought was going to be Eirion’s arm but turned out to be his thigh. ‘Sorry.’

‘Go… go on.’

‘Kid knows she’s like doomed. She’s totally beyond the pale. I mean, I’ve listened behind the door when Mum’s been counselling individual parishioners – which is, like, her version of confession. You get some people who are really, really scared that they’ve thrown it all away because of some really piffling sin.’

‘Gets blown up out of all proportion.’ Eirion tentatively slid an arm under her waist.

‘You’d think it was only a Catholic thing, or hellfire Nonconformism or something, but I don’t think it’s anything to do with what denomination you are, or even what religion. It’s a psychological condition. A kind of dependency. A terrible fear of getting on the wrong side of God. I mean… no wonder she threw up in church. Holy Communion? The Eucharist? You’re kneeling there with a mouthful of the blood of Christ, knowing you’ve as good as sold your soul to the other guy? It’s all gonna come down on you in a big way, isn’t it?’

‘Layla would have known about this girl’s background?’

‘Oh yeah, Riddock knew exactly what she was doing. Must have been giving her a major buzz, a cruelty high. But you can’t help wondering how shocked she was when it really started to happen. When this Justine started coming through and turned out to be Amy’s real mother.’

‘Would heighten the power trip no end.’

‘Mind-blowing. She wouldn’t want to let Amy go after that.’

Eirion pushed a hand through her hair. ‘You’ve got this pretty well sussed, haven’t you, Jane?’

‘I don’t know. It’s all guesswork, isn’t it?’

‘You tell your mum all this?’

‘Not the theoretical stuff. But she’ll have worked that out for herself by now. She’s not thick.’

Eirion drew her to him, the length of his body the length of hers, toe to toe, faces almost touching. ‘You haven’t told me how it ended.’

Jane closed her eyes, saw the circle of letters, the glass with a mind of its own.

J-U-S-T-I-N-E.

‘How it ended? We got raided, didn’t we? Pretty ludicrous. The shed door just like crashed open and they burst in. The drug squad – the deputy head and the caretaker. All very dramatic. “Nobody move! Hands on the table!” Like one of us might pull a gun. Of course they didn’t expect it would be so dark. Layla just blew out the candles, and it was probably Kirsty gathered up the letter-cards. I don’t know where she put them – down her front, I expect; they certainly weren’t there by the time the caretaker found the lights. The glass was knocked off the table and smashed. It was just a glass. They were expecting… I don’t know – Es or worse.’

‘They search you?’

‘Nah. Layla had her cigs out by then. Plain old Rothmans scattered across the table, like she was sharing them out. Smart bitch. You could see the relief on the deputy head’s face, now it was clearly no longer a police matter. “Now, girls, because it’s the end of the term, apart from confiscating these disgusting things, I’m not going to take this any further. However…” ’

‘That was smart of her.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What will she do now, your mum? Go and tell the girl’s parents, try and patch things up?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Or go after this Layla?’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said soberly. ‘I’m afraid that’s exactly what she’s going to do – having not the slightest idea of just how massively evil that bitch can be. And if I try to warn her, it’ll look like there’s something else I don’t want her to find out. I… I’m like… feeling pretty pissed-off, Irene. On every front.’

He kissed her gently on the lips.

‘OK,’ Jane said, ‘except maybe that one?’

She put a hand behind his head, opened her mouth to his tongue and moulded her body into his. One of Eirion’s hands seemed to be trapped against her left breast.

Jane was feeling less and less like a knackered housewife when they heard the doors of Dafydd Lewis’s new Jaguar slamming down in the yard, then laughter. And then something about Eirion, the great lover, Mr Experience, began to kind of shrink.

Soon afterwards, Jane crept back to her own room and lay glowering at the ceiling. She’d been set up; she’d been framed; she’d been used to damage her own mother. She couldn’t live with this.

16 Mafia

LOL GENTLY SHOOK the hand of the vicar’s wife.

‘I won’t get up,’ she said.

Simon St John said, ‘You might think she says that every time.’

‘Just go and get me a drink, you bugger.’ Isabel’s accent was Valleys Welsh. She was plump and had light brown hair, with tufts of gold, and warm eyes. ‘No hurry. Give me time to get to know this boy.’

‘I’ll get these,’ Lol offered.

Isabel glared at him. ‘Sit down, you!’

Simon headed for the bar, still in plain clothes – the jeans, the crumpled collarless shirt. Vicar’s night off. It was gone nine p.m., the Hop Devil three-quarters full. Lol sat down.

Isabel’s black top was low-cut and glittery. Over one shoulder strap and a handle of the wheelchair, he caught a glimpse of Gerard Stock, sitting in the shadow of the bellying chimney breast. So the landlord had let him back in.

Stock was on his own, except for a pint of Guinness and a big whisky. He was leaning back against the wooden settle, with an empty smile and an arm extended along the top of the back rest like he was claiming an invisible girlfriend. Lol thought suddenly of the Lady of the Bines and felt uneasy for a moment.

‘You a Catholic, Lol?’ Isabel inquired loudly. ‘Only I’ve decided it’s time I went to Lourdes, but you’ve gotta go with a Catholic, isn’t it, or it doesn’t work.’

‘Is that true?’

‘What?’

‘That you need to be accompanied by a Catholic?’

‘Well, he won’t take me, anyway. And his lot’s rubbish at healing.’ Isabel pouted. Then she laughed. ‘I fell off a high wall, Lol, is what it was. A long time ago. So, that gets that out of the way. Now – what’s a nice-looking boy like you doing all on his own?’

Simon had said he and his wife had made a practice of going to the pub on Monday nights, making it known that this was when the parishioners could get to them without making an official visit out of it – and therefore when delicate issues could be raised informally.

He’d asked Lol to join them, explaining that Isabel liked to meet new people; she didn’t get out much.

So Lol had back-burnered his usual reservations about country pubs. Tonight, he felt he owed Simon several drinks. The first analogue recording they’d made of the River Frome song – Lol humming the bits where the lyrics were incomplete – had been so much stronger, more atmospheric, more ethereal than the demo playing in his head. And this was all down to the cello, of course. The cello – dark, low-lying, sinuous – had become the spirit of the Frome.

Simon had sat there, listening to the playback with his arms folded, wincing at the cello parts and then remarking shrewdly, ‘Somehow, you can’t settle anywhere, can you, Lol? You’re the kind of guy who really needs a proper home, but you don’t know where it’s safe for you to be.’

‘Huh?’

‘Rejected by the born-again parents, shafted by the shrinks, dumped by the girlfriend in Ledwardine. You want to trust, but you’re scared to trust people. And then you fetch up here, and the first thing you latch on to is a sad little river.’

‘Very perceptive of you, vicar,’ Lol told him. ‘But I’ve learned how to psych myself now, thanks.’

Isabel leaned her head close enough for Lol to smell her shampoo. ‘Expecting trouble, he is,’ she murmured.

‘Simon?’ Lol wiped condensation from his glasses.

‘Needs you for back-up,’ Isabel confided.

‘Me?’

‘And me. Who’s going to assault a clergyman minding a short-sighted songwriter and a cripple?’

Lol grinned. He loved the way she said crip-pel and troubel. Now Isabel had turned away and was loudly advising a woman who didn’t look pregnant to get the christening booked before she missed the boat. The woman looked alarmed for a moment, then dissolved into giggles and tossed Isabel an oh you kind of gesture on her way into the toilets. Lol thought that maybe the vicar’s wife had already become more a part of this community than the vicar was ever going to be.

‘There’s a reason someone would want to assault him?’

‘Oh, always someone who’d like to.’ Isabel grimaced. ‘Some people here, they’d do anything for Simon. Others… well… Trouble is, he doesn’t care, see. Doesn’t give a toss, not about himself nor who he offends. One reason I had to marry him. Give him a reason to keep himself alive.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re not one of those men who says “sorry” all the time, are you?’

‘Sor—no.’

‘Good. Play well for you today, did he?’

‘It was almost spooky.’

‘You want to hear him on electric bass. Always be a fallback for him, when they chuck him out of the Church.’

‘There’s a danger of that?’

‘He tries,’ Isabel said.

Lol stood up to help Simon with the drinks: lagers and something golden-brown for Isabel. The atmosphere in the pub was like in the days before ventilators and smoking restrictions. Thin fluorescent bars glowed mauve between the beams, as Isabel jogged her neckline to and fro to fan the air on to her breasts. Lol tried not to look.

‘Stock’s over there,’ he remarked.

Isabel pushed her wheelchair back to see. ‘On his own, too, poor dab. She’s a funny one, his wife. Adapted to that dreary hole like a bloody barn owl. Invite him over, shall I?’

‘This woman is a liability,’ Simon said to Lol, then he turned to his wife, and spoke as to a child. ‘Isabel, Stock has probably been in here three hours, at least. Do you know how drunk that makes him?’

Lol said, ‘Why exactly are you expecting trouble?’

‘After a while, you learn never to ask him that,’ Isabel said. ‘Never tempt fate.’

Trouble came, just the same. It came with the arrival of Adam Lake and a lovely young woman with a wide, sulky mouth and short hair the colour of champagne.

‘His wife?’ Lol wondered.

‘Fiancée,’ said Isabel. ‘Amanda Rae. She’s got a discreet little chain of tiny fashion shops in Cheltenham and Worcester, places like that. Not Hereford, mind – they wouldn’t pay those prices for that tat in Hereford.’ She sipped her drink. ‘Don’t much in Cheltenham, either, I reckon. That’s why she’ll always need someone like him. Shallow, pointless people, they are, supporting each other’s public façades.’

‘My wife the social analyst,’ Simon murmured.

‘They’ll’ve come out for the first time today, I reckon,’ Isabel told Lol. ‘All these press people about the place, see, and the wrong kind of press. Rip off all their clothes for a centrefold in Horse & Hound, but the buggers’ll lie low till this one’s over.’ She smiled slyly at Simon. ‘Bit like him. Taking off before ten in the morning with his cello case.’

Simon glanced uncomfortably at Lol. Lol thought about the magical enhancement of the River Frome song. It was an ill wind.

It was getting very warm in the bar. He noticed that all the tables had been taken except for the one in front of Stock, who sat there motionless, still smiling. 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. The level of Stock’s pint had gone down a couple of inches, though, like he was taking it intravenously.

‘Lake usually come in on a Monday night, too?’ Lol asked Simon.

‘More often than not. Meets his friends from the hunt. He’s taken up the cause – a crucial part of the salvation of his birthright. Just become local organizer for the Countryside Alliance, so called. Leads demonstrations to London.’

‘Hypocritical bastards, they are,’ Isabel growled. ‘Still the Norman overlords, isn’t it? All the countryside’s their hunting ground. It is a class thing, whatever anyone says. But they also grow to enjoy killing. I’ve seen it. Doesn’t have to be like that.’

‘She means that, in the country, sometimes things do have to be killed, if they’re preying on stock,’ Simon explained. ‘But there has to be something questionable about people who simply love to do it.’

‘He said that in the pulpit one week,’ Isabel said proudly. ‘That old bugger complained to the Bishop.’ Lol followed her eyes to a fat man, seventyish, in a khaki shirt, at the centre of a group at the bar.

‘Oliver Perry-Jones,’ Simon said. ‘Former master of the hunt. Failed politician. Almost made it into Parliament once, until the true nature of his politics became apparent, thanks largely to revelations by Paul Foot in Private Eye.’ He swallowed some lager, leaned back and scanned the room. ‘Knight’s Frome’s like all rural communities: scratch the surface and you come away with all kinds of crap under your—’

‘Shhhh.’ Isabel’s warning hand on his wrist.

‘Good for you, vicar,’ Adam Lake said.

‘I’m sorry?’ Simon looked slowly up at him. Lake wore a light tweed jacket. His mutton-chop sideburns had been pruned and razored to sharp points. The whole style looked too old for him, too old for anyone of his generation, Lol thought. Lake was like a gangly mature student playing a spoof squire in the college review.

‘It won’t be forgotten,’ Lake said, and Simon was on his feet.

‘Oh shit,’ said Isabel.

‘What won’t be forgotten?’ Simon said quietly.

‘Your support,’ Lake said. He was taller than Simon, taller than anybody here. ‘Your support for the community, against potentially disruptive influences.’

‘Right, listen!’ The bar noise sank around Simon like it was being faded by a slide control on some hidden mixing board. ‘I support what my particular faith tells me is right. And you, Adam – you don’t represent the fucking community.’

Dead silence. Adam Lake smiled nervously, his girlfriend looked annoyed. ‘Fine language for a so-called minister,’ Oliver Perry-Jones muttered.

‘OK,’ Simon said. ‘As Adam’s raised the issue, is there anything anyone thinks I ought to know about?’

And Lol realized what this was about: the vicar making himself available for questioning about the Stock affair. Most clergy might have saved it for the pulpit, but that would leave no opportunity for argument. In pubs, though, arguments never lasted long before they turned into rows, and rows turned into fights.

This was Simon St John opening his arms to the accumulating shit.

Which was admirable, Lol thought. Also a little crazy.

Simon looked around, raised his voice. ‘Anyone here who thinks I’m under the thumb of what Gerard Stock likes to call the rural mafia? Anyone thinks I declined to assist Mr Stock purely for the purpose of currying favour with The Man Who Would Be Squire?’

Silence. No sign of anyone rising to the bait. Maybe it wasn’t so crazy.

Simon shook back his hair. Isabel had a hand around her glass as if she was expecting someone to knock it to the floor. Eddies of tobacco smoke fuzzed the lights.

And then a slow handclap began.

Pock… pock… pock…

Heads started turning, cautiously.

Stock didn’t lift his head, just went on clapping. His pint glass was down to its final quarter. His whisky glass was empty. The space in front of his table soon grew bigger, people instinctively edging away, until there appeared a meaningful emptiness between Stock’s table and the one Lol was sharing with Simon and Isabel. Although no one was looking at him, Lol, who hated an audience, felt exposed. I can get you a nationwide tour, Prof Levin promised in his head.

Pock… pock… pock…

‘What’s the problem, Gerard?’ Simon said.

Stock stopped clapping. His eyes were like smoked glass.

‘You’re a hypocritical bassard, vicar.’

Simon shrugged.

‘But thas how the Church survives, isn’t it? Never take sides.’

Isabel shouted, ‘That’s ridic—’ Simon put his hand on her shoulder and she gripped her glass tighter, clammed up.

‘Thas right,’ Stock said. ‘Keep the liddle woman out of it.’

Oliver Perry-Jones called from the bar, ‘Why don’t you just clear out, Stock?’ His voice was high and drawly – like a hunting horn, Lol thought. ‘Take your money from the gutter press and your drink-sodden fantasies, go back where you came from. People like you don’t have a place heah.’

Stock stared into his beer for a moment and produced a leisurely burp before turning his head slowly. He was clearly very drunk. He peered in the general direction of Perry-Jones.

‘Jus’ like old Stewart, me, eh? Din’ fit in either, did he, the old gypo-loving arse-bandit?’

‘Take your foul mouth somewhere else,’ Perry-Jones said predictably. ‘There are ladies here.’

Isabel smiled.

‘I bet…’ Stock pointed unsteadily at Perry-Jones. ‘I bet you were so fuckin’ delighted when Stewart got topped. Served the bassard right. And, hey, it also took a couple of dirty liddle gypos out of circulation.’

No reaction. Stock’s rosebud lips fashioned a blurred smile. Lol caught sight of Al Boswell with his wife, at the end of the bar. Expressionless. Non-confrontational is all we are.

‘Din’ like the gypos, did you, you old fascist? Gypos and the Jews. You and old man Lake, eh? Fuckin’ blackshirts. Still got your armbands?’

Lol wondered if Derek the landlord might intervene at this point, but Derek was looking down at the glass he was polishing; he’d know there were enough people here to deal with Stock – and enough people who would want to watch it happening.

Perry-Jones had started to vibrate with fury, but Lake’s tanned face was like a polished wooden mask. His girlfriend, Amanda, had her mobile out. ‘I’m calling the police.’

‘Go ’head, darling,’ Stock said mildly, not looking at her. ‘Lezz have the coppers in. Whole wagonful of the bassards. Swell the audience. Lezz get the fuckin’ press back.’ He shouted out, ‘Any hacks in the house?

Amanda clutched the phone but didn’t put in a number.

‘Where’s the Lake boy gone? Where’re you, you liddle arse-hole? Tell me one thing: what you gonna do if the Smith boys geddout? Appeal’s gotta come up soon. Case’ll be wide open again, the Smith boys geddoff.’

If Stock was expecting a reaction from Lake, he didn’t get it. He searched out Simon again.

‘You think they did it, vicar? Maybe the police were a liddle hasty, there, whaddaya think, man? You’re a liberal sorta guy. You think the Smith boys really did it? You ever wondered who else wanted poor ole shirtlifting Stewart out the picture?’

Lol sat up. A new agenda was forming like invisible ink appearing between the lines of the old one. He heard Lake’s girlfriend saying, ‘Right. I am calling them,’ but felt nobody was really listening to her.

Adam Lake finally spoke. ‘Put it away,’ he told Amanda. ‘Let him finish himself. Plenty of witnesses here. We can talk to my solicitor tomorrow.’ He walked out into the space between Simon and Stock. ‘Spell it out, Stock. What exactly are you saying? You think someone else killed Ash, rather than the convicted men? That it?’

‘There’s a turn-up,’ Isabel murmured.

Lake said coolly, ‘Well?’ He was either hugely arrogant or he really had nothing to hide.

Stock picked up his beer glass and drained it calmly.

‘Come on!’ Lake suddenly roared. ‘Scared to say it, are you? Scared to say it in front of witnesses?’ He put both big hands flat on Stock’s table. ‘Stock, for Christ’s sake, how much do you really think I care about that place? You really think I’d… you think anyone would kill for it? For a broken-down bloody hopkiln? Have you seen my place? Have you seen where I live? You really think I’m now going to offer you some ridiculous sum for that hovel, is that it? Just to get you out of my hair? Are you mad? Are you sick?’

Stock stared at him, froth on his beard, set the glass down hard, about an inch from one of Lake’s hands. He said nothing. He’d got what he wanted: Lake was losing it.

‘Let me tell you… Gerard. Let me tell everybody…’ Lake looked around wildly, and Lol saw emotional immaturity twitching and flickering in his big angular frame like a forty-watt bulb in a street lamp. ‘You picked the wrong man.’ Lake levered in towards Stock. ‘You couldn’t have done it to my father and you won’t do it to me.’ His face inches from Stock’s, exposed to the booze and the sour breath. ‘You can stay in that dump for as long as you like, you and your imaginary ghosts, you stupid, pathetic little turd.’

Like some soiled Buddha, Stock gazed blandly into the bared teeth and the glaring eyes for maybe a couple of seconds before his own eyes seemed to slide up into his head and his body wobbled.

Lol knew what was coming and so did Lake, but too late.

Simon stood with Lol on the forecourt under a night sky like deep blue silk shot with rays of green.

His white shirt was dark and foul with brown vomit. The good shepherd. It was Simon who’d guided Gerard Stock outside. In his life of ducking and diving, bartering and bullshit, Stock had probably come close many times to getting beaten up; Lol reckoned maybe he was now so physically attuned to the proximity of a kicking that his metabolism automatically came up with the most effective defence.

After it happened, Adam Lake could have battered him, drunk or sober, into the stone flags without blinking. But it was clear that all Lake wanted – women and some men shrinking away from both of them with cries of abhorrence and disgust – was to get into the men’s toilets and wash Stock away. On his way, he’d collided blindly with Simon.

Now Simon stank of Stock’s vomit, too, but Stock was clean and dry, leaning casually against the pub wall, the calm in the eye of the storm.

‘You are a piece of work, Gerard,’ Simon said. ‘It just drips off you, doesn’t it?’

‘I’m a survivor, Simon,’ Stock said.

‘You’d better go home. Lake’s going to be out in a minute, in search of a change of clothes. He sees you out here, he – he’s a big boy, Gerard. And not a happy boy.’

Stock made a contemptuous noise.

‘You as good as accused him of murdering Stewart. You accused him in front of a score of witnesses.’

‘Oh no.’ Stock straightened up. Apart from the sheen on his face, caught in the blue light from the window, he looked almost sober. ‘You don’t listen, Simon. I asked a question, was all. I asked who else might have done for Stewart if it wasn’t the Smiths. No libel in a question. Didn’t even ask him, either, I asked you. He doesn’t get me that easy. Nobody gets me that easy.’

Simon walked over to the pub door and pulled it until the latch caught. ‘Where did you get that idea, anyway, Gerard?’

Stock tapped a meaningful finger on the side of his nose: not telling. ‘But what a reaction, vicar. What a beautiful, instantaneous reaction… and’ – inclining his head to Simon – ‘in front of witnesses.’

Lol wondered precisely how drunk Stock had really been in there. How pissed did you have to be to throw up on cue?

A good publicist has control, tells you what he wants you to know, when he wants you to know it. Timing.

What was happening here? Lol felt on the edge of something from which he could still, if he wanted to, turn away. ‘You OK to walk home?’ he said to Stock. ‘Or you want Simon or me to—?’

Stock looked down at the dirt and cindered surface of the forecourt. ‘Not going home, yet, Lol, thank you. Gonna take a walk, clear my head. Time is it?’

‘Nearly closing time,’ Simon said, ‘in case you were thinking of going back inside, to attempt to get served.’

‘Actually, I think this may finally call for a change of hostelry.’ Stock produced a hawking laugh. ‘What d’you think, vicar?’

‘I think you’re walking a narrow ledge,’ Simon said.

‘Reason I need a clear head,’ Stock said, ‘is I’ve got your lady exorcist coming to visit. Tomorrow, we lay Stewart, as it were.’

Lol froze, as the latch of the pub door clacked. ‘Thanks very much,’ Isabel said to someone, and wheeled herself out. Then she saw Stock. ‘Bloody hell, you still here?’

‘You’re going to ask this woman to exorcize your place, then, are you?’ Simon said quietly. ‘It isn’t that simple, you know, Gerard. It isn’t just a formality.’

Stock sniffed. ‘Goodnight, boys. Goodnight, Mrs St John.’

He began to walk away towards the lane. Above him rose the broad-leaf woods that enclosed the village, the pinnacles of occasional pines piercing the green-washed sky, stars beginning to show.

‘Gerard,’ Simon called out, ‘it’s not something you fart about with.’

Stock stopped about fifteen feet beyond him and turned round. He was quite steady. He pointed a finger at Simon.

‘Don’t you,’ he said, ‘presume to patronize me, sunshine. I came to you with an honest request and you told me to piss off. Whatever happens with this woman, it’s down to you. Remember that.’

Lol thought the pointing finger quivered; he thought he saw a smear of something cross Stock’s half-shaded face, and then Stock stiffened and turned and walked away. At some point before the shadows took him, Lol thought the walk became a swagger.

Lol walked back to the vicarage with the St Johns, Simon pushing Isabel’s chair, lights blinking up on the Malverns.

‘Bloody hell,’ Isabel said. ‘Stink rotten, you do, Simon.’

They crossed the humpback bridge over the silent Frome, hop-yards either side, the bines high on the poles. Simon looked over to the church, about fifty yards from the river bank, small and inconspicuous among trees risen higher than its stubby tower.

‘Maybe the stink around Stock is subtler.’

‘I’m not sure he’s right about Lake,’ Lol said. ‘The way he claimed he just threw out a question and Lake dived on it, like this was a sign of some kind of guilt. I don’t think—’

‘Be nice, it would, to think he did have a hand in it.’ Isabel looked up at Lol. ‘But it didn’t feel right to me either. Boy was clever enough to realize smartish where Stock was going, but not intelligent enough to control his reactions – if he had something to hide. Does that make sense?’

Lol nodded. ‘Lots of money, well educated, but nowhere near as clever as Stock. And yet…’ He turned to Simon, took a breath. ‘Look, what you said about exorcism…’

They came to the vicarage; against dark woods and hills and the lines of foliate poles in the hop-yards, its whiteness seemed symbolic. There were no lights on in the front rooms, but a soft glow seeped through to most of the windows from some inner core.

‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’ Lol said.

Simon didn’t reply, went to open the gate. Isabel reached up and squeezed Lol’s arm. ‘Listen, love, he gets things he can’t put into words, sometimes. You know what I mean?’

Lol looked up over the wheelchair to a broken necklace of moving lights rising up into the Malverns, to a band of black below the stars.

17 Comfort and Joy

SOD IT. NOT a question of keeping confidences, not any more. Merrily switched on the anglepoise in the scullery, picked up the phone. At 10.45 p.m., this wasn’t going to make her very popular.

However, the situation had altered. She hadn’t been in a position to give away any names before, when all her information had come from Hazel Shelbone. But now there was another and possibly more reliable source.

Reliable? Merrily sat in the circle of light and prodded in Robert Morrell’s home number. Really?

Little Jane Watkins, now learning that there was no such thing as a free holiday, had done it again. While she hadn’t actually initiated the spirit sessions, she had been involved, albeit peripherally.

Peripherally? She’d had a finger on the damned glass!

The phone was ringing out at the other end. Morrell was going to be in bed getting a pre-holiday early night, sleeping the sleep of the self-righteous. The phone would also awaken his wife and kids – always hard to get kids off to sleep on the eve of a holiday.

Merrily wondered how easily Jane would sleep tonight. Getting it into proportion, she couldn’t really imagine herself as a kid – the black-clad, black-lipsticked Siouxie and the Banshees fan – standing up and warning her mates that their ouija game was actually a form of psychic Russian roulette, then walking primly away, to communal jeering.

Not even if she’d been a vicar’s daughter.

‘Yes?’ The woman’s voice wasn’t sleepy, but it wasn’t exactly accommodating either.

‘Mrs Morrell? Could I speak to your husband? I’m sorry it’s so late. My name’s Merrily Watkins.’

‘One moment.’ Resentful now.

Merrily waited. The fact remained that Jane hadn’t even mentioned the incident afterwards, even knowing it would be in confidence. This hurt; she’d thought they’d got beyond secrets, beyond concealment. She’d thought there wasn’t anything they couldn’t discuss any more. She’d thought they were friends, for God’s sake.

The phone was snatched up. ‘Mrs Watkins, I have to tell you that in just under seven hours, we’re leaving for the airport with three small children.’

‘Look, I’m really sorry. But this is something I need to know and if I left it until tomorrow I’d be doing it behind your back, which—’

‘If this is about what I think it’s about, I’d be immensely glad if you did look into it behind my—’ Morrell calmed down. ‘All right, I’m sorry. It’s been a difficult year. I need a holiday. Go on.’

‘I’ll be very quick. I understand the organizer of – what we were talking about – is a girl called Layla Riddock.’

He breathed heavily into the phone. ‘And you’re asking if I’m surprised?’

‘I can tell that you’re not – which is interesting.’

‘Before we take it any further,’ Morrell said, ‘anything I tell you has got to be absolutely unattributable. And I mean—’

‘Of course.’

‘Because normally I’d only discuss any of my students in this way with the police, and only then if there was some suspicion of—’

‘Sure.’

‘All right,’ Morrell said. ‘Layla Riddock… God almighty, do I really need this? Layla is… a dominant kind of girl. Stepdaughter of Allan Henry, yes?’

‘Allan Henry of Allan Henry—?’

‘Homes. With all the baggage that implies, and more. Obviously, I don’t have an overview of their domestic situation, but if I had to guess, I’d say that, like a lot of wealthy men with potentially problematical stepchildren, he’s been throwing money at her for years. Buying her compliance, until such time as she leaves home. She’s driving around, for instance, in the kind of car I couldn’t afford. Well… I probably could, but you know what I’m saying…’

‘Mmm.’

‘She’s an intelligent girl, but she’s got away with too much at home, which is why she expects to get away with the minimum of work at school. Swans around the place under this thin veneer of disdain at having to spend her days with children. You getting the picture?’

‘A bully, would you say?’

‘Not in the physical sense, far as I know. To be honest, I don’t think she’d lower herself. I think she can be intimidating enough, without resorting to physical violence. I mean, she’s quite…’

The line went quiet. Jane’s word had been ‘sinister.’

‘Something you’re thinking about, particularly?’ Merrily pulled her sermon-pad into the lamplight, reached for a fibretip. ‘Something which might save us both some time?’

She heard him breathe down his nose. ‘I’m thinking, inevitably, about the Christmas Fair we held at the school last year. Did you come?’

‘No, I was… a bit busy before Christmas. And Jane was off school, she wasn’t very—No, we didn’t come.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I can tell you we were all quite surprised, to say the least, when Ms Riddock volunteered to take part in the fund-raising – a Christmas Fair being something she might normally consider well beneath her. What she did, she approached the teacher in charge of the event and volunteered to set up a fortune-telling stall.’

‘Oh, did she?’

‘Yeah,’ he said ruefully. ‘I thought that might get you. Made a few of the staff sit up when she appeared on the day in full gypsy costume. Very exotic – and very expensive, too, according to my wife. Long, low-cut black dress, big gold earrings – gold, not brass. Black hat with a dark veil. All very mature, very mysterious, just a bit sinister, I suppose – but that may be hindsight.’

She always looks… tainted, somehow, Jane had said. Merrily lit a cigarette.

‘Some of the staff had reservations from the start,’ Morrell said. ‘But as it was the first time in anyone’s memory that Layla Riddock’d shown any enthusiasm for anything apart from burning rubber outside the gates, they weren’t inclined to push it. So they set her up in the hall, back of the stage, behind a curtain. Somebody painted a sign – Gypsy Layla – and, as all the other stalls were fairly routine, people were queuing up to cross her palm with silver. Men, too, once they’d seen her.’

‘She’s very attractive?’

‘I suppose you would say she exudes a certain hormonal something. Something you don’t often find at school Christmas fairs, anyway.’

‘And was she good at telling fortunes?’

‘She was bloody good at frightening people,’ Robert Morrell said bitterly. ‘Wouldn’t have frightened me, as you probably realize by now. But I accept that a lot of people are taken in by that kind of rubbish, against all their better instincts. Anyway, I don’t know much about this sort of thing, but I gather that the usual routine is to tell the customers they’re going to cross the water, or come into some money, live long and happy lives, have lots of children.’

‘What was she using? Crystal ball?’

‘I wouldn’t know. She was certainly reading palms at some stage. Anyway, the staff started to notice that very few people were coming out actually smiling. And the ones who did, their smiles tended to be rather strained. Then some granny emerges very white-faced and almost fainting. One of the female staff sits her down, brings her a cup of tea, learns that Layla’s looked at her palm and advised her to start getting her affairs in order because she ain’t… got… long.’

‘Oh.’

‘Quite. There were several others, we found out later. One pregnant woman, for instance, had been told to prepare for the worst. Or, as Layla apparently put it, “I see a withering in your womb.” ’

‘You found this out on the night?’

‘Not all of it. Some of the stories came out over a period of days. But, I suppose, the atmosphere on the night itself… well, as Christmas Fairs go, it’s fair to say there was gradually less of an ambience of comfort and joy than one might have wished for.’

‘She wasn’t stopped?’

‘Oh, she was stopped. Eventually. One of the parents had been kicking up about it long before it became widely known that she was taking people’s money for predicting death and sickness. The guy was objecting on religious grounds. Eventually, to my shame, we had to use that as a way of bringing it to a close.’

‘Anyone talk to Layla afterwards – ask her why she was doing this to people?’

‘I had Sandra – the deputy head – haul her in on the Monday morning. Waste of time. The girl pretended she couldn’t understand what the fuss was about – she was simply passing on the information she was picking up. Psychically. She claimed there was a long line of gypsies on her father’s side – her real father. I wanted to make her an appointment with the schools psychiatrist…’

Merrily wrote down: Gypsies – ask J.

‘But Sandra talked me out of taking it any further. Let it go. Just make bloody sure Gypsy Layla and her crystal ball don’t get invited back.’

‘Any of the kids, the other students, go in to get their fortunes told?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who was the parent who complained?’

‘A religious nutter. I’m sorry, I should say, one of our churchgoing parents, appalled that such a thing should be allowed to go on in an educational establishment, was threatening to take it up with the Director of Education. I was a bit short with him at first.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Is that important?’

‘Might be.’

‘Shelbone.’ A thoughtful pause. ‘David Shelbone. Father of – a fourth-year girl. And unfortunately he works for the council. He actually knows the Director of Education.’

Merrily kept her voice steady. ‘Layla know about this?’

‘Well, yes, of course, everybody did. I… the way we played it – and I’m not proud of this, but it seemed expedient at the time – Shelbone was still around, in another part of the school, so we had someone tip him off that people had been upset by the girl’s predictions. Sure enough, he comes rushing back. In God’s name, stop this wickedness! Embarrassing, really.’ Morrell chuckled. ‘But I don’t think anybody else went to have their fortune told after that. After a few minutes, Gypsy Layla walks away through the hall, head held high, grim little smile on her face. Crisis over.’

‘You thought.’ Merrily sat in the circle of lamplight and tried to remember if Jane had ever mentioned the incident. But she hadn’t gone back to school until the January term; probably all blown over by then.

‘And that’s all I can tell you,’ Morrell said. ‘However, if you are planning to take this any further, I’d offer two suggestions – one, if you’re going to take on Layla Riddock, remember you’re taking on Allan Henry, too, and he’s a man with unlimited money and with friends in high places.’

‘Not as high as mine, I always like to think.’ Merrily was starting to feel light-headed. How peevishly simple this could all turn out to be: Shelbone terminates Layla’s power-trip; Layla puts the frighteners on Shelbone’s daughter.

Morrell said, ‘My other advice is, leave Shelbone alone.’

‘You think he might try to convert me to Christianity?’

‘If you want to know about David Shelbone, talk to our friend Charlie Howe. He’ll tell you what kind of fanatic you’re dealing with – and I don’t just mean religion, which would probably never seem like fanaticism to you. The other reason not to bother Shelbone is that I’m afraid the poor guy has personal problems at the moment. I… I had a call about it earlier this evening. His daughter attempted suicide this afternoon.’

Merrily froze, the cigarette at her lips.

‘Less uncommon, I’m afraid, than it used to be,’ Morrell said, ‘especially at this time of year – children thinking they’ve done badly in their GCSEs, therefore their lives must be over. Maybe nothing at all to do with us, so I’m not going to theorize at this stage. Summer can be a stressful time for some kids.’

‘What did she do to herself?’ Half an inch of ash fell to the desk.

‘Friend of… Jane’s – is she?’

‘What did she do?’

‘Overdose, I believe. Taken to the County Hospital. They got to her in time, I gather.’

Merrily closed her eyes. The penny started spinning.

‘Always sad,’ Morrell said. Just like Merrily, he must have been putting two and two together from the moment the name Shelbone left his lips.

But he did have to be at the airport by seven.

‘So… if that’s all, I’ll get off to bed,’ he said.

She called Dennis Beckett; he knew nothing about Amy and an overdose. He couldn’t seem to absorb the significance. ‘But I prayed with her,’ he said querulously. ‘We prayed together.’ And then he added vaguely, ‘Perhaps she should have seen a doctor.’

‘Her parents wouldn’t.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘when I left her, she was spiritually calm.’

And how could you possibly know that?

Merrily asked him if he’d be visiting the parents tomorrow. ‘You are still minding the parish, aren’t you?’

‘Why did this have to happen?’ Dennis said plaintively.

Meaning, why did it have to happen while Jeff Kimball was on holiday.

‘What is it you want me to try and find out?’ he asked her at last, with resignation. He clearly didn’t want to have anything more to do with this case.

‘Could you find out if they’ll talk to me?’ Merrily said. ‘Both of them?’

She switched off the anglepoise and sat in the dark, watching the red light on the answering machine, wondering how she would have handled this if she’d known from the beginning about Layla Riddock.

When she switched the light back on, nothing seemed any clearer and it was eleven-thirty. She called Huw Owen, who never seemed to sleep.

‘I tossed the coin,’ she told him eventually. ‘It came up tails. Twice tails: no spiritual interference, no unquiet spirit.’

‘And how did you feel, lass?’

‘Weird.’

‘Come on, talk grown-up, eh?’

‘Sorry. I felt separation. Transcendence. Little me, big God. Plus, I was in there all night, but it felt like… not so long.’

‘How long?’

‘Six hours felt like – I don’t know – less than two. And you don’t fall asleep on your knees, do you?’

‘Contraction of time, eh?’

‘And it was… profound, moving, exalting – all that stuff. But I’m trying not to get carried away, because somehow it didn’t tally with what happened afterwards, out here in the material world. It’s not been a great day for me, Huw.’

‘Bugger me.’ She heard him drawing in a thin breath, like the wind through a keyhole. ‘You’re still expecting God to make it easy?’

‘I should scourge myself, put Brillo pads in my underwear?’

‘What I’m thinking, Merrily,’ Huw said reasonably, ‘is if you were in the church all last night, you should be getting some sleep. Just a thought.’

‘I grabbed an hour or so earlier. Look, I’ve got a kid who tried to kill herself. What can I do?’

‘Nowt. Let this Dennis pick up the mucky end of the stick for a change. Hang back, see what transpires.’

‘What transpires? Hasn’t enough bloody transpired?’

‘The girl’ll be safe in hospital for the time being.’

‘And what about Layla Riddock?’

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘there’s your problem, looks like. But we’re not the police. And even if we were, what’s she done wrong?’

‘Apart from terrifying old ladies and driving a little girl to the point of suicide as an act of pure vengeance?’

‘All right, it’s a tough one,’ he admitted. ‘Needs thought, prayer.’

‘Or the toss of a coin?’

‘Get off to bed, Merrily,’ Huw growled.

She lay in bed, with Ethel the cat in the cleft in the duvet between her knees. She slept eventually. She dreamed, over and over, that the phone was ringing. She dreamed of a withering foetus inside her and awoke, sweating, and then closed her eyes, visualizing a golden cross in blue air above her, and slept again and awoke – something coming back to her from the night in the church. And she thought, Justine?

Awakening, stickily, into blindingly mature sunlight and the echoey squeak-and-clang of the cast-iron knocker on the front door.

Panic. Jane would be late for—Stumbling halfway downstairs, dragging on her towelling robe before she realized there was no Jane to worry about. The knocking had long stopped; she didn’t know how long it had been going on, and now the phone was shrilling. She dragged open the front door, and found nobody there. She ran through to the scullery, saw she’d left the anglepoise lamp on all night, and grabbed the phone.

‘Oh. I was begining to think you’d left already.’

‘Sophie—? Oh God, what time is it?’

‘It’s just gone eight. Are you all right?’

‘Er – yeh. Sorry, I… Late night.’

‘You haven’t forgotten Mr Stock?’

‘Mr S—?’

‘The haunted hop-kiln,’ Sophie said. ‘You’re due there by nine, remember? I made an appointment for you?’

‘Oh shit…’

‘Merrily, I was ringing to warn you that we’ve had more calls from the press. The People asked if they could be there – exclusively – for the exorcism. We said on no account. We also declined to confirm that there was going to be an exorcism. Also, more alarming as far as the Bishop was concerned, the religious affairs correspondent of the Daily Telegraph—’

‘Did you know Amy Shelbone had tried to kill herself?’

‘What?’

‘Consequently, I need to speak to both the Shelbones. I think I’ve finally got some idea of what it’s about. Now, obviously they’re not going to want to speak to me, after what—’

‘Is the child all right?’

‘I think so. I don’t know. I haven’t had—’

‘I’ll talk to them. I’ll arrange something if I can. Merrily. Meanwhile… I hate to do this over the phone, and I did try to reach you last night but you were constantly engaged… I have to tell you the Bishop would like you to expedite this hop-kiln thing with the minimum fuss and the minimum publicity. He doesn’t want it dragged out. He doesn’t want to see you walking out of there into a circus of flashbulbs and TV lights.’

‘Sophie, it’s not that big a story.’

‘His exact words, as I recall, were… “Tell her to throw some holy water around and then leave by the back door.” ’

‘Put a bottle in the post and do the rest down the phone, shall I?’

‘He’s nervous, Merrily. Since the Ellis affair, where Deliverance is concerned, he’s been like the proverbial cat on hot bricks. Rarely a day goes by when he doesn’t ask me if we have a shortlist yet, for the panel.’

‘Meaning he doesn’t quite trust me.’

‘He’s nervous,’ Sophie repeated. ‘And once he finds out about this attempted suicide, he’s going to be very nervous indeed. Fortunately, he’s leaving at ten for a three-day conference in Gloucester. Transsexuality in the clergy. Should absorb his attention for a while.’

‘Three days?’

‘This year alone, surgery has increased the number of female clergy in Britain by four,’ Sophie said dryly.

‘I need to speak to Simon St John, obviously. I trust he’s not in the operating theatre.’

Sophie made a small noise indicating it wouldn’t surprise her unduly. ‘I shall call him and tell him you’re on your way. Just… go.’

‘I’ll call you when it’s over,’ Merrily said. ‘Whatever the hell it turns out to be.’

18 Lightform

‘AND THIS IS where…?’

‘You’re standing on it,’ Mr Stock said.

Although a despicable shiver had started somewhere below her knees, Merrily made a point of not moving.

‘The police, it seems, don’t operate a cleaning service,’ he said. ‘So we could hardly avoid knowing precisely where it was.’

They were standing, just the two of them, on stone flags in the circular kitchen at the base of the kiln-tower. The place had a churchy feel, because of its shape and its shadows. The light was compressed into three small windows, like square port-holes, above head height – above Merrily’s, anyway. And it was cold. Outside, July; in here, November – what was that about?

It’s about doing your job, isn’t it? It’s about not prejudging the issue on second-hand evidence.

She let the shiver run its course, let it sharpen her focus.

She’d driven over here with a head full of Amy Shelbone and Layla Riddock and Jane – everybody but Gerard Stock, whose problem had been devalued because he was allegedly a professional conman, a manipulator, a spin-doctor.

And then you walked out of a summer morning into this temple of perpetual gloom, and it came home to you, in hard tabloid flashes, that a man had actually been beaten to death, in cold blood, right here where you were standing, his face, his skull repeatedly crunched into these same stone flags.

Violent death would often have psychic repercussions; you knew that.

Then there was Gerard Stock himself – bombastic, bit of an operator, possible drink problem. This morning Gerard Stock was wearing a clean white shirt and cream-coloured slacks. His hair was slicked down and his beard trimmed. The impression you had was that Mr Stock had bathed this morning in the hope of washing away the weariness in his bones, changed into clothes that would make him feel crisp and fresh. But the weariness remained in his bleary eyes and the sag of his shoulders.

If this was an act, he was good.

‘There are… two different versions of the story.’ He was standing with his back to the cold Rayburn stove that sat on a concrete plinth, probably where the old furnace had once been. His voice was as arid as cinders. ‘The prosecution’s submission was that Stewart had been in bed upstairs – alone – when the boys broke in.’

‘Boys?’

‘Glen and Jerome Smith, nineteen and seventeen. Travellers. Members of their family had been helping Stewart with his research into the links between the gypsies and the Frome Valley hop farms. He’d bought the boys drinks in the Hop Devil, paid them also in cash for their “research assistance” – mainly a question of finding Romanies who were willing to talk to him. But, according to the prosecution, the Smiths got greedy, and they came to believe he had a fair bit of money on the premises.’

Merrily looked around. No indications of wealth and no obvious hiding places in a circular room that didn’t seem to have altered much from its days as the lower chamber of a hopkiln. Its walls were of old, bare brick, hung with shadowy implements, non-culinary.

Romantic, maybe, but not an easy place to live.

‘In their defence,’ Mr Stock said, ‘the Smith brothers told a different story which, to me, has more than a ring of truth. It certainly didn’t do their reputation any favours. Basically, they admitted visiting poor old Stewart on a number of occasions at night to… administer to his needs.’

‘You mean sexual,’ Merrily said. ‘For money.’

Next to her was a dark wood rectangular table top on a crossed frame which looked as if it had once been something else. A large-format book called The Hop Grower’s Year lay face down on it. On the back of the book was a photograph of the author – small features under grey-white hair so dense it was like a turban. The photo was one of those old-fashioned studio portraits with a pastel backcloth like the sky of another world, and the face brought home to her the reality – and the unreality – of why she was here. For this was him: the kiln-house ghost.

Her first task: to determine whether it was reasonable to believe that some wisp, some essence of this person was still here. Madness. Even half the clergy thought it was madness.

‘… Agreed they’d accepted money several times,’ Gerard Stock was saying, ‘for research and for giving him… hand relief, as it was described to the court. All rather sordid, but gypsies aren’t squeamish about sex. As Stewart pointed out in his book, their society might be closed to the outside world, but it’s very open and liberal when you’re on the inside. Gypsy kids tend to get their first carnal knowledge at the hands of siblings, if not parents. Prudish, they’re not, which is healthy in a way, I suppose – you won’t find many Romanies in need of counselling.’

He inspected Merrily, as if checking how prudish she might be. No way could she align this Stock with the slick PR man described by Fred Potter, the reporter, and hinted at by Simon St John. He was just someone trying to rationalize the irrational, more scared by it than he’d ever imagined he could be. He’d told her frankly that Stewart Ash and he had never got on – Ash always blaming him for leading his niece into a world of ducking, diving and periodic penury.

People will talk to you, as a human being, the Bishop had said, meaning she came over as small and harmless – no black bag.

‘Look… if you want to sit down over there…’ Mr Stock indicated a chair pulled out from the table. ‘I’m afraid Stewart really was found lying with his head almost exactly where your feet are.’

‘I’m OK. Go on.’

‘Well, he was wearing pyjamas. There was a lot of blood. His face was almost unrecognizable. We’ve scrubbed and scrubbed at the flag, but when the sun’s in the right position you can still see the stains distinctly.’

Merrily made a point of not looking down, inspecting the upper part of the room instead. She’d been in hop-kilns before, and couldn’t help noticing how basic this restoration had been – rough boarding fitted where once thin laths would have been spaced out across the rafters, supporting a cloth to hold the hops for drying over the furnace.

‘The Smiths always fiercely denied killing him, insisting, at first, to the police that someone must have followed them in and done it after they’d left.’

‘Any evidence of that?’

‘Of sexual activity? Apparently not. When there was nothing in the forensic evidence, nothing from the post-mortem, to suggest Stewart had recently had sex, they panicked and one of them changed his story – claiming they’d come here to do the business and found him already dead.’

‘That couldn’t have helped them,’ Merrily said.

‘Finished them completely, far as the jury was concerned. Found guilty, sent down for life. They’ve appealed now – every one appeals. Couple of civil-liberties groups assisting. Probably won’t succeed, but I imagine one or two people in the area are getting a touch jittery about it. We certainly are.’ He laughed nervously. ‘If they didn’t do it, who did? It’s one thing to live in a place where a murder was committed; something else to live with the possibility that the murderer’s still out there.’

‘You think that’s a real possibility?’

‘Oh yes.’

He walked over to the wall, pulled down a wooden pole with a slender sickle on one end. Unexpectedly, the crescent blade flashed in the shaft of sunlight from the middle window. Merrily stayed very still as he hefted it from hand to hand.

‘They used these things for cutting down bines. I sharpened it. I thought, they’re not going to get me like they got Stewart. Ridiculous.’ He shuddered, replaced the tool. ‘I just don’t trust the countryside.’

So why hadn’t the Stocks sold the place and got out?

‘I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to get to you?’

‘I—’ He looked at her, as if he was about to say something, then he hung his head. ‘I don’t really know. I just don’t feel safe here. Never have. Lie awake sometimes, listening for noises. Hearing them, too. The country is—’

‘What sort of noises?’

‘Oh – creaks, knocking. Birds and bats and squirrels.’ He shrugged uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know. Nothing alarming, I suppose. Except for the footsteps. I do know what a footstep sounds like.’

‘You’ve actually heard footsteps?’

‘Not loud crashing footsteps echoing all over the place, like in the movies. These are little creeping steps. Always come when you’re half asleep. It’s like they’re walking into your head. You think you’ve heard them, though you’re never sure. But in the middle of the night, thinking is… quite enough, really.’

It wasn’t quite enough for Merrily. ‘What about the furniture being moved?’

He looked up sharply. ‘Oh, we didn’t hear that happen. We had the table over the bloodstained flag – to cover it, keep it out of sight. We’d come down in the morning and find it was back where… where it is now. This happened twice. But we never heard anything.’

‘And you talked about a figure? You said in the paper you’d seen a figure coming out—’

‘Yeah.’ He walked over to the part of the wall opposite the door. ‘Coming out… just here. I said “a figure” because you’ve got to make it simple for these crass hacks – my working life’s been about avoiding big words. But actually it was simply a… a lightform. Do you know what I mean?’

‘A moving light?’

‘A luminescence. Something that isn’t actually shining but is lighter than the wall. And roughly the shape of a person. We’d finished supper… a very late supper; it was our wedding anniversary. And sudenly the room went cold – now that happened, that’s one cliché that did happen. It’s a funny sort of cold, you can’t confuse it with the normal… goes right into your spine… do you know what I mean?’

‘Yes, I do.’ This was, on the whole, convincing. When you thought of all the embellishments he might have added – the familiar smell of Stewart’s aftershave, that kind of stuff…

Merrily shivered again, glad she’d put a jacket on – to hide the Radiohead T-shirt, actually. She’d left the vicarage in a hurry – no breakfast, just a half-glass of water – throwing her vestment bag into the boot. Usually, she’d spend an hour or so in the church before a Deliverance job, but there’d been no time for that either.

‘Mind you, it’s so often like a morgue in here.’ Gerard Stock folded his arms. ‘And dark in itself creates a sense of cold, doesn’t it? The living room through there’s no better. That was formerly the part where the dried hops were bagged up, put into sacks.’

‘Hop-pockets,’ Merrily said.

‘Oh, you know about hops?’

‘A bit.’

‘Stewart had absolutely steeped himself in the mythology of hops – not that there’s much of one. He got quite obsessed over something that—I mean, it’s just an ingredient in beer, isn’t it? A not very interesting plant that you have to prop up on poles.’

‘There was a hop-yard at the back here?’

‘Was. The wilt got it.’

‘Is that still happening?’

‘I believe there are new varieties of hop, so far resistant to it. But it happened here.’

‘You said you saw lights out in the hop-yard.’

‘My wife. My wife saw them. I never have. That was the first thing that happened. It was soon after we moved in. Winter. Just after dusk. We’d brought in some logs for the stove, and she was standing in the doorway looking down the hill towards the hop-yard and she said she saw this light. A moving light. Not like a torch – more of a glow than a beam. Hovering and moving up and down among the hop-frames – appearing in one place and then another, faster than a human being could move. She wasn’t scared, though. She said it was rather beautiful.’

‘Just that once?’

‘No. I suppose not. After a while we didn’t—This might sound unlikely to you, but we stopped even mentioning those lights. When far worse things were happening in the house itself, I suppose unexplained lights in the old hop-yard seemed comparatively unimportant.’

‘Hops,’ Merrily said. ‘When you say Stewart was obsessed by hops, you mean from an historical point of view, or what?’

‘Well, that too, obviously. But also hops themselves. I wouldn’t claim to understand what he saw in them. To me, they’re messy, flakey things, not even particularly attractive to look at. But when we first took possession of the house, the walls and the ceiling were a mass of them: all these dusty, crumbling hop-bines – twelve, fifteen feet long – and the whole place stank of hops. I mean, I like a glass or two of beer as much as anyone, but the constant smell of hops… no, thank you. And when you opened a door, they’d all start rustling. It was like—’ He shook his head roughly.

‘Go on.’

‘Like a lot of people whispering, I suppose. Anyway, we cleared out the bines. It felt as though they were keeping even more light out of the place. Some of them were straggling over the windows. The windows in the living room back there once looked out down the valley. Apparently.’

Through the central window in here she could see blue sky. Through the other two, blue paint. It probably hadn’t even been this dark when it was a functioning kiln with a brick furnace in the centre.

‘The barns,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘That’s awful,’ Merrily agreed, ‘but I’m afraid it’s not—’

‘Your problem. No.’

‘Have you talked to a solicitor?’

‘I’ve talked to a lot of people,’ Mr Stock said.

‘Erm – that aroma of hops.’ Merrily breathed in slowly, through her nose. ‘I almost expected you to say you’d been smelling it again.’

She thought his eyes flickered, but it was too dim to be sure. He shook his head. ‘No, nothing like that.’

‘So… what about your wife?’

He was silent. His face seemed to have stiffened.

‘I mean, how badly has she been affected? She saw the… lightform?’

‘My wife…’ He turned away, shoulders hunched. ‘Won’t talk much about it. When the hacks were here, we had to virtually manufacture some suitable quotes for her. Maybe she thinks it’ll all just go away.’

‘You mean she’s not so scared…?’

‘As me? Probably not. Obviously, neither of us likes the darkness – it’s the kind of darkness you have to fight. And you lose. In here, a two-hundred-watt bulb’s like a forty. Bills’ve been horrendous. But Stephie – perhaps she just doesn’t believe Stewart would harm her. Also, more of a religious background than me. Catholic, lapsed. But it doesn’t go away. Not like…’

Merrily smiled.

‘I’m sorry, didn’t mean to be insulting. I was raised in the C of E.’

‘All I meant about your wife,’ Merrily said, ‘is that I think she should be here too, when we do whatever we do. As a blood relative of Mr Ash.’

‘Well, she will be… She’ll be here tonight.’

‘Mr Stock,’ Merrily said, ‘if I could just make a point here. Unless you really think that for some reason it’s important for this to be done at night, I don’t necessarily think that’s a good idea. I think it might be better for all of us’ – better for the Bishop, too – ‘if we said some initial prayers, perhaps a small requiem service for Mr Ash. Without delay.’

‘Now?’ He didn’t quite back away.

‘By daylight, anyway. Personally, I always think there’s an inherent danger in making this all too—’

‘Serious?’ Almost snapping.

‘Sinister. I’ll probably need the book, but we can dispense with the bell and the candle.’

She could almost see his thoughts racing, something almost feverish in his eyes. Did he have plans to involve the media? Had something already been arranged for tonight?

He unfolded his arms. ‘All right. I can call Stephie at work. Maybe she can take time off. How long will the exorcism take?’

‘That might be too big a word for what we do. Not very long, I shouldn’t think. Best to keep things simple. Oh – and I’d also want to ask the vicar if he’d like to join us. Two ministers are better than one in this kind of situation and it’s usual to involve the local guy when possible.’

‘St John?’ Hint of a sneer. ‘He won’t want to know, tell you that now.’

‘I’d like to ask him, anyway, if that’s all right with you.’

He shrugged. ‘Your show.’

‘Yours, actually. And your wife’s. And it would actually be helpful to have a few other people who knew your wife’s uncle. Is there anyone you think—?’

‘Oh no!’ Both hands went up. ‘Definitely not! I don’t want local people in here, I’m sorry. We don’t exactly have any close friends in the area. I’d rather this wasn’t talked about.’

‘But you went to the press.’

‘I was desperate. I’ve told you, I felt threatened. I didn’t know who I could trust, especially after the vicar refused to help us. Bottom line is I don’t want any of those people in here. All right?’

‘OK. Erm, another point – at a service of this kind, we need to draw a line under the past. A big element is forgiveness. I think that means we’re looking for some kind of reconciliation between you and Stewart, which of course has to be initiated by you.’

He laughed. ‘I’d guess that for Stewart one of the best things about death would be never having to see Gerard Stock again. But… you know best.’

‘Well, I don’t really know anything for sure,’ Merrily said. ‘We’re assuming Mr Ash is what you might call an unquiet spirit.’ Huw Owen would call it an insomniac. ‘Our fundamental purpose has to be to guide him away from whatever’s holding him down here towards a state of—’

‘Look!’ He put his hands on his hips, faced her. ‘Is this going to, you know, tell us anything?’

‘I’m not a medium, Mr Stock.’

‘What if Stewart’s… spirit, whatever you want to call it, is unable to rest because it wants to get a message across? Like, for instance, that his killer’s still out there.’

‘Ah.’ Merrily looked down at the flags. Around her shoes she could now make out the outline of what might have been a stain. Hidden agenda coming out at last? ‘Who’s the killer, then, in your view?’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ he said.

‘Because you don’t know. Or maybe you’ve got ideas?’

‘I’ve got ideas. However, I might be open to legal action were I to share them with you, Mrs Watkins.’

‘OK. What’s the actual time now? I’m afraid I came out without my watch.’

He held his wrist up to the light. ‘Just after ten minutes to ten.’

God, was that all? She needed breathing space, prayer space.

‘Look, I’ll call her now,’ he said. Something seemed to have lifted inside him. ‘Daytime. Yes. I should’ve thought of that. Daytime’s much better.’

‘And meanwhile I’ll go down to the church, talk to the vicar and change. See you back here in… an hour, or less?’

‘Yes. Fine. Thank you.’

They went back through the living room, the former hop-store, where any extra light not blocked off by the barns was absorbed by drab leathery furniture – Stewart’s, probably. By the back door, Merrily turned, looked up at Stock.

‘Could I just ask you – what do want this to achieve? I mean you personally?’

He wasn’t ready for this one, didn’t meet her eyes. Instead, he went to open the door for her, and the day came in like a golden cavalry of angels.

‘I want things to be normal,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

She drove up to the minor road leading to Knight’s Frome and was almost through the village before she realized that it was the village. The church was out on the edge, the other side of the river; the white house nearby could only be the vicarage. No car outside.

She pulled on to the verge, about fifty yards away from the church, took off her jacket, threw it over the passenger seat, lit a cigarette and checked her mobile for messages.

Just the one. ‘Merrily. Sophie. I’m afraid I can’t raise the vicar, but Bernard says go ahead without him. He’ll clear up any political debris. Which I suppose means I shall.’

Right, then. Merrily switched off the phone and put out her cigarette. As she was climbing out of the Volvo, she saw, through the wing mirror, a rusting white Astra pulling in about twenty yards behind.

It was already hot, and not yet ten-fifteen. A single cloud powdered the sky over the church, which was low and comfortably sunken, with a part-timbered bell tower. Pigeons clattered in what had once been a hedge surrounding the vicarage.

From the car boot, Merrily pulled her vestment bag and a blue-and-gold airline case containing two flasks of holy water. She’d knock on the vicarage door, on the off chance someone was home. If not, she’d change in the church, always assuming it was open. Slinging the bags over her shoulder, she bent to lock the car. As she pulled out the key, there were footsteps behind her, a quiet padding on the grass. She turned quickly, wishing she hadn’t locked the car.

She froze.

The mirage was wearing a black T-shirt, jeans and those same round, brass-rimmed glasses. She was aware of the bird-song and the laboured chunter of a distant tractor as they stood and stared at one another for two long seconds.

He shuffled a little, nodded at the Radiohead motif on her chest. ‘So, er… what did you think of Kid A?’

‘Erm…’ Stunned, she put down the vestment bag, adjusted the plastic strap of the airline case. She swallowed. ‘Well… you know… it kind of grew on me. Parts of it.’

‘Uh huh.’ He nodded. Then he said rapidly, ‘Merrily, I’m sorry to, you know, spring out at you like this. I did come round to the vicarage quite early this morning, but—’

‘That – that was you knocking?’

‘But there was no answer, so I went to buy a Mars Bar and a paper at the shop, and then I ran into Gomer Parry and we talked for a few minutes and then… when I got back your car had gone.’

‘I… overslept.’ Merrily saw flecks of grey in his hair. It was shorter now; the ponytail hadn’t come back. She bit down on her smile, shaking her head. ‘You really choose your times, Lol.’

‘Because you’re working.’

‘Yeah. I mean, could we…? I mean…’

‘Gerard Stock, right?’

She felt the smile die completely.

‘As… as you know,’ Lol said hesitantly, ‘I’m about the last person to try and tell you anything about your job. But… don’t do this.’

‘What?’

‘Put him off – could you do that? Stall him? Please?’

‘I… No. No, I can’t do that.’

‘Then at least come and talk to the vicar,’ Lol said.

19 And then… Peace

THE VESTRY AT Knight’s Frome was about the size of a double wardrobe and didn’t have a proper door, never mind a lock. She had Lol stand guard just inside the church porch while she changed.

This was getting crazy, too much to take.

She unpacked the bag: full kit plus pectoral cross.

Jane, of course – Jane would love this situation, wouldn’t she just? All the times in the past six months the kid had asked innocently, ‘Have you heard from Lol? Has Lol been in touch? Does Lol spend all his weekends in Wolverhampton…?

Merrily took off her skirt and T-shirt, got into the cassock that she never wore except for services, since a certain incident.

Laurence Robinson: palely sensitive singer-songwriter – in downbeat, low-key, minor chords. Unlucky in love, survivor of a nervous breakdown and some years of psychiatric treatment. Might well have become the next Nick Drake – Q magazine. If, like poor Nick, he’d killed himself, the less satisfactory route to immortality.

But Lol had survived to become droll, self-deprecating and, from Jane’s point of view, dangerously cool. The stepfather to die for. And flirt with, obviously.

Merrily did up all the fabric-covered buttons of the cassock. Fortunately the kid was away. Her own feelings she could control, up to the present.

The last time she’d seen Lol Robinson had been on Dinedor Hill, above Hereford, where a few days earlier a young woman’s death had been shatteringly avenged – leaving Lol in the middle of steaming wreckage with two people dead and one dying. Heavy trauma. In a still December dusk, before Christmas, the two of them had stood next to a fallen beech tree on the edge of the Celtic hill fort and looked down over the city, where steeples and the Cathedral tower were aligned under a shadow of cloud and the distant Black Mountains.

A prayer, a meditation, in remembrance of the victims and then they’d walked back down the hill, hand in hand. And then Lol, no big fan of organized religion, had told her he was wondering if there wasn’t some middle way between spiritual guidance and psychotherapy… a new path, maybe. And they’d walked away to their separate cars and she’d known in her heart that they would meet again sometime, at least as friends, but that this wasn’t the moment to allow things to go further.

Lol Robinson. Just about the last person she’d expected to meet today, materializing in a heat haze at the roadside. And, more confusingly, revealed as one of the anti-Stock contingent warning her to back off.

Like she had a choice.

Abandoning attempts to contact Merrily, Lol had been on the road by seven a.m., knowing that if he didn’t catch her before she went out, she could be anywhere in the diocese and there’d be no chance of talking to her until she arrived at Stock’s tonight – by which time it would be too late.

I truly hope your friend has the sense not to get involved, Simon had said. And then, last night, Isabel: He gets things he can’t put into words.

When he found Merrily had left the vicarage, he’d gone into Hereford, checked the Bishop’s Palace parking area, then called the office to make sure she wasn’t there. Mrs Hill remembered him but wouldn’t tell him where Merrily had gone. She’d offered to pass on a message; Lol said it was OK, no problem. He’d decided to stake out the entrance to Stock’s place, all day if necessary, to catch her before she could go in.

But he’d arrived back in Knight’s Frome to find she was already there. Shoved the car into some bushes, gone running down the gravel track by the kiln, about to go and hammer on the door, disrupt whatever was happening… when the door had opened and she’d walked out—

—followed by Stock: Merrily and Stock together. The first time he’d seen her in six months and here she was with Stock, who was looking, from this distance, as pristine as the husband in some old soap-powder ad, a man on the side of the angels. Merrily had been nodding to him – conveying understanding and sympathy – and at one point seemed about to take his hand. But then she’d turned and walked towards her car and Lol had sidled along the bushes, back to the Astra, to follow the Volvo.

When she’d parked close to Simon’s church, it had seemed meant. He’d made his move. Shock value. It hadn’t even been too difficult to persuade her to walk with him the few yards to the white vicarage.

Where it had all seized up like an overwound clock.

The door had been opened by a woman of about sixty-five, in a pinny, who told them the vicar and Mrs St John had gone shopping in Hereford. They always went on a Tuesday, see, because it was a slack day in the city, between the weekend rush and the Wednesday market. Easier for Isabel to get around town, the housekeeper had explained. Easier for Hereford if Isabel was in a good mood, she’d implied.

Blank wall. How could he persuade Merrily to back away from this when he couldn’t tell her any more than she already knew?

Like, what was the real reason Simon had refused to exorcize Gerard Stock’s kiln? It was becoming clear that there was more to it than the vicar’s declared belief that Stock was fabricating the whole thing either to screw Lake or milk some money out of an inheritance he couldn’t sell.

Isabel had implied, Trust him. Lol didn’t trust him – too many suggestions of instability there. And if anybody could spot instability, it was Lol.

He stood gazing down the aisle of Simon’s very basic little parish church – no fancy carving, no stained glass – towards the altar. The truth was he had no reason to trust anyone in the clergy, except—

He turned at the swish of the velvet curtain, and she emerged from the vestry like she was stepping out of a dress-shop cubicle. Apparently, some men were kinky for women priests, like with nurses and meter maids, because of the uniform. But when Lol watched Merrily stepping into the nave, in her cassock and white surplice, it only made him scared.

Stock was very bad news. Simon knew more than he was saying.

Lol… was just a guy who wrote songs.

She gave him a small smile. She looked like a child playing dressing-up – the silly-vicar outfit. Then he saw the lines at the corners of her eyes. New lines.

‘Don’t look so worried,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s what I do.’

Walking back to the car, she sensed his discomfort. She didn’t think he’d ever seen her in the full gear before. Now she was a priest, with an aura of black and white sanctity; not a woman any more. There was even a new stiffness, a formality, in the way he spoke to her.

‘I just think,’ Lol said, ‘that perhaps you should ask him why he can’t sell the kiln – just to see what he says.’

‘Lol, that’s…’ It was childish, but she did it: pushed herself onto the bonnet of the Volvo, with the surplice fanning out around her. ‘That’s irrelevant, isn’t it? I’ve heard all about him, I know what kind of man he’s been, I realize he probably went to the papers for the express purpose of stirring it for this guy Lake, or capitalizing on it in some other way. But it – it doesn’t change the fact that I do think he’s got some trouble here. If I had to like and admire all the people I was asked to help, then… well, I’d be having a lot of days off, you know?’

Lol kept peering up the road and Merrily knew he was hoping to delay things until Simon St John got back from Hereford.

‘If you’re thinking about me…’ She felt suddenly edgy and embarrassed and delved in her bag for cigarettes. ‘I’m protected. From above, by the Bishop. And… from further above. I mean… you know… come in with me, if you want.’

‘In?’

‘When we do it. I don’t imagine Mr Stock would mind. I wouldn’t.’

Merrily bit her lip. She hadn’t thought about that, she’d just said it. She thought about it now. The standard advice to Deliverance ministers was to have a few good Christians around at an exorcism, including a second minister, if possible. Back-up. What kind of Christian you could call Lol she had no idea, but he was actually living here, he actually knew Gerard Stock… and, however he felt about dogma and the clergy generally, she knew by now that she could trust him. All the way.

The car bonnet was warm under her cassock. She looked at the fragmented cloud over the little church of Knight’s Frome and then back at Lol. He was coincidence. Charismatic Christians, like the infamous Nick Ellis, saw every small coincidence as a pointer from God.

‘Look, there are two ways of looking at an exorcism of place,’ she explained.’ It’s not waste disposal, pest control, Rentokil, whatever… it’s helping a dislocated essence… spirit… soul back on to the path. What I mean is, maybe we’re doing this less for Gerard Stock than for Stewart Ash.’

‘Whom neither of us knew.’

‘Every day, in crematoria all over the country,’ Merrily said sadly, ‘duty clergy conduct funerals for people they never knew, in front of grieving relatives they’ve only just met. Maybe we’ll meet him today.’

Lol looked up, startled.

‘It’s been known for the subject of an exorcism to make one final appearance,’ she said. ‘And then… peace.’

‘Hi!’ Stephanie Stock sprang up from the old leather sofa. ‘It’s really, really nice to meet you at last.’

A central ceiling light-bowl and two lamps were on in the living room at the kiln-house. It still didn’t get close to summer daylight. The walls had been painted white, but the furniture was old and dull. Unexpectedly, the brightest thing in the room was not the white-shirted Stock, but his wife. She squeezed Lol’s hand, lingering over it, smiling into his eyes.

‘I’ve kept on saying to Gerard, hey, bring him over! I had the first Hazey Jane album years ago, when I was at school, and I’m just dying to know what you’ve been up to since. It’s not as if… I mean, you’re looking good!’

Lol blinked. Stephie Stock wore a short white summer dress, like a low-cut tennis frock. She was considerably younger, conspicuously more animated than her husband who, close up, was looking as worn and grey as you might expect after last night in the Hop Devil. She’s a mouse, Simon St John had said dismissively. What other kind of woman would Stock marry?

‘Steph, this is Merrily Watkins,’ Stock said. This was a different Stock, sober and withdrawn. He had raised no objections to Lol being here, expressed no particular surprise that Lol and Merrily were acquainted. The feeling Lol had was that Stock was just relieved it wasn’t Simon.

Stephanie slowly let go of Lol’s hand, running her warm, slender fingers to the tips of his. She looked at Merrily and her wide mouth flexed into a one-sided grin. ‘You know, it’s still really strange to see a woman with the full—’

‘Steph was brought up a Catholic,’ Stock said quickly. ‘Convent girl.’

‘And, let me tell you, you don’t escape that easily,’ Stephanie said ruefully.

Lol was studying her. He still couldn’t be sure. He remembered that his Lady of the Bines had had darkish hair, stringy. Or maybe just wet. Stephanie’s hair was golden brown, shorter, looked altogether healthier. As did the woman herself: smiling, confident, in essence not the keening banshee wreathed in dead bines. But then nor was this the Stephanie Stock he’d been told about.

‘Coffee?’ Stephie offered. ‘Beer? Wine?’

Merrily shook her head. ‘Maybe afterwards.’

‘Afterwards! Wow. This is really going to happen, isn’t it?’

‘Of course it is!’ Stock snapped. Then he straightened up, pulling his shoulders back.

‘Poor love,’ said Stephie. ‘He gets so spooked. One thing about Catholicism, it teaches you not to be too afraid of what goes bump, right? Look, Mary—’

‘Merrily.’

‘Right. Sorry. Look, am I… suitably dressed for this? I could go up and change.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ Merrily said. ‘I was saying to Gerard earlier, I don’t like this kind of service to seem sinister, because it’s basically about liberation. We’re asking God to give you back your home and at the same time free Stewart’s spirit from this earth and let him go into the light. In fact, it could be that when we’ve finished, you’ll notice a difference here.’

‘What, lighter?’

‘Let’s just see what happens.’

‘Wow,’ said Stephie.

She seemed very young to Lol. Although she had to be over thirty, she still had the confidence of inexperience – innocence, even. He couldn’t understand, seeing her now, why she’d kept such a low profile locally, why neither Prof nor Simon had ever met her. It couldn’t be that Stock had kept her penned up like some exotic pet; she didn’t seem the kind of person you could treat that way. And anyway, she was the one who went out to work while he stayed at home.

‘So, how much time have you got?’ Merrily asked her.

‘Well, I’m currently temping for this big car-dealer and it’s quite busy… but I guess I’ve got two hours. Is that enough? I mean, I can phone them…’

‘Let’s see how it goes. Erm… Stephanie, I’ve already asked Gerard, but is there anything else you think I ought to know?’

‘About Uncle Stewart?’

‘About anything.’

‘Well, not really, I’m just – I’m just glad you’re doing this for Gerard. I’m glad someone’s taking him seriously.’

‘But how do you feel about it?’

‘How do I feel?’

‘You don’t seem too scared.’

‘What’s to be scared about? He’s my uncle. My charming, camp old Uncle Stew.’

Merrily smiled tentatively. Lol could see her dilemma. Trying to put them at their ease, saying she didn’t want it to be sinister. But this girl seemed more at ease than the exorcist.

‘OK, then,’ Merrily said. ‘Let’s make a start. I want to organize some things in the kiln area. What I’d like the two of you to do is sit quietly and think about… about what this is for. Think about Stewart. Think about helping Stewart. Maybe recall some happy memories of him?’

Stock snorted mildly.

‘I can think of some,’ Stephie said.

‘Good.’ Merrily beckoned to Lol. ‘And, Gerard… maybe you can think in terms of reconciliation, like we talked about.’

The airline bag was open at her feet. She brought from it one flask and placed it on the table.

‘This was once a hop-crib,’ Lol observed. ‘See the crosspieces? There’d be like a big canvas hammock thing hanging here.’

‘Gosh,’ Merrily said, ‘you know your way around hops, then.’

‘There’s a museum down the road. They’ve got several cribs.’ Lol sensed that Merrily was less sure about all this now, after meeting Mrs Stock. He wondered if he should tell her about the Lady of the Bines.

He looked around the circular wall of old bricks, some of them actually blackened by the furnace. It was like being in a big chimney and nearly as dark. Apart from the stove and a tall, juddering fridge everything in here seemed to be still hop-related. Even the shelves on which crockery was piled looked old and stained.

‘OK,’ Merrily said quietly. She looked around the kitchen, then took down one of the coffee cups, put it in the centre of the table. She bent and took a small canister out of the airline bag, stepped back, closed her eyes.

Lol moved away, looking down at his trainers. He couldn’t quite believe he was doing this. He felt privileged to be here, but that didn’t make him feel any closer to her. She was The Reverend Watkins.

Merrily said softly, ‘We come to bless this place and pray that the presence of God may be known and felt in it. We pray that all which is evil and unclean may be driven from it. As a sign of the pouring forth and cleansing of God’s Holy Spirit, which we desire for this place, we use this water. Water has been ordained by Christ for use in the sacrament of Baptism…’

She poured water from the flask into the coffee cup, whispered to Lol, ‘We’re guarding against anything else that might be around.’

He nodded. The fridge rattled.

‘Lord God Almighty, the Creator of life, bless this water. As we use it in faith, forgive us our sins, support us in sickness and protect us from the power of evil.’

Merrily made the sign of the cross, opened her eyes and picked up the small canister. She took off the lid: salt. She blessed the salt, sprinkled some on the water. ‘Water for purification,’ she explained softly to Lol. ‘Salt representing the element of earth. A formidable combination. In any religion.’

Merrily stepped back from the table. ‘You up for this, Lol?’

Lol nodded.

‘Think calm.’

‘Sure.’

Merrily put her right hand briefly over his. Her fingers were cooler than Stephie Stock’s. The light, at close to noon, glanced off her pectoral cross. Lol thought, unhappily, of vampires.

‘I think we can bring them in now,’ Merrily said.

20 The Metaphysics

IT WAS PARTICULARLY during a Requiem Eucharist that images of the departed had been known to appear, sometimes standing next to the priest. They would usually look solid and entirely natural, an extra member of a select congregation.

Sometimes, as the rite was concluding, they would smile.

Gratitude. The received wisdom was that the hovering essence, presented with an overview and offered assistance, would usually recognize the pointlessness and the tedium of haunting. Nine out of ten cases, Huw Owen had told his students, they’re not going to resist you. They’ll not fight. Most times you’ll get a welcome like an AA van at a breakdown on the M4.

And so sometimes they appeared. Smiling.

Actually, this had never happened to Merrily – either that or she wasn’t sufficiently sensitive to have noticed. Always nervous enough, anyway, before it began. Who was she to go dancing on the great boundary wall?

Never, never, never show nerves, Huw Owen would warn his students. All the same, don’t let them think it’s a bloody tea party.

A balancing act, then, these dealings with the dead.

Initially, Merrily had prepared for a Requiem for Stewart Ash. The dining table, the converted hop-crib, was to be her altar. On it, she’d set out wine in a small chalice she kept in the airline bag and communion wafers in a Tupperware container.

And then – woman priest’s privilege? – she’d changed her mind.

Question of sledgehammer and nuts, Huw had said more than once. You don’t even get out the nutcrackers if you can squeeze it open between finger and thumb.

So she ended up telling the Stocks she didn’t think there were enough people here for a valid requiem – not enough committed Christians (she didn’t actually say that). She’d explained to them that she proposed, in this first instance, to offer a prayer commending the soul of Stewart Ash to God, and maybe a prayer of penitence for his killer, followed by a blessing of each room, a sprinkling of holy water.

A Eucharist for Stewart would be the next step if all this proved ineffective.

Gerard Stock had nodded: whatever the priest thought best.

Stewart’s book on hop-growing still lay on the table. Merrily was unsure about this. Perhaps it should have been taken away; it represented his work, part of his attachment to the earth which it was now necessary to break. His other known attachment had been to young men; how strong was that now? The pull of earthly obsession: weakened, but not necessarily severed by death.

In the otherwise-silence of the kiln, the growling refrigerator was an unstable presence; its noises varied and fluctuating, as if it were trying to tell her something.

‘Our Father…’

It remained the most powerful prayer of all, an exorcism in itself. This was how they all should begin.

How you took it from there… well, there was always an element of playing it by ear, by sensation, by perception – always remembering that, in the end, it wasn’t you doing this; you were only the monkey, you didn’t have any powers. You could only respond to signals.

In the kiln-house kitchen, the sun shone through as best it could; the fridge still shivered. The timing seemed about right: nearly noon, the time of no shadows. Nothing sinister.

Merrily offered the prayer conversationally, with only a little extra stress on the crucial line ‘… and deliver us from evil.’

Us.

Four of them in a semicircle in this half-lit brick funnel. Gerard Stock with shoulders back, eyes closed, lips invisible in the beard. But she knew now that those moist, rosebud lips were clamped tight on Gerard’s hidden agenda – oh, there was one, something raging inside him, like the fire in a brick furnace. Merrily was sensing anger and frustration made unbearable by fear. Even Fred Potter, the journalist, had picked up on that. But fear of what, exactly?

‘For ever and ever. Amen.’

‘Amen.’ An echo from Gerard Stock and Lol.

‘Sorry.’ Stephanie giggled. ‘Amen.’

Convent girl, huh?

There was – and face it, it could be relevant – almost certainly a problem in Stock’s marriage, no concealing that. Stephanie’s eyes were wide open, the twist of a smile on her lips – not taking this seriously and not caring who knew. There were perhaps twenty years between her and Gerard. Maybe he’d been slim and successful when they’d met – glamorous parties, cool contacts. Now he was looking florid and finished – career-wise, anyway.

Stephanie was standing between the two men, but closer to Lol than to Stock, their shoulders sometimes even touching, and Stephanie’s was bare, her strap slipping, and Merrily felt a stirring of—

Whatever the emotion was, she squashed it. She was the priest here.

All right: the metaphysics.

Had the transition of Stewart Ash simply been too sudden? Merrily caught a cold, shocking image of the spirit flung out, flailing and struggling, as the skull went crack, crack, crack, crack on the flags, an implosion of shattered bone and dying brain cells. Huw Owen again: Most hauntings are imprints, caused by the atmospheric shock of sudden death. Your imprint is no great problem – a tape loop, a magic-lantern show. It’s with the insomniacs and the sleepwalkers you need a bit of one-to-one.

Or was there, as Gerard Stock had suggested, a powerful, residual sense of injustice because the nature of the crime had been misunderstood, the wrong people convicted?

Merrily prayed silently to understand, to get a feeling of what was needed, and then intoned aloud: ‘O God, forasmuch as without You we are not able to please You, mercifully grant that Your Holy Spirit may, in all things, direct and rule our hearts, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’

‘Amen’ – Stock and Lol. Nothing from Stephanie – she looked hazy, suspended in the column of the midday sun. Next to her Stock seemed dense, leaden. Was Stephie already building another life for herself, away from here? And where would Stock be if she left him? This was, after all, her house.

‘At this point, we’ll have… a period of quiet,’ Merrily said. ‘If that’s OK.’

‘Sure.’ Stephanie’s voice was crisp, and Stock glared at her, like a disapproving father, but said nothing. Merrily turned her face away from a collision of light beams emanating from the tiny trinity of windows, and looked down at the flags where Stewart Ash had been taken down, and then closed her eyes.

Greyness.

Stewart…?

Careful not to reach out for him or call him back. It was about being receptive. She kept her eyes shut, allowing any unfocused thoughts to drift away. There was a metallic shudder from the fridge, then comparative quiet.

In her head: Stewart… don’t be afraid to let go. I know it’s very confusing for you. You must have been utterly terrified – and outraged. You must have felt, along with the pain, a terrible sense of betrayal. Perhaps you’re still feeling that. But there’s no progression without forgiveness. Try to release your resentment, the sense of injustice. We’re with you. God’s with you. Let go. Please.

She lifted her face towards the central window, now framing the full sun, an orange glow through her eyelids. Appealing now to Jesus Christ to come into this place, because it was always better to welcome in the light than simply drive out the darkness.

‘Jesus, we ask that Stewart might be free of all earthly bonds. Free to go into the light and the warmth and the sublime reality of Your eternal love.’

She bent her head.

The commendation came next: a call to the spirit, in the name of its creator, to leave this world. An appeal to God to send His angels to meet Stewart, guide him home. Something told her to omit the prayers of penitence for the killers. Keep the killers out of this, whoever they might be.

Next: the cleansing.

‘Father, You have overcome the power of death, strengthen us now with Your spirit and make us worthy to perform correctly the blessing of this home. Let evil spirits be put to flight and may the angel of peace enter in. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’

Lol thought, This has to be a scam. But who’s using who?

He watched the priest, his friend, through half-closed eyes – her hands together, the tips of her fingers parallel with the bridge of her nose, the pectoral cross catching the sun through the inverted V of her black-sheathed forearms.

Doing her best for these people: no scam, no sham.

Merrily. If there was only…

Stephanie Stock’s bare arm slid up against his own, again. He tried not to think about it.

Merrily opened her eyes to a light lancing through the central window, was momentarily blinded and felt an intense heat all around her, as though there was still a furnace in here and the doors had been flung open.

She felt sweat on her forehead and a harsh rawness at the back of her throat. She fought the urge to cough.

Oh God.

It had caught her off guard. Until then, there’d been nothing: a growing sense of anticlimax, no sense at all of Stewart Ash. Now the kiln seemed claustrophobic, suddenly stifling, and when the fridge grated like a passing container lorry she realized what she’d forgotten to do.

She saw Lol watching her, a flaring of alarm in his eyes. She put a hand to her throat, swallowed. Her throat was burning. She was gasping on a stench of gunpowder and rotten eggs and the smell of cheap fireworks from when she was a kid, fierce and searing as a jet from a blowlamp, hot breath of hell.

21 The Brimstone Tray

SULPHUR?

As she struggled for breath, she was asking herself Is this real? and turning to glance at the stove in case it was pumping black smoke.

It wasn’t.

Then Lol’s voice: ‘Merrily…?’

His normal voice – no wheezing, no coughing. He wasn’t getting it; none of the others were. She began to utter in her head the lines of St Patrick’s Breastplate: Christ be with me, Christ within me…

Hand to her mouth, she crossed the room and pulled open the door leading to the hop-store-turned-living-room. Rushed in and grabbed a wooden dining chair to wedge the door open.

Christ behind me, Christ before me…

Huw Owen coming through. What’ve you forgotten, Merrily? Huw putting them through their paces in a Victorian chapel in the Brecon Beacons. DOORS! All of them… cat-flaps… cupboards… open and wedge… firmly… come on… it’s not a joke! Do it! Open and wedge! OPEN AND WEDGE!

She dragged open the door of the huge old fridge… a cold, white bulb blinking on inside. Then the heavy door began to swing back on her and she pulled down two bottles of Chardonnay from a shelf inside to set on the flags and wedge it open. When she turned back into the room, Lol was moving towards her.

She croaked, ‘No!’

One of them must have jogged the hop-crib table, because the chalice instantly tipped over and the red wine began dribbling into the cracks in the wood. Why hadn’t she put away the sacrament when her plan for the Eucharist was shelved? Why hadn’t she done that?

She snatched the flask of holy water to safety as the spilled wine dripped down and pooled in the outline of Stewart’s bloodstain on the flags below.

When she could manage to speak, she said, ‘It’s all right. Not what I thought.’ It came out both hoarse and shrill, no kind of reassurance.

What she meant was: It’s not Stewart Ash. Something was loose, playing with her senses, but it wasn’t Stewart.

‘Grant, Lord—’ She broke off and took a deep breath, watching droplets of holy water from her flask twinkling in a channel of sunlit dust. ‘Grant, Lord, to all who shall work in this room that in serving others they may serve you.’

But in her voice, the recommended blessing for a kitchen sounded as potent as watered milk. She’d blown it. She’d been unprepared, had come in here, unforgivably, as a partial sceptic, her mind absorbed by something else, and whatever was here had known it and gone for her and only her.

What is it? What’s here? Who are you?

She cleared her throat, hands trembling around the flask. She could still taste the sulphur. Stephanie Stock was watching her, amused, as if storing up the whole event for a party anecdote – Stephie’s famous impression of the loopy woman who thought she was an exorcist.

‘The living room?’ Merrily asked.

Gerard Stock nodded. He kept glancing at the small pool of wine on the floor, now a stain on the stain.

Coincidence? Coincidence!

But Stock was sweating, wet patches the size of dinner plates under each arm. I’ve lost it, Merrily thought in horror, I’ve let it through. It’s come through me! She was aware of Lol watching her intently, as if there were only the two of them here. Lol, who rarely judged, almost never condemned – because he was a loser and a wimp, he’d insist.

Stock began to lead the way into the living room. She stopped him, a hand on his arm.

‘Gerard, I think I… need to go first.’

How ridiculous that must sound from the smallest person in the place, and plainly incompetent. She saw Stephanie suppressing a smile, with difficulty. And then she goes, ‘Gerard, I need to go first…’ Howls of laughter.

In the living room, the only smell was a faint aroma of mould from the two heavy armchairs and the lumpy sofa. Merrily called on God to unite all who met therein in true friendship and love. It sounded trite and hollow. She saw a wood-burning stove and over it a framed photograph of a younger, slimmer Gerard Stock with two people she didn’t recognize and the late Paula Yates.

‘Bedroom?’

Of course, she should already have known where it was. She should have been up there already. Should have been all round this place.

‘Through that doorway,’ Stock said, ‘and the stairs are on the left.’

‘Thanks.’

The bedroom was instant vertigo.

Lol came last up narrow, wooden stairs that were not much more than a loft-ladder, passing through where a trapdoor must once have been, joining the Stocks and Merrily on the platform where hops had once been strewn to dry. It was floor-boarded now, but it didn’t feel safe, somehow – probably because you emerged gazing straight up into the apex of the big timber-lined cone, the witch’s hat of the hop-kiln, all that dark-stained wood rising to the wind-cowl.

Someone had switched on lights – metal-cased bulkhead lamps bolted to the sloping walls. Just as well; the only windows up here were like the arrow slits in a church belfry. On a stormy night, Lol thought, it would be either wildly exhilarating or terrifying.

‘We’ve got quite a lot to do up here yet, as you can see,’ Stephie Stock said, as if they were potential buyers viewing the place.

‘Shut up,’ Stock rasped.

What a turnaround: bullying, boisterous Stock become all edgy and anxious. Swaggering Stock turned sober and tense. His back to the wall. His back to Stephanie. And to the bed.

The only furniture – apart from a modern sectional wardrobe, its louvred doors now being flung open by Merrily – was a double bed without a headboard, still unmade. Stephie went to sit on the edge, crossing her legs. Lol was aware of a slightly sour amalgam of scents, including – he was fairly sure – hops. Hop-pillows, maybe… or the residue of millions of rustling hop-cones?

Sleep? Fucking hops work like rhino horn. Fact, man. Me and Steph, we’re living in an old kiln, walls impregnated with as much essence of hop as… as the beer poor old Derek can’t pump. My wife… leaves scratches a foot long down my back.

The other Gerard Stock. The one who did not bring his wife to the pub.

From the bed, Stephie gave Lol a conspiratorial smile. Her golden-brown hair was in provocative disarray, her eyes still and knowing; she was now the only one of them who appeared entirely relaxed.

Lol smiled briefly, uncomfortably, turned away to look for Merrily. Something had happened to her down there, maybe just an attack of nerves, and she’d temporarily lost the plot and then recovered. Now she was moving round the sloping wall with her bottle of holy water, and she looked forlorn, vulnerable, like a child.

He felt useless – worse than that, faithless; he didn’t believe this exercise was helping anyone, least of all the murder victim. He didn’t know why they were here at all, what Stock was after. He felt superfluous and embarrassed, an extra. He felt Merrily was being made a fool of – joke vicar. He felt an irrational and unusual urge to put a stop to this melodrama, demand an explanation – what Prof Levin, with style and finesse, would have done ages ago.

Only two people were taking this seriously now, pressing on.

‘Stand up,’ Stock said tiredly to his wife. ‘Please.’ It was clear to Lol now that, whether Stock believed in the power of the Holy Spirit or not, this was something he still very much wanted to happen.

Stephie came languidly to her feet, stood by the bed. Merrily moved into the centre of the room, and they formed a small circle, the boards creaking.

‘Lord God, our Heavenly Father,’ Merrily began, ‘you, who neither slumber nor sleep, bless this bedroom…’

Water flying again like a handful of diamonds. The bedroom formally cleansed and blessed, but nothing, for Lol, seemed to have changed. At the end, flask in hand, Merrily stood at the top of the stairs. Her forehead was gleaming. She faced the bed.

‘Lord God…’ Her voice was louder now, Lol sensing defiance. ‘Holy, blessed and glorious Trinity.’ With her right hand, she made the sign of the cross. ‘Bless…’ Another cross. ‘… hallow and…’ again. ‘… sanctify this home, that in it there may be joy and gladness, peace and love, health and…’

The noise came out of her surplice. She drew a wretched breath and closed her eyes, carried on.

‘… goodness, and thanksgiving always… to You, Father, Son and…’

It didn’t stop; it shrilled and shrilled, piercing the prayer like a skewer, over and over.

‘… Holy Spirit,’ Merrily’s voice shook. ‘And let Your blessing rest upon this house and those who…’

With a peal of pure joy, Stephanie Stock reeled back on to the bed. A shoulder strap slipped all the way down, half uncovering a breast, with two livid scratches forking up from the nipple.

‘I think you’d better answer that, vicar,’ Stephie squeaked, convulsed. ‘It might be God.’

The minutes after midday. A brutal sun. Global warming: so un-British. Christ. Merrily pressed her back against the ouside brick wall. She’d pulled off her surplice, and she buried her face in it for a moment.

‘I’m so… so sorry.’

‘These things happen.’ Stock was beside her, sour with sweat.

‘I switched it off. I was sure I’d switched it off. I distinctly remember switching it off.’

‘You don’t understand.’ He leaned his face into hers, suddenly almost aggressive, his eyes red and squinting in the full sun. ‘These… things… happen here. They happen. I thought you knew this stuff.’

In a pocket of Merrily’s cassock, the mobile phone went again.

‘Answer it,’ Stock said. ‘Go on… answer it. There’ll be nobody there. I guarantee there’ll be nobody there.’

‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to go.’

Skirt hitched up, shoes kicked off, she was squatting at the top end of the bed, her head back against the wooden wall. She raised a hand. A double click, and two of the bulkhead lights went out, leaving only the one over the bed still on. She was very much in shadow now, and there was no doubt at all any more. She was from his dreams.

‘Look.’ She was reaching down now, to the side of the bed, then underneath. A rustling. ‘Remember…’

Merrily had left very quickly, making the sign of the cross, then almost stumbling down the stairs, with her phone still screeching; she couldn’t seem to switch it off. Stock was right behind her, Lol making to follow, until Stephanie had called him, sultry siren in a slippery tennis dress, slipping off. She glanced down at it, then back at Lol, blinking hard as if trying to wake up. ‘He won’t come back,’ she said rapidly. ‘He’ll see the vicar off and then he’ll go to the pub, drink himself stupid, come crawling home in the early hours. Collapse on the couch, like the sad pig he’s become.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘What’s to be sorry about?’ She lifted a forefinger, crooking it at him. Baring her teeth. She said something he didn’t understand, which began with a sibilance. ‘Usha…’ He didn’t like it. He started down the wooden steps. It was the sound that made him look back – he had to – and he saw her haloed under the utility lamp, fingered by the slitted sunlight.

Garlanded again.

‘… A kam mangela.’

She was breathing hard, her breath surrounding her, it seemed, like a chilled mist.

‘I warn you,’ he heard, ‘don’t say no to me now.’

The voice came rolling warmly out of the phone, so loud Merrily had to pull it away from her ear. Stock heard and hmmmphed and walked away, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets.

‘Merrily! Wasn’t sure I’d get you. Knew you couldn’t be in church, this time of day. Least, I thought you wouldn’t.’

‘Charlie?’

‘You had lunch yet, Merrily?’

‘Charlie, listen, I’m with somebody right now.’

‘Oh, I am sorry,’ Charlie Howe said. ‘Just that I’ve got some information for you, my dear. Talking to Brother Morrell last night about this sad business with the Shelbone girl, and a couple of things rather clicked into place, and I thought… I thought you ought to know about them, that’s all. And, of course, I also thought you might like some lunch.’

‘Well, thanks, but… actually, I don’t feel too hungry. I was thinking of—Well, it’s been a complicated morning.’

‘A coffee, then. I’ll be here for an hour or so yet.’

‘Where?’

‘The Green Dragon in Broad Street? If you don’t manage to show up, look, give me a ring tonight – though I’ll be out till quite late. But you might find it worth your while, I’ll say n’more than that.’

‘All right. Thanks. That’s very good of—Charlie, how did you get this number?’

He laughed. ‘That Sophie Hill’s a hard one to crack, but her armour’s got its weak points, like everyone else’s. My, you do sound a bit subdued, girl. Nothing else going wrong in your life, is there? Can’t take on all the troubles of the world.’

‘No.’ She saw Gerard Stock walking back towards her and realized how badly she wanted to get away from here. ‘I’ll try and get over there. I’ll do my best.’

Gerard Stock had made an irritable circuit of the yard and, as he came beefing back, she saw the change at once and got in first.

‘Gerard, would you do something for me?’ He looked suspicious. ‘If I give you some prayers, would you be sure to say them?’

He stared at her.

‘I’ve got some appropriate ones printed out in a case in the car,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to say them at specific times. Both of you, if possible. If not… one of you will do.’

‘That going to help, is it, Merrily?’

For the first time, he was challenging her. Was this because she’d quite clearly messed up in there? Or was it because his wife was no longer with them? So where is she? And where’s Lol?

‘It will help,’ she assured him. ‘But I’d also like to come back again. I think this may need more attention. And more preparation than we were able to give it today.’

‘You and liddle Lol?’

She sighed. ‘Like I said, I’ve known Lol Robinson for some time, although I didn’t know he was living here. He’s somebody I can trust, that’s all.’

‘He’s a bloody psychotherapist. That why you brought him? Just tell me the truth.’

‘No. Really.’ She shook her head. ‘And he’s not yet officially a therapist, anyway.’

‘So what was it that made up your mind?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘What I’m asking’ – he tilted his head, scrutinizing her sideways – ‘is what happened, liddle lady, to make you decide I wasn’t after all just a scheming townie trying to shaft his neighbours?’

‘I’d never decided you were.’

‘Because something did happen in there, didn’t it?’

She took a breath. ‘All right, something happened.’

‘So tell me. I’ve got to go on living here.’

‘Tell me something. What does sulphur mean to you?’

‘Why?’

‘Is there anything around here that might… or might once have… released sulphur fumes?’

‘Not now. Not any more.’

‘Meaning what?’

He shrugged. ‘I’ll show you.’

She followed him back into the kitchen. The gloom seemed at once oppressive – or was she imagining that? He went straight to the wall where the implements hung, brought down a short pole with what looked like an ashpan from a stove or grate attached. He sniffed at it.

‘Can’t smell anything now.’ He thrust it towards her. ‘Can you?’

‘What is it?’

‘Was known, I’m told, as a brimstone tray. Used for feeding rolls of sulphur into the furnace.’

‘Why’d they do that?’

‘Some sort of fumigation. It also apparently made the drying hops turn yellow, which the brewers preferred for some reason. Made the beer look even more like piss, I don’t know. I don’t think they do it any more.’

‘Would sulphur have any special interest for Stewart Ash? Can you think of—?’

‘You’re saying you smelled sulphur.’

‘Quite powerfully.’

He tilted his head again. ‘Fire and brimstone… Merrily?’

‘That was what it smelled like. Could be argued it was subjective, I suppose.’

‘Oh… subjective.’ Stock held the wooden shaft of the brimstone tray with both hands like a spade. ‘There’s a good psychologist’s word. Why don’t we ask Lol what he thinks?’

‘Like you said, things are inclined to go awry in there. A few minor elements which, when you put them together, suggest a volatile atmosphere. Not necessarily connected with the murder of Stewart Ash.’

‘Volatile?’

‘I would like to come back, Mr Stock.’ She saw Lol in the doorway. ‘What about tonight?’

‘To do what?’

‘There are quite a few things—’

Stock hurled the brimstone tray to the stone with cacophonous force.

Merrily flinched but didn’t move. ‘—things we can still try.’

‘You don’t really know what the fuck you’re doing, do you?’ Stock snarled.

Lol walked in.

‘No… geddout… both of you.’ Stock picked up the chalice and the Tupperware box of communion wafers, shoved them in the airline bag, tossed the bag to the flags near Merrily’s feet. ‘You’re a waste of time, Merrily. I heard you were a political appointment.’

Merrily bit her lip.

‘Been better off with the fucking arse-bandit,’ Stock said.

‘Well…’ Lol picked up the bag. ‘This is actually quite reassuring. For a while back there, I was almost convinced you’d been possessed by the spirit of a nice man.’

Stock looked at him silently, then back at Merrily. He was waiting for them to go.

Merrily paused at the door. ‘I’d like to come back. If not me, then someone else.’

‘Geddout,’ Stock said.

22 Barnchurch

‘MERRILY!’ CHARLIE HOWE stood up, tossing his Telegraph to one of the tables in the hotel reception area. He was wearing a creased cream suit and a yellow tie with the lipsticked impression of a woman’s red lips printed on it, as though it had been kissed. He looked genuinely delighted to see her. Putting an arm around her shoulders, he steered her into the coffee lounge. ‘What a job you’ve got, girl: devils and demons on a wonderful summer’s day.’

She’d shed the cassock, was back in the T-shirt. ‘How d’you know I wasn’t doing a wedding?’

‘Contacts.’ Charlie tapped his long leathery nose.

‘Sophie’ll be mortified.’

‘When Mrs Hill wouldn’t tell me where you were, look, nigh on forty years of being a detective told me a wedding wasn’t an option.’

‘Smart.’

‘Pathetic, more like.’ He pointed to a window table. ‘Over there?’

‘Fine.’ She followed him. ‘Why pathetic?’

‘’Cause I miss it, of course.’ They sat down. ‘Don’t let any retired CID man tell you he don’t miss it. I’m even jealous of my own daughter.’

‘I’m jealous of your daughter,’ Merrily said ambivalently.

Charlie laughed and patted her wrist. ‘Scones,’ he said. ‘I feel like some scones. You don’t diet, do you?’

‘My whole job’s a diet.’

‘Scones, my love,’ he called to the waitress before she’d even made it to the table. ‘Lashings of jam and heaps of fresh cream. And coffee.’

‘Just spring water for me, please, Charlie, I’m afraid I don’t have very long. I’m sorry.’

She and Lol were due to meet at the Deliverance office in the gatehouse at five. Lol had said he had things to tell her, but neither of them had wanted to hang around Knight’s Frome. It was a blessing, in Merrily’s view, that someone like Lol had been there, seen the way it had gone, the two faces of Gerard Stock.

‘We better get down to it, then,’ Charlie said. ‘Brother Shelbone.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘Not wrong about that one, were you, Merrily? As for the little lass…’

‘Little lass?’

He looked pained. ‘Give me some credit, girl. This suicidal Shelbone child and that kiddie getting messages from her dear dead mother, courtesy of Allan Henry’s stepdaughter – one and the same, or what?’

‘You never retired at all, did you?’

‘I tell you, my sweet,’ said Charlie Howe, ‘the longer you live in this little county, the more you wonder how anybody manages to keep anything a secret. There are connections a-crisscrossing here that you will not believe.’

‘Really?’

‘She was very lucky, mind – the child. The version I heard, the mother only found out because she’d got a headache herself, and saw the aspirins were down to about three in the bottom of the jar. Another half-hour and your colleague over in Dilwyn would’ve had a very sad funeral.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘No cry for help, this one. Kiddie must’ve been messed up big-time. You were dead right, and Brother Morrell was dead wrong, out of touch.’

‘He didn’t know the full circumstances.’

‘Nor wanted to, Merrily, nor wanted to. I tell you another thing – nobody who was at the Christmas Fair’s likely to forget that girl of Allan Henry’s. Jesus Christ, no…’ He looked suddenly appalled. ‘Oh, I am sorry. Easy to forget what you do, Reverend, when you’re out of uniform.’

‘Doesn’t offend me, Charlie, long as it’s not gratuitous. Keeps His name in circulation.’

Charlie Howe raised both eyebrows. The scones arrived. ‘Put plenty of jam on,’ Charlie said. ‘You’ll be needing the blood sugar.’

Then on to David Shelbone. ‘Got to admire him, really,’ Charlie said. ‘Sticks his neck out for what he believes. You know anything about listed buildings?’

‘I live in one.’

‘So you do.’

‘Frozen in the year 1576. I pray we never get an inspection, because my daughter’s created what she calls The Mondrian Walls in her attic… all the squares of nice white plaster and whatever between the beams are now painted different colours.’

‘Good example,’ Charlie said. ‘Most listed-buildings officers would let that one go, because you can always paint them over again in white. Brother Shelbone – forget it. A stickler. Told one of our lady councillors she had to take down a conservatory porch she’d put on her farmhouse. When the good councillor tries to square it with the department under the table, it gets leaked to the press. Red faces all round. That’s David Shelbone: staunch Christian, not for sale.’

‘And that’s bad, is it?’

Charlie grinned. ‘Oh, it’s not bad. It’s good, it’s remarkable – and that’s the point. In the world of local government, a very religious man who cannot tell a lie or condone dishonesty of any kind is remarkable.’

‘Meaning a pain in the bum.’

‘Correct. It was widely thought that when the councils were all reorganized, he’d get mislaid, as it were, in the changeover. But he survived.’

He looks after the old places, makes sure nobody knocks them down or tampers with them. Hazel Shelbone in the church. They offered him early retirement last year, but he said he wouldn’t know what to do with himself.

Merrily licked jam from a finger. ‘His wife indicated he’d been under some pressure.’ Migraines, Hazel had explained. ‘Maybe that’s not been a happy household for a while.’

She didn’t look at Charlie Howe, helped herself to a second scone. Anything said to her by Mrs Shelbone ought to be treated as confidential; on the other hand, Charlie expected give and take. After forty years in the police and now local government, it would be how his mind worked.

‘Pressure,’ he said. ‘Oh, no question about that. Brother Shelbone’s under serious pressure. Over Barnchurch alone.’

‘The new trading estate, up past Belmont?’

‘Source of much weeping and gnashing of teeth,’ Charlie confirmed.

‘Well, it looks awful,’ Merrily said. ‘There was a time, not too many years ago, when Hereford used to resemble a country town. I mean, do we really need a supermarket every couple of hundred yards? DIY world? Computerland? It’s like some kind of commercial purgatory between rural paradise and traffic hell.’

‘My, my.’ Charlie added cream to his coffee.

‘Nothing personal.’

He leaned back, hands clasped behind his head. ‘What do you know about the origins of Barnchurch? The history of the site.’

‘Fields and woodland, home to little birds and animals.’

‘Gethyn Bonner? You know about him?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘Thought you’d know about Gethyn Bonner. He was a preacher. Came up from the Valleys in the 1890s, sometime like that.’

‘Ten a penny,’ Merrily said with a small smile.

‘Tell a few of my colleagues that. Tell English Heritage.’

‘I’m not following.’

‘Gethyn Bonner was an itinerant firebrand preacher with a big following, who came out of Merthyr Tydfil and decided Hereford was the land of milk and honey.’

‘As you do.’

Charlie drank some coffee. ‘Hadn’t got a chapel of his own, but a good Christian farmer, name of Leathem Baxter, had a barn to spare. A few local worthies, including a craftsman builder, all gathered round and they put a big Gothic window in the back wall, and in no time at all Leathem Baxter’s barn was a bona fide church.’

‘Barnchurch.’

‘Exactly. Well, in time, Gethyn Bonner falls out of favour, as these fellers are apt to do, and moves on up to Birmingham or back to the Valleys, I wouldn’t know which, and Leathem Baxter dies and the church becomes a barn again, and the Gothic window gets bricked up… and it’s all forgotten until the Third Millennium comes to pass.’

‘And, lo, there came property developers…’ said Merrily.

‘Barnchurch Trading Estate Phase One. Should be completed in time for Christmas shopping. Phase Two, however… that’s the problem. Nothing in its way except a derelict agricultural building, not very old – Victorian brick – and falling to bits.’

‘I see.’ Merrily poured some spring water.

‘Well, even before work started on Phase One, the developers had been assured by the Hereford planners that there’d be no bar at all to flattening this unsightly structure – which, as it happens, also blocks the only practical entrance to the site of Phase Two. Reckoning, of course, without Brother Shelbone.’

‘Suddenly, I like him a lot.’

‘Who helpfully points out that, although the building itself is of limited architectural merit and not, in fact, very old, its historical curiosity value makes it a monument well meriting preservation.’

‘It’s fair enough,’ Merrily said. ‘They should’ve consulted him before they started.’

Charlie leaned forward. ‘Merrily, nobody in their right mind consults David Shelbone, they just pray he’s otherwise engaged at the time. Brother Shelbone gets involved, it’s gonner cost you: time and money. And the stress factor.’

‘So he’s put a preservation order on the Barnchurch. Can he do that on his own?’

‘What he does is gets it spot-listed. It then goes to the Council, with a report and a recommendation from Shelbone. Well, this is seen as a very significant project, with considerable economic benefits for the city, and the Council, by a small majority, goes against the advice of the Listed Buildings Officer and declares that the Barnchurch can be flattened.’

‘I don’t remember reading about this in the papers.’

Charlie smiled thinly. ‘The authority has a certain leeway these days to conduct business not considered to be in the public interest less publicly.’

‘Which stinks, of course.’

‘But is quite legitimate. Anyway, David Shelbone isn’t a man to be put off by petty local tyranny. He goes directly to the body responsible for conservation of historic buildings – English Heritage – and they step in. So then—’

‘Which way did you vote, Charlie? Just so we know where we are.’

Charlie Howe grinned, whipped cream on his teeth. ‘I abstained, of course.’

‘Ah.’

‘Didn’t really think I knew enough about the issue.’

‘Why do I find that hard to believe? So, can English Heritage overrule the Hereford Council?’

‘Not just like that. It’ll have to go to Central Government for a decision. Because what had happened, see, was that the developers had already lodged an appeal contesting the scheduling of an old heap of bricks as a building of historical merit. There’ll be a public inquiry before an inspector from the Department of Culture – or the Ministry of Arty-farty Time-wasters, as one of my colleagues likes to call them.’

‘Which will take time to organize, I suppose.’

‘Months and months – and then more months waiting for a decision. Even if they get the green light at the end of the day, it’s going to’ve cost the developers a vast amount of money, what with all the delays and their contracts with prestigious national chains on the line. In the meantime, some of those firms are bound to go elsewhere. The situation is that Barnchurch Phase Two’s already looking like a financial disaster on a serious scale.’

‘And all because of one man.’

‘You got it.’

‘Who are the developers?’ Merrily asked.

‘Firm called Arrow Valley Commercial Properties.’

Merrily shook her head. ‘Not heard of them.’

‘Subsidiary of Allan Henry Homes,’ said Charlie. ‘You with me, now?’

Merrily put down her scone.

Charlie Howe’s arms were folded. She studied his face, tanned the colour of lightly polished yew. She knew very little about him, either as a councillor or a former senior policeman, but if she had to guess why he was going out of his way to feed her controversial information, she wouldn’t get far beyond the fact that he clearly enjoyed causing trouble – stirring the pot.

‘Gosh,’ she said.

‘You talk for a bit and I’ll listen.’ Charlie glanced around. ‘You’re all right: no witnesses.’

‘Well… phew… where do we start? David Shelbone may well have got himself crossed off Allan Henry’s corporate Christmascard list.’

Charlie poured himself more coffee. ‘You ever actually come across Allan Henry, Merrily?’

‘He doesn’t go to my church.’

‘He’s an ambitious man, and a very lucky man. Things’ve fallen his way. Just a moderately successful small-time house-builder for quite a few years, then his horizons got rapidly wider. Took over Colin Connelly’s little workshop development beyond Holmer when Colin had his accident. And then things started falling into his hands. A few slightly iffy Green Belt schemes, but he got them through. One way or another.’

‘Erm… would you say he found success in ways that might have interested you in your former occupation?’

Charlie Howe said, very slowly, ‘I am saying nothing that might incriminate any of my colleagues on the council.’

‘I see,’ said Merrily.

Charlie drank the rest of his second cup of coffee.

‘So David Shelbone could be getting in quite a few people’s hair.’

‘I think I said as much earlier.’

‘Why are you telling me all this?’

He cupped his hands over his eyes and nose, rubbed for a moment before bringing them down in the praying position.

‘Got nobody else to tell any more,’ he said. ‘Last thing Annie wants is the old man on her back. Most of the people I mix with… well, you never know quite who you’re talking to, do you?’

‘What happened to your… to Annie’s mother?’

‘Oh, it was a police marriage. Average life expectancy five years. Better nowadays, actually. Now there are plenty of professional women around, so you can take up with one who understands all about funny shifts and late-night callouts and having to cancel your fortnight in Ibiza because you’re giving evidence at Worcester Crown Court. Back then, it was this huge majority of full-time housewives and mothers who didn’t understand at all.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He grinned. ‘Don’t be bloody sorry, vicar. I’ve had a lot more fun in twenty-five unencumbered years than I had with her. Anyway… I met you there at the school and I liked your attitude and I thought we were likely to be on the same wavelength on certain matters. And then that little girl taking the overdose – that rather clinched it.’

‘Well… thanks.’

‘I don’t much like Brother Henry,’ he said. ‘I don’t like him as a businessman or as… as a man.’

‘Because?’

‘Because… well, he’s ruthless and he’s vindictive, for starters. The rest I’d need to think about.’

‘And Layla Riddock’s not even his daughter.’

‘He brought her up, though,’ Charlie said, ‘didn’t he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Me neither, really. I don’t know how long he and Shirley Riddock have been together. But it makes you think, don’t it just?’

‘He must’ve been very disappointed when certain people failed to persuade David Shelbone to take early retirement.’ Merrily broke off a small piece of scone and then put it back on the plate. ‘Oh hell, this is getting ridiculous.’

‘Nothing’s ridiculous,’ said Charlie Howe. ‘Hello…?’

Merrily looked up. A man had come in through reception and was walking directly towards their table.

‘Well, well,’ Charlie said.

Merrily recognized Andy Mumford, Hereford Division CID. Being promoted to Detective Sergeant in the twilight of his career must have given him new heart, because he’d lost weight. Sadly, it had made him look even more lugubrious.

‘Andrew Mumford, as I live and breathe.’ Charlie beamed but didn’t stand up. ‘This your local now then, boy, in keeping with your new-found status?’

‘Hello, boss,’ Mumford said heavily.

‘Dropped in for some career advice, is it? Stick it as long as you can, I’d say. Half these so-called security jobs, you’re just a glorified caretaker. Have a seat.’

‘I won’t, thank you, boss. In fact, it was actually Mrs Watkins I was looking for.’

‘Well… you can study for the ministry up to the age of sixty,’ Merrily told him, ‘but at the end of it, caretakers still earn more money.’

Mumford didn’t smile. ‘Mrs Watkins, Mr Howe’s daughter and my, er, governor would like it a lot if you could come to her office for a discussion.’

‘Oh.’ She sat up, surprised. ‘OK. I mean… Just give me half an hour. Because I do need to pop over to my office first.’

‘No, Mrs Watkins,’ Mumford said. ‘If you could come with me now…’

‘Only somebody’s going to be waiting for me, you see.’

‘If it’s Mr Robinson you mean,’ Mumford said, ‘we’ve already collected him at the gatehouse.’

Mumford’s unmarked car was parked in one of the disabled-driver spaces at the top of Broad Street. He drove Merrily across town and entered the police car park, from the Gaol Street side.

It was the pleasantest time of day, layered in shades of summer blue. Mumford didn’t have much to say. He’d evidently been warned not to spoil the surprise. But he’d said enough.

Annie Howe had been given a new office. Merrily couldn’t remember how they reached it. She didn’t notice what colours the walls were. She didn’t remember if they’d taken the stairs or the lift. She felt like she was walking on foam rubber through some bare, grey forest in the wintry hinterland of hell.

Howe’s office door was pushed-to, not quite closed; they could hear voices from inside.

Mumford knocked.

No answer.

He pushed it a little. ‘Ma’am?’

Inside, the room was dim, the window blinds pulled down. Merrily could see a TV set, switched on. The picture on the screen looked down at a group of people standing about awkwardly, looking at each other as if they didn’t know what to do next.

‘… oom?’ a woman said.

One of the others, a man, nodded and walked across the screen and out of shot.

‘Better wait here a moment, Mrs Watkins,’ Mumford said.

On the TV screen, nobody moved for a second or two, then a woman, much shorter, followed the man.

The sound was not very good, with lots of hiss; you could hear the voice, although you couldn’t see who was speaking.

The voice said awkwardly, ‘Gerard, I think I… need to go first.’

23 Poppies in the Snow

‘SIT DOWN, MERRILY.’ Annie Howe switched off the TV. She went over to the window and reeled up the blind, revealing a small yard and the back of the old magistrates’ court.

It was possibly the first time she’d said ‘Merrily’, rather than ‘Ms Watkins’. Using the first name the way police talked to suspects – patronizing, to make them feel lowly and vulnerable.

Right now, it was entirely superfluous. Merrily sat in an armless chair, one with aluminium legs. She felt sick, wishing she’d said no to the scones. And to Gerard Stock.

The last time she and Annie Howe had been face to face, Howe had said, I don’t know how you people can pretend to do your job at all. To me, it’s a complete fantasy world.

Merrily put her hands on her knees. ‘Where’s Lol?’

‘Robinson’s being interviewed separately, by Inspector Bliss.’

‘Frannie Bliss?’

‘If you only knew,’ Howe said, ‘how badly I’m wishing there was something I could charge you with.’

She was in white blouse, black skirt. Her ash-blonde hair was tied back. She was wearing maybe a little eyeshadow, mauvish. If she’d worn glasses they would doubtless have been rimless, like a Nazi dentist’s – Jane’s line. Merrily thought, There is absolutely nothing I can tell this woman that she’s going to believe.

She bit her lower lip. The whole office was painted butcher’s-shop white. There were no plants, no photographs. The calendar did not have a picture; it was framed in a metal box, and you expected it to have ten days in a week, ten months in a year. Andy Mumford sat in the corner by the door, presumably in case Merrily should try to do a runner.

‘Still,’ Annie Howe said, ‘I suppose by the time you leave here, you’ll at least be in a better position to assess your own degree of responsibility.’ She ejected the videotape from the machine. ‘At some point you and I will have to watch it all the way through, to verify certain points. Did you know you were being recorded?’

‘No. It never even occurred to me.’

‘Two cameras.’ Howe went to sit behind her desk, which was away from the limited distraction of the window. ‘Semiprofessional: one digital, one hi-eight. Both of them wedged between timbers in the ceiling. It’s a fairly primitive ceiling, with small holes and gaps all over it, so all he had to do was prise up a couple of boards in the bedroom and position the cameras underneath – one wide-angle, one focused on the table. Why do you think he wanted it all on tape?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Of the suggestions so far, the most likely is that he may have been planning to make the material available for some future television documentary. I’m told he’s always looking to the main chance. Perhaps – let’s not overestimate the man’s intelligence – perhaps he thought he might even capture something looking vaguely paranormal.’

‘Media-oriented, I suppose. He’s a… professional PR man.’

‘Really? According to people in the village, he’s a washed-up drunk.’

‘He wasn’t drunk when I was with him,’ Merrily said.

‘No, amazingly, he wasn’t. So you didn’t even hear the cameras? One was quite old and noisy.’

‘There was a big fridge, which made a lot of noise. If I heard anything, I would have assumed it came from that.’

Howe thought for a moment, expressionless. It was hard to credit she was probably only thirty-two years old.

‘Doesn’t seem to have been a very successful exorcism, does it, Ms Watkins? Or are they always like that?’

‘They’re all different, in my limited experience. But no, it wasn’t as… productive as I might have hoped.’

‘Depending on how one interprets the word “productive”.’

Merrily winced.

‘What time did you leave?’

‘I’m not sure exactly. It couldn’t have been long after midday. I’d suggested we might go back tonight.’

‘He didn’t seem to take that proposal terribly well.’

‘No.’ Merrily was looking down into her lap. Her hands were on her knees, but they wouldn’t stay still.

‘My impression from the tape is that he’d about had enough of you.’

‘Yes.’

‘He described you as amateurish.’

‘I remember exactly what he said.’

‘You and Robinson left at the same time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘I drove back to Hereford. I had an appointment to meet someone at the Green Dragon.’

‘Who?’

‘You know who; your dad.’

‘Why?’

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

‘I’m asking you.’

‘It was in his capacity as a school governor. He rang me while I was at Knight’s Frome to tell me he had some information relating to an attempted suicide by a young girl whose parents thought she was… spiritually troubled.’

Howe’s top lip lifted in disdain. ‘And was this attempted suicide before or after you were called in to assist this child in her alleged religious distress?’

Merrily didn’t answer.

‘Really not your week, is it? Did you go directly to the Green Dragon?’

‘No, I went to the Deliverance office first. I parked on the Bishop’s Palace forecourt which, as you know, is only a couple of minutes’ walk from the Green Dragon.’

‘Was Robinson with you?’

‘He followed in his own car. We had a brief discussion, and then I had to go and meet your father. Lol and I agreed to meet up afterwards.’ She shook her head. ‘Can’t get my—I can’t believe how quickly this all happened.’

‘If it’s any help, the videotape shows that it happened precisely eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after you and Robinson made your last appearance on the tape.’

‘Useful, that videotape.’ Merrily moistened her parched lips.

‘From our point of view, it’s unique. Like being handed a case gift-wrapped with a pretty bow on top.’ Howe stood up, looking down on Merrily. ‘We can even say that it was approximately sixteen minutes after the event itself when Gerard Stock telephoned here, asked to be put through to CID and baldly informed DC Little that he’d just slaughtered his wife.’

It was an interview room with a tape machine, for suspects, and that didn’t help. DI Francis Bliss was about Lol’s age, with red hair, a Merseyside accent and a chatty manner, and that didn’t help either.

It all took Lol back to when he was twenty, a baby rock star… the accused. So hard to tell with young girls these days, isn’t it, Laurence? How old did you think she was? Stitched up by the police and a ruthless bass-player called Karl, and by the parents of a nice girl called Tracy Cooke. Prelude to the great psychiatric symphony.

‘Listen, I’m gonna get yer another cup of tea,’ DI Bliss said.

‘I’m all right, thanks.’

‘You’re not, you know. You’re in shock. Be a shock for anybody.’ Bliss perched on a corner of the interview table. ‘Sorry about this room, but I’m not based here, so I’ve not gor an office of me own. Known Merrily long?’

‘Just over a year.’

‘And you two just met up in the village this morning, after not seeing each other for a few months, and she told you what she was doing and she asked you to go in with her, yeh?’

‘I know that sounds…’

Bliss put out placatory hands. ‘I’m not trying to catch yer out, Lol, I’m just trying to get the basic picture, that’s all.’

‘I was worried about her doing it,’ Lol said.

‘Because of what you knew about Mr Stock?’

Lol nodded.

‘That’s fair enough, I’d’ve been a teensy bit worried meself after reading that stuff in the papers… and the local vicar himself refusing to have anything to do with him.’

‘It was the vicar who suggested I should try and talk her out of it.’

‘Was it now?’

‘He was suspicious of Stock’s motives. But Merrily doesn’t like to prejudge people.’

‘She’s a very nice person,’ Bliss agreed fervently. ‘I was there during that thing, back before Christmas at… Oh, what was that little church called? Anyway, she was giving it a spiritual clean-out after this bugger broke in and hacked up a crow all over the altar. She wasn’t very well that night, mind.’

‘I wasn’t there.’

‘She was with this priest looked like an old hippy. Hugh somebody. He took it over in the end, ’cause she wasn’t well.’ Bliss had a gulp from a can of Diet Pepsi. ‘See, unlike the Snow Queen in there, I’ve gorra very open mind about all that stuff. Comes with being raised a Catholic in a big Catholic city. You’re a Christian yourself, obviously.’

‘I’m not sure what I am,’ Lol admitted.

‘Just a good friend of Merrily’s, then, Lol.’ Bliss put down the can. ‘Listen, pal, I do know a bit about what happened to you way back, and I accept you may’ve had a bad time with coppers in the past… but I do like Merrily and I fully understand the problem she’d got with this guy. And I know it’s her job, and I realize that after that stuff in the papers there was no way she could duck out of it.’

‘No.’

‘So, you’ve gorra believe me when I say I’m not trying to stitch her up, I’m not trying to stitch either of yer up – it’s just we’ve got a feller down the cells putting up both hands to the big one and, before we start talking seriously to him, we want as much background as we can get. Make sense to you?’

Lol nodded. He decided that, for Merrily’s sake more than his own, maybe he should open up a little to this cop. To a point… a point stopping well short of the Lady of the Bines.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I just—’

‘You’re all right, pal. Take your time.’

‘Truth is, I was on edge from the minute we went in there. I mean, I didn’t think – not in a million years – that the guy was going to do anything like…’

‘Goes without saying.’

‘But everybody who’d had anything to do with Stock was on about what a conman he was, and a manipulator, and how he’d drop you in it without a second thought. Also, I’d seen him in the village pub a couple of times when he was well pissed. Had a big chip on his shoulder about this bloke Adam Lake – virtually suggesting he was behind Stewart Ash’s murder, rather than the two lads who went down for it.’

‘Let’s not open that can of worms for the time being, eh, Lol?’

‘I was just worried he might try and involve Merrily in that.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know, but she doesn’t like to turn away from anyone.’

‘So what was he like when you and Merrily went along today?’

‘Not himself. I mean, he couldn’t’ve been nicer.’

‘Why was that, you reckon?’

‘Well, it might have been genuine. Maybe he was serious about needing an exorcism, and he didn’t want to put her off or make her suspicious. That was what I started to think, but now… I suppose that’d be for the tape, wouldn’t it? Like, if he was videoing the thing, he’d want to appear on it as a sincere and honest man, genuinely concerned about what was happening in his house.’

‘That’s a good point, Lol.’ Bliss thought about it. ‘Mind, he wasn’t being very appreciative at the end, was he, when he threw yer out?’

‘But he’d got it all in the camera by then, hadn’t he? Everything that counted. The Deliverance stuff. He could just have wiped the end of the tape afterwards.’

‘True. Why’d he turn nasty, you reckon? Apart from his wife’s attitude.’

‘I don’t think there was anything apart from that. Stephanie started taking the piss, so Stock took it out on Merrily.’

Bliss nodded. ‘Certainly the times you see him looking at her you can tell he’s trying to keep his temper – or something. But then, she was a lot younger than him. And clearly not too worried at being in a haunted house. Or was that bravado?’

‘She was a Catholic, like you. Protected. She said earlier – maybe before we went into the kitchen – that she didn’t think Uncle Stewart would do her any harm.’

‘Oh, we’re not scared of ghosts, us Catholics?’ Bliss blew out his lips. ‘News to me. How did Merrily react to the wife?’

‘Tried to ignore it. Just carried on.’

‘A true professional.’

‘A good person,’ Lol said. ‘Doing the best she could.’

‘You’re fond of her, aren’t you?’ Bliss smiled. ‘Who wouldn’t be, eh?’

Lol said, ‘You haven’t told me exactly what he did.’

‘How he killed her?’

Lol looked at Bliss: pale skin, freckles, an unusually small nose.

‘What happened when you all went upstairs, Lol?’

‘Well, just…’

Lol had a terrifying thought: the only cameras in the bedroom were the ones under the floorboards, pointing downwards, but suppose their microphones had picked up the voices from above, during Merrily’s blessing of the upstairs room? And during what happened afterwards, when Merrily had followed Stock downstairs. If there was anything on the tape, the quality would be terrible. But they could work on that. Someone like Prof Levin could clean up the thinnest of recordings.

‘… Just more or less what happened in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘With different words.’

He could tell Bliss about Stephie’s implicit invitation. But it sounded too incredible, unless you knew about the Lady of the Bines incident. Which he’d also kept quiet about. Which he hadn’t even told Merrily about.

Lol blanked it out. He was terrible at cover-ups. He would look furtive, he’d sweat.

Bliss said, ‘Nothing happened up there you think might throw more light?’

‘Not… not that I can think of.’

‘You wanna see the tape, Lol?’

‘Not really.’

‘Don’t blame yer. But… I think you’re gonna have to. I think we’re gonna have to take the both of you through it. I’m sorry.’ Bliss thought for a moment, then sighed. ‘Look, all right, I’ll be frank wid yer – he’s not saying a lot.’

‘Stock?’

‘In fact, the bugger’s not saying a thing. Won’t see a solicitor, won’t make a formal statement, just sits there like some bloody big Buddha.’

‘But he phoned you to confess…’

‘Oh aye. When we get there, he hands us the videos. Looking relieved, if anything. He won’t talk about it, though, won’t explain. That’s why you and Merrily are so important to us at the moment.’

‘I see.’

‘Don’t tell the Snow Queen I told you that.’

Annie Howe said, ‘Have you heard of the case of Michael Taylor?’

‘Yes.’

She’s loving this, Merrily thought. A case on a plate.

Me in the toaster.

She was desperate for a cigarette, but she wouldn’t give Howe the satisfaction. She was also desperate for silence, somewhere to collapse and think and, if necessary, scream. Nothing made any sense. Nothing had made sense for days. She felt a welling hatred for Gerard Stock and a bitterness towards Simon St John who had known enough to shut the door in his face.

‘Happened near Barnsley, in Yorkshire.’ Howe was back behind her desk. ‘In the mid-seventies. I know most of the details because of the pseudo-Satanist person we found in the Wye last year. I called up some background on Satanism and related issues, and this case was the first to come up on the screen.’

Merrily closed her eyes and inhaled on an imaginary cigarette. This was one of Huw’s cautionary favourites, which Howe would just love relating.

‘Michael Taylor was thirty-one, a good Christian, a family man – and a member, with his wife, of some local religious group. At some point, for reasons I’ve never found entirely understandable, he came to believe he’d been taken over by the Devil.’

Howe had a set of files on her desk. She opened one and extracted a cellophane folder.

‘Two church ministers agreed that Taylor appeared to be possessed by evil, and they spent all night trying to exorcize him, claiming to have expelled – I think – forty demons – the statistical exactitude here obviously adding important credibility to what most people might consider an inexact science. However, Taylor left the priests early the following morning, went home—’

‘I know,’ Merrily screwed up her eyes in anguish. ‘I know what he did, there’s no need to—’

‘He went home and, with incredible savagery, attacked his wife with his bare hands.’

‘Yes…’

‘He tore at her skin, ripped out her tongue. And her eyes.’

Merrily leaned her head back, stared at the ceiling.

‘Eventually, she choked to death on her own blood,’ Howe said.

‘And Taylor claimed, in his statement to police’ – Merrily’s voice was starved; she couldn’t look at Howe – ‘that he loved his wife very much but there was an evil inside her that had to be destroyed.’

‘Not, I think it’s fair to say, the Church’s finest hour.’

‘Exorcism of a person is a complex and dangerous process,’ Merrily said. ‘But this… this case wasn’t anything like that.’

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘It wasn’t an exorcism. I made that completely clear to Mr Stock from the start. I even decided to hold off the customary Requiem Eucharist because it might look too much like Christian magic. It was prayer, that’s all – prayer as the first stage in dealing with a suspected spiritual presence, there being no reason to suspect any demonic infestation.’

‘Let’s go back to Taylor,’ Howe said. ‘Found not guilty by a jury for reasons of insanity. Caused quite a stir, didn’t it?’

‘What should be said about that verdict… although Michael Taylor had been, by all accounts, a friendly and popular man with no history of violence, nobody – not the judge, nor the jury, nor the media – seemed prepared even to consider that he might actually have been possessed by a metaphysical evil.’

‘He was considered insane.’ To Howe the difference between insanity and possession would be indiscernible. ‘His mental decline appears to have coincided with his taking up membership of a Christian group. His recourse to almost unimaginable violence immediately followed his so-called exorcism by two Christian ministers, isn’t that true?’

Merrily could only nod, knowing now where this was going – a goods train with a toxic cargo inexorably picking up speed, and nothing she could do to stop it.

Howe was still flipping through the file on her desk. ‘I’m trying to find what the local bishop said at the time.’

‘I can tell you more or less exactly what he said.’

‘Here we are… “Exorcism is a type of ministry which is increasingly practised in Christian churches. There is no order of service for this; it is administered as the situation demands. Clearly a form of ministry which must be exercised with the greatest possible care and responsibility.” ’

‘But this was not—’

‘Ms Watkins, the tape clearly shows the sacrament laid out on your impromptu altar, and the sprinkling, by you, of water, which I assume is what you regard as holy water.’

‘The sacrament wasn’t even used, it was—’

Annie Howe wasn’t listening; she was back into the report, flipping pages.

‘Yes… the Taylor case was also commented on by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, who said, I quote: “We must get this business out of the mumbo-jumbo of magic. I do not see exorcism as something set off against and in opposition to medicine. Far from it. I think there are many cases where the more rash exorcists have bypassed the work of psychiatrists.” ’ Howe looked up. ‘Partly as a result, I believe, of the Taylor case, there was a re-examination by the Church of the usefulness of exorcism and how such disasters might be avoided in the future. As a result, the guidance now to exorcists is that they should always work with community psychiatric resources. Is that correct, Ms Watkins?’

‘Before an exorcism is carried out on an individual, it’s recommended that they should be seen by a psychiatrist, to make sure they aren’t, for instance, schizophrenic. Yes.’

‘And when an exorcism takes place, it’s advised that a qualified psychiatrist should be present. Is that correct?’

Merrily sighed. ‘Yes.’

Howe rearranged the papers in the report, applied a paper clip and slipped them into the folder. She smiled pleasantly at Merrily.

‘So, is your idea of deploying community psychiatric resources – in carrying out a ritual that might loosely be described as “mumbo jumbo” at the behest of a notoriously unstable, possibly alcoholic, individual – to take along with you—’

‘That’s not what—’

‘—take along with you, as your expert medical consultant, a former psychiatric patient with a police record?’

‘You stay the fuck away from me!’ Stock screamed. ‘You do not come near me!’

He was backing into shot. His shirt had come out of his trousers. The sweat patches under his arms were the size of hi-hat cymbals, Lol thought.

And it was all so beautifully bright. This was what video did; it compensated for the conditions. Clear and clinical, then, even if the quality was not great; Bliss had said these were quickly made VHS copies of the two originals. The one they were looking at was wide-angle, evidently shot from a camera position just above the fridge. The constant picture included all of the table and an area of flagged floor about three feet around it.

On the table were Stewart Ash’s book on hop-growing, and a wine stain.

Frannie Bliss froze the tape.

‘I think, boss, that this bit gives the lie to the theory that this whole thing was like some big theatrical production… that he even had an idea how it was gonna end. Whatever she’s doing now, you can tell he’s not expecting it.’

‘Not necessarily,’ DCI Howe said. ‘We can’t even see Stephanie at this point. We don’t know that she’s doing anything. She might not even be there. This could be part of his act.’

‘He’d have to be bloody good.’ Bliss started up the tape again.

Stock was shaking. He just stood there trembling, almost full-face to the camera. His beard was shiny with sweat and spittle.

The fridge noise was rumbling out of the TV speaker. Lol thought of rocks before an avalanche. He thought of Stock in the seconds before he’d spouted a gutful of sour beer over Adam Lake. He prayed that both Stock and his wife would be out of shot when the killing happened.

‘If I didn’t know the circumstances, I’d say he was shit-scared,’ Bliss said. ‘What would he be scared of, Merrily? What could she be doing that would put the fear of God into him?’

‘I couldn’t give an opinion on that.’ Merrily’s voice was all dried out.

‘We’re looking for ideas, that’s all,’ Bliss said. ‘Doesn’t have to be a thesis.’

Merrily had been placed near the covered window, DCI Howe standing next to her chair like the angel of death. They’d brought Lol into the room, but only just, seating him near the door, between Frannie Bliss and the other detective, Mumford; he couldn’t even exchange glances with Merrily.

‘Not saying much, is she, young Stephanie?’ Bliss said. ‘She still taking the piss? Is she taunting him, you reckon? What’s she doing, Lol? What d’you reckon?’

Lol said nothing. Why should Bliss think he would know? Had he given something away, with a reaction, an expression? Had Merrily told them that Lol and Stephanie had been alone together, upstairs, not long before the killing?

‘Bearing in mind that her body was unclothed,’ Bliss said, ‘when we found her.’

‘I don’t…’ Lol was thinking of Stock that first night in the pub. Derek, the landlord, must certainly have overheard when Stock had said, My wife leaves scratches a foot long down my back.

‘Stock implied that his wife was highly sexed,’ Lol said. ‘He talked about it in the pub a few nights ago.’

‘Boasting?’

‘Kind of.’

‘He’s not looking too turned-on now, is he?’

There was a movement on the screen – Stock reaching up to the wall.

‘Recognize that thing, Ms Watkins?’

‘Yes. It’s a hop-cutter’s hook. It was part of Stewart Ash’s collection of hop-farmers’ implements. Stock said—’

Breaking off because Stock had walked out of shot again. Carrying the hook. Lol had seen enough. Both Howe and Bliss had gone quiet and were watching the screen. There was nothing to see there now but stone flags, a curving brick wall and a table with a book on it. The fridge was going whump, whump… whump – irregular, as though its metal heart was about to fail.

After about a minute, there arose, from somewhere in the house, perhaps everywhere in the house, this cavernous, animal bellow, mingling with its own echo and the sound of the fridge.

Rage and terror, Lol thought, numbed.

Then only the sound of the fridge.

‘What were you about to say, Ms Watkins?’ Howe asked mildly, as if the TV was merely screening some corny old melodrama they’d all seen many times before. ‘What did Stock say?’

‘He told me he’d sharpened it himself.’ Merrily’s voice was flat. ‘He said that, because of what had happened to Uncle Stewart, he’d become afraid of someone breaking in at night, and so he… he wanted to be ready.’

On the TV screen: flags, table, book. The only sound was the fridge.

Frannie Bliss said delicately, ‘I wouldn’t think there’s any particular need for Merrily to watch any more, would you, boss?’

Lol heard Merrily saying, ‘He said it might seem ridiculous, but he just didn’t trust the countryside.’

‘Boss…’ Bliss said plaintively, ‘do you really think this is…?’

Annie Howe didn’t reply.

Lol was still hearing But he just didn’t trust the countryside, repeated like a loop in his head, when Gerard Stock walked casually back into the kitchen.

He wasn’t carrying the hop-cutter’s hook any more. The picture quality was crisp and suddenly very pleasant, the midday sun throwing a bright path from the middle window across the flags, creating a golden alley. Into it, Gerard Stock – the stains on his white shirt as startling as poppies in the snow – put down Stephanie’s head.