The Cure of Souls

Church of England

Diocese of Hereford

Ministry of Deliverance

email: deliverance@spiritec.co.uk

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For a number of reasons, possession is the most misleading and dangerous term in the Deliverance dictionary.

The first thing to remember is that satanic or demonic possession is extremely rare, and offers of practical help or exorcism should be treated initially with caution, as misguided treatment could make the situation worse.

If you think that you are in spiritual danger or someone close to you has become the victim of demonic or spiritual interference, it may help to read the following pages before deciding which kind of assistance might have the most immediate benefit.

24 Being Lost

TRAFFIC HAD FADED, the shops and the city library were all well closed. Broad Street was cooling into torpid evening and the trees were draping long shadows over the Cathedral green.

Inside the gatehouse, Merrily sipped tea the colour of engine oil, not tasting it. Furrows of concern on Sophie’s forehead were dislodging strands of her fine white hair.

‘I mean, what was the woman trying to do to you?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Merrily watched a man aiming a camera up at the gatehouse. Just the one camera, not very big – a tourist, then. It would be the real thing soon enough, the pack unleashed. ‘She probably did the right thing in the circumstances. Until we saw the video, I don’t think I quite believed it. Thought maybe I was being set up – or that he’d told them he’d killed her, but he hadn’t… not really. She was probably right to show us.’

‘I shouldn’t have gone in with you,’ Lol said. They’d both had to make full statements, which had taken another hour and a half. ‘It isn’t as if I was any use in there.’

The three of them were hunched close to the window, as if putting on lights might draw the eyes of the world. Siege mentality already.

Sophie looked at Lol. ‘Mr Robinson, were you posing as a qualified psychotherapist when you went into the kiln with Merrily?’

Merrily smiled wanly. ‘He’s not good at posing. Even if he was qualified, you’d never get him to admit it.’

‘Quite,’ Sophie said. ‘So there’s no real argument, is there? A – neither of you was suggesting that Mr Robinson was there to fulfil the psychiatric or psychological function. B – this was a minor exorcism-of-place, for which a psychiatrist would hardly, in normal circumstances, be considered essential anyway.’

‘That’s not how it’s going to read, though, is it?’ Lol said.

‘The fact remains,’ Sophie told him severely, ‘that, for reasons of her own – resentment, religious antipathy, whatever else – Detective Chief Inspector Howe is fabricating a spurious scenario.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Merrily almost howled. ‘A man’s murdered his wife. Would that still have happened if I hadn’t gone there and done what I did? Possibly. But possibly not. And possibly not is enough to hang me. But more than that—’

‘Just don’t hang yourself first,’ Lol said. ‘You know really that you didn’t have a choice.’

‘—more than that, I’ve got to live with the killing of a young woman. And the inference – the increasingly strong inference – that it… it doesn’t work. Or when I do it, it doesn’t work.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Sophie snapped.

‘So what do you think God’s telling me?’

‘Look.’ Sophie raised a finger. ‘If – if any one person can be said to carry any blame here – and I don’t necessarily accept that anyone should – then it has to be The Reverend Simon St John, doesn’t it? Whatever St John knew about Stock to convince him to stay out of it, he kept it to himself.’

‘You don’t understand…’ Merrily lit a cigarette and, for once, Sophie didn’t frown. ‘I was approaching this right on top of the Amy Shelbone issue.’

‘Oh, Merrily, that—’

‘No, look…’ Merrily glanced apologetically at Lol. ‘I’ll explain this properly sometime but, in essence, I was being accused of not responding to a situation with sufficient effectiveness. Following which, a young girl tried to take her own life.’

Sophie hissed, exasperated. ‘For heaven’s sake, Merrily, Dennis Beckett—’

‘Look at the facts: here’s me driving down to Stock’s place this morning with a head full of Amy Shelbone and, like, totally insufficient background about Stock’s own problem – in fact, not really believing he has a problem. And then, while talking to him and coming to realize there is a situation, am I not then subconsciously thinking, God, I can’t underplay this one as well? Less concerned with finding out what the hell’s going on than with covering myself? Was I—’

She stopped, realizing her speech was becoming swollen by sobs, and aware of Sophie getting decisively to her feet.

‘Drink your tea, Merrily. Pull yourself together.’

Through a film of tears, she saw Sophie walking over to the door, beckoning Lol to follow her.

Sophie Hill almost dragged him down the stone stairs. Her expression was taut and her eyes were like grey stones in the half-light.

‘Mr Robinson, I don’t know what your current relationship with Merrily is, but I think you’ll agree that what we need to do now is get her out of here, before she does or says something from which there’ll be no going back.’

Lol nodded, bewildered. ‘Anything I can do. Anything.’

Sophie took his arm, led him to the foot of the steps and even then kept her voice low. ‘I was very much playing it down in there, as you probably realized.’

Lol nodded. He instinctively liked Sophie, wished she didn’t have to keep calling him ‘Mr Robinson’.

‘This is actually rather grim.’ She opened the door leading out to the stone archway. ‘We both know that the press and the Church of England are going to hang Merrily out to dry, and if she thinks she’s in any way at fault she won’t even fight back.’

He remembered Merrily in Howe’s office, what he could see of her: cowed, shattered. ‘In any situation, she always tends to feel responsible.’

‘All right,’ Sophie said, ‘let’s examine the situation. First – I can’t see them charging Stock with murder tonight, can you?’

‘Not unless he’s had a change of heart and given them a full statement.’

‘They won’t charge him even then, not immediately. And you know what that means.’

‘Gives the press free rein to rake over the story. They go back to the original piece in the People and they find that quote from Merrily saying she’s going to be looking into it carefully, and they’ll want to know if she ever did.’

‘And whatever answer they get will be the wrong one. If she didn’t actually do anything, the Church was being fatally neglectful. And if they find out the truth…’

‘Merrily’s dog food,’ Lol said.

Sophie stood in the gatehouse doorway, gazing through the stone arch towards the Bishop’s Palace yard. An elegant, white-haired Englishwoman with a cardigan draped over her shoulders. Formidable.

‘I don’t know how much you know about the Church of England, Mr Robinson, but I can tell you with some authority that, like any large secular organization, it’s essentially self-serving and self-protective.’

Lol said nothing. It was hardly a revelation.

‘For the Church, it’s going to be more than Merrily on trial, it’s the credibility of the entire Deliverance Ministry – arguably one of the few dynamic arms we have left. They may not even try to defend her, simply wash their hands of it all. They’ll have an inquiry, at the end of which they’ll agree that she behaved in an arbitrary fashion, reacted too quickly, disregarded the guidelines, failed to take advice.’

‘Can they throw her out of the Church?’

Sophie looked him in the eyes. ‘With what you know of Merrily Watkins, would they need to?’

Merrily stood at the window, staring down at the evening light on Broad Street. Stephanie Stock’s severed head lay in the middle of the road. She wondered when Stephanie’s head would no longer be visible everywhere she looked, with its smile slashed to double-width and one of its eyes fully open – and the other one missing.

In fact, she realized that she and Lol must have been spared the worst. They’d only seen Stock’s video. The police’s own footage, while it might have less narrative tension, would be far more explicit. She’d heard Frannie Bliss and Andy Mumford talking in the corridor, and so she knew that Stephanie had not died by having her head cleanly cleaved off, like Anne Boleyn, but that Stock had gone at her, at the bottom of the stairs, like some barbaric Dark Age butcher.

This had happened immediately in the wake of what the papers would inevitably describe as an exorcism. A botched exorcism. Howe hadn’t exactly been concealing the existence of Stock’s video; its contents would inevitably be leaked.

And had this supposed exorcism, it would be asked, brought out something savagely malevolent, long dormant inside Gerard Stock?

It wouldn’t matter that, unlike Michael Taylor, Stock had not been personally exorcized – no induced convulsions, no speaking in guttural tongues, no green bile, no Out, demons, out. Wouldn’t matter that it had been simply a modest entreaty to God for the Stocks’ home to become dweller-friendly again.

Merrily’s fists tightened. How could that possibly cause a man to go into a murderous rage? How could it?

It wouldn’t matter.

Tell her to throw some holy water around and leave by the back door. She wondered if Bernie Dunmore would even remember saying that.

The phone rang.

She turned slowly. Perhaps this was Bernie himself, fresh from the conference on Transsexuality and the Church, disturbing gossip having reached him while he sat nursing his single malt in the bar of Gloucester’s swishest. Casually approached by some journalist, perhaps, as he debated with the Bishop of Durham how best to react to an archdeacon’s new breasts.

She started to laugh, and let the phone go on ringing.

A clattering on the stairs. Sophie rushed in. ‘Don’t touch that.’

‘Wasn’t going to.’

Sophie sat down behind her desk, took two calming breaths and picked up the phone.

‘Diocese of Hereford, Bishop’s Palace. Sophie Hill speaking.’

Lol came in, looking a little brighter; Sophie could do this. Don’t depress Merrily.

‘No,’ Sophie said, ‘I’m afraid she’s on holiday. Is there anything I can do for you?’

She? The only two women working from this office were Sophie and Merrily.

‘When?’ Sophie said. ‘Well, I don’t know, precisely. I know she was supposed to have left yesterday, but I believe she delayed her departure for some reason… No, I couldn’t. I’m afraid that’s not the sort of personal information I’m permitted to give out.’

Merrily held her breath and moved away from the window: they could be out there somewhere, on a mobile.

‘No, I’ve no idea, I’m afraid. You’d have to ask Mrs Watkins herself about that sort of thing… No, the Bishop’s away at a conference. He’ll be back on Thursday night… Look, I’m sorry, but I’m only a secretary. I’m really not party to that kind of information. I should try our press officer tomorrow. Goodnight.’ Sophie hung up. ‘The Daily Telegraph.’

‘Why am I on holiday, Sophie?’

‘For the sake of your health.’

‘Not good enough.’

‘For the health of the Christian Church, then,’ Sophie snapped. ‘Look, I’ve just been asked if you conducted an exorcism today at the home of Gerard and the late Mrs Stephanie Stock. What would you have said if you’d been asked that question?’

‘I’d have explained that it wasn’t exactly an exorcism.’

Sophie and Lol exchanged glances.

‘Yeah, I know. And they wouldn’t have believed a word of it.’ Merrily reached for her cigarettes, glared from one to the other of them. ‘I’m supposed to run away?’

‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘For the moment. At least until such time as the police charge Gerard Stock with murder and the media are formally gagged until after the trial.’

‘What about the Bishop?’

‘I’ll phone Gloucester and advise him to stay in his hotel room and lock the door.’

‘And where am I spending my holiday? Learning Welsh in Pembrokeshire with Jane?’

‘You can stay at my house tonight.’

Sophie lived with her husband in one of the streets behind the Castle Green.

‘Which would implicate you,’ Merrily said. ‘Thanks, but forget it. Anyway, I have to go home and feed the cat.’

‘Don’t throw up silly barriers,’ Sophie said irritably. ‘Phone Gomer Parry. He has a key to the vicarage, doesn’t he?’ Sophie knew everything. ‘Or Mr Robinson has an alternative suggestion,’ she said.

In the fields to either side, cut and turned hay lay like a choppy green sea. The road and the fields and the woods lay in shadow, but the Malverns above them were caught in the sunset, their foothills glowing as if lit from underneath, like a Tiffany lamp.

It was serenely beautiful. And yes, she had to agree, it was the last place anyone would think of looking for her.

Eye of the storm. Merrily lit a cigarette. She felt a little scared, actually. Trepidation – or the electric, arm-bristling fear of another imminent revelation.

Lol had driven her back to Ledwardine Vicarage, and she’d packed a case and phoned Gomer Parry. Gomer had been round in minutes: how about he move in tonight, feed the cat, keep the newshounds off the premises? He’d caretaken once before, when Merrily and Jane had been armlocked into a family wedding in Northumberland. Now widowed and restless, he liked being the guy who looked out for them both… which also brought him closer to the action. Good old Gomer.

‘A holiday.’ Merrily inhaled and leaned her head over the torn back of the Astra’s passenger seat and closed her eyes. ‘So what’s that like, exactly?’

‘Boring,’ Lol said, ‘as I recall.’

‘We had a few odd days, when Jane was younger. Not for a while, though.’

‘How is she?’

‘Raging. Eirion’s stepmother seems to think she enjoys being a nanny to her youngest kids.’

‘Taking a risk there.’

‘And can she even begin to know how much of one?’ Merrily closed her eyes. ‘Don’t really want to get there. I want to drive through the night talking inane crap. Like when we were young.’

‘That’s a holiday. I remember now. Inane crap with bits of sex in between.’

‘You and Alison?’

‘Once. Five days in Northern France. You ever see Alison in the village?’

‘Well, she’s still with James Bull-Davies, if that’s what you mean. They say she’s really taken him and his decrepit house in hand. But they don’t come to church.’

‘So who sits in the Bull pew now?’

‘Nobody. People are so superstitious, aren’t they?’

She felt the car slow and turn, and when she opened her eyes the road had become an alley between rows of short wooden pylons. Entwined around them, luxuriant growth seemed to be surging towards the awakening stars.

It was Lol who was shivering. He pushed his compact body back into the seat to stop it, but she felt the tremor and she knew his hands were tightening on the wheel.

‘Time to abandon The Prince of Wales Guide to Making Stupid Conversation, I think.’ Merrily caught some ash in the palm of her hand. ‘What haven’t you told me?’

Lol watched the road winding between the hop-yards, put on his headlights. ‘So exactly how long have you been a vicar?’ he said.

She recognized the church, embedded in shadow, fusing with the bushes above the river bank. There was a light on in the vicarage, just one. It was the kind of light you left on when you went out for the night, to create an illusion of habitation.

The Astra crawled through the village, if you could call it that. There were several cars on the forecourt of the pub. One was a station wagon with its rear hatch flung up, a man pulling out a black tripod.

‘Didn’t take them long, did it?’

Lol drove slowly past. He even managed to give the man a suspicious glance, like a true local in his battered old car. Subtle. There are rooms at Prof’s studios, he’d said. It’s not finished yet, but it’s quite respectable. Who else would be there? Only me, in a loft, out in the stables.

The road curved out of the village, up a slight incline and down again. The Malvern Hills disappeared and reappeared, undulating with lights like gems mounted on a jeweller’s velvet tray.

‘Is this going to help?’ Merrily said. ‘Us coming here?’

‘Trust me, I’m a drop-out trainee psychotherapist.’

‘Well, I’m not any kind of psychotherapist.’ She squeezed out her cigarette, turned to look at him, her back resting against the passenger door. ‘But I’ve learned enough about your little ways in the short time we’ve known each other to know that when you’re at your most facetious it usually means you’re also kind of scared.’

Lol turned through a gap in the hedge, went very slowly downhill and eventually came to a stop. She could see the humps of buildings but no lights. What had she expected: The Prof Levin Studios, in neon?

‘You’re obviously not scared of the dark, though,’ Merrily said.

‘No, I like the dark.’

‘Yes, you would.’

Lol switched off the engine. ‘When…’ He hesitated. ‘When I first came here… I went out for a walk in the dark. Well, actually, it wasn’t that dark, bit like tonight. I walked down there.’ He pointed through the windscreen to a line of poplar silhouettes. ‘Over the river bridge, then I picked up a path and wandered into a wood. Then I got a bit lost.’

‘Your thing, being lost,’ Merrily said softly.

‘Is it?’

‘But it’s produced some lovely songs. Ask Jane.’

‘She’s just being kind.’

‘She’d take that as a serious insult. Go on – you went for a walk. You got lost.’

‘And then I came to this abandoned hop-yard. Everything cleared or dead, with the poles and the frames naked.’ He paused. ‘And a woman – Stephanie Stock. She was naked, too.’

Merrily stiffened. The summer night gathered around the old car, opaque now like November fog.

25 Soured

DOWN PAST THE inn, at the edge of the old harbour, there was a stony footpath, and if you followed it for about half a mile you came to a fairly secret cove. Or at least it seemed secret at night; there was probably an oil refinery beyond the headland.

‘You can’t.’ Eirion stood with his back to a millpond sea. There were just the two of them on the beach. One of the great things about Pembrokeshire was that you could still find lonely beaches in July.

Jane climbed onto a rock so that she was looking down on him. Post-sunset, the sky was luminous, almost lime green.

‘What?’ Hoping her eyes were glittering with an equally dangerous intensity.

Eirion backed off, the heels of his trainers almost in the water. ‘Well, yes, all right, of course you can.’ He would always start to sound Welsh when he was agitated. ‘You can do what you want. You’re free, you’re sixteen years old, you’re—’

‘English.’

He moaned to the brilliant sky. ‘Don’t start that again! Please, please, don’t hit me with that racism stuff again. They’ve just been brought up to be proud of their language and their culture.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Jane. ‘Their culture.’

This evening they’d been to the movies, to a cinema in Fishguard. Well, not actually a cinema, a cinema club. Where they’d seen this thriller, with not-bad car chases and a couple of half-hearted love scenes and a leading actor who Jane recalled from TV and who was moderate totty, in his fresh-faced way.

It had actually helped that it was in Welsh and that snogging had been rendered impractical due to two small girls sitting in between them with their chocolate ripples. It had allowed Jane to contemplate the terrible turn events had taken, and the element of guilt she could no longer reject.

An unexpected wave hit Eirion’s ankles and pooled into his trainers. He groaned. ‘Jane, please don’t do this to me. Stay until the weekend, at least, then we can think of something.’

‘I’ve thought of something. I’ve thought of a taxi. I’ve thought of the nearest station. I’ve thought of… lots of things.’

‘But there’s nothing you can do there!’ Eirion sat down in the sand and took off his trainers to empty the sea out of them.

‘I let her down.’

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘I dumped her in it.’

‘That’s ridic—’

‘Because I didn’t have the guts to say to Riddock, “This is naff, this is dangerous, this is wrong.” ’

Jane came down from her rock, and began to ramble up the beach – but slowly, always keeping Eirion in sight. People here still talked about that couple who were murdered years ago on the Pembrokeshire coastal path and nobody was ever caught. English couple, as it happened, on holiday.

‘Jane, we’re all—’ Eirion picked up his trainers and ran barefoot along the sand towards her. ‘We’re all braver after the event. She’s not going to hold it against you. You think she doesn’t understand how hard it is? You think she was never in that position herself, of having to keep her street cred at school?’

‘Huh?’

‘Plus, she’s your mother. Plus, she’s a – you know – a Christian. And also a very nice woman.’

Jane stared at him in pity. ‘Irene, did I even mention my mother?’

‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ Eirion said. ‘I’m a stranger on your planet.’

‘OK.’ She stopped. ‘This evening, when I went up to change before we went to see the film, I pinched the cordless from the sitting room – leaving three quid in the dinky little box marked ffon, I hasten to add – and I locked myself in the bathroom and found the number from directories, and I tried to ring Amy Shelbone.’

‘Ah.’ He sighed. ‘I did wonder if you might.’

‘She’d fitted me up, Irene. She’d lied. She was supposed to either put that right or give me a bloody good reason why not. She wouldn’t talk to Mum but she’d have to talk to me. Also, I was gonna tell her what a disgusting old slag Riddock was and how she should tell her to piss off out of her life. Try and put her right, you know?’

‘All right.’ She felt Eirion’s hand close around hers. ‘That was a reasonable thing to do, but why’d you have to be so secretive about it?’

‘Wasn’t anything to do with anybody else.’

‘Thanks.’ Eirion had trodden on an old bottle in the sand, and let go of her hand to rub his bare foot.

‘I didn’t mean you. I’m sorry, I’m a bitch, I’m a bitch, I’m a bitch… Anyway, she wasn’t in. I got her mother, and I said like, when will she be in? I didn’t say it was me, of course, just a friend from school. But then her mother, she’s just like… screaming at me: “Don’t you go claiming to be one of her friends, she hasn’t got any friends, just enemies.” And then she goes, “You’re evil, you’re all evil! But you won’t hurt her again, she’s not going back to that school.” And I’m like… what? Gobsmacked, obviously. I mean, come on, let’s get this thing in proportion, you know? Oh, for Christ’s sake, Irene, put your bloody shoes on!’

She walked up a couple of steps, where the beach joined the stony path, and waited for him to pull on his trainers. She could see a light far out in the bay. This was such a romantic place.

‘And then it came out,’ she said. ‘ “As if you didn’t know,” she’s screaming. ‘ “As if you didn’t know, you Godless wretch!” ’

‘Know what?’ He reached for her hand.

‘Amy tried to top herself.’ Jane pulled away. ‘Overdose of aspirins.’

‘Oh, dear God,’ said Eirion.

‘Yeah.’ Jane picked up a big pebble, pulled back her arm as if to hurl it at the sea, then let it drop by her feet. ‘Could you live with that?’

Eirion said, ‘It doesn’t mean—’

‘It does, Irene.’

‘It’ll all come out now, though, won’t it? There’ll be an investigation.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Probably.’

‘Proving what? Gonna nail Riddock, are they? Not a chance. Her old man – her mother’s husband – is one of the fattest fat cats in the entire county. It’ll never come out, unless…’

‘Oh, shit,’ Eirion said.

Jane glared at him. ‘How do we know there aren’t other kids being terrorized? I think it was actually you who said the other night that when you’re nine, an eleven-year-old could seem like Charles Manston.’

‘Manson.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ hissed Eirion through his teeth.

‘What kind of holiday do you think I’m gonna have, dangling my toes in the ocean, listening to Sioned trying to teach me the complete works of Taliesyn and all the time thinking about the evil that slag’s wreaking?’

‘And what could you do if you were back home?’

‘Loads of things. I could speak out about it for a start. I know this woman, Bella, at Radio Hereford and Worcester. I could go on there live and talk about it and I could just like name names before anyone could stop me.’

‘They’d pre-record you,’ Eirion said. ‘And then they’d edit out the names.’

‘I could do something. I could get that slag. I will get her.’

They both stood looking at the light out at sea, Jane thinking, What a magic night, what a magic place to make love. What an incredible memory to have for the rest of your life.

Too late now. It was all soured.

26 Cats

LOL WOULD KEEP pausing, glancing at her to see if she believed him. As if she might be thinking he’d invented these two bizarre, creepy and sexually provocative encounters with Stephanie Stock, both of them ending with him walking away. But this, in fact, confirmed it: walk away was what Lol would do.

Of course she believed him. But what was it all supposed to convey, apart from that Stephanie had been as mad as Gerard?

As she followed Lol across the yard, a sensor switched on two lamps projecting from the stable wall, revealing the cottage in front of them. She could see it had originally been quite small, a typical Herefordshire farmworker’s timber-framed home: two up, two down and a lean-to. There was a brick extension, probably nineteenth century, longer and taller than the original dwelling.

‘Just the four bedrooms at present.’ Lol had a long key for the cracked and ill-fitting front door. ‘But there’s scope for conversion of a few more outbuildings, if Prof can get listed-building consent.’

Merrily thought that with David Shelbone around this could turn out to be more of a problem than Prof might figure.

Unexpectedly, she discovered she was starting to feel less depressed. It was clear that the case of Gerard and Stephanie Stock had several dark and, as yet, unprobed levels, was more complex than either the police or even she had imagined and went deeper than a violent rage inflamed by a botched Deliverance.

If she could be convinced of this, it was a start. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself – as an exorcist, a priest or a person – if she thought anything she’d done had led, however indirectly, to the slaughter of Stephanie Stock.

‘It’s a nice idea, in principle,’ Lol was saying. ‘Musicians can come and stay, no real time limit, and help out generally around the place when they’re not recording. Van Morrison on orbital sander – that’s yet to happen, but people will do all kinds of things for Prof.’ He pushed open the front door and put a hand inside, feeling around for light switches. ‘This is the living room. It’s still a bit, er…’

Merrily stepped inside, looking around by the harsh light of two naked bulbs. She saw several wooden packing cases, a bubblewrap mountain, an inglenook full of CDs, a TV set on a tea chest, two deckchairs and one padded garden recliner in the middle of an ice floe of polystyrene packing.

‘Lol, this is a dump.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s, er… that’s one way of—’

‘It’s the only way, Lol.’

‘The bedrooms are tidier,’ Lol said.

Which was true. Merrily chose the smallest of them, which contained just a tiny porcelain washbasin, a rag rug and a bed. It was in the old part of the cottage but had recently been done up – fresh plaster between the beams. The three-quarter bed had no headboard, but there was a new duvet lying on it, still in sealed plastic.

It was stuffy in here. ‘It was supposed to be my room.’ Lol prised open the window – one pane, eighteen inches square. ‘But for some reason I keep going back to a camp bed in one of the lofts over the stable.’

Yes, he would do that; he’d need the feeling of impermanence.

Merrily sat on the bed. She felt like an asylum seeker in a hostel; tomorrow seemed as impenetrable as Prof Levin’s living room.

‘Hang on a minute.’ Lol went off and came back with a small wooden reading lamp with a parchment shade. He placed it on the deep window sill and plugged it into a socket underneath. With the ceiling bulb switched off, the lamp turned the room a hazy buttermilk. Monastic cell to cosy boudoir in two clicks.

Lol asked if could bring her up a drink. ‘Probably better if you didn’t see the kitchen tonight.’

‘Bad?’

He shrugged. ‘The rats live with it.’

‘Is there a kettle, say, and a teapot that we could perhaps bring up?’

‘Sure.’ He was hovering in the doorway. ‘I’ll… fetch your case in, then?’

‘You want some help?’

Lol held up both hands. ‘Stay. Luxuriate.’

She spread the duvet on the bed and sat down again, staring at the rough plaster. She and Lol had shared some secrets again. She wondered if he still had the sweatshirt with the Roswell alien motif.

With Lol, it all went back to a teenager called Tracy who had a mate called – Kath, was it? Karl Windling, the aggressive and unpleasant bass-player in Hazey Jane, had fancied this Kath and set Lol up with Tracy – she was about four years younger than Lol, but you probably wouldn’t have known, seeing the two of them together, and he certainly wouldn’t have suspected. And then Windling had decided he wanted Tracy as well, and it had all turned nasty, and Windling had squirmed out of it, leaving Lol – innocent in everyone’s eyes but the law’s – with a conviction for having sex with an under-age girl, six months’ probation and rejection by his family.

That was the start of it. A long time ago. A long time for anyone to remain an alien. But it would partly explain his reaction, both times, to Stephanie Stock.

‘You must have thought she was unreal… a ghost.’

‘I’d’ve been happier with a ghost.’ Lol put down the tea tray.

Merrily thought back to his involvement with the ethereal Moon, who’d lived on Dinedor Hill. ‘It’s like cats, isn’t it?’

‘Cats?’

‘Put a cat in a room with someone who’s afraid of cats or allergic to cat hair, the cat invariably heads straight for them, jumps onto their laps.’

‘I like cats.’

‘Well, I know that. And you quite like women, too – I realize this is an inexact analogy. I’m talking about women with problems. Weird women. They tend to come on to you like cats. And you put out a tentative hand, and then experience tells you to back off.’

‘I’m not proud of backing off.’

‘I don’t like to imagine what might have happened if you hadn’t.’ Merrily poured the tea. ‘Could she have been stoned?’

‘Or was she ill?’ Lol wondered.

‘What? Something long-term? Schizophrenia? Could that have been why Stock kept her apart from the community? Was he drinking to excess to cope with it? The mad woman in the isolated kiln? But you can’t really do a Mr Rochester these days, can you? You can’t keep this kind of thing secret any more – if she was on medication, for instance… and schizophrenics are almost invariably on medication.’

‘And she apparently went out to work.’

‘Yeah, but did she?’

‘She said she was temping for a car-dealer in Hereford.’

‘But was she?’ Merrily leaned her head against the side of the bed. ‘All this will have to come out.’ She looked at Lol. ‘That night in the hop-yard – was she aware of you?’

‘Yes.’ Lol drank some tea. ‘And no.’

‘Good answer. Helpful.’

‘It was dark.’

‘She was aware of you in the bedroom, though. And she was certainly aware of you downstairs before we began.’

‘Well… coming on to me like I used to be this big rock star – what kind of crap was that? She’d probably never heard of me until Stock mentioned I was staying at Prof’s. But she gave absolutely no sign of recognizing me from the hop-yard. Not then, anyway.’

‘But you recognized her?’

‘Wasn’t sure at first. Not till we were upstairs together and she was on the bed and you and Stock had gone… and then suddenly she was.’

‘Because of the hop-bine?’

‘The Lady of the Bines? Who never existed? Who is an invented ghost?’

‘Remind me about that again.’

Merrily lit a cigarette; she’d smoked it by the time he’d finished.

‘So the museum woman made it up. You been back to ask her, Lol?’

He shook his head.

‘Hops.’ Merrily tapped the tea tray with her fingertips. ‘Think hops.’

‘Hop-pillows? Stock said hop-pillows were supposed to give you a better night’s sleep. But not in this case.’

‘Hops as a turn-on? The first time you saw her, she was naked and winding a hop-bine around her. And up in the bedroom, she was playing with an old hop-bine again – a hop-bine, which she was again using in a… lubricious fashion. How did you feel?’

‘Embarrassed. Scared.’

‘And maybe just a bit…?’

‘I’ll stick with scared and embarrassed.’

‘Basic nymphomania?’ Merrily wondered. ‘That can be a mental illness, can’t it? I mean, people have a good laugh about it. Men in pubs always like to pretend they wish their wives would catch it, but it’s a mental illness, isn’t it?’

Lol considered. ‘I don’t even think it’s a clinical term. There are no criteria to back it up. It’s applied to women who want “too much sex” – but how much is too much? And what do you call a male nymphomaniac? Could be a purely sexist term, because a woman who lives for sex is a slut, while a man who can’t get enough is a role model.’

‘Wow,’ Merrily said, ‘you really have been on a course.’

He looked uncomfortable at that. He pulled off his glasses and began to polish them on the hem of his T-shirt. Merrily slid down to the rug and leaned back against the side of the bed, her bare arms around her knees. She was aware of the irony of being alone in a bedroom talking about sex with a man she’d always found attractive, but in circumstances that rendered the whole subject forbidding. Like going into a tobacconist’s to discuss emphysema.

‘We’re going round in circles, Lol.’

He told her about the odd words uttered by Stephie in the bedroom, the foreign language which definitely wasn’t French, might have been Welsh. And then Don’t say no to me…

‘As if someone else had been saying no to her? Well, Stock’s a lot older than she was and probably close to being an alcoholic, which—’

‘—is no cure for impotence,’ Lol said. ‘And I think I’m right in saying the number one reason for men killing their wives is being drunk and on the receiving end of taunts about not being able to perform. And Stock’s an arrogant guy. Very, very hard for someone like that to admit to sexual inadequacy. And if he doesn’t say another word to explain why he did it, that’s probably what they’ll put it down to.’

‘If,’ Merrily said heavily, ‘there hadn’t also been what they will insist on describing as an exorcism.’

They were both silent. It occurred to Merrily that she might have done rather better if Lol had accompanied her as a psychologist, part of her putative Deliverance team.

He stood up and leaned against the window sill next to the lamp. ‘How about if I go back to Bliss and tell him about Stephanie?’

She looked up at him. ‘You’d hate to have to do that.’

‘It might alter the direction of their inquiries. And it’s the truth.’

She went and stood next to him. ‘They wouldn’t believe you.’

‘You did.’

‘Also, Howe would take enormous pleasure in bringing up your… past record.’

He smiled. ‘Hazey Jane Two?’

They looked at one another; she saw his face soften. It was the kind of confluence of gazes that might normally have progressed rapidly to a meeting of mouths.

But the moment passed, and Merrily went and sat on the bed.

‘Call this a vague guess,’ she said, ‘but it’s my feeling that if there’s one person who could explain much of this, it’s Simon St John.’

Lol used a phone plugged into the wall next to Prof’s garden recliner. The call was answered in seconds.

‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s…’ He always found it hard to identify himself. ‘It’s Lol.’

A sigh. ‘Sorry, mate. Thought you were the media. About to tell you to fuck off.’

‘You said that to the papers?’ He really didn’t care, did he? What must it be like not to care? ‘Had many calls tonight?’

‘Not as many as I expected.’ Simon sounded tired, though, like he’d been doing a lot of talking.

‘But the police have been round?’

‘Briefly.’

Lol said, ‘So you know everything.’

‘This is the English countryside,’ Simon said. ‘Everybody within a six-mile radius knew everything by teatime.’

‘You don’t sound surprised.’

‘I’m getting over it.’

‘The thing is,’ Lol said, ‘Merrily Watkins is here.’

‘Good for you.’

‘It’s not looking good for her.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘We thought you might like to talk. Now… or tomorrow morning? There’s quite a lot to—’

‘No, there isn’t,’ Simon St John said curtly. ‘It’s over. Let the police sort it out.’

‘Hang on, how can you—?’

‘It’s over, Lol.’

The vicar hung up on him.

The old pine door of Lol’s loft opened on to a rickety wooden gallery directly above the mixing board, overlooking the studio floor – moonlight now falling through the skylight on to snaking cables and the Boswell guitar on her stand.

It must have been after three a.m. when he came out and stood there, leaning on the basically unsafe rustic railing. Times like this when you smoked a cigarette. Maybe he should start, if only to get through the nights.

He’d just dreamed of the Lady of the Bines again, weaving and rustling towards him, and this time she was a ghost and she came in a shroud of cold, and her eyes were like smoke, and Lol had shuddered awake.

He stood on the gallery – the minstrel’s gallery, Prof called it – and thought about Merrily, lying no more than forty feet away, thought about how close he’d come to kissing her. Clearly it just wasn’t meant; as she’d pointed out herself, only weird cats jumped into his lap.

And although he thought about her every day, only negative circumstances had ever brought them together, and even then… He was aware that tonight they’d attempted to analyse his experiences but hadn’t even touched on hers: whatever had happened to her in the kiln, whatever it was that had made her appear to choke, sent her dashing around the place flinging open doors.

It’s over, Simon St John had said. Was it?

Was Gerard Stock lying awake in his cell at Hereford Police Station, going back over the day, screening the movie? Lol tried to see that movie – Stock, still angry after showing Merrily the door, walking in on Stephie… Don’t say no to me… Predatory Stephie. Gerard Stock imploding, like an old radio blowing all its valves.

It struck Lol that Stock could still virtually walk away from this. Only in exceptional circumstances these days did the perpetrators of hot-blooded domestic murders get life. A domestic killing was a one-off, the killer no danger to the public. In this case, the killer had been under massive stress, heightened by an exorcism that hadn’t worked.

It could, in the end, be Merrily who came off worst. A career wrecked. More than a career, a calling.

It’s over.

In the hour before dawn – the only way to cool the fever of his thoughts – Lol wrote a song and, as the sun came up, sat in the shadows of the booth with the Boswell guitar and played it through, complete.

It even had a title: ‘The Cure of Souls’.

27 Scalding

AS SHE OPENED her eyes, a shaft of sunlight from the one small window threw her back into the kiln-house. She tasted sulphur, heard the shrill, cold calling: beep… beep… beep… beep… invoking dead Stephie, racked with laughter. I think you’d better answer that, vicar. It might be God!

She clawed around the bare boards for the mobile. ‘Yes?’

‘Merrily?’

‘Sophie…’ She sat up in the bed – no headboard: stone and rough plaster against her back and shoulders, dungeon-like. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in the office, of course. Are you alone?’

‘I’m in bed. Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m alone.’

‘I have the morning papers here.’

‘Oh. Do I want to know this?’

‘Gerard Stock was charged last night with the murder of Stephanie Stock.’

Merrily closed her eyes.

‘I think that for you we can take that as a…’ Sophie hesitated. ‘I was about to say reprieve.’

‘Think the phrase is “stay of execution”.’ Merrily fumbled for her cigarettes. ‘What do they actually say?’

‘It’s made page one in the Mail and the Telegraph. All the reports identify the Stocks as people who complained that their home was haunted, and how it was the site of the murder of Stewart Ash. Nowhere, I’m relieved to say, is there any mention of an exorcism taking place, although the Telegraph reminds us you’d voiced an intention of looking into the problem. I would think that they’ve said all they consider themselves allowed to say until after the trial.’

‘Which, since he’s confessed, may be not too many months away.’

Sophie said calmly, ‘Has he?’

‘What?’

‘Confessed.’

‘He was the one who called the police.’ Merrily tried to grip a cigarette between lips that felt slack and rubbery.

‘But you don’t know if he’s made a formal statement, do you?’ Sophie said. ‘We may not even find out. He’ll probably be shipped off to a remand centre, if he hasn’t gone already.’

‘Well… it means I’m back in circulation, at least.’ Merrily looked around the tiny monk’s cell and felt a small pang of regret. Safe haven. Sanctuary. ‘For the present.’

‘Ah,’ Sophie said. ‘About that. I’ve… spoken briefly to the Bishop at his hotel in Gloucester. He feels, as I do, that – since we’ve already told several people that you’re away on holiday – perhaps it would be best if you were to remain away. For a week, at least.’

‘What about the parish?’

‘That’s all been arranged. A locum’s been organized for the Sunday services, if you agree. It’s the ubiquitous Canon Beckett, I’m afraid. Jeffrey Kimball’s back in Dilwyn tomorrow, so the Canon’s available again.’

‘Oh.’

‘I imagine DCI Howe will need to talk to you again, but I wouldn’t make the first move there if I were you. I’d keep your head well down.’

‘What’s Bernie’s attitude?’

‘Guarded,’ Sophie said.

‘That’s a useful word.’

‘And there’s something else. Someone else wants to see you. I pass this on now, but I’ve also told him you’re going away.’

‘Who?’

‘Mr Shelbone. David Shelbone. Perhaps you could talk to him on the phone, if you must.’

‘Something’s happened?’ Merrily swung her feet to the bare boards.

‘Well, it seems Mrs Shelbone’s done something rather drastic.’

‘Oh, Jesus…’ The unlit cigarette fell from her lips.

‘Nothing like that,’ Sophie said hastily. ‘What’s happened is that she’s apparently left home and taken the child with her. Convinced – he claims – that, in the wake of her attempted suicide, Social Services will try and take Amy away from them and put her into care. Mr Shelbone reckons there’s a story going round that he and his wife are religious extremists and the child may be psychologically dam—’

‘Does he know where they are?’

‘If he does, he isn’t saying.’

‘Sophie, I need to talk to him.’ A couple of days ago this would have seemed like a serious breakthrough, and it was still important. ‘Maybe Lol could give me a lift in.’

‘If you must do this, I’ll pick you up. An hour? Don’t wear a dog collar.’

First time Sophie had ever said that.

Lol had somehow produced scrambled eggs in the microwave. He’d spread a clean tablecloth on a packing case. Merrily looked around, felt quite touched. Either he’d lied about the condition of the kitchen or he’d been up for a long time, scrubbing.

He brought her more toast from the toaster. He was actually wearing his old Roswell alien sweatshirt, faded now to light grey – big slanting eyes on the chest, holes in the elbows. She told him about Sophie’s call and that the worst of the heat was off, for a while. She also told him about the Shelbone situation, why it was important for her to go back to Hereford.

‘And afterwards?’ Lol said lightly.

‘I’ll get Sophie to bring me back here. If that’s OK with you.’

Lol smiled.

‘Or maybe I’ll just pick up the Volvo. Not as if it’s got a Deliverance sticker in the window. Sophie was perhaps being a little overcautious last night.’

‘I just don’t think she trusted you on your own,’ Lol said. ‘How do you feel now?’

‘Well – I’m eating… thank you.’ She looked at the remains of her breakfast, then at Lol. ‘Can’t say I feel a more seasoned human being for having seen a man carrying his wife’s head around like a potted plant.’

First shudder of the day. Get it over with. Why had Stock done that – brought in the head, put it down in a beam of light, like a Stone Age priest with a sacrifice commemorating the arrival of the midsummer sun? She carried her plate to the sink, turned on hot water.

‘Lol, when – when I said Stock had confessed, Sophie said, “Has he?” Like there was some doubt.’

She watched his reaction. Lol was looking unhappy.

‘Am I missing something?’

‘Well…’ He picked up a tea towel. ‘Maybe she means, what if he pleads not guilty?’

‘But he did call the police, didn’t he? He did actually tell them he’d killed his wife?’

‘But he’s had time to think about it, hasn’t he? I didn’t like the idea of him refusing to make a statement. He’s clever. Suppose he gets a smart barrister and they try to hang the whole thing on exorcism?’

‘You mean on me, right?’

‘I don’t know. You studied law for a while, didn’t you?’

‘But saying what?’ The backs of her legs felt weak. ‘That Stock had acted out of character due to a sudden infusion of the Holy Spirit? I don’t think even that was quite suggested in the Taylor case.’

‘But you said that was over a quarter of a century ago. Probably twice as many people going to church as there are now. We’ve become a secular country very quickly. You might talk about the Holy Spirit…’

‘I imagine some barrister would argue that’s become a meaningless term. Mythology.’

‘They’d probably bring on a tame shrink,’ Lol said. ‘There are dozens of the buggers out there – university professors… authors of distinguished textbooks, theses. Awesomely eloquent, frighteningly fluent, oozing with… certainty. I’ve been listening to them for months. They’re scary. Not necessarily right, but convincing.’

He put down the tea towel, and came to lean against the stainless-steel draining board. Merrily let the hot water run over her wrists. This was a new Lol, wasn’t it?

‘So they screen Stock’s video in court,’ he said. ‘The jury see you at work. Then they see Stock at the end, when he’s about to throw you out. He’s angry, almost irrational – this is the real Stock, of course, but the jury don’t know that. The first Stock they saw was this quiet, subdued, compliant character who just wants peace restored to his home. They’re thinking to themselves, what happened in there? What brought about this change?’

‘He was annoyed at Stephanie, the way she was behaving.’

‘But on the video he isn’t going for Stephanie, he’s going for you. And me – he’s questioning what I’m doing there. Am I there as a psychotherapist in case he’s bonkers? So what’s this other guy about? the jury asks itself…’

‘Is directed to ask itself,’ Merrily said, ‘by the smart brief.’

‘Meanwhile, back on the video, Stock’s trying to find out what’s been achieved there, and he’s not satisfied with the answers. He loses it completely, hurls the brimstone tray to the floor. And what do we do? We just walk out, leaving this unstable and clearly violent man—’

‘With the offer of a few prayers to tide him over,’ Merrily said bitterly.

‘And then they… I suppose they put you in the witness box.’

‘And screen the – what they’ll keep on calling an exorcism. They take me through it, prayer by prayer, line by line, demanding explanations, justifications. They ask: What happened to you when you looked like you were choking? Why did you suddenly start rushing around opening doors?’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Well, that was… that was just something I should’ve done before we started. You’re supposed to open all the doors.’

‘So the evil spirits have nowhere to hide?’

‘I…’ She stared down into the sink. ‘Something like that.’

‘You actually had an awareness of evil?’

‘Maybe.’ The water was very hot on her hands and wrists, but she didn’t remove them.

Lol took a step back. ‘Did you?’

‘Yeah, I know – how do I qualify that? How do I define evil?’

‘No,’ Lol said. ‘This is me, not the barrister. I want to know. Did you feel an evil?’

‘I… I smelt sulphur. I tasted sulphur. It went to the back of my throat in this raw, searing way that sulphur does. I can’t explain that, but it did feel like I was choking. For a couple of seconds I felt like I was going to—’

The water began scalding the backs of her hands and she pulled them back with a small scream. Lol wrenched a hand towel from a hook on the wall.

‘—die.’ She pushed her hands gratefully into the towel. ‘Now that sounds really stupid, doesn’t it? Imagine having to say that in court. But yeah… I mean, obviously, what happened afterwards took the edge off it in a big way, but for one terrifying split second I really thought I was about to choke to death, or at least pass out, lose consciousness. So I started to say in my head something called St Patrick’s Breastplate, which is a complete spiritual self-defence thing, surrounding yourself with the power of Christ, and I went around opening doors, and it… it went away. And I got my act together and carried on. How would your psychologist and your agnostic barrister react to that?’

Lol didn’t reply. He was holding her hands, still wrapped in the towel.

‘Go on.’ She felt her voice shrink. ‘Finish the scenario.’

Crunch of tyres on the track outside. Sophie?

Lol took his hands away. He stood there in that same old alien sweatshirt, those same sad, whipped-puppy eyes behind his brass-rimmed specs. But this was Lol back from psychotherapy school – six months exposed to concerned humanism, sympathetic psychobabble. He was right: he did know these people now.

‘They’d take me apart, right?’ Merrily said. ‘They have full access to science and psychology and scepticism and cynicism. I’m—’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. We shouldn’t’ve started this. It could be that none of it will happen.’ He followed her to the door. ‘I was just playing devil’s advocate.’

She turned and stared at him, and he realized what he’d said and smiled ruefully, eyebrows rising above his glasses.

‘Jesus,’ he murmured.

‘Two thousand years of exorcism on trial,’ Merrily said.

It seemed so ridiculous when you put it like that.

So why was she sweating?

28 A Religious Man

LOL FOLLOWED MERRILY out to the grey Saab, its engine running. She was wearing a short, orange-coloured skirt and a crumpled white jacket and carrying a canvas shoulder bag under an arm. The exorcist.

He thought: They’ll do it. They’ll sacrifice her.

At the car, as though she’d simultaneously reached the same conclusion, Merrily turned to him, tried for a smile but failed. She shrugged instead.

Her image misted. Behind her, in the meadow sloping down to the Frome, the hay had been cut and turned and lay heavy, like acres of gold leaf, a heat haze hanging over it.

From behind the wheel of the Saab, the stately Sophie raised a hand in formal greeting, like the Queen or somebody. She wore a dark blue business suit and no smile. She revved the Saab like a getaway driver. Sophie would do her best for Merrily. Probably even the Bishop would do what he could. But in the end they’d both have to walk away.

Lol watched the Saab turn, crunching baked red earth, vanishing around the curve of the track. A cold electricity was branching through him as he walked rapidly away, down the footpath, across the hay meadow, to the river that seeped below the brambles, under the hedge and the fat, purple-spotted banks of willowherb.

The River Frome, flowing invisibly. Like the truth.

Just when it seemed entirely unimportant, the substance of the final verse of his river song seeped unbidden into his head.

What you did, Lol realized, was join another river.

Walking through Knight’s Frome, he saw nobody: no police, no press. He crossed the bridge, to the small, sunken church. The churchyard was wilderness, so overgrown around the perimeter that you couldn’t tell where the countryside began, several gravestones even poking out of bushes.

Lol stood in the porch and listened: no voices, no clatter. He went in, letting the iron latch fall behind him.

Sometimes they still oppressed him, churches, with their rigidity and weight, the ungivingness of them, their atmospheres dense with the residue of humourless old hymns. This one was almost frugally plain, the air inside ochre with sunlight and dust. Lol went and sat in a back pew, over in a corner. He couldn’t quite see the altar; that was OK.

He sat for a while in silence. The prayer-book shelf was thick with dust; in it, someone had finger-drawn two sets of initials and a heart.

Lol took off his glasses, wondering how often Merrily did this, how many times a day – how long it took to break the ice. His feeling was that it could be like meditation, that you’d have to connect with your deepest inner self, the part that flowed into some collective unconscious, rippling under the light of whatever it was you called God.

Rivers again.

‘Listen,’ he whispered, when the level seemed beyond his reach. ‘I mean, we don’t really know each other – at least, I don’t know you. But we’ve got one mutual interest, and I hope you’re not going to let her down.’

His eyes had half closed and all he could see was a dark yellow haze, with blobs of white where the windows were.

‘Because she’s not going to help herself, you know that. She’ll just keep on telling the truth as she sees it, and that might be the wrong kind of truth for certain people. And I realize we only learn by suffering, by screwing up, and maybe she did screw up… but her heart was in it, and what else can you ask? And if she goes, she won’t come back, and I don’t think that’s going to help anybody. I mean, how do you want to play this? You want a church run by politicians or by people who actually give a shit?’

He glanced over his shoulder towards the vestry, which Merrily had entered as a woman and emerged from as a priest. He leaned back and thought for a few minutes.

‘So, like… don’t you think some things need to start coming out? I mean, don’t know how far this goes back, but I think it probably pre-dates Stewart Ash. I think something bad happened there, apart from Stewart’s murder. And I think that Stewart, as a lingering presence… was an irrelevance, and I think Stock knew that. So what did Stock really want? Why did he want an exorcism? Why did he approach Simon and then go after Merrily?’

Talking to himself, now. He’d tried to puzzle it out last night and early this morning as he’d mopped and scrubbed the kitchen. But puzzling had produced nothing. He just didn’t know enough.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘This is bollocks, isn’t it?’

He stood up. Nothing resolved. No revelation. No inspirational feedback from his inner self.

When he put on his glasses, the white blobs hardened into pearly Gothic windows. He slid wearily out of the pew and across to the church door.

Daylight filled the crack around the door. When he put a hand up to the latch, he found it was already up. Which was odd, because he was sure he’d closed the door and heard the latch fall into place.

It was probably warped. He opened it and went out, and there she was in the porch, blocking his path with her wheelchair.

‘A religious man after all, then, is it, Lol?’

There were no unfamiliar cars in the palace yard; no one was waiting under the arch or at the top of the stairs.

Sophie unlocked the office door. ‘If he doesn’t show up now, I think I shall be very annoyed indeed.’

Inside, the phone was ringing. They heard the machine pick it up. ‘This is for Mrs Watkins. We’ve met before. Tania Beauman, formerly of the Livenight programme, now researching for the Witness series on Channel Four. I’d appreciate a call back. Thank you.’

Merrily drew a surprised breath. ‘She’s got a nerve after last winter’s fiasco.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Sophie said. ‘I can handle this. I didn’t tell you, but we’ve had a similar approach from Panorama at the BBC. They’re all thinking ahead to the court case. They make a background programme in advance, to be screened immediately the case is over and the shackles are off. The spiel is that they’re going to make the programme anyway, and if you don’t agree to appear, your views may not be fully represented.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘I said we’d discuss it when you returned from your holiday, adding – God forgive me – that I was sure we could trust the British Broadcasting Corporation to produce a balanced and accurate account, with or without your help.’

There were two other messages on the machine, one from the Bishop, nervously demanding an update, the other from Fred Potter, of the Three Counties News Agency.

‘Look, nobody can print anything now, so I won’t be on your back for a good while. I just wanted to say thanks for your help, and if there’s anything I can do to help you at all… because, you know, I’ve heard one or two things which don’t sound that promising from your point of view… so, if you think there’s anything I can maybe tell you… you know where I am, OK. Thanks. I’ll give you the number again, just in case…’

‘Little shark.’ Sophie lifted a finger to delete the message.

‘No, I’m going to ring him.’

‘You’re not!’

‘What have I got to lose? Besides, he was—’

‘Everything,’ Sophie snapped. ‘For a start, you’re supposed to be on holiday.’

But Merrily was already tapping in the Worcester number. The young woman who answered said Fred was on the phone, asked who was speaking.

‘It’s Mrs… Sharkey, from Hereford. I’ll hold.’

When Fred Potter came on the line, Merrily said quickly, ‘Just don’t say my name aloud, or I’ll have to hang up.’

‘Mrs Sharkey?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Well, thanks for calling back, Mrs Sharkey. Hold on a moment. Ah, Sinead, you don’t fancy getting me a tuna on rye from the sarny bar? Plus whatever rabbity morsels you allow yourself. Excellent, thank you. This enough? Cheers.’ Pause. ‘Right, Mrs Sharkey, we’re on our own. Bloody hell, that was a bit of a turn-up, wasn’t it?’

‘A turn-up. Yes, it was.’

‘You know about the video?’

‘Video?’

‘All right, I’ll be honest. I knew Stock had the place bugged and wired up for sound and pictures. He told me himself.’

‘Did he?’

‘He had one camera wedged into a shelf at the time, and of course it fell over while I was there, and it was dangling by the strap. He asked me if I’d mind keeping quiet about it. Said he was convinced he was going to get something mind-blowing on tape that would prove he wasn’t making it up. That’s why I said I believed he was on the level – I couldn’t tell you, I’d agreed to say nothing.’

‘That’s OK.’ Thanks a bunch.

‘Besides, I was thinking, if he does get something mind-boggling…’

‘Seems like he has,’ Merrily said.

‘You reckon he thought something might appear during the exorcism?’

‘You’re just trying to find out whether I did one or not.’

He laughed. ‘All right, forget it. Anything I can tell you, stuff you might not know? No notes, no recording, swear to God.’

‘What did you think of Mrs Stock, Fred?’

‘Good question. Er… well, the first thing I thought was, he’s landed on his feet there, hasn’t he just, jammy bugger?’

‘Meaning what’s a clapped-out old drunk doing with a charming young thing like that?’

‘I wouldn’t say say charming. Sexy. Not beautiful, but she’d got a certain… It’s funny, he was going on about what it had done to them, living in that place, making them withdrawn, nervous, all this… and she kept very quiet while I was there. But after it came out about the murder, when we’d got all we could in the village, I drove into Hereford and hung around outside the secretarial agency where Stephanie worked, back of Aubrey Street, and I had a word with a few of the girls when they came out. And I got just a completely different story.’

There was a tapping on the door. Merrily glanced up as Sophie let in a man who had to stoop in the doorway. She saw grey and white tufted hair, a face like a tired horse. David Shelbone?

‘In these situations,’ Fred Potter said, ‘you’re just after kind of, “We’re all absolutely shattered, she was a lovely person who remembered everybody’s birthday” – predictable stuff, because this is the victim and it usually helps if the victim’s a nice person. You normally find the workmates or the neighbours’ve already had the cops round and the initial excitement’s worn off a bit. But on this occasion, as it happened, I was in there first. These women didn’t know about it.’

Sophie offered the visitor a seat. Merrily put a hand over the phone, whispered, ‘Sorry, I’ll be one minute.’

‘So what I was getting was genuine, off-the-cuff reaction,’ Fred said. ‘The women looking at each other, shocked, naturally, gasps of horror, as you’d expect, then grilling me for information. But the quotes I was getting from them were not what I was looking for. In the end I put the notebook away because I was getting a load of stuff I couldn’t have used – asking more questions than it answered. And we weren’t going to get any answers, not now, with her dead and him—’

‘Questions?’

‘What I was getting was not a lot of genuine sorrow, to be honest. She’d worked for that agency four or five months. When she first arrived, she seemed very, very quiet. Very proper, very polite, butter wouldn’t melt. The kind, if she met a bloke on the stairs, she’d shrink into the wall to avoid him brushing against her.’

‘Stephanie Stock?’

‘And when she talked about her husband, it was like he was some sort of guru – her mentor, her guardian. Gerard this, Gerard that. “Oh, I don’t know, I’d better ask Gerard.” “No, I don’t think Gerard would approve.” This was when she talked at all.’

‘So what happened?’

‘She changed.’

‘Damn right she changed,’ Merrily said.

‘Not overnight; it was a continuing process. If I’d been writing it up for the tabs, I’d’ve had the girls saying something like, “Stephanie was very quiet at first and hard to get to know, but the job really brought her out of herself, and in her last few days she’d been full of life and getting on with everybody.” ’

‘Meaning?’

‘You’re clergy, Mrs Watkins. I can’t…’

‘Oh, sod off—’ Merrily looked up, uncomfortably, with a strained smile for Mr Shelbone.

‘All right,’ Fred Potter said. ‘There was a bloke upstairs, an accountant. Divorced. Sports car. There’s always one, isn’t there? The one no woman likes to meet on the stairs on a dark morning. The one where they always prefer to hold open the door for him, yes?’

‘I know.’

‘Again, this is one of those bits where the girls’re exchanging knowing glances, and frankly I don’t think any of them knows exactly what happened between Stephanie and this randy accountant. But someone saw her coming down from his office one lunchtime, and after that the man was very subdued.’

‘More than he bargained for?’

‘No, he was actually scared – that was the consensus. I don’t know if this was an exaggeration, but they said he was working from home the rest of the week. Like he was frightened.’

‘You serious?’

‘Yeah,’ Fred said. ‘Yeah, I am actually.’

‘These women – they didn’t like her.’

‘I think it’s fair to say they did not like poor Stephie. One of them started whispering that she was probably a bit mental, and who knows what her husband had to put up with, and then another one’s shouting, “Hey, this isn’t going to be in the papers, is it?” and of course that was it for me – everybody clams up. Well, no way was it going in the papers, even if he didn’t get charged last night – this is the victim; if you make a victim sound too much like a slag, the level of interest goes right down.’

‘Meaning the amount of space you get, the amount of money…’

‘Well… yeah.’

‘What about the haunting? Did she ever talk about that at work? I mean, she must have, after that spread in the People.’

‘Somebody apparently said something like, “How can you go on living there?” but she just laughed, and then the boss sent her off to this garage, Tanner’s, temping, so they never saw her again.’

‘What’s the name of the agency?’

‘The Joanna Stokes Bureau.’

Merrily made a note. ‘Thanks, Fred.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ve been wanting to tell somebody. It’s like I’ve been carrying her around.’ A little laugh, part cynical, part embarrassed… part something else.

‘It’s different, isn’t it,’ Merrily said, ‘when a murder victim is somebody you knew, however slightly. Somebody you’d seen not long before it happened.’

‘Yes,’ Fred Potter said, ‘it’s different. Look, is it OK if I ring you again, if I… if you…?

‘Of course.’

She gave him her mobile number. She didn’t usually do that. It was that phrase carrying her around.

29 The Plagues of Frome

EVEN FROM A few feet away, it looked as though the wheelchair was gliding through the undergrowth, cutting brambles like Boudicca’s legendary chariot with the knives in the wheels.

In fact, Isabel knew where the overgrown path went burrowing through the tangled churchyard to the bank of the Frome. Where the wheelchair stopped you could see the river down below, like smoked glass.

‘Look at that,’ she said contemptuously. ‘No rocks, no rapids. Seemed such a nice boring place, it did, after Wales. No historical baggage, see – no ruins, no megalithic sites. No history at all that wasn’t to do with hops.’

She wore a short-sleeved tropical top, with big golden flowers, and cord jeans. Her hair had amber highlights. There was a thin, grey shawl folded on her lap.

‘Perfect, it was,’ she said. ‘Perfect for us. And now – blood everywhere.’

‘Everywhere?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Huh?’

Isabel shook her head. Apparently, she’d sent the vicar off on a pastoral visit to the farthest of his four parishes, up towards Ledbury. Missionary work.

‘Starting to mope, see. Becomes dangerous when he mopes.’ She looked up coyly at Lol. ‘ “You want a church run by politicians or by people who actually give a shit?” I like that. That’s telling Him.’

Of course, she’d overheard it all, every whispered word.

‘And now you’re throwing it all back at Simon. Can’t blame you for that. Fair play, though, he did say bring her along to see him first, if she had plans to go into that place.’

‘We tried,’ Lol said tonelessly. ‘You weren’t at home. You were in Hereford, shopping.’

‘My fault. He was moping, and I got the feeling he was getting ready to… go in there himself.’

‘To exorcize the kiln?’

‘Or whatever was needed.’

‘He’d made it pretty clear he didn’t think anything was needed!’

‘Ah, well,’ said Isabel, ‘what he says and what he thinks…’

‘You’re saying,’ Lol looked up in despair at the flawless sky, ‘he did think something was needed.’

‘I’m not saying what he thought. You can blame me, like I said. I didn’t want him in there. I didn’t mind him warning your lady friend, that was only right. But I didn’t want him in there. So you see… It’s me to blame.’

Lol didn’t say anything. Isabel wheeled herself back from the river bank, along the path, to the base of an arthritic-looking apple tree.

‘Funny, though, isn’t it, this whole religion business? God working in mysterious ways. How do people expect Him to work – bolts of lightning all the time? And there I am, sitting at the door, and you pleading for enlightenment: “Isn’t it time it all came out?” Me thinking, I must be it – the mysterious way. What a bloody honour.’

Lol shook his head, mystified.

Hands folded on the shawl on her lap, Isabel fixed him with a gaze blazing now with what looked like a fearsome candour, and her voice acquired a flint edge.

‘Time for us to talk, isn’t it, boy?’

She got him to push her back to the vicarage gates and then down towards the main road. The haze had been burned out of the sky and the tarmac was beginning to sweat. There were hops on either side of them now, high on their frames, the fruit tight and green on the bines.

‘Preserve the beer, they do,’ Isabel said. ‘And the memories, I bet. And all the old hate.’

Lol sensed a stage being set out and climbed up onto it. ‘So who do you think killed Stewart Ash?’

‘Does it matter?’ Isabel gazed downhill towards the just-visible roof of the hop museum. ‘Wasn’t Adam Lake himself, was it?’

‘No?’

‘Hasn’t got the balls. Big man, macho image, but no balls. I reckon, see, that what Stock was trying to suggest the other night was that Lake got somebody else to do it. No balls, plenty of money – that’s what Stock was saying.’

‘But like Lake said, would he really kill somebody just get back another little bit of his old man’s estate?’

‘Ah, well,’ Isabel said, ‘you’ve got to look at the whole picture, isn’t it? Son of his father, when all’s said and done.’

Lol recalled what Gerard Stock had said in the Hop Devil about Conrad Lake. ‘You mean some kind of Nazi?’

‘Wasn’t far out. They still don’t say too much out loud, round yere, about all that, because old Perry-Jones isn’t dead yet, and Perry-Jones and Conrad Lake were part of the same disease.’

‘Armbands, Stock said.’

‘Nothing so obvious. Right-wing politics, racist stuff – you don’t get so much of that in the country. You get Tories, of course. They’re all bloody Tories, the old kind, stuck into their Little England feudal ways. No tub-thumping, though, no rabble-rousing. It’s the cities where the real extremism starts, isn’t it, the cities where all the immigrants go? How many black faces you ever see behind the wheel of a tractor? Life just trundled on in places like this: the same families, the same faces, the same hairstyles…’ Isabel reached out and fingered a bine. ‘Except in September, of course.’

‘The hop harvest.’

‘September, see, that was when the people of the Frome Valley had a taste of what life was like in the cities – drunkenness, debauchery, robbery, violence. All those thousands of common working-class folk from the Black Country and the Valleys. People like me. In fact my mam and my auntie used to come round yere hop-picking when they were young. Great times, she always says. Hard work, but a lot of laughs.’

‘Debauchery?’

‘Oh, no more than you’d expect with all those thousands of people and not much to do at night but drink and flirt. Got out of hand sometimes. And there was jealousy and rivalry… bar brawls, beatings, the odd stabbing. The Hop Devil – that was a no-go area for local people until about halfway through October. Bit like the Wild West. Then, one night, a farmer’s boy… they found his body in the Frome.’

‘What, murdered?’

‘Never proved. This was the early fifties, they didn’t have fancy forensics back then. But it was enough for Perry-Jones. He was off… “These barbarians…” ’

‘The Welsh?’

‘Thank you, Lol. No, the Welsh, mostly they just sang. This was the gypsies.’

‘Ah.’

‘The Welsh looked like everybody else, but the gypsies looked like foreigners, another race. The gypsies weren’t sociable. Clannish. Set up their own camps and only mixed with their own kind. Not that they weren’t loyal to their employers, because they were – more than any of the others, in some ways. But they were a race apart, and they knew it. What are they, originally? From India or somewhere?’

‘I think so.’

‘And heathens. Oh, Perry-Jones made the most of all that. Ambitious, he was, see – only a young man, then, in his twenties, and a firebrand. Didn’t care what he said. Well, nobody did back then. No such word as racism. You call the gypsies a bunch of no-good, lying, evil, murderous bastards, nobody’s going to jump on you for not being politically correct. “Get them out!” he’s screaming. “Clean this filth from our farms!” ’

‘He said that? With the war not long over? What about the Holocaust? All the gypsies who went into the death camps? Was that not fresh in people’s memories?’

‘If you listen to my mam, Lol, all that was fresh in people’s memories back then was the war itself and what a relief it was all over. Besides, I think it was years later before they even knew the extent of the Holocaust. Anyway, Perry-Jones, he was up for the County Council and looking for a future in Parliament, and he got a fair bit of support, blaming the gypsies for every bit of trouble. A lot of people, they have a natural fear of anything they don’t know about. And nobody knows about the Romany folk, do they, except other Romanies? Not to this day.’

Lol recalled that Al Boswell had been among the Romany pickers at Knight’s Frome, back then, and wondered how he’d managed to drink in the same bar as Oliver Perry-Jones. Nonconfrontational is all we are, Al had said. He’d have to be.

Isabel explained how Perry-Jones was forever on at Old Man Lake – this was Conrad’s father – to ban the gypsies from Knight’s Frome for good. In the nineteen-forties and fifties, the Lakes owned the two biggest farms in the village.

‘But Old Man Lake, he said the gypsies were good workers and that’s all that concerned him – wasn’t one of his boys that wound up dead in the river.’

‘But if there was no proof—’

‘No proof whatsoever. But then the old man, he died, and Conrad took over, and Conrad was very ambitious, too, went at it like an industrialist, buying up every bit of ground going, until he owned what amounted to the whole of Knight’s Frome. And he was around the same age as Perry-Jones, and a close friend of his, and Perry-Jones was on the council by then and oiling wheels for Conrad. So… well, the first thing Conrad does is cut the gypsy pickers’ pay, hoping this will drive them away. Didn’t work – they still came back. Resentful, sullen, but they came back. No loyalty to him now, mind, and a good deal more poaching and theft, including his wife, it was said.’

Lol stopped pushing. They were at the crest of a rise, and the land before them sloped panoramically away, low hills and woodland, towards Hereford.

‘His wife?’

Isabel peered over her shoulder at him. ‘Nobody’s told you that?’

He shook his head. Isabel smiled.

‘His first wife, this was, not Adam’s mother. Caroline, her name, and quite a prize – high-born beauty, god-daughter of the Earl of so-and-so. And, well, she just disappeared one day, isn’t it? Gone. Vanished. And it was never explained. Well… the police certainly weren’t called in, so it’s clear that Conrad must’ve known where she was and was too proud to let it out. But this was the height of the picking season, and the rumour was she’d been bewitched by the gypsies – seduced, kidnapped, spirited away. That’s what they do, isn’t it, gypsies? Conrad never mentioned it, never a word, but that was it for the Romanies… and the tinkers and what-have-you. Conrad’s manager told them to take their money, clear out and never come back.’

Lol pushed the chair into a passing place near the bottom of the lane and sat on the grass verge in front of Isabel. ‘When was this?’

‘Oh… the sixties? You don’t hear the full truth about it, ever, because this was the time when machines were taking over from the hop-pickers, generally, so most of them were going to be out of a job soon anyway – the gypsies, the Dudleys and the Welsh, all of them together. And some people still say Conrad kept quiet because his wife had run off with one of his own friends, and he just took it out on the gypsies because they were there and because Perry-Jones was his best mate. Today you’d have questions asked, but in the sixties people knew their place – though that was about to change, mind – and Conrad Lake was the boss, and he owned the whole bloody village, so…’

‘This was when he was living at the house that was originally behind Stock’s kiln?’

Isabel’s eyes shone. ‘Correct. It was after Caroline left, he started building his new place. Turned his back on the old farmhouse, knocked it down, just left the kiln. As if the house itself was responsible for the failure of his marriage.’

‘And the gypsies all went?’

‘Oh, they went. In their own time and their own way. The hop-picking, see, that was part of their seasonal cycle – Hereford, for the hops and apples, then down to Evesham for the plums, what have you? They went… but not before buildings were set on fire, fences cut, stock loosed into the hop-yards. And that was when the police arrived in force.’

‘Not very non-confrontational.’

‘The police?’

‘The gypsies. Al Boswell says the Romanies are essentially non-confrontational.’

‘Aye, well, what had happened, they accused Lake, or one of his managers, of taking one of their own women. An enormous outcry, there was. Police out searching for her. In the end, I think the cops decided the gypsies had made it up, to get back at Lake. The gypsies of course, were saying – still say – that the coppers never really tried to find her because she was only a gypsy, see, and not worth shit. Maybe something in that. At least some things have changed for the better since the sixties.’

‘What do you really think?’

‘Well, I don’t know, Lol. But Stewart Ash thought he did. Gone into it all, he had. And of course it was all going to be in his book, in detail.’

Lol blinked. ‘Which book?’

‘The book he was working on when he died. The book the Smith boys were supposed to be helping him research. He was going into the whole business: the reasons the Romanies were banished from Knight’s Frome, never to return – if you don’t include Al – and what really happened to the girl. Rebekah, she was called, with a k and an h. Rebekah Smith.’

‘Smith?’

‘Oh, it’s a big tribe, Lol, the Smiths. None bigger. Doesn’t mean she was related to the boys who killed Stewart.’

‘It does give them a reason for not killing Stewart, though, doesn’t it?’

‘I suppose you could say that.’

‘And did Stewart claim to know what happened to this Rebekah Smith?’

‘I don’t know. The thing is, Lol, you can’t libel the dead, and if Stewart wanted to suggest that Conrad Lake was in some way connected with the so-called disappearance of Rebekah Smith, there was nothing much to get in his way…’

‘Except Adam Lake, maybe. How much does Stock know?’

Isabel spread her hands. ‘Who can say? Especially now.’

‘Is there a manuscript?’

‘I’ve no idea. I don’t even know if he’d started writing it before he was murdered. But, yes, you’re right, of course, it wouldn’t make young Adam feel any more at home to have some book on sale for ever and ever in Bromyard and Ledbury and Hereford, linking his late father with some nasty old scandal. Especially,’ Isabel smiled gently, ‘as the local people have always said – and Sally Boswell will confirm this for you – that the terrible collapse of the Lake family hop-empire is down to what you might call a very traditional Romany curse.’

‘Of course.’ The aphids, the red spiders, the white mould… and the Verticillium Wilt. The four plagues of the Frome Valley.

And the Lady of the Bines – where did she fit in?

Lol stood up. ‘So that was where Stock was coming from.’

‘Bit clearer now, is it?’

‘That’s a joke, right?’ Lol said.

‘You asked God,’ said Isabel, ‘and God, in His mysterious way, asked me to fill you in on a few basics. Can we go back now? I need a wee, I do, and I can’t just nip behind a bush any more. Not till I’ve been to Lourdes.’

Lol pushed the wheelchair back into the lane. He wondered when God might think it appropriate to ask her exactly why she’d been so afraid of Simon going into Stock’s kiln?

30 Element of Surprise

EIRION TOOK THE big roundabout at Carmarthen on two wheels, it felt like, throwing Jane into the passenger door. ‘There’s a station here, right?’ she demanded, but he didn’t react. He drove on, until, quite soon, there was only open countryside in front of them.

‘I did not ask for this,’ Jane said. ‘I did not want this.’

Eirion was heading north towards Llandeilo. He was, like, serious. He was even wearing his baseball cap the right way round.

‘I’d really hoped,’ Jane said, ‘that you were not going to turn out to be one of those guys who think women can’t transport themselves from A to B on their own.’

He still didn’t respond. Well, stuff it, Jane was thinking now, why should I complain if he wants to drive me to Hereford and then turn the car around and drive all the way back to the bosom of his incredible family? Except…

‘This is Gwennan’s car, isn’t it?’

‘She lets me use it,’ Eirion said through his teeth, eyes fixed on the road. ‘And anyway, they’ve still got Dad’s car.’

‘As I understand it, she only lets you use it because you’ve got some heavy dirt on her. Like that she’s really English or something?’

‘If you’re just trying to make me dump you at the roadside,’ Eirion said, ‘it won’t work.’

‘I was merely trying to envisage the scenario when little Sioned and little Lowri returned from y siop, maybe half an hour ago, to find out that we’d pissed off without them, and their mummy discovered she was obliged to take care of them for the entire day. I would have gone on to make the point that whatever dirt you have on her – and I would be the last one ever to ask – would then count for like… not a great deal. I just make the point.’

Eirion slowed the BMW. She saw that, despite the air-conditioning, he was sweating.

‘I just don’t want you to get disinherited in favour of those spooky kids, is all,’ Jane said. ‘It would like distress me if you were to be taken away from the Cathedral School and forced to work as a rent boy in Abergavenny.’

‘What makes you think I don’t already?’

‘You’re not pretty enough.’

‘Why don’t you call your mum?’ Eirion said.

‘It’s not your problem.’

‘Then why did you tell me about it?’

‘We’ve been through this. I just didn’t want you to think it was a racial thing when I went over the wall.’

Eirion pulled into the side of the road. Though it was a main road, it was still fairly quiet. The hills were low and green and there were broadleaf woods. Apart from the colour of the soil, it didn’t look dramatically different from Herefordshire.

Eirion turned to face her and took off his baseball cap. His eyes were solemn, his famously amazing smile now in cold storage.

‘I’ll be straight with you, Jane, I’m going to be in deep shit over this. Gwennan and Dad have a big lunch today in Tenby with some Arts Council people and National Assembly delegates and a cultural delegation of Irish-speakers from Ireland. It’s informal, but there could be a significant PR contract in it for Gwennan, in connection with this pan-Celtic cultural festival.’

‘Turn the car round now,’ Jane said with this, like, dark menace.

‘No. They’ll deal with it. They’ll find someone to look after the kids. Things will be a little tense for a while. I may have minor transportation problems – nothing I can’t handle.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Brownie points, that’s all,’ Eirion said. ‘I mean I’d really hate you to think I was in love with you or anything like that.’

He turned on the engine and pulled back into the traffic without looking at her.

Jane sank back into the leather. ‘Holy shit,’ she whispered, almost to herself.

They stopped for lunch at a roadside diner, where they were served chips only slightly broader than matches, then made it through Llandovery and Brecon without once being stopped by the Welsh National Assembly Cultural Police looking for a stolen BMW, and reached the outskirts of Hereford by early afternoon.

It was like Eirion had crossed over some barrier, and nothing emotive was touched on again. His mood was lighter, but Jane also sensed an underlying determination, and by the time he pulled into a side road off Kings Acre it was clear it had never been his intention to drop her off at the bus station.

‘Where exactly do we find this suicide kid?’

‘It wasn’t my intention even to try,’ Jane said. ‘It would mean getting past her old lady. That could take time. She sounded like a very difficult woman.’

‘Then let’s be sensible about this and go and see your mother.’

‘You’re missing the point. My mother is in an invidious position. And if she gets involved with Riddock it will like rise off the scale of invidiousness.’

‘So you want to go and face up this Riddock?’

‘Christ, no. She’d chew us up. Especially you.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re a guy. Guys she eats for an aperitif.’

‘An aperitif is a drink, Jane. Try hors d’oeuvre.’

‘I thought children of your ethnic persuasion had to do Welsh instead of French.’

‘I didn’t need to do Welsh, Jane. It was my first language – well, almost.’

‘Sometimes you scare me, you’re so alien.’

‘Bollocks,’ Eirion said. ‘Neither, somehow, do I believe this Riddock scares you.’

‘Doesn’t scare me, exactly. I just don’t want to go near her until I’ve got the means to, like, bend her to my will. No, listen…’ Jane hammered both fists on her knees. ‘Listen, listen, listen, I can work this out. You were right, of course. There was no way I could go to the media with half a story. We have to know first what the complete score is with this slag. Like, are we talking extortion? Because when I first sat down at that table in Steve’s shed, the first thing Kirsty Ryan asked me was had I got the ten quid. I mean, was that a joke? Or have they actually been taking money off little kids for letting them talk to their dear departeds?’

‘Little kids tend not to have dear departeds,’ Eirion said. ‘Death doesn’t mean that much to them.’

‘Jesus,’ Jane said, ‘when did you have your mid-life crisis?’

‘Besides which, I thought you said she had this rich stepfather who bought her a yellow Porsche.’

‘Mazda. Look, we don’t know enough, OK? Therefore, we need to talk to someone who does. Turn the nice German wheels around, and I shall endeavour to direct you. And…’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m very grateful to you for sacrificing your cultural heritage on the altar of, um…’

‘Don’t embarrass us both,’ Eirion said. ‘We have all the time in the world for that crap.’

‘Wasn’t that in an ancient James Bond film?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Bond’s like, “We have all the time in the world.” Then his woman gets shot.’

‘You have to turn everything into wide-screen, don’t you, Jane?’

‘It’s a cultural thing,’ Jane said. ‘It’s about seeing the big picture – being outward-looking, rather than… all right, forget it.’

She had a vague idea where the farm was because Kirsty and her sister had thrown this barn-rave for Kirsty’s sixteenth, about a year ago, and these little maps had been given out. Despite her old friend Dr Samedi doing the music, Jane hadn’t gone along in the end because… well, because of a nobody-to-go-with kind of short-term situation, if you wanted the truth. But she remembered the name of the farm.

‘The Bluff?’ Eirion said. ‘Is this an omen?’

He was taking it very slowly because this was, after all, Gwennan’s car, and they were into rough tracks now. He’d left a terse but nervous message on his dad’s answering machine, explaining about the car. All Jane knew was that it was terse and nervous, because it was also in Welsh.

‘I could’ve sworn this was right.’ She was sitting up, peering from side to side: fields full of hay like big rolls of butter, a distant church steeple that could be Weobley. The Bluff implied high ground, but this was all fairly flat.

It was getting very hot; she wished she’d worn shorts.

‘You didn’t say you’d never actually been here,’ Eirion said crossly, the BMW lurching on a baked rut. ‘And you don’t know she’s going to be there when we find it. In fact, you haven’t really thought this out, have you?’

‘I’m an emotional, volatile, charged kind of person, Irene. When I see what has to be done, I just go for it. I thought that was one of the things you—’

‘Don’t push it,’ Eirion growled.

‘All right,’ Jane said. ‘I’d have rung her, if I’d thought about it. But anyway, I always think the element of surprise works best, don’t you?’ She looked over the back of the seat, through the rear window. ‘You know this… this has got to be right, Eirion. If Weobley’s over there and Sarnesfield’s back there—’ She pointed across the field. ‘OK, look, there’s a guy on a tractor. Why don’t we just ask him? Just like drive across, you’re OK.’

‘I can’t just drive across his field!’

‘Course you can, he’s already done this bit.’

Eirion changed down; the BMW chugged across the spiky surface of the mown meadow. When they got to within about ten yards of the tractor, the big machine stopped and the driver was jumping down, walking slowly towards them. The driver wore a red shirt and jeans and a dark blue baseball cap with Ford across the front.

The car couldn’t go any further; they were into this rolling sea of cut hay. There was another guy messing about with whatever you called the piece of machinery the tractor was pulling. He looked up. Both of them looked sweaty and knackered. Eirion wound down the window and hot, urban music came in, along with the industrial juddering of the tractor.

‘Sorry to bother you—’

The driver whipped off the cap, uncovering short red spiky hair and unshadowing a face that was, despite its deepening tan, not a happy face.

‘Right, mate – deal. You show me the sign that says “picnic site” and I won’t ram you into the bloody ditch.’

‘Oh.’ Jane leaned across Eirion to the open window.

The tractor driver peered past Eirion at Jane.

‘Er… hi,’ Jane said. ‘Hi, Kirsty. You got a couple of minutes?’

Kirsty Ryan wiped the sweat from her nose with the back of a hand, and a clinking of the outsize nose-rings not allowed in school. She looked butch and she looked sullen. She also looked like she knew exactly what this was going to be about.

‘Piss off, Watkins,’ Kirsty said. ‘We got nothing to say to each other.’

‘Element of surprise,’ Eirion murmured. ‘Yes, that always works best.’

31 Little Taps

DAVID SHELBONE DIDN’T look well. There was something static about one side of his long face, as though he’d had a stroke.

‘No, I’m all right, quite all right,’ he’d kept saying to Sophie, as she offered him more tea, a paracetamol. ‘I’ve always suffered from migraines; this is nothing.’

Merrily didn’t like to stare, but she wondered if perhaps he had only one eye. He was not what she’d imagined. Charlie Howe had led her to expect some stern prophet type, wielding the banner of Christ and the Law of Listed Buildings. But David Shelbone had a diffident, faraway look, like some ageing poet weary of words.

Sophie had read something in his manner. Announcing that she had some papers to collect from the Bishop’s Palace, she left them alone. Merrily led Mr Shelbone into the little Deliverance office. A few weeks ago, she’d turned the desk around, so she now had her back to the Palace yard and was facing the door – a feng shui arrangement, recommended by Jane. She had to admit it did feel better-oriented; she felt more in control. Even this morning.

‘I owe you an apology.’ David Shelbone didn’t have a local accent like his wife; there was something vaguely northern about it, and his voice was flat but thin, like card. ‘When Amy came home from hospital, we had a talk. She told us your daughter was not one of the organizers of this spiritualist circle, that she in fact only attended once and was virtually dragged into it.’

Merrily nodded. ‘That’s my understanding, too.’

‘Amy said it had been on her conscience. She felt pressured – not so much by you as… Anyway, I’m very sorry. There was, I’m afraid, some overreaction.’

‘That was understandable.’

‘We were going to write to you, to apologize.’

‘No need. How is she? It must’ve been—’

‘It could have been a lot worse. We thought there’d have to be a stomach pump, but fortunately she was very sick in the ambulance. Anyway, I rang Canon Beckett last night, and he said I should talk to you, although he wasn’t sure whether or not you’d gone on holiday yet. Failing that, he thought I should go to the police. But we’d rather keep the authorities out of this. She’s our only child, you see, the only child we’ll ever have now.’

Police? ‘Erm… Sophie said your wife and Amy had gone away somewhere, because you were afraid Social Services might—I mean, can they do that? Can they take her away, if she’s been formally adopted?’

‘It’s complicated, I’m afraid, Mrs Watkins, but broadly, yes, they can take away any child they might consider to be in danger.’

Merrily thought of all the battered wives, abused children in unstable homes. She didn’t understand.

Mr Shelbone coughed nervously. ‘Also, you see, I’m… This is going to sound ridiculous.’ There was a patch of white stubble on his neck, a grease spot on the collar of his faded grey shirt.

‘Which is what most people say when they come here,’ Merrily told him.

‘Normally, I abhor talk of victimization… vendettas.’

She said carefully, ‘We are talking about Amy here? We’re talking about school?’

‘Er… not entirely.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Or at least, we… we’re probably also talking about me.’

‘I see. I think I see.’

‘Do you?’

‘Possibly. I happened to be talking to one of the councillors.’

His eyes flickered: a hunted look. ‘Which one?’

‘Well, I don’t think I’d better…’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’ His breathing had quickened.

‘But someone who I think you could say is neutral on the issue of the Barnchurch development,’ Merrily said.

He blinked hard then looked almost relieved, closed his eyes for a moment. The wall clock clicked on 11.55, and Merrily remembered, with an inner shudder, precisely where she’d been standing this time yesterday.

‘I have to be careful what I say here, Mrs Watkins,’ Mr Shelbone said. ‘As you may have heard, I’m not a very popular person in some quarters. Though I try to do what is right and Christian.’

Merrily nodded. Tell me about it.

‘The problem with councils,’ he said, ‘is that, although different departments – let’s say planning and social services – have very different functions, and officials rarely encounter one another in the course of their work, they’re all closely linked, through the elected members.’

‘In that a councillor who serves on – shall we say, planning…’

‘May also serve on social services.’ He nodded. ‘You’re being very perceptive, I think.’

‘No, I’m just putting two and two together from what I’ve been told. You’ve a history of getting in the way of certain people’s plans. They’d like you out. Your wife indicated you’d been offered some sort of early-retirement deal, but you wanted to go on.’

‘We all feel we’re here for a purpose, and protecting the past is mine,’ he said simply. ‘How could I relax at home, knowing wrong decisions were being made and important buildings were in danger of disappearing for ever?’

‘Especially religious buildings?’

He bowed his long head, like a shire-horse over a gate.

‘So someone who might be adversely affected by a planning decision influenced by a ruling from you,’ Merrily said slowly, spelling it out, ‘might seek to use any influence they might have in Social Services to damage you in other ways.’

‘Knowing that if I became ill or… disgraced in some way, it would be difficult to continue. You don’t believe people would behave like that?’

‘To get rid of someone seriously damaging their potential incomes? Of course I believe it. But, just so we know where we are, are you suggesting a bunch of councillors are on the take from Allan Henry?’

‘I doubt it’s as simple or as provable as that. It might involve a new garage or an extension to someone’s house. All peanuts to Henry, of course. But I’m not naming names.’ He looked directly at her, eyes full of pain and fatigue. ‘All I want to convey to you is that if anyone took Amy away, it would destroy Hazel. There’d be nothing left for either of us. Ever.’

‘These fears are very much in the wake of Amy’s overdose?’

‘Gossip travels fast in Herefordshire. In no time at all, people were linking Amy’s sudden hospitalization… to the incident in the church.’

‘They were linked, weren’t they?’

He looked defiant. ‘It was a horribly stupid and dangerous thing to do, and she knew it. I said to Hazel, if Amy wanted to draw attention to herself, she’s certainly done it now.’

‘Is it your feeling she was just trying to get attention? Rather than…’ Wanting to be with her mother?

‘And it’s all horribly exaggerated, I’m sure.’ Avoiding her question. ‘Because serious churchgoing is so unfashionable these days, people have accused us of being fanatics, forcing Amy to go to church all the time, operating a strict religious regime at home. I…’ He passed a hand across his eyes. ‘There’ve been all kinds of stupid stories. People are so needlessly cruel and vindictive. And social workers have big ears.’

‘You don’t need big ears when somebody’s whispering into them,’ Merrily said. ‘Have there been any formal inquiries? Any contact at all from Social Services?’

‘I have some friends left in the office. I’ve been discreetly warned, put it like that.’

‘As a result of which, Hazel’s actually taken her away?’

‘I – no. No, she hasn’t, of course. That was untrue.’ When he half turned, she thought it was to hide tears, but he was putting a hand into an inside pocket.

He slid a folded paper across the desk to her.

Merrily unfolded it carefully. Though the message was word-processed, it didn’t looked official – probably something to do with the fact that the paper was pink and had a kitten in the top right hand corner.

Oh God.

Dearest Mum and Daddy,

I am so very sorry. I have behaved abbominably and feel I am ruining both your lives. I pray that you will understand what I am doing and support me in this and not worry for my safety because I have definately learned my lesson and you need have no fears on that score any more.

I know it is not your fault and that you were only trying to protect me by not telling me the truth about Justine, but I know now, beyond all doubt, that my real mother is very unhappy and cannot rest in spirit and I know I cannot live a normal life until I have done all I can to help her.

By the time you read this I will have been to a cash machine and drawn out the money that you said was mine from your account. I am sorry I borrowed your card and will post it back to you.

Please try to understand how important this is to me and do not try to find me or tell the Police. I am quite safe, but if I find out that they are looking for me I will be very upset and might do something stupid, so please trust me and I shall return home in a few days, when Justine is at peace.

Yours sincerely,

Your loving daughter,

Amy

Merrily folded the letter. Oh God, oh God, oh God.

‘Erm… I’m with Dennis,’ she said as calmly as she could. ‘I think you should take this to the police.’

David Shelbone reached for the letter and quickly pocketed it.

‘No,’ he said very quietly.

‘David, just a couple of days ago she tried to kill herself.’

‘Tell me, do you trust your daughter when she tells you something?’

‘I…’ It was the things Jane didn’t tell you about… ‘Yeah. I suppose I do.’ She thought quickly. He wouldn’t want to go to the police for two principal reasons: one, that Amy might indeed do something stupid if she thought there was a search on for her, and two, it would confirm any social worker’s suspicions.

But this development might be more serious than David Shelbone could imagine. For instance, how much did he know about Layla Riddock? Anything at all?

‘She’s never lied to us, you see,’ he said. ‘Not from being a small child. Not about anything. It’s the way she was brought up, certainly, but also the way she is.’

Merrily sighed. ‘She lied – I’m sorry, but she lied about Jane, didn’t she?’

‘No!’ he insisted. ‘She didn’t. She said your daughter was there. The rest was implied. She didn’t lie.’

‘So when you told Sophie that your wife—’

‘I lied. Hazel’s gone to try and find her.’

‘She knows where to look?’

‘She has a good idea, yes.’

‘Where?’

‘Up near Birmingham. It’s where Amy was born. And where her mother died.’

‘And Amy knows this?’

‘We assume she does.’

‘From…’

‘Initially, from the so-called messages she received.’

‘The spirit messages?’

‘Whatever they were, they were horribly accurate. And so, in the end, we had to tell her where she came from. And what happened to her mother.’

Merrily said, ‘Do you think you could tell me?’

She’d been born Amy Jukes at Tipton in the Black Country. Her parents were even married before the happy event. Just about.

Justine was seventeen when Amy arrived and not yet a heroin user. She came from a respectable family, was doing A levels, hoping to become a doctor. This was what the court was told.

The father, Wayne Jukes, was twenty-two, an ‘assistant manager’ at a night club. What this actually meant was that Wayne had been responsible for selling various stimulants to the punters. He also did a little pill-peddling around the schools and colleges, for a bit of extra cash, and that was how he met Justine. Wayne wore nice suits and a tie and was smooth and plausible. He had a Toyota sports car, so it didn’t take long.

Justine’s parents were disappointed, naturally, but they thought Wayne was a presentable enough boy, with an apparently promising managerial position. They helped Wayne and Justine get a house, a little semi on a not-bad estate, ready for the baby.

David Shelbone knew all these details from the Social Services people in the Black Country and in Hereford. He’d also gone out of his way to obtain the inquest and court reports in the local papers – destroying them, of course, before Amy learned to read. He’d even traced Justine’s parents. David was very thorough: anything that might help understand Amy better, he and Hazel wanted to know.

Justine had been very young, had never really wanted this baby, found it awfully hard work, especially with Wayne out most nights, pursuing his junior managerial role. Justine, at home with the infant Amy, had very rapidly become depressed, and it became clear that Wayne Jukes had taken to slipping her a little something to make life seem easier. Sometimes he’d even keep her company.

They thought they were cool, rising above it. They thought because he was in the business somehow that meant they could control it. And they were young, too young for life to appear seriously bad. When you were young, you bounced.

It was a long time before Justine’s parents realized what was happening. By then, Wayne was himself using more than he was selling – too far gone to realize he was being eased out of the club operation because he was becoming untrustworthy, careless, a risk.

And the mortgage wasn’t getting paid, and the baby cried too much and Justine complained sometimes – to the extent that Wayne had found it expedient to give her a little tap from time to time.

David Shelbone was telling the story in his colourless, hesitant way, but Merrily was seeing it in harsh documentary flashes, hearing the voices, the accents, the head-spinning, squashy, bloody, sobbing reality of those little taps.

There was a serious falling-out with her family, and Wayne and Justine sold the house and got a small flat in a run-down area, at the end of one of those streets that went on for ever, a greasy ribbon of tatty garages and betting shops, chip shops, half-dead pubs.

At the very end was a church, which had been a big parish church back in the days when this had been a village street but now had a congregation of about seven pensioners. Some days Justine would retreat into the church, taking the baby, when Wayne was in one of his moods.

Which was most days, because Wayne was drinking heavily now as well. He’d made friends in one of the half-dead pubs and Justine had found it best not to be around – or to be there but completely out of it – when Wayne got home.

It was worse at night, obviously. A neighbour, who cleaned the church for the vicar – who had four other collapsing congregations to try and shore up – became concerned for Justine and gave her a key to the side door next to the vestry, and some nights that was where Justine would go, carrying the baby and a carving knife in case there was anyone already in there.

And one night there was.

Wayne had been wondering for a long time where Justine went, the times she wasn’t there when he came home in need of some kind of action. So one night he left the pub twenty minutes earlier than usual and waited in a derelict doorway across the street and followed her when she came out with the kid. Next day, he found the church key in the back pocket of Justine’s jeans and had a copy cut for himself.

And that same summer night, when Justine came into the church with Amy, Wayne was waiting for them behind the dusty, moth-eaten drapes in front of the vestry door.

It might have ended differently if Justine hadn’t done some business of her own that afternoon with a bloke she and Wayne used to know when Wayne was at the club – a bloke who gave her a little something for her trouble. If Justine hadn’t shot the little something into her arm before she came out, if she hadn’t been up there and ready for anybody, Wayne included, it might have ended with just a few more little taps.

‘And Amy saw all this?’ Merrily said. ‘How old was she?’

‘Nearly three.’

‘Dear God, that’s old enough to absorb everything. Even if she had no conscious memory, it would all be there.’

‘The Social Services were very careful about where she was taken,’ David Shelbone said. ‘The grandparents didn’t want her – they’d recently taken in an elderly relative, and, well…’

‘Mmm.’

‘It was an emergency, obviously. They wanted to get the child well out of the area, and we were experienced, reliable foster-parents, unencumbered at the time. We were approached, told the background. We were fully prepared.’ He fell silent.

‘And?’

‘Nothing to cause alarm. Not ever. No particular problems at all – and, believe me, Hazel and I have coped with some very taxing children in our time. But Amy settled down remarkably quickly. No nightmares beyond the norm. Nothing to suggest suppressed memories of violence. She was always a very well-balanced, if rather serious child. Our daughter. We both decided very quickly that, if at all possible, she should stay with us and become our daughter.’

‘There were no indications at all that she might have remembered something?’

‘Not until… I mean, yes, I have sometimes wondered if her serious and rather… orthodox approach to life didn’t reflect a subconscious need to impose an order that would in some way cancel out the chaos of her early years. But it’s not something that’s greatly worried me, and Hazel was always most emphatic that Amy should never be exposed to any kind of psychological assessment. We were naturally glad when she – without any coercion from us – began to embrace Christianity from quite an early age… perhaps four or five. Hazel always believed that if she ever required solace she would find it there, rather than in counselling or therapy.’

Merrily recalled Hazel Shelbone’s reaction to the suggestion that some kind of psychiatric assessment would be needed as a preliminary to exorcism.

‘What did you tell her when she asked you about her real parents?’

‘We told her we understood there’d been an accident – and she never questioned that. We always accepted that there may come a time when we’d have to tell her the real truth, but not until she was old enough to deal with it.’

‘So when, after years of going happily to church, she suddenly knocked the chalice out of Canon Beckett’s hands and—’

‘It all ended at the altar, you see,’ David Shelbone said. ‘That’s the point. That was what frightened us the most.’

No one knew exactly how it had ended. Wayne Jukes had presumably either decided or been told that it would help his defence if he was unable to remember anything after emerging from behind the curtain to find the baby sitting on the font and his wife crouched, snarling – the Kitchen Devil glinting in the feeble light, swishing the air.

Less than half an hour later, police – summoned by neighbours who had been afraid even to go in – found the threadbare chancel carpet already slippery with blood, Wayne standing in the aisle, with his face opened up from eye to chin, Justine vomiting blood over the altar rail.

Amy sitting on the altar itself, laughing.

‘Justine had stab wounds to the lungs, throat and stomach,’ David Shelbone said. ‘She died in the ambulance.’

The trail of blood apparently suggested that Justine had first slashed Wayne and then picked up the child and run to the chancel, the trail of blood along the aisle showing how Wayne had blundered after her.

‘She’d put Amy on the altar and then either she’d put down the knife in horror at what she’d done, and he picked it up and attacked her with it… or he overpowered her, and in the struggle—’

‘What happened to Wayne?’

‘I gather he’s out of prison now,’ David Shelbone said without emotion. ‘Doing youth work in Bristol.’

Merrily felt faintly sick, thinking not about Justine Jukes but Stephanie Stock and Gerard with the wild poppies on his shirt. Domestics: the most common kind of murder.

‘Why didn’t Hazel tell me about this at the very beginnning?’

‘We’d never told anyone – anyone. Besides, Hazel and I both fervently believed that the way out of this was through Christ. Her mother died in church, so Amy had some sort of flashback – again in church.’

‘So Hazel never really believed that Amy was possessed by Justine?’

‘It didn’t matter,’ David Shelbone insisted. ‘She was possessed by the past. If the memories could be reawakened by these foul experiments then they could be exorcised by Christ. We have old-fashioned values, Mrs Watkins. Today we’d probably never be accepted as foster-parents.’

‘When did she go missing?’

‘She wasn’t there when we got up this morning. That was a terrible shock. Her bed hadn’t been slept in. Her mobile phone was gone. We’ve tried ringing it, but it’s always switched off.’

‘And you think she’s somehow made her way to the Black Country. Does the church still exist?’

‘Oh yes. And also… we searched her room. Something we’ve never done before. We found an old road atlas of mine under the bed. The area was ringed. Hazel set off for there about three hours ago.’

‘How much money has Amy got?’

‘There was five hundred pounds of her money in the account. She can draw two hundred a day from a machine.’

‘And what do you think Amy might do there?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t a clue what they’d do.’

‘They?’

‘I doubt she’s on her own. That’s one reason I wanted to talk to you. Your daughter would know who the other girls were, wouldn’t she?’

‘Didn’t you ask Amy herself?’

‘She wouldn’t tell us… except for naming your daughter. This was when Mr Beckett—We asked her again, later, as I was ready to go to see the headmaster, but she insisted it was all over.’

‘She told you that?’

‘I honestly believe she thought it was over. And it was clear that if we tried to take it further she’d throw a tantrum. She once said if we attempted to find out, she’d—Mrs Watkins, you have to understand this is not the way she normally behaves. It’s clear, looking back, that she’s under someone else’s influence. And I rather doubt we’re talking about her dead mother.’

So he actually didn’t know yet about Layla Riddock? He didn’t have the information to make this other, very meaningful connection with Allan Henry?

And how, in his present state, would he react if she told him about it? Merrily wasn’t prepared to put it to the test.

‘Erm… my daughter’s on holiday with her boyfriend’s family. I’ll try and get hold of her, OK? I don’t know how long it’ll take, but if I find out anything I’ll… I’ll get back to you at your office. And if Hazel finds her—’

‘I’ll get straight back to you, of course,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Mrs Watkins. Thank you.’ He stood up. ‘There is one more thing. If Hazel finds Amy and brings her back, I don’t think it’ll be safe for her to come home. I wondered if the Church had any place of – of sanctuary, I suppose, somewhere you could recommend as safe for both of them. I mean Hazel as well. I’m sorry to put this on you.’

Merrily stood up too. ‘If you think it’s necessary, we’ll find somewhere. Until all this is sorted out. Even if it’s in my vicarage.’

She smiled.

This was all she needed right now.

‘I’ll help you all I can,’ she said. ‘But if Hazel doesn’t find her by tonight, I really think you should go to the police.’

When Sophie returned, Merrily laid the whole story on her, including the information she’d had from Charlie Howe at the Green Dragon, before Andy Mumford’s arrival had rearranged everyone’s priorities.

Sophie’s eyebrows rose several times.

‘What was I supposed to do?’ Merrily asked her. ‘Do you think I should’ve warned him about Layla Riddock?’

Sophie thought about it, hands clasped on the desk.

‘That would be giving him a target,’ she said at last. ‘Not good. Especially if the target’s Allan Henry.’

‘What do you know about him, Sophie?’

‘I know that he isn’t what one might call a Friend of the Earth, particularly the Herefordshire earth. He began by buying small derelict properties in villages and hamlets – a petrol station that went out of business, that sort of thing – demolishing them and developing the sites. And then somehow those sites would start to expand into adjacent fields. His own thoroughly tasteless dwelling began that way. He gets away with things. Luck of the Devil, as it were.’

‘Charlie Howe said that.’

‘And there’s a man who’d recognize it,’ Sophie said darkly. ‘However, you have no proof whatsoever of any connection between this girl’s evident persecution of Amy Shelbone and her stepfather’s grudge against David Shelbone. No, I think you did absolutely the right thing in not telling him – at this stage, at least. I think you have enough to worry about, without having an already distressed individual behaving in a probably irrational fashion because—’

‘Because of something I did.’ Merrily sighed.

Sophie glared at her. ‘I certainly intended no parallel with the Stock business.’

‘But what if Amy Shelbone is out there with Layla Riddock? This is a girl even Jane is scared of.’

Sophie thought for a moment, then reached for the Hereford phone book. After a couple of minutes tracking along columns of names, she slammed it shut.

‘Ex-directory.’

‘Only to be expected,’ Merrily said. ‘I imagine there’s quite a lot of people would like to ring Allan Henry late at night. Well, at least we know where he lives. A little bit of Dallas in Canon Pyon.’

‘Oh no,’ Sophie said. ‘You stay away from there. What would be the point?’

‘We could at least find out if Layla’s there. If she is, she can’t have gone off with Amy – and then it all falls down, doesn’t it?’

Sophie scowled. ‘Why doesn’t that man just tell the police?’

‘But he hasn’t. He’s told me.’

‘Almost as if he knew you,’ Sophie said with bitterness.

‘And, whatever he says, Amy did lie. She claimed Jane had approached her initially, to lure her into the circle – Jane, not Layla. She also tried to stitch me up when I went to the bungalow when her parents were out. So we know that Amy does tell lies.’

‘But the attempted suicide… why did she do that?’

‘Well, there was a vague mention of “pressure”,’ Merrily said. ‘But it was clear he didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t think – and this is possibly the most worrying thing of all – I honestly don’t think he knows why she did it.’

32 The Big Lie

‘I MEAN YOU’RE not gonner scare me, Watkins,’ Kirsty said. ‘I don’t give a toss who you’ve talked to. The school year’s over. The slate’s wiped clean. They can’t touch any of us now and like, by the time we go back, those time-serving gits en’t gonner want to remember. Also, I may not even go back. I’m undecided. I may’ve had enough of education.’

She sat down with her back to a tractor wheel, stretched out her legs, fanned herself with her baseball cap. Jane thought she looked disgustingly smug.

‘Came to me, couple of months ago: OK, you get your A levels, you go to university, you get some pissy little job in some nasty, overcrowded city, so that in twenty years’ time you can afford to take your kids to live in the country. It’s insane, ennit?’

‘You’ve got a point,’ Eirion agreed. ‘But—’

‘But meanwhile – yeah, yeah – Amy bloody Shelbone.’ Kirsty closed her eyes in a kind of weary contempt. ‘Why don’t you just let it go, Watkins? The kid’s neurotic. She tried to kill herself, so-called, but she didn’t make it. After an hour or so on the end of a stomach pump, or throwing up, whatever, she en’t gonner do that again in a hurry, is she, stupid little cow?’

Jane stared at the chunky girl sprawled in the hay. The other guy had gone, just slipped away. Kirsty didn’t need back-up, she was wholly self-sufficient; this was her place. But for the tractor and the blast of Massive Attack from its cab, she could have been part of a scene from centuries ago.

‘Questions are being asked all over the place,’ Jane said. ‘And it isn’t you in the frame, or Layla, either. It’s me, right? I’m the only one she named – like to the doctors and the police and people like that.’

Jane didn’t know if Amy had named her to anyone except her parents, but she needed to bring it down to a personal level that Kirsty Ryan just might relate to.

‘Tough,’ Kirsty said. ‘Go tell Morrell about it.’

‘Like you said, why should Morrell care? School’s out. But I am so not gonna sit here and take the shit for you and Riddock. I’m going public on it. You ever heard of Bella Ford from Radio Hereford and Worcester?’

‘Nope.’

‘Well, she’s a mate of mine, anyway, and I’m going over there to see her tonight, and I’m putting you and Riddock in the frame for bullying and terrorizing this younger kid into trying to top herself.’

Kirsty’s eyelids flicked up.

‘Believe it,’ Jane said grimly.

‘I only listen to Radio One,’ Kirsty said. ‘Therefore, I don’t give a monkey’s.’

‘OK.’ Jane shrugged. ‘So you won’t hear it.’

‘So why you telling me?’

‘’Cause I’m kind of a straight person. I don’t go behind people’s backs. I just wanted to tell you why I was doing it, is all.’

‘And to warn you they’ll probably be ringing you up for a comment,’ Eirion put in swiftly. With his news-reporting ambitions and his dad having fingers in BBC Wales, HTV and the Welsh-language outfit, S4C, Eirion knew quite a lot about radio and TV. ‘They’re obliged to do that, to give you a chance to get over your side of the story.’

‘Well, they can piss off, can’t they?’

‘Sure. Sometimes it’s easier for them if you do refuse to comment. They only need to give you the opportunity.’

Jane said, ‘It’s just, you know, that I’d started to feel a bit bad about you. Thinking maybe you weren’t as majorly responsible as Layla, and I wanted to tell you what I’d done. And now I’ve done that, so, like… we’ll go now.’

She turned away. It was beginning to get uncomfortably hot in this field, anyway, like the hay was extracting all the juice out of the sun.

Eirion pulled the car keys out of his jeans.

Kirsty sat up. ‘You’re an evil little cow for a vicar’s daughter, aren’t you?’

Less than ten minutes out of the centre of Hereford, you could be into deep countryside. There weren’t many cities like this any more and, the way things were going, Merrily thought – as she thought almost every time she drove out of the city – it wouldn’t be long before Hereford had become like the rest. Rampant megalomania, disguised as essential economic growth.

Ego-tripping councillors and unscrupulous developers.

Allan Henry.

Sophie stopped the Saab with two wheels on the grass verge, near the top of a low hill a mile out of the straggling village of Canon Pyon.

They were in a quiet lane, looking down on sloping woodland. On its lower fringe, the sun was reflected darkly from the huge picture windows on the side of a long, brick villa that had been built on so many levels it seemed to cascade down the hill.

Where they were now parked was probably the only place you could get a good view of Allan Henry’s home. The surrounding trees failed to conceal a wall with railings enclosing about two acres of garden, suggesting Allan Henry must also own the land between the wall and the lane. In fact, Merrily supposed he owned the whole hill.

‘What do we do now?’ She was in need of a cigarette, but Sophie had a yellow and black no smoking sign on the dash, and she meant it.

‘I suppose that depends on to what extent you think Henry might be implicated,’ Sophie said. ‘Personally, I wouldn’t even get out of the car.’

‘Think about it. If we assume David Shelbone is costing him hundreds of thousands of pounds, maybe millions – because, if the Hereford bypass goes through there, the Barnchurch estate would be gold dust – then anybody might feel frustrated to the point of… I mean, people have killed for less, haven’t they? Much less.’

Sophie nodded. ‘It’s frightening when you think about it. Which is why, if I were you, I wouldn’t get out of the car.’

‘So… accepting that killing people can seriously damage your future, Allan Henry’s looking for ways of neutralizing a sober, clean-living, God-fearing man who can’t be bought. What are the most important things in Shelbone’s life?’

‘His family,’ Sophie said reluctantly. ‘Wife, daughter… and his religion.’

‘Adopted daughter. Originally a foster-child taken in by the Shelbones under very difficult circumstances. Now, David Shelbone might think Amy’s origins are a secret, but quite a few people in and around social services will be aware of the history – including councillors, present or past.’

‘In some quarters it would be quite an open secret,’ Sophie agreed. ‘It wouldn’t take much for the information to get back, via certain councillors, to Allan Henry.’

‘Whose stepdaughter goes to the same school as Amy.’

‘This is very much the tricky part, Merrily.’

‘But if you work from the premise that Allan Henry initially asks his stepdaughter what she knows about Amy Shelbone, and Layla tells him that Amy’s this prissy, stuck-up little swot… And from then on, Layla starts to take a particular interest in Amy. Now, why – as a teenager – would she particularly want to help her stepfather?’

‘No,’ Sophie said. ‘They don’t, as a rule, do they? Not without an incentive, usually monetary. Has her stepfather told her the full background, do you think? That this girl’s father is a serious thorn in his side who could affect their future standard of living? Does he perhaps exaggerate that situation?’

Merrily thought of Robert Morrell on the phone the other night: like a lot of wealthy men with potentially problematical stepchildren, he’s been throwing money at her for years.

‘Mmm. Maybe he tells Layla that if the Barnchurch project goes down, his business will be in ruins and her lovely new sports car will have to go?’ She caught a glimpse of shimmering turquoise behind Henry’s villa. ‘Or even the swimming pool? I mean, maybe he isn’t exaggerating at all – we don’t know the size of his stake in Barnchurch.’

‘I don’t normally like to encourage flights of fancy,’ Sophie said. ‘But I suppose there is a certain tainted logic to all this.’

‘At some point Allan Henry tells Layla what he’s learned about Amy Shelbone’s history – the background even Amy herself doesn’t yet know. So then what happens? Most girls would simply confide it to a best friend, and within a couple of days it’d be all round the school. And Amy would probably become a more popular figure as a result – attracting a lot more interest, even some sympathy, for a change. But Henry realizes that Layla, being Layla, is going to come up with something far more elaborate.’

Merrily thought of Gypsy Layla: black hat, dark veil, predictions of death and destruction. Had Layla also been aware that it was the father of Amy Shelbone who’d complained about her at the Christmas Fair and ended her show – the very same David Shelbone who was now trying to shut down Allan Henry’s show?

‘So Gypsy Layla becomes Madame Layla, confidante of the dead, in session every lunchtime in the caretaker’s hut. She has at least one friend in on the secret and, between them, they work the glass. She has a lovely name to play with – Justine. She takes it very slowly, feeding out bits at a time to Amy… there are probably usually other girls involved as well so it won’t look suspicious – like Jane, in fact. And slowly and exquisitely, little Amy is hooked.’

The barb really taking hold when Amy went home and asked Hazel Shelbone certain questions – saw the instant dramatic effect on Hazel. Immediately, Amy would feel herself to be at the centre of this awful conspiracy – her beloved adoptive parents had been lying to her for all these years. The only person who wasn’t lying to her was her real mother, reaching out from beyond the grave. Layla, with her sense of drama, could create whatever kind of Justine she needed for the purpose: lonely, sad, unloved, imploring.

And horribly seductive to an adolescent who perhaps did sometimes feel like an alien – without previously having known why. Had something previously hidden been unblocked, horrific memories awoken?

‘So gradually Layla was feeding it out to Amy: blood in the church, blood on the altar. Then here’s Dennis Beckett in his vestments, with his chalice: “The blood which he shed for you… The blood of Christ keep you in eternal life.” And Amy Shelbone, kneeling in the chancel, is getting a whole different slant on this.’

All smelly and musty and horrible, and it’s full of dead people… There must have been some ghastly images in her head by then – Wayne Jukes, maddened with pain and shock, half his face hanging off, plunging the kitchen knife into Justine. And ‘eternal life’ was some church-bound, tortured spirit.

‘The big lie, the great cover-up.’ Merrily was rocking in the passenger seat, everything suddenly making blinding sense. He watches us suffer and die and he doesn’t help us, ever, ever, ever… Nobody’s going to ever save you. It’s all a horrible sick lie! ‘Amy only knows one church, one altar. She’s imagining her mother dead… in Dilwyn Church.’

She stopped, hearing what else Amy had screamed from her room: And I don’t… I don’t want to die in… Had ‘Justine’ predicted that Amy too was going to be killed or at least die in church? Had she given some kind of terrible warning that made suicide seem like a soft option?

‘The essence of all this,’ Sophie said, ‘is that the child has been virtually programmed to turn against everything the Shelbones cling on to. If that’s true, then, in its insidious way, it’s actually extremely sophisticated. Almost Satanic in its… Do you know what I mean?’

‘In the way the poison’s been introduced.’

‘However, I don’t even see that any laws have been broken. And I still don’t think you should get out of this car.’

‘You bastards.’ Kirsty Ryan lay flat in the churned hay, staring up at the deepening blue. ‘I don’t know whether you’re lying to me, or what. It don’t matter either way to me, though, look, ’cause I en’t catching no armful of shit for that bitch, I can tell you that much.’

‘Why don’t you just tell us everything?’ Eirion suggested.

Kirsty rolled her spiky head back into the hay. ‘Who is this guy thinks he’s Geoffrey Paxman?’

‘Just a friend,’ Jane explained.

‘Thanks, Jane,’ Eirion said.

‘Well, all right, a really good friend,’ Jane conceded.

Kirsty grinned. ‘Then why’n’t you both just go and have a roll behind that hedge and leave me alone, eh?’

‘Please, Kirsty.’ Jane leaned over her. ‘This is really important.’

Kirsty sat up. ‘All right. Siddown. Got any blow? Naw, forget it. Only kidding. Wouldn’t do at the vicarage, would it? Listen, I’ll go so far and no further, so don’t go asking me more stuff when I say no. And you keep me out of this, right? Else I’ll come after you with the four-ten.’

‘OK.’ Jane sat down in the mown grass. Kirsty with a shotgun – that was entirely believable. ‘We never even spoke to you.’

‘This thing, it got out of hand, right? I went so far with it then I was out. Finished. I even tried to bust it all up, but that didn’t work. So that was it, I was outer there. Plus, I mean, in school you need diversions, right? You gotter have things to get you through it. Though I don’t need that now, do I? I look like I got time to mess with the mind of some stupid little cow?’

‘No,’ Jane said.

‘All right, well, it’s simple enough. Layla knew some things about Shelbone, look – about her parents, her real parents.’

‘How did she—?’ Eirion began, but Jane put a warning hand on his knee and he shut up.

‘Like, for instance, that her dad knifed her ma to death in this church,’ Kirsty said.

Jane clutched at the hay.

‘Both of them bloody junkies. Both parents junkies and her dad’s a murderer – and Shelbone’s this holier-than-thou, pain-in-the-arse, stuck-up little cow who’d grass you up to the teachers soon as—Unbelievable, ennit?’

‘Where did this happen?’ Eirion asked.

‘Somewhere up the Midlands? Not round yere.’

‘In a church?’ Jane felt numb.

‘Now Layla, she had a very good reason to bring down that family. On account it was Shelbone’s ol’ man, her adopted ol’ man that messed it up when Layla done that gypsy thing at the Christmas Fair.’

‘I wasn’t there. I was sick.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you, Jane, that was real scary, that stuff she was coming out with. When she gets in that gypsy gear, it’s like she’s another person. Wouldn’t have my fortune told by her, no way. But that’s beside the point. The point is ol’ man Shelbone protests that it’s unChristian and he gets it stopped. So in Layla’s view they all got it coming to them now, big-time. Gypsies don’t forget, right? And she done me a few favours, mostly money, you know? So I couldn’t say no.’

‘To helping her stage the ouija?’

‘But, after a while, I could tell this was fucking the kid up, serious.’

Merrily gazed over the glass waterfall that was Allan Henry’s home. She thought about getting out, going for a meditative walk around, with a cigarette. Perhaps there was something obvious she was missing.

‘Where’s her mother stand in all this?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Sandra Henry,’ Sophie said. ‘Sandra Riddock?’

‘You know her?’

‘Not personally, but she worked for an estate agency where my sister was manager for a while. It was how she met Henry. They were the agents for one of his first shoddy housing estates – twelve, fifteen years ago? She was quite a beauty, apparently. I remember my sister saying that no one knew she even had a child, then.’

‘The father was a gypsy, Jane says.’

‘I wouldn’t know. But you’re right – I do wonder if Sandra Henry knows what her daughter’s been up to.’

‘I wonder if she’s in. I wonder if she’s down there now – on her own. I wonder if Layla’s away, supposedly staying with friends or something equally suspicious.’

Sophie stiffened. ‘On what basis would we be calling on her?’

‘We? Well, me, I’d have to play it straight. I’m a minister of the Church. I’ve just found out my daughter’s been involved in experiments to contact the dead, along with Mrs Henry’s daughter and a girl who attempted suicide. As a priest I’m naturally very worried about that. What’s she going to do, laugh it off, turn me away?’

‘You’d be using Jane.’

‘I’m not using Jane. Jane didn’t even tell me about it. Dennis did.’

‘All right.’ Sophie started the car. ‘Let’s try and find the entrance to the drive. I’m told it isn’t obvious. I won’t say “On your head be it.” It’s both our heads.’

‘You’re a mate, Soph.’

‘Oh, shut up.’ Sophie pulled into the lane, drove very slowly down the hill. It was very quiet; there were no other houses or farms in the vicinity. No cows or sheep grazed the hill. As far as Merrily could recall, no other vehicle had passed them since they’d stopped.

‘Likes his privacy.’

‘Evidently.’ Sophie stopped opposite a tarmacked opening on the right. ‘You think this is it?’

‘Try it.’

Sophie drove into the entrance – the deep shade of big forest trees immediately closing over the car. After about fifty yards they came to the perimeter wall with its railings on top, a couple of brick gateposts, eight or so feet high, with metal gates, open. A black sign on the left-hand post decreed, in yellow lettering, NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY.

‘Probably be security cameras, somewhere,’ Sophie guessed. They passed a small bungalow with a van outside. ‘Staff there, I expect. We supposed to check in, I wonder?’

‘Nobody about, anyway. Carry on.’

On the left was a clearing in the trees. Sophie braked.

‘Good heavens. Either it’s a reproduction or a museum piece.’

‘Or Layla’s dad’s dropped in.’

The vardo stood alone. It was crimson and gold, like an outsize barrel organ. It had ornate, gilt-ribbed panels, a porch with side-brackets like golden wheels, and brass carriage lamps. The windows had intricately patterned shutters. The vardo looked immaculate, out of a children’s picture book.

Really has thrown money at her, Merrily thought. For a couple of seconds she even wondered if Amy Shelbone was in there with Gypsy Layla.

‘Too easy,’ Sophie murmured, and drove on.

After a few yards, the full sky reappeared as the drive widened into a forecourt with three vehicles in it: a Range Rover, a black Porsche Carrera and a small sleek yellow sports car. There was a flight of about five stone steps up to a front door that was about the size and thickness of the one accessing Ledwardine Church.

A man came down the steps. Merrily got out of the car.

‘I’m looking for Mrs Henry.’

‘Are you, indeed?’ He wore jeans and an old cheesecloth shirt, open to the waist. Gardener? Handyman? Security?

‘This is the right house, isn’t it?’ Merrily said.

‘And you are?’

‘My name’s Merrily Watkins.’

He nodded slowly, waiting.

‘I just wanted to talk to Mrs Henry on a private matter. I would’ve rung first, but it’s ex-directory.’

‘So it is,’ he said. ‘Well, she’s not here.’ He looked her up and down like she might have a set of burglar’s tools under her jacket. ‘Maybe I can help.’ He put out a slow hand. ‘Allan Henry.’

Kirsty Ryan said she’d first started to get cold feet when she realized that Amy Shelbone had actually not known about her real dad killing her mother until they pulled the spirit scam on her in Steve’s shed.

‘Even Layla was surprised how easy she went for it. We’d give her a bit of a spirit message from her ma, and she’d write it all down, like it was tablets of stone, and next day, half-twelve on the dot she’d come scampering across the field, desperate to contact her ol’ lady again – I’m saying ol’ lady, she was just a kid herself when the bastard carved her up. I was getting pissed off with it. I mean, a joke’s a joke, but you don’t let it take over your life.’

‘Whose life?’ Eirion asked.

‘She needed it as much as the kid by then.’

‘Layla?’

‘Don’t get the idea she’s playing at this, mate.’ Kirsty pushed a hand through her foxy hair. ‘She’s into the gypsy thing in a big way. Whole shelves of books, wardrobes full of exotic clobber – the veils and the hats and the flouncy skirts. She got crystals and a dozen packs of Tarot cards. She got her own gypsy caravan. She mixes herbs and things. She’ll do you a love token to get the bloke you want – involving locks of your hair and his hair and ribbons and stuff. Calls herself a shuvani, a gypsy sorcerer. Like – OK – once, there was this bloke I fancied and I wanted to know if I was wasting my time, right? Layla’s like, OK, wait for the right time of the month, gimme a Tampax—’

Jane recoiled. ‘Gross!’

‘We make this necklace of beads out of clay and menstrual blood. I was supposed to hang it on the guy’s locker and then if the beads had like dissolved by morning it meant he wasn’t gonner be interested. In the end, I bottled out, threw it away, said somebody must’ve nicked it. I mean – what?’

‘She really believes this stuff?’ Eirion said.

‘It’s her life, mate.’

‘So she didn’t think it was entirely a scam – the spiritualism?’

‘It started out that way, like I said. But when it began to work, when the kid’s really gone for it, she’s like, “Oh this is how it happens, this is how it happens.” You know?’

‘Not really.’

‘It was like she believed the kid’s ma really was in touch. Now, she believes she’s got the power. All the things she told people at the Christmas Fair, ever since, she’s been like, “Oh, Mrs So-and-So just died, you hear that? I told her she was gonner die!” Going on like that.’

Jane shivered.

‘They’re really cooking, you know, her and the kid. I don’t know how she found out about the murder, I really don’t. But then she reckons a load of other stuff’s coming through that she didn’t know. Layla is very excited, not that you’d know that, if you en’t known her as long as me. Come the holidays, no way does she wanner let go of little Shelbone. That afternoon, after the heavy mob crash into Stevie’s shed and bust us up, I’m like, right, that’s it, you can count me out, sister, I got better things to do. But she’s already making other arrangements.’

‘So you haven’t been in contact with Layla since school broke up?’ Jane said.

‘She rang me a couple of times. I said I was too busy? Next thing, I hear about the kid chucking up in church – well, nobody knew what that was about except me. I thought, this has gone too far. This is well over the bloody top. Next thing I hear, she’s tried to do away with herself. That’s spooky, ennit?’ Kirsty stood up. ‘There it is. You got the lot now.’

Eirion said, ‘You’ve known Layla a long time then?’

‘All my life, give or take. We were at the same little school at Eardisley. Course, they weren’t rich then, her and her ma. When Allan Henry come on the scene, he wanted to take her away from Moorfield to some private school, but she wouldn’t go.’

‘You never met her father?’

‘She never met her father. She used to have like fantasies about him, this mysterious gypsy. He was probably some travelling scrap-metal dealer, but she had him roaming Europe in his romantic caravan, seducing women with love potions and doing the business.’

‘The business?’

‘The magic. Doing the magic for his friends and cursing his enemies. She got all the books, and whenever there was gypsies in the area she’d spend hours with them. She even went off with the buggers once for two nights, her ma went bloody spare. And then… Oh yeah – she cursed a teacher once. We had this gym teacher at Moorfield, Mrs Etchinson. Gave us a hard time. Gave everybody a hard time – team spirit, all this shit. Layla was never a team player.’

‘Cursed her how?’ Jane asked. ‘This was probably before my time.’

‘It must’ve been before your time, because everybody knew about it. I dunno what she did. The evil eye, the bad words… grave-dirt in an envelope.’

‘What happened?’

‘Put it this way – within a few months it was confirmed she’d got multiple sclerosis. Not good for a gym teacher.’

‘That takes years to come on,’ Eirion pointed out. ‘She must have had it already.’

‘That was what we said,’ Kirsty said. ‘But it does makes you think, don’t it?’

It didn’t give Jane a good feeling. She stood up, too. ‘What did she do for Steve, to get him to lend her his shed?’

‘More what she didn’t do, if you ask me,’ Kirsty said enigmatically. ‘Like being considerate enough not to shrivel his genitals.’

‘But she’s still seeing Amy?’

‘Look, all I know is, when she rang me she said Amy was coming out to meet her at night. Like really at night – when her parents were in bed. She’d ring Amy on the little phone that Amy kept under the pillow, and Layla would say the word and Amy would be up and dressed and out the front door and Layla would pick her up at the bottom of the lane.’

‘Where would they go? I mean she’d need somewhere with a table, to lay all the letters out and—’

‘No way,’ Kirsty said scornfully. ‘That is history.’

‘What?’

‘That’s primitive stuff, now. They got well beyond the glass and the little bloody letters.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘You don’t wanner know, Jane.’ Kirsty started to walk away. She looked back over her beefy shoulder. ‘Or, more to the point, I don’t wanner know.’

33 Item

ALLAN HENRY’S SITTING room had one wall that was all plate glass, perhaps forty feet long. It had wide green views across to one of the conical, wooded humps known as Robin Hood’s Butts. Appropriately, according to legend, the Butts had been dumped there by the Devil, making him Hereford’s first sporadic developer.

‘And this is your…’ Allan Henry studied Sophie, evidently trying to decide whether she was mother or sister.

‘Secretary,’ Sophie said quickly and firmly. She and Merrily were at either end of a white leather four-seater sofa, one of two in the vast snowy room. Under their feet was a pale grey rug with an unusual design – a tree growing through the centre of a wheel.

Merrily didn’t recall ever seeing Sophie looking more agitated. Sophie wanted out of here. Sophie was Old Hereford to the core; to her this man was the Devil.

‘Vicars have secretaries now?’ Allan Henry said.

‘Sophie works for the Cathedral,’ Merrily told him.

‘And what do you do, Mrs Watkins? Specifically.’

‘Erm… official title: Deliverance Consultant. I’m afraid I don’t have a card or—’

‘Or a dog collar. So what is a—?’

‘It’s somebody who deals with problems of a paranormal nature,’ Merrily said, for once without embarrassment. ‘Used to be Diocesan Exorcist.’

His eyes widened. ‘They still do that?’

‘It’s never gone away, Mr Henry.’

‘Well…’ He leaned against the towering brick inglenook, long mirrors either side of it reflecting the greenery. ‘I’m now trying to think if I have a problem of a paranormal nature. Let’s see… when things go bump in the night, I can usually explain it. And although I often have people leeching off me, I wouldn’t call them vampires. Can I offer you both a glass of wine?’ He laughed. ‘That is, can I offer you each a glass of wine.’

‘Thank you, but I’m driving,’ Sophie said quickly.

‘And I’ll be driving in a short while,’ Merrily said.

‘Not even one glass?’

‘Not even one between us. Honestly, we don’t have very long. We’ve got a number of parents to see.’

‘Oh, parents, is it?’

His local accent had been planed down to a light burr. He was probably in his late forties. He had strong, lank hair, deep lines tracking down his tanned face from eyes to jaw. A modest beer-belly overhung his jeans, but you had the feeling it was being gradually ironed out.

‘So why did you want to see my wife rather than me?’

‘We didn’t think you’d be here,’ Merrily said. ‘We thought you’d probably be out somewhere building something.’

‘With my bare hands.’

‘We all have our fantasies,’ she said, and then realized there were two ways he could take that. Sophie frowned at her. Sophie was sending out the message: Get out now, make some excuse, this is a mistake.

Allan Henry laughed. He laughed, Merrily was noticing, with a confidence that was almost self-conscious. Maybe he’d had a lot of costly work done on his teeth, was determined to get his money’s worth. Otherwise, she sensed around him a kind of conserved energy. She could imagine him in board meetings, relaxed and expressionless and then jumping on someone without preamble, like a jungle cat. Laughing, maybe.

‘Rare afternoon off,’ he said. ‘You were lucky to catch me. And my wife’s away, as it happens. The only parent here is me. A parent from my first marriage, that is. The youngsters live in France now, so I don’t see them very often.’

‘Perhaps we’ll come back when your wife’s at home.’ Sophie half rose. ‘It’s nothing terribly pressing.’

‘Unless it’s about Layla, of course,’ he said.

‘She’s with her mother?’ Merrily asked him.

‘I hardly think so. Her mother’s on a cruise around the Azores, with her sister, who was recently widowed, poor woman. Thing is, I don’t think of Layla as a child any more. And she’s my wife’s daughter, not mine. This is about Layla, yes?’

As he leaned forward, a medallion on a black leather thong swung out from his bare chest. It was clearly made of gold. Engraved on it was the symbol of a wheel.

‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s about Layla.’

Sophie sank back in her seat, with a leathery creak that sounded like a cry of pain.

Jane said, ‘I remember Mrs Etchinson now. It was at one of the prize-givings. She was in a wheelchair. A guest of honour. Everybody was making a fuss over her and she was smiling so much that you thought it must be hurting her, all that smiling. And somebody said she used to be a teacher and she had MS, and I remember thinking, God, she’s so young.’

She flopped back into the soft leather and felt for Eirion’s hand and squeezed hard, as if to make sure she still could.

They were parked on the grass outside a farm shop overlooking the Ledwardine valley, the sunlit steeple of her mother’s church poking out of the surrounding orchards like a terracotta rocket.

‘Listen, Jane… that’s how they get these reputations,’ Eirion said. ‘They utter a curse and then something like that happens, and everybody conveniently forgets how many curses have been laid on people who go on to have completely trouble-free—’

‘It’s the fact that she could even do it!’ Jane could feel tears of anger coming on. ‘Wish illness and misfortune on someone.’

‘You never done that, in a fit of pique? Wish that someone would have a bad time?’

‘Yeah, but I don’t ever believe it’s gonna have any effect whatsoever, and then I take it back anyway in a couple of minutes. Or a couple of hours. Or before I go to sleep. Whereas Riddock, she believes, like, totally that she can do it… and then she does it. It doesn’t matter whether she gave Mrs Etchinson this awful degenerative disease with the grave-dirt in the envelope or whatever. The fact that she wanted to, that’s just as bad, isn’t it?’

‘It comes back on you, though, doesn’t it?’ Eirion said. ‘Karma.’

‘Allegedly. But not necessarily in this life.’

‘Sounds to me,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘like she needs this kid, Amy, as much as the kid needs her. You know what I mean? She lays a curse and somebody falls ill or dies or something, well… She isn’t really sure, is she? She might like to fantasize, but she knows that’s all it is. But when she sets up this spiritualism scam, then suddenly she’s getting what seem to be real messages from the Other Side.’

‘How?’

‘Trance? Automatic writing? Whatever it is, it’s proof to her that she’s got the power. She’s a medium, now, she’s a shaman. And maybe that’s never happened before, except with this young kid.’

‘Who’s so precious she drove her to attempt suicide?’ Jane said.

‘What do you want to do, then? It’s getting a bit late, if I’m going to get the car back before nightfall…’

‘You’ve got hours yet. But sure, by all means, drop me somewhere.’

‘To do what?’

‘I’ll think of something.’

‘There’s only one thing you can do. You can go home and lay the whole lot on your mum and leave it to her.’ Eirion nodded down at the valley. ‘Stop putting it off.’

‘She’ll probably be a bit gobsmacked to see us.’

‘Why do I doubt that?’ Eirion said.

What they told Allan Henry was that a teenage girl had tried to take her own life after being drawn into ouija-board experiments at school. The Deliverance service was trying to establish how widespread the craze was and whether other children were at risk or in distress. Merrily said finally that a number of kids had mentioned Layla Riddock as the girl presiding over psychic sittings at Moorfield High School.

Close as it was to the truth, the story sounded worryingly thin to Merrily, and foreboding arose just a second or so before Allan Henry got to work on it.

‘Well.’ He sat in a steel-framed swivel armchair, his left ankle resting on his right knee. ‘I didn’t know about this.’

‘It came out through the hospital where the child was taken.’ Sophie had evidently assumed responsibility for any necessary lying. ‘When a schoolchild takes a potentially lethal overdose, quite a lot of people start wanting to know why. In this case, as the parents are churchgoers—’

‘No, that’s not what I meant. What I didn’t know, Mrs Hill, was that the Anglican church had its own investigative branch.’

‘It’s not quite like that,’ Merrily said.

‘Because, you see, I find that very disturbing. Are the lay police also involved?’

‘Not yet,’ Sophie said.

‘Not yet. I see.’

He was silent for a short while, during which Merrily became aware of a gilt-framed painting on the wall, high in the alcove to the right of the great fireplace. In glowing colours, style of Gauguin, it showed an unsmiling black woman, robed and veiled, with either a crown or an ornate halo over the headdress.

‘OK, let me get this entirely correct,’ Allan Henry said slowly. Neither the tone nor the pitch of his voice had altered, only the sense of laughter had gone. ‘On behalf of the Church of England, you are accusing my stepdaughter of psychologically abusing young children.’

The absolute accuracy of this left Merrily’s mind momentarily blank. She couldn’t meet his eyes and went on staring at the picture of the Black Virgin.

‘We don’t accuse people, Mr Henry,’ Sophie was saying. ‘We try to help them where we can.’

‘Mrs Hill… is it the Reverend Mrs Hill?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘You have to excuse me for feeling threatened, Mrs Hill. You two women arrive at my door like Jehovah’s Witnesses, with some assumed authority—’

‘Look,’ Merrily said, ‘it’s not about the individuals involved, it’s about the practice itself. And what it can release… psychologically, if you like. It might seem harmless, a game, though I don’t think it is. But this is certainly not a witch-hunt.’

As soon as the word was out she wanted to snatch it back, but it was too late. Allan Henry caught it in the air, like a fist closing over a fly.

‘Witch-hunt? Now that’s a very interesting term. The Church has a long history of persecuting minorities.’

‘I’m sorry… persecuting kids?’

‘Minorities, I said, not minors. If we look at the Romany culture, for instance, they’ve been subjected to the most appalling discrimination and persecution over the years, the world over, because of their customs, their lifestyle and, of course, their—’

‘Well, yes, but—’

‘No, no, let me tell you about Layla. She’s a very serious young woman, very mature for her age, with a brilliant academic career ahead of her. And she has Romany blood. Which gives her a striking presence that some people find intimidating. And also certain abilities that some people can’t accept. Ignorance breeds prejudice. ’Twas ever thus, Mrs Watkins. Ever thus.’

Merrily was aghast. ‘You’re implying there’s something racial behind this?’

‘Again, your term.’

‘Mr Henry, all I’m concerned about’ – she wished she was the other side of the plate glass; she would run and run, all the way to Robin Hood’s Butts – ‘is kids dabbling with the dead. That kind of worries me. I can’t stop them. All I can do is advise them that they could be messing with something that can’t easily be controlled.’

‘In your culture. Can’t be controlled in your culture.’

‘Let’s say not easily.’

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you need to consider your position very carefully before you come here and accuse someone you don’t know of pressuring a child into suicide, like one of those mad Californian cult-leaders.’

‘Oh, you know that’s not—’

‘We should go, Merrily.’ Sophie stood up.

Allan Henry didn’t move. ‘I’m not pushing you out. I’m just warning you to be very, very sure of your ground. These are terribly serious allegations. Which could have repercussions.’

Merrily felt mauled. He hadn’t even raised his voice or moved his ankle from his knee. Persecution? she wanted to cry out. What about David Shelbone? But she knew the most that would get her would be a writ or an injunction by morning. He hadn’t got this far without being able to push people over with one finger, like dominoes.

She suspected there would indeed be repercussions from this. Everything she’d touched lately, there were repercussions.

‘OK. I’m sorry if…’

She stood up. Her face felt hot. As she rose, she became aware of a group of objects laid out on a ledge in a small cavity inside the fireplace: acorns, two dice, a magnet, something that might have been a rabbit’s foot.

‘Allan…?’

A woman had entered the room through a narrow archway at the furthest end. She had on a full-length black kimono, open over a tiny white bikini. She wore sunglasses. She carried a champagne glass, half-filled.

‘Allan,’ she said, ‘I didn’t leave my mobile—?’

Allan Henry stood up. ‘Layla,’ he said warmly, ‘we were just talking about you.’

Merrily could almost feel Sophie’s stomach contract.

Ethel met them on the driveway and Jane picked her up and carried her round to the back, where they found Gomer Parry, placidly weeding the path.

‘Welshies throw you out, is it?’ Gomer said.

‘They found my arms cache, and there was this car chase, but we made it over the border. Hullo, Gomer. Where’s Mum?’

‘Ah, well.’ Gomer laid his trowel on the gravel, straightened up, blinking a few times behind his bottle glasses. ‘The vicar en’t yere, see, Janey. Her’s been called away.’

‘How long’s she been gone?’

‘Oh… day and a half, mabbe.’

‘Huh?’ Jane clutched the cat to her chest. Mum spending a night away, without a word? This did not happen. This just did not—‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Gomer?’

‘Nothin’ exaccly wrong.’

‘So like… where is she?’

‘Out east,’ Gomer said. ‘How are you, Eirion boy?’

‘Not too bad, Gomer. You’re looking—’

‘East? What’s that mean? Norwich? Bangkok?’

‘Bromyard way, I believe,’ Gomer said.

‘Jesus, Gomer.’ Jane slumped in relief. ‘So it’s a job, right?’

‘Som’ing of that order. Her spent the night over there and mabbe a few more to come. I does the days yere, feeding the cat, doing what’s gotter be done. Give her a ring, I should. Her’ll likely explain.’

‘A few more? A few more nights? I don’t understand. Where’s she staying? Who’s she with?’

‘You can get her on the mobile. Her’s, er…’ Gomer scratched an ear. ‘Her’s staying with young Lol Robinson, ennit?’

‘Oh.’ Jane bent to put Ethel down and to conceal her expression. Bloody hell. ‘I… didn’t know Lol was living in Bromyard.’

‘Not livin’, exaccly. Just mindin’ a place. Like me.’ Gomer gestured at the back door. ‘You stoppin’ a bit, Janey? Only I gotter be off in a coupler minutes. Gotter help young Nev sink a new cesspit up by Pembridge.’

‘We’ll probably just get something to eat,’ Jane said.

Well, bloody hell. All those hints she’d been dropping, like for months. Heard anything from Lol lately? Lol still doing that stupid course, is he? Why’s he wasting his time on that crap when he’s so cool and talented? Somebody should take him on one side, somebody he really trusts and believes in and… Why don’t you invite Lol over sometime? You know he’s never going to invite himself. You ever think about the future, Mum – what it’s going to be like when I’ve gone?

Actually, Jane felt kind of resentful, if you wanted the truth. Mum going behind her back, giving it a little try at Lol’s love nest in Bromyard, to see if things worked out, and if they didn’t that would be it, and Jane would be none the wiser – if she called her on the mobile, she could pretend to be at home, anywhere. Bloody sneaky, really. Just when you thought you knew how certain people would react to a given situation, they did something to surprise you – shock you, even. In a way, it made Jane feel a lot better about not immediately telling Mum what had gone on in Steve’s shed.

‘She’s still fairly young,’ Eirion said when Gomer had gone and they were in the kitchen.

‘Yeah,’ Jane said airily. ‘Sure.’

‘It’s always hard to imagine your parents still feeling—’

‘Oh, come on, I know that. Don’t be patronizing, Irene.’

‘He’s a good bloke,’ Eirion said.

‘I know that, too. And interesting – an artist. And vulnerable. Women like guys who are vulnerable and a little… askew.’

‘Askew?’

‘You know.’

Eirion was sitting at the kitchen table with his chin in his hands. He eyed her sheepishly, eyebrows disappearing into his hair. ‘What would a guy have to do to appear… a little askew?’

‘Hmmm.’ Jane came to a decision. Little bloody Sioned and Lowri weren’t here. Gomer had gone to sink a cesspit. Mum was out east finding out if everything still worked after all these years. Even Ethel was a cat of the world.

‘Irene,’ Jane said. ‘Did I ever tell you about the Mondrian Walls?’

Eirion lifted his chin out of his hands. ‘This would be in your… apartment? On the—’

‘Top floor. Formerly attics.’

‘Where you painted the plaster squares between the timbers in different primary colours in the style of the great Dutch abstract painter?’

‘Correct.’

‘It sounded very… experimental.’

Jane nodded. ‘I thought maybe you could give me your expert critical assessment.’

‘Well…’ Eirion stood up. ‘I’m not an expert.’

‘Good,’ Jane said.

Jane wasn’t wrong. There was something forbidding about Layla Riddock.

A big girl with a mature, not to say ripe figure, a mass of dark brown curly hair still slick from the pool. She had smoky brown eyes under heavy brows. She was seventeen going on thirty-eight, and darkly radiant. And she was here.

She was here.

As in, not in the Black Country with Amy Shelbone.

‘Layla, love,’ Allan Henry said. ‘Excuse me, but these ladies would like to know if you have much regular contact with the dead.’

Layla Riddock backed away, mock-startled, wrapping her kimono and her arms around her.

‘We talking about necrophilia?’ She cocked her head. ‘Necrophilia’s useless for women, isn’t it? I mean, rigor mortis doesn’t last, right?’

Allan Henry laughed again, for the first time in several minutes, as if a little light had come back into his life.

‘No, actually, Layla,’ he said, ‘this could be very serious. For somebody. This is Mrs Hill and Mrs Watkins. Mrs Watkins is a minister of the Church of England, and it seems one of her parishioners, a young girl from your school, has attempted to take her own life.’

Layla nodded casually. ‘Amy Shelbone.’

‘Oh…’ he said. ‘You know about this, do you?’

Merrily was watching him closely now. She saw nothing. No obvious reaction from Henry to the name Shelbone. And there really should have been, shouldn’t there?

‘Sad,’ Layla said. ‘But horribly predictable, I’m afraid. That’s one disturbed little girl.’

‘Really.’ Allan Henry looked at Merrily and Sophie in turn, triumph in his eyes, then back at his stepdaughter. ‘Layla, would you tell us about this?’

‘About what?’

‘About any previous dealings you might have had with this young child. Please?’

Layla shrugged. ‘Not much to tell. I’ve never made any secret about my bloodline, and so I’m always getting approached by kids who want their palms read, or their cards, or something. Anyway, one day – a few weeks ago, I suppose – up comes this rather solemn little girl, says would I help her contact her mother, for heaven’s sake. Her mother is, you know… dead.’

‘She approached you, did she, this little girl?’

‘Oh yeah. Very politely. I told her not to be silly. I told her that whatever she may have heard about the Rom, we have great respect for the dead but we don’t get involved with them on a personal level. I said – you know – like, run along.’

‘And that was the last you heard?’

Layla sighed, wrapped her kimono tighter in frustration. ‘Wish I could say it was. Next thing I hear that some other students – principally a girl called Kirsty Ryan – have taken Amy under their wing and they’re holding these kind of seance things, what d’you call them – where you lay out letters in a circle and have a glass upside down?

Merrily said nothing.

‘Anyway, I thought I’d better check it out. There’s a lot of this stuff about the school lately – little witchcrafty groups popping up. Awfully childish. I don’t like to see kids playing at it. If you have psychic skills, it’s your responsibility to develop them sensibly. If you haven’t got it… don’t mess with it. So, yeah, I found them in this shed on one of the fields and I…’ Layla paused and smiled. ‘I’m afraid I arranged a little surprise.’

Layla glanced around. Holding court, now. A dominant kind of girl, Robert Morrell had said. Perhaps the kind of girl where all the teaching staff, both sexes, would be relieved when she left school.

It was hard to believe this woman was only about a year older than Jane.

It was also hard to believe she’d want to waste time on a little girl like Amy Shelbone.

‘What did you do, Layla?’ Allan Henry was taking a back seat, playing the feed, the straight man – and proud to do it, Merrily thought.

Which was interesting in itself.

‘I grassed them up,’ Layla said smugly. ‘I discreetly tipped off one of the staff. And there was a raid.’

‘Caught them at it?’ Allan Henry said.

Layla put up both her hands. ‘Absolutely nothing to do with me!’ She wore five rings, all gold.

Everyone was quiet. It was not so difficult to believe that Layla Riddock would consider her natural peers to be found among the staff rather than the pupils.

Allan Henry glanced at Merrily and Sophie in turn again. He was smiling gently.

Very mature for her age.

‘Good for you,’ Merrily said hoarsely to Layla, and the schoolgirl smiled at her, too, the tip of her tongue childishly touching a corner of her mouth. But her eyes were cold with malice. Merrily felt sure it was malice.

You can’t touch us, the smile said. You can’t get near us.

Neither of them said a word until they were in the lane, heading back towards Canon Pyon. Merrily was expecting a hard time. Stay away, Sophie had advised back in the office. What would be the point? And then, in the car, If I were you, I wouldn’t get out.

When had Sophie ever not been right?

She was looking at her most severe, sitting stiffly, eyes on the road, both hands positioned precisely on the wheel, like she was taking her driving test. Merrily sat with her bag on her knees, a hand inside playing with the cigarettes. She couldn’t keep the hand still.

‘I’m sorry, Sophie.’

Sophie said nothing, but you could almost hear her thoughts ricocheting like pellets from the upholstery and the windscreen and the dash.

‘It was a very bad idea,’ Merrily said. ‘I should not have dragged you into it.’ She’d crushed a cigarette, strands of tobacco teased between fingers and thumb. ‘I don’t know how he’ll get back at us, but he will. I was useless in there. I let him walk all over us. A corrupt developer, a crook, and I let him… let them both walk all over us.’

Sophie turned right, towards Hereford, and the car speeded up. A mile or so along the road, she said mildly, ‘They’re an item, aren’t they, those two?’

The sky was flawless, the blue deepening. Across the edge of the city, you could see all the way to the hooked nose of The Skirrid, the holy mountain above Abergavenny.

Merrily closed her bag on the tobacco mess. ‘I’m glad you said it first.’

‘Is Sandra really away on a cruise, I wonder?’

‘Maybe she’s buried in the garden. He can do anything, can’t he? He’s got everybody in his pocket, and now he’s sleeping with his stepdaughter!’ Merrily was momentarily horrified at how high her voice had risen.

‘He might sail close to the wind,’ Sophie said, ‘but he’s not stupid. I expect Sandra is on a cruise. Quite a long cruise.’

‘So you think she knows?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘I wonder how long it’s been going on.’

‘A more interesting question is, which of them initiated it?’ Sophie said.

A very lucky man, Charlie Howe had observed. Things’ve fallen his way.

And people have fallen out of his way.

Sophie said, ‘The girl was lying rather cleverly, wasn’t she?’

‘Beautifully. Forget about the trinkets, that’s probably the best evidence of genuine Romany ancestry.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘They’re supposed to consider it an art form.’

‘Lying?’

‘Mmm.’

‘And what else do you know about them?’

‘Not enough. Not yet, anyway.’

‘Well, forget about it for tonight,’ Sophie said. ‘Get a good night’s sleep. If Inspector Howe or anyone else rings wanting to speak to you, I’ll put them off.’

‘No, put them through.’

‘You’re getting personally involved. That’s not helpful to anyone.’

‘I am personally involved. And now there’s a child missing.’

Only two, three years between Amy Shelbone and Layla Riddock, but one was a child and one was a woman. Merrily folded her hands in her lap, couldn’t keep them still. A teenage girl had done this to her. She closed her eyes, breathed in.

‘Sophie,’ she said. ‘Could I possibly have a cigarette?’

34 The Cure of Souls

‘HA,’ HE SAID. ‘The drukerimaskri.’

He seemed to be dancing in the last of the dusk, will-o’-thewispish. The late evening was rich and close, the atmosphere laden with herbal scents. There was going to be a full moon.

Merrily said, ‘Drukeri—?’

‘—maskri. It’s a Romany term.’ Al Boswell’s white hair flurried as he did a little bow. She suspected he was mocking her.

A lantern hung from the bowed roof of the vardo, a thick candle inside it. On the grass in front of the wagon, a heavy wooden table was set up, with bentwood chairs. A shaggy donkey browsed nearby. In the distance, beyond the building housing the hop museum, glittered the tiered lights of Malvern.

Al Boswell presented himself in front of Lol, hands behind his back. ‘Where’s your guitar? Why didn’t you bring your guitar? We could have played for the moon.’

Lol told him Prof had insisted the guitar was a short-term loan. ‘Besides, it didn’t seem—’

‘Appropriate?’ Al Boswell arched his back like a thin, white cat. ‘Relevant? Seemly?’

‘All those,’ Lol said. ‘Plus—’

‘You can’t surely be afraid to play alongside an old man whose arthriticky fingers slur drunkenly over the frets?’

‘Tonight, I can manage without total humiliation,’ Lol admitted.

‘Certainly not in the presence of the lovely drukerimaskri.’

I am not going to ask what it means, Merrily thought.

‘Or are you afraid the drukerimaskri would think it was wrong to play for the moon? And besides, look at her: she’s in a hurry, there’s no time, she’s on hot bricks, she needs the information. Therefore, she might find you… trivial.’ Al Boswell walked right up to Lol, peered into his eyes. ‘And that would never do.’

‘Al, for God’s sake!’ The beautiful, frail silvery woman in the long skirt came down the steps of the wagon, carrying a tray with glasses on it. ‘He’s such a terrible walking cliché sometimes,’ she said to Merrily. ‘Except, of course, in the presence of other Romanies, on which rare occasions he’s almost withdrawn.’

‘She’s such a bitch tonight!’ Al Boswell howled. He took Lol on one side. ‘So, have you heard from Levin?’

The donkey had ambled up to Merrily and she ran her fingers through his heavy fur and gazed into his billiard-ball eyes. There was an unreality about the night or perhaps a hyper-reality – a sensual intensity she hadn’t been prepared for. Lol had brought her here, and suddenly she wanted Lol to take her away again; she wanted to be alone with him. Things needed to be said, worked out, if that were possible.

‘You’re terribly tense, aren’t you?’ Mrs Boswell was standing next to her. ‘And exhausted? I’m going to fetch you something that might help.’

‘No, honestly, it’s…’ Merrily let the donkey nibble at the sleeve of her jacket. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Stanley.’

‘Does that mean something in Romany?’

‘I do hope not.’

Merrily smiled. A wave of tiredness washed over her, and the lights of Malvern blurred.

‘About Stock.’ Mrs Boswell looked insubstantial in the dusk – like steam, like a ghost. But for the glasses on a chain, you felt you could have put a hand through her. ‘There’s nothing you could have done. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen, but there’s nothing you could have done. You weren’t to know.’

‘Know what?’

Mrs Boswell didn’t reply. Merrily let it go: a false trail, probably. This woman didn’t look at all like a gypsy but she’d been married to one for many years.

‘What’s a drukerimaskri?’ Merrily said.

‘Al called you that? Originally, I think, it meant soothsayer. Then it became applied to Christian priests who could lay spirits to rest. Drukerimaskro is the more familiar form, in the masculine: an exorcist, a healer of souls.’

Merrily held on to the donkey and looked for Lol.

Healer of souls.

The song had been happening when she got back to Knight’s Frome just after seven p.m.

She’d insisted on driving back in the Volvo – which had meant first returning to the office and submitting to two cups of sweet tea, a biscuit, a paracetamol and a dissertation on the parameters of responsibility.

‘The Bishop’s back tomorrow,’ Sophie had reminded her, finally seeing her to the car. ‘I’m going to advise him to put off the inevitable formal meeting with you until next week.’

‘I’d rather get it over with.’

‘And admit to things for which you were not to blame?’ Sophie held open the door of the Volvo. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘If I lose the job, I lose the job. There were things I got wrong. I’m not just going to keep denying everything to preserve my… dubious status.’

‘Merrily,’ Sophie said very clearly, ‘I have to tell you I’d be more than pleased – for your sake, at least – if you were to leave Deliverance behind for ever.’ Merrily stared at her in dismay. ‘But certainly not under the present circumstances. I’d never forgive myself if you went down for either Gerard Stock or Allan Henry and Layla Riddock. Now go back and get an early night. I’ll talk to you in the morning.’

Sophie pushed the car door closed – except it didn’t; this was an old car and you had to slam the door. Merrily opened it again to do that, overheard what Sophie was muttering to herself as she walked away.

She’d sat there with the door hanging open – maybe her mouth as well – until Sophie was out of sight. Then, to avoid having to think, she’d snatched the mobile and called David Shelbone at home, intending this time to insist he get the police in.

No answer. In the silence of the Bishop’s Palace yard, she’d prayed for the Shelbones and then started the car and put on the stereo very loud, something sparking with ideas but not too profound: Gomez – Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline.

At 7.03 p.m., she’d driven out of the lane from Knight’s Frome and on to the now-familiar track, parking the Volvo between the stables and the cottage. Lol’s Astra sat there, years older than the trees Prof Levin had planted to screen off his studio. In Prof’s absence, nature was running things again – green hazelnuts in the uncut boundary hedge and a gold-dust haze on the seeded long grass of what was supposed to be a lawn.

The stable door was open, and Merrily went into the kitchen area, putting down her bag on the breakfast-bar packing case, walking down the short passage to the studio door. It was ajar. She peered through the gap.

Some of the stable remained as it had been, three of the stalls turned into recording booths. Lol was sitting in one, his back to the door, a guitar on his knee. On the smaller of the two tape machines to her left, she could see spools revolving. He’d be laying down a demo for Prof Levin. She knew he’d had his orders.

There was a pair of headphones hanging from a metal bracket beside the tape machine. She could hear the tinnitus buzz of music and she slipped off her shoes and padded across. The air was still and warm. Feeling like whatever was the aural equivalent of a voyeur, she slipped on the cans.

The music stopped. ‘Shit,’ Lol murmured wearily into her head. There was silence, then a string was retuned. The crisp acoustic was frighteningly intimate: she could hear his breathing, the movements of his fingers on the machine-heads.

Lol said, ‘Take six.’

The guitar, in minor chord, was awesomely deep and full – this kind of weighted fingerstyle sounding like a piano. She felt like she was inside the soundbox and somehow also inside the heart of the guitarist, and tears came into her eyes as Lol’s voice came in, low and nasal and smoky, and the first shockingly resonant line fell like a stone into a deep, deep well.

‘As you kneel before your altar—’

Merrily froze. Lol stopped. He cleared his throat. He sighed.

‘Seven,’ he said.

Merrily had been holding on to the sides of the tape deck, as if she was part of the machine, recording it, too, every softly explosive, questioning phrase. She recalled Lol waiting for her in the dappled quiet of the church at Knight’s Frome, re-experienced his expression of loss as she emerged from the vestry as a priest.

He began again.

‘As you kneel before your altar,

Can you see the wider plan?

Can you hear the one you’re talking to?

Can you love him like a man?

Did you suffocate your feelings

As you redefined your goals

And vowed to undertake the Cure of Souls…?’

Merrily had hung up the cans and walked rapidly out of the stable with her shoes under her arm, the stones and baked mud brutal on the soles of her feet.

‘The Black Virgin,’ Al Boswell said. ‘Sara la Kali.’

Candles in bottles dramatized his goblin profile. He’d calmed down now, after a couple of glasses of wine, and the four of them were sitting around the wooden table outside the vardo.

‘Medieval French saint,’ Merrily recalled. ‘Linked to Mary Magdalene. A servant?’ Was this the woman in the unlikely picture on Allan Henry’s sitting room wall?

‘Gypsies in France became strongly identified with the Catholic pilgrimage of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mere in the Camargue,’ Sally Boswell said. ‘This is where the three Marys – Mary Salomé, Mary Jacobé and Mary Magdalene were said to have landed and where their relics are presumed to have been found under the church… and later, in a bronze chest, the remains of their black servant, Sara.’

‘Why did the gypsies adopt this Sara?’ Lol leaned away from the candlelight, his elbows on the table hiding the holes in the famous alien sweatshirt.

‘They’re a great paradox, the Rom,’ said Sally Boswell. ‘Flamboyant, volatile, and yet subtle and secretive. They were pagans originally – some still are, but most adopted the dominant religion of whichever country they travelled. They may have chosen Sara because she was the humblest of the saints, the most unassuming… the least obtrusive.’

Lol nodded. He would understand that. Given the options, she’d have been his patron saint as well, Merrily thought, tears pricking again. She was overtired, that was the problem.

‘Or,’ Sally went on, ‘they may have seen her as a Christian incarnation of the Hindu goddess, Kali. There was talk of blood sacrifice, but I think that’s an exaggeration or a corruption of the truth.’

‘Hmm,’ Merrily said.

After leaving the studio, she’d walked through the fields for a while before going up to her cell in the cottage. She’d washed and changed, come down, and then she and Lol had raided Prof’s fridge for scraps of salad, while she told him about Layla Riddock and Allan Henry and the objects in the big white room, the picture on the wall, the conclusion she and Sophie had come to. And then Lol had suggested Al and Sally Boswell might throw some more light on this, and he’d phoned them.

‘Can I ask you about some symbols?’ she said to Al. ‘The wheel, for instance.’

‘On its own?’

‘Like a cartwheel. With spokes.’

Al glanced at his wife.

‘Money,’ she said. ‘Wealth.’

‘So a gold talisman with a wheel engraved on it, worn around the neck…?’

‘Would obviously be designed to promote wealth.’

‘I wouldn’t wear one.’ Al poured himself more wine.

‘OK.’ Merrily moved on. ‘A group of objects: acorns, dice, a rabbit’s foot – oh, and a magnet.’

Al drank, then put down his glass. ‘To which you might want to add a few gold coins – and a magnifying glass. Because this person, whoever it is, wants – or needs – considerable wealth.’

‘Why wouldn’t you wear the talisman?’ Merrily asked.

‘You would want unearned wealth, little drukerimaskri?’

‘But you’re not a priest.’

His eyes flashed. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Sorry. I don’t know that.’

He sniffed sharply. ‘My father was a chovihano. Well-known guy – a shaman, a healer. A healer of souls and bodies and the living and the dead. Not many left in the world now.’

‘It’s hereditary?’

He looked glum. ‘Sometimes. But you need to work at it. It’s a calling, a commitment. You’d understand that. Me… I was a disappointment to my family.’ He offered the bottle round, got no takers, poured more wine for himself. ‘No, you’re quite right, I’m not a priest.’

‘You’re not rich, either,’ Lol said. ‘You don’t make enough guitars. You could have had a Boswell guitar factory turning out thousands, like – I dunno – the Martin family?’

‘Mother of God!’ Al half rose, the wine spilled and the candle flame wavered.

‘Not that I was actually advocating that,’ Lol said. ‘Just making the point.’

‘Valid. Quite valid.’ Al shook his head sadly, sat down and topped up his glass again. ‘I’m no businessman, Lol, and no chovihano – I’ve lived too long in gaujoland. But I try to honour the old code… which is about living lightly on the earth, taking what you need, taking selectively, taking secretly sometimes. Taking in a way so that nobody notices that what you’ve taken has gone. It’s not quite stealing… if nobody notices it’s not there any more.’

This was questionable morality, but Merrily was too tired to ask the questions. She sipped some of the sweet soft drink that Sally had brought her. It apparently contained hops and nettles.

‘You want to know the truth of it, I’m still paying back.’ Al drained his wineglass in one. ‘I’m paying back for the one time when I took… and it was noticed. How could it fail to be bloody well noticed? And that’s how I brought a curse upon my own family, why I live among the gaujos and keep my head down. It’s why we have a museum devoted to hops, and most of the Romany memorabilia’s in the back room, behind a locked door.’

Sally Boswell said in a low voice, ‘You could have paid.’

‘You get off my back,’ Al growled.

There was an uncomfortable silence. A bat flittered in an arc over the table. Merrily had one more question.

‘What about a wheel with a tree through it?’

Al looked up. ‘Where did you see that?’

‘It was a design on a rug. In the house of the man with the wealth talisman.’

‘Nothing particularly to do with wealth.’ He poured the last of the wine, a dribble, and pulled over another bottle. ‘The wheel would be the medicine wheel. The tree is the Tree of Life. Comes in three sections. The branches are in the Upper World of vision and inspiration. The middle, where the wheel goes through, is about our life and dealing with it. The roots are in the lower world of the ancestors… and the dead.’

‘The gypsy dead aren’t in the Upper World?’

Al smiled ruefully.

Sally said, ‘Not all gypsies believe in a heaven. And anyway, the dead are gone, and must stay gone. The dead are unhealthy. Death pollutes a place meant for living, so when someone was dying it used to be that they were taken out of their home and put in a tent or a bender. The person is always washed and dressed in fresh clothes before death.’ It was coming out pat now, Merrily thought – the museum curator’s voice. ‘Also, in Romany society, the names of recently dead people must never be mentioned lest this might call them back. At one time, when a gypsy died, his vardo would be set alight with all his possessions, so there would be nothing in this world to draw him back.’

‘Of course, these days,’ Al said, ‘the vardo is worth a lot of money, but it’s still usual for something to be ritually burned. Something closely associated with the dead person.’

There was an important question here; Merrily couldn’t untangle it.

Lol did. ‘So gypsies don’t try to communicate with the dead?’

‘Not recommended,’ Sally said.

‘But isn’t that what a shaman does – talks to the spirits?’

Merrily nodded gratefully – this was it.

‘Their ancestors, mainly,’ Sally said, ‘which is different. Also spirits of nature. Spirits of living things. Everything has a spirit… this table, those trees, the River Frome.’

‘A guitar?’ Lol said.

Al turned slowly. ‘Smart boy.’

Merrily saw that Lol’s face was alight with understanding. ‘All the wood for each guitar, you take sparingly,’ he said, ‘so that it isn’t missed. So maybe even the tree doesn’t have to die?’

‘Aha.’ Al leaned back, a knuckle depressing his cheek, two fingers making a V around an ear.

‘So that the living spirit of the tree – or trees, all those different species – goes into the guitar,’ Lol said. ‘And maybe you consult the tree spirit first to make sure it’s OK to take the wood?’

Al pointed a long forefinger. ‘And I’ll tell you something else, Lol, boy – if you ever bring that instrument back, you’ll be insulting those spirits… have you thought of that?’ He flung back his head and laughed. Directly above the table, Merrily was aware of the full moon, the colour of custard cream. It seemed warmer than the day had been, as if the moon was putting out its own heat.

She said carefully, ‘So a gypsy who was attempting to arouse the dead, for whatever reason—’

Sally said, ‘You know of a gypsy doing this?’

‘I know of somebody trying to do it. Somebody claiming to have a gypsy father.’

‘A poshrat?’ Al Boswell asked.

‘Sounds vaguely appropriate.’

‘Half-breed. Is this the same person seeking wealth?’

‘Seeking even more wealth would be more accurate. And ensuring his wealth involves damaging another person. A family, in fact.’

‘Have nothing to do with this person,’ Al said. ‘Erm… it’s my job, Mr Boswell.’

His face was blank in the milky moon and candlelight. ‘What, at the end of it all, is so important about a bloody job?’

‘It’s a gaujo thing,’ Lol said.

‘Black magic,’ Al said flatly. ‘Raising the dead to damage another person or acquire wealth – that’s the black arts. And also, let me tell you, it’s far too stupid a thing for a traditional Romany ever to go near.’

‘There are no evil Romanies?’ Lol said.

‘You don’t understand, boy. Romanies respect, sometimes consult the ancestors. But they let the dead lie. Most of us don’t even like to touch a body after death. This is about fear.’ He leaned towards Merrily and into the candlelight, as if he was concerned that she should see how agitated he was. ‘Listen to me, drukerimaskri, I want to tell you – and this also concerns the other thing, the thing in the kiln – I want to say to you, don’t ever trust the dead.’

In Merrily’s bag – she jumped – her phone began to shrill, just like it had in the Stocks’ bedroom when she could have sworn it was switched off. She didn’t touch the bag. ‘Go on,’ she said to Al.

The phone went on bleeping – Al glancing nervously at the bag, as if this might be a spirit coming through.

‘I’ll get it if you like,’ Lol said. Merrily nodded gratefully, dug in the bag and pulled out the phone, handed it to him. Lol took it over to the boundary fence.

‘We have a word,’ Al said, and he whispered it. ‘Mulo. This is the Romany word for a ghost. The same word… this word is also used for a vampire: the living dead.’

Sally Boswell was silently observing her husband’s melodramatics with a faintly sardonic expression, but her skin looked whiter than the moon.

‘The point being, I think, that we don’t see that much of a difference,’ Al said.

Merrily didn’t know how to react to this. Was she supposed to say something inane about not all ghosts sucking your blood? The moon picked out a circle of pink, as perfect as a tonsure, on the crown of Al’s white head.

‘This is our dead I’m talking about. We don’t worry about your dead – we’ll settle down to sleep in your cemeteries any night of the week. We believe that the Romany dead… we believe they don’t come back for no reason. And they’ll leech off you. They’ll steal your life-energy. They’ll keep on taking it until you’re a cored and cancerous husk. We are very afraid, drukerimaskri, of the vengeful power of our dead.’

She didn’t really know what he meant. She didn’t understand what he was saying to her.

Lol came and sat down again, but said nothing. Nervously, Merrily drank some more of the nettles and hops. The night was suddenly swollen with tension.

‘Whatever it is,’ Sally said to Lol, ‘you’d better tell her. We’ll go away and leave you.’

‘No, it’s OK. It’s no big secret.’ Lol handed the phone across the table to Merrily. ‘It was Sophie. The police are trying to get hold of you.’

Merrily drew a fearful breath. She was thinking of Amy Shelbone… David Shelbone not answering his phone.

‘There’s been an incident at the remand centre in Shrewsbury where Gerard Stock was taken. He, um—’ Lol cleared his throat. ‘Stock’s hanged himself.’

35 Left to Hang

THE TURNED HAY was a rich confection, baking under the moon. Merrily stood on the hard mud track that bisected the meadow below Prof’s place, the mobile damp against her ear, a cigarette in her other hand.

The air was so very still and DCI Annie Howe’s voice so crisp and distinct and authoritative, it was like the news was being broadcast to the whole valley.

‘Easier for them to do it in remand centre,’ she explained, as if she was talking about laundry or something. ‘Fewer personal restrictions there. As they haven’t been convicted of anything, they’re not forced to wear prison clothing.’

The full moon, Merrily was thinking, outraged. She and Lol had walked all the way back from the Boswell hop museum before she’d felt able to make the call to Hereford police. Why the hell don’t they watch them more carefully under a full moon?

‘Unfortunately, it’s not too infrequent an occurrence,’ Annie Howe said. ‘There’s more of an element of loneliness and despair among remand prisoners. But a man of Stock’s apparent intellect and resilience – I have to say I wouldn’t have expected it from him, and I do wonder what pushed him over the edge. Did he suddenly realize he enormity of what he’d done? Was it remorse? Or had something… perhaps altered his state of mind?’ Meaningful pause. ‘What do you think, Ms Watkins?’

Merrily thought about the court scenario Lol and she had built from what they knew of the mind of Gerard Stock. She didn’t like Howe’s innuendo, but she let it go.

‘How did he do it?’

‘With his shirt,’ Annie Howe said. ‘The shirt was torn and soaked – he’d urinated on it and rolled it up tight.’

‘Not a cry for help, then,’ Merrily said dully.

His white shirt. White for innocence. White for the side of the angels. Out in the endless darkness, Gerard Stock’s heavy body was revolving slowly, his feet inches from the floor. Don’t really know what the fuck you’re doing, do you? You’re a waste of time. Geddout. Stock revolving slowly for ever: an obscene enigma.

‘I do feel obliged to warn you,’ Howe said, ‘that all legal barriers must now be considered down. No impending court case any more, only inquests. No one’s freedom’s at stake, so the gates are wide open. The media can go in now, with all its fangs bared. You understand what I’m saying?’

Merrily said nothing. She imagined Howe in her half-lit office, relishing the moment.

‘It means they can exploit the exorcism angle to the full,’ Howe said. ‘They can print whatever they like. I can’t stop them.’

Even if you wanted to.

‘And it means, of course, that they’ll come after you, Ms Watkins. If they aren’t after you already.’

‘I expect you’ll give them a full description,’ Merrily said, ‘so they don’t miss me.’

Everything under the full moon was bright and sharply defined: the crisp ridges of hay, a line of graceful poplars, Lol – still and compact, standing looking down at his trainers.

‘I should get some sleep,’ Howe said. ‘It’s been a fairly stressful couple of days for you, I imagine.’

She didn’t say, But nothing compared with the stress to come.

Eirion sat up in horror, staring around the moon-washed attic. ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ He bounced out of bed, ran to the window. ‘Look at it!’

‘What?’

‘It’s bloody dark. It’s got to be after ten.’

Jane put on the light. ‘Five past. No sweat.’ She looked at him, head to bare toes. She smiled. ‘Doesn’t take the little guy long to shrink, does it?’

‘Jane, I’m dead.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far.’ On the Mondrian walls, the moon spotlit the yellow rectangle and the blue square, and Jane sighed in some kind of weird rapture. ‘Irene, isn’t life sometimes so… really quite good, in spite of everything?’

‘It—’ Eirion came back and sat on the bed and tenderly stroked her hair. ‘Well, yes. Yes, it is. But there’s always a vague downside – like we fell asleep. We weren’t supposed to fall asleep afterwards, were we, Jane?’

‘It happens.’ Jane shrugged knowledgeably. ‘Release of sexual tension.’

‘Even if I leave now, I’m not going to get back until the early hours.’

‘So don’t leave.’

‘They’ll have locked me out.’

‘You’ve got a key.’

‘They’ll have barred the doors, out of entirely justified spite.’

‘Just say the car broke down.’

‘Jane, it’s a two-year-old BMW. It’s still under warranty. Plus, we didn’t even say we were going anywhere.’

‘You know what?’ Jane said.

‘What?’

‘I don’t actually care a lot.’ She linked her hands behind her head. She felt, like, all woman. ‘The car, your family… all this is so not a problem.’

Eirion looked into her eyes.

‘And Amy Shelbone?’ he said.

‘Ah.’ Jane went quiet. That was a problem. Yes. Oh God.

‘I think we were going to see Amy, weren’t we?’ Eirion said. ‘Either before or after or instead of ringing your mum. If you recall, we looked up the address in the phone book. Some hours ago.’

‘Irene, what are we going to do?’ She was confused: part of her wildly happy, the rest horribly anxious, the combination bringing her to the brink of tears. ‘I mean what are we going to do about Amy now?’

‘Yes.’ He stood up again. ‘I guess we do have to do something.’

‘Because that would like destroy everything, wouldn’t it, if it—?’

‘Don’t go imagining things, Jane.’

‘Irene, that stuff… you couldn’t even imagine it.’ Everything came back to her, in the tough, no-shit tones of Kirsty Ryan: They’re really cooking, you know, her and the kid. She covered herself with the duvet, as if some astral Layla Riddock might be watching her from the shadows. ‘You couldn’t dream it up, could you?’

‘No.’ Eirion walked around, discovering into which corners he’d thrown his clothes. ‘How long would it take us to get over there?’

‘Dilwyn? Ten, fifteen minutes. But suppose she’s already in bed.’

‘Then she can get up, can’t she? At least if she’s in bed she’s not going to run away. Go on, get dressed. I won’t watch.’

‘You don’t want to watch?’

‘Yes, I’d love to watch. That’s’ – Eirion gathered up his jeans – ‘why I’m getting dressed in the bathroom.’

‘Irene?’ Jane slipped on her bra. Eirion paused at the door. ‘You will come in with me, won’t you? At the Shelbones’. You’re more likely to convince the parents than I am.’

‘Sure. We’re… an item, aren’t we? Official.’

‘I…’ Jane smiled a little stiffly, wondering how she felt about that, like, post-coitally. Hey!

She reached down to the little pile of her clothes lying beside the bed.

‘Maybe he left a suicide note,’ Lol said.

They were on the wooden footbridge. The river was down there somewhere, but even the full moon couldn’t find it. Lol was standing over the Frome which went nowhere in particular, maybe aching to join another river before it was too late.

‘If he refused to make a statement,’ Merrily said, ‘I don’t see him leaving a note, do you?’

Lol didn’t have an answer to that. He couldn’t imagine why a man like that would ever have hanged himself – taking Gerard Stock out of the picture, robbing the world of a sensational trial at which he might easily have put up a strong defence, with Merrily Watkins left to hang.

‘Sophie mention the media?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘So, do you want to risk staying here?’

‘Risk?’ She was wearing a blue cotton skirt, a top the colour of the moon, a small gold cross on a chain. She looked very small. ‘What are they going to do to me? The press are only people.’

‘In the pack, they tend to lose their humanity.’

‘We’ll see what happens. Look, I…’ She brought out her phone. ‘I’d better call David Shelbone again.’ She switched on the phone and the screen came up green. Merrily put in a number and listened. ‘Engaged.’

‘What was it Al told you?’ Lol said. ‘When I was taking the call. What was Al so keen to tell you?’

‘Oh, he’d… had a little too much wine.’

‘Something about not trusting the dead.’

‘He was talking about the gypsy dead. Romany ghosts. What he called the mulo. He said gypsies were terrified of their own ghosts, though they didn’t give a toss about ours. It didn’t seem entirely logical to me. But what do I know?’

‘He say anything about there being a presence in the kiln?’

‘Only in passing.’ She stepped onto the footpath on the other side of the bridge. ‘But it doesn’t matter now, does it? Nothing to explain to the Crown court. Just an inquest.’

Lol followed her. ‘And yourself. If you can’t somehow explain it to yourself, you’ll never trust Deliverance again, will you?’

‘Well, sure, I’d rather have got myself shredded in the witness box, have the whole exorcism thing held up as some kind of tawdry medieval spoof, than lose another life.’ She waited for him by the first of the poplars, the moonlight on her face, shadows under her eyes. ‘Or maybe I’m fooling myself? Maybe I’m secretly glad he’s dead, because he’d already set me up and he was probably going to do it again.’

‘You don’t have it in you to be glad anyone’s dead,’ he said.

‘As a vicar.’

‘Not even – let’s be honest here – as a person.’

‘Oh, well, you – you kind of stop being a person when you join the Church,’ Merrily said. ‘You have to learn to suffocate your feelings.’

It went so quiet you could even hear the Frome moving below.

‘Ah,’ Lol said.

‘Redefine your goals. That kind of thing.’

‘Damn,’ Lol said.

‘Nice tune,’ Merrily said.

They both stood with their backs to the door, so there was no way out, short of physical violence. And although they were both seriously into middle age, they were big people. She was kind of pudgy-armed and hefty and he was tall and thin and, although he didn’t look too well, he did look desperate enough to damage somebody.

Like, for instance, somebody who might know where his daughter was but was refusing to tell him.

‘Honest to God,’ Jane said, scared, ‘we didn’t even know she was missing. We came here to see her.’

Invoking God because it looked like this might well cut some ice here. The room was too bright from a big white ceiling bowl loaded with high-wattage bulbs. There was a wooden crucifix on the mantelpiece over the Calor gas fire and round the walls these really awful religious paintings by one of those pedantic Pre-Raphaelite guys who thought it was important to paint every blade of grass individually.

‘I wouldn’t lie,’ Jane insisted. ‘My mum’s a vicar. I wasn’t brought up to lie, OK?’

‘Your mother knows you’re here, then?’ said Mr Shelbone. He had a weak voice that sounded kind of laminated, and Jane felt slightly sorry for him; it was clear his wife called the shots.

‘Of course she doesn’t,’ Mrs Shelbone snapped. ‘Her mother seems to know very little of what goes on.’

Jane let the slur go past. ‘No, she doesn’t. But only because I feel responsible for dropping her in it when I didn’t tell her at the time because I didn’t think there was anything particular to worry about, but now I know I was wrong, and I want to put it right.’ She drew a long breath.

‘Why should we believe you?’ Mrs Shelbone demanded. ‘How do we know you’re not just sensation-seeking?’

‘This is silly. Jane’s only trying to help.’ Eirion’s Welsh accent coming through. ‘That’s all she wants – and to find out what’s going on.’

‘And what,’ said Mr Shelbone, ‘is going on, in your opinion?’

Jane swallowed. It was one thing telling Amy what kind of psychotic slag Layla Riddock was; it was something else laying it on her parents in her absence. Serious as this whole thing could turn out to be, it broke some kind of code of honour. You didn’t grass until you reached the stage where it was impossible to deal with it yourself.

This didn’t seem to worry Eirion, however. Maybe he’d just had it with the whole thing. Or maybe he thought this was the stage.

‘It comes down to bullying, Mr Shelbone. Your daughter’s been picked on by an older girl, who evidently thinks she’s… something special.’

‘Picked on?’

‘Ensnared. You must know what I’m talking about. Especially as it’s been suggested to us today that she – this girl – might have wanted to use Amy to get at—well, to get at you.’

Mr Shelbone was silent. Once Eirion mentioned the Christmas Fair, Layla Riddock would be in the frame. Best to leave it here, Jane decided. They should say as little as possible, get out and go and grovel to Mum, let her decide what to do.

‘Sit down.’ Mr Shelbone indicated a sofa in a pine frame, like the bottom half of a bunk.

Jane said, ‘We have to be…’

Eirion just shrugged and went over to the sofa and sat down.

‘Now then, son,’ said Mr Shelbone. ‘Let’s start at the beginning.’

‘Well, her name’s Layla Riddock,’ Eirion said.

36 Confluence

LOL TENSED. There was the tower across the fields, just as he’d seen it the first time, the tip of its witch’s hat askew, as if a low-flying aircraft had clipped it. He remembered how he’d thought it looked like a fairy castle, with that glow in the window.

Where a glow was now.

‘What?’ Merrily demanded.

‘There’s—’ He sagged, his back to a tree trunk, the breath forced out of him as if he’d been punched. ‘Sorry, it’s just the moon. It’s just a reflection of the moon.’ It seemed to be everywhere tonight.

‘What did you think it was?’

‘How about we go back?’ He searched for the path, then spotted where he’d gone wrong the last time: there was a stile he could have climbed over to follow a circular route back to the bridge, and another path that led into the tangled wood. ‘Merrily?’

‘Erm… Lol, how do I get to the old hop-yard? Where you saw Stephanie that night?’

‘Oh no.’ Lol stood in the middle of the path, ‘I really don’t think so.’

‘Lol…’

‘Merrily – tell me. That’s why we’re here?’

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I haven’t got the gear, I haven’t got the holy water, I haven’t got the sacrament. But I can pray. I can do the words.’

‘Words?’

‘Words to get them out of here.’

‘Who?’

‘Stock, Stephanie… Call it precautionary. Call it—’

‘To stop them becoming earthbound, right? To fix it so nobody in the future goes for an innocent walk in that field and’ – Lol actually shivered – ‘sees something.’

‘All right, to try and fix it. You’ve got to try, haven’t you? It’s what I do. Like I keep telling people. I’m actually trying very hard to believe it’s what I’ve been put here to do.’

‘Cure of souls,’ Lol said. He sensed how close she was to tears.

‘Yes.’

‘Souls of the living or the souls of the dead?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Merrily, it’s just a phrase I heard with the right balance, the right metre. If it sounds right, use it. What does it mean?’

‘It’s,’ she shook her head at him, ‘just an old description of what we do – what we’re supposed to do. Implies we have curative powers, which I suppose we don’t, most of us. We just know how to ask nicely. And all I want to do now is say, Please God, will you accept the souls of these two people, help them break the bonds of obsession, anger, lust, hatred – help them leave it all behind. Is that so bad?’

‘You’ve known you were going to do this ever since we left the Boswells, haven’t you?’

Something to prove, he thought. Stock’s death must have made her wonder if she wasn’t so much a force for good as a force for chaos.

‘It kind of grew,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s a responsibility. Least I can do. You don’t have to join in or anything. Just point me in the right direction. If you think it’s crap, that’s OK.’

Lol nodded. ‘Joining another river,’ he murmured.

‘Sorry?’

‘Just another song.’

The trees were closing overhead, the moon shining through a grille of high branches like the wires around a hurricane lamp. He wasn’t even sure of the way, but he was in no doubt that they’d get there.

He wondered if Merrily was secretly hoping that if she prayed in the haunted hop-yard God would mystically grant her knowledge, an explanation of the deaths of both Stephanie and Gerard Stock.

Because it seemed unlikely that anyone else could.

‘You know what I’m beginning to think?’ she said, with alarming synchronicity. ‘I’m thinking Stock – because of his professional history, because of his attitude – was sorely misjudged. I’m tempted to think he approached Simon St John out of pure need, having come to the conclusion – very gradually and very reluctantly, no doubt – that Stephanie was possessed by something evil. I think it was her he wanted exorcized, not the kiln.’

‘But wasn’t the type of guy who could ever come out and say that.’ Lol held up a branch for her to duck underneath. ‘So he laid it on Stewart. The obvious ghost.’

‘The e-mail he sent to the office was very straightforward and very sincere,’ she said. ‘He appealed to me as a Christian. He said he and his wife were being driven to the edge of sanity. I also spoke to a journalist today, called Fred Potter, who spent some time talking to Stephanie’s colleagues at the agency where she worked. She seems to have gone through a radical personality change, from mouse to… someone altogether more predatory.’

‘Are you actually talking about possession?’

‘I don’t know. I’m the only person who ever has to consider that possibility. So I try not to.’

‘I think it was Conan Doyle who had Sherlock Holmes say—Oh.’

Just as he’d done the first time, Lol almost walked into it: the first of the abandoned hop-poles. They walked out of the wood and into full moonlight, into the first alley of hop-frames, the moon overhanging the hop-yard, making the lines of naked frames gleam whitely like prehistoric bones.

‘God,’ Merrily whispered, ‘you were right. It isn’t nice at all, is it?’

She took his hand and led him to the centre of the hop-yard – the field of crucifixion. They stood together beneath a broken frame, the crosspiece hanging down, a frizzle of bine dangling from it. Lol had an image of Stephanie, with the bine in the bedroom. He blinked hard and shut it out.

‘Has to be done tonight, you see,’ she said, ‘because this place will probably be crawling with people tomorrow.’ She looked around. ‘I’d like us to get protection first against anything else that might be here. So we’ll do St Patrick’s Breastplate – Christ be with us, Christ within us… you know? And perhaps we could visualize a ring of light around the hop-yard and the kiln, spreading out to Knight’s Frome.’

‘Sure. I mean I’ll try.’

The truth was, he felt an unexpected, slightly shameful excitement. This was nothing like the cleansing of the kiln. Just the two of them this time. And the big full moon.

She said, ‘To be honest, I’m not sure I could do this alone, tonight.’

‘Well, I’ll do whatever—’

‘Just be here. And think no harm of them. Wish them… love. Maybe repeat a few things after me.’

‘Merrily, I…’

‘Mmm?’

‘I believe you can do this. I believe in you.’

‘I know.’

They were quiet for a few moments, looking across at the kiln-house, soot-black now against the creamy sky.

‘Erm… it’s about guiding the undying essence to God,’ Merrily said. The moon was full on her face and she didn’t look like a saint or a goddess. She looked like a woman. ‘That’s Deliverance.’

He said on impulse. ‘Merrily, how can you love Him? How can you commit your—?’

‘Can I love Him like a man?’

‘Words to that effect.’

‘You want this straight?’ He nodded. ‘When I pray, I don’t see a man. Or a woman. I just experience – it started out as imagination, but now it truly exists – a warmth and a light and a great core of… what you’d describe, I suppose, as endless, selfless love. Which asks for nothing in return but an acceptance of it… which is faith. It sometimes comes in a kind of blue and gold – but that’s subjective. It’s just some incredible benevolence, so beautiful and so close, so intimate that… No,’ she said, ‘this is not a man. It’s completely different.’

Lol was glad, for a moment. ‘You feeling any of it here? The benevolence?’

‘No. That’s what worries me. Somehow I can’t get going until I feel there’s something – some small light – something to… connect with.’

‘So what exactly are you feeling?’

‘Scared?’

The moon hung in the black wires, several feet above them. The moon was not Christian; it was not about selfless, undying love; the moon was cold rock and had no light of its own.

They stood together between the poles, looking down a whole avenue of poles towards the wood, and then Lol was aware of them turning and facing one another, and he didn’t actually perceive Merrily coming into his arms, she was just there, a small, warm, slippery animal, not a saint, and her mouth was soft and moist, not like the marble mouth of some sacred statue, and the air around them was full of the caramel essence of tumbled hay.

‘Oh God,’ Lol murmured, drawing back in final, fractional hesitation and then lowering his head again as he felt her lips part and her breath meeting his breath, a confluence, her breasts pushing against him. He felt the two of them were pure energy, blown down the alley, the poles to either side blurring in the warm, racing night. He felt this was the moment his soul had been rushing towards, through days and months and years and lives and…

… And yet it was wrong.

It was sickeningly, shatteringly wrong.

It grew cold. The air around them grew as cold as the moonlight. Lol heard wooden poles creaking, as if one had cracked. They were old poles, some had fallen, many were probably rotting inside their creosote shells. Held inert by a damp dread, he heard a crumbly rustling that his mind translated into images of brittle hop-cones on mummified bines. He heard the humming in the wires and looked up at stringy clouds in the luminous green-grey northern sky, through the hop-frame, a black gallows.

‘No!’ he heard behind the studio silence, the crisp eggbox acoustic. ‘Come out!’

Merrily’s back felt cold against his hand, the cold of an effigy on a tomb. Their faces were apart, a chill miasma around them, as if they’d dropped into a vault, and Lol felt sick with the wrongness of it and sick at heart with what this implied.

37 Rebekah

CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT. Sweet, black tea. A cardigan around her shoulders. A warm summer’s night, and she was still cold under a moon that now looked pocked and diseased.

The iron table was wobbling between clumps of couch grass on the cracked flagged yard in front of Prof Levin’s studio, the four of them seated around it, Merrily between Al and Sally Boswell, with her back to the hay meadow and the moon.

‘I called you,’ Sally was telling her. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I stood in the clearing and I shouted to you to come out of there. My voice’ – she looked at her husband in sorrow and some irritation – ‘doesn’t have the carrying power any more.’

‘She means I should have gone in for you, but she thinks I was afraid.’ Al was sitting with his back to the stable wall. ‘I wouldn’t go further than the little wood.’ He put a hand over Merrily’s. ‘Well, maybe. But the real truth is, I’d only’ve made it worse. My father was the chovihano. I just make guitars.’

Sally said, ‘After you’d gone, we talked about it and then we came after you. With Stock dead, there seemed to be no reason at all any more why we shouldn’t tell you… everything, I suppose.’

Opposite Merrily, with his chair pulled a little further back from the table than the others, Lol was looking down at his hands on his lap. Merrily felt his confusion. Also the distress, coming off him in waves.

Al was talking to her. ‘… like we were saying earlier about the Romany custom of burning the vardo? Was this your Christian way of ensuring that the Stocks did not—?’

‘Maybe.’ It seemed such a long time ago. Had she actually done that? Had she completed her impromptu apology for a Deliverance? Had she even started it?

Couldn’t remember.

Couldn’t remember.

‘Brave girl,’ Al was saying, ‘but maybe not so wise. That yard – the yard in the shadow of the last kiln – they tried to turn it into pasture once, and the cattle kept aborting.’

Why couldn’t she remember? Was it the potion Sally had given her? She said, ‘Can someone tell me what happened? Did something happen in there?’

Lol looked up, bewilderment in his eyes.

‘We couldn’t see what was happening,’ Sally said quickly. ‘Too many poles.’

‘Laurence brought you out,’ Al said. ‘I respect him for that.’

She didn’t understand.

Lol said to Sally, ‘Why don’t you tell us about the Lady of the Bines? That’s what this all comes back to, isn’t it? Rebekah Smith.’

Sally shot him a glance. ‘The Lady of the Bines… there’s been more than one, of course.’

Lol nodded.

‘But the original, I suppose,’ Sally said, ‘was Conrad’s first wife. Caroline.’

It was the local secretary of the National Farmers’ Union who had got into conversation with Sally. This was in the mid-seventies, when Verticillium Wilt first hit Herefordshire in a big way. They wanted to discourage young trespassers who might carry the disease from yard to yard, and Sally had said, in fun almost, why not put a ghost story round?

And she’d thought then about the Emperor of Frome and how much more resonance the story would have if it carried echoes of the truth.

According to the ‘legend’, the Knight of Knight’s Frome had banished his wife because she could not give him a son. It wasn’t quite like that with Caroline, but the basis was there. It was true that she couldn’t have children, threatening Conrad’s dynastic dreams – Conrad, collector of farms, with his lust for land, each new field turned into a sea of stakes, a medieval battleground. Eight centuries earlier, Sally said, Conrad would have impaled the heads of his competitors on hop-poles as a warning to other potential rivals.

And yet, he could be charming. Especially away from his domain, on one of his wild weekends in London or at someone else’s house party. He’d charmed Caroline, still in her teens, a city child with dreams of vast green acres and dawn walks through wildflower meadows.

Caroline had actually loved the hops – the exuberance of them, their mellow smell, much nicer than sour old beer. Caroline had loved, especially, the month of September when the Welsh came, and the Dudleys and the gypsies. She loved to talk to them – especially the Romanies who did not want to talk, who reeked of mystery.

Conrad had said she should not mix with them, the lower orders – lower species, he’d implied. Conrad would drive among the hop-yards in his Land Rover, a royal visitor. He looked on his pickers, it was said, much as the American cotton kings had regarded their slaves.

The fifties, this was, and the early sixties: feudal times still in the Empire of Frome.

It was said the gypsies took Caroline away,’ Lol said, explaining quickly that Isabel St John had told him a little of this – some of the dirt on Conrad Lake, which would have been published in Stewart Ash’s book.

‘And I suppose they did, in a way,’ Sally said.

Caroline became particularly close to one family after helping them get medical assistance for a child who turned out to have meningitis. Caroline called out her own doctor in the middle of the night and the condition was diagnosed in time to save the child. This was something the Romanies would not forget and, from then on, the doors were open to the young Empress, the mysteries revealed. Under the tutelage of an old lady – the puri dai, the wise woman – and some others, she became aware of an entirely new way of looking at the countryside, the world.

She learned about living lightly on the land. Taking what you needed and no more and then moving on. Fires from the hedgerows, water from the springs. The secret of not owning.

‘Ecology… green politics… all this was far in the future.’ Sally’s face shone in the light from the stable walls, and her hair was like steam. ‘To Conrad it was simply communism, of course. Conrad lived very heavily on the land. For a while, she thought she could change him – women do, as you know, and sometimes they succeed. But Conrad was already middle-aged and heavy with greed, and Caroline, still in her twenties, was learning fast… too fast.’

‘They gave her a present,’ Al said. ‘The Romanies, this was. The mother of the baby she helped save made her a dress, a beautiful white dress, exquisitely embroidered. She wore this wonderful garment, with pride, to a party at the end of the hop season. This was the first and the last time she was to wear it.’

‘The Emperor went into her wardrobe and took out the dress,’ Sally said. ‘Took it into the kiln – yes, yes, that kiln. Gave it to the furnace-man to put into the furnace. The furnace-man couldn’t bear to do it and took it home to his wife, who wore it to a dance. The word got back, and the furnace-man was sacked, of course. After this, the dress was considered bad luck, but no one wanted to destroy it. It was passed from hand to hand and… well, we have it at the hop museum now. One day, I like to think, it will go on display. When it’s safe. When the full story’s told.’

‘What did happen to Caroline?’ Merrily asked. ‘She left him, presumably.’

‘Yes, after… I – I believe that Conrad began to abuse her in a more direct sense.’

‘Physically?’

‘Conrad was an owner. Body and soul. Caroline had to leave him, of course she did. She had a little money of her own, and the gypsies had awoken in her a need for more… within less. There was – we assume – a discreet divorce. She joined a community set up to develop human potential – at Coombe Springs with J.G. Bennett, who had been a pupil of the Armenian guru, Gurdjieff, at Fontainebleau. And she embraced Schumacher. But Caroline is not so important to our story from then on. If she ever came back, I imagine it was to haunt Conrad’s hop-yards.’

‘She’s dead?’

‘She’s not important,’ Sally said. ‘Rebekah Smith’s the important one now.’

The Rom were always very protective of their women. The term ‘communal existence’ didn’t come close; it was a vibrantly crowded life among siblings and parents, grandparents, great-grandparents – eating together, sleeping together, part of the same chattering organism, Al explained.

The point being that young gypsy women did not go for solitary walks. Outside the camp, even outside the vardo, they were always within sight of the brothers and the uncles. Part of the traditional defence mechanism.

So how could Rebekah disappear?

‘I’ll show you some photos of her sometime,’ Al promised. ‘You’ll see the long, coppery hair, the wide, white gash of her mouth as if she’d like to seize the whole world in her teeth. It gives you a small idea of what went wrong.’

No one could explain how Rebekah came to be quite as she was. Poshrat, didekai? No way. Her lineage was impeccable. This was a good family, and Rebekah was deeply grounded in the traditions. Also, she had the sight, had been dukkering from early childhood. Rebekah could read your palm and your very eyes. Rebekah could look at you and know. They used to say a true chovihani was the result of some dark union between a Romany woman and an elemental spirit. Well, everyone knew who Rebekah’s mother’s husband was. But her father?

‘If you look carefully at the pictures, you’ll see the courage and the arrogance. She was not afraid to be out there,’ Al said. ‘She was twenty-three years old, and they all said she ought to have been married.’

When she wanted to go off, for a night or longer, she’d always outwit the brothers and the uncles, who would suffer the consequential tirades from the wizened lips of the puri dai every time they lost her. But lose her they would, whenever Rebekah decided it was time to make one of her forays into the gaujo world.

It was as if something would be awakened in her during the hop-picking season in Knight’s Frome, when the gypsies were as close as they ever came to being part of a larger community. After she went missing, the police discovered she was already well known – or at least very much noticed – in some pubs in Bromyard and Ledbury, also further afield, Hereford, Worcester. A woman of the world, it seemed: two worlds, in fact. Rebekah Smith, once away from the camp, wore fashionable clothes, was never even identified as a gypsy. Where did she get those clothes? Who bought them for her?

It was clear she wanted out, the police said. She wanted the bigger scene. She’d be in Birmingham now, or Cheltenham or London. Or even in America. Wherever she was, she’d have landed on her feet. She was twenty-three years old, said the travellers. She should have been married.

She was dead, said their puri dai.

But no body was ever found.

And the Emperor of Frome, still raging in private over the corruption and defection of his wife? Oh, he was never even questioned in any depth.

Al looked like he wanted to spit.

Sally Boswell said, ‘We look at the 1960s and we tend to think that was not so very long ago. The young musicians now are all influenced by sixties music – the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead and people freaking out on hallucinogens, the voice of youth.’

She leaned forward under the wall-light, as if to make herself more real, her museum curator’s voice taking over. She must have been breathtakingly beautiful back then, Merrily thought.

‘But the sixties were a long time ago,’ Sally said.

Particularly the early sixties, when there was still an almost mystical aura around the Royal Family… when, in the countryside, this was still feudal England… when the Lakes were the squirearchy, clear descendants of the Norman marcher lords. And when their actions were not subject to examination.

Conrad Lake’s friends included MPs and would-be MPs like Oliver Perry-Jones. The Emperor dined and drank with senior councillors, magistrates, chief constables… and this was the time when the senior police would tend to be ex-army officers with medals from the Second World War, men for whom stability meant the preservation of a hierarchy – and the structure – at all costs. When the police knew their place.

‘Conrad was himself a magistrate for a time,’ Sally said. ‘He was also Worshipful Master of the local Masonic lodge. And the gypsies were vagrants, and their so-called culture was primitive. And they lied, of course. And they also had a grudge against Conrad. So when the police were told that Rebekah Smith had been seen getting into Conrad’s car…’

‘And they were told,’ Al said. ‘There was more than one witness.’

‘Uncles or brothers?’ Lol asked.

Al smiled. ‘You see the problem.’

Merrily saw how intense Lol had become, as though he’d channelled his confusion and distress into an urgent need to know.

‘Isabel told me the police finally concluded the gypsies had simply made it up to get back at Lake for banning them from his hop-yards,’ he said.

Sally nodded. ‘That was one suggestion, yes.’

‘But she also thought Stewart Ash had evidence linking Lake to the disappearance. Does that mean he just spoke to the gypsy witnesses who the police chose to disregard?’

‘Oh, more than that,’ said Al. ‘It would have to be more than that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like photographs. She took a very good picture, did Rebekah.’

Merrily stayed quiet. Lol hadn’t told her any of this – not that there’d been time.

‘Especially naked.’ Al’s eyes glinted metallically. ‘Gypsies aren’t the most inhibited of folk, and Rebekah – well, she was not the most inhibited of gypsies. I imagine there would have been times when she had Conrad crawling to her feet.’

‘Conrad took many photographs,’ Sally said quickly. ‘He liked to have photos of his land and the things he owned – or wanted to own. He’d bought all the most expensive equipment.’

‘You sound as if you know that Stewart had pictures,’ Lol said.

‘Well, of course.’ Al extended long hands that bore no signs of arthritis. ‘We know Stewart found some of them when he was carrying out his rudimentary renovation of the kiln. Stored behind the furnace, like a private porn collection. For a long time, Stewart preserved the old furnace. I guess it would be – when?’ He looked at his wife. ‘Early last year? When he decided it was going to have to come out to make more kitchen space.’

‘It was certainly well into the spring when he showed you one of the photographs and asked you if you recognized the woman.’ Sally turned to Lol. ‘When the furnace came out, the builder had found a space at the rear, well away from the heat, where the bricks could be removed. And that was where an old briefcase had been stowed. It contained, apparently, about two dozen photographs. Of the same naked woman.’

‘Though not necessarily the same hop-bine,’ Al said.

Merrily saw Lol flinch slightly. She drew the cardigan around her. She didn’t like where this was going.

‘And those pictures of Rebekah,’ Lol said. ‘They were going in Stewart’s book, right? So where are they now?’

Al laughed. ‘You tell me. He showed me just the one. He said he had the others. We became excited, naturally, that an old mystery might be solved, an old injustice exposed. But I warned him to keep quiet. Obviously, it must not get back to Adam Lake.’

‘And did it?’ Merrily asked. She wasn’t convinced this would have exposed an injustice. What was there to link these pictures to Lake?

‘Well, if it did, it wasn’t us who told him,’ Al protested.

‘If it did get back to Adam,’ Sally said, ‘it was probably through Stewart himself. Consider: Stewart bought the kiln at a knock-down price, after the receivers moved in – Conrad’s death being almost contemporaneous with all this.’

‘The Emperor became old quickly and died quickly,’ Al said, with evident approval. ‘When his second wife left him, taking the child, Adam, they said his mind was already going. They said he drove her away. Eventually, the old bastard had a timely coronary while out patrolling his shrinking domain. He was found by a walker, dying in the hop-yard below the kiln. Yes… that hop-yard. I like to wonder if, knowing the kiln was being sold, the Emperor was on his way to retrieve his photos when he was struck down… and died knowing his final crime was there to be discovered.’

‘Why would he keep them there?’ Merrily asked.

‘We can’t know, can we?’ Sally said. ‘Perhaps it was his old hiding place, going back to when the kiln was part of his farmhouse. He knocked down the house in the bitter wake of his first marriage, built the new house for his second.’

‘That’s another thing – why did he knock down the house and leave the kiln standing?’

‘We don’t know,’ Sally said, too quickly.

‘Why would he have kept those pictures at all?’

‘Obsession, Mrs Watkins.’

Merrily didn’t ask her to expand, didn’t think it would get her anywhere, not yet. ‘You were about to tell me why Stewart might have told Adam Lake about the pictures.’

‘To get him off his back, of course,’ Al said. ‘Obsession again. Adam’s obsession was to recover what he could of the old empire – especially that bit. Maybe he even knew there was something in that kiln, maybe that was another reason why he was so anxious to get it back that he was prepared to make Stewart’s life a misery. Maybe Stewart told him about the pictures and tried to blackmail him. Who knows?’

‘Al,’ Lol said softly. ‘Who really killed Stewart?’

Al’s head tilted. ‘You’re asking me?’

‘You couldn’t let Stewart turn those pictures over to Adam Lake, could you? Not at any price. If Stewart had let Lake have the pictures, they’d have been destroyed. So the truth would never have come out.’

Al looked down at his long, guitarist’s fingers. ‘Yes,’ he said calmly. ‘Quite right, Lol.’

‘And he would have, wouldn’t he?’ Lol said. ‘He’d have given them away in exchange for money or just the removal of the big blue barn – just to be left in peace and a decent amount of light to get on with his books. I mean, I never knew Stewart, obviously, but I don’t see him as any kind of investigative writer. The idea of publishing those photos – that would’ve scared him to death, probably. I mean, how often do you find soft porn in a local-history picture book? The story of Conrad Lake’s war with the gypsies, maybe culminating in an undiscovered murder – it wasn’t exactly an obvious sequel to The Hop Grower’s Year, was it?’

Merrily stared at Lol with, for the first time, a kind of awe. She wondered how long he’d been brooding about all this? And what had happened in that cold, sterile hop-yard to sharpen his focus.

There was momentary quiet around the table. Then Sally Boswell pushed away her mug of cooling tea.

‘You’re right, of course. Stewart Ash was a gentle soul. I feared very much for him, with the appalling Adam Lake pursuing the kiln. He was so happy there – compiling his little books, talking to the locals about the old days. Taking his careful photos with equipment so old that Conrad Lake would have discarded it without a thought. You’re right – poor Stewart just wanted to be left alone in his beloved kiln-house.’

Sally said she’d once asked Stewart to whom he planned to leave the place. It would have to be his favourite niece, he said – despite her dreadful husband. And so it was Sally who had suggested, half humorously, that he make a will leaving it to the most obnoxious of his relatives, with a clause pre-empting resale… and then tell Lake what he’d done. On the other matter, the book, Sally had asked Stewart if he’d consider turning the photographs over to her, saying she was prepared to write the book and publish it, too, and sell it in the museum if no one else dared take it.

‘He could keep the profits, for all I cared,’ Sally said.

‘And what did Stewart say?’ Lol asked.

‘He was thinking about it,’ Sally said. ‘He was still thinking about it when he was killed.’

‘By who?’

Al exploded. ‘Mother of God, there’s no big mystery here, boy. Stewart was gay. He was doing a book on the hop-pickers of yore, and his bits of research did indeed bring him into contact with some very nice gypsy boys. Most gypsies have very few hang-ups about sex. Twenty quid for a three-minute hand job would sound very reasonable indeed.’

‘And these are nice boys,’ Sally said cynically. ‘Very friendly. He can trust them. So perhaps we weren’t the first ones to see those photographs.’

‘Let’s just imagine,’ Al went on, ‘that Stewart – no doubt more interested in the hop-bine than the naked girl – gives one of the photos to the Smith boys and asks if any of them can tell him who the girl is. They say they’ll take it back to their family and ask around. They return the picture a day or so later, heads shaking: “Terrible sorry, guv’nor – nobody’d recognize this one at all.” ’

Al flashed his goblin’s grin around the table.

‘But in fact someone in the family whose opinion you do not, under any circumstances, discount, has said to the Smith boys, “It is your duty to the family to go back and get the rest of these photos and if you know what’s good for you for the rest of your dishonourable lives, you will not return without them…” ’

‘So the Smith boys did do it,’ Merrily said.

‘Never any doubt in my mind. It was probably much as it was told to the court – an attempted burglary. They went for the pictures – all of them. And the book, too, whatever stage it was at, to find out how much Stewart knew, find out what really happened to Rebekah Smith. Oh, a mission of great importance. And had it been anything else – anything but his precious book – Stewart would’ve said, “Go ahead, take it, take it all.” ’ Al sat back. ‘Anything but his bloody book.’

A large moth, with black rings on its wings, landed in the centre of the table, moved around it for a few moments and then fluttered away.

‘There goes Stewart now,’ Al said whimsically.

Lol kept asking about the pictures. Where were they now? Did the Smith boys take them, or did they panic and leave empty-handed, as had been implied in court? If the Smiths had taken them, would they have had time to pass them on before they were brought in by the police?

Merrily thought Lol seemed obsessed, as if he was determined to spread out all the mysteries of Knight’s Frome, like the cut and turned hay under the full moon.

‘If the family have the pictures,’ Al said, ‘they’ll keep bloody quiet about it now, at least until after the appeal. No stronger evidence of the boys’ guilt. And it’s all spoiled now, anyway. Who could ever justify the murder of an innocent man to prove the guilt of another who’s already dead?’

‘Besides which,’ Merrily said, ‘it’s just a photograph of a naked girl – no proof of who took it and no suggestion of what happened to the girl.’

Lol looked at Al and then at Sally. ‘And what did happen to the girl?’

‘No one knows,’ Sally admitted. ‘We don’t know how the relationship between Rebekah and Lake came about, which of them seduced the other, who exploited whom. But everything I know of Conrad suggests that it was probably going on before Caroline left him. He would have taken a perverse delight, knowing of her friendship with the Romanies, in forming one of his own. However, Conrad’s idea of a relationship was not… a two-sided thing.’

‘But he picked the wrong woman.’ Al pushed long white hair behind his ears. ‘He picked the woman with the mouth which would eat the world. It’s likely that the departure of Caroline would have fed some ambition into her head. So what does he do? Does Conrad Lake, good friend and supporter of Oliver Perry-Jones, marry a gypsy? Out of the question. Can he pay her off, perhaps? Ha! Does even the Emperor of Frome have enough money to pay off Rebekah Smith? I think not.’

Sally said, ‘I don’t know how he killed her. Probably strangulation. But I think I can guess how he disposed of her remains.’

Merrily stared at Sally, and the night quivered around her.

Vision, when it came, could knock you sideways.

The burning stench of gunpowder and rotten eggs, the smell of cheap fireworks from when you were a kid, fierce and searing as a jet from a blowlamp, the hot breath of hell; brimstone.

Just because the pictures of Rebekah were found in the kiln, didn’t mean—?

Merrily put a hand to her throat. She saw the sudden concern in Lol’s eyes, recalling his anxiety in the kiln, during the Deliverance – the utterly needless deliverance of the soul of the inoffensive Stewart Ash to God. It wasn’t Stewart, it had never been Stewart. Stewart wasn’t the type…

Al Boswell put his head on one side. ‘Drukerimaskri?’

‘Is it possible,’ Merrily said, ‘that Rebekah Smith might have died in the kiln? Was this the conjecture at the time?’

Sally Boswell raised up her glasses on their chain, put them on, gazed through them into Merrily’s eyes. Her face was severe and, for once, she looked her age.

‘Oh yes,’ she said.

‘And could she have choked?’

‘Sulphur,’ Sally said. ‘Do you know what sulphur does?’

‘Yes. I’ve a strong idea.’

Sally spoke in her museum curator’s voice, without emotion. ‘What happens in a hop-kiln is that when the sulphur is to be burned, everyone gets out very rapidly. Sulphur, in small quantities or as an element in spa water, can be beneficial to health. Sulphur burning in a confined space can be horribly poisonous. It causes extreme reactions very quickly. It attacks, the eyes, the throat, the lungs, the skin. It turns hops yellow. I think that anyone exposed to sulphur fumes, in a confined space and unable to get out, would be… grateful to suffocate.’

Al said, ‘Lake always took his women to that kiln. Common knowledge.’

‘Women? How many women did he have?’

‘How many sheep in a flock?’ Sally said. ‘And after the cursory search for Rebekah was over, he became less cautious. He’d pick up prostitutes in Hereford and Worcester and bring them back – right up to his death. He had a mattress in the loft.’

Al regarded Merrily gravely. ‘How do you come to know of this?’

Merrily’s phone began to shrill.

Al suddenly smashed a fist down on the iron table. ‘He locked her in, didn’t he? He locked Rebekah in the fucking kiln with the sulphur rolls burning blue in the brimstone tray?’

‘I don’t know that,’ Merrily said. ‘I just—’

‘He turned her yellow! And then he came back and did whatever else was necessary, and then he fed her to the furnace. The reliable old oil-fired cast-iron furnace, burning at two million BTUs… cremation guaranteed!’

Merrily stood up and found she was shaking. She took the phone to the edge of the weed-choked terrace.

‘M–Merrily Watkins.’

Behind her, Sally was saying, ‘We’d always suspected he must have spread her ashes on the hop-yard, then had them dug in.’

‘Mum…’

‘Jane?’

‘Mum, I swear to God we thought we were doing it for the best but it, like… it’s all gone wrong.’

‘Where are you?’

‘We’re in the car. We’re on our way to Canon Pyon.’

Merrily said tightly, ‘I didn’t know there was a Canon Pyon in Pembrokeshire.’

‘Oh, Jesus Christ, Mum, we went to tell Amy Shelbone to stay the hell away from Layla Riddock, but she’s piss—she’s run away…’

Behind her, Lol was saying, ‘What do you mean, “in the real sense”?’

‘Jane,’ Merrily said, ‘what have you done?’

‘So we were in this like really difficult situation, and we ended up telling Mr and Mrs Shelbone about Layla Riddock, but it was only when—’

‘You did what?’

‘It was only when I said, just, like, in passing, that Layla’s stepfather was – was Allan Henry…’

‘Dear God,’ Merrily said drably.

When she came back to the table, Al Boswell was saying intensely to Lol, ‘… drains him, you know? Exhausts him sexually, but it’s like a drug, until he doesn’t know what day it is. You know what I’m telling you, boy?’

38 Physical Dependency

IF THE SHELBONES knew they were being followed, it didn’t seem to bother them. Their Renault was puttering steadily along like this was some little jaunt to the all-night supermarket. Even in his seriously unstable condition, Mr Shelbone was driving with impeccable care, slowing for every bend.

‘And she said what, exactly?’ Eirion was keeping a steady distance between them, all the same.

‘She said kind of, you know, be careful,’ Jane said.

‘These were her actual words?’

‘Close.’

‘She said “Go home”, didn’t she?’ Eirion didn’t take his eyes from the tail lights ahead.

‘Well, yes, she did. She said that, too.’

‘But the phone signal wasn’t great at that point, I would guess.’

‘Maybe the full moon affects them.’

The road at this stage was absolutely dead straight, probably an old Roman road, and there was no other traffic, so Eirion let the Shelbones increase the space between the two cars. ‘What did we have to lose, after all?’ he said morosely. ‘There was only one parent left to alienate.’

‘The point is, Irene, she doesn’t know what we know, and she wouldn’t let me explain.’

‘Jane, you really think we know everything? You see the looks those Shelbones were exchanging as soon as they heard Layla Riddock’s name? What was that about?’

‘It was the Christmas Fair thing, of course. And anyway that was your fault for telling them. The Shelbones are immensely strange people. All those awful, sombre pictures? You can tell why Amy’s turned out the way she is. If they’ve got a shotgun in the car with them, Allan Henry’s blood will be on your hands.’

‘But she is coming out here?’

‘What?’

‘Your mum.’

‘Oh, yeah. And Lol, I expect. And OK, she did say to keep out of it, but what she really meant—’

‘What she really meant was, keep right on top of it so you don’t miss any of the action.’

‘I would not forgive myself if something happened I could’ve prevented. Riddock’s psychotic, and Allan Henry’s some kind of semi-criminal with pockets full of councillors and police – bit like your dad.’

Eirion let this go; there were some issues beyond argument. They drove through Canon Pyon, which was strung out like a Welsh village.

‘What is it with you, Jane?’

‘Maladjusted?’

‘Angry,’ Eirion said.

They drove in silence, eventually leaving the village lights behind. Then Jane said, ‘Actually, that day in the shed, when Riddock – when she kind of dominated me – it was like she was a woman and I was just a little girl. I was feeling screwed up and insecure. Whereas now…’

Eirion braked slowly as the Renault in front indicated right. The moon shone down on woodland.

‘Don’t say it,’ Eirion said. ‘Do not even—’

‘Whereas now…’ Jane smiled grimly. ‘Now, I reckon I should be able to take the slag, no problem.’

Lol drove. His old Astra wasn’t as fast the Volvo, but when you lived in the country you knew that speed didn’t help, because cars didn’t own country roads. He headed straight for Hereford, the most direct route to Canon Pyon; at least there’d be no hold-ups, past midnight. He concentrated on his driving; there were issues he didn’t want to think about until there was something meaningful he could do – if there ever could be.

At the Burley Gate crossroads, Merrily said, ‘Lol…’ He heard her groping in her bag for cigarettes. ‘Lol, I have to—’ All kinds of stuff rattling in the bag, getting thrown about. ‘Look, what happened back there… in the hop-yard—’

Oh God.

‘Nothing happened,’ Lol said.

Nothing at all.

‘That’s not entirely true, is it?’ Flick of the lighter. ‘What I remember feeling was… what you might describe as a – at that moment, an unseemly need. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’ve been times, and – and quite recently, when it would not have struck me as unseemly. Not at all.’ He heard her sink back against the vinyl. ‘God, the older you get, the harder it is to talk about these things. Or is that just me?’

‘Could I have a cigarette?’

‘You don’t smoke.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since after you hand me one. No, all right, forget it.’ He sighed. ‘If you’re asking, was it normal, healthy, adult passion, well, I would love to have thought it was. But in the end…’

‘Thanks,’ Merrily said.

There was a long silence.

‘Where does that leave things?’ Lol said.

‘I don’t know.’

Lol swallowed.

After a while, Merrily said, ‘What did Al say to you when I was on the phone?’

‘You know – gypsy stuff.’

He heard her blowing out a lot of smoke. ‘Al is saying that the presence in the kiln is this Rebekah Smith, isn’t he?’

‘That’s what he seems to be saying.’

‘And even though he knew Rebekah – had known her since she was a child – he’s very much afraid of her now, isn’t he?’

‘He…’ Lol could see clusters of lights in the distance, maybe the city itself. ‘The difference apparently is that gaujos – we’re ambivalent about our ghosts. We have bad ghosts, we also have vaguely tolerable ghosts. But the Romanies – I may be wrong, but I think mulo is the only word they have for a ghost.’

‘And it can also mean vampire,’ Merrily said, ‘in the real sense.’

‘They don’t have to take your blood, Al says. They’ll just take your energy.’

‘That’s…’ He sensed her strained smile. ‘I was going to say “normal”. It’s usually suggested by those who accept these things that spirits need to absorb energy in order to manifest. Hence cold spots in haunted houses. Hence, in extreme cases, possession.’

‘In the case of the mulo or muli,’ Lol said, ‘it seems to be… sexual energy. It’s sexually voracious. Sometimes it comes back to its old partner. In the old gypsy stories, it would come out of its grave and appear in its lover’s wagon and spend the night. The next day, the lover would be physically drained. And this would go on. And eventually the lover would die. Exhausted. A husk. Maybe become another mulo. Something like that. I don’t know. Al was losing it by then, and you were just coming off the phone.’

‘This is not going to be pleasant,’ Merrily murmured. ‘It’s going to be much worse than I could have imagined.’

‘When you asked Sally why Conrad Lake would have knocked down the house but kept the kiln – I mean, why would he? Especially if that was the place where he’d left Rebekah to die, where he’d burned her body. You’d think it would be the very first place he’d choose to demolish, wouldn’t you? Unless the kiln was the place where they used to meet…’

‘And would perhaps go on meeting?’ Merrily said.

‘Yes.’

‘And if he had to keep going back there. I mean had to. He said—’ Merrily coughed. ‘Boswell said Lake became old quickly and died quickly. He said he virtually drove his second wife and the child away – as if he wanted to be alone there. People were saying his mind was going.’

Lol heard Al talking. Exhausts him sexually, but it’s like a drug, until he doesn’t know what day it is. You know what I’m telling you, boy?

‘As if he had to be alone with her,’ Merrily said tonelessly, ‘and with what he’d done. Killed a gypsy, but he couldn’t kill the need. Kept her pictures in the kiln. A memorial. A shrine. And she was still there. In his head. A physical dependency.’

Lol glanced at her. She was holding the cigarette between finger and thumb, eyes focused on its smouldering tip.

‘But he wasn’t always alone there,’ he said. ‘According to Al, he’d pick up prostitutes in Hereford and Worcester and pay them to come back with him. I believe that. You can’t take women regularly in and out of the kiln without somebody noticing. But people would keep quiet – at least until such time as Conrad no longer had any money left to pay them.’

‘Still found money for the women, though?’

‘Because she needed them.’

‘Rebekah.’

‘Yes.’ Lol drove faster as he saw the lights of Hereford gathering ahead and then surrounding them. He wanted them to get there soon, wherever they were going. He didn’t want to talk about this any more. He didn’t want the theory expanding to take in Stephanie Stock and the scratches she’d made down her husband’s back – maybe Stephie and Rebekah between them. Stephie and Rebekah on the bed with the bine.

Stephie and Rebekah in the hop-yard, rustling and crackling with the cold electricity of the dead, and the keening in the wires.

Had Stewart Ash known this would happen when he left them the house? But why would he do that to his favourite niece? The answer, Lol supposed, was simple: Stewart was unaware of it. He was gay, so Rebekah’s muli could never have reached him. It had taken predatory males to destroy Stewart.

Lol drove into half-lit Hereford with its shutters up, its pubs long shut, a cruising police car waiting at the traffic lights.

He thought of Merrily finally in his arms, breath on breath, the warm confluence, then the passion turning cold as they became a foursome: Lol and Merrily and Stephanie and Rebekah.

The lights changed. He felt her hand on his arm.

39 Rich Girl With a Hobby

BIG, BLACK, METAL gates. Not decorative gates, but gates with bars more than an inch thick, and with spear-prongs on top. Gates designed to keep you out. White security lights pooling the turning circle in front of them.

The Renault was stopped outside them with its engine running and its headlights on full, and its horn was blasting, an unbelievable noise down here in the woods.

What was more unbelievable was that this was adults, in the old-fashioned sense: staid middle-aged people. It was kind of shocking. And, sooner or later, it was going to have to get a reaction.

It was cooler now, in the hours before dawn. Jane, in her old fleece jacket, was hunched down by some rhododendrons about ten yards behind the Renault. She’d got Eirion to drop her at the end of the drive and she’d walked down through the trees while he’d gone to find a place to park the BMW – so it would be ready for a fast getaway, he said; also so it wouldn’t be damaged in the event of—

—whatever happened.

Jane couldn’t blame Eirion for being cautious; he was in enough trouble, domestically. And anyway she wasn’t in any mood to blame him for anything tonight. Right now, stocky, solid Eirion was very OK; Jane still carried that warm glow, warmer than the fleece, and her body felt different, felt stronger; felt like a complete unit – though maybe the unit now was her and Eirion: an item, official. Yeah, OK, cool. It felt like the start of a journey. Scott Eagles and Sigourney Jones? Had it come to this?

‘STOP THAT NOW!’

This guy was inside the gates, on the edge of the area floodlit by the headlamps – big guy in a leather jacket and jeans.

The horn stopped, though Jane could still hear it in her head, so the silence was kind of shattering. Mr Shelbone got out and stood next to the Renault, staying behind the headlights, a long silhouette.

‘I want to speak to Allan Henry.’ His voice sounded harsh and fractured, the way cardboardy voices did when they were raised.

‘We’ve got an office,’ the guy in the leather jacket said. ‘You can phone in the morning and ask for an appointment like anyone else. Now go away.’

‘You tell Allan Henry I want to see him now. Tell him it’s Shelbone.’

‘Do you know what time it is?’

‘Tell him if he doesn’t come out, I shall stay here all night, blowing my horn.’

‘You won’t, you know. Because if you aren’t away from here in two minutes, I’m calling the police.’

‘And you are?’

‘The gardener. Don’t you even know it’s illegal to sound a car horn after dusk? Now get back in your car and get out of here, before I get annoyed.’

Oh yeah, he really looked like a gardener. The kind of gardener who planted people.

Mr Shelbone got back into his car, like he’d been told – and just leaned on the horn again. It filled the night like a wild siren. Jane felt a little scared. If this was a bunch of kids, like drunk or stoned, it wouldn’t mean a lot, but these were quiet, suburban, middle-aged, extremely Christian people, and they believed this man and his stepdaughter had somehow taken away their precious child.

And Jane was now inclined to believe this, too, though it didn’t make any proper sense. It was one thing for Layla Riddock to be very turned-on by the idea of real communication with the spirit of Amy’s murdered mother, something else entirely to kidnap the kid. And bring her here, thus connecting Allan Henry to it?

An arm around her waist. She screamed.

‘Ssssh.’

‘Irene!’

‘Not so loud, cariad.’ He pulled her down into the rhododendrons.

‘Cariad?’

‘Welsh term of endearment. What’s happening?’

‘I know that. They’re demanding to talk to Allan Henry. That guy claims to be the gardener, would you believe? Where’ve you left the car?’

‘There’s a little clearing about thirty yards back. I turned it round and tucked it under some trees.’ She had the feeling that now he was sure Gwennan’s car was safely off the road he was almost enjoying this. ‘He’s breaking the law, making that noise. He drove here like he was on his driving test, and now—’

‘He knows. The gardener guy’s threatened to call the police. Shelbone’s just ignored him.’

‘Maybe he wants them to call the police. Maybe he realizes that if he went to the police himself and asked them to start questioning this Allan Henry’s daughter about the disappearance of his kid, it would be quite a long time before they even took him seriously.’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said. ‘That’s good thinking, Welshman.’

‘But if Henry does know where that kid is, getting the police up here’s going to be the last thing he’ll want.’

The gardener guy was no longer visible. Maybe he was taking instructions on the phone. Shelbone was still blasting away on his horn.

‘He’s even beginning to annoy me,’ Eirion said.

Jane became aware of a small gate, set into one of the big gates – became aware of it because it opened, and the guy in the leather jacket came through and walked around to the driver’s door of the Renault.

‘Open the window!’

No reaction. The horn went on blaring. You could just make out the Shelbones – heads and shoulders front-facing, neither of them moving. You felt they ought to have placards in the windscreen: Save our Child. They were a little crazy.

‘Open it!’

No movement inside the car. The guy in the leather jacket swung an arm and stepped back. There was a faintly sickening snapping sound.

‘Jesus,’ Jane whispered.

‘He’s smashed the wing mirror.’ Eirion’s arm tightened round her waist. ‘I can’t believe he did that.’

‘Open the window,’ the guy said, almost conversationally, like he was into his stride now.

Shelbone revved the engine a little but stayed on the horn. The guy’s arm went back again; there was a glint of moonlit metal.

‘Bloody hell, Jane, he’s got some kind of big wrench.’

The arm came down fast and there was this massive crunch.

‘Oh my God, Irene, he can’t—!’

The gardener had begun smashing in the driver’s door and the side panels, his arm pumping with a deliberate, workman-like savagery, which reminded Jane of those disgusting clips of the bastards beating baby seals to death. The whole car was rocking with each blow, the horn intermittent now, fractured beeps, Mrs Shelbone screaming, the woods echoing to a scrap-yard symphony of violence.

Eirion let go of Jane. ‘We can’t just stand and watch this.’ He pulled out his phone, thrust it at her. ‘Call the cops.’ He stepped out of the bushes.

‘No!’ Jane grabbed his arm. She’d seen lights coming on, some way behind the gates. ‘Wait.’

The guy in the leather jacket backed away from the car as both metal gates started to swing back.

Then this man in a check shirt and jeans strolled coolly out, making these casual but authoritative side-to-side wiping movements with his hands until the gardener guy and his wrecking tool went back into the shadows.

And the man just stood there, waiting – until the horn stopped, and Mr Shelbone’s door began to open with this really horrible rending noise. The man didn’t move, didn’t wince. Mr Shelbone got out, unsteadily – kind of top-heavy like a wall-flower that had come unstaked.

‘It’s David Shelbone, isn’t it?’ The man was talking like this was a cocktail party. ‘From the Planning Department.’

Mrs Shelbone shouted, ‘David, don’t go near—’ But the rest was muffled by Mr Shelbone slamming the car door and taking a step towards the casual guy, who just stood between the headlight beams, his arms by his sides.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was going to say I’d be surprised if this were an official visit, Mr Shelbone, at one in the morning. But then, on reflection, I suppose I wouldn’t be surprised at anything you did.’

Shelbone was breathing hard, ‘Where is she, Henry?’

‘What? Who? What are you talking about? This your idea of a night out, is it, Shelbone? Taking a tour of historic buildings in the moonlight to make sure nobody’s replaced any slates with the wrong colour—’

‘Tell me where she is.’

Allan Henry stood with his legs apart. He wasn’t the puffy, bloated tycoon-figure Jane had imagined. He looked quite young from here. He looked fit – a lot fitter than Mr Shelbone.

‘So what’ve you got against me, David? It’s just your name keeps cropping up time and time again. Everything I do to bring new business into this town, improve the local economy, create jobs – you’re there trying to sabotage it. I don’t understand – it’s just you, every time. A reactionary little man, a deluded loner with a grudge. Nobody at the council can figure you out. What’s the problem? What’s the matter with you?’

‘You and your thugs!’ Mrs Shelbone was out of the car, now, a big, bulky woman, arms flailing. ‘You can have your thugs destroy our car, but you won’t intimidate us, with the… with the Lord Jesus Christ on our side!’

‘Destroy your car?’ Allan Henry looked for a moment like he was going to laugh but in fact, Jane thought, his expression had turned suddenly menacing. ‘Thugs? You arrive at my private residence at one in the morning in a car that’s either been in an accident or been… quite deliberately damaged by you and your husband and you wake everyone up – to accuse me and my gardener—’

‘You—’ Mr Shelbone stabbed a quivering finger at him. ‘You’re filth. God will punish you!’

‘Ah, you’re a sad and a sick old man, David Shelbone,’ Allan Henry said, almost lazily. ‘You should be having treatment. You should be on medication.’

‘It’s you that’s made my husband ill!’ Mrs Shelbone shrieked. ‘And you’ve turned our daughter… You and that… witch.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Allan Henry turned on Mrs Shelbone. ‘That’s something else, isn’t it? I had a silly little woman vicar here allegedly investigating some ludicrous allegations against my stepdaughter. I might have known where all that came from.’

Jane began to quiver. Eirion put a hand over her mouth. ‘Save it,’ he whispered. ‘Just remember everything that’s said. You’re a witness.’

She thought she caught a movement behind Allan Henry, a figure flitting like a moth. Eirion took his hand away.

‘You…’ David Shelbone’s rigidly pointing arm began to shake suddenly. God, Jane thought, what if he has a heart attack? ‘You tell me… where you’ve got’ – his voice rose to a howl of helpless anguish – ‘GOT MY DAUGHTER!’

And suddenly Allan Henry was losing it. ‘Shelbone!’ Advancing through the gate in the illumination from the headlights. ‘What would I want with your fucking daughter? Truth is, you and this mad old bat should never have been allowed to adopt that child, and if she’s run away, then you’ve driven her away. We—’

He half turned as headlights appeared behind him. There was the mean, throaty snarl of a powerful engine, and then the lights were full in Jane’s eyes.

‘It’s coming out!’ Eirion yelled. He started to drag her back into the rhododendrons.

Jane heard Mrs Shelbone scream, saw the woman throwing herself in panic across the bonnet of the Renault as the yellow car came through the gates. There was a vicious scraping of metal on metal, a small splintering crunch as it tore a tail light from the Renault and spun off into the bushes, no more than a foot from Jane’s legs, to get past and back onto the drive. She heard tyres spinning and then the wheels hit the tarmac, skidding, and the car took off into the night, and Jane yelled,

‘Layla!’

Eirion was frantic. ‘You OK? Jane? Jane!’ Feverishly pushing foliage aside, like he might find both her legs severed at the thighs.

‘That was Layla Riddock!’ Jane cried. ‘Where’s the car? Get after her!’ Her legs worked. She began to run back up the drive. ‘Come on!’

‘What?’

‘Please, Irene, go, go, go – go!’

Nice idea. Quick thinking in the circs. Except that when the BMW reached the lane, there was no sign of the yellow car. She could have gone either way, either left towards Dilwyn or right to Hereford. Jane was sobbing in frustration, scanning the horizon for tail lights, but the horizon was no more than five yards away, here: high hedges either side of the twisty road.

‘Right! Irene, go right!’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know, but we’ve got to try something. It just seems more likely. Just do it.’

‘Call the police.’ Eirion was poised at the junction, holding the car on the clutch. ‘The phone’s on the dash. Dial 999.’

‘And tell them what?’

‘Tell them there’s a disturbance at Allan Henry’s. Tell them you’re a neighbour and you heard crashing and screams.’

‘There aren’t any neighbours. Please, Irene, go – go!’

‘Call the police! And if you really want to help the Shelbones, give the cops our names as witnesses.’

‘Oh, all right!’ Jane stabbed at the phone, and Eirion sent Gwennan’s car racing towards Hereford, Jane half hoping that after a couple of hundred yards they’d find the yellow sports car upended in some ditch.

‘Emergency – which service?’

‘Police.’

Eirion made pained noises as Jane described the sounds of what could have been a massacre coming from the Henry spread, and then conveniently got cut off.

‘Why the hell did you—?’

‘Just keep going, Irene.’

‘Why? What’s the point?’

‘Haven’t you figured this out yet?’

‘Forgive me, I’m Welsh.’

‘She’s got the kid in the car,’ Jane said. ‘She’s got Amy.’

Merrily was breathing again. In the confining darkness of Lol’s car, they’d approached the absurd, cornered the chimera… been able to talk about something that otherwise might have remained undiscussed, possibly for ever, putting a permanent distance between them – a gap that might never have been crossed.

Now, she was feeling closer to Lol than she had to anyone except for Jane, Sophie sometimes and – curiously – Gomer Parry, since first coming to Ledwardine and taking on this impossible job and discovering that the people she could trust to try and understand her were all too few.

Ironically, Lol remained unconvinced about the threat posed by Layla Riddock – maybe because, without her, they wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t have reached this level of communication.

‘She’s seventeen,’ he said as they neared Canon Pyon. ‘She’s just a rich girl with a hobby.’

‘However,’ she reminded him, ‘she clearly believes that being half-gypsy gives her access, a power base.’

‘Imaginary power base.’

‘And she’s now got remarkable influence over one of the richest developers in the county.’

‘It happens.’

‘Taking over his house, his bed? From her own mother?’

‘She’s a young girl, he’s a rich middle-aged man,’ Lol said sadly. ‘The gypsy magic could be entirely superfluous.’

‘And the fact that she’s also assuming responsibility for conserving and regenerating his finances? And somehow being allowed to?’

‘It’s not a fact, though, is it?’ Lol said. ‘It’s only what she thinks. He scatters her mystical charms and talismans around, it keeps her sweet. He doesn’t believe any of it, and they both know it won’t last.’

‘Maybe.’ She watched Lol driving, the slit-eyed alien on his sweatshirt lit green by the dashlights. The mature woman’s dream: a nice-looking man who, targeted by a young girl, any young girl, could be firmly relied on to run like hell. ‘So, what about the persecution of the Shelbones? It starts as a game, becomes a serious fixation for the persecutor as well as for the principal victim. And it’s working.’

‘Why is it working?’

‘It just does,’ Merrily said.

‘Black magic just works?’

‘In the short term, it works. People who go down that road find they can get what they want very quickly. Then it starts to mess them up and they can’t get out. I’m not being metaphysical here. Pure, calculated evil works, short-term, because it nearly always takes us by surprise. We’re not conditioned to turn the corner and meet the man with the knife.’

‘And what happens when we are conditioned?’

‘Then maybe we also start to carry knives,’ Merrily said miserably. ‘Then it gets ugly. Hang on, Lol, I think we’ve just passed the turning.’

She’d spotted a man standing by the roadside, smoking a cigarette.

Lol pulled in and reversed. The man threw down his cigarette and stamped on it. The Astra drew level with him. Merrily wound down her window.

‘Good morning, Reverend Watkins,’ Allan Henry said wearily.

On the edge of the Holmer industrial estate, at the top of Hereford, there were temporary traffic lights. They took for ever to change. There was already a great wide Dutch container lorry waiting at the lights.

‘Mum was right after all,’ Jane said. ‘There is a God.’

Behind the container lorry, its headlights full on, was a chrome-yellow Mazda sports car. Its driver kept revving impatiently. It was clear that if it hadn’t been for the Dutch lorry, this particular driver would have shot the lights.

‘Just as I was convinced we’d got it wrong and Layla had just kindly taken her home to Dilwyn,’ Jane said.

‘We’d got it wrong?’

‘Just don’t lose the slag.’

Eirion said nothing. This was not such a happy development for him, evidently.

Over the old city, the moon was very bright. You could see right across to the hills and Wales beyond. Jane didn’t think she’d ever felt so wide awake.

40 Bleed Dry

THEY FOLLOWED THE yellow car down to the silent city, past Hereford United’s ground and the livestock market, losing the Dutch lorry at the big traffic island.

Just the BMW and the Mazda now and, on Greyfriars Bridge, Eirion let Layla widen the gap.

‘You’ll lose her!’ Jane wailed.

‘Not now. I know where I am now. I know all the escape routes.’

‘What if the lights turn against us at the bottom, and she’s away? You want to lose her, don’t you?’

‘That would be nice,’ Eirion admitted, ‘but unfortunately I’m an honourable sort of person.’

‘Sorry.’ Jane glanced back across the River Wye where the Cathedral sat placidly beyond the old bridge, above a nest of modern buildings turned greyly medieval under the moon.

They watched the Mazda go around the bottom island and up towards Belmont and the Abergavenny road, Jane leaning forward, peering through the windscreen to see if there were two heads in there. But the sports car was too low; Amy could be sunk down in the seat. The clock in the BMW said five past two.

‘Look – how do we know she’s got the kid?’ Eirion said.

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Layla was there all the time – behind Allan Henry at the gates. I’m sure I even saw her once. She’d have heard everything. She knew the Shelbones were raising hell and the police were likely to be involved. She had to get Amy out.’

‘Out of where? She was staying with the Henrys? Does that sound likely to you?’

‘Irene, the whole thing’s sick. I don’t know what the arrangement was. For instance, Layla’s supposed to have a gypsy caravan somewhere in that wood. Maybe the kid was in there, maybe that’s where they were doing their seances, I don’t know.’

‘All this presupposing she’s so much under Layla’s thumb that she’d let her nearly run her mother down on the way out, without protesting, leaping up, shouting out. Admit it, none of this is making a lot of sense.’

‘Just stay behind her.’

They tailed the Mazda through the Belmont District, past the all-night Tesco, another roundabout, a half-mile or so of main road, and then Layla took a left, and Eirion slowed but didn’t turn.

‘This looks like a minor minor road. If we so much as turn down here she’ll know we’re following her.’

‘Who cares?’

‘Let’s not blow it now, Jane, for the sake of a bit of caution.’ There was woodland both sides of the entrance, but it wasn’t too thick; anyone the other side would see their headlights. Eirion switched them off. ‘I don’t think there are many places you can get to from here, anyway, I think it just goes into plant roads.’

‘Huh?’

‘Industrial development.’

‘So like maybe she killed Amy and she’s going to have her body set into some concrete foundations?’

‘Let’s try and retain just a modicum of proportion here.’

‘Oh yeah, let’s be sensible.’

‘OK, let’s not, then.’ Eirion turned left, put his headlights back on. They were into a newly made road through woodland that you could tell was being cleared: another ecological disaster zone. About half a mile in, they came to a fully cleared area washed by sterile, high-level security lamps. Eirion suddenly slammed on the brakes, cut his lights.

Because there was the Mazda, parked outside some utility wire-meshed metal gates. A sign behind and above them said:

DANGER. KEEP OUT.

ALL TRESPASSERS WILL BE

PROSECUTED.

At the side of it, another sign:

Arrow Valley Commercial Properties

BARNCHURCH TRADING ESTATE

Phase 2

‘I don’t get it,’ Jane said.

‘Stay here,’ Eirion warned.

Jane snorted. What was the point of that? She zipped up her fleece and got out of the car. She walked out into the middle of the clearing, the big lights shining down like this was a prison yard. A lone tree, a Scots pine, towered over the site, its steep trunk filigreed with moonlight.

There was nobody in the Mazda. It was dead quiet, surreal.

After a couple of seconds, Eirion stepped out, too, and Jane turned to wait for him. It was now that a shadow peeled off the base of the pine.

Jane squeaked.

The shadow spoke.

‘Little Jane Watkins. The vicar’s child. We are honoured.’

Allan Henry leaned down to the Astra’s wound-down window. ‘My solicitor’s on his way. Not his usual office hours, but with all the money I pay the fat bastard, he’d’ve been reaching for his pinstripes even as we spoke.’

He grinned, all those nice white crowns shining in the moonlight: teeth like stars. Basically unworried, Merrily concluded, up against it yet perversely energized; a stroll around the grounds with a cigarette and he was ready for anything. Been here before, and he’d be here again.

‘Where are the Shelbones now?’ she asked him.

‘Finally gone to the police, I imagine. I told them the bloody kid wasn’t here, never had been here. They weren’t convinced. My own fault: I’d antagonized them – maybe a mistake. Can’t believe they got you out again. Those people are frighteningly unbalanced. Look, how about you come down to the house and have that drink, Mrs Watkins. Is that your friend in there, the very proper Mrs Hill?’

‘It’s my other friend, the very self-effacing Mr Robinson.’

‘Boyfriend, eh? What a shame. When you’d gone yesterday, I had a little fantasy about you in your cassock.’

‘Thirty-nine buttons to undo, one by one,’ Merrily said. ‘That’s an old one. You haven’t seen a couple of teenagers around, boy and a girl?’

‘I told you: nobody here but me.’

‘But you’re a notorious liar, Allan.’

‘I swear on my Swiss bank account.’

‘OK.’ Merrily got out, Lol too, leaving the sidelights on, locking the car.

‘What’s he do, then?’ Allan Henry asked. ‘Archdeacon?’

‘He makes music. He writes songs.’

‘I think I feel one coming on now,’ Lol said.

‘Be careful, my friend,’ Allan Henry said, as if by instinct. ‘I don’t just threaten, I sue. I always sue. Go for everything. Bleed dry – it’s the only way.’

Layla unlocked the metal gate with a steel key. She was wearing tight jeans and a black cotton top that finished three inches above her gold-ringed navel. Her tumbled hair was dyed black, with a long, streak of gold that seemed to have been spun from the moon. Jane could tell Eirion was unexpectedly impressed; he’d gone very quiet.

‘You don’t know about the Barnchurch, Jane?’ Layla’s voice was throaty, almost gravelly.

It stood no more than twenty yards behind the gates. All the ground around it had been cleared, and a small mountain of sand had been dumped a few yards away. It was a regular red-brick building with a slate roof. There were brick steps up the outside, tough grass sprouting between them.

It looked like, well, just a barn, and not a very old one – except that, where the gable end was half-lit by the security lamps, you could make out where a Gothic window had been bricked up, just the ridge now, like an old operation scar.

‘This Welsh miracle-worker used to preach here, way back,’ Layla said. ‘Sinners reborn, the sick taking up their beds and walking out, angelic visitations. Powerful stuff. In fact, the farmer here was so impressed he gave him this barn, and all the local people helped turn it into a church, and the miracles went on for a while and then… I dunno, the buzz died, or the preacher fucked off back to Wales, or the miracles stopped happening or something, and it became just a barn again and got forgotten about. But, hey, once a holy place – you know what I’m saying?’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said, though it really wasn’t much more than a breath.

‘Imagine all that energy shut up with chickens and cows, sacks of feed, tractor parts. Throbbing away on its own for about a century. And then Allan buys the site and it wakes up again – so much energy focused on the old Barnchurch, so much money banked up, so many greasy palms, so much desire… that it’s become really charged again.’ Layla’s face was radiant. ‘You go in there, pow! Heavy shit, Jane. This place really makes it, where so many real churches are just old dust.’

Eirion said, ‘Where is Amy?’

Layla turned to appraise him. ‘Boyfriend?’ She walked right up to Eirion, gazed arrogantly into his eyes from about three inches away, her breasts almost touching his chest. Eirion blinked. Jane tensed.

‘Hey, this boy’s had nooky tonight!’ Layla spun away from him. ‘Was that with you, Jane?’

Jane said nothing.

‘Where’s Amy?’ Eirion said stolidly.

‘You want to keep this boy, Jane? You’d like to stay together? I can actually fix that, if you like. I can show you kitan-epen. I fixed it for Eagles and Sigourney, did you know?’

‘Ms Riddock,’ Eirion said, ‘is Amy Shelbone with you?’

‘She’s probably in there.’

‘In the barn?’

‘She’s got a key. She’s very trustworthy. She’s got a key to the main gate and a key to the Barnchurch itself. She comes on the bus. Isn’t that sweet?’

Jane stared. ‘She’s been here? All the time?’

‘Just for a couple of nights, approaching the full moon. Making things ready for Justine. You remember Justine, Jane?’

‘Her… mother. Murdered.’

‘Oh, you know all that. Who’ve you been talking to? Kirsty?’

Jane said nothing.

‘There was a full moon the night Amy’s daddy slaughtered Amy’s mummy, did you know that? The moon’s great for that stuff. It moves the tides, and we’re nearly all water – but you’d know all that.’

‘Sure.’

‘You want to go in and see? Talk to little Amy?’

Jane looked back at the wire-mesh fence and the BMW. Actually, she didn’t. She wanted to go home.

‘After you,’ Eirion said to Layla.

‘Tell me something.’ Layla put the flat of a hand on Eirion’s chest and spread her big, fleshy fingers. ‘Do you get asthma at all?’

She didn’t wait for an answer, let her hand fall and walked away towards the brick steps, big hips swaying, the sliver of gold breaking up and reforming as she tossed back her hair.

Eirion swallowed. Jane looked at him questioningly.

‘Haven’t had an attack in years,’ Eirion said uncomfortably ‘Jane…’

‘What?’

‘I don’t think it would be a good thing to annoy her, do you?’

They didn’t make it to the house, only as far as the vardo in its little clearing, to one side of the drive.

Allan Henry noticed Merrily looking at it.

‘She’s not in there, vicar. Believe me.’

‘Can I see, anyway? Would you mind?’

‘The holy of holies?’

‘Please.’ What she needed was to get him talking about Layla. Now, while he was hyped-up, aggressive, his back to the wall. Outside the gates, he’d picked up what looked like the plastic cover of a car’s tail lamp and thrown it far into the bushes, without comment.

Allan Henry tutted. ‘Can’t believe how amenable I’m being to everyone tonight.’ There were two wooden steps up to the vardo. The door was locked, but he had a key. ‘She doesn’t know I had this cut. Thing is, I don’t like there to be places I can’t go. ’Specially not on my own property.’

He went in first. There was electricity: a flicked switch turned on a couple of erstwhile Victorian brass oil-lamps, one on a dresser, one on a wall bracket.

‘Gosh,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s a complete little world.’

It was beautifully kept but not like a museum. Although everything – from the decorated and lacquered panels on the dresser to the vaulted ribs in the bowed ceiling – was polished or at least shiny, there was a used feel about the place: a pan on the cast-iron stove, a mortar and pestle on the dresser with powder scattered around it, a silk scarf spread on a small camping table, with a pack of Marseilles tarot cards at its centre.

And books: over a hundred on shelves, floor to ceiling, either side of a red-and-black-curtained window. Merrily checked out a few of the titles: a couple of dozen on gypsy lore but mainly general occultism. One was laid horizontally on top of a row: A Manual of Sexual Magic.

‘How old is she?’

‘Coming up to eighteen,’ Allan Henry said. ‘That means she’s been a grown woman for five, six years.’

‘Erm – in what context are we talking here?’

‘Gypsy girls mature earlier. By Layla’s age, most of them are married, with two kids. By my age, there’d be a bunch of grandchildren. Like you say, a different world.’

‘Which sounds like as good an excuse as any.’ Merrily looked at Lol, who was still standing out on the steps. Lol’s eyes narrowed.

‘However, this is not really any of your business.’ Allan Henry picked up the tarot pack and then dropped it quickly, as if it was hot. ‘No blood relationship between me and Layla. Don’t even have the same surname. I’ve never been a father to her. She never wanted a father. But, like I say, not your business, Reverend.’

‘No, it’s between you and Layla and… Mrs Henry.’

‘Mrs Henry’s well taken care of.’

‘I bet.’

He grinned. She saw he was still wearing the wheel medallion, representing wealth.

‘Where’s Layla now?’

‘I wouldn’t know. She’s a free spirit.’

‘Just I had a feeling you always liked to know where everything was. Where you could put your finger on it.’

Allan Henry turned and glanced at Lol. ‘Before we go any further – some things I don’t talk about in front of a third party. Legal safeguard.’ The lines either side of his nose were parallel, like a ladder without rungs.

Lol looked at Merrily. ‘Go for a walk, shall I?’ Merrily nodded.

‘Don’t go anywhere you shouldn’t, my friend,’ Henry said over his shoulder. ‘The boy in the bungalow’s nervy tonight.’

There was a Victorian sofa opposite the cast-iron stove. Merrily sat at one end of it, with her hands on her lap. Henry was at the other, an arm flung over the backrest.

‘Costly, this little vehicle?’ she said.

‘You wouldn’t believe.’

‘Beats a Wendy house. But she’s worth it, is she? Layla?’

‘You’re not wired, I suppose?’

‘I’m certainly not going to invite you to check.’

‘Sometimes she’s solid gold,’ he said. ‘Sometimes she’s plutonium. We had a big bust-up after you left. She drove out of here during—when my back was turned, but I don’t want to talk about that.’

‘She gives you Romany talismans to wear, and decorates your house accordingly.’

‘Where’s the harm?’

‘Does it have any effect?’

‘On a personal level.’ He smiled. ‘You bet.’

Merrily glanced up the bookshelf. A Manual of Sexual Magic.

‘How long have you and she been…?’

‘Longer than I’m ever going to admit to the likes of you, my dear. Like I say, they mature early, and not only physically. I have no guilt about this. She made the running, in the early stages. She knew what she was doing. And I’m a businessman, not a teacher, not a politician. I’m not obliged to set an example to anyone.’

‘But she’s still at school.’

‘And will be until she gets her four A levels. It’s a changing world, Reverend. That’s all right by me. You only have one life, live it on the outside track.’ He jabbed a finger at the window. ‘He famous, that guy?’

‘Not especially.’

‘Too old to make it now. Nobody in that business sees first-time action the wrong side of thirty. What would you want with a loser?’

‘He’s not a loser. He just doesn’t make much money. Maybe you’re the loser.’

‘How do you figure that?’

‘Just my warped Christian way of looking at things.’

He shook his head irritably. ‘What do you want, anyway? Not to help the Shelbones. Nobody wants to help the Shelbones.’

‘And that would make me your enemy, wouldn’t it?’

A fist clenched. ‘Where do you get that from? The man’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of a fucking breeze-block. His colleagues don’t like him, the council doesn’t like him. He wants to turn Hereford into a museum – how many jobs are there in a museum? Do you have any idea how much money’s riding on Barnchurch, how many people go down if it crashes?’

‘It’s not going to crash because of one barn. It’ll just have to be modified.’

‘Modified?’ His face quite visibly darkened. ‘A full-conceptualized multi-million-pound project that everybody wants has to be modified because of one man’s whim? Let me tell you, an out-of-town location, it’s got to be big to work – we need the whole fucking space, we don’t need a prime plot right on the entrance clogged up with a useless pile of old bricks we aren’t even allowed to adapt. If this works – when this works – it opens up the whole Hereford Bypass corridor… and that’s mega. Let me tell you—’

‘—that it makes sense, in anybody’s language, to destroy one awkward cranky little family rather than spend a lot more money?’

Go for everything. Bleed dry. It’s the only way.

‘That’s a naive oversimplification,’ he said.

‘And that’s an admission,’ Merrily said.

Total darkness at first.

‘Amy?’ Layla called out. ‘Are you there, love?’

Then, gradually, a lozenge of light appeared high up in the furthest wall – the old ventilation slit.

They’d come in from the door at the top of the steps, into the loft where there must once have been pews, Jane figured.

‘Amy!’

There was a big echo. It was a cathedral of a place, but it didn’t smell like a cathedral. Instead, there was a crude blend of old hay and manure and engine oil and something sourish.

‘Evidently not here,’ Layla said. ‘Come on, we’ll go down. You’d better follow me. No electricity, I’m afraid.’

Eirion held Jane’s hand. He squeezed it encouragingly. But this was all going so totally, totally wrong. Layla Riddock was supposed to be furious and devastated at being exposed as some kind of spiritual abuser – not playing the affable tourist guide.

Jane remembered, with a wince, her own excruciating cockiness earlier on. Now I can take the slag, no problem. The truth was, she was feeling exactly the way she’d felt that day in Steve’s shed, when she was just a mixed-up little virgin and Layla was a mature woman, seventeen going on thirty-eight – someone who didn’t guess or fantasize, someone who knew.

Rites of passage? What a load of bollocks. It didn’t make any bloody difference at all, did it? Jane didn’t even have as much going for her as little bloody Sioned and little bloody Lowri – at least they had a culture around them. Like Layla, in fact – a Romany gypsy, with all the powers that seemed to confer. One hand on Eirion’s chest and she’d identified him as an asthmatic, something even Jane, his girlfriend, his lover, didn’t know. Where did that skill come from? Jane remembered reading somewhere that gypsies didn’t tell each other’s fortunes, because that was something they could all do – no big deal.

No big deal. Wow. If you weren’t part of an ethnic minority you were like nowhere these days.

‘The steps are quite steep,’ Layla called, ‘so you’ll need to go down one by one. There used to be stairs when this was a church, but they rotted away years ago.’

‘I’ll go first, wait at the bottom for you,’ Eirion said.

Jane could hardly see her way to the steps, which were wooden, with gaps in between, not much more than a wide ladder. At the bottom, there were stone flags.

She could see Layla’s dark form moving on confidently down what maybe was once an aisle.

‘You say your dad – Allan – owns this place?’

‘Yeah. He’s going to flatten it in a couple of months. We’re just getting some use out of it first. We needed a church. We needed to match that energy, you follow?’

‘Not really.’

‘Where were we supposed to go, Steve’s shed?’

‘I don’t understand, Layla.’

Layla was squatting by a wall. Far above her was the ventilation slit, the only light source. It was a cold light, and Layla’s silhouette was blue-grey.

‘They go through an identity crisis, Jane, adopted kids – especially when they’ve got adoptive parents like hers. Weird old fucks. But you saw them at our place, obviously.’

‘Er… yeah.’

A match was struck, yellow-white light flared, like the light in Steve’s shed: a fat candle.

‘I’m helping her to find herself, Jane. Very rewarding, for both of us.’

Another match, another fat candle. Two fat candles – on an altar.

‘Here she was, little angel in a house full of religious prints, Bible at the bedside, church twice on Sunday. Is that normal?’

Jane thought about Mum: no, not normal.

She could make out the altar now. It was obviously not the original one; it was supported on two rough pillars of old bricks, but the top was quite a big, thick piece of wood, varnished and shiny. As well as the candles, it had a chalice on it, a real churchy kind of chalice, perhaps even silver. Layla was loaded, Layla could get hold of these things, no problem.

‘And it wasn’t Amy, was it?’ Layla said. ‘Not the real Amy, whose parents got pissed and shot up. What this is all about is letting the real Amy come through. This is what her mother wants – I mean her real mother.’

As Layla stood up, Jane screamed and clutched at Eirion. A grey-white figure was standing behind the altar.

41 Another Round to the Devil

LOL HAD WALKED twice up and down the drive, once exchanging a wave with the nervous gardener through the front window of his bungalow, when a police car nosed in, no siren, no fuss.

He waited for it near the gates. This was slightly awkward, but walking away wouldn’t look good.

Both coppers got out. ‘Mr Henry? Mr Allan Henry?’

Lol stood blinking in the headlight beams, aware of another vehicle pulling in behind the police car: the solicitor, maybe, arriving with Henry’s legal bulletproof vest.

‘Er, no,’ Lol said. ‘Mr Henry’s back there. In a gypsy caravan.’

Exchange of glances, then they came slowly towards him, one either side. He leaned back against the gates, arms loose: no threat, not part of this. Where was the gardener – he should be handling it.

‘Then who are you, sir?’

‘Me? I’m just—’

‘Mr Laurence Robinson, as I live and breathe!’

Not the solicitor, then. This was a recently familiar figure with red hair and an expression of pleasant anticipation.

‘Remember me, Mr Robinson? DI Bliss?’

Like there were several Scouse accents in Hereford Division.

‘Remind me,’ Lol said.

Bliss laughed. ‘What a night that was, eh?’ He walked over, car keys in his hand. He looked like he’d come out in a hurry; he was wearing a dark suit jacket over a white T-shirt and sweatpants. ‘And what a night this is turning out to be – what’s left of it. What you doing here, pal? That your car, is it, on the road?’

Lol nodded. He saw one of the uniformed men had a flashlight levelled at the ground, tracking around.

‘Looks like there’s been something approximating to an RTA in this vicinity, boss.’

‘Does there, really?’ Bliss nodded absently. ‘Tell you what, Terry, why don’t you boys go and see if you can find Mr Henry and make sure he’s in one piece. I’ll have a chat with Mr Robinson here.’

They leaned either side of the bonnet of Bliss’s modest Nissan. Lol was explaining as best he could, covering up very little.

‘Two nights?’ Bliss whistled thinly. ‘A fourteen-year-old girl missing for two nights, and no bastard tells us?’

‘Hang on,’ Lol said, puzzled. ‘You knew this, surely. You’ve talked to the parents.’

Bliss looked genuinely blank. ‘I know nothing about any parents, pal. We’re just responding to a 999 from a young girl. Sounded like everybody who ever bought an Allan Henry home was arriving to complain en masse. I was in bed, I had a call, the magic name was whispered in me ear and… as I’d always wanted to visit Southfork, I came. I’ll be making the most of that in a minute.’

‘Young girl?’ Lol said.

‘I doubt it was this actual missing girl, if that’s what you were thinking. Let me get this right, are you saying Henry’s step-daughter knows where she is?’

‘Well, that’s what the kid’s parents thought.’

‘I’ll give Hereford a bell in a minute, see if these parents have shown up. Hereford can handle it from their side. Me, I feel much better knowing Mrs Watkins is on the case.’

Lol met his eyes: sarcasm or a feed-line?

‘I like that little lady,’ Bliss said. ‘She tries so hard.’

‘She does.’

‘Allan Henry, mind, that feller’s something else again. Not harmed then?’

‘Not that I could see.’

‘Doesn’t sound like it was worth getting out of me pit, does it?’ Bliss stood with his hands flat on the car bonnet. ‘So… anyone tell you about Gerard Stock, then, Laurence?’

Lol nodded.

‘Surprise you?’

‘Kind of.’

‘C’mon, Lol, I’m not taking a bloody statement here.’ Bliss straightened up. ‘You’re one up on me – you knew the bugger before he was a murderer. What I’ve learned in the past day or so tells me a bloke like that doesn’t clam up then top himself. Now he’s gone, there’s not much left for us to clean up. But I’d still like to know what it was about. Really. So – what was it about?’

‘You’re asking me?’

‘I am. I’m asking you ’cause you’ve got no professional angle on this. And also, well, our governor, Annie Howe… very busy little snow queen tonight. She’s probably still up in her office right now. Don’t get me wrong – good copper, Annie, good thief-taker. But limited vision. And I’ll tell you now, Annie’s out to stick this on Merrily. Big-time.’

‘Why?’

Bliss blinked. ‘That’s a good question. I never gave it much thought, to be honest. Why? Well… she’s no believer. It offends her a bit, working in a cathedral city, seeing what it all costs, being told by the Chief that she’s gorra stay on good terms with the Church hierarchy. And women priests – not that she likes men priests either, but I reckon she actually thinks women should be above that kind of superstitious rubbish. Women becoming priests is a sell-out. That’s what I reckon, anyway. Women like Merrily are traitors to the cause.’

‘That’s a new one,’ Lol said.

‘Yeh, and I never told yer. So, go on. Why did Gerard Stock kill his wife and chop her head off?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I know you don’t bloody know, Lol. What do you think? What does Merrily think?’

‘Well, nothing you could put in a police report.’

‘Bloody Nora!’ Bliss gazed at the moon. ‘I’ll decide what can be made to fit into a report – and it might not even need to be a report, as such. Might be a whisper in the right ear at headquarters. I’m trying to help here, pal. I was raised a Catholic in Liverpool, me.’

‘You said.’

‘It was a long time before I even started to question whether the stuff in the jug at Mass might possibly not have turned into the actual blood of Christ. Still keeps me awake sometimes. So, what I’m saying… I’m not gonna laugh, you know?’

‘Well… Stock gave the impression he thought his place was haunted by the ghost of Stewart Ash. But if you believe it was haunted, maybe you’re not looking at Ash whose murderers were caught. Maybe you’re looking at something that happened there a long time ago but that was never solved at all.’

Bliss blinked. ‘Something else happened there? Should I know that?’

‘Maybe something was left that affected Stephanie more than Stock, because she was a woman. Something that changed her personality.’

‘You’re suggesting Mrs Stock was possessed, right?’

‘I don’t know if that’s the right word.’

‘Tell me,’ Bliss said.

So Lol actually told Bliss about the Lady of the Bines. About Rebekah and Conrad Lake. Out here, under a full moon, it didn’t sound entirely crazy. While he was talking, a Mercedes drew up and a plump man with a pilot’s case walked past them to the gates without a sideways glance.

‘Doesn’t waste any time, does he?’ Bliss commented. ‘Right then. You’re saying that, whatever the truth of the matter, Gerard Stock, notorious piss-artist of this parish, had every excuse for thinking his wife had been… shall we say, infected by the spirit of a woman whose murder had gone undetected.’

‘Not only undetected, but undiscovered,’ Lol said.

‘This is not uninteresting, Laurence. You think if I went back through the annals of the old Herefordshire force, I might find a reference to this missing gypsy? Not that I’m doubting your word, but it might help to have that bit official.’

‘I wish you would.’

‘I will, son, no skin off my nose. There, that wasn’t too hard, was it? I get very upset about how nobody wants to talk to us any more in case it gets taken down and used in evidence.’ Bliss patted Lol on the shoulder. ‘See, from Merrily’s point of view, what would need to be shown was that Stock wasn’t just a dangerous mental case who only needed his blue touchpaper lighting – by, say, an unwise exorcism carried out without due forethought, et cetera, et cetera – but in fact an intelligent man forced by circumstances to grapple with possibilities to which he’d not normally have given houseroom.’

Lol noticed Merrily on the other side of the gate. She was talking to one of the uniformed coppers. She had her shoulder bag and her jacket draped over an arm.

‘Looks like this is the bit where I’m called on to fence for a while with Henry’s foxy brief,’ Frannie Bliss said.

‘Um, there’s something else.’

‘Quick as you can, Lol.’

‘It’s likely Stewart Ash had an unfinished manuscript suggesting Conrad Lake as Rebekah Smith’s killer. Also some pictures – photographs – that Lake took of Rebekah, naked, with a hop-bine wound around her… the two most important elements in his life, maybe.’

‘Or a sadomasochistic symbol of Mr Lake’s dominance, if she was tied up in the bine, Lol.’

‘That too. Anyway, we know Stewart had them in his possession, and that they’ve disappeared. Be interesting to know if the Smith boys did nick them, and if they got a chance to pass them over to someone before they were arrested. I mean, how long after the killing were the boys brought in? Could they have hidden the papers and photos somewhere? Could that stuff still be found?’

Bliss nodded. ‘All right. I’ll check it out. Might take a day or two, and I might not be able to tell yer even if I do come up wid something, but you’ll know the info’s in good hands. Thanks, son. Anything else you think of, you know where to get me. Leominster or Bromyard, usually.’

He moved towards the gates. Lol followed him.

‘So what exactly… has Howe got planned?’

‘Well, it won’t come from her, will it? It’ll come from the Chief Constable.’ Bliss stopped. ‘Not a word, OK? You can tell Merrily, and that’s it.’

‘OK.’

‘I mean it, Laurence. I fuck’n hate this politicking, but I’m not gonna lose me job over it.’

‘Sure.’

‘Right, this is it. Annie’s suggesting the Chief puts out a press statement on the lines of, if the Church can’t be relied on to police itself on matters of irresponsible exorcism, without psychiatric back-up and the like, then it should be made far more open to legal redress. Words to that effect.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘I only wish it were so, pal.’

‘What’s the bottom line?’

‘The bottom line, Lol, is that the Chief Constable of West Mercia puts his name behind the suggestion that a priest who performs an exorcism that has unfortunate consequences should subsequently be held legally responsible for those consequences. In this case, for instance, we could even be looking at manslaughter.’

Merrily came through the gate. She looked worried. She was digging in her bag for a cigarette.

Lol said, ‘They’d want… that she could actually go to prison?’

‘That’s extreme, but,’ Bliss shrugged, ‘this could serve as an important precedent. Chances are nothing’ll come of it – I mean, they repealed the Witchcraft Act, didn’t they? But it’ll certainly make everybody very nervous for a good while.’

‘The Church has no balls,’ Lol said. ‘No bishop in this country would ever sanction an exorcism again.’

He watched Merrily coming towards them, the ruby glow of the cigarette between her fingers. It wasn’t the wider issue that worried him so much as what it would do to her. Prison – OK, unthinkable. But being identified as ‘the precedent’ would, for Merrily, be immeasurably worse.

The pariah. Goodbye to the clergy, obviously. And then what? He’d never fully come to terms with the awesome concept of her as a curer of souls. But ex-Rev. Watkins, the disgraced former priest – the consequences of that didn’t bear thinking about.

He couldn’t tell her. He had to do something.

‘As Father Flanagan used to say to us when we missed mass,’ Frannie Bliss winked, without humour, acquired an Irish accent, ‘ding-ding, and there’s another round to the Devil.’

42 Witch Trials

THERE WAS A screen behind the altar in the Barnchurch. Not a rood screen but the sort of concertina thing women used to toss their robes over in Victorian bathrooms.

The grey-white figure was hanging from this screen like a giant moth.

Jane stayed back. The face was chipped and grotesque: the face of a black, dress-shop dummy, greasy white rings smeared around the eyes.

‘People touch her clothes, usually,’ Layla Riddock said, weaving in the candlelight, ‘for healing.’

Jane recalled Kirsty: Gypsies got their own virgin – like a patron saint or a goddess – the Black Virgin.

‘Sara,’ Layla Riddock said carelessly. ‘Yes, she helps. Amy’s had so much starchy religion pumped into her that we have to bring her down slowly. Sara’s the Black Virgin, and you can view that two ways, can’t you? A saint or an inversion – or a semi-Christian mother goddess. All ways, she helps. Amy’s finding her true mother. And, through that, her true self.’

‘Where is Amy?’ Eirion said.

‘Haven’t you taught him any other words yet, Jane?’ Layla tossed her hair. Jane was realizing for the first time how scarily intelligent she was. ‘Watch my lips. I – don’t – know. Perhaps she went home. Perhaps she’s walking the streets. Perhaps she let a rapist in.’

‘Don’t,’ Jane shouted, ‘talk like that.’

… alk like at… The walls sent back the echo. This was a big, empty place, bigger than the average parish church. Layla seemed very much at home here.

‘Your mother came to see Allan,’ she said. ‘And me.’

‘What?’

‘Yesterday. She was with another woman, from the Cathedral, looking for Amy. Didn’t you know?’

‘No.’

‘That’s funny, because it sounded like someone had told her all about the Steve’s Shed Experience.’

‘So?’ Jane had backed up against something low and hard, an old manger.

‘Well, that wasn’t a very nice thing to do, grass up your mates, was it? And it caused a nasty little row between me and Allan, making it difficult to get away tonight. I arranged to meet Amy here, but I’m late, and now she’s pissed off. Anything could’ve happened to her. All because you had to blab.’

‘What do you expect me to do? My mum was in a hassle with the Bishop, because Amy had laid it all on me. Because she was scared to put you in the frame. What was I supposed to do?’

Layla shook her head in disgust. The ring in her navel shone like the edge of a coin. Jane was bewildered and furious with herself. How could she have let all this get turned around?

‘Anyway,’ she found herself saying petulantly, ‘it was you who set her up.’

‘This is Kirsty again, yeah?’

‘It’s the truth, though, isn’t it? You hated that family ever since her old man got your fortune-telling act pulled at the Christmas Fair.’

Layla smiled. ‘Oh, Jane, one forgets, you’re so young…’

Jane gritted her teeth. ‘Caution, cariad,’ Eirion whispered.

‘I’d go to all this trouble for that?’ Layla exploded. ‘For fuck’s sake, what am I?’

‘You predicted all kinds of bad stuff. You sent old women home thinking they were going to die—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, I was pissed! I’d spent a couple of hours in the pub with some guys, then I go back to the school, put on the clobber, and I just couldn’t bear to do all that you-will-come-into-money-and-go-over-the-water shit. So I just let it come through.’

Jane stared at Layla in her black top and her black jeans standing next to the Black Virgin in her white robes and white headdress.

‘I can do this stuff. The dukkering. It’s a mixture of insight and scam. You do the patter, and sometimes the real stuff comes through. But you’re also observing, judging what kind of a punter you’ve got and tailoring your predictions accordingly. But I was pissed, like I say. I mean, you wouldn’t believe some of the people you get in there. There was this old woman, well dressed, dripping with jewellery, all she wanted to know was whether her friend, who was in the hospice, was going to leave all her money to her. You think, that age and all she cares about is more money? I said, yeah, you’ll get the money but you’d better spend it quick ’cause you ain’t got long yourself, dearie.’

Silence. Jane looked at Eirion. There was a little smile twitching at his mouth.

Layla chuckled in her throaty way. ‘The one I was a little sorry about afterwards – but, yeah, I said it, sure I said it – was Libby Walker who used to do school dinners part-time. You know Libby? She’s about thirty and she’s got about five kids, all by different dads, and everybody knows she just does it for a council house and the family allowance, that’s how thick and irresponsible she is. And as soon as she came in the booth I could see she’d got another one in the oven, and I just lost patience and told her in this sinister voice that I could see “a withering” in her womb. Course, the stupid bitch went bloody spare.’

Eirion made a little noise horribly suggestive of amusement, which made Jane blurt out, ‘You cursed Mrs Etchinson!’

‘Yeah.’ Layla sighed and fingered the hem of the robe of the Black Virgin.

‘Yeah, I did that. I cursed Mrs Etchinson, and Mrs Etchinson had got MS and we didn’t know it, and that was why she was so bloody ratty all the time. I’m sorry. What is this, the Salem witch trials?’

‘Layla,’ Eirion said, the Welsh coming out in his voice, ‘can we come back to the Shelbone issue? Whatever you think about Mr and Mrs Shelbone, their dear little daughter has vanished and they’re worried sick. And they’ve been treated pretty abominably at your stepfather’s house – we saw this. First they had their car smashed in by a man with an aggression problem who calls himself a gardener, then your stepfather blatantly lied about it—’

‘Oh, Allan’s just a little boy,’ Layla said. ‘Turns peevish if he doesn’t get his own way. Forget all that. He’ll get Douglas Hutton, his lawyer, to fix it – money will change hands, faces will be saved. Allan’s not a bad guy, he’s just a crook, which everybody knows anyway. He needs a gardener on account of so many people want to punch his lights out.’

‘Hmm,’ Eirion said.

Jane wondered if Dafydd Sion Lewis had a gardener, too.

‘Look,’ Layla said. ‘Shelbone’s bonkers, and he’s the bane of Allan’s life. He’s this kind of loose cannon. Puts the blocks on lucrative development.’

‘That’s necessarily bonkers?’ Jane said.

‘From Allan’s point of view, yes,’ Layla said patiently. ‘The situation was that Allan had been after some dirt on Shelbone for years. Unfortunately, although he’s out to lunch, he’s cleaner than the Pope. But some councillor knew about Amy’s origins, and Allan told me, and I admit I got so utterly tired of his constant ravings and his threats to have Shelbone’s brakes seen to, that I thought maybe if Shelbone was already cracking up, like everybody said – maybe we could destabilize his life enough to push him into early retirement or something. No real harm done.’

‘So you admit it,’ Jane said.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I admit it, big deal. I am a bad, bad person. But, then, my old man was a gypsy who conned his way into my ma’s pants and pinched her car and stuff, so it’s in my genes. It’s a hard and ugly world, Jane. Also, Amy was such a pompous little sod that for quite a while it was very much a pleasure, I have to admit. And I had Kirsty, who’s this delightfully amoral creature with no sense of moderation – it was all too funny. But then…’

Layla went to sit on the altar between the candles. She looked cool and exotic. She didn’t look at all worried, about Amy or anything else. Jane supposed that growing up in Allan Henry’s household kind of emulsioned over your conscience.

But the really disturbing thing about all this was that the Layla with the cut-off jumper and the navel-ring didn’t really seem such a vicious, evil person. And this weird, echoey half-church, with the grotesque Black Virgin overseeing the proceedings wasn’t the best environment for working out whether this was simply because she could be witchily enchanting and insidiously plausible, or—

‘The word is, you’re quite interested in matters of the spirit yourself, Jane. And I don’t mean Church.’

‘Er, yeah – kind of…’

‘Which, of course, was why I let you into Stevie’s shed. Thinking you could be relied on. Thinking the last person you were going to tell was your old lady.’

‘I couldn’t know, could I, that she was going to get called in by the Shelbones, thinking their little girl’s possessed or something?’

‘Yeah.’ Layla tucked her legs under the altar. ‘That’s what they would think. Me, I just thought she was a pain. I don’t think any of us could’ve known.’

‘Known what?’ Eirion asked.

Layla glanced at him. ‘He OK with this stuff, Jane?’

‘He’s been around me for months.’

Layla smiled. ‘What none of us could’ve known was that Amy Shelbone is the most—it blew me away.’

‘What did?’

‘She’s a natural. That kid is the most amazing natural psychic I ever encountered.’

‘Huh?’

‘When we did the ouija – and I know how to do this, right? I know how to move the glass and you would never know I’m doing it. Which was what I did. I started it off – and it was like the bloody Internet. I punch in Justine and boom – like a search-engine: “We have forty-six listings for Justine.” You know what I’m saying? All this stuff comes pouring through, and I didn’t have to do a thing, the glass is moving like a bloody piston. Kirsty couldn’t write fast enough. She tell you this?’

‘Not the way you’re telling it,’ Jane admitted.

‘Ah, she’s in denial, is Kirsty. It was just a scam to Kirsty. Beyond that she wasn’t interested. All the time, she wanted to think it was me swinging the glass. I wanted to think it was me. For a couple of weeks, I did think it was me – me as a psychic. I got a little cocky. Then I did it with somebody else.’

‘The ouija?’

‘Got squat.’ Layla looked down at her feet. ‘Sod-all. Embarrassing. This was at the end of term. Next day, I called Amy, picked her up when the Shelbones were out, and we came here.’ She looked up. ‘Jane, what a blast! We get into Justine, I ask a question, the glass doesn’t move. Won’t move. I couldn’t push it. I ask the question again… Amy starts speaking. Only it’s not her. It’s not the little squeaky I’ll tell my mummy voice; this is grown-up, it’s kind of raunchy – and it’s got this Brummy accent.’

‘Oh, wow.’ Jane felt Eirion squeezing her hand. A warning. He was telling her not to take all this as gospel. He was reminding her that Layla Riddock was a notorious manipulator.

But, like, wow.

‘What I’m listening to is a detailed description of a killing. Little Amy Shelbone sitting there in her prim little summer frock, and her mouth’s twisting, spittle on her lips, and this like slurred, bitter voice, going, “I’m gonna cut him this time, I swear, I’m gonna put him away for ever…” ’

‘—way for ever,’ the walls sang. Jane dragged her hand away from Eirion’s, shoved it down into a pocket of her fleece.

‘So she… like, she really was possessed, then. Mum got it completely wrong.’

‘No.’ Layla shook her head briskly. ‘No way. She’s a medium. It’s a different thing altogether. The medium has control. The medium can let the spirit come through and shut it off whenever. Jane, I am psychic. I get insights. A lot of people are, you know that. It’s either in the blood or it isn’t. But it’s nothing I can control. I’ve spent years trying to master it – since I was about twelve. Read hundreds of books, tried all kinds of stuff. And I’m not a medium. I’m just one of a million people who get insights. She made me very jealous, did little Amy.’

Layla stood up, lifted up the chalice, sniffed the contents and put it back. Whatever Eirion thought, Jane’s feeling was that this was the absolute unvarnished truth, as Layla saw it.

‘So what did you do?’

‘I just marvelled, Jane. I just wanted to understand. The complete injustice of it. I wanted to understand how come this obnoxious little—I’m going, “How long’s this been happening to you? You had experiences like this before? You must have!” She’s like “What d’you mean?” ’

‘Did that mean she hadn’t? Or she just didn’t understand what you were talking about?’

‘I still don’t know for sure. What I felt – feel – is that she hadn’t, or wasn’t aware of having had any serious psychic experience. Quite often it’s something that doesn’t happen until puberty. But also she’d been brought up in this strict religious household, with the fear of the Devil and all this stuff hanging over her, and the Bible on the bedside table. She was surrounded by this big, white wall of sterile, puritanical—You know what I mean?’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said, excited now. ‘You kind of dislodged that. You knew about her past, you did the ouija thing, you pushed out the block. It all came flooding out, and not only these awful suppressed memories, but the whole—’

‘The whole wall collapsed.’ Layla nodded. ‘The wall her parents – the Shelbones – had thrown up around her, maybe thinking they were protecting her, I don’t know, but I think more likely they were just making sure she was theirs. I’ve read about this loads of times – often people’s psychic side gets awoken by some trauma. Like it could be physical, a bump on the head – or, in this case, something deeply emotional.’

‘Like you suddenly find out what your dad did to your mum.’

‘No, Jane, you remember what your dad did to your mum, ’cause you were there and you saw it all.’

‘This is incredible stuff,’ Jane said.

‘Let’s not…’ Eirion walked off into what she could now see was an aisle between, not rows of pews, but stalls and mangers. ‘Let’s not get carried away, ladies.’

‘Doesn’t this move you at all, Irene?’

‘It makes me a little scared, if you want the truth. But then I come from a stiff, puritanical, religious—’

‘But not so much any more.’

‘No,’ he said, as if this was a cause for regret. ‘Not so much any more.’

‘So where do things stand now?’ Jane said to Layla.

‘You tell me. It’s all out now. The Shelbones are on the rampage. I suppose the police’ll be out looking for the kid. I mean, I was excited, sure, but I also felt responsible for her – still do, obviously. A person I don’t even like. But it was me that broke her through, trying to help Allan. Does that matter now? Seems so trivial: money, again. He’ll go on piling it up, and then he’ll die.’

‘And you were going to meet her tonight,’ Eirion said. ‘Here?’

‘I’ve already said. We were both excited. Hyped up for the full moon. Look, it’s started to run away with itself. Bit like me when I first found out about my dad. Changed my whole world. She’s been rejecting the Shelbones’ church for a while – which is OK. Except she needs something to replace it and what’s been replacing it is her.’

‘Justine,’ Jane said. Her own voice sounded hollow.

‘Justine was real, God wasn’t. I think she thought that tonight she was actually going to see—It nearly happened before… I would swear, it nearly happened.’

‘What?’ But Jane was not sure she wanted to know.

‘It was just a haze, a mist – a fine, grey mist. But it was coming.’

‘Justine.’ Jane was shivering inside the fleece.

‘I think.’ It was as if the cold was even getting to Layla now, she was hugging herself. ‘You want the truth, I’m not sure how much I like Justine.’ She looked up, towards the ventilation slit. ‘Why doesn’t the bloody kid come back? She can’t think I’ve deserted her, just because I was late. Sometimes you could almost believe the stupid Shelbones were her parents.’

‘I think we should call the police,’ Eirion said. ‘If she’s wandering the streets of Hereford… Well, it’s not the genteel country town it might once have been, is it?’

‘Christ, no,’ Layla said. ‘Junkies out there, muggers, violent people – like Amy’s dad. Yeah, give it a few minutes, then call the police. Maybe it’s working out for the best, after all. Maybe it’s better if she does go back into care. Maybe I let a bloody monster loose.’

‘Justine?’ That name had a disturbing symmetrical sound for Jane now. She had to keep saying it.

Layla looked up at the Black Virgin. ‘I lied about this lady. She’s my protection – nothing to do with Amy. I always felt this affinity with Sara. The patron saint of gypsies. But more than that, like I said: as long as she’s up there, watching over me, I feel protected – against whatever Justine turns out to be.’

‘More than I do,’ Jane confessed. Not that it was hard confessing anything to Layla Riddock any more. It was as if, in these past few minutes, she’d shed some age, was far closer in years to Jane. ‘Look, I’m sorry, you know? I got this badly wrong.’

Layla patted Jane’s arm. ‘We’ve all got this wrong at some stage.’

Eirion watched them from a few yards away. ‘Now that,’ he said, ‘is something I find moving. I’ll go out to the car and ring the police. Where…?’

‘Follow the aisle and you’ll find a wooden door at the end. It’s barred on this side. Hang on, take a candle with you.’

Layla walked back to the flickering altar, where the grotesque but evidently benevolent Black Virgin hung above it in her white robe.

As she reached the altar, the Black Virgin fell, with a slithering sound, down from the screen, in front of the candles. ‘Oh God.’ Jane rushed back down the aisle. ‘She’ll catch light.’

The Black Virgin rose up to meet her, its white arms flapping, which was kind of spooky, but Jane laughed and brushed the cotton robe aside, and then Layla fell into her arms.

‘Oh Jesus!’ Eirion cried out.

Layla was coughing. Jane was aware of movement to her left, but she was too intent on staying upright because Layla was pretty heavy, a big girl. Jane staggered back into the aisle under her weight, her arms wrapped around Layla, who just kept coughing. Jane’s chin and neck were hot and wet now with what Layla was coughing up – vomit or bile. Oh, gross.

It was when she became aware of the salty, coppery tang that Jane’s arms sprang apart in true horror.

One of the candles did set light to the robe of Sara, the patron saint of the Romanies. Jane saw the flames suddenly leap. And then, in their light, she saw the girl with straight, blonde hair in a white dress – it looked like a confirmation dress – standing on the altar with the carving knife held high and dripping.

Then Amy Shelbone leaped down from the altar and ran jerkily up the aisle and, as Jane stood there, with Layla’s lifeblood on her throat and chest, Amy also stabbed Eirion.