The Cure of Souls

Church of England

Diocese of Hereford

Ministry of Deliverance

email: deliverance@spiritec.co.uk

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If you are in trouble, any Christian priest will be very willing to help you.

However, in all denominations, attitudes towards the treatment of spirtual problems will always differ and, as with any other form of healing service on offer, you should never be afraid to ask for a second opinion.

43 Retribution

WHEN THEY FINALLY made it home, the dawn was bleeding freely over Ledwardine. Less than half an hour after going to her own bed, Jane appeared in Merrily’s bedroom doorway.

It was 6.08 a.m. The sun was well up now. It was already, somehow, humid and airless.

‘Cold,’ Jane said and slipped into bed beside Merrily.

Eventually, Merrily slept for almost an hour, though it felt like four minutes. All the time, the phone was ringing downstairs. Or so it seemed.

At just after seven a.m., she rose quietly. Jane was still sleeping.

Merrily prayed, in a desultory way, had a quick, lukewarm shower. All the stored hot water had fallen on Jane not so very long ago. Jane hadn’t wanted to come out of the shower. Ever.

In towelling robe and slippers, Merrily went down to the kitchen and put the kettle on. The phone was ringing again. She didn’t react to it.

She put out both wet and dry food for Ethel the cat. She made herself some tea. Outside, it was as sunny as it had been yesterday morning and the morning before. This would be the last day of the mini-heatwave, someone had said. More little yellow-green apples had fallen to the ochre lawn.

Merrily felt like the world was in colour and she was in black and white and grey.

She felt like a ghost.

In the scullery/office, she sat down in the usual sunbeam with her tea. The phone was still ringing. There were twenty-five messages on the answering machine, which meant that the tape was full.

Merrily unplugged the phone and forced herself to play every one.

There were calls from papers and radio stations she’d never even heard of.

There was a call from a woman, who even gave her name. Mrs Fry said Merrily was a smug, ambitious little bitch who deserved everything she had coming to her. Merrily didn’t recognize the voice.

There was a call from someone, a man, who just sniggered and hung up. It was a vaguely familiar snigger, quite possibly a church organist who had once exposed himself to her over a tombstone. Stock’s death had been announced too late for most of the papers; the sniggerer, like Mrs Fry, whoever she was, had probably been inspired by something on the radio or breakfast TV. What did it matter now?

A call from Dafydd Sion Lewis, in Pembrokeshire, began without preamble. ‘Mrs Watkins, I consider myself a liberal parent and what my son does in his own time is, for the most part, his own business. However—’

Merrily had already spoken to Dafydd Sion Lewis, awakening him at three-thirty a.m., because she didn’t want the police to call him first.

The only useful message was from DS Andy Mumford at Hereford. ‘Mrs Watkins, thought you’d want to know we found Amy Shelbone wandering near Clehonger, couple of miles from the Barnchurch estate. We’ll be talking to her properly today. And if we could see Jane again, that would be useful. Oh… we still haven’t found the knife, but we’re searching.’

There were several calls she had to make. She plugged in the phone and picked it up.

A man’s voice said, ‘Hello…’

Damn. How could that happen?

‘Is that Merrily Watkins?’

Yes, she said. The word didn’t come out. ‘Yes.’

She decided, at that moment, that whichever paper this was she would answer whatever questions were put to her and she would tell the entire truth. This would save a lot of time and in no way alter the final verdict.

‘This is Simon St John at Knight’s Frome.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah, I’m very sorry to bother you so early. I was going to leave a message on your machine, actually. I understand from Lol that you’ve had a stressful night, so you may not want to be involved in this. It’s just that I’ve been talking to the Boswells.’

‘Oh.’

‘And we… decided that something needed to be done.’

‘In relation to?’

‘In relation to a particular area of ground and the building on its perimeter.’

‘Pardon me,’ Merrily said, ‘but weren’t you invited to attend to this particular problem a while ago? Approximately two deaths ago, in fact.’

She waited for him to hang up, the way he’d done with Lol.

‘I can understand your bitterness,’ he said at last.

‘Wouldn’t call it that, exactly. I really admire your ability to tell people with problems exactly where they can shove them. I think it’s an enviable quality in a clergyman.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you do feel inclined to help, we’ll be meeting at the Hop Museum between ten and ten-thirty.’

‘Tonight?’

‘This morning. It has to be done at noon.’

‘What does?

‘Al and I agreed this seems to require a more… customized procedure. There’s a traditional Romany form of exorcism. I believe they have a word or phrase meaning soul-retrieval, but I’m buggered if I can remember it.’

A shadow fell across the desk. She turned in her chair. Eirion stood there. ‘Oh.’ He backed away. ‘I didn’t… sorry.’

She waved to Eirion that it was OK. ‘It’s all a bit of a rush, isn’t it?’ she said to Simon St John.

‘Well, it…’ She picked up either crackle on the line or some agitation. ‘Al’s in a state. A bad way. And I suppose I’m—’

‘What time did you say?’

‘Midday.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it has to be. Al will explain. We were planning to meet as soon after ten as possible.’

‘I don’t know if I can make that.’

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I just… thank you for your—’

And now he did hang up.

Lol grabbed the ringing phone, hoping it was Merrily. He’d given up trying to call her at the vicarage. Last night/this morning, he’d forgotten to ask for her mobile number. He hadn’t been to bed. He was rediscovering, on the far shores of fatigue, a state of heightened consciousness produced by a cocktail of body chemicals that he suspected was only rarely mixed. It happened sometimes after a whole night in the studio. Afterwards, the hangover would be awesome, but right now he was floating on a luminous pool of awareness.

‘Good morning, Laurence,’ Frannie Bliss said briskly. ‘You’re up then. Gorra pen?’

‘Not on me.’

‘Good. Don’t get one.’ There was the unmuffled sound of main-road traffic; Bliss was clearly outside, on a mobile. ‘Some night, then, in the end, eh? Quite a few added complications to this Shelbone business, sounds like. What’s Merrily’s take on it?’

‘Haven’t spoken to her for a few hours.’

‘Never mind, not my case anyway. Let’s leave that alone; time’s short. I got in early this morning, couldn’t sleep – bloody full moon. And I was thinking about what you were saying, about Mrs Stock. So I had another look in Stock’s computer – we brought his computer in; fascinating, all the things a computer’ll tell you about its owner. I got into his Internet files – you click on “history” and the computer very kindly tells yer all the Web sites Stock and his missus have been into the last months or so. Now, what was the general subject that most interested one or the other or both of them over the past few weeks?’

‘Gypsies?’

‘You’re on the ball this morning, son. Aye, there’s about ten files on the general subject of gypsies. Which I already knew about, of course – and no big mystery there because that was Mr Ash’s main interest, too. But I did begin to detect another element coming through. Either Stock or Mrs Stock was going back to the same sites, following up particular angles. Gypsies and Death was a popular one, gypsy death rituals and gypsy ghosts and evil spirits.’

‘The mulo?’

‘Exactly. The living dead. You wouldn’t want one, would you? The female version might be all right at first, but she’d start to wear yer out after a while. Couldn’t keep up, could you. Go bloody mad.’

‘Especially if you were already having problems down there.’

‘Precisely. Now – what would you do to get rid of it? Several suggestions came up on this one particular Web site – you could drive steel or iron needles into the heart of the corpse, or a hawthorn stake through one of its legs. Or you could simply… chop its head off. Isn’t that interesting?’

‘It is, isn’t it?’ Lol said soberly.

‘Course, this is corpses, and I think we can assume Mrs Stock was not one of the walking dead. But then if, as you suggest, the normally rational Gerard had come to believe his wife had been taken over by one of these things, and if she was making demands on him he was failing to satisfy – and if he’d got in an exorcist to sort her out…’

‘And if, the minute the exorcist had left the premises, Stephanie appeared to be unaffected or even…’

‘Go on.’

Perhaps even perversely stimulated by it, Lol thought.

‘Maybe prayers focused on helping Stewart Ash didn’t quite hit the spot,’ he said. ‘But how was Merrily to know that?’

‘How indeed? Because Stock wasn’t telling the truth, was he?’

‘Why break the habit of a lifetime? You going to tell Howe about this?’

‘Not yet. Anyway, it might not have the desired effect coming from me. She’s the governor, she decides what line we take. She could tell me to leave the gypsy stuff alone, and that’s me silenced.’

‘Would she?’

‘She might. But let’s talk about the disappearance of this gypsy girl in the autumn of sixty-three and the recent murder of Stewart Ash. What’s the connecting factor between these two events?’

‘There is one?’

‘There is, my son, long as we agree you never heard it from me.’

‘Sorry,’ Lol said. ‘Who are you, again?’

‘Good boy. Listen, this is something I can’t help you with beyond what I’m about to say. Might be something or nothing. Either way, you’ll have to follow it up for yourself. Cherished reputations at stake. I didn’t go through official channels, because you leave tracks that way, but I did put in a call, first thing, to a former copper, who I won’t name, who used to be based at Bromyard and, as it happened, was one of the PCs involved in what you could describe as the less-than-intensive search for Rebekah Smith. And who, as a local man, was well aware of all the rumours about the womanizing activities of the late Mr Conrad Lake. You with me?’

‘All the way,’ Lol said.

Merrily brought some tea over to Eirion at the kitchen table.

‘How is it?’

‘Oh, you know, bit sore… stiff.’

‘Couldn’t sleep?’

‘Not really.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘Well, I’m supposed to go back and have the dressing changed this afternoon.’

‘That’s not quite what I meant.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Can we talk?’

‘We can try.’ Merrily sat down.

The dressing was on his upper arm, just below the shoulder. The woman doctor in Accident and Emergency, stitching up the gash, had said the point of the blade didn’t seem to have quite penetrated to the bone. Dafydd Lewis had started saying he’d come over at once, take the boy back to Withybush Hospital at Haverfordwest, but Eirion had insisted he wanted to stay here and see this through. Besides, he assumed the police would want to talk to him again.

‘Anyway, I don’t deserve any sleep,’ he said to Merrily. ‘If we’d stayed out of it, this would never have happened.’

‘You should never say that. Perhaps something even worse might’ve happened.’

‘Personally,’ Eirion said, ‘I really can’t conceive of anything worse than what did happen. How’s Jane?’

‘Sleeping.’ She’d put Eirion in one of the bedrooms on the first floor.

‘Jane’s in a bad way about this,’ he said.

‘I know. She thinks she was guilty of rather demonizing Layla.’

It was the first thing Jane had said when Merrily and Lol had arrived at the Barnchurch: Mum, I got her deeply, deeply wrong. We started talking, and gradually she was like really normal – like a friend, a mate… oh God! Jane was looking like the time when, as a very small girl, she’d found a pot of raspberry jam and got it all over her face and down her front; only it wasn’t jam this time and it was even in her hair, so much of it that Merrily’d panicked and thought she must have been stabbed, too, and hadn’t bothered to tell the paramedics. Layla died. Mum, I watched her dying. I watched her heaving and shivering and struggling for breath… Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…

In fact, Layla had passed away in the ambulance: multiple stab wounds, at least one believed to have penetrated a lung. It was Eirion who’d had to watch her die on the way to Casualty – the ambulance leaving as the fire engines came in.

The Barnchurch had burned to a shell. The flames had already been into the rafters when Jane and the wounded Eirion had brought Layla out.

‘The kid must have been behind that screen the whole time,’ he said now. ‘Clutching her knife. What was she doing with a knife?’

‘Well, I – I believe her mother, Justine, used to take a kitchen knife with her as protection when she went to a local church to hide from Amy’s father. This was the knife he ended up using on her.’

‘I couldn’t believe the… strength in her. She was like a wildcat, a puma or something. The flames behind her. That white party dress. It was terrifying – sort of elemental. I was just shaking all over, afterwards. I’m sure I’m going to see her in nightmares for the rest of my life.’

‘It’ll fade, Eirion, I promise. Erm… I know the police have asked you this, but what do you think brought it on?’

Eirion drank some tea, trying not to move his injured arm. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot more, obviously, since I talked to the police. I suppose, if you were looking for an ordinary, rational explanation, you’d have to say it was because of what Layla had been telling us. She wasn’t being particularly polite about Amy. One of the last things she said before it happened, she called Amy a monster and said perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad thing if she was put into care.’

Merrily nodded. ‘Mmm. And if we weren’t looking for an ordinary, rational explanation…?’

‘Well, earlier, Layla told us how the spiritualism thing had started with her stepfather, Allan, finding out about Amy’s history when he was looking for some dirt on Mr Shelbone because—’

‘It’s OK, I know about that.’

‘And then Layla got excited because she assumed she was doing it, that it was coming through her. But then, the further they went with it, the more they realized that it was actually Amy—’

‘Amy?’

‘Layla said Amy was this incredible natural medium. It was Amy who had… raised her mother, if you like.’ Eirion drank more tea. ‘I think Layla had the idea that if she stuck with Amy, kind of supervising her progress, then she’d see some, you know, amazing things. She said – this is all a bit creepy for me, Mrs Watkins, but she said that it seemed like Justine had been about to kind of, you know, manifest. Which was why they were here on the night of the full moon, because there’d been one the night Justine died.’

‘And Layla was convinced Amy was the real medium?’

‘She said she’d been trying to develop her own psychic side for years, and suddenly here was this awful, repressed little girl who was a natural. She said she was quite jealous. That’s more or less what she said. Does this mean Amy could be in some way possessed?’

‘I don’t know.’ Merrily was thinking back to the intense, truncated night in her own church when an eighteenth-century penny had supposedly given her God’s spin on the problem: no demonic possession in this case, no possession by an unquiet spirit. ‘I suppose,’ she said, clutching another of those slender straws frequently offered to you by faith, ‘that mediumship and spiritual possession are separated by a degree of control. The medium consents to open herself to the spirit, knowing she can always close the door.’

‘That’s more or less what Layla said.’

‘Except we’re not talking about Betty Shine here, we’re talking about a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, and a fairly archaic example of the species at that – impressionable, naive—’

‘Will she be charged with murder?’

‘I don’t see how they can avoid it.’

She was momentarily haunted again by thoughts she’d kept pushing away, about the similarities between this killing and Stock’s murder of his wife. In fact, when you examined them individually, the similarities were not so great, since the Romany element was peripheral to the Shelbone issue. To an outsider, the strongest link between the two cases would be herself: Deliverance – failed.

‘It’s tragic,’ Eirion said. ‘When you think about it, it’s tragic for everyone. Layla Riddock – she was about the same age as me, and she was…’ There were tears in his eyes. ‘She was obviously incredibly intelligent. And there she was, one minute coolly analysing the situation, the next coughing up all that blood, and then in the ambulance… What a terrible waste, Mrs Watkins. I’ve heard people say that so many times, but when you actually—’

‘Eirion,’ Merrily said, ‘you really are a nice guy. You risk alienating your family to pursue Jane’s whim, you—’

‘No, I’m not.’ He stared at her, blinking in agony. ‘I slept with your daughter!’

His features slumped into comical dejection, like a boxer puppy’s.

‘I see,’ Merrily said softly.

‘Last night – well, evening. It was the first time. It was why we were so late getting to the Shelbones. We fell asleep. You see, that’s another thing – retribution. If we hadn’t… been to bed, we’d have got there earlier – and Layla might still be alive. It’s retribution.’

‘I really don’t think so.’ Suddenly she wanted to laugh. She’d often thought about what she’d say in this situation, and now she didn’t know what she wanted to say. Except… ‘Well… thanks for telling me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Eirion said.

‘Well, you know, it’s not—’

‘I do love Jane, you see.’

‘Yeah. That’s, er, that’s the impression I already had.’

‘I mean, it wasn’t… casual sex. I’m a not a very casual sort of bloke.’

‘No?’

‘In fact this was the… you know, the first time.’

‘You said.’

‘No, I mean for me. For me, too.’

‘I see. Does Jane know that?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s probably not the impression I’ve given her, no.’

‘I won’t tell her, then.’

‘That’s very good of you.’

‘But just… just take good care of her. You know what I’m saying?’

‘I think so.’

‘I was only about three years older than you when I was pregnant, so I’ve tended not to come on heavy with Jane, so as to avoid any mention of pots, kettles and the colour black.’

He smiled tentatively. On the shelf beside the Aga, Merrily’s mobile began to bleep.

‘Excuse me a sec.’

Sophie sounded as if she had a cold.

This was the Sophie who never seemed to get colds, not even in winter.

‘I’m afraid the Bishop’s back,’ she said.

‘Good.’ Merrily lied, carrying the mobile to the window.

‘A short time ago, we took a call from the Church of England Press Office, which has learned of inquiries from West Mercia Police – and also, I understand, from the Crown Prosecution Service – about the Church’s guidelines on exorcism. Do you know anything about this, Merrily?’

‘Not a thing.’ Merrily stood looking out over the vicarage garden. This was only their second summer here; it seemed like half a lifetime.

‘The Press Office also understands there may be a statement from West Mercia very soon, expressing dismay at the way the Church of England reacted to the Stock case. The upshot is likely to be a call for the Church to be held more directly answerable for the effects of what’s been described as “irresponsible ministry”.’

‘But doesn’t this pre-empt the result of the inquest? Isn’t it usually the coroner who makes comments like that?’

‘I think it’s more of a reaction from the police to an impending onslaught by the media. It could be weeks or months before the inquest’s over. Anyway, the Diocese needs to prepare a counter statement, so an emergency meeting’s been called at the Bishop’s Palace for this morning. The Bishop needs to hear your explanations, in considerable detail, to decide if any of it’s—’

‘Rational enough to repeat. Hang on, you just said the Crown Prosecution Service. But Stock’s dead, so there’s no prosecution, only the inquest. Why should the CPS—? Oh.’

‘Quite,’ Sophie said.

‘Oh my God.’ Merrily went cold.

‘It doesn’t necessarily mean anyone’s contemplating prosecuting either the Church or… or…’

‘Or me.’

‘I’m very sorry to have to drop this on you, Merrily.’

‘Hardly your fault.’ How could it have come to this?

‘The meeting’s at eleven a.m.,’ Sophie said, ‘on the dot. If I were you, I’d—’

‘Sophie, perhaps… you could make my apologies.’

Pause. She counted six, seven, eight, nine little green cider apples on the lawn.

Sophie said, ‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’ve got another appointment, that’s all.’

‘Merrily, let’s be perfectly clear about this: you do realize what your non-appearance would be taken to imply, don’t you?’

‘Things have happened. Don’t suppose the news has reached the Cathedral close yet.’

‘News?’

‘Allan Henry’s stepdaughter, Layla – you remember Layla? Black kimono, champagne glass? Layla was stabbed to death early this morning by Amy Shelbone. Who also injured Eirion.’

‘What?’ Sophie’s voice was faint and fractured, like the crinkling of tissue paper.

‘That’s actually not the reason I won’t be able to make it to the meeting,’ Merrily said. ‘But I thought you should know.’

Lol picked up his keys, locked the stables and drove the Astra up the lane. Despite the window being wound all the way down, the day was already too hot for him. Already, he felt oppressed.

On his way through Knight’s Frome, he spotted Simon St John standing on the humpback bridge. Simon started flagging him down.

‘I’m sorry, Lol.’ He was wearing a black shirt and a dog collar and very old jeans. He was sweating, and his hair looked like the leaves of a long-abandoned house plant. ‘Whatever I said to you the other night, I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t you remember?’

‘Whatever it was, it was probably offensive and I’m sorry.’ Simon squinted, the sun directly in his eyes, but he made no effort to avoid it. ‘Have you spoken to Mrs Watkins today?’

‘Not since first light.’

‘Lol, I need her.’

Lol stared at him, said nothing.

‘I’m in a lot of trouble.’ Simon’s eyes were glassy with sunlight and anxiety. ‘I phoned her and asked her to come over, but I’m not sure she’s going to.’

‘Tell me,’ Lol said. He didn’t have that much time but if this involved Merrily he wanted to know about it.

‘It’s a priest thing.’ Simon started to laugh. ‘Oh, fucking hell…’

‘Why do you swear so much, Simon?’

‘Denial. I’m a sick, polluted priest in denial. Pity me, Lol, we’re not exactly twin souls, you and I, but I guess we’ve been to some of the same places. In my case complicated from time to time, as you may have heard, by a certain sexual ambivalence – but, then, in the seventies and eighties an entirely heterosexual rock musician was considered a serious pervert.’

‘That’s not the pollution, though, is it?’ Lol said from his vantage point on the hill of no sleep. What was the point of all this confessional stuff? It was as though Simon was desperate to convey sincerity, openness.

‘Oh no,’ the vicar said, ‘physical pressures I can control. He turned his head and stared at the bridge, the church, the roofs of the village. ‘This bloody place!’

Lol suddenly thought of Isabel in the churchyard. Seemed such a nice boring place, it did, after Wales. No historical baggage. No history at all that wasn’t to do with hops. Perfect, it was. And now – blood everywhere.

‘I’m horribly, horribly sensitive, Lol,’ Simon said. ‘That’s my problem. Like people with a skin condition who can’t go out in the sun. Will you tell her that?’

Eirion saw she had other preoccupations and said perhaps he’d take a walk around the village. When he’d gone, Merrily phoned Huw Owen over in the Brecon Beacons.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Wondered if you’d be calling one of these days. We do get the papers up here – not necessarily the same day, mind. Anyroad, say nowt, that’s my advice. When the trial date’s set, we’ll happen have a chat about it.’

‘There won’t be a trial. He hanged himself last night.’

‘Who?’

‘Stock. In his cell at the remand centre.’

‘Simplifies things,’ Huw said.

‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘You can get yourself through an inquest. You can tell the coroner why any comparisons with the Taylor case are inappropriate.’

‘No. I mean, yes, all that’s very much on the cards, and I’m really trying not to think about it yet. But to complicate things, informed sources at Knight’s Frome are suggesting there’s a remaining problem.’

‘At this kiln place?’

‘That the killing happened not because Stock was in any way possessed, but because his wife was.’

‘By what?’

‘A gypsy girl went missing, back in the sixties. There’s reason to think she was imprisoned in the kiln and either strangled or choked to death on sulphur, and then her body was burned in the furnace. All I wanted to ask is, have you had any dealings with, or do you know anything about, Romany beliefs?’

‘Specifically?’

‘Specifically, the mulo.’

He didn’t say he had, he didn’t say he hadn’t. ‘How long you got to play with?’

She told him, expecting him to laugh.

He didn’t. ‘Walk away, lass,’ he said. ‘Just take a holiday. There’s no shame in that.’

44 Avoiding the Second Death

HER HAIR FELL not much more than shoulder-length but was bushed out, maybe a little frizzy; her nose was hooked, her mouth small but full-lipped. The sleeveless white blouse she wore was knotted under her breasts. She had her hands clasped behind her head, her face upturned. Smiling at the sun – eating the world.

Rebekah.

The black and white photograph was pinned to the wall above a small inglenook in the back room. Eating the world, and then she choked. It broke your heart.

‘That’s not one of Lake’s?’ Merrily asked Al.

‘Mother of God, no, it’s a blow-up of a picture she sent to Tit Bits or Reveille – you remember those old glamour magazines? Looking for a career as a pin-up or a model. It was found after she disappeared. The family had copies made to show around, to see if anyone had seen her. They had to conduct their own search, in the end.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Ah, in those days, as Sally may have said to you, people from ethnic minorities were not considered proper people.’ His eyes were quiet this morning. ‘Even the beautiful ones.’

The back room of the Hop Museum was not open to the public because it also served as a workshop. It ran the length of the main building, and the two shorter walls were lined with racks of hand tools, probably antiques in themselves. There were a pair of elderly wood-lathes and a bench with a Bunsen burner attached to a liquid-gas bottle. Guitar parts – necks, pine tops, bridges – hung from walls and beams. There was a rich composite aroma of glue and resin and wood.

And hops, of course. The scent of hops was unavoidable in this place.

In a white waistcoat and a spotted silk scarf which, Merrily recalled from childhood, was called a diklo, Al had welcomed her with a small bow and a kiss on the hand. Now he was moving around the workshop, picking up guitar fragments and gently putting them down. A sign down by the road had said: MUSEUM CLOSED ALL DAY.

They were still waiting for Simon St John.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Merrily asked Al. ‘I’m afraid I don’t really have as much time as I’d have liked.’ She’d told him as much as she needed to of what had happened after she and Lol had left Knight’s Frome last night. ‘And I’ll need to be there, obviously, when the police come to talk to Jane.’ Al was nodding, but she could tell he was somewhere else.

Jane might sleep for hours yet, Eirion had kept insisting. You go. I can tell this is important. And when she comes down we’ve got a lot to talk about, haven’t we?

At least it wasn’t far; she could be back in just over half an hour, if necessary. If they could hold off the police until this afternoon, that would help. She’d already called Mumford, asked if this was possible. Mumford had said, We’ve found a knife, by the way.

Al was still nodding his goblin chin. ‘By one o’clock, it should be over. By one, we’ll have done all we can do.’

‘But are we trying for the same thing?’

‘To bring her into the light,’ Al said.

‘But is it the same light?’

‘Light is light, drukerimaskri. You know that.’

‘I suppose.’ She didn’t even know if he was a Christian. ‘Where’s Sally?’

‘Gone for a walk. Coming to terms.’

‘How happy is she – about what you’re proposing?’

‘Ah…’ He picked up an unstained guitar neck, only half fretted, held it up to one eye and looked along it. ‘Well, she thinks we should have acted on this when we first suspected something was arising. I tried. I talked to Stock, way back. Told him to sell the place to Lake, take his wife away from here.’

‘Did you?’

‘Ah, but Stock’s patting me on the shoulder, patronizing, like I’m this colourful old rural character. Perhaps I should’ve had more patience with Stock, told him I was Boswell the guitar-maker, but I didn’t want him to know. Consequently, perhaps, I don’t suppose he believed a word I was telling him.’

‘He must have believed something in the end. He went to Simon St John. And then he came to me.’

‘Poor Simon, he doesn’t want to do this, even now. He’s afraid for himself, and for his wife. He’s afraid of what he might bring down on his wife.’

Merrily didn’t quite understand, but it was clear that nobody seemed to be entirely happy about this, perhaps not even Al himself.

‘Then why today?’ she asked him. ‘Why the hurry?’

‘It’s not a hurry for me, drukerimaskri.’ He put down the guitar neck. ‘I’ve had years to prepare.’

‘Why you?’

‘Because I’m the only Romany left. And because it’s always been my responsibility.’

‘Why?’

Al peered around the workshop, as if to record every detail in his mind. As if to hold a memory of it.

‘I think Simon’s here,’ he said.

The address Frannie Bliss had given him proved to be a three-storey Victorian terrace on the main road out of Leominster. Lol parked the Astra half on the pavement, from where he could see the numbers on the front doors.

The man he was looking for lived in the ground-floor flat at the far end of the terrace, but he owned the whole building, Bliss had emphasized, as if this explained something.

Lol sat there for ten minutes, the car slowly turning into a roasting tin around him. He thought about Simon St John, who had once said, This is the country, Lol. In the country, in certain situations, everybody lies. Had Simon himself really been telling the truth this time? Had he genuinely been too scared to attempt to exorcize Stock’s kiln? In which case, why hadn’t he referred it directly to Merrily instead of trying to claim Stock was making it up? Lol concluded that in an irrational situation people acted irrationally. How would Merrily react? Would she help Simon now, despite everything?

Stupid question.

No time for stupid questions.

As Lol got out of the car, the front door at the end of the terrace opened and a man in a light blue suit came out.

Lol stayed close to the Astra. The man didn’t look behind him, or towards Lol, as he walked out of the entrance. Could this actually be the right guy – wide shoulders, stiff white hair? Stop him now? Accost him before he got into his car?

But the man didn’t go to a car. He walked briskly along the pavement. When a woman passed him, he said warmly, ‘How are you, my dear?’ Glanced up into the sky. ‘Make the most of it, it’s due to break today, I hear.’ Rich, rolling local accent.

Lol followed him to where the road widened and you could see a junction with fields beyond. But before that there was a big Safeway supermarket, a commercial palace with a tower, set well back behind its car park. The man almost skipped down the steps towards the supermarket. Lol waited until he’d reached the bottom and was strolling across the car park towards the entrance, before following.

He watched the white-haired man go through the automatic door. Hesitated. Was he supposed to challenge this guy across the fruit counter, maybe block his trolley in one of the aisles?

Lol went through the door, through the porch, past Postman Pat and his black and white cat in their van, and on into the store. He looked from side to side: a dozen or so customers, none of them a man in a blue suit – maybe he’d gone to the Gents’. Lol moved further into the store, uncertain. He felt conspicuous, so he picked up a shopping basket from a stack. He felt hollow. He was hollow. He couldn’t do this.

The voice was very close to his left ear.

‘Looking for me, brother?’

A clock made out of a breadboard with a six-pointed star on it put the time at ten-fifteen a.m.

‘Why noon?’ Merrily asked bluntly.

Simon St John exchanged a glance with Al.

Al was sitting straight-backed on his stool, determinedly defiant, with his hands in the side pockets of his waistcoat. Simon St John, however, looked as wrecked as his jeans.

‘When we travelled,’ Al said, ‘we camped at night, but we always stopped the wagons at noon: the time of no shadows. Do you understand? Noon is the dead moment in time. When the day belongs to the dead – all the energy of the day sucked in. Sometimes, for a fraction of an instant, you can almost see it, like a photograph turned negative. Everything is still, everything – the road, the fields, the sky – belonging to the dead.’

‘He means that noon is the time of the mulo,’ Simon said. ‘The only time you’ll see one by daylight.’

‘No.’ Al tossed a guitar bridge from one hand to the other. ‘In most cases, you won’t see it at all.’

Merrily shrank from the melodrama. The time of no shadows. And yet…

‘You do know, don’t you, that we did the Deliverance in the kiln around midday? Stock wanted me to do it at night. I said, let’s do it now, in the full light of a summer morning. Let’s not make it sinister. You did know that?’

‘And was this when the sulphur came to you?’

‘At midday, yes. Or very close.’

Al glanced at the photograph. ‘She could have had you. You were lucky.’

‘Or protected.’

‘And were you protected in the hop-yard last night?’

Merrily felt herself blush. ‘It happened too quickly.’

‘Lucky,’ Al said.

‘What is she?’ Merrily asked. ‘I need to know. You use these terms – muli. Very sinister. But what are we really talking about?’

Simon St John came over to sit down. He had a glass of water. All three of them were drinking water. No alcohol, no caffeine, not today.

‘Not quite a ghost,’ Simon said. ‘Not possession either, in the classic sense. You could say it’s a question of borrowing the aura.’

‘Very much a Romany thing,’ Al pointed out. ‘Live lightly and borrow.’

‘But the mulo doesn’t necessarily give back,’ Simon said. He kept rubbing his black-shirted arms as though they were cold.

‘This is true,’ Al accepted.

Simon said, ‘When Shakespeare talked about shuffling off the mortal coil, he was probably close to it. Death appears to be a staggered process – when the body dies, the spirit exists for a while in the aura, the astral body, the corporeal energy field. Its normal procedure, at this stage, is to look for the exit sign and get the hell out.’

‘But if the cycle’s incomplete,’ Al said, ‘if there’s a need for justice, for balance, for satisfaction…’

Merrily thought about it. ‘This is about what’s sometimes called the Second Death isn’t it?’

‘This is about avoiding the Second Death.’ Simon leaned forward. ‘I don’t think it’s common, not in our society. I don’t imagine it’s a common occurrence in the Romany culture either. I think it’s something they’ve tended to blow up out of proportion over the centuries – I bloody hope it is.’

‘It’s an unpleasant state to be in,’ Al said, ‘because the mulo is said to require life-energy to maintain its existence. Hence the term “living dead”. There are tales of a mulo or muli sucking the blood of the living, but’ – he waved a long hand dismissively – ‘it’s all energy. Sexual, mostly. The victim may be the former life-partner – you get tales of people having sex with their dead husbands or wives – or the person held responsible for the sudden death of the subject before their time.’

‘In the stories, they talk of a solid physical presence,’ Simon said. ‘But we prefer dreams, or sexual fantasies.’

‘You’re selling it as psychology?’ Merrily asked, doubtful.

‘It’s all psychology,’ Simon said. ‘That doesn’t make it any less real. It doesn’t make it any less frightening.’ His face was gaunt; it was one of those soft, pale faces which could alternate in seconds between looking youthful and prematurely aged. ‘The thought of Rebekah – or what she may have become – leaves me cold with—I’m sorry.’

Al stood up and walked over to the photograph. ‘It seems to me that our task is to separate the spirit of Rebekah from what’s formed around it. The evil that grows like fungus around hatred and rage. You follow, drukerimaskri?’

‘And lead it to God. To the light.’

‘And the evil,’ Simon said sourly. ‘Where does that go?’

‘My responsibility.’ Al walked to the door. ‘You two probably have Christian things to work out. I’m going to the place. I’m going to talk to my father. Come when you’re ready, you won’t disturb me.’

‘Al…?’ Merrily touched his sleeve.

‘It’ll work out, drukerimaskri.’ He looked again at the picture of the young woman amateurishly pouting at the sun. ‘She’s ripe. She’s swollen. We can’t delay.’

He walked out without looking back.

Councillor Howe said, ‘Small piece of advice, brother Robinson, in case you’re ever called upon to tail anybody again. Nobody comes shopping at a supermarket and parks half a mile away. Just a small point.’

‘Thanks.’ Lol took the two cups of tea off the tray, along with Charlie Howe’s doughnut. This time in the morning, fewer than a quarter of the tables in the supermarket coffee shop were taken. They were sitting at a window table, just up from the creche.

‘I take it this en’t council business, then.’ Charlie Howe’s brown, leathery face was not remotely wary. He bit into his doughnut. Dark, liquid jam spurted. Charlie licked his fingers. ‘And you’re not a newspaperman after my memoirs?’

‘Newspaper, no,’ Lol said. ‘Memoirs, probably.’

‘Cost you, boy.’

‘Bought you a doughnut.’

Charlie smiled. ‘That gets you as far as 1960. Nothing much happened that year, I was still a beat copper.’

‘How about sixty-three?’

‘Young DC, then. Still hadn’t done my first murder. What did you say you did for a living?’

‘Write songs.’

His eyes were deep-sunk in his craggy forehead, like rock-pools. ‘So this’d be ‘The Ballad of Charlie Howe’, then?’

Lol fought the urge to look away, out of the window. ‘How about “The Ballad of Rebekah Smith”?’

Charlie raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t reckon that’s a song would mean an awful lot to me.’

‘Maybe you’d only be in the last verse,’ Lol said.

Merrily lit a cigarette.

Simon St John eased his stool a few inches further along the bench. ‘You always smoke before an exorcism?’

‘Sounds like that old joke,’ Merrily said. ‘ “Do you always smoke after sex? No, only when…” What did he mean, talk to his father?’

‘His father, the chovihano, dead these twenty years. Didn’t speak to Al for the previous twenty because Al came off the road, married a gaujo. Cardinal sin, punishable by lifelong curse. Sally once told me he and Al have been communicating better in the past three years than the previous forty.’

‘Candidly,’ Merrily said, ‘do you believe that stuff?’

‘Why not? They talk to the ancestors like we try to talk to God. Their own ancestors, not anyone else’s.’

‘What about you?’

‘I have a fairly strict rule. I talk to living people, and I try to listen to God. Anything else I see or hear nowadays, I turn off the fucking set, rapido.’

‘You’re saying you’ve seen and heard more than most of us.’

He laughed.

‘And you’ve had a bad experience, with that?’

‘I’ve had a whole sequence of bad experiences, Mrs Watkins. I’ve had the living shit scared out me. I’ve been afraid for myself, for my friends and – worst of all – for my very dear wife, my soulmate.’

Merrily said cautiously, ‘Israel believes all exorcists should be psychic to a degree. Which I suppose means you could be a lot better at this than me.’

‘He doesn’t, however, say all psychics should be exorcists. Spare a cig?’

‘Sorry, I assumed—’

‘Periodic vices. All my vices have been periodic – the worst kind. Look, my view on suffering is simple: you ask the question, “Is anyone benefiting from this?” If not, don’t fucking suffer.’

‘What about Stock?’

‘We couldn’t help Stock. His only recourse was to get out, and I told him that. Al told him that. But Stock was Stock.’

‘So why this, now?’

‘It’s for Sally.’ Simon lit up, holding the cigarette between finger and thumb, like you’d hold a joint. ‘Sally didn’t want Al doing this on his own.’

‘Why does he have to do it at all?’

‘Ancestral ties. Who else is gonna do it? Al was trained for years in the Romany mysteries and then backed off. Bit like me, really, but I only backed off to a place that looked safe. Nowhere’s really safe, is it? You ready, now?’

‘What are we going to do?’

‘Deal with this stupid bitch, I suppose.’ He went up to the picture of Rebekah Smith.

‘I meant, what are we going to do? Those Christian things.’

Simon turned back to Merrily. ‘You ever sleep with Lol?’

‘No.’

‘Poor sod puts you on a pedestal. He thinks you’re a much better person than he is, purer, holier. You’re going to have to make all the running, I fear.’

‘People tend to underestimate Lol,’ Merrily said. ‘Where is he, anyway? I’d somehow expected him to be here.’

‘Nah, this is a priest thing. He drove off somewhere.’

She stiffened. ‘Where?’

He shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He had another deep drag on his cigarette. ‘Anyway, I’m very grateful to you for coming.’

‘I’m sure you are, Simon.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘It’s a set-up, isn’t it? For instance, why can’t you and Al do this on your own?’

‘Maybe we could.’

‘No, you bloody couldn’t,’ Merrily said, ‘because you need a woman. Because of the nature of it, there has to be a woman, doesn’t there? It’s a female entity, so it needs a woman’s energy, a woman’s aura. Poor Stephanie underlined that. And who else? Who else before Stephie?’

Simon’s eyes didn’t move. ‘OK, I suspect there was some similar impact on the second Mrs Conrad Lake, Adam’s mother. But she was wise enough to get out before too long.’

‘And the Hereford hookers?’

‘Sure, and the working girls of Worcester. “Come back to my kiln, my dear. Help me recapture some old memories.” ’

‘Each one of them acquiring, however briefly, the essence – the destructive essence – of Rebekah Smith. I just hope none of them ever got into his car a second time. I pray the psychological damage wasn’t permanent.’

He grimaced. ‘Depends what fucking Conrad did to them. Not much, by the end, I’d imagine. I suppose the times he couldn’t get himself fixed up, he’d potter along to the kiln and get auto-erotic over his photographs. And she’d be there for him.’

‘Like a drug.’

‘A craving, yeah. Until he died. How far you want to take this? I don’t know if it’s an infection, like the wilt, or a sporadic phenomenon. I don’t know whether it’s a wilful spirit or an imprint. Should I be poetic here? Should I say it came out of the kiln on the smoke of Rebekah’s cremation? Was it scattered with her ashes? How the hell can we know?’

‘Until you present her with a woman’s aura to enter, you probably won’t.’ She met his eyes and saw the fear behind the aggression.

‘You done this sort of thing before, Merrily?’

‘That a serious question?’

‘What I meant was, there’s nothing in the book on this one, is there? When she comes, if she comes, you’ll have to be fully aware of her and at the same time have a strong enough sense of your spiritual self to keep her out. At that point, you’ll be very much on your own.’

‘I do hope not,’ Merrily said.

Simon St John smiled tiredly. ‘He might see it as a little test for you. Just… don’t count on the parachute opening.’

Merrily looked into Simon’s light blue eyes for flecks of bullshit. Saw only the faded sorrow of experience.

45 Drukerimaskri

CHARLIE SAT BACK, with his hands on his knees and his tea going as cold as anything could in this weather. His smile was constant and condescending. Although he wasn’t looking directly at Lol most of the time, Lol felt under intense study.

‘If this is poker,’ Charlie said at last, ‘you better show me some cards, boy.’

‘Ron Welfare?’ Hesitantly, Lol brought out the only name he’d been given by Frannie Bliss. ‘PC Ronald Welfare. He’d have been one of your old colleagues?’

‘Dead,’ Charlie said, with contempt.

‘Ron Welfare talked to a bloke who saw a woman closely resembling Rebekah Smith going over to the kiln and the door opening and a man closely resembling Conrad Lake standing there in the light, before the woman was admitted.’

Charlie made no comment.

‘There were probably other witnesses, but most of them would have had some family members still employed by Lake. This was a chap from outside the area who’d gone to visit his mother nearby.’

‘How’re you, Terry?’ Charlie called out to a man leaving the coffee shop. ‘Don’t forget to get that application in before September, now.’

Lol pressed on. He realized no ordinary former copper would even be talking to him by now, but Charlie Howe was a prominent local councillor, a friend to the people, an open book. And maybe his ward was a marginal. And also they were in a public place. And you couldn’t tell whether Charlie was worried now, or just curious.

‘Ron Welfare was so convinced he was on to something that he even worked on it in his spare time,’ Lol said. ‘But no police were going to risk grilling Lake, because he was the Emperor of Frome and he owned half the valley, and Rebekah Smith was considered the lowest of the low.’

‘Could be you’re a journalist,’ Charlie said thoughtfully. ‘But I don’t think so. You don’t talk like a journalist.’

‘When Ron eventually reported it to his superiors, a detective was assigned to check it out. By this time, Ron had put some more stuff together – reports of the kiln furnace being fired for two days or more, even though the hop season was well over.’

‘Not unusual,’ Charlie said. ‘Furnaces can be used for more than drying hops. You don’t talk like somebody works for some gypsy-loving civil-liberties charity, either.’

‘Did you never have the furnace checked out for…’ Lol struggled to keep the ignorance out of his eyes. ‘I don’t know – fragments of bone or whatever? Were there any forensic tests?’

‘No need, boy. Waste of resources, would’ve been. Seeing as the hunt was called off that very night. Now, I wonder if you’re simply someone with a grudge against the Lake family.’

‘The witness didn’t stand by his story, in the end. Suddenly he said he couldn’t be sure. Or maybe somebody made it worth his while to drop it?’

‘Or perhaps it’s me you’re after. Perhaps you or some mate of yours is trying for the council. But that don’t make a whole lot of sense. You wouldn’t come and face me up with some half-arsed story – less you got a little cassette recorder on you. But you en’t even wearing a jacket. No.’ Charlie leaned back. ‘It’s a puzzle. But, for the record, that girl probably left home, like a lot of young gypos did, sick of a life of squalor and ducking and diving. And the gypos, never ones to miss an opportunity, made out she was missing, presumed dead, to get back at Brother Lake for kicking them off his land. Whole bunch of ’em should’ve been charged with wasting police time. Rebekah Smith, she’s probably a suburban granny now, keeping very quiet about her origins.’

‘But Ron Welfare never forgot. And he never did make CID. His career kind of… stopped right there. For some reason.’

‘Ron Welfare left the force years back. Ron Welfare was a second-rate copper and a sick and bitter man.’

‘However,’ Lol said, ‘the DC who went with him to question Lake – he did really well. He was a sergeant by the end of the year and he never looked back at all, did he?’

The condescending smile was history. ‘Well, now.’ Charlie leaned forward, his face close up to Lol’s, eyes like knuckle-bones. ‘You wouldn’t, by any chance, be suggesting this detective was corrupt, would you, Brother?’

Point of no return. Lol wondered briefly if he hadn’t been set up by Bliss, no fan of Annie Howe, to stir an old pot. He made himself meet Charlie Howe’s bruising gaze.

‘Lake was a very powerful figure locally. Influential.’

‘So Conrad was buying off witnesses and bribing policemen to look the other way?’

‘Isn’t that how it was in those days? A strong squirearchy, and senior policemen expected to be in the Masons?’

‘I’ll ask you once again, boy, are you suggesting this particular detective was bent?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Because another alternative about you that occurs to me would be attempted blackmail. Of course, only a very stupid person would attempt to blackmail an ex-policeman. But then small-time blackmailers often are very stupid people.’

Lol shook his head.

‘And shy,’ Charlie Howe said. ‘They’re often a bit shy. And hesitant – bit timid. See, a real criminal, he’d go and hold up a bloody garage, but your small-time blackmailer, he en’t got the bottle. He’s quite often someone on the small side of average, maybe unsuccessful in his career – a misfit, a social inadequate with a personality defect. Would that be you, Brother Robinson?’ Charlie sneered. ‘Aye, that could very well be you.’

Two elderly ladies brought their trays to the next table, and Charlie broke off to smile pleasantly at them, raise a hand. ‘So piss off, boy,’ he muttered out of the side of his mouth. ‘Take your forty-year-old, cobbled-together nonsense somewhere else, and don’t try and play with the pros.’

Lol’s hands were gripping the sides of his chair and for about half a second he seemed to be looking down on himself and the white-haired man with the leathery face, that condescending smile returning to it.

‘Right, you’ve done it now, Brother Howe.’ Surprised at how calm he sounded. ‘I’m going to tell you exactly why I’m here… just so you’ll know that it’s nothing to do with money – absolutely the reverse, in fact – and there’s nothing you can ever do to scare me off.’

Charlie Howe blinked, just once. It was the first time Lol had noticed him do that.

‘And also why,’ he went on, ‘if I ever find out you did take money or favours or even benefit from a word from the Emperor of Frome in the right chief superintendent’s ear – or that your old mate Andy Mumford slipped you some pictures and a manuscript he took off the Smith brothers when he nicked them for murder – if I find out any of that I’m going to hang you up to dry so high that, from where you are, I really will look very, very small.’

The old ladies were looking across. Charlie Howe smiled and it was not, Lol noticed, with immense relief, an entirely comfortable smile.

‘My place next, I think, Mr Robinson,’ he said.

At 10.45 precisely, Merrily and Simon St John drove over to Prof Levin’s studio, left the Volvo on the back forecourt and walked down the track through the meadow. The hay lay like stilled waves either side of a causeway. There were still traces of heat haze over the Malverns. Merrily saw the Frome Valley as an airless, spectral netherland where the real and the unreal wrestled in an amorphous tangle of threshing limbs.

She was afraid.

Not yet eleven on a wonderful summer morning, the kind of morning that dissolved fatigue, the kind of morning from which the uncanny was banished, but she was afraid. Her stomach felt weak; her throat was dry and sore. Walk away, Huw had said. No shame.

This would probably be her last Deliverance job. Bit of an occasion? In the museum, she’d put on her light grey cotton alb and a large pectoral cross, for the aura.

‘A holy cross is supposed to condition it, isn’t it? The aura?’

‘So I believe,’ Simon said. ‘Just as ordination does. And regular prayer, the celebration of the Eucharist – all protective.’

Simon smiled in a half-hearted way, felt in a hip pocket of his jeans and brought out a heavy gold cross on a chain, slipped it over his head.

‘What about Al?’ Merrily said.

‘I doubt it.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Al won’t be looking for protection.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because gypsies believe in destiny, and Al believes this is his.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Oh, I think you do, Merrily.’

They’d arrived at the bridge over the Frome. She stopped and stared down into the dark water of Lol’s river. She supposed she’d known since last night.

‘It’s the unspoken, isn’t it? The first Mrs Lake.’

‘There you are, then.’

‘Does everyone know?’

‘Not quite everyone. But the Frome Valley people are rather like the Frome itself. Secretive. Protective.’

‘Sally?’

‘Is her actual first name. Sarah Caroline Lake. She was very young when she married him, of course. It wasn’t exactly an arranged marriage but fairly close. Her father was a wealthy enough guy, but nothing compared with the Great Lakes. When she went off with Al, it’s hard to know which family was more appalled.’ Simon unsnagged a hanging twig from the chain of his cross. ‘At the divorce, she took only a small settlement – far smaller than someone in her position would expect today – and distributed it among a number of charities, considering this the only way of laundering, in the old-fashioned sense, Conrad’s tainted money.’

‘And when Conrad died…’

‘She and Al were able to return.’

‘She’s the Lady of the Bines.’ The thought made Merrily absurdly happy. ‘She wrote her own story and gave it to a ghost.’

‘Rather lovely, I always thought,’ Simon said.

‘It crossed my mind, of course it did. Al virtually told us.’

‘And now you can forget it, just like the rest of us have.’

‘Well… sure.’ They followed the path towards the line of poplars, and her flare of happiness faded. ‘But going back to Al’s destiny…’

‘Think about it,’ Simon said.

‘I have. The gypsies genuinely believed Lake took Rebekah because his own wife had gone off with a Romany.’

‘Some of them still believe it,’ Simon said sombrely. ‘And, after all, it may be true. It’s certainly why Al’s father never spoke to him again – while alive. Why Al became an outcast. A pariah. Cursed.’

Al’s profile in the glow of candles in bottles. You want to know the truth of it, I’m still paying back.

‘He seriously believes he’s cursed?’

‘Don’t underestimate the weight of that tradition, Merrily. He seriously knows he’s cursed.’

Charlie Howe’s high-ceilinged, white-walled sitting room was more than half office: a roll-top desk, a crowded flat-top desk, a wooden filing cabinet, a bookcase full of box files and a computer. There was also a TV set, with satellite box, and a black-leather recliner placed in front of the screen.

Right now, Charlie didn’t seem in the mood for reclining. He sat on the deep window sill.

‘The Reverend Merrily Watkins,’ he said. ‘My latest weak spot. You bastard, Brother Robinson. Are you two—?’

Lol shook his head.

‘But you live in hope, I imagine. Were you there last night, by any chance, when this Shelbone child…?’

Lol nodded.

‘Can’t beat that for bitter irony, can you? Allan Henry gets his biggest wish in all the world: the bloody Barnchurch burns down – at a cost. And what a cost. What’s he gonner do now? Will he build on the very spot where his stepdaughter died?’

‘My guess,’ Lol said, ‘would be a Layla Riddock memorial plaque on a side wall of Debenhams.’

Charlie Howe laughed and pointed at him, one eye closed. ‘Dead right, Brother! By God, you must be very fond of Mrs Watkins. Last time anybody threatened me like that in public, he – but then, I must watch my tongue in front of you, mustn’t I? You really were going to try and blackmail me, weren’t you?’

‘Persuade you.’

‘Good word. Often used it myself. Persuade me to do what?’

‘Just to get your daughter off Merrily’s back. She’s trying really hard to make sense out of an impossible job, and your daughter’s going to turn her into a demon or a martyr. And the Church of England doesn’t like either, so we all know what that means.’

‘This is the kiln murder, yes? And that’s what put you on to Lake.’ He scratched his head. ‘Fact is, I hadn’t even realized this was the same bloody kiln.’

‘Well, I’m going to be dead honest with you—’

‘Must you, Robinson? Half a lifetime in the police force and a good few years mixing day-to-day with councillors, I en’t comfortable with honesty.’

‘Well,’ Lol shrugged, ‘the truth is I haven’t a hope in hell of proving the police had good reason to suspect Lake of killing Rebekah Smith and then pulled back because Lake was who he was. I’ve got even less chance of proving that somebody in the police confiscated whatever the Smith boys nicked the night of Stewart’s murder. All I know is that Mumford made the arrest, and Mumford and you were always close, despite the disparity in rank.’

‘Absolutely correct, my friend. Salt of the earth, Andy. Solid as a bloody rock.’

‘And he presumably holds you in similar esteem – and he wouldn’t like to see your reputation impugned by something that happened forty years ago when you were a youngster and perhaps had to choose between turning a blind eye to something and seeing a promising career go down the tubes. And anyway, he’s coming up to retirement, so he doesn’t have much to lose. See, I can’t prove anything. But I can think of one or two papers – even TV programmes…’

Charlie came down from the window sill. ‘We’re not in a café now, Brother. I could knock your bloody head off.’

‘Sure. I bet you know all the ways of working suspects over in the cells without leaving a mark. But you’ve got to remember, when I get up, I’ll be back on the case. You can take a lot of bruises and broken bones and ruptured spleens, for love.’

Charlie Howe’s expression didn’t change. ‘And what’s Anne gonner do, exactly?’

Lol told him about the proposed statement on exorcism and responsibility, as outlined by Frannie Bliss.

Charlie sniffed. ‘Not a chance. You been led up the garden path, brother. No chief constable – certainly not this one – would put his name to something that could get him in bother with the Church. They don’t need that kind of conflict. En’t like you get one of these every day or even every year, is it? The Chief’ll tell Anne if she wants to say that stuff, she can get out there and say it herself.’

‘You think she wouldn’t?’

Charlie finally went over and collapsed into his recliner. ‘You want the truth, I think she would. The truth – bloody hell, you got me going, now. Have a drink?’

‘No, thanks. I was up all night. I’m already running on reserve.’

‘You want more truth? I don’t think it’d do Anne any more good, long-term, than it would for Merrily. A detective with a big mouth has a limited career span. In the Service, anyway. Might get a job on there.’ He pointed the toe of his shoe at the TV screen. ‘And I thought she’d got over all that. All right.’ He sat up. ‘I’ll talk to her.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t think this is a victory for you, Brother. I en’t finished with you, yet. And I’m not saying she’ll take any notice. But I’ll talk to her.’

Lol said, ‘Any chance you could make it a priority thing?’

‘I’ll see if she’s free tonight.’ Charlie stood up, went over to the phone. ‘I en’t finished with you, though, I surely bloody en’t.’ He didn’t need to look up the number. ‘DCI,’ he said into the phone. ‘Aye, this is her ol’ man, if you don’t know the voice.’ He waited, then he said, ‘Colin, how you doing, boy? Where is she? Really? What time would that be, then? Aye, I know that, boy, but where can I find her now?’ He blew some air down his nose. ‘All right. Thank you, boy.’

‘Not there?’

‘Gone off tying up the ends of the Stock case,’ Charlie said. ‘As you might expect.’

‘The ends?’

‘And there’ll be at least one TV crew up there filming, for the news. She’s agreed to do interviews early this afternoon, on site.’

‘She’ll use that as the opportunity, won’t she?’

‘She might,’ Charlie conceded. ‘You going back there?’

Lol nodded.

‘Might follow you,’ Charlie said.

She’d wondered, half-hopefully, if by day – especially on a day like this – it might look innocuous, even friendly. She’d half expected to feel, on arriving here, faintly stupid.

Never before having been asked to exorcize a field.

So it came as a shock, the deadness of it: the yellowness of the grass on what was supposed to be deep loam, the black alleys of poles with their crosspieces looking like some battlefield arrangement from the First World War, so that you expected to encounter occasional corpses leaning against the poles, tatters of uniforms and flesh hanging from grey bones.

But there was only Al.

She didn’t see him at first. He was sitting immobile between two distant poles, a white thing like a chalk megalith.

‘Stay here,’ Simon said. ‘He’ll be in some kind of trance. Not that we’d disturb him – a Romany shaman could go into trance between checkouts at Tesco. At their spiritual-healing sessions, it’s pandemonium, everybody talking and laughing, drums, violins – it’s the way they are. I just suspect – call me an old reactionary – that we shouldn’t necessarily become involved with his current ambience.’

‘Stay at this end, then?’

‘I think so.’

Merrily looked up at the sky through an irregular network of wires. ‘How long to noon?’ She’d come out without her watch.

Simon looked at his, then took it off. ‘Fifty-one minutes.’

He laid the watch on the parched grass near the base of a pole. Stood there in his dog collar and his ruined jeans, with his fair hair looking almost white and as dead as the grass, and his hands on his hips.

‘Over to you,’ he said. ‘Drukerimaskri.’

46 Every Evil Haunting and Phantasm

CHARLIE HOWE CLEARLY knew the TV cameraman – grey-haired bloke crouching near the sign saying knight’s frome, getting the church into shot. The old Jaguar pulled in next to him and Charlie leaned out of the window, bawling out, ‘Jim!’

Lol brought the Astra up behind the Jag, as the cameraman turned in irritation, then saw who it was and grinned, lowering his camera. ‘Knew they’d never be able to manage without you, Charlie. Come to take over the inquiry, is it?’

Charlie poked a finger out of the window. ‘Now don’t you go saying that to Anne, boy.’

Jim said he wasn’t that brave, and they laughed, and then Charlie said, ‘Talking of whom, you seen that girl at all?’

Lol spotted a slender woman walking through the churchyard, about two hundred yards away. He thought it was Sally Boswell, with someone else, a child it looked like from where he was.

He got out of the car as the cameraman said, ‘Nobody here yet, Charlie, only me, shooting wallpaper till the reporter shows. What you doing with yourself now?’

‘Creating the new Hereford, most of the time,’ Charlie told him. ‘So Anne’s due when?’

‘Two o’clock, outside the pub. That’s what I was told.’

Lol ran past them, towards the churchyard.

Sally wore a faded yellow dress and a straw sunhat, and it wasn’t a child with her but Isabel St John in her wheelchair. Isabel looked defiant. Her crimson top began just above her nipples.

‘Laurence.’ Sally pulled off her hat; her misty hair was pushed back over her ears and her skin was pale as moth wings. She tucked the hat under an arm, drew a tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose. ‘Hay fever. Isn’t it ridiculous? Haven’t suffered in years.’

Lol thought she’d been crying.

Isabel glanced back, almost disparagingly, at the church. ‘Been trying to do our bit, isn’t it?’

‘Supportive prayer,’ Sally said. ‘Though I’m afraid I don’t particularly feel any closer to the Deity in there.’

Isabel raised her eyes. ‘Should’ve said. Out here’s all right.’ A Red Admiral butterfly landed on an arm of her wheelchair and stayed there, as though it had been sprayed with lacquer.

‘Where’s Al?’ Lol said. The air seemed hushed and heavy, not only around the church but over the whole valley. He wasn’t aware of any birds singing. He could see Charlie Howe walking towards them, but couldn’t hear his steps.

‘Al?’ said Sally. ‘Don’t you know?’

‘Al’s with Simon,’ Isabel said. ‘And your lady. Chasing the gorgeous, pouting Rebekah. Dredging her up from the slime.’ Her voice had gone harsh with distress. ‘Didn’t you know?’

‘Now? Today?’

‘For noon.’

‘They’re doing it now?’

Sally put a hand on his arm. Her fingers felt like lace. ‘Don’t interfere, Laurence. It does have to be done, I’m afraid. Al and I quarrelled over it. I didn’t want…’ She half turned away. ‘He believes he has no choice. He believes he’s responsible for her. That’s all there is to it.’

‘What about Merrily? Who’s she res—’

‘You want to concentrate more on your music, Lol,’ Isabel said. ‘Form a new band. Employ Simon, get him out of this crappy job.’ The butterfly still hadn’t moved. Isabel looked as if she wanted to swat it. ‘Nobody needs this in their lives. We can deal with it, if we have to, when we’re dead.’

‘Where are they?’ Lol said.

‘Leave it,’ Sally told him. ‘Whatever has to happen will happen.’

‘While we get to wait on the shore.’ Isabel put on a pair of very dark sunglasses. ‘Keep the bloody home fires burning.’

The butterfly finally took off, fluttered to a nearby grave. Lol said, ‘Why do they need Merrily? Why couldn’t they have done this in the first place? I can’t believe Simon was scared.’

‘What do you know, Lol?’ Isabel said with venom. ‘What do you know of what he’s been through over the years? You think it isn’t a terrible bloody burden for a priest to be psychic?’

‘I’m sure it is. But if he thinks Merrily can come in and shoulder it—’

‘Nobody can shoulder it. He has to face it on his own.’

‘Then why do they need Merrily? Is it because Rebekah will only come to a woman?’

‘Stop it,’ Sally said. ‘Both of them are Christians. Neither of them is part of the tradition. If anything happens to anyone…’ She opened her bag, took out a parchment-coloured, egg-shaped label and handed it to Lol. ‘I found this when I came back.’

He recognized it at once. It was what you saw when you peered down the soundhole of a well-loved guitar, with the sacred name ‘Boswell’ printed quite small.

Sally said, ‘It’s the price you pay. For preserving the balance. What you borrow must be repaid, if not in itself then… in kind. Sometimes with interest.’

Below the name was an inner oval in which the serial number of each instrument would be stamped. In this space was hand-printed:

My love

Don’t burn

the vardo

The hop-frames were constructed from now-faded creosoted poles, ten to fifteen feet high and leaning inwards. The cross-pieces of some were fixed below the top, forming two actual crosses, joined. Merrily took this as significant, and she and Simon each stood under a cross, close to the entrance of the alley.

Al Boswell sat at the far end, seventy or eighty yards away. His head was bowed.

Dead bines hung limp from several frames.

With the airline bag at her feet, Merrily laid the Lord’s Prayer on the still, already humid air.

When she’d finished, there was a strange silence in the yard that seemed close to absolute. No birds was what it meant, she decided – there seemed to be nothing here for them to feed on. The hop-yard and adjacent fields were almost in a bowl of earth, the landscape curving up to wooded hills, only the highest ridge of the Malverns visible.

And only one building, the one with the witch’s-hat tower. Should I say it came out of the kiln on the smoke of Rebekah’s cremation? Was it scattered with her ashes?

What came out? What was at the core of this? As Simon had pointed out, there was no agreed ritual for this situation.

Merrily glanced up the alley towards Al Boswell. His hands were raised now, in supplication, and he seemed to be chanting, though she couldn’t hear anything – was Al’s consciousness down there in the Lower World, home of the ancestors and the dead, bargaining with his father, the chovihano, for the soul of Rebekah? What was he offering? What did he expect to pay? She felt scared for him because he came from a culture which was, in essence, unbending.

She also felt an agitation and a tension emanating like cold steam from Simon St John. She banished it, closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on her breathing without changing its rhythm.

In her hands she held a slim prayer book. Into her mind came the image of Rebekah in her sleeveless white blouse. No earrings – the girl wouldn’t have wanted to look like a gypsy for the picture editor at Tit Bits. Poor kid. Poor Rebekah: brazen hussy of 1963, blinded by her own sexuality. As if she’d like to seize the whole world in her teeth.

Eating the world… and suddenly choking. Merrily sensed how dense and dark the flesh-smelling smoke from the kiln would have been, made noxious by all the psychic bacteria that fed on the detritus of violent death. Remnants here, too, of Conrad Lake, his greed, his ultimately murderous cruelty.

This was about separating Rebekah’s soul from all of that and guiding it to the light.

Merrily opened her eyes, consulted the book and said quietly, ‘Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers, and do not condemn us for our sins… Lord have mercy.’

‘Lord have mercy,’ Simon echoed from across the alley.

‘Christ have mercy.’

‘Christ have mercy.’

She visualized Rebekah Smith in the kiln, doubled up, the beautiful features blotched and reddened and distended by coughing and retching and wheezing.

‘Heavenly father.’

‘Have mercy on her!’

… While the sulphur rolls burned blue and the few remaining hop-cones yellowed on their loft.

‘Jesus, redeemer of the world…’

‘Have mercy on her.’

Rebekah screaming inside as the fumes took her.

I watched her heaving and shivering and struggling for breath…

Merrily broke off from the litany. The air felt dense and weighted. She suddenly felt desperately tired, and she was scared to close her eyes again in case she fell asleep on her feet.

‘Oh Christ,’ Simon murmured.

She looked across at him. He was aglow with sweat. He said, ‘You’ve brought someone with you, haven’t you?’ He had his eyes closed now, his fists clenched. ‘You’re carrying the weight of someone.’

Merrily began to pant.

‘Bleeding,’ Simon said. ‘She’s bleeding.’

Merrily whispered, ‘Jesus, redeemer of the world, have mercy on her.’

Her. Rebekah, in her white blouse.

Her. Layla Riddock in her black kimono.

‘Have mercy on them,’ Simon cried out.

Sweat dripped down Merrily’s cheeks.

‘Holy Spirit, comforter…’

‘Have mercy on them.’

‘Holy Trinity, one God…’

‘Have mercy on them.’

‘From all evil…’

‘Deliver her…’

It all came out in a rush now, and they were working together, a unit. ‘From anger, hatred and malice… From all the deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil… Good Lord, deliver them.’

The cotton alb was fused to Merrily’s skin. If she had an aura, it felt like liquid, like oil. The air was very close. There seemed to be a different atmosphere here between the poles, a separate density of air. Between the wires, the sun was like a hole in the sky.

‘Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world.’

‘Have mercy on her,’ Simon said.

‘Yes,’ Merrily said.

She felt that Rebekah was very near, but resistant to the idea of being guided towards the Second Death. It came to her suddenly that Layla had somehow been sent as an intermediary. Allan Henry: Layla, love, excuse me, but these ladies would like to know if you have much contact with the dead.

She prayed for guidance, but she couldn’t see the blue or the gold, and her pectoral cross felt as heavy as an anvil.

The cross? Was the cross preventing—?

She touched it. Please, God, what shall I do? The cross felt cold. She longed to give herself away, as she had in church on the night of the coin, in true and total submission, so that her life-energy, her living spirit, might be used as a vessel of transformation for the tortured essence of Rebekah Smith: a sacrifice.

She turned to Simon, but he seemed a long way away. She closed her eyes, was aware of an intense pressure in her chest, as though she was about to have a heart attack.

She let the prayer book fall and used both hands to slip the chain and the cross up and over her head.

Simon had both arms around the pole with the wooden cross at the top, hugging it, like a sailor who’d roped himself to the mast in a storm. His body seemed to be in spasm. She was aware of a foetid fog between them.

She heard a cry from the end of the alley—

‘Oh, Mother of God!’

—which had become like a tunnel now, a tunnel through the middle of the day, and then there was a wrenching sensation from above, as though the crosspiece linking her pole with Simon’s pole was under sudden, severe stress.

Don’t look.

But, of course, she had to.

Her body was held inert by damp dread, but her eyes followed the leaden, loaded creaking to the cross pole. From it, hanging like a lagged cistern between her and Simon St John, the corpse of Gerard Stock was turning slowly, tongue protruding, white and furry, between the rosebud, spittled lips.

Merrily sobbed and sank slowly to her knees.

Flaunting him.

Failure.

Too strong for them.

Too strong for her.

Stock swung from side to side like a swaddled pendulum. Don’t really know what the fuck you’re doing. Waste of time, Merrily. Heard you were a political appointment.

Merrily’s hands fumbled at the airline bag, closed on the flask of holy water.

‘Begone!’ she sobbed in pain and fear and ultimate despair. ‘Begone from this place, every evil haunting and phantasm. Be banished, every delusion and deceit of Satan. In the name of the living God, in the name of the Holy God, in the name of the God of all creation—’

How empty it sounded, how hollow. She was on her knees with the flask of holy water, and she couldn’t get the bloody top off.

She would have fallen forward then, into her own shadow, but there wasn’t one.

It must be noon.

He’d gone, of course he had. He was never there. Nothing dangled from the crosspiece. There was only Simon, with his face in his hands.

Merrily came to her feet.

‘Mine,’ Simon croaked.

‘What?’

‘My projection.’ His face was grey-sheened. ‘Projection of defeat.’

Merrily leaned against the pole, nothing to say. There was no fog, no Stock, and the air in the alley was the same air that lay heavy on the whole of the Frome Valley. She swallowed; it hurt.

When did it ever go right? When did it ever work? Through the overhead wires, the midday sun was splashing its brash, soulless light over the whole of the sky.

Go out losing. What better way? Nothing to look back on, no foundation for thoughts of what might have been.

Sodden with weariness, she put away the flask, picked up her airline bag.

Simon didn’t move. Merrily heard a crumbly rustling that her tired mind dispiritingly translated into brittle hop-cones fragmenting on mummified bines.

‘Almighty God,’ Simon said numbly, gazing beyond her. ‘Please don’t do this.’

47 Ghost Eyes

THE FIRST SOUND Merrily was aware of was the vibrating of the wires overhead.

It wasn’t much; if there’d been a breeze, it would have sounded natural. If these had been electric wires, it would have seemed normal. It was a thin sound, with an almost human frailty, a keening, that somehow didn’t belong to summer. The rustling overlaid it, as if all the wires were entwined with dried bines. This other sound belonged to winter. It sang of mourning, loss, lamentation.

The sounds came not from their alley, but the one adjacent to it and, as Merrily went to stand at its entrance, she noticed that it seemed oriented directly on the tower of the kiln, the poles bending at almost the same angle as the point of its cowl.

Merrily stood there with sweat drying on her face, edging past the fear stage to the part where she knew she was dreaming but it didn’t matter.

She waited. She would not move. She fought to regulate her breathing.

For here was the Lady of the Bines, approaching down the abandoned hop-corridor, drifting from frame to frame, and the sky was white and blinding, and the Lady moved like a shiver.

Simon St John came up behind Merrily.

‘What am I seeing, Simon?’

He didn’t reply. She could hear his rapid breathing.

‘Whose projection now?’ she said, surprised that she could speak at all. ‘Whose projection is this?’

She blinked several times, but it was still there: this slender white woman, pale and naked and garlanded with shrivelled hops.

Merrily put on her cross. Christ be with me, Christ within me…

The bine, thick with yellowed cones, was pulled up between the legs, over the glistening stomach and between the breasts. Wound around and around the neck, covering the lower face, petals gummed to the sweat on the cheeks.

Christ behind me, Christ before me…

The head was bent, as though she was watching her feet, wondering where they were taking her. She was not weaving, as Lol had described his apparition, but almost slithering through the parched grass and the weeds. And she couldn’t be real or else why was she affecting the wires?

When she was maybe ten yards away, the head came up.

Merrily went rigid.

The Lady swayed. Her eyes were fully open but hardened, like a painted doll’s, under a thickly smeared lacquer of abstraction. They were a corpse’s eyes, a ghost’s eyes. The end of the bine was stuffed into her mouth, brittle cones crushed between her teeth, and those petals pasted to her cheeks – grotesque, like one of the foliate faces you found on church walls.

She put out her arms, not to Merrily but to Simon, but he stepped away.

‘Stay back. For Christ’s sake, don’t touch her. Keep a space.’

The woman’s hands clawed at the air, as though there was something between them that she could seize. Her breath was irregular and came in convulsions, her body arching, parched petals dropping from her lips like flakes of dead skin.

‘Don’t go within a foot of her,’ Simon rasped.

‘It’s all right,’ Merrily said softly.

And she reached for the clawing hands, and waited for the cold electricity to come coursing up her arms all the way to her heart.

48 Love First

NOON: THE DEAD moment in time. All the energy of the day sucked in. Sometimes, for a fraction of an instant, you can almost see it, like a photograph turned negative. Everything still. Everything – the road, the fields, the sky – belonging to the dead.

But these people clustered in the base of the bowl under the midday sun, they were not the dead.

The severely beautiful elderly woman, weeping, and the sharp-faced, white-haired man with an arm around her and the plump woman in a wheelchair and the leather-faced, crewcut man demanding an ambulance – surely somebody had a bloody mobile phone. And Lol, standing apart from the others, looking thoughtful.

And the pale, naked woman under the hop-frame, lying with the padded airline bag under her head. Not even she was dead.

Keep her here? Would that contain it? For how long? How long?

Merrily looked up at the sun.

Simon St John understood. ‘Get back. Please. Just a couple of yards, please.’ Simon was OK, he was in the clear – the woman was not dead, had not been dead when she walked under the wires. Simon was all right with this. Wasn’t he?

‘Yes,’ the woman agreed irritably, ‘Just keep back. I’m all right. I’ll be all right.’ She coughed, her head thrown back over the airline bag, a bubble of saliva and a half-masticated hop-petal in a corner of her slack mouth. ‘I’ll be with you in… just give me… give me a moment… give me a bloody minute.’

Merrily looked up at Simon. He nodded towards the woman. The hop-bine was still curled around her legs, yellowed petals crumbled into her pubic hair.

Simon said, ‘You know her?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Merrily knelt down, was immediately enclosed in a dense aura of sweat and hops. ‘Annie, listen to me – were you in the kiln? Were you in the kiln, just now?’

‘Cordon it off!’ The eyes were still blurred. ‘We… need the fire service. There’s probably—’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said.

‘Gases. An escape of gases.’

‘Or sulphur.’

‘I don’t… I got out of there, but I must have lost… Put somebody on the door. Don’t let anybody go back in there. It may be… I think I lost consciousness, just for a moment. You—’ She seemed to register Merrily for the first time. ‘What the hell are you—?’

‘I’m going back to the village,’ Charlie said. ‘We need an ambulance.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Annie Howe tried to sit up. ‘That’s—’

‘Who’s he?’ Simon demanded. The woman in the wheel-chair had made it from the path, breathing hard from her struggle across the baked ground. Simon was holding her hand.

‘Her father,’ Merrily told him. ‘Charlie, she’s right. Forget the ambulance. But—’ She met his eyes, his copper’s eyes now, hard as nuts. ‘There’s something else we need to do, and we need to do it now. I’m not kidding, Charlie, we’ve got a problem here, you must be able to see that.’

‘And possibly a solution,’ Simon St John said.

‘Dad?’ Annie Howe struggling to sit up. ‘What the hell are you—?’

‘Stay where you are, girl,’ Charlie said softly. ‘Everything’s all right.’ He looked down at Merrily. ‘She been attacked?’

‘Not in the way you think, no. In the way I think – do you know what I’m saying?’

‘I don’t know, Merrily, her clothes…’

Lol was there. ‘I think it’s pretty obvious she took them off herself, Charlie. The things we saw strewn across…?’

‘I’ll fetch them,’ Sally Boswell said.

Merrily came to her feet. ‘Charlie, I swear to God. I swear to you that this is not some scam. She was in the kiln just now – on her own. The wrong place at the wrong time. Charlie, it all comes down to that place.’

‘I was simply’ – Annie shook her ash-blonde head in irritation – ‘taking a final look round before we handed the keys back to…’ She looked vague for a moment. ‘Before we handed over the keys to S–Stock’s solicitors. Is there some water? If I can just have some water…’

Merrily said, ‘Charlie, I don’t have time to explain. You have got to—Please trust me.’

‘Look,’ Annie Howe said, ‘where’s the fucking car?’ She finally sat up. ‘Get these people—’

‘Stay where you are, Anne.’ Charlie’s jaw was working from side to side. ‘You’re naked, girl.’

‘What are you—?’ Annie Howe rose up suddenly, and Charlie Howe stepped to one side so that Annie was in the full sun.

There was a moment of silence, and then she started to scream, her head tossed back, eyes squeezed shut against the blast of light. Her spine arched in a spasm, her white breasts thrust towards the sun, her mouth opening into a big, hungry smile, as if—

In the instant that the screaming turned to laughter, Merrily was down by Annie’s side, both hands on her burning forehead. The eyes opened once, a flaring of panic and outrage under the sweat-soaked white-blonde hair.

It wasn’t all sweat, though. The top must finally have come off the flask inside, because the airline bag, where Annie’s head had lain, was soaked now with holy water.

Rebekah, Merrily said calmly, somewhere deep inside herself. Listen to me.

For an instant, hugging the Lady of the Bines, in all her persons, absorbing their coarse, racking sobs, she found the core – or maybe the core found her. The coin spun in the air and stayed in the air, caught in a confluence of sunbeams, and kept on spinning, bright new copper.

She could do this.

St Paul said: Put love first.

That simple: bypassing fear and revulsion, the heaving aside of a great concrete slab of personal resentment, ignoring even the stunning irony.

Behind her, Simon St John stood quietly, made the sign of the cross in the air above them.

Love is patient. Love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful, nor conceited. Love keeps no score of wrongs. There is no limit to its faith, its hope and its endurance.

Merrily felt her hands becoming very warm, warmer than the skin beneath. She was in a void, an emptiness that was infinitely vast and yet also movingly intimate. She didn’t understand. She didn’t have to understand. At some point, the words came automatically, from the final verse of the old Celtic anthemic prayer.

Let them not run from the love that you offer

But hold them safe from the forces of evil

On each of their dyings shed your light…