The Fabric of Sin

1 Third Hill

ALTHOUGH THE COUNTRYSIDE around the barn was open and level, three landmark hills were laid out along the horizon. Like ancient and venerated body parts, Merrily thought, the bones of the Border. Holy relics on display in the sunset glow.

Standing at the barn window with Adam Eastgate, she tracked them, right to left, from the southern end of the Black Mountains: the volcanic-looking Sugar Loaf and the ruined profile of The Skirrid which legend said had cracked open when Jesus Christ died on the cross.

Still somehow sacred, these hills. No towns crowded them, nobody messed with them.

At least, not the way someone had with the third and lowest hill, the only one this side of the Welsh border but still maybe a dozen miles away. The third hill had been stabbed under its summit, some kind of radio mast sticking out like a spear from the spine of a fallen warrior, a torn and bloody pennant of cloud flurrying horizontally from its shaft.

‘Oh,’ Merrily said, realizing. ‘Right. They say it’s like another country up there.’

Garway.

The light through the window was this deep, fruity pink, the sun dying somewhere behind the hill with its radio mast, its famously enigmatic church and a farmhouse called the Master House that they were saying was haunted.

Adam Eastgate had been aiming a forefinger like he wanted to stab the hill himself, again and again. Sighing, he let his hand fall.

‘We don’t often make mistakes, Merrily.’

She’d never actually been to Garway Hill. Nor, before today, to this place either – a tidy cluster of converted farm buildings off a dead-end country lane, maybe three miles outside the city. Pieces of Herefordshire adding up to more than twelve thousand acres were administered from here, on behalf of perhaps the most prestigious landlord in the country, and she hadn’t even heard of it.

All the stuff you ought to know about and didn’t. Sometimes this county could be just a little too discreet. All a bit awkward. Merrily turned away from the window and the hills.

‘Jane and I – my daughter – we keep planning to go over to Garway, check out the Knights Templar church. Somehow never seem to find the time.’

‘Aye, we saw it with the Man, when he came to inspect the farm. Likes a quiet stroll when he can. And, of course, it’s always so quiet there, nobody noticed us even when—’ Adam Eastgate slipping her a cautious glance. ‘Why are you smiling?’

‘You might not have seen a soul, but it’d be all over the hill before he was back in his Land Rover.’ Merrily looked down at the outline plans on the conference table. They were blurred. She rubbed her eyes. ‘He inspects every property you take on? Personally?’

‘Aw, hey, he’s not just a figurehead.’

The brackeny accent digging in – Northumbria. In his dry, soldierly way, Adam Eastgate was affronted. Very protective of the Man, the people working here.

‘Does he know about this particular problem then?’

Eastgate didn’t reply, which could have meant yes or no or not something you’re supposed to ask.

‘OK, then.’ Merrily sat down in one of the high-backed chairs, red brocade. ‘What, specifically, are we looking at?’

‘Oh hell, I can’t tell you. Perhaps I wasn’t listening hard enough, y’know?’

‘Or you find it embarrassing?’

‘Not a question of embarrassment, Merrily, I’m just not the man it happened to. If anything did.’

Always the get-out clause.

‘How would you like me to play it, then?’

‘How would you normally play it?’

‘Well …’ Dear God, how long was this going to take? ‘To begin with, we usually try to find out if there’s a back-story. Talk to local people, village historian – there’s always a village historian. Or maybe—’ She clocked his wince. ‘That would be the wrong approach, would it?’

‘Depends if you want it on American TV before the week’s out.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Merrily …’ Tight smile. ‘I’m the land-steward. Deal with builders, architects … and tenants, right? Most of whom … good as gold. But we know if we’re forced to evict somebody who hasn’t parted with the rent for two years, next day’s tabloids we’re half-expecting Prince Puts Family on the Street.’

‘Oh.’

‘You see where we’re going?’

‘Haunted Prince calls in Exorcist?’

Eastgate shuddered. Nice chap, Adam, the Bishop had said. Knows what he wants and how to get it done. But raising this had taken the best part of half an hour and three false starts.

This had been two nights ago, one of those receptions where the Duchy was explaining its ambitious conservation plans to the great and the good of Hereford. The Bishop and the Archdeacon and their wives were having a drink afterwards with Adam Eastgate when the Garway investment had come up. And its complications. You could imagine the Bishop nodding helpfully. We do have a person, you know, looks after this kind of thing.

‘I mean, you’ll’ve read the stuff, same as I have,’ Eastgate said. ‘He only has to venture an off-the-cuff opinion on whatever it is – architecture, alternative medicine, GM foods …’

‘The benefits of talking to plants?’

‘See, there you go! That’s exactly it. How many years ago was that? But do they ever forget?’

Well, no. This was the nation’s last bit of official glitter, a face from commemorative investiture plaques, Royal Wedding mugs on your gran’s dresser. Merrily feeling slightly ashamed that, although she’d known it was most unlikely that the Man would be here today, she was wearing her best coat. Her mother would have agonized, changing tops, changing shoes, inspecting her hair many times in the car mirror, just in case.

‘Who is it safe to talk to, then? Who’s actually living in the house?’

‘Well … nobody. I’m trying to explain, this came from the builder. Canny fella, normally. Or so I thought till he’s ringing us up – Adam, man, I think you’re going to have to find somebody else for this one. I’m going, What?’

Eastgate walked to the darkening window, glanced out briefly, unseeing, turned and came back.

‘We’re good employers, Merrily. In some ways, the best. Never short of tenders and once they’re allocated we don’t get jobs chucked back at us. Doesn’t happen.’

Merrily nodding. They’d be a fairly significant name on a builder’s CV. But it worked both ways, Eastgate said. This builder had a rare feel for an old property. And the Master House itself …

‘See, normally, we’re not interested in anything less than about two hundred acres, and this is, what, ninety-five? But it’s a forgotten bit of old England, right down there on the very edge of Wales. Not much you find these days completely unrestored, hardly touched in over a century. We get to tease out the past. Plus, I’m thinking craft workshops in the barns, the stables, the granary … a little working community, new economic life. And green. Very green. Woodburners, rainwater tanks, sheep’s-wool insulation …’

‘Oh, he loves all that, doesn’t he?’

‘The Man? It’s his number one, and it influences us all, naturally.’ Eastgate shook his head. ‘I’m going, come on, Felix, what is this really about? You sick? Domestic problems? Adam, he says to us, maybe this is an old place that doesn’t want to be restored. His words. Hostile. That was another. One of his team had a powerful feeling they were not wanted.’

‘He pulled out of the whole project because one person thought he—?’

‘It’s a she, Merrily.’

‘Oh.’

The sun had gone, leaving a raspberry hue on the room, but you could still make out the shapes of the fields and the fuzz of hedgerows on the side of Garway Hill.

‘I’m going to leave it in your hands, all right?’ Eastgate gathered up the plans into a black cardboard folder. ‘You take these, they’re only copies. See what he’s putting in jeopardy.’

‘The bottom line being you’d like him back on the job ASAP.’

‘Only if he’s normal. Look, if you want to ask a few questions locally, go ahead. We’ve nothing to hide. Bought in good faith, and what we have in mind is going to be good for the community. I’d just say exercise a bit more discretion than usual.’

Merrily nodded.

‘My watchword, Adam.’

She had a headache.

They walked into the forecourt, deeply shadowed now. Not quite six, and everyone seemed to have gone home. Maybe Adam Eastgate had timed their meeting for the tail-end of the working day so he wouldn’t have to explain any of this to the staff.

All the leaves were still on the trees and it was still warm – too warm. A long, flooded summer and the planet in the condemned cell. At least the nights were drawing in now, the tindery musk of autumn on the air as Eastgate walked with Merrily to the old Volvo. It had been nicked last summer – in the dark, obviously – and then swiftly abandoned, presumably after they’d heard the engine.

‘So – just to get this right – what exactly will you do at the house, Merrily, to, ah …?’

‘Depends what it is.’

‘You work on your own?’

‘I … like to think not.’ She smiled wearily; he didn’t get it. ‘OK, there are a few advisers I can call on, if necessary. Usually when there are people involved who might have particular problems – psychological … psychiatric? When you’re looking at an empty … that is, a house not lived in, as such …’

Oh, the way you shaped and trimmed your glossary of terms when addressing ingrained scepticism. Adam Eastgate cleared his throat.

‘Only I didn’t think you’d be so …’

‘Small? Female?’

‘I was going to say, matter-of-fact about it.’

Meaning, like it’s real.

‘I don’t do it all the time. There’s also a parish – weddings, funerals, rows with the churchwardens.’

‘I suppose medieval was the word I was groping for.’

‘I’m medieval?’ She looked up at him through the fast-thickening air. ‘You’re working for an institution dating back, if I’ve got this right, to thirteen—?’

‘Thirty-seven. Duchy was created by Edward III, to provide an income for his son, the Prince of Wales. The king’s father having been the first to hold the title.’

‘Well … the first Englishman.’

‘And by that you mean … what, exactly, Merrily?’

‘Well, they …’ Flinching at the sharpness of Eastgate’s glance. ‘They had their own, didn’t they? The Welsh. For a long time.’

And even after the princes of Wales had become English there was Owain Glyndwr, in the fifteenth century, still trying to get it back. But maybe mentioning this would not be very tactful.

‘Not my subject, Welsh history. Thank God.’ Eastgate straightened up. ‘Anyway, you’ll keep us up to speed, I hope.’

‘Obviously tell you what I can. Without, you know … breaking any confidences that might arise.’

Not that this was likely. It didn’t seem to be any more than what Huw Owen would call a volatile or a delinquent: the wonky fuse box, the dripping tap – Deliverance-lite.

Merrily unlocked the car.

‘It’s an empty house. If anything’s happening, nobody has to live with it day-to-day. So we’re looking at … probably, prayers, a room-by-room blessing. Or, if a particular and persistent personality is identified, maybe a Requiem Eucharist involving the people most closely involved, present and – where possible – past. Nine times out of ten, this is enough to restore a kind of calm. Adam, why’s it called the Master House?’

‘If anybody was able to explain that,’ Eastgate said, ‘they didn’t want to. Maybe the main house when there were subsidiary farms. Or the local schoolmaster used to live there?’

‘Mmm.’

She had a last look at the hill, where isolated white lights had appeared, its big sisters, the Skirrid and the Sugarloaf fading, uninhabited, into the dried-blood sky.

Adam Eastgate said, ‘Ever get scared yourself, Merrily?’

‘Me?’

Merrily laughed, an unconvincing hollow sound in the stillness. An early owl picked it up, or seemed to, and flew with it as she got into the car.

2 Lament

‘THEN HE WAS back on the phone,’ Merrily told Lol in the pub. ‘Soon as I got in. Barely had time to put the kettle on.’

‘The Duchy guy?’

‘No, the Bishop. Must’ve rung several times already. I don’t think I’ve ever known him this jumpy. I just … I don’t get it.’

She took a drink. Serious decadence: a house-white spritzer in the Black Swan – oak beams, low lights – with one’s paramour. How long had it been before she’d felt able to do this comfortably? Six months? A year?

Seemed stupid now; nobody glanced at them twice – although this was probably because almost nobody knew them. Thursday night, and most of the drinkers in the lounge bar were from outside the village, having drifted in for dinner. Some probably responding to the dispiriting Daily Telegraph travel feature identifying Ledwardine as the black-and-white, timber-ribbed heart of the New Cotswolds.

Like, when did that happen? Couple of years ago, the village was still on the rim of the wilderness. Now there was talk of the Black Swan chasing a Michelin star.

‘The Cotswolds are coming.’ Merrily listened to the brittle laughter at the bar. ‘Ominous. Like a melting ice cap. Rural warming. Feels suddenly claustrophobic, or is that just me?’

Final confirmation of the county’s new economic status: the major investment in Herefordshire by the old Cotswolds’ most distinguished resident.

Charles Windsor, Highgrove.

‘Does he know about this?’ Lol said.

‘Well, that’s what I asked. Didn’t get an answer.’

‘He’d probably be fascinated. Has his other-worldly side.’

‘Only, he keeps quieter about it these days.’ Merrily looked around, making sure nobody could overhear them in their corner, well back from the bar. ‘Since the tabloids labelled him as a loony who talks to plants. Maybe they’ve been advised not to tell him, just get it quietly disposed of. As for the Bishop …’

‘You can see his problem. This is the guy next in line for head of the Church of England.’

‘That didn’t escape me. I suppose it’s as good a reason as any to play it by the book.’

No reason, however, for the Bishop to go adding extra, entirely gratuitous chapters. Full attention, I think, Merrily. We’ll need to get you a locum for at least a week. Move you over there.

And she’d gone, ‘What?’

Like … what? Sounding like Jane, probably.

‘Lol, I don’t want to go and stay in Garway for a week. I just … I don’t see the point.’

‘In which case …’ Orange sparks from the electric candles on the walls were agitating in Lol’s glasses ‘… why not just tell the Bishop to, you know, piss off?’

‘Because he’s a friend. Because I owe him. Because …’

Merrily shook her head, helpless. Lol leaned back. He was looking good, actually. Old denim jacket over a Baker’s Lament T-shirt, which he wore like a medal but always keeping the motif at least partly covered up, as if he could still only half-believe what was finally happening to him. He put down his lager, thoughtful.

‘Suppose I come with you.’

‘You’re touring.’

‘It’s only three gigs next week, just the one night away. I could reschedule … or cancel.’

‘That is not a word we use, Lol. You give anybody the slightest reason to think you’re slipping back …’

A year ago, the thought of three gigs – three solo gigs – would have given him palpitations, night sweats.

Lol looked into his glass, obviously knowing she was right, and Merrily watched him across the oak table, through this haze of love and pride blurred by fatigue. Very happy for him, if concerned that he might just be feeling he didn’t deserve it. Ominously, when she’d gone over to the cottage to drag him out to the pub, she’d heard the voice of his long-dead muse, Nick Drake, from the stereo. Worst of all, it was ‘Black-Eyed Dog’, Nick’s voice pitched high in bleak and terminal despair. Lol had turned it off before he opened the door, Merrily staring at him in alarm but finding no despair in his eyes, just this sense of puzzlement.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘I’m supposed to be staying with the local priest. They haven’t got a vicar in the Garway cluster at present, so a retired guy’s taking services meanwhile. He and his wife do B. & B. I turn up there with a boyfriend, how’s that going to look?’

‘What about Jane?’

‘Jane stays here. Can’t miss any school at this stage. Woman curate called Ruth Wisdom’s lined up to mind the parish. Work experience. She’s OK. And Jane’s less likely to drive her to self-mutilation than at one time, and she—’

Merrily looked up. A woman was standing behind Lol’s chair.

‘Excuse me. You just have to be Lol Robinson?’

She was tall and very slender. She’d been with a group of women in their twenties, with fancy cocktails, their backs to the bar. All of them now looking at Lol, hands over smiles.

‘Nobody has to be anybody,’ Lol said.

Mr Enigmatic. The woman was leaning over him now, her glossy black dress like oil on a dipstick, one small breast almost touching his cheek.

‘Lol, I just wanted to say, we all went to see The Baker’s Lament at the Flicks in the Sticks special preview, and it was … absolutely enchanting. Especially the music, obviously. But, listen, when I went to buy the CD in Hereford they hadn’t even got it? Nobody had?’

‘Well, it … it all takes time,’ Lol said.

‘And I’m like, for Christ’s sake, this guy’s local? And the manager guy, he eventually admitted they’d had about fifteen orders just that day? Fifteen orders in one morning? This tells me you need to get a better recording company, Mr Robinson. I couldn’t even find a download?’

‘Well, it’s kind of caught them on the hop,’ Lol said. ‘All of us, really. We didn’t actually—’

‘Well, I have to say I just totally love it. Hope you don’t mind me coming over?’

‘Er, no,’ Lol said. ‘No, not at all. Thank you.’

The young woman straightened up. As did her conspicuous nipples. She looked across at Merrily and smiled at her.

Merrily felt small and dowdy and old.

‘He’s lovely, isn’t he?’ the woman said.

Walking back across the village square, Lol avoided the creamy light of the fake gaslamps; Merrily was a pace behind him.

‘Fifteen orders? In one morning?’

‘She was probably exaggerating.’

‘Why would she?’ Merrily pulled on her woollen beret, zipped up her fraying fleece. ‘She doesn’t know you. Although she’ll probably be telling people she does, now.’

‘One small song in one small film?’

‘Not so small now. And you know what? People will remember the song when they’ve half-forgotten the film. Because it’s somehow caught the mood. The zeitgeist … whatever. You have become a cool person, Laurence.’

‘It’s not real.’ Lol was shaking his head, as if to clear it after his two halves of lager. ‘It’s a freak accident.’

Sometimes you wanted to encircle his neck with your hands and …

Over a year now since this young guy, Liam Brown, not long out of film school, had written to Lol, telling him about his self-financed rural love story. How badly, after hearing it on Lol’s album, Alien, he wanted ‘The Baker’s Lament’ on the soundtrack, only wasn’t sure he could afford it. Just take it, Lol had told him, the way Lol would, sending him three versions of the song, including an unreleased instrumental track, and forgetting all about it. Not even mentioning it to Merrily until the middle of July, when the first DVD arrived.

The Baker’s Lament. There on the label, with a bread knife stuck into a country cob. The guy had named the movie after the song.

Shooting the picture with unknown actors who’d formed some kind of workers’ cooperative. Lol and Merrily had watched it together at the vicarage: the tragicomic story of a young couple setting up a village bakery on the Welsh border in the 1960s when the supermarkets were starting to starve small shopkeepers out of business. Following through to the new millennium when the couple were played – and not badly, either – by the actors’ own parents and the village had turned into something like contemporary Ledwardine, the bakery now a twee delicatessen.

The movie was simple and charming and unpretentious, a rural elegy with Lol’s music seeping through it like a bloodstream, carrying the sense of change and loss and a kind of resilience.

Liam Brown was even worse than Lol at self-promotion, and they hadn’t known it had been released – in a limited way, on the art-house circuit – until it was in the papers that an obscure British independent film had picked up some debut-director award at Cannes. Then the who is this guy? calls had started coming in to Lol’s producer, Prof Levin.

Change was coming. New Costwolds, new Lol.

They stopped on the edge of the cobbles, where they’d go their separate ways, Merrily to the vicarage, Lol to his terraced cottage in Church Street. When he took her hand, his felt cold.

‘Apparently, the next question they ask is, Is he still alive? Thinking maybe it’s a forgotten recording from the Sixties, by some contemporary of …’

‘Nick Drake?’

‘It should be him, Merrily. Not me.’

‘Lol, he’s dead. He died in 1974, after a mere five, six years of not being successful. You get to double that … and some.’

She pulled him under the oak-pillared village hall and – bugger it, if there were people watching, let them watch – clasped her hands in his hair and found his lips with her mouth and then unzipped her fleece and tucked one of his cold hands inside.

‘All this,’ she said, aware of the ambivalence, ‘is something overdue. Remember that.’

Trying to banish the image of the girl in the pub, showing him her implants out of a dress that must have cost something close to two weeks’ stipend.

Jane said, ‘You’re a soft touch, Mum. Always were. A doormat.’

‘Thanks.’

It was getting late, but it was Friday night and Merrily had lit a small log fire in the vicarage sitting room. The whole place was colder since they’d said goodbye to the oil-gobbling Aga. Which, while it had to be done, meant she wasn’t looking forward to winter.

‘And I don’t mean one of those rough, spiky doormats,’ Jane said.

‘You’ll like Ruth. She rides a motorbike.’

‘Jeez, if there’s anything worse than a trendy lesbian cleric in leathers with a vintage Harley between her legs … Like, maybe I could arrange to stay at Eirion’s …’

Jane’s voice dried up, and her face went blank. Eirion was away at university now, and she still hadn’t got used to that. OK, it was only Cardiff, and he came home to Abergavenny at weekends, but things, inevitably, had changed.

‘Ruth’s not a lesbian, Jane.’

‘Not a problem, anyway.’ Jane, on her knees on the hearthrug, stared into the desultory yellow flames. ‘I was thinking of giving girls a try for a while, actually.’

Shock tactic. Cry for help. Merrily pulled up an armchair.

‘He didn’t phone, then.’

‘Erm … no.’

‘How long?’

‘Ten days? No problem. I don’t think he was even able to get home last weekend, didn’t I mention that?’

‘No, but I kind of assumed that was why you suddenly had to work on your project.’

‘All that’s gone quiet, too. They may not even start the dig until the spring.’

‘Oh.’

Pity about that. Jane had been hyper for a while after her campaign to stall council plans for executive homes in Coleman’s Meadow. Convinced that the field had once been crossed by an ancient trackway and, amazingly, she’d been right. They’d found prehistoric stones there, long buried by some superstitious farmer. Sensational archaeology, for a place like Ledwardine.

‘He’ll call,’ Merrily said. ‘He’s Eirion.’

‘I don’t care if he calls or not.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘Like, it’s very demanding, university life.’ Jane didn’t look at her. ‘Lots of guys you’re obliged to get smashed with. Lots of girls to assist with their essays and stuff.’

‘Eirion was never like that.’

‘He was never at university before.’

University. Further education. This could be the time to talk about it again. Just over six months from her A levels, Jane needed to start applying to universities … like now. But Jane wasn’t interested, because that was what everybody did. She kept saying she could feel The System trying to stereotype her. And look at the cost. Tuition fees. Could they afford it? Was it really worth it? Especially as she hadn’t yet decided on a career. Like, you didn’t just do further education for the sake of having done it.

‘You went to uni,’ Jane said, looking down at the rug, ‘and got pregnant before you were into your second year.’

‘We were naïve in those days. Well … comparatively immature. Although I suppose every generation gets to say that.’

‘In which case I must be—’ Jane turned to her, moist-eyed, or was it the light? ‘I must be very seriously immature, then. Pushing eighteen and only the one real boyfriend? That’s not normal, Mum. That wasn’t even normal in your day. That’s, like, almost perverted?’

‘Well, actually, flower, I think it’s really quite—’ The phone rang then, offering her a timely get-out, which she felt compelled to ignore. ‘I’ll let the machine—’

‘No, you get it. Go on. You’ll only sit there worrying until you find an excuse to sneak off and play the message.’

Merrily nodded, got up.

‘It’s a doormat thing,’ Jane said sweetly to her back.

‘Thanks.’

She took the call in the scullery office, padding over the flags in the cold kitchen where no stove rumbled, scooping up the phone with one hand, switching on the desk lamp with the other.

‘Ledwardine Vic—’

‘Mrs Watkins, is it?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Adam Eastgate likely mentioned me.’

‘Oh … right. Mr …’

‘Barlow.’ Low-level local accent. ‘Felix.’

‘Right. I was going to call you tomorrow, actually, see if we could arrange to meet.’

‘Tomorrow would be all right for us, yes.’

‘At the house?’

Owls whooping it up in the orchard. Silence in the old black bakelite phone, the kind of phone that could really carry a silence.

‘The house at Garway?’ Merrily said.

‘No,’ Mr Barlow said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Any … particular reason?’

‘Well, see … person you need to talk to, more than me, is my plasterer. It’s my plasterer had the experience.’

‘Your plasterer.’

‘I call her that. We’re converting this barn at Monkland, see. We’re in a caravan on the site.’

‘That’s not far for me. It’s just I thought you might find it easier to explain the problem in situ,’ Merrily said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘You couldn’t spare the time?’

Another silence; no owls even. She waited.

‘I think you’re gonner have to come here,’ he said. ‘We don’t plan to go back, see.’

‘To the Master House.’

This was what he was ringing to tell her? That they weren’t, on any account, going back to the house?

‘That’s correct,’ he said.

She had the feeling that he was working to a script and whoever had written it was standing at his shoulder. She felt another question coming and hung on for it.

‘I was told you … you were the Hereford exorcist.’

‘More or less.’

‘And you’ll have the, um, full regalia, is it?’

‘Regalia?’

‘We’d like it if you came with all the regalia,’ Felix Barlow said. ‘The full bell, book and candle, kind of thing.’

‘Oh.’

‘If that’s all right with you,’ Barlow said.

3 Fuchsia

SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL and shimmery in the mist. Like one of those exotic birds that weren’t supposed to migrate here. Greens and blues in her dark, tangly hair, skin like milky coffee. She stood by the long green caravan, in her pink-splashed overalls and her turquoise wellingtons, calling out when Merrily was close enough for the dog collar to show.

‘Will you bless me?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘In the old-fashioned way, please,’ she said. ‘That is, with all due ceremony?’

From the field gate, through the lingering mist – a keen hint of first frost – she’d looked as young as Jane. Close up, you guessed she was nearly thirty. Still not Merrily’s idea of a plasterer.

‘I’m serious.’

‘I can tell.’

Merrily looked into eyes which were startlingly big and round, like an owl’s, and widely separated.

‘It strengthens the aura,’ the woman said. ‘Isn’t that right?’

‘I’m sure it must be.’ Merrily parted her woollen cloak to expose the cassock, hemmed with mud now. The full regalia could be a pain. ‘But would it be all right if we talked first?’

‘I just wanted to ask you while Felix wasn’t here. He’s not religious.’ The woman turned away and moved back to the caravan. ‘Fuchsia,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Fuchsia Mary Linden.’

Which meant that her parents had been either gardeners or big fans of the Gormenghast trilogy. Following her into the caravan, Merrily’s money was on Gormenghast.

She felt tired again, had a lingering headache. She’d awoken a good hour before dawn, her body all curled up, tense with resentment.

Never her favourite negative emotion, resentment. Most times it came hissing like poison gas out of inflated self-esteem – they can’t treat me like this. Seldom objective, never exactly Christian and hardly (thank you, Jane) the Way of the Doormat.

At six a.m. she’d been hugging a pot of tea, Ethel the black cat on her knees, in the frigid kitchen. Watery sunlight eventually seeping into the windows before the mist had blotted it up.

The more she’d thought about the Duchy job, the more senseless it had seemed. She was expected to desert the parish – and Jane and Lol – for up to a week to address some embarrassment in an empty house?

An empty house. That was the other point. No family life disrupted there. Nobody’s sanity at risk. Was there, in fact, anything more on the line than the reputation of the Bishop of Hereford as a faithful servant of the monarchy, and the professional judgement of the Duke of Cornwall’s land-steward?

Merrily had put on her pectoral cross and knelt, in her bathrobe, on the cold stone flags and prayed. And listened.

The result had been inconclusive.

It was a substantial, professional caravan, with a living room and a good-sized kitchen area, copper pans on hooks conveying weight and a sense of permanence. Twin doors at the bottom of the living area suggesting a separate bedroom and bathroom.

The walls of the living room were lined with oriental rugs, and there was a wood-burning stove, lit, the sweet scent of apple logs mingling with the sweeter fumes of cannabis. Fuchsia kicked off her wellies, picked up a rubberized walkie-talkie.

‘I’ll call Felix. He’s over at the barn. Have a seat, please, Merrily.’

Shrugging off the black woollen cloak, Merrily made a space for herself between tumbled books on one of the fitted sofas. She could see the barn, its bay agape, through the window opposite and the goldenbrown mist. The window behind her framed the church tower across the rutted field and the lane where she’d left her car. Monkland was a main-road village on the way to Leominster; this was the first time she’d penetrated its hinterland.

‘So the barn’s going to be …?’

‘Our home. It’s supposed to be finished by now.’ Fuchsia prodded at the walkie-talkie. ‘But that’s what it’s like with builders, Merrily, they fit in their own projects between jobs. If a builder’s home looks like some wretched hovel, that means he’s doing very well.’

The ephemeral beauty didn’t include her voice, which was quite slow. And loud, in an uncontrolled way, like a child’s.

Merrily folded the cloak over her knees, less puzzled now about why it, or the cassock, had been necessary. Why Felix Barlow, though not religious himself, had thought traditional priestly attire would be appropriate.

The walkie-talkie cackled and Fuchsia said, ‘She’s here, babes,’ and clicked it off. ‘He’ll come now, Merrily. He was getting a bit frazzled and he needed to work with his hands to calm himself down. Felix has problems talking about the non-physical. Which is very odd because he’s really perceptive, and buildings speak to him.’

‘How do they do that?

‘They send him information, communicating what they were and what they can be again. It’s like dowsing. He feels it in his muscles – the needs of the stone and the oak. Well, in some buildings, anyway.’

‘What about the farmhouse at Garway?’

‘The Master House had been left to rot.’ Fuchsia was wrapping her thin arms around herself as if to crush a shudder. ‘And it wasn’t complaining. Houses know when they’ve gone bad.’

‘And this is what it said to Felix?’

‘This one didn’t speak to Felix, Merrily,’ Fuchsia said. ‘It spoke to me.’

‘I see.’

‘And now my aura’s permeated with darkness.’ Fuchsia opened her arms. ‘Can you see?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Some priests can. Not the man at Garway, he was no help at all, but there was a very good guy in the place I grew up. He’d packed it in, but it never goes away. It’s a calling, like they say. I believe that, Merrily. If you answer the call, you may receive gifts.’

‘It’s as well to be careful about gifts,’ Merrily said. ‘You can never be too sure who they’re from.’

Fuchsia crouched in front of the stove and opened up its vents, pale flames spurting in the glass square. On a shelf to the left of the stainless steel flue, Merrily read titles from a stack of paperbacks. The Gap in the Curtain, The Secrets of Dr Taverner, The Flint Knife, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.

‘Where did you grow up, Fuchsia?’

‘West Wales. Cardiganshire.’ Fuchsia watched the flames. ‘I was born there.’

No Welsh accent, though. Through the caravan window, Merrily saw a man in a hat coming out of the mist.

‘Felix was there, too,’ Fuchsia said.

‘In Cardiganshire?’

‘In the place where I was born. He was there when I entered the world.’ Fuchsia smiled, her face reflected, stretched and warped, in the shiny flue. ‘Felix cut my cord, Merrily.’

Merrily blinked.

‘Which makes for a lifelong connection,’ Fuchsia said.

Something you learned as a deliverance minister: whatever ghosts were, there were people who saw them and people who wanted to see them, and they were seldom the same people.

Put it this way: if whatever had happened at Garway had happened to Felix Merrily would have been more inclined to believe it.

He was a big, untamed-looking man in a leather waistcoat. Long red-grey hair in a rubberbanded ponytail, a wide smile through a stubble like sharp sand. He’d left his wellies at the bottom of the caravan steps, and she saw that his woollen socks had been darned. How often nowadays did socks get darned?

‘Didn’t really want this, Mrs Watkins.’ He lowered himself with a sigh into the sofa opposite her; he had to be a good twenty years older than Fuchsia. ‘I just wanted off the job, and that would be an end to it, but Adam … he’s like a terrier, is Adam.’

‘He likes you. Trusts you to get it right.’

‘He should know better.’ Felix pulled out a dented cigarette tin and Rizlas. ‘All right if I …?’

‘Please do. In fact …’ Merrily reached gratefully down to her bag, bringing out the Silk Cut and the Zippo. ‘And he doesn’t want to see you lose the contract, if something can be … cleared up.’

‘I never asked for this. I want you to know that. I said to Adam, leave it. It’s just one of those things.’

‘But then he told me,’ Fuchsia said, ‘and I realized you must be meant, Merrily.’

‘Meant,’ Merrily said.

‘It’s a matter of metaphysics.’

Merrily looked at Felix, who said nothing, and back at Fuchsia whose wide-eyed gaze met hers full-on.

‘That house is diseased, you see. We need spiritual antibiotics.’

‘You know a bit about these things, then.’

‘I know that this is about good and evil, Merrily,’ Fuchsia said, ‘and I’ve experienced the evil.’

‘OK.’ Merrily lit a cigarette. ‘Do you want to tell me?’

4 Nearest the Scissors

DUST SHEETS?

Mostly heavy-duty plastic, Felix explained. They’d laid them on the floor where the damp and sunken stone flags had been taken up. This was after the roof had been made safe. First things first. They’d spread the dust sheets on the floor, so they could make a start on the walls.

‘Lime-plaster,’ Fuchsia said. ‘I love it.’

‘You should see her,’ Felix said. ‘She moves like a dragonfly.’

‘Not that day.’ Fuchsia moved closer to the wood stove. ‘There was no air that day. It was close and heavy outside, but still damp inside the house. My wings …’ She giggled bleakly, a sound like pills rattling in a jar. ‘My wings were drooping.’

‘It was the first time she’d been there, see,’ Felix said. ‘I have three blokes in the regular team, they’d made a start on the roof.’

Fuchsia watched the flames.

‘I was looking forward to it. It seemed a lovely area. It has two personalities, Merrily. Long, light views on the English side, and then deep green and full of drama as it swoops down to the Monnow Valley and Wales.’ She gripped her knees. ‘All spoiled now.’

Felix looked at her, worried, then he turned to Merrily.

‘So … Ledwardine, eh? You know Gomer Parry?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She smiled. ‘Very well.’

‘Danny Thomas?’

‘Not quite as well. I didn’t meet him until he became Gomer’s partner in the plant-hire.’

‘I was in Danny’s band in the Seventies,’ Felix said. ‘Bass. Fingers always too messed up for anything more delicate than a bass guitar, and a bit clumsy at that. I think we did one gig, and I wouldn’t say folks was actually walking out the door—’

‘It was full of death,’ Fuchsia said. ‘The cold, white, waxy stillness of death.’

Merrily saw Felix grit his teeth, turning away from Fuchsia, whose elongated reflection in the stainless-steel flue was starting to look like Munch’s Scream.

‘I didn’t know whether it wanted me out or it wanted me dead, Merrily.’

‘Stop it, girl.’

Felix’s fingers gripping his knees. Merrily knelt down next to Fuchsia on the rug.

‘What made you think that something wanted you dead?’

Fuchsia shrugged.

‘I tried to work – I went out, I came back, I went out again. And then I went back. I am a professional.’ She stared defiantly at Merrily. ‘Felix went back on his own the next day, and when he came home it was like it was all over him. I made him shower and then I burned all the clothes he’d been wearing. Just out there, Merrily. I poured petrol on them.’

Merrily nodded. Very early in her deliverance career she’d been advised to do something similar, to draw a line under a particular situation. Some things it was easier not to question.

‘You said you went back.’

‘It was under the dust sheets.’

‘What was?’

‘I tried to ignore it, but all the time I could hear the dust sheets behind me, wriggling and rippling and whispering. The air was really thick and heavy and I wouldn’t let myself turn round.’

‘Felix wasn’t there?’

‘I was checking out the granary,’ Felix said. ‘Working out how many steps could be repaired. Heard her screaming, started running …’

Fuchsia was staring down at her hands, mumbling something. Merrily bent to her.

‘I’m sorry …?’

‘A face of crumpled linen,’ Felix said. ‘She’s said that a few times.’

‘That’s what you saw?’

Fuchsia nodded her head violently and bent forward as if she had awful stomach-ache, and Felix looked depairingly at Merrily, and then Fuchsia said, ‘Can we do it in the church?’

‘The blessing. Don’t see why not. But I’d need to clear it with the vicar.’

‘No. There’s no need, Merrily.’

‘Well, it’s what we usually do, but …’ At least she was on fairly good terms with the minister at Monkland; she could get away with it. ‘If you’d rather not make a thing out of it …’

‘Not this church,’ Fuchsia said.

She’d insisted on changing first, into something white.

The old-fashioned way. All due ceremony.

Merrily went back across the field, through the clearing mist, to the car and brought the blue case out of the boot. Inside it were the holy water and oil for anointing. Borrowed from Roman Catholicism but it was sometimes helpful. Partly theatre.

She waited in the field, with Felix.

‘Those books on the shelf near the stove – are they yours or Fuchsia’s?’

‘I don’t read much nowadays. Half a page and I fall asleep. If they en’t technical books, they en’t mine.’

‘I meant the ghost stories.’

‘Oh. Aye, she likes the old ghost stories. Sometime she’ll read one aloud and it scares the pants off me, but she just giggles. Finds them comforting, mabbe. The old houses, the formality, the stiff way people talk. Stilted. Sometimes she says she was born out of time. Wrong place, wrong time.’

‘Where was she born?’

‘She didn’t tell you?’

‘She said Cardiganshire.’

‘Well, that …’ Felix half smiled. ‘That’s more or less right. You heard of Tepee City?’

‘Blimey, is it still there?’

‘I reckon. Likely the longest-surviving alternative community in Britain by now. I was there about a year, as a young feller. Gap year, as you might say. Nice folks, in the main. Had to pull your weight, mind, or you wouldn’t be welcome for too long.’

‘So you were a tepee dweller.’

‘Bender, in my case. You know – the ole bent-over sapling kind of thing?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘Only there a year, like I say, but I never regretted it. When you eventually graduate to building and rebuilding proper houses, if the first ones you ever put together was benders you’ve probably got your priorities right – make it warm, watertight and use natural insulation.’

‘Fuchsia said you, erm …’

‘Cut her cord? Aye, she likes to tell people that.’

‘Is it true?’

‘It is, actually.’ Felix squeezed his prickly jaw. ‘Childbirth in the valley, it could be like a communal event. I just happened to be nearest the scissors. Afterwards, Mary asked me to be her … godfather, kind of thing. Though we never went to church, just down the wood. Where we lit a fire, asked the gods to bless the child … bit pagan, sorry about that, but they did, kind of … you know, they included Jesus.’

Merrily smiled faintly.

‘Then we played some music, smoked some weed, and I held the child for a bit and made some vows in the smoke.’

‘So you and Fuchsia’s mother – I’m sorry for asking personal questions but it helps to know a few basics …’

‘No,’ Felix said. ‘Me and Mary, that never really happened. I wanted it to, at the time, I en’t denying that. She was beautiful. Thin. Fragile. Didn’t have much to say. Needed looking after. When she turned up at Tepee City, she was already pregnant. Said the father’d buggered off to America to go on the road in a pick-up truck. I suppose I got closer to her than anybody, but not as close as I’d’ve liked, you know? She stayed a few months, and then she … she just left.’

‘With the baby?’

‘No, she left the baby in the Valley. With another family.’

‘Just like that?’

‘More or less. Rachel, the woman who took Fuchsia, she was this earth-mother type, done it before. I mean, it was that kind of place. Fuchsia was a child of the tribe, kind of thing. We thought Mary was gonner come back – she said she’d been offered a job, good money and she’d be back for the kid. The social services tried to find her, got nowhere. So it ended up with Rachel adopting Fuchsia, or fostering her, whatever. And I kept in touch, kind of thing. Helped out. Sent money.’

‘You left when it was clear that Fuchsia’s mother wasn’t going to come back?’

‘No, no, what happened, my ole feller died suddenly, I had to sort things out. He had a builder’s yard, my dad. I sold it after a bit, went to work for a firm of conservation builders. Learning the trade, kind of thing. Then went on my own, built up a business. Got married, got divorced. Then Fuchsia showed up.’

‘What, just appeared?’

‘We’d put her through art college, see.’

‘You had?’

‘Had the money by then, Mrs Watkins. Why not? I mean, I never meant for this … for us to be like, you know, how it’s turned out. She just arrived one day, and she was interested in what I was doing, the conservation work, and she hadn’t got a job …’

‘She went to work for you, before there was any … relationship?’

‘That was how it started, aye.’ Felix wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. ‘I call her my plasterer – what she does really is mouldings, recreates original colours, experiments with limewashes. She just loves the feel of plaster.’

‘I see.’

‘Look, Mrs Watkins, I’m under no illusions about how long it’s gonner last, but we’re rebuilding that—’ Felix nodded towards the barn. ‘It was a ruin, and I’m determined to make it into a proper home for her. Like an ancestral home, kind of thing, for the ancestry she’ll never have. She reads all these stories about folks living in country houses, and if I can give her that, things might be … good. For a while.’

‘You never heard from her mother again?’

‘Not a word.’

‘You’d never tried to find her?’

‘Didn’t know where to start. No idea where she was from. She had a bit of a Brummie accent, I remember, and she was mixed race – one of them must’ve been black. Fuchsia reckons she’s dead.’

‘Why does she think that?’

‘Just a feeling. There’s this kind of tribal mysticism in Tepee City, and she had a period of building fires in a clearing in the wood and looking for Mary in the smoke. Now she just mopes around ole churches and reads ghost stories. I was hoping, when the barn was finished, it’d be some kind of stability.’

Merrily looked at him, saying nothing. There was a sadness here. A longing, but also a realistic suspicion that it wasn’t going to work out.

‘If you can take away the fear,’ Felix said. ‘If you could just do that … you know?’

‘You think it’s more than just this place – the Master House.’

‘Look, I don’t know. I believe something happened to her in that place, I just don’t know if it’s … in her mind. I don’t know, Mrs Watkins. I accept that these things go on.’

‘What I mean is, you have a feeling for houses, but nothing seems to have … I mean for you …’

‘It didn’t have anything to say to me, good or bad. What I usually do, if a place is blocking me, is I’ll spend a night inside, in a sleeping bag. You wake up in a house, you can somehow get a proper feel of it. I might’ve got round to that, but … she didn’t want me to. Look, I know what you’re thinking, but … it’s just a job. Just money.’

‘Right. Erm … why’s it called the Master House, do you know?’

‘Not really. Bloke I spoke to said it goes back to the Templars who built Garway church. They had masters and grand masters, apparently. It could be old enough, I found fourteenth-century bits, maybe older.’

‘Did you ask anybody if it was supposed to be haunted? Anybody locally?’

‘A woman we talked to said it wouldn’t be a surprise. Said it hadn’t been a happy house.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Has a smallholding, edge of the hamlet. Sells free-range eggs and honey and herbs. Mrs Mornington … Morningside. Something like that.’

‘And the reason you won’t go back now is purely …’

‘See it from my position, if you can,’ Felix said.

Fuchsia came down the caravan steps then, wearing what looked like a bridesmaid dress with a bodice of white lace. The colours in her hair were like streaks of oil rainbowed in dark water.

Merrily felt a flicker of unease and glanced at Felix, but he was gazing across at Monkland church with its halo of gilded mist.

Pity this wasn’t the church they were using. She had no history here.

Felix turned and saw Fuchsia and swallowed.

‘Looks so much like her now it scares me a bit.’

‘Her mother.’

‘Aye.’

5 Who is This?

THE LAST TIME Merrily had been inside the Church of St Cosmas and St Damien, somebody had sacrificed a crow on one of the altars.

These things happened, just occasionally, after a church had been decommissioned by the C of E, left to fade into film-set Gothic.

Lifting cloak and cassock to climb into Felix’s silver truck outside the caravan, she was remembering the crow’s entrails arranged like intricate jewellery on the right-hand altar. It was a church with two of everything – twin chancels, twin naves – with a pulpit in the middle. They might see this as representing a dualism, Huw Owen, her spiritual director, had said at the time. Left and right, darkness and light.

This was in the very early days in Deliverance, and she’d blown it, been unable to handle the necessary cleansing of the church. Emotionally exposed at the time, her senses still snagged on memories of a fairly sickening job in the old General Hospital. Feeling clammy, palms itching, and then the explosion of coughing … and Huw, supervising, ordering her out.

This was when she’d been advised to burn the vestments she’d been wearing, and she’d done that, in an incinerator behind the vicarage. Burned everything, except for …

Oh God.

… This cloak, the same heavy, woollen, cowled cape that she’d worn here on the night of her humiliation. Because it hadn’t been at the General Hospital, it had seemed OK not to burn it. After all, they weren’t cheap, these cloaks, the female clergy still a minority market.

But – never dismiss coincidence – it was better not to take it in. She began to unlace the cloak as the truck bounced down an eroded lane where torn shards of tarmac were crumbling like piecrust into the verges and Fuchsia’s voice came cawing from the back seat.

‘Are you High Church, then, Merrily? Anglo-Catholic?’

‘Oh, well, I’ve never been one for labels, Fuchsia. You adapt … compromise where you can.’

Mix-’n’-match. Pick your own. Anything works now, in the new, flexible C of E.

‘Do you have a statue of Our Lady in your church, Merrily?’

‘No. But I’ve thought about it.’

‘We have two in the caravan, now,’ Felix said bitterly. ‘One’s above the bed. Makes you feel a bit queasy when you look up and the moonlight’s full on it.’

‘I also like to go to the cathedral in Hereford,’ Fuchsia said. ‘When it’s fairly quiet.’

Merrily turned to look at Fuchsia, rocking in the narrow rear seat, her hair centre-parted, one hand holding a cream woollen shawl together at her neck, the other steadying the canvas zip-bag on her knees – the Deliverance bag. She’d asked if she could carry it.

‘When it’s quiet, Merrily. When there’s nobody to say I don’t belong.’

‘Why would you think you don’t belong?’ Merrily said. ‘Nobody has to sign anything.’

‘I’m neither one place nor the other. That’s how I feel.’

‘I see.’

Everything had turned around. This was no longer just about an empty house with a presence. Now there was a human dimension, complicating matters in a way the Duchy of Cornwall wouldn’t have anticipated.

… There are a few advisers I can call on, if necessary. But that’s usually when there are people involved who might have problems – psychological … psychiatric?

Like an apparently intelligent woman with the manner of a small child – repeatedly clutching your name like a mother’s hand in a bewildering department store.

‘I’ve thought of joining the Catholic Church, Merrily, but they haven’t got the old churches any more, and I like the old churches. Especially St Cosmas and St Damien. It’s open all the time. I can go in at night … at dawn, whenever.’

‘And what do you do there?’

‘Just sit there. It’s a place of healing.’

‘How long have you felt you needed healing?’

‘Oh, it’s not for me. It’s for my mother.’

‘You … won’t remember your mother.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘But you were only a baby, when she …’

‘I’m sure I do remember her. Part of her’s in me, isn’t it?’

‘Have you … ever tried to find her? Maybe the internet?’

‘I did once. There was another Mary Linden. It just got confusing.’

‘Would you like me to … include your mother in the prayers?’

‘It’s too late, Merrily.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘I just want you to make my aura strong, please,’ Fuchsia said.

The mist was low and white among the pines around the little sandstone church. There might have been a proper village here once but it barely qualified as a hamlet now. A couple of dwellings sat fairly close, one of them a farm.

The church of St Cosmas and St Damien had a squat body and a timbered bell-tower, and its churchyard was raised like a cake stand. Supported by the Churches Restoration Trust, it apparently held just one service a year.

Felix left the truck at the side of the track and locked it. With the sun muffled like a coin in a handkerchief, Merrily, uncloaked and chilly, opened the gate into the churchyard.

‘Perhaps we should tell someone we’re here.’

‘Nobody ever disturbs me.’ Fuchsia handed her the bag. ‘They probably take one look at me and think I’m a mad person.’

Shouldering the bag strap, Merrily saw Felix wince.

‘Look,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll stay outside, yeah? Explain to anybody who shows up.’

‘You sure?’

His look confirmed it. Merrily nodded, and Fuchsia drifted ahead of her, like a ghost in the mist, around the church to the arcaded wooden porch.

Is this safe? After several recent cases of exorcism turning up the jets under something combustible, you were forced to ask.

But this wasn’t an exorcism; Fuchsia knew enough not to be asking for it. She’d wanted a blessing which was exactly what Merrily, under the circumstances, would have been offering, so no problem. Really, no—

‘Fuchsia, before we go in …’

Fuchsia stopped just inside the porch, the mist hanging in shining strings from the Gothic points of its deep and glassless windows. Merrily caught her up.

‘I want to get this right. Is it your feeling you might have brought something with you, out of the house at Garway?’

Fuchsia stood for a while, moistening her lips with her tongue.

‘Something found me.’

‘Something which … knew you already, do you think?’

Fuchsia said nothing. Her eyes gave nothing away.

Merrily said, ‘When you talked about evil and also a feeling of death …’

The owl eyes didn’t blink or flicker, the skin around them softly lucent.

‘And about something moving … under the dust-sheets?’

‘You mean, was I talking about something subliminal?’ Fuchsia said.

‘Something under the surface of my own mind? Are you asking if I’m mentally ill, Merrily?’

Merrily found a smile from somewhere.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not asking that. Let’s go in.’

She remembered its intimacy, emphasised by the central pulpit, the two chancels like cattle pens. She remembered the harmonium and the discreet domestic medieval tomb of John and Agnes de la Bere, praying effigies modestly separated by John’s shield.

Found herself picturing stone images of herself and Lol with his Boswell guitar between them.

‘Candles.’ Fuchsia held up a brown paper bag she’d found inside the pulpit. ‘They’re still here.’

‘Yours?’

‘Three left. And a stub. Sometimes I light them on one of the altars.’

‘You have a preference?’

‘The left-hand one. Because it’s furthest from the door.’

‘All right. Shall we make it just the one candle?’

‘Oh – I haven’t brought matches.’

‘I’ve got a lighter.’

They didn’t use the candlesticks provided, instead placing the candle stub in a tin tray, and Merrily lit it, praying within herself for assistance. They sat side by side, facing the altar from benches just inside the rood screen, Fuchsia in white, Merrily black-cassocked. It was less cold than she’d expected.

‘You OK, Fuchsia?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You know what I’m asking?’

‘There’s nothing here now. There never is, in here. It’s a holy site. A healing place.’

Merrily nodded, stood up.

‘Shall I kneel down, Merrily? Before the altar?’

‘OK.’

It didn’t take long. Hands-on, very gentle.

‘Father, I ask you now to cleanse and make new all things within the heart and soul of Fuchsia. To restore her to new life and a new relationship with you. To … make her welcome.’

The lids were down over the owl-eyes. Wings of white light opening up in the window over the altar.

There was a small rustling from behind them, in the left-hand nave. Churches were full of small sounds. Merrily didn’t look towards it, but was suddenly thinking of dust sheets wriggling and rippling like something malevolent under the skin, and it—

It needed more. Something – a vibration in the solar-plexus – telling her that.

She left Fuchsia kneeling there, the white dress tucked under her knees, the shawl hanging loose over her shoulders, keeping her in view as she moved quickly back to the bench and her bag, feeling for the smoothness of glass and bringing out the most Roman Catholic item in there.

The oil. Olive oil, extra-virgin, blessed by the Bishop, in a brown screw-top vial.

Fuchsia’s forehead shone. Merrily bent and, with a forefinger, inscribed on it a cross, in oil.

‘And if you could open your hands …’

On the left palm, another cross.

‘Oil of wholeness and healing …’

And then the right, Fuchsia drawing a slow breath, eyelids fluttering.

‘Watch over her, in the name of all the angels and saints in heaven. Keep guard over her soul day and night.’

All very solemn and slightly surreal. Merrily shivering slightly as Fuchsia’s eyes opened and she was looking back through the chancel screen towards the harmonium and the doorway.

‘Who is this?’ Fuchsia whispered. ‘Who is this who’s coming?’

And laughed as lightly as her harsh child’s voice could manage.

6 Stonewall

THE LOOK ON Sophie’s face was beyond outrage, bordering on disbelief. Down in Broad Street, air brakes gasped.

Bishops came and bishops went, Hereford Cathedral remained.

And Sophie.

She sank down at her desk, almost fading into it like a ghost. Merrily shut the window of the gatehouse office, usually a refuge under the cathedral’s calming façade, where the Bishop’s lay secretary applied cold cream for the soul.

Today, the air up here was tainted with dismay, Sophie’s snowy hair disarranged. Merrily had phoned her before leaving for Monkland, outlining the brief, and this was when Sophie had gone over to the Bishop’s Palace to elicit some hard facts from Bernie Dunmore. And been unaccountably, shockingly, stonewalled.

Merrily sat down opposite her, with her back to the window.

‘That doesn’t happen, Sophie.’

‘It certainly never has before. I actually thought at one stage that he wasn’t going to tell me about any of it.’

All the time Merrily had been telling her about Fuchsia and Felix, Sophie had been rearranging the correspondence on her desk, lifting up the pile and stacking it like a pack of cards that she was about to shuffle. Finding things to do with her hands as if she was trying to stop them shaking.

Autumn at last: twinset time, but no real need for that extra scarf. The idea of Sophie feeling the cold was disturbing to Merrily; she stood up again as the kettle came to the boil.

‘I’ll make it.’

‘I should perhaps take one sugar,’ Sophie said calmly.

‘Jesus.’ Merrily pulled down the teapot and mugs. ‘So … all in all, there’s probably more to this than either of us knows.’

‘You know rather more than I do.’

‘Until last night, I didn’t even know how heavily the Duchy was into the county.’

‘I’ve made a point of finding out.’ Sophie put on her chained glasses to consult a computer printout. ‘The serious involvement with Herefordshire happened fairly rapidly. According to the Duchy of Cornwall’s website, major investment here began with scattered segments of the once-vast estate, around Hereford and Ross, owned in the seventeenth century by Thomas Guy. Of Guy’s Hospital fame.’

‘I should know about this, shouldn’t I?’

‘Held more recently, of course, by the footwear magnate Sir Charlie Clore. And then, after his death, by Prudential Assurance, who sold it to the Duchy in, I think, 2000. This probably means there’s now more Duchy investment in this county than anywhere outside of Cornwall itself.’

‘Royal Herefordshire?’

‘The showpiece being the very impressive Harewood Park. Which, of course, one can’t miss because it’s right next to the A49.’

‘Why here? I mean, why Herefordshire?’

‘Beautiful. Unspoiled. Perhaps the Prince wants to help keep it that way. He’s famously keen on Green issues. Seems likely to ensure that the land will be treated sympathetically, with an eye to heritage, conservation and organic farming.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Nothing overtly sinister, Merrily. Nothing for, say, Jane to rail against. Which is why I can’t understand—’

Sophie, cathedral person, confirmed royalist, closed her lips and turned her head, ostensibly fixing a clip in her hair.

‘Nothing about Garway on the Duchy website.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Do you know Garway, Sophie?’

‘Haven’t been over there for many years. Not since our hiking days.’

‘Hiking days?’ Merrily blinked. ‘Bobcap … knapsack … flask of soup. You?’

‘I’m not in the mood, Merrily.’

Merrily sighed. ‘Maybe you could tell me what you remember?’

‘I remember the church. Small and rather strange.’

‘Built by the mysterious Knights Templar.’

‘In fact, one of the best-preserved examples of Templar architecture in the country. Especially since the London church was badly damaged in the Blitz. And there’s a medieval columbarium nearby, said to be absolutely the finest of its kind anywhere.’

‘Columb—?’

‘Dovecote. The Templars kept doves and pigeons as a food supply. The whole area had, I suppose, a sense of isolation – self-isolation, in a way – that I wouldn’t imagine has gone away. Not an area, I should have thought, that anyone visits without a particular reason. I printed out some general background material for you, Merrily. After the Bishop dropped what crumbs of information he deemed it necessary for me to have.’

OK, time to deal with this. Sophie hadn’t seemed so screwed-up since Siân Callaghan-Clarke’s attempt to turn Deliverance into a branch of social services. Merrily dumped two tea bags into the pot and brought the kettle back to the boil.

‘What exactly did he say when you first mentioned it?’

‘It’s not so much a question of what he did or didn’t say said as of what he did next. Which was to telephone Canterbury.’ Sophie scowled. ‘On his private line.’

‘How do you know he did that?’

‘About twenty minutes later, someone returned his call on this line.’

‘Who?’

‘Suffice to say, the voice was instantly recognizable.’

‘Not—? Aaah!’ Pouring boiling water into the pot, Merrily had scorched the back of a hand in the steam. ‘Shit. Sorry.’ What was the matter with her?

‘Some issue of Church politics here,’ Sophie said. ‘Obviously.’

‘It isn’t obvious to me.’ Merrily held her reddening hand under the cold-water tap. ‘All I can see is a conflict of loyalty over a woman who could well be emotionally disturbed.’

‘You think the girl’s delusional?’

‘Don’t know enough to say one way or the other. She has a complicated history. Seems to be looking for a kind of stability she’s never had. Likes old churches and ceremony. You might’ve seen her in the cathedral. Big eyes. Doesn’t smile.’

‘And what were you able to do to help her?’

‘Protective blessing. In church. With oil, which seemed appropriate.’

‘You don’t look entirely convinced.’

Who is this who’s coming? Outside, she hadn’t even remembered saying it. Merrily dried her hand on the towel.

‘I’ll keep an eye on her. Meanwhile, check out the house at Garway. Actually, I’ve got some stuff here …’

She came back to the desk and brought out the folder that Adam Eastgate had given her, with the plans and a photo of what looked like a traditional Welsh longhouse, stone-built, one end extending into the barn or cowshed.

‘We haven’t had any reports about this house before, have we, Sophie? Nothing on the database? Even peripheral?’

‘Nothing. I checked the files and correspondence going back to Canon Dobbs’s time and earlier. You haven’t been there yet?’

Merrily shook her head. She’d driven directly over to Hereford after picking up the Volvo in Monkland. Sophie brought out more printout.

‘I looked up the Master House on the Listed Buildings database. It’s given as fourteenth century, but they usually play safe so it could be earlier.’

‘If it dates back to the Templar occupancy of Garway, which is what Felix Barlow reckons, that would be thirteenth century … maybe very early fourteenth. I think the order was scrapped around then, wasn’t it?’

‘The order was officially – and rather brutally – dissolved in 1307. In France, anyway. This was less than two centuries after it was formed. The Templars would have survived a little longer in Britain, but not in any organized way.’

‘And would they have been connected, in any way, with the Master House, given that head Templars were called Masters?’

‘Possibly. In peacetime, they seem to have behaved like any other monastic community – farming the land, employing local people. As the house is still part of a farm, I phoned an acquaintance in the local NFU office. It seems to have belonged for quite some time – many generations – to the Gwilym family, whose land straddles the Welsh border.’

‘Not heard of them. Should I have?’

‘Very long-established. And rather affluent now, with business interests here in the city. They seem to have had financial difficulties in the early 1900s and had to sell the Master House, with a large package of land, to a family called Newton, who settled there for about fifty years. Finally moving out of the house itself in – we think – the late 1960s.’

‘Why did they move out?’

‘Nothing of interest to you. Upkeep, heating costs. They had no historical attachment to the Master House. Bought another farm nearby, with a more modern house. The Master House was later rented out to various people at various times. A riding stables, a commune of self-sufficiency fanatics in the 1970s.’

‘And it’s these Newtons who sold it to the Duchy?’

‘The Grays now. An eldest daughter married into a family called Gray. They seem to have sold it to the Duchy with about ninety acres. Feeling the pinch, I gather. Had a very bad time during the Foot and Mouth in 2001, rather losing heart. When are you going?’

‘Not decided yet. Possibly tomorrow. I’d hoped to persuade Felix and Fuchsia to come with me – doesn’t make a lot of sense going alone. I can do a house-blessing and prayers, but who’s going to say if it’s achieved anything, with nobody living or working there to report back?’

‘So you’re going tomorrow, to stay for a few days.’

‘I’m going for half a day, have a look around, talk to a few people locally and then come back to think about it.’

‘The Bishop was insistent,’ Sophie said, ‘that you should have as much time as it takes to get to the bottom of this. I was asked to ring the Reverend Murray in Garway and reserve you a room at the guest house his wife runs. And, no, I don’t understand it either.’

‘Can’t you stall him? Frankly …’ Merrily poured tea ‘… it’s hard to imagine Bernie Dunmore being so far – excuse me – up the Duchy’s bum. Maybe I should talk to him.’

‘He’s in London, I’m afraid, until Tuesday. House of Lords.’

‘Would be, wouldn’t he? Still gives us three days. If you can copy some of this stuff, we’ll present him with a full and careful report which he can safely dangle in front of the Duchy, the Prince of Wales, the Archbishop of— Are you sure he was talking to Canterbury about this?’

‘I’m his confidential secretary, Merrily. Supposed to be.’

‘So what are your personal feelings?’

Sophie was looking down at her desk. Sophie Hill, who worked for the cathedral. There was a pause in the traffic on Broad Street.

‘Mmm.’ Merrily nodded. ‘You’re probably right. The Church has always relied on the silence of its employees. No disruptive questions asked. Knowing your place. As you say.’

Sophie looked up, letting her chained glasses fall to her chest. Merrily avoided her gaze.

‘I think,’ Sophie said very quietly, ‘that a lot would depend on whether the Prince of Wales knows about this.’

‘Oh?’

‘He has, after all, been known to express an interest in such matters.’

‘Such matters?’

‘You know.’

‘Well, he’s talked publicly about spiritual healing, organic farming, relationships with the land … and plants. If that’s what you mean.’

‘I think you’ll find that it goes deeper,’ Sophie said.

Merrily stood up, walked across to the door, opened it and looked down the stone steps.

‘I don’t think they’ve got around to bugging us yet, Sophie. We’re quite alone.’ She closed the door, came back and sat down. ‘What?’

7 The Naked Cross

THE STEEPLES OF the two city-centre churches, St Peter’s and All Saints, were far more visible in Hereford than the tower of the cathedral, which was in a corner, backed up against the river, not central.

It didn’t hide, exactly, it just didn’t show off.

It didn’t have secrets, as such, just didn’t go out of its way …

Like Sophie.

‘This relates to your late predecessor,’ Sophie said.

‘Dobbs?’

You could see him standing silently in the corner, face like an eroded cliff face. The man who had refused to be called a Deliverance minister. Who, until his last collapse, in the cathedral itself, had been the Hereford Diocesan Exorcist. Canon Thomas Dobbs, who wouldn’t even open his front door to Merrily but had left a message for her in its letter box, succinctly conveying his thoughts on being replaced by a woman.

The first exorcist was Jesus Christ.

Interesting how rapidly the situation had changed since then. First Merrily, then Siân Callaghan-Clarke, canon of this cathedral, getting herself appointed Deliverance Coordinator, with plans to subtly secularise the service. Hadn’t worked, and now Siân’s ambitions were, allegedly, focused on the impending vacancy for Archdeacon.

‘Sorting through Canon Dobbs’s files after his death,’ Sophie said, ‘I came across a box file of press cuttings – I didn’t bother you with any of this at the time; it seemed hardly relevant and you had enough problems. But he’d accumulated a substantial collection of newspaper and magazine articles about the Prince of Wales.’

‘Dobbs?’ Merrily rocked back in her chair. ‘Dobbs collected stories about Prince Charles?’

‘I don’t mean photo spreads from Hello. These all have specific references to the Prince’s spiritual life. For some reason, I filed them away in a storeroom in the cloisters.’

‘Why would Dobbs be especially interested in Charles? I mean, this was presumably before the Duchy got into Herefordshire?’

‘Certainly before they bought the Guy’s Estate from the Prudential.’

‘Is there any possibility that Dobbs knew him personally?’

‘I don’t know. I have no reason to think he did. I mean, he may have … I really don’t know, Merrily, it just brought it back to me, with all this …’

‘Could I have a look at the cuttings?’

‘I’ve brought them up. You can take them with you when you leave.’

That night, Merrily called Huw Owen, who took it all unexpectedly seriously. Listen, he said, you must never trust the buggers. Never. Any of them. Not at this level.

Covering the phone, Merrily reached out a foot and prodded the scullery door shut. Jane, in a black mood, had Joanna Newsom on the stereo in the sitting room: California Gothic, cracked and witchy. Merrily lowered her voice.

‘Who are we talking about – the Duchy of Cornwall or the royals generally?’

‘It’s not so much the royals, lass, as the C of E. The Church and the Monarchy have been an item for nearly half a millennium. But change comes fast these days. Some of our masters, as you know, have become a bit wary about a certain individual.’

‘Let’s not walk all round this. Charles.’

‘Most of it dating back to his famous remark about the Monarchy – when he takes over – becoming Defender of the Faiths, plural. Muslims, Hindus … Catholics? My God. Is this a safe pair of hands for the sacred chalice? It’s backs to the cathedral walls, lass. Knives unsheathed in the deepest cloisters.’

‘I’ve always liked the way you underplay a drama, Huw.’

Trying to psych out if there was even a hint of a smile on his cratered face as he sat by the racing flames in the inglenook of his eyrie in the Brecon Beacons. Smuggled out of his native Wales by his mother as a small child and brought up in Yorkshire, Huw was back in the land of his unknown father, supervising Deliverance courses for C of E clergy in a former Nonconformist chapel burned out by decades of hellfire preaching – the place where it had begun for Merrily, this weird ministry, not quite as long ago as it sometimes seemed.

‘All right, maybe I’m exaggerating,’ Huw said. ‘I’m just warning you to watch your back. Where the royals are concerned – the royals and Canterbury – the smallest rumour can cause a seismic shift, and little folks like you can get dropped down the nearest crevice.’

‘Thanks, Huw. I’ll sleep so much easier tonight.’

‘I’m just telling you.’

‘So …’ Merrily shifted the heavy bakelite phone from one ear to the other. ‘Having established that nobody in ermine or a dog collar is to be trusted, what’s your considered opinion of why Canterbury would need to be kept informed about a house owned by the Duchy of Cornwall that’s alleged to be haunted?’

‘Well, they wouldn’t, would they?’

‘Would they tell the Prince, or would they try to keep it from him in case he became too curious?’

‘I think if he is curious, he’s probably experienced enough now to keep it to himself. Happen what’s more important – like your feller at the Duchy said – is that the press don’t get wind of it. They’d hound the builder and then they’d hound you.’

‘Mmm.’

‘You ask me, this is just Bernie Dunmore covering his own back. Thinking how it might rebound on the Diocese if it all went pear-shaped.’

And it did go pear-shaped sometimes, no denying that. An inexact science, deliverance. Well, not a science at all, obviously …

‘Everybody lives in fear nowadays,’ Huw said. ‘Way things are going, deliverance itself could be C of E history in a year or two.’

‘And what would you do, Huw, if we all got the elbow?’

‘I’d retire, lass. Take the pension, rent a little shack at the rough end of Sennybridge, with a back yard and a bog, and carry on with the job. No bureaucracy, no politics, no farcical PC synods. Just me and the naked cross.’

‘Talking of which … Canon Dobbs.’

‘Old bugger’s dead.’

‘Sophie’s given me a collection of news cuttings he kept about the Prince of Wales and the Church and other connections. Why would Dobbs keep a royal scrapbook?’

‘Traditionalist of the first order, Dobbs. Happen he’d started to notice the lad spreading his favours. I wouldn’t worry about it. Concentrate on covering your own arse.’

‘And your specific advice, as my spiritual director, would be …?’

‘Keep all your cards on the table, face up.’

Merrily shook out a Silk Cut.

‘Explain?’

‘Stage one: find the former owners of this hovel and see what kind of recent history it’s got. Forget the White Lady and the Phantom Stagecoach. The home movies you can do without.’

Home movies: Huw’s latest euphemism for place-memories and trapped events that repeated themselves.

‘And then … if it’s just what the girl claims she saw and there’s nowt blindingly obvious from the last few years, Stage Two would be to set up a low-key house-blessing for a specific date. Being careful, mind, to invite the local incumbent.’

‘There isn’t one. A retired guy’s holding the fort.’

‘He’ll do. Also, you want at least one member of the family – the folks who flogged the place off to the Duchy, plus, if possible, someone from the family as owned it before. For many generations, you said?’

‘So I’m told.’

‘That would help, then. And finally – this is important – you must formally request the presence of an official of the Duchy of Cornwall. The higher up the better.’

‘Wow.’ Merrily sat back, lit her cigarette. ‘Smart.’

‘That way, you’ve acquitted yourself in full view, and they’re all involved – all implicated.’

‘Flawless.’

It wouldn’t be, of course. It was never that easy.

‘And what do you do after that?’ Huw said.

‘I don’t know. What do I do after that, boss?’

‘You bugger off out of it just as fast as your cute little legs will carry you.’

‘What about the woman? Fuchsia. Aftercare?’

‘Oh, aye.’

There was a lengthy, meditative silence. She imagined him staring down at his peeling slippers, their rubber soles smoking on the edge of the hearth.

‘You do need to separate it,’ he said eventually. ‘If there’s nowt particularly to support it at the house, you most likely are looking at a different problem. You said she was orphaned?’

‘Abandoned. She’s certainly had personal problems. Maybe the house brought something to a head?’

‘Possible. How was the blessing?’

‘Curious. There wasn’t the normal sense of relief afterwards. In fact, she looked up, as if something might have followed us into the church. Said something like, is something coming? Something like that. And laughed. I mean, it’s always a problem, isn’t it? You can never be quite sure when somebody’s winding you up.’

‘Happen include her in your prayers when you do the cleansing. Something moving around under the carpet, was that what you said?’

‘Dust sheets. I suppose a shrink would be talking about demons in her past that she’s covered up. Perhaps she just has a Gothic imagination: the wriggling under the sheets, the face of crumpled linen. She’s also obviously read a fair amount about healing and deliverance, because she knew exactly what she—’

‘Hang on … Gimme that again, lass.’

‘What?’

‘Crumpled linen. A face of crumpled linen?’

‘That’s the image Fuchsia claims she saw when she turned around from the wall she was plastering. Poetic, in its macabre way. Although this would’ve been crumpled plastic.’

‘Aye. Very literary,’ Huw said. ‘But, then, not surprising, really. It’s a quote.’

‘What?’

‘M. R. James. Author of classic ghost stories in the 1900s?’

‘Yeah, I know who M. R. James is.’

‘I can even tell you which story it comes from. “Whistle”.’

‘What are you—?’

‘“Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is the one about the university professor haunted by a malevolent entity which … I’d get hold of a copy if I were you, without too much delay.’

‘You’re saying …’

There’d been a book of James’s stories amongst Fuchsia’s collection in the caravan. Orange-coloured spine on the shelf by the wood stove. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.

‘All right, lass?’

‘Let me get this totally right. You’re telling me it’s an actual phrase taken from one of M. R. James’s ghost stories?’

Merrily dropped her cigarette in the ashtray and flopped forward, both hands around the old black phone.

Oh, bugger.

‘Bit of a coincidence, eh? If you have any problems finding the story, give us a call and I’ll scan a few pages and email them across.’

‘Yes. Thank you, Huw.’

Shit.

Merrily tipped the phone very gently into its rest. Gazing at her reflection in the dark mirror of the scullery window and into a too-familiar void.

8 Heresy

THIS JOB …

People learned what you did, and envisaged desecrated graves, chalices of blood, night-long spiritual struggles with an indelibly black metaphysical evil, his satanic majesty, The Beast 666.

Their disappointment, almost invariably, was palpable.

So you’ve never really had to rescue anyone from actual demonic possession?

To which you’d shrug and smile awkwardly and admit that, rather than the coils of the Old Serpent, it mostly came down to the spirals of the subconscious mind.

This was the void – the thought that there might, in the end, be nothing there that psychology would not be equipped to explain. That people like Siân Callaghan-Clarke might just be right about the relevance of what you were doing.

The dark night of no-soul. What, in the end, you feared most, and a dampener on the spirit, as Merrily drove down into the Unknown Border, using a route she’d never travelled before: sunken lanes below the bare, abraded hillsides, wind-whipped, twisted trees.

Still England. It had to be; there, below the road, was the River Monnow, which was the border, failing to be crossed by a smashed and collapsing footbridge, fenced off, with a sign that said: Danger.

But if this wasn’t Wales, neither was it truly Herefordshire, not with names like Bagwllydiart on the signposts. Rural Wales – almost all of it, now – was designated tourist country, while Herefordshire’s own tourist country was Ledwardine and its neighbouring black and white villages in the north of the county and the lushness of the Wye Valley in the south.

The Unknown Border was only about an hour from Ledwardine and, sooner or later, it would be joining the New Cotswolds.

Not for a while, though.

And it certainly had never been, nor ever would be, East Anglia.

Jane had them all, natch. The Penguin Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1862-1936).

Sitting up in bed last night, under the blackened oak beams, with her dressing gown around her shoulders and the tawny owls fluting in the churchyard, Merrily had read ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, first published in 1904.

She couldn’t possibly have read it before or even seen it on TV, because it really wasn’t something that would ever allow itself to be forgotten, this story of Parkins, an academic on a golfing holiday on the Suffolk coast, and what he discovers there, and what discovers him.

Oh Parkins, says a colleague before he leaves, if you are going to Burnstow, I wish you would look at the site of the Templars’ preceptory and let me know if you think it would be any good to have a dig there in the summer.

Templar preceptory. The only immediate connection with the village of Garway. Preceptory: the Templars’ term for one of their communities, a description apparently unique to this curious order of medieval warrior monks.

But Burnstow, according to the author’s own foreword, was based on a seaside town the whole width of England away.

Merrily had followed Parkins into the Globe Inn, where the only room available had two beds. Sure to be significant. As for the Templars’ preceptory, all Parkins had found there was a series of unpromising humps and mounds … Oh, and – in a cavity near the possible site of an altar – an old whistle.

On one side of the whistle it said:

QUIS EST ISTE QUIVENIT

Who is this who is coming?

If you weren’t aware of Garway Hill, it meant that you were either on or immediately below it. She couldn’t see a radio mast, only a row of houses like battered ornaments on a shelf, overlooking – a couple of fields away on the right – the Church of St Michael.

Welcome to GARWAY. Please drive carefully.

Like you had a choice in lanes like these.

Sanded by the low October sun, the church was aloof, in its own shallow valley. Saturday afternoon, nobody about. The folder containing the directions and the key of The Master House lay on the old Volvo’s passenger seat. The house was supposed to be within sight of the church tower, but only just. You should look for two white gateposts, one broken in half.

Later, maybe.

If at all. Thanks to Huw Owen and M. R. James, the case was as good as closed. Fuchsia was making it up. Delusion was another possibility, but probably less likely, now.

A right turning brought Merrily to the entrance of the churchyard. No concessions here to the advent of the motor vehicle. Parking tight into the hedge, she climbed out through the passenger door, walking up, in jeans and a Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt, into a curving and shaded path leading to a mellow enclosure. A haze of greens and ambers, an awning of birdsong.

If you wanted to know about a place, always check out the church first. Feel its disposition: benevolence or disapproval or, more often nowadays, a mildewed resignation.

This one, she thought, was … aware of her.

She walked up into the bumpy churchyard, under the tower: plain stone, simple pyramidal hat. And yet …

Its origins are almost certainly Celtic. The earliest record of a monastery on the site is in the seventh century. Sophie’s notes, from the internet. But it is not until the arrival of the Knights Templar in 1180 that the history of Garway Church opens out … and, at the same time, closes in.

You could, apparently, still see the foundations of the original circular nave which the Templars had created in imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – the extent of Merrily’s knowledge of Templar architecture. She took a step back, looking up. The tower was square and unadorned, stonework like oatmeal biscuit, the lower half darker as if it had been dunked in tea. Two vertical slits near the top on each of the four sides were disconcertingly like all-round eyes. Watchful and mildly amused.

‘I suppose, seen from above, it does look rather as though its neck has been broken. Like a chicken’s.’

Merrily half-turned. He was standing alongside her, in walking boots and fishing hat, a two-tone nylon hiking jacket over his faded blue shirt and clerical collar.

‘You see, the tower originally was entirely separate from the body of the church, which is why it’s set at such an angle. The gap was bridged at a later date, as you can see. The arrangement would have looked less odd, one imagines, in the days when the nave was circular. I’m so sorry …’ He bowed his head. ‘Didn’t mean to sneak up. It is Mrs Merrily Watkins, I hope. Walking home from the pub when I saw the car, and you did look rather purposeful behind the wheel.’

‘Mr Murray.’

‘Teddy.’ He bent down to her, putting out a hand. ‘So glad. I realize this must be a terrible bind for you, but … heavens, the gossip this sort of thing engenders. Usually among people who enter a church no more than twice in their lifetimes, carried in and out both times. Not really what one looks for in retirement.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

Actually, the Reverend Murray didn’t look old enough, or unfit enough, to be retired. Handshake firm, eyes vividly blue, and skin tanned to the colour of Garway’s lower tower around the stiff white beard and the high bland dome of his forehead.

‘Never been a particularly pastoral sort of chap, Merrily. When the girl turned up here asking for protection … sanctuary … I confess I was completely thrown.’

‘You mean … Fuchsia?’

‘Fuchsia. Indeed, yes.’

‘She came here to the church? To ask for sanctuary?’

Merrily remembered now. The bloke at Garway, he was no help at all.

‘Sanctuary is perhaps too emotive a word. The builder chap was waiting in the entrance in his truck. The girl was rather vague, disoriented. I thought she was … Anyway, I brought her in and said a short prayer. You know the routine.’

‘What did you think she was?’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘You said when you first saw her you thought she was …’

‘Ah.’ Murray straightened up, hands behind his back, looking up at the tower. ‘I thought – I’m afraid – that she was probably on drugs. A small percentage of the visitors here do tend to be what we used to call potheads. Found a chap the other week completely out of it, lying with his head under the holy spring. Harmless enough, I suppose, but not what one expects to see in a country churchyard.’

‘Where’s the holy spring?’

‘My, we are getting down to business, aren’t we? I’ll show you, if you like. I can show you everything.’ Teddy Murray extended an arm to steer Merrily towards the church entrance. ‘It appears to be my principal role in this community: guide and interpreter. Much more my sort of thing – I have to say, with no little shame – than dispensing spiritual succour. Historian by inclination, I’m afraid. And the walks.’

‘The walks?’

‘For the guests. My wife’s guest house tends to cater for people who like to tramp the hills in all weathers. I compile the handy route-maps. And I’m available to go along and point things out, when required. This …’ The Rev. Murray turned and flung out an arm towards the guardian hills ‘… is God’s own weekend retreat. I always say that. In fact it’s in Beverley’s brochure. God’s Own Weekend Retreat.’

‘Very, erm …’

‘Presumptuous, I suppose. But there had to be some reason for the Templars to favour it, remote spot like this. Was it divine guidance? Sorry!’ He put up his hands. ‘One gets carried away. Do you want to know all this? I only ask because, as someone’s bound to tell you, the Master House does seem to be contemporaneous with the Templars’ occupation of Garway – although, despite the title, it does not appear to have been the home of the preceptor, or master.’

‘So you didn’t go back to the Master House? With Fuchsia?’

‘Well … no.’ Murray looked bewildered. ‘She didn’t ask me to. Hardly my property to intrude upon. Anyway, my impression was that you couldn’t have dragged her back and, in the absence of a full-time minister here, I wasn’t sure who it would be best to inform. And then events overtook me, and so— Paul. How are you?’

A man in jeans and a heavy work-shirt had come out of the church, leaning on a stick. There was a motorized wheelchair on the path outside; he stood looking at it with no great love. Teddy Murray took a step forward, and the man raised his stick.

‘Bugger off, eh, Teddy?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Not ready for him yet, boy. Gonner have another bit of a walk round. Come back for the thing.’

Teddy nodded. They watched the man making his way up the path. He couldn’t be more than mid-thirties, thick brown hair.

‘MS,’ Teddy murmured. ‘What kind of luck is that for a farmer?’ He opened the church door, stood aside for Merrily. ‘You been in here before?’

‘Never.’

No sooner were they inside than he’d closed the door, blew out a breath.

‘Didn’t want to introduce you, Merrily. Difficult. That’s Paul Gray – he and his wife …’ Teddy lowered his voice ‘… sold the Master House to the Duchy.’

‘Oh.’

‘Long story. Bad feeling. Not for me to … Still a bit of a newcomer. As, of course, is Paul, which is one of the problems.’ He laughed. ‘You can be here for three generations and they’ll still call you a newcomer. Couple of families go back to the Norman Conquest. So …’ Extending an arm. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s … unusual.’

‘More than you know.’

Merrily nodded, taking it in. It was quite small but lofty and airy and filled with rosy light. The chancel was framed by a classic zigzagged and serrated Norman arch, wide and theatrical. Red velvet curtains were drawn across it, as if what lay beyond them was not for the unprepared. Something rare and sacred, Grail-like.

Or perhaps a body in a coffin?

Merrily shook herself. Too much M. R. James.

Teddy Murray nodded towards a banner with a crusader kind of cross, red and gold on white, hanging from the pulpit.

‘Still a major presence, then?’ Merrily said.

‘The Templars? Yes, I suppose they are. Do you know much about them, Merrily?’

‘Erm …’ She looked up at the dark brown wooden ceiling, curved like the bottom of a boat and decorated with a small and regular galaxy of white stars. In a pocket of her jeans, the mobile phone began to vibrate against her left thigh. ‘Maybe not as much as I ought to.’

Merrily placed a hand over the phone, and Teddy Murray leaned back against a pew end, looking down at her with what you could only describe as a beneficent smile, evidently all too ready to do what he was better at than dispensing spiritual succour.

‘It’s sometimes difficult to separate the truth from the lurid speculation,’ she told him. ‘Never a problem for my daughter.’

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that few of us like to countenance the idea that the Templars guarded the secret of the bloodline of Christ through his supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene.’

‘Oh, she’s happy enough with that idea. I suppose what bothers me most is the idea of the Templars – or someone – guarding the secret resting place of his bones.’

‘Let’s not talk of heresy.’

‘Let’s not.’

‘None of it, however, makes the Knights Templar less interesting,’ Teddy Murray said. ‘Follow me, Mrs Watkins.’

9 Funnies

WHEN MERRILY CLIMBED back into the car, the weather had changed; the sky had the deep grey lustre of tinfoil and a single slow raindrop rolled down the windscreen like a cartoon tear, and she just wanted to be home and lighting a fire.

She pulled out her phone. Lol would be on the way to his gig in Newtown, Powys, so it was more likely to be Jane.

It was neither, just a short text.

CALL ME.

MOB PLEASE

FB

A text from Frannie Bliss? If it was him, this was a first. Mobile would mean he didn’t want to take the call in the CID room. She found his number in the index, but the signal was on the blink, so she reversed out of the church entrance and drove away from the village, uphill, pulling into a passing place, winding up the window against a rising wind.

‘Nicely timed, Reverend,’ Bliss said. ‘You’ve caught up with me in the gents.’

‘I totally refuse to picture the scene.’

‘Not good enough, anyway. Too much of an echo. I’ll call you back. Just give me a couple of minutes to … finish up in here.’

Echo?

Merrily sat watching the sloping landscape losing its colours in the gathering rain, compiling a mental inventory of all the curios that Teddy Murray had revealed in Garway Church.

Beginning with the green man, the familiar stone face with entwined foliage, inexplicably found in churches. This one was in the chancel arch and, with those stubby horns, he wasn’t typical. There was also a cord or vine with tassels resembling fingers, so it looked like he was making a funny face at you, waggling his fingers at either side of his head.

What the green man had to do with the Templars Teddy couldn’t explain, but this was a Templar church so it must have had some significance.

Everything in a Templar church was significant. They’d moved on to the matching long stones set into the chancel steps, the altar steps and one window ledge – these identified by Teddy as the lids of Templar stone coffins, now part of the fabric of the church. Teddy laughing, in his element now, the historian, the tour guide.

‘Someone said you can throw the Templars out of the building, but you’ll never get the building back from the Templars.’

Giving her the primary-school version, for which she’d been quite grateful.

The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon: founded in the early twelfth century, the time of the crusades, ostensibly to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem. The King of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, had allowed them to establish their headquarters at the al-Aqsa mosque, believed to be the site of the original Temple.

They’d begun, it was said, with only nine members, led by one Hugh de Payens. Monastic soldiers, red crosses on their surcoats, growing over the next century into something internationally powerful, influential and very wealthy.

Too wealthy and too powerful, by the thirteenth century, for the King of France, Philip IV, and the pet pope he’d acquired, Clement V, accommodated at the time in Avignon. The French Templars had all been arrested in a series of simultaneous dawn raids on Friday, 13 October 1307, accused of a black catalogue of heresies.

‘Hang on …’ It hadn’t taken much calculation. ‘Doesn’t that mean it’s exactly—’

‘I’m afraid it does. Seven hundred years ago next Saturday. I was hoping we’d have a permanent minister in place by then, but it was not to be. It therefore falls to me to conduct some sort of memorial service for the poor chaps.’

‘You don’t sound totally enthused.’

‘It is so obvious?’

‘And the problem is … what?’

‘Fanatics, Merrily. The known facts about the Templars are relatively few – the amount of wild speculation has been quite monumental in recent years.’

‘The Da Vinci Code?’

‘And its source, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. All the preposterous theories undermining the central tenets of Christianity as we know it.’

‘Mmm.’

Everybody knew about it now: the alleged bloodline of Jesus from his alleged marriage to Mary Magdalene, the female disciple whose crucial role was supposedly written out of the scriptures by the Roman Catholic Church. Jane had been quite taken with the idea that the real reason for the suppression of the Knights Templar had been their guardianship of this secret knowledge … and the whereabouts of the tomb of Christ, unrisen.

Whether or not you accepted this, Teddy Murray had said, the charges against the Templars were surely made up.

‘Like many of those levelled at various abbots by Henry VIII’s people during the Reformation. What kings tended to covet most in religious organizations was their money.’

The last Grand Master of the Order, Jacques de Molay, had been burned alive in Paris, but the persecution had been less extreme in Britain, where most Templars had been allowed to join other monastic orders – except, apparently, the order of Hospitallers of St John to which the properties of Garway had been transferred.

De Molay was now seen as a martyr and Friday the Thirteenth … ‘Because of this? That’s the reason for the whole superstition and a bunch of slightly distasteful movies?’

‘Such is the received wisdom, Merrily. What rather bothers me is that the church promises to be packed. I’ve had letters from all kinds of organizations wanting to be represented – from Templar re-enactment groups to more … shall we say more sinistersounding societies.’

‘Like what?’

Teddy had said there seemed to be a number of occult-sounding groups whose rituals were supposed to be based on Templar practices. He said he didn’t know much about them. Merrily knew a little more, from Huw Owen’s reading list. Supposedly ancient formulae handed down through Renaissance magical orders and then developed by the fashionable fraternities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mainly bollocks.

‘Lucky the anniversary is going to be a Saturday, then,’ Merrily said.

‘You think that will change anything? I don’t. It’s their first opportunity in a century to commemorate the suppression – and a century ago few, if any, of these theories were in the public domain.’

‘Why here? There must lots of Templar churches all over the country. In fact—’

‘Actually, no,’ Teddy said. ‘Nothing so perfectly preserved. The London temple, for instance, was wrecked in the Blitz. There’s nowhere more authentic. Or more isolated and yet … get-at-able.’

He’d unlocked the tower, dark and starkly atmospheric with its funeral bier and a magnificent medieval oak chest hewn from a massive log.

‘Whose idea was it to have a memorial service?’

‘So many people wrote in, we couldn’t get out of it, Merrily. So I’m quite anxious that this business with the Master House should be dealt with before then. Do you think that will be possible?’

‘Before next weekend?’

‘Bad enough when the girl arrived. Wish I hadn’t been here.’

Merrily had been forced to say that she’d do her best to get it wrapped. And if Huw was right that might be on the cards. She’d asked Teddy where the Master House came into the picture. One of the Templar farms, he’d said, that was all. They farmed sheep, as did the Hospitallers after them.

As did the locals today. Not much had really changed in Garway, Merrily was thinking as the mobile chimed to indicate that DI Bliss had left the building.

‘Raining hard in the police car park, is it, Frannie?’

‘It’s not raining at all, and I’m not in the police car-park. I’m off the premises entirely, and if it was known I was calling you I’d probably have a tail.’

‘Sorry?’

Merrily was still thinking about the Garway Green Man who, having small, stubby horns, might be expected also to have a tail.

‘All right, listen,’ Bliss said. ‘I may be touching upon something you already know about, but why would the gentlefolk that humble coppers like myself used to call the Funnies suddenly have become interested in you?’

‘The Funnies?’

‘I’m thinking specifically of a feller in an unmarked room at headquarters who very occasionally creeps around this division when it’s felt that national security might be at stake.’

Merrily rubbed vainly at the condensation on the windscreen. Without the engine running, it kept re-forming under her palm.

‘You’re talking about the Special Branch?’

‘I hope you’re on your own using language like that.’

‘Frannie, are you actually saying the Special Branch are making inquiries about me?’

‘I’m saying nothing, Merrily.’

She scrubbed furiously at the windscreen, starting to put it together, and it was … it was beyond ridiculous.

‘What are you doing, exactly?’ Bliss said.

‘Trying to see out of the bloody—’ She sank back in her seat. ‘I’m looking into something connected with the Duchy of Cornwall’s investments in Herefordshire. Would that explain anything?’

A short silence, except for a car engine somewhere and a clanging that became duller. What sounded like Bliss moving away from something to a place of greater safety.

‘That would possibly explain it, yes,’ he said.

‘It’s nothing particularly contentious.’

‘With respect, Merrily, how would you know?’ Bliss paused. ‘You want to explain? Being as we’re old mates and those smart-arsed cloak-and-dagger twats get right up my nasal passages?’

‘Well …’ She thought about it, could see no harm. ‘All right. The Duchy of Cornwall have paid good money out of the Prince’s piggy bank for an old farmhouse which their favourite conservation builder is refusing to work on because his girlfriend says it’s haunted.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Sorry to disappoint. Obviously I’d like to be able to tell you that the vengeful spirit of Princess Diana’s been seen around Highgrove in a—’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘But that’s it, Frannie. That’s the lot. As far as I know.’

‘I see.’

‘You don’t, though, do you? Where’s the threat to national security in that?’

‘Maybe there’s more to it than you know.’

‘I’ve already been thinking along those very lines. These inquiries about me … is that still going on?’

‘I don’t know, Merrily. I’ve been off for a couple of days. I got this from Karen Dowell – now promoted to DS, by the way. They wanted your background, potted biog, any political connections and … Oh, yeh, they wanted to know about little Jane and her widely reported altercation with the Herefordshire Council over the proposed development of Coleman’s Meadow.’

‘Wha—?’

It was like yobs had strolled up and starting rocking the car.

‘Calm down, Merrily, it’s not so unusual. And it would’ve been pointed out by somebody fairly quickly that the kid’s a force of nature, as distinct from a rural terrorist.’

‘It doesn’t matter, it’s just—’ Merrily sat up, dipping into her bag for the Silk Cut packet. ‘The bastards! I mean, you know what else they’ve done, don’t you? Someone’s leaned on the Bishop, so that he’s actually freed me up to … to devote all my attention to a minor issue which, the way it’s shaping up, may not even be Deliverance business.’

‘The Bishop’s told you this himself?’

‘Bishop Dunmore is conveniently away in London until Tuesday.’ She lit a cigarette, opened the window to let out the smoke, which blew back in a blast of wind from Garway Hill, wherever that was from here. ‘Sod this, I’m going home.’

‘You’re on this now?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Where?’

‘Garway Hill.’

‘Be a spectral sheep-shagger, then, would it, Merrily? All right, just remember we haven’t spoken and you know nothing of this. If you need to speak to me, call the mobile. Using your mobile. As distinct from the vicarage landline.’

‘You actually think—?’

‘I’m just being careful.’

‘Bloody hell, Frannie.’

‘Stay cool, Merrily.’

Switching off the phone, she felt hunted, exposed, focused-on … and just tired, brain-dead. Sod it. She took two angry drags on the cigarette and then put it out. Pulled her waterproof jacket from the back seat and walked out into the rain.

A lumpy grey mattress of cloud meant that she couldn’t see the village or the church tower or anything much apart from the wind-combed coarse grass on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. Supposed to be going back to check out the Master House, but what was the point?

As Merrily was leaving the church, Teddy Murray had said, We, ah … we have a room for you, Merrily. I’m not sure what you …

I don’t know, to be honest, Teddy. I don’t live that far away, and I can’t really understand why the Bishop feels the need to inflict me on you.

Oh, I think we both know what that’s about. They want you to put the lid on something … firmly. As regards my interpretive role, I suspect Mervyn Neale might have had a hand in it.

The Archdeacon. Been with the Bishop when the issue was raised by Adam Eastgate.

Mervyn and I have known one another for some time. He refers people to us – people looking for an open-air holiday. Not on a percentage basis, I have to add.

Well, she’d said finally, I have a few things to sort out at home, so maybe I could ring you tomorrow.

Pleasant enough guy, but Merrily had been glad to get away. His interpretive role suggested he’d been appointed by the Archdeacon as her native guide. Useful in some ways, but there was a sense of remote control that she didn’t like.

The rain gusted into her face and drummed on the side of her hood. She let it come, shivering, thinking of the wind that had suddenly arisen when Parkins, the academic in the M. R. James story, had blown, experimentally, on the old whistle he’d found in the remains of the Templar preceptory.

Who is this who is coming?

A figure like wind-blown rags pursuing Parkins along the deserted beach. Making its final, most memorable appearance at night in his room at the Globe Inn. Arising under the sheets of the second bed and standing in front of the bedroom door, with its arms outstretched and its intensely horrible face of crumpled linen.

Although the dust sheets were plastic, you got the idea.

Merrily turned back towards the old Volvo, with the wind behind her.

10 Signposts

USING THE MOBILE from the scullery – this was insane – she called Sophie at home. Sophie’s husband, Andrew, answered, humphed a bit. Andrew, the architect and cathedral widower – they even lived in one of the cloisterish streets behind the close.

‘Merrily.’ Sophie had picked up an extension, Andrew humphing again and hanging up. ‘I was half-expecting you to call this afternoon – the Bishop having suggested, in an email from the Palace this morning, that a preliminary written report might be quite useful.’

‘And you thought, odd – he’s never previously particularly requested a report of any kind on anything relating to deliverance.’

‘Correct.’

It was almost dark, the grey-brown sky melding with the churchyard wall outside the scullery window. Still no rain here. Maybe Garway Hill had its own climate.

‘Well, Sophie, it might all be academic now, anyway.’

Merrily put on the desk lamp and explained in some detail about Huw Owen’s M. R. James revelation. Never any discretion problems here; next to Sophie, the grave was Broadcasting House.

‘So the woman made it up?’ Ice particles in Sophie’s voice. ‘The whole thing?’

‘Either that or her perceptions have been conditioned by her reading habits, which seems unlikely.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Presumably you’ll go back and ask her.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘That should be revelatory.’

‘I’m almost looking forward to it, in a rather unChristian way. I’ll try and get over to Monkland tomorrow after the morning worship. With or without a Special Branch tail.’

‘I’m sorry, Merrily – I may have misheard.’

‘You didn’t.’ Merrily looked at the cigarettes on the desk, decided against. ‘Sources close to Gaol Street intimate I’ve been checked out by the security services. Jane, too – the heritage terrorist.’

‘This is purely because of your unsolicited proximity to the business interests of the heir to the throne?’

‘I don’t know, Sophie.’

‘But you’re a minister in the Church of England.’

‘That makes me harmless? Think about it.’

‘The amount of surveillance in this country is becoming quite terrifying.’ A pause. ‘Incidentally, have you had a chance to read Canon Dobbs’s file on the Prince of Wales?’

‘Not really. It’s on the desk here. I’ll try and have a look later.’

‘Well,’ Sophie said, ‘I realize we live in troubled times, but I think this has gone far enough. Leave it with me.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I think I’m going to call the Bishop in London.’

Sophie was probably the only person, outside his immediate family, with the Bishop’s mobile number.

‘I’m not sure that would really—’

‘Will you be in tonight, Merrily?’

‘Yeah, but I don’t want to ruin your night. Or Andrew’s.’

‘Merrily,’ Sophie said with some severity. ‘This is what I do.’

Merrily sighed, pulled over the old black box file and opened it up. Unwrapped a wodge of A4 copier paper, held together by two rubber bands, the top page splashing two headlines.

CHARLES IN HEALTH STORM

TOP DOCS SLAM PRINCE OVER SUPPORT FOR ‘QUACKS’

Both dated back to the early 1980s when the Prince of Wales, newly married to Diana Spencer, had been appointed President of the British Medical Association, the conservative and seriously cautious organization representing doctors in the UK.

The BMA was not into alternative therapy. In fact, the hatred of the association for practitioners who had not been through the System knew few bounds.

You would have thought these guys might have known better than to appoint, as their figurehead, a man whose famously healthy family had a long history of consulting osteopaths, homeopaths and various spiritual healers.

The first warning came at a dinner for the new President. In his speech, the Prince said how touched he’d been that the BMA should have even considered electing him, adding, You may, for all I know, wish to get rid of me after six months.

The laughter, Merrily thought, must have been hollow. She’d thought she remembered the row, but was now realizing that she couldn’t have fully absorbed it, nor been knowledgeable enough at the time to recognize its significance.

One of the cuttings had an edited transcript of Charles’s speech to the BMA.

It was dynamite, basically.

One of the least attractive traits of various professional bodies is the deeply ingrained suspicion and downright hostility which can exist towards anything unorthodox. I suppose it is inevitable that something which is different should arouse strong feelings on the part of the majority whose conventional wisdom is being challenged.

I suppose, too, that human nature is such that we are frequently prevented from seeing that what is taken for today’s unorthodoxy is probably going to be tomorrow’s convention …

Perhaps we just have to accept it is God’s will that the unorthodox individual is doomed to years of frustration, ridicule and failure in order to act out his role in the scheme of things, until his day arrives and mankind is ready to receive his message … a message which he probably finds hard to explain himself but which he knows comes from a far deeper source than conscious thought …

Merrily lit a cigarette. Amazing to think he’d actually said that to a bunch of doctors.

It got better – or worse, depending on your angle of approach.

Through the centuries, healing has been practised by folk healers who are guided by traditional wisdom that sees illness as a disorder of the whole person, involving not only the patient’s body but his mind, his self-image, his dependence on the physical and social environment, as well as his relation to …

Bloody hell.

… the cosmos. I would suggest that the whole impossible edifice of modern medicine, for all its breathtaking successes, is, like the tower of Pisa, slightly off-balance.

You could imagine some of Britain’s leading physicians having to leave, at this point, to check their own blood pressure. Especially if they looked closely at the Prince’s sources.

Merrily found an interview with Charles, which Dobbs, or someone, had marked down the side in what looked like felt pen.

It seemed that Charles – how had she avoided knowing about all this? – had become interested, apparently via the writings of Carl Jung, in the power of dreams, coincidence and what he called signposts.

In other words, the idea that individuals were open to guidance from … elsewhere – the collective unconscious. The cosmos. That they should be alert for psychic pointers.

One of which had apparently manifested while Charles was in his study attempting to draft his speech to the BMA. He was quoted as saying.

It was the most extraordinary thing. I was sitting at my desk at the time and I happened to look at my bookshelf and my eyes suddenly settled on a book about Paracelsus. So I took the book down and read it, and as a result I tried to make a speech around Paracelsus and perhaps a relook at what he was saying and the ideas he propounded. Wasn’t it time to think again about the relationship between mind and body, or body and spirit?

Paracelsus. Rennaissance physician and … herbalist?

Also, an occultist of the Renaissance period. A magician.

Deep waters.

11 Because it was Raining

‘AS ABOVE …’ Jane did the arm movements ‘… so below.’

At least she seemed happier, the sullen face replaced by the concentration face. It always paid to consult Jane. They’d built a log fire in the parlour and eaten from trays, and Jane had produced one of her paperbacks with planets and pentagrams on the front.

‘Paracelsus was just the name he adopted, OK? His real name was – this is interesting – Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, from which the word bombast is derived. Because that’s the kind of guy he was. Always throwing his weight about and losing his cool. Got up people’s noses.’

‘Can we get back to “As above, so below”?’

‘Paracelsus said the human body was like a microcosm of nature … or the universe. Whatever. It’s the basis of astrology. He had this theory that your main internal organs corresponded to individual planets? It made serious sense in the Renaissance. Still does, in a way.’

‘He was an occultist, though?’

‘Ah, see, that’s a typical Church attitude.’

‘Terribly sorry.’

‘He didn’t think of himself as an occultist – like, nobody did. It was science. Science and philosophy. It was like high learning. Cutting edge. Like, is Stephen Hawking an occultist? I can see where Chazza was coming from on this. Homeopathy operates on this microcosm basis, doesn’t it?’

‘I believe it does.’

‘So you could consider Paracelsus as the father of alternative medicine. Except it wasn’t alternative then, it was—’

‘Cutting edge. State of the art.’

‘Exactly. So does this mean the Duchy of Cornwall’s going to be setting up a centre for alternative healing at Garway?’

‘No, it … there’s probably no connection at all. I’m just interested in why the late Canon Dobbs was interested in the spiritual development of Prince Charles.’

‘Be a good place for it, though, Mum.’

‘Garway?’

‘With the Knights Templar. A lot of this started with them and their excavations of the Temple of Solomon. Most ritual magic, raising of spirits, all this, goes back to Solomon. And maybe the whole microcosm/macrocosm thing.’

‘Sometimes I wish you didn’t know all this,’ Merrily said, and Jane smiled.

Happy … ish. Down on the rug, arms around her knees, watching baby flames scurrying from log to log. She’d be happier still if she knew she’d been checked out by the Special Branch, but perhaps this wasn’t the time to enlighten her.

‘I was over in Coleman’s Meadow this afternoon,’ Jane said.

‘I thought it was all fenced off.’

‘It is, but Coops has a key to the temporary gate.’

Coops?

Jane turned from the fire, picked up Merrily’s look.

‘Neil Cooper – the guy from the County Archaeologist’s department?’

‘Oh.’

‘Actually, he’s pretty pissed off. Been trying to leave for a while – too young, obviously, to be tied to local government. He’d like to be a field archaeologist. But he’s afraid of what will happen at Coleman’s Meadow if he quits now.’

‘In what way?’

It had gone suspiciously quiet since the initial excitement over the discovery of the three long-buried megaliths in Coleman’s Meadow. Jane had been euphoric about the stones, because the field was bisected by what she – and the great visionary Alfred Watkins before her – had considered to be a seminal ley line linking Ledwardine Church with the Iron Age earthworks on the summit of Cole Hill, the village’s holy hill.

Hills again. Always hills.

‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘You know about rescue archaeology, right?’

‘This is where archaeologists are given a specific period of time to excavate an area scheduled for development?’

‘It’s what most archaeology is these days, thanks to the rampant overpopulation that’s suffocating Britain.’ Jane scowled. ‘Time we scrapped all family allowance if you’ve got more than two kids, so it’s like … three kids, no more benefits. Four kids, compulsory sterilization.’

‘That’s your personal concept, is it?’

Jane’s politics could veer from extreme left to extreme right and back again within seconds. Extreme being the only constant.

‘I don’t know. We’ve got to do something, haven’t we? Like I don’t care what colour people are or what they worship, as long as there are less of them.’

‘Fewer,’ Merrily said.

‘You clergy are just so pedantic.’

‘But to return to Coleman’s Meadow …’

‘Yeah, well, obviously it’s our beloved councillor, Lyndon Pierce. Gomer should’ve buried that bastard with the JCB while he had a chance.’

‘Gomer almost wound up in court, as it is.’

‘He wanted to go to court. He told me. He wanted his day in court, so he could stand up and publicly accuse Pierce of corruption and get it into the papers. If you say something in court, you’re like immune from getting sued for slander?’

‘Mmm.’ It was interesting, the way Pierce had declined to give evidence and the police inquiry had been dropped. ‘However—’

‘OK.’ Jane plopping down next to Merrily on the sofa. ‘The situation is that Pierce and some of his fascist friends in the council’s so-called cabinet want it confined to rescue archaeology. Which means Coops is allowed to get the site excavated and learn what he can from it and then they have to give it back. Like, take the stones away or something, and then give back the Meadow? So all that’s left is like maps and stuff in a report?’

‘And the housing estate goes ahead?’

‘Which would be crass, soulless and a total crime. As well as, obviously, destroying the ley.’

‘I’m with you there. What can we do to stop it?’

‘OK, well, there’s a small lobby inside the council, supported by the heritage guys and the tourist guys, suggesting that if the stones were reerected they’d be the best prehistoric remains in the county and a major tourist attraction.’

‘So potentially better for the local economy than an estate of four-bedroomed houses with double garages.’

‘Means we get coachloads of tourists, but still the lesser of two evils.’

‘So what are you proposing to do?’

‘Nothing.’ Jane’s face had gone blank. ‘Coops says it’s best if I do nothing at present. Don’t give Pierce any ammunition.’

‘And you … you’re going along with that?’

‘Coops is a very persuasive guy. In his quiet way.’

Merrily watched Jane selecting a new dry log for the fire, considering the options in the basket: the ash or the oak, fast burn/slow burn.

‘Don’t suppose Eirion called?’

‘Wouldn’t know,’ Jane said, insouciant. ‘Haven’t had the mobile switched on all day.’

The call came just after ten. Jane was watching Law and Order, the one about sex crimes, Merrily’s eyes closing when the mobile chimed on the arm of the sofa.

‘Sophie rang me,’ the Bishop said. Doleful.

‘Two seconds, Bernie.’

Merrily took the mobile into the kitchen, where the cold air was like a razor. The Aga had swallowed two gallons of oil a day, but it had had its compensations.

‘I suppose a grovelling apology’s due,’ the Bishop said. ‘All I can say is that I kept nothing from you. Not intentionally.’

‘That’s reassuring. Kind of.’

‘And I’m still no wiser, Merrily. Although, yes, I am now inclined to believe that the initial information I was given by Adam Eastgate is … probably incomplete.’

‘Incomplete. That’s a very elastic word, Bernie.’

‘Whether any concealment of information is down to the Duchy I would personally doubt. I don’t think Adam’s the sort of man to play a double game. However I, ah … Sophie did say she’d felt obliged to tell you that we’d also had a call from, ah …’

‘A private number in Canterbury?’

‘Yes, well, whoever it was from, I was advised that the best way of dealing with this might be simply to allow my Deliverance consultant to devote herself to uncovering what there is be uncovered. Without the usual constraints on her time.’

It was Canterbury who wanted the investigation?

‘So – let’s just clarify this, Bernie – there is more to it than a decidedly iffy haunting.’

‘I’m assuming there is. I honestly do not know.’

‘But someone in Canterbury does.’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Bernie, we’re not somehow … indirectly working for the security services, are we?’

‘Good God, Merrily …’

‘All right. Suppose I was to conclude that the ghost story was a fabrication.’

‘You can do that?’

‘It’s a possibility.’

‘Then please do it,’ the Bishop said. ‘Soonest.’

Afterwards, she felt exhausted, but couldn’t settle. With the half-eight Eucharist tomorrow, she ought to be in bed, but …

She made two mugs of hot chocolate, took one to Jane in the parlour then came back, sat down in the scullery and reopened the phone. Rang Felix Barlow and asked if it would be OK to come and speak to Fuchsia tomorrow.

‘I know it’s late, Felix, but I need to fit it into my fairly rigid Sunday schedule. I’m sorry.’

‘Hang on, would you?’

Felix didn’t sound happy. Merrily heard him moving back into his tin home, and thought there were raised voices. She drank some chocolate, lit a cigarette, still unsure of what to make of this. It wasn’t unprecedented, but – if you excluded council tenants desperate to be rehoused – it was rare for anyone to invent a ghost story. Rarer still for anyone to transpose a relatively well known fictional story into a real situation.

After just over a minute, Felix returned and told Merrily that Fuchsia didn’t want to talk to her.

‘No offence to you, Mrs Watkins. She gets like this. Maybe leave it a few days?’

‘A few days?’

‘We’ll get back to you, all right?’

‘No. I’m afraid it’s not all right. I’m under a certain pressure to get this sorted one way or—’

‘You’re under pressure …’ She heard the clangs of him hurriedly clambering down the caravan steps into the night, then his voice, upclose and frayed. ‘Tell the Duchy we won’t be touching that job now under any circumstances, all right?’

‘But that—’

‘Yeah, I know this is me burning my boats with them for ever, and that’s some kind of madness, and I’m going to regret it for a long time, but that’s the size of it.’

He was panting.

‘Has something happened, Felix?’

‘We’ve told you everything we can. Why do you need us any more?’

‘Because …’ Merrily really didn’t want to say any of this to him, she needed to put it directly to Fuchsia, but it was late and she was overtired, and … ‘… because I’m not sure you have told me everything.’

‘I have to go now.’

‘Where is she?’

‘In the … bathroom. Doing her hair. She got soaked.’

‘Tell me one thing. Has anyone else been to talk to her about that house? Or to you?’

‘Why would they?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You think Fuchsia’s holding something back, is it, Mrs Watkins? Or do you think she’s lying?’

‘I think we need to discuss it again, that’s all.’

‘You think she’s lying, Mrs Watkins?’

Oh God, why had she made this call? Why hadn’t she thought about it first? Or maybe prayed for advice, sat in silence and listened to the voice inside.

‘How’s she been, Felix, since the blessing?’

Through the scullery’s open doorway, the kitchen clock ticked off the seconds of silence in the phone.

‘I think she’s been back,’ Felix said.

‘Back?’

‘To Garway. To the Master House. I had to go and collect some timber for the barn, and when I got home she wasn’t here. Gone off in the van. When she got back it was dark. She said she’d been shopping in Hereford. Which is something she never does on a Saturday. Hates crowds.’

‘How do you know she went back to the house?’

‘Because we still got a key to the place. When I said I’d take it back to the Duchy, Adam said no hurry. Likely still thinking we might go back to the job one day.’

‘And the key was missing?’

‘It’s back now. And, no, she won’t talk about it.’

‘All right,’ Merrily said. ‘How about I come over now?’

‘No!’

‘I think it might help.’

‘It might help you, it wouldn’t help me. If she won’t let me go back to the bloody place because it’s so evil, why did she go there again? You explain that?’

‘I can’t. I wish I’d known. I was in Garway this afternoon, too.’

‘At the house?’

‘No. I was at the church. I didn’t go to the house.’

‘Why not?’

Good question. Because I’d decided I was being misused, under-informed, short-changed. Because I was pissed off. Because it was raining.

‘If I’d known she was there, I would have, obviously.’ Christ, what a mess. ‘Felix, can you ask her to ring me? Can you tell her it’s very important?’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and get her to call you.’

‘Any time. Doesn’t matter how late.’

‘Yes.’

On which basis, Merrily took the mobile to bed and kept waking up in the night, thinking she was hearing its electronic chimes.

Although she never did.

12 Ghosts and Scholars

USUALLY, AFTER A Eucharist, you were aware of subtle ambient changes: a charge of energy, a sharpening, a recolouring – on a fine day, shards of sunlight spilling between the apples in the rood screen, raising shivers of gold dust in the air.

This was not a fine day. When Merrily unlocked the church, under a sky like a gravestone, the interior had been unresponsive. Sixteen people had since taken Holy Communion. Afterwards, nothing much seemed to have altered. Or so she felt, blaming herself and her headache.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Shirley West said in the vestry, cradling the empty chalice like a sick baby. ‘I’m so terribly clumsy. I just get nervous, I’m afraid, Merrily.’

‘But you didn’t knock it over.’

‘I very nearly did.’

‘Shirley, I nearly do most weeks. I’ve stopped worrying about it.’

You were often told that a Mass was supposed to be like perfect theatre, conducted with precision and …

‘Grace,’ Shirley said. ‘I have no grace.’

‘Shirley …’ Merrily shook her head. ‘That’s not true.’

Which was a lie, but what could you say?

Shirley had come to live in Ledwardine a few months ago and had shown up in the church before the removal van had left. She was in her early forties, overweight, divorced, a bank manager in Leominster. She had family here. She’d come to virtually every service, moving up rapidly to giving out hymn books, arranging flowers and assisting, eventually, with the Eucharist.

Altar girl.

‘Someone said in the shop,’ Shirley said, ‘that there’s been talk of those old stones they found in the ground being put back up.’

‘Mmm. It’s a possibility.’

Merrily looked up from the chalice into deep-set brown eyes full of worried fervour.

‘Shouldn’t we be doing something to try to stop it?’

‘Stop it?’

‘The raising of heathen stones opposite our church?’

‘Erm … well, you won’t see them from the church, will you, Shirley? You’ve got the market square in between, and the market hall. Besides, I suppose they were here first.’

‘And duly toppled over and buried. There was a Christian purpose to that, surely.’

‘I think it was probably more to do with three big stones getting in the way of ploughing and haymaking.’

Evidently nobody had told Shirley about Jane’s pivotal role in the discovery of the Coleman’s Meadow stone row. Parish life. Complications everywhere.

‘The thing is, Shirley, quite a lot of medieval churches were actually built on the sites of prehistoric stone circles and burial chambers.’

‘Exactly. Burying the evil under the house of God, surely.’

‘I’m not sure if pre-Christian necessarily means evil.’

‘Our Lord was born into a world full of darkness. He was the Light of the World.’

‘And, in fact, looking at it in a practical way, most archaeologists seem to think the early Christians put the new churches in the places where local people were used to worshipping.’

‘I’ve never heard that.’

Shirley looked at her, eyes narrowed.

Merrily sighed.

‘Nothing’s ever quite as it seems,’ Huw Owen said on the answering machine. ‘Give me a call, would you?’

Priests rarely phoned one another on Sundays.

Merrily had twenty minutes before having to go back for the Morning Service. She’d only slipped home in the hope of finding a message from Fuchsia or, at least, Felix – she’d been worrying about it on and off since waking into the grey light. Suppose Felix had gone back into the caravan and told Fuchsia that she was being accused of lying?

Before calling Huw back, she tried ringing Felix. Phone switched off. For possibly the first time ever, she took the mobile back to the church with her, calling Huw from a damp bench in the graveyard, catching him in his Land Rover, between parishes. The signal wasn’t brilliant.

‘… Might be pu … oincidences …’ Huw on the hands-free, breaking up. ‘… You should know … James collection … foreword mentions … based … ordshire … call you back.’

‘Mobile, Huw – on the mobile!’

Getting interested glances now from fragments of congregation filtering through the lych-gate. In most parishes, the Morning Service was as good as it got, congregation-wise, Evensong having been dumped through low attendance. Here, mornings had actually been overtaken by the Sunday-evening meditation, even though the rumours of healing had long since died down. It was satisfying, a good reason to be able to be here tonight rather than at Mrs Murray’s guest house in Garway.

Merrily waved to James Bull-Davies, a fairly impoverished remnant of the Ledwardine squirearchy, and his partner Alison Kinnersley who, when she and Jane had first come to Ledwardine, had been living with Lol. Always faintly troubled, Alison would return tonight for the meditation – alone. James wasn’t into silence.

A nervous sun tested the clouds, and the phone chimed.

‘“The Stalls of Barchester”,’ Huw said.

‘Sorry?’

‘M. R. James mentions in his foreword to the collected edition that his Barchester Cathedral was partly based on Hereford Cathedral. I’d forgotten that. Herefordshire was also the imagined setting for one of the later stories, “A View from a Hill”.’

‘I thought they were always set in East Anglia.’

‘Sorry to complicate matters, lass.’ No engine rattle now; he’d parked up somewhere. ‘But it seems that James – Monty, as he was known – came to relate to rural Herefordshire extremely well. You could even say it became a refuge for him.’

‘You didn’t know this before?’

‘Of course I didn’t, else I’d’ve mentioned it.’

‘How come you know it now?’

‘How does any bugger know owt these days? I Googled Montague Rhodes James and found an unusually erudite website called Ghosts and Scholars, devoted entirely to the man. How much do you know about him?’

‘Hardly anything. He was an academic, wasn’t he?’

‘Divided his career between Eton – his old school – and King’s College, Cambridge. Son of a clergyman, brought up in the parish of Livermere in Suffolk – moody sort of place, apparently, very inspirational. In later years, he reckoned there was only one area to match it.’

‘Let me guess.’

‘Aye. Specifically, the countryside around Kilpeck and Much Dewchurch. Four miles from Garway? Five?’

‘Thereabouts.’

‘The trail, however, does lead to Garway itself.’

Merrily pulled her cloak over her knees, wanting a cigarette. Watching an unexpected sunbeam stroking a mossy headstone. Where was this going?

‘Monty never married,’ Huw said. ‘But he did have a close, though presumed platonic, female friend called Gwendolen McBryde. Widow of his good mate James McBryde, a talented artist, illustrated some of the early stories. Gwen was pregnant when he died, very young, and gave birth to a daughter. Mother and daughter moved to Herefordshire.’

‘As youngish widows with daughters sometimes do.’

Oh, sod it. She pulled her bag onto the bench, found the cigarettes. ‘Seems Monty would visit Gwen on quite a regular basis,’ Huw said. ‘Finding the countryside much to his taste, like I said. Monty was very fond of old churches and extremely knowledgeable about them. No big surprise that he’d visit Garway.’

‘If you say so.’

‘This is the point. After Monty’s death, Gwen published a collection of his letters – Letters from a Friend. In one of them, James recalls a particular visit to Garway in, I think, 1917. Actually, there are two mentions of Garway, but one just in passing. The one you need to know about … Well, I’ve already emailed it to you. Best if you read it when you get back home.’

‘Huw, for heaven’s sake—’

‘The woman who edits the website, Rosemary Pardoe, says Monty appears to have had, quote, a peculiar experience at Garway, the nature of which is, quote, tantalizingly unclear, but which he writes about with typical spooky Jamesian humour.’

‘Saying …?’

‘Read it when you get back. I don’t want you thinking I’m embroidering it, winding you up. Some places just attract this kind of thing.’

‘Huw—’

‘Have to be off, anyroad. I’ve work to do, and so have you.’

And then he wasn’t there, the bastard.

But if he’d thought it was so important, surely he’d have told her.

13 Couldn’t Make it Up

AFTER THE SERVICE, when everybody else, even Shirley West, had gone, Merrily had a furtive cigarette with Gomer Parry behind the tower. Asking him what the feeling was in the village about the resurrection of the old stones in Coleman’s Meadow. Maybe most people would actually prefer a new estate of executive homes?

‘En’t so much that, vicar,’ Gomer said. ‘Few more fancy houses en’t the argument. Tip o’ the muck-heap. It’s who’s in bed with Lyndon Pierce. Who wants to see the village turned into a town? Supermarkets and posh restaurants. And who’s on young Janey’s side.’

‘And yours, Gomer. Let’s not forget that.’

‘Ar. I’ll be doin’ my bit, sure to, to see Pierce gets his arse kicked, vicar.’

The light was back, big time, in Gomer’s wire-rimmed glasses, his white hair topping his weathered brown face like the froth on beer. Councillor Pierce had said Gomer Parry was halfway senile, an old joke who ought to be in a home. Gomer would need to be a long way into senility to forget that.

‘Harchaeologists needs a JCB and a driver,’ he said. ‘Won’t be no charge from me.’

‘That’s very generous of you, Gomer. I’m sure Jane’ll see it gets back to the right people. Erm … you know Felix Barlow?’

‘Barlow …’ Gomer adjusted his cap, screwed up his eyes. ‘Builder?’

‘From Monkland. Knows Danny.’

‘Ar. Met the feller a few times over the years. He don’t build no mock-Tudor rainbow-stone crap. Don’t build nothin’ new at all, far’s I can see.’

‘Good bloke?’

‘Oh, straight, I reckon. Liked a drink at one time, so I yeard. That’d be when he was married.’

‘When was that?’

‘Eight years, nine … I lose track. But I remember his wife. Oh, hell, aye, I remember her, all right.’

It started to rain. Merrily leaned into the base of the tower.

‘You know Lizzie Nugent?’ Gomer said. ‘Widow, up by Bearswood?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Husband left her with two kids and a twenty-acre smallholdin’. I was over attendin’ to some ditchin’ one day, early March it’d be, when the gales blows the roof off Lizzie’s cowshed. Smashed to bits. So I calls a few people, see if we could get some galvanized, cheapish, and somebody puts me on to Felix Barlow. He comes round in his truck that same day, with these sheets off a shed he’s took down, and we fixed the ole roof between us. Took us n’ more’n a few hours, and when he found out Lizzie en’t got no insurance he was very reasonable about it, was Felix, no question ’bout that.’

Gomer ignited his roll-up, hands cupped around it.

‘We’re havin’ a cuppa with Lizzie afterwards when up comes this bloody great white BMW. Woman inside leanin’ on the horn till Felix goes out. Givin’ him hell, we could all of us year it. Folks in the next village’d likely year it – all this, what you doin’ yere when you oughter be up at Lady So-and-So’s? What you think you are, bloody registered charity?’

‘This is Mrs Barlow?’

‘Good-lookin’ woman, mind. But it en’t everythin’, is it?’

‘Erm … no. I suppose not.’

‘Barlow goes around helpin’ too many poor widows, where’s the next BMW comin’ from?’

‘You met the woman he’s with now?’

‘The hippie? Never met her, no, vicar.’ Gomer waved his ciggy. ‘Feller’s a bit alternative hisself, mind. Builder as en’t into cheating his clients, that’s alternative for a start, ennit?’

Merrily laughed.

‘Knows the job, too. Could be in an office, collar and tie, directin’ operations. But he knows that money en’t everythin’, no more’n a goodlookin’ woman is.’

‘She is a good-looking woman, as it happens.’

‘The hippie?’

‘And not much more than half his age.’

‘Oh well.’ Gomer shrugged, teeth crushing the ciggy. ‘Just cause a feller spends all his time shorin’ up ole buildings, don’t mean all his tools is obsolete.’

Merrily blinked.

Merrily didn’t know what M. R. James had looked like. The only face she could see in her mind was Huw’s, framed by hair like dried-out straw, mounted on an age-dulled dog-collar and settling into a complacent conjuror’s smile.

We must have offended somebody or something at Garway, I think.

‘I wondered why you were so anxious,’ Jane said, ‘to borrow the M. R. James.’

Always a danger with emails. She’d been on the computer in the scullery, researching some aspect of stone rows, when Huw’s mail had come through. She’d read it, looked up the references, been into the Ghosts and Scholars website.

‘You couldn’t make it up,’ Jane said, still sitting at the desk.

Impressed, excited. Merrily walked to the window. Oh hell.

‘Mr James could make it up, though, couldn’t he? I mean, that was what he did.’

‘Oh, Mum. It was a letter to his friend. Someone who obviously knew exactly what he was on about. He doesn’t spell it out, does he? He knows she understands his point of reference.’

‘Mmm. Possibly.’

Merrily read the rest of it.

Probably we took it too much for granted, in speaking of it, that we should be able to do exactly as we pleased. Next time we shall know better. There is no doubt it is a very rum place and needs careful handling.

No, the kid was right. You couldn’t make it up. She could see why Huw had insisted on emailing the whole page from the Ghosts and Scholars website. Something had happened to M. R. James at Garway. Either something faintly curious which James’s serpentine imagination had inflated into something disturbing. Or something seriously disturbing which James, in this otherwise routine letter to a female friend, was deliberately making light of.

The editor of the website had made a kind of pilgrimage to the area to track down the settings for the main Herefordshire story ‘A View from a Hill’. Although the story seemed to be set in the general area of Garway, the village itself didn’t appear to feature, even under a different name.

‘I love this guy.’ Jane was glowing. ‘Greatest ghost-story writer ever. Because he just … well, basically, he just … he didn’t do ghosts.’

‘What did he do, then?’

‘Entities. He did entities. Creeping things. Indefinable things, exuding … malevolence. In traditional settings, like old churches and deserted shores and places with burial mounds. According to the website, he once said there was no point at all in writing about the supernatural if it wasn’t evil.’

‘Doesn’t that kind of invalidate the Bible?’

‘He meant fiction, Mum.’

‘Wow,’ Merrily said, ‘there’s a step forward for you.’

‘I mean complete fiction. Anyway, he wasn’t exactly anti-religious. His old man was a vicar, in Suffolk. He was brought up in the Church. He might even have gone that way himself if he hadn’t got into academic research and teaching and stuff.’

‘And did you know he came to this area?’

‘Well, no! I just didn’t! It’s incredible.’

‘But you’ve read all the stories.’

‘Erm …’ Jane fiddled with the mouse. ‘Not all of them, to be completely honest.’

‘You totally love him, but you haven’t read all his stories.’

‘OK … mainly, I’ve just seen the TV versions.’

‘I don’t remember us watching them.’

Remembered them being on. Usually around Christmas, and mostly before Jane had been born.

‘Erm … I didn’t mean us.’ Jane’s face had clouded. ‘I saw them at Irene … Eirion’s. His dad had a complete set of the videos, and we watched most of them one night, one after the other. It was … it was pretty good. We were on our own and we scared ourselves silly.’

‘That must’ve been a long night. Watching them all.’

‘Not that long.’ Jane looked away. ‘They only lasted half an hour each. Or a bit longer.’

Oh, Jane, Jane …

Merrily guessing they’d watched them tucked up together in Eirion’s bed, when his parents were out.

‘Anyway,’ Jane said. ‘The TV versions were obviously set in East Anglia or somewhere. To be honest, I bought the book but I only got round to reading a couple. And I didn’t read the foreword, otherwise I’d’ve known about him coming here. Obviously, I’m now going to read everything. I’m going to find a biography. It’s amazing.’

‘Mmm.’

It was certainly a complication. Did Fuchsia know M. R. James had been to Garway? It was not unlikely.

‘So …’ Jane sat back, hands behind her head. ‘What’s your angle on this, Mum?’

‘Oh, it … it’s just somebody else who scared themselves silly.’

‘In a house belonging to Prince Charles?’

‘Did I tell you that?’

‘Not directly, but I just happened to click on history …’

‘And found the Duchy of Cornwall website.’ Merrily nodded, resigned. ‘Right.’

‘Didn’t mean to snoop, but this one was interesting. And you know it never goes any further, with me. Not any more.’

‘I’d’ve told you all about it, if you’d asked.’

‘I know, but … Anyway. Sorry. So, like, the house is at Garway, then. With the Knights Templar church. How did you get on to M. R. James?’

‘Because … there’s a mention of a Templar preceptory in one of his stories – “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”.’

‘That one is really scary. In the TV version, this professor, he’s not what you’d call sociable and he just goes around kind of mumbling to himself on this grey beach, and then he—’

‘Do you know of any more? Any more stories mentioning the Knights Templar?’

‘No, but I could email this website and ask this Rosemary Pardoe, who obviously knows, like, everything about M. R.’

‘OK,’ Merrily said. ‘Why not?

Whatever had happened to M. R. James at Garway, he didn’t appear to have used it in a story, but perhaps he had, in some less obvious way. If he’d been at Garway in 1917, it would have to be one of the later ones.

And Fuchsia … whatever Fuchsia had seen or imagined or invented at Garway, she’d linked it to a story set in East Anglia, albeit with a Templar connection.

James had talked of next time. Next time we shall know better.

You sensed a residual fascination.

‘Holy shit …’

‘Jane—’

‘Look at this …’

Jane had read further down, to where Rosemary Pardoe was passing on her own observations about Garway Church and its environs. Merrily leaned across.

‘The dovecote?’

‘Mum, did you know about this?’

‘Sophie mentioned it. It’s apparently the finest of its period in the country.’

‘Oh, yeah, that too … Now, read the rest. Go on.’

‘It was built by the Knights Templar?’

‘Probably. And then rebuilt by the Hospitallers who took over at Garway. Go on … read it.’

Jane stood up. Merrily sat down.

As well as the ancient Garway church itself with its (semi) detached thirteenth-century tower, there is a huge dovecote on private property on the adjoining farm …

Its doveholes number a worrying 666.

‘Oh.’

‘When are you going back?’ Jane said. ‘And can I come?’

When she went upstairs to change into jeans and sweatshirt, Merrily took the mobile with her and called Felix again from the bedroom.

Unsure, now, of how best to approach this. It was all subtly turning around, M. R. James himself becoming a player, seventy or so years after his death.

As for the dovecote … if it had been there for the best part of eight centuries, it was a bit late now to start worrying about the implications of 666 dove-chambers.

‘The person you are calling is not available. If you would like to leave a message …’

‘Felix, it’s Merrily. Could you or Fuchsia please call me. I need to talk about the …’ She hesitated. ‘The face of crumpled linen.’

Crumpling her cassock for the wash basket, she put on jeans and the Gomer Parry sweatshirt. The alarm clock said one-forty. Meditation was seven-thirty. She swallowed two paracetamol in the bathroom, came back downstairs to find Jane still hanging around in their chilly kitchen.

‘Not got a meeting with, erm … Coops today?’

Jane shook her head. She looked less happy, her face a little flushed.

There were crossroads in her life.

‘Do you want to drive, then?’ Merrily said.