The Fabric of Sin

14 As Above …

WHAT JANE KNEW about the Templars came, of course, out of paganism.

Those difficult months when she’d been a teenage goddess-worshipper, slipping out into the vicarage garden at night to make her devotions to the Lady Moon. Partly a rebellion thing – OK, understandable in an intelligent, imaginative kid who’d been dragged away to the unknown village where her mother had become a low-paid, low-level employee of the boring, set-in-its-ways, male-dominated, hierarchical Church of England.

Jane’s paganism: partly about giving Christianity a good kicking.

Merrily watched her driving, back straight, hands textbook on the wheel, eyes unblinking. Remembering the all-time-low, a couple of years ago, with the heat of the old Aga at her back, a white-faced Jane rigid in the kitchen doorway, and their relationship trampled into the flagstones.

Nobody gives a shit for your Church. Your congregations are like laughable. In twenty years you’ll be preaching to each other. You don’t matter any more, you haven’t mattered for years. I’m embarrassed to tell anybody what you do.

The rage had evaporated, tensions long since eased, but Jane’s pagan instincts remained – tamer now, certainly, but still feeding something inside her that was hungry for experience; up in her attic apartment she was still reading books about old gods.

‘Like, for centuries it’s been accepted that the Templars were the guardians of arcane secrets – including the Holy Grail. I mean, who better? They were spiritual warriors. They put their lives on the line to protect sacred truths. They were like … the SAS with soul?’

‘Who says the SAS have no soul?’

‘Unlike the Templars, however, they’re not known for their monastic celibacy,’ Jane said.

They’d driven in from the east, less of a back door to Garway and better roads for Jane, who was hoping to take her driving test before Christmas. The sun was low and intense, a searchlight spraying the yellowing leaves on the turning trees. When you weren’t driving, you got a more spectacular overview … or underview, maybe; all you could see of Garway Hill itself was the top of the radio mast on its summit.

Changing down for a sudden incline, Jane let the clutch slip.

‘Sorry …’

‘It’s OK. Take your time.’

Jane, red-faced, pulled the car out of its shudder, the Volvo wheezing and protesting like an old dog being dragged out for a walk by a child who didn’t understand.

‘So if The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail concept is that the Grail is actually the suppressed feminine principle as, like, enshrined by Mary Magdalene, who was Jesus Christ’s other half … and don’t look at me like that, Mum.’

‘You don’t know how I’m looking at you, your eyes are firmly on the road.’

‘I can feel the self-righteous hostility.’

‘It’s not self-righteous and it’s not hostility. It’s just that all that’s been discredited. Even the authors are now saying they were just testing a theory.’

‘It doesn’t change the fact that Mary Magdalene, whether or not she was Mrs Christ, represents the goddess figure which male-dominated Christianity suppressed.’

Jane’s debating skills had become formidable, but how many times had they been here?

‘Look … I accept that there may be a hidden feminine principle. What I don’t accept is Jesus and Mary Magdalene being an item, starting a bloodline. For which, when you look into it, there’s no real evidence at all.’

‘Aw, Mum, why do you have to deny the poor guy a sex life?’

‘There you go. The guy. If he was just a guy, just another prophet who didn’t rise again, didn’t ascend into heaven … if you want to deny his divinity…’

‘I don’t want to deny anybody’s divinity, I’m into divinity big time. But I don’t see why women shouldn’t have a share of it, whether it’s Mary Magdalene or the Virgin Mary.’

‘We won’t argue now,’ Merrily said. ‘Take this bit slowly.’

Maybe she ought to be driving instead. The lanes were proving unpredictable, and there were more of them than she’d figured. More to Garway, too, than you imagined; flushed by the low sun, it seemed like a remote and separate realm. Like Cornwall was to England. Maybe the Duchy had recognized that aspect.

Jane glanced at a signpost which seemed to have been twisted round, so that Garway was pointing into a field.

‘So Garway and Garway Hill are like separated, right?’

‘Looks like it. I thought the church and a few cottages nearby were the centre of the community, but apparently not. You get these separate clusters … kind of disorienting.’

After half a mile or so, the landscape broadened out and they were into a random scatter of modern housing and an open stretch of common with a children’s play area. Across the lane from the common was a pub of whitewashed stone with a swinging sign: a full moon in a deepening twilight sky.

THE GARWAY MOON.

‘Cool sign,’ Jane said. ‘Artistic. Kind of pagan.’

‘Why does the moon always have to be pagan?’

‘You tell me. Does the Bible have much to say about it?’ Jane relaxed into the driver’s seat. ‘This is very much my kind of place, Mum. It’s like frontier country. On the edge.’

‘It is frontier country. Those hills are Wales.’

‘I actually meant frontier in the deeper sense. The Knights Templar move in, monks with horses and swords, and they stamp their presence on the whole area. Infuse it with mystery. I mean like, why out here? Unless … maybe it was considered a really good, obscure place to conceal secrets, practise arcane … practices.’

‘Or they were just given the land. Maybe no better reason than that.’

‘There’s always a better reason,’ Jane said.

‘For you, flower, there always has to be.’

‘Don’t call me “flower”. And don’t tell me you’re not curious, too.’

‘I can be curious without having to subscribe to the whole fashionable Gnosticism thing.’

Jane slowed, as the road sloped past a modern-ish primary school on one side and a run-down village hall on the other.

‘I don’t see what’s so wrong with Gnosticism. It’s just saying that faith is not enough. The Gnostics wanted to know. They wanted direct experience of the reality of … something out there. God. Whatever. I don’t see why you have a problem with that.’

‘Anyway …’ Not now, huh? Too weighty. ‘… I’d’ve thought you’d lived in the sticks long enough to know it’s absolutely the worst place to keep a secret.’

‘Yeah, now. But in medieval times, when almost nobody could read.’

‘Including the Templars. Most of the Knights Templar seem to have been illiterate.’

‘Mum, they were international bankers! People could stash money at one preceptory and withdraw from another.’

‘Since when did banking demand literacy?’

‘OK, then, maybe this was just where they came to carry on their own form of Gnostic worship, which the straight Church would see as heresy.’ Jane pulled the Volvo over to the grass verge to let a tractor get past. ‘Was that all right?’

‘Except you should’ve signalled first, to let him know what you were doing. And why are we going up here?’

Inexplicably, Jane had taken an uphill right.

‘Sorry. I thought …’

‘I think the church was straight on down the hill. Never mind, carry on.’

It didn’t matter. Merrily suddenly wanted to hug Jane. If the worst you had to deal with was theological debate …

‘You OK, Mum?’

‘Mmm.’

She felt the pressure of tears, deciding that when Jane wasn’t around she was going to ring Eirion on the quiet, find out what had gone wrong between them. Just wanting the kid to be happy.

‘This sort of location is actually more suited to the Cistercians,’ Jane said. ‘They liked to be way out on their own. But, see, that fits, too, because the Knights Templar were connected with the Cistercians. Through Bernard of Clairvaux? The top Cistercian fixer, smartest operator in the medieval Catholic Church?’

‘I know who you mean. I’m just impressed at the extent of your knowledge.’

‘It’s in the medieval history syllabus – just. Our history guy, Robbie Williams, it’s his period. So what happened, Bernard cleared up the problem the Templars had about being devout Christians and also having to kill people on a regular basis. Simple solution: he ruled that it was OK to kill non-Christians.’

‘Especially Muslims,’ Merrily said. ‘A medieval interpretation, which now seems to operate in reverse. What’s your point?’

‘Comes back to paganism again. Of all the medieval monastic orders, the Cistercians were the ones who most reflected pre-Christian religion. The old ways.’

‘Some sources might say that, but—’

‘Come on – natural successors to the Druids? Sheep farmers who liked relative isolation and were into ancient sites and earth-forces and sacred springs?’

‘Natural running water was very much prized in the days before taps,’ Merrily said. ‘And, sure, maybe they dowsed for it. That doesn’t mean—’

‘Garway Church has a holy spring, doesn’t it?’

‘It does. And if you can find somewhere to turn this car around we’ll go back and check it out. No, not there. Jane, keep your eyes on the—’

‘Did you see that sign?’ Jane’s head swivelling. ‘On the house?’

‘Mmm. I’m afraid I did.’

They’d passed a grey stone corner house which might once have been a pub and still had a big yellow sign on the side. THE SUN. A mystical golden sun, with a smug-looking, curled-lipped face and waving tendrils of radiance; below it were sunflowers and a naked figure on a horse. Merrily also noticed that the farmhouse almost opposite had a name plate: The Rising Sun.

‘It’s just an old pub sign, Jane, that’s all.’

‘Mum, it was like a giant tarot card. The Sun? And the Moon? This place had two pubs called The Sun and The Moon? That says nothing to you?’

‘I’m … reserving my opinion.’

‘I think I was probably guided to turn up this road.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘As above, so below,’ Jane said.

The holy well was at the bottom of the churchyard. Like most holy wells, it was disappointing. A trickle under the wall. Ribbons on a nearby bush, which could be down to either visiting pagans or local kids.

Jane crouched down, unzipping her white hoodie, holding cupped hands underneath the water. Merrily was reminded uncomfortably of the author Winnie Sparke, who had hung around the wells in Malvern, and what had happened to her.

‘Jane, you know how much I really hate doing the mother-hen bit, but that water …’

Jane looked into her cupped hands but didn’t drink the water. She smiled and dabbed some on her cheeks. Beyond the body of the church, the vertically-slit-eyed tower gazed down with what Merrily took to be a kind of benign cynicism.

‘If we go back to the church, we can see the outline of the original circular nave. Templar trade mark. Designed in honour of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem?’

‘On the other hand …’ Jane stood up and walked off to the edge of the churchyard ‘… if we go along here, we should be able to see the dovecote designed to commemorate the Beast 666.’

‘It’s on private land. We’d need to ask for permission.’

‘Not just to see it.’

Jane – why else was she here? – was already walking across a marshy-looking field towards the fringe of a farm with barns, storage tanks, a galvanized shed and some kind of stone silo. Merrily, wrong shoes, as usual – bugger – stepping uncertainly across a boggy bit, following a shallow stream, while slowly realizing that the stone silo on the edge of the farmyard clutter was probably what they were looking for.

She stopped and confronted it: a squat round tower, like a sawn-off, roofless hop-kiln. The fading sun balanced on its rim, Jane shading her eyes.

‘Doesn’t look very evil from here,’ Merrily said.

‘Why should it be evil?’ Jane turning in annoyance. ‘That’s just Christian propaganda. Anyway, recent translations of the Book of Rev from the ancient Greek suggest it might actually be six one six.’

‘Not being much of a Greek scholar, I may have to continue to be wary of 666.’

‘Whatever,’ Jane said, ‘it does suggest a kind of partly submerged mystical awareness, doesn’t it?’

‘It does?’

‘Sacred architecture.’

‘It’s a dovecote.’

‘Everything is significant. Another pointer to this whole hill being a store of arcane knowledge. I can’t believe Coops and his guys haven’t checked this place out. I need to ask him.’

‘Jane, I think—’

Merrily shut up. Some mothers with daughters, it was pregnancy, abortion, drugs. If the worst you had to worry about was your kid creating a fantasy landscape …

And Coops, of course. Maybe she ought to find out more about Coops.

‘Fantastic energy here, Mum.’ Jane began whirling around with her arms spread wide, eight years old again. ‘Can’t you feel it?’

‘Not to speak of, no.’

The sun had tucked itself under the rim of the tubular dovecote, the ground dropping into shadow, and Merrily was aware of a damp pattering, as Jane said, ‘You just don’t want to admit—’

And then was staggering back, something long and grey and damp surging between them.

‘God—’

Merrily lurching towards Jane through the wet grass, a woman’s voice crying out behind her.

‘Roscoe!’

When Jane sat down in the grass, it was on top of her, pinning her down, all over her face.

Tail waving, thank God. A woman with shoulder-length white-blonde hair threw down a short leather dog-lead.

‘You bastard, Roscoe!’

The dog shifted from Jane, looked back at the woman, seeming bemused.

‘Obviously thought she was offering to play with him,’ the woman said. ‘Is it racist nowadays to say the Irish wolfhound’s the stupidest bloody creature on four legs? You all right, darling?’

‘I … sure.’

Jane had struggled upright, holding Roscoe’s hairy head against a hip to prove that she wasn’t afraid of him. If there hadn’t been energy in the air before, there was now.

‘Teach you to stand there in a place like this,’ the woman said, ‘calling out the Number of the bloody Beast.’

15 Fearsome Tradition

THE WOMAN PICKED up the dog-lead. She wore an ancient Barbour, flayed almost white in places, full of holes and flakily at odds with her rose-pink silk scarf. Her face was long and thin-lipped, and older than the Barbour, but by how much was anybody’s guess.

‘If we’re on your land,’ Merrily said, ‘I apologize.’

Frowning at Jane, who was brushing herself down, smudged brown paw marks down the front of the white hoodie.

‘It isn’t my land, don’t worry.’ The woman patted her knee and Roscoe ambled over, and she attached his lead as a mobile phone beeped inside the Barbour. ‘Not that ownership of most of the land around here isn’t open to some kind of dispute. Excuse me a moment.’

Reining in the wolfhound, she dug out the mobile, pushed back her straight white hair and held the phone to an ear without turning or moving away.

‘Mr Hinton, good afternoon … No, not yet, I’m afraid. As you may not have noticed, it’s Sunday … Yes, indeed, I’m expecting the delivery in the next week and as soon as it gets here I shall bring it round … Yes, I guarantee you’ll love it. Guarantee it … Money back, yes, absolutely. We’ll talk again, Mr Hinton.’

The woman clicked off the phone, dropped it into a coat pocket.

‘Farmers. They think everybody works on Sundays. The columbarium, yes, why does it have 666 chambers? Not often spoken of locally. As you see by its situation, we tend not to advertise our antiquities.’

‘Why not?’ Jane asked. ‘It’s supposed to be unique.’

‘No idea.’ The woman smiled, exposing a dark and raunchy slit between upper front teeth, setting light to deep-set but vivid blue-green eyes. ‘But then I was merely born here. We tend, nowadays, to rely on outsiders – usually Americans – to explain all our mysteries. Where’ve you come from?’

Merrily told her Ledwardine, in the north of the county. Aware of time moving on, the need to take a brief look at the Master House before they left.

‘You’re no use at all then.’ The woman patted her pockets. ‘Haven’t got a fag on you, by any chance? Slim chance nowadays, I know.’

‘Actually, I have.’ Merrily reached down to her shoulder bag. ‘Only Silk Cut, I’m afraid.’

‘That would be perfect, m’ dear. Left my buggers on the mantelpiece, and I’m absolutely gasping. Thank you.’

She mouthed a cigarette and Merrily lit it for her and she swallowed a lungful of smoke, head tilted back to exhale it into the sky in the direction of the devil’s dovecote.

‘Lit up in the pub the other night in joyful contravention of the law. Chap looking at me as if I’d pissed on his shoes. Bloody government. How dare they?’

Merrily looked at Jane. Jane was wide-eyed and trying not to laugh.

‘Ledwardine, eh?’ The woman lowering her eyes to Merrily’s Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt. ‘And you evidently know the little digger chap with specs that you or I might use to track the canals on Mars.’

‘I didn’t realize Gomer worked so far out.’

‘Needed new field drains in a hurry – ditches overflowing. Quagmire. My regular chap had packed it in but absolutely refused to recommend anyone local. He’d worked for the Grays, you see, and, oh my God, you can’t work for the Grays and the Gwilyms. You were here yesterday with Murray, weren’t you?’

‘So fascinated that I came back.’

‘Thought so.’ Squinting at Merrily through the smoke and a frond of hair, nicotine-blonded, fallen forward, a worn elegance about her.

‘Bad penny,’ said Merrily.

‘Oh, I don’t think so, Mrs Watkins.’

And you thought the intelligence services in Ledwardine were fast. Merrily took a step back. The woman held up her cigarette.

‘Not habitually nosy. But living here, one learns there are things it’s as well to know about as not. So, yes, I do know who you are.’ She snatched another puff, blowing the smoke out sideways. ‘And what you do.’

‘Not exactly a chance encounter, then,’ Merrily said.

‘No. Sorry.’ The woman switched the cigarette to her left hand, putting out the right. ‘Morningwood. Mrs.’

Free-range eggs and honey and herbs. The woman who’d told Felix the Master House was unhappy.

They shook hands.

‘This is Jane. My daughter.’

‘Of course. Girl involved in a fracas with the wretched Council. I applaud you, m’ dear. Would have been there m’self, with a placard, but always too busy.’

Merrily sighed. ‘Mrs Morningwood, this is all very impressive—’

‘Darling, it’s not impressive at all. Truth of it is, Roscoe and I happened to be padding quietly through the church precincts yesterday afternoon when Murray was kind enough to identify you by name.’

‘You must’ve been … behind the church tower?’

‘No wish to intrude.’

Merrily imagined Mrs Morningwood flattened against the stonework with a hand around the wolfhound’s muzzle. Not that this would have been necessary; you couldn’t help noticing how docile and obedient Roscoe had become since being … set on Jane?

‘And the rest was down to Google. Directing me immediately to your Diocesan website. Deliverance? That’s really what they’re calling it nowadays?’

‘Mixed blessing, Google.’

‘Brass tacks, Mrs Watkins?’

‘If you like.’

‘All right.’ Mrs Morningwood flicked away an inch of ash. ‘Save some time, I ask you why you’re here. You say, what’s it to you, you prying cow? I then try to convince you that I might be able to assist in some way, being the nearest neighbour of whoever’s attempting to live in that benighted hovel at any particular time.’

‘The Master House.’

‘So-called. And now, interestingly – or mystifyingly, perhaps – in the ownership of the heir to the throne. Should we feel honoured, do you suppose?’

Merrily said, ‘Attempting to live there?’

‘If you were able to point to anyone who’d succeeded, you’d have a sight longer memory than me, m’ dear. Am I to understand you’ve been invited to subject the place to some form of exorcism?’

‘That’s probably overstating it. We haven’t even found it yet.’

‘Want to find it now?’

‘That was the original plan, but now we don’t have much time.’

‘Not much time is probably an advantage. An excuse to get out of there.’ Mrs Morningwood patted her thigh, and the dog crept close. ‘Follow me.’

The sun had been reduced to a reddening corona on the rim of the dovecote. They followed her back to where the Volvo was parked, up against the hedge on the edge of the churchyard. Then along the lane and into a lay-by concealing the entrance to a mud track.

All too easy to miss. Cigarette poking from her lips, Mrs Morningwood began pulling nettles away from the bars of a galvanized gate with her bare hands, a rural skill that Merrily had never mastered. Impressive.

‘Entrance seems to seal itself up in a matter of days, even at this time of year. Make of that what you will.’

‘Not you, Jane,’ Merrily said, and Jane smiled and moved alongside Mrs Morningwood at the jammed gate.

‘Mrs Morningwood, can I ask you something before I forget? Why were there two pubs around here called The Sun and The Moon?’

‘Before my time, child.’

‘I was thinking that the Knights Templar were well into astrology,’ Jane said.

‘Were they?’

‘You don’t know much about the Templars?’

‘Problem at Garway …’ Mrs Morningwood freed the gate, with a ferrous clatter, prising it from the post ‘… is separating fact from legend. You probably know the saying about the Garway witches. No? There’ll be nine witches from the bottom of Orcop to the end of Garway Hill, as long as water runs.’

‘And are there?’

‘To my knowledge … only me.’ Mrs Morningwood let loose a short, throaty laugh. ‘Herbs, darling. I grow various medicinal herbs. Make potions and flog them at the farmers’ markets, two fingers up to the diabolical EC regulations.’

‘Have you lived here all your life?’

‘Except for the twenty years or so when I tried to separate myself, before the damn place reached out its suckers.’ Mrs Morningwood pinched out the remains of her cigarette. ‘Mother passed along, leaving me the cottage, which tied in roughly with the divorce. Came back to recover. That was thirteen … no, fourteen years ago. God almighty. Shouldn’t’ve reverted to the maiden name, that was the mistake. Slotted myself back into a fearsome tradition.’

Jane looked at her, waiting for it.

‘Always be a Morningwood on Garway Hill, as long as badgers shit on the White Rocks!’ Mrs Morningwood exploded into catarrhal laughter and flung open the metal gate. ‘In you go.’

16 Watch Night

A SQUARE, RIDGED field, given up to docks and thistles. New thorn trees sprouting around the greying bones of the old. Woodland enclosing it on three sides hid many of the hills, and the only sighting point was the conical cap of the church tower.

‘So many folds and hollows,’ Merrily said. ‘Hard to be sure exactly where you are.’

‘You know Kentchurch Court?’ Mrs Morningwood’s arm, another of Merrily’s cigarettes at the end of it, was signposting a heavy canopy of oak woodland. ‘Down behind there. Home of the Scudamores. Normans who followed the Conqueror over here in the eleventh century. One of the sons married Owain Glyndwr’s daughter, and they’re supposed to have sheltered him when his rebellion went down.’

‘And the Master House is … where?’

‘Close. Over the ridge.’ Mrs Morningwood pushed the gate shut and plucked a twig from one of the holes in her Barbour, turning to Jane. ‘Suppose I might as well tell you – those pubs, Sun and Moon?’

‘Uh-huh?’

Jane stood on the mud track, a hand on Roscoe’s grizzled head. Getting better at containing her curiosity.

‘That’s only half the story,’ Mrs Morningwood said. ‘Used to be a third inn. Called, as it happens, The Stars.’

‘Wow.’ Jane blinked. ‘Really?’

‘And … if you continue past The Sun, you’ll come to a white house which also used to be a pub. With the, I suppose, equally celestial name of The Globe.’

‘Holy sh …’ Jane lost it. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘Go and look on your way home. There’s a small sign on the wall. The Globe.’

‘Four astronomical pubs in one small area? This is amazing, Mrs Morningwood.’

‘Yes, it is interesting, I would agree. When you’ve grown up with it, you don’t think. Part of the fabric.’

‘I’m sorry …’ Merrily kept on looking at the point of the church tower and the autumnal woodland glowing dully, like dying embers, under clouds the colour of old brick ‘… but did you say The Globe?’

At the first oblique sight of it, you thought of a fox dozing in the undergrowth.

Except they didn’t, did they? Not out in the open, by day. Foxes didn’t sleep like that.

They’d walked uphill for about fifty paces, cresting a rise with two oak trees on top, boughs locked like antlers, and then the house was in a hollow below them: sprawling side-on, low-slung and sagging in a frame of bleached oak, built of rubble-stone the muddy colours of Garway church. A tin-roofed lean-to had collapsed at one end, exposing arms of oak raised in a ragged V to the rafters.

There were the usual twentieth-century additions to the house itself, notably the dormers jutting from the old stone tiles, but you could see that they were already rotting – slates slipping, guttering hanging off, while the original oak endured.

‘Sort of Welsh longhouse in one of its incarnations,’ Mrs Morningwood said. ‘Barn or cattle shed attached. Are you all right, Mrs Watkins?’

‘I’m fine.’

If disoriented. Like she’d passed into a dream and then from one dream into another that was darker. The Globe: where did fiction begin? And why had Mrs Morningwood suddenly decided to pass on information that would make the place, for Jane, even sexier?

‘Nice job on the roof, actually, Mrs Watkins. Timbers patched rather than replaced, and he had the foresight to use second-hand stone tiles. New ones might’ve been disastrous. The chap was good. Pity he couldn’t stay.’

‘What’ve you heard, Mrs Morningwood?’

‘His girl was frightened.’

‘He told you that?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘You told him it was an unhappy house,’ Merrily said. ‘Would it be possible to explain further?’

Moving beyond the second oak tree, she saw a granary, with stone steps and a barn with a badly holed roof. Mrs Morningwood zipped up her cracked and fissured Barbour over the pink scarf.

‘Last time I was in there was nearly fifty years ago. I was nine years old.’

‘You lived next door and you haven’t been in for fifty years?’

‘“Next door”’s a relative term, darling. My cottage is six fields away, including one we let go to conifers, for purposes of concealment.’

‘So you wouldn’t see this house?’

‘Word is the Duchy of Cornwall wants to turn it into craft workshops, employing green energy. Good luck to them. I’ve nothing against Charles – been times I’ve even applauded the chap. Especially when he supports alternative remedies against the weasels of the medical profession taking their grimy little backhanders from the drug companies to cure us of non-existent ills. Cholesterol – who the hell invented cholesterol?’

Mrs Morningwood had sunk her fists so deeply into the pockets of the worn Barbour that you could see her knuckles through the holes.

‘Do you know what a watch night is, Mrs Watkins? Or was.’

‘Erm … maybe.’

‘Most places it had faded out by the end of the nineteenth century. Garway’s said to be the last part of Herefordshire to carry it on. Even so, it had almost vanished, even here, when it was reinstated by the Newtons.’

‘This was the family who’d bought the place from the Gwilyms?’

‘And how much do you know about that?’

‘Not much. That’s why I’m here. Learning history.’

‘Fychan Gwilym,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

‘Sorry?’

‘A name inevitably – and deliberately – mispronounced this side of the border. It all begins with Fychan. The Gwilyms, while not exactly marcher lords – being, of course, mainly Welsh – nonetheless had a substantial domain, and Fychan was their patriarch around the turn of last century. Notorious drunk, gambler, fornicator, wife-beater and, worst of all, a very bad farmer. Weekends, he’d take himself off to the fleshpots of Hereford and Monmouth. Weekdays, he’d be out hunting and gradually running the farm into the ground to pay off his debts.’

‘When was that?’

‘Early 1900s? Fortunately, one morning they found the bastard dead on the road to Bagwyllydiart. The eldest son far too young to take over, and the widow – much relieved, one imagines – rejected the local vultures, moved to a cottage on the edge of the village and shocked everyone by flogging the farm to the Newtons. From Off, Mrs Watkins.’

‘How far off?’

‘Over towards Ross, I believe. Well-heeled farming family, the Newtons, looking for a living for a second son. Gwilyms incandescent with rage. Hordes of them wriggling out of their holes. Imagine a raiding party of red-necked bastards, spitting and cursing – well, I exaggerate obviously, but such were the recriminations that the widow Gwilym found it expedient to leave the area altogether within the year.’

‘This house was so important to the family? Or was it the land?’

‘Oh, the house, principally. Ancestral family home, you see. Attempts to stop the sale, but it was legal, and once the Newtons were in they started buying more land – couple of fields here, bit of woodland there – gradually assembling a lucrative holding. Aware all the time, of course, of the Gwilym family closing in like Birnam Wood from the Welsh side – for many years in the ample shape of one Owain Gwilym, who had a farm near Skenfrith, ground extending almost to the border. Dedicated to getting the Newtons out and the Master House back. Not an ideal neighbour.’

‘Sounds like the seedbed of a classic border feud.’

‘Inevitably. Two farming dynasties head-to-head. Harassment … destruction of fences … smashing of gates … rustling of stock …’ Mrs Morningwood sniffed in contempt. ‘Farmers can be like children – petty bullying and breaking one another’s toys. Split the community down the middle. You were either for the Gwilyms or the Newtons. And the Newtons, during this period, had considerably more money and were generous to their local employees.’

‘Always helps.’

‘And they were clever. Always thinking of ways to weave themselves into the very fabric of the area, learning its psychology, absorbing its traditions – and using them. Which brings us back to the watch night. You remembered yet?’

‘I think …’ Merrily flicked a wary glance at Jane ‘… that it was about … keeping company with the dead?’

Mrs Morningwood folded her arms and hunched her shoulders, leaning her head back, as if to allow the memories to come sliding down like grain.

‘Specifically, Felicity Newton. Only ever remember her as an old woman. Must’ve been close to a hundred when she died in the 1950s – and not many people made the century in those days. Her son, Ralph, head of the family, decided to make an event of it – in theory, to allow everyone to pay their respects. One can see now that it was designed to work as a kind of ritual homage, binding the village and the neighbouring farms to the Newtons. All I know is, it haunted my dreams for years.’

‘You all had to see the body?’

‘Darling, if only it had stopped there.’

Mrs Morningwood pointed down to the Master House, where the skeleton of a porch had been half pulled away from the Gothic-shaped front door of whitening oak. She described a square hall just inside, which had also served as the living room. With a large inglenook, in front of which the remains of Felicity Newton had been displayed.

‘It must have been about eleven p.m. on a winter’s night – I was quite excited, I’d been allowed to stay up. We walked across the fields, my mother and I – just across here. People going in before us, all dressed in black, leaving their hurricane lamps outside. People who all knew one another, but no one spoke. I remember there was a fire in the room, kept very low, the only source of light, apart from the one candle. Like a grotto, a shrine. We were allowed to enter in ones and twos, and each time the door closed behind us, so that we were shut in with the corpse.’

Merrily saw Jane discreetly rolling her eyes.

‘First time I’d seen a dead ’un,’ Mrs Morningwood said. ‘The candle was in a saucer. Sitting in a mound of salt on a saucer placed on the chest of the corpse, which lay in its coffin on trestles in the centre of the room. The candle casting a quite ghastly light on the face. I remember – one of those frozen moments that resurface, for years, in nightmares – taking one look and being gripped by a horror that was physical, like a cramp in my stomach. Tried to run out, but then, from the shadows by the inglenook, a bigger shadow arose. Tessie Worthy, the Newtons’ housekeeper. A large and formidable woman. I remember, as clearly as if it was yesterday, Tessie Worthy, in her big white starched apron, rising up and intoning, in this low rumble of a voice, Everybody is to touch her.’

‘Gross,’ Jane said, hugging the wolfhound.

‘I remember my mother lifting me up and placing my hand on the withered cheek. I remember turning my head away when the smell wafted up at me – I’m sure if I went in there now I’d smell it again. Putrid. The faint but piercing stench of decay, mixed with the sickly smell of molten wax. I closed my eyes tightly. The face felt like the skin on a cold egg-custard.’

‘This is an old Celtic thing?’ Jane said, unfazed. ‘Like corpse candles?’

‘About keeping away evil spirits, m’ dear. A light must remain burning in the room where the corpse lies, up until burial.’

‘Until the funeral,’ Merrily said, ‘the spirit was supposed to be hanging around the house and shouldn’t be left alone. That was the belief, I think.’

She looked down at the house, some of its windows leaded and framed with rusted metal, others just holes, like the sockets of eyes which had been put out.

‘However, I do believe the Newtons used it as a kind of controlling device,’ Mrs Morningwood said. ‘Each hand on the dead cheek an unspoken gesture of allegiance. And, of course, almost everyone came – except, obviously, anyone called Gwilym.’

‘How often did that happen?’ Merrily asked. ‘These communal visits to the Newton dead.’

‘Twice? Three times? I don’t truly know. I left home in my twenties. Couldn’t wait to get out, to the big, exciting, non-superstitious city. By the time I returned, they’d moved out.’

‘Left the house?’

‘Built a new house, originally for a tenant, then improved and extended it, and then it became the family home. More convenient, easier to heat – or that was their story. The Master House was rented out, first to some people who tried to run a riding stables – and failed – and then to one of those 1970s good-life communes, posh kids with ideals but no morals. They’d gone, too, time I returned, and word was the Gwilyms were trying to buy it back. Gruffydd Gwilym, not a bad chap, actually, but the Newtons turned him away – rather see the house rot away than returned to the Gwilyms. And now, of course, there’s Gruffydd’s son. Suckarse.’

Merrily blinked, patting Roscoe, the wolfhound, who’d come to sit between her and Jane.

‘Sycharth, actually.’ Mrs Morningwood spelled it out. ‘Some of us do know our Welsh pronunciations but can’t resist taking the piss. Sycharth inherited earlier than expected, Gruffydd having been killed in one of those ubiquitous tractor accidents that occur on hill farms. Wouldn’t happen to Sycharth – man’s never even been on a bloody tractor. Big businessman, now, in Hereford. Property, restaurants. Latest is some abomination called The Centurion?’

‘I know it.’ Flash eatery on Roman Road. ‘He owns that?’

‘A reversal of fortunes for both families. The Gwilyms back in the money, hard times for the Newtons. Suffered terribly during the Foot and Mouth of 2001 – which, of course, the despicable government allowed to spread, to shaft the farmers the way Thatcher shafted the miners.’

Merrily nodded. You heard this all the time. A conspiracy theory that would last for at least a generation.

‘All governments are the same underneath. Final straw, though, for the Newtons. Farm was like a concentration camp after the war – smoke and death. And the Newtons – hardly the powerful family I remembered, and it didn’t get any easier. The boys wanted out, and that might’ve been the end of it, had the eldest girl, Roxanne, not married Paul Gray. Young farmer with ambition and enough family funds to buy in. Actually started to turn it around … before he was diagnosed with MS.’

‘Ah. I saw him. Briefly. Trying to avoid his wheelchair.’

‘He’s fighting. Cursed, though. Farm was cursed. People still talk like that, as I’m sure you know.’

‘And the feud?’

‘Never went away. Like a live electric wire under the ground, and periodically someone would strike it with a spade. Sycharth pretends it’s all history. When the word leaked out about Paul’s illness, he immediately offered to help by buying back the Master House and surrounding land. Which might’ve been tempting if he hadn’t been a Gwilym.’

‘Didn’t want to know?’

‘But I think it did make them realize that this might be a good time to sell … to the right buyer.’

‘Ah.’ Merrily nodded. ‘Perhaps a respectable outside buyer with plenty of money and no possible link to the Gwilyms?’

‘I don’t know the details,’ Mrs Morningwood said, ‘but it was clearly the Grays who made the approach to the Duchy of Cornwall.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Knowing how keen the Duchy were on Herefordshire at the time, having recently bought Harewood Park, not a dozen miles away.’

‘Clever.’

‘Oh, they’ve always been clever, Grays and Newtons both. If rather unlucky.’

‘And how do the Gwilyms feel about the Duchy?’

‘One can only imagine. All right then, darling …’ Mrs Morningwood squeezed out her cigarette, tidily pocketing the stub. ‘If you want to go into the house, I won’t detain you any longer. But at least you know some of the background.’

‘Yes. Thank you, Mrs Morningwood.’

‘You have a key?’

‘A very big key.’ Merrily could feel its outline bulging her bag. ‘Only problem now is, I’ve a church service to take at seven-thirty, back in Ledwardine.’

‘Time for a peek, surely. I’m sure your God will protect you. Come along, Roscoe.’

‘You’re not coming?’

‘Hens to get in before nightfall. Besides, I think I told you – I never go there.’

‘Because you actually believe it’s haunted or for some other reason that you … maybe don’t feel able to share?’

For just a moment, Mrs Morningwood looked almost thrown. Then she smiled.

‘I trust the dog, Mrs Watkins. Once got carried away, in pursuit of a bunny, found himself within yards of the ruins. He froze for a moment – absolutely froze – then made the most extraordinary noise and came running back to me like the wind, tail well down. Walked pitifully to heel all the way home.’

She attached the leather lead to Roscoe’s collar and then held out the looped end, first to Merrily, then to Jane.

‘Go on – try him. See what happens.’

Jane looked at Merrily.

‘Wouldn’t be fair,’ Merrily said.

17 The Inglenook

A YEAR OR so before moving to Ledwardine, Merrily had helped take the funeral of a youngish woman with psychiatric problems, wife of a local head teacher. Probably suicide but passed off, by a kindly coroner, as accidental death.

Up in Liverpool this had been, when she’d been a curate, and there’d been an open coffin, in the American tradition. And that had bothered her, and the fact that it bothered her was also worrying. Was she squeamish? Immature? Surely it was good to be as open as possible about death. Took away the fear. Touch a corpse, you’ll never be afraid again.

They’ve made her look so composed, the husband had said. After all her suffering and her confusion, I want everyone to see how together she looks.

Together, yes. Like an expensive doll in a white padded gift-box. A classy ad for the embalmer’s art, but you couldn’t believe it had ever enclosed an animating spark.

This was the problem: the underlining of the finality of death, the erasure of the spirit, a lasting image of the recently departed in eternal rigid repose. Where was the promise of freedom, the energy of release?

Standing in the ruins of the Master House porch, gripping the big, rust-brown key, Merrily was still unsure how she felt about public displays of mortality. But one thing was certain: a single, eerie experience as a child would hardly be enough to keep someone as world-hardened as Mrs Morningwood at bay for a half a century.

‘Weird about the dog,’ Jane said.

‘Maybe.’

‘You think she was winding you up? You could’ve just taken her up on the offer, walked him down here yourself.’

‘Wouldn’t have proved anything. Most dogs don’t like being suddenly taken away from their owners on the end of a lead. Perhaps she knew how he’d react.’

‘Honestly …’ Jane scowled. ‘You’re always so suspicious of people. Is that really good for a vicar? I mean, I liked her.’

‘I liked her, but I’m not sure how far I’d trust her. Everybody has an agenda, and she’d targeted us. There were things she wanted me to know. That’s suspicious.’

‘And you a Christian.’

‘Yes, it’s very sad.’

Down in the hollow, the air was already purpling with dusk, the birdsong withdrawing into the trees. Two sparrows flew out of the eaves. Merrily looked at the oak front door.

‘Makes you wonder why these Gwilyms wanted it back,’ Jane said. ‘It’s going to cost a fortune even to patch it up.’

‘I can understand that – if it’s the family home since way, way back. And if this guy Sycharth owns The Centurion, he’s certainly got the money.’

The house looked heavier close-up, less vulnerable, some of its lower stones like boulders. Jane picked up a stone tile fallen from the porch and propped it against the wall.

‘So these Gwilyms are obviously going to be seriously pissed off about the Newtons or the Grays or whoever cut this deal with Charles’s guys behind their backs.’

‘Having to sit there on the other side of the river and watch the old homestead getting immaculately renovated. Turned into somebody else’s business.’

‘Would there be any chance of them ever buying it back?’

‘Can’t be ruled out, flower. The Duchy’s a business, buying and selling property. If they can’t make it work, they might sell it on. And the project certainly hasn’t got off to the best of starts.’

Merrily was watching the top unrolling from a new can of worms. How influential was Sycharth Gwilym in Hereford property circles? Had Felix Barlow ever worked for the Gwilyms? Had Felix somehow been got at? OK, that seemed unlikely but … God, who could you totally trust? Who could you ever trust?

‘So,’ Jane said. ‘We going in?’

She was standing, brown paw marks down her front, under the grey metal skull of a lamp over the front door. Fragments of glass embedded in its rim like splintered teeth. Merrily frowned.

‘Perhaps not. Can’t just look around and leave. First rule of deliverance: never walk away from an alleged disturbance without leaving God’s card.’

‘In case of what?’ Jane said. ‘A ghostly coffin in the hall, and the body suddenly sits up, with the pennies dropping from its dead eyes?’

‘Wasn’t quite how I was thinking.’

‘You know what I think? I think you just don’t want to go into a possibly haunted house with someone you think might still be halfpagan.’

‘Things have changed. These days, I tend to credit the boss with being more broad-minded.’

‘So go on, then. Unlock it.’

Jane’s eyes were dancing erratically. It could be that she didn’t actually want to go in. But she was Jane Watkins.

‘Yeah. All right.’

Merrily put the key into a hole enlarged, probably, by generations of Gwilyns coming home from the pub in the dark. The key rattling around in there, failing to locate the tumblers. It took both hands and a lot of jiggling before the lock turned over and the door sprang loose and hung there sullenly, still needing a shoulder to shudder it open.

‘House that doesn’t want to be restored,’ Merrily said.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

She stepped inside ahead of Jane, inhaling damp and plaster dust disturbed by the vibration. Two grimy leaded windows were set into a sloping wall, and the restricted light – brown and flecked, like the sediment at the bottom of an old medicine bottle – was barely reaching the shadows that crowded the corners of what seemed quite a big room.

Smelling wet earth, Merrily counted one, two three four … five doors, and the wall opposite jaggedly agape: a vast inglenook, the oak beam across it as rough and massive as the capstone of a cromlech. Primeval. Like the tree itself had fallen onto some waiting stones, been sawn off and the entire house built around it.

‘So this …’ Jane peering over Merrily’s shoulder ‘… this is where they laid the old girl out?’

‘Not here now, though, Jane. Sorry to disappoint.’

The only furniture was in the hearth, a rusted iron fire-basket the size of a small sheep-pen. In search of better light, Merrily walked across what seemed like worn linoleum ground into the earth to a narrow door next to the inglenook. When she unlatched it, greyness slithered down a stone staircase, half-spiralling behind the fireplace.

She didn’t go up. She was cold, rubbing her arms through the toothin sweatshirt, looking over her shoulder into an empty …

‘Jane?’

‘Down here. Couple of steps going down into … looks like the kitchen. Big hooks in the beams. Kind of a fatty smell.’

‘Just … tell me when you’re going somewhere, OK?’

‘In case of what?’ Jane came back up, pulling a door shut behind her. ‘What’s upstairs?’

‘I don’t know. I’d feel better with a torch.’

‘If it was dangerous, they’d have warned you, wouldn’t they?’

‘I suppose.’

The only warnings had come, in that faintly teasing way, from Mrs Morningwood, Merrily scenting a set-up.

‘Go on, then, Mum.’

Jane was behind her on the steps, the wooden handrail was hanging loose from the wall. Merrily didn’t touch it.

Upstairs, they found a landing with no windows, the only light fanning from one door left narrowly ajar. Merrily put out an arm to hold Jane back – could be floorboards missing – before stepping tentatively into a long and dismal bedroom smelling of dead things in decay. Bluish light from a single dormer, half-boarded. Wooden skeletons of two beds, at either end of the room.

‘Like in the story,’ Jane whispered.

‘What?’

‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You”. In Parkins’s room at the … whatever the pub was called.’

‘The Globe Inn.’

Jane turned sharply.

‘Bloody hell! That’s why you—’

‘It’s just a bit coincidental.’

‘In the circumstances, Mum, I’d say it’s seriously coincidental.’

‘It’s … noteworthy.’

There was a paper sack up against one wall. Fuchsia’s lime-plaster? Was this the room where she’d … claimed to have seen something wriggling under the …

The floor was bare boards. Felix had evidently taken his dust sheets away.

‘Mum, why didn’t you ask Mrs Morningwood about M. R. James?’

‘Because there’s a couple of other people I need to discuss it with first. And if you were to email the Ghosts and Scholars website we might learn a bit more from the experts.’

‘I’ll do that tonight. But if … like, if M. R. James admits something strange happened to him in Garway, maybe he actually stayed in the Globe Inn? That would surely—’

‘He always stayed with some people not too far away. Let’s not speculate, huh?’

‘Whatever.’ Jane looked around. ‘Are you going to leave the calling card or what?’

‘Can’t decide what to do. It’s just an empty house. In my limited experience, they need … people.’

‘They?’

‘Don’t ask me what they are. However, I think – Huw Owen thinks – we might need to ask a few people round, interested parties. Although getting a Gwilym and a Gray into the same room might be problematical.’

‘Why would you need to?’

‘That seem a bit like meddling to you?’

Feuds were a pastoral issue, and she wasn’t the parish priest. Maybe she needed to talk to Teddy Murray again, even though he was only a stand-in.

They checked out three other bedrooms of varying sizes, unfurnished. A bathroom with a cracked, discoloured bath and no water from the taps. A separate toilet that stank. Everywhere tainted by dereliction, in dire need of Felix Barlow.

But Fuchsia?

If Felix was right, something had brought Fuchsia back here yesterday. Fuchsia, who wanted to be blessed in the old-fashioned way. Watch over her, in the name of all the angels and saints in heaven. Keep guard over her soul day and night.

Fuchsia, newly blessed, had returned to a place she’d judged to be full of death. Nothing here was suggesting why.

Jane headed for the top of the half-spiral stairs, and Merrily followed her down, unsatisfied, mildly annoyed. The stone steps were worn smooth at the edges, slippery, some shored up underneath with bricks. Pointless doing a room-to-room prayer cycle; she didn’t know enough of the history to have any kind of focus, and all she could feel in the air was the criss-crossing of private agendas. It was an unwelcoming old house, soured by neglect, and that was probably the extent of it.

Back in the big room, the light seemed stronger, but that would be just her eyes adjusting. She looked around, walked around the ingrained lino and then stepped inside the inglenook. Ducking, although there was no need to, under the vast beam.

The inglenook was almost a small chamber in itself. A separate place. In the sooty dimness, she found the remains of what must have been a bread oven, empty, and a matted tangle of grey bones, all that was left of a bird, behind the fire-basket. She looked up the chimney: glimmerings of light, but something blocking it – nests maybe.

‘Nothing much here, Jane.’

‘Sorry, Mum?’

Jane’s voice coming from the other side of the room.

‘I’m sorry,’ Merrily said, ‘I thought you—’

The sentence guillotined by the thought that if it hadn’t been Jane who was with her in the inglenook …

‘… Sort of passage, leading to a back door,’ Jane called out. ‘Kind of a washroom?’

Standing very still and fully upright, her back flat to the rear wall, Merrily let in a long, thin river of breath.

‘… An old sink.’ Jane’s voice further away. ‘Cupboards …’

‘Jane, get—’

Merrily’s throat spasm-blocked, her headache back, like spikes, like a crown of thorns, twisting in. The iron fire-basket gaped up at her like an open gin-trap while she scrabbled in the pockets of her mind for prayer. Christ be … Be, for God’s sake, calm. Pushing back a sudden amazing panic, vile as a migraine, she closed her eyes, but it was like when you made yourself dizzy as child, and she felt sick, feeling the crumbling house turning slowly around her, grinding on the axis of its origins.

‘Christ be wi—’

‘… with …’

Only half-hearing the words – St Patrick’s Breastplate, the old armour – but her lips were cold and flaccid and wouldn’t shape them. There was a solid, substantial resistance, a flat, hard-edged no, and a rubbery numbness in her hands when she tried to clasp them together. And although the prayer was sounding in her head, it was distant, someone else’s whispers, and she tried to turn up the volume, envisioning bright brass bells clanging in a high tower, but the sound was harsh and industrial.

Christ behind me, Christ before me …

A muted crackling down there: bird bones crunching under her shoes. When she opened her eyes in revulsion, there was a face in the high corner of the inglenook and it had stubby horns and a worm squirming from its blackened mouth, and Merrily recoiled.

‘Mum?’

Jane’s footsteps sounded on the ingrained lino. But she mustn’t …

‘Mum, look, I don’t want to worry you or anything, but it’s getting dark, and you’ve got your meditation in just over an hour? And I think we’ve both had enough of this place.’

Merrily wouldn’t move. Or try to speak because, if Jane knew where she was, Jane would join her.

18 Listen

WHAT LOL LIKED best about the gigging was the coming home. Home to the mosaic of coloured-lit windows in the black and white houses, the fake gas lamps ambering the cobbles, sometimes the scent of applewood smoke.

He parked the Animal under the lamp on the edge of the square, well back from the cars and SUVs of the Sunday-evening diners in the Black Swan.

The truck had been Gomer’s idea, watching Lol loading two guitars and an amp awkwardly into the Astra, together with all the one-man-band gadgets which contrived the drumming and the toots and whirrs and storm noises that audiences loved for the apparent chaos of it all.

Gomer had remembered that his sidekick Danny Thomas knew a reliable bloke who was selling his Mitsubishi L200. Animal, it said on the side. Gomer seemed to find this funny. He and Danny had converted the truck, building a watertight compartment into the box to accommodate the gear, fitting a metal roll-top cover you could lock, and Gomer had taken Lol’s old Astra to recondition for himself: Waste not, want not, Lol, boy.

Lol climbed down, walked round the Animal in the late twilight and pushed back the roll-top under the lights, uncovering the case of the lovely Boswell guitar, handmade by Al Boswell, the Romani, in the Frome Valley, two harmonicas, shining like ingots in a black velvet tray, and the plastic thing that could make your voice sound like an oboe. Audiences everywhere – Hello Hartlepool, Good Evening, Godalming – seemed to warm to the homespun, the cobbled-together. They actually wanted to like you.

Taken him a long time to realize that. Nick Drake never had. Nick who, for God’s sake, was so much better, all he’d felt was a paralysing isolation which had sometimes left him playing with his back half-turned away from the crowd.

Lol opened the case that held the Boswell. Paranoia, he knew, but he was always worried that the vibration of the truck might have damaged it. Many different kinds of wood had gone into its mandolin soundbox. It wasn’t the kind of guitar you took out on the road, but he felt it was his talisman – receiving it from Al Boswell when his life was turning round, the songs coming through and Merrily, miraculously warm in his bed.

The guitar seemed fine. But, across the street, over the corner of the square, the vicarage had no lights.

Not how it should be. Before Merrily left the house to do the evening meditation, she’d always put on the globular lamp over the door. Always. Symbolic. Place of sanctuary. For Lol more than anybody. He pulled back the roll-top, locked it quickly, ran across the square to the vicarage gate. No visible lights in the house. No Volvo in the drive. Garage doors shut and bolted.

Lol felt the inner freeze of dislocation. She wasn’t there, and she hadn’t told him. He felt, for cold moments, like a stranger here again. Without Merrily, he would be a stranger, snatching moments of warmth only from his hard-earned applause, a furnace door opening and closing.

Stupid. Not as if they were married.

Maybe she’d left him a message on the answering machine? He ran back across the square to the terraced cottage in Church Street, unlocked his front door.

A haze of street light on the desk under the front window. Silence. No bleeps. Lol looked out into the street, up and down at the windows of Ledwardine, the mosaic of coloured squares now as unwelcoming as the ash in the hearth.

There would be a simple explanation. He was becoming neurotic, over-possessive.

Not as if they were married.

Yet, so often, with the nature of what she did, when he’d felt a wrongness there had been … something wrong.

He went back out to the square, to where he could see the body of the church through the lych-gate, the bunched shadows of people drifting through to an evening service with no hymns, psalms, lessons or sermon.

A vaporous glow from the church-door lantern. About to walk down, glancing back at the vicarage, he saw a blur of white, someone emerging from the gate, crossing the cobbles towards Church Street.

Lol made tea, and Jane seized her mug with both hands, carrying it through to the parlour with the burnt-orange ceiling, where Lol switched on the parchment-shaded desk lamp, leaving the curtains open, his initial relief burning away.

‘You mean she’s ill?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jane’s eyes glassy and anxious. ‘Maybe.’

‘Jane—’

‘We were in a hurry, Lol. We got back late. I said I’d get on the computer, try and get some background.’

‘On what? She is in the church?’

‘Yeah. She dashed straight across. Left me to put the car away and feed Ethel and stuff.’

‘So what’s wrong with her?’

‘Lol, I just … I don’t know, all right? Maybe it’s been coming on for a while. OK, it’s been a heavy year, all the death, all the things she couldn’t prevent. All the stuff that came to nothing. I don’t know.’

‘OK.’ Lol sat down in the chair facing Jane on the sofa, a chill on the room. ‘Tell me. In sequence.’

And she tried to, but most of it he couldn’t really take in. The number of the beast and the pubs with the cosmic names, the spooky woman with the dog. And the farmhouse.

‘When we came out, honest to God, Lol, she was white as … as a surplice. Like, trying to be normal – kind of, let’s not worry Jane. Which only made it worse because it was so obvious. Like I’m going to be worried? Me? The pagan?’

‘Worried about what?’

‘And then we go into this field, and I get the full blessing bit. The spiritual body-armour, at sundown on the edge of a field? Like, huh?’

‘She ever done that before?’

‘No. But then I don’t usually go with her on these jobs, do I? She said it was routine. Quite normal. Yeah, right.’

‘And she’s gone ahead with the meditation?’

‘Mmm.’ Jane nodded. ‘I mean … maybe that’ll help?’

Lol got her to tell him again – about the pubs and the dovecote and M. R. James.

‘After you came out of the house, what exactly did she say?’

‘She looked at her watch, and she’s like, “Oh my God, we’re not going to make it back in time.” But you could tell that wasn’t what was really bothering her, and if we were late why was she wasting time with all this blessing crap? Like, I’m an idiot? And all the way back she was like talking about other things – trivial things, in this brisk, practical way. Like she was trying to screen something out. Like she’d seen something in there, or realized something she didn’t want to face up to.’

‘And when you got back, was she still …?’

‘Upset, yeah. That was obvious.’ Jane drank some tea. ‘She looked totally out of it, like someone who’d been in a car crash. But when we were actually looking around the place, she was fairly dismissive, a bit annoyed, like she’d been set up. She hates that, people treating her like she’s some dim … vicar.’

Jane finished her tea, still looking starved and unhappy and maybe even resentful that some dim vicar might have picked up on an aspect of otherness that she’d missed out on.

‘Lol …’ Catching him looking at her. ‘I think I’ve changed quite a bit the past year. I’d like to think I could help her. But she’s still wary, you know?’

‘I’ll talk to her,’ Lol said.

Lol padded past the font, unseen. Not difficult at the Sunday-evening meditation, when the front pews were arranged in a circle, and the only light was candlelight, vast shadows ghosting the sandstone walls.

About two dozen people had come – about normal. When the rumours of healing had been circulating, there would have been as many as a hundred, but it had calmed down now.

‘… Idea that prayer’s as much about listening … means we have to think about what we mean by listening.’

No priestly trappings, no ceremonial. No smoke, no mirrors, no applause, no stamping for encores.

Merrily’s gig.

She was sitting on the edge of the circle in her black jeans and sweatshirt, hair tied back. Never a pulpit person.

‘Because, when you think about it, we hardly ever really do it.’

Lol sank down a couple of rows back, in deep shadow, his eyes closing momentarily in relief. Feeling her voice: low, soft, conversational, unassuming, intimate. Half-guiltily fancying the hell out of her.

‘If we’re holding a conversation with somebody, even if we think we’re taking in what they’re saying to us, what we’re actually doing is filtering it … putting it through this sieve of our own needs, desires, fears. Thinking of what we want them to be saying, and also of what we’re afraid they might really be saying. We’re processing the words, analysing, alert for any subtext. Our minds are taking an active role, in other words. We’re not listening. Does that make sense?’

Murmured assent. The people who came here on a Sunday evening were, by and large, not the ones who came to the family service in the morning. This was post-watershed.

‘OK, then,’ Merrily said. ‘Do you think we should try listening tonight? Without filtering, without questioning or intellectualising? Without any attempts at interpretation.’

Someone said, yeah, they should go for it, and Merrily moved her wooden chair a little forward, into the candlelight.

‘First, we need to go into the contemplative state, opening ourselves up. So …’ laying her hands, palms down, on her knees ‘… if we start with the relaxation exercise, beginning at the feet. Becoming aware of our feet. Curling our toes …’

The scraping of a pew.

‘Merrily … I want to ask …’

Merrily looked up.

‘Shirley.’

‘Is this in the Bible?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Does the Bible tell us we should be opening ourselves up to … messages?’

‘Well … I think you’ll find it’s all over the Bible in one way or another. But when you say messages, I’m not sure we’re talking about the same—’

‘Messages from beyond? Is that in the Bible?’

‘I could find you some examples, Shirley, but this wasn’t really intended to be a Bible-study session as much as—’

‘Only, it’s what the spiritualists do, isn’t it? Go into a trance and wait for something to come through. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate you’re trying to do something different here, Merrily, to bring some of these people into the fold, but I’m an old-fashioned Christian, and I keep asking myself, is the church the right place for it?’

Merrily sighed, her breath fluttering a candle flame.

‘Shirley, I take your point, but there’s a subtle difference between spirituality and spiritualism – spiritism. What I’m— No, actually the difference is not that subtle at all, it’s something entirely—’

‘How do we know that what’s coming through is from God? That it’s not a dead person?’

Merrily’s face was tilted into the candlelight, and now Lol saw the furrows and the strain.

‘Or something evil,’ this Shirley said.

Restive murmurs from around the circle. A groan. Lol just sighed. A fundamentalist – all she needed.

‘Because when we approach it like this,’ Merrily said, ‘in this context, it’s coming out of prayer and it’s an act of faith. Shirley, if you could bear with me …’

‘It’s just that, in the dark, with a ring of candles, it doesn’t feel right to me. I don’t like opening myself up. How do we know there isn’t somebody here who’s brought something evil in with them?’

This time, when Merrily looked up, Lol was shocked at the pallor of her face.

19 Sound Like Jane

WHEN IT WAS over, Merrily held the snuffer over the last candle and then guided Lol through the darkness towards the south door.

‘Didn’t handle that too well, did I?’

Moving them both swiftly down the nave. She could find her way blindfold around this sandstone cavern – had even actually done that once, when she was new here; it had seemed necessary, having an intimate, tactile knowledge of the body of the church, her own sacred space, to which it had seemed desperately important tonight to get back.

Bad mistake. She felt sick. Better she hadn’t made it in time than have to watch the so-called ground-breaking meditation service crumbling away into a pointless debate about the validity of replacing the traditional Evensong, hymns and all, with quiet and contemplation. More like a bloody parish meeting.

‘I wouldn’t care, Shirley doesn’t normally come on a Sunday night. I mean, if she prefers the formality of a structured service, well, fine …’

‘Who is she?’

‘Shirley? I think I mentioned her. Currently my most enthusiastic parishioner.’

‘Oh. Yes, you did.’

Lol bumped into the prayer-book rack; there was the slap of a book landing on flags.

‘Leave it, I’ll find it in the morning. Why are we talking in the dark? How did the gig go? Oh hell, I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten where …’

‘Newtown. Theatr Hafren. It was good. Almost full. The local record shop was selling albums in the foyer. They sold out.’

‘That’s fantastic. Come back to the vic? Have some supper with us?’

Lol didn’t move. She could see his outline, head bowed.

He said, ‘When she said that about … someone bringing evil into the church …’

‘Lol …’ God, what was she supposed to say? ‘Look, this is uncharitable, but I sometimes think Shirley actually comes to too many services.’

‘You thought she meant you, didn’t you?’

Merrily’s fingers found the stone bowl of the font, pressing into its whorls and furrows.

‘You’ve been talking to Jane, right?’

‘Well, she came over just now. A bit worried. Told me about M. R. James and the woman who was saying she’d seen one of his ghosts. And the dovecote. And this Mrs Mornington …?’

‘Wood.’ Merrily straightened up. ‘Morningwood.’

‘And how you came out of the house, white-faced, and wouldn’t talk about it.’ Lol was standing next to her now. ‘Pretty much the way you’re not talking about it now.’

Merrily leaned against the firmness of the font. She looked back along the nave, vaguely moonlit now. Like a straight path through woodland.

But there was no green man at Ledwardine.

‘All right. I may have … I saw something that wasn’t supposed to be there.’

‘Inside the house? The Duchy of Cornwall house.’

‘It just looked ordinary. It felt ordinary. Until I decided, for some reason, to have a look inside the inglenook. It’s quite a high inglenook. Someone like me can stand upright in it, and quite a lot of space all round. Like a small, black room.’

Her mind was already tightening. She’d hoped it might melt away in the meditation. But the meditation had never happened, and maybe that was just as well. Maybe she had brought something back and if they’d gone into the meditation it would’ve been contaminated. Maybe Shirley— Oh, for God’s sake …

‘Go on.’ Merrily felt Lol’s hand on her arm. ‘The small black room behind the inglenook.’

‘There was a feeling of not being alone. I’m not talking about God or anything.’

‘You’re saying you actually felt something was with you inside this inglenook?’

‘Something watching me. It’s all a bit subjective. A feeling I’d been getting at Garway generally. It has a very peculiar atmosphere, I can’t explain it. Even the church seems to have eyes. Ancient landmark, sentient landscape … Oh God, listen to me, I’m starting to sound like Jane.’

Lol was silent. There were cooling clangs from the heating, which had switched itself off.

‘You know the green man?’ Merrily said. ‘Like you get in country churches? Stone face looking through foliage?’

‘Mouthful of leaves and stuff.’

‘Maybe an ancient fertility symbol. Several in Herefordshire. The one in Garway Church is moulded into the chancel arch, and … there’s also this one inside the oak lintel over the fireplace in the Master House. Almost identical, I’d guess, but I’d need to check. I just looked up, there it was.’

‘That’s what you thought was watching you?’

‘At the back, so only visible from inside the inglenook. You don’t see him unless you enter his …’

‘A secret green man.’

‘And not in a church. I don’t know of any ancient ones that aren’t in churches, though maybe there are. And hidden away. Why?’

‘This green man is what scared you? Why you’d turned white?’

‘I haven’t been feeling too great lately.’ She pulled away from the font, couldn’t deal with this now. ‘Let’s go.’

Outside, a wind had arisen, chattering amongst dead chrysanths in a grave-pot. Merrily pulled the church keys from her shoulder bag. The Master House key poked out, and she thrust it back.

Lol said, ‘You now think something actually happened to this Fuchsia at the house?’

‘I’d convinced myself she was pulling some kind of scam. The face of crushed linen, all that. I was coming round to thinking there was some entirely prosaic reason for Felix changing his mind, wanting out of the job. I was ready to confront her about it.’

‘So what are you going to do now?’

‘Confront her. But maybe with a bit more … sensitivity. That is, I still think there’s a lot she hasn’t told me, but I’m no longer ruling out the possibility of something else.’

‘What are you going to tell Jane?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You sure you’ve told me everything?’

‘Lol, I’m going to ring them now, OK?’

Fumbling out the phone and putting the number in the frame.

They stood under the lych-gate, opposite the square, orange and green lights making lanterns of the leaded windows of the Black Swan.

Lol said, ‘Why don’t you call them in the morning?’

‘They might leave early.’ The ringing stopped. ‘Hold on, he’s—’

The voice in the phone said hello.

‘Felix,’ Merrily said. ‘I’ve been trying to get you all day. Listen, I really need to talk to you. Both of you. Tomorrow morning if possible. Even tonight, if you’re up for that. Take me about twenty minutes to get there.’

There was no reply, something quizzical about the silence.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s Merrily Watkins.’

‘Yeh. I thought it was.’

Oh shit.

‘Frannie, I’m sorry, I must’ve put the wrong number in. More haste, less—’

‘Who did you think you were calling, Merrily?’

‘Just … just a guy I’ve been trying to …’

‘Felix, you said,’ Bliss said. ‘That would be Felix Barlow.’

‘How did you …’ Something jerked inside her chest. ‘Frannie …?’

‘Twenty minutes, then,’ Bliss said. ‘I’ll be waiting.’

20 Supposed to be Sheep

THERE WAS THE usual small, sordid fairground under a frantic night sky, fallen leaves panic-dancing in the intersecting headlight beams from three cars and a dark blue van, all pointing at the caravan, engines growling. Flapping and crackling from the plastic screen they’d erected inside the tapes, to keep out the rising wind. A rich smell of churned mud.

The West Mercia Police travelling show.

‘Fuchsia.’ Merrily felt insubstantial, blown around like the leaves. ‘Where is she? Please, can someone—?’

Nearly a dozen men and women, cops and crime-scene technos like worker ants in the grass, none of them answering her, all of them hyper: never let anybody tell you these guys didn’t get a wild buzz from violent death.

‘This is the feller?’ Bliss was in a white coverall, what he liked to call a Durex suit. Flicking occasional questions at her like pellets. ‘You’re sure about that?’

All the motion only emphasizing the stillness of the big man in a heap, dumped like manure below the caravan’s open door. Oh God, oh God, oh God.

‘Yes.’

Was she sure? Under the hardened mud and the congealed fluids, his head was a different shape. Mouth half-open, dried blood caked around his nose, both eyes soot-black. Merrily forcing herself to keep looking at him, aware of Bliss watching her closely.

‘This is the builder you were telling me about, right? Doing up the farmhouse for Charlie’s outfit?’

‘Yes.’

One of Felix’s feet was twisted into the gap between two of the metal steps. A hand clawed the mud, poor guy trying to seize the earth one last time.

‘A decent man, Frannie. Kind. Trying to do the best thing.’

‘Really,’ Bliss said.

‘Do you know where Fuchsia is?’

Bliss said, ‘Tell me again – why were you ringing him tonight, Merrily?’

‘I was trying to arrange a meeting.’

‘Sounded like an emergency to me,’ Bliss said. ‘Sunday night, very heavy day for the clergy, and there you were, prepared to drop everything and come rushing out here in the dark?’

‘Yes.’

‘What conclusions am I to draw from this?’

‘I was …’ Merrily sighed. ‘How long have you got?’

‘Till Billy Grace gets here.’

‘The pathologist.’

‘Which I hope is gonna be before flamin’ daylight.’

Two crime-scene women were moving around Felix’s body with evidence bags. Emotions uncoupled, not seeing a person, not looking for history much beyond the final act.

‘Who found him, Frannie?’

‘Dog-walker. Where would the police be without dog-walkers, eh?’

‘What do you think happened?’

‘That’s for Billy Grace to find out.’

‘Well, he didn’t …’ Merrily spun at him, furious ‘… just fall off the sodding step, did he?’

Segments of smoky cloud on fast-forward across the three-quarter moon. Bliss’s eyebrows going up.

‘My, we are fractious tonight, Merrily.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s interesting that you’re so emotionally involved.’

‘Interesting?’

‘Significant, even.’

Bliss had his head on one side, red hair shaved close to the skull these days, to disguise erosion. Merrily looked away, over towards the edge of the field where Lol was parked, forbidden by some jobsworth copper even to get out of the truck.

‘You need …’ steadying her voice ‘… to find Fuchsia. The house I told you about …’ How trivial and foolish this was going to sound. ‘It was Fuchsia, who had the problem.’

‘This is Fuchsia Mary Linden. The assistant.’

‘And girlfriend. I keep asking if anyone’s looking for her, and nobody— At first, I thought she was being, you know, disingenuous. I’m now more inclined to believe there’s something to what she’s saying, and I wanted to tell them that. Talk it all over again.’

Bliss scratched his nose, obscuring a reluctant half-smile.

‘I’m loath, as ever, to go into the details of your frankly unenviable job, Merrily, but … you’re saying you were feeling a bit guilty?’

‘I … yeah.’

‘When did you last talk to Mr Barlow?’

‘Last night. On the phone.’

‘And the girl?’

‘Not since last week. When I met them here.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘She’s … unusual.’

‘Unusual. Yeh, that explains everything. I’ll be sure to put that in my report.’

‘Whimsical? Imaginative? In a childlike way. And beautiful, of course. And about twenty years younger than Felix. That what you were looking for?’

‘This word whimsical,’ Bliss said. ‘Would that translate, for the rest of us, as three sheets to the wind?’

‘What are you asking?’

Bliss didn’t reply.

‘You have got people out looking for her?’

‘We’ve gorra couple of people out there, yeh.’

‘You’re sure she’s not … somewhere close?’

An image of Fuchsia crouching, big eyed, between tree-roots in the woods.

‘Sure as we can be,’ Bliss said.

‘You actually think she did this, don’t you?’

‘Can’t deny that the domestic solution would save us a lorra graft.’

‘What was he hit with?’

‘Could be one of his own tools. I’m never one to pre-empt the slab, Merrily, but when the head’s swollen up like that, battered out of shape, you’re looking at multiple skull fractures. And, no, you wouldn’t generally get that falling off the steps into a field. The killer must’ve been … very, very angry.’

A fourth vehicle had appeared next to the dark blue van. A cop shouted across to Bliss.

‘Dr Grace, boss.’

‘Must be a bad telly night.’ Bliss turned to Merrily. ‘You ever think, on these occasions, that our fates might be entwined, Reverend?’

‘Every time there’s one of those occasions, Frannie, I just … Look, when you find Fuchsia, will you let me know?’

‘If I can,’ Bliss said. ‘And we’ll probably need to talk about this at length, maybe tomorrow. Thanks for dropping by, Merrily.’

‘Yeah.’

Walking back across the field, hands jammed into the pockets of her fleece, Merrily looked behind her once and saw, on the very edge of the headlights, the gaping maw of the bay in the barn that Felix had been renovating for Fuchsia. To bring her stability.

‘Shit.’ She wanted to scream it into the wind. ‘Shit, shit, shit …’

Jane’s mobile played the riff from Lol’s ‘Sunny Days’ and she tightened her lips and ignored it. Wouldn’t be Mum; she’d call the landline.

Ethel, the black cat, prowled the scullery desk. The mobile stopped. Jane clicked on the email address from the Ghosts and Scholars website, put in the message she’d drafted, read it through one last time.

Dear Ms Pardoe

Sorry to bother you, but I wonder if you might be able to help me. After reading on your website about M. R. James’s unexplained ‘strange experience’ at Garway Church, on the Welsh Border, I wondered if you could throw any more light on it.

I live in Herefordshire and went with my mother to Garway today and, to me, the mystical influence of the Knights Templar could still be felt very strongly there after all these centuries. M. R. James’s story ‘Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, my Lad’ has a Templar preceptory in it, and we were wondering if the story could have come out of whatever M. R. James experienced at Garway.

Like me, you were also intrigued by the medieval dovecote with 666 dove holes. Do have any ideas why this might have been?

Anything you can tell me would be very gratefully received.

Perhaps we might be able to help with your own researches too, one day.

Yours sincerely,

Jane Watkins

Seemed OK. Didn’t give too much away.

Jane sent it.

Feeling a lot less excited than she had when she’d composed it. Since then, Mum had been back with Lol – Mum looking totally like death, this time – and then they’d both gone out to this place at Monkland. Mum apologetic, as usual – could Jane get herself something to eat? Jesus, what about her? Like, when was she going to eat? Mum was clearly losing weight. She looked like a small bird after a long winter.

Jane picked up Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, one of two books she’d brought down from her apartment. She put it down again. ‘Oh, Whistle’ was actually quite a bleak story, full of solitude. The guy didn’t die or anything, but the effects of what he’d seen would be hanging over him for the rest of his life.

She saw – the image still as vivid in her head as if it had been on the computer screen – Mum walking out of that derelict farmhouse into the early dusk. Walking with her shoulders stiffened and her spine kind of pulled in, like she knew there was something very close behind her. Her face like yellowing paper.

Never seen her quite like that before. Never. And it was unnerving because, in one way, she needed Mum to be basically sceptical – as resistant to the paranormal, despite her job, as Jane was to the strictures of the Church.

Mum as a buffer against her wildest ideas. Giving Jane the freedom to explore because there was always that framework of stability. Maybe she was really afraid of growing up into a world where a mature and intelligent woman was visibly and seismically shaken by the irrational, trying to conceal her fear from a kid … who was no longer a kid.

Jane turned, with a reluctance she recognised as unusual, to the second book on the desk. Ella Leather’s The Folklore of Herefordshire. In the index, under Garway, she’d found the line about nine witches and also a page reference for The watch after death.

On page 120, Mrs Leather listed the places where:

It was customary, until a few years ago, for the household to sit up all night when a death had occurred. They did not sit in the same room as the corpse, but elsewhere, the idea being that the spirit of the dead person was still in and about the house, and the people said, ‘it was for the last time, it was the last night’; so no one went to bed. But at Orcop and Garway, the watch is still kept, so Martha S— who lived on Garway Hill, assured me. ‘Only if it was somebody you cared about,’ she added, ‘not for strangers.’

So, as for bringing comparative strangers into the same room as the body … The Newtons had obviously bent the rules in their own best interests, picking up on what came next. Maybe they’d even read this very account, published for the first time in 1912.

… Usually, among the country folk, a light is kept burning in the room where a corpse lies every night until burial; a pewter plate of salt is placed on the body; according to Martha S—, the candle should be stuck in the middle of the salt, heaped up in the centre of the plate.

Seriously creepy. Jane shut the book. It was too quiet in here. Picking up the mobile, she got up and walked to the scullery window, looking out at darkness and a wall, pressing one on the keypad.

You have three new messages. To listen to your messages …

She hesitated, staring into the little square of light, before pressing one again.

First new message, received at thirteen forty-three today.

‘Jane, it’s … Oh, shit, you know who it is. For God’s sake, I’ve left about seventeen messages …’

Five actually.

‘… I know there’s nothing wrong with the phone, which means something wrong with YOU. I even tried ringing the landline, thinking I’d ask your mum – yeah, yeah, I know how much you’d hate that, but I’m a bit beyond caring. Only it’s always the bloody answering machine.

‘I mean, have I done something? Have I done something I didn’t know about? Has somebody told you I’ve done something? Just— You don’t even have to ring me back. Just leave a message. I’ll close down the phone for the rest of the night so you don’t risk speaking to me. Just leave a message, Jane. I mean, Christ, we’ve been, like, together for two years? That’s longer than a lot of marr— Oh … fuck it!’

Jane stared into the phone for a long time before switching it off.

The builder was dead, his girlfriend missing.

Most of this Lol had already put together out of fragments of chat heard from the open window of the truck, watching the shadowy scurryings around the screened-off caravan. Guessing what was coming when Merrily returned. Just not sure – as a failed psychotherapist and a derivative songwriter finding a little success a little too late – how best to handle it.

‘Maybe you need a good manager.’ She was rubbing her eyes wearily. ‘A tour-organizer. Whatever the word is.’

‘I really don’t think so.’

‘Or just a roadie to carry the spare guitar.’

‘You’re tired.’ Lol started the engine, flicked on the headlamps. ‘You haven’t eaten since lunch. Or, as it’s Sunday, knowing you, maybe even breakfast.’

‘It’s still Sunday?’ As they bumped into the lane Merrily loosened her seat belt, as if there was pressure in her chest. She hadn’t yet reached for a cigarette. ‘Couple of weeks ago … I lay awake counting up all the people who’ve suffered in some unnecessary way, or died – unnaturally – in spite of all my prayers and entreaties and …’

‘It’s supposed to be sheep, Merrily,’ Lol said gently. ‘I suppose counting corpses will eventually get you to sleep, but the dreams are going to be altogether less pastoral.’

‘She had the blessing, Lol. The full bit. Holy water. Oil.’

‘We could drive into Hereford now, and you could go round administering blessings at random to people in the street, but some of them would still get into a street fight, cause a road accident or something.’

‘So what’s the point? What’s the point of any of it?’

Lol was silent, pulling on to the main road, speeding up as Merrily stared out of the side window. On the way here, she’d told him about the ritual in the little, disused church, the girl suggesting something was coming – Merrily’s discussions with Huw Owen leading to her discovery of the fictional origins of that line.

This constant tension between her faith and an equally-necessary scepticism must drive her half-crazy at times. Like now. Her face was still turned away from him, watching the night.

‘You keep thinking, what if the Church is actually reaching the end of its useful life? And every day it gets harder to answer that persistent, nagging question: If there is a God, why does he allow so much suffering? Well, my children, the truth – the bottom-line, heartfelt truth – is, I’m buggered if I know.’

‘You’re thinking—’ Lol braked hard for a badger ambling across the road. ‘You’re thinking of that guy … Michael Taylor, that his name?’

The Yorkshireman who, back in the 1970s, told his local priest he was possessed by evil spirits and then, having been subjected to a night-long exorcism, went home and murdered his wife. In the most horrific way possible with bare hands.

Merrily shook her head, probably meaning she hadn’t been thinking about the guy for a whole half-minute

‘It was a blessing, not an exorcism,’ Lol said. ‘There was no question of possession, was there?’

‘I did at least two things wrong. One, I didn’t involve Felix.’

‘In the blessing? Would he have even wanted to be involved?’

‘Two, I had a chance to go to the house yesterday, and I didn’t. I decided it was probably bullshit.’

‘But you had every reason to think that. You talked to Huw Owen and he—’

‘I was careless. Cynical.’

Traffic was sparse, this area still managing to stay a decade or so behind the rest of the country. High in the cab, Lol saw, in a dip on the left, the lights of the perfectly-formed-around-the-green, black and white village of Dilwyn. He tried again.

‘Even if you’d gone to the house yesterday, there’s no certainty you’d have felt any reaction. That isn’t how it works, is it?’

‘I don’t know how it works. Nobody knows how it works.’

‘Maybe the woman didn’t kill him,’ Lol said. ‘They don’t know it was her, do they?’

‘They know something. I’m fairly sure there’s something Bliss wasn’t revealing. It’s how they operate. Never tell anybody anything unless it serves a purpose.’

‘When they find her, you need to talk to her. Bliss would arrange that, wouldn’t he?’

‘She didn’t want to talk last night. And why did she go back to Garway? Why did she go back after the blessing? Evidently, he didn’t want to tell me that.’

‘Merrily …’

‘Should’ve thought.’

‘Please,’ Lol said. ‘Just …’

He slowed for the sign that said LEDWARDINE 3, trying to shut out the whingey voice of the fundamentalist woman, Shirley West.

How do we know there isn’t somebody here who’s brought something evil in with them?

The road curved towards the village, the hump of Cole Hill forming under the half-clouded moon and the steeple rising out of nowhere like an ancient rocket petrified on its pad.

Crises of faith, Merrily would say, when she wasn’t in the middle of one, were part of the deal; they could only strengthen your faith, in the end.

Until, Lol thought, you had one too many.

He parked easily on the square. The diners had left and the lights of the Black Swan had dimmed. There was nobody about. He turned to Merrily, not touching her.

‘You, um … want me to come in with you?’

21 Lesser Creatures and Birds

IN THE EARLY light, Merrily let Lol out by the vicarage back door, so that he could use the garden gate to slip, unseen, into the churchyard. Creeping between shadowed headstones and out the other side into the old orchard which had once enclosed the village like a nest around eggs.

The secret ways of Ledwardine.

Merrily, in her bathrobe, watching from the landing window as Lol emerged from the alley by the new bistro, onto the square. Vanishing into Jim Prosser’s shop – called Eight Till Late but usually open by seven – and coming out with a morning paper.

There was no real need for this game any more; everybody must know by now. Yet she had the feeling that it was expected, a matter of decorum, a village thing.

No sex, anyway, just needed warmth. Whatever gets you through the night and the recurrent images of wide-eyed, big-eyed Fuchsia: ‘Will you bless me?’

‘You look like the Lady of Shallot or something,’ Jane said.

Appearing at the top of the stairs, already dressed for school, face shining, hair brushed.

‘Wasn’t she last heard of lying in a barge or something?’ Merrily said. ‘Kind of … dead?’

‘Before that, she was a seriously messed-up person.’

Messed-up? Right.

‘Erm …’ Jane had waited up last night, knew the worst. She was leaning against the stair-rail with her blazer over an arm ‘… I’ve just been listening to the news on Hereford and Worcester. They said a man’s body had been found near his caravan at Monkland, and the cops were treating it as suspicious.’

‘It is.’

‘They didn’t mention a woman.’

‘Good.’

‘Mum …’ Jane came down to the landing. ‘Look, I’m not stupid. I can put the pieces together.’

‘If not always in the right holes.’

‘Are you OK? I’m serious.’

‘I’ve been thinking maybe I should take a hairdressing course, open a little salon in Lol’s front room.’

‘Mum—’

‘Do something useful.’

‘You need a holiday.’

‘Mmm. I’ve been thinking about Garway Hill. Nice views.’

‘So do it,’ Jane said. ‘I mean it. If you want to go over there and deal with whatever needs dealing with, I’ll stay here with whichever loopy, militant-lesbian cleric they want to dump on the parish.’

‘Jane, I was just—’

‘And I’ll help however I can. Checking stuff on the net, ringing people, whatever you need. I … well, I just wanted to say that. Any religious differences don’t come into it. I want to help. No ulterior motive, I swear it.’

‘I never thought there was, flower, but—’

‘I looked up some stuff in Mrs Leather last night. Left the page refs on your desk.’

‘Thank you. Maybe I’ll get a chance to read them when you’ve gone to school.’

Merrily set off downstairs, Jane right behind.

‘I bet you didn’t sleep much last night, did you? And not because Lol was here.’

‘Yeah, well, thanks for your concern, however …’

‘For Christ’s sake, Mum, your guy’s had his head smashed in. That must be—’

‘Something I wish I hadn’t had to see, yes.’

‘And, like, not the only thing? I saw your face when you came out of that house.’

This wasn’t going to go away, was it?

‘Look … I’ve told you. I’d seen something that was in the wrong place. The green man – we don’t know what it means, but it’s an odd, symbolic, medieval thing, and it isn’t usually, if ever, found in houses. So it was unexpected, just a bit of a shock.’

‘Bit more than that, if you ask me.’

‘The jury …’ Merrily stopped on the stairs ‘… is still out, all right?’

‘There are some things you just don’t want to face up to. You’re a priest but you’re afraid to confront the reality of, like, metaphysical evil. Even when it’s possibly caused violent death. I’m just putting two and two together.’

‘And making thirteen. Violent death, in my limited experience, is caused by people.’

‘Sure, but what causes the people to cause the violence?’

‘Let’s just get some breakfast, or you’ll be late.’

Merrily carried on to the bottom on the stairs, listening out for the bleep of the answering machine, but all she could hear was Ethel crunching dried food, rocking the bowl on the stone flag.

‘Oh, the other thing,’ Jane said, ‘I emailed the M. R. James site last night, while you were out. About the dovecote and the Templars? So like if something comes in for me don’t feel you have to wait till I get home. Just open it.’

‘Thank you.’

Jane looked at her. That look got shrewder every year; all you could do was stare back and hope you came through.

‘Breakfast,’ Merrily said.

‘I’ll make it,’ Jane said. ‘And I’ll make yours, too, and I’m not going to school until I’ve watched you eat it.’

No overnight messages on the machine and no early calls. Local people had come to accept that Monday was a vicar’s day off, usually the only one. By the time Merrily had read Mrs Leather’s account of the watch after death, the computer’s in-box was showing what looked like an actual email amongst the spam.

Dear Jane,

Thanks for your mail. Garway is certainly the most mysterious and intriguing place I’ve ever visited in my quest for MRJ. I’m afraid I can’t throw any particular light on the dovecote mystery apart from pointing out, as you probably already know, that, before the suppression of the order, the Knights Templar were accused of denying Christ, rejecting the Mass and the sacrament and spitting on the cross. These charges may have been fabricated, but the possibility of the order becoming corrupt in later years cannot be ruled out.

The dovecote, as it stands today, seems to have been largely rebuilt by the Knights Hospitaller, who succeeded the Templars at Garway, but I don’t know of any satanic scandal attaching to them.

Re. your question about ‘Whistle’, I’m afraid I have to disappoint you. Whatever happened to MRJ at Garway seems to have occurred in 1917, a good thirteen years after the publication of the story (it was probably written in 1903). He may have visited Garway before Ghost Stories of an Antiquary came out in 1904, but there is no record of it that I know of. He doesn’t seem to have found any reason to come to Herefordshire until the widow of his friend James McBryde moved there with her young daughter in 1906.

So that was that. Merrily sat back, unsure if she was disappointed or relieved that, despite the Templar connection and the Globe Inn coincidence, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ could hardly have been inspired by whatever happened to M. R. James at Garway Church nearly fourteen years later.

Remiss of her not to have checked those dates herself.

And Fuchsia, the face of crumpled linen, it had all turned around again: more evidence that whatever had happened to Fuchsia had happened inside Fuchsia’s head, whether creatively or otherwise. It was not unlikely that Fuchsia had even made those same connections with ‘Whistle’.

Time to talk to Huw Owen again. As she glanced at the big black phone, it rang.

‘You in, Merrily?’ Bliss said.

‘What’s it sound like?’

‘You’re not still ratty …’

‘Make that confused and upset.’

‘Will you still be in in half an hour or so?’

‘Have you found her?’

‘I’ll have another bloke with me,’ Bliss said.

Background buzz suggesting the CID room rather than the car park. His tone – and the fact that he was ringing on the landline – suggesting she might need to exercise caution.

‘Who?’

‘You’ll like him,’ Bliss said. ‘He’ll make you laugh.’

‘You still haven’t told me whether—’

The line went dead. Merrily sat holding the empty phone, staring blankly at the rest of the message on the screen.

Incidentally, if you didn’t know this, Gwendolen McBryde’s daughter was also called Jane, and MRJ was very fond of her. This may well have been because Jane, something of an artist like both her parents, was fascinated by the supernatural and creepy things generally. So when MRJ says ‘we’ caused offence at Garway, he may well be referring to the, by then, teenage Jane and possibly her mother as well as himself. It occurs to me that you might like to read Michael Cox’s biography of MRJ, relevant pages of which I’ve attached.

Good luck with your investigations; do let me know how you get on!

Rosemary Pardoe

Merrily sat up, clicked on the attachment, bringing up two scanned pages from M. R. James, An Informal Portrait. The first began by examining the possibility that the lively and affectionate young widow Gwendolen McBryde had been rather attracted to her late husband’s best friend, a man who had helped her through difficult times and been conscientious about his role as Jane’s guardian.

Monty had been entirely relaxed at the house, Woodlands, in south Herefordshire, treated with ‘affectionate and admiring indulgence’ by his host. Gwendolen had recalled him doing impersonations, putting on funny accents and once reading aloud from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a background of nightjars.

He’d also once read the lessons at nearby Abbeydore. According to Gwendolen, he had a beautiful voice which, when he read aloud, lent you his understanding. At Abbeydore, it gave me an unreal feeling as if some saint held forth to lesser creatures and birds.

As for Gwen’s daughter … well, it seemed she was very much Monty’s kind of kid, producing lots of delightful drawings of unspeakable entities emerging from gaping tombs.

So Rosemary Pardoe’s suggestion that it was the daughter who’d been with Monty James in Garway seemed to be on the money.

Oh God. When in Herefordshire, M. R. James had stayed with a widowed single mother with a teenage daughter who was into creepy things and was called … Jane.

Into the bleak morning, after the night of cruel tragedy, came the brittle sound of cosmic laughter.

She thought of Bliss. He’ll make you laugh.

And what he’d said on the phone when she was in the car on Garway Hill.

What they used to call the funnies.

Oh hell.

‘This is Jonathan Long.’ Bliss hooked out a chair at the refectory table. ‘One of my colleagues.’

All the time she was making them coffee, Merrily kept glancing at Bliss, but there was no eye response; he didn’t look happy. She felt the tension rolling in her stomach, hard as a golf ball.

Jonathan Long – rank unspecified – looked several years younger than Bliss, perhaps very early thirties. He didn’t look like a cop, maybe a young academic, a lecturer in something dry and exact like law or economics. His body was thickening, and he wore a dark grey threespiece suit. A cop with a waistcoat was rare these days, a young cop with a waistcoat entirely outside Merrily’s experience.

‘I gather you’ve known Francis for some time,’ Long said.

‘Way back. Since he had a full head of hair.’

Tension throwing out flippancy like feeble sparks. Long didn’t smile. Neither did Bliss. Long had spiky black hair, and a light tan; Bliss needed to avoid the sun in case his freckles turned malignant.

‘We were hoping, Mrs Watkins, that you might share some of your impressions.’

Long’s accent was educated and still fairly refined; seemed unlikely that he’d spent much of his career confiscating crack pipes and bundling binge drinkers into blue vans. It also seemed unlikely that he was going to identify himself as Special Branch.

‘About what, Mr Long?’ She sat down opposite them. ‘Theology? Contemporary music?’

‘Specifically, Fuchsia Mary Linden.’ Long examined his coffee. ‘Do you have cream, by any chance?’

‘Erm … no, sorry.’ All right, playtime over. ‘You’ve found her, right?’

‘Yeh,’ Bliss said. ‘We’ve found her. We think we’ve found her.’

His usually foxy eyes were dull as pennies. Sudden sunlight dropped from the highest kitchen window like a splash of cold milk.

‘We’re still waiting for the dental report,’ Jonathan Long said. ‘But it’s unlikely to be anyone else.’

22 Collecting Beads

HAD SHE, ON some level, expected it? Had she looked down on Felix’s body last night, dumped like a heap of building rubble on his own doorstep, and somehow known she was seeing only half a tragedy?

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

A train in the distance, rattling through the night. The coffee going cold in front of her while the horror came out in short, sick spurts.

‘On the southern line. The London train, via Newport.’ Jonathan Long’s voice light and casual, as if he was reading from a passenger timetable. ‘Just under half a kilometre from what I understand is known as the Tram Inn level crossing.’

‘Past the big feed place with the silos,’ Bliss said.

The full significance of it crashed in on Merrily like a rock through a windscreen. She pushed her chair back, a raking screech on the stone flags.

‘She laid her head …?’

‘On the line,’ Bliss said. ‘I don’t know how people can do that, meself. They just think of the train roaring unstoppably out of the night. Never a thought for the poor bastard driving it.’

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

‘You knew last night, didn’t you?’ Merrily stared at him. ‘You knew when we were at the caravan.’

This word ‘whimsical’ … Would that translate, for the rest of us, as three sheets to the wind?

‘Don’t look at me like that, Merrily. We knew a woman had been hit by a train, that was all. What do you know about her?’

‘Not much. But then, in some ways there isn’t much that anyone knows.’

‘We have names of adoptive parents, but we haven’t spoken to them yet.’

‘You even found them?’

‘I’m— We have someone working on it.’

Merrily told them about Fuchsia’s mother, Tepee City.

‘How did you get an ID, Frannie?’

‘Car keys in her pocket. A van parked near the Tram Inn, registered to Felix Barlow.’

‘Tepee City,’ Long said. ‘That’s well into Wales, isn’t it, Mrs Watkins? A Welsh-speaking area.’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘A significant amount of old-fashioned Welsh nationalism in that area, I think.’

‘Not much in Tepee City itself, I’d’ve thought. Alternative communities are usually immigrants. What’s your point?’

Like he was going to tell her, this smooth git with his secret agenda. Merrily just wanted to throw him out, throw both of them out and take herself down to the church to scream abuse at God.

‘This house,’ Long said. ‘The Master House. Fuchsia was instrumental in getting Felix Barlow to pull out of the contract?’

‘She was the reason he pulled out.’

‘Because she thought it was haunted.’

‘Because she said she’d sensed a … an evil there,’ Merrily said, reluctantly.

Long smiled the kind of smile where you couldn’t have slid a butter knife between his lips.

‘From your conversations with her, can you think of any other reason why she – or anyone else, for that matter – might not have wanted that house redeveloped?’

‘You mean a sane reason? No. I can’t.’

Wasn’t God’s fault. Merrily gripped her knees under the table. She was incompetent. Smug, self-satisfied, lazy. She’d spotted the unconvincing elements, the lines from M. R. James, and missed all the danger signs.

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.

‘So what did you …?’ Long was steepling his fingers. ‘Francis has tried to explain your role in the, ah, Diocese, but what precisely did you do with this woman?’

‘Are you actually leading the inquiry, Mr Long?’

‘Mr Bliss is leading the murder inquiry, I’m dealing with a side issue which may or may not be connected.’

‘Do you want to explain that?’

Jonathan Long said nothing. Merrily played with a teaspoon, let the silence drift for a few seconds, looked at him.

‘So would that … would that be one of those we ask the questions kind of silences?’

‘I did try to tell you on the way here, mate,’ Bliss said. ‘This is a woman who isn’t invariably attracted to the enigmatic type.’

Long’s gaze settled for a moment on Bliss, and then he turned back to Merrily.

‘You performed an exorcism? Or whatever you prefer to call it.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake—’ Merrily dropped the teaspoon into her mug. ‘We have an escalating series of responses, and exorcism is so far up the ladder we usually get vertigo before we … She had a blessing. In a church. That’s it.’

And it shouldn’t have been. There should’ve been follow-up. Aftercare.

‘What was your opinion of her, Mrs Watkins?’

‘What?’

‘Give me a picture.’

‘She was intelligent, in her way. Intense. Seemed certain about what she’d experienced, but I was … keeping an open mind.’

‘You thought she might be delusional.’

‘Or making it up. Some people do.’

‘But you went ahead, all the same.’

‘At the blessing stage, we can afford to be … a bit uncertain. For the heavier stuff, you need permission from the bishop. It’s also likely to involve a psychiatric assessment.’

‘And do you think psychiatry might have been appropriate in the case of Fuchsia Mary Linden?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Any suggestion of previous violence? On either side.’

‘Her and Felix? No. I mean, are you sure she did this?’

‘Merrily,’ Bliss said. ‘As I’m apparently leading the inquiry, I’ll make an executive decision to spell it out for you. We’re waiting for forensic. Even the dental stuff isn’t straightforward. When a train’s – I’m sorry – when a train’s run over someone’s head, it’s like collecting beads from a broken necklace. No, we don’t know she killed him and there’s a possibility we never will, for sure. We haven’t found a weapon. But it’s one of those situations where the press statement is likely to say that we’re not looking for anybody else. That any clearer?’

‘Thanks. No … I can’t see any reason she’d want to kill Felix. My impression was that she very much needed him in her life. Her rock, if you like. An old family friend, a link going … way back. She’d gone in search of him. She seems to have wanted security, a proper home.’

Didn’t want to mention either umbilical cords or paying for art college. Might tell Bliss later, but not in front of Jonathan Long.

Not for her to pass on Mrs Morningwood’s stories, either. Not to this guy.

Long nodded. ‘Right then.’ He stood up. ‘That’s probably all for the present … unless …’

He glanced at Bliss, who came more slowly to his feet.

‘If you think of anything else that might be relevant, Merrily, you know where I am.’ Bliss smiled. ‘Jonathan … well, nobody really knows where Jonathan is.’

When they’d gone, Merrily poured Long’s coffee, untouched, down the sink and rang Huw Owen in the Brecon Beacons. No answer. She called Sophie at the gatehouse. Engaged.

She wasn’t ready to go to the church.

She ought to sit down and think about it, sensibly.

She didn’t feel sensible. There was a possibility – no getting round it – that she could, in some way, have prevented this. All of it. If she hadn’t been so blasé, so easily deflected. She fumbled a cigarette out of the packet, started to light it and couldn’t get a proper grip on the Zippo. No use saying it had all been out of her hands; she’d let it slip through them, fall to the flags, smash.

The phone was ringing in the scullery. Merrily dropped the lighter, went to the sink and splashed water on her face. Towelled it roughly and went through to the phone.

‘Ledwardine Vicarage.’

‘Adam Eastgate, Merrily, at the Duchy. Listen, have you heard the radio news this morning?’

‘Kind of.’

‘I’ve been trying to get some sense out of the police.’

‘Erm … I was over there last night. Not long after they found him. I’m so sorry, Adam.’

The big black phone was full of a charged-up silence.

‘The police’ve just been here,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m afraid …’

‘Jesus, Merrily, I could never in a million years have imagined—’

‘No. Me neither. I’m not sure if you know this, but Felix’s girlfriend Fuchsia is also dead. Found on … on the railway. Not yet officially identified, but I don’t think there’s any doubt.’

‘Christ almighty. So, how … how did Felix die?’

‘He had head injuries. Adam, I’m sorry. I didn’t see any of this coming, either. And I ought to have.’

‘Come on, that’s easily said, Merrily. We could all say that. Hell, I knew him better than any builder we ever used, he was a canny fella, I liked him a lot, but … Jesus, this is not real. This is complete madness.’

‘Yes.’

In her head, Merrily was in the car again on Garway Hill, on the phone to Bliss, irritably deciding not to check out the Master House. Sod this, going home.

‘I’ll have to get word to the Man,’ Adam Eastgate said. ‘He always admired Felix’s work.’

She heard him breathing steadily. Pictured him standing by the window in the Duchy’s barn, looking out towards the Welsh border hills and Garway and wondering how this might rebound. Heard him clearing his throat.

‘Merrily, I’ve got to ask. Does this connect, in your … your view of things, to the Master House?’

‘Be stupid of me to say it doesn’t. But not, I’d guess, in any way that would interest the police.’

‘So it won’t come out at the inquest or anything, about …’

‘Inquests tend to stick to the cold facts.’

‘Right.’ Eastgate paused. ‘Well, I don’t know what to say. Have to … get another builder.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know how to react to this. Was she crazy? I mean, that’s the issue, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know. At first I thought it was something like that, but now I’ve been to the house, and … I don’t know. There’s a lot of history.’

‘What do you suggest?’

‘Me?’

‘The Bishop referred it to you, Merrily.’

‘Yes.’

Remembering how she’d reacted, telling Lol, I don’t want to go and stay in Garway for a week.

‘You think it’s over, Merrily? You think it begins and ends with this disturbed woman?’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘Not really.’

23 Corruption of Muhammad

WHEN SHE WENT out by the back door, it had turned into the kind of October day that made global warming seem like a scare-story, cold air seizing her arms through the thin sweatshirt; she didn’t care.

She walked through into the churchyard, the way Lol had left at dawn, the sun now pulsing feebly in a loaded sky. Self-disgust oozing rancid fluid into her gut.

We have to think about what we mean by listening. Because, when you think about it, we hardly ever really do it.

She hadn’t. She hadn’t really listened to Fuchsia.

Smug, sanctimonious, hypocritical bitch.

‘He don’t look happy, do he?’ Gomer Parry said. ‘The ole sun.’

He was sitting, gnomelike, on the headstone of Minnie’s grave, his head on one side, as if he was listening for faint sounds from below the soil. When Minnie died, they’d both had new batteries in their watches and he’d buried them together in a small box under her coffin.

The watch after death.

‘You OK, Gomer?’

‘En’t too bad, vicar.’ He stood up. ‘Ole Min’ll be sayin’ I’m makin’ the place look untidy again.’ He peered at her. ‘’Ow’re you?’

‘Had better days.’

‘Felix Barlow, is it?’

‘How did you hear?’

‘Danny rung me. Hour or so ago.’

‘What are they saying?’

‘Usual. Never mess with a mad hippie, kind o’ thing.’

‘And Danny?’

‘Reckons there’s likely things we don’t know and en’t never gonner find out. ’Bout Barlow and that woman.’

‘He’d known her since she was born. Literally.’

‘Knowed her ma. When her moved in, some folks put it round he was the girl’s ole man.’ Gomer shook his head. ‘Feller starts doin’ well for hisself, always some bugger ready to pull him down the gutter. Don’t take it to heart, vicar, I reckon you done your best.’

Merrily stared at him. Didn’t recall telling Gomer anything about her dealings with Felix Barlow and Fuchsia.

‘The ole church, vicar.’ Gomer dipped a hand into his top pocket, pulled out his ciggy tin. ‘St Cosmo’s?’

‘Cosmas,’ Merrily said. ‘And St Damien.’

‘Ar, them’s the boys.’

‘Bloody hell, Gomer, it’s a disused church … remote.’

‘Exac’ly. You wasn’t exactly dressed for not gettin’ noticed, place like that. You like a nun, her like a bride. Word gets round.’

Like a bride. Fuchsia in the white dress. The candle and the bigger light from the window over the altar. The light in Fuchsia’s wide-apart owl eyes. No light now, no eyes, no head.

‘Go back in the warm, eh, vicar?’ Gomer said. ‘You’re shivering.’

‘I’m OK. I just …’ She stared at the dull sun. There was something else. ‘Gomer, you did a drainage job in Garway – for a Mrs Morningwood?’

Gomer stiffened, shut the ciggy tin with a snap.

‘Muriel?’

‘Sorry, I don’t know her first name.’

‘It’s Muriel,’ Gomer said.

‘Just that we met her, Jane and me, the other day.’

‘Oh ar?’

‘And when she heard we were from Ledwardine, she mentioned you.’

Gomer said nothing. He looked wary. Merrily blinked.

‘This is, erm … where you usually tell me something interesting. Some little anecdote.’

‘What’s to tell?’ Gomer sniffed. ‘Got her own smallholdin’. Keeps bees, chickens. Does this toe-twiddling treatment thing. And herbs.’

‘Yes, I knew some of that.’

‘And her’s popular with the farmers.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well … knows her way around, ennit? Lot o’ the ole farmers don’t. Don’t like computers, paperwork, London, Europe. Hell, don’t like Hereford much neither.’

‘No.’

‘Plus, add to the list the council and the Min of Ag, whatever they calls it now.’

‘She helps farmers deal with red tape?’

‘Knows how to talk to shiny-arsed buggers with clipboards, that’s the basic of it. Farmer’s got hisself a problem with some official, don’t know how to harticulate it, he calls Muriel. Officials’ll back down, write it off as a bad job, see, soon as deal with Muriel.’

‘And this is official, is it? I mean, does she do this kind of thing as … you know … some kind of agricultural consultant?’

Gomer laughed, started coughing and fitted a ciggy in his mouth, still laughing, still coughing.

‘I see,’ Merrily said.

‘Go and get warm, vicar. That’s the best thing.’

Robbie was complaining that his coffee would be ready. Couldn’t this wait? But Jane persisted; these guys were sometimes inclined to forget they were getting paid fairly decent money to feed young minds.

‘I suppose you’ve been reading some trashy novel,’ he said.

‘No, Mr Williams,’ Jane said. ‘I’ve been to Garway Church.’

Robbie sat down again, behind the history room desk.

‘Have you now?’

‘Seriously interesting place.’

‘Yes, it is,’ Robbie said. ‘Spent many a day there, fully absorbed.’

Morrell, the head, had introduced this system where sixth-formers got to call teachers by their first names, like they were your mates. It just led to awkwardness, in Jane’s view, and this was a view clearly shared by the head of history, who refused even to reveal his first name. It had always been R. Williams. So, obviously …

‘Right …’ Jane pulled up a chair. ‘So if anybody could answer my questions about Garway and the Templars …’

For you, Mr Williams, the mid-morning break is over.

‘Damn and blast,’ Robbie said mildly. ‘Dropped myself in it there, didn’t I?’

He had to be coming up to retirement. Sparse white hair, tweed jacket, comfortably overweight and, unlike most of his smoothie colleagues, so determinedly uncool that he almost was cool.

‘You see, it’s not exactly very big, that church,’ Jane said. ‘But so full of mysteries.’

She wasn’t going to tell him she hadn’t been into the actual church yet, due to them running into Mrs Morningwood and everything. Anyway, no problem, she’d been on the common-room computer, and there were two or three websites with stacks of pictures of the church’s unique features – the Templar coffin lids in the floor, the enigmatic carvings, the remains of the circular nave …

Robbie took off his brown-framed glasses, looked at the ceiling.

‘Thing is, Jane … there’s an awful lot of twaddle talked about the Knights Templar. Always has been. Supposed to be magicians and guardians of famous secrets, but in reality they were uneducated and illiterate, most of them. Weren’t even monks, in the true sense, simply a religious brotherhood who observed various disciplines and went out into the world to fight people.’

‘But they obviously knew about magic and astrological configurations and things.’

‘Not “obviously” at all, girl. Magic, in medieval times, was a high science, chronicled in Latin and Greek. Hardly for the illiterate.’

‘Yeah, maybe one kind of magic, but, like, what about all the hedge witches and the local conjurers? You’re saying they were intellectuals? I mean, there was always like an instinctive element, surely. Like, something that was passed down?’

‘An oral tradition. Perhaps. I’m merely saying that the ornate web of mythology woven around the Templars was precisely that.’

‘But you don’t know that. You don’t know that they hadn’t—’

‘They’ve became a very convenient repository for ludicrous conspiracy theories, and you need to remember that I—’

‘But you don’t know that they didn’t develop some instinctive spiritual feel for—’

‘—teach history, Jane, not New-Age theology.’

‘OK, history.’ Jane focused. ‘The Templars were linked to the Cistercians, right?’

‘That’s one theory.’

‘And the Cistercians were known for being close to the earth, in like a pagan way? Always settled in remote places where they could be self-sufficient. And they studied the stars and they were well into landscape patterns and stuff.’

‘To an extent.’

‘And that wouldn’t’ve been written down in Latin, would it? And … OK, if the Templars weren’t into magic, what about all the charges that were proved against them? Secret rituals at night?’

‘The charges were not proved, Jane. The Pope, Clement V, actually declared that they were un proven, but decided to dissolve the Templar order anyway because these accusations had brought it very much into disrepute.’

‘But if you—’

‘Ah, Jane …’ Robbie Williams sat back, arms folded, smiling almost fondly and shaking his head. ‘You really are a most unusual girl. Hard to think of anyone else in your year who displays the smallest curiosity about anything not actually involved with achieving the necessary qualifications. And I’m not being very helpful, am I? Why don’t you tell me where you’re going with this? Or hoping to go.’

For the first time, Jane felt her engine stall. Couldn’t tell him that. Stick to questions. Teachers always liked questions.

‘There’s only one pub left in Garway, right?’

‘The Moon.’ Robbie patted his comfortable stomach. ‘I do know my hostelries.’

‘Did you know there used to be another three, called The Sun, The Stars and The Globe?’

‘I didn’t know that. How interesting. Do you know how far those names go back?’

‘Well, I … haven’t had a chance to check it all out yet. But it does suggest there’s some astrological tradition in the area, doesn’t it?’

‘Astronomical, anyway. Then again, it may be simply that some chap opened a pub called The Moon, and another chap set up in opposition and called his The Sun. And so on.’

‘Yeah. I suppose.’

‘Sorry, Jane. What else have you found? The dovecote with 666 compartments? Your guess is as good as mine on that one. Could be a coincidence, could be someone’s idea of a joke or it could be rather sinister. Who knows?’

‘How about the green man?’

‘Ah,’ Robbie said.

A bell at the end of the passage signalled the end of break-time.

‘The stone face carved into the chancel arch,’ Jane said quickly. ‘And nobody knows what it really means … even though they’re fairly common in churches.’

‘Yes. Is the green man of Celtic origin or early medieval? And does this one even qualify for the title?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘A green man is, by definition, a foliate face – leaves and vines coming out of his mouth and his nose and whatnot.’

‘Yes.’

Jane had a picture of it in her head, from one of the websites. The blank eyes, the stubby horns …

‘But what’s interesting,’ Robbie said, ‘is that the specimen inside the chancel arch at Garway appears to have no foliate embellishments whatsoever. No representation of greenery emerging from its mouth – instead, what, on closer scrutiny, is quite obviously a thick, studded cord with tassels at either end. I admit that’s puzzled me, too.’

‘What could it mean?’

‘Well now …’ Robbie leaned forward in his chair; he smelled quite strongly of mints. ‘If we return to the list of charges against the Templars, they were, if you recall, accused of worshipping an idol. In the form of a bearded male head.’

‘Yeah! Of course … It was supposed to have powers?’

‘It was also said to have a cord wound around it,’ Robbie said.

‘Holy sh—’ Jane slid to the edge of her chair. ‘So that face could be—’

‘Baphomet.’ Robbie raised both arms and joined his hands behind his head. ‘It came to be known as Baphomet. A name for which there seem to be several explanations, the most common of which is that it’s a corruption of Muhammad. And the Templars, during the Crusades, would obviously have been much exposed to Islam.’

‘The Templars could’ve been secret Muslims? This could be a kind of Islamic idol?’

‘The Muslims don’t have idols, Jane. And if we pursue that theory, we also tend to stumble over the word “worship”. While the Muslims afford their prophet the very greatest respect, they only worship Allah.’

‘Maybe the Pope or somebody put a spin on that. Because, like, messing with Muhammad, that would be serious heresy, right?’

‘Obviously, it would. However, since those days – in the West anyway – Baphomet seems to have acquired a rather darker image. Satanic, even. Demonic, anyway. Which is where it rather departs from the medieval historian’s sphere of expertise, so you’d need to research that at the library.’

‘But, like, the fact that the head’s set into the chancel arch, the entrance to the holiest part of the church …’

‘If that is Baphomet …’ Robbie put on a slightly twisted, conspiratorial smile ‘… is he guarding the altar? Or is he drawing attention away from it? Think, for instance, which side it’s on.’

‘Well, erm …’ Obviously she hadn’t seen the actual thing, only the picture, which was close-up. ‘I suppose that would depend which side you’re approaching it from.’

‘It’s only visible from one side Jane. The side facing you as you walk in. Putting it very firmly on the left.’

‘Oh.’

‘Sinistral, as it were. The left-hand path. Hah! Now I’m getting carried away. And my coffee will be completely cold.’ Robbie rose from his chair. ‘I do so hate cold coffee.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Williams. But you’ve been really helpful …’

‘I suppose I really ought to have asked you why you’re so interested in all this.’

‘Maybe I’ll tell you sometime.’

‘Might, on the other hand, be better if I never knew, Jane.’

She watched him plodding across to the door, his battered briefcase under an arm, and couldn’t believe how, after rubbishing all her other ideas and dismissing the Templars as some kind of thick thugs, he’d suddenly come out with something as weird and disturbing as this. She came to her feet.

‘Oh …’

Robbie stopped, neck hunched into his shoulders as if she’d thrown something at him.

‘Just one more thing, Mr Williams. Have you ever heard of a green man or a bearded head or whatever … that wasn’t in a church? Say, in a public building. Or a house?’

‘Can’t say I have. And, unless it was in a chapel, that would strike me as unlikely.’ He turned and looked at her, his eyes narrowing. ‘Why? Have you seen one somewhere else?’

‘No, no.’ Jane slid her chair back under one of the desks. ‘I just wondered, that’s all.’

This time, the phone was picked up at once.

‘Gatehouse.’

‘Sophie, it’s me. Look, I’m sorry about this, but—‘

‘I know. It’s been on the radio. No more brutal form of suicide, in my opinion, than to lay one’s head in the path of a train. The engine driver is usually traumatized. I did try to ring you. I don’t think the Bishop knows yet.’

‘It brings up the question of going back to Garway.’

‘Oh,’ Sophie said. ‘I doubt he’d want that now.’

‘I think I want it.’

‘Merrily, some people appear to be locked into a tragic cycle, and whatever we—’

‘A cycle I just might have broken if I’d known more.’

‘Yes, you would think that.’

‘I need to understand, as far as I can, what happened.’

‘That’s surely for the police to establish. Or the coroner.’

‘Superficially.’

‘And you think this would need a full week?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve had another message I can’t really ignore. I’ll explain when I know a bit more.’

‘You want me to tell the Bishop?’

‘Please.’

‘I’ll see if Ruth Wisdom’s still available … Merrily?’

‘Mmm?’

‘I think you need to be very careful,’ Sophie said. ‘This may go deeper than either of us had imagined.’

Merrily made some tea and took it into the scullery. Lit a cigarette and stared unhappily at the answering machine for a minute or so before rewinding the last message. The one waiting for her when she’d come in from the churchyard.

‘Mrs Watkins. Morningwood. Come and see me, will you, darling?’

A pause, then

‘Someone didn’t do a terribly good job, did they? Was it you or was it me? Or is something dreadfully amiss?’

24 Invaded Space

‘BACK OFF, MERRILY,’ Huw said. ‘You’re not thinking, you’re reacting.’

She said nothing. Over by the door to the hall stood two overnight bags, packed. She didn’t have a respectable suitcase.

‘Let it lie, lass. Attend to your parish, go into the church morning and evening for three days. Contemplate. Let things settle. And then look at it again.’

‘I’ve just been to the church. It wasn’t a great success. I was probably too emotional.’

‘My point exactly.’

‘Anyway,’ Merrily said, ‘it was already too late.’

She was on the mobile in the kitchen. Using the mobile too much, thanks to Bliss and his paranoia.

‘So you think you had a bit of a psychic experience, do you? That’s what this is all about.’

‘No, what it’s about is that two people are dead. For reasons it seems unlikely anybody will ever be able to explain. Except possibly me. After a fashion. And too late. Because I was putting my home life and my parish and my personal comforts before the job I agreed to take on. Because I was being lax and lazy.’

‘Wrong attitude, lass.’

‘Mopping up, Huw. It’s just mopping up. And a miserable attempt at penance. I won’t exactly enjoy it, but I don’t think I really deserve to.’

‘Mopping up?’ Huw’s voice rose, uncharacteristically. ‘It’s digging up. It’s disturbing the ground, it’s exposing live wires. A little woman with a bucket and spade?’

Spade. Wires. Mrs Morningwood talking about the sometimes-dormant feud between the Gwilyms and the Newtons/Grays: Like a live electric wire under the ground, and periodically someone would strike it with a spade.

‘I’ve told you what to do,’ Huw said. ‘Talk to the vicar of Monkland or whoever’s attending to the funerals, and the bloke standing in at Garway. You then have a Requiem at Garway Church, followed by a blessing – or something a bit heavier, but don’t overdo it – at the house. Two priests, plus interested parties. Bang, bang … out.’

‘And if it goes on?’

‘What … deaths?’

‘I don’t know. They bring in another builder, who happens to have a heart attack, whatever. I need to find out what’s there.’

‘Merrily, there’s masses there. It’s always going to be there. Garway’s layered with it, that whole area. Tantalizing little mysteries. Codes nobody’s going to crack and symbols and forgotten secrets. And occasionally summat flares. So you tamp it down and you walk away and, with any luck, it won’t flare again in your lifetime.’

‘You’re saying it’s too big to deal with?’

‘Too big, too deep. It’s Knights bloody Templar. Folks’ve been obsessing over the buggers for centuries. You don’t need it.’

‘One week.’ Merrily looked across at the overnight bag. ‘I’m giving it one week, max.’

She’d phoned Teddy Murray. ‘Oh dear,’ he’d said, all vagueness, the kind of minister who held garden fêtes and came to tea. ‘I was told it was all off. Never mind, I’m sure we can organize a room. Do everything we can to ensure your stay is as painless as possible – think of it as an autumn break in God’s weekend retreat.’

He clearly hadn’t known about Felix and Fuchsia.

‘All right.’ Huw did one of his slow, meditative sighs; she thought of him pushing weary fingers through hair like waste silage. ‘Tell me again. Tell me what happened to you.’

‘I’m not going into it again because it sounds stupid and if anyone told it to me I’d react the way you’re reacting.’

‘Oh, for— Listen. Don’t get me wrong, Merrily. I accept that summat happened. You’ve been doing this long enough to know the difference and it’d be patronizing of me to suggest otherwise. Give me the physical symptoms.’

‘I don’t—’

‘You bloody do.’

‘All right, couldn’t breathe, heart going like an old washing machine.’

‘And?’

‘And the feeling of being … I was transfixed. It was like I’d invaded his space and had to take the consequences.’

‘It felt evil?’

‘It was … without heart. I thought it had some kind of worm coming out of its mouth, but it was rope or something fibrous. There was a sense of naked contempt. And a sense that it was …’

‘Alive?’

‘I was trying to pray. As you do. The Breastplate. Second nature. And I couldn’t get the words out. Couldn’t, you know, form the words. Jane was calling to me from across the room, and she might as well’ve been miles away. There was just me and him. I’d invaded his space, he … invaded mine.’

‘How’d he do that?’

‘It was just an instant, a microsecond of insidious cold, a … a penetrating cold.’

‘Sexual?’

‘Jesus, Huw!’

‘Was it?’

‘The so-called green man …’ Merrily stifled the shudder, leaning back hard ‘… carries a lot of associations, some of them fertilityoriented, therefore—’

‘Therefore it’s all subjective. Jesus wept! You go in with that kind of namby-pamby academic attitude, you’re stuffed before you start. You’re a priest. You either treat it as a level of reality, or you back off. Which is what, as your spiritual director, I’m formally suggesting that you do.’

‘You’re spending too much time in your hellfire chapel, Huw.’

She listened to him breathing. Shut her eyes, bit her lip.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Let’s lay it out,’ Huw said. ‘A woman kills her lover and then tops herself, and you’re worried it’s because of something she picked up at this house. That correct?’

‘I think … that it’s a question that needs an answer. And a question that neither the police nor the coroner are ever likely to ask.’

‘Even though the only experience in that farmhouse she told you about was a not-even-thinly-disguised scene from a famous ghost story by Monty James?’

‘I can’t explain that. Doesn’t help, either, that the story predates James’s visit to Garway by about fifteen years.’

‘And bears no relation to your own perceived experience.’

‘No.’

Frannie Bliss’s face had appeared at the kitchen window, peering in, hands binoculared against the glass. Merrily pointed in the direction of the door, making turning motions to indicate that it was open.

‘Ever think summat’s playing with you?’ Huw said. ‘The way a cat plays with a bird?’

‘You trying to scare me or something?’

She’d noticed he’d said bird. Unlike mice sometimes, she thought, birds don’t escape.

Bliss said, ‘I’m not here, all right?’

‘You’re asking me to lie for you again?’

Merrily filled the kettle. Bliss sat down and stretched out his legs under the table, hands behind his head.

‘He really bothers me, that bastard. They all do.’

‘Jonathan?’

‘If that’s his name.’

‘I thought you knew him.’ Merrily sat down. ‘I thought he worked out of a little office at headquarters.’

‘No, Merrily, that’s Bill Boyd. We’ve learned to put up with Bill. Jonathan came up from the capital last week, apparently to look into a certain issue. One of the less-publicized aspects of nine-eleven and seven-seven and the rest is that we get to see a lot more of his sort. Lofty, superior gits in expensive suits.’

‘What issue?’

‘You’re not the first to ask.’

‘You’re expected to work with him, and you don’t know what he’s investigating?’

Bliss glanced at Merrily, an eyebrow raised.

‘I didn’t like to ask him directly, Frannie, if he was Special Branch, in case he realized we’d been discussing it.’

‘I’m grateful, Merrily.’

‘So …’ She half-extracted a cigarette and then pushed it back. ‘He’s not investigating a haunting, is he?’

‘I think it’s reasonable to assume,’ Bliss said, ‘that he’s looking into a perceived threat against the Heir to the Throne.’

‘I don’t think I understand.’

‘Applying my renowned deductive skills, I’m working on the assumption that they – the Duchy of Cornwall – have received certain communications. Could be anonymous letters, untraceable emails, text messages – lot of options in the technological age.’

‘Locally?’

‘Or at their head office, wherever that is. But relating to here, that’s clear enough.’

‘Posing a direct threat to the Man?’

‘Maybe suggesting – if I’m reading between the right lines – that the Duchy is acquiring too much property in this part of the world.’

‘But who would that be likely to bother? And what can they do about it anyway? It’s probably just a crank.’

‘Merrily, Al-Qaeda might just be five towel-heads in a cave with a computer, a video camera and a mobile phone.’

‘It’s crazy.’

‘It’s the world we’re trying to go on living in.’

‘All right …’ Merrily let her chin sink into her cupped hands. ‘Long did ask a particularly odd question, didn’t he, when we were talking about Fuchsia and Tepee City? He said isn’t that a Welsh-speaking area full of Welsh nationalists?’

‘Old-fashioned Welsh nationalists, was the term he actually used.’

‘Why would he think Welsh nationalists are concerned about the Prince of Wales buying property in Herefordshire, England?’

‘Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it, Merrily?’

‘And anyway, the days of Welsh nationalist terrorism, such as it was, are long over.’

‘If he really thought there was anything in it, he certainly wouldn’t’ve mentioned it in front of you. Oh, Merrily …’ Bliss bounced his heels alternately off the stone flags, like a kid ‘… you don’t know how much it pisses me off when there’s something high-level going down in my manor that I don’t know about.’

‘You think I can help, or you’re just here for sympathy?’

Bliss smiled. Merrily leaned back, folding her arms, thinking it out.

‘OK … if someone is suggesting that the Master House – for reasons we can’t fathom – is one acquisition too many, was this before or after Felix Barlow told Adam Eastgate that this was a house that didn’t want to be restored?’

‘After would be my guess.’ Bliss nodded at the overnight bag in the corner. ‘What’s with the luggage?’

‘Going to Garway.’

‘Why?’

‘Need to.’

Merrily pulled over the padded folder containing Adam Eastgate’s plans for the Master House. When she upended it, a plastic bag fell out, resealed like a police evidence bag. She pulled it open and shook out the key onto the table.

‘You don’t find too many like this nowadays, do you, outside of churches?’

‘And prisons,’ Bliss said. ‘You’re not staying there, are you?’

‘Too scary. And the central heating’s not working.’

‘Come on, Merrily, the truth.’

‘Why I’m going back? Apart from, every time I close my eyes, seeing Fuchsia Mary Linden swimming towards me, asking to be blessed in the old-fashioned way?’

‘That’s it?’

‘And all the things we might have found out if I hadn’t been so smug and sceptical. Things that would never come out at an inquest. I’m assuming an inquest is going to be where this ends.’

‘The media have indeed been told we’re not looking for a third party,’ Bliss said. ‘And, frankly, if it was so much as suggested that the third party might turn out to be the kind of third party I suspect you’re looking at then I think we’ve made a sound decision.’

‘Assuming the forensics support the obvious conclusion that Fuchsia killed Felix and then herself … how important is it to you to find a motive?’

‘It’s obviously tidier, for us, Merrily, if we can find evidence of domestic strife and/or mental imbalance.’

‘You tried to find the mother, by any chance? Mary Linden.’

‘We’ve got the birth certificate, and the name tallies. As does Tepee Valley. But the mother’s name is less poetic than “Linden”. Mary Roberts.’

‘What about the adoptive parents?’

‘Moved on, some years ago. We’re trying to pin them down, but bloody hippies, they could be anywhere. We’re continuing inquiries, but we don’t have the manpower to make too much of it.’

‘If you get anywhere … would there be stuff you’re able to share? Sometimes it’s easier for the police to get information than somebody like me with no obvious reason to inquire.’

‘Equally,’ Bliss said, ‘there are situations where it’s easier for a harmless cleric to learn things than a copper.’

‘Does that mean we’re looking at an arrangement? You tell me what you’ve learned from relatives or anyone else, I tell you … what I can.’

‘What you can?’

‘Look at it this way, Frannie – most of the stuff I wouldn’t feel right divulging is going to be stuff that would embarrass you anyway. And the coroner.’

‘You’re so cute, Merrily,’ Bliss said.

‘I’m a professional. It’s odd how people seem to forget that.’

Bliss smiled, shaking his head.

‘Particularly me,’ Merrily said.

After a lunch of soup and a cheese sandwich, she rang Uncle Ted, the senior churchwarden, to explain that she might be away for a few days. He was out, so she laid it gratefully on his machine. Uncle Ted was still resentful of Deliverance, although he must know that without it she’d probably wind up with another four parishes and Ledwardine would see even less of her.

She rang Lol, but he must have already left for tonight’s gig, somewhere in South Wales. She’d try his mobile later. She ought to go and lie on the bed, try and recharge, but there was too much to do in a very short time.

Looking up Morningwood in the phone book, she found just one entry and called it on the mobile.

‘Poor girl,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

Nothing about Felix. Just ‘Poor girl.’

‘I’m … coming over. Either tonight or early tomorrow. Will you be around, Mrs Morningwood?’

‘In and out, darling. Never far away. Always there around nightfall to shut the chicks away.’

‘And you’re … where?’

‘Coming in from the Hereford side, past The Turning – know where that is?’

‘No.’

‘Ask. Three hundred yards, sign on the right, Ty Gwyn. Short track.’

‘OK. If you’re not in, I’ll keep trying.’

There was an uncertain pause. Mrs Morningwood cleared her throat.

‘Reason I called earlier … Spoke about you with a friend, Sally, in the Frome Valley.’

A momentary fog; you ran into too many people in this job.

‘You met, it seems, under difficult circumstances, relating to gypsies,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

‘Oh … Sally Boswell?’

At the hop museum. Her husband, Al, had made Lol’s most precious guitar. Mandolin soundbox and about a dozen different types of wood. Lol revered Al. Al revered Sally.

‘Known her for quite some years, darling. She confirmed what I’d sensed when we met. That you are rescourceful and trustworthy.’

‘That was very kind of her. Mrs Morningwood, can I—’

‘No, come and see me. I’m wary of phones.’

And she’d gone. Suddenly nobody was trusting phones. It was getting like the old Soviet Union.

Merrily dropped the mobile in the in-tray, picked up Dobbs’s Charles file and read an unidentified cutting – looked from the typeface and the length of the paragraphs like one of the quality broadsheets – about the Prince’s diet. How, aged around thirty, after seeing how some pigs were treated, he’d vowed to become vegetarian. Dropped red meat, taken up raw vegetables, lost weight and developed a rather ascetic appearance.

He’d still gone shooting, though. Some family traditions must’ve been hard to shed, especially with a father like his. But the interest in organic farming had grown out of it, with impressive results.

How relevant was any of this stuff? If there’d been anything immediately pertinent in the Dobbs file, Sophie would have spotted it. Merrily slid the papers back into the file as the phone quivered before it rang.

Sophie herself.

‘You have … a locum.’

Her voice was not so much dry as arid.

‘That was quick.’

‘Merrily, I’m afraid that it isn’t going to be Ruth Wisdom.’

‘Oh.’

‘Ruth has unexpected domestic ties,’ Sophie said. ‘Consequently, I had to put out a round-robin email. Which, I’m afraid, was answered within … a very short time.’

‘I did point out, didn’t I, that Jane will still be here? I mean, she’s got her own apartment in the attic, but— it’s not a bloke, is it?’

‘I’m very sorry, Merrily,’ Sophie said. ‘You really won’t like this, but it was out of my hands.’

25 Monster

WHEN JANE GOT off the school bus, there was a silver-grey car she didn’t recognize outside the vicarage.

She walked over. It looked like one of those hybrid jobs that ran partly on urine or something, cost an arm and a leg but the driver was guaranteed a martyr’s welcome in eco-paradise. Very tidy inside, a pair of women’s leather gloves on the dash.

Jane went back to the market square, wishing whoever it was would just sod off. Needing some time, undisturbed, with Mum, because what she had in her airline bag was likely to be of serious and sobering significance.

Normally, if you had a free period in the afternoon, you spent it wiping out any outstanding homework essays. Jane had had two free periods and had spent them both, plus most of the lunch hour, on one of the common-room computers. Feeling she had something to prove. To Mum and … maybe to Coops, who she hadn’t seen for a few days. But she intended to, soon.

She looked around the square for Lol’s cool truck. Not there. He must’ve left for his gig. Jane felt a kind of dismay. While it was good that Lol had gigs, better still that he’d found the balls to do gigs, inevitably it was pulling him and Mum in different directions. And although they did their best neither of them, in all honesty, was what you could call a strong and decisive person.

Outside the Eight Till Late, a news bill for the only evening paper that reached Ledwardine, the Star, read:

DOUBLE DEATH RIDDLE OF BUILDER AND GIRLFRIEND

The girlfriend, too?

Jane froze. Literally froze, hard against one of the fat blackened oak pillars holding up the market hall.

She could remember, quite clearly, a time when shocking death had given her not a shiver but a frisson – subtly different, fizzing with a forbidden excitement. Back then, death had not, essentially, been about loss. Even – God forbid – the death of her own dad, because it had happened, when Jane was quite young, in a high-speed car crash with a woman next to him who had not been Mum.

Then they’d moved to the country, and death, in Ledwardine, had resonated. It was so much closer – as close as the churchyard just over the garden wall, where funerals were conducted by her own mother, before burial in a grave dug by Gomer Parry. Whose wife, Minnie, had gone, in the hospital in Hereford. His nephew, Nev, in a fire. And there was Colette, the friend Jane had first got drunk with, on cider, both of them paralytic under the tree in Powell’s Orchard where old Edgar Powell had blown his brains out at the wassailing. And, worst of all, Miss Lucy Devenish, Jane’s friend and mentor and inspiration … but not for very long before her moped had been on its side in the main road under Cole Hill.

The fragility of life. Random cosmic pruning. One snip of the big secateurs. And then what?

Sometimes, she wished she had Mum’s faith. Always assuming it really was faith. She pictured Mum standing at the landing window in her frayed robe, staring bleakly out into the drab, grey morning.

This guy, the builder. Obviously Jane hadn’t known him, or his girlfriend, but out here he was much more than a cheap cliché on a billboard – Death Riddle – tapped onto a screen by some cynical hack in a town where the air was always singing with sirens.

Out here, where it was quiet and death resonated, he’d been part of the fabric, working the sandstone and the timber and the Welsh slate.

And the girlfriend. Mum was not going to be easy to live with tonight.

Now the stuff in the airline bag, the printouts – from, admittedly, some fairly lurid websites – felt like some kind of porn. Not the kind that could get you banned from using the computer for the rest of term, more insidious than that.

Unnerved by the billboard, switching the bag from her left shoulder to her right, Jane crossed to the vicarage.

She’d seen the woman somewhere before, she was fairly sure of that. Fiftyish and elegant, heavy hair with a dull sheen like pewter, serious grey eyes, dark grey suit. Dog collar.

Mum said, ‘Jane, this is Siân.’

Mum was looking, to be honest, frazzled, her skin close to grey, standing at a corner of the refectory table, like the kitchen wasn’t her own. Which of course it wasn’t. The Church owned it. The Church owned everything. Owned Mum.

There was a case in the hall. A real leather traveller’s case, with stickers, next to Mum’s old overnight bags.

Siân? Jane stared at the woman. The woman smiled in this bland way. Perfect teeth.

Holy shit. It had to be Siân Callaghan-Clarke.

‘Siân’s going to be looking after things here for a few days,’ Mum said. ‘As you, erm, suspected this morning, I need to go over to Garway, sort some things out.’

This was the woman who, only a few months ago, had nearly destroyed Mum after getting herself made diocesan Deliverance coordinator. Callaghan-Clarke’s view of Deliverance seemed to be that it was totally about helping deluded people to seek treatment – bringing in this smooth shrink as part of the Deliverance Module. At least he’d gone, and the last time Mum had mentioned Callaghan-Clarke it was to say that she’d been keeping a low profile lately, not interfering, never going into the office.

But Mum was inclined to take her eye off the ball.

‘Jane is fairly self-sufficient, Siân. She has her own apartm— a big room on the second floor. And a lot of studying to do. So, with all the parish business, you probably won’t get to meet a lot. Anyway …’ Mum smiling inanely ‘… here she is.’

Jane just stood there, like struck dumb, Ethel doing a figure of eight around her ankles.

‘Hello, Jane,’ Callaghan-Clarke said. ‘I’ve heard such a lot about you.’ Black farce. Mum had collapsed into the old captain’s chair in the scullery. The door was shut, Jane with her back to it.

‘Have you gone insane?’

Callaghan-Clarke was upstairs in the guest room, unpacking her fancy case of Italian leather covered with stickers from international church synods, and it was a big house where voices didn’t travel … so, like why, in God’s name, were they whispering?

‘Nothing I could do,’ Mum said. ‘Fait accompli. Ruth Wisdom couldn’t make it, Sophie asked around by email, Siân offered.’

‘Sophie accepted that?’

‘If she’d said no, how suspicious would that have looked? Siân’s … highly placed in the Diocese. I wouldn’t want Sophie to get on the wrong side of her over something like this.’

‘I have to stay here with this monster?’

‘She’s not a monster, Jane. She’s just an ambitious, very smart, exbarrister with … some kind of calling.’

Mum started to laugh. One of those laughs where things really can’t get any worse.

‘Your builder guy,’ Jane said. ‘There’s a news bill outside Prosser’s. It says the girlfriend’s …’

‘Yes.’

It was worse than Jane had expected. Immediately, she was imagining doing it: one ear squashed into the cold steel track, the other exposed to the enormous saw-bench scream of the oncoming train. Did she lie facing it, watching the lights? Or was she turned away, feeling the vibration inside her brain, her whole body hunched and tensed, foetal? What could make a fairly young and apparently beautiful woman batter to death somebody she’d loved and then have herself demolished, her face ground into fragments of bone, shreds of tissue?

Jane pulled the plug on it. She dragged over the other chair and sat down.

‘Why does Callaghan-Clarke want to come here? Like, what’s the ulterior motive?’

‘Jane, there—’

‘I’m not a kid any more, Mum, I can keep my mouth shut and I’ve been around this situation long enough to get a feel for seedy C of E politics. Why?’

‘OK,’ Mum said, ‘to look at it charitably—’

‘Oh, yeah, sure, let’s all be terribly Christian about it—’

‘To look at it charitably, first … Maybe she just wanted to help out, knowing this was a job that the Bishop’s keen we deal with efficiently and it would need to be a woman.’

‘She wants to be the first woman bishop, right?’

‘Archdeacon, apparently. In the short term.’

‘What?’

‘The present Archdeacon’s coming up to retirement, possibly next year. Becoming Archdeacon would be a good stepping stone to a Bishop’s Palace, when that becomes a possibility for a woman.’

Jane thought about this. As she understood it, the Archdeacon was like the Bishop’s chief of staff, the Head of Human Resources in the Diocese. He – or she – organized priests.

‘The Archdeacon’s in charge of like not replacing vicars who retire or burn out, so the rest of you can all have seventeen parishes each? The Bishop’s axeman. Or woman.’

‘Something like that.’ Mum wasn’t laughing now. ‘The word is – according to Sophie – that Siân’s shadowing Archdeacon Neale for a month, using the time to put together a new game plan for rationalizing the Diocese. I’ve known for a while that I could be affected.’

‘But you can say no to more parishes, can’t you?’

‘I can. But I’m on a five-year contract, which may not be renewed if I don’t agree with whatever they propose. No getting round the fact that I’m one of the very few to have only one church. Because I’ve also got Deliverance.’

‘She wants to figure out how to turn you into the Vicar of North Herefordshire, with South Shropshire, and no time for Deliverance?’

‘Who knows?’

‘You sound like you don’t care.’

‘What can I do, anyway? Siân’s view has always been that Deliverance should be spread out over quite an extensive team. So you have a larger number of clergy with rudimentary training in aspects of healing and deliverance. Like the way – stupid analogy, but it’s all I can think of – a percentage of police are firearms-trained. Many more now than there used to be.’

‘And you’d …’ Jane was dismayed ‘… you’d actually go along with that?’

‘I think too many armed cops can be dangerous. Better to have a handful who know when not to shoot. But I didn’t get ordained to become Deliverance Consultant.’

‘You’re good at it. I don’t care what you say.’

‘Anyway, it might all be academic. She may not become Archdeacon. And there’s nothing she can do in a few days.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Just stay cool, disappear into your apartment, feed the cat and don’t get into arguments.’

‘Me? Arguments?’

‘Please?’

‘I’ll try not to antagonize her. But I will be keeping an eye on her.’

‘Just don’t make it too obvious.’

‘Discretion is my middle name.’

Mum smiled this weak kind of if only smile. Her face looked drawnin, blotchy.

‘You know what?’ Jane said. ‘You shouldn’t be going to Garway, you should be going to the doc’s.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’

‘Have you looked at yourself?’

‘Just need a good night’s sleep.’

‘No, you just don’t want to give Kent Asprey the satisfaction of having you at his mercy.’

‘I’m all right. Probably one of those twenty-four-hour bugs. Be fine tomorrow. Why are you hugging that case?’

‘You weren’t fine yesterday.’ Jane took her airline bag over to the desk and unzipped it. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid this isn’t going to help you sleep.’

Mum stiffened.

‘What’ve you done?’

‘No, it’s not … I was talking to Robbie Williams. The head of history?’

‘I know.’

‘He’s a medieval historian, and he knows a lot about the Crusades and the Knights Templar.’

‘Jane, you didn’t—?’

‘I didn’t say a word about you. I just said I’d been across to Garway and got interested. Bottom line is, I asked him about the green man, and he said he thought the one at Garway Church was a representation of … something else.’

Jane pulled out her plastic document case and opened it out. All the stuff she’d printed out from the net.

For some reason – Sod’s Law – it opened to the crude engraving of the dark and devilish bearded figure with a goat’s head and cloven hooves, wings and a woman’s breasts and a candle burning on its head between the horns.

Mum went, ‘Oh, for God’s sake …’

26 Scarecrow for the Vulgar

AN IMAGE OOZING calculated perversity. Paint it in blood on the wall, in the soiled sanctity of some abandoned crypt: the Devil, the Antichrist, the Beast 666. The oldest enemy.

Introduced into the vicarage, inevitably, by little Jane.

Merrily’s first instinct was to cover it up with the mouse mat, take it away, but that would be playing into its … hooves.

Don’t let Siân see it. Siân, whose upper lip would pucker in distaste – not revulsion, no nervous fingering of the pectoral cross here, merely distaste at the medievalism of it.

Only, it wasn’t medieval. Nineteenth century, probably.

Merrily propped up the plastic folder against the computer and gazed into the smudgy smirk of the goat/man/woman/demon. The face of bored decadence. The face of look-at-me-I’m-so-twisted-and-satanic-and-don’t-you-just-love-it?

The red and black ink had blurred, making it look even more perverse. Hints of blood and lipstick.

‘It’s an old printer and I probably whipped the paper out too fast,’ Jane said. ‘You’ve got to be a bit careful about what you download, Morrell has occasional dawn swoops. Anyway, this is the work of Eliphas Levi. You have heard of him?’

‘Heard of him?’ Merrily turned wearily to Jane. ‘Flower, I’ve worn his jeans.’

Jane scowled. Merrily smiled fractionally.

‘Sorry. Yeah, I have heard of him. French occultist, late nineteenth century or thereabouts, who, under his real name, was an ordained priest. Although he and the Catholic Church became increasingly estranged – didn’t help when he ran off with a sixteen-year-old girl. Like Aleister Crowley, who claimed to be his reincarnation, he really wanted to be a rock star but, unfortunately for both of them, rock music wouldn’t be invented for another century.’

‘I hate it when you’re flip,’ Jane said. ‘Although I realize it’s essentially a defensive thing.’

Merrily felt the thickness of the file. Must have taken Jane quite a long time to collect all this.

‘Sorry. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble. Yeah, I suppose you could be pointing me in a direction I hadn’t thought of. Both Levi and Crowley, as I recall, were, at some stage in their murky careers, into what they saw as the tradition of the Knights Templar.’

‘If you already know it all I’ve been wasting my time.’

Jane snatched down the copy of the engraving, looking quite hurt. Merrily sighed.

‘I’ve probably forgotten most of it. Remind me.’

‘That woman will be down soon.’

‘No, she won’t. She’ll see the value of giving us some time to talk before I leave.’

It was like this: in 1307, with no crusades on the agenda, the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon were no longer even pretending to be poor. They were multinational bankers: a wealthy, powerful, secretive and formidable presence.

The guardians of too many arcane secrets – that was Jane’s view of it, but to orthodox historians they were simply a threat to the French monarchy. And the Pope. This Pope, anyway, Clement V, based at Avignon and therefore under the protection of the French king, Philip IV. A puppet Pope.

Jane talked and it all came back.

How the list of charges against the Templars was drawn up, or dreamed up, nobody could quite say, but it was impressively damning: they denied Christ, they didn’t believe in the Mass, they practised sodomy and exchanged obscene kisses on being received into the Order. They were taught that the Masters of the Order – none of them ordained priests – could absolve them from sin.

And they worshipped this bearded head, which came to be known as Baphomet. Mr Williams had told Jane that the name was seen by some sources as a corruption of Muhammad, but Merrily vaguely remembered other interpretations.

‘It was quite clever,’ Jane said. ‘If you look closely at the charges, you can definitely see where some of them are coming from.’

‘Yeah, I know. The denial of Christ could mean that they were simply denying the divinity of Christ because they were supposed to have known the so-called truth: that he’d died, leaving behind his girlfriend, Mary Magdalene and their family. On the same basis, you have the rejection of the Mass, because – allegedly – they knew there could be no transubstantiation.’

‘Right. And then we come to the head.’

‘OK, tell me about the head.’

‘Probably goes back to the Celtic cult of the head,’ Jane said.

‘I hadn’t heard of that connection.’

‘The Celts saw the head as the receptacle of the spirit, right?’

‘Mr Williams thinks the Templars actually did worship the head?’

‘Or maybe just recognized it as symbolic of something? Consider the fact that the Templars were linked to the Cistercians and gnostic sects.’

‘Here we go …’

‘And other guys who weren’t stupid enough to reject centuries of pre-Christian knowledge of nature and harmony with the land and … and a lot of other practical stuff that you can’t get in any way from the Bible.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’m sure it must’ve been symbolic of something. However, if the bearded head represents that revolting joke’ – Merrily jerked a thumb at the engraving of the horned beast with the candle on its head – ‘then it really doesn’t say a lot to me about mankind’s links with the earth. Especially as it also features in black masses and is often found above the altars of satanic temples.’

‘You haven’t actually read Levi, have you?’

‘Somehow, that thing with the teenage girl kind of said it all for me. But go on …’

‘What it basically comes down to …’ Jane shuffled papers ‘… is whole centuries of superstition, smears and misrepresentation. It’s a hieroglyphic representing male and female and illumination – the candle? It’s also Pan, the goat-foot god, the spirit of nature. OK, listen to this: “The symbolic head of the Goat of Mendes is occasionally given to this figure and it is then the Baphomet of the Templars and the Word of the Gnostics … bizarre images which became scarecrows for the vulgar.”’

‘So only thick people think there could be anything evil here. And the Church, of course.’

Jane shrugged.

‘Well, thank you, flower, you’ve converted me. I’ll pack in all this Christian crap, put up a Goat of Mendes poster in the hall – only ten dollars from the Church of Satan and All Fallen Angels, Sacramento – and once I’ve popped into the church and spat on the altar—’

‘All right … you can mock.’ Jane stood up. ‘I’m just trying to show you what you’re dealing with, that’s all. There are two sides to everything.’

‘So the Garway Green Man is actually Baphomet. Mr Williams thinks that?’

‘He knows Garway church, and he thinks it makes sense. And if what you found inside the inglenook at the Master House was a replica of the Baphomet in the church …’

‘You didn’t tell Robbie Williams about that?’

‘No, I just asked about it in a general kind of way.’

‘Only I would hate any of this to get back to your beloved head teacher, because if Morrell thought I was involving you, a minor, in what he regards as my unscientific, primitive and superstitious occupation …’

‘It’s OK. I don’t think Robbie Williams likes Morrell either. And in case …’ Jane’s gaze softened. ‘In case you were fearing the worst, even I would be a bit wary of bending a knee to Baphomet. Or the Goat of Mendes.’

She came over, and Merrily half-rose and then they were spontaneously hugging. Ridiculous. Embracing your heathen daughter because she’d granted you the concession of drawing the line at actual devil worship.

More probably, Merrily guessed, it was the formal sealing of a pact against what was upstairs.

‘Jane, look … I’m sorry. It was a bad night, and it’s not been a great day. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be doing. Going over to Garway – it could be a wasted exercise. Even Huw Owen’s telling me to back off, because whatever happened there concerns ancient secrets that aren’t going to get cracked. Definitely not by someone like me.’

‘He actually said that?’

‘I don’t think he meant it in any mystical sense. I think he was saying I’d just tie myself up in knots, getting nowhere. And when you come home and hang all this on me, with the saintly Siân upstairs …’

Merrily was feeling almost painfully tired. Tired and inept. Huw was probably right: tamp it down, walk away and, with any luck, it won’t flare again in your lifetime.

‘Listen, there’s one final thing, Mum. Jacques de Molay?’

‘The last Grand Master of the Templars.’

‘I think there’s an engraving of him here. I’ve got it … there … He looks a bit like Baphomet himself, doesn’t he?’

Merrily looked at the drawing of the figure with the cross on his surcoat. Dignified but defiant. Che Guevara. Or maybe just the quiet one from some electric-folk band in the 1970s.

‘He was burned at the stake?’

Jane nodded. ‘After refusing to confess to sodomy, sacrilege and the rest of it. Most of the others who were arrested did confess after being threatened and tortured. But De Molay insisted to the end that he was a good Christian. He said he wanted to die facing the Church of Our Lady. But – get this – before the flames took him, he said that God would avenge him. He said the Pope and the King of France could expect to see him again before too long.’

‘I know. De Molay’s dying curse. Where’s this going, Jane?’

‘Neither the King nor the Pope lasted a year. And Jacques de Molay became this kind of cult figure. Still is, apparently.’

‘Yes.’

‘There was some guy in the French Revolution,’ Jane said, ‘and when they guillotined Louis XVI he was like, This is for Jacques de Molay.’

Merrily thought she could hear footsteps on the stairs and stood up. Felt, for a moment, slightly dizzy.

‘Suppose I’d better show Siân around.’

‘Hang on,’ Jane said, ‘I haven’t told you, yet.’

‘Sorry. Only—’

‘And this isn’t, like, supposition or legend or anything. This is official history. I think it was 1294.’

‘All right.’ Merrily paused, holding the door handle, aching for a cigarette. ‘What happened in 1294?’

‘That was the year Jacques de Molay came to Garway,’ Jane said.

27 Bev and Rev

SETTING OUT A place by the window in the whitewashed dairy, now the guests’ dining room, Beverley Murray glanced at Teddy across the table, and you could almost see it happening: this smouldering issue reigniting in the air between them.

Then Beverley went back to the cutlery tray, and Teddy said, ‘If handled discreetly, I think it would be sensible. Discretion being the operative word.’

‘When was there—?’ Beverley letting the cutlery clink more than was necessary. ‘When was there ever discretion in a place like this? Sometimes I think that damned radio mast picks up everything we say and broadcasts it into everybody’s living room.’

‘In which case, Merrily needs to get it all done and dusted before too many people find out.’

By ‘too many people’ Teddy presumably meant some of the cranks likely to descend on Garway next weekend for the Templar memorial service.

‘Quick as I possibly can.’ Merrily was not feeling up to an argument. ‘As soon as I can establish what we’re looking at.’

Meaning help me here. Teddy prised out a reluctant chuckle.

‘Merrily has a most unenviable job. Bumps in the night being an area most of us tend to steer clear of. Too many pitfalls.’

‘If there’s a crisis in the parish, Teddy tends to take himself for a walk,’ Beverley said.

She was maybe ten years younger than Teddy, one of those brisk, practical, short-haired blondes who’d become a familiar breed in these parts, like the golden retriever. Their farmhouse was eighteenth-century, a block of sunburned-looking stone wedged into the hillside half a mile beyond the church, ruinous outbuildings scattered below it like scree. The Ridge: Dinner, B & B. Walkers welcome. Two public footpaths intersected below a terrace with tables and green and yellow umbrellas.

‘Balm for the soul, this landscape.’ Teddy was in thick socks, still carrying his walking boots by their laces. ‘You’ll start to feel it soon, Merrily. Take away that anxious frown.’

‘Teddy!’

‘Well, it’s true, Bevvie.’ He turned to Merrily. ‘Sorry if I’m being tactless, but I have to say I don’t think I’ve seen anyone alter as dramatically as you have in just a few days. Well, yes, sudden death … inevitably a shock to the system. But it’s not your fault, my dear, not your fault.’

‘Yes, well …’ Merrily said, ‘Maybe a good night’s sleep …’

‘Or, as I say, a good walk. Oh, I know Bevvie thinks I’m an avoider, but the countryside calms and strengthens. One of the functions of a parish priest is to remain centred and … essentially placid.’

‘He means passive,’ Beverley said. ‘In other words, uninvolved. Male priests think there’s some sort of dignity to being remote. One of the benefits of having girls in the clergy is that at least they aren’t afraid of getting their feet wet. Women get involved, men go for a walk. He does yoga, too, I’m afraid.’

‘Basic stuff, but it keeps one in trim.’ Teddy dumped his boots by the door. ‘Like to enjoy this place for a couple more decades. That so wrong?’

‘I mean, obviously we’re delighted to have you here, Merrily,’ Beverley said. ‘If only the circumstances were different.’

‘Yes. Thanks.’

If only. Merrily was the sole guest, although a party from Germany was expected at the end of the week. There were no-smoking signs in the dining room, the lounge, her bedroom and the en-suite bathroom.

‘At the end of the day, I’m afraid I really don’t see,’ Beverley said, ‘why this community has to be dragged into something which might be terribly sad but is also sordid, sordid, sordid. Bad enough that Teddy’s forced to conduct a service next Saturday for a bunch of … anoraks, I suppose. But nothing to do with the Knights Templar is terribly healthy, it seems to me. The activities they were accused of … well, no smoke without fire, that’s my view.’

Outside the window, rolling shadows chased the last of the sunlight out of a patch of woodland.

‘I can … understand how you feel,’ Merrily said carefully.

When she’d rung from the vicarage, thinking she’d go to Garway in the morning, Teddy Murray had invited Merrily over for supper. Jane, listening to her vacillating, had held up both palms, pushing: go.

And it was the only way, she realized that now. Time-consuming, but if you went in cold you learned no more than the police would, or the media. Interviews. Statements. On the record, therefore restricted.

Really, it was about listening. As she’d said at the Sunday meditation, not quite getting through to Shirley West. Merrily shivered, not the first time, Beverley noticing at once.

‘Cold, Merrily?’

‘Oh no. Not at all. Goose walked over my …’

After a light supper – Vegetarian? Not a problem, grow our own – the three of them were sitting around a glass-fronted wood stove in the lounge, which had rough panelling and a small cocktail bar, like a pulpit, in one corner.

‘More coffee, I think,’ Beverley said, reaching for the pot, and Teddy, having collected more of Bev’s sidelong glances, discreet as neatly folded notes, made another approach.

‘How much of a public affair does this have to be, Merrily?’

‘Well, I won’t be selling tickets.’

‘No … ha … I think what I’m asking …?’

‘Eight people, max. That’s what I was thinking. You, me, a representative of the Duchy, a couple of friends or relatives of Felix and Fuchsia and – tell me if you think this is going to be a problem – members of the two families who’ve owned the place. The Grays and the Gwilyms.’

‘Oh Lord.’

Teddy’s white-bearded chin sank into his chest, and Merrily pined for a lie-down and a cigarette. She sat up.

‘A bit ambitious, do you think?’

‘They don’t speak to one another, you know.’

‘I did hear that.’

‘Family feuds in this part of the world can be very bitter indeed and go on, literally, for centuries.’

‘It’s not a joke.’ Beverley was filling cups. ‘Personally, I think it might cause more trouble than any of this is worth. There’s still a lot of superstition in this area, and this is almost encouraging it. I mean, how can a house …? It seems more than a little absurd.’

‘Yes.’ Merrily nodded. ‘I suppose it does.’

Later, when Teddy had gone for his evening stroll, she joined Beverley in the kitchen. Stainless steel, halogen lights. Ultra-functional, no dust, no stains, no dark corners. Beverley wiped down a worktop with a damp cloth.

‘I didn’t want to be offensive, Merrily, and I’m still a churchgoer of sorts but do you really think the atmosphere of a place can affect the way someone behaves? Make them do something horrible?’

‘I suppose I have to say yes, sometimes, in a way, but—’

‘And that you can do something about it?’

How were you supposed to answer that? Tell her about the times you awoke in the night and wondered if you weren’t just patching up the fabric of a great big ancient but flimsy construction that was, in fact, completely hollow?

Merrily closed her eyes momentarily, finally admitting to herself that she wasn’t very well. Couldn’t be pre-mentrual, she wasn’t due for another … ten days?

‘You OK, Merrily?’

‘I’m fine. The thing is, I thought at first it was going to be nothing. I thought the Bishop was going over the top in asking for a full inquiry. Then two people die.’

‘Yes.’ Beverley threw the cloth into one of three sinks. ‘Something you said earlier worried me a little.’

‘Mmm?’

‘When you said there should be no more than eight people at this … ceremony. And that one of them should be Teddy. How necessary is that? I suppose what I’m saying – and please don’t tell him we’ve had this conversation, he’d be angry with me – is that I’d really rather you did it without him.’

‘I see.’

‘No, you don’t. What you see is a fit, healthy, athletic man who walks at least five miles every morning before breakfast. You don’t see what I saw when he was the rector of our village near Cheltenham.’

‘How long ago was this?’

‘Six years? That’s how long we’ve been married, anyway. I was recently divorced at the time – when I first met Teddy. And my son was abroad – gap year before uni.’

Beverley said she’d had room to breathe for the first time in years. She’d been awarded the house in the divorce settlement, and there was a recent bequest from an uncle. But she’d only been forty and on the lookout for a meaningful job.

‘I was thinking of going back to nursing, but that’s a thankless task nowadays. NHS hospitals are like meat-processing plants.’

Beverley switched on the dishwasher and then, mercifully, dimmed the lights. She stood looking out of a small square window towards the glowing of distant farms. Telling Merrily how she’d started going to church, helping out, spending time with the rector. Much as Merrily had when her own marriage had been coming unstitched. The difference being that it had led Merrily into a personal calling and Bev into a project called Teddy.

‘His workload was becoming ridiculous, poor man. Four large parishes in Gloucestershire, and the phone never seemed to stop ringing. And then the main church was broken into five times in two years. You get that, too, I imagine.’

‘Not so far.’

‘Then you’ve been very lucky. The final straw was a wave of absolutely awful vandalism. Well, not just vandalism – desecration. Gravestones pushed over, defaced, strange symbols chiselled into them. And one night someone broke in and actually defecated in the church, which was horrible, horrible, horrible …’

‘And a police matter, surely?’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? It’s only when it actually happens that you find out that, unless the damage is very serious or someone’s been hurt, the police really aren’t interested in the slightest. They might show up and take a statement, looking rather bored, but you never hear from them again.’

‘How long did this go on?’

‘Couple of months, intermittently. There was supposed to be a neighbourhood watch in the village, but they were only interested in protecting their own homes. Teddy would be out patrolling the churchyard himself at all hours of the night. One night, he almost caught someone and was knocked to the ground. What is happening in our society? Sometimes they’re killed. Priests killed outside their own churches!’

‘We’ve been lucky in this part of the world. So far.’

‘I suppose that’s one advantage of a place where everyone knows everyone else. But, to cut a long story short, he more or less had a breakdown. Constantly tired – you’d see his hands trembling, dropping the prayer book at service. When the graves were desecrated, some people in the parish were talking about – well, it was inevitable, I suppose …’

‘What – Satanism?’

‘That sort of thing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t pleasant. It left a nasty taste. Teddy seemed to age about ten years. I … found myself looking after him. It’s what I’m good at, I suppose.’

‘He, erm … he wasn’t married then?’

‘His wife had died some years before. Car accident. The Church was his life, if you could call it a life. And in the parish … the nerve of people. The way some of them reacted when they found out I was divorced! I mean, it was hardly a major scandal. One night, I said, for God’s sake, why don’t you pack in this stupid, stupid job, and let’s move to somewhere they don’t know us and start a guest house. I did know what I was doing, by the way – my parents were hoteliers.’

‘He got early retirement?’

‘After I threatened to go to the press. Overworked, overpressured, underpaid and under threats of violence?’

‘Literally?’

‘There were threatening phone calls. Didn’t I say? Untraceable these days, people make them from cheap mobiles. But … he got early retirement, and we wound up here. Not quite my idea of an idyll, but the people are OK, they don’t judge. “Bev and Rev”, that’s what they call us in the pub. We thought of having it on the sign outside, but that would be a little too cosy.’

‘He seems OK, now.’

‘I tease him about his walks, but it’s really done him the world of good, the four years we’ve been at Garway. Learned all the history, guides people around, leads expeditions, and able to keep his hand in with the church. Just our bloody luck that the vicar would have to leave and there’d be an unexpected hiatus before the next one takes over, and Teddy would feel obliged to stand in full-time. And that it should coincide, God help us, with this madness.’

It wasn’t clear whether she meant the Master House problem or the Templar service. Maybe both.

‘What sort of service is he going to give them?’

‘We still haven’t given up hope that someone else might take it on.’ Beverley looked at Merrily, eyes steady. ‘I don’t suppose …?’

‘Beverley, most of what I know about the Knights Templar I got from Teddy the other day. All he needs is an ordinary service with a couple of customized prayers, a sermon about the need for religious tolerance and … I dunno, “Onward Christian Soldiers”? Beverley, would it be OK if I—?’

‘Your exorcism service … someone prone to stress-related problems, that could be damaging, couldn’t it?’

‘Well, it … it’s been known. But in the vast majority of cases it—’

‘So if you do need an extra minister at your, whatever you call it, deliverance, perhaps you could call in another … exorcist or something?’

Merrily nodded wearily.

‘Sure.’

She’d end up doing it on her own in the dim, mould-smelling room, the atmosphere swollen with historic hostility, the Baphomet grinning in the inglenook.

‘Is that all right?’ Beverley said.

‘Of course. Would it be OK if went to bed. I’m feeling a bit …’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry, you must be absolutely exhausted. It’s obviously been a difficult couple of days.’

‘Just a bit tiring,’ Merrily said.

As always when you were feverish, there wasn’t much sleep that night. Strange bed, a hard, fitness-freak mattress. Getting up around two a.m., feeling hot, and leaning out of the first-floor window. Cold air on bare arms, murky night obscuring distance so that the end of the cigarette, feebly glittering against the moonless sky, was like the tail light of a passing plane.

Before bed, Merrily had called Jane on the mobile. Jane said Siân Callaghan-Clarke had been very friendly, not at all what she’d imagined. They’d actually talked for a couple of hours, about Siân’s time as a barrister and Jane’s problems finding the right career plan.

‘Erm … great,’ Merrily said.

‘Hey, Mum, it’s not my fault she wasn’t being a bitch.’

‘I never said a word …’

‘That meaningful pause said it all.’

‘You remembered to feed Ethel?’

‘Like Ethel would let me forget? Mum, don’t—’ Small hiss of exasperation. ‘How’s it going there?’

How was it going? Merrily peered down the valley, into vague dustings of light. There was a prickling of fine drizzle now, on her arms. She pulled them in, stubbing out the cigarette on the stone wall under the windowsill, feeling cold now, and hollow and disoriented. No sense of where she was in relation to the top of the hill with its radio mast or the hidden valley of the church, the rum place where M. R. James believed he’d caused some offence.

This was not an easy place.

Jacques de Molay had located it, though.

In 1294, the last Grand Master of the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon had sailed from France, then ridden across southern England to visit the remote preceptory at Garway. According to Jane’s internet research, nobody appeared to know why he’d come or what he’d done here. And if there were no crazy theories on the net, last refuge of the extreme …

She shut the window, groped her shivery way back to bed. Please God, not some bloody bug.

Woke again, from a darkly vivid dream in which the tower of Garway church was with her in the room. The tower was standing in the far corner beyond the window, its vertical slit-eyes solemnly considering her. Guarding its secrets, knowing hers.

She sat up violently in bed, the duvet gathered around her. The moon had come out, sprinkling talcum-powdery light on the wardrobe.

The wardrobe, no more than half a century old, was roughly the same shape as the church tower and had twin vertical ventilation slits, high up in each door, black now.

You could go crazy.

Merrily lay down again, rolling herself in the duvet, turning her back on the wardrobe, stupidly grateful that The Ridge was not The Globe and the room had only one bed.

When she walked on to the square in Ledwardine, a crowd was gathering, but nobody was looking directly at her, although she was collecting meaningful sidelong glances from people like the Prossers, James Bull-Davies, Alison Kinnersley and Shirley West.

It was a deep pink dusk and the lights were coming on. Lol wouldn’t be at home, of course, he was off on a gig somewhere. So why was there a filtered light in his cottage in Church Street?

She walked across the square, getting out the key he’d given her, but she didn’t need it, the door was slightly ajar. She went in.

There was a dim light in the hallway and low music coming from somewhere, the song ‘Cure of Souls’, from Lol’s album, the one he’d written about her before they were together:

Did you suffocate your feelings

As you redefined your goals

And vowed to undertake the cure of souls …

Over the music came the throaty notes of slippery female laughter. Dripping down the stairs, like a pouring of oil, was a shiny, black, discarded dress.

Merrily, heartbroken, ran out, back onto the square where they were burning Jacques de Molay, his cold eyes fixed on hers through the darkening smoke as his white smock shrivelled up, turning brown.

She awoke sweating and shivering, no light in the sky.